#Shadowrun Second Edition

[ttrpg-smash-pass-vs]

actually now I'm curious.

EDIT: Right, my personal experience is D&D 3.5, years of PF1e, a quick bout of Call of Cthulu, a year long campaign of Changeling the dreaming, Some d100 fallout thing, big campaign of Shadowrun 5e, D&D 5e, and PF2e. Haven't gotten to play PF2e in an actual campaign though, just watching and studying and running through mini adventures solo to balance test. Which is sad, but the only group I'm part of that plays it currently includes someone I'm not inclined to play with again. Also, have sat in on plenty of VtM and a bit of the Witcher RPG (and heard the tale of the campaigns like 10 times to the point I know it well.)

Most of it was PF1e. While I did enjoy my 3 year 5e campaign once I got dragged over, I'm glad to be slinking back home to Paizo. Changeling the Dreaming is my second favorite system. D&D 5e behind it. I feel like PF2e will knock PF1e down to 3rd of 4th once I can actually play the damn thing, but for now my mastery and nostalgia keep it at 1st.

[vintagerpg]

This is the second edition of The Mines of Keridav (1983) from Gamelords, a reissue of the 1979 Phoenix Games edition. It is statted for Thieves Guild but it is essentially generic, suitable for any D&D-derived system with a minimum of conversion. The basic plot is a cliché — rescue the princess from the evil wizard — but there aren’t actually a ton of scenarios where damsels are in distress, so it feels sort of novel in a weird way. The mines themselves are logically arranged and therefore extremely deadly for a frontal assault — players who want to succeed are going to need to be clever. The mage, Keridav is tough (though one with an interesting weakness — in close quarters, he is liable to get flustered and stutter, disrupting his spellcasting) and supported by a band of orcs and a menagerie of critters. Of potential help for the players, Keridav has imprisoned a population of dwarves and forced them to work the mines. His hope that the princess will naturally fall in love with him also presents unusual opportunities a smarter villain might otherwise account for.

The great thing is that the mines is only a small part of the module (just five of the 28 pages). The rest is dedicated to describing the Tiraval Valley, a number of overland hexes that include a well-realized village, a ruined castle (which would be expanded on in the companion module) and a number of encounter areas. This sort of material was more common by 1983, but when the first edition came out in ‘79, there wasn’t a ton of wilderness stuff out there and honestly, of the stuff I’ve read, this is some of the most polished and cohesive. I’d have no problem lifting this for one of my games.

Like most Gamelords books, the art is pretty solid. VM Wyman is on the cover — I like their cartoony fantasy and that lettering is great (they did a lot of work for the Thieves Guild line and it is definitely part of the charm). Bob Charrette (Bushido, Shadowrun) also has some art inside, an artifact of the book originally being published by Phoenix Games, where he started out.

[ttrpgcafe]

Heya! TTRPG trick or treat, please! 🎃👻

This one's got a backstory, so stick with me.

When I first got into TTRPGs, I learned about the big 6: D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, Cyberpunk, WoD, and Shadowrun. Of those, I've still, to this day, only played 5, and Shadowrun has remained the odd man out, despite having probably my favorite setting of all of them after Pathfinder. Part of this is its reputation for being a really crunchy game, keeping me from getting players, and part of it was that it's a very crunchy game that explains its rules SO POORLY (in recent editions at least, I'm told 3rd is the best in this department) that I couldn't even really convince my friends to get over the hump because it's hard for ME to grok the rules.

For well over a decade, Shadowrun has been my white whale, always on my shelf, never my table. So I did what any other well meaning TTRPG player does when they have a setting they like but a system for that setting they hate: I looked at every hack on the planet for every other system.

So here's your treat: every Shadowrun hack I've found!

Up first, Runners in the Shadows by Mark Cleveland:

This is a Forged in the Dark hack for the Shadowrun setting that is probably one of the better ones for emulating the "crew going on heists and doing cool shit" vibes that Shadowrun tries really hard to say is its core. I'm a sucker for FitD games in general, I think the system is *so* elegant, and I struggle to find a system more suited for the setting (SR's own rules included) than Blades, so this one has to go at the top.

With that said, there are still plenty more!

I'm going to give 2 PbtA games a shout out here, the first I've played, the second I haven't, but have heard plenty about.

Up first: City of Mist!

"But that's not a shadowrun hack!" I hear you saying behind your screen, and you're almost right, it technically isn't, BUT it's asymptote certainly approaches shadowrun, for my math nerds out there. This is a game about the (literal) power of stories, about struggles against an unseen and unknowable force trying desperately to remove every semblance of magic from your life, and about the yearning to keep your mundane life despite, or maybe in spite of, your magical adventures. City of Mist proper is a fantastic gritty noir urban fantasy game that works wonderfully as the framework for an early 6th world setting with minor tweaks, but it's sequel: Metro Otherscape, leans into the Shadowrun of it all, adding a 3rd axis along which your character can struggle, being "noise". In Otherscape, you're balancing a mundane, magical, technological life, and trying not to let any of those three overwhelm your being. A lot of cyberpunk games try to say that cybernetics reduce your humanity in one way or another, but I think Otherscape does the best job at embodying that balance in a way that isn't deeply ableist in its messaging. It's ALSO the only PbtA game I actually LIKE.

Hot take: I can't stand Moves, they annoy me to no end, and needlessly complicate an otherwise brilliant system. I might make a follow up post if anyone wants to hear my deeply bad take, but for now, just know that I'm a ttrpg heretic, and we can move on.

