IDEAS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM

First of all, a good gm must be able to find run ideas from almost anything. Not necessarilly good ideas, but ideas nonetheless. A pathetic gm is somebody who reads "Neuromancer", watches "Terminator 2" or "Bladerunner" and doesn't come with any run ideas, or at least ideas to use in their runs (if you're turning red because you recognized yourself as a poor gm, you must have a REAL hard time getting any ideas...). The purpose of this text is more to tell you where to look for ideas than to tell you direct ideas for runs.

There are numerous places to look for ideas. One of the most obvious is in news papers. Search some news that not everybody knows about (if you make a run involving snatching proofs that Haefner (the president of the UCAS, for those of you not on the edge of Shadowrun news) has had some sexual adventures with a secretary, your players may wonder if her name is Monica Lewinsky...) and transform it to fit the world of Shadowrun. Depending on the experience of your player's characters you should use different news stories. If your team is of low level, dabbling more on the streets than with corps, use news of some crime that happened lately on the streets. On the other end, if your runners are of the international kind, read world news to get ideas. For example, you could use the story of Biochem Farma (this a Quebec news, and somewhat old besides, so it's not surprising you don't know about it) which is a Biochem (who would've guess) and drugs R&D center that was bombed. The run could involve the runners actually bombing the plant, or finding those responsible for the bombing.

One of my favorite inspiration is music. You listne to one of your favorite music albums (one of which you know all the lyrics by hearth) and listen to it. Take some sentence at random and build a run around it. For example, I'm listening to some Pink Floyd music at the moment, "Another Brick in the wall (part 2)" to be more exact. If I use the sentence "We don't need no education. We don't need no thought-control." I already get about 10 run ideas at once (some call this schyzophrenia, I prefer to call it inspiration...). For example, a group of ex-Shiawase employees (a megacorp which is renowned for the great "control" over their employees) are outraged because they realise they were almost brain-washed while they were in the company. They want to free other workers, do they hire the runners to disrupt the thought-control operations of some specific center  (that would be a run which involves doing a good deed, for a change...). Of course, the employers could actually be another corporation who wants to disrupt this, so they can manipulate some important employees into moving for their own corp. And that's just with one sentence, which at first may even seem as hard to use for such a purpose.

Another inspiration that is widely used but not very good is movies and books. Although you can get great ideas reading or watching them, often these ideas are simply rip-offs of it. If none of your players have read the book or seen the movie, that's fine, but if not the game will be bad. As such I seldom use books or movies, and if I do I make sure nobody have read or watched it and make big changes in the story.

Finally, videogames can be source of tons of great ideas, but have their own problems. The problem caused by already having played the game before isn't as bad as the precedent source of inspiration since a videogame is interactive in nature. As such, this media can be easilly transformed into Shadowruns. For example, the game "Syndicate" by Bullfrog can inspire numerous ides for runs, especially if you have a team of runners working for the mafia, the yaks or the triads. The problem with videogames is that, most of the time, they involve almost exclusively running and shooting, which can result in some boring Shadowrun game (of course, if running and shooting is your only fun in rpgs, go ahead...). you may have to adapt what is in the game to fit your style of gaming. For example, you can take a run in Syndicate and make it the basic of an adventure, but put complications in the run. For example, since the runners won't have the nifty radar thing that indicates the position of their target, they may have to make some legwork to find it.

These are a couple of sources of inspiration I use myself to get ideas for runs. There are, of course, a lot of other places to look for ideas, the easiest might simply be looking in the streets of your city. With these, I think you can find numerous run ideas pretty easilly. It works for me, at least...