alt.War: Turning Anger into productiveness

[Username17]

That's some really nice work. Of course, even that doesn't clear up all the issues with the map, like the missing countries. Most relevantly for the SE Asia segment, the kingdom of the naga just isn't there at all.

I mean, when it comes time to do Africa, the map is even worse. Most of the continent is lightly scribbled on with an "Ah, fuckit" pen. Basically, you pretty much have to ignore that map completely and make a whole new Africa map from scratch. But the map in 6WA does Asia no services either.

-Username17

[hermit]

@Loki: Actually you overlooked the massive differences between the Africa part of the 6WA map and the Cyberpirates Ivoire/Ghana map, and the Feral Cities Nigeria map. Asamondo is massively resized in every one of these maps.

Other than that, fantastic work.

[sabs]

Hey Frank, I have a question about Africa.


My understanding of Africa is this:

Northern Africa is mostly the same.

Subsaharan Africa is basically:
Lagos and the Kingdoms of Nigeria is inhabited (sorta) and everything else is given back to Paracritter infested Parajungle.

Savanah Africa has the Kingdom of Zulu in what used to be South Africa.. and the rest is back to Nature as well.

Between VITAS I, VITAS II, SURGE, and Goblinization, The population of Africa went from roughly 1 billion to just over 150 Million.

Lagos has roughly 20 million of those.
The rest are split between:
Kingdom s of Nigeria
West Africa
Congo
Azanian Confederation
North Africa
Asamondo (*bleh*)

Is that close to accurate?

I know that in my personal African setup. The rate of awakened people is higher than the standard 1%. But that's because I feel that Africa is so deadly, that awakened metahumans are more likely to live to adulthood.

[FistFullOfEdgeDice]

Frank, it seems you've got some interesting ideas of your own, and rather than butting heads, I think I may sit back a while and see how yours develop.

[Username17]

Hey Frank, I have a question about Africa.

Everyone does, because it's an important continent and Shadowrun has never said a single thing about it that was coherent with any other single thing. Everything Catalyst has released on the subject (most notably Feral Cities, and 6WA) has been an incoherent mess. Feral Cities in particular is a fucking train wreck where they forgot to put the "why the fuck would I care about any of this?" into the book. 6WA had a genuine chance to make nationa boundaries in Africa and decided to... not do that. They just scribbled over the area with the "Ah Fuckit" pen and didn't even bother to make sure that all the areas they had marked as Congo jungle were either jungle or Congolese.

The idea that everyone is dead in Africa is totally at odds with the fact that they put a giant sprawling African city in every fucking book. The sprawl of Cape Town is specifically not even the largest city in the Azanian Federation (Runner Havens). And Nairobi, Kenya is bigger than that (Corporate Enclaves) and Lagos bigger still (Feral Cities). And that's not even counting the "Middle Eastern" cities that are technically in Africa like Rabat or Cairo. The various tribes obviously made it through VITAS because they are fucking talked about in those books. If the land was actually decimated beyond recovery, then those tribes would be dispersed and recombined - but supposedly tribal ethnic regions still exist. Hell, even the tirade about VITAS in Africa is mathematical gibberish - big numbers keep getting tossed back and forth but they don't add up at all.

The descriptions of what countries exist and what they are doing is basically at odds with every description of that every time they make a new description. And every time Catalyst writes a new book they get more incoherent, not less. The last decent work on Africa wasn't done by Catalyst, or even FanPro, it was a FASA book in 1997: Cyper Pirates. It has a section on the Gold and Ivory Coasts, and it is reasonably well researched. It specifies also that Nigeria still exists and that Azania is the big power in the South.

So here's the TL;DR: Africa has never ever been written up in any kind of coherent fashion. What little information there is is mostly contradictory and stupid. You can't accept any of the canon material without ignoring other canon material. Which means that anything you write will be just as valid as anything else.

Want to make Nairobi a wasteland with a skeleton crew brought in from the Balkans to operate the mass driver? Sure, go ahead! Because some of the versions of the timeline imply that there can't be any Kenyans left. Want to make Nairobi a thriving metropolis full of Back Africans? Sure, go ahead! Because that's exactly how it's described in Corporate Enclaves. Want to make Nigeria a lawless wasteland full of disunited tribal kingdoms? Sure, go ahead! That's how it's described in Feral Cities. Want to make it a modern republic that still has a functioning legal system? Sure, go ahead! That's how it is described in Cyber Pirates. Want to do something else entirely? Sure, go ahead! Go fucking nuts, every "official" author who had fuck all to say about Africa certainly did.

Rule of cool totally supersedes adherence to canon for Africa. Because the previous companies didn't care enough to put down a complete story, and the current clowns just throw shit at the wall and call it The Dark Continent. Draw in any countries you want, and write up any history at all to back that shit up. It doesn't even matter.

Personally, I'd go with a total population of about 500 million, with them divided roughly in half between people living in big cities that are walled to keep the dinosaurs out and people living in villages and/or corp compounds (mining camps and such). So there are little bullshit villages all over the place and the major cities are cramped and overcrowded. If you really wanted to justify the numbers quoted back in FASA days, you'd say something like "750 million deaths doesn't mean that the population is 750 million less than it would have been - all those people would be dead in 2073 anyway." Furthermore, I'd go with a ghoul conquest of Nigeria. Because Lagos Necropolis is an awesome name - and Asamando and Azania are the only two countries that anyone cares about as countries in Subsaharan Africa. And then I'd go fucking nuts writing up a new map. I'm talking like eighty fucking countries. Dig up old maps with "There be Dragons" on it. Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Presteria (Uganda), Sheba (Eritrea), Ajuuraan Empire (Somalia), Nubia (Sudan), Oyo (Benin/Nigeria), Songhai (Niger), Bangalla (Central African Republic), Kongo (Congo), East African Protectorate (Kenya), Kanem (Chad), Lunda (Zambia), Kitara (Tanzania), and so on. Africa has had 10,000 countries in it and as many fictional countries written about it, just fucking put some there.

