Roving bands of ork gangers decked out with cybernetic limbs and neon glowing dreadlocks, elf celebrity starlets schmoozing with megacorp executives, street shamans rummaging through garbage bins while communing with their rat spirit totem, dwarf hackers with a whole virtual world and an army of weaponized drones at their fingertips, hermetic mages cooped up in laboratories using scientific methodologies to study ancient magical artifacts, troll bouncers guarding the most exclusive night clubs, dragon CEOs holding boardroom meetings that influence the fate of the world far more than any gathering of politicians...

...no, I'm not having a stroke and spewing random gibberish, I'm talking about Shadowrun.

Shadowrun is an amazing role-playing game that fuses classical fantasy elements (elves, dragons, magic and the like) with a gritty, nigh distopian cyberpunk setting. It takes place on a version of planet earth that is almost identical to the world we live in (i.e. it has the same continents, countries, cities and history as our world) save for the fact that it goes through cycles of magic lasting for thousands of years. Periods where mana waxes and wanes, either bringing with it magic and all manner of fantastical creatures, or leaving a world devoid of any magical energy whatsoever. These cycles are called “Worlds” and, in the Shadowrun setting, the time we are living in right now would be called the Fifth World, a period of extremely low (if not nonexistent) magic.
In Shadowruns alternate history this all changes in 2012 when magic comes back to earth. Starting with the sighting of the great eastern dragon Ryumyo above mount Fuji, elf and dwarf babies being born to human parents worldwide and native American shamans becoming the first humans to bend spirits to their will, humanity’s dawning realization that magic is real quickly devolved into a worldwide panic that only died down when the great dragon Dunkelzahn (the future president of the United States) gave a 6 hour interview explaining the nature of magic and it’s awakening. Thus ended the Fifth World and a new cycle of magic began… the Sixth World.

It is now 2072, and the earth, sixty years after the Awakening, is scarcely recognizable as the world we all know and love. Mega corporations claim extraterritoriality and wield more power than all but the mightiest of nations. The populous is largely divided into corporate wageslaves, model citizens that live and die for the mega corporations while residing in their futuristic megalopolises, and the disenfranchised SINless, people lacking a SIN (System Identification Number) that live “of the grid” and are thus largely unprotected by any laws countries or megacorps. might have in place.
The SINless mostly live in almost post apocalyptic slums that are left over from once thriving cities (for example, Seattle, being the hometown of the games developers, is a quintessential city in Shadowrun and one that is most fleshed out) and it is in these semi anarchic communities that your characters ply their trade, it is there that they run the shadows.
In Shadowrun you play as one of the SINless, but not just any old SINless junkie or hobo wallowing in the streets, no, you play as highly trained mercenary operatives that work outside the law and are hired regularly (whether by governments, megacorps. or other interested parties) to carry out all manner of highly dangerous and usually extremely illegal missions… You play as shadowrunners.
Whether you are a hacker specialized in matrix infiltration, a street samurai decked out with so much cyberlimbs and weaponry that you could be characterized as a one man army, a rigger controlling a veritable menagerie of drones of all shapes, sizes and purposes through VR, or a mage dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of the astral plane (and occasionally burning someone to a crisp for some extra cash), there is always work to be had for skilled shadowruners.

While I have only recently started playing the newest edition of the Shadowrun game, I have been familiar (and completely in love) with the setting itself for some years now. If you share my opinion of the world of Shadowrun (namely that it is ball shatteringly amazing!) or would just like to check it out, beside getting a group together and playing the pen and paper game I would highly recommend playing through the “Shadowrun Returns” series of video games (“Dead Man’s Switch”, “Dragonfall” and “Hong Kong”). They are turn based tactical RPGs funded on Kickstarter, developed and published by Harebrained Schemes with gameplay mostly resembling that of Fallout 2 or similar turn based games.
Playing through them is a great way of getting to know the Sixth World without the hassle of rounding up a group to play with and reading through the tons of material that are available, but it also carries the big risk of getting you so hyped on the setting that you will want to buy any and all the rulebooks and game supplements that are out there (I know that’s what happened to me )

Here are some clips of the games in question, see If you like them.

For those of you who are really intrigued and who DO want that ton of material I mentioned I can recommend reading through the 4th edition books as well as the 5th edition ones, because, the differences in rules notwithstanding, the fluff information in both editions is generally accepted as canon… and the is so much fluff guys! Even after years of casual reading I feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface