Hoi chummers

I just started a Shadowrun 3e game with three of my friends. (3e because I have a crapton of books for it, and only the main book for 4e)

All of them have played RPGs before (D&D and Rogue Trader), but none have played Shadowrun before, and I have never GMed Shadowrun F2F before. It took us about a week to get started, with me helping them make characters, and explaining a lot of the backstory to them. We had our first session yesterday, the first mission in Brainscan, and they did fairly well.

The characters are as follows:
Cyrano - A lecherous dwarf rigger with chloroplast skin (He has green skin which provides him nourishment in the sunlight). He lives in his Black Maria van, which is like an armored SWAT van thing.

Lars - An elven decker/face who has a ton of fancy clothes and a high lifestyle, and is also the only member on the team with any social skills.

Stein - An Irish (At least by accent) ork street sam with a cyberarm, wired reflexes, and bone lacing who lives in a mini-storage unit. The player also took Amnesia as a flaw, and I said that he was fished out of Puget Sound with two slugs squashed against the back of his skull. (Jason Bourne ripoff, but I came up with it on the fly.)

So my questions are as follows.

What can I do to make the game more cyberpunky, so it's not just kind of like playing in the modern day with cyberware and metahumans?

What are some things I can throw at the ork player to make his heretofore unknown backstory kind of suck for him? I want him to sort of regret taking amnesia as a flaw after all the dust settles.

What's some cool stuff I can do when they're not on a shadowrun? The team dynamic got pretty clearly defined in the first session, with Lars being more or less in charge of these two near-homeless social rejects.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Having been born an Ork isn't enough for you?


If he's careless about letting it get around that he's an amnesiac, the old "have people from his old life show up" thing gets better, because since other people know about it they could be fakes. What point level did he go with?


Atmosphere. Doing it tastefully is a difficult task, but background descriptions of random violence, abject poverty (sometimes juxtaposed against conspicuous consumption), and a focus on the lack of law and order in most areas (Lone Star beat cops hitting people/PCs up for bribes in exchange for overlooking things, lack of an aura of invulnerability/reliable retribution around Lone Star's lower echelons, gangs taking over downtown highways after dark, etc.) can go a long way. Remember, things should be blowing up on a pretty regular basis.


Expand on the social rejects? Aside from running into atmosphere, I think off-run cool stuff will mostly be driven by people going places or doing things and consequently being exposed to the parts of Shadowrun they run into.

~J

Was just reading some stuff on William Gibson and I came across this thread. Gibson's cyberpunk style was described as a mix of "lowlife" and "hi-tech". Gibson's books tend to focus on people on the fringe of society, down and out deckers, people who live in shantytowns, etc. How they interact with corporations and the nova-rich emphasizes the dystopia. Seattle is also a very international town, being the only UCAS port on the west coast, never mind that the whole world has become more integrated with suborbital travel. Foreign accents should be a common occurrence.

Check out some of the supplements like Matrix, and Rigger 3 and you will see that the first few chapters talk about how advanced tech has changed things. The 3rd Ed Shadowrun companion had a good chapter on 6th world life too, explaining cultural shifts that have occurred. Consider in you games how technology has mutated human culture making it seem more alien. Even normal people modify themselves to shocking degree, like your green dwarf.

I also try to write using the slang terms, when I do scene descriptions. That and emphasizing the influence of corporate advertising and capitalism on everyday life. Its not a coffee maker, its a GE-Keurig Coffee BLOW! Go to the stuffer-shack and get yourself a Fizwiz slushie-tube, and chase it with a nasoya soyburger.