Anyway, the thing I always thought was pretty cool was the idea of the hinterlands being these dangerous wild zones that totally had people in them - which the corporations (especially Debeers-Universal Omnitech, but really whoever) would send these armed teams into with a bunch of extraction equipment. They'd kill everyone who got in their way, grab whatever resources they could harvest and carry away, and then retreat. The idea was that speed of resource extraction was more important than completion of resource extraction.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

I'd forget about the fucking stupid ghoul nation. Everytime I read about some bunch of feral blind zombies having the best infrastructure in Africa my stomach turns. Tamanous is even worse.

Someone really had a hard-on for ghouls to write up that kind of stupidity. I'd rather have the world come to its senses and shoot any feral cannibal fuckers on sight and isolate the coherent ones so they do not spread.

[hermit]

Everyone does, because it's an important continent and Shadowrun has never said a single thing about it that was coherent with any other single thing.

To be fair, the guy who was supposed to do the Africa book died, and there are some bits about South Africa, and Cyberpirates. The treatment Africa got in 6WA struck me as 'here be dragons and [EDITED]' too, though. I mean, would it be too much to ask for a writeup of Benin? Or maybe a couple more factional states? It's *Africa*, people. Africa is not the place where large multi-tribe, awesome alliances form.

But given the Somalia part and 6WA, Africa gets the shit treatment by CGL now. Worse than many other contiennts even (or better, as in, they don't plant epilleptic trees there).

They just scribbled over the area with the "Ah Fuckit" pen and didn't even bother to make sure that all the areas they had marked as Congo jungle were either jungle or Congolese.

Yes, because the people doing the writing right now are geographically challenged (Bogota is also jungle, because it's South America, and everybody knows South America is all Jungle right? MAGIC! It changes geography so much we cannot map it, hence no map! Magic, ladies and gentlemen! Magic!)

I'd forget about the fucking stupid ghoul nation. Everytime I read about some bunch of feral blind zombies having the best infrastructure in Africa my stomach turns. Tamanous is even worse.

As of 6WA (or was it Feral Cities), the Asamondo ghouls also are the worlds best diamond cutters. Because of, I guess, their fine eyesight.

[Username17]

Ghouls actually are better than you. They astrally perceive all the time and have genetically superior perception - in addition to boosted strength and speed and magical ability. Ghouls actually are better diamond cutters than you are, because they don't need light. The operate entirely on the diamond's astral form and their own hyper effective tactile senses, and yes it's better than a human.

Ghouls need to eat dead human flesh, but they aren't vampires. They don't need to eat live people. They just have weird funerary practices. They don't even really get anything out of killing people - the number of bodies left for them to eat is generally 1 per person, regardless of whether they hasten the death part along or not. Their preferred meat is actually carrion, so if they were to kill you for meat they'd just end up leaving you to age for a few days anyway. If a ghoul kills someone, it's because they want to, not because they have to.

The "Ghouls are infected!" plotline was stupid when they made it up for Target: UCAS, and it's stupid now. The ethical and practical equations for dealings with ghouls in society are totally distinct from those dealing with vampires or banshees, and there is absolutely no reason for them to make common cause with any of the critters that were already defined as Infected. They are a true breeding subspecies that does not require metahuman victims at any point during their lifecycle and don't drain essence. They're just... gross. Making ghulishness into a "disease" on top of the normal sexual reproduction they are already capable of just made ghoulishness into a fucking super serum that people would be injecting voluntarily.

Anyway, what I'm talking about with the map for the Southeast Asia warzone is this:



Red dots are capital cities, blue dots are non-capital cities that get writeups. Haven't decided whether to go through with the Roanapur writeup, so it is tentatively not on the map. Probably will though.

-Username17

[sabs]

We were going to try and add the 5 Kingdoms War into the same book as SE Asia.. but now.. I wonder if we wouldn't be better doing China/Mongola/Korea/Japanese Imperial State power grab in Northern Asia as a seperate book.

The Book ideas we have right now are:
Issue 1 AZT/AMZ
Issue 2 SE Asia (including 5 kingdoms war)
Issue 3 War Games
Issue 4 7 Seas. (All naval warfare, including Piracy in the Carib Leage, Indonesia, African Coasts.)

And then we had some badly thought out ideas for 5 and 6.. which I think we're tabling until 2012

But we could do an issue 5 that seperates out the 5 kingdoms stuff. SOunds like you guys have already a ton of stuff for a SE book.

[Loki]

Of course, even that doesn't clear up all the issues with the map, like the missing countries. Most relevantly for the SE Asia segment, the kingdom of the naga just isn't there at all.

Well, I only put country boundaries on the map. That's why the borders of Luxembourg are on it and not the SOX and why I removed all borders in the West Balkans. For a real map I would superimpose areas that are not recognized as countries like the Naga Kingdom or the Dega Alliance over the national boundaries. Like in this older map:

http://shadowhelix.de/Datei:Karte_Kambodscha.png

@Loki: Actually you overlooked the massive differences between the Africa part of the 6WA map and the Cyberpirates Ivoire/Ghana map, and the Feral Cities Nigeria map. Asamondo is massively resized in every one of these maps.

