I've been running the Dawn of Artifacts series for my group and my experience has been... lackluster. This got me thinking of what the golden age of SR material is. I don't mean game mechanics in a 3e v 4e debate, but when were the best metaplots? In my opinion Shadowrun was at its finest in the stretch between Brainscan and Survival of the Fittest with Year of the Comet shenanigans in there too. For about 18 months or so everything seemed like gold. The issues with Dues was really cool and getting to the top of the Arcology every bit the nightmare it was meant to be. Year of the Comet wasn't an adventure in of itself but our GM at the time mined some great, and I mean great, material out of that for a good 6 months. After that we played Survival of the Fittest, a competition among great dragons, which might be the greatest adventure book this side of Harlequin.

How about the rest of you? Opinions?

I always felt like, if you were to graph the quality of Shadowrun throughout the years, Year of the Comet would be a very significant point on that graph as it marked a point where that graph was no-longer increasing.

-Wired_SR_AEGIS

System Failure has still been the only sourcebook where I cried real tears on finishing it. Thing was a fucking masterpiece.

Honestly, the old setting, SR2. You had your major players, you had your minor players, in terms of how the corporate dominated world worked. I think the game improved, in terms of how it was defining itself and Shadowrunners, and Shadowrunning, in SR3, but that was also the point when they started to run out of ideas. When game designers run out of ideas, which is easy with a product life such as Shadowrun's, they start to throw stuff at the wall to see if it sticks. We get eye lasers and cyber skates, and SURGE, etc.

The original setting as it had matured in SR2 understood itself. There was a coherent vision to the universe. You knew what Shadowrunners were and what they did. The game setting had matured away from the stupid stuff like Rockers who are corporate saboteurs in their spare time for beer money. The background to the corps had matured, the ideas of what corporate security would be like had matured (CorpSec Handbook had to be an eye opener for some groups). Basically, there was enough background to the world that players could exist in it, and it felt "real" enough.

I'd say Dunkelzahn's Assassination (to shake up the background enough to need to sell new sourcebooks ) was a bad sign given how much rapid and sudden (and unneeded) change happened in the timeline, and the Renraku Arcology Arc was pretty much the last of the "good" background material. The metaplot for Shadowrun has honestly been Shadowrun's biggest problem for years. It just keeps getting worse and worse.

The time when Universal Brotherhood was published was seriously the best period ever. All the hints in other sourcebooks suddenly made sense, and only if you had read/player UB would you know the truth.

IMO Universal Brotherhood hit all the notes that make Shadowrun unique. System Failure has grown on me, but it also marks the point when the setting starting to turn inward and become increasingly convoluted and baroque. It honestly needs a total reboot and return to basics, with a clear idea of what it wants to be. Right now it tries to keep the pink mohawk gang-banger special ops attitude it started with while "updating" itself to be a quasi-transhumanist game with dudes who have biological cyberdecks because that's what's cool these days. It doesn't help that the 'dystopian' elements of Shadowrun look positively Pollyannaish compared to what's happening in the real world.

Shadowrun is really about hobo mass murderers and psychopathic one percenters. It should stick to its roots.

A reboot wouldn't bother me. They can even keep the cool stuff from over the years for a recent history of the game world.

Brainscan and the Arcology Shutdown. Specifically I love this arc:

7326 Mob War
7327 Blood in the Boardroom
7328 Renraku Arcology: Shutdown
7329 First Run
7331 Brainscan

Lots and varied jobs to keep your runners entertained. This was an edition transition period too BTW.

I have to agree with this. There are a lot of ups and down in SR1-3. But around Year of the Comet or Threats 2 things started a downward slide. I'm very optimistic about 5th edition and the direction it is going. I hope their execution is as good as their vision.

I would love to see a good story arc out of the gate to get the edition hoping. I worry that with the incressing intrest in Missions the published arcs tend to suffer.

Aye. Despite some of the niggles and gripes I am really looking forwards to SR5

Kruger really caught it.

SR1 was fun, but a little crazy and over-the-top. If you're Pink Mohawk, that's probably the beginning and the end of it. SR1 was also a little light on the metaplot though, so for the purposes of your question, probably not its best period.

