SR was written in '89, iirc, which would mean the known universe winked into existance in 2049. It's 2064 now. 15 years.

SR has been around *fifteen years*. It won't be long when runners can say, "I've been running 20 years" or "I was dodging lead when you were learning your ABC's" and mean it.

So, maybe I'm strange, but that kinda blows me away when I think about it.

I guess that is funny. You could have characters who are like "I'm a runner! Like my father, and his father before him!"

Right! TIme for the paternity suits to come do.

"Hey, Dad. Fuck you! Take me on a Shadowrun, now! Or I'll rebel and join the corps!"

"Hey! WHo bought you all your diapers, tampons and SINs, huh? I want you to be a nice girl that fences weapons for a living, not a smuggler and part-time wetwork specialist like me!"

Dude, when this whole thing started, I wasn't even in kindergarden.

I may be betraying my age, but HOLY CRAP.

19, btw, in case you were wondering my age. (Yes, I'm young, but shh, I am the future of Shadowrun. Scary thought, eh?)

Very well. Call your father and tell him I'll GM his Shadowrun game while you kids are off playing with your fancy-ass 'mechs. Ghost, I feel old...ancient, e'en.

I guess some of you youngsters are too young to remember when the Reactive Trigger was added to the game. It allowed shooting TWO bullets when you could act, instead of the standard one.

Firepower Ammo. Yeah.

Ahhh, Firepower Ammo and Boosted reflexes.

My samurai never looked back. Which is probably what killed him.

-Siege

My father doesn't play. Until I was kicked out at 16, I had to rely on pirated internet copies (shh... I've made up for it since) because my parents thought RPGs were the devil.

And frankly, I think that some of us young'ns have the original idea preserved even better than some of the fogies. It's not about the anime SURGE cat-girls (Hi, Barbie) and world-changing loci. It's about trying to scrape out a living in the shadows of the corps in a world gone wrong.

Ah, cyberware. Back when I first started. I remember the twice installed skillsoft plus system...four level 6 skillsofts at once. Man...he was the greatest character ever...untill he dropped his wallet of skillsofts down the sewers...

I've just realised I could say that I've been Running half my life. Wow. I feel old.

I got into Shadowrun fairly late... mid-'90s.

I suspect I've been playing Battletech longer than some of you have been alive, though.

I know I've been playing D&D longer than some of you have been alive...

I'm 21 and two thirds and I've been playing SR since my School's gaming group got their first copy of SR3... Would that be around '98-'99? That's a nice 4-5 years... About 1/3rd of SR's Lifetime. I can see 4th edition any time now....

What does it mean that I've been somehow involved in rpgs for 22 years, and I'm 22 years old? Raise your hand if you remember Chainmail.

Seriously, though, I picked up the habit from my father and never looked back. I learned the GM ropes from him, and now he's one of my players. Turn and turn about, neh?

Hmm, i play RPGs since 1994, just ten years or 5/13 of my lifetime. But what a good time...

I still have fond memories of the 'Turn to Goo' spell, but then again, who of the original SR I players doesn't?

*puts on a party hat* Woo...
Lets see... I started in '98 (a bit before the 3rd release) so thats just under 1/4 of my lifespan.

Well i started about 94 -95 so on/ off about 9 years for me. I know i started before awakening and Virtual realties i think....

first played SR in 93 - First edition, then 2nd and now 3rd.. but I had been playing rpgs since 86... so I have been playing SR for 11/26 and games in general for 9/13ths of my life.

yes I started gaming when I was 8. (with my mom of all people)

-Mike R.

Started gaming at 10. DMing right off the bat for my 7-year old brother with the old red. So I've been gaming for 64% of my life. Shadowrun somewhat less, only for the last 12 years, or 43%.

mmm...turn to goo...

Yeah, I started playing Shadowrun around December of 1989. I was in high school then. First gaming days? I was seven when I colored in the AD&D Coloring Book, rolled up my first character a Dwarf (Basic D&D) at 9, and was running Star Frontiers games not long after (and couldn't for the life of me get my players to stop naming their characters Apollo, Starbuck, and Buck Rogers!)

I think I'm gonna use MiTS to come up with an updated Turn to Goo spell for SR III and post it for review...

I started out with interactive bedtime stories based on D&D. My old man is 60 now and has been a DM since waaaaaay before I was born, and I'm 25! I only just got him into SR, though - he's oldskool d20! He's trying his best, though, over in the Welcome to the Shadows board

Gaming since 1994. I played one AD&D 2E game, learned about Shadowrun that same weekend.

I remember my first 3 or 4 characters had an incredibly short life expectancy. One lived for just about 15 minutes...

Oh, and by the way, I'm 23.

Is FanPro planning to celebrate the 15th Annviersary? I remember asking that question in the old Forums, but IIRC there was no clear answer. How about a big event at a GenCon, like they did with Battletech's 4th War?

Rakshasa. (heh - d20 holdover, neh?) My parents are generally cool - although my mother doesn't play, she is quite understanding. Unfortunately she had her imagination surgically removed when she was young.

Dave (the old man) used to run games at the local youth club when I was a kid, and also round our house as I was growing up. Some of my most enduring memories of childhood are drifting in and out of sleep on the sofa whilst various cries of "Shit, orks!" and so forth issued from the table at the end of the room. All the players explained things to me and when I was old enough to understand properly (say what, eight or so?) I began to join in. Hesitantly at first, but now I GM myself and have a fairly large collection of RP stuff...

