Style

This is the tone document, and it's for everybody at the table rather than just whoever is writing pages. Three questions it answers: what register are we in, how do we talk about technology, and what are the lines we don't cross.

Nothing here is a secret. If a scene at the table doesn't feel like the campaign, this page is probably where the mismatch is.

The register

Anime action, comic-book science, and consequences that stick around. Those three dials are the campaign's voice, and the first one is the loudest.

• Anime action is the visual and combat grammar. Silhouette-readable characters, signature gear, rooftop chases in rain, the beat where somebody takes their coat off before it starts, mooks who break and run, and the occasional one-on-one everybody else stops to watch. Fights are composed, not simulated.
• Comic-book science is the causality. See below — the sludge makes monsters, not dosimeter readings.
• Consequences that stick are the quiet dial. They aren't what scenes are made of; they're what a loud scene costs you later. A name in a public record, a flag on a file, a contract up for review, somebody who now knows what you look like. A little of it keeps the action from being weightless. A lot of it turns the session into an afternoon at a permit office, so keep it to a beat or two, arriving after the fun rather than instead of it.

Nobody gets shot for filling in a form wrong, and nobody shoots their way out of a form either. That's the balance, not a third genre.

Why the Japanese corporations are everywhere

Deliberate, and it's a genre decision. Five of the eight megacorps are Japanese, which over-represents them relative to any plausible economics, and we keep it because it earns us the anime action vocabulary: corporate strike teams with a look, the Red Samurai as an image rather than a stat block, Mitsuhama's Zero Zone as a promise the table can feel, arcologies, neon, rain on a tower plaza. That vocabulary is most of what makes a Shadowrun fight fun to describe, and the Japanacorps are where it lives.

Which makes the characterisation discipline more important, not less. Taking the action cues does not license taking the 1980s cultural cues that came bundled with them. So:

• Corporations get the aesthetic. People don't get a personality assigned by nationality. Mitsuhama can field a strike team out of a Bubblegum Crisis storyboard. The Japanese characters the crew actually talks to are individuals with jobs, and no more inscrutable than anybody else in a boardroom.
• No honour-culture dialogue, no restored-emperor mysticism, no inscrutability. Those are the parts our version cut; see the portrayal audit in the GM notes.
• The aesthetic is anime's, which is Japanese artists' work, and we're borrowing a visual language rather than making a claim about a country. If a description would work as a frame of animation, good. If it only works as a statement about what Japanese people are like, cut it.

Short version: steal the storyboard, not the stereotype.

Comic-book science

Radioactive sludge is far more likely to produce ninja turtles than radiation poisoning. That is the causality of this setting, stated as bluntly as it can be.

The Green Tide is a catastrophe, and the register of the catastrophe is strange rather than clinical. What comes out of El Infierno is changelings, things in the channels that shouldn't be, paracritters where no paracritter has business being, plants that grow wrong, and people who are different in ways no clinic can name. What does not come out of it is a session spent tracking dose exposure.

Rules of thumb:

• Nobody at this table wants a dosimetry subsystem. Contamination is a condition of a place — masks on a bad wind, fenced ground, don't drink that — not a resource to track per character.
• Consequences are mutagenic, magical or weird before they are medical. If something has to go wrong with a person's body, make it interesting and visible rather than a slow decline. A slow decline is real life and it does not play.
• Grief is allowed to be real even when the physics isn't. A million people live inside the cordon and somebody's mother died of it. The science is four-colour; the loss is not a joke.
• Same licence applies everywhere else. Magic is not a physics system, cyberware is not a medical simulation, and the Matrix does not need to be a network diagram.

Technology voice: misuse the old words on purpose

The setting was designed in 1989 and we're playing it in a 2060 that has to sit on top of a real 2026. That mismatch is a voice opportunity, not an embarrassment.

The device: when 2060 needs a word for something the 2020s already named badly, characters use the 2020s word wrongly, or ironically, or as an insult. That is exactly how slang actually drifts, and it explains the anachronism in-fiction instead of apologising for it.

Worked examples:

• A fixer calls a data haven "the dark web," with audible quote marks, the way someone today might say "the information superhighway." It's a dead phrase that survived as a sneer.
• "The cloud" is a bitter joke, because the clouds are what died in the Crash. Saying something is "in the cloud" means it's gone.
• "Smart" as a sarcastic prefix. A smart building is one that locks you in. A smart contract is one you can't read.
• "AI" in street usage means something much stupider than an AI — a scheduling system, a phone tree, whatever mangled your permit application.
• "Podcast" for a pirate simsense feed. "Streaming" for something illegal. "Influencer" for a corporate spokes-persona nobody believes is a person.
• A hardline is a status symbol. Wires are secure and everybody knows it, so "we'll talk on the landline" is a flex.
• Dead brand names outlive their meaning, and nobody notices. The arena downtown is signed Crypto.com Arena under a licence that expired in 2041, and locals call it Staples after the brand before that — three dead words, a full stop, and not one person in the building could define any of them. The best variant is a word that survived by changing referents: the only people who can define staple are medics, because it's what closes a scalp wound, so the city has quietly concluded the arena is named after a surgical supply. A dead word is funny. A word that's alive and pointing somewhere else is better. The dot-com is the best part: punctuation from an addressing system that died with the open network, which people now read as part of the word and occasionally pronounce. See Crypto.com Arena. This is the purest version of the trick — don't explain the joke, don't have a character work it out. Somebody just says the wrong dead word with total confidence.

What we don't do: explain the joke, or have a character deliver a lecture about how words used to mean something else. It's seasoning. One or two per session, dropped and left.

And keep the canon furniture with its canon names — deck, trodes, commlink, ICE, Mr. Johnson. Retro-futurism is the aesthetic. The misuse trick is for the gaps between canon's vocabulary and ours.

Visual palette

Moved, because it was the longest thing on this page and it's reference rather than register: Palette. Four neon accents with a job each, a background that isn't black, the rules that stop it becoming a casino, and a plain note about the fact that every image here is AI-generated.

The voice

Fiche keeps this wiki, so the pages about the world are written by somebody in it: second person to the crew, opinionated, occasionally wrong, and thin in the places where they wouldn't write something down. The table's own documents — this one, Homebrew, Table Agreements — are ours rather than theirs.

Slang goes in lightly and only the nouns. Nuyen, credstick, deck, trodes, stack, street doc, Mr. Johnson. Chummer and omae are things people say out loud, not things anybody writes in a note, so they belong at the table rather than on a page.

The full writing guide, including the prose habits we're trying to avoid, is a GM document.

Vernacular

Slang does more work than description. A character who says chummer has been placed without a paragraph. Use it lightly — a couple of terms a scene, not a dialect — and never gloss it in-fiction.

Canon street slang, period-right for 2053–2060:

Our local coinages, Los Angeles 2060:

Slurs exist and are handled per the portrayal audit in the GM notes. Trog, keeb, halfer, dandelion eater are in the setting's vocabulary. They come out of named NPCs' mouths with intent, never as table banter and never as scene-setting colour. If a slur isn't doing characterisation work, it isn't in the scene.

Lines we don't cross

The full treatment is in the portrayal audit in the GM notes. The four that come up weekly:

1. Villainy is institutional. Corporations, agencies, contracts, party machines. Never a people, never a religion, never a neighbourhood.
2. Poor is not ruined. The working districts have institutions and are functioning. The emptied places are the hills and the desert suburbs, which is where the money was.
3. Name the place. Real Los Angeles institutions with addresses. Somebody at this table will check.
4. Nobody gets to be the good guys. Not the crew, not Pueblo, not the district with the working council.