Maybe it's just me, but Shadowrun seems to have become much less cyberpunk. The world's got wireless all over the place, the corporations are commiting relatively small evils, and there are less things than ever to jump out and say "BOO!".
I think Shadowrun should go the route of Ghost in the Shell; the entire world sort of fits together, but the poorer areas are giant, shambling masses constructed of one building on top of another. The world is generally peaceful; relatively few have guns. And all the corps are at each other's throats.
Alternately, they could return some "grittiness" to the SR genre. I want the feeling of Blade Runner or Neuromancer, not the feeling of D&D with Uzis.
So, does anyone have any tips?

I think you run with the wrong gms if it has the feel you describe.

Use horrible, awful experiments by the megacorps. Have the megacorps take larger steps towards securing key personnel.

As for your main point, I don't think Shadowrun is really un-gritty at all. Even the Sprawl trilogy had non-plug in ways of hooking onto the internet near the end. There are still gigantic amounts of slums and powerful, sadistic gangs. And I don't think Gibson ever featured blood mages. As for the spiritual and emotional effects, that's completely up to the GM.

funny thing. I have the COMPLETLY opposite feeling.
Where SR3 left it was all international runs and humongusly huge players.
I feel SR4 just gave that turn where SR come meet cyberpunk again, and that is a feeling shared with those I have been playing to show them the new edition.
Humanity have lost it to the machines/corps/spam

Try to make everything as depressing and unreal as possible in your flavor text. That's what I loved about Neuromancer; Gibson just rushed by all the slang expecting you to keep up. Describe how the sky is the color of a television tuned to a dead channel; talk about the programmers on the subway licking holographic tatoos of vaginas. Insert little details; those were the parts of the book that really interested me. It's a matter of flavor more than a matter of having crazy people on motorcycles killing mutant bunnies.

In the shadows of the Sixth World, it's easier to buy a gun than get a hot bath. The streets are full of people that fell through the cracks of society, the downtrodden and the forgotten. Left to their own, they prey upon one another in a desperate bid to escape.

You're different. The street is home to you, your natural environment. You play in the daily hustle of street biz, but you stand apart from it. Magic, 'ware, skills, reputation. These are your currency, your edge. The only things you value or respect. The only things that keep you from being like everyone else.

Grittiness can be easily injected with totally crappy weather All The Time.
And corpses. Lots and lots of dead bodies to be found as often as we find gum on the sidewalk today, showing the utter cheapness of life in the Sprawl.

it is seatlle, it rains how much of the year there?

I was looking at the Horrors, and I've been thinking about how to properly GM them. Oscuro is scary enough...and he's obviously quite afraid of something already on this side of the bridge. Although I don't intend to be including Horrors in this campaign anytime soon, it does give some interesting example of how to keep things suitably depressing and creepy.

A nifty page:
http://www.wiredreflexes.com/sr/characters...index.php?id=15

Now, all I need to do is find a copy of HB, and I'm set.

How about a little Bruce Sterling for this occasion?

Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. We can do just about anything you can imagine to rats. And closing your eyes and refusing to think about this won't make it go away.

That is cyberpunk.

It's also how you perceive it too, i've played some games with shitty GM's and the only things that saved it was my imagination.

Suddenly, ninjas!

Ninjas may not make SR4 more gritty, but they make it better. After all, we all know ninjas are just drop bears in disguise! I recommend liberal doses of them, especially nearby eucalyptus.

What about Pirates?!?! There is nothing more gritty than a man walking down the street in bright red overcoat with a black tricorner hat and a feather with one peg leg a hook instead of a hand with a green mangy parrot on one shoulder squawking "pieces of eight, 10 dead men on barrel of Rum!" And the man limping down the street muttering Argh!!

And then have the pirate attacked by a ninja. A CYBER ninja.

And as for the big happy shiny consumerism with comlinks and AR thing, a theme of cyberpunk is to have consumerism be a sort of false idol, a fake beacon of hope and beauty.

Pfft, pirates are cybernetic and ninjas are adepts.

Everyone knows that.

