I'd love to get some ideas for these kinds of jobs. Normally I'd just steal plot ideas from Leverage or Burn Notice when I'm hard up for an idea, but my players are avid watchers of both shows. Examples of runs they've already done - helped a SINless family find a kidnapped boy, found evidence of a dirty politician's crimes, protected a whistleblower to a talislegging operation from criminals and corrupt cops until after the trial, helped a contact settle a "problem" with a Triad gang, surveilled a husband whose wife was convinced he was cheating, and gathered evidence for a journalist interested in the BTL trade.

Many of these runs haven't paid all that well (either the client is poor, or they're doing it as a favor to a contact, etc.), so I'd love some ideas that will also provide a larger amount of cash.

Thanks!

the Robin-Hood-Way is steal from the rich - divide among the poor - but keep half

Did any of your players watch the A-Team? If not, or if they don't remember the plots, that would give you LOTS of exactly what you are looking for. HuluTV has them all, I believe.

Free a community from the clutches of... gang/go-gang/crime syndicate or generally bad people

Do something where the land belongs to Corp A, but somehow Corp B was supposed to provide security so neither bother protecting the neighborhood and leave it open to the street.

This would setup a nice chain of adventures and allow for some permanent NPC's.

Bodyguard work can be pretty morally cut and dry and profitable, political leaders or the kids of corpers work very well.

SRM02 Had a couple of text book white hat runs that I highly recommend an ounce of Prevention http://www.shadowrun4.com/missions/downloads/srm_207.php and Critical Care http://www.shadowrun4.com/missions/downloads/srm_215.php

Doc Wagon is also one of my favorite organizations in shadowrun for White or Grey Knight scenarios. Lets say a major disaster or military conflict affects some sprawl. Doc Wagon could hire shadowrrunners, especially ones with first aid or military knowledge to plus up their High Threat Response teams for the duration of the conflict. Pay and benefits might be excellent and could lead to many hooks.

work for smaller corps. a common theme in adventures and missions are AAA and sometimes AA corps destroying smaller companies. Simply do the opposite and work for the little company that is trying to protect its newly developed product.

be a gun runner. many govts and AAA like to keep people from being free and being able to defend themselfs, use those skills to get the good stuff to those in need.

do extraction jobs. big corps dont like their big talent to leave the company alive. Help those in need of a way out get a new life, and since its big talent they will probably be able to pay well.

be a journalist in the way of the old V. That dude got paid to make videos of nefarious activities in dangerous situations. 80s action journalism is a shadowrun where the paydata is trid footage.

Good guy runs?

*A rich philanthropist hires the runners to protect him from a pink mohawk group that was hired by a rival.

*Someone is blowing up/burning down orphanages, soup kitchens and poor houses, a group of runners is hired to look into it. It turns out the major politicos are behind it in an attempt at cleaning the undesirables out of their fine city.

*There's a mad street doc on the loose in the city kidnapping people off the street and performing strange bio/cyberware surgery on them. Escaped survivors hired a runners to find this person and put a stop to it.

crime is out of control. the city hires the runners to run the criminal element out of town by burning down soup kitchens, poor houses and govt housing.

Assumption: PCs operate out of Z-zone/Barrens and have friends, loved ones, and contacts in the area.
Set-up: Team of NPC runners steals something/someone important from a corp facility and hides out in/near the PCs' Z-zone turf. Corp big shot decides to make a show of force to discourage such actions and starts hitting the area hard.
Pitch: A more humane Johnson within the company contacts the runners and wants their help to end the situation before costs (in nuyen and lives) gets out of control. He wants the important something/someone back and the other runner team captured/killed. The humane Johnson is offering the release of SINless 'persons of interest' that were picked up in the crackdown. These would be the PCs' friends, loved ones, and contacts.
Fallout: The humane Johnson embarrasses and replaces the hot-headed corp big shot, earning himself a promotion. The PCs may earn him as a contact, and they will certainly gain some Rep in their hood. Unfortunately, they also get a Rep for hunting other runners...

