Continuing in the vein of "you'd think my next campaign was set in DeeCee and not Seattle":

1) Federal District of Columbia - does it get Senators and Representatives in the UCAS Congress? (I could see DC still getting shafted and not having representatives, but once you expanded it to annex NoVa and SoMD suburbs that already had Senate and House representation, seems like it would be trickier to deny it)

2) Swear I saw somewhere (on the internet, not a sourcebook) that there was one Representative in the UCAS House per every 50,000 citizens... but now I can't find it... I've read good arguments for how smaller House constituencies would be better, but 1 per 50,000 works out to something like thousands of representatives in the House instead of hundreds (for 1 per 500,000)... it'd be crazy... not that this is necessarily a bad thing for a Shadowrun campaign... wondering if the internet thing I saw was just a transcription error and the FASA (or post-FASA) product that they got that information from said 1 representative per 500,000

3) was there ever a canonical explanation for why William Springer assassinated US President Jesse Garrety in 2016? and how he escaped? and if it was in any way connected to the world-wide spree of assassinations (Russia*, UK, Israel) a few weeks latter? (mostly asking because one deviation from cannon that I've already had is in a previous campaign, the team guarded the NewsNet reporter who got the deathbed confessions of William Springer, I just never spelled out any of the details)

* or, if you are reading the first printing of the first edition, before the search and replace was done, the USSR

The 1 in 50K was the CAS, not the UCAS. It was part of the "MORE REPRESENTATIVE!" form of CAS government, and was workable with a good Matrix network, but it fell apart after Crash 2.0 when the country was paralyzed and the government couldn't act. They wound up scrapping it to a one in a million representation level, knocking out 95% (!) of the House in one go. There're still quite a few Shadowruns as political players try to get dirt on one another, to take those now much-fewer seats.

Have you picked up Dirty Tricks yet? It's one of the two books that'll really help on this one. (The other ... shoot. Spy Games I think? Has a write-up of DC and an expanded timeline, laying out presidents from 1989, forward. You'd eat it up.)

okay, that makes sense (lowering the size of House constituencies being an idea that's out there in the real-life USA, and CAS being the sort of place that would give it a go), though wikia says CAS is 1 rep per 15K citizens, and I found where I got UCAS being 1 rep per 50K info: https://shadowrun-throw-back.obsidianportal...ucas-government

it looks like that page is using information taken out of Neoanarchist's Guide to North America, but I'll have to double check when I get home... I'd wager it's either a transcription error, an original FASA typo (found one of those this morning, Redmond Mall entry in the Seattle 2E sourcebook has references to Renton-owned shops and Renton-made products, who knows if they meant to have that entire mall in Renton or what), or... dude who made that Obsidian Portal page made the 1 per 50K part up?

have picked up Dirty Tricks, looking through it... though for my campaign, I'm doing an alternate history where Dunkelzkhan's effort to become a UCAS citizen was derailed, at least for 2056, and something else happens in the 2056 election (part of the ongoing divergence of my campaign from the canonical timeline)

The way it's described in the original 1st Ed. timeline sounds like it was supposed to imply a connection, but IMO there has never been anything canonical on what the connection was, nor anything on the motive.


But if you need a conspiracy, "cui bono" always works: Who profits from worldwide turmoil?
- The IEs, turmoil and weakened states helped establishing their nations
- The corps, same reason
- The SAIM might have thought that causing trouble on all fronts helps their cause, plus Garrety was responsible for the concentration camps. However, that would have been a plan which backfired massively...

yeah, was thinking chaos-minded spirits possessing all of the assassins... and William Springer's deathbed confession amounting to "the devil made me do it"

conversely, some benevolent party intervened to stop the Lone Eagle from detonating over Moscow?

both of these scenarios likely involve *powerful* entities with early access to magic, similar to the manna burps that produced 1980s-1990s spike babies... so IEs or dragons or somesuch seem more likely than megacrops

North Virginia is its own UCAS state (from Arlington to the Rappahannock, IIRC). SoMD still is a part of Maryland. I seem to remember DC still has no representatives or self-governance to speak of. UCAS and CAS went to war in 2055 when CAS-backed Policlubbers and insurgents (and the North Virginian governor) tried to secede from the UCAS to reunify Virginia in the Compensation Army Crisis. Didn't work out though (detailed in the novel "Just Compensation"). There was no major war between them because they found that with the Bugs in late 2055/2056, they had a much more dangrousn foe they needed to cooperate against to some degree.


