Did it ever happen? Did I miss that day in history class? No? Oh that's right. It STILL Has never happened. The THREAT of nukes is one thing. Nuking your own country is another. Noone's ever done it. And as has been pointed out even in these insane "oh it was the plan" proposals, they would be targeted at huge advancing armys. Not citys of your own people that may harbor a few 100 to 1000 terrorists amist 1000s to 100,000s of your own people. It's not the same thing. It's absurd.



Because at the time Magic was an unknown military force multiplier that could not be easily contained. When Howling coyote walked out of the detention camps troops were emptying machine guns at him and the bullets just bounced off. Then they blew up multiple volcanoes across the us. They basically stepped up and went 'We have a new super-weapon YOU DON'T HAVE. Do what we say or we'll F you up"

The US couldn't say they COULDN'T do it, and after the GGD demonstration, they couldn't risk it.

And summoned hurricanes to take down birds and jets, earthquakes to destroy warehouses, etc.
Until then, it was basically a weird new weapon used against military targets. When they went "berserker" they pretty leveled 4 cities with volcanoes and hit civilian targets. It was basically the same thing the US did with Japan in WW2. And after Japan had recovered from the war they did not went against the US for revenge and japanese people are crazy

Japan has been systematically underminding the US's industrial complex since WWII ended.

They went after us for Revenge. They just did it the slow, safe way.

Or they did until the '80's, when their recession hit and never really went away. Now their population is dying off faster than they can replenish it.

Yeah.. Overinflated economy based on housing prices is a bitch...

Thank God we learned from their Mistakes..

oh..

Wait.

We learned how to do it better.

For varying degrees of 'better'.

I would have said we learned how to do it more hardcore

That truly is the american way, uh? Get what other people do but do it faster, harder, stronger.

Somethings might be better off not duplicated

just saying.

We're in for 10 years of economic nothing.. at least.

Doesn't help that your President doesn't seem to understand how the economy or international trade works. But as a Canadian that just means more of the pie for us!

Can we shut up about politics please.

*Shrugs* Beats the three pages of Internet Tough Guy warrrgarbl about nuking/gassing half the country.

Real life political discussions violate the terms of service agreement and get threads locked. Internet tough guy "what if" nonsense about using WMD's on fake countries doesn't.

You're right, it's what got the last NAN thread locked, it's frustrating to read at times, and the inevitable return to TOS-breaking topics like that is part of my reasoning that NAN threads should just be banned as a whole in the first place. Still, I would prefer it to ITG drek.

I don't think I've ever seen a NAN thread that had anything interesting in it. Sorry if my comment offended anyone.

Feel free to go back to discussions of ethnic cleansing. Yikes.

Sadly, sometimes i wonder why i return to dumpshock as it seems very little is actually new (maybe because very little in the books released lately is anything new).

Like the SR writers did with NAN?

A hit, a Palpable hit.

Yeah, whatever. As I said, feel free to cut the NAN out of your game, but that won't convince me you're playing Shadowrun.

and?

And what? I've already said my pieces. I posted already a few pages ago backing up that specific statement as to why I think that, and I've also had a post in the previous one that lined out where I thought the population movement could be considered feasible. (IIRC, only about 35 or so million had to get moved in the areas, and that's not taking any out for the countries that were lax on the anti-Anglo) . If you guys are going to get glib with one-sentence posts, then I figured I'd just follow suit. Otherwise this argument is getting tiring.

You hate the NAN. Fine. I'm completely disturbed by the casualness you use when talking about using nerve gas or a nuke, to be honest, more than the idea you hate a fictional creation.

So me thinking of trying to wipe out a group of individuals who have ordered me to dissolve and abandon my country, under pain of genocide is "CRAZY", but someone leveling a city without warning, trying to start a nuclear war, and erupting 4 volcanoes is perfectly "A-ok".... Yes I can totally see where you are coming from.

To begin with, I never said you were crazy. You quoted my entire last post, and the only one calling you crazy is you. All I said was I was disturbed how quickly you reached for the mass murder option, whether it would affect civilians not involved in the conflict or not. Not to mention you're also using "a group of individuals who have ordered me" making me think you're taking this entire NAN thing a little bit personally; also disturbing.

