but why would your corporation even *have* matrix-crushing cyberworms, or stuff like that?

the corporations exist for the sole purpose of making money. there's no money in selling stuff that prevents you from making money. if you destroy the corporate court, *which is a major investment on your part in your efforts to make money*, you have just destroyed your own interests. see, there really *isn't* any motivation to take down everyone else with you. your corporation dies, you just go join a different one. the people at the top know that. and while they certainly aren't going to be thrilled about how much they lose from an omega order against their corporation, those people are *far* more likely to care about getting out alive and with as many of their assets intact as possible than they are about throwing a hissy fit and screwing the world over for everyone else too.

Jaid, please don't make the mistake of thinking that corporate employees are somehow distinct from their corporation, or are all rational, money-minded actors.

People don't identify themselves as "Bob Smith, I work at Ares." They identify themselves as "Ares citizen Bob Smith, and damn proud of it! Ares, hoo-rah!" They are far more than merely financially vested in their corporation. "Jumping ship" like you describe is tantamount to defecting from your country today. It does happen, but far more people are irrationally prepared to fight for their country (or company) than to jump ship like a coward.


The corps will invest in matrix-crushing cyberworms for the same reason they invest in goddamned nuclear weapons, standing armies, space-based weapon platforms, anti-space-platform weapon systems, astral defenses, physical defenses, etcetera. It's because they need those things to prevent the other corps and/or nations from running in, shooting the pissant rent-a-cops that "real" companies today have, and stealing all their shit, and at the highest level, it's to deter them from all banding together to do that with the "If I go down, I'm taking you with me!" mutually assured destruction thing.

And if you're not willing to deploy a MAD weapon if the other guy decides to aim for nothing less than your absolute destruction, then it's not really a MAD weapon at all.

Very little. Kicking off an Omega Order against one of the AAA megas is very much tantamount to NATO declaring a war of extermination against the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war. It will cause World War III, so about the only things that could possibly justify it would be the revelation that the corp has been completely taken over by hostile, alien entities, like Bug Spirits, or Horrors, or actual extra-terrestrial aliens; something to that effect.

Corp-crushing secrets are going to be rare, and at least in theory are going to be so heavily protected that just knowing that the information exists will get you killed off by any means necessary. If your runners get hold of one somehow, their first thoughts should be 'oh crap we're all going to die oh crap!', not 'wow we could take down a megacorp with this!'

Now the fact is that any secret that runners leak by normal means is going to be crushed even faster than the runners in question. How would they get the word out in a way that isn't already used by crazy conspiracy theorists or else completely under the thumb of the big ten? Assuming they found a way, and the evidence was not disbelieved or discredited, what then?

It's also worth noting that the big ten don't really want to destroy each other. They've got a good thing going here, and wiping out one of their biggest rivals will upset the status quo in ways that may not benefit them. As a general rule they're going to play it safe rather than take such a radical risk, with a couple of exceptions *Cough Aztechnology Cough*. As a result, it's in everyone's best interest to keep any mega-corp destroying secrets from seeing the light of day.

So barring completely impossible to ignore evidence that Ares is mind controlling Bug Queens and using their bug spirit minions to take over the world, good luck finding something. Any evidence must be of an act that will upset the status quo worse than the Omega Order will. That's doomsday level stuff. anything else will likely be ignored or swept under the rug, possibly with a more covert retaliation from the court coming into play once the evidence is safely hidden away.

I kind of like a combination: Bug Spirits infestation combined with tainted food supply about to turn a few billion people into Rage Monkey Zombies maybe combined with some sort of planned Decapitation Strike using funky blood magic to take out most of the leadership across the world.

the people at the bottom of the corporate ladder may feel like that. (well, okay, the people slightly above the bottom... the people dragged in from the barrens to do the stuff you don't bother hiring permanently for likely don't feel any loyalty either).

the people at the top are generally *at* the top because they care more about themselves. they worship the almighty nuyen, and don't really care one way or the other about their corp, except as it exists as a vehicle to drive their own success.

if people were always unwilling to work for other corporations, there wouldn't be any need for extractions.

i don't doubt for a second that there are people fanatical enough to pull the trigger if they're given the orders (though again, stuff that destroys their own ability to make money would not imo be developed; nuclear weapons were around before the corps basically took over all weapons research by several decades, the corps aren't responsible for that). but the people with the authority to give the orders? as a rule, they're more interested in their own gain than they are in taking everyone else down with them. oh, if it's absolutely certain that they're going to die, sure they'll give the order out of pettiness (or at least, some will). but this is corporate war. your enemy is out to make money, and you don't do that by burning your enemies to the ground, you do that by incorporating them into your own corporation. and you already know how to make your part of the business profitable (hopefully). you know the people there. you're a familiar face to the workers (which may be important if the wageslaves are indeed brainwashed into loyalty to their original corporation). and if you're part of a mega that's being chopped into pieces, it's incredibly unlikely that the corporation taking over has the personnel on hand to be able to afford to discard you entirely.

so really, while many corporate employees are loyal to their corp first... that kind of personality doesn't tend to become top-level executives.

