Creating Shadowrun Adventures

[Umbran]

I played a *lot* of Shadowrun in its 1st and 2nd editions. I moved away from the group that I was playing with, and then didn't pick it back up again. I'm not familiar with the 3rd or 4th editions rules.

But, exact rules aren't the thing in my mind at the moment. I'm more interested in the adventures. Shadowrun is one of the few games I've see where the published adventures were better than pretty much anything individual GMs would create. This has nothing to do with rules, and had everything to do with plot complexity. Published adventures typically had a whole bunch of moving parts, where, by comparison, individual GMs created things that were pretty straightforward ("You are hired by someone far too circumspect, the run goes bad tactically so you cannot complete the mission simply, when you try to recover from that, your employer tries to screw you over, done."). While the tactics changed with whether what you had to do was get a piece of information, or an item, or protect a person, or the like the plot structure could get terribly repetitive.

So, for sake of discussion - how do those of you who run the game these days keep from falling into repetitious adventure structures?

 

[Cergorach]

It's been a while, but...

Kind of depends on what you want to achieve. I usually go with the Babylon 5 method, an over arching x season story arc that is subdivided into y episodes each season. Initially you do a couple of the standard runs to create a sort of baseline and introduce the setting to players. The we start changing up things. *grins evily*

SR is best done by making scene's, divided into locations, 'people', and events. These are not static components but interact with each other. If the players instigate event 1, some people might be at location B. I usually find that flowcharts help to depict what happens. If you have these different parts prepared you can be far more flexible towards the players when they come up with some rather horrid plan you didn't anticipate (with SR this is sure to happen). The great thing about SR is that you can create a database of parts that you can reuse, far more easily then with D&D (or any other level based system). That security rented detachment might be hired by other facilities, names might change, but skills stay the same. That apartment has about a thousand similar buddies in that neighborhood/building.

As for ideas and runs (adventures), how is this different from D&D? It totally depends on with what people your players are, what kind of characters they play and what the expect from the experience (while your job is pushing the boundaries). Borrow heavy from fiction, movies, anime, comics, etc. We were playing with the 'Ghost in the Machine' as a theme a long while before the Technomancer was ever introduced into SR.

I often start with simple concepts. For example: 'Bad guy' has acquired a rather large and old (still intact) weapons cache of nuclear weapons and is selling those to the highest bidders. Gimmick: The auction is held in a strange floating iceberg fortress that has some unique methods of keeping the host separate from the bidders (no flying through walls in Astral space muchaco). Megacorps, undercover government agencies, terrorists and 'other' parties are all extremely interested. Plot twist: But is the 'Bad guy's' objective to actually sell the weapons for the greatest possible profit margin, or does (s)he/it have something else in mind... Protagonists: By what party are the players hired? That of course depends on their reputation and their morality.

 

[Lwaxy]

I am Mrs Overcomplicated, which I need to reign in in most other settings but for SR, it is perfect

Usually, I grab a co-GM who knows the setting better than me (history, different interest groups, gadgets etc) so I won't make any mistakes there, and then I pick 2 or 3 interest groups and think up the thingamajig they are after (for example, one wants to kill the scientist, the others want to kidnap him) and why (each group might have different views) and then the fun is to string it all together, which sometimes only really happens during play

I try to leave options for surprise motives, weird 3rd or 4th party interventions and some side adventures

The downside is that it usually takes quite long to play through my creations The now dissolved group I used to play with didn't mind though