Preparing for our upcoming Shadowrun campaign I decided it would be best to add some tools to help aid me. Last week I ordered the Runner’s Toolkit from Amazon. It comes loaded with some pretty nice toys that I think will help me out.

Here are all the fun things that came in it:

DM Screen (Super nice)
Sticker that says “Shadowrun”
Five Books (I’ll get into them later)
Six double-sided sheets that break down game mechanics (See the images below)
Four sheets with location layouts, double-sided. One side with a legend saying what everything is and the other side blank so the players won’t know what is what.

Now let’s talk about the books you get with this kit. On The Run is one of their more popular adventures that helps both new GM’s and new players enter the world of Shadowrun 4th Edition. I have actually used this adventure and I will agree, it is helpful for newbie GM’s, plus the players seemed to enjoy it (I had two guys that have never played the game before)

Anatomy Of A Shadowrun is a break down of an adventure, re-written to make it feel like reading a story. During certain events the book breaks down what happened in terms of game rules and mechanics. I haven’t had the opportunity to sit down and read this one but it’s on my to-do list.

I really like Compiled Tables as it provides a full, compiled list of tables from all the source books. Example, you can look at the light guns table and it will show you all the stats for each light gun found in the current Shadowrun books and list what page to find them in their respective books.

Contacts | Adventures | Sprawl Sites is exactly what the book’s title is. This book provides you with some pre-made contacts, sprawl sites and ideas for adventures that can be used in your campaigns.

Finally the P.A.C.K.S (Pre-Generated Auxiliary Character System) does its best to help you build characters on the fly through various steps in trying to allow custom, quick npcs to be built and hope to have some uniqueness. You might pick a troll, that is a blades man (skill set includes skills and bp total cost) with swords and climbing gear (two different gear sets with individual bp cost, plus a list of items the character receives.)

I would dare say that for the $24 I spent on Amazon, my money was well spent with the amount of tools I managed to get from this. If you’re a new GM to Shadowrun or just want to add some extra options to aid you, I don’t see how you could go wrong with this.

And to top it off, here are some pictures I took while opening the box.