Hello,

It's been quite some time since I was last in these parts. I expect a few of you will remember me.

I took a few too many things on and had a bit of a collapse under the weight of it all. I'm sorry to those who left me messages I didn't reply to or were waiting for things from me. It's not been the best however long it's been for me. My own Shadowrun game imploded as well.

I have (with a lot of help from a more technical friend) revamped my site. I'll have some more new material on it in the near future probably. Also, people should be able to leave comments on it JackPoint style when it's done. I have written a short article on resources in Shadowrun which is here. I've got some NPCs, a full location and another article to go up as well when I've finished them.

Anyway, I see everything is still green and black. It seems a little quiet around here. Are people still playing Shadowrun, or have we had a bit of a drop-off? I bought Vice a couple of weeks ago and reading through it has drawn me back into writing the odd bit of Shadowrun material and maybe doing a game if I have time.

Anyway, feedback on the site (any bugs, etc) and on the articles are welcome.

Peace and be cool,

Khadim.

Very much like the article you wrote, but I can't help but feel you've made at least one major miscalculation as to the amount of money that a crime family or any other group makes based on how much its members are paid.

I don't recall the exact numbers, but Freakanomics takes a fairly in-depth look at how the income from a gang gets distributed. Only something like 10% (If I recall properly) gets to the 'employees'. Most of it goes up the chain (In your mob example to the Don), though a significant chunk stays in the pocket of whoever is in charge of the local group.

I'd suggest trying to figure out some figures based off of that.

haven't finished reading the article yet, but just thought I'd throw in my 2

Thanks. This sort of feedback is genuinely very welcome. I'll take a look into this and perhaps re-adjust the article accordingly. 90% gets passed up the chain? Wow! If I used Low lifestyle for a gang member (reasonable) and assumed that the money to cover that was only 10% of the amount they brought in, then that would mean each ganger was bringing in 20,000¥ per month. I find that unworkable to be honest.

I suppose we could say that they retain 10% of their gang related earnings, but the large bulk of their income comes from other sources that they don't have to push up the chain. E.g. Ganger X lives with him parents and draws a welfare check whilst doing some dealing on the side. His dealing brings in 200¥ per month and he passes 180¥ of that up the chain. I could make the 10% retention work that way, but it raises other problems. For a start, it's not going to apply to the Syndicate examples where the presumption is that their entire earnings come from crime and that the made man isn't working a day job on the side. Secondly, the Sixth World isn't a setting that seems big on welfare so I'd have to refine that ganger example somehow.

Alternately, there could simply be an enormous amount of money being passed up the chain in the Syndicates. There's no reason I can't handle gangs and syndicates in different ways.

Anyway, thank you very much for your comments. Keep 'em coming. I'll go and have a look at that reference now.

Khadim.

Khadim who?

Freaconomics gangers cant´t earn their lifestyles by gangwork alone. They NEED "secondary" jobs to sustain a living.

True, most of the gangsters seemed to have the sound of being kids (Or young adults) that still lived with their parents and/or had other ways to make ends meet, or simply didn't have very good ends.

Like I said, I could have been wrong about the 10%, but I remember it being a very small percentage that actually got kept. This makes sense after all. The person pushing drugs (or whatever) isn't really doing 'hard' work persay, and drugs make a huge profit, and more importantly, the lower level people are willing to work for not so much because of the dream of that big payoff from moving up in the gang.

This holds reasonably true for stores and the like as well. Walmart pays their people low wages, and their $10/hour or less people sell TVs that are worth 3k. The employees are only making a small fraction of what they are technically 'worth' to the company. Now granted a 3k TV isn't being sold every hour, and the TV doesn't have 0 production cost and you have to keep the store open and such, but I can assure you that walmart is making more than $11/hour from their $10/hour employee.

