Expression of Interest: Shadowrun

Hey everyone, as some of you know I have been diving into Shadowrun recently, now that my DnD game and to a lesser extent my L5R games are up and running. I have been looking to expand the games I am comfortable with outside of my normal NWoD buddle. That has now brought me back to Shadowrun. It has been a game system I have tried in the past but while I love the fluff, the crunch has been...challenging. After some good advise from a few members of the board here (thanks everyone!) I have given it another go. I have also found some resources that I think will be helpful (cheat sheets, chummer 5, a live stream). I have also been playing with the idea for a campaign recently and before I go diving head-on into the rules, I figure I had better check to see if there is any interest in Shadowrun and my game idea.

The game would be set in LA, you would all begin as Runners with basically zero rep, taking whatever jobs you can get to scrape by. This would probably mean that you would start in the slums around the reconstruction zones. As you gain rep, you would move up the food chain and join the bright lights of Hollywood. You would need to find a way to make yourself known in a city that has the attention span of a goldfish. Make it there? Well that's when the real fun would begin. You'd more than likely end up making runs to San Deiago, CAS, Amazonia and of course Atzlan. This would all be taking place in what I am going to go ahead and term the "Whistler Continuity". That basically means that you can't rely on existing canon events, relationships etc or future events to guide you, which in turn means you'll have to do real leg work to find stuff out. The majority of things will remain the same but all I am saying is you don't want to make assumptions and head down to Amazonia for example and find yourself face to face with a very pissed of Sirrurg.

Anyway, if there is an interest I will put together some setting info that covers the broad strokes that your characters would be aware of and dive into the rules. If not, I'll just go back to reading and enjoying the fluff. Thanks for reading!

Would you be open to Shadowrun noobs? That's a game/setting that always seemed cool as hell, but I never had the opportunity to fully dive into it.

Well, considering I am a noob myself, it would be hypocritical to say no ;)

I think I may have found another setting that might be more interesting and its an area of the world none of my games have ever been set in. How would you and kadeton feel about a game set in Lagos? Here's the introduction from the setting in the book to give you a taste.

In the poverty-stricken countryside of the Kingdoms of Nigeria, in the pirate-havens of West Africa, in the war-ravaged regions of the Mahgreb, or in the deadly Awakened jungles and savannahs of sub-Saharan Africa, people speak of Lagos as a city of opportunity with streets paved in gold, where every man drives shiny new Rover and women are draped with necklaces of gold and diamonds. God knows where the tall tales come from, but every day, thousands immigrate to Lagos—fleeing armed pirates, mercenaries, and guerillas, running away from villages decimated by never-ending wars, driven from their homes by the Awakened jungle and its denizens, hoping to escape slow starvation and crushing poverty. They flood Lagos, arriving with empty hands and hearts full of dreams.

They find that the streets aren’t lined with gold, but with garbage. That no one has a new car, not even the few rich crime-lords, and that women wear chains of slavery and death, not diamonds and pearls. In one of the largest cities of the world, there is n government, no order, and little to dream about. In the underground economy, a man’s life is worth less than a bag of rice. It’s a city where the localized politics change as quickly as the tide, where the flow of metahumanity runs into the city faster than the foul rivers, where neighborhoods and slums of thousands appear overnight. It’s also a place with more wealth than anywhere else in the Kingdoms of Nigeria or the surrounding nations. The Lagos free-for-all marketplace makes the city the perfect commercial crossroads where anyone—drug lords, corporate megaliths, government agents, pirates, runners—can fence, sell, buy, or trade any imaginable service, information, or goods, from blood diamonds to milspec equipment. Vibrant and filthy, full of dreams and despair, swarming with metahumanity’s worst vices and sins, the pipeline to Africa’s black gold and blood-stained diamonds, and all the riches and sins they draw—Welcome to Lagos.

First impression: that setting seems really bleak. It sounds like the kind of place that forces you to engage with its horrible elements, to (inadvertently or directly) support human trafficking, slavery, rape, murder, etc., by making it unfeasible to stick to any kind of principled existence without enduring immense personal suffering (or death).

I don't think I'd be comfortable playing a game that dark. It might be an okay starting point, but then I'd want the focus of the campaign to be on making Lagos a better place, and we'd need to make appreciable progress toward that goal in order for it to be bearable. If the essential premise of the setting was "Everything is awful here, and it's impossible to make it better" though, I doubt I could handle that.

This is the problem with my background in WoD and Gothic Horror games, I see stuff like that and go sweet that seems like an awesome setting. I think reclamation and improvement could be a really interesting idea though, particularly if it came from working with a Megacorporation and the best you hope to deliver is another bastion of megacorp power where wage slaves march to their beat. They may no longer be living in poverty but they now work 18 hour days in a cubical. That's just a different breed of horror. I will keep turning over ideas and see what I can work out. Or alternatively, if you are more comfortable we can just go with my initial LA idea.

Here's something that would sit comfortably between Lagos and LA as a setting, Chicago:

A common mistake these days is assuming a sprawl’s Downtown core is synonymous with the entire metroplex. That might apply to L.A. or Istanbul, but things are different in Chicago. When you mention Chi-Town to Jane Shadowrunner, you can almost see the trideo images playing in her head, the half-informed questions they want ask, and the look you get when you tell them ‘it’s actually not that bad, once you get the hang of it.’ The last part’s a lie, of course. People overlook the fact that Chicago proper is actually only part of the vast region that is the Greater Chicago Metroplex Area. After a decade of insect spirits, magic-eating bacteria, and warlords terrorizing the Downtown core, those images stick with people.

