Ivy and Chrome is a Shadowrun adventure from the dawn of Shadowrun (1st edition). This adventure has a great balance of things to have players do (Magic, Decking, Rigging, Combat, Social) but is also one of the single most unbalanced adventures I have ever personally seen. I think the story has great heart, but it needs a WILD amount of tweaks to keep your players from accidentally wandering into what I can only describe as 2 absolutely apocalyptic battles.

The players are sent on a journey from a strange Decker to find a missing woman before something terrible happens to her. Track her down as time ticks down and be faced with a final choice that has what I believe to be the true heart of Shadowrun. Corporations loom to threaten a way of life that could bring hope back, are you willing to stand by?

So what can players expect when facing down the challenges of Ivy and Chrome?

Ratings out of 5!

Spoilers

Here we go. Everything below will spoil your fun for this adventure! So turn back now lest it fall on your shoulders to make this hungry beast work for your table!

Plot Overview

The plot for this one is simpler than most Shadowrun adventures I have seen. A man working for Aztechnology discovered a lost magical path through the use of blood magic and metric tons of psychedelics. Through this path he joined a spiritual magical tradition that offers huge amounts of power at the cost of killing everything you love. In this case, it was his wife (Diana) and daughter (Fayette) who were to be offered up to a dark god. He managed to sacrifice his wife before she could get away, but not before she hid their daughter and used her impressive decker skills. She saw the writing on the wall as he began to sink deeper and deeper into psychosis.

The plot begins with the players approached by a decker who hires them to find one Fayette Myers. She was last seen at a super fancy prep school and then just disappeared. The Johnson (Fay’s aunt) is trying to impersonate her sister and has access to her wildly powerful cyberdeck. She has absolutely no idea what she is doing with it, and it shows. She hires the runners to find her niece and gives them what information she has, which is mostly a picture and where she was last seen.

This leads the characters to begin searching various haunts for Fay and piece together her life. They can talk to some of her fellow classmates or roommates to get more information. This can lead to a few places: some evidence points to Juzu Clinic, some to various haunts she frequented, and finally to her desire to go to Shoalwater. The clinic has some matrix information tying her to her dad, and investigating her mother shows that she has been dead for some time, setting her up for life. Most of the other locations are either straight traps or lead to conversation threads the players can pull to find more locations. The clinic is a death trap if they try to sneak into the basement — it can end the whole adventure. There are a few other notable problem areas, but for the most part things are fine.

The final showdown comes when the players learn of her final destination. Shoalwater is a kind of experiment in self-sufficiency: an electrical grid, some quaint town politics, and most importantly, no real security. The final trial is whether the runners decide to help Shoalwater against the oncoming attack. Fay’s father turns out to be big enough and important enough to send the kind of hardware usually only seen in full-scale war. There are a few surprises the players can find to help in this battle, but it doesn’t feel like nearly enough — more on that below. The run technically ends when the players get Fay back and, having discovered her boyfriend, decide whether to go to Shoalwater and stay with Fay’s aunt or flee.

Things I Changed For My Table

Some of Diana’s Death Details

So perhaps it’s because I enjoy horror games too much, or want to believe that deckers can do some insane things when they begin to plan, but I wanted the players to find Diana’s death absolutely concrete once they started looking into it. By the time they learned about her death, they’d already learned that her husband needed to sacrifice her for a blood magic ritual. So I set up that she was recording her apartment 24/7, and should she ever miss a day of logging into her deck, that video would go public on a Shadowland forum to try to prove her husband killed her. This was perhaps over the top, but it felt right at the time.

How Much Prep Diana Did Before She Ran Out of Time

The adventure hints that Diana set up Fayette with everything she possibly could before she knew she would run out of time with her dad: bank accounts and trusts, a heavily guarded and secure school, everything left to her sister in the event of her death. The idea was that she’d make Fay as secure as possible before removing herself from the picture. This included clearing Fay out of the Matrix as best she could. The biggest issue here is that, ultimately, her efforts hurt the runners more than the people chasing her. They learn about her from a blood sample, which is all that’s needed to ritually track her — and that’s also required to make the adventure work, since if there were public records for Fay, a decker could dig them up so quickly that most of this adventure would be moot.

What Weapons and Gear Some of the Enemies Have

A lot of these encounters have the primary enemies carrying assault rifles and automatic weapons. It’s odd how well-armed everyone is — I understand they’re waiting for trouble, but it seems like overkill for capturing some college students, and it’s hard to hide their intentions if they’ve got AKs sitting next to them in a bar. So I changed them to carry large handguns: easier to conceal, plenty of stopping power, and significantly less likely to end a starting character outright if things go wrong while questioning locals about Fay.