Well, if you are talking about Azthechnology they tend to be charming, ruthless and totally self-confident sociopaths who are perfectly willing to kill their way of of a problem. Personally, if the situation requires it.

sure, but destroying the economy doesn't really fix any problems. it just makes more problems for everyone, including themselves.

That analogy only works if the Soviet Union was a member of NATO, which it wasn't. Great Britain or the US would have been a better choice there.

-Temperance

Remember that Triple-As have fallen before, without the world ending. What does the head of some subsidiary have to gain from pushing the red button instead of simply handing over the keys to the competition?

Well, my personal expectation would be that "something bad" happens to ZO right before the vote. Darn, now everyone has to appoint new justices.

Quite possibly because there never was any Omega Order against Fuchi Industrial Electronics.

It almost happened to Aztechnology in 2048 (or actually did, depending on which author wrote the piece you're reading) when they had the Aztlan governmention nationalizing every foreign corporation assets without paying compensation (You Commies !!!).

It almost happened to Renraku in 2059 (but clearly didn't) when Fuchi Industrial Electronics brought evidence they were working with a hacker who had penetrated each of the Big Eight central hosts in 2057, and have been using his techniques to conduct large-scale industrial espionage.

But I know of no reference to an Omega Order against Fuchi.

The United Nations Security Council may be a better example than NATO in this case.

When they established the United Nations Organization and the Security Council, the United States, United Kingdom, France, Soviet Union and China did not get permanent seats and veto power as reward for winning World War 2 (unlike Poland). Nor did they get it because they were to become nuclear powers in the following decades. They got it because they all were strategical behemoths (remember United Kingdom and France still had their colonial empires at that time). The veto power is effectively here to prevent the United Nations from ever voting any action against one of them. The line fo reasoning was that the "international community" acting together could impose its will by force on any other country. But attempting to do so on one of the Big Five would rather cause a new world war. So they put a built-in security to prevent such vote.

There is no veto power on the Corporate Court, but the line of reasoning is similar. See, the original Big Seven megacorporations did not open their rank to newcomers because they somehow thought Yamatetsu, Wuxing, Cross or Horizon somehow "deserved" it. On a basic level, megacorporations would have no reason to grant AA rating and extraterritoriality to the corporations they compete against, let alone upgrade them to AAA rating with a slice of Zurich-Orbital Gemeinshaft Bank benefits and a voice on the court. But still, they did so because those megacorporations have been growing too big to ignore.
What AA rating means is the corporation is too important for the world economy to let it depends on governments' political decisions, hence the extraterritorial privileges. The AAA rating means the corporation became so important for the world economy that its point of view must be defended on the corporate court, and its funding backed by Zurich-Orbital reserves.

An Omega Order overturns that. It's the Corporate Court deciding to destroy a corporation for which it previously considered that even mere governmental meddling would have been harmful to the economy at large, in a AA case. In a AAA case, a corporation who opinion was considered necessary to the ruling of corporate affairs, and who was given a cash flow in the billions of nuyen at the expense of the other AAA.

Guys, it's all about politics.

The reason Aztechnology will never have an Omega order issued against them is because they have enough political clout on the Corporate Court to avoid it. Sure, in theory they could do something awful enough to earn one, but in practice it'll never happen.

Others, though? Art Dankwalther had wealth equal to a good sized megacorp, and similar resources. What he didn't have was political clout with the court. So even though he wasn't a threat on the level of the bug spirits, they issued a kill order against him, because he didn't have the influence to stop it.

He also didn't have the defenses needed to make this tough. If you are going to have much of your military assets destroyed while attacking him, and this will require that you destroy most of Mexico city and accept the loss of pretty much everything belonging to everyone in Earth orbit, plus quite likely having someone destroy really costly parts of your company (like nuking your HQ and main R&D facility mid-morning) the cost-effectiveness changes.

Some interesting points there. Being corporations, there definitely would be some cost/benefit analysis involved in deciding whether or not to issue an omega order.

Still, I'm not entirely sold on the idea of the AAA megas seeing their rivals as "too big to fail." Power vacuums are a thing, and trouble begets opportunity to those who know how to capitalize on it. I think gaining AAA status is less about the other corps seeing you as necessary for the continued functioning of the global economy and more about gaining the financial and political clout to walk up to the big boys' table and convince them you belong there--or at least keep them from tossing you out on your hoop.

