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Shadowrun | Harebrained Schemes Will Cut All Corners, Release Beautifully Polished Sphere
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WiiU: JamWarrior
Corporate espionage is pretty typical, but there's also stuff like mercenary work, big robberies, assassinations, bodyguard work, gunrunning, stealing data, etc. etc. Like suggested earlier, you could even do stuff like work as a Doc Wagon team, which is normally an NPC unit designed to just help the player out of tight spots. Then you would end up doing all the stuff to rescue clients instead of the kind of stuff that requires getting rescued.
It's entirely up to the players and the person running the game; doing something like, say, running a team where you snag rare animals for zoos would be perfectly possible if that's what everyone wanted to do. Or swiping people to take their organs. Or working for the police. Or working as the police. Or working as a corporate counter-espionage team. There's no effective limit to what you can do if you want to do it, at least in the tabletop.
As for runs? One of my favorite plot points involves some rig off the coast of Africa. It's seemingly abandoned, a giant tube going straight down to the bottom of the ocean, sheer walls, REALLY deep. Rumor has it there are vampires down there that can't escape due to the sheer walls of the tube.. and someone is using it to dispose of bodies. Imagine the fun you could have sending players into that.
NNID and many other services: Athenor or Myridiam // 3DS: 3883-5283-0471
Chicago.
Discussion over.
Bugs. *shudder*
Yep. They talk about it on the Kickstarter page and in one of the videos.
Even then, the nature of the game and the premade campaigns could send you anywhere. Some sent you out to Bug City (what's left of Chicago after they nuked FASA) to rescue people or tech from insect spirits (N-A-S-T-Y-! critters), or sent you out to gather valuable intel on some subject.
There's few variations on the mission structure, but it's always up to the GM what's coming next. But what kind of missions can you do in shadowrun? Every conceivable variant on espionage, noir, robbery, kill-for-hire, army-for-hire, hacking, theft, rescue, snatch, or whatever kind of crime you can think of.
If you want a good idea of the kinds of missions you might be sent on, here's a handful of the movies that always screamed "this is a Shadowrun adventure!" when I saw them:
Lucky Number Slevin
Maltese Falcon (yeah, I was introduced to Shadowrun before Maltese Falcon, bad dedwrekka!)
Smokin' Aces
Oceans Eleven, original and remakes
Snatch
And, yeah, even the Dirty Dozen has a bit of Shadowrun flavor to it.
Right now they're getting a few large areas of the city fleshed out as a whole, but they wont be able to flesh out the entire thing without more funding, hence why their new funding plan points out that the more they get the more Seattle will be fleshed out.
Also, when they wrote the original Shadowrun, they didn't live there, but they do now, and they're planning to add in a bunch of things they didn't know about the first go-around by not living there. Which is pretty much word for word from one of their update videos.
Since this will take place in the 2050s, there's a good chance any Chicago adventures will be before the initial Bug outbreak or Knight Errant's disaster which happened in 2055.
I would suggest Berlin for another city, or Tir Na Nog. I think Tokyo is built up as more of an eastern analog to Seattle in Shadowrun, so I'm not sure an accurate representation in the video game would be much more than "a new coat of paint".
NERPS! It's just that easy!
Chicago was Univeral Brotherhood territory until 2055. No one knew that the bugs were there until they threw up the wall.
Edit: If you look at their stretch goals, they are going to continue to flesh out more of Seattle until about the 750k mark. And trust me - with 4 dedicated sourcebooks to Seattle, to say nothing of the tons of adventures, novels, and the fact they actually live in the city now, I'm sure it'll be more fleshed out.
NNID and many other services: Athenor or Myridiam // 3DS: 3883-5283-0471
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
I once ran a game where for the first third of the arc they were working playing double agents for a bartender friend while working for an acquaintance of his trying to recovered a missing 16 year old girl. The runners spent half their time sabotaging the efforts of another team to find the girl, and the other half the time covering their tracks so their "employer" would not discover they were the reason his highly priced runner team kept failing their missions. He eventually paid the players to take out his other team of runners due to incompetence.
The whole thing was a revenge plot between two former best friends. They had fought over a woman. She chose one of them. They had two daughters, and then she died. The father of course was distraught, his buddy however arranged an accident to have him murdered. Then as godfather to the children ended up having the oldest mindwiped to think she was her mother and married her. The youngest ran away from home and had been on the run for some time. Well turns out dad wasn't dead, just more metal than man, and had assumed his children were being well taken care of in a good environment. So he came back and decided to take his revenge on anyone associated with what happened. Working for him was the second part of the arc.
This is the same game where one of the runners jobs was to stage a riot with the instructions Knight Errant Security had to come off looking awesome, and Lone Starr had to end up looking terrible. Other duties included rescuing a Toxic Shaman being turned over to the Tir Tairngire under guard of both Elven and US Military Special Forces for acts of Eco Terrorism, as well as infiltrating the local Nuclear Power plant that I spent several weeks researching for maps that they ended up using less that 10% of. The grand finale took place during the Urban Brawl Finals (think Superbowl) where they had to help Seattle's team hold off the visiting team because if they scored a single goal a Toxic God Elemental would be unleashed and decimate the city. Everyone else was locked out behind a shield, but the players could interfere because at the time of its instructions the Minor Toxic Elemental playing referee was told they were allies and to ignore them.
Famous quotes from the game:
"We are the good guys, right?" (after realizing they are the reason Seattle is about to become a Toxic Wasteland)
"You've got an entire crate of Tiffany Self Defenders? My brother got shot with one of those like 37 times. You want to talk to him? He's right here."
The runners got hired by a totally-not-Yakuza Johnson to investigate a brothel. A bunch of Yak goons had disappeared, last seen at that brothel, but they couldn't get near it themselves and needed (*cough* disposable sacrificial lambs with) unknown faces to have a look.
Yep, insect shamans. Those Yak goons were goners.
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I'd love to see Chicago as a locale. I bought and read Burning Bright when I was eight, had no idea what was going on, and didn't even know what Shadowrun was for another eight years after that. I still loved the book and attribute this experience to my love of nerdy shit.
I hope to start running Missions here in the upcoming months, and maybe GM at GenCon if they'll have me. My local city has a game store that doesn't want to stock roleplaying games -- which bites, given how it is a college town. But hey, we're working to revive the scene around here.
NNID and many other services: Athenor or Myridiam // 3DS: 3883-5283-0471
This kind of sentiment is why I am so exciting for Shadowrun on the PC. Very similar to Szechuan (even how his mom was sounds similar), I found Shadowrun through one of its books (and any others that I could lay my hands at in the local tiny library) and didn't realize it was based on a Pen & Paper game, so when I found out that it was something I could play I was ecstatic ...
... only that turned into dismay, as there is barely even a board game scene in the village I live, let alone a P&P scene, despite my many attempts at trying to get people to come over and play.
Its so much bloody easier to find people to play with online and even though this is single player focus, between this and Shadowrun Online, I hope something works out that this makes for a whole lot of fun for us to have collectively online with the setting.
And just like someone else mentioned, the North American Native nations is a aspect of the setting that endears me to it. That is why if I have a choice / say in the matter, I want the expanded content to explore the ever living fuck out of the nation that surrounds Seattle, the SSC (Salish-Sahide Council) and other NAN member states.
Bug City?
Fuck yes.
In the meantime, need to check out the SNES and Genesis Shadowrun games. Leaning towards trying to the Genesis one first, like the top-down graphical style better than the isometric.
He'll be able to keep my Bearded Hippie Fixer company.
Me blogging about my (amateur) indie game programming
No guarantees on final price unless you kick in now buddy.
WiiU: JamWarrior
I get the Linux people want to avoid dual booting or whatever but they need to understand that every 100k donated to this game is kick to the crotch of Microsoft since they sat on the license for all those years without making this game.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
There's microsoft emulators for linux that are, of course, 100% free and work well.
Linux was an option for them, not a commitment, and it takes them away from their current coding when they're already planning on having it for iOS and PC, without a lot of real results. The difference between splitting the team even more to code for Linux versus adding more content and polish and having Linux operators run it on an emulator, is huge in terms of whether you make everyone happy or just make it a little easier for one group.
The way I look at it, every dollar spent on doing Linux development would be a dollar taken away from making a better Shadowrun game. I wouldn't disagree with Harebrained Schemes at all if they decided not to make a Linux version for the 10 people out there who don't use anything else.
I know this is from page one, but I'm reading through the thread. This has me super excited.
Anyway, I feel like what's going to happen is I'm going to kickstart a bunch of games, forget about it and in two years get a bunch of fun shit via e-mail.
Plus, as a Windows user, I could apply the exact same logic to Mac and Android users, it's just a different way of saying "it doesn't matter to me so nyeh".
However, I do feel pretty strongly that I'd rather Linux not be a serious concern at all until the game has already proved its quality and profitability. Under the hood, it would probably be a good choice for the devs to make it easier for themselves to later port to Linux and I wouldn't contest that choice at all. But the Mac/Android/Microsoft device market dwarfs the Linux market and there are already ways to emulate something which would run the games. I can't say I'd want to have to emulate anything to play a game I want, but it's not like Linux users would be shut out completely. Not to mention that somebody who uses Linux is more likely to be able to get the proper emulation running anyway, so there's even less of an imperative there for Harebrained to devote resources to that right now.
Either way, this is a pretty simple cost/benefit analysis: they need to cost and time out what it would take to do a Linux version, then tell the market.
I think additional information would help cool the debate a bit.
Hopefully they will post more info on why.
FYI I do not run Linux and largely agree that 99% of Linux users have access to other compatible formats... But then again I get the feeling that Linux users would also be on average more prolific map makers... So I think they would add to the success of the game after launch too.
I want anything.
One thing they might be considering is the difficulty of post launch support.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)