Shadowrun Review
Alright today let's take a look at everyone's favorite mash up between fantasy smut and the kind of computer nerd who owns three katanas. It's Shadowrun! It was my very first ttrpg ever. Both as a player and the first game I ever ran. I think that makes me the perfect candidate to review it 30 odd years later, don't you think?
So what you need to remember about Shadowrun is that the rules don't matter. Or maybe they mattered a lot. I've no fucking idea because I can't remember any of them. What I do remember is occasionally rolling fistfuls of d6s into a dice cup because otherwise those little fuckers would end up everywhere on the cold basement floor. That's about all I've got for the mechanics. Don't ask me what edition we played. The one with the street punks on the cover. Here's what you should ask instead. Was it fun? Hell yea. Did we do hacking? Not really. How did we actually play the game? We just kinda played, you know? We played the setting. Idk, something like that.
My character I made was a cliché trenchcoat wearing PI with an old revolver. Creating that fucker took me ages because I was poring over the equipment lists trying to figure out how to best spend the money I had. The only way I could've made him even more pathetic was to have him constantly smoking and give him an alcohol problem, but I didn't have any experience with either yet. But man, that fucker really stood out among the others. Someone was playing a literal troll street shaman, with about as much problematic baggage attached to it as you'd expect from preteens who didn't know any better, because doing magic sounded way more awesome to them than shooting guns. The other one I remember was the most redneck trucker imaginable, slathered in ridiculous amounts of sunscreen because he was a fucking vampire.
I think that's what I liked about Shadowrun. Just play some suckers and run around in what people in the 80s thought would be a capitalist hellscape version of the city you actually lived in, which somehow made it sound cooler than it actually turned out to be huh? Anyway, my very first interaction with the game was our crew hanging out in some dive bar getting info on a job when the windows shattered and somebody hurled gas grenades inside making everyone drowsy. Little me sitting there thinking what the fuck do I do and just said I douse some piece of cloth I'm wearing in my drink, cover my face with it and run outside. And it worked. I get outside into broad daylight and there are these unmarked corpo police fuckers ready to stir trouble while everyone else is still inside going unconscious because none of them thought to cover their face. So I'm standing there alone like well fuck.
I pull out my revolver and shoot into the air. Just making as much noise as possible cause in my head I thought surely somebody is going to notice a bunch of heavily armored assholes gassing a bar in the middle of the day. And fucking yeah, that was enough for them to back the fuck off because they didn't want the attention. That was it. I didn't roll once. I said something that made sense, everyone at the table went yea sure, and that was enough. That did something to my brain because all these years later this stupid little scene is still in my head while I couldn't tell you fuck all about a single actual rule from the game. I've been chasing that kind of shit ever since without ever knowing what it is I'm actually looking for.
We didn't play long, couple months perhaps, but it was enough to hook me. Fucking rpgs are my shit I thought. I sprang at the next opportunity I got to play another one, different group. They played the german answer to d and fucking d, The Dark Eye. And man I was hyped. Fantasy and shit? Hell yea, that's what I loved! Got disappointed pretty fast though. They set me on the grueling task of character creation, not wondering what I need for my character but filling out pages over pages of skill lists with numbers, and told me some bullshit I needed to know about what the world was like or whatever, I forgot. But they also expected from me and everyone else a whole level of commitment to portraying your character. Everyone treated it like some acting gig. Good morrow, fair tavern wench, prithee bring forth a flagon of thy finest ale. That kinda shit. It was a slog. Sessions were a couple hours longer too, I think, or maybe they just felt like forever. Not much I found interesting was happening, so to no surprise I dropped out fairly quick.
Yea, years went by and Shadowrun kinda stayed in my head. Not the game system, fuck knows about that, but the feeling I had playing it. Video games were the next big step in my gaming journey and I kept checking out anything that reminded me of it even vaguely, until somewhere along the way I kinda forgot what I was even looking for and got more and more sucked into online games. MMO shit. Competitive games and all that.
