I feel the same way. Yay shadowrun !

Anyway i'm off to work. If you raid any factories tonight, please have mercy on the guards and use nonlethal damage. Thank you.

Funny thing is they already have this. One of the most extreme and hillarious episodes was when Jacques Villeneuve, a former F1 driver, wanted to start a restaurant in Montreal. He wanted to name it "New Town" but wasn't allowed because it was in English.

Punchline: Villeneuve means "new town" in French.

Separatism waxes and wanes in Canada. Quebec is pretty mollified right now because it has gotten so many concessions (including recognition as a separate nation within a nation). The only reason it is pissed is because the current government is headed by a former-Western Separatist. Western Separatism was huge in the Trudeau-era (70's) and had a re-emergence in the 90's after the Reformers split off from Mulrooney's Conservatives (split happened in 80's but didn't gain traction until 90's). Alberta and Saskatchewan were pissed that they were the only Provinces forced to join Wheat Pools and Alberta was pissed off about PetroCanada (a national oil and gas distributor).

The motto used to be "Pierre Elliot Trudeau Rips Off CANada."

I am going to look at this "Is NAN possible" divergence from a different perspective:

The problem I have is not with NAN. I like NAN. It's in the world. Live with it. My problem is with the idea of magical infrastructure regeneration.

When you have a country founded you have to keep the populace in its place.

When you have driven out the intelligentsia, you will have major institutions stagnate.

When you drive out the bureaucrats, lawyers and tax men, you have no details on who you can tax or who owns what. In short, your legislative branch collapses.

When you chase out the banks, your currency will be forced to become protected or suffer from inflation and foreign business draining up.

When you remove the workers, basic services collapse.

When you have driven out the farmers, your agricultural system will collapse.

When you start confiscating property and possessions, you will find that people no longer use government services and will rely on the black market, corruption rises.

When you invite international corporations to come, you will find that you have created a corporate subordinated government to plunder natural resources. Once natural resources have been depleted, the corporations will move out and the corporate maintained functions of government will collapse.

A controlled withdrawal at its best would mean that the fledgling government starts with existing support infrastructure, but would still be heavily reliant on external support to feed its population, maintain internal currency, and retain its institutions. It will take over 20 years for a country like this to become self-reliant.

In a worst situation, the new government starts with rubble. It does not have professionals to maintain its infrastructure. Every major infrastructure node (i.e. bridges, factories, government buildings) has been damaged/destroyed. All energy infrastructure is inoperable and existing power plants have been irreparably damaged. Fuel, food, and medical stockpiles have been destroyed or heavily depleted. The percentage of work-capabable members in your population is under 20.

Even if waving your ass in front of a bonfire can cause volcanos to explode. If you can't feed your population you will be dead in a year or force to use draconian measures to keep the nation from collapsing. You will be forced back to the negotiating table by far more powerful corporate and national entities with the hope for money in exchange for political concessions.

If your population is used to a middle-class American lifestyle, and then forced to backslide to an Angolan one, there will be resistance if not revolution. The majority of your populace will seek to escape.


***

As for seceding from most developed nations. The simple answer which they give is they will stop funding the region. Same holds true from Quebec to Texas.

About Quebec:
Seriously, as a so-called "French separatist" myself, I think the language and other issues in SR Quebec are highly overrated, even taking into account the "dystopian future" trope common to the cyberpunk genre. The Newtown example given above is true, but IIRC, the uproar came mostly from a "hard-liner" group with enough money to be heavily mediatized. Moreover, I think a growing number of separatists think said group complains a bit too much. In my opinion at least, they're pretty fraggin' selective about their complaints. As for language laws, what we have right now is a law stating that french is the province's official language, and that writings on business signs should be predominantly french. It's up to business owners to figure out the specifics, and brand names don't really seem to be affected. In the same vein as the Newtown, there was some complaining among the hard-liners about the Second Cup cafe franchise, but never about Starbuck, Dunkin' Donuts, Burger King, etc. You figure it out yourselves, because I gave up long ago...

We now return to your usual thread topic!

Both the NAN books and SoNA state that there was a mass transfer of people in and out of the NAN (not unlike what happened when Pakistan and India were formed). They do address that good talent did leave and some of the NAN economies were hit hard because of it (Ute being the main example).

As for cutting off funding to Quebec, that is how the whole FLQ crisis in the 1970's was started. That is the source of the modern day separatist movement in Canada.

I like the mix of Magic and technology. I think the idea of extra-territoriality to silly because to uber-bastardize a movie line:



I could accept some extra-territoriality, but not to the extent that they do it in Shadowrun... my "I BELIEVE!!!!!!!" button™ doesn't work quite that well.

I also think that the splitting of the US was just FASA being a bunch of fucktards who took every stereotype and cliche and magnified it to the nth degree. I mean just look at the movie Ronin, or Patriot Games. They did a Shadowrun with governments still being in existence.




The collapse of Europe, if I remember correctly, part of that was due to a nuclear meltdown in England and a war going on. In fact Sixth World Wiki shows a major war or two happening in Europe... those tend to upset the apple cart... just a little mind you.

