Best products from r/Shadowrun

ok, so lets break this down with the information you provide and my imagination of what a morally bankrupt exploitative employer would do. This is about leisure, but also about the lifestyle of an average consumer/worker/wage-slave.

First off, you have to make your job look attractive, to a point. you need replacements for workers that 'retire' or die in terrorist actions, or get jettisoned for violating company rules. The turnaround on a wage-slave job has got to be high, so you still need to recruit quality people to complete the tasks.

So what do you do? 1) you can't just take anyone off the street. 2) there are other wage-slaves from other companies that may be able to give a hint about what the competition is doing, and can handle the job you need filled. 3) you want them to be stable. you want them to make a family, so that way you can train their children to fill the jobs their parents will one day vacate. 4) you need to instill a sense of loyalty so that the competition can't tempt the wage-slaves away with the promise of a better life.

1&2) Recruitment and Hiring The hiring requirements you can most likely fill in on your own. Imagine today's hiring practices and methodologies and crank that shit up to 11. Specific requirements for applicants. If you're headhunted, things are a lot more lax, since the company has need of your particular skill set. Do what you will with this.

3) Relationships. You don't want single people running around. Single people do crazy shit. You want them anchored, in multiple ways. Company sponsored singles nights, company run dating apps (results are controlled by the company- you don't want your R&D department intermingling with someone without a security clearance) - not Tinder clones, mind, you want them to get into a relationship with another employee, not booty call everyone in R&D. You want them to marry into the company because it makes it that much harder to leave. If they date someone from another company, they are now a liability, and while the company could potentially use that connection, depending on the risk involved of company information leaking, generally it would mean instant shunning and consequences in their professional setting. make subtle propaganda about how marriage is the best and what every person needs. Once they get married, the addition of fertility hormones to their rations would make the perfect method of cementing them into corporate ownership. Oh, and don't forget to throw in some marriage counseling - at an affordable rate- to make sure that those marriage connections stay nice and strong. EDIT; to add to this, gay couples are encouraged to adopt (from Company sponsored selectees, of coarse)

3.5) Education. So now your little minions have a nice, happy family. Well, the biggest concern for your little minion-parents is the well being of their offspring! So you have a "Discounted" day-care/preschool available for employees! train them from infancy that [Corp_Name] is teh best! You want your future employee to be well educated, intelligent, and able to work with others, so you screen them Brave New World style. The dumb ones you can track into the labor divisions, the average ones can take the place of their average parents, and the smart ones or ones with leadership/bullying abilities, those are your future executives! So you provide the education each kid needs to fill their predestined role, but make sure that you cram 'em in as tight as you can, applying pressure on the parents to make sure their child is doing the best they can. You want them to be an executive, right?

4) Loyalty So how do you instill loyalty into an individual? you make their life somewhat of decent quality, and you make the alternatives seem horrifying. Company scrip keeps them churning 'money' into the company itself, but its just another method of control, but you want your wage-slaves to think they have control of their own destiny. So you provide them with entertainment. Bread and Circuses, right? Make sure they're fed and entertained, and you can do just about anything you want. "I know you're working hard, but if you purchase the sleep regulator you can get that much more time off, and don't you know, the company store has them on sale!

5) Wages and how to own people The company pays Sararyman in company scrip. Why? because they control it. Its easy to track and keep tabs on. Your employees 'rent' company apartments. They ride in company transport. They eat company food. educated in company schools, spend their scrip in company stores. and guess what? you get a company discount. and yet, for some reason, you can't get ahead. you try and save, but food prices keep going up, rent has to increase, and you can't manage to save anything. Why? because it's designed to be like that. Enough to 'survive' but never enough to 'live'. Simple pleasures can be obtained easily enough, but having employees that are able to save up to do something independently, or even worse, could benefit another company? you can't have that.

So what does all this have to do with free time? Free time is an illusion. The Company makes it so easy to spend the money. Amazon clones make it so you can buy things online. Trideo subscriptions live-streamed to your device of choice. The only time you're not generating revenue for the company is when you're sleeping, and wouldn't you know, they designed something to reduce how much time you spend sleeping.

Recommended Reading/Viewing:

Sten (book 1) (at least the first few chapters)

Brave New World

Instructions to fit in; The Lego Movie

Monologue by Chancellor Sutler (V for Vendetta) Adaptations/alterations in italics-
>what we need right now is a clear message to the people of this corporation. This message must be heard on every radio, read in every newspaper, seen on every trideo. This message must resound throughout the entire Matrix! I want the employees to realize that they stand on the edge of oblivion. I want every man, woman, and child to understand how close they are to chaos. I WANT EVERYONE TO REMEMBER WHY THEY NEED US!