No, that's intentional. Astonishingly the Cyberpirates! map is relatively well preserved in the Almanac. Some shapes changed, yes, but Baulé, Anyi (called ANYL in the SWA, looks like a i->l OCR mismatch, there are a number of similar mistakes on the world map), Asamando and Asante are more or less in the same position. It's the Feral Cities map that misrepresents the portion of the Ivory Coast that is shown on it.

I used the African geography as presented in the SWA for my alternative map as it doesn't contradict prior maps. Because there aren't any of course. The choices made for Africa certainly don't strike me as particularly inspired, but there are many other areas of Shadowrun canon you could say the same thing about. So whatever...

I'm more concerned with the general unwillingness to actually match the geographical information to the fluff. Egypt swallowed a good portion of Sudan, but the name does not appear anywhere in the Almanac. This geographic change is of no consequence to the country. The same with Azania, so Namibia and Botswana are now part of the Confederation, but it isn't touched upon at all. Namibia is mentioned in the timeline though. On page 96 some of it's diamond fields are described as occupied by Angolan troops in 2069 (this comes from Feral Cities). You would think that this belongs in the Azania write-up, which conveniently has space for two more paragraphs. The same thing with Asia of course. Shaanxi has lost territory to Gansu and Mongolia, Canton to Sichuan, also it's northern neighbour Henan has lost a third of it's territory to Sichuan, you would think that this is worth mentioning in the write-up of Shaanxi or Canton.

BTW: I forget to put the borders of Asamando on the map, I have fixed that.

Also, Pegasus added internal administrative borders for Azania on popular demand (me in their forum, I like to think ^_^ ). Those who are interested, they are marked on this position map:

http://shadowhelix.de/Datei:GeoPosition ... Azania.svg

It's nothing fancy just the old South African provinces more or less:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: ... vinces.png

[Username17]

We were going to try and add the 5 Kingdoms War into the same book as SE Asia.. but now.. I wonder if we wouldn't be better doing China/Mongola/Korea/Japanese Imperial State power grab in Northern Asia as a seperate book.

The Book ideas we have right now are:
Issue 1 AZT/AMZ
Issue 2 SE Asia (including 5 kingdoms war)
Issue 3 War Games
Issue 4 7 Seas. (All naval warfare, including Piracy in the Carib Leage, Indonesia, African Coasts.)

And then we had some badly thought out ideas for 5 and 6.. which I think we're tabling until 2012

But we could do an issue 5 that seperates out the 5 kingdoms stuff. SOunds like you guys have already a ton of stuff for a SE book.

I don't actually have strong opinions about the Chinese Reuinification War. I don't know enough about different Chinese dialects to even tell you what the sides would be. Whoever does that, I intend to give mostly formatting advice with possibly some fact checking against Shadows of Asia if it comes to that. I could make a map I guess, but only if I knew what the plan was.

Anyway, the format for the Indchinese puzzle is I guess going to be:

• Welcome to the Khmer Rouge
  A discussion of mercenary work in the Nag Kampuchea War of Succession. First a historical setpiece about Khmer Rouge history and tying it together with the "deniable assets" as military units in the region. This is followed by a mercenary's eye view of what objectives countries and corps have, and that is followed by a discussion of military doctrine for the various factions.
• Nag Kumpuchea
  A discussion of the naga kingdom from the eyes of someone who works with the Four Winds Triad. Discusses the history, the goals, and of course, the internal factions.
  • The Four Winds Triad
    An in-depth analysis of the Four Winds Triad.
• Cambodia
  A discussion about Cambodia from the perspective of one of the Javan contractors brought in to build Cambodian infrastructure by the new government.
  • ESPRIT Corp
    An in-depth on ESPRIT's Asian holdings.
• Siam
  A discussion of the history of Siam and its current outstanding demands on and from its neighbors from the perspective of one of the ousted soldiers from the Thai military dictatorship who now works as a criminal.
  • ShinSiam
    An in-depth on ShinSiam
• Laos
  A discussion of the Laotian Civil War from the perspective of a member of the Black Crescent doing relief work.
  • Khoung Combine
    An in-depth discussion of the Khouang Combine.
• Trollish Myanmar
  A discussion of the rough and tumble of the might makes right wild west of Myanmar and its various warlords and reformist groups from the perspective of a human parts dealer.
  • Tamanous
    What the fuck is up with Tamanous?
• The Montagnard Confederation
  A discussion of the Montagnard Confederation, its gods and its wars, from the perspective of a corrupt Buddhist monk.
• Vietnam
  A discussion of the big dog: Vietnam.
  • The Năm Cam
    Vietnamese mafiosos get up to all kinds of trouble from Australia to Czech Republic. Discuss.
• Other regions of interest.
  A series of mini essays about peripheral states such as Shan, Kashin, Pattani, and Malaysia.
• Armies of the Region
  Military Analysis from an interested party. Probably a collection of corp analyses.
• The Progress of the War.
  A blow by blow of the first stages of the war, presented in a "file dump" format of a series of hacked memos from various corporate and national databases put up by a Malaysian hacker.
• Rules

So that's the project outline. Figure maybe 60,000 words total. Probably less. Does anyone want to write one of those sections?

