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Saturday, June 16th is Free RPG Day ‘12 and with it comes a slew of new and interesting little releases. They can usually be divided between tasters for new games that will be released at Gen Con this forthcoming August and support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera. In general, the tasters for the new, “hot” games are highly anticipated and on the day itself, in high demand, but come the day, it would be remiss of us to ignore the less-in-demand titles. Many of these it should be made clear, are worth your time and effort to make it to your friendly, local gaming store to get hold of a copy. One such title is Shadowrun Quick-Start Rules, provided by Catalyst Game Labs.

First published by FASA in 1989, Shadowrun is a roleplaying set in a near future in which cybernetics, magic and fantasy creatures co-exist, and which combines the cyberpunk, urban fantasy and crime genres. So you can have a Dwarf Street Samurai and an Ork Street Shaman, and a Dragon really can run for President of the United Canadian and American States. For the most characters in the game are Shadowrunners, specialist subcontractors that undertake dirty and illegal work that corporations and governments want done without resorting to their own assets. The setting is not necessarily to everyone’s tastes, but it is well supported and well developed.

The Shadowrun Quick-Start Rules come as the flipside of the BattleTech: A Time of War Quick-Start Rules, but essentially they are separate products so will be reviewed apart. The Shadowrun Quick-Start Rules are an easy read, explaining the game’s dicepool mechanics and rules with numerous examples that make use of the book’s four sample Shadowrunners. Essentially, they require rolls of six-sided dice with results of five and six counting as successes. The number of successes needed changes, but never the target on the dice. Throughout the booklet, the margins are used to explain or expand upon aspects of the rules, often with reference to the Shadowrun, Twentieth Anniversary Edition.

The four Shadowrunners include a Human Combat Adept, a Human Hacker, an Ork Street Samurai, and a Dwarf Street Shaman. They are fully worked and like the rest of the book, easy to grasp. It is a pity that the artwork does not match the characters. For example, the Human Hacker is illustrated with a picture of an Ork Hacker!

The adventure included in the Shadowrun Quick-Start Rules is not really an adventure. Rather “A Night on the Town” is an encounter, though a very detailed encounter. The Shadowrunners get a call to meet a “Mister Johnson,” their next employer, at a dive pit known as the Aces. Just as they spot their contact, there is a gunshot and all hell breaks loose! It is up to the Shadowrunners to determine what is going on and protect their contact. The encounter is pleasingly detailed and it should be relatively easy for the GM to run. That said, the adventure should not last long in terms of game play and it would have been nice if there had some information as what could happen after the encounter in terms of a sequel.

Physically, the Shadowrun Quick-Start Rules are well presented with what would normally be full colour artwork handled such that its detail is not lost in greyscale. It is just a pity that the adventure lacks length to support more than a taster of both Shadowrun’s setting and game play, because otherwise, thus is a solidly done package.

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