[shrike]

Tell me about your games: strange occurrences, cool stunts, crazy plotlines, anything. Do you use published missions as is or do you modify them? What mix of archetypes do you have?

[CanRay]

Well, I made my group steal a cow, kidnap Goofy from MouseCorp, and rescue Batman from San Diego ComiCon (Which is in Aztlan, BTW.).

[Medea]

     My group of runners is based out of the Redmond Barrens in Seattle.  They are called the Morlock Resistance Army (M.R.A.).  Unlike many Shadowrunners, they are completely anti-corporate.  They won't work for any corporation directly and spend most of their resources helping the people who live in the Barrens.  They do this by sabotaging any corporate attempts to relocate the poor people that live there so they can erect a new arcology or make a profit, and they eradicate any gang that preys on the populace (which, in the Barrens, is A LOT of gangs).  They could be called a socialist type outfit, as they give much of their assets back to the community and try to help the poor as much as possible, unlike the neo-anarchists, who seem to want a purely libertarian society.
     The group consists of highly specialized individuals (we have almost any type of archetype you could want to play with in the M.R.A).  My character, Medea, is a sorceress with high negotiation and stealth skills, as well as the groups unofficial leader (I'm just not bossy enough).  Ash is a street sam and the "Field Commander" of the group in any combat situation (just think of a cybered up Bruce Campbell from those Evil Dead movies).  We have many other characters too, who act as NPCs if we don't have enough players, such as Lexi, the spunky combat decker with one real arm and one cybered one;  Diesel, the former troll mercenary who could pass for Ron Pearlman's Hellboy; Cassandra, a bad-ass covert-ops former CIA agent turned rogue (just think Nina from the Tekken series of fighting video games, with cyberware); and about a dozen others, including, like I said, just about any type of archetype you could want to play in SR.
     The M.R.A. is a spin-off of the morlocks in H.G. Wells the Time Machine, in case you didn't get the reference already.  They see all the people who just want to "go to the nightclub" and party while the world is ending as the "Eloi".  The M.R.A. believe that the only way to restore civilization is to eliminate the corporate rulers who already have the world in the palm of their hands, or to severely limit their power, and if they have to kill a few Eloi in the meantime, so be it.  The greater end justifies the means.  I know they sound a little bit like some terrorist organization, but in their eyes the corporate types are the ones destroying the world, and MUST be dealt with.   
 

[SpiderWord]

I follow the official Time Line and I like to push my Shadowrunners into the Affairs described in the various Books. Still since SR is a RPG I give time also to the chars and their motivations so we foucs also on each Char Plot Line. I think I tend to mix written stuff with Stories made by myself trying to be faithfull to the main Time Line. I want that my Runners are able to say "Yeah... I saw that, I was that." I want to involve them in the big stuff happening in the 6th World but at the same I give them enough space to tell their on stories. Till now it seems to work, it seems I keep a decent balance. Some players have more than one char and they decide which one they want to use in each Story. Usually the Team is composed by a Face, a professional Thief, a Street Samurai, a Magician, a Voodoo Priest and a Technomancer. The main Setting is Seattle but I like to use other cities, since I used most of the written material they visited several locations. The funniest Run was the one in which they had to recover a Black Cherry Cat in the Ork Underground: grabbing a magical cat is more complicated than you imagine.

[bigdamndm1986]

ask shrike about the 2 girls fighting over him. 

[shrike]

Hush you.

[Lacynth40]

Last game I was running, I had a magically overpowered group. They were all newbs, so most thought that magic characters would be the end all, be all... Heh. So, anyway. Had one Thaumaturgical mage. He lasted all of one session before going back to WoW. Had a social adept, that the player hated after a couple of sessions. He didn't like having to do all the talking. Had a Kick Artist Adept, who has an interesting story for later. There was an Infiltration Adept, going for being a corporate ninja... And the other player actually had a good thought, and went for Hacker. I grumbled about their choices, so I had to make them a meatshield NPC for the first couple of sessions. His job was to get them into the setting easier, and then die tragically.

So, the kick artist, seriously newbie, was supposed to get some intel off of some punk ganger. He decided the quickest way was to beat it out of him. And he wanted it to be a very quick interrogation. So, before checking with anyone else, he told me he was activating critical strike, killing hands, and rolling for attribute boost (strength). My jaw dropped, and I had to ask if he was sure. He replied with a quick "Yep!", and proceeded to smack his adept's hands over the guy's eardrums, trying to cause concussive damage to the eardrums. He rolled the att boost, and maxed his strength. At this point I was dumbfounded, but let him continue in this madness. He then rolled his attack, against a tied-up target... He did rather well, to say the least. After damage was rolled, I explained what happened, and why they would have to find another source for the information they wanted. The hacker gleefully recorded the whole three second interrogation, and called up the ghouls to take care of the body. Suffice to say, they spent the time before their next session actually READING what their powers did...

And yes, I believe in letting the players make horrendous mistakes just to learn from those mistakes.

[Red]

One of the players started as a teenage girl stolen out of a containment vat in a Delta lab. Very long story but she ends up being a biodrone driven by a highly advanced pilot program. Celedyr arranged it because he wanted to see if he could "grow" an AI by having it develop in a human brain. In this case, it worked. Involved Ordo Dracul, Celedyr, Pax, the Imago Project, and took the runners to Geneva, Prague, Seattle, Neo-Tokyo, Chiba, Caerleon, and Boston.