Shadowrun

Stalker, from the Shadowrun Forums has created an interesting utility for Gamemasters. It is an Initiative Tracker that includes the ability to roll and sort the initiatives of PCs and NPCs alike. This utility can be downloaded to your local computer so that the javascript can be edited so that the PCs of the party are automatically inserted into the list of people in the fight, saving the GM some time. Currently it does all the rolling for every character placed in the initiative tracker, but Stalker is considering a way to allow Players to roll their own initiative with dice and that result just entered in for the character and sorting them into the order along with the NPCs.
This should be a great utility for most GMs to help deal with larger numbers of NPCs and since it can be downloaded to your system, doesn't require a connection to the Net to be able to use at ones gaming table. Plus it should work on tablets and other systems that support Javascript in their browsers.

A recent posting by another Savage player brought me back to the idea of using GraphViz in gaming. This particular example was in mapping player characters with their in game relationships to people, places, things and ideas to help a GM visualize how they are all interconnected.
I went through the post and created several .gv files that have presets setup to make doing more of these easier should I continue down this path with my own games.
Each relationship has a weight that is colored. Yellow is for weak, green for Normal and red for Strong. The colors can be adjusted for each edge or for each type of edge by changing the parameters either at the top of the given section (changes all of them) or right next to the connection (changes just that edge).
The first gv shows the two initial characters, Grimm and Klovis, and Grimm's connections to his initial choices.

The second gv expands on the first connections file reflecting some new comments and examples from the blog. Grimm's boss now has a name and the relationship shows how Grimm is conflicted about authority figures. No connections were defined for the other example characters, so Klovis doesn't have anywhere to link to still. The nice thing about GraphViz is that it will move nodes out to provide space for the edges that link nodes together.

The last gv adds another connection with the note about it being a negative relationship. This would probably be better represented by a different color edge rather than a note near the edge since each relationship will probably end up with some notes near them. Other links that could be added are the interconnections of the PCs, but those aren't as needed as seeing how the various PCs are connected to the NPCs in a campaign setting.
This idea would make for a great idea for dealing with games of more Political Intrigue, like Shadowrun or Legend of the Five Rings.

Of course once you go this far with mapping relationships and places, then the next step would be to build the entire world in something like a GIS database to actually show where everything and everyone is in relation to each other. A massive undertaking for any single GM, but maybe more possible with the collective masses for a popular world, like the OpenStreetMaps project.

Talk about a blast from the past. I recently came across a copy of FASA's 1990 Shadowrun Promo video. I never realized that FASA had ever done anything like this. In some ways it is much better than the current WotC ads for the "Red Box".

It features everything I'd expect from Shadowrun, and all with that old school late 80s amateur look to the sets. I was impressed by the fact that they actually did have some 3D animation in the video, but, as expected, it was very low polygons (just a few boxes with very few textures or shaders to their surfaces).

Updated December 25, 2009

Merry Christmas...

I spent some time and took and created a version of a Shadowrun character sheet that is fillable in Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. Most of the file is complete, but there are still a few sections that I haven't gotten to as yet to make editable, like the cybernetics page at the very end. This sheet is based on the one by Ismo version 2.1.
I recently found another SR4 Character Sheet to begin modifying from Super Spy Studios. This is a basic sheet designed for characters that can fit on two pages. Or just keep filling out and printing the additional "back pages".

updated Aug 6, 2009.

A friend of mine is wanting to start up a new Shadowrun game, so I thought I'd be helpful and make a few PDF sheets editable like I did for Shadowrun 4th Edition sheets. This first one is the Shadowrun Companion Character sheet that can be found at Catalyst Labs Shadowrun Site. This is the first of 6 files from that location.
Got the second sheet up. This one is the basic SR3 sheet. A few fields might need a bit of adjustment for size or placement, but it shared enough in common with the SR3 Companion character sheet that I was able to copy and place the fields from it into this one.

I’m standing on the edge. The brink of eternity, staring out at the vast nothing that is before me and the long and distant nothing of the landscape that extends off to nowhere behind me. I’ve been here before many times, but something about this time feels different. Just one small step forward is all it would take to go from standing on the edge to plunging down into the nothing that yawns open before me. Turning around again, careful not to lean too far in any direction I stare back at the landscape behind me that led to this place. The reddish-tan ground is covered in random patches of low, dry scrub, struggling to eek out an existence in a place that receives little water.