Writing the Classic Run

From Shadowrun: Awakened

Shadowrun Awakened is dedicated to developing original stories within the established framework of Shadowrun and its 20 years of fiction. This guide explores the archetypal structure and situations of a single mission in the shadows. The likely themes and motivations for a mission are discussed in the Writing guide; this article is intended as a guide on their practical application. The actors and organizations providing intrigue and opposition are captured in the Factions article.

One Night in the Shadows

Missions in SRA are intended to take on myriad possibilities and permutations. This guide only presents the most basic three act structure of a story as it appears in SR: the contract, the turn, and the triumph. These phases capture the progression from a simple job with a simple plan, to a painful complication, and the dramatic decisions leading to a conclusion. Each part of the run is outlined below with a brief summary and some example variations that may arise. This guide is NOT intended to be an exhaustive discussion on how to craft a Shadowrun, rather a jumping off point for writers to explore the classic format.

The Contract

Most runs start with a phone call (or any of the more modern analogs available in 2070). The team is contacted to listen to an offer. The offer lays out a the job: the target, the risks, and the pay to varying degrees of precision. Of course, all from lips of a man named "Mr. Johnson". Usually, this involves getting into heavily secured buildings inside the city (Urban Fortresses), though force, fraud, or coercion. Common objectives for missions in Shadowrun include:

Theft - Take an object and run! Most often, the MacGuffin is held in an urban fortress that must be subverted or raided.
Destruction (Sabotage) - Something must be forgotten, deleted, disabled, or just plain blown up. This is like an assassination only with property (intellectual or otherwise).
Security - An object or location must be guarded against attack (probably from other Shadowrunners).
Extraction (Kidnapping) - Someone must be (voluntarily or involuntarily) removed from a location and delivered somewhere. This is basically a theft, but the MacGuffin is a person.
Assassination - Someone must die. Targets are often being transported somewhere, will be at a particular destination at a particular time, or sometimes are secluded in urban fortresses.
Escort - Prevent someone from being assassinated or extracted. This will usually lead to direct conflict with another Shadowrun team.
Investigation - Something secret must be uncovered. The characters spend their time tracking down the clues, running down leads, and seeing what floats to the top. Investigations are thematic for all of the above scenarios, since usually the team must learn something about their target before undertaking a mission.

The team must come up with a plan of action and execute it. How smooth it goes usually plays into The Turn...

Writing the Contract

Of all the phases of a Shadowrun, the writer is free to use the least imagination in the Contract. Most runs start with a simple job with a simple plan, so attempting to be fresh and original is laudable, but not very necessary. Be sure to lay out the promise of a reward early. Explain the parameters of the run, but do not feel compelled to spoon feed every detail (finding the details is what Legwork is for). If you are going to have a dramatic reversal in the Turn, make the conscious choice whether or not you are foreshadowing it in the contract.

Variations on the Contract

Simple runs are actually The Contract and only The Contract. Things rarely tend to be simple in the shadows.

The Test - Perhaps before the Johnson will even sit down and talk with the team, the team (or just a single character) must prove their skills/loyalty/trustworthiness. This usually requires a singular display of skill, talent, or cruelty. If they pass, they get the job, if they fail they walk (or die).
Legwork - The Johnson is unlikely to tell you everything about a run up-front; and often times the team may try to dig into the "why" of the run or the Johnson to prevent a possible bad 'Turn' scenario from ruining their day. Legwork usually involves talking to contacts, scouting out locations, and otherwise investigating. This is how they unravel the mystery and uncover early secrets critical to success later. Sometimes legwork is the whole point of the run (see the Investigation objective above).
Getting the band back together - Before the team can embark on their mission proper, or perhaps as a condition set forth by the Johnson, they must acquire the trust and services of a new ally. Often times, this means attracting an old friend (or at least informative NPC) to lend their aid and provide vital information or skills toward the planning or execution of the run.

