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Heat (1995), one of the best and worst influences on Shadowrun

Michael Mann's Heat (1995) is a Los Angeles crime epic that, if you're reading this, you've probably seen or been told to see. It is among Blade Runner and Ronin in the fan canon of Shadowrun inspirations. This is because it's an incredible movie with a well-crafted story world, and a gunfight so realistic that the Marine Corps shows it during Basic Training. Neal McCauley's (Robert De Niro's) crew is team of professional criminals, experienced in working together, are well-armed (They carry CAR-15s, Galil, H&K G33 or SR9 rifle, etc.) well-trained in their specialties and in overall combat and heist/burglary tradecraft (including hacking or using very technical methods to counter alarms and other technology), use sophisticated counterintelligence and counter-surveillance methods, and basically depicts what could easily be described as a Prime Runner team (The jobs they pull off or attempt to pull off escalate from $1.6 million to ~$4 million to over $12 million).

However ...

I was listening to the Sixth World Podcast #14 with Adam Koebel and as I replied in that episode's post (See More), I generally agreed with him. One thing that he discussed that I didn't really touch upon then that I noticed this time and want to comment on is the dichotomy between the cyberpunk fiction of a loose confederation of lone wolves and the reality of a tabletop crew being a recurring group of characters involved in a long-term campaign. The reason this matters is that First and early Second Edition were written mostly by the original developers, especially by Nigel Findley, and there was a consistent vision of the world that didn't really have anything to do with the experience of playing this game at a tabletop. Then Steve Kenson, Jon Szeto, and other second-generation authors came along; freelancers who had actually played Shadowrun (They even played by snail mail). Following them were freelancers who came up through the Internet because Shadowrun has had a consistent presence online and a close relationship with Internet fans since it was published.

And a lot of these players knew of Heat and referenced it. And beyond that, they also tended to come to Shadowrun as players or GMs in campaigns with set teams and basically running "professional" shadowrunner crews like in Heat. To be fair, Heat does not stand alone at this time in the mid-90s. Reservoir Dogs, Mission: Impossible, and Ronin are thoroughly Shadowrun movies even without knowing they are. These fans took influence from crime and noir fiction like the Donald Westlake Parker novels and similar movies that run from the 1950s-70s (Payback [1999] was the first film adaptation of Westlake's The Hunter since Lee Marvin’s Point Blank was released in 1967). Anyway, nostalgia in the 1990s was for the 1970s, just as today we are nostalgic for the 1990s. There were also very distinct themes and settings when it came to Shadowrun and especially Shadowrun online in the mid to late 1990s.

This was the era of the Professional Shadowrunner.

As it happens, this coincided with the release of a hyper-useful Shadowrun sourcebook, Fields of Fire. Fields of Fire was the intellectual precursor to adopting the attitudes and techniques we then saw in Heat because the first third to half of FoF is a treatise on being a Professional – it's about being a professional mercenary and also addressed repeatedly in the book to how to behave as a shadowrunner. It's so useful that it's a starting reference for being an adult in general because – SPOILER ALERT – "common sense" actually isn't. Plus, Tom Dowd wrote it. It's not quite Gospel, but at the time it was more like the Dark Lord on High's Letter to the Pink Mohawks.

Anyway, the Professional Shadowrunner was a mercenary and a sociopath, if not in fact then at least in effect, and any punk ethos was eliminated in favor of "realism." I should add that in the 90s, the idea of real-life mercenaries and private contractors was becoming a thing as the end of the Cold War put a lot of professionals onto the streets. So what do you do? In Ronin, you steal a case (Which is actually cover for a whole other job). The Professional Shadowrunner wasn't a Black Trenchcoat, he was a Grey Man Assassin. Black trench coats are ostentatious as Hell even here in the Pacific Northwest. The only people who wear them, except for a short time in the 90s, are men who need a coat long enough to protect their suits, which appropriately enough describes the Professional Shadowrunner sometimes.

The Professional Shadowrunner has to worry about living in the real world because once they're off the job, they're trying to be an inconspicuous as possible. These people don't squat in the Barrens, they have houses their fixer bought through cut-outs with laundered money and impeccable fake SINs. The Black Trenchcoat focuses on drama; the Professional Shadowrunner is No-Drama Obama about this shit. They over-prepare for everything. And like in Heat, when combat does go down they operate like a team of Navy SEALs — probably because according to the PCs’ backgrounds, they were Navy SEALs. Having a "legitimate" or "realistic" background to acquiring skills and learning tactics (and you could learn tactics online from field manuals and other resources) was critical to justifying basically the runner's entire existence.

This attitude towards "realism" eventually stretched into how people treated the entirety of the setting, excusing the fact that Shadowrun has MAGIC and just flat-out is not Real Life. All of this influence began coming to a head in the material following, ironically enough, Dunkelzahn's Will.

Yes, kids, the last will and testament of the first Great Dragon to be elected President of the successor to the United States was the primary catalyst to making Shadowrun more "realistic."

I should also mention that the death of Dunkelzahn and the will were also used as capstones for a period of time that was absolutely batshit within the context of the entire life of the line. In a two-year period, we got Bug City, Aztechnology Blood Magic, Harlequin's Back trying to stop the Azzies from bring the Horrors back sooner, and a ton of Earthdawn connections (Earthdawn was released in 1993, but references to the Fourth World have existed since the original Big Black Book in 1989) to sell the connection between both games, especially ED since there's never been a lack of fantasy settings for tabletop RPGs. Earthdawn's schtick was that it led to an already-popular cyberpunk and magic game set in the dark future.

With Dunkelzahn's Will in late 1996, FASA slammed the door on a lot of the more fantastical elements that had dominated the setting and metaplot. 1997 was the year of the Mob War, and 1998 was the year of the Corp Wars of 2059-60. The Corp Wars sought to address some of that lack of realism such as how Japan had experienced the Ghost Decade IRL while in Shadowrun the Japanacorps still ruled everything. So they added White Monday (the Tokyo Stock Exchange plummets), moved Yamatetsu to Russia, killed Fuchi, and replaced it with Novatech in Boston, and brought on CATCo and Wuxing – because no one foresaw China mattering at all in 1989.

And thematically, tonally, Shadowrun players were increasingly being told to reference 90s crime movies and other films about teams of clandestine or covert professional, either proprietary or freelance, and the library expanded. To contrast 1999's The Matrix; Mamet's Heist, Way of the Gun (Its combat scenes were choreographed by a Navy SEAL), and Payback (Yet another adaptation of Westlake's The Hunter). At the top of that list, however, are Heat and Ronin, and while Ronin is a better depiction of the random crew assembled for a job, Heat is the model for how to build a team of PCs who are going to run together for a long-term tabletop campaign.

I love this movie, and it's one of the only I still own a hard copy of (along with The Godfather Trilogy). It's incredibly useful for envisioning the life of shadowrunners both on the job and during their downtime, where the PCs have to balance life with their career of being professional criminals. Michael Mann created a beautiful world of the criminal underworld in Los Angeles, complete with a fixer, a Mr. Johnson, an Information Broker, Fences ("All fences are informants," Mann revealed in the 10th Anniversary DVD commentary), and the world they occupy off the clock. And, again, the downtown gunfight is fucking brilliant.

I also appreciate much of the influence, directly and indirectly, for inspiring people to add realism and depth to their characters and the world. However, I think these drives sometimes were excessive, and adding realism without appreciating the full context and world that preceded them. I'm not revealing state secrets to mention that people who would become freelancers, including myself, would even dismiss some material because it was "wrong" and not because, you know, this is a game.