Hoi All,
So, I'm preparing to switch my regular campaign table over to Shadowrun 5 rules, and I thought I'd do a quick demo game to showcase the rules and give them an idea of how their characters are going to translate, what's new with the combat system, and so on.
We had recently had a very interesting run on a DocWagon facility (which I may post later), so I'd thought I'd switch the roles around this time, and go for an old shadowrun classic: playing as a DocWagon team. The module itself is a very bare-bones synopsis as we mostly used a whiteboard for laying out combat scenes, but I prepared some gaming aids to try and walk the players through character creation and the new combat mechanics, that I think may be useful to other GMs.
First, a quick guide to speed up character creation:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99137386/SR5/SR5 Character Creation.pdfA summary of the SR5 combat rules where I tried to highlight the major changes
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99137386/SR5/SR5 Combat.pdfI wanted to showcase the new character creation system without spending more than an hour on it, so I pre-made a series of "Roles" with all of the gear already assigned, so the players didn't have to worry about assigning or spending resources, they just chose priorities for Metatype, Attributes and Skills (and Magic for one of them)
Here are the 5 roles I made up for the demo:
Team Leader:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99137386/SR5/The Leader.pdfPilot:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99137386/SR5/The Pilot.pdfMage:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99137386/SR5/The Mage.pdfMed Tech:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99137386/SR5/The Intern.pdfGrunt(s)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99137386/SR5/The Grunt.pdfFinally for the run itself I only have a quick synopsis, with stats for mooks just plucked from the core book, but it made for 3 hours of fun and spirited gaming.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/99137386/SR5/First, Do No Harm.pdfQuick summary of how the run went through:
Approaching the firefight between two gangs on the I-5, the team first had some fun with the mounted "Goop gun" (Taken from 4th ed Arsenal), covering a few gangers in freeze foam while the mage was busy dispelling a fire spirit. One of the grunts tried to rappel to the ground, glitched and came stuck, so we had an Ork dangling from a rope below the helicopter. The second grunt, a dwarf, decided to one-up him and wen rappelling too... without a rope! At that point I had to look up the falling damage rules, and after an epic damage resistance roll the dwarf landed in the middle of a group of astonished, and soon to be dead gangers.
Around that point, the client flat-lined from his massive wounds, and the team received the abort-mission call, and were ordered to head down to rescue another client (an MCT executive, super-platinum client). Much to my surprise, they decided to disregard the order, and insisted on rescuing and extracting not only the original client, but his family as well, while the mage maintained a barrier spell to cover them. The EMT even did an epic, 10+ successes roll to stabilize the client (He Edged, so limits didn't apply), so I even let have the satisfaction of bringing him home alive.
By the time they finally made it to the MCT client, of course, he had already been carted away by the team of Eco-terrorist disguised as another Docwagon team. A couple days later, this same MCT executive starred in a video released on the Matrix, in which he confessed to the horrendous crime he and his corporation committed against the land and people of Tsimshian, before being very messily executed.
Needless to say, the affair turned into a major embarassment for DocWagon, and the whole team was fired for their insubordination - which actually makes for a neat origin story for a group of runners.
Some more people at my game store have expressed interest in a second demo, so all suggestions are welcome to improve on this, and maybe explore some other aspects of the game mechanics.
