Hey all,
It looks like I have an opportunity to run a 1-shot FS adventure for my gaming group. Any thoughts on the best published intro adventure (granted, I'll probably want to customize it)? I have a bunch of the old books as well as the FS2 book. So long as I can unearth my old books from their storage in the cupboard 
Marked For Death evidently has a couple of intro adventures... Brinks and (don't know if it's an intro?) Blood for the Master.
One thing to consider 1st is how much will you let the players know of the Secret War and will you put any restrictions on allowed characters.
If you keep them ignorant and limited to just modern characters
Sleeping Dragon Awake and Baptism By Fire are good intro secret war adventures.
Legacy of Ming is good too if you do some modifications to it, and just turn it it into a treasure hunt against competing forces.
A thread exist of the favorite least favorite official 1st edition adventures that you may want to check out. In which people posted their favorite and least adventure and why.
https://forum.atlas-games.com/t/favorite-least-fvaorite-official-adventure/9470/1
My personal favorite was Shaolin Heartbreak.
Yeah, that is a good point. Sorry, I should have said: this is going to be a 1-shot. And I'm going to start them without SW knowledge. So thanks for your recommendations!
So I think I'm going to pick a mix of modern-juncture non-magical characters for them to select from. Probably cops, spy/thief, everyman hero, that sort of thing. Ideally the adventure would start mundane - at least magically speaking - and end with introducing some sort of "what the hell" element.
Hmm.
"You were not put on this earth to 'get it', Jack Burton!"
I run improvised Feng Shui 2 one-shots all the time. I generally just have the players pick their archetypes and melodramatic hooks, then weave something together which includes all of that.
If you guys don't mind a little shameless self promotion, I'd like to mention a blog post of mine of a FS2 one shot:
moxboardinghouse.com/media/ ... adventure/
It opens in a Modern Hong Kong night market with a fight against a local gang, and a surprise reveal of a demon. The follow up is a combat chase through the Netherworld tunnels against snake demons on giant bugs. The final fight is against a sorceress in an upside down pagoda hanging over a bottomless chasm.
I wrote it for FS2 and I play-tested it with random people at (gamer) bar as a one shot. You wouldn't need to convert it, and it's designed around the FS2 three-encounter structure.
Thanks BlackJaw! I think someone linked to your adventure up-thread.
Right now I'm thinking I want to make something custom using local (Toronto) locations. I'm going to hold off on any magical weirdness until the finale, which I'm planning to be at an abandoned inn in Toronto. It has extensive grounds littered with bits of statuary and architectural fronts from now-demolished buildings, and a 19th century log cabin. I'm just going to tweak it to not be a park and to be surrounded by a stone wall...
And I'm thinking of making the plot revolve around an attempt to kidnap a celebrity jokily modelled on Justin Beiber. 
Nice
I have a recurring Ascended antagonist who's a global pop star named Magdalena, loosely based on Lady Gaga, Madonna, etc.
Ok given what you said about SW knowledge, juncture, and characters.
The best 2 are still Sleeping Dragons Awake and Baptism by Fire.
Sleeping Dragons Awake was made just for modern juncture characters with no knowledge of the secret war and it let the players encounter representatives (enemies in most cases) of all the 1st edition factions, lets them go to the Netherworld and, puts them in contact with the Dragons. So it is a good adventure if you want to set up all the major Secret War background stuff.
One problem with it is that it was written using a play test version of the 1st edition FS rules so you'll need to toughen up opponents, fix shticks etc.
If you don't have that adventure send me a PM as the adventure was an "official" one that ran in a hard to get magazine. (The only other official adventure that ran in a magazine was Legacy of Ming, but some other official stuff ran as magazine articles when Daedalus was publishing FS.)
Baptism by Fire a s I mentioned is another good choice and this has been for years the default adventure most people use fo starting new campaigns or one shots.
Most of the problems in it have been discussed with fixes offered, plus all the stats have FS2 conversions for them. Do note that the FS1 stat blocks had a few errors regarding the damage of weapons in them. (I'm not sure if the FS2 conversion fixed the various errors that were in a lot of the 1st edition FS stat blocks.)
A few nice player handout props have been done for it by other players which helps.
Out of the 2 if I had a choice I'd go with Baptism by Fire. The adventure in Marked for Death were made to take place after it too.
You can download Red Packet Rumble as a free PDF from the FS2 page. It's designed to be a one-shot playable in 3-4 hours.
There will be another one-shot adventure coming out this summer as part of Free RPG Day.