Uh-huh, and I believe I mentioned that The Great Ghost Dance was used to blow up a couple of volcanoes and summon up some freaky weather, I doubt the claim of "state sized" storms though, but more importantly you have yet to explain who is summoning all of these spirits and sustaining the invisiblity spells at the same time. Shamans simply were not that common.

Also it is important to note that weather doesn't care which side you are on, and then you also get into the same problems that people claim the USA would have if it had used nukes, namely you've lost any chance you might have had at popular support once you start using WMDs.

Good find Alexand! Now can you actually do page citations? This takes care of all my issue with it quite neatly it handles how they managed to get all those non Native's to leave, or in this case not. Where they went, nowhere. And how the nation actually sustained itself without dropping the population density to one person every thousand miles. It also prevents the two wrongs make a right and explains why there hasn't been a follow up war between the UCAS and the NAN sense over one of the biggest human tragedies in the history of the world.

Also all the good folks out there who are stating "It's Shadowrun it happened, if you don't like it why don't you go play Cyberpunk." etc etc and basically all the equivalent. I want to say this explicitly clear so there can be no confusion:

GROW UP

This is a Shadowrun discussion board on the Internet. It is quite possible, nay likely that everyone here is here because they ultimately enjoy the game and want to see it continue. Having said that it is quite possible that people can have divergent opinions on what should be in the system. I know only one person who actually doesn't like icecream, yet i know a whole lot of people that disagree on the flavor of it. If your not equiped to logically state and defend your position or at least not get so detached from it your only response is to suggest others are so wrong they should leave then perhaps it is you who shouldn't be on the above mentioned shadowrun board on the internet.

@ LurkerOutThere:

You want page 8, of Shadows of North America, it's about halfway down the page, where Nuyen Nick talks about how the Danchekker Primers (NAN 1 & 2) went through 'edits' by the NAN government which turned it into a pure propaganda pieces. (Ie. 'Our earlier numbers are way off, so they were misinformation!' retcon. Like I said, slick in my opinion). Later pages in the history section go on to describe how the large famous tribes like the Salish & Sioux replenished their numbers by absorbing all the smaller tribes into themselves, and how most NAN states (aside from Ute which someone pointed out suffers economically for doing this) also absorb most of the anglos living in their new lands. Those that can assimilate do so, and the rest are put on 'anglo reservations' and basically left alone.

@Ravor:

The state sized storm comment comes from my earlier Katrina comparison. If you look at the radar map, and the amount of damage done over multiple states, you see the storm was pretty huge. 'State sized' might be a slight exaggeration, but it's not much of one, that thing was big.

Also I think there might be disconnect of some sort between what your describing, and what I see from knasser, and myself.

Who do you think the US military is fighting exactly?
It's not like NAN had much in the way of ground troops. This was strictly a unconventional conflict. No two armies massing up on opposite sides of a valley and going at it. NAN went around mostly with Commando raids, and attacks on US arsenals and bases. You don't need a lot of shamans to go with your commandos when the opposition has no magical counters. Furthermore knasser pretty easily described how a single fire spirit could rip up a fair amount of US hardware by itself, almost unopposed. Three shamans in a cave summoning up spirits, and going "Drive the military off our land" can pump out more than that, and it's not like Army has any way to stop them or retaliate. They just pop out of astral space and start owning face.

It's only after the Ghost Dance war that the US and all the traditional powers realize they need a integrated fighting force with magical support to compete in the 6th world. Heck I think back in a previous edition core book, they even specifically point this out. I can't remember the exact quote, but it was something along the lines of how the Ghost Dance war taught the world governments that they couldn't win a war without magical countermeasures anymore.

This is a game where I hear repeatedly, from 1st edition to 4A as we're now calling it, that full magicians are overpowered and hinky once they get some karma and stuff. Why is it so hard to believe that a even just few dozen shamans, facing an entirely mundane opposition could not cause mass carnage and owning of face?

Wasn't that like the big scary threat behind, Aden, Winternight, the Blood Cults of Aztlan, they Sheddim, the Amazonian eco-terrorists, and etc? That they are magically powered terrorist style powers, that are difficult to stop by conventional forces?

It always seemed to me that a basic premise of Shadowrun was that the awakening changed all the rules, because magic changed all the balance of powers in the world. It also seems to me that the world of Shadowrun is completely littered with small magically powered groups threatening and even sometimes beating much larger more mundane groups. The NAN incident is hardly the only example of this is the SR world. I mean we've got both Tirs, Yakrut in russia, Manchuria in china, Pomoryo (sic?) I forget where, Azzania(sic? again) in Southern Africa, Amazonia in Latin America, and who knows how many other factions who all used some form of magic to overwhelm their local governments and take over. Plus we've got the magical groups of the Atlantean Foundation, Apep Consortium, and the Draco Foundation all dipping their feet in the 'magical megacorp' pool.

Why pick out just NAN to dislike?

Well as i stated above mostly it was a matter of numerical extremes. To get a people to surrender you have to offer them a better option. Mass exile isn't a better option then "potential" mass extinction. THe previous treatments handled it entirely too pat for what it was. In their rush to "break all the rules, change everything" they didn't consider some of the sheer logistics applicaitons. Additionally as someone who is familiar with a lot of the modern indian condition the "magical indian brave" mentality is always a little insulting.

