Review – Shadowrun: Neo-Anarchist Streetpedia

Shadowrun: The Neo-Anarchist Streetpedia is a sourcebook for Shadowrun and lets you know a little bit about a lot of things in the Sixth World of Shadowrun. It is edition agnostic, making it a useful book no matter which edition of Shadowrun you play though timelinewise it is set at the start of the new Sixth World Edition (2080), so some of it could be spoilers for games set earlier in the timeline. It is a fun read and a good way to provide an in-game look at the world to players but by no means a required book.

Shadowrun: The Neo-Anarchist Streetpedia, is a Deep Shadows Sourcebook for Shadowrun, this particular book provides an overview of just about everything important in the Sixth World, from a NeoAnarchist perspective of course.

As is traditional, the book begins with one of the ubiquitous fiction sections, then moves into From the Ashes, Neo-Anarchism, which explains the background to and current state of the Neo-Anarchism movement in the world of Shadowrun.

Then, the meat of the product, the data here is organized alphabetically, with some exceptions, such as famous AI (Artificial Intelligences) being tucked inside the AI definition. But the information is apportioned haphazardously, as you would expect from something that is presented as being crowd-sourced, which is often annoying at least to this reviewer. Nations often get short shrift, this is especially annoying for countries that have never appeared in sourcebooks or whose last appearance was more than a decade ago, to only get a paragraph light on details and high on snark (and some nations, like the Scandinavian Union, do not even get that).

There is also a missing referenced entry, Omnistar references that it is a combine of DocWagon, Lone Star Security and Manadyne and to refer to the individual entries . . . but there is not one for Manadyne. Very unfortunate.

But for all of these flaws, it is still a useful and interesting resource, giving the “state of play” at the beginning of 2080 and the Sixth World edition.

Notes: Cover image from DriveThruRPG and used for the purpose of this review.  The links to the product are affiliate links and I will get a small amount if you purchase through them.