Freerunning

Game Design

This is a port of Shadowrun to Fate, which means it’s about telling Shadowrun stories. It has wildly different mechanics in places: standard Shadowrun is very much a simulation game, where you are rewarded for cleverly stacking together lots of things to accumulate advantage. This is a narrative game, where game balance is about the effect on the story. Characters will not port over directly from one to the other. Things that, in Shadowrun, could give you an increased chance to hit are either permission to add an Edge to a Skill, or they’re a way to Create an Advantage, or they affect what happens on a successful hit.

Setting

This is a variant Shadowrun setting with the following differences from the normal books:

• The player characters are all part of the Haven movement, creating an alternative to the extraterritorial megacorporations. The theme is open vs. closed, distributed vs. monolithic, resilient vs. brittle, Maker Faire vs. mass production. They very seldom work for a Mr. Johnson; instead, they will come into conflict with the opposition as part of their work in supporting the Havens around the world.
• The timeline is updated to reflect changes in real-world technology through 2019, and rationalizations to make the future history make more sense. This is summarized in the discussion of the Scape. The Wireless Matrix Initiative turning point is edited out of the standard timeline, since the Matrix has always been wireless in this setting.
• To facilitate storytelling, the game uses the Fate Core System (from Evil Hat Productions), with inspiration from the Leverage RPG (from Margaret Weis Productions) to cut down on the amount of player time spent coming up with clever plans.
• The otaku are all technomancers. (Even with all the other fantastic elements in Shadowrun, neurons firing at a rate to interface with digital processors running at gigahertz speeds is straining the gamemaster’s sense of disbelief.) The technomancer freakout happens on schedule as the fraction of technomancers in the population increases.
• The conversion to Fate is also changing the balance of the game somewhat, making it easier for chrome to be found on the street, and emphasizing the narrative qualities of chrome and magic over detailed mechanics. I deviate from the Shadowrun source material when it suits my purposes, sometimes to make the game balance match Fate better, sometimes because I want to add flavors that I enjoy.

Part of my motivation in creating this is that in the current news environment, I want to tell stories of creation and connection. Another is that while Iain M. Banks does a superb job of exploring what a fully post-scarcity society with superintelligence would be like, I wanted to work out the details of something more practical, limited to human-scale intelligence and grappling with the scarcity issues that are inescapable while we’re living on a single planet. (Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway makes a stab at this, but fails to confront numerous issues that I want to tackle; the technology level there is effectively My Little Anarchist: Fabbers are Magic and doesn’t examine the difficulty of supply chains.) And, last but not least, I want to take up the challenge that as long as we’re imagining elves, dragons, and cybernetics, we should try to imagine economic and social justice.

I’m also establishing that the monolithic Big Bads are not monolithic; for instance, Aztechnology is the result of the Cult of the Smoking Mirror appropriating Aztec heritage and magnifying the worst parts to their own advantage. Quetzalcoatl is not happy about this.

Campaign Aspects

• Pink Mohawk in the Streets, Black Trenchcoat in the Suites: a classic division of Shadowrun style is pink mohawk vs. black trenchcoat. This means that pink mohawk behavior works when in a street setting but is trouble on corporate turf, and vice versa. We use Blades in the Dark heist rules to avoid spending too much time planning black trenchcoat runs, but it is still appropriate to don a black trenchcoat at such times.
• Bleeding Edge Technology: state-of-the-art tech is very effective, but has its drawbacks.

Themes

• Flexible Response: the Havens have well-trained people for dealing with expected problems. Balancers prevent emergencies internally, Rescuers deal with emergencies, and Defenders protect against external threats. But when things come up that no one is prepared for, Flexible Response teams handle the weird stuff.
• Construction Crew: the player characters build infrastructure in Havens and sometimes have to deal with interference... or with the things they dig up.
• Live and Direct: investigative journalism is usually punished by assassination; even Consumer Reports has to have a clandestine cell organization now. (Pavel Sheremet is only the latest in a long line of real-world journalists martyred for their pursuit of the truth; this will only be worse in a world with shadowrunners.) The player characters are willing to take those risks to publish the truth on the scatterweb, working with covert news organizations like Network 23 and NewsLeak and pirate trideo stations like Orks First! and Greenwatch.
• Master Craftsfolk: the player characters are expert Makers, and regularly smuggle feedstock and new machinery to Havens and teach other people to build things for themselves.
• Unicorn Express: the party courier packages and people between Havens. They aren’t proper smugglers per se, but they occasionally wind up moving sensitive things around. And sometimes there are complications...
• Leverage: the megacorps take what they want. We steal it and give it to the Havens. We provide... leverage.

