As a kid, I played a lot of the #Shadowrun #TTRPG. More than you're imagining right now. Even more than that. Keep going. Still more. Okay, a bit less than that. You get the idea.
In case you're unfamiliar, Shadowrun is "What if we had a cyberpunk dystopia, but there's also orks and elves and dwarves and trolls as an allegory about racism, and also there's magic, and a number of the megacorporations that rule the world are run by actual dragons?"
It's wild how well this prepared me for 2026.
Oh yeah, and the megacorps try to use Ai to control the masses, but it backfires and the machines kill a whole bunch of people. Horrifically.
So, y'know. Pretty standard 21st century stuff.
@gahlord Shadowrun is a super odd duck. The setting is legit among the best of any RPG I've ever played, but the rules are a hot mess. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th edition, they're all different kinds of messy, which is actually kind of impressive. I haven't touched 6th edition, but I hear they're continuing the proud tradition of fixing some things while completely breaking others.
Still one of my favorites, warts and all.
@gahlord One of the big challenges in SR is that they never really figured out how to bring the whole table together. The street samurai are doing physical combat, the mage is off in astral space providing magical cover, and the decker is in cyberspace doing computer stuff. Each of these is fun and compelling in their own right, but they never quite gel.
4th and 5th edition came close, but it's still not a solved problem.
@Legit_Spaghetti Lately I've been wondering, whether the Crash of '29 will be caused by all the vibe-coded slop failing spectacularly.
And following that thought, Echo Mirage would be an elite AI-slop cleanup team. And when you think what Lovecraftian horrors manifested in code they would encounter, no one would be surprised about how few of them survive.
Legit_Spaghetti
gahlord
mhd
Oliver Stueker