[OSSR]Bug City

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Shadowrun
Bug City


Because Frank doesn't have a copy of UB anymore.

Welcome to Bug City

AncientH:

No, seriously, we were going to do Universal Brotherhood, which we suspect has not aged very well, but Frank didn't have a copy but he did have a copy of Bug City...so here we go.

I'm Bobby, and I used to be a Shadowrun fan. I used to be a particularly huge Shadowrun fan, in fact, but like with a lot of things I didn't get in on the ground floor. I did, in fact, not actually get into Shadowrun until the Second Edition, and even then I was young enough that books were accumulated...sporadically, as time and money were available. Keep in mind, this was before I had the freedom and disposable income to basically buy anything I wanted off the internet. If the game store didn't have it, you couldn't buy it. Even if they did have it, you only had X amount of dollars, and that would not buy all the books. So while writers might like to think that you're reading everything in order, the fact is that any given gamer's collection pre-Bittorrent erra is likely to be...eccentric. You played with the books you had, not the books you maybe wanted to have. Works well for GURPS, not so much for Shadowrun with its ongoing metaplot.

So, that's a long story way of saying I actually originally read Bug City long before I read Universal Brotherhood.


Conservation of nerdjitsu.

FrankT:

Universal Brotherhood is almost universally looked back upon rather fondly. I'm not sure how well it holds up, it's been a while since I've seen a copy and that's another OSSR altogether. Today we're going to talk about Bug City, which is where the plotline from Universal Brotherhood eventually went. While UB hit all the right notes for most people, and the next step was the novel Burning Bright that is one of the better regarded pieces of game line fiction you're liable to read, the next step to Bug City is... more contentious.


People like Burning Bright.

The story involves the Insect Spirits. They are basically Shadowrun's version of the Aliens from Aliens, with a little bit of the cultic magic from Games Workshop's Genestealers thrown in (the fact that the Genestealers are also ripped off of Aliens is not a coincidence). It was all worked in to how Shadowrun magic was supposed to work, so you basically get a shaman who summons the spirits, and then sticks them into the bodies of living victims, who then turn into bug monster gross hybrids. No real reasoning is ever given for why a shaman might want to do any of this, we are pretty much told that they are “crazy,” which since this was the early nineties is about as much motivation as most villains got so that was that.

The Universal Brotherhood kicked things up a notch by having the bug shamans working in secret behind the scenes in a self-empowerment cult that was a bit on-the-nose as a Scientology expy. The shadowrunners were tasked with tracking down a missing person for way too little money, and with shocking ease they discover the human trafficking, the mass human sacrifices, and the tunnels full of rubber suit monsters that they then get to have a proper dungeon crawl wiping out. It's paranoid, it's gross, and people remember it fondly as both a spy thriller and a dungeon crawl.


The big reveal is rather spoiled by the front cover.

Here's the thing though: the player characters don't actually dig very hard to find the mass murder, cannibalism, and pointless mutant army of degenerates. The players basically pull at a few loose ends and scout out some facilities and become totally convinced that the world is under They Live style invasion. It just isn't very well hidden. But you're still on your own, because the Scientologists Universal Brotherhood have strong
lawyers and can totally issue Youtube takedown notices, and otherwise stop you from going through official channels. That doesn't make a lot of sense, but it fits the flow of the narrative of the thriller they are presenting you with in Universal Brotherhood. Burning Bright kicks it up a notch again, where the Universal Brotherhood have kidnapped and murdered enough people to form an army under the streets of Chicago and a secret strike force has to wipe them out with a nuclear bomb without telling the public to avoid a panic or something. It's a novel, and it's fairly well written for the genre, so you mostly just sort of go with it.

But here's where a lot of fans get off this train: none of that made a whole lot of sense if you take a few steps back and try to work out how it all fits together. It's an engaging story, but it's kind of a house of cards. Bug City is a setting book that talks about Chicago after the alien invasion and nuclear blast and now the city is surrounded by a wall to try to quarantine the bug monsters who can both burrow and fly (don't ask me how that's supposed to work), and now we're supposed to make our own stories from these legos despite the fact that none of them really fit together in the first place. None of this shit held up to scrutiny, because it was all Alien allusions and Scientology metaphors. It was never intended to make literal sense, it was a god damn story. Well, two stories. But you know what I mean.

AncientH:

The thing about insect spirits is that they're taking totem animals...maybe a little too literally. People that have Lion as a totem actually growling is one thing, but having Roach as a totem and you start eyeballing Little Sister as a place to lay your egg invest your spirit is bizarre.

The thing about Universal Brotherhood is that it was set up from book one; the UB are referenced in the original corebook back in 1st edition. They were a background element as ubiquitous and kinda-invisible as the United Santas of the Salvation Army. So it was a good reveal.

I'm going to go against Frank on one or two things, though. Burning Bright was not a great novel. It was written by Tom Dowd, who was one of the big noises in the first edition and a great guy, but it wasn't...great. It also requires you to wrap your head around one of the weird things about RPGs: while you the player have read the rulebook and know how the physics and metaphysics of the world work, your characters don't necessarily know all that shit. So you can see a lot of stuff here and there that makes no damn sense from a game mechanics standpoint, but they go through it because it's a novel. You can, in fact, see plenty of characters in novels do stupid shit that makes no sense, like trying to turn an ork back into a human or stopping Goblinization in fetuses...look, novels are where authors get to play with the setting.

FrankT:

Shadowrun had a lot of magical threats. They were “bad” and that's pretty much the only motivation most of them ever got. Toxic Shamans were given a little more to work with (you get your choice of being a poisoner who is a Captain Planet villain, or an Avenger who is an eco-terrorist villain from a Michael Crichton book – and if neither of those sound all that nuanced, it was the fucking 90s), but the Bug Spirits never got any semblance of a reason to do anything. All they got was a look and feel. Which was that they kind of looked like this:



Now... if that seems almost comically unsuited to do subtle infiltration or the story where “no one believes they are secretly evil” then... um... yeah. Tonally it didn't really mesh up all that well. Victims got turned into Kafkaesque giant cockroach people because Scientology was metaphorically a hive mind, but it's all very magical realism and not the kind of thing you were ever expected to consider any deeper than the fact that it was gross and you wanted to stop them.

So a lot of people had their brains break about Bug City, because now we're talking setting rather than narrative, which means that it runs headlong into the problem that fictional history has to be believable in a way that real history or action thriller narratives do not. We are talking about the aftermath of man-eating alien monsters donning ridiculously thin disguises, taking over local government, convincing everyone to love them, and then getting into a scrap up with super ninjas that destroyed most of the city. All without the common folk ever really figuring out what was going on. It sounds exactly like the kind of thing that would be a plot point in a comedic children's cartoon because it was.


More organs means more human.

AncientH:

At this point I should probably mention that I was one of the authors of the Chicago chapter in Feral Cities, which is this book two editions later. (I was cited by a young law student in their paper about zombie apocalypses and squatter's rights because of that chapter!)

So, the big gist of this book is pretty straightforward: Chicago was crawling with insect spirits. To stop them, a nuke was set off, which didn't kill all the bugs, and the city was mostly evacuated except for people that thought Mad Max was a positive lifestyle choice.


The difference is, I make this shit look good.

It's basically an excuse to do Dark Sun in Shadowrun.

FrankT:

This book presents the basic destruction of Chicago (fourth largest metroplex in North America) as both a fait accompli and a big secret. The first part was sure to piss off any players who happened to have their Shadowrun games set in Chicago (it could happen, Changeling was also a pretty decent book and was set there). The second part is just teeth grindingly non-sensical. When major cities get devastated by disasters natural or man-made, there is a lot of confusion, but it's pretty fucking implausible to suggest that the whole thing might get covered up by the government.


Happy Devil's Night.

The actual suggestions on how to use this book are also a bit thin on the ground. The introduction suggests:

Shadowrunners might find themselves caught inside this terrible, lost place, desperately trying to get out. They may be hired by those lucky enough to be on the outside but who lost or left someone or something valuable enough to retrieve. Even more so than in the other dangerous cities of the Shadowrun world, Bug City offers tremendous opportunities for profit and death.

