Yes, and that would be the reaction of some of the more 'tolerant' people.

Considering that it's already the reaction of INtolerant people already.

Yes, Humanis Policlub, I'm looking at you. "Dirty Indians taking our land away from us" indeed.

Considering in Canada alone there is only about 5% of the total population which is native, I don't see the territory having the needed population to sustain any from of modern economy across that large an expanse of land if all non natives there removed. I also don't see the other 95% agreeing to not murder the aforementioned 5% when they display freaky supernatural powers, and threaten to use them.

well it was stolen in the 19th century fair and square. and by fair I mean no magic, and yes magic is cheating.

I'm still trying to figure out how Canada is able to have a modern economy with the population we currently have.

or 1% in the US.

your friendly southern neighbors.

Really, I don't think either were all that great. The rules have always left something to be desired. Especially the combat mechanics, which are one of the most important parts of the game.

But they did capture a market with a creative hook.

Their writing improved over time though. By the mid-nineties the game was on track. I think FASA just ended up stuck with some of their bad ideas from 1989 that were just going to be too hard to retcon. And then they added some of their own new bad ideas from new people on the team.

Eh, in Shadowrun, magic is fair and square. Even if sometimes magic just a MacGuffin.

A MagicGuffin?

Ok, I crunched some numbers, since people are all psychotic about realism in an RPG.

I decided to add up about the approximate population of each state taken by the NAN. For quick purposes I left out the Canadian provinces affected, just doing some quick estimation. I'll list the figures I have, and then I'll take 1/3 of that population off for VITAS.


Leaving off California, so I don't even have to figure their number in.

First is the half chunks from the SIoux lands. This is being generous since the portions taken out were some of the least populated parts of those states.
45% of South Dakota- 365,000
35% of North Dakota - 220,000
30% of Nebraska- 538,000
Not counting the bits taken out of Kansas.

Then the whole states: Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming- 34,268,000

That makes a subtotal of 35,391,496

Minus 1.5 million for Denver area.
Minus 3.5 Million for entire Seattle Metro area.

That leaves ~30 million before VITAS hits. Knocking 1/3 of that off, we get ~20 million population in the areas "affected" by the NAN.


What does this have to do with anything? Well partly I just like playing with numbers, but the main point I'm really making is that it's not like the area affected by the NAN, when accounting the retention of California, Seattle and Denver, is a huge amount, even before VITAS it only represents ~9.5% of the total US population. The idea I've had is thus- that the US had been severely taxed with VITAS and the diplomatic messes that the Lone Eagle incident caused. (For one example, for people wondering why they didn't use nukes in the fight, it's because it was stated that due to the Lone Eagle missiles being duds, they didn't have faith in any of their missiles because they didn't know if they'd even work anymore.) They face an enemy that wields a weapon they hadn't been able to quantify or use yet and it puts them in a panic statement and suddenly they find themselves in a position where they can cut loose a portion of land that isn't too heavily populated so it won't tax the country in way of refugees much, and it would satisfy most of the tribes in the fight being their traditional lands anyway.

I'm largely of the idea that they didn't just kick everyone out as most of them with the exception of the Ute Nation weren't rabidly anti-Anglo. And even the Mormons had basically cut a deal with the Ute Nation, so most of Utah was left alone and Las Vegas cut their own deal so that saves about a million there as well. It would vary by country but I would say that it was similar to a mix of Ute and Pueblo; that everyone would have a chance to join the country, but there'd be an obvious bias towards those with at least a quantifiable portion of Native blood. And that quantifiable portion could probably be enough that a lot of Latinos got in easier than Anglos so that would bolster populations right there as Latinos have a huge chunk of actual population. I could do some crunching, but Latinos have about 46.9 million of any race so if we start hashing out things that might actually bolster some numbers for population factors..

It may sound a bit hokey, but looking over the numbers, there could actually be some theorizing.

"Um. Mr President. Those are the states that grow a huge percentage of the food we eat. Heck, you've proposing giving away the whole Ogallala Aquifer."
"Yes Bob. But I'm heavily invested in underground soy production. Wave of the future, Bob. The people will all eat soy."
"I'm sorry Mr. President. Please excuse me while I call my broker."
.... a short phone call later ....
"Yes. I have to agree with you. The threat the Native Americans pose is real. We need to relinquish control of those states to them."

FASA writing in Mary Sue/Gary Stu's... no, never, not THEM!!! I mean it's not like they do it with every game they created... Oh, wait, they DID!

Yeah, FASA came up with a great game system, but their balkanization of the world was just plain stupid! Also having the Mexican's going back to being Aztecs...

Meh. Balkanization's the whole point. Sounds like you all made the mistake of reading the fluff.

