g
Tir Society
Ways and Paths
FrankT:
The chapters we're doing aren't in order for Tir na nOg anymore, because Tir Tairngire and Tir na nOg don't have equivalent chapters in the same order once the first couple are done with. They just do their own things. Tir Tairngire's “Tir Society” major heading is about Tir Tairngire's bizarre racist meritocratic aristocracy and runs 21 pages before that book's “Economy” major heading. Tir na nOg's “Ways and Paths” major heading is about Tir na nOg's weird predestined hereditary regional magic system and runs 17 pages
after that book's “Economy” major heading. Meh. Close enough. Today's chapter theme is “how do Elves know they are better than you?”
AncientH:
By RPG standards, Shadowrun does fairly well in keeping down the metahuman sub-breeds. This is good in some cases, bad in others. This is why to really understand elves in Tir Tairngire and Tir na nOg, you first have to understand trolls.
No, really, I'm going somewhere with this.
Trolls are big, and by metahuman standards generally considered less attractive - or so their Charisma penalties are meant to indicate. They typically have tusks, horns, and bony build-ups on their bodies that render them asymmetrical. Most of them can also break you in half and troll women are noted for having some of the largest breasts. But I digress.
When writing
Paranormal Animals of Europe, Sargent & Gasciogne created the Fomori, a troll that had been infected with a variant of the Human-Metahuman Vampiric Virus (HMHVV). This turned the poor plague victims into gilled, furry, sub-sapient cannibals whose skin leaked corrosive secretions, with a preference to dwell in swampy areas.
With me so far?
Then, many years later, the
Shadowrun Companion came out. One of the things in it were
metavariants, regional variations of normal metahumans that cropped up from time to time. So you had pale green elves that were allergic to urban areas, and fuzzy blue elves that were like Nightcrawler without the tail or two dicks, and you had a handsome, Celtic troll variant called the Fomori.
I said NO Charisma penalty!
So you've got two troll-critters called "Fomori" - the cannibalistic swamp-dwelling plague critter, and the handsome Gaelic metavariant. Then you get to Tir na nOg, and
Fomor has an actual meaning in in Irish mythology. Which Tir na nOg mythology is based off of. And it's not a positive association. So already in speech you're wondering if somebody bitching about Fomori is talking about the HMHVV critter, the metavariant, or just orks and trolls and general. But the Tir elves basically don't split the difference. Tir na nOg's Ways and Paths is basically a new pagan religion excuse to persecute a minority, in this case trolls (and orks).
It's up in the air how much of this was accidental. Like I said, Sargent & Gasciogne did the Fomori (HMHVV) bit before
Tir na nOg was written, so you could write that off as coincidence/bad judgment. But the
Shadowrun Companion came later, so there's no excuse for that. And really, there's no good excuse for making elves in Tir na nOg a bunch of racist anti-troll pricks.
FrankT:
The first
page of Tir Tairngire's Tir Society major heading contains a couple of major continuity errors. We come out swinging with the sub-heading “Race” where it explains that despite having pan-metahuman language in its founding charter, Tir Tairngire is an Elf country. So far, so good: in the real world the Republic of the Union of Myanmar claims to speak for its 32% non-Burmese citizens too. Then it tries to explain why Elves are a super majority and sticks its tongue in the electric socket of continuity problems.
Explanation one is that the Metahuman tribal enclaves were declared by an Elf, so Elves were much more likely to go than non-Elves. Which makes plenty of sense until you remember that 28 pages earlier in this book they revealed the Elvish nature of the guy declaring the enclaves – for the first time in Shadowrun history. Back then, he was wearing a fake beard and pretending to be a Human. Also, this call went out when the oldest Elves in the general population were in junior high, so it's not like they were plausibly “in on the secret” to any demographically important degree.
Explanation two is that Orks and Trolls just have a predilection to living in cities and the idea of running around the woods just didn't appeal to them the way it did for Elves. The problem here is two-fold. First, that while Orks are described in Shadowrun lore as wanting to live in dense apartments, Trolls are actually the opposite. They like space and don't get lonely easily. Trolls, moreso even than Elves, are naturally drawn to rural and even wilderness living. If you're going to use a racial stereotypes argument for justifying population migration, you should at least get the arguments
right.
