I've finally understood what repels me so much about the modern-day Shadowrun.
It isn't the lack of editing, or the adventures built on weird presumptions about the player logic, and not even the failures in the metaplot - all of that was present aplenty before, too. The problem is moving from what made the setting unique, and it didn't by far start with the Fifth Edition, either. Look, what made Shadowrun special? SuperAIs that hold a whole corporate city-in-a-city captive, and then dish it out in the brains of their followers (literally) - gone, disappeared. Bug City, a postapocalyptic wasteland full of dangerous spirits - gone, Chicago's becoming civilized again. Imperial Japan, a nationalist country with a persuasive culture and global influence - gone, replaced with shintoist ecology games and local rebuilding. Mysterious Great Dragons that decide the fates of civilizations - gone, now every Vory broad knows the most hidden of their secrets. Metatypes as a meaningful characteristic, the power behind political movements, including creation of new nations - gone, tolerance is the dish of the day, metahatred is a fringe phenomenon, and the insular states built on the idea of one metatype superiority are moving towards instead becoming "normal", losing their uniqueness. Megacorps ready to burn the Earth for an extra nuyen of profit, ghouls with their own state where of course people aren't eaten, poverty-ridden barrens full of legal non-entities - all of that has been moved out of focus and either disappeared there altogether, or at was least sterilized and normalized there.
All in all, the setting's losing what made it itself rapidly, and it's getting nothing it return.

You mean the setting is becoming political correct?

I would tend to agree. Perhaps the setting needs a new antagonist. Too bad the Yuuzhan Vong are in a galaxy far, far away...

That is not neccessarely a good thing in my eyes either . .

I'm not sure whether the intention was to make it more politically correct, but it's having the sharp corners cut, yes.

As for new enemies - there were shedim, for instance, a great enemy with a lot of potential. What have they been up to after the New Jihad? Nothing much?
Judging by the current developments, we're seeing the return of insect spirits (except on a smaller scale and less logical than the Universal Brotherhood and the Bug City) and a nano-plague (which to me so far is not exactly breathtaking, seeing the jokes like nano-produced assault rifles melting to slag from it).

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly.
I believe that the drift towards PC is to be capable of casting a larger net to try and bring newer players. Then again, this might allienate the old ones.
I mean, Shadowrun Online is coming. How many of you believe that the game will be PG-13? I do. Because if the game was to show the violence, despair and horror of a true dystopia, they would lose all the potential high school kids as clients.

Another thing possibly unrelated, but I've heard stories that pen and paper RPG has becoming more and more niche (than what used to be, exactly because of the rise of MMOs), don't know how true this is.

As for me, making the setting less special is making it harder to sell to new players. It's one thing to pitch an awesome cyberpunk dystopia where elves have their own kingdom in Portland bent on racial superiority and megacorps are out to get you and rape the planet, it's quite another to sell a postcyberpunk where there are elves in Portland and kinda evilish megacorps.
New players (hell, all players) want intensity, not blandness.

???

I don't see why that would ever dictate where the game is going. I mean I could create a PC game in Mootland in Lord of The Rings acceptable for 7+ and in the same universe do a darker one in the Mordor.

Likewise, not every SR tabletop has be put into Shadowrun Online.

It's a new edition. My bet is their clearing out the old and they'll be building something new once the few core books are settled.

Certain settings to become PC either have to be stripped of everything that makes it unique or it just becomes something bland.
I mean, sure, LotR can be good for children but then again you better explain why it's ok to kill orcs and not humans, dwarves, elves and hobbits. You could make a whole game in the Shire where the players just have to deal with wolves and stuff...

Shadowrun has a LOT, a LOT mature content. The whole xenophoby stuff for different metahuman variants and even other sapient species., it has social classes struggle and the players are basically mercenary criminals. So, yes, creating a Political Correct campaign for Shadowrun would seriously harm the setting as a whole.

Toon on the other hand is a RPG that really any one could play it because the setting is completely based on cartoon physics.

I find the setting's appeal remains unchanged for me. But then the appeal for me was never these specific events, because I mostly ignore them and the metaplot except as established history. None of the ingredients that went into making those events have left the setting, and I am at complete liberty to use those ingredients to create me own epic plotlines and world events.

I thought the line was doing fine until the Loren Coleman scandal pretty much made all the writing talent run away. War! was a pretty watershed moment for Shadowrun and CGL. That's about the point where everything started sliding downhill fast.

I think Ghost Cartels was the start of something really special, and we can only guess how that metaplot would've turned out now.

