I'm new to GMing Shadowrun, I GMed Pathfinder before and played SR but never GMed it.
Now I'm more or less set on running my first game, and will soon start looking for players. Not sure when, but soon. I play online on Roll20 mostly, so I'll look for players that fit my style and idea for a campaign, not the other way round.
I'm going to use the 5th Edition rules for certain.
I'm just torn between the decission if I should start in the 50s with some of the classic modules that I heard so much about, or not. Universal Brotherhood (though since SRR I doubt I can surprise anyone with that conclusion anymore), the Maria Mercurial adventure and Dunkelzahn only knows what else.
There's the Shadowrun 2050 sourcebook for SR4, that should be easily converted to SR5, so while modules would still need to be converted, I at least got some help on this.
Or I could start in the 70s. I'd probably start with something like the Ork Underground plotline from season 4, throwing in some other runs (modules like Copycat Killer or stuff I come up with myself) in every now and then, then eventually moving to Splintered State (which seems to be sort of a continuation of the Ork Underground plot).
It both seems to have advantages and disadvantages.
For example an advantage I see for the 50s timeline is that it's the actual start of the story, so to speak. As a player and GM you don't have to catch up on 20 years of metaplot and history and stuff, this is the era where all that history happened. This is where the legendary runners and shadowtalkers of the 70s were made. You see all of it happen and unfold right infront of you, not just read about it. We'd just grow into it somehow. Hopefully.
On the other hand, you could say "A lot of that stuff were Shadowruns and therefor not widely known anyway, so no big deal if you don't know about it or if you mess up some details. Your runner wouldn't know either."
Also more experienced players will at least have heard about some of the more famous modules, and probably wouldn't be terribly surprised by a lot of them, so I'd really have to stick to new players and tell them not to use google...
It also seems to me the 50s were a more "pink mohawk" time, and that's usually not my style, but I may be utterly wrong on that part.
But somehow I still feel I'm missing out on never having experienced those old runs, you know?
I find it really hard to make a decission here. So I'm turning to you for opinions. I know you can't make the call for me, and in the end it will be "whatever I like best", but I just wanna hear what others have to say. See if I'm missing some crucial piece of information on either side of the argument, or maybe people who did one or the other and it worked great or they wished they hadn't.
