kigmatzomat
Legend
SR is chock full of horror. You have
- world-reshaping magic that can set off tornados, volcanos, earthquakes, tidal waves
- "contagion/body horror" monsters like vampires, ghouls, wendigo
- "possession" monsters like Invae (insect spirits that gestate inside people and consume their souls) and Shedim (dark spirits that drive people mad) and wizards who can muck with your emotions or just make you dance at their whim.
- junior kaiju mega fauna like sharks the size of busses or birds & wyverns the size of airplanes
- "almost unkillable" monsters like Proteans which are magical amoebas that can look like a cow...until it engulfs and digests a person.
- shape-shifting predators like kludde that can use an innocuous shape then use magical effects to make people easy prey for their "attack" form. (Serious "dingos ate my baby" vibe)
- ghosts/spirits, some of which really hate humanity
- technological horror, like nanotechnology going rogue and using people as "drones". Or parts.
- plague horror, like the disease that makes you allergic to (iron, wood, plastic, sunlight, water, etc)
The world of Shadowrun is very a frightening place.
(Edit)
I forgot that SR is also a kind of post-near-apocolpypse, as something like 25% of the global population died. That's Black Death numbers. Much as Rome collapsed inwards and left the outer territories to fend for themselves, many places went to a "points of light" scenario, where a lot of small towns and villages were effectively abandoned as they require more resources per capita than a city.
The rural areas were also hard to protect from all the evolving monster threats. Better to lean into industrialized farming, where a few dozen people and some high tech machinery can farm thousands of acres and can be protected by a handful of combat drones from most threats and for the rest, a contracted group of monster-hunters with a mage and machineguns can be flown in within 2 days.
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