I'd rather not have it be dystopic. I like how it's heading currently - sure, you've got megacorporations, but I liked the fact that there is hope in the setting, and things seem to be improving slowly, with significant setbacks here and there. Having the world just evolving in a more or less natural way is nice.

100 years in the future, the problem is we can't really predict what things are going to be like there. Shadowrun's strength is that it is building off what we're doing now, and projecting a short jump ahead. 2170... I don't think we'll even be able to recognize what the world will be like in 2170. 60 years ahead is already difficult, but at least we have a point of reference to work with.

OTOH, a new VITAS plague could really shake things up. And maybe the setting needs that - something "external" to the perpetual one-upsmanship of the corporations, something that will scare the bejebus out of everyone around: a plague, that defies all efforts at containment; that can lay undtected, dormant, for months or maybe years, then suddenly BAMMO, huge outbreak.

...

Or hell, maybe the Horrors need to start showing up, already.

I think putting it at 2085 or 2090 would be a good jump since it's at 2074 (almost 2075) now.

I like the ED / SR crossovers, but I think the Horrors showing up isn't possible, with the split of the respective properties to different companies? Thought I saw that somewhere...

Turn SR into more of a zombie/survival genre with the new VITAS plague. Sign of the times, with how popular that kind of thing is now

Well, there's always Sirrurg.

Also, the Atlacoya blight is still an unknown factor...

I go the other direction. All 'hope' in the Shadowrun universe is a veneer of self-delusion over the reality that the corps own everything up to and including the governments and religions, and any sense of freedom or success you may have is simply the result of some accountant noting that it is not cost-effective to swat you like a fly just this second.

Remind me never to play at your table.

You're right,Patrick
+1 from Me !
binarywraith's Vision/Version of SR reminds me of the Movie Brazil.
While it was fun to watch it would never be fun to live(or play a Char) then/there

with a Dance up in the Sky among the Angels
Medicineman

I'll third that one...

That's more depressing than *I* go, and I'm all Dragon Hunt up in this house.

Yikes.

That's cyberpunk for you. It's necessarily distopic.
Doesn't mean you can't be personally successful, of course.

That's half the fun. Knowing the system can crush you at any point, almost without noticing, and still making what successes you can despite that knowledge.

Seriously, do people not sit down and think about what extraterritoriality really means? The AAA megacorps are bigger than the 1990's superpowers, and field literal armies in Desert Wars for TV ratings. There -is- no higher authority to appeal to about the ways they use and abuse their power, the only ways to survive SINless are to either be too useful for the annoyance you present to be worth smashing, or be too ineffectual to be noticed. That's the whole reason why shadowrunners can even exist.

Uh, Corporate Court?

Sure, if you're another A+ rated corp. They're not going to be too interested in Billy McCornerStore complaining that the Red Samurai mortared his gas station.

Just mortarring random gas stations is bad for business because other megas will be making a PR example of that. Civvies are fragged over in a myriad other ways (like the fact that the megas control all the markets, to begin with).

By definition, Shadowrun is distopian. IT's a -punk game, and that simple fact means it must have some degree of distopia about it.

Now, of course, the degreeof distopia (from "boy the world is a fragged-up place" at one end, to "soul-crushing despair, physical agony, and bone-gnawing want? Sounds like a GOOD day!" at the other end) .... the degree fo it can and should vary from table to table, player to player.

But if the distopian elements go away entirely, it's not cyberpunk anymore.

BAH! Could be worse, they could be living in Aztlan.

Hopefully the new edition will do away with the last remaining dregs of that dystopian stuff.

noo, not the dystopia.
shadowrun needs to delete all that fantasy magical stuff everywhere for good finaly . .

I have to say, they would pretty much destroy the flavor of the game. Glimmers of hope in the dystopian world is one of the things that, to me, has been at the core of the Shadowrun universe.

What RedJack said.

See, the world, the setting and backdrop, are dystopic. They need to be - because it then throws even the smallest, slimmest victories of the protagonists (that's the PCs) into starker relief. They seem more significant ... yet we know they're NOT significant.

And it is the tension of that dichotomy, that drives any -punk setting.

Need... Not so much, I ignore as much of that dystopic drek as I can, and it works out better to me than it would emphasizing it.

Shadowrunners are professional criminals.
In a non dystopian world, there is no need for professional criminals to do anything, because there are governments that use laws to provide for people and to protect them.
If you don't need professional criminals anymore, you don't need Runners anymore. Then you don't need Shadowrun anymore.

Dystopia is a great way of telling the players
"See those workers coming home from their 18 hour shift to their nice fenced off apartment complex? Aren't you glad that isn't you?"

