I had an idea a few weeks ago, that once I get back home (I'm working away for the summer) that I wanted to get a PDF of every Shadowrun adventure I can even going back all the way to 1st ed, convert them to 4th ed rules and then run a MASSIVE campaign that spans the Shadowrun timeline. Player's characters will grow old, and therefore get penalties ect, they may retire and the Player make a new character, but I think it's an interesting idea. I'm just wondering if anyone here thinks it's worth the time (and somewhat expense) to actually do it?

Wow. That's ambitious. That must be worth years of real time playing to get through them all. I wish I had the vision/patience to do that.

Good luck.

I'd do this instead - Make a SR1 character, run SR1 adventure, get karma, run till SR2, make original character according to SR2 and add karma, run SR3, rinse and repeat.

The only problem is many of the 1st edition plots can be fairly high level (with one of them you come away with about $1M in swag and cash, plus a fairlight excalibur, if memory serves), but the power level has mostly gone down as we approach 3rd and 4th. Ironically, it would probably be easier to do them in reverse.

'mostly' because one of the last published adventures has the PCs determining which GD of about a dozen becomes Loremaster while in their presence, and includes other such street-level vagaries as being offered 1 billion nuyen by Lofwyr to sway their decision.

Shadowrunners growing old?
It sounds great and epic and all, but I imagine you'll run into the problem of 'I don't want to let these characters die because then it would spoil the continuity'. You'll also, I think, run into the problem of 'the characters just completely changed history, and now the next adventure doesn't make sense!'

For a TRULY ambitious project, get Earthdawn, roll an immortal Elf and play them from the 4th World through to Shadowruns 6th world.

Enjoy.

For a really epic adventure use my ED rules. Once a character hits 15th circle in a discipline it stops aging. So play ED to 15th circle then play the SR campaign.

Hmm...that's a good point about Paradise Lost, may need to change some of the money payouts a bit, or in an inbetween adventures game being an evil GM and somehow have them loss all the money.....I can be an evil GM, hell once everyone pissed me off in a BSEM game and I killed everyone off except for one who amused me by running up a tree and throwing coconuts at the attack dinosurs.

Anyways back to Shadowrun, the issue of "I don't want to let these characters die because then it would spoil the continuity", I personally as a GM would have much of a problem with that, I'm not very invested in the individucal PC's, my job's the game and the game world, if they don't want their charcter's to die, they'd do a good job at role playing and acctually think before trying to do something really stupid with low karma.

I kind of like toturi's idea, but I think it would be cheaper to just buy the adventures and then convert them to SR 4, because in your idea toturi I'd also have to have all the rule books for each edition, other then that I think it's a great idea. Is there even a PDF of SR1?

If the guys I GM for acctually manged to change history I'd be very very impressed, the only way they'd manage to do that is like somehow killing The Big D ten years early or something by a total accident.

Whenever players make a character, have them make 3 versions of it... the "new runner" character, the "veteran runner" character, and the "elite runner" character. Hand out corresponding amounts of BPs, and encourage them to keep them pretty similar, to reflect the fact that they're really just older versions of each other.

Go through the missions with them being different parts of the same runner's life. It'll screw with your plot order somewhat, but that'll be okay.

Or you could have them do the same thing (starting/veteran/elite) except that the characters are NOT different versions of each other. At that point, you can say "alright, this is one of the plot arcs the veteran runners were involved in," and maintain the plotline.