I like the Anarchy version the most. The cover is v4 and v5 is better but it stays too crunchy for me.
If anybody understanding French wants to start Shadowrun, look at Anarchy and Anarchiste. The second one is the best presentation of the universe of Shadowrun over all versions (over all languages between French and English).
Did anybody tried :Otherscape? I understand it’s a clone of Shadowrun.
Talking about other games, I love Blades in the Dark and CBR+PNK is really great.
I tried to get into Dragonfall for a few hours, I love the setting (and cyberpunk overall) but I can’t get into turn-based combat. It’s annoying cause I know I’ll miss great games like BG3 because of that 🫤
Isn’t that still what it is? It’s just that its understanding of what Cyberpunk is is more than just superficial.
Goddammit another game to go on my wishlist apparently.
Goodbye, money
Like others have said, the rules are… bad. Especially the latest edition. A couple of the older editions are “favorites,” but still mixed bags, and lots of people just take the setting and use it in another system entirely.
There’s a Shadowrun actual play podcast called NeoScum that I loved (now concluded), and it began with “It’s like D&D mixed with Bladerunner!” and ended with “Fuck this, fuck Shadowrun, the universe rearranges itself so we can play a different game.” They even had a goofy recurring bit they would do whenever they had to stop play to look up rules or calculate something, which happened constantly. It’s also not a player issue, since they’ve switched to Call of Cthulhu for another story (Gutter) and just don’t have that problem.
I recommend Sprawlrunners, a Shadowrun/Cyberpunk ruleset for Savage Worlds. We had a game that had been Shadowrun that we converted to Sprawlrunners rules and it ran fantastically.
Look at older editions. 6th is hot garbage published with criminally low quality material and he didn’t pay the freelance writers that contributed to the game.
Nobody hates Shadowrun more than the people who love Shadowrun. :P
Also check out the video games Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Shadowrun: Hong Kong.
Shadowrun Returns is part of that trilogy, and pretty decent too.
They can be played in any order - they’re all standalone stories.
Returns is extremely linear and lacks a party though, in addition to the later games having improved mechanics. Also, there’s a mod for Hong Kong that remakes the Returns campaign.
I should play Dragonfall again sometime. Preferred that to Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is exceptionally wordy. That’s not necessarily bad, but I spent far more time going through conversations with the party than I did on runs, and I’m a quick reader. They’re excellently written characters, but the conversations had little interactivity and were just pages of text with ocassional dialogue options. Conversation in Dragonfall flowed much better.
Gobbet is still the best character, though.
Still trying to dig through Returns myself, I heard latter two games are even better.
The latter two have a lot of nice QoL changes and imo more fleshed out stories, but all three are fun. There are mod that have recreated the entire first game in Dragonfall, so it might be worth checking out (have not played the mod myself)
Im considering hacking Into the Odd to rebuild Shadowrun without all the… nonsense. Anyone got advice?
I can’t comment on Into The Odd, but I would consider either The Sprawl or Runners In The Shadows. The former is a general purpose cyberpunk system built on Apocalypse World and the latter is a Shadowrun hack of Blades in the Dark.
And I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that I’ve built my own system for my Shadowrun campaigns, called Straylight. I’m in private playtesting right now, and I plan to have the first public playtest draft up very shortly (weeks or days, depending on how things go).
Don’t know anything about Into the Odd, but I know Blades in the Dark had some people working on a Shadowrun conversion; the heist nature of that game appealed to them. GURPS also handles Shadowrun pretty easily, you can find other people’s conversions online.
I think Runners in the Shadows has been out for a while
Hah, it was a while ago when I saw chatter about work being done on that. Nice to see it came along so well!
Others have given alternatives, but no one has offered Savage Worlds. It’d probably work great in a cyberpunk setting with magic, and it plays super easy.
You could just run it straight out of the box with the SWADE rulebook, but there’re published books (and free homebrews) that go for that feeling as well (like Sprawlrunners).
kind of curious to how you think SWADE could be good.
Try Cities Without Number! It’s also an OSR game, and is more well-suited for the Sixth World setting.
Ooh I have WWN rotting apart on my shelf, one of my favorites :) thanks for reminding me!
Shadowrun: Anarchy is rules lite. Apparently a new version is coming this year.
Shadowrun: Anarchy was a rules lite version of Shadowrun. I had to search the name to remember it and apparently 2.0 is kickstarting this year.
Guys hi, just looking for some support share, a Fantasy Adventure Story, for all ages and just some entertain with some storyes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mVIvQ1wsgg - maybe you are curious
fucking clanker