Neo-Anarchism and friends: Questions about the Sixth World

[Stahlseele]

OK, here goes:
25. HMHVV is a magical Sickness. Does Mana-Static/Background count have any kind of influence on it at all? If so, doing a quick suborbital(read through the space -12 void) would be an easy cure to infections, as long as it's not yet completed transformation.

[Libertad]

26. What is the current political status of the Vatican? What forms of magic do they consider unholy (I can't see them approving of Aztechnology blood magic)?

27. How industrialized are the Native American Nations? I know that the Pueblo Corporate Council is the most industrialized thanks to Los Angeles and their corporate structure, but what about the rest of them?

28. The Sixth World Almanac mentioned that Russia is re-adopting the term "Soviet" into their government agencies, such as the Nation Soviet Reconstruction and Supreme Soviet Council. Is Russia trying to go back to their Cold War glory days? If so, how do the megacorps feel about this?

29. Some of the later Shadowrun products don't have much in the way of detailed reviews. How would you rate the Corporate Guide, and Attitude products?

[Kot]

@26: As far as I remember, they still are 'the Holy City' and have enough autonomy. The church has approved magic per se, as a 'gift from god', but I bet things like 'death magic' (for now the only blood magic besides self-sacrifice), toxic and insect traditions are considered unholy. 'Holy' magic is a christian magical tradition, the 'officia' church tradition.

@29: Bad, and Very Bad.

[Blade]

26. The official stance of the Vatican on magic. As for blood magic, you have to keep in mind that Catholics litteraly drink the blood of the Christ, so I guess they aren't that opposed to the idea of blood magic. Though I doubt they approve of "pagan" forms of Blood Magic.

27. Depends on the Nation. Some are back no nature types with little industry while other are as much industrialized, if not more, than the UCAS.

28. It's complicated. In the first edition of Shadowrun, Russia was somehow still USSR. And to most (American) writers, Russia only use in a plot is as Cold War USSR.

29. Corporate Guide isn't too bad for general information. It gives a good overview of the different corporations and their style. The problem is in the details: there have been some "retcons" due to writers not doing their research, there are even conflicting informations in different chapters, and in most cases it doesn't go as far as it should (for example, there is nearly nothing new about Horizon).

The best way to sum up what I think of Attitude is to break it down into the good, the correct, the bad and the ugly:

-The good: A few fun/interesting ideas scattered in some chapters. About one good idea per chapter. The accessories in the gear chapter are nice.

- The correct: The music scene has no factual error. It forgets to mention many things that were in previous books, but the list of music celebrities show that at least the writers did a little bit of research. The sport section is in line with what was in the previous books, it could have added some "underground sports" but it's still ok.

- The bad: Most of the book is bland and unimaginative. It shows no direction and no vision. It seems like most writers wrote about the 2010s with magic and cyber instead of the (post)-cyberpunk 2070s.

- The Ugly: Nothing about legit Simsense (it seems like the writers don't know that it exists). Completely WTF chapters ("how to live like a hobo in 2011 with an absurd twist ending (and half a page footwear fetish)", "you can do cool things with Edge I guess.").

[Ancient History]

Some of the conflicting information is because I pulled my drafts for Corporate Guide, and they had to fill it in quickly. Some of it is just because Jason wrote some complete crap and stuck it in there, and wouldn't take it out even after it was pointed out in great detail why it was complete crap.

[Username17]

25. This is going to be a rant!

First of all, we have to talk about what a virus is. A virus is an incomplete lifeform that is able to perform basic life functions like growing and reproducing only by hijacking the cellular machinery of a more traditional organism. What exactly a virus is made of and what it needs varies tremendously from one virus to another. HIV doesn't have any DNA and uses reverse transcriptase to create its DNA anew in every cell it infects. Hepatitis D doesn't even have a way to infect cells and relies on other parasites to open a door it can hijack so that it can go about hijacking cells.

HMHVV as originally conceived is a virus that only affects the newly dead. That's actually totally plausible. There could be a whole bunch of those running around the real world right now, and since they apparently don't make people sick we don't give a crap. They hijack the cellular machinery of dead cells to reproduce themselves. When you think about, there probably are things like that in the world today. The thing that made HMHVV special was that it caused the corpse it was infecting to get up and turn into an unstoppable regenerating killing machine that would then go make more corpses to infect. That's awesome.

But then people started getting retarded. This was a long time ago, in Paranormal Animals of Europe and Target: UCAS I think. Thething they introduced were HMHVV variants that infected living organisms and made various monsters. Because apparently they thought the important part of HMHVV was that it made monsters, not that it could reproduce in (and required) a dead fucking host. And so you had fucking stupid shit like Loup Garoup and infectious Ghouls and Drop Bears and all kinds of fucking stupid crap that is in no way interesting scientifically, narratively, or game mechanically.

