[Fallen]

I'm interested to know just how important is canonical material to my fellow GMs.

How comfortable are you with playing around with the established material and setting?  How much of your campaign's setting is of your own creation?

And, perhaps more importantly, just how much "interpretation" is too much that the campaign could not rightly be called a "proper" Shadowrun game?

Food for thought and discussion is the goal of this thread.  It is in no way meant to allude that diverging (or not) from the published works should or shouldn't be encouraged.  Merely, I'm interested to read about how my contemporaries tackle the topic.

Keep in mind that I've been more than a bit out of the GM loop for over a decade (longer still, so far as Shadowrun goes) -- and, as such, I find my curiosity to be piqued regarding how it is people running a campaign go about it nowadays.

[Crash_00]

In my opinion, following the canon for Shadowrun isn't really that important. What makes Shadowrun is the style and environment. You have a standard cyberpunk dystopia with all the chaos of magic thrown in.

I've run games where every adventure was an official published one and the players oohed and awed over ever tasty morsel of the official storyline, but I've also run campaigns where the characters never made it out of the barrens and the players were still just as happy. If something doesn't jive for my campaign idea, I change it. The only thing I make sure to do is inform my players.

An example of this is my 2050 game that I run using SR4A. I retconned wireless in, but made it ineffective compared to a wired connection. So, every decker worth his salt uses a cyberdeck and jacks in, but I get to keep the niftyness that is AR. The matrix crash was just the wireless 1.0 crashing and wireless 2.0 was brought in to fix everything.

I believe that unless you're hopping to a different setting, you're still playing Shadowrun. After all, everyone has their own style.

[Valashar]

Heh.

Any of my players (or those who played in the same campaign as run my by late roommate) could tell you that, while I do use the evolving cannon to shape my campaign, it often turns out to be just a fingernail scratch to find the left-hand spins. I've got a whole underlying series of linked story threads behind normal cannon that sometimes make the Lost seem simple. Fortunately for my own sanity, it's generally limited to only two or three of them that are important or even nudged up against in a given campaign. The current one is different, unfortunately. I've got about two years of game time before nearly all of them crash together, but in the process I get to seriously screw with the minds of my group, especially my newer players (*waves to the new player that reads the forum* Hi, Darryl! ^_^).

[Walks Through Walls]

I generally keep to cannon, but if your game is passing time faster than the cannon evolves there comes a time when you have to guess what makes sense or what works best and hope for the best. Back in second edition I ran a weekly game and when the whole presidential campaign idea was launched I was already a year beyond the election in my world so had to leave it out.

I have always run a large percentage of my own adventures and this breeds having some divergence from cannon.

[StarManta]

I make every effort to not actively contradict canon, but within those bounds I take as many liberties as I like.

[Mystic]

For me, the Sixth World is big enough that my characters have yet to do anything that would de-rail anythng Cannon. And to be honest, my group isn't really into SR all that much  so I could tell them that there are legions of dragons and they would buy it. They care less about the overall story but concentrate on what Im throwing at them. That and SR tends to be a fallback game I get to run every now and again because I pester them a lot.

More 

[nakano]

My game world started out closely following canon.  From there it has evolved.  The evolution from being strictly canon really took off with my second group of player when I opted to use our home town of Toronto as the primary setting.  Given the fact that the devs have traditionally ignored it, staying close to canon has been easy.

[Fallen]

I've always personally tried to stay true to canon as much as I found sensible within the confines of how events taking place in the campaign may sometimes alter certain elements.  That and some of the stuff I introduce could, on occasion, take a turn in a way that would divert from the course of canonical material.

Thank you very much for the feedback, guys.  It's appreciated.

[CanRay]

Considering that "Cannon" suffers from "Unreliable Narrator"...

[Nath]

Considering that "Cannon" suffers from "Unreliable Narrator"...

There still are Game Information, from time to time.

[CanRay]

Which can also suffer from "Unreliable Narrator". 

[Ranger]

I ususally stick pretty close to it for the most part.  I usually try to run a ratio of about 3 adventures of my own creation (at least) to 1 published adventure.  That is just a general ratio though as some points in time are a bit slower or busier than others as far as published material goes.  Also the wants of the group can and has taken that ratio and thrown it out the window a time or two.

[Fallen]

I ususally stick pretty close to it for the most part.  I usually try to run a ratio of about 3 adventures of my own creation (at least) to 1 published adventure.  That is just a general ratio though as some points in time are a bit slower or busier than others as far as published material goes.  Also the wants of the group can and has taken that ratio and thrown it out the window a time or two.

That's pretty similar to how I do it also.  I like using the adventures of my own making as an opportunity to insert bits relevant to published adventures I plan to run them through in the future.  Currently, I've put in some bits relating to Dreamchipper (some locales, and news regarding Global Technologies), One Stage Before (the Shadows climbing the charts) and Queen Euphoria (I introduced Amber Gel on the market, yay).

[Ranger]

Thats cool and exactly what I do as far as introducing things like Amber Gel and what not. I also like to introduce big NPCs in simialr fashion.  It seems to make the world more real when places and people the players know and understand suddenly become parts of their story.  Done right it makes the transition between original and published adventures almost seemless.

[Fallen]

Thats cool and exactly what I do as far as introducing things like Amber Gel and what not. I also like to introduce big NPCs in simialr fashion.  It seems to make the world more real when places and people the players know and understand suddenly become parts of their story.  Done right it makes the transition between original and published adventures almost seemless.

I completely agree!