Enhancing Some of the NPCs

Some of the NPCs could be made much more interesting with just a few tweaks. First is Shark from the Double Devils — I gave him multiple cyber jaws, so he has a smile that reaches his ears with several extra rows of teeth to match his name. I also had the players get brought back to Nick’s van, which they were planning to burn out.

Nick doesn’t do anything special besides being good in combat, so I also made him good at forging fake IDs — it made a lot more sense how he and Fay were planning to escape.

The receptionist at Juzu I ended up making a big fan of the surguries and offerings from the clinic. So she ended up having tons of work done to the point that in the astral she looks horrific. I feel like that kind of thing leans into the darkness that the ritual magic would kind of lend to. It would be great for them to have an angle to try to break her free from her addiction to surgury but it’s not really required.

Things To Look Out For!

The Power Level

There isn’t a mage or shaman in this entire adventure without a power focus, and it’s insane how much nuyen is poured into it — someone even has a rating 6 power focus and is multi-initiated. Be warned: if you don’t tone these characters down, they have the power to wipe out your entire party with a single spell, rolling a huge dice pool (Sorcery 8 + Power Focus 6 + Spell Pool/Force depending on edition).

Several encounters (the Humanis club, the basement of the clinic, the dive bar) are wildly deadly. Humanis has a ton of people with all kinds of guns who will hunt down anyone metahuman they come into contact with, and players could easily trigger this without knowing anything about it. The merc bar has the same problem: say the wrong thing by accident and you’re facing a shaman with a power focus plus multiple assault rifles. The clinic is at least more straightforward about why the fight starts, but players may still be caught off guard by how powerful the doctors and interns are.

This led to a discussion at my table about adventures not explaining this sort of thing. D&D adventures always flag the power level they expect. I think some Shadowrun adventures need that same disclaimer — this one especially. These magicians can still be plenty scary without the extra dice.

Trap Locations

On the subject of power levels and trap locations: I’m not entirely sure what the intent was for some of these. There’s no strong connection to either Fay or Nick, but if players go asking about them in the merc club, they’ll get thrashed. I had to tone down the enemies’ equipment there so it didn’t turn into a total party kill.

Super Heavy Racism

Shadowrun has always had tension between humans and metahumans, but be warned: it’s the central theme in several scenes in this adventure. With Humanis, ork-only bars, and elf-only gangs, it comes up in almost every other scene.

Things I Would Change If I Run This Again

Trailing Fay and Nick / The General Timeline

One thing I don’t fully understand about this adventure: Fay’s aunt is trying to find Fay, but if the players do nothing, Nick and Fay make their way to her aunt without any intervention anyway. The opening chapter says Fay and Nick reach Shoalwater by 3pm on the first day, and the drive takes four hours — meaning if the meet happened the day of her disappearance, she’d be leaving the city by 11am. They aren’t even in the city when the adventure kicks off, which seems completely nuts.

I’d change this so that Nick and Fay are running from place to place, looking for friends, getting turned away or betrayed. That way the players can offer Shoalwater as a way out of the city, and gather allies for Nick and Fay along the way — making them something unique for Shadowrun: two people who truly love each other and are willing to fight for it. That’s more of what I expected from this adventure.

The Final Showdown

It seems insane that a guy going crazy from macrodosing hallucinogens while chasing a god of blood can field attack helicopters in a remote country. I changed this so the Aztech team sneaks in via semi trailers and has to actually set up the choppers and soldiers on-site — giving the players a high-risk/high-reward window to sabotage them before they’re ready. The adventure as written has the players find a crashed vehicle in the forest (“Charlotte”) to salvage weapons and missiles from, a guerrillas-vs-a-larger-force setup. The problem is the odds: Fay’s dad brings something like 4 helicopters with heavy machine guns and 4 missiles each, plus 20–30 soldiers and 5 or so mages (all with power foci and force 6+ spells). Even with the salvaged missiles, the players might down 3 of 4 choppers if everything goes perfectly, and that’s before Shoalwater itself gets cratered. I’d scale this back heavily — he shouldn’t be on good enough terms with his bosses to pull this off while spiraling into psychosis.

Final Thoughts

Ivy and Chrome has real heart. Strip away the encounter math and it’s a story about a mother’s last-ditch sacrifice and two kids willing to fight for each other against a corporation that wants to erase them — that’s the best of what Shadowrun can be, and worth running for that alone.

Run it as written, though, and you’re gambling with a TPK. The power level is wildly out of step with what should be a street-level investigation: rating 6 power foci, multi-initiated mages, and a corporate strike force with attack helicopters, all aimed at starting characters. Budget real prep time to rebalance the antagonists, fix the timeline so Fay and Nick are still findable in the city, and warn your players that a wrong word in the wrong bar can turn lethal fast.

Put in that work and this is one of the better emotional stories 1st edition Shadowrun has to offer. Run it out of the book with no changes, and you’re likely ending the campaign early.

You can grab Ivy and Chrome on DriveThruRPG.