Racist stereotypes of 2054 are evidently just as perplexing in the present as the racist stereotypes of 1954.
AncientH:
Which is why the
other metahuman NAN tribe is the Cascade Orks. No, seriously.
There's some hemming and hawing about why elves tend to be richer - I personally liked it when Sargent & Gasciogne admitted in
The London Sourcebook that royals just cribbed-death'd any orks or trolls that came out, which is part of the reason the UK peerage has more elves than other metatypes.
But, and I want to emphasize this, at least racism is a conversation you can have in Shadowrun. You can talk about how some clinical study on UGE and goblinization was biased by the Humanis Policlub, as they talk about here. You can't really do that in D&D; it's a fairly advanced social concept that gets about as much play as Greek-style government brothels propping up the republic or stringent rules for citizenship. In SR, though, it's an interesting talking point.
Aside from being an Elf-majority for ill-defined reasons - prior planning, heavily supported immigration, yadda yadda. Nominally, Tir Tairngire has the most stringent anti-discrimination laws on the books; in point of fact, these grand laws are rarely enforced. (There's also a page xx error that makes my heart bleed).
FrankT:
Tir Tairngire wrote:Legally, no form of racial discrimination is sanctioned in employment, accommodation, club membership, public transit, restaurants, immigration, emigration, taxation, pricing, public office, and advancement in social rank (see [b[Social Rank[/b], p. xx).
In the early nineties, game books had a
lot of page XX errors. Both Shadowrun and Vampire eventually issued dickish mea culpas by printing books that actually had pages entitled “Page XX” in them. Neither did something classy like put out errata lists on that page telling you where things in various books actually were. There was a general opinion at the time that page XX errors indicated that game books had incredibly shitty editing. And that's actually not true. The massive numbers of typographical errors and mystery punctuation indicated that these books had incredibly shitty editing. Page XX errors are actually the fault of the typesetting.
See the order of operations is that you submit a manuscript as a writer, then developers take issue with content, editors go through the work for structural errors, and then and only then the text is sent to typesetting to have the text merged with finished art and placed into pages to be converted to a series of printing plates. Only after the text is placed with the art can you know what page any particular text is actually on, and
only then can you go through the book to convert all the placeholder double-Xs to their real targets. This is shit simple to do with a computer, but it was kind of a pain in the ass in the old days when you didn't have ways to effectively text search your printing proofs.
Having page XX issues definitely does imply that
someone was fucking up. It's just that it doesn't inherently mean that “Senior Editor” Donna Ippolito wasn't doing her job. It means that they had two people on Layout and one person on “Keyline and Pasteup” and no one thought it was their job to find and fix the page citations so it didn't get done.
AncientH:
Racism in Tir Tairngire is your basic Jim Crow stuff at every level. Non-elf metahumans get charged more, don't get served well in restaurants, pay more taxes, and most don't get elected to any public position. And remember, this is the country that elected a fucking
sasquatch into its highest political body because, in true internet fashion, his plushies sold the most.
(No word on what happens to elf poseurs, but presumably some true Fight Club shenanigans occur.)
FrankT:
Tir na nOg's Ways and Paths are... unnecessarily complicated. The idea that you even
could (let alone
should) portray the differences between magic traditions with subtle mechanical differences or selections from short lists was an innovation from 2005. I'm literally the person who developed the 10 spirit type model, and I got a lot of grognard pushback on that even from other writers (*cough
threattraditions*cough*). This book came out twelve years before then, and I was not arguing for such a change because it was written while I was in junior high and I hadn't thought of it yet. As far as the designers (and most of the fans) of the time were concerned, more rules meant more flavor. Tir na nOg's magic system attempted to have the
most flavor. Ever.
It will
work.
Now the actual mechanics are in the game mechanics section at the back. This major heading is about describing how Danaan magical, spiritual, and racialist thought works
in character. For 17 pages. There's a five by eight “mystic ways table” that must be further explained to us with such wisdom as “The conjunction of sun, moon, and stars in the Center Way denotes all times, both day and night.” It's all quite intricate, and I have no idea why any of this happened. It's a bizarre mishmash of Celtic mythology, neo-pagan wiccanism, hippy goggled hinduism, and Earthdawn allusions. It looks like the authors were trying to go the whole Tékumel on us and make their special Elvish magical tradition be fully realized. But really, this reads like Time Cube more than serious speculative anthropology.
