Shadowrun

Shadowrun
RPG published by Catalyst Game Labs
Rule System	Custom d6 Based (Roll over Dice Pool)
Authors	Bob Charrette Paul Hume Tom Dowd
First Publication	1989 (1st edition) 1992 (2nd edition) 1998 (3rd edition) 2005 (4th edition) 2009 (20th anniv. ed.)

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Shadowrun can best be described as Cyberpunk meets High Fantasy. Or what would happen if William Gibson and Anne McCaffrey had a love child. But being mindful of the fact that William Gibson hates Shadowrun.

It's set in a dystopian near future where megacorporations have taken over as the superpowers of a world whose political boundaries are shaken and fragmented. Players play Shadowrunners, the criminal elite: expert thieves, saboteurs and assassins, who sell their skills to whatever megacorps or police bid the highest. Dragons and Magic play just as big a part of life as computers and guns. In fact, they often overlap.

Shadowrun was created by FASA games in 1989. It is currently in it's 4th edition, being published by Catalyst Game Labs.

Despite being next to each other alphabetically on this Wiki, Shadowrun has nothing to do with the Tau general Shadowsun.

Story

If you've played Earthdawn, this might make a little more sense, it used to the prehistory of Shadowrun. So, the game is set in the Sixth World, when magic has returned to Earth. It all starts with a group of Native Americans who, after being placed in concentration camps, began the Great Ghost Dance and set off several volcanoes around North America. They walked out of the camps and pretty much ignored the bullets shot at them. The world goes downhill pretty quickly from here. The first wave of Goblinization hits around this time and people start turning into Orcs or Trolls (talk about awkward), and eventually Elves and Dwarves start showing up as well.

During a food shortage in the UCAS (United Canadian and American States), one company was transporting some industrial waste and the people thought they had food in there and attacked the transports. The company's security forces fought them off (lethally) and their actions were later affirmed by the Corporate Court. Through a series of legal cases, corporate power quickly expands until each corporation is essentially its own nation (owning the ground its buildings are on and issuing passports and the like too). Corporations often have many, many subsidiaries that make many diverse products. One of the main conceits of the setting is that these corporations need some extra-legal help for sabotage, espionage and various deniable and covert operations.

A few years ago, the Matrix (the new term for the Internet) crashed horribly thanks to some 3e metaplot adventures and many corporations and nations lost the identities (SINs or System Identification Numbers) of their citizens. The SINless are basically non-people who eek out a living on the edge of society and are afforded few rights (Most Shadowrunners are SINless). On the upside, the crash allowed them to re-tool the Matrix infrastructure to use more wireless and augmented reality, rendering Deckers an outdated concept.

Gameplay

Contrary to the convention of most RPGs, Shadowrun doesn't have a class system. Characters are basically the sum of their skills. People use a priority system or a point build system (depending on edition and sourcebooks in play) to create their characters, assigning values to racial features, magic ability, and statistic values. All functions in Shadowrun are based on a related skill or stat rating, or a combination thereof. To resolve issues, people roll a number of dice equal to their rating, and resolve successes based on that.

Despite the system being classless, there are still system-enforced broad archetypes. They way they are enforced is by making the players choose whether their character will be Awakened (or Emerged) or implanted with useful implants. This is governed using a special attribute, Essence, representing the holistic integrity of a character. Any implantation reduces said integrity, and lowers Magic for mages and adepts or Resonance for technomancers.

Typical character roles

Runner teams, as any teams build up of professionals, tend to have their members highly specialized. Roles are varied and often combined, but generally most teams have characters with those roles:

Muscle - either heavily cybered street samurai (often just called "sammy") or Awakened adepts, whose unusual physical abilities depend on the magic they channel through their bodies and their self-belief. Muscle deals with direct physical threats, and are expected to be capable of dealing and soaking massive amounts of damage, coupled with high Initiative Passes count, allowing them to act more frequently in the real world than their opposition. It is also a good idea for Muscle to have some infiltration skills to cover up Shadows and at least marginal intimidation skills. Despite the popular Hollywood image, making samurai and adepts into actual sword-wielding melee warriors is only encouraged if you want to see your character dead.

Shadow - physical infiltration specialists. Those are usually either special adept builds or non-Awakened characters using specialized implants. Naturally, Shadows are expected to be as unnoticeable and observant as possible, making implants and powers that allow them to hide from sight or perceive in unusual diapasons highly popular. Shadows should also be capable of full-on breaking and entering, requiring some hardware skills and specialized gear.

Face - the social player of the party. The Face is the one who deals with the employers, gets the gear needed for the job, has all the right contacts and the cunning plans to come ahead of the opposition. Many Faces are also the ones to hire the hideouts for the team; and some of them make excellent impersonators, using magic or specialized implants to assume disguises. While Face is a relatively straightforward role mechanically, it is frequently the most intellectually tasking and roleplaying-heavy, since it often falls on the Face to arrange the team's planning.

Mage - the astral cover. Mages are all Awakened, but still come in different traditions and specializations. While some rely on direct-effect spells which allow them to whip out bagfuls of damage dice, fly, dodge bullets and more, others count on summoned spirits to do the job for them, without risking direct opposition or at least having some heavy support at hand. Mages' ability to astrally project makes them valuable assets for scouting, especially long-distance one. Given enough time and resources, they can get almost everyone in the world with ritual spellcasting, and naturally, Mages are also the only magical healers a shadowrunner team can hope to get. There's also absolutely no defense against a Mage except another Mage, so the runners depend on their mage's counterspelling abilities and guard spirits heavily.

