We’re excited to announce the release of a new mobile tool for Shadowrun—the Shadowrun Dice Roller!
This app, now available for iOS and Android, rolls up to forty D6s, since we all know Shadowrun needs plenty of them. And they’re not just any dice—there are currently seven different types, each with its own color, custom design on the 5s and 6s, and individual animation when you roll a hit or a one. Each one is themed to a classic Shadowrun archetype, so there are street samurai dice, hacker dice, face dice, mage dice, rigger dice, adept dice, and shaman dice!
You can roll dice one at a time, choose an amount to roll,
create your own customized roll, or use one of the presets for common dice
rolls (like primary attack, defense, spellcasting, hacking, and so on), making
it easy for you to quickly throw the right amount of dice. The dice roller
tallies hits and glitches automatically, and it also tells you the total amount
rolled, in case you’re doing an initiative roll.
The app is filled top to bottom with cyberpunk flavor. From
the appearance of the dice to the sound effects to the background wallpaper, the
whole app is designed to convey a Shadowrun feel.
While the roller is specifically designed for Shadowrun,
it can be used with any D6-based game. As long as you have your device nearby,
you’ll always have enough dice to get a game going. So get the dice roller now,
and get playing!
Gen Con is a week away, which
means we’re really close to seeing lots of people from the Shadowrun community,
soaking in Shadowrun games, and indulging in a number of ways to create
more Shadowrun fun!
The Catalyst Demo Team will,
of course, be running a ton of games during the con, and we’ll also be demoing
the new Shadowrun, Sixth World rules at the booth. You can also dive
into a demo of the board game Shadowrun: Sprawl Ops!
But the fun doesn’t stop
there. It’s Shadowrun’s thirtieth anniversary, so we want to spread Shadowrun
joy around. We’ll have a special display case of Shadowrun goodies from
across the years for your viewing pleasure, and we’ll have plenty of new products
for sale at the booth. Let’s get a look at the Shadowrun items you’ll be
able to pick up at the con!
Shadowrun, Sixth World Core Book
The newest edition of Shadowrun
will be up for sale! Get ready to dive into Sixth World action, gain edge over
the competition, and use it to pull off stunning victories and thrilling
escapes. We’ve talked a lot about this edition lately in recent posts, and
we’re excited for people to play it!
Shadowrun, Sixth World Beginner Box
Want a quick taste of what
the new edition has in store? Try the Beginner
Box! With quick-start rules, four pre-generated characters, an adventure,
setting information, and reference cards for gear and spells, the box will get
you right into the action. Did we mention it has poster-sized maps and some
custom Shadowrun dice?
Shadowrun Dice & Edge Tokens
A good amount of six-sided
dice is always important to Shadowrun, and in the new edition, tracking
and spending Edge is more important than ever. This pack of dice and Edge
tokens makes your game easier to play and manage—and they look cool, too!
Rogue’s Gallery NPC cards
Need a runner for any
situation? This deck has them—more than fifty, as a matter of fact! With
compact game stats, character art, and some flavor to help you get to know the
character, this deck will help gamemasters introduce characters on the fly to
help or hinder the players.
Prime Runner miniatures
We’ve long wanted to create
our own Shadowrun miniatures, and they’re finally here! Featuring Sledge,
the ork street samurai, Coydog, the elf shaman, Gentry, the human decker,
Hardpoint, the dwarf rigger, and Blanco, the troll weapons specialist, this
pack brings Shadowrun action to life.
Neo-Anarchist Streetpedia
Want to know about what
Aztechnology is up to these days? Need some info on Asamando, Deus, or Maria
Mercurial? Then check out the Neo-Anarchist Streetpedia! It covers
topics from Aden to the Zurich-Orbital Habitat, written in the off-the-cuff
style the neo-anarchists are known for! Get it and get caught up on the Sixth
World.
No Future
What hot new shows are on the
trideo tonight? What tunes are shadowrunners blasting into their earbuds as
they rampage through corporate security? What sports teams do runners root for
in their downtime? No Future has the answers. It’s your guide to the
culture of Shadowrun’s Sixth World, helping runners navigate
their time off while also sneaking in critical paydata that might help them on
a run.
Sledge collectible statue
Sledge, who has appeared in Shadowrun
art and fiction over the past six years, is the very model of an ork street
samurai. Soon, he’ll be a model you can put in your home.
Catalyst Game Labs is
thrilled to announce a new collectible statue of Sledge, produced with the help
of our friends at Monster Fight Club. As you see in the pictures, Sledge is
fully detailed and ready for action. He is a great addition to any Shadowrun
collection and a great way to bring cyberpunk flavor into any home or
office.
Sledge will go on sale to the
general public later this year, but we were able to fly in a small number of statues
for sale at Gen Con. How small? Twelve. Due to the limited availability, we
want to make sure they go to some of the most dedicated Shadowrun fans at
Gen Con. Here’s what you must do to get one:
One statue will go on sale at
the designated times listed below throughout the con. To acquire the statue,
you need to purchase our Shadowrun Super Fan package at a cost of $500.
