/srg/ - Shadowrun General

Speaking of food fight, how would you make it a little more interesting?

I was thinking of making one of the people in the stuffer shack a vampire or an undercover cop pop up out of nowhere but that just seems too generic and obvious.

>vampire
>in a started level session
Are you nuts?

Go-Gang shows up to acquire snacks. They're regulars and are gonna be pissed if the clerk's been injured or the NURPS were damaged.

That's why I said thinking.

Take something more believeable that won't kill the players in the blink of an eye if they attack it.
A cop is actually not bad, I think.
Maybe put a very humanoid drone in there, maybe even controlled by an AI. It shouldn't be obvious though. I think there are some that can be modded to look passable as human if you don't look at it too hard.
Wouldn't kill them in an instant and would be surprising to an extend.
If the decker tries to hack it, encountering an AI gives alot of opportunities, if they attack it it might surprise them that there was a drone in the first place

Give the shop lights a UV filter, and inevitably break a few filters during / at the start of the fight.

Well to be fair it wasn't going to be a vampire at full strength, but yeah I like that drone idea. Maybe I can have it be one of those ares duelists so there can be a showdown type scenario.

You could get away with the vampire if it wasn't guaranteed to be an enemy, and if it wasn't there "just because".
For example, the group gets accosted (after the action has broken out) by a shabby-looking guy with an ill-concealed hole from a rejected datajack, who offers to help them for "no strings attached". He's obviously not in his right mind and completely unarmed, so there's an opportunity for the players to consider things.
If they accept his offer, he'll fight on their side but leave a shitton of bodies and a lot of problems for the runners, who might have to find and kill him to clear their name.

We must go full Dragonfall:

One of the customers is Lofwyr, and after 15 minutes Fastjack walks in.

Then Shasta and Dunk come in and start fucking while devgrill records it all.

Kat'O and Slamm-O! commentate.

Don't forget the Bull shit. I mean cameo.

Another shadowrun team is having lunch at the stuffer shack celebrating a successful run.

You find Bull when you walk outside, beating H's face in the gutter.

Another Shadowrun team comprised entirely of rejected unplayable/snowflakey character concepts is loading up on food. Communication is difficult.

Complete cosmetic resculpts, custom jobs and crazy clothes/weapons/personafixes are purchaseable in-universe, just expensive enough to land someone in deep debt if they take them straight out of high school to be a shadowrunner.
It's true in-setting that shadowrunners are glorified like rockstars (in their brushed-up silver screen versions, of course), and look what people in this world do for their idols.
A group of people who blew their savings on too-gaudy or too-creepy sculpts, too-intimidating weapons, too many crazy gimmicks and too many skillsofts compared to their actual proficiency, reduced to shoplifting from Stuffer Shack even when they look like skull-faced Blackest Ops and alluring elf-lookalike femme fatales, is about as Shadowrun as you get.

It looks like they're introducing more and more earthdawn aspects, too. Which is scary, because even though ED was balanced around bows compared to SR's assault rifles, things like Matrices and blood charms are fucking insane.

If they ever introduce stuff from Equinox, like that blood magic ability to ignore voids or background counts by stabbing yourself in the face, the fluff is going to get *really* weird.

That's weak as fuck. Come back when you're at least on the level of snowflake of an illiterate sasquatch that speaks no languages.

>balanced around bows
Good. Maybe they'll remember to make some fucking called shots or ammo type specific shot results for arrows then, and we can get a rule on why exactly removing an arrow sticking in you ASAP is somehow desireable enough to justify barbed arrowheads. Maybe we can even get proper Volley shot rules or Multiple Opponent Attack in Kyujutsu.

..but, user, Sasquatch don't normally speak.

Is being snowflakey that bad? A lot of characters end up being shadowrunners because they're freaks on the lam, changelings, technomancers, AI in certain scenarios, hell even certain metavariants are all wanted for study.
Just use a shotgun.

This is about spicing up food fight though. A sasquatch is a lot more fun to throw in then a guy with a neon mohawk.

There's a big difference between runners who're on the run for being born with something they couldn't control, and those who in-universe try to show off.
It's probably a lot less prominent in 5e, now that the playerbase generally identifies more with the characters and the setting has been made to correspond more to the modern world, but a big part of older Shadowrun was that the prime runners were just the very tip of the iceberg. Below them, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of posers, wannabes, incompetents, half-assers, self-satisfied edgelords and God knows what rabble who mostly just posted on Shadowlands, but occasionally showed up in person (often to get killed).
Shadowrunning in pre-CGL Shadowrun was more of a job taken up by the stupid, the desperate and the suicidally brave, and they had their fair share of incompetents, showoffs and second-rankers. Nowadays, shadowrunners are written like they're spec-ops teams in their own right, never having to contend with their own foibles or weaknesses.
You might put in a team of wannabe snowflakes to taunt this, or you might want to put it in because it's always good to remind the PCs that there's somewhere lower to fall.

