So I'm playing a Shadowrun 4th ed campaign. It was a bit of an experiment

So I'm playing a Shadowrun 4th ed campaign. It was a bit of an experiment.

Instead of 400BP runners, they're 200BP children with lower stat caps, less hit boxes, and only legal gear avail 2 or lower. They've got nothing and they're building their way up.

I had them rob a convenience store for candy and fight off the rats from an abandon building in the barrens. And since they actually wanted to play again, I scrambled a bit and ad-hoc'ed a smattering of tibits. Namely: patching up the kid who got shot robbing the convenience store, fencing the stolen lotto cards, and trying to earn some cash.

That night ended with them getting gang-pressed into a gang. And for some reason they want to pay again.

I've got nothing though. All my shadowrun campaigns are for... you know... runners. Adults. People with guns, not 4 kids with one taser between them all. The gang-boss has to send them to do SOMETHING. I'm just drawing a blank.

Any advice?

i got some questions, how old are we talking here? like 9ish or 13ish or something else?

Eh, sure. That age-range sounds right.

Visibly young. Shorter stature.

...

I worry that if I let them actually get some cash and equipment it's going to turn into this.

lets see..... how about he wants them to sneak into a school to steal the money from the bake sale and they stumble into some kinda cult/PTA meeting?

that is adorable

Make the gang leader visibly upset at his press hangers to have recruited too young for use kids.

Make the leader have soft spot for them and make them do deliveries to less dangerous people, pick up dead drops and make them clear the area of smaller, least worry some insect spirits

That's... Not a bad idea.

Yeah. A school. Cause they're kids. You'll fit in just fine. They always having these "fund raisers". Got some big fish from the 'burbs (wait, it's shadowrun, the arc'), so you KNOW they must have some dough in there. Just go snoop around and see what you can snatch. That lady with the fucking hair has a tinney little lockbox of credits. Grab it and run.

I think I might switch "cult PTA" to.... principal and a few select teachers using their new and experimental hypno-learning system on donors to impart the great wisdom of
1: The hypno-teaching system works and can turn urban ghetto kids into engineers
2: They should donate to the experimental school
3: They should get more rich donors to come see the wonders of hypno-teaching.

If they stumble into it, I'll give them a compulsion to donate and to tell their gang leader they really need to check it out.

...

Typical gang uses for kids are:
-runners
-distractions for a hustle/pickpockets
-begging/scavenging schemes
-spies
-leaders for other groups of kids engaged in the above

Child soldiers are also a possibility but generally only a mark of complete desperation in very anarchic environments (food shortages, for example).

You may want to consider aging them up to young teens at the least; 14-17. This makes them old enough to plausibly qualify for higher end jobs.

>You may want to consider aging them up to young teens at the least;
I plan to.
Give them more hitboxes, let them level up stats sans karma.

I think I'm going to have them do a couple ganger type jobs, have the gang leaders abuse them by taking all the earnings, getting them hooked on drugs, and generally being assholes. If they put up with that, life will go by for a while and they'll grow up with a few negative qualities.

If they buck that sort of treatment, well, life continues to be interesting while they're young.

pft, who am I kidding. They'll deal with all the abuse in the world, but have the leader demand ANY cut of their cash and one player will burn the entire district down in vengence.

Tagging other gang turf in the middle of the night, with some doing the tagging and the others distracting anyone who tries to stop them.

Smuggling literally anything. Much easier for kids than big, tatted out gangers.

"Word is there's an old renraku lab that fell into disrepair after some runners trashed the place beyond repair. Turns out Raku forgot to grab a handful of construction drones, meds, and whatever guns got left when the runners split. Hop in there sneaky-like, map the place out and grab whatcha can. If you make it back, we can run through and clean the place out before lone star even knows what we're up to. "

>Tagging other gang turf in the middle of the night,
Nice.

>Smuggling literally anything.
god, I know. But that just seems so bloody obvious and boring and it was all I could think of. And I have no fucking clue how to make that an interesting game night. I mean, sure,
>composure checks, do you keep your cool?
>Navigation, you haven't been here before
>Preception checks. Yeah, sure, you don't see anything
>OH SHIT! The cops! Hide? play cool? Run?
>the guy doesn't want to pay full price. Says there's a new dead. What do?
And.... that's a game night... but it's just so.... I dunno.... fucking routine.

Should I stop being a plot-snob and just run them through a regular day in the life of low-life gangers?