Which is a long walk to say that um... maybe you could do something like Escape From New York. Or something. It's a decent type of setting for something like The Purge Anarchy, but it's hard to come up with a reason for mercenary superspies (that is to say: player characters in Shadowrun) to want to interact with this fucking place at all. There's a mission where someone will send you into devastated Chicago to [Do A Thing], and when you are done (and inevitably double crossed and left to die inside the containment zone, and subsequently escape and take your revenge), you will leave. And never come back. Because the place has a “devastated economy” and obviously no industry or research or anything. Super spies do not break into refugee camps unless someone on the outside is paying them to.

You can't even go the District 9 route with all this. Because in Shadowrun, magic items are not transferable, which means there is no advantage at all to be had in stealing alien tech. If the insects have any material culture, there is no purpose to be served in taking any of it for yourself. And the rich creepy people outside know all that, so there is zero reason for anyone to hire the shadowrunners to steal any alien super tech or whatever.


Every creative decision made with Bug City would have been better if it had been the equivalent decision from District N9ne instead.

AncientH:

You could, if you were of a suitably libertarian/crazy survivalist bent, suggest that players might like to go to Chicago specifically because it has little-to-no government oversight but still has enough infrastructure to be attractive to those in favor of indoor plumbing. Which is basically what we did with Feral Cities, but there we at least had the benefit that the government was no longer holding Chicago under active quarantine. No, for Chicago in Bug City days, you have to break in to the radioactive, Insect-infested Mad Max hellhole, and then break out again.

It's...not an uncommon issue with Shadowrun, to be honest. We talked about this with the Two Tirs; it's not enough that getting to place X is an adventure in itself, but what the fudge are you supposed to do when you get there? I'm not saying that they never address this issue in Bug City, it's just that there's very limited amounts of stuff you would actually want to do there.

FrankT:

This book is 151 pages split among 6 sections. We will try to do one section per post. Hopefully I will be able to maintain sufficient anger to get through each of them in one go.

AncientH:

Also, I think it needs to be said - this book is from 1994, and looks better than a lot of books in 2015. It may not have glossy pages or photoshop, but the art is fine black-and-white (okay, yes, there's a color section, but the less said the better), and you can read everything instead of getting a migraine from the font. There's maps and things. It may be silly, but I like the old layout a lot better than some of the new ones.


I should remind everyone at the onset that insects creep me the fuck out.

[Almaz]

It's too bad, because "city overridden by xenomorphs in yon cyberpunk wasteland" sounds like an awesome setup. But Shadowrun's specific version hamstrings itself at every turn.

[name_here]

They seem to have retconned it for the 4th edition history section, which indicates that the nuking of Chicago was what blew the secret wide open.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Bug City
Chapter 1: City Under Siege


We have infiltrated your halls of power... somehow.

You must read this file

FrankT:

Shadowrun books tended to be presented as in-world online documents. Collections of essays on future message boards with snarky comments on them from futuristic Redditors. It looked snappy and it still looks pretty snappy. Of course, we now know that the comments sections on these things are absurdly short unless we're looking at the highest rated comments in which case there is too much spam and not enough racist and nationalistic Poketalk to troll for upvotes. But despite the fact that the comments don't seem to match up with our horrible horrible modern experience of Youtube comments, it was and is a fun format. Between the introduction (1 page) and the credits page (1 page), and the page after page of fake computer formatting and teaser art, the first chapter does not happen until page 9. It's 15 pages long, but so much of it is filled with little pictures or space devouring fake computer formatting that the whole chapter is probably less than 4000 words. Text density is so low that this chapter might as well be a graphic novel.

The framing of the piece comes with an essay from Captain Chaos about how you have to read the file because it's the most important thing ever. That Insect Spirits are real and the cake official story of a plague in Chicago is a lie and um... stuff. I won't say that books of this type are wrong to hype their subject matter and play up the importance of their contents to readers, but this is pretty weak tea.

First of all, let's talk about the whole concept of a “secret invasion” that the government is pretending not to be fighting. Why the fuck would that ever happen? Governments get really popular when they are fighting a defensive war, and really unpopular when they impose draconian measures to fight epidemics. No government, no matter how evil and Orwellian and dystopic, is ever going to voluntarily perform a coverup of an event that would make them look good using a cover story that makes them look bad. If Chicago blew up because of an invasion from an alien power that the government was successfully holding off... they would never ever shut up about that fact. August 22nd would be like 9/11 on steroids and governments and corporations would shout “August 22nd changed everything!” at anyone who disagreed with them about absolutely anything. Not just in the UCAS, but in the whole world and for like a whole decade (after which, all Orwellian government actions would be justified with Crash 2.0).

And second... we should probably talk about how actually not very threatening Insect Spirits actually were. A Bug Shaman's hive was pretty much not better than a Hermetic Mage's pack of elementals. And a Hermetic Mage was one of the team members of a group of shadowrunners. An Insect Shaman had to run around murdering a fairly large number of people, and their bug hybrids were a lot not as good as a big Fire Elemental. The idea of a giant terrorist organization of wizards secretly kidnapping and sacrificing thousands of people to make an army of shitty bug demons without anyone noticing they were doing it was absurd in the first place, but the actual invasion itself would be quite a let down. Think about the bad guys in The Raid: it's overpowering opposition for the small team of badass SWAT officers trapped in the building, but if they went head to head against the entire army of Indonesia it would be like Bambi vs. Godzilla.


These guys are actually kind of shit, so I'm not sure how they are a major threat or why anyone would make them in the first place.

But so despite the fact that this doesn't make any fucking sense, we are asked to believe that satanists scientologists bug aliens secretly committed thousands of human sacrifices without anyone really noticing, then they were able to seriously threaten not on Chicago but the frickin world with an army of... a couple thousand mid-grade thugs with claws. Then the governments of the world decided to not publicize their victories against invading cannibal bug monsters, leaving tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists to puzzle out what “really happened.” Every part of this is dumb. The setup is dumb, the climax is dumb. And the aftermath is probably dumbest of all. And this is the book of aftermath, where they ask you to review the timeline and figure out where to go from here... which doesn't lend itself well to glossing over the fact that this is all pretty stupid.


And now everything is all “after the fall.” For reasons.

AncientH:

Again, we're in the weird place where the players have knowledge that the player characters don't. Insect spirits aren't particularly unusual in Shadowrun from a strict mechanics standpoint; they were mentioned in the very first sourcebook and starred in the fourth novel, 2XS. Mechanics for insect shaman NPCs in full was introduced in the Grimoire. Universal Brotherhood, which was the "big reveal" for insect spirits (not the first bug hunt adventure, that was Queen Euphoria) back in 1990, four years before Bug City came out.

Now, you can call this a matter of scale - thousands of bug spirits! Dozens of queens! Oh noes! - but that runs right into the issue that Shadowrun is terrible at matters of scale. So instead of getting The Great Patriotic Bug War...


All we need is Neil Patrick Harris.

...we're getting Aliens 2. Which doesn't make a lot of sense without copious fishing for justifications by players - which, to be fair, Shadowrun players are often very willing to do. Some of us even specialized in it.

From a narrative point, I think the whole "this is a forbidden file - read on!" reveal is highly characteristic of the Shadowrun brand; you see the exact same underground journalistic zeal at work in Aztlan, the two Tir books, and even Cybertechnology. There's a sort of Orwelling subtext to the whole setting - at least in the first couple of editions - about governments and corps fighting to control the flow of information. Which is fine for a cyberpunk dystopia, but when examined plain it looks a little silly.


Shadowrun could do worse than Magical Truthsaying Bastard Spidey.

T'be honest, Shadowrun as a whole has been about as accurate at predicting the future of technology and pop culture as William Gibson - which is to say, it has failed hard at almost every turn, and made many ass-covering attempts. So, judge this as a product of its times, and it's still a shitload better than a contemporary AD&D or World of Darkness book. White Wolf was just getting warmed up on its bullshit fonts in '94.

