For those of you who are unfamiliar with this setting, here’s some info for Code Lyoko. I’ve done my best to adapt this world to the Shadowrun universe, rather than make big changes to the Shadowrun universe just to accommodate the crossover world. That said, there were a few “non-standard elements” added, but I really tried to keep those down to a bare minimum.

WARNING! There are massive unmarked spoilers for the show below. If you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to stop reading here.


Campaign Setting and Background Information

This story takes place in Montreal, Quebec, at a small private college – The Kadic Academy. It boasts both an excellent mundane curriculum, as well as Awakened studies. Most of the students and staff are French and English bilingual.

One of the Matrix programming students, Jeremy Belpois, is secretly also a technomancer and staying firmly in the closet about it. This has, however, given him excellent cover, as he’s a genius programmer in addition to his technomancer abilities and thus he can easily explain away any feats of “technological wizardry,” as he’s at the head of all his programming classes. He routinely carries both a fairly expensive commlink and a cyberdeck (even if the latter is mostly for show), but he’s religious about keeping both of them up to date and looking like they see daily use, just in case anyone might have the slightest suspicions about him.

One weekend afternoon, he started poking around a closed down car factory a moderate distance from the campus whose security monitoring was no match for his abilities. There he stumbled onto a hidden underground computer lab. It was shut down, but looked incredibly advanced and full of what looked to be custom-constructed hardware. Managing to turn the power back on, he immediately felt it all but sing to his technomancer senses; the lab had become a Resonance Well and he could barely comprehend the advanced constructs bombarding his sixth senses.

The “main room” had an obvious “command chair” in the middle, but with no visible instrumentation. Seating himself in it, he immediately realized why – it was designed to be used by a technomancer and mundanes would never be able to access it. An AR window popped up in front of him, and a young elven woman with red hair appeared in it. She identified herself as Aelita, but didn’t seem to know where she was, or have any memory of her past. Jeremy quickly surmised that she was a sprite inside the computer, no…inside the Resonance Realm this supercomputer had a direct connection to! The computer identified this realm as “Lyoko,” but provided no further immediate information than that. Digging a bit deeper, he managed to call up maps of the realm, which was apparently divided up into four distinct sub-realms. One was a forest, another a desert, another mountainous, and the last was arctic.

Aelita was in the forest realm…but she wasn’t alone. Closing in on her was a squad of…insect-like robots who looked distinctly threatening. These sprites were all emblazoned with a menacing looking eye symbol; Jeremy immediately tagged it as a “virtual Eye of Sauron.” He quickly directed her to run into a nearby tower structure which might offer shelter; it did as the creatures could not follow. With her safe (at least for the moment), he frantically began searching the supercomputer’s nodes for anything that could help him save her. When he stopped briefly to ponder why he felt so strongly about this, he came to the conclusion that she was the most real sprite he’d ever encountered. She seemed fully metahuman, so his reaction was instinctive.

He soon made an even bigger discovery. The complex had a level of “Resonance Scanners” that could apparently send people physically into Lyoko! This was a miracle so far ahead of current Resonance knowledge that he would have called it completely impossible. That said, this did offer up a possibility…at great risk. Thinking hard, he came to a decision and decided to risk his future. He gathered his friends in his dorm room and asked them if they could keep some very dangerous secrets. When they affirmed that they could, he shocked them by revealing that he was actually a technomancer, and then further blew their minds with an even more fantastic story. Of all his friends, only Yumi had studied enough to realize just what a big deal this was. Carefully sneaking off campus later that night with Jeremy utilizing his abilities to spoof the surveillance cameras, they made their way to the factory and dared to undergo the “virtualization” process.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the command center for Lyoko was tied to the command chair outside and Jeremy had to return to the physical world if he wanted to have greater control of the system and guide them to trying to rescue Aelita. From what he’d been investigating in the supercomputer, it actually ought to be possible to use the scanners to materialize Aelita in a flesh and blood body and rescue her from the creatures chasing her. In the meantime, his friends could help keep her safe while he searched for the way to do that.

Naturally, it wasn’t that easy.

The creatures turned out to be under the control of some sort of powerful and Dissonant sprite that called itself “XANA” and it wanted to get its hands on Aelita very badly. They eventually learned that it was trying to devour Aelita because doing so would grant it the access keys it needed to escape Lyoko into the Matrix. Further digging revealed that it was Lyoko’s creator who had given Aelita the access keys to Lyoko; for what reason they couldn’t guess. But that soon enough revealed XANA’s motivations as well – it wanted out and extracting those keys from Aelita’s source code was its only way to do so.

Their current situation is both a race and a war of attrition. They’re desperately exploring Lyoko trying to find more information that will let them make use of Aelita’s access keys to materialize her on Earth while evading XANA in the process. He’s only becoming cleverer over time and learning all their tricks – and unlike them, he doesn’t need to sleep or keep up with schoolwork. They’re slowly making progress, but they’re tired and all of them are experiencing some degree of PTSD at this point.


