A Shadowrun Sourcebook
The Best Just Got Better!
We've covered some Cyberpunk RPG books before, but we've never yet assayed that most quintessential type of cyberpunk RPG book: the 'warez book. Where games like AD&D might have an Arms & Equipment Guide and plenty of books full of new magic, one of the defining characteristics of Cyberpunk is the augmentation of the human body - and that led, by degrees, to chapters and then entire books dedicated to new implants that player characters could add to their body.Bruce Sterling wrote:Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats.
This wasn't a simple or straightforward process - in Shadowrun, you started off with the cyberware section in the core rulebook, and then there were cyberware sections in books like the Street Samurai Catalog - but Shadowtech was really the first proper all-augmentation book for Shadowrun - and this was in 1992, before the first Chrombook came out for Cyberpunk 2020, which largely lifted the "catalog-style" format from it. Shadowtech was a gamechanger.
Most people whose opinions about Shadowrun I care about in the slightest would put Shadowtech as one of the five most influential books of Shadowrun. There are certainly people who hate this book, but there aren't many who doubt its impact. What the Grimoire did for Mages, Shadowtech did for Street Samurai. The original Shadowrun book didn't really offer people much in the way of “higher level” options, and this was the first book that offered some for Street Samurai. It set the tone for what a high level Street Samurai would look like in Shadowrun for the next twenty years.
As an expansion for Shadowrun at the time, Shadowtech was monstrously large. 120 pages of rants and power creep. That's basically twice the length of previous outings like Street Samurai Catalog. Now, by the standards of 10 years or 20 years later, this is a very short book. A lot of pages are still one per item, and while font sizes and column placement are about 500 words per page, most pages have both pictures and white space. It's not an exaggeration to say that Augmentation for 4th edition is about ten times as long in terms of actual word count. And obviously the 300,000 word monstrosities that became “normal” for the industry in the last decade are closer to twenty times the length. Shadowtech is very much a transitional product, where the production values are computer assisted and things aren't getting stuck in paste-up for months or years, but we haven't quite gotten to the word processor apocalypse where twelve thousand words is a short chapter.
Shadowrun itself posits a future where people have ports drilled into their heads so that they can splurge content directly from their brain to the page. The length of a typical RPG book in the Shadowrun future is probably millions of words (or at least hundreds of thousands). Shadowrun never really wrestled directly with that fact, but sort of implied it by the fact that all data was initially measured in megapulses rather than any simple multiple of bytes. The number of characters in a text was simply handwaved as being exceedingly large. Sadly, that part of the future looks fairly plausible at the moment.
Conceptually, the book is inspired by the Street Samurai Catalog in being, well, a catalog, mixing out-of-game information and stats with in-game presentation, formatting, and color commentary - and this was the start of some of the most popular shadowcommentators in the game, and would largely set the stage for how such comments were presented until 3rd edition simplified things a bit.
Mechanically, the game wrestles with the fact that Shadowrun has hard conceptual limits on how much 'ware you can stick in your body - installing cyberware subtracts Essence, you have a finite amount of Essence, when Essence hits zero you die. It's the Shadowrun equivalent of being able to die during chargen from Traveller. What this means, then, is if you want to sell players on new implants - or, more directly, sell players on a book full of new cyberware - you're going to have to get creative when dealing with the numbers. And they did.
Shadowtech had two main people behind it. Tom Dowd was the “rules guy” and was charged with “Development” and Karl Wu was the “science guy” and was charged with “Writing.” Also with producing some of the illustrations that incorporate actual MRIs because Karl Wu was some kind of actual medical scientist. Shadowtech is as far as I know the one and only RPG supplement Karl Wu ever contributed to. Tom Dowd has his fingerprints all over Shadowrun and is at least partially responsible for almost everything that makes Shadowrun great and terrible from 1989 to 1999 or so.
