Shadowrun: Hong Kong Update #20, $900,333 and Counting

Harebreined Schemes has pushed yet another update for its Shadowrun: Hong Kong campaign. The update announces a new $100 reward tier that includes a pdf of the out-of-print Shadowrun story anthology Into the Shadows that comes with a new short story from Tom Dowd and a new foreword from Jordan Weisman. On top of that, art lead Chris Rogers also shared some insight on the thought process behind the design of the campaign’s props:

For Shadowrun: Hong Kong we are concentrating on immersing you, the player, in the Awakened Hong Kong of 2056. That requires the team to rely on a combination of research and creative extrapolation. From the moment the game opens we want you to be dropped into a world based on our own world but shaped by decades of incredible technological advances and the awakening of magic. and that’s why the chairs are so important. Our environment team researches chairs, (and tables and brooms and windows etc.), basing their designs on specific examples, looking for ways to ground the setting in a specific place. We don’t want your run to happen in a generic teahouse. We want it to happen in this teahouse, the one that has seen better days; the one with the last scraps of green 1960’s wallpaper still clinging to the walls and the high-backed chairs with brocade seats. That way when the more amazing aspects of the game hit and we really go all out with the magic and tech of Shadowrun – if and when, for example, you find yourself in hot water with a dragon or a particularly nasty corp – we have done everything we can to ground the excitement in believable detail.

Our environment team does this one a chair at a time, not only designing the chair but adding the scuffing and aging (maybe pulling out a corner of stuffing here or there) that helps make it feel lived in. From my desk (sorry everyone, I was peeking at your screens) I can see the environment team working on three different locales, and, without giving too much away, they are three very different snapshots of Hong Kong 2056 ranging from a dilapidated industrial locale, to a slick modernist environment, to an interior richly covered in traditional Chinese designs.