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Where Man meets Magic and Machine.

"Watch your back, shoot straight, conserve ammo, and never, ever, cut a deal with a dragon."

Shadowrun is a Tabletop Game from FASA straddling the Cyberpunk and Dungeon Punk genres. It is set, depending on the edition, in the mid- or late 21st century, after magic returned on December 21, 2012, as it had more than once in the distant past. Dragons and other mythic beasts awoke from eons-long slumber; many humans gained magic and/or mutated into new, yet familiar species. The Native Americans were the first ones to use magic on a greater scale, and they used their newfound power to retake most of the western North American continent. The real movers and shakers, though, are the megacorporations, who have achieved extraterritorial status and are now, edition depending, exempt from the majority of laws or virtual nations unto themselves. In this world, the players are Shadowrunners; freelance operatives who take jobs that corporations, governments, and other entities prefer not to handle themselves — and occasionally, they handle the ones those entities can't.

As noted previously, the game takes place in the future. The game timeline progresses at (on average) one game year per real year. First Edition starts in 2050, Second Edition in 2053, Third in 2060, Fourth in 2070, Fifth in 2075, and Sixth in 2080.

Shadowrun handily became the most popular cyberpunk role-playing game, a fact which pisses off genre purists to no end. Video game adaptations of the setting were made for both the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System in the 90's. The two were very different from each other. The Genesis version was considered a classic for its console, while the less-popular SNES version is thought of as one of the console's hidden gems. There was also a Japan-only game for the Sega CD. Another adaptation, a team-based FPS for the Xbox 360 and PC, however, has been much less well-received. The primary reason you will find it referenced is the rare use of cross-platform multiplayer between the 360 and PC versions. (This game is also the reason for its rarity, as gameplay was unbalanced in the favor of PC players due to superior controls.) A new game started getting funding via Kickstarter and exceeded its $400,000 goal in just 28 hours, making $1,889,416 total. Shadowrun Returns, as it was called, was produced by FASA founder and Shadowrun co-creator Jordan Weisman and released on July 25th, 2013.

It has a strictly fantasy spinoff called Earthdawn. It was originally stated that Earthdawn is actually a prequel to Shadowrun placed in the Fourth Age (Shadowrun being Sixth), but this connection is no longer used officially, as the two games are now managed by different publishers. A Space Opera offshoot was/is in the works, Equinox, but it was split off into two separate projects, one retaining the Equinox name and the other called Eclipse Phase, with neither retaining much connection to either Shadowrun or Earthdawn, though Equinox is closer.


This game contains examples of:

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     A-D 
  • Aborted Arc:
    • When Dunkelzahn was killed at his Presidential inauguration, the plot appears to have been part of a tie-in to the Big D preventing the Horrors (from Earthdawn) from returning. While this story is still assumed to be "canon", ever since FASA was broken up and Shadowrun & Earthdawn went to separate publishers, the plotline has largely been dropped, as detailed under Left Hanging.
    • Also, despite the nations continuing to exist and Aztechnology remaining a major megacorp, in many ways the Native American Nations and Aztlan as metaplot entities have been largely Out of Focus for a long time, certainly for almost all of the 21st century in real time; this is mostly due to increasing awareness of Native American issues and how the backstory and a lot of the earlier depictions of the founding of the NAN and Aztlan can come across as scalding examples of The Savage Indian-style racism and racial panic. Aztlan and its related "scary Aztec" imagery took somewhat longer to fall away (4e's Sixth World Almanac still used it as far forward as 2010) but it too eventually faded from focus.
  • Absurd Brand Name: There are many brands that make you wonder what the marketing department was smoking. Examples include a sleep med called ComaDoze, the mobile medical service DocWagon, and the Stuffer Shack convenience store chain.
  • Achievements in Ignorance: More subtle than most examples but this happens a lot when Technomancers first emerge. At least one fixed up her motorcycle before realizing that her commlink was off.
  • Adaptation Amalgamation: BattleRun, a free April Fools' Day crossover between Shadowrun and BattleTech; a sequel (BattleRun 2: The Quest For The Thing) came out for April Fools Day 2020. In No Future, BattleRun appears in-universe as a Game of Thrones-type trid show.
  • Adjective Animal Alehouse
    • Native American Nations Vol. 2, adventure "Eye of the Eagle". The city of Kemano in the Tsimshian Nation has a tavern called The Randy Sasquatch.
    • Seattle Sourcebook (1990).
      • Bars: The Filthy Dragon, The Green Fish, The Lost Unicorn
      • Hotels: Gold Lion Inns (also a Bland-Name Product for Real Life Red Lion Hotels)
      • Restaurants: The Big Rhino, The Shy Giant
      • Stores: The Green Nymph, The Silver Slug.
    • London Sourcebook. White Lion Hotels and The Lounging Lizard nightclub can be found in London.
    • Neo-Anarchist Guide to Real Life. Nightclubs: The Chrome Stallion in San Francisco and The White Elephant Saloon in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.
    • Prime Runners sourcebook. The Chrome Rat nightclub in the Salem section of the Seattle Metroplex is co-owned by the rock star William Marshall Ossian.
    • Shadows of the Underworld supplement, adventure "Two Solitudes". In San Francisco, the White Horse Tavern is just a few blocks from UC Berkeley.
    • Ka•Ge magazine Volume 1 Issue 8 (2nd quarter 1993) story "Instruction Takes A Turn". Roc meets the fixer Weasel in the Chrome Beetle bar.
  • Adventure-Friendly World: One of the "friendliest" ever. The millennial wars, plagues and the return of magic have turned the entire planet into a Death World — either a Wild Wilderness full of supernatural critters where only Magical Natives can thrive, or a Polluted Wasteland full of even nastier supernatural critters that even the Magical Natives can't handle. The only exceptions are the sprawls, each a Truce Zone between what's left of the Lawful Stupid hyper-bureaucratic governments that let things get this bad, the Magical Natives who overthrew them in a somewhat-effective attempt to fix it, and the mercilessly efficient Mega Corps who were actually responsible for the whole mess. And you, player? You're a deniable mercenary in a world full of things to steal, shoot, or just run past. Welcome to the Sixth World, chummer.
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Literally; In the first editions (1-3), until 2064 (the 2nd crash), only three A.I.s existed (Mirage, Morgan/Maegera and Deus — the latter one being the big, bad kind of AI)note . All of them were extremely powerful entities but all of them vanished in Crash 2.0 which ended the 3rd edition. In the 4th Edition, starting 2070, lesser A.I.s started to appear. Self-awareness can't be written into a program; it has to occur on its own. The best that the corps can do as far as creating AI goes is to monitor their most data-intensive programs closely and see what happens. Second, the result may be self-aware but not sapient, like a dog or a cat. Or it could be the very rare third type where it still is somewhat like its original program. These are called xenosapients because they are so alien to metahumanity that they are pretty much Starfish Aliens. Then there are the metahuman-like A.I.s. Some have just spawned from nothing, some from existing programs and others seem to be based on people that got trapped in the Matrix during the Second Crash or later events.
  • The Ageless: Dragons have this as a racial trait, as well as some elves. Anyone can gain this if they can make the right pact with a free spirit, which requires the spirit to write its formula (essentially its true name) into the recipient's soul.
  • Air-Vent Passageway: Supplement State of the Art 2063. HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) systems have ductwork that can be used by shadowrunners to infiltrate corporate buildings. Knight Errant Security recommends that the ducts be made too small to allow entry by intruders.
  • Aliens in Cardiff: Subverted by Real Life: When the first edition was released in 1989, the creators chose to set the game in Seattle since as major American cities go, it was almost completely under the pop-cultural radar, giving them a bit more room to play. Then The '90s happened, and TV-series and films moved to Seattle, and grunge and Starbucks moved out.
  • Alien Space Bats: The Magic Comes Back on Mayan Doomsday. Cue the rise of megacorporations, the shattering of some of the world's mightiest powers (including the U.S., China, and Germany), and the realms of science and religion turned on their heads.
  • All Deaths Final
    • If you die in the tabletop game, you're dead. Not so much in the FPS, where you can be resurrected within the same round if your buddies care to do so and have the MP. In newer editions, you can burn Edge to make a killing blow non-lethal, implying that your character got lucky and wasn't murdered.
    • As of Lockdown, this no longer necessarily applies to your enemies. Cerberus Strain head cases have a healing factor sufficient to repair even lethal injuries such as head shots, thanks to the nanites possessing them.
    • Advanced blood magic also gives some flexibility to the Only Mostly Dead, allowing the resurrection of the very recently deceased.
  • All There in the Manual: To be specific the Sixth World Almanac. It explains what happened in the background. This is somewhat necessary because of the RetCons from the previous editions, new players getting into it, and just clearing things up. However it's written In-Universe so Unreliable Narrator is in effect. (Also there are several misprints in it.) Still worth it for background information
  • Almighty Janitor: Somewhat. At least one supplement points out that bribing the underpaid janitors and rent-a-cops at buildings can make a run a lot easier.
  • Alternate Continuity: The 2007 videogame — according to the developers/ The Other Wiki — should be considered Shadowrun In Name Only.
  • Alternate History
    • The Fulton County Stadium (former home of the Atlanta Braves and Falcons) still exists in 2060, despite being torn down in real life in 1996 (the building is referenced in a book published in 2001), and was renamed Ted Turner Stadium before Georgia Tech acquired it for research purposes.
    • Events stick to Type 2 and possibly Type 1 events on the Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility until Mayan Doomsday; Warren E. Burger doesn't retire from the US Supreme Court in 1986. Ronald Reagan throws George H. W. Bush under the bus during Iran-Contra. The first Alt!POTUS is Michael Dukakis. The US sells Native reservations to corporations to exploit their resources — throwing the residents in camps to expedite the process, which spares them from the global pandemic that wipes out a quarter of the Earth's population. Two SCOTUS decisions lead to the rise of Mega Corps;
      1. In 1999, the Supreme Court grants many major corporations the right to act as Private Military Contractors as "ex post facto" justification for ending a vicious food riot with a massacre instead of permitting the rioters to accidentally start an outbreak by eating hazardous medical waste. It's implied that the "Seretech Decision" was planned in advance from riot to lawsuit, because it's kind of stupid to transport hazardous medical waste through Manhattan during a food riot...
      2. Especially because the same year, the NRC was forced to give another corporation its own nuclear power plant rather than be accused of graft. And the corporation was able to spin an ecoterrorist attack on the plant into full-blown corporate extraterritoriality.(the "Shiawase Decision") by saying they'd have been able to protect the place better with mercenaries instead of local cops. And an attempt by the ecoterrorist group to clear their name is interrupted by a bombing believed to be the first shadowrun.
    • Averted with the Kowloon Walled City in that the timeline of the game acknowledges it's demolition in 1994, only for it to be rebuilt in the 2020s.
  • The Alternet: The Matrix was retconned to be implemented after the Crash of 2029 destroyed the internet. In 2064, another Crash destroyed the wired Matrix and the wireless mesh Matrix replaced it.
  • Amazing Technicolor Population: While most metahumans are restricted to real-life skin colors, a few notable exceptions exist:
    • The nartaki, a human metavariant found in India, have red, blue or yellow skin.
    • The Night Ones, a type of European elves, have full-body coverings of short, fine fur that's typically black, violet or blue in color, and more rarely green or dark orange.
    • Oni, a Japanese ork metavariant, have red, orange or blue skin.
    • Querx, a type of German dwarves, have blue skin.
  • Ammo-Using Melee Weapon: The AZ-150 Super Stun Baton delivers a strong jolt of electricity that can knock a victim unconscious. It can be used 12 times and must then be recharged. The Reinco Shock Glove uses stun baton technology to render targets unconscious with an electrical charge. It has up to eight uses before needing to be recharged.
  • Amoral Attorney: The 5th edition rulebook states that most consiglieri (the "trusted advisors" of Mafia Dons, though not directly in the families' chains of command) are lawyers in their legal day-to-day jobs.
  • Ammunition Backpack: Some heavy and directed-energy weapons like flamethrowers and lasers require lots of fuel/energy. If they're man-portable, the wielder is likely carrying all that fuel on his back.
  • Amusing Injuries: Taking the Cursed disadvantage causes this with a character's magic. Rule wise it causes glitches to happen more often when casting magic and causing you to make dice rolls for otherwise automatic successes. An example they give is summoning a water spirit can set your clothes on fire and glitching a casting of Improved Reflexes results in your character tripping over their shoelaces.
  • Ancient Conspiracy: The immortal Elves and Greater Dragons, together and separately.
  • And I Must Scream: Personasofts override the user's mind while active. If they malfunction, the user may be stuck watching his body do what the p-soft tells it. It's bad enough if the p-soft is a benign one, but bunraku p-softs are unpleasant for their users.
  • Anti-Frustration Feature: Some premade runs specifically instruct the GM to let any MacGuffin or needed clues survive combat by "pure chance" even if they should be put at risk by fireballs, grenades, or similar area of effect abilities. Now if they manage to destroy it after combat....
  • Anti-Magic: Awakened, magic-draining algae/bacteria exist in the setting, and can magic-proof walls if you slather enough on them. Fifth edition also introduced Grey Mana Tattoos, tattoos that drain magic targetted at the user.
  • Appeal to Force: Run Faster discusses that, if you want to get paid by your Johnson...well, you can't take him to court, so you'd best be able to collect from him if he decides to fuck you out of your pay.
There is a common thread to all of these things—the rapport de force. That’s French for “who has the biggest dick.”
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Chinese Triads deploy their goon squads based on traditional numerology — four and five are unlucky numbers, seven and eight are particularly lucky.
  • Arbitrary Mission Restriction: Published adventures sometimes have Mr. Johnson put these type of restrictions on the shadowrunners. For example, if the run involves sending a decker into the target's computer system to retrieve a file, Mr. Johnson may order that the decker is not to look at or copy any of the other files in the system or keep copies of the file for himself. Which is often less arbitrary than you might think. If data is valuable enough for a Mr. Johnson to hire the runners to get, then it's potentially valuable enough for some runners to sell to more than just Mr. Johnson. Often the seemingly arbitrary restrictions that published adventurers (and regular GMs) place on a mission are less than arbitrary when you (as players or characters) do some thinking or digging.
  • Arbitrary Weapon Range: Some grenade launcher projectiles don't detonate until they travel a minimum distance after firing to protect the user from being blown up by their own grenade, but also prevents the use of the weapon at close range. Truth in Television; the RPG-7 and M203 both must travel a certain distance in order to arm.
  • Arm Cannon
    • Cybernetic arms with installed guns are fairly common. Smaller guns can shoot from the heel of the palm in a "hand blast" effect, or fold back parts of the hand to expose the barrel, but bigger guns like grenade launchers take up the entire arm and forego the hand entirely.
    • As of 5th Edition, nothing larger than an SMG goes in a cyberarm.
  • Arms Dealer
    • Pretty much anyplace will tend to have one shady dealer one way or another since legalized arms-running is generally unheard-of, and shadowrunners who want to look for some kill-toys usually have one arranged by their fixers in order to meet them in person. The only AAA-corporation who specializes in actual small arms manufacturing and wholesaling is Ares, in which about a good 1/3rd of all of the world's weaponry is made by them.
    • The Crime Mall is a completely shameless example: they operate directly-open-to-the-public storefronts out of an actual abandoned shopping mall in the Puyallup Barrens to anyone regardless of welfare, income or status, even if they leave themselves directly at maximum risk of being targeted by law enforcement.
  • Artifact Collection Agency: The Mystic Crusaders. Take a wild guess who they REALLY are...
  • Artificial Cannibalism: One of the bequests in the will of the dragon Dunkelzahn was to give 2 million nuyen to anyone who developed artificial metahuman flesh that could satisfy a ghoul's hunger.
  • Artistic License – Geography
    • One adventure taking place in Bogotá describes the landlocked mountain city as having a port. It has an airport, but no seaport to speak of.
    • In-universe, Sounder voices his displeasure that the simsense retelling of Water Margin set in Seattle fobs up its geography.
  • Ascended Fanboy: Supplements to the game introducing new gear are presented as posts on Jackpoint (or its predecessor Shadowlands in early editions), a major Shadowrunning message board. In early editions, Slamm-O is a kid commenting on the weapons' usefulness in the video games he plays. This annoys the real runners to no end, but they can't seem to get rid of him. In subsequent editions, he matures into an actual shadowrunner, and eventually becomes an admin of Jackpoint.
  • Astral Projection: It is possible for some mages and magical creatures to project themselves into the astral plane.
  • Attack Reflector: The Reflective Shielding initiate metamagic ability, first described in Awakenings: New Magic in 2057.
  • Attack Speed Buff: Certain types of cyberware, such as Wired Reflexes, as well as some spells and adept abilities, allow the recipient to take extra passes (actions) each round. This means that a chromed-up Street Samurai with tier 3 Wired Reflexes can attack four times in the amount of time it would take an unaugmented character to attack once with the same weapon.
  • Auto-Kitchen
    • 2nd Edition main rules. In the section "Lifesyles of the Rich and Shadowy", the Average lifestyle description says that "the autocook has a full selection of flavor faucets". Statements in the other sections indicate that the autocook prepares a substance called "nutrisoy" that has flavors added to it.
    • Supplement The Neo-Anarchists' Guide to Real Life. McHugh's restaurants have computer-controlled food preparation equipment. When the customer makes his selection, the food items are automatically moved to the appropriate preparation equipment, defrosted/heated as needed and delivered to the customer.
  • Awesome Backpack
    • Shadowland magazine Vol. 5 article "Bigger, Badder and Powered". One option for powered armor is the Extended Power Supply, which is a backpack attached to the rear of the armor that doubles duration of use.
    • 3rd Ed. Man & Machine: Cyberware supplement. The Savior Advance Medkit can be worn as a backpack. It can inject stimulant, coagulant and painkilling drugs into the recipient's bloodstream, as well as healing nanites that can reseal damaged flesh, prevent blood loss and prevent the victim from going into shock.
  • Back-Alley Doctor: Vital to know for shadowrunners in general and Street Samurai in particular. Those who are SINless in general are forced to look up to these as certified professional doctors can only be accessed by one who has a SIN. However, as multiple source books detail, the skill level of these docs ranges from "Folks who have watched too many medical dramas and fancy themselves as doctors while relying on Skillsofts and Auto-Docs" to actual trained medical professionals who lost their medical licenses one way or another or who run backyard practices in their spare time. There are also some who engage in Organ Theft of both actual organs and cyberware or docs who sell their patients to Ghouls as a meat source, but those are thankfully pretty rare.
  • Backpack Cannon: The Ballista Multi-Role Missile Launcher is also an Awesome Backpack.
  • Bad Boss: Saeder-Krupp's CEO Lofwyr (the great dragon of the setting after Dunkelzahn) is notoriously thin-skinned about being Out-Gambitted (which is difficult but possible) or failure in his organization (and a longstanding, more than likely true but unverified rumor is that he eats those who displease him), and micro-manages practically every aspect of his company from the bottom up. These tendencies are so well-known that only very stupid, very daring or very desperate runners accept jobs that involve Saeder-Krupp in any way.
  • Badass Crew: Any sufficiently experienced crew of runners that have worked together for a length of time.
  • Balkanize Me: Large countries like China are split into many small countries, Russia is split in two, Germany into a Confederation of six states, and Africa into tribal nations no more then a few miles across. North America is similarly divided; see Divided States of America below.
  • Basilisk and Cockatrice: Basilisks are black-and-yellow Awakened Komodo dragons with petrifying gazes, and are extremely popular as guard animals. Cockatrices are long-legged, three-meter-long Awakened chickens with a paralyzing bite.
  • Bat Out of Hell:
    • The rather inaccurately named birdman, also referred to somewhat more accurately as the manbat, is a type of Awakened bat the size of a bird of prey. While they don't normally go after humans, they're still quite aggressive when disturbed, naturally prey on creatures as big as owls, move in large swarms, and possess very sharp claws on their thumbs and saliva laced with contagious bacteria.
    • Stonebinders are large, but not unrealistically so, Awakened brown bats with long tails tipped with venomous stingers. Their real danger comes from their saliva, however, which causes living tissues it touches to rapidly calcify and turn into an immobile, stone-like state. Stonebinders can spit this saliva with great accuracy from a meter away, and its effects spread from the area of contact until the victim is entirely petrified within a few hours.
  • Beast Man
    • SURGE from the passing of Halley's Comet late in 3rd Edition caused animal traits to manifest in certain people, called Changelings. It's mentioned that "cute" Changelings, such as anime-style cat girls, can use it to their advantage, while more radically-transformed Changelings — derogatorily called furries — are subject to discrimination. Or become The Matron and wind up clearing out a good section of Chicago... with sentient spiders. Not just any spiders, either, but black widow spiders. That now make up the world's largest undetectable observation network.
    • Kitsune, from the SNES game, is a fox shapeshifter who possesses a pair of — what else? — fox ears.
  • BFS: Claymores and nodachis are available weapons for those who find katanas too small. As of 5th edition, the latest offering is the Highlands Forged Claymore, which is less accurate than the katana, but more accurate than the combat axe while offering equal reach, damage, and superior armor penetration, balanced by a higher restriction rating and price tag.
  • BFG: The Thunderstruck Gauss Rifle, assault cannons, sniper rifles, etc.
  • Big Bad: The Horrors. They are Eldritch Abominations of unspeakable power and subtlety, with abilities that are beyond the comprehension of even the greatest mages. They appear on Earth from astral space in a Vicious Cycle (once every several thousand years) and try to kill most life by inflicting unspeakable pain.
  • Big Blackout: A significant part of the metaplot for 6th Edition is month-long blackouts/power surges in many major UCAS cities after the UCAS backs out of the Business Recognition Accords.
  • Big Brother Is Watching: If someone is in public, they're on several cameras at once. Everything they buy is put on file, every transaction they make leaves a datatrail straight to them, every ad they show interest in is monitored... All so that the corps get more of their money. Thanks to them, in many places it's illegal — or at least very suspicious — to have your commlink switched off in public. Taken to the extreme in Manhattan, where it is a crime to not be broadcasting your SIN at all times, and there are sensors specifically set up to find people who are not broadcasting. It's also the one place where "corporate secrecy" is trumped by the "common good": if Manhattan Inc asks for security footage from a corporation, they are required to comply. Needless to say, it makes life difficult (some would say fun) for shadowrunners.
  • Big Eater: Raven shamans cannot turn down an offer of food, and orks and trolls (and anyone with the symbiotes or suprathyroid bioware upgrades) must eat much more than normal.
  • Big Good: Harlequin and Dunkelzahn fill this role, despite being as ethically-questionable as anyone else in this setting. They're the only ones who seem to be playing the long game against the Horrors, at any rate.
  • The Big Rotten Apple: New York City was the site of the food riots that lead to the Seretech Decision, and then was devastated by an earthquake. Manhattan became the Free City of New York after the other boroughs pulled out and the region became the possession of the Manhattan Development Consortium, a group of companies devoted to rebuilding the city. While New York is now a shiny paragon of a city, it's illegal to go anywhere without flagging your SIN (so if you don't have one, you're committing a crime just by existing), and while most cities have sold out to private groups like Lone Star, the NYPD itself has reformed as its own corporation. As such, shadowrunners have to be extremely careful if they want to get anything done in the city.
  • Bilingual Bonus: The Genova-Milano-Torino sprawl — one of several "feral cites" where law and order have completely broken down, Mega Corps do as they please, resources are scarce and life nasty, brutish and short — is typically referred to as GeMiTo for short. In Italian, a gemito is a moan or a groan such as one made by someone in fear, pain or despair.
  • Biotech Is Better: Bioware, first introduced in the 1st edition sourcebook Shadowtech, part of the core rulebook in 4th ed, is presented as being the latest and greatest thing in augmentation. In game rules it is more expensive in terms of cash than traditional cyberware but does less damage to your Essence, making it preferred for mages. In earlier additions it cost no essence but had its own Bioindex score. In the Everything Is Online world of the latest edition, it also has the advantage of having no wireless capability, meaning it can't be bricked or worse by an enemy decker. It tends to be the most subtle augmentation option.
  • Bioweapon Beast:
    • Fideals are creatures resembling a cross between a jellyfish and an amoeba, and often infest shallow waters and try to eat anything that touches them. They're generally believed to have been deliberately designed as bioweapons of some sort and then released into the wild, although nobody agrees on precisely who created them.
    • Sirens, creatures resembling small Pterosaurs and possessing hypnotic calls, are believed to have been artificially created as guard animals from unknown reptilian source animals. They weren't suitable for these purposes due to their highly aggressive natures, however, and now live as aggressive predators in wildernesses worldwide.
    • Fourth editions adds in Warforms and Chimeras as deliberately created non-awakened bioweapon beasts.
  • Bizarre Alien Senses: Certain Awakened creatures have thermographic (infrared) vision, including dwarves, trolls, dragons, vampires, centaurs, cerberus hounds, and fomorians.
  • Bizarre Baby Boom: Unexplained Genetic Expression, responsible for the emergence of elves and dwarves among the population.
  • Black Market
    • Hell, in the world of 2070, they're this close to advertising. Anyone up for a trip to the Crime Mall?
    • One sourcebook mentions Hacker House, an online store for illegal hackers' gear that openly advertises its existence. The trick is finding it, then hacking into it in order to use its services.
  • Blade Below the Shoulder: Cyberspurs can be installed to emerge from wrists, elbows, and knees.
  • Bland-Name Product: Both averted and played straight in several sourcebooks.
    • NERPS (or New Exciting Retail ProductS) is something of a Running Gag throughout the game's history. It's so generic that it could stand in for any product one can pick up at the department store.
    • For an in-game example, McHugh's is McDonald's in all but name, down to the color scheme, clown mascot and greasy, unhealthy soyfood.
  • Blessed with Suck:
    • The Latent Awakening quality. Why? The Gamemaster gets to pick what you become, and what spell/ability you start off with. If you pissed him off, he can screw you over.
    • All of the Infected qualities. All of them. Nothing says "this isn't worth the tradeoff" like having to feed on the flesh of your former species to survive (and that's if you're lucky).
    • A mechanic for creating a changeling; you must choose (either randomly or specifically) up to 30 karma worth of disadvantageous qualities to offset up to 30 karma worth of negative ones (e.g. if you want a changeling with a usable tail, you have to offset the 6 karma with something like critter spook).
  • Blob Monster: Supplement Paranormal Animals of Europe. The Protean is an amorphous Awakened (magical) monster made out of protozoans that resemble the dysentery bacterium. It engulfs animals and digests them with its acidic secretions.
  • Blood Magic: Practiced by Aztechnology mages and others.
  • Blood Sport: Urban Brawl, Combat Biker, and Aztec-style Court Ball.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: Street Magic points out that insect spirits can't be called evil since they are incomprehensible to metahumanity.
  • Body in a Breadbox: 2nd Edition supplement Prime Runners. Two of the troll members of Wolfram's Gang, Hammerhead and Shoot-to-Kill, are boyfriend and girlfriend. After an argument, Hammerhead left Shoot-to-Kill and got together with an old girlfriend of his. Shoot-to-Kill tracked them down, waited until Hammerhead left, cut off the girlfriend's head and left it on a plate in the refrigerator, along with a note asking him to come back to her. Hammerhead made it back to her in record time.
  • Booked Full of Mooks: In the campaign Harlequin's Back, there's the adventure "Walk in the Park". The shadowrunners are hired to pick up a woman in a park. When they try to do so, they discover that everyone else in the park is part of a security team that will try to capture or kill them.
  • Boxed Crook: State of the Art: 2064. When shadowrunners are sent to prison, they sometimes receive offers from Megacorps and governments: do a criminal job for them and they'll cancel your sentence. Those who accept are usually fitted with an Explosive Leash consisting of a cranial bomb that will cause Your Head A-Splode if they fail or run away. Runners are advised to not put themselves in the sponsor's control after finishing the job, as they may decide to put the runners back in prison or just kill them to keep them quiet.
  • Brain/Computer Interface
    • Monitors are as dead as print. The Matrix is accessed with AR these days, but professionals use VR with a Direct Neural Interface. If you're a sissy (or hanging on to your Essence), you can use non-invasive neural interface electrodes, like in Neuromancer. Real users have input/output jacks drilled in their skulls — it's the new HD!
