Thanks.

Yep, Page 67, Artifacts.

"> All right, chummer, you asked for it. As I mentioned before, Hound Dog is an old shaman I know, but he doesn’t talk too much about his religion or totem or whatever. He’ll tell you how great the King is all day long, but the rest seems to be a personal thing for him. Met him back in ’62, but it wasn’t the first time I’d heard of the First Church of Elvis. That came back in ’57, from a posting on Shadowland. Capt. Chaos vouched for the poster, a runner named Shade, so the info was apparently at least semivalid. If you’re lucky, you can find uncorrupted versions of the post kicking around ShadowSEA and the Denver Data Haven. Fortunately, I save everything, so I still have it stored away somewhere. Let me dig it up.
> Bull

> You guys are ancient! I was born in ’57!
> /dev/grrl"

Hold on... Elvis shamans are canon?!

lol they have been for a long time. They're not talked about overly much but enough to keep the ... well I'd almost call it a running joke... going. "The First Church of Elvis" has appeared two or three times.

Don't know which forums you've been reading for the last few years, but most of those people have been criticizing CGL over War!, Street Legends and The Clutch of Dragons, and a few ones over almost every book or pdf they released.

I had an Elvis shaman in my group like years ago, always assumed it was just one of his flights of fancy... You know with tradition just being a set of personal paradigms to predictably shape mana and all.

Well that's pretty much what they all are. Aren't they? *grins*

But yeah. I don't know if they've been detailed out greatly. More off hand comments now and then, I think.

The church of Elvis started out as a joke tradition on Bull's old page (now defunct), on Dumpshock's precursor platform, the Shadowrun Archive (IIRC). It has subsequently been written into canon.

Alright Shippers, she's legal, get to it!

Depending on how you interpret her comments, the FMC has been there before. Yuck.

lol which comment. I didn't get that when I read through.

That was my line of thought ....

I didn't read that as she was screwing them. If you go back, ever since she's tracked down Kane, Kane's been teaching her things.

Kane has hat firm link with the FMC, he used them to get his lady love back, and still is cool with them. From a couple of her other comments she's getting some training from Kane, and would have met the FMC through him.

Yes. That's why I said 'depends on how you interpret her comment'
I personally don't think that she'd brag about filming a porn movie with maryne sues, but it could sound dirty for dirty minds

It's more to the bad repuation of CGL than simly War!.

If War! hat been a singular occurrence and the following books been at the previous level of writing, CGL would have a much better reputation.

I wrote up stats for them as a gag way back in the day, but that was based on something from... Awakenings maybe? There was some book that mentions Elvis Shamans or some such. Though to be fair, it may have been just something Steve Kenson posted to ShadowRN once upon a time (That's the original place I wrote that for).

When we were doing Artifacts Unbound, one of the things we talked about behind the scenes a little bit was the idea of "spontaneous artifacts", something that reflected the idea that belief creates magic (and magic traditions). Again, going back to older magic books, especially Awakenings (WHich is the book that really touched on and expanded that idea). SO the thought was, if enough people believe in something, wouldn't it exist? So with Artifacts Unbound we put in the idea that there's actually an Elvis Artifact, a very low-power item, "Elvis' Sequined Jumpsuit of Performing +1" or some such (We deliberately didn't stat it out ). This led into discussions about other post-4th world artifacts as well.

Mainly, I wanted to do a couple things... For one, reaffirm the whole "Belief creates magic" theory, because that largely got glossed over in 4th edition, and it's always been something I really liked. And two, I wanted to do something a little silly, because Shadowrun has always had that slight undercurrent of absurdism running underneath the surface (hell, almost all Cyberpunk does. From Ninja Pizza Drivers to Game Shows involving mass murder to various cults based on celebrities or whatever), and again it kind of lost some of that through 4th edition, IMO. So I redid parts of the First Church of Elvis write up from ages ago. I considered completely updating it, but I decided to leave it largely as an "old post" because hey, it gave me a chance to write Captain Chaos one more time.

Not to everyone's tastes, and that's fine. It's one very small part of the product, and it's not like we're planning to do a metaplot around them or anything. I've talked to a few folks who really enjoyed it (and one guy at a con last year who said he was actually playing a Shaman with The King as a totem), so hey, cool. Mission accomplished.

Bull

Given the next to religious devotion some pop culture give rise to today, there's a lot to explore and personally I would love to see it explored more.

I'm with you on that, when I explain tradition I usually tell them about the hobo and his wish granting spoon... Then I get technical, blame the hermetic streak

Actually, that reminded me of Paolo's old archive and made me all nostalgic. I don't agree with quite some things in that book, but I really liked this, both because of it's nostalgia value to old fanboys like myself, and because I also missed the belief-makes-magic from earlier editions in SR4's magic fluff.