So right away, when you're talking about preventing infection by HMHVV, the original writeup would simply make that a non-issue. Simply being alive prevents you from being infected, because the virus only infects the recently dead. But if you're talking about the revisionist HMHVV variants that affect living people then... I don't fucking know. Krieger Strain never made any god damned sense, so asking what would happen if you poked at it with a stick is not something that is going to get a definitive answer.

The big issue is whether the viruses require magic to infect people, or whether they are simply mundane viruses that implant genetic code that happens to cause you to goblinize. If it's the latter, then going into space would simply delay your transformation into a Ghoul. If it's the former, going into space would cure you outright.

29.

Here's the short review of Attitude:

On sober reflection, I really don't know what the point of Attitude was supposed to be. It's seriously missing all the parts of Shadowbeat that make that book usable. There aren't pricelists or availabilities for any equipment used in making entertainment, no rules for performances, and not even a bare bones discussion of what you can do with the kinds of items you can already buy in the basic book. I am no closer having read the book to knowing what the authors think you can accomplish with a trid production "Kit", "Shop", or "Facility". I suspect they haven't thought about it at all.

For War! the rallying cry of the naysayers was and is "Where are the fucking maps!?" But for Attitude there isn't anything so cut and dried. But the book doesn't give a complete anything, so I guess the rally cry is a simple "Where are the absolutely anything?!" or perhaps "What the fuck?!"

There's a chapter dedicated to "The Music Scene" and much of it is itself dedicated to wanking about "Shadow Bands" where the band is a front for a Shadowrunner Team. Like Josie and the Pussycats or Jem. But for all the discussion, it doesn't actually give you any of the support you'd need to actually play such a campaign. It's not a set of rules or a menu of options, it's people talking about the subject.

And so on. And you can say the same thing about trideo, simsense, BTL, news, sports, or subcontracting - which are the other things that get poorly thought out and incredibly inadequate treatment in the book.

By the way, I'm calling it right now: the chapter "The Street Life" was written by David A. Hill Jr. I would be fairly surprised if I am wrong about that, even though that book has twelve authors and only one of them is Mr. Hill. The fact is that for th last several books, whether it is demonstrable plagiarism or writing from a pro-Nazi viewpoint, every time I have felt like the writing itself was trying to give me the bad touch I have subsequently found out that the segment was David A. Hill. So since that chapter in particular made me feel like I got brushed up against by the author's kinky sexual obsessions in a bad way - I'm guessing that was the writing of David Hill too.

Note: that chapter did in fact turn out to be written by David A. Hill. The longer version is here:

So in order to assist me in reviewing attitude, I felt it necessary to acquire and consume some of the local booze. So for the purposes of getting through this book, the use of medovina (Czech mead), and praděd (Czech chartreuse basically), and slivocice (Czech plum liquor), and good old fashioned cream liquor (like, for girls) have been employed. This is so that the reader of the review (you) and the reader of this truly phenomenally poorly put together book (me) can better enjoy ourselves.

Once again, I think it's pretty unfair to harp over much on the book's adherence to the established plots, characters, or events of Shadowrun's 22 year history. It's written by people who don't know what the fuck is going on and we can't expect them to spontaneously know all this information. I mean, we used to, but that was before. This is a new crew and they are basically writing “Ultimate Shadowrun” for better or for worse. As it happens: it is for worse. But it is worse because of how it stands and fails to stand on its own merits, not based on how it stacks up to what was previously canon.

So let's start in on what I find to be the most fundamental flaw in this book: basic writing mechanics. That shouldn't ever be something you even notice in a supposedly professionally produced piece of literature, but there it is. Specifically, let's talk about pronouns, and their friend's: implied clauses. You use a pronoun to stand in for a name or description when it is contextually obvious what you are talking about. So the declaration “Sally went to the store, she bought some milk.” is totally acceptable. We assume that the use of “she” refers to “Sally” because in context Sally is the feminine agent who was in a position to buy milk. On the flip side, the statement “Sally and Carla went to the store, she bought some milk” would be no good, because “she” could refer to Sally or Carla. Similarly “Some people were at the store, she bought some milk” is completely fucked, because “she” could refer to any fucking person at all.

So to give a solid example of how Attitude fails this very basic test of English grammar, here are the first sentences of several chapters. Since they are the first sentence in the chapter, there is by definition no context for them, and thus nothing they could be referring to.

We’ve all seen her.

Have we? I genuinely don't know, because as of this sentence I don't know who “she” is. In fact, while the rest of the paragraph is also about “her”, “she” is never named. The rest of the section just wanders off the topic, so I genuinely don't know if the character is supposed to be talking about a specific trid star or the generic portrayal of runners in media. It could be either or both or neither because the paragraph uses pronouns and doesn't use the context necessary to interpret those pronouns.

Did that get your attention?

No. “That” did not grab my attention, because there is nothing before it in the chapter. The sentence is apparently referring to a recruitment flier printed later on the page, but since it doesn't come immediately before the statement asking your reaction to it, both the statement and the flier are total non sequiturs.

