[OSSR]Bug City

[Ancient History]

I remember the anti-technology fields. Gah.

[Stahlseele]

i don't.
but i do remember the smurfs.
and those are ridiculed over here as well.

[sandmann]

Oh, we're not even talking FanPro - I think the Bavaria sourcebook was third-party, wasn't it? And the whole Immortal Dwarf nonsense.

Both of those are afaik Pre-Pegasus. München Noir was the last Fanpro/Freelance book before the Pegasus sale, and the immortal dwarfs are from Das zerrissene Land, which was a funny read, but 0% Shadowrun. Ok, 1% SR, but they had shoppingmalls with autocannon-rototurrets on top, so ... yeah.

I don't know if you'd read the SR5 writing credits, but German freelancers are writing the Catalyst shit. And it's bad. Really bad.

Seriously??? Oh, boy. As Stahlseele pointed out, Pegasus has quite a reputation here.

(W)e're talking about "Me Tooisms" for all the North American splinter countries inside fucking Germany.

Not only is that one of the things that are slowly being retconned away with the new ADL-Unity in the new books, it doesn't really matter. I played SR several years, and I never met anyone, on- and offline, who played outside Hamburg, Berlin or the SOX for more than 2-3 weeks. Rhein-Ruhr got a new shiny book, but still, those three places are really the only one that matter, in my opinion.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Bug City
Chapter 5: Bug City


This chapter of the book Bug City is called “Bug City.”

AncientH:

Okay, so after re-hashing and updating all the Chicago material from Neo-Anarchist's Guide to North America, and re-hashing and updating all the fluff material on bug spirits from Grimoire, we're finally down to talking about Chicago as it is today, under bug-occupation! It's the meat of the book.


Bon appetit.

FrankT:

Clocking in at 40 pages, this chapter is the longest in the book. It basically is the book, in that it is the part of the book that is actually a location book in the reasonably standard and approachable format that Shadowrun was wont to use for such things. There are fourteen locations that are each started up with some snippets of in-world documents that are news stories or press releases or whatever the fuck, and then some banter back and forth about rumors or refutations or whatever.

Three of the locations are marked “(Haven)” to indicate that you can rest there and you aren't in the dungeon. I mean, basically it's literally exactly that. There are three areas that are “in town” in the Diablo sense, and everything else is like wilderness or dungeon environs and has a wandering damage monster table. So if you want to rest and regain your spells, you'd better go to one of the no-monster regions of the zone. I feel dirty just typing that.



This is such a naked appropriation of D&D tropes that it's actually kind of jarring. We're in a 21st century cyberpunk dystopia, and it's been re-imagined as a Dungeons & Dragons hex crawl. And that would be fine I guess, if that's what people really wanted to have. But this comes about a hair's width away from people talking about kill XP in character.

AncientH:

T'be fair, this isn't the first or last time we'd get an attempt to import a sort of dungeoneering feel into Shadowrun.


I mean for fuck's sake, this was written by Dave Arneson and features a subterranean mall, a lab complex dungeon with a random monster table, and a bear-human hybrid.

Part of the problem is that in cyberpunk, it is taken for granted that that these anarchic spaces grow up at the edges of normal societies, and because they're extralegal grey spaces they attract criminals, independent thinkers, etc. Indeed, in some cases they're considered valuable as buffer zones or regions to stimulate growth, or just convenient places for various criminal activities that you don't want next door but can't do without. Even fucking Tatooine has Mos Eisley, and fucking space wizards go there to hire some mercenaries, because where else are you going to do it? Log on to the galaxy-wide internet from your moisture farm and post a want ad on Craigslist?



Really, the whole concept of an enclave of anarchy like this is pretty much Escape from New York, and that pretty much was a D&D adventure with guns.

FrankT:

The section on the downtown core lays the groundwork for some dungeons that have actual treasures in them. There are corporate buildings that are not in use because everything is overrun by bug monsters. But if you broke through the security, found your way through the maze, and fought off the monsters... there would be lootable treasure. It's like an actual Dungeons & Dragons set up. Literally exactly, by the numbers. There are ruins filled with monsters and traps, and great treasures are there for the taking – with the biggest treasures on the lowest floor of the basement where the nastiest monsters and traps are. As excuses to run D&D shenanigans, it's not bad. Actually it's pretty good. But I'm not sure that was a thing that was ever really missing from my life. Shadowrun had a pitch, and “being exactly like D&D” wasn't it.

The only thing missing from this was a reason for the nastiest monsters to be at the bottom of the dungeon, rather than wandering around outside. Because the monsters actually had no special affinity for the traps in the dungeons and you'd logically expect the one to destroy the other. Still better than the insect hives in slaughterhouses from earlier in the book, where there apparently wasn't any treasure at all.


Renraku Arcology Shutdown had a very good excuse why the monsters weren't killed by the traps and why the nastiest monsters were in the hardest to get to areas next to the biggest treasures. But it also came out 4 years later.

The information on what is supposed to be in these things is a little weak actually. I'm not sure why a Federated Boeing corporate building in the downtown core of Chicago would have experimental aircraft in it. It's like the authors do not know what an office building is. Shadowrun always had trouble explaining what treasure was supposed to be. The magical mechanics they had written painted them into a corner as far as magic items went. The original authors had a mad hate on for D&D style magic swords and made them basically impossible in the setting. People kept trying to write them in, but it never worked out. So what exactly you were supposed to steal that would be valuable was something the designers of the game never actually agreed upon.


There's nothing here but worthless gold!

AncientH:

The maps aren't a great deal of help, either. Seriously, there have been three maps at this point, at different scales (and with no actual scales given), and borders are at once well-defined boxes and vague as we're not certain what the fuck the borders are supposed to be. I miss some of the old maps for Shadowrun. But I digress.

Like the earlier section on Chicago, this is primarily told in excerpts from other guides to Chicago, heavily annotated by local posters. Which is weird. I can almost see why you would regurgitate the NAGNA stuff, but what possible reason could you have to bring up Foddor's 2028 guide to Chicago when the local date is 2055? I don't grok that. Maybe it was just that the internet was in its infancy and they just didn't understand how ubiquitous GoogleMaps and shit was going to be, but it's like trying to navigate a mall by compass. Bizarrely anachronistic.

That said, the writing itself isn't bad. It's characteristic Olde Shadowrunese, full of "frag!" and "drek!", and it's just chaotic and silly enough for a lot of the interhuman conflict to be believable - like rival corps fucking each other over near a nest of Ant spirits.

FrankT:

Some of the places that get shoutouts are pretty much completely pointless. The big downtown hospital has been looted already and is pretty much just a burnt out husk. Also there is an apartment complex that has monsters in it and you don't care. And there's an example of a bar that people hang out in even though it has been looted and no longer has live music.

AncientH:

It's a weird problem to have, in that you want to cover the major landmarks, but at the same time the game has changed sufficiently that the major landmarks were the first things that were fucking looted, except for the deep levels, so what you're really interested in are the new shops and communities and stuff that have cropped up - which is basically what we tried to give people in Feral Cities.

I'm tempted to draw parallels between Bug City and the Parlainth Boxed Set released the previous year, because they're both essentially stand-alone tourist destinations in their respective settings, more or less. Parlainth was even more of a ready-made dungeon setting, however, complete with a fucking town attached that was literally named "Haven" and existed for the same purpose as villages in goddamned Diablo 3.

