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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HellHound" data-source="post: 2872467" data-attributes="member: 3397">(sorry, my shortest game a day so far - I have very mixed feelings about Shadowrun)My first exposure to cyberpunk gaming was through a custom MegaTraveller campaign. Shortly thereafter, CyberPunk 2013 was released, and I started buying anything cyberpunk under the sun. The most famous of the cyber-style RPGs is of course Shadowrun. I only ever actually played first edition SR, although I’ve made characters and run a few mock combats and so on with SR3. The arrival of the sexy new SR4 hardcover in the mail yesterday, however, reminded me of our old games.For those who didn’t have a copy, First Edition ShadowRun tried very hard to be a cyberpunk RPG – it even had all the roles from the cyberpunk core book as character templates, without the special abilities. It had all the rest of traditional cyberpunk setting material – cybernetics, virtual reality hacking, smartguns, uber-corporations, and so on. But it also had all the D&D goodness of elves, dwarves, dragons and magicians.(getting ready for the flames)But it really wasn’t very cyberpunk in the end. Now I’m not saying it isn’t damn cool, but the resurgence of native magical traditions, the introduction of elves and dragons, and the awakened species taking over areas and healing the earth of the damage wrought by corporate western civilization just doesn’t have the flavour of cyberpunk for me. And it seems that at least one of the influential cyberpunk literary authors agrees.So anyways, as a gaming group of ex-D&D players now converted to CyberPunk, we grabbed hold of Shadowrun with gusto. Characters were made, home rules introduced, and many a stuffer shack was shot full of holes. In the back of the core book, there isn’t an adventure for SR1, not even a bunch of plot hooks like in CyberPunk, but a simple combat setup at a convenience store. That was the example of play, go into the convenience store, and get into a shootout with some robbers, and get sprayed by the randomly-generated contents of the stuff on the shelves when shots miss (Mmmm… Maraschino Chowder!).To the game world of SR, we added the skaven from warhammer, wolfen, goblins and changelings from Palladium and so on. In addition to a thousand stuffer shack massacres, a few serious games were played, including a one-shot where the party’s panzer gets shot up and they end up pulling into an Arcology in the desert to repair. Each player had two characters, one to stay back at the panzer and one to go out scouting as they try to figure out why there was no response inside the arco. Segue from Shadowrun to Aliens. It was fun, but we got tired of the system pretty quickly, especially with firefights in the stuffer shack including scenes of shooting one person in the head repeatedly with an uzi to no major effect. So, my brother (who was the real SR junky in the group) and I went through the effort of converting the whole game to the CyberPunk system, magic and all.Did I bother to rant about magic yet? Yeah, a wizard in SR1 was about as deadly as someone packing a minigun. Now, other characters COULD pack miniguns, so it was balanced, right? Except that in a roleplaying environment where you couldn’t carry a minigun into a bar, restaurant or corporate facility, you could still load in a few instant-kill blast mages without anyone knowing the difference.In the end, we only ended up using the SR to CP conversions a few times before ditching SR completely and going back to the darker future of CyberPunk.However, now that I’m playing with a group less intent on the feel of cyberpunk and more into D&D, I’m looking at SR4 with renewed interest. The essential story of cyberpunk (the dehumanizing effects of technology and the humanization of said technologies) can slip away and I can sucker them into the dystopian future of cyberpunk through the gateway drug of SR4.</blockquote>

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