[OSSR]Shadowrun: Tir Tairngire and Tír na nÓg

[Stahlseele]

it's the best theory i read as of yet.
makes sense to me.

[kzt]

I don't know what the political stage looked life in the US in the early 1990ies (I was, like, twelve years old at the time, I wasn't even interested in my own coutry political scene...). Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not sure the role of political lobbies was a well-known fact of life at the time.

No, the ACLU, NAACP, Sierra Club, ADL, the Chamber of Commerce, The Tobacco Institute, NRA/HCI, the AFL/CIO and all the rest were all pretty much understood as to what their mission was and how they went about it by anyone who cared. This doesn't mean that the writers understood or that they cared, but this is how political lobbies have operated since at least the Anti-Saloon League got Prohibition passed in 1920.

[talozin]

We're expected to believe that Tir Tairngire does lots of biotech with firms of less than 10 employees. At first, second, or third glance that seems impossible – it takes more than 10 people just to make sure that everything you're working with is sterile. I assume that when you get a vat grown organ to order that you do have people collecting tissue, people calibrating equipment, people cleaning the facility and the equipment, people replicating and shaping the tissue, people arranging for sales to the end users, and people transporting the materials – but all of those are handled by independent self employed contractors. If you're a lab technician, you don't have “a workplace,” you just have a series of contracts that you go to over the week to do lab work like you were a plumber doing house calls. And that's everyone. No one has any job security because by modern standards no one has a job.

I wonder whether maybe this was a subtle jab at Microsoft. At least in the early to mid '90s, Microsoft was notorious in the IT industry for having huge numbers of "contractors" who were pretty much employees in all but name. The perception was that it was almost like a very extended internship -- where the company held out the promise that if you worked hard and did well you might one day be rewarded with those sweet sweet Microsoft stock options and ESPP -- but that at any given time there were fairly vast swathes of this company staffed by people who technically speaking were not their employees.

I never personally worked for Microsoft in any capacity so I can't vouch for the accuracy of this stereotype -- although I knew some people who were working for them at the time and they all seemed to think it was a fair characterization. (Hell, why not? When I worked for the federal government, the entire IT infrastructure for the space exploration mission I was working on was run by contractors.) But given the era in which this book was written and the Pacific Northwest setting, it seems like a possibility that this was on someone's mind.

[Ancient History]

Telecommunications & Laws
Tir Provinces

Time, I think, for some British Steel.

FrankT:

There's a major mismatch in major headings here. Tir Tairngire simply has more major headings than Tir na nOg does, and we've nearly run out of in-character sections to talk about in Tir na nOg. Tir Tairngire gives a full major heading to “Telecommunications” but it's literally only 3 pages so we're lumping it in with the next major heading: “Laws.” Tir na nOg doesn't have a major heading for either of these things, and instead tucks discussions of laws into other parts of the book whenever one of the sections would otherwise be short of wordcount. This is basically a bad thing. Shadowrun is a game about breaking the law and having a major section on laws is the kind of thing that you'd actually find useful as a player. Having to read the entire book to find secret gems like “the police can arrest you if they see you throw a book into a public trash receptacle” is not good planning.

The Tir na nOg chapter we're contrasting is “Tir Provinces” which is what's left. That's where they go through the traditional 32 counties of Ireland in no particular order and rant about each one. And yes, I mean the traditional 32 counties – like when the Normans divided up the island in the 12th century. And not at all like the counties of the current Republic of Ireland. So all the Northern Ireland counties are in, but Tipperary isn't divided into North Tipperary and South Tipperary. Anyway, with 32 counties and less than four million total people that the average county population is about one hundred thousand. But since the city of Dublin is in the county of Dublin has more than half a million people in it by itself, that leaves several counties that don't have much more than a pile of mud and a cow. The book doesn't even shy away from this, talking about how there are herders and fucking peat diggers.


There's some lovely filth down here!

This underlines the fundamental contradiction of early nineties anti-industrialism. Environmentally friendly techniques and traditional techniques are very rarely the same things. Peat is proto-coal that is dug up from wetlands, and burning it is roughly equivalent in environmental impact to burning extremely dirty low grade coal. It's an ancient and cultural tradition in Ireland to be sure, but burning peat is about the worst thing you could possibly do to the environment for the amount of energy you get out of it, and no halfway environmentally conscious government would allow large scale peat digging no matter how much of their cultural heritage it was.

AncientH:

Okay, starting off with Telecommunications. This was pretty typical for early Shadowrun place-books because each nation (or division within a nation) had its own Regional Telecommunications Grid (RTG), and then each city/township/etc. had its own Local Telecommunications Grid (LTG). This was based more or less directly on MaBell and the Public Switch Telephone System. So each country had its own public network connected to the other public networks, and together this formed the public Matrix.



Effectively, Tir Tairngire is supposed to have Matrix connection speeds very high compared to the UCAS; this is a bit like how South Korea has internet speeds much faster than the USA today.

FrankT:

In early editions of Shadowrun, they tracked network security by having a color coded scale. A more secure node would have a nastier security color on it. Also, there were numbers that represented the difficulty of doing
things via hacking, because Shadowrun had too many dials to set difficulty with. So when they say that “Orange-5” is the lowest security level on a Tir telecommunications grid, that is pretty nasty on two different measures of matrix security nonsense. It could be made more secure by going to “Red-5” and it could be made more secure by going to “Orange-6.” Now you may be asking: “What if it's Red-4? Is that more or less secure than Orange-5?” and the answer was, unfortunately, “It depends.” Depending on what your capabilities were, the color or the numeric code would matter more. And the rules completely changed in Virtual Realities, Shadowrun 2nd Edition, Virtual Realities 2.0, Shadowrun 3rd Edition, Matrix, and Target: Matrix. Sometimes any number above 5 might as well have been a giant sign saying “go fuck yourself” while with other rules revisions any number below 11 was a joke.


The basic color codes of Shadowrun's matrix nodes. The number codes are in inches or centimeters depending on the edition.

Then they added Violet and Ultraviolet nodes in the whole Renraku Shutdown to Brainscan arc [AH Note: Technically, Virtual Realities 2.0]. Those were nastier than Red nodes, which you might notice is actually violating the idiom of the already extant threat levels. Violet is blue shifted Blue, not red shifted Red. So by the logic of the things that had already been made, Violet should have been the least secure of all – and the new ultra powerful super nodes should have been called Infrared. Anyway, these security codes never really worked that well, and every time the matrix rules got overhauled (which happens more than once per edition because all the matrix rules have been unsatisfactory), they just got more convoluted. 4th edition rules just said “fuck it” and scrapped the whole thing. Still wasn't satisfactory, but at least there weren't 60+ game mechanically distinct security levels.

AncientH:

The future of hacking looked nothing like what anybody really thought it looked like. Hell, the internet and personal computing didn't look anything like anybody thought they did. So that's sort of the ongoing problem with any cyberpunk RPG; the science-fictional technology based on the tech and paradigms of today always looks outdated and wrong because it can't foresee the innovative shifts.

I'd pay real fucking money for one of these with tabs. Wait, we don't have money. Shit.

The bad part of this is that even if you give the most barest, raw numbers for a system in SR1 mechanics, the system itself has a distinct network topology which isn't on there and can be the equivalent of the Tomb of Horrors (G to NC-17). Likewise, as Frank noted, the Matrix rules updated consistently and that meant that this section quickly became fairly outdated.

I mean, you can sort of see what they're doing when they describe some of the most interesting systems in Tir Tairngire - Lofwy're Personal System (Red-10), Behon Database (Red-6), Telestrian Industries Corporation (Red-6 and up up up) - they're trying to provide something for decker players to play with, sort of like how in D&D they might include mention of some good dungeons or trap-filled tombs in a country. It never really worked well though.

FrankT:

Every time people get into the specifics and nitty gritty of how hacking works in a futuristic game, God kills a kitten. The futuristic computers haven't been invented yet and run operating systems that haven't been conceived of and have strengths and weaknesses we can only imagine. The systems, to the extent they are described at all, are described in ways to support the “rule of cool” that is whatever the designers think sounds awesome for hackers to be doing. The actual technical details probably don't make sense because they are written by game designers rather than IT specialists, and it's profoundly dubious to think that current IT specialists have experience that is going to be terribly applicable after Moore's Law has clicked over thirty times. Sixty one years ago today, IBM shipped its first electric computer: the mighty 701. Tir Tairngire was written 61 years after the invention of ROM memory. So when this book explains their foolproof plan to prevent hacking into corporate servers, it doesn't come off as being terribly convincing.


In all honesty, I don't think corporate servers will ever be terribly secure.

The plan this book comes up with is to have information sent blindly from one point to another (accepting no information in return), and then to take the information and store it for a period of time and run the code later. This... is not a good plan. I mean, sure, it manhandles the real time virtual reality hacking that player characters are supposed to be doing in the game, but are they fucking serious? They want to send important data with no way to verify that it got to its destination intact or that copies of it weren't stolen? They want to leave unverified and indeed unverifiable code sitting on secure severs and then run it? You might not be able to run around playing at Tron combat with a system like that, but for traditional data interception and trojans, the described scenario is a fucking rose garden of opportunity.

This is why, ultimately, it's a really bad idea to even have discussions of what stuff you can do to make futuristic networks more secure. The author decides to trump hackers by setting up a structure that makes the hacking described in the game book impossible – but there's no reason at all to believe that such a topology would be actually secure. Just that the ways to attack it would be somewhat different than the things players signed on to having their characters do in-game. This is like a “my dad can beat up your dad” argument, except we're talking about our grandchildren having a hypothetical battle sixty one years from now trumping each other with advanced technology that hasn't been invented yet.

AncientH:

Tir na nOg doesn't have an exectly equivalent section, but buried in the Out-of-Character section in the back is a page or so on the Tir na nOg Matrix. This is actually kind of weird because Tir Tairngire was released pre-SRII, and Tir na nOg was released post-SRII, but still using Virtual Realities. Unlike TT, TNN doesn't give you any suggested ratings for government systems, it just notes that the TNN Matrix is EXTRA SPECIAL and if you're unfamiliar with the iconography your Target Numbers go up.