But, another part of the difference between Bug City and Feral Cities is the atmosphere; Bug City was an prison filled with desperate people struggling through daily horror and deprivation, shellshocked masses stuck in a ghetto with monsters, while Feral Cities is set twenty years later, after the military had withdrawn and the walls were largely down and most of the bugs were cleaned out. Chicago in Feral Cities, then, is the cyberpunk grey area, the "open space" that can allow extralegal communities to bloom. Chicago in Bug City is...not.

FrankT:

OK... Ghoultown. Where to start?

Ghouls made their appearance in the very first book in first edition. They got revisited several times, and every time it got worse. You'd think the part where AncientHistory tragicomically misread the disease rules I wrote and created a ghoul-fever so horrendous that was an extinction level event just for it to exist would be the end of it, but it wasn't. Because after that came out and people read the numbers and cleaned the cola and spittle off their monitors, mea culpas were dutifully delivered. People involved admitted that peak stupid had been achieved and that the disease writeup was simply wrong. And then Pat fucking reprinted it verbatim anyway in Running Wild because he is a lazy no talent hack.

But back to the original concept. Ghouls are in the original book as a fifth metatype that people goblinize into but you aren't allowed to play. They are much much better than any of the others, being as tough as Orks, as fast as Elves, as magic resistant as Dwarfs, and hyper perceptive, able to hunt by scent or hearing. Also they have murder claws and inherently have astral perception. And the bad part is that they are blind on the physical, smell like someone shat on a vulture, and have a dietary requirement of human flesh. Plus, most of them go crazy and turn into little more than violent beasts. They are also not well liked. Structurally, they exist to fill the niche of being an excuse for there being medium-quality mooks that no one will get upset if you shoot in the face.

But remember how I just said most of them go crazy? Some don't. And they are blessed with racial powers that make them medium badasses just for being alive. If they actually have skills in badassery on top of that, they make great named villains or anti-heroes. The human flesh dietary requirement isn't even a deal breaker for them being sympathetic – because unlike Vampires or Wendigos, they eat dead flesh. So they can be like Lovecraft Ghouls, eating the long dead and making inappropriate meeping noises around the dinner table. If they don't go crazy and start snapping at things like a rabid dog, they have no incentive at all to actually hurt anyone. And they are inherently crazy badass like I mentioned.

So there was this plotline about Ghouls getting rights and not being hunted for sport any more. The first stirrings of it are in first edition actually. There are mentions of metahuman rights activists arguing that Ghouls deserve them in the first book, back in NAGNA Chicago has a thing where people leave corpses in sky burials for the ghouls to come and eat in exchange for the ghouls leaving the living alone. You're still not allowed to play one because they aren't remotely balanced with anything, but there's the whole genuine moral quandary there – these people are people, and yet they are also never ever going to stop being cannibals, and if you see one there is a very decent chance that it's basically a man eating tiger. The discussions of what to do about their civil and human rights while respecting the human rights of the people who didn't want stinky monster men to eat their grandmothers were genuinely interesting. One of the few times the game didn't go for the cheap moral answers.

Anyway, this book spends seven and a half pages on “Ghoultown” where it starts telling an intriguing and morally complicated tale of ghoul rights, ghettoization, sanctioned murder, vigilanteism, and betrayal. It gets off to a really solid start... and then it all goes to fuck. This book just casually mentions that Ghouls can transform other people into Ghouls by “infecting” them. Holy fucking shit. That's a huge change to the world, every bit as big a bombshell as if they had announced that being an Elf was a sexually transmitted disease. See, in Shadowrun you can't “catch” goblinization. It's genetic. You either do or do not goblinize, you don't have Trollishness rub off on you and can't cure Dwarfiness. Except suddenly, for no fucking reason at all, now you can. This book takes the entire concept of goblinization, the entire framework for how people deal with the essential nature of metahumanity in Shadowrun, and drops a big fat juicy turd all over it.

And the game balance implications! Remember, you aren't allowed to play a Ghoul because they are fucking better than you! They are much much better than their human equivalents, because a Ghoul is supposed to be a thug level threat as a fucking bystander and a main villain level threat as runner. If Ghoulishness is infectious, it's also a fucking super serum that player characters can inject themselves with on accident and for free.

So when Target: UCAS came out a few years later, they did what any sane author would do to such a fucking bizarre and unbalanced change in the fundamental working of the game world: they retconned it away. Oh, silly me, that's what anyone would have done if they weren't a fucking idiot. No, what they did instead was to create new rules where if a Player Character caught the ghoul bad-touch, then instead of taking a level in badass like would happen to an NPC, they got all the limitations and none of the super senses, super speed, or super strength. Because go fuck yourself, that's why. Also they made it so that Ghoul was a template that stacked on top of other metahuman types, because that's totally insane and at this point we're basically just fucking with people anyway.

The 3rd edition revision of the Companion added more epicycles and stupidity to the mix. First of all: that book has the same FASA product code as its much better written 2nd edition version, so good luck finding the one you want at this point. But anyway, in the 3rd edition Companion they decided to make Ghoulishness be a thing you could buy with points in addition to being a disease you could “buy for free” just by being bit. And they kept the PC ghoul rules being totally fucking different from the NPC ghoul rules, which is exactly as insulting and for the same reason as 4th edition D&D is an affront to god and man alike.

In 4th edition's Companion, AncientHistory took the stupid up a notch if you can believe that. First of all, the ghoul-fever is spread by contact, meaning that one business lunch and everyone is proper fucked. Secondly, through an astonishing lack of math comprehension the total disease power on that fucking thing is eighty. Yes. Seriously eighty. People have Body scores on a one to six scale, and the total disease power is closer to a hundred than it is to being merely an order of magnitude larger than the Body scores people actually have. It's insane. It's so insane that AncientHistory just fucking apologized to the gaming community for inflicting it on them after people pointed out how insane that actually was.

And when Patrick Goodman rewrote those rules in Running Wild, after the whole fucking mess had been explained, he elected to not fix it and instead repeat exactly the same mistakes and reiterate the global 28 days later style zombie apocalypse that those fucking inexcusable rules actually were. Because Patrick Goodman is and was a no talent hack whose writings are bad enough that the world would be a better place if he had just photocopied his butt instead of turning in any of the drafts he has ever been responsible for. He was one of the worthless pig fuckers who wrote the verbal diarrhea that was Shadowrun 5th Edition for fuck's sake.

The Ghoultown section has some nice writing. It gets off on a solid start and presents a noirish tragedy where everyone is acting in an understandable fashion and you can still see how it's all going to be a trainwreck with a lot of innocent people dying. And that's cool. And then it just casually, lazily starts a ball rolling that just propagates from book to book getting worse and worse and worse as the cracks in the setting just create more cracks that require more and more mind caulk to fix.

AncientH:

I've done this before, but it's required for me to do it again: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I misread the disease rules, I used the wrong vector, I miscalculated the target numbers and the point cost, and we didn't playtest it. I am unclean. I am unclean.

