THE PREAMBLE...

In my previous thread, "What happened to magic...?", I was talking about the various changes to magic that have occurred over the past four (ish) editions since SR2 (the last time that I played Shadowrun). It was at the time the latest edition. Clearly, it's been a while.

If it wasn't clear, rightly or wrongly the Shadowrun rules weren't working for me principally because I was trying to draw in the (originally) related settings of Earthdawn and Equinox (Fourth and Eighth Ages, respectively). Yes, I've been interested in running some variation of that campaign and, while I could have used the Shadowrun system (it would have made things easier?), I ended up using another one: GURPS.

Mea cula. In my defense, it has a lot of stuff covering the various things that I want to explore in excruciating detail. All that it needs is a Shadowrun etc. "feeling" magic system and I'm kinda good to go.

That's not the point of the thread, though...

In summarising the events leading up to the setting of Equinox, the 8th Age, it struck me that the authors had made the decision to put the game so far into the future that its connection to previous settings didn't really matter. I mean, it's at least 10,000 years in the future. I mean, at at least 10,400 years past 2,100 ACE, it's "the year 10,500" which beats at Dune by a good three centuries. That's "anything goes" territory, which is probably the point--so far in the future that current standards of technology etc. don't really matter.

Yet in so doing, the author(s) created something that seems to have broken more away from Shadowrun than in some ways Earthdawn did. Arguably, in some ways it feels less like Shadowrun even though it has only bounced ten millennia into the future rather than it's past. It doesn't feel connected. Equinox ends up feeling like Spelljammer.

(I'm not saying that it's a bad game, nor is it a terrible setting. Rather, I'm talking about the sense that it doesn't feel as grounded in Shadowrun as I might like, at least part of which is in the design of the author(s) and not just because a license was lost,)

ENOUGH! SO WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT...?

What I'm wondering about is a future vision of "Shadowrun in spaaaacccceeee" that is grounded in the Shadowrun of the now. Or, at least, some reasonable point of reference in the current Shadowrun history. After all, 5,200 until the next Age of Shadow is quite some time away in the innovative, technological society of the Sixth Age. (This is before one gets to the changes in the magical field wrought by the Atlanteans/Therans in perpetuating the Fourth Age beyond it's natura lifespan of the Cycle.)

So here's the fun game, at least for me. Take the Shadowrun setting and put it into spaaacceee. The end goal is to colonise other worlds and form a distinct little "empire" for metahumanity that is predicated upon some of the aspects laid forth in Equinox, e.g. it's ultimately done between active worlds in active mana cycles. It requires advancement of technology to create "biomachines" whose materials can channel mana and, thus, the development of hybrid spirit-tech/ships.

But how is this made to feel more like Shadowrun? In the short-term, what about the Sol system and the development of a bigger space program from the corps and what remains of the governments? What worlds/planetary systems would be the focus and for what reasons?

I would imagine that the short "future" history would be more detailed, then heading over to more general historical sweeps as you got further into the future.

How does this gel with some of the information presented in the recent materials with stable metaplanar doorways (the origins of "fold shadows"?) and perhaps some other metaplanar shenanigans with lost races or whatever?

A FUN DISCUSSION?

Well, that remains to be seen.

I was going to recommend you take a look at Taran’s comments about GURPS conversions… and then I looked at who posted that thread

~J

I've just come back from a deep dive of some of the old threads in this forum (including one quie similar to this one--just absent the discussion about oceanic stuff!) and, well, I don't quite feel so bad about the setting crossover given that many something similars have been discussed in the past.

For clarity, though, at the moment I'm more interested in the short range stuff (colonising the system) before moving onwards. So, things like technology, how magic might operate around the various worlds/moons... That sort of thing. (And is the Monolith on the moon present in the SR universe!? )

* * *

Oh, and as to:


After the aforementioned search, I think that I'll start a separate thread on this topic to run by y'all.

One thing that comes to my mind is that there is no clear reason that i can see that the mana level should be the same across the galaxy. Think for example of ripples in a pond.

Couldn't agree more. "Astral tides" and all that. Very evocative of the Warhammer 40,000 setting that was apparently a source of inspiration for the Equinox "in spaaaacccceeee" setting in the first place.

* * *

What would be a good starting point for continuing the exploration of the Sol system? I'm not sure why more was not made of it. Err, other than the tumultuous events of the first half of the 21st century.

Eclipse Phase. It's made by SR4 people.

I'm sure that I've got a copy hanging around on my computer somewhere. With that said, just being made by the same (or some of the same) people that made SR4 doesn't assure its relevance. Is there something specific that you were thinking about?

