Previews of the North America Page

Tsimshian is now a part of Salis-Shidhe

layout: Ugly. Period.

They actually just edited the 2nd edition map.

Yeah, it seem so but they resize it in a odd layout

no color and no fold-out format.

Yucatan now appears to be independant, the Ute is gone and the PCC is larger.

Interesting.

Damn. Ute was one of my favorite places to force the players to go. And with the Azzies out of Yucaton, that place loses some of its fun.

It looks like Ute just got absorbed into the PCC, possibly the crash dealt it's already shitty economy the death blow and the PCC moved in to save the day.

And having had a good, hard look at California, here's what I guess:

Winternight, having read "hammer of god" like all good terrorists with nuclear weapons should have, detonates their weapon focus nuke inside the san andreas rift. This results in a megaquake (I don't remember who said that, but I agree with them now) that created these islands out of the land between santa barbara and SanFran and sunk LA and San Diego and Tijuana and made the peninsula an island. It's basically the SA rift sunken.
Now, of course, such a quake causes massive damage and wrecks two of the continent's largest sprawls. And again, it's PCC to the rescue (I bet they also have cut a deal with Celedyr on wireless matrix access just prior to the crash. PCC, the new Aztlan), as they already have LA and are propably expecting a huge refugee wave into the now-assimilated areas formerly known as Ute Nation. Now, to avoid the inevitable civil war brought by that (and the Ute peoples' friendly attitude), they establish their own SoCal protectorate and make it a PCC province.

The war between SSC and Tshimshian that has long been brewing also has finally started, adn apparently, Tshimshian cannot depend on MCT any more. Either the corp cut a deal with the SSC, or MCT is recalled to Japan to rebuild it from whatever desaster has struck it (another RoF outbreak triggered by the nuke-focus?). Anyway, it seems Tshimshian is occupied but not fully under control, or the war is still raging.

Otherwise, nothing changed except Yucatan's independence becoming factual. Not that this is a country where anyone would want to live, being half a giant toxic domain and half run by quite mad spirits, with little population left.

Sounds like a good guess for the explanation, hermit. I wonder what the ~1km tall tsunami did to the rest of the Pacific rim (and how the west coast of North America survived the rebounding tsunami, which would probably be around 100m tall, IIRC).

Maybe Hong Kong is now one giant arcology and the tsunami just washed over the enclosing dome. ("Hey, look Mommy, there's a giant squid in the sky!" "You have such an imagination, dear!")

Am I the only person who hasn't been able toopen any of the links this guy has been posting?

In fact it turns out I can't open them from the FanPro site either.

They're PDFs.

Tsunamis happen when the epicenter of the quake is offshore. In the case of California, the epicenter(s) surely are inland. When the waters rushed in, there was very probably lots of damage (in addition to the quakes'), but not much of a tsunami everywhere else around.

Does it look liek Saito got kicked out to anyone else besides me?

The miniature plot-holes powering certified credsticks lost containment when the Matrix crashed and sucked it all up, ok?

Well, don't look at me for definitive answers, 'cause I don't have any. I'm just like you, trying to make sense of this change, because I don't know the fine details that Rob planned for that. But while your approach is one of denial and opposition to the change (which doesn't mean it's not a valid approach), mine is to try to find an explanation that embraces the change and makes it palatable (no easy task I admit).

For all I know, the coastline presented in SR4 map is still a temporary one, with waters slowly receding to the ocean, and flooded areas are not deeper than a couple meters at most. Or it could be a deep chasm rivaling the Marianas Trench just on CA's doorstep...

The awakening is magic, manasphere, blah blah; they came up with an in-character reason for all that, and much of the game is about the social implications of that change. Dragons fit in the same category. The comet fits in the same category, mostly. There are normal-scale disasters (those that happen every few hundred years) that shouldn't be triggerable with magic but somehow are. A lot of that is the flavor that makes Shadowrun different, and not just another near-future cyberpunk game. There's a few cubic tons of unbelievability there, sure, and plenty of events are not handled realistically, but they're all in the realm of human society and the natural environment, and these are things that are fluid relative to geology.

This dwarfs them immensely (a thousand cubic tons, at least!)--but if there's a good IC or OOC reason for it so that it adds to the game, great! I'm just not seeing it right now, nor do I expect to see it. (Well, there is one explanation that might work, but I doubt that it will be used.)

I'm missing your point with the Ireland reference, unfortunately.

Well, let's just say an island doesn't just regrow lost monuments and entire forests overnight.

Thanks for clarifying.

Those things happen only in tens to hundreds of years--a speedup of 10,000x. And again, it involves the biosphere (and human artifacts), which already has piles of backstory to partially justify such chanes. The CA event is a speedup of at least 1,000,000x, and probably more like 1,000,000,000x. I taste a lot of cubic tons, there!

Which all, in the end, adds up to one thing: They don't really give a shit about how logical it would be if they can justify it with magic.

Agreed. They just haven't done the groundwork to justify this with magic, except to say, "It's magic!". The other things at least have partially been explained by the nature of magic and the mana cycle and manasphere and so on.

If they do the same groundwork here, then I'll show the same leniency I do with the other stuff...which is to grumble a bit, wish they'd made it a bit less spectacular so it fit the rest of the game world better...and get on with it. If they just say "It's magic! Woot!" then I'm going to be rather more cross.

Actually, there is a magical scenario under which these changes could have happened. Compare on the map where that stretch of water is. A good multifront war relying heavily on magic in that area could, combined with the right toxic elements, produce the equivolent of the world's largest powerball. The result would be the reshaping of a lot of land in that area, all without the nasty radiation side-effect.

