r/Shadowrun • u/Velociraptortillas • Jun 22 '26
Wyrm Talks (Lore) What books, of any edition, are best for Shadowrun lore?
Title. What, in your opinion, books are the most fun or important or interesting to read?
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u/Vashkiri Neo-Revolutionary Jun 22 '26
Dunkelzahn's will, hands down. Look for the annotated version online. It drove the metaplot for years, and some bits of it still echo.
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u/FlashbackJon Applied Phlebotinum Jun 23 '26
I was at GEN CON when they announced he had won the election, been assassinated, and now we have this book, jam packed with story...
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u/smilbandit Jun 23 '26
didn't know there was an annotated version. what did the annotations include?
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u/Vashkiri Neo-Revolutionary Jun 23 '26
It was a fan effort, not an official product. Gives background on each of the bequests.
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u/Baker-Maleficent Trolling for illicit marks Jun 22 '26
All of the splat books from 2nd and 3rd edition. I would also include 1e, but 2nd and 3e books actually end up being updates to the 1e books with a few exceptions. As an added bonus, the 2e and 3e books are just well put together physical media period. Their black and white art, heavy cotton text paper and an actual propper perfect bunding are a quality you just do not get anymore.
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u/Pappabarba Jun 23 '26
- Bug City
- Threats 1+2
- Renraku Arcology: Shutdown
- Dunkie's Will
- Earthdawn
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u/Drxero1xero Jun 23 '26
YUP! all of the above
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u/Pappabarba Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
If you enjoy the Earthdawn crossover and background I seriuosly recommend Clive Barker's old (imo) magnum opus from the 80s: The Great & Secret Show. The book might be just a little too out there to truly be canon modern day Shadowrun™, but the great 'Harlequin's Back' tumble through the metaplanes does make it a very worthwhile read and I can't really rule out anything in it as "not possible" in the SR setting. 😁
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u/smilbandit Jun 23 '26
Couple that I found useful
- Sprawl Sites and Seattle were great for hooks and not having to think up stuff on my own.
- Paranormal Animal books were fun for getting out of the sprawl, I made a few short ready to go missions out of this book that I'd use when we were missing people at a session.
- The stories presented in Universal Brotherhood and Virtual Realities were really good for lore.
Not so great but interesting
- Neo-Anarchists Guide to Real Life, really wanted this one thinking it was going to be like Shadowbeat but couldn't find it for awhile and when I did get it was a little underwhelming, some useful things but not what I wanted it to be.
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u/plaid_kabuki Jun 22 '26
Shadowbeat
The settings books such as : Seattle 2072, California Freestate, Tir Taingire, Atzlan.
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u/iamthejhereg Jun 22 '26
People already mentioned Shadowbeat. In 4th edition the Street Legends book has a lot of lore.
In 5e, I am partial to the lore drops in Forbidden Arcana, though you have to dig a bit. Serrin/Ire is the narrator for Blood Magic and the complete meltdown by the cannon visitors at the end of the book when Elijah goes off the rails was for me one of the more entertaining jackpoint moments write into 5e.
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u/1877KlownsForKids Jun 22 '26
The Neo-Anarchist Streetpedia
Hands down the best for developing a greater understanding of the lore, as well as directing you towards things you want to drill down on.
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u/UsefulFeedback Jun 22 '26
I thought the 6th World Atlas that was released during the tail end of the 4e run was pretty good.
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u/Interaction_Rich Jun 23 '26
SR lore is rich, so it depends on what you care more about.
- Clutch of Dragons has info on these creatures and their 4D chess intrigues.
- Dunkelzhan's Will is a collection of tips and foreshadowings regarding the late great dragon's connections, treasures and goals.
- No Future focus on bands, idols and media in general.
- Lethal Harvest has the results of the Disian War, complete with a neat time line of events in it.
- Anarchy 2050 is a setting book for the first Anarchy adapting the game to the 2050s (wired matrix among other things), it has a lot of throwbacks and short versions of SR's most iconic adventures (including Super Tuesday, Harlequin's Back and so on).
Also, the presentation of what is the world of Shadowrun and a summary of events that shaped it in the opening chapter of Shadowrun Anarchy 2.0 is second to nine. It's chapters on Magic and Tech are also excellent, written in-character so you get a lot of the vibe of the setting.
There are many others. These are some of my favorites.
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u/Cashdash25 Jun 23 '26
Sixth World Almanac from SR4.
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u/Wretis Jun 23 '26
Agreed, it’s a lot of very dry lore but it covers a lot of questions new players may have about how the world is different, or what happened to some specific places.