-Username17

[Username17]

Here is how I am doing the timelines for each country:

Cambodian History Timeline

1945: Imperial Japan's occupation of Cambodia ends.
1953: French colonial rule ends in Cambodia.
1970: Monarch of Cambodia deposed by right wing coup.
1975: Khmer Rouge takes over and begins its brutal genocide campaign, 2 million die.
1979: Vietnamese forces conquer Phnom Penh, Khmer Rouge ousted, but pockets of insurgents continue a reign of terror in the wilderness. First Vietnamese Occupation begins.
1989: Vietnamese forces leave Cambodia, Khmer Rouge vows to reconquer country.
1992: Cambodia becomes a UN protectorate.
1993: Cambodia becomes an independent republic again, Prince's party wins highest fraction of the vote.
2007: Those Khmer Rouge leaders as were still alive finally brought to trial for crimes in the “killing fields”.
2011: VITAS hits a poorly managed Cambodian healthcare system, 2 million die.
2012: The first Naga appears in Siem Reap, many worship it as a divine being.
2013: Cyclone Tanaguk devastates Cambodia's crops, mass starvations begin and hundreds of thousands of refugees flee to Thailand and Vietnam.
2014: Giant creatures now thought to be spirits appear in Ratanakiri. They become known as the Plig, and they devastate the villages in the area. As the Khmer people flee, the jungle grows up behind them.
2022: In the wake of waves of VITAS II, Sino-Khmer criminal syndicates take control of the government. Vietnam conquers Phnom Penh again, and the syndicates resort to insurgency.
2028: Vietnamese soldiers withdraw from Cambodia. The Plig expand their jungle into Stung Treng.
2029: In the wake of the Crash, Thailand falls under military rule and invades all of its neighbors, Cambodia loses quickly and becomes a vassal state.
2034: Insurgents from a disparate alliance of Sino-Khmer criminal syndicates force the withdrawal of Thai military. Cambodia is classified as a “Narco State” by the Corporate Court and loses all lines of credit.
2037: Vietnamese forces invade Cambodia and begin the Third Vietnamese Occupation.
2043: With the last of the Sino-Khmer criminal syndicates crushed, Vietnamese troops withdraw. Cambodia's monarchy is restored.
2056: ESPRIT Industries breaks ground on an arcology in Kampong Som.
2058: The Nagaraja Vasuki declares that the Cambodian monarchy is illegitimate and a civil war begins to take shape.
2062: The Four Winds Triad allies itself with the naga, and begins an insurgency in Northern Cambodia.
2063: ESPRIT Industries wage mage Sofie de Rochefort finds the lost Preah Khan – entitling her to be queen of Cambodia by ancient laws.
2065: Using the confusion of the Second Crash, the naga forces seize several provinces of Cambodia and Thailand. Vasuki claims Naga dominion over all Khmer people, and is seven times crowned Nagaraja over the new nation of Nag Kampuchea. Recognition is swiftly granted by Amazonia, Azania, Assam, Myanmar, and Manchuria.
2066: Tribal peoples allied with the Plig apply for and receive United Nations recognition for a country composed of portions of Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. Cambodia's uncontrolled Northeastern provinces are awarded to the Montagnard Confederation.
2067: Sofie de Rochefort marries prince Narodorom and is crowned Queen of Cambodia. New elections are held, and the “Queen's Party” wins the most seats in parliament.
2068: Cambodia has an economic boom with heavy corporate investment. Immigration restrictions are eased, and millions of people move from more depressed regions – most notably Java and Myanmar.
2073: The Prince's Council of Nag Kampuchea formally accuses Cambodia of the assassination of Vasuki, war is declared.

They are put in spoiler boxes so that they don't disrupt the flow of the narrative, but are still accessible in each relevant section.

-Username17

[Username17]

And here's how we put up a second timeline. Note that events in one country have knock-down effects in adjacent countries.

---

Kingdom of Siam:
“The problem with a coup is that it implies that there could be another coup.”
Posted by: Surayud
Siamese History Timeline

1932: The Siamese king is deposed by a military coup, and the country becomes a constitutional monarchy.
1939: Facists in the Siamese parliament change the name of the country to Thailand to emphasize ethnic supremacy of the Thai people in Siam.
1942: Thailand annexes Shan, invades Malaysia.
1945: The Axis loses World War II, Thailand's military regime expelled and its conquests revoked. Civilian rule begins in Siam.
1951: Constitution abolished. Military dictatorship begins again, nation renamed again to Thailand.
1955: Elections declared.
1957: Unhappy with the election results, a military Junta overthrows the Prime Minister. Elections canceled.
1961: Thailand sides with the United States in the Vietnam War, invades Vietnam and Laos, ultimately unsuccessfully.
1973: Massive protests bring the country to a halt and the Thai military junta leaders flee that country. Civilian rule is established.
1976: A bloody coup crushes the civilian administration and returns the country to military rule.
1977: A second coup overthrows the military regime and installs a different military regime.
1979: Thailand allies itself with China and the Khmer Rouge against Vietnam and Laos, this war is eventually won by Vietnam.
1981: Another military coup attempts to take control of the country, but fails. The leader of the last successful coup teams up with the king and forms a “partially” democratic government.
1991: Angered at the favoritism that the military portion of the government showed to certain sections of the military, a different portion of the military overthrows the government. A new civilian-military partnership government is formed with more civilian oversight.
1997: Asian Financial Crisis hits Thailand hard, nation's economy remains depressed for years. Crime flourishes, and the country becomes an international code word for sex tourism.
2001: Fully free and fair elections held, major shareholder of ShinSiam corporation wins in an overwhelming landslide. Economy begins steady recovery.
2006: A military junta overthrows the elected government.
2008: The country is brought to its knees by street fighting between “yellow shirts” who support the monarchy and/or the military, and “red shirts” who support corporate interests and/or socialism.
2011: VITAS hits Thailand, political conflict ends as millions die of the disease.
2012: Crown prince Vajiralongkorn dies, and the king dies shortly after. With only daughters to ascend to the throne, the monarchy is abolished by a military junta.
2015: Another military junta overthrows the military government, promising to restore the monarchy, but a suitable king is never found.
2020: Thailand invades Myanmar and attempts to annex Shan, ultimately unsuccessfully. The military regime collapses, and elections are held.
2022: Roughly a million Cambodian refugees flee to Thailand, where they are ghettoized.
2029: The Crash happens, sending Thailand's economy into a tailspin. A military junta guns down the civilian government and launches an invasion of Burma, attempting to gain control of the Golden Triangle.
2031: A different military faction overthrows the military regime, and pledges to restore the monarchy.
2033: A new king is crowned and installed by the military regime, the Thai army changes tactics, withdrawing from a newly independent Shan and successfully annexing Tanintharyi region.
2034: Emboldened by Vietnam being essentially cut off from southern Laos by the stalemate with the Plig and their Montagnard supporters, Thailand's military annexes parts of Champasak and Salavan in Laos, but their attempt to invade Vietnamese soil is thwarted by the same jungle that cut off Vietnamese resistance.
2038: New elections held, ranking military officers “win” all the top seats.
2043: With an influx of even more Khmer refugees, the government is no longer able to keep them contained in camps, and they found Roanapur – a city of ambiguous jurisdiction in Trat Province.
2047: Islamic resistance in the south overwhelms the police's ability to maintain order. The Islamic Republic of Pattani secedes, a new junta overthrows the government for its perceived weakness.
2052: Nippon Imperial Marines brought in to restore order following a failed coup. Shiawase breaks ground on an arcology in Surat Thani.
2063: Somdet Phra Ramathibodi comes to a pro-democracy rally with the apparent assistance of the sacred Garudas.
2065: Naga incursions seize several provinces along the Cambodian border, and Nag Kampuchea is formed.
2066: The Montagnard Confederation is recognized and seizes much of the territory that Thailand had seized from Laos. The military government collapses, and the king flees Somdet Phra Ramathibodi V is crowned king and the country is renamed Siam. The military is vastly reduced in size and the new government promises to promote traditional Buddhist values.
2068: Kra Canal built under contract by Shiawase.
2069: Trollish Myanmar invades Siam and Shan, attempting to retake lost territory. Myanmar warlords are repulsed, but at tremendous cost of life and the institution of a draft.
2073: After the assassination of Vasuki, naga raids in Siam intensify, and the Siamese parliament declares war.