This past winter, my group was hired by PALADIN to hunt down a group of rogue runners-turned-serial killers who were killing children in the area and luring them in by wearing mall santa suits. They were paid pretty well, and the more moral in the group were very satisfied with the job. The pure merc....well, she liked the pay.

You can check out other old shows like x-files, air wolf, knight rider, and max headroom. I found those had tonnes of ideas as well.

A few times I would download the episode guides and glean pearls out quickly.

I had this idea for my campaign but never eventuated.

My PCs found out and ousted an Ant shaman who recently came out of jail. Long story short - he went in a mundane and came out a fledgling insect shaman. The magicians present, with official Lone Star assistance, they found out that he was part of a much larger network and that this Hive had slowly grown to overtaking a jail. The cop reported this to the Feds and it was a lose thread that was never picked up.

My plan was to have the PCs get hired by the feds as expendibles, send them to jail to sus out what was going on and then report back to them once they understood what was going on. The plot while being my own, sounded eerily familiar to Double Exposure (not that any of this group every played that module).

Due to time lapse I had this arc unfold as if the Feds eventually found out what happened and arranged for an accident to befall the facility (involving Ares Macrotechnology, UCAS Army and NSA but thats another story) - all without the PCs.

But this is a potentially interesting story arc with good pay (and a lot of buildup/suspense!!) fighting the bugs.

- J.

Sounds like you need to pull a changeup on your team.
How about The Professionals? It's a western wherein a team of gunners is hired to save the kidnapped wife of a rich older man.
They head south into Mexico to retrieve the woman from a group of political rebels who have the woman. They grab her, but it soon becomes apparent that she was originally kidnapped from them and forced to marry the older gentleman. She had merely returned to the man she loved originally and to whom she had always wanted to return. So the choice becomes, get paid to re-kidnap a woman for a rich guy, or go back to the armed rebels they've killed in order to return the woman sans reward.

But plenty of regular runs can be organized as a white hat thing. Like Daylen says, the traditional corp retirement plan for their more storied employees is to let them lose and send an execution squad right behind them. Seems like a guy appraised of his situation would work real hard to transfer all his corpscript to nuyen and pay someone like your team to pull him out or hide him away after he's left the corporate reservation.

An exec's daughter is being held hostage by a crazed cult leader. The runners have to somehow extract the girl from the heavily fortified compound. Of course when they get there they find the daughter is not the only hostage...

A local chain of diners is pressuring a small Mom & Pop operation to sell. The owners cant figure out what's so special about their out of the way place. They hire the runners to get the chain off their backs. Of course the runners soon find out that a new freeway exit is planned to go in right next to their clients...

A small delivery service is being terrorized by a nearby recycling company. The delivery owners hire the runners to help them. Of course what the runners dont know is that the recycling company is illegally dumping toxic industrial byproducts into a main that runs under the delivery service. Now they know why the attacks started as soon as the delivery service filed a permit to build an underground garage...

I would suggest looking at movies like.. the Transporter and things. Great shadowrun material there.


Mission: Pick up Mr. X's daughter and transport her to Y location. (Causes a fast paced vehicular game)

Mission: Mr. X has received a threat to his daughters life. Tonight is her cello recital, guard her. (Forces shadowrun team to be quiet and deadly)

Mission: Mr. X's son needs a liver transplant. The only matching liver of his DNA type is in X location. Pick up and bring back. (Causes them to be meticulously careful while carrying delicate property)

Mission: Mr. X has learned that there is terrorist activity targetting the power grids, root out and stop it. (Forces characters into infiltration and info gathering scenarios)

Mission: Mr. X has learned that Y Industries has developed a strain of Z Virus that will wipe out a specific (or all) metahuman types. Destroy it. (Forces them to subturfuge and stealth to get into corp security)

Mission: Sentient drones have escaped from imprisonment. They are now killing indescriminantly, but are hard to catch. There is a large (5k) reward for each capture of escaped drones. (Can be living or dead, your choice).

