Check out the link on TVTropes for "It Makes Sense in Context".

It's really complicated, but basically...

Okay, maybe it still doesn't make sense. But go read the books and it will.

Wasn't me, I didn't know what would and wouldn't be in Corp Guide (STill don't, really, I never had the chance to do more than skim one or two chapters when they were in the draft stage).

Bull

The Carmack Blast and the infestation of Chicago as well as bugs in general aren't the part that was covered up (though the Carmack Blast WAS covered up for a long time, as well as what was going on inside the CZ as getting info in and out was insanely difficult). It was the Universal Brotherhood being a tool of the bugs that got whitewashed. The reason for this being hushed up was the pure numbers of members from he upper echelons of both governments and corporations who were members. No one wanted to admit that the former Managing Director of Marketing was in cahoots with insect spirits. He just "retired suddenly due to health concerns" to that same nice farm your parents said your old dog went to. It was an embarrassment that the UB was able to infiltrate everything so quickly, so EVERYONE wanted the connection with the bugs covered up. At least that's my take on it.

I wouldn't quote me on this, but if I understand correctly:


EDIT: Epic ninja my Abstruse. Read his explanation, mine seems absolutely vulgar in comparison

Then I misremembered and apologise.

I have three major obsessions in my life...Red Dwarf, The Dresden Files novels by Jim Butcher, and of course Shadowrun and its metaplot. I've got a 4/5 complete library of all the Shadowrun novels and sourcebooks from every edition (mostly missing duplicates and boring stuff...only reason I want the first edition Rigger Black Book is for all the drawings, and why bother with the 2nd edition version?) and I still read them even when I'm not playing games. It's been a while since I've picked it all up, but I still remember most of the major plot twists, and I'm damn good at explaining away continuity problems

I, of course, have nothing on Master AH, but I'd like to think I'll do in a pinch if he's not around

<@sniff> And I really thought the dragons being ET with a grudge was a good idea... <@sniff>

@=)

No sweat.

I think that if CGL's Shadowrun schedule was a bit more... Reliable... This wouldn't be as big a problem. Jason noted that there are some Horizon centered adventures in the pipelie, and they'll probably end up exploring Horizon a bit more. I'm not really sure though. We should be a lot closer to them than we are. RIght now, stuff seems stretched out, but keep in mind that it's barely been 2 years "in game" so far. It took at least that long for Bug City and Renraku Shutdown to shake out and shake down

(The slowness and erratic-ness of the production schedule is one area I really wish we could manage to get things smoothed out on... Oi. )

Bull

On the plus side, there've been so many delays that the old rule of "Shadowrun is 61 years in our future" is almost true again...

Heh, there is that...

What in the world is Google doing that's so questionable? I haven't seen much of anything negative about them.

Not sure what makes Whole Foods particularly benevolent though. I mean they're just cashing on people who've bought into the whole organic foods craze. Nothing really special, that I've heard, about them.



Yeah aliens probably wouldn't be in flavor. Not that I don't think they couldn't be done well, they just don't need to be.
Though in Btech, yeah, after Dark Age is overwith it totally needs an alien invasion. 400 years of constant warfare? Yeah, they're overdue for an alien invasion. ;p

I don't have the link on hand and I don't feel like looking it up at the moment, but Cracked has a list of the ways Google is more evil than you think or something like that. Basically, MASSIVE data miners. They have more info on you than the CIA has about Al Qaeda operatives.

And maybe it's because I live in Austin where Whole Foods is headquartered, but they're consistently in the top 10 of best employers to work for, the pay scale of all employees is set to that of the lowest paid employee (so that even the CEO can never get paid more than 20 times what the guy stocking the shelves, mopping the floors, and collecting the buggies does or something like that). But yeah, they get a lot of good press, but of course there's more going on.

I'm like Bull in that I like my games to be classic cyberpunk. Corps are evil, life is a dirty affair, and violence is observed with cynicism, not shock.

Because the idea of a truly beneficent corporation doesn't fit well into my game, I just run it so that Horizon is a brainwashing Big Brother type corp. They're the type of people whom you'd rather not even know you exist, because, if they think you're potentially useful, they'll scoop you and put you through the wringer. Even though Corp Guide's Horizon section doesn't say this, it doesn't mean that it's necessarily antithetical to how I run things, nor does it mean that the whole section is useless to me (well, I haven't got it yet, so maybe it does.)

But the point of what I'm trying to say is that you're free to disregard anything in any of these books so long as you can make your game work.
Does the lack of real dirt on one of the top 10 mean that the Guide is less useful than it could have been? I can't deny the answer is yes.
Still, I can't imagine that it leaves us off somehow worse than before. It's just disappointing to waste ink.

