So ages ago, I mentioned wanting to do a Creepypasta themed game. I finally got the players interested in a game but they've completely forgotten the theme I had planned (which works in my favor). I'm less inclined to making it full-on creepypasta & more borrowing inspiration at this point. I was wondering what everyone thought of these plot angles I want to use in the near future.

• Magical Madness

I have one run idea where the runners are hired to clear out some slums for the Johnson because his company wants to pave the land over for their company, but his own company men haven't returned from evicting the last person in the area (all others accepted payment to leave or were scared off).

The run seems easy enough, but the NPC at the root of the problem is a drug addict who foolishly made a pact with a free spirit (either a shade or a wraith) and they're a gun adept to boot. Would it be too dangerous for starting characters for me to use this plot hook?

• Angel of Vengence

The other plot hook I have is that there's (according to the Johnson), a mysterious hacker who has been attacking his people and stealing the company data. He wants them to find out who & stop them. Possibly retrieve the data if it's still there.

The NPC causing all this is a technomancer who follows a dark paragon (Nemesis) and she has a vendetta against people she percieves as "evil". She feels this company will bring about ruin and believes through violence and viruses, she is doing God's work. Kinda like the Operative from Serenity, only less katanas and more Black IC and Dissonance.


I've settled on there being just little threats they encounter & not some grandiose plot of a evil spirit or AI seeking to destroy the world. Sort of an episodic campaign if you will. Some runs will seem normal but as they get more powerful, stranger & darker things will happen.

The first sounds like an interesting hook. Especially if it's a dream pact and "asleep" includes "passed out" they might meet either of the personalities in the body and have to sort out what's actually going on. And if they kill the junkie, they have a new enemy free spirit that could come back to bite them in the ass. The adept is probably no more dangerous than a team of high level opposition. I might reserve it for a group with a magician, because if they've made an enemy of a free-spirit, they're going to have to go on a quest to kill it for good.

The second sounds like the type of individual my group would want as a contact and they would probably not try very hard to stop her. In fact, I can totally see my group going "So heads up, they're on to you and want you dead. You didn't hear it from us. If you need money for your anti-corp crusade and want someone to dispose of that data you've been stealing, give us a call. Happy hunting."

I have a confirmed mage and hacker which is why I'm keen on these ideas. And yes, I'm counting "passed out" as asleep for a dream pact.

The technomancer might be a bit touchy about the hacker if the player chooses to keep his mild addiction to BTLs due to her past & the fact she was abused by her drug-addicted parents. Otherwise, she COULD be an ally if they play things right. Otherwise she'll consider them on her drek-list.

(sorry for a double post)

On a related note, how many extra powers can a free spirit have? I'm REALLY tempted to slap "vessel trading" the free wraith or shade that they could be dealing with (it would mostly use it to bully its pact-partner)

The deadliness of the wraith or shade will depend on its force. I probably wouldn't do this as a first run if your only 2 characters are a hacker and a magician. Adding a gun-adept to the mix is overkill for first run I think. Maybe some ex-corp army guy or something with PTSD but not much else beyond the powers that spirit gives him would work. Until the characters get some money and the right sort of gear to deal with spirits, tossing a wraith at them could be unfair.

Can someone explain creepypasta for me?
Also I would discourage using a matrix threat before the players are accustomed to the matrix rule. It tends to be frustrating when their commlinks start going bump in the night and they don't know how to deal with it, at the flid side a TM villain that doesn't do anything worthwhile tends to end up more comical.
Spirits can be straight forward to deal with, as 'kill it with fire' always is an option... Not so much with the matrix.

"Creepypasta" is basically a term applied to various horror stories circulating around the internet. They range from simple ghost stories to tales of cursed places/objects or horrible monsters/spirits. Plenty of times people go mad in the stories.

And yes, I don't plan on introducing both NPCs around the same time. I don't have a place quite for the technomancer so she's sitting in the corner til I have a solid plot hook, but I'm thinking by the 2nd or 3rd adventure, I introduce my crazy gun adept because I'm thinking I want it to be a recurring villain (honestly the spirit could care less about his pact-partner's fate because he can just go off and cause more misery elsewhere if something happens to her) but we'll see.

