Hey, thought I'd share a rant on Shadowrun that you may find interesting (Hey - First Post!).

It's been a long time since I looked at Shadowrun - probably five years or more since I ran a SR3 campaign. There were a few coincidences that brought me back to the fold. I loved SR3, and had followed the game when SR2 surfaced (I still remember seeing the lone Shadowrun 'S' logo advert in the back of a RPG mag ... I just had to get it). After the campaign wrapped I decided to take a break from RPGing that lasted four or five years until a friend at work convinced me to play Dark Heresy and suddenly I was back on the bandwagon. Then a second factor emerged - I was illustrating for another title published by Catalyst, and got the chance to illustrate some spots in SR4A.

I completely skipped SR4 when it came out, for a few reasons. Firstly, I was burned out on RPGing and thought I'd kicked the habit. There were more serious things to do, like have a family. Secondly, and this is entirely personal opinion and prejudice, I was turned off by what I saw as a step backwards in presentation and design (yes, I do judge rpg books by the cover). Zug's usually awesome cover art (Loved SR3 cover, unlike many I get the feeling, and Archetype paintings) was lacklustre - the green interior was damp, the overall layout left bad tastes in my mouth. It was enough to make me ignore the new edition.

So along comes my chance to do some pics for SR4A! As an old fan I had to do it, and it was heaps of fun. Eventually I recieived a copy of the SR4A .pdf and a few of the v.1 SR4 guidebooks. The new core layout was substantially better, and the colour interior worked well. I began to get drawn into the story again, interested in where the game had gone in terms of rules and backstory. I gotta say it feels damn good! Streamlined and modernised, and the unwired matrix AR/VR was slick. Now it felt like could emulate some of my faves, like GITS:SAC, The Professional, Heat, Button man, Bourne Identity etc.

So now I've potentially got a new handful of players and a new game is in the works. Im toying with a storyline which I'll ramble on about below - these are just quick thoughts thrown out there that are only half formed - so please feel free to add your opinions and suggestions.

...

fugue state

• Our team is created by a mysterious fixer with connections to Shadownet (In my games this is an matrix service that distributes shadowrunning and mercenary jobs). After a series of small milk runs to prove their worth (short story: extracting a Yakuza chemist being forced to work for a bikie gang crack house) the real plot begins to unfold.
• A job is offered to discover the contents of a shipping container inbound via Seattle port. They must also determine the original source of the container. The runners discover that the contents are not outlined in the shipping company's logs, or even the Port Authorities - just the container number. They'll need to get into the port's storage and have a look before it's moved to a more secure compound (they could follow it there and discover that a Biotech company is receiving the goods, and then investigate them by hacking etc - but this will be harder). As it turns out, the container is full of bio-material comprised mostly of (illegally grown) foetuses.
• The runners can hack/infiltrate the cargo vessel to see where it came from. As it turns out it picked up the container from Lagos.
• During their investigation the runners notice a tall, athletic blonde-haired woman in an all-white jumpsuit on board the ship (She's actually White Lady, initiate mage, international terrorist and one of the high ranking members of the Anti-Eurocrats). They are told to follow her, and to be careful as their fixer doesn't want her spooked so she can potentially lead them back to the point of origin. She travels to an upmarket, top floor appartment in downtown, where she meets a corp-worker scientist (biotech corp name?). The fixer informs the group that this individual is in fact the man who whistle blew on the container in the first place. The woman suddenly knocks the scientist out (stunbolt?) as a helicopter manned by another shadowrunner team land on the roof, and extract the two of them back to the boat. This section is really all about surveillance.
• Targets who have some connection to the Lagos Facility around the world are being murdered by individuals who have no criminal backgrounds - each were seemingly normal citizens. Each one now claims to be the same individual - some South-AM revolutionary, who it turns out to be long dead. As the runners close in on the Facility they're attacked by groups of these goons, all claiming to be the same man (even the women). As the puzzle comes together it turns out they've been brain-coded by a powerful persona-fix - seemingly at random, although they're all heavy BTL users.
• The runners are hired to travel to Lagos and trace the White Lady and scientist. There are many cool things that can happen here as the players investigate the origin on the bio-materials. There are many agencies at work behind the scenes, including the AE, Tamanous, Interpol and White Lady's rogue mercenary team and Lagos gangs. A contact who can help them in the city is kidnapped by Tamanous and sent to be Ghoul-food who they have to rescue, etc.
• Finally the runners discover an underground Tamanous Facility hidden in one of the slums. When they get there they find the place is guarded by a bunch of tough-as-nails mercs in the employ of the White Lady, including nasty folks like an orc with four arms, hard-core hacker/rigger with a few heavily armed/armoured drones and spirits. Inside, women are impregnated and gestate until they're deemed suitable and the foetus removed. Also, it seems that some heavy scientific research has been made on cyborg technology. The kidnapped scientist is being forced to work on the project along with others - the White Lady has taken over the facility and been forcing the production of a cyborg which she plans to use for the purposes of terrorism. The sales of the bio-materials is merely funding the operations.
• That's as far as I've pushed the idea so far. I can see the White Lady escaping with a semi-functioning cyborg (they runners discover a brainless corpse in deep freeze - is he someone of importance like another hi-ranking terrorist?). Perhaps we need an ending like GITS: The runners corner White Lady and the Cyborg somewhere just as she finally activates the Cyborg. Or if they escape, what are her plans?

