A (Relatively) Short and Dirty Primer on the Sixth World

Shadowrun is a tabletop roleplaying game that has been around since 1989. It's firmly nested in the cyberpunk dystopia genre and borrows many concepts from a book called Neuromancer, but also includes fantasy elements.

Corporations

In general, corps have replaced governments as the institutions responsible for enforcing laws, maintaining order, and providing services. States still exist, but corps aren’t beholden to or are explicitly exempt from their laws. The only purview where states retain power is in immigration and customs. Someone who lives on a corp property is often entirely reliant on the services provided by the corporation, including housing, health care, schooling for their children if they have any, and most other services that are, in real life, expected to be provided publically. Corps are varyingly good at actually providing these services.

There are three tiers of corporation: AAA, AA, A. (pronounced Triple A, Double A, A – alternatively, first tier, second tier, third tier).

AAA Mega-Corps are the ten corporations represented in the Corporate Court, the only body that regulates corp actions and the only venue through which corps cooperate. These ten corps are necessarily international, horizontally and vertically integrated, and span multiple industries. The founding members of the Corporate Court maintain permanent seats and cannot be ousted from their positions.

The AA rank is given to any multi-national corporation that (1) does not have representatives on the Corporate Court and (2) are granted extraterritoriality rights in their locations.

A corps are multinational but do not necessarily have extraterritoriality rights.

Suddenly, Magic

In 2011, leading into 2012, dragons climb their way out of the earth from volcanoes and trenches. Tibet creates a magical barrier while declaring independence from China. Babies are born, en masse, with pointy ears or genetically-incongruous dwarfism. Spirits take over the city of Jerusalem. Everyone is completely blindsided by all this, naturally, because none of these things are supposed to actually exist. I’ll go into each individually.

The dragons are notable for their immortality, for having excellent memories and for usually being extremely territorial. They’re also smart – using their hoards of useful magical items to establish themselves in the burgeoning magical powers or, alternatively, to buy corporate stock. It quickly becomes an adage to never cross a dragon since (aside from protecting their hoards) they have inscrutable and perplexing goals and don’t usually care about human morality. Except for Dunkelzahn, aka the Nice Dragon, who takes it upon himself to educate everyone about all this magic stuff that’s going on – specifically, that they now live in the Sixth World, that the mundane Fifth World is over now that the dragons and everything else have come back.

As far as magic is concerned, it’s not just for people in Tibet – lots of people become Awakened! In fact, in what most people fail to find a funny coincidence, the groups that acquire the highest populations of magic users also happen to generally be marginalized communities that have maintained their old cultural traditions – most relevantly to the United States, various Native American tribes. In 2014, they declare independence from the general United States and carve out the Native American Nations from most of the western half of the continental United States. A similar balkanization occurs around the rest of the globe as the introduction of magic changes the nature of military power.

Elves and dwarves were only borne to humans in the first few years after the magic came back. When they come of age, some elves are aided by immortal elves from the Fourth World and set up their own generally socialist authoritarian societies – most notably Tir Tairngire in what was formerly Oregon and Washington states, and Tír na nÓg, which encompasses the entire island of Ireland.

Spirits are poorly understood. They are sentient, come from metaplanes through astral rifts or when summoned, and are varyingly friendly. More likely to be friendly are spirits of water, heaven, land, plant, or man, which coalesce around more specific human cultural concepts or environmental forces. Less likely are beast spirits, especially insect spirits, which, while sentient, don’t communicate well with metahumans and have extremely alien goals and mindsets. Least friendly are toxic spirits, which have coalesced around a devastated, polluted, or irradiated area. These are the most powerful and the most actively malicious.

In 2021, ten percent of the world’s human population, including fetuses in utero, mutate into orcs and trolls. Major media sources call this process “Goblinization.” Everyone takes this even worse than the arrival of elves and dwarves – Japan annexes a Filipino island and dumps its metahuman population, the British king dies of a mysterious cause and is widely rumored to have become a troll. Some countries consider it to be a disease and quarantine those “afflicted.”

Transhumanism

(... or, "help a bio-ethicist helped design this magic system")

As early as 2030, you can get replacement body parts that do neat things! They can be biological or clone based – bioware – or made of metal – cyberware. Both types of advanced limb/feature/whatever have ratings: Alphaware is the cheapest and the most likely to break or malfunction and Deltaware is the most expensive. However …

The shadowrun universe has magic. It also happens to have souls. People can even measure their amounts-of-soul using the collective noun "essence". Having slightly less than your total essence is normally safe -- except for magic users, who have drastically reduced power if they have any “essence loss”, ie: if they have any amount of bio or cyberware. For mundanes there aren’t as many consequences until you replace almost your entire body, at which point you start losing your emotions and motivation.

(An aside: mages can’t leave Earth, either. They’re constantly doing magic by existing, and magic only works on Earth.)

The Matrix

The matrix is the 1980s Tron-aesthetic version of the internet. There have been two successive crashes in the 21st century so far – one that replaced the burgeoning real internet with a virtual-reality – VR – based system, and another that made everything go wireless.

A normal person connects to the matrix using a commlink, which has the equivalent functionality of a smartphone. It can look like anything from a Bluetooth headset to a smartphone to Google Glass. You can connect to VR by buying an additional headset, but the connection is slow and doesn’t let you interact with much.

More powerful devices are called cyberdecks. They let you enter VR and allow you to surreptitiously gain access to and modify other devices. It also lets you control how others see you in the Matrix – your VR avatar and the icons of the matrix connected items you’re holding can be masked to look like something else. Alternatively, you could be invisible to a cursory inspection by “running silent”.

A limiting factor is noise, which scales with the distance from the object or server you’re hacking.

What's it actually like to use the matrix? Well -- the matrix looks like a giant, featureless gridded plane. Giant buildings rest on the plane and float in the air. Points of light move from building to building. Travelling to the buildings – hosts – is instantaneous, but you can only see them if you have a cyberdeck or if you have access to – a “mark” on – that particular host.

(Honestly there is a lot of stuff on the Matrix but it makes even less sense if you know any real-life computing so I am going to be explicit with respect to what it can do, and very vague when describing exactly how it works.)

Further reading:

History: https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/249v0q/history_101_data_nexus/

Timeline: http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/Shadowrun_timeline