Usually spam doesn't invite the customer base to post their own feedback/opinions. AH is trying to get conversation started, I believe, and posting his own opinions. Have you ever been to a book reading? Authors often do share their opinions on material they have written.

Frank's point above on prejudicing a player option is interesting. You could replace "technomancer" with "metahuman" in that theory and I still think it would be an interesting point. But that brings up another question. People have posted here saying that the writers should be able to present realistic prejudice against metahumans in the writing, but Frank's post basically says that would be extremely difficult to do. If anything, metahumans are less "special" than technomancers and are also a player option.

the prejudice presented in Emergence is the most realistic depiction of prejudice i've yet seen in any SR material. now, that's not saying very much, and i don't feel that the depiction in Emergence was all that awesome, but it was a lot better than anything that's come before.

i'm assuming everyone reading and posting in this thread has read the book, so i'm not going to bother with spoiler tags. what would have made the prejudice in Emergence good, i think, would have been if Netkat had turned out to be the bad guy. if, instead of Clockwork going after Netkat in an ethically questionable manner, Netkat had gone after him. because the key to injecting realistic prejudice into fictional material is to provide believable reasons for that prejudice to exist. believable reasons, reasons that the players can believe, not just reasons that the players can find reasonable. if Netkat--the supposed damsel in distress, in this scenario--had made an unprovoked attack on Clockwork, a) she'd have no longer been the innocent victim, and b) she'd have shown in a much more visceral manner why technomancers are so feared. for all that Emergence showed a much better picture of prejudice than previous material, Netkat is still the good guy and Clockwork is still the bad guy. show me some shades of grey.

I talk your talk, demonseed elite.

Cheers,

Max

The argument whereas the situation is black and white because technomancers are a player character type is the root problem to me here (and with Frank's post above). Basically it assumes that there should be some inherent bias/sympathy/identification with the technomancer side of the issue on the part of writers and developers simply because there are technomancer players out there.

I can understand reader's bias (even were it only based on the fact that in a just world the kind of prejudice manifest in Emergence shouldn't happen) and I'll admit that I may have underestimated the pro-technomancer bias amongst readers and hence the emphasis needed for them to buy into the mistrust, doubt and prejudice that seems natural in the setting given the circumstances (not only during Emergence but dating back to the Crash2.0). This may be because, while I can't speak for my writers, I know I have no such bias and no such consideration was given as a guideline to Emergence writers - in fact quite the contrary, guidelines were to paint technomancers in all shades of gray (hence the technomancer-based smuggling op in Europort, the TM identity thief, the gilted guy who accidentally kills his former lover, Liu Phiang/ROM#138's play for sympathy, and Patient V's admission that he doesn't know if he's dangerous or not).

I feel obliged to add, and speaking strictly theoretically for a moment, that I have no problem with technomancers (PCs and NPCs) discovering somewhere down the line that they've had Deus Code running in their subconscious all this time and that they're all upgraded Nodes - as long as it suits the SR storyline. I have no problem were Unwired to say that a huge percentage of technomancers do actually suffer from AIPS and are mentally unstable or saying that their need for ambient wireless is actually an addiction that makes them potentially dangerous and unreliable chipheads. And I have no problem with developing some future plot which hinges on technomancers' biological commlinks making them vulnerable to being puppeteered/rigged by some AI menace from the Matrix or a Resonance Threat.

All of these developments would certainly impact technomancer PCs, but as a developer I'll run with them if I feel they're cool for the setting and the overall story was worth telling. Note that all of the above are possibilities advanced by one or more of the Jackpoint's anti-TM faction in Emergence and by the end of the book none of them have been ruled out...

That said, please note also, that I had a plot mapped out but never got round to pitching would have made put shamans through the wringer in SR3, and there's at least one idea I'm playing with that could still make the life of all magicians pretty complicated in the Seventies. I don't think we need to pull punches or show sympathy simply because player characters will be affected.

I did think most of Clockwork's and Butch's initial points (before the H-K incident escalates matters) were actually well-grounded in the facts that were coming to light. It's not as if either of them goes off on rhetoric-filled hate-mongering, and most of their concerns are legitimate.

I've got to say though, that I had not considered that they might not be selling their points to the reader (as opposed to other characters experiencing the same things) well enough, but that's something I'll keep in mind in rereading the book.

(Strangely, the most positive feedback I've recieved on Emergence to date has been from players with technomancer characters who liked being thrown into the deep end.)

I think part of the problem is that we just don't know most of these dudes on Jackpoint, and therefore have no real vested interest in their fears and concerns. As was pointed out above, if you replaced Clockwork with Slamm-O, it would have dramatically increased the impact of his concerns, because we all know Slamm-O to some extent.

Moon-Hawk and mfb have it exactly. We the readers are subject to priviledged information. We know specific technomancers can be "good guys" because they are player characters. In the KKK example, the reader starts off as a guy who has Blacks and/or Jews as friends. In order to sell the idea that TMs might be bad we'd have to introduce something that would genuinely make players wonder whether the technomancer was going to betray them.

