Running in The Shadows

"Listen to the wind blow, down comes the night

Running in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies
Break the silence, damn the dark, damn the light" - Fleetwood Mac, The Chain

 I have a feeling that if I can stick to my resolution to get back to blogging, I'm going to blog a lot about Shadowrun.  Specifically, Shadowrun as I love to play it- which means 20 minutes into the future of 1987.  I've loved the Cyberpunk genre ever since I was exposed to it as a kid by Bladerunner, Max Headroom, Neuromancer and the original Cyberpunk (2013) boxed set released in '87.  To me, Cyberpunk sounds like 80s synthpop and looks like a Syd Mead painting.  To me, the Shadowrun logo will always be as it appears above- much like the D&D ampersand will forevermore be the one used in the 80s, most conspicuously on the AD&D orange spine hardcovers and the BECMI sets.  I realize this is a function of my age, and our tendency to love things the way we were introduced to them.  I fully admit to my grognard ways and being stuck in the 80s.  I will neither deny nor be ashamed of my psyche's nostalgia for a simpler time, before I was saddled with the burdens of adulthood and awareness of the much wider world around me.  So, sufficient to say, my Shadowrun is informed in great part by these predilections.

  Shadowrun and I met in 1989 when, a couple of months after publication, I had occasion to flip through the book in JROTC and pronounce it silly.  I mean, ELVES in Cyberpunk?  What the hell was this crap?  I was a proud owner of the R. Talsorian Cyberpunk boxed set, and it was serious, edgy, style-over-substance PUNK.  Hell, you could even use Roadstriker II to do Bubblegum Crisis style Mecha Cyberpunk.  The VHS of the first couple of episodes of BGC were making their way around, and holy HELL was that cool.  Mecha and Cyberpunk?  Awesome.  Magic and Cyberpunk?  Kinda stupid, right?

  Well, my classmate Eric must have felt the same way.  Sometime later, after Seattle Sourcebook, Grimoire and Street Samurai Catalog came out, he had them all- and wanted to sell them.  I bought the lot from him for $25 in Theater class and proceeded to give them a solid read.  I was wrong.  Very, very wrong.  The mixture of magic and machine was seriously wiz, chummer.  Shadowrun, just like Cyberpunk before it, has its own selection of future street slang, wakarimasu-ka? Oh, yeah, the Japanese language sprinkles both games because Japan was going to take over the economic world back in the 80s.  And the Japanese megacorps?  Bad news, Omae.

  So, I had been bitten by the Cyber Fantasy bug.  And by that, I don't mean the ones in Missing Blood.  Those still scare me.  To this day.  But Shadowrun was where it's at.  Or where it was.  Or is where it will be.  Or something.  I had fallen in love with Shadowrun.

  We swapped our Cyberpunk 2013 campaign to Shadowrun, and away we went.  We immersed ourselves in the shadows of Seattle, and several things endeared me deeply to the books.  The artwork was very, very evocative of the world.  Jeff Laubenstein's art coupled with Bradstreet, Steve Venters' cover for the Street Samurai Catalog, the iconic Elmore cover of the corebook, and all the wonderful interior art by so many other contributors.  The Shadowtalk, too, was a thing of beauty.  In-universe characters making commentary on the sourcebook material giving you their opinions, advice, and sometimes just making fun of each other.

 

   So, in the Street Samurai Catalog, the Shadowtalk had various people commenting on the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the many pieces of equipment in the book.  In the Seattle Sourcebook, posters commented on the veracity of the travel guide and issued warnings and advice to people who were new to the Seattle sprawl.  It really gave an impression that Shadowrun was a living, breathing world.

  Shadowrun also had an undercurrent of empowerment for the Native American peoples, which has perhaps not aged in the best way.  Personally, I choose to see it as respectfully done, perhaps with not as much research and cultural sensitivity as we'd show today.  I really can't weigh in, though, since my Natchitoches blood is 1/8, my grandfather never really spoke about that part of our heritage, and I'm only now starting to research it since I didn't even know our tribe until a few years ago.  But as far as someone who presents and was raised in more or less vanilla culture can say, I think the intention of the authors was to give Native American their due and make their culture something REALLY COOL to play.  And to me, that's inviting players to research more, to read more, and to find out more about the cultures their characters belong to.  I've always thought RPGs were a great way to inspire people to want to know more- I certainly started reading voraciously to support my RPG habits - but the mileage of each reader might vary.  The Native American culture is presented in a shallow manner in the corebook- but it got expanded quite a bit with the Native American Nations books.

