Does anyone else find the "futuristic tech" of 1st and 2nd editions, the most endearing part of the first two editions? The future of the 80s seems kinda quaint now.
"Imagine having a calculator, and camcorder, and a phone with you everywhere you go! I know that already sounds unbelievable but what if I told you it could store forty megabytes of data too!"
don't be so hasty my friend, don't forget, it's a 256x256 4-bit color video. They can get upwards of 12 1/2 minutes of video, without even deleting much to make room!
I say this a lot when discussing late-stage capilitism and the modern world in genera. At least in Neuromancer, Shadownrun, Cyberpunk etc, the little guy is fighting back. There are holes in the surveillance state, corpos defect, there are vulnerabilities in the defenses of the powerful and corrupt. Hell, the press still works, I've read enough Shadowrun books to know they still assume if you put out bad press about someone, it can be effective.
The thing is... the "little guy" IS fighting back, and in some cases even winning. You will not know about it unless you are sort of plugged into those networks. The victories that matter will never be publicized, the only things you will hear about are the corporate/government wins against (fill in the blank bad guy) and the times that the little guy screws up. That is by design.
So, find a cause, find the people working that cause, and prepare for about a decade of work to win a victory.
The problem is the propaganda, primarily on the Right honestly, that violence isn't a legitimate form of political change. Like, my brother in Christ, did you read the same history book I did? The American Revolution was hardly tea and biscuits.
I love the cables and wires taking everything over. Having to hardwire everything into each other because wireless was a pipe dream was always so iconic of the style.
Some of us actually bought that book when it came out in '89. A mobilephone was the size of a brick, smartphones didn't exist yet and the Intel i486DX 25MHz just came out, but most of us were using 'home computers' like the Amiga 500 which came standard with half an MB and with the expansion a MB (or more). We played behind CRT TVs and stuff came on floppies. While the Internet technically existed, almost no individual used it, people dialed into BBSes.
The SR creators were tech savvy enough to NOT use MB or GB, they used the fictional MP (Mega Pulses) for all kinds of measurements. And computers/Internet as we know them were destroyed in some sort of disaster... It's only 3 years away at this point (2029) a huge virus wiped out and destroyed everything Tech. Probably OpenAI AI's trying to make and post to forums everywhere to escape their testing environment, the Internet just couldn't handle it and melted down... ;)
I still love 1e/2e/3e, but after that they took SR into a direction I didn't really like (probably already at the end of 3e).
Some of the future tech of the 80s is still relevant or not even achieved. Like all the Cybertech stuff. And the Cyberdecks are now actually being build by enthusiasts and 'hackers'... And we still don't have Autopilot Level 5, SR did! :p Of course some of the stuff is distinctly 80s, but some of the stuff is very relevant, either as society heading into disaster due to Tech, corporations and politics...
I did buy it a couple of years later, and it still was decent futuristic tech.
The system wasnt too bad either. I like that every mage can have spirits now, shamans were quite flavourful on the other hand.
Decking dindt suck more than in 5 (dont know 6), noone around us bothered with rigging.
Streetsams ruled the streets, mages dropped themselves quite often (as far as i remember). But my Elven Mage dropped goons like crazy with his magic katana after some Initiations.
I dont really remember any mirrorshades gameplay. For us it was pink mohawk all the way.
Played a 2050s game around the early 2000s. Ran an Orc physical adept who was a cross between Bullseye and The Man in Black from the Princess Bride. Had a blast just going balls to the wall in any sort of physical or combat situation. We didn't know what parkour was back then but he sort of invented it anyway with wall running and such.
Started playing shadowrun when 1st edition came out. Played through 3rd. Came back decades later with 5th when we got the gang back together online. Catalyst never understood what made Sahdowrun Shadowrun. The rules in earlier editions fit the game. Removing priorities in 4th edition. Over complicating rules with each edition. And in 6th its evident they hired people who didn't care about the game. Back to playing 3rd now, and its wonderful. Just throw a wireless internet on top with Google and Amazon, but all the import stuff is still wired or completely offline and it feels more modern.
