“Is this the path to Eden?” - Johnathan Tang

Double Exposure is an adventure for 2nd Edition Shadowrun. It is a very story heavy adventure that brings characters in a really unique situation that I haven’t seen in many other adventures. This adventure will put the player characters right in the middle of a new sprung up commune in the barons. What’s even wilder? This organization even seems to be actually growing sustainable food crops. They are accepting anyone with a pulse that wants a better life and is willing to work for it. Sounds too good to be true? Yeah, its Shadowrun baby, of course its fucked.

Greetings Shadowpunks!

With last year behind us, I look forward to what will come in the future. This year I hope to finish two new tools for the site: Weapon Designer and Vehicle Designer. These will more than likely take at least 3 or 4 months each (Though the vehicle one will take something really special to finish in that time). My hope is always to allow players more control over their characters and to give GMs the tools to be able to create custom things quickly and easily. I hope these will continue to help people make great games!

Before we dive in! I wrote another section of my adventure: Protect and Serve.

Music in the 80s was a bit more defining than today (Though Taylor Swift has definitely revived some of the old feelings of hardcore allegiance to a band or musician). Who you listened to and who you repped told you a lot about someone and in general I feel it had a lot more of a cultural impact than it does today. Clothing brands, commercials and like really strove to grab up bands for their products and in some ways it felt like they were larger and more important than even actors in their given time. Often whole movies would be scored by a single band to lend their kind of flavor to a piece. It really held serious weight. Movies like The Crow (The Cure) and Donnie Darko (which is a 00s movie, but was set in the 1980s and had the same done for it as other 80s movies by the Tears for Fears). Music from these movies and their scores really hit home.

One of the most common problems new GMs (And old for that matter) is running the Matrix for their players. In every edition of Shadowrun, the matrix has been a pivotal part of the game. It makes sense in the larger picture, Gibson’s Neuromancer (Which you absolutely NEED to read if your running Shadowrun or Cyberpunk! [Hardcover or Sprawl Trilogy (Plus Burning Chrome) - Good Christmas Gifts!] gives us the first console cowboy and we have been seeking that experience every since.

Silver Angel was the first published Adventure for Shadowrun. It was paired with the original Game Master’s screen for 1st Edition Shadowrun. What’s interesting is that it also came with standees (cardboard cutouts that you could use to show placement of characters and NPCs) which we wouldn’t see again until DMZ was released. These paired excellently with the Sprawl Maps.

This adventure is pretty short, but you can see the gritty bones of what would become the Shadowrun we all know and love.The story includes a dynamic cast of interesting street level people including a ripper jack and a dancer. As well, it is positively dripping with atmosphere. Tom Dowd laid some beautiful writing down on these pages. A line really sums up Shadowrun perfectly.

It seems I am often drawn to Shadowrun adventures with famous characters in the fiction of the world. Starting with Dark Angel and now moving onto Queen Euphoria, there is something special about the world that was written in those first few adventures of Shadowrun.

Queen Euphoria is one of the classic adventures that in general is one of the few truly horror based adventures in Shadowrun. Given there are always horror elements in all adventures in Shadowrun. The Dystopian world that our characters live in brings about some amount of horror in general. However, there are some special things that only Shadowrun can bring to bear. This is the first taste of real true horror (Though I think it’s been blunted by some design decisions i’ll talk about in the spoilers section). I think this had a kind of success with the players that the designers had not expected and then they began to do it quite a bit more.