Original can be found here https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film)

This has been one of my favorite character archetypes to play around with in my head for years. I don't have a TON of guidance mechanically speaking as I've never specifically played one in Shadowrun, but if you're concerned about the idea of them being officially classes as "Wild Spirits", well, the Nature Spirits category in Shadowrun already includes the subsection "Spirits of Man", and the examples given include spirits of streets, or the hearth. Why wouldn't the spirit of a car be a "tamed" spirit? It was created and "controlled" by human hands; if anything, the spirit of a car would be MORE comprehensible to a human mind than a Mountain spirit, because a car is a human creation, engineered entirely to serve human understanding and need. Or a highway, or an apartment building. Does not an apartment building still have every bit as much need of a Spirit of the Hearth as a log shack in the forest? It all comes down to how one arrives at the idea flavorwise: how does shamanism work? A shaman (at least of the variety loosely described by most RPG's, shadowrun included) is, at root, an Animist - someone who believes, in some capacity, that ALL things have a spirit, and that if you know what you're doing, those spirits can be interacted with. Just because something was "made" doesn't mean it has no spirit, and just because a human being made something doesn't mean that that thing isn't, ultimately, an expression of the same natural process that made mountains or forests or lakes.

​

If your storyteller is hesitant or wants inspiration as to how those kinds of spirits might behave/think/operate, it might be an odd source for it, but one of the best inspirations I've ever found for it was in a World of Darkness tie-in novel titled Three Shades of Night. In the Werewolf section, there's a teenage kid who's an urban shaman, and talks with the spirits of street murals, piles of trash/litter, and an old abandoned house. It won't quite touch on the kind of cyberpunk future-tech you might encounter in Shadowrun, but it's definitely a great start on how to think about the idea.

​

Hope any of that is helpful.

My suggestion when starting kids of this age in rpgs is always Savage worlds Its cheap, easy, fast, and versatile.

This week you can be playing super criminals(or cops) doing whatever in "not shadowrun". Then next week when he gets super into power rangers you can easily play "not power rangers" with the same rule set. Then when some pirate show comes on tv you can play "not pirates" or "not space rangers" or really whatever you want. There is a huge number of setting books (that you don't really need) for all flavors you could want.

The card based initiative system is great. Probably the best initiative system I have ever seen in something that has a codified init system.

it uses a target number 4 system with "raises" for each mulitple of 4 over your first. Dice explode and get added together. So it helps to teach math

its based on a 'benny' or benefit system where you have little tokens that allow you to do things like reroll dice. The game is based around an economy between player and gm, with the gm being encourage to give them out to the players for good roleplay, decisions in character, or bringing in their negatives. We can take this one step furhter with kids and use it teach them small life lessons. Encourage them to do things, like instead of fighting a guy, they talk him down, or help him, givem a benny.

I often suggest usings like candy to represent these tokens. He can't eat them until he spends them on something, but then when he is out of them he can't do cool rerolls and stuff. teach him restraint since he wants to do cool stuff, but also wants to eat the candy.

I haven't read it yet, but I've been meaning to try out Utopiates written by Josh Finney, which sounds like a BTL focused Shadowrun setting.

In the future, science has formulated a way to distill human personalities into a drug-form. On the street, they are called Utopiates and allow the user to swap personalities with the mental imprints of other people... for a short while. Within these pages you will follow the interconnected lives of individuals who inject the souls of others. Each is a user for their own reasons, but all learn the cost of soul swapping is extremely high.

Sounds like a good time to me, I hope to get to it sometime later this year. Click the Amazon image and it gives you the first few pages of preview, and some of it almost feels like a 2e sourcebook.

Actually, in previous editions, there were rules for a sort of necromancy. Corps cadavres are created by magicians, typically houngans or mambos (voodoo practitioners), casting a spell on a dead body. It's active for a while, but has no real will of its own or longevity. They could also create was was called a loa zombie by ritually preparing a corpse to be inhabited by either a free or ally spirit, but in that case the spirit is the one in charge of the zombie, although it's capable of much greater autonomy, and is significantly buffed by how powerful the spirit is.

