Blog Posts

New Years Goals 2025

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!

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Total Eclipse Review

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.

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Decker Problems and How to Solve Them

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.

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Silver Angel Review

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.

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Queen Euphoria Review Notes

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.

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Borrowing Rules for Better Games

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. As a collector I tend to play a lot of different games and have enjoyed learning new systems. Hopefully you can find something worthwhile to use in your game!

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Gamehole Con Review

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. Gamehole Con doesn’t have that problem at all. People from all over the country flew into Madison for the event!

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Anchoring Foci and Spells and Why You Should Be Using Them More Often

When we play games with magic often we look at it in the lens of our understanding most of us learned from games like Dungeons and Dragons. That is to say that magical people always go into combat with magical shields and energy blasts. Fireballs and Counterspells to keep yourself from getting fried. Shadowrun has a lot of this too, but there is more insidious magic that exists and it’s as old as the human race.

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Fancy Program Name

Program Names for more immersion

I’ve always wanted to sit down and write down some fun program names for decking programs. Having programs with ratings is one of the things that made older editions of Shadowrun infinitely more fun.

This is an attempt to make something more interesting for folks. Let me know if this is something folks enjoy and if they would want more of them!

Analyze Program Suite

Browse Program Suite

Commlink Program Suite

Deception Program Suite

Decrypt Program Suite

Read/Write

Spoof Program Suite

Sleaze

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Running Divided Assets in Cyberpunk Red

Most of you know me as someone who writes things for Shadowrun and Cyberpunk concepts in general. I currently am playing Cyberpunk Red just as often as playing Shadowrun 3rd edition. So I begin to see the tying threads between concepts and stories. A lot of stories in Shadowrun cannot be ported to Cyberpunk. The fantasy element is played pretty often in these stories, but every once in a while it’s left almost entirely out. This gives us the rare opportunity to tell the story in both universes almost entirely unchanged. Divided Assets is one of those adventures.

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