Ghost Cartels was indeed a very nice campaign book.

I surely hope so, but I'm not quite seeing any conditions for that. Could be, of course, that they'll make the nanoplague something worthwhile, but minding how much has been lost without any recompense, I'm not sure it's helping.


I'm not sure if you read by original post. Of the stuff I listed, a good half is setting fluff, not metaplot events. Like the omnipresent Japanese influence, or the metahatred and the metatype supremacy-based states, or the SINless masses. Those are the ingredients, and they're either gone or vastly toned down.


I don't really think so. In my opinion (which might be of course biased seeing how I'm reading the books from the older editions now) the setting started taking a serious beating even before 4e release, and the Fourth did not make it any better.

I think part of the issue is that some of those elements originally had a sort of anchor in real-world worries, and became unmoored as the world changed. While that might not much impact the people who'd already been playing, it WOULD have an impact on bringing in new players, and if that weren't dealt with Shadowrun would probably have died some time ago.

It's the most basic problem of maintaining a "20 Minutes Into the Future" setting over the years.

Yes... This. So much this.

If anything, the world changed to resemble cyberpunk more, not less...

People complained about shedhim and horrors and other MagicRun things, but the flipside is running against EvilCorp #5 or yet another mob boss.

I for one see nothing wrong about magical threats. I mean, technological threats are pretty omnipresent in the Sixth World.
Or, well, they used to be omnipresent before megacorps became oh so PR image sensitive.

Waitwaitwait... where's all those who were complaining about the grimdarkening of SR during the close of SR4? Moreover, championing Ghost Cartels as the direction they want SR to go in? This is me with my mind blown.

SR5 has had no metaplot currently only because Storm Front was a game changer that leveled the metaplot to its foundations in advance of the release of 5th edition. Subsequently, we've only really had the main BBB to come out for 5th. There has been no Renraku Arcology: Shutdowns or Bug Cities because there just hasn't been any plot books made for 5th yet. Given that the expanded rule books are quite likely to be the only books in the near future, there's a bit of argument in that there's no forward progression in the SR universe after Storm Front, but to say SR's metaplot is gone altogether is just being purposefully obtuse.

My personal experience is that SR has a problem with endings. There's been so many world shaking plots and conspiracies over the course of the line that have aftershocks and repercussions effecting everything that it stretches my suspension of disbelief to a breaking point. Fatum points at Deus and the arcology shutdown and declares it "gone." I view as a question of where exactly has Dues gone to? Yes, the arcology itself is no longer the gygaxian death trap, but Deus, in some form, is still out there. His otaku are still out there. The corps are still trying to unravel his technologies and the political fallout from a government having to take a military action to bail out a corporation flows directly into the DC power plays, which then opens up the Black Lodge and the IOND. And there's nothing to stop a GM from pulling something out of his ass and saying that one of Deus' projects, say in the depths of the nuclear power plants under the arc just got activated. Or the Black Lodge finally got ahold of all of the artifacts from the Dawn of the Artifacts series and pulled off a world shaking ritual. Don't be constrained by the lack of plot books for 5th telling you what to do, because there's more than enough plot threads left dangling for any GM to take and make his/her own.

As for the racism, I've felt it's never left and in fact has gotten more "realistic," in that it's just another jaded part of everyday life. Your average person will say Humanis is a bunch of nutjobs... but all their friends are humans, their neighbors are humans, and their co-workers are mostly humans, except for Bob, who we all know got hired only because the company didn't want to upset the National Association for the Advancement of Metahumans. That "I'm not Humanis, but..." or "Bob's an ork, but at least he isn't a technomancer..." screed and self justification of the inherit racism reads closer to my own perceptions and leads into how I can't take the over the top racism of the early works seriously.

Which goes back to RHat's "20 minutes into the future" point. SR needs to move and adapt to the current trends, politics, and most importantly, the current fears of our times. Cyberpunk was born out of the fears of the 80's. That's thirty years ago, and I don't believe that holding on to where SR was will attract new players, or continue to entertain older players that have already "been there, done that" for the original 80's fears, back in the 80's...

YMMV and all that.

I don't think either the setting (powerful megacorporations, weakened nation states, great dragons and other mysterious behind-the-scenes types, and magic) or the premise of the game (criminals for hire who work for/against the megas, with a bit of Robin Hood idealism mixed in with a bit of noir and a bit of action movie) have changed that much. Some parts of the setting - racist Amerindians who commit mass murder but are still somehow the "good guys", elven totalitarian states, overpowered great dragons, Japan as the boogieman it was to some people in the 80's - are pure crap, and I am glad they are papering over some of it.