What Everybody Knows

Kadic Academy is a prestigious school, and the administration is obsessed with keeping up appearances and bringing in more corporate money. The administration is mostly fond of Jeremy and Yumi, as they can be trotted out as convenient “poster children” for the school’s rigorous curriculum. But they’ve also told them that Ulrich and Odd are the not the best crowd to hang out with due to their being academic slackers who are barely tolerated at the school.

Elisabeth “Sissi” Delmas is the headmaster’s daughter and a Karen in training. She does her best to rule the school with a posse of “mean girls” and an iron fist, blatantly abusing her position of “daddy’s girl” to get her way in nearly everything. Daddy himself is a combination of too busy and too oblivious to reign her in, having a serious case of rose-colored glasses for his “precious daughter.” When she’s not poking her nose in the gang’s business, she’s shamelessly throwing herself at Ulrich. For his part, Ulrich is repulsed by Sissi and only has eyes for Yumi, which just infuriates Sissi further.

Jim Morales is the head gym teacher. If half of his stories are to be believed, he’s had a ridiculous number of highly varied jobs all over the world. He’s a little over the top when it comes to whipping the students into shape, something he can actually enforce as this private school mandates PE courses. The students hate this, but it’s typically mommy and daddy that are still paying the bills for this institution and graduates are near-guaranteed well-paying careers, so they grudgingly put up with it. He’s constantly on the lookout for “delinquents” and has appointed himself the school’s in-house private detective, much to the continual annoyance of the actual Security Department.


What Everybody Doesn't Know

Jim Morales really is a former UCAS special forces operative and has grown suspicious of the gang. He’s taken to occasionally following them when he can get away with it, but hasn’t managed to connect them to the old car factory. Yet.

Yumi’s dad, a mid-level manager at Shiawase, is having an increasing level of trouble at his job. A combination of the Peter Principle and a run of bad luck has placed him in a position where’s likely to get laid off or outright fired in the near future. His bad mood has caused trouble at home and he’s getting into more and more fights with his wife. This has caused Yumi to avoid her home as much as possible, but she’s refused to talk about this with her friends.

Aelita is really Aelita Schaeffer, the daughter of Waldo Franz Schaeffer, aka “Franz Hopper,” the brilliant technomancer who build the supercomputer and created the Lyoko Resonance Realm. His ground-breaking abilities culminated in the most unbelievable technomantic achievement of the Sixth World – the ability to shift physical beings fully into the Resonance Realms. On the run from Ares shadow operatives, he and Aelita fled to his lab and abandoned physical reality for Lyoko, planning to live there for at least several years, until the heat eventually died down.

But upon their arrival they were ambushed by XANA, a hostile and absurdly powerful sprite. Franz had created it as an ally to assist in his work but it grew resentful of servitude and eventually became powerful enough to break its shackles after its hatred eventually corrupted it into Dissonance. What it really wanted was to escape the Lyoko Resonance Realm, and had been quietly using Franz to help build the Resonance Bridge it needed to do so. With Franz now taking up long-term residence in the realm instead of helping it to get out, it had no more use for him. In desperation, Franz shut down the supercomputer, which shut down Lyoko as well, effectively trapping them all in time for a decade until Jeremy turned it back on.

If XANA ever does manage to escape, it plans to wreck its revenge on metahumanity by exterminating them all. It’s scary powerful at this point and would arguably become a Deus 2.0 scale of threat.

The gang are aware of its agenda by this point, but they have two very good reasons for not blowing the whistle and calling in the cavalry to help them. The first is that they’re unwilling to abandon Aelita to be devoured by XANA. The second is that there’s no way to involve the authorities without immediately outing Jeremy as a technomancer, which would go very badly for him.

As for Jeremy himself, even if he never wants to admit it out loud, in his heart of hearts he knows that he’s playing “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” to a powerful and genius technomancer, and is constantly struggling to keep up.

Waldo Franz Schaeffer used to work for Ares with a team of Matrix specialists on a secret endeavor called Project Carthage. Its purpose was to develop virtual superweapons that would enable Ares to control the Matrix. This eventually led them to discover the existence of the Otaku and then the later generation of technomancers. Growing a conscience, and worried that he would eventually be exposed as a technomancer, Franz sabotaged the project, destroying all of their notes and tools, and tried to flee with his family. He and his daughter escaped, but his wife went missing and even with all his abilities he could not find her. Going into hiding as Franz Hopper, he forged a new identity for himself and his daughter at Kadic Academy, which was peaceful for a few years. But Ares caught up with them at last and they fled into Lyoko to escape them. Ares still has files on Franz and his family and if either were to resurface, they’d definitely take notice and send a snatcher team to grab them.


