[OSSR]Cyberpirates!

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Cyberpirates!

A Shadowrun Sourcebook


Basically nothing like this.



There it is. The exclamation mark is in the actual book title. No one knows why.

AncientH

Shadowrun's central concept takes you a fair ways when it comes to material for sourcebooks. You've got your gunbook, vehicle book, Matrix book, magic book, and cyberware books pretty much laid out for you; the background introduces a default setting (Seattle) so you have a Seattle Sourcebook and can expand out the geography from there. Every book moves the timeline forward, so you can publish adventures in those settings with the new expanded setting and character options and whatnot.

Which is to say, it was a very long time before FASA got to Cyberpirates!. Nine years, in fact. This wasn't the book that was on the top of anybody's list of things to write. It is, in fact, downright weird.

Let's dig in.

Frank

1998 was the year that Shadowrun 3 came out as well as the year Cyberpirates! (exclamation mark included) came out. My local game store got Cyberpirates! On the shelf after SR3 came out, but the rules actually in the book reference the SR2 rules. The vagaries of publication and shipping dates are somewhat hard to tease out now that the company that owns Shadowrun has collapsed three times, but I think that Cyberpirates! Was probably intended to be released somewhat earlier and just got stuck in development hell for some indeterminate time.

In any case, Cyberpirates! Is formatted like a 3rd edition book, but the text is written in reference to 2nd edition rules. The front cover embraces the “gonzo cartoonism” of 3rd edition books in lieu of the trenchcoat noirism of earlier editions. The open pages inform you that this book is a document from “Shadowland 3.0” – a message board which was otherwise essentially synonymous with 3rd edition sourcebooks. We can look at this book as being an “in-between” book, having adopted parts of the new edition and not others during development. Like the 3rd edition D&D Fiend Folio that just casually dropped some formatting and nomenclature from the upcoming 3.5 revision.

AncientH

Nominally, this book is sort of a themed location book, a hybrid between D&D's Complete Guides and a setting expansion so that, basically, there was something for more than one small subsection of the gaming audience. Shadowrun had previously tried this thing before with Fields of Fire, which was nominally a book about being a Mercenary and also an equipment book for military grade guns (and actual tanks and shit); this book is nominally about being a pirate and covers the different places where you might pirate.

Even in that basic concept, the book kind of falls apart. It's damn near 200 pages, and while there are some rules for "underwater adventuring" and "ships," Shadowrun doesn't have any classes so there's no specific rules for pirating like there is for magic, hacking, or shooting people. You're a pirate if you declare yourself a pirate. It's not something written on your soul or necessarily on your character sheet. You're a pirate if you go and pirate things. There's not a union or a membership card or a fancy tattoo or anything.


Technically not a pirate...or is he?

Frank

With many later period books we rag on the fact that they have too many cooks and everything is a soup of no one knowing what any of the other hands were doing and the resultant book being basically gibberish. This book is not like that. There are two authors: Jennifer Brandes and Chris Hepler. The two of them are writing partners on Shadowrun, Paranoia, Earthdawn, and L5R before going off to write for video games. Jennifer Brandes is now named Jennifer Hepler because the two of them wrote so many things together that they eventually got married. It's very romantic. All “boos man” hats are worn by Mike Mulvhill. Interestingly, the Heplers stopped working for FASA over creative differences and freelancer issues before 3rd edition came out, which is probably the source of Cyberpirates! being in development hell. It sounds like the entire writing staff quit and walked off when the book was only mostly finished. That sounds extremely familiar, as basically exactly that would happen to Shadowrun books under both FanPro and Catalyst.

This book is 182 pages, and it appears that the primary author pair wrote pretty much everything for the first 155 pages. John Szeto and Mike Mulvihill stepped up to do additional writing on the first 2 pages and the last 17 pages. So I think the Heplers had the book over 90% done when they finally walked away from the company.

Trivia note: Jennifer Brandes Hepler ended up leaving BioWare fifteen years later because deranged DragonAge fans sent graphic death threats to her children. Whenever anyone claims that the atmosphere of The Gaming Den is “toxic” or whatever... just recall that we aren't literally sending death threats to the children of people suspected of signing off on changes to a video game's combat system. In any case, I suspect the creative differences she had with FASA were not remotely on that level.

AncientH

Speaking of creative differences, I actually like the art in the later 2nd/early 3rd Shadowrun books. Jeff Laubenstein was still doing pieces, the cover is a lovely cartoonish shot by Paul Bonner, and there's a lot of familiar names filling in the incidental illustrations. It's really funny how certain artists come to define the look and feel of a game line, and while Shadowrun would always be a bit of a revolving door of talent (that is the Way of the Freelancer), sometimes it's just nostalgic to recognize an old familiar artist's style.

On the other hand...this was also the late 90s and there were some pretty ugly early computer-generated titles in the first couple pages. Just really dark and murky and stepped straight out of an episode of ReBoot. Thankfully we don't get much of that.

Frank

In 1998, Shadowrun had been out for 9 years, and while it had made a better attempt at being a global world than contemporary games like Cyberpunk 2020 or Vampire: the Masquerade had done, there were still huge holes in the world as presented. And I don't just mean that books 7212, 7217, and 7218 are mysteriously missing from the release schedule (parts of the saga of book 7217: Target: Awakened Lands is AncientHistory's to tell if he wants to), but also that while there were books about Germany and Ireland and Latin America and various things in North America, that the entire continents of South Africa, Asia, and especially Africa didn't get a lot of ink dedicated to them.

Shadows of Asia didn't come out until 2005. Feral Cities came out in 2009. But before any of that, Shadowrun had a book dedicated to talking about Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean back in 1998. But Cyberpirates! Does it in a really weird way and people aren't sure it counts. But it was definitely a more sincere (or at least, less cringe-worthy) effort than White Wolf's Year of the Lotus that was going on at the same time.

AncientH

Global coverage is superweird in Shadowrun, because for the most part the game was set almost exclusively in Seattle as the default setting, which was very unusual for games at the time - yes, WoD Vampire focused a lot on Chicago in the early years, but they didn't include a map of the city in the back like Shadowrun did. FASA was doing "think globally, act locally" very early on compared to a lot of other games...and it kind of worked!

But Africa was a mess. Like, this gigantic black hole in the setting, barely mentioned in passing in most places. Then as now, a lot of Americans didn't know shit about Africa. No major powers erupted there, except for some elves (of course it was some fucking elves) and a Great Feathered Serpent in South Africa - apartheid was still a thing when Shadowrun 1st edition came out, and it had only ended four years before this came out, so maybe we dodged a bullet there, I dunno.

Which, unfortunately, means a kind of collapse back to Colonial tropes: Africa as this unexplored continent, waiting to be discovered...by white people. None of the people living there count as discovering shit.

Frank

In 1997, Piracy was a growing problem. The collapse of the Soviet Union caused a substantial reduction of Cold War military patrols from both sides, which left the high seas relatively free for rapacious criminals on no sides. In 1996 the International Maritime Bureau reported 224 acts of piracy. In 1997 it reported 247. It seemed reasonable to extend that and expect the hegemony-free world of 2050s Shadowrun to be simply overrun with piracy. This may yet come to pass, as while the 90s rise in piracy led to increased naval patrols by France and China and the United States to combat them and 2018 only had 174 pirate attacks – I can easily imagine the impending collapse of American power leaving a larger void in global naval security than the collapse of the Soviet empire did. The naval dystopia described in this book with more than one pirate attack per day is actually fairly plausible.


A future with basically three times as much of this as we already have seems oddly plausible.

Cyberpirates is a place book in the sense that it discusses several places, but Mike Mulvihill wants you to think of it as a theme book. Several places, but one theme. The theme is of course Piracy, and the places being The Caribbean, West Africa, The Philippines, and Madagascar. Shadowrun would try this concept out a few more times with the “theme books” of 4th edition such as Runner Havens, Feral Cities, and so on. Those books did fairly poorly relatively speaking, but much of that probably comes down to severely uneven writing, poor editing, and a total lack of usable “crunch.” I do actually think the concept has legs.

AncientH

It's a tricky balance from a design standpoint. You want to color in the edges of the map a little, because that extends the setting. But pure fluff doesn't sell very well, because not everybody wants to go pirating off the coast of West Africa. (Basically, the farther you get from Seattle, the less interesting/useful the location book to a lot of players.) Covering multiple locations helps, but then you're covering a lot of different places people don't want to go in less depth.

The trick, insofar as there is a trick, is to focus very strongly on why these are places for your nominally landlubber Shadowrunners would want to go, and you need something crunchy to get people to buy the book for non-fluff reasons. You need hooks to sell the books.

Shadowland 3.0

Frank

Most Shadowrun books are at least partially presented as in-world documents put on the internet of the future. In the first three editions of the game, the part of the Matrix where these documents appeared was called “Shadowland” and it was nominally based in Denver. In the fourth edition, it was more like a Facebook group with a much smaller group of posters that was called “Jackpoint.” It's mostly an excuse for the narrative device of allowing portions of the documents to include “hecklers” of various types. But it's also an excuse to put some pretty graphics at the front of the book and also shill other books by having clickbait links to other documents that are other books that have recently been published or were due to be published in the near future. It's actually surprising how accurate this is, because it's a very similar layout to something like The Escapist or Buzzfeed or whatever. This book is trying to sell you on the whole Dunkelzahn's Will adventure stuff and also too wants to get you hyped for Target: Smuggler Havens. Target Smuggler Havens was another theme book that focused on a couple of different locales – it got mixed reviews that mostly come down to “The New Orleans bit is good, but the Vladivostock bit is not.”

There's also some capsule news to get you up to speed on major events in Shadowrun's 2059. Which is to say that it's shilling for more books from the period such as Threats and Bug City. The main takehome of this section is that it had already adopted the “look and feel” of a third edition book despite having been written during the 2nd edition era by a writing team sufficiently removed from the core team that they probably weren't told what the 3rd edition changes were going to be.

Unless 3rd edition actually was the “creative differences” that made them quit, which is of course entirely possible. A lot of 2nd edition players thought the 3rd edition house art style looked goofy as hell.

AncientH

FASA Corporation can be reached on America OnLine (E. Mail--FASALou (Earthdawn), FASAInfo (BattleTech, Shadowrun, General Information) or FASA Art (Art Comments)) in the Online Gaming area (Keyword "Gaming"). Via InterNet use <AOL Account Name>@AOL.COM, but please, no list or server subscriptions. Thanks!

Visit FASA on the World Wide Web at http://www.FASA.com

The past is a foreign country.

Introduction

Frank

I'm reasonably certain that the majority of the 2 page introduction was written by Mike Mulvihill. Firstly, because most of it is not really about this book, and secondly because partway through the first page it puts up a big “The Developer's Say” and the developer is Mike Mulvihill. Before that, you just get a minimalist rundown on the contents of each chapter, in order. After that you get an introspective rant about where Shadowrun is going as a line and what they were thinking of doing instead of the previous place books.

AncientH

Which is all pretty standard. While the In-character/Out-of-character switch might be a bit jarring to some people, it's really just telling the readers what they're in for and giving maybe the only opportunity by the develop to justify the book's existence to their core audience.

