The Sixth World

Los Angeles, 2060. Magic came back, the corporations won, and you don't officially exist.

None of this is secret. Your character learned it in school, or on the street, and would be puzzled that anyone had to ask.

New to Shadowrun? The Basics is the short version of magic, chrome, credsticks and SINs. Some of this also differs from published Shadowrun, on purpose: Homebrew sets out what we changed and the six reasons why, and Style covers what kind of game it's meant to feel like.

The Sixth World

Magic works. It has worked since 2012, although nobody could prove it until 2029, and the proof when it arrived was a dragon photographed over the Atlantic by four countries at once. So: elves and dwarfs, born that way, the oldest of them pushing fifty. Orks and trolls, most of whom used to be something else and changed over three days in 2039. Spirits, if you know how to ask and are willing to pay. About one person in a hundred can do anything with it on purpose, and that person can generally find work.

Technology never paused for any of it. Cyberware is ordinary; a decent pair of eyes costs roughly what a used car costs, and you can tell from across a room who bought which.

The network is the part people get wrong. The open internet wasn't killed in 2044 — it had been closing for thirty years by then, down to a few platforms running on machines owned by three companies, and most people under sixty have never used anything else. What the Crash took apart in eleven hours was that: not a commons, a short list of very large houses. Being a short list is why eleven hours was enough. The Matrix that replaced it is credentialed, cut into segments, and watched, and nobody had to argue for building it that way, because there was no longer anybody to argue with. You get in by putting a cable in your head.

The largest corporations are extraterritorial in the legal sense. They write law, try criminal cases, keep armies, and answer to the Corporate Court, which is itself a corporate body. Walk through the doors of an Ares facility and you have left the UCAS in every sense a lawyer would recognise. Their employees are their citizens. Whether a person has that kind of citizenship, and whose, tells you more about their life than anything else you could ask.

The old countries are smaller now. The UCAS holds the northeast, the CAS the south, and the Native American Nations most of the west, which they took in a war and have held for twenty-four years.

Then there is the SIN. A System Identification Number is how somebody holds a job, signs a lease, crosses a border, or gets seen at a hospital that isn't a street clinic. A great many people don't have one. Some were born outside the system; far more were dropped during the plague years, when nobody was maintaining the rolls; a few paid good money to be removed. On paper they aren't there.

Timeline

This is our timeline, and it is not canon's. Real history runs unchanged through 2026 and everything strange happens after that — see Homebrew for why. Published Shadowrun runs its own version, dated roughly fifteen to twenty years earlier, and it's all set out on the Sixth World Wiki's Shadowrun timeline if you're curious. Nothing on this page requires you to read it, and where the two disagree, this page is what happened.

2012. The Sixth World is dated from 21 December 2012, which at the time was a punchline about the Mayan calendar. Nothing happened that anyone could see. Mana began rising in six places at once, and it rose the way compound interest rises — which is the entire reason nobody noticed for fourteen years.

Each zone roughly doubled its radius every two years, and a doubling only frightens you once the thing is already big. In 2012 every one of them was a few hundred metres across. In 2020 the largest was five or six kilometres. By 2025 the strongest was about one valley and the rest were smaller, and adding all six together still gave you less affected ground than Yellowstone. Then the curve did what curves do.

The six places, and what they have in common is not geology:

Every one of them is a place where an anomalous reading had nobody to report it to — or somewhere for the report to be filed and forgotten.

2013–2026. Afterward the evidence was easy to find. A cluster of children born across Chiapas and the Petén with skeletal malformations nobody could account for, filed as a syndrome and blamed by turns on pesticide runoff, a bad vaccine lot, and the mothers. Four new mammal species described in one watershed inside six years, three disputed and one retracted. Two sets of magnetometer readings taken on Salisbury Plain eleven years apart by graduate students who never met, neither published, one of them dismissed by a supervisor as instrument drift. A rise in psychiatric admissions among patients who claimed abilities and could not be talked out of it. None of it connected, because nobody was connecting it, and because it was happening in places where an anomaly gets a shrug and a grant application that doesn't get funded.

Ask anyone over fifty what those years were like. They'll tell you they were normal. They were right, as far as anyone could see.

