"Come on in, ladies and gentlemen. Sit down, make yourselves comfortable. Becker, is the location secure? Good, excellent. I know it's early, but our staff will serve you all a breakfast I think you'll find adequate. I recommend the grilled mushroom omelette, but please do request whatever you desire.

"Now, to business. This government has made a promise to reduce criminality, and we've been frustrated at every turn by the existence of lawless zones, commonly known as havens. Havens of piracy, murder, and all sorts of depravity is what they are in reality. Well, it can't be allowed to continue any longer, so I have come up with a plan.

"In phase one, we will contain them. Yes, Cartwright, I know what you're going to say, but the goal is not perfect containment. We all know that the determination of the smugglers will defeat containment as such, but the real purpose here is delineation. We shall buy out properties - on generous terms - where the owners can be identified. This will encourage other property owners to come forward willingly, but where other property owners are not on record, or are presumed dead, or the properties functionally abandoned, they shall be taken in the national interest. In any event the buildings are to be razed, and barriers erected. Checkpoints will be installed, and at those checkpoints all passers will be meticulously recorded. Troublemakers will be identified, and picked up outside the checkpoints, rather than making the checkpoints themselves focal zones.

"In phase two, the barriers will be grown inward. Again, property owners that can be identified will be compensated, but this must happen with great speed so that we can carve off pieces of each haven, search them in detail, and separate them. Bit by bit we shall eradicate the lawless element that chooses to fight back, capture those sufficiently intelligent to surrender, and bring the buildings up to code.

"Phase three shall be to install basic utilities, tear down the outer barriers progressively, sanitise the buildings and render the area ready for intelligent gentrification. We can provide incentives for government employee housing there, and establish a progressive structure for a security hand off from paramilitary to regular police forces while also establishing a solid public security surveillance infrastructure as well as a tax base to justify the entire exercise.

"Phase four will be to eradicate the last vestiges of the barriers and slums, putting the last blighted areas of land surface to productive use, and completing the rehabilitation of a once-septic scar on our land into a stable, productive, prosperous city.

"Any comment?"

Sounds a bit like what they did with Berlin, gradually shrink down the anarchist holdout under the pretense of bringing light and enlightenment to the poor people there (well, that and a convenient terrorist attack)

I was thinking about this in the context of SRV, trying to sort out what the authorities would try to do, and how. The question is how, after the examples of Chicago and Berlin, the inhabitants would actually respond.

If you live in the barrens, you certainly have had some less than amicable contact with the authorities. And now The Man comes to bulldoze your home?

You think the Ancients and the Spikes are bad news now?
Imagine what they would be capable of if they decided on an armistice untill they dealt with the corps trying something like that.

I just don't see the megacorps acting in quite the same way as a totalitarian government would. They like the barrens - a pool of cheap labor and cheap muscle to exploit, a dumping ground for toxic waste and burned-out ex-employees, and an explicit example to their other employees, of how lucky they are to have a job, 80-hour work week and all.

Now, if something happened to make that land valuable, then I imagine their version of gentrification would be pretty ruthless, but I doubt there would be any concern for the people they would be displacing.

I should probably elaborate on my thinking here. I've been very lazy, so please forgive my disingenuous brevity above.

Glyph: I tend to agree that the corps have uses for the barrens in general, and havens in particular. I've gradually come to the line of thought that the corps regard havens as being rather like nuclear weapons: they can't stamp them all out, and if another corp is going to use them then they sure as hell want access too.

Conversely, if anyone wants to stamp out havens, the corps won't cry too hard, so it's really up to the denizens of the havens to fight back against the process. The question becomes then who truly wants the havens destroyed? I believe that the answer must be national governments. They're already taking body blows from several directions (not least the corps) and the existence of havens is a constant reminder of their own limitations. Politically, attacking havens is an easy sell to voters. Hence my thinking that if anyone is going to try, it will be a government with access to governmental powers such as eminent domain.

The implied question is how they would go about it - to which my opening post was an attempted reply. The deeper implied question is what the response would be, and I think that Stahlseele offered a reasonable first approximation.

Of course, every tool of the government that is left unattended will be stolen, stripped, or boobytrapped. Workers would need a constant military or paramilitary guard (which makes the entire exercise massively expensive) and as soon as runners get word of what is going on, I imagine that they would volunteer some time, effort and a couple of sniper rifles (or panther cannons) to the cause.

Any other thoughts on likely responses?

Go with the old gag of sneaking in and mixing plascrete 7 or whatever it was into the vats that make the stuff for the walls.

Who's got an interest in doing something like this?

As has been written above, not the corps. They benefit from cheap lands, cheap labor and dumping grounds. However, some corp might want to restrain the playground to their exclusive access. It could be because of resources available in that place (natural resources, special human resources, presence of interesting artifacts/materials...) or just to get a monopoly on the local cheap lands, labor and dumping grounds. It might make sense for a smaller AA to try this to limit the influence of AAA in some locations, or to be able to get access to that location.

The government? What would it get out of this? Politicians are after two things : 1. money (for campaign funds or for themselves) 2. votes
The first, they can get by acting friendly with corps, so if corps have an interest in keeping the Barrens alive, the politicians have no incentive to change the status quo.
This leaves the second. The threat of the Barrens is a double edged sword. On one hand it helps keep the population in a state of fear that's useful for many things, on the other hand if the threat (or perceived threat) goes too high it can undermine the government's authority and force it to act in that kind of way (though I guess it would be more likely to send heavy police troops, build a wall or pass more aggressive/protective laws than do something like this)

Who/what else?
- Some Universal Brotherhood scheme
- A criminal syndicate that's trying to get government support (because even if the government is not interested in making it, it can't afford not to support something of that kind) to get a better hold on their turf.
- A powerful racist organisation that's trying to get rid of all the "wrong" people. But they'll need to have enough pull and funding for this. Please note that they can have infiltrated the local government/corp to get them (or the government/corp was made of them to begin with).
- Someone from a government/corp with either a flawed utopian vision or a personal grudge against the Barrens and enough influence to be able to pull off something like this.

Like your post. I'll take a more detailed look at the elements here.



This raises the separate question of corps trying to shape the havens, or control access to them, rather than destroying them. It's an interested question, but rather more advanced than my simple initial question. I don't really have answers to how this would work yet, but off the top of my head I'd say that I would see corporations doing the usualy hearts-and-minds thing, what with sponsorships of sports, scholarships, soup kitchens and the rest, while competing (and possibly hiring shadowrunners) to keep each other from doing precisely that.



Yes .... and no. Politicians want power and prominence. Power begets power, so a politician who successfully demonstrates that he (or she, or it - Shadowrun is so confusing!) can keep promises to a constituency gets an automatic his-word-is-good boost. Voters are not super sophisticated as a group, and tend to rally against perceived enemies. A progressive populist would call barrens a blight on the (meta-)human terrain, and a reactionary firebrand would call havens an affront against (meta-)human decency and law and order. Either way the pretext exists, and if by wiping out a haven a politician can demonstrate personal authority, swell the power of the state, and not immediately enrage every corp (probably wouldn't) that translates into a certain momentum of its own, in political terms. President Progpop says: "Look at all these new chummers we have brought into a well policed society with social benefits! Please ignore how most of the SINs we created immediately converted into criminal SINs and all the other cleanup that will be needed." On the other hand, President Reactfire will say: "We challenged the forces of anarchy and crime on their home grounds, and the losses were worth it because tonight our people sleep more soundly in their beds! Please ignore all the criminal scum driven into your suburbs by our activities." In either case, politicians have substantial motivations to be seen to be doing something, and to be successful at it.



It's the second I see as being more of a reason. If the politician bangs a drum claiming how terrible the barrens and havens are, the obvious reaction to the people who pound the bar while pounding back algaehol is: "Something oughta be done!" Politicians who talk a big game but do nothing don't win on this front.



These are solid ideas, but many of them would have to imply some sort of availability of amnesty or similar immunity from prosecution, since the methods are likely to be very questionably legal from the perspective of a nominal government. Granted, de facto immunity is not all that rare in the corrupt world of Shadowrun, but it is a concern for those who are paranoid about the machinations of their competition.