Now, before you get your hopes up, most of Chicago is still a dangerous, feral shit hole. You still walk twenty miles through Westside to avoid the Downtown core, and you should still think twice before conjuring a spirit at the lake front for fear of calling up something toxic. That said, Chicago is also still the perfect place to ditch the Star or the corpsec you just screwed over, end a smuggling run up from the Gulf, or get your paws on some near untraceable hardware.

Underneath the depressing sight that is Chicago proper and its grim reminders of a bad history, an undeniable undercurrent of restoration and encouragement is emerging from the Corridor— the buffer zone between the lawless CeeZee and the civilized but corp-controlled Chicagoland. Described as ‘a collective spirit of new beginnings’ by the optimistic pirate broadcasters, the eclectic and colorful collectives and communities in Chicago boast a rough but vivid frontier city atmosphere. Life, and business, still goes on. Chicago may be wild through the core, but it ain’t dead yet.

Now just to round it out, here's LA:

The view most runners have of LA comes straight out of the trids. Beautiful beaches, gleaming arcologies, bleeding-edge cars, and beautiful people as far as the eye can see. That’s the truth—well, minus the beaches—for a few hundred high-paid execs and nova-hot simstars. For the other 99.99 percent of Angelinos, LA is a simmering cauldron of tensions and underlying hatreds waiting to erupt, and no amount of media saturation can stop it. For the quick and the savvy it’s a place where millions of nuyen can be made in shockingly short amounts of time. It is also, and not coincidentally, the place where Horizon, the newest of the Triple-As, has set up shop. Therefore, it’s where Horizon duels it out with their newest rival, Aztechnology.

Who am I to tell you about LA you might ask? Well, these days I’m a simple talent scout. I find jobs for people in the sprawl. Once upon a time I was a bodyguard for a B-list-trying-to-be-A-list simstar by the name of Gary Cline. We’ll talk more about Gary later, but for now the important thing to know is that I got a front row seat to the rise of the newest, and most enigmatic, of the megacorps—Horizon. So: What do you need to know to survive in LA? The first thing is that what you may call LA is usually referred to by the locals as the LA sprawl, and it encompasses a whole lot more than what used to be the City of Los Angeles. As a whole, the LA sprawl stretches from Ventura and the valleys to the north all the way south to the bombed-out ruins of San Juan Capistrano, and from Catalina and the outlying raft communities in the west to Barstow in the east. If you could walk it, it would be more than two hundred kilometers on a side, but nobody, nobody, walks in LA.

The other thing you need to know about LA is that the "Twins," the two massive quakes that hit early in 2069 and brought Angel Town to its knees. The magical phenomenon known to locals as the Fall and the tsunami that followed allowed the waters to claimed about 80 percent of our city. Although huge efforts have been made to reclaim dry land, a significant portion of our city, most of the urban and industrial parts of old LA that used to run from the 10 Freeway in the north all the way south and east into Orange County, still lies ruined and flooded. Most outsiders still refer to this area as El Infierno, although the district once called El Infierno represents only a fraction of the total area that was levelled. About fifteen percent of LA’s population still remains in refugee camps, and the city has made little headway towards addressing the problem. Pueblo is erecting extensive prefab blocks to house refugees. What reclamation has occurred has been driven by the corporations at the expense of the city. Despite all our problems, tourists still flock to Fun City and Hollywood. The beautiful hopefuls still pour into our city, desperate for a chance at stardom. Regardless of how battered LA looks, Horizon continues to manage their worldwide interests from here. No matter what else is going on, the nuyen just keeps flowing.

It's not a bad setting, it's just hopelessly grim. One of cyberpunk's most compelling elements for me is the contrast between the haves and the have-nots, and the people (in this case Shadowrunners) who have a foot in both worlds but belong in neither. The Lagos setting sounds like a place where there aren't any "haves", so there's nothing to contrast against and nothing to strive for, just a desolate human wasteland of endless suffering and misery.

Chicago sounds a bit more my speed - still pretty post-apocalyptic, but with those glittering Corporate skyscrapers that make you think you could make it if you pushed your luck just one... more... time...

To be honest I was going to balance out Lagos a little more anyway. I agree the play between the haves and have nots in a good aspect of cyberpunk. I have flicked through Chicago a little more and I have to be honest, I am tossing up between Lagos and LA.

Yeah, cool. I think I reacted a bit strongly against the feeling that the Lagos setting builds on the whole "all of Africa is just a desolate war-torn hellhole" idea that crops up all the time in American media. If you're happy to balance that out by adding in some of the high-society side of things (which definitely exists in Lagos currently!), then I think magical-future-Nigeria could make for a super interesting setting.

Tell you what I'll do a write up for both and you guys can tell me which you would prefer. It will take me a bit to get my head around the rules so we have time.

Still with us details?

I started reading through the book, but it's just not taking right now. I think I'll sit this one out and follow from the sidelines.

Hey all!

I've been playing 4th Edition since 2010 or so, and have played in a brief 5E campaign. And although I don't have the bandwidth to GM, and I don't have the 5E core (but I could probably borrow it from a table mate), I'd be happy to play-along through a one shot or something and offer insight and guidance?

I played 5th edition a few years ago. Love the setting, although we played in Copenhagen instead of the normal Seattle. Kind of like the idea of Africa.... but the GM have a job of painting us a picture of the city as it is new ground for most of us (setting wise, not necessary game wise)

just so you know the bundleofholding.com is having a special right now on buying pdfs of 5th edition shadowrun if you are interested in checking it out.

When I bought the hardcover book, I also got a PDF version :)

I am thinking I am going to delay this until I can afford to pick up Better Than Bad, since it seems targeted at the kind of game that we would be looking at playing in Lagos.

Ooh, yes. Better Than Bad sounds great to me. :)