Different Eras shadowrun pitches

I've been doing these as a creative exercise, help me out Veeky Forums!

>Shadowrun 1900s: The world map last corners were filled and borders drawn, yet the heart of Africa and the depths of the pacific jungles are yet filled with temples full of magic artifacts of untold power, waiting for the brave explorer who may find them. In the US, the Death of the old west and the rising of a new order is still a source of conflict.

>1910s: Tensions mount up in Europe as treaties are signed and broken and a war seems unavoidable. Spies and double agents seek to learn, sabotage of steal other nation's secret weapons, magical or technological, to give their own country an edge in the coming conflict. Meanwhile, across the colonies, nationalist risings and freedom fighters prepare for their overlords to be weakened to strike the mercy blow in their colonial rule.

>1920s: Prohibition rans rampant in the US, hillbilly elves produce Elderbark moonshine and gangster orcs and trolls gun down police agents on the squalor ravaged streets. Europe faces a magical plague and undead outbreaks in the aftermath of the great war and the loss of some colonies. Necromancer dictators rise and fall.

>1930s: Prohibition conflicts continues and now the pursue also focus on dark magic after a eldritch aberration ravages central new york. Non registered mages find employment with the mob raising the stakes of the war. Europe fascist governaments try to rule what's left of the old world after the past two rough decades. Metahumans are put on concentration camps on germany and dwarven soviet commitees take over Russia, forming the URSS into a industrial powerhose with giant tanks and powerful mobile artillery walkers.

>1940s: The great world war still rages, and magic and technology wreck destruction across the battlefields of europe, while in the pacific, Japanese summoned Oni leap from swamp waters to devour american GIs. Dragons and harpies fight alongside hellcats and zeros over the pacific.

>Shadowrun 1950s: Cloak and Dagger and the Red menace. Dwarven soviets expande their dominion over asia and europe and paranoia runs rampant in the western world. Magic and technology evolve and merge as spionage tools to keep tabs on your enemy and your own people. The golden age of spionage to steal the enemy arcane and advance tech secrets. In Korea, nations test their new weapons and spells in a rehearsal for the fight to come.

>Shadowrun 1960s: As above, but also hippie elves, magic pot, alchemical dragonfire instead of napalm in Nam. Civil unrest in the US creates room for old fashioned homebrew 'terrorism'.

>Shadowrun 1970s: ??

>Shadowrun 1980s: ??

>Shadowrun 1990s: ??

Well, first of all, determine when the Ghost Dance/equivalent magical resurgence happened in each of those scenarios.
Would each era/decade follow up from the previous scenario? Or would they have a different 'timeline', so to speak?

My idea would be all assuming the resurgence happened before the 1900s, and than progress on that timeline, trying to stick as close as possible to the world history, maybe not on actual fights, but to the things that marked the zeitgeist of each era, so to speak. Like the cold war and the great wars. The factions don't have to be the same, but those conflicts are era defining so they should happen in some fashion.

Shadowrun is cyberpunk, which is 80's science fiction to a fault. You can't just take the 80's out of Shadowrun and still have it be Shadowrun. All that you're left with is history with magic. Big whoop. Been done before.

Thanks for taking time out of your day to tell us, people you don't know, that an Idea that doesn't require you to participate, is not to your liking, even though no one cares.

He is right. Shadowrun is cyberpunk + fantasy. If you remove the cyberpunk you just have historical fantasy. The good news is that you can publish without getting sued.

What about using Shadowrun in the far future as a space opera campaign?

>Shadowrun 1920
Whelp, add something else to the list of things that I didn't know I needed.

I'm picturing big ships stuffed to the brim with living plants, animals and humans to maintain a viable mana field. But not healthy happy elf ships. I'm picturing pristine white walls concealing vast amounts of algae, plankton, soy plants, and cloned animal flesh. Or human flesh. Unnecessarily large crews just for the extra mana. Second class citizens with entirely unengineered, unaugmented bodies just for the extra essence, performing menial tasks for soy paste.