I'm not sure I see any point in the Seattle government at least, even trying to clean up Redmond or Puyallup. Both districts are heavily polluted and at least in the case of Redmond, so overrun with gangs that it would take an actual military intervention (genocide?) to get them out. Following that would be the nearly impossible task of cleaning up the irradiated areas of Glow City or somehow dealing with Rainier dropping constant ash. Not to mention anything the various corps have dumped in these districts over the decades. Likely the only thing preventing Seattle from walling these areas off is that the NAN (Salish Shidhe) already did this from the other side and the expense. Unless they suddenly discover oil or gold or some rare earths in those districts I don't see any campaign to clean them up ever getting traction. The expense is just way too high to justify any perceived gain.

Havens take all this a step further. With the corporate presence in HK, for example, what incentive is there to return the city to the fractured clusterf*!k that is the remnants of China? Hell, compared to some places, HK is a literal heaven and haven. Other places like Hamburg or Capetown are in similar states. These places also act as release valves for the country they are in. A place to dump undesirables and conduct whatever social or scientific experiment they want without having to worry about voters or oversight committees.

Keep in mind these places were lost to their various governments due to the expense of keeping the place or placating (or pacifying) the population. Unless things change dramatically on the financial front there just doesn't seem to be much incentive to step in and take a place back. Take a look a Chicago for an example of how the 6th world reacts to things that go wrong. Walls and armed guards around the place but no real effort to take it back and rebuild. You could look at New Orleans for a real world example of just how much effort a government will put in to fix things. Katrina was a decade ago and parts of that city still aren't back to normal. And they don't have to deal with 6th world threats or mega-corps sticking their noses in and messing things up.

It's an interesting thought experiment but I'm not sure there is any incentive, even a tough on crime one, to get a given government to try and recover one of these lost cities or districts. Too expensive and too many opposition forces in play. Or at least, that's how I see it.

Bear in mind that corps in SR also are governments. For the most part, they don't care what happens outside their comfy little enclaves, but if some place has gotten too troublesome they might decide a little "humanitarian intervention" is in order. Or maybe somebody has calculated that turning the barrens into a thoroughly gentrified yuppie refuge will be profitable (as it is IRL, gentrification does not happen because it's a poor business model ), and your particular quarter has been designated as the trial ground.

The first thing that popped into my mind when I read the original post was "that sounds very expensive."

Taking control of havens can happen for many reasons, not least being strategic. Havens are a pain in the butt for people who long for control - i.e. politicians. Corps have the luxury of considering the benefits and problems inherent in having havens around. To politicians, they are a constant challenge, a lawless zone over which they should have control, but do not. Tolerating havens looks like weakness.

Now, in the case of havens that simply exist as inhabited toxic landfills, it's easier to justify ignoring them, but even so to tolerate free travel back and forth is weakness in this context; weakness the way politicians see it. They can't control their own people, they have a gaping maw of (relatively) untouchable criminal activity, they can't tax it, and every time something bad happens to their constituents (ostensibly) because of a haven, they get blamed for not doing anything.

And worse yet, there's no upside. A nation in crisis could get away with saying that they have bigger fish to fry, but there's absolutely no real reason that a government couldn't set up a series of elevated monitoring stations around a haven, populate the area with a team of people with suitable police powers, and start handing out criminal SINs. People who resist can be buried or imprisoned, and bits of property that are cleared out can be bulldozed, covered in tarmac and repurposed.

The bigger question is how much of a fight the haven and its inhabitants might put up. Might a corp oppose the government in this sort of urban reclamation? Maybe, although it's not at all guaranteed. Corps might figure that there's more profit in letting the government deal with cleanup while they go back to their core competencies.

So, balancing the pros and cons, as long as corps are promised that they'll get nice concessions from the government (cheap housing for wageslaves, solid police services, subsidies for commercial construction), they can be easily mollified. The governments have no benefit to a haven existing, and many detriments. A haven's continued existence depends on itself - which means that a haven must be more trouble to clean up than it is worth.

Who brings that level of trouble?

Guerrillas. Guerrillas bring that level of trouble. None of the inhabitants in such places are going to fight anything like a fair fight. There will be IEDs every where along with snipers and magically threats of all sorts. Cleaning any of these places up to such a level that wage slaves are going to live there will require military intervention. In Seattle, while they can call on the Metroplex guard, how many of those troops are they willing to lose to take back Redmond? How much military intervention can they get away with before the Salish ask them to stop bombing the area? How much can they do without it looking to the Salish that this is actually just cover for a land grab on their side?

Politicians may claim they want to control these areas and may claim they want power over them but the politicians also use the resources in the barrens and havens for their own dirty work. So long as the cost of clean up outweighs the financial benefits nothing will be done. Most of these places aren't socialist in their political leanings so the local politicians are unlikely to gain much support for a 'good of the many' type of program. If there is nothing in it for the individual then there won't be the support needed to take the places back. Tax hikes to pay to clean up some place where the SINless and ganger scum hang out won't gain traction. You have to think that after all these decades of lawlessness in the barrens and havens that if nothing has been done, nothing will be done. Inertia is too great at that point and it would take some very serious threat out of one of these places to get anyone to act. These zones have been this way for literally decades by this point. Easier to let it be.

Mantis raises a very cogent point. Guerilla resistance aimed at making the area ungovernable is the single most plausible idea on this front I've heard yet - and shadowrunners would be guerillas par excellence.

Now we get to the more detailed points: who would rally those guerillas? Neo-anarchists or their counterparts? Maybe goblinoid separatists of some stripe? Maybe there are smaller dragons, dragons that do not have the size or power to have continental ambitions, who protect havens as their own domains, who would pull strings to arrange an impassioned and ferocious defence.

What then would be the fall-back position of governments around the havens? I suspect that there would be a belt of relative abandonment, a sort of no-man's-land, but around that would be a brutal policing team with a well-entrenched monitoring setup, intended to try to contain the anarchy that they can't stamp out.

To be honest, while it has never (to my knowledge) been explicity stated, I have always assumed that the border between the Barrens and the rest of the sprawl is like a DMZ, or at least has checkpoints/security to keep the average SINless barrens denizens where they "belong", outside of a few tolerated buffer zones such as Loveland, where the suits can go slumming.

I see that security as being relatively complacent (no real major uprisings have happened) and porous, with bribery and corruption being the norm, and security not being too inclined to confront obviously armed types such as shadowrunners. North America in Shadowrun is like a third-world country today, with widespread poverty and anarchy, with a few bastions of relative stability in the megacorporate holdings. This is a setting where gangs like the Halloweeners are downtown gangs, and where other gangs do things like take over stretches of I5 or use the Tir border patrols for target practice.

Glyph's right of course - with one major exception. The exception in question being that that situation isn't really stable. All it needs is one competent street gang warlord, or would-be authoritarian president of the UCAS, or crusading do-gooder policlub leader, or other destabilising influence taking advantage of the natural stresses in the system.

At best, it's metastable, waiting to be thrown out of its zone of stability - and that impetus will inevitably come even if only because of pressures of shifting demography, food supplies or even something as simple as a determination to return I5 to usefulness as a logistical stream.

Remember, I'm trying to work out for an SRV environment what might have happened, rather than what the RAW currently say.

Well then you need something, like you say, to move these areas or situations out of their current stasis, but like Glyph says, NA is pretty much like a current world third world country. Every documented city in the SR universe has a barrens and some are just barrens with little enclaves of civilization (Lagos for example). So these places aren't something unique to Seattle or unique to just a few places. They are everywhere. Politically then, you would need some pressure from somewhere to force this situation to change and be big enough to get the majority or at least the vocal minority behind it.

So sure, throw in an ambitious ganger warlord, link his supply chain to an enemy of a given area (whether it is true or not doesn't matter) and then have the outraged populace rise up in anger after said warlord starts attacking things he really shouldn't. Housing projects in Tacoma or farmland in Snohomish. Make it indiscriminate so long as the targets are not linked to either this outside enemy supplier or the interests of the gang itself. Place the gang strongholds well within the Barrens and then have the government roll in to deal with it via military. After they have dealt with the gang they may have their own foothold in there and can wage a clean up effort from there. Of course this effort would face the asymmetrical warfare issues I mentioned earlier. Whether the government involved would fare any better than any real world government has when faced with a similar situation is up to you.

