I wan't to hear about people who have done any shadowrun rebooting. Changed the world in some manner.

I'm asking because I've been thinking about doing this. My friends played alot of Shadowrun but didn't really get much involved in the canon backstory. Now this backstory is really rich because of 20+ years of existance and it is often referenced in sources because of this. This gives me the feeling the players have missed alot of things and the world has changed so much from when we knew it best (SR2 - early SR3).

Also while it doesn't really come up it can be a bit strange that wireless has recently taken over from wired matrix when in RL everything is pretty much wireless right now.

So I thought why don't I allow my players to play through all this rich and great history and have their adventures affect it. Awakening happens a little later and the Matrix is mostly a major upgrade on IP standards.

I wouldn't necessarily do a huge writeup on how I change things. Just assume it happens pretty much the same up to a point in time, just a little quicker ( exponential growth in technology and evolution points to things happening pretty quick in the future). Might make some small changes based on current affairs in the world.

I wouldn't see much of an rules upgrade, except maybe limiting some things until certain points in time ( some cyberware, otaku and such ). Your thoughts on solutions/problems ruleswise.

I'm just thinking this might be cool, having their PC's as major players in some events like UB, Dunkelzahn's death ( or they might even stop it, up to them) and so on.

Anyone else done anything like this, or just a reboot based on other reasons?

only reboot i "did" was in preparation for the change from SR3.5D to SR4 . . Basically, i threw away the System Failure stuff about Otaku and AI's and Terrorists fighting and destroying the Matrix . .
and made it so that MicroDeck(Yes, it's the SR Version of Microsoft) got used to start a world wide more or less all out corp war and then got the blame for it later on . . Yes, this was done out of spite, out of anger, because M$ had by that date just canceled the fan project SRO(Shadowrun Online, MMORPG) and brought their abomination of a game under the name Shadowrun to the market . .
and then it wasn't even needed, because my group basically unanimously decided:"SR4? Not 4 us"

About 3 months ago we finished playing a white wolf based game that took us 4..5 years. We have now flipped to shadowrun and are starting in 2050. We started at around 550 karma, and expect the game to last a long time...we have to get all the way to 2070, and who knows if shadowrun 5 will be out then (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Its quite fun. The hardest thing for my wife and I is helping the Universal Brother charity hospital. Every time we go in we cringe...but of course our characters don't know any thing

Well there was that one time where the hacker would shout "Glitch cutter!" everytime he used the Attack program... oh wait, not that kind of Reboot...

That said I don't see why you can't do something like Marvel's Ultimates, and take the older stories but set it up in SR4. Mercurial for example. You don't NEED to use the backstory fluff of the 2070s after all, and revisiting some of the old missions for people who haven't played them would be cool. Just hand your players the ruleset, minus a lot of the fluff, or hope they're good enough players to buy into the stories even if they know what the outcome was (not mixing OOC and IC knowledge). Like Seth says: "Oh the UB, they're such nice people!"

Does "ignore many changes SR4 made to the game world" count?

Brought back the USSR, reduced the number of Native Americans (basically replacing them with rednecks), increased the amount of punk rock, made big hair and shoulder pads standard fashion accessories.

I planned out (but never played) a post-apocalyptic SR4 universe. I made fuel cells run out quicker and harder to recharge. I gave cyberware gremlins by default and they got worse without repair. I also was going to use the redlining rules for normal operation, so cyber only really worked in bursts. Backgrounds counts were really high, so mages struggled. Wireless matrix was 95% dead zones and the rest pretty heavy interference.

I thought it was going to work out pretty well, although corporate running would be close to non-existent. Survival runs for themselves or for exchange for goods and services would be the norm...

One good thing is they haven't really read too much on the fluff, just a few bits here and there. Also as english isn't our native language we have a harder time remembering english names from long ago. The players might have heard of Universal Brotherhood a long time ago but probably won't make the connection today.

One time I had a group who wanted Shadowrun without magic (yeah, weird, I know; they were going for cyberpunk with decent rules, not the setting).

So I wrote a setting for them.

I know of several groups that did this for some reason.

Well, some in that group disliked the very idea of magic mixed with their cyberpunk; others didn't like the way Shadowrun did it, with seemingly only 60 years for unique cultures to form.

Ran one that was pure Cyberpunk. Meaning no magic, not Otac's, no metas (though there were gene engineered humans). Threw out almost all the back story and used classic cyberpunk bordering on trans-humanism. Actually added in space craft. Game felt a lot like updated Cyberpunk 2020.

Oh yea, this was using the SR3 rules.

Of all the things that SHOULD NEVER be brought back from the 80's, shoulder pads is number one on my list.

In RL everything is still wired. The transcontinental cables which were cut two years ago showed just how much we still rely on a wired infrastructure. There aren't any large scale and viable Wireless mesh networks. Everything that is wireless has a wired backbone. You just cannot beam information in the air as you can over fibre.

As far as reboots go, I have ran post - apoc/wastelands world, added a great deal of more transhumanism, but mainly stick to vanilla 2nd BBB.

Right now I am running a detective investigating a missing musician. Right back to the roots.

A friend and I came up with a few changes to the back history of the series. In part he did not like the eruption of the NAN in general, and we came up with a change difference from the UGE and goblinization that originally happened. An idea was taken from Hellboy II, where metas and paracritters had a glamor about them that concealed their nature, so all the metas never expressed because they were already what they were (no shock to discover you're an ork because you knew you were an ork). When magic returned it messed with their glamor and it was lost, so instead of the UGE or goblinization you suddenly saw the elves and orks and such for what they really were (like Michael Jordan suddenly loosing his glamor and turning out to really be an elf, or Shaq turning out to really be a troll).