The difference here is that it's not a single book. Hell, even Storm Front, what, a year after the hit, still can't spell a Shiawase's first name the same throughout a page.
And CGL hasn't gone out of business or dropped its release schedule or anything.

Lol. Is this guy for fucking real?

He's Russian. We Russians are incapable of irony.

You have giant killer beavers though. Right?

Hey! That is OUR national trait!

This is referencing something a page or two back, but if somebody turns Dodger into a TM, I can promise that at least personally that will be the end of the line of me buying any current SR products.

The Artful Dodger was already pre-released in it's entirety. He may be, he may not. We don't know. It also doesn't have a Game Info section.

Why?

Pepsi Jedi, nah, you're thinking of bears. Those get vicious unless they get their daily dose of vodka and balalaika music.

As for the chapter on Dodger - hey, at least now we know that a technomancer thinks it possible for a first generation AI to be a Paragon. Which supports hermit's hypothesis, if you ask me.

I'd imagine because we all have some "fuck no" buttons about our hobbies that if the developer presses we'll pack up and leave. Had it happen to me in Magic and D&D so far, and was very close to walking away from Shadowrun with how heavy-handed the Horror angle was being pushed towards the end of FASA (I loathe the Horrors. If I wanted to play CoC, I would do just that).

It was a running thing in the first Paranormal Animals of North America. There was a Russian guy that kept popping up, either talking about killing every critter or saying how "That ain't nothing!! in RUSSIA.... " I'm pretty sure at one point he started talking about killer beavers that could kill grizzlies. lol

I suppose, then, that you didn't notice that the fiction specifically explained what happened when people tried to take it back?

Also, something you may not be aware of: It would be entirely up to Ares if they wanted to refund vendors/retailers for the return of defective product. In this particular case, they put out a notice that defective Excaliburs were to be handled in a specific way that was not a refund, which means there's no way in hell the guy you bought it from could get his money back. Which, for the most part, means that you're not going to be able to get a refund for yourself, either. That's just how this works.

And given that they had a substantive amount of Excaliburs, which do you think is a more likely course of action for an entity that exists solely for the purpose of making money?

(a) Take a massive hit in terms of RnD, marketing, and manufacturing costs
(b) Try to sell as many as you can before people find out they don't work so that you can recoup as much of the loss as possible, while suppressing the story to avoid the damage to your reputation

Seriously, just stop and think about it for a moment. I'll wait.



So how is it that no one gave her a hard time about this?



Hey, if you weren't contracted for Game Information, it's hardly your fault.

This does certainly give me something to work with, though. Thanks.



I'd echo Pepsi Jedi's "why", but I'll just point something out: if they were making him a technomancer, it seems to me they would have come right out and said it. There are observable physiological differences between technomancers and non-Emerged; someone along the way would have done a medical exam and figured it out. Could well be he's something new entirely.

And given that Dodger's situation is unique, if he is a technomancer and Maegara is his paragon, the uniqueness of that might serve as counter-evidence to hermit's hypothesis - because this one case is very unique. it breaks the rules that would apply to other cases.

However, I do think they're setting things up for the old-school AI's to make a return, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered with this.

Unlike other, less crappy goods, which exist for the purpose of charity?

Could you clarify what you're saying?

Exaggerated for comical purpose:
"Whoops! For $obvious_excuse we forgot to put out that bugfix and printed a gajillion defective rifles! How did this happen? Well, I suppose we better sell ALL OF THE GUNZ, before someone notices it!"

Yes. Thought about it. Laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of the notion. Still laughing at your inability to accept it as decidedly pink. Also laughing about the fact that Ares running shoes aren't selling anymore.

At some point, if you're in the business of making money (as you so eloquently put it), you recoup your losses and cop to a mistake. And you let the Apple maps guy go.

What is so hard to understand there? Apparently, you think it is normal for money-making products to be extra-strength crap. So products that aren't super crap aren't made with profit in mind, but ... well, what? Charity?


Economics 101: Sometimes, you just cut your losses instead of throwing more money at a money sink.


And nobody flies Qantas or American anymore. Oh, and there's a run on the Bank of America.

The whole Excalibur angle is beyond stupid. You have to try pretty hard to screw up a firearm even in this day and age. The greatest likelihood of a problem comes from materials not being up to snuff, but catching that is pretty easy and in the worst case you jump back to something tried and true, which usually adds weight. At worst you wind up with a weapon that weighs more than intended, maybe even more than the competition, but to get a weapon that fails 1 out of 6 times that takes real effort. If they wanted to screw Ares they should have picked a weapon system a lot easier to screw up, like a plane, a drone, an attack submarine, not an item a 12 year could make in a decent machine shop.