No. No, no, no, no.
Non-Dystopian does not mean utopian.
The world currently is not a utopia, nor a dystopia. We have criminals, don't we? We have professional criminals, right now. We have the yakuza, who were formed to do things because the government was corrupt. You can have Shadowrun in a non-dystopian society, easily. The government, or some private group, or a corporation can hire people to do things so that the people hiring don't get their hands dirty. You know, mercenaries?

You can do Shadowrun just fine without having it set in a dystopian society.

In other news: -punk (cyberpunk, steampunk) has sort of lost the meaning it had originally in this context. It means 'counter-cultural', which is the main thrust of what Shadowrun is. The PCs are shadowrunners, they're not part of the 'mainstream culture', they're part of a counter culture of sorts. This makes sense. You can focus on that aspect of the game, without having a dystopia, either. Getting rid of the nihilism in the setting doesn't make it stop being cyberpunk, neither does adding the wireless world.

My wife points out Pat Cadigan's cyberpunk novels aren't nihilistic or dystopic, but they're still cyberpunk.

Do you know what Shadowrun looks like if you strip out the megacorps and the dystopia?

It looks rather much like Human Revolution, with more elves and dragons.


And that is a game I'd very much love to play.

Why do you even play Shadowrun again?

I mean, you say you ignore half of the fluff, and you ignore at least most of the matrix rules in favor of people hacking nodes from 2 feet away..just curious as to why the SR RPG over something else.

Now a shameful admittance, I haven't actually gotten around to play that yet. (Don't panic, I got it sitting on my shelf Im just not ready to submit to the steam overlord)
But! The absolutely stellar trailers were all like "corperations got more power then governments" and police opening fire at protesters.
There's also all kind of grim dark subplots transpiring throughout the game.
Dystopia... Seem to be very much intact.

Yeh, Deus Ex: HR certainly does have the Dystopia going. People living in steam tunnels, gangs controlling entire neighborhoods (to the point the cops are afraid to go in in strength), terrorist adn semiterrorist organisations operating openly, and ... a corporate-funded cybernetic "hardbody" elite soldier type (a.k.a. Adam Jensen), thumbing his nose at the law in the interests of his Corporate Master.

Oh, and you have private security firms acting as official police (Belltower in Shanghai). And the same company then staging overt ambushes (second visit to Shnghai), including shooting down an aircraft. not to mention the coffin-motel raid, er I mean, outright massacre of people noone gives a frag about, just to get to one or two people.

The Dystopia is very much alive in DEHR.

Two feet away? What? All I said is that I enforce mutual signal range with hacking. Now, admittedly some systems are going to be in wi-fi inhibited areas, but those are HIGH security systems.

Half the fluff? Maybe half in prior editions, but in case you haven't noticed, the dystopic drek has been fading, so there's not that much left to ditch.

Ignoring the "dystopia drek" would also involve ignoring the omnipresent and worldshaping megacorps alltogether and in a lesser way aspects like the dragons manipulating the "lower" namegivers like figures in a game of chess...

Dystopia in it's definition as beeing a undesireable or frightening form of community or society is so deeply entrenched into what is Shadowrun and the Cyberpunk genre that ignoring it means that the game you play wouldn't even be recognizable as Shadowrun anymore. I guess you try to ignore some aspects you conceive as the dystopian aspect of the game which actually are only little facets.

The 'hopelessness' crap that some people bring up. That is the dystopic drek that needs to be burned and the area it was burned in sowed with salt.

The 'hopelessness' pertains to the fate of the individual. The little man. The setting as whole for me never had that hopless feeling to it - mainly due to magic and it's influence.

Except it's not crap. It's intrinsic to the setting - for NPCs at the very least.

You think a SINless squatter trying to navigate a life between ghoul nests on one side, gangs on the other, and the MEgacorporations' collective bootheel above, has any hope in his life beyond "please don't let things get worse" ...??

You think anyone, SINless or SINner, in the Barrens has much real hope of anything at all?

You think that your typical skillchipped Wageslave has any real hope, beyond desperately praying s/he doesn't lose their job this week?

...

Yet, the squatter, the Barrens resident, and the Wageslave are foundation elements of the setting. As are the omnipresent, near-omnipotent Megacorporations.

Hell, you think the smarter of the gangers don't realize they're krill in a world of megacorporate sharks? This is a setting where the cops aren't just openly for sale, they're listed on the stock market. Everyone is using everyone else, but that's okay because it is the only way to survive. Hell, Dunklezahn tried to replace some of the terrible with at least a somewhat benign leader, and they killed him offhand.
Seriously, it sounds terribly depressing, but in practice at the table, my games work out to have a serious element of Nietzsche. 'Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.' is a watchword. The world is terrible, but against that kind of blackness even a grubby, battered heroism can shine. A lot of SR characters are, let's face it, sociopathic multiple murderers with questionable personal hygiene. Making someone like that into a hero takes one hell of a villain.

I'd play at your table binarywraith

Half the fun of the setting for me is the dystopia - the fun morally questionable choices that the players have to make wouldn't be half as fun without it.