That being said...unlike Frank, I've never been really fucking bothered by the fact that they made the switch from ghouls goblinizing to ghouls being spread by disease; HMHVV was a thing for a long time in Shadowrun, and it was full of crazy, and even if it was hamfisted to try and squeeze ghouls into it...well, no crazier than some other shit. Look, we have chickens that turn people into fucking stone. The fact that you need to wear a condom so you don't develop a craving for human flesh is just not quite as big a deal.

What is a big deal is how they went about the whole Ghoul Rights thing, and where they chose to do it. See Cabrini Green has a history. When people talk about "the ghetto" in the United States of America, a lot of the time they were specifically talking about Cabrini Green. Ghoultown was basically founded on a symbol of racial inequality housing in the US, and it basically appropriates all the trappings of African-American rights activism, right down to black "Ghoul Power". It's as subtle as a dominatrix strapping on a horse dildo. With spikes on it.

On the other hand, Ghoultown was one of the things about Bug City that stuck; the idea of Ghoul Rights was sufficiently liberal flag-raising enough to get a fair amount of attention from writers, who put some work towards it. Of course, other writers just wanted humanoid flesh-eating monsters for PCs to blow away without moral qualms, so it's rather one step forwards, two steps back at all times.

FrankT:

Most of the other locations are just excuses for the authors to riff on whatever historical rant they want to. There's an Occupy Wall Street type tent city set up in a park that is basically just an excuse for one of the left-anarchist writers to name check the IWW and some left-anarchist historical figures. Shows the children is learning.


Yes they is.

There's also a writeup of how one of their favorite restaurants (Leo's) is still open in the 2050s. In a city under siege. Somehow. I guess one or more of the authors just really liked that place. The place actually closed in August 2005, meaning that this was a still possible future prediction for 11 years after this book came out. Still kind of pointless except as a shout out to fellow Chicago residents or something.

AncientH:

A note: this is before Occupy Wall Street, so I guess this would actually be going back to when people protested the World Trade Organization and shit.

The thing about Leo's is characteristic of sourcebooks revisiting the setting; people get really upset that some bar or restaurant or something in Shadowrun closes or doesn't get mentioned in the latest book on X location - well tough fucking cookies, girlscouts. Places close, clubs close and change and get remodeled. You can't honestly expect the neighborhood Chipotle to still be there twenty years from now. I got so frustrated with some of that shit when it came to the location books, honestly. Just because the place seemed cool fifteen years ago and you had great memories of it doesn't mean it's going to be there forever. Fuck, the Vulgar Unicorn didn't stay the same throughout half a dozen anthologies! Evolve or die.

Goddamnit I can't find an appropriate depiction of the sign of the Vulgar Unicorn, so here's a rainbow colored horse cock. NSFW.

If you clicked this after I warned you, it's your own fault.

Certain of these places were tenacious or interesting enough to revisit in Feral Cities, but not many. Little Earth, the magical side of the University of Chicago campus, was kind of a desperate bid to get magician shadowrunners some place to go and train up and reload on fetishes and whatnot, for example.

FrankT:

The Shattergraves are something we mentioned a few chapters back. It was a region that did basically everything the entire Bug City scenario does, just on a much more believable level. Basically you had a 9/11 style terrorist attack on the biggest building in Chicago, and then rather than taking 12 fucking years to finish a replacement building, they just left the area in rubble. Because they were building arcologies and it wasn't worth redeveloping that area for anyone unless everyone cleaned up their sections. Which wasn't going to happen, so it was just a cancer of urban decay full of monsters. That's a pretty good story. And narratively it does anything you could imagine wanting to do with Bug City as a whole.

So we're basically in recursion mode. The Shattergraves are inside Bug City, but they also are Bug City. The entirety of Bug City as a plotline, as a book, and as a playable setting can basically be looked at as the author throwing a temper tantrum because they thought their Shattergraves idea was really cool and it wasn't getting enough attention paid to it. Which it was, and it probably wasn't. But that doesn't mean that this kind of ante-upping in the sequel isn't kind of dumb.


Look, Return of the Jedi isn't a great movie either. We only give it a pass because Empire was awesome and we want Return of the Jedi to be better than it is.

AncientH:

The Shattergraves got revisited after Year of the Comet because shenanigans. They introduced ghost buildings and shit where you could go and explore until they faded away, and for some reason someone thought that was a cool idea.

Also, with the poster "Lovecraft," this is one of the few references to H. P. Lovecraft in Shadowrun! And far from the stupidest or worst.

FrankT:

Whenever numbers are mentioned, it's pretty shocking how... small everything is. The Dome has four hundred and fifty people in it. Big fucking deal. When I helped run a displaced persons camp in Louisiana, we had a few thousand. When I was providing logistics for disaster relief in Mississippi, we were providing meals for thirty thousand people a day. 450 people is like a temporary shelter set up in a public library. Why that kind of piddly shit gets rated as ready for prime time I do not know.


Now this was a humanitarian crisis. Despite happening in a much larger city, Bug City describes a humanitarian inconvenience.

AncientH:

Basically because none of the people writing this had any idea of scale. As we said, it's not something Shadowrun is good at; there's not even any real idea of how many people are in the Containment Zone.

The Sanctum is another "haven" set up in the Field Museum of Natural History Museum, which is supposed to have a bunch of gee-whiz ancient magical artifacts and shit, despite the fact that a lot of the display articles are fake. It's supposed to be run by a shaman called Jason Two Spirits who is basically a Man-of-Many-Names expy. I always suspected that Two Spirits was sort of a Steve Kenson character that he snuck past the radar, because in many Native American cultures two spirit was a term for LGBT individuals (well, sortof - I do not pretend to even be a Wikipedia expert on AmerInd sex and gender roles) - but anyway, I thought it was a sneaky way of maybe having one of Shadowrun's first homosexual characters in there. Maybe.

Volksville is...uh...well, it's basically a commune for your racist Tea Party aunt. Seriously, it's a WASP-heavy, anti-metahuman, pro-human, Christian conservative community of guntoting survivalists. The kind that fap to libertarian ideals like not paying taxes and telling the government to keep their hands off social security. Shadowrun existed before a lot of those time-specific issues were a thing, but just trust me that the Volk are xenophobic assholes that fill the absolutely crucial role of first characters you don't mind feeding to the nearest bug hive because no one will miss them, not even their mommas. It's like a KKK colony.

Like that, but with ghouls and cyberware.

FrankT:

We get short rants about some gangs and some warlords. And how a warlord is different from a gang leader in this case I do not know. I am physically reading it right now and I can't see any difference. So there's no way I can tell you what that difference is supposed to be. Gangs in this case aren't super well fleshed out. Shadowrun often ran into the issue that various authors would write gangs in as a literary reference or one-note joke. The Halloweeners were the most famous Shadowrun gang, and they were basically the Jokerz from Batman Beyond. Various other authors felt embarrassed by them and kept having the Halloweeners getting disposed of off camera, only to have still other authors write them back in.


The Halloweeners. Or near enough.

The ones that make my teeth grind the most, however, are the Fleshmongers and the Living Dead. Apparently these guys sell live humans to ghouls as food. This is just the book taking the piss. Ghouls eat carrion. They do not want live humans, because they eat dead and partially decayed humans. That is what they fucking do. Also they aren't rich or anything. They have no means to buy people from human traffickers. Also they are as previously noted inherently bad ass and would have no need to pay other people to murder pedestrians if they for some reason wanted pedestrians to be killed. The sensible thing would be to have gangs that killed people dump the bodies off with the ghouls to cover their tracks or something. But like everything about this book and it's understanding of ghoul issues, it's really quite terribad.


