Shadowrun/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • No Export for You: The Mega-CD version was never released outside of Japan, and was the last game ever released for the Mega-CD in any region.
  • Shout-Out:
    • In the 4E Sourcebook Runner Havens, there's a chart of the top-grossing movies in Seattle. Among them: I Hate It Here, starring W. Ellis, produced by Global Frequency Studios; Ninja Princess, starring M. Shiranui; and The Pleasure Dome, starring E. Jarvis, produced by Smash Trideo Entertainment.
    • Also two of the top selling simsense in the 20th Anniversary rule book is, American Gods and... The Road. On that same list is another shout out to Transmetropolitan, with Spider J: A Half True Story by Ellis Alt.
    • Buckaroo Banzai
      • The supplement Tir Tairngire has "Frag you and the horse you rode in on" and the Lone Star supplement has "Frag you and the hog you rode in on". Both are a reference to John Bigboote's line "Damn John Whorfin and the horse he rode in on!".
      • Supplements Sprawl Sites and Contacts. One of the Club Owner's quotes is "Look, I don't care what you done someplace else. When you play my club, you're just another act and I expect to get what I paid for." In the film the nightclub owner tells the Hong Kong Cavaliers "When you play my joint, you're just another act. I want some music outta you characters."
    • Bored of the Rings. Virtual Realities 2.0 mentions a decker who has IC "lusting for her chitlins" (trying to kill her). In the novel, when Legolam and Gimlet draw weapons and are about to attack each other it says that they're "lusting for each other's chitlins".
    • Robert Heinlein's novels.
      • Virtual Realities 2.0 has a quote by a decker named "Hassan the Assassin" (a character in Starship Troopers had the nickname "Hassan the Assassin").
      • The Neo-Anarchists' Guide to Real Life. The semiballistic and Wolverine Security are taken from the novel Friday.
      • Paranormal Animals of North America. The blood kite is taken directly from Heinlein's Glory Road, including its habit of deliberately attacking arrows in flight and being killed by them. Likewise, the firedrake uses a tactic borrowed from the "dragons" in the same novel: using its fiery breath to fry burrowing mammals inside their burrows and then digging up and eating their burned bodies.
      • 2nd Edition main rules. The Tribal Chief in the Contacts section has as one of his quotes: "I have a fine horse, so who needs a car? A horse is a renewable resource. Have you had any success breeding your car lately?" Tunnel in the Sky has the following line: "...which made horses more practical than helicopters, picks and shovels more useful than bulldozers. Machinery gets out of order and requires a complex technology to keep it going but good old "hayburners" keep right on breeding, cropping grass, and pulling loads."
      • The Tir Tairngire sourcebook refers to the Tir's air traffic control network as "No Sparrow Shall Fall". In Heinlein's novel The Puppet Masters this phrase was used to describe the U.S. air traffic control net, and in his short story "If This Goes On" the Prophet's news network was called the "No-Sparrow-Shall-Fall News Service".
      • Man & Machine: Cyberware mentioned hollowing out a compartment behind the navel as a storage container, which the title character in Friday had.
      • Native American Nations Volume 1 has two. The quote "Vox Populi Vox Dei usually translates as 'My God, how did we get into this mess?'" is from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long section of Time Enough for Love. A Salt Lake City police officer is quoted as saying "Can I do you a service, citizen?" Almost the exact same quote appears in the short stories "Methuselah's Children" and "Coventry".
      • Native American Nations Volume 2 has the quote "Inuit hatred makes the blackest, vilest form of hatred you'll encounter in Seattle seem like mild displeasure in comparison". Stranger in a Strange Land has "Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called a mild distaste".
      • Lone Star. The Watchers are said to "fight like an angry buzz saw". Heinlein's Glory Road says that candidates to become Emperor/Empress of the 20 Universes were trained in personal combat so they could fight like an angry buzz saw. The phrase also appears in the Aztlan supplement.
      • Nigel Findley's supplements often used words and phrases that Heinlein used in his work, such as "yammer", "no huhu" and "cobber" (from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), "slitch" (from Friday) and "biological back pressure" (AKA desire to have sex, from Glory Road). Other writers started doing it too.
      • Denver: The City of Shadows boxed set. Aztecnology places "scuttling charges" in visiting medical vehicles, a reference to the "remote control destruction packs" put in police vehicles in Friday. Also, people use "cubic" as a term for volume, a term taken from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
    • Lone Star.
      • The Princess Bride. The first Fast Response Team was nicknamed "The Brute Squad".
      • Monty Python's Flying Circus. After a riot five rioters were declared "Missing believed pacified". In a Monty Python sketch about curing athletes' foot with dynamite, twelve patients were declared "Missing believed cured".
      • Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge. Members of the Department of Psychology have the nickname "The Grey Men", taken from the villains in Harrison's book. Both groups use psychology to brainwash their victims.
