Literally impossible to beat the first level as a shaman. No conjuring points, combat broken up into 4 segments (ie. with non-combat gaps that cause summons to despawn instead of having reinforcements within same combat like normal) and best of all the guy who sells you starting gear just doesn't have a conjuring weapon for sale

In fact the first level in general has just awful design in general. I managed to clear all 4 base campaigns and both this author's other campaigns on max difficulty with only 3 combat related reloads, I am already at 6 on the first level here.

Great side characters and a damn good ending. Thanks for the mod, my friend. What a ride

Hi, Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere, but I didn't want to get spoilers in my search for an answer. My character is still solo at this point. He's been shot up quite a bit making a dash for Kali. I told her what's in the box, and she asked me to explore the basement. When the game resumes after that, her guards keep shooting even though she said they wouldn't. I assume there's something going on here that I've overlooked, or perhaps something is not right?
Thanks

Oh the irony Colonial, that you answer of all users.

Also he's talking about his love of twentieth century values with satanic imagery sprawled all over his profile. your ancestors do not approve my bro.

also kinda funny he's talking about it showing up for no reason, like nigga it's a fucking story, you can tie things into narratives without needing to have set up for their existance

Fausto telling us all he never remotely understood the Shadowrun universe, lol.

This was clearly made in the 2010s. It is very, very noticeably left wing. For no apparent reason a racist faction appears fairly early in the game. Out of spite I wanted to try to join them because I saw where this was headed. Of course there was never an option to join them or even use insults against metahumans. So much for roleplaying. Authors inserting their narratives was very noticeable.

Oh dear god it was just that simple wasn't it.... wow

Thanks a bunch, it's always that one little thing you miss or don't try and someone tells you "no yeah try that, it works" and just... really? Of *course* it was that

Hey i got a riddle for ya, about searching for something like your keys or wallet;
why is it always in the last place you look?
why would you keep looking?

@Wrench In The Plan: Glad you enjoyed this entry! And thanks for putting up with the puzzles, I know they can sometimes feel clunky compared to later entries in the series. You may already know this, but Antumbra Saga was originally three smaller episodic missions, which is part of why it feels the way it does.

@BowShatter: Thanks for the feedback! This campaign is definitely heavy on combat, and I generally recommend a Street Samurai or Mage for an initial playthrough, but I'm glad you made it through!

@Frenne Dilley: Just double-checking, are you launching Dragonfall: Director's Cut and not Shadowrun Returns or Hong Kong? If it still isn't appearing in Dragonfall, you might try following these troubleshooting steps [shadowrun-series.fandom.com]. Good luck!

@Rammur: Heh, thanks!

@rmcmullan: Woot, congratulations on completing the whole trilogy! I appreciate the little guide.

@chainsawash: Ooh, thanks for the tip on Edge Zone! I still have my classic Shadowrun CCG cards from the 90s, glad to see that game is still getting some love. Good luck with the rest of the trilogy!

@SPRÅY: Thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed it!

@KittyHat: Thanks for the thoughtful and detailed review! I'm amazed at how half of my players love that character and the other half despise. That's a great reference guide about using money, too.

Shucks, howdy! It's been a while since I popped in here, so I wanted to say "Hello!" to all the runners who have been exploring this little slice of CalFree! Thanks for continuing to subscribe, play, and recommend this campaign.

@teh_wamburger: Thanks for the review, glad to hear you enjoyed the writing and NPCs! Yeah, the gear in this campaign is based off the original Dead Man's Switch campaign, so it's more limited than what you'll find in the sequels. Likewise, this campaign strongly encourages hiring companion runners, but that does also limit funds for other expenses. Good call on playing on Normal, and I'm glad your Adept made it through!

@MasterGooseASMR: Congrats on the completion! My first Shadowrun character was a Decker/Rifle Elf, that can be a fun combo. Glad you enjoyed Norton, I got a kick out of writing him.

@nemovadis: Thanks for the feedback! Samurai is a great choice for this particular campaign, especially for the fights early on. Glad you enjoyed the story!

but dude, i can't even start a new game, it's just not THERE, i'm subscribed and the other two show up as normal, but not this one?

I really dislike over critical reviews on ugc's its not a aaa game people relax done for free and all his stuff is super good almost better than the main campains imo relax enjoy the icing on the cake and stop tryin too review it like your payin an arm and a leg to play it.

how is it i can't see this in the content list, i only have a few subbed, i'm subbed to this, why can't i find it?

