They're well aware that *someone* was pulling strings, but they don't know who (yet) or which parts are connected and which aren't.

For instance, did one group engage in the Blackouts, tear down Detroit, encourage St Louis to go solo, and instigate the Sioux assaults? If so, who, and how has no evidence of that come up yet? If people were talking to set hings up, there *have* to be records, right?

They sit down and compare notes when it's done, discuss the OBVIOUS answer, but also detail some others, noting that some pieces fit, some don't, and that you have things from the tech side, the magic side, and more.

Which parts were orchestrated and which, if any, just happened on their own?

More details slide in or out as more investigation is done, but what you've read there at the start was, well, the *start*.

Feel free to lay out your own theory as to what happened, why, and who is responsible for it. It might be as obvious as you think, it might not, but feel free to try and get the solution early before the rest of the clues come in.

The two first episodes of Dawn of the Artifacts were written by Jennifer Harding. As far as I know, she was scheduled to write the end as well (before she parted way with CGL over unfair payment delay).

Bobby "Ancient History" Derrie (or AH) has started writing a campaign book titled Harlequin's Gambit, who would have taken place right after DotA.

A copy of the working document AH released after ending his working relationship with CGL (for the same reason than Jennifer Harding) can be found here : https://fondationdraco.fr/files/harlequins_gambit.rar

Ah, yes. I misremembered. I knew it was something DotA-related.

I honestly don't care what the solution is.

Something with the capabilities demonstrated is a bigger threat than the Great Dragons, which just makes me yawn and find something else to read.

The very last thing SR needs is yet another quasi-omnipotent Big Bad.

Can't help you then amigo.

Not every plot is for every person.

Sorry.

+1

That's just lazy writing. "Find your own truth!" - "Pick your own adventure!"
Geee, thanks... remind me again why I should spend money on a module like that?

Reality became stranger than fiction lately - fuel shortage because a billing system went offline. Or a power grid shutting down because buying electricity on the exchange market would be too expensive.
Make you wonder if the whole blackout plot was not even a conspiracy or an Omega Order but rather just an accounting problem.

"Apologies, the negotiated utility rates to your city are based on membership to the BRA. We are of course willing to extend you a new quote as soon as possible. Sorry for any inconvenience until service is restored."

During the Brexit negotiations, they had to make specific provisions and hold separate talks to ensure trains could still circulate through the Channel Tunnel after Brexit. Otherwise, train drivers licenses, vehicles security certifications and all that would have legally ceased to be valid on the British side.

So I can totally imagine an overnight withdrawal from the BRA could make megacorporations and their subsidiaries immediately "pull the plug" on Matrix hosting or some piece of software simply because of legal liabilities arising from the end of certification equivalencies or simply to avoid getting dragged to a UCAS court instead of the Corporate Court.

I mean, we already know what's up.

It's just fun to speculate when you don't.

If you're not interested, then that's fine too. I just hoped that you might enjoy part of the overall game.

Not every part's for everyone.

I'm very late to this thread, but I just wanted to comment on this part. It sounds pretty cool, and in a comic book or set of novels I think it plays well. Probably even in a video game where player options are controlled by the game.

But from a GM perspective, I've found it to be pretty useless, in some ways a net negative. I'll try to explain. (eta: sorry, this gets ranty. it hits on something that has been bugging me for a while)

When you introduce "big events" into the game, of course it is going to get the players interested. Even if you don't give them runs directly related to the "big events" they are still going to try and find things out. And if you let those big events hit things that they/their characters care about? They might get motivated. Motivated shadowrunners can get pretty impressive since often they don't care about the rules or sometimes the long term consequences -- think John Wick and his dog. They have skills, they have knowledge, they have contacts, and they may have hundreds of karma of practice at getting around obstacles in their way. So if they really want answers they may not find answers, but they might wreck a campaign in the search for those answers. After all why introduce this "big thing" if they are not supposed to react to it?

The problem is that in this situation, I, as a GM, don't have answers. Oh sure I can make up answers -- I'm a GM, I do that all the time for my own plots. BUT, presumably some day more info will come out. Sure, they could have found fake answers, but I can't even fake the answers well because I don't know who would know what. So in essence what Cutting Black seemed to suggest was to introduce a "big thing" and then say "but don't worry about it too much, nothing for you to worry your pretty little heads about. Let the Jackpointers worry about it, they'll find an answer eventually."

