So I picked up Corporate Guide a couple days ago and have been reading through the various information it provides. So far I've read on Ares and Aztechnology and am 90% of the way through the chapter on Evo. As the responses in the chapter state, it's written by a fan-boy for the company and as a result, it is all very clean. Being new to the Shadowrun world, I can't see this as a possibility (you don't get to AAA without doing some underhanded things...) so I'm asking, where's the dirt on Evo?

Well, for one thing, CrashCart, their medical service that runs as competition to DocWagon in the UCAS (And elsewhere) was founded by Insect Spirits. Will that be a good start?

Wait, what? Where'd that tidbit of info come from? And whats the full story?

Oh man, back in the day...

Nigel Findley's novel, 2XS has the full details. Available in ebook form right now, so you don't even need to hunt through the used book stores to find it.

Second book I read about Shadowrun, and what sold me on the universe.

Coincidence, I came here immediately after posting that entire thing on the "official" forums.

Yeah, there's some dirt on Evo, but it's back when they were Yamatetsu. They have a free spirit on the board that no one knows a whole lot about, they jumped from Japan to Russia, and there's the whole CrashCart thing which is just a really great story you should REALLY get from the novel 2XS. One of my favorite books of all time.

They're really into transhumanism. Which some people find appealing, others find scary.

They'll be doing a lot of scary bio-research. And are you sure all test subjects are willing?

There are pretty high on the list of corps I'd suspect for human bio-drone research.

Evo and Horizon are actually notorious in-universe for having squeaky clean images, leading people to suspect they must be up to something really bad.

My campaign has Horizon as Google reborn, because you know those guys are up to something.

Something like this?

Their Mars terraforming project (mentioned in Agumentation IIRC) could be the start of something sinister. Creating a biosphere will also establish a manasphere, which could cause those mysterious pyramids and dragon skeleton on Mars to "awaken" in some way...

Yamatetsu/Evo hasn't been always playing nice, but most of it happened before 2049, or in the gap between 2064 and 2070.

Yamatetsu originally was the merger of Japanese and Filipino companies in 2032. During the 2040ies, the Japanese conspired against their Filipino partners to take full control of the company. That was probably not nice.

The free spirit Buttercup, a shareholder of Yamatetsu, had Yamatetsu endorcing a policy toward metahumans slightly nicer than other Japanese corporations. In 2059, Buttercup and Yuri Shibanojuki seized control of the company from the Japanese traditionalists. It is more or less suggested Buttercup may have hasted the death of Yuri's father, chairman of the board Tadamako Shibanojuki, after he suffered a stroke.

After the second crash, between 2064 and 2066, a number of Japanese executives acted on their own behalf. In Turkestan, they tried to overthrow the government (Corporate Guide talks about an "open war", ignoring the three golden rules of the Corporate Court as defined in Corporate Download). In Poland, they helped members of the Rybinski regime to loot the country before leaving power. But Yuri Shibanojuki quickly cleaned up the house. However, it seems Yamatetsu/Evo Naval Technologies, which was created by Yuri with Yamatetsu naval forces and Russian former military, is under control from the Japanese traditionalist faction.

That's bizarre. I'd figure that CGL would give some tidbits or something to just keep people guessing, but by saying "nope, they're cool. completely cool. don't worry about it!" without any reason *to* worry about it seems strange to me.

It makes us jump to our own conclusions...

Exactly, they know their public and know that fans of shadowrun will just assume some big nasty on the event horizon. Then they get to plunder our ideas for metaplot hooks.

Yeah, but with more mind control. I'm scared shitless of The Consensus. I betcha t's brains in jars or something akin to The Attic from Dollhouse.

It's what I'd do. You get the best of options from a variety of sources from some rather imaginative people, and get to smile when someone gets to crow, "I WAS RIGHT!"

Or, if you don't like any of the other ideas, you just go with your own, and make like Jim Butcher.

Jim Butcher is AWESOME

He's also a complete and total bastard.

I made the mistake of reading the first chapter of "Ghost Story" online yesterday...

What is wrong with that one? Book 3 of the Dresden Files, right? Just finished it, and I actually liked it.

Book 13 of The Dresden Files. The one that's coming out later this year.

Changes left it at a cliffhanger, and I really, really, REALLY wanted to know what the light at the end of the tunnel really was.

Sorry... Saw "Ghost" and thought Grave Peril. My apologies.