Before any of you out there get offended, let me say that this is not for you.

Is “it”? I have no idea. I assume they mean “this post” or “this chapter” or something, but even then why not? The rest of the paragraph implies that “this” is geared towards someone new to Shadwrunning who may need a primer in the basics, but shouldn't that include Dev/Grrl? She's one of the “you” that the book is fictionally talking to, right? What the fuck?

I know what you’re thinking.

Do you? How? Since there hasn't been anything in the chapter yet, how could we possibly be thinking anything?

As you might be able to tell from the fact that I restricted myself to the first sentences of chapters from the first half of the book to gather these wall-bangers, the book is literally full of unimplied clauses and non-referential pronouns. These are things that with even casual editing should not ever happen, but they do constantly. It makes reading the book without liquid determination very difficult. And it's not just pronouns and clauses that don't refer to anything, often they refer to the wrong thing, which is even more painful.

The next thing to talk about is something that has become a worrying trend in Catalyst's new books: vast lists of people we don't care about filled with more information than I necessary for a list and nowhere near enough information to flesh those people out. Most emblematic of this is the chapter “The Right Crowd”. It is ten pages long and covers 7 people – 4 if you count the fact that the musicians gets separate fucking writeups in the music section. Each person is nominally written up by a different writer, but it reads like a one-man info-dump. Each person has an identically formatted bio box for them, which includes an “awards” section and that is obviously incomplete. Each of these major film makers or musicians or ball players or whatever (the chapter has no focus at all) is listed with one or two awards. So it's obviously not showing us only the biggest award, and it's also obviously not complete. The Director guy presumably has various “Best Pueblo Film” awards and shit, which are not listed.

The music section's writeups of a bunch of solo artists and bands is a better space value, getting 20 whole acts into 7 pages. Still, the lack of creativity here is stunning. Many of these are acts from Shadowrun's origins. Mercurial, Dark Angel, The Elementals, The Shadows, and DNA. While those are real Shadowrun music groups that even had adventures around them and shit, the fact remains that many of them broke up 10 or 20 years ago. For fuck's sake, Dark Angel got the bad touch from a vampire in 2053. The book has these lists of the members of fictional bands, but I honestly can't tell what the section is for. Really, I can't tell what a lot of things are in the book for. Many of the chapters seem to be piles of unedited ideas with no obvious tie-ins to anything that anyone would care about.

And yeah, remember how I said that there were 7 writeups of people in the “The Right Crowd” chapter but only 4 unique ones? There are three characters (Orxanne, Deirdre, and CrimeTime) who have complete multi-paragraph subsections in the book in two places. Why? Worse, characters writing shadowtalk on the two different entries have different and contradictory scuttlebutt on the different pages. RedAnya says that CrimeTime was an ex-BTL user and chip mule for the Vory on page 50, but when she writes the entire separate CrimeTime entry on page 141 she mentions two possible narratives, one in which he is a current BTL-head and the other in which he never was one! Basically the book has 12 different authors. And while sometimes you can take more than one person's work and combine them together to form Devastator (the most powerful of the evil Decepticons), in this case it mostly comes out like the literary stylings of Grimlock of the Dinobots. There isn't even a cursory attempt to get the different segments written by different people to hang together in a cogent narrative – and they don't.

But enough about systemic problems. Let's go chapter by chapter.

Introduction
The introduction is pretentious and incoherent, starting in with the diatribe about some nebulous female who may or may not be a specific in-world woman, I can't tell. The introduction tells you what is in the book, but it basically comes off as being an incoherent list – which at least isn't deceptive because the book is a big incoherent list. Still, a massive improvement over War!, in that it has a “what this book is about” section at all. But they still couldn't resist the urge to throw the reader into the deep end by having the first sections of the introduction be completely unreferenced

The Untethered Life
This chapter was originally done like a year ago by Ancient History, and still bears the chapter title he worked under. Nothing else remains of Bobby's work here, which is pretty much good because it means that it wasn't plagiarized like Corp Guide and 6WA were. However, that's about all I can say in the chapter's support, except for the fact that at least it doesn't go on very long. The entire chapter is a very sophomoric discussion about what kinds of people shadowrunners are. Apparently it breaks down into professionals laid low, lowlifes working their way up, and other people. Any time your arbitrary categories leaves the “other” category as the biggest, your classification system blows. There is a little bit on why people might want to be a shadowrunner, but it doesn't make the “contractor” analogy even once. Yes, it goes on and on about how you might make a big score and the work isn't steady and it doesn't ever make the contract work vs. permanent employment comparison. To say it is superficial is itself a condemnation which is overly superficial.

The Street Life
This chapter is completely incoherent. Completely. It's written as a transcript of one side of a conversation of one person giving newbie tips for a wannabe Shadowrunner. You don't get the other half of the conversation or a narrative about what the fuck is going on, so you're left wandering around the page for some time before you even figure out what was supposed to be being conveyed. The entire chapter has a “twist” that reads like something penned by M. Night Shyamalan. It's a deeply experimental piece, and the experiment is an unmitigated failure.