The problems with that should be obvious, but to be blunt: the PC should be the protagonists, not the Jackpointers, and the PCs should be in some way advancing the plot that the game books are presenting. To me this has been a growing problem over the course of 5th edition, and it is so far worse in 6th edition. The books could say "this big thing happened, here is how your PCs could be involved, here are things they could find out, here is how they can contribute to fighting back against the powers that be (the genre is called cyberPUNK after all). Instead they say "This big thing happened. Here are what the jackpointers are doing to find information, and what they find. Tune in next supplement for more clues and banter from those clever and wacky Jackpointers!" (btw: I love shadowtalk, it is one of the best things about shadowrun. But anytime you are writing something that sounds really cool, please ask "Is there any way we could have the PCs do this instead?")

Sorry for the long rant, but it was something that was increasingly bugging me through 5th, and Cutting Black then just made my blood boil. I ended up having to rush a major character development plot to take characters off to Europe to keep one campaign from exploding, because having recently finished the Chicago Missions arc the characters were rather protective of Chicago, and then it got hit by the blackout too, and they got pissed at whoever was attacking their poor city again, and things started to go critical quickly. Another campaign got put on hiatus and we played 30 Nights instead. And you know what, by the end of 30 Nights, despite all the time you spend in that adventure, you still don't know squat about who was behind any of it. In the climatic scene there was magical interrogation of one of the leaders of the mercenaries defending the power plant, to find out who had hired them to keep people out, and in the climatic scene of the whole adventure the best answer I could give that I was confident wouldn't cross future truths was "I don't know, it was kept secret, all I know was rumors and speculation." How hard would it have been to give the GMS not the full answer, but a piece along putting it all together, to give some sense of advancement after all of that playing?

And we still don't really know, over a year and two more books later, what was going on. For an RPG campaign that is not building tension, that is smothering it from lack of plot progression. Character progression and character development can only carry a game so far.

/rant

And btw, I don't blame the free-lancers for this -- I know that to a large extent they are writing to an outline/instructions. But it really is a problem IMO.

You mean except that it's all hand-waved bullshit where there is only style - no substance?

Yeah, well... as Beta so elaborately puts it - no, we don't. We don't even get proper multiple choice.

But that would be a plot about politics, corporations and the resulting conflict - as well as power, money and technology.

Can't have that in a Cyberpunk game.

Well no, I assure you that there's no hand-waved BS, nor is there, in generl, a focus on style over substance.

If you have any specific issues, rather than general disregard, I'd be happy to talk about what I can. NDA means that I can't, say, lay out some plot beginning to end or the like, but, if you have any specific issue? Lay it on me brother. I'm always happy to talk things out.

Accidental doublepost.

I'm certain you believe that.

My problem is primarily that I'm not even certain we have a common foundation to start from. Especially given that statements concerning technology before in this thread were either inaccurate or misleading.

Technology was pretty consistent in Shadowrun over the editions (including everything from 1E to 4E*), with one fundamental core definition was the optical chip. Not just as a storage, but in fact that even processors are optronics and thus immune to EMP. Even wireless was pretty much optional in 4E - things just worked fine with it turned off. And the mesh matrix being optional as well in active mode as a lesson learned of the second crash to have a fallback to central infrastructure. If the world went through world-changing events, that impacted everything from technology to daily life. With the cellular satellite service gone in the second crash, there was in fact less wireless coverage in 4E than in 3E.
*After reading the 3E Matrix & 2E VR2.0, it is kind of stricking how much 4E Unwired essentially is working exactly along those lines... and how even 4E comlinks are more like 3E cyberterminals/cyberdecks than 5E and especially 6E 'decks'.

With Hardy, especially in 5E, that went pretty much out of the window to enforce ad-hoc combat hacking via Data Spike to make stuff explode-on-demand. While the matrix went on to become based on Resonance. Uncontrolled nanoreplicators as well as Borg were introduced because it sounded like a cool idea at the time without considering that self-replicating nanotechnology is an extinction scenario - either grey goo if mindless or titan level if not. The same happened with antigrav - using it for a grenade gimmick for the lulz without considering the world effect of advancing the tech level to antigrav. (Not that I mind that if done consistently, though - Traveller is a perfectly fine setting.)

