Maybe you had a mother who told you that you were special. Who said there was no one like you, you were wonderful in your uniqueness, blah blah blah. Or maybe you had a mother you regularly reminded you that you were nothing more than a mouthy drain on her finances, an inconvenience at best and a pain in the ass at worst, and if you somehow managed to wind up as nothing in this life it’s because you managed to take a step up from whatever nightmare destiny your horrid, wilted personality was suited for.
The thing is, no matter what your mama told you, she ain’t with you on the streets. (At least I hope not. Dragging your moms around on runs with you is embarrassing.) Good or bad, whatever she told you about yourself doesn’t matter. In the shadows, you’re going to make yourself whatever you want to be. You hope to hell you’ve got some basic skills to carry you forward—but to take advantage of those skills, you need a full set of tools to make yourself into the street legend you were destined to be.
What we have here are the tools. It starts with Who You Are and How You Got Here, looking at the various ways people slide into the shadows and how that shapes them. You’re going to meet each type of runner in your career, and the sooner you understand how they work, the better. This is also the kind of info that helps you understand yourself better—where you been, and where you gotta go.
Ethics, Codes, and Other Jokes strolls through the wacky world of runners who think there may be something to the job besides collecting the next paycheck. Maybe their dedication to outdated ideals is pathetic, maybe it’s noble, but there’s a good chance that one way or another, one of these codes will affect your life, so you better know what’s up.
Then we take a deeper look at the Sixth World around us. The Spice of Runners’ Lives scans the wide variety of jobs we can take to keep ourselves amused, while More than Skin Deep looks at the cultures and countercultures of many of the world’s metatypes, the better to anticipate some tendencies you’re going to encounter.
Construction Kits offers different approaches to making you, well, you. Use them to build yourself to be the shadowrunner you were born to be. Then The Mess of Metahumanity talks about the full range of metahumans you may encounter on the mean streets and gives you what you need in case you happen to be one of these freaks. No offense.
A few archetypes give a hint about the wide variety of professionals you can find in the shadows, and then things take a turn to the dark side with Into the Night, a look at the ghouls, vampires, and other Infected that make those really dark Barrens alleys so interesting. As You as You Can Be outlines the qualities that help make us all such a bunch of special snowflakes, and Who You Know details the people who grease the wheels of the shadows, helping you get gear, information, and other necessities. There’s a whole barter economy with these guys, and the better you understand it, the more you can take advantage of it. And while we’re on the subject of people to know, Bosses and Betrayers talks about the Mr. Johnsons that make our work possible, profitable, and dangerous, while offering tips on how to deal with them and survive to tell the tale.
But life isn’t all work. A Dump of One’s Own focuses on the glories of home, that special place where the likelihood of you being shot drops by sometimes as much as fifty percent. Take a look at the customization options it gives you to get the domicile you need without instantly hoovering up your next payday.
Then we’ve got Pack Your Kit. The megacorps of the world have filled up the shops and bazaars we frequent—or the ones we walk by, wishing we had scratch to spend—with lots of pretty, shiny things, and it’s not always easy to figure out what you need. We’ve arranged a lot of gear into nice thematic packs, allowing you to easily make selections that will let you take care of business in the best way possible.
That’s what’s out there. So get moving, jump in, get stronger, tougher, and faster, and maybe you can prove that your mama was right all along.
Or wrong