The Sprawl Survival Guide is exactly the sort of science fiction content I always claim to want, a ground-level view of the most excruciating minutiae imaginable - what is it like to buy a bus ticket, how do people shop for groceries (and the more you can imply about the extant agricultural infrastructure, the better), what are the schools like, how do people consume popular entertainment (and yes, I will take the behind-the-scenes industry shop talk in the process), what is the current state of health care regulations, etc and suchforth, et al ad infinitum. . .
And I was absolutely right to want that, because the Sprawl Survival Guide was positively delightful. I feel completely vindicated right now.
Although, it would be a smidge dishonest for me to act like I learned something new here. I first read this book 20 years ago, and I distinctly remember, 18 or 19 years ago, writing a forum post to the effect of, "This is one of my all-time favorite rpg supplements. I love how it goes over the picayune details of Shadowrun's culture and society. Liking this sort of thing is going to be a part of my personality now."
The question I have to deal with now is whether the book holds up. Is it still one of my favorites? And that's a bit of a thinker.
I still very much enjoy this type of book. And of the books I own, Sprawl Survival Guide is the one most like this type of book. I appreciate and respect its curation of subject matter (for the most part, some of the stuff was a little too "this is criminal information, directed at criminals" for my taste, undercutting the book's best feature - offering a rare glimpse into the mindset of Shadowrun's normies). I enjoyed reading it, even the parts I think should have gone into a different supplement.
But I've changed. My interests nowadays trend more towards the esoteric or, failing that, towards performative spectacle. I still really want this type of book, but I want it to be about Eclipse Phase's chromosphere-dwelling Surya, or Champoor, the Nighted City from Exalted.
Which is to say, Sprawl Survival Guide remains a top Shaowrun supplement, but Shadowrun as a whole has slipped down my list of top rpg settings. Not through any fault of its own, mind you, but just because (3rd edition at least) is a vision of the future that feels . . . aged.
Of course, this is the inevitable fate of all sci-fi, and I wouldn't necessarily say that Sprawl Survival Guide has aged particularly badly. Yeah, it does the thing that all fin de millenaire sci-fi does where it gets the shape of our basic information infrastructure wrong (somewhere along the line, I've lost the ability to relate culturally to pirate television broadcasts, despite the fact that they were objectively badass), and one of the in-character sections is narrated by "a big-shot travel agent," and for some reason it thinks that the only reason our major railways would have to avoid switching to monorails is that they're "dinosaurs." But except for the monorail thing (which, I'm sure, even in 2003, informed people would have told you was wrong) that's just standard retro-future stuff.
Ironically, it's the stuff they get right that's more alienating. Online shopping, the internet of things, your personal electronics spying on you for major corporations - this is stuff that used to feel like sci-fi sizzle and in now just completely mundane. And that feeling is something that this book's particular brand of "everyday sci-fi" can't quite recover from. At one point, one of the Shadowland commentators is interrupting an IoT sales pitch to talk about corporate spyware and another commentor, called Skeptic, replies "Oh, please. There's a limit, you know. Next you'll be telling me the faucet dispenses microscopic tracking devices with my water."
And it's like, one thing if you're talking about fanciful day-after-tomorrow technology "oh, they think the microphone in their futuristic voice-activated refrigerator is going to act as a de facto surveillance device and report back to the manufacturer to help them assemble a more accurate advertising profile, Skeptic is right, that's too paranoid. People would never stand for it." But it's a conspiracy theory that hits differently against the backdrop of our everyday reality. There's some compelling anecdotal evidence that this does happen and the corporations' defense is just . . . that the behavioral profiling they do through other data streams is so uncannily accurate that they don't need to listen to your microphone. So Skeptic is dismissing a theory that, best case scenario, is only slightly more cynical than confirmed reality.
Which isn't a great place for a cyberpunk setting to be. Another pertinent example is the section on health insurance. This book was written pre-ACA, and so technically they have a slightly more cyberpunk healthcare system than us, based purely on recapitulating their present, but they don't properly capture the bleak horror of the health insurance industry. "Sometimes the corp grunts don't have it so good either - health insurance companies have everybody by the short hairs and they know it. They're not supposed to cancel policies when people get sick with something expensive, but they've been known to do it."
Yeah, that's cynical. Yeah, it paints a picture of ruthless capitalist excess. But you left out the part where they use an algorithm to automatically deny claims and then have a corrupt doctor sign off on those denials, forcing the sick and dying to pursue costly and stressful legal action to avoid being sent into bankruptcy, despite doing everything "the system" told them was necessary. Or the part where medical expenses are the driving force behind corporate America's hijacking of the generational transfer of wealth, forcing the vast majority of people into a permanent state of economic precarity.
And this normally the part where I take a step back from being so cynical and ask myself if I really want an rpg supplement to get into this kind of political quagmire. But this time, I think . . . the answer might be . . . yes?
These are, in fact, some of the game's core ideas. There is a real thematic tension between "corporate espionage in the form of your Alexa recording everything you say" and "corporate espionage in the form of heavily-armed mercenaries busting into a competitor's office and rummaging through their computer files."
Or between "a blue-collar worker delays seeking medical attention for a suspicious-looking mole (because they can afford the copay if it turns out to be nothing, but not the deductible and out-of-pocket if it turns out to need expensive tests and/or treatment, but if it's nothing, it would be better to wait for it to clear up on its own, and thus the financially responsible move would be to wait until it's clear that it's not nothing before getting the doctor involved)" and "half-conversion cyborg gets elective surgery to install retractable roller skates into their feet."
