I don't exactly know how it happened, but I'll be running a short game set in 2072 London. I'm reading through Conspiracy Theories and Shadows of Europe to try and get a good picture of how runners operate in the UK (6WA being the usual no help at all), but some parts of Britain's history in SR don't quite seem clear to me.

First, what exactly did the Lord Protector's Office do? I get that Lord Marchment was important and his departure left a power vacuum that the current PM isn't quite filling just yet, but I'm unsure exactly what Marchment's role was in the British government during his time. What was he doing exactly that made him so formidable and important?

Second, what is the relationship between the Lord Protector's Office and the New Druidic Movement?

Third, if Britain is still a constitutional monarchy, why do SR writers spend so much of the time focusing on how the King/Queen rules, when that should still be Parliament's/Lord Protector's/PM's job?

Considering who the authors are, I imagine it all makes sense - somewhere.

But then, it could be a case of US authors rewriting the Uk to be the US with funny [from their viewpoint] accents.

Need more members of the Commonwealth on the team, I guess.

The old London Sourcebook would be your best bet. Shadows of Europe and especially Sixth World Almanac were both written more to be update books than stand-alone setting products, in my opinion. London Sourcebook is the original that both of them built off of, and should have plenty of goodies for you. Amazon's got it used starting at less than $3, according to a quick search.

The London sourcebook for SR was/is excellent - material, feel, rules.

Although I was prepared to pay a pretty price for an official PDF [to be a more portable version of my original and old copy], I had to resort to unofficial means.

I also found the Cyberpunk 2020 Rough Guide to the UK to be pretty useful, too.

When I sober up tomorrow I'll try to remember to break out my copy of the London sourcebook.

Since the title goes back to the Cromwellian Dictatorship I assume it is something along those lines of combining PM, Home Secretary and potentially the star court.

To sum it up, think of a Edgar J. Hoover-type career, with more power at the beginning and even more as time passed.

Beat me to the punch. Damn you sobriety!

Eh, there's some mixed opinion on the old London sourcebook. Some like yourself really liked it, personally I think it was more of a mixed bag with some good parts but with a lot of bits that were a bit rubbish. I just found it a bit too hackneyed - yes Shadowrun is set in the 80s to the n-th degree, but there are limits - with lazy 80s cliches turned up to 11 in parts and relying more on rule of cool than logic, not surprising since the authors also gace us the Tir Na nOg sourcebook which is even worse in that offence but that's my own personal opinion. Synner was able to clean things up a bit in Shadows of Europe but he had to start from using the London sourcebook as a baseline.



Pah! Sobriety is highly overrated. Although that could just be the alcohol talking.

It's probably fair to say the London Sourcebook was good in spite of its authors, rather than because of them. A London Sourcebook was bound to be cool, they just...gave us the very least one might expect of it. They had rather a habit of that.

To clarify...
The rules part was good, to have some setting material for a different Cyberpunk, which pretty much had to be full of stereotypes considering it's aimed at a whole lot of people who don't know anything about the UK - and only have bad tv stereotypes to work with.

Cyberpunk is about cool, rather than just about doing things - so that's not too much of a problem.
Much SR is cool, rather than sense - it's just what it is.

For me, part of the excellent-ness of the rulebook was the whole inclusion of adverts and those full colour pages.
They might look crap now - but this was nearly 20 years ago, and they really added to the sense of it being a guidebook, of the cyberpunk UK atmosphere.


I always feel that it's such a shame that fans don't put together more homegrown sourcebooks, wiki-style.
The material's there, but few people ever contribute. Or they contribute on their own, but actively ignore any attempts to put together such documents as a group.

I don't know how to use a wiki but *cough*; *cough*; yeah I agree.... (Sorry couldn't resist!)

This sense of the document being an actual feed from the setting is something that's been almost entirely given up by Shadowrun, although some lip service is played to it. As you say, while the ads and other flavor from earlier books might look hokey or amateurish, particularly looking back now, they made Shadowrun [and Earthdawn] real in a way that the latest books simply don't do for me. But it's also hard to separate the effect of that from the, "This new music just ain't as good as AC/DC!" effect of just becoming an old man.


It's a source of continuing disappointment and surprise for me that there's not more fan-created material. If you can get 40 pages of obscure rules argument, surely you'd think you could put together a couple dozen new vehicles. If we can post a hundred Shadowrun-sounding songs or a thousand Shadowrun-looking images, surely we could record a single song, or draw a single picture. To be honest, I think a lot of it's about the shift to freelancers rather than staff writers: if you're motivated enough to produce content, you can do it for [theoretically] pay, now. Several of the gear PDFs are of fan-produced quality, but the authors got paid for it; why would anyone with the motivation to do the work properly do it for free?

As a note on my own question, I believe I have largely solved my initial confusion, thanks in large part to Nath and my own re-reading of things (sobriety does help sometimes )

For my part, I have ordered a copy of the London sourcebook off of Amazon and will see how much use it is in planning my game.
Thanks again, Dumpshock!