[raggedhalo]

OK, so my current table is on hiatus due to some interpersonal problems between two of the players.  I still want to run something, though, so I came up with the following idea for a three-player (plus me as GM) campaign.  I'd really like it if you fine people could give it the once-over and give me your feedback.


Title:      The Clutch of Dragons
      The idea is to look at the high fantasy side of Shadowrun, with missions focused on the secret history of the world and attempts to acquire various powerful magical artefacts across the world, as well as the politics and rivalries between Great Dragons.

Influences:
   TV:   Alias
      Human Target
      Spooks
   Film:   Collateral
      Mission: Impossible series
      Ronin
      The Transporter

Concept:   I’d like to run a Shadowrun game influenced by the above, where the PCs are highly competent, highly resourced and highly supported group of drakes working for the Draco Foundation.  Drakes are an extremely rare species, outwardly appearing as normal metahumans with the ability to assume a small dragon-like form, which manifests after a period of personal turmoil.  Your characters will have either sought sanctuary with the Foundation, or else been rescued from indentured servitude with a Great Dragon.

Legwork and planning will be a big part of the game, and much like spy movies, at least some of the fun will come from the times where your plans don’t quite match reality.

You’ll start as a newly-formed team of drakes from a variety of backgrounds.  Your missions will be the retrieval, protection, or discovery of information about various magical artefacts from the ancient world, as well as other tasks that advance the cause of drakes in general or the Draco Foundation.  One week you might be breaking into a highly-protected secure vault to steal an artefact from a private collector, while the next you might be extracting a captive drake from under the snout of a powerful Great Dragon.

Your characters will likely feel a lot like regular shadowrunners, with two key differences: first of all, you’ll have much more support and structure (see above), and second of all, you’ll all be drakes.  There will be a great deal of international travel, because that’s the only way to get the job done.  That means that characters could come from anywhere in the world, but your home base will be Lake Louise in the Athabaskan Council, southwest of Edmonton.  I hope that the campaign will develop in such a way that there will be many high-stakes activities that challenge your characters’ morals and capabilities, with the end result being lots of fun for everyone.

Character Creation:
   We will be using the Shadowrun 4th Edition rules, specifically the 20th Anniversary Edition (errata to older versions of SR4 are available at http://shadowrun4.com/resources/sr4a/sr4a_changes.pdf) and all the various supplements (Arsenal, Augmentation, Street Magic, Runner’s Companion, Unwired).  Each player should answer the 20 Questions (below) for their character, and will receive 5 Karma for thoughtful and complete answers.  In particular, I’m keen that characters have the various “hooks” provided by a social life – friends, family, confidantes, cellmates, romantic relationships, old school friends, that sort of thing.  They do represent vulnerabilities and extra factors to consider and juggle, but they’re also where a lot of potential story and challenge could come from.  Do you keep your job a secret from them, or do they think you’re in sales and travel a lot for work?  Or are they the street gang you used to run with?

Characters should be created using 1,000 Karma using the Karma-gen rules from the latest edition of the Runner’s Companion.  You also all get the Drake Quality for free, and should choose which type of drake (common, feathered, oriental or sea) you wish to be.  I’d recommend that you consider skills like Computer, Data Search, Dodge, Etiquette, Infiltration, Perception and some close-quarters combat skill no matter what your character’s focus is.

Although they shouldn’t be seen as a strait-jacket, I would draw your attention to the eight team roles from Runner’s Companion and suggest that you design your character to fill no more than two of them.  We will talk in more detail about this when we do character generation, but the idea is for people not to step on one another’s toes so that everyone gets the chance to shine.  The roles are:

•   Close Quarters Combat: physical engagement with the enemy
•   Fire Support: taking down enemies at range and suppressing opposition
•   Infiltration: entering areas physically without raising suspicion
•   Investigation: gathering relevant information pertinent to the job in hand
•   Magical Support: keeping the team safe from magical threats, and gathering astral intelligence
•   Matrix Support: primary defence against online threats, plus hacking and Matrix-based intelligence gathering
•   Negotiation: handling most contact with people outside the team
•   Transportation: planning, co-ordinating and enabling movement from point-to-point for the entire team

