Let me tell you a story, if I may. No, you cannot leave. If you try and sneak away again, you’ll get the long version. It has a Power Point presentation. Now, where was I? Oh yes. A story. Unlike a lot of people I know, my introduction into the world of tabletop gaming wasn’t D&D in any flavor. Instead, I found my way to tabletop gaming through Shadowrun. I played the SNES Shadowrun game and pretty much fell in love with it. I loved the blend of cyberpunk and magic, the noir mystery, the action, the works. So one holiday, my friends got me a Shadowrun sourcebook and the rest was history. My formative RPG years were spent neck deep in late 1e through early 3e Shadowrun. Only later did I branch off seriously into other games. Shadowrun is my first RPG love and still remains one of my favorite games. I find that the 4e/20th Anniversary Edition of the game is the most playable yet. That being said, I always preferred the setting fiction and fluff from those earlier days to the more recent stuff. It seems to me that it was more mysterious, more dangerous, just more of everything.
So now you know the background context for the review you’re about to read. Shadowrun 2050 is a “historical sourcebook” for Shadowrun 20th Anniversary Edition that’s designed to give people the ability to run a game using current mechanics but using the old school setting. Even the front cover is designed to emulate those from the FASA days and it’s a real kick of nostalgia to see it. For veteran players like me there are a lot of familiar commenters, names, and events to hearken to way back when. Captain Chaos, Hatchetman, Hangfire, Argent, SPD, and more are all commenting. The Universal Brotherhood is making people uneasy for reasons they don’t yet really understand. Rumors about the stability of Fuchi abound. It’s really awesome for me to step back into the past like this. The art and layout for the book are excellent, arguably higher quality than they were back then. Outside of the cover it doesn’t really have that same distinct 1e/2e feel (aside from at least a couple of images taken straight from older books). I can’t call it a complaint since the art, as I said, is very good but it might have been nice to see some more of the old art.
Slot and run, chummer
Down to the book itself. The first part of the book covers the state of the setting back in 2050. For people who have only played in the 2070’s of the current 4e/20th Anniversary edition, it’s a good primer to help people understand all the subtle, but important, differences to be found. The criminal underworld is different, the megas are different, the important people are different, and so on. Going into the game with 2070’s expectations will lead to some confusion or losing immersion, so having a good 50 pages or so to help people acclimate to the changes is good. For people like me who did play back then, it’s a nice quick refresher that hits on all the highlights. It doesn’t really go into the history of what came before 2050, but I’m okay with that since you can get that pretty easily from a couple of other sources. We don’t need to go over Seretech Decision, the Great Ghost Dance, or UGE again. What we instead do get is an overview of a variety of different organizations like the megacorps, mobsters, gangs, and clubs as well as some cultural icons and some information about dealing with Lone Star.
The second part of the book goes into what three cities used to be like in 2050. First is, of course, Seattle. Although there has been an effort to emphasize that Seattle isn’t the center of the Shadowrun universe since FASA closed down, the fact of the matter is that to a lot of people Seattle is the Shadowrun spot and back in 2050 this was even more true. To the point where if they’d only detailed 2050 Seattle it would have been very true to the original material. Instead, we have two more cities covered as well, Chicago and Hong Kong. Hong Kong makes sense because it’s really being pushed as a big time runner haven in recent years and it’s really interesting to see what it used to be like, given that it really didn’t get much focus in the older material. Chicago also gets a good treatment because there’s no city in the Shadowrun world that’s changed more between 2050 and 2074. Bug City was a world changing event. That being said, I actually kind of wish we’d gotten something else other than Chicago. In older material, Chicago wasn’t really all that important until Bug City and even in this write up it doesn’t really strike me as being anything so good that I am excited to run there. It feels… kind of generic and bland. I would have much rather read something else like Denver, London, or Berlin. It’s not a huge complaint because Chicago is written up well here, but I just would have liked a bit more diversity.