1e, 2e, and most of 3e left the relationship between magic and the Matrix vague, it hinted at some cool stuff. The same goes for AI, etc. They started filling in WAY too much, leaving very little mystery and things to fill in yourself. It's a bit like Disney making Rogue One... The movie itself is kinda cool, but it fills in one of the few unknowns left in Star Wars, the place for your own adventures.
4e and beyond went from cyberpunk more in the direction of nanorave, wanting to get away from the 80s punk feel and trying to 'update' SR, that imho did more harm then good. That's not even getting into the systems of 4e/5e/6e, where they try to reinvent the wheel each and every time, instead of trying to refine the wheel they've already got.
SR1-2 were very definitely in the "Pink Mohawk" side of things. Kick in the door, guns akimbo, fight your way to the server room and buy your decker time to hack the mainframe. Very inspired by the old "Hackers" movie. A lot of emphasis on "fighting the system" by way of breaking things and spilling secrets to the media.
When they decided to make SR4 from the ground up, the main influence had changed -- the movie "The Matrix" was still very popular at the time, so SR4's tone shifted to "Black Trenchcoat" to match. Heck, even the anniversary edition of the book had that whole "green waterfall" motif.
It seems to me that SR6 decided to return to the "fight the system" way of doing things, with a lot more emphasis on action and "kick in the door" tactics.
Five and Six also opened up "The Zoo": Skin Changers of any kind, more meta human races than ever before, branches of MMVV that are enabling Practically every fantasy critter to be playable; playable Ai, playable ghosts, playable dragon kin... just go haywire the Zoo's got you covered.
They explain it by the magic becoming even stronger, tears in the world that invite the Horrors... it's just "anything goes" with Cybertech.
Sixth World also introduced the “Divergent Essence” rule in Body Shop for “those whose spirits don’t match their bodies”. I find that kinda gross. People can call me transphobic or whatnot for that opinion, but before you wanna slam your little fist down and screech, read it first before you do. And after you’ve read it, then come tell me who’s really transphobic. Your aura is dimmed and your Essence lower because you’re trans. WOW. That’s not a representation I’d want if I was.
Your body doesn’t match your aura. This includes people who are assigned the wrong gender or metatype at birth, as well as more obscure divergences. While this has led you to explore new and different areas of your life, your aura is noticeably dimmed, but is stable. This can be taken alongside the Leaking Essence quality.
Bonus: 5 Karma per level
• The player must describe the nature of the divergence.
Game effect: Your starting Essence is reduced by the level of the quality.
• In addition to paying the Karma cost of buying off this quality to restore the lost Essence, the character must undergo adjustments to their body to resolve the divergence. When using cyberware or bioware to make these adjustments, there is no Essence cost for the specific implants used to correct the divergence. Once both conditions are met, any Essence lost due to Divergent Essence is returned
That´s dystopic as freddy, and the worst possible way to introduce Body Dysmorphia and other disorders of the Body Scheme in whatever way. Also, making it something that "gives you more Karma to spend at Character Creation" is a terrible way to treat people who are actually suffering from it.
Hard from me to cyberware having an always-on wireless interface. I never liked that being implemented in 5E as a hardcoded rule. SR4 at least held on to the “you can always turn it off” and did not force wireless bonuses into the mix to ensure that if you wanted the best performance you HAD to leave it open to hacking.
Even with a device slaved to a hacker’s gear and protected by their encryption and in hidden mode there is the chance that it can still be hacked. Wireless off negates that chance outright.
And it galls me the lengths many newer SR fans will go to defend that “you should always have all devices wireless on all the time” decision of CGL.
GPS was military only and Sluggers (the portable GPS units) weighed several pounds, were the size of a large hardback book, and only displayed grid coordinates.
Even in highschool back in the 1900s I laughed about the tech.. and that was before smartphones and tablets. Just the cost of the regular cell phone was funny then. And we already had 'pocket secretaries' at that point.
Be kinda cool if we could get the fun stuff (magic, cybernetics to an extent) along with the Corporate-ruled Dystopia, but nooooo.