IIRC, both Pakistan and India (along with Israel to use an example from earlier in this thread) had populations abroad to pull from. I don't think that native americans really have such a thing excepting those living in the eastern US and Canada. And the point about most of those not wanting to live in what amounts to an unsupported wreck of infrastructure still stands.

I have to again go with the idea that the NAN were originally supported as puppet governments of the megacorps. They're the only one that could have really bankrolled the nation building. Tsimshian was just the most blatantly abusive set up shown.

@LurkerOutThere:

I too found it a little insulting. I however am somewhat comforted by the "Kickass Native (mage, samurai, hacker) is such a standard shadowrunner troupe that it manages to make it into most of the books. Some good, Some bad. I hope the SoNA reference makes NAN stuff fit a little better for you.

HappyDaze:

Since the formation of NAN is basically a puppet of the great so called 'IE' conspiracy in normal cannon, your megacorp idea pretty much only changes the who the man behind the curtain is. I think most GMs do that somewhere in their games

And again, NAN as of SoNA is not very 'ethnically pure' they absorbed a lot of other tribes, and a lot of non-natives (latino, anglos, and metas mostly). So population wasn't so much a problem, as mainly who was in charge of the governments is what really changed as a result of the war, not as much the people themselves.

Interesting points, but there's a drekload of diference between the effects of the GGD and suicide bombs or groups of men with pistols and SMGs. As to defending their soil, many would, but most would probably not - if their government was not actively backing them up. In the crucible of hard reality, the majority of people will surrender when confronted with organized overwhelming force (say, two dozen armed NAN soldiers coming to ask you to leave).

And volcanoes don't "just errupt"; They explode. We're talking forces comparable to atomic weapons here. Don't make the mistake of writing off such things. And a pack of guided tornadoes can toss construction materials through feet of reinforced concrete, or overturn a main battle tank, and they can swat fighters and bombers from the skies like flies. The natural forces subect to the GGD are collectively and potentially more powerful than any nuclear arsenal. Most of the major North American cities are either near a fault line (even if long dormant, like the Blue Ridge on the East coast) or near the coast and vulnerable to storms. A class 5 huricane with a direct strike would obliterate the likes of New Your or D.C. as certainly as a nuclear detonation, if not as instantaneously.

I think Alexand and my interpretation of the NAN are pretty much in line here. Simply having 180 million people kicked out doesn't make sense, and frankly I think the idea of a massive reverse cultural assimilation where plenty of white folks come to consider themselves Native Americans is fascinating.

Moreover, I also see the Ghost Dance War as probably having been won by a monopoly on hard to combat magical power, a good PR war bringing a whole lot of not-strictly-Native folks on board, selective hit-and-run magical destruction of military and hostile corporate facilities rather than Custer's Last Stand 2.0, and the US being too broke and fucked up to deal with it all.

"the USA was very, very near bankruptcy and run by idiots and tools."

I thought you said it was not the USA of today?

I want to be relocated to Critias's Camp.

People really should get an atlas and a calculator.

Here's my premise and the supporting math & facts: the nan population isn't that big and Vitas was already causing mass migrations.

The population of the NAN states pre-VITAS was
Wyoming (0.5M), Montana (0.9M), N. Dakota(0.6M), S. Dakota(0.8M), Nebraska (1.8M), Calorado (4.8M),
Utah (2.7M),Nevada (2.6M), New Mexico (1.9M), Washington (6.4M), oregon (3.8M), idaho (1.5M), and arizona (6.5M). This is all 2008 wiki data, good enough for this argument. Assuming I got all the NAN states, that comes to around 34 million. Post Vitas that's more like 27 million. Of which some 4 million live in Salt Lake City and Denver, which are quasi-intact in the nan and don't need to evac.

So maybe 20 million need to evac, assuming the indians are contained by my rounding errors.

Of course half of these are in disparate small communities, half of which probably collapsed from Vitas. When 25% of your electic utility's linemen die, you eventually lose 25% of the grid because you can't maintain it. Same goes for water distribution, fuel trucks, food, phones, etc.

And if you have to let miles of service areas go dark, will it be the denser cities or the sparse smaller communities that gets the short shrift? Lots of small towns became ghost towns because of external distribution problems, let alone their own losses.

So that means about 5 million were already displaced in this region. That means maybe 15 million Nan-displaced people.

which is kind of lost in the noise of what the rest of the country sees. The previtas population of non nan areas is 320 million. 80 million people died to Vitas, leaving 240 million. If a third of the surviving population lived in smaller communities (80m), half of which ghosted, that's 40 million displaced people.

Where'd they go? they take the spots of the 55 million urban dead or the 12 million dead in surviving small communities.

You can send all 20 million nan evacuees and still have 7 million beds left over.

I just wanted to say that, from now on, I am going to describe more things as "hinky".

Nice work on the math analysis. One of the things to note (that you obviously did), is that the states that make up the NAN countries are some of the least populous ones. All of the Great Plains states that went to the NAN all put together don't even come close to equaling the population of New York state.

