The Universal Brotherhood

The player characters, based in Seattle, are hired to do a "simple trace and recovery job" to retrieve an "expensive trinket back from a weak-kneed suit's vanished mistress".^[1] In the course of the heist, the characters become aware of a national self-help organization called the Universal Brotherhood, and their original objective takes a "nightmarish plunge", bringing them face to face with an evil, existential threat.^[1]

The adventure comprises two books:

• the actual Shadowrun adventure titled "Missing Blood"
• A novella titled "The Universal Brotherhood", supposedly a reporter's account of his investigation into the Universal Brotherhood. The players discover this during their investigation and must read it to discover clues.

FASA originally published the cyberpunk role-playing game Shadowrun in 1989. Over the next few years, FASA published dozens of supplements and adventures, including The Universal Brotherhood in 1990, a 55-page adventure written Chris Kubasik, with interior art by Earl Geier, Jeff Laubenstein, Jim Nelson, and Joel Biske, and cover art by Biske. The adventure was packaged with an 88-page novella written by Nigel Findley.^[2]

In the 2014 book Designers & Dragons: The '90s, game historian Shannon Appelcline noted that following the publication of Shadowrun in 1989, "Over the next few years, Shadowrun was supported by over a dozen supplements each year—some of which were quite well-received, such as Seattle Sourcebook (1990), one of the first extensive RPG descriptions of a modern city, and Nigel Findley’s adventure, The Universal Brotherhood (1990). The line would eventually include a second edition of the rules (1992), which cleaned up some of the game systems and updated the timeline to 2053, following three years of metaplot advances detailed in the various supplements."^[3]: 74