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Shadowrun: Anarchy is a Catalyst Game Labs book for their 5th Edition Shadowrun setting.  Sorta.  While it uses the Shadowrun game universe, the game is actually a completely different rules set.  The back cover describes it as: "Based on the rules-light and easy-to-learn Cue System".  Rules-light, easy to get into.
Goodness knows, this game could use that approach, right?  

 In the Preface, Randall Bills, one of the authors, makes the same points that a lot of Shadowrun fans have: "I find that my tastes have changed over the years, and while I have lost no love for the Shadowrun world, these days I prefer RPG game systems that are lighter on the rules and more focused on story and character... As a hobby-game retailer myself, I have also witnessed no shortage of gamers interested in playing tabletop Shadowrun but utterly intimidated by the massive rulebook."  In this regard, he says that Shadowrun: Anarchy is designed to be a rules-light, "freeform" version of a "traditional" roleplaying game.  

I'd heard of "Cue System" before but was uncertain where.  As it turns out, Cue System is the same system used for the Pulp SF game Cosmic Patrol and also the Valiant Universe superhero RPG, which I'd already reviewed.  Well, I was not a big fan of that game, however well-made it was, because it was so narrativist that it almost defeated the purpose of having rules.  Shadowrun: Anarchy isn't quite that obsessed with narrativist ideology, but it's definitely not Shadowrun 5E.  Of course that isn't necessarily a bad thing.  

After the introductory stuff (including, of course, a fiction piece), the book starts with The Bleeding Edge, reviewing some of the setting material, including 21st Century history, that Shadowrun 5E glossed over.  One of the subjects is the Top Ten list of megacorps in the setting, and in this book, part of each description includes "tags" which are Cue System game terms not really explained at this point.  Tags for Aztechnology, for example, include "Aztlan," "blood magic" and "Stuffer Shack."  This section also mentions gangs, crime families and actual governments, but none of these get tags.

Rules of the Street is the section with rules mechanics, and it is indeed very simple and to the point.  In this iteration of the Cue System, all rolls are on xd6, as in regular Shadowrun.  Shadowrun: Anarchy doesn't rotate the role of Gamemaster (the way Valiant RPG does) but the book says the GM's job is more about "facilitating the story" than controlling it, which it promises to explain in a later section.  Like Valiant, the game is front-loaded with a lot of scenarios (here called 'Contract Briefs') that almost take the place of actually writing your own adventures.  Likewise the game book is loaded with a LOT of premade characters, so one doesn't have to spend very much time at all looking things over before starting a game.  

So how does it work?  Well, the game uses Shadowrun-like Attributes – Strength, Dexterity, Willpower, Logic, Charisma, Essence and Edge – but simplified.  Notably, Strength is also the "Stamina" type stat used to determine your Physical Condition Monitor (hit points).  Willpower is used for the Stun Condition Monitor.  The Attribute number is added to Skill rating (if any) to determine the number of d6 used to roll an action, similar to regular SR.  Likewise characters roll their dice pools looking for "hits", or a 5 or a 6 on each d6.  Differing from SR 5E, the PC's dice roll is compared to an opposed roll of either an NPC or based on the difficulty of the test – these are called Opposing Dice.  This is on a scale where a Very Easy test is 4 Opposing Dice and a Very Hard test is 12 dice.  The difference between the rolls is the "net hits."   All the Kewl Powerz stuff you get in Shadowrun – cyber implants, magic, technomancer abilities – is placed under the rubric of "Shadow Amps."  
In a game turn, a given player's actions are referred to as a Narration, or what most of us oldsters would call a "player turn", although it includes the opportunity for the acting player to add elements to a scene.  In this process, the turn starts with the GM, who then turns to the player on their left, then around until everyone has had a Narration, at which point a new turn starts.