I'm not quite sure that you understood my purpose, so let me see if I can get this a bit clearer.

My earlier mentioned SRV project was to envision a ShadowRun rule/milieu combination with maximal verisimilitude; i.e. that it be as plausible as possible (within the limits of reasonable playability). This is why I'm not asking the question of how things happen in the canonical environment, but how could they plausibly work in an adjusted model? The problem with havens is that right now the rules as written don't really address their continued existence but blandly assume it. In actual fact, even in the more functional parts of the Third World, people pour a lot of money into attempting to stabilise and uplift depressed areas.



As I explain above, it's not a matter of needing to move them out of stasis. Instead, I'm observing that the existence of havens as active thorns in the side of those who have power and seek more is not a particularly stable condition. Even if you accept that the UCAS is basically a degraded state, it's far from entirely broken. The biggest constituent pressure is from SINners (because they actually have votes) and they (as a rule) want their little slice of suburban bliss to be as well defended as possible. Thus it becomes very easy to envision, at some point, a law-and-order sort of government taking the reins. In fact, it would be downright amazing if that didn't happen. So what would such a government do? Ideally, they want to a) take action b) be seen to be taking action c) have some kind of success that they can demonstrate so that the whole thing doesn't turn into a huge political black eye for them. Taking power and not doing something around at least one haven would be unthinkable, in electoral terms.

So what would they do? Given that the havens are de facto a hostile territory, or at least an ungovernable no-man's-land, despite nominally having been claimed by the theoretical sovereign power, they need to contain, control and extinguish the haven as a coherent entity. The question, from a world design standpoint, is why and how havens would survive this sort of approach. As was suggested above, if the inhabitants of the haven pose determined and skilled resistance, they can make themselves far too expensive to reconquer - which raises several more questions. The first is: what would be the fall-back position of the government? Approximate containment with paramilitary police forces and a deep surveillance field? That seems plausible, and not particularly expensive while having the virtue that it's something the politicians can point to as an active step towards their electoral promises (while downplaying the bloody nose the haven's inhabitants gave them). The fact that corps would love to sell the government surveillance goodies, weaponry, and computing power with which to manage all this simply makes the corps more interested in profiteering from this rather than sabotaging the government's efforts. The second question is: who would have rallied the haven's inhabitants? To what flag would they actually rally? So far the prime candidates are various policlubs, or a sort of floating neo-anarchist collective, but it's unclear.



Governments can and have actually won against that kind of resistance, historically speaking. The problem with queasy denizens of the twenty-first century is that the techniques for doing so are brutal and protracted in direct proportion to how effective they are. A case in point, depending on how far you want to go back in history, might be as distant as the roman conquest of Western Europe, or as recent as the troubles of Sri Lanka. In the world of ShadowRun government brutality is easily justified, so the main question is whether the effort would be worth the result, and here the case becomes foggier.

If we stipulate for the sake of argument that the denizens of havens (not merely barrens in general, but areas sophisticated and stable enough to be substantial runners' havens) value their way of life highly, or at least despise their would-be conquerors, and have the means and the will to resist conquest, they would still need some form of coordination, however tenuous, to pose effective resistance. In the early days it might be as simple as a few street thugs hurling molotov cocktails at government bulldozers because they hate the government, but at some point there needs to be a clear reason to offer continued and determined resistance, rather than quit the haven in favour of another.

These are the questions I'm trying to puzzle out.

It does strike me that some of the strongest resistance, and coordination, would probably come through fixers. If you have a smart fixer who sponsors some runs against government targets, and uncovers the real project, the revelations might easily motivate a lot of other fixers, and for that matter organised crime blocs, to collaborate to preserve their independence, such as it is.

OK but what do you mean by a haven? As described in Runner's Havens? Because these places have governments in place already along with substantiation corporate protection. Or do you mean places as described in Feral Cities? Those are really well beyond a government intervention more because the government that would nominally rule the place has completely collapsed or else just lacks any real power to do anything. Chicago for example, is still infested with bugs and despite efforts, no one has really come up with a surefire way to get them out.

In the case of barrens, these are examples of urban blight and decay taken to the extreme. You can look at parts of Detroit to see this happening in real life and how difficult it can be to actually do something about it. I suppose if your government is despotic and ruthless enough nothing is beyond them but this would just create more of a rallying cry for various groups to oppose them.

I feel like the governments of SR are just barely holding on as is. As Glyph pointed out, the Halloweeners are a downtown gang. These guys are really horrific and yet they inhabit areas or are next to areas that already have very high security and are home to some very influential people. Yet there they sit, despite this, carrying out their crimes. Despite any posturing, the SR governments feel like they exist more because the corporate overlords can't be bothered with the things the government does and so needs them to perform tasks they would rather not waste effort on rather than because they (the corporations) couldn't just take over a given area or country and run it themselves. In fact, I'm pretty sure this has been outright said to be the case in earlier editions of the game.

So for an alternate timeline sort of thing, you'd need the government in question to not have been neutered by the corporations at some point. They'd still need to be seen as a strong force in the area, something that people would turn to. I also think they would have needed to step into a barrens before it became a decades old establishment and done something then. So rewrite the history to take that into account.

While substantial money is poured into third world countries to uplift depressed areas most of that vanishes into graft and corruption. Very little actually makes it to the people who need it the most and what does make it doesn't last long before conflict wipes out any gains made. SR barrens are much like this I think, and would need an absolute and ruthless grip on the area to keep it from backsliding. So how ruthless is your government? And how willing to accept that ruthlessness is the population? Its hard to imagine a government that ruthless limits itself to just the barrens it is trying to clean up as far as draconian measures go. Possible but not likely or at least not likely for long. At some point the cure is going to become worse than the disease which, I suppose, will make for some new and interesting stories.

You are assuming governments and states working like today. But in Shadowrun, most states had their territory and people balkanized beyond recognition, the monopoly and the use of force has been outsourced to private companies, and every company above a certain size is extraterritorial, owing neither taxes nor anything else.

To your description, Koekepan, it sounds a lot like the Gaza Strip of Today.

Balkanized, yes, but not destroyed. UCAS is still (at least nominally) a unified state. The monopoly on the use of force may have been outsourced, but that doesn't mean that the government can't tell contractors: "Monitor this area and bulldoze these plots of land." nor for that matter that the government doesn't still have its own armed forces as well as police forces.

As for extraterritoriality, that's mostly moot in this case. Allow me to explain: let's say that Siemens meets the definition for extraterritoriality. It's huge, it's globe-spanning, it employs enough people to form a pretty substantial city just by itself. If I were El Presidente of La Republica, and Siemens just took fat chunks of my territory and I had no way of effectively resisting that, I'd still charge tariffs when products cross borders. There would be customs offices, and while Siemens might not like it, and there might be an almighty fight about it, and they might push for free trade, I'd probably not end up empty-handed. Alternatively, if I'm genuinely backed into a corner and can do absolutely nothing about them, that leaves me a completely free hand to pay zero attention whatsoever to their convenience. If there's a haven causing me problems, and I want that haven wiped out, the fact that this would make the directors of Siemens pout would mostly make me giggle, while I order the Revolutionary Soldiers of Freedom to establish a perimeter.

The take-home message: if governments still have (even rump) armies and police forces, they can do this. If they still have the ability to exercise even commercial control over their own borders (without which smugglers would be pointless) then they can still tax, their point of taxation just changes. So they might be corrupt, and the map lines might have been redrawn, but they can still launch bombers and send cops to arrest people. More importantly, they can still afford to do precisely that.

Now, if what you're proposing is on a completely different level, where governments are genuinely toothless and broke, and mostly become country clubs for the idle rich, then the entire discussion vanishes because the country clubs aren't about to (afford to) violently contend for control of anything very much. In that case I have a whole list of other questions, but I'd want to hear why you think we'd get there.

