#2 Not Sketchy at All!

So we're in the magical, dystopian Sixth World and we're a shadowrunner: a mercenary criminal operative who breaks the law just by breathing.

Here's our first real look at the game.

It's isometric - reminiscent of the quintessential late '90s pen-and-paper based RPGs. Shadowrun Returns is generally a tribute to that era, even using the ruleset and continuity that '90s Shadowrun players would be familiar with. We're on a rainy street at night, and cirion the creator has managed to use explosion noises and ripples of light to simulate the occasional crackle of thunder and lightning.

You might remember from the briefing that we're actually in one of the more famous Shadowrun starting cities of Seattle, not California. Don't worry, we'll get there. Antumbra was originally released as three separate modules and the first one is very short, basically set in and in the vicinity of a single building.

Here's our PDA.

On the top right is the ubiquitous Help button.

We're on the first of four general sections of our menu - the information section marked by an exclamation point.

The top tabs show us our mission briefing and general objectives under Objectives, and our Mission Items -- information, special variables we encounter or trigger throughout the campaign, and quest items that don't belong in our inventory.

The second section shows our character info.

This shows our name, character portrait, cash (1200 nuyen, which the campaign gave us to start with) and other statistics.

Our etiquettes -- persuasion dialogue specialisations -- are Gang and Street, implying that our character's lived on the streets or dealt with homeless people for some time, and that they were part of the culture or hierarchy of a gang.

As for the other statistics, the most important takeaway is that he's a tough guy who punches things until they die. I went for balance over optimisation here, but as the game progresses he'll get better and better at that.

In the inventory section, he has a basic healing item, a basic resurrection item and a dinky pistol that he's no good with. Also, no cyberware yet.

We're off to meet the wizard! Uh I mean, Mr Johnson.

We find Club Antumbra! There's a line in front, a car park filled mostly with motorcycles, and Mr Johnson is waiting impatiently over in the far right corner.

Conversation time. I'll mark my responses with an X.

I'll try to play him as cocky, but moral.

For now <scare chord>

Johnson talks like someone who's used to hire runners and that's bad. People who regularly hire shadowrunners understand the 'disposable' part of 'disposable assets' all too well. He's (clearly) human. Humans are in Shadowrun what they are in most RPGs - the baseline race, most prevalent and most average. Humans have a cap of nine in every statistic but start with a little extra karma to represent flexibility.

Fun fact: when I first played Returns I had no idea what a Johnson was and I actually started playing this campaign thinking it was a name. Imagine my surprise when this new face shows up and I go 'hey, I know Mr Johnson. That's not Mr Johnson!'

"Frag you" indeed.

I didn't mention that shadowrunners tend to have their own shadow-slang. It's infamous.

Were I playing this character as strictly professional, I'd skip this question, but I'm not.

Ouch, outmaneouvred. He has a point.

We've asked one good question too many. Here's another noob one. Hold onto your butts.

He doesn't snap at us this time. We're out of options. We could complain about the job or just get quiet, but I think it's time to get a move on.

...it's a bomb, isn't it? This is totally a bomb.

Delivering Johnson's box sounds like totally misguided innuendo

We walk past two bouncers and into the heart of Antumbra.

Dynamic shifts in colour, poison gas visual effects to represent coloured smoke, and the more techno-sounding tracks from the Shadowrun OST get combined to make it feel like an actual nightclub. People of various metatypes bob their heads, wander or dance. It works.

Prominently featured is the final boss theme from Shadowrun Returns, which itself is a callback to the first zone of the SNES game. I had actually planned to stick this into one of my Zer0es videos as part of a gag but never got the chance.

Let's check out the bar zone.

It's definitely a lot more subdued. We strike up a conversation with a friendly dwarf.

He seems like a shaman. And a creep.

Mechanically, Shadowrun dwarves are similar to you'd see in, say, D&D -- with bonuses to Body and Strength. But they also get extreme bonuses to their Willpower cap. Aesthetically strange or no, they make great martial artists and superior hermetic mages.

Huh. That is solid info. Dalmin knows his clubs and his business.

...I don't know if I believe him. What, did he try to flirt with Kali? Eh, let's assume he's being truthful but that opinion sounds pretty biased.

The question of the hour.