>it's always good to remind the PCs that there's somewhere lower to fall
We already put in Bull, though.

Checked.

Gassing the trogs when?

Thank you, that clarifies what /srg/ goes on about when they complain about various metasapients.

I guess I'm lucky the players I know that went with metasapients or SURGEs did it to either cheese out gigganigga retard strength or as a part of their character's background or to recreate shit from Earthdawn.

Not to mention that the 'prime runners' were often from somewhere *else*. Johnny Operator was actually a highly trained special operative who fucked up seriously. Thomas Magecock, Initiate of some stupidly high degree, has been a Magician since the Awakening itself. In CGL SR, Operator and Magecock are plucky kids from the Slums and downtown Bellevue, respectively, who are rebelling against the man. Pre CGL, a runner who wasn't after the 'big score' was probably a complete fucking lunatic, and anyone who actually survived the lifestyle long enough to BECOME a 'prime runner' was to be avoided.

Hell, use the Witcher. Someone like Geralt in the SR world would be terrifying because he's routinely dropkicking paracritters for beer money and can actually *survive* getting into those fights regularly, even if he gets a bit banged up.

Er, banged up, pre CGL. Where as in CGL Shadowrun, that sort of thing is just a lifestyle choice.

A lot of times people seem to take Snowflake as someone gaudy and "loud" in their appearance, incredibly eccentric or stupidly tricked out edgelords and weird mutant metatypes.

In other systems, that indeed is a snowflake. In Shadowrun, that's almost expected of a runner. When you're talking about a snowflake here you should mean a snowflake in the context of Shadowrun, which is likely going to be something so tremendously awkward and stupid that it has approaching zero playability because it cannot feasibly function in the setting, you know, like a snowflake.

CGL just gave the opportunity for pink mohawks to become neon pink, 50 feet tall and hooked to cybercocks that spew Seven7. That's all. Black trenchcoat had its time, now pink.

Is this shadowrun: the movie?
youtube.com/watch?v=6EZCBSsBxko

I think its similar to how True Blood was Not-VtM. This is now Not-Shadowrun.

And of course the titular woman is basically Jane Frosty Foster, with the posted Elf being a set of claws away from being Human Form Lofwyr. Fucking hell.

Shoulda done Armitage as lead and gone a bit more blade runner tbqh.

Neuromancer could probably be trimmed a bit into a solid action film. It'd tick most of the diversity boxes, too.

I feel like you'd need something like LOTR-era Peter Jackson to direct a Neuromancer, though. Or Dune-era David Lynch.

So I'm about to start an SR campaign in Denver tomorrow, and I'm considering running the crew (Two players, a Rigger/Techno and a PhysAdept Street Samurai) through a basic run with some assistance from a few NPC's. What's the best way to use GMPC runners to help with the crew?

Nah. You'd need a solid tone shift for the film to work. Doesn't translate well to film in all it's glory. It's like Ghost in the Shell - the movie was good fun but definitely not anything like the series. Trying for a faithful adaptation would waste the movie.
I'm guessing you want a face who works for a cut of the gross, since neither of them sound like they're the most charming motherfuckers around.

The aristocrats!

One of the other differences I've gleaned from 3e and earlier (through the glasses of someone who started at the end of 4e) is that Redmond, etc wasn't just the shithole it's presented as now. It was a shithole that runners could escape into. Your shithole. Somewhere the omnipresence of SINs and corporate fuckery didn't touch or invade. You could stop pretending to be part of the system, and if not relax, then at least only shoot people for simple, straight-forward reasons. He spilled my beer, she's stealing my credstick, etc.

4e onwards? Runners don't live in the shitholes that spring up in the cracks and shadows corporations don't want to touch. When they're not running, they're living on their fake SINs, accepting the permanent state of sousveillance, and pretending to be part of the system day-to-day with no 'out' time.

Weird question, but does anyone know who this artist is? I know they did a bunch more psuedo-Shadowrun stuff.

I was thinking ranged support, since the Techno realized with his living persona that he had a decent enough Charisma to justify taking negotiating, con, and etiquette skills. I rigged up a sniper who'll just communicate with them via commlink and provide overwatch already, and I was thinking of maybe adding a mage just that they could contact in case of spooky spirit shit(TM) getting involved.

Other than that, all the denver runner modules look like they're aimed at higher level runners (Not that I won't crib some stuff from them because it's neat) and the group seems oriented towards the 'Kick in the door kill everything' as plan A. Subtlety is secondary. So I've come up with a few ideas.

