Just to prove that I am not a powergaming munchkin, I have decided to start a non-munchkinky thread for once.

Now my gang of toxic/blood mages wanna start a prostitution syndicate.. one which specializes in changeling hookers, elven hookers and other freaks..

Any ideas on how to run a prostitution campaign?

I would say the source book? Vice would be excellent background on what organizations are involved prostitution.

Depending on what location the various source books for that region if any would give local details on that.

As for opposition for your Runners hmm rival criminal organizations etc also groups like Rote Zora and Sie. For the last two I do not recall where the source of information on them is at the moment. But you can search the forums here and get maybe some more details.

I have a runner in a game right now that was a former Bunraku parlor girl with some customer request made alterations.

Big question is what type of prostitution? ie Bunraku? SimRig etc.

Be also aware that changelings can also be altered/created using the rules in Augmentation.

Loose Alliances has some stuff on them IIRC.

Meh. If you're not doing runs, it's not really Shadowrun to me. Setting up shop is boring.

Setting up shop is how you hide properly.

Numbered Corporations FTW!

Sure, but it's just like in D&D: you *could* just make a fabulous living casting Minor Creation or something all day. It's boring, you're an *adventurer*.

Your group is doing it wrong.

First off, you're playing toxic and blood mages. This alone invalidates any question you might have. Toxic and blood mages are not supposed to be player characters.

Oh, missed that part.

Draco18s, meet pattyhulez. You get used to ignoring it.

@OP: To be fair, I don't think anyone said you *were* a powergaming munchkin. That implies success, and everything you suggest is wholly illegal.

Typing this on a mobile, or I'd just have posted the link.

Search YouTube for "Dolemite".

That's how you run a magical prostitute SR campaign.

Yerameyahu and Draco18s: Please be careful about your tone. Putting smiley faces behind a mean statement doesn't make it less insulting.

Wounded Ronin: You are in rare form, sir.

As to the original topic, one easy plot line to get you started is to have some other shadowy organization or entity kidnapping changeling hookers for some nefarious purpose. Have your toxic blood mages try to figure out who's stealing their lady-friends.

Just remember folks, Pimpin' ain't easy!

You have to take and hold your territory and stables, deal with Johns and Janes, launder money so the IRS can't nail you like Capone...

Sorry if there was an insult. My point was just the simple fact that munchkinry is usually within-the-rules craziness, not just making things up.

Now, your big problem here is that everyone else already beat you to the punch. You'll be up against every criminal organization in the area, and they'll all destroy you. To address this, you'd better have a patron. No, don't tell me that you have a 'gang' of not-allowed-as-PC supermages with their million-karma ally spirits inhabiting impossible-to-get dragons. You'll want to be affiliated with someone powerful, like one of those existing crime groups, or something else with a lot of pull. It would basically be a mafia game: runners as enforcers and things.

(Emphasis mine) I like how racist this statement is.


Maybe, but why then would they have rules for all their abilities? Why couldn't a hermetic mage take Sacrifice? Or why couldn't anyone use Calling to call a blood spirit? How about a shaman who gets irradiated during some 'run in Chicago and decides to look towards the spirits of nature around him who help him survive, but they turn out to be Toxic?

There are plenty of ways to allow toxic, blood, and even insect mages as players. They just really, really have to watch their backs. I mean, more so than normal shadowrunners.

Of course, if the group is building mages just to have their teammates "auction" them off, that's another matter.

EDIT: Also, as for opening a prostitution gig, read Taltoss by Steven Brust. That's a story of what happens when someone just moves in and starts a gig in someone else's territory. Or read the Dresden Files. There's a couple times where Marcone says what happens when other people try to move in on his territory.

I think it's okay to be prejudiced against things that don't exist. Of course, the real irony is that his characters are mages, which makes them freaks too.

I think it's an idea. Not really a good idea or a fun one, but an idea. You could have lots of intrigue as you fend off competition. Remember, anywhere you set up shop, somebody's probably already doing it. And while shadowrunners could probably easily displace Bosley the Ork Street Pimp assuming he's not working for someone or the players are willing to work for the same someone, they might run afoul of organized crime if they set up a competing rub & tug or straight up brothel.