2027. VITAS. Virally Induced Toxic Allergy Syndrome — nothing whose shape hadn't been seen before, and sequenced in nine days. The name is the diagnosis: what killed people was their own immune system. Two days of something like flu, then a rash, then the swelling, then the airway closing on somebody who had been sitting up and talking an hour earlier. A vaccine existed inside a year and here it made very little difference: uptake in North America never cleared forty percent outside the corporate enclaves, the surveillance programs that would have tracked spread had been shut down for budget years earlier, and no American government had the standing left to require anything of anybody. It killed for six years. The figure people use is a quarter of the world. The truthful answer is that record-keeping failed in the third year and in some countries never resumed.

It did not go the same way everywhere, and that difference explains the next thirty years. Japan vaccinated most of its population inside fourteen months. So did Korea. The states that still had the machinery to ask something of their citizens came out the other side with their institutions intact. The ones that didn't came out owned by their contractors.

Which is what happened here. What came through was corporate: they held the freight, the cold chain, the clinics and the walls, and nobody has since worked out how to take any of it back. It is also most of why the biggest companies in the world answer to Tokyo and Osaka rather than to anywhere on this continent.

2029. On the night of 13 April the asteroid Apophis passed 31,600 kilometres above the Atlantic, inside the ring of communications satellites, bright enough to follow from a lit street. It had been on calendars for twenty-four years and most of the planet went outside for it.

Which is how the first dragon came to be filmed from three continents at once, by people who had gone outside to look at something else.

2030. Once the admissions started they came fast. Magic was real, it was measurable, and it had been for eighteen years. That year's birth cohort was too large to keep calling a syndrome. In December a twenty-year-old named Daniel Coleman walked out of the Abilene Re-Education Center in Texas and took every person inside it with him, which nobody had believed was physically possible. He has been Daniel Howling Coyote ever since.

That cohort was not spread evenly, because the six zones weren't. The 2030 births clustered on the epicentres and the country around them, all six of them — so the largest elf and dwarf populations on earth are in Guatemala and southern Mexico, in Ireland and Britain, in the Pacific Northwest, in the eastern Congo, on the Tibetan plateau, and across central Australia. Six populations on five continents, thirty years old, with nothing in common but a coincidence of latitude and longitude, and entirely separate institutions, politics and opinions about each other.

Two things follow, and they are worth saying plainly. The Salish-Shidhe has an elf population with its own institutions and a territorial claim it has never dropped, which is a live political problem rather than a colour on a map. And metatype tracks distance from an epicentre in 2030 and nothing else — not ancestry, not culture, not anything anybody chose. Goblinization in 2039 didn't even have that much geography to it: it hit everywhere at once, in the same three days, at the same rate.

2032. War, between the Native nations and a United States that had assumed the question was closed. It ran four years.

2035. On 17 August at 10:32 in the morning, Hood, Rainier, St. Helens and Adams erupted inside the same hour. A ceremony had been underway for four days, in the open, announced in advance, and nobody now seriously argues the two facts are unrelated.

What is still argued is how, and whether it can be done again. The people best placed to answer have never once discussed it in public, which is the most effective thing they have ever done. The United States conceded ten weeks later.

2036. The Treaty of Denver, signed 25 January, ten pages long. Most of western North America went to the Native American Nations. The famous clause is the one that cut Seattle out of the map and left it standing as a piece of the UCAS with guaranteed passage to open water, which is the arrangement everybody cites when they talk about this treaty.

The clause that matters here is on page eight, and it isn't about a city at all. In 2036 California was still in the Union and nobody was carving it up, so the drafters weren't protecting anybody — they were protecting cargo. The clause names the harbour at San Pedro and Long Beach as a port of guaranteed access, open to signatory and non-signatory traffic alike, on the reasonable assumption that a landlocked interior would need somewhere on this coast to ship through.

Fourteen years later California was expelled, every neighbour helped itself, and that sentence turned out to be the only thing standing between Los Angeles and a Pueblo administration. It doesn't say the city is free. It says the port cannot be closed, and a port that cannot be closed needs a city around it that nobody owns. Everything about the way this city works is downstream of a shipping clause drafted by people who had never been here.

