Shadowrun, the classic tabletop RPG published by Catalyst Game Labs, is currently celebrating its 30th anniversary and ushering in its sixth edition, the appropriately named Shadowrun: Sixth World.
For those unfamiliar with the title, Shadowrun is basically a cyberpunk adventure game set in the not-too-distant-future of 2080, but it takes place in a world where magic and the beings who can wield it have returned. If you can imagine any given urban sprawl guns-n-chrome William Gibson story populated with elves, dwarfs, dragons, and sorcerers as well as the usual cyborg mercenaries and wily hackers, you’re on the right page.
With the new edition comes, as you’d expect, a whole bunch of new products. The Sixth World Beginner Box is available now, and the new core book is launching at GenCon this weekend with all due pomp and circumstance. However, of particular interest to Australian gamers and nerds is the high profile presence of a new character in the shadows: Emu, an Indigenous Australian rigger (someone who can use cybernetic implants to control vehicles and drones – Shadowrun is wild). Emu has so far appeared in a free character dossier, which you can scoop up here, and in the second part of The Frame Job, six interlinking Shadowrun novellas designed to introduce the new edition, which is available here.
Australian Indigenous representation in genre material is rare as hen’s teeth, the occasional high profile outing like Cleverman aside, and is even rarer in tabletop gaming circles, so we thought we’d reach out to Brooke Chang, the writer behind Emu, to find out how this cool-as-chrome character came to life.
Give us a quick bio of your good self – how did you get into writing and game design?
I’ve been writing recreationally for ages, and been a fan of RPGs since I was a kid. I started working on Shadowrun as a proofreader back in 2012, and debuted as a writer in 2015 with a short section in Chrome Flesh. Since then, I’ve had chapters or portions of chapters in Dark Terrors, Street Lethal, Better Than Bad, and the Neo-Anarchist Streetpedia—along with the character dossiers for the Sixth World Edition Beginner Box and Emu’s novella, of course!
What’s your specific involvement with Shadowrun?
I’m a freelance writer and occasional editor, and was involved in parts of the rules design for the Sixth World Edition.
What was the actual writing assignment with Emu?
I did both the dossier and the novella for Emu. The dossier was only about three thousand words, including the example run, and was intended to give players a fleshed-out character they could pick up and play. The novella was twenty thousand, and was supposed to follow Emu through both the overall arc between the six character novellas and her day-to-day life as a shadowrunner.
What made you decide to create an Indigenous Australian character?
The project spec was the genesis of it; the art notes I was given when I first started on the Beginner Box dossiers modeled the character who would become Emu off an Indigenous actress, Shareena Clanton (Wentworth) Honestly, after that, it never occurred to me that Emu wouldn’t be Indigenous. It was just a matter of explaining how she became a shadowrunner in Seattle.
It’s very impressive that you made her specifically Wiradjuri (an Indigenous people and language group from Central New South Wales) instead of generically “Aboriginal”. What kind of research did you do? Do you have any specific interest or connection to Australian Indigenous culture and or history?
I wouldn’t say I have a specific interest or connection so much as that I’m familiar with the context. I’m Canadian, and the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples here have also suffered a great deal as a result of colonialism, much like Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia. In Canada, First Nations people often have to remind non-natives that “First Nations” is a label applied by outsiders, and that they’re far more likely to think of themselves as being a member of their respective nation instead of using a more generic term. I figured that Emu would feel the same way, and everything I read about Indigenous culture while I was researching Emu’s background suggested the same, so I spent some time looking up which Indigenous nations live(d) in various parts of Australia and made sure to pick one from the same general area where Emu had grown up.
Incidentally, I originally identified Emu as Kuringgai in both her character dossier and the novella. Her dossier got changed before publication to describe her as Wiradjuri, I guess based on the broader language family; something similar happened with [Shadowrun character] Zipfile being changed from “Xhosa” to “Bantu”. I hope that terms is still accurate, and if not, my apologies!
The character and her short story have to fit in with the other dossiers and short fiction, obviously – how did you tackle that challenge, coordinating with other creatives on the project?
In a sense, that was the easy part! The novellas were only green-lighted after I’d written the other four dossiers, so I sent those to the other novella writers and kept Emu for myself. When the novella-writing got started, the writers involved all posted our drafts as we went, and I made a point of coordinating with Dylan Birtolo (who wrote the first novella) to make sure the portrayals were consistent.
There’s a tendency to make Indigenous characters of almost any nation magical or primitive, activating the “noble savage” archetype, but Emu is a technological character, a rigger – what’s the thinking behind that? Was it a deliberate refutation or a more instinctive decision?
It was deliberate, and was actually built into the character even before I got involved. The project spec from CGL listed the rigger specifically as the character who would use Shareena Clanton’s photo as an art reference. Separately from that, I’d previously written a Blackfoot (First Nations) rigger as a point-of-view character in a different project, and I was happy to continue subverting the “noble savage” trope with Emu.
Can we expect to see more of Emu in the future?
I certainly hope so! I don’t have any definite green lights for more Emu-centric projects at the moment, but the runner team featured in SR5’s Beginner Box became recurring characters throughout the whole edition, so I’m hoping that Emu and her teammates will do the same in this edition.
What else are you working on at the moment? What’s coming up that we should look out for?
In terms of what I can talk about publicly, I have a few sections in the upcoming Cutting Black and 30 Nights releases that are due out later this year. I do have a couple other projects going on as well, but I’m afraid I can’t share the details of those quite yet. When I’m able to discuss them in public, I’ll put more info up on my brand-new Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/brookechang , so head over there for the latest scoop!