Otherscape completely does away with moves, and instead just lets the MC and the players decide whatever is most relevant to the action being attempted! It solves almost every problem I've ever had with PbtA games, AND kicks ass as a shadowrun stand-in, so this also deserves a place at or near the top.

Second PbtA game: Shadowrun in The Sprawl. This one is a hack of The Sprawl, a PbtA cyberpunk game in its own right, SRiTS adds the setting and magic of SR to its formula, and that's all I know about either system, due to my aforementioned PbtA-phobia. I've included this one for thoroughness, not because I have any stake in it.

Most of the other hacks I've seen use generic systems like Fate, Savage World, Cypher system, Genesys, and a hero system hack I've heard a bit about but can't find anywhere. All of this is to say that there is a wealth of options for generic systems that try to emulate SR, and most of them are fine. The last game I'm going to talk about though uses its own system, its own setting, and manages to be completely, utterly unique while capturing the vibes of SR so well that I'm still a little in awe at how well it does all of the above. I'm also not 100% certain it's a particularly good game, but the fact that I'm unsure about it should tell you that it's definitely still better than SR proper, because I KNOW that system is bad.

Without further ado: NewEdo

NewEdo is fascinating to me in that it feels like the same jump from Shadowrun that 3rd edition D&D made from 2e, or even the same kind of jump from 3rd to 4th, where you can clearly see the spine of the game it's evolving, but almost every other part of the system has been changed and improved in new, interesting ways that can still be used to tell VERY similar stories, but has its own identity at the same time. I mentioned that City of Mist is Asymptotic to SR earlier, and I stand by that assessment, but I'd say that NewEdo is closer to a parallel line, or a tangent from SR's line, if we're using the same terminology. To get into the nitty gritty, NE uses a system the author describes as "Crunchy lite easily managed", which amounts to a priority system during character creation very similar to the one SR uses, but with each tier you can select having pretty impactful ramifications for your character going forward. The easiest example is the modifications priority, at its top tier, you basically make a mythical creature into robo cop for your character's ancestry, but at its absolute lowest tier, your body actively rejects any and all implants, such that your character will NEVER have implants. On the same note, cyberware is handled REALLY well, with your body only being able to handle so much at a time, but otherwise the only ramification is a "biofeedback" line on your fate card, which I'll get to right now!

Almost every option your character picks gets added to a little personalized random d100 table on your character sheet called the fate card. This includes your character's crit rate, the possibility of a deity intervening on your behalf, or the aforementioned biofeedback line, which briefly fucks you up as you cyberware malfunctions. You get new lines on your fate card through picking certain character options, making impactful decisions during the story, and otherwise fulfilling the express goals of your character. The entire system kind of hinges on the fate card as a mechanic, which is weird, because I don't think I super love it, as it adds additional rolling to an already pretty dice heavy system.

Which brings me to the dice! New edo uses a d10 as its primary die for dice pools when rolling your characteristics like strength, speed, etc, but the rest of the polyhedral family for your skills. (D20 excluded) The skill system is a little funky, but I like it. Basically, each skill has a rank, which indicates how many dice it has, but each rank is assigned a die, each having a different cost associated with it. So my swordsmanship could be rank 4, but what that really means is that I've got 1d6, 2d4, and a d8 that I get to add to my strength rolls every time I attack with a sword. As far as resolution, you total all of your dice together to try and hit a target number. I don't have the table handy, but it's something like 15 for a moderately challenging task, and up to 40 for a nearly impossible task. I dislike addition in this context because math at the table usually slows things down, but it looks like you're probably only rolling 2-5 dice at a time at the beginning, which isn't *that* bad.

You'll notice that the two major mechanics I've mentioned so far have received pretty luke-warm responses from me, and that sounds like I hate the system, but those aren't that makes me like (\love?) this system is the back end, the choices that happen during character creation, and the things that those choices let you do. Every skill is attached to feats that unlock at different skills, magic is a skill, and its feats unlock better relationships with the Kami in your repertoire (magic is up next, I promise) and your class (path, they call it) doubles as a way to tie your character to the world, with each being associated with an in world faction which gives your character an immediate stake in the world and their community. It's a lot, but it all comes together to make something greater than the sum of its parts.

The last thing I want to talk about is the magic system, because I found it deeply interesting, as it's one of the very few skill based magic systems I've interacted with, and one of my favorites on a narrative level. Instead of spells or spell schools, your character instead develops relationships with Kami, and each new "order" or "type" of Kami your character gets access to represents them finding out how to supplicate, make an offering, or otherwise convince a given Kami to do a certain effect. If you have a relationship with the fire Kami (that's plural, not singular), then your character has learned that their local fire Kami really like a certain type of hot bun, so they offer them that hot bun after a scene where they invoked those kami, to maintain their relationship. Mechanically, this works instantaneously, you simply make a roll on your "Shinpi" skill, invoke whatever "rote" you want to use, and the relationship building is left for the GM and player to work out at the table.

(That's the last I have to say on the game itself, but I would ask anyone who has read the game and is more intimately familiar with Japanese culture to tell me if the game feels respectful to that culture, because I truly don't know, and the book doesn't list any sensitivity consultants. The author is Canadian, but spent many years sailing to and from Japan as a professional sailor, so idk. )

I guess the moral to this post, if there is one, is to acknowledge when a system or setting has faults, but learn from them, and don't ignore the good or cool stuff that's there! It might inspire you to make some amazing shit like City of Mist, Metro Otherscape, or New Edo, all of which, their relationship to Shadowrun aside, are fantastic games in their own right! (NewEdo is still up in the air, but it has its teeth in me, and that has to count for something)

That ends my trick or treat, thanks for asking!

