What's the best way to get into Shadowrun in 2026?
>>98165846Read the rules. Play the game. /thread
>>98165846Anarchy 2.0. Its been yo ho ho'd, and the physical release should be in the coming months.I know some people use Cities Without Number to do a Shadowrun-like, but Shadowrun=fistful of d6s to me, so ymmv.
>>98165846What is your wait time for remaking this thread, because it wasn't immediate like some of the others.
>>98165846haha nigger!it looks like nigger! it's funny hecause it says the magic word! nigger nigger nigger! haha!
>>98166332Yes, Reddit, saying that word is funny here.
>>98166348It is for about the first three or so years. I've been here since before you were born and lemme tell you, it's lost its luster. You treating it as some holy mantra WOULD make it funny again, if it wasn't so pathetic.
>>98165846>What's the best way to get into Shadowrun in 2026?avoid anything published after 1996
>>98166358
>>98165846Probably 20th anniversary/4e or 3e (keeping in mind that 3e consolidates a lot of 2e splats into the core).Tbh, these days I would use Cities Without Number if you aren't opposed to a resolution system other than fistfulls of d6.
>>98166358Don't forget, you're here forever.
>>981658464E
>>98166363Pink mohawk garbage
shadowrun is a game that had a time and that time is overThe fluff is cool and there are really good ideas in it, but the combat and skills systems have been a disaster from day 1.The metaplot became brutally retarded around 3rd Edition5th Edition was a huge piece of shitThinking up a character in shadowrun is cool. Thinking up an adventure for a shadowrun game is cool. The early rulebooks and splats were cool.Playing shadowrun sucks
>>98166358This place is for edgy middle schoolers and people who never developed past the mentality of an edgy middle schooler, but gained the crankiness and self importance of depressed older men. A bad combo.
>>98165846Pirate all of 3E, 4E, and 5E then take a look at the core books to decide which you like the best, then read the rest of the core book for whichever edition you picked and rope some "friends" into being players until one gets into it enough to GM so you can actually play the game.
>>98169296this is good advice but don't play 5E it is terriblePlay 3E and establish a game rule that all decking is done by NPCs
>>98166332>EVERYONE LOOK ITS THE NIGGER WORDCalm down kramer
>>98169296>>98169464>>98169180Is there any difference in the setting between editions? I liked the CRPGs
>it looks like nigger! it's funny hecause it says the magic word! nigger nigger nigger! haha!
>>98165846the HBS games
>>98169672Yes. The CRPGs are more reflective of the 2E and 3E era. For example: 4E decided to go hard on the wireless shit, down to your cyberware impants, did away with Deckers using bigass cyberdecks to hack the planet by direct wire connections to networks for more general Hackers using commlinks, basically smartphones but more cyberpunk, to do all their hacking of everything from corp networks for big jobs to a street punk's cyber-dong mid combat, with the in setting thing with it being that it's an advancement in technology after the second super matrix crash that killed a bunch of people, trapped some in the internet forever, and maybe turned some into Technomancers who were a wireless version of the 2E/3E Otaku who are weird genetic fuckups that use their brain to do hacking instead of a cyberdeck/commlink. 5E decided that wasn't as enjoyable and that having everything be wireless and hackable without any reason for people to have their shit on wireless connection wasn't a great decision, and that the flavor of just using a smartphone was shit, so they brought back cyberdecks and made it so wireless is an option that opens you to a few risks for some benefits rather than the default with no real upside.(1/2?)
