Someone on another forum turned me onto two awesome concepts that could be used to make a game:

Concept 1: A Yakuza group in Hong Kong that is interested in learning and exploiting magical things to increase their foothold in the city.
Concept 2: 14 drowned, undead imperial concubines, each with a knuckle bone from Guatama Buddha giving them eternal undeath (or perhaps a persistent ability to reform), attacking a floating restaurant.

My current brainstorming has the runners hired by an Ares Johnson, who day-times as a supernatural affairs major for the Hong Kong police. Under pressure to solve the growing number of angry spirit incidents in the inner city, the police have been found wanting by the angry populace. He wants the runners (who specialize in magical drek-ups) to pull off a showy exorcism or two, then giving him all credit to restore his face. In return, he will influence some magical neerdowells to pay the debts they owe the runners.

I want to create a lot of exciting action and thriller type things with the yakuza and spirits, but since the players want a "one-shot" (in our parlance, 2 to 3 3/4-hour sessions) I am at a loss as to how to condense it into a more or less linear progression.

It really doesn't look that long to me at all. A few rolls for legwork to figure out some stuff, maybe some knowledge skills/research to figure out backstory, then the main thing is finding the floating restaurant as a target through either legwork or some interrogation of a mini-encounter and you're set.

Well, I thought I'd like to have the attack as the starting point of the scenario, leaving the characters hard-pressed to fend them off, and then needing to find a way to banish them for good, and make their boss man look good.

First Session: Concept Two. Mission "Active Defense of Floating Restaurant". You want to enter the Yakuza into the picture, so a triad magician is creating the concubines. Why 14 instead of 10? A knuckle bone of Guatama Buddha is a special magical artifact created by the magician. Starting point "we have this floating tea house, and the triad wants it gone". Find out about attack vector, do something about that. They find the triad staging area just in time. Preparing defenses would be more risky but also possible.

Second Session: Attack triad outpost, learn about the magic secret. Find knuckle bones.

Third Session: Attack the mage at home using a group of yaks and a group of fresh concubines.

It started out as a tongue-in-cheek joke, because there are probably a lot more quacks peddling a knuckle bone of GB than actual joints in his body On the other hand, a knuckle could refer to a single digit bone, or perhaps Buddha was a spike changeling with additional limbs. Shadowruns general weirdness come to the rescue there, I think

What do you mean with "attack vector" (English is not my first language)? Do we want the concubines to be invincible in the first attack, and vulnerable after the bones are found, or what?

E: Does anybody have any good recommendations for media picturing Hong Kong, particularly in postpunk/sci-fi settings? Movies and series preferred, but I guess anime would do.

I would make the Yaks the employers, and the task protecting the tea house. The runners would have to find out what kind of attack the Triads are planning.


For RL images that might help search for "kowloon walled city" pics. For sci-fi ones try the same for "deus ex hong kong".