FrankT:

The laws of Tir Tairngire are brand new and disregard precedent and don't give a shit about your rights and shit. Supposedly, this makes the law be air tight and devoid of loopholes, which means that Nigel Findley was unfamiliar with legal systems that actually work this way. This is strange, because he was born in 1959 in Venezuela just one year into the Betancourt government. This is actually how Venezuelan law worked: a Civil Law framework where the previous legal systems had been jettisoned. It is notable that his family left this system and by the age of ten he was living in Canada enjoying the fruits of Common Law. I'm pretty positive that his family didn't leave Venezuela because of a lack of legal loopholes. In actual Civil Law, loopholes run rampant because every new case has a very strong possibility to not be directly referenced by any of the laws written. This means both that the requirement for laws is infinite (as it needs to exhaustively cover all contingencies), and also that because creating an infinite set of laws is literally impossible – that naturally scenarios that exist but are not covered by the law (and which are thus “loopholes”) happen constantly.

If an ox spring upon a man for intercourse, the ox shall die but the man shall not die. One sheep shall be fetched as a substitute for the man, and they shall kill it. If a pig spring upon a man for intercourse, there is no punishment.

Civil law has found itself having to make laws for niche scenarios for some time.

Tir na nOg's legal system isn't even that thought out. It uses a mix of Civil Law and Common Law and Icelandic Law. The book claims that everything is highly regulated, but high regulation without transparency isn't really “regulation” it's “punitive dickishness.” The authors probably thought they were writing something that was the best of both worlds when they mixed and matched legal systems, but really they just made a word salad that would very obviously be totally unworkable in practice.

AncientH:

Tir na nOg does not have a UCAS-style Bill of Rights, a Freedom of Information Act, or anything like them. Instead, the Constitution Acts of 2035 and 2044 delineate a balanced set of rights and responsibilities for every Tir citizen.

The rights enshrined in these Acts are exclusively freedoms to have or do something, rather than freedoms from something. In addition, each right carries with it a reciprocal responsibility. As an example, Article 1.4 of the Constitution Act of 2044 states that "every citizen of the Tir has a right to gainful employment in accordance with his abilities and talents." Article 9.4 describes the corresponding responsibility, namely that "ever citizen of the Tir shall demonstrate to the Tir and its duly appointed officers and inspectors his ability for gainful employment in accordance with his abilities and talents." Along with his right to work, a Tir citizen must prove himself available for work, and take what jobs he is offered.

This reminds me of a thing that ran several years ago about a woman in Germany supposedly required to take a job at a brothel or lose her unemployment. But the upshot is that while the American Bill of Rights grants very broad freedoms of action (anything not forbidden is allowed), in Tir na nOg freedoms are very narrow (anything not permitted is forbidden). Not exactly peachy.

FrankT:

Both Tirs have baroque systems for immigration. Tir Tairngire's is actually somewhat plausible and based on the actual hoops you have to jump through if you want to immigrate into a European or North American country. Considering that Nigel Findley moved to Spain, Nigeria, and Canada by the time he was ten years old, it's hardly surprising that this kafkaesque nightmare world reads true. Sargent and Gascoigne never went through anything like that to my knowledge, and their rants about border crossing look less like Papers, Please and more like random crap spouted by Herman Cain.



Tir Tairngire doesn't go into a lot of detail on how many catch-22s there are, but there are a lot. You have to apply from outside the country, but you have to provide documents that you have assets, housing, and a job inside the country. And you have to get those documents inside the country, but it isn't legal to work or live in the country before you get your application approved. So basically it's impossible unless you have an accomplice in the country, which either means that you have enough money to hire a Tairngirite lawyer to set it up for you, or you're going to work for a corporation that has enough money to hire a Tairngirite lawyer to set it up for them. Unlike the silliness of the Tir na nOg writeup, this rings pretty true. This is actually how it works if you want to immigrate legally into most European countries. Indeed, one of the commenters notes that his grandmother experienced capital controls moving to Canada in 1969 – which is the year that Nigel Findley's mother moved to Canada. The writeups of laws on moving across borders in Tir Tairngire read as autobiographical because they are.

One thing severely missing from either writeup is a rundown of why you might want to move to either country. Or really, why you'd want to go to either country under any circumstances. It's difficult in a plausible way in Tir Tairngire and difficult in a very implausible way in Tir na nOg, but in either case it's something that there is precious little incentive to attempt.

AncientH:

I dunno, maybe if you're an elf the idea of a summer home in a Tir sounds like a good idea. Especially if you just pissed off an ork gang.

The other side of the immigration thing is something players might be interested in: work visas, student visas, and visitor's visas are all practical ways to come into a country. Comparatively to moving or working there, getting student or visitor visas are fairly straightforward - put in your electronic paperwork with your fee and wait. Provided you can get through customs (ha), this is part of the general crap that Mr. or Ms. Johnson should give you to sneak you into the country to get the job done.

Likewise, if you dig deep enough into this section there's stuff about licenses for any cyberdecks, cyberware, or magical items you bring with you or weapons and stuff you buy inside the country (or need to get fake licenses for, as the case may be).

One of the upshots to Tir Tairngire's silly pseudo-feudal political setup is that dueling is totally legal. I once used this as an excuse to give player characters the chance to shoot an immortal elf in the face (for money!)

FrankT:

Most of the counties in Tir na nOg are basically empty. Crusader Kings only uses 13 counties in Ireland and no one actually complains about that. Meaning that really 19 of the counties could just not get drawn on the map and it wouldn't matter. Many of the county writeups talk about the reigns of various Celtic kings that you don't actually care about. And which the nOgians presumably don't care about either, because they derive their legitimacy from pre-Celtic hypothetical Elf tribes. Or something. Fuck it, I can't figure out any reason in or out of character to give half a rat's anus whether and when O'Connor tribal chieftains claimed kingship in Offaly. But the Tir na nOg book feels the need to drone on at you about this shit.

The draw of the chapter is supposed to be the “notable sites” list, which comes after the rundowns on the Counties, and is arranged by Province rather than County. There are only five provinces, and you might actually care about them, at least somewhat. These are in “alphabetical order, with the name of the county in which each site is located in parentheses.” I'm sure there was a more inconvenient way to get this information across, but it's so non-user-friendly that it defies understanding. It really doesn't help that many of the notable spots are things like “a place where an Irish boxer beat an English boxer in 1815” which are tourist destinations that I have a difficult time imagining giving a fuck about even if I wasn't a globe hopping mercenary on important business.

AncientH:

The Tir Provinces and Counties is...well, imagine if you had a sourcebook on Alabama and listed every fucking county in that state. That's roughly equivalent. It's only a 19 page chapter but it feels like it goes on fucking forever. There's a lot of cultural bollocks and uncle's lectures on ancient Irish history which you pretty much don't care about, because none of it is really interesting enough to use in a game, and if you are interested it's not enough by itself to use it in a game. I mentioned somewhere else that the nice thing about RPGs set in the modern world is that they don't have to waste time on all that crap because you can just pick up a proper tourist's book and leave it at that, but Sargent & Gasciogne never got the memo.

If Tir Tairngire has county-level political divisions - which it might have carried over from Oregon, you never know - we never hear of them. Which kinda makes me want an HBO drama about an elf sherrif in a town with a sizable ork minority, out where the Tir Peace Force rarely comes.


Oh, wait.

This level of regional granularity brings with it the incredible pissiness that comes with regionality. Example:

Yeah, Cork is cool, but it's also home to the Social Benefit Registry and other state-sponsored surveillance scams. Those Corkites like to know what everyone else is doing!

Really, it's the small-minded mentality that takes pride in stupid shit and denounces the neighbors of the next town over. I hate it.

Most of the poncy Tir na nOg magic sites consist of crooked ley lines and old Irish ruins which have inexplicably started growing elven faces and repairing themselves. I'm honestly not sure what the fuck the point of some of this stuff is, because there are places where all the soil suddenly turned back into subsistence farmland laid out along a some pattern set in the 1200s for some reason. In addition to this there are a couple sites of supposed hauntings, classic Irish touristy crap like the Blarney Stone, and of course the Sheela-na-Gig:


It's art. Suck it up.

Tir Tairngire, surprisingly, doesn't have as many mystic sites, at least not openly. There are immortal ape-critters in the woods, some dried lakes that are power sites, Crater Lake, and maybe some manalines, but that's it.

FrankT:

Shadowrun in general dropped the ball on magical sites. Simply put: they don't do anything that you care about. Let's say you have a cairn of power, what does that do? It means that a follower of the path of the druid (not the same as those other flavors of druid) gets a couple of bonus dice while casting spells while he's standing in it. Good for him, I suppose, but it means that he can't use the cairn to project force from the power site (he loses the bonus as soon as he leaves), and there is no reason for anyone else to try to take it from him (they wouldn't get any bonus at all if they moved in themselves). The power site makes it difficult to evict the owner, but since it doesn't actually produce anything that people care about. Even if you really hated the guy, the only reason you'd take out his power site is to make him sad. You might as well key his car or egg his house.


The Tirs really want you to care about various magical sites of power in them. You don't.

AncientH:

There's a weird evolution to magic sites in SR; it started out with the concept of Background Count (emphasizing the magic == radiation idea), where the more potent a site was the harder it was to do magic there. That evolved in The Grimoire/London Sourcebook into some people (i.e. druids for ley lines) able to use the Background Count as a bonus instead of a penalty - so not only was it harder for other people to do magic there, but the person that could use it had more juice. This eventually evolved into attuned sites, straight dice bonuses/penalties, aspecting and then eventually re-aspecting. Straight-up geomancy has always been a thing in SR but never given proper stats for fear player characters would actually use it.

FrankT:

In the Criminal Law section of Tir Tairngire, we are again reminded that Tir Tairngire uses Napoleonic Law. Nigel Findley is writing for a North American audience, and spends a considerable amount of ink to hammer in how this all works. But while we are assured that everything works smoothly because Elves are awesome, the basic fact that guilt and innocence are decided by the judge who also sentences you and is also charged with investigating your case means that the system is so obviously corrupt that junior highschool me was incredulous that such a system could be seriously suggested. It wasn't until later that I realized that a majority of the world is supposed to “work” like this.

