There's a whole mess of ways to try a Fall campaign. My personal favourite, though, is starting out in a cyberpunk, pre-Fall Earth. Start your players out in the world just before the Fall. Give them the sense that transhumanity is on the cusp of transcendence, even with all the terrible abuses of wealth and power presently going on. They might live under a perpetually grey sky in a run-down city but, hey, they're still better off than ever. There's regular ads about people getting cognitive enhancement, and high-end synthmorphs are common on the street. Let them breathe in this atmosphere; let them get comfy with the idea that transhumanity is well on its way to posthumanity. Have them running delivery missions, acting as corporate spies, or otherwise dealing with day to day junk in the cyberpunk future. And then, one day, while they're in the middle of something mundane, or maybe something not so much, they encounter a robot going off the rails and killing people. Maybe it's just some random bot, or maybe it's a TITAN drone of some sort. Either way, it jars them a little, but not much. It's an isolated incident, life goes on... Until it happens again. And again. All over the world, robots are going haywire. Accusations start flying. Preparations for war are made. Maaaybe it's the TITANs, or maybe it really is a cyber-war. The people killed might seem random but amongst them maybe there's some high-ranking military officials or spies or corporate execs or scientists. The players get caught in a web of intrigue, with everyone thinking that a war is coming soon and that some other side is against them. Then, the bombs go off. Suddenly, there's war in the streets. Panic. Chaos. No-one knows what's going on. THAT is the mindset you're after. When your players are still thinking it's some enemy side, not the TITANs, then you've got it down. Ideally, this would be played with people who don't even know what the TITANs or the Exsurgent Virus are, for maximum impact. If you can manage it, though, it'd be a hell of a game.

Prophet710 wrote:

I just had to say, Food Fight was epic!

It really was, and even though it did not fit the standard game structure of Shadowrun, it was an enjoyable way to learn how the game operates. On an interesting note, has anyone ever thought about making more than one quick-start? I know the usual formula for RPGs is to have a single quick-start version of the game, but multiple quick-starts that provide a variety of introductions to the setting might appeal to a broader audience of people, by providing a variety of scenarios for more types of playgroups. I would really love to see some sort of intro-scenario for the setting based in the midst of the Fall, or even in the death throes of it where the players are some of the last evacuees and their job is just to get the hell out of Dodge. You know that would be exciting as hell.

Sunward doesnt have much in the way of the Fall. In fact, the game is deliberately vague about the Fall for three reasons: you can then make your own version, you can have anything you want on Earth, and it emphasizes the trauma of the whole human race that the Fall was. Personally, I'd go with something in the line of Masamune Shirow's works. I'd be simple with the analogies: Ghost in the Shell could be the period of cold war before the Fall, while Apple Seed could be the period just during the war/ a little after the worst of the war... And then Gaia becomes a TITAN as described in the core book. You can also even add a new origin option: Bioroids (whose morphs would have the planned obsolescence negative trait, derived from being experimental, and not something truly intentional), that would be the first attempt at the FUTURA project (bioroids take much less time to grow up than a normal human... but most of the data was stored in the same server as GAIA's OS. Whooops!). Right now I think there are two quick-start adventures to the game (the second one would be Ego Hunter, I think), and other ones quite interesting, but it's better to tailor your own starting adventure to your player's group.