FrankT:

The opening is a chat log where people who don't know what's going on are talking about how weird shit is getting on the invasion day. With soldiers moving around and then man sized bugs flying around, and then people dropping out of the chat. And it's effectively written. It looks a lot like the beginning to a 21st century schlubs caught in the middle of a soldiers vs. monsters showdown setup. Like Shaun of the Dead or Attack the Block. And since this was written in 1994, that means that this is actually forward thinking in the extreme.


The other shoe that's about to drop obviously looks like this. But this came out 17 years later, so Shadowrun's futurism looks pretty fucking good even now.

Then the Matrix starts crashing left and right. Oh noes! References to blue screens and snow crashes are made. It's all very dramatic, and builds tension effectively. And um... I have no idea why any of that shit happens. It's like this section was written about an entirely different and in no way related to Bug Spirits alien attack. See, Insect Spirits aren't the aliens from Independence Day or something, they are spirits. And in Shadowrun that means that they don't know computers. The tagline of the game was “Man Meets Magic and Machine,” and in that context the bug spirits are the magic, not the machine. Insect spirits can't even see computers because their vision is based on the vital energy of living things and natural features. Blacking out the matrix is something that Bug Spirits wouldn't know was a thing they were supposed to do and couldn't begin to tell you how to go about doing it if they did.

I think the implication is supposed to be that The Man is cracking down and trying to memory hole the invasion of Chicago by a literal army of literal aliens in real time. It's so dumb that I don't even know what they were going for here. The whole thing where MiB come down to eliminate evidence of aliens is a trope that only makes sense if the government actually wants people to go on with their lives ignoring the presence of aliens. Once it's open war, none of that shit makes any sense any more. Someone is working with thriller and monster movie tropes that do not in fact go together in the slightest, and the result is simply confusing the moment you stop being immersed in the narrative long enough to even ask how you'd use it in a game.

AncientH:

Bug City is a different sort of product than you see in other game lines, because it's sort of an event book and a location book rolled into one; it's metaplot material built on the bones of some previous setting material - very literally in this case, as it involves large chunks from Neo-Anarchist's Guide to North America, which we'll address in the next chapter - and it's something that other games don't do well.

The closest I can think of is Legend of the Five Rings, which like Shadowrun kept up (nominally keeps up) a long-running continuous metaplot, usually by sweeping the uncomfortable bits under the rug, declaring they never happened, and hoping that by ignoring them people will forget about them. Partially though, it's the case that you rarely want paradigm-shifting events in a setting; as Frank mentioned, Bug City shat on the non-zero number of players that had games set in Chicago.

On the other paw, some people like that; they like it when the game continues to evolve, and they like it when the plot references some element relevant to their characters (hopefully in such a way that doesn't automatically kill and/or negate them, like revealing they were the enemy all along). Overall, BIG EVENTS introduce a lot of interesting possibilities and lead to a new status quo that makes the setting more complex and interesting - that's basically why Marvel and DC do them.


DC was invaded by alien bugs in '93. Just sayin'.

There are other problems to the approach. Event fatigue is a recognized one - too many MASSIVE BIG CHANGES in short order wears on readers and players; it's why edition changes are a good time to make big changes, with the setting remaining relatively static in between. On the other hand, writer fatigue is a thing too - writers don't always have the stamina to keep up a storyline (or, more importantly, publishers get tired of paying for it), and situations can just sort of "hang" in limbo for considerable periods of time. Chicago wouldn't be visited again until Target: UCAS, and then wasn't substantially revisited (no, I'm not counting Shadows of North America) until Feral Cities in 2009. If you were 15 when Bug City came out in '94, you would be 30 years old when Feral Cities rolled out. There are players that were conceived, born, and raised to roll dice in those 15 years, probably.

Which isn't to say that Shadowrun ignored Chicago or the situation there - it gets several mentions in various products - but the region itself was basically fallow ground for a generation. It's a hell of a dangling question as far as "What happened to Chicago?" - but given the weird timeline of RPGs, that's sadly fairly typical. It's like with comic books, you don't want characters to literally age out. Shadowrun is very atypical in RPGs in that has actually happened.


Fought in Vietnam. Probably shouldn't be able to move at this point.

FrankT:

The book calls time for two solid pages to give you error codes and garble text to show how the Matrix isn't working super well. That part would have worked pretty good as a screenplay – just a short bit of footage being all glitchy and fuzzy to show that things were going to hell. This isn't really a part of the book you “read” in the traditional sense. It's like ASCII art – something you look at to appreciate what you are being shown. And it works on that level.

When we get out of that and start having people talk again, it's not as inspired. It's people giving infodumps to each other. Giant insects are running around killing people and soldiers are running around fighting them. And this completely violates the “show don't tell” mantra that the author had been chanting to himself up to that point. We should have been getting a first person testimonial of something specific happening with the implication that it was happening all over the city. But instead it comes off like someone giving a a capsule review of a horror movie to their little brother.

I'll be honest: this is the part where Highschool Frank just fucking stopped reading the chapter and skipped ahead to the next chapter. Because the actual story being told is kind of dumb and I can only appreciate it in terms of the way it is being told. Which, up to page 15 was pretty solid. But once it starts having people giving past tense exposition dump, it gets boring and clunky in addition to being kind of stupid overall, I lost interest. Still have of course, but now I have “liquid determination” to keep going.


That'll do.

So there's more garble text, a bunch of people shouting into the void about how they are alive and also online, and then we get a rant about how someone brought the node back online by hosting it on their own server. The thing is: none of this shit is interesting. They are trying to get a “many Bothans died to bring us this information” vibe going, but it's just dumb. It's like Factol's Manifesto level of stupid on this point.

AncientH:

The whole thing is supposed to be a transcript of a lead up to the Cermak Blast, when a nuclear weapon was dropped on the old FASA offices, which coincidentally were the seat of the insect spirit nests. The novelization of all that, Burning Bright, actually uses a smaller unmanned drone, but nobody actively gives a fuck about the novels. Shadowboxer was a novel for fuck's sake. Black Madonna was a novel, and that was DaVinci's Code with elves. The last time people gave a fuck about the novels, it involved perky brown elf nipples.

What did you expect?

Oh, very well.

FrankT:

The conclusion of the chapter is SYStem 05 giving a 1950s style monologue about how the government has abandoned the people of Chicago and we have to take up arms Red Dawn style against the occupying army of alien monsters. And um... there's certainly some red meat to throw around with cold war rhetoric, but honestly what the fucking fuck?


And yet, this is supposed to be set in the twenty fifties...

Again and still, there has to be a reason to allow a city with 10 million people in it to just “go feral.” Because that is a totally crazy thing to have happen. Katrina hadn't happened yet, so we didn't have that model. Instead, the government is leaving the Midwest to die because the government is bad. This is like fucking Saturday morning cartoons for the children of Libertarians or something. Having a country hide the fact that it is being invaded from its own people requires a pretty good sales pitch, and this book doesn't make one at all.

And that's it. Next up: the chapter that is mostly copypasta from the Neo-Anarchist's Guide to North America.

AncientH:

As name_here mentioned, by the time 4th edition rolled around we'd rolled over on the whole trying to justify the conspiracy part of it - the main reason that Chicago was abandoned was because there were still major nests active in Chicago, and oh yes they had dropped a nuke on it. Eventually FASA did a storyline where Ares basically invaded Chicago and took out most of the remaining insect spirits, declared "this site is clean," and then packed up and left...which set the stage for 4th edition Chicago as a feral city. (Would you want to move into a slightly irradiated fifth-floor walkup after a decade of squatters and with only a slight chance of being buggified?)

Well, in the writers' defense, the idea of the government waging a secret war against the supernatural is a pretty common trope - you saw it in the whole Hellboy/BPRD "War on Frogs" arc, and there are various properties where their are military groups working to contain the Cthulhu Mythos or sparkly vampires or whatever. It's just...an atypical cyberpunk trope.


Seriously, dude, just move.

[erik]

Man, this is making me sad. They could have had a quarantined Chicago (or better yet, a different city that is land-locked and able to be quarantined) overrun by Xenomorphs. Tons of valuable shit remains, but you have to be sneaky as hell to get in and out without being turned into the decor.