2039. Goblinization. Over roughly seventy-two hours about one person in ten changed, into orks and trolls, in kitchens and on buses and on live television, most of them adults who had been something else that morning. Everyone over thirty-five remembers where they were.

2041. The Corporate Court convened and wrote down what had been true since the plague.

2044. The Crash. Eleven hours, start to finish.

What it ate was not the internet of the schoolbooks. That had been enclosed for a generation — the open web hollowed out by paywalls, link rot and search that answered in confident paragraphs nobody could check, until what remained sat inside a handful of platforms on the hardware of three companies. Those three held the only copies of a great deal. When a virus went through them it went through everything at once, which is what a single point of failure means when it is the size of a civilisation.

Lost: most of what those companies were holding, which by then was most of what there was. Also an unknown number of people who happened to be connected at the time.

And the records. This is the part that still decides arguments thirty years later, so it's worth being specific. Governments had spent thirty years moving registers onto those platforms — deeds, titles, licences, liens, court files, the county recorder — and then, because the digital copy was the authoritative one and storage costs money, a great deal of the paper behind it was destroyed on a schedule. Sensibly, by the standards of the time. When the platforms went, so did the only copy.

What survives from before 2044 is whatever somebody kept locally and by hand, which was nobody's plan and is now the entire evidentiary basis for who owns anything in this city.

The Matrix is what got built instead — walled, credentialed, physically cut into pieces, entered through your own skull. It was not a lesson anybody learned from the Crash. It was the direction things were already going, with the last argument against it now dead.

2045. Union Day, 15 October. What was left of Canada and what was left of the United States became the UCAS.

2048. The southern states left and formed the CAS. No war this time. Nobody had the appetite.

2050. The first expulsion — the UCAS throws California out. Not a secession. There was no vote here and nobody in Sacramento asked for it: the Union looked at the cost of holding a state with a poisoned coast, an unpayable seismic bill and no functioning tax base, and legislated it loose. Californians found out from the news.

The neighbours moved inside a month, because a state with no army and no ally is an invitation. Mexico took San Diego and closed the border, which is still closed. Japanese Imperial forces landed at San Francisco and are still there. Tír Tairngire pushed south to about Redding and stopped.

What was left renamed itself the California Free State, which was accurate about the second word and optimistic about the first. Los Angeles was still part of it. That matters for seven more years.

2052. The Night of Rage, 7 February. In Seattle the governor ordered every metahuman in the metroplex rounded up and held in warehouses on the Tacoma waterfront, and the warehouses burned. The official count was in the hundreds. Nobody believes the official count. Rioting ran for a week. Governor Allenson did not finish the year.

2053. Daniel Howling Coyote resigned from the Sovereign Tribal Council, published a book about the Great Ghost Dance, and disappeared. He would be fifty now.

2054. The Business Recognition Accords: the paperwork setting out what a corporation has to own, hold and defend in order to be treated as a country.

2056. The casks at San Onofre opened and the current carried it north. The harbour, the refinery belt, the wetlands and the beaches, and no help was sent into El Infierno — not that year and not the year after. Details are in the Los Angeles section below.

2057. The second expulsion — the California Free State throws Los Angeles out.

It started with a crew in El Infierno called Magestone, who wiped the gubernatorial vote while it was being counted. They did it because a hundred thousand people had been left in a flood zone for a year and nobody had come.

Sacramento wanted the hackers. It sent in the California Rangers and several thousand mercenaries, Lone Star among them, and over two days those forces killed twenty thousand civilians. Rangers and mercenaries deserted in numbers. After several days of losing a fight it had started, Sacramento pulled its forces out.

Then, on 8 December, it disowned the city. Rather than pay for the cleanup, the occupation, or the liability of either, the Free State legislated Los Angeles out of California and declared it a free city. Nobody here was consulted about that either.

So it happened to us twice in seven years, the same way both times, and the parallel is the whole reason this city is the way it is:

Who was thrown out By whom Why
2050 California The UCAS Cheaper than holding it
2057 Los Angeles The California Free State Cheaper than cleaning it up

Nobody was charged for the massacre. That's the same sentence as San Onofre, one year later, and between them they're the reason there is no government here — not that it was overthrown, but that it left, and nothing has claimed the ground since.