If anything, the fall of Fuchi and Cross show that the megas are perfectly happy to take down one of their own should the opportunity arise. Hell, three of the seven founding member of the corporate court have been bought out and absorbed by other companies.

In hindsight, getting an omega order is probably less likely than being bought out/taken over or otherwise crippled and dismantled. In theory, a sufficiently bad PR disaster could lead to a mega's collapse. The other AAA's would be happy to step in and snap up the market share that's being lost, and that would just keep snowballing until the company is broken up and absorbed by it's rivals.

Of course, it would have to be something pretty damn bad (and you'd likely need the other megas to be complicit in getting the word out) to do enough damage that the company couldn't recover in time to keep the sharks at bay.

I was trying to avoid posting too many details, for fear that my players might run across this--but frag it, I'm not sure I'm going to use this anyway:

My initial idea was to catch the players in the middle of a Horizon/Aztechnology shadow war, during the course of which they would uncover information that Horizon could use to bury the Azzies, should the runners choose to give it to them. Given the power of Horizon's PR machine, that doesn't strike me as too far-fetched. The problem is that, (as I understand it) Aztechnology is the biggest food supplier in the 6th world, so it's quite likely that billions could starve while the company sinks and the other AAA's fight over the pieces and try to step into the void.

again, this is corporate warfare.

if aztechnology dies, it'll be because someone else is taking all their stuff. they're not going to burn their farms to the ground, they'll just take it over, one way or another. instead of the azzies selling food to everyone, it'll be whoever took their stuff.

Jaid - Aztechnology will not go down without a fight.

What are you not getting about this? This is a setting where corporations hire criminals to shoot employees of the other corporation right in the goddamn face for money.


This isn't corporate warfare as we know it today, this is corporate warfare where the "Warfare" is literal.

They will not "just take over the Azzie farms," because the Azzie guards will shoot them when they come to change the locks. And the harder they try, the harder the Azzies will escalate - or more likely, they'll escalate first because fuck those guys, like fuck we're going to let them just take our stuff and shoot us - and the Shit will be On.

ummm... or not?

because the guy who runs the farm is a manager. not a general. and most likely, he doesn't have a ton of soldiers hanging around on the farm either, because they're all busy protecting places that are typical targets for corporate espionage, not a farm or a stuffer shack.

the aztechnology super secret research lab? yeah, they won't go down without a fight. the blood mage cabal they've got researching new ways to convert metasapient life into magical power? they probably won't go down without a fight, either. that aztechnology arcology? well... sort of. the security will probably fight, and any armed forces they may have will fight. and taking it over will probably suck, and inflict a lot of damage on it. but the average joe isn't going to fight, and there's a heck of a lot more average joes than there are soldiers in there.

but really, who's going to help the azzies if an omega order gets declared on them? everyone will be looking for mercenaries, and who do you think is going to find it harder to hire: the side with 9 megas, or the side with 1 mega that has been designated as a target by the other 9? the corps don't maintain huge standing armies, they maintain corporate forces (including some organizations that are essentially military), but most of it will be security. they didn't sign up to fight against military hardware. when the renraku arcology in seattle got totally screwed, renraku didn't have the military to take it back. the UCAS did.

corporations have armies. they don't have huge ones, because they don't need them most of the time and they're expensive to maintain. and even if they did, their army is going to be dramatically smaller than the armies of the other 9 megas combined. when they need armies, they're probably going to call up mercenary groups to fill in. and when it becomes obvious that aztechnology is not going to be around tomorrow, and that they'll be counting their blessings if they only face 9 times as many enemies if they're working for the azzies (bearing in mind that everyone is going to be busy doing their best to not be working for the azzies, so you can expect far more merc companies fighting against you than with you), the security forces will eventually be gone. and then, the managers of those various businesses are going to start folding. not every one of them. but way more of them will surrender (and hopefully get out of this mess with their life and their livelihood intact) than will mobilize for war.

Hmm, who might Aztechnology go to for soldiers? Somehow that whole Aztec in the name reminds of some country that (thanks to the the magic of PLOT) has a rather significant military. So I'm thinking that, just possibly, they might have immediate access to a whole lot of trained military units that are equipped with a the full spectrum of modern equipment.

As I mentioned earlier, declaring war on Aztechnology means declaring war on all of Aztlan.

Two entities. Lots of armed forces, lots of superweapons.

No winners, only survivors.

Another thing to keep in mind about the Azzies is that they're a corporation that took over the area where all the drug cartels come from. You think the cartels just rolled over when Aztechnology started stepping on toes and swinging their dicks around? So they are not only pretty tough militarily, but they have the capacity to deal with, and perhaps even out-evil, the Colombian and Mexican cartels that make the Capone organization look like Dudley Dooright.

