Shadowrun books were once a must-purchase for me but once I had acquired the core books, other releases quickly became PDF purchases either due to quality or exclusivity (the E-Book line for example). This coupled with my disinterest in the current version of Dungeons and Dragons my RPG budget has been free to spend on other games.  Unfortunately, finding the time to play these other games has been difficult and the games have been gathering dust on my desk. Fortunately, this looks to change in 2012 as I’m finding I have a lot more free time lately.

So what’s on my desk ready to be played and what do I intend to do with them?

• Legend of the Five Rings 4E– The emperor has succumbed to his wounds and died but in his hands he holds his orphaned, new-born heir.  The PCs must flee back to their estates and raise the fallen emperor’s child while the world around them descends into civil war. Do they raise the child to assume the throne or do they use him as a bargaining chip and take the throne for themselves? This is the campaign I’ve been working on while I’ve been running SR and I hope it turns into a domain level, cross generational game with wushu styled sword fights. I once described this as Game of Thrones meets Star Wars.
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay– I don’t have anything planned for this but I’ve acquired a few of the supplements to go along with the core box. I really like how Fantasy Flight have moved away from the book-only approach to RPG releases and broken the rules in tokens and cards. I believe including these in the core rule box was the right thing to do as opposed to WOTC approach with power cards. This will probably be my beer and pretzels game for the year and I’m planning on picking up a few of the expansions to make this as prep lite as possible. The Witch’s Song is probably the first one I’ll GM as I’m quite fond of haunting, fairytale-esque adventures in my fantasy games.
• Necromunda – I used to play marathon games (24 hrs+) of this in college but as I moved on in life I no longer fit in Games Workshop’s target audience and more importantly either did my wallet. Fortunately I acquired a Delaque gang for my birthday last year and I hope to get a group together to play through a campaign. Standing in my way are 9 primed but unpainted gangers and a table without any terrain. I imagine I’ll get the gangers painted this year but getting a game together is the most likely thing on this list to fail.

So what of Shadowrun?

The group has played 1 game this year and I think we all felt a bit let down at the end of it. This coupled with life has left us unable to get together for a game. However, things are looking brighter, I’ve convinced one of the players to run a few games of SR so that I can play (in return for a few games of 4E) and I’m refocusing on what’s important to me as the GM. So if you have been coming here for some SR goodness then expect things to resume sooner rather than later.