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LIFE ON THE EDGE
Day to Day
Face it—you’re not going to spend every moment living on the edge, running from the corps, and raising your rep as the hottest runner in the ’plex. In fact, you’ll probably spend more time living in a doss, running to the Stuffer Shack, and getting stuck in traffic when the grid’s running as slow as a troll on BTL. Here’s a taste of what everyday life might be like for your friendly neighborhood shadowrunners.
A PLACE TO STASH YOUR GEAR
Everybody’s gotta live somewhere, and that “somewhere” can vary from a squat in a condemned building up to a palatial apartment in a chic corporate enclave. Shadowrunners usually gravitate more toward the “squat” end than the “palace” end, but hey, anything’s possible, right?
Most people these days, especially in the sprawls, live in apartments. A standard mid-priced apartment includes a wide array of amenities, all of which are wired or wireless so they can talk to each other and keep your life running smoothly. When you get up in the morning, your coffee maker has your fresh soykaf ready for you. Your fridge monitors your food’s freshness dates and quantities and orders up replacements when needed. Your vacuum-cleaner drone rolls around doing its job quietly and unobtrusively. Lights turn on and off automatically when you enter or leave a room, and your windows can be programmed to show you any view you want—who wouldn’t prefer, say, a South American beach to the rainy squalor of the sprawl? You can even have a robot pet to come home to—all the fun with none of the walks or litter-box cleaning. All this is usually controlled by a central terminal—and good news for shadowrunners is that most people don’t upgrade its security settings past the defaults.
For those who don’t want—or can’t afford—such accommodations, squatting occupying a residence without the permission of the legal owner) is widespread, especially in areas where the police don’t feel as welcome. Don’t expect much in the way of perks, but if you have lodging, there are always “coffin hotels”—they’ll rent you a cubicle barely larger than you are, complete with trid unit, Matrix hookup, and a door with a lock on it. Need a place to stash your stuff (or yourself ) for a few days? If you can get around the dehumanizing aspects of the whole thing, coffin hotels can be just the ticket.
GETTING AROUND
There are all kinds of ways of getting from point A to point B in 2070—it’s just a matter of how fast you want to get there and how much money you want to spend doing it. Most cities have at least decent public transportation, with trains, monorails, buses, and intracity air transports that will get you almost anywhere you want to go as long as you don’t mind walking part of the way. Taxis (ground and air) are common too, and, like the trains and monorails, are often autopiloted drones or controlled by riggers. It’s safer that way—at least for the operators.
If you’re lucky enough to have your own vehicle, it probably runs on electrical power and finds its way around via GridGuide, a system that theoretically manages traffic, shows you the quickest routes and latest maps and alerts, and instructs your car’s autopilot how to get there—when it works, that is. Just keep in mind that the grid doesn’t go everywhere—in bad neighborhoods, for example, you’re on your own. For that matter, in barrens areas, you can’t even count on the roads to be in good shape, let alone the navigation aids—and that’s not mentioning the go-gangs and road predators that come out at night.
For long-distance travel, you can compete with the road trains, drone convoys, and asphalt pirates on the highways, grab a bullet-train, or pay a smuggler to get you there faster and without hitting border checkpoints. Or you can book everything from short-hop commuter airlines to high-flying suborbitals or even semiballistics that actually leave the Earth’s atmosphere (magicians beware!), but keep in mind that you’ll need a SIN (or a reasonable facsimile) to fly any significant distance on public airways.
YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
It’s amazing what they can do with soy these days. Seriously—the staple diet of all but the rich and elite is heavily based on the huge array of foodstuffs formulated using “new foods” like soy and mycoprotein and krill. Sure, the texture can get a little monotonous after a while, but the stuff is clean, nutritious, cheap, and for the most part tastes pretty darn good with the right flavorings, even when compared to the real thing. Most homes contain appliances that let you start with a soy base and add assorted flavors until you’ve approximated whatever food you’ve got the munchies for. Same goes for beverages—synthahol isn’t quite as tasty as a real brew, but it’ll get you just as drunk for a lot cheaper.
That’s not to say “real” food and drink don’t exist—agriculture and technology have made great strides, allowing crops to grow in unlikely places (like underground, in vertical farms, or on polar icecaps, for example). This means that even the poor can afford to supplement their diets with real meat and vegetables now and then—as long as they don’t mind the health risks of eating genetically engineered “franken-foods” or genetic-hybrid chimera foods.
SHOW ME THE MONEY
Nowadays more than ever it’s almost quaint to see someone carrying actual money, including credsticks—so last decade. Almost Everybody simply beams funds back and forth using their commlinks and online accounts, and the only credsticks you’re likely to see are the certified variety—the payment method of choice for people who don’t want to leave a data trail behind them.
If you look hard enough or travel to enough places, you’ll run into areas where they still use hard currency, but since it’s a lot more convenient to keep your money in electronic form, it’s getting rarer every day. Then there’s corp scrip, a specialized form of currency that the megacorps issue to do things like pay their employees. It’s no good outside the issuing corp, and in theory only authorized corp employees should have it, but in practice there’s a thriving black market in corp scrip—one that even has its own underground “stock exchanges.”
While we’re on the subject, there’s actually a thriving black market out there in just about everything, tempting you with all sorts of fun and illegal goodies. In these transactions, payment methods are all over the map, from certified credsticks to hard cash to barter to favors.
LIVING IN SIN
The SIN, or System Identification Number, can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Without one, it’s very difficult to do otherwise simple things like rent an apartment, buy a car, or check into a hotel. With one, however, the system can track almost every move you make—what you buy, where you go, what you connect to on the Matrix.
Technically, everybody is supposed to have a SIN (it’s illegal not to), but in reality, many people don’t. Some had them erased; some lost them when the Matrix went down in ’64 and getting a new one was too much of a hassle; some never had one at all because their births. were never recorded. The SINless, as they’re called, tend to operate outside the system and have a hard time doing anything legitimately, since not having a SIN marks you as either an alien or a person subject to lesser rights.
Of course, the best of both worlds for shadowrunners is to have one—but not their own. Underground services for setting up fake SINs are in high demand, and there’s no shortage of customers. Some runners even maintain more than one fake SIN, corresponding to one or more false identities based in different cities and even different countries. If one is discovered, the runner simply dumps it and picks up another.