Don't you know how to dispose of bodies?

AncientH:

I'd like to end this chapter by noting that for all its flaws, it has some fun art. Larry MacDougall is always a class act, even if today he mostly draws faeries, and a lot of the art has this nice washed-out look that you don't get with modern photoshop filters.

This is what I'm talking about with the map, by the way. This is way dinky in the book. And it's mislabeled; this isn't actually the Containment Zone, it's the Core. I don't know why the fuck #8 was so important to mark on the map, but so inconsequential they literally couldn't be arsed to put anything there.

After this, it's Game Information. Party on, chummers.

[Shrapnel]

Like that, but with ghouls and cyberware.

I laughed at this more than I should've.

[Aryxbez]

Bug City was an prison filled with desperate people struggling through daily horror and deprivation, shellshocked masses stuck in a ghetto with monsters,

Chicago in Feral Cities, then, is the cyberpunk grey area, the "open space" that can allow extralegal communities to bloom. Chicago in Bug City is...not.

Despite Bug City book sucking for content evidently, Is Feral Cities conductive to more content with that set-up? Doesn't sound as exciting, once have Chicago's storyline "resolved" (although with shattergraves, didn't need that storyline in the first damn place).

And the whole Immortal Dwarf nonsense.

Immortal Dwarves sound fraggin awesome, and I see why not. If SR is allowed to have stupid pointless Mary-Sue Elves, then we can have efficient Illuminati Dwarves. Immortal Ork Lich thief I think also sounded awesome, and curious what details on him, as I'll bet he'd make for a cool SR story-arc than any of the Mary-Sue Elf BS or Kefka Elf (aka Harlequin).

Although what I could search, I couldn't really find any info on Immortal Dwarves, something that's apparently implied, with some super hidden city under West Germany. Similar with the Immortal Ork Garlthik One-Eye', who stole from death, and had a city back in Earthdawn.

But like everything about this book and it's understanding of ghoul issues, it's really quite terribad.

Oddly enough when I brought this up to our SR group, the DM mostly ignored the fact they eat dead bodies, and think just like eating dead bodies in general. Is the ficiton on Ghouls eating people in general so strongly suggests to common readers they just eat people like zombies in general, opposed to wanting to be the guys that eat Zombies?

Or we might do some of the more gonzo location books like Cyberpirates!

First, I want to put in my vote for the Arc SR adventure, the idea sounds awesome enough I'm strongly considering buying the book. Just so I can see what design lessons for SR dungeon-crawls, and how to populate the with treasure that people would care about. Anyway, Cyberpirates! product summary sounded cool, I'm deadly curious what has it so "gonzo"?

[Ancient History]

Bug City was an prison filled with desperate people struggling through daily horror and deprivation, shellshocked masses stuck in a ghetto with monsters,

Chicago in Feral Cities, then, is the cyberpunk grey area, the "open space" that can allow extralegal communities to bloom. Chicago in Bug City is...not.

Despite Bug City book sucking for content evidently, Is Feral Cities conductive to more content with that set-up? Doesn't sound as exciting, once have Chicago's storyline "resolved" (although with shattergraves, didn't need that storyline in the first damn place).

Well, that's the rub. You already have locations in Seattle which are basically lawless no-man's-land types where gangs and mobs rule. So for Chicago, we really had to break out the jams and try and find good reasons why 1) people would still be there, and 2) why player character shadowrunners would want to go there. I'd like to think we did that, but I'm biased.

[Orion]

If I'd had my way, inhabitation would have simply been the binding alternative to possession magic, which would have meant that Loa Zombies and Insect Hybrids would use the exact same rules.

Wouldn't this have been a substantial nerf to possession mages?

[Longes]

If I'd had my way, inhabitation would have simply been the binding alternative to possession magic, which would have meant that Loa Zombies and Insect Hybrids would use the exact same rules.

Wouldn't this have been a substantial nerf to possession mages?

Why? If I read this right, then Inhabitation would be stronger than Possession, not Possession weaker than it currently is. And since Inhabitation is like Blood Magic - for deathevil mages only, butthurt of houngans shouldn't be all that great.

[Orion]

I interpreted it to mean that when you use the Binding skill on a possession spirit, you have to bind it permanently into one vessel. This means that Houngans lose the ability to keep a huge bound spirit in their back pocket and use it to possess enemies, or just use it to to bind spells or sustain powers without having to carry anything physical around with them.

[Fucks]

I'm tempted to draw parallels between Bug City and the Parlainth Boxed Set released the previous year, because they're both essentially stand-alone tourist destinations in their respective settings, more or less. Parlainth was even more of a ready-made dungeon setting, however, complete with a fucking town attached that was literally named "Haven" and existed for the same purpose as villages in goddamned Diablo 3.

I loved that box set!

[Username17]

I interpreted it to mean that when you use the Binding skill on a possession spirit, you have to bind it permanently into one vessel. This means that Houngans lose the ability to keep a huge bound spirit in their back pocket and use it to possess enemies, or just use it to to bind spells or sustain powers without having to carry anything physical around with them.

This is correct. However, you also get your bound spirits for an amount of time rather than an amount of services. So Houngans have to carry their zombies around in a van rather than having bound spirits teleport in to possess whatever happened to be around. But they also would get to have their spirits do whatever was required of them for weeks at a time. So they'd get to use bound spirits for trivial tasks like concealing cars or harvesting sugar cane. And the big "evil" inhabitation option was to bind spirits into living hosts to extend their stay indefinitely.

This setup did Loa Zombies like in Awakenings, used the same mechanics for Bugs and Houngans, and made Possession mages feel really different as regards their bound spirits than materialization mages without either one being obviously more powerful than the other. Which is why I suggested it, because it fulfilled all design criteria. But I was not allowed to go that route because German playtesters are assholes.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Bug City
Chapter 6: Game Information


Shadowrun had an effective system of keeping the game information out of the in-character text.

AncientH:

It's the little things that tend to get us. Bug City is a big concept book; it asks the reader to accept that a major Canadian-American city was overrun by giant insects, that the military dropped a nuke on them and walled off the area, and then issued a cover story while pretty much leaving the metahumans trapped in the Containment Zone to their own devices. Now, that may sound insane, and it is, but I think you also have to appreciate everything that goes into that sentence too. Most game settings are so far removed from reality that you can't really pick them apart at this level; most game settings have individual factions that are so puerile or silly it's impossible to invest emotion into them, much less have long drawn-out arguments on what to call citizens of the United Canadian American States.

Anyway, at this stage in the Shadowrun life cycle, you turn the page and you're in the Game Information section. Not the "Gamemaster's Eyes Only" section, just the section with all the rules and mechanics. This is opposed to some earlier texts, which had references to the rules embedded more-or-less directly in the text. I think the move to separate mechanics and fluff is a good one; it means you don't have to drop suspension of disbelief just because your eyes ran across a damage code or something.

