I picked up Street Magic today. On page 119, in the "Mana Anomalies" section, it mentions that the government of Aztlan has engaged and/or is engaging in "heavy manipulation of local mana levels" in Aztlan. What does this mean? What are those wacky human-sacrificing Azzies up to down there?

Well, there's advanced metamagic to cleanse an area of background count and so on. I daresay there's probably some method through which one can use blood magic to induce an insta-high background count or even increase magic in the area. If you're willing to commit mass murder, which Aztlan is.

The powers behind Aztlan have been doing stuff like that since at least the late 2050's - mostly through blood magic, ritually linking their teocalli pyramids, and the use of 2nd or 4th world artifacts called Loci (big carved hunks of obsidian run through with veins of orichalcum). At least according to novel-fluff. The 'why' seems to be a combination of appeasing their metaplanar masters, increasing their own magical resources for fun and profit, and turning it against their enemies.

Yeah, at its most basic level, this doesn't require any fancy metamagic. If the Azzies use blood magic repeatedly at a given spot, the background count will increase, aspected to blood magic. That means that they've just made casting blood magic in that area easier. On top of that, Threats details how the Blood Mage Gestalt linked these areas of aspected background count to each other through ritual magic, creating a network of aspected blood magic domains.

Well, Street Magic also has the Corruption Metamagic, and the Geomancy Metamagic. As long as they have backround count, they can raise it to whatever number they want.

And don't forget that certain acts can cause backround count. So if they do sacrifice people (who knew?!), they can cause their own backround, then Geomancy it to aspect it towards whichever Tradition they want.

Indeed. There is more to this story.

Thye might also be manipulating public activity to create a back ground count- like a big state sponsored sporting event or parade. Look at RL North Korea having big rallies to tell the people they're happy.

So maybe the state sponsors a big soccer game and gives away free tickets to workers to attend. A BBQ following one of ther cardiectomy's or a bull fight. That's going to generate a lot of happy peope with good feels, then manipulate that by a trained team who know what to expect and you've got a potetnially wild time

Especially when they sacrifice the winning team

Not the whole team, only the captain. And officially, they're not murdered. They only die soon after the championship, in horrible accidents...

"Honest officer, he tripped on the last step and fell right onto my obsidian knife, executed a perfect pirouette, and in the ensuing collapse his heart flew out of the clean hole in his chest to land in that smoking brazier. Could have happened to anybody. I really need to put a rubber strip down, or something."

*snickers* ^^

So basically, the Azzies are screwing over the whole world (including themselves, in the long run) for short-term gains? Who else knows about this? And who are these "metaplanar masters" the Azzies answer to?

The Horrorsâ„¢
And basically: yes, they do.
but they don't see it quite like that.
Just like any of todays Religious Fundamentalists, be it christians, muslims or whatever else, don't see that what they are doing is dumb as shit.

Wait, what? Aztlan/Aztechnology are puppets for the Horrors?! The "astral bridge" referred to in the Magic and Death section of Cybertechnology is a link to the Horrors' home metaplane? Why the hell isn't every other nation and corp on Earth pounding the living hell out of the Azzies already?

Exceptional public relations. Also, things are are not that clear-cut these days.

And how the hell did you not know about this? O.o
Okay, so you probably did not read the Dragon Heart Trilogy, i can't blame you for that . .
But with Uncle Ancient, or Mr.Fluff impersonate, i thought by now everybody would know ^^

Also: WE know that, IN the World of Shadowrun, nobody really knows anything about Aztechnology, aside from them being evil for some reason.

As AH said, Aztechnology's goals, especially since Mr. Darke vanished are not so clear. In fact, I would say that some of the powers in AZT would say that their goals are quite long-term (and not necessarily to the detriment of mankind, believe it or not).

"it saddens us to report that a internal investigation have turned up a rogue element within our organization. said element is being removed as we speak, and we will do everything within our powers to make sure that something like this will not happen again."

when your have move employees then some nations have citizens, its easy to say that some subsidiary or department was abusing their powers or acting on their own initiative.

and if you want to be really sneaky, you make sure the connection to the head office is 5 ways removed by way of holding companies, all buried in the small print on page 246 of document 78 in the monthly report.

I tend to stay way from "franchise" novels on general principle, unless it's an author that I know and like. I've read exactly one (1) Shadowrun novel (Worlds Without End), and it was years ago. I might still have in lying around somewhere. I don't remember if it was any good or not, but it didn't really inspire me to go out and pick up more SR novels.