Honestly, I wish they would fill in some of the nuts, bolts, and everyday details, and stop trying to have an apocalyptic, world-changing event every month.

I think it is the mix of magic and technology that will always give Shadowrun its uniqueness. And I think it has transitioned to post-cyberpunk so well because it never went full-out cyberpunk (in the corporate feudalism sense). I mean that in a good way. Corporations may be powerful, but nation-states are still there, and the wild card of resurgent magic and all of its ramifications.

What an awesome phrase

Its basically the truth that we need to wait till more publications come out for more plot lines to develop, that's how they push the changes. I mean, the universe is what it is, even if it is evolving. but for anyone, like myself who's taken the universe and dove headfirst in, i'm enjoying the books based in the 50's and 70's. If you look at the plotlines, you can see that the plots hit a wall around 2063 and they just made a crash happen and pushed the 4th edition. they were touching on the idea of themes used in the 70's, but i guess they would think it easier to just force a huge change and then develop from there.

i don't think the universe or game is hard to sell at all. i haven't played a game yet, but i have about 10 new players ready to play when i can get a car to organize a game. all of them i basically convinced that its D&D/LOTR and Ghost in the Shell mixed together. bam! sold. OR that we can download an app and avoid the massive d6 rolling. i can't wait to play. but till then, i'm working on my 11th novel, and i'm almost done with every 4e book i can afford.. and re-reading the 5th rules again. i mean... i don't understand why this game isn't way more popular. it's super violent, it's a twisted mad awesome world, (i mean combat biking) it's very anime esque, and it's got AN amazing history to divulge in.

for future plotlines... the undead, another plague, superb cyborg's & AI, maybe a land war invasion inside the americas, the idea of diving to deep in metaplanes and bringing out unknown entities, space travel, and even more advanced technology. plus there's tons of cities with no plot lines ever yet. in fact i better see if my idea for a story can put a known surving city on the map.. i need to get that taken care of. so sweet

I gotta be honest, as far as plotlines go I spent most of SR4 really hoping they'd do something awesome with Dissonants - something to really drive home that they're a big damn threat to everyone.

Not to single you out Shinobi, given that the OP certainly touches upon the concept first, but this is a really loaded way of terming it and I think it has very little to do with the real problem besides. Really, I think Glyph is closer to the truth. A lot of the stuff sounds somewhat interesting if wacky when summarized, but in practice a lot of those old SR staples were really borked in practice even if you were OK with the subtext. For example, both Tirs and the NAN had serious timeline and demographics issues that were not adequately addressed by the fluff that was available. And that really is a problem, because it's harder to extrapolate what should be happening within a setting when none of the premises you're working with make a lick of sense to begin with. As a GM, I look back at a lot of that old stuff and just don't want to deal with it. Any comprehensive fix I can come up for that stuff would end up being sufficiently complicated that I may as well start from scratch and concentrate on my own pet obsessions instead, since it would hardly be more work. Furthermore, such issues have a real trickle down effect, since if the Tir seems kinda stupid then that splash damages Immortal Elves who are intimately connected to those settings which in turn hurts the perceived value of the rest of the metaplot given that the whole Earthdawn thing is supposed to be kind of a big deal. So, really, you end up with a lot of incentive for the writers to wallpaper over that crap and start over, but at the same time it must be said that it's still a net loss for the setting if that crap gets tossed in a landfill without having enough good content out there to replace it first.

This is pretty much my view.

Though if they had people who were competent running the damn product line or as writers it would sure help a lot. The Neo-Nazi "murder the jew ghosts" adventure was not an improvement over any of the awful crap that showed up over time. Not only was it offensive, it was clearly written by someone who didn't understand the rules and edited by someone who didn't understand the rules then published by someone who didn't understand the rules.

In my mind the problem is not the big events but rather the tone of the game has changed, and to be honest I think that has been driven by the realists....and in a bad way.

This game rocked when you could do things without having to worry about nanobots tracking you down in your sleep and turning you into goo, when a security camera was just.... a camera, and it wasn't assumed that every minute of of said film is analysed with gait/facial recognition software. Seriously, gait recognition software? This is where I diverge from the realists. Yes, in the future this sort of stuff will probably happen, but that doesn't make for a good game. The game was so much better when...well..... there were pink mohawks.

