The Shadowrun Situation

[fectin]

Formatting should fall off once we hit the next page anyway, right?

Edit: yes, apparently.

[hermit]

Maybe they didn't want to repeat the mistake of the Tirs, (because absolutely fucking no one speaks that pidgeon-Gaelic, Sperethiel,) but it's not like they've shied away from accurate-if-bothersome pronunciations in the past.

As this is a fictional language that does not exist, that's rather unsurprising.

Wait, why the fuck am I talking about this? This whole Nazi topic is dumb.

I see we agree. Let's move on, okay?

Also, formating is better now.

[Smeelbo]

When I described the Auschwitz Ghost Adventure in War! to my boss, he said that book will never be in his store--ever.

Even though I could sell a couple copies, we will NOT be ordering it for the store shelves, nor will be accept special orders for it. I am also letting my Alliance Sales Representative know exactly why we are canceling our pre-orders, and why we will not carry it.

Smeelbo

[Zherog]

Fix your tags

[tech support guy]
Please report such posts. I'm usually pretty quick about making such edits once I know about them -- but I generally don't know until somebody reports it.

Thanks.

--Z
[/tech support guy]

[raben-aas]

Sorry for the botched tags (whatever the problem was). I posted that while just logging off at work, and am now home. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[Stahlseele]

Fix your tags

[tech support guy]
Please report such posts. I'm usually pretty quick about making such edits once I know about them -- but I generally don't know until somebody reports it.

Thanks.

--Z
[/tech support guy]

ah, good to know for the future, thanks ^^

Sorry for the botched tags (whatever the problem was). I posted that while just logging off at work, and am now home. Sorry for the inconvenience.

eh, it happens from time to time . .
i don't even understand why broken tags fuck up the layout @.@

[Jay Levine]

It also omits the cross over into Magical Monk Mystery Tibet. But probably David A. Hill is uninformed about the biggest damn magical mystery being right across the border from Nepal.

As the guy who wrote SR's Tibet material, I'll say I am extremely relieved that this book didn't touch it.

[name_here]

What is up with Tibet beyond being permanently enclosed in a magical blizzard that may or may not be passable with magic artifacts?

[Stahlseele]

it's basically the great veil done right.
NOTHING can cross through without special invitations.

[TheFlatline]

Shadowrun is balls deep in shooting Nazis. Not, like, arm-band NAZIs, but still. Running around shooting up Nazi assholes is one of the core elements of cyberpunk.

You've got it completely backwards. You're not going and blowing away Nazi ghosts in the book, you're going an destroying the anguished, restless spirits of the Jews who were massacred in a concentration camp.

Why?

Because you're supposed to covet a Nazi scalpel that was used in god only knows how many unnecessary surgeries and has god only knows how much blood and death associated with it.

The underlying statement is that while Megacorps are the big evil bad guys, genocide is desirable if it leads to magic trinkets that make you a bigger badass.

And you know, I might be able to let it slide if it was anything other than this specific, focused iteration of some of the the very worst that WW2 had to offer.

It would be like saying that raping an infant to death while holding a crystal empowers the crystal with energy that you, a troll mage that comes along years later, can tap into and use.

[Otakusensei]

Shadowrun is balls deep in shooting Nazis. Not, like, arm-band NAZIs, but still. Running around shooting up Nazi assholes is one of the core elements of cyberpunk.

You've got it completely backwards. You're not going and blowing away Nazi ghosts in the book, you're going an destroying the anguished, restless spirits of the Jews who were massacred in a concentration camp.

Why?

Because you're supposed to covet a Nazi scalpel that was used in god only knows how many unnecessary surgeries and has god only knows how much blood and death associated with it.

The underlying statement is that while Megacorps are the big evil bad guys, genocide is desirable if it leads to magic trinkets that make you a bigger badass.

And you know, I might be able to let it slide if it was anything other than this specific, focused iteration of some of the the very worst that WW2 had to offer.

It would be like saying that raping an infant to death while holding a crystal empowers the crystal with energy that you, a troll mage that comes along years later, can tap into and use.

Nah, they pointed out on DS that you're going in to collect the chains of the ghosts there so you can sell them into slavery.

Way more lucrative than some knife. I mean, a spontaneously magical artifact from the downcycle only goes for 10k these days. And it's basically a vibroblade that won't shut up about blood...

Edit:
From my wife, for the visually inclined.

Presented with (admittedly) minimal research!

