Shadowrun: Shadow Stock - Ingentis Athletes provides ten non-player characters, all trolls, sharing a sports theme and information on the troll meta-variants (cyclops, formorians, giants, and minotaurs). More useful for Game Masters than players, it would have been supported by providing more context for the role of trolls in sport in the Sixth World and a few examples of shadowruns where sports were directly (or indirectly) involved.

Shadowrun: Shadow Stock - Ingentis Athletes, is the first of the Shadow Stock resources for Shadowrun, Sixth World Edition, providing NPCs organized around a theme and new character options, trying to be something for everyone.

It begins with a brief in game introduction which boils down to “here are a bunch of athletes and ex-athletes who are operating in the shadows.” Then on to the characters!

The ten characters cover a wide range of sports from football and soccer to urban brawl and “azzieball” (and no, that later one is not really explained) and have a wide range of skills: brawlers, drivers and even organizers. Sometimes there is a little mismatch between character description and the skills the character has and, since many of these seem like they could be used for player characters, it seems odd they are not given knowledge skills as well. But most of the characters have more than one way they can be brought into games which is good design. Lacking is any actual character art, there are a few generic troll pieces but nothing specific to the characters and only one that touches on the sports theme.

The work concludes with an in-game world discussion among the various troll variant types about how they differ, which is an amusing read, and then game mechanics for the variants.

Overall, a solid if niche work, nice to see some broadening of roles for trolls. I look forward to seeing more of the Shadow Stock line.

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