[RedneckDevil]

Okay first time here and wanted to ask for advice.  First off ive been running pathfinder for a few years and video rpgs set "in the past' magical fantasy, but ive not experienced anything cyberpunk related.  like brand new to the very concept.  laugh if u want lol, but im blown away with this new type of fantasy ive come across.  What got me introduced was the shadowrun pc games and absolutely loved them.  My friend told me that he plays in a tabletop shadowruns game and got to sit in one.  Was very impressed and excited, and we smoked and talked for a couple hours on just explaining the setting. 
So heres what im asking advice for. I got lucky and bought the collectors edition off ebay of the 5th edition and waiting for it to come in the mail and been re watching ghost in a shell to try and get the vibe.  is there any special books that go in depth to the lore and factions and the politics and etc?  Any good anime or shows to get ideas from for bout anything with cyberpunk, to get a better feel on cyberpunk and/or this setting?

I appreciate yals time and thank you for any advice in advance 

[MijRai]

Neuromancer is a classic cyberpunk book, if you're interested.  The Sixth World Almanac is a history of Shadowrun going from around the divergence from 'real' history to 2072, covers pretty much every major event, the new nations, etc.  Seattle 2072 is also mostly up to date and can give you a lot of culture in Shadowrun, as can Attitude. 

[Zweiblumen]

Welcome to the Sixth World chummer!  It's a rough place, but we like it here

Almost any book by William Gibson will be helpful, and most of Neal Stephenson's will as well.  Two of my favorite authors.  Similar topics but very very different writing style.  Gibson is the faster read.

Ghost in the Shell and Akira would be my anime suggestions, but I'm not very well versed in that genre.

There are several great threads on the board for movies and tv shows, but on my phone now. Run a search on the site for movies and you'll get several good threads.
ETA: Okay, I forgot how bad search was.  Here's a couple of links:
http://forums.shadowruntabletop.com/index.php?topic=16415.0
http://forums.shadowruntabletop.com/index.php?topic=6033.0

As MijRai suggested, the almanac is great for reference.  If you're into podcasts, check out neo-anarchists by Opti, he does a great job of telling the history of the Sixth world in a fun and interesting way.  CriticalGlitch is a great podcast as well.  Complex Action is a great YouTube channel, GM Bobby does a great job with explaining some of the more difficult parts of GMing Shadowrun.

HTH!  Remember, always watch your six, shoot straight, conserve ammo, and never deal with a dragon.

[halflingmage]

While it is a contemporary rather than science fiction setting, I would strongly suggest the movie Ronin with Robert De Niro.  Although in the end there ends up being alot of stuff that in RPG terms would be PVP and interparty conflict, probably more than you would want in most of your sessions of shadowrun, it gets the mentality totally right.  Take Ronin, throw in some elves, motorcycles, and magic, and you basically have black trench-coat style Shadowrun. 

[Mirikon]

Here's my 'viewing list' to get the feel of Shadowrun:

Ghost in the Shell - Honestly, if I have to say why, you need to go see the movie/series already.
Johnny Mnemonic - Textbook pink mohawk.
Leverage - Not cyberpunk, but black trenchcoat all the way.
Blade Runner - Quintessential cyberpunk
Oceans Eleven - Getting the feel of the black trenchcoat runs
Escape from New York - A stroll through the Barrens
Robocop - Need I say more?
Judge Dredd - Sprawl life
Hackers - Hacker subculture
Sneakers - Old school spy/heist movie, but there's some clever tricks there.
The Sting - Your Face must watch this movie. Period.
Akira - Barrens rats and an out of control mage?
Mission: Impossible - Datasteal out of a high tech facility? Check. Doublecrosses? Check. Sounds right to me.
Aliens - This is what happens when you go into a nest of insect spirits.

[Dinendae]

Aliens - This is what happens when you go into a nest of insect spirits.

Everything planet-side is pretty much what happened in Chicago, thermonuclear explosion and all!

[Beta]

This primer is a bit old (2063 in game time, so about 14 years old), but still gives a decent feeling for the world (just ignore the part about so many hovercraft being used, that didn't really stick).  https://s3.amazonaws.com/ch_shadowrun/shadowrun_primer.pdf

There isn't a lot of stuff that mixes cyberpunk with magic, (except for the various ShadowRun novels and short story collections).  So most of what you can find are either cyberpunk, or 'urban fantasy' set in roughly our current world.  Both can be good for inspiration, but in both cases there are probably more books than there are movies or TV shows.