I think that was the CAS. It doesn't seem to work out too well for them, but between states killing any national cohesion, permanent secession threats, rampant racism and being sandwiched between three neighbours they each picked wholly unnecessary fights with in the past 20 years, it's not their biggest problem by a long shot.


No, there never was, unfrotunatly. Just as there never was an explanation for the mysterious 2011 internet message, what the hell happened to the nukes in the Lone Eagle crisis, or a more in-depth look at the Shadowrun version of the US' War on Terrorism (domestic, not foreign, against its own minorities) and the Native American Holocaust (death camps and all) that started the Ghost Dance War.

Russia is in an interesting state in SR writing. I once tried t foind out about it's system of governance. There is no coherent description. It's somewhere between "Soviet Union", "Oligarchy" and "Russia according to crappy Tom Clancy brand games". It's just never explained how that is supposed to come together. And not for a lack of attempts.

Hmm, I've always put the Lone Eagle story down to the general wonkiness around nukes seemingly caused by the Awakening.


But if you want a big, grand conspiracy pulling all the strings in the background, that conspiracy should indeed have an interest in not letting things escalate too far.

it looks like Montgomery, Prince Georges and Howard county are taken from SoMD and put into FDC...

[img]http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/shadowrun/images/2/2f/Greater_FDC.png[/img]



there's a section of neo-anarchists guide to North America that speaks of federally-appointed commissioners and so forth, so yeah, seems so... still doesn't make sense to me that it'd be politically possible to expand DC to include areas that currently have Congressional representation, but oh well



that was a full-on war? thought it was just riots in DeeCee and verge of war kind of thing... need to track down and read that novel, already ran a couple campaigns set in late 2055 / early 2056 with no mention of UCAS-CAS war, thought all of my campaigns have been in Seattle or Denver...



I've seen that too, some 2E where they replaced "Soviet" with "Russian" but still used Soviet terms like "Secretary-General"

Somewhat better description of what's going on in Russia in Shadows of Asia, but still, compared to North America, where you have the Treaty of Denver described and can imagine an orderly withdraw of US nuclear weapons from what became NAN territory (e.g. Bangor across the sound from Seattle), you look at the map and have to wonder if Yakut / Awakened Siberia got their hands on a bunch of Soviet nuclear weapons (certainly they got the locations where a bunch of Russian nuclear bases are now)... what in real life would be very big thing, the disposition of Soviet/Russian nukes, totally not even addressed... I've generally assumed a somewhat insular economy and something like the current oligarchy under Putin pertaining (e.g. ignore what it says in 1E and assume the Soviet Union collapsed just like it did in our timeline, and someone besides Putin came after Yeltsin, to match the names used in the write-up of Lone Eagle Incident, but at the end of the day, the old school Soviet nomenklatura made a killing off the privitization of Soviet assets, just like they did in our timeline)

I didn't fully appreciate how wonky it was until I recently went through the timeline on wikia... the Lone Eagle incident is one thing, but why did Gaddafi bring upon certain nuclear destruction by attacking Israel with chemical weapons? for no explained reason... the lack of explanation about what happened to Russian/Soviet nukes after Yakut was formed... the very cryptic and unconvincing descriptions of what happened with China's and India's nukes...



aside from some generic guardian angel type intervening at the last minute to stop Moscow from becoming a mushroom cloud, the only way the Lone Eagle incident makes sense to me is if someone knew the Lone Eagle was going to be launched ahead of time, and that they could stop it... and that the ensuing response would lead to the internment, spare the Native Americans from the worst of VITAS, and that the Ghost Dance was coming...

