I've been kicking around ideas for a new writing/ GM'ing project for a little while and I've settled on an idea I've attempted and horribly botched in the past: A campaign that starts at the beginning of the universe and concludes at the end of it.

I'm somewhat confident I could run a good game with the Shadowrun system. I GM'd it for a while, though that was years back and I've played within it for much longer. I'm more familiar with it than a lot of other systems that could achieve the same thematic and mechanical goals. (Somewhat deadly combat with an emphasis on planning, resource and people management and logistics, robust enough to handle character+ storytelling concepts from both before and after the timeskip and able to supply a distinct but still coherent experience in two wildly different settings.) So Shadowrun feels like a very easy fit thus far.*

(I am also tickled by the opportunity to give somebody playing a character with a cleric-y warlock-y feel to it the ability to talk to their patron via the Contacts mechanic. That seems VERY elegant and I don't know why more systems don't have a similar option.)

Does anybody feel that Shadowrun will be able to function, in any way, shape or form, with large chunks of content and tools removed and am I missing any potential problems that aren't mentioned below?


-Removing high tech abilities and tools at the beginning of the game incentives magic builds even more than the core system already does. Will a mundane character be able to compete outside of a edge build or a specialised armoured troll-ish type?
-Secondary concern: Archery Alchemists, particularly archery alchemists using toxins are going to be kind of nuts, with fewer good ranged weapons and defensive options.
-Potential solution: Would providing more readily available/ discounted bioware, in the form of mutations or boons from pacts with monstrous creatures be enough to redress the balance somewhat?


-Will there be enough build versatility in general to support even my small, three/ four person group? Because with even one character death and people trending towards optimal strategies, that feels like we're going to end up with quite a lot of overlap.
-Is there a way to handle some kind of resurrection spell ability? It's much more appropriate within the genre expectations of both "Highly Volatile Magic Heavy World" and "Amazing future tech" so I'd like to have that kind of tool available in one timezone but not the other, to emphasise tonal difference.
-System books are generally quite a significant investment of scratch to compose even partial collections. Can anybody recommend any books/ PDF's that I could pick up in order to provide myself with appropriate, pre-made content or just the content that would provide the best play experience for my group?


Thank you for reading and your time and I'm looking forward to being told this is ridiculous, wrongheaded and broken and I should do it anyway.

*My fallback option will probably be Pokemon Tabletop United. I recall it being a surprisingly versatile system, even if it doesn't give me everything I was hoping for in terms of allowing space for planning and mechanical freedom.

I think the main issue you will have is with character balance. In SR, magic/awakened characters are balanced by Karma and non-magic/mundane characters are balanced with nuyen. If you are taking SR to a pre-tech era, then the non-magic characters are going to suffer OR you will have to completely re-price every biotech/mutation effect in the book. That will be very work intensive.

The other thing (not really a problem but a quirk) is that the mechanics of SR are very highly tied to the SR universe. Drain, Essense, Physical vs Mana effects, etc. are things in SR that were designed for balance but have deep roots in the metaphysics of SR. Striping those things away may reveal a lot of problems with the system that do not normally present themselves.

You might start with a more lean rules system. I think even Shadowrun Anarchy might work for your purposes. Instead of using nuyen vs Karma for balance, it uses Karma-only for effects that could be tech/magic/gear/etc.

I like this idea!

Consider The Drake Equation. If you're starting "at the beginning of the universe" there will be billennia before the Physical plane will provide anything useful, let alone anything as complex as alchemical archery troubles. That's a long time to play before crossing that bridge when you come to it. And then in the twinkling of an eye, if you're looking in the right direction, a small blue planet with simians building kaers will wax and wane, the fourth world, followed closely by all the cyberware, firearms, imaginary matrix, troublesome ammo, and mutually-assured-destruction of the sixth world as that civilisation waxes and wanes. But wait, there's more! So much more to explore before the end of the world universe; if you want to finish before your players are all dead you can't afford to take that finger off the fast-fast-fast-forward button.

So first step is to forget mundanes. Make every character a Free Spirit. That fixes a lot of stuff. For the first 99% of the game when there's nothing to do on the Physical plane until supernovae have stabilised some interesting planets, etc. just hang around in the metaplanes. Every session is a metaplanar quest with a metaphor appropriate to the way the Johnson perceives the objective. This also fixes the resurrection issue: as free spirits, most combatants will be defeated in metaplanar combat and merely disrupted to their home metaplane's citadel, getting them out of the way of your quest but not killing them. The same applies for the Player Characters - if they are defeated they simply leash back to their home citadel and must wait out their time in the penalty box. Or the rest of the team can come and fetch them early by completing a quest proportional to how powerful that character is. But player character death should occur sometimes - there's no excitement if there's no risk, and there's no risk if there's certainty. Götterdämmerung should be a plot-significant event though. Let the player make some rolls to determine how many shards their original free spirit splits into, and they can play the descendent with the most karma. The other fragments of its personality form independent second-generation free spirits which may become contacts or antagonists or anything. Even a cleric-warlock who regards the player-character fragment as their patron!

