So I kinda fell out of the game as 5e was releasing. What's happendd in the metaplot since? Any major developments? Hell, any links that anyone can offer for the state of the world in 2080? Heck, what year is it, even?

Last I recall 5e installed wifi on everything so you would take penalties if you didn't leave wifi open on your central nervous system, then I got married, moved about a dozen times, and am just now getting my 4e books out of boxes and remembering the goodtimes had here woth you lot.

I've been out of the world, what've I missed?

Apologies for spelling errors, I am writing this on moble with clumsy thumbs.

I know you don't want to hear this, but stick with 4th edition... 5th is a flaming dumpster, and 6th wish it was good as 5th.

That's kinda terrifying, actually. I was curious about the return of GOD and allusions to a wired Matrix. Was the lore as bad as the mechanics?

Is there new information to add--the "lore"--without taking a dump on the mechanics? (5e and 6e are not well respected, but surely there is some new setting information in there that would help the OP?)

Worse actually. In SR 2, 3, and 4, you could be a Decker/Hacker with your own custom made hardware. In 5th & 6th edition, you have to buy your decks from the corporations. No more home made hardware.

Also GOD, in my opinion, TOTALLY breaks the setting. They are omnipresent, and it doesn't matter what you do, if you have too high of a mark on you they send in kill teams.

Shadowrun before 5th edition was such that you could run against a certain corporation and not be squashed like a bu, 5th takes that away with GOD.



Not really. Just more of the new Monster of the Week. In 5th edition it was the nanite virus that could overwrite your personality... Think Insect Spirits, but done technologically.

So, GOD is unstoppabl and omnipresent, and Deckers can't make their own decks anymore Because Reasons? And we're looking at some sort of Borg Hive Mind problem? That really doesn't seem like a great direction for the line.

Like, at least thematically, deckers building their own equipment is a neat part of the underdog, underground nature of the setting. I was looking forward to GOD being a new antagonist for deckers, and was curious about the hinting at a return to the wired matrix mattering, but it sounds like that didn't happen.

Don't forget the massive hike in the price of everything for 'reasons', wireless everything with such well thought out bonuses as silencers that can tell you if someone heard the shot (somehow) and the ability for hackers to permanently fry your cyberware. Dumpster fire doesn't begin to define the mechanical mess that is 5th and 6th ed.
The lore also fell off pretty steeply once Catalyst decided that the editor doesn't need to do his job and should spend his time writing terrible novels, unpaid volunteers should handle the errata and paying freelancers for their work was optional.

Boy, that's a long one.

I'll give more info on this when I'm off tomorrow, but, the Matrix has gotten … interesting.

Short form? The current iteration of the Matrix isn't understood by most people and it tends to be much more dangerous than it used to be. It can code itself, to some degree, and it lets superiors know when it's being manipulated. Do it enough in a short time and GOD sends down agents to deal with you. Go slow, or quiet, and you draw less attention.

Wires are still useful for reasons... mainly if you don't want t broadcast your location to nearby people looking for wireless signals, but also if you run hot … when basic line noise can fry your head, it's good to plug in directly. more on that later.

That's certainly one way to look at it.

Wait, the Matrix is self-aware now?

WHAT!?

Like is this Deus, or one of the AIs driving everything?

last I heard, nobody was really sure about anything because the whole matrix has a "foundation" (they actually call it that) which nobody who built the damn thing understands in the slightest, they just sort of found a thing there and decided "you know what, after multiple worldwide crashes that did unspeakable things to the economy and repeated attempts by god-like AIs and doomsday cults to take over or destroy the world through the matrix in recent history, this seems like a great basis for us to rebuild everything on even though we don't have the slightest clue what it is"

so basically everyone got a lot dumber and more trusting of spooky mysterious matrix stuff.

Oh dear. It seems that the advancing storyline might have gone a little bit too crazy for my liking.

And not being able to custom build your own decks? Naaah. Out goes the whole hacker mentality and culture if you do that.

The 5th edition was set between 2075 and late 2079, and the 6th edition started in 2080.

Little happened during the 5th edition. The main reason seems to be the Shadowrun Online videogame, which was supposed to take the lead regarding the metaplot. The game was delayed for about two years before its release as Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown, pushing back the end of the CFD storyline and the fall of one AAA megacorp (which was initially intended to be decided by the action of Shadowrun Online's players).

