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Shadowrun: Crossfire
- metalface13
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- D10
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EDIT: Not my Cup'oTea if you will. But I also felt the same about P:AG and Legendary: Encounters so what do I know I guess?
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- Legomancer
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- Dave Lartigue
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Oh, and elves, because god fucking forbid RPGers play a game without goddamn elves.
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Legomancer wrote: Shadowrun is a game where they took the idea of Cyberpunk -- a world where technology has so outpaced the average person that it may as well be magic -- and decided it needed actual magic.
Oh, and elves, because god fucking forbid RPGers play a game without goddamn elves.
Nice summary of why I hate Shadowrun. It's Cyberpunk with big clunky training wheels for people who don't think they can handle role-playing without magic.
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It seemed that it allowed for playing more dubious characters than one normally would. I imagine players would feel more at ease dropping racism on fantasy races over the ugliness of real ethnicities.
I say this as someone who's only played the SNES game, the TCG, read one novel, played two sessions of the rpg and a read through the rpg books. I don't know how much players or DMs actually handled race relations in their games though.
Again, maybe this isn't something one wants to role-play (we didn't), but from the material I gleamed it seemed like this was an area that other rpgs didn't even go near.
(I didn't love that SNES game though. And the TCG was a lot of fun for awhile.)
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Green Lantern wrote: What does the term cyberpunk mean? I have no idea so can't comment on whether or not Shadowrun fails at being a cyberpunk game. Shadowrun was always about the ebb and flow of magic, heists, and not knowing who to trust. That fact that elves, dwarves, trolls, and orks were in the setting was always window dressing. The in game explanation for the existence was clever too so their presence never felt forced.
Cyberpunk is a sub-genre of science-fiction that focuses on near-future settings where computers and cybernetics are everywhere. The style of a given setting is usually multi-cultural, noir, cynical, high-tech, and somewhat dystopian. Common concepts dealt with in cyberpunk fiction are surveillance, alienation, loss of humanity, rebellion against authority, corporations becoming more powerful than governments, artificial intelligence, and above all else, hacking. In real cyberpunk stories, the multi-culturalism is that of various human cultures, but in Shadowrun, it is all about the tired Tolkienesqe stereotypes of elves, dwarves, etc.
Blade Runner is a great example of what a cyberpunk setting should look like. So is modern Japan, except for the multi-cultural part. Other movies influenced by cyberpunk include Brazil, Robocop, Hardware, the Lawnmower Man, the Matrix, Total Recall, and Dredd. Max Headroom and Dark Angel are two tv shows that were definitely based on cyberpunk.
I suspect one reason that Shadowrun was a more popular rpg than Cyberpunk was the miniatures. A lazy or cheap gamemaster could just recycle his D&D minis for a Shadowrun game, but running a Cyberpunk game would have meant buying lots of new minis and painting them.
The original Cyberpunk rpg was published in the '80s and set in the year 2013. That is part of the problem with cyberpunk... most of the writers were only peering a short distance into the future, and now their works are dated.
The best cyberpunk material was always the books. I highly recommend trying these:
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Mirrorshades: the Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by Bruce Sterling
When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger
Islands in the Net, by Bruce Sterling
Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan
Vacuum Flowers, by Michael Swanwick
Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams
Burning Chrome, by William Gibson
Steel Beach, by John Varley
The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
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Shellhead wrote: Cyberpunk is a sub-genre of science-fiction that focuses on near-future settings where computers and cybernetics are everywhere. The style of a given setting is usually multi-cultural, noir, cynical, high-tech, and somewhat dystopian. Common concepts dealt with in cyberpunk fiction are surveillance, alienation, loss of humanity, rebellion against authority, corporations becoming more powerful than governments, artificial intelligence, and above all else, hacking. In real cyberpunk stories, the multi-culturalism is that of various human cultures, but in Shadowrun, it is all about the tired Tolkienesqe stereotypes of elves, dwarves, etc.
Well then, with that definition I can certify that the Shadowrun game and materials incorporated every one of those elements. To those that think having Tolkien races intermixed somehow negates the cyberpunk themes I got nothing. Haters gonna hate. I've played several editions, read numerous novels and source books and never got the impression the game solely focused on the races. In fact, the idea of various races trying to cope with survival in a dystopian future while trying to establish new cultures was simply an opportunity to flesh out and explore those themes if a group wanted to go that route. The races were just one more tool in the kit for the GM and players, nothing more.
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However, if somebody is really stuck on the Shadowrun take on cyberpunk, I can recommend a couple of good books by Michael Swanwick: the Iron Dragon's Daughter and The Dragons of Babel. I can't recommend any of the dozens of official Shadowrun novels, because I had already read too many bad books written primarily to cash in on the popularity of other games and assumed that these books would be more of the same.
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