COO~oooooooooool! I hope she also got de-aged by it, like a complete rejuvenation!

*sarcasm* and next we can have Fastjack trade his relationship with Ghostwalker away to get Dunkelzahn restored to life....



......actually i'd be surprisingly ok with that.

Hey, if technology (via age rejuvenation) can do it I don't see why SURGE can't!

Besides, Mariah Mercurial is hot. Fastjack is not! If one of 'em had to de-age I know who I'm choosing.

Fastjack?

Fastjack is a long running system NPC that appears in alot of the books as a moderator or poster on Shadowland stuff. In the newer books, "Technically" Alot of the information is presented in a format as if you went into the Matrix to find information on a topic. Like "Paranormal critters' in Running wild or 'Gear" in Arsenal"

That first page "Jackpoint" is run by Fastjack. He was (( or was not)) One of the original Deckers back when they fought back the wilds of the Matrix. And is an 'old man' of the Shadowrunner community now.

The4th edition books usually start with that log on page and a message from him on where the information came from and what not.

No, no. I know who Fastjack is. I've been around SR for some time now, that was my guess as to which one he wanted to "de-age"

Actually the whole thing was a combination spider man refrence and commentary on what appears to be a situation of reseting everything to the setting to zero, old plots are so exciting.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

"Chupra Sangre," in case it hasn't been touched upon (just stepped into the thread, and haven't completed it as yet), roughly translates as "blood sucker." As all of the killer's victims have been Awakened, this could just be a sick fucker who does some research before offing his victims. As the murders are referred to as gruesome, it can be inferred that the nom du guerre involved is not just colorful metaphor, but could involve the killer actually draining his victims of blood. So far, we could just be dealing with a vampire, though HMHVV was not mentioned in the quoted news article.

Possibilities include, but are not limited to:

• He really is a vampire and just takes care to make sure his victim doesn't become Infected as well. Also seems to like the "flavor" of either Awakened blood, Awakened aura/Essence, or both.
• The killer isn't a vampire, but has some other condition that compels him to drain blood from his victims. Since all the victims are Awakened, the as-yet-unknown condition might require some unknown substance in Awakened blood, though that sounds a little farfetched to me.
• The killer's just a sick bastard who drinks the blood of his victims; the Awakened bit is either a coincidence or research on his part due to some grudge against the Awakened.
• The killer's not human at all, and things are far uglier than the police suspect.

If he is a vampire, it might be a new strain of HMHVV that requires him to drain the Awakened; he might not be able to survive otherwise. I touched on something similar to this in Running Wild in some shadowtalk referring to a crime spree perpetrated against the Infected population of Washington, DC. The two aren't connected, to my knowledge, but I love how things arrived at independently can kind of work side-by-side to help make a bigger picture that is a little darker around the edges than perhaps anybody thought of.

Don't mean to interrupt, but just wanted to mention that Vice is the first SR book that I'm reading cover to cover, not just jumping from topic to topic as the mood fits. It's really insightful with alot of useful stuff, like the stuff on the mob. Curse my slow reading and stupid tax season (I do income tax so Feb-May I'm insanely busy). Hoping the rest of the book is just as well written.

Blah, clients...
Akh

Major Syndicates
I'll have a lot less to say once we get to the sections I didn't write. Bear with me.

Intro Fiction
The basic premise of this chapter is based on Shadows of Europe, specifically:

The gin-and-insecticide bit actually comes from Tim Powers' Declare, but it worked well in this context.

I love writing intro fiction, but I had my doubts about this one. Think it came out okay.

The Mafia
Oh boy. This was a real challenge. I wanted something resembling a realistic criminal organization rather than just a bunch of media stereotypes, and at the same time I had to incorporate SR's Mafia history and depiction. My basic solution came to me while watching The Sopranos - after a hundred years of Hollywood Mafia, the actual criminal organizations would be full of people that had learned about being a gangster from sims and trideo as much as anything else (Planet of Gangster Skrulls, shadowkids). So I could build up the Mafia mythology and at the same time poke fun (and holes) in it, and however the gamemaster and players read and played it, it would still be an accurate interpretation.

Overall, I'm fairly happy at how the tone of this chapter came out.

I still love Do I Look Sicilian, Mon? - it cracks me up every time.

