Escaped gaming meme

[mithriltabby]

While I’ve been known to make use of standard locations from sourcebooks, I have too much fun creating my own, especially when I can warp the genre a bit. There are tons of grungy bars to meet in, but a Mr. Johnson with an expense account might feel much happier about a place that caters to secure meets rather than a dive where a firefight could break out at any moment. These are a few of my more memorable Shadowrunner meet spots, some of which are in my Seattle Locations page.

32,767 Flavors

Inspired by Baskin-Robbins, whose 31 flavors are 2⁵–1 and the fact that you can create instant ice cream using liquid nitrogen. The core idea is that you don’t need to advance technology very far to be able to make custom ice cream on the spot, leapfrogging past Cold Stone (which hadn’t even made it out of Arizona when I came up with the idea).

Take the massive high-tech ice cream making machinery, put it behind armored glass in the middle of a large ice cream parlor (where everyone can watch it in action), put heavy-duty booths all around the edge of the restaurant where people can feel secure, give it a name that’s an in joke for technophiles (32,767 is 2¹⁵–1), and you’ve got a perfect spot for counterculture shadowrunners to meet with their Mr. Johnsons. There’s even a highly secured room hidden behind all the machinery for people who need absolutely secure meets.

A location like that is a great spot for character development: in a restaurant where they can make any flavor of ice cream or sherbet you want, what does your character order? It’s also a great way to establish the personalities of the NPCs: a Mr. Johnson who has a glass of ice water and sits ramrod-straight in his booth will come across very differently from one who gleefully tucks into a sundae. The players enjoyed this effect so much that they made it one of their regular meet options.

Okefenokee

This spot was inspired by the shifting “tree islands” of the Florida swamp. Take a large indoor ice rink and convert it into an indoor fish pond, and have a bunch of floating platforms that can be steered around the pond with magnets under water. Have living trees (like weeping willows) growing to shade each platform, with strands of living greenery hanging down and providing a barrier to astral projection. (This was in 2nd Edition, back when such a barrier was much more absolute than it is in 3rd Ed.) The islands are moved around by a computer that schedules their motion to be as random as possible relative to each other, making surveillance incredibly difficult, but has them dock at appropriate times for waiters to arrive with food. And, of course, you can feed the koi in the pond while you’re there.

The place is very classy, and appealed to the James Bond complexes of a number of the Twilight Brigade, who loved the chance to get into their armored tuxedoes and other stylish gear. It also appealed to the Mr. Johnsons who had expense accounts. This was another good spot for meeting; the PCs were sufficiently fond of it and 32,767 flavors that they made up a longer list of potential meet sites so they could roll dice to pick them at random and avoid building up a predictable pattern of behavior.

Smooth Smarts

I don’t actually recall the name of this one, as I haven’t transcribed any details of the time the runners visited Hawai’i onto my web site, but it was another one that stood out as breaking the usual mold of meet sites. I was inspired by the SF Bay Area places that make smoothies with all manner of healthy ingredients like wheat grass and so on.

In Shadowrun, there are all manner of intelligence enhancement technologies, both as cyberware and bioware, and one of the things I play up in games where these things exist is that intelligence augmentation is addictive, in addition to being a status symbol in technophile culture. So I made one of the important decker hangouts on Hawai’i (where the runners had been hired to track down a copyright infringer) a juice bar where you could get custom smoothies made up with the latest cutting edge smart drugs, nutrients, and so on.

This place was interesting as a way of getting the characters’ reaction to the general attitude of the place: start with elitist intellectual behavior that would embarrass most Mensa members, add three shots of streetwise, stir, and ferment. The party, being mostly magical in nature, had to work at establishing “brains cred”, not just street cred, in order to get the info they needed.

Comments

[deirdremoon.livejournal.com]

My favorite is still the Old Green Bagel Bar that an ex of Preciousjade's ran in high school. :) You really could get green bagels, although they were usually colored, not, er, cultured into being green.