Admittedly a rough number. Take even the current population of the states the NAN lay claim to and that number is probably a low one.

And then take atleast some 20 million of that as killed by VITAS and the differend natural disasters.
Plus i'm pretty sure that not all of them left.

Oh I apologize I forgot about VITAS reduce that number by 25%. Oh wait reduce the American Indian population by 25% also. The numbers still don't make sense.

Oooppss! I screwed up again take California out of it we are down to 30 million minus 25% equals rougly 22.5 million versus 4.5 million minus 25% or rather 3.3 million or so. Surprise the numbers still don't make sense.

As someone who has been blessed to attend several sweat lodge ceremonies in RL, I have no problem accepting the GGD. There is a power that many native peoples have even now. Given the further abuse and continuation of a policy to eradicate them portrayed in SR, I don't see any reason they wouldn't bring out the Metaphysical can of wupass since at that point they had nothing else left to lose. When the feces hits the rotary oscillator, it ain't good to be facing off against someone who's only remaining action to salvage their self worth is kick your lily white hoop.

I also have an acquaintance who is an active member of AIM and bears the scars of a sundance. Sundancers definitely fit the bill as blood magic.

sundance link

Well I respect your opinion, but having studied history I will put my money on those sick bastards known as individuals of European descent; they have a track record.

if you have studied history you probably know that all have a track record...

Closest thing to the spread of Western Civilization historically speaking is when the Mongols did the same damn thing. So sure everyone has a track record, but just how relevant is their track record.

As I recall, the Amerindian reliance on traditional, folk medicine and magical healing, rather than conventional medicine actually cut down on their fatalities from VITAS significantly. Also, since the fatalities to VITAS are just reported in a percentage of the world population, generally, in the books, and a lesser percentage were in traditional societies, industrialized, western populations would have borne the lion's share of the losses. Even so, there's still quite a disparity between the two populations, though.

The Native Americans are actually spared the devastation of VITAS ironically, because they were all rounded up and put into death camps. Being isolated from the outside population, they were safe from infection.

Oh right. That too.

Depends on the history book. I even read an article, that I cannot find right now, claiming that the Aztec human sacrifices were a stage show and did not actually include killing the 'sacrifice'.

Next up: Zulu 'warriors' played a variant of rock, paper, scissors rather than actually stab each other.

So instead they suffered the usual ailments of dyssentry and pneumonia. I suppose we could use the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp as an example we would be looking at between a 32.5% and 58% mortality rate. Out of approximately 320,000 prisoners who were incarcerated in various sub-camps of KZ Mauthausen-Gusen throughout the war, only approximately 80,000 survived,including between 20,487 and 21,386 in Gusen I, II and III.

Of course none of the guards caught VITAS. Any idea what happens when the plague gets into a closed system, lots more people die than would have otherwise. If this is cannon it just adds to the weakness of the original idea. My whole point is that without the Shadow play behind the GGD it is highly implausible for it to ever occur the way it did, along with the consequences to the US after the event.

Only if you conclude that the USA wanted to work the natives to death rather than simply contain them. These would probably be better examples to work from, and from the math on this one (first I looked at, no data manipulations beyond that), there were 131 deaths out of 11,212 occupants. 1.17% death rate.

To add more rampant math to those statistics, that 1.17% is over a span of 3 years and almost two months. If we round up to 0.4% deaths per year, I do not remember how long it was from round-up to GGD in SR, but it gives a basis of relevant and useful statistics to work your population math off of.

Edit: And to add irony, none of the other camps with any wikipedia summary have a nice convenient stats block. Interpret that detail how you like, but it does mean that I chose well in which camp to look at in detail first.

Dudes, we're talking about death camps set up by a country that swabs your arm with alcohol before sticking the lethal injection needle in. Knowing American bureaucracy, these with SOTA facilities, the Hiltons of concentration facilities, five star all the way.

Conditions in German death camps were so horrible because they were designed by idiots who didn't know how to provide proper sanitation, hot and cold clean running water, central heating and air conditioning, HEPA filtration, and all of the other goodies any modern death camp designer would include. They also greatly underestimated the population which the camps would be required to hold. Modern death camps would be designed with sufficient space such that there need be no more than two people to a room and probably enough that many, if not most, inmates could have private facilities.

It is almost certain that these camps would have SOTA medical facilities and screen people coming in from the outside for diseases. And, of course, a full-time janitorial staff to keep everything clean. It would be more like a death spa, really.

just a quick question:
WHY would ANYBODY designt it that way, if it was MEANT to be a frigging DEATH Camp?