Special props go out to a half page rant with multiple voices talking about socks. Yes, really. But instead of being quirky and wise, this comes off as a weird foot fetish, because almost the same discussion appeared in War!. A discussion of proper foot ware in the jungle was one of the better parts of that misbegotten book (even though it was also out of place considering that Bogotá is not in the jungle), repeating the diatribe in an urban setting is just creepy. I'm starting to think one of the new crew likes feet a little too much.

It's Who You Know
This chapter doesn't know what it is doing. It actually comes out and tells you straight up at the beginning that it doesn't know why you wold want to read it and warns you that reading it might insult you. This is actually the case. The chapter gives advice for forming a Shadowrun team. This advice sounds kind of vaguely OK until you realize that Shadowrun is a cooperative storytelling game and thus having leaders and chains of command and shit is off the table. It's an ensemble cast with multiple co-equal protagonists, so all of this advice is totally game destroying. I guess when they say that this chapter is “not for you” they are referring to actual players of the actual game.

---


Independent Together
What is this chapter about? The “theme” is supposed to be groups that runners affiliate with or something. That's a pretty big theme, and honestly it looks like a chapter that was hacked together out of essays that didn't fit anywhere else. There's an essay about a bar chain that smugglers recruit out of, an essay about Runners who have political causes, and an IM transcript of people talking about net ghosts or something. The first bit is pretentious and over-long for what is essentially the writeup of a chain of bars you might or might not end up having a meet with a Johnson in, the second one is so superficial as to be a complete waste of space, and the third is exactly as exciting as you'd imagine reading an IM transcript (including headers) to be. I couldn't even make it through while drunk, so maybe there was a big reveal 2/3 of the way through – but I doubt it.

The Music Scene
I've complained about this chapter before: how large amounts of “the scene” are dedicated to canon musical acts that broke up and died off two decades ago. Musical styles have apparently just not advanced like at all. The entire list of stuff people listen to is just a pile of stuff from today and stuff from 2063. There hasn't been any innovation. But beyond that, stuff in this chapter is just wrong. I think it is best summed up when Snopes, the character whose entire schtick is that he knows the semi-obscure factoid that people are deafened by treble says: “Yeah, but I’m not going to buy my son cyberears because he’s gone deaf from too much bass.”

The Trid Scene
Now that we have a chapter about a “scene” right after another chapter abut a “scene” (and before a third chapter about a “scene”) we sort of have a theme. This chapter holds together with the previous chapter as well as paragraphs in the previous chapter hold together. Which is to say: not terribly well, but at least it feels like you are reading a book when you go from one to the other. Rather than starting by telling you anything about what trid is or how it is made or why you should care, the chapter starts with one of those unordered lists of vaguely related stuff that is too long to cover much ground, but too short to actually tell much about any specific list item. The first list contains discussions of theatrical releases and broadcasts in Trid and SimSense format, of which only two of those could charitably be considered part of the “Trid Scene”. Some of them are in special box text, but I have no idea why. Then there is a list of more of them that aren't finished yet which are I guess supposed to be plot hooks. Only then does it get to “the point”, which is apparently talking about how to be a Shadowrunner who also works in acting. Or maybe news. Then it talks about making entertainment, but the “small video studio” metaphor is so strong that they don't even appear to be talking about SimSense and Trid production – lots of discussion about “the camera” rather than evoking visceral responses in you SimSense Stars.

The BTL Scene
Poor neglected SimSense. You'd think that BTL would be part of a SimSense chapter since it's basically the same thing. But no, SimSense got jumbled jarringly and often incoherently into the previous chapter. BTL gets a chapter all its own. And this is actually the chapter where the book's “list of random stuff that all gts several paragraphs and wordcount consuming shadowtalk” is at its most jarring. Because there's a list of beetle dens from various places in the world. And there's a bunch of shadowtalk on each one! Dev/Grrl is a child and lives in North America, how the fuck does she have the play-by-play on a BTL club in London? The story on how she came by any of that information would be way more interesting than this actual chapter. All that being said, this is the best chapter in the book. The format is grating, no one acts in character, and there is a lot of padding. So much padding that they run out of wordcount before they get to some important stuff. But most of the writing is competent, and you aren't ever left wondering whether the author is talking about 2073 or 1973.

Playing Ball
I'll admit that I always found Combat Biker to be a kind of “stupid” game. So the Playing Ball chapter was probably never intended for me. I have no idea who it is for since it gives us a writeup on one team in each sport. I'm pretty sure that the bare minimum number of teams to use a game in an adventure is two, so this whole chapter seems deeply structurally flawed. Listing the leagues really doesn't do shit for us if you don't list teams that are in those leagues. We're not talking much, just a box with the current twenty members of the Premier League or something for each sport. It would have been nice if the leagues and shit had been updated a bit more. The CBL plays basketball in “China” which isn't even a country.