Dragonslayer's untimely demise due to "gangland violence" actually is because of the Yakuza...but that's a story for another time.

A Bit On The Side was one of my attempts to show that in 2072, the Mafia is a little more gender-balanced than in previous generations. Plenty of made women.

I could, occasionally, get crap past the radar. Which is why that "peg her husband" comment is still in there.

I think it was Jennifer Harding that came up with Fianchetto's diminutive "Fian-o."

My greatest hindsight regret for this chapter was not including a list of the major families. However, when you consider I was looking at the mob on three continents, I think it's understandable.

The original concept of the Major Syndicates was to do a breakdown of each organization and position, and then provide an example of a "typical" branch syndicate and members in those positions. Didn't quite work out that way, but it's why you have the Mareno Family in St. Louis. "Mareno" is my little half-Irish/half-Italian grandmother's maiden name.

Fianchetto's comment about "A good sign of a smart capa..." is pretty much derived from the Steven Brust novel Jhereg (closing the businesses) and The Godfather (to the mattresses).

Even in the Mafia section, I stuck in a reference to the Zobop.

The Lares were Roman household gods, and Crotone's nickname represents his relative age and otherworldly nature.

Dirty Pinelli was a guilty pleasure to write, particularly 2XL's comment.

Stregharia is actually quite interesting, much more so to me than modern Wicca traditions, which suffer from a bloat of New Aged bees wax-and-granola.

The comment about Perlmann sipping his gun cleaner is a reference to one of the first issues of GrimJack, where the titular character does the same.

Perlmann is pretty much an homage to Dark Man, and I readily admit it. The nickname is a bit of a stretch.

Overall, I don't know if I did the Mareno family justice with this snippet view. I mean, it's definitely not a "typical" Mafia family, but it is a Sixth World one.

You know, I actually thought that the Mafia chapter was the strongest one in the book. You did a good job there Ancien-o. The little breakdown of a family is, I think, a very useful one. It shows in reverse a "how to progress in the mafia" guide and also lets you see the different ways those at different levels live and work.

I'd start with the same advice given in Vice[/] credits : read [i]Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano. If you trust Saviano, what Ancient is saying is already true : Camorra women dress in yellow because of Tarantino's Kill Bill, and a boss had his villa built after the videotape of De Palma's Scarface he gave to the architect.

Having myself read and watched my share of Mafia material, I found the Mafia part a little bit less interesting than the Triads'. But I'd still rate it above Yakuza and Cartels (for the Vory, well, I'll speak about it whenthe thread will reach that point...).

The description of the French Milieu and the Union Corse follows the background set up by Shadows of Europe and Capital des ombres (the French version of Runner Havens, which includes a chapter on Marseille). But those sort descriptions fail to satisfy me. The Corsican milieu is not (IRL and as far as I know) some secret society like the Italian and North America Mafia are. There are no symbolic initiation and no "made men". They trust each other and are expected to keep their mouth shut just because they're born from Corsican parents.

's a very good point, the concept of a unified Mafia involves - besides a gigantic leap of faith - an extreme degree of simplification that ignores a lot of individual developments on the part of different ethnic syndicates. The very same concept applies to other transnational syndicates, natch; you can't imagine that in a country as big and diverse as China every group designated as a Triad operates or is organized the exact same way, or even speaks the same language. We could easily have written an entire book the length of Vice detailing the individual peculiarities of different mafias.

I found the Mafia section quite useful and informative. While I've played Shadowrun off-and-on for years, I've never picked up a lot in the way of sourcebooks until recently, when I decided to finally take a crack at running a game. One of my players decided he wanted his character to be Mafia affiliated, so Vice and the crime section of Seattle 2072 have been invaluable to me so far. I don't really have any of the background from older books, so I definitely appreciate the effort made to be welcoming and informative to new readers.

I'm getting a little ahead here, but one thing about Vice that jumped out at me in a less positive way was the number of typos and errors. While all my 4th Ed books have a few noticeable errors (indeed, I've never read a roleplaying book from cover to cover without finding a fair number, from any company), but Vice really seemed much less carefully proofread than the other SR4 books I have. Was this a factor of the recent internal trouble at Catalyst getting in the way of the latter part of the production process? Was the book particularly rushed?

