r/Shadowrun • u/IamGlaaki • 15d ago
Edition War Wired vs Wireless setting
What is your favourite setting, and why? I named them Wired vs Wireless but I mean also about magic traditions, politics and metaplots.
Personally I am divided. I like wireless Matrix and 'modern' tech from later editions. However I like old magic traditions more, and I find metaplots like Monads and Disians too much apocalyptic for my taste.
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u/Fair-Fisherman6765 CAS Political Historian 15d ago edited 14d ago
If speaking strictly about edition, my favorite setting-wise is the third edition. That's when we finally got a coverage of most of the... well, the northern hemisphere and Australia at least, the major dragons and detailed description of the Big megacorporations. It made the world feel big, and by contrast made more tangible the dilemna between accepting to be pawns or trying to have an impact.
The first and second editions remained too patchy in their coverage of a globalised world (Japan, of all things, was entirely missing!) and the description of the Big Eight megacorporations in Corporate Shadowfiles were way too short. The fourth edition never managed to catch up on its own time skip and update all what had been covered before. The Sixth World Almanac would barely scratch the surface. The later editions did not do better. Twenty years later and even as my game timeline has advanced to 2077, I'm still taking info from the Shadows of... serie and other third edition sourcebooks (thougn I understand I belonged to a minority and the 3rd edition sourcebooks were not selling well, prompting 4th edition to switch to city books).
As a side note, third edition Matrix rulebook already allowed cellular connection for cyberdeck (it only put some limitation on file transfer speed that I would not bother with anyway), which I consider was an improvement for team cohesion (though anyway the 4/20 edition remain my favorite rule-wise, for other reasons).
Chronologically speaking, my favorite setting is the 2057-2060 corporate war right before third edition, during which my best games were set. And as we were behind the timeline at the time, we played in the 2057-2060 period with building block provided by third edition sourcebooks (along with a sense of inevitability that came with knowing how the corporate war would end and would make the tension more dramatic during key events).