Ah let the Nuyen flow freely in the streets.

Well I'd always like to add a flash of culture to my games, so one thing i always have in my games is rock, troll thrash and so on.

I include The Redmond rocker, this is a guy who always plays at a bar at Skunks in TouristVille, **where my players always start off.**

So what I am asking what kinda rockers do you include for flavor in your game?

So far, I've only had one. And he spent the whole game dead, so he didn't really count.

I do intend to inject Flock of Strato-9s (all the band members are ex-Star) into a game sometime in the near future.

My group of Barrens gutterpunk PCs has a band... Now, they aren't very good yet - they've only had one gig so far. I'm using the rules from Shadowbeat to gauge their performance. So far, they could be doing better.

Rule of Ones came up when figuring their Impact. Oh, well, that's one place they won't go back to for a while... And like most beginning bands, they are still fighting over a band name.

I can only remember two (unless you count the time San was dressed as Angus Young, but let's not go into that), and only one of those any of my players will recognize unless they remember some minor details from my NPC bios I post.

The one they'll know is Amp, an elf ganger who's band is doing fairly well in their corner of Seattle. The one nobody will remember is that a Lone Star cop who's appeared a couple of times has a daughter who's in a band. But her group, unlike Amp's, has never really gotten to play anywhere, as they're mostly in high school.

I created an NPC college band at UDub called the Societal Washouts.

Haven't had a chance to put them into play yet. The lead guitarist is a contact of one of the PC's in our group

I'm running an campaign where the characters are all high-schoolers. One of the characters is a rocker wanna-be. The player even wrote an impressive amount of text describing his two cheap synthaxes.

I've got a PC who's going to be setting up a celtic rock band in my game in St. Louis.

Shadowbeat has rules for this kinda stuff? Figures it's in a book I no longer have access too, and it's OOP. Can you give me some sort of idea how the rules work? I know it's a no-no to cut and paste from books, but I'd really like an idea about how to gauge this kind of thing

Well, your rockers need skills - Its up to you as GM if you want to make it an active skill or knowledge skill. I made it an active skill because it will come up more often than most of their knowledge skills. I set it up as charisma-based: Musician, with specializations in type of perfomance (by instrument, vocals, etc).

Impact was based on an open test by the lowest skill in the group. There are mods for the venue, the amount of rehearsing, etc.
The total perfomance rating is Impact x average charisma.

There's tables and stuff to make sense of it in Shadowbeat, too much to repeat here. I got my copy from a freind who went to GenCon. I've also seen them for sale on Ebay occasionally. Ask around, its a nifty book to have, with Newsies, rockers, Trid, and sports. Some small parts of it have been reprinted in the SSG.

Found, ordered, and in shipping, and it looks like it's going to be worth the pittance I paid. Thanks for the tip

A Dwarven Blues musician thats a cross between Tom Waits, Popeye, and your favorite Uncle?

An industrial ork band done with ugly, obvious cyberware- sounds like Ministry, especially stuff from Psalm 69 and the songs Supermanic Soul and Lava.

A black metal band (pack?) of ghouls from Norway - sounds half-way between Darkthrone (for the evil) and Emperor (because it should sound a little musical). If anyone did black metal, it would be ghouls, and for once the makeup would be used to make them look *more* normal instead of less.

I never thought up band names, but after reading Shadowbeat, sometimes a groups' sound would conjure a mental image of their Shadowrun counterparts if they happened to be playing while I was looking at SR material.

I wouldn't be surprised if some black metal bands deliberately infected themselves with HMHVV just for scene cred. At the same time, classical, jazz, and some other performers would probably refuse cyberware except to overcome disabilites, and even then just at a prosthetic level rather than for enhancement, for the same reasons.

A classical pianist with enhanced articulation or cyberhands, or a brass player with extended volume or internal air tank, would probably be seen as a cheater and a "sell-out" by their scenes. Although it'd work great for listeners and performers that aren't purists.

At some point I decided that noise, ambient, and industrial worked better as a general sound for Shadowrun than the trance techno that seems to be favored. Context specific sounds are exempt of course.

Whenever the subject of music in SR comes up, I think of Rammstein's "Live aus Berlin" show... well, excluding the performance of Bück Dich, which I try to avoid remembering...