Three decades of playing roles
I’m pretty sure I began playing Dungeons & Dragons around 1978 – after Star Wars but before Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I vaguely recall hearing about it from school friends, but have a clear memory of sitting in a sickbed opening the box my mom had purchased for me. The game came with cardboard chits you were supposed to shake in a cup for random rolls, but there was a dice accessory available that she got me soon after: 5 Platonic solids of very very cheap plastic. The 20-sided die was marked 1-10 (0, really) twice: you had to mark half the faces with a colored Sharpie to know which ones were 11-20.
And thus began a minor addiction…
Never deal with a Dreadlord
Just watched Unlimited Escapism, Vol. 0, by “Baron Soosdon”. 14 minutes of wild visuals and trance music… nicely soothing on a Woden’s Day evening.
This image of Petite Nikita, however, made me want to run a Shadowrun (2nd ed.) game set in a highly-technological future of Azeroth…
I doubt that anyone would be thrilled to find that their back-alley street doc was an undead Forsaken 🙂
Sixth World v4
So FanPro is going to release Shadowrun 4th Ed. in August. Since I never got around to getting much for 3rd Ed., this isn’t as painful to my wallet as it might be; and I’m not the type to go all “end-of-the-world” just because a game company changes a game I like.
Some notes from their blurb:
* The core mechanics are completely revised to be simpler and more streamlined for quicker, easier and more consistent play.
* Matrix 2.0! An all-new level of wireless “augmented reality” overlays the real world, unleashing hackers to be mobile digital wizards.
* The year is 2070 five years since the System Failure took down the old Matrix, nine years since the passing of the comet unleashed wild and unexplained magic in the world. The Sixth World has changed. Some of the players are familiar, but there are new faces – and new forces – at work in the shadows.
* Complete rules and world information in one volume playable the day you buy the book!
Simpler core mechanics? Uh-oh. After the oopses in 1st Ed., Shadowrun’s core mechanic became pretty dang easy. Simple enough to run fast, just complex enough to easily simulate various challenges and results. This seems a lot like fixing something that wasn’t broken.
IMHO, major Matrix changes have been desperately needed since 1st Ed. Deckers have never functioned well as part of their character groups, and the system bore little resemblance to any sane method for using computers. The Matrix has also suffered from the SF problem of reality quickly surpassing technologies proposed for six decades from now. A re-work is a great idea.
The Matrix goes down? I would think that in the mid-21st century, that would be just short of apocalyptic for world civilization. I mean, imagine today’s turmoil if every means of electronic communication failed for a few days… OTOH, major changes to a game world can be good for it sometimes, allowing new players to jump in and long-term players to get interested again.
One-book gaming: this is part of what sold me the original Shadowrun, back in the day. It helped sell me Paranoia XP, as well. I hate that if I want to buy any d20 game, I have to own a few 3.5th Ed. D&D books first. Good for FanPro!
I’ll buy it, I know I will. But as always, when I GM, I reserve the right to throw out the bits I don’t like.