There are many big holes in the canon history. The idea that any other country in the world would recognise extraterritoriality after the US-centric Shiawase decision seems pretty weird to me. If I were in just about any other country in the world I'd probably shake my head and mumble about crazy americans, and opine that they should be left to their own extraterritoriality decisions and not tell us how to live our lives. I am OK with the idea that extraterritoriality would or could come about to some extent, at least functionally in a wide variety of areas, but I don't see why it would be universally recognised, and even if it were I don't see how every corner shop marked HORIZON would suddenly be foreign territory. Major installations, company towns and HQ zones would be more likely candidates in my view. Corporate citizenship? Sure, but that wouldn't nullify my laws in my territory any more than it would convey diplomatic status on all citizens of Siemens, Inc. If someone wants diplomatic status, there would have to be a delivery of credentials, an arrangement of standing and of diplomatic offices. These things don't spring unbidden from the soil.

I have substantial problems with both the foregoing. In this case I mean a zone in which the globocorpogovernment panopticon does not reach, and in which external forces have no enforceable internal jurisdiction, but I do not necessarily mean an irredeemable hellhole either. In a nutshell, it's a place where runners can go and do runner business without expecting that every streetlight, shopfront and drone is immediately summoning starship troopers to dismantle them. The hows and whys of these places are still under discussion (obviously). Somewhere between Hong Kong, Christiania, and Mogadishu.



Detroit is already flattening buildings - that part is straight from reality. The inhabitants are not being driven out at the point of bayonet, but there's no urgency to doing so, since there are processes already in place intending to correct the problems that Detroit has - and in financial terms some people are describing those as scorched earth warfare, but the rest of the country isn't paying much attention because the alternatives largely appear to be worse.



I'm OK with the idea that the corps would simply ignore parts of the normal functions of government. I'm not OK with the idea that, in the light of a group like the Halloweeners, an actual government wouldn't have set up drones equipped with sniper rifles, monitoring the Halloweener area of influence, and the first time they see the gang lighting up some old lady just for yuks, the drones shoot as many of the perpetrators as possible. Fairly cheap, highly effective, and since the gang members are largely SINless, largely consequence-free. Give the poor victim a nice burial at city cost, shed a tactful tear in front of the cameras, bang on a podium and talk a big game about subhuman criminal murderous scum, and shoot anyone else who demonstrates similar tendencies. At some point the gang will either move on, or run out of members. Problem solved. And before you complain about the ostensible brutality, if a cop saw that happening on the streets of Seattle today, that cop could shoot every single one of the gangers with flamethrowers and suffer no legal repercussions whatsoever. Possibly even get a medal. In fact, if a private citizen saw it happening and unloaded on the gangers, it would still be legal. And that's in the modern USA! SINless scumbags getting shot up in anything like the chaos of the ShadowRun world would be hot stuff on trid.



The government might, even if it still exists, write off a true toxic, radioactive wasteland as a lost cause. However, that doesn't mean that every inconvenience would be ignored. And honestly, the government doesn't even have to be all that strong to be active. Imagine you're made the governor of the Seattle Enclave. Most people think you're a joke, or a figurehead, or the latest face of bribery, but if you want to raise your game in terms of prestige there's no reason you couldn't exercise some of the prerogatives of government, and try to prove that there are things you can do without Knight Errant or Lone Star's involvement. Given that the private police services have been very open about depolicing areas that they do not deem worth it, there's every opportunity to go down to where people complain about crime, press the flesh, look concerned for the camera, and get some actual government cops in to do the dirty work that Lone Star is just too scared to do. There are lots of ways you can spin this. Hell, you could even do it as a cynical contract negotiation strategy, trying to get Knight Errant to come to the table and promise greater police coverage in areas that Lone Star isn't. To the detectives and beat cops on the ground, it's still their job to police those areas, investigate criminal activity, defend the ostensibly innocent and exercise the power of arrest granted them by the government.



We're talking about different levels of third world here. Yes, there are the purely kleptocratic shitholes where foreign aid is seen as an income stream for the head honcho, but if you look at large parts of the uglier sides of the BRICS, say parts of Brazil or South Africa or India where things aren't as shiny as the brochures would have you believe, there are big pushes for education, for public health and so on.

I do agree with you that the cure and disease imbalance is an interesting question, and should absolutely give rise to a plethora of stories.

So let's think about this a bit more. In the 2020s and 2030s, things are deeply violent, chaotic, and the new world is being born from the wreckage of the old. At this stage I have no problems with large, ungoverned, ungovernable areas appearing. In the 2040s, the first clumsy efforts at stability will be created as the governments and corporations of the day recover from repeated shocks and I expect that a lot of the simpler approaches will involve internal divisions; walls, checkpoints, monitoring stations and newly constructed customs offices. These will be the glory days for smugglers.

In the 2050s, more complacent types might be inclined to sit back and let the walls and checkpoints do their jobs, but given that politicians tend to be ambitious glory hounds by nature, it's a fairly safe bet that a lot of land will fall under eminent domain, a lot of blighted buildings will be demolished, and some evil genius will come up with something they might euphemistically call Enhanced Monitoring Zones, in which civil liberties are substantially suspended (in the public interest, of course). The (currently still open) question is who will resist that encroachment by the governments of the day? Currently the best bet appears to be organised crime (who are roughly organised on feudal lines anyway) and neo-anarchists (who are almost impossible to stamp out because of how decentralised they are).

In the case of a gang like the Halloweeners, my point is that there has to be some reason they are allowed to exist. I totally agree with you that even today, in any stable first world nation you'd care to name, these guys would have been crushed long ago. But for some reason, in the SR world they haven't. This gang is old enough to have at least second generation members now. So why is that? What prevents the government or the corporations around 'Weener turf from doing something about them? Apathy? Lack of resources? Are the 'Weeners just that tough?

So why does that matter? Well if the city can't or won't do anything about the 'Weeners, then just how terrifying or powerful are the gangs in the barrens that don't need to worry about 1 minute police response times and live somewhere that no one cares about? What are they armed with? Who is providing them these arms and training? These things are never really discussed in the canon and leave gaping questions about how all this operates.
My take on it is that yes, the governments are that toothless and weak. They are indeed, just an old boys club for the idle rich.

How did it get there? I suppose along the same route that allowed Shiawase to gain the same rights and powers as an actual nation. Something to remember is that during the early part of the SR timeline, Japan was much more powerful than they are in our world or are presented in current SR timeline. 4 of the original 8 megas are Japanese and this is a nation that sent marines to take over cities or countries that annoyed them (Philippines and San Fran). They shipped all of their meta-humans out of the country to death camps and no one did or could do anything. They were never balkanized and never really suffered as other nations did with VITAS or nights of rage. The world-wide standard currency is the nuyen giving Japan immense power to control economies. So perhaps around the time the Shiawase decision was made Japan was exerting influence around the world to make sure things fell out the way the corps wanted. They are the only country that seems to have an actual effective and functioning government. Sure, with a change in Emperor and some heavy awakened influence, the country has become more tolerant and less overtly aggressive but they are still the big boys on the block. I think they use that stability to help their corporate buddies keep the status quo.

You are quite correct that a lot of the SR history doesn't make sense. Look at the formation of the Tir. How the hell did a bunch of teenagers take over Oregon and kick the crap out of northern California? This seems unlikely except they had immortal elves and great dragons helping out so I guess it's maaaaagic. Why do the barrens still exist? Has to be something going on that keeps the situation static. The corps have to neutering the governments to keep things as they are. The balkanization of North America has to have shit kicked the will and ambition of what remains of the UCAS and kept it reeling so it doesn't do anything about these obvious problems. It doesn't seem like the various NAN nations are suffering from the same sort of issues. Does Vancouver have a barrens? Who knows. It's never mentioned anywhere though. The Tir does have ghettos but these were quite deliberate and allowed to fester. The current Tir government is trying to clean these up though so here is a case where what you say should happen is actually happening. Why though? There must be some major difference between the two places that has one cleaning up the mistakes of the past government and the other just running along and leaving things as is.