[tabletopgayventures]

My current list of Tabletop Roleplaying Games.

13th Age

1879

A Grim Hack

Aberrant 

Absolute Power

Abyss

Accursed 

After The War

Anima Beyond Fantasy

Animal Adventures:  The Faraway Sea

Apocalypse World

Arkham Horror The Roleplaying Game Starter Set

Ars Magica 4th Edition

Arzium

Avatar Legends Starter Set

Babes in the Wood

Badger + Coyote and their Daring Adventures 2E

BattleTech:  A Time of War

Beacon Tabletop RPG

Beam Saber

Blades in the Dark

Bulldogs

Bunkers & Badasses

Cairn

Call of Cthulhu

Candela Obscura

Cantrip

Cats of Cathulhu

Chaos 6010

Champions Now

Collateral Damage

Contagion 2e

Cortex Prime Game Handbook

Cosmic Patrol

Cowboy Bebop Roleplaying Game

Coyote and Crow

Cthulhu Awakens

Cthulhutech

Cypher System 

Daisy Chainsaw

Deathmatch Island

Defiant Role Playing Game

Denial & Yearning

Dialect

Dinocar

Dinosaur Princesses

Discworld RPG

Dragon Age Roleplaying Game

Dragonbane

Dread

Dream Machines

Dresden Files Accelerated RPG

Dungeon Crawl Classics

Dungeons and Dragons 3.5

Dungeons and Dragons 5e

Durance

Dwelling

Epitaph

Epoch

Essence 20

Fabula Ultima

Fantasy Age

Fate Core System

Fever Nights Role-Playing Game

Flabbergasted

Fragged Empire

Fratboys Vs

Girl By Moonlight

Glitter Hearts

Goblin Quest

Goblin Slayer TRPG

Gods of Metal:  Ragnarock

Hannukkah Goblins

Have Axe, Will Travel

Hellfrost

Here, There, Be Monsters!

Hero Kids Fantasy RPG

Heroes Against the Darkness

Hopes and Dreams

Hounds 

I’m the Badguy?!?

In Nomine

In the Ashes

Inevitable A Doomed Arthurian Western

Ink

Interns In The Dark

Into the Dungeon

Jiangshi:  Blood in the Banquet Hall

Jordenheim

Katana-Ra

Kids on Bikes 2nd Edition

Killshot an Assassin’s Journal

Konosuba TRPG

Leverage The Quickstart Job

Lilliputian Adventure on the Open Seas

Little Fears Nightmare Edition

Lost Roads

Marvel Multiverse RPG

Mermaid Adventures

Micro rpg book

Modern Age

Monster of the Week

Moonlight On Roseville Beach

Mork Borg

Motel Spooky Nine

Musketeers vs. Cthulhu

Mutant Year Zero

My Mother’s Kitchen

Necrobiotic

Never Going Home

Night Shift:  Veterans of the Supernatural Wars

Night Wolves

Numenera

Odyssey Black Tales

OneDice Pirates & Dragons

One More Quest

Ork! The RPG

Our Woodland Gods

Outcast Silver Raiders 

Outgunned

Over the Edge

Overlight

Pasion De Las Pasiones

Pathfinder 1st Edition

Pathfinder 2nd Edition

Pathfinder Savage Worlds

Perils & Princesses

Pirate Borg

Power Rangers RPG

Prism

Psychic Trash Detectives

Punk’s Been Dead Since ‘79

Queerz!

Raccoon Sky Pirates

Raven

Rebels of the Outlaw Wastes

Reign

Rhapsody of Blood

Rivers of London

Ryuu Tama natural fantasy role play

Samurai Goths of the Apocalypse

Scum and Villainy

Shadowrun 5e

Shadows Of The Past

Shield Maidens

Shiver

Someone in this Tavern is a fucking mimic!

Spell The RPG

Squeeze

Star Trek Adventures Captain’s Log 

Star Trek Adventures The Roleplaying Game

Star Trek Adventures Second Edition

Star Wars 

Starfinder 1st Edition

Starfinder 2nd Edition

Stoneburner

Syma

Tangled

Temples and Tombs

The Bleackness

The Dark West

The Dread of Night

The Play’s the Thing

The Quiet Year

The Revenant Society

The Void

The Watch

Thirsty Sword Lesbians

This Discord has Ghosts in It

This house is Fucking Haunted

Thousand Year Old Vampire

Tomorrow City

Troika!

Unisystem

Urban Decay

Utopia

Vaesen

Vagabond

Valiant Universe

Variations On Your Body

Venture and Dungeon

Waffles For Esther

Wanderhome

Warcraft The Roleplaying Game

Werewolf the Apocalypse

What Lurks Above

What Lurks Beneath

What Lurks Beyond

World Ending Game

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast

Xianta Cyber Wuxia

Xoe Microplayer

Zweihander

I'll update this list as I get more. Feel free to send me ideas and also reblog this!

[rawrienstein]

I'm getting a new job so I made a dnd one shot for newbies as a going away gift for my old co-workers (yeah, I'm the type that gives gifts when I leave).

Then one of them remembered last second that they had a wedding they had to go to.