I know I'm brand new here, and I'm not trying to be actively critical. I'm just curious. The content throughout the book is great, and it's not like some typos are the end of the world, but the number of them in this book was pretty noticeable.

I apologize for any typos the book might contain. The book went through the normal proofing process; unfortunately, all the people involved in said process remain fallible!

Feel free to send errata you notice to info@shadowrun4.com

Jason H.

Proofing is a labor of love more than anything else. In my experience the level of proofing on a book depends a great deal on which freelancers have the time and energy to sit down, read the completed drafts, and post lists of corrections for the editor or developer to make - which aren't always accepted. Generally speaking, newer freelancers are less willing or able to do proofing - they are less familiar with the setting and they don't get any sort of extra pay and generally little recognition for it - and several times what happens is people read the sections they are most interested in (such as those they wrote) and proof those, giving less attention to other chapters.

The line developer (or whoever's editing the book) can and does proof the book and generally implements the actual changes (or vets them to be implemented), but given the fact that SR line developers haven't been lasting that long lately, several books are developed under multiple line devs and there's usually some question as to whether a chapter has been proofed sufficiently or not.

Uh, to answer your question, no I don't think the typos in Vice are due to the recent issues (i.e. last couple months or so), they're a symptom of the SR book development process.

I can see as how that would make the proofing process more difficult. Thanks.

To me, the most obvious problem is the hierarchy of titles and parts, which made the table of contents shitty (especially painful for the PDF version).

While we're at it, the third paragraph in the Kumi-in Ren Asawa description, page 61, rather belongs to the Horishi Horiamana, page 61.

Part of that is because the sidebars use a header style, and a sidebar that is attached to a fourth-level header actually uses a third-level header...which makes the whole thing a bit wonky.

Ancient, I still owe you some comments regarding Vice, especially since I finally just finished it. I'll try to remember to jump in here when I have some more time.

do you have the most recent version? i already sent in a list of typos to correct (and i still haven't re-found the second, or rather the first, instance of an entire sentence repeated that i noticed on my first read-through) shortly after it was released, and they updated the book a couple weeks after that i would say.

Vice was unusual in this regard because proofreading is one of the very last stages of development (in fact, it usually goes on until the very last minute that the book is sent to the printers) and it went through 3 different developers before being released (myself, the interim dev-crew, and finally Jason). While I handled development in finished drafts to editing, I wasn't around to proofread. On the other hand Jason wasn't yet onboard during most of the process so he caught the tail-end of the development cycle. Ancient is correct to a point. Only towards the very end of my term as developer did Catalyst begin to get its act together regarding proofreading and even so the timeframe involved remained suboptimal. However, I disagree with Ancient that the typos and layout issues with this book weren't related to internal changes at Catalyst over the past year (ie. the turnover in developers). Many of the problems with the table of contents, layout and artwork, as well as the unusual amount of typos had no precedent. All that said, Adam seems to have been able to correct the most blatant items pretty quickly and updated the release pdf.

As a developer I always made a few tweaks to the drafts after editing and before proof-reading, and there are certain things I would have tweaked in Vice that I didn't get a chance to.

Was there a difference in proofreading for BT versus SR? Comparing SR products pre-Vice to BT products at the same time, there seemed to be less frequent more noticeable proofing errors on the BT side (like the repeating sentence or misplaced paragraph issues in a few of the SR books). It always seemed odd that there was what seemed to be such a big difference. That could just be my own skewed perception of it though.

I've never cared much for Fastjack. Hacking is a job for the young and reckless. Fastjack should be so ridiculously wealthy by now that he'd have next to no reason at all to be active in the shadow community, let alone crushing everyone in his path with no competition in sight. Hell, that was true when he was first introduced. And if he hasn't accomplished whatever ultra-deep purpose he originally had planned by now, which is ridiculously unlikely after all these decades, then he should have just burnt out in the attempt by now. He's worse than Dunkelzahn or Harlequinn ever were as a deus ex machina or whatever you wanna call it.

That said, I'd definitely prefer to see Maria youthanized (I'm coining that term in reference to Leonization-type effects, by the way) than him in a heart beat.

Well, I'm not completely done yet, but I'll get there in a bit. So far I think it's a good chapter. It starts out quite strong with the talk about Omerta, Pentito and Rispetto. Those did a good job of clarifying the "recipe" that holds the Mafia together. I also like the tidbits by 2XL about "culture".

