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  • Call of Duty: Black Ops: A section in the fifth edition core book is entitled What the Numbers Mean.
  • A number of references to William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy, such as "new yen", decks, the matrix, 'trodes, Edge, SINs, Japan taking over the world...
  • In the 4E sourcebook Runner Havens, there's a chart of the top-grossing movies in Seattle. Among them: I Hate It Here, starring W. Ellis, produced by Global Frequency Studios; Ninja Princess, starring M. Shiranui; and The Pleasure Dome, starring E. Jarvis, produced by Smash Trideo Entertainment.
  • Also two of the top selling simsense in the 20th Anniversary rule book is, American Gods and... The Road. On that same list is another shout out to Transmetropolitan, with Spider J: A Half True Story by Ellis Alt.
  • The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
    • Supplements Sprawl Sites and Contacts. One of the Club Owner's quotes is "Look, I don't care what you done someplace else. When you play my club, you're just another act and I expect to get what I paid for." In the film, the nightclub owner tells the Hong Kong Cavaliers "When you play my joint, you're just another act. I want some music outta you characters."
    • Supplement Shadows of Asia. In the section on China, starting with the Neighbors subsection, a number of deckers were named after characters in the film (Reno, Perfect Tommy, Penny Priddy, Red Lectroid, Lord Whorfin, Scooter Lindley, Emilio Lizardo, Pinky Carruthers, John Big Boote and John Ya Ya). Other deckers were named Yoyodyne (after the company Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems) and Blue Blazin' Irregular (after the Blue Blaze Irregulars combat teams who work for Buckaroo).
  • Bored of the Rings. Virtual Realities 2.0 mentions a decker who has IC "lusting for her chitlins" (trying to kill her). In the novel, when Legolam and Gimlet draw weapons and are about to attack each other, it says that they're "lusting for each other's chitlins".
  • Legitimate The Lord of the Rings references
    • The radical ork rights faction named the Sons of Sauron. Presumably this is also an Appropriated Appellation as well.
    • 4e's Land of Promise shows that there is a dwarf street gang named the Sons of Gimli in Tír Tairngire, continuing the tradition.
  • Robert A. Heinlein's short stories and novels
    • 2nd Edition main rules. The Tribal Chief in the Contacts section has as one of his quotes: "I have a fine horse, so who needs a car? A horse is a renewable resource. Have you had any success breeding your car lately?" Tunnel in the Sky has the following line: "...which made horses more practical than helicopters. Machinery gets out of order and requires a complex technology to keep it going but good old "hayburners" keep right on breeding..."
    • Denver: The City of Shadows boxed set. Aztechnology places "scuttling charges" in visiting medical vehicles, a reference to the "remote control destruction packs" put in police vehicles in Friday. Also, people use "cubic" as a term for volume, a term taken from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
    • Lone Star. The Watchers are said to "fight like an angry buzz saw". Heinlein's Glory Road says that candidates to become Emperor/Empress of the 20 Universes are trained in personal combat so they can fight like an angry buzz saw. The phrase also appears in the Aztlan supplement.
    • Man & Machine: Cyberware mentions hollowing out a compartment behind the navel as a storage container, which the title character in Friday had.
    • Native American Nations Volume 1
      • The quote "Vox populi vox dei" usually translates as 'My God, how did we get into this mess?'" is from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long section of Time Enough for Love.
      • A Salt Lake City police officer is quoted as saying "Can I do you a service, citizen?" Almost the exact same quote appears in the short stories "Methuselah's Children" and "Coventry".
    • Native American Nations Volume 2 has the quote "Inuit hatred makes the blackest, vilest form of hatred you'll encounter in Seattle seem like mild displeasure in comparison." Stranger in a Strange Land has "Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called a mild distaste."
    • The Neo-Anarchists' Guide to North America. There's a restaurant in the Dallas/Fort Worth megaplex called Tanstaafl. This is taken from the acronym TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
    • The Neo-Anarchists' Guide to Real Life. The semiballistic and Wolverine Security are taken from the novel Friday.
    • Nigel Findley's supplements often used words and phrases that Heinlein used in his work, such as "yammer", "no huhu" and "cobber" (from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), "slitch" (from Friday) and "biological back pressure" (AKA desire to have sex, from Glory Road).
    • Paranormal Animals of North America. The blood kite is taken directly from Heinlein's Glory Road, including its habit of deliberately attacking arrows in flight and being killed by them. Likewise, the firedrake uses a tactic borrowed from the "dragons" in the same novel: using its fiery breath to fry burrowing mammals inside their burrows and then digging up and eating their burned bodies.