Completed this mod using a Sniper Rigger with 3 points into Decking. It felt more difficult than the main campaign for sure and you really need to make use of everything at your disposal to come out on top. This mod was great and it gets better the further you progress through the story!

Decking sections were pretty hard especially near the end since I had so few points into Decking. Combat overall was challenging all around too which got my character killed multiple times.

Just finished this part of the trilogy, and enjoyed it a lot - though I must admit some of the puzzles did have me feeling a little frustrated when I couldn't figure out the proper combinations.

Even though it feels like I didn't explore the characters too much (which, to be fair, the story does have a time pressure element), I still enjoyed them.

I'll be honest, I was completely blindsided by The war with Tir Taingire . For some reason I thought the game was just going to end when the player confronted the troll trying to poison the water . But I'm glad that didn't happen.

Anyway, guess it's on to the next one for me.

As far as money's concerned, I'll use street samurai chrome as a measuring stick:

Antumbra Saga: You won't get fully cybered up.

The Caldecott Caper: After a certain key event at the endgame, you could pay to fully cyber up an entire team by yourself. At the end, money will be no object for you. I think you can guess why.

CalFree in Chains: I was just barely able to fully cyber up (to Essence 1 with Cyber Affinity 6, using top-shelf 'ware) while also having the best armor and a smartlinked Ares Alpha, but I was also down to something like 43 nuyen and had almost no consumables because I sold nearly all of them to fund it.

The Ugly:

This is a very combat-heavy series, which can also be a lot of fun, but the combat can feel a little over-tuned, especially for those of us too stubborn to turn the difficulty down, until you get to that point where you're powerful enough to faceroll battles.

If you have a little more sense than I do, you may want to consider dialing it back a bit, at least away from "Hard." Especially in CalFree.

The Bad:

Dorbi. Dorbi, Dorbi, Dorbi.

Nearly every important move not made by an antagonist or plot device is made by Dorbi. No matter what, Dorbi always comes out on top. In CalFree, she exposes the key conspiracy and somehow builds the strongest alliance, even if you do everything right and get seemingly everyone including a megacorp on your side. Your choice in the end comes down to whether you want to play second fiddle to her or refuse and not even get that much.

It's not that she's badly written. She can even be entertaining! The problem is she replaces the player as protagonist. You're not the protagonist of the trilogy, and you're arguably not even the protagonist of CalFree in Chains! Dorbi is. The trilogy, especially CalFree, is the story of Dorbi's rise to power.

I just finished the CalFree trilogy:

1. Antumbra Saga (Dragonfall)
2. The Caldecott Caper (Hong Kong)
3. CalFree in Chains (Hong Kong)

Now that I have, I'd like to share my thoughts.

First,

The Good:

It's an entertaining ride! The stories and characters are well-written enough that you could easily believe these were official campaigns. The interactions are fun, and there's a bit of humor that even on at least one occasion gets very slightly meta, but it's subtle and doesn't go overboard.

Although your own protagonist is a different person each time, you get to see recurring characters appear over multiple installments in the trilogy. It's enjoyable to watch how their stories progress and to see them again from the perspective of a different "you."

I enjoyed the trilogy and don't regret having played through all three games! I'd totally do so again.

That being said, I'm afraid I have no choice but to talk about ...

Thats a rant if I ever seen one lol

Case point five: The story is stupid. Random enemy terrorist troll serving someone else splits away, somehow magically gets stupid amount of resources to make a conspiracy dragon would be proud of.

But seriously, damage immune enemies are stupid. You can feel my frustration.
Also, the game lacks basic shaman attack spell (newly introduced in Dragonfall). Big surprise because I wanted to run shaman relying on this attack spell.

Case point four: Puzzles are not really telegraphed much. Then they spring up, and to solve them is often very fiddly. Like the time when ghouls are constantly respawning, you see that you need to break some vase behind a table, but you can't really click behind the table to reach it. So you need to spend a few turns carefully positioning your character (because they can't reach it normally) to be able to go at a precise tile, from a precise side (while it looks like it is reachable from both sides, it isn't) and then finally crack it. While the combat is being resetted every single time, because the ghoul that respawns is the last ghoul alive.

This is really boring combat-focused empty-map type of "Here is puzzle, but we won't tell you about it" and "you can't interact with enemies that you see from half map away, until you come close enough so that they can one-shot you at the start of combat where you need to go without cover" coupled with "we will make these character immune to damage" nonsense.

