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For those of you who know me from Dumpshock, you’ll know that I’m not the biggest fan of Shadowrun 4th. I know that other people seem to really like it, but it really just rubs me the wrong way. I mean, as one guy put it: “They tried to copy World of Darkness, except they didn’t do it right”. I gave the game a go once, and it really did not work at all for me. However, I have a rule about trying everything twice, just to make sure I don’t like it. Some time ago, I discovered that an old hangout of mine still existed. A game store that I was convinced had gone out of business, managed to reappear out of the blue. Some of the people there were talking about how they were sick of D20, and wanted to try something new. We went through my library of games, and it was decided that we should try SR4. Since I knew the most about the game, I decided to make this my second try, and decided to play “On the Run”. The story that is about to follow involves a lot of things, some of which might seem odd, but have all contributed to my overall picture of the product. Warning; This review contains heavy spoilers, so if you think you’ll end up playing in this game, you have been warned.
Prologue:
The story begins from the moment that I downloaded the book off of DriveThruRpg.com. I’m kind-of an old fashioned guy, I prefer to read hardcopy to staring at a computer screen—you just can’t curl up in bed with a pdf. So, I try to print out the book. Almost immediately, my computer locks up. After some fiddling, I manage to force a reboot, but the print run is lost and my copy is corrupted beyond repair. Luckily for me, DriveThruRpg.com allows you to download it multiple times, so I try again. This time, I managed to save my copy, but everything else crashed. I tried everything I could think of: sending it in chunks, single pages, and so on… none of it worked. If I sent a 10-page batch to my printer, I’d get a page and a half out of it. Now, since I’m an avid Dumpshocker, I happened to start venting on those forums, and Adam Jury came to my rescue. (For those of you who don’t know, Adam is the webmaster for Fanpro, and an all-around cool guy.) Despite the fact that I’m a naysayer, he offered to help me personally with my printing issues. He even went so far as to give me a free copy from another site, in case it was the watermarking that might be gumming up the works. I still couldn’t get that one to work, but other things were going wrong with my computer as well, so I thought that maybe it was a hardware issue.
My next step was to take it to my college computer lab. My home machine is fairly old, so I thought that the more recent equipment in the lab could handle it. I started by sending a 10-page batch to the printer, and waited to see what would happen. And waited. And waited. Eventually, the tech made an announcement: “Someone sent a file to the printer that jammed the network. You’ll all have to resend your print runs.” Needless to say, I didn’t try that again.
The next stop was to my favorite print shop, where they’ve run many copies of many different books for me. Long story short, they didn’t have any better luck than I did. I’m not sure how powerful their computers were, but their system got gummed up repeatedly. They managed to get something, but then they surprised me with a huge hidden fee, for all the inconvenience. We screamed and yelled, and I’m not going back there anymore, but I also didn’t pay the extra money they were demanding.
So, finally, I broke down and went to the professionals. I walked into Kinko’s, and handed them the file. They took a look at it and said: “No problem! We’ll have it for you in ten minutes.” About forty-five minutes later, I finally had a copy of the book in my hands. They explained to me that there was something in the layering that slowed down the print process. And this isn’t the first time this has happened, either: my copy of SR4 was even worse at printing. I’m sure the layering system must make the book look very nice on screen, but it caused me no end of nightmares.
The Game in Action:
“On The Run” starts in typical Shadowrun format. It has a fiction piece to introduce the general feel for the adventure, followed by an overview, and then gets into the nitty-gritty of the game. While it offers a fairly complicated backstory, the adventure itself starts with the typical: “You get a call from a fixer to meet Mr. Johnson” line. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, and the gamemaster section also goes over this cliché in detail. In fact, the gamemaster section is very meaty, and contains a lot of good material.
If only the scene itself were as good! For all the details given to the GM, there’s really almost nothing offered to the players. The characters are told that their mission is to get some vague music disk stolen from a mysterious employer, and no other information is forthcoming. My players balked heavily at this, pointing out that tracking down a single data disk is the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack type of deal. It took quite a bit of finesse on my part to get them to accept the run.
The next part of any Shadowrun module is legwork. Once again, the book goes into excellent detail about how to do legwork: how to access your contacts, and which ones would be of most help. Unfortunately, it relies heavily on there being a decker character on the team, which I didn’t exactly have. This forced me to do some serious rewriting of the module; I have to respect the author for trying to think of everything, but she’s a human being and can’t manage it. Still, I’d think that she would have planned for something like this.
After this, we have a very entertaining scene involving an ork rap concert. The information here is very thorough, and covers almost every reasonable approach the players might come up with. Naturally, my players came up with something different, but that’s to be expected. Overall, this scene ran very smoothly, and was a lot of fun.
The next few scenes weren’t as good. Basically, they amounted to going from dive bar to dive bar, going from person to person, tracking down the disk. After this, the team then potentially gets treated to a large-scale combat, depending on what they’ve done. In my case, the combat just dragged on and on, with people constantly popping in and out of the battle. This scene has some promise, but unfortunately it is set as a running gun battle, instead of as an exciting set piece. However, in the end, they players manage to recover the disk without taking too much damage. Mission accomplished, right?
Well, here’s the thing. You are now only roughly halfway into the book. From this point on, everything depends on the players deciding to act unprofessional, and start snooping into the data they were sent to recover. Since this is supposed to be an *introductory* module, encouraging professional behavior should be part of the game; but the module will end at this point unless they start doing things they’re not supposed to. Luckily for me, I had an impulsive player with a curious otaku for a contact, and the NPC started them down the path.