The tonal difference with these two authors is massive. Karl Wu was a doctor or at least someone who was almost a doctor according to the dedication. In any case, large sections of the book read like a medical teaching session where Karl Wu is telling you how various glands and chemicals work in the real world, and then giving a Popular Mechanics style rant about how those actions can be exploited in the future with SCIENCE™! On the flip side, Tom Dowd is putting stuff into the game because he wants it there for various gameplay and/or story reasons and his technical acumen when describing how these things work is approximately at the level of a Saturday morning cartoon. Going through the book, it is actually quite jarring when the book's voice changes, and I think I could bet real money betting on a sentence by sentence level which sections were written or reworked by Tom Dowd and which were Karl Wu originals.
Karl Wu also contributed some cyberware to Cyberpunk, but once we get to the Clinton administration, Karl Wu is never heard from in RPGs again. I dunno why Karl Wu didn't make any more rpg materials. Given the amount of work he obviously put into this, the paycheck must have been pretty disappointing. Based on wordcount, he likely saw less than a thousand dollars for something that probably took months. We're talking 1992 money, but even so he could probably legit make twenty or even forty times that much working as a radiologist or whatever the fuck he did in his day job. The paycheck I got for working on Augmentation is less than half of what I make in a week as a doctor, and the wordcount I got in that book is close to Shadowtech's entire length. I don't think something like Tom Dowd finding him incredibly hard to work with really explains much, considering how White Wolf was eagerly snaffing up any Shadowrun contributors they could find in the early nineties. Of course, the reason Nigel Findley stopped writing Shadowrun books is that he straight up died. In any case, no one I know seems to know what happened to Karl Wu.
As an aside, medicine is an extremely greedy profession when it comes to your “extra work” time. In the United Kingdom, where I currently work, doctors get paid kinda bullshit money for their base job, but that base job pushes them up the continual professional development ladder and entitles you to work extra shifts to keep hospitals and clinics open. These extra shifts pay double to triple what you make at the base pay scale. So in essence, doctors are pretty much required to work 60+ hour weeks, but the overall pay is fairly decent. But this means that the incentive to not have a second job is immense. As a British Medical Registrar you make about 24 pounds an hour for 40 hours a week, but your extra shifts pay 70 pounds an hour. If you work 8 hours a week at a second job, those 8 hours could have been paid at 70 pounds an hour if you'd just done more medicine. I don't know where exactly Karl Wu was practicing medicine, but the incentive structure is always and everywhere for doctors to work as doctors to the point of near death from exhaustion. I, for example, just worked 12 days in a row where I was in the hospital for 144 hours, which is literally 1 hour out of every 2 for 12 days straight. And the US is famous for trying to get doctors to work more than that.
The influence of Shadowtech can most immediately be seen in its spiritual sequel, Cybertechnology, which canned a lot of the science but kept the general attitude of "10 pounds of sugar in a five pound sack." After that, however, SR generally dropped both the catalog format and consolidated cybertech gear books - maybe for obvious reasons. It's expensive to put out sourcebooks that appeal to only a fraction of your audience, and while cyberware has fairly universal appeal outside of the magic crowd, Shadowrun moved toward consolidation and expansion of material in one-stop-shop books, sacrificing formatting for cramming everything you can into a book like Augmentation.
The bipolar nature of the text, veering erratically from demanding that things work mechanically some way or another because of scientific realizarm and demanding that the technobabble conform to some form of demanded power creep ends up making entries with actual in-game utility that is all over the fucking map. Some of the shit in there was like “OMGWTFBBQ?!” when it came out, freaking everyone out with how much more powerful it was than other options in the game. Other stuff is completely at the other end of the scale, being so fucking useless in-game that you wonder why it takes up page space at all (cranial cyberdecks, we will get to you).
Time to go shopping.
Obviously, actual players are going to choose to get implants and equipment that are awesome and not get the stuff that is hot garbage, and the result was that characters of the street samurai persuasion were unrecognizable in their power level shortly after this book came out. Lots of groups house ruled various items off the island entirely (Dikote was a popular choice for that treatment). Which is not to say that the game was now objectively tilted in favor of street samurai over mages, far from it! But that the power jump from Shadowtech for its target archetype was so dramatic and so obvious that it was pretty divisive at the time.