Because Shadowrun was written in the 80s, when swarthy bearded men where the Hollywood villain/cannonfodder of choice, and Gaddafi was the very real embodiment of that cliche: When his agents didn't go around bombing airplanes and discos, Libya was exporting small arms and especially Semtex in bulk to everybody to shouted "revolution!".

The "unconvincing" descriptions for China and India IMO are for similarly meta reasons: Shadowrun has always focused on America, Western Europe and Japan, if the descriptions for how China lost their nukes seem kinda glossed over, that's precisely because they were.



Or the nuke simply malfunctioned, like so many other nukes and NPPs in the setting

That would be wrong. Could you please link the referenced article? DS does not allow image links.


It was more than riots, at least, with CAS Special Forcesoperating in DC, and mobilization on both sides of the border, martial law, and downed planes. Let's call it an insurgency with foreign support, maybe.


You mean unlike now?


Why, those are actually rather well accounted for: China's were buried by Lung who didn't want humans to have nukes, and India used a good deal of theirs nuking every valley in Kashmir, and kept the rest. Whether reunified Korea has nuclear weapons is a much more interesting question, as is whether some of the japanese 3A corps have arsenals of their own, kept because the Japanese state doesn't want to dirty their hands with nukes (much like Krupp and Gemany).


Gaddafi was quite batshit. Maybe he just lost it over some botched operation (that may or may not have been Israeli) and decided to make them pay, fully expecting Africa and Arabia to join him - which never happened.

http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/Federal_District_of_Columbia

seeing it as well in the Neoanarchist's Guide to North America, those three counties as part of FDC, will security ratings for all of the neighborhoods (including mine, AA, woo hoo)... also finding where it says 50,000 citizens per representative (though I still think that could be a FASA typo... there is also some font weirdness in the pdf right at that point in the text)

also says 32 states and territories, which would add up only in you assume FDC and the UCAS Sector of Denver are special cases and not treated as states, no Senators, no Representatives, do not pass Go, do no collect 200 nuyen... both the NAGNA section on DeeCee and the Denver boxed set talk about commissioners, so that tracks



understood, will definitely have to read Just Compensation before I run a FDC (~2057) campaign, right after I finish my current Seattle (2056/2057) campaign



Didn't realize it was Lung, the description I saw was from wikia which just mentioned earthquakes or landslides or somesuch...

Japan also has fleet of solar power satellites in the canonical timeline, which could be switched into city-fry mode at a moment's notice, so maybe don't need to build nukes to be a major military power, neo-Empire and all that jazz... though if I were in the MoD in Tokyo, I'd want to build nukes to offset UCAS (and CAS?) and Russia, because it'd be relatively easy to knock out the solar power satellites with ASAT missiles in one fell swoop... less easy to be 100% confident you've knocked out every nuclear weapon (especially if some of them are on submarines)



yeah, Gaddafi was batshit, though by the time the ten minute war happened in SR timeline, not much else had changed from our timeline... so it's notable that he was *more* batshit in the SR timeline

and on a more meta-level for the whole genre of cyberpunk - Gaddafi-sponsored terrorism helping to bankrupt Pan Am means the iconic image from "Blade Runner" of a neon Pan Am advertisement as part of the 2019 Los Angeles skyline is made incongruous

I don't know about the nomenklatura, more middle management I think. Apparatchiks adopting to the changing times. I mean Putin had a rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel when he quit the KGB.


