Back when I was in college, a friend brought up a weird game that he picked up from some friends of his who worked for a publishing company in Chicago. It was weird because it had the audacity to mix elves, orcs and dwarves into a science fiction future inspired by movies like Bladerunner and books like Neuromancer. In case you haven't figured it out yet, this game was FASA's Shadowrun.
A couple of years before this, I had picked up William Gibson's groundbreaking novel Neuromancer to read on the flight to go up to college for my freshman year. If you weren't there at the time, it is hard to explain the impact of this book, as big (if not bigger) than Bladerunner. Suddenly science fiction was feeling a lot different from what it had previously felt like, and the genre with the strange name of cyberpunk started to make its first steps into the light.
It wasn't unusual for tabletop gamers to start pulling the ideas of cyberpunk into the games that they were running, and the people that I was gaming with at the time weren't unusual in this regard. We looked around in those pre-internet days for games that had elements of this genre. Games with strange names like Cyberspace from Iron Crown Enterprises, Cyberpunk from R. Talsorian Games and SpaceTime from Greg Porter's Blacksburg Tactical Research Center. Some meshed with our group and others didn't.
Shadowrun was also brought into the mix. At the time, the mixture of science fiction and fantasy was a strike against it with our group. We weren't as big on fantasy gaming as we were with other genres. The mechanics were a bit underwhelming for us, as well, not to mention the enormous number of dice that came into play. After that, I had tried the game a few times, and it still didn't click for me. Recently, one of the groups that I game with did a one-shot of Shadowrun 5E and it was a fun night for all of us. It probably still wasn't something that I would do regularly. The mechanics of the game had improved a great deal since those earlier editions, but it still wasn't there for me mechanically.
However, I think that has finally changed as Catalyst Game Labs have put out a new Shadowrun game called Shadowrun Anarchy. This isn't a replacement for Shadowrun 5E, but a concurrent edition of the game.
Based upon the Cue System rules that powers the Cosmic Patrol and Valiant Universe role-playing games published by Catalyst Game Labs, Shadowrun Anarchy uses a much lighter, more streamlined gaming system than what regular Shadowrun players might be used to. There are a lot of familiar elements to the game for existing Shadowrun fans: the use of pools of six-sided dice, the same attributes, the familiar Matrix and hacking rules and other things. Those things that are tried and true in Shadowrun, and have demonstrated to work are still there.
Now, the dice pools are a lot smaller. There are fewer skills in the game. There are fewer spells and cybernetic enhancements, but there are also pretty robust rules for converting from your Shadowrun 5E books into Shadowrun Anarchy. This means that people interested in Anarchy can still keep their Shadowrun 5E books…and Catalyst Game Labs can sell the 5E books to people who pick up the new Anarchy rules.
The Cue System in its previous incarnations was a pretty freeform game. Characters were made up with little mechanical impact. With Shadowrun Anarchy, the rules have stabilized and found their best expression.
There are a few speed bumps in the rules. The writing could be tighter, even as an experienced role-player with experience using previous versions of the Cue System I still had some places where I needed to re-read passages in order to get them straight in my head. The rules are solid, but the writing could have used another pass or two for clarity, or maybe some additional editorial oversight. This doesn't mean that the game is unplayable, or hard to understand, as a whole, but it just isn't as clear as it could be. My PDF had a couple of errors that stood out, and showed that it could have used some more time in the editorial phase of production.
Now, don't think that this means that the game isn't good. I'll be honest, editing is something that often falls flat in role-playing games, and while I think that we shouldn't just settle for poor editing it is a factor that all of us as gamers have to deal with.
Character creation is definitely the high point of this game, and much quicker than in the Shadowrun 5 rules. Depending on the "level," of the campaign (gang-level, street level and "prime" level), you are given a pool of points to spend on character attributes, and another for skills. You have a number of points for amps (those enhancements for characters that can come from magic or cybernetics). You are told how many weapons and pieces of equipment that your character can have.
In a sample run through of the character creation rules, it took me about 20 minutes to create a character. This was a lot shorter than the process in Shadowrun 5E, where we ended up deciding to just pick from a list of pre-generated characters instead of making them from scratch. There is also a robust list of templates of various character types common to Shadowrun games that you can pick from, if you would rather. Whether you create a character from scratch, or pick a template, you get characters that are more or less equivalent to each other, so there's not a lot of benefit to one or the other method.
Combat and hacking rolls are also simpler, and a Shadowrun Anarchy combat (or cyberhack) should take a lot less time than their Shadowrun 5E equivalent. The glitch die is still a part of Shadowrun Anarchy, however they come into play from spending plot points during conflicts.
On the negative there are a few things. One thing is that there are a few freeform elements to the Cue System that might cause trouble for people playing because there are no mechanics attached to them, and they don't really do anything in the game. Tags are mentioned throughout the game. They are one word, well, tags that are used to describe characters or stories or scenes. The problem is that is all they do. There's no real use for tags in the game. Cues, which is what the underlying rules are named after, are the same way, but they are longer phrases. Again they don't really have any mechanics to them. They're just suggested as shorthands to help you remember how to role-play your characters.
Do you need tags or cues? Not really. The game probably could have done away with them without anyone noticing that they were gone. Other than some people wondering why the system was named "Cue," I don't think that they would have been missed. The idea of having something like this is a good one, and I think that they could have added an element to characters in a similar vein to the aspects of the Fate System. Making them mechanical, and perhaps giving a Karma or Plot Point backing as a reward for playing in character would have made these things more important to the game.
Another problem that some may have is with the game using the term "narrative" to describe its approach to storytelling. Unfortunately, this use of the term can cause some confusion with games with a narrative priority like Apocalypse World or the Fate Core rules. Despite calling what players do during the game "creating a narrative," it is just another term for doing what everyone already does in most so-called traditional role-playing games. The player says what their character is doing, rolls some dice, and determines if the actions were successful or not. As we know, in narrative priority games the interaction of the rules and the characters are tightly integrated so that the actions within the story shape the direction of the story, and at times the world as well. Yes, this is a gross simplification of narrative priority games, but it really isn't the point of this review to go into all the ongoing schools of thought for this style of play.
The point is that the use of narrative in the game's rules can cause not only confusion on the part of people who want these sorts of rules, but it can cause them in those who might not want a narrative focus to their games. I think that this is a bit of confusion that could have been avoided with some changes to terminology within the rules.
I won't say that there aren't issues with the Shadowrun Anarchy game, but overall I think that the pros outweigh the cons. If you have always wanted to play Shadowrun, but thought that there was just too much game there for you, then I think that you should check out Shadowrun Anarchy. This game is a bit of a diamond in the rough, but I think that the right group and the right GM can make this game really sing. I am excited to get some playing of this game under my belt, and I hope that Shadowrun Anarchy is a success for Catalyst Game Labs, not only for the further game support that will come with success, but also because I think that the game will get the love and attention it needs to overcome some of the roughness in this first edition of the game.