Honestly I think this is just game design. The game started with barrens and no one in charge of developing the game has had either the desire or inclination to change that. They need a place that is lawless and somewhere the runners can hide and where the baddies can do bad things without anyone asking why the cops don't do something. You can't really use the Salish-Shidhe lands for this purpose because canon has established this nation as being relatively peaceful and prosperous. Anywhere else is too far away for a game set in Seattle.

So I think for your purposes you need to rewrite history starting with some of these premises. Japan and the megas would need to be less powerful. The NAN nations would have to have less power or be more chaotic. The UCAS would have to have won something at some point to reestablish their confidence rather than the continuous beating they have suffered for the last 50 years (balkanization, VITAS, successions, Crashes, bug invasions and assassinated presidents). Another option is to set this reclamation in a different city. Denver has a much smaller barrens (the Aurora Warrens) that might be easier to deal with. Ghost Walker or the City Council could decide (and are ruthless enough) it needs to go and just do it.

As for who would oppose a reclamation? Well, anyone who liked things the way they are. Organized crime of course, and the gangers who live in a given area. Shadowrunners and the corporations who use the area as a base or a dumping ground or whatever. The Neo-As and likely even elements of the government itself that likes things as is. I think a bigger issue is how does whoever is pushing the reclamation avoid getting taken out one way or another. An assassination, either actual or political or personal would put a stop to such a campaign and for far less money than the campaign would cost. Defense of the status quo is much cheaper than change and in a world as driven by the bottom line as SR that is going to be the determining factor.

I like your idea of someone trying to fix a barrens but I also feel like ultimately it would fail without a change in all or at least much of the things that allowed it to exist in the first place. If the government can't get rid of a thrill gang on their doorstep then doing something about an extreme urban blight in a district with no voters or tax income is going to prove difficult.

Depends, if it's local custom to place something in the hands of the deceased and the strangely well-equipped insurgents or coup leaders respect those traditions, you won't end up empty-handed. Or maybe the CC will just decide to give you a lesson in the orbital mechanics of tungsten rods, in which case the status of your hands becomes slightly irrelevant.

The corps did not fight for extraterritoriality just to have any privileges afforded by that status rendered moot by the countries surrounding them, just ask Atzlan...or the IRL history of various banana republics.


That would indeed be the procedure for diplomatic missions, diplomats have to be invited by the host country and have to leave when they are declared persona non grata. But AA corps are not diplomatic missions, they are sovereign nations. The UCAS does not have any more influence about whom Ares grants citizenship than Germany has influence on who gets a US passport.

[double post]

@Mantis
Why would the Halloweenies be crushed in our world of today?
Hells Angels, Banditos, Cribs, Bloods, Arian Brotherhood . . These are 5 gangs i can name of the top of my hat alone without needing to look anything up.
They are more likely to wear each other out than they are likely to be crushed by any law enforcement agency.

And that is all in the more civilized parts of the world.

And then we get to the really organized crime like the Mafia, the Vory, Yakuza, Seoulpa and everybody bloods knows about them and they still exist and have done so pretty much openly for several decades by now.

In fairness, Stahl, we also tend to have laws and such that make just declaring members of a gang all to be KOS illegal. In Shadowrun, they certainly can roll into Ancients territory and just slaughter everyone wearing so much as a shred of green or whose ears are a little pointy.

Legally, anyway. The question is whether they actually have and are willing to commit the manpower and firepower it would take to do that, and that question, in Shadowrun, is not a resounding "Duh" the way it is IRL. Remember, they've been building up an arsenal for decades now, much of it will be mil-spec gear. They may not have tanks, but they definitely will have explosives that can cook tanks. Especially the half-assed cheapshit "tanks" the corps are making in Shadowrun.

Could the UCAS crush the Ancients in Seattle? Absolutely. Could they do it with only the assets they have on-hand in Seattle? Debatable.

Could they survive the Ancients as a whole declaring war on them; Ancients in the UCAS all turning into guerillas, and Ancients outside the UCAS suddenly being willing to sell milspec weapons at cost or possibly even at a loss to anyone they can be reasonably sure is going to use those weapons to the sorrow of the UCAS?
Survive, probably. The politicians who make the boneheaded decision to start a shooting war with a "gang" like the Ancients? They're dead men; if the Ancients don't get them, Runners will, whether hired by the Ancients or their political rivals or people pissed off that they embroiled the country in the fuckbarrel. And the country will be rather the worse off for it.

Sure, the UCAS would win an open war with the Ancients, or the Spikes, or probably even both at once; eventually. But it would be a very Pyrrhic victory; no land worth having would be taken, no resources worth exploiting will be gained, and it will have been very expensive in life and materiel by the time it's all through.

Stahlseele, the 'Weeners are a bit of an odd duck when it comes to gangs. The gangs you list exist for protection and/or profit. The 'Weeners exist to blow shit up, kill people and make things generally unpleasant and they do it mostly for the thrill. I can't see something that chaotic existing for long. Gangs or mafias in the real world have rules and for the most part stick to their own turf, follow their own rules and aren't batshit insane. If someone steps out of line they do something about it. The 'Weeners make a habit of stepping out of line and have no rules. I really don't know how they exist in the SR world either, other than that things must be really messed up if something so insane can go on existing so close to the heart of the city. Which makes my point that if these guys can carry on then it follows that gangs in the barrens have to be at least that bad or else the government has to be at least that toothless or both. The other option is just saying it was a stupid idea from a game design perspective to create such a gang and ignore them. Either one works but by acknowledging that such a gang can exist in SR leaves more room for stories. Crazy stories admittedly.

If you want to make sense of the Shadowrun history and setting, you should ask Nath. He's got great explanations to make sense of the rise of megacorporations, NANs and other stuff. I'm not sure if they've got English versions of his articles, and I don't know how well translations tools would handle them.

If I remember correctly, the Halloweeners used to be anti-corporate anarchists. That could get them some support, but they still wouldn't have lasted 30-ish years operating downtown. Then they were taken over by a (possible) shedim, and started killing indiscriminately. It seems like that situation would either get solved quickly, or end up with an army of shedim (which would gain attention, and get solved fairly quickly). It seems like part of the story that was just forgotten, and could be cleaned up pretty easily. Even if they are a string of similar thrill gangs, new ones won't last long enough to really take root.

As for the barrens, that's another area with a different mayor (or not). Are the citizens of Tacoma going to be willing to foot the bill for KE or Lonestar to take over Redmond and maintain a permanent presence? Build a wall with a gate to let deliveries through, and set up a buffer area (Touristville). It keeps enough of the crime in the poor areas that nobody has both the will and the power to do anything more about it. Same reason riots today happen, but never make it to the nice parts of town. It's cheaper and easier to contain, and it can be used to keep people afraid of what happens if <group in power> isn't allowed to do what they want or retroactively justify what they have already done. That's tougher to clean up. It's taken this long for ork-rights groups and hate groups to come together to make sure something gets done about the Ork Underground, and that's downtown and can spill over or hide undesirables.

Why are gangs like the Halloweeners or the go-gangs on the Interstate able to survive and even thrive? That's an interesting question.
To me, the answers depend on the universe you're playing it.

Shadowrun 2035/techno-thriller: the state is powerless against gang violence. The city police force doesn't have the firepower to deal with such a threat nor do they always have the power to wage an open war against them in the first place. Security forces might have the means, but their job is to keep their own clients safe, they don't care what happens to everyone else. When the Halloweener decide to go on a rampage, people will flock to secure malls or other buildings where security is high enough. Corps benefit from this as they can easily get smaller companies and employees to swear fealty to them against protection, and they can use the climate of fear to pass law that grant them even more powers.

Shadowrun 2050/80s cyberpunk: Ganger attacks are just a part of life, like acid rain and crumbling buildings in the Barrens. It's your fault if you don't stay inside your safe corporate bubble and don't wear your armored jacket and DocWagon bracelet when you go out. The police might be able to do something against them, but then another gang would take their place, so it would be wasting money, and people love watching the firefights on the trid, there are even bets on the number of casualties. Anyway, they'd feel safer seeing the police blast some gangers on the trid from time to time than if there was just "ordinary" crime. It's easier to blame all the crime problems caused by the enormous SINless population on some psycho gangs than to acknowledge that society is broken.