Any group doing this type of business will have to deal with competing criminals and, to a lesser extent, law enforcement. They will also be raising their profile - it's not good, for a shadowrunner (especially a group with massive bounties on their head from the Draco Foundation), when it is easier for people to find you. Finally, the type of prostitutes they are going for will be hot commodities. If they get sent out to work the streets, they might be abducted. If the group runs a brothel, they will be stationary and vulnerable to other criminal organizations. Even if they do this with a criminal group's patronage, they will still be targets for that group's rivals (if they work for the Vory, the Yaks might torch their brothel).

Also keep in mind that this stuff can get squicky. Pimping is nasty enough when you think about the kind of things it usually entails (abductions, tortures, rapes, etc.), but on top of that, you will be having your drooling players describing various "working girls" that sound like something from the dregs of 4chan.

I dunno, seems like a lot of peoples' characters are sociopathic killers, so being traffickers in the sex trade is almost tame by comparison.

I.m 99,9% sure he has neither players nor a GM, he just seems to like thinking up wierd and most of time not allowed by the rules stuff.

Oh sure, you could, but how often are legitimate mages like that going to be summoning a Force 20 blood/toxic ally spirit with inhabitation?

Doing stuff like that (and running a business, including illegal ones) just breaks the setting. This guy's only posts have basically gone like this, "My group has decided to write our own rules, are there any existing rules for X?"

Admin/Mod call on this.

Wow.

Look. There's nothing wrong with how he and his group plays. But showing up here and asking our opinions on something that is broken (when compared to how the game expects you to be playing) and assuming that all of us will recognize this as normal is wrong.

It's like playing The Other Game (D&D 3.5) where you and your group always plays with the Divine Minion template (see: Pun Pun the infinitely powerful kobold) and then hitting the WOTC boards with the question, "So how would I best go about getting my character infinite reach?" General reply, "Dude, you broke the game. This question is not appropriate."

And then asking another question with the same premise, "So how would I bet go about getting an infinite move speed?"

None of that makes what you're saying any more on topic, however. Ultimately, I see a thread where a guy is mostly asking about how to run a different style of game within the Shadowrun setting. In other words, this is largely about fluff.

I guess if you only read this thread in isolation, you could get that misapprehension. Ooh, ninja-edited on me. I'll just leave this to confuse people, I guess?

Yeah, my mind was wandering during my initial post so I pared it down to the core of what was bothering me about this whole thing.

I'm just waiting for the part when he asks how many karma he can drain per john...

In seriousness though, you can have fun with a criminal shop setup. (running a prostitution ring would be way too squicky for me, but YMMV) There are always rivals to butt heads with, potential blackmail schemes (from both sides), cops to worry about, getting caught up in turf wars between gangs/syndicates, the list can go on and on.

Heh. I think people have been quite helpful, actually. *shrug*

While I don't care about 'racism', Neraph's right about the elves: they're not freaks, they're supposed to be gorgeous. Depending on how people feel about 'species', they'd be simply expensive normal 'escorts', an exotic option, or for other elves. In any event, they wouldn't make sense to include with 'we specialize in freaks'. A minor detail, sure, but that's what threads are for.

Does not compute.

Listen, man, we're all glad you and your friends are having fun twisting the game around and turning it into something you're able to enjoy. Apparently actually running the shadows didn't do it for you -- if you ever even tried it -- so I think it's cool y'all are finding ways to play with rules you like, at a power level you like, to run the sort of campaign you like.

But, really? It's getting to a point you're asking such bizarre questions, about such bizarre circumstances, that people aren't gonna be able to (a) help you out, and (b) help but think you're pretty bizarre.

It's like if someone was running an all Dragon game. Not drakes, mind you, but Dragons. Sure, they'd still be in the Shadowrun universe (sort of). Sure, they'd still be using the Shadowrun core mechanic. Sure, they'd still maybe be playing a "campaign" full of "characters" and earning "karma" and all that good stuff that everyone else goes through...but their campaign would be so friggin' out there that there's really not much point in asking regular GMs for advice.

