War in Shadowrun, From flagpole to fighting hole Options

[Tzeentch]

Archaic Articles of Interest
-- My Shadowrun stuff has been back online for quite a while, but people may not realize it (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
-- Most of these were written during SR2-3. Obviously many things have changed since then.

Military and Security NPC Stats

Shadowrun Vehicle Countermeasures

Shadowrun Intelligence Agencies
-- Also see my general article on intelligence.

Military Musings (five part series) - Download as a zip file.


More Dumpshock Threads of Interest

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=22789
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=33203
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=32094
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=11137
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=2063
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=4455
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=25851
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=2153
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=34696

What would people want to see in a military sourcebook for Shadowrun 5e? Specifically, one oriented around translating the shadowrunner roles into special ops (i.e. not playing Pvt. Nobody painting rocks and rules for successfully completing field day). Significant design questions are in listed in bold.

What are the key points that need to be touched on, the players that need to be described (i.e. what corporations and nations are of relevance and interest), and the bits of canon related to the military that need to be explained (read: retconned)?

I keep pretty up to speed on the SR4e releases but don't have a few of the PDFs (notably, 10 Mercs). I have basically every sourcebook published for 3e and below but the game setting is nearly unrecognizable these days so I'm not sure how applicable stuff like Fields of Fire would be anymore.

What are the key publications (aside from SR5e and 5e Arsenal equivalent) that we can assume a buyer of a Shadowrun military sourcebook would already possess? That is, what material would need to be repeated or iterated on.

Shadowrunners as special ops is an obvious direct translation (albeit with a better fallback job and health benefits) but mercenaries seem like a very popular concept as well. This would probably require some classic Shadowrun Magic ™© to putty over the obvious logical problems that would arise, but nothing too serious. People have mentioned the (IMO quite good) Only War as a good starting point for a metasystem to drive this kind of thing. However, I've always really liked the game-within-a-game aspect of how BattleTech handled mercs.

Does 'designing' your unit (merc, corporate, national) with a metasystem sound appealing? If so, would you want it as a fairly detailed metacharacter with stats or as a narrative element that basically is just used as a shorthand way of describing various units and adversaries?


The military in Shadowrun exists in a bizarre nether-realm that bounces between Tom Clancy and useless set dressing (much like in Hollywood blockbusters). Depending on who was doing the writing the military is either the ultimate deus ex machina or upgunned corporate guards. Even the gear is schizophrenic, with early miltech being so bad-ass it didn't even get stats (e.g. the Stonewall hovertank) and it still getting the absolute best of the best in some areas ('mil-spec' armor) for no clearly discernible reason.

What is an appropriate power level for the military in Shadowrun? Ultimate bad-asses or mallcops with artillery support? Note that IRL many military units are basically mallcops with better PR.

Speaking of equipment, Shadowrun has always been terrible at handling the big guns because of the dice mechanic. SR5 may address this to some level, but I'm not sold that a military sourcebook would do itself many favors by getting too "in the weeds" for strategic weapon systems beyond what is absolutely necessary (and doing something about Thor systems is probably germane).

Should this be the book of tank guns and tacnukes? At what point are you comfortable just handwaving the level of firepower as an abstract dice roll for "Mass Destruction"?


The smaller PDF supplements seem to have gained a lot of traction, as they break down writing and editing requirements into far more manageable chunks and you can market them to smaller audiences that my not want or be able to digest a full 120+ page sourcebook.

Would a series of 32-48 page supplements be more useful than a monolithic sourcebook?


Key Gaming References
Shadowrun
Arsenal
10 Mercs (need to read this, but it's cheap so no problem)
Way of the Samura (maybe?)
Fields of Fire (ancient but still interesting for the vibe it puts off)

Other
BattleTech Field Manual: Mercenaries
GURPS Mass Combat
GURPS Special Ops
GURPS Tactical Shooting (and the ultra-tech updates in Pyramid #3/55)
World of Darkness: Dogs of War (pretty much a turd sandwich but the stories were cool)
Twilight: 2000 (well, not really, but some interesting ideas buried in the muck)

[Tanegar]

Foxhole. The word you're looking for is "foxhole." "Flagpole to foxhole" is a well-turned, evocative phrase. "Flagpole to fighting hole..." not so much. OK, now that I've gotten my linguistic snobbery out of my system...

I would be quite interested in a detailed unit-creation system. Have different types of units give different bonuses: commando units give +Infiltration, combat infantry gives +Dodge, combat engineers give +Demolitions, etc. Maybe +1 Initiative for each member of your unit within X meters.

Units should have, at minimum, their own Positive and Negative Qualities, to reflect things like better or worse officers, supply lines, morale, that kind of thing.

I think there's a decent chance your target demographic will have bought SR5's Augmentation equivalent. Augmentation is virtually certain to be, if not free to military personnel, then at least heavily subsidized and incentivized. When wires, bone lacing, and muscle replacement make a tangible difference in the effectiveness and survivability of your troops, you want your troops to have those things.

The power level of the military is going to depend heavily on what type of unit you're facing. RL militaries run the gamut from reservists with bare-minimum training and equipment, all the way up to high trained, disciplined, and motivated Special Forces with the latest and greatest gear. The 1024th Conscript Regiment is going to be a very different beast to fight than SFOD-D.

Tanks are viable for getting actual stats. Tactical nuclear weapons... less so. The PCs could conceivably be a tank crew, or the four commanders of a tank platoon (it is four tanks to a platoon, right?). When you get into weapons designed to kill thousands at a stroke, that's beyond the scope of the game. Roll 10d6, and everything within <hits> kilometers dies.

On the issue of supplements vs. splatbook, I need more details. Why and how would you split the subject up?

[TheOneRonin]

Oh man, I would SOOOOOO love to get involved in this.

One thing I've been doing since SR2 as a GM is coming up with skill packages for certain backgrounds. For example, a UCAS Combat Contoller would have a different package than say a CAS Army 18B, which would be different from a UCAS Navy DEVGRU Operator.

One of the issues with SR4 (maybe with SR5 too) is that the character gen rules tend to force overspecialization and penalize a former Special Operator for picking career appropriate skills. I think something that should be included in a supplement like this is some sort of Skill Package system that costs a flat number of skill points but gives a complete skill list at the appropriate ratings for all the skills (or all the SR equivalents) that a particular Special Operator would have. Most players using the normal chargen rules will have skip out on skills like Instruction or Parachuting because they won't have enough points to cover the more common use skills like Automatics or Infiltration. Hell, I find it almost impossible to build a realistic special operator in SR4 for under 500 points, and that's even considering his overall attributes will be lower than they should be.

I've already done entire skill packages in GURPS for CCTs, PJs, the whole US Army 18 series (and those in CIF units), SEALs/DEVGRU, Centra Spike/Torn Victor teams, and CIA SAD SOG units (I've only done Ground Branch so far). I've got 1000s of pages of research on all of these units, plus some personal experience (I've never served in spec ops, but spent several years in the Army as a Mech Inf dismount, most of it at the JRTC at Ft. Polk).

In addition to Skill Packages, I think this supplement should include an example of the sorts of tactics you would see Military/SF/SWAT type guys use when doing things like clearing rooms, movement to contact, reacting to near and far ambushes, etc.

I also like the idea of PDF only splatbooks as opposed to Large Format sourcebooks. I think you can turn them out quicker and whet people's appetites for more rather than put all your eggs in one basket and hope it sells well.

[TheOneRonin]

THIS!