Actually, it's as strong as ever. I don't know which books you've been reading, but Corp Enclaves and Seattle 2070 are still filled with dystopic themes. Do you even know what dystopic means?

You can have any and all of this without having the game be a dystopia. Hell, you have things similar to this in real life right now, and we're not living in a dystopic society. Specifically, there are people living normal lives in Shadowrun, close to what people are living now. Not everyone is either 'top tier' or 'wage slave' - there's a middle ground as well. There is a chance to change your living conditions (by luck or skill), which is what sets Shadowrun apart from a dystopia.

For your examples: The SINless squatter doesn't have much hope, but neither does your typical homeless person now. Your person living in the Barrens is on par with those people who live in urban wastelands now, and your wageslave is about on par with what my wife had to deal with last month (until the bomb dropped and we found out her work was shutting down). Your examples deal with the dregs of society - which are fine, if you want to play the dregs of society. I tend to play more 'middle class' - characters who have something to fall back on if necessary.

Hell, two of my characters wouldn't even be able to exist in an actual dystopia. A middle-class ex-military officer with an actual SIN, who does 'courier' jobs on the side? A socialite from Japan whose father's a Renraku upper class saraiman, who had to rescue him from the Renraku Archology, and now is a ninja secretly under his employ? Not actually possible in a dystopia.

You can do this without having a dystopia. The big thing with a dystopia is that it crushes hope. That, ultimately, everything you're trying for will come to nothing. I don't like games like this -- I prefer to know that, if I'm pushing hard, have the right skills and the right plans, and the dice don't hate me, I'll ultimately succeed.

You might have to make questionable choices - that's fine - you can do that outside of a dystopia. People do it all the time. The end-game of a dystopic setting however is that you're left with ashes at the end. (1984, where the main character betrays everything he believed in and becomes a pawn in the machine, or Brave New World, where the main character winds up killing himself because he succumbed to civilization).

I have made characters with strict codes of conduct, and they have been able to cling to these even in the worst circumstances of the game I play in - and face the consequences of doing so. You won't get this kind of thing in a dystopia - the setting won't allow it. You either capitulate, or you die as an example.

Actually, thinking about this - here's a good way to show a dystopian Shadowrun game.
-- Your first mission is to rescue a girl from her father to bring back to her mother. You succeed, only to find out that you didn't rescue her, you simply kidnapped her for her mother. You get paid, but you're now wanted by the police, and her father's intent on hunting you down. Minimum pay, big blowback.
-- Your next mission involves breaking into small company warehouse to steal information and plant a virus. You plant the virus, ruining the company's big reveal in a few days. You find out that the information you stole's worthless (now), and you never get the rest of your paycheque. The company was working on making a more ecologically efficient product, but can't now. If you were able to negotiate an up-front, you at least got a little money, but either way, minimum or no pay, big blowback.
-- Your third mission isn't a mission. Someone's been systematically killing off anyone who has reasonable contact with you. You need to figure out who's killing off your friends and contacts. Meanwhile, said contacts are trying to break off any dealings with you. By the end of the adventure, you find out it's the father from your first run. You can either kill him off (ignoring the fact he's kind of justified in having a hate-on for you), or you might negotiate to try to get his daughter back. You go with plan B, and try to break into the archology, infiltrate to the mother's estate, and get the girl. On the way to extracting her, an overzealous guard shoots and kills her. Good job. Now you've got the mother AND father after you.

The way this works out, is you get half-a-step forward, then go two steps back. The characters never really get anywhere, and are mostly spinning their wheels while everything falls apart around them. The GM never rewards the characters (a tiny bit of money if they're incredibly lucky, and karma), and every time they try to do the 'right thing' they're punished, and if they're not trying to do the right thing, they sink deeper.

Middle class in SR has died out long ago, it's in the books. You're either with the 'have's or with the 'have-not's. Because you nice life with a suburban house and a bank account can be sweeped away at any moment without warning for a billion reasons. So the possible runner stories of success are just that - moving from a street kid to a multimillionaire retired on a private island in the Carribean.

Oh, and no, dystopias are not "always grimdark, all the time". A dystopian society is just one massively geared against the vast majority, if not the entirety, of the population - and SR's megacorp structure is undoubtedly so. In no way it means that each time you keep a vow you have to be messily killed, or that no sweet stops exist for people to lead normal or successful lives.

Oh, and minding that we (as in "the citizens of the first world") each have about a dozen people working to produce all the stuff we consume around the rest of the world for the wage we wouldn't even call laughable, yeah, we're living in a pretty dystopic society ourselves.

Wow, i really like this - i should try this as a GM. Thanks for the ideas.

Yeah, because your bank account's mostly corpscrip, your mortgage lender is a subsidiary, the school your kids go to is corp-run. Piss off the wrong middle manager, and he can make life literally hell for you.



