Greets,

I was thinking about a while someone in one of the threads commented that Shadowrun is not really dark, just a bit smudgy around the edges, like all those bad 80s adventure movies rolled into one.

Well, I was thinking how can Shadowrun be made grittier. I don't see shadowrunners living in hovels, I don't see Seattle being a place of rain. I don't see NPCs just as well shoot them as help them.

So my question beyond the assenine "it's up to the GM!" how can SR be made not only darker but grittier. How can we take the happy realm of Shadowrun and turn it into a dark mysgonistic, racist world, where corp enforcers decide they don't like you and beat the living crap out of you just to show where they stand. No freedom fighters, no pretense even of ideals a world where you have to be a monster to survive.

A lot of the atmosphere is down to how the players actually want to play. No matter how gritty and dark you might want things to be it's no good if the party decide they're going to hide themselves inside a giant pink cake and have themselves delivered to a wetwork targets house.

Using the severe injury rules works as does making low essence impact upon a player by warping their personality.

The GM can influence this by picking themes for missions. For example to make the last run I GM'd a bit more dark I had them break into a research lab only to discover they were using Elf babies for DNA testing. Complete with creepy science lab with it's own inbuilt nanite baby blender.

- Screw over your PCs. Have the Johnson only pay half as much as promised because of some petty detail a runner failed to pay attention to.
- Have your PCs be the victims of regular burglaries if they don't pay for adequate security. It prevents squatter power-gaming too!
- Have equipment break on critical glitches. Say, for instance, a PC's TMP submachine gun comes unbolted in the middle of a firefight and disintegrates in his hands.
- Award karma for only EVIL behavior.
- Failing all that, randomly kick your players in the shins.

Mechanically, the number one item is to eliminate Edge, or reduce the refresh rate for edge significantly. Look at bumping drain values for spells to DV, instead of DV/2. Reduce armor effectiveness in reducing damage. Don't switch Physical to Stun, make Physical always physical. There are a list of grittier mechanics options in all the books.

Anything that makes it harder to do things, more likely to get hurt, and harder to recover will contribute to the mood of grittiness.

And deciding on those options is in fact up to the GM.

Retaliate against the runners. Destroy their assets, force them to change IDs frequently. Even if their rate of pay is sufficient to supercompensate the losses, they will feel that they have to fight for everything they own.

But by all means, don´t force that upon the players if they don´t like it.

I simply point out what their contacts have to do to survive and therefore by extension what they have to do. For example a 'retired fixer' contact in the barrens geeked a breeder chiphead for disrespecting his turf, simply because not to would make him look weak.
All the characters have lived in poverty at some point and know all to well the hell hole they dragged themselves out of will reclaim them if the cred stops flowing, the barrens re-illustrated to them every time they enter for gear or paydata.
Dystopian reality that drags down those with ideals to the most primative necessities and amoral imperatives.

As to grit, you don't necessarily have the game more mechanically challenging, or punishing to those players who are playing a character who should know about security (read: any professional Shadowrunner) who are not themselves conscientious of such things.

Even relatively little things can make things dark. Just have the local gangers beating up on some kid on the street, really going to town on him. These are the gangers the character pays for protection, and if they intervene, they just hosed themselves and their possessions. Either way, they're paying money to thugs who sometimes hurt undeserving people for giggles. Don't let them forget that.

A lot of 'darkness', like the example above, can be atmospheric. The used-looking junkies on the asphalt, the ghettos, the sense of futility, the people who will never go anywhere in life. Daily police reports about murder, rape and all the rest with a community that shrugs its shoulders and doesn't care so long as it doesn't happen where people with money live.

Then, as has been mentioned previously, are the runs. I ran a canned run called "Born to Die" by Aaron Pavao. There are a couple of brainwashed little kids the characters have to kill to complete their mission. Their mission is to rescue a pregnant woman whose fetus is being experimented on, but they find about twenty-nine extra women. If you were playing it dark, you could structure their confinement such that there's no way to break out all twenty-nine. So you rescue the one you're paid for, and leave the rest and their children to...whatever you can imagine.

To me, it seems to me that Shadowrun is as dark as the elements that you emphasize.

I thought critically glitching a SMG test would rather come down to shooting yourself in the foot.



Grit, not slaughterfest.





My recommendations :

First of all, don't confuse gritty and dark.
The SR background in itself isn't dark.
In fact, much of it is cheerfully bubblegum coloured, even if it's completely messed up, cruel and insurvivable.
Take the whole cyberzombie stuff- creepy as hell, even with deep implications regarding human identity, self-perception and the whole meaning of life stuff if you want it to, but at the same time, it comes with a nice side dish of science fantasy kitsch rooted deeply in classic pulp culture.

SR is the gonzo game.
Not as much as RIFTS, but for successfull mainstream RPGs, it's as gonzo as it gets.


