|
You also knew that it was a Findley-written adventure when it started raining physad trolls with weapon focus pole axes from the ceiling, backed up by double-digit threat rating grunts as bonus chaff… …because he kind of assumed that the players would be powergaming assholes that needed equivalent nukes to be challenged. 
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 00:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 16:09 |
|
|
Dawgstar posted:His other one, 2XS, is really good too. Does a lot with the insect spirits. I read 2XS when I did that novel dive a few years back, but I feel like House of the Sun is one of those rare sequels that surpasses the predecessor in every way. Findley has a special place in my heart, reading Shadowplay in 5th grade was my first encounter with Shadowrun (outside of seeing the games get reviewed in EGM), and I ended up picking up a used copy of Shadowrun 2nd Ed. the next year, which was my gateway drug into RPGs. Now, 25+ years later, I'm a professional writer and I feel like a lot of the reason for that came from the creative frameworks that RPGs provided for me as a kid, and I guess I can trace some of that back to Nigel Findley. edit: aww yeah let's goooo 
Vulpes Vulpes fucked around with this message at 02:34 on May 1, 2021 |
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 02:04
|
|
|
...this means that Black Cat has been one big Shadowrun. They're even breaking into a metaplane!
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 07:23
|
|
|
Vulpes Vulpes posted:Now, 25+ years later, I'm a professional writer and I feel like a lot of the reason for that came from the creative frameworks that RPGs provided for me as a kid, and I guess I can trace some of that back to Nigel Findley. Then I fully expect to see Felicia talking about having a jander at some point. 
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 15:04
|
|
|
I have definitely used "jander" in my writing in the past, but I don't think it ever made it into any of my comics. "Kick artist" is another great term, though I can't remember if that was a Findleyism or not.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 15:44
|
|
|
I certainly never saw it anywhere outside of Findley's stuff, save that it was adopted as another term for assassin in other SR books as well sometimes. (The Underworld book, at the least, which was written years after he passed.)
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 16:34
|
|
|
lol speak of the devil
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 17:14
|
|
|
Vulpes Vulpes posted:I read 2XS when I did that novel dive a few years back, but I feel like House of the Sun is one of those rare sequels that surpasses the predecessor in every way. Findley has a special place in my heart, reading Shadowplay in 5th grade was my first encounter with Shadowrun (outside of seeing the games get reviewed in EGM), and I ended up picking up a used copy of Shadowrun 2nd Ed. the next year, which was my gateway drug into RPGs. I still have a couple of Hilroy exercise booklets in my basement with my ancient conversion of Shadowplay into an adventure module. Really liked that book a lot.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 19:50
|
|
|
Vulpes Vulpes posted:lol speak of the devil lmao
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2021 20:21
|
|
|
"The fragging bakeware."
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2021 18:59
|
|
|
I kinda lost a bet with my friends, and now I have to run a game for them. They gave me two options: Kult, or Shadowrun. As much as I believe one can run a good Kult game without veering into the edgelordy poo poo, Shadowrun is an old favorite of mine. The last edition I played was 3rd ed, though, and I loved it to pieces. Now that the 6th is out and 5th is well-established (I assumed), which one would be good for a returning player?
