Hey guys,

Myself and a couple of friends recently started playing shadowrun amongst ourselves. None of us have really had much experience with the system or setting before this. We had a game last night and I couldn't help but notice that we weren't really using the setting to its full potential. Barring using a commlink instead of a mobile we could have been in real life today.

So how would we make the setting more "cyberpunk" or futuristic?

I admit that neither of our characters are particularly techno-savvy but still.

gridlink(autopilot) on cars.
drones.
cyberware.
exotic materials such as plasteel and ferrocrete, and monowire.

even if your characters dont make use of these things, the NPCs will.

Focus on the mega cities and the dominence of the mega corporations over everyday life. Have ther commlinks bombarded by advertisements, have convoys of corporate troops escort some big wig through their area of town. What about just making a point of mentioning how the kinds of things they do in this world are taken care of by fancy technology. Doors open automatically and greet you in a pleasant female voice,.

Become familiar with the different vehicles and drones...hell just drones themselves should give a pretty good image of how much technology has changed. They clean up garbage, hover in the air above intersections to control traffic. The gridlink is a system that monitors cars and prevents accidents as well as allowing for interesting hacking abilities,.

Some things are fairly unique to shadowrun, like drugs being replaced by sim chips that stimulate the senses in ways that make real life seem dull and lifeless.

Urban brawl, the sport of the future.

Have the players have a meeting in an arcology (a self contained city within a city.

Hovercars are almost as common as normal ones. The tint on the windows can be changed at will, and even be used as a TV while your car drives itself. You don't have to park your car, it can drop you off and find it's own way there. Call it when your done dinner. Nutri soy replaces alot of meals for poor people, let the players know how rare a good old steak is.

People in shadowrun are walking talking facebook pages, everyones pan displays common info on them and stores nearby scan your comlink to find out if they have deals that you might be interested in.

Everything can be hacked!! Get the players into the mindset of using the envirment to their advantage...Everything is a mini computer! Sunglasses, contact lenses, watches, tables, cyberware and even clothes!

Plus, ther is all that magic, most building with any kind of security will have wards on them, which show up on the astral plane. It wouldn't be uncommon to see a spirit or two shooting accross the sky on some mundane task, or a more clandestine one.

Find some viaul aids. When I thinmk of what the cities in shadowrun look like, I see new york in the movie 5th Element, or Bladerunner. Want atmosphere? Try your best to ignore the shitty acting and poor excuse for movie magic and watch Johny Mnemonic.

Strange Days is an excellent movie for the feel of a Shadowrun city as well.

Plus, everyone knows everything about you if you have a sin.

Acid Rain. And it's constantly raining. In the rare times that rain doesn't pour down on the luckless citizens of a sprawl, smog blocks out the sunlight.

Annoyingly true. SR is a bit weird in that a SIN contains basically everything about your life, and yet you're expected to broadcast your SIN freely to anyone and everyone who asks (especially in certain areas where it is actually the law).

Privacy? Is that a city in France or something?

Cool thanks for the good ideas guys. I don't think our GM got the whole futuristic feel of the setting right so I'll give him a hand. I guess I'll head down to the video store and rent out The 5th Element then .

The thing with any setting is that it requires some part on the GM/players to make it non-generic. The truth is that SR is very easy to play as 'modern day with magic and cybernetics and drones' and it does require a certain touch to give it that cyberpunk feel.

Take Ebberon for example from the other game. It is an amazing setting, but it is beyond easy to make it simply another generic D&D world because the actual rules for it aren't different (few new races/class/abilities, but not much else).

SR could easily be changed to steampunk with a few simple rules tweaks and a large dose of new descriptions. So yeah, SR, like any RPG, is what you make of it.

Hope that made some sense, way too late to be posting

Don't get the 5th Element if you want it get a feel for a more cyberpunk setting. Get The Fifth Element because it is an awesome film.