SOME of them are pretty good.

exactly and as runners we know better but in north Aemrica AZT makes most consumer products. imagine if some wacco got on the evening news and said "Executives at Sarah Lee are currently engages in black magic rituals in their corporate board room."

"That Devil's food cake? Real devils man. They're a coven and they summon 'em up, then grind 'em into powder. That's why it rots your teeth. It's sinful!"
"What about their angel food cake?"
"Dude, it's angel's food cake. Just a frickin' cake. Durr."

Sounds like the business strategy of the average corp to me.

In modern days, yes. The "Buy - Strip - Dump" technique that has gotten us into the economic dung heap today (Along with some REALLY bad banking ideas!) is all for the "What can I get before I have to take my Golden Parachute?".

In Shadowrun, Corporations are NATIONS, not of Land, but of Product. Remember, their people love to work from home so they can "Spend time with the family and not feel like they're neglecting the Corp.". This goes for the Boardrooms as well. The ideal is to get to the top, and stay on top as long as possible.

Yes, it's still about power, personal power at that, but that power comes from the Corporation, and you want it to run your lifetime, your children's lifetime, and longer.

Yes, there might be some guy that wants to screw over the Corp short term, but he's probably planning his extraction in the near future as well, jumping ship to a different Corp.

AH, you make me laugh.

Most of the dreck happens out of site and the Azzies take pain to keep it there, it usualy hit the fan due to shadowrunners and when it happens the Azzies just put on the market four or five new line of products distracting the attenction of the masses from the bad news and allowing the incredibily short lived memory to focus on something else (most likely something absolutely useless that won't be trendy anymore in about a week).

i guess its also a question of who owns the news...

Aztech is basically in there so the PLAYERS have some big bad booman to be afraid off.
But If that stuff were common knowledge, even in the Shadows, who would do business with them?
No runner ever would risk being sacrificed or something like that.
One of the reasons why it should, technically, be safe to do runs for Aztech.
They can't really afford to fuck you over or let you see what they are doing.

So? I've never read any of the Shadowrun novels and I still know this stuff.

What you need to be reading is stuff like Threats 1 & 2, because they are freaking glorious, and give you a fantastic glimpse into just how fucked up the Shadowrun world really is. Also, because the Winternight chapter of Threats 1 will give you fucking nightmares.

In fact, go to Battleshop and download the following:

• Threats
• Renraku Arcology Shutdown
• Bug City
• Universal Brotherhood
• System Failure
• Portfolio of a Dragron: Dunkelzahn's Secrets

That covers pretty much all of the batshit crazy whackiness going on in the SR universe, and none of those books costs more than about $8 for a pdf. It's just a pity that there isn't an e-book of Threats 2 available yet (Oi, Catalyst, I hope you're taking notes here). It's inferior to the Threats 1, but still full of useful material, especially for understanding half of the madness that goes down in System Failure.

dude, it's worse than that. the peanut butter cookies are made from peanuts. The oatmeal cookies are made from oat meal, and the GIRL SCOUT COOKIES ARE MADE FROM.....

{Doctor's note, we've upped Ms. Fox's medication at this point as she is still clearly in the grip of delusions brought on by the feaver she suffered as a result from an infection she picked up on a recent trip to Accapulco. Naturally we at Atlan Medical services are deeply saddened by such a vibrant woman becoming so ill while enjoying a holiday, we wish to assure the public that this is an extremely rare case and we take every possible step to ensure you stay at such affordable luxery resorts as the Aztlan Hilton and the Accapoluco Aztlan memorable and exciting and safe.}

can someone recommend a ebook reader that can handle us letter sized pages and pdf files?

Could we possibly have a 20th anniversary year without a nod to Dunkie's will?

And, personally, Loose Alliances is another on that must-have list if you want a glimpse of some of the behind-the-scenes craziness of SR.

I couldn't really recommend one yet. There are a few full letter-sized readers, but they are expensive. And PDFs still suffer from the problem of taking a long time to turn pages because of the amount of data in each page. PDF was designed as a print format and not really for e-readers.

Plastic Logic has a nice looking (and most likely expensive) letter-sized e-reader coming out soon. And the new rumor is that Amazon will have a letter-sized e-reader out by Christmas this year. If you want a comparison chart of the e-readers that exist, MobileRead has the best one.