4th quarter last year Walmart had a profit of $108 billion dollars. They also have somewhere around 1.8 million employees. Now if a quarter is 13 weeks @ 40 hours a week, then they are getting about 936 million man hours of work. Lets assume that the average pay is $10 an hour (Which it is for associates, which I imagine makes up 1.7 million or so of the 1.8 million). That means that employees cost Walmart a total of 9.36 billion dollars. But Walmart made (After paying out that 9.36 billion) 108 billion. So basically 0.8% of what a Walmart employee makes for the company actually goes to the Walmart employee. The other 99.2% goes up the chain into Walmart's pocket (And that isn't even counting the several million a year that the upper echelons in Walmart make, which comes directly from what that bottom run makes for the company). I'm sure if you take out from profits things like the upper people's wages you'll see that the basic workforce only gets to keep about 0.5% or less of what they 'earn', and the rest goes up the chain.

So yeah, Joe wageslave earns 6k a month, but he might have an almost 1.2 million a month impact on the company. The reason he doesn't make any more is because while he earns the company alot, someone else could earn just as much.

While I'm sure the number doesn't hold true all the time, I think it illustrates that a person earns far less than he actually makes for the company.

Edit, oops, sorry, that should be 8% and 5%, not .8% and .5%. This reflects very closely with the 10% figure I happened to remember.

Take thy beak from out my heart!


Okay - I've gone and read the requisite chapter of Freakanomics. It was interesting so thanks for that pointer. Your recollection isn't far off. It said that the leader of the local gang faction paid 20% of his earnings up the chain to the very top of the gang. That's as you said: a big bottleneck of funds at the middle tier. The gang had around 100 members at this level. Beneath the particular mid-level leader the author has information on, were another 50 people who were paid around $3.30 an hour. We can work out from his figures that each "foot soldier" was bringing a mean of $500 per month through drug sales and that the mean payment per month was $150. There's all sorts of things wrong with inferring the percentage passed back up by an individual from those two numbers, but if we did use it lacking anything else, it tells us each low-level gang member passed up 70% of their earnings. This would be off anyway as there are non-drugs based income and presumably the "foot soldiers" as the book calls them, assist in those also. So, you could raise that figure a bit and say perhaps the gang members pass up 80% of their earnings. Though I put the book aside before reaching this chapter due to the author's constant self-praise and dubious conclusions, this is still useful. The author likens the gang members to other "tournament" careers - where you work not for the money but for the chance to win big and get to the top where the money is. He highlights that there were many people eager to join the gang if an opening arose.

So I'll need to revise the gang section of the piece. Most of the factors listed by the author apply to Shadowrun gangs as well. I'm not so sure about the syndicate side of things. With the gang example, you have a lot of replaceable people desperate to "make it". But in the Mafia example, the Made Man has already, erm, made it. At least I would say he has to the extent that you can't just cast him aside and pick someone else up if he wont work for peanuts. We also have to say that he really is making his living from crime. See that was the difference between the gang in the book and my Cutters and Ancients work-throughs. Those in the book, weren't making a living from the gang. As it said, many were living with family or had day jobs. So for crews like the Cutters and the Ancients, we have to decide if they are making a living off crime, or if their part-timers like the book's. But for the Syndicate's real members, I think the book and the fluff strongly suggests that they're really making their living from their Syndicate's operations. I can maybe see some really low-level soldati holding down a day job (for some reason, I picturing one working in a meat warehouse) but it's a stretch. So perhaps we go with my model for Syndicates and something more akin to the book for Typical Gang™.

What do people reckon?

EDIT: Incidentally, I've also started on an article on the economics of Shadowrunning. That should have some direct game implications as well.

For syndicate members, I actually would deem it more likely they have a day job. Looking at the real world Mafia in particular, tdon't they usually hold down day jobs, then do their criminal activities on the side and amidst their legit jobs? For example, working on the docks as a member of the Teamsters.

Makes for a good cover. Being 'unemployed' and yet living in a nice house and you wear suits everywhere and so on might draw a bit of suspicion.

Hey Khadim, great to have you back, I use your materialsin almost all of my runs, especialy the grunt sheets you have made.
I pretty mutch use cold blood the same way most people use food fight, I look forward to seeing what else you putt out.

Khadim
Big fan of your work. Keep it up.
If you want more info on the gang hierarchy thing (but unfortunately less crunchy economics) read the sociology students book. This is the guy who actually lived with the gangs (Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh) and then talked to the Freakenomics guys. His book is Gang Leader for a Day.