AncientH:

One of the more notable omissions from the description of Ireland is, of course, the English Peerage of Ireland. Because Britain owned Ireland for a long time and stuck its own nobility in there with many titles, such as Lord Dunsany.


You'd think they'd at least let him in.

Nominally I suppose there could still be a Baron Dunsany in the UK, which is a weird thought.

FrankT:

I still honestly could not tell you why or how it is supposed to matter whether the County Cavan is considered to be in Ulster or Meath. Nor could I tell you what difference it makes whether it's considered to be part of the petty kingdom of Breffni. That's actually an unusual spelling of “Breifne” and I don't know what, if any, implications there are of the book using that spelling.

If these territorial disputes were supposed to mean something, Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connacht, and Meath all should have been different countries. As it is, we're talking about people disputing which non-transparent arm of an obscurantic government should be in charge of the street signage. I don't care. I've never met anyone who cares.

AncientH:

The way that the narrator in Tir na nOg tells it, you'd think that the Danaan families ruled Ireland like old-school feudal lords. Which is kind of hilariously sad.

Ten kilometers west of the village of Clifden lies An Clochan, a gathering of huts and tents. Because the site faces America, many of those unwilling to accept Danaan teachings on false spirits come to commune with the spirits of their fellows across the ocean in distant Tir Tairngire.

...not for nothing, but GoogleMaps says it's 4,569 miles from Galway to Portland, Oregon. Even if you astrally projected and went full out (I think top speed was 800 mi/hr or something), that's too far to do a meet-up, unless it's somewhere over the fucking Atlantic. Seriously, get a Matrix connection, send an email, welcome to the 22nd century.

FrankT:

Tir Tairngire gets its own crime, but most of it is wasted in discussions about why human-centric organized crime factions like the Yakuza don't have a strong presence in Tir Tairngire. It rings more true than Tir na nOg's claim that ethnic gangs never achieve anything in Tir na nOg because the country is insular and ethnically homogenous (seriously: it fucking says that!). But as AH said earlier, what we really need is to know whether Tir Tairngire imports or exports Elven prostitutes – and we don't get that information. Instead we get a vague idea that it is chic for criminal syndicates in Tir Tairngire to pretend that they are a corporation and use normal corp-speak as euphemisms for dealing BTL and murdering people who get in their way.

AncientH:

They died for poaching deer, damaging sacred copper beech trees belonging to Prince Cathal O'Kennedy, and resisting lawful arrest with firearms.

Quick quiz: Which Tir does this quote come from?

Tir na nOg. Good guess.

Part of the problem in both cases is that the biggest group of criminals in the country is running the country. It's like in Russia, Putin has a bigger cash flow to his corrupt friends for the Winter Olympics debacle than the entire Vory v Zakone will take in for ten years.

Part of the issue with the tourist guide to Tir na nOg is, well, the guys involved didn't do their research. For example, the Stone of Fal (Lia Fáil), or Stone of Kings is an important Irish landmark relevant to the old Celtic royalty. Except they say the British stole it. Which...didn't quite happen? I mean, the British moved it, but I think they're thinking of the Stone of Scone, which is a Scottish artifact with similar properties. But, y'know, Scottish.

Anyway, the Stone is kind of important because it's one of the Four Treasures of Ireland, in the keeping of the Seelie Court, associated with the various orders and basically reputed to be powerful artifacts that would pop up later in Shadowrun lore, notably Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzhan's Secrets.

[Stahlseele]

Ah, so that's where the scone of stone had it's home.

[talozin]

The actual technical details probably don't make sense because they are written by game designers rather than IT specialists,

*gritting teeth*

and it's profoundly dubious to think that current IT specialists have experience that is going to be terribly applicable after Moore's Law has clicked over thirty times.

I dunno; in some ways I think the pace of radical innovation has slowed down (and the notion that Moore's "Law" will hit physical or practical limits sooner rather than later is a common one among hardware nerds today).

Both System V Release 4 and SunOS 4 came out in 1988; that's 26 years ago. Hardly anyone is still using either operating system today (and hardly anyone ever used vanilla SVR4 to start with), but both of them are sufficiently similar to Solaris 10 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 that if you plucked a SunOS system administrator from 1988 and sat him down in front of a Red Hat box, he would very quickly grasp most of what he saw. Cisco IOS existed in a somewhat recognizable form in the late 1980s. And the odds that either of these things will stop being true in the next 5 years is basically nil.

Our hypothetical system administrator would have no idea what the fuck to do with an iPad or how to operate Windows 8. But ironically, he would have a great deal of applicable knowledge on how to manage infrastructure systems. The idea of an SSL-enabled web server running Flash apps would be completely new to him, but the actual server-side applications are configured and run in much the same way email servers were 25 years ago.

For all that -- and really, because of that -- I 100% agree with this:

This is why, ultimately, it's a really bad idea to even have discussions of what stuff you can do to make futuristic networks more secure. The author decides to trump hackers by setting up a structure that makes the hacking described in the game book impossible – but there's no reason at all to believe that such a topology would be actually secure. Just that the ways to attack it would be somewhat different than the things players signed on to having their characters do in-game. This is like a “my dad can beat up your dad” argument, except we're talking about our grandchildren having a hypothetical battle sixty one years from now trumping each other with advanced technology that hasn't been invented yet.

Hyper advanced computer networks are basically magic. I don't want to get into arguments over how they work and the more details a game gives me about that, the more likely it is that I will.

[kzt]

I'd argue that it's far more likely that you can more realistically portray the network part of futuristic IT than the user facing or the application parts.

But I don't see any good reason to do this, as the network should be fairly boring, because it "just works" to someone who isn't trying to do some sort of large-scale network attack.

If you want to portray network attacks then you need to develop it a lot deeper, and to do that you need someone who can come up with something that seems feasible to people who know something about the topic. So I'd vote for not going there.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I'd argue that it's far more likely that you can more realistically portray the network part of futuristic IT than the user facing or the application parts.

But I don't see any good reason to do this, as the network should be fairly boring, because it "just works" to someone who isn't trying to do some sort of large-scale network attack.

If you want to portray network attacks then you need to develop it a lot deeper, and to do that you need someone who can come up with something that seems feasible to people who know something about the topic. So I'd vote for not going there.

So, you suggest assuming security advances to the point where Social, PEBKAC, physical access, etc. attacks are always easier than network attacks? (or at least, almost always -- if someone doesn't hide behind 47 proxies, you might get a buffer overflow in edgewise or something)

[kzt]

So, you suggest assuming security advances to the point where Social, PEBKAC, physical access, etc. attacks are always easier than network attacks? (or at least, almost always -- if someone doesn't hide behind 47 proxies, you might get a buffer overflow in edgewise or something)

Nope. But the others are really essential to the setting, more interesting to most people, and somewhat easier to write. I've spent a lot of time inside of other people's exquisitely detailed fictional technologies and these are very hard to convincingly write and the good ones take a huge amount of time and work and still leave holes.

Furthermore modern network security does horrible stuff to SR hackers. An in-line hardware based IPS is going to be hell on people who are trying to (SR style) carry in some sort of commonly available attack software, the IPS will recognize that package as evil mobile code and nuke some critical part as it passes through, which the hacker will discover when he tries to use it. Consider also an in-line IPS preventing you from acting when the system attacks you by selectively dropping your inbound VR command traffic.

[talozin]

So, you suggest assuming security advances to the point where Social, PEBKAC, physical access, etc. attacks are always easier than network attacks? (or at least, almost always -- if someone doesn't hide behind 47 proxies, you might get a buffer overflow in edgewise or something)

To a very real degree, those sorts of attacks are easier now than network attacks. Yes, there's always the chance that someone deploying or maintaining a system will do something stupid, but installations that really care about security are at least as worried about hiring Edward Snowden as they are about the chance that someone running crack against their SSH server from some APNIC IP will get a match and be able to do something harmful with it.

But I wouldn't suggest that we ignore matrix hacking because of that: I just think we should make it vague. Cyberpunk hacking in fiction is generally more about the iconography of the Matrix than about the intricacies of the OSPF routing protocol. Focus on that part and throw in some colorful terms that hacker characters can toss around knowingly and then don't bother even trying to explain the underlying network infrastructure. I don't want to know what it is, probably very few game designers are capable of designing one that's convincing, and it's not actually necessary for the game to do what we want it to do. Nobody gives a shit about the exact words wizards say or what rules govern the hand gestures they have to make for necromancy versus evocation, even though this almost certainly matters in-world. I propose that we should devote exactly as many fucks to how the Matrix "really works."

[Ancient History]

Tir Tairngire Peace Force
...

Nothing Compares 2 U

FrankT:

Before we get to the city comparisons, we have an extra hanging 5 page major heading in Tir Tairngire with no obvious parallel in Tir na nOg. The Orwellianly named “Peace Force” of Tir Tairngire gets a small section devoted to it in the Tir Tairngire book. The Tir Tairngire Peace Force is the combined military, paramilitary, and intelligence agencies of Tir Tairngire. They are all placed under the umbrella banner of “Peace Forces” like how the Department of Homeland Security consumed a fuck tonne of agencies during the Bush Administration. This chapter is like a greatest hits of opposition that the players might run into: border patrol, police, special forces, electronic warfare, and even the military.

There are certainly some things that are wrong with this not-quite-a-chapter, and we're gonna try to cover it. But I submit that having a section in the book is quite important. Tir na nOg's presented alternative of simply hiding bizarre and outrageous claims around the book like a fucking scavenger hunt to figure out what your fucking opposition is supposed to be like is not a viable one.

AncientH:

It's not that Tir na nOg doesn't have a roughly-equivalent organization in the Reach Fuileach, it's just that the RF is taken care of in less than a page.

Of course, even saying that we're leaving out all the other military and paramilitary forces in both Tirs like the Ghosts, which if you believe the hype are Special Forces badasses that eat Green Berets for breakfast.

You guys eat too much red meat.

Then you have Tir na nOg's hundred of physads, Tir Tairngire's paladins, they can probably buy Cyberknights from Snowdonia wholesale...


We won't talk about Teachdaire, I promise.

