The Gaming Den

Why was the review to this OSSR so LONG?...It seemed like it really just went on and on for several pages, and became less and less interesting in its detail. That said, I appreciate the detail of discussion that went into this, and good to have reviewers who have this deep knowledge and understanding that you guys do. After awhile, it got harder and harder to simply not just "skim" things, and I'm one who generally likes to read entire posts through.

Maybe it got less interesting, as the hate on the elves didn't really intensify per each chapter (kinda seemed to be at a "eh" level after awhile)? Even ends with the implication by AncientHistory that these elves "weren't so bad", despite how terrabad of Mary sues they be?

Maybe because this is actually a 2 OSSR in 1 thread deal?

Aryxbez wrote:Even ends with the implication by AncientHistory that these elves "weren't so bad", despite how terrabad of Mary sues they be?

Of course! AH built his career on his reputation in the SR community on immortals' shenanigans. He owes them

The biggest and most damning problem with the immortal elves is that ultimately none of this shit really mattered. People bitched and yelled because they were unkillable big penis NPCs, and while that was insulting, it didn't actually matter. Damien Knight makes more in a day than Lugh Surehand made during the entire run of the setting. Ultimately the little kingdoms the elves fought over were worth less than any one arcology complex belonging to any of the megacorps. The villains they were fighting a shadow war with might have been capital-E Evil, but they weren't as big a global problem as tribal vendettas in Africa or border disagreements in Eastern Europe.

People complained about how big and unstoppable the immortals were, but the actual problem was the opposite. They were simply small potatoes bullshit that happened to have plot immunity for no adequately explained reason. Yes, it was infuriating that you arbitrarily weren't allowed to beat them, and yes it was crazy and insane that they arbitrarily got to win all their wars against massively superior opposition and never face reprisals from their enemies who had nuclear weapons and long range bombers - but they never did anything with these massive powers. They conquered Ulster and Yreka. Really. All of that together isn't a major city one way or the other. The Aztlan conquest of San Diego is a bigger deal in every possible conceivable way. San Diego is by itself more people, power, and wealth than everything the Elves ever got.

Despite the conspiratorial tones and the rants about how uber the elves were, all this shit was ridiculously small scale by the standards of Shadowrun. Now to an extent, that's probably why it pissed people off so much. Taking over something like "The UCAS" or even "The CalFree State" was probably out of the question for a street shaman turned shadowrunner. But you could imagine taking over a city. You might become the "Boss of Houston" or the "Emperor of San Francisco" or something. So bite sized bullshit countries that were the size of Houston or Minneapolis were probably about the level that player characters should have been allowed to aspire to defeat. And yet, when it came to writing up these countries, the devs decided to go the other way and say you weren't allowed to win because go fuck yourself.

It pissed people off. And it pissed people off more than it should have. Honestly, nothing was stopping you from taking over Sioux or even the Pueblo Corporate Council, and that would have been a comparable prize.

-Username17

Immortal Elves started out bullshit, but the problem was that the bullshit was carried on and on, and the next generation of writers just had this feud with them. Immortal Elves in Tir Tairngire are kind of annoying in hindsight, but at the time they were cool and mysterious; IEs in Tir na nOg are almost absent but MORE annoying because they trampled all over ancient Irish history to make their bullshit elven isle.

[/edit]And it was so long because we were doing two books at once, with all the comparison and contrast and side-rants that implies.

Thank you both for doing these reviews. I always smile when I see a new one up.

FrankTrollman wrote:Despite the conspiratorial tones and the rants about how uber the elves were, all this shit was ridiculously small scale by the standards of Shadowrun. Now to an extent, that's probably why it pissed people off so much.

I think that SR gamemasters and players are just as bad with scaling as SR authors are. I rarely heard or read people complaining about the small size of Tir Tairngire or Tir na nOg (I rather was the guy pointing at it, and don't get me started on Asamondo!). In most games, the Tir border control thing was played straight, the Tir elves special operations squad was an ubiquitous staple, even far away from Seattle, and few if any give it a second thought.

Tir Tairngire association with immortal elves is by itself insignificant. Remove Oregon, and they would have played the exact same role story-wise, with the same magical powers and squads of elven ninjas. Ehran's role in books and adventures was exactly the same when he was an Oregon prince and when he sat on the board of the Dunkelzahn Institute. The other prince, once removed by the uprising, still have those unlimited supply of paladins "that left with them".

