There is a gaping chasm between "noticing something's going on" and "doing something about what's going on", especially in the world of Shadowrun. Really, who the hell had both the means and motivation to do anything about it?

Means, I dunno. Haven't read the book. Motivation? Try any neighboring power that doesn't want to deal with a refugee crisis.

Well if the dragons were eating a bit faster there would be no refugees for the neighbors to worry about.

Though the rumours of refugees being sent back from one undisclosed neighbouring country covered in a honey glaze seems in poor taste, or at least extra fattening.

Maybe hoping for 'To Fat To Fly?'

The actual depiction of the events were down to this:
The problem with Shadowrun is that it is written as a disjointed collection of posting on some underground information site plus some novels. There is no requirements from the writers to establish a realistic coverage of world events over time, nor even to pay attention to ongoing major world events (which may differ from major game events). The Clutch of Dragons is a prime example of this, dedicating more wordcount to VAT tax negotiations in Denver than it does for ten of thousands dead in northern Italy.

There's also the simple fact that with the freelancer exodus after CGL's pay fuckery, the new writers may literally not know the behind the scenes backstory at all. I'm pretty sure a few of them don't know the printed backstory, much less what was going on in the setting bible in actuality. A lot of the stuff in the last few years definitely seems to have been written in isolation, then just crammed into a book and published without anyone sanity checking to make sure the parts didn't contradict the whole.

Hell, they can't be bothered to open wikipedia to make sure that they're not writing about docks and water-based shipping trade a couple thousand feet above sea level.

I'm assuming that GeMiTo is short for Genoa-Milan-Turin Metroplex. Those three cities, according to the most recent figures available to Wikipedia, have a combined population of 2,833,168. Let's be generous and assume that in order for them to merge into a single conurbation, that figure doubled or a little more; for simplicity's sake, we'll say six million.

That might sound like a lot of people, but it's significantly less than the current population of New York City. Point being, this is not a population large enough for 70,000 missing people over a six-month period to go unnoticed. It doesn't matter whether they're reported or not, you cannot hide an event like this.

To put this into perspective, roughly 2,300 Americans are reported missing every day. In a nation of 300 million people, that's roughly 0.0077 disappearances per 1000 people per day. 70,000 people in six months is 388 per day, or 1.94 disappearances per 1000 people per day in a population of six million. That is two hundred and fifty-two times the missing-persons rate in America right now.

There is absolutely no way that 70,000 people went missing in a six-month period in northern Italy, and no-one noticed. No. Way.

It should also be noted that most people reported missing get found fairly rapidly.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ncic/ncic...istics-for-2010

"As of December 31, 2010, NCIC contained 85,820 active missing person records. Juveniles under the age of 18 account for 38,505 (44.9 percent) of the records and 10,248 (11.9 percent) were for juveniles between the ages of 18 and 20. *

"During 2010, 692,944 missing person records were entered into NCIC, a decrease of 3.7 percent from the 719,558 records entered in 2009. Missing person records cleared or canceled during the same period totaled 703,316. Reasons for these removals include: a law enforcement agency located the subject; the individual returned home; or the record had to be removed by the entering agency due to a determination that the record was invalid."

So it's more like two thousand times the rate...

Still wondering why people think it wasn't noticed.

Or the 90 000 dead persons after the Renraku Arc shutdown was briefly mentioned in one of the SOTA Books without any further follow up. Just as in "Meh, wie have nuked the UCAS, no one cares, but we have new a page long rule system for swimming".

SYL

I guess it has to dowith the sentence "In public, these deaths have not been reported in order to avoid an all-out panic." and the fact that none of seven or so books released before The Clutch of Dragons and set in the six months before mention it, even on Jackpoint login page... except for The Twilight Horizon where an important file on an Horizon secret node reads the corporation believes these events are taking place.

Also, there has been a discussion on Shadowrun Forums where several people (including freelancers) held that the information must not have spread outside of northern Italy.

