Total Eclipse Review

By Dean

December 31, 2024 - 10 minutes read - 1940 words

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.

I think this is why music and bands were such a center piece for Shadowrun (And Cyberpunk2020 for that matter). At the time, it felt like these characters were larger than life and more important people followed, respected and even cared for them (sometimes more than their own family). This obsession with musicians carried some people and allowed for a near cult-like following. Music to some, is life. This brings us back to our adventure, featuring a new band in the Shadowrun Universe known as The Elementals.

Total Eclipse at its heart is a story about people who come from nothing, able to produce something beautiful. I believe some of the best aspects of this story are written between the lines. Something we will explore in our spoilers section.

So, what can the players expect? Ratings out of 5!

Magic | 5 | Most of this story won’t make sense unless you have a mage or shaman with you. Even then it needs to be a pretty good one. Some knowledge of the expansion books (Grimoire/Magic in the Shadows/etc) will be required!

Matrix | 1 | The Matrix can be used to get background information to make things make more sense, but it’s not required to advance the story at all.

Combat | 5 | This story can go from zero to eleven pretty quickly if you’re not careful. Players will be tested thoroughly on their combat preparedness.

Rigging | 3 | There are several chances for a rigger to be useful in this adventure and it does contain at least one chase scene.

Face | 4 | As always negotiations will aid the players heavily in this adventure. Being able to persuade people as well will be a huge help. It’s not required but it will grease every single wheel needing to be turned to progress the story.

So now onto the Spoilers Section where I will walk you through the basic plot and how I would improve it. As well as adding a 3rd edition Matrix Sheafs where applicable.

Spoilers!!

Total Eclipse is a story about a man and a spirit who are up to no good. A jerk of a shaman has found a bound and weakened Free Spirit. Twilight (The Free Spirit) has made a deal with Eclipse (The Shaman in question) to serve him if he will break him free of the prison he is being kept in. Eclipse sees the power this spirit has and figures it will put him up as king of the drek heap if he can revive and break the spirit free. Unfortunately it will take great magic to do so and Eclipse only has the vaguest ideas of what that looks like. He tries and fails for months to do so.

His luck changes when he hears a killer new tune drop in his favorite strip club, he hears the melodies and groundwork for a healing spell he had been looking for. Our adventure begins after he tracks down who wrote the song and begins to devise how to use it and the people who wrote it to complete his great work and release Twilight. This requires him to have the band members kidnapped (Each has their vocals or instruments tracks individually on chips so no one can steal their songs without all of them together. Smart), brought to a ritual site in NAN territory and then forced to play their song “Healing the Spirit” (I know, it’s super on the nose) to heal and then release Twilight.

This adventure is kind of unique to me because it centers around the players working for a Shadowrunner who has targeted good street people. You characters will understand as they move through this adventure that they are the baddies and that something isn’t right with their Johnson. This isn’t uncommon, but if they start to see what the Elementals have done with their lives, this isn’t shouldn’t be sitting well with them. This is also where I think our story should lie mostly. The players have accepted the job, but being able to see what good the Elementals have done should start to play on their heart strings and make them want to research Eclipse just a bit more.

Here are some tweaks I would apply when running Total Eclipse for your table.

Ramp Up the Band Members’ interactions and make their stories more apparent.

The band members have some truly awesome altruistic aspects. I like to think perhaps in performing their new song it has helped them gather some kind of spiritual healing to know what those in their community need in order to keep on keeping on.

One thing I should suggest is to really ramp up the understanding your players should have with each of the band members’ stories. Here are some examples of how you can ensure your players learn of each of their back stories.

Whispering Wind

Wind has her origins in mercenaries. Her father was a well respected merc until he passed in some corp related actions. Wind managed to get out of the life and became a moderately respected singer. Her father was proud of her for escaping the life and doing something safe and meaningful. When shes taken she will have her chip on her, but I think she should keep a few memento chips on her too. The players would need to go through the chips to find her vocal tracks for syncing up the audio. I think it would be worthwhile for them to hear something from him left behind. Something like the last voicemail left to her that she keeps around to remind her.

Wildfire

Wildfire is an ex-go ganger who managed to pull himself out of the life and rise above his old and more violent ways. He runs an arcade in the barons (which wow, you gotta have some MAD respect to keep an arcade going in an active war zone) which is a neutral ground for any ganger activities. He barters deals, works for peace here and people respect him for it. I think his story is pretty front and center, so no real tweaking needs to be done. I’d say having the gangers be willing to negotiate or the likes which should seem kind of strange and out of character.

Coyote

Coyote is ex-military and struggled hard when he got out. He spent some time living off the street and met some folks that he got close with. Once he started making money with his music he started buying food and bringing it back to his old stomping grounds. As written, Coyote is stalked to his old stomping grounds and the Amerindians who he used to stay next to will protect him.I think this fully encapsulates his story. I’d make sure if they search his bike, he has a bunch of groceries to really rub it in.

Bambi

Bambi is another one that needs to be tweaked some because it doesn’t really show off his story. Bambi goblinized during one of the first waves. His father opened the store that the players will stalk Bambi too. Unfortunately, that in and of itself doesn’t really reveal any of his back story when you go into it.

In order to get the most out of this story, I’d ensure that the players make it into the big and tall store. Have part of the background of the store be a small ancestral shrine to Bambi’s father. It’s wild how common ancestral shrines are across modern cultures. It should be a more common set piece in a world now with more of a spiritual bend. If you want to REALLY step it up. Bring an Ancestral Spirit to protect Bambi during any kind of exchanges. Especially if any stray rounds strike the altar.

Decide ahead of time how much magical combat you want

One of the options from this adventure is having Eclipse hire a hitter to “take care of the runners” if they cross him. This dude is WILDLY overpowered. His 30 Quickness is enough to give him a high double digit combat pool (20 Combat pool?!). I imagine this is in order to make a single person viable against 4 runners, but he hits like a truck, will almost assuredly be faster than them and will essentially kill 1 runner a turn unless they are prepared to fight an actual vampire. I personally feel like this was just to ramp up how much “magic” was in this adventure. I don’t believe he really adds much to the adventure in general.

One of the other large threats are ghouls that live in the Cave where Twilight is being held with magic. I think the idea is that his dark nature is drawing “evil things” to it. I’m not sure how much I like that though. Ghouls to me are tragic characters, they aren’t evil by nature. They just have to eat.

My Players know Eclipse is an Ass Hat, what do I do now?

So if you’re running this and your players do any kind of research on the people they are kidnapping. They very well may decide, “Holy Drek is this not worth it. Helping this dude feels real bad”. The whole adventure as written expects your characters to deliver some or all of the band members to Eclipse. Assuming he gets at least 2, it makes sense to hunt down Eclipse at the ritual site. However if the players turn over no one you may end up getting into a bad way with the story because there won’t be a reason to go to the ritual site. Let me offer another way to come to a finale.

I recommend having the players stumble onto some of the other songs that the Elementals were preparing. Their album, “Through the Lightning” is supposed to contain a bunch of new songs. Assuming that they found the song that would heal/release Twilight, then it makes perfect sense that “resealing” him or weakening him would be just as readily available from the same locations. This would allow you to change the playing field, where they are still using that same cave and setup, but now they are playing, “Protecting The Heart” instead of “Healing the Spirit”. Have Eclipse, Dusk and Lupus all come in to try to stop them from finishing, locking Twilight into the metaplanes forever!