[DigitalZombie]

Are your runners tired of going on "importantlike corporatish researchy patch 14" run? especially after they
havent been doing anything else than patch 1 to 13 runs the last 7 months? well despair not, this thread is meant for GMs to share their macguffins (plot device used to drive the story forward, but is mostly unimportant in itself)
This is meant to expand the macguffin list on page 343.

Aztech FABulous chihuahua \ ares mana poodle
This research project is about crossing the flourescing astral bacteria with a glow-pet chihuahua dog. The pet dog is meant for the rich and fameous in need of some astral activity surveillance. The dog glows a faint pink, green or blue when in contact with an astral being.  its in either data form or maybe in a cute beta testing puppy state.

Saeder krupp power riegel.
Twice the taste and thrice the articifial addetives. This power bar comes in a myriad of taste variants. And has an addiction treshhold of 2. Planned to be released in 2 months, steamrolling the competing powerbars like sugar rush 2k, soylent green and krill action bar.

[Shade]

Extraction:

The team was supposed to be extracting a highly skilled SK magic researcher from an outpost in the middle of the frozen emptiness that is Athabaska. The employer left out a particular key fact...the extraction target was a Wendigo. Intentionally infected by the corp to work on HMHVV research. Minor detail!

[Belker]

Handle with Care

Theft or hijacking: a cargo of incredibly fragile spun-glass sculptures of butterflies. These are packaged in specially-made individual shells that resemble large eggs for protection. The eggs are actually surprisingly tough and impact-resistant, but lack internal shock absorption. Thus you could wind up delivering what looks like a complete and undamaged cargo, only to have the recipient discover some or all are actually destroyed within their shells...

(Stolen from Kage Baker's "The Caravan From Troon")

[Reaver]

Simple list of Mcgruffans I have used to great effect.


Daddie's little Angel:  Teen girl of a middling Corp Exec. is missing, corp security investigated "for the allotted time" but came up dry. Suspect gang involvement. Turns out, daddy's into the drug dealers for a whopping $50k! And she's gonna either pay it off, in cash or "working", or daddy can pay it off for her. (he can't).

All that for this: Simple courier run, deliver a letter (looks like it has something in the bottom of it.. something hard..) to a particular person, at a particular location and at a particular time. Seems easy.. until the tail.. then the snatch and grab... and the shoot out, and chase..... all to deliver a letter to a middle aged woman in <where ever>! She in turn gives THEM a letter.
"Thank you for acting as our decoy during a difficult exchange. We thank you for your hard work, and hope to do so again in the future, Mr. Johnson"

Know me Not: A "random" stranger walks up to one of the character and starts acting like they are long lost buddies... even going so far as to hug them!! Once they sort out that they do not in fact know each other, the man apologies and walks away. then someone starts following them. Then attacks them. Then people start talking money in exchange for the data chip.... that they DO NOT have! And they won't take know for an answer. Then 96 hours later, everything stops. 

[GiraffeShaman]

I once used a very ancient "Jared the Subway guy" as the team's target for an extraction, to the groans of my players.

[Crunch]

At one point I had a recurring NPC named Alfred Magguffin.

[a very angery werefox]

i give you"The china man. out of nowhere a strange man offers to sell you anything you dream of. and it allways some how ends in tragedy or madness. but hey it didint cost you your soul. the china man allways gets what hes owed. bewere.

[Black]

Rage

Viral version of kamakazi... but the players only know it as test sample 2.3...  just don't break the test tube...

Cleaning Solution Canisters

The team is hired to inflitrate an acrology and replace the disinfectant canansters for a clean room research lab...  with the intention that the chemicals will give the scientist a mild stomach bug which will delay their release date for the the product... except of course its actual a letheal disease designed to kill the research team... runners find out and then must race against the clock to get back into the facility to replace the canisters with normal chemicals and thus save themselves from getting a major bounty placed on their heads.  On a side note, they stole a genically altered prototype fish from a neahbouring lab to cover up the reason behind their multiple infiltrations.

DreamChips

Already stolen, the job is to recover them from an oppossing runner team.  twist?  the running team has started using these personality-altering chips and mayhem and chaos has ensured.

Detective Claudio

A police contact being illegally detained in a 'closed down' prison which has been turned into an soul battery for a powerful shadow spirit.