And in either post, have I ever defended the IC actions that created the NAN? Not entirely. I'll defend the creation of them from a story perspective, the plot can seem a bit feasable given what people have been trying to say time and time again, but I'm not going "hey mass murder on either side is groovy". Yes, my sympathies are with Natives anyway being part myself, but I wouldn't approve of something like that.

I never called you crazy. I called speech like yours "Internet Tough Guy wargarrbl", but I've never called you crazy.

I do not like the NAN because they do NOT make sense. Let's face it, the NAN would have had to have Magic Braves™ coming out of their ass to keep their gains after the GGD ended.

Acme, FASA just took EVERY stereotype in the world and said "Yeah... that would be cool to add to our new game!"

Examples of FASA uber-stupidity (not a complete list):

1. Mexico turning back to Aztec in less than 60 years.
2. Japan turning back into a Empire with the ability to wage war.
3. California getting handed over to Japan.
4. The Union and the Confederacy live again!
5. Europe imploding to such a degree that you have anarchy.

They also make a Super Faction in their game systems. BattleTech had the Clans and Shadowrun had the Elves of the various flavors of Tir. These elves can do things that normal humans can't do.

Sorry Acme, FASA took one too many stupid pills when they made the fluff for Shadowrun.

Well that's your opinion, KC. You can play the game with whatever you decide, as I've said before. There have been several people giving their opinions of how it could work, but meh, right. I stand behind my opinions. If you don't like the fluff, then fine, but the fluff is part of Shadowrun.

I feel just fine about cutting the stupid out of a game and still playing the good parts that are left. If you want to balkanize north america, fine, I can think of a dozen reasons to do it which don't need 'magical genocidal natives'.

As far as things that disturb people go however....
You're disturbed I would use a personal pronoun to describe why my theory of mind would not allow a ridiculous conclusion to be reached by rational people?
You're disturbed that I would consider using any means to defend myself against genocide?
You feel that talk about using high levels of force to defend ones self against genocide is "Internet Tough Guy wargarrbl"?
You feel that the entire country of Canada would disband... when the primary points of contention the NAN have are with U.S. government actions and policy is reasonable? And that I would right tooth and nail to keep my country under such circumstances is disturbing?

I'm disturbed by a few things too....
I'm disturbed by the fact you are sympathizing with those who attempted to incite nuclear war....
I'm disturbed by the fact you are sympathizing with those who blew up an entire city without warning....
I'm disturbed by the fact you are sympathizing with those who blew up 4 separate volcanoes......
I'm disturbed by the fact you are sympathizing with those who threatened to commit genocide against everyone not belonging to a certain race living in my country unless we all moved.....
I'm disturbed by the fact you feel I should not respond to use of WMD's and threats of genocide with every and any available means.....
I'm disturbed by the fact you have this mysterious double standard where natives using wmd's is just fine but me doing so is "Internet Tough Guy wargarrbl"......

You know what, Mord? Then just cut it from your game. That's fine, that's all I've ever said. I'm not forcing you to play with something you don't agree with.

You know what disturbs me most of all? That you're taking this way too seriously, way too far. It's a fragging game. A FRAGGING GAME. You're taking me out of fragging context, you're warping my words, all but calling me a terrorist, OVER A GORRAM GAME. It's a story, it's words on a page.

I hope I never meet you at a game at a con, because I don't care if Arneson and Gygax themselves came back from the dead to run it alongside Weisman and Charette and everyone was getting free signed Universal Brotherhood books. I would get up and walk away.

Otherwise I'm done with talking to you. I'm ashamed to be in the same hobby as you.

This posting is just an example of way too many that discuss RL politics. Stop that, please.

So you spend several posts saying how deeply I disturb you, and all but calling me a psychopath, and suddenly I'm the one who's insulting..... That's.... interesting.

You say things like

and somehow I'm taking your words out of context when I say that you sympathize with them? I'm sorry, but the best synonym for sympathy I have is sympathy. I never said you approved of their actions? and I sure as hell didn't call you a terrorist. I simply pointed out that saying camp a can use WMD's and genocide to fight for their homeland, but camp b can not is problematic. Besides, if me pointing out the inequalities of your statements makes you embarrassed to play the same game I do, try to imagine how you'd feel if I'd only said

Now only imagine that what you may have felt about me if I had actually said that, I could very well feel about you right now because you did.