Be careful, though—if the cops arrest you and you don’t have a SIN (or you have one that doesn’t match up), they’ll assign you a criminal SIN,” which has significantly fewer rights and privileges than a regular one.
THE DOCTOR IS IN
For the most part, medical care comes in two flavors: public and private—which in reality mean “poor” and “rich.” Thanks to privatized healthcare, most people are forced to throw themselves and their ailments on the not-so-tender mercies of an overstressed public healthcare system. Spirits help you if you’re seriously sick or hurt and have to deal with a public hospital; most of them mean well, but they’re notoriously understaffed, awash in red tape, and generally a nightmare to navigate—and this is if you have a SIN. If you don’t—good luck.
If you’re rich (or have the right friends), you have access to all sorts of medical advances, including clone “spares” for organ replacement, leonization treatments to stay young, state-of-the-art implants, the latest gene therapy, and every other cutting-edge technology medicine has to offer. Even corp citizens, though they don’t often have this level of coverage, can take advantage of limited corporate healthcare.
Not sick, but just need “a little work done”? Bodyshops are common, handling basic cybersurgery and cosmetic alterations—things like datajacks, cybereyes, cosmetic bioware, and the like—but as always, it’s good to do your homework first since they vary widely in competence and professionalism. If you need something more extensive done and you can make the right connections, “black clinics” with corp-exile surgeons and all kinds of stolen and experimental technologies and techniques can provide whatever enhancements you desire, legal or not.
Savvy shadowrunners don’t take chances with these matters—as soon as they’ve got the cred to do it, most of them sign up for a contract with one of the “armed response” providers like DocWagon or CrashCart. These services will do everything from swooping in to snatch your injured body out of a firefight to bringing you back from the other side of flatlined. Yeah, that little biomonitor and contract are expensive, but when you think about it, what do you own that’s more valuable than your life? Just one thing to note, though: if you’re going to get yourself shot up, don’t do it on megacorp property—these outfits won’t cross extraterritorial boundaries without permission, so you’ll be out of luck.
WELCOME TO THE MACHINE
Back in the latter part of the last century, futurists and cyber-pundits were all excited about the coming of “ubiquitous computing”—the total integration of computer technology with everyday life. They were right, but they didn’t know the half of it. While your average 2070's citizen probably wouldn’t think of it in those terms, computers and the Matrix are ubiquitous nowadays—in fact, you’d have to try pretty hard to get away from them. Here are a few everyday-life examples—you can check out The Wireless World, p. 216, for the full lowdown on using the Matrix for fun and profit.
MATRIX 2.0
The times, they are a-changin’, but people are nothing if not adaptable. Even before Crash 2.0 took down the Matrix and caused widespread chaos on multiple fronts, the seeds of wireless network connectivity were already sown. By 2070, the new wireless Matrix is mostly in place, and the whole Matrix model has shifted from wired virtual reality to wireless augmented reality. That’s not to say that you can’t still go for the full-immersion experience, but AR has proven itself to be more practical in most situations. Most people by now have embraced the new technology, to the point where even the poorest sprawl denizens are likely to have commlinks that connect them to the Matrix on a constant basis. What this means is that everybody’s wired (or, rather, wireless) and everybody’s connected. For most people, the question isn’t whether to be connected, but how much.
THE NETWORK IS THE CONSUMER
Every time you go out to the mall or the Stuffer Shack or that new club downtown, you’re surrounded by computer networks. Everybody’s heard of LANs and WANs, but 2070s society brings a new one: PANs, or Personal Area Networks. People don’t just belong to networks these days—they are networks. All hooked together by a commlink (a combination cellphone, PDA, wallet, and network router), PANs are accessed and controlled by a wide array of useful devices, including goggles, contacts, or cybereyes that let you perceive the sights of augmented reality; headphones or cyberears that give you the sounds; gloves for the touch; clothing that regulates your temperature and lets you change its color with a thought; simsense modules that let you experience sensations, emotions, and even others’ senses; weapons and peripherals tied directly into your conscious control; and a whole lot more. It’s called a “mesh network,” and it means that all your goodies talk to each other seamlessly, keep-ing each other up to date with status reports and working together to enhance your computing experience.
SHARING THE LOVE
All this PAN stuff is wiz, but just like the dinosaur days of the Internet, networking isn’t much fun if you can’t share it. When you open up your PAN to the outside world (or whatever part of it you choose to allow in), you open the door to a myriad of interactions. Heading down to the mall to check out the latest gear, you can subscribe your PAN to the mall’s network and view arrows (AROs, or augmented reality objects) that show you everything from a map of the place to current sales to recommendations your friends have left for you last time they were there. You can connect your commlink to your friends’ networks and hold private conversations completely inside your head. You can (if you’re not careful) be bombarded by advertising and spam—but you can also hook up with other people who read the profile you’re broadcasting and want to meet you. You can play a video game in your head with a friend on another continent as your opponent. In short, pretty much anything you can think of that can be done with a computer, you can do it wherever you happen to be. No wires, no clunky cyberdeck—just you, your commlink, and the airwaves.
Of course, those who want to take things a little further can do a lot more—hacking into systems (including other people’s commlinks), controlling vehicles with their thoughts, even injuring other users. That’s where the real fun is—but that’s a topic for another time and another place.
TAGGING, 2070s STYLE
What can control shoplifting, keep track of your cat (or your kid, or your employees), mark gang territory, or give you the skinny on that weird statue in the park? If you answered RFID tags, you get a gold star. Radio Frequency Identification tags are even more ubiquitous than Matrix connections in 2070s society, and almost as useful. Since your commlink can read the data on a tag from about 40 meters away, they’re used for all kinds of purposes where some small message needs to be broadcast over a short distance. For instance, every item in almost any store you walk into will have an RFID tag embedded within it, to help track inventory and keep the items from wandering out of the store. They also help you when you’re ready to buy—you simply pick up the items you want, they’re scanned automatically, and the charge is deducted (with your permission) from your cred balance.