Just like in Shadowrun, the player characters are not the most powerful beings. There will still be Johnsons and AAA-metacorp -like entities who are first-generation free spirits who've never been defeated / diluted. But there are also a bunch of scum the player characters can crush with ease if they see fit: perhaps when a PC is disrupted back to their citadel their player can "possess" a weaker relative of that PC to stay involved in the game session, tearing that minion away from whatever it was they'd been doing and bringing them into the thick of the action the other players are wreaking.

If you're concerned about diversity, look at most pantheons (even the Discworld) and you'll see that a bunch of immortals are no more homogenous than a given bunch of mortals -- even though some aspects of their portfolio overlap. A number of mythologies start with a bunch of Old Ones who hark back to the beginning of Time; a season of conflict in which the gods battled and some died, spewing raw arcane magic across the planes, sparking off life, tectonic plate movement, bringing fire to primates, and who-knows-what-else. That the offspring of such divine / daemonic intervention were giants / trolls of fearsome stature. You can go to town on writing a prequel for civilisation. After sufficient player character deaths, some of the weakest fragments would merely become immortals but stuck on the Physical plane (immortal elves, great dragons, nosferatu, etc.) while some of the more powerful fragments might become horrors, shedim, totems, etc. It's a system in which death is only the beginning of new life in multiple directions making the spiritverse more complex and its politics more in tension as time goes on.

If you haven't already read Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time, it sounds like it'd be right up your street as regards context / setting / scenarios and the whole concept of cosmic perspective.

If you're starting at the beginning then I think you want to check out the original Earthdawn material,

Shadowrun as a system doesn't really work outside its setting. Hell, it only barely works inside its setting. As soon as guns stop being a thing, casters flatly win in SR combat balance. Line of sight spells versus melee weapons isn't even a contest outside of alleyways and other highly complex environments.

You'd probably be better served using something of a more generalist ruleset for this kind of thing. GURPS and Traveller used to be good with tech levels, I'm sure there's something better in the 30 years since that came out.

It's true. Shadowrun devotes a significant pagecount to firearms, describing more variations on the theme than I knew existed in real life. And as firearms won't start being "things" until you've played 13,000,000,000 years of your campaign, spirits and mages are the only viable archetype. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, but it does mean much of the Shadowrun "culture" of magic being rare and unexpected won't apply for your players. With no corps and chrome, that leaves only a fraction of Shadowrun to play with. EarthDawn's 4th World and earlier cycles are similarly tenuous until there's a planet and ecosystem to support certain player races. I haven't played Equinox (the 8th World) but you need something where being based on a homeworld isn't fundamental.
In the space theme there's also Spelljammer if your players are AD&D grognards, Firefly (though I find the dice mechanic fiddly), and Eclipse Phase (which is well-suited to The Expanse series; you could explore its prehistory... check it out). I haven't played Microscope Explorer but it looks viable for such an ambitious timescale. All these are far from Shadowrun though, for the reason BinaryWraith highlighted. Eclipse Phase is probably the closest.

Mostly, I am impressed with S.A.M.'s postcount. I'm quite proud of my 35 posts per year, but 1 post per year really speaks for quality over quantity. See ya next year!

I've kind of settled on the idea that effectively evoking a particular kind of asthetic and game feel is more valuable than game balance, particularly because the nature of how the game is going to be played on a moment to moment basis is going to be pushing people towards powerful gameplay; which is going to be magical. With some consideration (and your own feedback and what other people have mentioned elsewhere in the thread) I'm also fairly happy letting game balance be pretty wonky because it's going to be fairly heavily weighted towards the players. Dangerous for my ability to GM effectively and provide challenge but much less likely to just tear the game in half through dis-empowerment and fish-guarding.

Shadowrun Anarchy is also a damn good call and I'm picking up a PDF on my paycheck after next, no matter how this goes. (I've got a kid I babysit who's getting a little tired of D&D, I'm also considering something that's Powered By the Apocalypse.) Do you feel that the conversion rules to "Shadowrun" Shadowrun is as doable as it seems?



