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[Chrysalis]

Corruption

Hi,

Renectly I was thinking about corruption and about its pervasiveness. In the western world if you are white, middle or upper class you rarely see any of the daily dealings on with corruption.

I was thinking specifically about Shadowrun as balkanized states, which are the perfect environment for corruption to grow into multibillion nuyen businesses. There seems to be a large number of mercenaries on the streets and crumbling government institutions which sit uncomfortably alongside vast private empires.

The olligarchs of the Shadowrun world: Nadja Daviar, Damien Knight, and Lowfyr - to name a few; have immense power. There is nothing they cannot do. They can and have subordinated government institutions so that they can continue with their private enterprises.

What I am wondering about is how often does corruption come up in games of Shadowrun. Have Shadowrunners ever had to worry about falling victim to a carjacking, or perhaps run afoul of a warlord? What do you do when the local Russian crimeboss of Seattle (who happens to live in a nice compound in Bahrain) discovers who is the ant that has been bothering him and decides to crush him so one unfortunate day he walks into a night club and does not walk out again. The crime boss does this with one phone call and the ant is promptly squished and forgotten.

The big problem with the real big criminal business is that it often takes at least a half an hour to explain the finer points of economics to our proverbial knluckle dragging, kill it till it stops moving Shadowrunners. In short they understand he is a "bad man", but what exactly does shipping cigarettes from Rotterdam to Odessa to around the world have to do with "criminal empire" or for that matter about converting heating oil to gasoline.

Or that this "bad man" is the hand puppet on the tail end of a very large criminal dragon, which will burn you before eating you.