No, those aren't. Neither Ghostwalker nor his minions appear in any of the Dawn of the Artifacts adventures. Artifacts Unbound is the book in which the dragon does appear in a short story, while the Children of the Dragon sect and Ghostwalker's "watchers" appear in some of the adventures.

Oh. Well, now I am lost.

Yeah, until he kicked the governments out in '79 and started a little mess of troubles for Denver yet again (re: SR5's Denver Adventures, particularly Ripping Reality). Harlequin shows up, yet again, to add kerosene to the fire.

I trust Nath on this more than my faulty memory.

Now I gotta figure out how it went from the Artifact adventures to Ghostwalker having them all if it didn't happen in there.

hrm.

It was never explained how Ghostwalker got the Piri Reis map. The other artifacts are just handed to him right before the ritual in Washington DC by the Draco Foundation and some elve. Which is really the short version of the story.

If the PC succeed in the Dawn of the Artifacts adventures, the Piri Reis Map, the Sextant/Sexton of Worlds, the Disc-of-actually-not-Phaistos and the Shantaya's Compass should end in the hands of Ehran the Scribe (and possibly through him, the Dunkelzahn Institute of Magical Research). If they fail, Celedyr should have the Piri Reis Map, Aztechnology and/or the blood mages of Aztlan the Sextant and the Disc, and Yakashima or the Atlantean Founation the Shantaya's Compass. In Artifacts Unbound, which is set about one year later, Ehran and the DIMR have none of them, and Aztechnology has the sextant in Bogota, at the beginning of "Coming Full Circle".

In that adventure, the Catholic Church hires the runners to steal it and deliver it in Caracas. The introduction of "Déjà Vu" mentions it was stolen again by pirates, and in "A Tales of Two Princes", Saeder-Krupp has it in its Portland facility. The PC supposedly deliver it to a former Tir Tairngire official in Washington, which hands it to Ghoswalker.

At the beginning of "Déjà Vu", the Piri Reis Map just has been stolen by Ryumyo-connected Yakuza from a Chinese Triad. At the end of this adventure, if the PC succeed, the map should be auctioned to either Wuxing, Mistuhama, the MIT&T, Renraku, Oxford University, Brokerage X, the Seer's Guils, the Doctor Faustus Society or Manadyne. Then Ghostwalker somehow has the map in "All Seing Eye".

The introduction of "Déjà Vu" mentions Ghostwalker "Watchers" having the Compass per Neonet intelligence, but in "All-Seeing Eye" the Black Lodge has retrieved it as well as the Disc. The PC must recover them and hand them of the Draco Foundation, who give them to Ghostwalker.

Artifacts Unbound first chapter does introduce a kind of curse that keeps separating the four artifacts as a deus ex machina, but it is really hard to go through the Dawn of the Artifacts and Artifacts Unbound without making all those immortal elves, great dragons and megacorporations not just reckless, but hopelessly goofy. Which if you ask me, is a kind of excruciating experience for the runners after all the hassle they must repeatidly go through to recover them (made worse in my case by the whole team having a rather ... tense relationship with Frosty).
Ehran should gets extra points here for making the entire Dawn of the Artifacts campaign happening by sheer dumb luck while being wrong about, well, nearly everything that is happening (he hires the PC in the first place because he believes someone is seeking to gather the artifacts, which is not happening, has the PC trail a guy to the wrong artifact, and has two runner teams going after a fake artifact he could have spotted for the price of a museum ticket). Thought IIRC Alachia also makes quite an impressive demonstration of her clout, with the Atlantean Foundation and the Mystic Crusaders grabbing the artifacts a grand total of zero times throughout the entire arc (unless the PC all get killed at the end of "New Dawn" that is), which is one less than a bunch of Carribean pirates did.

So, Ehran wants to get all the goodies, if the players succeed he gets all of them. He loses them all off camera for another batch of PCs to find. Then loses them again before somehow Ghostwalker gets all of them?

Did I follow that correctly?

Oh, keep it coming. I'm so having a wonderful popcorn moment!

Well, probably sorta hopefully. We know that the lower threshold for AIs emerging has gone down, AIs are no longer either godlike superintelligences or not an AI at all. But did the upper limit for an AI's capabilities go down as well?