Tags have lots of other functions, too. When viewed with AR, the data from an RFID tag is called a dot (DOT, or Digital Object Tag). Some dots are beneficial, helping you find your way around unfamiliar areas or giving you information about local historical sites or areas to avoid. You can also program your own to offer items for sale, look for lost items, or anything else for which your grandmother might have posted flyers on the street corner. Tags also have less savory purposes—corps routinely implant tags in their employees, while gangers use
spray-painted dots to mark their turf. Regardless of how they’re used, tags are cheap and easy to get, which means the world is awash in them. Better get used to it.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING
As wiz as all this technology is, don’t think it’s all a big hacker party. The downside of the fact that everything’s networked and the Matrix is everywhere (especially for shadowy types) is the fact that this gives authorities and other nosy folks the means to make some serious inroads into your privacy, especially when you’re out in public.
Sensors and cameras are everywhere, almost every transaction you make is tracked in one way or another, and if you’re not careful, your every movement—in the Matrix and in the meat—can be traced, monitored, and analyzed. Paranoid yet? Think of this: in most major sprawls, sensors on every street corner in certain ’hoods can not only monitor sights, sounds, and chemical odors, they’re also smart enough to automatically recognize aberrant patterns—say, a gunshot or an abnormally large crowd of people gathering near a business. this info is automatically transmitted to the proper authorities, and unwary miscreants can be in custody before they can say “What happened?” Naturally there are ways around Big Brother, and savvy shadowrunners are wise to study up. Life in the shadows isn’t easy but fortunately the all-knowing Big Brother isn’t without his failings.
HOLES IN THE SYSTEM
Several factors help those who are looking to stay off the grid.First there’s simply too much data out there and it’s growing by the nanosecond. Trying to find that one visual ID in the oceans of pointless videos uploaded by the public to their blogs, chat rooms, and data havens is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Simply hoping that someone in Redmond might have recorded the events of a crime scene with his cybereyes does not actually get you the data. The images, if they’re even uploaded onto the Matrix, might be posted on Connections! or another one of the hugely bloated blogging networks. The effort of sifting through the masses of images, blogs, and gripefests on those is often monumental. Agents are only minimally useful, generally, since they don’t have the intelligence or intuitive ability to spot details like a metahuman can, no matter how thorough their programming. And even worse, getting the visual data from corporate, government, or police cameras involves enough red-tape to wrap around the globe a few times, or a massive hacking attempt on potentially hundreds of nodes. And that’s before you get to the thousands upon thousands of public nodes: commlinks, cybereyes, or other recording devices. (And even if they manage all that, it’s useless if they have no records to match it against.)
The second factor revolves around those wonderful things, the Business Accords. Yes, those wonderful extraterritorial rights given to corporations of certain size (and the privacy rights accorded to all corporate entities, regardless of size). Few corporations are willing to share their information unless they have something to gain from it. Do you really think that “Kiddy Land,” the Aztechnology - owned chain, is likely to give Knight Errant, a subsidiary of Ares, access to all their video feeds and other sensor data just because their shop cameras might have caught an image of some criminals sometime in the last 24 hours? No? Damn right.
A third factor is data completeness. Camera coverage in the Sixth World is by no means total. You might be caught by several cameras while walking downtown, but most of the time, only a small part of you, like the back of your head, part of your clothes, or your hat is caught on camera, while the rest is obscured by other people and items. You might pass behind a street light, a crowd, or a car. You walk into a shop, but you walk out through a different entrance. Getting all of this together is a complicated and time-consuming process, especially if you know these facts and exploit them. By the time a reliable identification is patched together, the freelance criminals involved will have delivered the goods to their anonymous Johnson.
GET YOUR MOJO WORKING
Magic is power, and you’d have to live under a rock not to know it. The ability to sling the mojo is something you’re born with; if you don’t have it, there’s nothing out there that’s going to give it to you, and if you do have it, you’ve got opportunities not available to your mundane buddies. As you might expect, there are a lot of opinions and popular misconceptions about magic. Here’s a brief look at how the world at large perceives the magically gifted and their art.
MAGIC IN THE MEDIA
The entertainment industry loves magic. How could they not love something that lets them indulge their desire for tossing around spectacular pyrotechnical effects, weird landscapes, and eerie mysterious characters? The problem (at least to hear real magicians and adepts tell it) is that the trids and sims don’t often get it right. Oh, sure, they retain “magical consultants” on staff to tell them that you can’t blow up a building with a Powerbolt spell (not even if you’re a dragon), but as soon as the story calls for boffo mojo, the spellslinger-in-residence might as well step out for a sandwich for all the good her advice is going to do. As long as box-office extravaganzas like the “Karl Kombatmage” series pull in big nuyen for the studios, the bosses aren’t going to worry too much about whether their magician characters are doing things that would have a real practitioner’s brains oozing out his ears.
That doesn’t even touch on the subject of the magicians themselves. Most real spellslingers react with either amusement or disgust at the portrayal of their fellows in the media: males as lantern-jawed heroes with six-pack abs or weird inscrutable “masters of the mystic arts” festooned with (fake) arcane symbols; females as half-dressed temptresses with body-shop figures and dramatic makeup and tattoos. Adepts of both genders are almost always martial artists or sneaky “ninja” types, and metahuman Awakened types usually get stuck with the villain roles.
JOHN Q. PUBLIC
Hard as it is to believe, even in 2070 there’s still a decent percentage of average citizens out there who have never seen anybody do magic outside of the trids and sims. Magical ability is getting more common with each generation, but it’s still rare enough that full-fledged magicians and adepts don’t turn up on every corner.
What this means, as in the case of anything that's powerful and unknown, is that people’s attitudes toward magicians aren’t always the most charitable. Almost nobody is neutral on the subject, and for most, their reaction to magic is either fear, hatred, or fascination. The “fascination” end of the spectrum isn’t too much of a problem (many mages would be flattered to discover they had groupies), but the “fear” and “hatred” end (everything from concern about things like astral snooping and mind control to good old-fashioned superstition and paranoia) can lead to all kinds of things that can cause trouble for the Awakened—like stricter laws governing registration of mages and restrictions on magic use, for example. As it is, the laws regulating legal magic use are quite stringent, especially on combat spells and anything that affects the mind, but if some activists and political groups have their way, things could get a lot worse.
MAGIC AND RELIGION
Most of the major religions have come to an uneasy truce with magic by 2070, incorporating it into their belief systems with varying degrees of success. Some faiths, like Wicca, embrace magic, and have even grown in popularity once again; others, like most Christian and Jewish denominations, accept it when it’s used in the service of good (the Pope weighed in on the subject back at the early part of the Awakening); others still, like most (but not all) branches of Islam, view it as evil and heretical.
