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Shadowrun Mission Ideas

   
Shadowrun Mission Ideas

I have never GMed a Shadowrun game before, did a bit of DnD though, so I have to change the way I usually see and build a quest *cough* I mean mission. Basically I’m asking for help with ideas. Here are a few I came up with, if you guys have any tips on mission building I would love to hear them.

#1
Mr. Johnson hires the team to steal the prize of an illegal magical duel tournament. The duels are till incapacitation unless changed. To qualify and learn the actual location of the duel each participant must use clues to find areas designated as preliminary battles. The top three from each of these is admitted and a watcher spirit gives them the location within 13 days (A day for each member, the 13th is a special surprise at the end.) The team will follow the mage as his “pit team” or entourage. If the only magical character is an adept the tournament will be changed to adept duels instead, if no magical characters at all the players must spy on the duels themselves and once the winners have been chosen convince one to allow the team to be his entourage. If that doesn’t work they could follow them to the location, sneak in, and steal the artifact. Any other magical characters may be their 1st or 2nd proxy in case something should happen to them. Or the other magical characters could try to get in themselves giving them an even better chance at winning.

#2
Mrs. Johnson, a magical specialist in Lone Star, has been tracking down a rogue doctor for the past few months but has lost his trail. The higher ups want her to drop the case but the monster has been kidnapping metahumans, convinced that the idea of magically awakened genes is absurd, and has been doing terrible experiments to prove his “genius”. The Johnson represents the families of the victims and most of them want blood, all chipping in to hire shadowrunners. The old man is insane and even though the case is being dropped she wants him brought in, dead or alive. They get an extra 2k if brought in alive. If they kill him they will get the basic pay and if smart may try selling off some of his black market equipment. It’s valuable, all together an extra 5k for all of them, the problem is finding a buyer and getting it out of there before the police take it away as evidence.

#2 Part 2
If they bring him in alive for prosecution he gets defended by a powerful Humanis lawyer and gets a lighter charge because of insanity. Mrs. Johnson, wanting the bastard to pay, hires the team once again to sneak into the asylum he is being held in and kill him. She doesn’t want it to look like an accident as a sign to everyone else like him. The place is unusually well guarded for an asylum. Once they get into the inner portion of the building where he is being held they find it’s a front for a Humanis R&D branch working on biological weapons that only infect non humans (most of the inmates are there as test subjects.) The Doctor is leading the development with his ground breaking, if not somewhat macabre, research. Not planning to far ahead on this one because of a myriad of things the team could do. If a member of the team becomes infected with the prototype the cure must be found. Of course they wouldn’t make a cure because humans wouldn’t get infected. Instead to save him/her they would have to steal the doctor’s notes on the disease and get it to someone smart enough with the skills to use it or reverse engineer it to affect humans to force Humanis to make a cure. Not worried about them finding someone, there’s a Logic 7, medicine 5, combat medic in the group who would be able to do it.

I am thinking of expanding the doctor heart missions into a whole chain that would reveal a big conspiracy. That is of course if the players like the first one or two.

#3
Their fixer comes to them with an unusual request. A friend of his, a future prime runner in the game if he survives, has gone missing on a mission he gave him. Usually his runners are on their own but this guy is a friend and the team is hired to find him and if he is still alive extract him. His last known location was in an upper middle class neighborhood investigating rumors of some truly twisted rituals going on. Of course the neighborhood is owned by Aztechnology, I can almost hear the groans of my players as they expect to run into a blood mage or two. The name of the game will be subtlety…until the end at least. My players are closer to the pink mohawk style so while I will give their sneakier teammates a chance to shine it will most likely end with a gun fight so the other team members are happy. Anyway, after they get in the house and discover the ritual in progress they see a little girl over seeing the ritual and what looks like their target on a table about to be sacrificed. Their job is to get this guy so no matter what they do I know their going to rescue him so I expect a fire fight to ensue. If they rescue him the runner will say his real job wasn’t investigating these guys, it was finding the twins they kidnapped. Apparently they were born using a special metamagic that caused them to gain the magic of their mothers during birth but it killed them in the process. So were looking at two initiate 4 ten year olds under the command of some psycho (even more psycho) break away branch of the national Aztlan religion. They can either knock him out and forcibly take him back for the pay or (the most likely one since my players like money) they can help him and he will include them on the pay which means they each get I would assume around 50k but considering their targets I may up this amount depending on the final difficulty of the mission. Now the reason this branch is in an Aztlan owned neighborhood when their being hunted by Aztlan is because one of the people living there is an agent of theirs who found out another child was born the same way as these kids and now their trying to find them. It’s actually a trap set to lure them out but of course they don’t know that yet.