Well, that one's unanswered, but *probably* … if not, some would be around. I covered more of THAT in 10 AIs, but, well, still not dropped. D'oh.

One day!

You guys are giving me so much inspiration to draw from other sources (e.g., Transhuman Space in this instance)!

There's still a LOT to write about Matrix 3.0 but, you know, all in good time. The big thing that most people miss is that the Matrix isn't the INternet … not even close. The idea of all that information being out there where anyone can look at it? For free? Heavens no! Ecerything is gated and limited due to ownership.

For instance, the New York Yankees are a corporation who owns the information about the team … who's on it, their stats, team records, etc. They lease that information to other groups (like assorte dmedia channels, Major League Baseball, and so on) but Bob the UCAS Citizen has no right to put their logos up, share information about their games, and so on, without express written (digital0 consent. Some kid creating a fanpage for his favorite player will get a C&D letter as soon as WebCrawler smartframes detect it, but an option to pay a licensing fee will also be offered (at an increased rate, since the person's "proven" that they're an untrustworthy source) … and if you don't pay a company to get access to all NY Yankee content, none of it will pop up on your browser, other thank "Click me to find out more!" pop-ups.

In short, *everything* is based on America Online, or modern cable TV, rather than today's Internet. It's a giant mess, in corporate hands, with only a few tucked away grottos that house deckers and datahavens where information is stored … but even those require you to get access.

No one gives away information freely in 2080.

That's... Yowzers. That really hit home as a major difference in a way that I wasn't really thinking about.

*jaw hits ground*

With that said, I would push back insofar as I would imagine that there are still "crowdsourced" materials. I'm not saying that it's going to operate in the same way but... well, maybe that reinforces your point?

To a degree, that's what the assorted Shadowrunner hubs are, but, all of those are operating on coprorate resources... you have to be on, say, a NeoNET server. You can't just run a website off of your commlink with no source that hosts it. Deckers have managed to acquire *some* resources, hiding in little closets in corporate servers, and you have a handful of operators in nations that aren't in teh BRA, but it's real, REAL hard to find them and, of course, the main players squeeze all of those locations out. If you want some Salish-Sidhe host, you're going through Renraku, who filters what you can see. That one small tribe of techie-hippies has a server of their own that they access, but it's segregated from the lrger Salish-Sidhe world and you can't GET to it unless you're already inside of it.

The open Internet that we're used to is a *completely* foreign concept in Shdowrun. I mean, a few people know OF it, but almost no one's ever seen it. The few that keep teh dream alive do what they can (Hi, Slamm-o!) but information is just too valuable to just leave lying around somewhere.

I d like to point out that's it's really nice that there is some knowledge about the game provided on Dumpshock. I did love that site so much in the golden times (with Ancient History for exemple). When I saw the first answers, I feared that dumpshock went to far on grognardise, and I want to thank people or freelancers who still post here to provide game informations.

Thank You.

Basically the same as Sk8ben said. I'm really appreciating the lore catch up.

APEX still is around in Berlin, although only in the remnants of the old (pre Crash 2.0) matrix

And if any ASIs would be active in the new matrix, they would probably just be acting "dumb" to look like regular AIs




And even if you break out of that walled garden, it's the mailbox/BBS system of old: You need to know which system to dial into.

Yarp!

(Which means yes, at least to me. )

What are the value adds for all of these new Matrix versions? The whole "reset, remake" rather than "refresh" seems a bit odd to me.

I can answer that, the first two exploded.

Not sure what led to this current one, because nobody is, but the original internet got eaten, and then a couple godlike AIs broke the 1e-3e matrix while having a massive brawl in the stock market.

1.0 replaced the Internet after the Crash.

Matrix 2.0 replaced Matrix 1.0 after Crash 2.0, but it was absolutely *riddled* with holes … the Wireless matrix just wasn't ready for prime time.

Matrix 3.0 replaced 2.0 with a whole new bedrock of code, where the old hacking methods were no go. Billed as "An unhackable Matrix", the main thing it did was get around the millions and bajillions of hackers who took advantage of the wireless Matrix.

And that's where we are today. Deckers have learned how to get a few exploits into 3.0, but it's HARD, so "Just stick an auto-hacker in your Commlink" doesn't work anymore.

