#shaodwrun

OK, so Act 1 is up!!! Hooray!

(There are three Acts in this game. But they’re wildly unbalanced, and Act 1 is by far the shortest. Act 2, which will be really bulky and be made up of many missions, is really the main part of the game).

Act 1 does a few things. In story terms, it gets your little hero to Neo-Tokyo, gets the main story properly moving, introduces the new crew (who are the ROs) and gets you set up in your main Act 2 hub. In mechanics terms, it introduces a few systems we didn’t have space for in the Prologue (shopping, levelling up, secrets, and, for some magical characters, Astral Plane and mentor spirits).

Any thoughts, suggestions or bug reports would be most welcome. The next update (which will be a while, I’m afraid) will introduce you to everything that you can do in the hub, and will include two exciting Neo-Tokyo runs. In The Yokohama Ripper, you’ll be tracking a serial killer in an ork slum. In J-Pop A-Loo Bop, you’ll be helping a scummy music industry figure with a delicate matter of talent acquisition.

COG thread here: https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/shadowrun-neon-fire-major-update-25-february-2023-see-post-140-for-details/132365

So, my second foray into Shadowrun has been very different for several reasons. The simplest one to explain is that when I was playing Slane the Gunrunner we were using the 4th Edition, and now we are using 5th. But the biggest difference is that we're not actual shadowrunners.

Our GM for this campaign, Hans, decided that we would instead all be employees of a spin-off corporation business. We got to design the business and the store from the ground up, and we ended with Suburban Outfitters, a wilderness/hunting/sports store technically belonging to Horizon that also manages tours into the combat zone and has private rooms for corporate and Johnson types to rent for their own business. We dip into the shadows now and again for extra profit, but by and large we're truly SINners.

Dealing with shadowrunners has been like fighting mirror versions of ourselves from campaigns past.

One of the 'Things Mr Welch Can No Longer Do In A RPG' is "Can't make the blacks ops super easy by sending a couple of strippers to the guardroom first" (#739). We have done this. On multiple occasions, across several campaigns. The last Shadowrun campaign, even, featured the timely deployment of several troll strippers.

So when, while we are hosting a closed door meeting of a score of high-level corporate and shadowrunning types that we believe will highly affect who owns us, a group of hookers show up saying that one of the VIPs has requested some entertainment? "Oho, nice try, we've seen this before, get out!"