>>98384450
Yeah

>>98384450
No

>>98384450
It's a very cool setting, but the game itself ranges from "okay" to "non-functional" depending on which edition you're playing. I say that as someone who loves SR. If you want to give it a try just avoid 6E and you'll be fine

>>98384450
Frank Trollman did a good job with it in 4e with his fixes but typically...too magicrunny for my tastes.

>>98384450
Not really, even at its best in SR3 and SR4. The HBS games are pretty good. CGL are also a bunch of ratfuck thieves who don't deserve your money.

>>98384450
It's unironically weighed down by being a kitchen sink setting, magic and tech and everything else forced to co-exist which bogs down the rules and the setting. In the end it ends up being a half-assed fantasy game with guns in it. Because of course the magic is more important than the tech. It's fucking magic.

Setting is gr8
play the hacks instead of the book

>>98384951
Im gonna try the video games (Dragonfall etc.) tomorrow - are they good?

>>98385057
the games are good but a very very small slice of the setting and they don't scratch the same aesthetic/vibe itch i get reading the books
hong kong is great i wanna fuck the rat lady real bad

>>98385057
I had fun playing the pc games, but they only felt somewhat close to how I remembered the pen and paper game. (I mainly played 3rd) Dragonfall was one of few games where I rolled up a new character immediately after finishing the game for the first time, so I enjoyed it a lot.

>>98385111
>>98385119
thanks bros. excited to play them, I like the look of glory a lot

>>98384450
Shadowrun is the poster child for "What an amazing setting! Damn shame about the system." See also: Exalted.
However, if your group goes in expecting the jank, you can avoid the worst parts and focus on the fun. I'm currently in a 5e game, and have been having a lot of fun. This article was helpful to our group:
https://paydata.org/shadowrun/gms/getting_started_with_shadowrun/

>>98385127
A word of advice regarding Glory: don't be afraid to press her about her past. My first playthrough, I almost missed her storyline because my character considered it a professional courtesy not to ask probing questions.

>>98385127
Not those anons, but I would consider looking up a text guide to skim for miss-able things. Always ask Glory about her past, always pet Dante after each missions, talk to the rest of the team between missions, and do not use a pre-gen character. The pre-gen characters are just bad

>>98384450
It is if you make it that way, according to all the faggots who defend 5e with "rule 0 applies to every TTRPG".

Shadowrun is crap, it mixes to many genres.

>>98384450
From my experience?
Setting wise
SR1 is hilarious with how ridiculous things can be with one of the most famous adventures being about a dragon getting shot down over a hospital and getting amnesia so the players need to figure out what the fuck, because this was before they decided dragons were super powerful ultra wealthy gods.
SR2 is most interesting because it plays around a lot more with what the 6th world means, how magitech is the future, but the immortal elves in their attempts to make a rational future where magic and technology could fuse together, ended up making a world where people aren't spiritual and as a result the amount of magic in the world is all sorts of topsy turvy. Also shit like "There's a dragon skeleton on mars despite the fact magic doesn't work in space, figure it out."
SR3 writers hated a lot of SR2, and tried to shift the focus to be more about Terminators, and Skynet, and Megacorps doing corporate takeovers! OH MY GOOOODDDD
SR4 wasn't sure if it wanted to keep the black trenchcoats or go more into the ridiculous, and does a bit of both. It's not as bad as some people say, but it's kind of the beginning of the end.
SR5 and SR6 lore the less said about the better.

Gameplay
SR3 with some SR2 = SR5 with fixes >>> SR1 = SR4 > Pure SR3 >>> Pure SR5 = Pure SR2 >>>>>> SR 6

>>98384904
You can make the the tech more important, but then you basically end up ignoring the magical side.

Honestly, my biggest complaint about SR besides the rules being generally shitty is that magic is integrated really poorly into the rest of the system and setting. There are very few ways to interact with magic as a mundane besides shooting the mage or magic entity, so any magic problem inevitably has to be solved by the team mage if it can't just be shot in the head (and sometimes even then), and other characters just end up being helpless victims if they can't immediately geek the mage. On the lore side, it is incredibly poorly explained what magic actually does in commercial industry besides security work against other magical threats, so there's basically nothing to do with magic as a GM besides throw some weird scary thing at the PC or toss wagemages and spirits into your corporate security setup so the PC mage can't walk over everything quite as easily.

