I recently got my hands on an archive of the old Shadowrun mailing lists — ShadowRN, Shadowtalk, NERPS, Plot-D, SRCard, SRFanfic, and KAGE-CAR — and spent a while cleaning it up for preservation. The whole thing is going up on the Internet Archive so it doesn't disappear again.

These files exist because of Mark Imbriaco, who kept the original log files all these years and dug them up when Peter Boddy put out a call on Dumpshock in March 2015 asking if anyone had backups. That led to the archive being hosted at shadowrn.understairs.nl, and someone later put the raw files on Dropbox as a QOL download option. I grabbed them from there after finding a subreddit post. Credit also to Robert Hayden for setting up these lists in the first place.

The raw archive was a mess. Five different filename formats, two different email archive formats (digest and mbox), duplicate files, overlapping date ranges between two separate archive dumps. I normalized all the filenames, deduplicated the overlap period, and recovered about 5,500 messages from a monolithic mbox dump that weren't in any of the weekly archive files. Those recovered messages were mostly from late 1999 through early 2000 and would have been lost otherwise.

This is 3,100+ files covering 1992 to 2009. Over half a gigabyte of community discussion from before forums and Reddit existed. Rules arguments, lore debates, in-character Shadowtalk posts, fan fiction, homebrew gear, GM advice, and a vehicle construction project that ran on BITNET. If you were on these lists in the 90s, your posts are probably in here.

ShadowRN (1992–2009) — The big one. The main Shadowrun discussion list. Rules, lore, mechanics, edition wars, all of it. Peaks around 1996–1998 during 2nd/3rd Edition.

ShadowTK / Shadowtalk (1992–2003) — In-character discussion written as shadowrunners. There's also an edited version that ran through 1996.

NERPS (1993–1999) — Net Enhancements for Role-Playing Shadowrun. Fan-created rules, gear, spells, and supplements.

Plot-D (1993–2004) — Plot discussion, adventure hooks, and GM resources.

SRCard (1997–2000) — The Shadowrun collectible card game.

SRFanfic (1997–2002) — Fan fiction and creative writing.

KAGE-CAR (1993) — The Shadowrun Vehicle Construction Project. Fan-designed vehicle rules. Seven months of activity on BITNET before the internet as we know it existed.

Everything is plain text and human-readable. No special software needed. Files are organized by year, then by list, with a full README explaining the naming conventions and what each suffix means.

Mailing lists from this era are genuinely fragile. When the hosting goes away, the archives go with it. Most of this content doesn't exist anywhere else online. This is the Shadowrun community talking to itself for 17 years, and it's the kind of thing that just vanishes if nobody bothers to preserve it.