I'm in the process of putting together my notes and plans for my next campaign, using Shadowrun 4th. My players range from no experience with Shadowrun at all, to extensive. I myself have a lot of 1st-3rd experience but haven't actually run 4th edition yet.

Old Adventures

I have a fairly extensive collection of older 1st-3rd edition books so was planning on reusing some of the adventures and bringing them up to date for 4th edition. I was wondering if anyone on here had any experience of doing so and could give advise on any potential problems or positive recommendations on the best scenarios to adapt. For reference I own Bottled Demon, Dark Angel, Divided Assets, Dreamchipper, Double Exposure , Euphoria, Elven Fire, Eye Witness & Mercurial

I’ve also got various of the ‘major event’ books such as Super Tuesday, Universal Brotherhood/First Blood, Mob War, Blood in the Boardroom & Renraku Shutdown. Unfortunately they’re now major parts of the setting so much as I’d love to run them through UB with no knowledge of bugs at all or Renraku without knowing about Deus it’s not going to happen.

Missions

I'm planning on running in Seattle (primarily, branching out to Hong Kong in the future) as I have the original Seattle and New Seattle and intend to pick up Seattle 2072 when it comes out. As such the Denver and New York (?) Missions don't appear to be of any use. That said, however, the runs themselves might be yankable and reworked so I'd like to hear if anyone has any advice on the good/bad and ugly for the two (?) Missions series.


Advice
I couldn't find a general 4th ed advice thread - or rather lots of specific ones on individual details so, in no particular order:

There's a lot of back and forth on here about the Matrix and Unwired, multiple commlinks, Agent Smith tweaks etc - does anyone have a cohesive set of house rules that are well-regarded for using the Matrix/Unwired

I'm grabbing the cheat sheets from a site I found linked off of here, but if there are any good Srun websites to look at, campaign wikis or campaign sites out there I'd appreciate a link to them. I use Google Sites for all my campaigns and have just started to plan how i'll organise it.

Many thanks

Anybody?

Keep in mind for the NY Missions, it has its own little location sourcebook (Rotten Apple: Manhattan PDF). It really highlights Manhattan and, IMO, gives it a unique flavor of its own. There's definitely enough material there to center a campaign around. Perhaps you could have your players take a short trip to Manhattan with the NY missions to give them a feel of running in a different city, and to see if they would like the NY missions. Just a thought.

As far as the old adventures are concerned, right now, what I have done for my group is essentially set up my world in an alternate reality. It is set in 2055, but it is more technologically advanced than what that era would typically have available to it (so it has the tech from 4th edition as if it was 2072, ie, commlinks instead of pocket secretaries). Plus, the upside of setting it in a sort of alternate reality/alternate timeline is that as a GM, I can play around with the historical events and make changes to the timeline as need be. I have already told my players that things will not necessarily unfold in the same way as the standard timeline. It gives me the freedom to deviate from the established timeline, and to throw in some curveballs and surpises along the way. Yes, the Universal Brotherhood will be exposed, but unlike the standard timeframe of 2055, perhaps I will keep the players in suspense, and wait to say, 2060 for them to be exposed. And perhaps something different happens. And as a GM, perhaps I don't want to kill off Dunkelzhan and want to ignore the whole horrors aspect. I could do that. It kind of keeps my players, especially those who know the timeline backwards and forwards, on their toes, because they really don't know how I'm handling things or how things will be different. So, there's something you could do as well.

I'm doing Old School too.

My campaign is in 2055.

Most of the technology is the same as standard SR except Bioware is still new and fairly expensive (double cost but counts as one grade higher for detection purposes). Bioware is going to stay that way in my world.

I can ignore technomancers and most nano/gene technology and reduce the big brother surveillance level to a more manageable level.

Hackers are deckers (no one puts really valuable paydata on wireless) but then we use an NPC Decker (My number 2 suggestions to a new SR GM).

My number one suggestion is get Harlequin. Best SR campaign/adventure set ever and a serious contender for best RPG.

Also a lot of the Denver missions can be transplanted fairly easily.