fectin wrote:What's the distinction between "JackPoint Name" and "JackPoint Character"?
No difference at all. I was just tired of writing JackPoint Name over and over again. Although yeah, I get sick and tired of people fapping to rediscovery of Earthdawn magical techniques in Shadowrun. For fuck's sake: in just 18 seconds you might be able to get off a Fire Engulf or an Astral Perception... if you get to
seventh circle. Those are abilities that everyone has in Shadowrun at chargen and take 3 seconds.
On that note, what standards do you prefer for quotes, punctuation, punctuation in quotes, etc.?
Those standards are not important save that they are standardized. I would suggest:
When ending a sentence with something in air quotes, put the "period outside".
"If you are quoting an entire sentence, the period goes inside the quotation marks."
When using an ellipsis... use three actual periods rather than the ellipsis character. This is a change from Shadowrun's old styleguide, but seriously
most of your authors don't know how to generate the ellipsis symbol.
Use the word "dwarves" to pluralize people of the Dwarf metatype.
Capitalize Each Word in a title or subject heading, but don't capitalize for emphasis.
Use
italics for emphasis instead.
When referring to a specific book,
bold the name of the book. Then put a colon (also bold) and the page number as not bold. So you might have "
Magic in the Shadows: page 138". If that's a parenthetical remark, such as a citation, put it into parentheses, like this:
"This technomancer is a Pythagorean (
Ends of the Matrix: page 9)."
Never directly endorse any moral or religious viewpoint. Omniscient game text should never say that any specific person or act is "evil". Omniscient game text should never endorse any particular thing that happens or does not happen after you die either.
With all the talk about the Amazonia-Aztlan War, it actually looks like Megu is farther ahead on the Southeast Asia material. Here is that:
I've been wanting for a long time to do something with the hilltribe/forest spirit vs Vietnamese Army conflict in Vietnam. SEAsianstudies/linguistics student working on Hmong culture and language, so it's pretty close to home. I'm on break now, so I can actually contribute. I'll get some writing done on this over the next two weeks or so, but as for a brief overview?
Basically, the feel of the fighting out in the Annam Cordillera I'm looking for is Princess Mononoke meets Platoon, while in Saigon itself it's more The Quiet American. The forest spirits basically want resource exploiters out, and are willing to use the hilltribes for that end. The hilltribes, for their part, want to grow in political relevance compared to the lowland peoples, and are happy to use the spirits' magical punch to do that. Their strategy is to try and cut Vietnam in two along the Truong Son mountains in central Vietnam, between Hue and Da Nang, hoping the pro-democratic and pro-corporate rebel groups in southern Vietnam and Saigon especially will use that opportunity to declare their independence, and they'll have neutralized the biggest nearby military threat to the nascent spirit nation in Laos by cutting it in half. Obviously, the Vietnamese and their Russian and Aztlaner backers don't want this to happen. So far it's been a stalemate; the hit and run attacks a spirit army is good at is not a good way to break major fortifications around Hue and Da Nang, but at the same time, the hilltribes have hardly any infrastructure to target and armies sent up into the mountains tend to get chewed up for little gain. Aztlan has its own war on now, though, so the Dega Alliance of spirits and hilltribes sees a chance and is likely to get bold.
Other factions have their own agendas on this. A lot of the independence movement in the south is driven by the Chinese community in Saigon and the Cholon Triad there. Cholon, a poorer, more Chinese area of western Saigon, is a hotbed of insurgency, and the Triads are everywhere the way the secret police are everywhere else. This is a bit ironic given that the relationship between China and Hmong and other hill people has generally not been good. Similarly, part of the reason the hill tribes have what gear they do is from Hmong and other ethnic syndicates in the UCAS Midwest and the CFS, who sell opiates grown in Dega Alliance territory and send back weapons.
