[Kato]

I was watching a video on Youtube about Shadowrun lore the other day, and one of the commentators brought up an interesting point, so I wanted to see what everyone thought. His general train of thought was that Shadowrun has a distinctive style, but this style changes over time. For instance, when first launched Shadowrun was a combination of the wild west, with its lawlessness and duster wearing gunslingers, and Japanese cyberpunk, all neon and rebellious of the corps.

I have felt, since my return to the game from 2nd and 3rd editions, that the general "feel" of the game has shifted substantially. I couldn't put my finger on it at first, I thought maybe it was just my players who tend to want to play the good guys rather than the straight up criminals that my last group played. But after watching that video I realized that whole tone of the game has become reflective of a different time period in real life. Everything is wireless in the game now, the traffic is grid linked, and it seems to have shifted to a Mission Impossible feel.

I started wondering what a futuristic society with Shadowrun's background would look like if we had the technology that we have now and projected it into that society. With smart houses, wireless technology, widespread hacking, and VR tech very much a reality now, what would this translate into in another 50 years or so. Or did the game actually need to evolve past that 1980's version of the future? It is an alternate universe, is it conceivable that it could simply remain with pink mohawk sporting, duster sporting, wired up runners fighting to survive down on the streets amid the leavings of massive corps that have taken over the world? Maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic for the old version...

[Ajax]

Styles change overtime. It’s not 2050 anymore, chummer.

[PatrolDeer]

There is an opinion that the next evolution step will be merging with the tech to a point in which you can switch bodies or rather consciousness. Upload yourself on the Matrix and back. I recently saw an exposition where a Japanese photographer made a series of portraits of Androids, robots with human features. It was called "One of them is Human" and it featured 4 portraits of individuals. Its underlying message was to spot the Human among Androids, but to be honest, I had no idea which is which and that was pretty freaky!

I feel that that is where the future is going with chat bots, automated contracts working on Distributed ledgers and data mining. We won't be able to distinguish humans from AI as we both move closer to each other.
Ghost in the Shell, yes.

On the other hand, look how language works in the case of Emoji. Isn't that sign language and hieroglyphs all over again ? Or regions re-introducing it's own currency to divert and stimulate inner circulation of money. Scarcity of resources and crafts might bring back barter. Urban gardening communities, crowd-funding and sharing platforms, general idea of less ownership, less wide connection and more focused, narrower connection. Boom of Yoga and mindfulness, spirituality, healthy living, sustainable energy, ...

Even though poor are getting richer, the rich are even more rich. There will always be a gap, there always be the other side of the coin.

[Reaver]

As to the future.... I'll leave that to the future   

Still want a hover cycle though 

As to SR... things had to change, just to keep up with changing times....
Back when SR was developed, the "internet" was still an educational/military toy, and not really open to the public - the piblic used BBS systems.... independant computers that you had to phone in to (so you needed the phone number) with a modem! And the speeds!!!! All day for a 200k file!!

By 2004 (when 4e came out and really chnaged things)... this just wasn't a reality anymore... so yea... wireless matrix....

There was also a flavor change too.... instead of Dystopian... the creaters of 4e pushed a more transhumanism flavor.... which, suits some.... I guess

[FastJack]

Back when SR was developed, the "internet" was still an educational/military toy, and not really open to the public - the piblic used BBS systems.... independant computers that you had to phone in to (so you needed the phone number) with a modem! And the speeds!!!! All day for a 200k file!!

Unless you had access to a DECstation laboratory since your CompSci department had a military contract. 

[Reaver]

Back when SR was developed, the "internet" was still an educational/military toy, and not really open to the public - the piblic used BBS systems.... independant computers that you had to phone in to (so you needed the phone number) with a modem! And the speeds!!!! All day for a 200k file!!

Unless you had access to a DECstation laboratory since your CompSci department had a military contract. 

It got used a lot in universities in the mid 80s more then the military (they had their fun with it in the late 70s - early 80s).
By 1992, the internet was commercially available.... but your speeds and... webpages were limited, by today's standard.
Lots more text, lots more pics.... no sounds or flash video playing......



Kinda hard to keep everything the same, when to roots of your scifi game are in the dinosaur age



But it happens more then you think.... if you look in the ORIGINAL star trek technical manual.... the Constitution class space ship is run off of a 486 40mhz processor

[Giabralter]

Back when SR was developed, the "internet" was still an educational/military toy, and not really open to the public - the piblic used BBS systems.... independant computers that you had to phone in to (so you needed the phone number) with a modem! And the speeds!!!! All day for a 200k file!!

Unless you had access to a DECstation laboratory since your CompSci department had a military contract. 

Mine was connected to the Denver Backbone, though we still had dial-up for communications and my friend ran the BBS. 

[Ajax]

The earliest days of Shadowrun were based not on “the future” but on what people in the Seventies and Eighties thought “the future” would be. Remember, in William Gibson’s Neuromancer — an obvious inspiration for Shadowrun’s first two editions — there are no cellphones, there are no drones, and “three megabytes of hot RAM” is a valuable black market commodity. Consider as well the other major inspiration for the game, Bladerunner: People might have flying cars, but they use car phones rather than portable cellphones and only the really rich or government agencies have carphones, everybody else has to use a payphone, police photo analysis is done on a dedicated (and very noisy) device rather than as an application on a general purpse PC. In RoboCop they still use floppy discs and monochrome computer displays.

It was the Eighties’ vision of the future. Scary stoic Japanese businessmen were going to rule the world, computers were magic, the police-state had everyone under surveillance, and synth-pop punk-rock was the music of rebellion, chummer.

They cleverly decided to advance the timeline with later editions, which let the fictional world evolve in technology and social trends to change with the times. Later editions of Shadowrun gave us the Nineties’ vision of the future in 3rd and 4th Editions. Now we're solidly in the 2000-2010's idea of the future.

Scary stoic Japanese businessmen are still there, but so are the bizarre street-fashions, nerdy otaku, and kawaii mascot characters. Portable pocket computers are ubiquitous and social media has become a panopticon of surveillance people voluntarily join, and only your grandpa listens to punk-rock, omae.

[Viktor Renquist]

Hmmmm

Is it possible that the change in style is actually one of altered perception?

I ask this because of the deliberate inclusion at the beginning of the 5th and 6th editions of the “Everything has a Price” section. That is fleshed out, later both in the Core books and various supplements with guides and suggestions for alternative settings.

I’d argue that the feel and style is created primarily by the umpire/GM ... along with input from the players themselves. In general, most of my players seem to be a right pack of criminal larrikins … albeit often with hearts of gold. Well, silver, anyway.

I tend to enjoy running games that a combination of self-written and repurposed adventures that will eventually include arcs of storytelling. They normally include some aspects of hooding, along with some neo-A philosophy and anti-racist activity. YMMV, of course.

I nice meaty subject for a first post.

[Michael Chandra]

The final characters in my home campaign (pretty much everyone switched character at some point) were an enthousiastic civvy baking cupcakes for some side business in her downtime, a former teacher who would use his medic and magic to help the downtrotten in a clinic in the OU, a Puyallup mind-control mage running a soup kitchen, a small troll enthousiastically writing shadowrunner novels based on the experience, and a four-armed guy living with an ally spirit with both pretending to be human who was trying to make his banker contact more powerful. I blame starting with the Ork Underground storyline from SRM, that really set the mood. After a character has ended up utterly pissed due to Bull getting his arm blown off, there's no way back for the players it seems.