Now, the list of really major events between 2076 and 2080 is quite short...

So, 5e was a lore bust because the online game never really happened. That sounds about right. A buddy who was half-paying attention says that apparently the fae are real, and not just fancy names for the elves of Tir Na Nog? He also thinks Ghostwalker ate a sizable chunk of North America. Those seem like, well, major things on the magic side of things.

Wait, is this the wireless Matrix from the post 3e crash that they just found? Or is it the original one that was built off the weird virus bits of the worm that destroyed everything in the beforetimes? Or are those the same thing?

No, Wireless Matrix tech in 4th edition was well understood. I mean as much as Internet is understood today by those who's job it is to know about the Internet.
5th Edition Matrix is a "magical" place where things happen and NO ONE knows how the damn thing works. Even PhD people kinda shrug and go "It works because of... reasons."

Wait, so what happened to the 4e matrix? Did 4e end in a crash I forgot? I have vague memories of some lore that implied Dodger was some sort of techno, and maybe had been the whole time, near the end of 4e, and his AI friendmaybe being one with the matrix and possibly the source of the technos?

Man, it's been a while since I was thinking about "new" lore.

I feel like I have woken up from a SR2e dream that touched upon SR4e, and am now presented by SR5e/6e.

Is there somewhere that lies out the grand scheme of things? I've got the core materials SR2e through 4e, and a very limited smattering of SR5e materials (Core, Street Magic, Forbidden Arcana), but the Sixth World Almanac seems to be my last major info dump.

No, no crash, but a woman managed to take the brains of about 100 technomancers and essentially reformatted the matrix; Dodger was involved and incorporated loopholes that allow for hacking (IIRC).

Oh, and don't forget that there are now networks and such in the matrix that you cannot ever physically jack into directly because there is no physical correlation in the real world. Not all networks are like this, but there are many.

Say whaaaaat?

Are those non-physical networks not just The Resonance? Why is this so weird?

Depends on whom you ask.

Some are bothered by the idea that anything related to computer and network could non-deterministic. That is, they hold the idea that persistence and transmission of information require it to be losslessly encoded on a physical medium somewhere (as the saying goes, "in the cloud" just means "on someone else's computer"). The arguments against this position ultimately are that enforcing it 1) requires a lot of work from authors to grasp the complexity of modern, let alone futuristic, computers and networks, and 2) prevents authors from using a number of story tropes like Matrix ghost or wandering AI, and whether the increase of narrative believiability and predictability for a fraction of the audience is worth those trade-offs (and obviously it is impossible for people to agree on the amount of work, the interest of said tropes and what level of believiability is appropriate, because all those factors are purely subjective, and that finding said tropes interesting requires them to be believable).

There are also people who are a lot less bothered by adding some level of "magic" (as in Clarke's Third Law) in futuristic computers and networks, but whose suspension of disbelief is stiffer when it comes to management and security good practices. While the first group would have been already irked by the mere existence of Resonance and all that stuff, that second group has an issue with megacorporation and other organizations relying in any way on unmanageable and thus unsecure resources (by "unsecure" I refer not only to access control, but also recovery from from accidental or deliberate data loss).

Yeah, cuz, like, it seems very difficult for me to believe that if the world was presented with a New Internet, there wouldn't be a few billion pieces of megacorp tech that has to use Old Internet to continnue to function. If the New Internet was a maybe-sapient mind-destroying eldritch horror populated by incredibly zealous governmental types and powered by Deus-knows-what, people might be less likely to adopt the new system.

At least the Resonance was probably an evolution of whatever the Otaku were. But now the whole Matrix is magic? Why would anyone use that?

they wouldn't use that.

unless they all got a lot dumber, and arbitrarily more trusting of spooky matrix stuff.

(in spite of the fact that multiple times within living memory, spooky matrix stuff has killed untold numbers of people and nearly destroyed the infrastructure of basically the entire world minus a few tribes of people living in the remotest areas).

Whether or not the new Matrix has a mind is up in the air. Some Technomancers believe it does, because they talk to something and the thing that they talk to, they believe, is the "spirit of the Matrix".

Other Technomancers think that they're high, but that some AIs are, in fact, sentient.

Non-Technomancers talk about how sufficiently-advanced code is nearly indistinguishable from life.