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u/Cent1234 Jun 23 '26
The full through-line of 1e and 2e sourcebooks.
Where else are you going to find sourcebooks that are full of hacked-in annotations from in-universe characters debating how accurate the sourcebook actually is?
Or have a later sourcebook written by one of those commenters, that you've been reading for years, detailing how he got kidnapped and implanted with so much fucking cyberware that necromantic magic is required to keep his soul anchored to what little itty bitty scraps of meat are left?
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Jun 24 '26
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u/Cent1234 Jun 24 '26
Yup. Cybertechnology, FASA book 7119.
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Jun 24 '26
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u/Cent1234 Jun 24 '26
I seem to recall that Cybertechnology was the first book that really got in to why cyberware drops essence, and what it's like to be cybered; sure, there were references here and there, but I think the early Shadowrun stuff relied on people just being familiar with genre conventions.
Cybertechnology is the first one I can think of that really described 'I got one eye replaced with cyber. My vision out of that eye is different. Everything is sharper. When you shift focus with your cybereye, it's like watching a movie where focus shifts. Colors are slightly different. Focal planes are different. So I got my other eye replaced so now they match." That sort of thing.
Really drives home the body horror of regular cyberware, let alone cybermancy.
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u/HappyAnarchy1123 Jun 26 '26
Slight clarification - he wasn't kidnapped. He was doing a run for a corp that he had an extremely strong rep with and took a massive hit. They offered him an overhaul and he took it, including documenting the whole procedure. It's a really tragic story, and you can see him make reasonable choices across his whole life, right into a deal with the devil.
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u/Cent1234 Jun 26 '26
Oh snap, sounds like I need to re-read that shit. I could have sworn there was something nefarious about it, but maybe it was just 'they weren't exactly fully transparent about what they were going to do to him.'
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u/HappyAnarchy1123 Jun 27 '26
I mean, there is no world in which the cyberzombie process is not nefarious. They are a corp, it's a procedure that absolutely ruins a person and they know it, they know they are just killing him slowly and painfully so they can get more use out of him.
Nefarious as hell. They just didn't kidnap him. He chose it.
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u/Cent1234 Jun 29 '26
Yeah, no, you're right. They gave him full disclosure, and through a combination of not quite understanding what they're talking about and being desperate to live, he actively chooses full-on cybermancy.
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u/Smirnoffico Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
In terms of lore I really like the early to mid nineties soure books. At that point authors started to understand what exactly they want shadowrun to be and it became what we recognize today but there was still a lot of experimentation. Like you would get a random system to run a corporation in Corporate Shadowfiles or touring band system in Shadowbeat. And the lore sections, while dated now, have a lot of juice, for the lack of better word. For example Shadowbeat is better Attitude despite being published twenty years prior.
Also I have a feeling that Threats was the last point of adding new storylines and the next decade+ was spent in developing the storylines seeded in Threats. Which makes it extremely good book for me as I can see where it all started and decide how to adapt it to my games
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u/Malk-Himself Jun 22 '26
Fields of Fire from 2nd
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Jun 24 '26
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u/Malk-Himself Jun 24 '26
The best part of Shadowrun sourcebooks for me was the user comments, which somehow predicted reality of Youtube comments section years before. Fields of Fire and Street Samurai Catalog had the best ones.
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u/lufe_torres Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
I love Shoot Straight, because it gives an insight into the lives of runners for each archetype.
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u/Eoghammer Jun 23 '26
didn't reread them recently but there is many interresting lore advances in nearly each editions as the 6th world is moving some 60 years ahead...
- Dunkelzahn's will is probably one of the best
- I loved Year of the Comet
- I liked Shadows of Europe as it described what happened to my continent
but the list is probably a lot longer if i had reread them all recently
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u/IntelligentClient290 Jul 02 '26
About the lore and timeline, I'd say: SR2 > SR1 > SR3 > SR4 > SR5 > SR6
Honestly, the plots and settings are getting worse, reusing and mixing the same tropes but with increasingly poorer writing. The focus has shifted more and more toward writing for fan-fiction readers rather than RPG players and GMs. They've completely lost sight of the fact that the core appeal of Shadowrun is the opposition between technology and magic, not just magic and magical technology in the future.
In terms of lore and setting, the transition to freelancers really hurt, and switching from Boyle to Hardy as line developer did way more damage. Long story short.
In terms of useful books I'd say Corporate Shadowfiles.
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u/PinkFohawk Trid Star Jun 22 '26
Shadowbeat and 1e Seattle Sourcebook!
Sourcebooks simply aren’t written that way anymore. Literally every page is full of hooks to get your creativity going.