[Stahlseele]

*blink blink*
your WIFE? O.o
you got lucky ^^

[Username17]

Nah, they pointed out on DS that you're going in to collect the chains of the ghosts there so you can sell them into slavery.

That's certainly amongst the available readings. One of the things you are supposedly after is "necromantic artifacts". The only thing in Shadowrun canon that is particularly similar to a necromantic artifact is the chains of a ghost - which are basically the ghost's spirit formula that allow you to summon and bind the ghost. But, in this book they offer a different definition of necromantic artifacts, where they provide an example: a necromantically powered knife called "The Fleshfinder".

The Fleshfinder is presented as a rusty old scalpel used by Dr. Eduard Wirths to perform ghastly experiments upon the prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Not Mengeles's scalpel, but Wirths'. Now just for fun, I think I should share a sentence from Dr. Eduard Wirths' wikipedia entry:

Wirths’s primary research concerned pre-cancerous growths of the cervix. Dr. Wirths was also interested in the sterilization of women, by removing their ovaries through surgery or radiation. It is generally acknowledged that he himself never directly participated in such experiments but delegated their conduct to subordinates.

Yeah. The level of research into Shadowrun history and systems is pretty similar to the level of research into everything else in the book.

But yes, you really are being asked to run into the middle of the Shoah in order to take a prized magical treasure that those mean Jewish ghosts don't want you to have: a (misattributed) blade that had been used to carve up the genitals of thousands of Jewish women for dubious research. This blade has amazing and completely unique properties unseen in other weaponry, that causes it to cut through things like a monosword despite being apparently a tiny piece of rusted metal. You are then expected to sell this thing for ten thousand nuyen, despite the fact that the value of such an object would be incredibly high.

The entire Arbeit Macht Frei subsection is half a page and six paragraphs. However is so wrong that people's disgust at it will fill much more than that. Also it's jam packed full of errors to the extent that the annotations of how it was wrong would be so extensive as to ironically make the section look like a Toarah page.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Well . .over on dumpshock, we could not help but make fun of this misnomer either . .
and changed it to his pen, instead of his scalpel . .
and what do you know?
we actually managed to get something resembling a good story out of that . .
go figure . .

[Simba]

No, it's totally called Mariánské Lázně. It is famous under the name "Marienbad" because it used to be called that and various kings vacationed there. There's also a French surrealist movie called "Last Year At Marienbad" but that movie does not actually take place in Mariánské Lázně.

But seriously, this is like stubbornly calling Beijing "Peking" or calling Zimbabwe "Rhodesia". Actually it's a very dickish thing for Germans to do, considering that the town being renamed was one of the results of the Nazis losing World War II. To a very real extent, it's a lot like Nipponese people putting the rays on the sun when drawing their flag.

Now there's a whole different issue where that town is a tiny forest village built around a spa and a gold course, and it will never be the capital of anything. Karlovy Vary is nearby and has a lot more room to grow.

Hey, but i call Marienburg Marienburg.

Jmenuje se Malbork.

-Username17

Sry just had to register to comment on this stuff ...

I am from a german family living near the border, and i tell you there are reasons why many of this citys still have german names here.

Dont get me wrong I am totally left political and I am damn happy the nazis lost the war. But this citys have those names with an reason (same goes for many citys in poland) That are there histroical names for a long time, given by the people that lifed there a major time.

My Grandmother for example, was never a nazi, just a geram living in the border region. Her father died in WW1, she only had sisters there where no one fighting for the nazis there. Still the Czech few days after the war was over didnt, struggle to get on familys like that which lived with them for many generations. They raped her sister, hang her 84 year old grandfather up the next tree because he didnt want to leave his house, burn it down and drove them over the border with nothing left, just because they were germans.

That is a thing that happend in wide areas of eastern europe, and even if I can understand where that hate came from, and also if the czech goverment still calls that justified it is nothing better than the nazis did, just in a smaller scale.

if you now go towards people like my grandmother and tell her she should name her beloved home she never could go back to by the name the people that drive her out for no reason and terrorised their family gave it because otherwise she is a dick... she would spit into your face and wish you to hell... I could understand it.

So while I totally understand your point, if you talk about history ...look at both sides... espacily in such risky areas, or hwen talking about WW2 in general which where without a doubt the time period where the biggest gang off massmurderds from countrys all over the world meet to fight it out. If you want I honestly apologize for what happend back than.... but people should be damn careful about throwing the first stone...

[raben-aas]

I'm still with the pronounciation theory.

[Kot]

The thing is, that despite what any Polish citizen would tell you, Malbork/Marienburg is as Polish, as it was German. Almost as much of it's time it was in Germany/Preussia/The Order, as in Poland.

