Escaped gaming meme

[mithriltabby]

While I watch the log scroll up the screen, my mind wanders to thoughts of adventures past...

I think Omega Order was one of my better Shadowrun adventures. It provided a good way to expose the notion that the megacorporations were suppressing technologies that could destabilize their status quo. The basic premise of “engineer with a head full of information on an omega-list technology” can go pretty much anywhere in a Shadowrun game. The notion of that information being a “common sense” skillsoft provided a good sideline of humor while underscoring the fact that the big corporations felt threatened by something as simple as a chip that you can plug into your head that would make you question advertising.

It went quite well in the Twilight Brigade game because the player characters were in the “methodical and paranoid” camp, which suits the Shadowrun universe very well and most published Shadowrun adventures very poorly. :-)

When I wrote up the agents for the Corporate Court, I decided to avoid the “soulless MIB with almost no Essence left” archetype. Plenty of time to throw those in on actual combat missions. The investigative types had modest amounts of cyberware (enhanced senses, communication, data storage) and bioware (synaptic accelerators, reaction enhancers), but they had training. When I described them as never going anywhere alone and naturally taking up positions that let them watch out for each other and get 360° coverage, the PCs got very, very paranoid and cautious, far more than they did for the average chromed-out hulk. I don’t know if that would work well on other groups of runners, but it was very gratifying to see how well the description worked on the Twilight Brigade team. (They never actually engaged the MIBs to find out how nasty they were.)

They eventually managed to smuggle the decker out to the Denver Data Haven, where she got an identity change and employment putting together black market skillsofts. (What’s on a black market skillsoft that makes it valuable? Does your rigger subscribe to a regularly updated mapsoft service that marks all the routes that lead through building lobbies, construction zones, and narrow alleys that might or might not fit a given vehicle? No? Better not get caught in a high speed chase at rush hour...) And she decided that in addition to continuing to refine the “common sense” skillsoft, she was going to work on inventing one that provided moral reasoning capabilities...

An added detail I never added during the game seems obvious in retrospect: if there are “common sense” skillsofts on the black market, poison the market. The megacorps would start putting out their own skillsofts, but including anything from holes in the logic (distrust all advertising, but you can trust Renraku implicitly!) to dangerous “bugs” (0.1% chance of cerebrovascular accident per minute of political advertising viewed).