90,000 is the estimated total number of people trapped inside the arcology. A full 88-pages sourcebook, Renraku Arcology Shutdown, was dedicated to the event, taking place on the moment it started and describing the early media coverage and the corporations and government responses. There was later a full campaign book, Brainscan, which mentions "thousands" of survivors who are brought to hospitals and military refugee camps. Between that, the situation was mentioned or updated in Blood in the Boardroom, the 3rd edition rulebook, New Seattle, Man & Machine and Corporate Download. After that, the events were still referred to in Matrix, Target: Matrix, Threats 2, SOTA: 2064, Shadows of Asia and System Failure.

It would be difficult to require more coverage for a plot. Though we may not know how the public at large react to the news (Shadowrun has always been lacking on that), at least we get the impression that the information reached the Shadowland community.

Equally ludicrous. People should be fleeing the area in the tens of thousands. Again, you cannot hide an event like this.

Think about this. One thousand people is not a large number. You almost certainly know at least that many, by sight if not by name. Imagine if, each day, two of those people vanished. You don't know what happened to them, where they went, or if they're alive or dead. They are simply gone. Every day, two people out of the thousand or so in your life disappear. How long would it take you to realize that something horrible is happening, and that you need to pick up stakes and GTFO? I'm guessing, not very long.

Three hundred and eighty-eight disappearances per day should provoke a mass exodus from the region. Roads should be clogged, every available vehicle commandeered, people fleeing like rats from a sinking ship. It does not matter how hard the news agencies work at ignoring it, news like this would be all over the Matrix and all over the world in a matter of days, if not hours.

The dead count was mentioned in a sideline in SOTA and that was it.

SYL

Lower class people have the choice of staying around and vanishing, or fleeing and dying from starvation. Modern society is rapidly approaching a state were few people can process cattle or grain. People would however still be able to communicate. Dying from starvation while every friend knows is a special kind of horror.

As super-intelligent being I´d start harvesting whole areas. Since hiding 90k (short-term) missing people is impossible, the only way to get away with it is being allocated a part of society as prey by the rest of the population. "Yes, SIN-less vanishing by the thousands. What news?"
Yet we are talking dragons. A very small, very rich group of a different species preying on metahumanity. Greed is a stronger motivation than altruism, so the powers-that-be WILL act and play good guy while at it. Have major forces from government and supporting corps dislodge the cabal/kill the smaller dragons, and several greats finishing off Alamaise. Working solution I´d say. Trouble is that Alamaise should see it coming from the get-go, what with having experience with the elven courts.

That wasn't a SOTA book, that was Sprawl Survival Guide, page 78 (which I forgot to list). The authority were able to count the dead once the situation and the plot were (almost) over. Renraku Arcology Shutdown narrates how mere days after it was known 90,000 were trapped inside the arcology (a number updated by SSG to 100,000), there was a reaction with Renraku and Army troops deploying and a security perimeter established in Seattle Downtown.

A very small, rich group who are very, very aware that they are not invincible.

If they start openly preying on metahumanity, metahumanity will start killing them wholesale. Not because the dragons are weak, but because humanity recognizes a point where the options are gone and it comes to survival. We are a species who will willingly, nay gleefully push the Big Red Button just to see what it does, if we have nothing to lose. Unless the Greats are willing to see how many THOR shots they can bounce, letting things get as bad as they did doesn't even make sense.

Great dragons are an awful idea as implemented. I am fine with them being super-smart and extremely tough, but they should be plotting, planning, and wary of humanity, including a determined enough team of runners going after them - NOT these Thor-shot-no-selling, defeat-modern-armies-and-raze-modern-cities, gameworld-breaking, writer-wanking, Gary-Stu cheez-wiz covered monstrosities.

Also: in a world where shadowrunners have to be paranoid about cameras that are everywhere, where every single person could be liveblogging their daily life to the world, and where the populace is fearful and paranoid about all things awakened, and where sentient non-humans (shapeshifters, free spirits, etc.) have no citizenship or rights in many places, or even have bounties on their heads - in this world, dragons can kill and/or eat tens of thousands of people in an orgy of slaughter. And everyone collectively shrugs? I agree with binarywraith. That is nonsense.

Great Dragons weren't always that bad, but they've reached the level of ridiculousness that the Immortal Elves had in late 2nd edition.

