North America Map Options

[mfb]

dude, pay attention. i just said that the little stuff is basically okay because the ramifications are easier to ignore. the ramifications of a world-ending event are slightly more difficult to put out of mind.

[Nerbert]

[mfb]

oh, right, i forgot. because magic exists, we no longer have to pay attention to things which are factually true.

[Halabis]

Nope, we just have to accept that we may not be able to explain them.

[Nerbert]

[mfb]

i enjoy a measure of realism in my games. yes, 'realism' has to be taken with a grain of salt because of the existence of the fantastic in SR. that doesn't mean that it should be thrown out the window completely.

[Cynic project]

Becuase if the IC back drop is anwhere near reasonable then Seattle would not have one stone ontop of another when said thing hapened. because without magic you are not playing shadowrun but seeingas you could in the CFS 15 years without this bullshit you did not need to make it happen. Because even you removed those major cities from the CFS, it is still a bigger and jucier prize than Seattle is.

[Sabosect]

If we want to be technical, magic is perfect possible under current science.

If we accept the theory that all the universe amounts to is different expressions of waveforms, then it is quite possible that all magic does is influence and change the already-existing waveforms to create effects that normally would not happen on their own. Thus, the "cycle of magic" is really just the Earth moving through regions of the universe where waveforms are easy to manipulate by those with certain brain waves and into areas where it isn't. The rest can be explained using string theory. There. Now magic can fit under pseudo-scientific jibber-jabber.

Back to your regularly-scheduled case of Nerbert failing to comprehend and getting the smackdown as a result.

[Nerbert]

Ok, hows this for you? This traveling through different waveforms in space causes Earth to traverse into an alternate universe, and the Earth from that alternate universe traverses into this one. The only difference between them is that is a significant portion of California is a couple miles to the west.

[Ellery]

When creating a product, it's a bad idea to do things that certain people find incredibly stupid, for reasons explained below.

It's fine if you don't care what happened to California. After reading a few articles on plate tectonics and such, you might care more, but that's not the point. Right now you don't care, and view it as a potentially interesting story element--that's fine.

But other people find such events as jarring as small arachnids using them as shuttlecocks for an inter-city badmitton game, because they do know a thing or two about how the world works. Southern CA disappearing gives the same stupid feeling as a game where rounds for a pistol weigh 2kg each. It's just blatantly wrong.

There are two ways to use that. One is to make it the focus of the game. "Look, this is wrong, and I'm going to tell you why--and look how cool it is!" If I were to destroy southern CA in a game that was otherwise based on the present-day, I'd make that the entire focus of the game. It would be the apocalyptic post-Orange County Event game. Bands of starving refugees would wander the streets of Boston, piecing together fragmented reports about the destruction of southern CA and the loss of the entire Pacific rim in a giant tidal wave. Rumors circulate that New York was flooded. And so on. That game could be cool.

The other way to use that is to just toss it in, or make it a minor point. "Heavy pistol clip. 10 rounds. 20kg." That destroys suspension of disbelief for anyone who knows it's wrong. That breaks the setting for some people, and adds almost nothing for others. That's a bad deal.

So it's generally a bad idea to do super-collossal mega-majorly-vast things if you're not going to focus on them. People will either be really distracted/annoyed/think the designers are idiots, or they will go, "Oh, huh. That's sorta cool. I guess."

As I've said before, there is one way out that I'd grudgingly accept; the others would range from horribly bad to impossibly bad.

[Supercilious]

Yeah, well, they screwed up.

Not to sound too anti-SR4 but... The whole system feels that way to me.

[hermit]

Ah hell, we have seen worse, haven't we?

The explanation of an astral vortex sounds good enough to me. Better than explanations for smurf kingdoms popping up like mushrooms in Germany. Better than subterranean immortal dwarves living in giant shroom houses (you never read the original German novels. Be glad you never had to. They make 'Terminus Experiment' look well written and sensible). Better than the original France book either, from what I read. Better than the NYC setting from NAGNA. Not much worse than old SoCal's background, either.

In SR1's backstory, New York, a cities that, for all I know, is FAR FROM ANY FAULTLINE, was flattened in an out-of-the-blue magnitude 8 earthquake. How's that for fucking up a place. And that'S from glorious old FASA days, when there were rives of milk and honey and sourcebooks where every item got an image and a whole page each.

Get over it. If they only fuck up SoCal, I could care less, especially if Hongkong becomes a good setting. Seattle was really becoming stale, and Europe isn't quite the alternative (excluding Portugal, Poland and the other outlying countries. Those were covered rather nicely).

[Penta]

Hermit: What they don't tell Europeans is that Manhattan sits on a fault line, actually.

There's one that runs under 125th street.

However....What FASA ignored is that no quake beyond a 5.2 has EVER been recorded in the Northeastern US in the last 300+ years, and that buildings in the region are built to withstand at least a 7 on the Richter Scale.

Also...They've never outright changed the freakin geography of the world before. Like, say, ripping a piece off a continent.

[Spookymonster]

Fault lines in the metro/NYC area.

I remember the GWB quake in 1989; I lived in Fort Lee, NJ at the time, right where the bridge enters NJ. It was the middle of the night, and I woke up thinking it was the boiler in my house blowing up :).

[Kagetenshi]

[Cynic project]

[Stormdrake]

All we have seen is the map of North America to date right? Then who is to say that when the book comes out that there will not be some rather significant changes around the pac rim? Also, as far as I know no one has as of yet gotten a look at the history section of the new book which may describe a world class disaster occurring in that five year period. personally am going to wait till I can get my hands on the book before I blow my top. Actually the idea of Seattle being laid to ruin by the event that dropped California into the ocean opens a lot of possibilities for story lines to my mind.

[Stormdrake]

By the way, what immortal dwarfs? Obviously I need to stop at a game store next time I pass through Germany and pick up some copy of this german only shadowrun stuff.

[Darkness]

Believe me. It wasn't even worth mentioning.

[Starglyte]

[Shadow_Prophet]

[Stormdrake]

Truth be told as long as they spin a good story that hangs with previous cannon am more than willing to invoke suspension of disbelief. If they do do a pac rim wide event than you can proably kiss Japan good bye as a power in the Shadowrun world which possibly means the relocation of several megacorps head offices. Yet more fodder for story lines.

[blakkie]

[DarkShade]

[JongWK]

FYI, someone posted a little spoiler on ShadowRN. That should give a few answers and raise a few other questions.