Cyberpirates exposes a previously neglected side of the Shadowrun universe: the smugglers and pirates who are the shadowrunners of the high seas. These are the people who live by bold raids and smuggled goods and who sometimes even fight the good fight.

Basically, think of the opening scene in The Expendables (which is mercs vs. pirates, but whatever).

Keep to the Code.
Hang the Code! They're more like guidelines, anyway!

So the next question is, why piracy? Why smuggling?

This is actually a pretty big one; it's not like Shadowrun had actually neglected smuggling in previous books, even if it didn't specifically give rules for it, but like a lot of criminal enterprises it's a tricky one to actually focus on in the game, because smuggling is essentially a matter of economics, supply and demand, and availability...all of which are largely abstracted in Shadowrun and other RPGs.

Think about it: How many missile launchers are available, for any price, in your city or town? While a lot of us are used to RPG merchants being like Amazon's buy-it-now button where you hit it and the money vanishes from your account and a new magic sword appears in your inventory, in the real world the availability of a lot of goods is strictly limited, because the market for a lot of those goods is also extremely limited. It's not just about what you want and how much you can afford to pay for it, but what is available...

...and that's before you get into fine details of stuff like "rolls for hiding shit," "maximum weight/volume concerns," "price differences between this place and that place, etc." Because a lot of games prefer for a gold piece to be a gold piece to be a gold piece no matter what village or extradimensional inn you happen to be in, but in the real world you're dealing with credit transactions and bits of funny-colored paper and how you get paid is largely determined by where you want to spend it and what you want to spend it on. It's a grey space and can be very, very confusing.

Plus, it usually requires a degree of independent initiative.

Lots of people don't start their own businesses or go out on their own with commercial ventures. It takes some balls to fill the trunk of your car with bottled water and drive down to a town that just got hit by a hurricane and try to double your money by selling it to the people still dealing with the flooding...but that's sort of the idea here. It's not often smuggling diamonds past customs inspectors so that you don't have to declare the taxes. It's all about money, and trying to figure out what the demand is and how to supply it is a tough job for players and Mister Caverns alike.

Not A Shadow In Sight


D'oh!

Frank

The book proper opens with an in media res event told through on-the-spot news reports where pirates captured a ship that was supposed to be carrying oil, but it turns out that it was a false manifest and actually it's carrying radioactive waste and everything goes to hell and the Aztec navy gets involved and there's an environmental catastrophe and lots of people died.

There's some mildly racist stuff involving the transliteration of Jamaican accents, but on the whole it's a reasonably compelling story that is decently written. It sets up the rest of the book decently well. And most importantly of all: it's short. This isn't a 38 page story, it's 2 pages long. It gets to the point, it has wry things to say about corporations and mass media. It's very cyberpunk, but it's set on the high seas. It's everything you want out of the into to a book about cyberpunk pirates except the Jamaican cyberdwarf is named “De Mon” and I probably could have done without that in my life.

AncientH

[...] and the most popular qustion, "how can I do it and get away with it?" Now Shadowland brings you the answers.

This is actually a better opening than Mike Mulvihill's extended developer comment. Basically, a bunch of pirates tried to seize what they thought was a tanker full of oil, and was actually a tanker full of toxic waste, narrowly avoiding a major ecological disaster when they were fought off at the last minute. It was a headline-grabbing story which lit up the Dark Net Shadowland boards, and caused Captain Chaos & co. to put together a precis on piracy and smuggling in the Sixth World. Good, solid worldbuilding.

Frank

Next up... A World of Piracy. There are seven chapters, but only four of them are “major”, so we'll try to get it in four posts.

AncientH

Avast, me hearties! We be covering ass pirates of the Caribbean, booty buccaneers of West Africa, panty raiders of the Phillippines, and every other bad joke I can think of.

[OgreBattle]

Paul Bonner trolls are some of my earliest Shadowrun memories

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Cyberpirates!

A World of Piracy




In our world, the four piracy hotspots are not super different from the hotspots descibed in this book.

AncientH

Thirty hours ago, when I was young and naive, I figured a pirate was a pirate.

Which is about the best intro to the subject as you might hope for. Introduce the concept as something that challenges previous conceptions; make you question what you think you know. Forget all that yo-ho-ho-and-a-bottle-of-rum shit. Piracy is real and hardcore and not very fucking romantic. It's a highly mobile group of thieves, and people that actively organize to steal shit from other people are inherently fucking scary. It is against the regular social norms.

But, that same living-outside-of-society's-boundaries by itself makes them figures who don't have to abide by any other restrictions - and that, as much as anything, is what is appealing about pirates. Because everybody chafes a little.

Shadowrunners are unusual because they are by definition criminals - not mercenaries, not investigative reporters or private detectives, but professionals that specialize in doing illegal activities for money. They are outside the system, which makes them very useful for people inside the system who need to get shit done that they can't get done within the rules and regulations of normal life.

This is sort of in direct contrast to the idea of adventuring in D&D terms. Adventures almost always take place outside the context of any legal authority; some settings might make special provisions for how kings and towns deal with roving bands of experienced killers with too much gold and magic, but mostly the setting ignores the idea completely - adventurers rarely deal with law enforcement, and law enforcement is rarely equipped to deal with adventurers.

Pirates...a bit of both. They are indisputably criminals, close cousins to shadowrunners. But they also tend to operate in environments where law enforcement is either difficult or nearly non-existent. It's just a matter of speed, and the ocean allows a lot of room for running away. It is difficult and expensive to patrol, and you can't really build walls around it, except on islands or coastlines. Piracy brings the whole points of light aspect home: once you leave familiar territory, you are in the wilderness. Things can happen.

Things like pirates.

Frank

This chapter is 13 pages long and discusses piracy as like a thing you could do. Much of it is voiced from the perspective of fictional authors who are revolutionary privateers opposing the Japanese Imperial Navy around San Francisco. Such as this book has a “villain” it's mostly the Japanese Imperial Navy. They serve the role of the East India Trading Company in Pirates of the Caribbean. It seems like they really could have made more than one movie out of that, and I'm surprised that an outfit like Disney left it at a single movie.

The military of the Japanese empire are presented as very racist, and they are the villains because of that. Does that make their inclusion as villains not racist? That's a complicated question. Certainly, the use of specifically Japanese villains certainly invokes various “yellow peril” tropes. On the other hand, Japanese culture is actually pretty dickish to Koreans and Ainu and stuff, so having them also be shitty to the various Orks and Dwarfs and such that are likely to appear in the team of the player characters is not a super indefensible piece of futurism.

There have certainly been worse fictional conflicts. I mean, this isn't Marvel's Siancong War. But any time you use real people as “the enemy” you have the real possibility to go to some pretty racist places.

1998 was also kind of a transition point in thinking about Japan in cyberpunk futurism. Through the eighties, Japan was the rising power, and the idea that Japanese corporations were going to buy the planet was respectable even in main stream sources. The near future of everything from Back to the Future to the Sprawl Trilogy. But the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 caused people to reassess – in a downward direction – how powerful they expected the Japan of the future to be. Cyberpunk materials written new from 1998 on just quietly have a less Japanified future, but Shadowrun had already been being written and published for 9 years. Hence this book is talking about worldwide revolution against the holdings that previous generations of authors had already committed to be Japanese-owned. The lines on the map had alredy been drawn – but the level of power and control in those areas is retconned in this book to be much less than had been implied in earlier books. This trend continued through 3rd edition, where various Japanese megacorporations got kicked to the curb.


RIP Fuchi.

AncientH

There is a strong DIY, anti-estabishment vibe to Shadowrun in general, and to shadowrunners and pirates in particular. The thing is that they are counterpoising themselves against wageslaves - the people who grow up in and have every aspect of their lives controlled by a corporation. The people who live strictly bounded by the system. Basically, they see themselves as the people who have broken free of the Matrix.


The OTHER Matrix

The other side of that is that it's not all BDSM gear and mirrored sunglasses, "Guns. Lots of guns." and kung fu brawls. Pirates and shadowrunners aren't necessarily heroes or revolutionaries - they exist to get paid. These are people for whom a certain level of amorality is almost a given, because they don't subscribe to your rules, man. They may or may not have an ethos, but as the posters in this chapter lay out, they aren't the Mafia with any kind of pretense to ancient traditions that bind and guide them, either. There is no Pirate Code, no rules for the Masquerade.

Which is a large part of why pirates in the normal sense are portrayed as villains. They can do anything. Murder, rape, and pillage are career goals for a lot of these people, even if they aren't actual sociopaths who name their weapons and dream of the next sweet kill.

Shadowrunners, at least, are hired to do a job and operate within that remit: do the job, get paid. Pirates plan their own jobs. Which makes them much more unpredictable.

Frank

Dungeons & Dragons has a “standard adventure” which you can fall back upon if neither the players nor the MC has prepared anything else. The PCs meet in a bar, they find out about a dungeon outside of town, they go fight a bunch of monsters, and they haul off some treasure. The existence of this basic adventure is extremely valuable as it allows you to add setting and narrative complications bit by bit – putting as much or as little effort into the setting and the story as you have time for and still being able to tell a story and play a game. Games like Vampire that don't have this suffer tremendously.

What I'm getting at is that Shadowrun does have a basic adventure, and it's really helpful and makes starting a Shadowrun game much easier than starting a game of Unknown Armies or Call of Cthulhu. The player characters are a team of mercenary criminals, they get hired by an agent (named “Mr. Johnson” in Shadowrun slang) of an interested party to assault a heavily defended base, the player characters scout out the base's defenses, they make an elaborate plan, then they end up kicking in the front door shouting “Leroy Jenkins!” smash things up, take the thing, and get paid. Because the agent representing the interested party exists for plausible deniability the MC also doesn't even have to decide what's “really going on” until deep into the adventure or even after the adventure is over. You can add complications and double crosses at any stage of this story. The thing you're supposed to get could be absent or a different thing, the people hiring you could be double crossing you or using you as a distraction for the real mission, fucking whatever. Since the game's story has a basic structure, you have all evening to come up with twists for later in the adventure while things develop.


This part is not much different on a boat.

But here's the thing: just as some people play D&D campaigns where they do something other than kick in the local dungeon until Craig goes back home for the summer, some people want to play Shadowrun without dancing to the tune of whatever Mr. Johnson is playing at the moment. The problem is that Shadowrun's Earth is just a lot bigger than any D&D campaign area. And it's not just that the entirety of the Forgotten Realms would fit inside Africa and has less people in it. It's also that Shadowrun takes place in the near future and there are phones and planes. If the D&D campaign starts in Barovia, the players will probably end up with a goal to become Barons in Barovia, because it's a long fucking walk to the Marchess Marches or the County of Count. In Shadowrun, going to another continent is just a matter of getting on a plane and flying there, and getting to the next micro state is often a half hour by car (subject to traffic).

