Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Gamemasters' Lounge => Topic started by: lonewolf1210 on <10-31-12/1542:41>
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I´ve been GMing a group with my friends for a while now and now I am looking where to go next.
I generally prefere to take preconstructed runs and modify them to my groups taste than write my own runs from scratch.
We´ve started with a couple of Season 2 Missions in Denver. At some point we switched to the Ghost Cartel campaign which we played until the end (with the first chapter also relocated to Denver) and now are almost done with the Dawn of the Artifact Series (except for Artifact Unbound, which I dont really see as a fitting end to that series).
After that is done, we have decided to start with fresh characters and a new campaign.
Our general preferences are:
- Combats should be uncommon, sometimes avoidable(through good planning) and very dangerous
- Players should have the chance to find their own solutions to problems(the less railroading the better)
- From the runs above, we liked the Ghost Cartel Campaign best
Under these circumstances, would you suggest taking a look at the season 3 or season 4 missions? Or does anyone have another suggestion altogether?
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Go with Season 3, definitely. Manhattan is a setting that makes combat a bad option in most cases, has a bunch of modules that are very "sandboxy" in terms of giving players free reign to find whatever solution they want to the presented puzzle, and like Ghost Cartels, is very, very morally ambiguous.
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yes that sounds like it would fit us.
thanks!
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Go with Season 3, definitely. Manhattan is a setting that makes combat a bad option in most cases, has a bunch of modules that are very "sandboxy" in terms of giving players free reign to find whatever solution they want to the presented puzzle, and like Ghost Cartels, is very, very morally ambiguous.
What mission in season three did you find morally ambiguous? I am playing through it also and am finding it to be fairly morally clear cut. That or your team just has a different play style than mine.
If it helps I will do a mission by mission break down of my thoughts tonight after I get home from work but do far (have done every run but Elevator Ride to Hell" but I have not found any run to be especially morally ambiguous except for those runs where if you did not do bad thing X there would be no run at all....
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I guess I consider Burning Bridges pretty morally ambiguous, along with Monkeywrench and its sequel.
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The only issue I've seen with Missions Season 3 is that it can quite easily spark inner-party conflict if people's "side quests" conflict. Personally, I enjoyed it as it added a much needed RP tension in my opinion. Everyone had secondary motivation on their jobs. No one wound up killing each other until the very end mission.
That said, I've seen groups where first response to someone having a different plan (conflicting with their side interest) got gatted on the spot, which led to some out of game tensions.
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I found that the affiliate missions were something that could work very well with a group that play together all the time and have player to player relationships that will survive some IC backstabbing. With groups of strangers, they were a recipe for disaster and strained all plausibility.
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If it helps I will do a mission by mission break down of my thoughts tonight after I get home from work but do far (have done every run but Elevator Ride to Hell" but I have not found any run to be especially morally ambiguous except for those runs where if you did not do bad thing X there would be no run at all....
That would be very nice, thank you.
btw: has the storyline that was unfinished in Ghost Cartels been adressed in any newer book since then?
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Well let's just say I encountered more TPK-1 (1 player walked away living) sessions in Season 3 than any other (I ran games for groups at the local college). The funniest part was that only a couple of those were unsuccessful runs. Really, it seemed like a lot of the times the conflict was caused by the belief that they were being betrayed by team mates rather than any actual betrayal.
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That would be very nice, thank you.
btw: has the storyline that was unfinished in Ghost Cartels been adressed in any newer book since then?
No, and it likely won't. It's complicated.
For now, you might see a small nod to it here or there, but in general, it's one area where you should write your own stuff.
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I guess I consider Burning Bridges pretty morally ambiguous, along with Monkeywrench and its sequel.
How is Monkeywrench morally ambiguous? You get hired to break into a place to test its security measures using non lethal ammo and the people who you are going to breaking into are aware that there is going to be a pretend break in to test their capabilities in the near future, that's not even illegal let alone morally ambiguous! Okay then things go to hell when the floor explodes, but there is nothing morally ambiguous about defending yourself when attacked by crazy robots, or people who have no right to be where you are (other runners, Ares agents on Horizon property) and once again since you're loaded up with non lethal ammo, well stick and shock means never having to say you are sorry.
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Ok, so the ambiguity comes mostly from the sequel, when you catch up with the crazed robot thing and find out why it is acting all weird. It's nothing compared to "commit an act of mass murder on a grand scale for not enough money to pay your rent", but it's still pretty out there.
