Wow!
Sounds like you have experience for Game Mastering from other games I believe...!
The books you mentioned, I think I've seen a sourcebook of Hardwired, or possibly mistook for something else... but I have Phil K. Dick's "Do androids dream of electric sheep?" (translated in Finnish) in my bookshelf (Holy bounty hunters! I've forgot to continue reading it when I started it!
) and I've seen lots of movies about Cyberpunk genre (including anime's of the same genre!)
Some of these movies (and TV series' ) are:
Blade Runner, Mad Max 1-3, Robo Cop 1-3, Ghost in the Shell ("Gits" in short), Akira, "Gits" S.A.C., A.D. Police (recommending to see!), Terminator (all of them), Appleseed, Appleseed Ex Machina, Totall Recall, Cyborg, and the list goes on...
So yes, I have lots of sources... greater challenge would be BUILDING a scenario... ^.^''
Do you have any recommendations of "kickstart" story scenario? From CP2020 book or it's source books...?
Haha, not that much, I just played 2 or 3 times Dungeon & Dragon back then, but it just basicaly showed me how to master a game
(it's not that much hard, if you have some imagination and feel good with the people you play with)
For a kickstart story scenario, there are plenty in the cyberpunk books
(Hardwired is also a CP2020 side-book, based on the book by Walter Jon Williams), it all depend on your tastes story-wise, on the people you play with, and how a given story can inspire you.
You have some good basis with the movie you cited, keep on looking and inspiring yourself from everything you can (news, book, comics, TV, etc...)
Honnestly, the simplier the better, I've tried to do some overly-paranoid-plot, with a lot of twists, etc...
but it never ended really the way I intended it, always having to improvising a new route so my story won't be screwed.
One of the latest "not-so-bad / paranoid" plot i can think of was
(to gives you an idea, even if i'm not really James Cameron when it comes to scenario lol):
An inside job in Petrochem, where the vice-president wanted to kill his boss to take his place as Petrochem's president, so during a time, there were a said "terrorist" group, harassing different corporations
(all driven by the Petrochem vice-president), to cause havoc in Night City, and since they striked everywhere, no one would notice it was an inside job from petrochem.
One night, one of my player, a corporate newbies at Arasaka corporation, a white collar, had a mission by one of his boss
(an petrochem's industrial spy inside arasaka),
"Find a bunch of punks, and kidnap the professor XXXX in Petrochem, they'll earn 50 000$ each *giving him a wallet filled with money*", so he walked around in town, found the other players siting in a dark corner of a bar, he started to talk to them
(they tried to piss him off lol), but when he said them that he could pay them 50 000$ each for the job, they all agreed, he drived them to Petrochem labs, strangely no one there, except two guards almost asleep
(wich our she-netrunner tried to seduce... because other players hadn't enought discretion to pass throught them), i rolled a random "meet" for the corporate who waited in the car, and since cyberpunk is driven by the god of dices roll, a bunch of journalists came toward him to interview him about the awesome songs he make over his free time:
(his character was Jean-Pierre Sauser, a crappy singer from our country lol)
He failed all his roll, so they sticked him, and he was like
"Oh my god, what am i gonna do when they will get back with the old-man?", so the other players found the old man pretty easily
(too much?), get back to the entrance, and found the whole crowd of journalists around Jean-Pierre's car, two of them pushed the old man in the back-seat, and two others punched the journalists
(a cop and a retarded-fixer, our "A-team" lol), the corporate gived them their money, and drove back to Arasaka to give the old man to his boss, wich connected the Dr on a cyberconsole and the old-man falled dead on the ground, then a bunch of buffed body guard took our corporate player and throwed him outside of the building like a pile of crap.
"What are you going to do now?" (other players were buying stuff)
He gets back home...
"Ok, now roll a dice on your luck...."
"Why?"
"Just do it "
"2, i'm in"
Ok, so his apartement exploded, he was pushed away as the front door flyed toward him, woke up of his shock a few minutes later to see his appartement in flames, he was like
"come on dude, it's my first game and you tried to kill me"... "well, it's the game" (
he never tried to check why or who or whatever), so he called back the other punks, "Is it you who tried to kill me?" , of course not, they were all busy spending their money...
He joined them, every players found an abandonned warehouse to sleep, excepted our Fixer and our Corporate, who started to roam around the combat zone, beating wanabe-gangster, stealing their drug, and started to drug themselves, our Corporate remembered that the media-crew filmed them, the Corporate were firend with the police chief, so the police chief lend them some assault rifle and cool-looking space-suits
(don't ask me why, they wanted cool space suits...) so they entered in Net 54, found the edition's room and killed almost all the journalist before throwing a bunch of molotov cocktails
(all of this, being high as hell), getting downstair and having a car-chase with the police
(wich they won luckily for them, so close of an awful death)
but tomorrow they realised the mess they put themselves in, the money was traced by some nanotech engraved in the bills, so Arasaka can follow them
(the Dr was an old arasaka employee, and they've gone after them, my player's boss removed his image from the guard-camera, and pulled our punks instead, so the news of his death were everywhere).
They were waked up in the middle of an industrial zone by a bunch of AV9, filled with troops, and ready to fight, they flew away, or at least, tried, they were captured, and used as guinea pig for Arasaka's research
(you can addict them to a drug at this point, or just play with their nerves), then a squad attacked the lab
(Petrochem vice-president's deathsquad), freed the punks, and took them to Petrochem headquarter
The vice-president told them
"ok, we know who have done this, it's a new corporation, using terrrorists tactics to take market over other corporation, we don't want a new corporative war, so go to crystal palace, and kill that corporation president", as usual, they didn't tried to check if the guy said the truth or not (
they always think i'm lying to them when i don't, it's pretty funny), so they gone to crystal palace
(tickets payed by petrochem), bought a lot of stuff
(blocked on crystal palace, they never could get those back on earth, they could have, but Petrochem plot was to not let them get anything back on earth), so they checked the place, meet Mr Cuningham, who told them what they had to know, then they've gone to see the President of that mysterious corporation, talking him about how they found a cure to an unsolvable disease
(lucky enought, they had a medtechie who could play the role), so the medtechie has gone to see him with a another player
(our crooked cop), killed him as petrochem squad striked too and killed everyone in the house
(i planned that they hadn't any logo on their uniform, but they didn't even took time to check it), the thought it was Petrochem who came to help them
(anyway, it's what Cuningham told them), so everything ends good...
...
...until they get back on earth, driving back to Night City, turned on the TV in the automated taxi-cab, and saw that Petrochem's president was killed last night on Crystal Palace, that the new President (
ex vice-president of course) had a speech to do:
"We know who those terrorists are, here is their picture *show our punks pictures*, we'll never negociate with them, I ask to every police force as private force to make them pay for all their crimes, and show they how much we hate those kind of behaving in this free state".
Now, they had to prove they were innocent, excepted that our fixer started to shoot at the first officier who told them to stop, psychosquad caught them...shot them, they bleeded to death.
Bye bye, end of the game.
It was pretty cool, but it's tought to make a game like this, if one of your player starts to step outside of your "scenario", and out-think you, it can ruin everything you build
(so try to think about everything, even the most retarded idea).
But it's a great exemple about how you can make a whole plot around something simple
(vice president wanting to take the place of his boss), by driving your players paranoid, and making their live a living hell, it ask a lot of improvisation sometimes, and the risk with it is that you can confuse yourself if you don't think "ahead" enough, but if you prepare well your scenario, it's a good thrilling ride for your players.