The immortal elves problem, down to a basic level, it that they break about every premise of the cyberpunk genre. They're so powerful they don't submit to megacorporations, they don't need shadowrunners to do their stuff (that is, unless the author introduce a made-up "tradition" to justify it). They can't be the employer, they can't be defeated as opponent. Heck, they don't even get an interest in corporate business, so that to have them actually doing something, they had to introduce a "the world at risk" metaplot which, and I think it all boils down to that, made every other plot and character insignificant story-wise.

If I was a 4th edition-hater, I'd probably blame them for inventing wi-fi as well.

Nath wrote:Heck, they don't even get an interest in corporate business, so that to have them actually doing something, they had to introduce a "the world at risk" metaplot which, and I think it all boils down to that, made every other plot and character insignificant story-wise.

"World at risk" metaplots were one of the many reasons that SR ceased to appeal to me. The Universal Brotherhood metaplot worked as it a) was operating in the background from the publication of the Big Blue Book (1989) and b) took six years of real-world time (Bug City was published in 1995), and five years of in-game time to resolve.

Flash forward to late 2nd edition and into 3rd and 4th editions and focus began to drift. Over the course of 15 or so years there was a mob war, the fall of Fuchi, the Renraku Arcology, SURGE, Crash 2.0, technomancers, drug wars, Aztlan v. Amazonia... The SR universe became the role-playing equivalent of the Marvel Universe with massive body counts and an annual "event" that was more-or-less resolved within the time span of 365 days rather than combining smaller stories with long-running events that came to a natural conclusion after years of development.

Well, the Seattle Mob War hardly qualifies as a "World-at-risk" plot. The war between Aztlan and Amazonia also never was presented as such (actually, the stakes appeared to be so minor that it holds for maybe two or three books before being completely overshadowed by other, bigger events).

Meanwhile, the Universal Brotherhood kinda ended in the W-A-R league with Burning Bright (stopping a ritual with a nuke, tens of thousand killed in Chicago downtown, really?).

The Renraku arcology, Crash 2.0 and technomancers' emergence do just as well, but there are all part of a metaplot that was originally seeded in Seattle Sourcebook (that is, earlier than the very first mention of the Universal Brotherhood). It really started getting coverage with Virtual Realities and Black Madonna, which makes it at least like eleven or twelve years in the making, and even more if you extend it to the Geneva occupation in Feral Citie and the Las Vegas riot in The Twilight Horizon.

The Universal Brotherhood metaplot stands out mostly as people divide plots into two categories labeled "Universal Brotherhood" and "Not Universal Brotherhood". This probably has to do with both quality and nostalgia, so it's unlikely any other plot will ever compare favorably.

Maybe its because I'm younger, and thus have played a specific game for les time, but drawn out metaplots really annoy me. You're basically telling someone "there is delicious candy here, but you can't touch it for the next decade or so". Its one of the reasons why I like Deadlands reloaded, it cuts the chase and just lets you freaking play with the story instead of waiting for the world to change. Plus, the long drawn out meta stuff tends to rely on unkillable npc's (that fucking clown) as well as not letting players interfere with the writer's preferred fanfiction. They don't work without railroading.

I'd much rather have a situation where the people basically say: here's what people are trying to do, now what the hell are you going to do to stop them? You can then update that, with their plots getting more powerful, so people who are joining the game later still have stuff to do and longer term players who maybe looked the other way or wanted to concentrate on other stuff now have an even bigger threat to deal with.

The drawn out secrets thing works soo much better in novels than what is supposed to be interactive fiction.

My only direct experience with IE's is Harlequin in Shadowrun Returns. He was all right, although I could have done with him delivering more personal asskicking if he was going to clog up one of my party slots for the final mission. However, I can easily imagine another writer making him really irritating.

I think the main reason people hate IE's and the like is that they're inviolate. So the players can't do anything about things that annoy them, causing them to really resent characters that would otherwise be only mildly irritating. There's very little functional difference between "too difficult to beat" and "invincible", but the second one really pisses people off.

