Better Than Bad: A Shadowrun Supplement Review
Older Shadowrun core books used to include this charming in-world dictionary entry that defined the term “shadowrunning” as doing illegal or semi-legal acts for money. A shadowrunner a criminal by definition, but in a setting where the laws are written by evil corporations and their bigoted puppet governments, that definition leaves plenty of room for heroic characters of many kinds.
From the tail end of Fourth Edition onwards, however, it seems the game’s publisher started interpreting that dictionary entry in the narrowest way possible: “Criminals are bad, m’kay?”. From that point on it portrayed shadowrunners as amoral assholes who work for truly horrible monsters doing truly horrible shit as long as the money is good. And that’s not the game I want to play. Shortly after the dismal supplement “War!”, I got out of the game1.
Whenever I write about my feelings on the matter in the RPG.net forum, a couple of very nice freelance Shadowrun authors always point me towards Better than Bad, a 2018 supplement for Fifth Edition, telling me it’s an attempt at reversing this trend. When it came up as part of a Bundle of Holding alongside a couple other setting books, I decided to check it out. This is a review of Better Than Bad. Reviews of the other books might come later.
The goal of Better Than Bad is to provide support for “hooding” campaigns. Hooding is a bit of Shadowrun slang that’s been around for a while, and originally referred to missions where the goal was to “rob from the rich and give to the poor” Robin Hood style. This book broadens the definition to any mission where the PC’s main goal is more altruistic than financial.
Does the book succeed at its stated goal? Well, it tries to, while fighting itself every step of the way. It fights itself with such tenacity that I wonder if there was a corresponding real-world struggle between its writers and editors.
The supplement starts with a real downer of an introduction: “Are your do-gooder runners going to change the world? Probably not - too much money and power are arrayed against them.” Gee thanks, book. I was nurturing some hope there for a moment.
The focus here is going to be in “fixing some damage, righting some wrongs, and making the lives of a few people better”. Which is all well and good in general terms, but still comes off as disappointing when presented as the absolute limit of what a group of PCs can accomplish.
I mean, yeah, if you want to be realistic about it, there’s only so much a group of 4-5 people can do to enact large-scale change in an unjust society, even if they’re badass action heroes. But if you’re going to be realistic about it you have to go all the way and state that the best way to enact this change is through collective action and give some support for that. Lancer does it. Sigmata does it. Does Better Than Bad do it? Eh, not really.
This introduction and a couple of short sections at the end are the only parts of Better than Bad that are written in an out-of-character, authorial voice. The rest of the text is written in an in-character voice using the traditional framing device of BBS/forum posts interspersed with comments from other users. For SR4 and 5, that BBS is Jackpoint, a small network with a more or less constant cast of commenters and the occasional invited guest. This format is known as “shadowtalk” by SR fans, a term which is also used to refer specifically to the comments.
The major sections of the book are:
-
“Lights in the Darkness”: A list of activist organizations who might hire runners for “hooding”-type jobs.
-
“Fixer-Upper Opportunities”: A list of specific examples of such jobs meant to act as plot hooks.
-
“Pretoria, Hurrah”: A big chunk of pages presenting the Pretoria metroplex in Azania (former South Africa) as a setting. Despite the name it also includes Johannesburg and lots of other cities.
-
“Jacaranda Citizens”: A large list of NPCs who live there in the Pretoria metroplex.
-
“Being Less Bad”: A chapter on more general hooding advice, and on what makes a hooder different from a “standard” shadowrunner.
-
“Building a Hooder”/”Hooder Runs”: The afore-mentioned short sections of mechanical bits and bobs, including a Random Hooding Run Generator.
These sections are separated by short fiction pieces.
The Good Parts
There are a few good things about this book I must acknowledge. The untitled fiction piece at the start of “Fixer-Upper Opportunities” is really good! The others are “just” okay, but still a sight better than a lot of the bleak stuff I read in other SR books.
“Being Less Bad” also contained some interesting information, and I particularly liked the way it emphasized that a hooder has a much close relationship with their community than your standard runner.
Most of the Pretoria NPCs are presented as potential employers, with specific goals and interests as well as specific types of job they like to offer. This is a very large leap in quality from older supplements like “Prime Runners”, whose NPCs seemed to be mostly intended to overshadow the PCs.
The mechanical bits and bobs seem cool, conceptually speaking. I’m not fluent enough in SR5 to say whether they’re well-implemented, and they have little to do with the theme of the book, but they’re nifty. There’s magically resistant armor and the magically resistant tattoos some geniuses made from the paint extracted from that armor. There are spells that can strip a spirit’s immunity so your gunslinger buddy can shoot them as if they were flesh. And there are several “life modules” that must plug into some sort of lifepath system and that do bear a relation to the book’s theme.
Those are the good parts. Now for the not so good ones.
Style and Organization Issues
We need to talk about shadowtalk.
The shadowtalk format works really well for “news”- or “travelogue”-style sections, since it allows the shadow-randos to chime in with the truth behind the official version of the facts and provide the reader with plot hooks. It lends the whole thing a very subjective air, emphasizing that nothing you read here is necessarily true. The main text certainly isn’t the whole truth, and most of the comments are all about rumor, hearsay, and personal opinions. These traits make it possible for a GM to take the information as a baseline and shape it as they want.