Hacking has a similar issue, where there is an entire layer of reality that only the Decker/Technomancer can contribute towards, except that it is a lot easier to write in realspace alternatives to everything the Decker can do, and other characters can opt out of putting up with hacking bullshit at the price of losing the benefits of the internet in a cyberpunk setting (unfortunately, there's no opting out of having your brain hijacked or your blood boiled by a mage).

>>98385884
>SR2 is most interesting because it plays around a lot more with what the 6th world means, how magitech is the future, but the immortal elves in their attempts to make a rational future where magic and technology could fuse together, ended up making a world where people aren't spiritual and as a result the amount of magic in the world is all sorts of topsy turvy. Also shit like "There's a dragon skeleton on mars despite the fact magic doesn't work in space, figure it out."


I need to know, why is there a dragon skeleton on Mars?

>>98386128
>I need to know, why is there a dragon skeleton on Mars?
It's because it's never actually explained.
Shadowrun consistently since 2nd edition would introduce major plot threads and then leave them dangling so each table could solve them individually. Sometimes later editions would solve them but some of them were left blank.
For the Dragon Skeleton on mars, all we know is that there was a secret mars mission in the 00s, that found signs suggesting there used to be life on mars, including a dragon skeleton, but it was covered up so hard that NASA was shut down. There's an adventure about uncovering the truth to that mission, but it doesn't answer the big questions because no one was ever able to study it.

>>98384904
>Because of course the magic is more important than the tech. It's fucking magic.
Spoken like a true wand jockey.

>>98384450
As both a player and GM, SR3 is some of the best fun I've ever had, but just rip the matrix section right out of the book and staple in the one from SR1.

>>98386477
Sadly, the game has picked up the moniker "magicrun" in the last couple of editions for a reason. By all reasonable measures magic outcompete tech equivalents in almost all areas where the two are comparable, while also having a host of capabilities that tech simply lacks any equivalent to. If you aren't creating a hacker, rolling up a character without a magic score is a deliberate nerf for flavor.

>>98386506
>last couple of editions
Yea, like most games nowadays, because magic has become the safeword for retards who are indecisive and incompetent, so they replace everything with magic.

This, of course, is all besides the quote from my comment, where you deliberately stated:
>Because of course the magic is more important than the tech. It's fucking magic.
Arcanum is a pretty basic example that blows your statement out of the water pretty easily.

>>98384450
SR 3rd is hard to beat if you're into detailed combat. The initiative and dice pool system combine in a great way

>>98386533
Okay, but we're not talking about Arcanum. We're talking about Shadowrun, where both mechanically and setting-wise, magic is the bigger player. Of course some other settings treat tech as superior or more equal to magic. I don't know why you think that's a salient counterpoint.

>>98386128
>>98386181
Isnt part of the issue that one of the main meta plot writers died suddenly?

>>98386578
>setting-wise
>magic is the bigger player
Lmao, what? Shadowrun's entire setting is defined primarily by tech. There are multiple classes that are defined purely based on their interaction with the unique tech of the world like the Matrix, cyberware, and biotech.

>>98384450
Shadowrun 6e is truly horrible, just ape the setting and transplant it into GURPs or CP Red.

>>98385303
>>98385127
Yes, like the other anon said, be unprofessionally inquisitive with the NPCs to get their full story.

>>98385057
I thought they were great. It was my first introduction to Shadowrun so I didn't go in with any expectations. My only previous experience with RPGs were games like FFVII so I knew to talk to everyone after everyone mission. I made a generic gun specialist since I wasn't familiar with the magic and after putting enough points to boost hit rate, combat was easy. A hint: spell heals only heal the previous hit and first aid kits are expensive since money will be tight. There are often many ways to complete each mission, including non-violent or sneaky, so have fun experimenting.

>>98384450
It can be, under the right conditions
>good, knowledgeable GM
>crew not fucktards picking fights with Halloweeners every other scene
>tight leash on deckers and technomancers

>>98384904
The rules for magic, cyberspace, combat, vehicles, even chargen are each an overdesigned bloated mess individually and cutting any wouldn't help.

>>98385884
>SR3 with some SR2
Which parts?

>>98386625
Findley's death did in fact cause a lot of problems because most of the setting existed in his head.
There were also legal issues due to SR and Earthdawn getting sold to two different companies even though they're to same setting.

