ToME WikiBucketMan: Ok...next module idea: The Shadowrun world. I'll refrain from giving a complete description of the world, but technology meets magic in post-apocalyptic downtown Seattle, where trolls, elves, cybernetics and summonable spirits all intermingle. For once, here's a module where standard ToME style race/class conventions make a lot of sense. For the magic system, you have the choice of hermetic or shamanistic magic. For fighter types, you have both melee and ranged fighters It might be difficult to integrate riggers into the game, but all in all the Shadowrun world world translate extremely well, and easily to ToME. For quests, and general world construction, all of the classic Shadowrun corporations would be available, both for fixed, as well as random quests, and even simply for random 'dungeon delving.' The Matrix would be psuedo-randomly generated with each new character, and players would be able to jack in to try to disable security systems, trace phone logs, redirect security forces, etc, all in the middle of runs. Plot might be a bit difficult. There isn't any stereotypical 'buy guy' in Shadowrun, so we'd have to come up with some sort of storyline. Most of the Shadowrun books and games have featured extremely personal storylines. No 'saving the world' but rather, they focused on personal relations. Maybe your brother was murdered, and you need to find out who and why. Maybe the local orphanage is bombed, and it's up to you to figure out who did it. Preferably, a starter quest of some personal nature would be issued, and over the course of the game we could have a standard redirect as the player uncovers more sinister forces at work, and eventually goes off to eliminate them.
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ShrikeDeCil Excellent game. On the Riggers, this could be seen as a 'Companion Upgrade'. (At least, our riggers were rarely concerned about the car we were in, as opposed to the swarm of gun-toting bots.) There is one or two fairly long-running sets of scenarios in Shadowrun though. There's the Harlequin/elf thing. Where you learn that there are such things as triple and quadruple-crosses. Then there's the never-ending bug invasion one. I think it is like 5 separate scenarios. (Which agitated people in our party enough that they ended up stealing a nuke "Just to be sure.") Add planar travel and a home-of-bugs somewhere, and that's a pretty long list of dungeons.
BucketMan: I hadn't considered the companion aspect of riggers. I've always played them as pilots. That would definitely work. I'd want to see emphasis on their mechanic and device abilities though, rather than simply have them be summoners without the ability to summon. Any thoughts on how to get some mileage out of the rigger as a pilot? Air transport would certainly be a useful game mechanic, but it might be difficult to incorporate car/truck/bus/motorcycle rigging or combat in a useful way. As to story, I don't recall the Harequin elf, but I only ever read three or four of the novels, and played a few of the games. The insect and toxic shaman would make great middle and late game bad guys, but to really do justice to the Shadowrun world, the overall game story would have to be a lot more complicated than just 'There are bad guys in the sewers. Go kill them please.' The stories were always more involved than that, and with a lot more personal involvement than just 'x is bad.' It would require some thought to do well as a module.
ShrikeDeCil: You could consider 'rigging' as 'symbiosis', and essentially send a completely different set of enemies (Tanks, etc.) when you're using a rigged vehicle to get from A to B. I only read the first couple of books, I was busy wading through the pen & paper role playing scenarios. The thing about the bugs wasn't so much "There's bugs in the sewers, sic'em" so much as "Aztecnology has VP who has been doing some odd things." Investigation leads to Renraku experimenting on him with something odd. Searching for the something odd finds... bugs! Harlequin was also a behind-the-scenes manipulator. One scenario you'd be extremely infuriated at him for manipulating you into something obnoxious. A couple of scenarios later you'd come to realize that the _last_ scenario, Harlequin was the guy that (hired the guy) that hired you. As our game was winding down, we were all more than a little paranoid. The thing is, the more 'side stories' you can possibly work in, the better the long-running threads work. (Otherwise, you end up with the brick in the party shooting the first-contact-with-a-new-scenario... and claiming with a straight face "Hey, You know I just saved us 6 steps.")