Case point one: There isn't much legwork, talking, background, interaction with people. This makes it feel empty, lifeless, lazy.

Case point two: Somehow, you can easily one-shot security at the start of the game, including ghouls, spirits etc. This is to make the starting maps easy, but it is weird and inconsistent to have dangerous cave magically active stuff to be super weak in one mission, while strong in another one.

Case point three: Very strong and visible railroading. Including enemies immune to damage that will charge at you.

Fucking awesome, thanks this is amazing

Been on a recent Shadowrun kick since the recent Edge Zone kickstarter reignited some nostalgia for the setting. I found this little gem and just had to comment that I thoroughly enjoyed it! Glad to see it's the first of a trilogy, look forward to continuing the adventures!

Finished the CalFree trilogy and wanted to say bravo! This is impressive user-generated content with good runs and good storytelling. Here's a trail for anyone else who wants to see the full trilogy:
CalFree Trilogy by cirion
1) Antumbra Saga (stop an invasion!) in Shadowrun: Dragonfall
2) The Caldecott Caper (train heist!) in Shadowrun: Hong Kong
3) CalFree in Chains (liberate California!) in Shadowrun: Hong Kong

Well done and thanks for the work on the module. The story is nice, a couple fights could be rebalanced but it is perfectly playable (at least as a samurai). Thanks for the time and effort.

Finished on hard with a decker/shotgun elf. I had a pretty good time! I will say the mod definitely picks up a lot once Norton comes to visit you. Eventually I get around to CalFree in Chains as well...

I just finished the Antumbra Saga. I had a rough start at first because I was playing Hard Mode, and I don't think the campaign is quite balanced for it, especially at the start (could be that my choice of Adept + the dwarf NPC didn't help), but after save-scumming for a couple hours, I got bored and started over in Normal, and it was smooth sailing from there.

I had a few hitches during the decking bits, but I think that's a base game issue.
The writing was really good, some of the NPCs (especially Dorbi) are really fun, and just as I thought the campaign was a short and sweet thing, it bloomed into life and really started becoming fun.
I wished I'd access to a bit more gear, and I felt quite constrained by the tight budget, but overall nothing that detracted from my enjoyment of the campaign. Oh and the extra music and art were really good too.

Really, really good job.

@Sagil: The trailer music is Protocol by Invocation Array [invocationarray.bandcamp.com].

@DarkSpiral: Congrats on a successful run! The short answer is that the campaigns are loosely based on some of the pen-and-paper RPG sourcebooks, especially California Free State, Threats 2 and Year of the Comet. Both Antumbra Saga and CalFree in Chains have some Big Events woven into the campaigns, while The Caldecott Caper adopts the setting without touching the metaplot much. Most characters are original to my campaigns (except for Saito, Lofwyr and Hestaby ). Most factions are canon, except for Norton's Army. Cheers!

@Corax: Thanks for your interest, but no, Hong Kong dropped support for a lot of features that this campaign depends on, so it will remain Dragonfall-only.

@Cron99: Cheers, I'm pleased to hear that you enjoyed the narrative! I had a blast putting it together.

@tranz2deep: That's a cool theory! I often think that humans trying to understand dragons are like ants trying to understand humans. That's particularly interesting when it comes to divining their motivations.

@Jonny-o: Thanks for playing, glad you liked it!

Hello, hello! I just wanted to pop and and say "Hi" to all the new runners and "Welcome back" to all of the veterans!

@Bran: Congrats on making it to the end! You might want to turn down the difficulty and restart the scene. Your English is good, thanks for writing!

@Entaris: Weird, I haven't seen that behavior before. If you've already tried restarting the game and rebooting your PC, you might also consider turning off the "HD Textures" option and restarting the scene. That can help with performance.

@TW-Luna: Woohoo, good to see you again! Yeah, Dragonfall doesn't have the Dev Commentary feature. I would have a lot to say about my experiences fighting with the engine and managing updates! Thanks for the kind words, glad you enjoyed it.

Welladay! I've just finished the Saga for the first time. I very much enjoyed the growing complexity as I progressed through the chapters! Caldebert Caper will be next!

I was very surprised at the climax of the series. Trying to avoid spoilers here...so...hm...I Googled the major NPCs and found that this lines up with SR canon. Is the entire trilogy derived from some of the novels, or did you manage to weave this Big Event into your campaign?

Either way, it was a fun run, chummer!