>>98387432
High Str & Recoil Comp

>>98384450
I don't think it's even mechanically as bad as people like to let on, but it's a caster supremacy game which instantly diminishes its worth as a cyberpunk game unless you play with minimal magic

>>98387495
I think SR3 was the sweet spot if magic is useful but in 4/5 situations a tech person can more easily, and often better, specialize in the same thing.

>>98384563
>Trollman
Nominative determinism at work!

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48 KB JPG

>>98384450
I prefer Lightjog

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532 KB JPG

>>98385866
but does it in a really effective way, that's what impressive about it, it shoud be slop, but it's not.

Anarchy 2.0 is shipping in non-US countries, but CGL is handling fulfillment in the states, so who fucking knows how long it'll be before copies are on store shelves.

Still, good for Black Book, this is one of the few times I've seen a Kickstarter be completely on time.

>>98385057
The SNES Shadowrun game is a classic.

>>98385957
>most mages, especially wage mages, are dogshit with magic and only know very basic spells that are barely as threatening as a gun
>serious matrix work like ice cutting is always done as a group in the matrix, simple security hacks are just a bunch of quick rolls
and just like that, for no reason at all, my group adopted shadow run as their main ruleset for literally every setting. they do not want to play anything else.

>>98387665
it's called day walking, retard

>>98385057
For me they’re the only way to scratch the itch of no shadowrun game to play. I’ve finished them 4-5 times each

In Hong Kong you can pretend to be Dervish, or America-San. Which is pretty great. Haven’t noticed that hommage before my last replay.

>>98385957
>it is incredibly poorly explained what magic actually does in commercial industry besides security work against other magical threats, so there's basically nothing to do with magic as a GM besides throw some weird scary thing at the PC or toss wagemages and spirits into your corporate security setup so the PC mage can't walk over everything quite as easily.
Lorewise it explains most mages basically summon spirits for menial labor or do other things based on their spell specialties.
Combat mages are the most boring and typically just body guards or hired killers.
Detection mages mostly work security where all they do is keep tabs on things, some of them might even know the catalog spell so they run inventories or make sure no one is stealing shit.
Illusion mages I find the most interesting, because they work greatly in both the entertainment industry and in law enforcement.
The Lone Star book suggests that police mages for example spend most of their time just sitting in chairs with IV drips and life support systems, so they can astrally project to any calls that involve magic going on anywhere in the city, and if it turns out they're not needed they can just fuck off to the next one.
Only the really skilled/trained detectives actually go places in person.
In either case, they mostly are focused in illusion magic because illusion AoE spells are ideal for disabling rooms full of people, or at least giving them such harsh penalties that your cop friends can detain them. With later editions adding pornomancy under illusion magic, it only got better for entertainment.
Manipulation magic is where it's at though, transformatives, plastic surgery, potion making (in some editions), and so on. There's a lot to be said here and a lot of jobs they can work.

Special note to healing magic, while you'd think it'd be the most useful for a "wage mage" there's a whole thing about how the medical/insurance industries lobbied to make healing magic illegal in most instances

>>98384450
I find the setting to be extremely gay and redundant.
It's not that I dislike mixing sci-fi and fantasy, but "Urban Fantasy meets Cyberpunk" is trying to spin too many plates in different directions.

>>98386659
>Lmao, what? Shadowrun's entire setting is defined primarily by tech.
No you dumb retard, magic is what defines the setting. The entire premise is that magic suddenly returns to an industrialized Earth. Magic is what dooms the world and magic is what saves it. Dragons and spirits run the megacorps.

>>98389769
Magic almost causes the apocalypse, that's true, if you use the wacky harlequin's back adventure, you also have a group of runners sent on a time travel adventure straight out of a 90s TV show to save the world from the incoming apocalypse.
But most of the setting is based around the fact that the majority of people SHOULD have magic, but due to various fuck ups and unknown factors breaking shit, less than 1% of people have magic, and as such tech still reigns supreme.
For most of the setting's history it was about humans doing human things, both as the movers and shakers, and as the super threatening bad guys.
Lofwyr is not all of Shadowrun, though he is a petty and vindictive mother fucker.

>>98385957
>On the lore side, it is incredibly poorly explained what magic actually does in commercial industry besides security work against other magical threats,
This isn't true at all, at least in second edition. There's a lot of information about exactly that.

