The Sixth World

Lore & Background

In Shadowrun cosmology, the world moves through great cycles. The Fifth World was the long age of reason, industry, and the absence of the supernatural—an era that roughly corresponds to our own. The Sixth World began when magic, long dormant, surged back into the fabric of reality. Ley-lines reasserted themselves beneath cities, metahuman lineages that had been suppressed or hidden rose openly, and the old powers of sorcery and shamanism re-entered a world that had built its entire infrastructure on their absence. The result is a society in permanent cognitive dissonance: a surgeon can implant a neural jack while a spirit of the rain coils around a skyscraper's antenna.

Megacorporations, the dominant political and economic force, treat the return of magic as both a resource to be exploited and a variable to be controlled. The Matrix—the vast cybernetic network that undergirds commerce, security, and surveillance—coexists with the astral plane, and the two are not always compatible. In the Street, the unregulated underbelly of the city, runners juggle cyberware, spell components, and corporate contracts in equal measure. Metahuman communities, from elven enclaves to troll strongholds, navigate a world that still, in many institutions, treats them as the other.

The narrative gravity of the Sixth World is not a single villain or prophecy but the grinding friction between these systems. Every story is, at its core, a question of who gets to define the rules when two incompatible logics share the same skyline.

In Their Own Story

The rain on the 40th floor of the Seattle Synergetics tower doesn't fall so much as it is *assigned*—a corporate weather contract keeping the glass clean for the board meeting. Kael, a troll runner with a cracked dermal plate over his left eye, watches it streak the pane from the alley below. His deck hums against his hip, Matrix ghost-light bleeding through his coat. Somewhere above, a senior executive is about to sign a deal that will reroute a ley-line through the residential blocks. The elves in the block have already started singing. Kael checks his nuyen balance, racks a smartgun, and steps into the rain. The Sixth World doesn't care who he works for. It only cares that he's willing to walk into the space where the neon ends and the old green light begins.

Reader's Guide

The Sixth World is not a single campaign but the narrative architecture beneath every Shadowrun story. Its premise is deceptively simple: magic came back, and nobody was ready. From that single event, an entire society fractures along lines of power, identity, and belief. Megacorporations seek to industrialize the supernatural; the Street turns it into a black market; metahuman communities reclaim a heritage the Fifth World tried to erase. The player-character, a shadowrunner, exists in the gaps between these forces—hired by a corp to contain a spirit, by a street doc to trace a stolen cyberdeck, by a shaman to guard a node that a rival corp is trying to sever.

Key recurring elements across the setting include the Matrix (cyberspace), the astral plane (the magical dimension), the Street (unregulated urban zones), and the various megacorporations whose internal politics drive most plots. Metahuman identity—elf, orc, troll, dwarf, human—is a persistent lens through which characters experience discrimination, privilege, and belonging. In the tabletop game, these elements are modular: a GM can run a heist in a corporate penthouse or a ritual in a troll bar, and the Sixth World provides the connective tissue.

In the video game adaptations, the Sixth World is rendered as a specific urban sandbox. Shadowrun: Dragon Fall (2013) and its expansion Dragon's Breath (2015), developed by Slightly Mad Studios and published by Paradox Interactive, place the player in a near-future city where a dragon has awakened, forcing a runner crew to navigate corporate intrigue, street-level combat, and the raw threat of a returning apex magical predator. Shadowrun: Hong Kong – Extended Edition (2019), developed by P-9 Terren, transplants the same framework to a different cultural and corporate landscape, emphasizing the global reach of megacorporations and the local metahuman communities that resist them. Each game treats the Sixth World as a living system: the Matrix is a navigable space, magic is a resource with costs, and the city itself is a character with moods, secrets, and a memory that the player's actions slowly overwrite.

Did You Know?

• The name 'Sixth World' comes from Shadowrun's cyclical cosmology: the world has passed through successive ages, and the current one is the sixth, defined by the return of magic after the long, magic-less Fifth World.
• Shadowrun originated as a tabletop role-playing game published in 1989 by FASA Corporation, predating all of its video game adaptations by more than a decade.
• In the setting, the Matrix (cyberspace) and the astral plane (the magical dimension) are distinct but overlapping layers of reality, and interacting with both simultaneously is a core mechanical and narrative risk for ch
• The currency of the Sixth World is the nuyen, a name that reflects the setting's blend of Eastern and Western cultural influences in its worldbuilding.