Anyways all of the plots and metaplots took a noticeable turn for the massively fragging worse under Fanpro. There is no raving for any of them the way people get Nostalgic about the Universal Brotherhood, Renraku Arcology, Harlequin, etcetera.

5th edition has a new slate, but they'll need to do a lot better on plot setting than 4th edition did to make me want to buy any setting books.

Work something about mythical vulnerability against yellow birds free marines into that and you have it.

Their strength is that of ten men because their hearts are pure.

You do realize that the writers of Stormfront and Street legends are more or less the same authors who are working on SR5? So much hope for a better plot ...

SYL

Nostalgia is rarely a good guide. First, the very definition of it makes it for people who still hold one to replace it with a new for something that came out a decade later. Maybe in a few years you will see younger players nostalgic about Ghost Cartels or The Twilight Horizon.

And frankly, having recently played Harlequin with a group of players who started SR in 2006 and seeing their reaction, I'd say it may not deserve so much praise (though, lousy GM, that doesn't help).

Not to forget the exceptional well written ARBEIT MACHT FREI chapter in BOGOTA!

SYL

There are certainly universes where allocating parts of the population as sacrifices is considered fully acceptable for the greater good, but SR is not one of them. When alien creatures (bugs, AIs, allegedly TMs...) start indiscriminately munching on people on a large scale (i.e. more than the typical organleggers), SR's dystopia is not "nobody cares" but "everybody starts a lynch mob". Which the authors seem to have been perfectly aware of, hence the incredible handwaved news blackout.

High-intensity modern wars? Oh, they do. As technology develops, each army turns into an ever-more complex mechanism of inter-dependent components, and destroying just one spells doom for the entire arrangement. A good example would be loss of anti-air in a modern war.
We're not at WWI level, where you could dig in and fight back attackers as long as it takes; neither at WWII level where concentrating a force to punch through a defense line took weeks to months. Nowadays bringing overwhelming firepower to a particular part of the frontline, thus toppling it over, takes hours. And where we put our minds to it, nothing survives.
Look at the RL examples. The American invasions of third world nations, the Second Chechen War, the 888 War all had full-scale army combat end in weeks if not days, the winner largely reaching his strategic goals and only having to clear out stragglers later on.
With Shadowrun, the situation gets even more drastic. I mean, they have goddamn invincible flying tanks. LAVs. Large-scale magic. All of that means that a static frontline is something that just can't happen if at least one of the sides is pushing hard (and this is why Eurowar was such a subpar book).


I have to agree here. I'm a huge fan of dragons in general and in Shadowrun in particular (duh), but what the late fourth edition did with them is an abomination. It is as if the writers haven't read anything on the subject. The dragons are supposedly superior to metahumans (by suprematist estimations) not because they're larger and can swallow a metahuman whole, but because they're hyperintelligent and play an extremely long game. That's why you shouldn't ever deal with a dragon, too. How can this possibly be combined with eating tens of thousands of metahumans just because or attacking own mercenaries for being metahumans is anyone's guess.

Hell, from Day 1 that was the whole established reason why Lofwyr chose the path he did. He realized all the way back in 2012, when he woke up, that humans could and would slaughter his kind wholesale if they tried to rampage, so he took a much safer path to power. It's 50 years past 2012, and technology has vastly improved, especially in the field of military hardware.

This is also why he is the single richest and most conventionally powerful individual (should he choose to exert his full corporate resources) on the planet by the 2050's. He, like Dunkelzahn and to a lesser extent Hestaby, solved the 'human problem' by simply getting the metahumans' loyalty, one way or another.

In all honesty the abomination started with Ghostzilla and it was way before current team took over in fullest

Yeah, but it wasn't anywhere near in scale.
And, frankly, I figure a powerful metahuman magician could do basically the same Doll-Maker did.

