This an awesome set of missions for a starting Shadowrun crew. Get it!!!!!

Designed as an introductory adventure for Shadowrun 5e, this can meet a myriad of needs. Your group (indeed, you too) may be new to Shadowrun, or you may just wish to have a structured introduction to the changes brought in by the Fifth Edition - it's a lot more enjoyable to play through them than merely read about them, after all. Hence it is designed to be adaptable to suit the group you have in front of you, and yet provide excitement and adventure, challenge and sheer fun, however much they know about the game mechanics and/or the setting.

At its most basic, the adventure concerns information and the lengths some people will do to get their hands on it. This will mean that the party of shadowrunners will meet a range of different factions, many quite powerful, and they'll have to pick their way carefully to come out alive, never mind on top and with bulging credsticks. The opening chapter, Politics and Paydata, lays out all the background to what is going on: read it carefully and see how it all fits in to the background of Seattle life at all levels. Run well, this adventure will also provide a comprehensive introduction to Seattle and its movers and shakers, setting up a successful shadowrunner team for a potentially profitable future there, if that's your long-term aim for your game.

It all begins with the 'runners being arrested for something they didn't do (however many offences could actually be laid at their doors). From then it's a sequence of unfortunate events as they come into possession of potentially explosive, not to mention valuable, information and have to decide what to do with it... and the delight is, that it is very much up to them what they do. The whole adventure is open-ended, full of options provided in such a way that you can react appropriately to whatever they get up to - a real treat to run (unfortunately I cannot tell you if it's a treat to play, but they looked as if they enjoyed it!).

Open and flexible it may be, but it is structured enough that you are not left waiting on your players, there are plenty of events to run that will keep them moving - if they do not go out to find the adventure, it will come and kick their door down. There are at least five factions who would dearly love to get hands on that information, and not all are prepared to pay for it. Time to make friends and enemies, with repercussions that can echo on for the rest of your campaign.

An added bonus is an opening scene which is designed to enable you to actually form the shadowrunner team if your players have newly-generated characters who do not know each other yet. This is helpful if you are using this adventure as a campaign-starter. From then on, things move fast but well-structured, with plenty of advice on how to portray places and people and how to deal with whatever problems arise... or even make more problems if you think the 'runners are having too easy a time of it!

The adventure should appeal to all types of players with opportunities for interaction, investigation and role-playing as well as enough combat to keep anyone satisfied, with plenty for hackers to do as well. Multiple routes lead to the exact same key events, giving the players the illusion that they are in control of their own destinies whilst actually keeping the adventure firmly on track.

Overall, a cracking adventure perfect for getting your Shadowrun 5e campaign off to a flying start.

Shadowrun: Splintered State is an introductory adventure for SR5, designed as the launching point for a campaign. While I admire that ambition, the scenario drops the characters into the deep end of a very dangerous political game, and it would be very easy for the entire team to get wiped out in some of the early encounters especially if the NPCs are played as competently as they are implied to be. It also seems to assume that the players will have a strong grasp on the setting as they are thrown between no less than four rival factions for what they possess. My fear is that it is aiming for too complex and too political of a story to serve as an easy introduction for new players, now for players experienced with the setting but not the new rules, it may be an ideal starting point, but I think it fails as a solid entry for new players and GMs.

Disclosure: As a featured reviewer for RPGNow/DriveThroughRPG, I received my copy of this product for free from the publisher for the purpose of this review.

Note: Read more reviews and other gaming articles at my journal https://seaofstarsrpg.wordpress.com/

Originally published at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2013/10/04/tabletop-review-shadowrun-splintered-state/

Splintered State is the first adventure for Shadowrun, Fifth Edition that isn’t from the Shadowrun Missions line. Although to be honest, since the adventure uses the same formatting as Shadowrun Missions, follows up some of the storyline threads from the last season of Missions and looks and feels like a double length adventure from that series, it’s hard not to instinctively look at Splintered State as a post script to the Seattle adventures. Unlike Shadowrun Missions though, Splintered State is completely in black and white and it has nearly twice the page count. That said it also has a little over twice the price tag as well. Season 5 of Shadowrun Missions costs a little under six dollars per adventure and Season 4, which Splintered State ties into, costs $3.95 each, so you could get two or three adventures using the same format for the same cost as this. Why the higher price tag? I’m not sure save for the fact it’s the first adventure to start touching on plot points from Storm Front, the last Metaplot release for Shadowrun, Fourth Edition. We get to see a little more regarding the fall of Kenneth Brackhaven, Governor of Seattle, but more importantly, we also get a bit more of the mysterious weirdness “infecting” various people of the Sixth World including some beloved Jackpointers.

