Role-Playing Games
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Role-Playing Games |
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The Grimoire — The source for initiates and Free Spirits. Game masters should figure out how much limitation they want to put on initiation before their campaign starts.
Awakenings — Another important book, providing an entirely new type of magician (the houngan, following the traditions of voudoun) and a great deal more diversity for Physical Adepts.
The Shadowrun Companion: Beyond the Shadows — A whole batch of new and outré metahuman subtypes, introduction of Edges and Flaws and a point-based character building system, ideas for campaigns that don’t fit the classic Shadowrun model, and some new rules. Treat each separate item in the book as a distinct piece to review before you put it in your campaign. (The Enemies section, for instance, suggests that anyone who starts with a high Resources stat should start with a big Enemy, for no particular reason.)
Street Samurai Catalog — A big batch of armaments with some cyberware and vehicles as well; excellent for arming security guards.
Fields of Fire — A big batch of armaments with some cyberware and vehicles as well; excellent for arming military forces and making your players drool. Make sure they sweat over acquiring any items with high Availability numbers.
Shadowtech — Introduces bioware as well as a whole bunch of new and useful cyberware, most of which is non-combat. Lots of ’ware to enhance deckers.
Cybertechnology — Lots of new cyberware, varying from useful tools like fingertip lockpicks and cyberarm cyberdecks to the downright horrifying Move-By-Wire system. Plenty of rules for dealing with issues regarding cyberware, some more clues about the Earthdawn history of the Shadowrun universe, and rules for cybermancy, the technique for creating heavily chromed zombies that should by rights drop dead.
Rigger Black Book — Unfortunately out-of-print; the vehicle modification system (which had many flaws) has been superceded by Rigger 2, but the vehicle descriptions and pictures are very helpful.
Rigger 2 — Brings many thorough rules to rigging and introduces a vehicle design system. Unfortunately, Jon Szeto knows a lot more about vehicles than he does digital signal processing, so we had to introduce a lot of house rules to deal with effects in there that should have been eaten alive by the advancing state of the art.
Virtual Realities 2.0 — The best decking system for Shadowrun yet, and it’s still incredibly difficult to play. The rules for creating programs and cyberdecks are well done, but the sheer number of different utilities that need to be kept track of make it difficult to play a decker unless you use the rules every week, and that means lots of other PC’s hanging around bored. We usually just treat the party decker as a plot device.
Corporate Shadowfiles — One of the best sources of plot ideas for the Shadowrun universe! The actual details of megacorporate intrigue. The only difficulty is arranging for the players to figure out just what maneuvering they’re a part of...
Prime Runners — A large group of very competent NPC’s, including the Great Dragon Rhonabwy, with character statistics, personality details, and ideas that can become plot hooks.
Paranormal Animals of North America — A Shadowrun monster manual, with stats for the critters and handy diagrams showing the range in which they’re found, making it fairly easy to dream up random encounters on the fly.
Paranormal Animals of Europe — Another good monster manual.
The Neo-Anarchist’s Guide to Real Life — Good exposition on the society of the Shadowrun world, from security matters to international travel to fashion.
Corporate Security — Supercedes the security section of NAGRL and provides a whole bunch of toys for outfitting corporate installations. Good one-stop shopping for putting together those security systems.
Lone Star — A highly detailed look at the guardians of the Seattle metroplex. Includes a few toys for the cops and the occasional bit of complete nonsense. (Hermetic circles are only astral barriers when active, so it’s not much use to put one in your paddywagon. And no one would buy a datajack that allows viruses to take up residence in its firmware...)
Sprawl Sites — Quick descriptions of various institutions like banks, apartments, and video stores, a batch of contacts, a few new archetypes, and a bunch of short plot ideas.
Tir Tairngire — Everyone’s favorite totalitarian elven nation. In addition to a wealth of detail on why sane shadowrunners wouldn’t attempt to do anything there without major backup, there are also interesting annotations by Dunkelzahn and Harlequin and a discussion of immortal elves at the back.
California Free State — More info on California Free State to supplement the data in NAGNA. Contains at least one completely absurd map that has almost nothing to do with the geography of the area it purports to show. Information on northern California near the Tir Tairngire border, including the Great Dragon Hestaby up at Mount Shasta; central California and its farms; San Francisco under Imperial Japanese rule and its unhappy neighbors; the polluted, pirate-ridden Big Sur Coast; the hellhole of Los Angeles; and the Mojave Desert. Plus rules for toxic critters and the side effects of magical warfare!
Native American Nations, volume 1 and volume 2 — I wish they’d reprint these things in one volume without the adventures in the beginning. Lots of good information on the Native American Nations, including their economies and societies. I usually have to hit the Denver sourcebook to look up legality codes when the players are talking about what to try to sneak in and what to purchase there.
Aztlan — Lots of good information about everybody’s favorite sinister country, complete with data on blood magic and blood spirits and annotations by conspirators who remember the era of Earthdawn.