• Steal something specific from the city in the Hive.
• Steal some eggs/bio weapon samples.
• Stop some idiots from stealing some eggs.
• Bug hunt
• Investigate rumors of outbreak at nearby facility (or far away if someone managed to sneak out some gestating samples)
• Test out psi-emitter to make bugs docile
• Rescue some wealthy idiots who failed at one of the above and are pinned down, or maybe being plastered to walls as we speak.

So many hooks.

[Longes]

Man, this is making me sad. They could have had a quarantined Chicago (or better yet, a different city that is land-locked and able to be quarantined) overrun by Xenomorphs. Tons of valuable shit remains, but you have to be sneaky as hell to get in and out without being turned into the decor.

• Steal something specific from the city in the Hive.
• Steal some eggs/bio weapon samples.
• Stop some idiots from stealing some eggs.
• Bug hunt
• Investigate rumors of outbreak at nearby facility (or far away if someone managed to sneak out some gestating samples)
• Test out psi-emitter to make bugs docile
• Rescue some wealthy idiots who failed at one of the above and are pinned down, or maybe being plastered to walls as we speak.

So many hooks.

This set up has some problems though, in that half of your team has no reason to go into the bug city. What's Face going to do there, once you got past the quarantine? Wear a rubber mask to convince the xenomorphs that he's one of them? Why would you bring a hacker to the place where Matrix has been turned off and/or exploded? Bug City mission is basicaly an Only War/3:14 mission, where everyone is a weapons expert first, sneaking expert second, and maybe can open some doors without explosives third.

[Fucks]

• Steal something specific from the city in the Hive.
• Steal some eggs/bio weapon samples.
• Stop some idiots from stealing some eggs.
• Bug hunt
• Investigate rumors of outbreak at nearby facility (or far away if someone managed to sneak out some gestating samples)
• Test out psi-emitter to make bugs docile
• Rescue some wealthy idiots who failed at one of the above and are pinned down, or maybe being plastered to walls as we speak.

So many hooks.

You could use most of them in Chicago, Shadowrun.

[TiaC]

Man, this is making me sad. They could have had a quarantined Chicago (or better yet, a different city that is land-locked and able to be quarantined) overrun by Xenomorphs. Tons of valuable shit remains, but you have to be sneaky as hell to get in and out without being turned into the decor.

• Steal something specific from the city in the Hive.
• Steal some eggs/bio weapon samples.
• Stop some idiots from stealing some eggs.
• Bug hunt
• Investigate rumors of outbreak at nearby facility (or far away if someone managed to sneak out some gestating samples)
• Test out psi-emitter to make bugs docile
• Rescue some wealthy idiots who failed at one of the above and are pinned down, or maybe being plastered to walls as we speak.

So many hooks.

This set up has some problems though, in that half of your team has no reason to go into the bug city. What's Face going to do there, once you got past the quarantine? Wear a rubber mask to convince the xenomorphs that he's one of them? Why would you bring a hacker to the place where Matrix has been turned off and/or exploded? Bug City mission is basicaly an Only War/3:14 mission, where everyone is a weapons expert first, sneaking expert second, and maybe can open some doors without explosives third.

To fix this, let's come up with things for them to do. Toss in gangs of human survivors, suspicious of strangers for the Face. As to the Hacker, what if the military had kill-squads and drones sweep through occasionally? The hacker could provide overwatch and keep them out of kill-boxes.

[TheFlatline]

Bugs infiltrating humanity in crappy human suits that nobody even notices?

The writers of MiB must have been Shadowrun fans.

[TheFlatline]

As to the Hacker, what if the military had kill-squads and drones sweep through occasionally? The hacker could provide overwatch and keep them out of kill-boxes.

That's more rigger work than hacker.

The concept of a working matrix grid after a nuke becomes more feasible when you throw wireless/4e into the mix. A power generator (or some really good solar panels) and an omni antenna with a yagi uplink on a high spot and you've got coverage. The question is what would a decker/hacker *do* in that situation? I guess you could design a minigame sort of thing where you route power/water/whatever through the damaged infrastructure grid to keep alive, but that's downtime shit.

[Aryxbez]

Eventually FASA did a storyline where Ares basically invaded Chicago and took out most of the remaining insect spirits, declared "this site is clean," and then packed up and left...which set the stage for 4th edition Chicago as a feral city.

The whole idea of a Post-Apocalypse city Chicago I had found really compelling, and one of my favorite storylines. However I was really disappointed when in my last Shadowrun Campaign, our DM basically saying how that storyline was resolved, with Ares bug-spray nuking it all. At that point, just sounded like "just another sprawl", no longer having much to make it unique anymore from the others.

So, If I ever got a chance to run this storyline, I'd want to ignore the part where it got "resolved", and still have the ongoing calamity going down. Thusly I'm also really interested to see some more developed hooks of what could do for this. Otherwise, we have "extract an important personnel", or get some mcguffin-of-the-week. All likely with the conceit that the players got stranded, and need to find a way to escape (whether repairing a rail-line or other vehicle Dead Space style, getting to a timed extraction zone that may very well get overrun, etc.).

Because in Shadowrun, magic items are not transferable, which means there is no advantage at all to be had in stealing alien tech.

That sucks, so its all magical item foci's? Is there any examples or details of this Alien-Tech, if its minor enough, could probably just allow it to be used for non-Awakened use (if it's anything like that Nazi-Scalpel or whatever).

[Fucks]

Magic items can be transfered if the new owner is willing to pay Karma to bind it to himself.

[Nath]

Governments get really popular when they are fighting a defensive war, and really unpopular when they impose draconian measures to fight epidemics. No government, no matter how evil and Orwellian and dystopic, is ever going to voluntarily perform a coverup of an event that would make them look good using a cover story that makes them look bad. If Chicago blew up because of an invasion from an alien power that the government was successfully holding off... they would never ever shut up about that fact. August 22nd would be like 9/11 on steroids and governments and corporations would shout “August 22nd changed everything!” at anyone who disagreed with them about absolutely anything. Not just in the UCAS, but in the whole world and for like a whole decade (after which, all Orwellian government actions would be justified with Crash 2.0).

The second Crash would more likely comes as the "proof" the governments and corporations were right to shout "The arcology changed everything" since 2060, after the "warning shot" that was the bombing of the Pentagon by a rogue UCAS general who belonged to Winternight in 2057. But Shadowrun had plots occurring more than it had events happening: practical consequences for the setting were often forgotten. As Shadowrun authors forgot to wrap up the official investigations on Dunkelzahn assassination, I'm left to wonder if the opinion polls would rather had the bugs or Winternight "techno-terrorists" as the likely culprits for the assassination.

I guess those who wrote Bug City did it with the idea that complete cover-up somehow is a better display of government and/or corporate powers than appropriate spin. If barely true in real life, that's a common trope in fiction and conspiracy theories, summoning memories of Roswell and the Raiders of the Lost Ark ending warehouse. A Bug City War modeled after 1991 Gulf War instead could have been hilarious.

[Ancient History]

Feral Cities Chicago harped on some of the advantages of having a large lawless space for criminals and individualists to operate in, as well as the attractive secondary market for insect magician gear, Awakened drugs, etc. But even if some of those things had been available to the Bug City crowd, the quarantine relatively undermines it - since one of the advantages of illegal spaces is generally freedom of movement.

[Shady314]

Thusly I'm also really interested to see some more developed hooks of what could do for this. Otherwise, we have "extract an important personnel", or get some mcguffin-of-the-week. All likely with the conceit that the players got stranded, and need to find a way to escape (whether repairing a rail-line or other vehicle Dead Space style, getting to a timed extraction zone that may very well get overrun, etc.).

Id send my players in right when the shit has totally hit the fan. It'd be a chance for them to break out the military grade firepower and go nuts. You could plunder museums and such. Possibly they still have most of their security systems intact. Then maybe that's why there are some gangs of survivors holed up in these places. Survivors willing to fight you for a place on the train/helicopter whatever. Survivors that take up space you could fill will precious loot. One or more of which can be a bug in disguise of course trying to slip the quarantine.

