/srg/ - Shadowrun General

yes haha. Though he's not technically a hikki!

And don't worry about it, I was just wondering if you'd had the chance. No pressure, his "dramatic" reveal hasn't come yet

But where do the dwarfs fit in?

Who do you think is behind Humanis?

I once made a gnome who put herself through para-medical school as a porn star. She was fired from her cushy corp-therapist job when she was accused of producing pedophilic content due to the nature of her child-like appearance. Though acquitted her reputation was tarnished and she had to turn to Street-Docing to pay the bills.

those sound like reasons

Why would she do something like that? That's awful.

sure, but none of those require you to wear shades constantly to hide your eyes.
Having cybereyes isn't something people will judge you like having a large prison tattoo. They'll judge you more like someone getting a lip piercing or a small tattoo on the arm

Presumably she had to pay the ruinous expense of going through med school without a corporate sponsor.

See, for me the real downside I had with them is for when some hacker decides to say "fuck your eyes."

Why didn't she use facial sculpt to make her more difficult to recognise?

>facial sculpt
where do you see her being an adept/MysAd?

Aren't all lolis magical?

He's behind the elfjew, you just can't see him.

nope
Gnomes have Arcane Arrester which gives them harder to affect, but doesn't give them any powers
And just getting the Neoteny quality doesn't give you powers either
But if you mean magical as in "Deserve to be killed for being walking WMDs", then yes. Then they are extremely magical.

She was magical - magician, not an adept. Going under the knife wasn't an option for her multiple reasons in addition to the dangers surgery posed to Essence.

I don't believe you. My loli was plenty magical and she never took a single cock, trog or otherwise.

Their cuteness could be called a WMD, but it's impossible to kill something that cute. We will just have to learn to live with the risk of sudden burst of nutbladder.

Sounds suspicious. I think you were sitting there with your dad watching That's so Raven, and your dad is fed up with it and he changes the channel over, and its that loli taking all that trog cock. You sit there with a single tear rolling out of your eye as you're proud, so proud of the girl you brought up and you loved so much.

Nonsense, she only chose lolis of finest quality to be her companion. Trogs are icky and gross, and they only steal loli magic. However, when lolis dock with other lolis, they multiply their own magicality (the process must be repeated every week).

So there we go, not only is trog cock not beneficial to lolis, it's actually harmful.

Current one can't really do fashion, given that he looks a great deal like an ambulatory rock. Previous one, before death, looked like a Paris catwalk for one of those weird shows that seems like a bag lady designed it. Pic related.
>every infected are just classic WoD vampires
>laughingcorpsec.jpg

Oi, Krauts. What are the SR 2050 Matrix rules like, and would you be interested in providing a translation? I'm hearing they're decent.

Hey, /srg/, I need some variant ideas for my undersea base. Who built it? What are they doing there? How well did it survive Crash 2.0?

I'm planning on using it for some straight up horror when my players get stranded there, but I'd like some alternate ideas. Pic related as inspiration.

The Ghosts of Ma-- err, Neptune.

Yamatetsu, Proteus AG are the best bet for construction. Hit up Target: Wastelands or Cyberpirates for ideas.

Maybe they assumed the world above drifted off and went full Eclipse Phase and stayed underground and are now incredibly cultish about the fact they made a 'pact' with a 'deep power'. It doesn't even have to be magic, just some angry seaweed that spits up resources for them to use sometimes.

Please tell me the Sea Dragon is involved.
Please tell me your players don't know the Sea Dragon exists. Please tell me you're planning on describing it only as a shifting, absolutely gargantuan mass of shadow, always just outside of the radius of the station's lights. Never able to quite get a good look at it, only one thing is certain: it is watching, and it is aware of them.

So let's say you spread your skills out a little bit too broadly so you only have 4 in any one skill.

How do you fix this without dumping more Karma into them?

If you're willing to chrome up, install some skill wires and skill chips. Won't be cheap. Or pretty for that matter.

You bet your ass I had those thoughts, chummer.

>Can't walk around in the barrens, ghouls will kill you
>can't walk around in the city, corps will kill you
>can't walk around outside the city, bandits will kill you
>can't walk around in W zones, paracritters will kill you
>can't swim around in sea, sea dragon will kill you

Ffs, it's cyberpunk, not Mad Max

Bandits don't kill you outside the city.

They're NAN tribes or more ghouls or jacked up magic super predators. Get it right.

potayto, potahto

>it's cyberpunk, not Mad Max
>imblying it can't be both depending on where you are

Nonsense! The city streets are perfectly safe for our valued law-abiding corporate citizens.

>who have access to a taxi service that uses converted APCs.

Frankly I'm more scared of the devil rat swarms than the ghouls in the barrens. Nothing like a solid carpet of rats rising up and stripping a live ghoul to the bone in a matter of minutes to teach you your place on the food chain. Hint: FIRE GOOD.

Not explosives?

Explosives that spray fire.

