Shadowrun is one of the most vibrant and enduring role-playing settings of all time, but as with any game, its enduring strength is the people who play it. The games they play and the stories they develop have sustained Shadowrun for more than thirty years.
As we keep releasing books for the current edition of the game (Shadowrun, Sixth World), we have also been working on ways to build the Shadowrun community and offer more tools for players to tell their own stories.
One of those tools is the community content site that will be hosted on DriveThruRPG, called Holostreets. Similar to the Dungeon Masters Guild and Pathfinder Infinite, Holostreets will give people the opportunity to develop and sell their own Shadowrun content (see content guidelines here). One element that sets Holostreets apart from other community content sites is the ability to create material for any edition of Shadowrun. While we are going to continue to tell stories in the current setting, we understand that one of the many things the Shadowrun fan base is passionate about is which rule set and part of the timeline they prefer to use. Since, rules-wise, we don’t think there’s any wrong way to play Shadowrun (except maybe with a D20 system[1]), we’re happy to have people build out rules, adventures, and stories that work for them.
We’ll provide art and layout templates for people who want to make Holostreets content, and we’re excited to see how people apply their own creativity to the setting. We want to emphasize the “people” part of the creative community we’d like to see—while AI art and text might be easy to generate, that’s not the spirit of this effort. Shadowrun is about (among other things) asserting your individuality against the dehumanizing forces of the world, so we want to see individual personalities and ideas shine through. Let us see what you can create!
Holostreets is set to go live April 11.
Another part of our effort to build community is integration of virtual tabletops. The pandemic showed the utility of remote gaming, and the available tools (and associated internet speeds) are at good places to provide a quality gaming experience. So we have partnered with Roll20 to bring Shadowrun, Sixth World to their virtual tabletop. The Shadowrun, Quick Start rules are available for free, and the full Shadowrun, Sixth World rule set is available for purchase. The rules package doesn’t just give you access to the rules—you get tokens and art that work smoothly with the Roll20 interface and the Shadowrun, Sixth World character sheet. Like many of the other resources we have developed, including card decks and Edge tokens, the aim here is to make it as easy as possible to play Shadowrun, so a wide range of people can enjoy this great setting. The time has never been more right to tell stories of punks and neo-anarchists who will not fit a mold or be forced into the megacorporate way of life. Get your group together, build your stories, and unleash your creativity!
[1] Just kidding! But maybe not.