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Alright. I had a nice review, and it was eaten for some reason. Gotta love it.

SR is a game that loves its charts, and if you don't use them, it really robs the game of its charm. If you don't regularly apply low visibility penalties, bright flare penalties, or the like, then you deny those PCs with cybereyes a real chance to shine.

Enter the screen! It comes with a buttload of charts: A combat sequence, visibility modifiers, skills and linked attributes, difficulty table, concealability table, weapon range, melee/ranged modifiers in combat, defense modifiers, and damage codes, to name a few.

The art on the player's side of the screen is all taken from the SR4e book - all from those full colour 16 pages. My favourite is the elven chick with a ponytail, carrying a shotgun and a pistol.

The associated book that comes with the screen is just as useful. It has a list of useful contacts, and a bunch of interesting adventure ideas that show GMs new to Shadowrun exactly what shadowrunners do.

Each adventure has a twist or two associated with it; PCs must bodyguard a corp's son who has just been infected with the ghoul virus... but they must protect him from himself, as he tries to adopt his new ghoulish behaviour to the extreme! Imagine trying to stop a sixteen year old ghoul from breaking into a morgue to indulge his "sweet tooth"! Just goes to show that not all SR adventures have to be about gunfights in Seattle.

Finally, the book contains a random adventure generator. I haven't tried it yet, but it seems neat - though the generator pretty much seems to always make every run end in the Johnson betraying the runners somehow. In my mind, Johnsons shouldn't betray runners THAT often. But, ah well.

SR is a game of charts, and this screen is going to really help running an SR game easier. Plus, it makes a handy adventure holder. I'm not usually the type to use DM screens; the last time I used one was the old D&D screen, and I was

I've played SR since second edition, and I prefer this one to all of them. The rules sytem runs a lot smoother, and the rules subsystems (decking, rigging, spell-casting) seem a lot more integrated than they do in other versions of the game.

If you've never played SR, the premise is simple - "Cyberpunk meets Fantasy". trolls and orks get beefed up with cyberware and fight evil megacorporations. You use your contacts to do legwork on your illegal shadowruns, and move around through a seedy underworld of drug dealers, gangers, and body chopshops in your pursuit of a corporation's goals. It's a fun game, and highly lethal at times - it uses a "Death spiral" system, so once you've taken a hit, it's easier to take further hits. Characters can go from fully healthy to dead in a combat round if they're stupid. Don't get shot.

About my only complaint about fourth edition SR is the character generation system; in old versions of shadowrun, you allocated priorities to the various aspects that make up a character. You would decide that "magic is my main priority, and my character's race is my least priority", for example. While it could be unbalanced at times, I found it was a quick and easy way to create a character.

In fourth edition, everything is instead based upon "build points". It's probably a more balanced system, but it's confusing for newbs. Also, Shadowrun is a game about gear - at least half of the design process will be spent buying weapons, cyberware, and commlink programs.

This is a good game. It comes with a lot of setting material (and 4e finally got rid of SR's "Cant", and now uses plain jane curse words; there's no more "chummers" and "drek"), and actually explains what shadowrunners DO - something we didn't always see in earlier editions.

While the system is fairly easy to use at it's core, being a simple attribute score + skill score resolution systme, it can get complicated at times. I highly recommend picking up the GM