Good to see you again, Khadim.

Good to see you back, Knasser.

Point : AA rated corporations are megacorporations and have extraterritorial privileges. AAA rated ones are called prime megacorporations, and have at least one representative on the Corporate Court.

Nice to see you, shall be taking a look at the article in a bit

You´d have a place at my table, friend.

Ditto

Indeed... Welcome Back...

Keep the Faith

Thanks for all the nice words.

First off, just a quick mention that I have added a new NPC roster - a chapter of the Desolation Angels. For some reason after writing this, I keep humming "female of the species is more deadly than the male". Anyway, hope somebody likes it. They're rather deadly I'm afraid.

Link is here

As regards the gangs and syndicates...

Acidsaliva I'll take a look at that book when I get the time. Looks interesting and I much prefer to go to the source rather than someone else's conclusions.

Nath. I'm pretty sure the terms aren't as you say. I understand "megacorp" to be a AAA rated corporation and that this is synonymous with having a seat on the Corporate Court. AA corporations are the next tier down and are large and can be extraterritoral, but are not "megas." Extrateritoriality isn't the definition of megacorp and "the Megas" are Ares, Renraku and that limited elite. To my understanding at least, but I think this has always been the case.

I'm going to re-write the gangs part of the article in light of the feedback here. What I will probably do is examine three gangs, Cutters, Ancients and a smaller but still substantial player such as the Crimson Crush. I'll do the Crimson Crush along the lines of the real world gang we've discussed. The Cutters and the Ancients, I'll modify to be more like them, but I'll still make some distinctions. I think from the fluff, the Cutters have to have a slightly larger middle class - they're involved in a lot of non-local operations and they're pretty big too. Similarly, the Ancients have to be handled slightly differently due to their being a Go-Gang. In fact, the Ancients will make quite an interesting case.

As regards the "Made Men". I'm really interested in how you all see them. I can see low-level muscle having the day jobs. You know, Joe finishes work down at the Tacoma docks a little early, he knows he's meeting his friends tonight to go sort someone out and he'll get maybe 900¥ for his trouble. As you say, good cover etc. However, I figured the Syndicate level "Made Men" and equivalents, who were at the "Successful Criminal" level were beyond that. Without picturing clichéd dark suits and glasses, I had this level down as someone who was making their living from crime. I don't see people like this working the day job as well. The lines blur, nothing is tidy, but this is roughly where I'm pitching (listen to me, getting all USian when I talk about Crime Syndicates). Do others take the terms differently? I don't see someone who is a full member of"the Family", or the Shigeda-Gumi or whatever getting much respect when they've spent all day carrying crates around or being a cook in the back room of the restaurant. I don't see crime as glamorous, I see plenty of people at this level existing, I just didn't consider them to be what was meant by the full Syndicate members. Interested in opinions.

K.

Hey Knasser, glad you're finally back.

I liked your writeup, even if it got a bit too much number crunching in the end (im not much of an ecconomist). Still useful to get an idea of what resources organization can have.

I have questions regarding your Cold... something adventure though. Is it supposed to have identical security forces during the day, and what security proceedures seperates the employees (and visitors from other brances etc.), and contracted workers from intruders? RFID cards? Issued where? Also I found no details at all about the security of the medical building, where I assume the Mcguffin is.

Otherwise it seems like something I want to run for my newbie group, I did a short game about a datasteal in a medum office building, and the runners almost failed horribly and ended up having to tase the guards, cancel alarms, and then flee before LS could get them.

I'm gonna do "On the Run" with them as well but I want to do a couple quick and easy runs to get them aquainted with the setting, rules and the art of shadowrunning first.

Thanks in advance!

Yo Khadim!

Someone mentioned mafia guys with day jobs above. Anybody watch Soppranos? One of the recurring scams was that the family would provide "protection" for a construction site in return for "jobs" tho they didn't work. They just sat around in lawn chairs and shot the shit. They were also employed in mamagement positions in lots of little businesses where they did nothing. So you'd almost need a new edge: false day job or something like that.

