Ok, so i've started a semi low powered game where all of the characters are Gangers in the 405 Hellhounds, but i'm having difficulty coming up with runs that a gang would have done. So far, i've had them rob a grocery store for food (which i was surprised to have some resistance from the players on) and a hostage rescue. Anyone have any other ideas? preferably something that might take more than 30 minutes of game time to do?

Have one of their fellow gang members come staggering into their clubhouse bloodied after a fight with a rival gang.

Maybe they need to purchase drugs or weapons for some of their businesses.

Well, that was sortof the set up for the rescue. I played it as if the 3 gangers got captured during a running gunfight

Claim territory from a rival gain. Convince shop owners that they need to pay for 'protection'. Steal a new shipment of guns/drugs. Do a 'recruitment drive'. Steal some oversized speakers and other electronics for a rave!

Provide protection to someone's friend/girlfriend/other. Break into a corp or shop or something and tag the place.

Big race coming up, need to grab great parts for your team and/or make sure the other teams run into 'mechanical' trouble.

Honestly, this sets itself up perfectly for a sandbox game. Let the players decide what to do. Maybe they want to start selling new drugs to increase the profit on their turf. Turn that into an adventure. Maybe they want to steal some weapons or 'wares. As Karoline said, if they want to increase their turf, then they have to fight the guys who's turf it currently is. Instead of coming up with plots, ask them what they want to do. They should make the plots for you. To give yourself extra time to plan stuff, call/IM/email them between session asking for ideas of what they are planning next. Then you can do some legwork in advance as opposed to doing it on the fly.

Well lets see, Go Gangers.

1) Rival gang does a drive by shooting on a 405 member. Hunt down the bastard, and get medieval on him.
2) Meet up with your supplier goes bad, now the Vory is pissed off with you even though it was one of their who shot first. You might need to rough up a whole lot of shopkeepers as a favor to get them off your backs.
3) While we are at it rough up shopkeepers for protection money.
4) Go to a local concert, run into an enemy gang. Brawl-O-Mania turns into a shoot out to death metal riffs.
5) Your new member is a virgin take him out for a good time, pimp slap some ho's.
6) Play mailbox baseball with random passersby.
7) Ride over the local Lonestar Patrol car, after toying with him for a bit, lose him.
Molotov Cocktail the Lonestar Patrol car, and get ghost.
9) Deliver a beat down to some kid who is wearing your colors, but is not in your gang.
10) Harass people driving down Route 405, it's your road make sure they know it.
11) A tour bus makes a wrong turn into your turf, terrorize the elderly and steal valuables.
12) Play pool at the local bar, for free. In fact drinks are free. Actually everything is free. The bartender is a real nice guy.
13) Gang challenge. Race your bikes against a rival gang. Winner has bragging right if they survive the brawl.
14) Play chicken with a semi, don't worry you will win because you are a 405 HEELLLLLLLHOUND!!!!!! and your friggin crazy.
15) B&E at the local Motorcycle Store, a new member needs his own ride.
16) Party with some fine ho's. Shit one of them stole your stash, time to teach them a lesson.
17) Borrow a couple of kids from school for ransom, make sure mommy and daddy know not to call Lonestar or little Jimmy is going to be processed. Processed? We will leave that to your imagination.
18) Defend your position as top dawg against an internal challenge.
19) Humiliate a random passer by.
20) Vandalize a church...because it is fun, and you are Satan.
21) Play a game of William Tell with some poor schmuck. Oooops. You missed, get another schmuck.

Hope that helps.

"The 405 Hellhounds […] specialize in moving goods from one end of Bellevue to another—sort of a fierce, unpredictable messenger service for illegal deals."

Ferry goods from one end of Bellevue to the other.

Find and mess up someone who interfered with another member of the gang ferrying goods from one end of Bellevue to the other.

Duke it out with the Mountain Boys near the Renton Airport where the highways that form their respective territories cross. This one can be out of the blue while the team is riding, too.

Go get some very special Hellhound chow for Eddie.

~J

Go play Grand Theft Auto San Andreas or either Saints Row game for ideas. The other GTA games are ok, but less that street level ganger feel and more the independent guy working for the various syndicates feel.

If there's any videogame I'd recommend for a few scenerio ideas AND a good way to get a feel for how a ganger game would look and run in Shadowrun, it'd definately be The Warriors.

Apparently in 1979 all New York City street gangs dressed up in gaudy uniforms, who knew it'd come into resurgance across the entire former United States in 2050 and beyond? Of course, there are far far far more firearms in SR than in the entire city of New York within the Warriorverse, so yeah.

DO IT.

Watch Sons of Anarchy for some good criminal gang related story hooks.

Flesh out your gangs back story, what's the gangs relationship like with the organised crime syndicates? Have the organised players try to push the gang around like a pawn in their larger game

A basketball game
A car/bike race
A rap battle
Tell everyone you've slept with their sisters and/or mothers
Remember the help the Shadowrunners PC ask their ganger contacts? You're the ganger contacts.