I'm in the bit about the various ranks, which is a bit drier, I think.

There are/were differences in process and timing. Additionally, the BT side effectively had two developers in Randall and Herb while Shadowrun had a single developer since I took over until Jennifer Harding came on board to assist me (only about 2 months before I left Catalyst). There's also the question of the amount of writing and how much work editing and proofreading entails, your available editors, their familiarity with the setting, the timeframe for publishing, etc. Finally, there's also the issue that Catalyst had a ready made support structure for BT (via Battlecorps and the BT online community) that it didn't have for Shadowrun for a variety of reasons. Adam Jury was instrumental in getting a number of these elements rolling and setting up the relevant groups but it was much later than we would have liked.

It was nice to be able to use 2XL to such an extant. I had to make Pentito for the real insider's view, but 2XL is name readers are more familiar with

Speaking of 2XL, I totally forgot to talk about The Children's Hour! (The name of which is shamelessly stolen from the finest of the Man-Kzin War stories.) This was originally supposed to be a bigger part of the Mafia chapter, but too much wordcount was taken up getting the basics across to my satisfaction.

Mr. Bond's Mafia, Inc. is of course a reference to Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

Trans-Latvia, natch, is the mystery corp that ended up with a sizable chunk of Novatech after the IPO - and thus is one of the main owners of NeoNET. I believe there might be a follow up in Corp Guide, when/if that book gets printed it the chapter is under the original author. We shall see.

Just a reminder: next Monday, Yakuza.

Does anyone know who this idea originally came from? As my father's family comes from Latvia, couldn't help but smile when I first read about Trans-Latvia, never thought the nation would ever feature so prominently in Shadowrun

I think Trans-Latvia's first appearance was in Portfolio of a Dragon, which would likely make it Steve Kenson's idea.

As far as I know, Trans-Latvia Enterprises were first mentionned in Corporate Download. So the responsible would be Erik Jameson, unless someone whispered him the idea.

I actually have a Vice hard copy, so I doubt I have the latest version; I have the first and (I assume) only printing so far. Again, I'm not really complaining, and since it came in the middle of the developer switchover, I'm not really surprised things fell through the cracks. I'm familiar with the way publishing works--it happens.

so far as i know, the PDF was made available before the first printing was done from what i was told.

and as i recall, they only fix the PDFs when they're printing a new version.

still, that's a lot of "i think that's how it should be" so who knows... if you want to post a picture of the credits, i could probably tell you for sure if it has the stuff i noticed or not

Question: Does Vice have information on the Gangs? Like the Anchients and Halloweeners and what not, that's updated to 2072?

If so, how good is the information.

If not, where the heck do I find it? I glanced at the '10 gangs' preview and it didn't look like any of the ones I remembered.

Yes, it does. The information is solid. I would have liked a bit more on a few of them, but the coverage was still decent.

IIRC, you can also find specific information on the Cutters, Halloweeners, and Ancients in Seattle 2072, but obviously, you know...specific to Seattle.

Thank you!

I think Ancient will get round to the Gang chapter in a couple of weeks or so... But as a teaser here's some insight into what it features: first up is an intro to the various types of gangs not just in terms of scale but also general goals and outlook; next is an overview of how gangs work, how they are organized and how they turn a profit (this also fits the more realistic approach to the major gangs that I wanted for SR4); after that come detailed profiles of several major (multinational/multichapter) gangs including the Ancients and the Cutters, but also some international ones; this is followed by shorter overviews of some second- and third-tier gangs (including sample themed gangs like old favorites the Halloweeners and niche outfits like Matrix and wizkid gangs). Each writeup is accompanied by basic stats that allow you to get an idea of overall numbers and threat level.

That's perfect. That's _exactly_ what I was looking for. Bought the book at 3:10am this morning. Now, I just have to stalk the mailman.

This is the last major section I did (next is the Zobop) so after this everyone else should have much more to talk about!

Yakuza
By the time Vice rolled around, I (and my partners) had already done a lot of work on the Yaks in Runner Havens and Corporate Enclaves. Yakuza history and presentation, from the very first edition, never quite sat right with me - maybe I watched too many Takeshi Kitano movies. Anyway, I wanted the Yakuza to be less racial Japanese caricatures and cartoony villains and more true to the Yaks of real life (okay, maybe with a touch more ultraviolence).