Pirate Media
This chapter is certainly creative, and mostly avoids the “long, yet superficial and incomplete lists” format of much of the rest of the book. It's also thoroughly insane and I'm not sure it's even about Shadowrun. It constantly conflates “independent” and “pirate”. Except, apparently those are supposedly the same thing now. The core of the chapter is the conceit that books are against the law now. This is a fairly important point, and one I think would have been brought up at some point anywhere else in Shadowrun or even anywhere else in this book. Yes, apparently giving someone a copy of War and Peace is a crime. It's a crime whether you distribute it in paper or electronic format. Lots of other stuff is against the law too – such as recording your own music on a chip and giving or selling it to another person. But this whole Farenheit 451 future that apparently exists is so omnipresent that no one even bothered to mention it during any of the other chapters. You'd think that it would have been worth mentioning in the do-it-yourself section of the trid chapter that all forms of expression were illegal in all jurisdictions of the planet. The whole premise is just so jaw dropping d left-field that I can't even really discuss the rest of the chapter. Is it good? Is it bad? I don't know, I am not really drunk enough to grant enough willing suspension of disbelief to grant their opening premise, and I can't give the rest of the chapter a fair shake. So I won't. Moving on.

Celebrity Time
This is an eleven page story about a bounty hunter who probably faked his own death. It's supposed to be a mood piece or something. It's so out of place even in this book that I don't know what to say.

Be Your Own Boss
Finally one of the many fucking essays about Shadowrunning mentions the whole “contract work” angle. We have gotten to page 133 and we finally get there. Unfortunately, we do so in the context of discussing a format in which one runner is taking jobs and subcontracting work to specialists to form a team. That's the kind of shadowrunner team format that would certainly exist (see Charlie's Angels or Leverage for examples of this in TV format), but Shadowrun is still a cooperative storytelling game. All the player characters are ensemble protagonists. So this is another chapter of “ways some shadowrunner teams that aren't made of Player Characters are arranged”. That's really fucking pointless.

Diving Off The Edge
This chapter is a motivational friendship speech. Like in Yugioh or something. Be lucky! Believe in yourself! I believed in myself and totally shot a guy! It was awesome! This chapter is 100% filler. Maybe one of the authors read the title and decided they needed an essay about believing in yourself and your friends and the heart of the cards? I don't know.

The Right Crowd
I've mentioned this one before. The entire chapter is just one of those stupid unordered lists. This list is a pile of rich people who work in music or movies or sports or something. It has some of the lowest information densities I have ever seen. It's like an actual couple of pages from US Weekly or Teen People.

In Their Face!
Continuing with the US Weekly vibe, this next chapter is a he said/she said discussion of fashion. And it is written by Plan 9 and Dev/Grrl. Yes, really. Plan 9 is played up a tinfoil hat lunatic who literally blames the Aztlan/Amazonia war on color imbalances in shirt choices. Dev/Grrl is played up as an annoying and vapid teenage girl. The combination is extremely annoying. They say you should spend more time dressing Gothic Lolita or like a character from Mad Max. I happen to agree, but it's done in a deliberately irritating fashion that succeeds in its apparent goal to irritate me as a reader. This chapter is an incredible pain to slog through, and it even breaks character on numerous occasions to give you game rules for vests and shoes described in the in-character narrative. Which is even more jarring than you'd think at first because this chapter segues to the “compiled tables” (which are just from this chapter) with no chapter break. So when you're reading it, it appears as if all the tables are printed twice: once where they break up the text and make things hard to read, and once at the end of the chapter where at least they are out of the way. The tables aren't formatted differently when compiled, they still show up I “Urgent Message” blocks as if the typesetter has forgotten that other text boxes exist and that one looks really goofy if there are a bunch of them jammed together on a page like Tetris pieces. The narrative is also filled with incredibly dated references like Lady GaGa and Chia Pets.

And that's the whole book. Chapter by excruciating chapter. Going through all of it, I guess you could keep parts of the BTL chapter. Needs a lot of Shadowtalk gutted so I stop doing spit takes, but much of the writing is acceptable and a few of the plotlines even enjoyable.

Overall: I give this book an F. I have never been so fucking confused trying to figure out what an author was trying to say because of fundamental grammatical mistakes. Unless you count the emails I received from a paranoid ex-landlord who didn't really speak English who apparently thought that I forged bank deposit slips in order to avoid paying rent that had in reality been paid. But seriously: Attitude is on that level of not making any fucking sense most of the time. Reading it is painful and requires alcohol.

-Username17

[Kot]

@25: I agree with Frank on this one - the HMHVV is a virus. Making it re-animate dead bodies is cool - the classical zombie approach. But making it an explanation to all 'monsters' is just silly. I think most of these monsters are okay, Drop Bears including, but they can be explained the same way as everything magic-related was - the level of Mana has risen up to the point where it made such changes possible. The living world tends to use any resource that can help it survive, thrive and multiply. And if the magical cycle is a natural thing, I bet all kinds of plants, animals, fungi, and so on have genes that would be activated by magic raising to a certain level, and the information contained in these genes allowed them to use magic as a resource... That's logical.