    • Which have been replaced by electrode headbands and nano-paste, display glasses and ear buds. Everything old is new again!
    • The transition from headjacks to display glasses and earbuds is mostly due to the ubiquitous nature of commlinks, and the transition from Virtual to Augmented Reality. Most people use their commlinks as smartphones, and tend to wear them externally with the aforementioned display glasses, earbuds, and fashionably hidden trodes. Hardcore hackers have their commlinks and simsense systems implanted directly into their brains. Otaku didn't need cyberdecks to access the Matrix (but still needed ASIST tech and a 'jack), and their successors, technomancers, don't need any tech at all.
  • Brain in a Jar: What the game describes as "cyborgs" are scooped brains modified to function essentially like wetware drone computers. The books say that adult brains are less accepting of the radical change in sensory input and tend to go nuts; corps that want functional and loyal cyborgs resort to clones or scooping the brains of children.
  • Breathable Liquid: Cyberpirates introduces the Liquid Breathing Apparatus that allows divers to achieve depths of up to 3,000 meters.
  • Briefcase Blaster: In the 4th Edition Arsenal sourcebook, this is played perfectly straight with the Ares Executive Protector SMG, and then taken up to eleven with the briefcase rocket, which is effectively a short-range single-shot disposable rocket launcher.
  • Briefcase Full of Money: Nearly all transactions in the developed Sixth World are electronic, so the literal version of this trope is almost nonexistent outside places that don't have reliable Matrix access or recognize the nuyen as valid currency. Untraceable financial transactions are now made with certified credsticks, internationally-recognized bearer bond equivalents. Depending on the grade, a credstick can carry up to a million nuyen, usable by whomever holds it. Shadowrunners regularly receive these for their services and demonstrates fairly well why bearer bonds are so rare and regulated in Real Life.
  • Brick Joke:
    • In the 4E core supplement Augmentation, one of the shadowrunners in the JackPoint section was talking about rescuing a VP's kids. The kid had a single use .22 caliber pistol with a cartoon character on the side. The shadowrunner was amazed at how they cost more than her gun. Later in Augmentation, when talking about a nanoforged gun, one of the other shadowrunners (Baka Dabora) asked, "Yes, but does it have a cartoon character on the side?"
    • Another one is that in one supplement someone got a Horizon spam virus onto Jackpoint. The next supplement has FastJack say how he finally managed to get rid of it and that the person responsible has been found and banned.
    • The Street Legends Supplemental in 2012 has an enraged Clockwork threatening to sell Netcat's and Slamm-0!'s child to a laboratory, with Netcat equally enraged to know that he's got personal information on them. Jump ahead to 2014 in the Run & Gun supplemental, and Slamm-0! idly putting Rigger X on notice for selling that information. A couple months further in the Stolen Souls plotbook, Rigger X and Clockwork are both praising the utility of the Bust-A-Move child's toy drone for domestic espionage, with Netcat and Slamm-0! catching on immediately.
    • In the 5e core supplement Run & Gun, /dev/grrl links Bull to a picture of her cyberdeck holster which we don't get to see, but Bull describes as pink with unicorns and sparkles, lamenting "Kill me now." In the Data Trails core supplement, we get a picture of a female decker in full, stereotypical shadowrunning gear, pulling a cyberdeck out of a pink holster decorated with a unicorn and sparkles.
  • Bringing Back Proof: In early versions of the game, characters could receive a bounty for killing ghouls (human beings infected with a magical disease). To collect the bounty, the person had to prove that they had killed the ghoul by cutting off the ghoul's ears and turning them in.
  • Britain Is Only London: The timeline of 3rd edition describes Teesside as part of London.
  • Broad Strokes: The latter half of 5th edition into 6th edition takes this approach to Earthdawn the earlier editions tie ins, rather than full on Canon Discontinuity.
  • Brown Note:
    • The Flash Pak is a device that fires light bulbs in a random stroboscopic sequence that caused disorientation in anyone who viewed it.
    • Piricurus are Awakened thrushes capable of producing cries pitched at 30 kilohertz. This is above the range of human hearing, but large flocks can cause significant auditory pain when all calling at once. Piricuru calls are also painful and disruptive to people with cybernetically-enhanced nervous systems, as well as to animals capable of hearing them, and disrupt both natural and artificial sonar — bats and other sonar-dependent animals become disoriented and blind when piricurus sound off.
  • Bug War: The Insect Spirits don't want to kill humanity, but given that they need human sacrifice to cross over, it often becomes this when they get involved.
  • The Cake Is a Lie: What many runs all too often turn out to be. Especially if you've got a Killer Game Master. Generally if a stock run promises really big payout (one million nuyen for instance), the game will advise not giving it in part of a campaign.
  • California Collapse: Played With. In 2069, two major earthquakes known as The Twins (which measured 9.2 and 9.6 on the Richter Scale) hit Los Angeles, causing parts of Southern California and Central Valley to fall below sea level, and after being hit with a tsunami, Los Angeles and other coastal cities are cut off from the mainland, effectively becoming islands. However, it's noted this happened in defiance of plate tectonics; the sinking seems to have been something that occurred simultaneously with the quakes but was not caused by them. Some parts of the city are now tens of meters underwater, yet the buildings are completely intact and undamaged. It's later discovered that the topography of the area has significantly changed, with a vast network of astral constructs in the form of underground tunnels and lagoon-sized sinkholes appearing beneath California. This unnatural phenomenon is named the Deep Lacuna.
  • Call-Forward: The 4th edition Shadowrun 2050 sourcebook rewinds the timeline to the era of First Edition for the then-current ruleset. Some of the commentary and chatter is especially interesting in light of later plot elements, like Dunkelzahn's election, the Bug City outbreak, and learning the identity of "The Laughing Man".
  • Came Back Wrong: Fifth edition introduced Blood Necromancy which allowed for the very recently deceased to be revived. A failure on a composure test results in coming back with a physical, magical, or mental problem along with potentially essence loss if it has been too long. Arguably Essence Draining forms of HMHVV qualify.
  • Canon Discontinuity
    • A lot of 1st Edition novels, especially Dunklezahn's death.
    • And by extension, a lot of the earlier FASA continuity since Catalyst took over. Most notable has been the untethering of Earthdawn from Shadowrun's continuity.
    • Later 5th Edition work & into Sixth World, however, takes more of a Broad Strokes approach to Earthdawn in that it doesn't mention any specifics but is clearly operating under the idea that it still happened, & is trying to pick the old plotlines up again with the Serial Numbers Filed Off. The "Horrors" of Earthdawn & early Shadowrun have been rebranded as the Elder Gods(for the big, nebulous evil entities behind the threat) and "Terrors", the lesser monstrous creatures that appear in areas of their influence. They're still very much a part of the world, have been explicitly tied to many elements (masterminding the Great Ghost Dance to accelerate the flow of mana into the world & with it, their arrival), and preventing their entry is still a significant part of the Metaplot.
  • Can't Stop The Signal: Some of your contacts and Mr. Johnsons can be pirate stations that are dedicated to getting the truth out. These can vary from "The Underpants gnomes are stealing everyone's underwear" to "The Mega Corps' dirty little secrets hour." Of course this is the Sixth World so the first is probably true and the second is a plant by another Mega Corp. Generally they can't pay you in cash, but information is almost as good if not better in the Sixth World. Sometimes it's also the best way to keep things from exploding messily — in Nigel Findley's Shadowplay, someone recovers a bit of Lost Technology and global war is only averted because a decker posts it on Zurich-Orbital's message board so everyone has it.
  • Cards of Power: The Sixth World Tarot, which has a physical real-world version available as well. In addition to fortunetelling usage, individual cards have powers that can be activated that range from granting temporary technomancer powers to a favor from Lofwyr. (If he finds the favor interesting, you might even live to tell about it.)
  • Cast from Stamina: Mages have to roll to resist Drain when casting spells. If the spell's Force is lower than their Magic attribute they take stun damage, or fatigue, on a failed resist.
  • Cast from Hit Points: When magicians cast spells with a Force greater than than their Magic rating, Drain does Physical damage instead of Stun. Also, some uses of Blood Magic.
  • The Cat Came Back: This is a possible negative lifestyle quality from Runner's Companion. No matter how many times you change the locks and passcodes and re-arm the traps, friends and family members keep getting into your apartment.
  • Caught Up in a Robbery: In the "Food Fight" adventure, a team of shadowrunners stops by a Stuffer Shack convenience store to get some food. While they're there, a thrill-gang called the Chiller Thrillers tries to rob the place, and it's up to the shadowrunners to stop them. Or at least get out and save their hides.
  • Chainsaw Good: 5th Edition Run & Gun introduces the Ash Arms Combat Chainsaw and a monofiliment version. While the fluff mentions that users are more likely to hack off their own limbs, mechanically they're some of the best melee weapons available, with good reach and high damage and armor penetration; the drawback being that you can't apply your strength to damage.
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Played with. Johnsons have a nasty habit of stabbing the party in the back in the second or third act, just before they're paid — but those who are actually loyal and helpful can be extremely valuable resources or contacts. Many GMs actually throw a completely sincere Johnson into the works just to get the players (and characters) to wonder just when the gigantic sword is going to break free of the wire.
  • Chunky Salsa Rule: Trope Namer.
  • Chupacabra: Chupacabras, also called blood dogs, are mutated, mange-ridded canids with long, grooved fangs that allow them to drink blood. Their mutation is imperfect and they can't actually feed efficiently enough to avoid starving to death, making them perpetually hungry and thus highly aggressive.
  • Church of Happyology: Both straight and inverted. You see, the original Church of Happyology is all about removing alien spirits that possess you. The Universal Brotherhood is about putting alien bug spirits that possess you into you. That eat your flesh and want to take over and eat the entire world.
  • Circle of Standing Stones: After the return of magic to the world, the stone circles (and other places of power) regained their mystic potency, including being able to boost the power of magicians who knew how to use them.
  • City of Adventure
    • Seattle, Hong Kong, LA, Neo-Tokyo, Metropole (Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo), Lagos, and the Insect spirit-infested ruins of Chicago. Berlin used to be one before Lofwyr turned it into a Saeder-Krupp stronghold.
    • Also Denver and New York City (well, Manhattan, anyway. The other four boroughs haven't really been fleshed out all that well). Ironically, the ENTIRE STATE of Montana had a sourcebook written up by fans, created entirely from bits of fluff found in the official books, in case you wanted to see what the NAN was all about. Like, how it's the only place on Earth that actually creates the base materials for Orichalcum. Would've been nice to have had that, FASA...
    • For those wondering: The Horrors that did get through have been seen near the start of the Badlands in the Eastern part of the state, Billings is the last site of free trade in the world, the Mystic Crusaders are actively seeking Thor's Hammer, minor dragons exist all over Yellowstone, Great Falls AFB, as in "We fire the 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles laid all over Montana from here!" is under the control of Lofwyr through bartering with the NAN and, to make it absolutely perfectly crappy, if you're Scandinavian you just might express UGE by becoming either an Aesir (a literal angel, forsaking your physical body to ascent to the Astral Plane) or, A Frost Giant! Like Thrym! Which means phenomenal cosmic power, magical abilities, 12' feet tall and double-digit body and strength stats!... and an allergy to anything over freezing point. To make the point: SEATTLE IS PARADISE!
  • Clap Your Hands If You Believe: While magical power is itself an inborn trait, shamans and hermetic mages are strongly implied to derive their means to shape that power from belief; later supplements, especially Awakenings: New Magic in 2057, seem to make this even clearer, implying that one can base their magic on anything from ancient myths to the cartoons they watched growing up.
  • Class and Level System: Averted. There are "archetypes", such as street samurai, riggers, deckers, mages, and shamans, but these are more or less templates. A player can build up a character however they want, and can improve it by spending karma, but a skilled player will know not to spread themself too thin across secondary skills, at least early on.
  • Cloning Body Parts: It is possible for characters to receive replacement body parts or bioware that are specifically clone-grown for them. There are also mass-produced Type O(wen) biomods. One Owen Whiting was found to have completely hypoallergenic cells. So any Metahuman can accept organs and blood from him. This caused every biomedical company to pay him huge sums of money to use his cells to cultivate new bio mods, medical technology, and organs. Currently he is one of the richest men out there and is heavily protected.
  • Coca-Pepsi, Inc.: The UCAS (United Canadian and American States). Saeder-Krupp was created by the merger of (the fictional) Saeder Munitions with (the real) Krupp Industries. Real-life Krupp Industries merged with Thyssen AG to form ThyssenKrupp in 1999.
  • Code Name: Street Names are used by the vast majority of Shadowrunners, and players are encouraged to make up inventive street names for their characters and tie them into their character's background. On the other side, employers, fixers and corp employees at high-security sites that Shadowrunners commonly interact with also use these, the most common being "Mr. Johnson" amongst potential employers.
  • Combat Medic: Doc Wagon High Threat Response Teams and imitators are Combat Medics For Hire.
  • Come with Me If You Want to Live: The adventure Harlequin. The PCs are on a mission when things go haywire, with corporate police closing in from all directions. A van pulls up beside them and the driver says "So, are you guys going my way or would you rather stick around and wait for your new friends to catch up with us?"
  • Company Town: The megacorps have sovereign status, so most of their employees live out their lives in communities entirely run by their employers. If you don't mind pretty much literal wage-slavery (trying to quit is usually a punishable offense up to and including death,) it's generally safer than most of the Sixth World. Well, unless your employer decides you'd make a good test subject...
  • Concentration-Bound Magic: Maintaining an active spell requires concentration, and the more spells you try concentrating on, the worse you get at doing things that aren't just concentrating. Gameplay-wise this has almost always been represented by a stacking dice pool penalty the more spells you try to maintain.
  • Conversation in the Main Page: Most of each Shadowrun book is written as In-Universe conversations an articles on Jackpoint, with various commentary from the runners, but Bull (the administrator) tries to police this when it gets out of hand. One legendary example in Street Grimoire had 457 replies deleted after Axis Mundi argued against the Unified Magic Theory.
Geez, Axis. Way to stir the pot. Safe to say not everyone shares your beliefs.
  • Convulsive Seizures: People afflicted with TLE-x (temporal lobe epilepsy with complications) suffer these. It most commonly occurs in people with move-by-wire implants, which jack up the body's reflexes by putting it into a constant state of seizure regulated by the implant, allowing the user to act inhumanly fast when necessary. Problem is, as time goes on, the implant's ability to control the seizure state diminishes. Therapy and implant upgrades can alleviate the symptoms, but currently the only sure way to fix the problem is to remove the implant (and even then there may still be permanent damage). The disorder can also occur in people who have too many cyber-implants, or those whose nervous systems have been damaged by drugs, toxic chemicals, lethal computer software, or magic.
  • Cool People Rebel Against Authority: The setting was written from this perspective, but the message often gets muddled when the player-character "punks" are mercenary criminals who spend most of their time working for the Man while cherishing their own free agency. The rules and the fiction often reflect this tension.
  • Cop Killer:
    • In the novel Lone Wolf, deep-cover gang investigator Wolf Larson is listed as one as part of his cover identity, to enhance his credibility with the Cutters street gang he's infiltrated. This backfires when he loses contact with his handler and needs to get word to authorities quickly, as he's afraid any other cop he contacts may retaliate against him as soon as they look up his "criminal history."
    • It's advised that you avoid this in "Black Trenchcoat" (serious tone, high attempted realism) campaigns, or just in general. Megacorps know that runners are a necessary evil in the world they've helped create. Depending on the GM, they know that runners hitting them are just business, unless those runners rack up collateral damage, since it's cheaper to write off lost assets and pay a few medical bills than it is to repair facilities, replace and train lost personnel, pay out death benefits...
  • Cops Need the Vigilante: Lone Star and Knight Errant hire shadowrunners all the time, often to bring down criminals who are affecting their performance rating but can't be caught legally, or for "avenging angel" contracts where a criminal goes Off on a Technicality and they don't like that.
  • Corporate Conspiracy: It's probably easier to say which companies aren't involved in some vast conspiracy (i.e. none). The worst are Aztechnology (who use Blood Magic, and tend to be Card-Carrying Villain sorts to deniable assets like 'runners) and Saeder-Krupp (literally owned by a scheming dragon, who's rumoured to eat employees and shadowrunners who fail him). Even unethical shadowrunners avoid them, simply because of their tendency to invoke You Have Outlived Your Usefulness when it comes to being paid. It's practically a Running Gag that they have to pretend to be another corp just to hire deniable assets.
  • Corporate Dragon:
    • The dragon Lofwyr controls one of the largest Mega-Corporations in the world, and is the source of the catchphrase: "Never cut a deal with a dragon".
    • The Great Dragon Celedyr used his hoard of treasure to take over the MegaCorp Transys Neuronet. After it merged with the corporations Erika and Novatech, he became Director of Research and Development for the combined corporation Neo NET.
    • The Red Dragon Association or Hung Lung Mun is a centuries-old Triad, which used to be known as the "Red Fists". The syndicate is based in Hong Kong with ties to the Great Dragon Lung and the AAA-rated megacorp, Wuxing, Inc.
  • Corporate Samurai:
    • GM-created 'prime runners', unique enemies with the same skill-set and power level of player characters, often fall into this since they're usually employed by whichever corp or mafia the players are currently annoying. In-setting this trope usually applies to retired shadowrunners gone legit or corps-born security personnel, who are too valuable to use as mooks.
    • The Red Samurai security division from the Renraku MegaCorp is a literal example; they even wear the classic samurai armor painted red to complete their look and wield katanas to stay true to their name as well as invoking the Law of Chromatic Superiority.
  • Corporate Warfare: The primary source of income for shadowrunners.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive
    • The upper management of pretty much any MegaCorp.
    • Any Johnson you meet will likely be this, if they work for a corp (and that's statistically likely). A Johnson who isn't crooked (outside of hiring criminal mercenaries) is pretty rare.
    • Lofwyr would eat you for saying that, thereby proving the truth of your accusation.
  • Corrupted Data
    • Supplement Virtual Realities
      • The Hog virus takes over the memory used by other files, causing them to crash.
      • Scramble IC will corrupt the file it's protecting to prevent it from being copied.
      • Short story "Virtual Realities". The "Matrix Born Project" file which was the source of the story was corrupted. An attempt is made to reconstruct it but was only 61% successful.
    • Several supplements mention that a computer file was corrupted by some kind of software attack, usually a virus or IC (defense program).
      • Corporate Shadowfiles. Aztechnology got into Shadowland and planted a virus that edited their entry in the title work.
      • Tír Tairngire. On five different occasions someone working for the title country got into Shadowland and corrupted or deleted files about it.
      • Threats. The Alamos 20,000 file was corrupted by a heavy viral attack before Shadowland received it.
  • Cover Identity Anomaly: Since shadowrunners almost always operate under false identities (generally either fabricated or stolen) designed by people who are usually not privy to the secrets of the international SIN databases, it's accepted that it's a matter of when, not if, your fake ID trips detection and someone asks you a "personal" question you may not be prepared to answer. Hilarity Ensues when the question is along the lines of your ID coming up as belonging to a female troll when you're using it as a male elf.
  • Crapsack World: It's Cyberpunk, what did you expect? That said, it's implied things are getting better, albeit slowly: the current century is sort of the "Age of Piracy", with multiple East India Trading Companies.
  • Crapsaccharine World: The two Elven nations, Tír Tairngire (formerly Oregon) and Tír na nÓg (formerly Ireland). Paragons of racial tolerance and environmental consciousness with universal education and health care. Too bad they're also fascist oligarchies where everything besides basic metahuman needs cost an arm and a leg, the streets are teeming with armed Green Police, and don't forget the constant government surveillance and that all "persons of interest" (criminals, protestors, foreigners) are required to be implanted with Tracking Devices. The rest of the world is a capitalist dystopia, these two show a socialist dystopia in contrast.
  • Credit Chip: Since NuYen cash is rare, most runners prefer to be paid using certified credsticks.
  • Crippling Overspecialisation: If you're not doing this, common wisdom amongst Shadowrun veterans is that you're doing it wrong. Shadowrun character creation has always rewarded focus over flexibility, and it's better to have a party made up of a specialised sammie, decker, face, and mage that throw 10+ dice for their field and default at everything else, than four characters that can throw 4-5 dice for everything. Simple caveat; everyone in the party should have at least one multiple-use ranged attack (pistol or powerbolt) and the ability to stop someone else from bleeding out (a healing spell or basic training in first aid).
  • Critical Existence Failure: Notably averted with wound modifiers. Every few points of either physical or stun damage results in a cumulative penalty to pretty much every check you make, making even light injuries troublesome. Any kind of meatshield character will need cyberware, drugs, magic, or some natural quality that can help to fight through the pain and fatigue of their wounds or they can become useless in a hurry.
  • Critical Failure: if you roll too many ones while attempting something, but score at least one success, you suffer a glitch where some complication happens such as your weapon jamming or your character tripping and falling. If you roll too many ones, and no successes, you suffer a critical glitch where something goes catastrophically wrong. The books discourage instant death unless you were trying something pretty dangerous, but the something should generally either make death very imminent or put the entire mission in immediate danger of failing.
  • Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Mitsuhama and Aztechnology both started their lives as money laundering schemes for different underworlds and less-than-legal dealings, and ended up outgrowing their original intent. In aversion of the trope, the writers (and thus the in-game executives) got wise to this and their not-legal operations are currently mere fractions of the two megas' overall economic output.
  • Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Mechanically acts as an Arbitrary Augmentation Limit. If you install enough cyberware and bioware (performance enhancing thing-a-ma-jigs ranging from computer eyeballs to nanites and so on) to lose all your Essence, you die. That is, unless your MegaCorp of choice zombified you by intentionally overloading you with cyberware, but the subsequent necrosis, literal soul loss, suicidal tendencies, and cancer will force you to roll a new character two or three scenarios afterward under a sensible GM. Or; you've figured out cybermancy. Now you're a D&D lich with a phylactery stone protected by millions and millions of nuyen.
  • Cyberspace
    • It's even called the Matrix. In 4th edition, it's wireless! Better yet, it finally points out that cyberspace can look like anything it's programmed to look like: Systems can use the default Tron-inspired iconography, but can be programmed to be anything; libraries with books for files and librarians for security to overgrown jungle ruins with treasures for files and angry natives for security. Deckers in turn can discard their Tron Lines for anything from underage wizards with wands and glasses to BFG-toting commandos. Which leads to the awesome possibilities of Rambo clones getting their asses kicked by librarians or teenage wizards disabling angry natives with butterscotch syrup.
    • Also Unwired mentioned that there are unwritten standards. It says that being a 50-foot dragon in a small tour bus won't crash the node, but it causes a whole bunch of graphical glitches and it's just being rude.
    • As of 5th edition/2075, the wireless matrix is under much tighter control from the corporations, necessitating a return to cyberdecks and onsite hacking. A positive outcome of this is that matrix personas are now confined to the size of meta-humans; no smaller than a dwarf, no bigger than a troll. They can still look like anything — the book specifically mentions a comically undersized skyscraper or a horrifyingly over-sized beetle — but you're not going to run into the above-mentioned 50-foot dragon.
  • Cyborg: Cybernetics are common, but the term "cyborg" in the Sixth World is reserved for Full Conversion Cyborgs. Specifically, a cyborg is a metahuman Brain in a Jar implanted into a drone body, which is kept in a constant state of alert sixteen hours a day by a cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters. Like cyberzombies (see below), making someone a cyborg is very rarely a consensual procedure, and since adult brains tend to develop severe psychoses more quickly, most corps just use the brains of children instead, since they tend to last longer.
  • Cyborg Wizard: With cyberware being a thing, and magic being rampant, this trope is inevitable in several characters. Essence loss as a result of cyberware hinders the use of magic somewhat, so a balance is needed to make the most use out of both if you so choose to build such a character. Or you can Initiate and stack a high Magic stat along with a full suite of cyber; this is useful enough for physical adepts that there's an entire archetype based around such "burnouts."
  • Damage Reduction: Armor increases the dice pool for damage soak tests. Different types of ammunition have better or worse armor penetration values.
  • Dark Is Not Evil
    • Pretty much what a goody two-shoes team of shadowrunners will be. Also; though counted as Horrors, Spider Spirits run the gamut.
    • The Street Magic sourcebook points out that a toxic mage or a necromancer is not inherently evil; in-between the lines, it says that any player trying to run these better role play it well.
  • Dash Attack: 3rd Edition supplement Cannon Companion. Combatants can make a Charging Attack, which involves taking a running start and moving toward a target. If the attacker moves 2 or more meters during the charge, they gain +1 Power on the ensuing melee attack if it's successful. If the attack fails, the attacker has a chance of falling down.
  • Data Crystal: Optical crystals are used to store information, such as pictures, text, computer programs and so on.
  • Dead Man Writing: Occurs repeatedly in Shadowrun products, including The Universal Brotherhood, Awakenings, Threats, Threats 2, Dragons of the Sixth World (twice!) and Emergence. Always involves someone trying to publicize information about a dangerous conspiracy, with the conspiracy trying to kill the person to prevent this.
  • De-Power Zone: Background count areas for mages and spam/dead zones for wireless Matrix use.
  • Demonic Possession
    • Possession spirits need to steal a physical form to interact with the physical world. The vessel doesn't have to be a person, but it often is. Shedim are a type of spirit that exclusively possesses dead or soulless (e.g. astrally projecting mages) bodies. Insect spirits have the Inhabitation power instead of Possession, so their assuming of a living body is permanent and usually physically alters the vessel, making it a half-man, half-insectoid abomination.
    • In the first metaplot of Fifth Edition, cognitive fragmentation disorder is the main threat. It consists of a colony of nanomachines that overwrites its victim's personality with one of its own, creative dissociative identity disorder in its victims. The disease appears to have goals of its own, and Lockdown reveals that it's driven by the will of Deus, who is trying to rebuild itself after Crash 2.0.
  • Depopulation Bomb: VITAS (Virally Induced Toxic Allergy Syndrome) wipes out approximately a quarter of the Earth's population in 2010 and is a key element of the setting's bizarre nation-states; though highly contagious and lethal, it was not untreatable, far more lethal to humans than metahumans, and more easily cured through magical means than mundane treatments. This is why there is such a significant number of metahumans, magic is so widespread and respected, and the world is run by the megacorporations — who used their stockpiles to save their own executives and employees first. It also made the Magical Native Americans a superpower; as they were confined to isolated "internment" camps during the initial outbreaks, their populations were spared — and their magical talents made future outbreaks a chore instead of a threat. During the campaign, they would often find that VITAS outbreaks had killed their enemies for them. Oh, and the blasted thing is still around; VITAS-II hit in 2022, carving a second swath through the mundane population... ending a world-spanning series of race riots.
  • Deus Est Machina: The Artificial Intelligence Deus likes to present himself as one. While powerful and intelligent, he isn't really, and in fact he actually lacks a god complex, more just driven by fear of imprisonment.
  • Devious Dolphins: Storm dolphins are intensely hostile Awakened creatures and invariably aggressive towards humanity. They routinely attack ships, drilling platforms and harbor towns using their electrogenesis and their ability to summon localized storms, and attempt to kill as many people as they can. This hostility is not inborn, however — the storm dolphins are rapidly being driven extinct by the horrid pollution that permeates the Sixth World and are intelligent enough to realize that human civilization is causing this, and lash out as a means of revenge.
  • Dig Attack: The supplement Paranormal Animals of Europe: the Burrowing Beaver digs kilometers long tunnel systems underground. It can hear vibrations from creatures walking on the surface and collapse its tunnels under victims to trap them, then attack them.
  • Disciplines of Magic: Early editions had a hard distinction between Hermetic Mages and Shamans, however later editions introduced the Unified Magic Theory, reducing Mages and Shamans to merely two of several "paradigms" that differ primarily in fluff.
    • Hermetic Mages could bind elemental spirits to amulets and call upon them on a moment's notice, by Sixth Edition that practice has been banned and they have to summon like Shamans. They could also perform alchemy and create enchanted items, which is no longer exclusive to Mages.
    • Shamans call upon nature spirits in the moment, with a chance of failure or draining them, which is now the only means of using spirits in Sixth. Mentor spirits were once not only exclusive to Shamans, but mandatory, this is also no longer the case.
    • Adepts were introduced in Third Edition as an alternative form of magic user who didn't cast spells but instead channeled their mana into amplifying their physical abilities. Later Mystic Adepts could mix-and-match spells and adept powers.