[fectin]

Is editing for spelling/grammar/style useful?

[Username17]

Is editing for spelling/grammar/style useful?

Of course. Proofreading s an ongoing process that should be done to every part of it. Typographical and structural errors creep into every product. The CGL War! book is so insulting in no small part because no effort was made to limit them, which makes it look like a first draft. There is every intention of making alt.war more polished looking than that.

By the way, if someone still wants to do Africa, the place to start is not the 6WA map (which is fucking worse than useless), or even the map in Cyber Pirates (which is only of a very small portion and promised that things would be different 6 months from now and is set 15 years before the alt.war book). The place to start is with This Map. Remember: everywhere where there are a lot of people there can be functional small countries, and everywhere that there are few or no people you should put large countries or unowned regions.

Then, just start reading about pre-colonial and fictional countries in African and start filling in the map until it's all filled.

-Username17

[hermit]

Another map that might be useful - languages and their spread in Africa. Of course, refugees happen, and frequently do, and some of these population groups may just be dead, but at least it's a start.

Also, research, naturally.

I might even contribute a writeup of Benin, something I wanted to do ever since I read up on units for Empire: Total War.

[Username17]

Here's a first draft of the Tamanous section. Needs more shadowtalkers doing spit takes. Heck, I need more Shadowtalkers period - the list I made only has 10.

---

Tamanous
“How much for the little girl?”

You've heard of them a thousand times. People whisper their names into the dark and they know fear. Their the men in gray chemsuits, the body snatchers, the organ leggers. The one, the only, Tamanous. And yes, I do some business with them, and their credit is excellent. But while they have a truly excellent fear campaign going, almost everything you have heard about them is a lie. Some of them are spread by Tamanous workers themselves, others are just the overactive imaginations of people who don't understand the business they are in. So no, they aren't stealing metahuman fat to sell to cosmetic companies or harvesting hobo organs to implant into rich Cantonese Sararimen. That stuff makes great campfire story material, but it's not actually profitable. And Tamanous are not just in the business of being scary, they are also in the business of making Nuyen.

Which is not to say that they don't run a thriving trade in metahuman corpses – because they totally do that. It's just that most of the stuff you hear about is just not practical. What would you do with the liver of a random street person? It's not gene-matched to anyone in particular, so there really aren't any interested buyers to implant it into. The days of having people choke down immunosuppressors for the rest of their lives were over in the forties. Type O organs grow in vats and are better than implanting vagabond specials. The last people to have their kidneys stolen for transplant work were some Bihari guys in 2052, and that's just because Jharkhand is and always has been a shit hole. A shit hole where it apparently takes them several years to figure out that vat-tissue has a lower rejection rate than something you pried out of some random Yadav.

Commerce exists because there is a demand for a product and a supply for that product. And the trade in metahuman bodies is no different. To see what Tamanous is up to, all you really have to do is follow the money. There are after all, relatively few interested parties looking to buy metahumans and so you can trace things back to the supply. The biggest buyer by volume are ghouls. They need to eat metahuman meat and they genuinely don't care where it comes from. It's not a real big cash maker, because at the end of the line ghouls are usually paying about 10¥ per kilo, retail. So butchering up a human is about 420¥ (average human is 70 kilos, and they dress down to about sixty percent of live weight). But that's shared across the whole supply chain, from the razorguy who was paid 70-140¥ to bring in the corpse to the warehouse guys and the smugglers all the way to the butcher who has the actual secret menu he shows his homophagic clientèle. But while that part of the business turns a profit, it does not make a particularly large one. Tamanous mostly continues those operations because it makes them friends with some incredibly scary people and because it scares people. A lot. And Tamanous mostly defends itself with uncertainty and fear. Some guns too, of course. But mostly just by scaring people.