FrankT:

This is a 26 page chapter of just omniscient text and game mechanics. Shadowrun used to put a hard divide between the omniscient game information chapters and the in-character in-world chapters. It was a nice device. I say “used to” because the current bunch of clowns at Catalyst lack the discipline and intestinal fortitude to put all the game mechanics in sections that aren't nominally written by in-world characters. So while they aren't smacking you out of the narrative by ranting about shit so stupid you literally can't believe it like carnivorous tree wars, creepy sock fetishes, and anti-Semitic ghost busting, they are breaking your immersion by having people talk about dice pools and armor ratings in-character.

Now, Shadowrun 2nd edition did not in fact have what we today would call good rules. They were clunky and the probabilities generated by them were basically crazy talk. But standards were lower back then and I wasn't really aware of how bad they were in a lot of ways. While today I dismissively state that variable dice pools against variable target numbers is “unworkable,” at the time I regarded it as an advance. See, these were the days when games like D&D and Runequest would have your character fumble like 5% of the time, which was way too often. In Runequest or Warhammer Fantasy Battle any large engagement of soldiers was going to have a quite substantial number of characters accidentally chopping their own heads off. It was ridiculous. Actually having fumbles never happen offended peoples' desire for realizarm or whatever, but having this hit happen five percent of the time you swung a sword was ridiculous. But in Shadowrun, the Rule of One triggered once every 46,656 times a character with a skill of 6 rolled dice. Which meant that fumbles could happen, but they didn't. Which was exactly what people were looking for in the 90s.

But while Shadowrun brought the idea of the dicepool into mainstream rpgs (The Ghostbusters RPG was the first to use the term “dicepool,” but that was a roll-and-add deal that isn't remotely the same), the math just wasn't there. It couldn't be, because the target numbers, the number of dice, and the number of required successes for success (terminology wasn't stellar back then) all varied. So none of the numbers had any independent meaning, and calculating probabilities on the fly was polynomial based and was not going to happen at the table.

Through this period, if you had asked me, and some people did, I would have (and did) say that Shadowrun was on the right track and just needed aggressive mathhammering by the designers to iron out the kinks. I now understand that the kinks are hard wired into the system, and the fact that lots of stuff was wonky as hell wasn't merely evidence of designer laziness but an actual inevitability of the variable TN base system. Long story short: Shadowrun was fumbling around in the dark, and contributed a lot of novel and excellent ideas. So the fact that a lot of things were fundamentally wrong with the core mechanics is to be expected, and even forgiven given when it came out. You'd get no similar leeway with those particular mistakes today, which is why I am so dismissive of Savage Worlds.

AncientH:

Things start out with "What is Bug City?" - a section that very probably should have gone in the front of the book, which is what happened during parts of 3rd and 4th edition, but they decided to stick it here instead. C'est le vit.

A more immediately useful section is "Using Bug City," which begins with arguably the best acknowledgement available with 1992 experience and technology:

The John Carpenter film Escape from New York best exemplifies the Containment Zone in Chicago--with the added distraction of the horrifying, voracious, alien bug spirits.

I'd pay good money if that was a crossover.

It also has the ovaries to come out and admit the events of the book could be disrupting and disturbing to your game, especially if your game was set in Chicago. This is a good thing. It's good to acknowledge that events can be disruptive, and suggest ways to deal with that, including <gasp> moving events around or changing dates. Considering the level of anal retentiveness for Shadowrun fans experiences a positive correlation with age, I would probably have been burned at the stake if I had suggested that back in the Emergence or Ghost Cartels days.

FrankT:

The game information chapter is pulling double duty. Firstly it's telling you what's “really going on” by using omniscient text instead of in-character text that could be lying or just wrong. And the second is to give some hard and fast game rules for representing this stuff. These are not always things that you want to go together, and the basic result is that this is a chapter that should come with a spoiler warning.



Melissa Truman is still alive. The characters don't know that and there's good reason for them to believe otherwise, but she's not. That piece of information is not cordoned off by any sort of fence you might think there should be between the game mechanics for critter powers and secret important plot points.

AncientH:

I'm going to call out one bit of...not laziness exactly, but over-reference. The UCAS soldiers guarding the walls are described, with a clear reference to the make and number of their arms (not counting basic ammo), and...then they say that the rest of the stats use those for the Corporate Security Guard Contact in the SRII main book. Which is typical of the edition, but that is both a pain in the ass in terms of statting out soldiers, and a bit of a waste because I know the Contact stats are mostly bullshit and incomplete.

It's a quibble, but would it really have been this fucking hard to put up a proper stat-block for the hardworking men and women of the UCAS Armed Forces?

Private Jensen, are you classified as female?
Shit sir, after a few weeks in this get-up who can tell?

They do this for some other stats too, and it was pretty typical of the Shadowrun approach. Nominally, it's a page-saving measure, but in practice it's like running across a reference in a pre-made dungeon to applying two templates to a standard critter, and before you know it you need four sourcebooks and a calculator app to figure out the stats for your random encounter, by which time the players will have forgotten what they were doing and wandered in another direction.

FrankT:

The big timeline in this chapter confirms what you've been thinking: Tom Dowd was smoking crack the UCAS government sabotaged media outlets and then browbeat the rest into not reporting on the giant terrorist attack in the middle of the nation's second largest city. For reasons! I'm sorry, I meant for no reason. Because that's still stupid and doesn't make any sense. And when they give the omniscient 3rd person reveal... it's still stupid and doesn't make any sense.


You know how Umbrella Corporation has plans that make no sense? Yeah, it's kinda exactly like that.

Right next to the major plot spoilers about the inane government actions, you get equipment layouts of the folks in those thousand-odd guard towers. It's heavy ordnance, but actually the soldiers are kind of weak sauce. Getting in and out of the containment zone past a tower is actually not very hard for a team of high-end Shadowrunners. The bigger numbers serve mostly to illustrate how fundamentally flawed the system really was. Every increase in target number by 6 increased the number of dice you needed to roll to average the same level of success by six times. And being within 200 meters of the blast site increases your magic target numbers by 6, which basically goes to the very edge of what the game can handle and then pisses off that edge.

Not that you'd necessarily know that right away by reading this book. The effects of standing next to the blast site on your health and on your ability to cast magic spells are separated by 11 pages because this book isn't edited well. The “Radiation Hazard” subsection doesn't mention the magic impedance, and eleven pages later you get a subsection called “Astral Pollution” that casually drops the fact that despite not mentioning it earlier, radiation makes magic use almost impossible. Interestingly: the description of radiation exposures is a bizarrely kludge but actually surprisingly realistic. Obviously someone did a bit of research on radiation hazards. And this is the kind of thing that made highschool age Frank think this was the right direction for game design to go, and also the reason why I now realize that it wasn't (but still respect it as an experiment). You can make any probabilities at all with this variable TN crap. With enough mathhammering and epicycles, you could get the system to output absolutely anything you wanted it to. It's just that you aren't going to be able to get reasonable probabilities on the fly, which means that everything would have to be a stand alone kludge rule. To get things working in this manner, everything would have to be its own special case rule, and the radiation hazards don't even fit on one page.


These kinds of unworkable kludge rules survived in one form or another all the way through 5th edition. Even if these things all worked individually, it would still be unplayable. You can't remember a special case for everything, you can't even look it all up. And the fact that the radiation rules pretty much worked was the exception rather than the rule.