Magic Book / Black Obisidon Dagger

Used to summon shadow spirits and allow them to possess 'dead' bodies (well dead once the dagger is used anyway... Held in a Lone Star DPI Safehouse/Magic Lodge

Dirty Bomb

An actual nuclear device being actioned in Denver.  Flown out eventually in a light aircraft...

[a very angery werefox]

hah ill match yours whit"Pok-e-mon" a compenys new chimera pets ment for welthy kids with to much money turns out to be a plan to assassinte high profile public figuers with cleverly deguiesd bio drones. your runners will never see these cute cuddly killers comeing a mile away. got catch em all( befor they kill you all.

[Michael Chandra]

I ran the following and afterwards someone told me a similar event happened IRL a few decades or so ago.

Daddy's Little Devil:
The Johnson calls. His teenage/adult daughter was kidnapped a month ago and he's been paying ransom weekly since. Now he's only capable of going into one final payment + the team payment before he has to start selling his house and all that, which the Corp WILL notice and not like. He gives the team a cryptic hint for where he'll meet them to pay them and get his daughter back, a hint only his daughter will understand.
After receiving data on the previous random dropsites the team notices the similarity and manages to find out what exact location the kidnappers will be using next, with an elaborate scheme to throw off people following them. When they finally bust out the girl, everything's fine.
Until they arrive at the meeting point and spot a lot of cops and an ambulance. In secret the girl set up her own kidnapping and had prepared a hit squad to take care of her dad, so when she found out the destination she secretly gave them a headsup through her implanted commlink.
Of course there'd be ways to realize this and prevent it, or the team can milk your payment out of her once they realize they've been played.

(Fortunately for the dad in MY case, he had to send someone to the meet who barely managed to take care of the hitsquad thanks to a pain editor.)

[a very angery werefox]

hah sounds like revers plot from man on fire. cant trust kids these days what with there youtube an 20k a day cocain habits an rock an roll( shakes fist).

[ZeConster]

Daddy's Little Devil:

Ah yes, that one. I asked Tosh to join the run on his day off, vouching to cover the difference between what the Johnson could afford to pay him if we didn't get the nuyen back and a full share. As it turns out, he was able to have the accounts blocked before most of it could be transferred to safety.
Also, Michael got all sad when he placed one of the kidnappers in a seperate room to drag out the fight, only for him to be the first taken out since Tosh and I used the fire escape and busted in through his window.



Storage Wars

Two self storage companies, run by brothers, that cater to runners are in fierce competition: so much so, in fact, that SSC A hires the runners to do a raid on SSC B: apparently some of their containers got hit and the contents stolen, so they want them back before their customers find out. When hacking, files are found that show a hidden facility on B's premises: however, if the runners go after it, they encounter a corporate squad hitting the place who've been trying to get a hold of something that was stolen from their corp by... *drum roll* a now-dead team of runners that used one of the SSCs (the key got destroyed/lost when the corp caught up to the team, so they have no idea which container it's in). The runners will have to decide if they help out the corp squad, take them out (and perhaps try to locate the loot themselves), or simply let them be and try to milk the escalating rivalry for all it's worth.

[a very angery werefox]

wow these plots got more twists then the end of the movie` the crying game. never saw  THAT  trap comeing.

[DigitalZombie]

Hah these are great, Im definetly going to use some of those in my games
Data Insertion.
The newest Horizon simsense flick, starring popular simstar Ricardo Apudapi is about to hit the market. The runners are presented with a data chip containing VERY inappropriate simsense feelings. they must insert the data into the simflick, after the final cut but before the release, giving Ricardo Apudapi some f#cked feelings to the evil antagonist, thereby ruining the whole plot and his career.
Alternatively the runners could be hired to record some crazy inappropriate feelings themselves to be used to sabotage the simflick, with bonus cash for extra whackiness\f#cked-upness

[Shade]

Data Insertion.

Hah, yeah. The first run my players did in 5th ed was to do a data insertion into a major Renraku software project. Wouldn't you know it, a couple of months later Renraku was running the limited Beta of it's shiny new IC and quite a few innocent Matrix security analysts and Matrix users in those hosts were killed by the experimental IC. Pity, that.