Preferably with the tones of someone who loves the setting as much as they poke fun at it, but if that's not possible, then snarky, scathing rhetoric or absolute worship might also do.
Looking for that wonderful sort of Veeky Forums writing that comes of being overly cynical in general, yet sticking to a Hobby that provides a majority of one's pasttime.
First, shit was normal, like things are now.
Then, shit got crazy, Lord of the Rings motherfuckers springing up out of nowhere.
Then, the crazy shit got normal, but the shit that used to be normal got crazy, fucking cyberpunk as shit.
Now, everything is fucking crazy.
Hoo boy okay where to start.
Alright let's go with the most important change, arguably. At some point in the (at the time near future), huge-ass food shortages resulted in megacorporations deciding they needed private armies, and at the risk of starving out the US, the US government said 'yeah that's fine, this won't en dpoorly at all'.
This ended poorly.
More stuff happened, the cold war ended, and then magic came back becuase a bunch of native americans decided they were tired of whitey stealing their shit, so decided to cause the apocalypse over it 'cause we stole a casino. This resulted both in magic coming back, and also the formation of the Native American Nations, 'cause they had a lot more magic than the US did, which was also canada at the time.
Oh, and around this time is also when people spontaneous mutated into orks and trolls,a nd elves and dwarves started getting born, and lynch mobs became a thing again, but instead of niggers it was trogs and keebs. No one cares about dwarves. No one's EVER cared about dwarves.
More megacorps showed up, including one that turned detroit into a decent place to live by manufacturing a SHITTON of guns, and one that decided to also be a cult that wanted to bring the apocalypse along. Cybernetics show up and people get freaked out becuase it cuts into magic, but it's cool, becuase not everyone is magic.
And then dragons, and then a dragon was president, and he told a bunch of people to quit their shit after he had himself assassinated to stop the apocalypse. Another dragon, much earlier, took over most of europe's corporations because he wanted a bigger hoard.
Asia's alls orts of fucked in all the nasty places, but it's okay, because a good third of the ten biggest megacorps are japanese.
Quebec is important for awhile, but then the writers realize that's retarded and it was no longer important.
More soon.
Magic came back on it's own. Natives just made the most use of it.
A hard singularity AI takes off, but gets a bad case of the Evil Computer Virus. He surgically alters a ton of people to be able to use the internet WITH THEIR BRAINS, then tries to obtain godhood through the stock market but crashes when people stop his shit because how mahy apocalypses do you need?
Chicago gets a REALLY BAD cockroach infestation, and they try to nuke it. It works, but the bugs just go to sleep, which isn't bad, because it's still one mroe apocalypse they managed to stop, because these cockroaches can take over people and turn them into more cockroaches.
More megacorps come and go; one of them gets really big into historical revisionism, to the point where people SWEAR their CEO is a massive movie star with movies going back decades even though no one remembers going tos ee them in theatres.
Those people who can use the internet WITH THEIR BRAINS get better at it when the internet goes down globally for a bit, which crashes everything hard and almost ends the world as we know it.
And that is, in no particular order, with a bunch of rambling, the high points of the various parts of hte shadowrun setting.
Every major advance in human capability, magical and otherwise, of any sort has been turned into a profit center for a corporation more powerful than anything we've seen since the East India Company. Some of which are actually owned by ancient dragons.
You play a disposable minion hired through an outsourcing director who commits terrorism and espionage to further the ends of one of these megacorps. If you think you aren't doing that, it's just another layer of plausible deniability you haven't seen through yet.
This is Great! Thanks! But what can you tell me about Seattle?
Okay, so, Seattle. What you have to understand is that one: It is the only UCAS, that is, united states and canada merged together, the only city they control on the west coast. California left the union because no one liked them, then got taken over by japan, washington and oregon turned into magical elf-native american land, and mexico took over other chunks of it for a time. So it's a melting pot; the japanocorps go there for business with the UCAS, UCAS corps do stuff there, CAS (that is, the confederated american states, becuase the South Rose Again and then did fuck-all other than headquarter DocWagon, the single most badass non-AAA megacorp in the setting) has an embassy there and shit, it's basically a City of Adventure but for shadowrunning purposes, by default--it was the original Basic Assumed SEtting for shadowrun, before it really got out to expanding.
>California got taken over by Japan
isn't that racist and yellow peril?
Not really, given it happened after a natural disaster and japan moved in international aid, then peacekeeping forces because califree became an anarchist hellhole.
You should also read through Earthdawn if you want to know why the magic cycles rising is a VERY bad thing for absolutely everyone.
And you get to see what President Dragon was up to before he became President...like 50,000 years before he became President.
Basically the world was on course for Gibson style Cyberpunk but then fantasy shit started forcing its way into humanity and magic became real and dragons started appearing so all the hippies and indians and such suddenly got super powers and the dragons decided to put their attention into becoming CEOs and presidents rather than just capturing princesses.
The Fifth Age was nowhere near that long ago actually.
And yeah the "good" dragon used to be called Doll Maker.
>5th
Fourth World. My bad.
read the book you fucking moron
Magic comes back, people mutate into orcs and elves, dragons wake up to take over corporations, then the corporations get extraterritoriality which means no government can control them, cybernetics gets advanced but it also eats your soul, everything is networked and hackable (like the internet of things but it's called the matrix), and everything is also for-profit. There are a bunch of plagues and stuff, both engineered and natural and real food is too expensive so everything is soy. Life sucks and the corps own everything.
So basically modern day but with cybernetics and magic and grimy chrome and dragons.
The fuckers are hard to kill, too.
I thought Dunks was Mountainshadow and that Dollmaker is his brother Icewing who became known as Ghostwalker in Shadowrun.
>The fuckers are hard to kill, too.
partially becuase shadowrun dragons can literally manipulate fate as easily as most people breathe. Fucking edgelords.
To elaborate on user's mention of the Great Ghost Dance:
Native (North) Americans got fed up with the US government basically campaigning a second Trail of Tears, and their version of Che Guevara led a massive concentration camp break and directed them in a ritual dance to provoke spirits into erupting Mts. Rainier, St. Helens, Adams, and Hood.
The US backed down at this, and the natives seized half of North America as their own territory, dividing the land as nations between the major tribes.
Algonquians got the middle third of Canada, Athabaskans got the chunk between them and Alaska (Greenland and Iceland combined to form the Trans-Polar Aluet and currently own the garbage scraps up north), Elves got the Pacific Northwest, The Sioux got most of the Dakotas, almost all of Montana and Wyoming, a piece of Idaho, and a chunk of Nebraska and Colorado.
Colorado is currently owned by a dragon who basically sweats spirits.
Pueblo took chunks of Idaho and Wyoming, half of Colorado, all of Utah, a third of California, and most of New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada.
Mexico became a corporatized Aztec cult, discovered Blood Magic, rebranded as Aztlan, took over the entirety of Middle America, and became the scariest faction in the world.
The US had another civil war, the south split off, the north combined with what was left of Canada, and Texas briefly seceded as its own country before Aztlan ripped them to shreds, took half their land, and send them limping back to the Confederacy.
Denver is owned by the spirit-vomiting dragon, rather, not all of Colorado. Also Boulder and Colorado Springs, iirc.