[RPG] “Epic Level” Shadowrun

combatgm-techniquesshadowrun-sr3

Recently I've run into an issue with my Shadowrun campaign for a number of reason, the most key of which is that my players have hit the 180-250 karma level where they've started to ascend to levels of power that would lead to them being considered action movie heroes with better life expectancy.

Some background:

  • Most of the players are "owned" as it were by a prison megacorporation (slightly non-canon) and sold out as mercenaries with either cortex bombs or magical doohickeys to keep them from escaping. I've used this to tone down guns, but the mages remain very, very deadly.
  • My players started out last August/September as either entirely unexperienced roleplayers or non-Shadowrunners, so I've taken a low-lethality stance (we've had two deaths the whole time, and one came after no less than five "Are you sure?" prompts that the player ignored and the other happened when a player decided his chronically hospitalized character [courtesy of grenade-jumping] should just pass away rather than being a burden), so killing them is out of the question.
  • The players actively press for "assault cannons", which I find an iconic Shadowrun weapon to the point where I won't ban it; I've retooled them to have a higher cost and Street Index, but I need to handle when the players get out of jail.

I've been throwing vehicles at them, but most of them go down in a shot or two, mostly due to assault cannons, though the mages have been known to manabolt or stunbolt pilots of vehicles and steal them or let them crash and burn.

Last session I had a drone-adapted main battle tank suppress the players, and one player by dumb luck of incredibly difficult rolls managed to rip its hatch open, get another player in, and that player then rewired it (via phys-adept centering plus electronics genius) to roll through the city blowing up stuff at random to cover their escape.

How can I keep the awesome flowing when my players are at such a high tier of power, without restricting their character development or relying too heavily on narrator judgement? They're so powerful already that nothing I throw at them is a challenge unless it's a drone, and that's tedious.

Does anyone know of SR-3 content that's like epic level stuff for d20?

Best Answer

The scale and power of the Big Ten should not be undersold. Nor should the power and insanity that one experiences with a Horror. Shadowrunners are just a bunch of dudes, really. They're just really good and professional dudes. Ticking off the different corps or governments of the world can and will buy retribution from those corps if the cred is enough. And having the prison being a major hub of the players and where they are kept, there's a really good answer to this.

Have a mega corp purchase the Shadowrunners.

Honestly, this is the natural progression of your game. You are having the runners hit a Karma level that screams retirement or world-changing efforts. They can't continue to play as random chaos anymore. They are too powerful to continue to ignore, from a mega corp standpoint, and are good only two ways. Theirs or dead. The runners have shown Saeder-Krupp that they are good and can piss off a great dragon. If I was running Lofwyr as a business man, I would see the potential that these runners could offer, given that I could buy and contain them. Else, I'd just buy them to have them executed to get them out of my hair. As a great dragon that's in charge of the most profitable Big Ten in the world, I have so much cred that I can throw at a problem, I might as well bury the players in mountains of it to suffocate them.

Really, the best you can do at this point is show the runners that they can't be ignored anymore. No matter the power level of a PC in Shadowrun, there is always something bigger, tougher, and meaner. I'd go so far as to tell you to sic a cyber zombie or two on them. Not the player driven ones, but an honest to god walking abomination of magic and technology. From the flavor of the game and the durability and deadliness of it, it's the perfect thing to send at the players if you want to test them at this point. And most corps can claim to have one in their back reserves to clean up messes like your Shadowrun team if they absolutely have to.

But even if they can down the cyber-zombie, there's still the question of where they go. And honestly, I think it's time to roll new characters. A year-long campaign that's sprouted a few 250 karma players means it's time for a change of scenery. Have the runners take on their last challenge, break free from the prison they've been in or die trying, and retire the campaign. Keep all the flavor, even put some of the old PC's in as NPCs in the world if they survive, and roll up new characters. It's the kind of thing I see and say "It's been a good run, so let's go out in the biggest bang we can and start fresh". But, again, that's my two cents on if I was running the game.