AncientH:

Radiation rules in Shadowrun are an odd duck; here radiation exposure is measured in "rads" (a real-life unit), and I think in Target: Wastelands they switched to measuring "greys" (another real-life unit); given another iteration it would probably have gone to the banana equivalent dose.

There's a big table of shit that you basically can't buy in Chicago. This seems silly and it is, mostly because very few tables I knew actually used the Availability and Street Index rules as written. See, the costs listed with equipment in the main book wasn't the real price, it was sort of like the manufacturer's suggested retail price, which would be adjusted by whatever your local standard of living adjustment was (the big table from earlier, which was in all the early Shadowrun location books). So if, say, a Streetline Special was listed for 100 nuyen, and the local markup on firearms was 200%, then your default cost was 200 nuyen - ah, but that's if you buy it legally, which requires a permit and things! If you want to buy it on the street from Zork the Ork Gun Dealer contact, you had to multiply that by the street index! And even then, you had to roll (something) against the Availability as a Target Number just to see if there was one for sale!

(On the plus side, modifiers could be fractions too, so you could pick up cheap cybergear in Tokyo and they would practically be giving the drugs away in Caracas.)

It was very realistic, and far too fucking much math for most people to fuck with; it's like constantly revisiting the vendor in a MMORPG to see if the inventory has changed, and then getting fucked up the ass and saying "Thank you sir may I have another!" before getting your bang-bang. Only in Shadowrun (and possibly GURPS) could getting a military weapon be classified as a peril-frought mathventure.

FrankT:

Information on insect spirits previously appeared in the second edition Grimoire sourcebook (Grimoire II) and in the adventures Queen Euphoria, Universal Brotherhood, and Double Exposure. The game statistics, as well as the methods and powers of insect spirits, Queens, and insect shamans varied from each of the products to the next, mainly to keep both players and characters unsure of what they faced. These rules change the insect spirits yet again, but game masters should feel free to use the version of the insect rules that best fit their game. The numbers really don't matter – the horror of the bugs goes deeper than mere game statistics.

Now personally, I suspect that the rules change in each book because Grimoire II was written by Paul Hume, Queen Euphoria was written by Stephan Wieck, Universal Brotherhood was written by Nigel Findley, and Double Exposure was written by Fraser Cane. Then this book was written by Tom Dowd. Some of these authors get “contribution” credits here and there (for example, Double Exposure is written “with Nigel Findley”) but these are very much the babies of different people who lived and worked in a largely pre-internet world where people pretty much typed up their drafts and sent them in hard copy form through the post to FASA headquarters. All of the writeups of insect spirits look like the ravings of someone largely cut off from the overall zeitgeist they are trying to direct because that is exactly what is happening.

Basically, Shadowrun's rule system was in flux, and no one agreed about how to make it work because they couldn't actually make it work. Every rules revision was at this point made by someone who had either gotten lost in the minutiae of the rules they were trying to write or were just straight pulling things out of their ass. Almost every rule committed to paper was the result of hubris or apathy, which means that every writer was either too vain to consent to make their bug spirit rules conform to the writings of other authors or too lazy to try. These were heady days of experimentation, and as a Shadowrun fan you were paying to playtest the latest set of ideas.


In the Shadowrun future, the monkeys use voice to text rather than typewriters.

AncientH:

That said, if you sit down and look at them the results aren't too bad. It helps that Grimoire came first, so that's the default they all refer to; in the other books you mainly have some variations in statistics for various flesh-forms and crap. They're basically reiterated here, and are relatively consistent. Not entirely, but relatively.



Some of these guys I don't remember seeing...ever again. Firefly Spirits, I can't say for sure were ever mentioned again. The abilities of the different flavors of insect spirits, how long it takes to invest them and all that, are pretty much different and random. Common abilities for Queens/Mothers/Females is the ability to control inspects of the same general type (i.e. Cicada Mothers can control Cicadas, and theoretically keep you awake at night until you go mad and then attack you when you're weakened), Compulsion, Venom, and the all-important Summoning which lets them conjure other insect spirits. Some weird abilities include the Mosquito Spirit's ability to suck blood, and oddballs like Share Mind and Share Willpower. My favorite was probably Skill, which gave things like Ant spirits Build/Repair skills - great for maintaining the hive, or in my headcanon, for Korean sweatshops full of busy hybrid forms, churning out Nikes and upscale purses.



One thing all the bugs share is "Vulnerability (Insecticides)" - this is kind of a weird one, because the full gamut of spirit invulnerabilities and whatnot wasn't spelled out exactly in stats until 3rd edition, so it's kind of like using the same words to describe similar weaknesses, and then having to stat them all out separately. If that doesn't make sense, put it this way: Vulnerability (Silver) and Vulnerability (Insecticide) were two different weaknesses which might not share the same mechanics (although the differences were mainly minor, unless you managed the hilarious feat of getting an insect spirit into a drinking game and it swallows a shot of bug poison).

Despite the annoyance factor of insecticides, from a practical standpoint you may have an advantage loading up a squirt gun with insecticide and DMSO, or dipping your bullets in insecticide (especially against hybrids), but True Form spirits have Immunity to Normal Weapons (although this isn't listed in their profile), which basically means they have fuck-tons of armor against anything short of weapon foci, spells, and Ol' Reliable (what, you didn't have a flamethrower called Ol' Reliable? For shame, chummer!)

FrankT:

Evil magic guys are not inherently better than you. The authors couldn't quite agree with each other what Insect Spirits did, but there wasn't any of the versions that were unambiguously better than being a regulation shaman of something modestly decent like Cat or a hermetic mage or whatever. But the authors still wanted the big bad evil guy to be better than you. Because that's how D&D works. You don't send a whole team of superspies to go fight one dude who is individually barely a match for one of the heroes – it just isn't sporting. So what Shadowrun did was to give out “Threat Ratings” to evil wizards that just gave them dicepool bonuses all the time for being evil. As their evil plan got closer to fruition, their threat rating went up. Hamhanded, but it barely did the job.

But that was all a 1st edition idea. And in 2nd edition they independently came up with an idea of making NPCs easier to deal with by having them skip the dicepool allocation steps. That was a... thing... where you had pools of dice and allocated them to various tasks and it was an interesting minigame but it was book keeping intensive and just made calculating probabilities even more intractable without actually representing anything in-character at all. This was all eventually scrapped and replaced with characters rolling a number of dice equal to their stats plus their skills, which was way easier to use. Anyway, in 2nd edition they came up with the idea of badass NPCs skipping all this accounting and just having a floating couple of bonus dice to represent them doing that. And it was called... a “Threat Rating.”



So yes, there was a time when evil wizards had a “Threat Rating” and a “Threat Rating” that were different numbers that were calculated differently and added to some of the same things and also to different things. Because go fuck yourself. This book is on the sharp end of Tom Dowd's eventually successful campaign to rename one of those things “Potency.” So there's that.

Of course, evil wizards get Threat Rating Potency for furthering the goals of the hive. But... hives don't have any goals. The examples aren't of much help. They are stuff like “steal some stuff to do a thing” where neither the stuff nor the thing are described and you're basically back to having no rhyme or reason for anything. Literally.

Feel free to make these tasks seem utterly senseless and unrelated.