Other
GURPS Tactical Shooting (and the ultra-tech updates in Pyramid #3/55)

[kzt]

Did SR5 fix the hopeless way hardened armor worked in SR4? Without fixing that AFVs just can't be done in any intelligent fashion.

[hermit]

What are the key points that need to be touched on, the players that need to be described (i.e. what corporations and nations are of relevance and interest), and the bits of canon related to the military that need to be explained (read: retconned)?

Key point 1: National Armies. You can just translate and slightly update Pegasus' work on the Bundeswehr from German War translation Fronteinsatz. It comes with outfit splatsheets for a special forces scout and a (dwarf!) grunt. I'd then like to see one more civilised army (maybe Japan's?) and one fringe army (Argentina? Amazonia? Empire of Zambia?). The Bundeswehr description, especially with equipment spreadsheets, can just serve as a template. Other armies might get smaller summaries - UCAS, CAS, Aztlan, Russia, France/Euroforce, the usual suspects.
Key Point 2: PMCs. MET 2000, Tzunami, 10K Daggers, combat, inc. Those are entire armies each, with six-digit manpower, exterritorial corporate status, their own differentianted branches and worldwide renown. The Fucking Mary-Sues probably need to go in too, since they can hardly be ignored, though I personally wouldn't mind a thing if they were all eaten by the Seadragon, and they are a few weight classes below even a slightly damaged Belltower like either MET, Tzunami or Combat. Then smaller merc companies - and please, with a focus on non-American companies. Give me Argentinans, South Africans, a drug lord's force from the Golden Triangle or renegade Malaysian Communists operating in Oceania. And definitly at least one Russian, one SE European, and one Portuguese unit, since those are the hotspots for merc activity. Maybe shine some light on whether or not the Megas rent out their standing armies when not needing them. It is known MCT does, at least (see the Tshimshian conflict, or Saitho's occupation of California).
Key point 3: Merc hotspots. Where are wars happening? Why are wars happening there? Who is fighting? There's sme fanmade stuff out there that might go in, like Fatum's Yakut war, but there are also plots ignored for the War Where Nothing Happened or Dragons Gone Wild IV. Things like the situation on the Balkans, the Yakut uprising, the Phillipine pacification, California (which never got even a bit of spotlight), China (which was as ignored as California in 4E), Africa, or Yucatán.

What needs explaining is how powerful national armies still are, what they can and can't do, and how they, PMC megacorps like MCT and Tzunami, and megacorp standing armies interact. Shadowrun needs to decide whether it wants to be 80s Cyberpunk - weak to nonexistent state forces in favor of a hardline Reaganian private enterpirse focus, or governments as slowly dying, but still dangerous juggernauts, as in Ghost in the Shell (where, incidentally, the main characters are all government agents, government-created AI, or government-created superhackers, and military-intelligence-industrial complex structures take the place of Megacorporations). There needs to be a definite ruling on this.

Further, the situation with PMCs after Aztlan needs to be resolved. MET2000, Tzunami and Combat each are committed in several places, without possible reprieve to waste all their men on The War Where Nothing Happens - MET2000 is partially state-owned, so the German government has a huge stake in what they do, and IIRC it's likewise with Tzunami and the Japanese state. No way they threw all their forces into the Bogotán front, because they would never have been allowed to. Germany cannot afford to keep their toxic dragon prison unguarded, and neither can Japan afford to withdraw forces from it's remaining colonies. If anything, several megacorps have very vested interest in those two PMCs keep doing their jobs.

And for the love of Ghost, put in maps with every region covered. Nothing is worse in a book about military campaigns than having literally no concept of the territorry they're taking place on. This is what led to the most ludicrous claims in recent books, like ship-borne artillery strikes on Bogotá.

What are the key publications (aside from SR5e and 5e Arsenal equivalent) that we can assume a buyer of a Shadowrun military sourcebook would already possess? That is, what material would need to be repeated or iterated on.

The core rulesbooks. Making possession of 4e splatbooks and PDFs mandatory is expecting a little much. Plus, putting in equipment and stuff will open the book to a wider audience, I think.

Does 'designing' your unit (merc, corporate, national) with a metasystem sound appealing? If so, would you want it as a fairly detailed metacharacter with stats or as a narrative element that basically is just used as a shorthand way of describing various units and adversaries?

While that could be nice, it should be hard and fast rules, nothing super elaborate. Rules for managing a mercenary company - resupplies, rules for acquiring bulks of military weapons, ect - could be very useful, though.

What is an appropriate power level for the military in Shadowrun? Ultimate bad-asses or mallcops with artillery support? Note that IRL many military units are basically mallcops with better PR.

Except for 'pet units' of the government, mallacops with (more or less of) an attitude. Generally, PMCs should be better armed, equipped and motivated, but have a worse reputation. Of coruse, national militaries descended from former superpowers - Britain, France, UCAS, CAS, Chinese states, Russia - also has WMD and nukes, and well-fed national militaries like Aztlan's might even have built new nukes and other WMD. Also, national militaries have a distinct advantage in heavy units like warships, tanks and whatnot. Few PMCs would bother operating more than one or maybe two carriers. Even the Fucking Mary-Sues only have two. Also, please keep the tone neutral. While the heavy helpings of American patriotism in some recent books were rather unpalatable, neither should there be swings in the opposite directions. However, take your cues not from either modern military FPS games nor Tom Clancy. Not only are those highly ideological, they're also horribly bad sources, as can be seen in EuroWars Antiques.

Should this be the book of tank guns and tacnukes? At what point are you comfortable just handwaving the level of firepower as an abstract dice roll for "Mass Destruction"?

Tanks yes, ship/huge vehicle combat rules maybe (with a variation of Megadamage, sice that's really the only workable solution), stats for orbital weapons or nukes, no. Nukes and weapon sattelites are pure plot devices and should be treated as such. Also, rules should be thoroughly tested; we don't need another book where the surest way to sink a carrier is not a nuke, not a thor shot (both the carrier is likely to soak), but a bag with a LOT of grenades.

Would a series of 32-48 page supplements be more useful than a monolithic sourcebook?

No, but it would probably be more likely to be produced, so I'm for it if that makes the publishing of such a book easier, FWIW.

Three more key gaming references:

Shadowrun
Mercenaries chapter of SOTA 2063

Cyberpunk 2020
Stormfront 1 & 2

[Tzeentch]

Foxhole. The word you're looking for is "foxhole." "Flagpole to foxhole" is a well-turned, evocative phrase. "Flagpole to fighting hole..." not so much. OK, now that I've gotten my linguistic snobbery out of my system...

Take it up with the Marines, I stole that phrase from the 2012 U.S. Marine Corps S&T Strategic Plan (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I would be quite interested in a detailed unit-creation system. Have different types of units give different bonuses: commando units give +Infiltration, combat infantry gives +Dodge, combat engineers give +Demolitions, etc. Maybe +1 Initiative for each member of your unit within X meters.

I want to see how the cooperation rules work in SR5 before going too far down a path like this, especially as players will probably just pick something they are already good at. I've never been particularly fond of the tactical networking rules in Shadowrun (or GURPS, for that matter) so that might be an angle to look at - especially as it might help avoid the issue of "well, with this sourcebook how come my criminal shadowrun team can't learn the same SOPs?"

Units should have, at minimum, their own Positive and Negative Qualities, to reflect things like better or worse officers, supply lines, morale, that kind of thing.

Aye. I really like the concept of a unit meta-character, but it's easy to talk a big game on the subject (look at how 'meh' Pondsmith's system ended up being in CPv3) and end up with something not worth the GMs time. Although my old gaming group spent a LOT of hours on the 'group design systems' from various Rifts book back in the day (e.g. the traveling circus and mercenary point-buy systems).

