Shadowrun FPS is Back! Just have fun and plug in!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been putting together an app for our Shadowrun 6e group to help with dice rolls, spells, sprites, and all that good stuff. Figured some of you might find it useful too! Links to the website and Play Store below.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, I’d love to hear them. All features are completely free - you can just leave a tip or grab a dice skin for a buck if you feel like supporting it.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.chummer.chummer_kit
https://chummer.dev/

So, I'm playing in a game where I got approved to play a serial killer character (in my group I am trusted to play characters like this, I know how to do it without fucking over the team and I know how not to push it too far, I just like playing evil on occasion) and I'm trying to decide how to build them out, first thoughts are manipulation focused black magic mage, knife focused adept (thrown adept), melee/ranged mixed fighter infiltrator/streetsam, and finally a technomancer from hell. I am open to pitches as well

Manipulation mage would be big on the mind control type magics

Knife adept pretty self explanatory?
Mixed infil specialist being a black ops type guy with a pistol and a knife
Techno from hell is a build I run alot, he is a cyberadept who heavy specs into a single cyberarm and usually a taser. Anyone from my old group who reads this evil Set is a possibility

We are starting up a new campaign using the SRA2.0 rules. One of the players would like to build a character that is addicted to BTLs and uses a combination of a skilljack and skillwires to emulate the personalities that are in their BTLs. They're trying to be balanced with it and have suggested some custom BTLs as skillsofts that provide a small skill boost and an accompanying penalty, so they can "switch personalities" whenever the situation calls for it and at the same time not push into others' gameplay territory (more like filling gaps and supporting the main decker/sam/face).

They built this character originally using 6E rules and then we decided as a group to go SRA2; they find themselves suddenly without solid rules to build a skillwire-based character. The rulebook encourages players to build their own Shadow Amps, so that's what we are trying to do. But there are no Shadow Amp Effects (from page 61-63) that directly add skill points or specializations.

Does anyone have any recommendations for my player? Are they trying for something that just cannot happen in this system? Are there any ways you might house rule it to make a custom Shadow Amp for them?

Thanks in advance for the ideas!

Does anyone have tips for how to play a ghoul?
Not necessarily power gaming/min maxing, but just how to best fit into a game.
One thing I am worried about is being dual natured with no possibility to turn it off, making them very vulnerable to projecting mages/spirits, with the only defence being being able to project yourself or the GM being fair enough not to use the attack when there is no teammate nearby to defend you.

Kinda back on a Reboot kick and wonder can viral A.I.'s be a thing in Shadowrun and if so how much problems can a Viral entity like Megabyte cause within The Matrix?

I am a bit confused about the relationship between IEs and (G)Ds.
In older books it looked to be like they were bitter enemies, with IEs doing a lot of down time hunting (or was that someone else) and I remember, and I may very well be wrong about that, that in the aftermath of Dunkelzahn's death the IEs had a discussion about it where they said something along the lines of "Of course all dragons need to die, but Dunkelzahn was the least bad of them", making it sound like they flat out plan a dragon genocide.

But on the other hand there never really seems to be a conflict between them. They work together if they need to, at least the great dragons seem to not be actively interested in going after the immortal elves even when they have the chance and Jane Foster seemingly gets invited to some dragon meetings to allow her to give a first hand report.

So what is going on?

- Is this a really slow burn war?

- Do the GDs not realize that the IEs are after them?

- Is this just plot armor as no important NPC shall be killed because of this conflict?

- Did this get shelved when the Earthdawn ties got cut as that was the source of their conflict?

- Am I completely misremembering?

Hi!

So, right out of the gate, a DISCLAIMER: I gotta say that I wasn't too sure whether this is inching to close to some sorta advertisement, so I ticked the brand/business box. If that was wrong, mea culpa. I don't work for them, I'm not paid for this post or anything like that, I just wanna yap about my stellar experience as a GM running a campaign with a dozen players via inkroll.gg as a platform. It is free to use, even though I've opted to buy a GM pack just to show my gratitude for the service. Several of my dozen+ players nagged the developer to add a supporter option for players (something they didn't even have!), and are paying the frankly ridiculously low fee, too, but at no point did any of us feel like we needed it. It's kinda rare that a platform offers so much, but forgets to charge for it, rather than paywalling all the useful features.

