Tag Archives: Shadowrun

Harbinger

Game: Shadowrun (third edition – FASA, 1998)

My Experience: My claim to playing Shadowrun‘s first edition hinges on the barest of technicalities. It was my second-ever play-by-post game (first honors go to Polis). I made a character and participated until the GM got so tired of our circular planning arguments that hostile NPCs rolled up and fired a rocket launcher into our not-so-safe safehouse. I spent much more time in a long-running campaign that Little Sister ran, starting with the Harlequin published adventure and continuing into the insect spirit outbreak; we started that one in second edition and converted into third about two-thirds of the way through the run. I also got some play time in a campaign Paladin ran before real-life commitments killed that one off. I’ve run a few one-shots and played in a couple more, and I’m always up for going back to the dawn of the Sixth Age.

I don’t typically get involved in edition wars, but for me, there were no editions of Shadowrun after third. The mechanical changes, the massive shifts in the setting, and the movement from cyberpunk to transhumanism all made the later games unrecognizable and unenjoyable for me.


Julien Yoshioka (“Harbinger”), Nocturnal Predator

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Favoritism

Last week’s post on go-to game systems got me thinking about the settings I love and why I love them.

My lifetime achievement award for an intricately-detailed, internally-consistent, hugely-expansive setting has rested with Blue Planet ever since I first encountered it in the early 2000s. It’s worldbuilding at its finest, a sci-fi frontier setting that supports a broad spectrum of campaign styles. Its fatal flaw, if there is one, is that it has no default campaign. Without a clear vision of “we’re playing to do these things,” it seems very easy for a campaign to drown in options. But hot damn, the options.

Shadowrun (at least through the end of the 3e run) is every bit as detailed as Blue Planet, and benefits from an immensely-greater number of supplements. The FASA authors and developers crafted a fantastic world that could range from noir to gonzo while remaining internally-consistent. Moreover, the setting writing is a joy to read. I’ll still go back to 1e sourcebooks just to watch the in-setting conversations reveal another slice of the world’s secrets.

For big ideas and sweeping four-color generalizations, I adore the original 7th Sea. My elevator pitch for it has always been “the coolest parts of early Renaissance Europe filtered through the lens of Disney’s The Three Musketeers.” Every nation its its own unique setting that supports a different style of play. Theah as a whole is somehow stitched together in a way that feels cohesive rather than the half-assed patchwork that could easily result from a less-skilled attempt at putting together a kitchen sink setting.

The setting in which I’d most want to be a player character is Trinity. It’s not quite utopian sci-fi – the setting has plenty of dark places and rough edges, and there are ample reminders that when we went out into the stars, the monsters we brought with us were just as bad as the ones we found. But the overall tone is hopeful. It’s a setting in which humanity is striving toward a common goal but not united, in which the world is better but has been through some really bad times within living memory, and in which PCs can fundamentally make a difference on scales from human to interstellar. (Plus, I was an intern at the Wolf while the initial development cycle was under way, so it’ll always have a place in my heart for its proximity even though I had zero involvement with it.)

The setting in which I’ve spent the most time immersed is a toss-up, but I’d have to say that Twilight: 2000 wins by a nose over the (Old) World of Darkness. I’ve spent at least an order of magnitude more time playing the WoD line. Most of my closest, longest-lasting friendships came out of those gaming groups. It’s the foundation of my body of freelance work. But T2k is the dark future of the ’80s that I found the most compelling when I was a young gamer, and I keep coming back to it over and over again. It offers me a broken world whose fires are still smoldering, where memory of the world-that-was is still alive, and in which there is a faint hope of stabilizing the downward slide and starting the generations-long recovery process. Taken to the extreme, it’s the gaming counterpart to the calling that is my second career, and the same urge to bring order from chaos is what draws me to both of them.

Measuring Cyberhand

Idle thought while messing around in the basement workshop: a cyberhand mounting a set of dedicated measuring tools. This is inspired by the concept of a cybernetic tool hand (Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk Red) and by Adam Savage’s measuring tattoo.

