WELCOME TO SURPRISE THREAT!

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

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 Beginn

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 A