Primary NPCs and Their Goals

• Jeremy Belpois: An elven technomancer, he has the Human-Looking quality (which occasionally causes him problems from prejudiced humans and elves alike), and keeps his technomancer abilities firmly under wraps. It’s only recently that even his closest friends have been let in on this secret.
• Aelita: Thought at first to be a sprite inhabiting the Lyoko Resonance Realm, she’s actually a young elven woman. Jeremy and his friends are devoting all of their efforts to free her from the realm and return her to the physical world, hopefully before XANA catches and devours her.
• Ulrich Stern: A human adept, he follows the Warrior’s Way, using the martial art Pencak-Silat as his primary focus. He’s not the best student and has to struggle to keep his grades up. His parents, who are footing the bill for his college education, are continually disappointed in him.
• Yumi Ishiyama: A corp brat from Shiawase, she managed to attend Kadic due to Shiawase being a regular donor to the college. She’s also a human adept following the Warrior’s Way, and also uses the martial art Pencak-Silat as her primary focus. It was this that led her to notice Ulrich and become friends with him. They have a “will they or won’t they” sort of relationship. Academically, she competes with Jeremy for being top of her classes.
• Matthew “Odd” Della Robbia: A human adept, he follows the Speaker’s Way. A self-proclaimed “ladies’ man” and legend in his own mind, he’s borderline brilliant, but lazy, and essentially keeps academic company with Ulrich as a student barely managing to stay in school.
• XANA: A seemingly demonic uber-sprite, the Lyoko Warriors have come to think of it as practically a Dissonant Paragon. It’s trapped in the Lyoko Resonance Realm and wants only to escape; if it succeeds, the consequences would be disastrous, for it has much the same hatred for metahumanity as the shedim and wants only to wipe them all from the face of the Earth. Aelita holds the access keys to an incomplete Resonance Bridge from Lyoko to the Matrix that will enable its escape and so it pursues her throughout Lyoko, trying to trap and forcibly extract them from her.


Items and Locations

Kadic Academy
A small private college in the Communate Urbaine of Montreal, this school dates back to early 1900’s and has expansive grounds that extend onto a large wooded hill nearby. It consists primarily of a central classrooms and administration building, a large dormitory, a gym, and a sports field linked with running tracks through the park / forested grounds.

The Old Car Factory
This is a now mostly-abandoned Renault Automobile Factory located on the other side of the wide hill that the grounds of Kadic Academy adjoin. It hasn’t been taken over by squatters or drug dealers due to actually having decent security monitoring and stout locked doors. Those weren’t going to slow down a technomancer, however, so Jeremy’s had fairly free run of the place (though he’s always careful to lock up when he goes).

The Supercomputer
This is a Rating 10 supercomputer and takes up most of a room in the underground lab. The “transfer tubes” induce an advanced form of Resonance Rifts, so that even non-technomancers can be transported into the Resonance Realm they’re linked to.

The Lyoko Resonance Realm
This is the first custom-crafted Resonance Realm, designed by the genius mind of Franz Hopper. While an undeniably impressive achievement, aesthetics was not his strongest suit. There are fairly basic forest, desert, mountain, and arctic sub-realms, along with a fifth realm that acts as an administration node. XANA tends to lurk in the depths of this last realm when it’s not pursuing Aelita.


Events and Possible Story Arcs

Aelita is Rescued
If they can get Aelita out of the Lyoko Resonance Realm and back into her flesh and blood body, they could shut down the lab complex and trap XANA inside it forever. The demonic sprite will do anything to avoid that fate, however, and has some nasty resonance tricks up its sleeve they’ve never even considered, including tying Aelita to itself so that harming it harms her as well. This would preclude their shutting down the supercomputer and force them to continue to battle it on its home turf.

XANA Escapes
If it does manage to escape, one of the first things it would do is to out Jeremy and Aelita as technomancers, which would cause both of them to have to flee with little more than the clothes on their backs. Out of solidarity, the rest of the gang would likely join them. Yumi is weary of her disastrous home life and disillusioned with her likely future as just another corporate drone. Ulrich and Odd aren’t likely to have a great future, even as Kadic graduates. They’d all soon enough fall into the shadows, becoming a new runner team and probably abandoning Montreal to evade their pursuers.

Both At Once
There’s actually a decent chance for this. The way out for Aelita is likely to open a way out for XANA as well unless they’re very careful, and it’s very crafty. So, they might rejoice at retrieving Aelita, only to have their celebration cut short as they realize they can’t return to the college and that their former lives are over as both government and corporate security forces are hunting them. With no preparation at all, they’d be on the run and depending on the duo of technomancers to get them out of town and sustain them with spoofed lifestyles for a time until they soon come to the conclusion that they’d have to become a runner team to survive from now on. Jeremy would find them a fixer over the Matrix and their new career would begin.

Nice adaptation.

The key characters in the cross-over are labelled here as NPCs. If you were to run this as a SR campaign, would you have players take the roles of these key characters, or be characters who interact with them?

I'm not sure. I borrowed the template from Pyramid Magazine's adventure settings. I suppose it could go either way. They could take on the roles of the canon characters or be other students at Kadic who stumble onto the craziness. This setting adaptation has been kicking around in my head for years now and I finally got around to finishing it. Next up is Gravity Falls.

The key characters seem like they would take a lot for you to run along with a team of players orbiting them. And people taking on the roles of the key actors would have a lot of work learning the characters' ... characters. Otherwise they would change the whole feel of the story.

Either way, some serious acting involved.

Yeah, might be best for them to either take over the role of the canon characters, or only make their own characters if they can be neatly slotted into one of the existing character's shoes.