But is it gritty?
In the sense that it's a harsh world that doesn't give a fuck about Joe Blow on the streets?
Where incredibly powerful entities do incredibly evil things and no one can do a damn about it, and even if someone could, wouldn't do so because he wouldn't even bother?
A place ripe with mysery and human suffering?
Full of racial tensions, exploitation, imaginative new ways to die a slow and painful death and tons of eerie stuff lingering just out of sight of the masses?

Sure it is.


It's also a much more deadly game than, say, D&D.
The whole eggshells with hammers stuff.
No excessive hit points, no resurrections, even though there's the whole hand of god stuff around and damage can be healed insanely fast if you tale the right precautions.

Player characters tend to have a fairly good chance of survival if the players don't act too dumb, but it's not a CR-adjusted cakewalk either.


If you want to bring up grit, use settings such as Bug City, SOX, Tripolis Hot Zone, Asamando, Lagos, Belfast, PCC, Tenochtitlan, the North Sea, that toxic zone in England, glow city or whatever.
Bring in a stronger focus on the barrens, ghoul communities, genetic experimentation gone awry, hate-mongering policlubs, bunraku parlors, Tamanous, shapeshifter mutilation sex slaves, toxics, serial killer twisted adepts, jarhead kiddie brains with an identity crisis and so on.

It's mostly a matter of spotlight and focus to up the grit factor.

I disagree with most of the suggestions for simply making the game deadlier.
SR can digress into a cakewalk if you run it too easy and without considering the full impact of the rules applied against the characters, but i don't think that's your problem.

SR isn't like Cthulhu.
If your character gets wrecked (killed, crippled permanently, deprived of 500K of ressources, gets his good rep ruined forever or whatnot), you'll end up with hours of character creation.
If that happens every other game session, it gets tiresome.

If you want PCs that can die at any moment, play CP2020.
Better to have chargen that is done rather quick if you want that kind of game.

The "unfairness" of rolling up a character instead of tweaking around for a couple of hours helps, too.

SR basically always was the game for your own hyperawesome custom super(anti)hero fantasy.
That's countergritty on a very basic level.

SR is, on a very fundamental, non-fluffy, systemic level, more for said superheroes overcoming the grit than people who are going to take a hearty bite out of the shitsandwich they call their world.

Grit in SR is basically a way to make your character appear more awesome and to show that there are people who are much, much worse than him.

D&D = heroic
SR = antiheroic
Rolemaster, Runequest = gritty
CoC, CP2020 = victimizing

In my experience, there's really three things that you can do to make your game grittier, and only one of them is mechanical.

First, frame your scenes. It seems obvious, but scene framing can really crank up whatever mood you're trying to get across to your players. Also, skip to actual scenes. Unless there's a reason for you to let the players meander to a destination, as soon as they say "I wanna go to the bar," then they're at the bar, and something should be happening. If that something is gritty, then your game is gritty.

Second, when you introduce conflict into the game, make sure that the stakes are set in a way where the PCs have to make a serious choice. If you want the game to be gritty, don't focus on whether or not they beat a particular challenge, or come out on top in any particular conflict. Instead, focus on what the repercussions of that choice are. Sure, the players may blow away the group of gangers that accosts them on the street, but the consequences of that action might be that the gang's going to come after them, and you can bet that there are more gangers than the team has full clips.

The last one kind of ties into the first, but I found it useful to make the players state their intent on every roll - that is, I let them tell me what happened if they succeeded. The flip side to that is that you have the opportunity to tell them before they roll what happens if they fail. The reason for this is that they can choose to not roll - basically voluntarily failing at a task without suffering the consequences you informed them of. Say you've got a character running from an LS rotodrone across some rooftops, and he comes to a wide gap. He says he wants to jump across, and you tell him that if he fails, he's going to fall and break a leg. He then has the opportunity to make the jump and escape, miss the jump and break his leg, or not jump at all and risk getting arrested. The really important thing to do if you use a technique like this is to keep piling on consequences for failed rolls. Sure, it's going to take your game in weird directions, but it also makes every roll a difficult choice for the PC to make, which in turn gritties up your game.

Of course, these are just the things that worked for me, and the campaign I ended last weekend was pretty non-standard for Shadowrun.

As I said before, grittiness is slaughtering a cave full of kobolds and then discovering their babies.

Grittiness comes not from systematic oppression or uncomfortable lifestyles or even bad rolls. Grittiness comes from those little things that let the PCs know that what they're doing hurts real people.

You want an idea of real grittiness, I suggest watching Generation Kill and Over There. Both are good and show just how fucked up things can get even with the best of intentions due to human fallibility.

When the PCs start checking dead guards, have them discover things like crayon drawings proclaiming the slain individual to be the world's greatest [parent of the appropriate gender]. Guys who look like corporate strike teams from a distance are really just juvenile camel herders. Stuff like that.

From an old thread:

As people have mentioned the basic SR setting is "grittier" than most people play it.