So the difficulty in enlarging upon the Shadowrun basic story is to provide a new range of stories that is bigger, but isn't unmanageably big. You can't just say “make your own crimes” because one player might come up with “sell counterfeit vodka on Dominica” while another player might suggest “kidnap Nigerian princes and hold them for ransom” and it just isn't obvious how those could be worked into the same adventure. Books like The Shadowrun Companion (the good one written for 2nd edition, not the travesty that was the SR4 version) and Cyberpirates! Presented the idea that you could have the whole campaign be tightly focused on a kind of crime and that the players could select their own missions from a thematic list. This opens things up without making things so open that the game reaches a screeching halt with option paralysis.

I approve.

Anyway, for all the tough talking and calling the reader's character a “call girl” what they are really offering is a campaign where instead of Mr. Johnson offering you a single mission you are a group of pirates and Mr. Cavern gives you a list of five shipping manifests and then the players decide which mission to undertake. It's quite a bit of text to open things up a tiny bit. But of course it has to be that way, because the Earth is so fucking big that opening things up a little is a lot more effort than opening things up way too much.

AncientH

Like pretty much every Shadowrun supplement, this one is full of posters making comments, jokes, valuable notes, misleading lies, etc. 90% of these are pretty much one-off characters who never appear in another supplement in any context...but at least some of them become recurring voices throughout the chapter, and sometimes the book. This was far and away from the idea in Shadowrun 4th edition that you'd go from this sprawling, open-source document to a much smaller group of well-realized commentators (Jackpointers), but that was kind of part of the fun of these old books, both writing and reading them.

I don't know about any ball tricks, but a seal shapeshifter can hold its breath for up to fifteen minutes, swim as strong and as fast as a seal, regenerate and go human whenever it needs to use its hands and sees and smells astrally. Drek, I'd hire all I could get.

Some of the fluff - like the above - never got equivalent stats anywhere. It is a downside to Shadowrun during this (and pretty much all subsequent eras) that there was never any attempt to create a template system equivalent to D&D3.x, or to provide an idea of relative dangerousness of various critters (aside from Threat Rating, which is it's own bag of cut snakes). The system was never good at expanding in certain directions like that.

Frank

I'll be true to the song I sing, and live and die a pirate king!

A good chunk of the World of Piracy is given over to selling you on the pirate life. This seems a little pointless, because if we weren't looking to buckle some swashes, why would we be reading this book? Personally, I find the JASHook character annoying because he talks like Sailor Venus. But the basic setup that your “pirate crew” are all loyal to each other and select jobs to go on based on what the group wants to do is pretty reasonable. This is a very functional expansion of the basic Shadowrun Team concept, and it's legitimately shameful that later editions didn't bring this concept into the core rules. It's the immediate complexity jump from “MC gives the team a single job through a Mr. Johnson handpuppet” to “MC gives you a choice of five missions according to criteria established by the campaign.”

Shadowrun has always been a little slow on the uptake on how its core concept can and should be expanded. Like, an X-Files type team is basically the same as a Shadowrunner team because the MC gives you the mission each week in the form of the crime or event you're supposed to investigate. While a revolutionary group, pirate crew, smuggling ring, or criminal gang is the next step of complexity up. Running a corporations or otherwise playing house in the Shadowrun world is more complex still. As there becomes more possibilities of what missions the players could choose to advance at any given moment, the difficulty of keeping it all straight and of the MC to properly respond to player agency increases. But Shadowrun never really properly took stock of this.

The journalist characters of Shadowbeat could be approached the same way as our pirate crew. It's just that instead of getting five shipments you might want to hijack, you get five tips of shady stuff you might want to investigate. But again, the people actually writing Shadowrun had a great deal of difficulty thinking in these terms.

AncientH

> If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid.
> Kane
"FBI's Most Wanted #8--and dropping!"

There's a practical mindset to the approach here: the pirate concepts explored in this chapter are explicitly of a professional crew that decide to go pirating, as opposed to what you might call "opportunistic piracy." If you plan a heist ahead of time, gather a crew and guns and masks, ane execute the plan: that's professionalism. If you're out for your morning donut, see that the armored car guys have left the doors open, and pick up a bag that's laying loose, that's opportunistic.

And a lot of criminals are...not professional. They're just brazen, often desperate, and occasionally lucky.

Also, reporters can be racist.

But those kinds of pirates aren't sexy. Not many people want to play a game where you're literally fighting for calories to survive. They want to be rolling in nuyen and gold and spend it all on... platinum-plated cyberware and troll prostitutes, I guess.

Frank

One issue of Shadowrun and piracy. Or Shadowrun and smuggling. Or Shadowrun and stealing cars. Or really Shadowrun and any criminal activity at all is that the amounts of money involved get very large. Shipping crates are quite large, and boats carry a lot of them. But even cars and backpacks carry a lot of stuff when you're talking about contraband.


Aye... the hot pants.

What this functionally means is that the very moment you whip out a calculator and multiply out price per unit by the number of units and divide by the number of players you will get extremely large numbers. The criminal economy kinda has to adapt to what the hell you spend your money on once there are seven or eight digits in the cash line. Shadowrun has never really confronted this issue. What do you buy when you make a big score and you have Scarface money?

Mostly Shadowrun has historically chosen to write up missions where the player characters get paid ass wipe money for performing major missions. Even “big money” events like Portfolio of a Dragon have rewards that are – from an objective standpoint – loose change in the couch. Dunkelzahn set aside a quarter million to help pay the medical bills of people damaged by magic, but that's like three months of care for one person with newly diagnosed tetraplegia. The authors of Shadowrun simply had no real grasp of what large amounts of money meant.


Sir, strictly speaking, a million dollars will not go very far these days.

So anyway, this book does raise the point that if you steal a crate of medium-to-high end electronics and sell it on the black market for some reasonable percentage of retail you have just made more more money than all published Shadowrun adventure payouts combined. And um... that's it. They raise that point. The point has been raised. This book doesn't actually have an answer to that, and no subsequent Shadowrun book ever adequately handled this issue either.

AncientH

It's not a unique problem for Shadowrun, by any means. All games have a question of "what constitutes victory?" For a campaign, that might be as simple as vanquishing the current Dark Lord or recovering the lost widget or ending the war. But over time - especially when the primary motivation is essentially greed/the need to pay the bills - it becomes a lot harder to define when "enough is enough."

Shadowrun has the workings of a complex economy in ways that D&D struggles with, because nuyen are just electronic funds with a recognizable conversion rate to contemporary cash, not heaping piles of gold coins and jewels. If you don't want to abstract lifestyle costs, you can go out on Zillow and price houses and shit. But the game stops when the player says enough, not when some arbitrary level cap is reached, and the potential of actually acquiring vast wealth does bring the real question of what to do with it.

The implicit idea is that it isn't all about the benjamins. That after the big score you either blow a wad of cash, or you're faced with some moral crisis like the Expendables and end up doing The Right Thing, Even If We Don't Paid. The new orphanage gets built, Mr. Johnson ends up with a freshly ventillated forebrain, whatever.

Frank

A fair amount of ink is spent on describing how taking a boat is essentially exactly the same as performing a Shadowrun on a secret installation. That you still need diverse talents, that you still need to do legwork and scouting and make an overly complex plan and then kick down the door shouting “Leroy Jenkins!” This is reasonable. Then there's the after-stuff where you make your getaway and try to get into a port where you can actually spend money and take a hot bath and not get caught by cops.

In fact, Shadowrun really should have formalized all this and described the arcs of different kinds of missions ranging from military to investigation and have distinct phases such as Legwork and Leroy Jenkins. That kind of meta-awareness was never present in any edition of Shadowrun, and the closest we ever got was 4th edition. But books like Cyberpirates! show how that kind of thing would be a good thing to have and makes me sigh while thinking about what might have been.

AncientH

The most important point about a ship is, of course, it is moving. Shadowrun movement rules are not the kind of thing you want to think long and hard about, and combat is even more of a headache because trying to handle damage to even modest-sized vessels is tricky as fuck. As much fun as it might be to throw a grenade in a yacht and see the sweat break out on Mr. Cavern's face as he realizes what the Chunky Salsa rules are going to do to him, it's usually better to treat ships as static terrain features for the most part.

Frank

Notably absent from this chapter: any real discussion about how Piracy fits into the world. For a chapter called “A World of Piracy” you'd think they'd drop some science on our ass about how many pirate attacks there are in a year, or how much shipping comes under pirate attack, or even like how long a ship can be “off grid” before the Imperial Navy comes to poke things. But they don't. I don't have any larger point here, it's just that there's probably a fair number of potentially useful pieces of statistical information that could be here instead of rants about the general opinion on smugglers of the Confederated American States.

Also: the CAS really hasn't aged well.

AncientH

The breakup of the United States was something that was explicitly necessary in Shadowrun's history - they wanted to carve unfamiliar maps out of familiar territories - but whatever remaining glamour that the CSA had back when we were young and innocent is dead and buried as the racist traitors whose monuments still litter the USA. To its credit, Shadowrun never went full Dixiecrat with the CAS, but the DNA of the idea is still pretty weird and ugly, much like the CSA itself.

Unfortunately, we get a lot of the CAS because it has a large coastline with the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, and so we have to deal a bit with the perspective of people "down South" because that is probably the implicit staging ground for a lot of piratical forays, their coast guard and navy will be major players, etc. etc.

Frank

Next up.... Swashbucklers of the Caribbean.


Close enough.

[Nath]

The book proper opens with an in media res event told through on-the-spot news reports where pirates captured a ship that was supposed to be carrying oil, but it turns out that it was a false manifest and actually it's carrying radioactive waste and everything goes to hell and the Aztec navy gets involved and there's an environmental catastrophe and lots of people died.

This reminds me of a story that happened for real (or so it says) in 2008. The MV Iran Deyanat was officially carrying iron ore when it was taken over by Somali pirates. The iranians paid 2,5 millions dollar to get their ship back, but a number of pirates died later of what may have been radiation poisoning.

This was, like, my third favorite pirate story of the late 2000ies to use for Shadowrun. While I don't remember piracy getting a lot of media coverage in the 1990ies when Cyberpirates! was released, Somali piracy put the topic back into the spotlight.

My second favorite was the MV Sirius Star, a Saudi-owned oil tanker that earned the pirates a fatwa against them for stealing from the Custodian of the Holy Mosquees - aka the Saudi royal family. While the pirates initially asked for 25 millions USD, they finally left it for 3 millions, while a Islamic militia was coming for them as a result.

But the best modern pirate story ever is undoubtly the MV Arctic Sea, a cargo ship officially carrying timber when it was taken over in the Baltic Sea by tattooed Russians, Estonians and Latvians (yes, that kind of tattoos) posing a Swedish policemen. They had reached the Atlantic Ocean when Russian and NATO warships started searching for them. The Russian navy got them first, and then immediately dispatched not one but two Ilyushin Il-76 cargo airplane to Cape Verde, where they had brought the ship. But the part that makes it my favorite story is when one of the pirates (again, a Russian-speaking tattooed dude) testified they were ecologists working for an organization whose name he did not remember...

[DrPraetor]

I dunno, if you posit the breakup of the United States, it's hard to see it not falling along the lines of

http://www.bluescreenmusic.com/Gifs/blo ... usland.jpg

(I can't find a version of this pic that will embed!).