Secondly, some cadavers have useful bits in them that a good ripper doc can repurpose for another patient. Everyone thinks “kidneys” but that really hasn't been true for a long time. Yes, the corneas of the eye are immunologically privileged and people who for whatever reason don't want cybereyes could graft on some cadaver eyes and do OK – but that is gross, and clonal cornea tissue is cheap. No one cares. The real money is in Type O bioware, because after flushing it out with Type O blood for a few weeks you can get something that is ready for transplantation. You better believe that corpses are scanned carefully for that stuff, because that is a 5000¥ payday. Don't get excited if you find some cultured bioware, because that can't be transplanted and you might as well just sell it to ghouls as mixed oragans.

But what about the live people that Tamanous kidnaps? What happens to them? Well, some of them get fed to the “upper tier” infected. Vampires and Wendigos mostly. Infected who need to eat the essence of living metahumans and who can keep it together long enough to realize that they have to keep their activities secret and that paying an agency a few thousand Nuyen to make their victims disappear far away from where they live is totally worth it. As you might imagine, not a lot of Banshee or Dzoo-Noo-Qua are clients. Not because they don't totally eat metahumans, but because they are generally too invested in running around like a naked beast, roaring at their victims and their hunters alike to have any money – let alone to pay anyone else any money to cover their tracks for them. But that's actually a pretty small fraction of the live abductees. Mostly they are used for medical research.

Here's how that works: Let's say you're some company like De Beers-Universal Omnitech, and you have a new drug that has passed animal trials and looks amazing. What do you do next? Well, next up, you need to do human trials, so you get some volunteers and pay them money and do it all nice and above board and you carefully monitor all of your results and submit them to the Corporate Court and demonstrate that your product is safe and effective. And you tell everyone in the whole world that this is what you are doing. But the Corporate Court's mandatory trial periods are really short, and the required sample sizes aren't very big. And in any case, if you're DBUO, you actually had several tests going and only submitted the one that looked most promising. But you still want to know what the actual side effects and effectiveness ratings are, and that requires more research. It requires bigger, longer studies with people who take weird amounts and are subjected to intrusive tests on a regular basis. So what you do, is you hire an agency that will keep people in prisons and give them medications against their will. And that agency is Tamanous.

And here's the other part: Let's say that you're Novatech, and you have a competing medication to DBUO's offering. You want to know how effective and safe DBUO's drug really is, so that you can manage an effective marketing campaign. And if it turns out that there are actually some problems with it – see if you can't put some pressure to get it recalled or discounted. So your choices are basically to send shadowrunners into De Beers-Universal Omnitech labs and try to find out what they know, or hire an agency to do the testing themselves. And yeah, that agency is still Tamanous. In fact, Tamanous may just reuse their study findings for DBUO and sell them to Novatech. It's not like Novatech personnel are going to be touring their facility.

And lastly, Tamanous just plain operates a couple of shadowclinics. They have some of the most skilled and least ethical medical professionals on the planet and substantial cloning facilities. People will pay for that. And yeah, they may tell you that the organ they are implanting into you was stolen from a Korean highschool student, but unless you're getting a piece of generic bioware, that is almost certainly not true. It's just a story they tell the patient to make them think they have done something terrible and are dealing with terrible people that they dare not double cross.

But let's go through some more of the crazier myths for a bit. Does Tamanous have fetus farms to make babies to feed to ghouls or sacrifice to power magical rituals? No. Ghouls eat old dead human flesh and have no use for young babies. And there are plenty of unwanted orphans in Bucharest even today, so if you wanted to sacrifice a bunch of babies to dark gods or whatever, it would be cheaper to just steal them after they were already made. Even if there is some sort of profitable angle in there somewhere, Tamanous isn't doing it. Some female research prisoners are forcibly impregnated to test the effects of drugs and medical procedures on pregnant women and fetuses, but those fetuses are ultimately dissected to look at possible teratogenic effects. Does Tamanous keep meticulous records of the tissue profile of large numbers of people so that they can rip out their organs at a later date if a client happens to have a tissue match? No. There is no tissue match good enough to match the rejection threshold of a clonal organ – not even an Owen Type clonal organ. Sometimes specific people are kidnapped to fit required demographic profiles for a study, but that's almost always poor people who have rare diseases. Again, no one wants your squishy bits. Does Tamanous kidnap people and invest them with insect spirits? No, the more progressive hives of Australia and Chicago have turned to domestic livestock for true forms and can get volunteers to aspire to being good merges. And of course, the more bestial and aggressive hives don't have any money.

So that's what Tamanous does, now let's talk about how Tamanous is structured. The basic format is similar to the Pueblo Corporate Council: decisions are made by “chiefs”, with specialist consultants called “cacique” whether they have any magical ability or not. Members of any operation get “shares” of the specific activities and “shares” of the organization as a whole. These shares pay dividends, which are your wages. If you stop working for them, your shares are canceled. If you do good work or stay with the organization for a while, your shares can “mature” into “voting shares” (which allow you to have your voice heard in steering policy), or “permanent shares” that are kind of like a pension – as they keep paying dividends whether you are currently doing any work for them or not. Shares are given out either “lodge” or “non-lodge” and those pretty much correspond to whether the position is a “need to know” position or not. People working in peripheral capacities such as snatching, butchery, or sanitation get the “non-lodge” shares, which are primarily distinct in that while they can mature into permanent shares, they never mature into voting shares.