But that said one of the things I liked about SR is that it makes sense. There are games like CP2020 where the corps are getting silly. Like they want to destroy old art, because, well, that's a bad thing to do. It gets to the point of straining suspension of disbelief and goes against the SR trend of being smarter than other games. The dragons don't just wait in their dens to get ganked or pointlessly try to work out evil schemes. No they go on cable TV and then run for president.

I'd say if you really want to get down and extra dirty just change the setting. Instead of the reasonably stable Seattle send them off to South Africa or one of the warring Chinese provences. Or anyplace where some African style genocide is ongoing.

I mean as you read this some woman in Darfur is probably being raped next to the body of her dead child. You don't have to go far to find all the grit you want. Doesn't have to be Africa either, the Japanese were known for gutting Chinese women they gang raped back in WWII and leaving them to bleed out in the street. Now that they're a powerhouse and still as racist as every that could be going on again where they're expanding.

I don't know how Seattle was in New Seattle or Runners Havens but Seattle in the ancient 1e Seattle Source book was not a nice place. You had the dump of the barrens that the cops wont even go out to without riot gear and the pollution giving you acid rain to ruin your armored jacket and red smog days where you need to go outside with a respirator. Putting things like that in your setting will add more grit than any rules could hope to achieve.

Dont forget rats. Have the PCs follow the sound of a crying baby only to find it being eaten alive next to the remains of its mother who ODed/killed in a driveby/tried to give her 12 gauge a bj...etc.

Have a jumper land on the hood of their car while driving in broad daylight in the posh area of town or have someone step infront of them while their driving to the meet with the J.

suicide is grit

BTL is a canon shadowrun "substance" to be abused.

It's one of the most disturbing drugs. Heavy users are so distanced from reality, they might defecate on themselves, they might idly scratch at their arm due to a damaged sensory response, and walk down the street bleeding profusely. You see the tell-tale twitching and glaze-eyed stares from the joytoys, the amerind in the alley punching a wall in a BTL induced hot rage, the child, barely 13 years old, sitting on the doorstep of a long closed down store, not playing with the collect-a-idoru game on his commlink, but lying there zonked out on a hot sim.

And if this drug abuse doesn't effect them, if it's too outside their personal sphere, then have it encroach on their life. They notice the tell-tale signs in their favourite contact. It gets worse. If the runner doesn't do anything, maybe the contact accidentally slots a black death sim and they find him rotting away in his place of business when he doesn't return your their calls. And don't forget family members.

Also, play up the cybered society angle. You basically need to invest in cyber to get anywhere. Shadowrunners are the first example. Ever wonder why Shadowrunners have low lifestyles, but 200,000:nuyen: in ware in their bodies? Because they want to keep that edge. The sarariman wants that encephalon, math spu or cerebral booster to get an edge over his contemporaries. Bodyguards, security guards and bouncers need to get wired, the body builder needs some synthetic muscle enhancements and billy gets laughed at at school for his thick glasses, because mummy and daddy can't afford cyber-eyes for him. And once they get cybered, does it make them feel better? Does it make them feel adequate? Does it stop them needing, or thinking they need more enhancement? So many people feel the need to be special, to be better than their peers. When a few grand can buy that "better", how far do you go?

And don't forget, cyber does things to you. Essence is not just a decimal system to stop you filling up on ware. Every bit of cyber you put into your body, you feel less whole. You can see, but those cams don't feel like your eyes. Read/Re-read the intro to the cybertech section of Augmentation. Find the now ancient Cybertechnology and read up on the life and times of Hatchetman. Sure, he's a cyber-zombie, but he recounts his first mods. He talks about how his cyber-eyes made him feel. He talks about how jumpy he became after getting wired.

Cyberware has proliferated throughout Sixth World culture. But it doesn't make people happy. The bouncer that got wired? Why did he do it? For piece of mind? Maybe. Did he get it? Hell no. Now he's even jumpier than before. He twitches everytime there's a sudden movement in the line. Eventually he loses his job because he accidentally slit open a club-goer with an innocent case of ADHD with his spur. Maybe he becomes a shadowrunner. Maybe you meet him.

Shadowrun is supposed to be dystopic. And if your characters are playing it as if they're living in a rainbow gumdrop, then (and this sounds rather bitter) punish them. If they want their character to be happy, to be successful, then they're going to have to work their arses off. Through the blood and the grime.

Blade's guide to grit (short version):

* Environment: Pollution is everywhere. Corporations can do nearly everything they want, and those who are against are labeled as eco-terrorist. Even when there are no coulds, the sky isn't exactly blue but blue-grayish, there's no "air quality" rating but a "pollution" rating corresponding to the required respirator's rating. Don't hesitate to have your PC fall ill because of the pollution (for example after swimming in a river or in the sea outside of regulated areas, or after spending a whole day out without a respirator). In the Barrens there's no garbage collectors, garbage piles up where the wind takes it, attracting flies and rodents... And you don't want to be anywhere near these when it rains.