There are actually many more nuclear powers than today in the Sixth World according to State of the Art: 2064 p.15. You have UCAS, CAS, UK, France, Russia, Israel, Pakistan and India. But also Ukraine is said to have retained a few. Of the Chinese successor states Sichuan, Canton, Henan and Shaanxi. Japan is said to have secured North Korean nuclear weapons after the Korean Reunification War (which assumes they actually had working devices) and otherwise relies on Mitsuhama. All of the Triple-A megacorps and also a few Double-As have at least a few weapons with Ares, Saeder-Krupp and Mitsuhama possessing a significant arsenal.

nomenklatura were the ones in influential posts, apparatchik is anyone who was part of the party apparatus... but... semantics... point is people who were in positions of power under communism rigged the privatization process and became the oligarchs we know and love today

Binge the Delta Force series and then tell me any of those comes even close...

Hm, I think most of the oligarchs were businessmen who got their start during Perestroika and had some capital and the right foreign and government contacts in the early 90s. But I'm sure those government contacts also got something out of it. Anyway I read up a little and my view of the nomenklatura was too narrow. What I was trying to get at: Holding power in the Soviet system usually didn't translate into a lot of wealth. In terms of resources these "elites" really weren't particularly well off by Western standards, that was true even for many probably most among the nomenklatura. So more than the top leadership it was people who wanted to make up the "discrepancy" between their societal status and their lack of material wealth who participated in the rigging. And here of course I agree, that's what was going on.

Ironically, 2004 was the year IRL where Gadaffi accepted to dismantle its WMD program under foreign surveillance, probably after seeing what happened to Saddam Hussein. It is also the year Yasser Arafat died.

It's hard to say what Gadaffi would have tried if he had access to missile with a 1000 km range. I can picture him buying an Arafat assassination scenario and wanting to avenge it, or simply overeacting to a Mossad ops in Libya. But it could also be more of an open crisis scenario, like Arafat compound siege (2002 RL) or Cast Lead-type operation (2008-2009 RL) in which he was willing to interfere.

BTW, if you consider the Israeli counter-strike likely killed tens of thousands of people if not more (let's add, muslim people), and neither the US, Russia nor UK may have done much after, there could be the motivation for assassinating all four leaders in a row (even though they wouldn't have been personally in charge).

I think you may be looking at it from the wrong perspective. After 2017, it may seem obvious that the SAIM was going to win the war with magic. But to a number of people of 2009, the most likely scenario was that ecologist and native opposition could be crushed by federal agencies, let alone a full-fledged military response.

The Terrafirst attack on a nuclear plant in 2002 first made ecologists the bad guys. Then US government and corporations then started to exploit resources inside natural parks and tribal reserves. Which the tribes resisted. All of a sudden, military personnel from tribal background break into a nuclear missile silo, deliver a crazy ultimatum (all people from European descend must leave Northern America) and somehow managed to launch a missile all the while they all get killed by invading special forces. But that missile never hit. Tribal members get rounded into camps, reserves now are empty of people, and still full of natural resources. How convenient.

Originally, the nomenklatura were (plural) the lists of positions which required approval from a communist party committee. The most important position in the Soviet Union depended on the central committee, but every lower committee had its own nomenklatura. Apparatchiks were the people who made their career inside the communist party. All apparatchiks belonged to a nomenklatura, since every position inside the party would require approval from a committee, but there were parts of the nomenklatura that remained relatively from apparatchiks in most cases, namely Red Army and KGB top position (whose nomination required party approval, but often went to career officers).

pretty much, also, organized crime was a factor, people who ran the black market before were better-prepared for sudden onset capitalism

found a discussion in Conspiracy Theories about a massive reduction in nuclear stockpiles, agreed to by Reagan and unnamed Soviet leader (but seems pretty close to what almost happened with Reagan and Gorbie at Iceland summit)... of course, Conspiracy Theories segues to talking about a one-term Dukakis presidency (after Papa Bush was indicted for Iran-Contra), while Dirty Tricks talks about Papa Bush vs. Dukakis contest in way that lines up with real history of 1988 election, so...

