Tabletop Tales: ‘Shadowrun 20th Anniversary Edition’

As some of you on Steam may have noticed, Shadowrun Returns by Harebrained Schemes is on its way, which is of course based on the long running Cyberpunk meets Magic RPG series Shadowrun. This is also the first game in a long while that has been actually worked on by Harebrained’s founder, who also is responsible for the RPG, along with several other games such as Mageknight and something called Mechwarrior. Some of you may recall 2007’s Shadowrun for 360 and PC, which was a Counter-Strike esque team game that, while it had some of the spirit, it was more or less not really all that faithful to the source material at all. Yes, it was a good game, but it was not a good Shadowrun game.

While the first RPG to blend the Trolls and Elves of fantasy with cyber linked machineguns it was not, a year prior to its original conception, Cyberpunk 2013 debuted, later succeeded by Cyberpunk 2020 and its nuke and paved sequel Cyberpunk V3 (Oh trust me, that waits for another day). While they are comparable and to an extent the same game, there really are key differences. 2020 is simpler, with a heavier focus on the lifestyle of being a Cyberpunk without any of the trolls,orcs or magic, while Shadowrun focuses on well, its namesake: The Shadowrunners. A “Shadow Run” is a tactical operation performed, usually on the behalf of a megacorporation, that involves breaking several laws and must therefore be hush hush. Normally this occurs in meatspace, but it usually pays off to have a hacker capable of traversing the Matrix or a Shaman that frequently steps into the astral realm. While 2020 is all about how awesome it is to be cybered up, Shadowrun is all about the lifestyle and career of a team of Shadowruns created by the players with a greater focus on storytelling.

I own the Shadowrun 20th Anniversary Edition, which uses the fourth iteration rules. Full color hardcover with a nice silken bookmark. Like all dramatic RPG systems (Ex: World of Darkness), there are several vignettes that exemplify core themes and characters in the game’s lore. The first story “What is inside your heart” introduces the concepts of magic and hacking but most of all the important thing to take away from the first story is a mantra that will save your Shadowrunner’s life time and time again: Dragons are douchebags. Yes, the flying kind, but more on them later. The second story “Happy Trails” shows us inside the Matrix and introduces Fastjack, the best damn decker there is. Normally this is bullshit, but Fastjack goes on to save the internet by repeatedly smashing a cyberdragon directly in the face with his signature weapon: The Jackhammer.

Fastjack was born 1999, and narrates the game’s history lesson to explain exactly what happened between his birth and 2072 that left the world as it is today (in the FUTURE). Long story short, magic reawakened in 2011 bringing forth disasters of biblical proportions. Earthquakes around the globe, volcanos simultaneously coating the world in lava, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! Thankfully, the wise dragon Dunkelzhan appears and gives a 16 hour marathon interview explaining exactly what is going on and that magic had surged back into the world, causing the Earth to peak in arcane energy, which is the reason the world was fighting right back. At the same time, various megacorporations were fighting “terrorists” all over the world and constantly winning senate rulings in their favor resulting in their status as world superpowers. Now here in 2072, dragons rule most major corporations and in the same store you buy your guns, ammunition, pants, and can get your ears chopped and replaced with cybernetic ones. Why stop there though? Cyberware comes in four flavors, with varied tolls on your sanity, the best stuff is cloned tech if you can afford the insane fees.

The third story, still before any rules, is “Weekend Edition”, telling the story of an Orc Decker named Taylor, and shows off more of how to play the part of a Runner, making contacts, and managing the finances. Food, shelter, booze, ammo, it all costs Nuyen and most runners need to ply their trade to get bread on the table. Strange, since they go on to display bar prices. No way in hell are you getting tap water, but for 1 Nuyen a bottle of water who cares? Not into water? that same Nuyen gets you a can of FUTURE coke and a few more puts booze in it. Granted, that’s just one bar, but its already cheaper than bars are now. The rest of the chapter discusses the big ten megacorporations, combat sports, and finally the major theme connecting the three stories: Simsense.

Nearly everybody has a commlink, which is a form of cell-phone/computer and acts as your electronic swiss army knife, that emits a Personal Area Network or “PAN” allowing you and anybody nearby to indulge in the Matrix and experience Simsense. Simply watching movies is boring, why not be inside them? Simsense lets you do just that, but there are drawbacks as you might imagine living somebody else’s events can be addicting and the worst offenders are Better Than Life chips, they act as the major illicit drug in the setting. In the first story the main character mentions walking by several tags and online obstacles in his walks around town, in the second Fastjack pretty much fights Black ICE and in Weekend Edition, Taylor’s date is an Ex-BTL user that experiences withdrawal when a car pumping out raw Simsense data passes by. You can tell reading this book that every detail stated actually exists in the game world, you never feel too much doubt about the validity of the statements where earlier iterations likely felt more patch-worked.

The next story before the games rules is “Gaia’s Heart”, a brief story of a runner told a story about an artifact of great power that twists her into paranoia. The important moral being there are as many liars as ever and the existence of magic makes it even more dangerous. Shadowrun‘s system, like the type of drama it employs is very World of Darkness inspired with all tests using dice pools of Stat+Skill+Mod, with each rolled die of five or more considered a hit. The most important aspect of Shadowrun‘s character sheet is Essence, which starts at six for everybody, and is used for both magic and cyberwear. If you run out, your soul is very violently consumed and you die.

