Shadowrun, 90's Retrofuturism Revisited
Gandalf, Elliott (from Mr Robot), and John Wick plan a heist, have a shootout with the Terminator, and escape by driving through the world of Mad Max.
Shadowrun n. Any movement, action, or series of such made in carrying out plans which are illegal or quasi-legal. —WorldWide Word Watch, 2050 update
1991, Summer
My best friend shows up to spend the weekend. He brings this new book he found at the comic store:
The cover is fantastic.
It’s Cyberpunk D&D, right?, I say.
Yeah dude, but check out the language they are using…chummer.
I am hooked. I want to make a cybernetically enhanced wizard that has “amerindian” flair in a world where I can fight corporate-paid samurai.
What is Shadowrun, though?
This question has plagued me for decades. It is not just a setting, it is not just a game. It is some quasi-memetic namshub (See Snow Crash by
) that gets in your head.It is a heist game, but that isn’t a thing yet when it is released. It’s not just THE cyberpunk TTRPG (that belongs to R Talisorian’s Cyberpunk 2020). It is the ideas of Gibson’s The Sprawl Trilogy twisted with Magic.
I didn’t get it in 1991. Or in 1995. Or really for decades. The Matrix helped. However, even when that came out, I still didn't understand it. But it would not let me go.
Recently, I have returned to the Sixth World (as it is known, see below) in video game form, in novel form, and even by reading several editions of the role-playing game, all over.
I find it both a fantastic piece of retrofuturism now, but that is not what it started out being. It was supposed to be a dark, gritty cyberpunk future filled with ideas from smart people. People who knew how magic worked! People who had their fingers on the pulse of futurism and technology.
It truly is fascinating.
Check out this excerpt from the beginning of several of the novels set in Shadowrun’s Sixth World.
The year is 2057.
Magic has returned to the earth after an absence of many thousands of years. What the Mayan calendar called the Fifth World has given way to the Sixth, a new cycle of magic, marked by the waking of the great dragon Ryumyo in the year 2011. The Sixth World is an age of magic and technology. An Awakened age.The rising magic has caused the archaic races to re-emerge.
Metahumanity: First came the elves, tall and slender with pointed ears and almond eyes. They were born to human parents just as were dwarfs shortly thereafter. Then later came the orks and the trolls, some born changed, like elves and dwarfs, but others goblinized—transformed from human form into their true nature as the rising magic activated their DNA. Manifesting as larger bodies, heavily muscled with tusked mouths and warty skin.Even the most ancient and intelligent of beings, the great dragons, have come out of their long hiding. Only a few of these creatures are known to exist, and most of them have chosen a life of isolation and secrecy. But some, able to assume human form, have integrated themselves into the affairs of metahumanity. They “have used their ancient intellect, their powerful magic, and their innate cunning to ascend to positions of power. One is known to own and run Saeder-Krupp—largest megacorporation in the world. Another—Dunkelzahn—claims to seek the improvement of the metahuman condition and has just been elected to the presidency of the United Canadian and American States.
The Sixth World is a far cry from the mundane environment of the Fifth. It is exotic and strange, a paradoxical blend of the scientific and the arcane. The advance of technology has reached a feverish pace. The distinction between man and machine is becoming blurred by the advent of direct neural interfacing. Cyberware. Machine and computer implants are commonplace, making metal of flesh, pulsing electrons into neurons at the speed of thought.
People of the Sixth World are a new breed—stronger, smarter, faster. Less human.The Matrix has grown like a phoenix out of the ashes of the old global computer network. A virtual world of computer-generated reality has emerged, a universe of electrons and CPU cycles controlled and manipulated by those with the fastest cyber decks, with the hottest new code.
It is an era where information is power, where data and money are one and the same. Multinational megacorporations have replaced superpower governments as the true forces on the planet.
In a world where cities have “grown into huge sprawls of concrete and steel, walled-off corporate enclaves and massive arcologies have superseded two-car garages, vegetable gardens, and white picket fences. The megacorps exploit masses of wageslaves for the profit of a lucky and ruthless few.”
But in the shadows of the mammoth corporate arcologies, live the SINless. Those without System Identification Numbers are not recognized by the machinery of society, by the bureaucracy that has grown so massive and complex that nobody understands it completely. Among the SINless are the shadowrunners, traffickers in stolen data and hot information, mercenaries of the street—discreet, effective, and untraceable.
WATCH YOUR BACK. SHOOT STRAIGHT. CONSERVE AMMO. AND NEVER, EVER, CUT A DEAL WITH A DRAGON. —STREET PROVERB
This is from a later version of the setting, dating towards the end of it’s Second Edition, and published in a novel called Strange Souls by Jak Koke. It is the first part of an iconic trilogy about the fallout from the first dragon elected to be President of the UCAS (The United States and Canada merged into 1 country in the setting, what?!?!…no seriously they did).
The Summer Of Shadowrun Begins now!
My summer project is to run some sessions of the game, binge a bunch of novels, and write about all of it. You can expect TTRPG stuff, short stories, and whatever else catches my fancy.
Most of it will be free with monthly archiving. So sign up, follow, and enjoy a drek-filled (more about the slang in coming writings) scan of an alternate future based on a flawed, but vivid, 1990s aesthetic.
Teaser I made in Canva for this week’s TTRPG session using The Sprawl by Ardens Ludere
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