By Jason Hardy, Line Developer

Gen Con is a week away, which means we’re really close to seeing lots of people from the Shadowrun community, soaking in Shadowrun games, and indulging in a number of ways to create more Shadowrun fun!

The Catalyst Demo Team will, of course, be running a ton of games during the con, and we’ll also be demoing the new Shadowrun, Sixth World rules at the booth. You can also dive into a demo of the board game Shadowrun: Sprawl Ops!

But the fun doesn’t stop there. It’s Shadowrun’s thirtieth anniversary, so we want to spread Shadowrun joy around. We’ll have a special display case of Shadowrun goodies from across the years for your viewing pleasure, and we’ll have plenty of new products for sale at the booth. Let’s get a look at the Shadowrun items you’ll be able to pick up at the con!

Shadowrun, Sixth World Core Book

The newest edition of Shadowrun will be up for sale! Get ready to dive into Sixth World action, gain edge over the competition, and use it to pull off stunning victories and thrilling escapes. We’ve talked a lot about this edition lately in recent posts, and we’re excited for people to play it!

Shadowrun, Sixth World Beginner Box

Want a quick taste of what the new edition has in store? Try the Beginner Box! With quick-start rules, four pre-generated characters, an adventure, setting information, and reference cards for gear and spells, the box will get you right into the action. Did we mention it has poster-sized maps and some custom Shadowrun dice?

Shadowrun Dice & Edge Tokens

A good amount of six-sided dice is always important to Shadowrun, and in the new edition, tracking and spending Edge is more important than ever. This pack of dice and Edge tokens makes your game easier to play and manage—and they look cool, too!

Rogue’s Gallery NPC cards

Need a runner for any situation? This deck has them—more than fifty, as a matter of fact! With compact game stats, character art, and some flavor to help you get to know the character, this deck will help gamemasters introduce characters on the fly to help or hinder the players.

Prime Runner miniatures

We’ve long wanted to create our own Shadowrun miniatures, and they’re finally here! Featuring Sledge, the ork street samurai, Coydog, the elf shaman, Gentry, the human decker, Hardpoint, the dwarf rigger, and Blanco, the troll weapons specialist, this pack brings Shadowrun action to life.

Neo-Anarchist Streetpedia

Want to know about what Aztechnology is up to these days? Need some info on Asamando, Deus, or Maria Mercurial? Then check out the Neo-Anarchist Streetpedia! It covers topics from Aden to the Zurich-Orbital Habitat, written in the off-the-cuff style the neo-anarchists are known for! Get it and get caught up on the Sixth World.

No Future

What hot new shows are on the trideo tonight? What tunes are shadowrunners blasting into their earbuds as they rampage through corporate security? What sports teams do runners root for in their downtime? No Future has the answers. It’s your guide to the culture of Shadowrun’s Sixth World, helping runners navigate their time off while also sneaking in critical paydata that might help them on a run.

Sledge collectible statue

Sledge, who has appeared in Shadowrun art and fiction over the past six years, is the very model of an ork street samurai. Soon, he’ll be a model you can put in your home.

Catalyst Game Labs is thrilled to announce a new collectible statue of Sledge, produced with the help of our friends at Monster Fight Club. As you see in the pictures, Sledge is fully detailed and ready for action. He is a great addition to any Shadowrun collection and a great way to bring cyberpunk flavor into any home or office.

Sledge will go on sale to the general public later this year, but we were able to fly in a small number of statues for sale at Gen Con. How small? Twelve. Due to the limited availability, we want to make sure they go to some of the most dedicated Shadowrun fans at Gen Con. Here’s what you must do to get one:

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One statue will go on sale at the designated times listed below throughout the con. To acquire the statue, you need to purchase our Shadowrun Super Fan package at a cost of $500. That includes:

• One Shadowrun, Sixth World core rulebook
• One Shadowrun, Sixth World Executive Edition book
• One copy of No Future
• One Shadowrun Dice & Edge Tokens pack
• One set of Rogue’s Gallery minis
• One Sledge statue

Purchase of this package will enable you to then purchase a Sledge statue for $150 at one of the following times:

• Thursday at 9 a.m., 10 a.m., noon, 2 p.m., and 4 p.m.
  