FrankT:

As mentioned earlier, the Tir Tairngire book is written with a very strange and computer gamey concept of how war works. Conflicts are resolved quick and clean. A major battle is fought and the loser surrenders. Defeated armies are wiped out utterly.


No. That's too nuanced, in 1993 we'd be dealing with Civilization 1.


There we go. In 1993, Civilization 1 had just come out with the windowed variant.

So the Tir Tairngire Peace Force fights the Salish-Sidhe Council, wins a major battle and then the war is over. The Tir Tairngire Peace Force fights California, wins a major battle and then the war is over. Tir Tairngire fights an attempted coup by its Peace Force, fights a major battle and then the war is over. Apparently Nigel Findley thinks all military conflicts are solved with knockout punches. It's basically the 21st century that Donald Rumsfeld promised us during the Bush Sr. administration. It seemed pretty implausible at the time, and of course it is historical reality that when Rumsfeld actually had the opportunity to present his model of super fast warfare it... didn't work out. Rumsfeld suggested a six day way in Iraq with a conclusive victory and it ended up going eight years with no definitive result. So whether or not the concept seemed “not retarded” to you in 1993, it sure as fuck hasn't aged well.

The Tir na nOg equivalent doesn't make any sense. The whole thing is scattered around the book, but the snippets it reveals seem like they were taken from overly optimistic IRA propaganda. Somehow their terrorist bombs make all the other countries cede them all the territory they want, but the terrorist bombs of the other guys have no effect on Irish resolve and also prove that they are bad people. The basic contradictions of this presentation are so obvious that even a junior highschooler Frank who knew little of Irish history found it insulting and incomprehensible. There's no logic or concept of the logistics or moralities of war – it's just jingoism all the way down.

AncientH:

There was sortof a point in history where you could have "decisive battles," but it's really a weird concept even on the face of it, the kind of thing that seemed to apply only to the civilized parts of Europe back around when this gunpowder thing seemed like a neat idea. That ended around the time of the American Civil War (or at least it was pretty much over by them). There was no Waterloo in the Civil War, not the way there was an Agincourt or Crecy. People got it into their heads that if there were still people to fight they kept fighting.

Anyway, whereas today we'd automatically equate the Peace Force with Homeland Security, the idea that you'd have one bloated bureaucratic mess of an agency (as opposed to several competing bureaucratic messes in disparate agencies) was novel for the time. Or lazy. Hard call, really.

FrankT:

The age issue is a pretty serious one in the discussion of the Tir Tiarngire Peace Force. While the leadership of the country may be made up of Elvish Highlanders from the beforetime, the members of the Peace Force specifically aren't. This means that they were manned exclusively by children in the early days. There is a reshuffling of the head of the Peace Force from an Amerind that people liked to a conspiratorial German Elf ahead of the declaration of Elfia. The problem here is that the Elves declared themselves a tribe in 2029, and the oldest non-Highlander Elves at that time were 18. That means that Surehand put the Portland Police under the control of a German child. Even when the kid eventually made a play for power and enacted his failed coup in 2037, he was at most 26.



This is where it all breaks down, really. It's not just that they had to have armies of child soldiers. It's that they needed child managers, child police officers, child factory workers, child teachers. How the fuck do these people have advanced technology when their entire country had no college graduates in it when it was founded? It's one thing to have a single precocious teenager leading the revolution like they were Alexander or Joan d'Arc. But this posits an entire country where pretty much everyone is a child. I don't really care how superior you top leadership is, you can't run an advanced economy if children are doing all the work rather than being taken care of and educated by adults. It just can't fucking happen.

AncientH:

Which is usually where people yell Spike Baby! The presumption being that there were some older slots among the pointy-eared throng shouting orders, and behind them were millenia-old IEs who had a couple lifetimes of military education sandwiched in there.

Likewise, the concept of military power in SR tends to be...fairly traditional until relatively late in the edition cycle (and, for all I know, have swung back around with 5th edition). Nowadays we might look at Bruce Sterling or Charles Stross for how the approach to warfare and intelligence has changed, but the way the Tir militaries are laid out wasn't even sensical by 1992 Jane's Guide standards, except for a few things:

1) With Balkanization, armies get smaller. The Tir militaries are probably smaller than the Oregon Army National Guard and Oregon Air National Guard combined. Put it another way: the Seattle Metroplex Guard is probably a fair match for the Tir Tairngire Army in terms of numbers and equipment.

2) The Tirs doesn't have nukes, or display the capacity to produce nukes.

3) Smaller nations with their shit together tend to focus on quality over quantity. If they can afford it, they buy better equipment and give better training to their troops. However, it's important to remember that all this training and equipment generally comes from somewhere else. All the Tir ninjas are probably trained in the UCAS or CAS, and buying their weapons from Ares and Russia. Otherwise they'd be a bunch of kids stuck in trees with bows and arrows and the occasional dragon.

Ma'am, I feel our manual of battle is a bit...dated.

So both Tirs have an extremely limited ability to project force, except for terrorist-style ritual magic attacks. I wouldn't bet on the Tir na nOg Navy if it was having a Cod War with Iceland; the entire Tir Tairngire Navy probably docks in Portland. What they do have are these various flavors of supposedly bad-ass commando units.

FrankT:

One of the odd conceits of Shadowrun was that “military” meant “better than you” rather than simply “bigger” or “more numerous.” Things came in roughly four tiers, where civilian equipment was on the bottom, then restricted equipment, then corporate equipment, and finally military equipment at the top. Mostly military equipment was so super secret and bad ass that they didn't even bother to give it stats. This made a little bit of sense when they were talking about stuff like “aircraft” but... personal firearms? Militaries aren't exactly known for making customized stocks for all their soldiers. With thousands or even millions of guns to put into the
hands of soldiers, military industrial complexes tend to make weaponry whose chief virtue is large scale affordability. I am totally confident that as a private citizen with more money than sense that you can get a custom assault rifle that is “better” than whatever it is that any particular armed forces you happen to name happens to use.


National militaries don't normally threaten “the highly expensive high grade personal sidearms of our soldiers are far beyond what you can get custom crafted for yourself through normal commercial channels!”

So when these books drop the information that they aren't going to bother telling you what the military units of each country bring to a party because you're just going to lose anyway, that's in a larger context. It's not simple “Elf Wank” it's part of a general decision that “military means epic” for Shadowrun in general. It wasn't a great idea, but it was at least fairly consistent. When they wrote up the Confederate Stonewall main battle tank they refused to give it stats because you were just going to lose.

Of course, when we get to micro-nations like the Tirs, it becomes more absurd than it normally is. It's all very well and good to tell us that we can't beat the military of a hyper militarized Confederacy with a hundred million people in it (although even then I would think it possible to win a local victory, especially if you chose the time and place because you were setting the ambush), but how is that supposed to apply to countries whose entire populations are the equivalent of a single major city? Aztechnology is bigger and more militarized than these assholes in every possible way, why do we get to beat their security forces and not the national militaries of microstates? We complained about War! because it was an unforgivably terrible book – but idiocy on this topic has been endemic to Shadowrun for a long time.

AncientH:

And yet Fields of Fire remains popular, mainly because players like the idea of being ex-military or active mercenaries. The thing is that governments like to have a monopoly on the use of force, and try to retain that with restrictions on access to military technology and training. Therefore miltech becomes highly desirable to amateurs, almost to the point of fetishization. The truth is that sometimes militaries are given bad equipment because the price is right or the contract went to somebody's buddy, and the idea of a professional standing army still a relatively new one, but a lot of military education is hard to test in practice and retain, especially as technologies advance. The American Civil War was such a bloody affair in part because the weapons were way ahead of the tactics, and you had huge bodies of men marching in rows towards entrenched positions with rifles.

FrankT:

Tir Ghosts get way more ink in Shadowrun than they could possibly deserve. They were the archetypal “highest end mooks” in Shadowrun 4's overly brief list of writeups of NPC squads. Whenever someone in Shadowrun needs to talk about spooky high end special forces units, they talk about the Ghosts of Tir Tairngire. Why? Partly it was just because they had a cooler name. The Sioux were supposed to have even harder core special forces, but they were called the “Wildcats,” a name which could just as easily have been given to a street gang that dealt hyper-meth.


The Tir Tairngire Ghosts, admittedly, had style.

But it's also a simple advertising avalanche. As a writer, if you're going to write in a reference to special forces in a book you're writing, you're going to use one you remember. And every time you put in a reference to a specific special forces group, every other writer is that much more likely to remember that group when they have to write a special forces reference. So while it may have started as just some Mossad-envy and Elf Wank, the Tir Tairngire Ghosts became a forced meme. Their name was used so often that by 4th edition they were literally the standard of excellence. As in: they were actually the specific comparison standard in the book if you wanted to throw in some special forces goons who were “excellent.” By comparison: what was the special forces of Amazonia or India even called? Those countries were superpowers in Shadowrun, so presumably they had some. But I'm damned if I could tell you what they were called. There's a not inconsiderable chance that they actually never got named, and there's a roughly equal chance that they got named different things in two different citations. For fuck's sake, when it came time to write up the UN in Loose Alliances they fucking forgot that India was a superpower and would probably have something to say about it.

AncientH:

Tir na nOg doesn't quite get the special forces love, but what it does get are some really fucking retarded toys to play with, notably the morph-seeking weapons.

These sophisticated sniper rifles have an integrated Smartgun link and an onboard computer wired to the user's visual and motor cortex. The system uses advanced pattern recognition to analyze and identify targets in the weapon's rangefinder. When the probability of accurate identification exceeds 99 percent, the weapon signals its readiness. The control system then integrates with the sniper's motor cortex, allowing him to maximize the effectiveness of his shot. If necessary, the sniper can overrule both weapon activation and the selection of the target.

Individually made for the few expert counterterrorist snipers who use them, morph-seeking weapons use advanced CNS function analysis, retina scanning, and so on, to identify their user and are programmed to detonate if activated by anyone else. Runners cannot use them, not even if they beg. Tough luck, chummer.

Despite this description, the Morph-Seeking Weapon is just a bizarre decent sniper rifle. It's not the best sniper rifle, although it was better than most of the sniper rifles available at the time in terms of damage. (Which is a weird thing, because some players note that sniper rifles technically do more damage than heavy weapons...call if Rule of Cool.)