There are certain core elements that are used with this narrative-based system.  Cues (thus the name) are described as "building blocks players can use as a basis for Narrations."  For example, one of the premade character sheets has a hacker with tag lines like "I've been left for dead by people a lot smarter than you."  There is also the concept of Plot Points, used for a variety of things, like what other games call hero points, but one of their specific uses is to interrupt the otherwise set turn order and take over a Narration.  For example, this is how the game simulates Wired Reflexes, by giving the character an extra Plot Point.
Also, the dreaded "glitch" is made part of the Plot Point system.  Either the GM or a player can spend a Plot Point to hand the acting player a Glitch Die (a d6 which must be physically distinguished from the other dice in the pool).  If the Glitch Die comes up 1, it will cause something to screw up- you trip, alert internal security, etc.  This can occur even if the rest of the dice result in success, in which case the glitch occurs even though the main action succeeded.  If however the Glitch Die rolls 5 or 6, it is called an exploit, which results in an extra level of success or a lucky break.  This occurs even if the main roll doesn't get enough hits, which is described as a "silver lining to your failed action" like an accidentally tripped alarm system resetting itself due to its programmed maintenance routine.  

Rules of the Street also goes through the main combat rules, which are again similar to SR but deliberately abbreviated in details.  Ranges for both character movement and weapon ranges are defined in three very generic categories – Close, Near, and Far, where Close is basically melee range, Near is between that and 100 meters and Far is however far past 100 meters the GM feels is plausible.  Physical and Stun damage are similar to SR, as described above, except that Armor is basically a series of extra dots that are taken off the Character Sheet before the PC is actually damaged.  Once that happens, damage creates die roll penalties depending on how far down a character is.  If a character has taken boxes in both Physical and Stun tracks, the penalties are cumulative.  It's noted at this point (p. 43) that while most healing and equipment repairs can be assumed to be completed out of combat, sometimes payment of an NPC is required.  However, page 43 also says that Anarchy does not use cash.  In game terms, "paying" for such service requires either spending a point of character Karma, or agreeing to do the NPC a favor by taking on one of the book's Contract Briefs without negotiating a payment.
Rules of the Street likewise has rules for the more common variant situations, such as hacking/cybercombat, astral combat, use of spells, and combat with vehicles.  This section ends with rules for miscellaneous situations like environmental hazards (including molten rock and hot/noxious gas) as well as for how a character is narrated if subject to Mind Control.

Very wisely, this book goes over the details of how this gaming approach is supposed to work before going into more technical stuff like character creation.  The section titled Building Street Cred is supposed to be about the difference between being able to pull off a run and "(knowing) how to pull it off with style."
Tips include options for "cinematic" narration, where the first Narration starts with the person who initiated the action, and once that player is done, they decide who would go next based on what seems right (they actually say that one way to gauge this is 'where a hypothetical camera would be watching the fight if it were an action movie').

In the section cleverly called Controlling Anarchy, the book elaborates on how the Cue System allows a player to direct Narrations on his turn.  While a given player is going to be seeing things from the perspective of the PC, he can also introduce NPCs, environmental conditions, or plot twists to the scene.  In this setup (which differs somewhat from the 'pure' narrativism of the Valiant RPG) the GM still determines basics like whether a PC's actions require a dice Test, actually roleplaying NPCs, and determining when the player's Narration has ended.  The list of conditions where the GM may intervene on a player's Narration is specific, because the standard is supposed to be like "passing the mic"so that the end result with all player Narrations is a kind of collaborative storytelling using the Contract Brief as a base.  The book says that the only game specific limit on a player Narration is that a player can only make one combat-related Test.  If the GM judges a Narration is taking too much time or the player is not letting others participate, this is an example of where he can cut in and declare the Narration to be over.  This also includes intervening or refereeing when two players' Narrations work at cross purposes.  
Conversely, the book also tips the GM on how to proactively offer suggestions for player Narration other than saying "what do you do this turn?"  One example they give is the GM saying "The stairway leads to a dark basement.  What's hidden down there?"  At this point the player rather than the GM would be answering that question, and whatever they come up with becomes the setup for the next Narration.  The game also gives players the option of spending a Plot Point to literally get a clue, and it is also possible for another player to spend a Plot Point to offer a Narration idea to a player who is struggling for a starting point.

