I just got my copy of Running Wild and was thinking how much use I was going to get out of it because I love my paracritters. (You can look at my old posts to see the batches of them I've posted to DS.)

I realize that paracritters are my preferred go too guys for runs. I love putting devil rats in sewers and having people with exotic pets and having runs that end out being outside of the city for some reason.

I also realize that I HATE to use HTR teams. I think I can count on one hand the number of times that Doc Wagon or Fire Watch or even LS Swat teams have shown up in my game. Generally my players know that if they show up its going to be a TPK.

So who do other people love to use (to the point of saying I better not use them again this run.) Corporate security like the Red Samurai? Infected? AI? Gangs? Orginized Crime?

My personal favorite bad guys are other runners. Fixed position bad guys, corps, mafia and so on, are neat but a Free Agent with their own agenda is a dangerous enemy.

BlueMax

Gotta agree with Max on this one, especially since often times opposition runners will be subtle. You think that gang brawl just happened to go down on the road you had planned to use as an escape route, they know it is something they carefully kicked off to delay you just long enough for the Star, or KE now, to catch up. And hey, a few extra dead gangers is a plus in everyone's book, except the gangers anf they don't count.

I'm not a vampire guy; I don't read vampire books or have to see vampire movies, but I ended up running several HMHVV-heavy runs.

The very first (or nearly so, as the years have clouded my memory) was called The Butterfly Directive and had to do with a trio of HMHVVers-- a nosferatu mage, a vampire shark shaman, and a vampiric pawn physical adept-- who were trying to kidnap a young conjuring adept.

Sometime later I ran Brittany the Vampire Slayer, in which the runners were hired by a vampire to wipe out a spreading HMHVV infection at a high school. (Brittany was the elf on the jai-lai team who expressed her physical adept abilities and began killing the vamps.) This was the game where the vampires thought the White Wolf books were coded instructions from ancient vampires and the runners ended up wiping out what was basically a big HMHVV larp.

That game was referenced later in The Lone Star Campaign when the PC's (all LS) investigated a HMHVV club owner who had been crucified. Signs pointed to a group of quasi-religious vamp hunters in town (based mostly off James Woods' character in "John Carpenter's Vampires"), who turned out to be innocent of that crime but in town hunting his Infected ex-wife. There was a lot of overlap with the ghouls in this one, as well as the reintroduction of a vampiric fixer who was a neutral party between the various HMHVV groups in the city.

There was also a lot of HMHVV-goodness in my Africa Campaign, because the PC's got stranded in Asamando and ended up having to pull side jobs for the ghouls.

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I've always enjoyed using critters, both as guard animals and in the wild. I was always the GM who would pick up the Paranormal Animal guides. Probably the best example of one of these runs was cribbed from "Jurassic Park", where the runners were hired as troubleshooters for a large island game preserve filled with every paracritter I could fit on it. Naturally the island was hit by an eco-terrorist EMP that knocked out all the fences during a hurricane, and the PC's had to get the scientists from one side of the island to the other while everything was going crazy. Good times.

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Bug spirits are a classic for a reason. I don't use them a lot, but when I do I remember why I like them. I think it has something to do with the first SR game I ever played in being "Missing Blood".

I, personally, LOVE using "Corporate Big Wigs". They always have an agenda, even if it is just "Get the other guy's job." But the good ones use so many layers of disposable people (Read: Runners, Fixers, corp sec etc) that the players have to dig deep before they even notice that they are being used, and then get through 3-4 layers before they even meet the Big Bad Guy.

Makes for a great meta plot that you can insert and ignore at your leisure.

Right now I'm using Humanis/Flaming Sword in my game as the bad guys. It works in this case since the team is two orks and an elf, who all live in the Ork Underground so they have alot of insentive to stop whatever the meta-haters are doing at the moment.

I like to keep the focus on the corporations, so I'll try to use their offshoots as bad guys most of the time. I think Toxic Shamans are cool, but company men should be the thing people worry about.

Aztech! Easily my favorite baddies and the antagonist in a lot of my plotlines. Specifically, I like them since their troops put a high value on magic as well as tech, and they're likely to use paracritters-- always a nice touch. Essentially, Aztech is my one-stop bad guy shop.

My favorite Aztech-based plotlines, of course, are where the 'runners have to decide if it's worth getting deeply involved with, say, Ares or Saeder-Krupp in order to take down Aztech...

Actual "bad guys"?

I'm using Lone Star atm. Law Enforcement seems to be the greatest re-occuring villain in my campaign.... its not my favorite though.

- J.

I've been using a lot of the Vory lately as my runners have chosen to side with the entrenched mafia and koshari-esque factions in the city their in.

