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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8665881" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 107: May 1995part 3/5Virtual Seattle: A third new Living setting this year?! They really are stepping the pace up. Unlike the Living Jungle, we have heard a few rumblings about Virtual Seattle in previous months, as they hashed out the details behind the scenes and persuaded the RPGA heads that it was worth supporting officially, but here's where they're making the big push to get players. It does have to be said that Shadowrun is particularly well suited to the linear mission-based style of adventures that they prefer in here. All your PC's have to be SINless shadowrunners living in Seattle, unable to get an above-board job because you don't have a legal ID. This means you do literally need to stick to the shadows if you want to survive, and keep on scrabbling for your next job, even if you do have some cool big guns stashed away for missions, because if the police stop you they can be as brutal as they like. On the plus side, you all know Ms Claudia Tyger, a prominent fixer who will be your agent, giving a good IC reason why you're assembled into different teams every mission with people you don't know and hopefully filtering out the worst of the treacherous Mr Johnson problem. So this is all much more tightly written than any of the D&D Living settings in terms of spelling out expectations for what you'll be doing, how you'll be doing it and making sure your characters have a clear reason to be going on adventures. It's also much stricter in terms of looking at all the material from the supplements so far and telling you which bits are allowed at character generation, which may be allowed later on if you discover it in an adventure, and which definitely will not be. It seems like this is a case where the passionate amateurs are doing better than the people for whom this is a full time job because they genuinely care about the details of what they're making. A very interesting development that I'm much more optimistic will get further follow-ups than the Living Jungle.Born To Run: Having spelled out the general details of the setting and how it'll differ from a home game, they go into more detail about character generation here. Everyone starts with decent competency in computer skills and street smarts, to ensure that people can engage with the basics of finding jobs without blundering around like a dumbass in seedy bars and getting shanked or falling for a basic sting operation. They're also more generous than usual with languages, obviously not wanting the hassle of PC's not being able to communicate with one-another. They do intend to be quite strict with tracking lifestyle costs and need for medical treatment if injured though, which will eat into your ability to hoard your nuyen. So this actually makes characters better in some ways than going strictly by the book, rather than just slapping on restrictions to the more broken gear & magic, and seems to have a clear idea of what kind of game they want to encourage. This is actually quite exciting to read about. Hopefully that extra care at the start'll pay off and they won't need to add on more restrictions later, apart from as a response to new supplements.Primed Runners: If you don't have the patience for all that point juggling and just want to get down to the action, here's five pregens for you to use as is or engage in minor ability shuffling to make your own. Sorcerer, Shaman, Physical Adept, Samurai and Rigger. Just pick a race, add on the appropriate modifiers and you're good to go. In the process they remind us that magic-using characters need a lot more XP to reach their full power than muggles in this system. Let's hope they'll be running enough adventures that you can make some progress and they won't put an artificial cap and force you to make a new one if you survive more than a few years.</blockquote>

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