Nahh...

They need Dragons to wake up and magic to return. THe start of the 8th age, baby!

Heh.

Yeah, Herb's never gonna let me write for Battletech at this rate...

That Google collects data is not evil. It's what they do with it that determines that.

Mesh

Can you give a reference for this?

They post your personal information where everyone can read it, force you into a social network if you have a googlemail address, and sell any data they mine from you to the highest bidder. Also, they support the censorship and persecution of dissidents for rather unappetizing regimes (Burma's, Iran's ...).

Now, if they were just another marketing firm, nothing out of the ordniary really. But since thexy claim to be better than everyone ... it is a big deal. Because they et far higher standards for themselves. I fail to see why Horizon would not fall prey to the same mechanism.

The morally worst IT firm right now, by far, though, would be Apple.


Aliens would just clutter the setting. SR has all these awakened things. What do we need cheesy Aliens that are neither necessary nor fit with the setting?

As for BTech ... I really like the idea of a scifi universe where there are not humanoids with wrinkly noses or big ears on every second planet. No aliens at all. We *are alone*. It makes things that much more bleak.


That would not necessarily be a lot, though.


The last Kenson book of the Roc cycle (Time in Flames?) had GW the spirit form (in the end; Talon escapes ansd stirs up Shedum and soemthing else that looks like a pale Dunkelzahn). Dragons (of ED) details how dragons routinely become a purely astral form while transforming (hatchling -> wyvern; wyvern -> lesser; lesser -> great), hidden in a cocoon. The part about Luung was either in ED'S Dragons or DotSW, I don't precisely remember.

Also, the Immortal Elves can transfer their entire form onto the Planes too - planeswalking metamagic, which was a high-circle metamagic in ED, if I remember correctly. So, it is very possible that Dunkie, eventually, gets rid of Burnout's body and returns. As something else, maybe. My money still is on a Nidorcyl-like monster.

THE MEGACORPORATE SHUFFLE

- I found the tone to border on the insufferable at first. I first thought this was because the content itself was not really interesting to me. But it got better a few pages later, and then goes up and down, ranging from over vulgarization to dead-cold theory (when asking how many AAA would be the good number geopolitically wise).

- For a long time, it seemed like SR megacorporations only had a CEO and a bunch of individual shareholders. It worth reminding the board of administrators has some power within a corp. I think it would deserve a longer explanation, to explain for instance that even if Damien Knight owns 30% of Ares and has proxy rights, he only has one vote on the board, and need allies or puppets there.
The comments on how incestuous boards are would be true... nowadays. SR megacorporations are really different from the RL companies we know. It's not a problem when the CEO of a banking corp can sit on the board of a pharmaceutical company. But it doesn't work when both corps have a banking and a pharmaceutical subsidiaries that compete. Fuchi head of security sitting on Renraku board was a big issue. This may still work with AA and A corporations that do not have overlapping interests. Also, corporate outsiders are typically institutional shareholders (banks, pension funds and the likes) pick. AAA megacorporations have very few of those. Individual shareholders rather vote for themselves and their relatives.
Still, that's the kind of board I gave to Esprit in SoE (plus the aristocratic angle). I would also have a Pacific Rim Bank representative sitting on the board of most japanacorps. But I don't think it would work as a general rule, when the corporations most people are thinking about are the AAA.

- Explaining the difference between a private and a public corporations without any reference to the concept of "stock market" is a bit off.
Saying "Public corporations [...] can be owned by just about anyone who has the nuyen and willingness to buy stock in it" is a misleading short cut (I'll probably have the opportunity to ramble on that when reviewing the Ares chapter), though the "How to get bigger" box reminds that it takes a willing seller somewhere. Those are just easier to find on a stock market. As a side note, the concept of treasury stock is not very useful without getting deeper into how stock and market works. I'm not sure the lesson on inflation is useful at all, since it's not even factored in the much shorter explanation on debt.

- I can only concur with the idea that stability is the main requirement for AA status. I have been saying the same thing for some time. But I would also add that the megacorporate system works both way : sure, the AAA can pressure the smaller corps to submit themselves to the Corporate Court authority, but they also need them. The Corporate Court is only relevant as long as enough players accept its rules. That's why the seven founders had to grant AAA rating to newcomers at some point.

- The Shiawase Decision gets only a passing shot. But it would sure be hard to write a detailed and realistic explanation on how the US Supreme Court got to enact corporate extraterritoriality with this case.

