It's a work in progress, and input would be appreciated.
Part 1: Prologue
The Sixth World began on December 24, 2011, but the Shadowrun World effectively begins in 1986. Without getting too many details as to the how and why, it is the pivot point in time between our reality and the fictional setting. It’s important to emphasize this, however, because events occurring in Shadowrun’s “present” were shaped by and continue to reflect this world; a world without the collapse of the Japanese bubble of the 1980s, without the Internet Revolution of the 1990s, without the relative stability of the immediate post-Cold War decades, and without the socioeconomic signposts and shifts that are now a part of contemporary history in the real world. That isn’t to say that the Sixth World’s history is entirely different from ours, but enough of it is to be noticeable. One might argue that the non-existence of a free and open Internet alone is enough to make Shadowrun’s past and present as alien as the most fantastical setting; a world where social media as we know it was never allowed to develop, where supply drove advancement rather than demand, and instead of the interconnected, mobile world of today, th 2010s had the fastest dialup service one could ever need.
This isn’t some ahistorical explanation; this is the world that has been borne out of developments preceding the publication of the original Shadowrun rulebook in 1989. As the real Internet was becoming part of American households, Nigel Findley was painting a world far unlike ours — where the Clipper Chip didn’t die in the womb; where the obscenity provisions of the CDA weren’t held unconstitutional; where governments and corporations smothered the nascent World Wide Web in its crib until it was little more than the wasteland between walled-garden commercial services, bulletin board systems, and proprietary networks; and where the DMCA "Safe Harbor" never existed to protect startups that innocently hosted others' IP, uploaded by their users/customers (Thusly, social media could never have existed without this part of the DMCA). And that was merely the sideshow to the physical realm where a heavy-handed government cracked down on undesirable elements and even corporate independence while shedding itself of anything but the force of arms necessary to maintain only the state monopoly over use of force. It’s difficult to explain the kind of world and Internet Findley established as the predecessor to the Matrix; where Mark Zuckerberg would’ve been imprisoned for hacking the Harvard houses (assuming he’d have even made it that far), and people who cared more about censoring subversive and deviant ideas than about the potential for innovation and economic growth strangled Silicon Valley startup culture by enacting civil and criminal prohibitions against the most benign uses, alterations, or distribution of intellectual property.
The 1990s saw an escalation of violence across the world, but the corporations weren’t even allowed to protect themselves let alone sell their services to potential customers. The Seretech decision was a watershed moment in liberty, and would have rightfully been recognized as such. The story shadowrunners tell themselves is that Shiawase (I) and Shiawase (II) severed the government’s hand over corporations. It was a necessary evil at the time. Governments had proven themselves utterly incompetent; the Resource Rush was a moment of economic freedom and growth after a decade of economic and political disasters marred by strikes, riots, starvation, and stagnation. The Ordell Court of that decade is recognized as leaning towards pure libertarianism, but its decisions came at the end of a period where the government that seated half those justices was not exactly the best friend corporations had. Its policies speak for itself: restricting content on and access to the Internet, restricting the rights of people and corporations to defend themselves, literally militarizing law enforcement (viz. DEA), sitting on its hands as the Teamsters went on strike and allowed food riots to break out in America’s largest cities, and shuttering entire industries, up to and including national defense. Where it didn’t stand in corporations’ way to protect their assets or control the content broadcast or distributed on its networks, the Lynch Administration certainly didn’t help them any; refusing to break strikes, foster basic or discretionary consumption, or even deregulate access to natural resources or other commodities. That would come later, when the Bester Administration ushered in the Resource Rush. The reins over the corporations were removed, but the economic policies of the state remained that the business of the government was to minimize its power even further.