AncientH:
The year after this was published,
Denizens of Earthdawn, Volume 1 came out for Earthdawn (1st edition).
A better book than you would think.
The Earthdawn version of Elves have a Ways & Paths thing, but the difference is it's
sane. The Tir na nOg version has four magical orders with specific attached traditions with more benefits and requirements than any other tradition in any edition of Shadowrun. This is literally the nadir of magical tradition complexity in Shadowrun, and it's
1993. There's a reason some of this shit was walked back.
Part of that was because of the druids. I promised myself I'd save this rant for the magic chapter, but I'm getting it out of the way now. Sargent & Gasciogne basically created druids for Shadowrun in
The London Sourcebook, and those were basically hard-coded into the rules when they popped up again in
Grimoire. Except they were
insane about it. You could be a British Hermetic Mage and be a druid, or you could be a Scottish Shaman and be a druid, or you could be a Welsh Shaman and be a druid, and they had different fucking totem lists to choose from, and then they introduced a special type of aspected magician called the Cornish bards which were basically
fuck you, initiation because they couldn't do it and only got one metamagic but it was the best one and they had it from day one.
There's not actually a lot of benefit to being a druid - I mean, you had your magical cauldron and your sickle and put up a circle of stones instead of a lodge or whatever, and you could tap the ley-lines that crisscrossed the British Isles. Which is where some of the problems started.
Because in this book, they introduce two more types of druids! You have the Ways & Path Elf druid, and you have
Irish druids with their own distinct fucking totems, and Ireland has a bunch of ley lines too except somebody fucked up on the "lines" part because they're a bunch of squiggly fucking things instead of the bullshit straight-as-an-arrow leys over in the UK.
Also, technically ze Germanz and French have druids that use European idols instead of totems, but honestly at that point nobody really fucking cares.
My point being, Sargent & Gasciogne really needlessly complicated the Shadowrun magic rules for
over a decade for no real reason. It took until SR4 to really get the last vestiges of it scrubbed down to something sane.
Because really, I just want a street druid scraping blue moss off the subway wall with his homemade sickle and brewing awakened drugs to get fucked up on. Is that too much to ask?
So I like Grant Morrison. Shut the fuck up.
FrankT:
Tir Tairngire's unofficial apartheid rules get a lot of ink.
Legally they can't refuse to rent you an apartment for being a non-Elf, but they
can choose to not rent to you if you are “not suitable.” So landlords can and will balk at Orkish renters on various flimsy excuses. This is good atmosphere and fun to read, even if it isn't terribly useful or groundbreaking. Real black people have to deal with this shit all the time, and in the early nineties it was worse (and in the early sixties it was
much worse). This was Shadowrun playing political advocacy plain and simple. It's for a good cause (let's be real here: apartheid style systems
are wrong and they
are real things in the real world that hurt real people), and the prose is engaging. I didn't have a problem with it at the time, and junior highschool me found it fascinating.
Early Shadowrun had no problem throwing down political advocacy. They were pro-environment, pro-minority rights, anti-corporate, and anti-government and they weren't afraid to tell you that. They were left-anarchist punks, or at least wishy washy liberals who thought the idea of being left-anarchist punks was laudable and romantic. And when you read stuff by the original core authors, this point of view comes out right away. Native American rights are good, racism is bad, environmentalism is good, the coal lobby is bad. And so on. As the author pool got bigger, the political voice got muddled. Some of the later authors are rightwing libertarian types or devoutly religious, which really doesn't go well with a game that posited a neo-pagan revival and openly sympathized with eco-terrorists.
And you can see that muddling going on even with Tir na nOg. Sargent and Gascoigne don't just want the Irish people to have their own republic (which I point out: they already do), they want the Irish to get all weird and neo-pagan and punish the Brits with terrorism and stuff. Obviously, the authors are writing an oppressive dystopia, so there has to be bad stuff here, but the authors are also cheerleading some pretty bizarre policies like protectionism and de-industrialization. See, the oppression is
bad, but people don't rise up against it because other policies work so well – which are of course the things that the book is actually advocating. And with the Ways and Paths chapter, there's no much gobbledegook philosophy in here that I can't help but think that one or both of the authors is trying to sneak in proselytization for their personal religious beliefs. And it is no less crazy than when
Dave Sim went down that path.
