“Can’t Run On An Empty Stomach,” the tagline for Shadowrun: Running A La Carte from Catalyst Game Labs, sums up this cyberpunk sourcebook succinctly. Written by Darryl Mott, this sourcebook explores the question people ask three times a day: What is there to eat? In the Sixth World of Shadowrun, food isn’t simple, it’s profitable, political, and perilous. In other words, figuring out what’s for dinner is adventurous enough to warrant a sourcebook for the long-running fantasy cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying game, so let’s sample its flavor.
DARRYL MOTT, EN WORLD FREELANCER
Before tasting this, let’s talk about why I’m reviewing this sourcebook. Its author, Darryl Mott, is a freelance author, TTRPG journalist, and EN World columnist. In 2025, Darryl experienced a tragedy that he summed up as: “I fell in my kitchen on Christmas Day and broke my back. I am now paralyzed and unable to walk, move, or feel anything from my waist down.” When I read about Darryl’s fall, I was stunned; obviously, that’s the kind of medical event that changes your life completely. Darryl’s written about the complications on his GoFundMe page where friends can contribute to help with his new situation. To spread the word about his challenges and his ongoing work, Morrus agreed to publish a review of Darryl’s solo Shadowrun sourcebook, Shadowrun: Running A La Carte, the kind of book that makes roleplaying games my favorite hobby. To support one of EN World’s contributors, Join me as I bite into Darryl’s work.
HAPPY MEAL CONTENTS
Shadowrun: Running A La Carte from Catalyst Game Labs is already a Silver Best Seller at DriveThruRPG. This breezy, 19-page sourcebook for Shadowrun Sixth World, the latest edition of the storied game, offers a lot of food for thought. The core game debuted in 1989, with six core editions over its nearly four decades, Shadowrun is the synthesis of 1980s cyberpunk and high fantasy. Neon, elves, cybernetics, magic, corpos, dragons, street samurai, and fistfuls of d6s, Shadowrun blends two distinct genres flawlessly.
Enter Running A La Carte and you’re adding to the world of managers and monsters. Here, food matters, because everyone and everything needs to eat. Necessities, have-to-haves like food and drink, represent opportunities to those able to monetize basic survival. This book touches on that as well as restaurants in the Sixth World.
The opening pages set the stage narratively as an online group of readers comment on an article about food – Feeding The People. Implying the stakes (steaks?), one corpo, Aztechnology, tries to monopolize the restaurants and foods you consume. As the article and commentary build in a symbiotic fashion, discussions of shadowruns, the crux of the game, are suggested. As a cyberpunk, should you take food processing plant disruption jobs? It really depends whether you need to eat.
Darryl’s writing style draws me in. Over the book, he contrasts bought and paid for professional news articles and fluff pieces interrupted by street commentary and short historic factoids. The combination drives home the dangers of something as benign as food in a world of unregulated fantasy corporations with armies of mages, orks, and lawyers.
The booklet deals with a bedrock trope of cyberpunk TTRPGs, meeting a client and securing a job (run). Typically, this is handled face-to-face and, for the maximum thematic impact, the negotiations are conducted in a restaurant. In a cyberpunk world where fashion and attitude determine shadowrun rate ranges, a good meal can lead to a good deal. As a GM, making that encounter feel like Shadowrun is critical. To that end, Darryl breaks down The Fine Dining Experience: A Shadowrunner’s Guide to Five-Star Restaurants. This section sketches a high-level overview of restaurants that can be divided into mundane but nice and fantastical writ impractical. Mundane but nice is our world, fantastical writ impractical is the world of Shadowrun. An example is a restaurant that is a giant freezer with icy furniture, frigid air, and cold dishes, something experiential that the GM can describe at the gaming table to build the setting’s flavor.
The Dress Codes and Mind Your Manners sections delve into proper public appearance and how your character might portray their public persona and table etiquette. The world of cyberpunks is a facade of fashion; what you look like matters. Accepting that, in a world of cybernetics and hackers where appearance means a great deal, how you act and present yourself matters as much as your choice of clothing and body modifications. This sourcebook implies that your character’s fashion decisions, their actions, and even where they are seen publicly combine to give an NPC an impression of them, something key to this world of performative appearances.
