The year is 2060, and the world has changed. Thirty years ago, a plague ravaged the world. History books called the 'Y Plague', because of how it targeted men in particular. Nine out of every ten individuals with a Y chromosome died as the weaponized Ebola strain turned their organs to mush. Out of the survivors, eight out of every ten were rendered sterile by the disease. Even after the plague burnt itself out, there were lingering effects. Ninety percent of live births, post-plague, were female, but fifty percent of overall pregnancies were male. Didn't take much thinking to understand what happened there.

After losing his parents and both legs in an accident, Zayn Greene, one of the few men in this post-plague world where men are more likely to be coddled and protected than the ones in charge, was a PR department's dream. Approached by a tech company to test their new long-term medical support pod and beta test their new VRMMORPG, Shadowmen, he enthusiastically agrees in order to actually be able to walk again. Fast forward to the end of the beta, and it is time for the game to go live, and the year-long final test of the pod.

Diving into the fantasy cyberpunk virtual world of Shadowmen, Zayn becomes Iceblade, an elven Combat Mage living in the Seattle sprawl. As a criminal for hire, he is going to need a team, because no one can make it on their own in the shadows. And making it is important, since one of the big rules of Shadowmen is that there are no alts, and no respawns. You die in the game, and you have to restart practically from zero. With those stakes, every job could be the last. But that just makes everything more exciting.

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This story is going to be running based on Shadowrun 4th Edition rules. If you don't like blue boxes with dice rolls, this is not the story for you. This story is about professional criminals doing criminal things for money. If you want heroic heroes who go and save the world, this story is not for you. This story is going to have an episodic format with each 'episode' being another run. If you're wanting a massive fight against a conspiracy to save the virtual world and the real world as well, this is not the story for you.

That said, if you don't mind people shooting other people in the face for money, people being comfortable with their sexuality, and general RPG shenanigans? Then this may be the story for you.

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• Literature & FictionGenre FictionGameLit & LitRPG
• Science Fiction & FantasyScience FictionCyberpunk

• Publication Date: November 22, 2025
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 429 Pages
• File Size: 16 KB