Trust me, Harlequin's behavior in SR Returns is definitely an exception that proves the rule scenario. He's only relatively tolerable in that game because of the following:

1. He is nicer to you than the other penis extension NPCs present at that point of the game. He acts as the Good Cop to James Telestrian's "But Thou Must" spewing Bad Cop.

2. He actively helps you in a mission but his stats are obviously and demonstrably weaker than a well-built PC at that point in the game.

Both of those things run contrary to the "normal" Immortal Elf way of doing business in Shadowrun history. A closer approximation of IE operating procedure would have been if Harlequin wasn't in the game at all and instead James Telestrian elected to go on the mission himself and proceeded to be individually way more bad ass than you could ever hope to be.

Whipstitch wrote:Trust me, Harlequin's behavior in SR Returns is definitely an exception that proves the rule scenario. He's only relatively tolerable in that game because of the following:

1. He is nicer to you than the other penis extension NPCs present at that point of the game. He acts as the Good Cop to James Telestrian's "But Thou Must" spewing Bad Cop.

2. He actively helps you in a mission but his stats are obviously and demonstrably weaker than a well-built PC at that point in the game.

Both of those things run contrary to the "normal" Immortal Elf way of doing business in Shadowrun history. A closer approximation of IE operating procedure would have been if Harlequin wasn't in the game at all and instead James Telestrian elected to go on the mission himself and proceeded to be individually way more bad ass than you could ever hope to be.

Agreed, and I'm kind of disappointed the whole hacker/telestrian's daughter thing from the fiction part of the special edition didn't come more into play, would have been sweet to see some more options regarding how we approached the bastard.

That being said, Harlequin being underpowered was actually kind of disappointing to me. It kind of robbed the final fight of that "big fight" feel, biggest guns in the land putting the wrath of man into the critters. I'm not saying I wanted normal "fuck you I'm awesome and you're not" Harley, but something nearer to parity with your own character would have set a better tone. It kind of made me question why I was taking orders from people whose asses I could kick.

There's a benefit to drawn-out metaplot, when it's done correctly. It integrates into the setting regular small changes, and it sets up big changes that can lead to some terrific opportunities - in Shadowrun, you had the whole insect spirit thing, which for years was sort of a low-level background thing, and then you had Universal Brotherhood with the big reveal - and that led directly to Bug City, which was a huge change, but a cool one. Chicago after the Cermak Blast was unquestionably a more interesting setting than Chicago before that; and while Bug City might have been a little weird and nuts, it was still a playground for gamemasters. I'd like to have made more of it in Feral Cities, but we were fighting the format there.

The problem is when you have one big metaplot event feeding into the next, which can lead to fatigue and untouchable GM-NPCs. It's the kinda crap which leads to event fatigue in comic books these days, particularly if the smaller developments get wiped out or overwritten, which is a continual problem in sharecropper universes anyway. When we did Ghost Cartels, what I wanted to go for was a sort of street-level globetrotting adventure - the PCs get caught up in the big events, but they're still players - they have influence on what is going on, their actions have effects, the NPCs, no matter how badass, can die. That's also what we wanted for Harlequin's Gambit, but the whole Artifacts plot was a bit of a shambles from the beginning...and I think the fault for that lies, more or less, in the original Harlequin adventure much more than than either of the Tir books or Dragons of the Sixth World.

Because Harlequin introduced the idea that these immortal powers, whatever their individual capabilities, had a game with rules and scored points by using proxies - in this case, Shadowrunners. And by itself this is a great conceit when used once. There are a lot of chessmasters in fiction, and for the length of a single (and, less us add, railroady as hell) campaign it's kinda cool to figure out that you're the pieces being shuffled across the board between two powerful elves...and, of course, then be able to use that as leverage to skew the game, blackmail Harlequin for more money, figure out what the fuck is going on, etc. And if your players don't want to do that? Well, fuck, it's a sufficiently zany adventure that it can be played straight and a good time is still had by all. But it got kinda ridiculous how often the whole "PCs are pawns of IEs/GDs" thing became, just like it was kinda silly how often they started driving the metaplot from the front instead of the occasional behind-the-scenes gig. I mean, in Harlequin and Harlequin's Back, you'll notice that it is very rare that the PCs are ever within firearm range of Harlequin, and I really think that was on purpose. Because Harlequin was part of the background and backdrop of the adventure, more than a straight Mr. Johnson type; the adventures are focused primarily on the PCs and their actions and so it should be.