Any present great dragon could be easily swapped for 'powerful metahuman magician' without any harm to the plotline. Hell, some things would make more sense then. But this had nothing to do with the fact that it was Ghostzilla who broke the setting, and he was a dragon, and still is there in all his unreasonable (un)beauty. I mean, yeah, he could be swapped. But he is a dragon. And if we talk about great dragons being inadequate in current setting, we should point to the first offender, who made this all possible. One great dragon already messed up the whole political system of entire continent, including one (or two depending on your mileage) superpower. Any present writer accused of dragon, pardon me, fappery, could easily point at the fact and say 'hey, they did it, so can I'. And he would have a point. After all, Alamais ate some humans. That's not a big deal. The same amount was _officially_ killed in Syria and no one gives a damn. Compare it to an abolishment of international law which was preventing a full-scale war in the Americas.

Not really, if you consider the shitstorm after Year of the Comet. Which would mean that the authors of dragon-fappery (awesome name) didn t know or didn´t care. Probably both. After all they produced some other gems in the FATAL region.

SYL

Good to know there was a shitstorm. Wasn't here at the time to witness, but all this Year of the Comet is story is just... well, you know.

Too bad that the same writers are still with CGL.

Can totally see a powerful metahuman magician eating metahumans in GeMiTo and then attacking his own mercs. Yeah.

It's a complete railroad. If the players don't happily jump aboard and start shoveling coal then things might not work so well. But they usually do.

Dunno, does sound kinda like the last Aztechnology Company Picnic.

Good times, except for the potato salad and when the guys in R&D slipped that conjoined twin cyberzombie into the three legged race.

I mean, come ON!

I'm not entirely convinced by this line of argument. Not because I think that your premises are incorrect - they're historically demonstrably true - but because I disagree with your analysis.

First and foremost: I do agree that a static front line isn't going to be occurring any time soon. We can just deliver so much payload that any strong point turns into an open cast mine in a matter of hours at most. If the allies at Normandy had been able to use modern bunker busters, cruise missiles and similar with their air superiority, all the defensive placements would have been reduced to gravel and scrap before a single grunt hit the beach. Where I disagree is what the consequences are for duration and nature of war.

When concentration of forces makes a too attractive target, the reaction is diffusion and mobility. This isn't a modern idea, either. When cannon made closely packed blocks of men too costly to maintain, the british invented the thin red line. A cannon ball would maybe take out two or three men at a time, rather than dozens. When machine guns made mass charges too expensive, fire and movement, leapfrogging cover tactics worked out better. Guerillas are hard to defeat, not because they're so effective (although historically some were) but because the return on every hard strike, regardless of how individually successful, is so small. Devoting a regiment to wiping out a dozen boys and girls with antiquated battle rifles and rusting AKs is not an efficient victory.

Basically, I expect increased diffusion of combat, but a scenario in which the better (trained, equipped, supplied) soldier is able to exert more pressure around him on the opposition, and (with battlefield communications) coordinate better with his fellows. I expect greater fluidity and flexibility.

You can't kill what you can't find, or and you are unlikely to find something that you don't suspect is there. IIRC, one machine gunner in a bunker at Omaha that wasn't even known to exist before he started shooting fired something like 12,000 rounds of ammo and was largely responsible for pinning down the entire force for hours. Camo and secrecy just becomes more required.

But the problem works both ways, antiship missiles are hugely more lethal, to the point where amphip operations need to be launched from well over the horizon. Which is why USMC keep trying to make their combined armored personnel carrier/speedboat design work.

First, the strategic goal of starting a war is not destroying the opponent's army. It's a resource grab, or changing the government, or mass genocide, or what have you. Guerrilla fighters aren't going to interfere with that significantly, other than forcing the occupants to invest into local corroborators to keep them at bay. Neither is going a dispersed force. See the aforementioned Second Chechen War as an example, where self-reliant terrorists still struggle to this day, while the war in any conventional sense has ended.

Second, guerrillas don't present a fighting force able to face a conventional military. No man-portable anti-air system is capable of challenging even a modern fighter, much less a bomber (unless, of course, employed at direct approach to its airfield). So unless the guerrillas are willing to always face overwhelming firepower - infantry against tanks, aircraft, artillery and god knows what else - they need the aforementioned incredibly complex machine of the rest of the army. And a good deal of it can't be concealed (at least for long) at all, such as long-range radars, capital ships, etc.