That in itself could be a whole other job if the player group is dark enough. Ares hires your group to go in and Eliminate all survivors. Anyone could be a bug. ANYONE.

[Morat]

Governments get really popular when they are fighting a defensive war, and really unpopular when they impose draconian measures to fight epidemics. No government, no matter how evil and Orwellian and dystopic, is ever going to voluntarily perform a coverup of an event that would make them look good using a cover story that makes them look bad. If Chicago blew up because of an invasion from an alien power that the government was successfully holding off... they would never ever shut up about that fact. August 22nd would be like 9/11 on steroids and governments and corporations would shout “August 22nd changed everything!” at anyone who disagreed with them about absolutely anything. Not just in the UCAS, but in the whole world and for like a whole decade (after which, all Orwellian government actions would be justified with Crash 2.0).

The second Crash would more likely comes as the "proof" the governments and corporations were right to shout "The arcology changed everything" since 2060, after the "warning shot" that was the bombing of the Pentagon by a rogue UCAS general who belonged to Winternight in 2057. But Shadowrun had plots occurring more than it had events happening: practical consequences for the setting were often forgotten. As Shadowrun authors forgot to wrap up the official investigations on Dunkelzahn assassination, I'm left to wonder if the opinion polls would rather had the bugs or Winternight "techno-terrorists" as the likely culprits for the assassination.

I guess those who wrote Bug City did it with the idea that complete cover-up somehow is a better display of government and/or corporate powers than appropriate spin. If barely true in real life, that's a common trope in fiction and conspiracy theories, summoning memories of Roswell and the Raiders of the Lost Ark ending warehouse. A Bug City War modeled after 1991 Gulf War instead could have been hilarious.

Speaking of which...
W:"...The government is very keen that nobody should blame them for there being aliens."
H:"Would people do that?"
M:"They will when the aliens invade and they find out that we've known all along and could have been enlisting support all over the world in an effort to defend against them, there'll be hell to pay then."
W:"Yeah, cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, let's keep the existence of aliens, which is in no way our fault or indeed at this point exclusively our problem, a complete secret."

If they wanted that plotline, they probably should've made the bug invasion the fault of the UCAS government or at least Ares. If you're gonna copy Aliens, commit.

OTOH, I'd say that the end of Raiders is plausible. The Nazis opened the box and all died horribly in a completely inexplicable manner. It's not weird that the G-men's take on the box is "make sure nobody fucks with it."

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Bug City
The Windy City


If I pass out in leftover pizza, I wanna know that I'm not going to drown.

FrankT:

As we mentioned earlier, much of this chapter is copypasta from the Neo Anarchist's Guide to North America. As Ancient History spent a lot more time reading those writeups back when he was writing his own Chicago chapter than I did back in high school, I'm gonna defer to him on these matters. This chapter is 32 pages long and has 15 subsections, many of which are completely pointless in that they are things like “Economy” which is literally a rant about the economy that Chicago used to have followed by some snarky web comments pointing out that you can ignore all that text because now everything is like Fallout Tactics and no one is going to trade a can of precious beans for your worthless money.

I don't fully understand what the point of all of this was supposed to be. I mean, save money and tie by filling most of a 32 page chapter with copy text rather than having to pay a writer is the obvious answer, but it's so obviously a shit idea that I don't understand it. I definitely didn't understand it at the time. I mean, the place had been invaded by bugs and blown up with a bomb, who gives a frag what neighborhoods had good jobs in them in the before time? You could kinda make the argument that this way you could figure out what kind of ruins to put places, but that is and was a weak argument. Highschool age Frank skimmed the fuck out of this chapter, hopping from comment text to comment text and pretty much ignoring the paragraph bodies. I think most people treated the chapter this way.

The source material for this, um, source material is also a really weird book. The Neo Anarchist's Guide to North America was part scattershot place descriptions and part... political and economic propaganda for a bizarre libertarian pastiche belief system that the book called “Neo Anarchism.” They were basically anarcho-capitalists who thought that you could free the world from government and corporate tyranny by engaging in Pareto-efficient trade. I have no idea how that's supposed to work, considering that in Pareto-efficient trades no party is worse off by definition and thus all the mega-corps get to keep all their shit at the very least. The thing is that I don't even know if that shit was supposed to be serious. The head of FASA (the company) at the time and the author of the Neo-Anarchism babble was Sam Lewis. And he got his MBA at Northwestern, the freshest of fresh water economics schools. So it's entirely possible that all those weird rants about natural monopolies can't exist and corporations will cease to have power over us if we stop asking rich people to pay taxes are actually dead fucking serious.


It's libertarians. Their real beliefs are literally indistinguishable from uncharitable parody.

Anyway, the chapter actually about what the city is actually like (rather than being about discussing a previous offering on the same city from a book set before the metaplot events we're talking about) is the next chapter. This chapter is really more just to remind you how much source material there was for this city before they blew it all up. It would be like if every copy of Year of the Comet came with a couple dozen pages of excerpts from the Denver Box Set and then a giant picture of a middle finger pointed right at the reader.

AncientH:

Shadowrun has a reputation for metaplot movement, but traditionally it's been extremely conservative when it comes to sourcebooks. Grimoire 1.0 and 2.0 are basically identical, and significant portions are copied over into Magic in the Shadows. Location books don't have it quite as bad, but keep in mind that for a decade or two at a time you might be referring back to older sourcebooks written in the "now" of 2052 or something when the current "game year" was 2070.

Games like D&D don't normally have to worry about this because games tend to be set in an eternal "now," and the change of life is relatively slow - when was the last time you looked in a Gazetteer and were amazed that the Emperor was making progress building new roads? But in a time when change is accelerated, game books can't quite keep up the pace, and some books really can go out of date relatively quickly - hence the several version of the Seattle sourcebook for Shadowrun.

None of which explains why this chapter is pretty much just a heavily-annotated version of the Chicago section from Neo-Anarchist's Guide to North America. Seriously, I have nothing as to why that happened.

FrankT:

The metroplex of Chicago has ten million people in it and it covers more than ten thousand square miles. So actually, even with the nuclear bomb and shit, there's a fuck load of Chicago that is not in the containment zone. The book talks a bit about how there's still stuff outside the box with like crime and a mayor and shit, but I don't think they really thought this shit through. I mean, there's a map, and that's nice. And it shows how the Containment Zone includes some stuff like Oak Lawn and Berwyn that are part of the Chicago metroplex but not part of the official Chicago city limits. And at the same time, it doesn't include Northside, for whatever that's worth. But the point is that barely over a quarter of the people in “Chicago” live in the literal city limits of Chicago. So the areas of Chicago that aren't under quarantine still have more people in it than, say, Bulgaria. This is a reality that I don't think really settled in for all the writers of this book.

The weird part is that they already had something that served this narrative purpose. And in Chicago, at that. Shadowrun history already involved the Sears Willis IBM Tower in Chicago getting blown up by terrorists and then no one going and rebuilding the several square blocks of devastation because it was cheaper and easier to just build new stuff and let the devastated area rot. The area was called “The Shattergraves” and it had like squatters and monsters and shit in it. There's really nothing narratively that the Containment Zone does that the Shattergraves didn't already provide.


Parts of Chicago already looked like this, so I'm not sure why you'd need the Containment Zone to tell any story that needed telling.

The city is now surrounded by a constant gloomy cloud cover, because magic. No really. The government used big magic to create dour atmospheric conditions to make it marginally harder for people to update Google Earth with the new fucked layout of the city. Still no explanation as to why they wouldn't want to publicize this shit.

AncientH:

Typical noises about the difficulty of getting in we talked about this in the Tir books; people need a reason to go to Chicago and it they haven't really given one yet.

The map of the CZ (Containment Zone) can generously be described as "inadequate."


This is as close as I could find to the actual map in the book, which actually covers a larger area, including grabbing a chunk of I-294 for some reason.

Keep in mind that all of Skyrim takes place in an area about the size of Manhattan; as we said, Shadowrun isn't terribly great at areas of scale. So this is a relatively massive playing area, too small for Fallout-style shenanigans and too big for an insane asylum.

