Yeah, that's the point FT didn't think about in his otherwise well-thought (but still sorta rambling) post. As long as Tamanous and other organ-leggers offer much cheaper organs than legal sources and at the same time price for the needed medicine has droppped very much there will be a demand for it.

Agree with that, with the exception of Schattengesellschaft - what a complete waste of paper.

Hey, wanted to post here earlier but my phone died midpost so here goes.


On the topic of Tamanous, they have always been a 'boogeyman' in SR. They are the guys that do stuff that makes hardcore child killers blanche and faint, and thats when just them getting prepared to do 'business'. Groups like this are a cyber-punk and dystopian sci-fi staple, the bread and butter of evil, showing how far some of society has fallen, and can even make the 'evil, souless' corps look kinda pleasant in retrospect. One thing that hasn't been mentioned here sadly is the other things that they obviously do for business.

Essentially they are the supermarket of evil. For people they kidnap or are sold randomly, they have little metaphorical isles in this supermarket, each with a nice tidy label; Food, Food for Asmando, bioware, cyberware, fetus farm, organ farm, slavery, sex slavery, corp slavery (oh yes, it does make sense that anyone with major credentials sold to them would be sold to a corp for a nice 'finders fee'). Then they have their metaphorical (well maybe literal who knows...) online store, where trusted customers can tailor order anyone for the above reasons to their exact tastes. Need a 15 hermaphradite elf with AB blood, green eyes and naturally red hair who has an allergy to sugar? Hell they have access to data to get that exact match for ya. All of this makes them billions of nuyen, easy, without having the concept of actually organlegging come up. And when it does? Guess what, generally they can find a near match throughout the whole world for their A-AAA, criminal, and political customers who dont want knews of their organ failure to get out (Got to keep up image;) ) or just the run of the mill person for their less choosey customers. And on top, they have access to all the medicine in the world, and can get it for them real cheap. I highly doubt it would be 60, let alone 6000 like mentioned for the immuno suppressors.

And if you dont want to read all that and still dont like that they are in there for no reason, just have it that they are just baseline evil. No goodness, no spark of hope, just fragged and sick.

Also, no offense, but I highly doubt the average person would go through 3 organs or so, otherwise the average age of a person in either barren would be around 20, if not younger. Could be a good idea for a campaign, but for looking at canon, I doubt it.

As for the Matrix groups, loved DDS myself. Fully thought out and believably practical, if not truly a typical criminal group (Guess thats why they were put in the 'other' section huh) while the Schattengesellschaft seemed almost like a opposite of the exchange (like a ying yang kinda crap thing). Cool idea, but not much there really I thought. Could have been better, but it was made almost to secretive. (Could be mis-remembering some of it though, read it AWHILE back now lol)

The minor ones were okay, except Chimera. I wish they were gone already. Never really liked them. They made sense back in the 50's, sort of. But come on, a group of soviet KGB operatives doing assassinations? Cool, yes. Even slightly realistic to SR in 72? No. The youngest soviet KGB would be 83 (18 at 1989 when the union dissolved), and unless (s)he was a super adept, would be pretty decrepid by now. Unless I missed something in the whole russia/chimera thing from past editions, it is kind of a bad idea.

One thing I thinked they should have fleshed out more were fences. Fences are like fixers, in that every shadowrunner should know one, if not 10. THey can sell your loot/evidence better than a fixer, while still possibly getting you jobs, intel etc. Maybe even brought in Fixers and other types of Grey/Black area shadow contacts. Like I said, needed more, but was still good.

The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the same year the KGB was divided between the FSB and the SVR. Vice actually refers to "ex-FSB operatives ranging in age from 20 to 60", which is wrong on many accounts. According to the Underworld Sourcebook, Chimera was a part of the KGB Department 5, included within the SVR, then back into the new KGB when the comunist hard-liners returned to power in the 21st Century. Chimera became independent when that new KGB was disappeared. SOTA:2064 gives a slightly different version, with the SVR and FSB merging in 2010 to become the UGB, which still exists, even after the Chimera departure (and Vice actually refers to the UGB in Chimera's section).


About Tamanous, I guess this quote from another thread apply to my case :
I'd stick to the material I submitted for Loose Alliances. Mysterious boggeymen just don't fit in my kind of my play. I need small details and references to throw at my players.
It's not clear when reading Augmentation and Vice if the authors intended to clearly limit Tamanous scope to North America and Asamondo, by introducing the Body Bank and the Mansurs. I know quite a few people playing outside of North America assumed Tamanous was a global organization (including myself, in Shadows of Europe). Introducing new organization was one move against the North American bias of SR, but considering in the first place previous material in Underworld Sourcebook, Man & Machine and Loose Alliances only applied to North Am maybe was another example of it.

Dangerous Minds
I'm not particularly fond of this chapter - don't get me wrong, I think it's a very useful chapter from the standpoint of the GM, ready-fleshed-out NPCs with public rapsheets that can be handed out to players - but the whole thing reminds me a little too much of Prime Runners. To me, the most interesting part of this section is less the people than the slice-of-underworld-life that is revealed in their bios - the White Resistance in the NAN, things of that nature. Still, some of these entries - Sergei Malenkin, Snowbird, and Teachedaire really stand out - are sort of absurd in the level of information that the cops have been able to recover about these people, the scope of their crimes, and the presentation. It's the exact same mindset that made me leery when the idea of the 10 Jackpointers e-book was first floated (and why I did some pro bono editing once the results were in).