Without meta your setting never changes. Without SR meta we'd still be playing in the 2050's with cyberdecks the size of a briefcase. And that'd be just silly.

Good meta also introduces more options to the players over time too. If Emergence from 4th came out at the tail end of 3rd or if Technomancers weren't in the core 4th ed book, they would have been a great metaplot development (I still actually really love the meta and the fiction in Emergence, and I've used it as plot for SR3 era stories to great effect).

In fact, on the whole with the exception of IEs and sucking magic cock and brown elf nipples, I have to say SR's metaplot is one of the better ones out there. Yes, it fell to shit in 4th ed with CGL's debacle (which is where I consider SR's plot to have ended more or less), but before that more often than not I enjoyed the plot that was going on.

That might be why I don't have much tolerance for IEs. A large part of the rest of the meta actually was interesting and engaging and resulted in shit that I, as a street level shadowrunner, would encounter ripples of without having to be directly hired by the Mary Sue at the center of the metaplot.

Now. While I'll hold SR up as a generally good example of game meta, I will point to and roast for eternity White Wolf's meta. Especially Vampire's meta, but since they broke their own rules and jumbled the shit out of the settings (seriously, the "end" of Wraith is a battle over the waking up of an elder vampire, waged by science mages.) it's all one clusterfuck of horrible, horrible meta.

In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find worse meta than WoD. When they came up with nWoD and said they would be toning down the meta, I rejoiced. I didn't realize though that they confused setting with meta.

For all of the problems with the system, I feel that Deadlands Reloaded actually finds the best approach to meta I have ever seen. Rather than releasing adventures, which because you release them over a period of time you need a certain ending to keep going, they basically release campaign books. The GM needs to do more work filling in some of the stuff, but they make sure that the players start by experiencing the meta subtly, just like in Universal Brotherhood and by the time they are high level a while later, they are in the driver's seat and get to decide the fate of the setting. The increasing amount of player choice as their power increases is super cool and sets quite a good atmosphere. There is the trade off that there is more time between the release of meta plots, but the campaigns are meant to take at least half a year anyway or more, so it blends well.

That being said, they do have the advantage of the fact that they were so bad about answering questions in Deadlands Classic, so there is a ton of meta for them to pick up on and give players a chance to answer, but its still a system I would pick for a new game starting up. Just think about how much better W-a-r would have been had the runners gotten a chance to start off running missions and then really get to impact who they wanted to win as time went on. Hell, they could have turned it into a community based event, give about a year for players to post how their campaign ended and who won (Amazonia or Aztlan) and then let that impact their metaplot as it entered into 5th edition.

As bad as oWoD meta is (and it is very bad), it's still better than having the plot not advance at all. See: nWoD. Having the world not move forward is at least as stifling as telling the players they can't change the way the world is moving forward. There's not much incentive to interact with the various mystery villages and cannibal cults in New World of Darkness, because none of them go anywhere. There's no metaplot and nothing ever moves forward, so you know there's never going to be a payoff for anything. It's kind of terrible. There's no incentive to read a book like Midnight Roads because it doesn't do anything or interact with anything.

Shadowrun mostly got metaplot right in the nineties. Borders move. Corporations and nations rise and fall. Elections happen. Powerful people die or get forced out of public life due to scandal. Makes the world feel like it's moving, like history is happening. If there was one big problem it was that too often we are presented with black and white moralities. Aztlan is "bad" because blood magic is "bad" because killing (or even wounding) animals for power is "bad." You know what? That's stupid. We kill things for power all the fucking time and it's not a big deal. The whole thing comes off as immature. Also, kind of uncomfortably racist, considering that most of the presented "villain" groups had defined ethnic makeups and skin tones.


The power of hot dogs!

Many of the twists and turns were actually retarded. I'll go on record saying that I hated the Universal Brotherhood plotline because it was dumb. The writeup of Wasp spirits claimed that they liked to fly around the outside of tall buildings in plain fucking view of the hundred thousand residents of Chicago who can see astral shit. The bug spirits had no fucking way to infiltrate a major city. The ease with which the player characters discover the nest is so at odds with the extent of the conspiracy that the whole thing seemed insane. It seemed ridiculous to me when I played through it when I was eleven years old and it hasn't gotten any less ridiculous.

