Back home for Christmas again, reading through my old bookshelves. This time up: Shadowrun, 2nd Edition! (Trivia: my first real post here was about Shadowrun and V:TES. There’s actually quite a few weird post pairs that share a tag in common.)

First off, I forgot how good the setting was. Now that I’ve been to the Pacific Northwest, the grunge/tribal/punk/cyber/enviro/magic mix makes even more sense. And this isn’t even one of the supplements with their witty “BBS” running commentary. (I remember one supplement that didn’t really have any new rules or material or anything, it was just a surprisingly good introduction to corporate finance with the commenters dropping jokes and plot hooks along the way.)

Second off, I never actually played the tabletop, so I’d heard stories, but looking at it now I really realize how terrible these mechanics are. Combat, magic, decking, rigging, astral stuff - all completely different systems, all of them atrocious. If you had a balanced party it must’ve been like playing four different bad games at once. Or one at a time. I think it’s the weird insistence on doing everything with d6s.

I still plan on creating a masterlist of the happycore singles and starting on the mixes/livesets, it’s just that it slows the browser something terrible to look back too far, and every time I try to clear out the tabs I already have open I end up opening more.