Off with a Bang
The world changed forever on December 24th, 2011. At least, changed from humanity’s perspective. With the confirmed sighting of an actual, living dragon flying through the skies—by hundreds of terrified passengers of a Japenese bullet train—a new age begain: an age of magic.
Decades before, corporations had already expanded their control and command over governments and federal lands, exploiting the earth for short-term profits and stakeholder gains, having been granted expansive contracts that also included the right to maintain, govern, and defend their holdings as they saw fit.
Environmentalists and other anti-corporate activists had been rounded up and put into re-education camps, which ironically spared them from the VITAS plague which ravaged the world shortly after. All over the world, deformed children were being born to “normal” parents, the global news media calling these unique babies “elves” and “dwarfs”, their appearance reminiscent of creatures found only in folklore and myth.
And then the dragon appeared.
Corporations around the globe struggled to understand the new reality that had so forcefully made itself apparent: magic was real, and it could be wielded. In fact they negelected to even understand that within their own re-education camps it was a growing force, fueled by will and drive. Daniel Howling Coyote demanded the camps be demolished and the corporations’ land grants rescinded. Those in power laughed in their faces.
The mountains exploded.
As the US moved to stamp out Native Americans and those who sided with them, Mount Hood, Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Adams simultaneously erupted with cataclysmic fury. Mother Nature had announced whose side she was on, and even the most skeptical became believers.
The Treaty of Denver was signed in 2018, wherein the United States and Canada recognized the sovereignity of the collected Native American Nations over almost all of western North America. The maps had started to change, but they were far from done. Eventually the weakend civil governments combined, creating the United Canadian and American States. Seizing the opportunity, the American South ceceded, forming the Confederated American States largely along historic battle lines.
The return of magic wasn’t done with its changes either.
On April 30th, 2021, one out of three people suddenly fell victim to horrific bodily transformations, twisting and metamorphizing into hideous humanoid shapes. For some, the process was short and mild—at least physically. Others spent days or weeks in the hospital, writhing in agony. The media dubbed it “Goblinization Day”, and of those who survived, two new races had joined elves and dwarves on the world stage: orks and trolls.
Goblinization didn’t just affect the world once and stop however; while it seemed that elves and dwarves were born, some “regular” children goblinized during puberty, with the pain, terror, and social ostricization cycles becoming facts of modern life. Race riots spanned the globe, stopped only by an even more deadily strain of VITAS raging through every population on the planet, further destabilizing communities and social structures.
As magic became gradually more accepted within society, technology continued to leap forward, medicine blurring the line between (meta)human and machine. When an unprecedented computer virus struck the global internet in 2029, it ground the world to a halt. By the time the virus was defeated, governments had crumbled and new resource wars had begun. Corporations siezed the opportunity to fill the voids and took control over even more aspects of daily life, creating a coporate-controlled Matrix to re-wire the planet.
The stage was set for the rest of the 21st century.
The Modern Day
Over the next thirty years technology continued to advance, hostilities between metahuman races continued to flare up, cities and countries rose and fell, and corporations waged private wars against one another using “deniable assets” called shadowrunners as they jockeyed for position on the world stage.
The great dragon Dunkelzahn was elected president of the UCAS in 2056, but was assassinated on his inauguration night. Rumors continue to abound about forces that could wield the power and tactical acumen to kill a dragon, but the largest and farthest-reaching effect of his presidency was the establishment of the Draco Foundation to execute his sizable—and occasionally oddly-specific—will, which continues to make waves even into the present.
Humanity didn’t have time to process the sudden existence of Artificial Intelligence due to the passing of Halley’s Comet, which caused wild magic surges across the globe, including a new rash of unexplained genetic expression, first witnessed en masse on Goblinization Day. Luckily, as the comet retreated back into the cosmos the magical flare-up seemed to pass, though many were left scarred and wounded in its wake.
2064 brought the second global Matrix crash, and this time a new, wireless world was developed to replace the bulky cables of yesteryear. Records and files from companies and governments across the globe were lost, and while many lamented the chaos, some who found life under corporate citizenship unbearable took advantage and escaped into the surging throng outside the whitewashed walls.
Several dragons rampaged across the Americas, in apparent retaliation for mistreatment of their brethren at the hands of corporations. Anti-dragon sentiment surged as the death toll rose, and the Great Dragons held a conclave to stem the violence on all sides. Eventually, peace between metahumanity and the great beasts was restored.
Now, on the eve of 2075, the world seems to wait for what calamity, technological development, or great leap forward the new year would bring. Life for the common citizen—and those without affiliation or formal allegeance at all—plods along, so many focusing on the tasks and troubles directly ahead of them to impact plots and schemes that ripple under the surface of the world stage.
Shadowrunners however… well that’s a different story altogether.