[Lorebane24]

So I just started up a Lockdown campaign with a bunch of new players.  One of them has quite a bit of experience with Shadowrun, a few of the others have prior experience with RPGs but none with Shadowrun, and a couple have little experience but are taking to it well.  The party is a face/generalist, two magicians (one shinto shaman, one druid), a rigger (he's got a few rotodrones, a tricked out van, and a couple Ares Matildas), a decker, and a player who will come in later and hasn't made a character yet.

This is my main dilema.  I have two arcs of my own design that I want to play out here, and I'm good at big picture stuff but really bad at actually introducing the arcs to the characters and coming up with early runs for a buildup.  That's what I'm hoping to get some help with.  We've gone through the first adventure published in the Lockdown book (where the party has to retrieve an Ares exec's kid) and when we meet again I'm running the second one (where they're hired by the Morelli family to chase off what turns out to be a bunch of Pax's lackeys).  Once they finish that and get established in Boston, I want to start in on my own arcs.  The first one, and the bigger one, involves a bunch of head cases with a dominant Deus personality banding together and intentionally infecting others in the city.  Ultimately, they want to recreate a fully powered Deus by dumping a bunch of Deus-infected nanites into Renraku's HarborGuide mainframes and firing up all 25 of them.  Alternatively, they might try to use the old servers in the ECSE.  I know that if they party can't catch on and stop this from happening, Deus will come back full force and take over the Boston Grid, then the party will have to find a way to shut it down before the Corporate Court decides to just drop a thor shot on Boston.  The second arc is a little less fleshed out, but involved Damon playing a long game to take over the entire Boston underworld by manipulating the two mob families into finishing each other off.  He's got a former Seraphim working as his right hand man who is masquerading as a Moreli family enforcer right now.

So how do I actually get these arcs off the ground?  Any suggestions for early teasers or early runs I can give my party?

[Beta]

There is a perfect lead in to the big arc, right in Lockdown

Run the encounter with the child who is a head-case, of the controller type.  When I ran it, she was in a car on the freeway running alongside the trainyards.  They saw the headcases attacking a car while doing their surveillance.  Obviously they couldn't be bringing along a little kid, so they quickly found people hunkered down in nearby apartments to dump her off on, and I didn't ever get things back to follow up on what happened from that.  But that seems like a pretty common runner reaction, so you can probably lead your players to do something like that.

She will try to dominate other head cases, and will try to be subtle about it --but with an incomplete load and building off a child's knowledge, she won't be very good at it, and the players should catch on.  That will give them the idea that some head cases may be trying to control other ones, and to be watching out for it.  Once they are into the Cambridge containment zone, make one obviously well organized head case group, that seems to be getting stronger and stronger as they re-encounter it.  If they don't decide to figure out what is going on themselves, have KE hire them to investigate reports of a strong survivor group that is making no efforts to leave the zone. 

For extra churn -- the cops in the corrupted KE station (one of the Cambridge zone missions), are actually one of the few forces holding back the expansion of the Deus collective.  If the PCs do bomb the station, Deus gets stronger, and can access Cambridge campus more easily.  If they actually talk to that group of hidden, they have some chance of getting info about the Deus group.

[cyclopean]

yeah, almost all the "mini-encounters" suggested in the 2nd mission in Lockdown could be used to introduce little bits of your metaplot. I wouldn't run them all back to back, the way that the mission has them, but do 1 or 2 each session, and modify them a bit to fit your needs. Like the elf teen, Tulver (?) in Four Corners could be one of the headcases planning to infect others, the infected little kid is a good one, or the 'hidden' community lead by Stace. A bunch of non-mission encounters will help make the setting feel a bit more immersive/lived-in too.

And there's a Morelli ambush on the way to the meet with the O'Rilley's in the 2nd mission, which could be a good set-up to the mob war stuff. There's also a bunch of rumors scattered throughout Lockdown that the Morelli's might be teaming up with the Yakuza and/or Bane-Shidhe (anti-elf street gang) to move against the elf-lead O'Rilley's, who are affiliated with the Ancients, amongst others. But the ancients leader has dated Don O'Rilley's daughter on and off, so there's some drama- plenty of different things there (and tons more in the book) to get you started on some inter-gang/syndicate drama!