Though actually, almost all of Kansas, most of Nebraska, half of SD and only minus the section of southwest of the Platte River of North Dakota was still in US hands at the treaty, so the argument could still be made that they weren't mortgaging their entire breadbasket. Granted, they didn't know half of Texas was going to fall to the Azzies at the time and that it and Oklahoma would ditch to their own country twenty years later...

Point or not, its kinda stupid. Giving 1/2 of North America to < 2.5% of the population was also a retarded idea, and one I generally ignore.

Yeah, I'd buy one where they retconned a lot of the idiocy like the NAN.

I swear, it makes me wonder why some people play Shadowrun if they hate things like this with such a passion, especially because it's so entrenched in the history of the setting that to retcon it would be IMPOSSIBLE.

Because much of the rest of the setting is just fine.

I find that statement of yours hard to believe, Mord, so I'll just shrug and be on my way. Agree to disagree I guess, and my realization we're playing two different games.

To be fair, as weird as the Aztec thing is, it's thematically consistent with the ties drawn between the Awakening and with indigenous issues/suppressed cultures. And I think the main benefit of the balkanization is to give more opportunities for intergovernmental intrigue, border crossings, and to remove the presence of superpower nation-states, which all do have real effects on how a Shadowrun campaign works.




As much as I like the idea of the NAN, I think we have some common ground in agreeing that this is a problem. We've just dealt with it very differently, me by expanding that percentage to create an ethnically broader NAN, and you by throwing the whole mess out. But I think a situation in which there's a mass, one-way exodus out of those states is for sure lacking in verisimilitude.

The US government has credibility issues as is. If they told people they're being mind-controlled, that wouldn't be good for them. They're better off they did it because of the Great Ghost Dance.

Maybe the whole point of the GGD wasn't to scare the government, but to make it possible to sell the treaty of Denver to the general population?

I see that as an act of terrorism which would result is a terrified, and violent backlash. Unless the GGD somehow managed to completely disarm every firearm in the country, I don't see it working.

The end of states in the classical sense as the powers of the world (and the rise of megacorps to replace them) is one of the centerpieces of cyberpunk fiction, with big hegemonial states the whole scenario wouldn't work. Just the execution of this idea was far less than optimal at many times, IMO Kitsune is dead on with the "big book of cultural stereotypes". But hey, the milk has long been spilt so we might as well make the best out of it.


And wasn't the GGD taught to the Indians by some Immortal Elf-Horror-halfblood? I remember reading it on the wiki somethere, though I can't find it right now.

It worked on Hiroshima.

Yes, and they totally lacked any meaning way of striking back at that time. I don't think the GGD removed all the spy satellites, cruse missiles, and high altitude bombers from the U.S. arsenal.

I think it's because what people play isn't Shadowrun. It's a game based off of Shadowrun.

As an example, I grew up playing Monopoly as a kid. I've taught my children to play Monopoly. The game is very common, at least in North America. One could say it's part of the culture.

But I actually sat down and read the rules one night. I have NEVER played a game of Monopoly in my life. What I've been playing is a game based off of Monopoly. It's pretty close to Monopoly but it's been so houseruled as to be a completely different game. (Note. The rules may have been updated to include common houserules by now. I've heard they have but my box is old.)

I think this is what happen when people play Shadowrun. They're not playing Shadowrun, because there are parts of the rules and world that people just work around and change. What they're playing is based off of Shadowrun and that's close enough.

*shrug*. I think the corps/GGD/balkanization makes the most sense of anything in the setting (maybe that's not saying much). It's one whole point of cyberpunk, and it works. Done.

I think the NAN served its purpose quite well in setting up Seattle (which was pretty much the primary hub of game focus in the beginning) as a city surrounded by potential enemies. It purposefully parsed down a large ..well..state...into a manageable region to both explore and explain. Basically creating its own megacity or colony, but keeping the landmarks relatively 'same'.

In the first eddy you got the sense that Seattle was almost like an old school desert city, surrounded by the wilds/wastes/here there be dragons. It also set up a reason why you couldn't just pull a job and hop in your car and drive out of state so easily, forcing you to find a tense middle ground where you tried to hide while still within the immediate reach of potential enemies.

In combination with the megacorp stuff, keeping the initial area of Seattle 'small' and hyper-urbanized it also helped push away from the immediate need to explain why the rest of Washington, or for that matter the United States, didn't look like some extended Borg assimilated world, with tech and compounds and urban areas that stretched across the continent. If the lands had remained in 'American' hands, you think they would have given a shit about conservation or protecting the wilderness?

The only other alternative would have been 'um, yeah, the hippies won and...um...that's why the wilderness is still wilderness."

Part of the issue is, as the game grew and more stuff was added, the whole idea of 'being stuck in Seattle' took a back seat. Sure its kinda an embattled state surrounded by an enemy, but here's a bunch of sourcebooks telling you how PCs can basically ignore that and travel wherever the fark they want to. If we go by modern Jackpointers, its pretty common for them to be multinational/global travelers. As such, the fact that the NAN hold the territory around Seattle and across the country doesn't really mean much anymore, as PCs can go where they want, pretty much when they want.