Even so, there are still many who would use religion as an excuse to persecute magic and its practitioners—for example, the racist Humanis Policlub hates magicians almost as much as they hate metahumans, and they use their own twisted religious interpretations to support their faulty arguments.
GHOULS AND SPIRITS AND DRAGONS-OH MY!
Human and metahuman magicians aren’t the only ones out there who are touched with the Talent. Awakened critters come in all shapes and sizes, from the nearly mundane (common pests like devil rats) to the magically superior (dracoforms, great and otherwise). Critters with any significant magical ability are rare, and you’re not likely to blunder into one on your evening constitutional—but don’t get the idea that you’re safe in the city, either. Plenty of urban predators hang around places like sewers, toxic areas, and sprawl barrens, just waiting for juicy tidbits to come along. Ghouls, for instance, are a common threat in urban areas, banding together and hunting in packs to satisfy their never-ending need for metahuman flesh. There’s also the insect-spirit bogeyman to worry about—bugs aren’t as common as they used to be, but that doesn’t mean that most people don’t maintain a healthy (and justified) level of paranoia about them.
MAGIC IN THE SHADOWS
Most magicians have “real” jobs—mages often work as corporate researchers, university professors, healthcare providers, and such, while those from magical traditions that don’t mesh well with the corporate lifestyle (shamans and witches, for example) do things like run lore shops and act as tribal or community healers and wise folk. Because they’re so rare, they’re usually valued, paid well, and kept happy. So what about the ones who choose a less lawful (and potentially more lucrative and dangerous) path?
The public is even more fascinated with criminal and shadowrunning mages than it is with the garden-variety types. Every year you can count on at least a few new sims and trids featuring daring and charismatic magical scoundrels duking it out in arcane battles with corporate security mages (while teammates on both sides make sure that the bullets and grenades are flying at the same time). The truth is, the reality of slinging mojo in the shadows is usually a lot less glamorous than Big Media wants people to believe. For most magical types, they’d be a lot better off (and a lot safer) to keep their nice cushy job with the regular paycheck and medical plan. Still, there are plenty of them who (for whatever reason) don’t have that option—and for those who can handle it, the rewards of shadowrunning can be great.
WE'RE NOT ALONE
Magic is far from being the only force at play in the Sixth World. The ubiquity of the Matrix means it touches every aspect of everyday life, from private life to social interactions to work. Consequently, it came as a shock to global society to realize that the Crash populated the digital world with metahumans with their own inexplicable talents, and mysterious entities, known collectively as the Emerged.
Even rarer than Awakened talent—some believe this “virtuakinetic” gift is present in less than 1 in 100,000 individuals—these gifted few exhibit the ability to interface with the Matrix with the power of their minds. The origin and exact mechanisms of this ability remain unclear, which led to widespread public suspicion, and fears that have only recently started to subside. Keeping these technomancers company is a menagerie of Artificial Intelligences, sprites, and other entities confined to the digital realms—a realm that stretches across the globe and beyond.
Regardless of the theories behind these new abilities and new beings, everyone agrees—the Matrix is no longer just the playground of metahumanity.
COMING OUT
For years prior to the Crash 2.0, rumors circulated in the shadows of otaku—children able to manipulate the Matrix without programs or a computer. These children banded together in tribes, eking an existence on the edges of society, hiding in the slums and back alleys of urban sprawls. Some said they even worshiped digital deities—powerful Artificial Intelligences. Behind the rumors was a grain of truth, although the role these beings played in the Crash is known only by a few. Those who were aware of the AI/otaku agenda were relieved when the guilty factions appeared to have been destroyed in the Crash they’d engineered.
For five years after the Crash, corporations worked overtime to build the new, “resilient” wireless Matrix—and only realized after the fact that the new technology had unleashed something unknown. Whether technomantic abilities were sparked by Crash-related trauma, or they always existed and were triggered when the wireless network became widespread enough to support them is unknown. The existence of these abilities was unknown to the public or even in the shadows—until 2070, when the world was rocked by the explosive coming-out of the Emerged. Fear of these people, called technomancers or virtuakinetics by pundits, ignited a world-wide witchhunt, spurred on by corporate machinations. And if that wasn’t enough, another group revealed itself to metahumanity shortly afterward: Artificial Intelligences.
PUBLIC OPINION
The witch-hunts have died down over the last two years, largely due to efforts by several megacorporations—including Horizon and Evo—and the work of non-profits dedicated to helping the Emerged and digital intelligences integrate into society. Like the kneejerk reactions to the Awakened, to metahumans, and to changelings before them, the Emerged are slowly becoming accepted into society.
For the average Joe and Jane, the existence of technomancers is still a frightening thought, one that tears open the scars left by the Crash. When every daily action is facilitated by the Matrix—from home safety to bank accounts, virtual offices to educational systems—the existence of metahumans who can wreak havoc with those essential systems using nothing but their minds is a terrifying prospect. Unlike magic—which, while prevalent in the media, is still uncommon enough on the streets—the Matrix is everywhere. To address these fears, most nations have instituted required registration for the Emerged (much like that of the Awakened). The extreme rarity of technomancers has also helped to relieve some fears, and the media coverage—provided by shadowrunners in many cases—of inhumane corporate experimentation on technomancers has swayed public opinion to their side.
CORPORATE PARANOIA
Corporations continue to experiment on technomancers, trying to understand their abilities (with some notable exceptions). As more is learned, corporations realize there is even more to fear. Rumors of the Resonance Realms and of the digital entities who reside there are enough to strike fear in any corporation that relies on the Matrix. Security departments are scrambling to find ways to block access, while at the same time trying to discover how to harness the abilities of the Emerged for themselves. There is a corporate arms race going on, much like in the early days of the Awakening—only with so much of their business reliant on the Matrix, the corporations have even more at stake now.