Yes depending on Edition. My opinion is 3rd is the best iteration. The stories and plotlines of later editions are good, but the mechanics get wonky. You can of course use them in whatever edition you decide to run. Catalyst had an editing issue for 4th which made finding rules explanations difficult. Remember Watch your back, shoot straight, conserve ammo, and NEVER EVER cut a deal with a Dragon.

Lore: 2nd Edition
Mechanics: 3rd Edition
Bomus: If your group likes it lighthearted borrow from 1e lore, if they want more options backport things from SR4/SR5 (the fact it took so long before they introduced rules for melee with drones is ridiculous).

>>98387892

Your picture is a shining example of why people don't touch it.

>>98392498
Because they're giant fags who hate objectively rad shit?

>>98384450
>Is Shadowrun any good?
It was good. Now it's not.

>>98384527
This. It's good, but you can get anything from "Nobody involved thought these particular rules through, but it works, more or less" to: "This shit can only be produced by natural stupidity." The base system is also bare bones and requires the extensions. You pretty much need at least the magic and hacking expansions, and probably one of the gun digests for your brutes.

The main draw of SR was that even non-US groups could get splats for their nations instead of being stuck in Seattle/Night City.

Perhaps the owners of Shadowrun should tune the magic down by saying that everybody can now theoretically become a mage, instead of having to be born with awakened genes. Like, because there's now even more magic around, the astral plane now ceases to exist as a separate dimension, as it's now weighted down to be the same as realspace, and mages and spirits can't travel in astral space anymore.
That alone should already solve like 80% of all problems with mages.
If you don't have to fear being suddenly attacked by a group of astrally projecting mages and their dozen spirit slaves manifesting/materializing out of thin air and then ganking you, that ought to help.
If spirits now have to physically walk/fly/slither around, they'd be less frightening, and more easily dealt with.
And have every joe shmoe be able to learn how to cast spells, banish spirits, create weak magical barriers, ascense the local bad vibes and so on. Just make the karma costs for it much much higher than learning how to become an astronaut.

That way, everybody is now the man that meets magic and the machine.

>>98393881
We Earthdawn now.

>>98393881
They should have had "you can get magic through Karma" as a thing since fucking 2nd edition.
The fact you have to pay for magic at chargen or never has it clashes with literally every other system in the game.
That said, I don't think magic is as mandatory as people say it is, but that could just be because my group has regularly had runs/situations where magic was a nuisance but not defining.
Admittedly the cyber-pirates (2e) book makes fun of this, as in lore mages are super fucking rare, less than 0.1% of the population, and even among those only a small percentage actually develop their magic to be any good...
And then cyber-pirates jokes about how somehow every runner team in Seattle has 1 if not 2 awakened individuals on them.

>>98393991
To be fair, shadowrunners in general have an above average level of everything special: more magic, more cyberware, more smartguns, more cyberdecks, etc. It's not like the characters and the opposition they meet are supposed to be average joes.

>>98391739
>Lore: 2nd Edition
Which books have the most lootable/interesting lore? Doesn't need to be 2E

>>98397734
Shadowbeat, first edition book, is almost entirely lore. It's about music, news, entertainment, television. It's a really fun read.

>>98384524
>>98384470
Both.
Use Cyberpunk red rules, use Cyberpunk shit. Make magic rare and not common all over the place (corpos eat up mages early and fast, along with magic beasts and shit).
Emphasize storytelling on metas being catered to (imagine Militech and Arasaka subsidiaries celebrating the tenth anniversary of the awakening by selling toys and clothes).
Add goblins because it is such a missed opportunity for gobussy not being exploited.
Adjust rules and make it work.
Humanity cost for magic so you can either experience cyberpsychosis or mad wiz syndrome

>>98397910
goblins do exist in the setting though.
they're dwarves with the vampire-virus turning them into evil little hairless skinny buggers.

>>98395846
I punished my last GM with that after he insisted we make prime runners in our last campaign with a decker that rivalled the capabilities of the NPC DemiGOD in the book. He said basic runners wouldn't be strong enough to withstand what he planned to throw at us and I warned him with exactly what you said, but was overruled. We strolled through the mission with what could only be described as contemptible ease. Even basic runners should be considered a cut above an average joe who just picked up a gun.