FrankT:

Tir Tairngire's rant about Netwatch looks like out of character babble, but that's mostly because for all the lingo Shadowrun developed, it didn't actually have in-character terminology for most of the hacking stuff. So the Tir government decker has what is game mechanically a “rating 9 attack utility”, and which in character they call... a “rating 9 attack utility.” They are about one step away from discussing dice pools and initiative counts. But that's not because Findley lost his in-character voice, but because an in-character decker lingo simply didn't exist for him to use.

When Tir na nOg has the opportunity to go all-out and describe their matrix system in an actual out-of-character segment, it goes nowhere. Everything is super vague and it has something to do with how every icon is sculpted to look like leaves and stags and shit, and this is something totally incomprehensible to deckers from other countries. Because have access nodes be modeled as doorways is fucking madness. Or something.


Madness!

Partly it just comes across as them not knowing what they were doing, which they obviously didn't. But also we're looking at the fact that the lack of terminology went both ways. There weren't really game terms for what hackers were supposed to be doing either. So whether they are talking about things in-character or out of character, it comes off as clunky and uninformative and pretty much the same.

AncientH:

Welcome to the SR1/2 Matrix!

...yes, I should have something to add to that, but no I really don't. Part of the problem with the Tirs being so closed off is that they hardly ever get used. It's like playing a campaign in MERPS; you're probably never going to go to Mordor itself. In the same way, much of went on with Shadowrun passed the Tirs by. We never hear of gangs of elf-otaku-kids doing things in the Tir Matrix, for example, although totally seems like a thing that should have been a thing in a country with a majority of pre-pubescent pointy-ears living in what they think is a technological wonderland.

FrankT:

One military weapon system that does have stats is the dreaded “Morph Seeking Weapon” which is apparently what the nOgian villains use to fight the Power Rangers. Actually, it's a sniper rifle that takes control of your motor cortex and interfaces with a range finder. Functionally, it's just a sniper rifle with a 6 round magazine, but it takes an an entire essence point (shit cost more back then, but this was still a lot), and you can't buy it for love or money. You don't want this thing, and the quarter page of fapping to it that this book gives is wholly unwarranted. I don't actually want my firearms to take control of my frontal lobe, that's where my “self” is. And the actual mechanics for this thing are pretty unimpressive.

Runners cannot use them, not even if they beg. Tough luck, chummer.

That's kind of insulting and dickish. But, and I don't mean this is a sour grapes way, I really really don't want one of these things. It's kind of a piece of shit.

AncientH:

There's also some bollocks about special armors that the Reach Fuilleach and the Paladins wear, and my personal favorite for obscure-what-the-fuck-i-ness, Boosted Muscles. These are described as "organic cyberware" versions of muscle replacement. Considering Shadowtech came out in 1993 and introduced bioware, this just seems to be grossly taking the piss.


I do kinda miss the old covers.

[Nath]

Conflicts are resolved quick and clean. A major battle is fought and the loser surrenders. Defeated armies are wiped out utterly.

This could actually be an accurate description of what sometimes happen in African countries. The "liberation army" follow the road with two trucks and four jeeps, the "national army" takes the same road with three truck, two jeeps and a old Russian tank. They take a few shoots at each other. Then one side win, or the Russian tank engine overheat, it catches fire, and the national army soldiers flee, believing the enemy either has heavy weaponry or magic (IRL, not just in SR).
After that, the liberation army can march on the capital, while the former national army returns in the region their party hailed from. Since the only infrastructures that would allow to import ammunitions or spare parts to repair the tank is in the capital, the now former liberation army is effectively teeth-less, and will need a few years before they can become the next liberation army.

May the "war" between the elven rebels and Salish-Shidhe forces have looked like that? (complete with the children soldier!).

If Tir Tairngire is Finland, Salish-Shidhe would be roughly equivalent to Sweden. We've been told that the Salish-Shidhe Rangers have their own special forces, and fought a border wars with the Tsimshian, but that happened decades later. Possibly, they trained special forces as a reaction to what happened. Because having a military force divided into "rangers", "border patrol" and "coast patrol" reads to me like the council created and funded them to stop illegal immigrants and poachers rather than fighting even a small-scale insurrection by children soldiers.

The Sioux were supposed to have even harder core special forces, but they were called the “Wildcats,” a name which could just as easily have been given to a street gang that dealt hyper-meth.

Because of Speed, I sometimes wonder why Arizona U sports team would hunt a team of runners.

These are described as "organic cyberware" versions of muscle replacement. Considering Shadowtech came out in 1993 and introduced bioware, this just seems to be grossly taking the piss.

The divide between Muscle Replacement and Shadowtech's Muscle Augmentation never made sense on its own anyway, regarding what the difference between cyberware and bioware is supposed to be. The former involves "vat-grown synthetic muscles, calcium treatments and skeletal reinforcements". The latter use "an air-injected fluorinated polymer (Teflon) known as Goretex is braided into existing muscle fibers."

[Stahlseele]

i think i somewhere once read a quote about tir tairngire and war that seems oddly fitting here now:
random shadowrunner finds a genuine lamp with a djinn in it and gets the 3 wishes.
his wishes:
1) i wish california free state would go to war with the salish sidhe council
2) i wish the pueblo council would go to war with the salish sidhe council
3) i wish the salish sidhe council would go to war with both the pueblo council and the california free state
the djinn replies:"i can do that, but why would you want that? all that would happen would be that the salish sidhe council would lose all 3 wars"
Runner:"Maybe so, but they all have to go through Tir Tairngire!"

or something along those lines.

[Ancient History]

It's a joke in this book, and based on a much older joke.

[Stahlseele]

it is? O.o
i never actually read that book ^^

[TheFlatline]

Considering that computerized sniper rifles are totally a thing now without a datajack ( http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/ ... eal-world/ ) where you mark the target, squeeze the trigger, and pull the rifle over the marked point and it shoots automatically, a computerized sniper rifle is not that beyond the pale today (though 20 years ago I'm sure it was).

Besides, in reality, how often is a SR firefight going to occur at 250 yard ranges?

[Ancient History]

Portland
Dublin

Musical Inspiration: Mahones - Paint the Town Red.

FrankT:

Both books give two city entries. I believe Tir na nOg gives two city entries because Tir Tairngire gives two city entries. Shadowrun has never had a really great handle on how to present a location book, and once they have a formula that sort of works they tend to hold onto it, making evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes. Even when a format does extremely poorly, developers tend to be conservative enough to retain most of the formatting when they try the next book. Runner Havens was a sales catastrophe, but the developers kept the “cities of...” format mostly intact long enough to make two more books that also sold extremely poorly. Baby steps.

Anyway, Portland is not a huge city by North American standards, but it's a colossus compared to Dublin. The reality is that European cities are actually pretty small by North American standards. The largest city in Europe wouldn't be in the top three cities in North America for population. Depending on how you count metropolitan areas, Europe might not be able to place any of their cities in North America's top five. Los Angeles is bigger than the most generous assessment of London by the entire population of Tir na nOg.

Even by European standards, Ireland is a tiny backwater. Its population peaked in the 19th century before the famines and the diaspora, and it has not recovered to this day. The Tir na nOg book posits a second mass exodus as the Britishish people are forced to flee the might of Irish, Celtic, Elven terrorism, leaving the island more depopulated still. Tir na nOg's population is so tiny that you could fit them all in a clown car. Dublin, Tir na nOg is a third the size of Dublin, Ohio. That last one is not a joke. Dublin, Ohio is part of the Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area, which as the third largest metropolitan area in Ohio is more than three times the size of the nOgian Dublin.


You don't necessarily care about Dublin the way you would care about the biggest city in a country that was large enough to have big cities in it.

AncientH:

There's actually three cities given in Tir Tairngire: Portland, Salem, and Eugene. Because cities in Oregon are named after local AmerInd stuff or places somewhere else; seriously, there's a Berlin, Tir Tairngire. Anyway, Portland (or Cara'sir if you want to do a riff on "Now it's Istanbul/Now it's Constantinople") is included because it's seriously the biggest fucking town in the country, and Salem is in because it was the state capital and now is the national capital, and Eugene is in there because it's the second largest city. Either that or they were working north-to-south on highway 5, it works out the same. That's really the whole thing; honestly I'd have gone all Seattle and declared a Cara'sir Metroplex running from Portland down to Eugene along highway 5 and just left the rest of the fucking state depopulated except for leshy, man-of-the-woods, woodwose and wooly fucking mammoths.

Tir na nOg's two cities are Dublin and Belfast. Dublin because it's the only city in Ireland worth giving a fuck about, and Belfast because it's the only city in Northern Ireland worth giving a fuck about.

FrankT:

The demographic and econometric data doesn't add up. In general, the demographic data doesn't add up in any Shadowrun book. It might have something to do with fallacy of composition, but really I'm just going to say laziness. There are more humans in Portland than there are in Tir Tairngire. Seriously. The whole country has 5.6 million people and is 1% Human, but the city of Portland has 2 million people and is 10% human. So the whole human population is 56 thousand, but the part of the Human population that lives in Portland is almost four times that. It means that the entire Human population of the rest of the country is negative 144 thousand. The econometrics are like that too, where the per capita income apparently goes from 29,000 ¥ to 112,000 ¥ if you include Royal Hill. That means that the residents of Royal Hill have a total income of about 175 billion ¥, which is about two thirds the GDP of the entire country, which in turn means that they by definition can't be spending their income inside the country because it's actually impossible for the Gini index to get that fucked up.

I'd like to say that this was a one time deal, but it's not. really it's always been like this. Dublin and Belfast both have more Humans than Tir na nOg does. It didn't get any better in later books. In Year of the Comet, the Pueblo Corporate Council (population 10 million) conquered Los Angeles (population 17 million) and their population didn't grow when they were written up the next time in Shadows of North America. They literally added more people in the new territory than they had in the old territory and the combined territory had a population about the same as the old territory alone.


Words to live by.