Hacker - the Matrix specialist. Hackers are either un-Emerged boys with a head full of ware and a commlink the cost of a house or Emerged technomancers, using their mage-like skills and powers to conquer the Matrix with program and sprite (which is essentially the Matrix analogue of a spirit). A shadowrunning team depends on the Hacker to find the info Face's contacts can't or won't provide, break into opposition's hosts to fiddle with security systems, intercept their data exchange or do the rest of other things a hacker can be doing with a computer. Most hackers are known to be couch potatoes, but between wireless networks and wireless-inhibiting building walls, they have a good reason to have some actual infiltration skills. Hackers also frequently moonlight as Riggers.

Rigger - the drone specialist and usually the driver for the party. Riggers are mostly the ones to pimp out rides for shady shadowrunning biz, and their swarms of drones can rival Muscle and Shadows at their jobs. While rigging presupposes spending a lot of your time "jumped in", wearing your drones or vehicles as your own skin, many Riggers also double as hackers. High logic needed for hacking and rigging also makes Hackers and Riggers the most likely candidate for the first aid doc for the team.

Editions

First Edition

Released in 1989. The introduction to the world of 2050. The game's basic mechanics are introduced, the tone is set, and along with it come a ton of sourcebooks.

Second Edition

Released in 1992. The year is 2053 now, updates some equipment for the players, tweaks a couple of rules, removed some unbalanced spells and equipment. Basically a refined 1E Shadowrun.

Third Edition

Released in 1998. The year is 2063 and more new goodies are available. Magic and Matrix rules were altered in this version, but all sourcebooks from all editions still work with no serious hassles.

Fourth Edition

Released in 2005. The year is 2071. The system has seen a major rehaul, one fourth editions tend to bring.

A lot of mechanics have been simplified, starting right from the dicerolling: rolling a dice pool with variable target numbers and Rule of Six always in order, hoping to get at least one roll over the target number, has been replaced by rolling a pool of dice with the target number preset, and then counting successes - dice with numbers rolled over said target number. Rule of Six is only used for rare special cases, and lets a player reroll the dice with numbers rolled below the target number.

The new system is disputed to be more restrictive in the resolution of conflicts and character options. The new rule system also naturally renders most of the crunch from older edition books obsolete; the fluff contained in them, however, is still fully adhered to.

Also, the Matrix rules have undergone a complete overhaul (justified in the fluff as a shift to wireless following a network crash just after the 3e splatbook "System Failure") to hypothetically allow hackers to do their thing without leaving the rest of the party inactive. Still, hackers prefer to break into systems out of the heat of combat if at all possible, so, while the issue has been made less severe, it is still present.

The most discussed difference from the previous editions is, surprisingly, the change of street jargon. While justified by almost ten in-game years passing since the third edition, a good deal of old-time players still believe that replacing "deckers" with "hackers", "cyberdecks" with "commlinks", "chummer" with "omae" or "otaku" with "technomancer" is too severe a change.

20th Anniversary Edition

An update for the 4th edition, it's a basically a re-release of the core rulebook in full color with all the errata applied, new (and good) artwork and more structured layout. It is still fully compatible with SR4E, and the errata for the original release of the core rulebook can still be found on the Catalyst site.

Other Products

Video Games

Four video games exist for Shadowrun, three of which are available in America, and two of which are good.

The first came out in 1993 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and shamelessly rips off chunks of William S. Gibson's "Neuromancer" (right down to the name of protagonist Jake Armitage) as the player deals with the fallout of a run gone horribly wrong. While enjoyable for casualfags, more serious fans of the franchise have denounced Shadowrun SNES for playing loose with magic, cyberware, and the fact that having a bunch of the latter is supposed to do serious shit to your expertise in the former.

The second was released in 1994 for the Sega Genesis, and is widely held as a worthy use of the license. In this particular game, protagonist Joshua must piece together the puzzle behind his brother Michael's death on a run into Native American-held territory, making a name for himself in the shadowrunning biz along the way. Fans cite the expanded tactical opportunities (read: being able to move around and dodge bullets in doing so) and immersive Matrix depiction (real-time combat against unique IC types and messing with a variety of system nodes) as this game's greatest advantages over its SNES counterpart.

The third game is the Japanese-only one, made in 1996 for the Sega CD and set in Japan rather than Seattle. It plays more like a text adventure (i.e. Sega CD smash hit Snatcher) and its rare action sequences suffer for it.

The last video game adaptation of Shadowrun came in 2007 for XBox 360 and Microsoft Vista. While being designed for Vista should be fail in itself, Microsoft went to great lengths to fuck with the storyline in order to make a dime-a-dozen FPS out of the license - so much that the Sixth World Wiki claims it "may be more accurately described as a game loosely based on Shadowrun." Since Catalyst holds a decent bit of clout with the Sixth World Wiki and other parts of Dumpshock, it can safely be assumed that Microsoft's treatment of the Shadowrun franchise has been officially disavowed.

Software

An IRC bot with some Shadowrun functions coded by /tg/ anonymous