As for the method Stahlseele asks about, my bet would be that it wouldn't work. You take a HMHVV-infected creature into space, it loses it's magical abilities and probably goes crazy (especially if it's a non-sentient creature), just like mages, and other magically-active people. But it wouldn't die. It could get sick and wither, if magic is at the core of it's being, but it wouldn't kill it outright. Just as it doesn't kill metahumans.
I'd say a void zone (any, not only those in space) would stop it from taking over and re-animating a corpse (it has to use magic to fuel that, as it would be near-impossible to do without it*), but after you leave that zone, it's free to do it's thing, providing that the corpse hasn't started rotting yet.

* It works with fungi that make 'zombie ants', but reanimating and transforming a human body isn't something that can happen. If it could, it would already happen. Yeah, zombie apocalypse isn't gonna happen.

[Ancient History]

We were totally going to have this thing where if a critter's magic is reduced to zero it dies, but the rest of the guys pussied out.

But yeah, HMHVV started out pretty screwed up and I didn't help (maybe if there was playtesting...or maybe if I'd been less insane, I dunno). Patrick Goodman didn't like the way I'd done it and actually went another way, which makes the whole thing even more bizarre.

Part of the issue is, originally Ghouls were presented as a sort of 5th Goblinization option; they were retconned into HMHVV.

[Libertad]

30. What's the structure of the Corporate Court? Is it a body of impartial judges (at least as impartial as you can get by Shadowrun standards)? Is it composed of representatives of the various A, AA, and AAA megacorps?

31. The Shadowrun Wiki mentions that most Shadowrunners in Korea are female. Any reason why Mr. Johnson has a preference for the fairer sex in expendable corporate espionage?

32. I remember reading on TV Tropes that the Scandinavian countries were the closest thing to paradise on Earth in the Sixth World: the megacorps have minimal influence if any at all, and most of the populace was well off. While I know that the Scandinavian countries are very good places to live in real life, this seems at odds with Shadowrun's dystopian nature. How did they manage to avoid the worst effects of the world's chaotic events?

33. I read somewhere that nuclear weapons have lost the fear and power that they once had. Did the nations and megacorps get their hands on even more destructive arsenal? Are Kill SATs the Shadowrun nuke equivalent?

[Stahlseele]

30.) The Corporate Court is made up from representatives of the AAA MegaCorps only. That's why it's called the Corporate Court *snickers*

31.) No idea, did not know this myself O.o

32.) Because there is not much the corps would want up there i'd guess. And the few things they want from there don't justify the expenses of being there instead of simply hiring people already living there i'd think. Vast trackts of land, small populace/work-force, not that many natural ressources, mainly wild lands with critters that want to eat you . . Pragmatism and the old northern gods never having really been forgotten . . Children today still learn the old sagas, they have almost the same language the vikings had . . They are mostly the european version of the native indians in america in the world of shadowrun it seems.

33.) Thor-Shots. Massdriver weapons. Intelligent Crow-Bars. Tungsten Steel Telephone Poles launched from space using kinetic energy from the impact to eradicate targets. Enough energy to strike sparks when hitting oceans . . Also, Nukes have become exceedingly unreliable since magic returned. Lone Eagle Incident and several other incidents where nukes were set off and simply did not go boom at all . .

[Libertad]

34. Given that RFID tags and wireless imaging are the main venues of advertisement and visual entertainment in the Sixth World, how "dull" would most sprawls appear with your commlink turned off?

[Stahlseele]

34.) about as dull as todays cities i'd wager O.o
Just because you have RFID and AR does not mean you change what you already have. Tags are small and can be added to anything you have there without problem.

[Libertad]

35. I read in Corporate Enclaves that the Shinto priests of Japan got a large amount of power and significantly helped in extensive government programs relating to magic, urban development, and natural conservation. What hierarchy do the Shintoists have in the modern JIS?

36. What are the current major issues and world events of 2073? I hear that rights for non-metahuman sapients is a big deal worldwide, especially in regards to AI. I also heard that the latest products have a metaplot involving a Dragon's speech to the UN that pissed off the rest of his kind. What's that about?

[Stahlseele]

35.) No idea.
36.) Technomancers: Biig scaarryy woooh! *waves hands* (dumb as it sounds, but this is because emergence came out after the main book) Also, Aina Sluage(yes, Aina. Yes, the immortal Elf who stopped Horrors by herself. Who helped stop the Darke Horror Bridge. Who was one of the core members of the Draco Foundation after Big D's death.) got killed. Of Screen to boot. Because of another sceduling fuck up in the book releases . .