Now the CAS would probably not call itself the Confederacy (or Gilead,) but that's what it would be, more or less. The not-CAS would be a horrible racist shithole. Major cities like Atlanta and Austin would want to be enclaves of the UCAS (and border states like Ohio might want to be divided in half), you'd have population displacement that would make the partition of India look like a tea party, and so on.

But, if anything, the cultural divides between Red and Blue America have gotten more pronounced than in the early 90s. I mean, Clinton/Gore carried TN in 1996!

[Blicero]

There it is. The exclamation mark is in the actual book title. No one knows why.

I would say that pirates are just an inherently exciting concept, and people knew this even back in 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Pirates!

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Cyberpirates!

Swashbucklers of the Caribbean

AncientH

The first word in anyone's head when they think about pirates is "swashbuckling." Now, I doubt many people know what the word means. I did some time at Tulane, so I'll fill your heads with a fact from the archives. "Swashbuckle" was old Euroslang, meaning to beat the hilt of your rapier (Swash) against your shield (buckler) to challenge all comers in earshot.

Okay, so to swash was to swagger around with a drawn sword, and a buckle or buckler was a small shield that would be held in the left hand. It described a kind of swaggering, violent braggadocio in the late Renaissance and the term swashbuckler came to define a certain type in romantic literature and later film.



This is important because, like the effect of the Godfather films on the American Mafia, a lot of the popular concept of piracy has been shaped not by any sort of long-standing tradition but Hollywood. You think of pirates as rum-swigging loveable scoundrels who go on wild and zany adventures because that is what Hollywood has told you being a pirate is.


This guy didn't exist, this book didn't exist. How's mum?

But it's important to remember this, because Shadowrun writers deliberately make callbacks and seek continuity, and because it is set in the realish-world-but-the-future, they can deliberately comment on how some people are "playing pirate."

Frank

It's thirty one pages of ranting about pirates of the Caribbean. Not the movie, but actual pirates in the actual Caribbean. This is also where The Gingerbread Man comes from, who is a pirate character who is filled with braggadocio and is very annoying. Certain Shadowrun authors who are themselves very annoying fucking love this guy, and he ended up getting written into all kinds of weird bullshit later on. There's a whole chapter of Attitude which is just one of the freelancers freestyle riffing on this chapter. It's all very weird.



Anyway, the bottom line is that Gingerbread Man is a pirate in the Caribbean and he acts like an action star and uses exaggerated stories of his exploits to do the Dread Pirate Roberts thing and get people to surrender and hand over goods. Now that's a reasonably simple concept, but it's made longer because it's handled in the form of an unreliable narrator. That is, we aren't told by Gingerbread Man that he's a bullshit artist who uses boasts and PR stunts to get advantages in negotiations over pirate boardings – we aren't even told out of character that this is going on. Gingerbread Man is boasting to the reader, and you figure out that he's blowing smoke for reputational advantage through context and reading between the lines.

Actually, it's pretty well written. It's a good page turner and it effectively conveys its big reveal without having to actually stage a “big reveal.” And the sad thing is that the very fact of this subtlety is probably actually why this piece ended up getting rehashed by the Catalyst Scabs fifteen years later. That it was in fact too subtle, and people who thought empty braggadocio was “totally awesome” ended up being in charge of the game line and they stroked their dicks about it. And I became very sad.

But as a solitary piece it works.

AncientH

A large chunk of the chapter talks very briefly about the Carib, which in Shadowrun consists of a united Carib League, a coalition of different island nations (and South Florida) with a government which is...vague. Hurricanes, plagues, and the Awakening sort of did a number on fucking everything. Imagine the fucking surprise when Haiti found out that vodou actually works.


Sir, can I interest you in a new piercing? All the rage with the gentlemen.

How the League actually works is anybody's fucking guess, because half the islands are owned by various megacorps and shit. The place is designed (and I use the term loosely) to be as weird and anarchic as you can get while still having sandy, sunny beaches and cruise ships and things like that.

Frank

The Caribbean League was probably drawn on the map out of simple laziness. There are seven thousand islands in the Caribbean divided up among somewhere between 12 and 30 countries depending on what you consider a country, and the people drawing the original Shadowrun maps just didn't want to get into it. They simply were not drawing things to a scale where you'd be able to resolve whether Trinidad and Tobago were still in governmental union with one another. That being said, it's actually kind of an inspired solution to the region and might yet end up being what happens. You have the various island countries in a loose alliance with each other and kind of an EEC thing going on to let trade between islands go relatively smoothly.

In our world a lot of those islands have very close relationships with imperial powers. Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are straight territories owned by the United States, Curaçao and St. Maarten are owned outright by the Netherlands, and so on. Even independent countries often are bound very tightly to imperial powers with Jamaica mostly asking “How high?” when the United Kingdom tells it to jump. These imperial relationships are very difficult to escape, because the economies of these islands are generally pretty limited. Industry and Agriculture combined are less than ten percent of the economy of the Bahamas, and tourism accounts for more than half of GDP. If people in the Bahamas want to eat food, wear clothes, or play games on electronic devices they need agricultural goods and manufactured goods to come in by boat. And that creates a dependency on the imperial powers that deign to send those boats.

Of course, in Shadowrun's future timeline all of those imperial powers have collapsed totally. The boats from the United States do not come to the Virgin Islands because there is no United States to send them. The people of the Caribbean were forced to wean themselves off of imperial shipments because they aren't fucking coming whether you stay loyal or not. This is not an independence by revolt from below, but by abandonment from above.

This chapter establishes this concept of the Caribbean League and it's basically just been the canon understanding of the region ever since. It does a tolerable job of doing it, but I honestly wish it had delved a bit farther into the ramifications. One thing they mention offhandedly is that the number of islands that are officially in the League is ninety, which is a very weird number and I don't know how they get there. Like, there's 143 islands in Puerto Rico alone, but only four of those islands have people living on them. Obviously you could imagine a way to count to 90 islands with some sort of League representation, but I'm not sure how many of the Grenadines get to send representatives to meetings.

Anyway, you don't quite get a handle on how massive the disparity is between islands like Dominica and islands like St.Lucia by reading this chapter. It really could have opened with some wikifacts, because I don't think reading this chapter really gets across the reality that three quarters of the Caribbean population lives on two islands and that countries like St. Lucia have the population of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

What you do get is an acceptable future history of the islands of the Caribbean losing contact with their old imperial masters and joining together rather than allow new imperial masters such as Aztlan to fill the void. It works tolerably well.

The addition of Miami makes rather less sense. Basically I think Miami was originally included in the Caribbean League as a joke, because “It's basically Cuban” or something. This book suggests that the Southern states kicked Miami out because there were too many brown people and then it joined the League because it was that or starve.

AncientH

The nature of the Carib means you have a lot of different factions, a large amount of shipping traffic, completely porous borders (because it's the ocean), and lots of uninhabited island with plenty of room for smaller operators. It's not Waterworld by any means, but it does mean that a lot of the basic reasons why piracy during the Golden Age of Piracy worked out is also present here: the Carib is the gateway between South America, Aztlan, and the CAS. Goods, people, and services from these regions all flow through the Carib. So it is, whether by luck or design, actually a pretty good place for pirates and smugglers.

It is also, as Frank points out, geographically large but demographically small. It's not like Seattle where you're one troll among hundreds of thousands; if you step onto an island, you might be one of ten trolls on the island. You might be the only troll on the island. So with less ability to blend in, reputation should be more important...and for the most part, the chapter does suggest that is the case.

Frank

Shadowrun has “native uprisings” throughout the world, and the Caribbean League pretty much did not have one. And I'm going to talk about Elizabeth Warren now.

See, Elizabeth Warren is not part of the Cherokee tribe and never claimed to be. She does however have a Cherokee ancestor. She's a white person from Oklahoma, but she does have a tiny drop of Native American heritage. Being a member of the Cherokee Nation involves mutual recognition by the tribal council and involves partial ownership of tribal properties and is all very complicated and political. There have been and continue to be big fights over whether to accept the descendants of Cherokees and African slaves into the tribe and so on and so on. The Cherokee Nation recognizes about half a million people. But the people who consider themselves to have some small amount of Cherokee blood number in the tens of millions. And like Elizabeth Warren, most of those people are correct.

Shadowrun's native uprising was based on the original authors not understanding demographic data and vastly overestimating how many people “are” First Nation. But the fact that we consider Elizabeth Warren and people like her to be basically English and not basically Native American is simply a cultural choice. If culturally the people with various trace amounts of tribal blood considered themselves more Native American and less European, then the demographics would completely flip with vast swathes of North America being inhabited by First Nation people and exclusively European, African, or Asian peoples becoming minorities.

Anyway, the Arawak tribal affiliation is completely gone. Literally zero people are part of the Arawak nation. But more than 60% of the people of Puerto Rico have Arawak mitochondrial DNA and could thus trace an unbroken line of mothers back to the Arawak tribe. If we posit a cultural shift in which people like Elizabeth Warren are considered Cherokee, then the Caribbean would be majority native as well.

Arawak revivalism is actually a thing, by the way.

AncientH

Voodoo came to Shadowrun in Awakenings: New Magic in 2057, released about two years prior to this. The rules established Voodoo as an independent and distinct tradition which focuses on spirits that possess humans. Also, zombies were created by spells and alchemy.



Magical traditions at this point in SR were...pretty odd. The Mage/Shaman dichotomy was established in the original book of the original edition, and for a long time they tried to maintain that division exclusively, adapting all other traditions (Druids, various adepts, etc.) as variants of one or the other, mostly Shamans because totems give you a lot more variety for your buck than mages do.

Voodoo (or obeah, obi, vodou, etc.) like a lot of real-world traditions is not set up for throwing fireballs at each other from ten yards away. So the rules that are actually provided for voodoo in 2nd edition are kind of weird and there are special foci and things which were later retconned out of existence just because...well, mostly because they were trying to pay more than lip service to actual Voodoo beliefs and at the same time everybody wanted Hollywood voodoo complete with shuffling corpses.

Cyberpirates!, like your bicurious roomate from college, tends to go both ways. It wants to establish a strong Awakened presence in the Carib League and pay at least lip service to different religions, but at the same time everybody wants to talk zombies.

A supposedly big deal is that Dunkelzahn offered 36 million nuyen in his will to the Chief Houngan of the Carib League...a position which did not exist, and a sum of money which while spectacular for an individual is less than the operating budget for a modest-sized city. It is at once a lot of money and not enough money, but it is money sufficient to cause a bunch of magicians to kill each other trying to be Houngan Supreme.


Have fun with that.

Frank

Shadowrun's “giant plagues” bit in the future history was basically intended to explain why the population of 2050 was globally about the same as it was in 1989. That is why the “hardest hit areas” are also the fastest growing areas of 1989. Essentially the authors of Shadowrun didn't want to have to do a lot of future-history demographic modeling and came up with a hand-wavy solution in which they could pretty much use contemporary sources to write about regions in the future.

Of course, that gets super weird when Shadowrun goes on for years after that and then you end up having to project future population changes anyway. But also when you focus in on areas like the Antilles where you wouldn't necessarily expect the plague results to be demographically interchangeable with the world as a whole. Like, the VITAS plagues were a very heavy handed and lazy narrative device, and when you get into the specifics they don't make a lot of sense.

