I REALLY gotta get around to doing up a page or something for this sort of thing... Between answering "Is Shadowrun cool" and "What happened to FASA" emails... <laugh>
Ok.. First off, Shadowrun is very cool, IMNSHO. It's got a great world witha dynamic backstory, and the events and storyline progress as the books are published, rather than it beinga fairly static game.
No, it's not d20. As someone mentioned, there was indeed a sign at the FanPro booth at Gen Con last year that included the statement that "NO, we're not doing a D20 version". This was in response to a handful of WotC reps (And a few others) coming over and asking "When are you guys doing D20?" To be blunt, the d20 market is glutted with crap right now, and unless the product is D&D, it's not gonna survive for long.
A lot of good points have been raised about the overall style of the game. It's very freeform. You can play whatever you want. The setting is a nice mixture of Fantasy, with elves, dragons and magic, and Cyberpunk, with cyberware, hacking, and megacorps (Which are key to the entire Cyberpunk setting).
Combat and a lot of other stuff can get bogged down, but if you know the rules, it's not big deal. Mass combats don;t run any slower for it than they do for D&D, in general. Often, they can be far shorter, since SR is a bit deadlier a lot of times.
Overall, it's a great setting, and a good game to check out if you get the chance.
And for anyone that's interested and planning to be at Gen Con or Origins, I hav a team of GMs that handles the TOurnament and other SR games for FanPro. We'll be running a whole drekload of demo's and other games this year, plus doing something a little bit new that we're calling
Shadowrun 101.
The core idea is that we get a handful of Experts (Freelancers and writers for the Shaodwrun game) to do a short seminar on each of the major sections of the Shadowrun rules, giving an example of play and fielding questions about the rules, helping both new players learn the game and giving exstablished players and GMs answers to rules questions or ideas for using those rules more effectively in your games.
Watch either the official
Shadowrun Website or
Bull's Place, my own web site for more details and information about Shadowrun at the conventions...
Bull