The Shadowrun Novel

My novel's based on FASA's Shadowrun fantasy/cyberpunk game system. It's a pretty loose basing, because I haven't played Shadowrun (though I want to... I just don't have anyone to play with), and own only the main rulebook. Because of this, and because of copyright issues, it's tempting to cut the last remaining links to Shadowrun and base the story in my own fantasy/cyberpunk world. That would also allow me to dump some of the less plausible features (both social and technological (FASA's game designers weren't computer techs... or perhaps they just decided to trade realism and story-tellability for RPG playability)) in favor of things I think would be more realistic.

Here it is... what I've got so far, anyway. I haven't finished HTML-izing it yet, so bear with me.

Update, Dec 27 1998:

I finally got my chance to play Shadowrun... details here.

I now own the Third Edition Shadowrun rulebook... a lot of stuff has changed, including the Matrix rules that I disliked so much in the Second Edition book. The new rules are actually vaguely plausible, and much more like real hacking than the old ones, which mostly amounted to a D&D-style dungeon crawl with cheesy computer graphics. I'm going to have to rewrite the Matrix runs in the first few chapters to match the new rules, but WTH... I was planning on rewriting those anyway. I never did really like them, and maybe now I can get something that's not only better, but actually works with the new rules.

All the text I have written has been HTML-ized, and I'm writing the new stuff in HTML, so there won't be any delay in getting the material web-ready after it's written in future. That said, I'm not going to post Chapter Eight yet, though I'm several pages into it, because I haven't finished Chapter Seven yet. I just got tired of the bloody thing, because I've been stuck on it for the last two years or so, so I just skipped the rest of it. I'll have to go back and finish it eventually, but for now at least I'm getting somewhere on the rest of the story.

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