Meanwhile, Japan never experienced the real estate and investment bubble that would cause the lost decades in our world. That isn’t to say that its continued growth inspired the radical technological or economic advancements that we have seen in the last quarter century. Shadowrun’s consumers didn’t get the iPod; instead, they merely got the best CD player science could muster. In the 1997 film Men In Black, Agent Kay shows off a miniature CD as being the imminent replacement for CDs. That was the expectation at the time, and that was the reality in Shadowrun. As it happens, the hard drive in the first generation iPod — the actual replacement for CDs — released in 2001 was even smaller than fictional alien tech. The technological advances we’ve seen in the last thirty years never happened; instead, Shadowrun’s technology evolved in other areas similarly to how Steampunk aesthetic has emphasized advancements to make better zeppelins and trains than to develop airplanes and automobiles. In Shadowrun, we get space stations by the end of the century. The U.S. had Apollo, Russia had Mir, but Japan … Japan had the stars; it controls a constellation of satellites that collect solar energy and beam it to the surface via microwaves. The wildest dreams of the Strategic Defense Initiative came to pass as commercial developments once the U.S. government sold off its toys and even NASA to megacorporations like Ares Industries. The U.S. didn’t have energy policy. Shiawase had to fight the government for years and all the way to the Supreme Court to build a new nuclear power plant (The last plants to be built in the U.S. began construction in 1973 and 1977). As luck would have it, humanity would master nuclear fusion within the next two decades, a remarkable feat overshadowed by the monumental changes that ensure any similarities between our world and Shadowrun are purely coincidental.
Part 2: And So It Came To Pass
Shadowrun wasn’t entirely created or envisioned as such, but in many ways the game circa 2050 was a post-apocalyptic setting. The lack of world building helped facilitate this thinking, and to be honest, that’s what kind of drew me to the game when I first saw the Street Samurai Guide (coincidentally next to a copy of Twilight 2000). However, it’s also useful to help establish how the world works compared to the real world to acknowledge that there were a series of events that were for all intents and purposes apocalyptic and on top of that the Awakening truly did usher in a new world and clearly TEOTWAKI – The End Of The World As We Know It. Without the context of how long ago the Shadowrun setting diverged from the real world, it’s a bit hard to establish that the world and lore are even deeper and more fascinating than they already are for people who are new to the game.
So far, there are a couple of hard breaks that have allowed us to settle on the schism occurring in 1986, although that also disregards the connections to previous ages and elements of belief shaping magic and magic influencing faith and events in history. It’s also important to emphasize that even the official history of the elven states acknowledges the existence of spike babies born in the Fifth World. There’s also room to emphasize more of the conspiratorial thinking that Nigel Findley especially built into the setting with regards to how the NAN, Tír Tairngire, and Aztlan came into being by the actions of immortals and spike babies who prepared the world for the emergence of those states by weakening existing superpowers to ensure those states didn’t steamroll over the formation of those proto-states. It’s important to note that, especially compared to the post-9/11 world many new players have become accustomed to and probably is the only world they really know, that the setting predicted the 1990s arms reductions and how the superpowers reduced the size and scope of their militaries externally and refocused what was left internally. After Conspiracy Theories, it’s now canon that Reagan and Gorbachev did agree to the dismantling of virtually ALL of our respective nuclear arsenals. Subsequently, the Lynch Administration’s austerity measures gutted 40% of the Reagan-era military and would’ve eliminated SDI, Gorbachev’s sticking point to making the agreement in Reykjavik. Without the larger military (The U.S. has no foreign military presence by the time the Crash of ’29 occurs, but most of it was gone before the Ghost Dance War when units were recalled from abroad) and without the power of nuclear deterrence, it also explains how the U.S. loses a considerable amount of its soft and hard diplomatic power, especially as Japan militarized in response as well as in response to other events, e.g. the Second Korean War, and the ability to refocus resources once it deploys its microwave satellite array to alleviate power concerns. What was never stated, but could have been, is the idea that Japan militarized so rapidly by acquiring all of those mothballed American military materiel and personnel on the cheap and eventually forced them out as more Japanese nationals and the Japanacorps become accustomed to this newly aggressive, imperial mentality.