One thing I personally tried very hard at in fourth edition was to get past this idea that you have to spend pages and pages on the history of the Sixth World right up front at the beginning - like nobody reading the book would have been at all aware of the events of the last couple years. I wanted to focus on the now; not to ignore the history but to relegate it to its appropriate place as explanatory background material that would give context to current events and conflicts (and, incidentally, would ignore some of the lamer covers that had been attempted previously). This is basically why the Yakuza's history is summed up as succinctly as I thought I could get away with.

The Korean Yakuza was a bit of an issue, since the modern Yakuza include so many Koreans and Korean-Japanese members. I think this was the cleanest way of addressing (what to me was) a large problem.

The Gaijin's Game was one of my attempts to differentiate the Yaks from the Mob. The tighter cultural underpinnings and racism in the Yaks makes a plausible framework to draw outsiders into their internal struggles, sort of in a Yojimbo/Last Man Standing kind of way. That doesn't mean the Mob won't do the same thing, but there's too many different cultures in the different Mafias to really hammer the point home, I think.

Hitori Hanzo was based on the same character that the Kill Bill character is based on). The whole deal with the Oyabun-no-Oyabun and the New Way/Old Way are covered in some greater detail in the Neo-Tokyo chapter of Corporate Enclaves.

Incidentally, you'll notice both the Yaks and the Mob, despite their high levels of organization, lack anything like a single organized leader. This was deliberate; Shadowrun doesn't need a single Kingpin of Crime, and I think it works better in many senses for the local bosses to be bosses, not having to look "up the chain" for approval just because they want to whack somebody or start a new business. The nuyen stops at the oyabun.

Coda was one of those bits that was kind of difficult to write correctly but essential, even though they're concepts too complicated for most gamemasters to fool with in their games - at least they have the option. I wanted to really pop the bubble of the "honorable" Yakuza.

Kane is so much fun to write, because he lives over-the-top. That said, the prison story was long and silly and full of holes.

I have a wee personal interest in tattoo magic and quickening from writing the Magical Good section of Street Magic, hence the focus on tattoo magic in this section.

Frosty is my way of dropping snide remarks about the IEs and GDs. "not every magical advance in society is the result of some big flying lizard dropping crumbs for us wee mortals."

"Sweet southern baby Jesus!" -> I love writing Kane.

The Urgent Message on p.52 -> Wee screw-up on the complete lack of title, and it should have been a sidebar and not a message...meh. This is basically similar to what I should have done with the Mafia, but NorthAM along has fifty "major" families, believe it or not. I took advantage of the opportunity to squeeze in a few things to be expanded on later, like the Shotozumi-gumi's presence in Portland.

By default, the two biggest rengos in the Sixth World are the Watada-rengo and the Shotozumi-rengo. This is pretty much a direct lead-off of Mob War, except expanded far and away in scope.

Yakuza Hierarchy -> Poor Adam had a helluva time with these org charts due to my shitty notes. Came out well in the end, though.

The Naheka Rengo (everybody read Paradise Lost, right?) was basically my failure to do a traditional Yakuza clan. I did have fun though.

If Kia's comment to /dev/grrl under Saiko-Komon seems out of place, it's because originally I tried to do a bottom-up version of the Yak and the Mob - starting with the street soldiers and peddlers and moving up the chain of command - but that didn't work, so I rearranged everything.

Hideo Naheka's appearance is based on a character from the graphic novel Silent Dragon

Genjiro Yousei - I don't know why I keep putting elves in these positions - is based on a character from Bruce Sterling's short story Green Days in Brunei.

Mike Kanaka - That's Me-kay or My-k. Yes, a transgender Yakuza. No, I'm not going to apologize for him/her/it.

Horihamana II - I so wish we could have gotten a pic of him working, but I was late with art notes.

Somehow, the last bit (and shadow comments) for Horihamana II got tagged on to the end of Ren Asawa's entry. I blame those technomancer kids.

p.63 - Probably one of the best pieces of art in the book

Ninja - Oh ye red hairy gods, the ninja. After the utter debacle that Shadows of Asia made of them, I was truly, madly desperate to make the ninja believable, secretive, and as far from orks-in-pajamas as I could get. I couldn't ignore what came before, but I could - and did - try to spin it in a more palatable way.

