I’ve got another One Hit Wonder post I need to get up, but I figure I’ll wait a little before posting it. Not too long, though, since I’m theoretically running another one this upcoming Sunday.

But I figured I’d let people know that I’m going to be doing Shadowrun and I’m going to play around with a first wave of fixes that I want to try. When the girlfriend starts finding pictures of her character and asking me info about mechanics and setting, I figure I’ve been put on notice that I’ll be doing a command performance for Her Grace, the Duchess of Yarn-Craft.

We’ll be finishing up our current vampire game around June. (I’m quite proud of the fact that the girlfriend had mapped out the rough series of events for the next several sessions, and my character promptly derailed all of them this weekend. That’s just how I roll.) After I get back from my writing workshop in Kansas in July, I’ll be on the hotseat for Shadowrun.

I’ve made a wiki for the game already, which you can find here:
http://themotleyinstitute.pbworks.com/

I may mention updates here, but you can also get RSS feeds of updates sent to your preferred RSS feed reader. There may also be a way to get notifications of updates emailed to you, but I’m not sure how that works if you don’t have editor rights.

The general concept for the game, based off of input from the girlfriend, will revolve around a privately funded agency called The Motley Institute. It will be equal parts X-Files and BPRD. It’s been interesting talking to one of the kids, who comes at this without any prior knowledge of Shadowrun. At least, I find it more endearing than the last time it happened. When I ran my beer-and-pretzels game, I had a young man who didn’t quite get things like “reading comprehension,” “rules,” and “if you spread yourself too thin, you won’t be remotely badass.” He was the poster child for “why I don’t like taking care of high maintenance players.” If you aren’t my significant other, I’m not inclined to carry you in the game. =P

This other player instead just has a high concept character that she wants to try and immerse herself in. Which I feel pretty excited about.

I’ll be writing up some house rules. Mashing up Aspects and Fan Mail with the Edge rules. I’m also going to do Cyberware-as-an-Attribute. For a while I’ve been thinking I would just treat it like Adepts and their Magic attribute, but as I’ve put more thought into it and poked through game books, I’m realizing that there’s some flaws with that. If you can get bioware that does the same thing, costs less Essence and can’t be hacked… Well, why would you get the cyberware equivalent? There’s some stuff you can’t do with bioware (or genetic modifications or nanohives or whatever). The difference in cost theoretically equalizes it. (I haven’t done the math yet.) If you remove nuyen from the equation, then it doesn’t work so much. So… back to the drawing board for a bit.