What's been wrapped up? What loose ends are still dangling?

Let's see, I think Cross Applied Technologies is gone, Arthur Dankwalther has been Thor Shot (and their was much rejoicing), obviously the race to develop and deploy a wreless matrix has concluded, and to the best of my knowledge they are now rebuilding Chicago. There may still be some goodies from Dunkelzahn's will unclaimed, Bug Spirits haven't gone away, and Aztechnology is still up to no good.

System failure will be your best resource for this...If you Search for it over the last 180 days, you can get a pretty good mix of spoilers that explains everything from the Fall of Shadowland and Captain Chaos to who became President and why.

What the hell? Where'd you hear about Chicago?

And, yes, who became President is a fun topic. That is, if getting kicked in the nuts is what can be considered "fun."

I'll try to find the Chicago Reference and post it, it's in one of the newer books and it's sort of a passing mention made.

Ok I might have misinterpreted the Hate & Brotherhood section of the History Chapter in SR4 where they say Ares and the UCAS army cleaned up the containment zone. I believed that to mean some reconstruction as well as just clearing out most of the Bugs. However they may very well just mean that they cleaned out 98% of the bugs and left the city to fend for itself.

Oh I can't waite till some source books comeout for SR4!

Any one know whats being developed?

There are three kinds of source books: game information books, setting books, and published adventures.

Game information books coming down the line are:

Street Magic (Magic)
Arsenal (Equipment + Vehicles)
Gamemaster's Screen
Augmentation (Cyberware + Medicine)
Unwired (Rigging + Hacking)
Running Wild (Paranormal Animals + rules for playing non-humans)

Then the crystal ball gets darker, because I don't think titles have been announced. But there will probably be a Companion, which may get divided up into a Gamemaster's Guide and a Player's Guide.

According to their site, setting books coming down the line are:

Runner Havens (Hong Kong and Seattle, also some other hot spots like Hamburg)
Corp Zones (Don't know where this will be, maybe Zurich?)
Jacked-up Places* (Probably Chicago, maybe Tortuga?)

The smart money is on the next plot book featuring one or more of themajor players or items new to SR4. So it would probably focus on Evo, Horizon, Neonet, or Sprites/Technomancers since those things have never gotten a writeup before.

*Not its real name, but I don't think they gave a real name.

There is an announced published adventure called On the Run. Also, Shadowrun Missions will switch over to SR4 at Origins 2006.

-Frank

Thanks Frank

Who is this Art guy that eveyone is so glad he got Thor bombed?

what is a thor shot?

Take a chunk of metal, put it in orbit, strap on a simple guidance package and a chemical rocket. When the time comes to kill something, all you've got to do is fire up the rocket, drop it out of orbit, have it self-guide onto the target, and the pure kinetic energy of this piece of metal hitting it's target at orbital velocities (my understanding is that the space shuttle enters the atmosphere in the mid Mach-20s) will be enough to cause an enormous amount of damage.

Think of it as being a meteor that you're able to guide onto a target. I know the US military was considering these for a while during the Cold War as tank killers, to aid in fighting a tank war against the Russians across eastern Europe, as a thor shot would just destroy an MBT.

A Thor Shot is a space-based mass driver that drops objects on targets from space. 80 kilometers of free gravitational excelleration plus a medium-sized object = a crap tonne of flaming pain at the target point.

The Chicxulub Crater, for example, was formed when a 10-kilometer wide meteor struck the Earth 65 million years ago with hillarous results all around. The Thor system drops rocks that are much smaller than that, and are intended to take out installations and ships, rather than 70% of all life on Earth.

-Frank

Lucien died in a mysterious plane crash, and without him to hold it together CATco was essentially parted off.

Well, for starters, 1) Why was he in San Francisco, and 2) how did the Corporate Court let a AAA CEO remain within 100 miles of a known nuclear device.

THOR shot: see Orbital Based Kinetic Energy Weapon

The California basin apparently tried to fall into the ocean, but forgot which way was down. It's now a big island.

You don't typically see that sort of behavior in land masses below sea level. Current speculation focuses on heretofore unknown magical nonsense and/or writers who said "Hey, I know it doesn't make any sense and all, but it'd be cool if..."

I'm leaning towards c) The writers didn't even bother to look at a map and have no idea what they're talking about.

There's a whole thread on this nonsensical crap.

TGCM ?

- Ta Gueule, C'est Magique !
- Shut Up, It's Magic (so don't try to understand)
A good principle to use in earthdawn ...

Yeah, but that's Ghost Dance-level magic.

The city of L.A. is only about 2 million people. The problem also stems from the fact that the authors of the CFS book, as well as being biased towards certain aspects of the state, seem to have never left the UCLA campus and seemed to think that everything that people currently think of as "Los Angeles" is in one city, which it most certainly is not. The state allowed it to become a corp-run Free City, but the "city" is actually the majority of, but not all of, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is almost all of Los Angeles County, Orange County, and the populated (western) parts of San Bernadino county as well as parts of Ventura and down into Riverside counties all the way to the San Diego MSA (which is part of the explanation for the metroplexes merging in Demolition Man, BTW). The L.A. MSA has a current population of approximately 17 million people, second only (in the US) to the NYC MSA which is 23 million people.

To their credit, when the authors of CFS listed the population of the City of Los Angeles as 2 million, they were reasonably close. The problem is that the Free City of Los Angeles in SR is a sprawl of nearly 20 million people, which is more than (and this assumes a lot) the entire population of the PCC were in based on today's population figures and is around 12 million, which is apparently what the PCC's population was pre-Year of the Comet back in SR1 in the NAN book.