>Mr. Johnson contacts them, arranges the meet in a helicopter, flies them over the Aurora Barrens, and gives them something he needs in there and an address before kicking them out with some parachutes.
>Since the Alamos 20k terror attacks, organized crime has been hiding out, but the local Vory structure has decided enough's enough. Those yak fuckers have to go. Of course, fighting the Yakuza in the shadows means that Mitsuhama may or may not get involved.
>With the Azzies back on the scene, people have started to go 'missing'. A local buisnessman's daughter disappeared yesterday, and he's willing to pay top dollar to get her back

But I'm not sure if they're good enough or will work for just two players.

Even being prime runners with a group of 2 gets pretty tough. My party eventually whittled down to 2 and while the Phys Adept got good at murdering mages before they could act, we can still get tripped up with enough guards on our asses.

Playing a jack of all trades can get rough, while my S Adept is really good at stuff a social adept gets good at shooting, but when she has to juggle dispelling, hacking (from a com link no less) and banishing we can get bogged down.

Well, I have a third who won't make the first session. Potentially also a fourth.

Why is your adept hacking, what. Is it a burnout?

Hacker adept is some of the worst cheese the system has to offer.

Do you just take no physical attributes and rely entirely on attribute boost?

Only trumped by mystic hacker adept.

No, our decker hasn't shown up in 7-8 sessions, so she picked up decking and slapped a dongle onto her phone.

Our shaman hasn't shown up in 10, so she used her high charisma and picked up some banishing and eventually dispelling, though she sucks ass at it.

You boost your skills like a mother fucker rather than your attributes by using power points.

Heightened Concern, Improved Ability to the max and then some attribute buffs if you feel like it. Combines with attribute enhancing drugs for a merry time and an annoyed DM

>Maybe put a very humanoid drone in there, maybe even controlled by an AI

Why the fuck would there be an AI there? You can have a clever drone by giving it a high Pilot program, you don't need to go full snowflake by having a very rare Matrix entity inhabiting a random drone in a random Stuffer Shack buying Milk Duds.

Nah. Go read the Shadowlands stuff and you see one of the prime indicators of Mohawks - Giving A Shit. You had eco-terrorists, conspiracy theorists, campaigners for every cause under the sun, and they really cared about it. Sure, a lot of them died pursuing dreams that could never be realised, but before they fell they flew.

Nowadays the roster of Jackpoint are all trenchcoat-tier operators who do it for the money (or the money and the fun, like Kane), with vague platitudes about individual liberties and rights. You don't get points for saying that massacring protesters is bad. The last time I can remember a Jackpointer actually doing something vaguely related to a cause that was not personal enrichment was Fastjack trying to raid that facility where he got CFD.

Laughing Man and Co. trying to patch up Elijah maybe?

The one thing I want to see in the Jackpoint crew is an 'opposite number' to Frosty and Many Names as the High Magical Muckity Mucks. Some fruitcake blood mage/mystic adept/whatever that stays alive purely because mobilizing the level of firepower to kill him isn't cost effective. A Lo Wang expy or something, I guess.

You mean a Kane kind of deal where he plays government interests against each other?

Nah, someone personally powerful enough to sit in that rank but without any serious support infrastructure beyond typical shadowrunners, played straight. So probably pretty much a straight D&D murderhobo with a million fake IDs who never stops moving for more than a few weeks at a time.

Hey, you still have conspiracy theorists - Plan 9, Snopes, etc.

See that's the thing, I feel like its fine to be a murderhobo if you play the off-the-grid game straight.

You can be covert on a run or go in loud as fuck, as its possible to leave no evidence by never making any or by burning down the one you leave, but you better have a place to fucking vanish to afterwards and make sure no one can track you down. I honestly feel like there's just two extremes of "No, always trenchcoat" that need every run to be a heist, and "No, always mohawk" that give very little credibility and integrity to the world and the corporate surveillance machine and basically play without consequences outside of getting shot in combat.

That's more 'Elijah was bumming around and accidentally a Horror, then all the big hats from the 4th World showed up to wring him for info.' Laughing Man supposedly went there to help, but given how his part history of treating people who get mixed up in it (coughMontgomerycough) he's not doing it for Elijah's sake. Winterhawk at least seems like he went to help Elijah, but that's more personal friendship than anything.

So technically you're right, but I put 'avoiding the destruction of the world as we know it' in the same category of stuff that everyone cares about, rather than a specific cause deep to your heart.