FrankT:

The containment zone's wall cuts right through the train lines, so there are now a bunch of abandoned train stations and decrepit trains laying unused on the tracks like you were in a post apocalypse movie like Los Ultimos Dias or something. Much ink is spent on discussing post apocalypse gangs that ride around on the no-longer-maintained roads and train tracks. They have Akira style road fights with each other and stuff. Also, some of the roads and trains have been taken over by bug gangs.



It makes for a cool visual. But um... what?

There's still the completely unsubtle problem that the nominal targets of the containment wall can go over, under, or through it with ease. Spirits can fly. The true forms can also pass through the astral where the wall does not exist and then materialize on the other side. And some of the bugs make tunnels. Walls are like the least effective containment plan you could imagine. But Shadowrun really loved putting walls on cities. It was a concept they used over and over again. The most famous examples are Portland and Denver, but walls and checkpoints were brought up all over the place. Someone on the staff just really liked reading about Cold War Berlin, or was a huge Judge Dredd fan or something.

AncientH:

Berlin was walled up in Shadowrun too.

The most worthless section in this chapter might be the history section; nobody gives a flying fuck about the fact that Chicago was founded in 1833 by fewer than 100 inhabitants. Cities in North America tend to have bullshit short histories by most measures, and they also tend to grow out rather than up, because there's a fuckload more space. Again, we're talking about issues of scale here, and Chicago had a fuck more people and covered a hell of a lot more area than Paris or London - not to mention the economic impact, which you as a mercenary criminal Shadowrunner only care about insofar as it matters how easily you can buy and sell what you want to.

Chicago was actually sorta-kinda fundamental to early Shadowrun, but only because FASA was actively headquartered there and some stuff from their home games actually made it into the background of the setting; most players today would get a blank look on their face if you mentioned "Truman Technologies," and even racist asshole terrorists like Alamos 20,000 sort of dropped off the radar a bit after 9/11 - and remember the Shattergraves? Yeah, that was the Shadowrun equivalent event, although based more on the Oklahoma City bombings.

FrankT:

The NAGNA section they are copying has a section on buses. So this book feels the need to have some shadowtalk coming up with bus related story hooks. Yes, I just said “bus related story hooks.” It's about as dumb as that sounds.

For no reason I can readily wrap my mind around, they repeat the demographic numbers from NAGNA veratim and then casually mention in shadowtalk that this is a complete waste of time. And now my glass is empty. Anyway, one of the shadowtalkers actually asks how many people are dead and how many are left in the containment zone, and then no one answers that question because the authors are basically just dicking with the reader.

AncientH:

I get the feeling the demographics were put in their out of habit if nothing else; one of the things Shadowrun went away from for a good bit was hard demographic numbers simply because they were terrible at them. Seriously, the existing Native Americans in the US, Canada, and Mexico could fuck like rabbits for generations and the Native American Nation demographics would still be laughably off-base.

We're ripping this section pretty hard, because it's silly, but it's still more readable than your average White Wolf book. The annotations may verge on silly most of the time, but they're at least a little fun and give some personality to what is otherwise a dry, regurgitated text.


No, seriously, I'm ready. Bring on the bugs. I can't take another pointless neighborhood rating.

FrankT:

A few places get updates. These updates are generally things like “This landmark does not exist anymore, because it has been bulldozed. Probably by the army.” Sometimes it's a bit more imaginative, like having the meat processing plants get turned into gruesome bug breeding grounds where kidnapped victims get locked up in a literal dungeon that also used to be a slaughterhouse while they mutate into a bug monster. Cool visual! Basically pointless!

Most of this comes down to writing in various expies of post apocalypse fiction characters or scifi horror locations. Not a bad thing to have in the bag, but also not really something that characters would particularly care about.



There's still the fundamental problem that the bugs don't have anything you want. They are like the inbred degenerates in Texas Chainsaw or something. They kill people in gruesome ways, and you know they are bad because they are ugly, but um... so what? Shadowrunners are mercenary superspies. These are just gangs of mass murderers. No better or worse as a target than a child soldier using terrorist group in Central Africa. You could go kill them and the world would probably be a better place... but you aren't going to be scoring well on your risk vs. reward scale.

Shadowrun had figured out a way to generate D&D style “dungeons” full of “monsters.” But it hadn't figured out a way to fill them with treasure, so this whole piece of design work is basically a failure.

AncientH:

Which we tried to address, at least a little, in Feral Cities with Awakened drugs, insect magic paraphernalia, insect-spirit generated magical compounds and other crap, but that was probably 15 years too late.

I think an important part of understanding this book is that for the most part it's taking the perspective of someone who is already in the CZ, scavenging to survive. Which is fine for a campaign; it transforms it from you being badass Shadowrunners to you being Mad Max and the world is your Thunderdome, but gritty post-apocalyptic is still fairly cyberpunk.



More than what Frank said about there being no treasure, there's also no bad guys in the normal sense. Insect spirits are alien critters ruled by queens (usually) and organized in hives (not always), but this book - and indeed, most books - fall down on giving any sort of motivation for them beyond "grow your hive to the limits of sustainability, then eat a few more people." It's not just that the insect spirits in this book don't have their acts together or aren't unified - there's no real indication that they ever had a game plan beyond "make more insect spirits." I think that's a real failure on the part of the early Shadowrun crew; they didn't think beyond Alien-style bughunts. But the Aliens are animals, and the insect spirits...were supposed to be smarter than that.


The Hive Mother would like to invest in your cows. She feels they will make good stock for breeding the next generation. Do you accept chitin as a form of payment?

FrankT:

All in all, it's 32 pages, but like half of it feels like it doesn't belong. The rest of it is written in the space eating, low content “comments” style. This chapter tells me very little. The chapter ends with a bit on the organized crime groups, but by that point the chapter was pretty much long enough so there isn't any attempt to tell us what the Yakuza are doing now that there is an area with over two million homes in it that literally has no laws. Seems like a huge wasted opportunity, and I would like to see anything cut from this chapter to see more development of the crime groups. Literally anything. There is nothing in this chapter that wouldn't be better if it was cut for space and the space used for discussion of the crime groups in the devastated city. And that includes the copy pasta about the crime groups that they actually did include.

AncientH:

On careful consideration, the only reason I can think of for this chapter is to contrast what was already established for Chicago with the new reality. I don't think they literally needed to do that by compare-contrast in this fashion, but it's the only justification I can figure for why they dropped a chunk of NAGtNA right here.

FrankT:

Next up: Living In Oblivion. That's the first chapter that is actually really about the setting this book is nominally supposed to be about.

AncientH:

Also, with more spiffy art! I kinda like Larry "The Larvae" MacDougall.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Bug City
Living in Oblivion


Nope.


Also no.

AncientH:

I think it's important to realize that when Bug City came out it was well-received, and even today is remembered very fondly. Not so much for the actual writing or the thought that went behind the logistics - it was the concept and art that sold it, much like Dark Sun. A picture is worth a thousand words, and this book is literally crawling with bugs. So while the actual material setting up a Mad Max/Fallout style post-apocalypse enforced by the military which has you cohabitating with giant insect spirits that want to kidnap you and turn you into one of them...


Okay, nobody get into the homosexual metaphors, okay? I have to deal with enough of that shit during John Carpenter film nights.

...even if the set-up is absurd, and you have no good reason to go there, the setting itself is compelling. It's a lot like Shadowrun itself in that regard; the degree of balkanization, rise of the megacorps, the whole NAN thing is more than a little ridiculous. Hell, there's a multimillion-nuyen crime syndicate that's supposed to be running a multibillion-nuyen megacorp! The crazy goes deep into the setting. Not as deep as, say, Rifts, but that's part of the reason people love the game. Rifts never feels the need to justify any goddamn thing; Shadowrun does. The writers who care about the setting will bend logic into convoluted hypergeometric hoops to try and arrive at scenarios that are on-the-face ricockulous. Those who don't...well, they just wave their hands and say "magic!" Which misses the point entirely.