Have to say, I love the idea of the pact-junkie-adept. Yes, a gunslinger Adept can deal out quite a bit of hurt to a player party. Moreso if you catch the players with their pants down. But party vs 1 is rarely going to go the way of the lone gunslinger, even with knowledge of the terrain so I don't think it would be too much of a challenge unless you arrange things to ambush and murderise them from hiding (sniper fire+ambush=at least one dead runner). The character is interesting enough to demonstrate some of the weirder stuff that exists in the 6th world without being too horrifying, and just because they pissed off and potentially didn't kill a free spirit doesnt mean said spirit is going to hassle them FOREVER for the slight of it. Recurring annoyance with a minor grudge who potentially becomes more obsessed with the PC's sounds more like it, growing more directly antagonistic/lethal as time goes on.

It's my understanding that a Free Spirit cant be less than Force 6 and also, that they can't use AR when possessing someone. Does that mean that if the Wraith is possessing the adept, they can't access her Smartlink that's installed in her goggles?

The adept & the spirit could easily get the drop on the runners if they choose to go into the area during the day. I've set up for a special encounter of the adept's friend has come back to look for them (they don't know about the spirit or the pact). If the players cause a ruckus in interacting with the friend, the adept or the spirit will be alerted to their presence.

Finally, since the free spirit might be very powerful, should I put some filler mods in to give the players a chance to power up or do you think it would be fine to introduce them after a run or two?

Spirits of any type can't use AR, so no, the wraith wouldn't be able to use the smartlink for targeting. Whether is could for other features is up to you but I'd let it (things like ejecting magazines (clips) or activating/deactivating the safety but not things like ammo count).
It is rare to find a free spirit under force 6 but not impossible (see pg 106 SM).
I would certainly add a little filler mod or two to get the players experienced with the system as well as getting the characters a little karma and some better than the starting gear. Maybe something to build up the issues the corp is having with getting this guy off their land. Or perhaps just a few runs to establish the characters as being the right people for the job. You can find leg breakers anywhere but this job calls for a certain skill set and it might help if the characters were known in the shadows for having that skill set.

True. Most of the players and I are pretty much veterans to 4e (one person who might join is a newbie), but this is my first real attempt to GM since 3rd edition D&D.

The first mod is going to be the Johnson hiring them to steal a rival's shipments of cyberparts and files (since the rival keeps their files uber secure to the point they have to break in to download it on-site). They mostly deal with the tech side of things which will lead to the technomancer mentioned earlier in the thread. The druggie-adept is just a thorn in their side because they just want to pave over her apartment complex to build a new office. If I'm really pressed for ideas to get from "steal this stuff" to "evict the stubborn tenant", I might just check out the SR missions for download. That is, unless you guys got some awesome ideas.

Are you looking for horror type run ideas?

If you are (admittedly a bit cliche)
1. Ghouls, hunting them, clearing out a nest, etc.

2. Hired by a corporation to investigate an "incident" at one of their facilities and recover data from the servers there or a high value asset. The incident can be any number of things. A bioware experiment gone horribly wrong. Bug research. Test of a new variant of K-10 that is extremely volatile and accidentally got into the buildings air supply. Either way, they must enter a facility filled with dangerous disgusting creatures, overcome the facilities defense systems, and get the hardware. And of course the company will not have briefed them entirely on what they'll be dealing with or how many of them their could be. For the added twist, perhaps there are still trace amounts of whatever in the air and their characters are being slowly effected. They occasionally roll Will or Body to avoid going berserk, insane, hallucinating, becoming disoriented, etc.

3. Take on a cult that has been abducting people to sacrifice to perform blood magic.

4. Hired to sabotage a set of mines by rigging explosives to make them collapse. The Johnson claims it's to hurt a competitor by taking the mines out of commission, but really it's because the mining operation has gotten dangerously close to where someone buried a particularly nasty artifact that the Johnson doesn't want found. Something along the lines of the necronomicon. They arrive too late to find the workers dead or possessed. Maybe they don't discover this until their down in the mines and then they have to find their way out. And the mine cuts off their matrix connection so there's no calling for help.

First game went well. I was a little rocky remembering rules & numbers but the players helped me out and had a lot of fun. All those ideas sound awesome although #4 wouldn't work since no one has demolitions. Still, thanks for the suggestions.

Heh, combine #2 and #4 from thorya, and have a really creepy fun game. You can easily remove the "blow it up" or have a self-destruct built in that will need to be manually activated. (Press the shiny red button, and run!)