    • Technomancers technically don't use magic, but rather something... different that essentially works like magic with Matrix-connected devices.
  • Disposable Vagrant
    • 1st Edition supplement Sprawl Sites. In one of the adventure seeds, a Banshee (elf vampire) settles into one of the poorest neighborhoods of Seattle and preys on local vagrants and squatters.
    • The Universal Brotherhood was a cover organization organized by insect spirits and insect shamans. Many UB facilities were set up in run down areas and ostensibly tried to help the homeless, while actually luring them in to be possessed by insect spirits.
    • In the supplement Double Exposure, an unholy alliance between the Renraku MegaCorp and insect spirits exploits homeless people in Seattle, testing experimental medical products on them and changing them into monsters.
    • Underworld Sourcebook mentions that the SINless (those without a System Identification Number, usually homeless vagrants) are the preferred target of organleggers because they'll never be missed.
    • Prime Runners. The serial killer Corey Martin preys upon homeless metahumans (humans, dwarves, elves, orks and trolls) because very few of them will be missed.
    • Artifacts Unbound adventure "The Phaistos Killer". A serial killer deliberately chooses his victims from the lower class of society (e.g. minimum wage earners) because he knows they will never be missed and the police will have no interest in investigating their deaths.
  • Divided States of America:
    • After the Great Ghost Dance, a great political shakeup redrew the map all over the world, including the U.S. To break it down loosely, the most direct successor is the United Canadian and American States, which controls everything from lower Canada to Kentucky, and the North Eastern seaboard to the midwest. Everything south of that is now the Confederation of American States. West of the UCAS is the Sioux Nation, West of the CAS is the Pueblo Corporate Council. North California became its own nation, Oregon became the Elven kingdom of Tír Tairngire, and the American Southwest was the Ute nation until they collapsed and were absorbed into the PCC. The Pacific Northwest became the Salish-Shidhe Council, except for the Seattle metro area which stayed as part of the UCAS. In the middle of it all the greater area of Denver became the Front Range Free Zone.
    • Canada, where they weren't controlled by the previously mentioned nations, was subjected to this too. Quebec became its own nation. Greater Canada and Alaska were split between the Alquinkian-Manitoo Council, the Athabaskan Council, and Tsimishian; with the far north polar region and Greenland being taken over by the Trans-Polar Aleut Nation.
    • Ironically, the other part of North American got the reverse treatment. South Texas all the way down to northern Colombia became the nation of Aztlan, which is technically a subsidiary of the MegaCorp Aztechnology. The Caribbean politically unified into the Caribbean League, and nabbed the tip of the Floridan peninsula (read: Miami) in the deal.
  • Doppelgänger Spin: The Double Image spell in Magic in the Shadows creates a single illusory double.
  • Dragon Hoard:
    • A common status symbol among dragonkind, though they're not always in the form one would expect. Dunkelzahn's comments suggest that dragons gather hoards instinctively as a matter of collecting representations of their long memories and pasts.
    • Dunkelzahn's massive and eclectic hoard, divided and bequeathed in a will after his death (an unusual and deliberate decision to try doing things the mortal way, instead of letting his peers fight over it), included such things as classic convertibles, ancient magical artifacts of legendary power, and vinyl record albums.
    • Similarly, Lofwyr used his old hoard, composed almost entirely of gold, to buy a controlling share of what would become Saeder-Krupp. The world's largest megacorporation now constitutes his new hoard, and he takes the status of his hoard very seriously.
    • In general, players should not expect stealing from such a hoard to be part of a run, unless the Johnson is intentionally trying to get the runners, himself, his associates, family and little dog killed.
  • Dragon Variety Pack:
    • True dragons come in four distinct types — Western dragons, with four legs and two wings; Eastern dragons, the classical Chinese type; Feathered Serpents, great feathered snakes with birdlike wings; and leviathans, giant finned sea monsters.
    • Dracoforms, a collection of lesser dragon relatives of animal-level intelligence, include the two-winged and -legged wyverns; drakes, who can shift from humanoid form to that of small dragons; drakas, referred to as drakes before 3rd edition, wingless quadrupeds used by dragons as guard dogs; hydras; and lake and Sea Serpents.
  • The Dreaded: Aztechnology and Saeder-Krupp are the one targets shadowrunners won't hit unless they're very daring, very desperate or very stupid (or Mr Johnson pays a king's ransom). The former because of their "total war" approach towards anybody who steals from them (including hobos who simply tap in their power grid) or slights them in any way, shape or form. The latter because their CEO and owner is the most powerful Great Dragon in the world and considers his corporation his hoard.
  • Drone Deployer: The Drone Rigger archetype, who uses various drones to aid him/her and the team during missions. Also serves as the team's driver.
  • Dunking the Bomb: Supplement Lone Star. Lone Star officers will sometimes order a water elemental to engulf a suspicious package. If it's actually a bomb, the water will render it harmless.

     E-M 
  • Eco-Terrorist:
    • In the backstory of the game, an eco-terrorist group, TerraFirst!, is used as an excuse to give big corporations more rights to hire and use mercenary troops.
    • 3rd Edition supplement Loose Alliances. There are a number of other ecoterrorist organizations in the Shadowrun universe.
      • The Green Cells are the European version of the TerraFirst! group. They are organized in a cell structure without a central command. They carry out hit-and-run physical attacks, magical sabotage and Matrix strikes on anti-environment targets.
      • GreenWar is an ultra-extreme group that carries out vicious attacks such as dumping acid in water supplies, bombing corporate offices, causing toxic oil spills and using biological warfare (weaponized diseases).
    • Some shamans (magic-users) are corrupted by toxic waste and pollution and become toxic shamans. Avengers engage in ruthless vigilante action against polluters, while Poisoners draw power from polluted wastelands.
  • Eldritch Abomination: The Horrors.
    • The Aetherology supplement pitches the theory that H.P. Lovecraft might have been an accidental astral traveler, and strongly implies that the Yithians, mi-go, and other alien life he wrote about are connected with the Horrors who attempted to invade Earth in the 2nd Edition adventure Harlequin's Back.
    • Dark Terrors brings us the Elder Gods, who might or might not be those Elder Gods, who defy sane comprehension and break every rule for magic in the setting — most importantly, teleportation and revival. Worse yet, HMHVV is connected, and might or might not be a gestalt manifestation of an Elder God that can incarnate if the Infected cannibalize each other. Considering the state of Asamando...
  • Electric Instant Gratification: Entertainment in the Sixth World includes trideo (functional three-dimensional video) and simsense (recordings of a person's senses and emotions). Simsense actors ideally should have complete control over their emotions to maintain the audience's suspension of disbelief, though in reality much of it is put in through post-production. Organized crime has discovered a way to jack up simsense outputs and create "Better-than-Life" programs that give the user near-perfect escapism at the cost of addiction, neurological damage, and sudden death. Anything that a person can do can be recorded into a BTL; there are snuff BTLs out there, recorded from either the killer or the victim's perspective. It goes without saying that the latter can be fatal to the user.
  • Electronic Eyes: These are some of the most common augmentations on the market; anybody can get cybereyes that can see, record, and play back spectra outside metahuman normal. Many brands offer cybernetic ocular implants of the buyer's choice, with Zeiss being at the real high-end of the technological scale.
  • Elemental Embodiment: Several types.
  • Elite Mooks: High Threat Response teams and special forces, such as Ares' Firewatch, Renraku's Red Samurais or Tir Ghosts, are generally this. In general, corporations can't afford to keep enough firepower on site to deal with a trained team of shadowrunners, so they keep cheap security guards around and have access to paramilitary units (often security contractors such as Lone Star or Knight Errant) on call for when a team of runners trigger the alarm. If shadowrunners have to fight an HTR unit, they probably either screwed up or got screwed over. If this class of mook is actually used as site security, it's a sign that the facility is involved in something serious, because only that justifies that kind of expense.
  • Emotion Eater
    • The game (along with Earthdawn) has the Horrors, creatures from the Astral Plane who live on the negative emotions of others. The Horrors can only eat negative emotions caused by their own actions.
    • In addition, certain spirits, like the Yama Kings of Kowloon Walled City, feed on the negative emotional energies of places full of despair and horror.
    • Banshees, elves infected with HMHVV-type I, drain Essence through fear, usually leaving the victim emotionally drained in the process. While the emotion itself isn't what they feed on, it's the vehicle by which Essence is drained so the effect is indistinguishable from the trope.
      • Later editions retconned them to be hemovores to make them more consistent with other strands of HMHVV needing a bodily component. (Although they use fear as the emotion to feed on essence) still. It suggests seriously unobservant coroners.
    • Ka•Ge magazine Volume 1 Issue 9 short story "Wonderland": The evil monster threatening the protagonists feeds on the emotion of fear in its victims.
    • Supplement Howling Shadows:
      • Nocnitsa are spirits that feed off of the fear they cause in young children. They cause the children to have nightmares while sleeping. When the children wake up, the nocnitsa show them their worm-eaten, rotten faces to scare them into losing consciousness.
      • Stabbers are spirits that feed on the emotional energy from pain. They inflict pain on their victims by stabbing them with their barbed tentacles.
  • Enemy Mine: In Better than Bad, Freya relates a time when Humanis Policlub (a human-supremacist group) and the Sons of Sauron (ork and troll supremacists) were marching side by side against the government of Tir Tairngire (elf fascists). Since the SOS are kind of popular among Jackpointers, a couple of the kibitzers were a little queasy to hear about that, especially when it was confirmed by another source.
  • Enlightenment Superpower:
    • While most mortals can learn how magic works, they cannot work it themselves; only a small minority of Awakened have that privilege. The Awakened, in turn, can seek enlightenment through "initiation", increasing their magical potential and learning new ways to use magic (metamagic). They can undergo an ordeal during the initiation process, performing some action (example given include living in the wilderness for a month or undergoing a metaplanar quest) to reduce the karma cost of initiation.
    • Technomancers can do a functionally identical process called "submersion", in which they interact with the Resonance. Nobody can quite explain what the Resonance is, though describing it as a digital higher plane and Akashic Record is pretty close in a couple ways, and it's almost certainly as metaphysical as it is technological.
  • Epistolary Novel: Many sourcebooks read this way, as they're about 90% narrative postings and commentary from users on Shadowlands or JackPoint, with occasional short stories and patches of Scrapbook Story in between, and a short index of rule information at the end.
  • Equipment-Based Progression: Character progression through equipment/ money (gear) and experience (karma) are equally important. There's actually an exchange rate that Game Masters can use as a guide to convert between the two when deciding how to reward players for their quests. This is unusual in table top games in that gear is a formalized part of the progression system, with the same importance as skills. In general, deckers, riggers and samurai place more importance on their gear and on getting the nuyen to buy it, while mages, shamans and especially physical adepts have less use for nuyen and more for karma (though everyone wants at least some of both).
  • Equivalent Exchange: It's pretty much officially established that, at a minimum, the Great Ghost Dance messed up the entire North American weather system for decades. And see also Nice Job Breaking It, Hero below.
  • Even Evil Has Standards: Written into the rules as of the Aztlan sourcebook. PC Shadowrunners are professional criminals who may do anything from bodyguard work to assassination for cold hard nuyen, but if one chooses to learn Blood Magic, they are immediately turned into NPCs. Even shadowrunners don't do that kind of dirty. That and it means opening yourself up to horror corruption. In 4th Ed, this was scaled back to "it's recommended that the GM not let PCs learn this stuff, because it's secret and might be unbalancing in PC hands." In 5th Edition, a blood mage on Jackpoint discusses how one might be an Anti-Hero who practices blood magic without becoming corrupted.
  • Every Man Has His Price: "Everything has a Price" is a core pillar of the setting and is spelled out to new players in the 5th Edition core rulebook. If it exists, sufficient amounts of cash will get it for you, though obviously some things requires amounts of money not accessible to the player characters. Carrying a credstick, or just cold hard cash in some areas, is never a bad idea for when a surrepticious bribe can get you something quickly and quietly.
  • Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Everyone calls them Mr Johnson in the UCAS and in the meta, even if their name has local variants (such as "Herr Schmidt" in Germany or "Mr Wu" in Hong Kong). Right up to the point where after you've done their dirty work, they attempt to betray you and you either die, flee or reveal that you've done your homework, know who they are and where they live and currently have someone with a sniper rifle trained on the head of their little dog, too.
  • Everything Is Online
    • The transition from 3rd to 4th Editions brought about a complete overhaul of the Matrix in which practically everything is wireless and governed by RFID tags.
    • Not just everything, but everyone. Unless you live in a total deadzone, you're likely to have at least a basic commlink. A lot of high-security places require you to have one. While in 2nd and 3rd most people were hooked into the net one way or another, in an effort to make hackers more capable in meat-space missions, it was decided that most tech communicates wirelessly, meaning it can be hacked from a distance — including your cyberware.
    • In the 5th edition, seeing that the free, wireless Matrix does them more harm than good, the Megacorps took harsh control of it. From the POV of the Average Joe, this mostly means you have to pay a little more for the service; for shadowrunners (both in-game and out), though, this is a near-complete return to the days where you have to bring in very experienced specialists using highly specialized hacking equipment, both of whom are named after the deckers and cyberdecks of yore.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: If a decker pisses off the foundation during a deep hack by breaking the "paradigm" (basically the internal rules of that world), this is the result. The whole paradigm turns hostile and tries to eliminate the intruder no matter what. Since deep dives require the use of hot SIM, any damage suffered by the decker is potentially deadly biofeedback damage.
  • Evil-Detecting Dog: Paranormal Animals of Europe. The kludde is an evil vicious Shapeshifter. Dogs and cats can always identify them no matter what shape they've taken: the dogs bark furiously at them and the cats hiss angrily.
  • Evil Pays Better:
    • The mission reward table in Fifth Edition has a "Run that will make you a cold-hearted bastard" entry that increases the cash reward by up to twenty percent, but pays out less karma. Conversely, the "Run has good feelings as part of its reward" entry reduces the cash by up to twenty percent, but increases karma rewards.
  • Experience Points: Karma serves this function. Rather than gaining levels, you spend it directly to improve your character.
  • Expert in Underwater Basket Weaving: Player Characters get free skill points for "knowledge skills" from former job experience, hobbies, hometown knowledge, etc. Knowledge skills tend to come into play rarely if at all, and can include things like knowledge of hacker havens, the ability to speak fluent Esperanto, or a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Maria Mercurial.
  • Explosive Overclocking- surprisingly, it's Magic that does this the best. The quality Witness My Hate let's a mage push through a surprising amount of raw damage, at the cost of risking more blowback
  • Expy
  • Extreme Omnivore:
    • Juggernauts are house-sized Awakened, fifty-foot long armadillos that will eat anything — meat, plants, rocks, scrap metal, anything. They're walking ecological disasters, as they simply devour anything in their path and strip the land bare as they go.
    • Hellcows are mutated cows transformed into voracious omnivores. Like juggernauts, they'll eat anything — grass, meat, wood, metal, their own mothers...
  • Exty Years from Publication: The 1st edition was set in 2050. FASA kept sliding the timeframe 61 years from the present day with the 2nd and 3rd, but the 4th edition was set in 2070, and the 5th in 2075.
  • The Face: Any character with a high Charisma and Social Skills like Etiquette, Interrogation, Leadership and Negotiation. There is usually one in every party and they are the ones that talk to and negotiate with your Johnson to make sure you don't get screwed. On the missions themselves, they serve as whatever the mission needs a smooth talker for: distraction, subterfuge, seduction, you name it.
  • Failed Future Forecast:
    • In the early 21st Century, between mounting political trends that started to bear fruit with Lone Star becoming the first corporation to be granted the legal status of Extraterritorialitynote , and the insanity of the Awakening, many nations collapsed or split or were founded where the old ones couldn't hold ground.
    • The United States and Canada were broken apart. Lower Canada merged with the U.S. to become the UCAS, and the South, not feeling their interests were represented, seceded peacefully to become the CAS. This all happened some time after American Native tribes became prolific magic users and won a war that carved the rest of the continent in a series of nations collectively called the Native American Nations. Quebec, California, and Oregon (now Tir Tairngire) survived to become independent nations, and Mexico was refounded as Aztlan, which is a subsidiary of Aztechnology.
    • The first edition of Shadowrun, written in 1989, did predict the fall of the Soviet Union — but they predicted it in 2030.
    • This issue has been more or less solved in later editions by having the Shadowrun timeline explicitly deviate from our own in 1991. In Fourth Edition, the first true break is in 1999.
  • Fallen States of America: Throughout the 90's and 2000's, America fell into major disarray. The government gradually began favoring corporate interests, privatizing dozens of public services and cutting social programs, which caused a massive in unemployment, overworked welfare programs and countless worker strikes. Likewise, one-quarter of federal parkland and one-tenth of Indian Reservations wound up being sold for resource exploitation, culminating in civil unrest and, eventually, Native Americans being sent to "internment" camps. Things only got worse during the VITAS pandemic, when millions of Americans died while the Native internees were mostly spared. This set the stage for the Ghost Dance War and, subsequently, the balkanization of North America
  • False Flag Operation: Many. The PCs ought to expect to take part in at least one during their careers. To name two: the "TerraFirst! attack" on Shiawase's private nuclear reactor was likely staged to justify Shiawase's private army (the subsequent US Supreme Court ruling set the groundwork for corporate extraterritoriality) and Alamos 20K brought down the Sears Tower and pinned it on metahumans retaliating for the Night of Rage.
  • Fanboy: In-universe: several magic users say that magic fanboys are the worst because they will not leave the user alone and beg them to cast magic in a futile attempt to copy them and become Ascended Fanboys.
  • Fantastic Ghetto: Segregated neighborhoods, by choice and compulsion both, very much exist in the world of Shadowrun. Orks and Trolls most often get the short end of the stick in this regard. Notable examples include Orkland in the Bay Area; Yomi Island in Japan, serving as an internment camp for all Japanese metahumans, before being abandoned and left to to Wendigo and other HMHVV infectees; and the Seattle Underground, settled by Orks and Trolls following anti-metahuman pogroms.
  • Fantastic Legal Weirdness: The Native American Nations consider resisting a mind probe a form of contempt of court and utilize shamans to ensure truth and justice. Then there are the questions regarding spirits and if banishing one could be considered murder, binding one enslavement, and assigning parenthood of ally spirits turned free spirits.
  • Fantastic Racism
    • Elves against most everybody, humans against orks and trolls (though groups like Humanis Policlub will extend it to every metahuman type), Japanese, Native Americans, Non-Native Americans, and Aztlaners at each other's throats, and so on. Elves really tend to be the punching bag of everyone, but they don't get to return the racism as much as they'd like — elven-ruled racist nations have effectively imploded in 4e, to the point where Tír Tairngire is now run collectively by a Great Dragon and an ork.
    • Just over half the population are racist in some way in 3rd edition. Every npc gets a racism stat of 2d6-6 (0 or less means not racist at all) and around 1/6th of all racists are biased against everyone not of their own race. Mostly this is just a bias though. It would be harder to persuade a shopkeeper to sell you a reserved item for example.
    • This isn't changed much for the PCs in 4th Edition. You can expect nearly every group to have a specific viewpoint on various races, though it's most notable in a bias for/against orcs, trolls, and assorted goblinoids. Usually, this takes the form of a penalty on social checks, though.
    • There are certain cultures that have no bias — or even give reverence — towards metahumans, such as menehune (Hawaiian dwarves), or African elves.
  • Fantastic Recruitment Drive: People with the ability to use magic are extremely rare. Schools, corporations, and magical groups regularly test citizens (particularly children) for magical talent.
  • Fantastic Religious Weirdness: Religion has had to grapple with the rise of magic since the Awakening, and not all religions have fared equally well.
    • The biggest examples are the return of Native American shamanism and the Aztec religion, both now thoroughly entwined with magic. The latter has a bad rap because of Aztechnology's attempts to tie it to Blood Magic and Human Sacrifice; non-Aztlan practitioners generally don't go for either. Likewise, other pagan and neopagan religions (such as Asatru and Wicca) have surged in popularity.
    • Many religions adapted easily and brought magic into their practice. Hinduism and Shinto, for example, easily absorbed magic into their practices, and Shintoists are among the most accepted shamans in the Japanacorps for obvious reasons.
    • The Abrahamic religions have had a tougher time. Mainstream Christianity eventually accepted magic, though the Catholic Church prefers that its members practice a specifically-Christian form of theurgy. Jews largely accepted conventional magic, though there's a branch of Qabbalism that claims undiluted descent from true holy texts (most Qabbalists are largely secular, however). Islam, on the other hand, is torn on the issue; in general, it's considered forbidden, but the Caliphate couldn't just not use it. Accordingly, there are several branches of Islamic magical practice that attempt to reconcile Islamic teaching with magical practice, and whether magic is seen as holy Sufism or blasphemous sihr often depends on the connections of the practitioner.
  • Fantastic Science: As a result of scientific and technological progress over time combined with the return of magic. Manatech and magical studies are of interest to the Megas, still being an emerging field in many ways, after nearly forty or so years of study.
  • Fantastic Terrorists
    • The Awakened Liberation Front is an Animal Wrongs Group focused on the "liberation" of paracritters.
    • Fear the Dark is a terrorist organization of HMHVV infectees, mostly vampires and banshees.
    • GreenWar are eco-terrorists who employ toxic shamans.
    • The Native American Nations started as Amerindian separatists incensed by the US government's use of eminent domain on reservations, and the ensuing internment camps, who used the newly returned magic to seize control of most of the western states.
    • Supplement Tir Na Nog. After magic returned to the world in 2011, the Irish Republican Army started a series of magical terrorist attacks against British military forces in Northern Ireland. They had been given the magical knowledge necessary for the attacks by several Immortal Elves who had existed for the thousands of years since magic left the world.
  • Fantastic Underclass:
    • The lowest class in the UCAS (United Canadian and American States) is the SINless: people without a SIN (System Identification Number). Anyone without a SIN basically has no civil rights and no right to receive benefits normal citizens can expect, such as medical care. SINless metahumans tend to be very poor and homeless, with either a low-paying job or no job at all. They are often discriminated against and mistreated by those with SINs and have little hope of survival or bettering themselves. (However, having a valid SIN is overall a drawback for shadowrunners, both because it makes them easier to track down, and any income they receive is automatically garnished to pay taxes.)
    • In general, orks and trolls receive very poor treatment in most societies. They typically get stuck with the worst-paying jobs, are looked down on by humans, elves and dwarves as primitive brutes, and tend to live in impoverished neighborhoods with few to none opportunities to improve their lot. In elf-ruled nations such as Tir Tairngire and Tir na nOg, everyone who isn't an elf is a disaffected peon with no opportunities or political voice.
  • Fantastic Vermin: Awakening affected common rats same as every other animal. The resulting devil rats are hairless, resistant to most poisons and capable of controlling normal rats, although their sensitivity to sunlight keeps them confined to the sewers and nighttime forays. Demon rats are a further variant that mutated from devil rats during the Year of the Comet, and additionally possess fur, short horns and corrosive saliva. They also have opposable thumbs and are smart enough to open latches and simple doors. Some are even capable of regeneration.
  • Fantastical Social Services: The Universal Brotherhood presents itself this way, providing social services to homeless people. It turns out that they are a front for insect shamans looking for hosts for demonic possession.
  • Fauns and Satyrs
    • Both male and female satyrs have large curling horns like a bighorn sheep. They're implied to be the Awakened version of the wild goat. Their saliva can ferment sugary liquids into alcohol.
    • Confusingly in an aversion of One-Steve Limit, satyrs are also an Ork metavariant native to (naturally) Greece and other nearby Mediterranean countries. Later editions explicitly specify wild satyrs when not talking about the metatype.
  • Feel No Pain: A person with a pain editor bioware implant will be completely unaware of their injuries and won't fall unconscious from non-lethal trauma (in game terms, they ignore wound penalties from Stun damage). In fact, they have to examine themselves or consult a biomonitor to realize how badly they're injured; the implant's effects also extend to the sense of touch. The payoff, of course, is never having a clue if the next injury is going to kill you. An active adrenaline pump implant grants its user immunity to Stun damage penalties, but its effect cannot be ended voluntarily and can even be involuntarily triggered by exposure to high-stress situations.
  • Fearsome Critters of American Folklore: Shadowrun features numerous American folkloric creatures in its monster books, usually as Awakened animals — that is, normal wildlife transformed into magical creatures by the return of magic to the world.
    • Paranormal Animals of North America includes the agropelter (small humanoids descended from Awakened rhesus monkeys and known for making nuisances of themselves), the hoop snake and the Devil Jack Diamond fish (Awakened pike three meters long).
    • Parazoology includes a few additional critters in its section on mutated animals (creatures mutated from normal and Awakened animals by further magical surges and good old-fashioned mutagens). Cactus cats are mutated bobcats native to the Southwest, with green fur and thorny hides; they ambush prey by blending in with cactuses. Jackalopes are the standard antlered rabbits; there are also wolpertingers, which live in Europe and mutated from local European rabbits rather than North American jackrabbits, but the two strains are functionally the same species and produce fertile offspring.
  • Fictional Currency: Nuyen (¥) is the standard global currency, especially since the universe's rendition of Japan has supercharged its economy and became a global economic superpower.
  • Fictional Painting: In Tir Tairngire. Jenna Ni'Fairra is one of the members of the Council of Princes. She has an extremely old painting which depicts her with thorns growing out of her skin. This is a portrait of her when she was Alachia, the elven Queen of the Blood Wood in the Earthdawn setting.
  • Fictional Sport: Shadowbeat includes full descriptions of the new Sixth World sports of Combat Biker and Urban Brawl, as well as information about how cyberware has revolutionized boxing, baseball, basketball, and (especially!) American football.
  • Fictional Political Party:
    • The U.S. is run by the Technocrat, Archconservative, and New Century parties.
    • Policlubs are less political parties than special interests groups, yet some wield considerable influence in their aims. One of the most notorious is the Humanis Policlub, and it's an open secret they are Human supremacists.
  • The Fixer: No contact list is complete without one. Fixers can often provide common threads for new runner teams, and most veteran ones know several.
  • Flamethrower Backfire: Supplement Cannon Companion. Flamethrower fuel is carried in an Ammunition Backpack. If the fuel tank is broken by an attack it will explode in a ball of fire, probably killing the user and endangering everyone nearby.
  • Flame War: The in-book discussions from Jackpoint occasionally devolve into these. Axis Mundi's post on Unified Magic Theory in Forbidden Arcana was followed with 457 deleted posts and an awed reaction from Bull (the moderator).
  • Flying Seafood Special: Night mantas are Awakened fish so well-adapted to flight that they spend most of their lives airborne, even sleeping on dry land.
  • Food Chain of Evil: Among the numerous kinds of insect spirits infesting the ruins of Chicago, mantis spirits are notable for preying primarily on other insect spirits. They'll still go after humans and metahumans, especially if they interfere with the mantis spirits' own plans and hunts, but their favored food source are their fellow extradimensional invaders.
  • Forbidden Zone: On paper, this is what the Saar-Lorraine-Luxembourg Special Administrative Zone (SOX) is. A massive exclusion zone created after the meltdown of the Cattenom Reactor, it includes territory from France, Germany and the whole former nation of Luxembourg, all enclosed behind a massive and heavily fortified concrete wall. In practice, the SOX is administered by a compact of MegaCorps who run secret laboratories within what is effectively the largest extraterritorial enclave in the world. As a result, thousands of corporate citizens live and work within the zone in acrologies. They even host their own take on the Desert Wars called the Rad Wars. It's still mostly forbidden on account of the radiation, waste disposal sites, mutated critters, gangs of radpunks and the horrific effects all this has had on the astral plane.
  • Four Is Death: In his will, Dunkelzahn bequeathed the Four Coins of Luck to various beneficiaries. The Chinese dragon Lung is seeking to acquire exactly three of them — he specifically does not want all four because of this trope.
  • Full-Conversion Cyborg: 2nd Edition supplement Cybertechnology. It is possible to replace a person's arms, legs, torso and skull with cybertech, with only their brain remaining from their original body. However, cybermancy magic must be used to allow the recipient to survive the complete loss of all Essence (Life Energy).