Well, I always assumed that way before Ryumio awoke, the setting was already changing, with, perhaps 10% of the American population being of Native-Americans instead of the actual 1% and there being not only native-americans but other people who shared the belief of protecting the land fighting the American Government agains the Resource War.
Then again, and I agree that this was possibly an oversight of the writers was to describe how the climate and geography of the world changed when para-critters became an actual thing.
I mean, what kind of vermin control can you have against a 15 feet tall armadillo on steroids?
VITAS, war and hunger made a damn good job in culling human population.
Anyway, just my two on the whole thing.

Only if you actually liked that sort of thing, though. In my opinion, the game got better when there started being consequences for the ignorant murder sprees those with Mohawks caused.

Perhaps, but when pink Mohawk went out of style, a lot of hair stylists were put out of work, some of whom even went on to join the shadows.

You would be suprised how years of handling blades and scissors while just listening to people in some of the tougher inner cities made for fair CQC training and Face/Fixer skills....

R.I.P. Bobby 'Bro Fro'

Please don't start a mohawk/mirror argument .

We will always remember him with fondness...

One could argue that one needs Mirrors to properly care for one's Mohawk.

This is actually a problem I have with the setting. Go look at the populations for Seattle and such - supposedly everyone's favorite megaplex is significantly larger than it currently is but has about 1/2 - 1/3 the population (off the top of my head, Seattle is roughly 11 million people yet in SR it's like 8.something), and yet is overpopulated. I call horrible, horrible BS.

It's pretty much the only problem I have with the setting, but it's an important one.

Demographics are an interesting thing.

I'm not really sure I agree with the the original post and its premise.

If handled well, metaplot-lines should resolve themselves. That does not always happen, however, because of changing writers, changing line developers, and new edition upheaval. That the Deus plotline was resolved is not a problem for me. That Bug City was resolved and Chicago is starting to recover in some form, also not a problem. Etc, etc.

Along those same lines, I never really saw a lack of antagonists in the setting. Some changed, yes, and some became less two-dimensional. The Japanese Imperial State, for instance, became less of a two-dimensional "racist bad guy nation" with the introduction of some internal dissent. But those elements did not go away entirely. That's one reason I liked the Saito material so much and was sad that it didn't get resolved in any proper way. Here was a guy who was clearly part of traditionalist Imperial Japan and he said no when a reforming Emperor recalled him. His Protectorate was actually one of the most stable places in California after the Year of the Comet, but it was not a great place to be a metahuman if you didn't enjoy being a second-class citizen. Was Saito a relic of a bygone time when everyone was scared of metahumans or was he evidence that when everything goes to hell in a handbasket, scared people like a strongman?



There was a plan there and Ghost Cartels was only the very beginning of it. The full plan was never etched in stone before it was killed off and to be honest I wasn't a fan of all of the nascent ideas, but we did talk about some great stuff. The basic gist involved a very powerful spirit that was claiming to be Gaia (most likely was not, but the idea was to keep that in doubt) leading a bunch of toxic spirits to rise up against metahumanity for all of their crimes against Mother Earth. Distributing Tempo was a first move; the drug's ability to allow spirits to possess addicts would play into the spirits' later moves. Clearly there were elements of Amazonia involved in this plot, but there was also a plan to involve radical elements in the Native American Nations later, which was going to give us an excuse to revisit the NAN.



Deus, for the most part, died at the end of System Failure. Though I had deliberately left it dangling what had happened to his Nodes. They went into a coma after compiling Deus, but in theory they all still carried his code in their brains. The game line never came back to the Nodes (and generally declared super-AI a totally dead idea), so we'll never really know what happened there, but I left it out there as something GMs could feel free to use. And yes, Deus unleashed a lot of screwed up otaku on the world. We know what happened to Puck and Pax, but what about Scarecrow and The Nubian? No one really knows. Again, more GM fodder.

Actually, they did follow it up; I think that's what the Morbus Schletz plot is about. For one, Deus didn't die, he fractured into smaller AI (whether or not the Paragons are also such splinters is not resolved yet, though I hope so, it would at least tie the 'mancers back into the world and do away with this highly annoying Matrix Magic bullshit). That's in Splintered State (p. 56, sidebar). So by the looks of it, the Setting is basically going with the Sprawl Trilogy plot - Super-AI, Singularity, zzzapp, AI becomes gods of Matrix Voodoo Hoodoo.