It doesn't matter what group I try with. Someone will always last minute cancel. (as a forever DM, I get this all the time, but it still kills me)

So here's all the character/monster art I made for it. Feel free to do whatever with it. Throw it into your roll20 campaign or make an edit to make it into your own personal character, have fun.

We'll have our session sometime next week. I'll post the actual how -to - run materials depending on how it goes, but it'll probably be kinda jumbled string of thoughts writing. Probably not the best for newbies unless you have my specific kind of ADHD.

Oh, also this is mostly what I've been doing instead of posting art here. Takes a lot to draw up lil' guys, come up with session material and character to act for my players, but I like the TTRPG design space. Really quick to just try things out and gage from direct player reactions. I've been trying to move away from 5e but instead of being normal and just choosing something else, I've been cracking away at just making my own thing. I like some crunch, but I don't want Shadowrun. I don't actually like story systems. The "I've got a story to tell, I don't need help with that." logic from Brennan Lee Mulligan is how I've always felt ttrpgs should be, but also, players adding things to the scene is pretty compelling. I've been learning a lot about other ttrpgs.

Anyway, have fun. Sometimes playing pretend with weird rules is fun.

[mayamidnightmelody]

The 1990s was a pivotal decade for geek culture, solidifying many of the trends and franchises that continue to influence pop culture today. Here's an exploration of the various facets of geekdom in the 90s:

Video Games

The 1990s were a golden era for video games, seeing the rise of iconic franchises and gaming consoles.

Consoles and Games:

Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and Sega Genesis were at the forefront of the early 90s gaming scene. Classics like "The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past," "Super Mario World," and "Sonic the Hedgehog" became household names.

The mid-90s introduced the Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. Games like "Final Fantasy VII," "Metal Gear Solid," "Super Mario 64," and "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" revolutionized the industry with their storytelling and 3D graphics.

PC Gaming:

The rise of PC gaming brought titles like "Doom," "Quake," "Warcraft," and "Starcraft," which laid the groundwork for modern first-person shooters and real-time strategy games.

The introduction of the CD-ROM allowed for more complex and graphically intense games, expanding the possibilities of game design.

Comic Books and Graphic Novels

The 90s was a transformative period for comics, marked by a combination of innovation and market upheavals.

Marvel and DC Comics:

Marvel experienced a surge in popularity with the introduction of new characters like Deadpool and the significant events like the "X-Men's Age of Apocalypse" and "Spider-Man's Clone Saga."

DC Comics shook the world with storylines such as "The Death of Superman" and "Batman: Knightfall."

Independent Publishers:

The formation of Image Comics by former Marvel artists brought a wave of creator-owned series like "Spawn," "The Savage Dragon," and "WildC.A.T.s."

Vertigo, an imprint of DC, produced critically acclaimed titles such as "Sandman" by Neil Gaiman and "Preacher" by Garth Ennis, pushing the boundaries of mature storytelling in comics.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

The 90s were a golden age for science fiction and fantasy, both in literature and on screen.

Television:

"Star Trek" had a strong presence with "The Next Generation" continuing its success, followed by "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager."

"The X-Files" became a cultural phenomenon, blending science fiction with horror and conspiracy theories.

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" redefined the fantasy genre on television, combining teenage drama with supernatural elements.

Movies:

Blockbuster franchises like "Jurassic Park," "The Matrix," and "Men in Black" showcased cutting-edge special effects and imaginative storytelling.

The re-release of the original "Star Wars" trilogy in special editions prepared the groundwork for the much-anticipated prequel trilogy.

Anime and Manga

The 90s saw the global explosion of anime and manga, making Japanese pop culture a mainstream phenomenon.

Anime:

Series like "Dragon Ball Z," "Sailor Moon," and "Pokémon" became immensely popular worldwide, introducing many to the world of anime.

Films by Studio Ghibli, such as "Princess Mononoke" and "My Neighbor Totoro," received critical acclaim and international recognition.

Manga:

Manga series like "Naruto," "One Piece," and "Berserk" began their runs, setting the stage for long-lasting popularity.

The publication of "Shonen Jump" in English brought many of these series to Western audiences.

Role-Playing Games (RPGs)

The 90s were a significant decade for tabletop RPGs, with many classic games being developed and popularized.

Dungeons & Dragons:

The release of the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) in 1989 carried through the 90s, with campaigns like "Planescape" and "Dark Sun" becoming fan favorites.

Other RPGs:

"Vampire: The Masquerade" by White Wolf Publishing introduced the World of Darkness, a setting that offered a dark, gothic-punk alternative to traditional fantasy RPGs.

The cyberpunk genre was well represented by games like "Shadowrun" and "Cyberpunk 2020," capturing the gritty, high-tech, low-life aesthetic.

Collectibles and Trading Card Games

The 90s witnessed the birth and explosion of collectible card games (CCGs), with "Magic: The Gathering" leading the charge.

Magic: The Gathering:

Created by Richard Garfield and released by Wizards of the Coast in 1993, "Magic: The Gathering" became a groundbreaking and immensely popular game, sparking a new industry of collectible card games.

Pokémon:

The Pokémon Trading Card Game, released in 1996, quickly became a massive hit alongside the video games and TV series, contributing to the global Pokémon craze.

Internet and Technology

The rise of the internet in the 90s played a crucial role in shaping geek culture.

Early Internet Communities:

Bulletin board systems (BBS), forums, and newsgroups like Usenet allowed geeks to connect and share their interests in ways that were never before possible.