Let's think about this in terms of the X-Men. We are the reader, so we get screen time with Cyclops. We see him dealing with his problems, we see him sleeping with the White Queen, we see him fighting evil, and we see him going through a draconic training regimen to make sure he never loses his glasses. We know that he's a sympathetic character because we see this part of the world.

Now people who don't read the comics, but instead live in the world never hear about his secret agent escapades. They never see him fighting off alien invasions or destroying dangerous glaciers, or any of that crap. They just read in the paper one day that a dangerous mutant spontaneously shot red laser beams and destroyed his whole family and much of the town. And that dangerous mutant vanished and he could be anywhere. Do they have a reason to be afraid? Hellz yeah they do. But regardless of whether people in the world might make a very convincing argument that Cyclops is a dangerous mutie and should be hunted down - the reader is never going to buy that. Anyone making such an argument is an antagonist in the story. Because the reader has the priviledged information.

Sure, you could pull some slight of hand where players start distrusting technomancers. But the point is that in Emergeance, you didn't. The players have the priviledged information that some technomancers are cocks and some are saints because it's their character and they can play them however they want. So Clockwork is just an antagonist and nothing ever changes that.

-Frank

All of which is further aggravated by that "oh, and pretend it's been like this forever" thing I keep mentioning. If we were supposed to be scared of and hateful towards Technomancers, why wasn't anything of the sort mentioned in the core SR4 book? The prejudice and fear all just feel sort of slapped on after the fact, which further detracts from the believability.

It'd be like (using Frank's example) hearing "Oh, and by the way, this dangerous mutie with the uncontrollable eyebeams has been around for five years, too, before we felt like telling you about him! Dangerous! Dangerous!"

The new Jackpoint crew needs to be fleshed out sometime, so you can't really keep relying on the old, familiar names to be in the spotlight.

Understood and acknowledged, though I would underscore that a significant part of SR4's fanbase does not have the SR luggage us old-timers have - and Slamm-O and Smiling carry no more weight than Clockwork.

I'm just wondering how people would react if/when Clockwork's points are vindicated or proved correct.

They would complain anyway.

it would be interesting, but it wouldn't really affect the portrayals in Emergence.

One thought.

It may be that I'm supernaturally good at stepping into characters' shoes, or seriously screwed up, or whatever, but I got what the writers were trying to do.

Put the reader into that feeling of chaos, of only the most fragmentary information coming through the media, and you don't know whether to believe even that...Gut-clenching terror. That is where I loved the writing on Hong Kong.

The Soul of a New Machine
I don't know about the rest of you, but Muffy brought back memories of the first Chucky movies.

The bulk of the action in this chapter focuses on AIs, and the bulk of that lies somewhere between paranoia and propaganda.

There was, believe it or not, some significant debate among the authors about using names like "digital intelligence" and "synthetic intelligence." The term artificial intelligence is so ingrained in modern English and English-speaking culture it's sometimes difficult to see the need to use different terms-are the writers just using different terms to be different, or is there a point to it?

Again, keep in mind that Emergence was written way prior to Unwired, so the authors had to be careful about even the basic attributes of AIs-what they look like in the Matrix, if they can copy themselves, etc. There was a lot of discussion and research going on behind even the most innocuous comment. One of the most important decisions, in my opinion, was to make an AI vulnerable to damage, destruction, and finally whatever passes for its digital death (deletion?)

One of the real climaxes of this chapter is the whole revelation of Clockwork trying to turn Netcat in for a technomancer bounty. While some of you might have seen this coming, it does underscore the fact that JackPointers aren't all friends and family.

Personally, my least favorite bit in this chapter is Pulsar. I guess I just don't trust friendly faces on suspect causes.

Lol, my first thought when I read about Pulsar was, "The UB was friendly, too." Gee, we're not all a bit paranoid, are we?

Yeah, that had been my first thoughts too.

I have to say this was my favorite section, but I've always been enamored with the SR-AI metaplot. As I mentioned earlier, I really like that this new generation of AIs has been toned down a bit. Deus was fun, but the all-intelligent-knows-what-you're-gonna-do-before-you-do uber-AI has been done, and I like the new ones. They seem like they'll be more variable, less predictable, and less earth-shaking (individually) which makes them much more usable as a GM without basing an entire campaign around them; but there's still no reason you can't if you want to have a particular strong one, or even a group of them working together.

Wait, you didn't like Pulsar because you don't trust him? I liked Pulsar for the exact same reason.

I was hoestly shocked at the open arrival of AIs into the SR world, I was expecting them to remain an urban myth. Pulsar I like, he's nice and helpful, and overly so on both counts, so much so that I would leave him being perfectly nice just to make the paranoids twitch. Either that or make him the product of something really sinister, but came out nice maybe he's a Remenant of Deus or something.

Personally, I like the idea of more and lower-power AIs. Despite the fact that the Renraku Arcology Shutdown->Brainscan was very popular (yes, I know you might not have liked it, but I've been told the books sold relatively well), I don't think AIs were ever really well defined, because in all three of the confirmed cases, they were practically omnipotent when compared with everything except each other.