As far as movies, everything mentioned so far, and while I hate to admit it, I think one of the easiest ways to get into the right mindset to view the world is is Schwarzenegger's The Running Man (just replace 'steroids' with 'muscle replacement').

In terms of cyberpunk novels, if you feel so inspired, I agree with the William Gibson, but I’d also suggest
-   Walter Jon William’s novel Hard Wired (the origin of the vehicle rigger, possibly, and it also anticipates some of the things happening in the matrix in current SR)
-   George Alec Effinger’s novel Gravity Fails (it will give you a different view on all the ways to technologically and chemically boost and alter your mind in  SR).  (this one especially, although Hardwired too, has a very different feel than Gibson’s novels, to give you different reference points for how you want your world to feel. 
-   Not even remotely cyberpunk, but John Scalzi’s novel Old Man’s War gives a decent idea of what it may be like to get heavily cybered (although in that novel it is a whole new body, but the concepts are translatable)

And of course, every game world is going to be a bit different, so it is less critical to get it ‘right’ than to find a feel and focus that works well for you.

[RedneckDevil]

Thank you everyone for the advice so far Looking thru the lists, I need to re watch a lot of these movies that I saw when I was a kid in the 80s.
Now, is there any advice u can give to someone who has GM different games before for this game? I know I'm gonna start off small to get a feel for it and seriously thinking of using my hometown as a setting but tweeking it to fit this universe.  Does the core rule book give most of the info I will need to run the game?  Reason why I asked is because I've read reviews talking about the book has quite a few flaws.  I plan on reading and trying to absorb it a few times before I start with some test runs.
I guess what I'm asking is, like in other editions there's things to watch out for for players becoming to powerful to break the game we run for other players or dos and fonts in setting up encounters and such.  One piece of advice I've received so far is to have players roll up a couple characters at the beginning because player characters can die as quickly as a character in CoC.  Is there any links or books that help give advice in setting missions incase players FUBAR or don't have a certain class to solve situations?

Again tyvm for the advice so far and I apologize for asking a lot.

[Beta]

You can totally play with just the core rules.  The other books offer more options, of course, but it is a lot like Pathfinder in that way so no big shock to you there.

There are, however, two issues with the core rules which tend to drive people here to ask questions.  One, there are some flat out pieces of bad editing (where sections disagree on something, or information is ambiguous – and there is the vehicle movement table which just makes no sense at all).  More generally they made an editorial decision to assume that people are reading the book from front to back and have excellent recall of it all – in other words, rules are buried in the text (and there is a lot of text) and the information you need for a particular task may well be scattered around a number of sections of the book.  If you ever happened to read the first edition AD&D books, it is a bit like the creators of 5th edition loved that style, but thought that those books were too concise.

As for deadliness, meh, like any system it depends a ton on how the GM runs it.  It seems that GMs who like to run lethal puzzles (you know, the sort of thing where you have to be almost perfect or be met with overwhelming danger) occasionally gravitate to SR and justify their tendencies based on ‘Corporate security is really good.’  Some players enjoy that style, and if they are matched up with the right GM they’ll all enjoy some edge of the seat tension (and likely many opportunities to make up new characters).  But that is far from the only way to play the game.

There is one thing to keep in mind as GM, that is unlike some other games: as characters take damage they take penalties on pretty much everything they do.  This means that when they start to fail they can proceed to full collapse pretty quickly.  This can take some careful finagling to keep things threatening but not overly lethal if you’d rather characters don’t die much.  Personally I like to keep opposition in waves so that I can roll back on later waves if the group starts to crumble. 

[SmilinIrish]

Another angle (and not really what you were asking for) is to consider what might be different about having magic in a modern setting.  There are tons of urban fantasy out there, but think of Jim Butcher's Dresden novels (if you haven't read them, then you should).  Let's you consider magic in a modern setting, with monsters and such.  Some interesting ideas there for having magic with modern trappings, but also he tends to throw in old deities as powerful NPC's.  Gave me ideas about having old forgtotten deities turning out to be powerful spirits who touched our world at some time in the past, and maybe now are here as powerful free spirits.  It could be a cool moment for your PC's to put 2 and 2 together and realize that they are actually talking to Apollo or Odin or something.  They don't have to have epic deific power, just make them as high force free spirits.