Basically, the numbers were never intended to be true, just “truthy.” It's really a shame, because with a spreadsheet and an almanac and an afternoon you could actually writeup a set of numbers that was actually internally consistent and just pull numbers off the spreadsheet when you wanted to write up a place. The Sixth World Almanac actually got made, and it's fucking useless because no one bothered to do that. Also because a bunch of the material is plagerized and the guy drawing the map did a lot of copypasta off Googlemaps instead of referencing Shadowrun history for where borders are supposed to be. It's now 25 years since Shadowrun first came out, and not once has anyone decided to actually create some remotely plausible census data.

AncientH:

Granted, the NAN are all bullshit anyway because we don't have enough AmerInds to make it work, even if you include everybody with a great-great-great grandparent that was a full tribal member.

The thing about Portland is that it occupies ambiguous legal status; maybe they just don't count it for census purposes, but it's ruled be a military tribunal and the city is technically under martial law. Which, to be all honesty, would make an hilarious episode of Portlandia.


Seriously, who does not want to see Kyle MacLachlan in Spock Ears?

FrankT:

Portland has a big wall around it. It is used as a West Berlin analog. The way through is called “Checkpoint Charlie” because that is what the most famous checkpoint to get between East and West Berlin was called. But it was called that because it was the third designated checkpoint. After Alpha and Bravo, because that is how American military lettering works. And it was a symbol of oppression, which everyone hated. You would not call your first gate that for the same reason you wouldn't put the suffix “junior” on a child with a different name from their parents. And you wouldn't call any of your gates that because it's an insulting comparison.

The only way this possibly could have happened is if no one designing the fucking thing had the slightest knowledge of history. Like maybe they had all fled highschool before taking world civ in order to go be a child soldier founding a micro-nation based on Tolkienian principles. I have no idea whether this is happening because the author is writing broad parody or because the author is fucking clueless about what Checkpoint Charlie was or why it was important. And of course, he's dead and I can't ask him.

AncientH:

Some people might note that treating your largest city and main port as basically a hostile foreign colony isn't a good idea economically, and it is true that the local economy in Portland is fucking tanking because the local merchants can't really trade with the rest of the Tir. It makes no military sense and is the economic equivalent of cutting off your penis to spite your girlfriend for denying you a blowjob ("Now you have no jobs to blow!")

On the other hand, stupid excuses aside at least Portland is a proper elf-haunted cyberpunk dystopia of a city.

The big problems with Portland (and points south), Dublin and Belfast is that they're not the gateways to the Tirs that they should be. Portland should really be Bordertown, and right over the wall you go straight into the trippy Faerielands, and the Girdle of Melian Veil shouldn't have prohibited people from visiting Dublin. These are places where the elf nations should be interacting with the rest of the world, demimondes that cater to smugglers, shadowrunners, elf lords with money to blow, that sort of thing. Instead they're rather generic small cities you can't fucking get to, and don't have much reason to try and get to.

FrankT:

Portland is divided into Precincts, while Dublin is divided into Districts. Both of these are fancy local terms for neighborhoods. Shadowrun was trying to have a system where neighborhoods would have a wealth level (Squatter to Luxury) and a security level (AAA-F plus Z). This would have been the kind of thing that would be actually pretty useful, but the standardization just wasn't there. Each author had a different idea of what a middle class neighborhood was about, or what a B grade security coverage entailed, and you really couldn't do an apples to apples comparison of anything to anything. But it was a neat idea. And if you had a developers wiki and some population spreadsheets, you could have made it work. Ironically, when they got the tools to fix the mess in the 21st century, they scrapped the whole thing. I mean, you could have all this crap on the official webpage, but you don't. Because go fuck yourself.

AncientH:

The bit on public transportation in Portland is devoted to a limited subway (I'm not sure how feasible that is; the current city has light rail and buses).

On the other hand, you can't bring a private car into Dublin. Also, for whatever reason, Dublin doesn't have GridGuide and Portland does, but Portland's GridGuide is on a different frequency (?) from the UCAS so your GridGuide is useless, even if you do make it through the checkpoints. Life before GoogleMaps was interesting, neh chummer?

Can I just say that making a city you already can't get to and don't really want to hard to get around is not a good thing?

FrankT:

One thing Shadowrun books did a lot of was to produce eclectic lists of places with snide comments on them. So you'd get a couple of mini-reviews of a few restaurants and hotels and shit. It was filler, but it was flavorful filler. It's nice to be able to throw down some specific place names or have a short description of a location that you can have a meeting or a fire fight in. Often I just made my own (like Taco Temple or the Blue Donut), but I can't say that canonical place writeups are a waste of space. The format makes them take up more space than they should: to make things “look real” they put in fake phone numbers and crap. And of course the comments timestamps and crap eats pagespace like the Tarrasque has awoken, but it's not the end of the world.

Under no circumstances am I going to review these fucking things one by one. Many of them are just there as a one note joke, or to tie into plotlines that got dropped (like one hotel has ties to the Dark Circle, and if you're asking “Who?” the answer is “Exactly.”). The quality varies, but it won't make a top ten list of bad reviews for hotels or anything.

AncientH:

After a couple of editions, these kind of write-ups were pared down considerably - no building archetypes, addresses, or telecomm numbers. There's not much to talk about here...aside from one of my favorite bad jokes:

Yes, Hugh Laverty is related to Sean Laverty. I think second cousin once removed (but he came back).

Dublin is a bit more tourguide-y, with sections on weather, local newspapers, festivals; most of the locations are a sampling of the 850 pubs that make it possible for people to get through the "Go elf yourself" days and nights.

Whose a good boy? You are, yes you are.

For some reason, this includes two old fashioned bookstores. I love bookstores, but this is the cyberpunk future, and those things are supposed to be antiques.


Can you tell the difference between a Shadowrun Elf Hipster and an Earthdawn Elf?

FrankT:

Royal Hill gets its own section in Tir Tairngire. That's where the really really rich people hang out. They are so rich that as previously mentioned it is mathematically impossible for them to have spent their income because if they did that and noone else in the entire country had a job other than what was required to provide goods and services to support that income, the country's GDP would be considerably higher than it is. It's got a pretty limited map, and some plot seeds. Basically, every game I've ever seen that involves this country has involved setting fire to a building in this little neighborhood. It's about the only part of this country that is detailed enough to have that level of interaction, and people hate it here so much that they usually decide to firebomb the place even if they aren't getting paid.


Totally worth it.

AncientH:

A big deal is made of how the IE Royal Hill estates are done in some sort of unique, fully-developed style that is supposed to call back to the ancient past that no-one is supposed to know about even though people have been basically walking around the idea of IEs the entire fucking book. Sargent & Gasciogne either missed this or never gave a shit, because it never appears again.

One of the things we haven't talked about much are Banshees - HMHVV-infected elves that are basically vampires (and distinct from the Bean Sidhe, because fuck you). The gist is that yes, given all the elves in the nation, some of HMHVV-positive, protected by wealth or their families or else living in sewers or crap. This never gets a lot of press, so it never gets into Underworld territory.

FrankT:

The writeup on Dublin is actually longer than the writeup of Portland by a couple pages despite being a much smaller and less important place. This is because they take up some space with things like a month by month list of local events. Not unreasonable, but not terribly interesting. I can imagine caring when Dublin's opera season opens, but it seems unlikely to come up.

AncientH:

The end of the Portland chapter is literally a joke about "Wanker's Corner" being a haven of masturbation. When I was twelve, that was kind of funny.

If I had a qualm about these two write-ups, it's that they don't really dwell on the underworld much - a few mentions of black markets here or there, were to go for a gun or drugs - all good! But I wish there was more on the Portland/Dublin underworlds.

[Nath]

Anyway, Portland is not a huge city by North American standards, but it's a colossus compared to Dublin. The reality is that European cities are actually pretty small by North American standards. The largest city in Europe wouldn't be in the top three cities in North America for population. Depending on how you count metropolitan areas, Europe might not be able to place any of their cities in North America's top five. Los Angeles is bigger than the most generous assessment of London by the entire population of Tir na nOg.

As you pointed out, the number sometimes doesn't make a lot of sense.

Portland in Tir Tairngire has a population of 2,100,000 and a density of 325/square kilometer (which translates into an area of 6,461 km²). It almost matches those of the Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA Metropolitan Statistical Area nowadays, which were at 2012 census 2,289,800 and 333 per square mile. The city of Portland proper had in 2010 a population of 583,776 and a density of 4,375/sq mi or 1,689/km².

In Tir na nOg, Dublin has a population of 532,000. This is closer to the number of the city of Dublin of 525,383 (in 2011). However, it's difficult to make sense of the density number "in populated districts" of 700+ per square mile. If the reference was to make any sense, at 701/sq mi, it would require the city to cover 758 square miles. Which is 17 times the current area of Dublin city.
The entire Dublin Region nowadays covers "only" 356 square miles and has a population of 1.2 million. The Dublin Transportation Office covers a larger area, including the Meath, Kildare and Wicklow counties, which bring the total up to 2,700 square mile and 1.8 million.

Right now, Dublin metro is almost as large as Portland metro, but twice as dense. But SR Dublin is possibly really supposed to be a desert whose population was divided by three or four.

Disclaimer: someone should check the math and the metric to imperial conversion. I'm lazy right now.

Regarding the comparison of European and North America cities, following the statistical definition of metropolitan area, it would be #1 Mexico #2 New York #3 Los Angeles #4 London #5 Paris #6 Chicago (if you include Russia, Moscow is also more populated than Chicago). If you consider larger entities and fancier names like "conurbation" or "megalopolis", you can make up list topped by "Great Lakes", "Northeast Coast", "Southern California" and "Greater Mexico" in North America. Paris and London then disappear from the top spots, but Flanders-Randstadt-Rhine-Ruhr would come right after Mexico (and it doesn't reach up to London only because there weren't able to build onto the sea so far).

[Whipstitch]

As mentioned earlier, the Tir Tairngire book is written with a very strange and computer gamey concept of how war works. Conflicts are resolved quick and clean. A major battle is fought and the loser surrenders. Defeated armies are wiped out utterly.

This sort of thing is why I continue to feel bad for light cavalry and lightly armed auxiliaries and how short changed they get by the annals of vidja game history. The poor bastards specialized in exactly the kind of crap that tends to get abstracted away so we armchair generals can spend all our time on the good parts.