The creation of fan sites and the use of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) facilitated the growth of online communities dedicated to various fandoms.

Technology:

The proliferation of personal computers and the advent of the World Wide Web democratized access to information and entertainment, allowing geek culture to flourish and expand globally.

In conclusion, the 1990s were a transformative decade for geek culture, characterized by the rise of influential media, the advent of groundbreaking technology, and the growth of vibrant communities. The era laid the foundation for many of the trends and franchises that continue to shape geekdom today.

[cat-of-many-faces]

Interesting Game Mechanics ep1: Shadowrun Damage Codes

For my first of these I want to look at the damage system that Shadowrun used to have back in first, second, and third edition. It's a fun system and I'm sad that it was abandoned for later editions.

How it works:

All damage comes as a number and a letter, for instance 9M for a heavy pistol.

The letter is the level of damage: L(light), M(moderate), S(serious), and D(deadly)

The number is the difficulty for the victim to resist the damage.

A light wound inflicts 1 box of damage, a moderate wound 3, a serious wound 6, and a deadly wound is 10 (or dead). A character has 10 boxes of damage they can take.

So far so simple, but the interesting part comes from staging. Every two successes you achieve on an attack stages the damage up a level. Light becomes Moderate, Moderate becomes Serious, and Serious becomes Deadly. Likewise the victim stages the damage down during their resistance test per two successes.

So if someone gets 4 successes to hit with that pistol from earlier, it will become 9D for the victim to resist. If the victim gets 6 successes on a resistance test they would stage that 9D down to 9L and take a light wound!

Thoughts:

This system had an interesting effect of really highlighting character skill. the more dice you had the higher you could stage a damage code. someone with really high skill was able to take down strong enemies with even the weakest weapons.

There were downsides though:

First, while the system has lots of possibilities, they weren't really fully explored. In general damages were just higher number and higher level. There were never any interesting combinations like a weapon with 2D (very deadly, but easy to resist) or something with 13L (hard to resist, but needing alot of skill to make it hurt).

Second, Shadowruns basic die mechanic where you would regularly have to roll higher than 6 on six sided dice to succeed on something (a roll of 6 was rolled again and added) meant damage codes could go super high and be very hard to resist.

And Third, Damage was resisted with your body attribute. This means that if your att was too low there was no possibility to resist no matter how good your armor. Having body 1 was just a death sentence.

Summary:

All in all i'd really like to see the system come back in some other game refined and really explored. it was a great system.

[the-faramir]

Original Characters

Dungeons & Dragons

Veradriel Evangelou

Final Fantasy XIV

Does this count as "original"?

F'ara Mir

Pathfinder First Edition

Glabella Scipio

Pathfinder Second Edition

Niji-iro Midori

The Niji-iro Siblings

Zephyr

Shadowrun

Erika Blume

Star Wars

Kameron Dax

Starfinder

Shimaash Llaris

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness

Bat-Bat

Stan

The All-American Huskies

[dyke-pollinator]

Favorite ttrpg you can't find a group for?

Okay this one if gonna take me a second.

My favorite is always gonna be D&D 5th edition cause I know it insanely well. I know how to build encounters on the fly. I know how to make the campaign fun. Im good at it and its a skill I think I'm excellent at .

But I wanna PLAY in a Cyberpunk 2077 or Shadowrun campaign so bad. After watching Edgerunners and playing through the game I am really into it rn and wanna play that shit in a more open world setting so badly.

I dont wanna run that shit though. I am not confident in my ability to do so.

[radwolf76]

Filling in a gap in the above timeline, in 1989, Tabletop Gaming Publisher FASA Corporation published a new Tabletop Roleplaying Game called Shadowrun, which was a blending of Tolkien-esque fantasy tropes that had been popularized by other RPGs before it, and the cyberpunk genre, set on an Earth roughly 60 years in the future. (This was years before "Urban Fantasy" would become a common shelf category in bookstores.)

In the 80s tabletop RPG publishers were very conscious of the PR surrounding the hobby, and the potential public perception of RPGs being a corrupting influence on children and teens. Because of this, even though Shadowrun is about independent mercenary and criminal types that corporations contract out when they need "deniable assets", they didn't feel like they could get away with putting actual common vernacular profanity into Shadowrun rulebooks and fiction.

Instead they employed the time honored Science Fiction tradition of inventing new swear words. Their "shit" substitute, "drek" comes from Yiddish, "ass(hole)" got replaced with "hoop", but for the elder statesman of cusswords, "fuck"? That became "frag". At least for the aggressive, negative connotations of the word. The sex act meaning got assigned to "slot" which could also mean "cunt".

From the context in which frag was used by Shadowrun, the Vietnam origin of the term was acknowledged. However it was not generalized to mean killing as it would later become in video games, as Shadowrun had a different slang term for that, "Geeking".

Despite the bowdlerized profanity, the early Shadowrun releases received much acclaim. By 1993, there had already been 8 tie-in novels for the setting, and in 93-96 it saw adaptations for the SNES, the Sega Genesis, and in a Japan exclusive title, the Sega CD.

So during ID Software's development of DOOM, the Shadowrun franchise was doing at least a small part to keep the word in the pop culture consciousness of the especially nerdy segment of the populace. And if they were keeping tabs on the VG industry, they would have been aware of Shadowrun even if they never even looked at tabletop gaming.

