There is. But you don't have to know it to have fun. It can add depth to your game, when your players are interested in the background ... but that's something that you can build up over a few years .

Don't listen to us bastards . Play the game you like.

Not necessarily true. In fact, if you run printed adventures your group gets more karma (i.e. experience points) for doing good things. The campaign world pushes you towards self-centered greed but the game system challenges you to rise above that. The funnest games I've played in involved characters who tried to walk the line.

This also isn't necessarily a given. A lot of GMs like to have the Johnson turn on you, but it's not very realistic unless they can do it seemlessly. A Johnson that betrays his hired hands won't be a Johnson for long. All it takes is one guy to survive and post a picture on Shadowland for every runner out there to be alerted.

If you read the printed adventures most runs end without the group being turned on. Of course, outside forces are usually wanting the same thing the Johnson wants, which offers plenty of opportunities for betrayal of the Johnson by the players or by presumed friends of the players who actually work for secondary interests.

That's a good point. If you want a sense of the moral ambiguity in Shadowrun, play GTA for inspiration.

As for:

Everyone is out for themselves. True to a point. It's not so much like a DnD game where you've got a party full of Evil Aligned chars, which are pretty much out for themselves. Instead in SR hopefully your team (player group) takes on sort of a gang mentality, 'us against the world' kind of thinking. In SR I find it more important to have good player group cohesion, which means they more or less trust each other.

Society is on the Verge of Collapse: You can certainly play that aspect, but in the timeline, that seems mostly in the earlier stages. Even under the new SR4 setting where the matrix got nuked and there was some restructuring of society, its more of a 'it already fell, and we've made changes' kinda feel to it.

The players rarely get to enjoy the benefits of their missions: This can be handled by GM style as well. The loot mentality encouraged by other games can be hard to shake in SR unless you're careful to make the run-rewards worthwhile.

Mr Johnson: If you've played any sort of computer RPG, I think its fair to say any NPC that gives you the quest to do, in that sense is a Mr. Johnson. The difference is that Mr. Johnson is a generic pseudonym the quest giver in SR uses to protect his identity. He can be nice, he can be an ass, he can be more or less honest or he can be just waiting to screw you. I think its fair to say in general, he's trying to get the most work done for the least amout of cash he has to pay, so negotiation is almost a requirement

In many ways it's encouraged by this game as well. Most printed adventures have a few spots where the party (especially a decker) can walk away with more than what their job is paying them to get. Looting corpses isn't much of a payoff unless you're in a really low cash game, but looting megacorp labs can be fun and profitable.

Like a decade and a half of writings, now covering in decent detail just about every continent except Africa. Well Africa has some stuff covered, just not very well. Oh, and Shadows of South America which is written but still hasn't made it out to us yet.

Top it off with a lot of crossover information from Earthdawn that you can sort of assume is there. Earthdawn is a game that is in the same setting as Shadowrun, but occuring several thousand years before during the later parts of the last magic up-cycle.

I'm not sure how many books including novels, but a LOT. The bad news is that there only one SR4 book released so far, the introductory adventure On The Run. The good news is that the setting books (the Shadows of Xxxxx, Dragons of the 6th World, etc.) are largely version independant.

Although the magic books and the gear books on the other hand are the opposite, the SR4 magic book (Street Magic) is expected out in a month or two and the rest will eventually follow.

Basically it will support all sorts of different types of campaigns, so your group has some choices to make about what kind of characters they want to play and where in the world. They can even play anti-hero types, although you'll want to check out my sig just to give you a heads up of what the system itself seems to encourage.

There's no reason to adhere to the archetypes, actually. Character generation is quite flexible. If everyone made non archetypal characters that should be just fine.

There is a 1st or 2nd edition book called Missions with four or five different scenarios in it. I don't remember them all, but IIRC in one you work for Docwagon and in another you work for Lone Star.

Shadowrunners are basicly corporate whores with big guns. The term "Mr. Johnson" comes from the generic term for a whore's client. Like Johns who pay for sex a Mr. Johnson is just a guy who pays to have certain needs fulfilled. Like Johns Mr. Johnsons come in all flavors. Some have regular interactions with a core group of runners and become quite attached to them. Some are friendly and talk about their kids. Some beat you, cut you, sodimize you, and refuse to pay for your services in the end.

As for the Society Collapsing thing, not really. Society is degenerate in the same ways as it was before. It is a little more greedy and a little more isolated but, for the most part, everything is stable. Crash 2.0 was supposedly an Apoctolyptic event but must of the fallout was in the form of annoying buearucratic paperwork.

Hmm, that's what we need. La Traviata, Shadowrun edition. Every time your character says something you have to sing it in Italian and sound like Pavaratti or Karen Ott or Kiri Te Kanawa or someone.

Heh, sing this to the tune of the Queen of the Night's Aria from Zie Zaberflote:

There is no reason that they couldn't play more "legal" people like a News Crew or paramedic's as a different way to play.
There is a whole world, the options are limitless.

Don't ignore magic too much or it will be a big shock just how powerful it can be when you finally introduce it.