Looking at old school Shadowrun – Videos soon?

My book is in such poor shape!

Anyone that follows me, knows I am an Old School Gamer (OSG) and I promote old school games that I grew up playing vs mainstream games. If I do play mainstream games, I try to play them with the Old School mentality/spirit, which includes judgement calls, story trumps rules and making things up when there really isn’t a rule to keep the flow of the game going on. One of my mottos is, “The books are just guidelines, you rule the book, not the other way around”

Anyhow, one of the games I enjoyed playing as a young teen was Shadowrun. I remember fondly playing as a human Decker, and running around with my Commodore 64 like keyboard (because that was all the rage) and plugging in to fight the cyber spiders and obtain information like a hacker!

My group originally started with 1e, and then we quickly moved to 2e when one of my friends was able to get a hold of the core rules book. We played 1e, because my friend’s father was a gamer, and pass it along to him for us to play.. ya know, being an adult meant “fun is over” *Laughs*

The 1e rules are a heavy and crunchy, but provided days and days of countless adventures running around the streets of Seattle, doing “jobs” for some guy named Mr Johnson, or in our case we called him, “The Johnson”.

It was good times and I have a ton of these books on my shelf, I have a youtube channel and there is a lack of old school Shadowrun going on. Lots of videos about 4e, 5e and even 6e, but not a lot about 1e or 2e. So why not rekindle my love for Shadowrun and while I do that, make some videos for those that wish to follow along.

Tell me what you think? Do you want to see videos on Shadowrun 1e/2e going over the rules and lore?

9 thoughts on “Looking at old school Shadowrun – Videos soon?

  1. Hey there, me again.
    Ah Shadowrun … the memories ! When 1st editon came up, I remember playing a Street Mage (yeah the one with the funny hat and the awesome cane), I had a Nightsky limo and was very badass ! So much fun we had …
    My second character was a fully cyber-up troll (almost street-sam level) that was a close combat monster. Never really had the chance to play with him, but just spending time with friends creating characters was good enough.
    It quickly became my favorite RPG at the time (and still is in my top 5 RPG of all time).

    For some reason I skipped 2nd edition, but played my fair share of 3rd (just loooooooved the crunchyness of the rules). 3rd was more mercenaries doing dirty jobs than full “punk” but still far from what later editions would force you to become.

    So yeah, if you do some videos on the first 3 editions of that wonderful game, at least you’ll have me watching !

    Good gaming !

    1. hey thanks for commenting, appreciate it! Glad to see you following. I am not sure what edition I’ll do videos on just yet. I am still reading 1e, to wrap my head around it all again. I was like, “wow my 12 year old self understood this? lol”

  2. Yeah I know, I had the same feeling when I decided to read my old copy of Dark Conspiracy 1st edition (based on the Twilight: 2000 rules).
    For example, if you want to calculate concussion damage due to explosive you had to use the square root of a division …

    My best guess is that at the time we were mostly using our imagination and into a “let’s see what cool stuff my character can do” mindset, and less into trying to figure out the exact mechanical system in order to play the game “the right way”, like I tend to do today, unfortunately.

    I remember that 1st edition of Shadowrun system had some issues, and could be easily abused by crafty players. But at the same time, our group was more focused on having fun and not really into breaking the rules so that we had to win at all cost.

    1. YES you nailed it brother. We, now older, are looking at it “the right way” vs “yeah this is cool, do it!”

      Also yes, SR1e had issues, which got cleaned up by 2e, but caused a few more issues, and was fixed by 3e. I briefly played 3e when it came out and I remember it fixing the initiative order.

      1. Looking forward to watching your videos !
        Are you planning to do some sort of “let’s read the rulebook” kind of thing or more a “I’m gonna create a character and see how it goes” kind of thing ?

        Nostalgia aside, maybe it will help me decide if I should hunt down a copy, either this one or the 2nd edition one.

        Also, I had to tell you : just like you I firmly think that books are just guidelines, they help you create your game and are not Texts of Laws that should never be modified, ever.

        1. I am going to explore the book, not really a “Let’s read” but I’ll touch upon things in the book, go over some history with commentary. I am starting with 1e, because 1e and 2e are similar enough. Why 1e? because its where it all started, and its also what hooked me with Shadowrun. I was handed the 1e book one day when young teen me asked, “hey can we play D&D with guns and flying things cars?” and I was hooked. I probably was interested in it due how everything in the ’80s was doing the predict the future.. and the back to the future movies. lol

          also, sorry you’re comments are getting stuck in the queue for approval, I am not sure why its doing that.

          1. Yeah, that is strange, as when I write either a comment or reply to yours, I never automatically see my post. Most of the time I have to wait for you to answer in order to see what I wrote appears on the page.

            BTW, I always put a checkmark when it’s asking me : “Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.”

            Anyway, I found a used copy of the SR2 rulebook on eBay, very tempted to buy it. However it is a bit on the expensive side of my wallet, that is why I hesitate.

          2. I looked through the settings… I think it SHOULD BE good now. I am not sure, we’ll see… Yeah, the SR books have JUMPED up in prices, I have bought a few in the last couple of years, and I was picking them up for $5 to $10 a piece when I saw it. Beat up copies, but I wanted more the 1 copy for the table. I have 4 now, plus the hardcover. My original and hardcover never leave the shelf. The others are table copies for gaming. I only have 1 copy of the 1e rules, and 1 copy of the 3e Fanpro edition.

  3. You are SO right about prices … Over the years I was able to collect quite a large collection of Shadowrun books (mostly for 3rd edition). At the time I could find sourcebooks and splatbooks aplenty for a fraction of the price they are now.

    And because of you (well, not really BECAUSE of you, but I hope you get my meaning) I finally decided to pull the trigger and get the SR2 corebook. Almost spent 50$ for a used copy ! At least it included shipping.

    A bit unrelated to that, I found out that many people online are saying that the 5th edition of the game is almost, if not superior, to the “mythical” 2nd edition. Do you have an opinion on that ?
    I know next to nothing about this edition, I once had the core rulebook in my possession, and was turned off by the sheer size of it (almost 500 pages !). So that’s why I decide to get rid of it.

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