The world is not only Awakened—it’s wired. Cyber and bioware implants make your meat body better-than-flesh, while the wireless Matrix enhances your perceptions with hyper-real senses. Deals are made in steel and lead more often than gold or nuyen; success and failure live only a razor’s edge apart. Creatures of myth and legend walk the streets, while the arcane skills of spellslingers are in high demand. Above it all, monolithic megacorps bleed the world dry, sabotaging each other in covert cutthroat competition as they go to war over the bottom line. You’re a shadowrunner, a street operative, scratching out a living on the mean sprawl streets. You may be human, elf, dwarf, ork, or troll. From lethal street samurai to well-connected info brokers, spell-slinging mages to code-cracking hackers. No matter what, you’re a professional-corporate pawn or “deniable asset,” you get the job done. Shadowrun is a roleplaying game, not unlike improvisational theater. A gamemaster runs the game, while a group of players pretend they are characters set in the dystopian near-future of 2070. These character are created by the players, given a history and personality, and then further defined by a set of statistics that represent the character’s skills and attributes-as developed in the character creation process. The gamemaster then presents the setting and situation: through their characters, the players interact with the storyline and other characters, developing their own stories and high adventure during every game session. Shadowrun is much more than a simple roleplaying game. Its unique and dynamic universe is proactive, with over-arcing storylines twisting and shaping the universe as additional sourcebooks are released. This creates a vibrant, breathing universe in which players can carve out their own street cred and amass nuyen, all the while watching out for the megacorps, dragons and other world-level threats that can cut their careers short. Deadly short.