A measuring cyberhand (or metrology hand for the highbrow ‘punk), as the name suggests, is equipped with an array of sensors and tools:

  • The thumb and forefinger function as calipers, with retractable articulated jaws at the tips for particularly small or inner-distance measurements.
  • The middle and ring fingers mount retractable probes for a multimeter.
  • The little finger contains an infrared thermometer and a low-powered infrared laser rangefinder/tape measure, with both devices emitting through a dual-lensed aperture in the fingertip.
  • The palm contains a digital inclinometer, enabling measurement of a surface’s angle when the hand is placed flat and palm-down on it.
  • The hand can measure a held object’s weight, using pressure sensors in the palm for small items and strain gauges in the joints for larger or heavier objects.

All data can be displayed in a digital readout on the back of the hand or sent to a cyberoptic.


Cyberpunk 2020: negligible surgery (assuming mounting to a cyberarm); cost 300eb; Humanity loss 3.

Cyberpunk Red: install at clinic; cost 500eb (expensive); Humanity loss 3 (1d6).


Shadowrun 1e/2e/3e: This is a modification to an existing cyberhand. Due to the internal volume consumed by the various sensors, no other modifications can be installed in this hand. Cost ¥1,200; no Essence loss. The optional metrology datalink (data routed to any other cyberware for display or storage) costs ¥300 and costs 0.1 Essence. A measuring cyberhand is legal with Street Index 1.5 and Availability 3/24 hours.

If using the concealment and equipment capacity rules from SR3’s Man and Machine (p. 35), a measuring cyberhand has an ECU of 0.9 and a concealment modifier of -4. The metrology datalink adds 0.1 ECU. If, at the time of installation, the user chooses to omit the digital data readout and rely entirely on the metrology datalink to receive results, this reduces the concealment modifier to -2.

Melanoplus

This was prompted by a summer birding walk a couple of years ago, in which my wife and I spotted and identified our first grasshopper sparrow:

The sparrow grasshopper‘s name derives from its mottled brown-tan coloration and prodigious size – typically 14-18cm long at full growth. Genetic analysis reveals it to be an Awakened subspecies of the differential grasshopper (Melanoplus differentialis). It is believed to reach this size through consumption of Awakened plant life, which is its preferred (but not exclusive) diet. Its size makes it a target for predators that do not normally eat grasshoppers, including domestic cats and dogs, several species of raptor, and hoop snakes.

The sparrow grasshopper is generally harmless to humans. However, when startled, it takes flight briefly, and swarms along highways have been responsible for several major traffic accidents as they have obscured drivers’ vision and confused vehicular sensors. As a dual-natured creature, the sparrow grasshopper has an astral presence, and swarms are vivid on the astral plane.

Daucus

Occasionally, my wife and I go off on worldbuilding tangents that result in new fictitious species. This has previously resulted in the ghost plum and the spider peacock. Another time, someone’s Reddit handle inspired discussion of the floating ghost carrot.

Well, it’s not really a carrot. Nor does it float. It’s actually a subspecies of ginseng that can temporarily activate latent telekinetic powers.

The problem is that while a lot of people would like to have latent telekinetic powers, very few actually do. Because some of the interested-but-without are wealthy, powerful, and unscrupulous (but I repeat myself), this has resulted in a significant off-the-books genetic research project to identify the source of latent telekinesis. The results have been… questionable science, at best. And some of those results point to specific organs as the source of said latent telekinesis. Which has, in turn, resulted in a growing black market trade in organs stolen from latent telekinetic persons for transplant.

Meihua

From a tangent during character development for an old duet Shadowrun game:

The ghost plum is an Awakened variety of Prunus mume (Chinese plum) found mainly in China’s Yunnan region. The tree is similar to its unAwakened parent, but the fruit is an exceptionally pale lavender.

If consumed raw by an unAwakened metahuman, the fruit has a chance to bestow temporary and unpredictable astral sight. This phenomenon is more common in areas with high background counts related to large-scale or traumatic deaths. Awakened characters are largely unaffected, though a few report difficulty casting health spells. Statistical evidence suggests that frequent consumption may make subjects more susceptible to HMHVV.

Ghost plum is more commonly distilled into liquor. The resulting ghost plum wine provides a more predictable effect, less prone to “bad trips” – albeit with a greater statistical correlation to HMHVV infection rates. It is popular in death-fixated youth cultures around the Pacific Rim. It’s also a ritual component for practices related to several death-aligned totem spirits.