The next Shadowrun Legends installment is Blood Sport (BattleShop, DriveThruRPG).

Mama Grande streaked through Leni’s life like a bad dream. She arrived out of nowhere, claiming to be the ex-Lone Star detective’s grandmother. She prophesied rivers of blood and an earth in flames. But her murder was even more bizarre: she died at the hands of two Yucatán missionaries hiding a secret of the Gods.

With combat biker wannabe Rafael in tow, Leni dives into Mama Grande’s past… and hurtles into the dark heart of Aztlan – where human sacrifice is all the rage, and where ancient ceremonial games could trigger the end of the world. Are they crazy cultists of true harbingers of doom? The closer Leni and Rafael get to the answer, the nearer they move to the brink of oblivion. Either way, their futures could be cancelled….

We’ve two new Shadowrun Legends available in Stranger Souls (BattleShop, DriveThruRPG) and Shadowboxer (BattleShop, DriveThruRPG).

Dunkelzahn the dragon’s election as President of the United Canadian American States promised the dawn of a new era. But the hopes of a nation disintegrate with the powerful explosion that assassinates him. On that same fateful evening Dunkelzahn’s most trusted special agent, Ryan Mercury, is on a secret mission of great urgency involving dangerous magic. And only a miracle can save the world from total destruction…

In this first book of the Dragon Heart Saga, Dunkelzahn’s murder shocks the Awakened-world. Rumors and suspicions run rampant as shadowrunners, Secret Service agents, and megacorp execs scramble for the reins of power. Open these pages to see the story behind the great dragon’s death and the beginning of a new adventure…

Too Hot To Handle

For Two Bears, a dwarf mercenary accustomed to running the shadows, the job sounded like an easy way to make a huge stack of cash: track down and discover the meaning of the word “IronHell.” But when the decker he approaches for help gets her brain fried on the Matrix, Two Bears konws he’s up to his stout little shoulders in drek.

Too Cool To Give Up

Realizing that IronHell must be the title of something – or somebody – very powerful, Two Bears looks for some backup to make sure he gets through this job alive. He lines up a street troll called Thumbs, a slick decker named Silver, a suit-wearing samurai called Delphia, and Moonfeather, a magic-wielding disciple of the Cat totem. Together they blast their way through a stream of megacorp] operatives, giant meta-beasts, and high-tech pirates, desperate to unravel the incredible secret of IronHell – before it unravels the world ….

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!

You have seen it. You have felt it. The dream where you are falling, falling, and you cannot see the ground but you know it is there waiting. You may try to brace yourself, you may try to force yourself awake—you do anything to avoid the impact that keeps rushing toward you.

The Seelie Court is the realm of the hidden, the rumored, and the unknown. Fairies, spirits, and enchanted creatures mingle there, building alliances, plotting, scheming, toying with the realm of humans—and with each other. The Court has long held a distant attachment to the material plane, influencing it like a dream influences our waking hours. But now a new connection has emerged, allowing humans to infiltrate the courts and influence its proceedings. At a time when magical power is ever in the rise, the mix of human and fae could set both worlds into a calamitous plunge, and no one will want to be awake when they hit bottom.

Court of Shadows is an alternate setting for Shadowrun, Fifth Edition, emphasizing the magic and intrigue of the Seelie Court. With full setting, character, and plot details, as well as information on using SR5 characters in the Seelie Court, this book presents all-new ways to play Shadowrun and to live in the mystical intrigue of the planes of fairy, capturing the magic of the dream world—and seeing if they can prevent its fall.

Court of Shadows Bundles

• PDF only (BattleCorps, DriveThruRPG)
• Standard Edition Book only (BattleShop)
• Standard Edition Book and PDF (BattleCorps)
• Limited Edition Book and PDF (BattleCorps)
• Standard Edition, Limited Edition Books and PDF (BattleCorps)

View all purchasing options.

The Seattle Sprawl box set is in our warehouse and ready to start shipping. Anyone that previously ordered the Seattle Sprawl Digital Box will be receiving an email with a code for $10 off the physical order.