Picture Perfect Friday showcases art that captures the feel of Shadowrun. This Friday’s artist is Mario Wibisono.
Mission Essentials: The Extraction
April 15, 2012
By The Dood in Adventure, Design
I’m developing the mission essentials feature of the blog to provide gamemasters with a mission distilled to it’s core components. Its hoped this will allow sandbox gamemasters to rapidly generate missions as the core components present themselves in game while Non-sandbox gamemasters can use this as a template while preparing for a game. For the first mission essentials I present the extraction – the mission where the PCs need to abduct or free a person from hostile forces and bring them to a pre-defined drop-off point.
Picture Perfect Friday #1
April 13, 2012
By The Dood in General
Picture Perfect Friday showcases art that captures the feel of Shadowrun. This Friday’s artist is Sakimichan whose art has inspired some of the finer ladies in my campaign.
Why are the players rolling the dice?
March 11, 2012
By The Dood in General
A common piece of GMing advice is you should only roll the dice when a successful and failed outcome would affect the PCs. To me the intention of this advice is to avoid games from bogging down in needless dice rolling. I was discussing this piece of GMing advice the other day and we both agreed that you should only roll the dice when there is risk. However the application of this rule differed between the two of us which got me thinking about how I applied the rule in my games.
A Cornucopia of Unrelated Topics
February 4, 2012
By The Dood in General
Shadowrun books were once a must-purchase for me but once I had acquired the core books, other releases quickly became PDF purchases either due to quality or exclusivity (the E-Book line for example). This coupled with my disinterest in the current version of Dungeons and Dragons my RPG budget has been free to spend on other games. Unfortunately, finding the time to play these other games has been difficult and the games have been gathering dust on my desk. Fortunately, this looks to change in 2012 as I’m finding I have a lot more free time lately.
So what’s on my desk ready to be played and what do I intend to do with them?
2012
January 6, 2012
By The Dood in General
With 2012 being a significant event in the Shadowrun calendar I hope to see Catalyst jumping at the opportunity to publicize Shadowrun. The reason for this is because the SR community has dwindled for some time now and polarizing around the official forums and dumpshock. Unfortunately they lack appeal to new, interested players which makes it hard to grow the community. So how would I like Catalyst to get Shadowrun back out into the rpg masses during 2012?
Relationship mapping my game
December 11, 2011
By The Dood in Design, NPC
I’ve spoken about how important NPCs are in a sandbox game before and I’ve been wanting to map out the relationships between my campaign’s characters for a while now. There are several reasons why I’ve wanted to do this, most importantly was so I could remember everyone’s name but also so I could see where the focus of the campaign was and any hidden relationships that were developing. I ended up using XMind to draw the relationships and the result is below. The player characters are in green, deceased characters are in red and non-player characters are white.
Core Assumptions
December 3, 2011
By The Dood in General
One of the first things that stood out when I read through the 4th Edition Dungeon and Dragons DM’s Guide was the section entitled “The D&D World”. This is the section where the designers outline the core assumptions upon which 4E was built and explain the points of light concept. I have always thought this would make a good framework to introduce players to a particular sandbox game by providing them with the core assumptions they can hold about the game world.
NPCs and the Sandbox
November 19, 2011
By The Dood in Character Creation, Design, NPC
The defining element of a Shadowrun sandbox is the NPCs who inhabit the game world. I’m not referring to the nameless wageslaves and corporate guards that stand between the group and the macguffin. They could be called anything and still fulfill their purpose. I’m referring to the real NPCs – the Whiskey Joes, the Alices, and the Montys who make the world come alive because without them the world would be a sterile, boring place. Unfortunately, as a GM you can never predicate when you will need an NPC who can drive the story forward.
Carjacking in 2072
November 13, 2011
By The Dood in General
My game regularly sees PCs stealing and disabling cars and I’ve been hand waving a few of the intricacies in the name of fun. However recent events have forced me to look at the rules more closely and here is my interpretation of how to steal a car in 2072.