It must be strange to be Jordan Weisman . One of the original creators of Shadowrun , he spends most of his time meeting people who are kind of familiar with his work and then, occasionally, he encounters someone like me. I’ve made no secret of my love for the Shadowrun franchise in the past, and went into babbling-idiot mode about twenty seconds into meeting Weisman.
A gushing fan, honored and thrilled, is still a stranger. So Weisman’s bemused storytelling while I composed myself, and regained whatever shreds of journalistic integrity were left after my fanboy flare-up, showed me he’d been through this before. He offered me the “real story” behind the creation of Shadowrun, a gaming franchise and fictional world fans like me have enjoyed for nearly 25 years.
“I was working on a cyberpunk game because I thought the dystopian environment was interesting ... and then Mike Pondsmith at R. Talsorian brought out a game called Cyberpunk. And, as Mike is like to do, it was a good game,” he said. “Well, I don’t want to release the SECOND cyberpunk game, so what do I want to do?
I went back to the very early days of D&D where one of the weird sub-cults was D&D meets WW2. It was never done very well but it was fun thinking about dragons versus panzers. So I wanted to think about a way to do that and do that in a way that really does bring magic back in a way that feels organically correct.”
Weisman explained that he grew up around a lot of Mesoamerican artifacts because his father studied different tribal cultures. This lore captivated him as a child and later influenced the narrative of Shadowrun.
“I started thinking about the Mayan long calendar,” he said. “And what if that is actually the basis for the calendar of magic ebbing and flowing back to the earth. Every race always has these myths about creatures that don’t exist. What if that is about magic?”
The concept of a global, natural magic that ebbs and flows over time forms the foundation for the most pivotal event in Shadowrun lore: the Awakening , when magic returned to the world and creatures such as elves, dwarves and dragons returned to earth.
Weisman believed that there were enough real world instances of magical belief to support the Awakening in the world of Shadowrun. He cited the famous Ghost Dance of 1890 when Native American tribes put aside their differences to try and stop the scourge of white invaders by invoking ancestral spirits through a series of long and solemn ceremonies.
“They would only do that if they knew it worked at one point,” he said. “So the premise was that they were just a little too early.”
For Weisman, the overarching conflict of Shadowrun is this war between organic and inorganic, between the natural and digital worlds. The cyberpunk genre gave Weisman the material he needed to explore this concept in a number of ways.
“Cyberpunk is the story of the dehumanization of humanity. On the micro level it’s about how we determined biology is no longer competitive, about how we put computers in our heads and wires in our bodies because the way nature made us is no longer considered to be competitive by society,” he said. “Maybe we can make magic about the return of nature. That it’s nature’s way to bring back an alternate proposal that would offset that [cyberpunk] trend.”
He explained that Shadowrun is a game built on three different tiers. You have the physical world, the matrix , which is the digital overlay on the physical world, and the astral space which is a magical realm.
“To go against a really tough target you had to go against all three alleys at the same time to collaboratively coordinate between the three in order to be successful. And I thought that would set up an interesting diversity of skills and party dynamics,” he said.
One thing Weisman did not anticipate was the degree to which Shadowrun would accurately predict the culture of the early 20th century. Larger themes, like a world run by all-powerful corporations, seemed to jump into real life with incidents like the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court decision that declared corporations have the same rights as people. There were smaller details that Weisman got right, too.
“It is interesting in the Shadowrun lore how much of my prognostication of the future has come true,” he said. “Even fashion. I came up with this in the 80s and went ‘yeah in the future everyone’s gonna be covered with tattoos and piercings’ and that’s the world we live in now. Everything from that, to how Russia fell apart, to the development of the internet. It is both cool and really scary that so much of it came true.”
Narrative and story have long been central to the Shadowrun experience, from Weisman’s pen and paper days up until now with the critically-acclaimed Shadowrun: Hong Kong . This spirit of storytelling is what led to Harebrained Schemes including a powerful level editor alongside purchase of the main game.
“It’s a bitch of an editor. It’s got a steep learning curve,” he said. “We made it powerful so we could do cool things but that makes it a hard one to work.”
The learning curve has done little to discourage diehard fans from creating their own tales and adventures to share (for free!) with anyone who purchases the main game. This content adds countless hours to the gameplay experience but, more importantly says Weisman, adds more to the world of Shadowrun: Hong Kong.
“They’re doing amazing work,” Weisman said. “Shadowrun is about not only me and my team telling stories but it’s about people telling their own stories and we wanted to maintain that as we started telling [the story of Shadowrun: Hong Kong].”
He cited HBS work with a team of level editors working on a Maria Mercurial campaign , a story that has its roots in a module from the pen-and-paper days. Weisman said that working with fans has helped inform the process for developing new Shadowrun games, and many fans agree that there is a clear upward trend in the quality franchise. But HBS will turn its focus to Battletech for a while and, hopefully, find time to help out fans who want to continue to tell stories within Shadowrun: Hong Kong.
“It’s a world we’d love to keep telling stories in. But we’ve had three campaigns out in three years and the team needs a little break,” he said. “The one thing we want to do since we know it’s going to be a while before we do another Shadowrun game is engage the community. Because we’re not going to be heads down working on [another Shadowrun game] we should be even more available to help.”
The reboot of the Shadowrun franchise has done wonders for the brand, said Weisman. Not only have each of the Kickstarter efforts been successful , but there has been a renewed interest in the pen-and-paper game and even the novels. Weisman said that Mel Odom, one of the stand-out authors who has written Shadowrun books, is working on a novelization of the Shadowrun: Hong Kong story. It is one of several new Shadowrun novels set for release over the next few years.
It’s clear the Shadowrun is taking hold of a fanbase in a way that many decades old franchises cannot. The PC games are exquisite and turning fans on to the joys of pen and paper RPG gaming, and with a new set of novels coming it’s not much of a stretch to hope for Shadowrun TV series or movie in the not-too-distant future. Weisman is humbled by the new successes but, in some ways, not surprised.
“I think the reason Shadowrun feels ‘right’ to people is we see so much evidence of [the themes] in our own lives,” said Weisman.
And for long time fans such as myself I think it’s clear that the more Shadowrun we see in our daily lives, the happier we’re going to be.