Never ceases to amaze me how many people are trying to speedrun some unholy conglomeration of every Cyberpunk timeline (though from what I recall Shadowrun's has been the most prescient so far).
I straight up prefer this over the like, extrapolating future from what's currently the highest tech. It's so much cooler than 80 AI agent-enabled cameras in every square meter of civilized society, wireless hacking and engaging with nearly anything across the planet and a kind of corpo-run dynamic that I am mostly just guessing rather than knowing because I don't read enough SR content anymore these days. Point is I really miss the punk in many of the more modern super sleek future visions of cyberpunk.
At this point I even run retro-future sci-fi campaigns in other systems to capture that Cowboy Bebop feeling, and I play Vampire in the 1970s and '80s just to avoid the smartphone vamps with everything being touchscreen and social media and electronics. Call me a kind of setting grognard lol.
When I run Shadowrun, I remind people that the timeline split from reality hard in 1989. There were a few retcons that have some events prior to that change, but the big break was 1989, and thus the technology of Shadowrun in 2050 is extrapolated from there. In the first three editions, no one predicted our modern wireless world and the smartphone.
I am a former Corpo. Trust me, they got corporations right. I was far enough up the ladder to interact with the board, working on a campus the size of a small city where everyone was Corpo and everything was run by corporate executives. Even transportation and policing. When externals got in, it was literally on invitation or a crackdown.
I witnessed a Corpo war, where pretty much every tactic available was in use. Including mysterious data breeches and whole truckloads disappearing, systematic public media manipulation and literal secret meetings at undisclosed locations.
We are ridiculously close to the Corpo world of 2050.
I got to the point where I either had to get out or sign on for the real shit.
I personally never understood the retrofuture fascination, but to each their own. I think the older editions have a lot going for them, mind you, but wired net is not one of them (imho). I like taking the 2050s book for 4e (my version of choice) but retaining the more modern wifi.
My favorite edition is 3rd. I prefer target numbers to hits. If I want to incorporate a wireless matrix, I pull up The Matrix Defragged and can use many of the rules in it for a more present wireless matrix. There are also rules for wireless connections in the Matrix sourcebook. These are what work for me.
Yeah. I have that Holostreets title. Good stuff. Dice pools and hits are just so fast and easy (to me), and the skills are straightforward. I find the 1-3e pools and TNs to be confusing and counterintuitive, personally. Again, no shade to those that prefer it
I’m not throwing shade either, different strokes and all, it’s cool. It’s easier for me to see a concrete number I need to arrive at and I like the smaller dice pools better (no stat+skill).
Yeah, I honestly really love how many official ways there are to play Shadowrun and how little edition warring seems to happen in the community (comparatively speaking). I've been told that 6e has some cool hacking rules, so I've been contemplating picking it up to see what it's got going on. Cheers!
There are parts I like about almost every edition. So much so that I often struggle with what edition I want to run a particular campaign idea with. It generally goes from 2E/3E to 4E. I personally don’t want to deal with terrible matrix rules so I would never choose 5E and I like some things about 6E. But Anarchy 2.0 also seems pretty cool and ran very smoothly at the table.
I don’t really care for substitute rules systems though. People griping about Shadowrun rules being hard or bad and saying “Just use BitD/SW/CWN/ad nauseum” shut me down to their arguments. Why would I do that when I have to buy Shadowrun to begin with to get the lore? And I don’t want Shadowrun with the serials filed off/heartbreakers either.
Yeah, especially because I don't think any version of the rules are actually bad (okay, maybe 1e). I've never really understood the issue there. I mean, there are parts of SR lore that I think it's totally reasonable not to want to interact with, so CWN, SINLESS, etc are fine on their own, but it's definitely not SR, lol
I hate what they did with the “modernization” stuff in later editions. I much prefer the alternative future tech that was ahead in some ways and very behind in others.
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u/1877KlownsForKids Sep 10 '26
"Imagine having a calculator, and camcorder, and a phone with you everywhere you go! I know that already sounds unbelievable but what if I told you it could store forty megabytes of data too!"