If my game is about a combat decker, a street sam, and a Coyote shaman trying to get past corporate security, right? And if that's the threat level I'm used to GMing for, if my guys have maybe 15-20 karma, if that's the power level I'm dealing with, and where most of the games are aimed, and where most of the source material is aimed...what kind of advice could I really give you?

What GMing tips do you want from folks running an A-Team game, when you're running the Justice League?

Wasn't that the Spellstitched or something like that? The one that gets buffs when hit with spells, from MM3 IIRC. The speed one doesn't have a duration - it continues to stack.

In any event, just buy the Day Job quality with Karma in-game. Viola.

Side conversation.

And:

The one good thing BTL chips did was to make drug trafficking and prostitution share the market with something in some ways more tame.

Basically what you describe is a campaign where you try to build up a criminal organization and will be up against other criminals, gangs, organized crime, the law, and runners hired by any of the above.

It is not a horrible crime to chose because it is more victimless than some of the other crimes you could chose for your organization. Assuming all the prostitutes are fully voluntary of course, but I don't really think it is in a shapeshifters nature to do this sort of job. Wolves, tigers, and bears have not been known to hang out on street corners. You could as a criminal organization take the high ground (relatively) by being better alternatives than the opposition. Better standard of living, better protection, better treatment.

Personalty I don't really like it when an RPG goes into these themes. I guess it was just taboo when I was younger playing RPGs and in some ways to me it still is. But I do know people that play RPG games with suggestive themes. But in that group almost all the group is dating the other half of the group so it is a different dynamic.

I gave the warning about squick because, quite frankly, I don't see a gang of blood mages taking the "We're nice guys, and all of the prostitutes work for us willingly" approach.

And while this may not be any more vile than PCs who play kill-crazy psychopaths, the killers tend to merely treat the game as a first-person shooter. The players running a bunch of pimps are likelier to go into levels of detail that might make the other players and/or the GM uncomfortable. Unless the GM enjoys that same level of detail, in which case I guess they can all giggle and snort while describing four-breasted changelings chained in the basement to their hearts' content. But for that, F.A.T.A.L. might be a better game for them than Shadowrun.

Unless the PCs are playing the girls, it purely comes down to an organised crime game. The working girls are, in the organised crime view, just another commodity.

This, plus the level on-going brutality (at least potentially) tends to carry a heavier emotional impact to most people. You get to walk away from the consequences of a kill; not as much when the victims are your employees.

(Granted, there are other ways to play it out, but those would make it even less "Shadowrun-ery" to me.)

Yeah. Street-level hooking is only for the lowest, dirtiest places on earth where a guy can't even afford a sim deck. There's sort of a market for exotics, but that's for escorts or live-in joytoys. The kind of sex you wear as an accessory. If all someone wants is to get their rocks off, they can just plug a wire and feel an avalanche of orgasmic pleasure pouring over them for what seems like an eternity.

At least, if you're keeping to the setting. Which, well...

When I read toxic mages and prostitution, I mentally went to BTL snuff films. I wish I could have gone to a happy place like you did.

Attempting to set up a criminal shop, and run it in the face of inevitable competition and complication writes it own runs.

One of the workers is being harassed by their landlord? Your job is to step in and protect. Landlord is connected, escalations occur.

Someone decides you are on their turf, war breaks out.

Business is bad, money is tight, you need to get some extra cash to pay off the bigger fish above you, fast. How?

I did a shadowrun where a shady member of MCT's unit 13 was involved in funneling some of the girls who were "failed" magical experiments into this one high-level pimp's stable. The idea was that a new fad in the sex industry was to have affordable (at least for low level corp execs) call girls which have rudimentary thought reading abilities in order to quite literally realize all their client's fantasies...but not enough ability to grab their secrets. The goals of most unit 13 experiments was to take people with just smidgeon of magical ability and amplify it to the powers of a full blown mage to be used in corp security....but the vast majority of the test subjects are failures who would be dumped in the barrens or given back to their familes with a small compensation sum...nobody would notice if some of the girls wound up working for this one pimp. It was the back story for one players hacker who had the positive quality of spell knack. She could only cast the mind reading spell with a dice-pool of 3....so when she was a prostitute before being a hacker she could read the surface thoughts, but rarely anything deeper.