But because pirates are not legally allowed to get their cyberware through the actual exchange of money with a legitimate vendor, they have to steal, plunder, cobble together, recreate, teleport, nanomanufacture and substitute with cardboard cut-outs all their cyberware, hence, more often than not, they're at least a little behind SOTA. Truly retro-cyber pirates are not uncommon at all.

Now the question is, if ninjas are truly drop bears in disguise and there are drop bear vikings (who are pretty much pirates with funnier accents and bigger beards), are drop bears their own natural enemy?

i think that SR has become less classic cyberpunk as time moves on. this is understandable, since the elements that helped create cyberpunk are beginning to fade, so fewer people identify easily with it. the future is look less like Neuromancer and more like Heavy Weather--it's still gritty, it's just not at all the same kind of grit.

as for SR itself... eh, mneh. i think a lot of the 2nd edition stuff moved SR away from cyberpunk by any definition; 3rd edition wavered for a while, then moved back towards classic cyberpunk while simultaneously creeping towards Stephenson and Sterling-type cyberpunk. SR4 seems to be moving pretty strongly away from classic cyberpunk, and towards the new cyberpunk.

Well, it might also be wise to consider that the perspective of the population was when Gibson was writing his books and when Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun were being developed, and also consider that the fact that Fanpro Germany has any role in the development process along with a sea-change of perspectives in the authorship of Shadowrun books would inevitably lead to a conclusion that the thematic elements and tone of the setting will change as they stories change. To make a not-so-distant leap, it's like how Transformers is now written by people who watched the she as kids in the 80s. There were major socioeconomic themes evident in that cyberpunk which is evident in SR1 and parts of SR2, but which declined steeply with the release of the Germany SB and effectively died with Nigel Findley's passing and Dowd's moving on to Microsoft; and these are very American-centric themes at work which helped define the elements of Gibsonesque cyberpunk that aren't present elsewhere and which are so glaringly absent from books like Germany that is why some people (myself included) don't consider it cyberpunk at all (and more, frankly, cartoonish).

Consider when the sprawl trilogy was written in 1984. The United States had for several seemingly-unending years seen a simultaneous economic decline since the early 1970s, and especially made harder in the early 1980s under Reagan when the books were written combined with a massive increase in violent street crime with more advanced weaponry and fueled in much part by the increase in the drug trade which had been prior to that kept under control. The late 70s and early 80s were in effect a perfect storm of calamitous events which helped foster the overall depressing theme of cyberpunk of massive unemployment, massive amounts of violent crime, breakdown of inner cities, a right-wing sea change in the government which gave up on the War on Poverty and began cracking down on those same people with the War on Drugs, and all on top of massive inflation (a 20% interest rate on a mortgage and $2.00/gallon in 1982 dollars is a Bad Thing™). The Regan Revolution isn't just a cute term, it was a massive change in the direction of government leading to all manner of right-wing policies from deregulation to states' rights that we now take for granted but which at the time were novel and uncomfortable.

And of course this isn't even factoring in the Japanese threat (and I do use the word threat in all of its meanings. Books were written on the possiblility/inevitability of armed conflict). Japan was at the same time experiencing a prospering economy, it was buying out or buying up large parts of the western US, corps were expanding with no apparent limit in sight bringing a whole new management and organizational structure with them, and at the same time many old-fashioned and some particularly old American companies were being forced out of business by this horrible economy and/or because the Japanese were more efficient or just plain better producers.

Not to mention that the idea of extraterritoriality and massive corporate power were only beginning to be felt in the early 1980s in the US and Britain under Reagan and Thatcher combined with privatization of industries and the elimination and reduction of the scope of government oversight over economic actors. We take for granted how massive and powerful corporations in 2005 are, but in 1984 they weren't nearly as powerful and combined with deregulation and the japanese threat was the sight of Japanese corps which manifested a whole new level of market and social control encroaching onto the United States economy with freedom that had henceforth been unheard of in the United States. And while western Europe was seeing a marked increase in the power of Green parties, environmental regulations just put into place in 1972-73 were being rolled back and the environmental status of the US was falling back to where it was before the EPA was created. When Three Mile Island occurred, there was no rollback of exiting nuclear power plants. There have just not been any new plants built in the last few decades. How many people here are even old enough to remember the frequency of the term "acid rain" in the news?