It's not writing that's lazy and bad, it's mysterious. And maybe also a little bit lazy and bad.

AncientH:

It got a bit worse in some of the later books like Threats, because depending on how much of a Marty Stu an NPC insect shaman was, their Potency could racket up into the double digits and they'd break the game. Players knew this, and were envious, which is why they were specifically barred from getting Potency.

Other innovations in this book include torpor (insect spirits hibernating in astral space), and astral pollution, which initially took the form of massive background counts, and later on got really crazy with voids, negative background counts, and other shit - Chicago was basically the writer testbed for fucked-up magical phenomenon.

FrankT:

We talked about how the Insect Spirits were concepted as evil hives full of evil, and then they went ahead and made non-hive insects that followed basically the same pattern even though that made no sense and fit like a
rainbow horse cock in an onahole. And um... yeah. That's basically what happened.



The behind the scenes section kinda lamely admits that these tropes don't fit super well together and then just sort of leaves it like that.

AncientH:

There's a bunch of NPCs described here, without stats. Because as Nigel D. Findley gravely told us, if you give it stats than the players will find a way to kill it. No exceptions. So instead they give out a bunch of suggested game mechanics but no actual stat block. They die when the GM decides they die.

Even without stats, you don't actually care about any of these NPCs. I know I don't. It's like getting attached to a George R. R. Martin character, or one of the characters in Dhalgren. Just don't do it.



The only NPC you might possibly give the tiniest fuck about is Tamir Grey, a pacifist ghoul spokesman for Ghoul Rights that was martyred for the cause. So if you care about Ghoul Rights, and their development in later sourcebooks, you might possibly be interested in those paragraphs.

FrankT:

The first novels of Shadowrun were the Secrets of Power Trilogy. I read them when I was a pre-teen, so I probably have rose colored nostalgia glasses on with regards to them, but I remember them fondly. I hesitate to reread them, because I'm not sure how well they would hold up. Anyway, the big bad from the third book is the totem Spider. It's like a schemer villain totem. The main character uses ghost dance magic to punch Spider Totem in the dick (at the cost of Howling Coyote's life ) and there was much rejoicing.

Anyway, that is all out the window. In Bug City, it is insects who are the bad guys, so arachnids are the good guys. It's um... the kind of lame one dimensional biological allusions. But perhaps more importantly, it kinda shits on the entire first arc of Shadowrun's story. Punching Spider Totem right in the dick was so important that a bunch of major characters killed themselves to make sure the dick punching was extra painful and twisty. So if Spider is, for example, not a bad guy, that's not the kind of thing that characters suicide bombing themselves to defeat would count as the sort of “noble sacrifice” described in the first series.

So Spider Shamans are totally playable in this book. Which is pretty much SR2's Midichlorians.

AncientH:

I'm not even sure this is the first time the Spider totem has been stat'd in Shadowrun. They used to stick that shit in everywhere. If someone told me Steve Kenson or Tom Dowd had stat'd it out first in a copy of White Wolf Quarterly or the shortlived Shadowrun APA zine, I'd totally believe that.

I have reread the early Shadowrun novels, and while they're okay...in hindsight they are very seriously weird. The setting obviously was not done baking, and there are leaps of logic and things that the characters do in that book that characters in the game explicitly cannot do, and the writing kind of suffers from some serious Marty Stu-ism.

If you boil it down, Spider was punched in the dick specifically so he couldn't create Spider spirits, in the exact same way as insect spirits do...well, sort of. The implication with Insect spirits is that the Insect Totem for a given shaman basically is their Queen spirit; it's weird. And, ultimately, unimportant. You can't actually kill a Queen spirit, just banish her from this plane. Eventually, she'll link up with another shaman and return. To actually banish her permanently would require a metaplanar trip to the Insect Spirit Metaplanes, which only insect shamans could do. Which is a great idea that was never really capitalized on.

Incidentally, Scorpion is a totally acceptable totem too. Even Nova Scorpion!

FrankT:

All in all, the Bug City plotline is the place where things really start to fall apart. The Insect Spirit plotline altogether never really had a second shoe to drop. It was just some gross imagery backed up by nothing. There were no usable mechanics. There was no villain motivation. It was all smoke and mirrors the entire time.

AncientH:

It's kind of a book that demands a sequel that it never quite got. They did follow up on the plotline - repeatedly, in Target: UCAS, Threats, Threats 2, Target: Wastelands, and eventually Feral Cities - but as Frank mentioned, the "second shoe" never dropped. There was no cohesive plan for the bugs, there wasn't even a dedicated motivation for the bugs; even in Aztlan Nigel Findley put forward a couple different plans and motivations for the World's Evillest Megacorp(TM) beyond looking cool and carving up virgins for fun and profit.

Various writers revisited Chicago a bunch of times, usually to keep the players abreast of the situation or to add one more layer of complexity to the magical bullshit or whatever going on there, but nobody ever sat down and wrote the equivalent of Undermountain or World's Biggest Dungeon - which, if they'd been a bit more sane about the size of the containment zone and the disposition of the forces and factions within, they totally could have. So, it was an idea - an ambitious idea - but the execution, I think, was flawed. It had the potential for great stories that never materialized. Maybe if they'd set novels or short stories in Chicago, real grim'n'gritty stuff like Black Library puts out for Warhammer...but Shadowrun has never been terribly good at that either. I mean, it's put out some atrocious novels, and they probably sold well enough - they had out 40 just in English, before FASA closed - but they never really pushed the IP in that direction.

That's the book, basically. A highly celebrated "what-might-have-been" on a setting element which, though it got a lot of interest and words dedicated to it over the years, never quite lived up to its potential.

[Aryxbez]

Since we are talking about Bug City, which places in the SR universe are actually worth visiting for the team of runners not native to those places?

Albeit its from theMain SR thread, this is a burning question I promised myself I would re-ask to the Reviewing authors, once the review ended. Albeit I feel part of the review may've "quasi" answered it with the Renraku Arcology adventure, and likely the general notion behind SR scenarios are that:

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.

However, all the same, I am quite curious to the "better" SR locations, or even just ones the authors would suggest, and why.

[Juton]

I had never stopped to think about how the UCAS government tried to handle this but how they did it in this book just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Thanks for writing this, it was quite entertaining.

[Username17]

However, all the same, I am quite curious to the "better" SR locations, or even just ones the authors would suggest, and why.

One big problem is that every location book, and I mean every single one has some real wall bangers in it. Some it's more than others.



So the location books that people like, people like them in spite of glaring flaws. So for example, I really like Shadows of Asia. I think that's a great book. But... the section on India is just absolutely fucking insane. There's no way to pussyfoot around that topic: that section is beginning to end madness. Your understanding and enjoyment of the world will be substantially improved if you simply pretend all 14 pages about the Indian Union were just the gibbering ravings of what might have been if you weren't playing in fucking Shadowrun where all the superpowers collapsed and the established world powers are fucking Japan, Brasil and Mexico. All the nuclear war history of Khalistan is pretty fucked too, but in a much more manageable way than having an otherwise never mentioned country happen to be a magocracy with as many mages as the Chicago metroplex had people that controls the weather on a global scale. The idea of the Indian Union even existing in Shadowrun is so preposterous and game changing that it doesn't even merit consideration. Other than that though, awesome book.

