Another freelancer speaking out against Catalyst Game Labs

[Stahlseele]

Wait what?

[Libertad]

Nope, it's still around, and with UCAS weaker than ever the CAS is probably stronger than ever. Especially now that Ares has completely pulled out of the UCAS and is now setting up it's HQ in Atlanta.

Catalyst trying to rake in dat sweet, sweet ring-wing chud bux.

[Username17]

The original Shadowrun had a resurgent Confederacy simply because it was the 1980s and if you split the United States into pieces it was inconceivable that one of the sections wouldn't be called "the Confederates."

Initially Shadowrun was primarily concerned with the Pacific Northwest, which of course meant that whatever was going on in Atlanta was far away and largely irrelevant. One of the main racist terrorist factions is based in Texas (Alamos 20K), but aside from a few disparaging remarks about racist slags in Bubba country, the game was pretty much uninterested in the goings on of the Confederacy. Which was probably for the best because it turns out that there's no tactful way to talk about the Confederacy. The historical Confederacy were as close to unambiguous villains as history ever gives us, and that was in the 19th century, where the comparative 'good guys' were happily committing genocide on Native Americans, gunning down labor organizers, working children to death in factories and mines, and didn't allow women to vote.

A couple of things made that situation less stable and more terrible. The first was that the nature of stochastic freelancer driven writing meant that the only people writing about the Confederated American States were people that for some reason wanted to do it. Which meant of course that some of the Confederacy material was written by unreconstructed edgelords. But also remember that most of the authors didn't actually know or care much about the plight of the 19th century negroes, which led to some very dumb 'can't we all just get along?' shit written by people who just genuinely did not understand that writing 'Confederacy: but there's no Racism' is actually super offensive.

But the big thing that made that really go to fuck was the 'Horrors are aligned with Aztlan' plotline. First off, making the Mexicans the 'big bad' is already pretty racist, and opens the door for more racism in future products. And also too the creation of 'Bad Aztlan' meant that a lot of authors ended up portraying Aztlan's opponents in a positive light. Because writing shades of gray dystopian fiction is hard and people keep defaulting to whitehat and blackhat assignments even when that is dumb.

So the Confederacy gradually went from being a minor plot point with 'Here be racists' scrawled on the map to something where the setting itself was promoting racism and presenting white racists as unironic heroes. Not great.

Shadowrun basically has to be burned down with future fantasy cyberpunk mashups learning from Shadowrun's hits and misses but not actually being Shadowrun. As a setting, it cannot be saved. The fact that it's currently being written by criminals and clowns just makes that easier to accept.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

This is true, although a shame for my personal nostalgia. I don't just want a fantasy cyberpunk mashup, I want the signpost for the sixth world to be the great dragon Ryumyo flying above the Shinkansen.

But my favorite "and so it came to pass" tropes really can't be salvaged, because they were set eight years ago . Near future timelines have a definitive expiration date.

Aztlan was handled poorly. They could be villains simply because they're rich and powerful - they didn't need to be intrinsically worse than any other megacorporation, they just needed to run a 200M population nation-state that was left standing.

The Ghost Dance was handled pretty well, brownface aside. I was always skeptical about the whole "resource rush" ( https://shadowrun-2050.obsidianportal.c ... ource-rush ) setting element as a child, but with the way standing rock played out, it looks absolutely prophetic.

[Trill]

Don't forget that a third of the military disappeared into mist

[Trill]

Oh and some parts of it are written in a style very reminiscent of Reddit

[Stahlseele]

No no no no!

So, one of the new fluff books for Shadowrun has dropped, and they've essentially fucked over the entire UCAS as a setting. Some key points

-Ares' experiments with bug spirits ended poorly, surprising no one and now there's a new breed of insect spirits wandering around attacking people.

-The UCAS has decided to repeal the BRA as a result, no longer giving Megacorps the rights recognized in it. Surprise, most of the megacorps stop pulling out.

-EMPs hit all of the UCAS' major cities. People start dying, the matrix is permanently down, and the mageocracy has begun

-NAN has invaded

-Sea Dragon now rules Seattle. Ghostwalker 2.0 everyone!

Edit: Oh, and DocWagon merged with Lone Star

We will NOT just move on from this fustercluck of random history happened points!
The fuck happened there?

[Trill]

The desire to distinguish themselves obviously

And probably the desire to make the world more chaotic the only way they know how: Disrupt tech

[sendaz]

Sept 2080 UCAS drops out of BRA

January 2081 UCAS signs the BRA back into effect, plus the re-affirmation bill not only restores all of the previous provisions of the BRA, but adds several new conditions that give Corporate Court-rated megacorporations even more leeway to operate in the UCAS without government interference.

[saithorthepyro]

Not to mention Ares claiming that Damien Knight is both possessed by a Bug Spirit and dead, although there are plenty of hints to him not actually being dead. It's theorized the mysterious EMPs was the Corporate Corp punishing UCAS via Nukes to shut down their tech. Like Trill said a third of the UCAS military has disappeared into the mist and probably ended up in Ravenloft. Oh, and Detroit is now overrun by bugs and Seattle is now a free city headed by the Sea Dragon. Oh, and just before this Ghostwalker kicked all the governments out of Denver and has essentially sealed it off from the rest of the world.

[phlapjackage]

The setting is turning into TORG

[MGuy]

Over the years I've probably played one or two Shadowrun games per edition going from 3 to 5. I've never played in a game and outside of the basics I'm not all that familiar with the greater setting. What did Shadowrun actually get right as a cyberpunk dystopian setting?

[Iduno]

Over the years I've probably played one or two Shadowrun games per edition going from 3 to 5. I've never played in a game and outside of the basics I'm not all that familiar with the greater setting. What did Shadowrun actually get right as a cyberpunk dystopian setting?

Prior to Catalyst showing up? A decent amount.

Complete (but fragmented) corporate control, corrupt police, omnipresent violence, actual wageslavery. Plus, the ability to stuff yourself with equipment that totals an amount that would let you retire for a lifetime, without the ability to remove it and resell it because you're a cyborg.

[Stahlseele]

anybody got a drop to the cutting black file?
i looked at the /tg/ places and can't find anything.

[Nath]

One of the main racist terrorist factions is based in Texas (Alamos 20K), but aside from a few disparaging remarks about racist slags in Bubba country, the game was pretty much uninterested in the goings on of the Confederacy. Which was probably for the best because it turns out that there's no tactful way to talk about the Confederacy.

On the other hand, once Shadowrun introduced racism targeted at metatypes that are, by the rules, less intelligent than humans, I guess it was kinda foreseable that the issue was not going to be raised in a tactful manner in any way related to racism IRL.

That being said, the CAS chapter in Dirty Tricks happens to put the largest ork population exactly in the cities and states who has the largest black population IRL (New Orlean, Alabama, etc.), so yes, tactful is not the word.

[saithorthepyro]

Still nothing on a copy of the book Stahl. But yeah, this is what, the third attempt at Bug City between Chicago, Boston, and now Detroit.