One of my favorite contact types in street level North American games is the stereotypical crooked pawn shop owner and bail bondsman. Not only do they get weird items from time to time, they're also some of the first to get a hint if someone's got money troubles. Plus, bondsman know bounty hunters, another pretty useful contact since like private investigators half their job is simply the grunt work of finding out who so-and-so knows and where their mark is likely to go if things get dicey. Heck, a couple of times when my players were JUST short of making ends meet I let them do a couple of milk runs as bounty hunters themselves just to pay the bills. They really are precisely the quasi-legal sort of resource a low end runner can use to stay afloat until they work their way up the ladder.

Dangerous Minds
For me personally I've always found crime and corp books to come off alittle dry and honestly gotten little use out of them other then a few plot points. (That Ive always wished could someday get followed up on, but don't.) Occasionally I'll find a gem that draws me in and really gets me thinking like who's living up in orbit and why or dark dirty secrets you won't see in any other book. In vice I got pulled into the section on fencing and Dangerous Minds. I guess for me I'll get more use out of having hard and fast info on a subject or an npc. That being said I wouldn't mind seeing some prime runners statted/updated for 4th edition, I just don't have the time I used to back with 1st edition to fill a notebook full of npcs. These days I'm lucky to shove some bookmarks into a book to reference a pregen.

I really fail to see your point, considering that the 16-year-old girl in question is an establised member of the jackpoint community, i dont understand how /dev/grrl posting a factual essay on the history ofy of ghost cartels is any different from some other member posting the same think.

And i really dont understand what your saying about the criminals discussing it as the only comments are:
"Well, that paper probably gave your instructor a heart attack." from The Smiling Bandit
her reply to that
Marcos teasing Glasswalker about the fact that he's one of the sources
and Glaswalkers reply to that.

Ye gods and hairy fishes, I lost track of this...

I suppose we should talk about The Law, even though this book club has really sorta petered out...my fault, should have made it go faster, kept up on it.

I've posted before that I don't like the intro fiction for The Law, on p.173. Jason and I had a minor tiff over it, I don't want to go into great and loving detail about it here, we'll leave it at that.

There are difficulties and dangers writing about the law, because as a real-life subject it is huge and complicated, with a large body of specialized knowledge and language supporting it. Even better, the law isn't the same everywhere, and Shadowrun only complicates things - there are city statutes, state laws, federal laws and regulations, corporate law, international law, etc. - I think the big table of standardized crime and punishments from the 1st/2nd edition were on to something.

Even then, that's not The Law as far as shadowrunners are concerned. For any sort of heist/robbery/criminal protagonist movie/book/etc. getting arrested or nabbed is generally the end. It is the least fun, your options as a protagonist wither and die, you rely on skipping to "one prison sentence later" or a deus ex machina "job offer in jail" to get you out of it and back in the game. Which I think are points worthy of serious consideration and discussion, though nobody ever writes that. Because the law does not serve justice or vengeance - well, sometimes, but generally not - and it does revolve very heavily around deals. There are ways around laws, or to minimize their impact - loopholes, bribes, appeals to higher authority, escaping jurisdiction, the prisoner's dilemma - and I think those should be in a game too, if you want them, if you want to deal with them.

But that's not really the sort of Law we're talking about, we're talking about more of a know-your-enemy kind of thing. Who are your local cops, how do they operate, what are they packing in the event you have to make an ill-advised shoot-out with the po-lice or corporate security. What restrictions are they under, and how can you deal with that? How much of CSI is true for SR? That's the sort of questions you get here. It does that fairly well, I think.

Actually I do wonder. How do you run a 'realistic' high stakes game.
Pink Mohawk against gangers, that's no big deal. Noone cares what gangers do to each other.

But. A run against a corp, or within DPF or NYPD jurisdiction.
What kind of procedures do serious shadowrunners who don't want to get caught have to do if they're doing real runs against real targets. CSI? Magically Awakened Detectives with Assensing out the ying yang. Street sams with bloodhound olifactory sensors. Should every serious Runner have genewipe? Are you making your Hackers custom build commlinks for every run? with burnable SiNS?


How much do you gloss over, how much 'realism' and 'risk' do you weave into your shadowrun games.

I found the section on the PCC interesting and timely.

It's nice to see a quick list of how different countries and groups handle more or less the same thing. No reason to go into too much detail about policy and procedure, just what department is related to what, the names and the focus in a particular neck of the woods. Keeps things from looking too cookie cutter when you get picked up in, say, Japan.

Actually, I really liked the PCC/Koshari thing. It smacked of metaplot!

OK, -not- to derail the thread, but I've seen a lot of... maybe not hate, let's say dislike... pointed at PR over the years. And I have never fully understood why. Yes, there's some silly stuff in there, but there were an awful lot of plot hooks, and the format gave a lot of flavor for the Sixth World. Heck, I still get metaplot-goosebumps when I see Hessler/Zessler show up, or Teachdaire here in Vice.

Being on topic, this thread has only convinced me that I need to get Vice at the earliest opportunity. I'm just starting up a game now and it sounds like the players are going for sort of a semi-syndicate feel so this will be invaluable, and seeing some of the behind-the-scenes stuff has been great as well.