Shadowrun: Modern

The Tree of Woe

shrug I stand corrected.

Thenomain

@ThatGuyThere said in Shadowrun: Modern:

I think a huge reason of why Seattle is grunge.

A huge reason of "Why Seattle?" is the authors lived there.

@deadculture said in Shadowrun: Modern:

It is true that Case, Bobby and the solo whose name escapes me right now were all white

Molly Millions, aka Blondie, aka Debbie Harry.

Shame on you for not remembering this bit of trivia from the 80s.

Seraphim73

@Thenomain
Actually, most of the original writers of Shadowrun lived in Chicago (there offices were right where the Bug City nuke went off). When they moved to Seattle later (WizKids days), they noted that if they'd written the books again, they would have mentioned all the damned hills in Seattle.

I believe that they used Seattle because it's got a great combination of Asian influences, High Tech influences, natural surroundings, and Native American influences.

faraday

@Seraphim73, @Thenomain - might be interested in this Why Seattle? thread.

Lots of good speculation, but perhaps the most relevant bit is at the end from a guy purporting to have heard it from FASA directly:

I was told that it was due to Settle having a wide variety of terrain available for different adventures as well as being a port city with a large international population.

My personal favorite response, though, is this one:

FASA was saving Chicago so they could nuke themselves.

deadculture

@Thenomain said in Shadowrun: Modern:

@ThatGuyThere said in Shadowrun: Modern:

I think a huge reason of why Seattle is grunge.

A huge reason of "Why Seattle?" is the authors lived there.

@deadculture said in Shadowrun: Modern:

It is true that Case, Bobby and the solo whose name escapes me right now were all white

Molly Millions, aka Blondie, aka Debbie Harry.

Shame on you for not remembering this bit of trivia from the 80s.

Molly was a Street Samurai/razorgirl. There was the dude that rescued Angie in [redacted].

ThatGuyThere

@deadculture said in Shadowrun: Modern:

@deadculture said in Shadowrun: Modern:

It is true that Case, Bobby and the solo whose name escapes me right now were all white

Molly Millions, aka Blondie, aka Debbie Harry.

Shame on you for not remembering this bit of trivia from the 80s.

Molly was a Street Samurai/razorgirl. There was the dude that rescued Angie in [redacted].

Also we should mentions the coolest a.k.a she had, the Steppin' Razor.
She also makes a good counter point to the original complaint about all white males as she was white but not a male and figured in (and in my opinion was the most rounded character in) multiple Gibson stories.

Lithium

@deadculture said in Shadowrun: Modern:

Molly was a Street Samurai/razorgirl. There was the dude that rescued Angie in [redacted].

The concept of Solo and Street Samurai/Razorgirl/boy whatever is very similar. in cp2020 Solo's just got insane initiative cuz Solo. In ShadowRun it was cuz 'Wires.

deadculture

@Lithium I think the tropes are very different. You see that Molly's jobs tend to be less formal (in that there's no severance package, no corporations but people hiring her) whereas Turner seems to get himself jobs thanks to contacts in corporations here and there. He tries to honor his contracts, but evidently in the span of the novel he starred, that didn't turn out so well.

Also the choice in weapons and training reflects that. Turner is a mercenary, but he has military training and background. Molly has knowledge and training from the streets.

ThatGuyThere

This thread has got me thinking, (always dangerous I know) but could an RPG be set up to tell two converging stories, Gibson does this a lot in his novels, though i think it is most definitely shown in Idoru. I have tried to think of ways to do something similar but have never found a good way to do it. I would want ther to be some mechanical connection between the two but not sure how a system would go about this.

Saulot

@ThatGuyThere what about aomething aimilar to what arcanum does?

ThatGuyThere

@Saulot said in Shadowrun: Modern:

@ThatGuyThere what about aomething aimilar to what arcanum does?

Been forever since I played Arcanum, can I get a memory refresher?

Lithium

@deadculture said in Shadowrun: Modern:

@Lithium I think the tropes are very different. You see that Molly's jobs tend to be less formal (in that there's no severance package, no corporations but people hiring her) whereas Turner seems to get himself jobs thanks to contacts in corporations here and there. He tries to honor his contracts, but evidently in the span of the novel he starred, that didn't turn out so well.

Also the choice in weapons and training reflects that. Turner is a mercenary, but he has military training and background. Molly has knowledge and training from the streets.

Ummm I disagree with everything you just said.

Street Samurai's can come from many different backgrounds. It's a general archetype that can be further customized on a per character basis.

I also would /love/ to see a Street Samurai get a severance package, and be hired by more than a Johnson but at that point they would become Company (Wo)Men archetype as far as SR is concerned.

Basically, just because Molly chose to be hired by people, doesn't mean every Solo is hired only by individual people.

Thenomain

My god, you people are talking about two different game lines and a book series. Nerds.

deadculture

@Lithium Uh, okay. But your rebuttal has not touched on the nuance I outlined at all. Plus I wrote the difference between Street Samurai and Solo, and it appears that it also went right over your head. Their codes of conduct also differ greatly. Molly has one, Turner has another.

I also have to quote myself here:

@deadculture said in Shadowrun: Modern:

... whereas Turner seems to get himself jobs thanks to contacts in corporations here and there. He tries to honor his contracts, but evidently in the span of the novel he starred, that didn't turn out so well.

