I've been looking at some of the plots that I'm making for my campaign. It made me wonder what was the best plot I've ever made for my SR campaigns.

Usually I make a ton of backstory to my plots in the vain hope that the players will spend time and energy on researching what is going on. Normally they just move on as soon as they have been payed. In case the villian returns they shoot him and his henchmen in the head and ceases all further investigation.

One such plot was a a insect spirit related plot:

The players was hired to stop a troll gang that was moving in on a new territory. Mr. Johnson is a business man from Seattle who have flown in from USA to do it - they are in Denmark. The players succeded and as they meet with the Johnson for debriefing and payment, a mantis spirit manifests out of nowhere and mauls Mr. Johnson before it vanishes again. Mr. Johnson is flown to the nearest hospital and the players are pissed, because they didn't get paid before he was assaulted.

On top of this a mantis spirit in human form contacts them and tries to interrogate them.

The whole plot behind it was that there was an insect hive in the area where that the gang was moving into. It has been established long distance thought the carefull grooming of a young local shaman, - turning him into a insect shaman. He had infestated his whole gang and when the troll gang was moving in, he was about to hatch the queen. His tutor in Seattle - a Universal Brotherhood shaman - wanted the hive to survive, so he sent his henchman to Denmark to hire someone to stop the encroaching gang.

The players didn't give a toss about it and just walked away.

So...what is the best plot you've made for SR? and how do you write them down? just in a texteditor, do you do flowcharts? or are you more into a sandbox storytelling?

Do you have any particular good or bad things that you usually do?

/A.

I’m running a one player game, so it isn’t quite the usual situation, but for what it is worth here is how things work for me.

I tend to run relatively few big runs, and more smaller incidents (with some bigger runs). I look to the character (qualities, what skills get developed) for points that are interesting to explore, I try to give choices that will help define the character, and I bring back things that made a positive impression. A few examples:

- The PC is a shaman, with a code of honor against ‘enslaving’ spirits (he won’t use binding, tries to free bound spirits when he could). I decided to see how he’d react to other captured beings.
- While escorting an obnoxious simsense starlet, they encounter people trying to deal with a captured griffon that is in a truck but has partially broken free of its restraints. The simsense star volunteers the information that the PC is a shaman. The captors offer money to help re-capture the griffon. Instead he chooses to manipulate the situation such that he can free the griffon.
- Quite some game time later he is biking along the coastal highway, and a griffon swoops down and captures him and brings him to his nest to feed to hatchlings – then recognizes the shaman, keeps him safe, brings him food, then returns him to his bike—a small interlude in another adventure that provided emotional reward for his earlier decision.
- Then later in the game still an eagle shape-shifter tracks him down in Seattle, needing help to find her stolen eggs. She chose him, because she saw the interaction with the Griffon and concluded he must have done it a kindness in the past, which seems like a recommendation. She pays him with a feather that she says he should use when he needs a great favor from air spirits.
- Eventually he has to confront a ‘horror’ (outsider spirit) and uses that feather, allowing him to call a powerful thunderbird like spirit that defeats the horror (I forget exactly what the game impact I gave the feather, but honestly the biggest impact on the player was that it appeared to be thunderbird (not his totem, but cool all the same).
- None of this was plotted out in advance, but it played out looking like it had been.


- The PC likes racing motorbikes, even though he is obviously not a rigger (high ground craft with a specialization in motorobikes, has the gearhead quality. I wanted a run where his ability to get somewhere fast would be key. He got hired by an NPC to help steal a mcguffin, and they’d split the proceeds of the following black-market auction. Almost instantly they got a huge bid from a great dragon who has a residence up in Vancouver, and wanted it delivered there. Another dragon manifested its astral form, demanding the object. They decide to take the bid from the great dragon, and the PC takes off on his bike from Seattle to Vancouver, having to get past the various people that the other dragon manages to hire to try and stop him. Moving fast was key to not letting the dragon organize things too thoroughly, and the whole chase ends with him dodging around buildings in Vancouver to try and break line of site with a helicopter with gunman shooting at him. It was a blast of a run.
- The player was intrigued by the dragon that was chasing him – he’d had some banter with its manifested astral form, and found it interesting.
- The dragon later appears to him in human form, and forces him (with magic and threats) to take on an ugly little job, saying that the PC owed him.
- On that bike ride where the griffon snatched him, he later saw a dragon high overhead, which swooped down and matched his speed, flying low over him for twenty minutes before pulling away – he didn’t know what message it was trying to send, but was appropriately freaked and intrigued. I just threw this in as color to make the long ride more interesting.
- Later in that mission a club they were investigating gets bought out by a new owner, but only several episodes later do they learn that it was a dragon, and he suspected it was ‘that’ dragon. I only did that because of how favorably he responded to the fly by (originally I had another NPC planned for that role)
- I dropped other dragon hints in a couple of missions, without bringing them face to face, and he started buying up the Knowledge: dragons skill.
- When on a routine job for a contact, tracing who someone from Boston is meeting in Seattle, he is shocked to find that it is that dragon, and gets to see its human form in a new, more distinctive outfit.
- He is now caught up in the Boston Lockdown, and has realized that a rumored dragon showing up periodically is that same dragon. I’ll eventually set him up to meet it, and quite possibly the dragon will be his ticket out of the lockdown. Or maybe not, it isn’t fixed, it is just an option.

