This page contains scans of Shadowrun-related articles from a variety of magazines, as well as scans of whole magazines dedicated to Shadowrun, mostly from the 1990s. The reason I put them up is largely because there’s a lot of them out there (shadowrun.wikia.com has an overview of just the English-language ones to get you started) but hardly anyone has any copies anymore, nor do most people know where to look for them all — I know I don’t, for one.
Yes, they’re bootleg scans, which means they’re probably not legal to have in many places, and it’s almost certainly not legal for me to put them up here. I’m doing it anyway because first of all, I think they deserve to not be forgotten. Second, I don’t feel there’s any harm being done: the only people making money off these magazines are second-hand games sellers (if they have them at all, which is doubtful), and the target audience for these is tiny (chiefly the few people who are still interested in very old editions of Shadowrun, like yours truly).
Many of these files, I created from scans that are already to be found online, often on Scribd (see below for cheating their system). A few others I scanned myself from hardcopy magazines in my collection, or I received from other people specifically to put up here. All the issues were trimmed down to only the front cover (usually) and any pages relevant to Shadowrun.
A lot of these magazines and articles are in languages other than English, including ones I can’t actually read myself, but if the idea is to preserve articles, then that doesn’t matter — though I do hope someone who can read them, comes across them and finds them useful.
All of this is for first through third editions of Shadowrun — I have little or no interest in fourth or beyond, so, very selfishly, I don’t feel like putting in effort in searching out and making available material for that.
—Gurth <gurth@xs4all.nl>
P.S. What’s with the colons in some of the filenames? In Mac file systems, colons are forbidden in filenames but slashes are not, while Unix (that macOS is based on) doesn’t like slashes in filenames but has no problems with colons, so behind the scenes, a complicated switch occurs with the two characters. This results in most non-native Mac applications and other operating systems showing a colon where native applications display a slash. Rename the file yourself after downloading if you’re on another operating system and it bothers you. The colon in the filename, that is.
P.P.S. Somewhat related to these, in the sense that they are also “lost” and hard-to-find Shadowrun material, Lars Wagner Hansen has made available a Dropbox directory full of Virtual Seattle adventures, which were run at conventions by TSR’s Roleplaying Game Association (RPGA) in the ’90s.
(Click here if you would rather view the list on a page of its own.)
Many of the magazines may not be familiar, so here’s a quick guide to what they are.
This was a Hungarian magazine published by the company that also released Árnyékmagyarország.
Thanks to Thirlen.
A German RPG fanzine that coversed all sorts of systems, including Shadowrun. It apparently began as a hardcopy fanzine you had to subscribe to, but then moved into free downloadable issues. Its web site proclaimed that the magazine “is back” in early 2015, but the site doesn’t seem to have been updated since the middle of that year, and has since vanished entirely.
Thanks to Gottfried Neuner.
As the name suggests, this was an Australian gaming magazine, that covered all kinds of games including Shadowrun. It appears to have run from June of 1988 until November 1996. I know little else about it, though apparently, the author of the series of articles about Australia in Shadowrun that were printed in it, eventually turned those into a sourcebook for FASA, which was never actually published — see issue 19 for more on that.
You can find the full issues in the Internet Archive.
Thanks to Gottfried Neuner.
This is French, and has the best title I think I’ve ever seen for a gaming magazine. Its style reminds me a lot of the British magazine, arcane, that was out around the same time, but backstab had more game-specific content (arcane mostly kept things generic). A closer look at the credits reveals this is probably because backstab, especially in its earlier issues, included a number of articles translated from arcane, as well as using some of its artwork for unrelated articles.
These two are Hungarian, and I have been informed that (as I suspected) they’re the same magazine whose name was changed around issue 30. Another publisher apparently bought the name so the original editors just changed it to Holdtölte and carried on. (With thanks to Ádám Vitális, Bíborhold translates as “Reddish-Purple Moon” — not “Blood Moon” though — and Holdtölte as “the event of the moon becoming full” — or, perhaps, “waxing gibbous moon”. Thirlen explained the name change for me.)
A French magazine for tabletop and roleplaying games of all kinds. It was started in 1980 and was published until 1999, before being revived the following year, after which it ceased publication and was picked back up a couple more times. The current publisher is Black Book Èditions.
Thanks to Gottfried Neuner.
The magazine published by Game Designers’ Workshop (GDW), a company best known for its games Traveller and Twilight: 2000, from 1986 until the company ceased trading in 1996. The first issue was No. 25 (for continuity with the earlier Journal of the Travellers Aid Society), the last was No. 77. The magazine covered many more games than just GDW’s own, though. It is also the original place where the Wolf and Raven stories by Michael Stackpole were first published, which he reworked (slightly) into a novel of the same title (Wolf and Raven, that is — not Challenge) for FASA in 1998.
