This is a continuation from an earlier post about my experiences GMing.
My move to Michigan coincided with a bit of a break from the GM’s seat. Even though I found my Michigan group within a couple weeks of my move, the group had a DM for the weekly D&D and Pathfinder games. So for a bit, I just sat back and enjoyed being a player again. And I know that’s the sentence where half the GMs reading will look on in envy, and half know that I’m heading straight into getting the itch to get back behind the screen and run games for people.
What got me back behind the screen was coming across the first special edition rulebook I ever bought, my special slipcover edition of Shadowrun 4 Anniversary Edition. The slipcover looked so nice, and the silver lettering on plain black of the book was just slick looking. And it came with a poster of the Seattle Skyline (which made me smile at a time I was just starting to feel homesick).
Now a thing that Shadowrun books do extremely well is to immerse you right into the lore and get you wanting to run the game. So I start talking about Shadowrun to everyone from the Encounters group at Clem’s Comics who will listen. And the Pathfinder group. And I get a nice little group of interested players together. And I approach the store to set up a night that they can advertise in their newsletter.
I settled on using the Shadowrun Missions line for the games we ran on Thursday nights, sharing the tables in the sub shop next door to the comic shop with the Magic crowd. I showed up to the first session and sat down with a printout of the PDF that I’d made on school printers and we dove straight into a crazy tale of an academic and her newly found artifact being held ransom in the Ork Underground. My players were the greatest bunch. We had the troll “infiltrator” with the motto that if you carry a chainsaw, it’s always a sneaky entrance, because they didn’t realize you could come from that way. We had the dwarf rigger who took full advantage of Fourth Edition’s wireless rules and just chilled in his van. Always. No showers, no anything, he had his coccoon in the van, and sent his drones out to deal with the outside world. We had the elf face with a tqste for justice and an incandescent rage toward those who would steal basic agency from others (such as the owners of bunraku parlors). Then we had the elf street sam who just made sure to lay down the covering fire. It was a great group.
Running Shadowrun was my first time running pre-written material, and the experiences from running Shadowrun Missions for the store for three years, until the sub shop closed and we didn’t have a space anymore, are ones that have stuck with how I prep to run a game and how I handle situations when the players absolutely turn straight into left field when everything prepped assumes they took a right into the football stadium.
One of our next Shadowrun session featured my first party wipe. We’d not been great on what the Shadowrun mechanics were for cover, having mostly just not done combat, and the party hadn’t realized what overwhelming force was coming after them. A group the party had been unknowingly working against swept in to try and steal what they had rightfully taken. This was a chaotic battle happening in so many places. The rigger turned his van into a weapon while simultaneously firing from his drones, named Hugen and Munin. It was a completely chaotic session. In hindsight, I always check what sort of map I’m working with for an adventure now, and if things are going too chaotic, make an example of the enemies taking cover to avoid getting caught right in the open. If the enemies are using tactics, that usually makes the party stop and think for a moment before continuing.
We had an absolute blast, even that time they nearly wiped. Thursday Night Shadowrun became a regular thing, even when we had to get creative to find room to play so that we didn’t squeeze the Magic players out of the space. Using some of the smaller booths to handle the games taught me to get better with my spacial descriptions so that we could handle Theatre of the Mind tactics in our Shadowrun games rather than having to break out the mat and minis like I’d been accustomed to in my D&D games.
The group stuck together through the transition from Fourth Edition into Fifth, playing through the complete 3rd and 4th seasons of Shadowrun Missions and playing the first couple missions of the 5th, on top of every collection of Convention Missions we could get our hands on.
Our dwarf rigger continued in his shenanigans any time a computer so much as blinked within a mile of him, once rigging a security system to order pizza rather than police.
Though, I think my favorite example of Shadowrun and my players teaching me how to be a better GM is the time I had to run the entire four hour session on my feet making it up as we went because the players looked at what they were being hired to do and said “No, we are absolutely not doing that and he shouldn’t be doing it either.”
For those familiar with Season 3 of Shadowrun Missions, the objectionable content was SRM 03-03 Burning Bridges (Affiliate Link). If you object to spoilers to an adventure over a decade old, look away now.
Burning Bridges involves a Mr. Johnson who, in desperation of having lost an important job which would save his company, wants to hire the Runners to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and blame Aztechnology. My Runners put two and two together that if something is handling 70% of traffic constantly, then it’s likely that any destruction of the bridge is likely to have a high collateral body count. They were not having that. Gangers? Sure. Lone Star? No problem. Knight Errant? Line them up. Commuters? Now that’s crossing five different lines.
So the Runners decide that they will pretend to take the job, follow through on most of the legwork and collections to be done, but ultimately double cross Johnson and ensure he is turned over to the police because forget that guy.
Now the adventure as written assumed that the players may decide to double-cross Johnson and leave some evidence behind at the twisted remains of the bridge. Even included a possible reward for doing so. They did not plan for the ways in which that goal would so completely define every single action my players took at the table. So I had to come up with new NPCs that the existing characters could put them in touch with, after they had some words with the Fixer who put them up to this job.
And so, I have them running from end to end of Manhattan Island, and through the Boroughs piecing together a case to hand over to the police because they have decided that today is a day they don’t do the crimes. And it was a blast and one of the sessions that still gets brought up by players from that group as “That one time we decided to tell Mr. Johnson where to shove his job and made Alex improv a whole session.”
Shadowrun was the first system I GMed while in Michigan, paving the way for me to run a short-lived Pathfinder campaign as well, before eventually taking over D&D Encounters for the D&D Next Playtest, navigate taking the Encounters program through the Sub Shop closing and losing the play space we’d been in, and led to meeting some of the people I still invite to my games today.
Shadowrun gets a certain reputation for being rather complex and arcane, which is not at all helped by its rulebooks tending to be great for flavor of the setting but not as helpful as table references for the rules. But, the flavor of the Shadowrun setting is amazing. You get a few more tools in your belt to help your characters fight back in their lives which are utterly controlled by the whims of the megacorporations who set the laws and have bought the police who enforce those edicts. And your characters get to throw fireballs and rock the 1980s pink mohawk while you’re at it. It’s a great one to sit down and play once you get the hang.
Featured image from BadCat13 used pursuant to a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license
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