The corps are divided on the whole situation. On the one hand, the Khouang Combine, Vietnam's state-corp, has pretty much locked out everybody but Aztechnology from Vietnam's economy. And that means the other corps would be happy to see the rebels in the south have their chance to declare independence and open up south Vietnam's economy to them. At the same time, though, Ares and Monobe in particular have been involved in resource struggles in Laos for a long time, and the Dega Alliance, if successful, might lock them out of those resources. So Ares is of two minds, the Azzies are solidly behind the Vietnamese regime, and others who hate the Azzies and have no interest in Laos' resources, like, say, Horizon, might be very much behind the hilltribes. Amazonia might be sympathetic as well to an Awakened state threatening Azzie interests.
I haven't quite figured out where some other factions fit in: the Naga in Cambodia, the Canton Confederation, Kalokdam, et al. Still thinking about it.
Also thinking about plot hooks. I feel like a second Battle of Hue reminiscent of the Tet Offensive one could be cool. Want at least one war-related intrigue adventure in Saigon, that Quiet American feel I was talking about. And definitely at least one needs to focus on the Awakened element.
Does this look like a potentially interesting chapter thus far? What in particular should I elaborate on?
That being said, I would still put that par, not in Vietnam, but in the three way battle between Nag Kamuchea, The Republic of Cambodia, and Thailand. You get plenty of Hmong on that side of the peninsula if that's what you want out of life, but you also get to have an established multifactional throwdown in the jungle with established forces.
Here's what you have:
- Thailand, which may indeed be called either Ayutthaya or Siam at this point, is an expansionary parliamentary monarchy that is in bed with with local A-ranked corp Shinsiam and various Japanese megacorps. The monarchy is Garuda-aligned.
- Nag Kampuchea, which is a despotic monarchy run by the seven headed Great Naga Vasuki. As of Running Wild, they had successfully established a throne in Angkor. They hate Garudas for obvious reasons, but also they view themselves as the rightful owners of everywhere that Khmer people are - including the rest of Cambodia, Burma, and even Nagaland.
- The Dega Alliance, which is a region that extends through modern day Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, which is an unrecognized state of hill tribes backed by forest spirits. They are allied with Nag Kampuchea to an extent.
- Finally, the corporate backed Republic of Cambodia, kept on life support by intervention by the French army and led by Queen Sophie de Rochefort (formerly of Esprit Industries).
You have other interested parties (the nations of Vietnam and Laos, for example), but the main battle lines are around Angkor. It mostly boils down to the fact that almost every metahuman in the area is considered to be mythologically associated with Nagas or Garudas. The Khmer (most of the people in Cambodia) supposedly have a tribal existence
because of the Naga. The Kadai people (that's Thai and Lao) exist as a tribe
because of the Garuda. This means that the king of Thailand can snap his fingers and raise an army because the Garudas listen to him and Kadai people listen to people that Garudas listen to. Vasuki can his with any of his seven heads and raise an army, because Khmer people listen when a Naga hisses. Sophie de Rochefort is Queen of Cambodia because he has Preah Khan, which is the damn Excalibur of Cambodia. But even that exists because it was a gift -
from the Naga. So when Vasuki says that Preah Khan "doesn't count" anymore, a lot of people listen. Even hough Queen Sophie can raise her sword on high and make the Mekong flow backward.
Then we get to the Dega Alliance. They don't actually worship Naga or Garudas, and they don't feel that their right to own land flows from those magic beasts.They are ancestor worshipers who live in the wilderness and want to keep nature preserved. So they are provisionally allied with Nag Kampuchea, because the Naga are mostly pretty low tech and oppose corporate exploitation. But it can't really last, because the Dega are
disrespectful. The Naga are really big on humans being "lower" than Naga are, and the fact that the Dega don't actually regard them as superior to humans is a huge sore point in their relationship. To the Naga, alliance with the Dega Alliance is a military necessity but ideologically untenable.
Add to the mix some interference by the corporate backed and violently pro-metahuman fascist state of Vietnam and the just plan violent Malaccan Pirates, and you have yourself a good warzone where players can take mercenary contracts from different factions to do different stuff.
-Username17
