Author Archives: jhardy

Update: SR5 Master Index Edition links now updated!

Update 2: Links to places to buy Anarchy and cover preview added!

Hey, chummers, we got a lot of Shadowrun goodness for you today! First, we have the electronic release and print pre-order of the highly anticipated Shadowrun: Anarchy ruleset. Built to be fast-moving and easy to use, Anarchy takes some basic concepts of Shadowrun, Fifth Edition, mixes it with some narrative role-playing styles, and comes up with a whole new gaming experience. Want to check it out? Here’s where to get it! Battleshop, DriveThru. And here are a few more details:

Man. Machine. Magic.

Shadowrun. The Sixth World. Orks in pinstripe suits with uzis; mohawked dwarves jacked into vehicles racing through megasprawls at breakneck speed; humans casting fireballs at corporate-trained paracritters; elves hacking the Matrix for a datasteal of the latest tech or working to topple an upstart corp. It’s where man meets magic and machine.

Dive into a cyberpunk dystopia and become a shadowrunner, a deniable asset who does the jobs no one else can—or will—do. It’s not an easy life, but it beats selling your soul to the megacorps. You’ll break into top-secret labs, stand up to gangs bent on destruction and chaos, encounter dark spirits hiding even darker secrets, and come face to face with some of the infinite dangers the Sixth World can throw at you. And you’ll come out on top—because if you don’t, you don’t get paid.

Shadowrun: Anarchy is a new way to get into the best cyberpunk/urban fantasy action around. Based upon the rules-light and easy-to-learn Cue System, Shadowrun: Anarchy is a narrative-focused game experience that has everything you need to quickly grab some gear, load up on spells, and get to throwing the dice. With loads of characters and missions, the book makes it simple to get up and running. Immerse yourselves in the Sixth World!

We’re very excited about Anarchy and hope people have tons of fun playing it, but we want to make it clear that our beloved SR5 is not going anywhere. The new fourth printing of SR5 should be hitting stores now, and it’s about to be a free upgrade for PDF purchasers. What do you get in your upgrade? How about a comprehensive index of all the core books? Run & Gun, Run Faster, Street Grimoire, and so on. It’s in there! So get your upgrade and enjoy! And if you haven’t bought a SR5 PDF yet–there has never been a better time! Here are helpful links: Battleshop, DriveThru

And while we’re talking about new things, did we mention that the sixth season of Shadowrun Missions concluded with Falling Angels (Battleshop, DriveThru). Does your runner need a challenge? Then send them through this particular wringer and see how they come out. Here’s a little more info:

All Going Down

Tensions don’t simmer for long in the Sixth World. They build, and then they explode. In Chicago’s Containment Zone, that time has come. From the hunt for the missing Samantha Villiers (in her various guises) to rising gang tensions to mysterious strangers building power bases for secretive purposes, there are plenty of unstable reagents mixing in the CZ, and they’re about to blow. Shadowrunners are going to be right in the middle of it all—aren’t they always?—and they’ll have to see how many lives they can save. Including their own.

Falling Angels is the dramatic conclusion of Season 6 of Shadowrun: Missions. Drawing on plot elements and characters from previous Missions, this job brings the storyline to an explosive conclusion while setting the stage for future jobs in one of Shadowrun’s most chaotic settings. Jump in for a wild ride!

So enjoy the Mission, get ready to ramp up to Season Seven, play Shadowrun with SR5 or Anarchy and, whatever you do, have fun!

Gen Con is rushing down on us, and one of the things I’m most excited about is getting the prototype version of Shadowrun: Anarchy into gamers’ hands. Since that’s about to happen, followed by the push to get the full version off to print, it’s a good time to start talking about how the book came to be—and why it is what it is.

The reason to bring Shadowrun: Anarchy into being is simple—people kept asking for it. I love Shadowrun, Fifth Edition and look forward to further expanding and detailing that ruleset, but I also see the value in something that you can learn and play quickly, where the focus is the story and the rules are there to help the story move along. In early 2015, I kept having conversations with people interested in such a system, to the point where my thinking went from “Should we do this?” to “How should we do this?”

