Shadowrundown

I. Dear Reader,

Last Monday, I published a 4000+ word half-report, half-essay about Shadowrun on Rascal News. The big thing that the article does is talk about how there’s a lot of negativity about Shadowrun as a game but the more I asked around, that negativity seemed to actually be about how the publisher Catalyst Game Labs handled the game.

At Rascal, we’ve written a lot of stories that are “here’s a bad practice at a tabletop company”. And this could’ve been another story like that. There were freelancers complaining about poor treatment and I could’ve just done a story about them. Of course, very often, freelancers who are being treated badly want to be anonymous because they’re afraid of repercussions. But it’s hard to tell a story about anonymous people that makes readers care about them as people. They become statistics too easily. And making people care is the most important thing.

So this story ended up primarily being about fans. Now fans have lots of opinions and they have no financial stake so they can talk more freely. Which is good. But then you have to be really careful about using someone as a stand-in for thousands of people. Opinions aren’t equal. Some are just wronger than others. If you read the article, you’ll see me lampshading this problem a lot. I don’t want to write an article about “somebody on the internet is angry”. That’s a recipe for madness.

So instead, I start out very far back. I ask: What’s the deal with Shadowrun? Why is it so famous? Why it so famous for being complicated?

And I trust that asking those questions will take me to interesting places. I ended up speaking to three players (two of whom like the game but are broadly negative about its current state, one of whom is positive but is a demo agent for Catalyst so biased the other way). I also ended up speaking to people who worked on the game (anonymously) because hey, guess what, they’re often the biggest fans. These people were truly experts on this subject. They have literal decades-long relationship with this game. And talking to people like that is just the coolest thing to do.

There’s at least 10 hours of recorded interviews behind the article, maybe more. There’s discord conversations, slack DMs, and email exchanges. In the end, I feel like I find really good answers to my questions and I paint this nuanced picture. Shadowrun is an anti-corporate game that is published in a very corporate way. And honestly, I could probably double my wordcount and still have more to unpack about that statement. But hey, I have deadlines and it’s good to try leave some stuff for future articles.

I’m genuinely already thinking about future articles about cyberpunk as a genre, maybe look at Cyberpunk Red and maybe surprisingly Mothership‘s A Pound of Flesh. That’s more criticism but reportage-wise, there’s going to be more stories about the nature of corporate publishing in RPGs because that’s the water we swim in.

Yours cybercorporately,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• On Dice Exploder, there’s nice discussion about You Will Die In This Place. It’s interesting that once again it’s the characters who get the bulk of the discussion with hardly any conversation about its mechanical or world design, which is I feel pretty cool.

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III. Links of the Week

• Sharang Biswas writes a fantastic review of Stewpot, the fantasy-adventurers-run-an-inn game, and meditates on coziness: “Stewpot thus creates a lilting, easygoing, rhythm—a rhythm that harmonizes beautifully with the game’s cozy goals. This is a departure from the rest of the cozy genre, or at least from videogames of the genre. In the videogame world, cozy games are often criticized for exhibiting coziness only at the surface level, nestling exploitative, capitalist tendencies at their heart.”
• Loved Kieron Gillen ooh-ing and ahh-ing over Teeth: False Kingdom, which only solidifies my desire to run it: “You play a group of desperate lickspickles to a berserk tyrant, who gives you tasks which are likely close to impossible. Things escalate in the mission, turning an impossible situation to an ever more ludicrous one. At the end, you return to beg the berserk tyrant for your lives. Some of you are punished, perhaps even executed. Replacements are sent in, and repeat, until the world burns.”
• Also, on Old Men Running The World, an interview with Josh Fox about the grimdark-with-hope qualities of Ex-Tenebris.
• Asa Donald writes about “bookplay in TTRPGs” building on ideas by jay dragon about the importance of books in RPGs as props, anchors, and artworks.
• Andrew over at GeekNative talks about Magpie’s card-based PbtA game, Zombie World, whose rulebook is now available free.
• Not RPGs but: I enjoyed this interview with game designer Nathalie Lawhead: “I hate the word nostalgia, because to me this is more. It’s our collective fantasy. It’s a type of reality.”

From the archive:

• Always worth talking about the value of reincorporation so I’m resharing this Burn After Running post: “All you have to do is refer back to cool, incidental details that were established earlier in the game. Ideally, these incidental details are provided by the players – whether they realise this or not.” (Issue 117, November 2022)

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IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• SPINE is a dark solo TTRPG about losing yourself in a book… Play by reading and following prompts in the endnotes. Claim your free copy for a limited time!
• Yggdrasil MGZ is a one person ‘zine featuring art, essays, fiction, and gaming material for the Torchbearer RPG and B/X Era Dungeons & Dragons.

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• Far Roofs, a game of mythic rats by Jenna Moran, reduced from $27 to $6.
• 5e Treasures, a collection of D&D supplements for loot and treasure.

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.