Let's just take a chill pill and come back to this thread a later time, otherwise it may get closed and/or people being temporarily or permanently banned.

Problem with every discussion about NAN is that we look at it from eyes many years past the time when SR was being writern and the trends/poltics/economics etc that FASA used, manipulated, and took OTT to create their game. We look at what they did without remembering what exactly lead them to make the design choices they did.

NAN like Megacorps extraterritorality was a cool idea at the time- however now both look damm silly compared to how the world turned out, but they are both part of the offical game. Don't like them? Ignore them but they are part of the setting no matter how daft it might be.

Strikes me that there are plently of good runs to be had in the why's and wherefores of how North America fell apart- was it a conspiracy? was it simply dumb, paniked Humans? was it a war America lost? good stuff there if you want to use it. but only if you want to.

Besides- how bothered are your SINless Runners about what is frankly ancient history?

Mord,

There's a difference between "sympathizing" and "imagining".

I personally have zero emotional feelings about the subject at all. It's a piece of speculative fiction. In a roleplaying game. A story. That's all.

I dunno about you, but I can argue both sides of most conversations.

I just happen to be able to imagine and rationalize how the world presented in Shadowrun might have logically occurred. That given that the US government was at the time weak, and they were faced with a group, of unknown capabilities and limitations, that have at the very LEAST demonstrated apparent "impossible" nation-destroying abilities, they MIGHT have backed down.

Not that they WOULD have backed down. Just MIGHT. It's a possibility. Not the ONLY possibility, but can see it happening.

I did not say at any point that the story as presented is the ONLY possible route the "future history" might have taken. I can just as easily imagine everything going very badly the other way, with the US retaliating and a ton of bloodshed.

Maybe it's just the way my mind works. I cannot really think, when speculating, in terms of "X can ONLY happen in this way." I need to consider other possibilities.

All I, and I think the others, are saying is: "I think it's possible, and here's why."

Is this all that big a reason to get angry about it?



-k

I don't actually recall saying I was angry at all. My choice of words and phrases were chosen to best reflect the impression I was receiving from them, using the words they chose as often as possible to emphasize how untenable I thought their point was.

I mean lets start off with your analysis of the situation. You as I seem to be of the opinion that the U.S. was the one at war with NAN, yet for some reason it was virtually the entire nation of Canada that was given over to NAN, a nation which wasn't even part of the conflict. Does that even make sense? Since Canada didn't have the issues with NAN that the U.S. did I don't even see them being involved in the conflict.

Tack both the threats and acts of genocide, and you start to quickly have a political entity which would have lost all popular support among anyone not deemed to be insane. Even the rest of the first nations populations would likely be against them because of the damage these people are doing, the threat of retaliation, and the fact that at least some of the land damaged in the volcanic eruptions would have belonged to them.

The simple fact remains there most of the first nations wouldn't actually be put in the camps because making a camp for 4 million people takes a fairly long time, and is really hard to do as a knee jerk reaction. Tack on the fact that many of the cities they were threatening to blow up actually have native and metis inhabitants, and I'm really seeing no political backing of any sort. Of the ~4% of the population that is native, I would hardly see them having support from more then 5% of that, of that 1% is magically active, and of that only a small fraction are actually mages. Of that even fewer will have a high enough magic score, enough skill with ritual and blood magic, and enough initiations for the needed metamagics for a ritual like that..... and most of them would have died doing it the first time.

Add to this the idea that somehow the first nations had fully awoken to their full magical potential, but no one else who practices any other form of mysticism in north america had yet..... despite the fact I happen to personally know people who take the whole magic, and casting of luck charms thing very seriously, and everything drives so far down the path of improbability as to vanish to a point on the horizon.

There you go, NAN happened because the Illuminati and Knights Templar got together and helped pull political strings to allow them to break off without inciting full war, and their influence continued to keep them from being nuked immediately afterward. Now some 60 years later, they are simply accepted, and nuking them would be like nuking Afghanistan now.

Same goes for corp extraterritor and all the other stuff that doesn't make sense.

Hm. I guess I was going off the word "sympathizing" because it's a weasel buzzword. I avoid it myself because it implies an emotive component that tends to cloud the issue.