@Adhoc: From what I read I have the impression that you have the same problem I sometimes have: making a good story and then somehow fitting runners inside.
I don't think it's necessarily bad to think plot first and PC involvement second, but in that case it is crucial to make sure that the PC will have something interesting to do, and that the plot will be more than background noise.

A good way to get your PC to involve themselves more into the plot is to make it personal. As soon as it affects their contacts, their friends or something they care about, they will be less likely to walk away

I work under the philosophy that the best laid plans fail at the first obstacle.
Usually if I spend copious amounts of time crafting a narrative your players will still surprise you in what they choose to do, so the most sanity preserving method is to stick to bulletpoint and let the story unfold naturally from there, with a hefty chunk of on the spot improv for good measure.
Now you can obviously spend time crafting set pieces but keep it fluid where you put them in, that corp lab facility you drew up can just as easily serve as a server room in a knight errant office.
and oh, always keep a list of names handy... Its harder than you think to make up names on the spot for random NPCs you have to throw into the story.

I have absolutely had this happen too. I’d been building up one go-gang as sort of allies, then had this whole arc where they were getting into an all out war with a rival gang, each side calling in favors and allies, eventually getting too big and violent for the police to ignore … the response I got as soon as things started to escalate? *shrug* “If the two gangs kill each other off, it means less gangers terrorizing the highways.” Which was a kind of rough reminder to me that it needs to stay more focused around the player characters.

My aim is to force a tough decision. Something that adds to the character in some way- making them feel. Making them darker/lighter or more hopeful or cynical, feel happy or tired etc. The plot is a backdrop for the interactions of the humanity of the characters to interact with each other and the game world.
I craft set pieces with this in mind, running a probability tree where, playing with the PC's and to a degree understanding how the player sees their character, to guess whats a hard decision for them and how to get them there.

And yes I cheat by having a long time to think of this before hand and they only have a short time to think in the moment.

My aim is with my players to get on the same page at the same time at the right time. Everything revolves round the players. Even when the uncaring world spins on regardless, its doing that so the players feel their characters are parts of the uncaring machine not demi gods directing their own fate free from influence.

Start with linear plots which need the PCs to go forward, find what makes them tick by asking the players before hand. The start throwing in twists when your happy with that. Slowly complicating the plots by interweaving drives of the characters. Start making them have to juggle multiple motivations. Then you can start having them conflict in more convoluted and personal ways.

Thats a kind of thumb nail of my starting points and end goal.

Exactly this. 99% of my runs are on the fly. I build a backstory, outline some factions at play and personalities for NPCs who have goals, and then let the players go wild and see where they take things. I've got a whole folder full of set pieces with maps, NPC stats, and paragraph-sized description blocks on my old laptop, and pull them out as needed.

I do a lot of on the fly GMing. I'll sketch a loose plot, major antagonists and at least one twist or complication. Leave rest up to players. I also have few SR folders with maps, generic npc's, art, rules references and some random urban flavor tables.

I try and get the players to give as much direction to the campaign as possible - I'll throw them snippets of information that potentially could lead to runs, and usually have one or more campaign story arcs or one-shot runs available to them as options, but in general I want them to tell me how their characters are going to be proactive in the world. The way I figure it is that in real life, criminals aren't sitting around waiting for mysterious strangers to offer them scores - they're out hustling, looking for angles and ways to make money.

Nice!

Ta.