    • 1st and 2nd edition supplements had references to a character named Jetblack being dead. The name is taken from Hotblack Desiato, a character in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series who once spent a year dead for tax reasons.
    • Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel Oath of Fealty.
      • The Neo-Anarchists' Guide to Real Life. A decker describes a security system with weird layered defenses including anesthetic darts to take out unarmored intruders, sleep gas to take out intruders not wearing protective suits and intense heat to make those wearing armor and suits take them off. This set-up is what the Todos Santos arcology in the novel uses to protect its power plant.
      • The Germany Sourcebook mentions the FROMATES, a radical environmentalist terrorist group that originally appeared in this novel. FROMATES stood for FRiends Of Man And The Earth Society.
    • Sprawl Sites
      • One section mentions the Genom Corporation from Bubblegum Crisis.
      • Running Scared (1986). One quote for a plain-clothes cop is "Que hablo Colt Manhunter?" In the film, while plain-clothes cop Danny Costanza is pointing a gun at a criminal he says "Hablo Smith & Wesson?"
    • Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Requiem for Methuselah". Immortal Elves who lived thousands of years before the time the game takes place were the artists known as Rembrandt, Constable, Van Gogh and Grandma Moses. During the Sixth World they painted works in the same style they used in their earlier roles. In the Star Trek episode, the Enterprise crew found unknown works by Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Brahms in Flint's home - works created by Flint himself, since he was an immortal who was the original da Vinci and Brahms.
    • Earthdawn. There were many references to Earthdawn, which is not surprising since it was a prequel to Shadowrun.
      • The Tir Tairngire supplement says that the Tir Tairngire government requires all students to learn creative arts. In Earthdawn, being tainted by a Horror prevented a person from being creative. The leaders of Tir Tairngire were immortal elves who lived during the Earthdawn period and knew that the Horrors would eventually return, so they decided to teach everyone creative arts so it would be easier to identify people who had been Horror tainted.
    • The Germany Sourcebook had an ad with an endorsement from Max Hein•Rügen, a reference to Mark Rein•Hagen of White Wolf Games.
    • The London Sourcebook has a couple.
      • Disney's Mary Poppins. There was an ad for the Dawes, Dawes, Munny Grubb and Banks Fidelity Fiduciary Bank. It mentioned "Self-Amortising Canals", from the song "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank".
      • An ad for "Chauncey's Flower and Garden Shop" (Being There's Chance the Gardener).
    • The Neo-Anarchists' Guide to Real Life
      • Chapter "Dressed to Kill". A decker uses the term "Saturday Night Firefight". This is a reference to the combat system of R. Talsorian Games' original Cyberpunk 2020 boxed set, which was titled "Friday Night Firefight".
      • A decker named Ridley calls a decker named Unicorn "ugly one-horned mule". This was a line from the film Legend, which was directed by Ridley Scott.
    • The logins of various products' shadowtalkers include references to everything from Shakespeare to talk radio hosts to Guys and Dolls.
    • In an episode of the old Wormy comic strip that appeared in Dragon magazine, a mage named Gremorly used "Sons of Thunder!" as an exclamation.
      • Shadowbeat. Concrete Dreams' first music trideo (3D video) was for their song "Sons of Thunder".
      • Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzahn's Secrets. Dunkelzahn's will leaves a bequest to a shadowrunner group named "Sons of Thunder". It's possible that, In-Universe, the group named itself after the Concrete Dreams song.
    • Bug City. Truman Technologies operatives dressed up as Eagle Security officers captured Fuchi-employed gang members, lined them up against a wall and ruthlessly murdered them. This was based on the Real Life 1929 "Saint Valentine's Day Massacre", in which killers hired by Al Capone's gang dressed as police officers, captured members of the North Side gang and executed them.
    • Denver: The City of Shadows boxed set.
      • When talking about the U.S. government's attempt to destroy the former Air Force Academy, a decker named Hicks says that they "should nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." This is a reference to the line Ripley and Corporal Hicks speak in the movie Aliens.
      • A decker uses the phrase "un-mutual", a phrase prominently used in The Prisoner episode "A Change of Mind".
      • Another ad with an endorsement by Max Hein•Rügen (see Germany Sourcebook entry above).
    • Shadowtech. A decker named Kent says that he has cyberware that makes him faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound - a reference to the Superman phrase.
    • Awakenings. A decker named Al Phee is a reference to a character of that name in the Callahan's Bar short story "Have You Heard the One...?"
    • Corporate Enclaves had a reference to The Big Lebowski. One of the ten most influential people in Hollywood is one Joe "The Dude" Kliebermann, an unemployed slob who would be otherwise unremarkable save for his knack for stumbling into incredibly outlandish situations while broadcasting his POV live online.
    • in Runner's Companion, one of the options for Changlings is a Thagomizer tail.


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