The Matrix grows, kind of like mold or grass. It can be farmed, but it also does its own thing when no one is watching. Moreover, there's an ecosystem built on TOP of it, similar to how cows eat grass and other things eat cows, much of which is artificial but there are several cases when researchers just go, "Uh. We have no idea how that got there."

There're rumors about Technomancers having had their brains harvested to create it, but others dimiss those claims since a hundred human brains is hardly enough to run the entire worldwide Matrix and, besides, plenty of things have been added since.

So, really, you have a whole lot of conflicting information, but a few people *do* know what's going on and understand it, they just tend to not post on JackPoint to talk about it.

There aren't anymore Godlike AIs (Dues, Psychotrope, etc) but there are tens of thousands of lesser AIs, some that are an order of magnitude or two greater than a decker, most of which are lesser, but no one (yet) seems to know how to create them reliably. They just *happen* and that's frustrating but good. Nobody wants the corps to be in control of creating a digitial lifeform that they can enslave, but several corps are working on doing that and regularly put out bbounties for those who can bring them in for research.

(The Monads were, in fact, all caged AIs that escaped via infecting nanomachines. They range from "Don't want to get captured again so hide" to "REVENGE!")

Ok, that seems to sum up the state of Tech.

Anything magical happen?

I have heard that the fae are real, and that ghostwalker went berserk? Either of those things that are accurate? I got them from a non-SR friend who follows general RPG news more than I had time for the past few years.

When you say "Fae" you mean...?

(Read: I know what the Fae are in a number of settings, but I'm just not sure whether this is referring to Elven origin stories or Windlings or what...?)

Something about a hole into the metaplanes where beings that appear to be much like traditional gaelic folktales live?

Like, a manaspike happened and instead of Horrors we got leprechauns and Banshees?

Wait. Whuuuut?

Does anyone have more information on this?

Me again!

Yeah, there's a fae Metaplane (whose name I forget just now) and it has some access to meatspace. The main connection was the fog that roiled around Normandy back in the 50's, but has since managed to pierce through a bit in other places.

They may, or may not, be connected to the Yellowstone Incident, a manastorm that fades in and out that was "born" in Yellowstone and has since appeared in different places in North America, sometime sbriefly, sometimes for a while. The Fae have either managed to tap this energy, or are behind why it exists, to create short-term portals to and from meatspace and some people have travelled between the two.

The Yellowstone Incident creates weird magical effects in most places it shows up at, but not always... sometimes they're severe, sometimes it's just, like, blue rain. No one knows why it exists or what it's *doing*, and it's hard to research since it vanishes and reappears, but it's known to have never shown up near Salt Lake.

You may or may not have been around for the Las Vegas Incident, where Horizon did some rather bad things to some spirits and, in return, REAL BAD STUFF was inflicted on Vegas by some spirits.

Ghostwalker was involved in a quest to gather several artifacts from Dunk's will, and when he gathered them all, he did some kind of ritual in Washington DC at the rift that he came out of. This closed the rift (explosively), which has had some ripple effects on the manasphere that are not yet fully explored. (And predates the Yellowstone Incident. Connected?) … at least one Immortal Elf was killed during this explosion, and her death drove Harlequin into a revenge cycle.

Ghostie vanished for a while after closing the Rift. When he showed up again, it was with a fully-united Spirit of Denver and he was weirdly calm.

Harlequinn teamed up with Aztlan to take down Ghostwalker, trading off some knowledge for resources. This *possibly* helped them create anti-dragon weapons, but it's more likely that they got some other type of knowledge in exchange and the anti-dragon weapons were designed in other ways. (Rumor has it that much of the work was done in Memphis, TN, in the Memphis Pyramid there as dragons seem unable to enter Memphis for some reason.)

Harlequin and Ghostwalker eventually engaged in a formal duel in Denver that Harlequin lost... he was rescued by Erhan and Frosty but was allowed to leave. Denver went solo, becoming a private city-state, and Aztlan was briefly kicked out, but was later allowed back in after showing up with a big military convoy that drove through the PCC. (Aztlan, before doing this, gave a lrge chunk of land to the PCC, namely, a chunk of Texas nearly as large as Louisiana, the so-called "Rio Gambit". That the PCC did not immediately turn around and give this land to the CAS has caused a rift between those two countries and moved the PCC closer to being friendly with Aztlan)

Elijah used the chaos of the Aztlan-PCC transfer to slip down into the region and examine some of the mana hole (Faovre? I can NEVER spell it right!) where he discovered that spirits wouldn't go near them willingly, and eventually he projected his own astral form into one. He wound up having BAD JUJU VISIONS of a chasm and a bridge and bloody spirits and stones being used to rebuild a broken bridge and kind of lost his mind for a bit, but managed to fall back into his body and is still dealing with the trauma of that.

