Spoiler: I know Popularity won't really help with cases of fatal head trauma but who knows maybe S2 will have flashbacks or something.
Nah, I know we all love our boy David, but if S2 is ever happening it should be about other characters and another story. Cyberpunk is a ttrpg, different people living out different original stories is what it's all about.
Marlin said: Nah, I know we all love our boy David, but if S2 is ever happening it should be about other characters and another story. Cyberpunk is a ttrpg, different people living out different original stories is what it's all about.
Yeah, people seem to be way too fond of clinging to the same characters when it comes to adapting tabletop games for other media. Like, does Drizzt really need 30+ books? The Shadowrun Returns and its two sequels did a good job of avoiding that; each time the stories had nothing to do with each other, the number of characters who appear in more than one game can be counted on one hand's fingers (and even those who reappear are minor characters like a suspiciously well-connected store owner and a shady as fuck corporate bigwig actually rich as fuck dragon who is CEO of the world's largest megacorp, because Shadowrun is a cyberpunk-urban fantasy hybrid setting), and every game took place in a different location.
Shadowrun Returns: It is 2054; your former shadowrunner (type of underground mercenary who tend to do deniable jobs for megacorps, governments, etc.) pal, Sam Watts, has just been killed. He, however, had prepared for this; in the case of his death, you (the only person he ever considered to be his friend) are tasked with figuring out how he died, and if you succeed in doing so, you'll get to claim his life insurance. To solve the mystery of his death, you travel to Seattle and visit a local morgue where Sam's corpse is stored. It turns out that Sam was just the latest victim in a series of murders that have been occurring in Seattle; in each case, the victim was mutilated with surgical precision and one of their organs was stolen.
Shadowrun Dragonfall: It is 2054; you are a shadowrunner operating in the Berlin Flux State (Berlin went full anarchist in 2039). While raiding a mansion as part of a team of shadowrunners led by a woman called Monika Schäfer, things go horribly wrong and your team's leader's brains are fried while she was trying to hack a computer in mansion's suspiciously well-equipped basement laboratory. After escaping the mansion, you and Monika's former team (who vote you to be the new leader of it) have to figure out how Monika died, who hired you, and why Monika's final dying words were "Feuerschiwinge".
Shadowrun Hong Kong: It is 2056; you've just been released from a high-security corporate prison where you spent the last 8 years of your life after a job gone bad. Immediately after your release, your estranged adoptive father, who rescued you from the life of a teenage criminal in Seattle's crime-ridden slums, Raymond Black, called you and asked you to come to Hong Kong (now an independent city state controlled directly by mega-corps) on an important mission. Once you arrive in Hong Kong, you meet with your adoptive brother, Duncan Wu, whom you first met back when you were both just street kids in Seattle. After a brief and not-so-happy reunion (Duncan isn't exactly happy that your "small quick two-day job" meant you disappearing completely from his life for 8 years), you and Duncan make your way to the spot where you were meant to reunite with your adoptive father. However, there are a few problems; a) your father isn't there, b) he hired a team of shadowrunners to accompany you to the walled city (2nd walled city, in fact; the first one was torn down decades ago, but after Hong Kong was filled with refugees fleeing mainland China after China once again collapsed into civil war), and c) local cops have decided that you all should be killed. After you, Duncan, and two surviving shadowrunners make your escape, you and Duncan are declared terrorists by Hong Kong's authorities and are forced to destroy your System Identification Numbers (effectively making you stateless unpersons with no legal rights) with help from a local triad boss. You, Duncan, and the shadowrunners form a new team working for the triad (led by you, because the triad boss you're now working for doesn't have any better alternatives at hand) and start running in the shadows while trying to figure out what happened to Raymond, who had you framed as terrorists, and why all the locals are having the same nightmares about the walled city and teeth.
Pretty good games if you like isometric CRPGs (even if they're relatively simple as far as that genre goes) and aren't scared away by their rather unorthodox setting (it is a cyberpunk world except with such fantastical elements like magic, elves, dragons, and Native Americans who actually managed to win against the US for once), even if they're short (10h for Shadowrun Returns, 20 hours for Dragonfall, and 25 hours for Hong Kong and its epilogue campaign) and the first game is basically just a glorified tutorial/proof of concept for the latter two games with rather limited roleplaying options.
