We all know that Shadowrun is not the happiest of game universes, but for those of you who like to add a nice heaping of extra darkness to your games and reading–and who doesn’t?–we have two new releases for you today!
First up is a new e-book called 10 Terrorists (Battleshop, DriveThruRPG), and to get a sense of what’s going on in the book, we’re going to share a little behind-the-scenes exchange with you from when the drafts of art were coming through. Here’s how the author (who also wrote Nothing Personal and the Mr. Johnson chapter of Run Faster) reacted: “HOLY S***! … That’s some extreme art. Awfully violent, but it makes a statement.” And then the e-book developer explained it like this: “This is a dystopian universe and terrorists are generally considered the worst of the worst. To illustrate that in pictures we needed to reach into places the public doesn’t like to look.”
The point is, 10 Terrorists looks at some dark parts of human nature and how this can be used in your Shadowrun games. We understand that not everyone wants to go where this book goes (and for a glimpse of that, take a look at the cover on the linked pages), but for those who do, the book has some ways to throw new twists and dangers at shadowrunners while fleshing out the dangers of the Sixth World. Here’s a summary of the book:
Causes of Blood
There is no way to sugarcoat it—people in the Sixth World spend an awful lot of time coming up with reasons to kill each other. When it comes to moral codes, people don’t think they’re better than others because they don’t kill and others do—they compare the reasons for killing, ranking them, trying to justify the oft-unjustifiable. You can talk to a hundred people and get a hundred different opinions about what’s justified and what’s not, and about which motivations are worse than others, but consistently at the bottom of the list are those who would kill innocents for a cause, who would instill terror in people for political gain, because they see no other recourse.
10 Terrorists covers ten groups in the Shadowrun setting who add chaos and violence to an already chaotic and violent world to further their own twisted causes. From Seed, a Matrix terrorism group that split off Ex Pacis, to Logos, a group that combines environmental extremism with talislegging, these are groups that can add and danger and plot hooks to Shadowrun campaigns. Whether runners are infiltrating the groups, avoiding them, or dealing with the fallout from the chaos they cause, 10 Terrorists can increase the threat level of any Shadowrun game.
10 Terrorists is for use with Shadowrun, Fifth Edition.
Want something slightly lighter? How about a vampire shadowrunner in the ruined sprawl of Chicago trying to catch up with a world that has only grown more dangerous and stranger while he has been out of action? Okay, that may not sound exactly “light,” but that’s what’s happening in the new Shadowrun novel Crimson (Battleshop, DriveThru–note that both of those have epub and Kindle copies in a zip file–Barnes & Noble, Amazon), and even if it’s not exactly sunshine and puppies, it’s plenty of fun. Here’s the summary, as well as the terminally cool cover:
Where No One Knows Your Name …
Thanksgiving, 2075. Shadowrunning vampire-mage Rick “Red” Lang used to make his living hunting dangerous insect spirits and twisted mages, but when he awakens after twelve years of involuntary hibernation, he finds the rest of the world has gotten even stranger.
Red begins piecing together what had happened during his lost time—and who put him under in the first place. But as he journeys through the neon-drenched ruins of Chicago and its augmented facades, Red uncovers an even larger plot involving eldritch forces seeking to invade from beyond our reality. He teams up with the few allies he can trust—Pretty, a beautiful ghoul, and Slim, a hacker extraordinaire—as they head into the middle of multiple schemes and power plays surrounding a dangerous new conflict threatening to shatter the uneasy peace into all-consuming chaos.
