Corporate Guide and three classics released!, Blood in the Boardroom, Corporate Security, and ShadowTech also out Options

[hermit]

It's also a lot simpler for storytelling purposes to have the corps personified in just a few individuals. Damien Knight defines Ares. Villiers defined Novatech.

Bill Gates defined Microsoft, Steve Jobs defines Apple, Mark Zuckerberg defines Facebook ...

[Bull]

Bill Gates defined Microsoft, Steve Jobs defines Apple, Mark Zuckerberg defines Facebook ...

True. And your average person assumes that they run the company, and that they have absolute control. Which isn't the case, but it's the perception.

Shadowrun's always been our perceptions magnified, right or wrong. And even going back to first edition, all the corps have always had boards of directors and what not. They're just not important, so they get glossed over.

Bull

[hermit]

True. And your average person assumes that they run the company, and that they have absolute control. Which isn't the case, but it's the perception.

Exactly. I actuaylly always thought Knight and Villiers were pretty plausible as a corporate leader, especially since it had been empathised how they did have their fights with other board members and major shareholders (Aurelius, Dunkelzahn, Vogel, each other, the Nakatomis and Yamanas ...). But the way Ares is considered Knight's corp and Nova/NeoNET the Villiers firm never struck me as unplausible because many comanies IRL are embodied by their founders and/or CEOs IRL, too. Always have been and always will be.

[TW]

SHadow2run corps weren't (and still aren't, really) structured based on real world corps. They're modeled after the fictional Megacorps we imagined in the late 80's. OCP from the Robocop movies, and pretty much every Japanese based corporation in fiction around the same time.

Now, times have changed, and they've updated the corps a bit, and done things a bit differently with some of the newer corporations, but the fiction remains consistant because of how they were originally structured in 1st ed...

It's also a lot simpler for storytelling purposes to have the corps personified in just a few individuals. Damien Knight defines Ares. Villiers defined Novatech. They're much more interesting than a bunch of Board of Directors, and they're a lot easier for a casual fan to keep track of as well. Not everyone has Ancient History levels of minutia retention. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Bull

I tend to disagree here, as squabbles and downright hostility between the board members of a megacorp (Examples: Fuchi Renraku, Ares) were an essential part of that corp's atmosphere and overall setting. Fuchi's Villiers, Yamana's and Nakatomi's played an essential part in the Corp War, and the hostility between Knight and Aurelius and Corss is cemented in shadowrun history.

I also disagree with the portrayal of the corporation's board as explained in the final Megacorp Shuffle chapter - saying that a CEO brings in a bunch of college friends and brown nosing bootlickers tio run the corp "his way" contradicts pretty much all of the chapters that follow - every megacorp is subject to at least some sort of rivalry and infighting between its board members.

[Larsine]

Whole thing was covered in the Secrets of Power Trilogy, i think. (haven't read it myself, this is just what I've gleaned from reading the boards and the wiki)

Nope is was the Dragonheart trilogy by Jak Koke.

The Scerets of Power by Bob Charette was the first three novels published and had a whole different storyline, http://wiki.dumpshock.com/index.php/Secrets_of_Power_Trilogy

Lars

[Aaron]

Did I miss where any American bank actually had to pay anthing for what they did (and, given how the cartel they formed with the rating corps works right now, still do) to the world?

The lawsuits and criminal charges have begun. Corporations are slow, large governments (particularly ones that were deliberately designed to be slow) are slower. Thus shadowrunners.

[Ancient History]

AH, I'm not sure what you expect me to believe at this point. You say that they've copied the major divisions that you created wholecloth. How much of this stuff can be credited to your intrinsic creative genius and how much can be credited as a common-sense development of an existing concept? If you "invented" MCT Latin America, when MCT branches for the other regions existed, can we really be surprised if your successor decides to add it? I bet most people trying to flesh out MCT would figure that to be a no-brainer.

Hey, I'm not claiming this stuff is precious flakes of gold. I am saying it was a sloppy direct lift. You can even read it in the text, because for all that these are new never-before-mentioned-anywhere divisions - the text of the MCT chapter doesn't mention them once.

[MindandPen]

The lack of a Jackpoint login page is really kind of terrible. As a GM, I've been relying on those to determine "when" I'm getting the information from each book (i.e. when in game time is the information from the book current), which affects how I plan my metaplot. It bugged me that I didn't have that in Seattle 2072, and it bugs me even more here, since this is more of a traditional sourcebook (for lack of a better term). Were the Jackpoint login pages really all Adam?

Same here. In older editions, you had all the shadowtalk posts dated, so you knew which ones were important as they were dated on 12/24/xx year. I miss having those in game clues to organize the data.

-M&P

[Ghremdal]

....Villalobos is also a psionic, which
caused quite a stir on the Zurich-Orbital....