[All4BigGuns]

There is one thing to keep in mind as GM, that is unlike some other games: as characters take damage they take penalties on pretty much everything they do.  This means that when they start to fail they can proceed to full collapse pretty quickly.  This can take some careful finagling to keep things threatening but not overly lethal if you’d rather characters don’t die much.  Personally I like to keep opposition in waves so that I can roll back on later waves if the group starts to crumble.

Pretty much all of the games that incorporate wound penalties have that problem. This one is particularly bad with it if you take both Physical and Stun damage (the penalties on both tracks stack), but as much as I love it, L5R is worse where getting hit one time just starts a "death spiral".

[Wakshaani]

Now, while you can stick to pure CYberpunk to get the core of Shadowrun, you can also go to the roots of CYberpunk and check out some Film Noir. Pretty much any movie shot in blck and white and featuring a detective (who probably wears a fedora) can start showing you the foundations ... the world's gritty, almost everyone's corrupt, and while you can't change the world, you can make a difference in some small chunk of the population.

Of course, you also have sci-fi elements, 80's rock opera, buddy cop movie, furrydom, and TV soap opera elements, depending on what you want to stress.

One of my big influences on the Anime side was Bubblegum Crisis. If you want a rockin' soundtrack coupled with giant ominous arcologies run by Japanese corps, it's actually better for that than Ghost in teh Shell. Not as pretty, mind you, but closer to the heart of the beast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajTAnMqhZB8

If you want to absolutely *crush* it and see what Noir + Magic looks like, I can't reccomend HBO's Cast a Deadly Spell enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIlAGnpH5Aw It was released on VHS, man, twenty years ago? Lord I'm old! Never gotten a DVD release and that's just TRAGIC, but, it's the modern(ish) take on classic Noir that'll really lay out the building blocks you'll need.

For a show made when Cyberpunk was HOT, you can't go wrong with Max Headroom.

You can also find some very good fanwork if you search around. This trailer for a (sadly non-existant!) Shadowrun TV show, for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4wj3z45314

Lastly is a pair of clips that showcase Augmented Reality, to show you what it's like down at the bottom (So many ads!) and at the dreamy corporate top:

Low Lifestyle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSfKlCmYcLc

High Lifestyle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozLaklIFWUI

[ScytheKnight]

Another couple of great example for Urban Fantasy are Mercedes Lackey's Bedlam Bard and SERRAted Edge series. A really good look at magic in the modern world.

If you want to read something about magic suddenly reemerging into a modern setting Mark Chadbourn has a great set of series Age of Misrule, Dark Age and Kingdom of the Serpent. This series is pretty dark and Gothic, but the Age of Misrule trilogy especially does an amazing job of capturing the utter confusion and panic of magic making a sudden and full force return, and not playing nice with technology.

[Chaos Monkey]

Under Anime worth checking out I'm going to add a few more to those already mentioned:

1. Black Lagoon - An office drone falls into a shadowy world of mercenary criminals after being screwed by his corporate masters.  Chaos and carnage follow.

2. Jormangand - A large crew of mercenaries that act as bodyguards for a crazy arms dealer.  Never deal with a dragon chummer.

3. Psycho Pass - Everyone has a profile, and boy you'd better keep your score clean...

[ScytheKnight]

Under Anime worth checking out I'm going to add a few more to those already mentioned:

1. Black Lagoon - An office drone falls into a shadowy world of mercenary criminals after being screwed by his corporate masters.  Chaos and carnage follow.

2. Jormangand - A large crew of mercenaries that act as bodyguards for a crazy arms dealer.  Never deal with a dragon chummer.

3. Psycho Pass - Everyone has a profile, and boy you'd better keep your score clean...

Seconding Black Lagoon and Dragon Pass.

Seriously, if you use the Caribbean League setting from Hard Targets you're basically playing a Shadowrun version of Black Lagoon.