    • Tír Tairngire sourcebook
      • The Tír's air traffic control network is referred to as "No Sparrow Shall Fall". In Heinlein's novel The Puppet Masters, this phrase was used to describe the U.S. air traffic control net.
      • The Tír government set up the Star Chamber as a sham legislature designed to trick the Tír public into thinking that they had representation. It has no real power and is disregarded by the Council of Princes. In Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Professor Bernardo de la Paz creates a "Ad-Hoc Congress for Organization of Free Luna" and invites people to join it. He says he is "simply putting all my nuts in one basket" and expects them to do nothing substantial.
    • Virtual Realities 2.0 has a quote by a decker named "Hassan the Assassin" (a character in Starship Troopers had the nickname "Hassan the Assassin").
  • Lone Star
    • The Princess Bride. The first Fast Response Team is nicknamed "The Brute Squad".
    • Monty Python's Flying Circus. After a riot, five rioters are declared "Missing, believed pacified". In a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch about curing athletes' foot with dynamite, twelve patients were declared "Missing, believed cured".
    • Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge. Members of the Lone Star Department of Psychology have the nickname "The Grey Men", taken from the villains in Harrison's book. Both groups use psychology to brainwash their victims.
  • Adventure One Stage Before. The musical group called The Shadows has an upcoming sold-out performance. The group's fans fight each other for the tickets at local ticket offices, resulting in "ten dead and fourteen missing, believed disappointed." This is a reference to a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch about curing athletes' foot with dynamite, in which twelve patients were declared "Missing, believed cured".
  • 1st and 2nd edition supplements had references to a character named Jetblack being dead. The name is taken from Hotblack Desiato, a character in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series who once spent a year dead for tax reasons.
  • Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel Oath of Fealty
    • The Neo-Anarchists' Guide to Real Life. A decker describes a security system with weird layered defenses including anesthetic darts to take out unarmored intruders, sleep gas to take out intruders not wearing protective suits and intense heat to make those wearing armor and suits take them off. This set-up is what the Todos Santos arcology in the novel uses to protect its power plant.
    • The Germany Sourcebook mentions the FROMATES, a radical environmentalist terrorist group that originally appeared in this novel. FROMATES stands for FRiends Of Man And The Earth Society.
  • Sprawl Sites (1990).
    • One section mentions the Genom Corporation from Bubblegum Crisis (1987).
    • One quote for a plain-clothes cop is "Que hablo Colt Manhunter?" In the film Running Scared (1986), while plain-clothes cop Danny Costanza is pointing a gun at a criminal he says "Hablo Smith & Wesson?"
  • Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Requiem for Methuselah". In Shadowrun, Immortal Elves who were born thousands of years before the time the game takes place were the artists known as Rembrandt, Constable, Van Gogh and Grandma Moses. During the Sixth World, they painted works in the same style they used in their earlier roles. In the Star Trek episode, the Enterprise crew found unknown works by Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Brahms in Flint's home - works created by Flint himself, since he was an immortal who was the original da Vinci and Brahms.
  • Earthdawn
    • There were many references to Earthdawn, which is not surprising since it was a prequel to Shadowrun. They included the Horrors, a previous age of magic and Immortal Elves.
    • The Tír Tairngire supplement says that the Tír Tairngire government requires all students to learn creative arts. In Earthdawn, being tainted by a Horror prevents a person from being creative. The leaders of Tír Tairngire were immortal elves who lived during the Earthdawn period and knew that the Horrors would eventually return, so they decided to teach everyone creative arts so it would be easier to identify people who had been Horror tainted.
  • The Germany Sourcebook has an ad with an endorsement from Max Hein•Rügen, a reference to Mark Rein•Hagen of White Wolf Games.
  • London Sourcebook
    • Disney's Mary Poppins. There was an ad for the Dawes, Dawes, Munny Grubb and Banks Fidelity Fiduciary Bank. It mentioned "Self-Amortising Canals", from the song "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank".
    • An ad for "Chauncey's Flower and Garden Shop" (Being There's Chance the Gardener).
  • The Neo-Anarchists' Guide to Real Life
    • Chapter "Dressed to Kill". A decker uses the term "Saturday Night Firefight". This is a reference to the combat system of R. Talsorian Games' original Cyberpunk 2020 boxed set, which was titled "Friday Night Firefight".
    • A decker named Ridley calls a decker named Unicorn "ugly one-horned mule". This was a line from the film Legend (1985), which was directed by Ridley Scott.