Halliburton would so that they could create a 500 million dollar bill for creating a state of the art containment facility. If it went that way we would have to look at Supermax facilities. Or then tents out in the middle of Death Valley surrounded by mine fields.

-Chrysalis

Well, for one thing, you can't execute a sick person. It's illegal. Cruel and unusual punishment, they call it.
For another, only the President and a few other people knew of the extermination plans.
But, most impotantly, pork barrel politics. One should never underestimate the importance of pork barrel politics.
The government is an entity that, for the most part, spends money just to be spending money. Everyone connected to government spending has personal incentive to minimize efficiency.
The Congressmen who allocate the funds spend more money in their States and Districts to make it look like they're supporting their constituents back home and the other congressmen go along each other's pork barrel spending simply so their own pork barrel projects won't be cut in retaliation. Of course, the government agencies who receive funds allocated by Congress then have to spend all of those funds rather quickly because government accountants are already drawing up the first drafts of next-year's budget and they see money unspent as equivalent to money that won't be needed next year, thus a budget surplus is always followed by a budget cut. The best an agency can do is spend more money than it has, running in the red this year but making it more likely they'll be allocated more next year.
And then, of course, you have the contractors who actually build the stuff. The more it costs the government the more profit they make. Ideally, they want to make a wastefully SOTA facility. A SOTA facility makes them look good, it makes the Congressman who approved the project look good, it makes the agency overseeing the project look good, and it puts money into their pockets.

So, what happens is this. A guy is the CEO of a company that builds federal prisons. He has a friend who is a Senator from Oklahoma and, of course, contacts in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He knows that the President wants to put the Native Americans in Death Camps so he gets on the phone with his Congressman pal and his friends in the BOP and starts talking deals. Long story short, Congress approves a new SOTA Concentration Camp, some Oklahoman workers get very well paying jobs, and some BOP officials deposit some very large kickback into their bank accounts, and the media gets a guided tour of a very clean and expensive facility and don't bother asking why the showers don't have any water.

ironic considering how they were exterminated in the 16th and 17th centurys

Guess the people who made the camps were all out of Smallpox Blankets.

Yes, and I prefer to struggle with the first question. It's easily answered if you just accept that there's something "special" about Native American traditions in SR. Especially given the numeric disparity Faelan keeps pointing out. I personally don't have a problem believing the NAN defeated the US, but even with them getting spared from VITAS, it only really works if you also accept that their magic was hands-down better than everyone else's. In that case, I can easily see them defeating a force that outnumbered them 10 or 20 to 1. It's magic; it doesn't have to be fair or evenly distributed.


Hilarious! Sad, and true, but hilarious.



That's not quite true. Have read your posts, I agree with just about all the points you've made in this thread, but sick people are fair game to kill in the US. The big hold-up usually comes from the fact that before you kill them, you have to hold them. Sometimes, people are too sick to be held humanely, but if they're well enough to hold, they're well enough to kill. Which is why the government would probably want to keep them as VITAS-free as possible. That and, aside from legal arguments, if someone found the mass graves, they'd actually WANT it to look like they were exterminating Indians (who were seen as a terrorist threat at the time), at least rather than inadvertantly giving the American people the idea that they were massacring everyone with VITAS. Of the two possibilities, racist death camps are probably less of a PR problem than forced-euthenasia camps.

As I said YSRMMV. I don't think there is anything special about American Indians in the sense of there being anything more special about them than any other tribal ethnic group, religion, or philosophy. The initial history was just poorly thought out game design and I have paid attention to the justifications in the realm of "behind the scenes" to satisfy my players. Over the years I have GM'd for many different groups and with Shadowrun this has always been one of the sticky points. If you have not encountered this all I can say is you are a lucky bastard, and I wish you the best in the future, but for me I have had to make modifications or rather had to delve into the behind the scenes details for it to make sense.

As far as the description of camps Hyzmarca has detailed, I will just smile and laugh, because I assume it is a joke, so anyway ROFLMAO.

The whole setting depends on you accepting a series of implausible elements. Like single people owning huge keiretsu; national governments not only recognizing corps as equal of nations, but providing formal massive immunity to their nation's laws to certain people; that only morons are allowed to run corporate computer systems; that the US would choose to operate death camps; That 10,000 Utes become a world power and 60 years later have become 16 million Utes; etc, etc.

They are all crazy nuts.