You could have em try selling counterfeit goods and btls on the street to people. Or steal bodies/organs for a back alley cyber doc so that he keeps working for the gang. What gang is it and what are they involved in?

I was having them think of ways to make money themselves rather than tell them HERE DO THIS TO MAKE MONEY. But the gang leader would certainly be a mechanism for that.

The were trying to pull off the classic 3-card monty when the gang caught them picking pockets in their turf.

>What gang is it and what are they involved in?
... I have no idea what sort it is. I guess that's undefined.

So far they just got caught trying to operate in the gang's turf, and they weren't really given a choice about not joining. "you do what we tell you or we'll carve you up next time we see you" sort of affair. They don't know they're getting tattoos next Thursday.

Well the gang could always just say "alright, go make money. And none of that she'll game bull shit, we EARN our keep out here"

Id focus on figuring out 1) what the gang normally does to make money, be it prostitution ("alright little homies, just follow Candy and her girls around and if anyone gives you trouble use this" *machete added to inventory*), smuggling, protection rackets, or boosting cars (a high speed chase in a van full of cybered out fighting dogs driven by a gang of children sounds like a good time). Also think about progression, would the kids end up running the gang as they rise through the ranks or is the gang supplied/run secretly by the yakuza, giving the opportunity for this group of scrappy kids to become mob enforcers for a higher class of criminal

2 ) whose in the gang? Is it a mostly troll/orc group? Are they tech junkies or thrill gangers? AND then set up some characters that the kids can learn from in the gang, from old cholo street sams to fried crusty riggers to alcoholic/drug addicted shamans

3) does this end with the kids leading the gang, a massive shootout with a rival gang, the cops arrest the whole gang and the kids need to survive in the new power vacuum, or this gang snagged something real important by accident and now a megaCorp is hunting anyone with a certain set of gang tatoos

I don't know, I recall in some old editions there was some pretty depressing fluff on juviegangs with 50% death rates, doing anything from mugging people to prostitution.

You can give the players leeway in planning the smuggling job - the gang just wants them to get something from point A to B and doesn't care about the method. Again though, this is more plausible with older kids (14-17).

Where's her crew?

Okay OP Kid Adventurer is my favourite trope and imma gonna help you out.

It is necessary that you give them a mentor, he will be the good thing, the lantern, the little bit of love these kids have in the world, make him a loving father, no sex, no pervy shit, just a full blown Protector, you can make him gruff and old or Young and charismatic but he has to truly care about the players, you are in a grindark world, players need a little sunshine to highlight the stormclouds, give them his house as a HQ if you like, blankets and floor at first, but the Protector pays his own money from jobs on gifts and takes a cut of the kids and invests it back in them, so beds for the HQ, comforts for them, you NEED to drum the fact that this dude cares about the PCs, dont make the HQ fantastic, make it a comfy safe space where nothing bad happens, this is important, maybe a cut of old sewer that's cot candles and is cleanish or an abandoned train/tram cart outside the city,

maybe make him even help them get of drugs and etc the other gang members give the kids, this character is an Officer in the gang but not the boss, the boss makes them do bad things while this guy teaches the kids how to survive them.

Quests you can give an adult you can give a kid, just have to pretend the gang has other more important things going on, even if you give them a high up quest like a heist, it's because their protector is teaching them how to do it in their downtime, heists don't have to be banks, maybe a run down drug store or a shifty Pawn shop.

Now you let this dynamic go on until it starts to stagnate, my record is about 3 months of two sessions a week, but it works, don't throw a lot of characters at the players, keep rival gangs/bad guys vague, barely meet them sorta thing, never meet the higher ups, now remember when I said to make sure the HQ was a safe space? Crafting centre etc etc?.. Now you destroy it all, steal everything they have collected (So they can get it later) and kill the Protector, this way you can establish a really good bad guy, make it a cop or a rival band, but set up an escape route and do it during the night so they have to dump their stuff and run, give them a time limit to grab their shit and give your bad guy a low enough status that he has higher ups who will revenge him but a high enough status that the players have mini bosses to take on before they get to him.

Congratulations you got yourself a brilliant bad guy and a vengeance plot that players will love to hate. Make sure your baddy has a great accent and unique looks/mannerisms.

Make sure the Protector gets a good death and make sure, absolutely sure that him being killed is the players fault, they left the breadcrumbs or killed the wrong people, link it to their choices that killed him for major feels.