• ”Pretty Similar” my entire ass! That's exactly how a PCC semi-autonomous enterprise is structured!
• Green Ring

Outsiders aren't allowed to see the faces of any lodge member, which is why the gray chemsuits get trotted out. Non-lodge members are also allowed to wear the gray chemsuits to conceal their identities, as this makes the faceless creepiness even more faceless and creepy. If for some reason someone does see the face of a lodge member, the standard is the usual “join or die” choice made popular by generations of criminal organizations and secret societies. People low enough on the totem pole may not even know they are working for Tamanous, but a good rule of thumb is that if the person paying you to create or dispose of bodies is wearing a gray chemsuit or starts talking about share dividends to calculate your payment – then you probably are.

It is important to remember that when you factor in the difference in profits from the medical research angle and the body butchering enterprise, that the entire body snatching arm of the organization actually loses money. The people buying up corpses and selling the meat and salvageable parts literally make more money from their shares in the organization than they take in. That entire arm of the organization seems to exist to scare the fuck out of people. And it works. Tamanous has become a story that Yakuza killers tell each other in the dark. It is the ultimate bogey man, and the arm that provides that visceral terror even in law enforcement agencies and criminal armies is something that very nearly pays for itself. Plus, the medical research end produces a lot of bodies, and the network really can dispose of corpses more cheaply than other syndicates can – many of them even pay Tamanous to get rid of bodies for them. As an added bonus, Tamanous can call on footsoldiers and assassins who are the kinds of people that actually hunt and eat metahumans from their regular clientèle, which means that those gangs that have tried to put the squeeze on Tamanous really have met with grisly and unfortunate ends.

Today, Tamanous operates with impunity, albeit also in secrecy, in most of the world. They operate openly in Pathein, where they run a research hospital and prison. The fiction is maintained that they steal R&D data from medical companies and use it to run their own research. But the reality is that they are paid primarily by the companies whose works are being tested. Most of the inmates in the prison are random (presumably) innocent people that Tamanous goons have rounded up off the street or shanghaied out of bar, but for a shockingly modest fee, they will imprison people sent to them by individuals or even municipalities. Other medical prison complexes are harder to find, but there is one in the Congo, another in Romania, and a fourth one somewhere in the Los Angeles basin.

[Username17]

Since I had a double post, I figured I'd just paste in the longer Shadowtalker list:

Name	Description	From	Skills	Likes	Hates
Simba	Mercenary (Optimal Solutions Services)	Congo	Shooting People in the Face Jungle Survival Navigating Ethnic Tensions	History Black Ops	Magic Tutsis
RageX	Hacker	Antigua	Electronic Warfare Smuggling	Runners Piracy Voodoo	Catholics "The Man"
Green Ring	Hacker Terrorist for Hire	Los Angeles	Information Management Chemistry Collateral Damage	Chaos Money	Ares Macrotechnology "The Man"
Bɨryekomo	Tapir Shapeshifter Hixkaryana Tribe	Amazonia	Eating Bugs Guerrilla Warfare	Environmentalism Indigenous Rights Mycoprotein	Corporations Aztlan Insect Spirits
Rataxes	Soldier French Foreign Legion	Brittany	Tank Warfare Extreme Overkill Demolitions	Fascist Sympathies Overwhelming Force Victory for the Overdog	Communists Environmentalists
Chun The Unavoidable	Rigger Magician	Kuala Lumpur	Conjuration Rigging Scouting Datamining	Asamando Anime Ghouls	Governmental Secrecy Corporate Secrecy Vampires
VanHelsing	Monster Hunter	Serbia	Paranormal Critters Bug Hunts	Eastern Orthodoxy Slavic Unity Conspiracy Theories	Vampires Romania
ToyBox	Drone Rigger	Gary, UCAS	Scrounging Mechanics Demolitions	Forensics Old Tech	SOTA Creep New NERPS
Hannibal	Desert Warrior Quartermaster Ares Forces	Tripoli	Logistics Smuggling	Finance Military History Large Animals	The Mafia MREs Wasting Supplies
HugMonster	Troll Assassin Adept (Secret Way) 10,000 Daggers	Tblisi	Stealth Disguise Hand to Hand Combat	Political Instability Sex Tourism Fine Dining	Russia Collateral Damage Racism
Ringmaster	Elf Talislegger Antiquities Dealer	Athens	History Enchanting Smuggling	Legends and Mythology Wine Stolen Goods	Muslims Forgeries
Immortal	Combat Medic Black Crescent	Tehran	Field Medicine Logistics Relief Operations	Humanitarian Causes Helping People	The Caliphate Techophobes VITAS
Mamasan	Brothel Manager (Yakuza)	Bangkok	Pimping Intimidation Chemistry	Poisons Torture Blackmail	Metahumans Physical Violence Koreans
Kangean	Criminal Business Manager	Java Phnom Penh	Business Crime	Bribery Money Corruption	Emotional Decisions Morality
Hound Dog	Bounty Hunter	Nashville	Tracking Detective Work Classic Rock	Whiskey Classic Rock Wanted Criminals	Soy Food Minor Inconveniences
Monkeywrencher	Saboteur Green War	Scandinavian Union	Demolitions Sabotage Rock n' Roll	Environmentalist Causes Pink Mohawks Attitude	The Man Pollution
Groatster	Giant Mercenary Atlantean Foundation Minute Men	Liverpool Atlanta	Heavy Weapons Looming	Antiquities Coca Cola	Shedim The British Army Dragons
Kerrigan	Flesh Form Ant High Threat Construction Contractor	Pyongyang	Construction Magical Knowledge Super Strength	Worlds of Starcraft The Hive Major Construction Projects	Ares Terrans Universal Brotherhood
Heartfinder	Organ Legger Orkish Gurkha	Nepal	Sword Fighting Field Medicine Kidnapping	Hinduism Paracritters Modern Medicine	The Media Cowardice S-K
Solution	Magical Sniper Mercenary (open contract)	Moscow	Long Distance Fire Support Sorcery Astral Recon	Optics Metaplanes Elegant Work	Central Asia Collateral Damage Shapeshifters

[Fuchs]

That makes a lot of sense.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Nice. With that written up, Tamanous shadowrunning hooks pretty much write themselves.

