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討論區規矩與守則
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OK, and from a writers perspective? Like what made them go for it. Not saying they shouldn't have, well I wouldn't have.
We could suppose many things :
- Back then, fantasy stuffs was mainly about elf, magic and globinoid races.
- The book inspired them into choosing those races.
- Insert your theory here.
There doesn't need to be a reason.
I like the idea, treating non-human races as birth defects with no real culture or history of their own is why shadowrun is nothing like lord of the rings.
Shadowrun ('89) is cyberpunk, a genre born with the Neuromancer trilogy ('84, truly visionary novels) and the original Blade Runner ('82). Shadowrun combined the two: Cyberpunk and the fantasy roots of roleplay. Also as a pen and paper RPG of course. There was a (much smaller) RPG called "Cyberpunk" ('88), w/o magic and metahumans, but Shadowrun was more successful. GURPS also had a cyberpunk source book, which was supposedly delayed by US Secret Service till '90. GURPS would obviously allow combining it with about anything.
In fact Shadowrun is connected to Earthdawn, a more classical fantasy RPG that's supposed to play in the same world in a different age. The creators simply were fantasy nerds and combined all the stuff they loved I dare say - as did all role playing.
I like your question, because most people just overlook it w/o questioning. Then again you could as well ask why literally everything includes RPG elements these days. Be it sports games, adventures, shooters or even puzzles: You gotta level up! The basic idea of RPG is an open system and creating a vast world (as LOTR did) was it's premise, so of course people brought everything they've got.
@bunny de fluff Using the LOTR races has a big convenience advantage over newly made up races like in Mass Effect. You are already familiar with them. I remember how back when I played ME for the first time I was reluctant to read into each alien race. Exactly it isn't easy and I doubted that it would be worth it. As in things not staying consistant and the writers themselves forgetting.
@Joseph Stalin I kinda am asking them. Yeah the metahuman thing seems very trivial. A troll is big and strong and bulky, an elf is frail and mischievous and intelligent. Dwarfs are introverted or so. They still however have their own personality and sexuality and heritage. Like being slavic or asian or african and so on. Its another layer of identity added on top of what we are.
@Velox Banks Why not ask why they did it? When you write a story you don't just go sci fi and then for no reason at all bring in medieval fantasy races. I listened to the ingame commentary but they don't seem to address it. For me its uncanny, it makes it unbelievable. It can work for some people like it did in Ash vs the army of dead where you have a dude from modern times travel back to the medieval ages together with his car and shotgun and chainsaw. Just like how Shadowrun can work for some people.
@Clockwork thanks for the dates, yeah since its so old I thought that this question was already covered.
@Zadok I appreciate your "longish" text and am inclined to write one just as long xD but I don't know much so I rather not. Fitting avatar for a rpg buff.
I would make a seperation between RPG and leveling. Leveling gets you hooked but it just makes your numerical stats go up. Many games have that but they don't have any role play at all.
RPG elements are fun. Games like Doom are plain. You run around with a shotgun or a rocketlauncher and blow stuff up. Much more fun with leveling and finding gear. So we have games like Stalker which are very much enhanced by these elements. However Doom doesn't need depth to work. It needs you walking around with a shotgun blowing monsters to bits in fast combat.
A very interesting topic to talk about but just as offtopic xD
As is the world- and character building LOTR brought, the other half of RPG if you will. It is for instance the foundation for a new type of series that does not strictly follow any plot but simply revolves around characters discovering a different world. GoT, TWD: No can do w/o LOTR.
Admittedly these "halves" can go separate ways but they've got a history in common and they both go huge. It's still growing larger as we speak.
Did you read the bit where I said that these meta human races just happened to wink into existence in the blink of an eye? These races didn't develop organically among peopleor within their own regions, they were just something told to entertain audiences until suddenly they became real. Comparing the shadowrun versions of these species to the LOTRs version completely misses the point. No matter if you were american, candian, australian, japanese, or jewish, you could one day find yourself the parent of an orc, or an elf or whatever and these races took on the identity of whichever culture they were born to. It was world not much different from the real one we're in now, and shadowrun is very much an alternative history fiction with all kinds of fear and bigotry directed towards the meta humans. Shadowrun is in seattle, and dragonfall is in germany, and they all have identity traits of their respective regions regardless of race. So American elves act all american, and so do the orcs, except the humans don't like the elves because they can live for so much longer, get a good job, climb the career ladder all the way to the top and sit on it for centuries. And they don't like the orcs because they have more muscle and more energy and keep getting favored by employers in labor intense work. Humans being so fearful of the competition didn't like that much, and reacted violently. Nothing trivial about these subjects at all.
there are different races of people because of the new age of magic.
they are called similiar names to races in DnD or other fantasy because its what people would call people who became stuff like that in our society.
I'd have to look at the PnP game to see what abilities a Shadowrun 'elf' and a Tolkien or DnD elf has. but I suspect they are called elves because Tolkien EXISTS in this realm and they are slightly built with pointy ears.
not because they are birthed on the shores of the glimmermere.
It's a way of answering the unspoken question "Well, we know what humans were like in the Middle Ages and we know how elves and dwarves and whatnot fit into that sort of world. What would it be like if sorcery and 'fantasy' races suddenly re-invaded a modern or near-future world?"
This creates an interesting juxtaposition of very 'unlike' things, when you have these races associated with medieval-level technology rubbing shoulders with cyborgs and technomancers. You may notice a similar juxtaposition in the BattleTech and MechWarrior series that were created by the same original game designer, where feudal governments combined with futuristic tech. They also created Crimson Skies, which is a "What if 1930s fighter plane dogfighting were mashed up with 17th century era piracy (but in the skies)?"
I guess the developers just like taking two cool but very dissimilar things and fusing them together to create something novel.
I've noticed he also seems fascinated by the idea of history (in this case, mythological history) repeating itself. BattleTech is the Dark Ages, but set 1000 years in the future. Human nature doesn't change, even if you add giant robots or pointy ears and magic spells, so the same trends will cycle over and over. In ShadowRun, the "cycle" concept is just taken to a very magnified and literal level.
Also, cyb-orks are just drekkin' cool, eh chummer?