  • The logins of various products' shadowtalkers include references to everything from Shakespeare to talk radio hosts to Guys and Dolls.
    • Shadowtech. A decker named Kent says that he has cyberware that makes him faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound - a reference to the Superman phrase.
    • Awakenings
      • A decker named Al Phee is a reference to a character of that name in the Callahan's Bar short story "Have You Heard the One...?"
      • One of the datafiles is written by a forensic sorcerer with the Los Angeles Police Department. His name is Friday.
    • A few location sourcebooks have a contributor called "Woppler" who chimes in whenever weather is being discussed, likely a nod to Andy Wappler, a popular TV weather forecaster for the Seattle area.
  • In an episode of the old Wormy comic strip that appeared in Dragon magazine, a mage named Gremorly used "Sons of Thunder!" as an exclamation.
    • Shadowbeat. Concrete Dreams' first music trideo (3D video) was for their song "Sons of Thunder".
    • Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzahn's Secrets. Dunkelzahn's will leaves a bequest to a shadowrunner group named "Sons of Thunder". It's possible that, In-Universe, the group named itself after the Concrete Dreams song.
  • Bug City. Truman Technologies operatives dressed up as Eagle Security officers capture Fuchi-employed gang members, line them up against a wall and ruthlessly murder them. This is based on the Real Life 1929 "Saint Valentine's Day Massacre", in which killers hired by Al Capone's gang dressed as police officers, captured members of the North Side gang and executed them.
  • Denver: The City of Shadows boxed set.
    • When talking about the U.S. government's attempt to destroy the former Air Force Academy, a decker named Hicks says that they "should nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." This is a reference to the line Ripley and Corporal Hicks speak in the movie Aliens.
    • A decker uses the phrase "un-mutual", a phrase prominently used in The Prisoner episode "A Change of Mind".
    • In the write-up for the NPC smuggler character Zak, it says that he's been lucky enough to avoid any "official entanglements", a reference to Ben Kenobi's line to Han Solo about avoiding any "Imperial entanglements" in Star Wars: A New Hope.
    • The Phoenix talisman shop
      • The description says that its numerology software couldn't generate "the Nine Billion Names of God", a reference to the Arthur C. Clarke short story "The Nine Billion Names of God".
      • One of the items on sale at the shop is an idol carved from red stone in the form of a demon holding a pink crystal sphere to its chest. This is a reference to the Horror-powered idol in the Shadowrun adventure Bottled Demon.
    • An ad has an endorsement by Max Hein•Rügen, a reference to Mark Rein•Hagen of White Wolf Games.
  • Supplement "Mob War!". The assassin Firebird (Natasha Romanov) is described as a "kick artist". This is reference to the film Blade Runner, in which the female replicant Zhora is said to have been trained as a member of a "kick murder squad".
  • 3rd Edition supplement Magic in the Shadows. In the section on Ally Spirits, one of the possible appearances of such a spirit is in the form of a two meter high white rabbit (the title character in the play Harvey).
  • State of the Art: 2064
    • One of the new pieces of equipment available to shadowrunners is the Cigarette Micro-Rocket. When the tip is lit, a tiny missile inside the cigarette fires at whatever the cigarette is pointed at. This is one of James Bond's gadgets in the movie You Only Live Twice.
    • The elven nation of Tír Tairngire has a test for magical ability called the Xavier Exam. This is a reference to Charles Xavier of the comic book X-Men, who identifies and trains mutants in the Marvel Universe.
  • Corporate Enclaves had a reference to The Big Lebowski. One of the ten most influential people in Hollywood is one Joe "The Dude" Kliebermann, an unemployed slob who would be otherwise unremarkable save for his knack for stumbling into incredibly outlandish situations while broadcasting his POV live online.
  • Runner's Companion. One of the options for Changelings is a Thagomizer tail.
  • Arsenal gives players the option to customize the interfaces of certain electronic devices with personality software. Among the available personalities are Hal 9001, Max Headnode and The Shadow.
  • Corporate Shadowfiles as a precursor to extraterritoriality lists a theme park in Florida called "Futureland" that even in the 1970s constituted its own county with its own police force and a corporate-run council. You know, like Disneyworld.
  • RoboCop's Auto-9 provides the illustration of the Ares Predator I in Gun H(e)aven, while the BFG of the game, the Panther XXL Assault Cannon, is clearly modeled after the Cobra Assault Cannon.