He got jobs thanks to contacts in corporations. I didn't say he doesn't do jobs for individuals. He probably absolutely does, but that corporate contacts bring him his business.

@Thenomain I love cyberpunk. It is the dystopia I embrace in learning more about, as opposed to Brave New World and 1984.

Lithium

sighs And you missed my point entirely @deadculture. My point is that it doesn't matter where the skill set comes from, just that they have the capability to do the job with the skills they have.

Solo's and Street Samurai's are physical operatives of high caliber. It is their specialization, their focus, that's it. In ShadowRun a lot more 'Archetypes' exist than in CP2020, not even counting the magical ones... at least depending on the edition of SR involved.

What does a solo do? They kick ass physically, are faster than everyone else, and are bad asses.

What does a Street Samurai do? That's my point.

Any differences between the two are more about customization options to individualize the character rather than making them two different types of characters.

Thenomain

ORIGINAL POST:

In 50 or so years into the Shadowrun world, do we still have a national government, or has that broken down to the point where there are megacorps and enclaves and societies organically meshing and competing?

There will be an expanded post shortly. After editing this post three times I kind of decided maybe it deserves more, so more it will have.

deadculture

@Thenomain By then, according to the canon in the dystopia, if there are governments they are held entirely in ransom by the corporations. Sometimes, they even get privatized, so you'd get City of X, State of Y, and they're all distinct corporations under a bigger umbrella corporation.

Thenomain

THE EXTENDED POST:

@faraday and I had an extremely long discussion about money and government in the future, and it's changed my plans. Originally I wanted to have USA break down into essentially city-states, everything dependent upon local governments and hyperlocal communities, both relying on the supply-and-demand which are the international corporations.

However, Faraday brought up a key problem: The SIN, the identifier that allows you to get things done. With one, you're marked for life but can get a lot of things done. Without one, you can get a lot of other things done but so much more is difficult to do like "rent an apartment" or "use a bank".

This all came from one of the key feels of Shadowrun that she expressed, and is the reason I set up this thread to begin with: Without the SINless, it isn't really Shadowrun.

I'll argue about a lot of things "not being Shadowrun", but I concede to this. But that brings up so many questions: Who manages the SIN? How do people get paid? How does cash work? My head spirals out of control, so I'm going to put down ideas.

The SIN is a GUID for individuals. It's a biometric and historical check comprising of DNA, fingerprints, loan history, criminal record, birth certificate and so on. It's everything we fear a universal ID card would be. Problem: Who controls this database? Is it global? Based on government you were born into? Is there an agreement among the corporations to share this information? Each answer changes a lot, such as "is the city-state sprawl feasible?"
Cash in a post-cash society. If we have the SIN, why do we need cash? What bank or government in the world would risk giving up cash? If the governments were really corporations, why wouldn't they have a 100% Traceable global standard? Or worse, a 100% corporate-only script? This latter one feeds into an idea for "Corporate Enclaves", i.e. living womb to grave in service to a corporation. You work sixteen tons and what do you get?
Digitally signed currency in a post-cash society. I think we're going in this direction. This is really where the discussion Faraday and I started with: How can you have credsticks when you don't trust anyone around you? For that, she convinced me that the future still needs cash, especially a future with criminals for hire in it. Mind you, if you're getting paid by a government or major corporation, then I'm going to assume that they can get you currency that's hidden in the system. (Thoughts on that one, @faraday? Also, others?)

A RESPONSE WHILE I WAS TYPING THE ABOVE:

@deadculture: Part of what I'm doing is seeing what Shadowrun would look like if it was designed today, right now, as I'm sitting outside a Wendy's looking at the rush hour traffic drive in front of the tri-state area's largest university (and one of the best cancer research hospitals in the country).

For example, the idea of a Southern USA Secession seems outright implausible to me, let alone the Great Ghost Dance reclaiming huge amounts of the southwestern USA, at least not with blood, a lot of blood, and I don't see the natives of this land having those kind of numbers. But that's just my explanation for saying: I don't think it would fly in today's culture.

I think hyper-localized societies makes sense. America is starting to "get" what New Yorkers have known for generations: That Europe is how it is for a reason of population and space, not because "lol Europe". Gibson's Bridge series and Miéville's Bas-Lag series both hit this hard, as well as pretty much anything written by Stephenson.

I do have a singular reason to focus on these authors as templates: I feel cyberpunk should be personal. It should be about people, at least mine will be. I find myself subconsciously focusing on how every element I'm inspecting affects people. Not just the heroes, because in my perfect cyberpunk fantasy world there are no heroes, or they are heroes in the same way that a firefighter or a civil rights champion is a hero: They're heroes to the people around them, the people whose lives they improve.

The world will be the world, but you? You're the person you want to be, if you can make enough space to be that person.

deadculture

@Thenomain That is an interesting take, and it seems in sync with the genre, yeah. There are no heroes, everything is shades of grey, and the psycho ganger might actually be charitable and the perfect corporate manager is a ruthless serial killer for sport.

faraday

@Thenomain One thing to bear in mind... SIN is completely a UCAS artifact. The database is managed by the UCAS government. Other countries (and probably corporations) have their equivalents, but the SIN is not global. (In canon SR anyway.)