andmaybegayer:

Shadowrun is a combo fantasy/cyberpunk RPG with a classless character system where you build up a character out of skills. I haven’t played a lot of it but I have read the rulebook.

The basic setting is that the world goes through cycles of fantasy and mundanity, and a new cycle of fantasy (the Sixth World) started in the early 2000’s, and we play in the aftereffects of that, sometime between the 2050’s and the 2100’s. Some humans randomly turned into orcs and goblins, some human kids are born as elves and dwarves, dragon’s awake for centuries-long slumbers beneath mountains, some people (mostly Native Americans in the setting) find out that they can do magic.

It’s also the dawn of the technology age, so the combination of magic and the internet produces your standard explosion of technological advancements for any cyberpunk game. By the time you start playing, there are cybernetic enhancements, energy weapons, Cool Future Drugs, etc. and thanks to a number of major disruptions to the status quo like the internet being destroyed, the Native American liberation movement seizing half of North America, and the heartbreaking death of the first dragon president of the United States (RIP Dunkelzhan), corporations have taken over and are more or less their own micronations. You usually play as a SINless, someone who isn’t tracked with a System Identification Number, which makes you particularly suited to Doing Crime without getting caught.

In theory the main loop of the game is Shadowrunning, doing corporate espionage for one of the various corporations that control the world, which usually involves breaking and entering in the physical world and hacking stuff in the Matrix, the global computer network that replaces the internet and into which many people are jacked all the time. You do this to further your own investigations into things you care about, look after your own interests, or just get paid, like in most RPG’s. You have various skills (Strength, Dex, Magic, Hacking, Tinkering, etc.) where you can spend points to improve each skill, and as you improve it you unlock abilities. So you can build up a brawler hacker or a magical wheelman if you want, without needing a class system.

Shadowrun’s combat isn’t my favourite, I like Cyberpunk’s Friday Night Firefight, but it has a fantastic setting. Dragon’s are great, they’re all hyper-wealthy superbeings who are behind major organizations or corporations and they make plans decades or centuries in advance. I you are involved in a dragon’s plan they probably ensured your parents had sex on a particular day so you’d be born at the right time. they are so unbelievably powerful that they take on an almost godlike stature in the world of Shadowrun and they are so fuckin hard to write for.

Your Essence kind of works as a class system; directing its finite amount towards being a mage/hacker/rigger/street samurai are basically exclusive. And then there’s the weird “prioritize race, magic use, wealth, and skills” character creation.

Also as part of an attempt to spread it to people who had a bookstore nearby but not a game store to get dice, it uses D6s for everything, which means both a lot of rolling and combat has a really narrow margin between “narrow miss” and “catastrophic kill”.