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Ok, so the ambiguity comes mostly from the sequel, when you catch up with the crazed robot thing and find out why it is acting all weird. It's nothing compared to "commit an act of mass murder on a grand scale for not enough money to pay your rent", but it's still pretty out there.
Except that by the time you catch up to the crazed robot thing, the AI running around in its just wants to go back home having been heavily freaked out by his time running around in a drone body with some memories that are not his own, which it just so happens is exactly what the runners want him to do. Then a bunch of idiots with guns show up for poorly defined reasons leaving the runners morally justified in betraying /serving whichever of the three parties they want since they are all behaving in an equally dickish manner/have all equally betrayed the runners by refusing to trust the runners to just do their jobs. Seriously, where is the moral ambiguity?
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Okay here we go folks this is my big post on Season 3 and why I did not find it morally ambiguous (note not the same thing as saying I did not have fun playing it) and your results may vary in which case I would love to hear about it, since I'm always interested in hearing how different groups dealt with the problems /runs my group has.
Anyway, here we go on a run by run basis
Everyone is your friend: This one fails at being morally ambiguous because NOTHING in this run seems to resemble reality as I knew it. You get hired by a guy who is powered by love because the woman he loves has run away so you have to get her back, and he never makes it clear why she did it. Ghostwalker kicks you out of Denver despite the fact that the last time my group saw Big G we had decided to drive our Tour Bus come Armored Personnel Carrier through the streets of Denver in the process blowing away the elite shock troops of several of the groups that want to undermine his rule so that we could return his magical macguffin to him and also having said armored personnel carrier get its ARO properly registered as a ZDF prior to said drive so it's not like its our fault several gangs decided to launch major attacks on a government vehicle. In short, Ghostwalker should have no reason at all to be mad at us. Which brings us back to my thoughts on this run which are in short because it needs to serve as a bridge between season's two and three everything ends up feeling awkward and out of character so who is surprised if the runners act that way (by kidnapping someone) also.
Ready Set Gogh. This run fails at being morally ambiguous because your actions lack repercussions. Yes you are depriving the public of the chance to view a certain piece of artwork by stealing it and giving it to someone else, but considering all the shit most ordinary people in shadowrun have to deal with, this is not exactly stepping on the necks of people who are trying to form a union. Also you end up stealing the piece of artwork back and a few extras along with it because some other rich prick wants to dick over the original rich prick who hired you. So in actuality the museum up stole from will probably end up with more artwork than it started with!
Block War: This one fails at being morally ambiguous because the runners are so clearly in the right. First you do whacky frat hijinks which is just fun and not morally relevant one way or another. Then a little girl's father (your newest fixer) who was her only parent at the moment gets murdered. If the runners have any morals at all they will dedicate themselves to tracking down her murder. My team did and we then managed to hack basically everything with a camera in the area where they dumped his body. This gave us a couple of clues (a license plate and a face) and thanks to a combination of matrix and magic searching we tracked down the responsible party. Then revenge happened. Then we stepped back onto the rails and did what was left of the adventure easily because the guy who was supposed to try and backstab/murder us halfway through what was left of the run and his goons had already been killed for murdering our fixer. If a runner team doesn’t care about orphaned little girls then they're incapable of moral ambiguity since they're clearly evil bastards.
Burning Bridges: This mission is not morally ambiguous because it effectively takes all the options out of the players hands. If you're going to do the run then you're going to be terrorists, there's no way to white hat it the best you can do is try to minimize casualities. Also it doesn't matter if you choose to betray Mr. Johnson or not because even if you don't Aztechnology will still see to it that he gets blamed. Moral ambiguity implies different choices with different outcomes in my book, here you are either super mega evil (blow up bridge during the day) or just really evil (blow up bridge at night).
Monkey Wrench: This mission is not morally ambiguous because you're not really doing anything wrong. The fake break in thing is perfectly legal and it effectively makes you Horizon security contractors for the sake of the run. You use non lethal ammo so no body gets hurt worse than a light tazing or gel round splatter. Then of course the floor explodes. At this point there is nothing morally wrong with just tazing down anything from the Ares facility that enters the Horizon one, since they are trespassing without horizon's approval to try and trespass to test security like you are. Then you can leave and when Ares checks your vehicle they won't find anything of theirs in it so they'll let you go. So long as you actually do the job you're hired to do then what have you done that is in any way objectionable?
