I’ve recently been preparing for a play by post Shadowrun game. One thing I’ve been trying to do for it is give it an open world and a feeling of being ‘lived in’. To that end I’ve been working on a runner message boards writing project.
In the Harebrained games I loved the forums you could read between missions, and the same with the source books with their scattered Jackpoint/Shadowlands posts. I wanted to have that for my players in a way they could interact with.
Basically I’ve been been writing up some Shadowlands BBS style content in a google drive with the idea that my players will be able to read, edit and contribute to these. I’m using Shadowrun: Anarchy for my game, set in 2075, and using the sample runners from there as my shadowrunner community. The ShadowSea.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bVdFapR5Tjw_ftpv_xkme7rtylLUJ_-KThis should be the link to the Drive folder.
Feel free to let me know if there’s a better way of handling this kind of thing.
So far I’ve got four types of folder/posting:
Forum posts: Not a ton of these, just some general quick discussions. These are what I started with and was using mainly as a way of introducing some story elements as well as inside jokes from previous games.
Location descriptions: For each of my prepared open world locations I prepped a quick little description of what the character sees when they first arrive there as well as light discussion from the ShadowSea boards. The idea is that runners have tagged certain locations of interest in the Metroplex and added some kind of commentary. The formatting isn’t terribly consistent, but I’ve got a good number of locations and even some little story threads that play out between them.
Interviews: Basically some prose I put together. The idea is that a journalist is interviewing Shadowrunners in different parts of Seattle. I tried to give the characters and locations some personality. And the end of the interviews the interviewee sticks around to answer questions from the ShadowSea message boards. So far I haven’t thought of any good ones yet, so they’re blank at the bottom.
Short Stories: I’ve only got 1 here so far. It started out as a one shot I was going to run to introduce some new people to the game/setting. That game didn’t end up happening but I decided to write it up as a short story anyway. Mainly focused on trying to get the vibe of a shadowrun. Little bit of creative liberty and sprinkling in of stuff relevant to my campaign.
Why am I posting this here. First off I just wanted to share something I’ve been working on for a bit. I don’t think I’m an amazing writer, but I do think I’ve got some fun little bits in there occasionally.
Additionally, if this works the way I want it to, these docs should be open for anyone to edit (this is all a copy so I’m not worried about losing anything). It’s meant to be a public message board, so if anyone here felt so inclined as to add any content, feel free. Either just either as runners adding comments to the various posts, questions for the interviewees, starting new posts/locations, or even just editing/changing what’s already there.
Anyway, thought I’d throw this out there. Hit me with any questions or suggestions.
I wrote and setup everything on my phone, so hopefully it’s not too messy.