  I mention all this because I really liked the inclusion of Native Americans as a real, powerful faction in Shadowrun.  I always felt, even with the watered down lessons we got in public school, that the Native American peoples deserved so much better than what they received throughout history.  This storyline allowed for some payback - heavy handed and culturally insensitive though it may have been, teenage me thought the Ghost Dance would have been an awesome thing to behold, or take part in.  I kinda miss the influence in the newer Shadowrun products.

  Shaman and Mages were cool.  Orks and Trolls and Elves and Dwarves were cool.  You could form a band and have a Sasquatch wailing to your left and a cyberjacked synth player on your right.  You could fight The Man, or just take his dirty jobs and do them dirt cheap.  It was all the chrome and style of Cyberpunk with your favorite D&D tropes tossed in, and it was bitchin'.

  Magic in the Shadowrun world was a definite departure from what I'd been used to.  No spell slots, spell points, etc.  Play smart, and the dice don't betray you, and you can cast spells ALL DAY LONG.  And if you're looking to do damage to your enemies, combat spells ignore armor.  THEY IGNORE ARMOR.  And Mana spells attack Willpower.  That Corporate troll guard in the techno-plate?  He's got a maximum willpower of 4.  Nighty night!  Spell defense?  Your mage or shaman can allocate spell defense dice to the entire party to protect them from attacking magical effects.  Mages could summon elementals, shaman could summon spirits.  The difference between the Hermetic mage and the spiritual shaman put so much flavor into the game world.  Do you have a library or a medicine lodge?  Is magic a science, a force to be harnessed through formulae and study, or is it Nature and spirits and totems responding to those who know how to speak to them?

  On the opposite side of magic, there was The Matrix, and not the damn Keanu films.  The worldwide computer network accessible by computers and, specifically, cyberdecks.  A Decker could jack into their skull and run the Matrix virtually, taking control of equipment connected to the network, unlocking doors, jamming elevators, stealing data... that is, if the Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics (ICE) doesn't fry their deck or their brain first.  Deckers are awesome, but be warned- when the decker starts a Matrix run, the other players might get a bit bored.  It takes a good Shadowrun GM with a handle on how to cut scenes to make sure the decker doesn't bring the game to a screeching halt.  But it can be done.  

  Deckers are cousins to Riggers, who jack into vehicles.  The ultimate getaway drivers.  They become the van, car, armored vector-thrust tank, whatever.  They can also pilot drones of every description.

  And the best part (to me) about all of these different types of character, not forgetting things like Street Samurai, Rockers, etc.?  Players can get deep into the weeds of supporting their preferred schtick.  Grimoire has rules for creating new spells and enchanting items.  Virtual Realities has rules for cyberdeck and program construction.  Rigger Black Book has more vehicles, drones and options than you can shake a stick at.  Shadowbeat covers media, music, sports.  There are so many opportunities for characters to get invested in their gear, spells, lifestyle, allies, contacts, everything.  My girlfriend at the time came to our Shadowrun game dressed as her decker, complete with a keyboard on a guitar strap standing in for her deck. (Hi, Amy!)  BTW- my 31 year old Shadowrun corebook still has her apartment in Seattle marked on the map, along with other players' safehouses and hangouts.

  I love Shadowrun so much, I have created cheat sheets and placemat-sized character sheets for the archetypes so that I can run the game at conventions, and this year will be my fifth year running Shadowrun 1e at North Texas RPG Con in June.  To be fair, we only played first edition for two years, adopting Second Edition when it came out in 1992, and we played with that FOR YEARS.  So, my actual time playing 1e was short, but formative.  North Texas RPG Con bills itself as an "old school" con, so I made sure to go back as far as I could to support that.  In doing so I rekindled my love of 1e, reminded me of all the wonderful games we played in those first years of Shadowrun, and made me fall in love again, warts and all, with the clunky but endearing 1e game system.

  So, I love Shadowrun.  And I hope I'll be doing a lot more writing about it this year.  I hope you'll read along, and find it at least somewhat interesting.