It's often said that good science fiction is about taking an idea that is initially preposterous and playing it straight. For this reason Shadowrun should really work. The idea is as preposterous as you can get and therefore, you would assume, has the potential to be genuinely interesting if taken seriously. (I don't mean being played seriously in-game; I just mean the actual setting itself.)
Unfortunately it always came across to me as being cartoonish and frivolous, as if the designers knew, in their hearts of hearts, that what they were coming up with was really rather silly indeed - or else a rather cynical attempt to gain popularity through combining two contemporaneous fads (epic fantasy and cyberpunk). Then again, my perception of the game may have been skewed by the gaming group I was in when I was 15 and Shadowrun was at the height of its popularity - the main raison d'etre for the group was actually smoking weed, if anything, which as well as robbing you of your ambition does not generally make for good gaming. (Don't do drugs, kids.)
I think the most interesting take on Shadowrun would be to make it more fairy-tale and supernatural. It's the future, we all have BlackBerrys in our heads and submachineguns which fire cyanide-tipped bullets and the Chinese and Brazilians have taken over the world, and yet at the same time...there are fucking elves around. And not your D&D "Legolas from the LOTR films" elves - your actual sidhe of myth and legend, who steal babies in the night and replace them with changelings, who trick you of your money and sanity just for laughs, or spirit you away for what seems like hours but actually turns out to be years. Or redcaps who lurk in dark alleys waiting to let your blood so they can dye their hats. Or Gibson-esque Voodou Loa who gain actual spiritual form from the worship of their immigrant followers. Or Wiccan gangsters who use magick.
The key to all this would be the interplay between the fairy and the technological, and the failure of high-tech to deal with the fact that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. You know like how, in a cyberpunk game, the black ops wing of a sinister corporation could hack into your personal emails to find out your movements, or wait for you to come online and then fry your brain with hunter-killer software? Well, what would they do if you never came online because you use magick to communicate with your cronies? Wouldn't that sinister corporation want magick users itself?
Played straight, it works, see?
I was on gaming sabbatical during the Shadowrun era, but I recently helped a friend do some playtesting for a B/X Shadowrun mash-up. I was fine with the cyberpunk thing (although the Gibsonesque elements haven't aged so well), but I kept forgetting that there were fairies and cyber-hobbits and all that crap. It just sort of jumps the gaming shark for me.
ReplyDeleteShadowrun would work better minus the Cyberplonk elements. Occult races and magic come back to contemporary/near-future Earth - and how the world reacts to that - is hook enough for a setting.
ReplyDeleteFull disclosure: I never 'got' Shadowrun. The whole elf-ecowarrior-with-a-cyberdeck thing seemed too kitchen sink even to my teenage self.
Cyberpunk is already a mash-up of hardboiled fiction and science fiction. Fantasy and hardboiled both combine well with science fiction on their own, but trying to combine fantasy with hardboiled without seeming frivolous or banal is a major undertaking in itself. Throw in s.f. as well and you've got a major oversaturation of themes going on.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting take on it. Two themes are a couple, three themes are a crowd?
DeleteSee, to me the failing was less the setting and more the system. I can accept a gonzo mash up of D&Disms and warmed over William Gibson. What I can't accept is a really crunchy system that bogs down the gonzo action. I want it to play like a cartoon.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like Shadowrun by way of Neil Gaiman.
ReplyDeleteShadowrun was one one RPG I have played where it was really not fun (not that I have played all that many RPGs, actually). It is also possible that I didn't have a very good GM. As Jack wrote, the system seemed really complicated, and I wasn't interested in or knowledgeable enough about the system to be able to optimize my character at all.
I didn't mind the system. I quite like crunch when I put my mind to it. You do need somebody to hold your hand quite a bit at first, though.
DeleteI played an awful lot of Shadowrun at around the same time you did, although there weren't as many drugs around; there was a lot of whiskey around when we played Mutant Chronicles, but you sort of needed that to get through it.
ReplyDeleteEr... anyway, I still have a fondness for Shadowrun, and never really had a problem with the mixing of genres. The thing that put me off was the heavy-handed metaplot, but it was the mid-90's and everyone did it then.
I like the system -- I thought it did hand-to-hand combat and magic very well -- although Jack is right in that it was a bit too crunchy, and the hacking systems were always rubbish.
@ Kelvin:
DeleteWe should compare notes on the Mutant Chronicles sometime.
; )
Mutant Chronicles. I have... *shifty eyes* heard of this. In passing.
DeleteI dug into Shadowrun in the mid/early 90's when I was in my early teens, and I just ate it up. It's never seemed silly to me, possibly because the tone it was written in was way more mature than any roleplaying product I'd been exposed to at that point. The sort of world-weary camaraderie shadowrunners were portrayed as sharing was (and maybe still is, I don't know) uniquely convincing. On the one hand they're to varying degrees good at, like, the coolest job anyone could imagine, and on the other hand a person would have to be insane to want to do it. So you know your character is somewhere on the nutbag scale from square one. Yet you're definitely a professional nutbag - which I think is a very healthy place to start from in character creation.
ReplyDeleteAlso, since I came at cyberpunk through Shadowrun, rather than through Gibson, straight cyberpunk ala Cyberpunk 2020 has always seemed kinda thin by comparison. All the magic and awakened world stuff is one more angle to exploit and to worry about, which I found tactically interesting. I love the focus on Native American culture, and how in the setting native cultures in general have regained political power - that's a fantasy I can definitely get behind.
We're probably the same age. I didn't think it was silly at the time and really loved the idea of orcs and trolls running around San Francisco or wherever. (One of my first characters was a Minotaur; another was a hobgoblin from the Middle East.) It's just in retrospect that I think they missed a trick.
DeleteI've always had mixed feelings about Shadowrun. I love the basic idea - magic reappears in a cyberpunk world - but I find the execution of that idea lacking.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, the system is a pain in the ass. Rather than saying, "Technology and Magic are both potentially pretty complicated, so maybe we should abstract away some of the details," the creators of Shadowrun seem to have taken the attitude, "Let's explore every possible detail of technology and magic," which makes the game... difficult. The most recent edition improved the system a bit, but not as much as I would like.
Second, I don't care for how Shadowrun handles the interaction of technology and magic. Shadowrun presents magic and technology as being essentially incompatible. Having more technology in your body makes you less magical. I can see the appeal of this from a balance standpoint, but from a flavor standpoint I find the idea of combining magic and technology much more interesting than having them in conflict. It also seems pretty arbitrary to me - if magic can only be produced by organic systems, why can it affect inorganic systems? I would like to see a cyberpunk game that took an approach more similar to Mage: the Ascension, where technology is presented as a form of magic, rather than something inherently antithetical to it.
I agree. The whole astral projection thing never made a great deal of sense to me in particular.
DeleteI like your approach, in part because it seems to subtly shift the emphasis of the game. Instead of "magic in a technological setting", it sounds more like "technology in a magical setting", which is more appealing to me.
ReplyDeleteI really wanted to like Shadow Run in the 90'sf by the complexity, and the fact that i already had 2020 to fill my cheesy cyberpunk fix. But I have to say I absolutely adore 4th edition. It's a much more streamlined beast, and they have done a marvelous job supporting it. I'd almost say that ShadowRun's heyday is right now.
ReplyDeleteWell, everything could be improved by taking inspiration straight from the source, instead of the things it inspired. Myths over Tolkien any day.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure putting voodoo in a sci-fi setting looks any less silly than putting elves in it, though.
I would think that certain occult elements would work better than others. Like http://eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/139/monsters-in-the-night
ReplyDelete