I bought my first shadowrun 1e book when i was 12 because of the classic cover by Elmore...that cover just said it all...it looked so freakin' cool...and it WORKED. It had native americans, guns (sawed-off shotguns), hacking and sexy women with crackling power bolts...and it didn't look goofy, it looked tough. I was really in love with how lethal the game mechanics were and for me at the time it just all seemed so seamless....like the cover of grimiore where mages are reading spells off of trid displays....it just worked esthetically. After about 2 years I left RPG's for other activities and really didn't come back to them until about 17 years later at the behest of my sister I checked out SR 4e and we bought the books and started a campaign. I really like the 4e mechanics and setting changes....but unlike when I was a kid, i'm having a harder time fusing the tolkien-esque features of shadowrun with the darker cyberpunk features. I guess it's because i'm more closed minded now...but I really am looking for a way to find a cohesive texture to the SR world that doesn't feel like fusion, but more natural. So much of the artwork and setting of a lot of SR in between 2e and 4e really just looks super goofy and a lot of material lost that dark feel to it. Even the original 4e cover is just plain goofy looking and thank god the SR4A cover brings back that whole noir feel otherwise i don't think i would have ever purchased 4e.

The idea that i've been playing around with has been to ask myself the question: "how could you do some cool SR type things in other rpg worlds?"....and those things which I could only do in SR are the things I use to define SR. For example in what fictional world would i find corporate R&D into the occult?? Now that's SR...to the core. Or how do you make a world where native americans can take back the U.S.. Most people today scoff at the idea and think it's ridiculous or worse..."reverse racist"... but i happen to be very keen on that idea, and SR affords me a world where just that happened through the miracle of spirits and magic and I make it front and central in my campaigns. Another thing which SR explains well for me is the shear diversity future cities supposedly exhibit. In the background foot traffic in many scenes of the movie Bladerunner you have all these midgets running around...wazzup with that? Well only SR explains that satisfactorily to me. The gem which 4e also brings to the table is AR....that really is gold...1. because it reflects our current RL world...2. it redefines the esthetics where everything corporate and sanctioned is covered with advertising and flashy cg....a lot like minority report.

I just think that If you're trying to play cyberpunk...you're just going to run into a wall of silliness when you try and incorporate the other aspects of SR ....so it makes sense to me that it's more esthetically pleasing to think of SR as an occult world which is simply set in the future which by default will have more advanced technology. Just like how Aliens merges cyberpunk with space exploration....it's not cyberpunk withspace-aliens....it's space-aliens with cyberpunk. Same with Avatar....and those settings make sense and dont' make you feel like it's some weird fusion. Still, SR still doesn't seem as esthetically unified as those examples I gave and I would really love for it to because I love SR and I would love to one day see a good movie or video-game made about it....but that's never going to happen if it can't be pitched in an esthetically pleasing way. If the Neuromancer movie actually gets made....it will be really hard to ever have a shadowrun movie soon after it unless it's "sold" as a movie about the occult where mundane's actually have a fighting chance of staying alive because of advanced technology. Then again, when i re-watch bladerunner...it totally doesn't feel weird to push the whole "exotic diversity" levels one more notch up on many of the scenes and you just end up with SR. I'm almost positive that they came up with the idea for SR while they were watching bladerunner. They just should have never ever dropped the terms "dwarves, elves, trolls or orks"...they should have stuck with the cool latin names given to them...like Robustus, or Ingentis...or something along those lines....but i still think people can get over that.

Please share your ideas!

Whoa.. wall of text..

My beef with SR4 is the unhappy clash between middle class shoppers with iPhones, and dystopia in the barrens. It just seems like the barrens couldn't really exist. Things like Matrix dark-spots, where there's no Signal? I don't really see it happening, with just how cheap and ubiquitous everything is. The middle class seems so dominant and visible.

I suppose I'm missing the "punk" in the cyber (bio, by now, really) a bit.. everything seems so clean and controlled and monitored. Not enough cracks for messiness to thrive in.

The Barrens were artificially created in order to be "Dumping Grounds" for undesirables, a place for the Security Companies that are now the Police Force to point at and go, "Here there is danger! Pay us more, and we'll protect you better from it!" Criminals, the SINless, and so on. They've grown into, well, what they were created to be. Slums and Ghettos for non-citizens. Even with the Wireless Initiative, or perhaps due to it even more, this expansion would be even wider.

Remember, you need a CommLink (Out of the price range of most Barrens people) and a SIN (Even more out of the price range!) in order to even go a number of places. That means they're stuck in the Barrens even more, skirting out at night to try and pickpocket at a dwindling supply of paper money and certified credsticks, or the occasional smash 'n' grab at low-end stores, in order to pay for the necessities of life. Or booze and chips, which are probably more likely.

And I show the world as less "Middle Class with iPhones" as "Lower Class working as Middle Class with stripped-down, knockoff iPhones and scared out of their minds". Keeps it better that way, I feel.

But that's just me.