What does a psionic mean? I never heard that term used in Shadowrun before, but I am pretty new. Does that mean she is a mage with detect thoughts?

[Brazilian_Shinob...]

What does a psionic mean? I never heard that term used in Shadowrun before, but I am pretty new. Does that mean she is a mage with detect thoughts?

If I'm not mistaken it is a tradition of mages that think that they are not magicians, only that they have psionic powers.

[Dr.Rockso]

What does a psionic mean? I never heard that term used in Shadowrun before, but I am pretty new. Does that mean she is a mage with detect thoughts?

Could be she follows the magical tradition of the same name. Kinda like a mages calling themselves witches, sorcerors...etc. Or, it could mean shes a nutter that thinks she can bend spoons without any powers.

[hermit]

What does a psionic mean? I never heard that term used in Shadowrun before, but I am pretty new. Does that mean she is a mage with detect thoughts?

A school of mages who really believe they're the X-Men who do not look funny but have the mental powers. They were introduced in MitS and have rarely ever been poked since, but were squeezed into the traditions in either SR4A or Street Magic.

[Bull]

IIRC, Awakenings in 2nd ed first touched on Psionics (and a lot of the other oddball tradition concepts, like the "God Shaman" and shamans who thought they were superheroes). Of course, Awakenings and MiTS were both written by Steve Kenson, so no surprise they cover the same ground.

[shadd4d]

IIRC, Awakenings in 2nd ed first touched on Psionics (and a lot of the other oddball tradition concepts, like the "God Shaman" and shamans who thought they were superheroes). Of course, Awakenings and MiTS were both written by Steve Kenson, so no surprise they cover the same ground.

Awakenings introduced a lot of things which ended up more or less as canon, things like Adept paths or what structures a tradition and such. I do miss that passage about the one guy explaining and rationalizing away magic as psionics and that magicians were really psionics who "needed" magic as a rationalization and crutch in order to do psionics.

Still, mentioning that she's a psionic...what was the point of that? To emphasize her own viewpoints and maybe add in a personality trait of being possibly self-righteous and need to rationalize even deeper than others?

Don

[sabs]

Awakening read like someone took the Adept's Way book from Earthdawn and ripped entire sections of it for Shadowrun.

I like that we're seeing more information on the Corporations.
Btw, my read on Megacorps is that they were a throw back to the early days of Capitalism, combined with the Japanese Super Corporation thing.

Getty Oil
Standard Oil.
British Petroleum
Mitsubishi

Carnegie's steel,coal,rail, oil monstrosity.
Company towns, with company stores.

[IKerensky]

An excerpt of Unwired that , IMNSHO definitely doesnt show them as the good guys.

"Pulsar and Horizon’s major media blitz accomplished what they’d hoped: AIs are
predominately seen as benign or even friendly (according to polls)."

I just hear on my mind : "How to best serve man"...

[sabs]

An excerpt of Unwired that , IMNSHO definitely doesnt show them as the good guys.

"Pulsar and Horizon’s major media blitz accomplished what they’d hoped: AIs are
predominately seen as benign or even friendly (according to polls)."

I just hear on my mind : "How to best serve man"...

Horizon is actually controlled by AI?

[Rotbart van Dain...]

What does a psionic mean?

It means you can offset the cost of the chosen Awakened Quality with the Delusional Quality.

[IKerensky]

Horizon is actually controlled by AI?

No, they are not... Thoses are not the AIs you are looking for.

[sabs]

No, they are not... Thoses are not the AIs you are looking for.

What do you think you are, some kind of jedi?

[Nath]

Essentially SR megas are essentially world wide keiretsu (of various nationalities, but all the same), but it doesn't appear that any developer for SR actually has bothered to do even basic background reading on how various large corporate structures work. Instead they seem to want to pretend they are all General Electric run personally by Bill Gates because they think they understand that.

Zaibatsu, not keiretsu. The definition of a keiretsu involves mutual shareholding, with in most case a bank in a central position. All the SR megacorporations we know of have a clearly defined parent company, with the Zurich-Orbital Gemeinshaft Bank and the Pacific Rim Bank providing the financial services.

[Ancient History]

Funny enough, one of the early proposals for Horizon was as a keiretsu built around an Islamic bank.

[Nath]

CORPORATE LIFE
Not much to say. Interesting. Elements on India and Arabic corporate cultur would probably be more useful if there actually was more than one Indian or one Arabic corporations in SR, and that those got more than passing mentions.

