Shadowrun Sixth World Part 4 – Campaign Wrap-up

Posted on August 25, 2020August 25, 2020 by Alfred Bonnabel

The Final Battle Approaches?

Our fourth, and final, session of Shadowrun 6e saw us working our way through the final pieces of the “Free Seattle” scenario. I endeavored to stay fairly close to the gist of the final runs, but I found myself departing more and more from the scenario as it really felt like the political intrigue and behind the scenes action was a bit more than we wanted to tackle.

As mentioned last time, I was using Erika Hoffman as the group’s point of contact for the missions. The angle was that the governor and secretary of state needed some intel, favors, and blackmail on the various representatives attending the independence summit. The first session saw us getting some dirt on the Salish-Sidhe rep and arranging the removal of a bad UCAS rep to get a favor from a UCAS military officer. This session saw us steal a dragon egg as a favor for the Sea Dragon and dig up some dirt for some corporate rivals. Ultimately we turned all of the info we had gained over to Erika who was able to pass it up the chain. This information allowed the governor to negotiate some very agreeable terms for Seattle’s independence from the UCAS as well as some trade/mutual defense concessions from the neighboring powers.

Ultimately, we felt good about how things ended up and had a fun time roleplaying some of the scenarios. I’m not sure if I quite got the Shadowrun vibe down, but everyone was happy in the end so I call that a win.

Final Thoughts

We made it! The Elder Minion and I have finished our mini-campaign for Shadowrun Sixth World and we had a fun time overall.

This is what we really liked about this playthrough:

Roleplaying in a futuristic Seattle was a blast. It was great having an opportunity to play in an area we were already familiar with and really helped establish the atmosphere.
The lore of Shadowrun is really awesome as always.
The dice in the beginner box set are really sweet.
We really dig the dice pool mechanic and had a fun time rolling fistfuls of dice.

Here are some of the things that we did not enjoy or had difficulty with:

The beginner box set is very rough. The text did not really do a good job of explaining the rules, the character sheets were laid out poorly and missing text, the item cards used abbreviations instead of the full text for values, and “Battle Royale” doesn’t really do a good job of establishing what Shadowrun is all about. Many members of the community advised me to bypass the beginner box set and just go straight to the core rulebook and that is sound advice.
The structure of how the “Battle Royale” and “Free Seattle” adventures are laid out feels really barebones. “Free Seattle” in particular had no maps and very little explanation of how the encounter should unfold. The scenarios real feel more like rough guidelines that a gamemaster then has to fill in the gaps with. I’m not sure if that is the same format other modules in the series follow, but for me it felt like I could have done just as well with a homebrew scenario.
Hacking feels like an overly complex system that was not very well explained or supported in the beginner set material. For that reason, we tended to just do a series of opposing roles to resolve any attempts. That probably means we missed out on a key aspect of the game, but after pouring over the rules long enough at the table it just felt like it was time to move on.

So there you have it, we have come to the end of our time with Shadowrun. Will the Elder Minion and I be returning to this system in the future? Possibly, but with a different edition or by adapting the Shadowrun lore to another ruleset. I have had members of the Shadowrun community share their experiences and recommendations for visiting third edition, so we may add that to a future Tabletop RPG Sampler mini-campaign.

Thank you for joining us for our playthrough of Shadowrun Sixth World as part of the Tabletop RPG Sampler project. Coming next week…