What comes next is a sort-of old age scavenger hunt, as the characters try to trace down clues from twenty years ago. These scenes are actually very well done, and are loaded with roleplay possibilities. It also includes magic for the first time in the adventure, something I had been missing. About the only snag I encountered was that one player instantly glommed onto the idea of how valuable an unbreakable code was. He was willing to completely forego the data and the rest of the adventure, since he thought selling off an unbreakable code algorithm would be worth many times more than whatever was on the disk; and he wouldn’t technically be betraying Mr. Johnson, to boot. I had to come up with some semi-technical gibberish in order to satisfy him, which did save the game, but made me feel like a heel. Once past that little hurdle, the tempo and feel of the game picked up noticeably. Suddenly, everyone was interested in the team and their disk. It all culminated in a dark battle in a graveyard, with a strike team on one side and vampires on the other. The team was between a rock and a hard place, sweating bullets, and enjoying the hell out of it. They ended up deciding to stick with their Johnson, but we still managed to have the final cinematic battle.
The follow up for the module depends on who the team decides to give the disk to. Once again, they cover pretty much every eventuality, and give the GM good guidelines for what to do in other situations. You can close the adventure on any one of a number of notes; but the best part is that it all depends on the players, and not on the GM’s whims.
Scoring:
First of all, I’m going to make one thing perfectly clear. If you plan on downloading the pdf to print out a copy, then it earns a great big Zero. The nightmare I had in trying to get a hardcopy was just so bad, I cannot recommend it to anyone. This is not the first time I’ve had major issues with Fanpro pdf’s; my copy of SR4 was even worse than this. In fact, I highly suggest that people boycott Fanpro pdf’s, at least until they start putting out print-friendly versions. They do some very nice things with layering and bookmarking, and the text-search feature is nice; but if you want to print it out, avoid their products at all costs.
What if you’re not going to print it out, or if you want to buy a hardcopy from your FLGS or online? Well, then we have a different score. This is my first time doing a RPG.net review, so I’m going to break it down into style and substance categories. Please bear with me, as I explain what’s going through my mind.
Substance-wise, this is a pretty solid product. It is *loaded* with excellent GM advice and resources, and cross-references everything with the main book. And it’s not just the generic advice on how to run a game; the book contains a great deal of advice on how to run Shadowrun. It does a very good job of introducing the GM to a lot of concepts in the Shadowrun universe.
Where the book fails, substance-wise, is that it doesn’t do nearly as good of a job for the players. It’s an excellent introductory aid for the new GM, but not a very good introduction for the new player. Almost everything is directed at the gamemaster, to the point of cutting out a lot of player aids. And since the plot has some significant weak spots, the substance of the actual game is not that great. The GM parts are excellent, but the plot itself needs help. This means that if you’re buying the game to run it, about a quarter of the book isn’t going to be of much use to you. And if you’re already a good Shadowrun GM, then the GM advice isn’t going to be very helpful either; that renders about half the book obsolete. However, on a scale of 1 to 5, I’m going to rate the substance at a 3: what’s there is generally very good, it’s just that it’s not exactly what you might want. (If you don’t plan on running it, and you’re just looking for pointers on how to improve your Shadowrun GMing style, then bump this up to a four.)
Style-wise, things originally started out looking very good. The question here isn’t if book is well-written (it is), but if it accurately conveys the “Shadowrun style”. And initially, it does a decent job of it. Many classic Shadowrun concepts were introduced from the very beginning, and the writer tried very hard to make life in 2070 stand out. My first problem, however, was that they focused too hard on the wireless matrix, and virtually ignored magic for almost all of the book. In fact, a *lot* of the book is just “cool things you can do as a decker”. Magic is part of what separates Shadowrun from anything else out there, so ignoring it removes a lot of the Shadowrun style. Ignore magic, and you might as well be playing Cyberpunk.
But the big killer for me was this: Shadowrun modules tend to have a lot of behind-the-scenes things going on, shadowy figures and plots that generally become revealed. In the Shadowrun style, these figures are usually megacorporate heads, immortal elves, great dragons, and powerful spirits and matrix masters. So, who’s the mover-and-shaker in this book? A powerful elder vampire, that’s who. And not just any vampire; we get Elvis.
To me, this was the final straw. Everyone is accusing Shadowrun 4th of copying World of Darkness; having the first adventure revolve around vampiric plots really isn’t going to help matters. This is an absolutely blatant violation of the Shadowrun style; Shadowrun has such a rich world to draw off of, there is absolutely no reason at all to steal a World of Darkness theme. Elvis the Primogen was just one step too far.
Normally, since it missed the Shadowrun style so badly, I’d just score it as a 1 and be done with it. However, I’m going to factor in one other thing. This matters to me, and might not matter to you, but I think it’s important. Namely, the good folks at Fanpro, and Adam Jury in particular, bent over backwards to help me with my technical difficulties. Part of the reason I buy books at certain places is because the people there are nice; they take care of their customers, and provide excellent service. I firmly believe that places that support their customers like this deserve as much repeat business as we can send them. What’s more, Adam came out to offer his personal assistance to someone who’s been trashing SR4 all over Dumpshock. In my mind, that’s *real* style.
So, I am awarding the book an additional +2 for style. Not because the book is that good, but because the people behind it are. You may or may not like “On the Run”, and it won’t be of much use to you if you have top-notch Shadowrun GM skills. But I can’t imagine a better set of people to buy books from. All I ask is that they resolve the printing issues in the near future; that would have made this a much more positive experience for me.
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