I also think mentioning using nukes or poison gas weakened your arguments, because it causes people to focus on those instead of your main point, that there would be opposition. Might have been better to just assert that there would have be retaliation or force applied without specifying the form, because the form is more or less irrelevant.

I was referring to the US because it was the biggest opposition involved. I meant everyone that was in opposition to the NAN folks.

I guess I happen to think that "fear of the unknown" might play a bigger role in capitulation than you do.

It's not "just" a new weapon. It's a paradigm shift. And at the time, nobody knew what it was capable of.

You simply don't attack an enemy blind. The US (and yes the other governments) didn't really know ANYTHING about what the NAN folks could do.

Personally, I don't think it would have been as bloodless as the books make it out to be. I expect there would have been period of local resistance and some attempts by the governments to probe the NAN defenses.

But I do think it's possible the governments, facing destruction that they can't seem to be able to stop, might have eventually capitulated.

Almost certainly the NAN would not have had much popular support. So they would have had to resort to the other major way governments have used to control the populace, at least at first. Fear.

Lastly, I reject the use of the word "improbable". It's fiction. Anything is possible.



-k

Not for nothing, but this part's been tackled in some of the fluff.

Thais, half-monster child of Aina (one of the Immortal Elves), was responsible for teaching the Ghost Dance rituals to Wovoka, a Teton Sioux prophet/shaman. This led to Wounded Knee, in real life, as in Shadowrun's history...but establishes as canon that the Sioux had some "insider knowledge" going, where genuinely magically potent -- not just believed to be potent -- rituals were concerned. So then a couple hundred years later, Howling Coyote (established in canon as a direct descendant of Wovoka) tries it again with the same chanting and dance moves, and voila. We've got the mana level just high enough for it to work, crazy Thais's crazy ritual does the trick this time, and the mojo's back.

So there's an in-game reason, at least, that the NAN-to-be folks knew what they were doing, when all us paleface types didn't (no matter how seriously some of those palefaces take Wicca or the Asatru or whatever). The Sioux were a-cheatin', 'cause they had an inside man show 'em the steps before the music started playing.

Given how "personal" magic is in SR I just can't buy that. Anyone who could have awoken at that time would have done so already. Given Seatle has a population of ~ 500K, with 1% awakened, and maybe 1/10 of them being mages, that means about 500 awoken people with the capacity to counter spell would have existed at the time of the attack on mount reineer. assume they all had only 1 die in it, defaulting from magic, or paranoia or whatnot, and over the course of the ATLEAST 12 hours it took to perform the ritual look at the mountain and feel bad about it. That's about 150 dice worth of teamwork counterspelling.....
edit math error.

Wait. Who attempted to incite nuclear war?
And Who Blew up an entire city with out warning?

I used it because they did.


However given the threat has used WMD level weapons, they are infact an appropriate response should collections of enemy personnel ever be located.


And the whole thing started over a land dispute in the US when land was given to an oil company....


Fear tends to result in violent backlashes far more often then capitulation.


The problem is even most of the natives in north america would hate them for what they've done, not just the "everyone else they just threatened to murder, and then kicked out".


Probable is of paramount importance in fiction. It deals with what is likely and believable. If I am required to suspend my disbelief too much, then whatever you put to paper will likely be crap.

The Lone Eagle Incident.

NAN, the lone eagle incident, and the destruction of Los Alamos

You can buy it or not all you want to, I'm just saying it's there in the canon.

At least there's been a proverbial bone tossed out there, besides just "LOL they're Indians, of course they know magic!" If some of 'em got told exactly how to do it right back in 1890 or so, it at least helps smooth it over a little bit as an explanation of why they were "ahead of the game" if they kept those exact traditions alive over the intervening years.

There are points I want to address but really they were all gone over in the thread NAN Fading already ... oh wait, that is locked, I guess discussion can't keep going there. Huh, when did that happen... Poor Grinder, that mod warned several times it seemed. Darn you SR for when IRL politics seems to relate/mix with the fictional politics.

Oh well, despite this thread asking how the fictional SR population boom happened, doesn't seem like anyone minds we are no longer addressing that and just rehashing what IMHO is irrational hatred for a essential part of the SR fictional history. It comes across a bit like hating the fictional futures Marty Mcfly would end up in in Back To The Future or alternate earths the characters in Sliders would end up in.

