NEWS

writing up a new campaign, feedback appreciated

  • 4 Replies
  • 2079 Views

ImmortalShade

  • *
  • Newb
  • *
  • Posts: 35
« on: <05-13-14/0149:07> »
Hey all,

Been fleshing out an idea for a new campaign and i wanted to get some feedback from y'all. any other areas i should explore plots, corps, ideas ect... I have a solid frame work for the big pieces but i can miss the trees for the forest some days, npcs(the famous ones), any setting pieces i would be remiss to skip out on.... any thing else.

Resurgence.
Resurgence centers around exploring technomancers and resonance. So far the big set pieces are: a new phenomenon of Party personas, Interview with a paragon, the creation of a technomancer corp, normals getting made into technos. The basic plot revolves around a group of people running a under ground railroad for technomancers, the group gets hired to help with a series of extractions and deliveries of people. during the course of their work the group is dragged, literally, through the great firewall and comes out the other side with some resonance. when they wake up their johnson welcomes them into the family, of technomancers. As the group continues they form a party to submerge for less(using the 4e rules here) and they end up with a persona of the party. This persona lets the party donate karma to a pool that they can use to buy echos for the party persona starting with a free resonance mesh and link. The party eventually gets to pursue a paragon, which will task them with creating a more permanant solution for those they are helping. hence the formation of a corp that can issue sins.

Through the fire and flames:
The party gets dragged through the great firewall and ends up with some res, this lets the group be able to get at least a taste of the other side and play with some cool things (tm) without having to change thier builds. i am either going to be warning off magic or offering the chance to convert to being a technomancer instead. i dont want the magic crowd to be left out but i do think that Res and Mag should be exclusive. on that thread i was considering maybe a tie in with MIT&T wanting to add Technomancers on the end of it.

Party persona:
not sure where i want to go with this one yet but the more i mull it over the cooler of a concept it feels like.

Interview with a paragon:
Magic had dunkelzahn, technos have had no one, till now. this chunk of the campaign revolves around searching the resonance realms for a paragon to speak to the world. which paragon the group chooses to chase down will shape what the world has to think when the interview happens. the second half of this arc revolves around setting up the interview. the worlds top minds probably wont trust a email message that randomly appears inside their secure facility with no connection to the outside world, that is where the group comes in. They have to jet set around the world and convince a rep from at least several of the major corps to come to the interview and bonus points if they get a dragon or two. in the end the paragon tasks the party and their associates with the creation of a technomancer corp/nation. easy right?

Making a Corp:
1 A? 2A 3A? what sounds right here. does this sound like the right course? i want the campaign to culminate in the party building something big that they can be proud of.

and that's what i have so far.

Senko

  • *
  • Ace Runner
  • ****
  • Posts: 2485
« Reply #1 on: <05-13-14/0236:00> »
AA is the minimun you need to have extraterritoriality and issue SINS but some of them can rival the AAA's and are just lacking a seat on the council court so it'll be a delicate balancing act.


Also Awwww no mage/technomancer hybrid.

Fizzygoo

  • *
  • Omae
  • ***
  • Posts: 539
« Reply #2 on: <05-13-14/0241:48> »
In Reverse order (and just some thoughts/ideas);

Making a Corp
I believe AA Corps can get extraterritoriality, so that's what should be aimed for. AAA...well that would be majorly epic in that why would the big 10 accept a Technomancer corp into their ranks. It's difficult enough to come up with reasons why they would even get AA, let alone AAA status.

Regardless of what status the corp does end up with, if it's A or greater then you should outline how the corp makes its money, what's the corp's business(es). The Corporate Court is not going to want to grant A+ status to Technomancers, as a general rule, so flesh out how the get the cloud (do they snuggle up to a AAA, do the hack systems and get blackmail material, etc.)

Interview with a paragon
This should be heavily tied in with the corp gaining assets and/or blackmail material.

The rest of it
If you can get the group to make non-magic users that would be best, but otherwise even if you plan to allow magic users to drop their magic and gain Resonance...plan on the magic users saying no. They created their characters for a reason, so have contingency plans in place for the adventures in order to make sure they feel useful. But even more concerning is anyone that's heavily cybered. Street Sams with <1 Essence will be out of the core story-line as well.

Overall, it's an interesting campaign but I would do one of two things; set rules at character creation of no magic and only lightly cybered (which may upset some players as they may have expectations), or see what characters they make and then either go with your original plan if it works for all players or have the technomancers hire the PCs for jobs to for them to help them get their corporation up and running.
Member of the ITA gaming podcast, including live Shadowrun 5th edition games: On  iTunes and Podbay

Namikaze

  • *
  • Freelancer Ltd
  • Prime Runner
  • **
  • Posts: 4068
  • I'm a Ma'fan of Shadowrun!
« Reply #3 on: <05-13-14/0342:42> »
I agree on all points brought up already.  This sounds like a great plot for a novel actually.
Feel free to keep any karma you earned illicitly, it's on us.

Quote from: Stephen Covey
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.

ImmortalShade

  • *
  • Newb
  • *
  • Posts: 35
« Reply #4 on: <05-25-14/0100:41> »
How the corp makes money is going to be up to the players. some ideas i had included an information company, using a mixture of the echos from unwired to find and know almost anything quickly. reduces the search threshold by submersion level, plus info sortilege and resonance realm searches. or through the ability to make freaking huge sprites and selling their services. have 30 technomancers in a resonance mesh for a bonus 30 dices to resist fading? bind lvl 15+ sprites? (plot point i do have this awesome image of several hundred technomancers banding together to compile a godzilla sized sprite and letting it loose on mct and/or horizon)

To spread out the Story missions I am going to let the party take jobs to explore the resonance. In essence I will describe various "feelings" of possible echos the party can learn and demonstrate the rest through older more established technomancers in game. If the party wants they can take a side job to specifically learn an echo or submerge, each job would require the party to go physically to a location that is sympathetic to the echo and then perform a realm search for it. the idea of the run is to discount the cost of the echo/submersion with the karma they would earn on the "run" or possibly earning it outright.

For example if one of the party members wanted to learn Living ECCM from unwired, the group would have to pilgrimage  to an ECCM suite or facility. heading to the local radio station and jamming the air waves with a broadcast of war of the worlds would discount the echo (in awesome style, though i might just give it to em for free honestly); heading to a military ECCM suite would earn the echo outright.

In addition the party will be able to complete secondary objectives on the main story missions to earn extra resonance. in game i will be explaining echos as a flow of water with wells they can funnel it into, if they complete the secondary objectives they can earn more water to direct. Essentially this will be extra karma that can only be spent on echos or submersion. Submersion increasing the "flow of water" and their ability to direct it.

one of the things i was thinking of for the characters with low essence was an echo that raised their effective essence, that way they could "heal" their bodies connection and keep their character concept and expand on it. I was also toying around the idea of mages being able to earn karma for initiation and metamagic by observing the technomancers submerging and following the technomancers spirit in the astral as it changed possibly doing a meta plane search to see where the technomancers spirit traveled while in the resonance. Magic and Res would be kept separate but it would give another tie in for the MIT&T angle with the magic users in the group able to curry favor by exploring this aspect for the university.

I am going to be making a separate post with a list of "cool things"tm that i would like some feed back on. mostly they will be updated echos and some homebrew ones. ill edit the link in when its up.