Looking back on it, the anti-Scientology message is clever and well crafted, but the big reveal is too black and white and the villains insufficiently subtle to have successfully pulled off any of the crap they are supposed to have done.

Anyway, when things really went off the deep end was 2003. And for that I think we can blame Rob and Peter. The old guard was completely out of the loop and we had FanPro people taking over. Literally inmates running the asylum as promoted fanboys were now in charge of the line and responsible for sanity checking their own work. And they started doing... random crazy things. I don't think there's any other way to describe Year of the Comet or Dragons of the Sixth World. They are books full of random crazy things that don't make sense on their own or within the context of Shadowrun's future history.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Anyway, when things really went off the deep end was 2003. And for that I think we can blame Rob and Peter. The old guard was completely out of the loop and we had FanPro people taking over. Literally inmates running the asylum as promoted fanboys were now in charge of the line and responsible for sanity checking their own work. And they started doing... random crazy things. I don't think there's any other way to describe Year of the Comet or Dragons of the Sixth World. They are books full of random crazy things that don't make sense on their own or within the context of Shadowrun's future history.

Year of the Comet was released in 2001. It was I think the last book Michael Mulvihill worked on, though it wasn't finished when FASA shut down, and Rob Boyle replaced him as line developer once FanPro LLC took over.

Dragons of the Sixth World did come out in 2003, and is the first book who involved both Boyle along with Peter Taylor, Lars Blumenstein and Tobias Wolter for the German dragons (Shadows of Europe had started earlier, but was still in the work at that point). The last "old big name" on-board was Steve Kenson, who wrote DotSW Draco Foundation, Ghostwalker and Hualpa chapters, and got additional credit for Shadows of Europe Tir na nOg chapter.

Good point. I actually have the FanPro version of Year of the Comet which says it was published in 2003, but the FASA version came out in 2001. There was a clusterfuck involving the collapse of FASA and the transfer of publishing rights to FanPro. Not unlike the catastrofuck that was the collapse of FanPro and transfer of rights to Catalyst. So move back the time table to 2001. Not the nineties is my point.

Anyway, what the whole Universal Brotherhood plotline needed to make any sense is two things, only one of which it ever got. The first was for some way for some of the transformed people to make public appearances, which happened with the "good merges" (although it didn't become a thing that could statistically happen in the rules until 4th edition). The second was a staging ground for their hybrid army that wasn't plainly visible to people walking down the fucking street in large cities all over the world.

It wouldn't have been hard. Ascension candidates could have been sent to a farm to unlock their inner potential away from the distractions of the city. And there could be a compound on that farm that was hidden from view from the god damn road and they could put their growing army of hive soldiers there. It would have been like one or two more steps in the original UB mission and it would have made everything so much less stupid.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Not the nineties is my point.

Well, mine was that the Mulvihill-Kenson era already differed a lot from Dowd-Findley. For the sake of clarification, I consider the followings:

Dowd-Findley era = 1989-1995 (Shadowrun 1st edition - Bug City/Aztlan)
Mulvihill-Kenson era = 1995-2001 (Virtual Realities - Year of the Comet/Shadows of North America)
Boyle-Kenson era = 2001-2003 (Year of the Comet/Shadows of North America - Dragons of the Sixth World)
Boyle-Taylor era = 2003-2009 (Dragons of the Sixth World - Corporate Guide)
Hardy era = 2009 - nowadays (Corporate Guide - Shadowrun 5th edition)

Obviously, you can argue over the minutia of who did what in which book, but it gives a good indication. Especially the transition between Michael Mulvihill and Rob Boyle, who were both credited for the development of books such as Corporate Download, Braiscan, Year of the Comet, Survival of the Fittest, Shadows of North America or Threats 2.

Not that it invalidates your "promoted fanboys" analysis of the Boyle-Taylor era. But with regards to the topic at hand, the Universal Brotherhood plot was over before Mulvihill took the lead, and much of his tenure was dedicated to ending Earthdawn legacy plots (everyone remember Dunkelzahn's death, but I keep a special place in my heart for Technobabel's last minute "BTW, that elve was totally not Leonardo da Vinci"). And though he thus published additional development for those plots, I suspect he did as quick as he could while still closing them down properly.