Alexand no, I more or less agree with your vision of what the NAN Rebels were, where we disagree is on their effectiveness in being able to actually win the war. Bad action movies and Neocon wet dreams aside small groups of commandos are not a "I win" button.

And of course I disagree that the tiny numbers of spirits that the NAN Rebels could in theory summon would turn the tide either considering that the average summoned spirit would be ( Force 3 ) at most.

*EDIT*

the_real_elwood true but you really should compare the natural resources and military assets that happen to be in the NAN States as well.

But you do concede that they would have access to Force 5 spirits (as well as much higher and great forms, also). And that a single Force 5 could drop the thirty helicopter gunships, yes? But even with your Force 3's, keep in mind that they're unstoppable in where they want to go. One spirit drifts into an air base at night, past all the well-armed alert guards, none of whom can see astral forms, manifests inside helicopter 1, tears apart the controls, goes astral drifts to helicopter 2, repeats. Do this for any helicopters, jets, tanks, perhaps (for all the good that tanks do against guerillas), ammo dumps, gun lockers, radio stations, sleeping Majors and Generals. And we haven't even started on the psychological effect on the soldiers of seeing a ghost appear in front of them.

The war was a few years long, wasn't it? Just how much havoc could be wreaked in that period of time. Summon spirit, rest up the occasional bad drain roll, repeat.

From your cave.

The governments of the day were like people playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with only rocks. So of course, everyone kept trying to make bigger rocks. And then a man called Coyote turned up with Paper. Paper with spells written on it!!!!!

SR1, the original source, lists 3 acts of the GGD. The first was burying Los Alamos with a volcanic eruption (delicious irony) killing perhaps 18000 pop. [source wikipedia] with the kigmatzomat proviso noted above. Second was utterly destroying the 6th Air Cavalry Battalion out of Fort Hood, maybe the military types can tell us what such a force would typically comprise. The last was the simultaneous volcanic eruptions where it is said that Mother Nature showed whose side she was on and even the skeptical believed. One would gather it was impressive.

I'm sure that the NAN Rebels might have been able to summon an occassional high Force Spirit sure and that such spirits could and did cause trouble, but I do not conceed for one minute that the spirits aere unstopable grim reapers in the face of military weaponary. Also I'm rather leary of the idea that the NAN Rebels had perfect intelligence while Uncle Sam was blundering around unable to find anything to point their weapons at.

And needless to say, I am rather amused by the fact that assuming my recall is correct you've claimed that had America used WMDs it would result in a win for the NAN Rebels while ignoring the backlash from the magical WMDs.

One thing that always struck me, given that the NAN were killing 18 thousand people in a fit of pique, why would the populace at the time, especially post lone eagle. Think they would stop at all? Given that lone eagle was more or less an attempt to start a nuclear holocaust why wouldn't the powers that be, and this is speculative mind you, start to respond to this overwhelming magical force with nuclear or large scale conventional destruction.

kigmatzomat: You've lost whatever credibility you might have had fromt he words "only 20 million" on top of the lowballing the numbers.

As i said i'm much happier about the NAN situation with the clarification that they didn't randomly kick everyone out of their lands as that was always one of the more unbelievable things from both a capability and a credibility standpoint. Personally i further more believe that the war likely woudln't have been as one sided as people think it would have been. Nor do i buy the magic indian brave theory that every indian out of the camps was a certified spec ops badass. I also believe the effect of spirits is overstated as, assuming soemwhere between force 3-6 that's not that significant to overcome with military arms from an armor perspective. The ability to summon storms and blow the tops off volcanos is more difficult to counter but could only do so much. THe natam's can't live on a magma field any better then the rest can and the simple fact that there are way less natam's then others (and sorry stop using the term anglo, the natam's declared war on every race that wasn't them. Killing 18k civilians and military personnel at los alamos is a tragedy, killing the same number of natam's carves their population down by an appreciable percent. In a WMD fight the tribe would have certainly caused greater casualties but it's ultimately a fight they couldn't have won outside of story fiat.

Corrected for Truth™

The Native Americans were in NO position to win in a war, but the fraktards at FASA decided to push the "I WIN!!!!!!!" Button™ for them... and then decided to over blow EVERY stereotype in the World.

@knasser: if the Dancers were part of a rebellion and the US government noticed that a WHOLE lot of indians around this big ass campfire chanting and dancing and they decided NOT to bomb them?

So they go conventional the first time around. As the bombs drop they see Something intercept the weapons... Something that is killing their helicopters like people swatting flies. They go with bigger conventional weapons FAEs and MOABs. These get intercepted, or blocked. Now the government is in a pickle. They know that once these rebels started doing their dance that WEIRD things started happening. Things that can't be explained.

The Government may be corrupt, but they are not stupid! They go Nuclear. They launch a Trident II with 8 W88 warheads in a nice dispersal pattern so that the great big bonfire is in the center. I don't care what kind of Spirit you're using, they are not intercepting 8 ballistic velocity nukes.

Okay Ravor, I'm going to go through your post with friendly argument.



