At sunrise and sunset, a man casts a long shadow, Rebirth, parabolic change, apocalypse Options

[Talia Invierno]

I'll suggest, here, that the continuing vitality of a roleplaying game with an invented or adapted world and/or metaplot ties directly to the perception of world change (sometimes echoed within personal or group storylines). Such change absolutely requires playing near perceived beginnings or endings of a cycle or single rise/fall, never in the periods of general status quo or where change is so gradual as to be almost unnoticeable.

The Shadowrun universe manages to fit this requirement both of new possibilities (sudden positive change) and of dystopic decay (sudden negative change) -- simultaneously. We find the Sixth World and the (re)Awakening and in fact exponential rise of magic as an active event-awareness within the lifetimes of many, juxtaposed with and contrasted against a corporate world which seems determined at times to drive toward an inevitable death of the world and the spirit. Machinery erodes the traditional limitations of humankind, in apparently infinite change toward newer, better, more powerful -- but the newly discovered rigid parameters of Essence create a new sense of spirit, with cyberzombies embodying the corporate apocalypse. The Matrix simultaneously eradicates the physical within a new world, a new Creation by humankind which appears to be for all intents and purposes infinite: and yet the simulation cannot but ground within the body/mind balance, and ending existence in either physical or Matrix world ends both.

Interestingly, in Shadowrun as increasingly within our own world, a construct formed entirely upon faith seems to foundation all else: money. But offer an otaku or an Awakened type or even a street samurai a choice between personal riches and the pursuit of their own path in life, and which are they most likely to choose? Ultimately, the nuyen is only an illusion: representational of one's own goals, wishes, desires -- but not usually in itself the agent of personal change, growth, evolution. The reality is karma, the measure of personal discovery.

Nature itself reverberates the conflicting drives, one toward restored and thriving and sometimes overthriving life (redwoods, Amazonia), the other toward destruction and toxicity -- and each of the extremes defining such drastic rates of change occurring well within human memory, and having effects that last well beyond a single lifetime. Maybe that's why there had to be so many reactor accidents: not for the sense of realism per se, but to echo that uneasy feeling that whatever it is that's been unleashed here, for positive or for negative, it's (almost) out of control. There's a sense of a continual edge-of-control or even out-of-control, on both sides.

And finally, I suggest that the motif of drastic change within storytelling is effective only against constants appropriate in degree to the degree of change evoked, in this case the perspective of ancient creatures who have seen at least one rise and fall of the cycle of magic: and that the inherent, disturbing conflict of whether this world is actually rising or falling is further amplified by there being no single agreed-upon view by those ancient creatures. Thus, I propose that the existence of ancient, effectively immortal beings within Shadowrun is absolutely crucial to evoking the mythic imagination, and consequently the potentially mythic scale of one's own actions.

Without this constant sense of drastic change, of being either at the beginning of the world or of witnessing its death throes (or, from the pov of Phoenix, maybe both!) and of potentially being a crucial agent therein; if it had been only a game of runs against corporations etc. in a relatively stable social/psychological/spiritual environment: I doubt Shadowrun would have succeeded to the degree it has.