So the DeFacto leader of our gaming group is a follower of the Moon Maiden. Because of this, many of our missions tend to gravitate towards thwarting predatory males or destructive male-dominated organizations.

My idea for our next adventure involves the group investigating a string of abducted prostitutes. (Yes, yes, yes, I know that most of the time this wouldn't even be noticed in the grim and gritty reality of Shadowrun, but the abductions are cutting into the pimps' business, so they've pooled their money together and hired the shadowrunners to put a stop to them.)

Anyway, my idea is that the run will culminate in the discovery of a Snuff BTL production/distribution network. My question is, (and it's a dark one) just how would you specifically go about making this kind of BTL? What kind of equipment would be needed to record the emotions/pain/etc of the victim?

I know that's kind of a morbid question, but I need to know what kind of "production studio" the characters should stumble upon.

Thanks!

Simsense rig for one.

You'll also need a BTL chip making machine--really big thing, like modern money mint presses.

Never seen Strange Days, have you?

The one truth about murder and porn is that it can happen to anyone, anywhere. Of course, professionals prefer somewhere with drains in the floor, where screams won't be heard, and a pull-in garage. Recording equipment is mostly implants, it's the mixing equipment that can be tricky, and that you might want to have elsewhere under a legitimate cover.

The chips aren't any different from normal datachips. Datachips are datachips, dude (corollary of "data is data is data is data"). Burning BTL to a datachip is just like burning normal Sim. Just some of the binary values get interpreted as being larger. You just buy the chips wholesale and get some image put on them in the normal manner.

The mixing equipment is handled in Unwired.

I'll offer this...

I used to live in LA and the creepiest "studio" I ever encountered was set up in a multi-room warehouse several blocks from a major commercial airport. There was a single entrance, a small office up front that served as a bottleneck, and this led into two floors worth of large and small rooms--many with drains, as mentioned above. They also had a block of showers in the washroom. During the day, when the other warehouses in the area were open and active. At night, under the deafening of 474's taking off and landing, the place was alive with all kinds of activities ranging from club-type events to fetish-film production. As long as a production company can afford to rent space, anything goes. In some cases equipment is available; mostly "sets", "costumes", and "industrial materials". If you want recording equipment you bring your own. With a desk clerk that could care less what's happening and the prospect of bringing in body-sized equipment in an out, it wouldn't be hard to rent space and remove the evidence in a duffel bag large enough to transport it.

So for game purposes you need a production company that rents space at several different "no-questions-asked" studios. I could imagine porn producers who are down on their luck and had to go to a dark, dark place to make a living, pay off gambling debts. In fact, maybe its the debt collectors that are putting them in the position of making the videos. If they're not used to this kind of production they might screw up and leave evidence behind (like killing off the same women who "starred" in their other films). So you've got three layers of mystery for your players to unravel: the studio, the film makers, and the people who wanted the films made.

unwired may be the book to get, got its own chapter on simsense and related topics...

Yeah it is fairly simple. just need the recording device, then in editing you can electronically amp up the response to BTL level.

Something very similar happened in my favoirte GitS episode, "Jungle Cruise," where a serial killer is recording, in effect BTL's and distributing them to spread fear.

Strange Days is an awesome example.

Trodes can be used in 2070 however so even the headware isn't required. The recording equipment is the hard part.

- J.

Thanks for the help!

I haven't seen Strange Days but will check it out. I have UNWIRED but haven't gotten a chance to check it out yet.

I was thinking that the girls would be brought to an old parking garage under an empty building. The PCs would encounter the snatch vehicle and follow it there where they would have to deal with the team bodyguarding the operation.

The "studio" would just be a small area with some kind of restraint on the wall and they would find a drone kitted out with a variety of sexual/torture devices (told you this stuff was dark) as well as the necessary recording equipment...in another part of the parking garage would be all of the production/distribution equipment.

If the PCs choose to (and I'm sure they will) they can dig further to find out who is making the BTLs and deal with them. Unfortunately it is linked in with a Seolpa Ring, so they're getting in way deeper than some independent operation. The PCs were only hired to stop the specific "snatch vehicle" that has got all the girls too scared to work on the street, so if they want it to end there it can.

Sound like Mercedes Lackey's Born to Run, dark elves run a porn/snuff film studio in modern Savanah. People try out for films and don't know they can be snuff films.

I've owned Strange Days for years, but never watched it. Just watched it last night. Yup, you should see it.

Where was the mixing equipment? I've looked for it several times and never turned up anything but the ones for brainwashing people.

Itis the Simsynth, page 185 under the heading of the same name... No table entry for prices that I could find... if you have it (or can get it), see Shadowbeat

It's the table entry for prices that I was looking for, actually. May look into Shadowbeat at some point, but my budget for gaming books is currently non-existant, so it'll need to wait.

Of course, with the upgrades of SR4 in mind, you should only need a baseline SIM-Production shop (5,000 Nuyen) or a Facility (100,000 Nuyen) and then the rest can be abstracted so that it really does not matter...