Third, guerrillas can't operate for any significant amount of time unless they're supported by the local population, and any prolonged amount of time unless externally supported. Simply for the lack of food, ammo, medicine and other basic necessities.


You can with ease. Modern multiple rocket launchers have their impact zone measured in tens of hectares. We have thermobaric launchers even now, too, so cover's not going to help much. So there's no problem with guaranteed neutralizing any enemy presence in any given area of sane size.

So, where exactly is your disagreement with his argument that flying tanks would make static frontlines a thing of the past?

Imagine how much fuel these things chug.

No need to imagine, it's spelled out in the old rigger books...

Don't confuse LAVs and actual tanks.
See the stats for the Stonewall in MilSpecTech for example, it's actually a flying tank with Speed 400, Accel 20/100, Body 36, and Armour 28.

Well, I was an artillery officer, so I tend to laugh at people who make that kind of claim. As an example, how about Grozny?

How did the invasion of Grozny, Dec 31, 1994 work out? They had lot of BM-21s, tube artillery and total air dominance. How many hours did it take for the massive Russian force to take control of a small city (400,000)? Oh, and what happened on August 6th, 1994?

When these were used, it took 42 days to clear the city completely, taking care not to hurt the civilians. The Second Battle of Fallujah took about as long. It would've taken much less if there had been no reason to care for civilians, like Azt has no reason to care for Amazonians.
Of course, using combat swimmers and anti-terrorist spec-ops units as mechanized infantry, like in the New Year Assault, proved a tad bit less effective than that - although I fail to see how this is characterizing the effectiveness of modern artillery, rather than the Russian leadership in the 90ies (as dear it was to the West, unlike the current one).
As for August 6th, 1994, dunno, Avturkhanov and Gantamirov planned their attack on Grozny? Dudaev prepared his armour and aviation units? Heavy fighting between the local forces started in September, anyway.

'Modern' and 'What happened 20 years ago between forces both fielding equipment that was already 30 years old and was significantly behind the tech curve from the day it went into service' isn't terribly relevant to honest to God modern artillery. The science of warfare has advanced a weee bit since the BM-21s went into service in the 1960's.

Doesn't have much bearing compared to, say, the US flying B-2 sorties into Iraq from Omaha, Nebraska during the second Iraq war, or Predator drone kills made remotely from halfway around the world.

Well, considering that most of the city was methodically and block by block demolished by airstrikes, artillery barrages and MRLs using thermobaric warheads what exactly does "care to not hurt the civilians" mean? The Russians say 27,000 civilians were killed. That's out of the 400,000 total population, most of which fled the city prior or during the fighting.

So yeah, I'm unimpressed with these sort of claims. People who are willing to fight and willing to die can put up one hell of a fight against modern forces. And the fact that you have 18 airplanes based 12 hours away that can drop bombs is really not that decisive.

The AFV counts of the observers watching the Serbs leaving Kosovo were also another example. The Serbs drove out with more AFVs than USAF had claimed they had at the start, much less had left after the weeks of airstrikes. When people went and looked for the wrecked AFVs where USAF claimed to have killed AFVs it turns out that the zoomie claims for AFVs destroyed were just a tiny bit overstated. Like over 10x.

I am sure the proof you have for these claims is as exceptional as they are. Not based on the oh-so-unbiased media reports at all, calling the terrorists "insurgents" if not "freedom fighters" as they are.

And that leads them where, exactly?
Is Hussein still ruling Iraq? What about Gaddafi? Oh, I guess Taliban's still the acting government in Afghanistan, and Maskhadov is still launching raids across Russian Caucasus from Chechnya? Or maybe the overwhelming, almost uniform, Belorussian participation in guerrilla regiments or support of them freed them from the Nazi rule? Oh no you say, it just left more than 25% of Belorussian civilians dead, and it was the Red Army's Operation Bagration that drove the fascists out? So much for putting one hell of a fight.