Shadowrun 2070/post-cyberpunk: Gangers adapt. Setup drones to kill them on sight? They'll learn to hack drones or find a way to confuse them and take them down. Send police forces in a massive gang-cleansing operation and shoot them on sight? Suddenly innocent civilians everywhere are wearing the gang colors. Response time is one minute? They'll wreak havoc and be gone in thirty seconds.

Been absent a few days, but I'll pick up some threads and see where this discussion has led, because I've seen quite a few people take an interest in this topic.

Mantis writes:


If you look at a government, in the sense of a nation's existence, you have a few parts that describe what you're looking at.

The first is the borders; the extent of jurisdiction. Despite proximity, Tijuana is in Mexico, not the USA and this fact matters.

The second is the combination of regulation, legislation and executive policy that makes up the government's direction, or personality.

The third is the financial existence of government. This is how the government finances its existence, and what provides its muscles, as it were.

Fourth, you have the government's hands. Military, police, bureaucratic institutions.

Interestingly, a gang has (up to a point) all these things. They have their turf, they have their policies (usually what the boss wants), they have their cash flow and they have their thugs. Modern corporations have three out of the four - but without a jurisdiction they are largely reliant upon governments for enforcement. In the world of ShadowRun they have recognised jurisdictions; boundaries across which habeas corpus doesn't work.

If national government in the world of ShadowRun are toothless, they must lack some of the above. Jurisdiction they surely have - after all, the UCAS exists, and has different laws from the CAS. They also surely have regulations, legislation and policies. These may well be corrupted by external influences, but they evidently exist otherwise the Japanese Imperial State wouldn't have taken chunks of the western seaboard of North America, nor would there be anyone capable of deciding that Bug City should be walled off. They must also have financial means, because they have armies, they are capable of paying for outsourced police services (because Lone Star ain't lifting a finger without cash on the nail!) and they can decide where to spend (within the limits of corruption). Finally the government has employees, either contingent (contract workers, individually or collectively contracted) or permanent (government sararimen).

So where's the toothlessness? The Tirs don't seem toothless, Japan doesn't and so on.

You do discuss the idea that I'd have to rewrite history to answer some of these questions, and I think that you're right about that. On this front, here's my key dilemma:

For there to be shadowrunners, there must be some form of haven, otherwise the combination of the technological panopticon and the vast resources of their targets will result in them being wiped out. These havens must also provide them services which permit them to run the shadows, rather than simply being blank spots on the map.

For there to be havens, the powers that be have to be motivated to preserve them, or unable to remove them.

Corporations can find havens to be useful, especially if they are not big or important enough to have their own jurisdictions, but I can see no upside for governments. This is where the analysis gets sticky. Governments (especially the more authoritarian ones) can do pretty much as they please. They don't need havens to get up to anything they want kept secret. Lawless zones seem to only hold downsides for them, so for havens to exist there either have to be few (or no) pressures on them, or their defenders need to be powerful, capable and determined.

My current best theory is something like this:

Havens came about in the chaos and balkanisation of the awakening of the Sixth World, many of them existing simply because their denizens were left pretty much to their own devices for their common defence as infrastructure around them crumbled.

As things started to recover, but the tensions of the new world rose among various groups, havens became refuges for persecuted groups where nobody cared that they armed and defended themselves, whereas outside these havens there were all too many people who were all too eager to disarm, and ultimately prey on them.

By the time the governments and other powers started to look around, the existence of havens was largely a fait accompli, where the spread of ideologies such as neo-anarchism gave them a way forward that did not depend on them adopting the usual trappings of governments, and becoming enclaves and city-states.

Where governments gathered their forces and tried to hem in, demolish and dissolve havens, the denizens of the havens, supported by their history of fending off persecution, and by their new ideologies, fought back hard. Hard enough and consistently enough that a general consensus formed that containment, rather than dissolution, was the policy of prudence.

On another point, Sengir writes:


You're right. But you're also wrong. The corps might not like the fact that Tir Tairngire, or the CAS, or whoever treats an extraterritorial zone as one and starts to monitor travels, demand identification, and levy fees. That there sure is a bummer. It's just like all the oil companies being sad when the latest Presidente de la Republica de las Bananas decides to nationalise the oil industry. Or, for another example, rumblings about nationalising mines in South Africa (granted, that's not being taken lying down, but it's not at all clear how it will end now), or nationalisation or confiscation of commercially held farmland in Zimbabwe. They might fight it - but unless they can depose a government, or beat it in an all-out war, they just have to grin and bear it. And they don't want to win too many wars, because then they look like threats worth containing.

In the end, this is an effort to make socio-economic sense out of the phenomenon of shadowrunners. Why could they exist? Because they're mercenaries. Why aren't they hunted down and wiped out like the criminals they are? Because they can run to havens. Why are the havens tolerated? Because they're not worth tackling. Why are the havens so tough? .... the history has to explain this.

Another thought struck me:

Currently, extraterritoriality is not clearly defined.

Stuffer Shack is an Aztlan thing, but the grounds of Stuffer Shack aren't separated from the surrounding country. The Renraku Arcology? I don't know. Is all or part of it functionally a separate domain? Are there passport checks? Do you have to sign a customs declaration? Not according to the materials I have on hand.

So let's set aside (for the time being) the idea that corporate property allows for a geographic change in jurisdiction. There will be some exceptions, but it doesn't appear to be the typical case.

So if we're not talking geography, what are we talking about? The original case in the written history suggested, at most, that corporations could step into national courts to excuse their employees or contractors with something that looks rather like the infamous national security exception in US courts. A corporation's lawyer can come into a courtroom where some corporate employee is on the hook for some heinous act, and make it all go away.

This makes a lot more sense, all of a sudden. If Seattle had a police force, they would have jurisdiction within the arcology, and miscreants in the arcology could absolutely be restrained, cuffed, and dragged off for their day in court. The difference is that if someone in the right position of power is willing to sign a document to the effect that they were acting on behalf of a corporation and in the (nominal) public/corporate interest, then they can get off the hook.

So what are the implications? Police forces would be deeply cynical about the whole thing. It would be demoralising, and probably result in effective depolicing of a lot of corporate-controlled land. Not because they have to, but because what's the point? Corporate security will hand them the people that might be prosecuted, and they don't really need to lift a finger beyond stuffing them in jail. Conversely, the security forces of a given corporation will have a free hand to do whatever demented thing the big boss tells them to, because every complaint in a court with nominal jurisdiction will be met with: "It was a matter of corporate necessity!" and it's not clear where the boundaries of that claim could even theoretically lie.

This immediately raises a few more questions.

First: does every corporation get this benefit? No, definitely not. The Corporate Court (a necessity for mediating disputes between corporations, now) gets to decide that, and as a general rule only huge multinational conglomerates get that sort of benefit.

Next: what countries would even begin to recognise this sort of argument for qualified immunity to legal proceedings? Some could be bullied into it, but I don't even begin to believe that it would be universal. Many more autocratic systems would simply refuse any such arguments, and possibly persecute people trying to promote this position. I can't see Aztlan recognising extraterritorial legitimacy arguments in fact, even if they pay lip service in theory. You cross the authorities in Aztlan, and you will pay the price. This means that national jurisdictions really matter, and megacorporations will try to push other countries to accept extraterritoriality but it doesn't mean that they will always succeed, and they will try to take advantage of failed states and havens to do things that might cause the corporate veil to be pierced even where the corporate immunity arguments might otherwise be accepted. Please observe that this gives corporations a real, quantifiable reason to want havens to exist because they create geographic jurisdictional ruptures to which they otherwise don't really have access.

Furthermore: corporate citizenships may actually exist, but that doesn't mean that they have to be recognised. The world is rife with disputed citizenships, today, in the real world. So let's say some executive is a citizen of Ares Macrotechnology, that doesn't by itself lend legal immunity. Today a canadian who commits murder in Mexico will be prosecuted for murder in Mexico, not handed back to Canada under a cloud of apologies.

