Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Gamemasters' Lounge => Topic started by: Headhunter on <01-21-15/1003:37>
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I wanna make a new corpartion to be villain in my Campaign. It's gonna be based off the company by the same name from a podcast called Welcome to Nightvale. If you have any ideas of how to introduce them or how to get the runners against them would be highly appreciated.
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Okay... What do you want them to do? What do you want them to be? Are they a mana-corp, someone focused on magic? One of those groups that's cutting up technomancer brains? Illegal Mengele-esque 'scientific' experiments? You need to give a bit more information if you want help. If they do kidnap people to use for their research/production, you could have them take a friend of the player group. Give Strex really good PR, some scapegoats; make it so people will never believe they're that bad, and when a person discovers the truth, they're utterly horrified.
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To expand a bit on mijrai's direction, what place do you want this corp to occupy? What is their major area of interest? Example: shiawase is electronics, ares is weapons/armor, and so on. Define the major characteristics, and then we can help you better.
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Actually, Shiawase is biotech and service paired with agribusiness and heavy industry - especially mining and power.
I strongly recommend the 3rd Edition corporate book, Corporate Download, for help in this sort of thing.
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Yes, that book is excellent!
You might want to do one or more of these analyses for your corporation to flesh them out:
SWOT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis
Growth–share matrix: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix
Porter five forces analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis
I like to take notes on index cards, often in diffrent colours and then do a quick write up on my computer. At that point I connect keywords into brief paragraphs and come up with names. Usually by using a name generator, as I find the naming process tedious.
The beauty of strategic analysis diagrams like SWOT or growth–share matrix is that you immediately see where competitors might try to get "into" your corporation's portfoliio, i.e. where they might use runners and what runs might be about.
That's the economically guided approach that let's you flesh out your corporation and the world your runners interact with it. Then there is the story--approach. Just blank numbers and product names or portfolios make up for a bad story. You might want to think about how to involve you runners personally. Maybe one of Strex Corp's aim is to introduce a new product A in market field B, which happens to be either a cash cow (see growth–share matrix) for another major corporation or even organized crime. So they might contact the runners. Or Strex Corp has a product that is not selling well and barely breaks even, so they try to sell it off, but they need to fix some numbers, before someone might want to buy it. Or maybe, they want to lower investment costs into the product, so it becomes a cash cow. But lowering investment costs translates into dumping hazardous materials into the wilderness, calling the attention of some eco-activists, shamans or a govermental organization.
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I want them to begin replacing people in high places (eg. Gov Officials or Corp Execs) and begin to evelop other corps into them.
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... you don't want a corporation, you want a secret society. Maybe they own (read: have completely taken over) a corporation or two already, but you're talking about a global conspiracy. See Conspiracy Theories.
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While your conspiracy could take the appearance of a firm, like a hedgefond managing group, what you describe is not how a corporation works.
You should really take a look into older supplements covering conspiracies in the SR universe.
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Good luck replacing the CEOs of 2 corps; one is a high force free spirit and the other is a high dragon. Otherwise, yeah, you don't want a corporation but a secret society.