Thanks to Gottfried Neuner.
A German Shadowrun fanzine, of which three issues seem to have been released in 1995 and ’96 (Shadowhelix only lists two, but it’s missing the one available on this site at the time of writing). The only reason I have one is because the people behind it sent me a complimentary copy after I allowed them to translate and print some of the articles I had posted online.
Thanks to Tom Kedor.
One of TSR’s magazines, mostly aimed at (A)D&D players but also featuring articles for other games back in the day.
Thanks to Roger Bell West.
This British publication was apparently a follow-up to another magazine titled GamesMaster, whose publisher went under. It was published from July 1990 until October 1991, a total of 15 issues.
A Norwegian magazine, of which I know next to nothing else.
A Danish gaming magazine, of which I know pretty much nothing.
Thanks to Lars Wagner Hansen.
This was the magazine of the Shadowrun Network, an official players’ organization run by AWOL Productions and supported by FASA. It began with an issue 0 in 1991 and then released quarterly magazines until mid-1994 — at which point, apparently, the people behind the organization went AWOL themselves. Anyway, the name of the magazine is Japanese for “shadow.”
As a bit of trivia for long-term Shadowrun players: take a look at the credits of almost any issue, then go re-read the second-to-last adventure in the Harlequin campaign book. Yep, that run not only takes the PCs to the town AWOL Productions was located in, but its office manager is the focal point of the whole adventure … Why do I get the impression that AWOL’s president, who also happened to be the writer of that adventure, had a thing for her?
Thanks to Tony Rabiola and Lars Wagner Hansen
This American magazine I had never heard of, but I picked up a few copies at GenCon ’99 (ah, the nostalgia …) mainly for the Shadowrun article in one. Again, I know next to nothing else about it.
Another magazine published by TSR, under its RPGA banner because it was intended to support the activities of that. It ran from 1981 through 2004, by which time it was being published by Paizo, before being discontinued.
Thanks to Lars Wagner Hansen
This is a British magazine published from December 1992 for at least 13 issues.
Thanks to Thirlen
A Danish gaming magazine, that I once more know pretty much nothing else about.
Thanks to Lars Wagner Hansen
The second official Shadowrun magazine, published by Sword of the Knight Publications (“SOK”) under license from FASA. SOK also put out the Earthdawn Journal (for FASA’s fantasy RPG) and Traveller Chronicle (for GDW’s science-fiction RPG). It ran for seven quarterly issues from the end of 1995 until the end of 1997 — the seventh being published late because a new editor had to be found — and not much later, the company went out of business.
A German online fanzine that was published for six issues in 1998, “[e]very month, to be precise on the second Friday” — right … It still has a web site, from which I simply downloaded the zips to post here, just in case that site ever goes down. I also posted their font pack (even though you’re likely to have most of them on your computer already) and converted the Word documents to PDF as closely as I could; I had to zip issue 5 because it comes with a couple of other files.
Thanks to Gottfried Neuner.
TSS for short, this was a Shadowrun fanzine set up and edited by Adam “Fro” Jury that ran for at least 19 issues plus a few specials. It covered all kinds of topics, from new gear and spells to complete adventures to fiction to reviews, and a lot more besides.
This generic science-fiction gaming magazine dates back to the mid-1970s and was published until the early ’90s by various companies — see the Wikipedia article for its complex history.
Thanks to Gottfried Neuner.
WWM was one of the biggest American gaming magazines in the 1990s, changing its name to White Wolf Inphobia with issue No. 50. By then it focused ever more on White Wolf’s own games (not entirely unexpected, of course) and on gaming-related lifestyle stuff, but earlier issues had articles for all kinds of games.
Thanks to Rob H. and Thirlen
This was the magazine published by FanPro (the original German branch) to support its games, running for 50 issues from 1989 until 1999; the name translates as “Worlds of Wonder” into English. Overviews of the published Shadowrun-related articles can be found on both Shadowhelix and Shadowiki.
Thanks to Cristo Fe Crespo Soro.
Scribd wants you to make an account before you’re allowed to download PDF versions of the files they put up, and to view most of them in their entirity. If you try to with no account, most pages are made almost unreadable, with a request to sign up to view them. Luckily, you can get around that with a little bit of effort.
(Note that the method outlined below works on any Mac, but Linux or Windows users may have to adapt it a bit to the tools available on their systems.)