Shadowrun - Toronto Troubles

This series will include synopses of my weekly Shadowrun 5th Edition campaign entitled: Toronto Troubles. I chose Toronto for a few key reasons:

• It not mentioned in any book of any edition beyond VERY vague points like that it is UCAS Hollywood.
• It is a city I am very familiar with IRL
• Real city = Real Googlemaps = Real kickass mapping
• It is a city my players are only somewhat familiar with at best

All my players are completely or almost completely new to the game, but willing to learn. There was a keen interest in ensuring good party composition and we initially started with only 3 players and myself as GM. Based on the types of characters people wanted to play, I assigned them 5-10 pages of reading to do in order to ensure they understood the basics of their classes. This reading encompassed weapon firing modes for the Street Samurai, hacking mechanics for the Decker, and spell casting mechanics for the Mage. With that in mind, our starting character breakdown was as below:

Black Scorpion - Street Samurai - A former corp military grunt from Amazonia. After doing a stint in prison resulting from betrayal of his commanding officer, Black Scorpion made his way up to the UCAS to start fresh. As a human, he blends in pretty well in UCAS and his anti-capitalist viewpoints drive his primary motivations to help the community and bring about social reforms.

The Hanger - Decker - Clifford Hanger is one paranoid Elf. His desire for anonymity outstrips most guiding principles leading him to constantly wear an oversized helmet that conceals his entire face and ears. His only real motivation is to make money, with hardly a moral (other than self-preservation) taking precedence.

Shade - Mage - Following the Awakening, the native shaman now known as Shade was revealed as not human at all, in fact. Having embraced his native identity with that of the Elves, he seeks to bring peace and guide his people to better fortunes.

All characters were created using street level rules. I did this for a few reasons, but mostly because none of my players are experienced. In my view, street level characters are the equivalent of a lvl 1 DnD character. You are just starting your career as a runner and may make lots of mistakes. This is ideal for new players, because doing dumb stuff (like forgetting to do surveillance or research before the run) is par for the course. It's completely reasonable to believe your street level scrublord did this, so no big deal. I also like campaigns that have a sweeping story arc. It's hard to show a lot of character development when he started the game as a badass. Finally, there is a lot to do during character creation as it is. Beginning the game with some experience just increases the options, making it more difficult.

Setting up a new story can be tricky. I hate cliche devices that just assume everyone knows everyone, so I make a real effort to keep introductions more organic, but also bring the party together inside of a single session. In my next post, we'll go through introductions and setting up the story. Session 1 got off to a pretty good start and I'll share some notes in my followup post showing how I prepared for the game.

As usual, I own nothing but my own Shadowrun content. If you are interested in this thread, please upvote, comment, re-steem, etc. I look forward to hearing from you!