This is pretty much my view.

Though if they had people who were competent running the damn product line or as writers it would sure help a lot. The Neo-Nazi "murder the jew ghosts" adventure was not an improvement over any of the awful crap that showed up over time. Not only was it offensive, it was clearly written by someone who didn't understand the rules and edited by someone who didn't understand the rules then published by someone who didn't understand the rules.

In my mind the problem is not the big events but rather the tone of the game has changed, and to be honest I think that has been driven by the realists....and in a bad way.

This game rocked when you could do things without having to worry about nanobots tracking you down in your sleep and turning you into goo, when a security camera was just.... a camera, and it wasn't assumed that every minute of of said film is analysed with gait/facial recognition software. Seriously, gait recognition software? This is where I diverge from the realists. Yes, in the future this sort of stuff will probably happen, but that doesn't make for a good game. The game was so much better when...well..... there were pink mohawks.

Well, I always assumed that way before Ryumio awoke, the setting was already changing, with, perhaps 10% of the American population being of Native-Americans instead of the actual 1% and there being not only native-americans but other people who shared the belief of protecting the land fighting the American Government agains the Resource War.
Then again, and I agree that this was possibly an oversight of the writers was to describe how the climate and geography of the world changed when para-critters became an actual thing.
I mean, what kind of vermin control can you have against a 15 feet tall armadillo on steroids? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)
VITAS, war and hunger made a damn good job in culling human population.
Anyway, just my two (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) on the whole thing.

Only if you actually liked that sort of thing, though. In my opinion, the game got better when there started being consequences for the ignorant murder sprees those with Mohawks caused.

Perhaps, but when pink Mohawk went out of style, a lot of hair stylists were put out of work, some of whom even went on to join the shadows.

You would be suprised how years of handling blades and scissors while just listening to people in some of the tougher inner cities made for fair CQC training and Face/Fixer skills....

R.I.P. Bobby 'Bro Fro'

Please don't start a mohawk/mirror argument (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif) .

We will always remember him with fondness... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/indifferent.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/indifferent.gif)

One could argue that one needs Mirrors to properly care for one's Mohawk. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

This is actually a problem I have with the setting. Go look at the populations for Seattle and such - supposedly everyone's favorite megaplex is significantly larger than it currently is but has about 1/2 - 1/3 the population (off the top of my head, Seattle is roughly 11 million people yet in SR it's like 8.something), and yet is overpopulated. I call horrible, horrible BS.

It's pretty much the only problem I have with the setting, but it's an important one.

Demographics are an interesting thing. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/eek.gif)

I'm not really sure I agree with the the original post and its premise.

If handled well, metaplot-lines should resolve themselves. That does not always happen, however, because of changing writers, changing line developers, and new edition upheaval. That the Deus plotline was resolved is not a problem for me. That Bug City was resolved and Chicago is starting to recover in some form, also not a problem. Etc, etc.

Along those same lines, I never really saw a lack of antagonists in the setting. Some changed, yes, and some became less two-dimensional. The Japanese Imperial State, for instance, became less of a two-dimensional "racist bad guy nation" with the introduction of some internal dissent. But those elements did not go away entirely. That's one reason I liked the Saito material so much and was sad that it didn't get resolved in any proper way. Here was a guy who was clearly part of traditionalist Imperial Japan and he said no when a reforming Emperor recalled him. His Protectorate was actually one of the most stable places in California after the Year of the Comet, but it was not a great place to be a metahuman if you didn't enjoy being a second-class citizen. Was Saito a relic of a bygone time when everyone was scared of metahumans or was he evidence that when everything goes to hell in a handbasket, scared people like a strongman?



There was a plan there and Ghost Cartels was only the very beginning of it. The full plan was never etched in stone before it was killed off and to be honest I wasn't a fan of all of the nascent ideas, but we did talk about some great stuff. The basic gist involved a very powerful spirit that was claiming to be Gaia (most likely was not, but the idea was to keep that in doubt) leading a bunch of toxic spirits to rise up against metahumanity for all of their crimes against Mother Earth. Distributing Tempo was a first move; the drug's ability to allow spirits to possess addicts would play into the spirits' later moves. Clearly there were elements of Amazonia involved in this plot, but there was also a plan to involve radical elements in the Native American Nations later, which was going to give us an excuse to revisit the NAN.



Deus, for the most part, died at the end of System Failure. Though I had deliberately left it dangling what had happened to his Nodes. They went into a coma after compiling Deus, but in theory they all still carried his code in their brains. The game line never came back to the Nodes (and generally declared super-AI a totally dead idea), so we'll never really know what happened there, but I left it out there as something GMs could feel free to use. And yes, Deus unleashed a lot of screwed up otaku on the world. We know what happened to Puck and Pax, but what about Scarecrow and The Nubian? No one really knows. Again, more GM fodder.

