Sounds like what is suggested for runs in Neo-Tokyo in Corporate Enclaves.

I don't see where the new setting is enforcing a particular style of play.
Of course, the locations in Runner Havens are by definition default settings, but the other 4 core settings have very unique effects on gameplay, sometimes down to hard mechanical effects, such as the astral conditions in Chicago.
In any case, each core city will demand a completely different approach to organizing and conducting runs.
Seattle and Hong Kong are relatively similar in this respect, being both developed as standard SR settings.
CeeZee and Lagos both require a completely different skill set and different equipment than the RH sprawls and Tokyo and LA will each demand yet another unique setup of ressources.

The Yakuza are technically neighbourhood councils and whatnot if I recall correctly, they run festivals and nothing links them back to any crime they commit. Hell, a significant portion of the stuff that the Yakuza do to get their income isn't even an offense. One of the things they do is legitimately attend shareholder meetings and start disturbing proceedings until they're paid to leave.

Actually, the Kennedy's made their money by running moonshine during prohibition, that's my understanding of it anyway. But yeah, they probably got in with the mob during that time. It was either that, or their family would not have survived to enter politics. You know how the mob is about people cutting into their cash flow.

They do? In regard to how to approach runs, I see little difference between Lagos, Chicago, Seattle, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles. sure, some subtleties are different, whether you need to pack nuyen or gold, whether you need to buy this or that medicine and whether or not half the character types are shafted despite running in a highly developed first-world nation ... but where do these settings encourage something other than "we go there, shoot everyone, take the macguffin, shoot everyone else and ride off into the sunset"? Yes, Neo-Tokyo is slightly different, because you don't shoot people there, you slash them. With swords.

A (somewhat) interesting thought: most Yakuza in SR are portrayed has having connections with one of the Japanacorps (mostly Mitsuhama) so...
If they have a Mitsuhama SIN, and Licenses to carry milspec gear, and were careful to target the SINless, anything they do could be considered to be Corp duties, and thus not illegal. (SINless don't have rights so you can't commit crimes against them.) Attacking them means fighting someone protected by being a AAA citizen... and you are kinda screwed from there....
(SINless... no one will protect you, SINners, unless your corp is willing to play politics to save your ass may just find the Corp/Government you are a citizen of arresting you for assaulting someone while trying to defend yourself....)

I find these comments kinda strange (along with several others). We went to TT once. It was cleaner, and you stood out if you weren't careful, but as long as you made an effort, and your characters weren't too crazy to begin with, you didn't have any problems. Really, it was the GM's responsibility to give the characters a fighting chance, if he wanted the team to go there.

And that's really what it's all about - making the settings good for what you want them to be good for. I understand how you get roped into assuming a certain style for locales, because everyone's read the books and has that common understanding. I think you've got to discuss it, and come to a new understanding.

Every contact you have there has a 20% chance of being an informer. How many people do you have to interact with before you have a >50% of having an informer as part of your support system? How do you think crooks survive in these societies? They survive by feeding useful stuff to the police so the police don't arrest them again. Either that, or you are carrying out a deniable task for the secret police. How can they keep it really deniable? What kind of men tell no tales? How can three people keep a secret?

An interesting account of what happens when you try to set up secret operations in a closed police state is here:
Spies and Commandos: How America Lost the Secret War in North Vietnam Every single operator was captured or killed in short order and the people running the network had no idea that it was totally compromised and controlled by the enemy. All you need in one mistake early on and everyone else gets fed into the meat grinder.

I really wonder where you get those numbers from ... and word-of-mouth works well, especially in the underworld in a totalitarian system. Crooks survive by being tighter and more suspicious of outsiders, and by being on guard in general (unlike slackers like islamic terrorists in the West who haven't realised yet how tight western states' surveillance programs have become). Odds are, they won't all spy at each other. Those that survive do so because they don't. Of course, some interaction with the sectret police is inevitable - which is why, in such states, there usually is no distinction between secret police and organised crime. Just look at Russia!

And as for why not off the PCs - they may be useful to the johnson (usually someone from within the system) in the fututre, they may not know enough to be dangerous, or they may be fed false information which, if spread, benefits the johnson in some way. Also, some secret service people actually don't habitualkly kill everyone they used for operations once. Handydata bombs that go off if you do propably help that attitude, of course.

When I recently reread the Tir na nOg book, I was utterly depressed when I realised how similar this location (intended as a wacko eco-socialist quasi-dictatorship) has become to most EU nations. The isolation is more like East Germany used to be, but even there, plenty of espionage occurred (and a certain amount of crime). A police state may seem intimidating, but no police state is perfect.

Yet, organised crime still occurs here (like Mafia hits on open streets in broad daylight, or a mobster war that involved throwing grenades into crowded nightclubs), there is no crook shortage, and there are cracks to slip through.

As for the book: Espionage has always been something the US has sucked in for some reason. Other countries have been much more successful in infiltrating very closed societies. France, for instance.

The reason in the United States is an over-reliance on technical intelligence gathering. Human intelligence gathering is often with financial incentives. Also the CIA still has fast rate in change of personnel at stations, substandard pay to the private sector, and from 2003 onwards instigated a policy of commission pay for every new informant gained. During Bush's period decision making intelligence has also been tinged with making sure that its fits in with current White House ideology.

The majority of the informants the United States has and has had since the 1980s is either low-level informants or high-level political informants. Both are involved due to financial incentives and not due to ideology.

-Chrysalis

It's ok, we just make puppy dog eyes at the British, and they tell us what's going on...

...including that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction...

Damn you tea-sucking limeys! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/mad.gif)

Be quiet, yank. Just be glad that we threw ourselves into the same quagmire.