>>98384450
not really. The lore is all over the place and to be honest is just there so you can have Elf hackers and Orc bodyguards. It feels too much like a bad homebrew D&D races and monsters into a Cyberpunk setting someone from reddit or tumblr made. (I know it came out before those sites were a thing. Still my point still stands.)

>>98384450
Yeah, its fantastic.

The system is perfectly alright (except for SR6 which is an abomination) although the books are a masterclass of shitty formatting.

But more than that, the setting is genuinely great, and straddles the line between campy, edgy and serious, and outright funny/cartoonish.

>>98386625
Maybe, but at the same time Shadowrun didn't do "metaplot" in the same way oWoD did, for example. A lot of plot elements were deliberately left vague or ambigious, and then not revisited because demystification is generally a bad idea.

It is one of the major reasons Shadowrun as a setting has endured.

>>98392498
The people that wouldn't touch Shadowrun based on that image are "people" whose opinions are bad and invalid, because they are retarded and wrong.

>>98397910
Bad opinions with bad advice.

>>98398688
>I have never even seen a shadowrun book in person, let alone read any of it, and I get all of my opinions from memes!

>>98398809
He's right though. Large parts of the Shadowrun setting "just are" without much in the way of justification or explanation. You have to consciously agree with the creators that you're not going to ask questions about the conceits of the setting

>>98398809
Shadowrun absolutely is just Cyberpunk + typical D&D fantasy races and magic. That literally is the concept.

>>98398809
There's not exactly some kind of deeper thematic genius to the way Shadowrun was created. It is literally as simple as DnD plus guns. Always has been, always will be. It's not like Cyberpunk 2020 where it's the brainchild of a specific genre of fiction focused on the meaninglessness of material life in a high-tech world ruled by corporate interests. All that stuff is really only given lip service in Shadowrun, because Shadowrun isn't Cyberpunk and it isn't fantasy adventure like DnD either. Instead you get a clumsy fusion of both genres where it tries to mix and match tropes and ideas from both, resulting in a muddy mess that isn't sure what it's trying to be. You have Aztec megacorpos working for man-eating bug spirits, which sort of ruins the Cyberpunk premise that the corporate hellscape is simply human greed and callousness towards the working class taken to its ultimate extreme. No, in Shadowrun you have cultists idiotically serving a class of evil spirits who want to literally devour the entire planet, which is absolutely not the result of human disregard for life, it's the result of dark spirits manipulating humans into creating the worst corporate culture and selling the worst corporate products imaginable to abuse and exploit humanity to its own worst interests.
And whenever Shadowrun tries to do something huge and meaningful, it always turns into Harlequin DMPC doing all the work and saving the world while the PCs just stand around being minorly helpful at best. Every time Shadowrun tries to lock in like this, it completely fucks it all up.
Please note that I am not saying Shadowrun can't be fun or that I loathe it. As long as all you want is just DnD plus guns, you will have a good time. Simple dumb fun is an appeal all its own.

>>98398907
>>98398952
>>98398993
>We, the peanut gallery who have also never actually read a Shadowrun book, feel the need to weigh in!

K

>>98399041
It's okay to leave the thread when you have nothing to contribute to a civil discussion. Better that than shitposting.

>>98399041
If you’re so convinced you know better, why don’t YOU tell the class what you think it’s supposed to be, anon?

>>98398704
I think this is why a lot of SR3/SR4 lore gets ignored in favor of SR2/SR5 lore.
Take the mystical floating obelisks in Tir Tairngire, they were a mysterious thing, even more mysterious was the fact they were in an area of active mana warp so magic didn't work near them. Suggests that they're sapping the magic out of the area around them, or possibly something else entirely, all that's known is the ancient elves of Tir Tairngire like them for some reason, and that they've been creating a number of magical sites that seem to be connected to those obelisks, their exact purpose is unknown but the elf birthrate has been going up since the project started!
I may have mixed like 2 or 3 things into one entry there.
Then you have SR3 saying "Actually the elf birthrate is declining because all of that magic surge died when Dunkelzahn died, and now elves are even turning into humans, and the obelisks are just shitty stones now, and tir tairngire sucks now, and the immortal elfs are leaving, and also fucking orks and a dragon are now in charge of the elf ethno-state that definitely wasn't inspired by Israel."

And a lot more shit like that, that no one asked for.

