So, the fact that Ares ships SK-made weapons does not concern you, huh.

Hey, No need for me to "Troll" as you put it. I like the review you have provided. No complaints.
Oh, and welcome back...

Not really. Ares has a distribution network for weapons systems that S-K doesn't have a market share in. S-K makes it's money, Ares makes it's money, it shows that Megas can work together, keeps John and Jane Q. Wageslave happy that the world is a happy, stable place.

Oh, oh great, the arguing twins are back.

Not needed.

Cause it makes total sense to ship your most bitter competitor's wares. Rrrright.

So they ship the stuff they already know about, and not the cutting edge stuff. More market availability, more profit.

Also, maybe Ares is getting the items that are close to "Factory Seconds" and S-K is selling the quality stuff as a quiet way of proving their own superiority of their distribution network.

And maybe the CEO Dragon has a plan within a plan within a plan within an enigma that we don't understand. He does run the WHOLE company after all, unlike a lot of other Megas which have too many divisions making various deals left, right, and center.

And, alternatively, perhaps they wanted something from Ares, and that was the price of the deal, availability to certain items for their catalog.

Actually it does, Ares Arms is an organized arms dealer corp and as such sell anythink and everythink they can get their hands on.
I would think that you would be more distreped by the fact that the Ares catalog actually has more vehicles from Aztechnology then the Dassault catalog has.


That not a mistake, at least not from the part of this products writers, Esprit is listed as an Aztechnology subsidiary in Corporate Guide.
Also it Dassault catalogue, not Esprit.

Corp Guide was written by the same people. I am more thinking of Shadows of Europe and the general idea of the France setting. But that seems to be overturned in favor of another instance of boring and rather unealistic donkey economics.



Doesn't make much sense really, but they have done this, for whatever reason, since Street Samurai Catalogue (Steyr is an SK subsidiary, Walther too, and H&K was at that point). Ares also sells SCK guns, which are produced by Renraku. So, while this is profoundly weird, it is at least weird with a long history in SR canon. Maybe it's more profitable to sell their stuff that way than not at all?

Market saturation. Ares Arms has a good grip on a lot of things.

Weapon's World will sell weapons from any arms manufacturer, and they're owned by Ares as well.

If I was given a penny every time someone wrote on DSF Saeder-Krupp had ownership of Heckler & Koch in the past ten years, I think I would have... hmm, 15 pennies or so, maybe 20. Yet, I still have to see an actual page reference for this, because I never found one myself.
Monobe International got Weapons World back. See Corporate Guide, page 213.

*Blinks* HOW???

I mean, that was a major plum for Ares!

Ah well, it's the Stuffer Shack of Weapons, so...

No it wasn't.

H&K started out with Ruhrmetall (Germany Sourcebook p. 19), where it remained until the more recent books. That H&K is part of SK was dropped either in Target: ADL or in SOX. Don't have those as pdf, so I can't whip up a page just like that. But even if they are with ruhrmetall, SK owns 20% of that company too.


It was written by the current generation of authors. Unlike Shadows of Europe and France, which weren't.

Millspectech, has only one writer listed and that guy had nothing to do with Corporate Guide, so you can't say he made a mistake with Esprit being a Aztechnology subsidiary, as he was going by the latest info on corps.

Fair enough, I was assuming there was any kind of coordination at CGL.

Dunno if CGL, Jason Hardy and a lack of coordination is to blame - it's possible that none of the Corporate Guide-writers wanted to to work on Milspechtech at all.

Given that the pay rate for PDF-only releases is less per word than print publication, I think that's a safe bet.

Probably, given the pay rate, but why can't they TALK to each other? It's not like this changes what they are paid.

Blame the writer then. And partly Jason, ok.

I'd be happy to get anything for my work, actually... But, then, I'm just a hack of a writer...

NERPS News!

This just in; dysfunctional company is still dysfunctional.

Tune in at 11 for our exclusive interview with the Right Hand, where he tells all about Left Hand's issues, what drove them apart and about moving on.

PIRATE NEWS! VOLUME SO YOU CAN HEAR OVER THE CORPORATE SHILLS!

Private interview with the left buttock at 2300 hours!

I apologize for making Corporate Guide and MilSpecTech agree with each other re: Esprit. I also apologize for letting the hook presented in Shadows of Europe, where Esprit's chairman had possible Aztechnology connections, play out in the intervening 10 in-game years.

Jason H.

Whut, there seems to be pretty good coordination inside CGL as far as millspectech is concerned, after all esprit is in it correctly represented as a Aztechnoloy company, as per the Corporate guide's subsidiary list.

Yeah, self-referencing starts to work.


Dunkelzahn also had Aztechnology connections, that doesn't make the DF a subsidiary of Aztech, does it?

Good start though. Maybe some words on War?

Good to see you're still trolling, Jason. And kudos on the metaplot work. A good hand on that sort of thing is important to the setting of Shadowrun.

More important would be making sure the products are compelling and the mechanics are accurate and proofed. Basically it's like you got the floor mats right, but otherwise you're driving a beat up Civic and calling it a Corvette. But I'm glad to see that you're making an effort on something people thought was out of your reach.

To be fair (What? Us?), we do have the bar set rather high.

...

OK, that's me being nice for the year.

Well, if War! had been of the quality of MilSpecTech, it wouldn't have sucked quite as badly as it did (it would even have been it's money's worth probably, though this makes a lot of guesses on things like maps and the absence of retarded plots). It also seems to have been written by someone who knows what English words are supposed to look like, even complicated ones such as 'carnivorous' and 'cells'.

In case that is too subtle too, I think MilSpec Tech is a decent pdf. With the $ as lowly rated as it is, it's even a decent deal.

