Give them copies of this Chick Tract, which clearly explains that the Nazi party was a pawn of the Roman Catholic Church (aka The Whore of Babylon), which is run by the AntiChrist (aka the Pope) and tricks people into worshiping Satan via Mary.

The same Ancients who used to, along with other smaller go-gangs like the Eye-Fivers, regularly tear apart every Metroplex Guard unit sent after them?

Great, now my brain hurts.

I don't think the Barrens is quite as bad as you make it out to be. It has a mayor and taxpayers and infrastructure. While all of these are a far cry from the high standards of other parts of the plex, the Barrens are not truly urban wasteland. Besides, the publicity in openly causing mass death to anyone - even a street gang - is hell on the PR.

I disagree. The canon setting doesn't have all that many examples of large-scale massacres of the SINless. It may happen on rare occasion, but I don't believe that it's as common as you would have it be.

I do. I wish we're do it more often, in fact. If we just killed everyone and let Allah sort them out we'd be finished with Iraq right now and would have saved billions of dollars.
Not saying that it would be moral, but it would be cost-efficient.

I imagine that the cops could rather easily adopt the Tarkin Doctrine without complaint, mainly due to the fact that those who complain, and their entire extended families, would be killed.

However, they won't go into the BArrens simply because it is too much trouble. The entire point of them is the containment of the undesirables. They'll simply set up a perimeter and kill anyone who attempts to flee the troll takeover.

The funny thing being that the Empire never really tightened its grip, the vast majority of systems were fully self-governing, only those which actively engaged in or supported terrorism were targeted.

The whole rebellion was pretty much a plot conceit.

I'm not saying the Star rolls two hundred guys into Redmond every Tuesday night with an HMG and a six pack of beer apiece. I'm saying they could, and other than individual people fighting back (up to and including the gang level), there's not a damned thing anyone could or would or does do about it -- who do you go to complain to? It's not-people dying. It's the "cops" doing it (whether it be Lone Star, KE, or any other security force).

They don't do it because there's normally no reason to do so, no profit in it, all kinds of expenditures (of ammo, if absolutely nothing else), and because there's always the chance they'll take out someone important who's going slumming, and they won't be able to -- quite, this time -- cover the whole thing up. No one cares when they do go do it because they spin it right, go in fast and hard, and take out those who deserve it (folks who kill cops, folks who've pulled a high profile job, a gang known for horrible body counts, whatever).

They do it when it's justified, and they're able to either cover it up or spin it so that no one cares -- but the odds are no one would care very much even if they didn't bother.

The corps spend trillions of nuyen every year on propaganda, controlling the media, and essentially mind control. Take the current attitude in America concerning Muslim extremists and/or illegal aliens, and multiply it by a hundred. Then grow up hearing it your whole life, every day, all day, from the get-go. At school, from your parents, in every commercial, around the water cooler at work, in memos at work, on the news, the news, the news...Your average SINner hears his whole life about how nothing but bloodshed, disease, gang violence, devil rats, and ghouls come out of the Barrens.

You think he's even gonna bat an eye to hear about Lone Star wiping out some "gang hideout" or "criminal den" or "BTL factory" or whatever, if it even makes the news? Not any more than your average American or European bats an eye when we hear about Joe Terrorist getting blown up over in the Gulf by Blackwater.

I think you're (1) overestimating the power of human empathy in a dystopian setting like Shadowrun, and (2) underestimating that dystopian setting itself.

You've got to look at all this horrible "facist" stuff that people are seeing happen today -- gun seizures, wiretaps, people disappearing, whatever -- and take all that and every conspiracy theory you can think of and triple or quadruple it. Then toss in magic, point out that in a place like Seattle there's more than just one government doing all the disappearing, add metaracism to increase the apathy level, and then double what you've got left, to fit the setting.

You can gloss it over or sugar coat it or try to tell yourself Shadowrun's not much different than today, if you want to -- but that's simply not so. Corporate security gets away with things that would make the most steely-eyed Blackwater "mercenary" vomit, and no one cares in 2070 as long as it's happening to someone else. Especially if that "someone else" isn't even in any system to begin with, so there's no legal record of them dying except for someone's ammunition expenditure.

Torgos Spikes? O.o Really? o.O
I'd thought it were the Disassemblers . . you know, that big Troll-Biker gang with heavy weapons and magic stuff on bikes who declared that road leading between Tir and Seattle to be their turf? hrm . . i just thought of something . . what would happen, if the Disassemblers and the Spikes were to form an alliance? x.x

*steals for future use*

The continuing existance of such areas is yet another stretch in SR's believability. There's simply too much to gain from eliminating such a blight, and you even make it soun as if the power that be have the capability to accomplish it whenever. All the reasons they give for not doing so are pretty crap, but what do you expect of a game line that never really got past the 80s and can't accept that sometimes *good things* can happen as easily as bad (we have to stay so dystoptian it hurts - oooh). Dumb.

According to some, these tactics are perfectly acceptable. Add in field tests of your newest nerve agents and have a Barrens-wide scaveger-hunt with a squad of cyberzombies while you're at it. Lastly don't forget the old wage mage memo:

Attn: All magicians employed by (Corp X).

Every day this week, at sunrise, you are required to summon and send a single spirit - of the highest force you are safely rated to summon - on remote service to (location) and instruct it to kill every metahuman it finds there. You will be allowed an extra 30 minute break to rest after the summoning. Thank you for you prompt response.

So, if we assume that 0.05% of a corp's employees are magicians, this means 1 spirit per 2,000 employees. For many of the megas, that would be easily in excess of 100 or more spirits raiding the town every damn day. Yeah, it's stupid, but why the fuck not.

exactly. I can promise you that Lone Star would rather have the Spikes as neighbors than ten or fifteen thousand Shedim.

No, you can promise YOU wouldn't want them as your neighbors, you racist.

Seriously, though, Shadowrun's a lot more interesting when the opposition is opposition, and not the Enemy, or some other unquestionably evil entity. It's not gritty unless all your opponents are, like the PCs themselves, questionably evil.

Does this make any sense to anyone? You do know what a Shedim is right? And that if there were such a thing as Shedim city they would be an unquestionably evil entity. Or are you trying to say that Shedim, like insect spirits are just misunderstood?

What are you talking about?

Well, consider the quintessential act of urban pacification in Shadowrun: The assault on El Infierno. Lone Star officers from other countries were sent in to bust skulls and collect scalps along with soldiers, corpsec and half the LAPD.

And let's not forget, El Infierno isn't a walled neighborhood. It's not slums. It's several cities with a wall around them. When they went in, they all went in with one goal in mind--to kill as many people as possible. And when the last cop and soldier and corpcop corp soldier rolled out in their APC, did anyone care? No. They're SINless; they're terrorists; they're poor; and they are criminals. Screw 'em.

Even better, look at Munich. It wasn't the terrorist release of VITAS on metahuman refugees that killed and wounded the most--it was when Renraku went in to secure the area by killing everyone.

This is a particularly good point. In dystopian cyberpunk societies, people just don't leave money lying aroung. The only way (or anyway, the main way) the Barrens make sense in the context of the system is if it would cost more to get rid of them than it costs to exist, or if the Barrens themselves are a source of revenue. Since we know the Barrens exist, we know someone is probably making money off of them.