Mission: A Script Kiddy hacker has stumbled upon an Omega Code computer virus, and has unleashed it into the virtual world, where it kills people in the VR, and thier bodies outside of it. (Great for getting everyone into a wired campaign)

Mission: Neo-Nazi Corporate conglomeration is having a display of art they have had for over 120 years. Mr. X wants his family treasures back that where stolen back in 1944 Germany.

the list goes on forever.

Just include more loot with the bad guys.

helped a SINless family find a kidnapped boy -- tough one, kidnapped for ransom or for ...a ... um... dinner? Ransom = kidnappers think there's cash, so there probably is cash. Dinner = broke runners.
found evidence of a dirty politician's crimes -- got to be some kind of paydata attached to a politician.
protected a whistleblower to a talislegging operation from criminals and corrupt cops until after the trial -- No 'evidence' pile of talismans that he could have dipped into?
helped a contact settle a "problem" with a Triad gang -- gangs = drugs, cash, and stolen merch
surveilled a husband whose wife was convinced he was cheating -- Could have included a secondary run that could be done while monitoring the husband. Putting the hacker in slow constant slow hack mode to earn paydata.
gathered evidence for a journalist interested in the BTL trade -- Drugs and cash again. Steal BTLs or rob the crew shortly after the journalist gets theirs.

If you can find them
MERC: 2000
MERC: 2000 Special Operations

I would also recommend watching Leverage and Human Target, both of these are on Hulu as well.

The OP referred to Leverage in his post...

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Westerns generally have great "white hat" plots with dark grey overtones. Unforgiven comes to mind, or you could rip off the Magnificent Seven (which was really just a rip off of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai). Appaloosa and 3:10 to Yuma are also pretty good.

Also the whole CSI/NCIS family

I will admit I just skimmed over the list of suggestions up above, so if this (or something like it) was suggested I apologize ahead of time.

A group of small stores are trying to eek out a living in a poor part of town. Unfortunately they are being harrassed by a local gang/mob group/whatever that is forcing them to pay into a protection racket. A representative of the owners has collected some money (1 or 2 months of collection racket for all the stores) and offers it as payment to the runners if they can interviene.

This offers long-term RP opportunites as maybe the stores offer discounts or even give goods to the runners as thanks; but then they expect protection (turning the PCs into the new protection racket on accident).

Or, if you wish to go for moral dilema: The Johnson was really only interested in getting rid of the gang because they were in fact doing a good job of protecting the locals & the johnson either wanted to put his own group in to collect the protection fees; or possibly wants to place unprotected for whatever nefarious reason. This type of setup can lead to the PCs getting paid up front, then having to challenge their old johnson and possibly getting an unexpected reward later (the shops actually pool a month of racket fees as a thanks).

________________________________________________________________________________
Another one:

Make a Wish Foundation has a child (say 8 or so) that is going to die. Come up with a reason that the child needs to be smuggled someplace to fulfill his wish (wants to meet grandparents and they are in tibet, boy is a ghoul, something fun). Runners have to smuggle a person, so they have to keep him safe, but at the same time the person is a child and will probably be causing a fair amount of accidental mischief. The charity has been allocated some money to make sure the boy gets his wish; money that can be paid to the runners.

ghoul? hmm... or turn him in for the bounty!!

I just remebered one that is good fun time
The team is coming home from a run and see an old man trying to change tire and they decide to help him.
Weeks later one of the gets a letter that the guy was the head of a AA corp and has just died, giving the team a controling intrest in the company.

The real plot: He see that the team is a good oprotunity to fake his death and is using the team to smoke out his enemies.
I stole this from the Carrot Top Movie

When I was thinking about "Robin Hood" stuff planning for a one off, I looked at the list of suggested runs in the book, then asked myself, if someone really wanted to stop runners from doing those runs, they would send runners.

B&E: Assessments, Tests, Response, and Retrieval
Courier Runs: Tail & Report, Retrieval, Good Cause
Datasteals: Assessments, Tests, Response, Retrieval
Extractions: ...

And so on. There should be two (or three) sides to any coin anyways. In the dystopian, good intentions would need back channels as much as bad intentions.

So yeah, basicly if you have watched Burn Notice or like some PI noir stuff, you probably already have this idea anyways.