Chicago

Lore & Background

Chicago’s fall didn’t happen overnight. The UCAS military, overwhelmed and outmatched, threw up a wall of concrete and barbed wire around the Loop, parts of the Near South Side, and the Stockyards, sealing off miles of city into the Containment Zone. Inside: a no-man’s-land of collapsed arcologies, toxic sludge, and roaming ghoul tribes. Outside: a tense, corporate-run city where Ares Macrotechnology maintained a significant presence inside the zone for years after the CZ's establishment. The CZ is a place where the line between life and possession blurs, where runners can find jobs that pay in nuyen or nightmares—extractions from infested ruins, data theft from hive-mind networks, and containment runs that often end in screaming. Chicago is the Sixth World’s scar, a reminder that magic doesn’t just awaken—it can devour.

In Their Own Story

The rain tasted of rust and rot, each drop a tiny memory of decay. Kestrel pulled her collar tight, watching the flickering neon of a Soybucks sign bleed green into the puddles. Her fixer’s voice still echoed in her ear: ‘The CZ is hungry tonight.’ She was here for a data chip—buried in a collapsed arcology that had once been a Mitsuhama server farm. The rubble was slick with something that wasn’t water. As she crept through a shattered lobby, she heard it: a skittering, like a thousand legs on wet concrete. It crawled up her spine and settled behind her eyes. A shape emerged from the dark—humanoid, but wrong. Its joints bent backward, its eyes glowed with an alien hunger that had no name. Kestrel drew her Predator, the weight of the gun the only familiar thing. In Chicago, the real monsters weren’t always the ones with claws. Sometimes they wore the face of someone you used to know.

Reader's Guide

Chicago in Shadowrun is a city of razor-wire contrasts. The Containment Zone (CZ) is a walled-off hellscape—a no-go zone for civilians, but a high-stakes playground for runners willing to risk possession, ghoul packs, and corporate kill teams. Inside the CZ, the landscape is a surreal ruin: collapsed skyscrapers draped in bioluminescent mold, subway tunnels turned into insect nurseries, and toxic waste that glows in the dark. Outside the walls, Chicago is a corporate fortress. Ares Macrotechnology runs the show, using the city as a live-fire test range for new security drones, magical countermeasures, and psychological warfare tech. The streets are patrolled by armored response teams, and the shadows are thick with spies from every AAA megacorp. For runners, Chicago offers unique, high-risk jobs. Extraction runs into the CZ are common—pulling out a researcher who’s been studying the hive too long, or retrieving a prototype from a lab that’s been overrun. Data recovery often means jacking into a host that’s partially infested with insect spirits. Spirit containment jobs require a mage who knows how to bind something that doesn’t want to be bound. The city’s underworld is a fractured mess: ghoul tribes with their own codes of honor, insect cults that worship the hive, and corporate spies who’d sell their own mother for a lead. Protective gear is mandatory—a good chem-sealed jacket and a respirator can save your life. And never, ever go into the CZ without a mage who’s got a strong will and a faster trigger finger. Chicago is not a place for the cautious. It’s a place for the desperate, the damned, and the ones who know that sometimes the best payday comes from the worst nightmares.

Did You Know?

• The Chicago Containment Zone was inspired by real-world disaster zones like Chernobyl and Fukushima.
• Insect spirits in Chicago are particularly dangerous because they can possess humans and create hybrid forms.
• The ghoul population in Chicago's CZ has formed organized tribes with their own social structures.
• Ares Macrotechnology maintained a significant presence inside the zone for years after the CZ's establishment.

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