FrankT:

This chapter is 14 pages and is full of original content. It starts in with another one of SYStem 05's impassioned rants about how the government are a bunch of big meanies and the people of Chicago have been left to rot and forgotten about and so on and so forth. It's just... where to start?

Basically this looks like someone rolled dice on the “Evil Heavy Handed Government Response” and got “Massive Coverup” and “Left Innocents to Die.” And of course, obviously those are results on the evil heavy handed government response table. It's just... those aren't outputs of the Evil and Heavy Handed Government Response flow chart from the stimulus “massive invasion by alien terrorist religious extremists on the second largest city in the country kills tens of thousands of people.” This is the kind of thing where the evil government diverts resources that are supposed to defend poor people to protecting the property of rich people. Or allows the people to get caught up in a meat grinder to tie up enemy resources for minor strategic advantages. Or arrange for atrocities to happen to innocent civilians to get the rest of the population good and pissed to drive up their own popularity. This is where we channel Stalin at Stalingrad, not Kim Jong Il covering up a North Korean famine.


Once this shit is going on by the thousands in the middle of a major city, pretending that nothing is going on is not even on the fucking menu.


Our evil and oppressive government is supposed to be lying to the people like in Starship Troopers, not like in the X-Files once it has gotten to this stage.

AncientH:

The wall and guarded-border represent one of the fundamentals of Shadowrun location books: getting there, and difficulties with same. For short adventures, these kind of difficulties are absolutely worf'd - you don't want to waste precious game time with the players trying to out-think the gamebook designers as far as how to get in and out of Bug City. For longer adventures and campaigns, the wall becomes more important - just getting in or out of the city becomes an adventure.

Total aside: Somewhat ironically, the practical logistics of the prevalence of walled cities in history, particularly during the Middle Ages in Europe, has seldom sunk in with game designers for Dungeons & Dragons or the like. One of the major political advantages of city walls besides withstanding the occasional siege was that it greatly increased the control the local authorities had on movement in, out, and through a city. All traffic into the city was funneled through certain gates, which were usually constantly guarded and physically closed during the night; traffic through the gate was controlled, tolls and tariffs levied, laws on carrying weapons enforced. And once you were in the fucking town, once the gates shut you were basically trapped there, an if the authorities were looking for you, you'd have a hell of a time slipping out through the guarded gates. If the authorities really wanted you, they'd keep the gates shut and just search until they find your sorry ass. Which is a lot more of a pain in the ass than most "adventurers" want to deal with, and more challenging than most gamemasters want to toss at their adventurers. But it's important to remember that a castle and a prison are pretty much identical - it's just a question of whether they're trying to keep you out or in.

FrankT:

There's a quite lengthy and sober discussion of how they went about making the wall. Buildings got knocked down or sections of construction got repurposed into barricades. Someone put a fair amount of thought into this. I mean, not enough thought to have figured out that bug spirits can fucking fly and teleport and honestly do not give a single god damn about whether you have a wall or not. There are guard towers that have like dudes with guns in them, but the entire wall is 50 kilometers long (and that doesn't include all the water that is laughably supposed to be protected by alarm buoys). We are told that the towers are 30-100 meters apart, meaning that there are between five and sixteen hundred towers. This is a fucking absurd amount of manpower to spend on completely ineffectually laying siege to Chicago. That is about the number of watchtowers that the legendary general Qi Jiguang built on the fucking Great Wall of China over a thirteen year period. And here it's just being used to completely ineffectually transform a major city into a prison.


All cities must have walls!

It's very strange. Shadowrun actually has lots of threats that you would want to build walls to keep out. Like deadly chickens and killer cows. All kinds of cities could put up walls to keep dinosaurs out. If you really wanted to put up walls, you could do that. With like in character reasons and shit. If you really wanted to have a city get walled in rather than walling other things out, Shadowrun had several cities surrounded by hostile territories. In North America alone, Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, and Denver were all surrounded by the national territory of potentially hostile countries. Any one of them could have been put under siege for any reason at all. Any sort of city walled in and left to go feral story you wanted to tell could have been told without actually blowing up an established playable location or asking any governments to go full retard.

The fictional author claims that the astral plane is not his best subject, but apparently the UCAS army has sent all of their available mages to keep the bugs in, and they are somehow succeeding at that. I say “somehow” because astral movement is pretty much the same as teleportation. A trueform spirit in astral form can simply move at a thousand kilometers an hour, and one of them could wake up at the bomb site and astrally hyperdrive itself to Fort Wayne, Indiana in 12 minutes and you wouldn't even get your pizza free. The idea that they could meaningfully cover an area that size is totally absurd.

AncientH:

One of the key characteristics about bug spirits is that there are relatively few "true form" bug spirits - i.e. the ones that can zip in and out of the astral plane at will like Frank says, and basically say "fuck you" to walls because they can go straight over or through them. They're also the things you're better off attacking with a sharp pointy stick than a grenade launcher, because spirits shrug off a lot of technological attacks. Most of the bug spirits are "hybrids" - fleshy half-bug, half-man things. Those you can kill with a flamethrower, or a gun, or a half-brick in a sock. So if you were facing massive hordes of hybrids - we're talking zombie apocalypse (invaepocalypse?) numbers - a wall might not be a terribad idea. But it's still...y'know, not a great idea.



The problem is, we're never told exactly how many bug spirits there were in Chicago in the first place, and we don't know how many are in there now. The general consensus is "a large non-zero number," but whether that's three digits or six digits is never answered. So while this book does talk about there being hives of this-or-that type of bug spirits active - and what the fuck do they do? I have never figured that out. Normal inspects build hives to eat, live, sleep, fuck, take care of the kids, etc., but insect spirits don't have those normal biological drives, except to reproduce by kidnapping people to produce more bug spirits. Any effort to really flush out goals for insect shamans and insect spirits is seriously handicapped by them being literally one-trick ponies in that regard, which makes me sad.

FrankT:

This book spends quite a bit of ink talking about warlords. Well, not really talking about them, but about mentioning that they exist. Apparently various stuff is hard because there are warlords, and sometimes the UCAS special forces come in and murderstab a warlord, and so on and so forth. I don't know what the warlords do, or why people listen to them. I don't know what narrative purpose they are supposed to serve.


Remember Obasanjo, the Nigerian warlord from District 9? Like everything in District 9, it was better than this book.

I get the utility of having warlords controlling stuff and having goons and such. But these guys seem to be in here because warlords are a trope of regions descended into violent chaos. Not because there is any real effort made to explain how and why they exist.

This book also spends an entire page telling us that buying shit in the containment zone is super expensive. It fits into Shadowrun's standard model of making a chart with cost multipliers for different stuff. We should be getting some kind of post-apocalypse economy based on bottlecaps or cigarettes or government ration bars or something. But we don't.


Or a car food based economy. I'd accept a cat food based economy.

AncientH:

Well, they do mention in the comments that everyone basically barters stuff; in Feral Cities we played that up with a bar where you paid for your rotgut home brew with ammunition and suchlike.

There are various logistical problems with the CZ. Food is a big one; even if they kept the city water running, you've only got X amount of nonperishable food that people can plausibly loot, and after that you're looking at starvation and the goddamn alphabet of nutritional disorders, like scurvy and rickets. Gridlink is down, so most of your electric vehicles are SOL, but you can't possibly have enough gas around for most cars and bikes to be functioning after a few months either. Looking down the line - which we did for Feral Cities - you can jury rig bio-diesel and alcohol-combustion engines, but as I said before, you're basically looking at a siege mentality. All the resources are going to get used up, and then it's a slow and painful decay.


I knew it. Elon Musk, you've doomed us all!

So that being said, this sourcebook covers the relatively early period of the siege - the first few weeks or months - but how much is left for players to loot when they get there? Probably close to "sweet fuck all." You're going to see experienced looters bidding over the last sealed package of condoms.