Which is kind of a nice change. It was sorta weird in 4e how "easy" hacking was. Like, boy was The Wireless Matrix a weird liability. It was very "Internet of Things" where you could hack a bluetooth coffeemaker and own someone's whole network. Which, like, is a thing in real life, kinda, but it sorta felt like the game/setting assumed that everyone had their coffee machine networked into their Most Secure Secret Files, and people in real life have learned to not do that.

Printers on the other hand. . .

Could you expand more about the Matrix 3.0 and the vulnerabilities?

Or, you know, point me to the most relevant sources so that I don't have to ask you to pound out text when my silly old eyes can read faster than that anyway and with less effort (though very appreciated) on your behalf?

I think it's Stormfront where it gets introduced. Several deckers, including FastJack (who wasn't around to get it) are sent invitations to try and break into the Z-O, which is the seat of GOD and where they first introduced 3.0. They essentially arranged a time that a window would be open and said, "Come get some if you think you're 'ard enough!" and targeted the best in the world.

Nobody pulled it off.

After that, it started getting put live across the world, in Zurich and Japan first, Germany RIGHT behind, and everywhere else after that. At the time, most deckers were doomposting as it *completely* shut them down, but a few Technomancers were able to make headway. From there, it took a few months/about a year for enough knowledge to get around that you started having Deckers again, but the era of every commlink in the world being as good as FastJack was DONE.

It was Mitsuhama, NeoNET, and Renraku (in that order), with assists from the PPC, Saeder-Krupp, and … nuts. I forget the others... who got it running. It's the reason why MCT became the #1 Megacorp, honestly, and why Renraku is #3 again.

Hmhm. Hackers / Deckers were a class that was played too often and was completely overpowered, so they obviously needed to be curtailed with fists of ham

The old adage stays true: If you don't understand Magic, it gets stronger, if you don't understand Matrix, it gets weaker. That also applies to the authors.

I'm having issues here, not because what you're saying doesn't make internal sense but... I don't know. It just seems like a nuclear option in some ways.

Gah. Ignore me.

I need to read more and, given that it's not almost 5:30 am, apparently sleep more. O_o

nah, that was mostly 5e.

4e made it *possible* for that to happen, but also didn't think that your extremely illegal military-grade move-by-wire system was constantly announcing its existence to the world as a general rule. in 5e, that system has to be constantly broadcasting its existence to the world or it won't even work properly.

no, what made hacking too easy in 4e is 1) the fact that for something in the neighbourhood of 30k nuyen you could buy most of the hardware and software to hack with, and 2) for another 30k or so you could make it do all the work for you. also, 3) every person you KO'd that had a remotely decent commlink was a step away from becoming about as good as an average corpsec hacker if you had some cheaper software to install on it.

in 5e, they took a small step back by requiring decks (which I don't think most people minded), making those decks very expensive (which some people probably minded), and basically put a bullet through the head of the 4th edition agent program (basically a semiautonomous knowbot from earlier editions, except dirt cheap and can run on dirt cheap hardware... at least, compared to earlier editions). they also kneecapped technomancers, but I don't think that was deliberate or part of any direct effort to revise the matrix, so much as I suspect that several different people all felt that technomancers needed a nerf and none of them communicated with each other, so instead of getting one nerf they got like 5...

6th, I don't know enough about really. I have a very strong dislike of the new edge mechanic, which is a problem because it's a pretty major component of everything in 6th, that has led to me not being willing to spend my limited money on the new books.

Ok, that's super fair. I just remember a lot of the pre-written 4e adventures had a ton of stuff like "Hack the coffee machine to make it explode!" And environmental stuff like that. 5e definitely made that worse with the intent to push players into opening those vulnerabilities on themselves instead of just littering them about the world.

It felt like the intent of 4e was to be "everything wirelessly hackable" and when the rules team realized people weren't doing that they pushed the 5e rules to encourage that.

The barrier of getting into hacking was hilariously low, though. Anybody could buy Exploit 6 and a fairlight excalibur and be as good at hacking as Fastjack. I was fortunate enough that my players were coming largely from class-based systems and didn't think to multi-class like that, but I definitely saw that.

Yeah. "FastJack-in-a-Box" was a problem.

Fixed now, but … yeesh.

I remember thinking it was very weird that character stats didn't matter for hacking at all, and all the dice came from comparatively cheap gear.