  • Deus Ex is referenced a few times in 3rd Edition, particularly in the Loose Alliances sourcebook. When discussing the United Nations, one of the groups mentioned is 'UNATCO', or the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition. The group's name, headquarters location, and function are all lifted directly from Deus Ex. One of the Shadownet commenters providing additional flavor in the chapter even has the username 'JC Denton', which is the name of the Deus Ex protagonist.
  • Conspiracy Theories has two on the same page, on a section discussing some of the more outlandish theories about vampires (which are real in Shadowrun, but still sometimes misunderstood).
    • After one theory about True Vampires existing for millennia and hiding behind the more common variety, Haze comments, "That’s one of the most nonsensical bits of faux-vampire lore I’ve ever heard." FastJack answers, "Really? Then be grateful you haven’t become acquainted with some of the vampire stuff from the early part of the century..."
    • The theory goes on to explains that a cabal of True Vampires are hidden on a space station designed to keep the Earth between it and the sun. Clockwork butts in with "ORBITS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!"
  • Run & Gun
  • Several of the places mentioned in the Seattle sourcebooks are based on real-life facilities, restaurants, and stores, complete with correct street addresses. One such place, a small store called Nybbles & Bytes, is known through the 2050s-70s for selling top-quality computer equipment and "lore books." Meanwhile, the real store in the 1980s-90s sold computer equipment and RPG books... including Shadowrun.
  • Run Faster
    • In the chapter on prepaid character equipment packs, one of the skillwires selections notes that if you have nothing else to use it for at the moment, you can always download Kung Fu. A couple pages later, and a similar entry on knowsofts mentions a curiously popular piece that includes the entire life story of a Horizon employee named Truman.
    • Some of the new Negative Qualities are "Hobo With a Shotgun" and "Pie Iesu Domine, Dona Eis Requiem."
  • Stolen Souls. At the end of the "Extractor's Toolkit" intro fiction, one of the alleged NYPD Inc. officers identifies his superior to a building manager as Captain Barney Miller from the twelfth precinct.
  • One of the locations of interest in Seattle is an art gallery called Laubenstein Plaza. It's named after Jeff Laubenstein, a regular Shadowrun artist through Third Edition.
  • Safe Houses. The conversation on traveling to escape notice:
    Las Vegas-to-San Francisco on horseback was a great time for contemplation.
    Lots of secrets learned in the thoughts of nothing and the sounds of silence.
    - Man-Of-Many-Names
    Aren’t those old rock lyrics?
    - Kat o’ Nine Tales
    Oh, come on, that sounds nice. What did you call the horse?
    - /dev/grrl
    I do not believe he had a name.
    - Man-Of-Many-Names
    Seriously?
    - Kat o’ Nine Tales
  • Data Trails. It figures that a book dedicated to the hackers of Shadowrun would be a shout out to internet culture in general, stuffed with references to internet memes. In the section on new qualities you can find ones like Ninja Vanish (spend Edge to remove all marks on your persona), Nerdrage (a compulsion to vandalize the commlink of anybody who shames or humiliates you), and LEEEEEEEROY JENKINS (the urge to immediately attack threats without consulting your friends - but you can get a bonus to your first attack if you scream your name at your enemies).
  • Chrome Flesh
    • A new quality called Uncanny Healing grants what is essentially a toned-down version of Wolverine's Healing Factor.
    • Spinrad NeverRest cyberlimbs are optimized to improve the user's climbing skills. The sales pitch is introduced with "Rock climbing, Joel!"
  • Rigger 5.0. The Renraku corporation is known for being a leader of software technology. One result was an insane AI that imprisoned thousands of people for experimentation and built a drone army. Another is SkyGuide, a civil drone traffic control network, prompting this comment:
    Huh. A net in the sky? Wonder why they didn’t go with the obvious name?
    '- Turbo Bunny
  • Howling Shadows
    • One of the most fearful monsters in the Sixth World is a gigantic bear that has fallen victim to several toxic elements of its environment. Its name? The Shardik.
    • In addition, the book features a VERY dangerous protosapientnote  that only lurks in the darkness. Fittingly, it's named the Grue
  • A Jackpointer named Snopes often appears, usually to correct the misinformation of other runners.
  • Ares manufactures a grenade launcher named "Antioch".
  • In the book Year of the Comet, the write-up on the new Awakened animal known as the Horned Bear detailed a story about how one such bear seemed to engage in "honor duel" type combat and later went into a frenzy when its duel challenge was answered with a hail of gunfire. A Jackpointer then ponders if they're sentient, and another poster replies "Not really, though they're smarter than the average bear."

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