I think there's a decent chance your target demographic will have bought SR5's Augmentation equivalent. Augmentation is virtually certain to be, if not free to military personnel, then at least heavily subsidized and incentivized. When wires, bone lacing, and muscle replacement make a tangible difference in the effectiveness and survivability of your troops, you want your troops to have those things.

Never been sold on the military promoting or subsidizing heavy cybernetics simply from a cost-benefit perspective (and didn't seem to be supported much in the limited canon sourcebooks and novels). It appears that SR5 may have addressed the problematic cost issue to some degree, though.

On the issue of supplements vs. splatbook, I need more details. Why and how would you split the subject up?

From what is being published now, a division by major topic would be:
-
1. Silent Death: Special Operations. Shadowrunners backed by major powers, perhaps even posing as criminals for deniability and resource access (notably, information sources like Shadowland). Requires some discussion of what special forces are and are now, how they differ from freelance teams, training levels. Will probably require bringing some things down to earth (like 'typical' Ratings). Even 'Tier 1' operators are not supermen, Tom Clancy and videogames aside.
2. Kills to Pay the Bills: Mercenaries, pirates and militias that do most of the killing, but get none of the respect. Range from war tourists to entire private armies working for the highest bidder.
3. Sixth World on Fire. Regular military forces that are part of organized, uniformed organizations in the service of megacorporations and stable nations. This would be a bit more general and deal with background information to create a military or ex-military character that doesn't feel like it was written by either a recruiter or an anti-war activist. Bios of the major relevant military forces and a region-by-region look at the bit players (that part may be too damn annoying to unwind, so maybe just the Americas for this one).
4. Heavy Metal. Gunships, tanks, and other bang-bangs where you roll a bucket of dice and turn unprepared shadowrunners into chunky salsa. Probably a bit more organized then throwing a bunch of random vehicles in a box and shaking it around, I have some material I wrote WAYYYY back in SR3 days that is more about what makes a vehicle "military" versus just taking whatever has the most Armor and putting a cannon on it.
5. Warzones. I don't know what direction they are taking SR5 setting-wise, so don't know what this will cover. I would like to revisit some plot threads that got buried from Shadows of North America though. Basically, regions and plot threads to hang a military-based campaign on. Probably includes something about Desert Wars (although IMO that belongs in a media book).

[Tzeentch]

One of the issues with SR4 (maybe with SR5 too) is that the character gen rules tend to force overspecialization and penalize a former Special Operator for picking career appropriate skills. I think something that should be included in a supplement like this is some sort of Skill Package system that costs a flat number of skill points but gives a complete skill list at the appropriate ratings for all the skills (or all the SR equivalents) that a particular Special Operator would have. Most players using the normal chargen rules will have skip out on skills like Instruction or Parachuting because they won't have enough points to cover the more common use skills like Automatics or Infiltration. Hell, I find it almost impossible to build a realistic special operator in SR4 for under 500 points, and that's even considering his overall attributes will be lower than they should be.

Shadowrun has always been about the specialist who has, at some level, role protection from the dirty outsiders. The exact role of the Street Samurai seems to have been pretty hard hit, but even that exists after a fashion.

I'm somewhat of two minds about the skill packages of special forces. Shadowrun itself has never really settled on if shadowrunners are snot nosed newbies showing in the Barrens with a duffel bag and pink mohawks, or they are supposed to be salty veterans of the streets who don't bat an eye at shooting a security guard square between the eyes (or if the difference is just backstory and for some reason everyone falls within a fairly small range of competency at the start). There's also the issue that the perception of what special forces do, and their capabilities, is often rather disconnected from reality. This has been brought up in some armed forces journals, where it's actually beginning to cause some rather nasty ego inflation in the "special" forces and pushback from the units they nominally hail from.

In addition to Skill Packages, I think this supplement should include an example of the sorts of tactics you would see Military/SF/SWAT type guys use when doing things like clearing rooms, movement to contact, reacting to near and far ambushes, etc.

Certainly, if you haven't had a chance to check out GURPS SWAT or GURPS Tactical Shooting yet do so. Both go into turn-by-turn tactics along these lines. Some aspects of this wouldn't really gel with the abstract SR system, but even a fluffy description can be useful. I wrote up a near-future soldier loadout using Tactical Shooting, Ultra-Tech, and High-Tech for Pyramid #3/55 and Han's had a great article that updates Tactical Shooting to the general tech level that Shadowrun is at, so I recommend checking it out.

[Tzeentch]

Key point 1: National Armies. You can just translate and slightly update Pegasus' work on the Bundeswehr from German War translation Fronteinsatz. It comes with outfit splatsheets for a special forces scout and a (dwarf!) grunt. I'd then like to see one more civilised army (maybe Japan's?) and one fringe army (Argentina? Amazonia? Empire of Zambia?). The Bundeswehr description, especially with equipment spreadsheets, can just serve as a template. Other armies might get smaller summaries - UCAS, CAS, Aztlan, Russia, France/Euroforce, the usual suspects.

Is there already a translation of this Fronteinsatz book? I'm sure as hell not going to try and run it through Google Translate even if I could get a copy (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

A generic TOE is probably useful, but I'm leery of nuisance detail. The players presumably have far more agency in their organization than is typical, which would put them outside normal chains of command ("Sorry, sir, my orders are signed by the CG." Translation: "Go pound sand, butterbars.")

I hate to say it, but current Shadowrun canon is - to put it mildly - an impenetrable black hole of nonsense and pet projects (I'm not sinless in that, for damn sure) that I want to be detached from if at all possible. I've often wondered if just focusing on the events in the Americas would be a better use of time instead of half-ass globetrotting which just exacerbates the current timeline issues and one-off area notes. I don't mean to sound dismissive, but there's a LOT of canon spread out over dozens of books, adventures, and novels.

Major North American Players
UCAS - Not clear how the Ares situation is supposed to shake out in 5e, but they seem like an obvious example where the line between national and corporate military is so thin as to be a mere formality. Also pretty relevant for 'default' Seattle campaigns.

CAS - Seems to be a clear national military. The CAS in general seem to be bystanders to a lot of Shadowrun events though. Never was really clear one what story purpose they served, especially as a lot of freelancers assumed they were just the hillbilly UCAS (even when writing for SoNA I never quite got the 'angle' that made them special).

Tir Tairngire - Regular military that got forcibly transitioned to cops. Rife for all sorts of shadow wars between the Peace Force and Security Directorate.

Salish Shidhe - Fairly recently fought a nasty small war with Tsimshian (that got sort of forgotten in the canon). Country has no unifying political or social elements so is probably just a series of local militias in practice. Maybe divided into lodges by component tribe? Would love to do more with the Salish as it's my home area and I wrote that chapter in SoNA (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) ~

Sioux - Supposedly competent and professional military that hasn't done jack squat in decades.

Aztlan - Now a battle-hardened force that has learned some damn hard lessons in Sixth World insurgencies and asymmetric warfare. Probably more dangerous now then they ever were before.

Amazonia - Was locked in a spiral development path with Aztlan for magical and military supremacy. Learned a lot of lessons, but based on War! I'm not sure if it learned the right ones. Game mechanics in 5e may provide an explanatory mechanism for how a primarily Awakened defense force would organize.