SR4 had some optional rules to cover that, presented in Unwired. Basically a Limit. Either you used Attribute + Skill for hacking limited by the Program rating, or you used Skill + Program for hacking limited by Attribute. I used the former in games, and saw instances where the hacker's progress got slowed because the program just wasn't good enough.

Yeah, after my first game I used that. First game the hacker was a techno, so it didn't really come up.

No, I was referring to the same event twice in my post. Ehran hired a first team before the events of Dawn of the Artifacts, and got crossed, then has the PC retrieve the artifacts during DotA, then lost them to different parties somehow between DotA and Artifacts Unbound.

To summarize the events of Dawn of the Artifacts:

- In August 2070, Ehran hires a team of runners to steal several items, including the Phaistos Disc, from the Heraklion Museum. But the team leader crosses him, only delivering the other, uninteresting mundane items and selling the disc to a German mage of the Faustus Society instead.
- In January 2072, Aztechnology hires a team of runners to steal the Sextant of Worlds from the Dunkelzahn Institute.
- Ehran concludes from the two previous events that "someone" has started to gather the artifacts.
- A random employee of the Dunkelzahn Institute overhears a guy blaming Aztechnology for the thief of the Sextant.
- Ehran and Frosty hire a team of PC runners to find the Sextant of Worlds by trailing the overheard guy, but that lead actually get them to find the Piri Reis map in the hands of a tribal leader in Lagos.
- Ehran and Frosty hire the same team of PC runners to find the Aztechnology runners (which they somehow located) and recover the Sextant of Worlds.
- Ehran hire the team of PC runners to recover the Phaistos Disc, by finding his first team and then recover it the Faustus Society. Then Frosty says it is the not the real disc and that they must search another disc in Bosnia - Just to be clear about what happens here, Ehran does hire the PC to recover the disc that was stolen in Crete and when the PC do find that disc, the one that unearthed in Phaistos, on display in the Heraklion Museum for decades and stolen by Ehran's first team, Frosty looks at the things in the astral and say that is not what they were looking for and the PC are expected to go, for no extra fee, to Bosnia and defeat an Aztechnology military contingent (which, as far as the book goes, seems to be in that particular location by random luck) to recover another disc that has not clearly been touched for several millenias.
- Ehran hire the team of PC runners to recover the Shantaya's Compass from the Hong Kong Museum of Art and, when he discovers the compass' chain has been replaced, requires them to search for the missing piece in Central Asia. But this time the book does acknowledge the PC may attempt to renegociate with a Negociation roll... against Ehran's 19 dice pool to get 1000¥ per net hit.

That's, uh, rough.

But I follow it better, now.

"Attribute + Skill for hacking limited by the Program rating,": That's what my current GM is running right now, and it makes so much sense and fits in with how Mages and Technomancers work. Anything else and it's just retarded.
Also the "Hacker-in-a-Box"... well that can be curtailed by first limiting the number of Agents that a person can subscribe to just one. Second, Agents are NOT perfect. I would say that the GM should give IC +2 or +3 dice to Attack & Defense vs Agents because they're predictable. You KNOW how they're going to react. The same sort of thing (only +1 die to Attack & Defense) can be done with Sprites. Even though they're not programs, they can be a little more predictable than a metahuman.

eh, sprites are fine. technomancers pay for their matrix awesomeness (or, in the case of 5th edition, not being particularly awesome in the matrix unless they use one specific build and even then not being all *that* great) by being basically terrible at everything else.

unless of course you're talking about making much wider changes that make technomancers more on the level of deckers in terms of matrix competence but *also* makes them more on the level of deckers in terms of cost to be a technomancer, so that they don't have to be terrible at everything else (which I would support; being terrible at actually going places with the rest of the team is not particularly good for the game in my opinion).

because making them not particularly great at their area of expertise *and* expensive was the 5e combo, and it sucked.

Not really, since Agents lacked the Electronic Warfare Skill - which was non-defaultable and thus, quite a lot of things were unreachable that way.

..and then backpedaled again with lot's of ways around that as well. By adding hacking attributes to comlinks.

In the end, they just created a confusing mess of options, while like back in 3E, people never bothered to read the 4E matrix book... and thus never noticed the deck equivalent called nexi.