Splintered State is meant to be an introductory adventure into Shadowrun, Fifth Edition. It’s meant for rookie characters and to help a group of new shadowrunners not only make their name, but really get thrown into the deep end of Seattle intrigue and see whether they can sink or swim. Now note I said characters rather than players. While I think Splintered State is an excellent adventure for showcasing the new rules and system for Shadowrun, I hesitate to say it’s a good adventure for introducing people completely new to the setting. After all, the adventure makes heavy use of the metaplot that came before Fifth Edition, along with a cast and characters that have a lot of back story and baggage attached to them. As such, long time players with new characters will have a blast with this adventure while newcomers will have to stop and ask questions almost constantly about various players and megacorps that rear their head throughout this adventure. I personally feel an introductory adventure should be more handholding and explanatory about the setting and mechanics and Splintered State just doesn’t do that at all. I mean, when you throw in Jake Armitage and a back story that stretches back to First Edition as an Easter Egg, you’re obviously NOT writing for the newcomer crowd. Now it does do a great job of guiding a new GM through running the adventure and pointing out how players can go off the rails or make incredibly stupid (lethal) mistakes, but from brand new players. I think they would need something a little friendly to their inexperience and lack of Sixth World knowledge. So basically, Splintered State is a fun and frantic adventure that gives new characters a lot of potential contacts, allies and enemies, but it’s a little too intense for people who are touching Shadowrun for the first time.

Splintered State revolves around a very special comlink – one that used to be possessed by a special agent trying to bring Governor Brackhaven down. The good news is that it can do just that. The bad news is that this particular agent has the same problem that seems to have affects characters like Fastjack. The good news is that the comlink is worth a LOT of nuyen in the right hands. The bad news is many sides want the comlink and are willing to kill for it. The good news is the PCs end up getting their hands on the comlink. The bad news is the PCs end up getting their hands on the comlink. What follows is a set of potential, bribes, betrayals and battles as the players have to decide what to do with the comlink. Anything from getting bullets to the brain or collecting well over 100,000 nuyen can occur depending on how the characters play their cards. Hell, you could get the money AND the fatal injuries depending on the actions taken.

In a sense, the players have five sides that they can take. You have Ares, Mitsuhama, Brackhaven, the Law and “Screw you all.” If you’re using experienced characters, especially those that have been through Season Four of Shadowrun Missions, you’re pretty much guaranteed to side with DA Oaks and Tosh because you probably have them as contacts with a high rating while Brackhaven probably has already tried to murder you more than once. The Law is the lesser or the five evils but new characters and especially new players might not realize this, causing the comlink to fall into the hands whichever side makes the best offer. I really enjoyed the dynamic layout of the adventure and how it plans for any of the five sides to be taken, along with the repercussions of each.

Splintered State offers a lot of handouts, maps and NPC data, which as I have said earlier, make running this adventure pretty easy. It’s well written and laid out, and contains all sorts of ways to scale the difficulty of the adventure and also gives some tips for what to do when players try to think outside the box. If you’ve ever run or read a Shadowrun Missions you know what to expect. Splintered State does tie heavily into the metaplot of fourth AND fifth edition Shadowrun, and the results of this adventure will be felt in later releases for the system, so if you like that sort of thing, you and your team can play the adventure and read about it in future releases. For newcomers, this is a great way to tie emotional impact into the memories of a fun session of gaming. Some gamers however may be turned off the whole “everything is metaplot first and foremost” aspect of Shadowrun. For that I can only offer two solutions: don’t play or just ignore the metaplot. You can write your own campaign or version of Shadowrun if at any time you start to feel like you have to purchase and read every release in order to understand what is going on story-wise.

In the end, Splintered State is a really fun adventure. It’s probably a dollar or three overpriced and it really doesn’t feel like an introductory adventure for new players as much as it does for new characters, but it’s well designed, touches on all the tropes of the setting and gives you a large look at some of the key players and issues currently taking place in the Sixth World. If you’re familiar with the rise and fall of Kenneth Brackhaven and have enjoyed the drama, than you’ll definitely want to pick this up to see the continuation escalation of events. You can easily modify the adventure to fit your older, more established characters if need be. Bottom line – Splintered State is well worth picking up for long time Shadowrun fans, but newcomers can probably skip it as it’s not as newcomer friendly as it wants and/or needs to be.