One of the largest factors to how your Runner will behave is his race of metahumanity, that is to say whether he is human, ork, troll, elf or dwarf. Elves tend to be the less affected by racism, and many movie stars, celebrities, and porn stars are elves. Orks and Trolls, due to their very decidedly not normal features are usually without a registration number and subsequently, rights. Being a metahuman also means you either have thermal or low light vision, instantly making you better at fighting than a mere human is at the expense of Build points. Every character is made with a point buy system, a much more arbitrary system than the World of Darkness that severely handicaps the points of the various metahuman races in exchange for better stats and abilities. Those that are unwilling to play or mess with the build point system are able to pick from a handful of pre made character archetypes from Enforcers to Adepts, allowing anybody to jump into a field of interest fairly quickly without the math.

Getting to the halfway point in the book, the stories begin to sink in quality. “Fresh Meat” details the formation of a Shadowrun team, what roles these runners normally have, and how they would go about getting prepared in an actually fairly good cohesive story. The sink begins with Monica the Ork Adept in “Extraction”, which tells of Corporate back dealing. At least, I think it does, to be honest the story is written in a chaotic ‘action packed’ style that unlike every other story thus far is much more happy explaining abstract concepts than helping us understand what we are looking at. The last page is indecipherable, it’s hard to figure out who to root for, and what the twist is at the end.

Cyberpunk media prides themselves in a few major genre “requirements”, the first of which is its dark world. Atherton of the first story loses all of his friends in his search, if Fastjack had lost against the dragon both him and his daughter were to be devoured. Drug use, racism, and such themes are much more relaxed than other editions, but its far from gone. In the FUTURE, Orks play heavy metal (more), and are essentially treated poorly. The very nature of being a Shadowrunner is that you are a deniable asset specialized in crime, and part of this involves leading a double life. I appreciate the more dramatic tone in the fourth edition, but it’s worth noting that the 20th Anniversary Edition is NOT a compendium, it flat out sites the other books in the series in a sort of taunting manner. The book’s size is primarily attributed to how very detailed every single aspect of the world is. Factors like recoil, cover, drugs, and summoning are awarded plenty of room to be fully explained. Some may argue a lot of it does not really need to be so explained, but it does really show the effort put into making the reader get into their role in the way a roleplaying game should.

Second, the toys. We want our smartlinked guns, decking rigs, and cybernetic muscles. Like the Cyberpunk video games, the genre has spawned such as Deus Ex or EYE Divine Cybermancy, a staple of Cyberpunk is the equipment and weapons and Shadowrun still delivers exactly what it should with plenty of Cyberwear coming in several flavors, an extensive weapons list and plenty of drugs to nuke your characters memories. 4th edition presents even more with wireless technology: hackers no longer need to jack in, as most people carry a Commlink and can access whatever they want with it with no wires needed. Which is important as it keeps the group together.

And then of course we have the Cyber Realm, which in Shadowrun is known as Matrix 2.0. As said earlier, almost all tech is wire-free and most electronics allow you to simply think a certain way and things shall happen. In past Cyberpunk games, you normally need to escort your Decker inside the enemy facility if you wanted inside, otherwise your hacker was safely somewhere else. In 4th edition, Hackers can ply their trade wherever they stand and Technomancers act as Cyber-Magicians to add depth to the usual roster of agents (They basically get their own versions of mage abilities, but all sciency).

What seals Shadowrun‘s reputation as an extremely tactical combat game are the pages upon pages of “much easier than it looks” combat rules. While Cyberpunk 2020 had simple yet brutally realistic combat rules, Shadowrun takes it many steps forward with special rule after special rule detailing absolutely anything that could potentially happen or go wrong in combat. The main thing to note is through Magic or Cyberwear its possible to have more than one turn (called an Initiative Pass) in a round, with the most possible being four. Each Initiative Pass, a character has either two Simple actions or a Complex, with a multitude of choices of various actions. Firing semiautomatics is a simple action even if you are using two at a time, giving lots of room for badass Adepts to come crashing through windows with a gun in each hand blazing death. Another factor to combat is cover, as every material has a durability and armor rating, and gun control is a punchline in the future so I hope you are not expecting heavy caliber ordinance to be uncommon. Thus, it’s easy to expect combat to turn into Gears of War, running from cover to cover, blind firing to prevent snipers from getting too good of a shot on you. This presents realistic and gritty combat, and once you take the time to read through it, it’s really not too confusing.

The rest of the book details available gear and cyberwear, as well as shows off the Technological and Magical aspects of the game’s system. The last few stories thematically run through a combat scenario, a magic scenario, and then another net scenario; introducing more and more concepts alongside characters that we have no connection with. The only character we actually seem to care anything about is Fastjack and we already know pretty much everything that happens to him. The players are meant to be the sort of heroes, at least until you get the brand new NPC book released just the other week.

Shadowrun‘s main appeal is that in most cases you are playing a criminal, one in the darkest, deepest pits of society, and you’re shackled to the top of the pile. The rules are extensive and its one of *those* RPGs that is intended to be very deeply structured in the base material, with characters as an extension of it. In order to play the game correctly, its very suggested you read the book cover to cover; That can make the game very hard to learn at first. A lot of the concepts are covered in the book, and those without the time to learn the setting will be missing out, or getting their team killed. That’s something else that always looms in your team’s future as well, from how violent and deadly combat is, to how very ready everybody else is to sell you out: it’s far too easy to get yourself wiped out.

A Fifth edition is on its way, though I have not had the chance to really look through it. The 20th Anniversary Edition is worth checking out: it comes with its own bookmark and has a great comprehensive appendix for the then series of books. Other than that, the Anniversary Edition mostly just looks nice. All in all, I really enjoy Shadowrun‘s well fleshed out world, though its not to the liking of all gamers; those wishing for a much simpler Cyberpunk game need look no farther than Cyberpunk 2020. A great game of magic, guns, and tech, is worth checking out.