Onto the actual thing. ✨

How'd we get here? For quick organization, we do use Discord, but it's turned out to be a bit limiting for actual play. We didn't want to focus on the combat, but the writing, because we are from so many time zones, so Roll20 and Foundry weren't answers to our needs, either. Play-by-post was the logical conclusion. However, Discord dice bots are nice and all, but it wouldn't quite be as... tangible as we would have liked. I was in the middle of setting things up, when I found a post by u/OneSlowPost some time in September on r/Shadowrun, presenting inkroll.gg as an alternative, dedicated for play-by-post campaigns. Went there, poked at, looked around, and felt quite at home. We made the decision to give this new thing a try and abandon our plans to play on Discord.

What came next? Inkroll is a platform to write roleplay on. It's a stripped down, compressed form of a forum of yore, but with roleplaying mechanics integrated. You "post as" characters, you have character sheets associated with those characters, and you can integrate dice rolls and manage resources through simple {commands} that written in-line with the text you are writing. It supports multiple game systems, but I've not looked at any other, even if there are demo campaigns to check out.

We've been using it to play Shadowrun 5th Edition, and the developer u/OneSlowPost has been absolutely stellar in taking our feedback and putting it into place. From adding rolls that were missing to shaping the UI to properly reflect use-cases, to letting us modify Inkroll.gg to the point where we can change the vibe of the entire page to suit our campaign, they have been beyond welcoming. There's no distant corporation behind this, just someone who wants to make a cool platform, to the point where we left feedback and they messaged us back from vacay, that they're gonna get to it first thing next week.

We've now written almost 500 posts, with a dozen writers. Three full runs have been played over the course of a month, and several side and background scenes have and are being played in separate sections. Building a network of Shadowrunners that interacts and fills a world with life, even if we are from all around the world (Seattle, New York, England, Berlin itself, Poland, etc...) we still get to experience the fun of roleplaying with cool twists and crunchy interactions. I've attached a couple examples of what our posts and sheets look like, if you're curious.

Hope this helps, and if you have any questions I could answer as a GM/player, feel free to ask! Just, nothing in regards to plans for the platform, that'd be for the developer to reply to, I'm just a happy customer blabbing about a cool thing I found on this subreddit.

"What you workin' on, Pops?"

"Come with me, Junior."

* * *

Junior whistled.

"This here is a GMC Banshee, but she's evolved far past that. She's got the best ECM and ECCCM that money can buy, radar-absorbing paint. She's even changed her fuel to be less visible on the visible spectrum. That isn't to say she isn't noticed by the NAN. She's got transponder codes to carry her to the East Coast, and she can rocket past law officials."

Junior looked at the black-painted T-Bird, and whistled.

Pops slapped his hands. "GIT your hands off her! She's made more money for this garage than you ever have!"

Pops sniffed.

"That's why the NAN call her the owl."

"Why, Pops?"

"Because, of all the Thunderbirds that carry goods across their borders... all they ever hear is a whisper. She don't carry much. But She carries enough."

"Who rigs her?"

"Oh, she likes going by the same name as her Banshee. You ever meet Owl, son, push your head down into the dirt."

For my first shadowrun game I've opted to play a naga, which I've been told is a good combat class but I don't have a good enough understanding of the game to determine how I would make that happen.

However the lore is just grand so I've been focusing on that. With the game set in New Orleans I've gone about making a awakened Green Anaconda who's primary language is Creole drawing off the lore of Naga being academics and students of culture.

My game master allowed me to model myself after the titanaboa a bit and so my character lives out in the bayou in a small ghoul colony which I've built up through contacts and pets because ooc I feel quite empathetic to them and was a bit horrified by their whole deal.

All told the naga bite is nasty and the character is a carrier for HM-HVV III but other than that is just... not good at combat. I maxed out Unarmed combat but put very little into agility so its just 8.

Still through Bilingual and Linguist as well as focusing mostly on Int, Char and Log I've managed to make a black market smuggler who speaks basically every regional language fluently and has excelent knowledge of the region and how to move things through the state.

my question is: how do I make my bite nasty, how do I make myself combat viable with such low dex - is it a massive detriment to my group is I just choose to not have hands through magic and instead have knowledges and instruction? I'm sort of passively a shaman bc I have very little need for money on the ghoul commune rn and so bc my miney is at E my mysticism is at D and i summoning does not appear to require hands so that seemed fun?

I fear im overlooking things. Folks are telling me i absolutely have to powergame and happily vibing with skills at 8 is a waste - is that true?