I'm still torn on the Knights Templar going from a secret organization of Magician Adepts (SR2) to an organization listed as an example one for mage PCs to possibly be connected to (SotA2064)

>>98398907
I find that only really applies to the surge of Native Americans to the point that they could actually run their own nations.
Their populations make no sense for that, even with the stated divergence of 1980 something.
Everything else I find pretty fitting with the world as described and as it develops, at least in earlier lore.
Well, I guess you could say the south seceding from the north is also bullshit, but honestly I find that thematically fun, because while sadly later books would make it a RACIST SOUTH thing, in the old writing it was
>US joining with Canada led to erosion of the bill of rights and the US constitution
>Southern states, who include major politicians who were the first to accept goblinization as just a thing instead of a disease, say to protect the constitution and the american way, they're seceding
Both sides have problems, both sides have good sides, but if we're being honest it makes little sense.
Megacorps running everything is a debatable topic but also a conceit of all cyberpunk adjacent settings.

>>98398952
I think one of the things I like most about Shadowrun is the fact it very much isn't "just Cyberpunk", most of the world looks the way our world looks with more decrepit buildings in the decrepit areas, and newer buildings have more tech in them, but no one ran around tearing down everything to turn it all into a neon-city landscape or Bladerunner.

>>98398993
>You have Aztec megacorpos working for man-eating bug spirits, which sort of ruins the Cyberpunk premise that the corporate hellscape is simply human greed and callousness towards the working class taken to its ultimate extreme. No, in Shadowrun you have cultists idiotically serving a class of evil spirits who want to literally devour the entire planet, which is absolutely not the result of human disregard for life, it's the result of dark spirits manipulating humans into creating the worst corporate culture and selling the worst corporate products imaginable to abuse and exploit humanity to its own worst interests.

Its been a while but as I recall... the heads of aztech found they could tap into the power of "the adversary" to super fuel their rituals and magic AND technology, hence why they brought back blood sacrifices and doing huge shit, because as far as they're concerned, even if it does bring this alleged apocalypse, they'll have such a tech/magic advantage that they'll survive it. Which plays fully into human greed.
The bug spirits are a case of them bodysnatching people mostly in UCAS territory, and one high ranking member of Ares thinking "if we just study them more we can find ways to kill them!" using it to fuel the idea of the manatech division (which later editions made an utter failure), and his project of course backfired bigly in his face because breeding bodysnatchers is not a very intelligent idea.
Then as much as we talk about Ancient Elves/Dragons, iirc within the setting no one believes that's true even a little bit, and they haven't exactly explained or made clear what Earthdawn was about. Hell one of the big mysteries of the setting is "What's going on in Ukraine?" because that's where most of Earthdawn took place, so there should be LOADS of artifacts and curious finds there.
Also the Harlequin's Back adventure is specifically about the party assembling the tools and igniting the heroic spirit to save the day.

>>98399159
>his project of course backfired bigly
I could be remembering it wrong, but I'm pretty sure in fourth or fifth edition he has tamed bug spirits that he uses as bodyguards, so to an extent, it did work. It just also caused an ecological disaster that ravages the masses outside of their territory.

>>98399135
Imo most of the weirder shit makes a bit more sense if you think of the world building as starting from Seattle and then reverberating outward. It’s why so much political capital is given to Seattle and the Amerindians despite how insanely small they are irl and why the lore is so blasé about the east coast despite how much shit there is there, as well as how Europe and South America are just kind of megacorps extensions, save for Germany which has its own lore out the wazoo thanks to the German translators. I don’t mind it, but it does help me not get too wrapped up in how huge chunks of the world might as well not exist with how little girls in there.

>>98399187
That's fair, and yeah I've run a few campaigns out of the CAS because I find it so much more interesting than the UCAS, but it's pretty apparent the writers aren't familiar with a world existing outside of Seattle. I remember being surprised when I looked in... I think one of the first two Neo-Anarchist Guides, and seeing that one of the writers must have lived in the DC area for a time given they had some references that even people who live there wouldn't be aware of.
Then I saw other things that made it clear that the others writers on the book had probably just looked at it on a map.

>>98399041
I'm the middle of those anons and I've been playing Shadowrun off and on since 2e, lmao

Shadowrun needs more manatech that's usable by mundanes, especially bodyware. Cybereyes that can astrally perceive and assense, bioware and genetic treatments based on paracritters, runic tattoos/inscriptions on your 'ware that give extra powers. It's the future baby, money can buy magic now.