• Friday at 10 a.m., noon, 2 p.m., and 4 p.m.
• Saturday at 10 a.m., noon, and 2 p.m.

All this will be at Gen Con along with metal dice, t-shirts, and more! Drop by booth 1611, say hi, and see it all!

By Jason Hardy, Shadowrun Line Developer

Gen Con, as people insist on reminding me, is four weeks away, and that’s where the Shadowrun, Sixth World core rulebook will first be released into the wild. To build up to that, we’re going to spend the next few weeks talking about different aspects of the that book, including combat, Matrix, and the ever-present challenge of presenting the deep, enthralling world of Shadowrun to new users and experts alike. First up, let’s talk about magic!

Revising the magic system presents one significant obstacle from the get-go: I really like Shadowrun’s magic system (speaking specifically about spellcasting right now). I think it does what it is supposed to do admirably, in that it gives spellcasters the chance to do big things, do small things, and think about what it’s going to cost them. Want to throw a big fireball into a corp boardroom? You can do that, but be ready to have some cart away your unconscious body afterward.

So if the system works, what needs to change? This was one of the first things I thought about when the very first gears of SR6 were turning. I pondered one recurring request for magic that came up fairly regularly, and that was for spells that players and gamemasters can generate on their own. That can be difficult to do in you want to keep balance right (though there is no such thing as perfect balance in RPG rules—but that’s a topic for another time), but it helps if the system is designed from the get-go to allow that.

So that’s what SR6 spellcasting is–it’s designed from the ground up to (eventually) allow spellcasters to make their own spells. It treats spells in a modular way, so that each spell is a combination of modules, at that combination tells you how much its basic drain will be. For example, the modules that go into Fireball are Combat + Affect living things + Fire + Area effect + Ranged.

Now, this is a bit of a tease, because you won’t be able to design spells right out of the gate in SR6. Doing that would have required putting all the modules and the instructions for combining them in the core rulebook, and we simply didn’t have the space for that. So given that, what are the ramifications for people who will be using the core book? Here’s a few:

• Force is not declared before casting. With everything being modular, some of the main things you’d use Force for—namely, increasing the area of effect and increasing combat damage—are built into separate modules. Plus, with limits being removed across the board in SR6, it made sense to change the way the rules work in Magic, too. I’d seen many new players struggle with knowing just what Force to use for a spell, so changing this is a way of making it a little easier. You can ramp up the power if you want to, but you can also charge ahead and cast the basic spell without having to worry about it too much.
• Elemental effects can come in more often. The modular system allows for a great range of elemental effects, and it also allows them to come into play in a variety of circumstances. Cooling Heal, Warming Heal, and Elemental Armor Are particular examples of this.
• Drain should feel consistent. Since all drain calculations are based on the same modules, it should feel consistent across the line of spells.

Of course, spellcasting is only one area of magic. Adept powers, alchemy, conjuring, reagents, ritual spellcasting, and astral traveling/combat are in there, too. In those areas, a large amount of the changes that were made were to take advantage of the expanded Edge system, as discussed in the Shadowrun, Sixth World Developer Overview post. Various aspects of magic needed to be adjusted and tweaked to fit into the Edge paradigm, which should mean less calculating of modifiers so that you can get to the cool parts of a role-playing game. Spirits, unlike spells, still have Force, since it’s a handy way to measure the power of the individual entities, but Force does not act as a limit on Conjuring dice rolls. Enchanting needed a decent amount of tweaking, since many of its elements were based on the Force of the spell, which no longer exists, so other measures, including base drain value, were used instead. Reagents was one of those areas where good feedback during the development process led to rules that worked well with the larger system.

I hope that provides a taste of what we were thinking when working on SR6 magic, as well as whetting your appetite for that spell creation system you should see next year!