The next chapter, Forces of Chaos, acknowledges that even though a very large number of pre-written PCs are included in the book, a lot of people prefer to create characters of their own design.  The steps they list are: 1. Create a Character Theme (along with a character name),
2. Determine Game Level: the players decide together what level they want their characters to start at- Gang-Level, Street Runner or Prime Runner.  The standard/mid-level Street Runner game, for instance, has characters start with 16 Attribute Points, 12 Skill Points, 10 Shadow Amp points, 1 melee weapon, 1 ranged weapon, 1 set of armor, 4 miscellaneous items and 2 contacts.
3. Choose Metatype (race): The five basic SR metatypes are listed.  The stat adjustments for most races are simplified, though Trolls get +2 Strength (only the same as Orks), 3 Armor circles and minus 1 Skill Point.  
4. Decide if Your Character is Awakened or Emerged: "Awakened" means magically active, "Emerged" means being a technomancer who can access the Matrix only with their mind.  Either type of character requires a cost of 2 Shadow Amp points before any others are spent.  As in standard Shadowrun, a character cannot be both Awakened and Emerged.  
5. Assign Attribute Points: The character gets the number of Attribute Points determined in Step 2 and assigns them between the five attributes of Strength, Agility, Logic, Willpower and Charisma, along with racial adjustments.  Each attribute starts at a base of 1, so spending 4 points on Strength will increase it to 5.  This is also cumulative with racial adjustments.  
6. Assign Skill Points: This is a similar process, except that characters are only allowed five Skills in Anarchy, and each skill is limited to a maximum rating of 5 (6 for a Prime Runner game).  Specialization means that a character spends 1 Skill Point in a category (e.g. Katana within Close Combat) and gains two extra dice with that specialized use of the Skill.  A Skill needs a rating higher than 1 to have a Specialization.  
7. Select Shadow Amps: Again, "Amps" represent all the special powers that characters get in standard SR, ranging from cyberware and cyberdecks to talismans and spells.   A character can have a maximum of six Shadow Amps.  The Amps are to some extent customizable since there is no specific list of them other than the examples presented with the listed player characters.  As with the regular game, bioware and cyberware create Essence loss against a base of 6 Essence; each bioware mod is 2 Shadow Amp points and .5 Essence cost, while a cyberware mod is 1 Shadow Amp point and -1 Essence.  This is in addition to Shadow Amp points spent to add enhanced reflexes (extra attacks/Plot Points), additional armor, damage, etc.  Essence Loss is obviously a lot less granular in Anarchy and lowered Essence will result in up to -3 to Magic tests AND attempts to heal the character.  The total number of points spent is the character's "Shadow Amp Level" which is used to calculate upgrade costs in the future.  Edge is only adjusted in this step; a character starts with 1 Edge, except Humans who start with 2.  Any Shadow Amp points unspent at the end of this Step  are added to Edge, to a max of 6.
Step 8. Add Qualities: Characters get two positive Qualities and one negative Quality.  As a rule, a "Quality" adds or subtracts two dice from a Test it's related to, although page 204 of Anarchy starts a master list of Qualities for the game, some of which are less mechanical in their effects.  For example "Biocompatibility" means the character can ignore 1 point of Shadow Amp Essence cost, while the negative Quality "Elf Poser" means that when the character deals with Elves, he must always add a Glitch Die that cannot exploit.  It should be noted that Mentor Spirits are not included in Shadow Amps, only in the Quality List.  
9. Assign Armor: "If you want more armor than your natural armor – and if you want to survive more than a few minutes, you do – you want some wearable armor."  In this game system, armor comes in three levels- light (6 circles), medium (9 circles) and heavy (12 circles).  The book says that to wear heavy armor of 12 circles, you have to subtract one of your starting skill points, supposedly on the basis that "if you are choosing to specialize in heavy combat protection, you are less effective at other skills."  On the other hand, if you choose to wear light/6 circles armor, you get an extra starting skill point ('if you're going to travel armor-light, it's clearly because you have some other skills to rely on').  
10. Select Weapons: "If a player wishes to start with more than two weapons, the player group must approve this."  
11. Select Gear: Like everything else in Anarchy, game-related gear serves more of a story function than a utilitarian function.  It's already mentioned that the game doesn't keep track of purchases like ammo.  The best examples of what constitute gear are again probably in the sample character sheets.  Contacts are dealt with in this step as "a special kind of Gear."
12. Create Cues: Cues are simply character "catch phrases" or things he says every so often which may give a, well, cue to the PC's motivation or inspire a Narration appropriate to the current situation.  The book advises that a group can make the generation of Cues into a party game where people write down a few Cues based on character themes and pick from among them.  
13. Create Character Background: This includes details like gender, personality, etc.  
14. Final Tweaking or making any final adjustments before play.