[Ancient History]

Nice to see the Groatster get continued use.

[hermit]

These are additional shadowtalkers we use. Bold names are official characters (which of yours are from previous publications?). Added yours.

As for the article on Tamanous:

Nice writeup, which, though giving Tamanous a new direction, works well with current material and explains some weirdness about them. MAybe drop a few hints on Nosferati or weird research projects by some voting shareholders on the side that are tolerated for the scare effect and rumors that tie them in with the Ordo Maximus or whatever, but it stands on it's own quite well.

Whose voice is this written in? Heartfinder's?

[Username17]

These are additional shadowtalkers we use. Bold names are official characters.

That's pretty disappointing. Most of those people seem to be from Seattle and the surrounding countryside (Tir, Salish, etc.), and literally all of them are from "The West". There's not even a token Nippon voice on the register. So it pretty much looks like the SE Asia section will have to use a different set of commenters unless it is all written as a tourist brochure with guest speakers.

As for the article on Tamanous:

Nice writeup, which, though giving Tamanous a new direction, works well with current material and explains some weirdness about them. MAybe drop a few hints on Nosferati or weird research projects by some voting shareholders on the side that are tolerated for the scare effect and rumors that tie them in with the Ordo Maximus or whatever, but it stands on it's own quite well.

Whose voice is this written in? Heartfinder's?

The OrdoMaximus got liquidated hardcore. They don't really exist anymore. I could throw in a comment indicating that someone from the OM "got away" and now works for Tamanous as part of an explanation for why they have Cybermancy Technology... and yeah fuck it. I'll totally do that. Never did explain who ran the Bucharest Cybermancy clinic.

And yeah, that piece is part of the writeup on Myanmar, which is posted by Heartfinder.

-Username17

[hermit]

That's pretty disappointing. Most of those people seem to be from Seattle and the surrounding countryside (Tir, Salish, etc.), and literally all of them are from "The West". There's not even a token Nippon voice on the register. So it pretty much looks like the SE Asia section will have to use a different set of commenters unless it is all written as a tourist brochure with guest speakers.

Edited yours in. Yeah, bit of a western slant. SE Asia will need it's own roster of posters focusing primarily on SE Asia. Reminds me we need that bloody forum already to get this organised, I'll ping Grinder what DS says, otherwise I'll have one by the end of the week.

Also, since we may want local flavor in every book, we may wantt o organise shadowtalkers along the lines of global posters, and posters of local data havens. For instance, with our published document being part of Shadowland Digest or something, we could have articles borrowed from the Kuala Lumpur Morgue, Denver Nexus, Manx Data haven, [some havens in Venezuela and Lagos], ArachNet in Berlin and whereever, and make local poster lists for these places? Would give necessary local flavor without inflating our global shadowtalkers list too much.

The OrdoMaximus got liquidated hardcore. They don't really exist anymore.

What! Where? Also, who runs the Body Bank in Geneva now, or did that blow up in the technomancer shitstorm storyline that was first raised by CGL out of nowhere and then dropped?

I could throw in a comment indicating that someone from the OM "got away" and now works for Tamanous as part of an explanation for why they have Cybermancy Technology... and yeah fuck it. I'll totally do that. Never did explain who ran the Bucharest Cybermancy clinic.

Yup. Also, the mere allegation that Tamanous absorbed the remnants of the OM would go well for their trademark creepyness factor.

[Username17]

What! Where?

Augmentation, page 147. NeoNET basically bought out the Ordo Maximus, took their research notes, and then had them expunged. Since Martin DeVries had already gone public with his findings, it was really only a matter of time.

Also, who runs the Body Bank in Geneva now, or did that blow up in the technomancer shitstorm that was dropped?

The Technomancer Shitstorm idea was actually FanPro, and it was all part and parcel of the System Failure plotline. I started writing pretty much right when the people who wanted it were leaving, and Emergence didn't really go anywhere. If anyone had any artistic vision for it, they were amongst the people that were shuffling out the door during FanPro's financial crisis in 2006. So no, I really couldn't tell you what any of the Emergence plotlines were supposed to go to. The end result was sort of lackluster and hodgepodge. There was originally going to be a running story about two brothers going through it, but most of the pieces of that got canned partway through. Maybe we were supposed to watch that blossom into a full fledged Magneto vs. Xavier thing? I don't know. It never happened.

What ended up happening is that Lars wrote up the Dissonance Voices in Unwired, and that was fucking retarded. Lars has many talents, but the man should not be allowed to write about villains. He jacked up the Threats chapter in Street Magic, and he jacked up the Dissonance Voices in Unwired. It's a theme.

But anyway, that was the end of that. We have a hodgepodge of incomprehensible "evil" technomancers that do... stuff. They are "bad" because they have evil mustaches... in the matrix. Or something. This is a game about mercenary criminals who shoot people in the face for money, you can't just be bad. You have to do something that is bad. And even then, you have to have some sort of reason for doing it or it comes off as kind of Captain Planet Villainesque.

My guess would be that any specific thing the Ordo Maximus used to run is now in the claws of Celedyr. But I don't think that ever got picked up as a plotline.

-Username17