If you want to blame someone, blame Antony for biasing that report to coincide with George's wish to go to war with Iraq.

I love having tea in the afternoon.

You just reminded me. I bought tea yesterday. I should make some. Thank you!

A miss remembering of the Stasi informer numbers. Which actually seem to have from 1% to 4% of the population (depending on how you count them) and about 5% for party members. The figure 20% I think comes from dissident organizations, where it later turned out that about 20% of the members were secret police spies.

SINless are basically illegal immigrants. It's still murder when you kill someone who isn't a resident of your country. If LoneStar (example) sees an Ares employee in Seattle gun down a homeless person, they are still going to be arrested and prosecuted (unless your corp "bails" you out, owing the Star a favor). It would make LoneStar look bad otherwise. Corp citizens are residents of a different country, not ambassadors.

And yeah, the US has always sucked at espionage. What Chrysalis said. We like our toys to much, and think they can solve all our problems. (Same deal with war; we get cool toys and look down on soldiers, until we get into a war and remember "Oh right, we need people to stand there and hold the flag.")

That's part of it. It's also because the politicians here, no matter which side their on, will actively work against the current policies if they disagree with them, occasionally going so far as to give classified intel to our enemies. If you add to that the fact that in a free society you're easily infiltrated, all hell tends to break loose. For example, before and during the Viet Nam war communist spies from the USSR (and everywhere else) were infiltrating colleges in the U.S. (in fact they bankrolled the majority of the anti-war movement back then) to turn the youth against the government and get connections with future government interns and aids. Damned sneaky Russians. You gotta hand it to them though, they were are GOOD at what they did do.

Edit: Good point.
Correction per AngelisStorm

Crazy Russians are good at what they do. It's the scary part. They just don't look high enough. We have that crazy American Dream that makes us build intercontinental multiheaded super nukes, nuclear submarines to carry said nukes, and planes that don't have to land for days to carry more nukes. Oh, and invent nukes.

Russia, on the other hand, builds crazy good things with what basically amounts to widgets, ductape, and paper clips (the latter two which they likely stole or bought from us). They build 10 bagilion nukes. They build 10 million super quiet diesel submarines. And of course AK-47s, in numbers that don't have numbers to describe them.

And Winter. Thank goodness they haven't figured out how to make a winter powered death ray. It's bad enough they have a semi-senient quasy diety that impersonates a season.

While American intelligence gathering is a fascinating subject and I am sure we can all come with anecdotal information to back it up. I believe we were talking about Japanese society and how it can go back to being more extreme than the 1940s version of Japan.

Japan has never addressed their participation in the second world war which could lead to a radicalization of its populace. However, you would really have to remove the upper echelons of power (party leaders and diet members), who have no reason to change the way business is being conducted at the moment. Money flows into their pockets, and they remain on the top of power pyramid. An imperialised Japan means that every move is a gamble and at some point you will lose. So things then continue the way they have.

unless the economy becomes somehow militarized.

was there not something about orbital microwave platforms before imperial japan was announced?

ah, no. the orbitals came into place afterwards.

first there was a korean war, with the south backed by japan (that had north missiles fired at it, but said missiles failed to do anything).

end result, north goes bye bye, japan goes imperial.

I think multiple worldwide crashes and plagues would provide ample opportunity for an Imperial government to supplant the plutocrat elite. And the people might support that, feeling that their "democracy" has been bought by the wealthy and left them with nothing. Sure, they have universal healthcare, but social mobility really sucks in Japan, as I understand it. Also, whatever government was in charge could easily suffer from the crashes, even if there was nothing they could have done to prevent them, people would still be looking for someone to blame.

Hey, blame Saddam while you're at it. He was playing a dangerous game of political chicken and lost. He didn't have the weapons but because he did not want the Iranians to invade he never wanted the international community to prove it.

BTW-They did find some, a few shells here and there (which people forget), but no massive stockpiles.

Speaking of not so kind things Japan did, I've heard that it applied a eugenetic politic that implied sterilizing peoples with phisical defects; is it true?

But it you keep saying look at those japs doing this werid thing all the time you see this and talking about bad it is. Like women who wear headscraf are oppress by the men of they culture. Racist isnot alway bad. In the 1920's thought 1940's
the mayor of all major cities in america where white male who where racist toward black people but they didnot think they where superity to them. They have all black fire department and all black police department in the all black area of the city., even the orginize crime have than all black mafric which handle all criminal activilly in all black area of the city.
There was alway the racist KKK which was very powerful back them. In the 1950's the idear that non-white where not as capacity as white people rear it ulgy head. The all black fire and police department where ended. Then the racist riots started in the late 1960's and early 1970's. The country I grew up in have than upperclass woman who like wild sex goto biker bar to have sex with the biker. She was marry to than wealthy bussiener owner. One night she went into than biker bar walk up to some hell angle type removeing her clothes in front of then and in front of 6 black biker , she place her hand in avery suggestive mannor on the men there and then she started to undress the biker. After this she started to worry about what her hushand would di it she was pregeant by than black man, this was every taaboo black thewn. So she devide to file phoney rape charge against the six black biker. They where arrest by the local police. Unknow to her the biker bar have touble like this in the past so they have than camoner filming this along another biker filming this also
with his own camoner and other guest also film this. The lawyer for the six black got hold of the film than show it to the racist DA who took one look at them and dropped all rape charge against them. The country was 50% black and the country leaders want no race riot if it can be help. The country was willing to risk riots if the rape charge where true but not when they where phony.

not the only place at that time. im sad to say that even norway had one of those policies in place...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

Hilter have to wait untril 1941 before he was able to set up death camp. The germany people and culture wouldnot allow him to do so openly. He would have being remove for trying to setup death camp.