I pretty much stayed away from the whole Renraku Shutdown thing and Ghostwalker taking over Denver. A divided Denver offers a lot of opportunites.
In general my SR world tend to take place just before Chicago gets overrun by Bug Spirits, though I am still considering to bring about the SURGE.

Come to think of it, my first foray into Shadowrun, back in first edition, we played without magic. I was a 15 or 16 year old GM and I loved the setting (as did my friends) but I just couldn't get my head around the magic system. I might have had too much DnD in my brain, but regardless of the cause, no one wanted to do anything with magic (cyber and rigging were the biggest pulls for our group), possibly because I wasn't able to really understand it.

Back in Third edition days, I was actually working on a complete reworking of Shadowrun, history, rules, everything. It had a new history, megacorportions, and making VITAS matter. I was working on the rules (which I was calling D56 Shadowrun) when I heard SR4 was coming in a year and had similar base rules as my work so I decided to wait and never really got back to it.

As for wireless matrix, everything at least on the front end being wireless isn't that surprising. However everyone becoming even more dependent on a less secure system after two major infrastructure ruining crashes (one of which was only 6 years ago) within living memory is surprising.

Well, in SR3 VITAS mattered because one in 12 Devil Rats carried it, if i remember correctly . .

I recently did the sort of reboot the OP is talking about in a game of mine. Not just "ignoring a few elements", but actually rebuilding the whole thing from its basic premise. I had already been using GURPS as the rule set for a while, and I started growing a little uneasy with the sort of campaign SR's default setting seemed to foster. There's a few rumblings here and there about fighting oppression (corporate or otherwise), especially in the earlier adventures, but at the end of the day it mostly seems to be about bad people meeting worse people in scuzzy bars and doing scuzzy jobs for them.

So I talked with my prospective players and we settled on a setting that wasn't quite as hilariously dark. The premise is still the same: characters skirting the edges of an oppressive system to survive in a world of runaway high-tech and reborn magic. The actual setting is somewhat based on Transhuman Space, with added magic and no rose tint (higher technology != better society). The magic system is GURPS' Path/Book magic, which is a lot more ritualistic and subtle than the usual system. No metahumans, but plenty of genetic upgrades and oppressed bioroids. Wireless networking is something people have been doing for decades, encryption is realistic, and true AI is a pipe dream as far as most people are concerned (but Emergence is actually just around the corner). Spirits are always scary individuals rather than nameless cookie-cutter mooks for magicians to summon at will. Lots of ancient entities stalk the wild places of the world, but you still have your dragon CEOs and such. Magic in general is deeply disconcerting and a bit scary to most people, but it's not a secret.

There's plenty of shadowy government and corporate conspiracies going on all the time, crime syndicates still exist, and so on. In other words, plenty of adventure hooks for the players to get tangled on. However, the multiple concurrent apocalypses of Shadowrun are all gone. No VITAS, no turning half of Europe into a giant toxic wasteland, no multiple global network crashes. Also, gone are the hilariously dark elements: no lethal blood sports as the most popular form of televised entertainment, no 80-year-old civil war in Sarajevo, no guns as fashion statements.

The tone of the campaign was a bit lighter, too, leaning more towards "helping the helpless" than "shooting people in the face for drug money".

Now that sounds awesome and like something I'd enjoy.



Sounds a bit like our financial systems (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)
I think the whole switch to wireless was to become less dependent on central nodes. Basically you just need 2 wireless devices and got a functioning network without big hassle, downtimes etc.
Of course in reality it would probably be dreadfully slow once too many people join into it and the dangers of hacking and spoofing or just someone jamming the whole thing are much higher.

Sounds really, really familiar. Speaking of which I've decided to "reboot" my own game system which will look like a stripped-down version of SR and a stripped-down version of D&D/Iron Kingdoms meshed together in a custom world (TES meets the geography from the Halleluiah Mountains with a cold war political environment) I've worked on (in spurts) for eight years or more.

My current campaign has many differences with the canon:

- It's set in 2050 but still has most of the tech there is in 2070 (including wireless/AR, though hotsim requires a wired connection). Actually, the date was set to get the players in a '80s cyberpunk' mood.
- The environment is much worse than described in SR: the soil is polluted everywhere and there are little to no good fertile soil left, shaman's attempts to regrow forest have given dark forest full of bare trees covered with spikes, the weather is completely off and unpredictable...
- Most of the SINner population is pumped full of drugs and NERPS to stay productive. Nothing excites them anymore. Some are mindless zombies, spending their free time watching trideo in a completely passive way while others engage in extreme activities (violent acts (as an actor or spectator), drug abuse...) in order to feel alive. The rich and powerful are completely decadent, using their money and power to get whatever will entertain them, ignoring moral.
- Corps aren't even maximizing short-term profit, they're maximizing their leader's short term pleasures. Most of the time, it'll mean getting money, but it can also be destroying a competitor/enemy or pursuing a completely megalomaniac project.
-

Amazing. Just simply awsome.

I never liked "The Earth is DEAD" approach for Shadowrun. Maybe because when I read SR2 I got a sence that although Mother Earth has taken quite a beating, now she is fighting back and holding her own with the help of her awakened creatures and various organizations and magical awakened kingdoms ala Amazonia.
After reading SR3 a sence of doom came over me and the optimism I had gain was washed away by the ties of polution. So on my little planet, although there are of course sites utterly sterile and poluted to the point where nothing except mutated organisms and Toxic Shamans and their ilk can live, Mother Earth is alive and kicking and taking back huge parts of the planet. Although humanity is known for its viruslike qualities, now there are bigger fish in the sea giving him a bloody nose.

Yeah sure, call me a hippy but I prefer green forests where huge hungry critters can hide to nude treestumps as far the eye can see.