In essence, they brought back the ultra-loot-problem and the character-breaker gear for the illusion of role protection. And mages still became the best hackers because task spirits, channeling and money to spare.

Not really, they just made them run on decks only - which was equally ridiculous.

3E had Smart Frames and Agents - and those ran on the grid, not the deck. 3E Agents in fact were more powerful than 4E Agents - they were able to learn. But 3E Agents were in the Matrix SB of 3E - and since nobody bothered to read that...

Not really. 4E Agents lacked the ability to beat encryption, so any serious security simply locked them out.

To sum it up:
After the exodus of the people that cared & understood the game, the people brought in to write late 4E, 5E and 6E mostly decided not to bother too much with existing lore, nor read the rules. Thus, the Borg developed antigrav grenades and recently, people were sucked to hell and returned as the X-Men.

In general since 5E, magic rules supreme and playing a mundane character is... an even worse option than in 3E.

Neither GOD not the fibreoptic backbones were ever gone - check Unwired.

The lore is worse, as they made a magical matrix based on the ritual sacrifice of 100 technomancers.

Hosts became entirely virtual running on resonance and not even corporate admins really had control.
While any device including cyberware and drones would simply explode because a matrix gang pointed finger-guns at it.
And there was no way for GOD to control either the admin problem nor the vandalism.

Both MARKs and virtual hosts introduced in 5E were pretty much retconned in 6E.

So for all intents & purposes, GOD is just a timer to prevent matrix characters from creating the pizza problem... except if it's a technomancer now. Those can stay online pretty much indefinitely with the right echos in 6E.

The wireless matrix was introduced in 3E, in the Matrix SB. It worked fine in both 3E and 4E added mesh capability as a backup if people play nice.

Then again, dumb plots like the blackout plot in 6E would not have worked with a mesh matrix. It's almost like mesh capability when running active mode was like a lesson learned from the second crash...

Except in the "unhackable matrix", the millions and bajillions of hackers can now make all new devices produced to Matrix 3.0 standards explode without any repercussions. And of course... the hosts are as easy/hard to configure for the hacker as they are for the admin. Big improvements there

The funny thing is that it's actually fully compatible with matrix 2.0 since there are old hosts still connected. Maybe it's better to stick with the old stuff.

Yeah, "Just stick an auto-hacker in your Deck" is a lot better because it's more expensive.

Oh, wait - Agents in 5E are really Fastjack-in-a-Box since them lacking Electronic Warfare does not really hinder them when hacking like it did in 4E. Removing programs as meaningful tools really helped a lot there - especially lore-wise, since things like the JackHammer of Fastjack are now... not even fluff anymore.

Just want to say I love threads like this. Everyone often has a different take on things, or just picked up stuff I didn't consider when reading about how the lore has evolved the last several years.

I just realized this may actually be my first post after lurking for so many years. Hi!

Hello and glad to have you! If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Its even dumber.

All the megas who pay the hardware, power, and cooling bills for the absurd pile of datacenters that run the Matrix have no idea who owns what anymore, it's all merged into a 'Foundation' solely to let deckers have astral-quest style runs (with rules copped straight from said astral quests) in the ongoing attempt to turn hacking into magic. Mostly, IMHO, because the people 'writing' the rules today have zero idea how to use anything that isn't magic, so are just copy/pasting those rules across.

Quotes intentional, 6e is actively painful to try and read because the editing is terrible and they tried to go all 'natural language' in the rules so important concepts are buried in the middle of paragraphs of flavor text instead of being clearly delineated. not to mention fun stuff like 'Then there are spirits who adopt metahuman appearances and demeanors, because argle bargle, foofaraw, hey diddy hoe diddy no one knows.'

That's from rules text, not shadowtalk.


But on to other fun lore, we go to the initial setting book, Cutting Black:

So the lead-in to 6e brings us back to Bug City Only Bigger in Detroit, and we find out that Ares has been pretty much top-to-bottom infiltrated because they tried to go all Weyland-Yutani and commercialize the bugs instead of destroying them. This comes to head in an honest to god bug hive rupturing into the open on 30 July 2080. Ares kills the local matrix and goes into full military action to try and contain it.