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2021 03:16
|
|
|
Sephyr posted:I kinda lost a bet with my friends, and now I have to run a game for them. They gave me two options: Kult, or Shadowrun. As much as I believe one can run a good Kult game without veering into the edgelordy poo poo, Shadowrun is an old favorite of mine. Second Ed 
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2021 03:27
|
|
|
Sephyr posted:I kinda lost a bet with my friends, and now I have to run a game for them. They gave me two options: Kult, or Shadowrun. As much as I believe one can run a good Kult game without veering into the edgelordy poo poo, Shadowrun is an old favorite of mine. the one you're familiar with
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2021 03:28
|
|
|
Sephyr posted:I kinda lost a bet with my friends, and now I have to run a game for them. They gave me two options: Kult, or Shadowrun. As much as I believe one can run a good Kult game without veering into the edgelordy poo poo, Shadowrun is an old favorite of mine. Definitely not 6th, probably not 5th either. If you like 3rd and have the books, run 3rd and have a ball.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2021 03:33
|
|
|
Sephyr posted:I kinda lost a bet with my friends, and now I have to run a game for them. They gave me two options: Kult, or Shadowrun. As much as I believe one can run a good Kult game without veering into the edgelordy poo poo, Shadowrun is an old favorite of mine. If you've already played and liked third, play third. Fourth is better in some ways and worse in others, use it if you want a change.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2021 04:06
|
|
|
Tsilkani posted:Definitely not 6th, probably not 5th either. If you like 3rd and have the books, run 3rd and have a ball. Seriously, though, this right here. Play what you know. The only SR splat books I have outside of 2nd Ed are the magic and matrix books. I only bought them for reading the fluff and seeing the world’s meta story. I really like the setting is why. I did run some AD&D games for over a year after me and a friend in high school converted to use the Earthdawn/SR magic systems. I hate the whole spell system because I never saw Gandalf memorize spells or Morgan LaFey dig guano from her pocket to blast some fool. My mages knew magic and suffered when they tried too hard. From nosebleeds to temporary psychosis to fainting in a fight, much better than losing your life because you cast your fireball at a bugbear and had nothing but cantrip and create water against the black dragon warm he was employed by. Did the same with GURPS 1st ed magic and CthulhuPunk. It’s kinda silly to wake up hours early to try and plan which of 100 spells you attempted to memorize and hope you picked right for the day. Matrix books because I read Gibson and felt (feel) cheated that in 2021 our augmented systems don’t even need a data jack implant and my double corneal transplants just will be dead tissue instead of Zeis Ikons with lowlight/thermal vision and flash compensators. I’m 46 with low level Tardive Dyskinesia after 20 years of psyche meds and I blame it on my first generation move-by-wire conversion. I wanted to hack on a terminal because of Renraku’s Black IC. I want carbon fiber bones and smartlink induction for my Ares Predator instead of calluses from yard work on my palms. I want to move in bullet time years before the original Matrix movie, and to “hitch a ride” with my elven decker to a custom sculpted African RTG. Born too late for the frontier, and decades too early for 3Jane and the Straylight Run, with my dead mentor’s electronic laugh being all creepy as poo poo. At least I made it past VITAS and Goblinization, though. Small miracles still count for something. Tsilkani posted:Definitely not 6th, probably not 5th either. If you like 3rd and have the books, run 3rd and have a ball.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2021 04:15
|
|
|
I loved Earthdawn's magic system. I really wish it was a more popular. I'm literally reading 4e on my iPad every night before I go to bed. Nobody to really talk about it or play with, though.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2021 04:49
|
|
|
ninjoatse.cx posted:I loved Earthdawn's magic system. I really wish it was a more popular. I'm literally reading 4e on my iPad every night before I go to bed. Nobody to really talk about it or play with, though. I know. I have a bunch of overachieving friends living all around the world in fascinating jobs from CDC management to a NASA “so smart he gets paid to think poo poo up.” I get email from most of them at the very least once a week and some multiple times a day. I haven’t had as bad a time as others over the year, and since getting an actual internet connection (super rural Tennessee 4G LTE broadband), I get to video chat with them and see their kids and spouses even though some I haven’t hugged since the 2010s. Why all this drivel? I played ttg in high school, college, and a group in medical school. They are solid, help-you-move people, but the thing is…they are adults! They have kids and jobs, not to mention spouses that demand time. Many of us (including the women) are nerds and grew up RPing, but just can’t get away for a set block of time in a specific weekday to roll dice or work through a campaign. I still buy SR stuff, and I collect many AD&D- era settings (I no longer collect Planescape because I finally have everything they put out specifically for it  ) I don’t collect for resale or to “preserve” them, I like the fluff! To the point that a lady I’ve known since 12 saying I couldn’t afford to collect comics because if I had a Spider-man 1 I’d have to have two: one to sit in plastic and one to actually open to read! Best supplement I ever read is GURPS 1st Ed CthulhuPunk. I just bought Eldritch Chrome on my iPad and diving into it tonight! I’m so excited it’s like Christmas around here! I cannot wait for bedtime I feel bubbly. A lot of CthulhuPunk ties into SR, especially the expanded magical world. I’m just hoping EC lives up to my hopes…high tech vs. high magic has always been my favorite, and that’s why SR has always been my second favorite setting after Planescape (which SR cyborgs and combat mages in Dark Sun or Ravenloft jumping into a portal “escaping” to a Blood War skirmish in Archeron is my jam!). Have any splat books come out for 6e yet? Mainly interested in magic/matrix or even cyberware are the best.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2021 16:41
|
|
|
way too horny tho
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2021 05:03
|
|
|
I'm gearing up to run 3rd for some people online, because it's the edition I know and was in fact my first rpg.
|
|
#
?
