Shadowrun 3e

Overall score:

Mike Muliville, the developer of Shadowrun Third Edition, sought to reconcile the problems that the first and second editions had: unclear rules in multiple books. He failed. Not that he didn't make a valient attempt.

But let me explain a bit about the background of the game first: Shadowrun is set in 2060, over fifty years after magic has reentered the world. You see, the ancient Mayans predicted the world would end 2011. This was not an infrequent event in the Mayan calendar, and new worlds are always being born to carry on the saga of history. It turns out the Mayans were right. Imagine coming home one day to find that your brother Billy has turned into a menacing 10 foot tall ogre, or that your mom has become a slender, pointy-eared elf. Goblinification—or in the words of the medical community, UGE (unexplained genetic expression)—struck indiscriminately all over the world like a plague, turning some people into Dwarves and Elves and others into Trolls and Orks. I bet you can guess who got the short end of the stick. Things got especially bad when the Indians (who had been placed in what were essentially concentration camps for attempting to hijack a nuclear missile silo back in the 90's) got ticked off and decided to take back their land with the magical power of the spirit world. When all the volcanoes in Washington State went up with a cataclysmic boom the US government ceded a large portion of land back to the Nations, who were kind enough to leave them Seattle (which stretches from Everett down to Olympia).

After the dust cleared humanity realized that these new races (who were just mutated humans) were here to stay. 49 years later, Seattle is a gleaming mass of glass and steel populated by Corporate Archologys and strange denizens. Corporations own almost everything and are as powerful as governments, Dragons fly the skies (one was even elected president of the US) and corporate raiders called shadowrunners sell information to the highest bidder. Shadowrunners are freelance thieves and thugs without identities (social security #'s/financial records) who do almost anything for any price. All but the best of them die.

Your one of em'. You could be a chromed up cyber samurai living by a budo code of ethics or a Dog shaman communing with the spirit world. Or a rigger (vehicle pilot) or a Decker (hacker)—you could even be a normal Joe just trying to make ends meet. More than anything you're just some poor schmoe that no one cares about trying to make one big score and crawl away in one piece. So why is it that you keep crawling back...?

As you can see, it's a very cool setting. The third edition, however, just doesn't live up to its potential. Shadowrun 3e trys to handle too much in a rulebook by tacking on multiple systems to handle the Magic and Technology sections of the game, further complicating what was already RPG'doms most complicated game. Just about everything has its own special caviat and rule. SR3 wastes needless pages on exposition and confuses players and GMs alike. It's not a horrid game, but new GMs should be encouraged to organize their copy of the book with post-its or page tabs.

My biggest beef with SR3 is that much of the original flavor of the game is gone. There is almost no art, with pictures of the tech and other flavor illustrations dropped for the new ultra-dense text format. Seattle, the primary setting, is barely described, and important maps and art are dropped. Metahumans, once penalized with allergies and persecuted by regular humans, are now just normal people with attribute adjustments. Game powerhouses like Street Samurai and Mages still dominate, but now they have multiple ways around their essence restrictions. Even the Archetypes have changed and now, instead of a ready-to-use character with a few adjustments, all the Archetypes need to be refigured to fit what you want. Character creation is not easy unless you want a character with no magic, computer skills, equipment, vehicles, or cyberware. Otherwise you'll find yourself flipping from section to section, leafing through skills one minute, looking at guns the next, cars or motercycles the next, and then wondering if maybe playing a mage was better. I'll be honest: character creation gave me a headache and I hadn't even cracked the cover of the SR Companion yet, which adds a whole new level of complexity to character creation in the form of merits and flaws.

The skill system is needlessly complicated in some areas and inexplicably simplified in others: combat skills are now broken up into about 20 different categories, while decking, magic, and knowlege are pretty much consolidated into a few skills. The only addition that I like is the Knowlege skill category, because it can be used for anything and it's cheap. Even so, it takes a few reads before you understand that you get two sets of skill points (one for physical skills and one for mental) and that the points cant be exchanged between them.

Riggers and Deckers (vehicle specialists and hackers) are more useful than in the first and second editions, but still not useful enough for my taste. Unfortunately, this added utility comes with 30 pages per Archetype of dense rules on how to handle their speciality, making it annoying for the GM to handle the two types. To make matters worse, every speciality has its own book: Magic, The Matrix, Riggers, The Street Samurai Catalog, and The Cannon Companion. They flesh out enough rules to make the Archetypes exciting, but violate the author's initial reason for publishing a simplified edition.

There's a lot more, but honestly what I've gone over is enough for me to give the game a 2. The game is confusing, dense, and flavorless.

Written by ElJeffe on July 09th, 2003