FrankT:

The various criminal syndicates are at free-for-all with each other. The recent events have rendered old agreements moot, and now if mafiosos want to shoot yakuza in the face or vice versa, they just do that. That's an understandable position to take. It is, for example, extremely easy to write. I basically just wrote it for you, and you get what's going on. But it makes all the syndicates basically interchangeable with thrill gangs. They don't control anything outside of their own arm's reach, and don't have any meaningful diplomatic stances with anyone. There are some cool stories you could tell with such a situation, but it's both lazy and stifling.

The Bugs meanwhile are bad. That's all there is to it. You can't meaningfully negotiate with them, and everyone has to take arms against them whenever the opportunity arises. This really throws a wet blanket on the whole free-for-all atmosphere that is supposed to be generated by the collapse of law and gang treaties. It's not really a free-for-all if there's an ultimate common enemy. Defeats the whole point.

AncientH:

One of the small advantages of the bug spirits is that in addition to the true form (which looks like giant insects), and the hybrids (which look like special effects teams have been grafting antennae and shit to parts of you), there are the "good merges" - the bugs that look and act just like humans, have all their memories, and in fact are the ultimate spies and saboteurs. They're walking, talking paranoia fuel, the baddies that open the doors to let the bugs in at night or pretend to help you so they can find out where the rest of you meatsacks are hiding. They're probably the best part of the whole insect spirit experience, and add a good bit to the paranoia for anyone in the containment zone: anyone you meet could be an insect spirit in disguise, and there's no way to tell short of having a drinking contest involving shots of insect repellent (I know, I wrote that once.)


"Dust off and nuke the kid from orbit, it's the only way to be sure."

FrankT:

For no particular reason, detonating a nuclear device in Chicago made weird shit happen. Shadowrun has a long history of nuclear weapons not working quite right in order to accomplish a plot point. Mostly it's an excuse for incredibly lazy writing.

Anyway, the idea here is that setting off the bomb didn't kill a lot of the bugs, it just put them to sleep. So that they could wake up in small groups later on and fight the player characters in bite sized groups. This is a transparent attempt to have there be level appropriate opposition for the player characters to fight. But they really never explained why the tens of thousands of soldiers manning the fucking wall didn't just sweep through and kill all the sleeping bugs. The fact that they only wake up in small enough groups to be overpowered by small teams of superspies means that the actual fucking army could just splatter them on the windshield.

AncientH:

I don't have much for that one, except for a) these are supposed to be true form spirits, which armies don't have great success with, and b) the overall radiation is supposed to be bullshit insane, so any magicians or adepts that do go out bughunting in the radioactive wonderland near the core are in for a not-nice time. Eventually, Ares did do just what Frank was suggesting, using a magic-draining bioweapon to soften up most of the bugs and lots of fucking bullets and fire and shit to kill the rest. It was a dirty job, but apparently some accountant sat down and said that paying for XXX funerals and life insurance payouts from a direct assault was less money in the long term than to maintain the wall fully staffed for the next YYY years, especially since the bug spirits weren't going to die of old age or anything.


I just put a gate to the insect spirit metaplanes down in the bottom of the Cermak crater. Why the fuck not, right?

FrankT:

The section ends on a series of rants about how basically if the GM remembers to, he can fuck with your magic by making it harder to use or just plain having it go off wrong for the lulz. Why? Why fucking not!?

Really, the book is just coming up with ways to make things be “hard mode.” And since we already added a zero to the cost of explosive bullets in this hell hole, we gotta have some unspecified nerfs to the magic side as well. It all seems heavy handed and unnecessary, because it is. There are an arbitrary number of enemies, so you could always make things harder by throwing in a few more xenomorphs with claws.


No reason!

AncientH:

"Hard mode" is probably a good way to describe it; it's a lot like Dark Sun or camping with your parents: a lot of the character-building is supposed to come from the deprivation, the separation from your usual support network, and forcing you to live by your wits.

In practice...well, if you're PCs arriving from outside the Zone, you probably have the best gear and most advanced weapons and cyberware. If you have vehicles, they probably have the most gas. You're probably going to be able to stomp the locals in any kind of straight fight and because of this you're going to be seen as a destabilizing influence - yes, this really is D&D level politics in Shadowrun. You might come in there and have the only sniper rifle and cyberpenis in the Containment Zone. Those are valuable commodities, the very possession of which people would fight and kill over. But! The longer you stay inside, the more you're going to degrade. Remember, Shadowrun isn't level-based. You can have an obscenely high Firearms skill (literally, this was 2nd edition, double-digit skill numbers were not unheard of), but without any bullets you're going to be the bitch of the first troll with a polearm. As you piss away your resources in Chicago, you might not have enough left to escape...

[Foxwarrior]

Isn't it possible to build astral walls?

[Ancient History]

Short answer: yes.

Slightly longer answer: it's complicated. Shadowrun has a long history of complicated (and incomplete) rules regarding astral barriers and the like. Stuff like wards is commonplace, stuff like a glowing astral version of the Great Wall of China, not so much - but also not impossible. So you can totally have astral walls - but, see above: they're not always that much good, because movement in astral space is primarily in three dimensions. You don't walk in the astral, you fly. There's no gravity to keep you down, so you can zoom over or around or even through most barriers if you're bad-ass enough. Building a freestanding wall on the astral is a bit like building a freestanding wall on an open plain in the hope it keeps birds out.

[Aryxbez]

I guess people like me who enjoy the idea behind Chicago, mind Caulked in the assumption of Astral Walls. Which supposed the "astral" wall itself could be taller than the walls are tall, up till it hits that fiat-storm which could also serve to block out spirits like an emp/bug-zapper or something. As well as wards throughout the city placed by various wild shamans, or by remaining military forces as well.

On the supplies front, wasn't it said somewhere that they eventually started bringing in supply drops? (wouldn't be surprised if that was only feral cities, or just more mind-caulking). As well that, on mind-caulked front, if not all of Chicago is taken, relief efforts from the "safe" part of the city could be providing supplies that way.

Otherwise does suck so far that Chicago sourcebook is such an unhelpful book for content. It's possible to blame books like these for why I have "ideas" but no good executions to go with them.

Shadowrun had figured out a way to generate D&D style “dungeons” full of “monsters.” But it hadn't figured out a way to fill them with treasure, so this whole piece of design work is basically a failure.

This is going to sound dumb, but is there any satisfactory solution Shadowrun could do? Was there ever any Shadowrun material that had "dungeons" filled with worthwhile treasure for the main archetypes? Does seem like lot of swag in Shadowrun should be lot cooler than it is, and that would lead to allowing for there to be more enjoyable "treasure".

[Longes]

Shadowrun had figured out a way to generate D&D style “dungeons” full of “monsters.” But it hadn't figured out a way to fill them with treasure, so this whole piece of design work is basically a failure.

This is going to sound dumb, but is there any satisfactory solution Shadowrun could do? Was there ever any Shadowrun material that had "dungeons" filled with worthwhile treasure for the main archetypes? Does seem like lot of swag in Shadowrun should be lot cooler than it is, and that would lead to allowing for there to be more enjoyable "treasure".

The answer I can come up with is this: don't make cities into dungeons. Shadowrunners live in the cities to begin with. Anything you can find in Chicago you can find in a different city.
There's also an issue of time frame. Dungeons in a modern, non-D&D world have to be a quick events, where runners enter the dungeon within a week of the place becoming a dungeon. For example, Umbrella Corporations releases T-Virus under the Raccoon city, and Johnson hires runners to get the pure virus sample from their laboratory. You can't have that event stay around for years, because Shadowrun is a modern setting, and corporations will figure things out on their own some time soon. Modern world moves quickly, and events need to be resolved quickly.

[TheFlatline]

RE: Shadowrun "hard mode".

This also sounds like what they aimed for Renraku Arcology Shutdown to do. Though I always felt that the Arc was better done.

[Username17]

Renraku Arcology was a much better dungeon crawl. It had treasure, it had monsters, it had traps, it had horror elements, and most importantly it had a reason for the players to go through it as an adventuring party rather than just have the army go through and take it apart like the defenses at Normandy.

I mean, the narrative had plenty of stupid in it. But Renraku Arcology is pretty much the standard of what a cyberpunk dungeoncrawl should be.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

Any chance of the Arc making it to OSSR?