We are talking about the guy who ordered the Lockerbie, LaBelle, and UTA 772 bombings, supplied the IRA with enough Semtex that dissident Republicans still build their bombs from that stockpile, in general supported anybody who rebelled against anything but at the same time also supported various dictatorial regimes (in case of Somlia/Eritrea even switching from one to the other), instituted a fucking national holiday to celebrate the expulsion of all Italians and Jews from the country...

With access to MRBMs, the only thing hard to say would have been against which mortal enemy du jour he would have launched...



Arax is postulating that " *powerful* entities with early access to magic" were working behind the scenes, THEY obviously knew the Awakening was coming and the GGD was everything going according to plan

But your conspiracy theory also has its merits, it connects nicely to the question of why Garrety and Chelenko were assassinated in 2016...did somebody need to tie up loose ends? Of course the question would be what Russia or Chelenko himself would have gained from playing along in a staged Lone Eagle Incident

BTW, it is rarely mentioned that Jesse Garretty assassination on December 12, 2016 - per The Neo-Anarchist Guide to North America - would take place at the very end of his second term, after vice-president William Jarman had already won the election ("campaigning stridently against his predecessor's "inhumane" actions in dealing with the SAIM"). Thus Jarman only becomes president six weeks earlier than he was supposed to.

Sixth World Almanac gives a contradicting date, on October 15, which would be before Election Day. But the book also shows quite sloppy, if not outright ignorant, on presidential succession rules, stating President Garrety was inaugurated "immediately" ... on November 9, after the election, "instead of having the customary three-month delay."

Either way, although you would expect Jarman to have won a Congress majority along with his election, this may have given him the opportunity to have the 114th Congress ratify the Resolution Act in 2016, instead of dealing with the 115th after his inauguration in January 2017. Maybe a number of new congressmen who campaigned with the same strident platform than Jarman would have been reluctant to follow him.

makes sense to me... the Kremlin thinks they've got a secret magical alternative to "Star Wars" in their back pocket... think Rasputin from Russian history, crazy mystic will unconscionable level of influence on the highest levels of Russian government... or the fire god priestess lady in Game of Thrones, "for the night is dark and full of terrors", gaining influence on a political leader before anyone else things magic is really real... or a KGB equivalent to the CIA's "men who stared at goats"-type experiments...

Chelenko wasn't playing along, but he was being played, the same entity that arranged for the Lone Eagle to be fired, approached the Russians with an offer to be their magical SDI... Chelenko was killed because he could realize he'd been played... ditto for Garrety... undoubtedly both the US and Russian intelligence agencies were furiously investigating and putting the pieces together after nearly-WWIII... the British and Israeli PMs getting assassinated were just for cover... WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!

No need for an AMS system, really. Assuming the launch was rigged, so cold have been the missile. The question is what the Russians would have gotten out of participating in the conspiracy. US indifference over their expansion into the former Soviet Republics?

The Lone Eagle incident gave the Russian an opportunity to test their ballistic defense against a real US nuclear missile. As a part of a détente policy, that would be a serious commitment. That may even have been the original purpose of this event: the US offered Russia a high-level, top secret joint exercise.
As the Pentagon and think-tanks start writing different scenarios for the joint exercice, someone comes up with the rogue special forces unit taking control of a silo and firing a missile without any warning, and insert a made-up political cause that bear some resemblance to ecologist and tribal claims. Then someone at the White House read the draft and found it very interesting and inspiring.

The US would still have some additional layer of deniability if the Russian revealed the planned exercise. For instance that some of the soldiers involved in the operation knew about the exercise and that's actually how they had a window of opportunity with active launch codes. And point out how SAIM was ready to sabotage what was an unprecedented and bold move toward world peace, even if highly secret and sensitive (again, in a world that I had saw massive nuclear destruction just five years ago in Libya).

Once the Russian realized they have been played, their silence could also be bought with guarantees that the US will not export all those new natural resources that will be extracted in natural and tribal reserves and thus preserve Russian market shares (basically the opposite of what US is doing right now with shale oil).