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 people talk, and how do we portray a real city and the people in it.

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, consequences that stick around, and absurdity. Those four 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: radioactive sludge is far more likely to produce ninja turtles than radiation poisoning. The sludge makes monsters, not dosimeter readings, and there's a section on it below.
• 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.
• Absurdity runs underneath the other three. Everybody in this world is working extremely hard at being cool and not one of them suspects it might be funny. Play that completely straight and let the table be the ones who laugh.

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.

That makes the characterization discipline more important rather than 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.

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.

Absurdity, played straight#

Shadowrun is a little silly and always has been, and the silliness is that everyone in this world is trying so hard. The coat, the shades indoors, the street name, the slang, the meet in the dark bar with the man who won't give you his name: it is a world of people working extremely hard at being cool, and not one of them has ever suspected it might be funny.

Have fun with it:

• Every street name in the shadows sounds like an Xbox gamertag, and everybody uses them with a completely straight face. Hardpoint. Razzle Dazzle. White_Rabbit, with the underscore, out loud. Somebody chose that at nineteen and has introduced themselves that way to strangers ever since. The person keeping this wiki goes by Fiche, which is a filing joke, and nobody has ever asked them to stop.
• Every client is called Mr. Johnson, everybody knows every client is called Mr. Johnson, and the whole trade treats this as tradecraft rather than as a thing that stopped working forty years ago. Two of them in the same bar will nod at each other.
• Dragons hold board seats, own subsidiaries and sign off the quarterlies, and the dragon takes the board seat completely seriously.
• The corporation behind this city's worst secret is also the one that sold you dinner. Stuffer Shack is Aztechnology's, it's on every other block, and it's open at three in the morning.
• Fun City is a theme park nobody owns, watched under contract by an arms manufacturer, still licensing cartoon characters to a city with no authority to license anything.
• Deckers jack a physical cable into their own skull to read a file, and in 2060 that's the secure option.
• Magic runs on pseudoscience you have already heard of. Ley lines are real and you can survey them. Hermetic practice works off the four ancient Greek elements, so the most credentialed mage on the Westside is summoning fire, air, earth and water. And the Sixth World is dated from 21 December 2012, a date the twentieth century turned into an apocalypse by misreading a calendar in which the end of a b'ak'tun meant about what the year 2000 meant to us. The date turned out to be right and the reasoning never was.

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#

Its own page now, checked term by term against the corebook's glossary: Vernacular. Slang does more work than description, so use it lightly and never gloss it in-fiction.

Portrayal#

Two habits that decide how the antagonists and the city read, and they come up weekly. Content limits are a different conversation and they live in session zero under lines and veils.

1. Villainy is institutional. Corporations, agencies, contracts, party machines. Never a people, never a religion, never a neighborhood.
2. Name the place. Real Los Angeles institutions with addresses. Somebody at this table will check.