![]() And when your group's getaway driver wants to know if the force from the grenade that blew up under their camouflaged van is enough to allow them to temporarily drive across the front of a building, you can feel comfortable saying "yes" - because you've already looked up what the force of impact is going to be when they land and ram into the killer clown gang's armored car at the end of the street. While I began several months ago by sticking to every bit of filler text in each campaign module I downloaded, at this point I feel comfortable deciding for myself, for example, that Shadowrun's suggested stats for monofilament weapons are "good enough" on those nights that you've suddenly decided your players need to fight a female ninja with cybernetic prehensile braids. It's taken me a little while to learn this, of course. The nice thing about the gamebook itself is that it performs the same alchemy: there's a table for everything, a theoretically close-ish answer to any question you might have, and enough pretty pictures to encourage you that everything is going to be okay. ![]() It may be that the system is so hopelessly complex that you realize that the rules and structures put in place by the sourcebook don't actually matter, and what's far more important is putting forth the idea that order is possible, suggesting that there is the potential for structure to form the backdrop of the game, when in practice this is absolutely false. In addition to choosing whether or not their characters will have pointy ears or curled horns, players also get to run around in multiple realities: the physical plane of 2070s Seattle, the magical plane of something-whatever, as well as their own version of the interwebs, an enchanced-reality mess straight out of 90's sci fi movies because it is actually-really-seriously called The Matrix, jesus christ.Īnd if you, for no apparent reason, find yourself planning a Shadowrun campaign without even fully understanding what the hell an RPG actually is, the good thing is that you kind of have room to do whatever you want. In short, Shadowrun is Dungeons & Dragons meets Blade Runner - a cyberpunk dystopia that is somehow also populated with orcs, elves, and dragons. ![]() My fellow players (all of whom have actual experience in the field of diceslinging) say Shadowrun is the crunchiest RPG they've ever played ("crunchy" = lots of math and lots of dice), and yet the interwebs tell me that this new edition is the most simplified version of SR ever released. And let's get it straight - RPGs are an area in which I've been a longtime nerd fetishist, without playing a single game until about a year ago when I convinced a nerdier nerd than I to help me roll up some mutant kangaroos for a round of Mutants Down Under.Ī year later, I now GM a weekly game of Shadowrun, despite having only played that one other game - not merely just the one game system, but only one other very short campaign of anything - in my entire life. I feel like I should own up and admit that although I haven't read this cover to cover, this is the one book I've had my nose buried in more than anything else the past few months. ![]()
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