California Free State - Every man and dwarf for themselves. VERRRYYYY interesting shenanigans now that Hestaby isn't around to pick on the poor elven crusaders hovering to the north. Might have to get their shit together before Sperenthiel becomes the national language. Place sounds a total shithole in the canon though, a North American failed state if there ever was one.

Pueblo Corporate Council - The best mercs money can buy.

AMC/Athabaskan Council/TPA - Who? Yeah, exactly.

Tsimshian Protectorate - Huge potential here. It's next door to Seattle and the fallout from their war with SS has not been discussed. Probably the worst off NAN country in many respects.

Hawai'i - Just kidding. They supposedly do have a surprisingly large aerospace force, though (at least, back in the '50s).

Key Point 2: PMCs. MET 2000, Tzunami, 10K Daggers, combat, inc. Those are entire armies each, with six-digit manpower, exterritorial corporate status, their own differentianted branches and worldwide renown.

I'm hard pressed to see how these could be rationalized without some degree of retconning. Personnel costs alone would sijnk these, if my back of the envelope calculations are even close to right.

The Fucking Mary-Sues probably need to go in too, since they can hardly be ignored, though I personally wouldn't mind a thing if they were all eaten by the Seadragon,

In the opening vignette they all drown because their rusty hulk of a ship finally breaks apart and they all considered themselves too badass to wear any unstylish POG bullshit like life preservers. Ooh rah devildogs!

and they are a few weight classes below even a slightly damaged Belltower like either MET, Tzunami or Combat. Then smaller merc companies - and please, with a focus on non-American companies.

Aye, this can be a simple way to update some regions too. My concern here is that everyone would want bizarre "ethnic themed" mercenary units ("Oh, this is the Nigerian merc unit of all jackal shamans." or "Oh, that's the Chinese merc unit with a bazillion geomancers and inscrutable physical adepts.")

What needs explaining is how powerful national armies still are, what they can and can't do, and how they, PMC megacorps like MCT and Tzunami, and megacorp standing armies interact. Shadowrun needs to decide whether it wants to be 80s Cyberpunk - weak to nonexistent state forces in favor of a hardline Reaganian private enterpirse focus, or governments as slowly dying, but still dangerous juggernauts, as in Ghost in the Shell (where, incidentally, the main characters are all government agents, government-created AI, or government-created superhackers, and military-intelligence-industrial complex structures take the place of Megacorporations). There needs to be a definite ruling on this.

I doubt that anyone would be willing to commit to something like that, especially as this is often the line developer prerogative (and hence can change). I think that a military book could help set the parameters but it doesn't need to be the final word on if Westphalian nation states are dead or not.

Further, the situation with PMCs after Aztlan needs to be resolved. MET2000, Tzunami and Combat each are committed in several places, without possible reprieve to waste all their men on The War Where Nothing Happens - MET2000 is partially state-owned, so the German government has a huge stake in what they do, and IIRC it's likewise with Tzunami and the Japanese state. No way they threw all their forces into the Bogotán front, because they would never have been allowed to. Germany cannot afford to keep their toxic dragon prison unguarded, and neither can Japan afford to withdraw forces from it's remaining colonies. If anything, several megacorps have very vested interest in those two PMCs keep doing their jobs.

War! is a bit of a pickle. A new edition and timeline jump allows a lot of sins to be forgiven, though.

While that could be nice, it should be hard and fast rules, nothing super elaborate. Rules for managing a mercenary company - resupplies, rules for acquiring bulks of military weapons, ect - could be very useful, though.

Payroll and something about the four 'Bs' (beans, bullets, bandages, batteries) are probably all that most people would really grok. I was a logistician so that stuff is really quite fascinating to me, but the sharp end of the spear is where most players are going to be.

Also, national militaries have a distinct advantage in heavy units like warships, tanks and whatnot. Few PMCs would bother operating more than one or maybe two carriers.

PMCs can maintain a surprising amount of heavy duty hardware if there's a market to use it! I suspect that most national militaries can't afford elaborate appropriations either (they are probably managed like a business unit in many cases). I think there is a profound underestimation of maintenance costs and support requirements in general that leads to stuff like never-before-seen merc units floating around with their own small carrier battle groups. Using old ships would just exacerbate these issues, not allow them to waved away.

While the heavy helpings of American patriotism in some recent books were rather unpalatable, neither should there be swings in the opposite directions. However, take your cues not from either modern military FPS games nor Tom Clancy. Not only are those highly ideological, they're also horribly bad sources, as can be seen in EuroWars Antiques.

I'm American and a former Marine, myself. But I like to think I have a rather more clinical and game-oriented view of the subject. If anything, I'm a bit worried I may be a bit too much on the cynical side to appeal to the Call of Duty inspired Shadowrun fan.

Tanks yes, ship/huge vehicle combat rules maybe (with a variation of Megadamage, sice that's really the only workable solution), stats for orbital weapons or nukes, no. Nukes and weapon sattelites are pure plot devices and should be treated as such. Also, rules should be thoroughly tested; we don't need another book where the surest way to sink a carrier is not a nuke, not a thor shot (both the carrier is likely to soak), but a bag with a LOT of grenades.

Interesting note, when we were writing the updated GURPS Ultra-Tech, David and myself played with some abstract 'mass damage' mechanics to make handling millions of points of damage easier to manage and visualize (e.g. from nuke detonations). Ended up being a bit of a cluster because of competing detail requirements, but it might work in Shadowrun.

I am honestly not sure if Shadowrun, even 5e, can really handle extreme damage cases without falling apart though. Will require some brainsweat and disagreeable abstractions to be sure. Which is why I personally would rather just try and deal with more tactical level firepower (and honestly, the Thor stuff got way out of hand from what the proposed systems are capable of - the Shadowrun version is as over the top as the Cobra Zeus system in the new GI Joe movie, the real thing - based on the RAND study at least - is probably more like a strike-anywhere 500-lb bomb).

[hermit]

Is there already a translation of this Fronteinsatz book? I'm sure as hell not going to try and run it through Google Translate even if I could get a copy

Sadly not. It's only a few pages though.

I hate to say it, but current Shadowrun canon is - to put it mildly - an impenetrable black hole of nonsense and pet projects (I'm not sinless in that, for damn sure) that I want to be detached from if at all possible. I've often wondered if just focusing on the events in the Americas would be a better use of time instead of half-ass globetrotting which just exacerbates the current timeline issues and one-off area notes. I don't mean to sound dismissive, but there's a LOT of canon spread out over dozens of books, adventures, and novels.

The problem is, North America is, for all intents and purposes, the Europe of the Shadowrun world. It's an island of peace, with none of it'S nations overly imperialist, most isolationist to soem degree, and all of them weary and disinterested in making life difficult for anyone abroad or each other. While such a general stability makes for a good environment for the economy and people to live in, it maks for a very useless setting for anything war-related (just check out War! entry on Albuquerque. Shadowruns happen! Mercenary campaign hooks galore!) However, since I doubt disregarding North America will help the book's (or series of PDFs') sales if North America and it's relative uneventfulness - there was the 2055 and 2064 coup attempts in the UCAS, but those were hardly large military campaigns, and there is the perpetual dicklength comparison between the Sioux and UCAS, and Aztlan and CAS, but nothing ever really happens ther either; Tshimshian and SSC was a brushfire war with no consequence (really it was more a series of border skirmishes), and California has been handwaived away as a possible American Balkans too. Compared to the Perpetual War in Southeastern Europe, Africa, Central Asia or the Chinese Remnants, North America is a black hole of no mercenary activity. Hence the globetrotting approach. If there was to be a war there, you'd need to start one, and that would wreck many of Shadowrun's core settings, so it'll hardly fly.

