After a character, or group of characters, have existed for a long time it is inevitable that the GM will have trouble regularly creating runs that fully challenge the PCs’ abilities. Unless you’re the type of GM that believes a greater challenge simply involves an increase in the number of firearms pointed in the PCs’ general direction, formidable runs can take a long time to create, primarily because of the increased need for complexity. It’s relatively easy to crank out large numbers of NPCs armed with bazookas, but it can be a pain in the but to crank out enough spider-web plots to keep your group of players happy and interested in the game. Unless you happen to have enough time and mental resources to keep cranking out runs of this type it is inevitable that your players are going to get bored. (Is it just my imagination, or did the last three sentences say essentially the same thing?)

One solution is to sneak into your players respective houses and set fire to their character sheets, thus requiring them to creative new ones and allowing you to go back to drumming up nice, easy two page Shadowruns. Unfortunately this system isn’t especially popular with the players, and can be extremely detrimental to the health of the GM if the player happens to own a revolver and an alarm system.

A better choice is to simultaneously dump a whole bunch of relatively easy runs on your PCs. Drench them in so much work that simply remembering when they have to meet who will be a task more difficult than taking over Renraku armed only with a spork and a pair of boxer shorts.

This method of ‘overload’ not only presents the runners with a degree of complexity similar to that of a single, entangled run but also introduces new elements of conflict that you wouldn’t normally find in a single adventure:

Reputation Problems

After a Shadowrunning group attains an elevated status in the running community it is usually acceptable for them to reject a run from time to time, either because of a lack of interest, conflicting moral issued (yeah, right), location or time conflicts, etc. But even prime runners can damage their reputation by refusing too many assignments. Therefore, when the runner’s Johnson or other employers come at the group with multiple assignments it’s gonna be tough for the group to keep turning them away. Such an action would leave a scar on their rep in the eyes of employers, most of which probably aren’t concerned about the fact that the runners are loaded down with work. After all, if the group is as good as everybody says they are, why would they turn down such a simple run? So not only are you challenging the runners ability to multi-task, you’re also reminding them that having an excellent rep isn’t always peaches and flowers.

Time Conflicts

The runners may find themselves having to be in several places at one time, thus requiring extensive group split-ups or even the necessity for the runners to hire another batch of runners to take care of some minor chore they don’t have the time to handle themselves. The runners will have to time everything with pin point accuracy to make sure their Sammy isn’t stuck waiting for a ride at the edge of a Fuchi compound while the group’s Rigger is still negotiating with poli-club members at the local Drink N’ Puke. The runners may find themselves going for days without sleep and will discover an added advantage to not getting shot when they realize that a mere two day stay at the hospital could blow 3 or 4 different Shadowruns. They might not even have time to stop for ammo and will find themselves screwed if a run requires an article of technology of weaponry they don’t already possess.

Location Conflicts

While even I am not so cruel as to dish out a Seattle run at the same time I hand the PCs a job in, say, Indonesia, I have no qualms against giving the runners a few jobs several hundred miles away from each other, all of which are supposed to occur within an hour of one another. This means the runners are going to have to get from point A to point B really friggin fast and still have enough gas left over to get to point C later that same evening. Riggers may not find this to be much of a problem as it will probably be the first opportunity they’ve had to max out their customized Saab, but it still adds a decent amount of stress when you realize that a single blown out tire could cause a domino effect of suck for the rest of the evening’s runs.

Conflicts Of Interest

It’s never a happy experience when, after accepting a large number of runs, one of the group members notices that they have been assigned to defend the same corporate outpost they’ve been hired to destroy. While I’m not suggesting that all conflicts of interest be this extreme, it may be fun to introduce some less traumatic elements of inter-run friction just to see how the runners handle it. The runners may discover that they have to handle one run undercover in order to prevent anyone from noticing that the group of people that stole Keldor’s Mysterious Vase Of Glee are the same individuals who put it back later that evening. If a conflict is too extreme, the runners may have to subcontract it out to another team - hopefully a team that won’t completely botch it since the failure would still go against the original runners’ reputation. Just remember that, in order for conflicts of interest to work out, the runners shouldn’t discover the conflict until after the run is assigned, thus giving them little or no opportunity to reject it. An if they try, make sure the employer that assigned it has suddenly gone on vacation in Switzerland.

The last issue that needs to be addressed, since the runners (and the players) are almost certain to ask, is why such an avalanche of work would suddenly appear. A good way to cut off this kind of inquiry before it’s even asked is to elude, in earlier gaming sessions, that there has been a gradual swelling in the number of available runs. Then, slowly at first and then more rapidly, start piling up the runners work. Even though the runs are taking place at the same time, they can be assigned in a more staggered manner. If you play your cards right, the runners won’t even realize that they’re overloaded until they’ve got three or four runs on their backs.

A more dramatic method (which, in itself, could be a run) is to announce that the cops, corps, military, etc. have gone on an unexplained anti-runner kick sparked by, say, a single group of shadowrunners that happened to tick off a lot of people. In other words, a whole bunch of people have been wasting large numbers of runners. After this spike of violence ends (perhaps because they finally cacked the correct group), there’s going to be a depressing shortage of runners. The surviving groups will find themselves approached at all angles with a multitude of work opportunities.

So keep cranking out those low level runs, put them in a nice stack, and bring every single one of them to your next gaming session. And don’t forget your calculator: Figuring out karma for a situation like this is gonna be hell.