14 Shadowrunner Teams for the Cosmic Era

1. FBG 9000

Also known as the Fat Bottom Girls, FBG9K consists of a trio of genetically augmented women: Wanda Wonderbottom, Karen Bergman, and Marcia Bluejay. They have engineered themselves to be attractive to the point that it should be considered illegal, or a crime against decency. They are notable for having incredibly thick thighs, huge asses, and almost comically large breasts, and people find them either completely irresistible, or completely absurd. Their basic MO is smash and grab operations, grand theft, and personnel recovery/abduction, and they do not have any strong political stance or nationalistic association. FBG9K is out for large amounts of money and living large.

The thing that separates FBG9K from other similar augmented all female teams is that they have weaponized their bodies, and the large amounts of padding they have in their posterior and chest are used as storage vessels for a variety of substances, the most common being sleep gas, paralysis gas, and an erotic gas that causes people exposed to it to lose their inhibitions and self control. The team will use these and other chemical agents (which they are immune to) to move into an area, shut down all local resistance, and leave with what they came to steal.

There is no polite way to put this, but FBG9K enter the target area and deliver their chemical attacks via farting.

2. RAMEN HMX

RAMEN HMX is an unusual shadowrunning team, and their area of specialty is demolitions and sapping, a task they excel at. The man who runs the team, William Anzer, is a cook and chemist by trade and he produces the team's go to tool, HMX explosive powder. This chemical can be mixed with flour and other additives and be turned into edible baked goods. If exposed to a strong electrical charge, these baked goods, raw materials, or even excreted waste, will detonate spectacularly. RAMEN HMX runs a Noodle Scam, and will enter the mission area under the guise of a food cart peddling noodles, and will find a location near a waste disposal facility, even going so far as to provide a porta-potty if there is nothing present.

In the course of two to three days of operation, enough HMX powder is deposited in the target area, and then it is triggered remotely, causing it's normal explosive potential, and turning the waste collection facility into an anti-ship mine sized warhead. As an unfortunate side effect, if a particularly unlucky person eats a large amount of the noodles, or pancakes, or whatever angle the team uses to get the explosives in, and then gets electrocuted, they can explode like a hand grenade. On a related note, the raw dough can be used exactly like C4, and more than one targeted individual has been pelted with dough in a food fight, and then had themselves exploded because one of the dough balls had a blasting cap in it.

3. The Code Enforcer

The Code Enforcer is a one man team, as he uses his intimate understanding of urban zoning and inspection laws to make municipal and local offices provide him all the manpower he needs, and whatever passes for law enforcement to work as his fist. He is a short man with an infinitely punchable face and the snide arrogance of a fat weasel, and this is all part of how he works, he is a creature of red tape and municipal extortion and coercion.

What the Code Enforcer does is locates whatever his objective is, and then moves into the area as a literal inspector for various departments, a job he legitimately holds. Once there, he will engineer multiple violations, get two or even three agencies at each other's throats, and the holders of whatever he needs to be even more hostile. As soon as things look like they're going to get ugly, the police are obligated to step in, arrest people, confiscate or tag things for forfeiture, and shut the whole mess down. Then, the Code Enforcer picks up his prize from law enforcement, even signing for it, and then delivering whomever or whatever was contracted from him.

By the time the bamboozling has been discovered, the different agencies will refuse to admit anything has gone wrong, or that if something is gone, then it isn't their fault, and general legal immunities and protections will keep the victims of the Enforcer from finding him, or going after the agencies that unwittingly worked for him.

4. Mack 'Starhunter' and the Demon Clan Boyz

Mack 'Starhunter' is not a highly rated runner, as he is considered juvenile, unstable, and when it comes to collateral damage, a walking talking liability to anyone dumb enough to contract him and his Boyz. All of the members of the Demon Clan Boyz are classified as synthetic parapsychic biomorpic calamities. When resting, they all appear as teen to young adult males of scruffy and low income appearance, favoring trashy clothing, and things like vape pens, energy drinks, recreational drugs, and the general gauntlet of shitheel behavior. The main reason they keep getting work is that Starhunter works cheap, and despite the mess, they have a good rate of mission completion.

When its time to work, the Demon Clan Boyz show up wearing piles of busted power armor suits and scrap armor that is way too big for them. At go time, they activate their biomorphic power and rapidly swell into massive hulking monstrosities bristling with hair, teeth, claws, and entirely too much bad attitude. Being completely organic, they can sidestep most security looking for guns and cybernetic mods, and when they throw down they are more than capable of defeating men in power armor suits, absorbing most regularly available weapons, and using pack tactics to bring down their foes.