Do I have any kind of smoking gun to trace frag from SR to DOOM? No. But having lived through those years, and knowing the geek community, I do find it interesting that the timelines are so close. Just like the fact that teens who played Shadowrun in the early 90s, would have been graduating college in the late 90s right at the dawn of the dot com era, and what do you know, pretty much every first generation e-commerce website store looks like it's following the layout template of Shadowrun's first and second edition equipment sourcebooks.

[honkbird]

open question to the void --

i-swear-i-have-a-point-to-get-to but Starfinder gets a second edition playtest/softcover this month and they're using the spell tradition lists for arcane, primal, occult, and divine to retain compatibility with PF2e; but it's also not really fitting with the system's overall setting or meta experience (in regards to the same sources of magic existing) besides "oh we want this content to be accessible for Pathfinder games". ok PREAMBLE DONE and the actual question is more so a setting opinion of "What's some of your favorite representations of magic in modern or sci-fi settings"? Maybe a stretched question of Psionics v Magic depending on the system. e.g., I've got honorable mentions for Shadowrun and Stars Without Number but I'd love to hear some more from people who stumble on this post

[grenade-maid]

I never really appreciated just how much weird old anime my local used bookstore in my shitty little town has. Like, right now they've got Japanese import love live cds, Armored Trooper Votoms on VHS, All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku, Crest of the Stars, Licensed by Royalty, Scrapped Princess, Those Who Hunt Elves, Yugo the Negotiator, the Kashimashi Karaoke disc, Melty Lancer, the Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor 2 anime tie in, Aura Battler Dunbine The Beautiful Warrior Grenadier...

[probablybadrpgideas]

MORE COMPLAINTS

KULT: Can I make a character for your premade adventures? No? You want me to play a premade character who is so tightly woven into the adventure that it would be near impossible to change it? ...Do you want to play this adventure, KULT? Do you want me to leave so you can sit there playing with your edgy OCs? Yeah, thought so. Bye, have fun!

Shadowrun: RPGing for nearly a decade and I have literally never opened a single Shadowrun book. I know nothing about it. It is entirely possible Shadowrun is actually a Goncharov situation and everyone's fucking with me. I would have no way of knowing.

Delta Green: Hmm, burning down your entire setting and destroying everything in it is certainly a bold move for a second edition. Gotta give them that one.

Gumshoe: Ok so cards on the table- my opinions on Gumshoe are fundamentally tainted by Mutant City Blues. It's a gumshoe game where you play a super-powered cop but the rules expressly forbid you doing anything cool with your powers and focus mostly on the paperwork of police work. Now I can only associate it with that cartoonishly boring character from a sitcom whose hobbies are watching paint dry. Sorry gumshoe, I'm sure you're fun but ACAB.

Paranoia: Easily the most efficient friend removal system since the Illuminati card game went out of print.

Nobilis: It is a cliche to point out the rules for Nobilis are designed for moon goblins from the mirror dimension, so I will instead be focusing on the fact the game fluff repeatedly and specifically threatens my life. I am like 90% sure trying to play Nobilis has cursed my entire bloodline and this is only 50% a bit.

Monsterheart: I appreciate the mechanical and narrative purpose of the rule where you might be overcome with uncontrollable lust towards anyone at any time for no reason whatsoever, but its still a little unnerving.

PBTA: Ok fine. I admit that the rule where if you fail, the GM gets to punch you right in the face there and then could go down poorly in some groups.

THINGS I AM UNREASONABLY ANNOYED ABOUT BY GAME SYSTEM

D&D: Please put a disclaimer that you are not a universal system. Every time I see someone try to do a political mystery game in D&D, I take 3d10 psychic damage and have to make a death saving throw.

Pathfinder: Look. If i wanted to play a game about fighting Cthulhu there is an extremely famous game specifically designed around doing that. Literally no-one is ever going to say "Wow, I want to play a Cthulhu themed game! Time to stat up a musical halfling from a magical fantasy land!".

Chronicles Of Darkness: Just admit no-one uses any of your rules. You have Social Door Rules and Integrity Conditions and Corruption Levels and I bet at most 50% of COD players could tell me which of those I made up. Just admit people aren't dressing up as Alucard The Bringer Of Shadows because they want to sit down and do calculus.

World Of Darkness: You know that old guy who's still doing his job even though he is way too old to do it any more, but he's now an institution so you can't get rid of him? Like that. The 90s called and they want literally everything about this back.

Call Of Cthulhu: I appreciate the commitment to authenticity, but maybe stop hiring actual disgraced mental asylum directors from the 1920s to design your sanity system?

GURPS: Look. Look. Listen. We both know that you just want to write history textbooks. These are history textbooks with a few stat blocks begrudgingly put in. If you just give me a book on early Chinese history I will read it and go "ah, very interesting!". You don't need to put in a list of character choices. We're all nerds. We'll read them. Live your best life.

Powered By The Apocalypse: I actually can't think of anything wrong with PBTA. That's not a bit, this is literally the perfect system. Take notes everyone else.

Mutants and Masterminds/Heroes System: Your systems have probably the most customizable character creation in the world and you both just make reskins of the Justice League over and over again. Maybe we only need one "thinly veiled copyrighted characters" setting? You can fight over it once you decipher your combat mechanics.

FATE: Ok I won't lie, I have no idea how the fuck FATE works. I have read the rules repeatedly and played three games and I still have no idea what invoking an aspect means. I don't know why. I grasped the rules of fucking Nobilis but this one just psychologically eludes me. This is more a problem with me I guess, but I'm still annoyed.