UCAS - Not clear how the Ares situation is supposed to shake out in 5e, but they seem like an obvious example where the line between national and corporate military is so thin as to be a mere formality. Also pretty relevant for 'default' Seattle campaigns.

I never got the impression the UCAS military was very corporate, to be honest. Not from the Retired NCO archetype in Sprawl Sites 2E, not from Just Compensation, not from Colloton walking all over Renraku to prove the Military is better than Japanocorps, not from System Failure, and neither from more recent books. If anything, authors recently have taken to misinterpret the UCAS army for the US Armed Forces in Shadowrun, complete with several carrier groups and a budget larger than that of a major developed nation. Aztlan has an army that is nigh indistinguishable from Aztechnology Corporate Security, and Germany's forces depend heavily on MET2000 PMC troops too, and I think there's some similar agreement between Japan, MCT and Tzunami, but the UCAS have never been a nation whose army was largely corporate.

I'm hard pressed to see how these could be rationalized without some degree of retconning. Personnel costs alone would sijnk these, if my back of the envelope calculations are even close to right.

PMCs of this size are a product of Reaganian/Thatcherist thinking that anything works better with privatization. While this is an economical assumption that time has proven wrong at least to a degree, it's at the core of the idea of the Shadowrun economy. Megacorps would be just as economically unviable as mega-PMCs, yet we have to accept them for setting purposes. The GitS model of military-intelligence-industrial complexes and slowly fading but still dangerous nation-states is much more realistic, but at odds with the very core of Shadowrun, which is 80/90s Cyberpunk, primarily Gibson's Bridge and Sprawl trilogies.

In the opening vignette they all drown because their rusty hulk of a ship finally breaks apart and they all considered themselves too badass to wear any unstylish POG bullshit like life preservers. Ooh rah devildogs!

I approve of this and would buy the book only for this. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Aye, this can be a simple way to update some regions too. My concern here is that everyone would want bizarre "ethnic themed" mercenary units ("Oh, this is the Nigerian merc unit of all jackal shamans." or "Oh, that's the Chinese merc unit with a bazillion geomancers and inscrutable physical adepts.")

That's the other extreme (and you forgot the mandatory all-Indian New Dog Soldiers, who are all warpaint, feathers and shamans and use cavalry made of magical horses), but the "They were the nth Devil Marmots in the UCAS army, then incorporated and now are the bestest [unit type] mercenary unit in the world!" approach to creating mercenary units in 10 Mercs was rather tiring. Some units in there are good or at least usable, and one original unit is great fun (THUNDER CORPS!!!). But a more widespread approach that more accurately reflects where battle-hardened you-cannot-go-home-again mercenary types come from in the 6th world would be in order, I think. That 7 of 10 mercenary units coem from the region where armies have the least combat experience in the world is rather ... odd.

As for the bizarre ethnical angle: I'd personally just want units that have a distinct flavor (could be an Arab unit specialising in shallow water operations, could be a Austro-Hungarian unit an NBC focus because of the devastation in SE Austria, Hungaria and Slowenia due to the Jihad, could be a Chinese all-naval unit or African elite mountaineers. It just shouldn't have all units' histories start with "When the US Army broke apart, these guys were too awesome to bow to Canada, so they set up their own army with blackjack and hookers and now are the bestest ever!".

War! is a bit of a pickle. A new edition and timeline jump allows a lot of sins to be forgiven, though.

There will be no timeline jump.

PMCs can maintain a surprising amount of heavy duty hardware if there's a market to use it! I suspect that most national militaries can't afford elaborate appropriations either (they are probably managed like a business unit in many cases). I think there is a profound underestimation of maintenance costs and support requirements in general that leads to stuff like never-before-seen merc units floating around with their own small carrier battle groups. Using old ships would just exacerbate these issues, not allow them to waved away.

Sure they can, but there won't be a maket for 12 carrier groups, I think. Especially because the cost to maintain even one is immense, one of the many failures of the Fucking Mary-Sues. However, given the setting's Thatcherist core, I can deal with this easier than with something like the FMC, especially considering such PMCs are partially state-owned. And nation states, unlike corporations, have a much more dependable and fleecaeable income source - their populace and small businessess.

I'm American and a former Marine, myself. But I like to think I have a rather more clinical and game-oriented view of the subject. If anything, I'm a bit worried I may be a bit too much on the cynical side to appeal to the Call of Duty inspired Shadowrun fan.

Not every American writer is Tom Clancy, and I'd suppose the more experience they have with actual deployments and actual service in the Corps, the less GI Joe-esque their portrayal of war and army life becomes. A neutral view is all I'm really asking for. I just can really do without the kind of flag-waving exceptionalism so prevalent in recent books.

I am honestly not sure if Shadowrun, even 5e, can really handle extreme damage cases without falling apart though. Will require some brainsweat and disagreeable abstractions to be sure.

Neither am I. There's no perfect way of doing this, I think, but Mega Damage worked better than Shitloads Of Dice do.

[Tzeentch]

The problem is, North America is, for all intents and purposes, the Europe of the Shadowrun world. It's an island of peace, with none of it'S nations overly imperialist, most isolationist to soem degree, and all of them weary and disinterested in making life difficult for anyone abroad or each other.

Probably a lot more going on than outright warfare. At the very least North America would be the playground of the merc security team and monster hunters.

Tshimshian and SSC was a brushfire war with no consequence (really it was more a series of border skirmishes), and California has been handwaived away as a possible American Balkans too.

Both are good locations to do something productive with. The Border War just sort of fizzled away into nothingness, but people forget this was out-and-out warfare between the NAN and even involved chemical warfare. California as a patchwork collection of warlords and cantonments would actually be a big step up in that all-important "playability" category. I just read through the old California Free State book yesterday . . . yeah hard to jive that with what we have in 2070 that's for sure.

Compared to the Perpetual War in Southeastern Europe, Africa, Central Asia or the Chinese Remnants, North America is a black hole of no mercenary activity. Hence the globetrotting approach. If there was to be a war there, you'd need to start one, and that would wreck many of Shadowrun's core settings, so it'll hardly fly.

The Americas are a bit of a large playground, and you still have the Yucatan, whatever Denver becomes, Columbia, and who knows what's going on elsewhere in Atzlan or on the CAS borders.

Focusing some detail on a few warlord states and corporate interests in the broken areas of the world is exactly on the money though. Especially since that's where you can really play with morality and the ideas of "just wars" in areas that have been broken down by 20-50 years of constant conflict, disease and poverty.

I never got the impression the UCAS military was very corporate, to be honest. Not from the Retired NCO archetype in Sprawl Sites 2E, not from Just Compensation, not from Colloton walking all over Renraku to prove the Military is better than Japanocorps, not from System Failure, and neither from more recent books.

To be more exact, I got the impression that the UCAS and Ares forces were a revolving door and worked hand in glove most of the time (e.g. Burning Bright).

The Sprawl officer is noted as being low level and seems pretty jingoistic (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Hmmm .. will have to think about the latter. My hands might be tied by canon if the UCAS is running supercarriers to uh .... well ... do whatever it is they do with a bunch of supercarriers and one area they do force projection.

I approve of this and would buy the book only for this. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

It's hard to outright kill off the ideas of other freelancers. Reinterpreting them through shadowtalk or outright ignoring them is often preferred.

That 7 of 10 mercenary units coem from the region where armies have the least combat experience in the world is rather ... odd.

