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Posted by: Tashiro Feb 5 2013, 01:26 AM

I remember reading about the impending war between the spirits and Horizon (I believe this was in Las Vegas). So, canonically, what happened? Has Las Vegas been sucked off into Astral Space? Has it become plagued by spirits who exist in a dual-natured state there? What's happened? I've held off stating anything about Las Vegas in my campaign so far, but I'm itching to have something happen...

Posted by: tasti man LH Feb 5 2013, 01:51 AM

I'm assuming this is all after the huge massacre of TMs in Vegas, which bared Horizon's ugly side to the world?

*still needs to read Twilight Horizon fully*

Posted by: Smirnov Feb 5 2013, 08:27 AM

Never heard anything about spirits. Horizon had a fallout with tecnomancers and AIs when it turned out that Horizon was secretly slowing down technomancer recognition in order to have the exclusive rights to use them in whatever they wanted.

Posted by: Tashiro Aug 20 2013, 07:24 PM

Well, Horizon was experimenting with Free Spirits and such, and there was a big blowout, with the spirits of Vegas going rogue and such. There's a series of adventures connected to this, and I'm wondering what the 'canon' of it is. One of the options is Vegas gets sucked into Astral Space - my personal favourite for 'OH MY GOD' reactions.

Posted by: tasti man LH Aug 21 2013, 04:01 AM

Goddammit, really?!

It wasn't bad enough when they decided to flood half of LA?

Posted by: hermit Aug 21 2013, 07:58 AM

Actually, spirits try to destroy Hoover dam (now known as "the dam", by favor of the resident super spirits), but probably fail. On a side note, half of Salt Lake City is destroyed in a freak rain of blood.

Posted by: Sendaz Aug 21 2013, 08:23 AM

As opposed to the normal rain of blood that happens every spring around Easter.

Posted by: Tashiro Aug 21 2013, 01:05 PM

I know about the Flood of Blood. I'm just curious how the Hoover Dam event worked out canonically, and the outcome of the event. It looks like the PCs are expected to try to talk the spirits out of it, so I guess 'canonically' the dam doesn't go kablooey. A shame, it would have been interested to see such a big shift.

Posted by: Wakshaani Aug 21 2013, 04:03 PM

I don't know how much feedback there is on Twilight Horizon. Adventures like that have a section on the official boards where you can detail what happened with your group. I think those results get taken into account by Bull and the gang, in terms of story direction. (See also, who got the coins of luck)

Posted by: hermit Aug 22 2013, 08:05 AM

Oh, they have that for all adventures, not only Missions?

Posted by: Wakshaani Aug 22 2013, 03:59 PM

I think? Feedback's always welcome, I know. Helps give story direction a nudge.

Posted by: quentra Aug 22 2013, 04:01 PM

Am I the only person who runs Horizon as less Google/Facebook and more News Corp? I think I made the Murdoch family high level execs at one point.

Posted by: DWC Aug 22 2013, 04:48 PM

You can run it however you want, of course. However, turning Horizon into mustache twirling villains looking to tie a pretty girl to a set of train tracks kind of disregards the Brave New World quality of their malevolence. They're spending huge amounts of money researching ways to subvert human free will, along with overtly fostering crime and violence in the streets of Los Angeles purely to lure more people into opening themselves up to the company's psychotropic behavior modification simsense.

Posted by: quentra Aug 22 2013, 05:02 PM

...And how is that different from Fox News?

Posted by: DWC Aug 22 2013, 05:08 PM

Horizon is subtle, subversive, and trying to expand its influence. Modern media outlets are overt, clumsy, profit-driven echo chambers. They're not looking to actually change anything about how people think or feel because that's too much work. It's easier to reinforce the opinions of the audience they already have to keep them tuning in and watching sponsor commercials.

Conversely, Horizon is looking to change how people thing, and continually draw in new consumers of their content.

Posted by: quentra Aug 22 2013, 05:10 PM

Arguably, that's precisely how Time Warner/News Corp/etc function. They need to make a profit, and draw in new demographics. I don't see anything that shows Horizon does anything but the time-honoured tradition of spin doctor and reinforcement. (Now with more brain-hacking!)

Posted by: DWC Aug 22 2013, 05:29 PM

Much as I'd love to continue this debate, doing so will take it wildly off topic and into real world politics.

Taking things back on topic, I doubt that you're the only one who's shifted the culture of a Shadowrun corporation to more closely match an existing one. Look at Aztechnology. It's viewed by most players as being the giant, malevolent bogeyman of the 6th world, when most of the people with a SIN see Aztechnology as something closer to a mix of PepsiCo, Procter and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, and General Mills.

Posted by: hermit Aug 22 2013, 06:54 PM

TurnerMedia (Hisato-Turner Broadcasting in Shadowrun) is a subdivision of Horizon. The entire corporation is more Google plus Facebook plus Hollywood and with TurnerMedia as one of several areas of operations. NBC also belongs to Horizon now. Not sure where NewsCorp ended up in Shadowrun, but myself, I decided its Spirit lives on with Ares.

Edit: Cursory research indicates Fox Simsense, formerly HQ'd in Chicago (for whatever reason), ended up with Truman Corp, Truman Media, and hence, either still is with Ares or went to Horizon. We don't know. We don't even know if that is the same company. Maybe they were bought out in 2029 or something.

Posted by: Udoshi Aug 23 2013, 08:24 AM

Hmn. Which adventures/sourcebooks are this? I wouldn't mind a point in the right direction, to inflict on my gm of a LA game.

Posted by: hermit Aug 23 2013, 08:49 AM

The adventure seed arc about the rogue spirits is in The Twilight Horizon. The conclusion and canonic outcome of this conflict is in Hazard Pay.

Posted by: Daddy's Little Ninja Aug 29 2013, 02:51 PM

We think of horizon as like the news corp in the bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies" happy to manipulate the news markets and tech products to make people want them as the source- even to the point of having conflicting divisions so everyone has a 'source' to go to- imagine MSNBC and Fox owned by the same company.

Posted by: Wakshaani Aug 29 2013, 03:25 PM

Horizon is a combination of Apple, Google, and Facebook, with wads of cash, several philanthropic activities across the world, and operating in a radically different way than other Megacorps. The P2 system that rates employees and results in people being shunted around to different departments and elevated from worker to manager to executive (And back down again, if needed) makes it hard to really get a grip on in terms of who you need to extract and the like. They recently became the largest food producing corp in North America, as long as Aztechnology's wounded at the least.

Of course, as they lick their wounds from being Amazonia's partner against Aztlan and losing, they're dealing with a Technomancer uprising (But the AIs are still hanging with them, oddly), and Shiawase is starting to eyeball them. It's not all shiny happy time at Horizon anymore.