[RadiantPhoenix]

In AI War, Raid Starships are among the best normal units in the game (EDIT: or at least, the most glamorous, even if they do die horribly and with great frequency in accomplishing their missions). Scout ships are even more important, though.

[Ancient History]

Salem. Eugene.
Belfast. Musings.

Finishing up the dregs of these two books, the soundtrack will be The Warrior's Code by the Dropkick Murphys. Yes, the entire fucking album. I've got a cold coming on, and right now I'd inject orange juice concentrate into my veins if I thought it would stop the sniffling sneezing snot-slinging before the Original Green Death Flavor kicked in. -AH

FrankT:

As Ancient History pointed out earlier, there are actually three cities in Tir Tairngire to only two in Tir na nOg. This is because even the authors of this book can't pretend that there are three cities you give a damn about in Tir na nOg. Salem and Eugene are not impressive cities. They barely have two hundred thousand people between the two of them. I think they got writeups here because the map that came with the big blue book for Shadowrun 1st edition had already committed itself to having dots on the map for both of them. That map made some weird decisions, and Shadowrun has to one degree or another been paying for it every since. Some of the borders are just in strange places, following interstate highways rather than geographical features or historical administrative borders. Some of the borders are in really strange places, following nothing at all that anyone has ever been able to determine.

Belfast, meanwhile, is probably the only part of Tir Tairngire that you might actually give a fuck about. It's not a big city by any stretch of the imagination, but it has conflict. Conflict that the player characters might actually get involved in. See, Northern Ireland today is majority Unionist, which means that the people as a whole want to stay in the United Kingdom. The Tir na nOg book claims that this essential demographic reality remains much the same in 2054, only now the region has been forcibly reunited with Tir na nOg (through no adequately explained mechanism), and now the population is majority separatist, wanting to leave Elvish rule and go back to Britain.

This underlines the essential absurdity of many of the nation states of the Shadowrun future. I could imagine a future where the national boundaries had been radically redrawn in light of strong realignments of public opinion and gerrymandering. Perhaps a coalition of Red States or Blue States decide that some law or another is the last fucking straw and declare secession 2.0. Or maybe groups of counties have just had it with their state governments and want to go it alone. Stranger things have happened. But redrawing national boundaries is a fairly big step, and it seems to me that you have to posit some change to the status quo for the national boundaries to move. The status quo, after all, has already delivered the borders we currently have by definition. Tir na nOg, however, assures us that basically nothing like that has occurred. Now it's the Ulster Unionists who don't get what they want while the Irish Nationalists do, for no reason.

AncientH:

You can make an argument for Tir na nOg that at least geographically, Ireland is a single island and there has been a historical ideological movement to have it ruled as a single nation - that's basically what the provisional IRA was always going on about, anyway. Tir Tairngire doesn't have anything like that; it's immediate predecessor was the Salish-Shide state, and before that it was the region formerly known as Oregon. Out of game you can understand that the reasoning for putting Tir Tairngire where it was is it's proximity to Seattle, but in-game even the IEs appear to be grasping at straws trying to justify the decision to set up their little nation-state for elves, by elves there instead of in Vancouver or something.

Anyway, Belfast at least lets you tap into every 90s comic that involved the IRA, including some choice material from The Punisher, and not much else: see here and here.

And this is how you play it in-game.

FrankT:

There isn't a whole lot to say about Salem, so they start high level. The city has a mayor who is appointed by the national government and a seven person city council, who serve two year terms. Or maybe not, because the book then goes on to say that the last election was in 2051 so people will hold their seats until May of 2054. I guess there's just a really long time between when the election is held and government chairs actually change butts. Salem is actually where the Star Chamber operates, which means it's the nominal seat of national government. But the book can't really be fucked to mention much about that except to throw in some references to how low security the place is because even the council of princes can't be bothered to keep up the facade that democracy is an actual thing in the Land of Promise.


I think this is the building they use for the Star Chamber, which is referred to in this book as a “fragging ugly building.” Frankly, until they put the juicer attachment on it, I think it's too early to say.

AncientH:

Salem, Tir Tairngire is a lot like Talahassee, Florida or Canberra, Australia or Washington, D.C.. They're cities that are the nominal capitals of their state/country/etc., but they aren't great cities, the cities you immediately think of when you think of those places - which you might find weird. The truth is that great cities like Sydney and New York and London happen because there's lots of stuff going on there; the other cities are like company towns except that the "company" is the government - and unless you can provide more businesses and draws to a place than that, then the city is never going to grow beyond a certain point.

FrankT:

Eugene doesn't have anything interesting about it at all. It's a town of 110,000 people that is still stuck into a metropolitan area with Springfield and Santa Clara. Those areas are still on the map in this book, although I can't for the life of me figure out why they exist from the history of the region in the book. The entire region was depopulated and a new city built there with the miracles of child labor. So... why are there still 19th century US administrative divisions? Anyway, there's no way to tell how many people actually live in the Eugene metropolitan area because two thirds of the Eugene map is taken up with areas that are apparently inhabited but technically not Eugene – and the book doesn't have any writeups that pertain to the unincorporated or separately incorporated metropolitan area of Eugene. Basically, everything on the other side of an arbitrary line is left undescribed and there's no way to know how much there is on the other side of the line or what that stuff is qualitatively like.


Honestly, I don't even know.

I understand that people move and cities grow, and people move growing cities together into weird amorphous masses that felate and absorb each other, leaving administrative divisions hopelessly baroque and obsolete given time. But for fuck's sake, this entire country is only 19 years old. It isn't even old enough to drink, although it can now star in its own porno. You wouldn't think their administrative divisions would have had time to grow sclerotic and useless.

Other than that, blink and you'll miss it, which earlier in the review I actually did (I blame alcohol). It's less than five pages long, and most of that is taken up with shadowtalk about how Eugene, Tir Tairngire is a shitty place to get cyberware implanted. Which I probably could have guessed based on the fact that it's the third most important city in a country the size of Houston.

AncientH:

I'm honestly amazed they didn't talk about Yreka, which is the nominal southern tip of the Tir Tairngire border, although I guess they were saving that for the California Free State book. If I had this book to do over, I'd merge Portland, Salem, and Eugene into a narrow metroplex containing 98% of the Tir's metahuman population running all the way down I-5, and I'd make Portland the entranceway to the Tir at the top and Yreka the dirty back-entrance/dumping ground at the bottom where all the disaffected elves go/are exiled.

FrankT:

Belfast, unlike the other appendix cities, has style. I'm not sure if it's particularly good style, but it's different and they sell it. Belfast is a city in a state of military occupation. Martial law has been declared in the face of
separatist terrorism, personal vehicles are not allowed in the green zones for fear of car bombs, concrete barriers block major intersections, and armed soldiers search and arrest pedestrians at will. Dystopian police states are a cyberpunk standard, and the idea of a radical assault on liberty in the name of an endless and unwinnable “war on terror” is certainly not something that has become less plausible sounding in the last twenty years. But... what the fuck? How does Tir na nOg manage this with only seven thousand people in their armed forces? There is a major disconnect between the capabilities ascribed to the military in Belfast and their actual manpower and equipment as described in the rest of the book.

Also not explained is how the entire island of Eire is not “on fire.” See, apparently about a million British citizens were expelled from their homes or murdered over thirty year period by the nOgians before, during, and after the ill-explained conquest of Ulster. And there is no explanation at all as to why there haven't been high level reprisals against Tir na nOg by the United Kingdom. Even if we posit that due to [Unexplained] the British didn't feel they could actually hold Ulster, why haven't they responded to the mass murder of their people by deploying missiles and planes to reduce Dublin to cinders?

Shadowrun history in general has a bad tendency to downplay the willingness of world powers to raze cities to the ground in response to existential threats. But usually you can handwave this away with talk of secessionists and disorganized politics. If Czechoslovakia can disintegrate without a popular mandate, a major military campaign, or proper political procedures (and in 1993 it totally did), who's to say the same sort of “no reason” balkanization can't happen to other countries? In Tir na nOg, that kind of reasoning doesn't fly. At all. It literally posits an external invasion. We're talking a country a tenth the size of Argentina attempting to seize a part of Britain that is a thousand times more valuable and within actual walking distance of British military bases. And they just gave it up without a fight for... no reason. I understand that the authors are writing all this crap in for irony and poetic justice for British crimes in the 19th century, but come on! In the immortal words of Insane Clown Possee: “Well at least make this shit sound real, man, damn!”


Fukken international conflicts, how do they work?

AncientH:

Just for anyone keeping tabs, that means that in both pristine elf states there are major cities under martial law and only kept towing the line by sharp-eared grunts in combat trousers and guns.


I knew I'd get to use this.

FrankT:

The paradigm of having shadowtalkers dump extra location writeups into the file never really worked for me. If these are supposed to be contributions from forum trolls, why are they formatted in the standard way instead of written like forum posts? It was just a device to add pagespace and make some of the location writeups “more deniable than normal” or focused entirely on things that wouldn't make sense to appear in a tourist brochure (such as sleazy dives or illegal racing circuits or whatever), but it was basically dumb.

Belfast manages to piss me off unnecessarily by having literally all of their bar writeups in this format. Why? I don't fucking know. Apparently “getting drunk” is secret sauce in this fucking country. I remind you that the country in question is Ireland.

Where the bar locations are a state secret!

The section is also edited very poorly, and ends up looking like an old Usenet discussion where the posts were written as responses to posts that have now timed off the server. This is an actual post, in its entirety:

Now, there's a girl with an IQ smaller than her D-cup measurement. Then again, the predatory male clientele at Turpitude don't care about anything else.

The “context” for that bad and vaguely offensive joke is that someone had just mentioned a bar called “Moral Turpitude.” But no woman is actually mentioned in the description. So who exactly is being insulted? I have no idea.