I've never encountered players that called out the GGD as being hugely unbelievable. A lot of them call out the power level of the NAN in general, and then the GGD is the explanation. "It's magic!" I personally have always liked the whole Native American angle. But I can definitely see how it would get on other people's nerves.

welcome to cyberpunk

DISCLAIMER: IN-CHARACTER POST AHEAD



This. Good grief, this. I, John Doe, find the idea of killing people with a terminal disease horrifying. What if I caught that? What if my son/daughter/wife/BFF did? I'd be planning a way to break him (or her) out, that's for sure! Whereas being a redskin can't just "happen" to somebody. I'm from the Big Apple, born and raised, and I'm not going to wake up one day and find that my heritage has changed. I might grow pointy ears or tusks, but that's fine.

{{Apologies to anyone who might be offended by my hypothetical "average" jerk. The fact that such people comprise a majority of the voting block doesn't impede my opinion that they're still stupid jerks.}}

Camps based on disease can be better justidfied because it is a threat to the general public being contained. We are very sorry your son is sick but we have to keep him locked up so the plague does not spread to everyone else in town. We know you feel sorry for Mrs. Smith but do you want what she has?

Based on race is harder to explain away as other than prejudice. Japanese-Americans in the 40's were rounded up based just on looks. There was never a suggestion of rounding up ethnic German or IItalians. No one suggested locking up Joe Dimaggio's mother, born in italy, in a concentration camp. But when Danial Inoyu (sp?) was losing his arm and winning the Congressional Medal of Honor in Italy, his parents sat behind wire.

Are you talking about the Senator from Hawaii (sorry, I don't know how to spell it either--I think it might be Inuye?)? I didn't know that about him.

Anyway, the setting describes Amerinds as being seen as a threat to the general public. But also, the Japanese weren't detained because anybody thought they were a threat. On the East Coast, they weren't detained. The issue was that they happened to have a lot of fertile farmland that white people wanted in the West, and when the opportunity came, the government took it.

and that basically spells out the SR camps. resource rush/rape towards national parks and reservations. a nuke silo gets hijacked and a missile fired. big ass excuse to pull anyone remotely related to reservations into camps...

Yes, but Daddy's Little Ninja is right. I may have been a little hasty when I said the government would rather people find racist death camps than euthanasia death camps. Still, I see the idea of the camps as entirely plausible. I guess the only real sticking point is whether or not you can accept that the GGD was able to help a tiny population defeat a large, well-armed, well-trained, well-organized one. If you're like me, you say that sure, magic can do that. But I can see why some people would find it hard to swallow.

The American casualty projections for the invasion and occupation of Japan near the end of World War II were 1.7 to 4 million. Two atomic bombs later and what was to be the bloodiest series of battles in the history of human warfare fizzled out into a relatively peaceful surrender and occupation. The lack of casualties resulted in such a surplus of purple hearts that the Pentagon hasn't had to manufacture any since and still has 120,000 left.

So, yeah, the threat of unilateral nuclear-scale destruction is enough to bring a large population to its knees.


The reason the Italians weren't rounded up, by the way, was because of the Mafia. The War Department was working closely with Italian organized crime families in America because they had connections to their counterparts back home in Italy. Fascism wasn't particularly good to the criminal element, so they had reason to want Mussolini's government gone and their ample resources make them both the best source of intelligence about Italy and the best vehicle for covert operations against Italy. I'm somewhat saddened by the fact that the United States no longer conspires with organized crime to undermine the Italian government.

And, honestly, there wasn't much of a chance of Japan invading the Atlantic Coast, given that all of its forces were in the Pacific.

No, but there WERE two good reason for Japan to initiate covert operations on the Atlantic Coast:
a) that's where we were running the war from, with all the opportunities for espionage/sabotage that entails
b) they were allies with Germany, so at least in theory, they had a reason to cooperate

And why do you wish the US was trying to undermine the Italian government, by the way? I'm not extraordinarily pro-Italian government or anything, I'm just curious because there's no obvious reason jumping to my mind that you'd have a problem with them.

Because its cool. Engaging in OSS-style covert operations with the assistance of Italian organized crime figures is cool.
No other reason is necessary.

One of the big problems with the modern CIA and, in fact, with every major war and covert operation since WWII, is the general lack of coolness.

Yeah ,the senator from Hawaii. He was leading a patrol, got ambushed. Shot through both legs and kept directing his men. Lost an arm. Kept directing his men clear of the fight. Finally passed out from blood loss. His family was put behind wire as he was joining the army to 'prove' his loyalty to the land he was born in. Anyone ask Dimaggio for a loyalty test? (Yeah I'm a little bitter.)

But you are right. the Japanese americans were only interred in the western districts. It was a choice made by the region commander who was a racist. In the rest of the country Japanese-Americans were treated more fairly on a case by case basis.

Totally.