If you really want to capture a cyberpunk feel, get Blade Runner instead. SR4 isn't very cyber-punky though. So TFE might be closer to its version of the future.

Bubblegum Crisis is a pretty decent cyberpunky vibe, if you ignore the hardsuits. Since it takes its own cues from Bladerunner, it makes sense. The AD Police files stuff is pretty good as it avoids the Knight Sabers hardsuit issue, but still has a pretty dark crazy feel to it.

Except there's no reason for the pizza joint to access all that data, only think they need to know is whether you have money to pay them or not.
SIN is nothing but a reference number for databases, what you can find out by getting someones SIN depends on what databases you have access to, for the corner pizza joint that isn't gonna be many.

"Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr."

One of the interesting things about (somewhat Pink Mohawk) cyberpunk is the odd sense of freedom.

It works like this: there are thousands of laws, nobody understands them and they all contradict each other. You can't stay legit; everyone breaks the law. If the laws were really systematically enforced, society would collapse. In practice, law enforcement always has an excuse to arrest anyone they want, but they only do so if they really care.

As long as you don't piss off the Powers That Be, you can do what you like. Society consists of drop-outs just as much as it consists of boring sararimen. So fashions go wild, people carry illegal arms, illegal implants, drugs, whatever.

True. I can make the hardsuits though.


Exactly.

"This particular individual is unscannable."

I personally like the SINless in Seattle sort of low BP street-level game as an introduction to the setting.

Bunch of poor, malnourished bastards drinking rat swill in a burned out shell of what used to be a city before the corps decided that they could just curl up into a prison/commune and leave the rest of the world to starve off slow.

The cops, when they show, are all armored troops with attack drones and tactical software, giving them inhuman efficiency and coordination. Pompous jackbooted thugs who would kill you as soon as look at you.

Then you introduce the tech and the layers of future awesome as they move up a little.
Or you just roll up some higher BP characters.

Style over substance. Pink mohawk is more cyberpunk than black trenchcoat. Make sure pink mohawk 'plans' always have the right item at the right time, and black trenchcoat missions don't.

Style over substance was from the Cyberpunk 20xx game. Not really the genre. I mean, look at the most common example of Cyberpunk in film, Blade Runner. That's hardly Pink Mohawk. Then look at the most common example in literature, Neuromancer. Also not Pink Mohawk. Sure both stories have some bizarre imagery, but neither Deckard nor Case were successful by being overly flashy. I'm not really even sure where the game Cyberpunk 20xx came up with that idea. Probably because it was a product of the early/mid 80s. The same decade that brought you rock stars with teased hair and tights and told you that was acceptable for a man to dress like. Few, if any of the good cyberpunk stories are Pink Mohawk, even if they might have some striking visual elements to them. Black trenchcoat is just an evolution of the neo-noir/tech-noir style that is the classic cyberpunk setting. The "black trenchoat" style of Shadowrun was just the way the game evolved to take the core concept of Shadowrun (cyberpunk setting corporate espionage and subterfuge) and make it more believable (updating the security tech and runner tactics) and thus a bit more immersive, story wise.

Pink mohawk may be your favorite way to play Shadowrun, but it most certainly isn't "more cyberpunk" than black trenchcoat. And I know some of you will argue this to the death because you like Pink Mohawk games, but don't give the poor guy misinformation.

Technically, the Tech-Noir of Neuromancer and Bladerunner is a sub-genre of cyberpunk. Of course, the entire list of cyberpunk work is so tiny that the idea of sub-genres makes me laugh In any case, I do think you're right that "over the top" is not an integral element of cyberpunk.

Actual cyberpunk elements:

1. High Tech and Low Life
2. Post-industrial Dystopia
3. Corporate power over governments
4. The uncomfortable mesh between man and machine - often literally

Snow Crash is a good representation of Pink Mowhawk cyberpunk. I don't think any of the characters got anywhere by being subtle.

