Salutations, community of Shadowrun. As the topic indicates, I'm a relatively new GM (to Shadowrun - had a lot of experience with pathfinder, and I'm familiar with Shadowrun as a player) and looking for a few pointers in creating a good game. My own GM had always made our campaigns highly episodic, and it seemed that our karma and nuyen rewards were fairly light (after nearly a year, we were up, MAYBE, by about 35 karma and 30,000 nuyen in cumulative rewards. The day my samurai finally got a panther cannon was one of the happiest, and bloodiest days of our group. Our mage was able to initiate one time). I would like to run a bit more of a campaign, and also let my PCs eventually get access to some of the really fun shit (though not too quickly). I am looking for some tips on how to do this, and I'm also curious about a few points of SR lore, because I barely familiar with more than what is known from the core rulebooks.
To begin with: How lavishly do you usually reward your players? My PCs just finished their first run over 2 sessions, and got 7 karma between the two of them (2 from the first session, then 4 for surviving and completing the run, +1 for cool improvisation). They got 4,500 nuyen out of it. Also, they have been rewarded with a couple new contacts - a street gang that will look on them favorably, and a street doc who has the facilities to install anything up to betaware (as a result of them procuring some gear for him), though he lacks the channels to obtain the hardware himself (that will be up to the PCs).
My group, btw, consists of only 2 PCs right now. I have a decker/detective who also works as a bit of a face, and can pull his weight okay in a fight if push comes to shove, and a fairly typical street samurai who loves his shotgun.
Another stipulation moving forward: I want canon to serve as inspiration, not a straightjacket. I WILL deviate from it if I feel it would make a cooler game. My players have about the same level of knowledge as I do, so none of them will give cries of "Wait, that's not how it happened!" That being said, cannon has had some really cool ideas, and I would love to learn more about it (Shadowrun Wiki has been really, really sparse with their info).
Second, I could use a hand fleshing out the campaign I've got going. The game is set in Hong Kong, and the PCs are not natives. They basically cashed in all of their favors and spent all of their money to get their and start over after everything went to shit for them in Seattle, so they started with a rating 2 fake SIN for free, but weren't allowed to buy any SINS or licenses better than that. They've basically been stuffed into a little suburb of Hong Kong that's managed by a relatively small-time Triad. This place is where the Executive Council sends refugees from the mainland who are offering valuable man hours for their factories, but who they don't want mucking up the city proper. It has a single metro line into a factory district of the city, and that's tightly controlled. Because the Executive Council, and the corps, take a pretty hands off approach to this place as long as they get cheap labor from it, it's also become a favorite place for international criminals to lay low, so there are a few surprisingly large players who have set up shop here. Problem is, if you AREN'T one of those guys, the Triad tries to keep you there so they can develop you as one of their resources, which is exactly what the PCs are trying to avoid. As a final stipulation of their last run, they are being put in touch with a highly competent decker named Forge who can create better fake SINs for them so they can get access to the city proper. He, of course, will need a favor from them, since they still can't afford to pay in cash for a new SIN.
On their last run, the PCs had to steal some med-tech from a triad run hospital. They were pretty crafter about getting in, but blew their cover once they got near the target and had to fight their way out, so Forge wants them to run distraction for another small team he has planting something in a shipping office nearby, and this is going to be the actual start of my campaign. Basically, she knows that one of the AAAs (It's going to be either Renraku, Horizon, or NeoNet) is up to something big in HK, and he wants to know what. There is a shipment of highly specialized microchips going to one of their research stations from here, and he has a team that is going to plant a traceable chip in the shipment so Forge can see what they're up to. This is above the PCs' paygrade right now, but they'll get in on it later. Basically, whichever corp I end up setting on seems to have something contained in a closed network, something that has various AIs on edge, which the PCs will alter have to work with. It looks like they're building a massive program, and, eventually, the PCs learn that this corp salvaged a large portion of Deus's code in the aftermath of the crash of '69 and is recompiling him. I might also have some unsalvaged code floating around in the matrix, trying to rejoin itself with what the corp is building back up ala Neuromancer - I haven't really figured it all out yet.
To complicate things, Mitsuhama figures this out and want to snag Deus for themselves, hoping they can somehow use him to take over the Japanese Imperial State. Ultimately, the PCs will get caught up in a clash between Deus trying to free himself, Mitsuhama trying to steal him, and whatever the machinations of the other corp are.
First, which of the three afore-mentioned corps would work best for this. I figure that Renraku created Deus, and the Japanese concept of face demands that they control him. Then since NeoNet laid all the groundwork for the wireless Matrix I suppose that they would have been in the best position to grab up the little bits of him floating around. My front-runner right now, though, is Horizon. I don't know what they've been up to lately, but based on what I've read it was some creepy shit, and I hear their CEO is totally insane and wants to run some sort of assimilation plot on the world or something. In this scenario, they hope to study the ease with which Deus manipulates, controls, and repurposes systems so they can do the same thing with people, and after reading Gary Cline's entry on the Shadowrun Wiki, I was going to do one of two things with him - either say he doesn't actually exist and is a marketing tool creating by the board of directors, or cast him as the archvillain of the campaign and make him darkly charismatic but also wickedly aggressive in his quest to be loved and to dominate. In the latter case, I'd be taking a lot of inspiration from Borderland 2's Handsome Jack - he would be CEO mostly because he's so violent and unpredictable that he's cowed the rest of the higher ups, and he's trying to create a worldwide cult of personality with him at the center.
My final question is what EXACTLY was Horizon getting into in recent events?
In any case, any tips you guys might be able to offering in refining, fleshing out, or keeping such a game on track would be most welcome.