Yes, and the equivalent of about 100,000,000,000,000 move earth spells. That's a big war, with every magically active person on the planet casting at least a million move earth spells personally (or creating spirits that can do the same thing). And it doesn't explain the central CA coastline.

Nah. Doesn't take that. Just the combined energy of spells being cast and focuses present to supercharge the entire area, followed by something to ignite them. Instead of one massive explosion, you get hundreds of smaller ones that, combined, do all of the damage. As a result, a certain island contains only ruins. The entire area would likely be a magical deadzone, equivolent to deep space.

As for Central CA: Side effects.

Edit: Looking at it, it could all be part of the same event. The explosion merely followed the coastline.

Except it jumped over Santa Barbara, and the explosions demolished mile-tall mountains and put the rock...um...well, it sent it into the astral, maybe. You certainly don't want a thousand cubic miles of rock dust in the atmosphere. I don't think that explanation works very well, even by the standards of "magic caused a forest to grow overnight".

It's a problem of scale. SR isn't normally a setting where you can power up by a factor of a billion or so whenever it's convenient. That's, I don't know, Dragonball Z. The scale is so phenomenally off that it requires a pretty extraordinary event. This would be the defining sudden geological event of the past 64 million years. That's pretty extraordinary.

But your entire premise is based off the idea thats its not tied to the cycle of magic that the entire universe is based off of. That cycle of magic is totally 100% governed by the same minds that made the map that your nethers are all in a twist over.

Actually, it wouldn't send rock anywhere. It would simply use so much energy that the "destroyed" matter would simply be coverted directly into energy, thus fueling the explosions even more. As for that skipped area: I don't think it was. I think that it's simply an area that wasn't saturated, the explosions for it would be fueled only by the matter converted into energy. The area would be a cratered wasteland. Then the path gets into an area with more magical energy, but not as much as before. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if the path followed a ley line.

And, yes, I'm pretty sure that it will be put down in the book as the defining geological event of the last 64 million years.

As for why the destruction doesn't continue into Aztlan: No one said ley lines have to be straight lines all the time. Air and water currents aren't. Once it gets out to sea, it eventually runs out of energy to keep the explosions going.

You don't really want to know what happens when you turn 1000 cubic miles of rock into energy. You really, really don't. Really.

The sun would probably survive.

Actually, I have a good idea of what happens. Antimatter planet busters are based on the idea. In this case, it's also fueling something, which should prevent the majority of the destruction. However, pretty much most of California would be uninhabitable and would show up as a giant black zone on the astral. And, most likely, the Pacific wouldn't exactly be in that good of a shape either.

How would you keep the energy--however much it was--from throwing up lots more soil into the air? Supposing you converted the entire area into energy, what would you do with the 7e32J of released energy, aside from blow the planet to smithereens?

(Added in edit: I had a number for only a single cubic mile before...fixed the math to match the text.)

Also added in edit: Fuelling what? You do know about conservation of matter/energy, right? Where is the energy sink? (And if you say, "The astral!", then I already proposed that the matter just be dumped into the astral.)

Ellery, you have a problem with that post: I'm proposing a magical series of explosions are following a ley line. Those explosions, in turn, ended up converting matter into energy and using them it to power the explosions as the follow the line until the energy is too low to support the continued path of destruction. Stop and ask yourself if you honestly think that physics really enters into it.

yeah, i think it does. i mean, come on, the explosion is powerful enough to shove california apart, but it magically doesn't displace kilotons of dirt into the atmosphere (since air provides less resistance than water and the planet Earth, lots of the dirt will go up instead of out)? even if you decide that matter-to-mana conversion doesn't create as much energy as matter-to-nuclear-holocaust conversion, there are points to consider that just don't make sense.

You mean, the same points that prove dragons are too big to fly?

We have a problem of magic-physics interaction. Namely, they don't. If they did, SR dragons wouldn't be able to fly without some powerful alterations to their anatomy. If we have a magical explosion of the nature I'm talking about, there is nothing preventing it from dragging its fuel along with it as a side-effect of how it works.

Dragging it where?

The astral? When Dunkelzahn transferred the energy of a subatomic nuke blast into the astral, it left like a 10m diameter astral rift. The transfer of this much matter/energy to the astral would create a rift bigger than Earth.

Considering the explosion is on the physical plane, I would say dragging it along the physical plane. You end up with a roaming cloud of pure energy, unleashing two types of destruction at the same time. If it goes the way I suspect, it only affects the ocean once it leaves the coast.

There is the other possibility, that it simply consumes all of the energy at once and shoots out, unleashing it as destruction.

Either way, this doesn't make logical sense, but it's what I would expect from SR.

I would ostensibly expect from this group of devs and freelancers more personal "demand for believeability [sic] or 'realism'" (Synner in a PM to me) from themselves.

Depends on who writes/edits that portion and if it gets looked over. No matter what, it's going to end up silly and breaking or outright ignoring the laws of physics.

No kidding.

But the idea of a cloud of energy "walking the Earth" is more improbable to me than an astral rift over the Western Hemisphere.

Considering the events of Shadowrun past, I would say a cloud of walking energy is pretty much on par. That's pretty much all the mana storms in Australia are anyway.

The mana storms walking about in Australia don't have enough energy to destroy the planet. (And I do mean destroy--all atoms in the planet accelerated to past escape velocity, if the explosion was at the proper location.)

Physics enters it when you say "convert matter to energy". There's this guy called Einstein who had something to say about that at the beginning of the 20th century.

If you go, "Woo, magic!" you still need to do something with the matter, like suck it into the astral and make it disappear, or whatever.