SPRITES, AIS, AND DIGITAL CRITTERS
Metahumanity is not the only thing prowling the digital realms. AIs have fared well in public opinion, due to the intensive media coverage of benign AIs like Pulsar and his Undernet Alliance. Many people don’t realize just how sapient these AIs really are—or that they may not have metahumanity’s best interests at heart. Sprites also seem to be sentient creatures, and technoshamans believe they come from the Deep Resonance—a realm that isn’t understood even by technomancers, although a few are brave enough to venture into it. And rumors of other creatures, from insects to house cats, who are able to access the Matrix are just now starting to float around the chat rooms and data havens …
LIVING LARGE
Entertainment is big business in the Seventies, running the gamut from the sanitized and corp-approved to the downright deviant. No matter what floats your boat, it’s guaranteed that somebody’s out there to provide it—and probably to try selling you something in the process. Here’s a quick survey of the smorgasbord of entertainment possibilities available in any sprawl.
NIGHTLIFE
The world of 2070 rarely sleeps, and most of the interesting stuff (at least from a shadowrunner’s point of view) happens after the sun goes down.
Mainstream nightclubs—with their synthahol specials, DJs, and dance floors—are a dime a dozen. Some are more choosy than others, meaning you need to look good, dress well, or sport your exclusive-membership RFID tag implant to gain entry. Even the less exclusive clubs might have areas that the general public will never even know about, let alone hope to get in—including private rooms perfect for secure biz.
Besides the standard clubs you can usually find a large number of “niche-market” nightspots in most major sprawls. Under their skins the mainstream clubs are all essentially the same, but in the niche clubs you’re more likely to find a wider variation of themes catering to a narrower range of customer—everything from the magically active to metahuman groups to lovers of Japanese anime (especially since Japanese culture shows no sign of giving up its hold on the world anytime soon). Newcomers who show a genuine interest in (and understand of the social conventions of ) a particular theme are welcomed; others might be looked on with suspicion until their motives are determined. Some of these clubs are private and don’t admit new members without sponsorship by an existing member.
Finally, there are Matrix clubs. In the Matrix nobody knows you’re a dog—or a 12-year-old hacker, or a middle-aged ork pretending to be a cute Japanese schoolgirl—and nobody really cares, as long as you’re cool. Matrix clubs exist only in cyberspace, and thus aren’t constrained by those pesky real-world laws like physics and gravity. Naturally, hackers think this makes them far more fun than your typical meat market. Wizzer still are the clubs-within-clubs that can be reached only by that time-honored custom of hacking your way in. If you’re good enough to make it past the IC, you might be amazed at what you’ll see. After all, you don’t think they share the good stuff with anybody who can plug into an off-the-shelf commlink, do you?
Sometimes people ignore the clubs entirely, arranging meets on the fly, flash-mob style, or setting up their own venues by staging “break-in parties” inside closed businesses or street raves in abandoned urban areas.
MUSIC
Music is everywhere: in your house, your car, the places you shop, the ad kiosks you pass—even inside your head, thanks to your subdermal implants. Whether it’s the squeaky-clean, corp-sponsored Top 40 “hits” or any of a dizzying number of genres from goblin rock to elven acoustic to synthrash to neo-classical to everything in between, music is an integral part of 2070s life. In many places it seems like everybody’s listening to music—and if you get bored with your own sounds, you can always pick up something new by tuning your commlink in to whatever the people around you are broadcasting.
These days, music-makers enjoy many more options than their grandparents back at the turn of the century did. The old-style acoustic instruments still exist, of course, along with their old-school electric counterparts, but in the seventies they are joined by some wiz goodies that Grandpa could only dream about. Without a doubt the most important of these is the synthlink, which permits musicians to plug directly in to their instruments and create the music they hear in their heads. The synthlink was a breakthrough because it removed one of the last barriers to musical composition, opening up the creative flood-gates for many talented musicians who lacked the formal training or the knowledge to produce songs the old-fashioned way. These days, most music (except for genres that emphasize their “natural” sound) is produced using synthlink-enhanced instruments, and with few exceptions, musical idols come and go with the fleeting vagaries of the public’s hunger for the “next big thing.”
SPORTS
Sports are big business in the seventies, every bit as much about making piles of cred for their corporate sponsors as they are about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Equal parts contest of athletic prowess and media extravaganza, 2070s sports can be summed up in one word—intense. With the kind of nuyen that rides on the outcome of every contest in major sports, the field is wide open for every kind of edge that team, player, or technology can employ.
That’s not to say that enhancements like cyber implants and magical augmentation are universally accepted. Take technological upgrades, for example: debate rages stronger than ever these days on the subject of cyberware, drugs, nanotech, and genetic manipulation. Some leagues ban them, some have split to accommodate them, others have begun to reluctantly accept them in limited forms, and a few have embraced them. Many top athletes don’t want to touch them anyway, since there’s always the chance they’ll fail at the wrong time and put the athlete out of action; it’s the up-and-comers and the over-the-hillers who most often look for the quick fix, but this is changing as attitudes change.
Magic, on the other hand, is frowned on pretty much everywhere. Even though lots of big-league sports boast adepts on their teams, spellcasting is a major no-no in almost every sport except urban brawl (a game that’s part war, part football, part large-scale urban renewal), and leagues often employ trained magicians and spirits as referees to make sure everything stays firmly in the realm of the mundane.
One controversy that still surrounds major sports is the participation of metahumans. Some sports, like football and urban brawl, don’t care and allow everyone to participate; others, like some baseball and soccer leagues, are humans-only clubs. Efforts continue to get these bans removed.
In addition to the classic major sports that have been around forever (auto racing, hockey, baseball, basketball, soccer, football, boxing, and so forth), more modern sports have fan followings every bit as large: urban brawl, combat biking (soap opera mayhem on motorcycles), court ball (ancient Aztec game akin to basketball, but with the loser’s captain sacrificed at the game’s end), and stickball (a Native American sport that’s popular because it’s one of the few that allows magic.)
SIMSENSE
Why just watch a show when you can be part of the action? Why only get what your eyes and ears are telling you, when you can have the full spectrum of sensations and even feel the same emotions the characters are feeling? Simsense lets you do that.