We really should update this phrase to SR time lines. How about "Get 1940's on him"? or "Get Night of Rage on him"? Or "Get late 20th Century on him"?

1) Set up some competition. You want a few local enemies, and one or two local allies. One of those enemies should be the Big Bad Guy for the time being.

2) BBG is getting something awesome soon (a new weapon, a new tech specialist, a mage, support of a mob). You must stop it.

"Chachi got fragged on a drive-by."
"What? Let's get Victorian on some muthafuckas!"

Cut scene to a bunch of gangbangers in top hats and cravats, sipping tea before one gets up and slaps another with a velvet glove.

I was expecting some kind of sexual repression. Going into his house, covering all those naughty table legs with linens and so on

How about 'World War'? What's the current age called? Information age? That doesn't sound nearly as cool.

What's mailbox baseball?

Its where you hit mailboxes with baseball bats. Often done from a moving vehicle.

I'm not sure how many buildings would have mailboxes though.

Hmm. Don't think there's a British equivalent to that.

Mailbox cricket?

Edit: It isn't an actual sport or anything, and I'm not sure it is an 'official' name, it is just a delinquent activity. Figured I'd make sure to point that out.

We don't really have mailboxes the way you do.

Good point. Letter slits are the big thing over there, right?

Fact is you'll only find mailboxes in suburban settings anyway, so no real opportunity for it in city.

We call them letter boxes but yeah. No idea why as they are basically a hole in the door you put mail through.

As an aside, I can tell you from personal experience you get funny looks if you go in a 5* hotel with a baseball bat over one shoulder and and dripping wet (in the middle of summer)

As such, I'd like to suggest terrorising rich folk as a gang activity.

Squabble over how hard you are. Get drunk. Have somebody disrespect somebody else through an arcane street code that you all vigorously support without understanding. Survive the ensuing gang war. Break and reform your gang a dozen times based off of who is more popular today and to confuse people who were looking for you before. Go shoot up a a funeral for an opposing gang. Survive that gang war. Change names again. Keep squabbling over who is the hardest and deserves the most respect. Impress eager tweens in the barrens and make them into new gangers because all of your gang wars have cut into your numbers.

Have the actual power brokers in the 405 finally realize you exist. Start running goods. Find out you were wrong to squabble-you are very small fish. Become bigger fish. Eventually suffer the fate of all fish who get too big for the bowl.

Zyerne,

It's basically the equivalent of side-mirror smashing in the UK.
I swear breaking drivers side mirrors is a sport in England.


On topic...I need to start a storyline along these lines as well.
I try to stick to the basics.

1. Gang needs territory
2. Gang needs members
3. Gang needs money
4. Gang needs warez/transportation/drugs
5. Gang needs rep

Anything in those areas should be good for a story or two.

Well, people have already suggested the stuff I would have; I'd point out that The Warriors was a movie first, though the game replayed pretty much everything the movie did, so if you want an active role in that particular story, the video game will do it. (I was actually going to suggest watching the movie, to be honest.)

Other hooks:
The 45's leaders have been gunned down in a vicious drive-by. It's up to the PCs to hold the gang together and go Night of Rage on the bastards who did it. Information gathering, hunting, big firefight. Maybe slice it up into taking their territory, piece by piece, driving them into their rat holes until they've got nowhere left to run. Go Clausewitz. Total Fucking War.

A boss of a stronger gang/organization needs some expendable muscle, and who's more expendable than gangers? This one lends itself to episodic content pretty well, letting you go out on errands (escort this, find this, bring me that, etc). Maybe, possibly, eventually the gang (or at least the PCs) wind up absorbed into the syndicate, and hired out to other synidicates, gradually moving their way up through the criminal underworld one "gang" at a time. Can go forever, until the players wind up in control of the biggest gang of all... a Corp.

(I advocate both "Go Night of Rage on their ass" and "Go Victorian on their ass"... for two diametrically opposed responses to situations. The Sixth World needs more Victorian outfits.)

1) Someone's brother's friend hears about a corp shipment coming nearby. The gang has the opportunity to try to boost the shipment, and then fence the wares. Shipment might be something valuable (guns, drugs), something useless (ramen cups, advert chips, corp propaganda), or something dangerous (a crated pack of hellhounds, cyberzombie, biotech virus).

2) Rival gang encroaching on the territory. Solved via violence, diplomacy, or machiniations (convincing another gang to go after them).

3) Someone on their turf gets murdered, violently. The gang should give some vigilante justice, but must find out who it is (petty crime to ghouls and vamps).

4) Some shadowrunners show up on their turf, offering to pay for the chance to hide out on their turf. Gang then has to try to hide'em from the heat, or maybe double cross them.