First chapter of Ghost Story is online on his website. Tells you precisely what that the light is right off the bat.

Honestly... gonna read it, but that first chapter teaser has me worried.

Just a freight train comin' your way?

Hey hey, yeah?

...

I'll have to go read that tonight. Side Jobs was decent,but I'm finding it to really only be worthy of a single read. Changes is worth multiple.

Seconded. Ghost Story can't come out soon enough.

I loved the Side Jobs story with Murphy leading ^_^

I thought Jim Butcher was doing a bad job writing as a female until I realized... "Murphy is a woman thinking as a man due to her job.". I had new admiration for him after that.

Murphy is a very believable character once you realize that.

He also had his wife (a romance/paranormal romance writer herself) help him find the voice according to interviews.

He writing for Evo now?

Now that I would pay good money to see



Hell can I vote for a cross over Dresden, Nightside and Shadorrun book?

That would either be so awesome it would make your head explode or so bad it would be banned under the geneva convention.

I dunno if he still plays, but if I run into him in City of Heroes again I'll ask if he'd consider writing for Shadowrun.*








-k

*- Yes, that's really his character. He has specific permission from NCSoft to play that character in the game.

He's on Twitter. I'll ask him next time he's doing an impromptu Q&A on there (might be a bit since he's probably taking a break having just finished Ghost Story). Plus his schedule's kinda full right now according to him. I'm sure he has an opinion on Shadowrun seeing as the Dresden books feel a lot like Shadowrun without the tech and he's a gamer himself. Getting Butcher to write for Shadowrun would probably bring the game back to the Findley/Hume/Dowd glory days of the metaplot...

Back on topic, Evo is only bright and shiny for the last 10 years or so in-game. Before that, they were second only to Universal Omnitech in terms of icky inhuman medical experiments. Plus the bug thing didn't help.

That is SO AWESOME!

And here's something else that goes over my head. My library sucks. Who's Jim Butcher?

(Cue jaws hitting ground, undoubtedly.)

Author of the Dresden files. If you haven't read them, do so. Now.

Jim Butcher also took two really bad ideas, and turned them into a killer series.

The Lost Roman Legion, and Pokemon. Combined.

I don't follow, and I've read the books.

The Codex Alera series is a combination of The Lost Roman Legion and Pokemon. He wrote it on a dare. (Or a bet. I can't remember which.)

He won.

Heh. Haven't read those ones. Any good?

I bought them one after another. In less than a month. During a time when I had a hard time reading due to various... Issues.

You tell me.

I see *visits the library web site*

I love living in the second-busiest library system in the US ^_^

No megacorp is nice. Even if they aren't doing something monumentally evil like consorting with insect spirits (Ares) or running technomancer server farms/concentration camps (MCT), they still engage in wide-scale criminal activity with lots of black ops thrown in, for the silliest of reasons. Corporations in general are amoral and profit-obsessed by nature, and only play nice when compelled to do so by the law. And the only laws binding Shadowrun megacorps are those they make themselves.

You know how everyone says Horizon is "too nice to be true"? On the Run, the very first SR4 adventure, published right after the corebook, had a Horizon executive send at least one well-armed hit team after a music album, very likely because it was cheaper than just buying it.

As for dirt on EVO, they have a big military/research arcology in Hong Kong, from which they run the city's coast guard, which is practically a Vory subsidiary.

This makes that series so much more appealing to me. I'm kinda allergic to high fantasy. As much as I love Dresden, I really don't like high fantasy.

Better. An internet bulletin board argument

Seriously?

Wait... You're saying Jim Butcher did the absolute impossible... He won the INTERNET?

he was having an internet bboard argument with someone who told him that if your premise was trite and crap there was no way to make a good story out of it. And that with a good premise, even an idiot could write a good book.

Jim said he could take any bad premise, and turn it into something good, hell.. give him 2 bad ideas, and he could turn them into smoething good.


So the guys said.. Oh yeah..
I bet you can't write a decent story involving the Lost Roman Legion, it's been done to death and it sucks. I hate all stories involving the Lost Roman Legion.

So butcher says:

Okay.. what's the second bad premise.

The guy answers:

Pokemon.


And thus a New York Times best selling series was born.

So thats pretty much it? Crashcart was started by an Insect Spirit group...? Well I'm disappointed with the writers now ... And now it looks like I have some reading to do