I'll save you the time, it's not an adventure. It's a couple of paragraphs in War! one of the widely acknowledged worst books CGL ever shat out, because it was written by a bunch of talentless newfags after the old writers quit en-masse when the company jewed them and nearly collapsed.
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That's the one. I may have oversold it as an adventure rather than a suggested one, but even so I don't know which is worse - the sheer tasteless ignorance of it (and they're not doing it deliberately but sheer cluelessness); or the numerous ways in which they clearly don't understand or jibe with the Shadowrun setting and rules. They see it as D&D in the modern world.
Thanks. And while I'm rusty on the system that looks incredibly underwhelming as a reward for going through that sort of living hell.
Very underwhelming and not really a good fit with the rules. Shadowrun didn't have "Magic Items" in that sense. It had weapon foci. Which were really only useful to magicians / physical adepts.
The worst thing about CGL - and there were
many was the way they tried to revert Shadowrun setting and rules backwards with their 5th edition. 4th edition was a masterpiece. For game balance, for sophistication and above all, for coherence with the setting and logic. Original cyberpunk may not have been dead but it sure smelled that way. You had "deckers" walking around with giant cyberdecks they had to physically wire in, runs into the Matrix were essentially dungeon crawls in cyberspace. Integration with the rest of the party was terrible and none of it really felt like it made sense to anyone with a reasonable understanding of the modern world. I don't just mean that we don't have brain-computer interfaces capable of generating virtual worlds. I mean from a basic internal logic sense within the setting. It was, in short, beloved by anti-social grognards who still dressed like they were the 'rebel' kids they were in the early Eighties and jacked off over William Gibson novels.
Then along came 4th. Setting-wise it updated things and also smoothed over some of the less well-thought out parts of the setting. Rules wise along with playing in a much more streamlined way without losing any of the actual feel or depth, it modernised the Matrix. People had wireless commlinks, networking made so much more sense. It integrated with the rest of the party so you could actually not have the game stop while the hacker went on his dungeon crawl. The grognards
hated it. I remember endless complaints about how "they wouldn't store information like that on something that was wirelessly accessible" or "you'd have this on a separate server". And of course complaining that people were called 'hackers' instead of 'Deckers'. Honestly, the way the Matrix was written in 4th edition was downright fucking prescient. What do we all have? Wireless devices everywhere? What comprises our infrastructure? "Serverless architecture" in which people have no fucking clue where their data actually is most of the time but they do control access and user rights to it. Mesh networking. Mesh data structures and datalakes, "client-side" encryption where the encryption key never even touches your own device, everything about access not location. Shadowrun had drones be their own nodes, a million better thought out things in the Matrix rules! If 4th failed on any of the following criteria I would see their point:
- Less internally consistent.
- Jarred more with what we actually know of technology
- Less balanced
- Played worse / more work for GM
then I would see their point. But on every one of those criteria it was majorly improved.
So what happened? CGL came in and appointed a couple of major grognards who had been grousing all along under the people who put 4th together and saw the departure of that team (because CGL was refusing to pay them) as their opportunity to leap in with the new regime and rewrite everything into some horrible kludge of the earlier system in various heavy-handed ways. Not just rules but woefully contrived setting events to mean that wireless couldn't be effectively used for hackers and everybody needed a midi-keyboard sized device on a guitar strap around their neck.
CGL destroyed something beautiful. I really mean it - I've played a lot of different settings and systems and Shadowrun 4th edition is one of the finest pieces of work in the RPG industry.
(Except Technomancers - fuck Technomancers)
&D's necks to wring every single microcent from D&D have been backed all the fucking way off (for the moment) given how badly (and as importantly: publically) they fucked up the OGL situation to the point D&D Beyond subs still haven't recovered to level it was at before that little woopsie; basically the voices inside D&D who said "Trying to revoke the OGL is completely fucktarded and will needless piss off the community" are being regarded as savy oracles (for the moment). The execs who drive the project have turned their greedy malevolent attentions to MTG.