[Username17]

Oh, don't get me wrong, the Czechoslovakian liquidation of the Sudetenland was an atrocity. At the beginning of the war, Czechs and Sudetendeutsch lived side by side in Western Bohemia, eking out a rural existence and drinking beer. They had a reputation of being drunken and unsophisticated in Bavaria. And no one really seemed to care what they did or what country they were nominally part of at whatever time. That all changed when Hitler used the presence of Germans amongst the Western Bohemians as justification to annex it. Then we get six years of rather familiar Nazi ethnic cleansing, where standards of how German you had to be to not get kicked off your land and have your farm given to a German settler kept getting raised higher and higher.

And at the end of the war, Czechoslovakian soldiers marched all the Germans out of the region and over the border at gun point. All of them. The ones who'd been brought in by the Protectorate to Germanify the region and the people whose families had been living there for three hundred years in relative peace and harmony. They made absolutely no effort to distinguish. Also, they invaded Lichtenstein.

So I understand why they marched those people through the mountains across the border at gunpoint. It was a fucked up thing to do, and 40,000 people died on that particular deathmarch. But thinking at the time was that Germans simply living inside the borders of Czechoslovakia constituted a causus belli for Germany to invade Czchoslovakia and behave... badly... for years at a time. Because that is exactly what had just happened.

Yes, a large number of the people who had their homes taken away or were even killed by the Czechoslovakian reconquista were totally innocent. Indeed, radios were fairly scarce in that region, and many of the German people whose presence had been used as justification for annexation had not even known that the region was contested until Nazi troops came to take their Slavic neighbors away. But the bottom line is: it happened and it's over, and there is no one left in those regions who uses the German names. The ethnic cleansing was complete, and historically speaking it will never go back unless and until a powerful German army comes in and deports all the Slavs again. If the place is called "Czech Republic" the region won't be called the "Marienbad Anything".

And that's even before we get into the other problem, where the whole place is actually inside Bohemia, and the 6th World Almanac very demonstrably uses the current Western borders of Czech Republic, and thus the country does not extend past Bohemia in that direction and there thus cannot be a fourth region of Czech Republic that is distinct from Bohemia in that area.

-Username17

[hermit]

The borders in the Almanac are not worth shit. A good deal of the Council of Marienbad in GSB, GSB 2 and SOE is formerly German territory. It was German once, or rather, Germany called dibs on it, inherited from the neonazi days of Southern Germany, and thanks to Schwartzkopf, the entire region, including a bit of Bavaria, went to join the country with the superior beer. Hence, in my mind the name makes some sense. IF it just was the Czech border region, it would not (it would be a serious case of WTF). But it isn't.

Look at this map (from the German Edition SoE SB). The border next to the black dot where Plzeň is does not really follow the current border. That'S Marienbad's German part.

[Loki]

And that's even before we get into the other problem, where the whole place is actually inside Bohemia, and the 6th World Almanac very demonstrably uses the current Western borders of Czech Republic, and thus the country does not extend past Bohemia in that direction and there thus cannot be a fourth region of Czech Republic that is distinct from Bohemia in that area.

Yes, they used the current border but that was sloppiness on Catalyst's part. In the German translation of the Almanac this was fixed and now reflects the border of former publications. Since the errata for the German version were approved by Catalyst officially the German version should count, if a corrected English version or even an errata will ever see the light of day is another matter.

Mariánské Lázně/Marienbad is shown in this map: "http://shadowhelix.de/Datei:Karte_Süddeutscher_Bund.png" (sorry for the format, the umlaut kills the link)

[Stahlseele]

Yes, well, who better to correct our borders than ourselves eh?

[Loki]

Yes, well, who better to correct our borders than ourselves eh?

I'm sure that's what Hitler thought .... I know, I know, again with the Godwin!

[Kot]

Loki, that was too far. And not ironic, just cruel and stupid.

[hermit]

Besides, he then proceeded to get the borders corrected for him, the idiot.

[Loki]

Loki, that was too far. And not ironic, just cruel and stupid.

Wow, you are honest to god the first person in years that told me I went to far with a joke. Well making jokes about Hitler and the Nazis is a German "Volkssport" (common entertainment). I can see how you might think that I'm trying to trivialise the German military aggression and thus the atrocities committed by Germans, but I can assure you I'm not trying to do that. I would say you are more sensitive on this than most people I know, which of course is only my personal perspective, so might I suggest you are over-reacting?