>>98399478
What bothers me is early on they came so close to having some proper manatech
SR2 introduced spelllocks which if it weren't for grounding would be a great way to introduce manatech later on.
SR3 removes grounding, but also removes spelllocks, but then introduces Anchoring which is used to make items for other people to use, with examples being healing potions or a guy with a T-Shirt that turns into a bulletproof T-Shirt during firefights. Sounds like a set up for proper magic items which would then set up proper magitech items right? Wrong! Because every time one of these items activates it causes the creator to resist as if they cast the spell right then and there, also it can be used for rituals against the maker so...
SR4...
SR5 goes back to just having the same mundane shit that has always been around, just giving some of it slightly better stats, but it's still useless without loads of preptime.

>>98384450
It was

>>98399187
>as well as how Europe and South America are just kind of megacorps extensions, save for Germany which has its own lore out the wazoo thanks to the German translators.
There are source books and semi-official content covering all of Europe. Man, the things we lost when Social Media companies killed the message board-side of the Internet.

>>98384450
In my last session, I traded a stash of anti-tank mines to a somali pirate matriarch. In exchange, I was introduced to a wind mage with a parasailing rig, who flew me and a gas can full of high explosives a thousand miles north to syria. I then freeze-foamed that gas can against the side of the Tabqua dam, set a timer, and fucked off. Seventy thousand towelheads drowned and I ended that mission 250,000 nuyen richer.
Yes, I think it's a very good game.

>>98400069
"And then I went home and played Shadowrun with my friends."

>>98400089
Three Gorges next. There'll be a big enough bounty eventually.

>>98384450
The old FASA Shadowrun like that image you posted, yes. Anything from 4th edition onward when other companies took over is puke-worthy garbage.

Shadowrun needs to do away with mundanes and mages.
Everybody should be a mage. Everybody.
Even that magic-hating atheist who doesn't believe in spirits and dragons and elves.

>>98401202
In Earthdawn (the 4th age to Shadowrun's 6th) most people were adepts rather than magicians, and adepts can be pretty subtle in their power selection.

I fucking hate keeblers. Every time there is some corporate take over. It is some shitty keebrew. Every time some junkie chum gets let lose, the lawyer? Keebrew. Who keeps pushing equality for everyone but the second they got land it was just STOP NOTICING THE EARS.

>>98401213
There shouldn't be
>most are adepts
They should all be full mages and adepts simultaneously.
Also, cybering up and becoming more and more essence-less should in fact make you somehow supernaturally resistant to any sort of magic.
That 0.01 essence street samurai ought to have 12 bonus die to resist or evade magic and being unaffected by it. Spirits should have trouble affecting that nearly soulless crazy gal.
Dragons and immortal elves should get strong headaches being within a dozen meters near them.
But even somebody who lost essence by being a druggie should become super-resistant to magic as well.

>>98401237
No, I don't see how "you're losing control of your body and on the verge of death, so you're basically invincible" makes a lot of sense.

>>98401239
You should be practically invincible to magic by becoming antimagical and so soulless that mana wants to flee from you.
If industrial high tech is nigh impossible to be enchanted, then make people humming with high tech cyberware almost impossible to be affected.
No immunity to bullets, except what your cyberware might have given you.

>>98401267
"Industrial high tech" isn't immune to magic, though. It's just hard to enchant, but you can manipulate it through magic just as well as any other object. You can put a manabolt through a high tech device just as readily as a tree.

>>98400963
>The old FASA Shadowrun like that image you posted, yes
That cover has Catalyst Game Labs' logo on it.

>>98401237
At my table we did give bonus magic resistance dice to heavily cybered people. I also introduced a Cyborg edge to allow full-conversion cyborgs like out of rifts or other cyberpunk games

>>98401280
>You can put a manabolt through a high tech device just as readily as a tree.
That is true if you say trees don't have souls. Which raises a good question.
Manabolt doesn't work on anything without a soul, so does a tree count as having a soul or does it count as an object?

>>98401281
After they bought shadowrun all of the OEF pdfs online that were put out have the CGL logo in them.
Kind of like how the better quality PDFs for most Warhammer RPG books don't have the Black Industries logo despite them starting it.