BucketMan: Hmm. If it were me making the module, I'd rather see rigging ommitted completely, or relegated to being a simple piloting ability, rather than making it symbiosis with the names changed. Agreed on the side stories. Probably have runs possible both for corporations, as well as Johnson's of varying significance. You might be able to take out the local Johnson, but taking out Renraku is not going to be trivial. I suppose you could always fall back on the ' uniques who issue quests related to the main game story are invincible' routine, but with a little planning I don't think it would be necessary. Like in Dragonball T, it's perfectly possible to kill Rosshi, Oolong, Kami, and lots of others who issue quests. It just changes the way the game plays out. Plus, in Shadowrun, the megacorps aren't going to be seriously affected just by killing a few hundred of their employees and blowing up one of their offices with a small nuclear device. They're too big for that. But it would have unpleasant effects on your standing with them, and make them less interested in hiring you for runs.
Actually, that works out quite nicely, because each megacorp has its own focus. Fuchi makes better cyberdecks, Renraku makes better implants, Ares: guns, Aztechnology: magic foci, etc. So, when you start doing runs for a corporation, against another corporation, your relative standings will change, giving you better/easier/cheaper access to certain types of technology, and less so with others. This way, which missions you choose to do materially effects the way your character develops.
Sirrocco: Actually, rigging (and tech skills in general) maps *real* close to loremastery in general. In particular, rigging vehicles basically involves turning the human body off in order to turn the vehicle body on. That gives you something very close to possession (except without the need to go into spiritform or the worry about losing a corpse) and then you make it a bit more interesting with areas that rigged vehicles can and cannot go into. Riggers with drones actually play a lot like fire golems - normally the drones run on a basic AI with quick mental commands (rather like pet commands) but you can turn off your normal body (and leave it vulnerable to attack) in order to control them more directly. On the mechanics side of it, you get a mechanics skill tree that governs repairs, upgrades, and optimizations. Your vehicle and drones don't self-heal - that requires repair skill, actions, and money. Each mechanical would have a few slots for gear of various sorts, like weapons, engine, or whatever - you could upgrade them by purchasing better gear and using mechanical skill to slot them in place. Optimization would be the art of getting in under the hood and tuning stuff - adjusting gear ratios and changing cable types and so forth - which would let you improve the base stats to a degree, limited by skill and money. You could put in Build, Repair, and Optimize stats for Vehicle, Drone, Cyberdeck, and Weapon (with "upgrade via swapping parts" based off of "build".)
Decking, in turn, would be based on terminals. You'd get a personal decking avater, running under a somewhat different system, with stats based on their deck and their decking skills. You may or may not want to also include specific programs. Decking would be useful in three ways. First, you have your pure decking runs - get quest, jack in to a safe terminal, make the run purely in cyberspace. Second, you have simple access points for small dedicated systems. Get safely to one, jack in quick, if your skill is high enough something helpful happens - doors open, bits of the security system become friendly, data is accessed, or whatever. Third, you have full intranets, where you actually have to sleaze your way in, find a jack where you won't be interrupted for a while, jack in, and run a mission inside the mission, possibly making alterations to the security system along the way.
I figure the interesting thing is going to be the cyberware, but really, the trick is going to be figuring out where to stop. The source material is dense enough that you could go as far into the weeds as you want in a great many of the subsystems. Do you want to include phys adepts? Bioware? Magesight? Shadowrun-style magical items? Shadowrun-style item enchantment? Self-constructed cyberdecks? Summoned spirits/elementals? Magical societies, and the Awakening (or whatever it's called) that you can get from them? I do note that things became more complex as time went on. You may wish to start the adventure during the relatively early days, to simplify things a little.
Also noting that shadowrun had a bit of a focus on guns. You *could* make melee/bows work, but among serious folks, that was really only for people who were either cybered out, hung all over with boosting spells, or phys adepts. It might be worth putting in a few lethality tweaks to make that more real.