@Adhoc: It sounds to me like your players aren't really interested in conspiracies or plot in general.

once upon a time, I had a normal rat bring a datachip to a rat shaman. the players were a bit slow with this clue, but eventually they got to it....

along the way, i had them rob a lab on an upper floor of a building downtown. it was an ares bioware lab, and they had some unique specimens there at the time. things like a magically active symbiote worm, and a girl-ina-box (like episode 1 of firefly). when they went to meet with the Johnson, a sniper put a round through mr. Johnson's head before he could pay them. now, they had NEVER done any legwork on this guy. they grabbed his commlink as they ran, and dialed the first number in there- Aztechnology. the funny bit here, is he was not an aztechnology johnson, that was his burner comlink with fake data on it (the real one was an implant that was ghosting, which they never were aware of). so aztech sent an attack helicoptor, which scared off the helicoptor tailing their van and gave them a nice escort into the pyramid.

so, aztech just had this drop into their lap out of nowhere. they buy some very nice ares goodies from the runners on the cheap, and the fool runners evey pay for the privilage of having aztech implant some new stuff into their heads (with FREE cranial bombs). they sell the girl in a box to aztech, this becomes a plot point. ya see, this girl is a technomancer.

so things move on, they go on other jobs, and finally research the chip to find that its an old black site for Fuchi, an underground lab of some sorts. they send in a drone with some repeaters, and learn to their horror that inside this place, the matrix is manifest as a physical reality. around this time, they get contacted by the girl- she wants help escaping. being a technomancer, she gets several messages for help out before they finally go on a run to save her from the lab experimenting on her.

with a technomancer on the inside helping, they manage to stage a rescue, and then get her to the black site. its the perfect spot for her to hide, and in fact this site was the source of the 2nd crash, and part of her backstory. she gives the players a choice- should she leave the world as it is, or fundamentally change it, such that cyberware will no longer cause essence loss? sadly, the players fear change, and want the distopian world to remain unchanged. the campaign ends there.

the story belonged to the players, i just gave them a clue, a place, and an NPC to work with. somehow they managed to mess things up in new and interesting ways, then refused to make the world a better place when given a chance.

Wait, you ran with my table also?

Maybe they just think transhumanism is crap.

My best plot was written a long time ago and is here on this forum complete with a full module you may use.

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=11960

I like to think that it has made all other plots obsolete.

We tend to forget what "back-" stands for in "background story." If it ought to matter, then it's a foreground story. Otherwise, it's hard indeed to make your audience spend time and energy and learning more about background.

Giving background to the opposition can be especially un-rewarding as the point of any opposition is to be defeated by the protagonists. And once they're defeated, they're not relevant any longer, just as any piece of information about them. Hence the point of focusing on the protagonists' own stories, because they are the ones who will be here all along.

You can make it like knowing your enemy is important and all that, but that's rarely true in a RPG where all that matters is where it is and how many armor points is has. You may consider introducing in a backstory some special "vulnerability" that would worth looking for (NPC is wanted by a mob boss who's willing to help the PC, location has a secret underground access, and so on) but you' realize that the players still are unlikely to search for a secret information they have no reason to suspect it may exist in the first place (though I guess you can make your players learn from experience that they can expect such "reward" commonly are to be found in backstories).

I have been slightly more successful in making players interested in the backstories of third parties. They are going to defeat the opposition, but there are a number of other people and organizations involved that may become their employers or the opposition soon enough. It comes as widely more interesting to them to investigate backstories to know if a helping hand can be fully trusted or if A hindrance should be dealt with diplomacy or brute force.

What I basically do is introducing a NPC to the PC as a peripheral third party during one adventure, then in a more important role at least a second time, in a way that force the players to consider it under a different point of view (Why is he here this time? What's the connection with his previous appearance?). Whether or not they investigate his story, he's ultimately set for a final appearance in a central role as either the employer or the opposition (or both), at which point what the PC already learned or what they will quickly piece together will make sense, even if it actually useless to complete the mission. The NPC is out of the story, obviously once he has been defeated, but also once he has been befriended, except as the occasional contact, because all the mystery (and deniability as far as the shadowrunners and Johnson are concerned) is gone.

It can also applies to locations and general situation. In my last serie of games, I first made them play a mission to "rescue" young eco-activists from rich family on their way to a terrorist training camp in Amazonia, with the Colombia War just mentioned in the background. Then they were sent to French Guiana for a hit on a Esprit Industries' special force unit before it was sent to Colombia (on the behalf of a Aztechnology contractor whose contract would be jeopardized by these reinforcements), learning a bit more about the kind of operation they were training for. When the finally went to Bogotá in a latter adventure, they knew what to expect as soon as I said the name, instead of going through a long exposition.