You want cringe, because this is how you get cringe. The fact that it's tied to another two campaigns is the only reason i touched this piece of shit. But no, i am not gonna be finishing or even ever touching it again. It's just awfully constructed.

I don't comment on things often, and folks reading this review will probably be up in arms about what I'll have to say. "You go do better" blah blah blah.

The writing in this is really disjointed, from the story to the dialogue between characters and how they frame the missions and side objectives. There's no real motive or driving force other than "get paid to do A,B, C." While that's great and works as a formula, the attempt to pretend there's an overarching story takes away from it. This could have been a lot better as simply a series of jobs a runner had the option of picking through without the pretense of needing a big bad. Not every story needs to be LOTR.

The writing could easily be tweaked to suit that a lot better I think, and while it may be way too late for that on this mod, I think it's something worth considering in the future when you hopefully work on another project.

how many hours of content?

What's the music in the video trailer?

What a great mod. Thanks so much for doing it.

I was just having a discussion with my Canadian buddy and fellow HBS Shadowrun Games player on the Aztec calendar, Earthdawn, the Shadowrun history, and the Horrors. Here's a thought for Antumbra players; given that Dunkelzahn essentially sacrificed his life to fend off the Horrors a while longer, has anyone (even the creators) considered just why everyone's favorite "jerk" Dragon was seeking to command and retain sacred places and Hestaby's power?

I have... Look, the dragon's a jerk playing his own game, nothing new in SR... what if he was trying to ward Earth better? Nearly getting pre-empted on the AEGIS issue stung his pride if nothing else.

Came back to SR to replay the original stories and decided to check into the workshops. Hat's off to the author on the UGC. Can honestly say this combined with Caldecott and Calfree are some of the best fan created content I've had the pleasure to play through. Amazing story with well written narrative that keeps you immersed in the story from start to finish. Would certainly love to see a continuation or all together new adventure from the author.
Thanks for letting us play in your sandbox.

will you release this for hong kong?

Finished Caldecott and Calfree both twice before finally getting around to trying out Antumbra, I'm embarrassed to say. It's been really interesting to see how your development and writing styles have evolved since the start here. It's a shame that the feature probably doesn't exist with the Returns/Dragonfall engine, but it would have been really interesting to have seen your Dev Comments on the Saga after having finished your whole tale. Some of the best modded story content out there for any game on Steam, great work.

So, I have no idea where I am in the game, but I'm in the Armory and the game has...slowly...begun...to die.

Like, at first it was just hanging between turn swaps, then it was hanging between shots, then I had to open the ESC menu to get it to register an AP expenditure to move to the next guy, and now I don't have my character portraits and nothing is interacting or operating, everything is just in idle animations.

this campain is suuper hard! i tried is with a mage and simply can not pass the final instance! but man! it is do good!
[bad english, i know, sry]

@KronoKinesis: Aw, thank you for playing!

@DaveOfDeath: Thanks for the guidance!

@Starbuck: Great strategy notes, thanks for sharing!

@Carpenter: Woohoo, congrats on completing the campaign! I'm glad you enjoyed the ending.

@Bwon: Wow, that is a great coincidence! I'm so glad to hear that this campaign made you smile, thank you for writing!

@DarthThanos: I spent a lot of time polishing this campaign, and a ton of credit goes to players who have submitted bug reports over the years. I'm very pleased that this ended up feeling like legit DLC to you, that's what I was shooting for!

Hi, everybody! We've passed a huge milestone: over 50,000 people have subscribed to this campaign! That's insane. Huge thanks to everyone who has spent time playing this or spreading the word to your friends!

@KaliYama: Haha, yeah, that's totally the Armory! That map is basically Valencia and Mission from about 14th to 16th street. You'll get to see the inside later.

@proTarget: I appreciate the recommendation! I loved the official campaigns and am pleased that this compares so well for you.

@Porcinus: Welcome back! I think shaman summoner is one of the hardest archetypes in the official campaign too, but access to more etiquettes can be fun. I did buff that archetype a little in CFiC, it's more of a struggle in the first two games. Especially this one, I think summoners get Dead Man's Switch spells instead of Dragonfall spells. Good luck!

This was terrific! Very well done, to the point I thought this was made by some of the original creators/writers in their spare time. Could be legit DLC 😊

It is a funny coincidence that the river near where I live is called Elorn, it brought a smile to my face, one more to go with all the smiles I had playing this campaign ! This was an amazing run, a great experience, and I loved every part of it. You did a fantastic job !