Lack of coolness IS a major concern, but the modern CIA HAS worked with organized crime trying to get rid of Castro (and, possibly, our own president as well). The FBI worked with them, too, to get rid of the KKK.

Oh thanks. As a political geek, I always enjoy learning about Senators' histories. All I knew about Daniel Inouye was that his son was in a DC punk band. Also, I didn't know it was a regional commander that made the decision to inter people. I was under the assumption that it was the federal government. I learned in a ton of ethnic political classes that it was done mostly because Japanese-Americans had some of the best farmland in the West. I know when FDR was trying to get state governments to go along with his New Deal plans, he had to make a LOT of concilliatory moves to backwater racists. I figured the camps were just another instance of that.

IIRC, FDR had racially restrictive covenants (against blacks ever owning his land) written into his property deeds that that his neighbors didn't have. He wasn't a saint.

noone is...

btw, how far of the shadowrun path have this gotten?

I have a sort of sociological explanation for this that I wrote up for my own personal notes but it hasn't seen print anywhere. The idea is that when the Native American tribes were all displaced and mixed into the Re-Education Centers, Daniel Howling Coyote began to form a new, unifying Native American mythology and spread that mythology through an oral tradition passed from one Re-Education Center to another. That mythology not only contained a common set of totems and beliefs, but also a lot of coded language that passed information about the gathering rebellion that Howling Coyote was forming. So by the time Howling Coyote led his first followers out of the Abilene Re-Education Center, there was already a structured and common magical tradition and it was already being taught in other Re-Education Centers, as well as an insurgency strategy.

I actually was thinking about this last week, when I was recalling when I visited Manzanar. Hell, you should be bothered by it. It is a gross and unconscionable stain on the character of the United States, and is an extremely shameful part of 20th century history. It irritates me even more because I'm from California, where the anti-Japanese hysteria was probably the worst.

Like my friend Aya is fond of saying, though, 七転ã?³å…«èµ·ã??.

Really, you don't even need to get that convoluted. If Howling Coyote was Shaman-Zero, he could astrally project. That allows him to readily communicate with each of the internment camps in near real-time. Let's face it, if Obi-Wan's glowing ghost appeared to a bunch of Star Wars fans that had been put into prison, they'd quickly sign up as Jedi. Howling Coyote, who knew some of the people in the camps, would be recognizable and immediately accessible.

So try this on for size:
Howling Coyote talks to his Totem and becomes Shaman prime. He goes on "spirit walks" and finds protoshamans at the other camps, or just other buildings in his camp. Like most people being tormented, the Indians have fallen back on faith to find comfort. The spirit-walking Howling Coyote is right out of legend. He indoctrinates them at night via astral projection, which doesn't show up to the video cameras in the base.

Howling Coyote and his acolytes begin trying to reach people outside their camp. They spread their knowledge far and wide, likely acquiring additional intel and coordinating operations in the process. Some of the folks on the outside, who can set up or have lodges, summon spirits to be taught new spells. The more fervent believers start doing serious spirit quests to the metaplanes for really big stuff and one of them (or maybe a group or the lone survivor of a group) come back with the Great Ghost Dance.

Because let's face it, every spell exists in the Metaplanes.

Odds are the initial breakout was more than just Howling Coyote, there was also a cabal of shamans working ritual magic on the outside with Howling Coyote as the focal point. Heck, they could have just summoned several large nature spirits with physical wound levels of drain to break open the initial camp. I doubt even a SuperMax prison would hold up against a dozen force 6 spirits.

The GCD has a horrible cost to cast but it's one the freed people are willing to pay. It's not like SAIM bragged about their losses so it wasn't until months, or likely years, later that the other governments found out just how thin the GCD's threat was.


Move on to the evacuation. There's no good way of telling how many people were left in those regions. After Vitas did its job, there's a high likelihood that many towns simply went away as people moved to where there were services. If the guys who know how to run the generator died, the city lost power. Given that 25% of the generator operators in NorthAm died, you can see that the smaller towns would be abandoned.

It's even worse when you consider all the different failures that can result in a town being uninhabitable. Every town has power, water, telephone, maybe gas, maybe cable TV, maybe sewer (septic tanks). Statistically you're guaranteed to lose at least one service and likely more than one as many small utilities have multiple "single point failure" scenarios. Lose cable TV, no big deal. Lose gas and lots of houses become uninhabitable. Lose power and things get worse. Water's a deal breaker for all but the people on cisterns and wells.