So where does this leave us? The decision on what to recognise still rests with national governments, but we now have a more clearly articulated reason for corporations to value havens. In fact, we have a pretty clear reason why Ares and Renraku and all their buddies might be happy to clandestinely arm and equip haven inhabitants to resist national armies. In fact, the value of havens now applies every bit as much to corporations as it does to shadowrunners, and shadowrunners fit more cleanly and clearly into the model of corporate prerogatives and limitations.

To think of this in political-economic terms, the havens have clandestine financial power, and open ideological power that they can combine to see off the political power (including violence) of the national jurisdictions that surround them. The corporations benefit from the jurisdictional confusion even when they allow for shadowrunners, so if shadowrunning activity is a wash, the havens are still useful.

The havens themselves become economically dynamic precisely because the unthinkable is possible, and these days the unthinkable is deeply profitable. This provides for the wealth that justifies the entire structure, in a corporate sense. Smuggling in and out of havens is justifiable, and everything gets a fog of deniability.

The Barrens exist because the city has nothing to gain in retaking them but an insurgency of displaced social pariahs with axes to grind and square miles of ruined infrastructure that would cost more to fix than to build new.

There's no profit in it, and not enough tax dollars to go around in the first place, since nearly everyone making good money works for an extraterritorial Corp and doesn't pay them. Unless something drastic like Bug City comes up, the state is too busy trying not to starve to care.

If you just think of barrens as huge shantytowns/ruins/toxic waste dumps, sure. Try to contain spillover criminality, but otherwise you're right.

Havens on the other hand are quite valuable. Lots of business being transacted there, high tech in the shadows, and so on.

As for corp citizens not paying taxes, in the analysis I posted above examining what might really be covered in extraterritoriality, recast as a judicial waiver of sorts, it's a red herring. Demanding income taxes would be folly, but other forms of taxation would be roaring.

So what is a haven to you? Seattle itself is listed as a haven in Runner's Havens. As such no one is trying to take over the city or kick the runners out. Same goes for Hong Kong, another runner haven. Seems by canon, that runner havens are places where there is a lot of work for runners due to things like proximity to borders, some place nearby that makes hiding out easy, a large mega-corp presence and at least some level of government turning a blind eye to what it going on. So given those things, who exactly is going to step in to take the place over and kick out the runners?

Nobody's going to kick out the runners unless they're ready to wage war and take over wholesale. Runners are, bizarrely, a stabilizing element, as are organized crime.

They're big criminal fish that enforce a pecking order, and prevent the true monster raving psychotics from spilling out. Runners and syndicates set up between the monster raving psychotics and the "nice" parts of town, and have enough firepower and criminal clout to keep the true insanity from butting up against the places where you can generally walk down the street at nice without being gripped with mortal terror every step of the way. And they can be hired by law enforcement same as they can be hired by anyone else, say, to go and make some judicial, if deniable, "adjustments" to dangerous gangs of lunatics.

If by roaring you mean economic suicide. The megas can and have run corp-owned enclaves that sell everything their citizens want.

Then again we have substantial differences on the nature of the setting, as you insist on projecting 'reasonable' as a value of how close to modern outcomes the setting is. Shadowrun is explicitly an alt-future setting with a past that largely resembles but is not identical to ours up until the 1980s.

If by roaring you mean economic suicide. The megas can and have run corp-owned enclaves that sell everything their citizens want.

Then again we have substantial differences on the nature of the setting, as you insist on projecting 'reasonable' as a value of how close to modern outcomes the setting is. Shadowrun is explicitly an alt-future setting with a past that largely resembles but is not identical to ours up until the 1980s.

Mantis asks the key question, of what a runner haven is in this context.

What I mean by a haven is not the broader concept, of a place where runners can find jobs, operate and so on. It's the narrow concept:

A haven in this concept is a place where runners can escape the jurisdictions and power structures of those who would hunt them down. So probably not just ruinous, toxic barrens (although they can work in a pinch) but active communities that resist external incursions.

If you look at some of my earlier posts, you can see what I'm driving at, for example:



Seattle, under this definition, is not a haven as such because it is surely covered by major surveillance and competent policing.

I don't see how that's different from multinationals with their double dutch-irish sandwich tax avoidance strategies, and all the hand-wringing we see in the popular press about governments going broke because evil fatcats aren't paying their fair share (however that's defined, which seems to be something of a moving target). The USA didn't collapse because Apple figured out how to pay less in taxes any more than the state of Washington collapsed because Boeing relocated its headquarters.

In the sixth world, does it really matter if Ares or Yamatetsu build arcologies and try to actively shield the inhabitants from taxation? Every economic endeavour below an AA rated corp has no meaningful coverage under the Business Recognition Accords, even if the country signed those (which notably several have not). So everyone else will have payroll taxes, sales taxes, tariffs, income taxes, value-added taxes, property taxes, duties, regulatory charges and a whole bunch of other clever ways of extracting money. So let Renraku thumb their noses at the tax man from inside the Arcology - it doesn't matter because they were never going to pay that tax anyway. Schmucks on the street get to pay that tax - always have, always will.



I'm not interested in reasonability as such. I'm interested in verisimilitude - plausibility, if you like. It's an alt-future, but in that alt-future I'm looking for internal consistency. If we start with the presumption that shadowrunners exist, as an elite, mercenary, criminal subculture/industry, then I'd like to make sure that the milieu as presented supports that presumption.

Honestly, I know perfectly well that most players want to kick back on Saturday with the beer and pretzels (or Mountain Dew and Cheetos), frag some corporate hoop with big guns and laugh about it in their hideout afterwards. To at least 50% of players I don't think this entire discussion, or the SRV concept, is worth a moment of attention. I'm trying to address the problems of the people who do care about the deeper milieu, the questions it raises, and how things fit together.

I hope to answer questions such as:

How powerful are megacorps really, how long is the corporate arm and what countervailing powers are there?

How toothless are the governments really? Toothless enough that a shadowrunning team can ignore them? Or are they just corrupted and baffled by AAA corps?

What's the difference between a deck, a commlink, a pocket secretary, and why is one better for decking/hacking than another? Is decking naked possible? Wireless decking? Hot sim and cold sim and non-sim VR and AR and tortoises?

These are the thoughts that fill my head when the power goes out and I've finished lighting the kerosene lanterns.

See, I think details like this can be important for some types of campaigns. It gives the idea of how much resources corporations are going to throw at runners, what they can and can't get away with, and stuff like that. In the long run, having an idea about these things would add a lot of consistency to a campaign.

I'd like to address several points in this discussion (which I find very intriguing, thank you), explaining the way I see things:

On the subject of the eradication of the Helloweeners:
Yes, they simply are that tough. They're a Downtown thrill gang because they're essentially vermin. Even if you kill a whole lot of them, there always seem to be more of them. As far as I know, they've been beat down at least twice, once by the Ancients, the other time... I forget. They're not exactly a gang that's been consistant over all those years, but rather a mob with a high influx of new members: disgruntled sindicate grunts, psychotic slum denizens, the occasional crazed street sam...
That's why they can't be effectively stamped out and why they claim an area such as Downtown: They're a crazed out amorpous blob of vermin that keeps reforming with no higher organisational structures or ambitions that could be targeted.

On goverments in the world of shadowrun:
I've always thought that goverments are somewhat scarcely presented - the way the lore has it, governments are not as agressive as, say, the megacorps or the syndicates. That still doesn't mean that a young, progressive polititian armed with a rhetorical baseball bat can't suddenly push forward.
On a side note, some gangers or a warlord out of control (lots of innocent SINners get shot or something) could be enough justification for said push. Where'd those miscreants get those guns? See the conspiracy theory I'm spinning?