Warhammer 40k: Have you considered spending less on avocado toast? Then you might be able to afford to charge less for things?

Exalted: Apart from the lore, the setting, the mechanics, the metaplot, the character creation and the dodgy narrative implications, I can't think of anything to improve here.

[norcumii]

eatenbyagrue replied to your photo “Yeah okay but If I got to roll 216,000d6 on my saving throws I'd...”

I laughed too hard at your shadowrun tag btw

XD <3333

Look, I enjoyed the heck out of playing Shadowrun, but I still recall having to scrounge through every last boardgame in the house to add to the collection of dice me and Brother had - and sometimes we still didn’t have quite enough for everyone in the group.

[shadowron]

Useless Equipment of Shadowrun (1st Edition). The High-Intensity Veracity Examiner

“This state-of-the-art device measures voice stress, pulse rate, and minute contractions and expansions in the subject’s corneal blood vessels while the operator leads the subject through a series of questions.”

You mean a lie-detector? Or a…

Tyrell: …Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil. Involuntary dilation of the iris...

Deckard: We call it Voight-Kampff for short.

Yup. 

Good thing Shadowrun has replicants androids OH WAIT THEY DON’T.

You know what else Shadowrun doesn’t have? 

Rules for using this device.

It’s a 50,000 ¥, 5-kilogram brick in “high-impact carrying case”.

“Why did you buy it, Leon?”

The equipment listing puts it at Rating 8, except it is written nowhere how that Rating is used for any test. For Surveillance Measures and Countermeasures, the Rating serves as both Skill and Target Number for opposed tests, but this is not stated for Security Devices.

Back in the skills chapter, there is the Machine-Aided concentration of Interrogation, for which there is Lie Detectors and Voice Stress Analysis listed as possible specializations, so I would assume that the Device Rating is used as the Target Number for resisting the test. Interrogation “depends upon the subject’s Willpower Attribute Rating”, so it would be:

Operator’s Interrogation skill (Target Number = subject’s Willpower) vs. Subject’s Willpower (Target Number = Device Rating)

In fact, there are no rules for any of the Security Devices: Identification Scanners (Thumbprint, Palmprint, Retinal, Maglock) and Restraints (Metal, Plastic, Squealer). Later publications address this absence; Sprawl Sites has rules for credstick interrogation by security scanners (though it uses the Negotiation skill), and 2nd Edition Shadowrun clarifies that the Restraint Rating is a Barrier Rating.

2nd Edition also ditches the H-IVE entirely.

Wait a second. HIVE? Maybe it’s not replicants they’re trying to find, maybe is…

[autumnslance]

sorry if you've been asked before, but how did you initially get into roleplaying and learn how to improve at it and be comfortable rping? it seems like something difficult to learn, especially rping in video games, so i'm always interested in how exactly people adjust to it

OK, let me preface by saying I am old enough to remember the Satanic Panic of the ‘80s and actually read Chick Tracts that were at places I went to with my parents. Including the infamous one about Dungeons & Dragons. They were real dumb; even as a church-going kid I knew Christian media was by and large���very There in quality often, so much of it being overtly about morals and messaging (the best really is more subtle or flat-out silly about it, letting the characters and events speak for themselves with only just a little requisite shoehorning to appease their publishing house requirements). And Chick was…something with those hyperbolic comic stories.

So I didn’t get to RP at all until I was an adult (19ish years old), and in the army away from home and was introduced to it via an entirely different gaming system and world I’d never heard of before, the World of Darkness specifically, second edition, and I was a kid who loved supernatural things like werewolves and other shifters a lot. My first RP character ever for a game that only ran once was a Metis Fianna Galliard.

Bless White Wolf, they tried. The old editions have some serious Problems in various ways looking back now with what I’ve learned since, but they Tried.

I went to my first Vampire LARP in Augusta, Georgia while in job training—this was back in the fall/winter of ‘98 and ‘99–and when I got to Kansas I met up with the guys in my unit who RPed Palladium game systems (Rifts, Palladium, Robotech, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, etc). My first Vampire: The Masquerade char was a Toreador (artiste vampire). My first Palladium fantasy char was a bardic demigod. Then I settled into a I think half-elf druid in Rifts and was the only one interacting with the GM’s attempts at story while the other guys talked about minmaxing their megadamage and waited for me/my character to point them at things. At the local independent LARP in Kansas I swapped the Toreador for a young Tremere named Lynell Marsden.

My buddy and eventual roommate, the LARP GM, introduced me to a RPG-themed webcomic whose premise made it ripe for online roleplay, which the readership did initially on the old forums in play-by-post, and then also in IRC chat in a series of rooms we had. My main characters were an Amberite soldier-princess and a drow cleric/bard of Eilistraee I brought in from a D&D game after a few years, as I expanded to many, many other gaming systems, like D&D and Shadowrun, and so many others I can’t remember them all. I ended up helping narrate and do admin work for the LARP and the World of Darkness games we ran in our own town as well as at a small local convention we attended for several years.

And dear Anon, I sucked at RP in my 20s.

Cuz I was new and learning. What appealed to Young Me, once properly explained by a peer and seeing the game rule books, was that Roleplay is collaborative improv storytelling. It’s playing pretend—which I’ve always loved to do!—but with an actual ruleset and boundaries. As a writer, it sounded so neat to sit around creating characters and telling stories with friends. The rules were there as randomizer but also to help balance and make sure everyone could contribute (well, once one stopped playing freakin’ Rifts…).

