Review – Shadowrun: Neo-Anarchist Streetpedia

Shadowrun: The Neo-Anarchist Streetpedia is a sourcebook for Shadowrun and lets you know a little bit about a lot of things in the Sixth World of Shadowrun. It is edition agnostic, making it a useful book no matter which edition of Shadowrun you play though timelinewise it is set at the start of the new Sixth World Edition (2080), so some of it could be spoilers for games set earlier in the timeline. It is a fun read and a good way to provide an in-game look at the world to players but by no means a required book.

History Resources for your Game [3]

A variety of interesting articles and sites about history I have found recently and wish to share:

Gamers will be pleased to learn that dice and games of chance have been with us a long time, the Romans even used dice towers to ensure randomness of the roll!

A canal in Amsterdam was drained as part of a construction project and they cataloged and photographed it all.  You can delve below the surface and see what they found by the date it was lost here.

Aquaculture, that is, the controlled raising of seafood, is not a new thing.  The Hawaiian have been doing it for centuries and they recently set about restoring one of the fishponds, very interesting and a good idea of what clever people can do even with limited technology.

In the late 19th and early 20th Century, railway work was so dangerous that the companies retained their own railway doctors who pioneered early trauma surgery.  Seems like a great background for a character to me.

A fascinating article about travel in the Ancient Greek World, which is full of useful information and ideas.

California City was designed to be a massive metropolis but it never happened.  Now there are just echoes and roads to nowhere.  Seems like a great place to visit or the seed for an alternate history.

Have you found any intriguing or fascinating history you would like to share?  If so, please do!

Notes: Image of the Hawaii fishpond from Atlas Obscura and used without permission.

October emerges and September receeds

Tomorrow begins October, the eighth month (naturally) of the Roman Calendar.  It seems the Romans had no special association for October beyond Autumn, but we have Halloween!  So the theme on the Sea of Stars Design Journal will be Monsters and Monstrous Things!

If you have ideas for Monsters, let me know and I will try to make it happen.

Our kittens are now just over a year old thus, officially, cats.  There they are in the photo, Eris on the left and Artemis (always looking so serious) on the right.  They have been a joy and helped us over our loss of our dear Joxer cat.

September, 2019, saw the following posts here:

Dark Future Ahead 28 – News from the ‘Net of a Cyberpunk bent

How will the latest technological advances be used to advance the plutocracy?  Join me in reviewing some inspiration for cyberpunk gaming culled from my many trips into the matrix.  Enjoy the news:

Raytheon, that big defense contractor, is working on drone defenses for the US military working with various sorts of directed energy weapons, such as lasers and microwaves.

The Chinese Government is backing a Belt and Road Initiative, a new Silk Road, to build transportation and economic links from Asia to Europe and Africa, some of the giant machine used to build it are impressive in size and productivity.

A Swiss company, Energy Vault, has a design using cranes and concrete blocks to store energy.  If nothing else, it would be a great place to have a fight going on.

More ways to avoid facial recognition technology, some useful, others less so.

There are many ways to grow food inside using artificial light, LEDs are proving to be extremely flexible in such applications.  Who knows what harvest may come from such technologies?

For plants grown in the traditional methods, they are becoming increasingly vulnerable to diseases and other blights in our interconnected world.  Perhaps ironically, viruses may provide the best way to introduces defenses into plants to fight these dangers.

What visions of the coming dark future have you seen recently?

Notes: To my surprise, it has been nearly a year since my last Dark Future Ahead . . .

Image from Energy Vault and used without permission.

 

 

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Shadowrun Campaign Update with New Seattle Scream Prop (#62)

For various reasons Shadowrun gaming in our local groups has been slow for the last few months.  The monthly games at Tyche’s Games (every first Saturday every month, come and join) have been interrupted by Conventions (GenCon and Dragon*Con) and University of Georgia football games but we are back on track for October!  In support of that we have a new Seattle Scream (#62).

The Saturday game will be moving to the Sixth World Edition of Shadowrun which hopefully we will be seeing actual hard copies of in October.  Our other GMs are still debating if they want to adopt the new rules or stay with 5th Edition.  I suspect that eventually we will all shift over but it will take some time.

I have also built my first Shadowrun, 6WE, character: Elvis, a knight-errant of the Church of Elvis, traveling the highways and byways of North America bringing the good news and good music.

Our NorCal campaign just had a game this week and hopefully I will have a game report up soon.

Notes: Elvis Photo found on Wikimedia Commons and used under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

Down and Out in Taren Kost – Campaign Report Episode 11 – Family, right?

This takes place shortly after Interlude 3, again, amazingly, it is a straight chronology from one game to another.

Our cast for this episode (for more information on the game background, see here):

Reed Greenbottle, Mercutio, Skathfka and introducing:

• Agrippa, tortoise beastkine martial artist seeking his three lost brothers.  (Shadow Monk 3, played by B, naturally, as his other character is very city focused)

Episode 11: Family, right?

Out of August, Into September

Now we move into September (and hopefully some cooler weather here in Georgia, USA), the seventh month of the Roman calendar.  September does not seem to have any particular ties to myth or tradition among the Romans, however, as Seven is usually viewed as a magical number, magic and spells will be our theme for this month.   Please let me know if there is anything you would like to see.

At the start of the month I will be in Washington, DC, area visiting family and museums.  My plan is to set the journal to update during that time but I will slow to approve comments from new people but I will do so as soon as I can.  I shall return with new and inspired ideas and photographs of the wonders of the Smithsonian and other museums and historical places.

August, 2019, saw the following posts here: