Sounds like the making of the next hit Teen Drama on Fox

Thanks!

No Problem.
The Den is pretty acidic an environment, but that's part of it's charme.

I feel you're kind of missing the point here, folks. Are the Tirs and the NAN based on faulty premises? Maybe - do you really care? The whole cyberpunk pretty much is. The thing is, all that old-fashioned ridiculous stuff gives you something to make the setting special. "What's special about California Republic?" "It's captured by a rebel hardliner Japanese general". "What's special about Imperial Japan?" "It's a nationalist metaphobic state, home to traditionalist yakuza rings and japanacorps". "What's special about Azt?" "It's a corporation heavily involved with Blood Magic - they want to summon the end times to be the only ones to survive".
As the setting changed (maybe towards being more realistic, this is beyond the point), that feeling of being special went away, to be replaced with nothing. "What's special about California Republic?" "Nothing much, it's just a state in the West of North America". "What's special about Japan?" "Nothing much, it's just a state in the Far East". "What's special about Azt?" "Nothing much, it's just a megacorp like any other - a bit more direct about its conquests, maybe".

Putting it simply, I don't want the setting to be "realistic". I want it to be vibrant, unique, and engaging, while trying not to ruin the verisimilitude too much. If having Awakened Nations requires a bunch of Native Americans to capture a launch site and launch a nuke and 140 millions of Yakuts living past the habitation belt, so be it. Same as I don't particularly care how a dungeon sustains its monster population when there are no adventurers around. There's an explanation, even a lazy one? Fine. There isn't? Fine, too.

That's why the problem is not the metaplot itself. The Bug City line resolved, and Chicago is rebuilding; the superAIs killed each other? I'm fine with that development, but give me something else to spark my imagination, something to make me hold my breath. Sengir is right - the pipeline that produced such unique events and subsettings is basically dead. And it's not for the lack of wiggling space in the setting itself.

So what exactly is preventing you from having all that in your game?

You know, thinking about it, part of your issue might be the way that a lot of stuff was wholly self-contained in SR4. If you look at Twilight Horizon, for example, that stuff could easily have stretched across multiple books worth of metaplot development. That, frankly, would have been interesting, because you had all sort of crazy technomancer and spirit stuff going on around that time.

Things like the nanoplot are pretty clearly going in a different direction - that's already been in Storm Front and the subject of Splintered State, plus there's Stolen Souls coming around at some point to really delve into that. There's supposed to be something going on with Boston as an ongoing thing for SRO, as well.

And as for the setting changing to be more "realistic", I don't think that's the case - it's just that some of the things that weren't realistic in the first place were sorta anchored to the time that they were conceived, and over time they've become unmoored. Things like that need to be dealt with for the health of the setting.

Replacing it with nothing is certainly a bad idea. Hell, I said as much in my first post. It doesn't mean that the previous shit was well thought out enough to serve as a good foundation for further books, however, and I think that notion came home to roost. It's not even that unusual or exceptional of an occurrence--keeping things interesting for the better part of a couple decades is really hard to do, and just like everything else in this world Shadowrun was never perfect.

Yeah, and that's the trick. It can be pretty damned difficult to do triage on the dated shit while at the same time bringing along interesting stuff to build from - especially if you're aiming to make it interesting stuff that will appeal to the old players you want to keep and the new players you want to bring in. The balance of that is damned hard enough when that's ALL you're trying to do.

So what exactly is making me buy SR books, if I have to houserule half the crunch, and write my own global-level fluff? Or if I have to stick with the old fluff?


There are whole continents that have been barely described. There's no need to stick to only addressing legacy silliness (and sadly, in addition to addressing the silliness, necessary as that might be, the setting has seen a few sane ideas shot down, like Great Dragons working behind the scene in secret).

Modern Japan is a very different place from Modern Chicago or London, without being run by mass murdering racist militarists who rule the pacific with an Iron Fist ™, or by nature worshiping lovers of all humanity. SR tends to use cheap and vastly overinflated stereotypes and those just don't hold together over time.