I live right on the border. I hear stories all the time of finding 50+ bodies at a time missing their heads and hands (if they're lucky). People "stewed" in a burning 55-gallon drum of diesel for pissing off the cartels. These are some seriously psychotic motherfuckers and Aztechnology brought them to heel and probably learned a few of the more handy nasty tricks in the meantime. You fuck with Azzie and I fail to see even for a second where they don't quickly inform you of the tried and true, "Plata o Plomo". You take our bribes and work with us or we'll pump your bitchass full of bullets (again, if you're lucky).

and does aztlan have their soldiers, oh, everywhere on the planet? does every stuffer shack come complete with a fire team of trained guards? does aztlan have any way of plausibly making that happen?

yes, they have an army. no, it isn't hanging out at the dairy farm waiting to send in an attack chopper at the next person that goes cow tipping.

aztlan itself is gonna get screwed pretty hard, because yes, they do have an army (and they're so deeply in aztechnology's pockets there's no way they'll say no).

but they kinda need that army. if they pull it away, what do you think happens? i almost guarantee the CAS invades (honestly, the CAS will probably invade even if they don't get pulled away, once open season is declared, just because they can). the yucatan stops being controlled. and so on.

so there will be heavy fighting in aztlan. that one area may get blown to smithereens. the rest of the world, where aztlan doesn't have troops stationed (mostly because as far as i can tell, the list of nations that like aztlan and would trust them with an army in their country are as follows: aztlan, aztechnology). however, i consider it *slightly* unlikely that aztlan would be the location of the food supply of the entire world, so i expect that the rest of the world will get along just fine as far as food is concerned should aztlan be invaded. it'll suck for the people in aztlan, but then, war generally does.

having said that, if you're looking to create a moral dilemma, it really isn't necessary to threaten the entire planet with food shortages. as has been noted, war with aztechnology is going to mean war with aztlan, and that is going to result in the deaths of a lot of innocent people who are not blood mages and such (also a bunch of blood mages, and some truly despiccable people who the world will probably be better off without, but mostly innocent people).

Isn't it implied that the reason why Azlan has such a good harvest is because of blood magic? I mean, what good would taking Azlan's farms without the knowledge of blood magical crop growing do anyone?

It's not just military might. If Aztech were targeted, they wouldn't just fight with weapons, they'd fight with money and influence as well. Dankwalther was dangerous not just because he had money, but because he was willing to take a huge financial loss to take down a corporation. Aztech isn't willing to do that, but if they had nothing to lose, they could easily change their minds.

That much money and control over a major government means that they have power players the world over who owe them favors. Governments might be second string powers in Shadowrun, but they do have enough power and ability to make life difficult for megacorps, even AAA's and the Court. They're also holding onto IOUs and bonds for many other corps and governments, which they could call on in case of an emergency. Power is a lot more than how many guns you have, it's about how many people will do what you say-- and in the case of any AAA mega, that's a lot.

if an omega order is issued against you, i'm pretty sure you *lose* a lot of that power.

you are going to lose 9 against 1. if the people you're trying to apply leverage to just sit and wait a bit, not only will you no longer be able to apply leverage to *anyone*, but they'll probably either no longer owe that debt to anyone (because the entity they owed it to no longer exists), or they'll owe that debt to the people you're asking them to go to war with.

not to mention that organization you're trying to call in debts from? odds are good that the other 9 megas are also trying to call in debts too. and their reach is just as long as yours.

and no, so far as i'm aware there is nothing implying aztlan has particularly amazing harvests because of blood magic. the amazon is regrowing at an unnatural rate because of blood magic, but that would be amazonia doing that, not aztlan.

in fact, so far as i am aware, aztlan isn't even particularly known for food production at all. the place is actually so heavily industrialized that air pollution is a major problem, which suggests to me a focus on a rather different sort of industry.

aztechnology controls a lot of food production. not aztlan. and while those two organizations have very close ties politically, geographically aztechnology is all over the world. the notion that most of the world's food production is done in one physical location is absurd; the transportation costs alone would mean that anyone setting up food production near, say, china and india, the areas of the world with the largest population (and therefore the greatest demand for food) would instantly have a massive advantage over anyone trying to ship food in from the other side of the world, because transportation isn't free. but if, for the sake of argument, aztechnology was going to put all the food production of the world in one place (and somehow still managed to not be crushed in the markets by other corporations that produce food locally), that location would be a place with ideal growing conditions and extremely low living costs (because that correlates to places where extremely low wages are standard). last i checked, aztlan is a very dry climate, not particularly known for the fertility of the land, and is quite heavily industrialized and modern.