* Quality of Life: Even with a "middle" lifestyle, a character won't eat natural products regularly and will rarely eat real meat. With a low lifestyle, you get power failures, your tap water (when you actually get it running) is sometimes muddy and toxic. If you don't have security devices, you're likely to find squatters in your place. In secure neighborhoods you need to get past checkpoints to get to your home. Middle lifestyle aren't very common: you're either a have (high or luxury lifestyle) or a have not (street to low lifestyle).

* Society: Traditional values don't have much support anymore. People have lost their bearings and turn to corporations in hope of structure and values. They live under a permanent stress they can only escape through consumption, drugs or simsense. SINless people are criminals just because they live, and for most of them the law is just the local rules. Rich people are above the law. They can get away with nearly anything (as long as nobody important is affected).

* Magic: Magic is often seen as the light of hope, except for some bad inhuman things, which is too "black and white" to me. That's why there are a few things I like to keep in mind. For example, magic is linked to nature, but the sixth world's civilization is often incompatible with nature. That's what led to the totalitarist green dictatorship in Siberia which isn't exactly a nice situation. Keep in mind also that Magic is primarily used by corporations, which means that it will be used for profit rather than for "greater good"... no wonder that the most common spells are combat or mind manipulation spells. Finally I really like to consider that the need for karma of awakened character is an in-game mechanism to represent the awakened's thirst for power.

* A runner's life: don't forget that Shadowrunners are criminal. They aren't hired for the greater good, they kill (and don't tell me you don't kill people with Gel rounds, even a punch can be fatal. Gel rounds are just "less than lethal" ammunitions.). And if you want to make the world a better place, why are you a barely human killing machine? So you rescued these children from a horrible corporate experimentation... what now? How can you help them live a happy life? You are quicker than anyone, you can summon powerful creatures, but what can you do to really help these children?

A long time ago, a question was posed on the ShadowRN mailing list about what the Seattle Barrens was like, much like Blade already did, many people came up with really immersive and comprehensive answers. I decided to keep a few of those answers here, and I think they might help anyone interject a little detail and grit into their game as it did with mine.

By the way, Blade, that's a great graphic novel you have there, and I don't say that very quickly. I hope you'll get to it again sometime soon.

Thanks! I've actually resumed my work on it this week and I hope I'll be able to publish a graphic introduction to Shadowrun soon (in a month or so).

It's the same in 2070 (4th ed.) as it was in 2050 (1st. ed.). Just the famous faces and power players have changed.

Awesome. Keep us updated on the progress, if you can. Looking forward. The concept of a webcomic intrigues me, but the results are so incredibly mediocre. The only thing I liked, before bumping into yours, was NYC 2123.

"Grit" can mean a lot of things, and everyone's measure of gritty is going to be a bit different. (Duh)

I think that the best way to run a gritty campaign is going to be one in which the moral ambiguities of shadowrunning are played up. This is going to require cooperation between the PCs and the GM - because a campaign that is heavy on the girt is going to be tantamount to running in a futuristic film noire. The feeling is going to pervade everything. The common man leads a hopeless existence at the behest of huge, faceless megacorporations that count him as little more than an (very small) asset. Everyone is on the take, everyone is fallible and you can't trust anyone for too long. Betrayals are common place and there is no honor among thieves. Or Shadowrunners. Or Corps.

Beyond enforcing existing rules (be they common rules or optional rules) and making Mr. Johnson screw the players, there will have to be a degree of common belief in this world of drek. Everyone will have to be on the same page, and it's not going to be easy. Too often, games can degenerate into simplistic "roll to hit" scenarios where the PCs triumphantly smash all obstacles and run away. It can't be that easy. Every action has a consequence, though some will be more obvious than others.

Ultimately, everyone (the players) will have to care about the world, and the impact they (their characters) are making in it.

My group has made wound penalties increase the threshold by the usual modifier because removing 3 whole dice from being almost dead for a 12+ dice pool specialist is, well...a frickin' joke. It worked great in older editions were you might have rolled 5-7 dice w/o Combat Pool, but it's not so hot for the current set-up.

Another interesting one is to use a single wound track. Rather than the two tracks, just add the 1/2 stat bonuses from Body and Will to the base 8 boxes. Extend the modifiers to the -4 or maybe -5 and go from there. Stun damage is marked with a "/" in a box and generally heals first. Physical damage is marked with a "X" and is healed normally via time, first aid, and/or magic. This reflects reality a bit more where getting socked in the head and being shot makes emergency treatment, and continuing to fight, a bit harder to do.
I'm warning you now that this is quite a bit harsher, especially when combined with the optional rule above, but really makes your players think twice (or three times) before they decide to just take the lovin' because they have good soak scores for damage and/or casting.

I'm not entirely sure the OP was asking for house rules to make the game deadlier or more difficult. I think this was a question of flavour.

I wanted flavour, ways to make the game grittier. But how not to over do it. Tenth strung out hooker on the street starts becoming numbing.