Dalmin is a shaman. As a shaman, he has a magical connection to the elements of the world and the spirits that live in them. The Sixth World is alive, and shamans are its translators. Whether in the material the box is made of, the contents themselves, or the air in between, Dalmin's connection to the elements may be able find a helpful spirit somewhere between us and the box to give us insight into what it contains.

What?

We do know it's bad but we don't know the scale of the badness.

...the bomb guess wasn't that far off.

We want to weigh our options.

We leave the dwarf and head to our friend, Turm.

LESSER SPECIES

Turm is, of course, a troll. The one common Shadowrun race tougher than orks, trolls get legendarily high Strength and Toughness caps but max out at six Charisma and Intelligence. Quickness maxes at eight, which is acceptable. They're often thought of as dumb muscle and Turm isn't fighting the stereotype here. And 'toughness' isn't an abstract - aside from tusks (which us orks share) and horns (which we don't), troll skin is literally laced with stone.

SHE EVEN CALLS HERSELF MUSCLE --

-- AND SHE CLEARLY ISN'T DUMB.

Mechanically, she's a street samurai like 1nv4d3r, except she didn't put four points into Charisma for an extra Etiquette. And if I remember right she's a ranged combatant.

It's the moment of truth.

She offers us a 'discount' which turns out to be the same as Dalmin's price. And based on the previous conversation with him, these two probably won't play well together. Dalmin's big draw is Haste, which makes us get more actions per round, but I suspect my combat prowess isn't worth improving through Haste. I need a gunner.

Right. Getting in. You make it sound so easy.

Let's try hiring Dalmin anyway.

I'll take your word for it, omniscient narrator.

As the original Mr Johnson put it...

It might have been funnier if I just picked the [Leave] option.

Moving on, we find a drunk guy.

A salaryman or wageslave is someone stuck working for a megacorp at a low level position.

And hurlg?! Hurlg is so strong it gives weaker characters stomach cramps!

Soykaf is a ubiquitous coffee substitute (you might remember my comment about the rarity of natural grown products in the intro).

This is beneath us.

The bartender is in the corner of the club area, right where we left him.

But we have other things to talk about besides alcohol.

And so did I realise that I know so little about real life club music styles that fictional futuristic club music styles are almost impossible to imagine (except Neo-Jazz I suppose).

Wow. Some of this gear is actually rather expensive.

We take the bartender's advice and buy a medkit to complement our knuckledusters and armour.

Then we sell our old armour, buy another medkit and return to the drunk.

It is totally about that and not about robbing you of 95 nuyen, yes.

OR SOMETHING.

I mean, the omniscient narrator is doing the snarking for me. Why am I even here? Anyway, we leave, grateful for the extra medkit this guy inadvertently bought us.

This must be Brenda, standing near the exit to the dance-floor. Let's check something out there before talking to her.

Sadly, decking is a skill that we lack. We take the sales pitch instead.

With all the accents, I assume that's an elvish brand of wine. And real meat? Must be super-expensive.

...sorry I asked?

aka how bad should I feel for demolishing this woman's building?

THE NEXT MARIA MERCURIAL???

To put this in perspective, the Shadowrun wiki names thirteen musicians among the most popular and known in the world and eighteen groups. Four of those groups have an actual wiki article and one musician has one -- Maria Mercurial. She even got a mention in Dunkelzahn's Will.

All that said, perhaps she gets even more popular after 2052 and my timeline is out of perspective but that's a lot to swallow.

We leave the console and return to Brenda.

Your time has come, BREND-

-awww, a familiar face. That's a little jarring. This is the same portrait I used for my first-ever Shadowrun Returns run.

We pick option #2. Employment it is.

I was expecting Brenda to be harder to deal with than this.

Now dressed as a handyman...

...we head over to the sound system...

...and sabotage it.

We return to Brenda, triumphant but careful not to convey that emotion.

But before we get to business, a little trolling (and not the Shadowrun kind.)

She didn't take the bait. Ah well.

Farewell, unexpectedly reasonable boss-lady.

We go from unexpectedly reasonable boss-lady to undeniably polite security guard.

...replacing 'polite' with 'chill'.

Yeah, I'm wasting time. But this guy is legitimately entertaining.

Ah, crap. I assume if we'd hacked the decker terminal we could've pulled this off but...

Between this guy and Brenda (and even the bartender, heh, rhyme) I'm starting to think we're working for the wrong people, against the wrong people.

Okay, no more joking around. We have a job to do.

I'm very, very ready.