So! This is just a random musing by me, as regards a possible campaign type.

Suppose that one day, out of the clear blue sky, your group are abducted at gunpoint, flown to the Caribbean, and told "Welcome to your new homes, ese."

Kane has forcibly installed you as El Jefe of a Caribbean island, one that the Caribbean League either does not care about, or is impotent to take back.

Your mission is not at all simple: Kane instructs you to set up this island with an economy, and attract a working population; basically, to make it a place he can sail in and offload his goods, buy more supplies, and sail out again. As long as you're satisfying those requirements, he doesn't care what else you do with the island, so you can either turn it into the Redmond Barrens of the Caribbean or try and build it into an actual, working island paradise. Kane has promised that he won't be pirating up your island, and anyone else who tries to pirate up your island will answer to him, so you have a leg-up in that department compared to, say, the rest of the Caribbean.

Does that sound like an interesting game?

'Abducted at gunpoint' tends to make people not do what you want them to do when you leave them alone.
Specially made characters from a crew? Yes.

Just invest in the tourist industries. A bug in the mechanics makes that income be counted twice. And watch out that your wife doesn't spend an hour carefully laying out her tiny flower gardens across the entire island. (I loved that game.)

More seriously, I would enjoy an economy-building, country-developing RPG. But it's not Shadowrun, and I can't imagine how you'd execute it with the current mechanics.

It's called "An offer you can't refuse." Kane can do this and be reasonable certain that they will work on doing what he wants, between (a) being given a position with really great perks and tremendous security (as long as they do not cross him,) and (b) the implied threat that he will hunt down and murder everyone you ever loved before he gets around to you, if you should like, extract yourself from Tropico or lay a trap for him or something.

Yeah. What I was trying to say is: I don't like to be railroaded this way. And if you leave no out, it will be exactly that. But to each his own

FTFY.

I would want the setup to feel a little bit more Shadowrunny; basically have Penultimo or whoever handle a lot of the day-to-day stuff, and have the team handle all the "troubleshooting" aspects. I mean, who better to be Tropico's secret police than El Presidente himself?

I went with El Jefe because I don't think Kane would even bother pretending to keep up the appearances to whatever locals survived that they are free citizens of a country, as opposed to his slaves. Of course, if you do so damn well that you can institute elections that people actually go to, and keep winning, then you get to call yourself El Presidente.




Tropico 4: take the Secret Agent background, and the Veteran, Vigilante, and Well-Travelled traits. At day, you're El Presidente or La Presidente. By night, you are The Bat!

Anyway, I figured that the team's Face would handle the El Presidente stuff, giving speeches and such, while the others would handle their own sort of things - the Magician would pacify the island's astral space, the Street Sam would crack heads that get out of line, etcetera; and of course, when a big threat happened, the whole team pulled together, as usual.


I think the Win condition is if you get big enough to hire a military that can fight off Kane, or else buy enough cool toys that let you successfully Run on his ships and kill him and all of his subordinates who are charismatic enough to pull his pirate fleet together after his death.

It'd be an interesting diversion for sure.

I'd view it as side-thing: Kane has heard of you and on a dare, a lost bet, or plain whimsy he offers this to you. You fly there, get shown around, and are given the option--no one likes railroading much.

You say 'No' then you have a pissed off Pirate King who may want you to 'extract' a more willing candidate. You agree, and well, the fun begins.

This sounds really, really interesting. I'm getting a bit of a Black Lagoon vibe from it too.

So while I really want to dive into the psychology of SR players and what in their personal life makes them so resistant to being forced into decisions that they in RL and their characters in down time are likely constantly forced into... lets not do that and just say that I think this is a very cool idea.

Neither do I, but I might try this one as long as the GM was up front about it before the game started so that characters could be built accordingly (I don't think Kane would have someone do this who didn't have the necessary skills to do it).