[Mirikon]

So your PCs have screwed up. Maybe they didn't cover their tracks as well as they should have. Maybe that firefight went the wrong way. Maybe they tried doing everything right, and the dice gods just hated them. Regardless, their collective hoops are in a sling. Now, the easy thing would be to just kill them, and be done, but that's not nearly as much fun, for you or the players. Sometimes, PCs (and their players) have to learn that there are fates worse than death awaiting them in the Sixth World. So share with the rest of the class, and pay attention, since someone just might give you a new idea or two on how to make your PCs wish the bad guys just made a clean kill of it.

[Tecumseh]

Are you trying to keep them alive is your goal a fate worse than a quick death?

1) Slowly eaten alive by ghouls
2) Aztec sacrifice
3) Corp experimental victim
4) 'ware stripped out by clumsy street doc
5) bunraku puppet

[Pyromaster13]

1) Slowly eaten alive by ghouls

A fate worse than this death is infected with HMHVV III and is now a Ghoul for the rest of the game.

[lurkeroutthere]

Honestly, i'm not a huge fan of "the PC's must survive because if they don't the story ends" scenarios. Eventually it becomes more outlandish and suspension of disbelief suffers. I also believe most of the megas don't torture people for teh evulz. Kill em and be done with it is likely standard policy.

When a megacorp spares someones life they've caught it's because they want something. The most efficient way to do this is to implant the runner in question with a cranial bomb, a comlink, and a simrig and tie the system in one way to any of their visual or audio sense already present. The comlink has a sophisticated agent on it designed to make sure the PC's carry out whatever suicide mission their sent on. These work best as a one mission setup or a set of strategic objectives. You get the best response from you suicide agents if they know there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The agent is also designed with some pretty unforgiving scenarios in mind that basically fall along the lines of If the agent thinks you are trying to deceive it, it will blow up. If you try and delay the mission, it will blow up. If you If you non comply, it will blow up. If you fall asleep unexpectedly or for more then an hour, it will blow up.

Basically I don't hand the rest of the universe an idiot ball to keep the PC's in play. If the opposition has them dead to rights and a reason to kill them they'll do so. If they need them for another purpose they'll do so but they have to have a compelling reason. The opposition will take precautions based on what they know of the PC's capabilities. I'm not saying escape is never possible, i'm just saying it's really really unlikely at the high level. Sometimes the story of one PC ends and the story of the next begins.

[Pyromaster13]

Talking about corp control, another nasty 'fate worse than death' is to be implanted with a Stirrup Interface.  Didn't do what the corp wanted? Corp Spider just took over your body.

[Glyph]

I think fates worse than death are something to shy away from, most of the time.  If it makes sense for it to happen, just tell them that their character was turned into a lobotomized killing machine, or a sex slave, or a ghoul, or tortured into catatonia, or whatever, and let them make a new character.  Don't turn the campaign into "prison-run" or make them keep playing their ruined characters.  Even things like cranial bombs can breed resentment - people came to play a character, not to have a GM proxy telling them what to do 24/7.

I will give one caveat - it can be done, if the players are fully on board with it.

[Irian]

A fate worse than this death is infected with HMHVV III and is now a Ghoul for the rest of the game.

A fate worse than death should include the inablitity to kill oneself, as otherwise it's just bad as death. And being a ghul isn't that bad, if your brain survives, at least.  Any fate that includes getting your personality reprogrammed or something like that is also just as bad as death, as with the original personality gone, it's as the old person is dead.

Spontaneously, "Tranquility Lane" comes to mind, which is probably pretty bad and entirely possible in Shadowrun...

[lurkeroutthere]

And again, forcing people to play a non-viable character is just kind of dick GMing and doesn't make a whole lot of sense. With some notable exceptions the corporations don't do things "For Teh Evulz!"

In caveat to Glyph's argument, I don't need the players to be totally on board with the horrible things I do to their characters. However I shouldn't be all butt hurt if they don't want to play the character anymore. Sometimes you just got to tell em "Sammy Streetsam gets his ware disabled and goes down to do 10-20 in a maximum security lockup." Maybe some day he'll be back on the streets but for now you should probably make a new character for next week.

[Tagz]

Captured alive, wake up on a bed in a hospital.

"We put three cranial bombs with different types of triggers in you.  You work for US now."

This lets you not outright even kill the player.  Instead you can keep giving them grief by having to tell the details of their latest job and get orders from the corp.  Until they find a good way to get out of it of course, at the end of the day you want your players to succeed.

[NinthSphere]

Permanently turned to goo ala Harlan Ellison. Kill yourself now, goo.

[AndyNakamura]

That story was... disturbing. And that's me saying that.

[NinthSphere]

Not as enjoyable a read as the hype led me to believe, but yeah...disturbing.

[GiraffeShaman]

Turn them into a snitch, for a corp, government agency, whatever. On one hand, the good news is the player gets to keep playing the character. However, SR is definitely a game that encourages playing rebel types and it's considered a real badge of shame to turn into a rat. It's truly something many players would prefer death to. It is quite possible though that a player could see it as a somewhat noble act or the opposition could make it look that way. For example, as part of the cooperation deal, the rest of the team goes free or gets a light penalty.

The snitch type arrangement is less immediately deadly than a forced suicide run. Unfortunately though, these things usually come out and at that point the character at the very least must flee town and fake a death.

A twist on this is the opposition merely making the person look like a snitch, which is often a death sentence anyway. This is often done to those who refuse to cooperate.

[Bastwolf]

I'm actually thinking of a rather fun scenario where the only two human characters have a very real chance of being infected with the HMHVV II Virus. The only way to avoid it is to burn edge seconds before exposure occurs or avoid the transmission vector.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Worse than?  That's a problem, because each player - and each character - has a different one.  The neo-anarchist is going to hate being under the thumb of any corporation; the street samurai may just hate being under the thumb of Ares.  Some characters may not be ... set up ... for an easy transformation into playing a 'My Little Meat Puppet' scenario; any of the magical ones come to mind, though certainly Deus showed us how to do it with minimal impact.

It really all depends if, as was said before, your players are on-board with it.  Most of the situations fall in under one of two scenarios: "Working for" or "Becoming".  Working for Ares, or Aztechnology, or the Humanis Policlub.  Becoming a ghoul, or a wendigo, or a technomancer.  Most of these, however, only really work if the player is into the RP aspects of the game (we presume they are) and if they're willing to play this, though I'm sure there's a required assurance from the GM that there's a way out... at least for the 'Working For' set.