Explosives that spray flammable liquid everywhere and then sets it on fire?

Talk me into running a shadowrun game, you guys.
I'm too nervous to, but I really want my fucking wacky ass cyberpunk and I'm not getting it from anywhere.

I don't care if players play a hyper-religious ganger, a creepy otaku with combat sexbots, or straight up monstergirl body modders. I am just worried I can't provide a good game, or that I will panic and bail as I have before.

Once had an infiltrator weeaboo. (go on, boo)
So fashion not so much?
Doing runs however in cosplay?
Totally.

Believe in yourself! Ask players what they want to see! Build to it!
GMing is mostly improve afterall. Players are like cats, can't herd them but give them something shiny and you have to drag them away.
Go give them a good a gametime! You always got a community here to poke for feedback.

>monstergirl body modders
smalltime.
>literal SURGE monstergirl
big time.

I do not care and would not treat any differently other than, you know, logistics-wise.
Shit, the motivation isn't working. Maybe I should spend some time statting out and pricing various types of guards and wageslaves. That might be fun.

Turns out, kitting out KE fascist thugs with body armor, opaque flash deflecting helmets, SMGs, and stun batons is surprisingly expensive. No wonder they're so eager to shove the boot in to reassure the plebs they're working hard.

Players are most of the time as nervous as you are. If you're scared that your runs maybe not good enough, maybe cut yourself some slack and pick up a prebuilt one.

I feel like if I have a chart on hand of common prices of various type of thug, building materials, and electronics, and if I keep a hatchmark count of how many of each of these things is destroyed, I could give players a cash readout on how much they fucked things up with fairly little work on my end per game. It would be neat. Maybe it shows up in the news or something.

I might have to. I want to cull players from the thread, and I've shared some of my run ideas with the thread.
So people might know what twists are coming up if I use my own ideas OR a prebuilt.

You can always modify prebuilt mods to fit your style, vision, tastes, or hell, just to fuck with people who already know the module. Honestly if you are excited to stat random wageslaves, you'll probably do fine.

Well, really, you only stat like five wageslaves and use the appropriate ones for whatever you are doing out of your bag.
This is all theoretical though, I run so very rarely that fuck if I know it'll work out for real.

Rate this run skeleton:

General run objective: Extract famous action movie actor.

Run complication: Famous movie actor is in fact johnny cage, and has the green afterimages and bullshit

Secret ultra run complication: He is being kidnapped so that he cannot participate in a secret ritual fighting competition to preserve earth from horrors

What lifestyle do you live, chummer? It's not above low, is it?

Luxurious disguised as low, fluffed as an expensive research facility and living area inside a disguised and fortified complex in the slums.

Tell me I am not the only GM who doesn’t know the rules, never prepares and makes up bullshit on the fly.

Chummer, I'm a prime runner. My bank account is in the millions of nuyen. Plural. You think a multimillionaire dwarf in his sixties lives like a goddamn hobo? You are completely correct. I mooch off my dumbass son, because money is only to spent to enable zaniness and mayhem.

Travel lifestyle. Travel lifestyle is fun.

Nah, it's Low. Not that we couldn't afford better, but it would be... unwise.

It is bullshit to rule that sometimes people who do not have an adrenal pump still have similar effects?
Because I can totally imagine some mother having a higher initiative if she notices a bear is going to eat her baby.

Blitz. Pay 1 edge, receive 5d6 initiative.

Traveler, but my yerzed-out muscle car is kept at High. Gotta love them Corinthian leather seats and the minibar in the glove compartment stocked with expensive liquors.

Repostan from last bread because I'm so fuckin' happy that I managed to catch my inspirational second wind. And I am legitimately confused how perfectly this shit works.

You know, I think I've figured it out, chummers. I was planning on running a law enforcement campaign just to spruce things up and get my group to try something new, but I was having a bit of difficulty grokking just how to actually play that shit out without it feeling tedious and more like a job than a fun campaign. And then it hit me.

>NCIS: Los Angeles
A team of "law enforcement personnel" that generally are just playing secret agent, operate wildly out of their jurisdiction, do a bit of detective work but usually end up devolving into martial arts brawls or gunfights while collecting a fat bodycount. Where sometimes they don't even pretend that the cases they're on are at all related to their actual role but instead tie into larger conspiracies against individual agents and the team as a whole. Led by a legendary black ops player from the last major global war as well as sometimes a mysterious figure that no-one on the team can make whether or not he's loyal. And when their home base gets boring, they randomly travel to sub-Saharan Africa or Romania or Mexico or Afghanistan to kill terrorists or criminal cartels.

It's fucking perfect. Inspiration recovered, planning continues with a new fire.

Of my 5 players one lives in her car, one lives in a shithole apartment in Puyallup, the other 3 live in middle to upper class homes in Downtown Seattle.

I'm trying to make a recovered BTL addict. I haven't decided on a sex or metatype yet. Does anyone have character art that could work for that? Any of the following would be good features, I think:
>sleep deprived
>malnourished
>depressed/grim
>pale

Unfortunately, it turns out that most of the character art I have is of confident people with healthy body weights.

My Norse magician streetdoc lives in the Barrens, his 'look' is an armored trenchcoat carefully painted to look like he sleeps in an alley. He has an identical one that is clean and new looking for going to nicer places.

He lives a squatter's lifestyle but has perks like quality booze and food. He has a MASH unit docshop with 3 med drones so power and clean water for bathing is available. He drives an old pickup.

>apartment
Isn't Puyallup mostly urban wildness and volcanic-ash-covered blight?

Outside of Puyallup City proper yeah, otherwise its a Vory controlled barrens.

Yes, but there are still a lot of buildings still in use and major powerlines run through that people pirate power from. Very few 'normal' apartments probably mostly near the edge of the district.

Can't go wrong with the classics

Puyallup is like Fallout: New Vegas. The further from the city proper you are, the more of a wild, blighted, post-apocalyptic wasteland it becomes. As you get close to Seattle, though, you start getting shanty towns, unregulated gambling strips, and something that the books only call a 'Crime Mall.'

Google faces of meth, mugshots, such things

I got recommended shadowrun by my lgs when I dropped by, and I just looked through the mediafire page linked in the OP pastebin.

My question is, which books should I get? At least at first? I’m looking over them but I’m not sure which ones

Am I better off focusing on one thing at street scum level, or being okish at a few things?

TROGGER

DO NOT GIVE CGL MONEY

Use the pdfs. All the books are pretty easy to find for free online.

Depends on the rest of your team. For street level, though, I generally try to do either
>Great at a thing and good at the things that thing entails
>Good at a thing and decent at a bunch of things
It also largely depends on your role, as well. So a sniper might be Great at longarms and Good at sneaking, armororer, tracking, and etiquette while a con-man might be Good at con and decent at etiquette, negotiation, impersonation, pistols, palming, and street knowledges.

First one.

Core book and Run Faster are honestly the only ones that you "Have" to get.

They can't decide who the fuck runs Puyallup.
LaesA, Ancients, Yakuza and the mafia have all been said to run the place.

The vory running it is news to me.

>CGL can't be assed to have internal consistency
Shocker.

Adding to what said:
You want the pdfs for four reasons
>The editing is atrocious. There are often things hidden in larger texts, dozens of pages away with no indication that they are there. With PDFs at least you can search
>The bookbinding is shit. Many of the books fall apart within one week.
>The books are definitely not worth the price they are asking for.
And
>CGL are incompetent, the freelancers can't write for shit, the editor doesn't give a crap and the CEO embezzled ~850k and got a slap on the wrist. It is a moral obligation not to give them money.

Conversely, you should definitely pay for Pegasus books, since none of that shit above applies to them.

That’s what I’m doing, I’m just asking which ones

What about any others that are nice beyond the bare necessities?

Street Grimoire should honestly have been included as a must have, although only relevant if you're going to be a mage.

Run & Gun is also pretty nice to have if you're into seriously overpowered equipment.

The rest are very situational, or half the stuff would be banned by any sane GM.

Depends on what people play. Got magic users? Street Grimoire. Got Riggers? Rigger 5.0. Deckers? Data Trails. Sam's? Chrome Flesh. All of them have some things that are fun adds, but aren't 100% necessary.

Does anyone here play in any of the living campaigns?

I've considered applying for one, to try it out and unrust myself before I run a game for my own group.

Any recommendations? Experiences?

>very situational
Adding to this, there are one or two books (Complete Trog comes to mind, might be a couple others) that you shouldn't even bother with at all. There's essentially nothing good in that book.

Keep in mind that living campaigns are "Runs only", no downtime
So you show them your character, depending on their rules they approve it or not, if they did you join a run with some other people there, you do the run, get Karma and Nuyen, advance your character and go to the next run

>Keep in mind that living campaigns are "Runs only", no downtime
Isn't that how all campaigns are? I've never played out downtime.

>I've never played out downtime.
Then I'm really sorry for you, chummer.
In my games we don't play out every single detail. But I still ask my players what they do in downtime, play it out if they want, introduce things that happen and let them play it out, etc.
I personally wouldn't enjoy a game that goes "Well, now that this run is over, three weeks happen and it's now the next run."

If you're not playing downtime, how are you developing an incredible novacoke and hookers problem? How do you explain the cock rot you got from that ghoul that broke into your house? Why is your armour hot pink and covered in purple sex toys?

Simple, they vegetate until it's time for the next run. Almost like robots.

>Almost like robots.
>not being a literal robot
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Shadowrunner wageslaves. Between 'shifts', they just watch trideo and rot quietly.

Runners were always corp slaves, just like everyone else.

N-nuh uh! I ain't no wageslave! I'm s-sticking it to the man by working for him.

Learn German and buy the superior Kraut books.
At least they care.