EDIT - Conflict of interest disclosure - I was myself a "promoted fanboy" for a short time. So of course I love the early Boyle-Taylor era. It didn't last long (Shadows of Europe, Shadows of Asia, plus some suggestions for SOTA:2064) but for that short time I got to run SR corporate affairs just the way I liked.

My goodness, people are still discussing this gaming world so passionately so many years later? and nearly all the strongest passion (positive and negative) is still about the original sourcebooks? I don't know if Nigel Findley would have been elated or disappointed.

There are so many factual errors in this review, both real-world and SR, that I am not really sure where to begin. Are you working from a different draft? In case it makes a difference, I am using the 1993 book edition, not the pdf.

For now, maybe I will just address one of those errors, because it is the foundation of most of the rest of the review: your ongoing assumption about the average age of Tir Tairngire's elves. From your opening post:

As we go through these books, one thing to keep in the back of your mind is the absolutely crushing timeline fail both countries operate under. The first officially recorded Elf birth is on January 13th, 2011. ... when the Elf Tribe was founded in 2029, that the oldest officially recognized Elf was 18, and that all the secret older Elves had to have been pretending to be younger than that. Just keep that in the back of your mind: when we go through the history and talk about the formation of the Elvish nations, that they were created by a population whose median age was something south of ten years old. So for all the ranting about ancient traditions and long lives and shit, really we're looking at something between Red Dawn and Lord of the Flies.

Frank, you are making a fundamental statistical mistake here. You have made the assumption that the median age for a non-random (and in fact deliberately selected) sample will be the same as for the worldwide population.

You are correct that worldwide, the median age of elves at the time the Sinsearach was founded is probably around 9 or 10 (depending on exact population kinks).

However, you assume that the same median age must apply to Tir Tairngire. In fact you insist on it, to the point that even when the book evidence repeatedly demonstrates that the median starting Sineareach age is almost certainly somewhere close to 18 (and certainly north of 16, the NAN age of majority), you insist the book made the mistake.

From the sourcebook (and note that this is after Tir Tairngire was officially declared a country on May 1, 2035):

The founders initially established the Tir's age of majority at 16, a few years younger than the average age of most elves at the time. The Council officially raised the age of majority to 17 in 2056, and 18 in 2052. (p.55)

For real-world comparison purposes, 36.9% of the U.S. Marine Corps is between ages 18-22. Another 46% are between ages 23-30. (You can enlist in the U.S. Army at age 17 with parental permission.) A newly commissioned lieutenant is around 21-22 years old (having graduated ROTC with a university degree). Promotion to captain usually happens after 4 years.

Equally for real-world comparison purposes, every single western nation allows people to marry at age 16. Four U.S. states allow marriage at age 14. One allows it at age 13, and another allows it at age 12. This is the law in a country where the social net does not support teen marriage.

Elves were deliberately selected to come to Tir Tairngire in two ways. The most commonly cited selection is Sean Laverty's and Aithne Oakforest's worldwide invitations to exceptional elves. (The picture on p.27 shows a recruitment in London, England -- see the Union Jack and Big Ben?)

The other form of selection was the ability to come to an obscure and mostly uninhabited part of the Pacific west coast. This takes travel money and startup money, as well as not being human "Anglo". Core SR repeatedly demonstrates that the average economics for elves is above the average economics for other races. Real world statistics additionally demonstrate that on average, older people have more money than younger people. Anyone (elf or otherwise) who was not capable of personal and financial independence at the time of the "clarion call" could only have made the journey with parents who had the financial means themselves.

I might get back to the other points later. If I do, I will have to start a new thread and link it here.

Fuck me. How the hell did you find your way here?

For fuck's sake.

It's those damn Google Alerts, I'll bet.

Talia Invierno wrote:From the sourcebook (and note that this is after Tir Tairngire was officially declared a country on May 1, 2035):

The founders initially established the Tir's age of majority at 16, a few years younger than the average age of most elves at the time. The Council officially raised the age of majority to 17 in 2056, and 18 in 2052. (p.55)

Wait, wait, wait:

Year	Age of majority in Tir Tairngire
2035	16
2052	18
2056	17

If the age of majority was 18 in 2052, how is changing it to 17 in 2056 raising it?