Maybe I play too much 40k

Sounds like Snowpiecer but in space.

I approve.

I know right...Elf crooner singer and orc bartender at a speakeasy. And of course the troll in a fedora carrying a saw off shotgun like it's a tiny pocket gun.

Dwarf Brewer / Owner hanging out in the corner just watching everything going on.

The all human Lone Star prepping a raid on the outside.

I fucking need this.

>Shadowrun 1920
I wanted to do something like this last year, people shat on me. I say go for it OP

Welp.

I'm making this.

This needs to happen anons.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.

Shadowrun in the 1910s would basically be that, but worse. Much worse. WW1 as a blood magic ritual. Just fuck everything right up, senpai.

Maggot shaman galore before everything gets swallowed up into a horror's asshole.

Instead we would have a lot more modern science substituted with magic. Magic driven technology. I'm sort of aboard on this idea.

>WW1 was actually perpetuated for European royals trying to perform massively-powerful blood magic rituals
Oh lawdy

You're arriving at Full Metal Alchemist's setting

Full Metal Alchemist pretty much is early 20th century Shadowrun.

I recall that there was that one user on Veeky Forums that created a very rough setting of "gangster era + fantasy creatures" with gangs divided between different races.

I recall that one one of the races were "brain in jars". Or something like that. Had a screencap of that lying around, but I probably lost it.

Fund it.

also bump.

Umbralventure:

The World is changing, and not just because Industry, automatic weapons and automotive vehicles. Something deep stirred in the guts of earth itself and spilled forth magic that forever transformed the way the world works. While nations managed to maintain a grip of their territory, they are still struggling to maintain internal control.

In the US, organized crime rises around the smuggling, illegal brewing, selling and distributing illegal Alcohol and controlled alchemy ingredients. With a economic crisis in full swing, many turn to the bottle to drown their sorrows or the crime as a way of surviving. Orcs are looked down upon by other humans and metahumans as brutes of little to no intelligence, a fate they share with trolls, and few are able to see past this veil prejudice. They find work in construction for less pay than the other races counterparts, and other jobs that take advantage of their muscles. However, the mob is quick to realize their potential and Orcs and Trolls form the thick of their ranks, and experience there a chance of upward mobility in life they had no where else. There are tusks in any level of many criminal organizations, from the head of large operations to simple grunts. This only further other races pre-conceptions to add 'tendency' to crime towards the list of things they have against orcs.

Meanwhile, in the countryside, small communities of elves see a demand for their locally brewed liquors rise to levels they never expected. Elderbark Moonshine, Highbranch Mead and Root Whisky, all is being sold as fast as they can produce it and for increasingly more money and often weapons, this leads to a scalation in the feuds between the families in the countryside, and the violence grew there too rather than just in the cities.

The police start using more violent and aggressive methods to try and counter the rise of the mobs, but also invest in subterfuge. The mob is no strange to the spycraft.

...So both sides have moles, informers, double agents, waging a silent secret war in the shadows, a war for information and anticipation of the enemy's movements, often peaking in violent police raids, drive-bys and assassinations. And the increasingly growing number of corrupt cops in the pockets of organized crime leads to the FBI to deploy his own undercover man both with crime families and the local police to try and smoke out those betrayers.

Players take the whole of folorn people with nothing to lose, trying to make a living in this world. Are they secretly informed the Feds on the misdeeds of the local tyrant county sheriff? Or are they keeping tabs on a rival family? Are they just mercenaries fresh from the Great War with a thirst for violence and no outlet? Or are they cunning business ready to thrive in a land ripe with opportunity watered by the blood of fools?

Need to pick an event that triggered the magic to return.
Krakatoa
Tunguska 1908
Trinity/ Hiroshima
Moon landing

How about the actual ghost dance?

I really like the idea of tunguska being a magical event

Shadowun is a system as well as a setting. Just remove cyberware and make up your own equipment list and you can set it anywhere in time.

I for one, would kill to play a former Confederate cavalryman turned Gun Kata Adept in the 1880s.