Fudging the details is certainly a reasonable way to go about things at the group level, but at a game line level rampant fudging dilutes the consistency of your setting from table to table, which makes it harder to introduce true signature themes and characters to act as anchors for your setting as a whole. If you and I have wildly different interpretations of how the NAN works, that means that at least one of us is virtually guaranteed to feel put off by the next NAN release, and that hurts the value of the NAN fluff to the franchise. Beyond that, the fascination with Native Americans always hit me as crazy retro, if anything. Playing some Native American dude who reclaimed their land through shamanism seems like the kind of New Age fantasy that largely died out by the late '80s alongside The Cult's commercial viability. I suppose the greater concerns about cultural appropriation these days doesn't help, either, of course, but that does little to explain why the Tirs have largely crashed and burned either.

The NAN and the Tirs all required massive and continuing justifications for why they ever existed and how they continue to exist. Mostly because the people who came up with these had no idea WTF they were doing and just threw words on a page and everyone at FASA said "Sizzle good!"

So as soon as someone who isn't totally in love with these is in charge they get flushed because they have bigger fish to fry than trying to justify something that was crazy in 1988 or 1993. Plus the whole IE love thing resulted in a bit of backlash.

Frank and AH have recently pointed pointed that the Tir books manage to completely overlook the point that the oldest elves are like 16 when these were founded, so pretty much nothing makes any sense. Or that a country that has the population of Minneapolis doesn't need 6 levels of government, 4 of which are supposedly secret.

... Except that Resonance predates technomancers (being linked to otaku as well), and that the whole sidebar you mention doesn't link to what you said in any way. Frigging Jake Armitage isn't a splinter of Deus.

I was hoping for a whole dissonant thing - and I suppose it's still possible, perhaps as a variation upon the whole Code Induced Disease idea - but it's quite clear that e-ghosts are at the center of the whole Sybil thing.

Dude. Frank and AH's takedowns of Tir Tairngire and Tir na nOg were brilliant and hilarious. I was cracking up so hard last night reading those. They were spot on, and they just eviscerated those tomes and the ridiculousness in them, which perpetuates to this day.

Well, as long as you don't need the Immortal Elves to come off as the good guys, there's a way to make it work.

Which only shows that some Hate and some Don't

And then comes James Meier and kills . . Aina Sluage?

They have some pretty well thought out reasons for the hate though. To this day, I've never had either Tir contribute anything substantial to a game that I've been in, and I don't think that's an accident. Hell, even Japan had no impact in my games outside of the Japanese megacorps. At the end of the day, Shadowrun is more often than not a game about criminals for hire, and the only big claim to fame that the Tirs and Tokyo really have in SR boils down to being racially homogeneous isolationists who are obsessed with having the best security in the world despite having no unique man-portable resources for outsiders to steal. So, even if you ignore the bits that don't make sense, you're still left with the conclusion that all three nations are bad targets when it comes to for-profit crime. Having your ork runner move to Tokyo for the job opportunities is like having your pick of any celebrity to mug in a fist fight and choosing Cain Velasquez.

Secluded settings where normal rules don't apply are nice, but I also like that they don't last forever, instead of "whoa, serious event" and then nothing happens. I'd complain that the pipeline for such settings is drying up (unless you count GeMiTo...), not that existing one are "saved".


Japan takes over...I personally hope it becomes more pronounced again, but I can understand that people consider it an outdated pop culture reference


Shadowtalkers suddenly becoming omniscient narrators, The Black Lodge suddenly being common knowledge...can we just pretend all of that does not exist, thank you. I'm happy with my denial stage


...which were major screwballs


The "urban wasteland" aspect disappeared? I can't really agree with your premise here...


All in all, it reminds me of my attitude to the new Berlin book: The anarchist project with cannibal restaurants was weird as hell, but when it got "civilized" I felt like "well, it was somewhat cool.."

Aspects are only showcased if you choose to showcase them. I appreciate the Tir's even if they are never utilized in a game (we have used both in ours over the years (Tokyo too), even in SR4A). Not using them is a choice. Some games will NEVER use them because that environment/location holds no interest. Others might use them exclusively.

I don't know, I think there's tremendous room for hilarity here. You could make all kinds of jokes about top heavy government inefficiency and bureaucracy and then there's a lot of emo bureaucrats because they're in fact a bunch of teenagers, or something like that.

Like, you could do Tir so that they're so image conscious that everyone's afraid of them or buys into their image, but behind the scenes it's worse than the US federal government.

I need some humor...do you have a link?

Thanks!!!

here you go
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55019

i'll actually link this too:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53716