To their embarassment and much chargrin, the heart of the MSA is now its own city, which is swell (it was retconned in Shadows of North America to mention that the Free City was made up of the populous parts of L.A. and Orange counties) except that you have this sprawling city (when you can't see the edge of a sprawl from an airplane, you know it's pretty goddamn huge) with more people than the country which invades and annexes it. It is like Canada invading and annexing the United States militarily. After the PCC annexes Ute and more of California (so it now pushes right up into the central valley) it would now be like Canada adding Mexico to its empire.

All of this can be "fixed" if you hold a run in the area through various workarounds which need not be discussed here. But going back to the crux of Frank's post, the earthquake which submerged most of Los Angeles county and created an island in the heart of the City of L.A. is geologically impossible without wreaking massive destruction across the Pacific Rim.
Moreover, the waters don't "recede in a couple of years" or whatever crap was added. If they flooded into the basin, the water will remain until it is pumped out like in New Orleans for the sub-sea level areas, or would have receded immediately afterwards like tsunamis do. Water can't just float in mid-air.

It's crap, and it was going to be the only major thing I was going to houserule in spite of being a canon-whore, but then I read System Failure and ... Well, that's not for here.

Thread link, and Even longer, more detailed thread

I also used to have a .sig quoting Eyeless Blond from that second thread which sums it all up nicely:

I enjoyed the idea of a military coup in UCAS. What's so bad about it? Escpecially when the New Revolution may be backed up by Ares and some other corps?

The history chapter of SR4 didn't have any sentences starting with "note,...", so i'm fine with it.

Type "Colloton" and "SL James" into search (look for individual posts) and know that what I've said is a fraction of what pisses me off about it. If you have any doubts, someone will probably come alone later and explain how much I am pissed off with how pathetically inept the coup and pretty much all of the political machinations were in SR4 and SF.

But to put it simply (because I am too busy running the f-ing coup right now from a dozen POVs): It's not about the coup; it's about the fact that it was so poorly written.

OK, I did the search you asked for. In August you were happy that Colloton was president. And in the meantime, your primary concern seemed to be that you thought the description of who was acting president and when during the communications blackout was confusing.

What made you decide that you didn't like Colloton as president? I haven't been running in the UCAS since 2nd edition, so it never made much difference to me whether the UCAS had a dragon or a corporate sympathizer as commander in chief.

-Frank

How did this post not answer your question?

It's not about her, dammit. At this point, I don't care who it is. It's... fuck it. I'm not going to sit here and do this.

I'm still trying to figure out how they picked some of the boundaries between countries that they did. Sure some follow natural boundaries, latitude, or logitude lines, but many don't seem to have any logic what so ever.

hahaha

Many of them are or were (PCC/Ute border, Seattle/Salish) highways/interstates, which is just... Yeah.

Okay, I have a question about the coup. The sr4 book said they failed, but everyone on the boards says that they succeeded? Did they, and my book has a misprint, or is there something in SF that explains this (I don't have a copy yet)?

Well, the coup itself failed. Technically. But it was planned to fail. You have to read between the lines.

Damn it, now I need SF, damn, SR books are like an addiction.

Fanpro's Sales Department will love to hear that.

Wow... LA is an island?
I've always loved Canon, but I might have to go off canon.
What happened to Saito, by the way? Did he just mysteriously die like Art and Cross?

There is very little mysterious about the deaths of Art and Cross. One was Thor shot by the Corporate Court and the other's plane crashed enroute to San Francisco.

Contrary to what has been said above by the time the CC had stood down from high alert after Valhalla fell and it learned of Winternight's true plans only after the Jormungand had been launched (by which time Cross could already have been in the air for hours) - the only thing that might be considered vaguely "mysterious" is what he was enroute to San Francisco to do. His plane crash gets considerably more than a one sentence sumary and is covered in the Aftermath section as is Ares reaction to his disappearance.

What happened to Saito remains unknown except that he's MIA. His network was badly hit in Operation Jormungand (see WN adventure seed) and then the Mjolnir nuke though...

Hey SL James, not that you need any more ammo for your attack on SR4 Cali, but here are three more points to consider.

1. San Diego - Downtown San Diego is right off the water, so is the airport. Most of it will be gone. There are hills and such but a lot of canyons as well.

2. Take a look right above (North) of the Gulf of Mexico. Go in a little and you have the Salton Sea, the second lowest point in the state. We are talking about a region that is about 200 feet below sea level. And yet, it is dry. Maybe the Azzies built up the burm between the Gulf and the Sea?

3. As interesting as it is to see what happened to LA, what about the Salinas River Valley? This is the submerged land south of Monterey. That is some good farm land in the northern part (not sure of the southern).

Anyway, thought I would add fuel to flames that we can hopefully us to remake Cali into something more logical ("Sorry there was a fingerprint on the transfer that we used to make the map. It is all better now.").

The Cali map gets real wacky on the south end. Though it's hard to tell exactly what is going on there because of scale, the farther inland stuff is really weird. I think they meant San Diego as the same deal as LA, the higher land off to the side is now marked as being the city because downtown by the coast is no longer land. In any event the subsidence was not entirely even, perhaps even an inland syncline.

Something happened to Saito between 2065 and 2070, but he's still around in Aftershocks.

Thanks, mouser, but there's really nothing to make my impression any lower of Fanpro because of it. It's like kicking a corpse.

I'm going to have to take a look at SF, so far it sounds... Not Good.

SF is the best Shadowrun book I've read in years... Hands down.

And I just want to mention one thing before I set up to enter the argument: