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.

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.

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.

A lot of tabletops have attempts to make the perfect system. This of course has lent to tons of iterations of different ways of rolling dice, creating statistics and skill tests. This however has the amazing byproduct of creating some mechanics that are system agnostic that you can use to make your games more exciting and more interesting regardless of the game you are running. Here are 6 examples from games that are near and dear to my heart.

Cons and I have a kind of strange relationship. In general, I absolutely love meeting people but I get very concerned with large crowds. So Gamehole turned out to be just about the perfect size for me. Plenty of people but easy enough to walk around without having to struggle through a crowd. One of the main concerns with a “smaller con” is that its harder to get big names to show up to the cons.