Shadowrun - One Shot

Introduction

Some time ago, I had a chance to run Silver Angel, which I think is actually the very first published Shadowrun adventure. Prior to that, I had read the first edition to get immersed into the setting, and thought a lot about how I should go about running the game. See, I've run Shadowrun a bunch of times over the years, including one session using official SR 2 rules. That was a mess – too slow, too clunky, too 90s big rules game. Other attempts included: LotFP, OD&D, World of Dungeons, Sixth World (based on Dungeon World), Zaibatsu and Troika. With more or less success in terms of pacing, but rarely doing what I expected and hoped out of Shadowrun in terms of atmosphere, or what I've started to call “game feel” - how the moment to moment gameplay at the table affects said atmosphere. Not to say the games weren't fun, but they lacked a something I attributed to Shadowrun, and imagine that people who can endure or even thrive under the official rules get to enjoy. Game rules condition both referees and players to approach the game in a certain way, and that's what makes the originality and charm of different games – otherwise people wouldn't go through the trouble of creating new systems to fit their worlds.

Well yesterday I went with the FKR (Free Kriegspiel, see * at the end of the post) approach, using Shadowrun 1E archetypes as my basis, coupled with the violence rules of APIE (Any Planet is Earth), the Classic Traveller Saving Throw “system” and descriptive stats (if your archetype has a 5-6 or a 1-2, record an appropriate descriptor in the “stats” part of the character sheet), skills, cyberware, etc. (no numbers on the sheet save for PCs having 4 Hits, which we represented using tokens from a nearby board game). This was a huge success. I was apprehensive at first about the notion of automatic hits and flat damage as the default mode of resolution for combat (Into the Odd proved you don't need to-hit rolls but still has dicing in the default combat situation, though it encourages creative approaches to it). I am still a bit weirded out by how it plays, but believe it's a matter of habit, as the practical results were excellent.

Characters

• Echo is a punk Decker with a bionic arm capable of full autonomy once given “orders” by the brain. Her sister died in an industrial accident that she later learned Aztechnology could have easily prevented, but chose not to for the usual reasons (that sweet nuyen). She runs the shadows to put her skills to good use and hopefully one day get her revenge.

• Hick is a former Mage Detective with emerald green skin and black nails and teeth. Possibly related to her strange appearance is the fact that she remembers nothing of the twenty first years of her life - only joining the force, going undercover in prison, and eventually quitting to run the shadows in the hope of figuring out what happened before all this.

• Rusty is a Street Samurai and veteran of the Tunisian Winter War of '49. She did time soon after coming home, and kept doing all she knows how to do once free, as a shadowrunner.

Food Fight

• The crew all met in prison a few months ago and have been solid ever since - they usually squat around Hick's place. Game starts one night with the crew doing nothing much - shooting cans and smoking cigarettes, when Rusty decides she needs wasabi chips (or crisps if you're british). So they go on a 3am quest for junk food, to the nearby Stuffer Shack. Shadowrun veterans know where this is going.

• At the Stuffer Shack, there's a bubblegum popping teenager lost in VR behind the automated cashier machine, a weird old woman listening to eggs and breaking them in dissatisfaction and a few other night owl weirdoes. Oh, and three suspicious thugs. Rusty gets her chips and the thugs start some shit, pulling out crappy polymer one-shots. "Everyone get down!"

• Echo slammed a frozen pizza in the nearest thug's face (surprise), then shot him in the leg (3 hits) with her quick reflexes. Hick got into a brawl with the one bothering the cashier, getting clocked in the jaw (1 hit). Rusty threw a shelf on top of the last thug, and knocked him out once he was down (2 hits). He then went to help Hick, nonchalently knocking out his enemy before leaving some cash on the counter and walking out. Before the cops' arrival, Hick spent some time reassuring the cashier girl as Echo quickly hacked the camera feed to censor their figures with big pac-man icons. They left a few minutes before the cops showed up.

• Back home, they were greeted by an awkward gangbanger from the King Crimson gang. He looked at his feet as he told them they should go to the Matchstick tomorrow at 9am, password: Steward.

Silver Angel, part 1 [if you play in my online games, best stop here to avoid spoilers] - Legwork

• In the back of the Matchstick, the PCs are greeted by a somewhat famous (in the shadows) character - Eve Donovan, a fixer who was believed to be dead after a botched Aztechnology run. She's alive and cybered up, and works for a big company now. Her employers want the PCs to hit a Mitsuhama Research Lab in exactly 3 days, at 2 am. They need a file called "Silver Angel". 50k in advance, and again upon successful (stealthy) completion of the job. A bit less if things get loud.

• Each player called a few contacts, setting up vignette scenes of meeting to try and dig some information on the security contractor, matrix security provider and the site itself. There's no major highlight but this took a lot of time and was mostly handled with freeform scene setting, lots of switching back and forth between in-character chat and more OOC description. I tend to do one or two sentences in-character or certain major points of an NPC's interaction and casually switch back to "he says X and Y" to conserve energy and maintain a good pacing.

• The PCs heard that the girlfriend of a dead decker by the name of Frank G. (Neon Fever in the Matrix) - a stripper going by "Queen Conchita", Karen Whispers. At the club (the Cutting Edge), Echo and Rusty scare Karen off the bar, and Hicks stalks her backstage, trying to tell her they're here to help. She tries to run away and gets shot by some corporate goon as soon as she gets in the side alley. Hicks jumps in the way and gets hit for her sake, breaking a rib under his kevlar vest. A firefight ensues.

• There's two other corporate goons coming from the front entrance, with Echo and Rusty also coming out into the main street when they notice them being all suspicious-like at the bar, and then hearing the gunshots. Echo hunkers down and Hicks prepares a sleep spell while the street samurai gets shot a few time, nonplussed, and guns down the corps with his smartlinked Uzi. Karen Whispers now believes the crew to be friendly, what with saving her life, and they all ride away on their Yamaha Rapiers and Harleys.

• Safe at a capsule hotel, she says she has no idea what her boyfriend was up to but can sell the crew (for cheap, but she does need money to skip town) the data he had stored on the Mitsuhama research center before getting iced by the Azzies. Turns out it's a map of the matrix servers, which will make the decker's job easy.

• The following day, the party meets with their fixer to ask for some gear - gas masks, a canister of sleeping gas, kevlar vests, medkits, etc. Eve also set up a meeting for the crew with one Haruhiko Blake, a disgruntled ex-Mitsuhama employee who knows a lot about the target location. The meeting goes well, with Blake asking for a future favor in exchange for floor plans and information about the meatspace security of the site.

We stopped there, with most of the legwork done. Next, the crew needs a plan, and to execute that plan.