[Dwarven Godfather]

I am thinking of putting together a campaign for my group. I am new to GMing Shadowrun, but not to gaming. The concept is the group is an actual Doc-wagon crew, so I was looking into insight on if others see the Doc-wagon concept is something anyone has touched in the past or even recommended since they are more like a survival clause to characters?

  There is new to me since I really never really got into Shadowrun back during the 1st edition days, which I do remember picking up at Gen Con in 1989, but never really got into it until I played in a 3rd edition campaign a couple years ago before 4th edition came out. We are right now learning the rules and I found them to be quite entertaining and enjoyable. I am looking forward to when we all finally get a handle on the combat system.

  I am looking forward to everyone's input on this campaign idea.

[Critias]

The old ('96-'97 or so, I think?) book Missions has a whole section on it for running a DocWagon campaign.  It'll have "crunch" from a prior edition, but the fluff should still be plenty good.

[Damnyankee]

Its a very focused concept, one that is very likely to result in RMS (repetitive mission syndrome), The things that would make the life of a Doc Wagon HRT team member interesting aren't the kinds of things that are interesting to players.  This is why law dramas are very popular on TV, but who has ever heard of Law and Order D20?  Interesting in concept, VERY hard to execute.

Damnyankee

Side note, Lawyers make GREAT faces for shadowrun teams, practicing or disbarred.

[Crossbow]

I would disagree conceptually, I think such a campaign could be very interesting.  HTR is basically about pulling folks out of dangerous situations.  It is like running without the hassle of finding a job because the jobs find you.  And there is nothing to say that the crew couldn't take work on the side, they would just have to be REAL careful about exposure because they are SINners.

There are all kinds of moral quandries involved, like showing up at a gunfight with folks on both sides as targets/victims, and having to worry about the situations they are coming into the middle of.

It would be cool too because at least some of the little hassles that a runner team has to deal with, like ammo and vehicle repair, would ideally be dealt with, but you also can get stuck with budget cuts or substandard gear.  "What the hell do you mean I gotta give up my Predator?  I don't wanna test the new fraggin' Manhunter I don't care what the new contract says!"

[The_Gun_Nut]

Sure, they could take work on the side, but how long would it be before they just give up on the HTR job entirely and dive headlong into the shadows?

[Tagz]

This one has a great deal of potential, but it's going to be fairly heavy in the hands of the GM to direct things, a bit more so then a typical Shadowrun game I'd say.

Runners can do whatever they can think of, DW will have procedures to follow, laws to obey, and pretty much the same objective every time: save the lives of the dying people.  So, from a player standpoint it doesn't take much creativity to figure out how to always save the day if the scenarios aren't different in some way.

As a GM you'll have to find ways to challenge them by forcing them to "make the tough choices". 

Some ideas I have,

Hot rescue.  Plan holder is on a shadowrunner team while under fire from security goons.  No extraterritory issues, just save him and stay alive.

Hot rescue? Same as above, but now it's the local LEO.  Firing back would be a crime.  So would removing the runner from the scene.  The cops may even have issue with treating him before the area has become "pacified".

A session where the rescue is stopped by extraterritority - do they break the law and procedure and cross the boarder to rescue the poor slot or do they stand there and watch him die?  What are the possible consequences of each?  Do they save the life only to get reamed out by their manager for pissing off MCT?

One where there is a car accident.  Maybe one or two DW plan holders from one vehicle a bit roughed up, a SINless family in the other with the kid in critical condition.  The plan holder DEMANDS treatment for his wife right now, he seems the type to complain to your supervisor.  What do they do?  Help the dying kid who isn't on the plan or the wife who isn't in critical condition?

Bombing.  Lots of victims in critical condition.  Triage situation, more then you can save.  But wait!  There's a VIP/celebrity who isn't a plan holder among the victims!  Help him and potentially get a big favor for DW and the much needed approval of your boss but at the cost of a plan holder's life because there's too many to treat in time?

Some crazy troll took a couple K10.  He's a plan holder.  Help him, but only if he doesn't kill you first!

A patient refuses a certain type of treatment, he/she rejects science/magic and it's evil ways!  Treat the patient unwillingly, or give limited treatment that doesn't conflict with their belief?

Gangers beat the DREK out of a plan holder!  They left him on the roof of an abandoned building.  Treating him is easy but beating the man was just a trick to get DW out there so they could steal the truck full of valuable medical supplies while your on the roof!

The next plan holders are a shadowrun team that is the absolute WORST PIECES OF DREK you can imagine.  You know, the kind that might... torture an innocent who just happens to know something... kill for the kick of it then sell the body to organleggers... kidnap teens (or even kids if your group can handle really harsh world settings) to sell to bunrunku parlors... whatever outright EVIL thing you can think of.  The WPOD team is hurt bad, but will live if you walked away.  Do your job and treat them?  Walk away, try and make some excuse?  Finish off the bastards yourselves?  Consequences of each?



The concept is definitely workable.  The thing is it's going to be very much GM driven.  Some games the GM just needs to come up with a little bit and the players will drive the rest of the game, this will be more formula style and will require you to come up with new and interesting ways to make the same goal difficult and interesting.

[topcat]

I would look at it in terms of a DocWagon campaign with a Shadowrunner campaign out-clause.  You get to run the Doc Wagon game and you have an option in case it gets stale.  The characters remain the same, so there's less incentive to bail with any changes.

Think of it in television series terms.  You do a first season as Doc Wagon.  If/when this gets stale, you move the game from the safety and security of a corp job to the instability of the shadows.  The jarring shift from a comfortable SINner's life to shadowrunning should be pretty good material to work from.  You can perform the initial contact groundwork through the DocWagon stories, too ("Remember that guy we saved a few weeks back... what was his name?").