Did anyone figure into the population numbers the fact that VITAS and VITAS 2 killed like 30% of the global population?

And that the First Nations were "Lucky" to be in their internment camps and away from VITAS, thus their numbers weren't destroyed that much?

Now that I think about it, the guards were equally lucky... Then along came magic, and their luck ran out.

Cause a good portion of your economy is tied to the US economy and there is alot of trade between the two.

...which makes even less sense than the NAN population numbers

Even normal prisons are breeding grounds for diseases, a concentration camp is an incubator on fast forward.

Some have. but it's kind of a wash anyway.

1) Unless Native Americans were immune to VITAS I & II, it doesn't matter as far as the percentage of Native Americans vs the percentage of everyone else.
2) We could assume today's population for VITAS I*, but the population growth between I & II is really a guess. I could justify increased growth to relace the lost population. I could also justify higher child mortality rates to the point of shrinkage. Unless someone knows where the hard population numbers are in Canon, it's all a guess.

(* well, no, really we can't, since SR1 wasn't based off of the world of today. The worlds split at some point long before today....)

Edit: Assuming Native Americans were immune. .99 * .7 = .693 of the normal pop. Add that 1% back in and figure out how much is still non NA. .693/.703 and native Americans are now 1.5% of the population.

Out of every 1000 people:
990 non NAs become 693 non NAs.
10 NAs remain untouched.
So for every NA it's now 69:1 odds instead of 99:1 odds.

The US average of Native Americans is less than 1% and that's including Alaska where roughly 50% of the population is Eskimo.

That means that roughly there were 4 million men, women and chidlren of Native American heritage during the Ghost Dance.

Sigh, NAN just makes no sense. It's kinda cool, but it makes no sense.

It has been hypothesized that were Canada to be anywhere else in the world, it would be a regional power. Stuck where we are, tacked onto the north side of a people who live to buy stuff, we're just rich. Sucks to be us.

Yeah, the same country that used political maneuvering to prevent the industrialization of Canada. Just so that Canada can, primarily, be a supplier of raw materials for the US. And then they put up tariffs on a major part of those raw materials and make China their primary trading partner. *Shakes Head* Come on US, I thought Communism was equal to THE DEVIL or something similar.


Inuit.

looking at what the fluff describes of hurricances striking air bases and stuff and Low Orbit Weapons appearing only decades later, yeah, I can see how they couldn't strike back. Anyway, the split of ours timeline to Shadowrun's begins at 1989, if we assume that for the next 2 years Native Americans are blessed with a baby boon and immunity to VITAS, I don't think it is too hard to swallow the whole American balkanization.

remember all US policies are made to the benefit of Corporations.
Once you realize this, then you'll understand US Foreign and Domestic Policies so much better.

I realized that a long time ago. Canada is, basically, a Banana Republic without the climate for Bananas.

Well, OK, not really. I mean, the Prime Minister isn't a CIA plant.

...

That I know of.

Oh thanks alot! As if I wasn't suffering from ENOUGH paranoia!

The only thing that can get complicated is figuring out which corporations are making the calls at which time^^

The CIA and the NSA alternate who gets to have the Prime Minister as a plant every other election.
Once in a while, they let someone else get a turn. But it's rare. They're all competitive and shit.

I can believe that. I mean, they wrote the Kama Sutra after all.

Oh, wait, that's the OTHER Indians, isn't it?

I propose the "Pern" solution.

The Native Americans and Aztecs are REAL Native Americans and Aztecs.

People ask, "What caused the Aztecs or Mayas to disappear?" The answer? They didn't disappear. They moved forward in time.

The Anasazi are back in force. Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde are boomtowns. (Pueblo Grande de Nevada, not so much....)

I'm not sure whether to award you two points for such an esoteric scifi reference.
Or to fine you for daring to reference such crappy writing.

Yes, most of the Eskimos in a Alaska are Inuit, but unlike Canada, Alaska has a significant percentage of Yupik as well, so the inclusive wording is appropriate. (at least until they finally figure out new terminology, but they've been arguing over that for how long?)

lol

Because everyone knows that crowded prisons camps are just the healthiest place in the world. ...

Canada is pretty much the 51st State ranking just behind California.

I always thought the NAN got the short stick as far as Canada goes, seems like a perfect setting for a NAN upswing.

According to the 2000 US Census, the percentage of native peoples to the total population of Alaska is approximately 19%. Of the native peoples, over half are Na-Dene peoples, and Eskimos make a small percentage.

Apparently, in Alaska they still use "Eskimo". Most of those who get this name call themselves Inupiat, not Inuit.

Yeah, yeah, go ahead and troll for flames. Of course, CanRay was in the same hunt.