Actually, they did follow it up; I think that's what the Morbus Schletz plot is about. For one, Deus didn't die, he fractured into smaller AI (whether or not the Paragons are also such splinters is not resolved yet, though I hope so, it would at least tie the 'mancers back into the world and do away with this highly annoying Matrix Magic bullshit). That's in Splintered State (p. 56, sidebar). So by the looks of it, the Setting is basically going with the Sprawl Trilogy plot - Super-AI, Singularity, zzzapp, AI becomes gods of Matrix Voodoo Hoodoo.

Fudging the details is certainly a reasonable way to go about things at the group level, but at a game line level rampant fudging dilutes the consistency of your setting from table to table, which makes it harder to introduce true signature themes and characters to act as anchors for your setting as a whole. If you and I have wildly different interpretations of how the NAN works, that means that at least one of us is virtually guaranteed to feel put off by the next NAN release, and that hurts the value of the NAN fluff to the franchise. Beyond that, the fascination with Native Americans always hit me as crazy retro, if anything. Playing some Native American dude who reclaimed their land through shamanism seems like the kind of New Age fantasy that largely died out by the late '80s alongside The Cult's commercial viability. I suppose the greater concerns about cultural appropriation these days doesn't help, either, of course, but that does little to explain why the Tirs have largely crashed and burned either.

The NAN and the Tirs all required massive and continuing justifications for why they ever existed and how they continue to exist. Mostly because the people who came up with these had no idea WTF they were doing and just threw words on a page and everyone at FASA said "Sizzle good!"

So as soon as someone who isn't totally in love with these is in charge they get flushed because they have bigger fish to fry than trying to justify something that was crazy in 1988 or 1993. Plus the whole IE love thing resulted in a bit of backlash.

Frank and AH have recently pointed pointed that the Tir books manage to completely overlook the point that the oldest elves are like 16 when these were founded, so pretty much nothing makes any sense. Or that a country that has the population of Minneapolis doesn't need 6 levels of government, 4 of which are supposedly secret.

... Except that Resonance predates technomancers (being linked to otaku as well), and that the whole sidebar you mention doesn't link to what you said in any way. Frigging Jake Armitage isn't a splinter of Deus.

I was hoping for a whole dissonant thing - and I suppose it's still possible, perhaps as a variation upon the whole Code Induced Disease idea - but it's quite clear that e-ghosts are at the center of the whole Sybil thing.

Dude. Frank and AH's takedowns of Tir Tairngire and Tir na nOg were brilliant and hilarious. I was cracking up so hard last night reading those. They were spot on, and they just eviscerated those tomes and the ridiculousness in them, which perpetuates to this day.

Well, as long as you don't need the Immortal Elves to come off as the good guys, there's a way to make it work. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

Which only shows that some Hate and some Don't (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

And then comes James Meier and kills . . Aina Sluage?

They have some pretty well thought out reasons for the hate though. To this day, I've never had either Tir contribute anything substantial to a game that I've been in, and I don't think that's an accident. Hell, even Japan had no impact in my games outside of the Japanese megacorps. At the end of the day, Shadowrun is more often than not a game about criminals for hire, and the only big claim to fame that the Tirs and Tokyo really have in SR boils down to being racially homogeneous isolationists who are obsessed with having the best security in the world despite having no unique man-portable resources for outsiders to steal. So, even if you ignore the bits that don't make sense, you're still left with the conclusion that all three nations are bad targets when it comes to for-profit crime. Having your ork runner move to Tokyo for the job opportunities is like having your pick of any celebrity to mug in a fist fight and choosing Cain Velasquez.

Secluded settings where normal rules don't apply are nice, but I also like that they don't last forever, instead of "whoa, serious event" and then nothing happens. I'd complain that the pipeline for such settings is drying up (unless you count GeMiTo...), not that existing one are "saved".


Japan takes over...I personally hope it becomes more pronounced again, but I can understand that people consider it an outdated pop culture reference


Shadowtalkers suddenly becoming omniscient narrators, The Black Lodge suddenly being common knowledge...can we just pretend all of that does not exist, thank you. I'm happy with my denial stage (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)


...which were major screwballs


The "urban wasteland" aspect disappeared? I can't really agree with your premise here...


All in all, it reminds me of my attitude to the new Berlin book: The anarchist project with cannibal restaurants was weird as hell, but when it got "civilized" I felt like "well, it was somewhat cool.." (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Aspects are only showcased if you choose to showcase them. I appreciate the Tir's even if they are never utilized in a game (we have used both in ours over the years (Tokyo too), even in SR4A). Not using them is a choice. Some games will NEVER use them because that environment/location holds no interest. Others might use them exclusively. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I don't know, I think there's tremendous room for hilarity here. You could make all kinds of jokes about top heavy government inefficiency and bureaucracy and then there's a lot of emo bureaucrats because they're in fact a bunch of teenagers, or something like that.

Like, you could do Tir so that they're so image conscious that everyone's afraid of them or buys into their image, but behind the scenes it's worse than the US federal government.

I need some humor...do you have a link?

Thanks!!! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

here you go
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55019

i'll actually link this too:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53716