The next chunk of the book covers some different areas. There is a part called the hiring board which is arguably my favorite part of the book because it’s a lot of in-character commenting and stories about what it’s like to run in 2050. It’s not really a lot different than 2074 when you come down to it, but it’s really entertaining to read and useful for players and GMs alike for ideas and advice. It’s about all the kinds of runs you might run into, some war stories, some bickering commenters, and so on. Then comes some of the classic archetypes like Former Wage Slave, Decker, and Mercenary. There’s also a few pages on life in the 2050’s, including some slang and cityspeak.
The next two sections are arguably the most important, because they go into how both magic and the Matrix are different than the 2074 versions. Magic has fewer changes, but what ones are there are important. Decking is a world of difference from hacking, not least because the concept of wireless (rather hilariously, given our real life right now) doesn’t exist. I’m not going to go into details of the changes to either activity because it’d take too long and probably be kind of confusing. For people unfamiliar with how the game used to work, it’s going to be a serious shock especially with decking. It’ll be really interesting to see, however, if the changes bring back some of the problems that decking used to have where it was very slow and almost like a sub-game. The running joke used to be that everybody goes out for pizza while the GM and decker go off to play by themselves for an hour. Just reading the rules, I don’t know either way. Magic should be easier to adjust to in 2050 and I admit that I giggled like hell when I saw the return of grounding, which was both the best or worst thing ever when it came to magic back then.
Lastly is the weapons, equipment, vehicles, and other gear. All the classics, most of which have a newer version in 2074, but not all. It might be surprising to some people to see that there’s not really as much equipment to be found in this book as you might expect, but I think it’s okay. It covers all the bases much the same way the core rulebook did back then. It’s all you really need, but if you need more, well, you have the current era rulebooks to draw from.
Frag off and die, drekhead
So what’s not to like? Truth be told, most of my gripes aren’t gamebreakers and not everybody is going to see them as flaws the way I do. I’d have liked the book to be about 20-30 pages longer and cover more of the world as a whole in 2050. The writing feels very limited in scope despite the fact that a lot of places were pretty different 20 years before the current state of the game. What about CalFree and the Tir (either Tir)? What about Denver? How about anything from Europe? I understand page count restraints, but I think it would have been helpful and useful to have some broad information about the 2050 world. My second gripe I’m fully aware of being a personal thing, but a lot of the call-forwards, the hints at the future of the setting are really heavy-handed. We don’t need a commenter spelling out in blatant terms that Fuchi is likely to split up in the future. The “joke” about bees and hives in the Chicago section is really obvious, which sucks a lot of the humor from it. These hints and bits of foreshadowing should be a wink and a nod to players who know what the current state of affairs. Not a wink, a nod, a neon sign, and a brass band. They seem to thud like anvils rather than slide in smoothly to the narrative. I have to admit, not all of the call-forwards are so blunt and clumsy. Some of them are downright smooth and subtle, like a good shadowrun as a matter of fact. But the poor execution of the rest of them bears mentioning because they really took me out of the moment and drew undue attention to themselves. Like a bad shadowrun.
Shoot straight, conserve ammo…
However, gripes aside it’s a really tasty book. It’s well written, the fiction is fun, the real love of the game as it used to be is there, it looks good, and it’s a welcome addition to my Shadowrun collection. But I admit, I have a hard time looking at this book from the standpoint of someone getting into the game in the last few years and I honestly don’t know if the game will appeal to you. I think it should because it’s a fun read and it helps you to understand how far the game has come in the last 20 years. It also gives you the chance to run a historical game where your team is actively participating in the events that shaped the game. Go play around in that crazy awesome election of 2057. Be at ground zero when the wall went up around Bug City. There’s a lot of awesome things that happened before the current era of the Sixth World and this book is a gateway for new people to experience them for the first time and for veterans like myself to revisit them and relive those memories with what is arguably a cleaner and better ruleset.