But what do they do with their theories? Pyramid Watcher at least tried to do anti-Azzie stuff, and there was that anti-magocracy guy back in the day who fucked with the IOND because he thought they were a Black Lodge front. Plan 9 ... I don't even know if they're a shadowrunner anymore, or just someone with a surgery addiction and a CFD infection.

Ideas for stuff that happens between runs?

The other thing I missed was that they should be 'normal' - not someone who was probably a student of Coyote, like Many Names, or a baby immortal, like Frosty. Either some bizarre prodigy who screamed up to that level of ability over the last 30 years, or some frothing old lady berserker who figured out a form of immortality. Just to balance them out. Sure, he's not normal at all, but he didn't start with the advantages they did.

It's odd how Ehran has taken on Harlequin's role as the 'sympathetic' one now that Harlequin isn't sleeping with Ehran's daughter anymore. Esp given Ehran was, according to Dunkelzahn, much more likely to disappear people for fun.

Iunno, the whole "that's more than two, Laughing Man" thing seems to imply that H might have regularly checked on the bridge and said he saw 2 steps, and now there's 4, and some people consider it his responsiblity to keep it in check.

So... Captain Chaos?

You mean 'some scenes of RP that aren't about crimetime' or 'full sessions of stuff that aren't shadowrunning at all'?

Because the latter is tricky to do if the group isn't all living together and spending downtime in the same flat. Recently I heard about a game called Route Clearance (200wordrpg.github.io/2017/rpg/winner/2017/04/22/RouteClearance.html) that I want to adapt for downtime periods.

But not an electro-buddha in Hong Kong, and magical. A balance to those two.

Pay rent, visit relatives, get SWOLE, spirit shenanigans, take the team for the best soyburgers in the city, buy guns and gun related accessories, go see a movie, drink blood from gangsters prepare for the next run, hit the club, do general downtime stuff. I don't know, ask your players.

FastJack and his choice of SysOps is so much worse. Jack himself is pretty tolerable at least.

On a similarly related note. Has anyone done an 'Azziewatch' campaign, where they play shadowrunners/part time vigilantes that patrol the border looking out for Blood Mages and coyotes with bounties on their heads?

After they straight up printed a book saying DIMR was too broke to properly pay anymore?

>DIMR
>broke

keysartstuff.tumblr.com/

Maybe those CHOCOLATE NIPPLES take trillions of nuyen to maintain?

I'd need to reread the Dragonheart stuff and old books about the Chasm to remember Harley's specific role in it. Free Spirit Dunkeldonuts is supposed to be in charge of keeping an eye on things, but Harlequin does get involved with it from time to time. Bull knew about the number of steps as well; it's just a thing people involved with it have knowledge of, if they can keep their sanity. There's more than one Bridge out there.

It's dusky nipples.

I think Bull knew because of his business with H that had Johnny 99 die.

I'm a 6' skinny fat dude, so I would probably become a comedian, stealing all my material from different comedians of our time and hope nobody finds out.

It's not the best plan, but realistically it's all I have, since my /3/ skills will be worth shit in 2070.

Do your players not have backgrounds and relationships with the family members or NPCs or shit the look into?

Between sessions my DM will occasionally PM me on discord telling me my fixer found a guy on a data haven who can sell me info on which facility has my emerged ferret or some guy on magicnet who found a nearby rift to a metaplane where I might be able to thread an item from the 4th world.

Free Spirit Donutface is bound to Bob the Cyberzombie. Harley and Aina's role boiled down to screaming "ALRIGHT FUCKERS, LET'S DO THIS" and throwing nuclear warheads made of mana at the oncoming horrors while sodomising ryan mercury with more mana to destroy the bridge.

Can I play as lizardman in Shadowrun?

Be an oracle. Accurately predict the future because of sourcebooks.

You can indulge in your scaley fantasies, yes.

That's my point. Harlequin doesn't need to be the specifically appointed Horror Monitor to know how many steps have been taken - he just needs to exist at that level of power and care the slightest amount about the pending apocalypse, which he already lived through once.

He showed up in House of the Sun to stop the Hawai'ians from ending the world, but there wasn't necessarily the assumption that he was acting as the designated champion of the world there (there was a Great Dragon investigating it at the same time, and the two were at cross-purposes).

The example SURGE character was a lizardman, but he may just have been a T'Skrang with the name filed off.

Yeah. There's even one in fiction.
He is, that's why Lofwyr snapped him up. Equivalent of youtube comments going "first".

I just started playing and haven't even finished reading the 5th e sourcebook. I'm fucked, aren't I?

What stats would lizardman have?
I want to play as picrelated
Being cheeky friendly soldier/mechanic type of person.

You want the changeling rules for a human. Check Run Faster.

If you want setting accurate lizardmen, then they would have higher dex, body and charisma.

Thank you