That's a really valid point. I think that this clash is very hard to visualize in the U.S. and other 1st world countries, but this type of juxtaposition of have and have-nots is very stark and part of everyday life in other parts of our RL world. I would recommend the film "Dancing with the Devil"...just do a youtube search under the title, and "Brazil". Now that's how I envision the barrens and the whole gangworld of Seattle...not this cheezy go-ganger bull...which I hold Talsorian games wholey responsible for with their original CP game. I mean they even wrote rock lyrics for christs sake.....
But in any case, if you look at modern day Rio de Janeiro it is fully modern and advanced with some of the biggest corporations in the world calling it home....it is the business hub of all of latin-america. The middle-class and the wealthy are a very big group and you could go to sections of Rio and it's impossible to imagine that the favelas (slums) even exist. I recommend watching that documentary....it's what i model the barrens after in my campaigns.
So i think SR does a good job by having this clash between shoppers and dystopia...it's very realistic (although downplayed as unrealistic in the U.S.....remember Katrina and how so many people were shocked that those images of desperate poor people were of the U.S.) although I wish they would explore it more because I think it goes to the core of what SR is all about.


And sourcebooks like Seattle 2072 don't really give us a feel for this clash because they focus on the developed parts of seattle.

Nice...that make s a lot of sense , we all know that capitalism needs for their to be poor people. There has to be people who do all the dirty work and sweat shop labor...there has to be a group of people who will buy all the drugs that governments and corporations are selling.


One nice thing that 4e introduced was the new ubiquitous nature of wireless and commlinks is that now with a dirt cheap rip-off commlink, people rely more and more on AR icons to do basic things like run cash registers or use a microwave that literacy rates among the poor have dropped dramatically. To work at a stuffer shack you don't even need to read and write or do arthmetic. It reminds me a lot of my grandfather...he never finished 6th grade but had such an elegant hand writing because people judged you based on it...and all the letters he would write looked so pretty.... now compare that to me...my hand writing sucks...when I write a letter it looks like a 2nd graders art project....and it's cuz i'm used to typing emails. So in that small way i'm functionally illiterate....so extrapolate that to now using AR for everything.

Ascalphus, there are things I find harder than others to swallow my disbelief for in Shadowrun, but the class divide isn't one of them. Hell, my father's side of the family is from Michigan and it's already pretty much happened there; Detroit has 3 of 4 murders never making it to court, while some of the suburbs like Grosse Pointe are just about the richest in the country, where big shots hide behind private armies of security. And I think we are seeing a bit of a leveling between the Third and First Worlds; the main difference between now and something like Shadowrun, where pretty much every country is South Africa tier, is that when the poverty is far away it's a lot easier for a First Worlder to pretend it doesn't exist. All Shadowrun's done is brought the Third World hellhole to the First World's doorstep.

Inca, as far as thematically bringing in the magical elements, I think there's a lot you can do with them above and beyond just using Tolkien pastiche in a cyberpunk setting. First, there's the idea of magic as a leveling factor allowing previously suppressed cultures to reassert themselves, as embodied by the NAN, for starters. How the NAN is handled, well, that's a thread all its own, but I don't think it's necessary to indulge in "reverse racism", but that is a kind of a sticky issue to navigate as a GM. I've tried to make it clear that it's as much about culture as ethnicity, so it's not angry bad-bad natives kicking white settlers out indiscriminately and being a futuristic version of the Western movie stereotype of the Native American, but by the same token it's a state that's Native American at its core, it's not just Whitey commandeering things a la Dances with Wolves or Avatar. The average citizen might not be ethnically Amerind, but the Prime Minister or whatever almost certainly is, and they both consider themselves Native culturally speaking. Anyways, I like the ties between magic and indigenous issues, because it's pretty easy to use as a vehicle for empowerment themes and such.

This applies just as much to the neo-Pagan stuff Shadowrun has going on and the New Xia Kingdom in Shaanxi as it does to the NAN, too. Those aren't as much "suppressed cultures" as vanished ones, so it's a little different, but the ties to the past are very interesting and allow for viewing of the world through a perspective other than the modern, Western one we're used to, and isn't seeing the world through eyes other than your own kind of part of the point of roleplaying, part of the thrill? Or at least I should say, I think it is for me.

And magic ties really well into environmental stuff as well. Toxic shamans and background count are an excellent tool for talking about what we're doing to the Earth and to each other. And on the more positive side, you've got street shamans embracing those things and rejecting a purely capitalistic and resource-based view of the world.

Finally, the metatypes? If you're just doing it as "ork is the new black," well, yeah, that's kind of boring and one-dimensional. I find it more interesting to think about it as piled on top of all the other levels of privilege; when a SINless Latina human technomancer interacts with a gay black ork SINner, they're both viewing the world through very different privilege goggles compared to the other's perspective. Treating it as a compounding level of privilege gets more interesting results, I think. It's also cool to look at social strains caused by biological issues, which have few if any real world analogues that really work, such as elves never having to retire due to age, orks having many children at once and the strain society has in supporting that, orks maturing early (that probably plays merry hell with ideas like age of sexual consent; I remember, I think, reading that Evo has metatype-specific age of consent laws for this very reason?), things of that nature.

In any case, I think you're absolutely right that a good SR game should be a true fusion of cyberpunk and urban fantasy, and not just Cyberpunk with wizards and elves. There really is a big difference between the two.