Whether you rebuild on the ashes or on new ground, it's still a LOT to do at once. Really, the former seems easier than the latter.

Really? If you were transported from Tokyo to London to Chicago to Tokyo, you wouldn't even have to change your habits significantly. Same as any city of the broadly defined European civilization.
Pyongyang or Delhi or Hô Chi Minh would be noticeably different, but those are run by mass murdering racist militarists or other such interesting people.

Roleplaying games being larger-than-life? That's unheard of!


I'm seeing a lot of tearing stuff down, but I'm not exactly seeing anything built in its place.

I don't know, I would describe those setting a bit less mundanely. The California Republic was formerly ruled by the JIS with an iron fist, and now dealing with a power vacuum that a lot of vying factions are trying to fill. It also has partially-submerged cities and P2.0, which is like facebook taken to the extreme - California runners actually record their crimes. Japan is still a hub of economic and military power that exerts a strong influence on the world, but they are less of a faceless monolithic threat, and more a mess of vying factions like the rest of the Sixth World. I actually liked their writeup in Corporate Enclaves. It is a place where you need to pay attention to concepts like giri and honor, but it is a place that runners from Seattle can actually visit, and find work there. Aztechnology is still what it has always been - a corrupt company born from the Sinola Cartel, the puppetmasters of Aztlan, who practice blood magic and are festooned with trappings of Aztec mysticism, while at the same time they rule a far-flung empire of subsidiaries and have such good PR that the man on the street would poo-poo the notion of them having human sacrifices on top of one of their pyramid-like buildings.

See, this is why I advocate for just playing 80s run for fun in terms of the setting and flair, while refining and focusing on a satisfying firefight mechanic.

That way we don't need to hire demographers to speculate about what would "realistically" happen if a nation of Native American hipsters with real magic powers decided to revolt and form their own nation-state in the wake of the collapse of the USA.

If you don't think Japan is culturally very different than The US or UK then I don't think this is a conversation worth having.

Then play SR1. Have fun. The mechanics are totally broken due to thing like nobody involved understanding basic statistics, but it has lots of "flair".

we just need to wait for more books to come out. it's a lot more fun to fill the universe with rich details instead of CFS invades Tir. Tir wins later. they're obviously in a transformation point right now.. they still need to re-write and publish a whole bunch of rules. i'm excited for it.

Well I also enjoy good gameplay. So for me in my ideal world I'd run some kind of SR3R ruleset in the SR1 setting, if that makes sense.

I've been asking that first question question myself, since I bought SR5, but in the end for me is there's more good than bad in it (and eventually I'll get around to reworking the bad more to my taste).

As for writing my own global-level fluff, that's part of the fun IMO. I like fluff books like SR4's Vice and Corporate Guide, books that have broadly applicable background info that doesn't really change much over time and plenty of plot hook ideas. But you're referring more to the metaplot and scenario books, I stay away from those. (I do own Emergence, but I didn't realize exactly what I was getting at the time.)

That's sort of my point - I'm not truly surprised by the idea of doing one first, than the other because attempting to build and tear at the same time can become untenable (saying this without commenting on it being good or bad). Storm Front, really, finished up with the tear down.

We'll see. I'm expecting that CGL thinks we really need more major seaports located hundreds of kilometers inland at 8300 feet in the Andies. Then maybe some huge metaplots due to machinations of the powerful Antarctic Citrus Growers Association and the Islamic Pork Producers, with some shadowruns due to the the centuries long rivalry between the famous whiskey distilleries of Mecca.

That's because it's not our job to write the setting. Writers are supposed to do that. We're fans, and our job is to have fun. If what the writers are producing isn't fun anymore, we will move on.

Trust me, the ACGA is no joke. They are an exclusive if reclusive group. Going up against them is bad ju-ju. Anyone who has ever been beaten with a sack full of (frozen) oranges can tell you, it’s no fun. And don’t even get me started on the (frozen) pineapple treatment.