There are basically three approaches that can be taken to each of these team roles - the physical, the magical, and the technological.  For example, a physical approach to Fire Support might be a sniper on a rooftop or a troll with a machine gun.  The magical approach might make liberal use of combat spells and spirit powers.  The technological approach might be to set up sentry guns and use drone and vehicle weapons to get total coverage.  While certain roles lend themselves more obviously to one approach or another, there is no reason why any role couldn't be done by taking any approach (or mix of approaches).  Note that you don’t need to cover all eight if you don’t want to.  As long as both people involved are OK with it, doubling up on a particular role would be fine, although it would bring with it some difficulties.  Likewise, if someone wants to only cover one area as a specialist, that’s grand.

There are also some secondary roles that can be taken on in addition to those above:
•   Demolitions – blowing shit up
•   Leader or Tactical Co-ordinator – command & control in the field
•   Logistics – keep everyone stocked up on the latest gear and consumables
•   Medic – keep the team healthy and alive

It might be worth each of you considering taking on one of these too. 

My initial feeling is that the team needs to be able to cover the physical world, the astral plane and the Matrix.  However, it’s often not very much fun to be the person who stays in the van while the others go off and do things, so it would be best if everyone was at least a little combat-capable with at least two Initiative Passes in a combat situation.

So, yeah: how does that sound?  I'll basically be running them through Dawn of the Artifacts, Artifacts Unbound and stuff from Clutch of Dragons.

[Warmachinez]

To me... this sounds AWSOME!!!
 

[FastJack]

Sounds good. I don't know about restricting it to Drakes though, there are plenty of norms and SURGE'd characters that could fit the bill too...


Mostly because I like scenes where they corner the scraggly hacker and he smiles, saying his friends are coming. And then the enormous ruckus of something big & bad tearing their way to their friend...

[All4BigGuns]

Sounds good. I don't know about restricting it to Drakes though, there are plenty of norms and SURGE'd characters that could fit the bill too...

Agreed.

[Mithlas]

I also agree that other SURGE'd characters could easily fit, but given the heavy role in dragons and the 'free draco' quality and difficulties of trying to balance that with others I think there's a good basis for asking for that as a baseline. I'd love to try something like this - it would likely help me get a fix on what I actually think of drake character types, but I wouldn't have time to do so until after the first week of December.

[All4BigGuns]

I also agree that other SURGE'd characters could easily fit, but given the heavy role in dragons and the 'free draco' quality and difficulties of trying to balance that with others I think there's a good basis for asking for that as a baseline. I'd love to try something like this - it would likely help me get a fix on what I actually think of drake character types, but I wouldn't have time to do so until after the first week of December.

I wouldn't for two reasons.

1) I don't like restrictions of "everyone has to be this type".

2) I have Zero interest in Drakes.

[Wolfboy]

I also agree that other SURGE'd characters could easily fit, but given the heavy role in dragons and the 'free draco' quality and difficulties of trying to balance that with others I think there's a good basis for asking for that as a baseline. I'd love to try something like this - it would likely help me get a fix on what I actually think of drake character types, but I wouldn't have time to do so until after the first week of December.

i also agree, in fact i would love to run my old gun fu adept in this even surged.

[raggedhalo]

Thanks for all the feedback!

The reason I'm going for all drakes is that I honestly believe that just one drake in an otherwise relatively-normal group (even SURGElings are otherwise fairly routine) is inevitably going to be a massive spotlight hog*.  I wanted to run a campaign focused on the weird-and-wonderful side of Shadowrun, and got my concepts down to this and a Mystic Crusaders game (everyone's Awakened and part of the Crusaders).  Given I'd like to include some of the dragon civil war stuff too, drakes seemed like a better fit.

As it happens, my players all like the idea, but if they hadn't they could simply have played a character who hated being a drake and never transformed.  That would have been a shame (and more likely I'd've gone over to the Mystic Crusaders idea instead) but not a dealbreaker in my group.


*: like playing the only Solar Exalted in a Dragon-Blooded game