When it comes to style and ambiance, there are actually two very different visions of Shadowrun: local talents or globe-trotting elite? One considers shadowrunners are always hired locally: when the target is in, say, Seattle, you hire shadowrunners in Seattle, and when the target is in Denver, you hire in Denver. That actually makes sense if you are to consider all the constraint that goes with SIN, firearms, cyberware and magic, and explain why different corporations ends up hiring the same shadowrunners - that is, your PC - instead of sending in their own team of deniable but nonetheless trusted former employees from Japan/Hong Kong/Aztlan/Europe/etc. The other vision is that shadowrunners, especially your PC, are international elite mercenaries who will travel from Tir na nOg one week to Australia the next one. This vision is backed by a number of adventures and location sourcebooks (though some of the latter may make a token attempt at convincing you to run an entire campaign in that location).

While none of these two visions could claim to be "The One True Shadowrun" (mostly because it depends on the book you're looking at), I think it's important to think about when it comes to space travel. If you want the PC to be local talents, you will need at least one Seattle-like location that can support different adventures. Whether it's one of Jupiter moons or a colony in Alpha Centauri, it ought to have a population large enough, crime, competing factions, and so on. But if you want the PC to move from one location to another, you will need practical travelling solutions. Basically, interplanetary shadowrunning is not going to be a thing if you need to schedule a slot one year in advance in Kourou or Cape Canaveral or get access to the one or two remaining Stargates that are currently installed in ultra secret bases.

The corollary to frequent travels is that the PC are going to visit a number of places, and that you will want each of them to feel unique and different. This is a pretty common problem in world building: in real life, it just happens that a suburbs of Seattle looks and feels just as some suburbs of Denver or Baltimore, and it requires good knowledge and writing skill to pinpoint the small details that will be make the experience different.
In Space adventures, this very often result in what they called Single Biome Planet on TVTropes: the desert planet, the icy planet, and so on. But there is absolutly no reason for a single habitable planet not to have a desert, forest, ice shelf, swamp and any number of cities (including floating ones). Just like you would expact a megalopolis to have corporate skyscrappers and barrens at the same time.

Setting based on the real world like Shadowrun are created by filling the real world. I can describe Manhattan, Hollywood or Washington Mall in Shadowrun, and no one would wonder if Baltimore exist or not. The point here is not if Baltimore is needed as a scenery or not: Baltimore does exist and there might nothing particular about it (note that I did not choose Baltimore completely randomly - this is one city where basically nothing ever happen in Shadowrun timeline). Completely new settings, on the other hand, often feel either small (because you just put what is directly useful to the story/have something to write about) or empty (because the audience cannot "fill the void").

That's how you end with space settings where the Earth is treated like a single scenery - usually full urbanized and run by the United Nations, or entirely razed - so as to prevent it from competing with the space colonies and stations as topic of interests. Why bother about one militarized dictatorship on Mars or one corporate factory in the Asteroid Belt if there's dozens of them on Earth proper? In addition to the travelling problem, I'd say that also happened with the previous attempts of adding things into space for Shadowrun: sure, you can add corporate facilities into space and unexplained phenomenons - but there's still more to be seen and to be done on Earth, and it takes some writing skill (and wordcount!) to make some imaginary space stations more lively and thus intersting to use as a scenery than good ol' Baltimore.

Great post, but I think that you may be focused on the wrong problems.

I'll revisit this thread tomorrow, but it just seems that you are rather articulately not interested. And that's fair enough. I'm not going to argue for it any more than I would argue for or against street level vs. elite-level play.

It's just something that I'm interested in--just as with oceanic shenanigans (just not in this thread)--and quite literally not interested in gross simplifications as per the OP.

It's not the day after, but this is long overdue in terms of the response that I promised.


True.

In this case, one would expect to match the style--and character concepts--to the setting. For example, Jo Q. Punk from the street is unlikely to find themselves up-Elevator even in a more permissive environment that might be created in a developed solar system (i.e. not just making the initial steps). The same can be said of many sci-fi settings including another couple that can act as inspiration for Shadowrun as equally as Transhuman Space: The Expanse and, of course, GURPS Transhuman Space.


Indeed. There are, of course, a number of factors that play into this including such things as development/age (how long and far people have gone out into space), technology (ease of travel, reliability of environmental systems etc.) and so forth along with social, political, and legal parameters.

Suffice to say that there's likely a whole "boring section" of space travel that would essentially be relegated to a history section of (near) future Shadowrun because of the lack of permissiveness in the setting that would allow what we, the players and GMs, might think of as "adventure". I think that it's a given that a game would focus on this.


Okay. Agreed. I consider this to be a "given"--something that is obvious when we're talking about a game that explores different systems. In this case, however, as I'm referring primarily to the Sol system, "single biome" locales are (mostly) the norm. Mars, for example, is pretty much a cold, radiation-blasted "desert world".


Because it is interesting--presumably to the players, too, that signed on for the game.

With that said, interesting points but clearly not a premise that you're interested in. (Or which finds much inspiration on Dumpshock in general, and that's cool.)

Quick question. I could quickly find some information about the space elevator, but not on the why and wherefore of how it came to be. So, what were the economic and political motivations behind its construction?