Wild spirits are cropping up more often, especially in areas that have been visited by the Yellowstone Incident. These spirits aren't Free Spirits (summoned spirits that broke away from their masters) but seem to be either spontaneously generated (if you're Hermetic) or woken from a deep slumber (if you're a Shaman) and have been reclaiming some areas, serving as local protectors. Of note is that they haven't just been in natural areas, but spirits of the city, and other urban environs, have cropped up. New elementals have also been uncovered, such as Electricity, Plastic, and Concrete. Ghost Trains are a Thing, haunted spiritual ships have been seen, and there's at least one Parliament of Cars that can be visited for advice.

Oh, and people are calling into question the Unified Magic Theory based off this, and other, new discoveries, such as mana planar beings that have nothing to do with spiritual energy from Earth's manasphere.

There's a LOT going on out there and I'm not even scratching the surface on the magic front.

Oh, HMMV has been acting weird, and some new strains have been possibly created as vampires and ghouls have been acting more feral and wild. Some hidden vampires were outted, public ones snapped, and it's been a rough time for their kind. The Ghoul Nation in Africa got exposed for having a much larger population than first thought, keeping their feral members hidden. The Ethomalian Territories, who long ago sealed their borders and are *very* restrictive about who gets in, claim to have some kind of weapon of mass destruction that can be used against ghouls, and that their nation is 100% ghoul-free, setting up a bit of a cold war between the two nations, where they basically pretend that one another don't exist and don't mess with one another at all.

Crater Lake went from being a mana source to being a mana drain and the birthrate of Talented people, and Metahumans, has started going down in the Tir since then. The reduction is *very* small, but they fear it could get worse. The area's offlimits for any but the top-end Tir officials and the military, and lasers are used to blind flyover sats.

There's... man. There's a LOT. Forbidden Arcana gives you a crash course on much of this, while Dark Terrors will take you on a tour of the nastier stuff.

Oh, and Sirrurg the Destroyer parked a Category 6 hurricane over Puerto Rico for 24 hours, using spirits to feed it wind and water, then he, and his dragon allies, flew into the storm (protected by magic and bound spirits) and proceeded to la waste to anything they could find, starting with NatVat, then spreading out to gobble up people and wreck the place. The damage is incaluable, and when it was over, Aztechnology washed its hands of the place and walked away. The island's absolute devastated.

Sirrurg earlier wiped out an entire city in Aztlan, and later svaged several in Aztlan, the PCC, and the CAS, while operating out of a cave near Rsowell, New Mexico. He was eventually tracked down by the Aztlan military, and Aztechnology assistants, and was brought down. This turned Aztlan into "Dragon Slayers" and gave them a HUGE PR boost that they're still riding high on.

(About the time that Puerto Rico was ravaged, a plague of some kind struck the corn fields of Aztlan, as well as corn stored in silos, and ruined it. This blight, called the Atlacoya Blight, was never fully understood, but vanished roughly a year after it appeared. This, combined with the loss of NatVat, stuck Aztlan into a serious famine cycle for two years and drove up the value of food worldwide. Horizon managed to snag the Wind River underground farm complex during this and is now the largest agricultural provider in North America by a hair.)

Lofwyr and Alamais fought the climatic battle of the Dragon Civil War, which Lofwyr won, letting his human hirelings slay his brother rather than do it with his own claws in defiance of Dragon tradition. He resigned from being Loremaster after this, passing the role to Celadyr. Lofwyr is known to have suffered some kind of magical strike during this battle that was from afar, but, as of yet, nothing more of that attack is known.

(Are you up on the whole dragon civil war? It was a Thing.)

I just wanted to say a big "Thanks!" Wakshaani before I dive into something that is going to completely melt my brain in a wonderful way.


Sure!

I'm sure that there is law of diminishing returns when it comes to brain melting anyway.

I have Clutch of Dragons on my shelf, I think it might've been the last thing I bought.

Man, that is a lot.

Seriously, don't do this to me again. I just knee-jerk bought it for $18.

Gaaaah!