Shadowrun is a setting of extremes already. I'm frankly at a loss as to how it could be made more grim 'n gritty...

Take a look in the newspaper and see what's going on in the world. Take the concept, make it doubly intense, and introduce that. What you and I think may be gritty are probably two different things. I already live in a proto-Sprawl so grit is an everyday reality for me.

Well, that's part of the grit as well, IMO. When the players are so jaded that drug dealers using a small gang of orc kids as mules and burnt out 14-year-old hookers are normal, then I say that you've hit "Shadowrun" just fine.

"Oh, the (meta)Humanity!"

Agreed. Just read reports from South Africa and Darfur for one week, do a bit of research on the civil war in Liberia, Kongo and spice that with a book about Ruanda and you'll get many ideas how to make your SR more gritty.

That's Congo and Rwanda.

Also, if the barrens are anything like Congo, there's going to be a lot of sex, and not a lot of protection going on. A travel piece I read mentioned that people seem to fuck a lot in the Congo, because life is cheap and you never know when you're going to die.

It also included a story about when the tourist witnessed a group of boys from a town beat an outcast pygmy boy within an inch of his life and then lynch him. The pygmy boy was outcast from his tribe because mental retardation and deformity is viewed badly in their society, and the villages won't take him in, so he lives off the garbage outside their villages. He approached the journalist and a german tourist he was sitting with and dropped a huge branch on his head. When the german woke up, he had no idea what had happened, and there was a boy swinging from a tree, slowly dying.

If you wonder why a travel guide would talk about the Congo, it was the Vice guide to travel, and they covered a whole lot of lovely spots such as Chernobyl, Russia and Sofia, Bulgaria, not to mention a particular market in the middle east that makes a thousand firearms a day, where a journalist once bought a nuclear warhead, just to prove that he could. Journalists are not allowed there any more.

The sixth world isn't that fucked up.

That looks (aside from the nukes) pretty much like the Barrens (Redmond in particular) in my games. Perhaps a tad worse than that actually. Sure the volume of firearms traffic isn't nearly that high and the quality of said arms are low, but pretty much spot on.

Add in 3.5 tons of pollution and garbage per square foot, lots of race based violence, sex on demand (in one way or another), and the absolute impossibility of the majority of the residents ever knowing anything better (or living to see their 30th birthday in many cases), and there ya go.

That's not even touching the paranormal threats - ghouls, devil rats, para-mutt packs of all flavors, the occasional Infected, and worst of all toxic magicians that prey on their fellow Barrens dwellers. Cause really, coming up in that environment, the majority of Barrens magicians would eventually become some flavor of toxic IMO.

And the C and D zones aren't much better (think Robocop).

So, not that fucked up? Nah - it's plenty worse.

Sorry, used the german names for it.

You know that if it really was THAT bad then there would be riots and the Megas would have to do SOMETHING otherwise the government would step in and they would increase their power base and that would spell the doom of the Megas. Face it, Shadowrun is bad, but nowhere as bad as everybody here is portraying because humans can only take so much before they will become uncontrolled. That would decrease the profit margin for the Megas as they need people to BUY stuff to make money. No money, no profit... no Megas! Totally unacceptable to them.

Places like Congo and Rwanda IRL don't do this because they don't have the weapons and equipment to do so.

Well, first off, no one cares about the Barrens areas so long as they're contained - this is a long understood part of SR. Further, people in such hellholes are uncontrolled - no rules or restrictions beyond what Darwin and the gangs make, no niceties, and no hope. Morality is so much a thing of the past that most Barrens folk wouldn't know what the word means. Sure, they can riot and likely do all they want, but all the rest of the world sees is street scum looting and burning buildings, and the "heroic" Lone Star officers putting them down - and that's only if the rioting fringes on better districts of town. The majority of wage slaves are simply too wrapped up in their own cozy lives to care about street scum.

As for the government stepping in - why? The megas essentially control the governments through financial means and the megas don't care about Barrens folk because Barrens folk don't have money and don't hurt business so long as they are contained. Barrens folk are SINless - in the government's eyes they don't exist. So why waste resources trying (and failing) to improve the lot of people that can't even vote in order to help you get elected? "Uptown" folk aren't going to riot and risk loosing everything they have over nameless street trash. It's just that simple.



The US, Britain, and plenty of other countries do. Why then are they not involved, "cleaning up" the Congo, Rwanda, Darfur, etc etc etc? The reason they don't is the same reason the megas and governments don't make things better in the Barrens - because those areas are out of sight, out of mind so to speak, and no one with the capability to cares enough to do anything.

The barrens are uncontrolled. Why do you think the cops don't go there? They fence it off and point big guns at it in case of any signs of trouble. It's mentioned in LA. The higher rated californian areas bordering the barrens put up big walls and put automated guns on top.