Bibliography

Science Fiction and Fantasy

• Charles Stross, Halting State and Rule 34. Police procedurals set in a near-future Scotland.
• Cory Doctorow, Walkaway. In ungoverned lands neglected by the super-rich, people build a post-scarcity gift economy.
• Harry Connolly, A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark. Pacifist urban fantasy.

Nonfiction

• David Bowles, Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky. A retelling of Central American mythology. He also has numerous useful articles on Medium, including Pronouncing Nahuatl, and the Aztlan Affirmed series, parts Im II, III, IV, V.
• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. An anthropological study of the history of debt and its role in culture.
• Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. How pirates pioneered constitutional democracy on the high seas and inspiration for how people self-organize in the absence of a government.
• Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. My primary source for the Haven economy.
• Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disasters. An inspirational look at how people form networks of mutual aid in the aftermath of chaos.
• Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things. A serious look at future design ideas and the origin of the term spime.

News

• Growth is not required for a functioning economy
• Modern cities are laid out badly for cultivating adult friendship
• Fake media can create false memories and you can bet that the megacorps are very good at it. The main thing that keeps them in check is the threat of exposure by other megacorps who would find advantage in undermining a rival.
• 5 Species That Eat Pollution for Breakfast is an example of the kind of natural biotech the Havens are using to clean up toxic waste.
• Five Farming Bridges is a good inspirational project (Designboom, Inhabitat).
• Hempcrete is flexible enough to withstand earthquakes, though it needs a frame to support vertical load.
• Treated wood can be stronger than steel
• A better way to make drinks and drugs, These Scientists Have Discovered How To Use Electricity To Make Protein From CO₂, Pure Water for Haiti, Afghanistan: Just Add Bacteria, and Powerful Ideas: Bacteria Clean Sewage and Create Electricity are forerunners of Haven bioreactor tech. They use algae to make biofuels. Afton inventor designs a self-contained home sewage treatment system uses red worms.
• Nanostructured membranes can remove salts from water at 4× the efficiency of current materials
• Vertical farms are key to sustaining high population density. They can be vastly more productive than ordinary farmland, though they have thermodynamic limits with current technology.
• Using carbon nanotubes to desalinate water
• Graphene can be used to generate energy from vibration, make supercapacitors, and anything from insulators to conductors to superconductors.
• Floating solar is a win-win energy solution for drought-stricken US lakes
• Energy storage with salt and antifreeze
• Aluminium-graphene batteries
• A reversible heat-pump promises a cheap way to store renewable energy on the grid
• Methane-eating bacteria to create fully biodegradable polymers
• Creating hydrogen from sunlight, carbon nitride, and black phosphorus
• Terahertz imaging can see through clothing, paper, cardboard, wood, masonry, plastic and ceramics, and it can be generated without cryogenic cooling.
• We can suck CO₂ out of the air to make nanotubes.
• Phase spatial light modulators can display dynamic holograms.
• MARAUDER is a United States Air Force Research Laboratory project concerning the development of a coaxial plasma railgun.
• SALT is a non-lethal firearm that fires pepper spray capsules instead of bullets
• Graphene’s transparency to infrared is tunable, which is handy for stealth
• Nanostructured ceramic is 50% Harder than current spinel armor for Armor Windows and will make smartphone screens better than Sapphire
• Engineered spider silk is half as tough as Kevlar but far more flexible. There are also Kevlar-level results from feeding graphene to spiders.
• Composite metal foams turn armor-piercing bullets into dust on impact
• Removing lignin from wood and compressing it can result in materials stronger than steel; 3× the density of wood and 11.5× stronger; cellulose fibers can make stronger concrete with less cement; lignin left over from creating paper can be used as a substitute for the oil-based resins and adhesives employed in the manufacture of engineered timbers, such as plywoods
• Acoustic nanomodems can transmit at 40bps 2km underwater for 1W and listen for 10mW
• Breakdown of justice leads to democratization of kidnapping; Software can detect patterns in human trafficking
• Gait analysis can provide identification and health information
• Lasers and holography can scan deep into tissue with better resolution, and much less size and cost than an MRI

Role-Playing Games

• Shadowrun, of course!
• The classic Cyberpunk 2020 is full of fun ideas.
• Pathfinder Fate Accelerated (design notes) is a major game mechanical inspiration for this.
• Leverage
• Blades in the Dark and its spinoff Runners in the Shadows
• In Which We Live and Breathe is community-oriented cyberpunk, Forged in the Dark and Powered by the Apocalypse.
• Interface Zero is one of the most detailed cyberpunk settings in Fate. Well worth buying.

Useful Resources

• Fate Consequences Generator