We get some backstory in this chapter, apparently in 2079, as part of their operations in Detroit, Ares was staging an 'upgrade program' for their corporate military, pulling 80% of their units into Detroit. This was apparently a cover for a major op. Three days into the 'upgrade', there's an explosion at their HQ, and the entire Board save Damien Knight die. He assumes direct control of the corp, and creates seven 'No Go Zones' that we speculate were entrances to the Hive. The investigation goes on for ~8 months, bringing us to July 2080 when things go straight to Bug City. Full military assault on a presumptive hive with most of Ares' ground forces, full artillery strikes, matrix shutdown, and outright warfare.

Ares lost. Detroit was Bug City 2.0 only worse, because Ares had been fucking around and found ways to make full-form bug spirits native to the Earth plane, called Alpha merges, with the intent of weaponizing them. From all appearances Knight set this up, and is under the influences of at least bug shamans, if not an actual Queen.

Then comes the real kicker. Arthur Vogel, former member of the Board of Directors thought dead takes back Ares, becoming the new CEO after Knight's apparent death in September. He releases a press release, stating that Knight was killed in fighting at Ares Tower, confirmed by DNA evidence by the Corporate Court, and he is taking over as last survivor of the Board. He spins the whole fight as a massive terrorist attack to try and take out Ares' gathered military forces and cripple the company, and states he's forming a new BoD immediately as well as moving the Ares HQ to Atlanta, CAS, due to the UCAS government's lack of assistance.

The White House says he's full of shit about the terrorists, calls an emergency session of Congress... and nukes the Business Recognition Accords, revoking the extraterritorality of all corps in the UCAS in just under 7 hours.

Next, it gets weirder.

In August 80, III Corps of the UCAS Army deployed from the east coast to head to Detroit. Two days later, they just up and fucking vanished into thin air around Dutchville in Pennsylvania. UCAS Army sent Nat Guard Reserve out to find them, and they found a fog bank and a flat, featureless area of turned earth at least 5km across, they entered the area, discovered distance was anomolous within the fog, and didn't come back out beyond some radio chatter indicating they were being stalked and killed.

On 1 November 2080 there was a massive flash over Philly, followed by a full city blackout. Seems like an EMP, despite modern tech being EMP shielded, took out the entire power and matrix grid. 24 hours later it happens again in Baltimore. Followed by Bangor, Halifax, Newark, Providence, and St. John, then spread to other major cities in the UCAS at an accelerating rate. St. Louis, Chicago, Toronto... and then we find out started killing cyberware. Commlinks, devices, implants, all dead as if hit by some kind of super-EMP. Enormous background counts from all the deaths and the chaos.

(The game only really extrapolates this to the necessary secondary consequences, IE everyone with necessary medical implants and neural cyber in the area being dead in a one-liner from NetCat. Prognosis for someone whose cyberheart just turned off, or wired reflexes just shut down and deactivated their autonomic systems is Not Shiny.)

In the middle of this, Ares activates their 'ejection clause' in their contracts with municipalities to provide infrastructure, law enforcement, and medical services, and pulls out to the CAS.

This chaos causes UCAS President Colloton to declare a national state of emergency, and try to push back the elections in order to get the cities back online first. A week later Quebec invades and occupies New Brunswick and Ontario. They're driven out of Ontario, and an armistice is negotiated on the 25th after the Navy and Marines do what they do and severely damage their main operating bases.

Two weeks later (12/10) the Sioux and Algonkian invade across a five-state front, hitting Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, pushing east to within 10km of Kanas City and Omaha, with the open support of the Salish-Shidhe. The senator from Michigan suicides after reporting reveals he was taking bribes from Ares to keep the UCAS military our of Detroit.

A few days before Christmas, the UN finally gets organized and starts building up to deliver disaster aid a month and a half late, with rumors that the CC leaned on them to delay. Same day, Kansas secedes to join the CAS.

On Christmas, the Salish-Shidhe Council relents and lets the UCAS military forces out of Seattle. They withdraw essentially all forces, with the Navy withdrawing as well. Three days later Seattle declares independence, becoming a Free City. Saint Lois follows a month later, on 25 Jan 81. Later that day, President Colloton capitulates, and re-affirms the BRA in the face of what is an obvious (to the shadows) coordinated attack by the Corporate Court, giving extraterritorality back and further expanding megacorporate leeway.