In terms of literary inspiration, I had actually read Tomorrow and Tomorrow a few years back and I was hoping to evoke a similar feel for the second half of the campaign arc: Letting the players pursue personal goals and being Little Drama Monarchs while empires rise and fall around them, until the stars grow cold and they realise that they've abdicated their responsibilities and it might be too late. It's the opposite of what my first instinct for any kind of overarching narrative, means that there is a massive chunk of play that is almost entirely player driven and I feel is a very human response to the kind of existential dread that defines people. Also: It provides a direct contrast to the loneliness that I'm trying to evoke across the first few sessions of play.

Are there any rules that covers playing as Free Spirits in 5e? I know they existed back in 4th. (I presume that if they do exist, they'd be in the Metaplanes sourcebook; Aetherology?)

Dancers at The End of Time though? Also on my shopping list, cross my heart.

And if I can steal an idea off you? Literally losing chunks of yourself through play and having that spur ongoing play through the creation of new people and potentially artefacts or new places? Freaking brilliant.
Do you think it'd be a good idea to allow the players to have sole control over those chunks of themselves or if it would be a better idea to let them keep the biggest pieces and squirrel away crumbs for my own use as a GM?



Absolutely the plan. (Though I have admittedly, only been browsing the wiki and the TV Tropes page thus far.)



I've kinda started looking at the disparity in the system as a strength? If the players are going to have the opportunity to interact with the mundane world as something old and strange and a little bit broken; then being able to walk through legions, until the world catches up to them and beyond, is a strength. (Though: That as a function of PvE rather than intraparty balance is a meaningful distinction and is part of why I'm thinking that Shadowrun: Anarchy might be a good change.)



Okay, so if I can pick your brain for a moment? Between what you've said here and how you're advocating for a certain structural approach above (where the game is focused on something of a mission based/ episodic narrative and where they become entangled with and beholden to powers that are much greater than themselves) I feel that we might be talking at cross purposes here a little.

How fully entwined do you feel Shadowrun's mechanics are with it's episodic pacing? Particularly how much it incentives certain play styles? One of the things that I initially liked about Shadowrun, as a player, was how the sensible expenditure of resources allowed for an arbitrarily long "adventuring day." With the obvious exception of when it's necessary to go nova or to trade hit points for progression.

How do you think a generic group of players would handle it if I came to them with a game that broke many of the expectations that are implicit with Shadowrun as a ruleset and a system? (I thought all my group bar one is going to handle it fairly well but... II'm less sure now.)



That's... Something I'd been kinda worrying about, yeah. I was significantly more under the thumb of an anxiety disorder then than I was now and I wanted to try moving into a more social online space for a bit.

The three posts I made before coming back to the site now were lies about a rules conflict with my fictional GM (I think it was something about trying to hide your astral form and sneak around a fire elemental?) in an attempt to break the ice that I really had not felt went well.
So yeah. Even jokingly it's not got anything to do with post quality (as you can tell from reading what I'm writing here) it was pure cowardice.

And horray: I actually posted a substantive reply on Dumpshock after having lurked for months back in the day. I returned here on a whim. Promise. Not creepy.
Thank goodness for small miracles.

If you have respectful players who you know IRL, this shouldn't be a problem. It's an issue of trust - you all know that you as GM are aiming to create a context where everyone can have fun, and trusting them with power and influence on the understanding they apply it in ways where everyone has fun including the GM.

I've run AW for three years and like it. It is rules-light, shifting the focus from preparation to spontaneity. There's a good leeway for interpretation. It tends to favour those for whom storytelling is more rewarding than micromanaging spreadsheets of battle tactical optimisation strategies. Depending on why the minion is tired of d20, this may or may not appeal. It won't work well if the minion refuses to contribute ideas and just expects to lie back and passively watch you provide entertainment.

Ambitiously inspiring. If that appeals, you might be able to cherry-pick from Birthright though BR is based on an edition of D&D which may be unfamiliar.

That's an edition of SR with which I am unfamiliar. But Magic In The Shadows (SR3) and Street Magic (SR4) has plenty of info. (3rd Edition didn't directly support chargen as a Free Spirit, but it details how a character can in-universe beget a Familiar / Ally Spirit and the powers it gains when it goes Free.)

Well sharing ideas is what we all come here for so of course you can "steal" an idea I offered.

My main reason for that suggestion was that you want death to not be the end, but I think death should still have a drawback. Instead of contravening canon and houseruling that Resurrection is OK I think it's much more interesting to find a more creative way of achieving the core goals using the existing rules. In conventional play, having your superspirit disrupted to its home metaplane for 28-Force days is a major pain, meaning you miss out on its support for four runs (give or take) unless you can incentivise your Initiation Group to help you Quest to get the spirit back sooner.