Well, being intimately tied into the SCIRE on purpose for a decade before Deus "awakened" seems like a plausible explanation as to its power scale.

Has anyone read "The Star Faction" by Ken MacLeod? That one does have loads of AIs (And I do remember now. Smart gun in that book does not mean Smartgun). There is one progenitor AI that ultimately decides to take sides, the others are low powered in comparison.

What I'm really wondering is whether we'll see playable AIs in either Unwired or the Companion.

*cough* To the writers out there: I've always wanted to play a Free Spirit, too, but that doesn't have anything to do with Emergence... *cough, cough*

Okay. Not to do a disservice to the other authors, but I wrote the final chapter and I'll have a bit more to talk about it because of that.

Aftermath
To start off with, this is my favorite opening fiction I've ever done. I know not everyone will feel that way, and it's a bit sappy and sentimental to end the book with, but I thought it came out great. Opening fiction can be pretty damn difficult to do correctly because it's essentially microfiction: you only get 500 words to say your piece.

I also like Sunshine's opening speech, though you can cut the rhetoric with a knife, but I think it's effective.

All Tomorrow's Parties is, of course, a nod to both the William Gibson novel of the same name and the awesome Velvet Underground song he stole it from.

I actually made Otaku-Zuku up in my head a long ways before Emergence when I was writing the SR3->SR4 conversion document and thinking about turning otaku into technomancers, but this was my first chance to use him-in a much expanded role from the one I'd first planned for him (his first words were the e-Quote of the Day on p.114). Otaku-Zuku also shows up in Corporate Enclaves, because some of the other Neo-Tokyo authors decided to use him.

Chapters like Aftermath can be tricky because they're short, they have to sum up what happened in previous chapters and/or set the new status quo, and they're written at the same time as all the other chapters. Which generally means a lot of revisions to make things fit.

Okay, short story: when I first presented this draft, the dev in charge (Peter Taylor) read over the KivaNet section and noted both of the names on the married couple were male. I confirmed that this was the case. Took him a minute for the implication to sink in. I got a chuckle out of that.

"Paragons" and other technomancer terms will be addressed in Unwired. The concept goes back to Virtual Realities 2.0 and the technoshaman/cyberadept divide, not to mention groups like Isis-9, so his was more of an updating of terminology than a new idea.

Speaking of which, note the similarities 'tween Isis-9 and the Sisters of Isis on p.114.

...and an update on Ronin/Michael Bishop, star of Brainscan et al., in the news column. I like the news column. It's so handy.

You never see the Coptic Pope in the press often enough.

I think I'm the only person that refers to "ascended masters" in SR to represent someone with both magical and technomantic abilities. The mythical Ubertwink. I did it with otaku, and I do it with technomancers.

The resurrection of Doc Paterson wasn't done because I'm a trivia buff who likes to tie up loose threads, nor because the entire otaku-technomancer-AI plot is a morass of stuff that needs to get updated on occaison. Well, actually, there was both of those things to consider, but mainly I had a need: Paterson's Guide to Matrix Entities. Note the inifitely subtle (cough, hack, I have some sarcasm in my throat, excuse me) reference to SoLA.

PGtME was like scouting into the Fog of War on any game you care to name. I was basically giving thought and shape to things that wouldn't be properly addressed until Unwired, so you can imagine all the brainstorming that took place. Personally, I enjoyed it.

The original nickname for mimics was going to be Nyarlothoteps, but that idea was quickly, and thankfully, vetoed.

One day, oh yes, one day I will burn for the ARM of GOD. But not this day.

It's likely for y'all to miss it, so this one's for free: the talking ape is an explicit reference to the Bruce Sterling short story Dinner in Audoghast from his collection Crystal Express.

The AI-that-heads-for-Alpha-Centauri and Schmidt, Iakob, and Lei were both ideas of mine that came up originally in early discussions and drafts that were then seeded through the rest of the book (by the same token, many of the other ideas in Aftermath were originally made by the other authors). Personally, I like both, though they're somewhat problematic - Odo Schmidt is strongly implied to be a Spike Baby dwarf, for example, and and I dread the day hardcore sci-fi fans break out the calculus to try and prove my figures wrong (honest guys and gals - I did the math too!)

The game info was cut down to a single column mainly for space reasons-but trust me, y'all aren't missing much.

I REALLY liked the Schmidt, Jakob and Lei idea, even though it is a little...mmm... underdeveloped in the book. It allows to build upon tons of lawyer TV series a lot of people have seen and adds a new kind of Johnson/hook for Shadowruns. Heck, There could even be a shadowrunner concept-group built around that office. (we had Doc Wagon, military, why not lawyer assistants, at least it would be just natural when Johnson screws you) I know some people here have used that angle, but I had not thought about that seriously until that.

I would mostly welcome more background information or even a description of that lawyers and their work.

All in all I liked the chapter AH.

Cheers,

Max

Thankee.