I feel very old now...

The oldest ork decker you've never met. : P

Dammit. The Smiling Bandit, Buttercup, and Damien Knight sold me on it, even though I don't need it.

That part's inevitable. Can you not make them interested in it?

I was 4, and all of my current players hadn't been born yet.

1989? I was 17. Good lords, I feel old. On the plus side, no gray hairs yet - knock on wood.

1989? I was 23 years old, newly stationed in Bellevue, NE.

Yeah, I feel old now, too....

Ah, so you're the responsible one, who has to keep us all in line.

Oh, I have dragged several people from "no interest whatsoever" to "ordinary fandom". But I can't get them as far as matching my own ridiculous level of enthusiasm. (While there are certainly a few notable exceptions, as a general rule, no matter what I'm doing I'd probably rather be playing Shadowrun.)

At least you're not using a cane yet.

If that's the case...we're all so screwed....

In 1989, I was two :3

As for finding a game, well, I didn't have friends interested in pnp either, so I went and joined an English-speaking gaming IRC community; there I met a player from a Russian-speaking one on a friendly visit, and went to join that. After a few games over IRC there, I found a RL gaming group - so eh, it wasn't all too easy, and a lot of it was only a matter of chance.

Bah, I was 25 in 1989, after a while you expect everyone else to be much younger when you are dealing with rpgs.

Get off my lawn...

Our problem was that our friends just weren't the roleplaying type: our friends are cops and soldiers, rock stars and industrial sculptors, models and actresses and the occasional stripper. Roleplaying wasn't something they'd ever even heard of. [For me, either: thanks, Paul!] But Shadowrun was something they could get their teeth into, for the strategy, or the futureculture, or the stories that could be told against such a backdrop. Instead of finding roleplayers to play Shadowrun with, we found newbies to introduce to Shadowrun. [Wouldn't have worked with, say, D&D.] And it's worked really, really well, and has kept us in gaming groups - sometimes multiple gaming groups, particularly while Paul was in the Marines - since the very beginning, despite Paul and I both being highly personally unpleasant. We've been very lucky, but a lot of our luck has been down to finding interesting, creative people - non-roleplayers, almost exclusively - and saying to them, "Let me tell you about Shadowrun..."

Yeah, pretty much everyone I game with was non-gamer prior to SR too.

Getting them into Earthdawn was a harder sell, but the Horrors closed the deal for a lot of people.

I cheat. I recruit from a local college gaming club, and then bring them into the extended gaming group that I started, UR-Talarius (wiki link in my sig). We've got at least a dozen core members in our gaming group (not the club; we're associated with them, but we keep ourselves distinct), and at least another dozen-odd associated members, spread between five active games at the moment. So recruiting for a new game is fairly easy for us (and the gaming group is becoming self-propagating at this point) and waiting lists are becoming the norm instead of the exception. However, being tied to the school year is a pain.

Apparently I'm among the oldest of the youngest generation on here, ha ha.

I've been running games that weren't Shadowrun since the mid-90s, but I didn't start running Shadowrun for people until five or six years ago. The biggest point of contention was that the 2e / 3e rules were - at the time - confusing to me (and now that I re-read them, I have no idea why) and my friends either wanted to play Werewolf or D&D.

Somehow I managed to turn Tehana into a superfan (listening to my crazy conspiracy theories and hatching a few of her own) and I think we're well on the way to turning another friend into a big fan. My group is made from folks new to roleplaying too. Just the way it works out.

Every person I've introduced to SR has said, "I don't know why anyone would play any other [fanatasy pnp] game."

Unfortunately, too many of those have said, "I don't have time for any pnp game."

It's amazing what a teenager can do when you don't tell her she can't do something, ne?

It's the fact she did it in a schoolgirl outfit that makes it ALMOST fetish-fuel.

Another year, and it won't be almost.

Except for the one with his own TV show. He even spent some time in a Mexican jail for it.

Bounty hunters in the SR frame aren't referring to folks tracking down bail jumpers. They are going after big rewards with big risks, like ghouls, big time criminals/people who made the wrong corp angry, or freaking creatures.