Small nitpick here: It _works_ 1 out of 6 times. 1 out of 3 times, if you only ever fire SA.

Apart from that: Full agreement

Yeah. Have Ares bank everything on the Lightning III and sell it to lots of governments for up-front cash Knight misappropriates for adventures in Weyland-Yutani economics instead of developing an actual plane. That would at least actually hurt Ares' bottom line.

Or, even better, Ares dies from infighting. That's tried, true, and plausible.

Makes a hell of a lot more sense than 'Hey, Guys! Let's pull Billions in bad publicity instead of eating a few million in sunk costs!'

The above is the kind of thing that gets middle management promoted out of a window forty floors up.

It's also so mind-numbingly stupid that I can only assume the writer thought he was talking about a mom & pop gun shop in Bumfuck Egypt rather than a company bigger than a country.

Apple Maps wasn't quite that big a deal. Yeah it made the news, but as humor when they showed pictures of roads dropping into valleys and stuff. It wasn't a 'real' problem. If any idiot actually thought the road melted and went down and into the valley and back up and stuff like the few mistakes that were shown... well there's no help for those people, even with good products.

I know you're using it for illustrative purpose, but it just wasn't a big deal.

"New Coke". Now there you go. Use that. lol.

It was a big enough deal to officially be called out as a hazard to your life by the Australian police.
And big enough a deal for the guy being responsible for that clusterfuck to having been let go. Or resign. Or whatever.

And yes, the point was, that even with THAT BAD a publicity, Apple is still going strong.

Going out on a limb here but I don't think that's what he was saying. I think he was saying 'We've got this pile of inventory that we spent money to produce. It's crap. We can either just eat the total loss, or sell the crap and hope to recoup SOME of the loss."



And you're not actually reading what he said. He's not talking about throwing more money at a money sink. He's talking about recouping as much of your losses that you can, from a known pile of junk.



Not sure what you're trying to say with that. I know I don't use Bank of America any more.

Did they do that, or are you being hyperbolic? Did they put Billions into publicity, or does it just sound good when making a point?

Perhaps the Lancelot will do double-duty as a home pleasure drone?

They're Ares companies.


You don't understand economics, nor what I said.

lol I do.

You've paid X amount of money to produce the product.

Your (Hermit) advice is to just take "X" as a total loss.

He's pointing out, You've already paid X, for the product. You can try and sell as much of the product, to make Y money back.

Now... your saying 'Just take X as a loss."

he's saying "Sell as much of the product as you can, to get Y

"X" loss is bad.

X loss + Y profit, is always going to be less than X alone in the loss department. So that means the company has a smaller net loss. (( and sometimes you might actually cover your production expense and make some money) You've recouped some of the money you've invested for the product, by selling as much of it as you can before word gets out.

Usually this tactic works. Granted you might not make ALL of X back but you make more back than if you sold none at all.

The kicker comes in when some out side factor, makes the market freak out.(( As apparently it did on Ares.)) To where your attempt to recoup some of your production expenditure, backfires and the negative reaction is more than you anticipate. Most times (( as most everyone, including yourself, in this thread agree)) the backlash for ONE bad product is not this big. So the gamble to make 'Some money' instead of "No money" Works.

In short, if you spent cash to make crap, and you can sell that crap fast, you make back some of the cash you spent to make it, maybe even all of it.

But sometimes it IS worse than you plan for.

The thing had already been marketed - the Desert Wars thing consisted of giving them free ones, and keeping the bad footage from showing; in essence it just doesn't count. The only cost they'd have saved by scrapping it is shipping, which is going to be relatively negligible. And it's not a bug fix - they were fundamentally never able to make the thing work properly. So they could either scrap it and make no money, or release as was. Given the specific scenario, it's an entirely realistic result. It may not have been smart for whoever made that call, but far worse calls have been made in reality.

If nothing else, someone in the chain is guilty of the Sunk Cost Fallacy which, again, happens in reality.



Ah, so that is what you're saying. That's about as irrelevant as it gets. Especially given that I was saying that everything they do is about making money. The results are clearly not what they were expecting to happen. In fact, they're not what anyone would expect - it's fairly obvious that someone, probably whoever is responsible for the thing being sent to production in the first place, is using this to go after Ares and do some damage. It smells like a Horizon/Dawkins Group thing, really.

And where are you getting the notion that I'm talking about them spending more money on it? And if your counter-argument consists of "you don't understand X", you're obligated to explain the relevance of that, and to cite the specific principles involved - otherwise, it's fair to assume you're just making shit up.

CRAP! Would you be so kind as to point out where? I went through that section three times, but if something slipped through, it's squarely on me.

Now I have to stat them up in my alt.War fan supplement