The technology’s mature these days, having been around since the middle part of the century, but as progress marches on, simsense just keeps getting better. How it works is easy—you experience it through a sim module (either implanted or part of your commlink), a standalone simsense player called a simdeck, or even electrically-sensitive nanopaste that you can apply directly to your body. Depending on the type of rig you have (and what kind of sim you’re slotting), you can step into the main character’s shoes and get the same sensory data she’s getting, piped directly into your very own brain. Used to be that the lower quality sims only gave you the sensory side, but these days they all give you the whole shebang complete with emotional response
As you might guess, the best simsense performers aren’t necessarily the best actors, but rather the people who can experience the widest and most intense range of emotions. All the A-list sim stars have implanted simrigs, which are required to record the full experience. They have to keep themselves in top shape physically, mentally, and emotionally—after all, who’d pay to assume the personality of a flabby headcase? (Okay, some people would—but that’s for the niche studios, not the majors).Simsense comes in all varieties: action, romance, comedy, sports, children’s, documentaries, educational, and so on. Pornography is huge, as you might imagine—as, unfortunately, are a wide variety of illegal sims that remove the safeguards designed to keep emotional and sensual responses to manageable levels. Of ourse, there’s also the seedier stuff—but that’s a subject for a little later in this file.
TRIDEO, RADIO, AND CINEMA
Simsense is great, but most of the time you don’t want to experience your news or your idle channel-surfing in full-spectrum sensory glory. For this more casual form of viewing, there’s trideo—3DTV. The name its mom calls it when she’s angry is “digital high-definition three-dimensional holovision,” but most people just call it “trid.” Modern trids are hyper-real—it’s something of an experience to project a dinosaur action-sim, war movie, or sexy thriller right into your living room. Though a huge variety of trid shows are broadcast via Matrix or satellite to suit your fancy, including pay-per-view, you can also program your own preferences and schedules and create your own personalized media feeds, from your favorite trids to the keyword-tagged news items—uncluttered by commercials, news, or other shows you don’t care about.
If you prefer the big-screen experience, you can also head down to the nearest multiplex to watch the latest trid blockbuster with all your friends. Trideo cinema isn’t as popular as simsense, but it does have its plus sides—after all, if you’re the square-jawed hero in the latest bad action-adventure sim, you can’t exactly take a break from the fight and start throwing popcorn at the bad guys, can you?
Radio is still alive and well in the 2070s. Most of it is corp-sponsored these days, but if you look around a little bit you can still find a few independent stations holding on to their small market niches and trying to fly under the corps’ radar. Like trideo, radio comes in free and pay varieties, broadcast by local transmitter, satellite, or Matrix. Most forms come with their own AR “sense-spam” to supplement the audio portion of the broadcast.
Finally, this section wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the pirates. Pirate trid and radio shows, broadcast using illegal mobile (and often highly sophisticated) tech, are a staple in most larger sprawls. Their content ranges from the near-professional (underground news organizations broadcasting the news the corps don’t want you to hear) to embarrassing (the rantings of bigots, fringers, and tinfoil hat types with too much nuyen), but the fact remains that these dissenting voices—for however long they last before they’re caught and replaced with new ones—are a valuable part of the broadcast landscape. So too are the myriad of small broadcasters—after all, in 2070, anybody with a commlink can send out whatever content they want, albeit for a very short distance. Anywhere people gather in any numbers, the airwaves are clogged with live linkcasts of every media imaginable.
ADVERTISING
Advertising is literally all over the place. Unless you live on a desert island (and it had better not be a corporate-owned desert island, or all bets are off ), you’re bombarded by advertising from the moment you wake up to your alarm-clock radio to the moment you go to sleep with the hymns of trid commercials dancing in your head.
Ads come in all forms, from simple billboards and print spots to animated graphics, holographic images, catchy jingles, commlink-propagated word-of-mouth campaigns, targeted odors, and even subliminal cues and viral ads that replicate themselves to reach more markets. They show up on almost every surface that’ll hold still long enough to slap an ad on it, and some guerrilla marketing organizations even specialize in altering other companies’ ads to fit their own message—the Madison Avenue version of ganger graffiti wars. Memes (self-propagating units of culture) are prevalent, with Horizon being the acknowledged master of inserting these insidious bits of information into the public consciousness.
These days, targeted marketing has been raised to an art form. Because information about your every transaction is recorded, plugged into a relational database, data-mined within a millimeter of its life, and then shared with countless “affiliates,” advertisers quite possibly know more about your buying preferences than you do. Using RFID tags and the information broadcast by your commlink, they can tailor ads to your preferences on the fly and beam them to your PAN from all angles every time you walk into a store. Sure, this can get annoying (and usually does), but isn’t all the spam worth it for that one time when the clothing store points you at the perfect jacket you’ve been seeking for weeks—in your exact size, color preference, and price range?
FASHION
Seventies fashion isn’t just about clothing—it’s about your whole body and all the wiz things you can do to adorn it. Sure, clothes are one aspect: styles change radically from year to year, from the “natural look” of the early sixties to the tribal chic of a few years later, to the current trends in techno-inspired “wearable computing” couture, and getting caught in yesterday’s threads can be the kiss of death for fashion-conscious club hoppers. But that’s not where it ends.
For the 2070 fashionista, “the look” involves expressing yourself using that most intimate of canvases: the body itself. Other fashion trends include:
Body mods: Piercings and tattoos are practically required (the more exotic the better—animated nanotats are hotter than ever), while more extreme alterations like scarification, skin weaving, whiskers, and implanted gems and metals are gaining steady popularity. Full-body dye jobs, hot in the previous decade, have dropped some in popularity, though a new subtrend based on using slow-changing bioreactive inks is developing a small but dedicated following.
Hairstyles: You name it, somebody’s done it. Hair in non-natural colors is so common that people don’t even look twice at it anymore, hile alternative fiber implants, electrically-sensitive filaments that can change color with a thought, and head shaving (all the better to display your tattoos, implants, and scars) are all popular.
Advertising: It had to happen at some point—more and more people these days are renting out their bodies as walking billboards for whichever product will give them the best deal. It’s not at all uncommon to see ads tattooed (often in full animation) on people’s foreheads, chests or backs, and in the days of the ubiquitous RFID tag, most mod providers will knock a bit off the price if you’ll let them implant a tag advertising their wares along with your new look.
Of course, for the large percentage of the population who don’t care whether they’re “fashion-forward” and just want to be comfortable, the old standbys—jeans, athletic shoes, leather and synthleather jackets, sports-themed gear and so forth—are still as popular as ever.
