In order to pick up the pace with the proposed Shadowrun campaign I wrote up some more pregame info for them. If you know Shadowrun history it won’t be much of a surprise for you and where I deviate cannon don’t worry about it. I don;t really put that much stock into sticking to pre-established story lines.

A courier turns up and delivers a plain unmarked jiffy bag to your door. Inside is an old 1980’s style personal tape recorder with a sticker written on in permanent marker.

*PRIVATE*
PRESS PLAY.

You check no ones watching in the hallway and head back into your apartment. It bugs you that you don’t have a clue who sent it or for that matter wether its safe to actually press the PLAY button. You never actually get that far as you accidentally bump into the table its on and knock it over and bumping the button anyway.

*********

So my man says your man says you guys are up for the job? Yeah? Cool.

Anyway I’ll cut to the chase as time is short and to be honest I’m not being paid by the minute. I’ll send some docs through to your fixer with more info. Can’t chance them getting on the matrix so it’s hard copies only I’m afraid.

So yeah. Where to start with this thing. Cast your minds back to August 22nd and put yourself in Chicago. Look I know you weren’t there but work with me kid. I’m trying to set the scene.  So Chicago. As far as UCAS will tell you there was an outbreak of VITAS that was killing everyone and they quarantined the place. Don’t believe the hype. You’ll have heard about the nuke that went off on the 1st? That some anti-whatever group set it off to mess up the recovery operation? Well the bomb did go off but that’s about all that was true from that.

I could go on and on about this but as I said I’ll get straight to the point. It wasn’t no virus. A hive burst open and sent out millions of rogue insect spirits and literally decimated the place. The government set that bomb off hoping to wipe them out before they spread to other cities but from what I can gather it didn’t quite work. It did effectively destroy almost all civilisation in the city though. Millions are without homes, food or fresh water. Aid camps have been set up for those that can get to them but they can’t house everyone. Basically the place is a lawless hole that houses some of the worlds biggest companies secrets. Most of them are well protected but it only takes time before someone works out what is there and how to get it. That’s where you guys come in.

Our benefactor wishes you guys to get in, find some stuff and get back out. Simple as that. To be honest the trickiest thing about your job is getting you in and I think I’ve managed to sort something out for you. More details will follow on that but suffice it to say you’ll love it.

We’re sending in a few teams of runners for various things and the idea is that you’ll all ron-dayvu after a few days and extract together. That one might be tricky but we’re paying you guys to think on your feet and work your own way out of that one.

Just stay sharp out there when your on the streets as those bugs are still out there and the last thing thing we want is any of you getting to close to them. And for God sake stay the hell away fro….

*********

At least it made some sense. But what the hell was he trying to say before the tape ran out? You can see this run far enough already.

Still not giving much about the game away but I figured adding a little narrative and colour to it might get the guys a little intrigued.

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I’ve previously mentioned that over the years I’ve lost an awful lot of my gaming books. I’ve misplaced at least half of my ADnD books somewhere and of all my other systems only my Rolemaster books seem to be in any fit state and that was only because I bought new copies on Ebay a few years ago.

Anyway I was intent on rebuilding my old collection any way that I could and whilst hunting down the Dark Sun campaign books that I’d misplaced over the years I remembered a system that I bought when I was 15 years old. It was quite famous at the time but if I were to ask almost any of my fellow gamers in my home town about it they wouldn’t have a clue. That game is of course MERP or Middle Earth Role Playing to those that don’t like acronyms. A lot was said at the time about how it was a handicapped version of Rolemaster or that it was too complex for beginners but we loved it. I was never a fan of the books when I was younger purely because of the size of them but I loved the setting and the half finished movie by Ralph Bakshi.

Over the years I picked up a few modules for it but it was never a game we could get much material for what with it being in the days before the internet and online shopping. We would spend whole weekends just working through complex back stories for our characters before we even thought about starting game but we’d always hit the level limit and want to go further. As time went on we ended up moving all our characters over to rolemaster anyway and keeping the campaign setting but to this day I miss the MERP books. There was so much history in the rulebooks that was not easily digestable from the novels that even after we moved systems we still used the MERP books as our number one resource for the campaign.

I miss those books. I’m really beginning to wish I.C.E. didn’t lose the rights to make LotR games in 1999 now.

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Just a quick one to be going on with. In fact it’s that quick I think the lines I write about it being a quick one will actually take up more space on this entry than the actual entry.

If you write about things on your blog that maybe you are not sure about your players seeing how do you deal with it? I’m not talking about gossiping about them but instead talking about aspects of the game they shouldn’t know or maybe even your concerns about how well your GMing is going? I knew one of my players read this blog but it turns out they all do and now I’m second guessing any post I start writing that might be about upcoming games.

OK so it wasn’t shorter than the gumph I wrote at the start but it’s certainly a short one!

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