The Turn

In every moment of a run, something can go wrong. If you look too hard during legwork, you might arouse the wrong suspicions. If you botch the infiltration, you'll be in hot water before you get your hands on the goods. Even during the payoff meet with the Johnson, there's no way to know if he'll have your cred or just a knife for your back. Every run has a moment where plans come apart into mayhem. That chummer, is the Turn.

The turn takes the well-laid plans of the runners, tears them up, then gives them papercuts with the pieces. Ideally, it takes the form of a sudden surprise which discards the player's sense of control over the situation and replaces it with a whole new crisis. This should involve stripping their resources, undermining their understanding, and taking them to a new limit. In the best runs, there is more than one Turn to really keep the team guessing. Up until the turn, the team will have made choices on how to proceed, now they are given the most grave decisions which will determine their tragedy or triumph...

Writing the Turn

The Turn is where things get more difficult for the writer. In order to have a moment of surprise, you need to expose something new in the story or destroy one of the underpinnings of progress so far. The hardest part is ensuring that the players are excited to see the new twist in the story instead of angry that you arbitrarily moved the goalposts. A lot of times, the Turn will mean abandoning the objectives originally set forth by the Johnson. Unless the Johnson engaged in an irregular amount of deception (read: double-cross) the player may be unwilling to change objectives. It's your job to push them into a new decision and for them to pass a point of no return where they irrevocably commit to it. You should always remember that you are changing the reward for the story, not removing it completely in these cases.

Variations on The Turn

Oops - Characters in Shadowrun are highly trained specialists; however, they are not perfect. It's always possible for them to unravel their own plans by simple bad luck. This type of turn could be engineered by the writer, by making a task unwinnable on purpose, but most likely this arises just from player or character mistake.
The Revelation - If the Turn doesn't take the form of pure failure, it usually takes the form of new knowledge. This usually involves revealing an as yet undisclosed secret that fundamentally shifts the motivations for the story, pushing the characters to make a choice.
Tail Chaser! - A signature turnaround in Shadowrun is to have the entire premise of the contract (go steal X, go kill Y) be a planned failure from the get-go to serve as a distraction for someone else. This kind of underhanded double-cross is often deadly for the team, and for the Johnson should any of the team survive. This is a subset of "The Revelation".

The Triumph

It's always darkest before it's completely black. Fortunately, Shadowrunners pack night vision (or better). Assuming the runners use their skills to fight through the darkness of The Turn, they must begin to retake control of the situation. They will re-accumulate the power they lost during The Turn (and most often more), to the point where they attain triumph. Using the classic fantasy elements of Shadowrun, this may include a fleeting moment of invincibility that empowers pure victory. Drawing upon the noir influences, this might be a dark act of revenge, meaningful only to the character and otherwise aberrant to common morality. Somewhere in the middle are endings with themes of reconciliation, redemption, and forgiveness.

Part of the duty of the third act is to enable even a small moment after the climax to enjoy the renewed peace earned by the struggle(s) along the way. In Shadowrun, the peace is usually brought on by large transfers of nuyen by the Johnson, a promise of business in the future, and a safe ride home. The dramatic path of the mission's story may determine additional elements of the resolution, such as inferred epilogues about important characters and other story-driven components to give players satisfaction.

Writing the Triumph

The end is the hardest part of any story to make satisfying, so if you have only one good idea, put it in the Triumph. (If you have two good ideas, put them both in the Triumph; if you have three, then consider using one as the Turn). Do not be afraid to put a twist in the ending, even if that sounds like only the domain of The Turn. In the case where you wish to write a run that goes beyond the three act structure, then truly the story turns into a cycle of Turn and Triumph. The difficulty then is maintaining credible threats, satisfaction at the change in goals, and inventive surprises. Ask any fan, or troll, of a popular continuity-driven series (Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes) and they'll talk about the dangers of jumping the shark, going off the tracks, and overall how stitching together ever more diverse plot threads can create a real monster. The key is the end it all before it goes south, with satisfaction and triumph.