If you really don’t care (or you just want to blend in and keep your nice clothes from getting messy, gory, or otherwise trashed), there are always “flats”—buy them from a vending machine, wear them a few times, and recycle them for a new pair. Convenient, yes; fashionable—no way! On the other hand, flats mean never having to worry about getting out those troublesome bloodstains.
SEX
The sex trade is alive and well—if you know where to look, you can find a like-minded group of adventurers willing to share your deepest desire with you, usually for a price. Law enforcement has all but given up trying to keep control over the more vanilla end of the sex industry: strip joints and brothels (catering to all sexual preferences and metatypes and ranging from skanky street hovels to five-star luxury pleasure palaces) are common in every town of any significant size. Specialty sex clubs, usually private and invitation-only, serve the needs of all manner of sexual proclivities and desires: gay, transgendered, fetish, bondage and discipline, exhibitionism, and countless others. A quick look in the local directory should find you most of what you’re looking for, though some of the more extreme clubs advertise by word of mouth only and you’ll need to know somebody to get in.
If you’re not quite ready for an “in-the-meat” relationship, there’s plenty of fun to be had in the virtual world. Cybersex in the Matrix is extremely popular, especially with those whose chances of the real thing are limited by appearance, personality, or cred balance. There’s also a thriving pornography industry, ranging from simple trideo broadcasts to full-sensory simsense experiences that rival (and for some, surpass) the real thing. Who’d settle for the boy or girl next door when they could have the latest novahot porn star as their own personal pleasure guide?
For the magically active guy or gal looking for fun, there’s always their own private club: the astral plane. Free of their meat bodies in a way that even hackers can’t match, magicians can enjoy a staggering array of pleasures by hooking up with one or more fellow astral travelers—whether from the next apartment or the next continent. There are even rumors of good times to be experienced with willing spirits …
THE DARK SIDE
Turn any form of entertainment over and you’ll expose the cockroaches crawling around on its underbelly. The dark side of the entertainment industry is something not many people like to talk about, but everyone except the most hopelessly naïve know that it’s out there—and that you can find literally anything if you look hard enough.
This is the stuff the vice cops spend most of their time trying to stamp out, but its purveyors are smart and mobile and frighteningly well organized—and there’s no shortage of customers. Do you like simsense? BTL (“Better Than Life”) chips promise a sensory experience like no other, without those annoying governors to make sure you don’t fry out your mind and end up drooling on a street corner somewhere. Crave something even more intense? Try a “snuff ” BTL, where you can experience the moment of (usually violent)death from the comfort of your own home—if it doesn’t flatline you in the process. Just try not to think too hard about the poor slot who “volunteered” so your entertainment experience” could be recorded.
Maybe you like your pleasures a little more in-your-face. If that’s your thing, most sprawls boast several private clubs where you can fight for cred against all kinds of opponents—other metahumans, critters (vanilla and Awakened), drones, you name it. Some go to first blood, but for those real adrenaline junkies out there, gladiator combat clubs featuring fights to the death are always looking for new meat. If you’d prefer not to fight, you can always make some cred by placing bets on the action. Just don’t try to stiff the house, since the organized crime syndicates that run these houses have no senses of humor.
Are you a lover, not a fighter? Even in the sexually open society of 2072, there are still plenty of forbidden pleasures out there. You like little kids, furry animals, or nonconsensual sex? Guaranteed, there’s a scumb—uh, that is, an entertainment provider—who can hook you up for a price. Want to share a night with Nadja Daviar or Winona Flying Horse? The real thing might be tough, but you won’t know the difference at your local bunraku parlor, where “meat puppets” are surgically altered and equipped with personafix chips until they’re better than real—at least for their customers’ purposes. And why stop there? Bunraku puppets are just rented for the night—slaves are forever.
CRIMINAL ELEMENTS (OTHER THAN YOU)
Shadowrunners are certainly criminals, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve got the mean streets to themselves. Let’s take a look at some of the other two-legged predators who share the sprawl with you.
ORGANIZED CRIME
Wherever there’s illegal money to be made, you can guarantee that the organized crime syndicates are on the scene and doing their best to take control of as much of the pie as they can muscle into. The syndicates that shadowrunners are likely to come in contact with include:
Mafia: Everybody’s heard of the Mafia—you know, that collection of Italian guys in pinstriped suits and pinky rings? Actually, the Mafia’s come a long way in the last couple hundred years, and their influence is still strong all over North America and Europe. Organized into “families” and operating in every major UCAS city, the Mob is involved in just about every lucrative type of crime out there including shipping and smuggling, extortion, loansharking, hijacking, and gambling.
Yakuza: An old and honorable Japanese criminal organization, the Yakuza demands unswerving loyalty from its members and punishes transgressions harshly. Its members—almost always male, Japanese, and human—are usually identified by their extensive tattoos and sometimes by missing pinky fingers (one of the more minor ways they pay for failures). The Yak’s major areas of influence are prostitution, gambling, sokaiya (shaking down companies for credit and influence), drugs, and chips.
Triads: The Chinese Triads don’t get a lot of press when compared with the Mafia and the Yaks, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t a powerful force in their own right. Each Triad is its own organization, with none of the central control of the Mob and Yak groups. They take a far more enlightened stance toward women and metahumans, numbering many of both (as well as non-Chinese) among their ranks, and also featuring a number of adepts and magicians. Crime-wise, they specialize in extortion, protection, smuggling, gambling, illegal drugs, and BTLs.
Vory: The Vory v Zakone, or “thieves who follow the code,” originated at the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, but since then they’ve undergone many changes. Exported around the world by Russian expatriates, the Vory are organized into factions run by a single powerful leader (much like the Mafia). Though involved in smuggling and black market operations, the Vory’s most profitable enterprise is black-market information, or “infobrokering.”
Ghost Cartels: Though the traditional Central and South American narco-cartels suffered setbacks with the development of BTLs, thanks to biotechnology they have increased their crop sizes and profit margins and are getting back in the game with an assortment of traditional drugs and narcotics. Their biggest coup of late has been the development of Bioengineered Awakened Drugs—though they lack the full magical kick, they still carry enough mojo to take your mind on a ride—catered to exclusive clientele.
These are the big players, but the smaller ones deserve a brief mention as well. Ethnic-based organizations abound—the Pueblo Koshari, the Turkish or Kabul Maffiya, the Arabic Al-Akhirah, the Korean Seoulpa Rings/Jo-pok, the Scandinavian Vikings, and so on. There are also all sorts of specialty outfits,ranging from pirate crews and smuggler networks to assassin groups such as Chimera and the Smokers’ Club, and also including the untold number of hacker groups who specialize in Matrix crime.