The NAN were not only led by a initiate capable of summoning high-force spirits and invoking them into Great Forms but equally had enough magical clout between them to bring about massive "natural" effects. Exactly how many military bases does the US military have in North America. Danial Howling Coyote himself would surely be an initiated magician with a Magic rating of 8 or 9 (conceivably even more). With high natural Charisma and Willpower, magically augmented if he chose and Summoning foci (it's not as if he's going to be running into Wards very often in 2013) and definitely a lot of Edge, he should be able to manage a Force 8 or 9 spirit once a month. The war lasted a few years, right? So if Danial Coyote chooses, he could fire off a couple of dozen Force 8 or 9 spirits during the war, each one wreaking tremendous damage.

And there would certainly be other capable magicians amongst his forces. The majority of his shamans would have Magic of 2 or 3, but you only need four Magic 5 magicians with decent Summoning skill to dispatch a dozen Force 5 spirits each month.

Not that I think they would need to or necessarily did. Because...



Let's repeat some of my examples, and you point out where they're flawed. A bunch of helicopter gunships flying along. A force 3 spirit drifts along, unstoppable and undetectable, due to no defensive magic by the US forces. It manifests on top of the helicopter, sitting on the tail, and starts burning away at the tail rotor with its Elemental Attack power. I imagine Earth would work quite well. As the helicopter begins to spin out of control toward the ground, it goes astral, moves to the next helicopter and repeats. It takes about three combat turns per helicopter, one or two more if you insist that helicopter tail rotors are really robust and hard to damage. Alternately, it can manifest inside the helicopter and kill crew / wreck controls. What are the crew going to do? Pull their pistols and shoot it before it can do any damage? If it's outside the helicopter? Could other helicopters shoot it off? Not likely in either case. And this is one spirit, maybe the shamans decide to send five.

Lets say the shamans want to disable the US jets. They dispatch some spirits to an air base at 3:00am. Radar doesn't pick them up. Soldiers on watch don't pick them up. They're astral. Each spirit manifests inside the cockpit of a jet and goes to town on its controls. I have no idea how long it takes to refit the cockpit of a modern fighter jet, but I'm pretty sure you can't take off until you've done it. Or maybe, the spirit appears on the wing and starts breaking it up. Again, one spirit could take out two dozen jets in ten minutes.

Or perhaps they want to destroy stores. Perhaps they manifest inside an arms or missile depot and wreck everything. Or they open up fuel stores and burn it all.

Or is your proposal that all military assests were watched by soldiers 24/7 and that these soldiers knew how to deal with spirits? Because that's not supportable. And there weren't even very good drones back then.

How about the air spirit with Noxious Breath that appears beside each sleeping General or Major and chokes them to death?

How about the invisible, levitating shaman that drifts into a secure area and plants a bomb. The US government can't stop people doing that now, let alone when they have magic that lets them bypass any human observers and much physical security.

And they can do all of this with ease because...



Take a look at the real world. "Uncle Sam" is doing plenty of blundering around unable to find anything to point their weapons at. Or at least the things they're supposed to be pointing their weapons at. If there's just one group that ought to have the expertise to disappear into the USA's less developed parts and stay hidden, it has to be Danial Howling Coyote's forces. They don't even have to be going camping. With the powers a shaman has, someone could wage a lethal offensive against the US army from her dorm room on Saturday morning, walk to the campus shop for some organic fruit bars at lunch, sit in the bar in the afternoon discussing the political chaos with her college buddies, then go home in the evening to take her turn astrally projecting into the White House for a couple of hours. She can even go on holiday to Mexico for two weeks and still keep on fighting.

So that's "Uncle Sam's" inability to locate and target its enemies covered. What about Danial's surveillance of them? Well you can learn a bit just from astral projection - you can scout out bases learning the layout and guard positions. You can have a watcher spirit snuggled under a desk listening if you want to eavesdrop. You can use the spirit Search power to locate people. And don't even get me started on magical thought control and mind reading (which a spirit of man can perform just fine, before you start talking about needing access to someone).

You're basically treating Danial Coyote as a simple NPC opponent when in fact, he was a ruthless PC type. You know the ones - they who short-circuit your entire adventure because they use everything they've got in unconventional ways you didn't prep for. You think Danial Coyote just woke up one day and decided to start a war? He'd probably already gathered ritual samples, of key individuals, scouted out military basis, had a priority list of assassination / intimidation targets and sabotaged US arsenals and fuel supplies in various subtle and undetected ways. I know pouring sugar into a car's engine isn't good for it. What happens when someone does it to a hundred barrels of jet fuel?



I didn't say that it worked well for the NAN. I said it would work badly for the USA. Are you arguing that US forces bombarding local towns wouldn't turn people against their government rapidly? Good, thought not. It was an explanation to someone why the US couldn't just carpet bomb areas to get at Coyote's people (assuming they could even get that approximate a location).

Why wouldn't the volcanoes get a backlash against the Indians in the same way? Well, to some extent it probably did. But the positions are different. The US is the controlling force and thus dependent on the domicility of its populace. Coyote's people were not and thus weren't. In fact, they benefit from and count on the population getting uppity. Secondly, Coyote's people were winning. That makes a difference. People aren't rebelling against Coyote, by this point, they're ready to appease him. And thirdly, PR. Bombs are one thing. Nature itself demonstrating that she is angry - that's something else entirely.