On armed resistance from such havens:
Tanks are expensive, rockets are cheap and so's life in the barrens. As far as I know, urban warfare is a tactical nightmare.
So, if the mayor gangs (Ancients, Spikes) and the syndicates formed a truce, the more mentally coherent smaller gangs would follow suit. Keep in mind that in their general area of operation these gangs are revered as local heroes. So there's the civillian backing of these armed forces (important, because the gangs could not operate a war without local backing and recruits). Sprinkle some Neo-Anarchists on top of that who attempt to radicalise the rather isolationist communities (the Plastic Jungles, the 182 ghoul gang) and warfare parties will begin to form.
If there's some central command (most likely generals from the biggest gangs, maybe a local prominent figurehead), these parties will strike in a coordinated manner - which is pretty much the only thing gangs in the current setting lack, otherwise they'd go up against the city itself. Organise these war parties as cells and you have guerilla warfare on a turf they know inside out. Tactical nightmare, even with tanks and drones.
And there's still public opinion to consider. While a few dozen dead SINless squatters won't raise the ordinary citizen's eyebrow an inch... something branded as oppressive and/or genocidal by a popular blogger will. So if your carpet bombings or loose indiscriminate murder drones kill people just trying to get by or even children, there goes your voter support.

On exterritoriality and passport checks:
In my opinion, the lines between corporate and national ground simply are open borders, much like the EU of today*. If I were to pass the border from Germany to Denmark today, probably nobody would check my credentials either.
*In light of the influx of refugees things might be different these days, haven't been there for a while.

Glad to add some spice to the ShadowRun community. I'm a notorious troublemaker who raises crazy questions.



I'm not sure I buy that. If you genuinely had a bunch of pyromanic, murderous, destructive lunatics running around downtown they'd be defined as Public Enemy Number One in about three seconds flat. And if no powerful group, nor even a lot of angry vigilantes, didn't do something very permanent about them very soon, you'd see downtown being deserted pretty darned quick too.

Here's how it works:

"Hi, I'd like to renew my insurance on my business on the north side of Pioneer Square, oh and also my home three blocks from there."

"No problem, ma'am. That'll be NY20,000. Premium. Paid monthly. In advance."

"WHAAAAT?"

"Halloweeners. No effective response. I'm sure you understand."

"Fraggin' right I understand! Frag this policy, I'm outta here!"

So either the authorities are keeping it down to a dull roar (with armed drones, if necessary) or it rapidly turns into an urban no-man's-land with random firesetting that nobody cares about. But my money would be on vigilanteism, or neighbourhood groups flat out hiring shadowrunners to kill halloweeners as fast as they can find them, and put their heads on pikes as a warning to the rest. If I were a small business owner, I'd pool money with three others, find a fixer, and get the 'weeners on a hitlist real quick - and if I were the chief of police (corporate or otherwise) I would tell my guys to get rid of those lunatics by hook or by crook before vigilanteism reared its head. Cops hate vigilantes, because they undermine their legitimacy; and this in the case of rentacops like Lone Star goes double, because without legitimacy, their contracts are in jeopardy.



This I can see - and this is partly why I'm not too comfortable with the idea that governments get so totally sidelined. As long as you can have populist rabble-rousers, you can have angry people backing the government while it does all kinds of things.



They're presented as open borders. My point is that there's no inherent reason for them to stay open borders. If El Presidente del Republica de las Bananas can't get rid of the corp's enclave because it's a fait accompli, and doesn't want to violate the BRA because of sweetheart deals with other corps, there's absolutely nothing preventing him from erecting a Berlin Wall style enclosure complete with checkpoints, barbed wire and shoot-to-kill orders all around it. So, if all those nations are not doing that, there needs to be an explanation of why not.

This one I can possibly answer. In my opinion the megacorps have a whole lot of economical leverage over states and governments. Sure, the megacorps produce their goods, but they're bound to use some local suppliers for parts - for cost efficiency. If a national government were to anger them so substantially (and barbed wire does that because it erects all kind of discomfort for the corp citizens - they might realise the prison they're in), a megacorp could put down a boot and get those parts from elsewhere. Sure, it#ll cost more, but not that much, and they can afford to teach the local governments a lesson. This'll hit the local suppliers, and hard. They'll go bankrupt in two months flat if their main customer stops buying. A lot of middle sized local machine shops/factories are bound to one customer.
So, people will lose their jobs which means losing popularity and there will be less taxes to derive from. The megacorps won't pay taxes to their host country either way.
What's the net gain? Because this seems like a loss to me.

Yes. I can see that happening, sniper drones, contract hits, vigilantism and all. But can that be sure to get all of them? Because they will be back, like a fungus.
These guys are so dangerous because they have nothing to lose. Every other gang, say, the Ancients, would see such a dangerous profile as a danger to their profits and their lifes and act accordingly, i.e. back out of downtown. The Helloweeners have no such regards for profit or, frankly, life.
There's also a delay between the Helloweener's action/arson and a reaction by vigilantes, cops or runners. If the Helloweeners tried something like that on another gang's turf, they'd get shot at, a lot, almost instantly. The cops have to get there, and as we all know, if you're on reaction-enhancing drugs or cyberware, a minute is a lifetime. They can be gone by then, especially seeing as a routine cop patrol would be cautious to tackle a group of those gangers ("I'm not getting paid enough for this!"). The easiest way is, as always, to hope for the monsters to just go away - and those monsters just have to do that to be reasonably safe (say, 30 % combat losses, I don't think the Helloweeners will fret).
So, if they do not raise too much of a ruckus (and they're not burning every building in downtown, just the random car/office/poor pedestrian, I'd say), they can survive the violent retribution. Sniper drones in every street cost a whole lot of money, on-system spiders to catch hackers are, too (face it, those things in the wrong hands will add to the problem!). Liberal, middle-class citizens tend to react badly to an overall display of force by the police, even if it actually is for their protection.

I also picture the Helloweeners as psychopaths who mostly hang back and do drugs, but sometimes erupt into spontaneous, escesssive violence*. They're not out there every night, burning everything... they're just a looming threat.

*Had a situation like that in a run. The face called up his Helloweener contact for info on another gang and said lieutenant responded by rallying his men and throwing down a raid. The other gangers had machine guns. We managed to get the stupid lieutenant out alive, his raiders died. Lost 1 contact rating, gained 1 loyalty in return Oh, what a night... We might have stopped them, had we not stopped at a hardware store for fire extinguishers and stuff...

If they're that dangerous, that tenacious, and that ineradicable .... people will just leave, and you'll have the no-man's-land effect.

If they're that occasional (one arson per year) people will sigh, call the fire department, and call the rentacops to slap the idiot in cuffs.

Otherwise they will be wiped out, or driven out.

If they pose any real threat, and cannot be stopped, then people around them will die, leave, or be abandoned by the rest of society.

In the world of ShadowRun, where Lone Star runs Yellowjackets and drones and don't mind opening fire at sociopaths, I can see no reason why 'weeners wouldn't be offered a choice of surrender or die, with maybe one second to make that choice.

Alternatively, if the surviving 'weeners realise that their way of life is not conducive to a long and productive posterity, and that they value that after all, they will dissolve.



Vigilantes in the real world go hunting. And if they're not doing their own hunting, they're paying runners to do their hunting for them. If the fixer says: "Every 'weener kill nets you NY5,000 for the next three weeks from a consortium of grateful downtowners" then 'weeners are about to be an endangered species.



Rubbing shoulders with sociopaths really rubs people the wrong way. Property values tumble like ice calving off a glacier, and that means landlords will pay big, chunky wads of cash to mercenaries to fix the problem. And so will the local government, because property values relate to property taxes, and that translates into government money. If their own cops are too ineffective or worthless to clean house, they'll find someone who will - shadowrunners.

Hell, the shadowrunners who get the right kind of attention with this could really boost their rep.



If they're not as big a threat as, say, acid rain? Nobody cares, and the 'weeners are just local freaks. If they are a real threat, they get wiped out, or people leave. Burning to death is a horrible way to die, and deeply motivational for people to reconsider their way of life. Bear in mind, downtown is where people actually have money to pay for armed security, active drones, bars, automated fire extinguishing systems, shadowrunners .... or a moving truck for when they go somewhere else.

My entire point is that the continued existence of the 'weeners as anything more than a quaint local group depends on there being no effective resistance, and no mobility on the part of the people in the area. Now either of those things, or both of them, could be true, but all that will result in is the very rapid hollowing out of the downtown.