Shadowrun

Shadowrun was my first real roleplaying game. While I’d played BattleTech before and I knew about Dungeons & Dragons growing up, Shadowrun was my real first introduction to tabletop roleplaying. So you can imagine that I have high expectations for a new edition of the game of cyberpunk and urban fantasy. The good news is the rules for this edition are probably the most streamlined with all the depth I’d expect without the unnecessary complications that made previous editions feel intimidating. A quick primer for those who may not know about the thirty-year-old game. Shadowrun takes place in a world about sixty years in the future from whenever the book in question was written (give or take six months). Magic returned to the world in 2011 bringing with it dragons, elves, dwarves, orks, trolls, mages, shaman, spirits, and more. Meanwhile, megacorporations began to dominate a world of sociopolitical change, gaining extraterritoriality and becoming almost nation-states unto themselves. The internet evolved into the Matrix, a world of wireless augmented and virtual reality and permeates every aspect of daily life, for good or for ill. You play as shadowrunners, people with very useful skills and abilities who exist outside the oppressive system and off the grid who function as deniable assets in the constant competition between the megacorporations. Your team is usually hired by a Mr. Johnson (a generic pseudonym for corporate executives) to perform or prevent acts of corporate espionage like stealing data or prototypes, extracting or protecting key employees, sabotaging projects or research, or basically any other task the corporations need doing that they don’t want to dirty their hands with themselves. Right out of the gate, this rulebook makes its writing tone clear – this is a very conversationally-written book as opposed to the almost technical manual level of coldness you see in many other roleplaying rulebooks. The book even tells you what chapters you...