[Kot]

Heh. Now you make me feel young*. I ran a free-form SR game about seven, or eight years ago for two guys whom I've played Earthdawn with. We're still playing ED together, but there was a small Shadowrun(2nd ed., as that's the one translated to Polish - unfortunately it died out, because CP was a lot more popular) intermission, where i was playing a teenage rastafarian rat shaman. Fun times.
A while ago i bought the SR4A rulebook. And that's probably how it started. Though my group issued an ultimatum, because i tend to be sidetracked and drop games i run for a new one. I'm still trying to find people with whom i can play Shadowrun. It's not easy though.

* Remember that games in Poland were 10 years behind the US, as almost everything till a few years back. We were a third world country. And it seems they want us to go back to those days.

[etherial]

One of my friends in college learned to role play on his daddy's knee. Daddy was a Navy Seal, so they played a lot of Battletech and Shadowrun. So said friend introducted me.

[Nomad Zophiel]

Ah the good old days. It all started in 19xx with the Neuromancer video game and the follow up graphic novel. I was hooked on this whole Cyberpunk thing. My friends and I played D&D, Battletech Car Wars and Marvel Super Heroes now and then. Then FASA, maker of the holy Battletech, came out with a cyberpunk game. . .only with elves and magic. Yeah, I scarfed that one right up. I didn't play too much because I always wound up running the games. With the relative lack of source material I was making up a lot of stuff on the fly. To this day the Grey Line is one of the main runner bars in any campaign I run. It made sense to my teenage mind, the thin grey line between good and evil and all that. The first character I remember playing regularly was in my college-ish years as a 3rd Ed Elven Otaku. I played almost exclusively human non-mages in the old days because being either one just sucked up too much good stuff from the other areas and we didn't have no steenkin' adepts.

[Teknodragon]

About a year or so ago, one of the guys in my circle of gaming friends offered to run a Shadowrun game. I liked the setting, and put together a badly designed character that didn't do hacking, rigging, or combat well, and looked like a freak in a game that was supposed to be a little more 'pro' appearance. First characters and all that, y'know.

First exposure was one of the novels in a public library back in the early '90's. Alas, I forget which one(s).

[savaze]

I got my start with the war game Hero's Quest.  After we exhausted it and our home-brewed adventures we naturally progressed into D&D.  We eventually trickled into Darksword Adventures, Rifts, Cyberpunk, WEG Star Wars, World of Darkness, Battletech, SR, Ars Magica, and GURPS.  DnD, WoD, and Star Wars were the most heavily played in my group.  It was difficult to negotiate SR into the mix being the minority and all, meaning I GM'd most of the time, but SR was my favorite.  I managed to collect every book up through 3rd, at one point, including a signed monogrammed hardcover 4ed book.

We home-brewed all of our adventures, so I couldn't tell ya what my first adventure was, but it was back in the 2e days.  I usually played rigger combos.  I had the cool cars, big guns, army of robots, and in one case my own personal antroform to ride in (think battle armor from Battletech with a Pilot rating, probably looked like something the A-Team built).

[FastJack]

Oh hell, if we're talking about the first time gaming...

I was a wee young lad of 10 when I went to a friends birthday party and two of my best buds were playing this new game. It came in a box with two red books, some sheets of paper and dice (that you had to color in the numbers with a white crayon). I remember falling in love with the game and about a month later running my little brother through Isle of Dread with his character (he didn't last long).

[Dead Monky]

Ah, Hero's Quest.  Brings back some fond memories.  We used to use the pieces from it in our D&D and MechWarrior games.  I actually have the crappy old video game too.

[savaze]

The price Heroes Quest is going for now a days blows my mind... 

[Rascal]

A (at the moment new-found) friend of mine started a Shadowrun campaign back in.. 2003? Yeah, that would be it. I had never heard about the game before, but the pitch he gave totally sold it to me (still my favourite game setting). We played a few 3rd-ed-adventures, Food Fight being the first. I still have this picture in my head of our rigger-dwarf just keeping in a corner until one of the gangers got close enough for him to throw his steaming-hot take-away-soup in his face... *grin* And I know I was being busy summoning this hearth-spirit in the middle of the shop, it was just this animated (and angry) bunch of canned food and spilled soy-flour wreaking havoc on both gangers and Stuffer Shack.

Ah, those were the days...

[topcat]

Played a few sessions of 1st ed waybackinnaday.  Never really went anywhere with it, but I dug the setting and kept an eye on the game.  Sometime around the early-mid 90s, I got in a local 2nd edition game through a friend and became addicted instantly.  I got on the ShadowRN mailing lists and things just went out of control from there.

[LFG]

My introduction to shadowrun was much like yours.  Played the sega genesis version on some cable based video game thing com cast was trying out at the time.  2ed was still out, so those were the first books I had.  I convinced my younger brother to play also, though I basically used runs from the video game as a template.  My brother played a street Sam and I ran a Mage.

I'm new here (obviously,lol) and I was curious about everyone's first shadowrun experience.  How'd you find out about Shadowrun?  What was your very first run?  What "class" did you use?

Mine was the Sega Genesis version for the game.  After playing, I was VERY curious about the lore and grabbed the 3E book and read.  My first run was when I made my brother play "On the Run" with me.  I played a decker. 

[Dwarven Godfather]

we are using the templates in the core book for learning the 4th edition rules before we actually decide to make characters. I am playing the Combat Mage, there is also the Troll Street shaman, Street Samurai, Orc Decker, and the Weapon Specialist. I sat my character out of the the situation we ran across, so I could help our GM look rules up for other situations since I know a couple of our players do not read up on the rules between our game sessions. So this is more like an observation than an experience.

  I would have to say the combat took a little long, but I know that once we all get a hang of the different combat situations, the game will go alot quicker as we are all learning the system together. I actually did have some fun looking up the rules and reading it to the rest of the players so they would be able to understand the rules as well. I think I might have found a new fun game to actually run from time to time and maybe even do some conversions of other games over to this system. I would like to see what Catalyst Game Labs has installed for Shadowrun and the future.

[nakano]

My friends and I were playing a variety of games back when 1st ed came out.  It was not unusual for one of us to buy a new game and give it a go.  When I got to his place for our sunday afternoon gaming, instead of playing DND the other guys had decided to give this great new game a try.  Cursing under my breath, having carried my full bag of dnd stuff, I sat down and took a look at the book. 

The system was much different then any I had seen.  The guys wanted to play quickly, so I just grabbed a template from the book, the ganger, and ran with it.

We played food fight, had a hell of a lot of fun, and I was hooked. 

And so began my playing days of SR.  By SR3 I was the group's fulltime GM, and have never looked back.