As far as my table-topping goes, I’m in the middle of at least two games, with two more on the horizon. First is my Old School Palladium Fantasy sandbox game, which has had four gatherings so far and seems to be maintaining everyone’s excitement pretty nicely. This game is really doing a good job of reinvigorating me, both as an arbiter of events and as a creator of spontaneous content. I haven’t run this seat-of-the-pants in a long, long time, and it is quite simply titillating my gamer imagination. I go into each session with a mental picture of all the events happening in the world within a 20-mile radius of where the characters are, and as they move around, those events progress of their own accord. So far, the players have managed to hit up most of them quite nicely, and get themselves directly involved of their own volition. It’s wonderful.

Next is the Song of Ice and Fire game (loosely using the system, of the same name, by Green Ronin), for which the Torch of Arbitration has been passed on to my pal Sixten. We kicked of the new chunk of the campaign a coupla weekends back, and it looks like the next session is this coming weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Also this weekend is a meet-and-greet session for potentially starting up a new Unknown Armies game. I don’t have much to say about that one just yet, because we haven’t discussed it as a group, but I want to see a story of normal folks from different walks of life brought together by mutual exposure to the Occult Underground. More on this as it unfolds.

Further down the road, probably after the Palladium games comes to its natural end, I’ve got an idea to try a Shadowrun variant in which all the magic is removed, and replaced with simple conspiracy. Magic has always been my biggest complaint about Shadowrun, as it just never seemed to fit right. I was introduced to the setting during the transition from First to Second Edition, and the art back then (some by the always-amazing Tim Bradstreet) depicted a far grittier thing than the more fantasy-inspired Shadowrun of today. Old School Shadowrun was like Ghost in the Shell, while modern Shadowrun feels more like Cutey Honey. My thought now is to remove all the magic from the setting, and replace it with mostly-unexplained conspiracy. Like the Great Ghost Dance, for example, wasn’t a magical event. For some reason a call came in from High Command to just let them go, and the US forces complied – and to this day, no one knows why. And Saeder-Krupp isn’t ruled by lofwyr, but merely an entity known as The Dragon. Is it a person? An AI? A cabal of conspirators? Something else?

All this Shadowrun-minus-magic is in my head thanks to my current obsession with the new Deus Ex: Human Revolution game, of course. Very few games have ever affected me as deeply, or tickled that Fun Spot so furiously, as this one. I’ve been taking a primarily non-violent, stealth-based approach to this game, but the story is so good and the characters so realistically portrayed, that there have been moments where in-game narrative events have successfully swayed my decision. “Fuck. That.” I’d say aloud, before switching from trust stun-zapper to armor-piercing guns and brutally taking out every last motherfucker in the room as an act of revenge that I didn’t know I wanted until only seconds before. The character Jenson radiates this almost-tangible aura of cool boredom that personifies him as the ultimate Gibsonian cyberpunk bad-ass. Every inch of the game emanates a complimentary coolness and enforces a setting-appropriate dirty dismalness, creating what I feel is the most amazing cyberpunk gaming experience to date.

Going back to the subject of Tabletop gaming for a monent, I want to take a moment and talk about two services which have revolutionized my game-scheduling: Agree-a-Date and Doodle. These are online tools that allow you to send out a poll of sorts to a group of people, letting them pick which of the arrayed dates are best available for their attendance. As an adult with a full-time job, an active social life, budding romances, and other hobbies, this makes scheduling gaming sessions much, much less of a headache. I’m moving away from Agree-a-date towards Doodle, because it’s less restrictive and not constantly advertising itself to me. But aide from that, Agree-a-Date has served me very well for small-gathering social functions.

I’ve recently set up a profile on RPGGeek, and have begun posting my plays there. Feel free to friend me.

Finally, the current design project codenamed Hagakure 66 has had some great new developments. I can’t share them just, yet, however. I want the revelation to be damn awesome. It’s on its way, though, most definitely.

GAMES:

Shadowrun (Sega Genesis): This game got me into the RPG in the first place, way back when. Quite a fantastic and loyal translation of the game rules to video game format. Canon-wise and system-wise, it’s the best official Shadowrun video game I’ve yet to see.

Perfect Dark Zero (XB360): I freakin’ love this game. It fits the feel quite well. The short version: you’re a stealth-hacker action girl who sneaks into places and, essentially, performs a series of shadowrun-like jobs in a near future dystopia. Awesome.

Fear Effect 1 & 2 (Playstation 1): While the gameplay leads to frequent moments of intense puzzle-based hair-pulling frustration, these two gems are what you would get if you removed the magic from Shadowrun and turned it into a damn awesome video game.

Rogue Ops (Playstation2): Similar style of stealth action, this game didn’t get much acclaim or recognition, but is a hell of a lot of fun to play. Again, stealth-action girl going on sneaky missions in the near future

Syphon Filter (Playstation 1, 2, and PSP): A fantastic series of near-future espionage action games, a must-play for any fans of futuristic stealth games.

Deus Ex (PC): Another good stealth-action shooter, this game has hacking, sneaking, shooting, robots, cybernetic implants and more. A fan favorite, it’s too bad the sequels were crap.

SHOWS:

Leverage: This show really captures the essence of the Heist Job. It has humor, drama, action, and intrigue, and never fails to inspire me.

Burn Notice: I haven’t actually watched this yet, but it’s next on my list. I hear it has a lot of the similar themes as Leverage. EDIT: I watched the first three episodes last night, and yeah, this show rocks. It’s basically the adventures of a Face and his two friends. Good stuff!

