About 5-6 years ago, I was poking around the internet, looking for information on this cyberpunk RPG I’d heard about called Shadowrun.
This led me to a simple little corner of the Shadowrun Webring, a page run by a chummer known as shapcano. He wrote a series of fantastic short stories, and a few short novels that really brought the world of Shadowrun alive to me.
Thanks to him and his stories, I was approached by a group looking for Shadowrun RPG players, and although I’d never played a pen-and-paper RPG before, I loved Shadowrun so much that I jumped at the opportunity.
We eventually went on to other games, and from this group I met my wonderful and amazing girlfriend.
All thanks to shapcano. Others sometimes take credit, rightfully, but it all started with him.
Sadly, shapcano left us in June of 2013, and his website with all his stories has dropped off the internet.
I am providing a mirror for his primary Shadowrun-based work – the Owen Glendower, Lug and Hamon, and Lost Boys stories. The longer pieces have been consolidated from their original chapter-at-a-time format into single documents for more convenient reading, and the short stories are left as is with the exception of what I’m calling the Mouse trilogy (Mickey the Mouse, A Better Mousetrap, Of Mice and Elements) – this has been consolidated into a single document as well.
Each are numbered and listed in chronological order for easier reading.
I will be posting each one up as I have it ready. The consolidation takes some time, due to the number of chapters in the novels.
You can read it right here with the links, if you want to download it just right-click and choose save link/target as.
1: Inheritance (novel)
2: Rescue (short)
3: Student (short)
4: Demands (novel)
5: Shadow Reflections (short)
6: Mouse saga (collection of shorts)
7: Lug’s Magical Whatsis (short)
8: Lessons (short)
9: Debts (novel)
10: The Trouble With Fixers (short)
Here is all the stories in a single zip file: shapcano.zip
I hope you enjoy these as much as I did.
Thanks for saving this wonderful stories. Read them several times throught the years.
I’m reading through these again for the first time in a decade or more. They are still as great as the first 50 times I read them. Thanks for saving them.
Thank you for doing this. I read these stories years ago and only discovered Shapcano’s passing a short time ago when checking to see if anything new had been created. At the time, I appreciated his creation of the stories and posting them to the public to read. Today, I appreciate taking the initiative to make his work available .Thanks.
I stumbled across Shapcano’s trove of internet fiction sometime around 12-13 years old. Finding a gaming group was hard to I had to live vicariously through internet fiction (I grew up in a strict religious house and mother was positive that RPG’s were a portal to hell). There was no better place to find an introduction to Shadowrun, or what quality Fan Fiction could be than Shapcano’s place. I shot him a couple of emails over the years and we corresponded very sporadically. Really sorry to hear about his passing and my condolences go out to his family!
Thank you for this I truly loved shapcano’s stories and was deeply sad to hear of his moving on.
I think I’ve got all of his stuff, minus maybe the later WOW stories. send me an e-mail and I’ll send you a zip or two.
Hi Club, do you have more of his stories than are here? If so I would love to have them as well.
Aislinn
Here is all that I’ve been able to find. http://shapcano.blogspot.com/
Thank you very much, Club.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/bill-shapland-longtime-georgetown-sports-information-director-dies-at-57/2013/04/26/4b0ac5ce-aeb5-11e2-8bf6-e70cb6ae066e_story.html
It is an article about Bill Shapland, a.k.a. Shapcano, from last year.
Thank you.
Your brother’s writing helped carry me through a fairly rough time, and shaped the best portions of my then-future.
This was the least I could do in his memory.
Thank you for doing this, today I’m bringing someone new into the family with this zip file.
R.I.P. Shapcano. I have read most of his stuff, and used it in a loose manner as a GM. The looks on my gamers faces was priceless at times.
I just found out about his death. Its sad to find that out. I once sent and email and got a reply from him, when i was first reading his novels. Its my favorite by far. I love the amount of details and colour he wove into his stories. Ive read them over 4 times throught out the years. RIP shapcano. You were a great storyteller.
Thanks, was thinking about these a while ago and found all the other old stories I’d lost but could not find these, was about to cry then found you, keeping a great storie teller alive
Wow, thanks so much. I’ve been reading his novels over and over for years. Got into Shadowrun from the Sega Genesis game and found his fiction and Winterhawk’s a bit later on. Just found out he died, bummer. Thanks for keeping his work alive, they’re even better than the published novels.
Completely forgot my manners, thanks for putting this up, I was worried these were lost to the digital ages.
I don’t suppose you have any of his other short stories tucked away? I’m putting together a street sam who I wanted to be a decendant of Mellow (the gang boss)
Alas, I do not. This is all of what I had plus what I could salvage.
Most of his other fiction wasn’t Shadowrun-related, I think. If there’s some I missed, I lament its loss.
Might be able to salvage a bit more through the Wayback Machine, if you haven’t checked their archive already. I think this was their final crawl of his site: https://web.archive.org/web/20130623213854/http://shapcano.com/
A few of these I did pull from the Wayback Machine, but it was spotty in what was saved.
Thank you so much for rescuing these stories and posting them here. Shapcano was a wonderful mentor and a dear friend. He is sorely missed.
Thank you.
I hadn’t thought about doing this until it was too late and I found a few online through books.org.
If you don’t mind, I’m going to add a link from deckerm.net
No problem. I’ve had some connection troubles lately, but I’ve just switched providers so that should be solved.
Erm … the links don’t seem to work?
Ack!, I apologize.
Wonder why… Working on that now.
The links are working now. Sorry, I was somewhat brain-burnt after compiling and consolidating all of this, and neglected to move most of them into place.