Protection rackets
Gambling combined with extortion and Loan Sharking
Dealing drugs
Dealing BTL
Smugling drugs, BTLs and darker things
Scams

It is all evil. Some types of prostitution and some types of smuggling in addition to running the shadows is about the only steady illegal businesses I can think of that is not all kinds of bad karma.

A protection racket that is actually more like a real security service could be OK but protection money is in the real world is money you pay some one so they don't hurt you or your stuff.

Just to specify, Shadowrun seems to go out of its way to make sure there is no evil in the game - except, well, shedim. So drug dealing, BTLs, smuggling, scams, and other things are illegal, but you can justify them fairly easily, and you'd be within the mindset of Shadowrun to do so. Trying to say something is evil is saying that there is an external model of good to compare it to, and Shadowrun has tried very hard to avoid that.

EDIT: And, just to finish my argument statement about that, the fact that Shadowrun says that shedim are evil should tell you a lot about shedim.

Bad karma then, but not in a game mechanic sense. Just actions with consequences that bring about a negative result that with time will most likely come back to bite you in the ass.

Besides I meant evil because I see it as evil. I sometimes take the evil path in games but there are still some things I won't do. But I don't think playing evil in a game is evil in real life... with possible exceptions of course, but that would be some seriously evil role playing.

See, I still don't get the difference.

Unless your runners take absolute pains to avoid killing at all costs, killing even a single security guard becomes cold blooded murder. And with the kinds of body counts that seem common in Shadowrun games and fiction... Heck there's that story in Seattle 2072 where the woman plants a bomb on a guy in a public place and laughs when it explodes.

Shadowrunners are rarely good guys, no matter how you try to paint them. Drawing the line at drug running and BTLs but okaying murder? It's a violent, dark game. I can imagine not playing those kinds of games because, well, the material isn't as exciting. Cutting down corporate mooks is fun, let's face it, and it's make believe. But the characters aren't any less ruthless and essentially bad people. The average corporate employee isn't some evil mastermind. A security guard is probably just trying to make a living. Shadowrunners are, by their very nature, complicit in the corporate world even more so than the wage slave because they are specifically furthering ill gotten gains.

The game really isn't that squeaky clean. They have bunraku puppets, snuff BTLs, organ farms where pregnant women carry fetuses to term for spare organs/parts - hell, they have a book named Vice. All of these elements are there to add to the dystopian atmosphere. And they can add a level of gritty detail to the game in the hands of experienced and/or mature players - but that is not the impression I get from "Blood mages want to pimp out changeling whores."

Shadowrunners are grey hats who usually can only dream of being white hats. Because while they might be "fighting the man", in the end their participation in the covert war between the megacorporations only makes them part of the system they are railing against. They have to do bad things to keep even worse things from happening. Sometimes, they have to do bad things simply to survive.

I like the moral dilemmas and complicated decisions of shadowrunning. A lot of crime dramas out there, while usually presenting a romanticized view of criminals, still show how you can potentially have a great game exploring characters who get involved in shady activities. But often, it seems shadowrunners who want to do things like this only want to add treasure farming to their FPS experience. There's no conflict, no qualms of conscience - they are simply black hats. Which, to me, is every bit as boring as white hats.

"Dream of being White Hats"?

Must be nice having a group like that. Mine are in the "Shoot people in the face for money" business.

Yeah I guess I was on a little bit of a high horse. My thought process went like this. A runner group if it really tried could knock off an entire gang, especially if it was not a stand up fight. Alternately they could just back a small gang so that they become more powerful. Either way the runners could take over the protection rackets and other crime. But that is petty stuff. Protection rackets means shaking down shop keepers and little old ladies for chump change. I just would not find any fun in it as much as the idea of building a gang appeals to me.

But then again a gang does not need to be out to make money. They could just be a group of people that stick together and raise some merry hell just for kicks.

Must be nice. I've tended to be involved in those in the "hire orphans to pull rickshas, secretly filled with explosives, to bomb targets for money....or maybe just spite" business.