ARES MACROTECHNOLOGY

- The takeover of Cross assets by Ares Macrotechnology in System Failure had me whinning. As I use to say, you can't buy what ain't to sell, and the people heading Cross Applied Technologies had a bunch of reasons to sell to anyone else on Earth, whatever the price is, rather than to Damien Knight.
Leonard and Nicholas Aurelius sacrifying Cross to make money may be the beginning of an explanation. I also came to considerthat if the Seraphim were compromised, maybe Jean-Marie Cross simply hadn't the intel to know the company he was selling to were owned by Ares.
According to Corporate Download, some Seraphim did not trust Leonard Aurelius, and the ex-Ares people that followed him were still using runners instead of the Seraphim black ops team. But his son Nicholas worked closely with the Seraphim while he was heading Cross Advanced Electronics in Seattle. The head of the Seraphim in Seattle was Jezebel Surrateau, who took control of Dunkelzahn operative network there (see Blood in the Boardroom). And Dunkelzahn top agent in New Orleans, Toshi Akimura, was a former Seraphim operative in Seattle. Akimura had resentment toward the Seraphim, but if he went over that, you got an interesting link between Nicholas Aurelius and the Draco Foundation, that may also explain how the Seraphim were "compromised" in the first place.

- In Corporate Download, Ares had five big subsidiaries - KE, Ares Arms, Ares Space, Ares Global Entertainment and General Motors, who were "at the top", with regional divisions only coming "in addition" to those. What is decribed as Ares previous organization in Corporate Guide suggests Ares Global Entertainment was a lot less powerful, answering to Ares Europe (while having most of its assets in North America). I can imagine AGE have been downgraded at some point, though this is not very consistent with it growing thanks to the Cross takeover, and Troy Carpenter remaining in charge.
It's fun to have Troy Carpenter still around, and getting some mentions, as I'm the one who gave him AGE vice-presidency. On the other hand, I didn't think of him as the military type described in the Megacorporate Shuffle, as he was the only one of Ares Arms three top executives mentionned in Corporate Download not to be a general. I also hope he won't stay around too long, because SR would need some change sometimes. Roger Soaring-Owl have been heading KE ever since Seattle Sourcebook. That's 23
years. At least, he retired. I know leonization makes an excuse for keeping high-level NPC around forever. But there nonetheless must be something wrong with Karen King, who have heading Ares Seattle division for just as long, 23 years, without ever getting a promotion out of town.

While Ares predominantly served the North American continent before the Crash, Cross’s European media presence has allowed Ares Global Entertainment to become a serious competitor to traditional European media corporations such as DeMeKo and Sol Media.

Shadows of Europe explained Cross European assets were "stolen" from Ares Global Entertainment with the help of William Briggs, who left AGE vice-presidency to follow Aurelius. Had I the wordcount to expand, I would have explained that those "assets" were not companies, but rather technologies, contracts and people, mainly involved in the gaming industry. IMO, the gaming industry is overlooked in SR. Desert Wars Broadcasting would be small money, when compared to the sales of Modern Warfare: Desert Wars. Plus, Ares owns "NBS", RL NBC has an alliance with Vivendi-Universal, and Vivendi Games is a world leader in the gaming industry. Considering Vivendi as the basis for Ares Global Entertainment makes a good explanation as to why the American mega has it media HQ in Paris.

I’m sure some of you still remember Haeffner’s turn of phrase repeated ad nauseam in the corporation’s ads after he was sworn in: “A new era for the UCAS, a new Ares for the UCAS.”

- I remember, and those were Daviar's words, not Haeffner (Corporate Download, page 37).

- CG has Major David Gavilan joigning Acquisition Technologies after leaving Echo Mirage, thus contradicting the version of the 2029 Crash given in the Dragonheart Trilogy.

- The plot revolving around Arthur Vogel have been streamlined to dragons' play. I thought the Pueblo connection was as much interesting, because of what I take as one of the most overlooked plot of the Third Edition : Man & Machine explained Ares Space needed to acquire nanotechnology expertise to remain competitive in the space race, and that such a strategic issue made an Ares-MCT alliance an option, the other being an Ares-Pueblo alliance. That gave a nice web of intrigues, with the Pueblo supporting Vogel, and the whole Californian situation (with Ares in Silicon Valley, MCT in San Francisco, the Pueblo in LA, while Lockheed all but disappeared and Horizon increasing its presence in space).

- Page 54 says Michele Borden is a "former Cross Applied Technologies legal counselor". The bio on page 56 makes no mention of this, only saying Borden "followed Arthur Vogel from Sierra Inc. to Ares in 2066." Borden may sure have worked for Cross before Sierra, but this looks a lot like a mistake.

- Page 57 lists EuroForce as a competitor to Ares Arms, along with S-K and Esprit. Except that according to Shadows of Europe, EuroForce is a corps, not a corp.

[Demerzel]

My question is, why is Danny Ocean on the cover?

[Pepsi Jedi]

So here's a question.

What are the chances that this one ever actually sees physical print? And if not, should I go ahead and grab the PDF just in case that gets yanked down too?