And it won't leave a mark .

Reading the review of Book of Erotic Fantasy. Something made me chuckle.



I always knew Seattle was a special town.

If I ever run a Shadowrun again, the 'runners will be hired to intimidate the Seattle LARPer community to prevent them from posing for a latter day Book of Erotic Fantasy. They'll be hired by WotC who desperately wants plausible deniability.

I'd love writters to smash up a bit the NAN and get a good part of it re-integrated to UCAS or CAS. Because, honestly, I'm reading NAN Part 1 and 2 atm, and godamn, it sucks and makes no sense.

And i really understand the pain in the ass for a written to continue such background developments with those basis.

(unless that writter wrote WAR, he must be confortable with stupid settings)

What a long way we've come since AD&D 1st Ed.

Well, some of the poorest or or failing Native-American Nations got integrated into others (Ute was merged into Pueblo, I think?)

And I'm ok with the NaN for starters. Hell, Magic was an unknown quantity back then and largely disbelieved by the American Government. I do find silly the whole secession thing of North vs South and perhaps that division was indeed what prevented the U.S of taking control of much of the land they had lost during the civil war.

Yes Peublo annexed the Ute nation, Tsishman (spelling) was annexed by the Salish (or occupied after MCT left the country a giant strip mine). The Sioux are anti-UCAS, though they will work with the Other NAN. The former Canadaian provencies in the NAN are pretty much low population in RL anyway (a canadian can check me on this but isn't like 70+% of the population within 100 miles of the US border.

I always liked the NAN--they seem to have been ignored in SR4 though. I think Shadows of North America explained it best. As long as you had an once of Indian blood, we're married to an indian, we're hispanic, and in some places if you were Meta you'd be allowed to stay as well (cascade crow, sinsearch for example). Once you did that and take into account that these states are not the most heavily populated in the US (alot of it is federally owned land) it might make sense for the US in the face of magically induced weather disasters to just say screw it we're done its yours.

Could the UCAS take it back? Maybe, but genocide is bad PR and the other choice (a long term guerrila war) disuade the UCAS from going down that route. The CAS split is kind of emblematic of that, when it happened the UCAS just shrugged and let it happen. They were done fighting for the old USA, so what is loss of another portion of the country that we care little about and have little in common with.

Cal Free was just California looking at its situation and thought (wrongly) that joining the secessionist club would be better for them as well. Again, the UCAS just shrugged and decided at the time it was not worth the effort.


Does it make sense from our 2014 perspective? Not really, but by 2014 SR, international corporations had extraterritorality as well. One could even see these early mega corps purposely dividing the US to gain power.

That describes literally dozens of nations in SR.
Partially submerged cities and the underwater labyrinth are at least something of note to distinguish it.
P2.0 just doesn't make any sense whatsoever, imo.
That describes literally dozens of nations in SR.
Blood magic is severely out of fashion in AZT. Which makes it just another megacorp - they're all trying to sleaze into nation-state governments, run horrible experiments, and have good PR. Except for Horizon, of course - they're the good guys!

It is culturally different, but not as different as the aforementioned nations. And not different enough to significantly affect the urban lifestyle.

SR has been "cleared out" for more than an edition now. "CFS and Tir have a fight, CFS wins" was not exactly the high point of storytelling, but it involved two nations with their own very different character and Great Dragon politics.

The setting is vast. What's stopping from building up in the areas already cleared of what you think as outdated?

Yes, my "tearing down" comment related precisely to what the writers produce. And not just the current War!-writers, too.

I'm not getting the whole NAN hatred going on. The NAN don't make particular sense? Does corporate extraterritoriality? What about the concept of shadowrunners? The NAN serve their plot mission - they provide a political counter-balance to the UCAS, the CAS and Atzlan; they serve as an alternative to the techno-dystopia of the default Seattle setting, etc. So I can't see how they're worse than That Other Tir, Bretonia, half the AGS states, Awakened Yakut, etc.

