Hey guys,

I am planning an experimental adventure that is not designed to become a typical shadowrunning campaign - an extended one-shot for shadowrun newbies, sort of.

The setup: The characters are all child brain cyborgs that are on active MCT duty. Their supervisors try a new approach to lessen the impact of the cyborg condition on the subjects in order to create more long lasting jarheads. The disembodied brains are not reprogrammed to be happy subservient children in bizarre, dazzling, iconographic VR worlds. They are reprogrammed to feel as completely organic teens in a high-maintenance verisimilar VR world. So they chose a variety of children, jarred their brains, and made them believe they are lucky orphans in the 50s who are playtesters for the new incredibly submersive matrix game (think of eXistenZ). Since this is the testing phase, they still have luxurious amounts of downtime, which they spend on an UV node that represents their home sprawl. To strengthen their feelings of identity, their new personas resemble their real origins and of course they are allowed to hang around in a "shared appartment". When they are deployed, they start "playing the game" - which is called visiON - and begin wrecking up shit in the real world, while they have a special reality filter or simsense editing agent running which creates the in-game experience.

Ideas for "game levels" / reality filters - practically any contemporary video game is a good model
- fantasy party slaying despicable monsters
- underground fighters during WWII planning to assassinate a sabotage or assassination mission
- military vehicles in the desert wars (or any modern war)
- superheroes smashing minions to secure a mad scientist's dangerous novelty invention
Some of those don't need heavy editing, since they already are pretty close to fitting missions.


The twist: Hackers, technomancers, and/or digital lifeforms start to invade and infect the cyborgs' system slowly eroding their sense of identity and reality.

Since I am preparing the characters, should I bother creating them with 400 GP?
Any further thoughts?

That... Wow. That sounds incredibly complex, of dubious practicality and return... And awesomely exactly like something a megacorp would try.

I don't think a fantasy overlay would work; swords and shields are just too dissimilar from the factual nature of the reality they're going to be fighting in (same for the superheros) - but the rest should work.

Thank you.

The preparations are madness. I'll be handling all the crunchy background calculations, while the players only have their minimized colorful sheets with their background and dice pools. This enables me of course to simplify the exact figures behind the screen.

Also, I am thinking about a common theme of the liberators' manipulations: maybe recurring murders of crows, feathers, warning shouts and/or (obviously) mirrors and reflections. Any other inspirations for omens?

Musicwise, I will use the soundtracks of moon, requiem for a dream, donnie darko, oddworld stranger, and bioshock, but I am open for suggestions.

Inserting News Feeds of what they are doing into news they are watching/subsribed to in their real world.
Kinda like while they were playing a dungeon run game a group of military class drones wrecked up some building.

If their captors keep them isolated from the reality of the real Matrix, to the point of not even knowing it, have a couple of hackers constantly invading their "real" world and wrecking shit impossibly, running up walls and stuff. Make them antsy to learn the answer to the question "What is... 'The Matrix.'" Have one of them be a black guy sporting the bald of awesome and a leather duster, and one a rail-thin white chick who likes glossy catsuits.

Great ideas, thank you, guys! I'm looking forward to an unnerving eveging.