Starhunter is actively able to infect normal humans with his own biomorphic instability, and creates new Demon Clan Boys by hitting them with elixer that has been cut with testosterone and combat drugs so that their changes are fully hairy and wild.

5. Ninjin 7

Ninjin 7 is what happens when a spoiled, bored, rich kid decides he wants to be a runner, because its fun and exciting. The leader of Ninjin 7 is a tall thin highly effeminate but almost androgynous youth with red hair and a constant sneer of superiority. The other members of the team are tech support, bodyguards, communications and surveillance people, and other similar professionals who actually work for the kid's father. He is a highly ineffective runner, has low ratings, and is willing to work for free because its not about the money, its about, insert random quotes from whatever film had the latest one-liners from a dramatic anti-hero.

When in the field, Ninjin 7 wears a SmartFascia that links him to his team and has identity protection, and a combat coordination program for hand to hand fighting. He also wears an encounter suit under a decontractee armure suit or costume related to the job. Finally, he has multiple belts packed with useful gadgets and non-lethal devices so that he can do his job without killing tons of people and getting in legal trouble. His weapons of choice are a pair of three tined gauntlets that emulate hyperedge power claws. These are not real, but much lower power vibroblade claws. While certainly dangerous, they are not armor piercing, and he can't accidentally cut his own limbs off with them when he's trying to show off and be a badass.

Not only doens Ninjin 7's wealthy father pay for his son's toys and companions, he is also setting up most of the jobs. Its expensive buying all this gear and playing these games, but it is still cheaper than getting his son out of jail, or out of the news after trying to murder someone, or going through the costly process of reanimating him when he's gone and done something truly stupid.

6. Captain Cool and the Bandit Commandos

Captain Cool is a typically blonde Californian with a penchant for Petrol Era Americana, including stars and stripes clothing, and that motif on his vehicle, either a mag-rail 'muscle car' or star spangled military hover bike. The rest of the Bandit Commandos will be mounted on similar bikes or mag-rail cars, and are accompanied by the long combination vehicle the Duelist. They have guns, drones, smart gear, and the rest of the tech that would required to pull off a job as large as robbing a train, or ship in port.

The contrast is that Captain Cool (Howard Keithman) is really a hacker and anarchist and the Duelist is a mobile cyberwarfare bunker, packed with gear. He likes the attitude and machismo of being an nearly Amerikkano terrorist, but has no real interest in shooting people or blood. Instead, he plays the bantam rooster, and leader of a competent hacker team, who's real interest is online theft, vandalism, and computer fraud. Captain Cool robs people in MMOs and the CogNet, as well as more traditional data extraction jobs.

7. Lord Jade

Lord Jade is something of an enigma among shadowrunners, and an albatross. He appears as the consummate gentleman, and presents himself as just that, an elegant gentleman thief, recalling fictional characters such as Arsene Lupin or Moriarty. He is tall and thin, with features that hint at a mixed Amero-Nipponese heritage. He favors the finer things in life, and considers nothing to be beyond his reach.

Lord Jade is a potent parapsychic, his powers gained from a childhood so traumatic that he has no recollection of it. His known powers include telekinesis, mind manipulation, creating illusions, and generally being an incredibly charming bastard.

His secret power is that he can perceive the larvae of the outer gods and manipulate them. This is his ace in the hole, when it is time, he will bind one of the larvae to a person in the area, turning them into a youma, or barely contained monster, but one that is obedient to him. Each of these beings becomes a slave and a weapon for him to wield in the course of his mission, and then to be deliberately discarded or slain before he departs. He has a reputation as being the sole survivor of many dangerous missions, giving him a bad rep with other runners.

8. Black Chapter

Black Chapter is a remote shadowrunning team that leaves cybersecurity professionals nervous and sweating. The group excels in psychological and technological warfare, with their calling card being the creation of Black Bullets. A black bullet is a data file that is a compilation of the sins of the person it's been sent to. The data is gathered from deep net searches and even going so far as abducting people who knew the target at different times and subjecting them to Cohagaan aparatus brain draining and using AI to generate what amount to immersive dream reels.

In extreme situations, Black Chapter will abduct the person of interest, and plug them into a hybrid Cohagaan aparatus/sim sense rig, allowing the team to create the trapped in the nightmare/computer program where if you die in the system, you die in real life scenario.

Outside of Black Chapter, all the members seem like completely normal people.