- Infrastructures are important, but I would have put an emphasis on what may be called the industry "entrance fee". For instance, you needed a garage and a dozen of mechanics to start an automotive company at the beginning of the XXth Century. Nowadays, you'd need hundreds of engineers and fully automated factories to seriously compete. "Entrance fee" is what make impossible to jumpstart a microchip business to compete with Intel and AMD.

- "War can be used as the ultimate hostile takeover" is a change of paradigm. Corporate Download had "don't go at war" as one of the Corporate Court three golden rules.

- The megacorps joint strike against Aztlan/Aztechnology codenamed Reciprocity took place in 2048, not 2044. In my opinion, materials from Aztlan and Corporate Download don't leave room for a debate about it being the result of an Omega Order. There could be as much debate about Art Dankwalther killing being an Omega Order. The Corporate Court is a business court. Physical persons can't get AA status, they are legally out of its scope. So, at least, I wouldn't say "most people would agree".

- Eight out of thirteen CC justices were already there in 2062 (compare to the four justices from Corporate Shadowfiles in 2054 who remained in 2062). Well, maybe the period following the Crash required some stability... And as far as I remember, none of the previous books ever referred to a "chief justice" position (Corporate Download only stated Priault, not Hino, was "the default head of the court").

- The CCMA/GOD comment on Interpol is hilarious. So much more since Ghost Cartels just featured gun-totting Interpol agents invading Bogota along with Aztechnology military troops.

- The Right Hand example makes no sense to me. Why would the small corp heads would care about erasing the IC ? Knight Errant bought them, giving their new boss an uber IC would rather look like a good idea.

Yeaaaah. This was the draft I made all those horrible comments about weeks ago. Did not sit well with me at all.

About glossing over the Shiawase Decision...I can see that since it's the biggest thing in the SR timeline that happened on a date that's already passed. Unless they want to retcon it to a later date, it's going to break suspension of disbelief royally. Then again, they're going to have bigger problems in 2011 when no dragons come bursting out of Mt. Fuji...

As to not going into full detail...frankly, I liked it when Corporate Shadowfiles went into a lot of that sort of thing, but that was back when the shadowtalk sections took over a lot more and felt like real discussions rather than someone tacking a virtual post-it in the margin. The sad thing is that, even though I worked for a massive investment company for two years, I still learned more about economics and corporate management from Shadowfiles than I have from anywhere else. Probably also explains why I have no investments...

Did any of cour comments make it into the finished chapter?

I kinda doubt it. I mean, I wasn't specific in my lambasting in the general interest of not spoiling things. I did want to check a couple of weird rips I saw in the first draft.

There's a new post up at the Shadowrun4.com blog with a little Aztechnology preview.

Jason H.

I have to admit, reading the new versions of The Megacorporate Shuffle, Mitsuhama, and Manadyne & Mangadyne is...bizarre. I'm not seeing any of the straight rips from the original draft of TMS that had me spitting blood, but there are some weird...parallels. Like the intro fiction of Mitsuhama just happening to cover the exact same subject as mine...and using the exact same corporate slogan that I came up with ("The Future is Mitsuhama")...and the major divisions? I mean, c'mon Jason, I was the one that came up the MCT transition in the first place, y'all didn't even change the names there. Show me Mitsuhama Latin America in any previous sourcebook. At least for Manadyne you let the author write their own.

The apparent confusion over Taiga Mitsuhama's age is just bizarre. As is sending him up the gravity well. At least you had the good sense to change the CC justices - although in your rush to fix things, you got sloppy and left Priault off the Court in the Saeder-Krupp chapter.

Just wanted you to know my copy of Acrobat Reader (the most recent version as of late March) is erroring out on the font HFVNOS+AlexaStd which is preventing me from reading anything but the shadowtalks, the main text is just a bunch of dots.

Also, why is the fiction intro italicized the wrong way? It may be all the vodka I've had this evening, but it's making me dizzy trying to read.

Hmm . . . Anyone else having trouble with the preview? It looks fine on my screen (and the intro fiction isn't italicized on mine, in either direction), but if other people are having problems, I'll try to fix them.

Jason H.

I'm using version 7.something, which is WAY outdated for Adobe Reader. Going to update it and give it another shot and let you know what the results are. I thought I reinstalled from scratch when I had to format, but I guess it's whatever came on my image.

Yeah, definitely a version issue. No italics and the fonts are all working now. Definitely did not like Adobe Reader 7.0...

Okay, good. Glad it's working now!

Jason H.

From System Failure's Epilogue:



Boom.