Jun 4, 2021 21:30
|
|
|
Bullbar posted:I'm gearing up to run 3rd for some people online, because it's the edition I know and was in fact my first rpg. Best of luck. The people in your group who obsess about statistics will think it's absurd, but it plays very well.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2021 05:06
|
|
|
Yeah, we're 2 sessions into our 3rd edition campaign. I GM'd a ton of 2nd, and the bulk of my play experience was 4th, and 3rd is quickly becoming my favorite and go-to edition. It plays much smoother than 2nd, sometimes unexpectedly so. Why was 4th necessary again? I feel like a wireless matrix book to rewrite some of those rules and update for the direction modern tech went after 1995-7 would've been all that was needed, imho.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2021 12:14
|
|
|
Finster Dexter posted:Why was 4th necessary again? Gotta sell more books.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2021 12:38
|
|
|
Bullbar posted:I'm gearing up to run 3rd for some people online, because it's the edition I know and was in fact my first rpg. Oh, nice. It's also the one I would run if I ever run Shadowrun again. It's kludgy, but it's my kludgy and I know how it works.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2021 13:32
|
|
|
Tippis posted:Gotta sell more books. Well that and the post-FASA rightsholders had an urge to 'update' the setting to the expected futurism of the 90's... then it went to CGL partway through.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2021 22:20
|
|
|
Shadowrun had to acknowledge the existence of wifi, it's crazy to keep everything wired only.
|
|
#
?
Jun 5, 2021 22:37
|
|
|
Shadowrun was always the fantasy future of the 80s and making it the fantasy future of the mid-aughts produced a functionally different setting.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 03:59
|
|
|
They actually did have wireless in third, but it had so many restrictions that it was kind of an ace up your sleeve type deal.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 04:58
|
|
|
wiegieman posted:Shadowrun had to acknowledge the existence of wifi, it's crazy to keep everything wired only. The reality of this world, right now, is that wireless is dogshit for things like fighting games that require fidelity of connection without packet loss. And that's dudes loving around counting milliseconds on manual input devices. There was no need to pretend that serious dudes doing brain crimes with their computers would need wireless technology. Aesthetics have always been the most important aspect of any cyberpunk setting. Wireless was just the another step in Shadowrun going away from it's core identity, and when you lose that thread you get 6th edition. Something that literally nobody on the planet, including the people making it, actually care about.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 05:39
|
|
|
Mulva posted:The reality of this world, right now, is that wireless is dogshit for things like fighting games that require fidelity of connection without packet loss. And that's dudes loving around counting milliseconds on manual input devices. There was no need to pretend that serious dudes doing brain crimes with their computers would need wireless technology. Aesthetics have always been the most important aspect of any cyberpunk setting. Wireless was just the another step in Shadowrun going away from it's core identity, and when you lose that thread you get 6th edition. Something that literally nobody on the planet, including the people making it, actually care about. I think there's a difference between staying true to your roots and being a dinosaur. I'm serious real engineer when I'm a work, and we've been 100% wireless for years. What is it that really makes Shadowrun? In my opinion, it's the collision of fantasy with cyberpunk and the unfortunate realization that what matters about corporate elves is that they're corpos and not that they're elves, done against the backdrop of the big ten and the collapse of the idea of the nation state as a power structure that matters. I don't think the exact way you jack into the matrix is anything more than a detail. But I started with 5th, and I actually like 5th a lot right down it characterizing The Cloud as literally another dimension, so what do I know.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 06:20
|
|
|
Yeah, the class warfare aspect in an urban fantasy tolkein pastiche is more important than any particular tidbit accrued over the years. Fourth edition buying into the Army of Two/Rockstar Mercenary garbage from the GWOT was more of a betrayal of its themes than wireless ever was.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 18:21
|
|
|