A quick and dirty estimate tells me that something like 50% of the small communities in the US became uninhabitable due to loss of vital services and it wouldn't surprise me if the number wasn't closer to 75%. Then consider the economic downturn as many small businesses close either due to direct losses (Bob the machinist) or indirect losses (Steve the truck driver who delivers the parts).

Larger communities have more redundancy (Sr. Plant Operator, Plant Operator, Jr. Plant Operator, etc) and multiple businesses that serve the same purpose so total failure is less likely even though system failures would have a much bigger impact. While the risk of infection is greater in cities, so is the chance of maintaining a reasonable level of service. Food supply is the biggest chink in the city's armor.

Given that most of the NAN areas have fairly small cities that tend to be isolated by miles of nothing, odds are a disproportionate number of VITAS refugees head to the east and west coasts where older cities provide a greater chance of jobs and services.

So when NAN formed, the region was mostly empty except for the major cities. Odds are, 25% of those populations were already refugees from the smaller towns so when NAN said "go" they had no reason to fuss. IIRC from the SR1 NAN books, something like 25% of the local populaces remained, either because they were 1/32nd amerind or because they knew how to operate the generators at Hoover Dam and the NAN folks were smart enough to "adopt" the engineers. It's possible it wasn't all that voluntary. "Okay white devil, you keep the generators turning and the water in the dam and your heart beats another day."

That leaves 50% of the larger cities evacuating. I think if you told New Orleans "Hey, we can send KatrinaII at you next friday" I think 50% of the populace would be gone well before then. Same goes for Boise, Vegas, or Salt Lake City.

hmm, i wonder if any of the awakened big animals have any interest in infrastructure...

as in, what could say a thunderbird do to the maintainability of the power lines feeding las vegas?

They certainly do with Tourism.

Especially for Big Game Hunters! Paranimals, the new Big Game!

nonsense, there's been tons of saints. But this isn't far off-topic. We're discussing conditions under which the US will put people in camps, which, as can be seen from this thread, is a HUGE part of the setting.

And I really like the idea of Howling Coyote using astral projection to find proto-shamans. I don't even know why, that idea just sings to me.

And it doesn't require any major suspension of disbelief. Full mages can astrally project ergo Howling Coyote could astrally project. It's actually one of the most fundamental gifts and one that would require the least specialized training, far less than casting spells or summoning spirits. Furthermore, vision quests or spirit quests are a pretty integral portion of many amerind traditions so it's likely he had rudimentary training in the act.

Astral sight and projection is incredibly useful. First off, you have the ability to communicate over great distances. Information the most potent anti-terror weapon. Knowing where your kids are and what's happening will do a lot to energize the people. Being able to coordinate and communicate fends off the despair of ignorance.

Second, Astral sight means you can get a general idea of health. You may not be able to diagnose a disease but you can tell who is sick and either quarantine them or get them attention. That would go a long way towards boosting Howling Coyote's "medicine man" status.

The metaplanes eliminate the need for half-horror immortal elves. Heck, you can say that the GGD was so bloody because the people who performed the astral quest were bloody minded and willing to spend their own lives. Martyrs don't always think subtle and they may have demanded "a spell to terrorize the white man so thoroughly that he flees from his houses like the dog he is! Our warriors and shamans will willingly give their lives to power such a spell!"

Furthermore, nothing says that the GGD didn't have a "mental compulsion" component to convince anyone who saw the destruction as an attack to move away. I mean, if you can cause a couple volcanoes to erupt, doing the Jedi Mind Trick on 20 million people who would already be scared is pretty minor.

i'm sorry, and i don't mean to ofend you, but i just don't buy it somehow . . how long did it take from being imprisoned to him leading his people to shangri la?
some months at most? maybe one maximum two years? correct me if i am wrong, i ain't good on dates and stuff . . but i just don't buy that he builds all that up in this ammount of time and especially without word getting out by snitches or coincidink . .

Without word getting out that what, an influencial shaman is appearing to others in the night in ghost form and teaching them ancient secrets? Would anyone have believed that at the time?

even if it said aliens were in there, if there were enough sources saying that, then yes, someone would have to had stepped in to wipe out the threat no matter if it is real or not . .
and wasn't there other stuff kinda magical allready happening at that time? or did the GGD basically cut loose the awakening?

there was some stuff, including dragons showing up and appearing on talk shows

but it was with the GGD that one first saw what magic really could do. and at first i think it was just written of as just another freakish natural event, there being plenty at the time. but the second time round, howling coyote himself showed up on tv to tell people about it. and when us forces tried to capture him, their transports where grounded due to bad weather.

it peaked when they, after warning about it, detonated 3-4 volcanoes along the rocky mountains (or something like that).