Session Zero

Questions to answer before we start. There are no wrong answers and a few of them change the campaign.

Work through this before session zero or at the table, whichever suits. The point is to find out what everybody already has in their head, because Shadowrun runs two genres at once and most people arrive fluent in neither, one, or a different one than you'd guess.

Answer honestly rather than helpfully. A shrug is a real answer and so is "I don't know what that is."

The questions

A. Where you're coming from

  1. Have you played the Harebrained video games — Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall, Hong Kong? They're a lot of people's only exposure and they set specific expectations.
  2. Have you played R. Talsorian Games' table top rpg Cyberpunk (RED, 2020)
  3. Have you played any of the Shadowrun video games?
  4. How much do you want to know about the setting before we start, versus discovering it in play?

A2. The crew, before session one

You have worked together for years and you have two fixers: Fontaine, downtown, who runs a coffee stall at Grand Central Market, and Marko Zorić in San Pedro, who only does harbour work. Both take ten per cent. Neither has ever burned anybody. The campaign does not open with you meeting. Answer these together:

  1. How long has this crew been working, and what do people call you?
  2. What was the job that nearly ended it? Somebody still doesn't talk about it.
  3. What does each of you owe one of the others? One debt each, in a circle.
  4. What's the one job Fontaine sent you on that nobody discusses?
  5. Which of the two do you trust more, and why? There is no right answer and the difference between them is real.

All four answers are canon the moment you say them, and they go on the wiki.

The three table rules — worked together before, no backstabbing without a planned arc, and even shares with one extra as the ceiling — are on the player wiki under Table agreements. Read them before answering the questions above; the first one is why these questions exist.

B. Touchstones

Mark each: know it well / seen it once / heard of it / never heard of it. No wrong answers, and "never heard of it" is genuinely useful information — it tells me which references will land and which will be noise.

Films

Heist films— a Shadowrun run is a heist, so these may matter more

than the cyberpunk list:

Anime - I frequently use anime shorthand when describing some of the action, plus it has a lot of classic cyberpunk

Video Games

Books

C. Tone: mohawk, mirrorshades, or trenchcoat

Shadowrun's community has three names for how a run feels. Pick where you'd like the table to sit, and say whether you want it consistent or varying run to run.

Follow-ups:

  1. How much moral compromise do you want available? Shadowrunners work for people who are not good. Do you want the option to refuse jobs on principle, or is that not the game you're here for?
  2. How much comedy? Some tables want gallows humour throughout, some want it to stay bleak.

D. What you want to spend time doing

  1. Rank these by how much screen time you want: combat, infiltration, social maneuvering, downtime and character stuff.

E. This campaign in particular

  1. How do you want to treat Shadowrun lore?
  1. World building. Unlike D&D, it's set in an alternate reality with real locations and real organizations that exist today. Is this something that appeals, or do we like the escapism that we get when we're hired by the Umbrella Corporation rather than Sony or Smith & Wesson?

I'm interested in building out details of the city we play in and how it got adapted.

We're using a rebuilt timeline where real history is intact through 2026 and the world diverges after that. So the setting contains recognisable versions of things you have lived through.

  1. Does that appeal, or would you rather the fiction stayed further from the news? Both are workable and it's easier to know up front.
  2. The backstory leans on a pandemic, mass detention, corporate capture of government, and Indigenous dispossession and resistance. Some of that will be background colour and some will be plot. How much appetite do you have for politics in the fiction?
  3. Do you want to read the setting history before we start, or have your character learn it as it comes up?
  4. Seattle or Los Angeles? Seattle is a corporate enclave with a functioning government and a police contract. LA is a free city with no government above district level, three years after a state massacre. Either works; they play very differently.

F. Lines and veils

Standard, and not optional given the material above.

  1. Lines — things you do not want in the game at all. No justification needed, and you can add to this list any time, including mid-session.
  2. Veils — things that can exist in the fiction but happen off screen or get summarised rather than played out.
  3. Anything you'd like a heads-up about before a session, rather than encountering it cold?
  4. How do you want to raise it in the moment if something isn't working? (A word, a gesture, a text afterward — pick whatever you'd actually use.)

G. Logistics

  1. Session length and frequency that you can actually sustain?
  2. Online or in person, and what's the fallback when someone can't make it — cancel, play short, or run the character as an NPC?
  3. Anything about how you learn rules that would help me teach them?