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Shadowrun 2050
Chrome eyes. Computers called "decks." Big hair, big cyberlimbs and bigger guns. It's Shadowrun in the year it all started. Take a step back to Shadowrun's roots with Shadowrun 2050, a book that combines Fourth Edition rules — the smoothest, most accessible rule set Shadowrun has ever had - with the setting that first made the Sixth World a legend. Shadowrun 2050 has everything players and gamemasters need to dive into the grimy beauty that kicked off one of the greatest roleplaying settings of all time. With information on how to adapt Fourth Edition Matrix, gear, and magic rules for the 2050 setting, as well as in-universe information about the powers of the world, what shadowrunners will be up to, and who they'll be running into, Shadowrun 2050 puts a new twist on the classic setting. Captain Chaos. Maria Mercurial. The Laughing Man. Sally Tsung. JetBlack. Hatchetman. Nightfire. And the Shadowland poster who just called himself The Big "D." These people and many others are waiting for you in the year that started it all, a setting brought back to life with new, full-color artwork showing the chrome, dirt, neon, and darkness that was in the heart of Shadowrun when it started and remains at its core today. Shadowrun 2050 is for use with Shadowrun, Twentieth Anniversary Edition.
- GenresRole Playing GamesGaming
196 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 8, 2017
The good old days, when hair was high, mohawks were pink, and cell phones weighed one pound.
Shadowrun 2050 is a book for using the setting of the 2050s with the rules of Shadowrun 20th Anniversary Edition, for all those people like me who like throwing giant buckets of dice around. But because not everyone had their entry into the game in the 90s, when the 2050s was the current timeline, most of the book is actually fluff about the past, and that's where the book lost me.
There are giant sections on what shadowrunners are and what kind of shadowruns they go on, which would easily be applicable to any time period and seem out of place in a book specifically about the 2050s. I don't need a special supplement to know that shadowrunners are hired by corporations to extract data or employees from other corporations, since that's timeline agnostic and the presence or absence of ubiquitous wireless access doesn't change the basic nature of the job. Even in the specifics about the world in the 2050s, I kept getting tripped up. Spes is posting about a dragon, later confirmed as Lofwyr, on the Council of Princes in Tir Tairngire even though that wasn't revealed until 2054, but posters are speculating about Buttercup's real name even though she was confirmed as a free spirit in 2050. So trying to use the book as a snapshot of Shadowrun history is pointless and will just lead to errors for the people who are interested in that.
There are three specific cities detailed: Seattle (of course), Chicago, and Hong Kong. Seattle was a given, since it's been the default Shadowrun city for decades at this point. Chicago was...well. The problem is that I live in Chicago, so when I read about a manufacturing-based city, full of stockyards and industry, and run by the Mob, I think that they took 1950s Chicago, punted it forward a century, and changed the names. There's the Elevated instead of the L, the Noose instead of the Loop, and the Capone family instead of...oh, it seems they didn't even change some of the names. It's possible that this is how Chicago has always been portrayed in Shadowrun, which isn't known for originality at times, but this was the first time I encountered it.
I did like Hong Kong's portrayal, but I know nothing about Hong Kong. It's entirely possible that it's also heavily stereotyped and I simply wouldn't know it.
The setting takes up 75% of the book, and the remaining pages are devoted to the rules changes. The magic setting sets up the divide into hermetic mages and shamans again, with a reasonable approximation of the changes from earlier editions--mages can bind spirits long-term but require time to summon them, shamans can whistle up spirits quickly but the spirits have to stay in their domains--and a couple extra traditions to reflect Hong Kong. The Matrix section tries to take the hundreds of pages of matrix rules in both 2E and 4E and condense them into maybe thirty pages, reflecting the deck attribute + skill dice pools of 4E but the limited storage and mapped-out node networks of 2E. I don't know how well it works without testing it out, but Matrix rules have always been terrible so I don't expect much. The gear is helpful in terms of explaining what was available and what wasn't, but the rules are copied and pasted. An Ares Predator from 2050 has the same statistics as an Ares Predator IV from 2072, it just costs more. One could easily derive most of the equipment list by changing the names in the main rulebook, which is simple from a rules balance perspective but makes me wonder what the point of paying for this book was.
I also noticed quite a few editing errors. Mispellings, sections in the wrong place, formatting errors...maybe it wasn't a lot in absolute terms, but it was enough to stand out to me.
One of my more disappointing RPG purchases.
Shadowrun 2050 is a book for using the setting of the 2050s with the rules of Shadowrun 20th Anniversary Edition, for all those people like me who like throwing giant buckets of dice around. But because not everyone had their entry into the game in the 90s, when the 2050s was the current timeline, most of the book is actually fluff about the past, and that's where the book lost me.
There are giant sections on what shadowrunners are and what kind of shadowruns they go on, which would easily be applicable to any time period and seem out of place in a book specifically about the 2050s. I don't need a special supplement to know that shadowrunners are hired by corporations to extract data or employees from other corporations, since that's timeline agnostic and the presence or absence of ubiquitous wireless access doesn't change the basic nature of the job. Even in the specifics about the world in the 2050s, I kept getting tripped up. Spes is posting about a dragon, later confirmed as Lofwyr, on the Council of Princes in Tir Tairngire even though that wasn't revealed until 2054, but posters are speculating about Buttercup's real name even though she was confirmed as a free spirit in 2050. So trying to use the book as a snapshot of Shadowrun history is pointless and will just lead to errors for the people who are interested in that.
There are three specific cities detailed: Seattle (of course), Chicago, and Hong Kong. Seattle was a given, since it's been the default Shadowrun city for decades at this point. Chicago was...well. The problem is that I live in Chicago, so when I read about a manufacturing-based city, full of stockyards and industry, and run by the Mob, I think that they took 1950s Chicago, punted it forward a century, and changed the names. There's the Elevated instead of the L, the Noose instead of the Loop, and the Capone family instead of...oh, it seems they didn't even change some of the names. It's possible that this is how Chicago has always been portrayed in Shadowrun, which isn't known for originality at times, but this was the first time I encountered it.
I did like Hong Kong's portrayal, but I know nothing about Hong Kong. It's entirely possible that it's also heavily stereotyped and I simply wouldn't know it.
The setting takes up 75% of the book, and the remaining pages are devoted to the rules changes. The magic setting sets up the divide into hermetic mages and shamans again, with a reasonable approximation of the changes from earlier editions--mages can bind spirits long-term but require time to summon them, shamans can whistle up spirits quickly but the spirits have to stay in their domains--and a couple extra traditions to reflect Hong Kong. The Matrix section tries to take the hundreds of pages of matrix rules in both 2E and 4E and condense them into maybe thirty pages, reflecting the deck attribute + skill dice pools of 4E but the limited storage and mapped-out node networks of 2E. I don't know how well it works without testing it out, but Matrix rules have always been terrible so I don't expect much. The gear is helpful in terms of explaining what was available and what wasn't, but the rules are copied and pasted. An Ares Predator from 2050 has the same statistics as an Ares Predator IV from 2072, it just costs more. One could easily derive most of the equipment list by changing the names in the main rulebook, which is simple from a rules balance perspective but makes me wonder what the point of paying for this book was.
I also noticed quite a few editing errors. Mispellings, sections in the wrong place, formatting errors...maybe it wasn't a lot in absolute terms, but it was enough to stand out to me.
One of my more disappointing RPG purchases.
Displaying 1 of 1 review