Ronwayne posted:Yeah, the class warfare aspect in an urban fantasy tolkein pastiche is more important than any particular tidbit accrued over the years. Fourth edition buying into the Army of Two/Rockstar Mercenary garbage from the GWOT was more of a betrayal of its themes than wireless ever was. Agreed. The influence of 4th-style play on the rest of the hobby, not helped at all by later releases for 2020 & its sequel games, has done damage to any "-punk" genre in RPGs that I'm not sure can ever really be fully repaired. A few games are pulling it off (Spire for fantasy, Hard Wired Island for cyberpunk - no mixes of the two yet that I've seen), and 5th at least paid lip service in Better than Bad to anything other than "corporate mercenaries being mercenaries for money and thrills"... only really lip service from how poor quality I remember it being but I could be remembering the book wrong. It's a shame. Shadowrun has a lot of potential and I'd like to see a table use it to its full potential up close. So far my only actual play experience was an unmitigated disaster (tldr: immediate collapse into attempted stalking by the GM. that's about all that was interesting, there is no storytime) so I haven't had the chance, and I'm a poor GM for crunchy systems so Shadowrun as written isn't the best solution either.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 19:03
|
|
|
Ronwayne posted:Yeah, the class warfare aspect in an urban fantasy tolkein pastiche is more important than any particular tidbit accrued over the years. Fourth edition buying into the Army of Two/Rockstar Mercenary garbage from the GWOT was more of a betrayal of its themes than wireless ever was. Oh we can spend the next 20 pages discussing which of the many changes away from it's core experience actually killed the game fastest, but it wouldn't change that they were all a problem. Wireless as a thing, period, is one of the least objectionable. Issue is it's not *a* thing, it's part of a view that has technomancers and wireless trenchcoats and the internet being made of ghosts and nobody knowing how it worked and a bunch of other things. And the whole package from that viewpoint of "We need to update it" is a vast negative to the game world. If I had to pick one it'd be....related to yours I suppose. It's Jackpoint itself. Making the window into the world All Shadowrunners All The Time. As opposed to before, where Shadowrunners were certainly a voice, their concerns louder than others, but there was no pretense that the world revolved around them. It sounds like a small change, and maybe even a good one. I mean the players are probably playing Shadowrunners, shouldn't you present the world to them on the terms they'll interact with it? Except Shadowrunners are parasitic and reactionary. They interact with the world on behalf of others, so it's important to see how everyone else views the world before you get down to how Shadowrunners disrupt it. Getting so far up their own asses by having a 'runner echo chamber leads you to writing about a bunch of sociopaths that will commit any atrocity in the world for money, but will not kill other people in the group because....well poo poo, those are our viewpoint characters.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 20:22
|
|
|
Will not kill each other despite doing things like putting out hits on each others' children. Its like GBS but they don't ban for death threats. With regards to runners being reactionary, I agree. That's why the spinoff not-shadowrun thing I'm working on is trying to, as one of its major themes, focus on those areas and times where revolutionaries and organized crime meet, and both are extremely upset that they're turned into each other. Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Jun 6, 2021 |
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 22:42
|
|
|
I've been trying to find some movies/tv to point my potential players at to capture the vibe of Shadowrun. I'm open to any suggestions. One thing that's pretty perfect for me is the anime Black Lagoon
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 23:48
|
|
|
Super Mario Brothers movie with Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo? But really, Shadowrun is a lot of different genres depending on the themes you're into. Some people play it straight, others lean in to the ridiculous aspects of the fiction.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 23:53
|
|
|
I will unironically endorse the super mario movie as one of the most cyberpunk films ever made. Its got a level of charming batshit stupidity to it that works well considering what SR is. Now this is just me being a bit cynical but Fargo always seemed more representative of most runners than Ocean's 11. I'm not saying your PCs have to be like that, just saying your PCs have probably heard of or had to deal with Fargo-tier runners.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2021 00:06
|
|
|
The film Heat felt like the most Shadowrun (non-scifi, non-fantasy) thing as I was first watching it. The show Leverage is the easy answer. Just the pilot episode is enough. Black Lagoon's a good choice. Not sure what to recommend for a good sense of Shadowrun's near-future / magical setting, though. Maybe Blade Runner 2049 for a sense of the technology, social alienation (thinking of the hologram housewife), and subtle background sense that the natural environment is hosed.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2021 00:44
|
|
|
Ronin and Sneakers are two completely different sets of shadowrunners, but shadowrunners nonetheless.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2021 01:12
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 16:09 |
|
|
Vavrek posted:The film Heat felt like the most Shadowrun (non-scifi, non-fantasy) thing as I was first watching it. The big difference between Shadowrun and other CP is that the environment is loving back.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2021 01:20
|
|