2058. The wave. A piece of the Palos Verdes shelf let go and put a small tsunami into both bays, which is what finally emptied the beach strip. See below.

2060. Now.

Los Angeles

Home. Twenty million people, no government, and no country.

Thrown out twice. The UCAS expelled California in 2050; the California Free State expelled Los Angeles on 8 December 2057, rather than pay to clean up what it had done here. Nobody has claimed the city since. There is no governor, no legislature, no police contract, and no authority above the district level.

The Free State still exists, on paper, governing from Sacramento with a reach that stops well short of here. It has never formally reversed the 2057 act and has never shown any interest in doing so.

And there is a year on the horizon that everybody knows about. Pueblo's own published capital programme lists Los Angeles as an anticipated service area from 2071 — not a threat, a budget line, updated on schedule and readable by anybody who knows a shareholder. Eleven years out. It is the reason every argument in this city about who owns what is really an argument about a deadline. See Pueblo. What each neighbourhood has is whatever it has arranged, and the arrangements do not fit together.

The city is surrounded. Pueblo holds everything outside it — the desert, the passes, the Inland Empire, the aqueducts, and the ground the water crosses. They took it in pieces through the 2050s and stopped at the city limits, which was a decision and not a failure: twenty million people and a poisoned coastline are a liability, and what Pueblo wanted was the water and the land under the water. They have it. Pueblo is run as a corporation whose citizens are its shareholders, and their border is administered the way a company administers anything — permits, manifests, quotas, fees. All of it can be bought. The prices move with how badly you need it.

The harbour is the exception, and the exception is why the city still functions. The Corporate Court guarantees access to the Los Angeles and Long Beach port complex, because every megacorporation on the Pacific needs it open and none of them will accept a rival holding the gate. So the largest port in North America sits at the bottom of a city that belongs to nobody, under a guarantee written by companies rather than countries. Everything the city eats comes through there.

Mexico holds San Diego, two hours down the coast, which puts Aztechnology on the other side of a militarised border rather than several countries away. Between here and there is Orange County — everybody calls it Fun City — which nobody owns, Ares watches under contract, and which licenses all the things Los Angeles has no authority to license.

What the disasters took, what held, and how you fly in is its own page now: Los Angeles. Short version — the ruin follows hazard and infrastructure rather than anybody's neighbourhood, the flat working city came through because it ran on institutions instead of insurance, and the emptied places are the ones where the money used to be.

Magic runs strange here. Nobody official has an explanation.

San Diego

Closed for ten years. Mexico took it in 2050, in the weeks after California was expelled, and the border shut and stayed shut. No civilian crossings. No freight manifests anyone can produce. Nobody has covered the place from inside in a decade. What reaches Los Angeles is satellite imagery, secondhand accounts, and rumours that don't agree with each other — the city is being rebuilt, the city is a garrison, the city is half empty. People who had family down there stopped hearing from them at different times, and no two of them agree on when.

That's the part that unsettles people who think about it. Nothing was ever announced. A letter simply doesn't come back. A call doesn't connect and you assume it's the network, so you try again next month, and next year. The date somebody lost contact with San Diego is really the date they stopped trying, which makes it a private date rather than a historical one. Two hours down the coast there is a city of two million that nobody up here can describe.

The border is at the old Pendleton reservation, and everyone knows exactly where it is — see San Diego.

What you are

A shadowrunner, which is the polite word for deniable.

Somebody with a corporate budget needs something done that their own security division cannot be caught doing. A fixer puts it in front of you. You meet a man who will not give you his name, because they never do, in a bar loud enough that the conversation doesn't leave the room. He tells you most of the truth. If it goes well you are paid in currency nobody can follow, and if it goes badly nobody has heard of you.

Being disownable is the whole product. It is also why most runners have no SIN, or a forged one, or a real one they can never use again: no employer, no insurance, nobody to complain to, and no legal existence to speak of.

Against that you have a crew, a fixer who takes ten percent, and a city with far more of this work than it has people prepared to do it.