9. Red Lance Corp

Red Lance Corp is one of the larger shadowrunning operations in the Cosmic Era, and employs hundreds of runners and dozens of teams, and fields absurd amounts of equipment, including carry-all dropships and even space capable warships. What makes Red Lance stand out is that it's performance is mediocre to poor, and they are a great source of filler minions, the K-Mart of shadowrunners. They have a lot of stuff, and some of it is big, but none of it is good. Red Lance's main tactics include frontal assault, human wave, and armored cavalry charge. They are also known for, and willing to take heavy losses, and deal out large amounts of collateral damage.

Where Red Lance actually excels is in large scale actions, or in a support role.

10. Team Berzerkah

Team Berzerkah is based around a simple concept, regular people with really big weapons. The team uses fast light vehicles, conventional body armor, and rely on infantry support weapons, one shot anti-armor and anti-mech weaponry, and low end powered melee weapons. What sets the apart is that in additional to the self portable artillery they favor, Berzerkah exhibits an almost fetish leather-daddy aesthetic.

One of the signature weapons of Berzerkah is a two handed carbon fiber power blade that most equate roughly to a coffee table with a handle. It is lighter than it appears, and uses a series of ceramic insulators to contain a plasma charge along it's cutting edge. While it's power use is high, the blade generally turns itself on and off as needed, generally only being ignited for fractions of a second at a time. This, this allows for the Team Berzerkah muscle boys and danger girls to hack and slice their way through a lot of hostility.

11. Neotone Dream

Neotone Dream is the sort of shadowrunning team that gives corp security nightmares and leaves normal people scratching their heads in confusion. Every member of Neotone Dream is a neotenic human, a person who used genetic engineering and hormone manipulation to restrict their aging process and prevent the onset of puberty. They are physically permanent children. What makes the Team a nightmare is that the average member looks to be between eight and twelve, but can have the full skillset and knowledge of a thirty, forty, or fifty year old. They can use a wide variety of weapons, and weaponizing children's electronics and toys is frighteningly easy.

Neotone Dream is most commonly involved in data theft, breaking and entering, and generally non-violent shadow ops. Physically they are still children and while they can pick up and use SMGs and bullpup rifles, things like power armor suits and heavy weapons are uselessly outsized for them.

12. Technogravid

The task force known as Technogravid does a lot of surveillance, covert ops, smuggling, and data theft, and they have a remarkable means to accomplish this. Each member of Technogravid is a permanently pregnant woman. Through the use of cybernetics, genetic engineering, and psychosurgery they have turned their wombs into permanent disembodied partners. This can range from as mundane as having an organic memory core wired into their nervous system through the umbilical cord, the system having a preloaded organic AI, to as frightening and exotic as a woman hosting a parasitic cluster of sentient cells, complete with an alien will and latent parapsychic powers.

Frankly, this one just disturbs the hell out of me.

13. Latent Coefficient

Latent Coefficient is a very straight laced and normal shadow ops team in the classic spy versus spy fashion. No flashy weapons, few if any gadgets, and the members are almost by default normal and unaugmented humans. The power of Latent Coefficient is that the team exists solely because of a Parapsychic AISC. This mainframe was made of hundreds of Organic Memory Core that were networked together, and wired into a central cognitive capacitor. Unlike most OMCs, teh units that Latent Coefficient is made of were not tank grown blanks, but were brains extracted from criminals, deviants, spies, assassins, murderers, con-men, and the rest of the worst of the worst. Rather than being evil and destructive, Latent Coefficient is hardwired to understand criminals and the shadow world, making the team of the same name all the more efficient.

Latent Coefficient is based more in investigation, and headhunting both criminals for their bounties, and rival shadowrunner teams, to thin the market of the worst of the worst.

14. Darling Squad

Darling Squad is the stuff of masturbatory fantasies. It is composed entirely of younger women, all wearing skin tight encounter suits with armored sections, in typically feminine colors. Unlike other shadowrunning teams, Darling Squad has a staggering amount of financial backing, allowing them to field unique power armor suits, and highly customized battlemechs, leaving them in a blurry space between military mercenaries, shadowrunning operatives, and parapsychic commandos.

A sample member of Darling Squad would be a mock Southern Belle who affects a blue and silver color scheme, and can pilot either a fully flight capable power suit under the codename Firefly, or a heavily modified Archer missile support mech codenamed General Dixie.

The thing that makes Darling Squad stand out is that their gear is bleeding edge. Their mecha are top tier, their abilities soar in parapsychic powers, and somehow, the members of the team all seem to be attractive women in their twenties.