At the same time, there was a technology revolution with the introduction of the personal computer into the business world in the late 1970s, which was more readily (or at least seemingly) integrated by the Japanese compared to their more conservative American counterparts (wonder why the only American mega until Novatech was into Macrotech and considered weak on the Matrix?). There were also considerable other advances in consumer electronics from the Walkman to the presence of ATMs which become more noticeable and noticeably more... Asian ... at the same time to help give off that impression of Japanese tech dominance (because it wasn't an impression, it was the truth).

Combined with that, this was when Mexican and other American illegal immigration increased tremendously during the 1980s even though the US had been attempting to curb it since the mid-1960s with worker programs, and when the Mexican border became nearly (as opposed to mostly now) militarized due to the drug trade, and when the government also instituted a War on Crime which involved longer sentences, more enforcement, and a further militarization of police with the introduction of more SWAT units following LAPD's example of using them more and more often to literally block off and raid whole neighborhoods in South Central L.A. (One particularly amusing incident involved Nancy Reagan watching this go down and even patting down suspects in her LAPD windbreaker).

On top of all of this, you had white flight and the proliferation of gated communities and de facto segregation (there was actually a tipping point of blacks when a community would then begin to experience white flight; it was ~20% of the neighborhood) which further increased the social stratification along economic and racial lines; a social trend which had no comparable equivalent anywhere else in the world. Again, people take for granted what was happening at the time with the income gap growing ever larger and the increase in the numbers of millionaires and billionaires at the expense of wage growth for an increasing number of Americans. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer (between wage stagnation and cuts in social programs) and that was novel as well.

The time in which all this happened (about 1984) was a perfect storm of all sorts of horrible shit coming together in the United States that wasn't happening anywhere else in the world when Gibson was writing his novels (Reagan and Thatcher were as far to the hard right as could be imagined at the time compared to western Europe). So, naturally with a different temporal and geographic perspective, it's natural to see a shift in the perspectives of the themes and tone of Shadowrun as a new generation of authors, including a marked increase in non-Americans (from 0 to ... more) with no actual experience leads to considerably different setting being created now than was created for release in 1989.

Hey ! has this guy found any grit yet?

I think he's probably only found it sitting next to his fried eggs.

Look up The Duke, he had True Grit!!

Har Har

Anyway, compare that situation with 1998-2000 and the tone and theme of the SR3 sourcebooks or SR4 in 2005 where the cyberpunk aspects cannot be reconciled with the fact that Neuromancer was a cultural zeitgeist for its time because it reflected many of the themes present in society. How could SR3 capture that in the late 90s (and since?)? Everything seems fine, mostly because we just got used to it, but also because most of the social shifts which occurred in the early-mid 80s have been toned down and replaced by other factors such as the collapse of the Japanese economy and the bubble bursting on their real estate (which won't be as severe here when it happens in 2006-07), the dotcom explosion and the significant improvement of the US economy combined with stupifyingly low energy and transportation costs, rapid decreases in other costs, increases in American worker productivity unmatched anywhere, commonplace technological changes and innovations, and the rise of European and Korean (mostly them now) corporations in advancing technology, most favored nation status with China and competition with India and the conflict over high-tech worker immigration and outsourcing, and the current political climate where everyday surveillance by private actors is ubiquitous and by government is being accepted as the cost of doing business while corporations remain large and relatively uninteresting to the average person while the left-wingers are virtually eliminated from public discourse and scattered to the wind amongst innumerable pet causes. If Neuromancer was released today, no one would care. That's what made it so influential for it's time, and instead of remaining in that perpetual state Shadowrun has moved on in its cyberpunk motif to attempt to reflect the cultural zeitgeist of 2005 rather than remaining stuck in 1984/1989, and in doing so minimizes or omits many of the very aspects of cyberpunk which were crucial in setting the tone in prior editions for, for lack of a better word, complacent shadows.