Awakenings: New Magic in 2057 discusses the rules in depth (and has a lot of the best in character explanations and discussions of magic ever published in Shadowrun). The 3rd edition magic sourcebook, Magic in the Shadows also covered the voodoo rules, but in much less depth.

Those books are in the second and third edition respectively, so you'd have to adapt them to new editions, but the backstory is there to be used.

I agree with playing something premade to start with.

Yeah you can play the stuffer shack adventure in the quick start rules first, then I like the adventures in Sprall wilds http://www.amazon.com/Shadowrun-Sprawl-Wilds/dp/1936876728 There is a total of 4 short, and reasonably simple (especially the first one) adventures. They have got stat blocks for 4e and 5e, but that should not cause too much confusion.

The Splintered state adventure is good too, but the finale is going to be a challange for a new DM and new players, but as long as you go easy on them should be ok.

That should be a nice run-in I think and be about 7-10 sessions.

Do you know the old free short stories by Tom Dowd? Available on Ancient Files .

I’m just reading an old Torg novel by Nigel Findley called Out of Nippon which is almost Shadowrun imo.


Aside from that there’s always the fan fiction. Some of which by fans who turned freelancers/contributors later

Robyn Rat King’s novels from http://www.magespace.net for example.

Or Russel Zimmermann’s fan fiction on the forums: Rook , Angels , snipped fiction from Dirty Tricks: Castling ...( I believe there are more)

Russ also has a Patreon where he offers some more fiction.

The fan fiction forum also has a few excellent gems by people who didn’t break into SR, like for example Pananagutan by user The Wyrm Ouroboros.

Or CanRay’s excellent fan fiction on DeviantArt Just A Simple Run, and more...

Or the quasi SR books like Derek Canyon’s Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance

Whelp, I think this discussion is why context matters. As some people have pointed out, this blog post was never meant to be about Shadowrun. The only reason Shadowrun came up is because it inspired me to create my own game. Was pretty shocked to see it on the Shadowrun reddit, actually.

It's interesting to read the discussion it's generated. I will say:

a) my experience with Shadowrun was 1E to 5E, and the shift in direction the game took wasn't to my taste. I think people who started with later versions have a very different experience/viewpoint. I don't see anything wrong with either side.

b) I worked on video game design before tabletop design. As a result, when I think about design I think about how mechanics and player experience interact and reinforce each other.

You can absolutely play a TTRPG to create an experience apart from the mechanics. I think any non-combat only D&D game shows that. I've also played very narrative driven Shadowrun 5e games. It's just not how I design. [Jesse Schell's book on game design influenced me a lot when I first started, for those who are interested in the design perspective.] (https://www.amazon.com/Art-Game-Design-Lenses-Second/dp/0692288872/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519592300&sr=8-1&keywords=deck+of+lenses)

I really enjoyed

• Spells and Chrome: Anthology 1
  
• World of Shadows: Anthology 2
  
• Neat
  
• Shaken
  
• Secrets of Power series, start here
  
  And in general I like Nigel D. Findley, Nyx Smith, and Mel Odom's novels - search Amazon and eBay.
  
  As to order? Not really. It's academically interesting to try to read them in order and see how the timeline evolves - as well as how different authors write about the universe - but unless it's a series like Secrets of Power or Dragon Heart Saga then they stand alone. I'm a big fan of the pulpy, more noir stories - ex. Zimmerman's - than the "tactical military hardware porn" ones.

Others summed stuff up pretty well, but if you'd like to know more, and can get your hands on a copy of Burning Bright, it's a nice first hand look at the events that went down in Chicago.

I still think the original is the best. The Into The Shadows braided novel is mostly street level runners, and a good read.

https://www.amazon.com/Shadowrun-07-Into-Shadows-v/dp/0451451899

If you're willing to wait a month, you can use the Beginner Box Set, but if not, I recommend the 5th Edition book. The core rule book has everything you need except for character sheets, which you'll need to print, and dice, which I'm sure you can find.

Party Size: 1 GM + 2-4 players is ideal. 1 player "solo" adventures are fun, but can be difficult to run. If you have 5+ players, it can be difficult for the GM to manage, but it can be done. Consider splitting into two groups.

No, you don't need miniatures. You can use anything to represent your characeters on the map, such as rocks. Or don't use a map at all.

My first Shadowrun game (and my first time as GM) was done with the Runner's Toolkit Alphaware. It has a slimmed down rulebook and a basic campaign that normally takes a few sessions to get through. But if you just wanted to do a couple unrelated runs just to get a feel for the game, I think that it's a good way to do it.

