The Shadowrun Timeline

Lore & Background

Before the Awakening, the 1980s and 1990s of the Shadowrun world were a grim, magicless cyberpunk era: megacorporations like the Weyland-Consortium and Ares held sway over governments, and the streets were a landscape of chrome implants, synthetic food, and corporate espionage. The social contract had effectively dissolved into a corporate feudalism where citizenship was a subscription and dissent was a breach of contract.

The Awakening shattered that order. Magic surged back into the world, and with it came the re-emergence of metahuman lineages that had been suppressed or hidden for generations. Elves, orcs, dwarves, and trolls walked openly for the first time in centuries, and the old magical traditions — dragon bloodlines, shamanic rites, the Unseen Council's quiet stewardship — reasserted themselves against the machine logic of the corps. The Second Rebirth, a later stabilization of magical forces, further solidified the new reality and made the coexistence of technology and sorcery a permanent feature of daily life.

By the 2070s, the world is a patchwork of corporate enclaves, independent city-states, and tribal territories. Shadowrunners operate in the gaps: hired by corps, by street gangs, by metahuman nations, or by individuals, to do the jobs no one official will touch. The timeline is not a settled history but an ongoing contest between those who would control the new magical-cybernetic order and those who would survive within it.

In Their Own Story

The rain over Seattle tasted like copper and ozone. Kira wiped the condensation off her visor and watched the Weyland-Consortium tower bleed neon into the grey sky, its logo a slow pulse above the waterline. She'd been running jobs in this city for six years, long enough to know that the towers didn't care about the people sleeping in the undercity, and the undercity didn't care about the towers. You just picked a side, took the credstick, and tried to come home.

Tonight the job was simple on paper: a data shard, a dead-drop, a three-minute window before the corp's ICE scrambled the whole block. In practice, it meant threading a corporate kill-team through a market where a troll shaman was mid-ritual, and hoping the old man's wards held long enough for her to slip past. She checked the charge on her smartgun, felt the familiar hum of her cyberdeck behind her eyes, and exhaled. The shard was in the briefcase. The shard was always the easy part.

The hard part was the part after: the look in her contact's eyes when he paid, the way he'd already be planning the next job before she'd finished walking to the exit. The timeline moved. The corps built. The runners ran. And somewhere in the static between the two, the magic kept breathing, patient and indifferent, watching the whole machine grind on.

Reader's Guide

The Shadowrun Timeline is not a single campaign but the chronological framework within which every Shadowrun story — tabletop or video game — is set. Understanding its major eras is essential for apprecimating how each game positions its narrative.

Pre-Awakening (1980s–2030): The world is a purely technological cyberpunk. Megacorporations dominate; magic is a myth. This era provides the backstory for why the corporate structures are so entrenched and why the Awakening was so disruptive. It frames the social tensions that persist in later eras.

The Awakening and its aftermath (2030s–2040s): Magic returns. Metahumans re-emerge. Governments fracture. Corporate power is challenged by dragon bloodlines, the Unseen Council, and tribal nations. This is the era of chaos and reordering, and it explains the political landscape players encounter in later settings.

The Second Rebirth and the modern era (2040s–2070s): Magic stabilizes. The world finds a new, unstable equilibrium. This is the era in which most Shadowrun video games are set. Shadowrun: Dragon Fall takes place in Seattle during this period, pitting runners against corporate and criminal factions in a city still scarred by the transition. Shadowrun: Hong Kong extends the setting to a different geopolitical context, exploring how the timeline's forces play out in an Asian megacity.

Each game and tabletop campaign draws on specific tensions from this chronology — corporate overreach, metahuman identity, the ethics of augmentation, the cost of freelance violence — to build its own narrative while remaining grounded in the shared history.

Did You Know?

• The 2007 Shadowrun video game was developed by SSI (Strategic Simulations, Inc.), a studio long associated with classic strategy and simulation titles.
• Harebrained Schemes, the developer behind Shadowrun: Dragon Fall and Shadowrun: Hong Kong, is a Vancouver-based studio that also created the tactical RPG Shadow Tactics.
• In the tabletop setting, 'shadowrunners' are deliberately an illegitimate profession — the term itself implies operating in the shadows of the law, hired for jobs no corporation or government will officially acknowledge.
• The franchise's core conceit — that fantasy elements (dragons, elves, magic) coexist with hard cyberpunk technology (cyberware, AI, ICE) — was a deliberate design choice to merge two genres that were traditionally kept s