The Gaming Den

[Schwarzkopf]

There are parts of it that are pretty dumb (Hestaby assumes that it was Lofwyr behind the assassination because the killer used...get ready for this...a German made sniper rifle, and then she proceeds on this sole evidence to dismantle an entire arcology--which we're supposed to believe she did non-lethally, before the Dubai air-force or I don't know, Lofwyr himself could bitch-slap her out of the sky), but there are also parts of it which I think have potentially cool implications for the metaplot.

And I mean...at least there is a metaplot, with stuff happening that runners potentially have reason to care about. Which is a big improvement on what a lot of fans have rightly been complaining about.
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"Welcome to the Den. We will steal your car, burn your house, rape your wife, and kill your dog. Then we will say mean things to or about you. On the internet." -Frank Trollman

[FrankTrollman]

[Ancient History]

The Hestaby/Lofwyr things makes even less sense when you remember that at the end of the last dragon fapping, Survival of the Fittest, Lofwyr basically asked if Hestaby wanted him to impregnate her. I'd be seriously amazed the "Let's have Ghostwalker fall in love!" crowd didn't ramp that up to dracoporn levels, but then my opinion of their SR Lore skills is...very low.
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The Unpublishable - Updates Fridays between midnight and midnight | Farcast, an Eclipse Phase yearblog - Updates daily

[Libertad]

64. Do most corporate wage slaves have health insurance?

65. Other than ER rescue for profit, does DocWagon function in a "traditional" hospital format? Do they have buildings full of waiting rooms and offices for non-critical patients?

66. The Alamos 20,000 is apparently an even meaner and more violent version of the Humanis Policlub. But there seems to be less information about them in the sourcebooks; is there any more information on them I'm missing?
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[Schwarzkopf]

[Kot]

@64: Yes. Guess who provides it...

@65: Yes. IIRC for subscribers mostly (they have to put them somewhere after they get them off the street), and it's pretty expensive, but you get what you pay for. DocWagon always had that 'we're too good to be true' image in the material I read...

@66: Humanis is a policlub. Full of racists hicks associated with more racist neo-klansmen, but still. The Alamos is a full-fledged mouth-frothing anti-metahuman terrorist group. Wih firebombs & mass murder. I tried to come up with a good comparison of the two, but I couldn't find any that wouldn't invoke Godwin's Law.


@Schwarzkopf: It takes either a horror storm, another dragon, or writer's lazyness to do that.
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Mariusz "Kot" Butrykowski
"The only way to keep them in line is to bury them in a row..."

[norms29]

I've got a question
67.) How is the UN structured in the 6th world? because I was just rereading a part of the old alt.war thread, and one of Frank's pages implied that the security council has moved away from the current arrangement of 5 permanent seats with veto power and 10 voting seats that get rotated to different countries charged with representing their regions. and now have a greater number of permanent seats and apparently no temporary seats. and that confused the fuck out of me.
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After all, when you climb Mt. Kon Foo Sing to fight Grand Master Hung Lo and prove that your "Squirrel Chases the Jam-Coated Tiger" style is better than his "Dead Cockroach Flails Legs" style, you unleash a bunch of your SCtJCT moves, not wait for him to launch DCFL attacks and then just sit there and parry all day. And you certainly don't, having been kicked about, then say "Well you served me shitty tea before our battle" and go home.

[FrankTrollman]

The issue of international balance of power is a confusing one. My writeup basically had it switch to the Corporate Court model with the most powerful countries getting seats. The only attempt to do a writeup of the UN was in Loose Alliances, and it didn't make any sense or cover the underlying structure at all.

Here's the issue: the permanent members of the UN in 2012 are simply the victorious allies of World War 2 (plus France) and their successor states. But in Shadowrun's future, all of those countries have lost huge amounts of territory (even France), and been on the losing end of major wars. To say that none of them would have been forced to give up their security council seat is laughable. Hell, when China collapsed it fell into like a gajillion pieces, and even assigning that seat to one of the successor states would be as difficult as it would be pointless.

It's a part of the setting that the designers really never put any thought into. It's like India. India never got written up or even mentioned until late in 3rd edition. And Peter Taylor's writeup is that no one ever bothered mentioning the region because... it's a magocracy that controls global weather and is a monolithic empire that has the population of the next five biggest countries in the world combined. Uh... what?

-Frank

[Ancient History]

International politics in SR in general are strange, bullshit things. The authors really started getting in trouble the minute they released a book set outside Seattle (and that is ignoring the people who originally bitched about what happened to Seattle). Most of the freelancers came to that realization at some point or another. The NAN population figures have caused ulcers.

But it's helpful to remember that most games during the early 90s had strange, bullshit international politics. I should dig out Cyberworld and give a review...
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The Unpublishable - Updates Fridays between midnight and midnight | Farcast, an Eclipse Phase yearblog - Updates daily