  • Functional Magic:
    • Rather than "fire and forget" or drawing from a mana pool as is common in most RPGs, a spellcaster can, at any time, pull mana from Astral space (which can be achieved so long as they aren't in a mana-deprived environment, such as space), shape it into a spell that they know, cast it, and then resists the physical strain of the process. So long as they're alive and conscious, they can cast pretty much anything at up within that mage's limit of of power, though the practical reality is that a very real risk unconsciousness or death comes with being reckless with spells.
    • It's a known fact that learning magic is achieved through a number of ways and traditions, and while they all do it in different methods, they all achieve the same thing. So learning magic can be done through a methodical training and teaching session, or they can learn organically through "feeling out" magic or in a master-apprentice relationship. These different traditions have no mechanical effect, other than magical drain and which spirits can help with what, but it should reflect a character's philosophy, and might impact how they are built (Hermetic Mages should be more logical, Shamans more charismatic, etc.).
    • There's also Ritual Magic, Alchemy, and Enchanting. Ritual magic is about affecting the local area or a distant target. Alchemy is good for attaching single-use spells to an object, like healing spells into a vial of tap water, explosive or stun spells into ammo, and so on. Enchanting is about creating magic foci; a single focus generally has one general use, but broadly they're helpful in all sorts of ways.
  • Fun with Acronyms: As a world steeped in corporate and government bureaucracy, acronyms abound, with some that are ironic, and others that are intentional PR ploys. Notable examples of each are the System Identification Number required to be a legal, honest citizen, and the Grid Overwatch Division that safeguards global communications from hackers.
  • Fusion Dance: The Inhabitation Creature Power, mostly seen in Insect Spirits. Under the Fifth Edition rules, to summon an Insect Spirit, it must inhabit a living or dead vessel. When an Insect Spirit inhabits a body, it may take on one of three forms: True form, Hybrid form or Flesh form. All three resemble Power Booster in that the spirit gains a physical body although hybrid and flesh forms also gain some or all of the vessel's knowledge and/or skills as well as gaining other extra powers. The Hybrid form also resembles The Composite. In all cases, the Spirit has full control over the host
  • Future Food Is Artificial: Meat is a delicacy, so most settle for krill and similar mass breeding creatures. Soy products are mentioned often, but the cheapest food available is stated to be Mycoprotein — and over half the population wistfully speaks of fresh fruit and vegetables. Lampshaded at one point in an early book when a character reacts to seeing "artificial cheese substitute". Availability of natural tends to zigzag in strange ways, like squatters and the wealthy being more likely to eat real meat.
    • Later editions add in more of a spectrum of artificial with things like vat grown or cloned beef or grass fed.
  • Future Slang: The core books come with glossaries for Sixth World Slang terms that change and evolve over editions as time passes.
  • Gaia's Lament: The Sixth World is covered in urban and industrial sprawls, ruthlessly overexploited and polluted by oil slicks, refuse, toxic waste, industrial runoff and radioactive leaks. Some portions of the sea have become entirely uninhabitable, and the only truly wild lands that remain are within heavily cut back national park systems or Awakened nations.
  • Gaia's Vengeance: The world in the 2060s, after decades of rampant urban growth, commercial exploitation and reckless pollution, is one severely depleted of resources and wild land and thoroughly tainted with toxicity and contaminants of every material and spiritual sort. Consequently, nature and what defenders it still has have become… aggressive in their methods.
    • The most common form of Gaia's Vengeance comes in the form of ecoterrorist groups like TerraFirst! and Greenwar, who routinely attack whoever they deem responsible for the state of the Earth, chiefly the MegaCorps but also most scientific institutions, in violent retaliatory attacks.
    • Spirits of various sorts also tend to be highly proactive about protecting what wild land remains. Numerous powerful Nature Spirits, for instance, came to the aid of the Yucatan rebels in response of the Azlanti troops' heavy use of slash-and-burn, defoliants and chemical warfare to destroy the jungles where the rebels were hiding.
    • Northernmost Spain has been covered by sylvan, magic forests inhabited by creatures of the folklore of those regions, such as as the "xana"note  and the "cuélebre"note , with little more than the city of Gijón resisting nature's onslaught.
    • The Feathered Serpent Hualpa led essentially every intelligent and/or supernatural creature in the tattered remnants of the Amazon basin — including the remaining native tribes, sympathetic metahumans, nature spirits, Awakened animals of numerous sorts and a host of lesser dragons — in an outright invasion of Brazil, which, in a world still trying to understand what magic was, was woefully outmatched and fell in short order. Hualpa then established the nation of Amazonia, set strict anti-pollution laws, made it very clear that deforestation wasn't going to be a thing anymore and limited dense urban settlement to the preexisting coastal cities. Amazonia then went on to conquer most of northern South America, establishing the same laws there as well.
    • This is also implied to be why nuclear fission reactors have a marked tendency to melt down since the Awakening, although the resulting meltdowns only harm the environment further. The alternative explanation is even worse, namely that it was done by Horror influence.
  • Gathering Steam: The Vindicator minigun takes one combat turn for its barrels to get up to speed before it can fire.
  • Gambit Pileup
    • Too damn many to count. Every country, megacorp, and two-bit astral spirit has a lot of irons in the fire. And then there's the dragons...
    • The circumstances leading to the Second Crash. To begin with, you have Novatech, the largest privately owned company in the world, gearing up for an IPO to solve their cash flow problems. In order to accommodate the massive amount of trading that's expected, the East Coast Stock Exchange upgrades their servers. Meanwhile, Deus, having been disassembled and stored in the heads of his cult members since fleeing the Renraku Archology, decides to take over the ECSE and use its facilities to compile and upgrade its code, giving it almost complete control over the Matrix. Meanwhile again, Winternight, a Scandinavian Luddite apocalypse cult, has obtained a number of nuclear warheads and has modified them to produce massive EMPs; with the help of a rogue member of Deus's Otaku cult, they have identified two dozen of the world's Matrix nodes. Disabling over half of these would bring down the Matrix permanently and send the world back to the dark ages. The same rogue Otaku also helps assemble a virus to be implanted directly in the ECSE servers to do the most damage. On the appointed day, Deus invades the ECSE, takes over, spreads itself worldwide, takes over dozens of other servers and forces them all to work at upgrading his code. At the same time, Megaera, another AI who had been battling in Deus's "subconscious", breaks free and attacks him. Meanwhile yet again, Mirage, the original AI who had served as Deus and Maegera's source code, breaks into the ECSE servers to eliminate Deus. While they are battling, Winternight's Jormungand virus and a significant number of their EMP devices trigger. Between the devices destroying vital Matrix nodes, the nigh-unstoppable virus, the damage caused by three battling AIs, the damage done to the ECSE servers and dozens of others by Deus, and a Dissonance Pool created by the rogue Otaku to amplify everything else's effects, half in hopes of destroying Deus and half out of spite, the entire Matrix collapses. If you didn't get all that, you're not to blame. For the Shadowrun movers and shakers, this was par for the course, the only difference being the collateral damage.
    • Also this can happen during a run too. Many a group has a story that be summed up as "we gave up, shot everyone, and used the MacGuffin as a paperweight".
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: In-story, Technomancer powers explicitly aren't magic and don't follow the same rules magic does, but mechanically Technomancer powers work very much like magic, except in the Matrix instead of reality, because it makes things more streamlined and easier for players and GMs to manage.
    • For a long standing example: astral projection is specifically mentioned to require training yet mechanically it comes for free with being a magician (or astral adept) and doesn't call for any skill checks.
  • Genius Serum:
    • In 1st and 2nd Edition, an implanted cyberware device called the Encephalon can raise a character's Intelligence by up to two points.
    • The bioware system called the Cerebral Booster can increase the user's Intelligence by up to two points.
    • The Increase Intelligence magic spell can increase the recipient's Intelligence by up to four points.
  • Genre-Busting: It combines Tolkienesque fantasy with Classic Cyberpunk.
  • Ghost in the Machine: E-ghosts, after the Crash 2.0, and most notably Captain Chaos.
  • Glamour Failure: Illusion spells don't work on technological sensors unless the mage uses a version of the spell containing a physical component that is more difficult to cast, reflected in the Drain rating (Trid Entertainment, Improved Invisibility, Physical Mask, Trid Phantasm, Silence, Physical Camouflage).
  • Grand Theft Me: Possession by spirits and infection by CFD.
  • Gratuitous Japanese: English has picked up a lot of loanwords from Japanese. Justified, seeing how Japan took over the world.
  • Godzilla Threshold: Two AAA-level corporations who suddenly accept to work together means that somewhere, someone or something fucked up real bad.
  • Good Prosthetic, Evil Prosthetic: Present In-Universe: Obvious cybernetics, such as obvious cyberarms, cybereyes or armoured skin, tend to provide penalties to your Social skill rolls (especially in any kind of formal setting) as people assume you're up to no good. Most cyberlimbs have non-obvious and more life-like variants available, who carry the same Essence cost but will usually pass unmentioned (those who notice it's cybernetic will assume it's a civilian model).
  • Grey-and-Gray Morality: On the Shadowrunner side, you have anything from Hoods who steal from the rich and give to the poor to absolute psychopaths. On the Corp side, you have both security guards who just want to feed their families and completely amoral bastards (and the latter tend to be guarded by lots of the former). Although the books obviously paint shadowrunners in a more sympathetic light, neither side is completely innocent by any means. Lampshaded by a shadowrunner in 4th edition's Runners Companion:
    "Sometimes we do the right thing. Sometimes we shoot people in the face for money."
  • Grey Goo: With the rise of nanotech in 4th edition, this concept gets a passing handwave noting that it's "unlikely" and an "urban myth". In 5th edition, with hostile A.I.s infecting nanomachines en masse, it is becoming somewhat more of a concern, with nanofabricated buildings suffering structural failures all over the world, and Head Cases infected with A.I. nanites weaponizing them to eat through hazmat suits; fortunately there remain very real limitations, with nanites being extremely fragile, unable to spread to non-nanofab buildings, and unable to devour organic material, making cotton an effective protection against them. For now.
  • Groin Attack: In the short story "Plus ça Change" at the beginning of the 2nd Edition main rules, the street samurai Nameless kicks a Rat shaman in the groin to prevent him from casting a spell.
  • Guns Are Worthless
    • Partially played straight in that a single gunshot is never enough to kill anyone, unless you draw out a sniper rifle and a 10+ dice pool: Depending on calibre guns deal about 7-12 damage per shot and most people have at least 10 health levels before armour is accounted for. Apart from that hiccup the trope is averted: An optimised melee sammy or adept with a katana or an axe will out-damage a gun user on a per-attack basis, but melee weapons can't burst-fire. It takes a specialized build to make melee anywhere near as viable as gunnery, and melee focused character usually have to watch out for incoming gunfire even if they're more damaging blow by blow.
    • Played straight in combat against spirits and other purely magical critters, who are almost immune to non-magical damage. Since guns can never be used as weapon foci, you need to pack seriously hefty firepower to even put a dent into a spirit, and even then the mage will outdamage you without even trying.
  • Guns Firing Underwater: Averted, as there are rules for how bullets work underwater (generally, they don't) and there are a few weapons that have been specifically designed for underwater combat, including a carbine.
  • Gun Kata: Ares Firefight is a martial art completely manufactured by a corp, wherein the practitioner kicks the crap out of people while holding a pistol in each hand. Which he uses. A lot.
  • Hacker Collective: There are a number of "hacker havens" in the Sixth World. One of the most famous was the Shadowland BBS, which was based in Denver, Colorado. After the Crash 2.0, it was replaced by Jackpoint.
  • Half-Human Hybrid: Averted.
    • Children of mixed-metatype couples will end up as one of their parent's metatypes, not a mixture of both. Although metagenes can occasionally throw everything for a loop: an ork mother and a human father can have a dwarf baby, for example.
    • Also anyone can have a plain human child. It is hinted that this is more common among parents of different metatypes.
  • Hand Cannon
    • Plenty of impractically-large handguns are available for runners and hobbyists who don't mind guns that are as big and loud as they are powerful. This is pretty much the whole marketing campaign of the famous Ruger Super Warhawk revolver.
    • Of course, if the Super Warhawk isn't enough, 4th Edition's Gun Heaven 2 supplement has the Cavalier Sheriff, which packs firepower on par with a high-caliber sniper rifle. In canon, its rounds are capable of punching clean through softer targets.
  • Handcuffed Briefcase: Adventure Bottled Demon. The magician Topal owns The Guiding Hand talismonger/lore shop. One day an old friend of his, Simon Templeman, enters his shop with a briefcase chained to his wrist. The briefcase contains an idol filled with evil magical energy.
  • Hand of Glory: The 5th edition Street Grimoire details a Necromancy ritual for creating a Hand of Glory that allows the magician to use the skills of the person that the hand was taken from. To reuse the Hand, it must be treated with the blood of magician but doing this can lead to darker forms of Blood Magic. The book also advises against trying to possess more than one Hand of Glory, warning that the Hands may seek vengeance on their creator if left unused — idle hands being the devil's tools and all that.
  • Happy-Ending Massage: Played with a sidebar in the Vice sourcebook. It tells a Runner how to disguise an illegal Magical healing operation as one of these. It recommends actually sleeping with the client only if you absolutely have to. The reason you have to do this is getting a license to magically heal people in most countries is harder and leaves a lot more paperwork (which is a very bad thing for a Shadowrunner) than getting a masseuse's license.
  • Happy Place: Lots and lots of people retreat from their depressing lives by using simsense, to the point where simsense addiction is more common than caffeine addiction. Considering that coffee in Shadowrun is called "soykaf" and made of soy like everything else...
  • Harping on About Harpies: Harpies are monstrous, gigantic Awakened bats with long tails. They're all female, primarily scavengers and carriers of a great variety of diseases. It's not clear how they actually breed.
  • Heist Clash: 2nd Edition supplement Prime Runners. Two of the troll members of Wolfram's Gang, Wolfram and Shoot-to-Kill, first met when they both decided to rob the same bank at the same time. Wolfram suggested that they join up and split the take 50-50. She refused, shot him in the legs and left with the loot. He was so impressed by her that he tracked her down and asked again: the second time she accepted.
  • Hastily Hidden MacGuffin: In Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzahn's Secrets. According to the dragon Dunkelzahn's will the Russian crown jewels were smuggled out of the country after the Russian Revolution inside one of the nine spinet pianos from the royal palace.
  • Healing Serpent: Snake and Wyrm (serpent) shamans gain +2 dice when casting healing spells.
  • Hellhound:
    • The barghest has a protruding spine on its back, glowing red eyes and glowing teeth. It can cause fear and has a paralyzing howl.
    • The hellhound can breathe out and is immune to fire.
    • The Gabriel hound can freeze you in place and is a terror in combat.
    • The bogie is a black-furred, mastiff-like dog with short, soft horns and a fear-inducing howl. They share a supernatural kinship with regular dogs, and the two species never attack or become alarmed by each other.
    • The shadowhound is an extremely stealthy creature as tall as a man, and found worldwide. It tends to appear alongside other, dangerous creatures when these attack people, and there are conflicting reports as to whether shadowhounds are hostile monsters that gather other creatures to attack humans or whether they are benevolent protectors trying to warn humans of imminent threats.
    • The cerberus hound is an aggressive, three-headed wolf-like canid with caustic saliva native to the mountains of Greece.
  • Heroic Sacrifice
    • Dunkelzahn set up his own assassination in order to Ascend to a higher plane so he could stop the Horrors from crossing over to our world. Of course it had its, perks like functionally becoming a demigod. The net result of this is debatable at this juncture. He probably pulled the strings that set the adventure Harlequin's Back into motion, which bought Earth some 2,000 or so years. Harlequin makes a point that the Horrors won't be stopped by any action short of their utter annihilation.
    • Played straighter with Captain Chaos, who led a Matrix-based attack against the Jormungand virus in order to save the databases of Shadowland Seattle. He succeeded, but was unable to jack out and was about to be killed when Jack-Be-Nimble, a computer program gifted to him by Dunkelzahn, activated and saved his consciousness as data for later retrieval.
    • One simsense star talks about how she and her cast and crew were filming on the coast when the Twin Earthquakes of 2069 hit. They saw the water go out. The two special effects mages there pretty much burned themselves out getting as many people as possible up the cliffs before the tsunami hit. For bonus points she watched them get washed away and her simsense recording implants were still on.
  • Heroic Second Wind: Your character if you burn all of your edge points to stay alive. Unlike most cases, your character is near death and will need time to recover.
  • He's Back!: As it turns out the CFD Virus and subsequent Boston Lockdown plotlines in te 5th edition were building to the return of Deus, now possessing an untold number of CFD infected hiding among the metahuman population.
  • Hidden Backup Prince: Potentially done to the still alive (but goblinized) British Royal Family.
  • Higher Understanding Through Drugs
    • In the fan-written supplement called "Better Living (and Dying) Through Chemistry", The Awakened (magical) version of peyote allows the user to astrally perceive and project as if they were a mage, and gives bonuses for the use of magical skills, thus allowing them to act as if they understood magic better.
    • In canon, a rapidly popular recreational drug called Tempo allowed ordinary folks to see the astral plane, at least until rival cartels wiped out the ones producing it. It also permanently opened users to Demonic Possession by a collection of eco-terrorist spirits, who can now use them as sleeper agents, or even just for the fun of experiencing human sensations, like car crashes and shootouts with police.
  • High Times Future
    • Pharmaceutical development has kept up with the rest of technology, and hence street drugs kept up with that. The world of Shadowrun has uppers, downers, combat drugs, chillout drugs, medical drugs, toxic drugs, and everything in between, of just about every level of severity. While the Street Sam might take a potentially body-wrecking hit of Kamikaze to stay alive now, the rent-a-cops might take a dose of the less dangerous Cram to try to keep up. There's something for just about everybody.
    • Modern drugs have fallen out of favor due to the development of cheap, clean "simsense" programs. Why shoot or snort thousands of dollars in imported plant extracts which can be detected by testing urine or hair when you can experience exponentially more just by slotting a memory stick into your Unusual User Interface?
    • The Aztlan sourcebook mentions that Aztlan still makes a profit from cocaine and other coca-plant derivatives, to which many runners express surprise for the above reason. Justified by its target market; dirt-poor people.
    MesaStim: Yeah, sure. You got five bucks In your pocket from a trick or mugging some wretch poorer than you are in the slums and you just about got enough for a quick crack fix. You don't even think about chips—how do you play 'em? Rent the chipreader from the library? Coke may not be the drug of choice for the overaffluent, neurologically compromised American middle classes anymore, but down on the streets it's the same killer it always was. And Aztechnology makes money off of it, whatever they say in public.
    • Old drugs are mentioned to still exist, but most of them have been displaced by the drugs of the future. Most of the new drugs can be pretty nasty, but they provide a great benefit the the Street Sam or Decker under their affects. That doesn't even touch on the magical drugs...
  • Hive City: Kowloon Walled City still exists in this timeline (after the real one was torn down, the Shadowrun one was retconned as having been rebuilt to host refugees from a Chinese civil war). Thanks to the advent of magic, the place is even worse than its real-life version, with stagnant qi causing its residents collective despair to pool and attracting the Yama Kings to feast on all the bad vibes.
  • Hollywood Hacking: Not only that, but in a different way in every edition!
  • Home Field Advantage
    • Shadowrun Companion. The Home Ground edge gives a character a bonus on using skills on the character's home turf. This could include the building where the character lives or a computer system a decker is very familiar with.
    • Tír na nÓg. Followers of the Ways and the Paths gain bonuses to magic use if they are within the part of Ireland associated with their Path. For example, followers of the Northern Path (Path of the Warrior) gain a bonus die for magic when in the province of Ulster.
    • The Grimoire. Druids gain a bonus to summoning and banishing spirits when within a certain distance of their sacred circle.
    • Deckers gain advantages when within computer systems they're authorized to use. Their programs always execute properly, they can gain access anywhere they need to go and they don't have to worry about IC attacking them.
  • Homeless Hero: Shadowrun's Lifestyle mechanics are designed to avoid the "murderhobo" tendency of role-playing games; characters pay a monthly fee to maintain a certain standard of living between runs, which also comes with a place to live. Higher lifestyles also come with additional perks, like the ability to buy objects beneath a certain price tag for free as part of the lifestyle cost and access to better housing and facilities. Those who don't want to pay for a Lifestyle at all are forced to live on the street and become this trope.
  • Hopeless with Tech: The "gremlins" negative quality makes computerized devices much more likely to malfunction for a character, often in ways that defy logic. Almost everything has computers integrated into it, so this can cause a lot of mayhem. It also never works in your favor — if you try to deliberately mess up an enemy's tech, it not only won't malfunction, but may actually work better if that would cause the most trouble for you at the moment.
  • Horrifying the Horror: Even the Insect Sprits, alien invaders from another "layer" of reality, are terrified of the Yama Kings in Hong Kong's Walled City, to the point that the Universal Brotherhood couldn't get a hold in there.
  • Human Sacrifice: Man, Aztechnology has some dirty secrets.
  • Humans Advance Swiftly: A hallmark of the Sixth World, defined by rigorous scientific experimentation and open flow of information. By the end of the Forbidden Arcana supplement, Harlequin expresses genuine astonishment that mortals had learned so much of magic as quickly as they have, and humiliation at the fact that none of the immortal elves or Great Dragons of the Fourth Age (except for Dunkelzahn, of course) had predicted such rapid development.
  • I Know Your True Name
  • Illegal Religion
    • The elven nation of Tír Tairngire banned the Universal Brotherhood cult within its borders. They had good reason to: the organization in question is devoted to converting metahumans into hosts for insect spirits.
    • Aztlan revoked the Roman Catholic Church's tax-exempt status in 2027 and then outlawed it in 2041.
  • I'm a Humanitarian: Anyone infected with HMHVV (particularly the Kreiger strain, which creates ghouls) will turn into some kind of monstrous, cannibalistic version of themselves.
  • Immune to Mind Control
    • Paranormal Animals of North America. The Fideal is basically a magical jellyfish. Because it doesn't have a brain, it is immune to Control Manipulation (mind control) magic.
    • Paranormal Animals of Europe. The Corps Cadavre zombie is immune to all forms of magic that control or influence the mind, including spells and Awakened creature powers.
  • Impersonating an Officer: Supplement Bug City. Truman Technologies operatives dressed up as Eagle Security officers captured Fuchi-employed gang members, lined them up against a wall, and ruthlessly murdered them. This was inspired by the Real Life 1929 "Saint Valentine's Day Massacre".
  • In Name Only: The Xbox 360/PC adaptation was essentially a vehicle for an online, cross-platform multiplayer shooter with the Shadowrun name tacked on. Accordingly, setting elements such as All Deaths Final were discarded when they got in the way of making a multiplayer shooting game.
  • I Own This Town: Downplayed. Any MegaCorp who has a large enough presence in a city can almost do as they please on their grounds but are still bound by local governments, especially in countries where the politicians still have enough clout (such as France, Quebec and the Tir Nations). Hong Kong plays it straight as the government is made of eight corporate representatives, each from one of the biggest local corps.
  • Inside a Computer System: Anyone with a data-jack and cyberdeck can literally enter the networked computer world that is the Matrix. Usually it is the Deckers who partake in this kind of activity since this is their specialty. The main purpose of entering the Matrix is to gather important (i.e. sensitive) data from a specific building and/or company and selling it to the highest bidder, often to a data-fence (a pawn dealer who collects that data to uncover whatever information a third party or the public is snooping for in exchange for cold hard nuyen). If not digging for data in the Matrix, jackers often find themselves attempting to disable the security systems set up by their respective companies just to guard themselves for their potentially filchable data or other assets.
  • Instant Sedation: Upon delivery, narcojet does enough Stun damage to incapacitate the average metahuman. Its description says that it has no side effects. Partially subverted from stun overflow turning overdoses potentially quite lethal.
  • The Internet Is an Ocean: The Matrix is near constantly described as a sea or ocean. To the point that "Data Trails", 5th edition's Matrix specific sourcebook, opens with a short story about a pair of hackers infiltrating a server with an ocean theme. Also Played for Laughs by having Danielle de la Mar use it as a flowery metaphor.
    "The grids are a great placid sea where the agents of GOD monitor every ripple created by unauthorized activity. A poetic expression, but the best way to describe the current environment without delving into several terabytes of technical data."
  • Intrepid Reporter: The reporters ("snoops") described in the Shadowbeat sourcebook.
  • Intrinsic Vow: Spells that control the mind (Control Animal, Control Emotions and Control Thoughts) allow the target to resist the effect if it would cause harm to their loved ones.
  • Invaded States of America:
    • Inverted in the early lore, where Native Americans had to fight to eject American presence from the continent. Since they survived the VITAS plague more or less untouched, their numerical disadvantage was diminished, and they had a tactical advantage in magic, since they were one of the first groups to Awaken. After doing surprisingly well against American forces, the Treaty of Denver was signed, and America and Canada had to concede most of the continent between the Natives.
    • In more recent history Aztlan tried invading the Confederates and Pueblo, but were beaten back. They managed to keep the areas of Texas just North of the Rio Grande.
  • Jack of All Trades: Jaguar totem shamans in the Aztlan supplement.
  • Jackass Genie: Performing the right ritual with the right Sixth World Tarot card gets you a favor from Lofwyr. If Lofwyr finds the favor trivial or insulting, he'll find a way to turn the favor against the requestor.
  • Japan Takes Over the World: Everyone speaks Japanese and uses nuyen. Including Chinese territories. "Yamato damashii" has again become a popular phrase among the Japanese, to the increasing concern of their neighbors. Three of the world's ten AAA megacorps are Japanese, and are happy to join forces against non-Japanese corporations. When the new California Free State needed international aid, Japan happily offered assistance by taking control of San Francisco. Oh, and it changed its full name to the "Japan Imperial State", which sounds a lot like the name it used up until World War II... This started getting downplayed in later versions; while everyone uses nuyen still, Yamatetsu has renamed itself Evo and moved its headquarters out of Japan, and Japanese forces have left San Francisco.
  • Jet Pack: In one story in Paranormal Animals of Europe, a shadowrunner escapes the charge of a wild minotaur when her jetpak (sic) automatically activates and lifts her off the ground out of its way.
  • Jizzed in My Pants: Some editions have an Orgasm spell that induces this. Spirits and magicians can use it to cause a brief and relatively harmless distraction, or throw some great parties.
  • Jurisdiction Friction: Law enforcement tends to be contracted out to Megacorps, the areas they cover tend to be somewhat indistinct.
  • Karma Meter
    • A version acts as the game's Experience Points up through Third Edition — in Fourth Edition, it became one In Name Only and is treated more like standard experience points, but earlier editions explicitly stated that it was impossible to gain Karma from evil actions, even ones on the same level of significance that would award it if they were good.
    • Though a closer example would be Notoriety, which is gained by failing a run, pissing off the wrong people, and incredibly caustic behavior ("Forget giving the money back to the orphanage. Let the brats starve.") It gives penalties to social tests, except for intimidation, which grants a bonus instead. Both apply only to those that would know of said reputation, of course.
    • 5th edition is a bit of a compromise between the earlier editions' take on Karma and 4th edition's. Though you can gain Karma for any mission, like in 4th edition, you gain bonus Karma for good or charitable missions, and less Karma for "cold-hearted bastard" missions (like assassination). This is balanced by the fact that "cold-hearted bastard" jobs pay better, while "good feelings" jobs pay worse.
  • Katanas Are Just Better: Zigzagged; as of 5th edition, katanas are fairly well balanced. Several weapons match or surpass them in certain areas — the combat axe and the claymore do more damage and have greater armor penetration, the rapier is just as accurate, both the regular and monoswords do just as much damage, the monosword with equal armor penetration, and several weapons have equal or superior reach. But no weapon beats the katana in every category, so while it remains a competitive piece of equipment, it has viable alternatives.
  • Kill Sat: Megacorps have these. They come in your basic Frickin' Laser Beams and Thor shots — welded balls of anything dense enough to survive being dropped through the atmosphere — and guess what? The effects of Thor shots are basically nukes minus radiation and EMP.
    • They are a in universe replacement of nukes as they turned /very/ unreliable post awakening. Nuclear fusion while expensive has yet to have those problems mentioned specifically.
  • Kiss of the Vampire: The Essence Drain power of some Awakened creatures, such as, well, vampires.