But when you haven't eaten in three days, you live in a pile of garbage and a devil rat has left a big infected hole in your leg, you're not going to be starting war with the powers. You're frantic, animalistic. If you've got a gun you use it on your fellow man, not the untouchables up in the crystal castles that you've never even seen.

On the other hand, the barrens make a great place to recruit tough, violent mooks and even runners. It's a darwinistic breeding ground for killers and revolutionaries alike. And growing up there makes a great background for an anti-establishment runner.

Having to struggle for your survival actually decreases the chance of revolution to occur, as people are too busy ensuring that they stay alive to do something to change their situation.




Places like Congo, Rwanda and most of the rest of western Africa work like this because maintaining a constant state of low-intensity warfare is the base of operations for the local powers-that-be.
The warlords can use it to exploit natural ressources they otherwise wouldn't have access to, the government of the day profits from it because it is an excuse to stay in power (as long as the civil war is going on, elections will be postponed) and are otherwise no different than the warlords, the arms dealers can ship in steady supplies in exchange for the ressources.
Everybody in power profits from it.
Most people who have anything to offer to the local rulers look for a way to get their slice of the cake- by joining the army or one of the rebel groups or by working for the government to get rich on bribes.
No one who could do something about it is interested in ending the civil wars, building up a functional government or stop selling out the natural ressources there.

Many of those places have in common that there was never a stable, institutionalized government to begin with, power instead relying on patrimonial or charismatic rule.
This leads to the fact that it is very easy to destabilize the political system, decreasing the cost of warfare.
Other key factors in the establishment of economies of civil war are a high percentage of uneducated young men (as this also decreases costs for the warlords, giving them a steady base of recruiting cheap personell for their armies), the opportunity to make money in ways that are more easy to pull off if central authority has collapsed (such as kidnapping industry, stealing of ressources, narcotics production, slave trade and so on) and easy access to military weapons, private military companies and the like.

If the possible gains of starting a civil war outweigh the potential cost of doing so, outbreak of a civil war economy is extremely likely.
As long as the ratio between costs and gains stays the same, those profiting from the situation will do anything to keep the war going.

Note that this is a qualitatively fundamentally different type of warfare than traditional military engagement.
War is, in western Africa as well as in central-American narco states, Afghanistan and presumably Iraq as soon as America retreats, no longer a means to a political end in a clausewitzian sense, where achievement of the political goal that was the reason for the war will result in an end of combat.
It is an end in itself, the desired status quo the warlords base their power and economic success on.

In some cases, the government will even supply weapons to their opposition if they cannot continue fighting on their own, as was the case in Angola some years ago.

Don't forget drugs. It's harder to revolt when you're stoned.
In 2005 we had some quite big riots in France (in Paris' suburbs mostly). I still don't know for sure what were the reasons behind it. Sure, the context was (and still is) obviously there and the triggering events are clearly identified, but I'm not sure if that was enough to start this. I've read an article that said that a drug shipment had been seized which led to a shortage in drug supply, which helped trigger these riots. I don't know if that's true, but that makes sense to me.

Basically: have them do dirty jobs. Like, really dirty. Bodyguarding a corp fatcat on a trip to Pnom Pen (sic) where he indulges in sex with 3 year olds (which the runners have to supply him with and dispose of so that his habit remains secret), or have them guard a truckload of future forced prostitutes on their route from the Balkans to Japan. Have the Runners be the bad guys, and do bad guy things. Desintegrate any sense of heroism they have, have them make difficult and even revolting choices to pay their rent. And don't let that happen inf araway hellholes. make sure that's connected to the place they call home.

In my experience, this makes the world much darker than any descriptions of how everything sucks around them, or raping characters, stats/itemswise.

However, you have to clear this with your players. More than one player I know would be offended if his GM would make him essentially participate in child abuse, or any other rather revolting activity (of which there's more than enough in the setting).

I am going to tell a story about an adventure years ago. The story goes there was a group of American mercenaries working for a private contractor. That contractor had been hired to run a shipment of weapons to Sierra Leone to certain groups interested in maintaining the well being of the mines there. They leave the United States on a container ship with the weapons flying under a Panamanian flag and transport themselves in the mid-Atlantic to a North Korean cargo ship flying under Ivory Coast colors. The old Liberty Ship was also transporting North Korean women to their destination.

Now the mercenaries in their still fresh urban camo and interceptor armor are in a bit of a quandary. Accepting the status quo would mean losing their morals seeing that the women maltrutioned as they are would be sold for six months of fun and games, however if they decide to rebel then they would be on a leaky ship in the Mid-Atlantic without a job. So they had to accept the status quo. Most did not want a second mission like that. They want easy solutions and good endings.


I guess for me Shadowrun would be run as a dirty nasty place, where walls separate the rich underclass from a very large minority who live on the garbage of the upper class. Workers maintain this status quo, doing the drudge work of top management. If you are a troll, dwarf or ork, the highest they can get is clean out the bathroom of executive suite, and if someone happens to lynch a troll well it wasn't a man was it?