Is it bad that all I'm thinking here is "damn, that would take some pretty serious excavation and one crazy nautical elevator" and "that would be some seriously impressive hydroponics"?

As an aside, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there are some pretty serious places of power in the Andean region...

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. But speaking as somebody who played D&D during that time, the goal of having fun with friends hasn't changed. If you mean we were expected to do all the worldbuilding ourselves. you miss the fact that there's been published settings as far back as I can remember.

Also, you don't buy Shadowrun for the rules. One of the great innovations of Shadowrun was that it came with an integral setting that was intertwined with the rules. Until then, the tendency had been for generic settings with well-developed rules (or occasionally, the reverse). The idea of integrated rules and setting was fairly revolutionary in its time. Same's true with metaplot: Shadowrun was really the pioneer in that area, and White Wolf copied a lot of what Shadowrun developed.

So yeah: If Shadowrun fails to deliver in the areas it used to be known for, people are going to lose interest.

I'd add to that: I'm able to create my own metaplots but if a game enforce me to do so, I usually won't buy their books anymore.

Let's take an exemple: Let's say I decide to make a plot were Tir invades Seattle and generate a war between UCAS and Tir. And my new Seattle is an invaded one with runners beeing resistants.

Why would I buy a new Seattle Sourcebook?

As soon as I vastly differ from official storyline and vastly shake up the grounds of the game, I stop buying the plotbooks.

That's why I think a RPG-compagny should keep his game-storyline evolving or offering new plots.

The problem here being that recent editions had much less of a focus on fleshing out the setting and metaplot.

I mean, just take a look at the publishing schedule for SR2. It took forever until the 2nd edition of Virtual Realities came out, we didn't get a new edition of the Rigger Black Book until SR3, we just kept using stuff like 1st ed RBB, Shadowtech and PAoNA with pencilled-in SR2 stats because we simply had to.
Meanwhile, FASA kept shelling out fluffy tie-ins to Earthdawn like the Tir and Atztlan books and blew our minds with Bug City which had been built to over years with the Universal Brotherhood arc, Queen Euphoria and several novels.

Compare that with how RPGs work today. Edition cycles are much shorter, and the top priority after a new edition hits is to sell as many crunchy bits as possible. The fluffy parts are something you use inbetween gun and vehicle pdfs to milk the edition a bit more while you prepare the next one.

Not that I blame CGL for handling things this way. Metaplot heavyness definitely makes an RPG less accessible for newcomers who haven't been following the game for the last two decades. Almost all of the stuff in the Tir books was only usable as inside jokes for the GM and never showed up in our games. Running a traditional Bug City campaign with spirits as powerful as they are in 4th ed would be suicidal for anyone except the most experienced characters.
It's understandable they've changed those parts of the setting.
The problem I'm having is more that the way they've handled things comes off as a compromise. I wonder if it wouldn't have been better to just entirely reboot the setting, with the SR timeline diverging from the real world not in 1989, but in 2011 or 2012. Then again, we've seen how a total reboot of the metaplot worked out for WoD, so that's probably unwise from a business perspective.

I prefer setting books to metaplot books. Settings have useful information and adventure hooks, while metaplot contrivances only disrupt campaigns without really changing the status quo. I would rather see the setting evolve more naturally (a new power player is moving into CalFree, one of the megas is slipping while another one is on the rise, the Vory are making inroads into Denver at the expense of the Yakuza, etc.) than have all of these stupid BIG EVENTS (volcanic eruptions, matrix crashes, etc.), which lose their impact because they are happening all the time.

While I certainly see your point, the BIG EVENTS are what make things memorable. We're still talking about Dunkelzahn's will, even though it came out 17 years ago (and even longer, in game time). The death of Fuchi, even though it was as much a worldshaker as the will, isn't remembered nearly as much even though it came about through a natural evolution of the storyline.