>>98169672>>98169720There are also some more flavor related changes here and there by edition like which corps are big and important, which important characters are around, and what the big metaplot stuff is. Examples: 1E had all the major establishing things going on and the start of the bug spirit stuff with some slight tie ins for the fantasy game Earthdawn to imply that Shadowrun is the same setting a few ages later, 2E had things like the Great Dragon Dunkelzhan running for president of the UCAS then having himself assassinated for some greater plot and using the Universal Brotherhood that had been around since 1E for the insect spirit trouble, 3E having the Otaku matrix resonance vs evil AIs and insane Otaku doing matrix dissonance things resulting in the previously mentioned second super matrix crash Halley's Comet setting off the SURGE phenomenon that turns people into mutants and furfags, and really more of a focus on higher stakes stuff, 4E had the Technomancer stuff and a bunch of wars including dragon civil wars, 5E was a bit of a clusterfuck of metaplots with random Technomancer and people with cyberware in the head or with certain nanomachine related stuff done getting a disease called Cognitive Fragmentation Disorder which turned out to be AI overwriting people's minds to steal their bodies, the bug spirits coming back again, and more dragon civil wars. Never bothered with 6E but looking around it seems they went with a bunch of disasters leading to UCAS getting fucked up with loss of matrix grids all over, a corp losing face for actually getting their wacky bullshit outed, and some kind of secret invasion from a metaplanar extra-demensional realm what the fuck is this shit of some kind of mana sucking alien type things. Glad I never got into 6E holy shit
>>98169761>some kind of secret invasion from a metaplanar extra-demensional realm>mana sucking alien type thingswhati can take all the other stuff, sounds cool as fuck, but what
>>98169678ThisBut the Shadowrun Storytime is pretty great too
>>98169767The tail end of 5E and the early views of 6E killed the fairly long running, at the time having mostly spawned out of TwoDee's Shadowrun Storytime threads, which were also pretty good for getting new people into Shadowrun so here's some archive links, a bit split up because the guys tagging shit were a bit retarded sometimes back then: https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=2D https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Shadowrun%20Storytime https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=TwoDee or if you want just the storytime without the authentic lurking in the thread experience https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1441/82/1441824803216.pdf Shadowrun General here for a reason. All the transfers in ownership of the franchise probably didn't help long term quality either:>FASA to WizKids, after FASA died and some of their guys made WizKids, also partly Microsoft for vidya>WizKids to Fantasy Productions for the German version, which ended up in a very strong German fanbase that is partly why the Kraut versions of editions are very well regarded if you can read German or find it translated>WizKids was bought out by Topps, the fags that do sports cards>Topps licensed it to Catalyst Game Labs who still run shit into the ground to this dayThe old generals used to include a line reminding you to never buy any Catalyst Game Labs books for a reason.>>98169782I still go back thru the threads sometimes, I missed the first one live but got to read all the ones after as TwoDee was posting them which was a lot of fun and helped me get my at the time regular group to try Shadowrun for the first time. It's been 14 years since the first threads and 12 since it ended now, while I first got into Shadowrun in 1997 playing the SNES game as a kid. In that time Shadowrun has really just fallen off the edge of a cliff and then kept getting worse. It's hard not to be nostalgic for the better times.
>>98169798Just remembered there's the old FASA promo video for Shadowrun too if you need things to help get a group a bit interestedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GPGQoR6f6w
>>98169798I was wondering where the fuck the general was. Good lord.And yeah. There's a 21 hour narration of the storytime by some dude, and it popped up in my recommendations, so I decided to play it as background noise while replaying Dragonfall and HK.It's so damn comfy. Fucking America-san
>>98169798>>98169761>>98169720Well fuck. I think I'll go check out Pathfinder instead. Thanks.
>>98170224don go fren
>>98166332What the fuck are you talking about, that clearly says Rigger, as in the in-game class.you nigger
>>98165846>Black Book>is mostly red, blue and yellow
>>98166332lol simply epic xD
>>98169678This desu>>98169720SR4 is probably the best mechanically. It also has a supplement for classic SR decking.
>>98166332You alright? Your nephew a nigger or something?
>>98165846Port its 3rd Edition Lore over to a generic system like GURPS and never look back. You don't know how much Shadow Runs rules suck ass until you spend twenty minutes resolving three rounds of combat.
>>98175291how horrifying
>>98175291We tried to do a second edition game earlier this year and it was unimaginably tedious. I know people play games for all kinds of different reasons, but it's very hard for me to believe that people actually enjoyed that absolute fuckfest. It was bad in the ways I had assumed it would be (hacking took too long) but it was also bad in completely unexpected ways (hacking was horribly designed and basically purpose built to make hackers fail).
>>98176091this is why most people play by house rules
>>98166358Is the anti AI and loony toon word. That's about it.
>>98165846Learn German
>>98176592du bist ein sheit lecker
>>98166332lol you're scared of a word
fuck me, shadowrun is dead
LMFAO LOOK ITS THE NIGGER WORD! LUL NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER
>>98166373Yep. We're here forever.
>>98166373>those two got married and have children now>you're still here
>>98166358ok redditor
>>98165895SPBPAnarchy 2.0 is probably the best option for those who want to indulge in the setting without (most of) the headaches that plague the core editions.
>>98166332
>>98169761You can tell who the real Shadowrun fans are and the the people who have no idea wtf they're talking about.The invasion from the other dimension has been a meta-plot since first edition tied itself to Earthdawn, representing the 4th world, modern times representing the 5th world, and Shadowrun representing the Sixth World. The interdimensional beings are referred to as Horrors. Dunkelzahn sacrificed himself to prevent part of their invasion, and Harlequin is heavily involved in the lore as well, being as he is an elf who has been around since the 4th world. Shadowrun also references the Horrors as the Terrors.