Bonus points for the following;

10 pts - Kids leave the HQ with things the Protector gave them that will ensure feels down the road, Toys/Pictures of fun times out work best (Carnival or other celebration with arcades/picture machine is great for this, fun times with Protector that isn't just murder, but they get to win with stats)

10 pts Bad Guy has a crazy laugh and is a tough but not smart fucker who didn't realise there was kids but turns to drink because of this, so when PCs go for the final fight there isn't a struggle, but when they kill him he has portrait of family and his own kids, so the circle of hate continues

5pts - Kids all specialise in skills that make them unique and handy to each other and the gang, the Protector makes them this way not by force but suggestion.

7pts - You fill up every time they sleep with the Protector reading them a bedtime story about cool stuff he did in his youth, do it on accident first, maybe a "I don't got no books, so I'll tell you what I did when I was your age" kinda thing.

10pts - The PC's ask for a bedtime story because of this

The PCs actually cry when the Protector dies?... Instant win.

Anyone got suggestions for other points? Add them.

I just don't understand why you would play 4th ed?

I dunno man, I don't really wan to lead them around by the nose....

Oh.

Well that's fucking brilliant.

Because 5th ed only has marginal changes that don't really do much to balance this clusterfuck. It's a cheap money grab by uncaring corporate goons who are only in business because everyone is too lazy to learn the rules for other better more fringe systems.

ie, I'm cheap and have the books.

5th > 3rd >> 2nd >>> 1st >>>>>>> 4th

>Because 5th ed only has marginal changes that don't really do much to balance this clusterfuck. It's a cheap money grab by uncaring corporate goons who are only in business because everyone is too lazy to learn the rules for other better more fringe systems.

You sound really stupid. Enjoy your Commlinks and "Hackers"

>Shadowrun
>children

Depending on how... depressing you wanna get with the child perspective of cyperpunk-meets-low-fantasy that is Shadowrun, you could have one or more of the kids be sucked into ()or just be tangentially related to) a La Llorona-style cult, where uneducated street kids try to make sense of the mythological mish-mash by making a plausible but dire belief system. Only, because it's Shadowrun, their beliefs threaten to become real.

Might be something you'd have to build up to over several sessions, though.

Dude, they're all crap. Shadowrun as a game system is overall simply BAD.

But the differences I saw between 4th and 5th?

-They put a strangle-hold on character building to fight the obvious problem with min-maxing character creation. Which was never really a problem as all my players are way too lazy to make their own characters so I just hand them a sheet. (We had a one-shot which mixed 300, 400 and 500BP characters and it went pretty damn well. The 500BP samurai was an absolute nightmare, but had the hardest plot-goal. He lost)

-They brought back the 3rd ed system of extra passes by decrementing your initiative by 10. Surprise surprise, the wired people go 3 times before the non-coms go even once. Which is what they were trying to get away from in 4th. At least in 4th, those with 2 passes got to play a little with those with 3 and didn't get completely shut down before they went once.

-Hacking is different. Because they try to desperately make hacking not the cluster-fuck ad hoc mishmash where nothing makes sense and the hacker character plays a separate game from the rest of the table. Yeah dude, it's been a clusterfuck in every edition. And most cyberpunk games I've tried. None of us can play a hacker or play with hackers because we're all programmers. We understand wtf a stack overflow is and know how much this "sculpted reality" is bullshit. protip: It's all bullshit.

-Ok, and "decks" are a thing against. Because general computing is hard or something. (On that note, holy shit guys have you seen the Pi-Zero? It's SO FUCKING SMALL! You'd think I'd get used to these sort of improvements, but no, every year and a half, I'm still amazed)

But sweet jesus, edition wars? Really?
I said we're playing 4th because I have the books and I'm cheap.

Eh, that's not for me. I shy away from the mystical fantasy side of shadowrun if at all possible.

There's nothing saying you couldn't try the same thing in D&D.

>Eh, that's not for me
Ok.
>I shy away from the mystical fantasy side of shadowrun if at all possible.
Ah, that's all part of the fun, though. Oh, well. Guess it depends on what kind of freakish, terrible future you want to play in.

True, but he was asking for stuff to get kids involved in in Shadowrun's world.

I mean, you could timeskip, I guess, if you wanted.

>what kind of freakish, terrible future you want to play in.
I want to play in a near-future realistic one.

We're practically halfway there. All we need is the FBI/KGB to outlaw strong encryption that doesn't have their backdoors, cops to start protecting corporate profits over personal rights, and we're good to go.

We've got hand-held computers everyone carries around with the bulk of their ID, access, and contacts and most of them are horribly insecure. We've even got drones and riggers with POV "hot-simming".

...