That's probably why they are mercs actually. Fairly safe recruiting areas, no major supply issues if you are legitimate, lots of potential recruits from the national and tribal militaries spoiling for the "glory" and "excitement" of real war (you know, like in the Blood Bounty simsense games! Yeah, that's the ticket chummer, sign right here...). Have the opportunity to secure funding through participation in various "Real World" reality shows and combat gladiatorial matches (also helps weed out the riff-raff). Special forces with nothing to do and inadequate compensation (which can include 'respect') may also go merc - or be reorganized as mercs as a privatization scheme or because of no military budget (they just have to pray to the spirits that they don't skip the middle-man).

"When the US Army broke apart, these guys were too awesome to bow to Canada, so they set up their own army with blackjack and hookers and now are the bestest ever!".

A unit that specialized in gambling and prostitution sounds exactly like quite a few contemporary US ones (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

There will be no timeline jump.

From the last time many of these conflicts and areas were described, there may be a 15-20 year in-game gap. Hm, I thought that there was a 1 year gap from 10 Mercs and late-4e supplements.

[hermit]

My hands might be tied by canon if the UCAS is running supercarriers to uh .... well ... do whatever it is they do with a bunch of supercarriers and one area they do force projection.

They have two based out of Seattle (the Koontz and the Schwartzkopf, both supercarriers), and one more and a landing ship called Wolverine out of Ellis Island. And what do they do with them? Parade them around and feel like they still matter, I guess. The same reason Britain has carriers.

A unit that specialized in gambling and prostitution sounds exactly like quite a few contemporary US ones

I could get behind THAT.

To be more exact, I got the impression that the UCAS and Ares forces were a revolving door and worked hand in glove most of the time (e.g. Burning Bright).

No, not really. In fact, the UCAS and ares parted on bad terms and Colloton spent most of Hardy-era SR4 courting Aztechnology and other, darker Magic.

From the last time many of these conflicts and areas were described, there may be a 15-20 year in-game gap. Hm, I thought that there was a 1 year gap from 10 Mercs and late-4e supplements.

No, Stormfront smoothly translates to 5E. There's a gap to many warzones but not all of them.

That's probably why they are mercs actually. Fairly safe recruiting areas, no major supply issues if you are legitimate, lots of potential recruits from the national and tribal militaries spoiling for the "glory" and "excitement" of real war (you know, like in the Blood Bounty simsense games! Yeah, that's the ticket chummer, sign right here...).

Zero experience. I recon most contemporary PMCs take only experienced people on their payroll. Besides, the established major mercenary bases are Portugal, Macao, Dubai ... not North America. I'm seriously not sold on this.

Also, the sequencial publishing opens up publishing modules for different regions. I'm still not sold on North America as a mercenary playground; most of what you describe is Shadowrunner work not needing PMCs. But I'd really love to see an updae on China anyway. Or an actual look on Africa beyond "there be black people, poverty, and crap".

[Tzeentch]

Some threads of interest:
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=29737
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=22852
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=37854

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=92629
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=77774
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=88472

[Kruger]

Foxhole. The word you're looking for is "foxhole." "Flagpole to foxhole" is a well-turned, evocative phrase. "Flagpole to fighting hole..." not so much. OK, now that I've gotten my linguistic snobbery out of my system...

Foxhole is an Army term. For those of us who were Marines, it's a fighting position. Foxes hide. Marines don't. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[Fatum]

And nation states, unlike corporations, have a much more dependable and fleecaeable income source - their populace and small businessess.

Megacorps have both.


In what comes to Tsimshian - see System Failure, p.109. MCT packed up and left, the Tsimshian tribe lost the power, and the Haida are now the power brokers in a nation that is factually under the SSC control.


Also, canonically the national armies get the best stuff - like, remember how anything over Rating 6 is said only to be found in militaries? So it seems that the governments are less influential precisely because they're pouring an nonproportional amount of their budget into the military - think about the costs of equipping just the infantry with military-grade armour (and hey, it's military-grade because the military uses it!)
Still, a dozen supercarrier groups in a nation state Navy in the 70ies seems a bit too much. Maybe some legacy ships that are too new to cut for needles, but too old and unneeded to actually keep combat-ready and up to date?

[Nath]

UCAS - Not clear how the Ares situation is supposed to shake out in 5e, but they seem like an obvious example where the line between national and corporate military is so thin as to be a mere formality. Also pretty relevant for 'default' Seattle campaigns.

I never got the impression the UCAS military was very corporate, to be honest. Not from the Retired NCO archetype in Sprawl Sites 2E, not from Just Compensation, not from Colloton walking all over Renraku to prove the Military is better than Japanocorps, not from System Failure, and neither from more recent books. If anything, authors recently have taken to misinterpret the UCAS army for the US Armed Forces in Shadowrun, complete with several carrier groups and a budget larger than that of a major developed nation. Aztlan has an army that is nigh indistinguishable from Aztechnology Corporate Security, and Germany's forces depend heavily on MET2000 PMC troops too, and I think there's some similar agreement between Japan, MCT and Tzunami, but the UCAS have never been a nation whose army was largely corporate.

Ares Macrotechnology and Federated-Boeing were rather introduced as the good old Cold War military-industrial complex, before PMC were a thing. Ares had a USAF Major as CEO and a marine (or ranger, depending on which book you read) in charge in Seattle. But in SR early days, they were just selling weapons and satellites. The retired NCO archtype made a point of the governments being the only ones with the heavy stuff like stealth bombers. Knight Errant really were just cops and security guards, and Ares (small) military contingent belonged to Ares Arms.

The Chicago situation is the first time the lines were blurred, but the context is very specific, during the Haeffner administration, which had very close and personal ties to Ares Macrotechnology. As people discovered PMC in Real Life, Knight Errant was retconed to include military operations. But if you ask me, the full extent of Ares influence ought to be in the intelligence community, rather than in military operations, with the NRO and NSA relying on AresSpace assets, and Guantanamo now run as an extraterritorial corporate facility (I know Gitmo detention facility did not exist when Cyberpirates was written, but I like the idea).

No matter what, Conspiracy Theories made a point of removing much of the influence Ares may have had in the UCAS government. I'm not sure if the author had something against Ares specifically, or if it did not like the idea of the UCAS being a corporate puppet.

They have two based out of Seattle (the Koontz and the Schwartzkopf, both supercarriers), and one more and a landing ship called Wolverine out of Ellis Island. And what do they do with them? Parade them around and feel like they still matter, I guess. The same reason Britain has carriers.

The Neo-Anarchist Guide to North America mentionned the Wolverine as a "light carrier" with Staten Island Carrier Base (not Ellis Island) as its home port. Bug City describes the Wolverine class with these words: "Typically, Wolverines are armed for sea combat, local air superiority, and the occasional ground attack. However, Wolverines also have been used to ferry regular army and, of course, marine troops and their transports." I don't how intentional it was to have a USS Wolverine back in Michigan lake.

Runner Havens introduced the USS Colin Powell as the nuclear supercarrier based at Everett Naval Station. According to Rigger 3, it is the class-namer. Seattle 2072 says the USS Koontz now is a tourist attraction.

CAS - Seems to be a clear national military. The CAS in general seem to be bystanders to a lot of Shadowrun events though. Never was really clear one what story purpose they served, especially as a lot of freelancers assumed they were just the hillbilly UCAS (even when writing for SoNA I never quite got the 'angle' that made them special).

I always had the impression that the UCAS ought to be the remnants of the US after overexposure to the worst Washington corporate lobbies, New York banks, Boston lawyers and Chicago mob has to offer, while the CAS would the part left exposed to Bible Belt hardliner conservatives and Texas oil interests.

