Missed Proposition

When I stopped playing Shadowrun way back when, the Renraku Arcology Shutdown was all the rage. So I've missed quite a bit. When I came back to the game, I dived in to all the lore I missed. Honestly I'm still catching up on it. 

What I'm digging the most was the story around prop 23. It makes me wish I had gotten back into the game sooner. 

Fortunately, my wife bought me Sprawl Wilds and Splintered State for Christmas last year. They had just been sitting on my shelf, unused until now. I just had to use them. It was the prop 23 connection I was looking for. 

This is a pretty good place to describe the shadowrunners that make up my game. On the mundane side, there's an Elven face, with a high penchant for forgery. On the non-mundane side, there are four adepts. One is a katana wielding Ork built like a tank. There's a knife throwing Elf who likes to strike from the shadows. Next is a human Mystic Adept who puts his healing talents to use with DocWagon as a day job. Rounding out the group is an adept who went under the knife to get a datajack, and spends more time decking in hot-sim that fighting in meat space

Even though Splintered State mentions it could work for a new group, I wanted some of my newer players to cut their teeth on something easier. 

FOOD FIGHT!

DocWagon Regulars - Ready To Hire!

Shadowrun.

Quite possibly my favorite rpg. More than that, it's my favorite setting. The world of Shadowrun has amazed me since I first started picking up those books around twenty years ago. I played a bunch of different characters back in 2nd edition - my first was a rigger named 'Shadow' (named after my favorite Final Fantasy character). I've had the handle 'Shadowrigg' in various chat and message groups over the years. I also played a Shaman, a Street Samurai, an adept, and a few others. In third edition, while I did get to play a little (it's where my dwarven decker 'Head-Set' came from), I mostly sat behind the GM screen. For almost two years I tried to run an adventure for anyone who showed from my irregular group of players once a week. Sometimes we'd play another game, like battletech or warhammer 40k, but never for very long. The group tended to drift back to Shadowrun, and back behind the screen I went. On top of that, I ran another game for a group of friends once a month out of town. It was great. It was fun.

But it couldn't last.

Some people got tired of rpg's, and tried to break out of being a 'nerd.' Some people moved away. A few of my players got swept up in live action role play, specifically Vampire (myself included). That was fun for awhile. I met a lot of new people through vampire larp (even the lady that would become my wife). I played in a couple of games for a while, and even took over as the head storyteller for a Sabbat chronicle. The problem I kept running into was that I didn't enjoy telling stories for 20+ people. I didn't feel connected to anyone's character & story, which led to me introducing plot that wasn't character driven. I wasn't willing to take the extra step of running "side scenes" outside the normal game session, because I felt it was infringing on my time. When I realized I actually hated showing up to run my game, the time came to kill it. It lasted for two or three more sessions, that ended with a large scale final battle.

I walked away from running games. I still played in a few larps, but my heart wasn't in it anymore. Eventually I stopped playing rpg's altogether. Fast forward- I grew up, grew older, got married, had kids.

An article pops up in my facebook feed sometime in 2013 talking about "The Year Of Shadowrun." Catalyst was introducing Shadowrun 5th edition. 5th? I missed 4th completely. So myself and my old 2nd edition GM both picked up a copy of the rules. Eventually he decided to run the game. I had a chance to play THE game again. We played a few sessions spread across several months.

That's when the idea of running the game again popped in my head. I had always liked doing a mix of modules(FASA Text, anyone?) and original adventures. Back then I was a bit self-conscious about using prewritten adventures, because other people at the game shop would boast about "everything in my game is original." At this point in my life, I now know that original doesn't always mean better. Combine that with the fact that I've got two little kids at home, I don't always have a ton of time to draft out brand new runs, and I'm okay with that. So some original, and some established adventures make up my game. 2070's Seattle, I'm on my way.

So here we are. After over ten years away from the GM hotseat, I'm back. The DocWagon Regulars campaign started two months ago. I'm just getting warmed up.