If cyberpunks are meeting in a restaurant, then there’s bound to be fights. Acknowledging that, there’s the Security (No, Really) portion of the book that sets up the narrative expectations from passive security to countersurveillance to guards ready to defend the establishment and its patrons. Do restaurants have surveillance? If so, is it hackable? Do they allow weapons? Security? If you’re expecting a universal policy, think again, each restaurant will be different and, since your life and Nuyen are on the line, you’ll want to think about the restaurant’s policies before breaking them.
The Rise And Fall Of A Beloved Restaurant Chain describes the rise and fall of the fictional restaurant chain, Pirate Pete’s. This section takes a real world piece of history – the rise and crash of the Red Lobster restaurant chain – re-mixed in a Shadowrun setting. Any GM familiar with the real-world analog will see the choices made and how they could apply the same allegorical technique to their own storytelling, mixing their pet irritants into lessons as they tell their roleplaying tales.
When it comes to food and its purveyors, you’ll need to be aware of the Major Players. This section touches on the biggest food corps that exist in the Sixth World including Aztechnology and the handful of rivals that they have. It hints at the shadows these literal taste-makers move through.
TABLE(TOP) RATING
What is this booklet? Flavor, flavor, flavor. Darryl Mott assembles a tight set of narrative concepts that could be applicable to any edition of the Shadowrun TTRPGs, or, really, any cyberpunk set roleplaying game that combines cyberpunk and magic. There is no specific crunch to get in the way of these corpo sketches and broad adventure hooks.
In this setting, sustenance comes at a premium. What character’s eat fuels the dark Nuyen ecosystem that they survive on, and understanding how their actions are part of the fabric of this world is crucial to a successful Shadowrun campaign. If you want your cyberpunk setting to feel lived in, one of the bedrocks is determining how your characters and NPCs eat. This book isn’t going to give you stats, it’s gives you ideas to build your own adventures. Shadowrun: Running A La Carte takes existing elements of Shadowrun Sixth World, adds a fresh voice to the writing, and mixes those ingredients into a sourcebook worth finding.
I finished the book and decided to revamp the consequences every time my PCs fight in a restaurant. Before I read this, I set them against the badguys and, maybe, law enforcement. Next time they destroy a restaurant, they aren’t walking away clean. Next time, Burger King is going to bring a whopper of burger pain!
As a GM, should you get this book? If you run a cyberpunk TTRPG, especially Shadowrun, you’re going to break this content down and find the ingredients to create your own secret menu of fast food shadow runs. With writing by Darryl Mott and artwork by Bruno Balixa, David Dotson, Jeff Laubenstein, Lukasz Matuszek, and Derek Poole, there’s solid reference and lampoon images to feel the threats and fun found in the Sixth World. It’s a quick read, but one that will make you rethink every Johnson encounter.
As a publisher, should you read this book to see if you want Darryl on your creative team? Darryl Mott manages the impossible, making fake food and parody restaurants interesting while using multiple narrative voices. Food is a bland topic in TTRPGs despite dubbing descriptions as “flavor text.” This book focuses on presenting inspiration so the GM can build out backup plans. It’s not Old-School Essentials, where the text is minimal, but it’s not Dungeon Crawl Classics, where the paragraphs cover every possible outcome to the scenario. Shadowrun: Running A La Carte from Catalyst Game Labs falls between, offering something substantial enough to sink your teeth into without going overboard on the per word rate and eating the budget. When you read this, you’ll see why Catalyst Game Labs hired Darryl Mott to craft their official take on Sixth World eating. If you want to test him out, you can find Darryl on social media (here).
READY, CHEF
The book is excellent, and I’m glad to have a deeper understanding of restaurants in Shadowrun. I want to thank Darryl Mott for adding something new and tasty to the gaming table. As mentioned, I did this review because Darryl’s situation has changed. If you want to support Darryl Mott’s directly, check out his GoFundMe page. If you’re interested in reading his Shadowrun: Running A La Carte from Catalyst Game Labs, these links will take you to DriveThruRPG, which provides an affiliate fee to Darryl, and the book which, if you purchase it, Catalyst Game Labs will provide a royalty to Darryl. Buy, eat, and repeat because you “Can’t Run On An Empty Stomach.”
Darryl Mott
Egg Embry participates in the OneBookShelf Affiliate Program, but this article uses Darryl Mott’s OneBookShelf Affiliate Program links.
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