Character Creation

Lore & Background

In the Shadowrun setting, every runner is a product of the sprawl: a metatype born into a world of megacorporations, matrix ghosts, and dragon-ruled districts. Character creation formalises that origin. The metatype choice—Human, Elf, Dwarf, Orc, Troll, or one of the later-added types—fixes the character's physical and social starting point, with each race carrying fixed attribute modifiers that reflect how they interact with a world not built for them. An Orc starts with a body built for violence but a social life shaped by prejudice; an Elf gains a longer lifespan and a different relationship to magic, while a Tinker carries the cultural weight of a synthetic origin. These modifiers are not optional flavour; they are the mechanical expression of a world that sorts people by biology and origin.

The 150-point budget is the core constraint. Every point spent on a higher Logic score is a point not spent on a combat skill, a cyberlimb, or a higher Essence. This forces the player to commit to a concept early: a street samurai in heavy cyberware, a mage burning Essence for spell slots, a technomancer weaving code into the Matrix, or a social runner living off Charisma and Intuition. The cyberware–magic dichotomy is the single most distinctive mechanical fork in the game. Installing cyberware drains Essence, and in most editions a character who has committed deeply to one path is mechanically locked out of the other. This is not a minor trade-off; it is a philosophical choice about whether the runner's identity is anchored in the flesh-and-soul or in the machine-and-code.

The lifestyle budget, a unique Shadowrun element, requires the player to declare where they live, what they eat, and how they maintain their gear before the first roll is made. A runner in a corporate penthouse in Seattle spends their monthly income on rent and security; a street-level decker in a Neo-Kyoto capsule hotel scrapes by. This budget is not optional flavour—it determines what the character can afford to maintain, repair, and replace, and it feeds directly into the economic tension that drives the setting's plot: in Shadowrun, everything has a price, and the runner is always one bad month away from the street.

In Their Own Story

The neon bled through the blinds in strips of magenta and blue. Kael sat cross-legged on the concrete floor of the capsule hotel, a battered notepad open on his knee, and stared at the column of numbers. One hundred and fifty points. He'd spent forty-three on a cyberarm he didn't yet have, another thirty on Reaction and Agility because the last job in the sprawl had taught him that slow meant dead. He had maybe sixty left, and the mage at the table across the bar was already laughing, rolling her d6s with the easy confidence of someone who'd poured her whole budget into Essence and a single devastating spell.

He pressed his thumb to the scar above his left eye—the one from the Arasaka security drone, three years ago, two districts east—and wrote 'Background: Street' in the margin. No corporate sponsorship. No guild. Just the sprawl, the rain, and the next mark on the board. He circled the word *Troll* at the top of the page, underlined it twice, and started allocating. Outside, a dragon's shadow passed over the skyline and the neon flickered, and for a moment the whole city looked like a character sheet someone had left in the rain.

Reader's Guide

Character creation in Shadowrun follows a fixed sequence that the Game Master and player work through before play begins. First, the player selects a metatype. Each metatype carries a set of fixed starting modifiers to the 12 core attributes (for example, Trolls receive bonuses to Body and Strength but a penalty to Charisma; Elves gain Intuition and Magic bonuses). These modifiers are applied before the point pool is spent and are not optional.

Next, the player allocates the 150-point starting budget. Attributes cost points to raise above their metatype-adjusted baseline, and the cost curve is non-linear: each additional point of an attribute costs more than the last. This discourages min-maxing a single stat and rewards balanced, concept-driven builds. The player then chooses a background (e.g., Street, Corporate, Academic, Military), which grants a small set of starting skill bonuses and narrative context.

Skills are purchased in tiers: base skills are cheaper, specialty skills cost more, and the total skill budget is a portion of the remaining points. Gear, cyberware, magic items, and resonance programs are bought from the same pool. In most editions, cyberware and magic are mutually exclusive paths at high levels: installing cyberware reduces the Essence attribute, and Essence is the resource that fuels spells and magical abilities. A character who has spent heavily on chrome will find their magical capacity severely diminished, and vice versa.

Finally, the player sets a lifestyle budget, declaring monthly income and expenses for housing, food, maintenance, and gear upkeep. This is a mechanical constraint: a runner whose lifestyle costs exceed their expected income will struggle to maintain equipment between missions.

What distinguishes Shadowrun creation from other d6 or cyberpunk TTRPGs is the tightness of the budget combined with the cyberware–magic fork. In a d20 cyberpunk game, you can usually buy a cyberarm and still cast spells. In Shadowrun, that choice is structurally expensive and often impossible. The 150-point cap means every decision is a subtraction from another, and the metatype modifiers mean two players starting with identical concepts can end up with mechanically different characters simply because one is an Elf and the other is a Human. The lifestyle budget adds an economic layer that most TTRPGs omit entirely, grounding the character in a world where rent is real and the next payday is always uncertain.

Did You Know?

• The 150-point starting budget has remained the standard across multiple Shadowrun editions, making it one of the most consistent mechanical constants in the franchise's history.
• In most Shadowrun editions, installing cyberware reduces the Essence attribute, and because Essence is the resource that fuels magic, a character who commits heavily to chrome is mechanically locked out of being a powerf
• The lifestyle budget, a required part of character creation, is a near-unique element in TTRPG design: it forces players to declare monthly income and expenses for housing, food, and gear maintenance before the first ses
• Shadowrun has passed through several publishers over its history, including FASA Corporation, WizKids, Catalyst Game Labs, and Free League Publishing, yet the core point-buy creation structure has persisted across all of