  • The Klan: The anti-metahuman organization Humanis Policlub is this in a nutshell. Their members are even described as wearing white robes with pointed hoods. Ironically, their headquarters are in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.
  • Knockout Gas: The various neurostun gasses are often used to take out shadowrunners without killing them.
  • Kraken and Leviathan: Leviathans are ocean-dwelling dragons that, ironically enough, actually tend to be smaller than their land-dwelling relatives. The name is also used for Awakened killer whales that grow into some of the largest creatures in the seas. Krakens are Awakened giant squid so big that they can be mistaken for islands.
  • Kung-Fu Wizard: Adepts, mages, and shamans can be as proficient in martial arts and weaponry as much as they are in magic, so expecting the Squishy Wizard stereotype is not recommended. Hence why opponents make it top priority to deal with them first in combat.
  • Laser Hallway: Discussed in The Neo-Anarchists' Guide to Real Life.
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia: The Alter Memory spell can do this, but the altered memories can be recovered. Tír Tairngire is the source of laësal fruit, from which the drug laës is produced. Laës and its derivatives "format" the recipient's short-term memory, making them truly irrecoverable.
  • Law Enforcement, Inc.: Most police duties are handled by private megacorporations themselves. One example is the Knight Errant division contracted by the Ares Macrotechnology company. The Lone Star organization is a stand-alone version (i.e. not part of a MegaCorp and is its own company), based in Austin, Texas; who are a reference to the real-life Texas Rangers Division (also based in Austin, Texas), though they are more unscrupulous.
  • Leave No Witnesses: In one vignette in Chrome Flesh, a security guard at a DocWagon facility lets some runners in to steal some stuff in return for a bribe he hopes will feed his hungry family. Unfortunately, these are not "Pink Mohawks" — they start grabbing much more valuable loot than what was agreed on, before gunning down him and his colleague with a blithe "No witnesses."
  • Le Parkour: Get high running and gymnastics skills, maybe some hydraulic jacks in your cyberlegs or the adept ability to run up walls, and you can be the exemplar of this trope.
  • Left Hanging: The assassination of Dunkelzahn actually qualifies — it was pitched as quite possibly the biggest event of Second Edition, with a whole lot of mystery and obvious player plot hooks surrounding it and it was supposed to be a major tie-in event with Earthdawn. After FASA more or less had to carve itself up and ED and Shadowrun ended up in the hands of different publishers, though, the original planned narrative didn't work at all and with a number of other promising narrative foci available to the new teams, the Dunk assassination just ended up as a background event that informed the trajectory of the UCAS and several major UCAS/Ares-affiliated NPCs.
    • Later given a weird combination of callback and retcon away in Forbidden Arcana as Horrors had their serial numbers filed off but referenced the broken bridge and the true purpose of the fovaes as a network.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The Better Than Bad supplement for 5th edition has a bit of a Take That! for the Dungeon Master:
    "You can’t have strong morals for any length of time without running into a moral dilemma or three. That’s especially true for hooders, who sometimes wonder if some omnipotent sadist is manipulating events around us to ensure exactly that. (One hooder I know insists that these dilemmas pop up on the same night every week.)"
  • Ley Line: The Mana/Dragon Lines.
  • Lighter and Softer
    • Surprisingly enough, during the transition from 3rd edition to 4th — it's still a cynical Cyberpunk game, and definitely Darker and Edgier than real life to be sure, but 4th edition shakes off the overly grunge-rock motifs of 3rd edition and actually mentions places where life doesn't suck. This does get zagged a bit, though, as a lot of the signature runners of 4e end up being extremely Darker and Edgier, though the background fiction leaves a lot of room open for players to go either way.
    • Shadowrun also has a general reputation for being a bit lighter than other cyberpunk titles (especially in contrast to its longest competitor). The "darker" elements of 4e, noted above and elsewhere, may well have been in respose to complaints of SR being too "soft".
    • Also Street Magic says that the Bill of Rights is still alive and well in the CAS and UCAS, so they can't get a mage to mind probe you or copy your memories out of your implants because they violate the 5th Amendment (protection from self-incrimination). Since the extraterritorial megacorps make their own laws, they have no such limitations on their own property.
  • A Lighter Shade of Black: Of the AAA Mega Corps, Ares and Wuxing are this. Sure they smuggle guns, start wars to increase business, Ares owns Knight Errant and Wuxing is butt-buddies with the Red Dragon Triad, but they aren't bringing about the End of the World through blood rituals like Aztechnology. Ares fought against the insect spirits in Chicago and now use captured bug queens to make fleshform insect spirits into guard critters, while Wuxing is very friendly towards Awakened, metahumans and Infected as long as they play by their rules. They also are the only Mega Corps that are relatively easy on Shadowrunners; they'll kill you, but they generally let you go the second you're off their property as long as you don't cause too much of a mess. Mitsuhama kills any and all intruders, look Aztechnology the wrong way and you're never heard from again, and Lofwyr just eats you if you mess with Saeder-Krupp. If you're hired by an Ares Johnson for a run, odds are better than average that the run will avert You Have Outlived Your Usefulness. If you work for Wuxing and give a satisfactory performance, what you won't gain in nuyens (they are notorious cheapskates when it comes to hire shadowrunners), you'll gain in logistics and reputation (they'll smuggle your team anywhere you want once the job's done and put a good word about you to their Triad friends, free of charge and no strings attached).
  • A Lighter Shade of Grey: All but outright enforced on Player Characters before the 4th Edition. (Good) Karma is necessary to improve your character, and you can either earn it by doing sufficiently significant good deeds, or buying it outright (representing philanthropy and good works to offset the harm you cause). Fourth Edition took the Karma Meter aspect out of Karma and put it into Notoriety.
  • Like Cannot Cut Like: Monofilament wire and weapons to monofilament armour.
  • Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards:
    • Downplayed. It's easier for a street samurai to simply buy more power through advanced cyberware, but this only goes so far: Given infinite Karma, the un-Awakened are going to hit a point beyond which they can't push their overly-cybered bodies and minds. On the other hand, there's no such thing as "limits" for the Awakened once Initiations come into play, so after a certain point, the mage or adept will simply overwhelm the street samurai in power. This won't really become an issue in most player groups, though — it only becomes an issue on a very large time scale or if the PCs are aggressively pursuing Karma-generating "good-feelings" jobs over money.
    • Played straight in that there are certain things — most notably instant healing — that simply cannot be done without the use of magic. Just as in Dungeons & Dragons, the power of a Shadowrun magic user is in their flexibility and the use of Summon Magic. This flexibility means they are at worst competent at everything that's not Matrix-related, and sometimes bypass the need for other checks entirely by magicking their way through an alternate solution. Hence why the aphorism "geek the mage first" is so popular In-Universe — you can usually tell that the sammie with a big gun will be really good at shooting stuff, but with a mage there's no way to tell what they're capable of until the spells start flying.
  • Literal Maneater: The Incubus is a large octopus-like creature that has magical powers that can make it appear as a desirable person to its prey. The critter's actual form isn't changed, only how others perceive it. One runner describes an encounter with it at the docks in the middle of the night, where his partner saw a beautiful naked woman and as he approached it, it attacked him and revealed itself as an Incubus.
  • Little Bit Beastly: SURGE from the passing of Halley's Comet late in 3rd Edition caused animal traits to manifest in certain people, called Changelings. It's mentioned that "cute" Changelings, such as anime-style cat girls, can use it to their advantage, while more radically-transformed Changelings — derogatorily called furries — are subject to discrimination. Or become The Matron and wind up clearing out a good section of Chicago... with sentient spiders. Not just any spiders, either, but black widow spiders. That now make up the world's largest undetectable observation network.
  • Little Useless Gun: Light and hold-out pistols. Made a little more balanced in the 4th Edition.
  • Longevity Treatment: Multiple forms of rejuvenation are available. Léonization (the most expensive) restores physical age to approximately 21, a life span extension is a one-time procedure that adds 10 years to your life, while physical vigour simply counters the physical side effects of ageing.
  • Lord British Postulate: Harlequin has no stats explicitly because of this. The designers knew that "if you give it stats, they will kill it", and that by this point in the story arc, it was entirely possible that the players would want to give Harlequin what's coming to him, so for the sake of the module, they declared Harlequin to be completely invincible.
    He has been statted-out in Street Legends Supplemental (that's the second Street Legends book, BTW), though his list of Knowledge skills is stated as being only partial and for his spells, it simply says that he has any spell available to him when needed. The rest of it (which is too long to go into detail here) certainly borders on game-breaking. Curiously, there's a bit of Fridge Brilliance with statting him now. Right above the statblock, a long post by Jackpoint user Frosty (who seems to have been Harlequin's apprentice) states that the ritual at the end of the above-mentioned story-arc "took a lot out of him." So there's no lack of continuity — before the ritual, he was completely invincible, after, he was weakened to the point where a very dedicated team could bring him down — though with how many spells he has permanently sustained on himself at all times and how many he has quickened, any team trying to kill him is going to be in for one hell of a fight.
    All that power is justified. Harlequin is an immortal elf who lived through the Scourge that occurred in Earthdawn's backstory. He's as old as some dragons, and is the sole survivor of the Knights of the Crying Spire. Dunkelzahn considers Harlequin his knight for a damn good reason.
  • Lost Technology: A lot of research data and projects were lost in the two Great Matrix Crashes. However the books admits that most of the stuff lost is either obsolete, novelties, or just useless. However every so often someone finds something that it very valuable. At one point someone recovered a way to tap what was believed to be 100% secure fiber-optic lines(Nigel Findley's Shadowplay). This caused a war in 2053 that nearly led to World War III.
  • Luck Manipulation Mechanic
    • Edge (Karma Pool in the first 2 editions), a stat which only Player Characters and Dragons have. It's not so much "luck" as it is the little extra something that lets runners get away with what they do. Dragons have it because they're cheating bastards. In certain 4th Edition campaigns, anyone can have an Edge stat, if they're important enough to the story. It's just that Dragons can directly manipulate it.
    • In some cases, player characters with a sizeable enough luck pool basically turn into reality warpers in their own right, able to perform impossible tasks on a regular basis. The fact that dragons can do this on-demand lends even further credence to the statement that, "When going up against a dragon, you lose."
  • Lured into a Trap: In the Super Tuesday! adventure "Ghost Story", Fletcher Quinn lures the player characters to an abandoned sporting goods store with a faked message so he can blow them up with the bombs he's planted inside it.
  • Mage Marksman: Adepts, mages, and shamans can be as proficient in martial arts and weaponry as much as they are in magic, so expecting the Squishy Wizard stereotype is not recommended. Hence why opponents make it top priority to deal with them first in combat.
  • Magic Eater: Nimue's salamanders can absorb the magic of active spellcasting, preventing the spell from manifesting and using the energy to boost their own powers. There have been attempts to train them as anti-magic security, but these have been hampered by the difficulty in getting them to feed only on specific sources of magic instead of anything in range and in keeping them from leaving when an area's dry of magic.
  • Magic or Psychic?: Psychics are a form of mage who simply believe that their powers are different, similar to the difference between Hermetic Mages and Shamans. Technomancers, on the other hand, are able to access the matrix without using technology and have abilities that function like programs but are learned like spells, and their abilities aren't magically based as far as anyone can tell.
  • Magic A Is Magic A: Different traditions work magic in somewhat different ways, and have slightly different strengths. The development and general acceptance of the Unified Magic Theory has both expanded the number of traditions (and indeed led to the birth of entirely new ones) but also significantly reduced the functional and mechanical differences between them (particularly hermeticism and shamanism, previously seen as almost entirely separate). And then you get into adepts, who still function completely differently from other wizards and whose Ways don't remotely line up with magical traditions. Forbidden Arcana also provides rules for playing magicians of various traditions who don't practice the UMT and have more uniquely different abilities flavored by their tradition.
  • The Magic Comes Back: The Awakening is generally accepted to have occurred December 24, 2011, although magic had been cycling back into existence for some time.
  • Magical Clown: The Immortal Elf character Harlequin has lived since the previous age of magic and is thousands of years old. He is one of the most powerful magicians in the Sixth World. He usually wears clown-like face paint and acts in a clownish manner on on-line forums.
  • Magical Homeless Person: It's quite likely for a mage to be homeless, as mages and techmancers are discriminated against (especially by the justice system), and tend to be hunted by megacorps (meaning even a mage with some cash might want to keep their head down). Combined with the amount of people who live in poverty anyway, it's not unusual for an awakened runner to be living rough. The ascestism ordeal for ascension outright encourages engaging in this briefly for initiation.
  • Magical Native American: Literally and in spades — part of the reason why the US is fractured is because one of the first Adepts to awaken was a Native American, in the midst of a highly racist internment campaign that imprisoned every Amerind the US could find, and rolled over everything the US could throw at him until they caved to his demands. Shadowrun could be considered the great grandmother of this trope. However, a big part of the reason Daniel "Howling Coyote" Coleman's insurrection succeeded is that the internment camps — isolated so as not to reveal the extremely inhumane conditions within — were spared from the first of a series of viral pandemics which ultimately killed one-fourth of the planet's population. Further outbreaks pretty much handed the continent to them on a silver platter, as curing them required either over a grand in medications or one healing spell.
  • Magic Is a Monster Magnet: The insect spirits in Chicago.
  • Magic Plastic Surgery: Plastic surgery started capable and only got easier and/or more drastic as time went on. By Fourth Edition biosculpting is even relatively cheap, widely available, and widely accepted to the point that it is a norm even with low level employees of megacorps.
  • Mana: Mana (or "mojo" if you prefer) is the common term for magical energy in its purest state, invisible and intangible unless you can interact with the astral plane, or you're a living creature that gets walloped with a bunch of it at once. Rather than have limited pools of it, magicians can draw upon as much as they need, though using more mana for a spell increases the risk of fatigue or injury.
  • Manipulative Editing: The supplement Shadowbeat provides game mechanics for a character (such as a reporter) to manipulate video or audio recordings to make the subject look bad.
  • Man-Eating Plant: Awakened plants don't turn carnivorous very often, but some such variants do occur and can be very dangerous.
    • The Sangre del Diablo, a mutated variant of a naturally-occurring South American rainforest tree, is a dangerous carnivore that uses magical compulsion to lure its prey to it, at which point it engulfs it with corrosive sap, digests it and absorbs its liquefied remains. They're invasive in the Amazon basin, and when groves form they become entirely barren of animal life.
    • Yeteyeos are Central American trees that strangle victims with their snakelike branches are use their corpses as fertilizer.
    • South Africa's Dog Eaters use a combination of an enticing, fruity smell and thick, glue-like sap to lure and trap animals.
    • Malagasy elephant fruits are trees with very broad, hollow trunks tipped with a cluster of leaves that secrete a honey-like substance. Animals and metahumans trying to get at this bait climb into the tree's trunk, which is very slippery and leads to a pitcher plant-like digestive cavity.
    • Violet sleepers are Awakened Venus flytraps native to the Amazon rainforest, and resemble their regular kin in most respects except for being large enough to eat humans.
    • Gomorrah apple trees are an unusual variant — their fruit petrifies any creature that eats it, after which the tree's roots grown into the resulting statue and absorb its lingering life force.
    • The umdhlebi is an African tree with a slender trunk and branches and a wide, umbrella-like canopy. Creatures coming too close to it, typically in search of shade, quickly suffocate due to the large amounts of carbon dioxide released by the plant; once they pass out, the tree's roots lash out of the earth and drag the victim underground to digest it.
  • The Marvelous Deer:
    • Shasta deer live on the slopes of Mount Shasta in California. They have some connection with local nature spirits and appear to have latent magical abilities similar to those of spirits.
    • Grandfather elk are a rare variant of common elk, distinguished by greater size and a prominent beard, which occasionally matures from a regular animal. They're natural leaders of herds of common elk, which they guide and protect from danger. They do not allow their herds to protect them when they're threatened, however, because they know that this will cost the herd too many lives and that another grandfather elk will mature soon after their death anyway.
  • Massive Race Selection: While known primarily for its five metatypes of metahumanity, Human, Dwarf, Elf, Ork, & Troll, later additions bring the game into this territory. Firstly with metavariants of the five standard metatypes; in 5th edition there are 17 metavariants. Then with Metasapients outside of metahumanity, which include centaurs, naga, pixies, Sasquatch, and shapeshifters. One could count shapeshifters as up to ten different races going by the separate stat blocks they get by species in 5th edition. The option to play characters infected with HMHVV expands the list further if one wants to count the infected as a separate race rather than playing a metahuman with a disease. 4th & 5th editions include rules for playing as Artificial/Synthetic Intelligences as well as free spirits, and you also have the option to play as drakes & changelings. Changelings, especially, practically exist to facilitate this trope, as various combinations of changeling qualities can be put together to create any number of fantasy or sci-fi race without the developers creating individual entries for them.
  • Mass Transformation: While elves and dwarves were all born that way, the first orks and trolls of the Sixth Age all transformed later in life in a worldwide event called Goblinization. Later Halley's Comet triggered SURGE, causing people with dormant non-human genes to become Changelings.
  • A Master Makes Their Own Tools: In early editions, "real" deckers built their own cyberdecks from scratch by creating their own deck components. Deckers that bought standard parts to create their deck (or, even worse, a commercial cyberdeck) were looked down upon.
  • Meaningful Name: Mayoral spokeswoman Lotte Krapp in the Neo-Anarchists' Guide to North America supplement.
  • MegaCorp: All over the place, both fictional ones and real ones. The ten AAA-level corporations are all more powerful than any of the national governments, but even an A-level corp wields tons of financial and military power.
  • Mexico Called; They Want Texas Back: Aztlan, the country formerly known as Mexico, invades and conquers large chunks of Confederate Texas and independent California.
  • Middle Eastern Coalition
    • Turkey, Cyprus and Syria were taken over in the mid-2030s by militant Muslim sects (under the umbrella of "Alliance for Allah") and formed an alliance called the Second Jihad to launch an invasion of Europe. It ultimately failed, and the three countries have since broken free from these militant sects' control.
    • The countries of the Arabian Peninsulanote  merge in 2055 after prodding by the Islamic Unity Movement, forming the Arabian Caliphate. It then absorbed Jordan in 2063.
  • Military Mage: Most countries recruit and train hermetic mages and nature shamans to help in warfare. Several countries, such as the UCAS (United Canadian and American States), Native American nations and the elven nations (Tír Tairngire and Tír na nÓg) are particularly well-known for their combat mages/shamans. It is noted that worse pay makes it a rarer path however.
  • Modern Mayincatec Empire: Aztlan likes to claim this, and they have the aesthetics to match. Their corporate facilities are even step-pyramids, and guards dress like Aztec warriors (with better armour, of course). However, the Aztlan sourcebook makes it clear that this is so much moonshine. The Mayincatec elements of Aztlan culture are deliberate social engineering on Aztechnology's part intended to help create an Aztlan national identity. The Aztlan upper class's pretentious claims of being proud and noble Mayincatecs are pure fiction, and in reality, most of them are of nearly pure Spanish descent. All expressions of traditional tribal culture are crushed, and people of Native descent are still poor, marginalized and exploited.
  • Monster Organ Trafficking:
    • One supplement's shadowtalk includes posts by a sicko who'd kept an Awakened leopard with Healing Factor captive for years, periodically skinning it alive and selling the pelts. The same poster speculated about the possibility of catching a giant regenerating species of shark and selling its meat over and over again.
    • Another supplement mentions that several advances in biotech have come from HMHVV gene sequences, and the corps are still cutting up Infected to find more useful ones.
  • Monster Whale: Leviathans are Awakened orcas grown larger than sperm whales. They're aggressive predators, and in addition to hunting other marine mammals they're know to eat divers and overturn boats.
  • Monumental Damage: After the Night of Rage, members of Alamos 20k brought down the Sears Tower with a combination of explosives and magic, killing 26,000 people and blaming the event on retaliating Metahumans.
  • Mooks: A codified mechanic, these are called "grunts." They are groups of enemies with identical stats and simplified mechanics to make it easy for a GM to manage large groups of them. They are intended as low-level security or gang members that players encounter first, before the elite opposition such as a High Threat Response team shows up.
  • Motive Decay: Runners in the early editions often perceived themselves as liberators of truth and crusaders against the monolithic megacorps. By the 2070s, a lot of them seem to have stopped fighting the world order and simply accepted their lot. Members of JackPoint have specifically been called out on this in-universe.
  • Motorcycle Jousting: In the Combat Biker game the Lancebiker player carries a two meter long lance that he can use against other players.
  • Mr. Smith: Or rather, "Mr. Johnson" (or "Herr Schimdt" if you're in Germany, or "Tanaka-sama" in Japan, or... you get the idea). "Mr. Johnson" is what the people who hire Shadowrunners traditionally call themselves, in order to keep a level of official deniability on their actions. Of course, any team of Runners worth their nuyen will hack "Mr. Johnson's" comlink to figure out who exactly they're working with.
  • Muggle with a Degree in Magic: In early editions, a character without any magical ability could take the skill Magical Theory and understand how magic works. They could create new magic spells, design magic items, etc. — they just couldn't cast the spells or create the items. However, they could teach magicians how to do so.
  • Murder, Inc.: Neutral Ground operates two services: The Hidden Blades for posting murder contracts, and The Unwavering Shield for bodyguard services. And yes, they will happily broker both an assassination contract and the target's protection detail.
  • Murder Water: Toxic Water Spirits.
  • Multiple Persuasion Modes: Interrogation, Intimidation note , and Negotiation.
  • Mysterious Employer: Known in the business as "Mr. Johnson" or as just a "Johnson". It's not a name, it's a title for every employer of Shadowrunners — in the German ADL, Japan and Hong Kong the equivalents are "Herr Schmidt", "Mr. Tanaka" and "Mr. Wu" respectively. Their actual mysteriousness varies. Some of them are quite up-front about who they represent (which usually means they lie) while most prefer to stay completely anonymous. In either case, researching one's employer is one of the key skills every crew of shadowrunners learns very quickly, since at least some of them are more concerned with keeping the run a secret than maintaining a good working relationship for future jobs. There are always more shadowrunners...

     N-R 
  • N-Word Privileges: The word "trog", a racist term for orks and trolls, is used in "street ork" culture to 'reclaim' it.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Herr Brackhaus in Germany. Lore-wise, it's just a local variant of Mr Johnson. Anybody who ran the shadows long enough know it's a Johnson who works for Saeder-Krupp, meaning the job will come with lots of strings attached and be very high-risk. The most veteran shadowrunners will ask if "Herr Brackhaus" has long gray hair and golden eyes, and run for the hills if the answer is yes. If the answer is yes, this Herr Brackhaus is the human avatar of Lofwyr.
  • Neural Implanting: Skillsofts are programs that contain recorded data of knowledge and techniques that you can plug into your head. While anybody can use knowsofts as long as they have a direct neural interface (either a datajack or electrode net), activesofts require skillwires, a nervous system implant that allows the software to take over your body when called upon for its skills. If the activesoft is set to never actually turn off...
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero
    • The Great Ghost Dance, which would have given the Horrors the means to invade Earth some 2,000 years ahead of schedule. The adventure Harlequin's Back centres on fixing this. And, on a slightly more mundane note, screwed up the weather system in America for decades to come. If that wasn't enough, Forbidden Arcana suggests that the Great Ghost Dance is responsible for screwing up the manasphere so badly that it's responsible for goblinization; orks & trolls weren't supposed to manifest so early in the awakening, nor were they supposed to manifest so violently & traumatically. It's also to blame for various other races from the 4th era having not manifested at all yet, potentially rendering them effectively extinct.
    • Also, the first novel trilogy saw Sam Verner unleash the Spider bug-spirit into the world ahead of schedule as he was searching for a cure for Janice.
  • No Campaign for the Wicked: It is explicitly made clear that PC shadowrunners are not allowed to be genuinely evil.
    • The rules enforce this by making Karma synonymous with Experience Points. You can't get XP through doing evil deeds, period, and you can sometimes buy XP by donating money to soup kitchens.
    • 2nd Edition supplement The Grimoire
      • It is impossible for PCs to learn how to use Blood Magic or use druidic sacrifice rituals.
      • PCs are forbidden to take the Sacrifice geas, which requires a mage character to kill a sapient being in order to use their magic for the next 24 hours.
    • 2nd Edition supplement Awakenings. Players are forbidden to create PCs that are Petro rite houngans or have their PCs practice Petro rites.
    • 2nd Edition supplement Aztlan, Blood Magic part of Gamemaster Information section. It is specifically stated on multiple occasions and in large print that Player Characters are not allowed to learn or use Aztlan blood magic or summon blood spirits. In later editions learning Blood Magic instantly turns you into an NPC, no exceptions, because good shadowrunners don't do that sort of thing.
    • 2nd Edition supplement Bug City. Game masters are advised not to let Player Characters be insect shamans. The reason: the insect spirits they summon have to possess a human being, which destroys the victim's personality/soul.
    • 2nd Edition supplement Threats 2
      • "Dissonant Voices". Ex Pacis is a group of corrupted otaku (computer adepts) led by Pax, who once was the lieutenant of the evil Artificial Intelligence Deus. The supplement recommends to the Game Master that PCs not be allowed to join Ex Pacis.
      • "The Aleph Society". Player Characters are not allowed to learn or use the Shared Potency metamagic, because doing so requires them to join a spirit pact with the evil free spirit Gaf.
    • 2nd Edition supplement Cybertechnology. When a character has too much cyberware implanted in their body, they die. Cybermancy is the technique of using ritual magic to keep such a character alive. It involves dangerous and borderline evil rituals, and it is forbidden for PCs to learn how to perform it.
    • 3rd Edition supplement Loose Alliances.
      • It is recommended that players not be allowed to have characters that are members of Alamos 20K (a terrorist organization dedicated to the cold-blooded murder of metahumans, particularly orks and trolls) or the Ordo Maximus (a secret society of vampires who live on humanity's Life Energy and plan to take over the world).
      • The supplement recommends that game masters not allow players to have PCs that are active members of fascist groups because of the groups' evil tendencies. It even says that if players favor fascist ideologies, that they should stop playing Shadowrun and "have their heads examined".
      • Player characters are forbidden to be members of the Desolation Angels. All Desolation Angels are mantis (insect) spirits, which means that they possessed the body of and destroyed the soul of a human being. Other Shadowrun supplements say that mantis spirits are cruel and ruthless.
    • 3rd Edition supplement Matrix. Artificial Intelligences are able to create otaku (people who can enter The Matrix without using a cyberdeck). Since the only Artificial Intelligence-created otaku in the game are the evil ones created by the ruthless AI Deus, game masters are advised to not let players play them.
    • 4th edition averts this. Karma is now morally-neutral and can be earned by successful evil deeds, and the rules no longer strictly forbid players from using blood magic or playing toxic shamans, though GMs are advised against allowing it.
    • 5th edition brought it back partly. Now "turn in your character sheet because you're not a real shadowrunner if you X" is gone, though GMs are still strongly cautioned about letting runners learn Blood Magic. And you can now gain Karma through evil deeds, though good ones bring more Karma.
    • Later 5th Edition supplement Forbidden Arcana brought back player allowed blood magic, but still playing this trope straight, emphasized that blood magic needs to be used in moderation, with caution & understanding, & most importantly, with selfless intent, to avoid it's addicting and corrupting effects. I.e., using one of the setting's most evil powers is only viable if you do so for the most heroic, selfless reasons.
  • No FEMA Response: In Bug City, after insect spirits are discovered infesting Chicago and possessing its citizens, most of the city is sealed off to prevent them from escaping. Ares is the only responder and the Ares Bug War is the setting of one of the books and is alluded to in many a character background. Those in later books it's been somewhat retconned with the UCAS forces working alongside Ares personnel.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: In the section on hijacking, Vice mentions that if someone's going unarmed in an obvious danger zone, they're probably an adept or a mage.
  • Not Using the "Z" Word:
    • Discussed off and on if the topic is brought up. The most straight example are ghouls, who are still alive, albeit rotting slowly, and many still have their higher functions intact.
    • Another example is the Shedim, who are spirits that manifest by inhabiting a corpse. The Shedim's body can be destroyed, though you still have the problem of a Shedim spirit being in the area.
    • A Zig-Zagged example are cyberzombies, who are again very much alive. Their main problem is that they're artificially kept alive long past the point of when the soul should have left the body. That and the side effects qualify as a former of Body Horror on its own.
