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A Shadowrun: Anarchy Resource

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Anarchy Primer: The Contract Brief

In this Surprise Threat! we will talk about The Contract Brief. The Narration is all about Setting and Conflict. The Scene is all about Engagement, Challenge, and Consequence. The Contract Brief is going to focus on Objectives, Complications, and Story Arc. There are lots of ways to build a Contract Brief, but in one way or another, you will likely need to grapple with these. By Objective, I mean the required goal that completes the Run, like “Steal the thing” or “Kidnap the person.” I do not mean the smaller, intermediate objectives, what I call Tactical Objectives, like “Avoid the drones” or “Get to the choppa!” By Complication, I mean the major twist in the story that is going to take thi

Anarchy Primer: The Scene

In this Surprise Threat! we will talk about The Scene. The Scene can be thought of as the sum of all related Narrations. The Scene is also the smallest unit of storytelling that can stand on its own, in that it has a Beginning, Middle, and an End. You could potentially tell a whole story within one Scene. The true value of a Scene, however, is in building an engaging, challenging, and consequential Contract Brief. To talk about The Scene, we will break it down into its Beginning, Middle, and End (in that order), and into components of Engagement, Challenge, and Consequence (not in that order). By Engagement, I mean grabbing and holding a player’s attention with interaction and purpose. It’s

Anarchy Primer: The Narration

The next few posts on Surprise Threat will be a sort of primer on how to start playing Shadowrun: Anarchy. The shared-storytelling, rules-light system can be awkward to grasp when transitioning from a crunch-heavy system like Shadowrun 5e and it can be even more bewildering when starting from the ground up. We are going to build this primer by expanding our scope from the smallest unit of storytelling to the largest – from Narrations to Scenes to Contract Briefs to Campaign Arcs. There are untold ways to build these storytelling units within a roleplaying game and no one way is right, as long as it works for your table. But, as with everything on this site, these are how they work best for m

 
 

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