In response, two days later, Vice President Micheaela Martin holds a press conference demanding Canadian autonomy. The last of the blackout cities, Philly, finally gets power back and elections begin in March, and SecDef Ronald Despain is elected, the first Ork President of the UCAS.


So that leaves us with an independent Seattle, now under the protection of the Sea Dragon (who made significant investment in the free state from her hoard), and the UCAS with zero Pacific ports. There's a Founder's Council, populated by said Greater Dragon and reps from the Big 10, OmniStar, Maersk, Tir Tairngire, CalFree, and the Salish-Shidhe Council.

Saint Louis got the same offer from the Sea Dragon as well, with her payment made in gold bars stamped 'Confederate States of America', as in Civil War era gold salvaged from the Gulf. A deal was cut with the CAS and Sioux to give St. Louis back the southern half of the city in exchange for an enclave within the city and the rest of the formerly-split Missouri going to the CAS as well. Kansas and Kentucky also seceeded to join the CAS. Aztechnology was bought off with major contracts to supply St. Louis. Nebraska and the Dakotas joined the NAN.

Detroit's back in operation, but with Ares (who owned much of the city) pulled out, it's very reminiscent of post-Shattergaves Chicago.

All in all: The UCAS government took a swing at the Big 10 and got fucked sideways for it.

I'm still puzzled about what the intent behind Cutting Black really was.

It sure has a lot of things happening, but those events do not translate that well into actual adventures to play. They unfurl and are resolved in a short time frame with a set outcome. I'm not saying GM can't write adventures that happen during those events, but the book does so little to help them achieve it. For many of those events, you have to come up with your own story about who's going to hire runners and for what purpose. If anything, I actually find that book makes it hard for the GM to write on his own adventures that 1) fit in that tightly-sheduled timeline, 2) properly expose those plots, and 3) are compelling to the players.

I can't help but thinking the lack of a proper "Game Information" chapter says it all (three-fourth of a page in a 178-pages long sourcebook, seriously?). The Gamemasters are left alone, without any adventure seeds, explanations or hints about what might happen next. Cutting Black is not the first book with such lack of Game Information, so I'm inclined to think the current authors simply don't know what to do with that part of the format.

I got the feeling that the current authors are so eager with the opportunity to write Shadowrun like their predecessors did, with the shadowtalks, and the edgy tone, and all that. Except that it was one thing to introduce a timeline of world-shattering events between 1989 and 2049 and it's an entirely different one to do so in between July and August 2080. Those "And so it came to pass..." chapters from 1st and 2nd edition were nice to read and played an important role in establishing that magical cyberpunk dystopia that makes everyone nostalgic, but they were also pretty bad in that they too did nothing to help Gamemasters write their own adventures. The old books featured those backstories to explain how it's the real world but with Amerindian nations, and a Japanese superpower. The new books are only backstories to explain how it's the same Shadowrun setting but without Damien Knight and, what, that Nebraska is now in the NAN? For the audience that already got it that Shadowrun was that magical cyberpunk dystopia, you ain't likely to get as much credit for tightening screws here and there than the people who build the whole thing got, and getting "big" with dragons, dead CEOs and border changes is not going to change that. You can't write the setting twice.

The blackout thing really puzzles me from that direction, too. 'Here's info for playing inside these areas, where cybernetics and the matrix got disabled and the background count is enormous!'

Isn't that just any modern-setting RPG, then? It's Shadowrun without the Shadowrun!

I mean, it's pretty blindingly obvious to anyone who isn't a drooling idiot that there was a coordinated assault, and who was behind it.

...

not that there is any indication that the rest of the setting in any way acknowledges or reacts to that fact, to my knowledge.

Yeah, not even the shadowtalkers put together 'hey, guys, nobody should have the power to coordinate something like this without anyone finding out, it's big enough to make Lofwyr jealous'.

Of course you can.

You just need a line developer that does so out of spite after his ignorance of the setting is pointed out.

Shadowrun, directed by J. J. Abrams.

If I remember correctly, the adventure was written by Ah, and only part got out before the big breakup. So the things the adventure were being built towards didn't happen, and a different second half was tacked on instead.

Oh, that'd maybe ffit with the release timeline, and why the last couple books both became 2 books, instead of 1, and why the last two were so delayed.