Ooh, just noticed this. Yes, I too found my way into RPGs via Shadowrun (actually my RPG defloration was Star Wars original WEG version, but Shadowrun came soon after). This would have been around 2nd edition. Man, FASA was riding high in those days: Shadowrun, Battletech (and their sort of clunky RPG spinoff, Mechwarrior), Centurion, etc.
I played the *heck* out of Shadowrun 2E. My books became tattered, dog-eared and fell apart. My copies of “Sprawl Sites” and “Shadowtech” looked like they had been used as animal bedding.
I must confess if I were to run Shadowrun these days, I would open it up like the engine of an old car and swap out several entirely nonfunctional components. To wit:
-Decking: Ugh. Decking. Decking belongs to a particular wave of late-90s futurism (ever see “Lawnmower Man”?) . . . and nowhere else. The idea that it would make for exciting gaming for everyone else to sit on their hands while one player (and it usually was just one PC) would explore an alternative, non-physical (but still dangerous) realm was . . . dumb. I subscribe to Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy’s belief that computer usage can *never* be made exciting. The 90s and early 2000s movies tried their darndest–Hackers, Jurassic Park, the Pelican Brief, etc.–but it just never worked.
Plus, decking was a ton of extra work for the GM: If the decker character didn’t want to feel under-appreciated, the GM had to built in at least one whole extra encounter that required the PCs to go into the Matrix and do stuff. And ugh.
AND, it was a nightmare for the PCs because they had to buy a custom-built, usually *very* expensive cyberdeck with about 12 key stats to it. And those things got pricey! A Fairlight Excalibur or Fuchi Cyber-6 was like, what 100,000-some nuyen!? Geeze! What kind of a future is that, in which computing equipment becomes much, much MORE expensive?
If I were to run Shadowrun now: Need to use a computer to get info? Make one Computer Use check. Cyberdecks are ranked from 1 through 6, costing from 200 to 1200 nuyen accordingly and adding 1 to 6 extra dice to your roll. There. Done.
-Astral Space: Same thing. Astral space (a.k.a. “the Matrix, only magic”) was by definition a place that only some of the PCs would be able to go. That is, it would *require* you to split the party. Except not, because you only went there mentally. Ugh. If there’s something less interesting than “An alternative world you enter . . . except not really, your body is still here” then I don’t know what it is.
Almost all the magic-using characters I or any of my fellow players ever made were adepts because honestly nobody cared enough about astral space to worry if their PC couldn’t project there.
-Ritual Casting: This is one of those things that now makes me ask, “Nice. Except when are you ever going to use this?” It can sort of be an interesting story mechanic (i.e. disrupt an evil guy’s ritual casting before it’s too late!) but is so time-consuming and complex as to militate against usage.
-Penalties for Playing Metahumans: Very, very few characters were metahumans, as I recall. I think that was because of the ‘prioritization’ system of character-building. And giving up a priority slot to be Metahuman meant giving up a LOT. Either a lot of money, a lot of attributes, a lot of skill points, or magical ability. And the Metahuman payoff just was not worth it.
It was supposed to represent the prejudice Metahumans suffered, but it mostly just made them very, very unattractive to play. Like, a Metahuman Mage or Shaman was pretty much going to be crippled in every other way: *Very* low attributes or skills or else *very* poor.
And it wasn’t balanced because if you just prioritized Money (max money was, what, $1 million nuyen or something?) you could just equip so much cyberware that it wouldn’t even *matter* what your initial attributes and skills were: You had like 8 Strength and were rolling 3d6+10 for initiative and had bone lacing AND dermal armor AND platelet microfactories. You were a War Machine . . . and THEN you put on body armor.
Mmm, that last point is worth emphasizing: The PCs I either played or else encountered in my groups tended to be one of two types:
-Human Street Samurai built with either 1 million or 400,000-nuyen starting money and like 0.05 Essence left when the surgery was over . . .
-Everyone else, if you felt like it. Sure, play a Street Shaman or Rigger or whatever if it makes you happy. The 5 Street Sams in the party have it *so* handled it hardly even matters.