It's funny. After reading Target: Wasteland, I mused about the possibility of seeing the Shadowrun setting from the perspective of the winners, and this book is as close as we've gotten, but it has also made apparent to me the fact that shadowrunners are not the losers. They're actually in a poorly-defined in-between place (if only there were some metaphor to properly capture this state of not-quite-light and not-quite-dark) where they're functionally powerless next to the unaccountable capital that employs them, but, as the no-questions-asked hatchet men of the elite, they probably make enough money to avoid the most depressing parts of the system.
Which, incidentally, makes the lifestyle mechanics a little dubious. Not entirely bad, mind you, just . . . of questionable utility. Like, what's the story purpose of allowing PCs to play at the "Street" or "Squatter" (or even "Low," really) level when they're walking around with half a million nuyen in chrome (or a level of magical talent that would let the write their own ticket at any university in the country or special-forces-level combat and infiltration skills, etc)? Obviously, mechanically, it's because the player wants to save money for more widgets and they don't mind the GM describing their character's lodgings as a slum. But when it comes to the narrative . . . you can tell the first part of a "fall from grace" or "risen from humble beginnings" story, but you can only stay there for so long before it looks like a stagnant character arc.
Luckily, this book provides a pretty good hack to the lifestyle rules. It separates character lifestyle into six separate tracks - Area (i.e. the quality of the neighborhood), Security, Entertainment, Furnishings, Space, and Comforts. This reintroduces a lot of the bookkeeping that the Lifestyle system was originally intended to abstract away, but has the advantage of allowing for more nuanced depictions of a character's lifestyle. Now, you can live in a massive warehouse in the commercial district (high Space, medium Area, low everything else. Or a cramped downtown apartment in a building with a doorman (high Area and Security, low Space). Or, more relevantly to the discussion at hand, in an absolutely swinging pad in the middle of the old neighborhood. You know, real gangster shit.
I think, from a fictional perspective, that's probably the sweet spot for shadowrunners - successful criminals with a lot of cash and a lot of swag, but no ability to permanently buy themselves a ticket off the grind. It doesn't make much sense to me for them to be doing this out of true desperation, at least not more than once or twice. If running the shadows buys you the same lifestyle as a cashier at Stuffer Shack, you're probably better off trying to work at Stuffer Shack.
I mean, I'm sure there are SINless criminals who find their way to that economic niche - muggers of opportunity, petty drug dealers, etc - but I'm not sure they'd make for an exciting roleplaying game. You could potentially do some pretty funny satire along these lines - make minimum wage, no benefits, getting shot at for 60 hours a week, on behalf of the world's richest people - but the line as a whole would have to lean into it more.
That's kind of a weakness of Shadowrun, as a game. It's steeped in genre. It exists because it was fun to imagine mixing genres. But it never really embraces genre as a mode of play. To wit - the reason shadowrunners are special, the thing that carves them out a criminal niche and makes them valuable to the megacorporations, is the fact that they lack System Identification Numbers. They are the ultimate in deniable assets, untraceable by the system because they were never officially registered as existing at all. And yeah, okay, that's a good near-future thriller trope . . . or it would be, if the game rules didn't make getting fake IDs a huge pain in the ass. And even if you get one, they're in constant danger of being discovered (like, seriously, it's a coin flip each and every time someone checks your ID, except that the high end of character ID ratings overlaps with the average rating of identity verification devices).
Getting on plane requires a SIN. Shadowrunners going international is an intended mode of play (methods of travel get a whole chapter to themselves). Getting arrested at the airport should be an extremely rare way of ending an adventure. This all adds up to the notion that acquiring and using a fake ID is a casual activity for a career criminal. Just hop on down to the crime mall and buy yourself some fake passports in bulk, because you never want to use the same one on two different jobs. But that's not how the game works, because its fundamental design philosophy does not allow things to be simple just because it'd be convenient for the story. If something seems hard (like fooling a sophisticated computer network with fabricated data) then the rules have to reflect that it's hard.
Oh, wait, I was building to something before I got distracted. Sprawl Survival Guide is the closest we get to seeing Shadowrun's version of capitalism from the perspective of an average person, and it's pretty great, but it doesn't quite understand the opportunity and the responsibility it's been given. This is where the rubber meets the road, re: the setting's overall cyberpunk satire . . . and it misses the mark. There is a certain level of cynicism, and of social critique, but it's unclear what the game as a whole is trying to say.
And I think, regrettably, it's because the game as whole is not trying to say anything at all. That's why I can no longer count Sprawl Survival Guide as one of my all-time favorite supplements. I love that it focuses on small details. I truly believe those details are vital for making a fictional world feel alive. But now that I've been given almost everything I could have possibly asked for, I can't help but notice the world's wasted potential.
Let's call it five gold stars, with the understanding that on this blog, the stars go all the way up to plutonium.
Ukss Contribution: The freight trains of the 2060s, perhaps as a result of stubbornly refusing to become monorails, still have people hopping on and hitching rides cross-country. I'm sure this happens wherever there are unattended train tracks, but it feels to me like a timeless bit of Americana. I'm going to include it out of a perverse sense of patriotism.