Anyway, the stories of people eating spam out of cans for fear that the plague might spread through the water is vivid and decently written. It doesn't especially hold up as world building, but none of it does. What we kinda needed is a description of how many people are actually living in the Cayman Islands in 2059, which we don't get because calculating that kind of thing is actually super hard.

AncientH

We get a map, albeit not a great one, where all of South America is labeled "Amazonia." Individual islands get a couple paragraphs, but no CIA Factbook-style infodump.

Also, anybody from the continent is a "cont." That's funny.

Frank

The Caribbean League makes rules and laws and shit, but compliance with those laws is essentially voluntary on an island by island basis. It's like how Hungary and Poland wipe their asses with the precepts of liberal democracy and the European Union can't really do anything about it. The League has some amount of ability to enforce things between islands, but not particular within islands. This seems pretty plausible.

And since there are some islands that are small enough you can basically just fucking buy them, there are areas that might as well have no laws at all.

AncientH

While that might sound like a Libertarian paradise, it's probably closer to Pedophile Island, although thankfully the authors did not dredge that particular sewer. The fact is that pirates/smugglers don't need the lawless areas to operate within - they just need to evade pursuit long enough to escape jurisdictions. Living in an actual anarchist state is horrific because all social conventions break down. We live barely on the edge of sanity as it is, thinking that locking the doors when we leave is enough to keep out stuff safe - even if we know perfectly well that somebody can just break in.

But smugglers especially need laws to operate: if something isn't forbidden, then there's less demand for it through illegal channels, and they have no market. It is the prohibition that makes their trade lucrative. Otherwise, the megacorps would be all over it.

Frank

Gingerbread Man gives you a rant about a few of the islands and we get a map. Haiti and Dominican Republic are written up separately despite literally being on the same island. They throw Trinidad and Tobago under the bus as “private islands” so we don't really discuss them at all.

All of these are filled with rants and crosspostings by internet hecklers. It's fun to read, but information density is really low.

AncientH

Which is pretty par for the course. This book is covering a massive area but giving it less pagespace than they devoted to London. I can tell you from writing these things that entertainment tends to trump dropping raw data, and a lot of random brainfarts show up as shadowcomments - but it's not all silliness or dangling adventure seeds, it's practical ideas like big crews focus on one or two big scores rather than trying to shake down tourists.

The Chromed Accountant and Carousel actually discuss some of the ins-and-outs of smuggling, and it is a pretty good rundown. It's actually funny because what CA in particular suggests is to go full monty haul: grab everything that isn't bolted down or which you can conveniently unbolt and bring with you. He's basically telling you to strip the dungeon bare...and then find out which market will give you the best prices for the goods. It is actually an inspired and plausible solution to tell players to do all the shit they've wanted to do for decades, just to make sure they do it in such a way as to maximize profit.

Frank

This chapter presents things for Runners/Mercenaries/Pirates/Whatever to really aspire to. Get your own uniformed soldiers! Buy an island! Have your own nuclear deterrent! Expand your fleet! Influence governments! Have a trid show made about your exploits! This was kind of touched on in Fields of Fire as well, but this is the book where they really brought it home. And this is exactly right. All of it.

I want to play house. I want to create and expand my own Cobra Command. I want to conquer territory and get into military standoffs with corporations and governments. You're basically playing X-COM and there should come times when you start upgrading your base and getting better transport and so on and so forth. In D&D you become the Baron of Barovia and you get a castle of your own, and Shadowrun needed something like that. And this book describes it.

But of course no one ever made a book that detailed how you might make the transition from street rat to James Bond villain. Part of the problem was the itemization of purchases, but mostly it's just a failure of ambition and imagination.


There's also a thing about sitting in a fancy chair drinking expensive rum and smoking expensive cigars. Shadowrun did manage to allow you to do that part.

AncientH

We get a vague idea of the pirate/smuggler demographics; the implication is that there are dozens, maybe hundreds of different crews with bases and areas of operation scattered throughout the Carib, but it's sort of like trying to nail down how many shadowrunners there are in Seattle: as many as are necessary to sustain a robust game. Not putting a hard number on it sidesteps the whole "president of the anime club" issue in Vampire, but it also means there's a bit of a John Wick surreality to it where you wonder how the infrastructure exists to support all these different gangs.

And they are presented exactly like gangs are presented in the Seattle Sourcebook.

Frank

The list of players and dudes to watch out for is all over the place. It's like if a kid with ADHD was telling you about all the crazy shit in the Caribbean. It hops directly from ranting about an ecoterrorist cell operating out of the Everglades to talking about the Neo-Communist government of Cuba. There's no order to it. And the usability of this is extremely hit and miss.

Also not to put too fine a point on it, but the book's kind of repeating itself. There's a little rant about the Dominican Territories as a “Player of the Caribbean” but there was also a rant about it in the regional wrap up. I understand that this book seems to have been stuck in development hell for a while and also the primary writers quit working for the company before it was 100% finished... but it kinda seems like we have multiple drafts merged together in a fairly haphazard fashion.

It's not as bad about this as like Attitude, but it's in that general vein.

AncientH

The thing about gangs is that most of them don't last long. It's a dangerous occupation and people get sent to prison or die, and then the gang evaporates. It is exceedingly rare to have criminal syndicates of any size that survive more than a couple of years. But Shadowrun wasn't doing yearly updates on these locations, so some of the same information from 2059 was being repeated in the 2070s. There's not really a good way to handle that unless you've got a centralized website providing regular content updates or something, and Shadowrun never really had its act together enough to do that.

Frank

The final bit is about Dunkelzahn having left 36 million nuyen to the “head houngan of the Caribbean league.” Which is hilarious, because there is not and never has been a “head houngan.” So naturally there's a big dust up as various voodoo priests with real magic powers attempt to force all the other sorcerers to acknowledge them as pope. It's a hilarious image and also a great adventure seed, but like most things involving the Draco Foundation the actual amounts of money involved are way too small.



If you're going to throw out enough money to cause a religious schism, it should be enough money to buy the most expensive house in the Caribbean League. For fuck's sake, the tenth most expensive house for sale in Florida right now has an asking price of fifty eight million.

AncientH

As long as we're here, I'll voice a pet gripe: the Voice of Ogoun (coalition/initiatory group of houngans) is said to have 90 members. That's a big deal, but it is also mathematically impossible, because the way SR set up initiation group rules, joining the group requires passing a test where the TN is the number of magicians in the group. So when they have these honking big initiatory groups, they seem bullshit.

The gloss is that the Voice actually consists of several tiered initiatory groups - you start out with all the grade 1 initiates, and then you can move up and join the grade 2 initiates in a separate group, and so on and so forth as you gradually increase your power and magical might. But you don't actually get that detailed in this section, because only fanboys really care about how that stuff works.

Frank

Next up: The Philippines.

[Nath]

The final bit is about Dunkelzahn having left 36 million nuyen to the “head houngan of the Caribbean league.” Which is hilarious, because there is not and never has been a “head houngan.” So naturally there's a big dust up as various voodoo priests with real magic powers attempt to force all the other sorcerers to acknowledge them as pope. It's a hilarious image and also a great adventure seed, but like most things involving the Draco Foundation the actual amounts of money involved are way too small.

Over the years, I came up with two ideas to use this particular plot.

The first idea involved Earthdawn-style pattern magic, where Dunkelzahn wanted a head houngan to be chosen because having a leader acknowledged by all the practionners of a tradition would give access to some utterly specific pattern magic, and he thought it would still be easier to achieve with Voodoo than with, say, the shamanic, hermetic or wuxing tradition.

My second idea was to have "head houngan of the Carribean League has 36 million nuyen" as the Sixth World equivalent of the Nigerian prince email scam, and the Draco Foundation tasking the runners to retrieve the money one of Dunkelzahn's accountant or, for additional hilarity, Dunkelzahn himself, lost to scamers years ago (Ryan Mercury was another possibility), so they can pay the newly recognized head houngan.

EDIT: Now I think about it, I could have used both idea, with the head houngan scam actually giving Dunkelzahn the idea for the pattern magic thing

[JigokuBosatsu]

New magic in 2057

Oh my gooood what's wrong with your face

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Cyberpirates!

Rebel Pirates of the Philippines


Whether you support Philippine revolutionary pirates depends on how you feel about the revolution in question. For this book we are asked to imagine a noble one.

AncientH

[...] but hell, what do I know about pirates?

So, imagine if you popped in Die Hard, and what you ended up watching instead was The Raid. That's the Philippines chapter of Cyberpirates! in a nutshell.

The trick to these chapters is to present not just different locales for pirating, but different themes. The Carib is flamboyant and weird in the backyard of most North American shadowrunners. The Philippines is, geographically and spiritually, something else altogether. Insofar as the writers tried to capture that vibe, I think they succeeded.

Frank

It's 33 pages and asks us to believe that the folks behind Shadowland were completely unaware that there was a long history of civil uprisings taking the form of piratical acts performed in the Sulu Sea. This seemed fairly plausible to teenage Frank, because at the time I didn't really know anything about piracy in and around the Philippines. In retrospect, it's a really weird framing device.

Anyway, it starts with a declaration of war. A listing of intolerable acts, and a call to arms to liberate the Philippines from the oppressive rule of Imperial Japan. And it's written by a dragon. This chapter is metal as hell.

But it's also something that should make you pretty uncomfortable. The historical actions of the Japanese Empire in the Philippines were pretty reprehensible. The intolerable acts being described are drawn from immediate parallel actions in the 20th century. The historical occupation of The Philippines by the Japanese Empire is one marked by events like “The Death March” and “The Burning” it's a bad period that Philippinos are sometimes still a bit upset about (and substantially more were still upset in 1998). Having the Japanese revert to Axis behaviors in the Shadowrun future is... kinda racist. Especially when the Germans, Italians, and Spanish weren't similarly asked to reprise their World War 2 roles as uncomplicated villains.


There were historical reasons why materials like this existed. But it's still a thing we have to apologize for even though the other side was worse.

AncientH

This was the formal introduction of the Great Dragon Masaru, who is canonically the youngest current Great Dragon and other than that you really don't care. The Japanese going imperial militarily as well as economically is one of those super weird things in Shadowrun like creating KKK analogues that target metahumans (Alamos 20,000, Humanis Policlub) and explicit Tolkien references (Sons of Sauron) which are...<sigh>

How the fuck do I put this?

The world is shit. It gets better, but it is not a uniform progress by any definition of the term. There are always people that fight that change, that backslide, that feed on fear and ignorance and greed. We see it in the United States and United Kingdom and other countries today where right-wing shitheels have grabbed at the reins of power on a wave of narrow-minded xenophobia. And if you think I'm being a dirty leftist socialist for saying that, thank you and fuck off.

This is nothing new. It takes time for old hatred and stereotypes to die, and they seldom do. Strom Thurmond was alive and serving in congress when this book came out, and he fought every move to extend even the most basic rights of equality to black people. The idea that some nation state in the future might go full imperialist was not a weird idea then, and it is not now.