For reference:




Now, I want to be clear that both are for the most part derived from past material - Corporate Shadowfiles, Corporate Download - the percentage ratings of the Four Oyabun haven't changed much in twenty years; MCT has always been headquartered in Kyoto, etc. And Jason did a bang-up job of compiling the various subsidiaries. But other parts (i.e. all the major divisions) were obviously copied from my profile for the corp - hell, the ones that I didn't make up out of whole cloth (Mitsuhama Africa, etc. vs. Mitsuhama Media, etc.) weren't even listed as major divisions previously. The slogan, crappy as it is, was mine.

If you showed me both of those blind to see if one was derivative of the other, I would have to spend at least 30 minutes if not longer going through the old books. I know you're being paranoid with everything that's going on, but is a slogan and a couple of divisions which are kinda logical (the two examples you gave above...hell, I think I used Mitsuhama Media in a game back in 2004) worth getting all worked up over? I don't want you going all Hulk Smash over someone else deciding that a AAA-rated company might have a division in Africa...

AH, I'm not sure what you expect me to believe at this point. You say that they've copied the major divisions that you created wholecloth. How much of this stuff can be credited to your intrinsic creative genius and how much can be credited as a common-sense development of an existing concept? If you "invented" MCT Latin America, when MCT branches for the other regions existed, can we really be surprised if your successor decides to add it? I bet most people trying to flesh out MCT would figure that to be a no-brainer.

I really like this book so far. "The Megacorporate Shuffle" chapter is very well written, making material on the workings of big corporations very accessible to the layman reader,and opening up a lot of possible adventure plots. "Corporate Life" is a great section, too, bringing a lot of new color to the 6th World.

I haven't read the individual corporation entries yet, but I find the argument that Horizon is "too nice" unconvincing. When you've got ten AAAs, having all ten of them be pure evil would be boring and unrealistic. In the real world, some corporations are less evil than others, some national governments are less evil than others. And adventures that force good organizations to make hard ethical decisions can be very compelling.

And even with a nice Horizon, there's no shortage of villains in the 6th World.

And I was happy to see the release of this book as a sign of life from troubled Catalyst.

BTW, I have to ask...was the art unfinished or something? It looks like the artist didn't finish drawing in all the helicopters. And it doesn't feel like a stylistic choice either...like he left blanks he was going to fill in later and you guys didn't wait...

So, guys..you know, while I have not gotten the pdf yet, I am wondering: Is it really that bad on Horizon?
I mean, everything I read about Horizon previously scares the crap out of me. Not because I think it is a
"good guy" corp...but because I could see that happening today. Horizon is possible the most evil corp...
because no-one believes it is evil. "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making the world think he
didn't exist."

The lack of a Jackpoint login page is really kind of terrible. As a GM, I've been relying on those to determine "when" I'm getting the information from each book (i.e. when in game time is the information from the book current), which affects how I plan my metaplot. It bugged me that I didn't have that in Seattle 2072, and it bugs me even more here, since this is more of a traditional sourcebook (for lack of a better term). Were the Jackpoint login pages really all Adam?

Here's the thing... I read it and I STILL came away thinking they were downright evil, but a new kind of evil. My take on it was that they were the other side of the Aztechnology coin, but we haven't found out what their big secret is.

To expand and expound a little bit, 20 years of SR literature and metaplot have led to few concrete, recurring conclusions, but in every book through 4 editions, the following statements are true:

1.) Aztechnology is evil
2.) Aztechnology screws runners
3.) Aztechnology has a massive PR machine that keeps the public ignorant of their evil

The Horizon chapter was written from the perspective of Sunshine, a Jackpointer and KSAF investigative reporter (Note to Adam Jury: On Pg. 95, in the sidebar, its listed as KSFA. Should it be KSAF? KTHXBYE!). Sunshine spent an amount of time with the corp trying to dig up dirt, and found none. The whole chapter is a glowing review of their awesomeness and corporate responsibility. I would totally go work for them.

Except for a couple of things:

1.) The whole P2.0 system... yeah. Once people get comfortable with it, social manipulation can take place. Just like Aztech did with the Aztlan Matrix Voter system.
2.) Much mention is made, and backed up by Jackpointers, of their professionalism and honest dealing with runners. Hell, one commenter even said its hard to run AGAINST them, because you might end up blowing up bleeding edge software designed to help Autistic kids communicate and you'll feel like poop for doing it.
3.) The Dawkins Group. I don't think the naming of this group was a coincidence. Think about it. Think about what they do. And also your comment about the Devil.
4.) At the end of the chapter, after the brief discussion of "The Consensus", we are treated to an email, directly to Jackpoint, cryptically saying that (to paraphrase) "Its just a database! Its totally not an AI!" I personally don't think it IS an AI or hivemind, but then we are told that the email came directly from the office of Gary Cline (who also chearfully offers Sunshine his position at Horizon back).

