I hate three kinds of rules: redundant rules, rules that require maths, and rules that directly counteract against the story. I can’t imagine what they cut from it, because it seems like everything is here. That level of granularity – although it’s so granular it’s now unpleasant to experience, so perhaps grittiness is a better word, in as much as the bottom of a cup of coffee is gritty – is present in every level of the game. But if you’re just coming to the world now, that’s so much choice as to make informed decisions almost impossible. If you’ve been playing Shadowrun for the last ten or twenty years, it’s fine. That’s too much to take in as a new player. As a starting player, here, you’re expected to look over the list of potential vehicles and pick out twelve of them. This is a Rigger, one of the six basic roles you can take on in a Shadowrun team – they’re in charge of piloting vehicles from unmanned drones to tricked-out battletanks. You probably won’t be able to read all that, and that’s fine. Take a look at this sample starting character: SERIOUSLY. This is not the advanced, all-singing-all-dancing-hundreds-of-rules-for-a-specialised-class splatbook. In all of these examples, I want you to remember that this is the core book – the book should allow a gamesmaster to run a game with no extra written materials. I’m not against complexity in games, but I am against it when it’s the first thing that players come across. It is a Frankenstein’s Monster of a game, a cobbled-together list of in-jokes and leftover rules. In a game where you’re trying to make a legendary name for yourself. This is a BENEFIT you can purchase for your character. But, for the most part, they’re dinosaurs. There’s a thrill to pitting yourself against a ruleset and trying to wring the most effective characters out of it. There’s still a market for your Travellers and your Dark Heresies, of course, for hardbacked tomes that have rules for every eventuality and worldbuilding that covers every base. We don’t need massive blocks of stats and numbers to help us define a game world we need brisk, crisp rules that power reward behaviour and power stories. Now, these days we’re in something of a movement towards lighter games. So you’ve got near-future chipheads and goons struggling to survive in a world of chrome and neon and double-crosses whilst also, crucially, being trolls and elves and casting magic spells. This is the random personality table for NPCs, and almost all the personalities are awfulįor those who don’t know, Shadowrun is a combination of two great 80’s roleplaying tastes that taste great together – High Fantasy and Cyberpunk. Now – Shadowrun is a fucking joke, and here’s why. It’s filled me with such joy to go through and puzzle out why some of these rules are even in the book, and it’s going to provide me with hours and hours of confused fun yet. Firstly, I want to thank the chap who got me this massive book.
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