Okay, first off... I wanted to know if anyone played or GMed a game in which the characters were all part of a gang, and they did missions for that gang?

Did it work, do you think it would work?

If you did, what gang did you play with...

In Shadowrun Companion I liked the gangs they described, my favorites were the Halloweeners and the Spiders (I think I might have gotten their name wrong, its been a while.) It seems like they would make for an interesting game...

My last question is about the spiders gang. Shadowrun Companion claims it's members all go on a quest from the spider totem, does that mean most, if not all of them, are shamans, or for non-shaman characters does it just assume they've been spoken to by Spider?

One of the things that I find interesting is how pathetic gangers are in Shadowrun compared to their real-life equivalents, especially given the fact that it seems to have actually gotten much easier to be heavily armed. but then you look at, say, the troll ganger archetype from SR3 (or any ganger archetypes, really) and they are jokes. How is it that none of them have guns? It makes no effing sense. it's like the when the authors thought about referring to gangs, they figured, "Well... West Side Story was about gangs."

But then it becomes inconsistent because we have groups like the Spiders or Halloweeners described in more detail in SRComp.

WTF.

Link to a long running gang campaign here on the boards.

Ganger campaigns are actually fairly common, at least if the Welcome to the Shadows board is any indication. All kinds of examples can be found there. They seem to work out fairly well.

You can use the gangs from the books, but most gang campaigns create a new gang for the PCs, who are generally either lieutenants in the gang, or in the process of rebuilding a recently-decimated gang back up again (both of the ones that I played in were the latter).

The Spiders' recruits can be mundane or awakened.

The Spiders and the Halloweeners are both extremely brutal gangs - they are interesting, to be sure, but they would probably only be suitable for a very amoral campaign.

As a plot hook, it can work very well - you just have to account for the fairly common duplication of skills.

Or some pretty colorful backgrounds to describe otherwise unobtainable skills.

-Siege

The gangers can have guns, but in the streets "A gun is good backup" Then something about if you can't bust heads with your bare hands you're a little girl.

Seriously, any punk can wave a gun around but that won't get him any respect, beat some slag down and that might just get you a little. Rep and Respect is everything to the ganger.

Depends on your take on gangs - a lot of times, gang members carry guns simply for the respect they feel it gives them.

And if people don't respect them, they can inspire fear instead - which, to a lot of people, is indistinguishable from the other.

-Siege

hahahaha

Crimsondude:
I don't think the gangs are actually inconsistent. I think one of the big things to keep in mind is that Shadowrun has places like the Barrens where conditions are more like third world ghettos than any place currently existing in the U.S. Sprawling slums where the residents have been completely written off by the government and nearly everybody else, and have to scrounge for everything. That's where you get a lot of these "pathetic" gangs from. These are the ones where guns and cyber are a rarity, where they have weapons that Shadowrunners would laugh at like Streetline Specials and Knives.

But gangs like the Ancients, the Cutters, and the Spikes are more like the Crips, Bloods, or Aryan Nation today. They are professional criminals who can get their hands on automatic weapons, and cyberware will be fairly common.

I was going to pimp the Bleeding Edge, but Voor beat me too it.

Running a ganger campaign was great because a) I said from the outset that gangers die, and never had to skimp on the death-dealing. Nobody minded alot, and I never did it gratuitously (sp?), so it worked. B) I got to turn the brutal knob up to 9 and slowly make it higher and higher. I had plans to crank it up to 12. It was a wonderful social experiment for me.

Just remember; whoever came up with the descriptors 'nasty, brutish, and short', was referring to gang life.

I'm just proud that Nick survived the longest of anyone. Well, except Mickey...