Denver — A nightmarish place to run, with security checks all over the place, and a prime center for T-bird smuggling (whose economic viability I still can’t figure out). The gamemaster’s book comes with a whole bunch of different options for the levels of sinister plots and backbiting going on in the city.
The Neo-Anarchist’s Guide to North America — Descriptions of a number of sites in the UCAS, CAS, and Cal Free State.
Bug City — Supercedes the Chicago description in NAGNA, after the Bugs break out. Includes rules for dangerously high background counts and some more Bugs.
Target: UCAS — The most recent UCAS sourcebook; includes Boston and a post-Bug Chicago, along with rules for the Strain III pure-astral bacteria.
Tír na nÓg — Overly powerful totalitarian elves from the people who brought you Nosferatu and Black Madonna. In the tradition of cheesy gamemasters everywhere, has lots of detail about nifty powers that the opposition can have and the players can’t. If you read past that stuff, there’s plenty of material for describing Ireland in the 2050’s, how it got to be that way, and why any sane shadowrunning team won’t set foot on the island.
London — Shadowrunning in the United Kingdom. London is the centerpiece of the book, but there’s some description for the whole UK. Culture, politics, and places, with some information on druids.
Germany — Germany has met with a number of disasters in the new millennium, broken up into a lot of diverse little political entities, and there’s plenty of detail. Finally, there are metahuman lands run by non-Elves. Introduces a new kind of shaman, the icon follower, and details on magical power sites.
Cyberpirates! — Information on Madagascar, West Africa, the Caribbean League, and the Philippines, along with details of the world of piracy in the 2050’s and the toys they use.
Target: Smugglers’ Havens — Details on New Orleans, Vladivostok, and more. Applies the Kzinti Lesson to T-birds, but still doesn’t explain how it’s profitable to use them for smuggling. Lots of good information on border security of different nations.
Imago — A rather good adventure involving magic, high technology, and mysticism. I hijacked the astral quest in the adventure to put the characters in situations that seemed to be taken from their past lives, allowing me to explain why the group had gotten together by retroactively inventing karmic debts that brought them together in their current lives.
Harlequin — The classic immortal-elf adventure series; very handy for introducing the characters to bits and pieces of the Earthdawn background.
Harlequin’s Back — Any adventure involving as much work as this to save the world shouldn’t be superseded by some NPC’s work, so in my campaign, I’m going to declare the Dragon Heart trilogy never happened... and there will be a whole different set of circumstances surrounding Dunkelzahn’s death.
Threats — A variety of sinister groups out to control, destroy, or substantially change the world, and FASA finally admits plainly that there are immortal elves in Shadowrun.
Dunkelzahn’s Secrets — Dunkelzahn is dead, everyone is wondering who did it, and he left a Will that sends the shadowrunning community into a furor. I’ve been writing my own hyperlinks in the margins of this book just so I can follow the tapestry of threads it creates.
Mob War! — Repercussions of Dunkelzahn’s death, especially his Will, start a chain of events propagating through the underworld...
Blood in the Boardroom — ...and the megacorporations.
Walter Jon Williams’ Hardwired is the classic rigger book, and he even wrote a rather good supplement for Cyberpunk 2020 based on it; his other work is also good, but isn’t as useful for inspiring Shadowrun ideas.
Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash has another amusingly dark future, where the Mob has turned legit.
Daniel Keys Moran’s The Long Run is very badly out of print but contains the best (and only believable) depiction of decking that I’ve seen in fiction.
George Alec Effinger’s trilogy When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun and The Exile Kiss gives a superb tour of a cyberpunk-era Middle East. Like Williams, Effinger also wrote a good CP2020 supplement.
Cyberpunk did not come out of a vacuum. John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider had cyberpunk themes long before Gibson had people plugging things into sockets in their heads.
R. Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk 2020 has a lot of great ideas
that can be stolen for Shadowrun. CP2020 has a lot more
of the punk aspect to it; the world there is substantially different,
where cyberlimbs are so cheap they can be a fashion statement. The
Chromebooks are a great source of ideas for toys, and there is
a good set of conversions at the Plastic Warriors site. CP2020
has lots of great flavor that can easily be imported into a
Shadowrun campaign.
Ars Magica
For a wonderful “parallel history” view of the world, check out Richard Garfinkle’s Celestial Matters.
When playing martial artists, it’s good to read up on their disciplines. I found Sun Tzu’s The Art of War a much more accessible book on strategy than Clausewitz’s On War. Sun Pin’s The Lost Art of War is also a good read; Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings is an excellent look into the mindset of a martial artist. (The link I give here is to the Shambhala Dragon edition, which also includes Yagyu Munenori’s Family Traditions on the Art of War.) People whose characters use aikido should definitely read Morihei Ueshiba’s The Art of Peace. Deng Ming-Dao’s Scholar Warrior is an excellent look at the mindset of a Taoist martial artist, and The Chronicles of Tao is a fascinating story of a Taoist moving seamlessly from a mystical world into the modern one.