-D

Haha Yes. Purge the zone! Alternatively, a drop-off explosive could work that the players don't have to set-up all fancy. Just place the inconspicuous box on the floor and casually walk away from the epic explosion ala some action movie. The campaign isn't on a very strict weekly schedule as I'm sharing GM time with my husband and cousin who are running their own D&D games.

I got another idea that the players almost technically figured out (out of character). When I said the Johnson was a mundane old man with no cyberware, my husband blurted out "Or a mage using masking!" It took all my willpower not to tell him that's what I was starting to have in mind... I decided as I was making this thread that this campaign is sort of an alternate reality to my cousin's last major Shadowrun game. Except that... his game never happened because of alternate events our character's lives. My husband had an adept who was very skilled in disguise and he once told me that, if she hadn't met the team and been shown true comradeship, she may well have gone down a dark path towards being a blood adept. I'm very tempted to say she indeed went down such a road in this universe and is the one pulling the strings for her own means.... just as the technomancer is my old character who had a very different life herself. Kind of a dark mirror world I guess & so far no one's caught on.

I got an idea for the next session. The run will be an extraction run and it provides me with the chance to hint at the technomancer I mentioned. The group will have to break into the building and deal with physical, magic and matrix security, although some of the matrix security will have been tampered with and they'll find their target catatonic or something (having been attacked by the technomancer) Just curious how hard or easy it would be to detect if a file has been edited (in fact, what skills would be needed to roll) because the technomancer came in before the group and deleted a lot of files as well as attacked the system to get at the target for their own motives.

Maybe the technomancer didn't edit the access log (Unwired p65) before he left. The access log will show all activity that has been done on a node. It will also show the technomancer's Matrix access ID, so you can find him on the Matrix. But I'm not sure how technomancer's access ID's work. Can technomancer's really change their access ID? Anyway, if you have a technomancer you can hack in to his bionode and run a trace complex form to find him. If not, you might need to have the runner's find another technomancer to do it for them. Or you can probably just send him a message over the matrix...that'd probably be easier assuming he kind of wants to be found.

She'd be pretty damn good at covering her tracks but I suppose if I want to bait the players, I can have her slip up editing a line or two in the access log. I don't think technomancers can edit their access IDs since they're their own 'commlink'...

Technomancers CAN alter their Access ID's.

Good to know I don't want to the players to locate her physical location right away on the grounds that I haven't settled on if she's pretty healthy or physically weak in some way. Hard to say what the character's morals are (the players too for that matter) when it comes to encountering someone who thinks their doing God's work via the Matrix by punishing the "sinful".

So I'm still looking for the idea place to introduce the drug addict and spirit. My players team consists of the hacker, a mage and a combat adept. Since it's just the three of them I'm thinking the spirit is maybe a Force 4 free Shade spirit (rare but not technically unheard of), because it's my assumption that Force 6 is way overkill. Or should I dial it back more?

Of course, if I need to, I can continue on the story of the technomancer and see what the players do with her when they find out she's hacked their stuff to delete any record of her attack on their target.

So the group actually mopped the floor against the spirit. They wisely arrived during the day when I ruled the adept would be awake and they wisely used stealth and got the jump. So now the group gets to extract the vengeful technomancer from an insane asylum. I'm wondering what kind of security (real, magical, matrix) they may encounter. I'm considering crazed patients as well as security guards. Any suggestions?

Is the TM willingly there? If yes, he may have control of each and every peripheral via machine sprites and use them to be forewarned, forearmed and spray the runners with everything from hot coffee to debilitating electrical shocks.

Actually yes... She is there willingly (kind of) Going off some fun stuff I found in augmentation regarding cyberzombies & personality disorders... our lovely technomancer has a split personality... The crazy vengeful one... and a meeker more child-like one. The crazy one wants to protect the child. She/They were sent there when they were 13 because no one believed her story that an angel smote her dad and set her house on fire...

I kinda thought that the whole "picking on one company" wasn't going to work out... so I revamped that she targets BTL users & makers because they are tainted with evil.

Also, the staff of this place do not realize they have a technomancer on their hands because she's very careful about her powers and the only personality they've encountered in the real world is the meek one. No one thinks she is a danger although they remain perplexed why she won't talk and why she refuses to leave the facility.