#4
Their fixer sends them to meet a private doctor who once worked for a powerful mage, At one point in his life the old man had a spirit so strong it could destroy most other spirits with little effort. Its formula had been engraved onto bone lacing the old man had received in an effort to repair some damage and while under the knife he had some augmentations since he realized magic didn’t solve everything. Now dead the doctor wants the formula because after years of trying he was finally able to remember what he did after the mage wiped out their memories of the event. He tells the team to expect trouble as others who knew about it will be after the formula. To make matters worse, his body is stored in a massive necroplex. Its appearance is reminiscent of a ziggurat though its obviously modern in its mostly glass design and AR displays. Body storage begins at the second floor with more important people stored each floor above it. While some have enough room for just their coffins in a hole in the wall with an AR sign displaying information about them more important people have entire mausoleums, large rooms, and even some things that could only be described as small temples. The mage is in the second to last floor and inside a temple along with his former master. Once inside the runners find the spirit angrily pacing the room. It is a force 8 earth spirit that resembles a large bulldog made out of stone and plant matter. The spirit sees them and knew this day would come and offers them a deal. If they get the formula, he cant because of a heavily warded coffin, and set him free not only will he help them in the future, becomes a contact, he will also help them escape the necroplex, he purposely set off security to force their hands but the groups technomancer could have also taken control of security by this point so it’s a 50/50 chance. If they choose him I would think a force 8 free spirit would easily have a connection rating of 5. If they don’t help him and choose to take the money they make a powerful enemy who, after breaking free from the doctor and killing him, comes back for revenge. They could also pull an old switcheroo. Give the body but with an altered formula to the doctor and asking the spirit to act like he has control then after they get the money just have the spirit turn on and kill him.

#5
The team is hired to ruin the career of a recently popular artist who stole all her work from her former partner. The client wants the runners to hack into a node that will be running the broadcast of her largest concert to date all over the world. Once inside they are to upload a sex tape which will play over the feed and the background of the actual concert at the stadium. The tape is of her and a bouncer at a club which would ruin her squeaky clean image and make her useless as her main selling point is as an example to tween girls everywhere. After they upload the tape the runners are also there to make sure the feed doesn’t get cut so the whole tape is played. This will require quick work by the technomancer as he will be facing 3 Horizon spiders and 2 Agents. While they have the advantage in numbers these guys aren’t exactly top of the line hackers and knowing my players love for registered Tank sprites this one won’t be too hard for him. Alternately they could tell the pop star about the plot and be paid by her to keep it quiet and to kill their former employer for her. As an added bonus she will help them get into places only the rich and famous can though this is limited unless they do future jobs for her.

#6
A race is being held that is secretly smuggling weapons and drugs across multiple borders. The race starts in Seattle and ends at the southern tip of California (that’s roughly a 2 day trip right when you put resting and refueling?) This incredibly dangerous race has no real rules and is the latest ratings hog created by Horizon. The group rigger and one partner are to travel rough terrain facing both awakened paracritters and their fellow racers. The point of the mission is to drop off their smuggled merchandise at preselected drop off points while cutting into the competitions profit by making sure their smugglers don’t deliver. If they win the race for their Johnson as well, though they don’t have to, they will get a pay bonus for the positive advertisement. The other members of the team will be working on sabotaging the other teams HQs to make the race all the more difficult for them.

I have a few more ideas but I will show those later, right now I just want to get help with these six. I must make sure its absolutely clear these aren’t missions I will be running right away, their more like mental exercise to get me in the state of mind to write a mission for SR rather then DnD.

There are numerous examples of missions/quests in the core book. My plans tend to derive from those basics. I try to keep the missions fairly small(especially on PBP) where a quickie mission can take 6 months.

ie.

#1 Extract a doctor and his daughter from their highly guarded lives. Johnson claims they are switching to a new company but that the old one won't let him go. Runners need to find a hole in their defenses(at work, at home, in between, etc) and move in. Remove the Doctor and his daughter without injuring them(no explosives, area spells, etc). Defeat the bodyguards.

#1a Generic add on trouble... Johnson can't accept delivery for a couple hours... So.. whoever the adversary is will be looking and hunting for you for that time. In this case, the company that you stole the stuff from. They might send a first team to recover the doctor/daughter. If that fails, they'll send a second to assassinate them. This sort of add-on complication can be used on lots of runs.

#2 Johnson wants a prototype chip. He needs you to get it on the sly. Deliver it to him so he can examine it for a couple hours, then you have to put it back... again totally on the sly. No one can know anything happened to it.

#3 Contact in trouble... ie.. street doc calls and his shadowclinic is under seige. Ghouls are outside trying to bust in. Team needs to clear out the ghouls. May be a recurring theme where the team is led to investigate what is drawing the ghouls or where the ghouls are coming from.

Chaining missions. When I have related missions... that all have to do with a specific chain of events I tend to put filler missions(which might have their own chain) in between. It is only later that the players will start to see the chain of events unfold that they facilitated. Maybe a corp is taking over a district to put in a new 100 floor tower. First the players will get a mission to take out a rival gang or start a gang war. Second they might find blackmail evidence on some random corp workers(who happen to live in that area or who's relatives live there). Third they might be asked to setup (plant evidence) against some corp internal exec who is against the plan to get them out of the way).

I tend to go with little missions with smaller payouts rather than huge jobs and million nuyen payouts. I also tend to be flexible in my plans and not really cover how the mission should be done as the players often come up with something you didn't plan for, so why plan out those contingencies in detail. With PBP you have plenty of time to plan on the fly.





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