Is it (a) so unreasonable that the government doesn't locate two or three-hundred people in a carefully selected area in the entirety of the North American continent and in real time? And (b), that they make the connection from dancing people to exploding volcanoes?

Just making a counter-point. Missiles make sense. But there's also the possibility of caution. They'd just lost an entire airbourne division that they'd sent out. People think the government is all about victory no matter the cost in lives, but presidents and prime ministers only mean other people's lives. I think if they realised they were actually in danger themselves, the game changes.

Hence the explanation that I gave that they did an escalation of firepower. Also the gun camera footage showing the spirits is pretty well damning! Like I said, the government is corrupt... not stupid. When their MOABs and FAE do nothing, then the nukes start flying.

Also, the idea that some wacky shit going on at this massive bonfire (spirits and what not) and the exploding volcano not being connected is pushing it.



These frakers also just killed 18,000 people. The US government would kill them all and let God sort 'em out.

As I've already pointed out, if you know where the enemy is then sniper rifles will do the job. If you don't know where they are, then you can't just randomly carpet bomb parts of the USA both because you'll lose whatever support from the population you once had and because, well, the North American continent is huge. Randomly targeting areas will do nothing. As regards "gun camera footage", I don't understand what point you're trying to make. That the US government didn't know that they were up against magic. I think by that point, they knew this. It probably didn't help them much.



By this point, it's a little too late, don't you think? The volcanoes were a demonstration of power and it worked. Also, what massive bonfire where? Take a look at a map of the North American continent and make a rough guess as to how many places you could hold a three-hundred person campfire and not have it noticed. Rather a lot, aren't there. A few hundred people is nothing to North America. And you're attributing a lot of out of game knowledge to the US government. Magic was new. So amidst the devastation and destruction of missing air divisions, buried cities, you think reports of a big bonfire are going to be rushed to the President? And if a connection is made, everybody will have gone by then. And the US government know nothing about how ritual magic works. Maybe they can do it again. Immediately.



Again, kill who all? Lets play a game: I'll pick a random five square miles of the North American continent, and you try and guess which one it is. Each guess uses up one bombing raid (remember your air force keeps getting destroyed so you don't have so many left) and kills a varying amount of ordinary US citizens - moms, dads, brothers and sisters, etc. If you pick the right one, then you've eliminated Coyote's threat (though I wont tell you this since you had no way of knowing whether they were there or not). Now go!



Do you see my point yet? And as long as the US government kept fighting, the more people would die. Don't you think they might say to themselves: "18,000 people just died. Lets not risk that happening again". If you think people will allow their government to continue to wage war in the face of such casualties, I think you're wrong. And even if you think the US government would sacrifice tens of thousands of people repeatedly, and did have the level of population control required to keep the populace in order, do you really see them continuing when the leaders themselves are at risk? Can you see many of the recent US Presidents and senior advisers (the Bush's and the Cheney's) continuing a war in which they themselves would probably be killed?

And quite frankly, following the disastrous prior fifteen years, I could well see people embracing a group that promoted greater harmony with the land and nature (nature had, after all, just given mankind a good kicking with plagues, etc).

K.

Pretty much all of the land-based U.S. nuclear missile arsenal is in the NAN territory. So when the split occurred, unless you assume that the U.S. took all of its property when it went, it leaves the NAN countries with a whole lot of nuclear missiles, and the U.S. with the entire sub fleet, giving you a cold war-esque standoff between the two.

I wouldn't bother arguing with Knasser anymore. He's under the assumption that the only people who would fight on the behalf of the US are the military. He's forgetting that there are 300 million civillians that would also be helping out. He seems to think that government = bad therefore anything that protects government = bad. He doesn't realize that a large bulk of the populace would think that NAN rebels = bad and therefore US government = good.

Using real world analogies. Bush was facing some serious hurdles 1st term. He was unpopular and ready for a big fight to get anything through congress. Then some cunt ass terrorists fly planes into the WTC. Suddenly everyone is United We Stand and beating up random muslims that had nothing to do with the incident.

So now lets look at what happened in SR. No one gave a shit about a bunch of "chugs" being sent off to detention camps. They have no support from countries on which the US is dependent for oil so they don't need to worry about pissing anyone off. A group of these natives pulls off a terrorist action and then blankets the nation in storms and volcanoes. How do you think most americans are going to act? They're going to go back to the days of shooting Indians for sport! Anyone who looks at all native is going to get beat up and killed.

THEY ARE NOT JUST FACING THE MILITARY THEY ARE FACING 300 MILLION PEOPLE -- MANY OF THEM EXERCISING THEIR 2ND AMENDMENT RIGHTS!!!

My point about the gun camera footage is to link the GGD with the wacky shit that's going on with the terrorist strikes at the US military bases. Here is an definite target, and damn wouldn't it feel REALLY good to strike back.



Then you go with the MAD principle. Sure the Natams could have done it again, but the US would kill ALL of them. put it out on the public broadcasts that all indians are armed and dangerous. Shoot first, shoot again, and then burn the bodies.



Uh, how about satellite images showing a massive bonfire where there shouldn't be one and all the human shaped thermal images around it. Remember these natams were suppose to be in detention, and NOT with a bonfire. Easy target to bomb.