And that taught me a whole different way of approaching games. We'd finally get enough people together for Molten Core, wipe over and over because none of us had researched the fights, and eventually you learned that being the guy who didn't know what he was doing meant wasting everyone else's evening. Do that often enough and you stopped getting invited. Competitive games did the same thing. Once you play with others you become mindful of not letting them down because you didn't do enough. And you know, you got rewarded too. Being good at a game, having the cool loot and all that, that gave you bragging rights to compensate for whatever self esteem and validation I was seeking. That kind of pressure got internalized pretty hard and I carried it forward without really thinking about it.
So far the review of Shadowrun is going well. When I was still playing and trying to run a session I bought some random ass supplement in a game store just because it said Shadowrun on the cover and I could just about afford it. The rulebook I had to borrow. Anyway, when I got into 5e I started researching that game as well. For the characters I made, I didn't pore over equipment lists, I was looking up tier lists and discussions online to figure out the best abilities and spells to pick and what to avoid.
Running that game too. I ran Dragon Heist and like everyone looked up guides and advice on how to do that. And the fuck did I find? Xandering my Dragon Heist and some "dungeon" I kinda forgot about that would be perfect, or so the people in my phone said, some wizard nonsense and a minotaur. And you know what? The "dungeon" fucking sucked and was one of my worst sessions ever, and all that remix stuff did fuck all to improve the campaign. Thanks for wasting my time. The best fucking parts were the unchanged chapter about getting to own a tavern and hanging around in its neighborhood.
But it's not only that I did that, I saw it in others as well. My players not thinking so much in terms of what's fun but what's good and what's not letting others down. Picking the ancestry that gives them the best bonus for their class stat. Not doing that? What the fuck are you doing not playing optimally? What if we lose a fight? Not so much in so many words but the pressure built in snarky comments and helpful suggestions.
Not that the opposite automatically makes for better games either. I tpk'd my party once playing Phandelver with my bird bard when we got to the green dragon in the ruins. Everyone was scared of that thing and ready to bounce, but I decided it would be a great play to talk to the dragon and somehow convince it to go fuck up the orcs in the other location, who we were also kinda scared of. So I went out in the open field screaming and waving my arms until the dragon showed. It wasn't particularly interested in negotiating, so naturally I attacked it and ran back towards where my companions were hiding. And well, breath weapons are a bitch okay.
Was this good play? Idk. I still think my first thought when looking at two problems wasn't which one we were supposed to fight first, but whether I could somehow make the problems fight each other. The actual issue might've been that nobody else had signed up for my brilliant plan before I brought a dragon upon them.
I got closer to the thing I was actually looking for when I ran a short campaign for my brother and his friends, who'd never played ttrpgs before and weren't really capital G Gamers either. I ran some Dolmenwood using Cairn for them, starting them out in a little dungeon. These people, bless them, I didn't even tell to make a map, they just fucking did it on their own. Every one of them separately too. After clearing the dungeon they got to Dreg, this little village, and one of the NPCs there, some thieves' guild asshole, gave them grief and an unfair deal for their treasure. And they remembered that. They also remembered the dungeon they'd cleared that was just sitting there. Secure location, secret vault and all that. So they started thinking what the fuck could we do with this place? Money laundering or fencing stolen goods? Start their own operation. Maybe tell that guy in Dreg to go fuck himself. Before long they were basically preparing to start their own guild and go to war over turf. Holy fuck man, that's the shit. That's the Shadowrun I remember.
I think I kinda accidentally found the sort of game I wanted on my first try. I just didn't know that was what happened. I couldn't tell you why that dumb first ever scene in the bar stuck with me, why The Dark Eye bored the shit out of me, or what exactly I kept looking for in every game afterwards. So I spent decades chasing some feeling I couldn't even articulate. And I don't think everything I learned along the way was some mistake either. All the optimization and theory slop and obsessing over how games work eventually gave me enough context to recognize what I'd been looking for in the first place. I can't go back and play games like I did when I knew fuck all. But at least now I know it when I see it and I'm better at making room for it to happen.
Where does this leave the review? They do ratings or recommendations and shit right? So how good is Shadowdark? Did I say dark? Fuck, I mean Shadowrun. Idk. Our campaign ended with the vampire trucker getting chased down some highway by military level corpo police because we'd pissed off some important fucker, and then we drove off a fucking bridge. Does it matter? Ok if it does, here is my rating: rpgs are good.