SR2 Shadowrun really hit its stride. The whole UB arc was beautiful. So was Harlequin. IMO, tapping into Earthdawn was fantastic, because it made the world so much bigger and added the shadows of a lot more threats without necessarily having to actually write them in. I think how they handled the ED/SR carry-over was perfect; just enough to say 'there's more out there' without changing SR into ED with guns. I remember at the time of the transition to SR3, we had so many fantastic plots to choose from, it was almost overwhelming.

SR3 dipped a little regarding metaplots, mostly because they had to re-release all of the books. (Remember, SR2 ran for 6 years, so it had plenty of time to focus on adventures and settings rather than core books.) Once we get past that major transition, I was expecting SR3 to sort of flounder. It's hard to compete with past glories like UB, and it's tempting to just make more of the same. But Renraku Shutdown was also a fantastic product, and very different from UB. As a player, I now had three major plots to choose from (UB: Survival Horror, Harlequin: Epic adventure, RS: Sci-fi survival horror).

I agree though that Year of the Comet was when it seemed to set into decline. I'm not sure what the plan was there, but things got goofy fast.

My understanding is part of SR4 was a move away from the metaplot in favor of 'missions'. But I don't play SR4, so I can't really comment on their quality.

I loved the Shutdown, I liked the Comet.

Somehow I lost touch after the second crash ...

It was the FASA to Fanpro change over. Year of the Comet although published by Fanpro was IIRC the last book written entirely at FASA. The next few were a declining mix of FASA projects that FANPRO had taken over.

Literally nothing changed during the switchover, unless Rob was receiving secret commands that he didn't let the freelancers know about.

This thread gives me the warm and fuzzies, because I got an opportunity to work on many of these products and really loved it. Being a Shadowrun player who pitched Brainscan unsolicited and was set on my first freelancing gig working with Dave and Brian and Rob on that storyline was an epic experience.

So, I clearly think that period, between Renraku Arcology: Shutdown and System Failure, was a great time for metaplot. Yes, I'm totally biased. But I had so much fun. It was full of excellent metaplot discussions with Dave Hyatt, Rob Boyle, Peter Taylor, Bobby Derie, etc. But it also got very difficult. The metaplot kept layering on itself and with each layer it got more difficult to do something truly new and special. I'm firmly in Tzeentch's camp that SR needs a reboot.

Also, as much as I loved that period of metaplot, I also think the time of Universal Brotherhood, Harlequin, and Bug City was excellent. That's definitely the other high point in the game's storyline, in my opinion.

This right here. Universal Brotherhood was perfect, something utterly creepy and out of right field but which made sick, sick sense in retrospect.

Slightly off-topic, but I'd love to see Shadowrun at the start of the Awakening, and the first appearance of magic, just to see how the setting looked then. In other news, I'd also like to see Shadowrun in 2170.

Nothing? How about a change of Shadowrun line developer from Mike Mulvihill to Rob Boyle being in charge? How about an entire art department shifting. How about a change in owners and management? How about a change in editors because FASA's primary editor went to work at Wizkids and not Fanpro? how about a change in distribution because a number of brick and mortar stores which had large Shadowrun sections when FASA was selling it didn't know the game was still in production when it switched to Fanpro. As for a reboot, Fanpro gave it one. They blamed the third edition itself which under FASA was their number one money maker keeping the studio afloat. The System Failure reboot seemed to be failing too until Catalyst came along and convinced stores to carry it again.

I realize that probably every single Freelancer stayed on but in the actual offices it was a major turnover. Unfortunately it takes a lot, lot more than just freelance writers to produce a good RPG book. Look around and you'll see I'm not the only one who thinks that there was a noticeable decline in the game lines at Fanpro.

Wouldn't look like much, really. The Awakening was in 2011, 7 years before ASIST tech was even prototyped, and 8 years before the first cyberlimb was implanted.


Magic didn't even become widespread for almost a decade after that.

Hmm. So, about 2025 perhaps, would be a good place to set it. 25 years before 1st Edition. Current Shadowrun is 207X, almost 25 years after first edition, so it makes a nice sweep -- a 50 year span all told.

Yeah, I think I'd like that. And a look at Shadowrun a century after.

Are any of these arcs available as translated over to 4 ed? I mean, I COULD convert them myself, but I'd have to learn a new system at a second job. Not really the best way to make friends with my bosses. In the meantime, I have a group with characters they care about running in 2050, and I'd love to kill them in Bug City.