So apparently there’s this little game that Catalyst Game Labs released last week. It’s pretty small, so you may not have heard of it. Shadowrun, Fifth Edition? Oh, so you have heard of it! Excellent. I’m a big fan myself. So anyway, along with SR5 there was another product called Sprawl Wilds that was released and it has a lot of people asking “What is this?” Since I worked on the product and helped develop it, I figured I’d drop a little chip-truth on ya and tell you what’s what.
Sprawl Wilds is a collection of adventures written for the Shadowrun Missions Living Campaign back in 2010 for the summer gaming conventions. These adventures were only available at Origins, Gen Con, Dragon*Con, and a handful of smaller conventions. We always planned to release these after convention season was over, but we all got busy with other things (because chummer, there are always a pile of other things to work on, lemme tell you!) and these fell by the wayside. Once we finally realized that we were never going to have the time to go back and clean up and get these old Missions ready to be released, we brought in some extra help in the form of Robert McKittrick to finish off the adventures and make them all nice and shiny so we could release them to the public at large.
Now, we had two other problems. The first was that one of the adventures slated for Sprawl Wilds was CMP 2010-02: Copycat Killer, which some of you may recognize because that adventure is a prequel to one of our Season 4 adventures, and was released bundled with SRM 04-05: On a Silver Platter. So one of the four adventures planned for this book had already been used! We decided to make lemons out of lemonade, and Rob sat down and worked up a new adventure called Carbon Copy which serves as a sequel to both the original Copycat Killer and On a Silver Platter. The story of the Mayan Cutter lives on!
The second problem was that we were about to release Shadowrun, Fifth Edition and the adventures were all written for Shadowrun, Twentieth Anniversary Edition. So Rob and a few others put their heads together and dual-statted the book top to bottom with both SR4A and SR5 stats! So now the book is playable regardless of which edition you are playing—no home brewing needed!
So what’s in the book? Four adventures that will kick you in the hoop, that’s what. We start off with Manhunt by Ando Muneno, which tasks the runners with delving deep into the wilder parts of the Barrens and help out an ex-Lone Star cop who’s gotten himself into some paracritter trouble. Then we find that yet again the Mayan Cutter is back, like a killer from a 1980’s slasher flick in Carbon Copy by Robert McKittrick and myself. From there, we head into the Ork Underground where a meet goes horribly wrong in Ashes, another adventure by Ando Muneno. And finally we get an adventure a lot of fans have requested as the runners have to transport a vaccine to a town beset by a killer virus in Humanitarian Aid by Alan Vuchichevich, a prequel adventure to SRM 04-10: Romero & Juliet.
These Missions can be played as part of Shadowrun Missions Season 4 using SR4A or as prep for Season 5 under SR5. Or you can simply use these as one-off adventures for your home game, or as a mini-campaign to take your players into the wilder areas of the Seattle Sprawl.
Good luck chummers. The Urban chaos of the Sprawl is a deadly place, so you’re gonna need it!
Steven “Bull” Ratkovich
Shadowrun Missions Developer
Get Sprawl Wilds at the BattleShop or DriveThruRPG now!
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