First off new member here, Hello everyone!
A little back story on myself.
I haven't ran the table top shadows in awhile (late 90's early 2000's). Back then I did a few larger campaigns, never as GM however (I have Co-GM'd a few GURPS games which was surprisingly really fun).
Since (and before) I have played the video games (SNES, SEGA, and the new PC games).
Recently I've gotten together with a pretty fun group. Problem is the GM only knows D&D (not my forté) and is a little lackluster and lazy, in not so many words he's a "Munchkin" player/GM.
We've recently ended a campaign where we pretty much destroyed the world along ourselves, and are now in a limbo sort of deal with starting a new session.
I have a majority of the group on board with doing a Shadowrun campaign.
Main problem is, no one really knows what Shadowrun is besides myself. They're interested, but not familiar with the lore and the world. I also haven't GM'd in a long time, however I know I can be better than our last GM (no offense to him) . My other problem is I'm going off of a really old core rule set. Second Edition is the only rule book I have (I'm old school like that), and frankly I'm not ready to dump money into newer books if no one is interested in running the shadows.
Now onto what I have sort of planned.
A couple of the players are really inexperienced with roleplaying, so I'll allow them to pretty much play "themselves" in the game setting.
And I'm going to have the main game setting be local to our area, Duluth Minnesota, so everyone is comfortable with the layout of the land (Twin Cities could be a fun area to get into as well). And allows me to use Google maps and whatnot for ease of mapping.
As far as I know there's very little lore to our area up here in the north.
We have a pretty popular "sea port" mainly exporting iron ore from the "Iron Range" here. So I'm thinking those industries can have something to do with the story line.
We also have a large Native American population due to reservations that can add a fun "tribal" twist to it all.
One of the things I always struggle with as a GM is how all the players know each other and why they're running together.
An idea I've been playing around with is they all have an experimental brain implant they don't know about, and the streetdoc that implanted them got killed which triggered a "dead man switch" which sends them all to the same location (work in progress, not set on it).
I haven't put too much more thought into the campaign as I'm not sure everyone wants to play Shadowrun.
My main thing is, how does this sound to experienced Shadowrunners to be going off of such an old ruleset (2nd edition), and in an area with every little to no lore?
Am I doomed to fail? Or do I have so much room for creative improvisation that the world is mine for the making?
Thank you everyone for making it through this wall of text, and I look forward to everyone's input... and don't worry about criticism, I can take it.