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)

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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.

It's set in a dystopian near future where megacorporations have taken over as the superpowers of the world, the world's political boundaries are shaken and fragmented, and 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, although some people may gear towards playing a particular archetype. 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.

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. This version is totally different than the other three versions. It does simplify a lot of mechanics, but it makes the character mechanics a bit more clunky, and tends to be a bit more restrictive in the resolution of conflicts. 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 allow hackers to do their thing without leaving the rest of the party inactive.

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 ICE 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