Yeah, that's a very big difference. Grimdark does not equal dystopian. WALL-E is a great example of a dystopian setting used to tell a much more hopeful and entirely non-grim story, even.

I guess, for me, one of the fun things about SR is the feeling that the players aren't going to "win" necessarily in the end. The decisions they make and and actions they take might make a difference to someone, either good or bad, and they need to be happy living with the consequences of what they've done, but it's the progression that's interesting, not the end product. I guess I've just played too many games where the players end up being world-saving heroes - SR is where I go to get away from that.

I think there's great fun to be had in playing a game where you act based on what will help you survive and what will jar least with your moral conscience, rather than acting to overthrow the evil government or kill the BBEG. Each run you survive is a "win" in games like that, and earning enough scratch for your character to get out of the life and retire (if that's what they want) is goal enough for me. Your choices and actions are smaller on a world scale, but more interesting and important on an individual scale than, say, your typical Pathfinder campaign.

What Tashiro describes may be dystopian, but I feel that you can play SR as a game in a dystopian setting without going to such extremes. Just because the setting is filled with entities which can swat the players like flies whenever they want doesn't mean that they will. The players make their choices and try not to piss off the wrong people too badly.

Anyway, that's just my tuppence worth and as long as we're all playing the sort of SR game that we love, it doesn't matter ultimately. The very fact that there is such a commonly held up difference in play styles (mohawks and trenchcoats) proves that people will always take what they like from the game and run with it. I hope that 5e continues to allow people to play how they want.

So, what lifestyle does your typical Lone Star officer have in Shadowrun, then? Because they're not in the 'have nots', and they're not with the 'haves'. I'm pretty sure their income would fall into the middle bracket. Yes, their life can be swept away at a moment's notice (though if they're smart and have put some of their money into a national bank, they can protect themselves more). I'm sure Shadowrun still has banks like the CIBC and RBC, which wouldn't use solely corporate scrip - these banks answer to the government.



When you're dealing with literature, the hero fails. He might have a glimmer of hope, but the outcome is that those hopes are dashed, and the status quo prevails. I still hold up 1984 as the archetypal example of the dystopic society.

You're welcome. Just don't invite me to any of your games.

A Lone Star officer is a have-not, of course. Precisely because he has almost no power over his own life, unlike Lone Star Inc. Even high corporate managers, the ones who don't hold a major share and/or decide the company's policy are haven-nots, for the same reason - they can lose everything at a moment's notice. The system is geared to frag up everyone.

Governments are all but symbolic in SR, remember?

You just operate on a very narrowly understood definition of dystopia.
Generally speaking, the setting can still very well be dystopic despite some people, like PCs, seeing success. It's about the expected average value, so to say, not about the tiny itty bitty end of the bell curve.
And your definition of dystopia, the one denying any chance of success, is not the one used when we say that dystopic setting is the foundation of Shadowrun, and thus it needs to retain the overall dystopic feel.

Reminds me that I had wanted to try and set up a series of runs that would turn even the most law-abiding of players into horrible monsters, doing the things they said they'd never do. Doing the wrong thing is easy, but the repercussions aren't evident up front, doing the right thing is hard with immediate and obvious repercussions. Every job goes farther and farther down the rabbit hole where doing the right thing gets harder and harder but more and more obvious.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Do you know what a Dystopia is? Per Merriam-webster, "an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives " Aside from the part about a Dystopia being an imaginary place, yes, real life is pretty dystopic. Just look at things like the NewTown Connecticut shooting. Or the shooting in Webster, NY.


Even the middle ground is worse than what we expect for our own middle ground. The hours are longer, job security is less, employers' reach into their employees' private lives is more invasive and pervasive. They may eat as often as we woudl expect middle-management to today, they may wear nice clothes and have nice techno-toys.

But they have to have excellent locks and security on their homes and vehicles, they have to toe the company line very closely, their kids' futures are held over their heads ("lose th job, lose your son's schooling"), their social activities outside the home may have to meet up with some checklist of standards (at least one parent active in PTA; at least one child active in organised athletics; attending biannual company picnic is mandatory for entire family; family must be affiliated with at least one charity, church, or social association from company-approved list; etc).

Dystopia doesn't have to mean "starving, poor, filthy, and homeless". It just has to mean, people are dehumanised (the very nature and intent of a SIN: you are literally reduced to a number, not a person ... by the whole of society itself) and afraid (go-gangs; precarious employment; magical threats; ramant violent crime; corporate abuses).

And like I said: the real world is precariously close to a dystopia right now. IT would take only a few, small pushes in the "right" direction to teeter us over that edge, IMO. Mind, it's not quite as dystopian as I believe Shadowrun is and should be ... but it's not far from being dystopian at all.

Amongst other things...