In a game where the player characters all are Free Spirits, being disrupted and sent to the home metaplane still makes the battle that much harder because an ally just got booted out of it (so there's big incentive to stay "alive" and in action) but it doesn't strip power from the character permanently (like level loss). It's just time in the penalty box. It also gives the GM a filler game session for the rest of the team to go on an Astral Quest to liberate their team-mate, which can be flavoured as a data-steal or a snatch-the-corporate-scientist or exfiltrate-the-McGuffin -type run depending on whim.

Of course, some antagonists will be petty / determined / aggrieved enough that they will Quest to fully kill the disrupted character while it's trapped in its home metalane's citadel. The party never know whether antagonists are in the middle of such an assassination Quest or not, so they never know whether it's safe to leave their pal in the citadel until the time runs out, or whether they urgently need to mount a rescue party. (If the party do encounter / are aware of such motivated antagonists, the party might decide to eliminate them once and for all, giving you more mission hooks.)

Once a Spirit is ultimately killed, you'll need to decide what ratio of their former mojo they can keep together. Maybe make it a roll, or just fix it at two-thirds, or three-quarters. The ratio applies equally to player characters and NPCs so the party knows that defeating an opponent means that their energy is dispersed and reforms into a number of weaker beings which may or may not be hostile, but definitely shouldn't be underestimated. For PCs I'd suggest giving them that portion of their dead character's Karma (eg two thirds of it) for them to create a new character with. The remainder you make into one (or more) NPCs (not necessarily there and then - you can introduce the NPC much later on, detail its skills and connections as appropriate, and only if the party does some investigation (yay legwork!) reveal that NPC to be the player's current character's great uncle). With a ratio of two thirds, this keeps the player character twice as powerful as their sibling fragment(s) but not as powerful as their ancestors' sibling fragments. Just using arbitrary units:

• 270 Karma first-generation PC Spirit is destroyed, giving rise to two fragments:
• • 90 Karma NPC
  • 180 Karma second-generation PC. Which, without having earnt any more Karma itself is destroyed, giving rise to two fragments:
  • • 60 Karma NPC
    • 120 Karma third-generation PC. Which, without having earnt any more Karma itself is destroyed, giving rise to two fragments:
    • • 40 Karma NPC
      • 80 Karma fourth-generation PC

Obviously the PC will be earning karma between its birth and death (more than usual, since Nuyen are less useful!) but I've simplified that out to illustrate that after four character deaths, the PC is still more powerful than their sibling fragment, and their uncle fragment, but not their great-uncle fragment. So a reckless PC who dies a lot could easily become weaker than a conservative and cautious NPC from an earlier generation. Weaker fragments might regard stronger fragments similar to a cleric / warlock regarding their patron, or a shaman regarding their totem. This is where I thought while a PC is disrupted to a citadel, a weaker fragment might invite the patron it admires to direct it, giving the player something to do while their character languishes (Monopoly isn't fun while your token is stuck in Jail). This would encourage the players to develop Contacts among the weaker fragments, to give them such offers if they need it. It'd be similar to investiture by Great Loa into a houngan, possessing them for a purpose and then leaving them respectfully and safely afterward. And, much like with Leadership, taking advantage of such servitors to their detriment will result in the Hung Out To Dry flaw (ie, lose all Contacts) - so no using worshippers as cannon fodder (unless it's really going to be worth it).

If done well, this could even surprise them at how ants they've been dismissive of for so long have quietly overtaken them while they weren't watching.

Only because that's how it tends to play out in my experience. Maybe at a convention you could have a multi-day gaming marathon running an entire story arc in one sitting, but generally Real Life imposes enough restrictions that most players can only dedicate a block of X hours per week / fortnight and unless you find a way of packaging last session's progress into something cohesive (even if that's just "your legwork tracked down Anne and Bob and found they were both false leads") the players will be so lost at the start of a session you waste half an hour reminding and coaxing everyone up to being ready to play. A convenient way to make achievements more memorable is an episodic structure like chapters in a book, but that is by no means the best, the only, or the right way to play.

Right. With cautious casting, one can bang out spells day and night without taking drain. It tends to be more fun for everyone (including the GM) if there's a sense of urgency - a time limit that says although attrition will get the result safely, by then it'll be too late. Take risks or fail the mission.

If they are unfamiliar with Shadowrun, I think it shouldn't be a problem. Otherwise, if you introduce it as "I'm offering to run a homebrew setting, leveraging bits of the Shadowrun rules that I like" that's likely to set easier expectations than, "Let's play Shadowrun except customising this and that and the other and completely removing this bit and bolting on that bit..."

Lurking is good! There were times when I'd log into Dumpshock first thing on arrival at work, and see the first page filled only by threads started by Emo Samurai, that I'd wish some people would realise there is much to be learnt while lurking. Back when I learnt its value in the era of usenet and IRC it was considered basic netiquette, which is why I praised your post rate.