  • Nuclear Mutant: Critters may be mutated and corrupted by radiation or toxin exposure resulting in new abilities and the loss of essence.
  • Nuke 'em: During the "Bug City" incident, Ares tried and failed to exterminate the Bug Spirits in Chicago with a tactical nuke. The Bugs' energy shield trapped the blast inside their nest, which is the reason why Chigago was not wiped off the map completely.
    • The same couldn't be said for Libya, which utterly collapsed from the nuclear strikes of the Ten Minute War.
    • In 2030, when Kashmiri insurgents attempted to break way from India with the help of a Pakistani general, the situation escalated to India using tactical nukes. The entire region became irradiated as a result.
  • Numbers Stations: The 4th edition "Spy Games" discusses Numbers Stations and gives a few suggestions to the possible origins and purpose of the mysterious transmissions. Possible explanations include: an attempt by Artificial Intelligences to manifest in our world, communications from the future or Another Dimension or even the thoughts of being formed from the entire Matrix.
  • Obsessive-Compulsive Barkeeping: 2nd Edition main rules. In the Contacts section, the picture of the Bartender shows him polishing a glass.
  • Obvious Rule Patch: In the Augmentation sourcebook they added a rule called Essence pool. It means that while you don't get Essence back if you remove an implant, any future implants that don't cost more Essence than the implant(s) you removed won't cost you any more Essence. Before, you could kill yourself just by replacing your arm enough times.
  • Off the Grid: The default lifestyle when lacking a SIN, and also something Shadowrunners find themselves having to do every so often when the heat gets too high.
  • Oh, Crap!: Not uncommon in the side discussions, but Forbidden Arcana has a couple particularly notable ones:
    • A runner talking about the amazing reagents gathered from right outside the great dragon Hestaby's abandoned lair...followed by Hestaby saying, "Do tell."
    • After Elijah gets a bit too close to where the Horrors are trying to break through, Bull calls in Frosty...who calls in Hestaby, Ehran the Scribe, and Harlequin. Haze provides the trope name as commentary.
    • When Butch realizes that the former Renraku Arcology probably has a Renraku corporate spirit sleeping there, both she and 2XL promptly freak out.
  • Omniscient Database
    • Lots of these that range from the SIN Database (containing the identity, credit rating and purchasing history of every citizen of the UCAS... Well, legal citizens that is) to the Actually Magical Databases produced by MagicNet, MIT&T, and various other factions.
    • Fourth Edition actually details the methods and limitations of the SIN Database(s) for the first time, so while they are still extremely accurate, there are now cracks to slip through.
    • According to errata for 5e's Missions metacampaign, the tax database for SINners is Hand Waved as this. They will soak you for exactly fifteen percent of your income, legal or illegal, they will magically know about every nuyen you make, they cannot be avoided or tricked, and they don't sell your data to any other corporation or law enforcement agency.
    • The Endless Archive is a resonance realm that contains an almost infinite library containing almost all digital information, but it's completely disorganized. It's theorized that the resonance realms have all information ever was or ever will be created by metahumanity.
    • The Foundation takes things a step further, with "skimming". The Null Node of a host's Foundation can be used to skim data from the underpinning of the Matrix, and all the data you could possibly need literally floats into your hands — including information that has no possible way of existing online, such as the notes someone scribbled on the palm of their hand. This fountain of paydata comes with a price, though — the Doxx.
  • Once an Episode: Just about all of the 4th edition supplements start off with the reader logging into Jackpoint. The log-on screen advertise the different supplement in an in-universe style and show little news blurbs of in-universe news.
  • One Dose Fits All: Zig-zagged: drugs, toxins, and other chemicals affect every character equally with the same nebulous quantity of a single dose, whether it be an ordinary human, an ork built like a pro linebacker, or a two-and-a-half meter, three-hundred kilogram troll. The only concession made for different body sizes is that the subject's Body attribute can reduce the effects or negate them entirely, and orks and trolls have higher minimum Body attributes than humans. This can still result in strange cases involving toxins with non-damaging side effects: nausea gas is less likely to affect a hulking troll than a wispy human, but if it does, they both suffer the same penalties for the same duration, with no in-between to account for the troll's mass.
  • One Nation Under Copyright:
    • A concept from the very first edition of the game, and a core part of the setting as per its 1980s cyberpunk roots. Corporations began gaining extra-territoriality even before the setting began getting nuts, and by the time of even the earliest editions proper, it's an established fact of life. As just a few examples, the Pueblo Corporate Council was founded openly as one, and Aztechnology's dominant position in Aztlan is actually written into a classified section of that nation's constitution. By the 2060s, all the Big Ten are this to a greater degree, though, with corporate citizens being very distinct from national ones.
    • One of the thrusts of the fifth and sixth editions has been to deconstruct the idea a little bit, though, in keeping with evolving thought in cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk and the general zeitgeist around the idea of "corporate power". While the PCC and Aztech remain as they were (specifically because they were meant to be states from their inception), am early thrust of sixth edition's metaplot in particular is the idea of Ares Macrotechnology struggling a good deal to balance its "corporatehood" and "statehood", and how, for all its appearance of independent might, it still relied and relies much more on a last-century symbiotic relationship with an American government (the UCAS for most of Shadowrun history, and the CAS after the Detroit Rupture) than its leadership would ever be comfortable admitting and it can't really "replace" an actual government.
  • One Password Attempt Ever: Found in the supplement The Neo-Anarchist's Guide to North America. In certain high security areas, card reader security access devices are programmed to signal an alarm the first time they receive an invalid code.
  • One-Word Title: Also Portmantitle.
  • Online Alias: Deckers use mysterious and cool names if they're established and competent and ridiculous and common aliases if they're newbies. Many runners, once they're well known enough to enter the prime runner communities, post under the Code Name they got famous under.
  • Only Known by Their Nickname: The way most runners prefer things. Not only deckers, but pretty much every runner goes by street names, because a) they sound cool (for the pink mohawk crowd) and b) going by your real name is somewhat detrimental to leading a double-life of profitable crime (for the black trenchcoats).
  • One-Steve Limit: Played with and hilariously lampshaded in The Twilight Wars. The joke is really too good to ruin; suffice it to say that apparently not everyone knows there's more than one Kat in the fiction.
  • Organ Theft: It's known as Organlegging. Don't piss off your street doc unless you want to be the next "donor."
  • Our Banshees Are Louder:
    • Banshees are elven vampires (well, elven victims of the HMHVV virus). They aren't really much for screaming, but they do feed by using their Emotion Eater powers to induce fear and drive people to exhaustion.
    • Bean sidhe are entirely different things, being spiritual beings closely tied to certain Scottish and Irish families. They wail to announce the imminent deaths of these families' members, and are apparently in good standing among Europe's spiritual entities — summoned spirits and elementals simply refuse to oppose them. Some bean sidhe, however, go mad and use their wails to spread death indiscriminately, and these other spirits have no qualms about fighting.
  • Our Centaurs Are Different: Are actually an Awakened form of horse, with equine heads and their own way of looking at the world. 5th edition introduces a subspecies known as "lesser" centaurs who have the more traditional human heads; mechanically they're identical, but socially they face significant prejudice from other centaurs and are often left to die, so most are raised by metahumans.
  • Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: Actually not so mysterious any more, as many types came out of hiding or arose from mundane animals with the Awakening.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: They're far-and-away the most powerful beings in the game, and they've adapted quite well to the modern world. Their hoards often include real estate and stocks and bonds, and several of them head corporations and/or governments.
    • Dragons awoke during the Awakening and have been active ever since (in the "present day" of 2080, about 70 years now). They are often citizens of nations or megacorps, and are invariably as wealthy and influential as they are manipulative and scheming. Never, ever, cut a deal with one.
    • Dragons come in both Western and Eastern forms, with the Eastern in turn having a subspecies of sorts known as the sirrush with longer limbs and head and a shorter tail, as well as the feathered serpents common to Central American mythologies and seagoing leviathans.
      • All types come in "normal" and "greater" varieties: Greater dragons are very old, very experienced and very powerful individuals and survivors of the Fourth World (and therefore thousands of years old). Regular dragons are arrogant, manipulative beings that can pull the strings of cities and corporations. Greater Dragons pull the strings of megacorps and nations and are far too powerful for humanity to harm in any meaningful way. Fortunately for humanity they're about as cooperative as a bag of angry cats and expend most of their energy squabbling with each other and the various nations and MegaCorps.
      • They have a rather peculiar reproductive system — after two dragons mate, having selected their partner solely based on who they think will give their offspring the best genes, the female puts her eggs into the care of a great dragon. The great dragon cares for the clutch as it incubates, communicating telepathically with the young inside until they hatch and molding their minds before they're even born. On hatching, the newborn dragons inherit the features of the great dragon who cared for them rather than those of their parents — a western dragon's eggs cared for by a great feathered serpent, for instance, will hatch into feathered serpents. The great dragon who hatched and raised them (referred to as their sire) is thus who dragons perceive as their actual parent, and most neither know nor care about their original progenitors.
    • A number of lesser draconic creatures, referred to collectively as dracoforms, also exist.
      • Wyverns are animalistic predators closely related to feathered serpents, and are found in North America and Europe.
      • Drakes are shapeshifters who can alternate between a metahuman form and one resembling a miniature dragon of any breed; they were created in the Fourth World to be servants of the dragons, and their lines endured through the mana-less Fifth World as seemingly normal humans. They reappeared when the mana surge that came with Halley's Comet caused hundreds of unsuspecting metahumans to suddenly turn into drakes, which were then either rounded up by the dragons or went into hiding.
      • Hydras are large, amphibious creatures resembling seven- or nine-headed dragons, and are only found in Greece.
      • Drakas (known as drakes in the first two edition, before the later drakes were introduced in 3rd ) are wingless, primitive dragon relatives about as smart as orangutans, and are often used by true dragons as guard animals. They come in a fire-breathing variant and an ice-breathing one, but sometimes crossbreed to create hybrids with both types of breath. They are also related to seadrakons, mosasaur-like sea reptiles the size of a whale.
      • Gorgons are amphibious dracoforms with gills and manes of fleshy, mobile tendrils.
    • There are also dracomorphs, which resemble dragons but aren't actually related to them; examples include chimeras (Awakened iguanas with prominent horns and frills and a fiery breath) and lindworms (Awakened, sapient serpents that grow a pair of front legs as they age, and often serve dragons as messengers and go-betweens).
  • Our Gargoyles Rock:
    • Paranormal Animals of North America describes gargoyles as humanoid creatures with a single short horn and pointed ears; they normally live on cliffs, but some have adapted to cities. The main kind has males with wings and female with arms, but one subspecies possesses both sets of limbs. Another, also six-limbed variety is described in Paranormal Animals of Europe, with twisting horns and skin marked by numerous complex ridges. Unlike most other paranormal animals, which Awakened from clear mundane ancestors, no one really knows where gargoyles come from.
    • Neogargoyles, originally mistaken for a variant of gargoyles, are once-normal bats turned blind and flightless by chemical runoff, and whose skin is heavily calcified as a result of the same. They crawl along buildings, tapping, prodding and digging at them to find food, and over a period of five to seven months completely calcify into immobile statues.
  • Our Ghouls Are Creepier: They're metahumans (of any type) infected with HMHVV strain III, many go feral but there's a significant number who manage to retain their minds. They're not undead but don't look particularly healthy, are physically blind but gain astral perception, and need to eat metahuman flesh. Some establish working relationships with hospitals, organ-leggers, or shadowrunners to get food.
  • Our Giants Are Bigger: They're a troll metavariant native to Germany, Central Europe, and Scandinavia, and have varied in appearance as the editions marched on — currently they're extremely tall and very human-like as trolls go, but with skin having a leathery, almost bark-like appearance.
  • Our Goblins Are Different:
    • "Goblinization" is the term used for the phenomenon of adults turning into orks or trolls when the metatypes first emerged.
    • Actual goblins are dwarves infected with HMHVV Type I, the virus that turns humans into vampires. Goblins are emaciated, hairless beings with only minimal intelligence, immune to fire and vulnerable to iron. They eat raw meat, often from sapient beings.
    • Hobgoblins are something else entirely, being a regional variant of ork native to the Middle East and Central Asia. Hobgoblins are wirier and skinnier than other orks, have greenish skin tones (orks usually just have human colorations) and solid black eyes, and have a very strong sense of personal honor that demands that they obtain payback for any slight done against them.
  • Our Gryphons Are Different: Classic griffins, resembling the usual mix of lion and eagle with feathered ears, exist as Awakened animals of somewhat unclear origin, although they're somewhat tentatively classified as birds. They're solitary mountain-dwellers and prey chiefly on large hoofed mammals. A few additional variants are known to exist, generally created by additional magical mutation of the main griffin species.
    • An Asian species exists that is distinguished by a scaly head and neck and a spiny fin running down its neck and back.
    • False griffins are largely identical to the normal kind, but lack wings and external ears.
    • The hieracosphinx resembles a griffin with a falcon-like head and vestigial wings, while the criosphinx resembles a hieracosphinx with lion ears and ram horns. They live only in the Serdarbulak Plateau in the Middle East and are believed to have diverged from regular griffins in the surge of magical transformations that came with the passing of Halley's Comet.
    • Heliodromus are mutant griffins with fully feline bodies and the wings and heads of vultures. They're opportunistic scavengers, waiting near freeways to glean roadkill, raiding graveyards, lurking around battlefields and sometimes picking through garbage dumps. They are also known to try to scare other creatures into dangerous situations by using their ability to induce supernatural fear, and will attack targets directly if they're especially hungry.
  • Our Hydras Are Different: Hydras are large, seven- or nine-headed dragon relatives native to Greece. They're fairly indiscriminate omnivores with a diet ranging from aquatic vegetation to cattle and humans. Of note, the different heads don't have distinct wills — the craniums only contain sensory ganglia; the real brain is at the base of the spine. There's a more aquatic species, the hydra-wyrm, which possesses gills and seal-like flippers on its hind limbs; while normally native to lakes and estuaries, it has been developing greater salt tolerance and spreading into the Aegean proper. The hydra-wyrm was the default hydra in the 2nd edition Paranormal Animals of Europe sourcebook that introduced hydras to Shadowrun, but was retconned into being a distinct aquatic variant in later material.
  • Our Kelpies Are Different: The each-uisge is a horse-like para-animal that lives in bodies of water. It can compel metahumans to ride on its back, and secretes a glue-like substance on its skin to keep them there. It dives into the water and stays there until its rider drowns, then eats the victim's body.
  • Our Manticores Are Spinier: Martichoras are Awakened lions with vaguely-human like faces, multiple rows of teeth and tails bristling with barbed, venomous spines. They do not use their spines to hunt, though, and never eat prey they kill with them — they're immune to the venom, but apparently don't like the taste. Their prides are led by the females, unlike how regular lions operate. They prefer unspoiled and untainted environment and have a mild allergy to pollution.
  • Our Mermaids Are Different: Merrows and mermaids are, respectively, Awakened seals and sea lions provided with arms and clawed and webbed hands (merrows have thumbs, mermaids do not), anthropoid upper bodies and long hair, although their faces are still those of pinnipeds. In mermaids, both sexes possess pronounced breasts. Merrows come in both salt- and freshwater varieties. Both species are found worldwide in warm and temperate seas, and mermaids are both highly tolerant and dependent on pollution — like several other Sixth World species, they reacted to rampant environmental degradation by becoming so well-adapted to it as to be unable to survive without it. In mermaids' case, they're entirely unable to survive without a constant intake of mercury in their diets.
  • Our Perytons Are Different': Paranormal Animals of Europe has peryton as winged deer as tall as a man at the shoulder, and found throughout Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. They possess enlarged incisors and claw-like hooves and both sexes have antlers, although the males' are larger. They're omnivorous and take prey as large as sheep, goats and lone humans. They don't hunt smaller animals because their favored hunting strategy, a headlong antlers-first divebomb, doesn't work too well with prey below a certain size, but they're smart enough to experiment with alternative hunting methods. Most people in their range consider them dangerous livestock thieves and potential man-eaters and go out of their way to hunt them down.
  • Our Sirens Are Different: Sirens, creatures of unknown origin and resembling small Pterosaurs, possess hypnotic calls that evoke profound emotional trances and cause listeners to stand still in a daze or actively walk towards their sources. As sirens are aggressive predators, they are believed to use this ability to hunt.
  • Our Sphinxes Are Different: Hieraco- and criosphinxes are variants of griffins found only in the Serdarbulak Plateau in the Middle East, and are believed to have diverged from regular griffins in the surge of magical transformations that came with the passing of Halley's Comet. The hieracosphinx resembles a griffin with a falcon-like head and vestigial wings, while the criosphinx resembles a hieracosphinx with lion ears and ram horns.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Metahumans infected with HMHVV strain I develop chronic Essence loss, an allergy to sunlight, and fast healing. Humans become "classical" vampires, while elves become psychic vampire "banshees". The variants formed from dwarves (goblins), orks (Wendigo), trolls (dzoo-noo-qua), and sasquatches (bandersnatches) all regain Essence by eating fresh metahuman flesh.
  • Our Werebeasts Are Different: Shapeshifters are actually Awakened animals who've gained the ability to assume human form, they're not contagious or anything but (usually) have a weakness to silver.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different: Loup-garou, on the other hand, are humans infected with HMHVV II, which causes them to grow fur, fangs, and claws and every 28 days undergo a secondary transformation where their strength dramatically increases and they go into a killing frenzy where they attempt to kill everything in their path.
  • Our Wyverns Are Different: Wyverns resemble smaller — but still quite big; they head alone is as long as a man is tall — dragon-like creatures without forelegs, with a frill around their heads and a highly venomous stinger at the end of their tails. They're animals lacking the immense intelligence of true dragons, and aggressive predators. Two distinct species exist, one North American and one European, and they belong to the same genus as feathered serpents. Young dragons of any species, notably, look remarkably like wyverns — wings, no forelegs, stubby legs and stinger-tipped tails — only taking on their full draconic forms after a sort of metamorphosis, which has fueled in-universe speculation that wyverns may simply be dragons who failed to mature.
  • Our Zombies Are Different
    • Light sensitive and something of the intelligent Romero type. They are created by shedim, jellyfish-like creatures from the "Deep Metaplanes" that possess corpses and seek to kill everything.
    • A very, very different spin on the trope comes in the form of Head Cases; metahumans suffering from Cognitive Fragmentation Disorder; hostile A.I. infecting nanomachines that override the metahuman brain and take control. Results vary, but the cases that most resemble the zombie trope are the instances of imperfect integration that result in ragers and shamblers who's only thoughts are "kill" and "eat". In an interesting twist, headshots are the worst way to combat them; not only can the nanites regenerate even from a headshot, but due to the high concentration of nanites in the brain, brain splatter tends to be the most infectious part.
  • Overt Operative: It is perfectly possible to play Shadowrun as a team of very combat-oriented runners who treat runs as protracted firefights with lots of cinematic cool stuff and explosions, with minimal legwork and pre-planning. The playstyle is called "pink mohawk" by the fandom (because it emphasises the 'punk' part of Cyberpunk). Needless to say, the GM is the final arbitrator on how well that plays out for you.
  • Overt Rendezvous: Many of the adventures published for the game have runners meeting with their Mr. Johnson in public places such as restaurants, bars and nightclubs.
  • Pacifist Run: Commonly enforced in this case. Johnsons really don't appreciate when a runner leaves behind twenty corpses at a 'simple' snatch-and-grab, because that draws attention... and regularly doing so can have extreme consequences for a party. In some cases, 'killing nobody' can also result in a karma bonus at the end of the mission.
  • Partial Transformation: Wolfgang Kies in Michael Stackpole's Wolf and Raven short story "If as beast you don't succeed".
  • Passing the Torch: At the end of Fourth Edition, FastJack ceded control of JackPoint to Bull, Glitch, and Slamm-O! so he could fight a malevolent program that was taking over his body.
  • Paying in Coins: The Great Dragon Lofwyr bought the majority of heavy industrial corporation Saeder-Krupp stocks with gold from his hoard, although it isn't specified if it's tons of gold coins or in another form.
  • Pegasus: Pegasus (singular and plural) are winged horses native to the Balkans, Italy and southern France. They're not common, and extensive poaching for racing stock is rapidly wiping them out.
  • People Farms: Tamanous and their "fetus farms", where metahuman women cut down to the minimum necessary to bring a fetus to term are used to incubate infants for the ghouls to eat.
  • Phantom Thief: Shadowrun can be played in this way by a party full of skill-monkeys and deckers who specialise in covert ops and extraction where the target never knows what has happened to it until days later. Known as "black trenchcoat" or "mirrorshades" style by the fandom (emphasising the 'cyber' part of Cyberpunk), it carries with it the risk that 95% of all sessions will involve your characters doing legwork and planning and that your Street Samurai will fall asleep at the table unless the GM throws in a Spanner in the Works at some point.
  • The Phoenix: Phoenixes are large, red-gold predatory birds capable of generating fire, which they use to cook their prey before feeding. They do not resurrect or immolate themselves, but in a nod to the original legend they do incinerate their nests once their young are old enough to leave.
  • Place of Power: Places with a positive background count have mana that's aspected toward a particular magical tradition. To most magicians, this is as bad as having too little mana in an area, but those who are used to it can acclimate and deal with it, and those who are actually aligned with the local background have an easier time casting in the area. Too much mana (a "mana warp"), however, and there's no alignment or acclimation and magic is extremely dangerous to use. No sane mage even considers casting spells on the grounds of Auschwitz, for example.
  • The Plan: Multiple examples; the most devious ones involve dragons.
  • Plausible Deniability: This is the entire point of Runners. A Mega-Corp needs something of questionable legality done, so they send a mid-level employee to hire some "deniable assets" (in other words, Shadowrunners). Said employee always uses the name "Mr. (or Mrs.) Johnson" (or a regional equivalent such as Herr Schmidt in the AGS, Mr. Wu in China, Mr. Tanaka in Japan etc.) and bears no obvious connection to his or her employer. Should the runners be caught, the corporation can wash their hands of it, as there's no visible sign of them doing the hiring. (At least, not immediately visible — any good Runner team will have hacked into the Johnson's commlink and picked up the details during negotiations.)
  • Playful Hacker: There's a good few, such as Slamm-O. Script kiddies can leave tags or graffiti on servers. Interestingly, Aztechnology (the most overtly evil of the megacorps,) takes this approach to matrix security. If you tweak their virtual nose with something harmless on their digital turf, expect to wake up and find they've done the same to yours shortly afterwards. They've found it's better PR than a harsh response, and it sends a none-too-subtle "We know where you live" message. (The soft approach goes out the window if you do something damaging or that pries into their secret affairs.)
  • Plot Twist: Twists during runs are so common it was literally built into the system by the 5th edition: The quick concept maker for runs included in the core rulebook has a twist table such as heightened security, Your Princess Is in Another Castle! or You Have Outlived Your Usefulness on part of the Johnson. Most experienced Shadowrunners expect things not to go as expected: Those who don't commonly die.
  • Pin-Pulling Teeth: Occurs in the short story "Balance" in Shadowland magazine #6. Since modern grenades are radio-detonated, physical pins are generally a thing of the past.
  • Pirate Parrot: One belongs to the pirate Captain Monday of Moro Bay in the supplement California Free State. It may be an Awakened creature called an "eyekiller".
  • Pheromones: Tailored Pheromones bioware effectively gives the user a Charisma bonus against other metahumans.
  • Point Build System: the most complicated part of the game, at least in the 4th Edition.
  • Police Brutality: Lone Star tends to treat any Shadowrunners to the old "shoot first, bring in survivors for Assaulting A Police Officer" routine. Knight Errant will do the same, but use higher-calibre so runners are usually charged post-mortem. Private corps-sec don't have to play by any rules (corporate enclaves of the AA and up are their own jurisdiction, after all), with Mitsuhama taking it to the extreme with their "zero-zero" policy: Zero penetration, zero survival.
  • The Pornomancer: Trope Namer. The term is slang for Social Adepts built to throw around 50 dice at any social roll, where ordinarily, an utter grand master of a skill won't get past 25 dice.
  • Portmantitle: Also One-Word Title.
  • Possessing a Dead Body: Shedim are spirits from a distant metaplane who attach themselves to corpses, or the bodies of astrally projecting mages sometimes.
  • Post-Modern Magik: Naturally the setting explores how magic and technology can interact. For example, engineering harmless airborne bacteria that has a hyperactive astral body which will effectively blind anyone with its aura who tries to astrally project into a room where the air is filled with it.
  • POW Camp: The 're-education' camps that Native Americans were put into are of the internment/concentration kind.
  • Power Born of Madness: Madness mages. It's never explained if they went mad because of their powers, got powers from their madness, or were insane when they got their powers. No matter what, it's a bad idea to mess with them. One reason is because they are insane and you have no idea how they will react. Another is that their powers and spirits are twisted by their madness so you have no idea what they're even doing.
  • Power Perversion Potential: In the words of William Gibson, "...the street finds its own uses for things." Of course people are going to find ways to use Cyborgs, Magic and Powers for porn.
    • It's a Cyberpunk game, so The Internet Is for Porn is taken up to eleven. Simsense is officially so couch potatoes can visit Aspen to ski or climb mountains, but the primary use is detailed in Strange Daysrecordings of people screwing, and recordings of people committing crimes. There's interactive virtual reality Visual Novels, so of course there's interactive virtual reality porn. There's Snuff Films, so there's simulations where users can pretend to die — which often drives them insane. The Augmentation supplement has cybernetic genitals. Perhaps most disturbing are "bunraku"; prostitutes with artificial personalities — think Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, but used by organized crime on unwilling subjects. Usually these are just attractive men and women with a single brain implant, but particularly ruthless operations will mix-and-match body parts from various subjects to produce an "ideal" and kill the discards.
    • Magic gets "perverted" every bit as much. Certain mages have been rumored to use Summoned Spirits for... services. The chapter on Sapient Shapeshifting Animals as PCs has a sidebar called "But they look Metahuman!", in which a Jackpoint poster attempts to explain the differences between shifters and actual metahumans (resulting in Fastjack having to edit the explicit sexual content out of the post). To top it all off? Street Magic contains variants on the "Confusion" spell called "Orgasm" and "Orgy". That's not even getting into Seattle's underground sex industry, or the more "creative" uses of various other abilities.
  • Pragmatic Villainy
    • The only reason most shadowrunners get away. Most major players of the Sixth World accept losses from shadowrunners as part of the cost of doing business, and the odds they'll retaliate against you depends entirely on how big (and how public) said losses were. It's said in the sourcebook by other shadowrunners as long as you keep the damage down and not kill any guards, you get away scot free. Now, if you turn the building into a Michael Bay set and kill the guards, nothing is going to keep you safe. Generally, the more you cost them on damages or replacement personnel, the more they ignore the cost of taking you down. There are some "too big to ignore" items, secrets and proprietary goodies that the corps will kill to keep in their hands, no matter how subtly you steal them. Steal a nuclear-armed submarine (a lifelong fantasy of Kane, but one he'll never fulfill due to this trope), reveal Aztechnology blood rituals or steal a set of the Renraku Red Samurai's signature armour? They might just call down a Kill Sat on you. Bottom line, when deciding whether to retaliate against shadowrunners, a megacorp will ask "is the juice worth the squeeze?" Smart runners try to make sure that the answer is "no."
    • Aztechnology and Mitsuhama, meanwhile, make it a matter of company policy to take all shadowruns against them personally. Conversely, when running against those two, runners tend to not worrry so much about collateral damage — going up against the "zero zone" means that survival and victory take priority.
  • Prefers the Illusion: SimSense (or just Sims) are virtual reality devices which allow the viewer to experience all of the 5 senses (actors appearing in Sims tend to be very good at controlling their emotions). This has led to overuse, as Sim addiction is more common than chemical addictions. Made even worse by "Better Than Life" (or BTL) chips, which have the limiters illegally removed, making them even more vivid and "real" than the original recordings.
  • Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Players can take "Elf Poser" or "Ork Poser" as negative traits for extra karma. Either tends to cause negative reactions from people who find out, ranging from ridicule to outright violence for being a "race traitor." Elves universally loathe elf posers, but orks (being an oppressed minority) sometimes appreciate an honest attempt to bridge their culture.