In free form play-by-post, and in the IRC chat, there weren’t really rules like you’d find in a gaming book for at the table; you had whatever rules for the forum or chatroom the mods made, usually about being courteous and communicating, but the characters varied wildly. Each thread or room GM had their own ways to run their stories. Communication was key. Letting others get time in the spotlight. Making attempts, working things out, not being afraid to fail on purpose (even if your character was trying) cuz sometimes that was more interesting. We had some random commands for dice we sometimes used in the chat, but it could depend on who was running that particular session or storyarc.

It took practice. And mistakes I still look back on and wince at myself about, more for the times I hurt others or made things less fun for them, than my own creative errors that weren’t good for my characters (and I made bad choices for my characters aplenty). OK, and also for the times I spent staying up way too late roleplaying, plotting, chatting, when I should have been responsible and sleeping due to work and/or class in the mornings…But I also don’t entirely regret all those lost sleep hours.

LynMars, my common internet handle, comes from that Tremere I played for a few years in my friend’s LARP, before retiring her to play other characters. I made many Baby RPer mistakes on Lynell, she was a learning character, and while I messed her and her story up badly, I still love her as one of my firsts and ended up using her name as a handy online identity and also a reminder to myself.

You don’t have to do or be everything, especially on one character; everyone has specialties and limits, it’s what helps with the collaborative parts and team play. Learn and know your own boundaries. Respect others’ boundaries. Learn OOC doesn’t equal IC but also doesn’t give rein to be a jackass IC in a collaborative setting. Communicate. Be willing to collaborate and compromise. Be willing to lose as often as you win, sometimes the better story comes out of it. Build your characters with some grounding as people; give them flaws (sometimes their virtues taken too far can also count!), let them make mistakes, let them have their own stories so when they interact with other characters, you’re actually improv acting that person, not yourself in a funny hat.

I reconnected with my old webcomic-based group over the pandemic and people still talk fondly of my old characters and stories, and I have some good memories of theirs. A lot of things we all look back at 21-to-13-ish years later now and cringe and laugh at ourselves about, but the memories of those times are still mostly good and about the fun we had together back then, despite the clunky nature of our storytelling, our mishandled character concepts, the wank and stressors, the few bad apples we did have in the old community, the mistakes we made. We still remember the cool stuff and how it made us feel and why we sought each other out again to just say Hi. And in some cases, ended up playing games together again.

My experiences in forum and chatroom RP made the jump into MMO RP in WoW (back in Classic!) fairly easy, honestly. It was pretty much the same thing, only we had actual avatars and environments and in-built emotes as well as whatever gestures or settings we described for when the game didn’t have something. I wrote stories of my characters, many of them still up on my alt blogs, and collaborated on a few stories and RPs with friends.

After several years, some people had weird ideas I was “popular” and “established” and “good” so stirred up wank and jealousy that hit me out of the blue, especially since we were on a small server whose RP community was dying off as folks migrated away (from the server or WoW in general) and we were just among the last RP groups to still hang around out of inertia. They wanted to be a Big Fish in our drying-out pond, and didn’t like that I told them that it takes time and effort to build a story and a group with the reputation they sought, that one has to make time to run events on a regular basis and be there for it even if turn out isn’t great. I hope they’ve figured out what they want to do and better ways to do it since then.

Cuz even after 13ish years of WoW RP on top of all my tabletop and LARP and chatroom experiences, I still made some mistakes. I still sometimes ran and played in some mediocre to bad RP. For my characters and their stories, and in interactions with other RPers.

It’s OK. Learn from those errors, talk it out with your pals and others, keep IC and OOC knowledge and feelings separate, be willing to bend (not break; compromise means all involved parties have to give and get a little) for collaboration and interaction, know who you can only interact with in public RP events with a polite nod and small talk and otherwise not engage with—kinda like in real life, when you have to be tolerant or nice to those irritating classmates or coworkers but otherwise don’t deal with them more than you must.

It’s simply being social, with imagination thrown in. Remembering the stories are pretend, but there are real people behind those words and characters. The nuts and bolts of how to do emotes, which tense to use, whether to use /random or other dice commands…that’s just variable detail that can change as needed. Being a decent person OOC to make an enjoyable story—“good” or “bad”—IC with others is what’s important.

I don’t really RP online now, as I just don’t have the time or energy I used to—especially for the inevitable wank, as Roleplayers are by and large a dramatic bunch with our own hangups, awkwardness, and miscommunications galore (so many callout posts I’ve seen where I’ve wondered if the grievances were IC and came from lack of OOC communication about expectations, boundaries, and blurring the lines between characters and players. So many). These days I stick to my silly nonsense fanfics and some tabletop RP with friends—though due to us being scattered across the continent, we usually end up playing via Roll20 or similar programs to mimic it in an online environment, and even my local group’s had to do that during the pandemic and now with two players moving away soon, on top of the usual trials of being adults making time for games together. I could likely get into FFXIV RP easily enough, here on Tumblr and in game, if I were so inclined.

But it takes time. And constant learning. Figuring out the community norms and methods, which ones work for you, and which don’t. Giving yourself a bit of grace. Knowing your boundaries and respecting others’. Being social and willing to communicate, not being afraid of it, or making assumptions, giving benefit of the doubt—to yourself as much as to others. Patience. And just focusing on the fun and the good and who cares if it’s a bit cringey and weird and silly and dumb with outrageous characters so long as folks are feeling included, treated fairly, and having a good time.

That’s really what’s important.