Inn -N-Out: this mission fails to be morally ambiguous because Aztechnology is the biggest dick in town. You start out having to defend a girl's restaurant chain from a hostile take over by them and you are clearly doing the right thing. Then you need to see to it so that her mentally not quite all there brother can avoid serious jail time by putting the blame on Aztechnology. This is only fair because Aztechnology framed him first regardless of who was truly guilty (and probably would have blown up the bridge themselves if they didn't see someone else about to do it). While you're in the prison you also end up most likely saving his life from another shadow running team that is trying to assassinate him, another morally laudable act.
Jackknifed: Fails to be morally ambiguous because you're clearly in the right the whole way through. You start out fighting a gun battle in complete and total self defense. You move onto being bodyguards for someone whose boss may be trying to kill them. You end up play Robbin Hood stealing from the rich (and the Aztechnology associated rich at that) to give food to people who are starving, not a moral choice I'm going to be up all night pondering.
Knight at the Opera: Fails to be morally ambiguous because you're effectively doing two jobs; one of them is body guarding, the other is sneaking a guy out of an opera so that he can go watch a football game without anyone realizing it. Willing extractions don't ping my moral barometer, especially when part of the job is not to hurt the security detail you are extracting him from and then returning him to.
Firestorm: This mission fails to be morally ambiguous because all the non PC major players in it act like dicks. They don't trust the shadowrunners they hire to do the job they were hired for and insist on sending their own trigger happy agents onto the scene. When the people who hire you betray your trust like that, there's nothing morally ambiguous about betraying them right back.
Now for Something Completely Different: Fails to be morally ambiguous because you don't break any laws in this one either honestly. You get hired as body guards. You body guard. You rough up some artists who effectively kidnap all the people at the art show. You go on mystical vision quest. You convince/bully spirit into stopping his bullshit before somebody/even more people get hurt, all in a good day's heroing.
Spin Control: This one fails to be morally ambiguous because bug spirits are the shadowrun equivalent of the Borg, except that you can free a Borg from the collective, I've never heard of anyone having a bug spirit cast out of their body successfully after being possessed. So I don't cry for the bug spirits that are being dissected and experimented on by Ares anymore than I do for the Borg that get torn apart/blown up by Species 8472.
Food Poisoning: Fails to be morally ambiguous because once again Aztechnology is the biggest dick in town. Someone (Aztechnology) released a bio weapon to the public as food. They are clearly evil. You are trying to track down who it was and bring them to justice, you are clearly doing a good thing. Only possibly morally ambiguous part of this was Breeze, the crippled shadowrunning technomancer who works for Aztechnology luckily we resolved the issue of if it was okay to tip over a cripple's wheelchair if they're a technomancer by having our parties technomancer (who is also paralysis from the waist down) do the interrogation. Never before have his lack of functioning legs proved such a boon to the party!
Just to properly establish the goalposts, one of the best examples of moral ambiguity I've had while playing Shadowrun was during the 2012 Scramble at Origins. Our mission was to find a runner get him to a safe house where he will be met by a cop to make sure he stays safe. Halfway through the mission we learn that the cop we're going to be handing him over to is a dirty cop, this makes me wonder, are we turning this well respected runner over to somebody who is going to see that he is killed or is he the kind of dirty cop who likes shadowrunners? Are we helping save this runner's life by getting him to a safehouse, or are we getting manipulated behind the scenes to make it easier for him to be killed? When you're not sure what the right thing to do is, that's when you're waist deep in moral ambiguity.
And there you have my thoughts.
Also on the subject of inter party bickering, just remember this important lesson, Stick & Shock and Stunbolt means never having to say you're sorry or write up a new character sheet.
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Insert spoilers for ALL of Season 3.
Bear in mind that in Food Poisoning, you ARE the dicks who poisoned all the people who are dying, since you gave them the toxic grain at the end of Jacknifed.
I call it morally ambiguous because you're never actually doing anything that's good for a good reason.
In In and Out, you're helping the woman keep her restaurant so that you can use her to manipulate her brother into perjuring himself to cover for the crime you commited in Burning Bridges.
In Spin Control, you're working for a bug, who's paying you to shut down a program that might actually help humanity fight the Invae. It's not easy to discover, but it's hardly impossible.
In Knight at the Opera, you're offered a huge mystery reward to reveal personal information about one of Damien Knight's doubles, which will inevitably lead to something truly awful happening to an innocent family just because daddy kind of looks like Damien Knight.