I think it's important to recall that the original concept of what an Essence point was worth was pretty bullshit. In the original Big Blue Book, the offered exchange was 1 point of essence for 1 point of a physical stat (or half a point of Essence for a conditional +1 to a stat). You only get 6 Essence and bonus points of attributes don't matter very much, so Muscle Replacement and Dermal Armor were hot garbage, but those were conceived as the standard rate of cyberware. You spent half a point of Essence and you got +1 Body for some but not all purposes, and that's terrible.
The original authors of Shadowrun pretty much expected the iconic cyberware to be the thing where you had a knife you could pop out of your arm. This item was basically crap since you didn't really want to fight with a knife no matter how concealable it was.
The core issue here is that the items that the Shadowrun community thought of as the iconic cyberware for Street Samurai were actually mistakes. The basic layout for a Street Sam was Wired Reflexes, a Smart Gun Link, and Cybereyes. But those were good because the original designers underestimated the value of target number modification (cybereyes and smartlinks) and extra actions (wired reflexes). The original intended powerlevel of the game was way lower than what people were actually playing, which meant that the standard people were writing expansion material to was massively more powerful than the standard the original designers had in mind when they made the Big Blue Book. It meant that material for Shadowtech had to be either way above the previously published material or be useless garbage that people with system mastery would not use – because the vast majority of previously published material was hot garbage compared to the shit people actually used in real games. It created a situation where there wasn't a way to write Shadowtech that actually expanded the game in a meaningful way without having a bunch of neckbeards have their heads explode because you were doing the powercreeps. Shadowtech is really the first book in Shadowrun that just says “Fuck it, we're powercreeping everything!” It's also arguably the last, because even books like Fields of Fire tried to walk back the crazy and give powercreep options “drawbacks” that could generously be claimed to balance things somehow.
One of the main differences between Shadowrun and other RPGs like D&D and World of Darkness is that it was fairly open about being able to go out and just buy power creep cyberware. Hell, it was encouraged. There were in-game boutiques. The idea of being limited by your starting stats and gradually improving with time, effort, and XP Karma was shit for magicians to deal with while eating their granola. Yes, AD&D always had gp values on magic items, but you were almost never expected to be able to waltz into a store and just purchase your power up - but in Shadowrun, that was completely a thing, and it prevented an alternative - and fast - form of character advancement. Wealth by level guidelines be damned.
Now, they did offer some restrictions; the Street Samurai Guide had already introduced concepts like grades of cyberware (Alpha and used, basically), and "Essence hole" was a longstanding houserule before it was made official. But over all, if you were a lucky newb runner who pulled down a million nuyen score - and didn't immediately retire - you could buy a whole new body.
It's also worth noting that the 1990s saw the first outbreak of real popularity of cosmetic plastic surgery, which resulted in some frankly freakish mishaps and exaggerated proportions - it turns out when some people can now buy breasts bigger than their head, they will. Shadowrun never really hopped on board this particular train; Cyberpunk famously had the Mr. Studd(TM) implant, but Shadowrun was the kind of game sold to 12-year-olds back in the day and it was quite some time before perky brown elf nipples really crept in. Basically when we'd grown up into dirty old roleplayers.
Shadowtech falls right between 1st edition and 2nd edition. And it provides rules for playing it in 1st edition rules and in 2nd edition rules. Or rather, it's all technically 1st edition rules, but it happens to line up exactly with the changes made in 2nd edition. 2nd edition removed the concept of “Threshold” for combat damage, which was a thing by which some weapons required different numbers of hits by the attacker or defender to stage the damage levels up and down. This was needlessly complicated and didn't really add anything to the game. There are plenty of problems that 2e and 3e still had, but going from variable damage thresholds to static damage thresholds was simply a good idea.
