Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Gamemasters' Lounge => Topic started by: EltonJ on <03-28-16/2028:25>
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For that Shadowrun spirit?
I've had suggested the following crime classics:
* The Usual Suspects (by Fox)
* Ocean's Eleven
* Now You See Me
Anything else?
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Equilibrium
John Wick
Replacement Killers
Leverage (TV series)
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The Sting, movie (for when you somehow get a crew of Con focused Faces)
Ghost in the Shell, movies and anime. (right about the tech level of Shadowrun)
Black Lagoon, anime. (Lagoon Company would fit right at home as a team of runners)
Cowboy Bebop, movie and anime. (OK the tech level is wrong, but a great example of a runner crew struggling from paycheck to paycheck)
Blade Runner, movie. (if for nothing else then the visual vibe of dystopic cyberpunk)
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In addition to the ones already mentioned (all very good choices, btw):
Johnny Mnemonic
Hackers
Sneakers
Robocop
Akira
Dark Angel (tv show)
Ultraviolet
Aeon Flux
Smokey and the Bandit (for the smugglers)
V for Vendetta
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Blade Runner as already suggested. Ghost in the Shell (the first movie) is a very nice mention. Minority Report and I, Robot and Fifth Element in terms of technology are quite cool. Dredd, the last one.
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Strange Days (1995) - a beat ex-cop turned BTL peddler (and junkie) uncovering a murder mystery plot involving simrigs.
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this Question comes up every 3 Month, doesn't it ? :)
- Judge Dredd (both the old one with Sly as well as the new one)
- Demolition Man (use the Shells ;) )
- Equilibrium ( that's where Gun Fu comes from)
- the Raid Redemption
- Total Recall
- 6th Day
- Chappi
- Elysium
- Dragon Wars
and each and everytime the List grows longer (which is a good thing)
with a reocurring Dance
Medicineman
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HEAT (1995)
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Almost nothing left to suggest, except Black Rain (1989) for a great take on the yakuza.
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Hah
Leon the Professional !
http://akas.imdb.com/title/tt0110413/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
(better Late than never )
with a nearly forgotten Dance
Medicineman
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Most the good suggestions are above, but, I'll toss in Matrix & Italian Job as possible feel/idea movies.
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Can't forget the ultimate Hollywood Shadowrun movie, Ronin!
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I'd also throw in the Mission:Impossible movies, especially the first two. Also, The Rock, Swordfish, and Law Abiding Citizen as possibles
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Loving the shout outs to Neil Blommkamp and also to The Raid: Redemption. It is really hard to find that last one in Indonesian and not subbed, but it is SO worth it. The voices were cast absolutely perfectly in the original, and you forget you're watching a foreign film.
Neil Blommkamp's two movies mentioned above (Elysium and Chappie both have the underlying message of extreme poverty and inflation combined with a rampant abuse of the lower class. Elysium in particular is EXACTLY a variation of Shadowrun, really really good choice
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For me, Shadowrun really isn't so much about the cyberpunk or the magic, but the crime. The players are playing criminals, even if they don't think they are, and I believe this affects the role-play of their characters. As a result, they make decisions that I don't believe their characters would make under the circumstances, so it took me some time to alter their mindsets a bit about the kinds of characters they play in Shadowrun as shadowrunners. I do throw in the standards for the cyberpunk feel, but I made sure they got the path I wanted them to travel. Not that they can't be good guys, but they have to know which side of the law they're on, and understand that criminals tend to think in the short term, rather the long term, and tend to rationalize bad behaviors on that basis.
To that end, my list is:
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
Snatch
Carlito's Way
Scarface (the Al Pacino version)
Heat
Breaking Bad (the entire show)
The Italian Job
Inception
The Sting
White Heat
Double Indemnity
The Petrified Forest
Key Largo
The Big Sleep
The Big Lebowski
Harper
Most Rockford Files episodes
Kiss Me Deadly
Chinatown
The Maltese Falcon
The Man With One Red Shoe
Top Secret! (because, hey, watching a lot of these movies gets depressing)
Get Shorty!
The Usual Suspects
Reservoir Dogs
Jackie Brown
Pulp Fiction
The Great Train Robbery
Johnny Pneumonic
Max Headroom TV show (if you can still find it somewhere)
Mission: Impossible (not the movies, but the original TV show - the movies are silly)
Kojak (who loves ya, baby?)
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I recently watched The Call Up.
"A group of online gamers are invited to try a state-of-the-art virtual reality video game but things take a turn for the sinister when these masters of the shoot 'em up discover they will literally be fighting for their lives. "
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If you can find it, Ghost Dog. Forest Whittaker literally plays a Street Samurai. For scummy barrens gangs with a lot of firepower, The Raid is amazing. To show the influence of organized crime on all levels of society, including Corp and Government, Gomorrah is great. My go to classics for team based inspiration (besides Ronan) would be The Wild Bunch and The Magnificent Seven. (Seven Samurai is better, but gunslingers scream shadowrun to me). Another classic with the perfect noir feel is The Maltese Falcon.