Autocorrect is your friend.

That's what I wondered, too.

It's also your worst enemy if it keeps correcting slang.

Or you chose the wrong word with the list of options, of course. And it does nothing for grammar, which I've always sucked at, despite calling myself a writer.

'Course, I usually add "Hack" to that statement, so...

You, sir, should be ashamed!

That's what proofreading is for.
Oh wait, we're talking CGL here.

This is also me we're talking about here. I've had stuff up for years that hasn't seen an editor's pen.

Of course, that changes with my latest piece of work... Which is giving me conniption fits, BTW.

Yeah, one of my fellow IRC players is a beginner editor, and I asked for his help.
Sometimes I wish I didn't :3

Esprit Industries was one of the three French megacorporations. It regularly played a role in the French settings, in French additional content for Runner Havens and Corporate Enclaves, in French-German joint sourcebook SOX and in the French campaign Mauvais Présage. I heavily used Esprit Industries in my games for the past ten years. I should mention I am the one who imagined this Esprit/Aztechnology connection back in 1999 (along with a much stronger Esprit/Saeder-Krupp, should I add), before I joined the EuroSB team that would ultimately publish Shadows of Europe.

I think I can say I find regrettable that such change get 27 signs, not even a single sentence. Corporate Guide on page 69 (in the same chapter) actually says Aztechnology subsidiary compete with Esprit. I can't say if the author of the Lone Star section, page 202, was aware of the change when he put Esprit as the ninth biggest security provider in the world.

I have no need for a stronger word than "regrettable". Am I mad at this ? No. The very nature of a multiple-authors universe asks you to respect the work of others, no matter how good or bad it objectively can be (here, I'll allow myself to snipe at a number of past and present authors, involved in official content as well fan-made material, and add that respect start by reading and reading again what the other made before you).
So I scraped everything I had in mind involving Esprit Industries, and returned to work. I started just a few weeks ago a campaign (set in 2072) that will follow events leading to Esprit takeover by Aztechnology. I am not going to let my pet corp going away in 27 signs.

Were you involved with SR France? IIRC, the Aztech/ESPRIT connection is mentioned there, too.

No, I wasn't. France, page 52 and 53, suggests Esprit Industries would be under the influence of either Saeder-Krupp or Ares Macrotechnology, with a user comment guessing Damien Knight may own some shares.

A few years later, Jon Szeto (IIRC) in Rigger 3, page 19, made GIAT Industries a subsidiary of Saeder-Krupp. In France, GIAT was the original company upon which Esprit was built. So, we went with the S-K connection in Shadows of Europe (which, among other things, helped making Lofwyr control of Europe a bit more subtle than just everything being a subsidiary of S-K).

Ah, Ares. Thanks.

I remember not that long ago when it was a basic assumption that every company had ties somewhere to one of the megacorps, whether it was overt (like them outright owning the company) or covert (owned through a bunch of shell corporations, possibly witha misdirect somewhere in there pointing toward some other megacorp owning it).

10 Companies own 99.9% of the world was a Shadowrun basic premise. Should still be.

I can grok that.

But does it always have to be Aztechnology

No.

But they're the ones that have a tendency of getting caught by Shadowrunners.

The rest are better at subtle. Aztechnology is just sloppier than the rest due to arrogance. They do OWN a expansionist country after all.

Again, remember, all the stuff we're reading is NOT public knowledge, and would be rejected by the masses without extensive evidence! The other Megas (Well, maybe not Horizon) would be more accepted as having "Dirty Practices" going on than AZT.

Behold, the power of cheese... Er, I mean, PR.

Here's the question I always like asking players: When was the last time you heard of Shiawase doing anything scummy? Does that mean they don't do scummy things? So why haven't you ever heard of them being bastards?

Because IMO, Shiawase is the slowest and steadiest of the AAA megacorps doing terrible shit.

They're masters of misdirection and the art of "Thou Shalt Not Get Caught".

Edit: You know, that's another possibility... Some of the stuff that Aztechnology is getting blamed for in the Shadows might be misdirection. The Corporate Court knows the Bad Stuff AZT is up to, and it makes them the perfect fall-guy to point the Shadow Community at.

It makes sense in a twisted way that Corporators think in.

I thought that would be Horizon, but then again, they are the corp who actually does NOT DO SCUMMY THINGS. Canonically.

Besides, the 10 Megas own everything vanished with the first european books, and smacks of a very ... distasteful ... world view. I don't like it. The world shouldn't really be that simple. Just like not every setting should be made into a McCorpcity.

Eh, Horizon's so new that I can forgive not knowing shit about them. Shiawase's existed since 2nd edition - maybe even 1st, I don't recall - and I've never seen word one about anything underhanded they've ever done.

It was the Shiawase Decision that first established extraterritoriality, actually, so timeline wise they're the first mega. Slow and steady definitely describes them well, since they're the game's stereotypical zaibatsu down to the core. Lots of in-fighting, but they'll still close ranks and turn on you in a heartbeat if your gaijin ass tries stirring up trouble for them.

No, theey really DO mean well. The main idea for the Horizon runs was to have them fuck up badly anyway. Pity these runs now seem to have been changed into running a Horizon-sponsored Aztech smear campaign where a public who watches LETHAL COMBT WITH WEAOPONS OF WAR as the next saturday night special is outraged about Aztech shooting tribals.

Because the fun really stops if they're indigenous tribals. Everyone loves indigenous tribals. Especially in the UCAS.

Considering UCAS exists because of shooting indigenous tribals in the first place and they retaliated by blowing up mountains, I can see UCAS supporting Yucatan or at least try to make Aztlan stop the fight before they decide to do an Improved Ghost Dance that blows up half the continent...