Wait you mean the guy with PIC tattooed on his forehead wasn't SUBTLE?

Oh come now. They all listen to Reason™

Don't forget when it comes to Rock-Paper-Helicopter, Skateboard always wins.

I can't think of _anything_ more Pink Mohawk than a 750mph pit bull.

Raven with his NUKE on a biomonitor trigger is pretty PM though...

On second thought nothing is more PM than a team of shadorunning neoanarchist hooders who moonlight (daylight?) as a synth band as a cover.

"Sidecar nuke" is something that would, if not in Snow Crash, be thought up and sent straight to the Pink Mohawk thread. Or the list of Things Not Allowed.

I'm new to shadowrun but what I think happened was that people misunderstood the "Punk" part of Cyberpunk since as I understand it that the punk aspect referred more to the anti-establishment part of the punk movement which in the case of cyberpunk it was rebelling against the stranded sci-fi idea of the future being bright and hopeful not the fashion or the stereotype of punkers being violent thugs. But when it came time to do the art for shadow run the artists focused on the fashion of the 80s punk movement which gave us the whole pink Mohawk thing. But in the word of Denis Miller that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Actually it was what the guys who worked in Radio Shack called the kids who came into the store to play with the TRS-80s. Punks.

The whole bit behind the early work were those kids, who knew everything there was to know about a TRS-80. The adults who worked there knew 1/10th of what those kids knew. It was a bizarre generational divide. The latest and greatest business tool and 14 year olds knew how to use it better than adults. What beautiful chaos when only the have nots know how to work the stuff only the haves can afford.

----

Imagine a guy living in bug infested pay-by-the-week hotel. Today he'd be called Autistic or OCD but back then he was just a nut. But he knows things. He knows how hardware actually works. He knows how the protocols actually work. He knows how to write a piece of software that will read all the magnetic ones and zeros on a hard disk and be able to reconstruct all the documents that you thought you had deleted because you didn't know that delete just removed an entry from the index but didn't actually overwrite all the ones and zeros.

A guy who can do that in a world of people who didn't know it could be done is worth something. Unfortunately, he's just a nut. He has problems. That's why he's living in the bug infested pay-by-the-week hotel.

----

Imagine a kid, 14, too young for a GED. Too young for a job. Divorced parents. Dad lives in his new house with his new wife. Mom lives with her boyfriend. Learns how to build mercury switches from old thermostats. Does experimental chemistry in his kitchen sink. Has an old copy of the Anarchist Cookbook and some college chemistry textbooks he bought at the used bookstore.

----

Imagine a young girl. Grew up watching her daddy repair cars. Knows everything there is to know about a car. Learned everything there was to learn about car computers and electronics as the business changed. Boys don't like it that she knows more than they do. Girls don't like her either.

----

Too many years in the sandbox. No one wants to hire a vet. The skills you need there don't mean a job here. No future, just a past.

----

And then there's the guy who pays attention. Who has a grudge. Who's burned. And who, one by one, starts noticing these people in the shadows downtown, hanging out in some cheap greasy spoon where the food is cheap and that's the only good thing about the place. Hmmm. A hacker. An explosives expert. A driver. A soldier. And all of them needing a little cash. And that's when a plan comes together.

Quoted for Truth.

My GM did something really cool to set the dystopia-mood really well. We had to make a perception test, and if you succeeded you heard a baby crying. If you decided to investigate, it was a baby in the appartment nextdoor, underneath a kitchen sink, alone. No mother around. Been there crying for hours.
It made our whole group make an O face, just for a moment.

I love this thread my game was more transhumanist rather than cyberpunk. So I plan on adding some suggestions.

no, its what they call living in a Z-zone with only a layer of soggy cardboard between you and a litter of trogs.

or have some cry for help, and if investigated, its a borderline feral ghoul trying to attract a meal.

basically, the line between what we take for granted in what was once the "free world", and the lives of some warlord run hell, should be no more then a couple of blocks.