Be advised: Being told your in charge of the Seattle 405s (the whole damn thing) is like being told your in charge of a quarter of the current day LA Crips or Bloods or a major city chapter of the Hell's Angels. Quite literally 2,000 + members. Divided of course, into lots of little sub gangs, each with their own particular series of goals, seriousness, and loyalty. And full of egos needing stroking, crushing, etc. Plus you'll be presumably handling all of the contacts with major work for the previously mentioned couriering, and spending your day to day life managing to balance which factions (KE included) to keep appeased so you don't end up dead.

Very much like any tribal based structure, you would have a massive battle actually getting them to all listen to you, then ACTUALLY do what they say they were going to do, and then keep it all running, and manage to keep the losses reasonable. And actually get what people are doing to be effective. Oh, and prevent your own gang from tearing itself apart because, in the end you tend to occupy similar turf and niches. Even at the height of crips/bloods war in the 90s, the days when literally crates of AKs were being used in the inner city, it was mostly a semi-autonomous fight with minimal guidance because of these same factors. While you might know the guys from ten blocks over were technically in the same gang, your chance of working side by side with them involved byzantine politics. And if the recorded statistics are accurate, you were just as likely to end up fighting with other sub-gangs of what was nominally the same gang as the alleged big opponent.

It could be an awesome game. It would be great fun. But major gang leadership is going to be a series of endless social interactions, legwork, and more social interactions, then more legwork, with the occasional demonstration that you still got it, and perhaps a few key points of violence as a political statement, not a bunch of low life jobs. Because hey, you've got 2,000 folks doing low life jobs for you.

If you want more typical gameplay, I would recommend either a smaller sub gang/chapter of the 405s or positions as trusted lieutenants/enforcers who go make the good stuff happen, not the guys who order it before meeting yet another union rep or seeing if all the protection money is accounted for.

All, excellent ideas, thanks everyone As a follow up, as players, would you be offended if i did a "time warp" of maintaining the status quo, and building the trust with their current Lt, in order to transform it into more of an open world game, without actually playing that time? would they expect to get the karma and cash rewards for this time (presuming that they are doing work, it's just not being played?)

You might need to make the monetary rewards a little more abstract if you want to shy away from the labor of calculating salvaged goods, etc. Basically, anything they do should get karma. Thats a fact. Then if they do a "mission" like expand territory, you should say, if you win and get this street, it will add 5000k Nuyen per "time" to your cash flow. If you want to treat it like a business anyway, without getting caught up in income and expenses. Missions like beating up people or knocking off competition could result in street cred. If they get hired/used by larger criminal organizations, then you can have standard runner like rewards for completing tasks.

Actually, I would make everyone take the flaw day job 2500/20 for the gang for no benefit or penalty, since its inherent the game. That would be the income for their starting territory, with an even cut going to everyone. For missions that add new drugs/weapons/etc to their profolio of distributed goods, you can increase that dollar amount. Same with expanding territory. Additionally, they will have to defend their territory or else lose part of their steady income.

Few. But for an urban alternative, as a go-gang, it's practically required that you do the same thing with Gridguide/Gridlink boxes.

Those have boxes?

Gotta say I am delighted with the light repartee discussing the finer points of mailbox baseball. Mailbox baseball is a past time enjoyed by many recalcitrant youths throughout the suburban wasteland of modern America. It involves a baseball, one youth engaged in driving the vehicle, and one youth hanging out the passenger window with a baseball bat. Driving at a steady rate the driver lines up in attack position, as the batter prepares to swing. If it is perfectly timed, and the approach is good, it results in the demise of a mailbox. Of course sometimes these mailboxes may be filled with concrete in which case the batter will undoubtedly suffer extensive damage.

This game updated for 2072 would still involve the normal participants, however the target would be unsuspecting passersby. A point system for hit locations with the head generally being the most worthy since it potentially carries the greatest gore factor with it. The concrete mailbox could be simulated by a full conversion borg in disguise. All in all it translates rather well. A timeless classic.

There was a CSI episode about this. Of course, the youth died.

We used to collect (take from construction sites) Road closed signs and would cut off the on ramps to the highways before morning traffic would start....or close down our area to the school bus.....We also lived on a big ass hill and we would take buckets of water out and ice over the roads so the busses could not come up to get us at the start of winter, you know the usual teen crap.

On a side note, Syndicates use gangs as low level enforcers...get them involved with a crime family...then allow them to move up from Gang member to made men/women!

I remember when I was a kid, lived on a big hill, and we iced one of the sidewalks to make it into a slide. It was actually reasonably safe thanks to the 10cm or so of snow around it and the big snow bank down at the bottom.

Only problem was I don't know that we marked it as a slide. Luckily no one fell on it or anything.

I remember when I was a kid and lived in Florida.

At least you had......... water?

You should reenact Westside Story.

Obviously.