There are a few large events that are pretty air-tight - that is, they don't affect the parts of the setting you don't want them to affect. Like the UB plotline, the Far Scholar will, even the superAI showdown. It's not like many campaigns depended on Renraku Arcology staying as it was.

Dunkelzahn's Secrets: Portofolio of a dragon was released in January 1996. So it came out 18 years ago. In game, Dunkelzahn's Will was read on 15 August 2057. Gun H*ven 3 set the last date to 19 December 2075. So 18 years, 4 months and 4 days have passed.

As an event, the will is pretty dull (unlike the assassination). I don't know anyone who played a game set on the day it was read (though I admit I drafted one related to Miles Lanier departure from Fuchi, that I never had the opportunity to play). What it did was conveying a large number of information, hints, and hooks on many other topics out of context to us, gamemasters. I think we remember it primarily because so many events that came after had the label "This event was brought to you by Dunkelzahn's Will™". People even came to believe that the will was the cause for every event that happened in the following years, though some actually aren't, or are so thinly related that people couldn't tell what the chain of events was.

The breakup of Fuchi Industrial Electronics, on the other hand, was supposed to be a major event. But Blood in the Boardroom did not do a very good job to translate the events of the Corporate War into actual game content (which, to be fair, was more difficult than it may look). As far as the book goes, going through Fuchi breakup is fighting a vampire to the control of a black clinic in the middle of Pueblo nowhere. Also, BitB came out while the people already had their hands full with Bug City and Dunkelzahn's Will items, at the same time than Renraku arcology shutdown and the third edition.

That's a critic that is more about how they are executed rather than metaplot book/setting book.

If you had a book describing Tir Taingire, a change of governement and what evolves under a number of years, and how to use that for your PC and involves them, to me it's a metaplot book and setting book.

I think that's one thing that potentially is slowing the Shadowrun universe down, if not damaging it outright. Making a lot of inside joke-like references to a system that even fewer people have heard about than Shadowrun is just going to make some of the events of SR look dumb. I personally have never seen or heard of the game outside of these message boards, actually, and I had honestly thought that the game had died off because of that.

I mean, it might be "hip" and "cool" to tie in a game to another system, but all that ends up happening is that some of the older gaming-hipsters can speculate about the inside jokes. It does very little for the actual setting.

Tough back then, they had a long term plan with where they wanted their storyline to go.

I mean, we somehow knew/tought they wanted to move to a fight/struggle against the incomming horrors. I don't think it was the ED/Sr ties that mattered but the ability FASA had to instill elements for the future.

Sum it up as setting reboots are generally a bad idea. I'm not sure what happened at Fanpro to make them think this was a good idea.

Hopefully CGL makes the 5th edition setting more and more old school till we forget 4th edition ever happened. Otherwise I'll just keep playing Shadowrun Returns and loving that 4th edition never happened.

Considering some of the folks currently working on things...

I find it very interesting that people are talking at several points in this as if its Cyberpunk that in its death throes, not just Shadowrun. It strikes me as odd: for the first time in decades, you've had several major properties with cyberpunk tie-ins (Cyberpunk 2077, Dues Ex, the shadowrun games). Its not as if cyberpunk is over the heads of the modern youth. We actually have many of the predicted aspects of cyberpunk (massive corps, ipads and such, increasing drug use[though we're not at Vurt options yet], the increased focus on lack of meaning, hell, even the nihilism of modern wub-dub music). If you don't think high school age kids can get into cyberpunk, who do you think Snow Crash was written for?

Anyway, to actually add to the topic: Biggest problem with cyberpunk is that to modernize, it must either come back to its roots(much like shadowrun 5th seems to have, focused on a retrofuturist approach ala steampunk), or it much begin to refocus on its social commentary. Shadowrun was poignant when it focused on racism, class warfare, revolution and the loss of humanity. Some of the issues it takes about are kinda dead: I'm not gonna say racism is dead, but its not as common a threat as 25 years ago. The south is very unlikely to rebel now, really for any reason. Japan isn't the threat it once seemed to be.