But it's one thing to live that sort of thing, and another to write about it. We can say, fairly objectively, that the Russian Federation was the bad guy when they unlawfully annexed the Crimea in 2014, but that isn't to say that all Russians are bad or cartoon jackbooted Nazis or Cold War stereotypes. When dealing with real-world nations doing objectionable shit in the future, it is very difficult for that to not reflect as being racist in the present, whatever your intentions.

So making Japan the bad guy in this scenario, while totally reasonable in terms of storytelling, is super awkward because it feels like a Yellow Peril trope calling back to WWII.

Frank

I have read of your Caribbean-style piracy. If you tried that here, you would die. Style is not important. Money and glory are not important. Only freedom is important.

Like I said, this chapter is metal as hell.

But it also underlines a hole in the Shadowrun rules. Money (nuyen) and glory (karma) are the only currencies the game has rules for. If you go on a mission to raise awareness of exploitative labor conditions in shrimp trawling to attempt to influence consumer patterns or you go on a mission to fight a war against a military opponent – there's simply no means within the game to track your progress.

Without some sort of means to track progress of your prosecution of war, no objectives have any objective meaning. You are killing Japanese soldiers merely for the prurient glee of describing the butchery of Japanese people. Devoid of the prospect of your actions meaningfully impacting the progress of the war, there is nothing for you here but the empty misery tourism and bloodlust of murdering people for the color of their skin or the slant of their eyes.

AncientH

This is part of a larger issue where it is difficult in the real world to judge the effect of any military action. Simply counting up the people killed and the infrastructure lost or destroyed is insufficient; this is the kind of campaign that usually involves wargaming campaigns where small skirmishes add up to points and you track the battle on maps and play out the battles on other tables and eventually one player or coalition has enough points to declare victory.

Real war doesn't work like that. It's ugly and mean and a lot of the critical bits and pieces are not things you think about. It's not a Sid Meier Civilization game where everybody has their turn and moves their pieces across the board and a city goes from red to blue. With guerrilla warfare in particular, you're going outside the normal niceties of military command structure and clearly established lines between "base" and "house," "soldier" and "civilian." It ain't pretty.

Also, I should point out that the whole dragon-led insurrection against the Japanese has sortof been done before in the adventure/setting book Paradise Lost, where the feathered serpent Nahoka is leading an insurrection of Native Hawai'ians for...reasons.

Frank

The Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon (People's Army Against the Japanese) was a historical rebellion against the occupying Japanese Empire in World Ward 2. This is obviously the name that any revolutionary force that sprang up against a new Japanese occupation would take for itself. This book suggests that the revolution has taken for itself the name of “The Huk” and this is undoubtedly correct. I cannot imagine Philippinos taking any other name for their insurrection if their enemy was again the Japanese Empire.

It's also historical fact that the original Huk Rebellion continued for 9 years after the end of World War 2 because the Americans ended up betraying them at the end of the war because they sounded suspiciously like communists and also a lot of the landowners who had collaborated with the Japanese were equally eager to collaborate with the Americans. It's a pretty ugly period of history actually, and the justified pride that Philippino people take in Huk resistance is tempered with anger and disgust.

Anyway, The Nuevo Huk or whatever gets written up in rather too much detail for you to keep track of or give a shit about all the details, and not enough detail that you could meaningfully run this war out yourself. We get the names of various subcommanders you don't care about but none of the troop numbers or ship dispositions needed to actually sim this shit.

AncientH

This was also basically all that was written about the Philippines for approximately 7 years, when Shadows of Asia came out for 4th edition. For anyone that doesn't mind spoilers, in 2072 they would canonically achieve independence from Japan and start a Huk government.

Yay. You won. What the fuck did you win?

Unlike the Carib where the main goal is "make money," the goal of pirates in the Philippines is to strike a blow against Imperial Japanese forces, often by stealing their shit or blowing it up. The end result might be the same, from the Japanese point of view, or even from the runners point of view if they're just along as hired muscle, but the political tint of their actions does mean that...well, they'll still be shot and killed by the cops, but now they might be seen as martyrs to a political cause, I guess?

Frank

Apparently everyone in The Huk acknowledges the leadership of the Great Dragon Masaru. This seems... highly implausible. It's a revolution. There are revolutionary cells. There are spontaneous guerrilla uprisings. There are people who don't know and don't care whatever it is that big leadership people happened to say that day.


This is Luis Taruc, who was “the” leader of the Huk. Except that lots of Huk did their own shit and didn't listen to him because that is how anti-authoritarian revolutionary movements actually work.

Fundamentally, I'm not sure what Masaru being a dragon actually lends to the story. I mean, it makes things that much more fucking metal, but the main leader could be anything or nothing. It could be a caterpillar with a talk box or three ferrets in a trench coat.


Masaru exists to make pictures like this – which are totally metal. But you could still make these pictures if he was the movement's Trotsky rather than its Lenin.

AncientH

> Mistakes have been made by both sides. I suggest you try bodyguarding the 20,000 Filipinas who are forced to prostitute themselves and their children to the "civilizing" Japanese before you judge either side.
> Tetchie

There's a few parts of this book which get a little too real. Shadowrun never shied away from the fact that prostitution or drugs or murder happen - the PCs are all encouraged to partake - but it also generally never looks hard at things like sexual abuse, kiddie porn, human trafficking, etc. It's a lot easier sometimes to face hypothetical questions about addiction to fictional future electronic brain stimulants than it is to talk about which megacorp has a department devoted to making hardcore simporn involving adolescents because marketing says there's a market for it.

It's hard to fault that on the authors as a failure of imagination or an unwillingness to face the nasty realities of life. It's a matter of the audience you're addressing. Twelve year-olds pick up RPG books, and most of the freelancers writing the book aren't trying to open their minds to the deeply terrible social problems that cyberpunk-style dystopias can highlight. Most D&D books don't talk about why dragons kidnap princess either, or where all the half-orcs and tieflings come from.

To give some context, when I wrote an adventure for World Adventure Writing Month in 2007, it was described as:

It's dark, gritty and of adult content. The 'good guys' aren't particularly nice and the whole adventure is cast in a sea of human social effluent.

...I was in my edgy phase of Shadowrun at that point, because I had kind of grown up with the game and I wanted the game to grow up too. So I applaud the authors for taking the occasional step outside the game's comfort zone.

Frank

How many islands are in The Philippines? Certainly over seven thousand, but the actual country of The Philippines doesn't even know. The definition of what is an island is fairly disputed. There are areas that are sometimes above water and sometimes not, and areas that are sometimes connected by land and sometimes not. And you have moving sand bars that are sometimes things that you can walk on and sometimes not even a thing. And so on and so on. Shadowrun's future history involves a bunch of extra Pacific Rim volcano activity and Masaru claims that there are 8,216 islands in The Philippines. Because that's totally metal.


There's a bunch of these, and they are used as staging grounds for rebel pirates. Because that's awesome.

AncientH

Part of the context of the Japanese being the bad guys is that the cultural xenophobia directed toward Koreans, Ainu, and other foreigners was extended almost by default to metahumans, so...yeah, the Japanese are explicitly super-racist in this setting. Like super racist. I know I keep going on about it, but it's a lot more explicit in this chapter than the previous one. When the Japanese deport metahumans to die on an island named for the mythological Japanese version of hell, that island is explicitly in the Philippines.

Masaru actually authors this section, which gives his slightly unreliable take on events, full of revolutionary slogans and encouraging shadowrunners to come to the Philippines and steal shit from the Japanese because 1) they can make bank, and 2) it hurts the Japanese. Which in his mind is just win-win.

Of course, because Masaru is a dragon, that means that everything he does has people looking at it from the perspective of Great Dragon Shenanigans, and that kind of bogs the shadowposting down a little (or spices it up, if you don't care about piracy in the Philippines but DO care about conspiracy theories involving famous lizards.)

Frank

The future history of The Philippines gets a lot more detail than the future history of the Caribbean does. I'm not saying it's more useful or believable, but it's much more present. It exists. It is a thing.

In Shadowrun the explanation of like how the Ute exists is fairly incoherent. But the description of how and why there is a Japanese Imperial Philippine Occupation Zone is pretty well thought out and explained. Of course, this still comes back around to the fact that the existence of corruption and military juntas in the 1970s is real but it's the kind of thing the player characters could probably just fucking ignore. The existence of the Marcos administration perhaps explains why foreign powers were able to conquer the place, but the players aren't going to directly interact with the Marcos regime in 2059. Everyone directly involved is long dead in the near future.

What you do get is a much more visceral description of oppression than you do in other books. Like, the villains in most Shadowrun books are Saturday morning cartoon villains. It's like the Star Wars prequels – sure something bad is supposed to be happening back on the frog planet, but none of the rabbit robots are shown actually putting people into camps – let alone torturing people to death in camps. Well, this chapter describes people getting kicked to death by teenagers while they lie down and take it due to threats to their family. There's a good chance this chapter is actually the most in-your-face horrifying thing ever written for any edition of Shadowrun. This chapter should probably come with a trigger warning.

AncientH

Not to get too distracted by all the politics, we also get a look at potential targets for pirates in the Philippines, which speaks directly to the needs of a campaign. The major people you want to hit are the ones with the money - so, Japanese megacorporate facilities and shipments. In fact, they focus on the Japanese megacorps so exclusively you don't really get an idea of anybody else TO hit. The assumption is you steal from them because they're the ones with shit worth stealing.

Frank

The Japanese Empire sends metahumans to exile on a volcanic island. People have nicknamed this island Yomi, the legendary “island of monsters” from Japanese folk myth. This is, to put it bluntly, totally awesome.

Not for the people who have been exiled to a barren rock to live in internment camps until they die, obviously. But as a visual and a symbol of oppression that ties into both history and myth it is very well done. As far as I can tell, the whole Yomi bit is something that the Heplers wrote into Shadowrun lore on their own. All the 2nd edition references to the place were in books they worked on.


Japanese Bakemono stories are actually super weird, and this book does a good job of bringing them to accessibility for a western audience.

AncientH

Think Frank and I have gotten a bit out of line with our ranting.

Captain Chaos and my pirate friends double-teamed me to persuade me to share the following info.

This sort of (unintended?) entendre might have launched a few fanfics back in the day. I wouldn't know anything about that, since all my Shadowrun porn was lost in the Great Harddrive Crash of 2010. But the basic idea of this section is sort of the same as in the Tir books: how do you get to X place, how do you get around and do business in X place. It is necessarily a bit generic, and assumes you have enough money to burn to buy the necessary vehicles/IDs/guns you will need to pirate shit. But if you're shadowrunners, then possibly you aren't spending your own money anyway.

Frank

Of course, there's more to the enemy than just Imperial Troops. There's corporations that have their own facilities, personnel, and military forces. On the domestic front you have Yakuza and Philippino collaborators. The occupation has a lot of heads.

But of course, what happens if you throw rocks at one of these beehives? What happens if you cut one of these heads all the way off? Again and still the potential of the military campaign was unrealizable in Shadowrun because there was no way to measure military progress. You could tell a story about blowing up a power plant that belonged to Shiawase and supplied Imperial drones, but what actually happened afterward was all magical teaparty.