Smith: Very sadly, this excellent “what happens between the jobs” heist show was canceled after only a handful of episodes, but it had such awesome potential.

FILMS:

Strange Days: This movie just oozes with Shadowrun concepts, including simchip dealers, low-grade extraction runs, armored limo drivers, race wars, and more. One of my favorite flicks of all time.

The Usual Suspects: Crime, paranoia, whodunnit, and lies. Another one of my favorite movies ever.

Sneakers: A truly fantastic digital hacker flick. Lies, spies, and action.

Johnny Mnemonic: While nothing at all like the original cyberpunk short story it is very loosely based on, this is still a great movie to get yourself into the Shadowrun aesthetic. Has hackers, tech-gangs, yakuza assassins, cybernetic data couriers, and more.

Any other suggestions?

That’s right. I said it. Shut up.

I first started playing the Shadowrun role-playing game in 1994, when the second edition rules were still in their prime. I remember my first clue that the game even existed was when I rented the Sega Genesis game cartridge of the same name because I recalled seeing the awesome logo on a few books in the sci-fi aisle at Books-a-Million. I ate that video game up like it was momma’s special garlic mashed potatoes with the skins in, oh so deliciously slightly lumpy. While devouring the awesome that was (and still is!) that video game, I learned that it was directly based upon a tabletop role-playing game of the same name. Being a gamer-in-the-making at that time, I rushed out and grabbed a sweet shiny copy of the core second edition rules, and was hooked ever since.

(Author’s Note: avoid the SNES version of the Shadowrun game if you are at all a fan of the setting. It really butchers it, and quite mercilessly so. And keep the Xbox 360 version away with a sharp object.)

The art on pages 9, 77, and 237 of the Second Edition rules book have forever been stuck in my mind as images of exactly what Shadowrun should be: hard, gritty, dirty and penultimately bad ass street-level cyberpunk grime. From the moment I started devouring that book (and all the supplements!), the art and writing style all cemented within my mind this vision of a dirty dystopian future, a vision of four days after tomorrow where an outright apocalypse never happened, but by all rights should have. To me, Shadowrun was about edge, cool, racism, bullets, blood, grime, and those three bad ass pictures drawn by the legendary Tim Bradstreet.

Somewhere along the line, that edge got dulled down, and instead of keeping it sharp, the designers replaced it with a purple inflatable hammer. Now don’t misunderstand me, here: I am actually one of those long-time devoted players who has truly felt that with each new edition of the game, the rules of play have done nothing but improve. Right from the release of each new edition, I embraced the changes and improvements, and eagerly pranced forth and bought all the new core supplements. No, the rules have only gotten better over time, and I will rarely say otherwise.

The dulling I speak of is entirely a matter of style. Shadowrun started as a game world rooted very firmly and obviously in the 1980 Gibsonian cyberpunk mythos, with a whole lot of weird fantasy thrown into the mix for flavor. But despite the presence of the mystical and the ready availability of traditional fantasy gaming tropes, the earlier supplements and novels all held true to that gritty cyberpunk edge. But over time, the style changed. The developers realized that the popularity of that 1980s dystopian vision of the future was fading, and they did what they felt they needed to do to keep making money off of Shadowrun: they turned it into a fucking anime.

I almost gave up on Shadowrun entirely when the Year of the Comet book was published. Published in the final years of the Third Edition lifespan, this book took the last vestiges of whatever waning elements of gritty style were left, chewed them up, and shat them out into the pages of a weeaboo-dripping book of pure and utter feces. The short version: Halley’s Comet comes back around, and in its wake a giant spirit dragon flies out of a rift and takes over Denver, the world is beset by zombies (ahem, “shedim”), and now every player has the option of playing furries (oh, excuse me, they call it “SURGE”). I paid cash money for that book, and felt violated after reading it. How did FASA go from publishing my favorite gaming supplement ever (Bug City – hell, I still have nightmares about that mosquito picture) to this drivel? After giving that book to Goodwill in disgust, I turned my back on buying any new Shadowrun products, clinging lovingly to those I already had and holing up like the crotchety old grognard I felt I had become.

When Fanpro published the Fourth Edition rules, I risked ending my Shadowrun hermitage for a chance at potential change. Alas, while I loved the amazingly improved rules system, I saw that the developers had even further strayed from the original core themes of the game. Hell, the art in the Fourth Edition core rules is some of the worst art I’ve seen in a long time for a book of that supposedly-high production quality. I fully believe that when you buy a gaming book, you’re buying not only the rules of the game, but also the complete imaginative experience that those rules are supposed to facilitate at your gaming table. When you pay forty or more dollars for a book, that book had better rock your rocks. The art in this book just didn’t evoke the Shadowrun I had grown to love – the Shadowrun of 4th edition was tight and smooth, but utterly devoid of soul. It was like really terrible fan fiction. My solution: port the newer, more playable rules to the old established style, and root all my games firmly in 2055.

This new 20th Anniversary edition of the 4th Edition rules has fixed all of that for me. From the moment you open the book and see the original First Edition cover staring back at you on the first page, you know that actual love was poured into the creation of this book. Each piece of artwork in the book is either brand new and perfectly styled for the feel of the setting, or pulled from the pages and covers of products as far back as the very beginning. Seeing visual shoutouts to the covers of both Shadowtech and Downtown Militarized Zone almost brought tears to my eyes. This book took the new rules, which I love, and combined them with a visual feel that once again (finally) returned to the grittier, less-ridiculous cyber-grunge feel that I loved from my very first encounter with the game, way back when.

So I repeat: Thanks, Catalyst. Someone finally got it right again, and I’m glad it was you. I look forward to more awesome products like this.