The year is 2060 and shit has gotten weird.

About 40 years ago, magic reentered the world. All the things humankind had believed to be legends and myth, turned out to just be ancient histories of a time long forgotten. Animals transformed into mythical creatures as human beings also changed, giving birth to new kinds of humanoids dubbed Metahumans. The Meta's were your figures of fantasy novels, orcs and trolls and elves and dwarves and more. For some, it was a more unseen kind of change that began to manifest itself. Magic. Suddenly, those with the right talent could learn to control unseen forces of energy in order to create spells. Global society was immediately thrown into chaos.

In the intervening years much has happened. Most nations have fallen and risen once more, or else disappeared forever. International Megacorporations now serve as de facto rulers of the world, playing an endless global game of chess against their rivals. These games never end well for anyone, least of all the folks on the street. After years of brutal racial divides among humans and metahumans, most have settled into an uneasy coexistence. It's the Megacorps that fuck them over most of all, not some troll that runs a food cart down the way, or the mage that does parlor tricks for tips. The constant question of daily life is do you submit to the Megacorps, become a wageslave living in walled little arcologies like ants, or do you take matters into your own hands?

Shadowrunners were the inevitable consequence of this question. The Shadows are the dark spaces outside of the corporate web, the cracks where certain people with certain skills are in very high demand. Runners work for themselves, a tempting concept in this strange new world, and bet their lives on their skills. They do the work that the Megacorps can't do officially, or the work that others need done to the 'untouchable' corps themselves. The sort of jobs those are depends on one's expertise and their moral compass. The likelihood of them living very long depends entirely on their intuition. Being easily deniable, easily covered-up, and easily replaced is no recipe for a long life. But, it is a life of freedom in a world of chains.

The Big Easy. The Big Sleazy. Queen City. The Birthplace of Jazz, and Lee Harvey Oswald. New Orleans has always been a city of vice and exuberance and magic, long before it ever came back to the world. In 2060, the city is a dysfunctional metropolis at war with itself, in a crisis of identities. Mardi Gras still rages through the historic French Quarter even while modernization demolishes the rest of the city's culture and history. New Orleans has become the major hub of trade in the Gulf of Mexico, leading to the influx of Megacorps trying to unofficially claim the city for themselves. The local government is as corrupt as it has ever been, maybe even more so, and bends over backwards for anyone with enough bribe money. For the actual locals of New Orleans, there is a unifying animosity for the foreign Megacorps. Outside of the corporate zones, the mafias are the real authority. They oversee the many street gangs in their territory and dabble in local magic to varying degrees.

Those that can tap into magic are called Awakened, but the laws of magic are only just being understood even after decades of trying. What is known is that it comes from a variety of belief systems, but the awakened themselves fit into three general molds.

Technology has expanded in leaps and bounds since the early 21st century. Prosthesis and robotics have gone beyond merely replicating human limbs, and now seek to improve upon them. Shadowrunners are notorious for their gleaming pieces of 'Chrome', upgrading themselves like a street racer might upgrade a car. These upgrades come in endless possibilities, from huge metal arms tipped with razor-blades to an upgraded immune system that filters out common toxins. The most common cyberware is that of the Datajack, a neural port in one's body that enables the easy connection into the Matrix.

These upgrades do come at a cost besides Nuyen, however. For every bit of one's body that is replaced with some metal and plastic abomination, their Essence is also lost. Essence is the term for one's ability to connect to the forces of magic. For non-Awakened this can be a trivial concern, since they can't truly tap into such things in the first place. For the Awakened this is a horrible experience, slowly cutting themselves off from their most precious sense.

Cyberware can be graded in these ascending tiers of quality: Basic, Alphaware, Betaware, Deltaware.

In the year 2029, a cyber plague swept through every bit of networked tech in the entire world. The Crash Virus, as it'd come to be known, would send the entire planet back into the stone age in short order. Unable to use the internet, anything connected to it and anything with any manner of complex software, led to the quick collapse of entire economies. While the virus was eventually eradicated, or so we're told, metahumanity had to start over completely. So, the Matrix was born.

Bearing only the most surface-level resemblance to the Keanu Reeves movie of the same name, the Matrix is how all networked devices now function. It can be seen as a startlingly real virtual reality simulation, using the SimSense technology that allows living beings to interface directly with the code itself. Cyberdecks are portable computers, essentially, that allow Deckers to run complex programs from within the Matrix. Once inside, skilled Deckers can see the code as tangible objects, change certain aspects to their liking, and fight against the protection software trying to stop them.