The Basics

This is everything the crew takes for granted. None of it is rules — the GM carries those. It's what your character already knows and would never bother explaining.

For how the world got this way, read The Sixth World. For what we changed from published Shadowrun, Homebrew.

Magic

About one person in a hundred can use it on purpose, and that person can always find work. Mages learn it as a discipline; shamans work through a spirit they have a relationship with. Both are learned, both take years, and neither is inherited.

What magic can't do is scale. You can't mass-produce it, staff it in shifts or buy it by the pallet, which is the only reason the corporations don't own it — so they own practitioners instead, one contract at a time.

At the table a magician can heal without a clinic, see through a wall in a way no sensor manages, ask a spirit a question, or put a room to sleep without firing anything. They are also physically ordinary, and they are visible to other magicians, which is a security problem nobody else on the crew has.

Los Angeles runs hotter than it has any business running. Not the hottest place on the continent — that's the Petén, and everybody knows it, and it is fifteen hundred miles away. But the background count here is well above what a city this far from an epicentre should have, and no institution has published a convincing reason for it.

If you ask a magician they'll tell you it feels like proximity to something, which is not a measurement and is the sort of thing magicians say.

Cyberware and bioware

Chrome is ordinary. A good pair of eyes costs roughly what a used car costs, half the people on a bus have something, and you can tell across a room who bought which — corporate work is invisible, street work is not.

The cost isn't money. Every implant takes something out of the part of a person that magic and healing both run through. You mend slower, you feel less, and past a point you can't do magic at all. There is no version of a character who is fully chromed and still a mage, and that trade is one of the oldest arguments in the game. Bioware is grown rather than bolted in, costs more, and is kinder about it.

One detail that matters here: an implanted limb is conspicuous inside a simsense recording, because it reports none of the noise a real one does.

Getting hurt, and who comes

Nobody comes. There is no public ambulance service here and no municipal anything, so emergency medicine is a subscription product like everything else.

DocWagon is the serious one. You wear a monitor, it watches your vitals, and when they fall off a cliff it calls a team out. What arrives depends entirely on what you pay for: the cheap tier is a van that gets to you when traffic allows, and the expensive tier is an armed aircraft with a doctor in it that will land somewhere it has no business landing and fight its way to you. They are famously willing to do exactly that, because a contract is a contract — and telling somebody which tier you carry is a small brag people make on purpose.

Three things about it matter more than the tiers:

• The monitor is a tracking device. A corporation knows where you are, continuously, and knows the precise minute your heart rate did something interesting. For people whose work depends on not having been anywhere, that is a real cost rather than a paranoid one.
• They come for you. Not the crew, not the client, not whoever is bleeding next to you. One contract, one body.
• They take you to their facility, where you will be treated well and written down.

CrashCart undercuts them, and street opinion on it is unanimous and unkind: cheaper, slower, crewed by contractors, and everybody has a story about what a CrashCart team recovered from a scene besides the patient. Some of those stories are true. People buy it anyway, because the alternative is nothing.

Which is what most of this city has. The realistic answer for a crew with no SINs is a street doc — a clinic with no sign, cash up front, and a standard of care that depends entirely on whether you found a good one. You already did: Dr. Esther Kwon, up a stair off an alley on Sixth Street. That's among the most valuable relationships a crew can have, and it's worth keeping in good repair before you need it rather than after.

The Matrix

You get in by putting a cable in your head. It's credentialed, cut into segments and watched, and going somewhere you have no credential for takes a deck and a specialist — and carries real physical risk, because the serious countermeasures are aimed at the person rather than the machine.

There's no open web to search. There are hosts, each owned by somebody, each keeping its own record of who came in. People say "the dark web" the way you'd say "the horseless carriage."

Nuyen and credsticks

The currency is the nuyen, ¥. Physical cash barely exists. Money moves on a credstick, and there are two kinds, which is most of what you need to know about the economy:

• Certified. The value sits on the stick and no name is attached; whoever holds it owns it. This is what runners get paid in, what a Mr. Johnson hands across a table, and what can't be traced, frozen or reversed. Lose it and it's gone the way cash is gone.
• Registered. Tied to a SIN. Works everywhere legitimate, audited forever, and no use at all to somebody with no SIN to tie it to.

So the crew lives on certified sticks, which means every payday is a physical object somebody could take off you.

SINs, and not having one

A System Identification Number is how a person exists on paper: a job, a lease, a border crossing, a bank, a hospital that isn't a street clinic, a court that will hear you.

Your characters don't have one. Some were born outside the rolls, far more were dropped during the plague years when nobody was maintaining them, a few paid to be removed. The consequences are practical rather than romantic: no legitimate employment, no registered credstick, no insurance, no landlord who can be held to anything, and no recourse whatsoever if somebody harms you — because a complaint needs a complainant who exists.

What people do about it is buy a fake SIN, which isn't a forged card but a purchased record sitting inside somebody's database. They range from excellent to worthless, they get burned, and a burned one is worse than none, because now there's a file. This is what the campaign is named after.

Simsense

Recorded experience: what one nervous system did, played back into yours. Not sound and pictures — muscle, balance, pressure, fear. It's the most valuable commodity in the setting and it was invented here in Los Angeles.

It gets its own page because the details decide whole jobs. Simsense covers what a master is, why one is worth stealing, and how thirty seconds of it identifies the body that made it.

Moving around, and carrying while you do it

There's no gun law in Los Angeles, because there's no legislature to write one. The question is never whether something is legal — it's whose ground you're standing on, which is the same question that decides whether you can drive somewhere and whether anybody notices the car. Getting Around covers all of it: vehicle access, where a vehicle blends in, the five carrying tiers, and how to lose a response team.

Who you work for

A fixer brokers jobs and takes a percentage; yours is Fontaine, and she's had the job for years. A Mr. Johnson is a client who won't give a name, and the courtesy is that nobody asks. A run is the job. A shadowrunner does deniable work for people who need it untraceable — a career available to you precisely because you don't exist on paper.

The words people actually use are on Style, along with what kind of game this is meant to feel like.