AncientH:

I wish some of the art was available online, but I couldn't find it; while I you can hate on a lot of SR art as fairly generic white-and-black stuff that might not pass muster by today's standards, I always welcome a pick of an elf prostitute in dominatrix garb with a whip or an elf rock band where the lead guitar-elf is about to smash his ax, or the one where a skinny little Irish elf is up to the bar and clearly drinking himself to death as the elf barman nonchalantly watches. It's all in good fun, is what I'm saying, and it's a way and a ways away from your generic D&D stuff (mostly) because a lot of this art is supposed to be, kinda, street life. Granted there is some basic fantasy wonk stuck in there, particularly in some of the color plates, but that's more of a tip of the hat to elfland than anything else.

They're not all winners.

FrankT:

The really final portion of Tir Tairngire is the map. But before that is a section called “Open Conference” which is like a meandering off-topic thread that goes on for 11 pages. It's nominally divided into two different chat room captures, but if you'd claimed it was a single thread on an off topic board, I wouldn't have batted an eye. It was fun reading it at the time, sifting through it for metaplot clues. Looking back on it with older eyes, the metaplots they were hinting at were kind of lame. Mostly it was just an eleven page ad for Earthdawn. The big bad mystery of the immortal Elves ended up being meaningless because none of the characters were going to die of old age before the setting imploded.


Decoding the conversations at the end of Tir Tairngire is kind of a let down, to be honest.

AncientH:

These ending free-for-alls were not common in SR books; in fact they're most prevalent here and in Aztlan, another book that Nigel D. Findley wrote. The idea I guess is to reflect on the material and give any final revelations that you might have. So we get the manacycle theory of magic, the whole introduction to the Fourth World...

Both sort of based on Theosophy, look it up.

...and yeah, the sort of hints-and-possible-tie-ins to Earthdawn that some people love and some people hate.

FrankT:

Tir na nOg has 16 pages of game information at the end. We've touched on parts of it earlier in the review as it ties into various crazy crap they've ranted about elsewhere in the book. It's difficult to convey in words how much of a clusterfuck this whole thing is. We have extra totems that are just for specific flavors of non-Elven Irish Druid. This was before Shadowrun 4 brought standardization to mentor spirits, and these crazy things are all over the map. Some of these are straight incomprehensible. Boar gives you +1 service from a spirit you summoned for combat purposes. Does that mean that you go from zero to one service if you fucking fail the summoning roll? I don't know! And neither does anyone else! But really, I think this is all that really needs to be said:

Disadvantages: Bull has no disadvantages in terms of game statistics.

That entry continues for another whole paragraph. Fuck this book.

AncientH:

Right, so in this section are the Elven Path magic guidelines, including some for NPCs only, and the long and the short is that each of these is individually better than pretty much any other option. It uses the SRII and Grimoire II rules, but is so full of exceptions it isn't even funny. So for example, your starting Way of the Warrior phyical adept starts off as a Grade 0 Initiate with a Magic rating of 8, while everybody else starts off as a non-initiate with Magic 6, and only suffer one-half Essence loss from cyberware "directly related to their Path," whatever the fuck that means. Path of the Bard followers get to learn critter powers of Compulsion and Influence, Druids get to use ley lines and make ogam stones, Stewards don't get much but gain bonuses from standing near large fires.


Stewards suck. Some of them literally. Some of them swallow.

Ogam stones come in two flavors: one-die power foci that can be bonded for 1 Karma and allow the Elf Druids to blackmail you, and stacked power/spirit foci that are cheaper to bond. Because fuck you.

Followers each get to summon elementals (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), but because of Fuck You, Elves they can each also summon a type of nature spirit, which is normally restricted to shamans. This is especially weird because Bards get to summon Spirits of the Great Fiery Firmament - did I mention that the elemental equivalences here were all jacked up? - a unique critter created for this book.

We get rules for the Veil (shitty rules, but rules) and ley lines, which are pretty boring and probably should have consisted of a pointer to the druid rules in Grimoire II, and the Doneiann Draoidheil, which are magic fuck-you storms that range from "Oh shit, it's raining" to "No one cares, but these NPCs you can't play can gather power from them to fuck you up." Later on this would be retconned into manastorms where you could be automagically petrified if you forget your umbrella, but that would be in Target: Awakened Lands.

They also tell us the Wild Hunt fucks about in Tir na nOg.

FrankT:

Tir na nOg has a couple of pages dedicated to telling you which creatures from the basic book and Paranormal Animals of North America are in Tir na nOg. Bizarrely, most of them are on the island despite that making no
damn sense. Gets extra points for confusing the Bean Sidhe and the Banshee, which are actually two different creatures (because go fuck yourself) but referred to interchangably within a single paragraph in this fucking book.

AncientH:

One thing you don't notice is that these guys, who went to such trouble to pick out certain critters as "Faerie" critters in Paranormal Animals of Europe, kind of fall down on the job here. I mean, they mention a bunch of 'em, but it's not like you have sprites setting up a faerie circle outside Dublin or anything.

Arms & Equipment we've talked about a little bit, mostly the bizarre cyberware option and the shitty sniper rifles. The important thing they tell us is that the local arms manufacturer charges between 150% and 800% markup for their goods, because they have a local monopoly and that's fucking that. Which sucks, but what are you going to do about it? Likewise, deckers are hosed because local prices are (20 + 1d6) x 100% for cyberdecks, and you can't bring cyberdecks into the country. Honestly, it's cheaper to build your own.

There's a guide to Street Slang, and another of Elliptical Thinking ("If that cat had been a dog, it'd be a dead duck."), which are flavorful, and partially stolen from The London Sourcebook.

And those are the books. I won't say they weren't ever used, because there are published adventures that used both Tirs to an extant - Celtic Double Cross in particular is an example of how shitty an idea it is to actually adventure in Tir na nOg, because they take all your toys away and you're left practically naked except for your skills and your wits against what would be overwhelming GMPC dicks except that the writers were incompetent when handing out stats.

Ah, those are familiar names.

I think if you had to look at these today, Tir Tairngire has aged moderately better. Yes, it doesn't really make a lot of sense, but it's not the worst location book of the era, the basic idea of an elf-nation in a cyberpunk future holds a moderate appeal, and if you don't look at the details too closely it kinda sorta works...plus, the lack of stats gives it a kind of timeless quality. Tir na nOg is almost 20 pages longer, but it feels padded in a way that Tir Tairngire doesn't, and it contains what are probably some of the most egregiously unfair rules in the game. I mean, you can sort of see why the developers in the early 90s didn't want people cutting each other to power their spells (though ghost knows White Wolf was getting away with it), but the elf-wank of the Path magicians was ludicrous master-race stuff even by the standards of the day.

Which is a long way to say, you can sort of see where the later backlash against the Tirs came from - but it was mostly misplaced. The Path magic, for example, was pretty much cleaned up in Magic in the Shadows, but the nations themselves were hardly touched in most of 2nd through 4th edition. Yes, yes, Shadows of... had entries, and even then most of the political rebellion was aimed more or less directly at the IEs rather than address any of the serious flaws in the history or depiction of each nation.

So, those are the elf-books for Shadowrun.

[TheFlatline]

Good review. I dig the SR reviews, they're a pretty good nostalgia trip for me.

Tangential question that's probably been asked before, but what would you say was your favorite SR source book? And since I'm questioning like this, what do you think is the highest quality (in terms of writing and avoiding herp-derp) source book? Let's cap it at 3rd edition and earlier for giggles.

[Username17]

The best Shadowrun books were Awakenings and Shadowtech. Man and Machine and Magic in the Shadows covered all the rules of those books for 3rd edition and they did it better. Street Magic and Augmentation covered that rules ground for 4th edition and did it a lot better. But Shadowtech and Awakenings expanded what the game was about in a way that was eye opening. They were transgressive and transformative - in a good way.

Sure, the entire concept of Body Index was straight fucked, and even keeping track of bioware essence and cyberware essence separately (as we do in SR4) is an unnecessary complication. But Street Samurai needed more toys and it was power creep people could accept. It wasn't the power creep we deserved, but it was what we could get.

Awakenings is full of a bunch of really weird shit. Psychics are deliberately and specifically underpowered, and that's fucked up. But Voodoo was the first expansion tradition that actually expanded things. Tir na nOg has five different elvish magical paths plus non-elvish Druids and they are all just basically Shamans with some bullshit bonuses and special doohickeys that make us feel bad. Houngans were legitimately different and distinct. And unlike Bug Shamans and Necromancers, they were actually allowed for players to use and had complete and usable rules.

-Username17

[TheNotoriousAMP]

FrankT:

I think they got writeups here because the map that came with the big blue book for Shadowrun 1st edition had already committed itself to having dots on the map for both of them. That map made some weird decisions, and Shadowrun has to one degree or another been paying for it every since. Some of the borders are just in strange places, following interstate highways rather than geographical features or historical administrative borders. Some of the borders are in really strange places, following nothing at all that anyone has ever been able to determine.

The whole interstate highway thing may actually be one of the more accidentally intelligent things the writers did. Borders are often chosen to cut lines of communication. A river is an easy way to divide my land and your land, but when rivers are the main way to transport things, not having a river running from your land into my land is a great way from preventing you from easily transporting invading forces and supplies into my home. With the elves basically wanting to live in isolation and in defense against everyone else, stopping the flow of information and objects (highways) is actually kind of a smart idea. Most geographical administrations tend to be accidents of history to begin with and most people just go along with it. In normal times, yeah people like their boundaries because the economy is designed around them as well as their local networks and social set up. But in periods of complete collapse (Europe 1945) boundaries can get pretty fluid. The whole changing nation things in principle is kind of forgiveable, its just so laughably badly done.

But yeah, Shadowrun does suffer badly from a lack of retconning stupidity at times. And they don't seem to have gotten any better at understanding how history works, considering War is almost as bad as the original Eurowar "Bombers outta nowhere, shocking swerve!" crap. I mean, the whole elf thing could work if it was done in alliance with corporations who sought to gain something out of it, sort of like rival countries in Africa sponsoring independence movements to mess with their neighbors. The elves could then maybe betray the corps and through that gain their independence. But yeah, as written Shadowrun canon is basically "elvez are totally cool guyz and win at, like, everything". But its hardly the only rpg to feature the sin of elf wankery.

[Ancient History]

I'll break with Frank on this one; the two best Shadowrun books were Sprawl Sites and Shadowtech.