I had never stopped to think about how the UCAS government tried to handle this but how they did it in this book just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Thanks for writing this, it was quite entertaining.

Basically none of the responses to Insect Spirits make a lot of sense. In Threats 2, the plotline where Ares is working with some hives that are planting their spirits into animals and not people is called "Betrayal" and we're all supposed to get super mad at Ares for selling out the human race... by successfully convincing space monsters to not kill humans and then fight against other space monsters who do. I don't even know why I'm supposed to get upset about that decision. It's like the authors were so used to writing up various groups as Team Red Laser that they forgot that villains actually have to do bad things to be worthy of the title.

-Username17

[erik]

Pardon my Slowmo.

Fuck, the Vulgar Unicorn didn't stay the same throughout half a dozen anthologies! Evolve or die.

Goddamnit I can't find an appropriate depiction of the sign of the Vulgar Unicorn, so here's a rainbow colored horse cock. NSFW.

Or maybe you just wanted an excuse to post a rainbow colored horse cock...

[OgreBattle]

Thieve's World, earliest image of belts-as-limb-armor I can recall.

AncientH:

I can't throw stones; when we were writing Neo-Tokyo for Corporate Enclaves the Japanese asked we change a couple references - an atomic-bomb themed restaurant and a WWII memorial protest - and we did it. Mostly because at that point we ignored all the shit they did ask us to put in, because it sounded like something out of an anime.

What did they ask you to put in?

[Ancient History]

Some sort of magical maze under the Imperial Palace, things like that.

[Fucks]

Looks like Bug City is back in SR5.

Ok folks, as one of the people who kickstarted Shadowrun Online (now known as Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown), I got the ebook of Lockdown and spent the last few hours reading it. So, I came up with a thread for spoilers for Lockdown, and will post here. This is massive spoilers, please do not look any further if you do NOT want to be spoiled.






In short, major shit happens that changes the Sixth World forever, we get a lot more info on headcases (mostly because we have a massive dragon assisted outbreak of those) and adventures that can literally change the Sixth World and its players.

Let's see:

The Great Dragon Eliohann, who was seemingly taken out in the Crash 2.0/Deus wars, is still comatose, but his "soul" is still in the Matrix (in Cerberus, his Matrix icon)

Celedyr arranges for a surgery to try to reunite the two, using a version of the headcrash nanovirus to attempt to "re-write" Cerberus into Eliohann's body. Something goes wrong. It always does, but this time, it's.. um.. spectacularly bad. You see, there's two "life" forms in that nanovirus: Cerberus.. and Deus. (yes, it's back)

Eliohann/Cerberus/Deus (I'm just going to call them ECD) escapes the procedur, and in a confused state, flies away, eventually crashing into Fenway Park. Literally, as in "Great Dragon takes out the Green Monster".

The big uh-oh is that along with the problems of a Great Dragon at war with itself is that during ECD's escape from the surgery, it brought an iridescent rain on Boston. A rain full of nanobots with two Intelligences fighting each other inside those nanites.

(All together now: Uh-oh!)

People who get exposed to the rain get infected by the Headcrash virus and get overwritten. Some with a majority of Deus, some with a majority of Ceberus, some with a mix of both. Quite many die of the nanites overwriting their brain (it's being called an encephalititis attack). Others go insane (the original personality is locked out of control, but can watch everything happen).

Boston gets locked down (of course, you figured that out) hard, Nothing in or out. This is a tighter lockdown then even Bug City was, with good reason. No power except for absolute essentials (like water, sometimes). Air drops of food and other supplies more like "Fly at super high altitude, drop it technically outside Boston Metroplex borders and let momentum take it in to the City proper and trigger the parachute at some point)

There are three corps that are at risk here. NeoNET (the folks behind the experiment to "cure" Eliohann), Aztechnology (Participants in the experiment), and Evo (the original progenitors of the CFD Virus). If the players can figure out who was behind of it, those three corps are in deep stinky corp-destroying drek. In fact, one of the offers that the players receive is from a AA corp that offers 2.5 Million for the team, plus 1% voting stock for each runner (so your runner team could be 5% owners in a newly made AAA corp). The AA corp wants the info so they can take it to the Corporate Court, and strip one or more of the three corps at risk here of their AAA status (with the AA corp getting their status in return). Quite a few of the offers are "buy your own island and retire" levels, but that was the one that jumped out at me first

Apparently, they have a site set up for DM's and players to report how the deal went down, and which option their players took in their campaigns, and that Catalyst are going to take the results of this and from Shadowrun Chronicles players into changing the storyline.

[Longes]

Ugh. Because why make a new story, when you can repeat stuff.

The Great Dragon Eliohann, who was seemingly taken out in the Crash 2.0/Deus wars, is still comatose, but his "soul" is still in the Matrix (in Cerberus, his Matrix icon)

What happened to "Matrix and Magic never mesh"?

You see, there's two "life" forms in that nanovirus: Cerberus.. and Deus.

Le Sigh. SHODAN is scarry because she actually built a race of cybermonsters to serve her, and you are stuck in a confined space with nowhere to run. Deus is locked with you in the Renraku Arcology - scary. Deus is wrecking havok around the world - call the army, don't bother with the shadowrunners.

Boston gets locked down (of course, you figured that out) hard, Nothing in or out. This is a tighter lockdown then even Bug City was, with good reason. No power except for absolute essentials (like water, sometimes). Air drops of food and other supplies more like "Fly at super high altitude, drop it technically outside Boston Metroplex borders and let momentum take it in to the City proper and trigger the parachute at some point)

If I'm not mistaken, the nanites can form an antena and transmit via the matrix, so I don't know how much this lockdown will help.

[Stahlseele]

I think i remember Eliohann not receiving the Datajacks volountarily.
And he went crazy and on a rampage across england the first time he was hooked up to the matrix as well.

[OgreBattle]

What are the over all population demographics of shadowrun America? I got the idea that you had a few mega cities and lots of wilderness and maybe farms

[kzt]

What are the over all population demographics of shadowrun America? I got the idea that you had a few mega cities and lots of wilderness and maybe farms

The SR writers had no clue about population distribution/demographics in North America and cared less. So it makes no sense. The FASA internal motto was supposedly "Sell the sizzle, not the steak", and that was certainly true for SR1. Cool concept, stories and art, terrible mechanics and crappy worldbuilding.

[Username17]

What are the over all population demographics of shadowrun America? I got the idea that you had a few mega cities and lots of wilderness and maybe farms

As kzt said, the Shadowrun authors didn't really put a lot of thought into that. There was a period in 4th edition when the writer pool had detail oriented fanboys who had grown up on this shit like AncientHistory, Jason Levine, and myself who put a lot of effort into researching places and history and producing glosses to explain how it was all supposed to fit together - but that was really quite short.

In first edition, the Native American Nations are given more people than there are Native Americans in the whole world and they are supposedly busy kicking white people out even though that's completely impossible and insane. In second edition, different books can't even bother keeping it straight where borders are or what year wars happened in. In third edition a big event was the PCC conquering Southern California and their population did not change despite annexing a metroplex with more people than the entire country had before doing that. And of course, in 4th edition after we left they produced the Sixth World Almanac where they copied national borders off Google Earth without even taking the text in that book into account about how borders had moved.

-Username17