I like cyberpunk, succubi, and Netrunner.
Currently working on a hybrid web novel/comic featuring my OC, Reika. And an art book. And a visual novel.

Hail Sithis



Hey, was wondering if anyone on this here cool site for cool chooms and chummers could point me towards any writing done about the racism and cultural appropriation in Shadowrun. I'm playing the SNES game atm, and am finding the character portraits for indigenous people to be distasteful and also the explanation for magic is... suspect? There's been plenty of writing done on how Asian culture and imagery has been grabbed and used in cyberpunk, but Shadowrun has that plus this unique blend of indigenous and mezo-american cultural stuff that I want to know more about. I'm basing my experience on a 1993 SNES game and my one playthrough of Shadowrun Returns, so, maybe this stuff is handled better now? I've got no clue!

I assume people who are into the TTRPG have thoughts on this and I'd love to hear/read them! Drop thoughts/links in the comments if you have them.


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in reply to @neuroknives's post:

The entire premise of the birth of the metahumans being called "Goblinization" is still something that gives me pause. Shamanic magic is always portrayed as really grotesque feeling at times too. It's always weird to me how "Magic that is in tune with nature" always has like, One and Only One portrayal in mainstream things (totems, spirits, that whole thing)

Yeah, "goblinization" has always read to me as a take on "globalization" and because of the connotation of that, the portmanteau reads as anti-semitic to me. I don't know if it's intentional! It's entirely possible the creators of the game just wanted to come up with a word that describes the event that spun their fictional world into being and that's fine. I just look at the word and give it a bit of a stinkeye regardless lol.

And big same on the magic stuff. It feels like a kind of exoticization of the cultures those ideas are pulled from at best and really yucky and otherizing at worst. I feel like there must be a way to include magic in your setting that doesn't do this!

I'm not the right person to talk about this, but I can try to summarize the big problem.

Similar to how other cyberpunk material has latched on to Asian culture, specifically how in these alternate futures Asian cultures always revert to their feudalistic/honor bound roots, Shadowrun has non-white cultures immediately revert to their past when magic returns to the world. There are European cultures that follow a similar path in the setting, but to a much smaller degree.

In terms of primary source material, there's a lot to be learned (and a lot of troubled topics to unpack) from FASA-era Earthdawn.

A recurring thread in North American fantasy (going back to the genre's early staples) is a seemingly urgent need to glue the tropes of "civilization's glorious progenitors" (a centuries-old European theme reflected in its literary obsessions with Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Atlantis) onto the imagined past cultures of the New World. These efforts are usually imaginative, syncretic, and opportunistic; serious and respectful scholarship regarding those cultures is not the norm. Seeing how FASA conceived of Shadowrun's prehistory is thus very telling.