In Burning Bridges, it's not terrorism, since there's no political statement involved. It's simple, basic human greed. Someone asks you to commit an atrocity, and you decide that you're going to do it, or you decide to go to the NYPD and bring the guy down. The ambiguity comes in figuring out how you're going to do it and how much trouble you're going to take to minimize the damage. Blowing up the Brooklyn caisson is a lot easier than the river one, but will do a lot more damage and kill a lot more people. The hardest option is blowing up the river caisson in the middle of the night which greatly reduces collateral damage. The place where you decide that the risk balances out the volume of mass murdering you're comfortable with is where you draw your moral line. There's also the issue of how far you're willing to go to cover for your crime.
Elevator is pretty black and white, with the notable exception of what EVERYONE other than Ares wants from you, and why.
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Insert spoilers for ALL of Season 3.
Bear in mind that in Food Poisoning, you ARE the dicks who poisoned all the people who are dying, since you gave them the toxic grain at the end of Jacknifed.
I call it morally ambiguous because you're never actually doing anything that's good for a good reason.
In In and Out, you're helping the woman keep her restaurant so that you can use her to manipulate her brother into perjuring himself to cover for the crime you commited in Burning Bridges.
In Spin Control, you're working for a bug, who's paying you to shut down a program that might actually help humanity fight the Invae. It's not easy to discover, but it's hardly impossible.
In Knight at the Opera, you're offered a huge mystery reward to reveal personal information about one of Damien Knight's doubles, which will inevitably lead to something truly awful happening to an innocent family just because daddy kind of looks like Damien Knight.
In Burning Bridges, it's not terrorism, since there's no political statement involved. It's simple, basic human greed. Someone asks you to commit an atrocity, and you decide that you're going to do it, or you decide to go to the NYPD and bring the guy down. The ambiguity comes in figuring out how you're going to do it and how much trouble you're going to take to minimize the damage. Blowing up the Brooklyn caisson is a lot easier than the river one, but will do a lot more damage and kill a lot more people. The hardest option is blowing up the river caisson in the middle of the night which greatly reduces collateral damage. The place where you decide that the risk balances out the volume of mass murdering you're comfortable with is where you draw your moral line. There's also the issue of how far you're willing to go to cover for your crime.
Elevator is pretty black and white, with the notable exception of what EVERYONE other than Ares wants from you, and why.
The less you say about elevator the better since I have not played it yet, may be playing it this weekend or the weekend after that but whatever let me address the points you bring up.
First of all, "we' are not the dicks in food poisoning, the company that thought they could pass a bio weapon off as a grain is. The grain was designed to pass even the very best tests that Pulaski could run on it, so there is obviously nothing the runners could do to keep people from getting killed by it, they can only clean up their own mess but they are not the dicks who are ultimately responsible for the grain, Aztechnology clearly is.
Secondly, it's not about covering the crime we committed in burning bridges, its about covering himself. We got away from Burning Bridges scott free and there's no way that the police are going to be able to tie it to us even if Mr. Johnson testifies against us, since we blew up all the evidence along with the bridge. Also, we are comparatively smaller fish than he is, as the mastermind is a bigger catch than the peons who did the job. It is about getting him to commit perjury so that he will not go to jail for the crime he committed so that he could try and support his husband who was dying of Syphil-AIDS or some other disease that can't be cured by 2070 magic or technology. It's not about what is best for us, it's about what is best for him.
Thirdly : In Spin Control we did figure this out, or at least we suspected it enough that when we turned the data over we eliminated all the info we had gathered about how Ares and the CIA were planning some strikes against certain hives at this very moment on the off chance that he was a bug spirit and thus would not get any info which he could use to help his insect brothers. This run ran way too long (did you have that problem also?) and so we did not have time/energy to come up with a clever plan that required him to walk through a ward to get the info he wanted, thus 100% proving he is a bug spirit to us, which probably would have lead to him getting stick and shocked/stunbolted and then dropped off on the doorstep of the Ares/CIA base to become the next bug spirit on the chopping block for disection and experimentation because Karma is a bitch like that, but yeah this run went on too long for us to try anything trixy like that we covered our asses and got paid because sometimes real life trumps being a smarty pants in shadowrun.
Fourthly, in Knight at the Opera there is no such thing as a "huge mystery reward" since if the reward is a mystery you can not be certain it will be huge, QED. Also this mission features an even more blatant case of "Syphil-AIDS" considering all of Ares' facilities should have been at the disposal of curing the daughter's illness and I am skeptical that there still exists diseases that can not be cured by a proper mix of bioware and getting bodyparts replaced by chrome. Also honestly I though I did end up releasing info on the guy, I did it with every belief that he was in fact the real Mr. Knight at the time, so whoops on my part but I did not feel morally conflicted at the time about releasing info on Mr. Knight having a secret wife/family.