[Libertad]

37. Several passages throughout the books mention that the average corporate worker in the Sixth World operates on a 14-15 hour shift, with sleep-regulating cyberware commonly used to knock sleep down to 2 hours. What's the standard work hours (real-world US is 9-5)? How different is parenting in 2072, given that there's less time for raising children?

38. Potential spoilers: Horizon's the newest player on the Megacorp scene, and doesn't seem to be that bad in comparison to the other big nine. What's their deep, dark secret?

39. Other than 20th Anniversary Edition and the "Cores," (Arsenal, Street Magic, etc.) what 4th Edition Shadowrun books would you recommend as worthwhile purchases?

40. What percentage of the population in the UCAS have cyberware implants (even if it's as minor as a datajack)? Would an unware'd character stand out?

41. Damien Knight and Lofwyr are the CEOs of Ares and Saeder-Krupp. Who are the head honchos of the other megacorps?

[Ancient History]

37. Several passages throughout the books mention that the average corporate worker in the Sixth World operates on a 14-15 hour shift, with sleep-regulating cyberware commonly used to knock sleep down to 2 hours. What's the standard work hours (real-world US is 9-5)? Does this also mean that parents have less time to spend looking after their children?

I don't know about "several." I know I put one in Vice (8-6).

38. Potential spoilers: Horizon's the newest player on the Megacorp scene, and doesn't seem to be that bad in comparison to the other big nine. What's their deep, dark secret?

<sigh> The deep dark secret is that no-one ever figured out what the fuck the deep dark secret with Horizon should be. Whatever the original plan was, if there was one, left with Rob Boyle. I think Peter Taylor (the next line dev) had an idea, but it never made it to plot. So Jennifer Harding had a pretty much carte blanche when she went into writing LA for Corporate Enclaves, and it shows. Jason Hardy was soliciting for one before I left for the "Horizon adventures" but the results were, frankly, utter crap. The basic idea was that a well-meaning megacorp accidentally created a disaster - Jason shot down the proposal I worked on with some other people in part because he has no idea how memes work. The "Horizon adventures" (I have no idea if they've started to come out yet" were still being drafted when I left, but there were pretty dire and made about as much sense as the rest of the Amazonia-Aztlan war (read: not just zero, but some sort of negative imaginary number that goes back and screws with things for no reason.)

39. Other than 20th Anniversary Edition and the "Cores," (Arsenal, Street Magic, etc.) what 4th Edition Shadowrun books would you recommend as worthwhile purchases?

Seattle 2072 is not bad. Not perfect, but not bad. If you're looking to run a traditional SR game set in Seattle, it's the book you want. I had fun with Runner Havens, but literally everyone panned it except for Hong Kong. I also like Vice, but then I wrote a very large chunk of Vice.

40. What percentage of the population in the UCAS have cyberware implants (even if it's as minor as a datajack)? Would an unware'd character stand out?

Datajacks are fairly common, but not ubiquitous - especially with the advent of the wireless Matrix. The prices of most cyberware and the attendant surgery involved puts it on the realm of orthodontics and cosmetic surgery. Rates are higher in military/security professions, professional sports, and a lot of corporate players will cover the cost or part of the cost of work-relevant stuff. Counting in prosthetic limbs and the like, you're probably looking at least 15-20% of the American population with some cyberware (if you include just basic cosmetic surgery, orthodontics, laser eye surgery, etc. that goes up significantly). Extensive cyberware requires a lot of cash and willingness to endure surgery, so is comparatively rarer. But you don't have like 25% of the population with cybereyes instead of glasses or 50% with datajacks.

/edit: To put this in perspective according American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery in 2011 there was something over 1.6 million surgical cosmetic procedures and over 5 million non-surgical cosmetic procedures. The USA in 2011 had something over 300 million people, so that's possibly as much as 2% of the US population getting legal cosmetic procedures done - and that figure is rising. That's not counting actual you-need-this medical procedures like amputating a limb, but I think 20% is a fair extrapolation by 207X.

[kzt]

35. What hierarchy do the Shintoists have in the modern JIS?

I have no idea. As far as I know, there is no real hierarchy in Shinto. The typical way you become a Shinto priest running a shrine is by inheriting the job from your dad.

The only large-scale organization is the national "association of Shinto shrines", which mostly seems to financially support shrines, though it has some educational roles and many priests belong. I don't know if they have any ability to make anyone do anything. There are also dozens of separate sects. Even when Imperial Japan tried to organize Shinto they gave it up as a bad job in short order. The phrase State Shinto was actually created in 1970, so it wasn't something that actually existed as a formal institution in Imperial Japan.

Of course most Japanese are also Buddhists...

[Libertad]

42. Is the Decker Problem still a problem in 4th Edition? Is there an incentive or good in-game reason for Hackers, Technomancers, and Riggers to be "on-site" during runs? I heard that this was cut down on somewhat with the new Matrix rules, but I don't have much gameplay experience.