Man, to sum up? My childhood ROCKED. Shame I had to grow up and discover things like tax, bills and twisted women...

At the start of my last summer gaming session before I was to head back for my second year of college, our gamemaster showed us this neat new game that FASA had just recently published, called Shadowrun. We passed around the book for about a half hour or so and talked about some of the innovative new things in the book: magic mixing with high-tech, the cool picture of all the guns at the start of the "Gear" chapter, orks and trolls as PCs, funky spells like Toxic Wave and Turn to Goo, and this brand-new idea of jacking into a virtual-reality world called the Matrix.

We didn't actually get a chance to try it out until I came back in December after finals. I wanted to play the Elf Decker archetype, but one of the other players had already taken that archetype. So instead I settled for playing a Rigger, because I thought the archetype picture looked pretty cool.

And do you want to know something funny about all that? Our gamemaster was Steve Kenson. The guy who took the Elf Decker before me was Rich Tommasso, who wrote a bunch of adventures for FASA/FanPro (Corp. Punishment, Wake of the Comet, and a couple others).

started gaming in 80 with D&D box set. Started SR in 89 as a senoir in high school and never looked back. ahh the DMZ box set, after I bought that I've never gamed without minatures again. Always use them for combat sequences. "Dont have SR minatures? I have close to 200 Necromunda minatures, painted and ready to go."

Isn't Rich Tommasso secretly Nueron Basher, Freckled King of Dumpshock?

Anyone consider which of us is going to be holding the torch when Rob and Adam and Nueron and all the various freelancers all finally go to hell? Ever wonder who will keep what afloat? Cause you know the next generation of Shadowrun is right here.

Nah... we can all just pitch in and make sure they're turned into immortal jar-brains! Or we can go TS style and make them ghosts...

As for me gaming... all of it seemed to start 8-9 years ago. 40k, Necromunda, SR, D&D (I suppose AD&D at the time), and a personal favorite, Alternity.

Some of the best memories I have (after that little pub in Wales) are from gaming.

Grim Shear
"Poit and then narf! were two of the most important ideas of the last century."
"Riiiiight..."

Whereas I picture the mini-MadCat mech being piloted by a tiger-person in Indian style cholthing.

Maybe Mr. Szeto you or someone else knows what happened to all the old school folks who started Shadowrun. I like the way the game progressed and it seems that SR has moved away from Tom Dowd and Sam Lewis. (I played in a game that Sam Lewis ran at a Con in 92', he's a tad nerdy and kept mentioning Centurion.....) What happened to all the old school writers? I had a friend who had the balls to call up Tom Dowd in Chicago and chat with him about Shadowrun. The funny thing was how receptive and polite he was....I would have hung up....Then again I'm a jackass......I took a hiatus from 95' to 03' (In 03' I got married, no figure) Rob Boyle and the whole crew did a awsome job in Year of the Comet...I'm glad the game was well handed off and transfered. I hear Mr.Lewis works for Wizkids. What ever happened to the rest of the folks? I still remember when Second edition came out and they posted the test rules on Genie. That friend who called Tom Dowde was banned from Genie after he racked up $80 bill. Those were the days, Neo Anarchist's guide to North America. That's when I met the illustrious Richard Molpus (he worked on the DFW portion...He was....interesting......)

My God.

I have dice older than some of you kids.

FWIW, I started playing RPGs when I was...hmmm. Seventh grade, I think? I remember playing Chainmail well before that (and wish I knew what became of that old booklet). I'll be 38 in a little over a month...so something on the order of a quarter-century or thereabouts.

Man, I feel old all of a sudden.

Patrick G. stop your whining I game with a guy who still has the original copy / box set of chain mail. He's a tad older, so now you shouldn't feel old......Besides where do you think the term "beardy" came from? (See british wargame terms.)
All roleplaying games spawned from wargamming. Historical wargaming at that.....That was like 1974, the year I was born.

I have dice older than me too. I also have wargames of an age similar to you.

~J

I know a guy named Gary who's been playing for 27 years, since he was 5. Almost exclusively D&D, though. And he's not a very pleasant person to spend time around. I have to wonder how long it'll take the maintenance guys to get the smell out of his on-campus apartment when he leaves...

I started BattleTech in 1990, Shadowrun in 1992. I wasn't allowed to play D&D or V:TM because my mom was afraid I'd turn into a devil worshipper or start killing people. I remember I wanted my mom to get me the Universal Brotherhood for my birthday when we were at the comic store, she freaked out at the blood lettering and said I couldn't play Shadowrun anymore. That lasted a whole week before I got Grimoir. I went through two copies of the 2nd Edition rulebooks, both of which are now in the same condition -- no covers and at least 40 pages missing from each. And I grew up in bookstores, so I know how to take care of books. Let's see...1992, that would've made me 12 years old. I'm 24 now, so I HAVE been playing Shadowrun for half my life!

The Abstruse One

I've a First Edition D&D rulesbook that is older than me. A friend gave(smuggled) it to me, his parents went to church one day and came back with book burning fervour.

I'm 25, I started SR in 1991 and AD&D in 1988. So I've gamed for more than half my natural life and I know all about stealth, because my mom was anti-RPG and stricter than my RSM. When I'm running SR, I'm also really shadowrunning from my mom!