Style

This is the tone document, and it's for everybody at the table rather than just whoever is writing pages. Three questions it answers: what register are we in, how do people talk, and how do we portray a real city and the people in it.

Nothing here is a secret. If a scene at the table doesn't feel like the campaign, this page is probably where the mismatch is.

The register

Anime action, comic-book science, and consequences that stick around. Those three dials are the campaign's voice, and the first one is the loudest.

• Anime action is the visual and combat grammar. Silhouette-readable characters, signature gear, rooftop chases in rain, the beat where somebody takes their coat off before it starts, mooks who break and run, and the occasional one-on-one everybody else stops to watch. Fights are composed, not simulated.
• Comic-book science is the causality: radioactive sludge is far more likely to produce ninja turtles than radiation poisoning. The sludge makes monsters, not dosimeter readings, and there's a section on it below.
• Consequences that stick are the quiet dial. They aren't what scenes are made of; they're what a loud scene costs you later. A name in a public record, a flag on a file, a contract up for review, somebody who now knows what you look like. A little of it keeps the action from being weightless. A lot of it turns the session into an afternoon at a permit office, so keep it to a beat or two, arriving after the fun rather than instead of it.

Nobody gets shot for filling in a form wrong, and nobody shoots their way out of a form either. That's the balance, not a third genre.

Why the Japanese corporations are everywhere

Deliberate, and it's a genre decision. Five of the eight megacorps are Japanese, which over-represents them relative to any plausible economics, and we keep it because it earns us the anime action vocabulary: corporate strike teams with a look, the Red Samurai as an image rather than a stat block, Mitsuhama's Zero Zone as a promise the table can feel, arcologies, neon, rain on a tower plaza. That vocabulary is most of what makes a Shadowrun fight fun to describe, and the Japanacorps are where it lives.

That makes the characterisation discipline more important rather than less. Taking the action cues does not license taking the 1980s cultural cues that came bundled with them. So:

• Corporations get the aesthetic. People don't get a personality assigned by nationality. Mitsuhama can field a strike team out of a Bubblegum Crisis storyboard. The Japanese characters the crew actually talks to are individuals with jobs, and no more inscrutable than anybody else in a boardroom.
• No honour-culture dialogue, no restored-emperor mysticism, no inscrutability. Those are the parts our version cut; see the portrayal audit in the GM notes.
• The aesthetic is anime's, which is Japanese artists' work, and we're borrowing a visual language rather than making a claim about a country. If a description would work as a frame of animation, good. If it only works as a statement about what Japanese people are like, cut it.

Short version: steal the storyboard, not the stereotype.

Comic-book science

Radioactive sludge is far more likely to produce ninja turtles than radiation poisoning. That is the causality of this setting.

The Green Tide is a catastrophe, and the register of the catastrophe is strange rather than clinical. What comes out of El Infierno is changelings, things in the channels that shouldn't be, paracritters where no paracritter has business being, plants that grow wrong, and people who are different in ways no clinic can name. What does not come out of it is a session spent tracking dose exposure.

Rules of thumb:

• Nobody at this table wants a dosimetry subsystem. Contamination is a condition of a place (masks on a bad wind, fenced ground, don't drink that), not a resource to track per character.
• Consequences are mutagenic, magical or weird before they are medical. If something has to go wrong with a person's body, make it interesting and visible rather than a slow decline. A slow decline is real life and it does not play.
• Grief is allowed to be real even when the physics isn't. A million people live inside the cordon and somebody's mother died of it. The science is four-colour; the loss is not a joke.
• Same licence applies everywhere else. Magic is not a physics system, cyberware is not a medical simulation, and the Matrix does not need to be a network diagram.

The voice

Fiche keeps this wiki, so the pages about the world are written by somebody in it: second person to the crew, opinionated, occasionally wrong, and thin in the places where they wouldn't write something down. The table's own documents (this one, Homebrew, Table Agreements) are ours rather than theirs.

Slang goes in lightly and only the nouns. Nuyen, credstick, deck, trodes, stack, street doc, Mr. Johnson. Chummer and omae are things people say out loud, not things anybody writes in a note, so they belong at the table rather than on a page.

The full writing guide, including the prose habits we're trying to avoid, is a GM document.

Vernacular

Slang does more work than description. A character who says chummer has been placed without a paragraph. Use it lightly (a couple of terms a scene, not a dialect), and never gloss it in-fiction.

Canon street slang, period-right for 2053–2060:

Our local coinages, Los Angeles 2060:

Slurs exist and are handled per the portrayal audit in the GM notes. Trog, keeb, halfer, dandelion eater are in the setting's vocabulary. They come out of named NPCs' mouths with intent, never as table banter and never as scene-setting colour. If a slur isn't doing characterisation work, it isn't in the scene.

Portrayal

Two habits that decide how the antagonists and the city read, and they come up weekly. Content limits are a different conversation and they live in session zero under lines and veils.

1. Villainy is institutional. Corporations, agencies, contracts, party machines. Never a people, never a religion, never a neighbourhood.
2. Name the place. Real Los Angeles institutions with addresses. Somebody at this table will check.