I was - and exactly what I meant.

It's not uncommon these days to see Mafiosi with undergrad degrees, I'm given to understand, and even with MBAs and the like.

Now, do many Mafiosi really work legit jobs? Nah, probably not. But they need to file taxes the same as everyone else (at least, unless they want to wind up following Al Capone into the "they can't pin anything but *tax evasion* on him" book of dubious distinctions), so they need a way to explain the income to the IRS that's legal.

This would apply just as much in the Sixth World as in the Fifth.

Ah, now, fake jobs I can totally get. I think that would be quite common and the easiest ones to fake are indeed those casual labour jobs. By the way, thank you for now giving me the idea that Al Capone really was guilty of nothing other than tax evasion. It could be history's ultimate stitch up job: four police under pressure to produce results, pick up an innocent Italian-American...

Anyway. Thanks for the suggestions. Friendofthedork - I wrote Cold Blood specifically as an introductory adventure. I wrote it soon after 4th edition came out though and my skills weren't quite so polished back then. I'll take another look at it and see if I can come up with some answers for you.

K.

I don't want to overstate either: Al Capone, historians basically agree, really was guilty of what the Feds pegged him with. The fact is, though, that like John Gotti, the "Teflon Don" of the 80s, he: A. Had really good lawyers; B. Could, unlike Gotti, seriously pollute the jury pool. (Gotti could too, but more through media coverage than outright juror intimidation or subornation.)

So Capone only got convicted of tax evasion. Which he was so obviously guilty of it wasn't even funny.

At the same time, though: What I meant was that plenty of Mafiosi likely do actually work at legit jobs. You aren't always going to be doing stuff for the Family, after all, so you need some way to keep yourself busy.

But a good number only fake-work at jobs, too. The point is, they all got jobs of some sort, if only to explain the income to the IRS. It's not an either/or. (This is particularly true of Mob lawyers and accountants - the Family clients might well only make up a small portion of a larger practice filled with clients for whom they actually do legit work, bill legit hours, and so forth. But it's also true of a lot of the "management" of the Mob, too...Keep in mind that IRL, the American Mafia is only said to have a few hundred Made Men throughout the entire United States of America. A lot of "Family business" is done by "associates", and those associates can be doing any number of things when not committing crimes. Why do you think cops and the like undergo background checks?)

Various authors gave different definitions for what is a megacorporation (some because the definition wasn't anywhere to be found at the time, others because they failed to check their books). Corporate Shadowfiles and Corporate Download) each gave a slightly different definition. But for both, there are megacorporations that aren't among the Big, AAA that sit on the Corporate Court.

I could say "Trust me, I've read those enough times." But here's the fluff.

Also, the distinction between a "legit" job and living off crime are not entirely clear. The legit lawyer, law degree and all, who has as a sole client "The Mafia" is living off crime as surely as the Don, even if the work is all technically legal. The low-level guys down at the docks, are probably there as much for the benefit of being able to "move" cargo as much as to keep busy. Also having people on hand to make sure the people you "protect" don't get weird ideas while you are away is as illegal as anything else.

The Wal-Mart example is also a bad basis, I think, as the intent seemed to avoid Megas. Wal-Mart is pretty much a non-SR mega equivalent. And profit is still not actual cash on hand. A lot of profit gets divied out to shareholders, paying off loans, reinvestment into the business, or other things.

Shell jobs are also covered well by shell companies. Ones that exist only on paper as a way for the illegitimate funds to get funneled, also employing semi-legit accountants and business reps, who work "legit" jobs purely for the benefit of the illegal enterprise.

I like the chart though, the small corp of 100 employees pulling in 700k a month helps put things into perspective, which vanishes sometimes.

Thanks. If you could PM me with your thoughts about it I'd appriciate it. Otherwise I'll probably make it too hard for my runners again

It should also be noted that money laundering would be big business, so you'd have members of the syndicate that purposefully run a restaurant or other business at a loss in order to launder the money gained illegitimately. That being said, running a crap business still takes time, and is in itself both a real and fake job.

[late to the party, but...]
Welcome back Khadim, we missed you.