Shadowrun Is Shadowrun Hong Kong worth it?

[almondblight]

Worth mentioning that Mike McCain (director of Shadowrun) left HBS months ago and is now doing freelance art work. I always wondered how much of Dragonfall's success was due to it being a fairly small team that might have had less involvement from the higher-ups (it initially was planned to be a short mission pack type expansion).

Not sure how important the Shadowrun IP is, though, since it's pretty much just a ripoff of Gibson (directly lifting things like New Yen, Street Samurai, ICE and Cyberdecks) with generic fantasy awkwardly shoehorned in. It would be pretty easy to make a new setting that does the same.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

it's pretty much just a ripoff of Gibson (directly lifting things like New Yen, Street Samurai, ICE and Cyberdecks) with generic fantasy awkwardly gloriously shoehorned in

 

[almondblight]

it's pretty much just a ripoff of Gibson (directly lifting things like New Yen, Street Samurai, ICE and Cyberdecks) with generic fantasy awkwardly gloriously shoehorned in

Whether or not the idea of adding fantasy to cyberpunk is awesome, the way it's added to Shadowrun (at least the games I've played and the lore I've happened across) always seemed a bit haphazard to me. On the one magic is supposed to be relatively ubiquitous, on the other it seems like it gets forgotten a lot of the time while the story goes full Gibson cyberpunk. You run into Corps that have magical research labs and mages on security, but they don't seem to be mass producing any magic goods and are mostly acting like a generic cyberpunk megacorp. If you wanted to have a "Gibson with magic" setting I think you could probably find a better way to go about it.