Most of it doesn't play a world-changing role in 6E now - in fact, it is pretty much swept under the carpet. The tech level in Shadowrun is on the decline, with ammunition now becoming cased again. Now, EMPs destroying optical chips are the monster of the week - so forgive us for being skeptical how this is all part of some thoroughly consistent world. Mostly because the world essentially goes straight back to normal even in the books. And that those books contradict each other, from Cutting Black to 30 Nights. With the 'unreliable narrator' being used as an explanation. Except there is no unreliable narrator in the GM-Section.


So my specific issue would be... the total lack of consistency. Consistency with historical world-building. Consistency within the new world-building itself. Consistency in the plot-line.

Rest assured that our books only contain fully-explained BS, along with some hand-waved decent material, and a focus on style over substance in less than half the chapters.

Joke aside, the default assumption is that a freelancer truly believes his proposal deserve to be published and does fit into the lore. Otherwise we would never get to read and discuss it. Freelancing just doesn't pay enough for things to be otherwise. And, whether as the result of NDA rules or group culture, freelancers don't criticize each other works on forums (or even acknnowledge who wrote each part).

With such initial conditions, there is a limited set of events that can lead an author to admit a product is not good:

- The author or someone else comes up with an idea so much better that the original one looks lame in comparison. This happens to most authors, but usually a few years later. In open-ended stories such as TTRPG, the author may simply take on the new idea as a cool idea for what will happen next.
- The author recognizes the premise he had to work on was limitative. But you just don't do that openly if you want the Line Developper to pick your proposal again.
- The author discovers a fact he was previously unaware of, that makes his idea inconsistent. Which is basically what most discussions on these forums are about, for different values of "fact".

While there are plenty of other reasons for a work to be bad (not immersive, not compelling, not enjoyable...), those are the only reasons that can make an author admit his work was bad (at least without an unusual amount of self-criticism skill). The first two are not going to happen, or at least not openly, for the aforementioned reasons. Regarding the third one, my impression is that the current freelancers built themselves some sort of insulation layer from such critics, with the idea that old sourcebooks were bad, and it was all unreliable narrators, and that they are the ones who get to write the setting.

But the argument "there's no way I can use this in my game" simply cannot reach someone who truly believes his contribution had to be published.

Like Beta says, it does me no good to speculate. As a GM, not enough info is presented for me to foreshadow it into any campaign I'm going to run, and frankly given the pace and quality of CGL releases it's not like my players are knocking down any doors to play the newest adventure release.

Cutting Black is 18 months old. SR6 Core's been out almost two years.

The more I think about it, the more it looks like CGL treats plots like "Somebody else's problem" in general.

Putting the burden on the GM to 'Clean up someone else’s mess.' - as plots are terminated in a Poochie kind of way or in a footnote.

Kind of like the lesson learned from the backlash on System Failure & Emergence was not to put anything definitive in writing.

In the twelve years between Emergence and Cutting Black, the entire writing team has been renewed. I'm not sure "lesson learned" would accurately describe the process in which people who were part of the fanbase at the time, possibly ranting themselves, now are in control.

The lesson as it was learned by the authors of System Failure and Emergence back then resulted in Ghost Cartels: a plot only alluded to in previous and following books, exposed and solved in a single release through a series of interlocked adventures, with the persons and organizations involved cleary mapped out. Though it does not state what the next part of the Primeira Vaga plan was (whether they had decided it or no), I give them credit for at least stating what they are and what their goal is.

Cutting Black has one thing in common with Ghost Cartels and its self-contained plotline. But it takes a completely different road with no Game Information written for the Gamemaster, and no way to escape the unreliable narrator. I wonder if that choice was made in the hope that players and not just GM would buy it?

Maybe this is just the result of people worshiping Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzahn's Secrets as the most brilliant sourcebook ever written, while they actually only ever used about five paragraphs out of pages 25-34, like everybody else.

But in the case of Dunkelzahn's Secrets that didn't matter, because none of the hooks you ignored had any immediate effect on characters who didn't get involved with them. The events of Cutting Black will affect players, whether they want to or not.