So there's discussions about what kind of missions you might do and how to play in traffic avoid security cameras and so on and so on. And there's no discussions about what those missions might do to advance the war effort over all. It had to be that way, because Shadowrun never had “war scores” or anything along those lines to interact with. I'm not saying this is easy, it's basically where I floundered making Warp Cult. But the point is that this sort of campaign setup doesn't really work without some kind of war prosecution rules. All of your interactions with the revolution must necessarily be magical teaparty when it actually counts because there's nothing else for it to be.

AncientH

Economics in the cyberpunk future that includes wet-culture rice farmers scrabbling for subsistence and assholes walking around with million-nuyen cyberlimbs is...interesting. The thing is, the Huk pirates don't have a lot of hard cash, which is needed for things like food, gas, medical supplies, and weapons. But they have lots of information of sites that are ripe for thievery, networks for fencing stolen goods, and are more than willing to barter a couple hundred thousand nuyen worth of new simstim units (or the digital plans for next year's model) for a few tens of thousands nuyen worth of guns and ammo or antibiotics. It's...interesting. Adds a layer to running beyond "Fuck you, pay me."

Frank

There are a lot of groups and people (but mostly groups) written up in the “players” section. Someone put a lot of work into this and this conflict has a lot of moving parts. Different factions and ideologies clash within the revolution even as various criminal elements, corporations, military, and para-military forces support the occupation. It's fairly realistic. It's very much like reading a rundown on the factions in the Syrian clusterfuck or any other failed state scenario.

Of course, the entire format is necessarily shallow. Not only does each group fit on a page fragment, but it's also interrupted with internet hecklers and counterpoints from reddit commentors. Usability takes a backseat to readability. It's fun to read, I'll give it that. But your typical corporate subdivision gets a three sentence description followed by a single comment of indeterminate veracity. It's not much more than “Renraku Underwater Living: It is a corporate subdivision that exists.”


The implications for Renraku Underwater Living and Shiawase Biomedical are staggering.

So we've got groups like the Anti-Corporate Faction of the Huk. What would happen if they took Mindanao? Is that a thing that could happen? I mean, do they have enough people that they could actually occupy Mindanao, or are they just a group of ruffians who could potentially blow up enough things that Mitsuhama decided to leave? I don't actually know. Reading this book right now I don't actually know. It's not a format that lends itself to giving adequate answers to questions like that.

But it's a war. A war with clearly demarcated sides and goals and factions. So you might actually want to get answers to questions like that. You might want to join the Anticorporate Faction. You might want to take the fight to Shiawase. You might ask questions like this out loud. And the reply would be like...

AncientH

A lot of the Yakuza factions ended up influencing some stuff in my chapter on the Yakuza in Vice, which was...well, like in this book, most of the authors when they needed a new Yak faction just came up with an entirely new group. Figuring out where they fit into the global scheme of things was someone else's job (mine). And it isn't pretty, it's visceral:

> They bring illiterate peasants from the countryside in livestock trucks. While they're still doped up from the kidnapping, pimps feed them opium-laced food and water to keep them groggy. While they're high, they're alternately sweet-talked and intimidated, and also raped to keep them fearful and docile. After a week, the dosage is lowered to make them lucid but keep them addicted. Then they're put to work. Most stick with it, because if they run they find themselves alone in a strange city...and experiencing excruciating withdrawal symptoms within hours. Even the ones who bail often crawl back. No chains or locks, but there's still no escape.
> Lustin' Prussian
"Under the skin, we're all human."

And there are gangs today that operate similar schemes. It's ugly because it is plausible. People do that sort of shit for a living. In a White Wolf book, this would be a paragraph you'd expect from a Black Dog Games supplement. The kind of shit that was trying to be edgelordy as fuck. In here, it's just...welcome to the real world.

Frank

Next up: We go again to Africa. For the first time.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Cyberpirates!

The Smugglers of the Gold and Ivory Coasts


Mostly we're here for the drugs. But while we're here we might as well turn a profit from death somehow.

AncientH

Between the time when Toto sang of Africa (1982) and the rise of Shakira's Waka Waka (2010) there was an age undeamed of...

...okay, I can't think of anything more clever than that. Africa, like South America, Australia, and most of Asia, did not get a lot of love and affection for the first decade or so of Shadowrun's existence. It's not that it wasn't there, but with all the sourcebooks starting out in Seattle and then slowly expanding through North America and Europe, Africa et al. were seldom mentioned and never came into sharp focus until rather late in the game's production schedule...to the point that there is not even a map of the whole of Africa in Shadowrun before the Sixth World Almanac, and that itself was a very contentious affair.

Because when white people don't know what else to write about Africa, they tend to fall back on Colonial tropes.

Frank

30 pages and we start with a picture of a dude with a bone based septal piercing. As far as I'm aware, septum piercing is mostly an East Africa thing. But it's also a racist trope. People are shown with “bones in their nose” to show that they are “primitive.” It gets drawn on “cave men” and “savages.” If someone draws a black man with a bone based septal piercing, that is the kind of racially insensitive thing you should fucking apologize for.

This is the very first time anyone would write anything particularly substantial about any part of Africa in Shadowrun, and the editorial decision to start with a picture of a man with a frickin bone in his nose is not an auspicious start.

1) It's called the Mother Continent.
Most likely any of the countries you may have read about in school no longer exist.
If you wait six months, most of the countries you read about here will be gone.
Africa is still probably the most dangerous place in the world (outside a barfight in the Barrens).

Oh dear. Africa is not a place. At least, not in the way that “the Barrens” is a place or even that Seattle is a place. It's a continent. It's really really big. There are places in it. Specifically there are dangerous places in it and safe places in it. There are politically stable places in it and politically unstable places in it. I was actually on the Gold Coast while the Ivory Coast was having a legit civil war. And while those places look close enough on the map to have caused my mother to freak out, for the people living there it seems there is plenty of physical and cultural space between and there was no fear on the ground of the war spilling over to any degree. And it really didn't.

Also, while Africa does have a lot of countries in it and there is definitely churn in borders and names, it's not dramatically more prone to that sort of thing than say, Europe. You name South Sudan and I'll raise you the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Saying that countries are unstable and that's why you don't bother naming them is both lazy and racist. The chapter then goes on to call attention to the fact that people often think Africa is a country when actually its a continent full of stuff – but they also made the same category error in the chapter introduction.

AncientH

Part of the problem is that the same Balkanization which affected North America can become a racist trope if applied to places like Africa or South America, where "political instability" and "banana republic" are cultural stereotypes that Westerners have applied to anyplace sufficiently "foreign" for generations.

That a lot of the political instability is directly caused by Westerners and Colonialism is not something that seems to have actually occurred to a lot of people.

So, Africa as presented here is...not exactly a blank slate, but it's the chapter in geography that most kids never get to in American middle schools. African history wasn't taught much and still isn't very well understood by a lot of people. There are a lot of misconceptions about cultures, languages, little things like what people eat and how they live and why conflict happens. I wouldn't be surprised if this was some kid's first real bit of reading on the Gold & Ivory Coast, wondering how much was real and how much was fantasy.

And yet they are both wealthy beyond the dreams of even successful Africans.

Did we mention that in Africa people are poor and it's a dangerous shithole yet?

Frank

The future history section jumps past the entire 20th century and gets right in there with various problems arising from anthropogenic climate change in the early 21st century. This is something that Shadowrun was mostly pretty bad about, so kudos for mentioning it.

Shadowrun came out in 1989, when the environmental disasters people were aware of were acid rain and sludge dumping. So that's the environmental disaster people are dealing with for most of Shadowrun – a continuous worsening of acid rain like it was still the 1980s. Of course, relative to the greenhouse effect, getting acid rain under control is actually fairly trivial. And the reason you haven't heard much about acid rain recently is that in 1990 the US Congress instituted a cap and trade setup for sulfur emissions and since then acidic pollution in the sky has come down by 88%. Action on climate change is legitimately more difficult and also the political opposition to doing anything at all about it has been more intense, so while sulfur emissions were not the future problem that was predicted in the eighties, carbon emissions may yet kill us all.


Forests killed off by acid rain were dramatic in 1989 and caused action. The forests are growing back but we're still super fucked. Just not from the direction the original Shadowrun authors predicted.

The specific ecological and agricultural disasters predicted in this book didn't happen, but that's basically the point. Increasing global temperatures makes for a more energetic system that has more extreme weather events. Both more events and also events that are individually more extreme. There was no way to know that New Orleans specifically was going to get devastated by extreme weather in 2005, but predicting that climate changes was going to result in something getting devastated by extreme weather events in 2005 was prognostication on easy mode back in 1998. The rolling worsening ecological and agriculturally state of emergency described in this chapter is just our life now.

AncientH

I was part of DeBeers-Omnitech's army when it traveled upriver to destroy the village of Tolegbe. We killed every living thing, burning the corpses with surplus petrochemical fuel so that they would not attract predators and parasites. At the next village, people surrendered because they believed they could turn my heart with words. they do not understand what pirates need. I do. Once they were handcuffed and bound, I sent them overland to be sold as food for the Sasabonsam. I did not do this because I hate the people I kill. I feel nothing for them. They are the balance on a credstick. That is all.

There's more than a touch of misery tourism to this book, and the reasons are more than any particular writer feeling their edgelordiness. They're making foreign shadows be exotic and dangerous, they're setting up these places as scary to enhance the mood if you actually go there in a campaign. By making your home ground seem tame, they encourage players to go test themselves out in the wilds.

All of which, basically, feeds into preconceptions that people already have about places like Africa. Nobody wants to hear that there are just areas with nice roads built by friendly Chinese companies in exchange for natural resources, or a better cellular network than the US, and some suburbs which probably wouldn't be out of place in France or Florida. Don't get me wrong, Africa is huge and diverse, but it is also very populated and people have been living there for a long time.

Frank

Quite a bit of space is given to ranting about the plagues and the awakening, and honestly it's mostly wasted space in the book. The VITAS plagues and the Awakening are just a normal part of the Shadowrun future history. The plagues hit West Africa harder than it hit North America, but you already knew that if you read the big blue book. The book takes place in 2059, so huge population losses in 2011 are things that the grandparents of the people you're talking to were exposed to. This is an amount of time that is as long as when Americans still watched ads for cigarettes on television or the separation of East Pakistan from West Pakistan. For fuck's sake, the Vietnam War hadn't ended yet 48 years ago, it's a long fucking time.

The only real point here is that a lot of people died a few generations back and the population pyramid of the region is extremely steep. Which is fine. But I just got that across in a single sentence.

But really I gotta step up and talk about the fundamental uselessness of “So It Cames to Pass” sections when set up like this. It's a subtle point because I talk mad shit about 5th edition for having no “what the hell happened” section and I also too talk mad shit about WHFRP's bizarre tirade about shit no one cares about that happened thousands of years ago.



