Shadowrun

Hoi, Chummer. Welcome to the 21st Century of gaming. With a return to gaming as a player, I've taken up the task of just trying to get notes down about what has happened in the game sessions so that some of the information isn't lost over time and help track what the group is up to. Rather than just using something simple and old fashioned, like paper, or slightly newer ideas, like a Word document, I've taken to utilizing a new tool that has been discussed before.

How many times has this happened to you as a GM, or seen it happen as a player? The night started great. The adventure is underway and suddenly the group just veers off into left field and keeps on going. Who knows why. Maybe the group got caught up by some little detail the GM let out or maybe the evening wasn’t really planned and now, you’re forced to come up with information on the fly; things like NPCs with names and backgrounds, places to go, things to find, creatures to kill. All of that is great, at least when the imagination is awake and working.

Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Weekly or monthly titles that fed the imaginations of millions with colorful images and headlines whose titles would rival the best catchlines that a muckraker of the turn of the century would envy. Creating such as a GM might make for great ways to introduce players into the flavor of a campaign, but not everyone is an artist, or has the time to create such works.

More and more electronics are invading lots of spaces that used to be the domain of the ripped off piece of paper that was hastily scrawled upon to create a reminder of something for the next adventure. Laptops and Tablets have become more affordable and the use of PDFs and other file formats and programs have reduced the large, heavy library of books for one’s game to a much more manageable weight. On top of these devices comes the ability to manage one’s campaign with digital tools; from the basic like Word/Excel to more advanced programs like The Obsidian Portal site.

Updated August 29th, 2012

I spent some time and took and created a version of a Shadowrun character sheet that is fillable in Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. Most of the file is complete, but there are still a few sections that I haven't gotten to as yet to make editable, like the cybernetics page at the very end. This sheet is based on the one by Ismo version 2.1.
I recently found another SR4 Character Sheet to begin modifying from Super Spy Studios. This is a basic sheet designed for characters that can fit on two pages. Or just keep filling out and printing the additional "back pages".

From the people of Weregeek, Happy UCAS Day. 

Yes, I'm aware that these aren't real videos, but fan created products. Each of these spots was created by splicing together scenes from other shows and movies, but they are still very creative and imaginative in telling a story with those works. First up is a TV Spot by user "Bloodrunsclear." I'm guessing this is a Farscape reference.

Second is a Movie Trailer from "Harleykeen"... Yes, I get it, Harlequin... very cute name.

Stalker, from the Shadowrun Forums has created an interesting utility for Gamemasters. It is an Initiative Tracker that includes the ability to roll and sort the initiatives of PCs and NPCs alike. This utility can be downloaded to your local computer so that the javascript can be edited so that the PCs of the party are automatically inserted into the list of people in the fight, saving the GM some time. Currently it does all the rolling for every character placed in the initiative tracker, but Stalker is considering a way to allow Players to roll their own initiative with dice and that result just entered in for the character and sorting them into the order along with the NPCs. This should be a great utility for most GMs to help deal with larger numbers of NPCs and since it can be downloaded to your system, doesn't require a connection to the Net to be able to use at ones gaming table. Plus it should work on tablets and other systems that support Javascript in their browsers.

Another "Blast From the Past" that I recently ran across thanks to some gamer forums I read. Wildspace - A TSR Ad for something that looks like either a predecessor to Spelljammer.

Talk about a blast from the past. I recently came across a copy of FASA's 1990 Shadowrun Promo video. I never realized that FASA had ever done anything like this. In some ways it is much better than the current WotC ads for the "Red Box".

It features everything I'd expect from Shadowrun, and all with that old school late 80s amateur look to the sets. I was impressed by the fact that they actually did have some 3D animation in the video, but, as expected, it was very low polygons (just a few boxes with very few textures or shaders to their surfaces).