AncientH:
It's probably worth talking about the actual antipathy between the two Tirs. At first they were kinda-sorta chummy, but pretty quick it turned into a Vulcan and Romulus situation.
Basically, they don't get along and view each other with suspicion. There's no really good reason for this given, though if you read between the lines it's supposed to be an IE spat or deep-seated spiritual/political divide, probably because the Tir Tairngire guys aren't about to recognize the authority of the Seelie Court and the Tir na nOg guys declared the TT guys "false spirits." Nevertheless, some of the young'uns haven't gotten the memo and try for a sort of reunification of the elven homelands.
FrankT:
In one of the few nods to the general youth of actual Elves in the Shadowrun setting, when Tir Tairngire was first founded, the age of majority was 16, and they raised it to 17 in 2045 and 18 in 2052. Now by my calculations, that's actually
still not “a few years younger than the average age of most elves at the time.” But at least they
acknowledge that it's a teenage rebellion at the beginning. That's more than most of the rest of the book does. And a lot more than
all of the Tir na nOg book does. Upon reaching the age of majority in Tir Tairngire, you undergo a rite of passage and get to name yourself, which is why Elves in Tir Tairngire all have stupid names that sound like they were made to sound mysterious and sylvan by teenagers. Because they totally were.
It would be better if they chose their Elf Names this way.
In Tir na nOg Elf children are fostered out to other Elf families so that every Elf can grow up having a same sex life partner. There's a gay joke there, but I'm too lazy to tell it. Tir na nOg officially recognizes Elf Reincarnation, so Elves get their official bios updated based on the rambling stories they tell when they are six. They don't need to have their names rewritten, because Irish names are considered stupid enough.
AncientH:
There's a bit in
Tir na nOg talking about "Sacred Essence," and it really is an in-character rant to promote the authors' personal view of what Essence-the-out-of-game mechanic is and how it works and why it's important. The
stupid thing about this is that it proved popular enough that it was pretty much adopted for the rest of the edition, and onwards up until
Augmentation or thereabouts.
We all carry a metaphysical blueprint, an aural template, conceived with our physical selves and borne until our deaths. This template represents not only who we are, but what we might have been had our bodies and spirits developed unhampered from birth. This aural template, our essence, also connects us to the mystical world. For most people, essence envelops and sustains them throughout life, but they derive no other power from it. For a magician, the aural template serves as the circuitry through which magical power flows. It connects the inner world with the outer in a direct, observable, tangible way.
In the past, metaphysicists have warned of the associative damage done to the aural template through the implantation of cybernetics or bioware. Though such warnings have validity, we believe the reasoning behind them to be inaccurate.
Rather than damaging the aural template, the associative damage done by cyber- and bioware and the resultant loss in magical potency results from the deviation between an individual's aural template and his body. In effect, the implantation of artificial enhancements creates a new body, or physical template, that differs from the aural template. The greater the deviation, the less efficient the transfer of mana from the aural to the physical becomes.
Young me liked this argument, liked arguing about it, but older me notes that this has basic flaws when it comes to, say,
dentistry, or fixing a cleft palate, or separating conjoined siblings, or basically any major corrective surgery you can name. I strongly suspect it has its roots in Larry Niven's
The Magic Goes Away, where one magician has a club foot he could totally fix with magic, but doing so would cost him "half his power." Of course, then the magic goes away and he has to hobble around for the rest of his fucking life because he didn't fix it when he fucking could have.
FrankT:
Tir Tairngire has five social ranks and regressive taxation. Higher ranked people pay lower taxes and lower ranked people pay higher taxes. Because fuck you. I don't see how this system is supposed to work, and I'm not sure if it
is supposed to work. It's basically social commentary more than serious world building. Made for a good read in 1993, but it wasn't really all that great for playing games and telling new stories. Pretty much every time I've ever had a group of Shadowrunners be in Tir Tairngire, whether I've been a player or a GM, the team has ended up firebombing some residence of a dickish one percenter on Royal Hill and fled the country. That's basically all you can do.
Rank in Tir Tairngire is determined by an elaborate system of physical and mental tests, none of which actually matter because they are judged subjectively and the Hungarian judge gives out points that are nothing short of insulting. Rank in Tir na nOg is determined by past life regression therapy on small children. I am not making that up.