Cool posts, SL James. to you.

As for grit... Puyallup is still an ash-covered urban wasteland, isn't it? The corps are still bastards, the sprawl still terminal to your health and pollution still substitutes for weather. I've never noticed any change in those areas.

Perhaps a change in perspective though, less tough Seattle streets and more faraway wilderness. Not a bad thing by any means, but I guess I'd like some more focus on the ol' Seattle, since you can never have too much sprawl with its accompanying nastiness.

Nope, they're all still there. You just don't see a lot of references to that stuff anymore.

Oh, yeah. I also forgot one of the best parts of how scared and crazy people became in the early 80s: AIDS.

i think that the SR4 system will lead to a bigger feel of grit in that you can now run into people that can match you skill level for skill level without it looking like something out of dragonball z (alltho, having two highly initiated adepts going head to head may still give somewhat similar feel).

the question tho is how you define grit. to me its back to the old bogart black and whites. basicly you and your team is just doing a job. mess with the mafia or the corps or whatever and they will step on you and keep stepping until your either dead or manage to go into hiding on the other side of the planet.

rember, if the corp can trow one team of security at you, they can throw 10, 20, 50.

grit is to be small and still keep going. to be able to die at any moment and still go into the heat of battle for "the right thing". not something empiricaly right thing, but whatever will be the right thing to do for you to keep on going.

shadowrunners are like unlicenced detectives/assasins. they are expendable assets. if the players screw up, the gm should come down hard on them, just like the powers that be would do to anyone that rock the boat.

one is hired to do something thats at best illegal. if one screw up one will either end up shot or with some length of time in jail.

a runner that starts a open gun battle in the street should end up just like someone doing the same thing in GTA. the powers would just pile on more and more heavy weapons until the problem is a red spot on the ground. only this time there is no save, there is no extra lifes or quick hospital visits.

the players should feel like small fish in a big ocean, where very large predator fish is swimming around. best way to survive? dont be noticed.

That, and the television sky thing. And the culture; it has to feel fucked up and fractured. There can't just be street gangs; there has to be consumerist media slaves, massive corruption, and redundant, fanatically followed, nonsensical memes that cycle like biomass.

You mean like bellbottoms, trucker hats, logo Ts, furry boots and Farrah Fawcett/Pam Anderson? We got that.

I will confess that SR4 does not set the scene for the stratification of society that earlier books did, at least in as blatant terms. But the new "high security zones" where you have to constantly broadcast your ID via Comm are about as Ivory Tower as you can get. Heck, the gates of Heaven are now automated so you can't try to con St. Peter.

I hope Havens will help reset the stage; portraying Combat Biking as Roller Derby & Urban Brawl as the WWE, how the Middle Class is now brainwashed by their MMOs (imagine the Soap Opera MMO!), and the elite do their best to wring every dollar out of the lower classes to keep their Westwind's fully stocked with a fine chablis.

As opposed to now where Aids is up 20% in North America and some people actually get it on purpose...

Man I miss the 80's.

That just shows the change in mindset that we're all talking about, Dale. Now, people are comfortable with AIDS. It's not the bogeyman any more. People know how it works, and they've been around it for so long they just don't care the way they used to. The nation-spanning terror is gone, and that old-school 80's feeling of "oh my god what disease might be in me, dormant," is probably a lot of what fueled the VITAS stuff.

Humans are dumb. AIDS didn't wipe us out (the way everyone was spooked it would), so no one gives a damn any more.

That's one example of that shift away from the cyberpunk paranoia.

Folks, wear a rubber.

What's an MMO?

I have to agree that Shadowrun has moved away from what was called cyberpunk in the 80´s. Cudos to SLJames for the exaustive explanation as to why.

There are two examples of concepts (that I can think of at the moment) that are more frequent in the new edition, due to their relevance in current times: Loss of privacy because of technology and natural catastrophes on a global scale.

Dude... the whole "doing bad things for money" angle has totally destroyed my view of shadowrunners as righteous nonconformists in the neo-technocratic age.

I thought this had already happened.