Answering that question meant looking at an asset we already had in hand—the Cue System that was first used in Cosmic Patrol and then in the Valiant Universe Role-Playing Game. I love Cosmic Patrol’s fast pace and the way it draws all the players into shaping a shared story, while the Valiant RPG showed the system’s potential for holding more mechanics, allowing more depth and variety of characters without sacrificing speed and simplicity. Still, if we were going to try to adapt the Cue System to Shadowrun, it was going to have to change even more. Some critical issues that arose during development included:

• Could we move the system from a series of progressing dice—attributes in the Cue System improve by going from D4 to D6 to D8 and so on—to pools of six-sided dice, which is a critical part of making a system feel like Shadowrun?
• Could we adapt the Cue System’s shared-gamemaster structure into one that allows a more traditional, single gamemaster as an option, or even one that uses a single gamemaster as a default?
• How many connections could we make between Shadowrun, Fifth Edition and Anarchy so that players may move from one to the other?
• How could we introduce magic, combat, and the Matrix so that all elements feel usable without overly complicating the game? What about spirits? Technomancers? Riggers?
• What is the balance between providing the information the players need for the game to work and providing too much information so that it becomes off-putting?

These are not easy questions, and they were not answered easily or right away. One answer we saw pretty quickly was that the Cue System could work—we could bend it and stretch it into what we wanted it to be while working with its cooperative storytelling strengths. We had the bones we needed—our work was fleshing it out.

As we look into the development process, we’ll talk about how we answered some of the other questions I mentioned, and why we chose what we chose. For this post, let’s answer the first question: Six-sided dice pools are go! Having a simplified list of skills and connected attributes allows us to use dice pools that grow as characters improve, and allow the same virtues of scaling up that we get in Shadowrun, Fifth Edition. If it’s a Shadowrun role-playing game, we want to be able to roll six-sided dice, so that’s what you’re going to get!

How did we answer those other questions? Future posts will let you know!

The wonderful thing about critters is the Sixth World is that no matter who you are, no matter where you are, there is a critter prepared to mess up your day. Street sammies in heavily urbanized areas, deckers riding the lightning of the Matrix, mages tripping the light fantastic of the astral plane–all of them might run into something wild and fierce that is perfectly capable of screwing up their day.

You’ll find information on the full spectrum of these critters–savage Infected, venomous paranormals, mysterious spirits, Matrix-hacking beasts, and more–in the new book Howling Shadows, now available for PDF purchase and print pre-order (Battleshop, DriveThruRPG). Maybe you’ve seen some of the new art we’ve shared, but now you can look at the whole thing. Need a little more info? Read on!

Sometimes we like to come out with Missions that are not part of the regular Missions schedule, and sometimes we like to do things with those Missions that are a little experimental. In that vein, we bring you the new Mission, UnCONventional Warfare, wherein the type of Shadowrun adventure often played in a convention setting is an adventure with a convention setting, because we hope reality will fold back in on itself enough times to usher in the Singularity.

Along with its bold setting, the Mission features a whole new look that in many ways may seem primitive but in other, more important ways is totally futuristic, because it has emojis all over the place, and nothing says hip, hot, and futuristic like emojis. Shadowrun line developer Jason Hardy said about this design choice: “I love almost everything about Shadowrun‘s art and design, but there is one glaring flaw: an almost total lack of emojis. We need more emojis. More emojis! Emojis everywhere!”

Shadowrun art director Brent Evans took the whole thing in stride. While the decision was made a little late to allow Mr. Evans to actually participate in the design, he noted his enthusiasm thusly: “My head is swimming with the visual possibilities.  We could run amok with this.” And run amok we shall!

Legendary design and layout guy Matt “Wrath” Heerdt was somewhat less sanguine, saying “Oh nice, you drop an emoji project on me with no warning? And let me guess, production will have to develop those? Do you have any idea how swamped I am and how much time a smiling-winking-troll emoji would take to design? I’ll shuffle some projects around, just don’t expect the troll emojis to be twice as big as the elf emojis …” At that point he shuffled off to hide under a warm blanket with his laptop and a huge carafe of coffee.

But enough build-up. Why don’t you see the triumph of emoji-based design for yourself? Since this Mission is such an experiment, we’re giving it away for free. Here’s the link: SMH 2016-01 UnCONventional Warfare

And we’ll note that whatever else this Mission is, it’s entirely playable. Have fun!