Does this mean that at some point, you guys were planning on returning to Hawaii / writing more outside of the 6WA?

I can't speak for anyone else but yes, I had hoped to do a little more with the Kingdom of Hawai'i and Australia at some point.

Vice is the fifth or sixth sourcebooks I think, to speak about the four Yakuza sitting on MCT board. This time they are full-fledged oyabuns, heading a Rengo on their own. Corporate Shadowfiles and Underworld shadowtalks (by the same poster) had them as oyabuns. Then Corporate Download featured a rumor of Eiji Yakamura being a puppet for Yakuza bosses, and a fifth Yakuza retired like him on Zurich-Orbital. More recently, Corporate Enclaves had a poster calling them "the Four Komon". And I have yet to check Shadows of Asia on that matter.

The difference between Mafia's "godfather" and Yakuza's "oyabun" (as well as lower Yakuza titles) is interesting. Mafia is a made man second family ; the clan is a Yakuza's new family.
It also worth noting that the Yakuza, like the Triads, are born in merchant cities, while the Italian Mafia hail from rural area. The origin actually matters much more to the later. Within the Cosa Nostra or the Camorra, it's all about the village or the street in Naples you're from. Yakuza, Triads, just like North American mafiosi, couldn't care less : even if "ethnically homogene", a single block in any city houses families from a wide area. Racism aside, your exact origin doesn't matter, as long as you have the proper cultural background (which, in turn, basically exclude all non-Japanese or non-Cantonese).

Mmm secret clans of Ninja like Drop bears....

There is, if I can find it, a conversation that John Dunn and I had (the Dunner was very good about being my sounding board for ideas) which is basically the genesis of the cohesive "Four Oyabun" idea as their own rengo.

Looks like we've finally found the ultimate weapon against the Horrors, heh?

Full of holes it may be, but it's still an awesome little anecdote. I really enjoy most of Kane's appearances in the shadowtalk, especially in Vice.

I found this section as useful as the Mafia section, since I plan on using the Yakuza a fair amount in the campaign I'm running, including a Yakuza prime runner as a foil for the Mafia character one of my players is using. So, thanks again. The book is quite helpful.

AH, the book club idea is awesome - after reading these discussions, I'm considering buying Vice. One question, though: I'm planning on running Ghost Cartels soon, and Vice deals with the post-Tempo underworld. Would it still be relevant when running GC?

As someone who has both, yes Vice would be relevant to GC. Tempo may have made a mess of organized crime, but the culture and organizations did not change. It also might help you in deciding how the groups would more realisticaly (I use that phrase loosely) react to the runners.

It would give you insight on how the whole mess ends up, so as you insert a gang into your campaign, you can have an idea of where they fall after tempo shakes out... might give you some ideas on how to manipulate events for your players.

(Plus some fun news stories to give them...)

One feature I think deserves a special mention in the Mafia and Yakuza sections is the inclusion of a "sample" OC organization in each section with some notable figures. These serve a double function of grounding the general notes in the main text in setting specific street-level examples, and also providing easily customizable plug-and-play NPCs for people's games. I felt the previous Underworld sb had painted things in broad strokes and was missing some of the fine details that ground the general examples in everyday "dramatic" elements and characters. (And, yes, I did debate whether or not to include stats eventually deciding not to - different GMs will have different ideas of what a Yakuza hitman should be capable of.)

In the case of the Naheka-rengo, Ancient really wanted to writeup one of the more less conservative and stereotypical Yakuza clans and after discussing the merits and disadvantages of such a sample I told him to run with it since it was more in keeping with (a) the global feel I was pushing for with SR4 and (b) the less stereotypical/semi-realistic portrayal of OC we were aiming for in Vice - after all, for the stereotypical stodgy old-style Yakuza there are plenty of references in past SR books and general crime fiction.

Regarding kjones' query, and as others have said, while Vice is post-tempo most of the background and organizational information is intentionally useful for any period you chose to set your games in. The background will also help contextualize why the Olaya decided to deal with smaller fish rather than the big sharks.

Just a reminder, next Monday we'll be discussing the Triads (yay, finally something I didn't write to death!)