Well, She Survived.....

Okay, yesterday was game day. I rolled into my local game shop at about 1 pm, to finish up Chapter One: Life's Bazaar from Paizo's Shackled City adventure path. It's a fun little adventure, and as a adventure path, is ALOT different from the adventures I usually design myself. That game has converted me forever to the love of D&D minis and battlemats.

I rarely used minis in my previous games, preferring to just abstract combat and occasionally make do with symbols scrawled on a dry-erase board. The group I play with- about 90% current or former military by the way, which makes it just like coming home for me- all enjoy minis, and have a huge collection. One of the players has a huge rolling box filled with every damn monster in the game, and I've had great fun borrowing his toys for the session's encounters.

At about 7 we broke for dinner, and when I came back, I played my first actual session of Shadowrun 4th edition. Things got off to a late start, because a couple of extra players from the D&D game wanted to make characters and jump in, but soon enough things were off and running. Our GM ran us through a basic, intro adventure, which amounted to little more than a live fire exercise. Good thing, since out of the six players, three of us were veterans of SR4, myself and one other guy had never played this edition of the game, and one guy had never played Shadowrun, of any kind, at all.

Basic premise was a raid on a Shiawase shipping hub, to intercept a blood sample, do some damage, and make the raid look like standard corporate espionage. Our real objective was to swap out the blood sample for a clean (?) sample, supposedly to cover up some dark secret of our Johnson's wife.

The whole raid, start to finish, in game took about 5 minutes. I learned something about my character. I had built her as a non-combat girl, and I'd assumed that having extra 'initiative passes'- or extra actions was like having a high BAB in D20, useful but not essential. Instead, not having extra actions was like being the team's semi-retarded, drooling mascot. I'll be purchasing Wired Reflexes before the next session.

Another thing I learned, is that as the team's face, my function is front loaded. I do research on our clients, negotiate the pay, and help in the planning. After that, I get to stay in the car and listen to the radio while everybody else is inside, killing the fuck outta some unprepared guards. Grrrr....

Still, my character's stock market knowledge ended up being one of the more useful skills in the session, and I'll be pumping some extra points into that. I figure my role on the team is 'clue wagon' and I want to have as many knowledge skills and funky enhanced senses as possible. Anyway, Arywn Unchained survived, much to my shock and pleasure...

Oh, and lest you think I'm not working....

I'm sending some material over to Amanda to illustrate. I'll be releasing another short race book for Otherverse America, focusing on genetically engineered human subspecies used by the military and the mega corps. That'll be a fun, quick one.

I'm also working on a sequel to this sourcebook:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=23341&it=1

Hey, what do you expect? I've been playing Shadowrun,and I've got a hankering to build some cool D20 bionics. I'm going to release Cybernetics II as a State of the Otherverse product.

After that, expect me to get to work on Otherverse America: APEX, and to put the finishing touches on some more Thinking Race sourcebooks.

Talk to you later,
CHRIS