I've noticed that the more mainstream underworld organizations like the Mafia, the Yakuza, and even the Triads get a lot more attention than the Seoulpa Rings. I've wondered why, espeically since the Schism, to me, made them seem more motivated and driven. Have any of youse guys used them in your campaigns lately? For what?

I only know what the sourcebooks say. IIRC the Seoulpa rings are a relatively new oganized cime group that uses some really brutal methods. I have never used them in a campaign.

That and they're a lot more fluid than the other organisations. They've got hierarchies, chains of command and set duties, defined territories and a fair amount of history/tradition etc. The rings on the other hand are much more cell like in nature and less bound by the past, meaning lots of variation from one group to the next.

i thought it was the Triads who had a rep for brutality, not the Rings. the Rings run the gamut from hippy protesters fighting the good fight, to merciless street machines in it for the money. basically, they're a loose network of contacts. same could be said of all OC, i guess, but the Rings are much looser than most.

Hippie protesters? Which Ring is that?

any of 'em. the books only list one or two, and says there are a lot more. it depends on who's in charge of a given ring; if they're true believers in the anti-japanese (by extension from their basic anti-yank stance) cause, they might be involved in public activism in addition to, as a front for, or funded by their illegal activities.

I believe that the Rings vary greatly not only from city to city but also from culture to culture. Rings run by whites and blacks might differ from rings run by asians or orks, or whatever. Some, like say in Frisco, might have idealistic goals and dreams-others might be straight up thug killers.

The Seoulpa Rings are the Koreans who escaped annihilation during the Schism. I don't really know of any black or white rings.

the Rings were started by the Koreans who escaped annihilation. since then, they're recruited widely.

the only thing most Rings have in common is their origin and a dislike of the Yakuza. check out the last shadowpost on page 65 of the Underworld SB; most of the Rings are cults of personality. they are, to quote the post right above that, "gangs with an ideology".

i'm not saying an activist-type Ring won't be hardedge and violent, and i'm not saying that activist Rings are at all common. but the only thing you can really guarantee, when it comes to any given Ring, is that they don't like Yaks; community activism isn't at all outside the realm of possiblility.

Fair enough.

They're a lot less organized than the other major OC factions, and except for a very small few, they don't have access to the resources that the others do. Also, if they were trying to work up into a major power player in a city, they would have to compete in a lot of areas in which the Mob or Yaks would be already established, and attrition would hurt them a lot more.

I would tend to agree, but the Rings' ultimate goals and the Yakuza's ultimate goals differ slightly. The Yakuza wants total control of crime, be it smuggling, BTLs, Bunraku houses, narcotics, whatever. The Rings want to eliminate the Yakuza. So while The Yakuza is focusing on keeping the Mafia, gangs, the Triads, and everyone else up outta their criminal Kool-aid, the Rings are only fighting minor border skirmishes to keep a few profitable pots simmering while they gun for the Yakuza. The Rings are much more focused and much more fanatical.

Maybe the original Rings, yes, maybe even four or five rungs down-but this is like a chain letter tome. You can't ultimately control where itends up. Thats what intrests me in the Rings.

Sure in 2043 (Older than I thought they were...) when Akira Watada (Anyone else just love that name...) sent his army of shadow asassins Park Jai Kyu may have possiblely formed the first Seoupla Ring, but he can't control the end product here. Operating i groups of thirty or less means they have to make up for size with numbers-there have to be a lot of Rings out there.

This is straight from Shadows of the Underworld by Steve Kenson:

to a point. the Rings are less disorganized than they are loosely organized. it's hard to bring the hammer down on them because it's too easy for them to scatter an regroup elsewhere. think of it as guerilla OC.

The Rings are the Whack-A-Mole of organized crime.

Note that the Seoulpa Rings originate in North America. The situation in the motherland could be very different.

If it's not Korean, it shouldn't be a Seoulpa Ring. Seoulpa Rings were formed by the Koreans that escaped the Schism. If they branched off over and over to the point that there aren't any more Koreans, the end result would just be a gang calling themselves a ring. Hell, the original rings were basically big, organized gangs to begin with.

that's not how the Rings work. the Rings weren't started with the intention of creating a korean mafia; they were started with the intent of creating a criminal enterprise which, as part of its operations, hurts the Yakuza. what seperates the Rings from common gangs is, 1) they're more likely to come to peaceful, cooperative agreements between themselves; and 2) they all have, to greater and lesser degrees, an anti-Yak bent. the fact that they're so korean-oriented is mainly an artifact of their founding; when the original Ring leaders begain recruiting, they recruited from within the korean community because that's where all their contacts were. as soon as they started making good contacts outside the korean community, though, they diversified their racial base as much as possibe.

what binds the Rings is ideology, not race--which is one of the reasons they're so hard to knock down. the Yaks still think of the Rings as being a korean thing; the less and less korean the Rings actually are, the easier it will be for them to strike at the Yaks--and also make money.

I like onion rings.

Personally, I love the Rings. The whole story line behind their founding is great and the Rings they describe in New Seattle add a lot of depth to the city. I created an excellent human street sam who was a member of the Komun'go ring in Seattle. He was the older cousin of Chulsoon Grey Wolf and a former Korean yakuza member.

I based him off of Spike from the Cowboy Bebop anime. The best part of the character is I had a pervasive enmity that lasted the entire campaign (the Yakuza) and I also had some useful underworld allies and contacts that weren't so over powered that they disrupted the game balance.