You know, one of the things I had hoped that Shadowrun would abandon was the idiotic Tolkein/D&D concept that elves live forever. But instead, they've plugged along at it where they should have ignored it as more bad 1e fluff to be kinda swept under the rug. The problem is, they've never explored the emotional/psychological impact that living forever would have (the concept that without death, life is meaningless), nor the sociological aspect that Ork over-breeding and relatively short lifespans would have. I mean, even in late 3e sourcebooks, there were still disproportionately too few Elves and Orks give the fact that virtually no Elves are dying and the Orks are breeding approximately four times more in numbers in two thirds of the time period, with a life span that is only a little more than half.

And can you imagine just how much a troll has to eat just to subsist? Their lifestyle costs should just default to double that of any other metatype. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

I don't think of them as elves, dwarves, and trolls. They're genetic variants of humanity that are named after the mythical creatures they sort of resemble. In other further cases (such as yeti and dragons) they're simply the creatures we knew of but science didn't believe in.

I have great hope that in 5e or 6e angels and demons will have come out of their closets and be part of the world.

I'd rather see them do more with it than abandon it. For one, the immortality angst thing, none of the elves have really been around all that long, except for the IEs. So that very debatable concept is for a good reason not prominent. I'm much more interested in how they use the fact that they never get old in terms of how that affects power structures; any hierarchy is fundamentally reliant on old-timers passing on to make room for new blood, and if you look at, say, the Ancients, things are starting to look a little strained, because that's not happening. That sort of societal shakiness I find more intriguing than personal angst about living forever (personally I don't think people would have all that hard a time dealing with it...)

And the demographics, well, SR canon has never been well put together demographically. This is small potatoes compared to six million Inuit coming out of nowhere and the like.

What are IE's?? And while we're on the topic of homo sapiens nobilis, where does sperethiel come from? Is it like modern hebrew in that it was reconstructed by linguists? A lot of old material seems to give the impression that some elves have very old knowledge....but how could this be true?...The first elves were born in 2013 or something like that.

It's holdover from Earthdawn, the last cycle of Magic, which ended in 3113 BC with the sinking of Atlantis, IIRC. The elven language comes from there and was re-discovered or some such.

One question answers the others - IE stands for Immortal Elves; a handful of elves that have been around since the Fourth World. (The Fourth World would be where you play in Earthdawn)

so where were they in between eras?

Hiding behind the scenes, killing sleeping dragons, being behind many important events, etc.

Illuminati!

Exactly...

And why did dragons fall asleep but not IE?

Because they are not Dragons... Duh! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

Dragons have magic as a part of their very being, and they have to hibernate during times of low Mana.

Elves just lose their magic abilities. Which is major for magicians, but not so big a deal for those that have no magic.

So you spend your centuries learning conventional warfare. Which is dangerous indeed. In fact, one lost an ear because of it.

And I'd be cool with that, if they were just slightly different humans. Obviously Trolls are going to have shorter lifespans because of the greater stress on their frames, but the whole "Elves don't age" thing is really silly. I mean, there would be an absurd market in abducting Elves for research to try and unlock the secrets to eternal life. (The problems with including things like Leonization is a whole different can of worms)

Of course, you then get right into the inherent problems with a population that lives forever, and that's the lack of advancement for those below them. Imagine the kind of corporate intrigue that would cause that's never been explored in the game. Human employees below an elf on the totem pole who isn't advancing fast enough because he figures he has all the time in the world to do it. Or, the consequences if an Elf was elected to a board of directors on a primarily human corporation. He'd hold his seat effectively forever assuming he didn't get sacked. That's gonna cause some dissatisfaction amongst his human underlings who don't get to live long enough to be patient.

Everything mankind has achieved has been because of our mortality. People are motivated to accomplish things in part because we don't live forever. Would the Tir nation share that same drive? If they did, what kinds of discontent are you going to see amongst a population that is inherently familiar with human standards of goal setting and time lapse but don't have the same genetic disposition?

Even worse, can you imagine having to be married to the same woman for hundreds of years? Jebus. The suicide rate among older elven males must be absurd. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

The implication is that dragons are tied more closely to the ambient magic. The IE, at least according to rumor, were just mortals that had their genes tampered with.

Kruger, that's one perspective. It's very romantic. It's not exactly falsifiable, though, is it? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Or the very idea of marriage would disappear. If "until death do us apart" does not work, you have to find something else.

I guess all you folks have missed the various mentions of just such that issue happening in the Sixth World over Elves not aging.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a good reason for humans, who are ticked off working for a Keebler for 10-years, getting older, and not getting a promotion because his boss isn't getting any older and is stuck in his position due to The Dilbert Principle, is a good reason to join Humanis.

Or hire Shadowrunners to have a bit of "Random Street Violence" on said boss. Hey, look, an opening just happened!

Honestly, Elves have only been around for 60-years. This is just starting to be noticed in a Corporate environment. Street Gangs, on the other hand... I mean, look how long Green Lucifer has been in charge of the Ancients of Seattle!

It has disappeared.

It's called "Divorce". (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)