What's In Asphalt Jungles
Asphalt Jungles is the latest campaign book for Shadowrun 6th edition. I read it lightly this week and here are my thoughts.
- If you read Cutting Black and thought "Motor City sounds cool as hell, that's where I want to set my campaign" then your wish is granted.
- Riggers get so much love.
- Don't look for a campaign story arc here.
- Despite the cover, it's not bug-centric. That's a little spoilery, but people deserve to know.
There is a map of Detroit in the back with pinned locations, but I didn't read the book closely enough to know if there are any errors or notable omissions. Not an amazing map, but way better than no map. Many of the pins are only detailed in individual missions, and this is a criticism I have in other campaigns too. There's a lot of locations that only appear in the "Hot Spots" section of a mission deep in the book, but would be better off in the player-facing section. This book has descriptions of 3 neighborhoods buried in mission 21, for example.
Minor spoilers follow
The campaign has no central story arc, which may be disappointing for some and a relief for others who like their Shadowrun in smaller story chunks. There are connected missions, but the stakes are small. We won't be saving the material plane from an invading dimension of mana-suckers, and the rest of the world won't care what happens in Motor City anyway. Instead, the major themes here are smuggling, syndicates, gangs, and a smattering of evil magic. There is a surprising glut of rigger content. If someone's been dying to play a rigger for awhile, this is the campaign to do it in. If you were hoping (like me) for a bug-squashing good time, you will be disappointed. The book isn't entirely bereft of bug content, but let's just say it's not even a B story.
All in all, like other 6e campaign books there's probably a good year's worth of content in here, double that if you're the GM and have to flesh out and detail all these mission outlines.