Yes I would see Bush continuing a war because these terrorists just killed 18,000 people and if you give in they MIGHT DO IT AGAIN! They would see you as weak and they could have it all rather than a small part of the country. If they unleashed WMDs then you have to strike back so hard that they NEVER want to do that again.




Why in God's good name would they leave them there? I can see them destroying those weapons before they allowed to fall into the enemies hands. Anything less is more of FASA's asshattery.

All well and good, except for the simple fact that the common man DID NOT KNOW this immediately... and once your power and watter are out and you have been reduced to (in some cases) pre-industrialization because none of your cool toys work, there would be anarchy in the streets as the american people descend into barbarism, at least on the short term, as survival becoems more important than finding those people who are responsible for those acts of nature that are cropping up all over the nation...

Are you really trying to convince us that the common man is going to immediately equate the massive natural disasters with a group of several hunfred of people hidden somewhere in teh great plains of the North American Continent...

Seems a stretch to me...

Oh and by the way, at the end of his term (in case you missed it), the Bush administration had immense credibility problems that pretty much guaranteed that the common man paid little to no attention to the governments grandstanding...

When your government loses credibility, the common man tends to refuse to stand up with theose who continuiously lie to them... and as for the 300 Million people exercising their 2nd Amendment rights, they are probably a lot more concerned about protecting their families form their neighbors than they are about some elusive and possible imaginary "Force" trying to seperate from teh Nation...

My 2

Meh...like I said I like the NAN but I don't like the way that they came about. I can take plothammer to a certain point but push it too far and it strains credulity. No one knew t was them at first. It was all just "part of the freaky weather." In one year they went from "kill them all" to "have half of America."

But I've never been a big fan of "it's magic" in near futuristic, dystopic sci-fi games to explain plot holes away. Guess I should be playing CP2020.

I chalk that up to the media being so liberal that if Bush THOUGHT about farting crooked, that the media would be calling for his death. If Obama was caught eating white babies, there would be news stories about how eating white babies is good for your health and promotes longevity.

No offense, but this is a pointless argument.

The media clearly kisses the ass of anyone with money or power, period. They don't care what party you are, otherwise I wouldn't have had to put up with newscasts about how the president is the greatest pres ever. I'll note, I've seen those for the last 4 Presidents, both parties.

Also, your tone is clearly taking on a bit of nasty bent here. Just saying. It makes me take you a little less seriously at least.

As for the arguement, that somehow there will be some mass armed civilian uprising, by 300 million people? :rolleyes:

Have you guys been reading the material? We've had uncounted natural disasters, magically caused ones, toxic spills, out right warfare, and oh yeah VITAS killing half the population all by itself.

There aren't even 300 million people alive in North America at this point. All sides, all races put together. The idea that there is armed militias roaming the backwoods hunting for 'injuns!', when they've got no water, no power, and dead people! stacked up in the streets is a little ridiculous. I mean remember this whole thing goes down in the 3 years that 99% of the world thinks is the end of days, and everyone on earth could all die tomorrow. While that inspires a certain amount of psychologically impaired parts of the population to go hunting for more trouble, history has shown most people will try and pull the grass over their heads and simple try and survive until the world settles down a little bit.

At the time all this is going down, the US, Canada, and proto-NAN (forgot what they used to be called, SAIM was it?) are about the only groups that can project any kind of military force in North America at that point, which is why all of them were involved in the Ghost Dance War to begin with.

You obviously don't watch ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, or CNN. They are so liberal leaning that it's not funny. Now the reason that Tymeaus Jalynsfein brought this up was that he was making a comparison in the credibility of the US government in the SR timeline and George Bush. I just corrected the record. Yes I was being absurd, but honestly Obama is handled with a lot kinder hands than Bush.




Yes it was, then the indians came in and were trying to take over the rest and kicking. Oh, Alexand, you're wrong, a 1/4 of the world's population was killed by VITAS. It is already know that ready access to medicine will reduce deaths from a disease. Also, why were the indians spared the worst of VITAS? They were receiving supplies, therefore if 1/4 of the world's population kicks off, then they should have had suffered as well.

For the Record... Obama has yet to lie and deceive the population on a grand scale, attempt to cover it up, and when that did not work, change the laws so that what he was attempting to do was legal; which in the end was struck down or reversed by various administrations in the nation... and this is why Obama has been given the benefit of the doubt, at least for now, and why Bush was sacrificed on the alter of public opinion...

This administration may end up with credibility preoblems, but for now, it is a breath of fresh air not having to spend time trying to ferret out the truth from the lies and misdirection...

Are news agencies Liberal... Probably, but there are just as many left leaning journalists as there are right leaning ones... an informed public must weigh the given information from the press and then decide what they believe on their own...

Anyway, sorry for hijacking the thread with current politics...

Hahahahahahaha!

Yeah, it's so nice having an honest politician for once. No more lies coming to the rest of us from the White House! How refreshing! At last, we've got a President that really cares about us, and only tells us the truth!

Hahahahahahaha!

How bad is it if I wish we WERE arguing about edge rules at this point ?

How cynical can you really be there Critias?

