Back during 4th, I wrote bits of a setting that places Shadowrun back about a hundred years: VITAS hits with the 1918 flu pandemic, and is mixed with the Awakening (pregnant women who got the "spanish flu" during the first wave gave birth to dwarfs and elves, and a lot of survivors slowly turned into dwarfs or elves themselves, a lot of people hit by the second wave Goblinized and/or developed magical powers); magic users play a prominent role in the Irish civil war and in the US's Prohibition-era bootleggers, and a lot of native American youths cause trouble with their magic and then flee back onto the reservations; during WWII, the nazis are anti-metahumans while the Russians use a lot of Trolls and Orks in their front lines; bits like that. Augmentation would be the result of a law enforcement countermovement against magic users, combined with post-WWI prosthetics. Shadowrun would basically play during the Cold War, in the 1960s-1970s era, while technology would be about 25 years ahead in some areas.
The hardest things with converting the setting to the Cold War would be biometrics and the Matrix: with very few wireless connections, technomancers would mostly be about intercepting radio and radar/sonar signals; commlinks would be far more low-tech; Pilot programs would be missing in most vehicles; and GPS would still be pretty expensive and mostly used by the military.
A commlink (or "minicomp"), for example, wouldn't have a wireless router, cell phone, chip reader, gaming device (Pong is from 1972, so that's the level of games you'd expect even if you did), or wallet/credstick (except maybe for 'ghosts', which is the setting-specific term for shadowrunners). They would, however, have a small computer (on level with our world's 1980s computers, at the most), a radio, an instant film or microfilm photo camera, stuff like that. Smartguns would be pretty expensive, too.
Anyway, my point is that given how much work is involved with moving Shadowrun back 100 years, moving it back 200 years would be even harder technology-wise:
- 1830s: lawnmower, sewing machine, steam shovel, Colt revolver, photography, the telegraph, matches, conceptual design of a predecessor of the computer
- 1840s: general anaesthesia, accuracy problem for early rockets "mostly solved"
- 1850s: Darwin, epidemiology, first airship, first distillation of petroleum
- 1860s: First Transcontinental Railroad, Gatling gun, Suez Canal, submarines, dynamite, internal combustion engines, basis for genetics, modern periodic table
- 1870s: prototype telephone, light bulb, phonograph
- 1880s: first central power plants, electric tricycle, first solar cell, electric fan, safety iron, first automobile, dry cell batteries
As you can see, even if you advance technology by about 20-30 years, there'd be a lot of technology missing (even weapons-wise: there wouldn't be a lot of machine guns that anyone could carry around; grenades either had paper fuses or a combustion mechanism that required them to land on their nose; sniper rifles may have reached an 'effective accurate' range of up to a mile during the 1870s, but they didn't begin training soldiers with them until WWI, and "reasonably accuracy" of over 600m wasn't reported until the end of WWII; missile and rocket launchers didn't really get used until post-WWI), so you'd have to steampunk the
heck out of every bit of technology. It might be better to use a different system.
