[Neongelion]

Snow, if you're reading this, turn back now. You know who you are 



So a year or so ago I started running Shadowrun 4th for my group, but put it on hiatus until now, when we're gonna be continuing with 5th edition. I've had some bare bones ideas for a campaign arc but I could use some help in refining the story and bouncing off my ideas to you folks who are far more SR savvy than I am.

So my idea was something called the Matrioshka Project, the brainchild of someone within the Evo corporation. I had an idea of what MP was but scrapped it because it honestly sounded too gonzo. Need proof? Just look up a Matrioshka brain. Yeah, I'll save that for an actual sci-fi game methinks.

The dude behind Matrioshka (whatever it is) is Alex Reed, who has unfortunately made things personal with the shadowrunners. Manipulating the technomancer's wife and the street samurai's uncle into killing the brawling adept's mother, and so on. They have no idea what the Matrioshka Project, just that this Alex Reed guy has messed with them all and needs to die.

So what exactly would Evo invest so much into from one dude, being Alex Reed? Corporations expect results and won't invest in some madman's dream if there's no results from it. The Matrioshka Project will not be a literal Matrioshka brain, but it should still be something significant. I'm thinking something about human evolution or some other transhumanist thing (being Evo and whatnot) but I'm honestly stumped for ideas.

Short story: I'm playing this is a Jason Bourne meets James Bond kinda campaign. What're your guys' thoughts? Any questions from anything I might have left out or needs more detail? Any part of this sounds outrageous by Shadowrun standards and needs revamping?

[Caradoc]

The Matrix gaming community is large and will flock to play in great games. Evo has a division that has devised a hit game called "Evolution EX" whose popularity is continuing to climb. It has special features and for those with a data jack can provide a semi-sensory experience much like BTL but apparently without the threat of addiction and it has passed all health and regulatory checks. Needless to say, many subscribers have DNI's or make use of Evo's offer for subsidized DNI's if they take up a lengthy subscription to the game. Some vague rumours have floated around about the game, but many have heard that this is the competition trying to stop people leaving their own games and they don't get much traction since most users are raving about the game.

What Evo has really done is that they've devised a way of tapping into portions of people's brains without them being aware of it. Those with DNI's experience a Matrix game in all its sensory glory, but a second stream of data is carried into the brain which the user is unaware of. This doesn't happen all the time and Evo only transmits this data to those DNI subscribers it has gone through a process of vetting to ensure they are not being monitored by third parties. This has taken some time since the game started, but Evo is now in the final stages of its testing phase and is ready to put the network to real use. This hidden part of the division has a codename called The Matrioshka Project.

With several million people logged in at any one time and a sizeable percentage of them DNI users, Evo is able to create a virtual Matrix computer with far more processing power than anything seen before. Each DNI gamer acts as a unit of computational power and the process allows for those logging in or out during computations as the computations are easily transferred during logouts. Its other great advantage is that Evo is getting this computer at no cost when an equivalent electronic computer would cost billions of nuyen.

Alex Reed works for this division of Evo as a troubleshooter for the Project and there have been some incidents he has had to take care of. Never mind the occasional side effects of migraines, epileptic seizures and even brain death that he has had to sweep under the carpet, there's also those who somehow get wind of what Evo is really up to. This is where the shadowrunners comes in as somehow they've unwittingly gained some clues about Evo's project and Alex Reed is pursuing his leads and taking no chances by having those he believes have learned something being killed or otherwise neutralised.

For further complications, Evo has at this stage only completed some small scale tests which have met every expectation with test computations being done in hours rather than the months or years it would otherwise have taken. However, they intend to do a full-scale run in the near future with some major computations involving [insert Evo R&D projects here] and will require at least a million DNI subscribers to be logged in. To ensure this, Evo has scheduled an Evolution EX expansion for their game to take place in the near future and in which most subscribers are likely to be online for some significant time once it goes live.

Nobody knows what is going to happen when one million plus DNI brains are linked together to process some of the most difficult computations ever attempted. Will they all suffer seizures or brain death? Will something strange and new be seen in the Matrix as one million brains create some new virtual life - is it hostile and self-sustaining? Maybe the system doesn't work properly and it never has and those few who are aware of it have been siphoning off funds and are going to slip away when the expansion goes live and everyone else is distracted.

[Neongelion]

The Matrix gaming community is large and will flock to play in great games. Evo has a division that has devised a hit game called "Evolution EX" whose popularity is continuing to climb. It has special features and for those with a data jack can provide a semi-sensory experience much like BTL but apparently without the threat of addiction and it has passed all health and regulatory checks. Needless to say, many subscribers have DNI's or make use of Evo's offer for subsidized DNI's if they take up a lengthy subscription to the game. Some vague rumours have floated around about the game, but many have heard that this is the competition trying to stop people leaving their own games and they don't get much traction since most users are raving about the game.

What Evo has really done is that they've devised a way of tapping into portions of people's brains without them being aware of it. Those with DNI's experience a Matrix game in all its sensory glory, but a second stream of data is carried into the brain which the user is unaware of. This doesn't happen all the time and Evo only transmits this data to those DNI subscribers it has gone through a process of vetting to ensure they are not being monitored by third parties. This has taken some time since the game started, but Evo is now in the final stages of its testing phase and is ready to put the network to real use. This hidden part of the division has a codename called The Matrioshka Project.

With several million people logged in at any one time and a sizeable percentage of them DNI users, Evo is able to create a virtual Matrix computer with far more processing power than anything seen before. Each DNI gamer acts as a unit of computational power and the process allows for those logging in or out during computations as the computations are easily transferred during logouts. Its other great advantage is that Evo is getting this computer at no cost when an equivalent electronic computer would cost billions of nuyen.

Alex Reed works for this division of Evo as a troubleshooter for the Project and there have been some incidents he has had to take care of. Never mind the occasional side effects of migraines, epileptic seizures and even brain death that he has had to sweep under the carpet, there's also those who somehow get wind of what Evo is really up to. This is where the shadowrunners comes in as somehow they've unwittingly gained some clues about Evo's project and Alex Reed is pursuing his leads and taking no chances by having those he believes have learned something being killed or otherwise neutralised.

For further complications, Evo has at this stage only completed some small scale tests which have met every expectation with test computations being done in hours rather than the months or years it would otherwise have taken. However, they intend to do a full-scale run in the near future with some major computations involving [insert Evo R&D projects here] and will require at least a million DNI subscribers to be logged in. To ensure this, Evo has scheduled an Evolution EX expansion for their game to take place in the near future and in which most subscribers are likely to be online for some significant time once it goes live.

Nobody knows what is going to happen when one million plus DNI brains are linked together to process some of the most difficult computations ever attempted. Will they all suffer seizures or brain death? Will something strange and new be seen in the Matrix as one million brains create some new virtual life - is it hostile and self-sustaining? Maybe the system doesn't work properly and it never has and those few who are aware of it have been siphoning off funds and are going to slip away when the expansion goes live and everyone else is distracted.

That sounds deviously awesome, thank you! Why I didn't think about having a video game as a front for something sinister is beyond me.