I never said that I believed everything that comes out of the White House, what I said was that, at least for now, the Press has been giving the Current Administration the benefit of the doubt... Does he lie? Maybe, or maybe not... Just because you are jaded does not mean that the rest of us can not have a little hope here...

However, it is irelevant to the topic at hand...

I am all for the History of Shadowrun as it has been written... some of you are not... that is okay... we can agree to disagree, as it is not really worth the argument...

Yeah. Indefinite detention without trial evokes such "Fierce Moral Outrage" that not only is the president who promised to abolish it not going to abolish it, he intends to indefinitely detain people who are tried in his "kangaroo courts" and found not guilty. Hope and Change!

Now, can you knock off the current politics crap!

Well knasser firstly I think you are over inflating DHC's stats and magical abilities. Secondly other than the overly inflated Force Ratings I don't really have a problem with the example you've given of a possible battle between a group of spirits and some helicopters, sure the NAN Rebels were able to use magic to win some battles but that doesn't change the basic weaknesses that prevent spirits from being a huge flashing "I win" button in the Sixth World. Yes they are easilier to handle with magic but automatic rifles and armor piercing rounds work as well.

One of the problems with the idea that the NAN Rebels were able to stay off the radar and thus were immune to massive bombings is that they did not have the support of the locals and with the racial makeup of the NAN Rebels you don't get to assume that they were hiding in plain sight at the local college, at least not without linch mobs. And Uncle Sam doesn't have to know what the Great Ghost Dance was, just that you had a large gathering of people who may be Indians in the wilderness during an uprising.

Also something to keep in mind is that those of us who live in rural areas are sadly used to having our power go out, sometimes for extended periods of time, and although I personally doubt people would be out hunting "injuns", it wouldn't be very safe for any Indian to be seen in the open either.

the_real_elwood exactly, and that is one of the reasons why Uncle Sam doesn't surrender to the people who've already shown that they had no problem with using WMDs.

Frankly, I'm not sure I buy that this was universally the case, that they didn't have local support. Areas like much of the Southwest with significant Latino and Hispanic minorities might deviate greatly from that, as would areas with an anti-federal government bent, which covers much of the plains. There are a lot of people who might find themselves identifying with the NAN's goals, all over the country. Moreover, considering the "one-drop Indian" attitudes in the movement, I'm not convinced at all that NAN rebel forces would be ethnically identifiable. For example, one of my players is a quarter Ojibwe and likes the idea of the NAN, but looks completely white. I imagine that that's the kind of people who are the average NAN militant; they don't all look like Sitting Bull.

I sourced and documented my facts, if you disagree state a source and value. My math proceeded from canon and therefore cannot be a "lowball".
Either document my error (I'm human, it happens) or provide a rationed counter arguement.

As for the "only" you took issue with, let me restate the case in a way you can understand:

In a 2010 SR without the NAN:
90 MILLION citizens died
45 MILLION citizens were displaced
135 MILLION total citizens directly impacted


In a 2010 SR with the NAN:
90.2* MILLION citizens died
60 MILLION citizens were displaced
150.2 MILLION total citizens directly impacted

Net change total citizens directly impacted: 10%

IMNSHO a change of 10% earns an "only".

* The LA volcano killed around 180,000 (vs about 300,000 from Vitas depending on how you define "LA") and the volcanoes and military strikes I gave another 20,000 which I think is excessive for air cav and known volanic zones.

Whatever...

This is the one thing in the Ghost Dance War canon I really object to as unreasonable, considering that this is a horrifying PR move given that it didn't work, and if it had it would have put the lie to everything they'd said about the environmental aspects of their movement, as the country's ecology would be destroyed. Honestly, I can't justify this as making sense in my head and pretend in my games that it didn't happen.

Megu I think you are forgetting that the NAN Rebels tried to set off WWIII and actually launched a nuke to that end, that is one of the reasons that Indians were rounded up into the death camps in the first place with public support. Then they claimed credit for the magical WMDs that by their very nature didn't care if you were pro government or not, so yeah I stand by my statement that the NAN Rebels would not have the support of the locals even before you factor in racism.

That's a strong point, so see the handwaving in the post above. I think the Lone Eagle thing is by far the single biggest inconsistency going on here. I can at least buy that the Ghost Dance was an endgame play and destroyed a vast amount of military/industrial infrastructure for the amount of lives lost, which was a tragic secondary consequence. But the Lone Eagle thing can only be understood as an attempt to cause a nuclear holocaust, which is suicide for the Natives as much as it is for the Anglos.

I find it funny that people find the concept of complete national collapse and surrender to .009 percent of the population completely well founded but the concept that a group of extremists who evidently have no problem burying whole cities for being the wrong skin color would try and do something ultimately foolish without considering the potential impact. I guess it's a matter of do you believe the magical noble super brave or do you not? Personally given the general crap sack world build up lone eagle makes a certain amount of sense in context or could have been a complete smear job shadowrun perpetrated by the corps *DUN DUN DUN*

I also can personally attest that those of native american ancestry are distinguishable by more then just skin tone and to those who know what their looking at, say those who live near reservations or other concentrations of them, they pretty easily distinguishable.

Also i can't believe i came back in to this thread.