Yeah, trying to juggle all of this, and remember what I can say in public and what I can't, is tricky. Like *I* know the backstory to some of this (but not all!) but I have to check and see what's been published, what's in the pipeline, and what's not on paper anywhere.

For instance, I had to track down what was meant by "Where the rock meets the sky" from the will, but it's never been released, so I can't talk about that at ALL.

5E had a TON of books and I only worked on maybe, MAYBE a third of 'em, probably less, so there're lots of subplots I have to check up with other people about.

But I can say that Forbidden Arcana and Dark Terrors are filled TO THE BRIM with goodies.

My bank account is shaking a fist at you right now. Like, really vibrating with the implied "Waaaaaghhhh!"

Wish more of my Ork army was painted. I should *really* give you a good reply here.

(Forbidden Arcana's the one I like more, but we won an award for Dark Terrors, so I think it was more popular.)

((TECHNICALLY my second Ennie, but I don't count the first one since I wrote, like, five lines of Shadowtalk and nothing else.))

It's all golden. As long as there is good craic that's what I love.

Is that where the Ghostwalker stuff is?

Depends on the part. Ghostwalker's in the Artifacts adventures, then gets time in the Dragon Civil War, and his big fight with Harley's in Stormfront. Since then, he's mainly been quiet in his little Denver fiefdom.

Some might say TOO quiet...

Are the "Artifacts adventures" the Dawn of the Artifacts adventures?

Sorry, in trying to break back into Shadowrun I'm having to deal with the standard "Can I have a vowel?" situations?

Those are the ones, yup!

(And no need to apologize! I know how it can be trying to get back in. I took about a year off and I was shaking other writers, going, "What the heck is THIS thing?!" It happens!)

I have the first few Artifacts advenrltures, then the delay in releases led to me having to wrap it up on my own shortly before losin that group. I actually have no idea how those ended, but I guess that's the setup to the rift stuff?

Yuppers.

OH!

Almost forgot!

As a side-effect of Ghostwalker closing the DC rift, the Shedim no longer have a path to get to our world. Thus, whenever one is destroyed, it goes home, never to return, making them a limited-time threat.

Some Master Shedim realized this and got together to work out how to teach metahumans how to summon Shedim, similar to bug spirits and bug shamans.... common Shedim are fully under the control of the summoner, but it gives a pathway for new Shedim to come in. What the long-term plan of the Master Shedim is by teaching this ability isn't fully known, and there are *very* few people who have this ability (less than a dozen, probably half that), but it could, *could*, turn into a Thing.

Doing this requires changing your magical tradition. That's been *possible* for a long time (the first known insect shaman, from Queen Euphoria, was a Dog Shaman before he heard the call of Ant, for example) but this is codified in Forbidden Arcana.

Also Elementals are back, far, FAR more subservient spirits that Hermetics can call up that have the downside of being rather dumb.

I didn't realize Elementals ever left, fluff-wise. I just thought they were mechanically reskinned to simply Summoning in general. Neat that they're back, though.

Also, it never really occurred to me that there would need to be rules for changing your Tradition, but I guess it makes sense. It both never came up, and I figured I'd be refluffing it as GM as I went if a PC went Toxic, or Bug, or something.

FA introduced several new traditions, some of which are temptation-based, like bug shamans, blood mages, and Shedim-summoners, so it was the perfect place to codify "Here's how to change it up" in case someone's character wanted to go that route instead of ap layer making a whole new character to start anew. Obviously it's going to be *super* rarely needed, but, you know, tool in the toolbox and all that.

I always try to put a few things in that are more for background than for PCs, to help showcase the world. Popular TV shows, ad micro=blimps, how someone trads in their tradition, and so on. 95% is PC-focused, but those other little bits are keen. For instance, I hope no GM ever unleashes the fuel-air bomb drone from GOD onto a PC's head since that's just a TPK, but having that threat laying around that, if needed, GOD can, and will, level an entire city block to get a single decker if they're valuable enough … speaks volumes about the world as a whole, you know?

Yeah, that sort of extra detail is very nice. Helps people get the world and integrate fluff into characters. And the threat of a fuel-air bomb is always nice to have when the trollbow goes trollerskating too hard.

To be fair, the in-setting commentary is one of the things that make most Shadowrun books so enjoyable to read just for the sake of reading and mining for ideas.

Shadowtalk is my favorite thing about how the books are formatted. It's very, very good.

For the record, it's my favorite thing to write, too.