And it’s these exact same traits that make shadowtalk about the worst possible format for advice chapters. I was honestly a bit baffled when I saw that Better Than Bad chose to use it for explaining to the reader what hooding is and how to run a hooding campaign.
You can’t go two paragraphs without some amoral amoeba popping in with a hot take on how the entire concept of altruism is complete bullshit and only a fool would ever choose to practice hooding. This kinda muddles the message a bit, y’know? Makes me wonder why I spent money on a book that calls me names for being interested in its premise2.
You’re also no longer getting the official authorial stance of the game on something, but some shadow-rando’s opinion. As a result the main body of text also fights itself, with at least one instance where the “Being Less Bad” section disagrees with “Lights in the Darkness” because they’re written by different fictional authors. And since they’re separated by the huge chapters on Pretoria and its NPCs, it takes a while to get the full picture if you read through the book linearly.
Shadowtalk can also be useful to insert brief humorous exchanges that break long info-dump passages, but they don’t do that in this book. Rather, they spend space in long conversations between mysterious big shots who only ever speak in vague allusions to the lore of We’re No Longer Legally Allowed to Say It’s Earthdawn.
Plus the decision to present the Pretoria NPC list in-character means Jackpoint ends up doxxing the mysterious Zorro expy who’s supposed to be one of the city’s greatest forces for good. Way to go, chummers.
If it were up to me, the advice sections and the NPC list would have been rewritten as out-of-character, authorial-voice pieces with the extra space dedicated to a White Wolf-style discussion of themes and motifs for a hooding campaign.
Content Issues
You’d expect that a book named Better Than Bad would want you to stand up for people and things that are, you know, better than bad. The ways in which this book fights itself, however, make it so that’s not always the case.
Like, that list of activist organizations which your hooder PCs might work for? It includes a couple of literal terrorist groups. I’m not talking about “the corps say these people are terrorists but that’s a lie”. I’m talking about “these people would absolutely blow up a train station full of innocents to get at one bad guy.” Now, the text doesn’t really condone the violence, and if you go all the way to the other end of the book you’ll see that the general advice section also includes a full condemnation… but it really muddles the message to lump them in with the potential employers.
The Pretoria chapter is quite long but I’m not sure I’d use the setting as presented. In terms of real-world knowledge of the region I’m just another ignorant foreigner, so I can only speak of my own impressions of what I read in this book. And I get that this is a cyberpunk setting, so it has to focus on economic and social inequality to some extend, particularly in a book dedicated to fighting it.
But you see, the city is under a sort of er, well, apartheid. There are actual laws that make it so people are segregated into different districts based on their financial status plus tribal and/or corporate affiliation, and any citizen caught in an area “above their station” must have papers proving they’re allowed to be there.
And there’s this bit at the start where the fictional author of the piece (a shadow-rando named “Afrikaaner”) actually seems to defend this situation by calling it “a status quo that while not fair is the way of life in Pretoria”. This is in bad taste, right? It’s not just me that thinks so? Sure, the corps he’s speaking against want to put something worse in place (“everyone poor or SINless is now a slave in an diamond mine geofront”), but again this is Better Than Bad, not Settling for Segregation.
The “Being Less Bad” section, which I’ve praised before, is not without its share of “yikes!”. For starters, it lists cops as potential employers of hooders, with the example job being a detective who hires runners to plant evidence so they can arrest someone. It suffices to say that This Did Not Age Well.
It also contains several side boxes about how as a hooder you’re going to suffer from all sorts of psychological trauma and from an inevitable crisis of conscience due to the “inherent contradiction” of wanting to do good things while being a criminal. “Criminals are bad, m’kay?” is apparently still the order of the day, so the assumption here is that PCs are still doing all sorts of horrible shit and constantly hurting people even if their stated intentions are good.
Do “evil” shadowrunners get subjected to the same hazards in other books? Because if they don’t, the aggregate message kinda adds to “just be evil already”. I can definitely see your typical asshole Shadowrun GM penalizing players of altruistic PCs for not roleplaying their trauma while letting the amoral assassin live their best/worst life unimpeded.
And finally, there’s a significant chance the random mission generator gives you a run where all of the following are true: Mr. Johnson is a villain in disguise, opposition is overwhelming, completing the mission makes the world a worse place, and the group gets double-crossed at the end. I got something very close to that with my test roll. I’ll show these tables to the next person who says Shadowrun never intended this sort of thing to be common.
Conclusion
I’m told buying this Better Than Bad is a way to convince the publishers of Shadowrun that it’s worth their time to support a less relentlessly bleak vision of their setting. I sure hope that this is the case, because reading this book made it clear that they don’t really want to. It does have some good bits, unlike the completely execrable “War!”, but I don’t think I’d pay full price for it.
The now woefully out of print Leverage RPG gives the subject a much better treatment, used to cost the same, and also included a lot of other excellent rules for running cinematic heists. It wouldn’t take a lot of effort to adapt those to Shadowrun. I really wish someone made a white-label version of it available.
Alternatively, the Lancer RPG costs only a little bit more and has strong support for campaigns where PCs can enact large-scale change in a society through being part of collective action and getting into giant robot fights.
want to say I got angry when I found out Clockwork is still around and allowed to post on Jackpoint. I expected them to have better moderation standards. After what happened back in Emergence I’d also expect someone to nail Clockwork’s head to Fastjack’s front door along with a printed essay on the paradox of tolerance.