Enforce the effects of pollution in big cities. Look up London's yellow fog or the current state of Mexico City for descriptions and coping mechinisms.

I started doing that as well as having a near-persistant toxic rain, treated as a Mild Allergy to everyone without at least a R1 chem protection on their clothes/armor. For added effect, increase the minimal Chemical Protection required to ignore the effect.

Or, of course, both.

i could see it show up on a npc, but then one would expect the players to come up with some way to hijack it fairly quickly.

Doubt it. I've had a friend with a diabetics-bracelet who got denied service because he really wanted a coke, and they didn't want to give it, why wouldn't an enstranged dystopic futre-pizzahut do that?.

I always imagined knowing someones SIN could quite litteraly give you everything there is to know about this guy, even where he is right now. Commercials specially tailored to your history. If you rent "T&A, tits and ammo" and like watching Roadhouse till 4 in the morning, a corps wouldn't want to waste precious indoctrination time, excuse me, I mean advertisment time on those 'lady scented body washes'.
I would easily use this if I worked at a pizza place. You like 5 pouds of beefed jerky this year? Try our two for one-and a half American Meat Lovers pizza, only 50% extra.

If I ran the show, everything would be customized to your needs specifically.

There are a lot of options for this in SR, having custom tailored information. It's similar to what we have already, where you have custom browsing ads based on cookies and the like. Places like Amazon 'You may also like this and this'.

But the SIN access would be dependant on the position and requirements in my mind, anyway. A pizza place will know their food allergies, their address and phone number, maybe have an option to do an automatic withdrawl from their account with a confirmation code, like we do today with credit cards. But they wouldn't need to know the guy's wife's birthday, or the fact that he goes to Yoga on the weekends or things of that nature.

However, other places, like the Internal Corporate Services can examine your SIN backwards and forwards and upside down, legally. Take a look at the short story Spew, the character examines a person's profile and finds out all sorts of details about them. It's much like working in a callcenter. Loss Prevention can look at credit checks, address history, etc, but your average sales agent doesn't know you from Adam.

Now, illegally, sure a decker could do a lot of things with someone's SIN. And if someone wanted to, they could attempt to get someone's SIN number and do things to it, but I would imagine security would be more advanced in SR as well. Rather than tell you the SIN number or the personal details, it tells you whether the information matches the account or not. Think of having a credit card without any numbers on it. You slide it through the reader, enter a code, and the merchant's terminal tells you whether it went through or not.

Anyway, as for the original topic, making things more cyberpunk can be done in a lot of ways. The big issues are usually the overwhelming access to information (anyone can suddenly look up the details on the primary food eaten in a country around the world if they wanted), the dystopia in the seperation of society in a tiered structure (and also the general distancing from each other), and also the interaction between man and machine (what do you give up to become better? Johnny 'Just Johnny' Mnemonic gave up his childhood for brain implants).

However, don't forget that cyberpunk is also about the punk culture, the underworld and rebellious attitude, the going against the 'man' and forging your own way. It's why CP2020 did so well with non-runner archetypes like newscaster, rocker and nomad in my eyes. You could play an independant journalist, out to expose the coverups for the people, you could play a musician looking for inspiration or extra money (1980's had a show called 'The Fall Guy', where Lee Majors played a stuntman who would do sidejobs as a bounty hunter), or you could play someone travelling across country, no solid home, just doing odd jobs here and there to make a living rather than give in and hold down a steady job. It's not just about being a criminal, it's about being different, rebelling in your own way to the norm and making people think. Maybe your journalist is like Dr. Jak, an in-your-face tabloid style reporter (Even would 'spin' the news, looking away from something saying 'If I didn't see it, you didn't see it'), or maybe your musician after Rickenharp in John Shirley's Freezone short story, or maybe your nomad is Kwai Chang Caine from Kung Fu: The Legend Continues wandering the earth without destination because he has nothing better to do.