The underclass keep on foraging where they do not belong, coming up through the sewers. People go out and buy guns to protect themselves. the situation is tense the government or what's left of it is run by the generals and the presidency is a door prize given out by the corporate court. America actively pretends to be a world power, but these enclaves of corporations are slipping away, stripping away every resource back to Europe where the real people live.

Magic has come back and so has the church. End of Days is what the church is whsipering and the street preachers are proclaiming. Magicians are killed for showing their powers and are considered a disease. The media portrays them as ticking suicide bombers holding their fingers on the trigger.

Shadowrunners are just in it for themselves. A simple and direct access to any resources they might want without having to fight years for that magical pension. They want the fast cars and loose women and their 15 minutes on the trid.

This is what I would consider a gritty Shadowrun, but its not Shadowrun and is probably unplayable.

Neat. I like to throw in such twists too, every once in a while. Propably, Johnson doesn't even know that the ship would be transpotring future sex slaves, too ; that's what the captain does on the side. And J had to find someone willing to engage the pirate-infested gold coast, AND willing to work with mercenaries onboard, to boot ... so he propably couldn't afford to be picky. The captain and his crew, however, are the ruinners only ticket to getting off that boat. So they cannot do anything about that really.

Not every run of mine would include this, as I find it would make the players too used to such surprises ...

I have once run an adventure where the PCs were to keep a man's house safe from intruders. He expected an attack. The atack, of course, was about the three girls he kept in his cellar for fun and games, and the opposing team was essentially a hooding party out to save children from a molester. of course, the group's leader had his Knights of the Red Branch membership invoked to make sure the team stays on track - the molester just happened to be a major contributer to the cause and of great importance for an ongoing operation, and the Knights wanted him to be kept happy.

Personally, I tend to see SR nations like the UCAS as somewhat like Yeltzin-era Russia or present-day South africa. Slowly rusting and failing states that once were great, that haven't yet understood their time is over, and are rotting from within as well as crumbling on the outside.

I see the world pretty much like you do, though I also don't fashion the entire world like that - there're nice spots there, too. They're just out of reach for Runners, most of the time. And even relatively nice places have their nasty underbellies (you know, like it's IRL).

I wouldn't really think it's unplayable, though.

Smart countries realise that there is no such "nation" as Congo, Rwanda or Darfur. These are colonial organisations that have been forced onto their modern residents with no independant foreign oversight. These residents do not like each other, and they're not like you or I. Get these facts (dutifully emphasized) straight in your mind and you might start to understand why Africa is a shithole. They don't want peace because the tribe next door is summoning spirits to make their women barren, so they're going to kill the fuckers.

The best thing that we could do for Africa is permit it to reorganise its political boundaries along tribal demographic lines. Unfortunately, the UN is too used to static situations for this to be allowed to occur. The next best thing we could do is to leave Africa the hell alone and wait for it to reorganise its tribal demographics along political boundary lines.


This is one of the lies that wannabe revolutionaries tell themselves. That the reason that revolutions don't occur is that people are too poor, too starving. The serfs of Russia were well fed, well educated and practically Middle Class, right?

The real problem is organisation; most of these countries aren't organised on large enough scales to produce a viable rebelion, or else there's some other conflict that is positioned to oppose any rebelion that forms. Y'know, like the long and slow bush war between the Hutu and the Tutsi that nobody is going to be able to stop without putting someone like Saddam Hussein (a man authoritarian enough to force everyone to play nice, at gun point) in charge.

A popular leader could lead still a rebelion successfully in these circumstances, but the concept of the nation is not strong in the minds of the residents in the country and the tribal affiliation of the rebel leader would offend other tribes into rebelling against their rule.


You're taking the wrong drugs.


The Barrens is not Africa and will not be like Africa. People in the Barren do not consider themselves according to tribal afilliations, for a start. The guys in the other gang are at least fellow UCASians, or fellow NANers, or whatever. This goes a long way to avoiding the worst bits of Africa, since using every weapon in your arsenal is no longer on the table. A minimum of dignity and respect is granted to the other people. You don't rape them, for a start.

Sure, they might shiv you with a dirty knife. They're going to grant you as clean a death as they can, though. It's their own little bit of honour; no undue suffering for my fellow man.

Yeltsin-era Russia was quite safe. I remember the stripping of resources. I also remember when things got bad certain commanders took an overt interest in the running of cities. Russia was quite safe, overall, like any place you have to know where you can go and with whom, and who to avoid. Back then the police were safe if underpayed so you had to keep some money on you just in case you got into trouble. Nowdays alot of the police force are returning Russian soldiers from Chechnya they will as soon as kill you as help you.

However I do see the UCAS as being more like Zimbabwe, it is a world after the apocalypse, but no-one dropped the bomb, no virus came to kill each other, just your neighbors. The government is a rusting solid system, the question is how to steal the most from it. It is a failed nation-state. Rampant inflation means that the almighty million dollar bill is worthless so you trade in the euro for your hard sells. Luxury items such as new home electronics and kitchen equipment the prices are in euros.