Tir na nOg also has five castes, but they only apply to the magically active Elves. All others get to fuck off or find a druidic order to join. Not the path druids, the other druids. Not the other druids either. You know fuck it, you have to find a group that will take you in. The five castes determine what magical powers you have access to and also what county you're supposed to live in and what times of day and times of year you get bonus power surges. The fifth and highest caste is the path of kings, and they are extra special because their bonus times are “all the time” which is exactly like not having any abilities at all, because they are all NPCs and their base skill numbers and initiate grades are totally arbitrary when encountered. The actual mechanics for these fuckers are totally unneeded. They could have just said “Followers of the path of the Righ don't actually have any specific special abilities, but they are generally pretty bad ass, so give them slightly higher stats than you normally would.”
Literally partying all the time is much like never partying.
AncientH:
The Rite of Progression, which is sort of like the one-country Olympics or, I guess, the Hunger Games (ugh), is this thing where everybody in Tir Tairngire competes every couple years to see if they go up a level in social rank. Except because of RAISINS, this was put off, and put off, and continued to be put off until the country had a small, uninspired revolution and put an ork named Larry in charge.
This isn't Larry, but it'll do.
Tir Tairngire technically has a group of people that
don't want to play the fantasy nobility game called the
irenis, but the TT government gives them a rank anyway for tax purposes.
Meanwhile, in Tir na nOg, we're informed you can go to jail for defacing a James Joyce novel.
No, that's not a Ways & Paths diagram. Probably.
FrankT:
In Tir Tairngire, your same-sex kids get to have your rank until they reach the age of majority, and then they take the test and get given a new rank (or the same rank). Your daughters get your wife's rank (or if you're a woman, your sons get your husband's rank). I don't know what is supposed to happen to the sons of unwed mothers or children born to expatriates or whatever. Anyway, obviously the tests are a sham and the children of people who are allies of the high council get promotions and the children of the council's enemies get to be peasants. The lowest rank is still called “Gentry” but it sucks and you don't want to be one. People can also get given ranks arbitrarily by the high prince. Like how it's now “Sir” Ian McKellen, given a knighthood by the Queen herself for his services to the crown as Gandalf and Magneto. But it's not just an honorific, it comes with tangible tax benefits and you're allowed to go into corridors that are marked ultraviolet security clearance.
There isn't actually any ultraviolet security clearance. That rumor was spread by communist mutant traitors.
Tir na nOg has their own special security clearances. Each of the five paths has their own initiatory group with like 12 different ranks in it. That is not an exaggeration. Seriously 12. There are little boxes full of stats on each one, and this is where we learn that there are less than three thousand path initiates. Yes, the dread and ultra powerful path mages of Tir na nOg could all fit into a highschool gym. Also, the mystic order of the Path of the Warrior, where all the children born into it are Adepts rather than Magicians, has about 415 Magicians in it. I don't know what that is supposed to mean. There might be some explanation hidden somewhere in this word salad, but I kinda don't think there is and I'm already too tipsy to make much sense of it. But seriously man, all this work for a group of 3000 mages? The United Kingdom has fifty thousand mages in it. I don't even care if these assholes are supposed to be hyper competent, they demographically don't mean shit.
AncientH:
Keep in mind that
by the standards of the edition these numbers were ridiculously huge, because by the rules the more people that were in your initiatory group, the harder it fucking was to join. Most of the other really big organizations had maybe a dozen members, tops, and bigger organizations had this tiered structure where you moved from the Outer Circle to the Inner Circle or something.
So even by the rules, the five Orders don't work, but because they have a paper strength in the hundreds
each they look appropriately badass, because nobody had written up military initiatory groups for the UCAS and CAS or anything. You wouldn't get numbers close to these until Nigel Findley did Aztlan years later, and
he referred specifically back to TNN on it as maybe giving the Azzies the idea.
FrankT:
The Sperethiel issue is similar to Irish Gaelic or Hebrew. It's archaic and no one would give a shit except that it's nationalistically important to throw it around. So you have to say some Sperethial at your
Bar Mitzvah rite of passage, but normal every day business is conducted in English. Which is fine. These Elves aren't the first group to dig up a dead or made up language to rally their nationalism around. Even as we speak, the former Yugoslave republic of Macedonia is insisting that people speak “Macedonian” that is very slightly different from Serbian. But where Tir Tairngire goes off the reservation is where they apparently keep this shit exclusive. Only the nobles and people in the upper crust private schools get taught Sperethial. That is not how languages work. If you don't teach people your language, your language fucking dies.
AncientH:
The thing about Sperethiel is that a) no one knew where it came from, and b) it had no actual written equivalent, though they managed with Romanji just fine because seriously, this is just fucking gaelic with a couple twists. The Sperethiel section in
Tir Tairngire is basically THE big block of text on the language, and the only thing comparable was the section copied almost word-for-word in
Denizens of Barsaive in '94. There were some other words and phrases added over the years, and for quite some time I made a hobby of tracking them down and putting them together, because I am a sad little language nerd. I also did the same shit for Giak and Games Workshop Dwarf, I just didn't make websites of those. I guess you could say I found a niche and filled it.
Anyway, the big deal about Sperethiel is that even in its first appearance it was implicitly something that the Immortal Elves (or Great Elves, if you prefer) had brought forward into the Sixth World and started spreading around. It's part of what made elves special, and that's the way elves took it, saying that it was their own special language and everything while orks had to make do holding weddings in the traditional Klingon.
Sperethiel was also one of the big bridges that connected Shadowrun to Earthdawn, and its absence was a sign that FASA's Crucible was
not connected, despite the presence of orks, humans, and thorn elves.
Later on the orks would get their own language from Shadowrun, Or'zet. Mainly because Dwarven was "Throalic" and basically fucking English, and Trolls never got a name for their language. It's better than giving Orks and Trolls an Ebonics equivalent, to be honest.
Anyway, technically Tir na nOg uses an Irish dialect of Sperethiel, but functionally it's the same.
FrankT:
Tir Tairngire makes their own entertainment. This is actually looking more likely now than it did when the book was made. The fact is that it's pretty hard for bullshit tiny countries to fill all the air time with shows. Czech TV uses a lot of old American TV shows dubbed into Czech. Slovakia uses a lot of old American TV shows... dubbed into Czech. How big of an entertainment sector do you have? When your whole country has the population of Houston, your “national” stations are going to look suspiciously like Houston area public access stations.
Now the advancement of computer technology has made content creation a lot easier. But seriously, you're not going to be able to put out the kind of quality of the major networks when you don't have the population base. You expect to have roughly one thirtieth the number of quality actors and directors of the United States by demographics alone, and it's actually much worse than that because anyone who shows talent is going to try to defect to a larger market where they can make a fuck tonne more money. Like how Silvia Saint made pornographic movies under the name “Silvia Saint” and didn't stay in Czech Republic making films under the name “Silvie Tomčalová.”
The greatest country has the greatest Trid Channels!
For some reason, Tir Tairngire has its own sport. I don't know why you'd do that.
Tir na nOg's path of the Bard (who are totally different from Cornish Bards) comes with a rambling description of Irish musical instruments. Such as the Irish accordion and the spoons.
Save me!
AncientH:
Hurling is actually a British Isles sport somewhere between rugby, lacrosse, and beating the living shit out of people with sticks.
Go watch Blitz. Jason Statham has never been in an unentertaining movie.
It's presence here is supposed to be part of the Irish cultural contamination, and I might have made more of it as a point of contact between the two nations, where they alternate having the World Hurling Championship for the Elf Cup in Dublin and Portland on different years, and it's a big tourism magnet and shit. But that's about as much fun as you can have with the concept, and as Frank notes elsewhere, only cultural assimilation makes any sport acceptable, because they are silly and arcane things.
The end of the Tir Tairngire chapter is about how the once strong Irish connection between the two Tirs started to wane back in the 40s from pressure on high. You could see this a couple ways, but I like to think of it as Findley knowing that these other two assholes are writing a book at about the same time as him and politely not wanting to tie them down to anything he's written - so he uses the form of the name they used last time (Tir Nan Og) and the drifting apart bit. The end of the Tir na nOg chapter is a callout for gamemasters, because Sargent & Gasciogne hadn't quite gotten it through their heads that Shadowrun was separating in-character and out-of-character book sections at that point.
We're very fortunate that one of the primary elf-artists for TNN has put up most of their Shadowrun work on deviantart. Thanks Mike!