Anyway, VITAS 1 wiped out a quarter of the world’s population, even in the industrialized world and specifically in the U.S. VITAS 2 took another ten percent, reducing the American population by 1/3 in total. That doesn’t even include collateral casualties, and the near simultaneous occurrences of VITAS 2 and Goblinization really shook up societies, but in different ways depending on how connected those communities were when VITAS 2 hit. In some places, Goblinization was more accepted because at least it wasn’t VITAS. In more developed countries, the two were conflated and led to even more prejudice than what would’ve been normal under the circumstances. It was also within a short enough amount of time for the U.S. and Canada to think it was a bio-chem or magical threat from the NAN, which would’ve increased tensions and made the NAN more focused on its eastern borders (meanwhile Tír Tairngire was preparing secession within southern SSC). However, these pandemics would’ve increased the willingness for people to physically isolate themselves via arcologies and to segregate the poor, the weak, and metahumans into Z-Zones and ghettos. The reduction in the populations would’ve eliminated a serious problem that we see today vis-à-vis automation and the outright lack of importance of individuals as consumers and as employees – something especially important for the megacorporations. So automation increases because it’s a necessity as well as providing an economic benefit to the megacorporations, and justifying the eventual division of people into corporate citizens who are useful consumer-producers of the companies and everyone else who comprise external consumers but also as existential threats to the corporations. However, this all comes to a head with the Crash of ’29.
The Crash of ’29 is in many ways regarded in the earlier text as being TEOTWAKI. Hyper-automation fails when the Internet and computer systems in general fail, but the failsafes and measures put into place to maintain civilization during the VITAS, ecological, and magical pandemics keep the world limping along for a few years until the Crash Virus can be countered and eventually the Matrix is established. However, the damage is done and those temporary systems break down, resulting into political schisms and balkanization across the world because no one or no region wants to be considered expendable or low priority when the powers that be are trying to keep civilization from collapsing entirely. Subsequent to this and the fears produced by the Crash, the megacorporations and society in general re-evaluated the economy and the distribution of income and resources. The world didn’t need or care about those making money based on ethereal rents and other intangibles. What mattered instead were the physical world and physical commodities and consumables. In a way, the economy reverted to the postwar economy before 1972, which coincidentally explains why the economy in early Shadowrun seemed so similar to that of the 1970s-80s and manufacturing mattered while banking, investing, and rents didn’t. Your hedge fund doesn’t matter to the people who can produce food or provide security because stocks, dividends, and intangibles in general didn’t matter to people who were starving. Post-Crash economics was effectively barter-based without expressly acknowledged as such. As I noted in Seattle Sprawl, the reason why men like Knight and Villiers succeeded in the post-Crash world; or more importantly, Aneki, Yamana, Wu Kwan-Lei, and of course, Lofwyr are because they could manage the megacorps to ensure that their citizens were fed and housed above all and to ensure that when the global economy returned that those megacorps could make money off the backs of the non-affiliated and each other corporations. Post-Crash, automation took a backseat to fears about another Crash, and Matrix development slowed because the entire infrastructure and technology regime was rebuilt with an emphasis on security and survivability instead of openness.
Then The Night of Rage occurred, and everything nearly went to Hell again. And for those playing Shadowrun in the 2050s, unless the PC was an Otaku in the latter half of the decade, the Night of Rage was almost certainly personal. It's one thing to note it in the abstract, but I've had to point out just how important it was to a couple of people recently. If you played the first three editions of Shadowrun and your PC was metahuman or related to a metahuman – your PC was victimized that night, and if it's a Seattle native PC barring some rare corpkid exceptions that victimization is guaranteed. Shadowrunners in the 2070s, especially now (2078) hear about it. Runners in the 2050s were just assumed to have run for their lives from the flames and killers in those warehouses or on the Tacoma docks. Think about it this way – every metahuman in Seattle on the Night of Rage has a shared experience similar to being in the twin towers on 9/11. That's how universal and serious experience those communities share. And others in communities just like it faced the same or worse. And yet, that shared experience, like IRL, changes everyone in vastly different ways. But that's a longer discussion for another time.
What made the response different and what CP2020 players could never understand when they would complain about the game’s lack of racism at the time (beyond the fact that too much racism would have made the game sad and not fun, which defeats the point of it being a game) is that the megacorporations and their puppet states and regimes declared from on high that racism would only be tolerated to a certain degree or else they would violently intervene because too much chaos is bad for business, and they didn’t want further escalations like what happened during the previous decades’ catastrophes. Every day the world was just a few steps away from backsliding into chaos and otherwise just tipping over into Armageddon. Sure, the WMDs were supposedly almost all gone, but there will always be cheaters and the operative word is "almost" in that scenario. Additionally, magic is a giant X factor that needed to be contained and controlled. Too much knowledge was a dangerous thing.