Wireless Matrix is available in Europe, in some parts of Seattle but for there to be a wireless matrix you need to have electricity, working infra, and disposable income in the hundreds of euros. Most people can't afford to eat let alone pay for wireless subscriptions to services they will never see.

I mean Europe is a different story, sure Marseille is a dangerous place, but you don't have your population dying of starvation. The trains still run on time in Europe and you can still live your life there without ever seeing someone shot. The EEC has made Europe into a fortress nation, it is that one bit of civilisation in a morass of cockroaches eagerly flushing themselves down the toilet bowl.

William Gibson has used a good adjective in the last few books he's written:

"Blade Runnered"

Okay, I forgot you were a CP2020 player at heart. Then we differ quite a bit. My UCAS isn't quite Simbabwe (for one, it lacks Simbabwe's idiot dictator and underlcass racism that's killed the only economy they got). It's still got something resembling infrastructure, and no overly noticable famines (those still are primarily an african phenomenon).

As for the safety - that's the South Africa part.

Does it show that badly. Or was it the EEC comment? Still I would then add into the mix local contractors which are trying to keep the whole rotting fruit together long enough that anything valuable can be stolen.

It was the famine.

No offense intended, though; I own most CP2020 books myself and borrow stuff from them from time to time, mostly from chromebooks.

I'd actually love the NEEC becoming what the EEC was in CP2020.

That was in CP2020's basic book but was retconned in Home of the Brave.

Well spotted

Interesting. I know that France's government had hoped to institute industrial relations reform around that time (I think), similar to what we had in Australia. Both countries had public protests against the reforms, as they were removing and reducing a lot of systems that ensured reasonable minimum wages and benefits for workers. Here in australia, the body that handled our unfair dismissal legislation was disbanded. Our non-violent protests didn't do anything, and due to a shift in the balance of power within our political system, the laws were passed. The french however, apparently set fire to cars and buildings in their protests, and the government was forced to back down on the reforms.

Perhaps this was a completely separate incident. I had never knew the french were in the business of setting fire to things. I just had a quick look and it looks like those incidents occurred in 2006.

And which of the Bolsheviks were serfs? Lenin was the son of a Russian official. Stalin was the son of a prosperous cobbler. Trotsky was the son of prosperous Jewish farmer, etc.

Revolutions are almost always led by the middle or upper classes.

These riots weren't linked to the industrial reforms. Industrial reforms would have been handled the good old way: people go on strike and the governement doesn't care much. Then the SNCF (train company) goes on strike and a lot of people can't go to work. The government accepts to negotiate with the unions, the unions get a few things, but not as much as they wanted. After a few days (or a few weeks in case of really big reforms) the unions realize that the government won't back down, and decide to stop the strike because if it stretches for too long, the worker will be very disappointed by the union's inability to get anything. So they deliver a speech stating that they got "significant progresses" and tell people to get back to work.
The only exceptions are when an election draws near, in which case the government will probably back down.

The riots were about something else. First you have suburbs where poor and unemployed people (mostly immigrants or sons of immigrants) are packed in horrible buildings with nothing to do. You also have the minister of security (now our President) who's fond of "order", and not much of immigrants, and asks the police to stop playing football with people there and to bash their head instead (he didn't say it exactly this way, but I think you get the idea). He also called the youth of these poor suburbs "scum", and said that he'll clean them out of the streets (this time literaly). Add in a few unknown elements (such as this drug shortage, and possibly some moves in the underworld) and when one day, two boys get killed by policemen, the riots started.

Even if we don't, the police nationale sure got that one right, from what I've seen a few years ago in Paris.


It was Rodney King in French, pretty much.

Whoops, I did get mixed up, but I mentioned that at the bottom. The industrial reform protests were indeed a year later. However, the protests and strikes did involve rioting and setting fire to things. (Following your link on to a list of riots, you can find them there) And therefore they weren't exactly handled in the "good old way".

Interestingly, we've had two riots here in Australia (Three, if you count the cronulla riots as two separate riots, as there were two opposing groups rioting in response to eachother). One was similar to the french riots, in that an indigenous kid was (allegedly, not that it matters in the scheme of things) chased by some police and ended up dead, and his community rioted. The other was due to racial/religious tensions (also focusing on immigrants, particularly islamic immigrants), which erupted after some (allegedly) lebanese guys beat up some surf life savers. Then there was a message proliferated via text message (and then the arguably irresponsible media) inciting a "wog and leb bashing day". Then that night the "wogs and lebs" rioted as well, vandalising properties and roughing up a few people.

The drug shortage thing honestly sounds pretty insubstantial, as Chirac's comments and the issues in the slums seemed like enough of a hot-bed for the youth deaths to catalyse a riot. That they were on edge because they couldn't get their drugs sounds a bit like propaganda and/or hearsay.