>>98189102They're not using the Horrors/Terrors for it in 6E. They're using a metaplane they're calling Dis and inhabitants called Disians who are stealing Earth's mana to use for Dis. Completely outside anything to do with the Horrors/Terrors unless they've yet again rewritten it to be Disians are the Horrors/Terrors or a new subtype of Horror/Terror or something, but the Horrors/Terrors were feeding on fear and suffering and such not trying to steal the mana life energy of Earth to dump into their own metaplane to prevent it's decay and were physically described as having all sorts of different forms that each individual one might have as opposed to the Disian's looking like magical energy versions of the Grey aliens possessing constructs. Horrors/Terrors are fine since they've been around in the metaplot since the start and were part of what kept Earthdawn and Shadowrun connected, the problem I'm having with the Disians is they seem to have come up suddenly at without particular connection to things that came before from some dying but otherwise normal Metaplane rather than the crazy and difficult to connect to Deep Metaplanes that Horrors/Terrors were coming from. Basically the main issue I'm having with them, unless they're just a full on rewrite and retcon of the Horrors/Terrors to completely decouple them from Earthdawn for further copyright shit which would be shit in it's own way, is they feel like they've just come from nowhere with no setup while stepping on the toes of the Horrors/Terrors metaplot which has more established ties to everything.
Frankly I think the Horrors only work as a distant looming metaplot threat that never actually arrives because that would completely fuck up the setting and genre. Like the occasional mission leading from a simple heist to unraveling a sprawling conspiracy in which your actions set back the Horrors...for NOW (ooh, spooky~) is cool and good for the setting, but the Horrors ACTUALLY arriving for real means that cyberpunk-fantasy heists are over and the setting is now post-apocalyptic survival eldritch horror, and there is no going back (unless it turns out that you can just shoot the Horrors and they die, and other than a major UCAS city being destroyed--because of course one would be--everything goes back to normal after enough Shadowrunners shoot all the Horrors).
>>98190626well yeah that's what they werei don't think even earthdawn gave that much focus from what i heard about it
>>98190626Didn't the HBS game in Hong Kong do that with a Feng Shui engine getting fucked and locking into a Chinese mythology horror?
>>98190565Yeah, they had to scrap the storyline going forward when the two licenses diverged. Its changed hands a couple times since then so there's no way Catalyst can use that storyline anymore.
>>98193350astral illegals thoughfucking astral illegals
>>98193350They didn't have to turn it into Marvel's Secret Invasion but Shadowrun though.Instead of having the Horrors and their sort of looming "end of an age" doomsday feel, with them having shown up and starting The Scourge for the last chunk of the Fourth World and implicitly doing the same for the previous era of magic, we're now stuck with the Disians replacing people in Mitsuhama. Aztechnology, the UCAS government, and so on to run some shadow war shit while building machines to suck the mana out of Earth and send it off to Antarctica to refine and dump into their shit metaplane. The Horrors were something that had to be struggled thru in the past and something to try desperately to prevent the return of, with even Great Dragons being willing to die to do so, instead now the Disians are something that are dealt with by Renraku, Horizon, Evo, a couple Great Dragons, random groups, and some Shadowrunners teaming up to turn the Dis mana suck shit off, kill the Disians, have Ares swoop in to jump thru the Dis portal and kill a bunch of them in their own shithole metaplane, and then shut their portal after, with the story then following up with something or other about magic being weaker now after all this caused mana to act weird and magic to turn off and on again after a week and a half. It really just feels like replacing some horror/apocalypse/end of an age stuff with what seems like it would fit in better with capeshit hence comparing it to Marvel's Secret Invasion as an insult at the start of my post when they could have just kept the Horrors and their metaplot stuff as is and then just changed the name and made a few tweaks as needed to make it just legally distinct enough without just throwing it all in the trash and replacing it with the Dis stuff.
Does someone have a PDF trove link? Best way to see if you like the flavor
>>98197270Normally I'd tell people to go to the share thread, but its shit is super dead due to PDF posting being gone, the main links to the guide and archives being killed, and the newer way of sharing things being short term links making the guy who did the archives for it give up a bit, so use rebrand with /ShadeRushLifeSupport or use MF with /folder/s8h1ai7hbdgla/Shadowrun for a older one that hasn't been updated in a long time.
>>98197872Thanks Anon you rock
>>98197872Thanks for your service, anon.I was browsing 6e and the amount of vulgar looking people in the art is a big turn off.The DMV lady in pic related cannot possibly handle that sword. It's a clown show.I wish I did not have so much emotional attachment to Shadowrun. :\5e still looks good, but maybe 4e is the aesthetic peak.
>>98202504this isn't fucking realthis is some sloppa ai joke
>>98202504During the later chunk of 5E they started relying heavily on contractors for things like stories, rules, and character options, so I'm not surprised the art also lost cohesion for 6E.