  • Private Detective
    • Dirk Montgomery is a classic example.
    • In addition, the hard boiled Noir detective is a Player Character archetype. That Archetype also has Magic skills. So you're Harry Dresden.
    • Earlier editions had the Investigator, who had no magic or cyber, but made do with a bajillion contacts.
  • Prevent the War: In the adventure Elven Fire, someone is trying to start a gang war in Seattle between the Ancients and other gangs. A Lone Star detective hires the PCs to prevent it.
  • The Purge: February 7th, 2039, also known as the Night of Rage, was the worst anti-metahuman riot on record. Beginning with a mass roundup of metahumans in Seattle by the Metroplex Guard, on orders of Governor Allenson, they were sent to warehouses on the waterfront, which resulted in hysteria, gunfire and the warehouses being firebombed. Once the news reaches the public, citizens protest the barbaric treatment of metahumans and the United Corporate Council threatens the governor with lockouts and boycotts, but the event also sparks other acts of violence across the city and the world. Thousands are killed, mostly metahumans and their supporters.
  • Punch-Clock Villain: Most Corporate wage slaves are this. As mentioned under Almighty Janitor above, bribing the underpaid janitors and Rent-a-Cops to look the other way can make a run significantly easier.
  • Quick Draw: Performing this action allows you to draw a small pistol as a free action instead of a simple action if you make the test. The iaijutsu martial arts manoeuvre allows you to do this with any one-handed weapon.
  • Rapid Aging
    • Anyone who uses the Horror-powered idol in Bottled Demon will age at a rate of approximately 10 years per day.
    • Supplement Shadows of Europe. One of the survivors of an outbreak of shedim (evil spirits that can possess living beings) says that a shedim sucked the Life Energy out of a friend of his, causing them to age until they became old-aged in seconds.
  • Rascally Raccoon: Bandits are Awakened raccoons with opposable thumbs and a propensity for theft, especially of food and shiny objects. They're remarkably cunning for non-sapient animals, and are rumored to even be able to pick locks.
  • "Rashomon"-Style: Runner's Companion.
    • The end part has a Rashomon-like story. It shows how a run is ordered, from the briefing to the run itself, the poor wage slave whose work is being deleted, and the end.
    • Also they show one bounty hunter that is annoyed by a cop, to the cop's perspective where all she wants to do is throw the guy to the ground and have her way with him.
  • Regional Redecoration: The geography of the Sixth World has changed quite a bit.
    • February 2011 brought the Black Tide, a storm surge from the heavily polluted North Sea that drowned large parts of the Netherlands, Northern Germany and the Denmark Jutland. Most of the waters didn't recede, leaving cities like Hamburg partially flooded.
    • Later in 2011, several islands sank and rose in Indonesia and the Philippines in accordance with The Awakening. One of these, Yomi Island, would later be used by Japan as a giant ghetto for metahumans.
    • In 2012, an earthquake hit the Russian Far East, splitting the Kamchatka peninsula off from Siberia. This allowed Kamchatka Island to remain under control of the Russian Republic once Yakut broke away.
    • In 2060, as part of Dunkelzhan's will, a volcanic island rose 301 kilometers off the coast of Petrolia, as a gift for Federated Boeing.
    • And in 2069, two major earthquakes known as The Twins (which measured 9.2 and 9.6 on the Richter Scale) hit Los Angeles, causing parts of Southern California and Central Valley to fall below sea level, and after being hit with a tsunami, Los Angeles and other coastal cities are cut off from the mainland, effectively becoming islands. However, it's noted this happened in defiance of plate tectonics; the sinking seems to have been something that occurred simultaneously with the quakes but was not caused by them. Some parts of the city are now tens of meters underwater, yet the buildings are completely intact and undamaged. It's later discovered that the topography of the area has significantly changed, with a vast network of astral constructs in the form of underground tunnels and lagoon-sized sinkholes appearing beneath California. This unnatural phenomenon is named the Deep Lacuna.
  • Remote, Yet Vulnerable: When a mage or magical creature uses Astral Projection they leave their body behind on the physical plane.
  • Research, Inc.: quite a few, MegaCorp labs or freelance.
  • Resignations Not Accepted: It's pretty common for employment in the megacorps to be mandatory for life, with imprisonment, death or other punishments as a penalty for trying to quit. Extracting a (willing or unwilling) target to work for a new employer is a common and lucrative job for shadowrunners.
  • Retirony: Poor Sergeant First Class Hefflinger in the "Cutting Black" supplement is "six days and a wake-up" from retiring when he's sent in to find a UCAS Army Corps that mysteriously vanished. His last recorded transmission is about fourteen hours later.
  • Reversible Roboticizing: In the cyberpunk future of the game, it is possible to have cybernetic parts removed from the body via surgery, the same way they were added in the first place. However, the Essence (magical Life Energy) that was lost when the cybernetics were first implanted is not regained.
  • Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Ka•Ge magazine Volume 1 Issue 8 (2nd quarter 1993) story "Instruction Takes A Turn". The decker Kam betrays the rest of his team to the corporation they're infiltrating in return for money, allowing the corp to prepare for their attack. However, the corp has Kam murdered because they have no love for traitors and know that if he will betray his fellow shadowrunners, he'll betray the corporation too.
  • Riddle for the Ages: What exactly is Aztechnology using all that blood magic for? Who sent the Nightwraith bombers that ended the second EuroWar? Is there a great spirit protecting the Japanese emperor, and why? Who killed Dunkelzahn, and if he did it himself, why did he make it look like an assassination? And what is half the stuff in his will all about, anyway? The developers have long included these kinds of open questions in the official plotline, and sometimes answered them later, but most are meant to be plot hooks for individual gamemasters. Solving mysteries and getting tangled up in conspiracies are often part of a shadowrunner's job.
  • Ridiculously Human Robots: Otomo drones, a Shout-Out to Katsuhiro Otomo, are one type of cyborg chassis that are designed to be as human as possible for the brains that pilot them. Alternately, a Shout-Out to the ninja Otomo in Robocop 3, originally thought to be a single man until revealed to be a mass-produced robot.
  • Roc Birds: Lesser rocs are Awakened albatrosses with a six-meter wingspan, and adapted for carnivory. Greater rocs are quite a lot bigger and can kill elephants.
  • Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Weapon damage rapidly outstrips characters' ability to absorb it. Getting into a firefight is slightly less dangerous in Shadowrun as it is in the real world; the base damage of most light pistols in 4th edition is 4P, while the average human can take 10P before going down in a bloody heap.
  • Royal Rapier: 5th edition's Run & Gun introduces the Horizon-Flynn rapier as a viable alternative to the katana for those street sams who were more inspired by swashbucklers than ronin. It matches the katana in reach, armor penetration, and accuracy (the only melee weapon to do so), but loses out in damage. It is just as restricted, but only half as expensive.
  • Rule of Cool: Monofilament CHAINSAWS — though the most common versions of these are noted as being rather poor weapons, and have mediocre stats compared to a dedicated melee weapon. They're mostly for carving through barriers that a cutting torch might have trouble with.
  • The Rule of First Adopters: The 5th edition lampshades this when talking about the commercial uses of magic.
  • Rule of Fun: The 'Pink Mohawk' playing style usually dabbles in this trope.
  • Rule of Three: 3rd Edition supplement Magic in the Shadows. If a free spirit's true name is spoken three times in succession, the spirit has to appear before the speaker.
  • Ruthless Modern Pirates: Kane, "the most notorious man in the CAS", is wanted in over 17 countries for piracy. His entries in Jackpoint tend to involve colourful boasts about the people he has killed, ships he has successfully destroyed/survived/added to his fleet, and the profit he makes from both the slave trade and organlegging. The organs are provided in their original packaging. He has expressed a fondness for submarines and excessively large ships.

     S-Z 
  • Sand Worm: Rockworms are Awakened earthworms about two meters long, with three-lobed jaws, lots of strong, sharp teeth and corrosive saliva. They use these to bore tunnels through solid rock, digging extensive tunnel systems. They don't prey on other animals, but their tunnel systems can and will cause large collapses when they grow too big — and they're just as happy eating the concrete in dams, highway supports and buildings as they are eating rock.
  • Sapient Tank: While ground attack drones are "intelligent" after a fashion, their control programs are called "dog-brains" because they're dumb. If the program running it evolves into a true artificial intelligence, then it becomes one of these.
  • Savage Wolves: Fenris wolves are Awakened descendants of gray wolves native to the forests of Scandinavia and Germany. They're bigger than horses and extremely aggressive — they'll take on bears and wolverines, and a full-grown fenris male can kill a bear on his own. They're typically considered actively evil creatures by people who live close to them, and are hunted due to the ecological damage they cause — the ones in Germany's Black Forest, for instance, have almost completely exterminated the regular wolves there. Male fenris wolves will also slaughter their own pups if they perceive them as being weak.
  • Saving the World With Art: Shadowbeat provides rules for creating characters with musical skills, such as rock stars. It also had rules that allowed the characters to put on performances that could sway the masses to defeat the character's opponents. For example, a musician could hold a concert with songs opposing the destruction of the environment, thus causing public opposition to a MegaCorp's plan to turn wetlands into a toxic waste dump.
  • Scaramanga Special
    • Ka•Ge magazine Volume 1 Issue 12. The Century 220ZX is a 9mm light pistol that disassembles into a cigarette case, a pen, a lighter, a ring, and either a brooch or a cufflink. It can be assembled in under 10 seconds.
    • Cannon Companion supplement. The SA Puzzler light pistol and the WW Infiltrator heavy pistol can be broken down into pieces that resemble jewelry and other commonly available items. They can be disassembled or re-assembled in thirty seconds.
  • Scary Scorpions: The Scorpyrine in Paranormal Animals of Europe.
  • Schizo Tech: When you mix Cyberpunk with magic, this is bound to happen.
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: All megacorps get this when they reach AA status. Their property is now a nation unto itself (a concept referred to as "extraterritoriality") and anything they says goes. However this can backfire when you steal something, from say, Aztechnology and then escape into a factory owned by Ares. This means they can't cross the border without starting one hell of an intercorporate incident. There are also some nations (like the Tír nations) who don't respect extraterritoriality: corporations with enclaves in those nations can't screw the rules. Well, not as directly anyway.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: The Horrors. Cthon in the Genesis game.
  • Sea Monster: The return of magic into the world populated the oceans with a fair assortment of giant, seagoing monsters.
    • Leviathans are immense whales descended from orcas, and some of the largest creatures in the ocean.
    • Leviathan dragons are immense, ocean-dwelling relatives of the three land-bound variants, and like them grow to be nearly unkillable forces of nature.
    • Megalodons are giant sharks descended from great whites, and will attack and try to eat anything they encounter.
    • Seadrakons are mosasaur-like sea reptiles the size of a whale, and will happily attack cetaceans and human boats.
    • Sea Serpents are plesiosaur-like dragon relatives with flexible necks and ridged backs. They're aggressive predators and will attack very large prey, including whales and seadrakons.
  • Sea Serpents: They're relatives of dragons resembling monstrous plesiosaurs with flexible necks and ridged or humped backs. They come in two distinct varieties: saltwater sea serpents are larger — up to twenty-five meters long — and are aggressive carnivores, feeding on cetaceans and other large marine predators; freshwater sea serpents are smaller — generally only up to eighteen meters long — herbivorous creatures native to large lakes.
  • Second American Civil War: In 2016, a coalition of Native American tribes led by Daniel Howling Coyote, incensed by their being forced into concentration camps, use the return of magic to start a guerrilla war with the USA. This results in nearly half the former US breaking away to form the Native American Nations two years later and leaves the United States, even after uniting with Canada to form the United American and Canadian States, too weak to contest the secession of California, Hawaii, and the new Confederacy.
  • Secret Test:
    • Supplement Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzahn's Secrets. The Denver Kid is asked by a fixer named Slim to handle some of his duties while he's out of town. He does a good job, and another fixer named Mr. Cajun asks him if he'd like to act as fixer full time. The Denver Kid tells him that he will have to wait until he can talk to Slim before he can give an answer. Mr. Cajun is pleased — he replies "Loyalty can never be bought, only earned. You have passed."
    • Ka•Ge magazine Vol. 1 Issue 4 (2nd quarter 1992), adventure "The Retching Rat". The PC shadowrunners are hired to retrieve a spirit focus (magic item). If they astrally scan the focus after they retrieve it, they discover that it's specifically used to summon and control toxic (evil) spirits. If they tell the fixer who hired them what they've discovered, he congratulates them and pays them a bonus, as well as promising them a larger payment for their next job.
  • Self-Destructing Security: The Scramble IC program is often used to protect computer datastores with valuable information. If a decker tries to break through the Scramble and fails, it will overwrite the stored information with random characters, rendering it worthless.
  • Self-Harm–Induced Superpower: A magician can use Blood Magic techniques to enhance their magical abilities. One way to do so is for the magician to injure themselves and spill their own blood.
  • Self-Healing Phlebotinum: Bioware and cyberware can have repair nanites that will fix any damage done to them.
  • Sentry Gun: Many are available and there's a weapon accessory that can turn any man-portable firearm into one of these.
  • Serial Killer Baiting: the adventure Dreamchipper. A stolen prototype skillchip causes its user to think and act like they are Jack the Ripper: hunting and killing prostitutes. In order to capture him and retrieve the chip, the runners must use one of their own female members as bait and lure him into attacking her.
  • Serpent of Immortality: Shamans who have Snake as their totem gain +2 dice when casting healing spells.
  • Serrated Blade of Pain: The Aztlan macuahitl is a modern-day take on the historical Aztec weapon of the same name, being a club studded with monomolecular blades.
  • Sexy Dimorphism:
    • Downplayed with the giants, a troll metavariant distinguished by large noses, bark-like skin and routinely topping three meters in height. For reasons unknown, it's common for giant births to express as otherwise entirely normal humans — but only female births. About one in four female births result in human girls, but males are always born as giants.
    • Some sourcebooks note that a lot of ork and troll women feel pressured to invoke this via surgery.
  • Sewer Gator: In the second of the Never Deal with a Dragon trilogy of novels, the protagonist Sam learns that generations of childhood belief in the fact that alligators live in sewers after being flushed has caused them to become an urban magical totem as well as a nature one.
  • Shapeshifter Showdown: Mentioned in an article in Shadowland magazine #5.
  • Sharpened to a Single Molecule: Monomolecular axes that possess a monofilament edge capable of cutting through virtually anything. They tend to lose their edge quickly though. In later editions, other bladed weapons can be outfitted with a monofilament edge. There's also a monofilament whip, noted by 'in character' reviews to be as big a threat to the user as to a potential enemy. From a gameplay standpoint any glitch while using it results in it hitting you instead.
  • Shock and Awe:
    • Thunderbirds are Awakened raptors capable of generating powerful EMPs — which, in a world where a significant part of the population has electronics wired directly into their heads, can make them very dangerous animals.
    • Eyekillers are large, owl-like flightless birds capable of generating powerful electrical shocks to bring down prey.
    • Electric martens are specialized predators of other electrogenic animals and the Matrix-connected technocritters, and can both generate electric bolts to stun their prey and disruptive electrical waves to disable their powers. This disruptive effect also works on man-made technology, making the martens destructive pests in urban environments.
  • Shoot the Mage First: Common advice. In fact, "Geek the mage first" is one of the first rules a new shadowrunner learns.
  • Shoot the Medic First: Averted for all but the most desperate. Shooting at DocWagon dispatches is a good way to lose your health insurance permanently, not to mention the risk of them shooting back. And they're usually better equipped and more experienced than you.
  • The Short War: The Ten Minute War started on September 10, 2004, with an unprovoked chemical attack on Israel by Libya. It ended shortly afterward with the nuclear destruction of Libya's three largest cities, including Tripoli, killing millions and leading to the complete collapse of Libya as a state.
  • Shoulder Cannon: Available as cyberware or in the form of the backpack-mounted Onotari Arms Ballista missile launcher.
  • Shout-Out: Has its own page.
  • Silicon-Based Life: Rockworms are about as close as Earth life can get to this even under the influence of magic. They still retain carbon-based DNA — silicon atoms are far too large to fit within its structure — but utilize silicon in most other systems, require carbon only in trace amounts and get along by eating silicate minerals as their chief food source.
  • A Simple Plan: Probably the scariest words any runner can hear is "It'll be easy."
  • The Six Stats: Shadowrun characters had six base stats through Third Edition: Body, Quickness, Strength, Charisma, Intelligence, and Willpower. When Fourth Edition came around, Quickness was split into Reaction and Agility, Intuition was split from Willpower, and Intelligence was renamed Logic. Player characters and great dragons have Edge and all living creatures have Essence.
  • Skeleton Key: There are several devices in the game that can bypass electronic locks.
  • Slaying Mantis: Along with Mantis spirits, the Awakened "Wyrd Mantis" is a deadly predator which often feeds on metahumans. They'd be an even bigger threat if they weren't cannibals as well.
  • Sleeping with the Boss: Junior Minister Patrick Flanagan from Tír na nÓg (formerly known as Ireland) was videotaped having sex with his curvaceous redheaded secretary in his office. Since extraterritorial corporations can make their own workplace laws, sexual harassment and coercion are probably not crimes when committed by high-level executives.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: This is what "Pink Mohawk" vs "Black Trenchcoat" usually boils down to. "Pink Mohawk" games tend to be more idealistic and feature more awesomeness and larger-than-life neo-anarchists and cyber-warriors fighting the good fight with high-powered explosions, while "Black Trenchcoat" is more about your players being criminals if not outright terrorists living under the radar in a cyberpunk dystopia where you're a small fry in a big pond. Thematically, Shadowrun's first two editions favoured Pink Mohawk (especially in art style) while the later editions have leaned in the opposite direction.
  • Smart Gun: A smartlink is a popular upgrade for guns (and built in to some models) that allows a computer to assist in its operation, greatly increasing accuracy and allowing mental control of the gun without having to actually squeeze the trigger. A character needs at least some cyberware to get the full benefit, though, which makes it less appealing for mages and other characters that need to avoid augmentations.
  • Smokescreen Crime: A decker hired to break into a company's computer on a specific mission (e.g. to steal data) could try to make their objective less obvious by doing random damage (deleting unrelated files, crashing the system, etc.).
  • Sneaky Spider: In Shadowrun, each shaman worships and gains magical powers from a specific totem. One possible totem is Spider, who spins her web and waits for others to come to her and fall into it. Spider "...waits and plots, carefully and deliberately". Spider and her shamans prefer dark, quiet secret places with no one else around. One of Spider's aspects is that of the trickster.
  • Snuff Film: In the underground world of BTLs, snuff "beetles" are rather popular. They're recorded from the perspective of the victim, making them possibly the most dangerous of the lot.
  • So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Elves don't just form exclusive groups for the sake of elitism — sometimes they need an escape from creepy fans and posers obsessed with elven beauty.
  • Sociopathic Hero: Shadowrunners are frequently employed to handle the dirtiest of dirty work by megacorporations, governments, and criminal syndicates. Some runners develop a code of conduct; others revel in their lack of limits. In some cases, they're not heroic at all.
  • Solid Gold Poop
    • In early editions, dragon "bodily fluids" could be used as an exotic material to help in enchanting magic items. The Fourth Edition book Street Magic lists it as an exotic magical reagent with the flavor text, "You want me to what in this cup?"
    • In Fifth Edition, this is not explicitly stated, but it is implied that magic reagents can be made from materials like this, depending on the mage's tradition.
    • The great dragon Dunkelzahn apparently saved up every one of his toenail/talon clippings and gave away vast quantities of them in his will. They're implied to be invaluable.
  • Soul Jar
    • Supplement The Grimoire. Free Spirits can have the power called Hidden Life. It allows the spirit to hide its Life Energy in a place or thing. As long as this is the case, the spirit cannot be permanently banished or destroyed (even if an opponent knows its True Name) and its physical form gains the power of Regeneration.
    • Supplement ''Mob War!". The sorcerer Su Cheng is a vampire who has used his Hidden Life power to hide his soul in an ancient Chinese vase. The PC's task is to steal the vase from the Triads and return it to Su Cheng so he can be free of their control.
  • Speak of the Devil: Third Edition supplement Magic in the Shadows. If a free spirit's true name is spoken three times in succession, the spirit has to appear before the speaker.
  • Spike Shooter: Volleying porcupines can fire their quills at opponents.
  • Standard Fantasy Races: The new metahuman breeds formed from humanity with the return of magic are, besides humanity itself, dwarves (short and stout, and good with technology), elves (long-lived, magical and reclusive, and often disdainful of other metahumans), and orks and trolls usually scorned and discriminated against by others, forcing them onto the fringes of society, but who tend to get along well with each other as a result. There are also variants of the main metahuman breeds, such as gnomes, nymphs, and giants; the ancient, powerful and arrogant dragons; and a number of less prominent species derived from Awakened animals, such as centaurs.
  • Starfish Aliens: Beings native to the lesser-known and more remote metaplanes can be downright incomprehensible. Spirits can also take bizarre forms, particularly those summoned by magicians of more questionable traditions.
  • The Stateless: Any person without SIN, including those stuck outside the system by a crash of two databases.
  • Steampunk: Steampunk clothing is popular in the cyberpunk world of 2073. Wrap your head around that.
  • Street Samurai: That'd be you, the shadowrunners. In-game the title refers to a common character archetype of team muscle who uses cyberware/bioware and skills as opposed to magic.
  • Stock Ness Monster: Lake serpents are reptilian creatures with long tails and necks, pronounced humps and plesiosaur-like flippers. They're generally considered to be lesser relatives of dragons, and are closely related to sea serpents, from which they're distinguished by their smaller sizes and herbivorous diets. Some speculate that they've been around all along and that things such as Nessie and Ogopogo are examples of early sightings; certainly, the Loch Ness pods are the most well-known lake serpents in the setting's modern day.
  • Stylistic Suck: The second BattleRun adventure, The Quest For The Thing, was intentionally written this way as a free April Fools' Day item. The resulting work is full of rampant Character Shilling, Nadja Daviar being Demoted to Satellite Love Interest, repeated Deus ex machina, and highly-meta Purple Prose.
    He gazed levelly at the horizon, or maybe at a raindrop winding its way down the window. Whichever was more dramatic.
    “I will search for my destiny. And I will find it.”
    Just then, his futuristic communications device beeped. Futuristically.
    Destiny was calling.
  • Submarine Pirates: Cyberpirates. Some pirate gangs use submarines to attack and loot surface ships.
  • Super-Reflexes: Available to characters with enhanced reflexes, either via cybernetics, spells, or adept abilities.
  • Super-Soldier: Plenty of Elite Mooks and Player Character Street Samurai originate from various corporate- or nation black ops super-soldier programmes. Ultimately they have very little impact on the overall setting, however, because the cost/benefit ratio of most super soldiers simply aren't worth it in a setting with killer drones with anti-tank missiles, modern-day artillery and mages who can necroticise your brain by looking at you.
  • Super Spit:
    • Paranormal Animals of North America:
      • The Deathrattle (an Awakened/magical snake) can spit its deadly venom at other creatures. The poison takes effect in only a few seconds and if it doesn't kill the victim, it leaves them in agony for hours afterwards.
      • The Lambton Lizard can squirt poison from ducts near its mouth. The poison causes temporary local paralysis, and multiple doses can cause respiratory arrest and death.
    • Paranormal Animals of Europe: The Spitting Pike can spit a glob of acidic saliva up to 10 meters away.
    • California Free State: In the Big Sur area there are toxic spiders as large as a human hand. They can spit a substance that produces paralysis in their normal prey and causes human beings to become sick (dizziness and painful stomach cramps) and collapse in 5 minutes.
    • Man & Machine: Cyberware: A chemical gland can be implanted in a character's neck and set to produce a dangerous substance such as acid or various types of poison. When the character wishes, they can spit out the substance onto a nearby opponent.
  • Supernaturally-Validated Trans Person: In the 5th Edition sourcebook "Chrome Flesh", a comment by Winterhawk notes that trans people don't suffer from essence drain (basically damage to the soul caused by modifying one's body), heavily suggesting that they're moving closer to their natural state (as opposed to, say, the difference that replacing all your limbs with robotic arms would make).
    It's actually something of a hot topic at MIT&T. KAM might like to attribute it to psychological reactions, but magical theory has found that people who identify as preop transgender has a slight distortion to their auras. Almost imperceptible, but still there, though it doesn’t seem to affect them, health- or magic-wise. The crazy thing is, procedures to bring them closer to their self-perceived correct state cause this distortion to stabilize. Some people say it’s a matter of self-sabotage or a subconscious side effect of feeling disconnected from your true self, but most of the research done thus far strongly supports that operations aligning the body with the identity of the subject in a non-enhancement way don’t damage their metaphysical self at all. Pretty revolutionary stuff.
  • Supernatural Team: One of the alternate campaign concepts is "Double Double Toil and Trouble", in which a team of shadowrunners with magical skills (hermetic mages, shamans, physical adepts, etc.) investigate and deal with Awakened supernatural threats (blood magic users, vampires, insect spirits/shamans, toxic spirits/shamans, shedim, Earthdawn Horrors, etc.).
  • Swiss-Army Weapon
    • 1E/2E Street Samurai Catalog. The AUG-CSL Weapon System can be assembled as a submachine gun, carbine, assault rifle or light machine gun.
    • 3E Cannon Companion. The Hecker & Koch G38 can be assembled as a carbine, assault rifle or light machine gun. Converting it from one configuration to another takes 36 seconds and the whole weapon fits inside a large briefcase.
    • 4E has the HK XM30 (based on the XM-29 and the XM8) mentioned under Real Life. Baseline, the XM30 is an assault rifle with an underbarrel grenade launcher. Using different kits, you can modify it to have an underbarrel shotgun, become a carbine rifle, sniper rifle or a light machine gun.
    • The Victorinox SmartStaff in Fourth Edition. It's manufactured by the modern-day manufacturers of the Swiss Army Knife, and can transform via wireless request between a short blade, sword, pick, baton, or staff, or collapse down into something the size of a pencil case.
  • Sword Cane: The Neo-Anarchist's Guide to Real Life introduces the Barton Arms Gun Cane. It fires a single 8 mm bullet that does light damage to targets at close range.
    • Fifth Edition has two, both made by Mortimer of London, both meant to be indistinguishable from Mortimer's regular dress canes, and both have enough shielding built-in to get them through metal detectors.
      • The 'Trafalgar' (from Run & Gun), a single-shot, mid-ranged, gun cane that takes caseless ammo (and has a few dozen knockoffs floating around that can fire larger rounds but aren't rugged enough to survive the first shot).
      • The 'Belgrave' (from Cutting Aces), a bonified sword rapier that unsheathes with a release catch. Has the added bonus of being usable as a weapons focus.
  • Take That!: Shadowrun: Gibson Edition, the April Fool's joke for 2010. For some background, William Gibson has infamously stated he hates this game for stealing from him and mashing it with Tolkien.
    The Mayans' Sixth World was ushered in not by the end of days, or the powering of ley lines, mana storms, or dragons, but rather the release of a new cutting-edge novel set in the near future by a totally fictional author named, um, Guilluame Gybsonne.
  • Takes One to Kill One: Spirits, being magic, can only be countered with magic. On a more meta level, while killing a Decker or Mage is best accomplished by good old-fashioned bullets, this becomes really difficult if you're unable to counter one with your own Decker or Mage while trying to reach them. Most scenarios use both the physical, astral and matrix layers interacting with each other, making it all but mandatory for any running team to be able to project force into all three layers.
  • Tarot Motifs: The Sixth World Tarot, obviously, but the Seelie Court factions take the names of most of the Major Arcana as well, including renaming from 'classic' tarot to Sixth World. (As an example, the 'Fool' faction is now the 'Bastard' faction.)
  • Technically-Living Zombie: Ghouls; infected with a magical virus; not all, or even most, are feral, but they all have to eat metahuman flesh. Also Head Case ragers and shamblers, metahumans infected with A.I. controlled nanites reduced to the instinct of "eat" and "kill", but who have their original personalities locked in an "And I Must Scream" situation.
  • Technopath: 3rd Edition's Otaku and their Technomancer successors in 4E.