>>98401374
Sorry, I guess it was Powerbolt that could hit physical objects. My point was that the effect he was talking about was a higher difficulty in making an object a magic item, not an impossible difficulty either and certainly not a resistance to magic.

>>98399204
If I recall correctly, a lot of those writers were from Middle America. They chose Seattle because of its proximity to Japan and being kind of a mysterious and on the rise city in the late 80s.

>>98401402
I understand that, I was being a dick.
I think it's sadly a place where balance and in-setting logic clash.
Physical spells generally have worse drain than Mana spells, because Physical spells work on anything and everything.
Elemental manipulations are particularly dangerous to cast.
However what does this actually mean?
Manabolt (and Stunbolt for some god forsaken reason) will always be better in the majority of situations unless you're face to face with a drone.
They ignore armor, they target WIllpower which only other mages tend to increase, and they leave no evidence that you did anything.
And if you are face to face with a drone you have a powerbolt which due to drone rules, the drone tends to explode instantly, though you may take some drain from it.
What about versus that 0.01 Essence Street Sam?
Well if he's kitted for war, then mana spells instant kill him, while those slightly harder to cast powerbolts inconvenience him because he'll have loads of body.
And god forbid if you cast the an elemental manipulation, which he can just dodge out of the way of with 0 fucks given, and that's assuming it does enough for him to not just tank the hit because he's got enough body/armor to say "fuck you."

As a result the only way mana spells ever get worse as you get deeper into the game is due to the GM using enemy mages and spirits, who can give a lot more dice for resisting spells, or if he's really a monster, Shielding comes out.

At which point all spells get worse EXCEPT elemental manipulations, which get marginally better because you can now throw 20 dice at an unchanging target number.

Personally I think
Mana Spells should get harder to cast based on essence the way Healing spells do.
Stun Spells should be one degree harder to cast because stunning is almost always preferable to killing.
Power Bolt shouldn't exist.
Elemental Manipulations should have less drain since they're awful until you have fuck tons of dice anyway.

>>98401202
Agreed. but reel in the summoning tho

>>98387443
>There were also legal issues due to SR and Earthdawn getting sold to two different companies even though they're to same setting.
How did that even happen?

>>98401523
If I remember right, the company that bought SR really only wanted Battletech, but for some legal reason had to buy another IP with it, so they just pulled Shadowrun because they assumed it would sell, and ignored everyone telling them Shadowrun is meant to be paired with Earthdawn.

>>98401379
That is actually disgusting.

>>98399135
Didn't some SR dev outright said that they increased Native population by orders of magnitude specifically so they can run native nations?

>>98404146
Sounds vaguely familiar.

>>98384450
The game's core systems are great, but the things attached to it range in quality from good to fucking mind bogglingly miserable.

>>98404146
i thought the NANs just started allowing hispanics with indigenous blood to be counted as natives

>>98409466
There was a southern one that did that, but most required ties to one of several native american tribes (1e had books explaining which tribes which NAN took people from)

>>98405399
Examples?

>>98412606
Too many dice!

>>98416093
It's a dicepool system, anon.

>>98416114
That does not make it ok to need to roll 50+ dice to resolve a single attack between two competent combatants.

And no, that isn't hyperbole. Here, I'll demonstrate using plausible stats for an SR 5e runner fighting his evil twin:

Attacker - elf sammy mcgee - 8 agi, 6 longarms skill, +2d spec, +2d smartlink, +1d aim, 7 reaction (+2 from augs), 5 intuition, quality to make agi usable for full defense, 5 body, armour jacket + ballistic mask + armguards + R2 dermal for 17 armour

Attack pool - 19 dice
Defense pool - 20 dice
Soak pool - 23 dice

Even with auto fire using an AP weapon to cut down those dice somewhat, that sammy is still rolling an absurd amount of dice on both attack and defense, and if I built a real runner and properly optimized it then those dice pools would be even higher (or they would be a bit lower and I'd also have a fully functional mage in addition to rolling 40+ dice between all my pools). Just forming pools and counting the hits significantly extends the time taken for every single action, and it becomes really burdensome when you are doing it dozens of times per combat round as a GM.

>>98416452
>Cyberpunk game subtly imposes the need for technological prosthesis on the players to get things done efficiently
Based

>>98416452
They call it a dice pool because a player’s desire to continue playing drowns in it