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

In the wake of several injustices, a group of Native Americans began the Great Ghost Dance, which brought magic back to the world and generally fucked shit up. After a while people started growing long ears and horns and being unusually short and tall. Then a company sued for the right to carry mil-spec weaponry and won. Then Dragons woke up and started making power plays in organized crime, big business, and politics. All in all the basic gist is that it's about 60 years after now, there's magicians, dragons, big guns, immersive internet, extraterritorial corps, and lots and lots of violence.

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