Game Concepts: Shadowrun 2032
"The body's in here, detective -- manager said another renter complained about the smell, so he opened it up and found the body. Called us right away," explained the uniform, leading us towards the cluster of squad cars and the coroner's van.
The smell as we walked into the small self-storage facility nearly had me putting my lunch on the ground -- this guy had been dead a while, no doubt about it. From the looks of things, he hadn't come to a very pleasant end, either. His neck had been slashed from ear to ear, though there didn't seem to be nearly enough blood for him to have been completely exsanguinated. Decomposition had been at work for a while and it looked like this place had a rat problem.
"Christ. Fucking freaks," I heard Chance mutter. Under the rotting corpse and the blood that was there, some sort of white chalk pentagram had been drawn, ringed with the "mystic" symbols that we'd started to see more and more the last couple years. Used to be you could count on it all being a bunch of wannabes or deranged cultists, but these days, you never knew.
"You think that's bad, look up," said Paulsen, the forensics geek. He pointed up towards the ceiling, where someone had painted another strange symbol, nearly two meters across, in red paint. Except it wasn't paint.
"Jesus. The Feds are going to be all over this one. You got an ID on this guy?" I didn't expect that anyone had found his wallet, but if we got lucky and he'd been fingerprinted at some point.
"Working on a DNA match, but so far nothing. I'd put time of death at at least three or four days ago, but I'll know more once I get him back to the lab."
Any reader of this blog has probably figured out that I'm a big fan of Shadowrun, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year (and I finally broke down and bought 4th Edition -- I'll be getting one of the numbered Limited Edition hardcovers when they are released (I assume around GenCon, though no actual street date has been announced). I haven't played the game in a long time, and to be honest I'm not too fond of the direction the new edition took with the setting -- it's much more Ghost in the Shell these days than Neuromancer -- but I still have a lot of fondness for the game, and for the people who write it. I would really like to get back to the game again.
My favorite period in the canon Shadowrun timeline is around 2055, the tail-end of the Dowd/Findley heyday that I've talked about before. However, one period I've always thought I'd love to try running a game in is the period right as the world is still coming to grips with all the changes of the Awakening. Magic is still relatively new and strange, the Matrix is just coming online, elves and dwarves are starting to come into adulthood and orks and trolls have been around for barely a decade. The megacorporations are still solidifying their positions and the old order is making its last stand, as the Eurowars rage.
To steal a trick used by NSDM's Cold War scenarios, here's some comparisons between 2032 and today. In 2032:
- VITAS I killed 25% of the world's population about as long ago as AIDS became prominent in the public consciousness.
- The Awakening happened about as long ago as the fall of the Berlin Wall.
- The Treaty of Denver happened about as long ago as Bill Clinton's second presidential election victory.
- Orks and trolls have been around about as long as Google.
- Lone Star has been in charge of Seattle's police about as long as the United States has been in Afghanistan.
- Magic has been a field of serious, practical study about as long as China has had a manned space program.
- Cyberterminals have been around a little longer than the iPhone.
- The Crash of 2029 happened about as long ago as the 2006 Lebanon War.
- The UCAS was formed about as long ago as Nancy Pelosi became the Speaker of the House.
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That's a fabulous idea. I've always preferred the gritty side of Shadowrun to the whimsical side, so an era where people are still coming to terms with the world's radical changes appeals to me. (One of my greatest disappointments with SR was that it couldn't seem to decide what sort of game it wanted to be, and as a result it tried to be both gritty and whimsical, without much success at either.)
I do like the idea.
I've also loved Shadowrun for years, and am also particularly fond of the 2055 era. I still occasionally run Shadowrun II when I can find players.
I agree that 2032 would be a very interesting time, especially if the players weren't familiar with the later game. When I'm a newcomer to a game, it always gets me when the other players tell me lots of background that my character wouldn't know. Unless it has some real affect on gameplay, it's much more fun for me to learn it as my character does.
Personally, I think of Shadowrun's variations as a feature, not a bug -- one of the great things about the game is that it can be played in so many ways -- Monty Haul-style dungeon crawls, political/corporate intrigue, superspies, survival horror, conspiracy horror, deep character study, whatever -- just by altering the time and place. I still think Universal Brotherhood is a scarier supplement than most stuff I read for horror games like Call of Cthulhu, for instance. When you run it, you have to decide what sort of game you want to run, but it's easy to meld into whatever you want.
I admit I tend to prefer a slightly lower-tech and lower-magic version than the current edition, but I think that's easy enough to tone down; reading through the PDF of the Anniversary Edition, I still get the same sort of feeling I did when I first got into the game all those years ago (almost 20 years, actually -- I think I first picked up the game in 1992, when SR2 was just coming out). Adam Jury and the other writers these days are certainly good at what they do, they just have slightly different tastes than I do.
And yeah, I agree with you Ghoti -- I definitely prefer when characters don't know much about the setting and I can introduce it to them slowly. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how easy that is with Shadowrun, which I suspect is a pretty well-known quantity, at least among gamers. Still, I think a 2032 game would have some serious merit -- and the style I'm thinking of might even fit well with a PbP game (since it probably wouldn't be as heavy on the action). Maybe I'll throw it out there on RPGnet once I form some stuff up.
If I did, I would probably diverge the timeline at that point, so even experienced Shadowrun players wouldn't be able to know everything that was going to happen.