Well now that history can judge 4th edition as a historical edition with all the others I don't think history will be too kind in general, especially on the plot side. As for sales, well Shadowrun was the primary game keeping FASA in the green during its years and Fanpro nearly killed. CGL has to be commended for basically resuscitating the franchise, still I've seen no sign in game stores of 4th edition being nearly as popular as 2nd and 3rd edition Shadowrun were in their days. But if you think Ghost Cartels can compare to Universal Brotherhood or Renraku Arcology in popularity then I'd be curious to hear how.

As for Ghostwalker I think his initial take-over of Denver made sense. It was a surprise attack by a previously unknown major power, in a very divided situation. Aztlan was able to hold him off in a few wars but eventually the other nations decided to join him and his team of Spirits to gang up on Aztlan. If an Ancient Immortal Elf or Nosferatu suddenly woke up and had a small army then he should be able to take over a city by surprise as well. So it rather made sense that he one initially. Him staying in power and getting away with being ruthless is another matter. Take over a city is one thing, keeping 5 major nations that have major magical or technological military powers of their own? Not really, they should have spanked Ghostwalker into toeing the line.

That was the figures of Sergei Kovalev, who was the Chairman of the President's Human Rights Commission and Human Rights Commissioner for the Duma.

Oh, and if you want a picture of what Grozny looked like after Russians fought there with "care not to hurt the civilians", here are some:
http://anthonysuau.photoshelter.com/image/I0000ol85worpKDo
http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I000...r-eru102563.jpg
http://cdn4.list25.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/grozny.gif

It's hard to tell from Berlin in late 1945.

This isn't just Russians, all urban combat is incredibly violent and bloody. It's room to room fights with rifles, grenades and sometimes knives; booby traps everywhere; houses being blown to pieces by tanks from 25 yards away and guys sneaking out of the sewers to place mines and set up sniping positions in "safe areas". It's about as far from the concept of surgical application of violence as you can get.

Anyhow, back to the original point, which is that until you go to using nukes or chemical weapons you won't have a war over in a few hours or days against people who are willing to fight. The US has been pretty careful to not fight people who were really serious opponents for the last few decades. Our opponents have been ones who can't shoot down propeller driven drones, much less ones who can jam or shoot down satellites or spread scatterable mines over airfields with ballistic missiles.

It's also worth pointing out that in about 10 years of combat in Vietnam USAF had shot down or lost in action about as many fixed wing combat aircraft as USAF currently posses (2141 aircraft lost). As far as I can determine we've lost 26 fixed wing combat aircraft in over 10 years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is that because we are so much better, or because the caliber of the opponent (and their outside support) is so much less?

Oh, the Sergei Kovalev who hanged out with the Chechen commanders during the First War, promising blocked armour regiments safe passage out of Grozny in 1996 if they provide their exfiltration routes? With results rather predictable?

Which shows us that there were destroyed buildings in Grozny. That's... eye-opening. That must mean that all the civilians went down with their homes, because evacuation is just not a concept a Russian can grasp, I understand.

And surgical application is necessary in a full-scale war why, exactly? I have to remind you we started this chain of discussion with massed artillery strikes. You yourself claim a city can be leveled in fourty days with modern-day tech; Shadowrun has seventy years of destructive technology extra.

You'll just have their leader hung after a parody trial, control their resources, and generally do what you want on the vast majority of their territory, with the exception of straggler-controlled enclaves which change nothing on strategic level, eh? So why exactly should that be different in Shadowrun, again?

That's more a question of detecting them, since even AA cannons can shoot these down. But yeah, sure, the US wars have been pretty one-sided lately. The 888 war wasn't; neither were the Chechen Wars in their initial phases.

You might also notice that modern aircraft (also, armour and infantryman gear) cost massively more than they did in the era. Which means modern aircraft can't be produced by thousands. Exchanging airframe quantity for quality has been the trend ever since WWII.
Also, are you only counting aircraft completely destroyed by enemy fire, or what?

I'm working from a list USAF published in one of their journals. There were also over 5000 helicopters shot down or otherwise lost in Vietnam vs 250 or so in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Either the US got a lot better at this warfare thing or we are fighting people a lot less skilled at this whole warfare thing than the NVA/VC. I'd guess it's both, but I'd wager the majority is the opponents. The whole idea of projecting the future of warfare based on these wars seems kind of risky.