The main difference is that automatic success dice were dropped and replaced with target number modifiers. This meant that combat went from an attrition battle to a drum roll of blood splatters, but it also meant that your base dice pool was far more important. In 1st edition, you'd get shot and have 6 automatic successes and then roll your dice looking for 6s. The whole die roll only affected things at the margins. In 2nd edition, you only get your base dice pool, but you're looking for 3s, so you actually get successes.
First Edition Combat – your armor removes most of the damage from being shot.
Second Edition Combat – your armor allows you to have a chance of reducing damage with your Body test
The ware from Shadowtech all does exactly what it says it does in either edition, but some of the stuff is significantly more important in one edition or the other. A bonus die is obviously a lot more important in SR2 than it is in SR1.
What I don't understand is why 2nd edition Shadowrun didn't just massively overhaul the costs and benefits of the Cyberware that was dog shit in 1st edition. It wasn't just the early developers who seemed categorically disinclined to simply make shitty things not shitty when they rewrote them. When I was working on Augmentation I got incredible pushback when I suggested just reprinting Cyberlimbs as things that weren't hot garbage (the Cyberlimb in 4th edition is fucking useless). We were allowed to write bizarre alternate versions of crappy cyberlimbs that were better in every possible way so you might actually want to use them – but we were not allowed to just rewrite the rules for Cyberlimbs in a manner that was remotely playable. I still don't understand the logic here, but I'm certain that Karl Wu must have been subjected to the same shit. It would explain so many things.
RPGs tend to be conservative, if the Granny's attic of the Encyclopedia Magica is any indication, they hate throwing anything away. Part of the reason is that you have a lot of legacy material wrapped up in the old system - adventures, sourcebooks, reams of player character sheets full of the old gear - so where major innovations take place is generally during the edition change, not in sourcebooks that come after. Which is why very few pieces of 'ware were ever dropped in any edition of Shadowrun - stuff like program carriers, for example, eventually bit the dust, but less because the designers didn't like them any more than because they had overhauled the Matrix rules so thoroughly that they no longer made any sense (if they ever did; Program Carriers were the precursor to installing a cyberdeck in your head, except instead of an entire deck you just had the bare minimum programs you needed and trusted to your skills to let you hack the Matrix. Even the NPCs basically never used them.)
The sole exception to this is the Matrix rules, which changed drastically from one sourcebook to the next and one edition to the next. Seriously, the material from the Grimoire in first edition was reprinted almost verbatim in Grimoire II, large chunks of it survived unscathed in Magic in the Shadows, and it wasn't until Street Magic that pretty much all of it was dropped, incorporated at base, or revised. It literally took until 4th edition for magic to change that much. The Matrix, on the other hand...changed a lot. Every single fucking book. It was a mess, and we might get into it one day, but not here.
The book is 120 pages and not particularly dense with text by modern standards. There are no chapter numbers, but there are eleven major headings noted in the table of context (including “Introduction” and “Equipment Table”). In several cases the format is that there will be a major heading that rants about science and rules for a type of thing, and then there's a catalog with a few items at the rate of one per page (or in the case of the Cranial Cyberdeck, one item in like 6-8 pages because the old Matrix rules were so many windows into madness that you couldn't see the desktop image). So I expect that we'll be able to power through this in 3-4 posts, followed by a rant about how this book influenced future books.
A significant portion of the book ends up ranting about this thing, although it turns out you don't want it.
I might be a little bit biased as about 15 years after this book I pretty much was Karl Wu: the Next Generation. But even so, this book is severely influential by any standards and I think we'll have a lot to talk about.
If nothing else, this book introduced a lot of gear which (by the law of conservation of RPG momentum) is still being used in the game, even if not in exactly the format the original designers had in mind. That's what a shared universe is about, folks. You think George Lucas imagined The Last Jedi back when the script called him Luke Starkiller? Fuck no! But that's what happens when you get big collaborative storytelling projects - which is what Shadowrun and other RPGs essentially are.
Next Up: Bionetics.
Yes. Fine. Bionetics is not a real word. But that is what the first book section is actually called.
Cyberpunk: