I’m not the first person who’s created a blog who’s slowly drifted away from regular updates and I certainly won’t be the last. Unfortunately I just haven’t had the motivation or inspiration to keep things up due to my gaming curse. Karma can bite you in the ass sometimes and after a string of pretty good gaming and scheduling, well, things took a turn for the worse.
With our Renegade Horizon games getting postponed, I have another space to fill in with some Shadowrun information.
As I’ve previously stated, I’m going with pre-generated characters for this campaign. For most of the players in the group, this game will be both their first exposure to the Spirit of the Century rules as well as the Shadowrun universe. Typically that means the game starts off a bit slower as everyone tries to grasp the rules and setting in order to figure out how their characters would act. In order to help them out in both regards, I’m going to do something different with the first session’s run. Part of the enjoyment of a good caper movie is how we as the audience aren’t aware of the protagonists’ plans and get to see them unfold piece by piece. Even if the event goes of entirely to plan, we are kept in suspense and continuously surprised because we see the obstacles that get thrown in the heroes’ way and watch as they are able to overcome them.
Since most Shadowrun adventures can break down to a caper of some sort the same parallels can be drawn. So after talking to the players about the first introductory mission of the mini-campaign, I’m going to pull a few tricks out to give them the same type of experience. They’ll be thrown right into the job with no time spent with the players sitting around planning every detail.
The problem to a set up like this is obvious – how are the players supposed to role-play competent shadowrunners sneaking into a secure facility if they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing?
I think I’ve found a solution.
Since my Star Wars and Renegade Horizon games have had to cancel the last couple sessions due to scheduling conflicts, I might as well follow up my last Shadowrun post with another one. Although I previously mentioned starting with an overview of the campaign and talking about characters, I realized that starting with my vision of the Shadowrun world and how I will be running it would be a better place to start.
There are a number of people who don’t like the Shadowrun setting due to its mix of genres. For them the inclusion of fantasy in their cyberpunk is like the ice cream in their Pizza. Normally I’d agree with them, but there’s an additional factor that has to be taken into account – Earthdawn.
I’ve finally started to settle on the game I’m going to try to put together for my next stint at gamemastering. After taking a good look at how Earthdawn went and where the problems arose as well as what parts of my gamemastering style need improvement I’ve decided to run a short Shadowrun mini-campaign – a single mission that will involve a basic run and then some follow-up in a more open format.
There’s still some time left in our Star Wars campaign, and I’m not trying to rush that out the door early in order to play something else. I’m hoping to use this blog as a design log and document some of the campaign design and planning that I do to get the game ready to be run. In the future I’ll be talking about the system I’ll be using, the campaign setup, the group template, and other aspects of the game but for my first post I’m going to start with how I’m going to address the problems of my Earthdawn game.