Fifthly, there is no "Run" if you decide to go to NYPD. You go to them, you tell them, they stick some guys to watch the place where the explosives are going to be stolen from, catch whoever Not your Johnson hires to try and steal the explosives and you're done inside thirty minutes. There's no "Run" if you don't want to destroy the bridge at least not unless your GM is willing to create something out of whole cloth. Also as for how you blow the bridge, we actually did blow the river caisson at night (with some help from a motorcycle that doubles as a submersable) and found it easier than blowing the bridge itself would have been for one simple reason... there are no spirits patrolling the caisson. So yes the when and how you want to blow the bridge does let you determine how evil you will be but like I said you're effectively going to be horrible people whatever your choice if you want to do that particular run, you only determine if you're going down in history for killing more New Yorkers than... well I can not finish that analogy in good taste.
I would argue that if "doing the right thing for the right reason" is what is necessary to avoid moral ambiguity than any run will have moral ambiguity since the reason you do any run is always the "wrong " one... because Mr./Mrs. Johnson is offering to pay you for it, and thus it is not a very high bar to clear.
Also these are just my personal beliefs and I hope I'm not coming across as insulting. Shadowrunners come in many shapes, sizes, and moral compasses, a shadowrunning team made up of The Joker, Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, Mr. Freeze and Bane is just as viable a concept as one of Nate Ford, Sophie Devereaux, Alec Hardison, Elliot Spencer, and Parker... though I think that first team might also want to bring along The Clock King since it currently lacks a hacker/technomancer.
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I call it morally ambiguous because you're caught up in the middle of doing a lot of awful things that directly lead to immense human suffering and misery, rather than just ruining a few careers. Based on your definition, it doesn't qualify as morally ambiguous, which suggests that I should have described it another way. How about I call it "bleak" instead?
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I call it morally ambiguous because you're caught up in the middle of doing a lot of awful things that directly lead to immense human suffering and misery, rather than just ruining a few careers. Based on your definition, it doesn't qualify as morally ambiguous, which suggests that I should have described it another way. How about I call it "bleak" instead?
Bleak and or dysptopian are fine, it's just that morally ambiguous to me implies a general sense that the runners are in a situation where they have a hard time telling wrong from right and are unsure if they are doing the right thing or the wrong thing at the moment. Burning Bridges is a very bleak mission for sure because the runners can tell wrong from right, but are deciding to do the wrong thing anyway so that they can get paid, and when all is said and done....
The only one who gets what they want is Aztechnology who are as always the biggest dicks in a city filled with them
So yeah, it sounds like our disagreement was more to do with word campaign.
Well that and I never had too much trouble (only one combat my team has taken part in has made it past the first turn and that was because the bad guys were so spread out) with fighting.
Though we also have been relatively smart in the fights we have picked, we manage to preform...
Everybody is your friend: This entire mission's combat was resolved with one well placed stunball.
Ready Set Gogh: Not a signle shot was fired.
Knight at the Opera: Not a signle shot was fired. Would have been no offensive magic either but the mage I was extracting Daimen Knight with failed a sneak check. We split up and he stunball, dust develed and blizarded his way clear.
Firestorm: All combat was resolved with two well placed stunballs.
Now for Something Completely Different: Test of self and mini-gun used as door opener to let people get out of the party.
Food Poisoning: Combat ended with a stunbolt and a single long burst.
Though on the other end of the spectrum, we did recreate the Lobby Shootout/Helicopter Rescue scene from the Matrix in Block War, and we earned a point of notoriety for taking out 30 mook guards with some well placed suppressive fire from a helicopter mounted mingiun
Also for complicated reason Jackknifed's climax invovled us fighting two Shadowrun teams at the same time, though I managed to take out 4/5ths' of one team in one combat pass....
But combat is a finicky thing in shadowrun so your results will vary even more than your character's morals.
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Thanks for all the reviews!
btw: has the storyline that was unfinished in Ghost Cartels been adressed in any newer book since then?
No, and it likely won't. It's complicated.
For now, you might see a small nod to it here or there, but in general, it's one area where you should write your own stuff.
Now you´ve peaked my interest. What is complicated about that?