Modernize your enemies. China is the new bogey man, so have someone actually put together a competent threat out of Wuxing. What if they ate up massive chunks of Aries? Put together a nation state that can hang with the corps. The last nation state that tried (amazonia) got destroyed. Shake up the big ten (though that seems to be in the works already). Use these issues to confront the fears and threats of modern society. Horizon was a great step towards that, even if they ended up being just mind control people. They're the perfect option to build a facebook profile that knows everything you do, so much you never make a choice. It thinks you really want sushi for dinner, and you become so certain that the machine knows you that it really just runs you, from childhood to the grave. Its not mind control, its social engineering of the highest level.

I don't think its a dying setting, I think the setting lacks new blood in the writing pool. Young isn't always better, but I think becoming less tied into the cyberpunk ritual icons might help. Focus on the new things that have those influences (Portal anyone?), and try to guess what people will love.

Oh, and talking about inside references: Shadowrun isn't accessible because the core book is 60 bucks, and could be used to defend yourself against a drunken version of The Rock. If you've made it past those hurdles, a few in jokes and side references don't mean much. In the same way the 40k games assume some background references are there to be followed, some open plot threads to the 4th age can be excused if its cool enough.

Shadowrun has a long history, and it started in the 80s, with a strong 80s vibe. It has then evolved along the years, with different writers. Some of them kept to the original tone (or what they felt was the original tone) while others tried to adapt the setting to the RL world.

Then some writers got something that was a mix of both, and decided to keep it vague enough to allow both to co-exist (the "pink mohawk and black trenchcoat"). While it allowed everyone to keep their vision of Shadowrun, it also diluted the setting.

So the writers have the choice between forcing their vision and disappointing all those who don't share it, or doing something that won't have too much flavor but should fit everyone.

Neither are good options and that's why I'm pushing for a third: splitting Shadowrun into three lines. One would be 80s cyberpunk (Shadowrun 2050), another would be GiTS post-cyberpunk (Shadowrun 2070) and the third would be more techno-thriller (Shadowrun 2035). In order to please most players, each would probably need to offer both low and high level playstyle.

Say, some in-universe genius could spot signal can be transmitted over wires? Which alone would instantly render a huge bunch of iconic art relevant again?


Agreed; RL is closer to cyberpunk than ever, with omnipresent government surveillance and social inequality deepening. It is just much more a globalised setting than classical cyberpunk, which means the poverty gets exported to the third world nations.

Now wait a moment, what, was the South ever really likely to rebel? Or is it less likely now, given the recent Texas's joke?

Actually, something powerful could emerge from the Chinese states themselves. Even if just a confederation of the moderately strong nations.
The PPC could be used to represent the resurgent China and wider Asia, but that plotline too was driven into the ground.
I'm not sure Horizon is changing much - I mean, megacorps already decide what's best for their wageslaves, and unless we take that absurdist bit with P2.0, the runners have zero reasons to let a corp on to them.

Surely any setting can be salvaged, even one with a dead core theme, if needed. I was rather talking about the current state of affairs - the iconic cyberpunk setting elements are going, and nothing's being added to replace their value.
Also, what about Portal? Unless you want to add a literal portal gun, corp experiments on metahumans are a thing since the very beginning of the setting.

I actually thought SR4 was an excellent move forward. The introduction to wifi was refreshing and kept the setting relevant.


40k can have all the references it wants - they're all self-contained in the 40k system. The inside jokes that SR is trying to run is bridging the gap between two different games. That's a very big difference.


Well, you know, they have certain claims. Whether or not they are credible is debatable, but I'm sure if we give them another 50 or so years they may get something right.

I completely agree with that sentiment.

In general, yes. The computer rules didn't work, but they never have worked in any edition. However the issue grows in significance as you can now expect that any new gamer picking up the setting has at least some reasonable idea about how the internet appears to work, and SR computers are something totally out in left field, based on what some dude who had never used a computer wrote on his mechanical typewriter in 1984.