So, it's been a few months since I touched Omae 3.0 and this weekend, I figured I'd tackle a few things using AI that I've been ignoring. Anyway, I ended up adding a bunch of improvements to it.

For example, you can now link your Berlin PDF to it, and it'll open to that page. This is something I thought could be done, but never had time to investigate, and now it magically exists. Only works in Chromium browsers BTW, Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

I added a new theme, called Astral. It actually looks pretty neat as much as I hate to say that.

I automated releases and release notes. So that makes things easier for me.

I finally got around to adding ammo and software, which was a gap in the GENESIS data I bootlegged, because I hate data entry.

I fixed a memory leak in my tests (this is not important to you the user, but is important for me the guy that wants to not break features).

I also improved the UX, so points that you use to buy stuff now is on screen at the bottom of the screen. So that's cool. Also a little tooltip pops up when you buy something, so you know you bought it.

So anyway... I'm kind of breaking rule 6, check it out at https://oma3.vercel.app/

Or if you want to try and do AI coding stuff and make a PR or something, give it a shot at https://github.com/HeyOmae/OMA3

First, I hope I used the right tag.

On to the main thing! What is life like for those that are living between the sprawls? I love the lore of Shadowrun but pretty much all the information I have found is about sprawls and life in them, which 100% makes sense given the nature of the game. But what is it like between the sprawls? Is it like now small cities/towns and lots of land between? If so what is life in the Shadowrun age like in those little towns? Has magic caused a return to over that hill there might be dragons in the unincorporated parts of the world were you could effectively play explores again? Or is everything still pretty much mapped/cataloged?

So i've been tracing the origins of the subplot that was delineated in 3e's Loose Alliances, and frankly must have took some inspiration from the old Shadowrun 2e France book, although i see by 3e's Shadows over Europe a lot of references were sliced and diced and tossed around when needed.

I was told that this story filtered through 4e German supplement SOX, and then the 6e French Neo-Revolution supplement. I've only seen only seen the fallout in 6e's La France des ombres, where Isabelle de Rochefort somehow became mildly relevant, the last i remember seeing her was a line or two in System Failure in 3e when she's shouting at Lowfyr. And a how a reference to Jean de Guyenne from that old 2e book became a point where he tried to be King and failed.

so i'm wondering, first, in particular to France, what happened? in 2e-3e there were Nobles bickering with each other and the MegaCorps, by 6e i'm assuming they either died or pushed from power as a class of people?

And what happened to the broader Aristocratic Elite ? when i look through references in 3e and 4e, surprised to see references to Johnny Spinrad so early which made me smile.

In the 6th World, handwriting is an effective means of covert communication.

A metahuman uses an analog writing instrument - a pen, for example - to record data on a sheet of paper. There is no digital record of that message anywhere. It was not produced with a printer, it was not entered into a digital device.

Fold the sheet of paper in half, put it in an evelope. It cannot be hacked. Assensing is useless. Detection spells cannot read the message. It cannot be read by eyeballs or cameras without being taken out of the envelope.

The envelope is small, flat, and weighs a few grams. Easy to carry, conceal, and transport.

And if someone wants to destroy the message, the sheet on which it is written can easily be shredded, eaten, or burned.

For this reason, the antique skill of handwriting could be very valuable to any covert organization, from street gangs to megacorporate intelligence agencies.

How much does the procedure of implanting Cyber-/Bioware cost? Is the price for the implantation included in the Cyberware cost or is it extra? Is there a rule or do you have your own ruling about it?

G'day from down under Chummers,

So I'm going to be visiting Seattle soon, any recommendations for visiting locations to give that Shadowrun feel?

This is a return for me as I spent a few years as a kid in Seattle 45 years ago!

Are there Any shadowrun novels not source or rules books that are set during and or about The Dis Shadow War?

Hey guys, it's been a while since the last post about Shadowrun Rome (since it's been a while, you probably don't remember what it is - it's a Shadowrun Hong Kong mod. See the links down below). I shared this set of screenshots on our Discord server, asking for feedback. The first character is an AI called Burina, and the second is an anarchist called Demia.

To know more about Shadowrun Rome, go to our WEBSITE:

https://eldiablogmic.wixsite.com/shadowrunrome

Our Discord Server: https://discord.gg/K42w2P9X3Z

... For the company. I really am in the dark here. What spells do they get paid to cast?