Besides, its fiction, if you don't like it, change it if you are the GM. SR 2073 - UCAS invades NAN member state with the backing of Ares, sparks of Western Hemisphere War when Aztechnology and Aztlan get involved and...

Whatever. Sometimes I think certain posters are just trying to get any thread about NAN locked, I'm just saying. Its getting old hating on other's fiction when we could just be making our own fan fiction.

It explains the knowledge of the ritual yes, but not how it remained perfectly intact to a culture that uses oral histories for 120 years, or how the rest of the planet was completely unaware the awakening had actually occurred.

My dislike if this part of SR canon is quite rational I asure you. Some of those alternate earth's I actually was rather unimpressed with however...



Who say's we're not?

I'm sorry Karma, but if someone used WMD, then the appropriate respose is to hit them with EVERYTHING you got. FASA just wanted to have NAN. No other reason for it. Just like Mexico and the Aztecs... I mean really?

Right, they just wanted stuff...and, uhh, they got it. Twenty-plus years ago.

So what's the good in griping about it now? I guess that's the thing that confuses me about how vitriolic these NAN threads invariably get -- it's there. It's been there for longer than some Shadowrun players have been alive. NAN's there, Azzies are there, the Japanese Empire is there! All the zaniness that the old school writers threw together, letting the Rule of Cool steer the ship, is there, and has been there since day one.

So why complain about it now, twenty years after the fact? Why let these threads get so heated, why have the "but they shouldn't be there!" side always seem to angry about it, when it's two decades too late to matter? Why not just roll with it, love the game for what it is, and move on?

Fair enough.




They aren't just WMDs.

Magic, as demonstrated, were as far above WMDs as WMDs were to conventional weapons at the end of WW2.

The government had already seen that weapons didn't appear to affect the NAN folks at all when they walked out of that prison. Machine guns and other weapons just bounced off some magic shield.

There as no equal footing here. That makes a difference. When the enemy seems to have massively superior abilities just attacking them is simply unwise.

It's not "They have weapons and we have weapons". It was "They have godlike powers and we have... weapons."




Violent backlashes occur when the people reacting think they have a chance to accomplish anything. When people still have hope.

For fear to work you have to break people. Make them lose hope.

Which is why I did say there would be a period of resistance initially.

But when people's heads keep exploding just because they spoke out too loudly, well, a lot of folks will tend to back down.




If it's not believable, that just means it wasn't sufficiently explained or was just poorly constructed.

If your argument was "it was written badly", I could agree with you.

I just can't agree with "it can't happen".



-k

So your answer is to kill everyone to get at the rather minute percentage of people you're targeting? They wern't all bunched up in a targetable army you know. They were mixed in with the population. How do you sick a WMD on them in retaliation with out killing many multitudes MORE of your own people.

*Shakes head* The 'knee jerk kid answer' is rarely the right one. Nations don't actually act like this.

The US used nukes twice and that ended alot of hostility because of what it represented.

The NAN did the same thing. They used the GGD to demonstrate the power they COULD unleash. It was enough to cowl the nations at the time so significantly they dare not TRY and retaliate.

When we nuked Japan you remember their response? you remember the WORLD's response? The world didn't rise up against the US and trounce us. They all sat down and STFU. The NAN had a weapon that not only seemed to dwarf Nukes, but couldn't be detected, couldn't be countered and wasn't understood. It's like aliens suddenly appeared and were helping out. (( Not that they were, but the magic the NAN used was of that large a step from what anyone else had))

Even now in 2073 'modern' SR. No other nation has done anything remotely as big as the Nan pulled off with the GGD. That is the 'lingering' reason that the NAN still exists. They still hold that "I WIN BUTTON".

See what I mean about the inclusion of nukes and gas weakening your argument, Mord?

Your main thrust seems to be, "There's no way they would surrender land to the NAN without a fight."

Why dilute that with mention of nukes?

It's a buzzword that will inevitably cause people to focus on that instead of your main argument.

It's the same reason you don't bring up a certain faction from WW2 in any argument. It distracts and derails the conversation.



-k