That includes:
One Shadowrun, Sixth World core rulebook
One Shadowrun, Sixth World Executive Edition book
One copy of No Future
One Shadowrun Dice & Edge Tokens pack
One set of Rogue’s Gallery minis
One Sledge statue
Purchase of this package will
enable you to then purchase a Sledge statue for $150 at one of the following
times:
Thursday at 9 a.m., 10 a.m., noon, 2 p.m., and 4 p.m.
Friday at 10 a.m., noon, 2 p.m., and 4 p.m.
Saturday at 10 a.m., noon, and 2 p.m.
All this will be at Gen Con
along with metal dice, t-shirts, and more! Drop by booth 1611, say hi, and see
it all!
Gen Con, as people insist on reminding me, is four weeks away, and that’s where the Shadowrun, Sixth World core rulebook will first be released into the wild. To build up to that, we’re going to spend the next few weeks talking about different aspects of the that book, including combat, Matrix, and the ever-present challenge of presenting the deep, enthralling world of Shadowrun to new users and experts alike. First up, let’s talk about magic!
Revising the magic system presents one significant obstacle
from the get-go: I really like Shadowrun’s magic system (speaking
specifically about spellcasting right now). I think it does what it is supposed
to do admirably, in that it gives spellcasters the chance to do big things, do
small things, and think about what it’s going to cost them. Want to throw a big
fireball into a corp boardroom? You can do that, but be ready to have some cart
away your unconscious body afterward.
So if the system works, what needs to change? This was one
of the first things I thought about when the very first gears of SR6 were
turning. I pondered one recurring request for magic that came up fairly
regularly, and that was for spells that players and gamemasters can generate on
their own. That can be difficult to do in you want to keep balance right
(though there is no such thing as perfect balance in RPG rules—but that’s a
topic for another time), but it helps if the system is designed from the get-go
to allow that.
So that’s what SR6 spellcasting is–it’s designed from the
ground up to (eventually) allow spellcasters to make their own spells. It
treats spells in a modular way, so that each spell is a combination of modules,
at that combination tells you how much its basic drain will be. For example,
the modules that go into Fireball are Combat + Affect living things + Fire +
Area effect + Ranged.
Now, this is a bit of a tease, because you won’t be able to
design spells right out of the gate in SR6. Doing that would have required
putting all the modules and the instructions for combining them in the core
rulebook, and we simply didn’t have the space for that. So given that, what are
the ramifications for people who will be using the core book? Here’s a few:
Force is not declared before casting. With
everything being modular, some of the main things you’d use Force for—namely,
increasing the area of effect and increasing combat damage—are built into separate
modules. Plus, with limits being removed across the board in SR6, it made sense
to change the way the rules work in Magic, too. I’d seen many new players
struggle with knowing just what Force to use for a spell, so changing this is a
way of making it a little easier. You can ramp up the power if you want to, but
you can also charge ahead and cast the basic spell without having to worry
about it too much.
Elemental effects can come in more often.
The modular system allows for a great range of elemental effects, and it also
allows them to come into play in a variety of circumstances. Cooling Heal, Warming
Heal, and Elemental Armor Are particular examples of this.
Drain should feel consistent. Since all
drain calculations are based on the same modules, it should feel consistent
across the line of spells.
Of course, spellcasting is only one area of magic. Adept
powers, alchemy, conjuring, reagents, ritual spellcasting, and astral traveling/combat
are in there, too. In those areas, a large amount of the changes that were made
were to take advantage of the expanded Edge system, as discussed in the Shadowrun,
Sixth World Developer Overview post. Various aspects of magic needed to be
adjusted and tweaked to fit into the Edge paradigm, which should mean less
calculating of modifiers so that you can get to the cool parts of a
role-playing game. Spirits, unlike spells, still have Force, since it’s a handy
way to measure the power of the individual entities, but Force does not act as
a limit on Conjuring dice rolls. Enchanting needed a decent amount of tweaking,
since many of its elements were based on the Force of the spell, which no
longer exists, so other measures, including base drain value, were used instead.
Reagents was one of those areas where good feedback during the development
process led to rules that worked well with the larger system.
I hope that provides a taste of what we were thinking when
working on SR6 magic, as well as whetting your appetite for that spell creation
system you should see next year!
Do you have the Shadowrun, Sixth World Beginner Box Set? Do you want a preview at how characters in that ruleset will look? Do you just want free Shadowrun stuff? There’s no wrong reason to download the character dossier for Emu, the human rigger! It’s now available!
And it’s a great time to share Beginner Box material with you, because the box itself is nearing release. The official street date is July 10–two weeks from now—but you might want to pay attention to your friendly local game store, because some copies might show up in advance of that. So if you want your first look at the next edition of one of gaming’s greatest settings, keep your eyes open!
Of course, the Beginner Box is the first step of the journey to the release of the full Shadowrun, Sixth World core rulebook, which will go on sale August 1 at Gen Con. We’ll be counting down until that week with more blog posts and information about that book, including the following:
July 3: Magic in SR6
July 10: Combat in SR6
July 17: Matrix in SR6
July 24: How to describe 30 years of Shadowrun history
July 31: Gen Con preview!
We look forward to sharing more about this edition of Shadowrun, and we’re especially excited to get people playing!