UCAS isolationism would result in oversized UCAS armed forces never actually deploying anywhere, but still flexing their muscles every time the corporations ask the State Department to threaten someone with a UN Security Council resolution, while preparing for a MAD scenario against the NAN.

CAS isolationism would result in oversized CAS armed forces never actually deploying anywhere, serving as one giant and expensive training and recruitment center for oil companies contractors, while preparing for high-intensity warfare against Aztlan.

Tir Tairngire - Regular military that got forcibly transitioned to cops. Rife for all sorts of shadow wars between the Peace Force and Security Directorate.

I would like to see a sourcebook finally address the fact that the majority of the elven population was about 20 years old when the Salish Council opened its border to metahuman immigration, and under 24 when Tir Tairngire was founded. The army that fought in Redding in 2035 must have been a mix of human, ork and troll veterans with a handful of spike babies, and a lot of young elves with no combat experience. By 2064, you would still have a military hierarchy clogged with the elven "heroes" of Redding now in their fifties. Not sure those would have went away with the old governement.

Tsimshian Protectorate - Huge potential here. It's next door to Seattle and the fallout from their war with SS has not been discussed. Probably the worst off NAN country in many respects.

Dirty Tricks has a chapter dedicated to Tsimshian. It focuses on the political process, and war reparations the Salishs-Shidhe asks for. The issue of what happened to the soldiers and members of the security services of the former police state is not really address. Since MCT already paid to have them trained by military advisers, I can picture the corporation hiring some of them for dirty works overseas as a cheaper alternative to Japanese employees.

[Wakshaani]

There are some points in North America where war could flare up, easily. CAS and teh PCC are doing one heck of a dance just now, and teh NAN-UCAS treaties are held up thanks to Denver.

There's a lot more going on than people normally see, I think.

[Tzeentch]

Dirty Tricks

Plots of Interest

• UCAS/Sioux border is a "powder keg looking for a spark." (p. 77)
• Sioux/PCC alliance may drive the CAS and UCAS together. (p. 78)
• President Colloton pushing back at the influence of Ares. Rah rah. (p. 78)
• Texas wants to invade the PCC (p. 89) after it was sold former New Mexico and Texas land by Aztlan. (p. 87)
• -- Shadowtalk hints it was for 1 nuyen as part of a plan to turn the CAS against the PCC.
• Sirrugh's storm has devastated south Florida. Refugees heading north are straining resources. (p. 89)
• CAS Supercarrier CSS Kitty Hawk used for rescue operations as part of shakedown cruise. (p. 88)
• Food blight (magical? nanites? nano-virus from petroleum-spill eating strain? Yeah, it's magic.) wipes out Aztlan corn crop (Aztlacoya blight) (pp. 88-89)
• -- Sirrugh also destroys producer of 80% of Aztlan food products - NatVat. (p. 87)
• -- Stuffer Shack is in trouble. (p. 89)
• Shedim infestation in New Orleans. (p. 89)
• Aztlan military morale is "in the shitter" at the Austin garrisons. Major supply problems. (p. 92)
• -- At least an entire division of Aztlan troops redeployed to Amazonia after the sale. At least a quarter lost when their transport ship sunk. (p. 76)
• Alabama is the largest steel producer in the CAS, second to Pennsylvania in North America. (p. 104) (Not sure how that works, but Shadowrun has never paid attention to this stuff).

CAS Military Assets
-- Note: CAS is the last nation on earth to use imperial units of measure. (p. 91)
-- Media blitz pushing the CAS as "the last bastion of the real America." (p. 93)
-- According to shadowtalk, CAS has the "world's only submersible carriers." (p. 91). Seems to contradict War!

• CSS Kitty Hawk - currently conducting rescue operations in aftermath of Sirrugh's magically enhanced hurricane in Borinquen. (p. 89)
• -- Note this is where NatVat is. (p. 79). Not clear who controls it then, Atzlan or the CAS.
• Carrier Strike Group I based on out Newport News, VA. (p. 91)
• Texas maintains a brown water navy consisting largely of torpedo boats. (p. 91)
• CSS Atlanta stationed in Texas (old flagship). Unstated where in Texas. Part of Battlegroup Atlanta. (p. 91)
• Texas Air National Guard is now based in Grand Prairie. (p. 91)
• Texas Rangers have at least two divisions of heavy armor around Austin. (p. 91)
• CAS Army has a division of light tanks in reserve around Austin. (p. 91)
• Sons of the Alamo and large number of militamen traveling to Amarillo. (p. 93)
• Magical research facility in the Smokies of Virginia. Specializes in spirit remote sensing. (p. 103)
• CAS Army based out of Alabama. (p. 104)
• -- Redwall Arsenal operated by Areas Heavy Industries and Ares Arms. (p. 104)
• -- Maxwell Air Base is a CAS base largely operated by Ares (p. 104)

Tsimshian Stuff

• Owes four trillion nuyen to the SSC. (p. 122)
• -- SSC is charging 39.6% interest on uhh. it's not clear. As written they are charging interest on ... payments?!. (p. 123)
• Sovereign tribal Council occupied the capital of Kitimat in December 2064. (p. 112)
• -- Officially rejoined the Native American Nations on January 5, 2065. (p. 112)
• Several Salish tribes support assimilation into the SSC. (p. 123)
• -- Remember that the Salish are the western tribes, not the entire collection that makes up the SSC.
• Large areas are completely deforested and many lakes and rivers contaminated with heavy metals. (p. 123). Somehow this doesn't seem to leech over to Salish territory much.
• -- Fraser River pollutants are a problem in the SSC. Trying to get the Shasta Shamans to return and help clean up. (p. 114)
• -- "[E]ighty-five percent of the land in Tsimshian is all but dead/" (p. 110)
• Combat trained toxic shamans a big problem. Hiring runners to take them out and spare their own casualties. (p. 123)
• Haida National Defense Force is a mixture of Awakened and mundane cops. (p. 125)
• -- SSC provides support (and manpower?) (p. 113)
• -- Many members of the Defense Force are Salish-born citizens. (p. 114)
• Sioux angling to grab Tsimshian as a Protectorate by forcing another STC intervention.

[Bearclaw]

Just a little point that's been bugging me:
The idea that mega-corps have "standing armies". There is no way. Standing armies cost giant piles of money, and don't make money. Having worked in several "non-profit generating areas", such as IT, Validation and Security over the years, I know exactly how corporate outsourcing works, and this stuff would be outsourced. Sure they'd have security, but again, the cheapest they could get away with, and most of the lower level stuff would be handled by outsourced renta-cop agencies. They would pressure the host nation-states to provide security for everything that wasn't super secret, at tax payer expense, and hire mercenaries for anything that needed a real military force. Let MET-20000 deal with training, equipment, and all the logistical crap it takes to keep an army running.
My point is, other than Aztechnology being both a company and an imperialistic country, most large militaries involved in corp stuff would be mercs. Just like now (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[hermit]

There is no way. Standing armies cost giant piles of money, and don't make money.

Not if they also function as a PMC.

Sure they'd have security, but again, the cheapest they could get away with, and most of the lower level stuff would be handled by outsourced renta-cop agencies.

Megacorps are inherently less effective than smaller companies, and have many attributes and functions of a nation-state, not a corporation. It's best, I think, to think of them as very imperialist, opt-in citizenship, corporate organsied nations, rather than profit-focused, shareholder value worshipping companies like today's corporations. A megacorp is not what would make today's short-term profit oriented Western oligarchs happy.