Variations on the Triumph

And the adventures continue... - An absolute, final resolution to the entire storyline is rarely possible or desirable in Shadowrun. Every mission is just one step in a long journey that defines and ultimately concludes the character, through either retirement or death. The end will come eventually, but usually not tonight.
Anti-Climax - When the Triumph is attained too easily or with a purposeful lack of action, the players will feel the conclusion was "anti-climactic". Skillfully engineering an anti-climax is difficult, but may lead to just as memorable an experience as a classic climax. The key is to make an anti-climax satisfying to the same magnitude as a normal one. (NOTE: No matter how hard you try as a writer, someone will always comment that your ending was an anti-climax; that's a consumer's way of saying "I was disappointed by it". Be prepared to live with this criticism as you can't make all the people happy all the time.)

Examples

The three-act run appears many times in Shadowrun. Just pick any of the existing adventure manuals (practically any of them!). All the good ones involve a simple contract that quickly turns into a pandora's box at the bottom of a rabbit hole.

Mercurial

One first edition adventure, Mercurial, puts the runners in the center of a pop star, her multiple personalities, her lover, an assassin, and a Western Dragon. It starts off as an escort mission for the hottest nova star on the music scene, Maria Mercurial. The team's simple bodyguard job turns into an unraveling mystery about her past as an Aztech "personal secretary", her coerced addiction to BTLs, and her rise to the top. It turns out all the BTLs and cyberware put a leak in her brainpan, giving her multiple personality disorder. Now, there's a rivalry between her old and new management that's turning very ugly.

Eventually, it is revealed that she has secret files locked in her dormant ware that puts three corps, one Yakuza ring, and one Aztech assassin with his Western Dragon companion into a mexican standoff. By the end, the team decides which corp gets the upper-hand in this conflict and whether or not Maria lives, dies, or perhaps even lives happily ever after with her one true love. To think, it all started with a call asking for some personal security.

Depending on how you look at it, first act in Mercurial lasts from the bodyguard hook to understanding the Maria Mercurial character. The real Turn in the story is when it's revealed that that she's walking around with the linchpin to a corp conflict in her skull and they've sent the biggest badass on the continent to make sure it doesn't get out. The triumph finally comes on the rooftop, where the team is rewarded with the (off-camera) killing of a dragon and the reconciliation of lost loves.

See How They Run

The SR3 base manual starts with a short story about Animal, a troll street sam, and his motley crew taking on a simple sabotage on behalf of the TerraFirst! eco-terrorist organization (though, initial legwork reveals it's really the Gaeatronics corp). Along with Flash, a neo-tribal decker, and Biggs, a dwarven shaman, they execute a textbook entry to an urban fortress using invisibility magic and hitching a ride on a supply truck. Once inside, they hack the Matrix systems to perform delayed sabotage.

Right after the decker jacks out, the mission turns into a riot of security guards, SMG fire, paranormal critters, powerballs, and double-cross. Turns out the run was a sham with the three-man protagonist team just being the setup for a parallel team of runners, sent by Renraku who was pulling the strings all along, whose mission included cleaning up the good guys. In the end, Animal is the only one to escape and his only reward is a vendetta against a mysterious elf named "Silver". A rather anti-climactic run, but an excellent introduction to the mean reality of 2060.

The contract is, simple enough, sabotage of a Shiawese facility. The Turn is a classic tailchaser plot twist, leading into a bloody anti-climax for the heroes. Not to say the ending isn't exciting, but a 2/3 party wipe is quite a down ending. The final moment of resolution in the story is truly just a segue to a larger unwritten saga about how the anti-heroic troll street sam will avenge his friends. Fitted into the structure of a storyline that expands upon the missions, it could be a fantastic opening, but standalone players would likely find it infuriating.