The kit is $60 normally, and that is crazy. I picked it up for $40, and it was worth it. This really does seem like it should be in the $30-$40 price range. That being said, it is a great tool for a group where no one has played Shadowrun before.

The 90s Shadowrun fiction books are pretty good. I recommend starting with the short story collection Into The Shadows

https://www.amazon.com/Shadowrun-5th-GM-Screen/dp/1936876914

or see this collection:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/1pfagz/sr5_gm_resources/

And also congrats for your first gm session ! Keep it up :)

Shaken, is my favorite. Jimmy Kincaid is a fantastic character

"Shadowrun: Spells and Chrome" was great. The way augmented reality was described really blew my mind.

http://www.amazon.com/Shadowrun-Spells-Chrome-ebook/dp/B003MGK9B4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374882892&sr=8-1&keywords=spells+and+chrome

Whoa whoa whoa, so you're saying that the 5E GM Screen I got in October of 2014 for $15.63 is worth $1k????
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1936876914?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00

Why did I not buy more??!!!!!

Amazon has Shadowrun 5 e listed for the 22nd of May. Unfortunately this is probably a placeholder date. Hopefully Catalyst will ramp up the marketing in the coming weeks to give us a better idea.

oh common dont be like that. i like the tikki novels by nyx smith, the Dragonheart Saga and into the Shadows.

the first review is what i like about the shadowrun novels http://www.amazon.de/Shadowrun-07-Into-Shadows-v/dp/0451451899/ref=sr_1_17?s=books-intl-de&ie=UTF8&qid=1374837854&sr=1-17&keywords=Jordan+Weisman

If you can read German, the gm screen here only costs about 13€ :)
edit:
Oh just see, the Englsih version is in stock for 18€!

https://www.amazon.de/SHADOWRUN-5TH-ED-GM-SCREEN/dp/1936876914/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1518612694&sr=8-1&keywords=shadowrun+screen

Cheat sheets and reference Guides

Have a look at the alphaware set of missions, it's a really good starting point for new players and Gms.

My favorite was 2XS.
Nigel Findley was a big influence on the setting early on.

RIP Nigel

EDIT: nevermind. the Digital Toolbox includes both "beginner boxed set" and "alphaware."

the Digital Toolbox had another boxed set with better (IMO) character dossiers. it is called Runner's Toolkit: Alphaware.

https://www.amazon.com/Shadowrun-Runners-Toolkit-Alphaware/dp/1936876930

It is a really interesting read about a mage and his spirit ally hired to find a lost heir in Chi-Town before and leading up to the Cermak Blast and the establishment of the quarantine wall.

http://www.amazon.com/Shadowrun-15-Burning-Bright-v/dp/0451453689

Yeah, the only problem with the ebooks is that they're novellas. So they're really short. I just want a full new novel! Where I can have a vested interest in the narrative.

Though, I also kind of like how brisk their pacing was. It really made them page turners if only because the plots were moving really quickly.

There is a sequel to Another Rainy Night that Patrick Goodman is done writing. It should be released later this year. It'll hopefully explain what's happening to the infected as of the events of Stormfront.

And while on the topic of SR ebooks, check out Spells and Chrome. Its a collection of short stories by several SR writers. The one about the kid with augmentation addiction is one of the saddest stories I've read, if only because I was reading between the lines.

There appear to be some on Amazon now for $60?

https://www.amazon.com/Shadowrun-Fifth-Jason-M-Hardy/dp/1936876515/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523637293&sr=8-1&keywords=shadowrun+5th+edition

I got mine from Amazon Shadowrun 5th Edition

Amazon has it for US $36.16
http://www.amazon.com/Shadowrun-Fifth-Edition/dp/1936876515/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1373541562&sr=8-4&keywords=shadowrun

The Wolf and Raven stories by Mike Stackpole. They first appeared in "Challenge" magazine. A new story is in Shadowrun: World of Shadows anthology.

Here is the desktop version of your link

Regarding acquiring the books, shouldn't amazon ship to Italy? http://www.amazon.com/Shadowrun-Fifth-Jason-M-Hardy/dp/1936876515/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1462199639&sr=1-1&keywords=shadowrun

Shadowrun Core Rulebook https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1936876515/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_aZ1ZAbWEAQ25F

Copy avalible in uk, might be a US issue :(