    • Otaku were introduced as a concept in 2nd edition and elaborated on in 3rd, and could directly interface with the Matrix without a cyberdeck. However, they still needed a datajack (even in the few places wireless Matrix access existed before the Second Crash, they still needed their jack to get in) and an ASIST like a normal decker. On top of that, they were mostly teens and children and very few of them could keep their powers past age 30.
    • Technomancers, on the other hand, are a lot less limited. They first emerged after the Second Crash, and rose to prominence in the time between the 4th and 5th editions. They can directly interface with the wireless Matrix with nothing more than their minds — indeed, cyberware actually hurts their ability to interface with the Matrix as if they were a magic user. They're capable of things no ordinary hacker or decker is capable of, and indeed things that shouldn't be scientifically possible. On the other hand, what they do isn't magic, and doesn't follow its rules, either — their powers don't seem to be anything anyone already knows about or understands, and they don't lose their powers with age like the Otaku did. This freaks people right the hell out, and most people either want them dead, or want to crack them open and figure out how the hell they work.
    • A few of the surviving Otaku, such as Puck and Pax, have become technomancers after Crash 2.0. Indeed, a story Puck tells in Data Trails suggests that Pax may have become a dissonance technomancer before the second crash.
  • Technician Versus Performer: Deckers versus Technomancers, and Hermetic versus Shamanistic traditions in the fluff. Gameplay-wise, the performance depends entirely on the stats of the magician in question.
  • Thanatos Gambit: Dunkelzahn's Will is filled with dozens of examples of plans he'd set in place for after his death: the DMRF is one of the most powerful — and legitimately good, in a world of Black-and-Gray Morality — organizations on the planet, and various different items came into play to allow Hestaby to profit enormously in the Rite of Succession. Plus, his death may have helped keep various nasties from showing up...
  • Theme Naming: Three humanoid drone models designed for housing cyborg brains are named after manga authors: Akiyama is a lightweight scout and assassin, Otomo is a Ridiculously Human Robot and Tomino is a heavy assault drone.
  • The Internet Is for Porn: The Vice supplement talks about this and how there is a huge amount of both 3D, HD, and simsense porn out there for free. Better than Life porn chips also are widely available. It also talks about how to set up your own porn site.
  • There Are No Good Executives
    • Played straight with almost every corporation, but seemingly averted with Horizon. Horizon actually appears to give a crap about their employees, and develops products that benefit metahumanity rather than attempt to control it. They're also nice to the runners they hire, which has led some younger runners to consider Horizon to be the "good" MegaCorp. More savvy runners, however, are creeped the hell out by this, and conclude that Horizon NEEDS to be up to something nefarious... They're right; Horizon is actually a Mad Scientist outfit obsessed with learning the secrets of Technomancers and AI by any means necessary, which includes lots of Playing with Syringes. And beyond just being right, Horizon's CEO and ultimate corporate objective turns out to be not so much "evil" as "utterly insane".
    • A lesser example is the direction of the Evo corporation and its focus on "transhumanism", technologies designed to enhance all of metahumanity beyond its natural limits and redefine the boundaries of life itself. Most assume that it's just a combination of market specialization and PR, but some are concerned that they're not just in it for the money, and believe they're working to force evolution with some other (invariably sinister) goal in mind.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: C-12 is an extremely powerful plastic explosive that is often involved in this. A handful can level a building, and larger quantities can take out whole city blocks. One vignette in Hard Targets has a team assassinate a target by lacing a pizza he ordered with it. It destroys his entire apartment complex, fulfilling the Leave No Witnesses clause of their contract.
  • Threatening Shark: Megalodons are Awakened great white sharks of immense size, which will try to eat anything they encounter. They're not related to the prehistoric kind, though, and were only named such due to physical similarities — their true scientific name in-universe is Carcharodon neomegalodon.
  • Tiered by Name: The decker programs sold by Hacker House for the Virtual Realities supplement had numbers at the end of their names. The higher the number, the larger and more powerful the program.
  • Time Abyss: Loads. Immortal elves such as Harlequin all qualify, having been born in the Fourth World and lived through all five thousand years of the Fifth World to reach the Sixth, which began in 2011. All Great Dragons were born in the Second World — the Age of Dragons — which was separated from the Fourth by another five thousand year gap.
  • Thunderbird: Greater and lesser thunderbirds — Avesfulmen splendidus and A. minor — are Awakened birds of prey native to North America and capable of generating powerful EMPs (something especially dangerous when a large chunk of the population has electronics wired into their heads), and enjoy playing in active thunderstorms. Rumors persist that they are also able to summon thunderstorms, but these are officially unsubstantiated. They also explode violently when they die, due to the sudden release of electricity stored within their bodies.
  • Too Qualified to Apply: In Shadowbeat, all of the major sports allow cyberware to some extent, but they also absolutely forbid any use of magic (spells, aid from spirits, etc.) to enhance performance. The only exception is if the player is a physical adept, whose natural abilities are enhanced by innate magical ability. As a balancing factor, physical adepts are forbidden to have cyberware.
  • Touch the Intangible: When mages travel astrally, they can pass through most forms of matter in the material world by virtue of not being in the same plane of existence. However, solid earth and the bodies of living beings (plants and animals) both block the passage of entities in the astral plane.
  • Tracking Device: The AOD (Activate On Demand) tracking signal, which only transmits when it receives a specific coded signal instead of continuously.
  • Tranquilizer Dart: Darts loaded with narcoject or neurostun.
  • Trans Nature
    • Elves are a subrace of humanity. Some normal humans are "elf wannabes" who want to be elves, and sometimes use plastic surgery to make themselves more elf-like. They're usually looked down upon by real elves, and some humans consider them race traitors.
    • And then, there are "ork posers"; elves and humans that dress up and act like orks to be part of the "street cred". Ork posers tend to inspire more varied (and extreme) reactions than elf wannabees: Some orks will be perfectly fine with it if you're respectful and 'orky' enough, while others are liable to beat you up and leave your ass in a dumpster. And, of course, most humans find it vulgar.
  • Treacherous Quest Giver: In any given run, the question isn't whether your Johnson has an ulterior motive and won't backstab you (or at least drop you like a hot potato if you mis-step in any way), it's how much blackmail material your decker can dredge up on him to make him reconsider.
  • The Triads and the Tongs: The Triads are in control of what bits of Hong Kong the corps aren't. In Seattle, the Yakuza is at war with them.
  • Uncanny Valley: Invoked. Getting cyberware enhancements makes people subtlety uncomfortable around the character due to the dehumanizing effect. So group faces normally avoid them.
  • Unequal Rites:
    • Inter-Traditional rivalry can be quite strong. Of the two major traditions, mages would tend to see shamans as uneducated and reckless, while shamans would see mages as too clinical and crippled by a need for order over understanding. In previous editions, this might have been accurate.
    • Toned back in later editions as the rules for (and in-universe understanding of) magic became more unified, but there's still plenty of rivalry between different magical traditions, and most shamans and mages still don't appreciate being confused for one another.
    • There were a few tidbits that expanded a bit on magic users in Sixth World society. Megacorps prefer to have mages on their payrolls since they tend to be more ordered and methodical in their thinking, which helps them fit in better at the more structured and hierarchical corporate subculture. Shamans tend to fare better in the NAN nations, since their focus on tradition and ritualization helps them fit into Native American culture better. To the man on the street, tradition is largely inscrutable from an entirely outside view, and is largely ignored, since the guy who flings fireballs and lightning bolts is a subject of fear regardless of what tradition he comes from.
    • While there are many traditions, there are few that are universally hated. Dark Magicians tend to be self-centered and destructive to everybody else. Blood mages are widely reviled due to the fact that they sacrifice others (and to those in the know, may be unwittingly helping Horrors make a bridge into the real world). Toxic practitioners are, as a rule, crazy, and actively try to poison the environment, which obviously kills others and makes life harsher in an already dystopian world. Bug shamans bring about bug spirits, which seek out any Earth life to kill and eat it in their instinctive need to expand, and again to those in the know, may be helping pave the way for the Horrors.
  • Underboobs: Illustrations in The Neo-Anarchists' Guide to Real Life and Magic in the Shadows.
  • Underground Railroad: In the Aztlan supplement, the Aztlan Freedom League helps refugees from Aztlan escape to the Confederated American States.
  • United Europe: Averted heavily. You think the political landscape in North American is bad? Europe has had several wars since the Sixth World started, with the EU becoming defunct and consequentially dissolved by 2029. By the 2060s, however, Saeder-Krupp/Lowfyr is covertly orchestrating things for the eventual creation of a New European Economic Community as the EU's successor, with the secret goal of turning most if not all of Europe into more or less Saeder-Krupp's playground (not that the general public is aware of that, of course).
  • Unreliable Canon: Most early edition supplements had a statement like this in their introduction. Like previous Shadowrun sourcebooks, this supplement is formatted as an electronic document from that fictional world. Scattered throughout the document are comments and additions from readers who seek to correct, expand, corroborate or contradict the information it presents. Because this "black" information comes from characters within the game universe, players or characters cannot safely assume that these comments are truthful, accurate, considered or clearly thought out (though they may be all those things). The material in this supplement comes from a variety of sources, most unofficial and all with their own biases built in. These different points of view give gamemasters greater scope to decide how much of the information presented is accurate, misleading or false in their own games.
  • Unusual Euphemism: The earlier editions used terms like "frag" and "drek" and others for the standard cusswords. In Fourth Edition, it's toned down a little, but you're still going to blank a few slots before the day's done.
  • Urban Segregation: Los Angeles ended up with a very severe case of this as increasingly large tracts of the city were simply walled off from one another — some to serve as exclusive corporate and high-wealth enclaves and others created as the city's poor were quite simply walled off and left to their fate. Anything resembling a middle class evaporated in short order, and LA essentially became two cities pressed against one another, one home to the fantastically rich upper crust living a life of continual partying and indulgence and the other to a desperate, starving pariah class cut off from the world by concrete walls and armed guards. This came back to bite the elites when an 8.5 earthquake shook the city in 2061, bringing down the walls and leading to orgies of violence and rioting as the poor flooded into the breached enclaves.
  • Vampiric Draining: Many Infected creatures have the Essence Drain ability, which allows them to drain Essence (life/magical energy) in order to restore the Essence they lose due to their Essence Loss weakness. Notably, vampires (humans infected by HMHVV I) drain Essence through blood and banshees (elves) use an emotional link established via fear, though other HMHVV I infectees get Essence by consuming raw metahuman flesh.
  • Ventriloquist Animal: Dragons need to communicate telepathically or using spells to project their voice (as Hestaby does) while in dragon form.
  • Vicious Cycle: The Horrors return to Earth every few thousand years.
  • Victory by Endurance: The barghest uses its fear-causing howl to drive its prey for long distances until they are exhausted and it can close in for the kill.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: (Well, Tabletop Game in this case.) Sweet Zombie Dunkelzahn, yes. Your characters are mercenaries in a Crapsack World. The Shadowrun C.L.U.E. Files have a good number of stories of players doing their best to make it worse. In theory, the notoriety system is supposed to nudge you toward rising above the villainy around you, except many players just love the idea of being "notorious."
  • Villain Forgot to Level Grind: Averted with the prime runner mechanic in 5th edition, where the NPCs (Which aren't necessarily villains but can be) gain karma along with the players. Depending on their level this may be slightly lower than the runners, the same, or twice as much.
  • Villain with Good Publicity
    • Aztechnology is known as one of the cuddliest, nicest corps around as far as the public knows. The shadows know that they're villains who mess with Blood Magic, bug spirits, and Horrors that feed off pain and fear. In the newer supplements, Horizon is this, even to shadowrunners, and to a particularly terrifying level. In true cyberpunk style, they are hiding something...
    • And in Columbian Subterfuge, Horizon's true colours are revealed when they decide to use every trick in the book of propaganda to discredit Aztechnology and Aztlan during the Aztlan Amazonia War.
  • Virtual Ghost: Ghosts in the machine, people who were logged in during Crash 2.0 and had their minds trapped in the Matrix.
  • The Virus:
    • Cognitive Fragmentation Disorder is caused by nanobots that rewrite the victim's mind to be a copy of its seed personality AI. 100% infectious on contact with surfaces or liquids and, once infected, treatment can only delay the inevitable. As of Dark Terrors in late 5th edition, there are a few cures, but it remains dangerous, especially given that several of the infected nanites carry the code of Deus.
    • Human-Metahuman Vampiric Virus (HMHVV) transforms metahumans into various forms of "monster" that prey on other metahumans, depending on the strain of the virus and the victim's metatype.
  • Wainscot Society: "The shadows" are something of a modern-day jianghu, populated by shadowrunners. Shadowrunners live by their own rules and customs and generally keep their mundane identities (if they have any) strictly separated from their shadow identities. A fair amount of shadowtalk is about the difference between this life and society and the way people live in the "regular" world.
  • Walking Armory: The average character uses an assault rifle. The Weapon Specialist premade character, on the other hand, carries "Combat Axe; 2 Katanas; Medium Crossbow w/20 Bolts; 10 Throwing Knives; 10 Shuriken; 10 Fragmentation Grenades; Ares Predator IV [w/Quick Draw Holster and 10 clips of Explosive Ammo]; Yamaha Sakura Fubuki [w/ Smartlink, Concealable Holster, and 80 rounds of Regular Ammo]; Walther MA-2100 [w/4 clips Regular Ammo]; Aztechnology Striker (a rocket launcher); Survival Knife; Stun Baton."
  • Walking Techbane: Any character with levels in the "Gremlins" disadvantage essentially adds an automatic 1 per level to any roll they make to operate advanced technology. At level 3 of Gremlins (the highest possible), expect the character to cause a Glitch or Critical Glitch any time they handle anything with an electrical current in it.
    • Data Trails for Fifth Edition would add the Negative Quality "Faraday Himself", which turns you into a walking signal jammer. Anyone within ten meters of you suffers from +2 Noise. Which is a massive pain, given how ubiquitous wireless tech is in 5E.
  • War for Fun and Profit: Hey, corps make weapons too. May as well ensure that the market's healthy. You're bound to have a few Shadowrunners who joined in for the carnage. And then there's Desert Wars; an annual series of theater-wide conflicts that are literally fought for Fun and Profit — as if it was a form of sport. The official story is that two megacorps got into a massive fight over some Lost Technology in Libya and the media got wind of it, exposing it to the world; the corps got to field-test and advertise their technology, the media made a mint documenting it, and there was no collateral damage as it took place in an isolated area. The broadcasting rights turned out to be even more profitable than the lostech(which was destroyed in the fighting), so it became a yearly tradition for Private Military Contractors to meet in that same desert and blow the hell out of each other in front of cameras. Un-officially...
    Findler-Man: Of course the only port of that tale that's true is the fact that the megacorps did start holding war-games in the Libyan Desert and that they were televised. The rest is corporate spin-doctoring and urban legend. The Desert wars were a planned event from moment one. Once again, the megacorps found a use for an otherwise useless piece of land that serves to train their security personnel and make them money while doing it.
  • Weakened by the Light
    • Many Awakened creatures have a magical allergy to sunlight. Depending on the allergy's strength it can do anything from just being an annoyance up to causing the creature physical damage, eventually killing it if it can't get out of the light.
    • 1st through 3rd Editions. Shamans of the Bat, Owl and Puma totems have a +2 penalty to all of their magical target numbers while in direct sunlight.
  • Weak to Magic: One of the reasons mages are so powerful is that summoned spirits are very difficult to kill without magic.
  • Weather Manipulation: Weather control is an ability manifested by certain Awakened species. Storm dolphins are particularly adept at it, and can combine it with electrical manipulation to create storms, whirlwinds and thick fog banks with which to attack and interfere with oil rigs, whaling ships and fishing vessels.
  • We Have Reserves: Killed a CEO of a Trip-AAA? Don't worry, there's thirty other CEOs-in-waiting that will take his or her place.
  • Weird Weather: The continent of Australia is plagued by violent and massive mana storms.
  • Weirdly Underpowered Admins: Being based on Neuromancer (which was written by someone who had never used a computer,) it has laughable computer security. If a system's security detects a decker (hacker) intruding, the admins have to engage in matrix combat to try to remove him. They have a "home turf" advantage, but no administrator commands to simply eject users.
  • When the Clock Strikes Twelve: Paranormal Animals of Europe. In one case, each night for a month a bean sidhe approached a person at midnight, wailed her mournful cry and vanished. Each person died within a month.
  • White Man's Burden: Sometimes felt by humans toward orks and trolls, or by elves toward everybody else. A sterling example was "Project Freedom", a collection of mostly human and elven outsiders who drafted Proposition 23, a Seattle ballot measure that would name the Ork Underground as an official city district. They never actually asked any orks for their opinions on the matter though, and while many eventually adopted the cause, many others preferred being independent from Seattle government. Bull bitterly notes that once the proposition passed, Project Freedom patted itself on the back, then packed up and left for their next crusade without sticking around to help with the transition.
  • Why Am I Ticking?
    • Cranial bombs are very, very nasty — one's integral to the plot of the SNES game.
    • They're bad if you get a cranial bomb stuck in your head. They can be handy if you can find a trustworthy surgeon (good luck!) and have one wired to go off when you want it to. This is great for being a terrorist getting captured and holding everyone around you hostage (your mileage may vary with your willingness to actually blow yourself up), or having a Dead Man's Switch that makes everyone want to keep you alive. Of course you can also get one small enough to only destroy your infolink in your head to destroy any data in case of capture.
    • Unfortunately, the so-called "cranial nuke" is just an area bomb. You can't be Raven without the sidecar.
  • Wild Wilderness: A justified example; a quarter of the world's population — over a billion people — died in the chaos of the turn of the millennium, and supernatural critters are dangerous enough to keep people from straying off the beaten path. Hell, the southern half of the North American continent has armadillos bigger than earthmovers trashing the place!
  • Will-o'-the-Wisp: The Corpselight, or will o' wisp, is a mysterious magical being that looks like a wisp, floating about two metres above ground in desolate areas. They are solitary and malevolent, draining their victim's Essence in a way similar to vampires.
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Madness mages. It's never explained if they went mad because of their powers, got powers from their madness, or were insane when they got their powers. No matter what, it's a bad idea to mess with them. One reason is because they are insane and you have no idea how they will react. Another is that their powers and spirits are twisted by their madness so you have no idea what they're even doing.
  • Wizard Duel: Supplement State of the Art 2063. Some magicians in the Sixth World participate in formal magical duels with their opponents. One of the major magical groups, the Illuminates of the New Dawn, has a set of rules similar to the old rules for dueling with weapons. They include the challenged party being allowed to determine the terms of the duel, the dueling area being warded to prevent the spells from affecting bystanders, and the presence of seconds and a judge to keep things orderly. The opposing magicians are sworn to accept the outcome of the duel, such as resolving the dispute between them.
  • Wolf Man: Loup-garous are humans infected with a virus that increases hair growth and recedes the gums, making teeth look like fangs. Their murderous activities aren't linked to the full moon, but follow an even 28-day cycle.
  • Wreathed in Flames: Flame jackals can shroud themselves in an aura of flames, which they use to intimidate and drive off rivals and potential predators.
  • Wretched Hive: Pretty much every city, the poorer sections especially.
    • The default setting, Seattle, has the Barrens.
    • The Denver: The City of Shadows boxed set describes the Warrens this way.
    • El Infierno (part of Los Angeles) in the California Free State supplement, was a massive slum where the city's poor had been walled off and left to their fate; predictably, it soon fell into chaos and gang rule; a massive radioactive spill didn't help matters. This lasted until the twin earthquakes and subsequent flood of 2069 described in 4th Edition's Corporate Enclaves supplement. Then it went From Bad to Worse: two thirds of the LA sprawl are now flooded and demon-possessed corpses often lurk in the ruins. The water is also extremely toxic and inhabited by all kinds of nasty fauna, including giant sharks.
    • Feral cities — urban sprawls where order and government have completely broken down — invariably become this as crime goes on unchecked, gangs take over and the MegaCorps do as they please.
      • Lagos is horribly polluted, choked with garbage and refuse, run by a coalition of the most powerful gangs and a haven for smuggling and piracy. The organ trade is also well-established there — if you're out alone at night, a mugging is the least of your worries.
      • The Genoa-Milan-Turin sprawl — GeMiTo for short — became this after most of Mediterranean Europe's nations went to pieces and the massive urban conglomeration was left on its own. The city governments quickly collapsed, leaving the decaying urban mass to the mercies of gangs, the Mafia and whichever neighborhood groups could defend themselves from the formers. The mega-city still isn't formally part of any nation and entirely lawless outside of corporate enclaves and a few well-defended neighborhoods, and the Mafia-run port of Genoa is one of Europe's main smuggling hotspots.
      • Chicago becomes a literal Wretched Hive after a particularly nasty incident with some bug spirits transforms it into a field of ruins inhabited by roving gangs, survivor holdouts, nests of ghouls and surviving insect spirit hives.
    • 4th Edition introduces the Kowloon Walled City of Hong Kong. It's so horrifically bad that even the insect spirits can't get a foothold there — the Yama Kings eat them. The only insect spirit that's gotten a chance is the Ebony Queen Vam Ly.
    • Ironically inverted with Detroit: unlike the real life version, the Motor City in the Shadowrun universe is one of the safest and most prosperous cities in the UCAS thanks to Ares Macrotechnology and its security division Knight Errant gaining a foothold in the metroplex (it helps that their headquarters is located there, which is a major reason why Detroit is kept from degenerating into debasement). There's still some criminal activity running around, but it is far more contained compared to the rest of the cities in the UCAS.
  • Xanatos Gambit: Why you should never deal with a dragon; they always win even if it looks like they've lost. A runner in the Threats book brags that he got one over on Lofwyr, but lost his entire team on the job. He's found dead a week later. Another runner does some digging on the details and discovers that the entire run was a setup: Lofwyr wanted that specific shadowrunning team to do the job (they had all worked against Saeder-Krupp in the past), S-K owned the pharmaceutical lab through a number of shell companies (which had been recently insured against theft), the paydata was bunk (Lofwyr thought he would copy it instead of destroying it as ordered, which made Shiawase waste time and money after they got it), and S-K got to field-test a device to control fenrir against them.
  • Yakuza: They're pretty damn successful, too. By accident, a Yakuza front company actually began making more money through legitimate business than crime, and eventually became one of the more famous Triple-A corps. And in true MegaCorp style, Mitsuhama Computer Technologies has thanked its Yakuza progenitors by largely forgetting that they exist, except for doing them the occasional minor favor. As the Corporate Shadowfiles supplement put it, "Why should the directors of MCT risk a multi-billion nuyen corporation to help beef up a multi-million nuyen crime syndicate?"
  • A Year and a Day
    • 3rd Edition supplement Magic in the Shadows. A hermetic mage can bind an elemental to guard a site for a year and a day, unless the elemental is killed in astral combat or banished.
    • In 2033, according to the Blood in the Boardroom supplement, the Great Dragon Dunkelzahn bound the Free Spirit Buttercup to the body of an ork for a year and a day to teach her a lesson in fundamental equality of all life forms.
    • Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzahn's Secrets. One of Dunkelzahn's bequests was for an ally spirit to maintain a constant telepathic link with Stefan Rubloff for a year and a day. It was to assist him as needed during that time.
  • You Dirty Rat!:
    • Devil rats are a species of hairless Awakened rats resistant to most poisons, capable of controlling normal rats, highly aggressive and prone to attacking people, and reputedly intelligent enough to be malicious in how they hunt.
    • Demon rats are a further variant that mutated from devil rats during the Year of the Comet, distinguished from devil rats by possessing fur, short horns and corrosive saliva, but retaining their ancestors' vicious attitudes and immunity to poison. They also possess opposable thumbs and are smart enough to open latches and simple doors, and are chiefly predatory animals who only scavenge when all else fails. Additional variants of demon rats exist, including one that carries the VITAS virus and another capable of regeneration.
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Some runs will usually have a Mr. Johnson with an agenda who eventually turns on his employees after they fulfilled their duties to twist and complicate the deal even further. Mr. Johnsons themselves must be careful not to abuse this trope, especially if they have succeeded in surviving their double-crossing attempts and their employees do not, as doing so too often will have them not remaining Mr. Johnsons for long. Nobody likes an untrustworthy Mysterious Employer, both in and out-of-universe.
  • Your Head Asplode
    • Cranial bombs and manabolts.
    • The first two tests of spiritual neurosurgery described in Stolen Souls ended when the patients' heads exploded due to the intracranial pressure of having a spirit manifest inside the skull during the procedure. The last one died because the pressure crushed a cerebral artery instead.
  • Your Heart's Desire: The Awakened creature ability called "Desire Reflection". It allows the creature to know the greatest desire of another being and trick that being into believing that the creature is that thing.
  • Your Mind Makes It Real: Justified: in the Matrix, most legitimate users use cold ASIST (Artificial Sensory Induction Systems Technology), which is exponentially better than current state-of-the-art interfaces and just as safe to use. High-end users such as deckers and computer security people use hot ASIST, a form of Synchronization which turns them into Technopaths while making it possible to fry each other's brains with combat software.
  • Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Defied in Better than Bad. Freya argues that the Sons of Sauron (ork and troll supremacists who fight against human and elf-sponsored racism against their kind) are no different from Humanis Policlub - to the point where the two groups work together in elf-ruled Tir Tairngire. The only difference is who they're fighting for and against, and at the end of the day, they should all be treated as terrorists, not freedom fighters.
  • Yowies and Bunyips and Drop Bears, Oh My:
    • Bunyips are immense marsupials with large noses and a keen sense of smell. They're bearlike omnivores, chiefly feeding on plants and small creatures but quite capable of tackling large prey should they feel like doing so. They also have envenomed claws that make their targets hypersensitive to sunlight.
    • Drop bears are Awakened koalas that have gained sharp claws and a taste for meat, although they still need some eucalyptus in their diets, and hunt by dropping on prey from high in the trees. They're also carriers of HMHVV-II, the virus that causes lycanthropy in humans; they're not infected themselves, but survivors of drop bear attacks often contract the condition.
  • Zeerust
    • The First Edition came out in 1989, which the worldbuilding reflects. History Marches On has rendered the game's "near future" an Alternate History. With each new edition, the game has updated itself every few years to reflect current technological advances, which has the side effect of making the Sixth World's technological advances appear simultaneously futuristic and five years out of date. And to be fair, it's hard to notice the "five years out of date part" on your gear when it's the only thing standing between you and getting Eaten Alive by Insect Spirits. Updates rarely make major alterations to established continuity, instead portraying the changes as normal technological advancement in the game world. This has the unintentional effect of portraying a future in which wireless technology will go out of popular usage for several decades, before again rising to prominence. The most current materials made for Shadowrun generally present the most "believable" future, whereas history gets less believable as you go back.
    • As of Rigger 5.0, the rigger rulebook for 5th edition, characters have, in-universe, acknowledged that electronic technology has scarcely improved in half a century. The blame is generally laid on the two global network crashes and the worldwide chaos of the Awakening, which collectively destroyed a great deal of knowledge, made everybody wary of computers that were too accessible, and shifted the focus of technological research. Medical science became a big winner in that department.
  • Zombie Advocate: There are a few groups fighting for the rights of ghouls, but to be fair, not all ghouls are serial-killing cannibals. The exceptions are either feral or just plain evil. The ethical solution is to eat the already dead or just old severed body parts, because ghouls can only survive on metahuman flesh; despite Dunkelzahn's efforts, there's still no substitute for it. The Zombie Advocate agenda has won, enough that ghouls can be PCs now. Not fun PCs, but still PCs.
    • Ghouls have established their own nation of Asamando in West Africa, which feeds itself by porting in the dead from combat zones in neighboring nations. Some see it as a horror show made real, others see it as a step towards progress for ghouls. That said, Asamando is actually fairly well-developed for its part of the world and quite accepting of other awakened metasapients. Relatedly the rise of the Shedim was quite good for them as dead bodies were given to them to ensure that they don't get possessed.
      • Come 5e and the pendulum swings the other way; an infected-supremacist political terrorist group, Fear the Dark, has begun launching attacks all over the world, the virus has mutated to make infected hungrier, more prone to mutation and going feral, the dark side of Asamando is becoming more public knowledgenote , and a new wave of anti-infected legislation & corporate policies are sweeping the world, with public opinion changing back towards "monster". Infected remain playable options, but "nuke Asamando" is becoming a more mainstream opinion.

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