Also while I'm glad the sheddim are gone (no stealing my body while astral projecting) where they just dropped or is there an ingame explanation about what happened to them.
The explanation is that when the Watergate Rift was closed, the shedim sort of vanished. No one knows where they went, and there's certainly some possibility that there are a few left over, but it appears that the connection between our plane and there's is closed. If one were to encounter shedim now, they're nowhere near as scary and powerful.
The out-of-game explanation is that shedim were a tie in with Earthdawn, which is no longer an IP owned by Topps. This means that Earthdawn can't be used by Catalyst, and can't be tied in to Shadowrun anymore. Of course, this might change in the future (as this IP has changed hands more times than Paris Hilton's sex tape).
That's not quite right.
Master shedim can't summon new shedim, but those on Earth remain unless and until they are killed or they figure out a way to reconnect to their home plane some other way, which is so "far" away that the rift was a sort of door jamb even though new shedim didn't come through the Rift and so it's not like the portal was closed, per se (
See every sci-fi blockbuster of the last decade). It's complicated. There's an artifact in Clutch of Dragons that might itself allow them to do that, or help, or
As for the OOC reasons, I don't recall it having anything to do with Earthdawn. First of all, I don't think the shedim are Horrors. Ultimately, Horrors need and want life to continue, albeit corrupted; shedim want the death of all things. But aside from that I think that the way I pitched it was to change their threat dynamic, to create a couple of plot threads, and for other reasons I won't discuss.
The Rift closure does have a Horror connection through Aina, but that's for another day.
I got long winded, but my point was that sex IS important to any large scale social setting, but to dwell too much on it for too long in character, tends to creep players out a bit.
It's a fun little balancing act with every group.
It's also a cultural thing the publishers have to worry about. RPGs still have this stigma and publishers still have that concern about being seen as corrupting influences, and because the U.S. is so weirdly tolerant of violence and fearful of sex, it is something that just gets a very light touch if at all because RPGs are aimed at males age 10-up. With regard to Shadowrun, this is a policy decision that Catalyst
and Topps have to consider.
That said, the Sixth World is pretty damn liberal when it comes to sex, sexuality, and gender. There are some rather powerful gay and lesbian plot characters, and some are LGBT but it's never been mentioned. I made DeeCee, locally and the UCAS federally, a gynocracy by today's standards and it didn't even register with me nor with the characters in the text. I didn't even notice it until I realized I forgot to add an entry for Anne Penchyk and then looked at all the named figures and realized that in a book titled
Conspiracy Theories no one even suggested (I don't recall. My memory's hazy because I just finished law school finals and I'm still consumed with statute sections and case names) that the UCAS government was run by a feminist cabal or, because I mention Penchyk and this was what I was checking, Mantis Spirits via the Empowerment Coalition/Timmons Fund — either as Mantis spirits or simply their allies like Penchyk, who is canonically an ork (and is old enough that she needs to be replaced soon).
I'm getting away from my point, but there soft limits to what most RPG publishers will touch, and for SR there's also the complication that violence is so predominant to the game that probably pushes the line further along the sex and violence spectrum. Of course this is all my personal opinion. But it's the same line of reasoning I've inferred when it comes to publishers (RPG and others) covering faith and religion. Yes, there's enough material already out there or hinted at to write a Deep Shadows book on religion, but even when discussing new religions or religions that have changed pretty drastically, e.g. Roman Catholic Church, to say it requires a delicate touch is a tremendous understatement.