Also, with the level of espionage and violent action, megacorps will want to keep security in-house to minimize loyalty problems as much as they can.

[Tzeentch]

Not if they also function as a PMC.

There's only so much business available, even in Shadowrun. Modern day PMCs are only profitable with REALLY sweetheart deals and because many of the owners are using them for stuff other than to make money.

I'm nonplussed on this though, Shadowrun economics has always been driven by rule of cool. It's cool to imagine Coca-Cola armored battlegroups getting attacked by Pepsi gunships in a dispute over StufferShack distributing.

Megacorps are inherently less effective than smaller companies, and have many attributes and functions of a nation-state, not a corporation. It's best, I think, to think of them as very imperialist, opt-in citizenship, corporate organsied nations, rather than profit-focused, shareholder value worshipping companies like today's corporations. A megacorp is not what would make today's short-term profit oriented Western oligarchs happy.

Shadowrun megacorps are free riding on the public services provided by the nation states. However, they are parasitic and will have to provide many of the functions of government eventually if they keep doing their level best to maximize profits.

Also, with the level of espionage and violent action, megacorps will want to keep security in-house to minimize loyalty problems as much as they can.

The standing corporate armies seem pretty small scale. There's a lot of off-hand references to "divisions" of this and that, but the actual number of uniforms that make up that division can be a lot less in Shadowrun. I don't think many people (even some veterans) really grasp how many people and resources are tied up in a modern division once you include both the tooth and tail elements.

[hermit]

There's only so much business available, even in Shadowrun. Modern day PMCs are only profitable with REALLY sweetheart deals and because many of the owners are using them for stuff other than to make money.

Certainly, SR corps are also involved in black market businesses to some degree (Aztechnology especially, being essentially run by Ghost Cartels, and MCT, being owned in parts by the Yakuza). Also, given the enormous danger from paraflora and -faune, business opportunities for mercs should be significantly higher in SR, and I see no reason why the Megas should entirely pass up on them. Most of them (all but Evo, Horizon and Shiawase, in fact) even own one or several private security companies. Also, keep in mind most municipal police was privatized, becausye Shadowrun is such a Thatcherist world.

Shadowrun megacorps are free riding on the public services provided by the nation states. However, they are parasitic and will have to provide many of the functions of government eventually if they keep doing their level best to maximize profits.

They're too large to be purely parasitic. While the governments still exist, they live in a symbiosis with the corps by now. For instance, financial trade is significantly more regulated in SR thanks to the megas, who want stability, not short-term profit. Also keep in mind all megas play the long game - Lofwyr and Celedyr literally don't give a damn about the bottom line if it suits their longer-term goals, and most corps have a supernatural, immortal or otherwise non-human element in their boardroom (MCT has Ryomyo, via the Watanabe-Gumi; Wuxing has Chinese Magics, Horizon has the Consensus, EVO has Buttercup, Shiawase has the Empress, Aztechnology the Blood Mages and a heap of unholy knowledge, NeoNET has Celedyr, Saeder-Krupp has Lofwyr and Ares has Bugs). Sure, they want to make profit, but aside from all the possible profit they sink by being such a large organisation, they also are less interested in pure profits than most contemporary corporations are by nature of who runs them.

The standing corporate armies seem pretty small scale. There's a lot of off-hand references to "divisions" of this and that, but the actual number of uniforms that make up that division can be a lot less in Shadowrun.

They once were small scale but, driven by Story needs and bad research, have significantly expanded. In SR3, Saeder-Krupp operated several supercarriers for .... lulz, basically. Or maybe in case Lofwyr wanted to cross an ocean and have a pad to take a nap, I dunno.

I don't think many people (even some veterans) really grasp how many people and resources are tied up in a modern division once you include both the tooth and tail elements.

The dimensions of major armies are something all RPG writers are notoriously bad at grasping.

[Nath]

Though the old Seattle Sourcebook mentions corporate military vessels belonging to Aztechnology and MCT, Corporate Shadowfiles had the Big Eight military forces at best regiment-sized. Aztechnology had no military force at all, and used Aztlan national army. Fields of Fire lists MET2000, Tsunami and the like as "organizations," not corporations. Before that, Deutschland in der Schatten description of MET2000 was the first time you had an actual semi-private military forces, but it still retained a strong link to the German state. The idea of Desert War was already around, but as far as I remember, Shadowbeat trid program mentions a company-level event (which match MCT description in Corporate Shadowfiles of maintaining military company almost only for Desert War). From an operational point of view, a company or a battalion wouldn't allow a corporation to do much more in a crisis zone than evacuating high-value employees. Such small units would be little more than a glorified SWAT with air projection capabilities (even more so in a cyberpunk setting where cops had full-auto weapons and body armor... but reality caught up since). Then Knight Errant went military against the bugs, while Aztlan retconed the balance between corporate and national forces. In Year of the Comet, 2,500 Ares sent in California is considered as "pretty large for a corporate military presence" Since then, as the PMC rose in real life, strong corporate military became the norm. But maybe it's a change that actually also took place between 2050 and 2060.

Unlike the stock market-driven companies of today, megacorporations can make long-term investments. For them, the only point of outsourcing would be 1) saving on downtime for both gear and personnel 2) deniability (but we already know how they outsource that part, don't we?). In the military, decent training is going to eat a lot of the downtime anyway, and Desert Wars would allow to make a profit of it for some part. Reserves does save on personnel downtime, but less so on gear.

Currently, PMC makes benefits primary for three reasons 1) they hire experienced veterans whose selection and training have already been paid by government money 2) they hire additional cheap cannon fodders in poorer countries 3) they still rely on national armed forces to provide the heavy armor. Things the SR megacorporations cannot rely on. So far, air transport is the only field that appear to be sustainable activity. Sea escort in high-risk areas may be another one, but it's a bit soon to tell. Those who still have to hide from Aztlan governement, to put it another way.

Then there's the rules of cool.

Aztechnology especially, being essentially run by Ghost Cartels

Incorrect. The name "ghost cartels" specifically refers to the other south american cartels who were not involved in ORO/Aztechnology and the election rigging.

[hermit]

Incorrect. The name "ghost cartels" specifically refers to the other south american cartels who were not involved in ORO/Aztechnology and the election rigging.

You're right. Non-Gost Cartels then. Still are cartels.

[Bearclaw]

So the point is, they are not long term investments unless you send them off to plunder the Ottomans. They are very expensive to start and very expensive to keep up. Unless it's your business, it's a crappy business to be in.
An ARMY is numbered in the 100,000's. For big countries it's in the millions. Navy as well.

An aircraft carrier has an active, on ship staff of 5,000, with more than that off ship dedicated for care and maintenance of the ship and planes.

So, you invest a few hundred million in a carrier, and a few hundred million more into the planes (billions in real life, but we don't want to get into that), for the privilege of paying monthly salaries for 10,000 guys, plus millions more every year for service contracts on the ship, planes and all of the onboard equipment.
Then you have to protect your gigantic investment with AA ships and anti-sub, which will end up costing as much as the carrier did.
So, you spend billions of dollars to start, and billions more to keep it going. For one ship.
Where is the pay-off? What does your company gain from this investment?
Your stuff is protected by treaties with your host nations and the corporate court, as well as UN treaties and all that other crap.

I'm not saying mega-corps wouldn't maintain some kind of a standing force, but it would be more like a ranger battalion and a special forces group, and probably a few armed cutter sized ships for shipping in dangerous areas, not an ARMY. Leave that crap to tax-payers.