[Username17]

42. Is the Decker Problem still a problem in 4th Edition? Is there an incentive or good in-game reason for Hackers, Technomancers, and Riggers to be "on-site" during runs? I heard that this was cut down on somewhat with the new Matrix rules, but I don't have much gameplay experience.

The basic concept of the 4e Hacker is that they shoot LOS wireless hacking lasers at things, and thus people take them on-site. Unfortunately, the rules as presented are incoherent, and cannot be played as written. People who tell you the matrix rules work at all, are using some sort of rules-lite approach where they ignore 90% or more of the die rolls the actual printed rules call for and have a gentleman's agreement where no one on team corp sets their shit to "Hacking == No" even though they obviously could.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

42.) as far as i can see? Nope not much of a change.
Just because the hacker CAN run around with AR hacking does not mean he SHOULD do it . . And VR still makes you an empty shell while you're working out. Also, as frank said, there's not that much less rules for Matrix activity. They are just more like the rest of the rules for other players, so you should be able to get them down a bit faster . . which coult, in theory, make it faster when you are on a VR run . . But realistically, hackers can still tell the other players to get pizza while he does his solo on the matrix with the GM . .

[Libertad]

43. How all-encompassing is the commlink as a communication, data storage, and entertainment device? Can one buy trideos, games, and music directly from a commlink, or do you need to visit the local Stuffer Shack for a purchase?

44. Do corporate office cubicles have company commlinks wired to the desks? Can the typical wageslave do his job from the confines of his home? If so, then why the need for offices?

45. In SR4A and Arsenal, what is the overall best gun in terms of versatility? The HK XM30 seems like an all-in-one firearm, but is there any weapon better suited to other situations (other than concealment and raw power, where I'm better off with a pistol or rocket launcher)?

46. How much more grim and gritty was Shadowrun pre-4th Edition? I heard that 4th "cleaned up" the setting a little to make it less bleak, but to what extent?

47. With the advent of drone technology and rigger adaption, how prevalent are riggers in the shipping, trucking, and piloting industries? The ability to jump between vehicles can be very convenient, and the driver/pilot doesn't even need to be present! Are most public transportation systems remote-controlled?

[Stahlseele]

43.) All encompassing does not even START. You technically don't even need to go out to shop for food and clothes and other stuff, there's matrix based delivery services for ANYTHING. And GAMES, TRIDEO and MUSIC are software only anyway . .

44.) Why cubicles? Because it'd not be a CORP without cubicles damn it!

45.) No idea, not that firm in the SR4 crunchy part.

46.) Well, not much really . . fluff is mostly unchanged in regards to this specific part. It's still as grimdark as you want it to be. The Slums still suck. Tamanous still steals peoples organs. Aztechnology still sacrifices Metahumans to their dark gods. Ares probably still deals with Insect Spirits. Dragons still rule Parts of the World. Humanis is still racist against anything that is not Human. Elves are still racist against anything that is not Elf. There was a second crash with worldwide terrorism and weapons of mass destruction used on american soil. Things actually went DOWNHILL from SR3.

47.) Riggers are specialists. They are not used for shipping, trucking and piloting. These can be done by automated systems just fine. Riggers do Military and security work. Or Smuggeling. Stuff that requires absolute concentration on the right here and right now in this very vehicle and nothing else matters anymore.

[Libertad]

48. So, how's Indonesia faring in the Sixth World?

49. Some drugs in SR4A and Arsenal are listed as having a "-" Availability. Does that mean they're over-the-counter legal? While we're on it, what is the UCAS and CAS policies towards drug use and legalization?

50. Is the NAN an official group, or just a generic label?

51. How different are the UCAS Democratic and Republican parties from their real-world 2012 counterparts? Governor Brackhaven of Seattle, a Republican, ran on a platform of resentment and fear against the Awakened, Orks, and Trolls. Are Brackhaven's policies par for the course for the GOP, or is he an exception or extreme example?

52. Is the CAS trying to live up to a "States Rights" example, having the federal government be non-intrusive? Or are their policies quite the opposite?

[Kot]

@45: Depends on character build. Remember that guns come in different classes - pistols, automatics (SMG's, assault rifles), longarms(shotguns, rifles) and heavy(L/HMG's, launchers, etc.). I'd say there probably is one 'bestest' weapon for each class, but if you mod them well enough, you can overcome that. And modding does give you a lot of space for improvement, dice-wise.

[Libertad]

@45: Depends on character build. Remember that guns come in different classes - pistols, automatics (SMG's, assault rifles), longarms(shotguns, rifles) and heavy(L/HMG's, launchers, etc.). I'd say there probably is one 'bestest' weapon for each class, but if you mod them well enough, you can overcome that. And modding does give you a lot of space for improvement, dice-wise.

The HK MX330 is an an assault rifle, sniper rifle, submachine gun, and light machine gun. It can be re-tooled to another mode with several minutes of repair; so from my standpoint, it does appear to be a gun suitable for most character builds.