Shadowrun Game Day Thoughts

I like Shadowrun quite a bit, and I think the style of play suggested by that game and setting really lends itself towards the Game Day application (see previous post). So Shadowrun is going to be one of the games in rotation but I wanted to post a few ideas I've had so that people had the right idea.

The first thing is that the actual runs won't be limited to a single city, or even a single country. There are a lot of really cool places and people in the world of 2071 and I'd like to get an opportunity to spread out. Now, with that said, each runner is still going to need a home, and I'd like to use Seattle as the default "base."

Each runner's piece of illegal gear will need to be written up on a small gear card that I have, for several reasons. The first is that every single Shadowrun character sheet I've seen has had very little space for equipment, which is odd considering how much emphasis the game puts on high tech gadgetry to get in and out of situations. Having each piece of illegal gear on a card allows for a much better management of on-hand equipment, so you don't have to take everything with you (some of it may be impossible to pass customs with anyway depending on its legality code). It also allows the player to jot notes about what the gear does for quick reference.

Also each runner's contacts will be written up on a small contact card, similar to the gear card. This avoids the issue of having too little space on the character sheet for contacts and makes managing them much easier. Your contacts are your lifeblood, and one of the rules I'll be using is the Friend of a Friend system - it's possible, depending on how connected your contact is, that they know someone in a city or area where you otherwise are without a friend. This will be the primary means for gaining new contacts.

I'm going to keep the naming convention of metal song titles for each run, and I might jump around a bit between artists. Definitely Iron Maiden's on the docket, but there are a lot of Megadeth titles that would work as well, plus some Metallica names I didn't get to use.

Official Game Day Post

I like continued campaigns with overarching stories, but I'm getting to the point where I can't seem to get players together on a regular basis to make it worth it. But I've still got a lot of ideas and access to a lot of scenarios and settings, and I want to start making it work. And thus begins ...

The Official DFGA Game Day!

Personally, especially lately, I've found my Fridays to be dull and boring, so I propose Friday late afternoon/evenings for the Game Day. Sunday would also work, I think, especially now that football season is over.

The concept of Game Day is a day to game - anything, something, in a format similar to the various anthology TV series (Outer Limits, Amazing Stories, Tales from the Crypt, etc.). Board games and RPGs would be the mainstay, and most of the RPGs I plan to have available with pregenerated characters for ease of play. This would allow us to play many different types of games in many different types of genres without having to worry about missing people. The goal would be to have each scenario take up a session with little or no overlap.

I also want to encourage others to take the helm of GM, as this format is perfect for many people to try their hand at gamemastering.

Here are some games/genres I've got planning right now: Shadowrun, RuneWars (board game), World War II, 1930s pulp adventure, space pulp adventures (like Star Wars), Victorian era monster hunting, modern day spy ops, Western horror, 1920s Mythos horror, D&D-esque fantasy adventures, pirates on the high seas, superheroes and villains, colonial era mystery and adventure, and many others!

The League 2000

Harris mentioned to me some time ago (years?) about a forum post he read that kind of stuck with me. It was about the League of Reagan-era Gentlemen and followed the trend of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in the sense that a group of otherwise unrelated characters were brought together to foil some plot/defeat some evil.

The idea has been rolling around in my head for quite a while and I decided I wanted to do a one-shot with this idea. It would be with Savage Worlds and would involve the League in 1999 - on the cusp of the 21st century. Some villain(s) were threatening the world and only an assortment of characters from the past 25 years stood in their way.

The premise behind the League is that the characters of fiction are real. Most of the most renown characters in the past 30 years have been TV or movie characters - larger than life, people whose name you know even if you haven't seen them or read them.

Here are some characters I brainstormed. You'll see some of these fulfill different niches, and more than a few are essentially "duplicates" (fulfilling the same role). But you get the idea.

John McClain – Die Hard

John Rambo – First Blood

Doc Emmet Brown – Back to the Future

Clarice Starling – Silence of the Lambs

Sarah Connor – Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Jules Winnfield – Pulp Fiction

Egon Spangler – Ghostbusters

Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez – Highlander

Ash Williams – Evil Dead II

Roy Neary – Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Karate Kid – Karate Kid

Cole Sear – The Sixth Sense

Agent J – Men in Black

“Crocodile” Mick Dundee – Crocodile Dundee

David Lightman – War Games

Thoughts for a Game Day

No kidding it's been a while. Well, I've been thinking, and thinking, and thinking, and sadly not playing. Aaron has a new Fantasy Craft campaign but sadly that's already falling victim to the dreaded "missing players in a small group" attack that seems to crop up at an alarming rate. All for good reasons, of course, so no hits there, just a reality of trying to play an ongoing RPG campaign with mid- to late-20s adults.

So I've been thinking about the best way to rectify this. I've got some ideas, and I'd like to repurpose this blog as a sounding board for those ideas. I'll post something in a few days once I work out a few kinks, but my idea is a sort of open game day - a day in the week devoted to gaming of some sort, including RPGs, board games, card games, and MAYBE video games (though that gets a lot of attention anyway). No ongoing campaign, essentially a series of one shots or one shot like campaigns sprinkled amongst other gaming related things.