My analysis:

Horizon is something or someone that has spent the better part of the last several decades carefully watching and analyzing events... Veracruz, Chicago, the Arcology, Crash 2.0... and has formulated a plan to use massive social engineering and deception to further their goals. They seem squeaky clean because the ARE. Aztechnology pretends to be, but their name is mud among the powerful and shadow community. The best way to keep anyone from discovering the skeletons in your closet is to have none. I think that they are engaged in a carefully calculated plan to build themselves up as the good guy to the world at large, perhaps even by staging runs on themselves to prove it. Once they've convinced everyone that they can do no evil, no one will believe the evil things they do.

That's just my take.

Depends on who you ask - hermit obviously is settled in his opinion that Horizon is portrayed in a too friendly way and the Writer's favourite corp, while other people around here may disagree with that.

Personally, I've always hated the whole "Corps = evil" thing.

Good and Bad are dependent on the amount of spin...
...Very Bad corps just don't work or last, look at the recent events to see that.

All corporations have good point, all corporations have bad points, all corporations are made up of people who do good and bad things.

Having all/most Corps = Bad is just lazy.

In the realworld...
..Apple is good, google is good, microsoft is bad - but they each have opposite things, too [apple = working conditions in factories; google = obsessive data mining; microsoft = charity donations].

Essentially SR megas are essentially world wide keiretsu (of various nationalities, but all the same), but it doesn't appear that any developer for SR actually has bothered to do even basic background reading on how various large corporate structures work. Instead they seem to want to pretend they are all General Electric run personally by Bill Gates because they think they understand that.

Now that is something I can buy into. That Horizon is so bad that they are good.

What's the Mitsuhama song? I mean, doesn't everyone know that all Japanese Corporations have to have a company song?

Like here

Toyota Holds Company Entrance Ceremony

Tokyo, Apr 1, 2009 - (JCN Newswire) - TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION (TMC) held its annual company entrance ceremony today in Toyota City, Aichi Prefecture, to welcome new employees to the company.

TMC Chairman Fujio Cho, President Katsuaki Watanabe, 23 other executives, five Toyota Motor Workers' Union officials and representatives from each TMC division took part in the ceremony, which was held at the Toyota Sports Center.

The 2,436 new employees present (compared to 1,973 at last year's ceremony) comprised 200 in administration, 771 in engineering, 260 in clerical fields, 1,139 in production and 66 in health-services.

The 30-minute ceremony included the appointment of new employees as official TMC employees, an address by Watanabe, the taking of the company oath and the singing of the company song.

Technically, no. If memory serves correctly, RCA used the slogan "The Future is RCA" when they were marketing the first TVs in the 1940's, plus a parody of it was used in Robocop 3 in the form of "The Future is OCP".

I thought American companies have those, too?


Yes. The whole "Horizon wins at everything!" fad is growing very tiresome. Especially if most of their their 'Revolutions" of the SR business landscape and "innovative products" have been around since VR 1 and Shadowbeat.


Did I miss where any American bank actually had to pay anthing for what they did (and, given how the cartel they formed with the rating corps works right now, still do) to the world?


Not Horizon. It doesn't have any bad points worth mentioning, which is mostly what grates me about their portrayal.


You live in a strange world, man.

No, they were all Peter (Taylor).

No other company I've ever worked for has, but my last job was with Unisys, who hired someone in the late 80s/early 90s to come up with one. It's hilariously bad. Google it.

Wait . . 6WA?
Are we not talking about Corp. Guide right now? O.o

An online magazine I read had that song featured a few months ago. Is why I thought this is as common in America as it is in Japan. Yeah, it is totally hilarious. Is this song actually used in work life there? I hope not, somehow ...

SHadow2run corps weren't (and still aren't, really) structured based on real world corps. They're modeled after the fictional Megacorps we imagined in the late 80's. OCP from the Robocop movies, and pretty much every Japanese based corporation in fiction around the same time.

Now, times have changed, and they've updated the corps a bit, and done things a bit differently with some of the newer corporations, but the fiction remains consistant because of how they were originally structured in 1st ed...

It's also a lot simpler for storytelling purposes to have the corps personified in just a few individuals. Damien Knight defines Ares. Villiers defined Novatech. They're much more interesting than a bunch of Board of Directors, and they're a lot easier for a casual fan to keep track of as well. Not everyone has Ancient History levels of minutia retention.

Bull