Shadowrun deserves better

[Ralif Redhammer]

Shadowrun Anarchy is a more lightweight and a bit more narrative version made by CatalystLabs so official.
This is the character sheet in whole and as you can see, considerably less crunchy.
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Otherscape is Son of Oak's mythical cyberpunk game which is a refinement on their City of Mist. Has nothing to do with Shadowrun except that it can be used to play it (and do so really good).

Shadowrun Anarchy's slimmer design makes me a fan of it. I do hope that 2e makes character creation a bit less crunchy. It was still more work than I want in a game to put together a new character. Once you get up and running, at the least, it's pretty smooth.

When looking at things from the past, I think it's best to try to place them within the cultural context of when they were produced. That certainly doesn't mean we should excuse bigotry nor does it make the work immune from criticism. They tried, they got some things right, and they stumbled over other things.

I think that their hearts were in the right place, but there was still a lot of learning and unlearning that needed to happen. When you look at the depictions of non-Western cultures in D&D at the time, for example, things were a lot worse. Likewise, I'm not a fan of people saying "It was the 80s/90s/00s" as shield against discussion and criticism. It's important to discuss those failures, because that's how we grow.

 

[500 Toads]

SRA2.0 character generation isn't super crunchy, but the core rules do expect that players will want to be a bit creative and use the provided framework to create "Shadow Amps" as their important gear ( whether literally gear, or cyberware, or spells, vehicles, etc) that reflects different mechanical effects and narrative effects. There's guidelines about all sorts of properties and how much they affect the amp's "rating" and thus cost. Attributes, skills, specializations, spells. all sorts of amps... all boil down to a nuyen cost.

It doesn't come with a huge "gear porn" section with a gazillion specific examples for you -- there's are examples, but it's not on the order of the old catalog-ish supplements. There's a fan-made "Shadow Amps Expanded List" freely available on DTRPG with a bunch of suggested ones, for those who want to choose from a list rather than make their own.

The core rulebook isn't yet available to a general audience (non-backers) yet AFAICT -- that's up to Catalyst -- but people who did back it have created some online tools, spreadsheets etc. which get discussed at Reddit - Please wait for verification -- so if you're curious, you can find threads on character creation tools and what-not.

 

[Staffan]

Shadowrun was cool in the 80s and 90s but suffered some severe problems with it's portrayal of Indigenous populations. I remember thinking back during 1E that for the populations they listed, every girl on the rez I knew would have ben having 10-20 babies starting more or less right then as I was in high school... and for all future generations getting knocked up by age 14 or so at the latest, with quintuplets... (whereas the White girls I was hanging out with would all have to be infertile).

I have a vague recollection that much of the populations in the indigenous-controlled areas of North America consist of "immigrants", i.e. people without any blood ties to various tribes but who either moved there or already lived there when things got shifted around and didn't want to move.

 

[500 Toads]

I have a vague recollection that much of the populations in the indigenous-controlled areas of North America consist of "immigrants", i.e. people without any blood ties to various tribes but who either moved there or already lived there when things got shifted around and didn't want to move.

The core book from the first edition indicates that reservations were established for non-tribal people and corporations who remained within the Native American Nations (NAN) territory; and that the most backwards people within the area governed by one of the major players (the Salish-Shidhe Council) are the tribes of non-native people who fetishize their concepts of how natives lived hundreds of years ago and reject modern technology.

At least as of 4E canon, the SSC opened their borders to all metahumanity pretty early in the timeline (roughly a decade after the Treaty of Denver that established the NAN as a separate entity), many of whom either joined existing tribes or created their own.

I think it's mostly the elven strongholds (in particular, Tír na nÓg’; and for a long while, Tír na nÓg’) that canonically are highly homogeneous and exclusive, demographically.

 

[aramis erak]

Shadowscum has an unfortunate second potential reading or I'd suggest that instead. ShadowScum?

Uhm... innuendo achieved.

IDK if that helps.

Not enough...
Hyphenate: Shadow-Scum. But that only helps in print.

 

[Kichwas]

Oh, nice. Otherscape looks fire. I'm familiar with PBTA and tags in other games. What do you mean PBTA-like but tab-based? Like are there moves, but they are based on the tags?

So I don't know PBtA much - this comes from what people tell me about it and then comparing that to OtherScape and Legend in the Mist.

Your character in the 'Mist' games (OtherScape, Legend in the Mist, and partially City of Mist) has no numeric ratings on the sheet (this is partly false - the sheets do have a 'status ranking' box somewhere to track when you get something like a stacking condition).

There's no ancestry/species/race, no class, no levels, no feats, skills, etc.

Just tags. Essentially a one sentence single line description of something.

In game, as you do things, you roll dice using the PBtA method, and add in tags that either give you a bonus or penalty to the roll. Any tag that fits the situation can be added. The only way to 'advance' in the game is to find ways to add your negative tags.

So you might have tags like:

• "back alley hacker"
• "cyberspace AI contacts"

- "known hacker"

In hacking a government database in Cairo - you could trigger all 3 of those for a net +1 to you roll by roleplaying that you're hanging out in a cafe in some slum based market, talking to your AI friend based out of Sudan who wrote an old version of the database you're breaking into, but the government of the country it's in is slowly closing in on your alias.

And then the GM might add in a situation tag:
+ Working for a Cyber Djinn

A magical Djinn from cyberspace hired you, and gave you enough details to get an edge on this mission.

So you roll your PBtA 2d6, and add 2.

In any given situation, you'd be running down your tags and seeing which ones fit the current narrative of the roleplay, and then triggering those for a die roll. That is done instead of looking at attributes, skill lists, class abilities, and so on.

Even combat works like that. If you get hit it might apply a tag of 'torn leg muscle' - and now any roll involving your legs has a penalty. Stack that penalty (and penalties that are close enough to be relevant - like say "bleeding out" and "concussion" or whatever up to 6 and your character undergoes a 'permanent alteration' - which might be getting killed, or it might be whatever fits.

 

[Kichwas]

On the one hand, Shadowrun tried. On the other hand, a lot of the ideas and language around inclusivity just weren't present in the late 80s/early 90s. They made some pretty rough mistakes. They featured indigenous peoples, but in ways still heavily indebted to stereotypes.

Exactly. It looked good at the time, but aged poorly.