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

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
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.

...didn't really throw canon out the window, however...

...six years ago (has it been that long already?) I did take advantage of an omission in SoE to create a campaign setting. With no writeup on the Balkans other than a couple paragraphs (on page 42), this pretty much left me with a blank slate. I made Serbia into an Orwellian styled dictatorship which was backed by New Soviet (Russian) interests (pre-SoA release). Montenegro and Vojvodina were annexed while Croatia was invaded and subsequently occupied as part of a plan by the Serbian Secretariat-General to reunify the old Yugoslav republics under the jackboots of the Beograd regime.

I had most of the NEEC member nations weary of conflict following the last Euro War and feeling as long as Serbian adventurism didn't spill across the northern frontier, there was little reason to become involved. However it didn't mean the were not going to keep an eye on things as a contingent of MET2000 forces was deployed along Austria's borders with Slovenia and Hungary.

I also had a bit of fun expanding on the Hawai'ian setting from Paradise Lost.

All my campaigns, had the presence of a large Consortium named The Olympus Group, which dealt mainly with aerospace/transportation technology and advanced security systems. They were not a true Mega, but still a powerful entity to reckon with. The primary members included Marathon Aerotek (a maker of military/civilian transport aircraft), Marathon Spacetek (the company's space systems division), I-Motive, (a provider of fuel cell and linear/looped induction drive systems), Tempest Security Systems, (provider of personal, mobile, and on site security solutions), and Aeon Technologies (a company on the cutting edge of power/propulsion systems development and manufacturer of a line of high performance/luxury fuel cell vehicles). The one odd member was Aurora Bionetics which was involved bioware and genetech development as well as providing premium medical services for Consortium members though its MedStar division.

A number of products and services from these companies were added to the gear lists.

While I pretty much stayed away from the established GD and IE personalities, I did have one IE of my own, the enigmatic Princess Kam (short for a very long Polynesian name). As her primary interests involved technology instead of political gamesmanship she was considered sort of a "black sheep" of the IEs. Kam was also the founder of the aforementioned Aeon Technologies .

I have also played around with the elements of transhumanism as well (particularly in my Euro campaign) to the point of removing magic from the Adept equation. Physds became martial or athletic adepts while social adepts were empathic adepts. Any powers that directly involved astral space or a connection to mana (like Astral Perception and Living Focus) were no longer available.

AFAIK, wires were (previously) also required for the bandwidth of VR. At least, that's a reason I've heard.

I am quite hairy but I always thought that's because of my Scottish ancestry, not my viruslike qualities. I guess I could see it though...

Uh, Earth still has an astral body.
And it IS taking back huge tracts of land - NAN, Amazonia and Yakut come to mind as examples immediately.

I know Earth has an aura and is considered a living entity and as I wrote I know about the nations revitilizing the land without there borders, but as I said when I read through the SR3 books most other places were described as either bleak or close to because of industry, mining or polution. Corps are in the process of stripping Earth to the bone and there is nothing stopping them. Earth is a poluted cesspool except within the "eco"-nations. Earth is dying, Her dying screams twist the minds of Shamans causing them to go Toxic and awakened critters to mutate or simply runamok.
Everywhere you read it was about polution or garbage. I think even when reading about space and Antarctica those places were littered with garbage :/ Of course I could be wrong ^^
Like I said that was the image I got from the books at least and I felt it was a turn for the worse from the sr2 version. So I changed it for the "better" and gave Earth a fighting chance which SR3 didnt have room for.

Using SR4, rolling back the timeline to Renraku Arcology timeframe, using the wireless Matrix way back when. Not too big a deal, really.

Not long after 9/11 I tried to rewrite SR with the premise that people traded away civil liberties for "safety" from global terrorists. Timeline was a lot slower and the NAN happened fairly differently (but still happened). I was also playing around with the theories of Corporate Feudalism at the same time which dove-tailed well into the dystopia. I lost it all that in various hard-drive failures unfortunately.

Well, corp drones do trade away civil liberties for "safety" from global terrorists. And corps are pretty much feudal states, too (some more so than others, admittedly).

Ah...good ole' Detroit

It creates a slightly different evolution when you start trading away to governments first. Added more fuel to the fire to convince Pinkskins to work with SAIM to create the NAN instead of what actually happens. Easy to be outraged when you see the politicians you sold yourself to sell you to a corporation. It also makes the governments a lot more culpable in the formation of the Corporate Court and Extraterritoriality than the Seretech Decision (moves it off the judicial and onto the legislative branch). Not hugely applicable by the time you get to the "Shadowrun" era but does have a difference in history and timing.

I also vastly slowed down the emergence of Magic. Awakening happened as usual but revelation to the public wasn't immediate (ie. Ryumyu didn't immediately wake up and fly past Fuji). The Dragons were groggy.

Done it 3 times so far, none of them lasted more than a few months though sadly.

1: Western. Basically kept everything rule wise, just removed all matrix/hacker/rigger/TM stuff, rolled back the timeline to the wild west. Had all vehicles removed and added in wagons/carts and allowed animals and some para's to be ridden, meta discrimination still around. For Guns; the Handguns, but made them all SS and SA. Removed machine pistols, smgs, assualt rifles and made all the rifles ss and sa, kept the remington shotgun, and turned the heavy weapons (MGs and Assualt cannons) into gatling guns, cannons etc. Magic was seperated by different cultures and their religions (Christian, Native, Chinese, Vodun, etc). Worked out pretty good too, kept most of the runs similar to SR runs, just lightly tweeked for the different setting.

2: Sci-Fi: Was a flop. Tried to do a SR version of firefly with a friend, where the corps had made a space race, colonizing planets in the different systems, and travel was now possible. Corps had the most control with different gov'ts trying to keep their own piecemeal power. This one never really worked out, had too much of a trouble trying to find a way to keep the players interested and make the game realistic. We ended up playing RT instead.

3: Post-Apoc: Essentially, Aztlan and Aztech try to open a horror flood gate, a world war starts with most of the world vs azzies and everyone else going after old enemies. Most of what survived was RD facilities, mountain towns, and 'lucky' spots. Bug spirits and shedim are a common occurance, but since the astral et al is so messed, they are rather weak, as are awakened abilities. All IEs and GDs are dead, just normal (some sapient) dragons left. Cyber is common in certain major towns (usually old production facilities or RD facilities) while bio is none-existant. Old cities are no go zones due to ghouls and shadow spirits. New "cities" are usually former trade towns between current population centers. Wish I could find my old write up for this one, was a real blast. Jury-rigging and survival became essential, rationing gear and food was a huge deal and damn there was some creepy moments for the players going in literal ghost towns and abandoned research centers, including the old renraku arcology.