GANGS
Below the organized-crime syndicates on the criminal ladder are the gangs. Every sprawl has them, and they range in size from small groups that get together for self-protection or mayhem all the way up to well organized, multi-city gangs that nearly rival some of the smaller crime syndicates.
Gangs come in many varieties: the most common are garden-vari-ety sprawl gangs that control territory and run criminal enterprises like protection, smuggling, or extortion, but most sprawls are also home to mobile “go-gangs” that prowl the highways looking for fun, profit, and victims. Rarer but no less dangerous are “wiz-gangs” made up of young spellslingers who seek their kicks on both the material and astral planes, and Matrix gangs that roam cyberspace terrorizing other users and hacking systems.
Some of the larger and more well known gangs with operations throughout UCAS major cities include the Ancients, the Cutters, and the Spikes, but old gangs die and new ones pop up every day. Wise shadowrunners know that staying on the right side of the right gangs can pay dividends when they need gear or the run starts going to hell.
ORGANLEGGERS
Getting involved with other criminal enterprises might end up costing you an arm and a leg, but rarely do they mean this literally. With
organleggers, all bets are off—and you might end up losing a lot more than a limb or two.
Organleggers are the bogeyman nobody likes to talk about—even “legitimate” criminals like the Mafia and the Yak are leery of getting into the business (though this doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t trying). In a society where somebody with a damaged or diseased body part can just head to the hospital or clinic to get it replaced, those body parts have to come from somewhere. Sure, they can be cloned, but that takes time, and often that’s something the recipients don’t have. Enter Tamanous, the big name in organlegging. These charming individuals specialize in getting the right part for the right person—and they don’t care too much about whether the part’s present owner is still using it at the time. They’ve even been known to hack hospital records to find people whose parts match their clients’ specifications, and you’d be surprised to find out how many crooked doctors are on their payroll.
As you might guess, Tamanous is a great place for the up-and-coming ghoul (who not only gets paid to do what he’d do anyway, he also gets to keep the scraps), but there are plenty of non-ghouls in the bodysnatching business as well. The organization is secretive, well organized, and, since organlegging is all they do, they’re very good at their jobs. Shadowrunners beware.
HE AIN'T HEAVY...
Most people can’t quite believe that there used to be a time when their ancestors discriminated against each other based on inconsequential differences like the color of their skin or which type of consenting adult(s) they liked to have sex with. These days, you’re much more likely to encounter prejudice based on your horns or your pointed ears than because you’re pink and the other guy is brown. Here’s a look at race relations in the Seventies.
THE WAY IT IS
For the majority of people, race—or more accurately, metatype—doesn’t figure too much into their view of the world. After all, it’s been close to fifty years since UGE occurred and people started changing into orks and trolls, and almost sixty since elves and dwarfs arrived on the scene. The average citizen sees other metatypes every day: we work with them, run into them at the Stuffer Shack, and party with them at bars and clubs. Our kids attend school with them every day. For the most part, the five basic metatypes have gotten used to being around each other and problems are far less prevalent than they used to be. That’s not to say that many people don’t still prefer the company of their own kind (witness meta-heavy nations like Tir Tairngire or the Black Forest Troll Kingdom for extreme examples), but this is based as much on shared experience as it is on any overt racism.
Still, it would be naive to say that racism doesn’t exist. If you don’t believe it, try being a troll and applying for a job as a corporate management trainee. Many workplaces still discriminate (particularly against orks and trolls) and other business establishments maintain subtle or not-so-subtle biases for or against particular metatypes. It doesn’t just benefit humans, either—a human or elf walking alone into the Big Rhino (a notorious ork restaurant in Seattle) will find this out in a hurry.
Often it’s the truly unusual who are singled out for discrimination: for example, even nearly ten years after the return of Halley’s Comet brought SURGE and a new wave of changes, the so-called “changelings” still have a hard time finding acceptance within mainstream society, while the less common regional metavariants (such as menehunes, fomori, and night ones) encounter more prejudice than their more generic “vanilla” varieties.
PRO-META ACTIVISTS
In the face of such discrimination, it’s only natural that metahumans would band together and form organizations to try to gain advantages for their group—whether they be political power, more resources or jobs, or simply the chance for their voices to be heard in government policy making. Some of these organizations, like the Mothers of Metahumans (MOM), number all metatypes (even humans) among their membership, and their efforts aim to benefit everyone’s needs regardless of type. Others, like the Ork Rights Committee (ORC), the Ghoul Liberation League and the dwarven Stonecutters’ Guild, focus their efforts more tightly and seek to advance the cause of their own particular people. In any case, these organizations employ many tactics to get their points across: for example, ORC and MOM focus more on street-level grassroots activism (along with a healthy dose of civil disobedience) in addition to political lobbying, while the stonecutters use their greater economic clout to advance the agendas of dwarfs. Regardless of the methods they use, there’s no arguing that the metarights groups have made—and are continuing to make—great strides toward leveling the playing field for metahumans.
RACIST ORGANIZATIONS
Of course, in any society there are always people who aren’t content to just live and let live—they’re convinced that metatypes other than their own are somehow less than people, that they’re stealing the jobs and benefits that rightfully belong to their people, that they’re destroying the moral fiber of society, and so forth. Some of these people have such big problems with metatypes other than their own that they band together with like-minded individuals and form their own organizations—sort of the dark side of the generally nonviolent meta-activist coalitions.
Groups like the sheet-clad Humanis Policlub and the pro-troll and –ork, anti-everybody-else Sons of Sauron range in aim from glorified political action committees to terrorist organizations bent on nothing short of the destruction (or at least the subjugation) of anybody who doesn’t share their metatype. Sometimes, as is the case with Humanis, the same organization can operate at both ends of the spectrum, presenting itself as a benign pro-human social club while working behind the scenes for more nefarious purposes. The depressing thing about these organizations is that while their memberships aren’t as strong as they used to be, they’re still quite adept at manipulating the emotions of the young, the down-and-out, and the failures of society. Since none of these types is in short supply, the racist policlubs are guaranteed a steady stream of new members.
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