Actual Play Report: Dark Angel (1993)

More wizards should wear cravats.

Three weeks ago a group of Shadowrunners embarked on a ludicrous, metaplot spanning journey through published adventures, that began with the 4th edition iteration of Food Fight and will hopefully end with the Twilight Horizon or whatever the team's story arc seems to be heading for. I've decided to call the campaign Decades in Shadow, at least for tagging purposes (for the record, it took three sessions to cover two game days, so at the current rate I expect to be done in 21,900 weeks - or when the party gets bored of either Shadowrun or my GMing, in both cases long before that).

Last night we effectively completed Dark Angel, the first adventure in the campaign. There are a few plot threads hanging - more than the book assumes, really! - but the main story arc is complete. It took about three sessions. I think the book assumed that, or one more.

(I'd normally post the cover of the book here, but it's so inutterably hideous - the worst in Shadowrun history, I think - that you'll have to deal with some interior art...)

The following post is one giant spoiler.

Super Tuesday!

In which we run a deranged Shadowrun campaign

So I used to have this fantasy about a campaign that could never actually be run. I'd take every single official adventure ever published for every cyberpunk game and work them into the Shadowrun metaplot, starting in 2050 and going right through to the 2080s. The characters - or several generations of the characters - would fight and struggle through the Universal Brotherhood, the Arasaka-Militech CorpWar, the Year of the Comet and the Arcology Shutdown... the universe would evolve and shift, technology would race forward in real time, corporations would rise and fall...

Do you have any idea how many extractions I would have had to run? Or how many Cyberpunk 2020 campaigns feature the son of a corporate exec who happens to be a big haired rock star on the run? MORE THAN YOU CAN COUNT

Also, I've never run a published adventure in my life. 

Also, the quality of some of the older adventures isn't, like, inspiring.

Also, Shadowrun's rules make my head hurt.

So I put that idea aside for years, until Shadowrun released the Horizon Adventures. Seriously, I've been running and reading this stuff for years and there's ideas in Anarchy Subsidized which I'd have never come up with. That's what I want from an adventure. I wanted to run the three Horizon adventures. I wanted to run the separate Twilight Horizon, which seems to demand a veteran team with ideals to burn. I wanted to run Elven Blood, because it goes to wild places. Then the idea of running Elven Fire as a prequel emerged. And if I was doing that, I might as well bridge the gap with the election scenarios in Super Tuesday and Shadows of the Underworld...

The lunatic plan was back.