If no one minds, I'm just going to cut and paste my introduction from my Shadowrun 2050 post.I am not as old as some of the members of this forum, and I'm not as young as most of them. But I was younger than most when I got my start in the roleplaying hobby, back in 1988 I was introduced to an odd little game called
Dungeons & Dragons. No, not
AD&D (that came latter) much like FastJack and his dinosaurs, I had an instant fascination for the hobby - these were the King Arthur stories I loved to read, the incredible tales out of
Lord of the Kings my mother had read me to sleep with in kindergarten, the He-Man adventures I loved to see on TV every Saturday... but I got to be the hero.
In the late spring of 1990, I was nine years old and a seasoned veteran of D&D. I'd even built my very first few dungeons, having left my original group behind when my parents moved to a new city, I had put together a new one from the kids in my new school. So a few weeks after my ninth birthday, I rode my scooter to the comicbook shop on the other side of the subdivision with a pocket full of grandpa's birthday money. I was a kid on a mission: cherry slurpee, the newest issue of
Batman, and a new book of monsters for my dungeon. I didn't get my frozen sugaar water, or the comic books, or even that new monster book. I blew every dollar I had on a $28.00 hardcover book with a feathered serpent on the back, a hardcore trio of punk rockers on the front, those immortal words about dealing with dragons on page six, and a logo that fascinates me to this day: a circuit-board imprinted scroll, an American Indiant serpent coiled around a celtic knot, a ram's skull, and a new word:
Shadowrun.
To a kid in subrban Detroit, in the world of 1990, the city was as dark and shadowy as any dungeon. A corporation as mysterious and arcane as any evil wizard. Japan was an exotic realm of ninjas, robots, and Nintendo. We thought that Cyndi Lauper's new video on MTV was the epitome of punk rock... I wouldn't pick up my first William Gibson novel for another four years. My introduction to the world of cyberpunk, neo-anarchy, and transhumanism had two elves on the cover, a chapter on magic, and a map of a Seattle on the inside cover. Seattle, five years before Starbucks and Kurt Cobain put it on the map, a city as fantasic for me as Lankhmar or Minas Tirth.
Shadowrun has changed a lot over the years, as our real world has changed so has the Sixth World. New editions, new technology, a better understanding of how players interact with roleplaying games, and even a better understanding of how those games interact with us. I love
Shadowrun Fourth Edition and the world of 2072... But, all these years latter, I still have that old copy of the original
Shadowrun. On that eternal cover, Dodger is still cracking the Ice, Ghost's twin Uzis are still covering their escape down the alley, and Sally Tsung is still preparing to weave her spell... and I still want to join them.
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