I was 11 and I think I am one of the younger ones in my group.

Or, even worse, Kane!

Purchased this along with with the street legends main book. I am really enjoying the series and hope you guys plan to come out with more.

Some personal requests for future characters:

--Updated Versions of Green Lucifer and Sting.
--Jack Skater from the Mel Odom Books.
--Dirk Montgomery
--Argent
--Striper
--Hart
--Sally Tsung.

Jackpointers:
--Rey Anya
--Kat O' Nine tails (Think that is how you spell her name?)

I know that more are intended for down the road, but I dunno when or who.

Just FYI, but Sting is featured in the Missions CMP adventure Ancient Pawns. It's not anything like a full SL write-up, but she's got stats in it, and plays heavily into the adventure's final act.

And for what it's worth? Believe me, GL's name has come up in pitches for future SL Supplemental books (I know, because I'm the one that's been jumping up and down, waving my arms, and shouting "me, me, ooh, ooh, pick me!"). I would have done my best to wedge him into the first one, but I just didn't have the time to write anything up last semester, so I had to let the whole first supplemental pass me by.

Kat O'Nine Tales.

And yeah, I want to hear about Dirk, especially the bit about what's going on with his arm.

Hart and Sally get votes from me, as well as Ghostwalker and Dodger.

Assuming they are all still alive. I guess throw in Sam for that matter, even he was running around in MR J's LBB or whichever book that was. That's not right but I can't recall the name.

Ah good ol' Twist.

More requests...ideas..

1. Doc Raven
2. Wolfgang Kies
3. Kid Stealth
4. Zig
5. Zag


Aka Michael Stackpole creations.

How is signing up Stackpole for a novel coming along?

Indeed, I am really interested in seeing how they do Wolfgang Kies. I have a few ideas, but it would be interesting to see their take on it.

This is the question I asked on his site:

Dear Mr. Stackpole,
Hello sir, i wanted to say thank you for your work in both battletech and shadowrun. I would like to know if you plan on any further shorts on Raven and his crew. If not did they survive to 2072? Your writing style has been one of my favorites 1989 when i first read the warrior trilogy. I hope life is good and take care, Drew

Mike 19. Jul, 2010 at 2:46 pm

"Drew,
I think Wolf and Raven still live. If I get a chance and Catalyst has an opening, I’d love to do more fiction in that world."

So that is from Mike, as to what fate the staff at Catayst has in store for them is anyone's guess?

-- Almost EVERY old plot hook is now completely irrelevent, as they have been OBE (overtaken by events) for DECADES of Shadowrun game-time. I mean, really. Consider the genetically engineered bloats from Shadowtech (pp. 65-66). Interesting potential there ... until you realize that in-universe it was set in 2052. How can you reintroduce them without people wondering why they were never mentioned in the intervening period without a "lol it was secret lol" (I don't remember if my nod to them made it into SONA or someone else mentioned them, just an example of an old, intentional plot hook, dropped into a book).

-- This is pretty much how it worked when I was a freelancer. However, there were some pretty significant cliques back then, so communication was difficult; there certainly was no forum to establish a 'canonical' dropbox of plot hooks. Everyone did their own thing and just assumed the line developers would iron it all out, and that people wouldn't intentionally crap on each other. There was even a term some of us used for freelancer plot items that were made up out of thin air and we were to accept they were part of canon all this time -- "parachuting in." In a sense, the entire section in SONA that talks about the Native population was this sort of "airdrop" of new canon

Ken! You're alive!

-- Of course I am. I still get the occassional new Shadowrun book and peruse the forums (even silently update my collected infodump posts on Space Technology, Hawai'i, and Tir Tairngire) I only have time to work on writing for one RPG, so sticking with GURPS at the moment. Been doing some articles for Pyramid lately (most recently, Mecha Operations in this months issue), and tinkering with some other projects I may submit for e23 (SJ Games PDF books).

Well, good to see you're alive!

With the proliferation of small PDFs in Shadowrun, maybe I can find time to do something Shadowrun related again. Perhaps space related ...

Something like this?

That would be awesome!

A lot of what you did for SR was pretty great, and space is a largely untouched area.