That's about it so far - thanks for listening and please feel free to throw in your own ideas and opinions.

H4G

Whereabouts in Oz are ya?

Melbourne Sprawls!

If the actual book is even HALF as cool as teh PDF is(which means, of course, since the dead tree is always twice as cool as the PDF..it should be much more!), then you
echoed my thoughts. Honestly, I like where RPGs have been ging the last few years: colourful books, as in..the books have colour through out, not just a small section
of colour plates. I was not really as fond of SR3 as I was of SR2 because of the one thing that was missing from SR3: Shadowtalk. Sr4's return of that is great, helps one
immerse in the setting. And, with SR4A having fiction...I hope they keep that from now on..it WORKS..it helps the new players get immersed int he world..

Oh..and I agree: the SR4 cover was not as cool as it could have been(but it was still better then the SR3 cover). The new one is MUCH cooler.

Welcome back. As someone who knew about RPGs but didn't get involved with them until my mid-20s, (thus missing SR1 through SR3) I'm in awe of folks like you. And as a former art student and current tradesman, I agree with you completely. Good art (and snippets of fiction) help immensely.

The storyline sounds great- our table's SR game is more episodic, so meta-plots have not gotten quite that extensive, unfortunately. However, I am hoping to take a turn toward this style when my game finally starts, sometime in the dim future. (Also planning to tap a fair share of GITS/Bourne Identity/Lang's Metropolis, etc. elements myself.) Although your plot bears a few similarities with one of our previous runs, I would like to work something like this into the new game- would you mind if I borrowed some of your ideas? A good surveillance-heavy plot would be incredibly useful. (Although instead of the usual runner group, this team will be a police unit based in Kiev, so it's unlikely that they'll be able to do much outside of the Ukrainian border for extended periods of time- things are not likely to to be too similar.)

Anyway, getting back on track: The White Lady sounds like a fun and challenging nemesis- if you can allow her to escape at the end, who knows? The players might really enjoy pitting themselves against her in the future. The nice thing about the SR world is that it isn't as small as it appears at first, and there's a lot of interesting little enclaves around the world for people to hide. If she's still got some good resources and a lot of connections, it wouldn't be impossible for her to latch on to a separatist movement somewhere and bend it to her own means. Again in our game we've "dealt with" people like this- sometimes they've gotten some powerful corp to back them for whatever reason, an angle of investigation which we have never pursued. (Probably for the better, at least as far as our characters' health is concerned.)

Funny that a lot of people didn't like the SR3 cover. I have the feeling that Zug's a bit of an artist's artist if you get what I mean.



Of course not! Swipe away - I'd love to hear how it goes. Interesting thoughts on the White Lady character - I love the idea of these rogue individuals moving amongst power groups and manipulating them to their own needs.