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Repo! The Genetic Opera is pretty good. LOTS of cursing and blood, but that's how I like to play. ;)
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Hah
Leon the Professional !
http://akas.imdb.com/title/tt0110413/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
(better Late than never )
with a nearly forgotten Dance
Medicineman
Love Leon! 8)
Can't forget the ultimate Hollywood Shadowrun movie, Ronin!
This is great! Be prepared and execute the plan - good one to watch if you have trouble organizing your teams.
If you want a good movie to inspire a good Vory character, check out Eastern Promises (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765443/).
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I'd also throw out the tv series 'Almost Human (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2654580/)' --- though be warned canceled early.
For that matter Firefly (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303461/?ref_=nv_sr_1), while not shadowrun it is a good 'team dynamics' tv series. They're a team in space, running from job to job, dodging the governments and corporations. Just trying to make ends meet and keep their ship flying. I mean it's not like they ever get double crossed by a johnson on any jobs or anything... Or have a slimy fixer cutting their margin... Or a bounty hunter on their tail...Or do the wrong thing for the right reason...hmmmm....maybe it is a good watch to inspire shadowrun... ;) Shiny!
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Ghost Dog is fantastic. As I have a love for assassin movies I'd add Collateral and Shadowboxer. The latter is especially good for any team with a heart -- or cybernetic equivalent of one.
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People have mentioned plenty of good titles for inspiration. I like anything with a "team of professionals" vibe, especially espionage and heist films: the Mission Impossible series (I actually prefer the later ones), Ocean's Eleven and its sequels, Heat, The Usual Suspects, Heist, The Italian Job, Ronin, the last few Fast & Furious movies, The A-Team, the Expendables series, and so on. For TV, you can't beat Leverage, and my regular campaign tries to capture the feel of that show.
Some movies and TV shows are useful for illustrating specific concepts or elements of the game. Strange Days explains simsense really well. One character in the TV series Alphas makes a good technomancer. The old Max Headroom series offers a good example of SINless life in the Barrens. Equilibrium is the obvious inspiration for handgun-based martial arts like Gun Kata and Firefight.
I often use Ghost Dog to illustrate an adept's magical stealth. In the opening sequence of the film, Forest Whitaker is invisible simply by walking where no one is looking. It's a remarkable piece of staging: he's never in anyone's sight line.
Movies and TV also dish up some great character studies. As a GM, when I say "think Jodie Foster in The Inside Man," everyone gets a pretty clear picture of a certain type of high-end fixer (everyone who's seen that movie, anyway). A hitman like Jean Reno in The Professional. A tough guy like Mel Gibson in Payback. A bodyguard like Avery Brooks in Spenser for Hire. A document forger like Mira Sorvino in The Replacement Killers. A con man like Will Smith in Focus. An adept like Maggie Q in Nikita. A government agent like Matt Damon in the Bourne movies. A detective like Morgan Freeman in Seven.
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High Rise (http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0462335/) for life going weird in an arcology.
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this Question comes up every 3 Month, doesn't it ? :)
For sure ! Can't it be stickied somewhere,
Maybe in the general discussion section, or as a section itself with music, novels and so on ?
Better when the role and/or concept are explained
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Dollhouse (the tv series, a great example of bunraku)
Get Carter (for God's sake, the original--demonstrates just how different career criminals are from normal folks)
The Third Man (amazing film in any event, I've adopted it as "The Third Metahuman" revolving around a (spoiler alert) smuggling operation of corrupted btl chips)
Automata (this is not a great film in many respects, but it's full of visuals to rip off in your game)
The American (who doesn't like a sniper/face?)
Sandbaggers (an old BBC show. If you can get past the production values, there's an awesome shadowrun team there)
The Conversation (another great look at the psychological toll being a shadowrunner would have)
Spy Game (good-looking people doing spy stuff)
Freejack (again, not a great movie, but a decent look at what it means to be SINless)
Renaissance (Paris 2054, evil megacorps, guns, what else do you need?)
Finally, not a movie but a free webcomic that I like to plug every so often
http://www.milonogiannis.com/ocb/comic/old-city-blues-1/
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And don't forget that you can suggest your players watch these so they have the same basis of reference as you do. Most frustrating time: trying to use movie/tv comparisons to explain what something looks like when the player hasn't seen any of the relevant stuff.
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I recently started watching "Person of Interest (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/PersonOfInterest)".
It's a great substitute for Leverage and full of Shadowrun-esque tropes. Including an AI with a god complex.
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Ghost in the Shell gets touted a lot (and it IS great), but I think Psycho-Pass is another, oft overlooked cyberpunk anime (AND it's chalk-full of cyberpunk references, from two villains discussing Philip K. Dick to an easily missable disk labeled "Johny Mneumonic"). The thing that I really love about it, though, is that even though the power lies with the government and not corporations, it explores exactly how the social contract changed, and how that allowed an entity like a government or megacorp to excercise more power, and how the complacency of the populace was instrumental in them securing that power. It's really changed the way I look at the influence of the Megas and how overt (or not) they are in how they wield it.