I'm kicking off a newbie-friendly SR4A campaign around mid-September.
The campaign will begin in 2052 which means no commlinks/AR, Technomancers or metavariants...yet.

I'll be using a blend of official adventures, meta-story and homegrown material so I would prefer players who are not familiar with any of the previously published GM sourcebooks, novels and missions.

Complete newbies to the setting and system are more than welcome as I will be "growing" the world each week with player handouts detailing history, society and the mechanics of play as they occur and become relevant to know. So no need for you to memorize the entire core book before we start playing.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with Shadowrun, here's a link to the SR4 Quickstart Rules: http://www.shadowrun4.com/resources/sr4 ... player.pdf
Players are encouraged to initially select from the pre-made characters in the sourcebook.

The first couple missions will be tailored to non magical and non VR characters to keep the action flowing and get people used to mundane combat and RP situations. Once we're comfortable with that we'll add Deckers followed a little later by Mages and then Riggers and lastly Shamans.
After all archetypes types have been introduced and experimented with you can choose either to continue with your characters or customize new ones.

By this time you will be familiar with the mechanics, history and setting of the 6th world so you will then be required to provide a detailed backstory to whichever character you choose to continue with. (This sudden emergence of your past will be explained IC as part of the campaign as well).

I would like to form a group of around 6 players but the missions will be tailored to 4-5 characters to cope with 1 or 2 players cancelling for any particular session.

Play times are TBD based on what works for the majority.

Cheers chummers!

Hi, I'd be interested. Do you have Xfire/AIM/MSN/Yahoo?

I was initially looking for a D&D Edition game, however, I am also interested since your message reads "NEWBIE-FRIENDLY", and I am definitely one of those. Please provide me more information and look forward to hearing from you.

Well, I've been interested in SR (4 and earlier versions) for quite a while so I have some of the major SR4 sourcebooks, but as I've never had a group with which to play, my reading of them has basically been limited to the occasional glance at sections that caught my eye. Given my penchant for researching character options, these were mostly crunch rather than fluff portions, i.e., char creation, options/variants, equipment, augmentation, etc. So while I know the basics of the setting, I am unfamiliar with most of the specifics of the timeline and such. I am utterly unfamiliar with the metastory of SR (again, beyond the basics of the Awakening and such) and have never read through any of the missions.

If that's fine, I'd definitely be interested in the campaign and your proposed method of staggered immersion for the players seems quite excellent.

Granted, as above, that my knowledge of the timeline is a bit spotty, iirc 2052 would bar changelings, Technomancers (and thus metasapient AIs), Drakes, etc., but would still allow a number of other character options. You specifically hinted at metavariants among other things as possibly being an option in the future of the campaign, so just to get it out of the way early, what are your views on non-standard PCs, such as non-metahuman sapients, free spirits, or the Infected? Obviously, if you were to allow such, it would be after the initial process of familiarization. Also, I imagine we'll be starting off with the BP system as it is in the quickstart rules, but once everyone becomes more familiar with the setting and system, is there any chance of using karmagen if the group and you approve?


Edit: Just realized I accidentally said priority system rather than BP. Lapse to older versions. Now corrected.

Hi and thanks to all who have replied both here and via email.



grenadierman: dragon_scribe *at* hotmail .com



Absolutely newbie-friendly. As stated earlier I want to gradually ramp up system and settings complexity to keep gameplay moving along at a good clip even for those new to SR.
This will be the first time in a long while that I'll be GMing Shadowrun (since 2E actually) so my motivations for being newbie-friendly are in part altruistic but also plain selfish



Thank you!



I'm not sure yet Bleak, it will also depend on whether the group's first encounter with these beings is positive or negative. Since our campaign will be outpacing real-time we will certainly be catching up to those developments in due course.



I'll have to read up more about it in the RC since I'm not familiar with the Karma char gen system, but I'm always open to suggestions.

For now what I would need from any prospective players are:
- Your available game days and times, if possible 3 alternatives ranked in order of preference.
- Character's First and Last Names, Nickname and the backstory to the Nickname, if any.
- Starting character, either selected from the core-book premade examples or generated yourself using standard build rules: 400BP total, max 200BP attributes, max 35BP qualities, no skill-group breaking etc.

Please email to the above hotmail address.

Cheers!

Fair enough and I completely understand that everything would depend on exposure. The question was basically just my way of seeing how open you were to player input and non-core options. The fact that you replied honestly and didn't reject them out of hand speaks well for you as a GM.

Cool, thanks. I'm making a character now and I'll send the details over as soon as I'm done.

EDIT: Are you only accepting humans, or are you accepting elves, trolls, orks, and dwarves as well?

EDIT 2: Email sent.

Yay, a newbie friendly game! most games want experienced players. I would like to join in on this but what time is it being held? or is that not set yet.

Ultimately, it is Corwin's campaign. That being said however, I see no reason why he wouldn't as their existence (and the return of magic to a technological age that causes it) is pretty much the entire fulcrum of the setting, not to mention they're part of the core rules. And really, they don't particularly change anything mechanically beyond a few stat mods, vision types, and small miscellaneous boni for one or two metatypes. RPing is another thing, though they're all still technically human.

Also, Corwin, I just realized you distinguished between Hermetics/Shamans, a la SR1-3. Given the UMT hasn't been discovered/formulated yet in 2052, that is understandable. Nevertheless, how will that interact with SR4 magic rules, which are far different and don't make that divide? From what I gather from your earlier posts, this campaign will extend across at least a few decades gametime (I imagine it will work up to the present 2072 in SR4, but that's just a guess - might be a little troublesome for orcs though, with their reduced lifespan). Anyway, if a player chose to play a magic-user long-term and survived to a point that makes this question relevant, would they be allowed to redo their abilities in this area as advances in magical theory were made across the years?

Thanks, I wasn't exactly sure what he meant by metavariants (still a newbie to Shadowrun) so I was just making sure.