Character advancement uses Karma points accumulated as experience during play.  The base amount of Karma is determined in the Contract Brief, although the GM may award an extra credit point to those players who demonstrated extra cleverness, humor or other qualities.  This section lists the point costs for improving various character features.  Removing a negative Quality, for instance, is 6 Karma, and there needs to be some story justification for it.   Again, in this paradigm, things like armor and Gear are character features that have to be paid for with Karma.  

The next section, Street People, is the set of sample characters.  There's 30 of them, plus sheets for threats like Bug spirits, enemy drones and vampires.  Each character has two pages, the first detailing the character's background history.  These stories are fairly well detailed for one page and would probably work better than the character sheets in standard SR, except that those are usually intended more as templates to be adapted than finished characters.  The actual character sheets for the second page of the character work as described above for character creation.
The second part of the section is the bestiary of monster/NPC threats, in an abbreviated format similar to regular SR.  

After this we have The Secrets of Seattle, which is a mostly in-character description from shadowrunners about how to operate in the enclave that is normally used as a setting for Shadowrun campaigns.  As per the Cue System, there are some tags listed for each major area.  The declining district of Tacoma, for instance, has tags including the Crying Wall monument, "Basil's Faulty Bar" and "Tacoma aroma."

Then you have the other major part of the book, Happening World, where the book has thirty of those Contact Briefs.  That's quite a lot, although the reason they can be presented in such brief format is because the Cue System means the contact brief is basically the spring point to an adventure that the players develop themselves, and where the GM's role is to rule when, or if, things get off track from what's written.  The briefs do a good job (in some cases, a better job than standard SR material) of describing the runners' goals for a mission, with the tags describing the sorts of things they would be expected to encounter.  One issue I have with the format is that the "Johnson" offering the mission tells the characters in text that they are being paid in Karma, as opposed to nuyen.  While that is what would be expected in a narrative system where equipment costs are irrelevant, it also brings up the primary flaw of narrativism, in that the metagaming of the real world becomes extremely literal in the game world, making it less believable.   

After the Happening World section, Shadowrun: Anarchy follows with a conversion guide for using this book with Fifth Edition materials, including an overview on exactly what 5E books to get.  There is also a guide for converting characters made with Anarchy rules to Fifth Edition.  This is followed by a capsule list of sample "Amps" (spells, cyberware, etc.) and their game effects, along with the Positive and Negative Qualities and Gear.  The book concludes with an Index.


SUMMARY

Ultimately, Shadowrun: Anarchy is about as much Not Shadowrun as D&D 4th Edition was Not D&D.  The difference is that at least Catalyst isn't obliging you to treat this as the official game system for their line.  Because using a narrative system doesn't even require learning a new rules set so much as adapting to a completely different mentality of gaming, one that not everyone may appreciate, and I for one don't think I do.

Anarchy does however, perform its advertised function: It allows fans of the Shadowrun setting the chance to start play quickly with a dice system that is not too far removed from original SR but is more straightforward.  
At least it doesn't have fraggin' "limits."  That may be enough reason to switch right there.  

RATING: 6

Great review, James!

I take it that they don't include much of a bestiary?

Quote from: Dan Davenport;941276Great review, James!

I take it that they don't include much of a bestiary?

It's about 24 entries in the abbreviated format, including NPC types and drones.  I don't think it's any less useful than the one in 5E.

jg