Grim and Gritty
Grittiness often adds believability. Reality is rarely pristine. People will point to Blade Runner as an example, though the earlier Star Wars movies come to mind for me (even if many of the Imperial glimpses are sterile). Whether it's stuff lying around or curses slipping out in stressful situations, these things help make a fictional setting feel more real and relatable.
Blackwing might overdo it a bit. It's a fantasy (I suppose with a "dark" or "noir" descriptor) story that seems to really delight in trudging through the filth of its established world. There's a complacent border against threatening near-gods and their peoples. There's a blasted zone between with semi-toxic dust and monsters, navigable only by use of moons and math. It's got corruption, slums and shady dealings within the capital city. Basically all the characters are scarred in ways both physical and mental.
The book is competently written, but I think the focus on all the darker sides of things might have been what made it difficult to really get into and stick with. So even when I had some time, I didn't necessarily pick it back up. It's not that it was bad. And some aspects of the story even resonated with things I put in one of my worlds years ago. I'm undecided on reading the sequel, but it's not out yet, so I have time to think about it.
I also happened across an address of a website that lets you play old SNES (I think some other platforms as well) games in a web browser. So what's the first one I pick up? Shadowrun.
I have some vague memories of playing it back when it was new. I don't know if it was borrowed, purchased, or rented. It kind of captured my imagination at the time, back when I would peruse the tech splatbooks and think of how cool that stuff was even if not playing the RPG. It was also my first encounter with the word "kitsune," as there was a fox shifter character who went by that name. Of course, even then, it occurred to me that Jake Armitage, the main character, is sort of broken - able to get multiple cyberware pieces without affecting his use of shaman magic. Ooo.
The game itself is gloriously terrible by today's standards. It's hard to judge a video game from that long ago. I mean, you sort of have to give a pass on the graphics - of course they don't measure up today. And the controls are clunky: press button to bring up aiming reticle, use D-pad/arrows to move it to the target, press button to fire repeatedly. That doesn't pause things and the enemies move, sometimes shaking off the reticle. They can also shoot from slightly off the screen in most cases. You can only save at beds, which may be a long way from a boss fight. I'm not sure you could so much better with technology of the era, though.
Some of the decisions, however... There are some hard points in the game, making grinding for XP/karma and money a virtual necessity. There's a fair degree of backtracking through areas. Some of the "puzzles" are rather opaque (ordering an ice shipment to a dock in order to get rid of mermaids who like warm water so you can get a boat to go to another zone). There's a timed section, requiring you to reach a certain point (without much in the way of directions) before a certain amount of real play time passes or get a game over. And in an example of "random damage" there are enemies that can spawn on perhaps 80% of the "city" screens that just shoot at you from bushes and windows. Granted, there's supposed to be a price on Jake's head, but it's a little ridiculous hit squads are everywhere trying to shoot him down in the open.
And yet, it's kind of cool. It has a certain atmosphere to it that fits Shadowrun. There's magic, metahumans, and tech. Nostalgia might be a factor, but I found it fun to play back through.
That, in turn, led me to reinstalling Shadowrun: Hong Kong and downloading a couple fan-made adventures. So I launched into The Caldecott Caper knowing it had a good number of downloads and positive reviews, but not expecting the depth of it. I figured it might make for a decent story, but instead I've been playing hours of one of the best workshop-built adventures I've seen out of any game. It takes the PC from a paid security job into shadowrunning in a plausible way (you always need to answer how someone with thousands of nuyen worth of gear is scraping by financially), introduces a selection of interesting NPCs (some romanceable even), offers a base of operations while building up and doing work toward a big heist, and then it doesn't end there. Several factions are at work, popping up here and there with the PC group often caught in the middle. There are some side missions along the way that add things to do.
I haven't finished it yet, but it's so very well put together. About the only things that I would expect from an official expansion campaign that I haven't seen out of this would be matching portraits and models for characters (some don't) and maybe a couple more side missions.
Blackwing might overdo it a bit. It's a fantasy (I suppose with a "dark" or "noir" descriptor) story that seems to really delight in trudging through the filth of its established world. There's a complacent border against threatening near-gods and their peoples. There's a blasted zone between with semi-toxic dust and monsters, navigable only by use of moons and math. It's got corruption, slums and shady dealings within the capital city. Basically all the characters are scarred in ways both physical and mental.
The book is competently written, but I think the focus on all the darker sides of things might have been what made it difficult to really get into and stick with. So even when I had some time, I didn't necessarily pick it back up. It's not that it was bad. And some aspects of the story even resonated with things I put in one of my worlds years ago. I'm undecided on reading the sequel, but it's not out yet, so I have time to think about it.
I also happened across an address of a website that lets you play old SNES (I think some other platforms as well) games in a web browser. So what's the first one I pick up? Shadowrun.
I have some vague memories of playing it back when it was new. I don't know if it was borrowed, purchased, or rented. It kind of captured my imagination at the time, back when I would peruse the tech splatbooks and think of how cool that stuff was even if not playing the RPG. It was also my first encounter with the word "kitsune," as there was a fox shifter character who went by that name. Of course, even then, it occurred to me that Jake Armitage, the main character, is sort of broken - able to get multiple cyberware pieces without affecting his use of shaman magic. Ooo.
The game itself is gloriously terrible by today's standards. It's hard to judge a video game from that long ago. I mean, you sort of have to give a pass on the graphics - of course they don't measure up today. And the controls are clunky: press button to bring up aiming reticle, use D-pad/arrows to move it to the target, press button to fire repeatedly. That doesn't pause things and the enemies move, sometimes shaking off the reticle. They can also shoot from slightly off the screen in most cases. You can only save at beds, which may be a long way from a boss fight. I'm not sure you could so much better with technology of the era, though.
Some of the decisions, however... There are some hard points in the game, making grinding for XP/karma and money a virtual necessity. There's a fair degree of backtracking through areas. Some of the "puzzles" are rather opaque (ordering an ice shipment to a dock in order to get rid of mermaids who like warm water so you can get a boat to go to another zone). There's a timed section, requiring you to reach a certain point (without much in the way of directions) before a certain amount of real play time passes or get a game over. And in an example of "random damage" there are enemies that can spawn on perhaps 80% of the "city" screens that just shoot at you from bushes and windows. Granted, there's supposed to be a price on Jake's head, but it's a little ridiculous hit squads are everywhere trying to shoot him down in the open.
And yet, it's kind of cool. It has a certain atmosphere to it that fits Shadowrun. There's magic, metahumans, and tech. Nostalgia might be a factor, but I found it fun to play back through.
That, in turn, led me to reinstalling Shadowrun: Hong Kong and downloading a couple fan-made adventures. So I launched into The Caldecott Caper knowing it had a good number of downloads and positive reviews, but not expecting the depth of it. I figured it might make for a decent story, but instead I've been playing hours of one of the best workshop-built adventures I've seen out of any game. It takes the PC from a paid security job into shadowrunning in a plausible way (you always need to answer how someone with thousands of nuyen worth of gear is scraping by financially), introduces a selection of interesting NPCs (some romanceable even), offers a base of operations while building up and doing work toward a big heist, and then it doesn't end there. Several factions are at work, popping up here and there with the PC group often caught in the middle. There are some side missions along the way that add things to do.
I haven't finished it yet, but it's so very well put together. About the only things that I would expect from an official expansion campaign that I haven't seen out of this would be matching portraits and models for characters (some don't) and maybe a couple more side missions.
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