My favorite bad guy so far has been a bad girl: Lisa Kellerman, the daughter of the late Maximilian Kellerman, a rich Hamburg businessman (and smuggler and suspected drug-designer). She's part singer, part actress and part fashion designer and Hamburg's favorite celebrity, I guess you could compare her to Lady Di.
The PC saw her murder a lot of kidnapped awakened children and thought that she had been posessed by a spirit or a shedim before getting hints that she might have been doing it on her own. They still don't know the truth, but they know she's not the nice girl everybody think she is. Except that nobody will believe them, even the Shadow community.

I've also enjoyed Howard Less, a brilliant and insane artist based on Enki Bilal's Holeraw/Warhole. He hired the PC to, officially, protect a box. His true goal was to have them participate in his nihilist masterpiece: an art performance without any meaning that revolved around an empty box. During the whole time, the PC took him for a nice and friendly guy, were sad to discover him dead (suicide) and only discovered the truth later, when everything was over.

For generic bad guys, I like two things in my NPCs:
* Professional behavior: use of tactics to make it more challenging, interesting and tense.
* Personality: it's better when the NPC aren't anonymous mooks. It's even better if the PC discussed with them sometime before fighting them.

Had so many.

Corporate: Aztech
Metahuman: Hitmage
Dragon: Celdyr
Astral: Bugs
Crime: Yaks
Cults: Toxics
Infected: Ghouls
When Critters Attack: A massive Protean (Sadly not stated in 4th).
Conspiracy: Immortal Elves/Black Lodge
Technology: A cyborg with a mini gun. Actually had one stated way back in 1st edition R.O.C 13 (Rigger.Operated.Cyborg). They still cringe when I make a buzzing sounds.

Newest Threat To Confound The Team: Free Dissonant Sprite

I'm a big fan of any kind of reasonably-powered paranormal or magical threat. I've had an entire campaign that revolved around the antics of a Blackberry Cat (my single most favorite critter in the game). There's a lot you can do if you don't handhold the players and instead just give subtle clues about what's going on if they bother to look. Took them forever to realize the Machiavellian plot they thought they were dealing with were all just random accidents created by a cat. Most players are just so used to being spoonfed they don't even try to really investigate things on their own.

I also love using Underworld politics in my games, particular the Mafia. It's more of an atmospheric/thematic preference, though. I find it a lot more comfortable and interesting, partially because I'm rather biased against the influx of Asian culture. Triads, Yakuza, Seopula Rings, etc. are a real turn off for me because of that. Which sucks because I used to love looking to movies like Big Trouble in Little China for inspiration in my games.

I don't use the Infected very often, but it's just that it rarely comes up more than a dislike for using them. Same goes for more traditional corporate espionage runs. I simply prefer dealing with the more criminal element of the game. Predator, Pulp Fiction, Two Smoking Barrels, The Fifth Element... those are the kinds of story ideas I tend to use in my games.

If there's one aspect of the game I kind of hate the most, it's the cyberpunk parts. I pretty much hate the whole genre with only a few minor exceptions. William Gibson is largely to blame for that; his portrayal of the future is so ridiculous, and his description of virtual reality... ugh. I was really happy when SR4 decided to drop most of those conventions, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I avoid those elements whenever I can. My players rarely have a reason to go to the Barrens or, when they do, it's usually just to hunt something rather than do any kind of business or socializing. Ditto for the Matrix as a whole, at least the VR version of it.

I really dont have a preference. I tend to us meta humanity slightly more as it is sprawl based game but what I really aim for is to make my players whince when they work out what is being done and draw a line in their soul that says, "no more!" or "we have to choose a over b".
Intellegent or pervasive enemies work for me. For extended plots there is alot of scope for brutish and simple but intellegent just has more complexity and longevity.

I had a toxic shark shamen working for tamonous who I described as half maori, half russian descent. Big wince just from that list of info hitting the players. Then they found out what he was planning...

With intellegent ememies I want my players to work out how they think and hate them not only for what they have done but why they have done it. It redefines the understanding of their characters. As does facing up to nature or of the dark impulses of human nature played out in the barrens and the board room.

MY 2

I'm a firm believer in the Frank Miller/Sin City school of GMing (I'm fine with my players being horribly violent assholes, it's my job to still make them the protagonists by making them go up against even more horrible assholes). My go-to baddies are the Yakuza, and affiliates. You can go to any level of game threat with them (two-bit go gangers, slick Yakuza mobsters, dangerous Adepts, corp connections), and they have the potential with bunraku parlors, metaracism, etc, etc, to be as dark and monstrous as I need them to be.

This is why I don't piss off Yaks when I play, you name the evil thing, they do it... or can put you in touch with people that do.

I have to say... there are three GMs at my table and only two who run SR - myself and one other guy. The other guy ALWAYS uses the corporate espionage gig. Always. Without fail or exception. And it makes me want to hang myself. Don't get me wrong, once in awhile its great. But overall, it gets real old real fast. Your idea of a campaign is very much like mine (and why I've found Ghost Cartels a breath of fresh air for my table).

I would LOVE to hear more about the Blackberry Cat - please post here or PM if you prefer. I'd love to borrow that idea because I could easily see that baffling my players.

- J.