The urban fantasy of Charles de Lint crossed with the Atrocity Archives of Charles Stross. Add in a dash of The Dresden Files and the X-Files for flavor.
The Setting
Imagine, for a moment, the world as you know it. Interesting, hectic, problematic, hurtling toward some destination in the future alone the path everyone expects. Now imagine that you don't know everything. That maybe the Freemasons were about matching the scientific with the arcane. That perhaps magic, for some people, is real. That there are demons, and shadowy organizations and secret agents and investigators trying to keep a handle on the meta and supernatural. That physicists are right; there are many universes of existence, except they overlap. Frequently.
Imagine your every day life not knowing any of this.
This is the day after you find out everything you believed was crap, and there are scary monsters in the closet that want to eat you.
The history of the world 2010 - 2027:
The world saw several key revolutionary inventions between 2010 and 2025 that are still shaping things in ways we cannot comprehend; the Graphene processor, the Rossy Heat Catalyzer, and the Polywell Fusion Reactor.
Graphene is a type of carbon material which has allowed computers to shatter Moore's Law bringing human level Calculations Per Second or processors a decade early. This has resulted in practical weak AI in nearly every object around us, from data mining advert signs to wireless info crawling augmented devices and implants making people connected to vast libraries of information at all times.
The Rossy Heat Catalyst is the realization of a 'portable' Cold Fusion engine involving a reaction involving Nickel and Hydrogen. The end result has been home power generators that only require the addition of a nickel fuel on a monthly basis.
Finally the Polywell Fusion reactor. After a long wait the world had achieved fusion at the practical level.
These three technologies should have brought about universal prosperity. Instead they disrupted the geopolitical world order causing chaos to spread in everything from commodities and futures markets, to the value of money to outright warfare in the petrolium producing regions.
By 2020 most petro-states had collapsed. The US was forced to default on its debts because the petro-backed dollar was worth less than the cost of printing it. The Middle East from Libya to Pakistan destroyed itself in chaos and revolution. The Chinese 'miracle' imploded because of the death of the dollar and demographics. Europe also flew apart as the US defense umbrella disintegrated and the repeated debt – defaults of EU member states until 2015 caused the Euro to collapse.
In short, the technological 'singularity' arrived destroying the old order killing millions in the process. This was The Crash.
As if this wasn't enough, something happened in 2020 that people still really don't understand. This event has simply been called 'The Awakening'. The story that has been patched together is that magic has always been with us, but for whatever reason only one person in 100 million could sense it. After The Awakening, that number changed to 1 in a million. Where there were thousands of Adepts in the world, overnight there were hundreds of thousands. Millions who could see ley lines and astral auras and all the rest of it. Still only a small fraction of humanity, but enough that it caused huge social problems across the globe.
As if that wasn't enough, The Awakening also caused physical changes in some people. That troll-like guy in the 5th grade who was 6 feet tall and shaved? Turns out he actually was a 'Troll' all along. Suddenly humanity had branched into the 5 different subtypes of meta-humanity.
Today the world has returned to a 'Great Power' balance, except the Great Powers are Multinational corporations and city states instead of 20th century style governments. The United States still exists, but DC is mostly ignored – much as the UN was in the 20th. Today the Great powers are Japan. Singapore. Hong Kong. Shanghai. Seoul. Kuala Lumpur. Tel Aviv. Germany. Seattle. LA. Chicago. Toronto. Atlanta. Denver. Mexico City. Mumbai. Nigeria. London. Paris. Rome. Cairo. And the regions around them.
Today's date: March 5th, 2027
http://ghosthuntersrpg.blogspot.com/
http://www.d20resources.com/index.php
Shadowrun resources:
http://pavao.org/shadowrun/cheatsheets/