[Dwarven Godfather]

Thanks everyone, these are things I will look into as this would be my first campaign that I would be running for Shadowrun. I do have a little bit of time since we are now just learning the rules which I do really like. It is moving slow, but I do not mind as we are all learning rules.

  I am hoping my friend has the 2nd edition Shadowrun Missions book which has assorted campaign ideas for the Doc-wagon campaign in it. I am now getting some cool ideas laid out for the game in my head and maybe porting some concepts over from a different game.

[Dwarven Godfather]

I am happy, first off, I finally was able to get a hold of the Missions book from my big Shadowrun fanatic friend and 2nd off I was able to get my own copy of the Shadowrun book and so I am really happy. Now if of mapquest would just work so I can make Shadowrun maps that I could use for my game I am putting together, I would be really happy.

[Man Who Walks At Night]

Neo-Anarchists Guide to Real Life has a chapter about Doc-Wagon, its 1st or 2nd ed shadowrun, so may not be that easy to get hold of, it does however cover some things worth noting for a campaign like you describe. This may actually also be interesting for GM's running normal campaigns.

1) Doc Wagon contracts will rarely cover shadowrunners - they are not going to bail you out when you get stuck in a firefight on Ares land. They do have deals with some corps, but mainly, they operate on national soil, not corp land.

2) Getting a DW contract, requires a tissue sample to be stored with DW. Something I can easily imagine most shadowrunners with a little sense would instantly categorize as a deal breaker, especially awakened characters.

3) Even in the worst of situations (HTR, High Threat Response) DW employees only fight DEFENSIVELY, their job is to get the customer out of the situation, their job is not to kill the opposition unless its nessecary, and if its a standard response and not a HTR, they may even stand back and watch, only going in to their customer after the situation is secure for their personel.

4) Its business, if a bomb goes off and 5 people are near death, only the one with the doc wagon contract will be saved.


Personally, Id say a Doc Wagon campaign leads to alot of problems. First there is the fact that every mission is roughly the same - Go to a location, extract contract holder, dump him/her at a Doc Wagon clinic. Sure it can be varied a little by having gangs place false calls trying to steal gear, or the moral dilemma of ignoring fatally ill people who covered by a doc wagon contract, or save them and risk unemployment. But generally speaking, I think the pool of plot ideas will dry out fast, many of the aspects which makes shadowrun unique and great (in my opinion) is also void in this type of campaign, no legwork, not much need for anything but combat, vehicle and medicine skills, little actual social interaction. It would basically be all about combat - which I suppose is fine for some but not my taste

The section about DW in the Neo-Anarchists guide to real life is about 9 pages long, and most of it is shadowtalk - as a gamemaster you would (imho) need to make up alot of stuff - standard operating procedures etc, but then you could skip on most of the work in a standard campaign (figuring out subtle plot lines, legwork, contacts etc).


I could see it work as a start of a compaign, 2-3 missions - with some added trouble brewing (cut backs, moral dilemma's etc) all ultimately leading to the characters quitting and joining the shadows as regular shadowrunners, but I wouldn't recomment trying it as a long term campaign idea.

[Teknodragon]

Just had a thought for a very... interesting DW run.
Multiple planholders. On each side of the firefight.

[Dakka]

I like the concept of a DocWagon crew being the focus of a campaign.  I could see it becoming repetitive quickly tho if you don't keep throwing in some creative missions now and again.   Maybe instead of having the DW crew be the primary focus have DW be how the team knows each other, they are a HTR DocWagon crew as their day job, but for whatever reason they are also a runner crew.  This would allow you to use the occasoinal DW call to inject some action into the campaign, and keeps the PCs ties to DocWagon, but allows for some flexibility.

Tek, in the above situation I think the team would do one of two things, 1) Gel round everyone and get the plan holders out of there, or 2) if the situation isn't critical for the plan holders let the firefight resolve then get to the plan holders.

[Man Who Walks At Night]

I would think multiple plan holders = multiple response teams. One plan holder in trouble will trigger an alarm and a team, so two holders should trigger two teams?

[LonePaladin]

Here's another one.

Start the session with them idling at DW HQ. Doctors trying to look important, orderlies busier than a cat scratchin' sand, patients being impatient, that sort of thing. Maybe they're just back from a call, kickin' it back in the break room, enjoying some soykaf (as much as that's possible), maybe watchin' some Co-Ed Mages reality trid.

Then a team of shadowrunners breaks in, looking for medical supplies on the cheap. (Cheap as in, five-finger cheap.) Maybe they've sleazed their way in with some social engineering; maybe their mage is covering them with a spell or two. Either way, something about their entry looks hinky to the HTR team, and they're the only ones in the way at the moment.

Gives them the quandary: do they just let the runners go by, or do they try to interfere?

[FastJack]

Here's another one.

Start the session with them idling at DW HQ. Doctors trying to look important, orderlies busier than a cat scratchin' sand, patients being impatient, that sort of thing. Maybe they're just back from a call, kickin' it back in the break room, enjoying some soykaf (as much as that's possible), maybe watchin' some Co-Ed Mages reality trid.

Then a team of shadowrunners breaks in, looking for medical supplies on the cheap. (Cheap as in, five-finger cheap.) Maybe they've sleazed their way in with some social engineering; maybe their mage is covering them with a spell or two. Either way, something about their entry looks hinky to the HTR team, and they're the only ones in the way at the moment.

Gives them the quandary: do they just let the runners go by, or do they try to interfere?

Only thing I might change is altering it so that it's Gangers instead of other runners breaking in. You don't want them to question their line of work too early in the campaign. Let the nagging conscience get to them after they've watched people die in their crossfire.