You are not wrong, but you are not 100% right either. Shadowrun is cyberpunk yes. We can't call any 'fantasy elements in modern scenarios' shadowrunnesque.

But there's a specific mood, a specific way of having fantasy/technology and society to interact that can be classified as Shadowrunesque without the need for cyberpunk. Sure the setting get it's name from runners which as a very cyberpunk think...

But the type of racial and class tension shadowrun propose can be reproduced in other eras, and the specific way magic is introduced, in a way it becomes a part of society as we know rather than change it to something we can't recognizing or being set aside from it is more 'Shadowrun' than pink mohawks.

>1960s
It's just TF2.

Thanks Wovoka!
Do the new Native American Nations (or maybe they take back the whole of North America) pitch in the Great Wars? Or are those solely the concern of the white men?
At least, until a Dragon burns down Wai Momi...

So...

There's enough interest in this thread alone to start a game of SR: 1920s edition.

Who wants to start hacking SR to fit?

With clunkiness of Shadowrun I'd suggest using something else. Even gurps.

I'm using ORE.

No reasons in particular, I just like it.

If you want to keep this Shadowrun in the 1920's you gotta have the NANs rise up. The Mexican Revolution gets the Aztlaners as an agrarian faction that eventually overtakes everyone with blood magic and terror tactics.

I just realized that in this version of setting Dunkelzahn is either FDR or JFK.

I was gonna suggest he pretend to be human as FDR, then runs as himself later on as the JFK analogue, but then they instituted the 2 term limit after FDR.

Also, do the Aztlaners come on the side of the Axis or the Allies? Or the Soviets, if you consider them a separate faction.

Back in WWI Germany tried getting Mexico to invade the US as a way to keep them out of Europe.

But, in WWII the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese had a deal to split the world. Depending on how divergent you want to get, it could be a three way split.

Imperial Japan gets the Pacific and East Asia. Aztland gets the Americas. The Nazis get Europe and the Mid East. Africa is exploited for its natural resources by the victors, all other lands unaccounted for are negotiated for during after victory talks.

Aztlan is it's own thing, but probably Axis-friendly and not belligerent. They take in German occultists fleeing the Soviet Dwarf Hermetic Magocracy, and maybe even Rasputin before that. If the Azzies do get belligerent they'd probably fracture the USA after the Great Ghost Dance, which I guess means a semi-victorious Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. It's more likely here that WW2 ends in an unfair peace treaty for the Allies than total victory.

Going off the above, and this it's pretty simple to get Dunky to change from FDR to JFK. Just make his "death" as FDR a fake, so that he can re-emerge as a JFK-expy with similar but different views, and without the baggage of a decade+ presidencey that lost WW2. Although Dunkelzahn wouldn't actually be FDR or, he'd have totally made up identities. Is Lofwyr a Nazis in this setting?

And what about Celedyr? Or Alamais, Kaltenstein, Nachtmeister, Rhonabwy and Schwartzkopf? Or Firewing, for that matter?
Honestly I can't see anti-metahuman Nazis arising with all those dragons kicking about in Europe.

On the other hand the great political mess of treaties and alliances that caused WW1? I can believe that. Probably even more complicated if there are any independent metahuman nations like the Black Forest and Tír na nÓg, though they'd have about 10 to 20 years to get independence after the O.G. Ghost Dance in 1890

What about a hyper pro-dragon group? Or a generalized pro-metahuman stance?

Now we're swerving away from OP's timeline, but I can't imagine the Dragnazis/Pro-Meta Axis losing, with the Awakening on their side. Plus the European colonies would take a harsh knock when the native's beliefs actual start working.
Maybe we see a reverse, the Allies start stomping down meta-humans, Dragon Germany takes umbrage with that and fight for democracy.
Or maybe WW1 ends up being a huge clusterfuck of revolutions and independence movements, as well as the old treaties being called in. Maybe Germany isn't so humiliated that the idea of a Third Reich isn't as appealing.

You could simply explain Hitler as another dragon. I mean...It basically fits.

Please explain!