The core issue is that players need to understand what is going on. And history is an important way of contextualizing and understanding what's going on. But history is only remotely comprehensible if it ties in to something. This chapter straight up refuses to talk about the twentieth century at all, and its description of what the hell is going on right now are pretty limited. As a typical reader, you don't know what the economy of Ghana looked like in 1995, so it doesn't mean anything to you that there was a major coffee failure in 2005. And without a frame of reference for what that event meant, that event does not inform you particularly about what is happening now or what could be happening soon.

Basically this is the authors telling you a story about West Africa. And that's fine for what it is. But what it isn't is a particularly effective grounding for telling your own stories in the region or extrapolating what might happen should major events happen in the future. Which of course is why this part of the book ended up having virtually no effect on what happened in future books. There's not much other authors can really use – whether they are Mr. Caverns at home tables or other freelancers contributing to the game line.

AncientH

If this one disturbs you, remember: what you asked was, "How can I make money pirating and get away with it?" You didn't ask whether you'd feel comfortable afterward. One answer is, "got to the Gold and Ivory Coasts and sign on to loot and kill." Whether you take that option is up to you.

Moral relativism is important in Shadowrun. You aren't happy-go-lucky D&D murderhobos, you aren't monsters that need to feed on humans to continue you unnatural life like Vampire: The Masquerade (usually), and you aren't random investigators into the bizarre like Call of Cthulhu. You're playing professional criminals in a cyberpunk future with elves and dragons and shit. The only moral currency is Karma and the only arbiter of whether or not you get any for shooting a baby or stealing candy from an old man is Mister Cavern.

It's a point that bears repeating because...Shadowrunners can walk away. It might cost them money and make them enemies, but they choose what crimes they commit, often with full knowledge of the consequences. All RPGs can be grimy and gritty if you choose to play them that way, but for Shadowrun the "street" was something that often comes back to haunt the game, far away from the glamour and style of Keanu Reeves-themed shenanigans. It ain't all glitz, and nor should it be.

Frank

I think oddly that I have to talk about the difference between a Nation, a Country, and a State. In North America we tend to use those terms interchangeably because our states are synthetic multicultural affairs with patriotism tied to social contracts on written pieces of paper. In the “old world” things are... not like that. A Nation is a distinct group of people, a Country is a distinct area of land, and a State is government that controls a territory and includes a collection of people (or vice versa). In Europe and Africa, that shit gets really complicated, because various peoples and lands have various claims that go back to well before the currently recognized social order.

So let's take the concept of “Poland.” It's a “Nation State” that claims the Country of Poland and also the Nation of the Poles. But neither of those things are uncontentious. What lands are “in” the country of Poland? Some people would like to include all the lands from when the Grand Duchy of Poland-Lithuania extended all the way through what is now the Ukraine. Other people would like to carve out places like Pomerania that have at some times in history not been included in Poland. Speaking of Pomeranians, who is and is not a Pole is well up for argument. The people of Pomerania and Kashubia and Silesia can all understand spoken Polish, but whether they speak a dialect of Polish or a unique Slavic language is an entirely political concern. It is the official stance of the Polish government that Silesians in Poland speak Silesian dialect Polish while it is the official stance of the Czech government that Silesians in Czech Republic speak Silesian dialect Czech. Which “Nation” an individual Silesian belongs to is an interesting question.


Playing Europa Universalis, I go to great lengths to get Pomerania to go to war with Dalmatia because the Pomeranian-Dalmatian war is the most adorable possible war.

Which brings us to Africa. When the various European colonial powers conquered and divided up the continent, they drew lines on the map that had absolutely nothing to do with what Nations or Countries had been present or recognized previously. Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire do not have different States because of where any geographically recognized Countries might be and it isn't because of the presence or absence of any Nations of people were appreciably different on either side of the border. It's just a legacy of colonialism – The United Kingdom owned a chunk of territory that became Ghana and France owned a chunk of territory that became Côte d'Ivoire. Nothing about the land or people makes those States legitimate or even explicable.

Actual redrawing of the lines on the map of Africa happen pretty rarely, precisely because there's no justification for the map that currently exists. If you draw a new map where all the Hausa or Igbo people go in one State, people are going to ask why the Yoruba and Akan don't get their own countries. And you got a metric shit tonne of people who don't live in a region where their people are the most numerous ethnic group and most of the major cities have more than one major nation and so on and so on.

Which is a bit of a long way to go to say that the map presented in this book makes no sense. I'm sure there was some kind of reasoning for it, but the reality is that justifying any rearrangement of State borders in this region would take a lot more text than this book gives to this entire chapter. Like, Sekondi is a free city apparently, but the Sekondi metropolitan area has four hundred thousand people in it. It's really small. What the fuck do they do? How is that an independent State? Like, not just how did that happen? But like how do they not fucking starve?!

AncientH

This hypertext brought to you by Manera, which was brought to you by Osgood Matrix Publishing, which was brought to you by Ares Macrotechnology. Who sure as hell isn't going to talk about Ares Arms and Saeder-Krupp's funding of ethnic wars, Aztech's strip-mining for every mineral known to man and all the corps' payoffs to pirates to waste one another whenever possible.
This is what happens when there's no national government to slow the corps down. They tell the world to look away, and then kill each other with impunity and work their indigenous labor to death. They perform human and human and animal experiments no one sane would approve. The corps and pirates are ruthless and out for themselves.

We're dangerously close to "moral lesson" territory here, but pretty much everyone who reads this is complicit in some corporate atrocity because big corporations use child labor to harvest fucking cocoa beans. That might not be the explicit example here, but the basic idea that megacorps would go wild in the end stage of capitalism where national and local governments are too weak and ineffective to apply leverage against them isn't a hard stretch.

Frank

The economies of countries are complicated things, and as we've seen with Brexit and Trump Trade Warz, if you radically change what goes in and out of those economies it is very disruptive. You can't just draw a line anywhere you want, there are like roads and shit. People need to exchange goods and services for money. People need to fucking eat. The borders matter, and changing them has a cost.

The authors basically seem like they discovered all the fucking ethnic groups that factually exist in Côte d'Ivoire and tried to Woodrow Wilson up a map. And like Woodrow Wilson's attempts at doing this in Europe it flounders on the fact that the number of peoples exceeds the amount of space there is to allocate them all. You can't give a homeland to the Baule people because other people fucking live there. And also too, the Baule people are basically Akan people who happen to have lived in French dominated territories, so from a linguistic standpoint Baule people want to either be in national union with other French speakers or other Akan speakers or both despite the fact that other Akan speakers happen to speak English and not French. And now repeat that for every fucking tribe in the region.

The map is drawn by someone who had done exactly enough research to know that all these various peoples existed but not enough research to know what dividing up these areas into smaller chunks would require or entail. Much of the time, countries that get divided get divided only partially, because none of the groups involved actually want to give up the other territory. The Ivory Coast, for example, was divided between North and South de facto for several years without anyone actually drawing new lines on the map.


The Ivorian civil wars didn't change the UN recognized borders, but created dynamically changing zones of control.

On the Ghana side, things are kind of more insane. Where apparently there was like a Trail of Tears type situation where the Ga people got frog marched from Accra (the area where the vast majority of the Ga people live) to Sekondi. What is that even for? Like a third of the people in Accra are Ga, and almost none of the people in Sekondi are. What the everloving fuck?

The bottom line here is that making ethno-states out of Africa is basically impossible, and explaining how it would work even for a tiny area of only fifty million people like the Gold and Ivory Coasts would take a lot more than 30 pages.

AncientH

This was the book that introduced Ancestor Spirits, an alternate Spirit of Man for African shamans (and some houngans). It's a fun concept but this being the tail end of 2nd edition, a lot of the ideas for how shit worked hadn't exactly gelled yet - 2nd ed introduced a lot of concepts that wouldn't be functionally worked out for a bit (although Magic in the Shadows made a game effort at actually trying to categorize different tradition options).

A lot of noise is made about totems & stuff, but it's important to remember that the idea of totems and fetishes are basically White People efforts to categorize a very widespread set of beliefs - like everything from Siberia to South Africa - and the fact that the individual beliefs of genuine cultures might only roughly approximate the general idea of a "shaman" is something people have to learn to deal with, because in Shadowrun at this point "Shamanism" was pretty much the default magical paradigm for anything not explicitly Western Hermeticism.

Frank

There is a bit about magic, but it's not particularly useful. It's 2nd edition and spirit summoning between different traditions is... weird. Anyway, African Shamanism is supposed to work slightly differently to Native American Shamanism. This gets super complicated. You don't care. I don't care.

A question you might have is: is it culturally insensitive for the African Shamans to be a little different? I don't actually have an answer to that. It's an attempt to be more inclusive, which is probably good. But it's also weird and not fully thought out, which made African Shamanism de facto excluded from most game tables. So that's bad, but not intentionally so.

AncientH

> Because most traditional coastal societies are polygamous, those families are really fraggin' big. A rich African pirate may have up to ten wives, six to ten children each. And orks? In lousy areas, infant deaths aren't traumatic--one or two is normal.
> Lustin' Prussian

I really hate whoever thought that Orks should have actual litters.

I honestly don't have enough general knowledge of the Asante or Fanti to know whether the depiction given here is good, bad, or indifferent. Unlike Frank, I haven't even seen Africa from a plane yet. As a general rule, the individual places are given rather brief descriptions I would have liked to see filled out more.

Then we get to the elephant in the room: Asamando...

Frank

Ah yes, the Ghoul Nation. Back in the 90s, this really caught my imagination on fire and it featured pretty heavily in some of the campaigns I played in. One of my characters was an agent as he had a brother who was a ghoul. There's a couple things going on.

First of all, the first part of this chapter is clearly written with the pre-Bug City concept of non-infectious Ghouls. Because literally nothing about the story of the African Ghoul Nation makes any sense on any level if Ghouls can convert people into Ghouls in a reliable way. I've ranted a bit about how fuckawful terrible the infectious ghouls storyline was in the Bug City review, but it honestly reads like the Heplers got the memo between writing the bit in the history section (which is laughably incompatible with infectious Ghouls) and writing the “players” section (where it is a Mad Libs where all blanks have been filled in with “HMHVV”).

But beyond that, there's a couple other issues that I didn't really pick up on when I was a teenager. The first is that the area they are drawn in on is bullshit small and has no people in it. And the numbers of people who conquered the place is basically a rounding error on nothing. It casually mentions twenty five thousand people moved in and took over the place. The nearby (but not included) city of Tamale has a million fucking people in it.


This “nation” is effectively a campsite in the wilderness.

AncientH

This was pretty typical for SR at the time, the idea was that magic gave a massive advantage outside of raw numbers, and of course Ghouls are scary and absolutely nobody did any kind of math. We've already talked about how Tir Tairngire was founded by a bunch of fucking teenagers with pointy ears, how there are more elves in India than all of Tir na nOg based solely on demographics, and there are even more obscure and terrible micronations out there if you absolutely want examples.

But for Shadowrun purposes, you need a lack of centralized authority and lots of borders to move around in.

Frank

The bottom line is that anyone who found themselves writing tiny polyps of states and countries and nations in such tremendous quantities for an area currently covered by two countries that are reasonably minor should have immediately reconsidered their life choices. I can kind of see how you get to this point, but you have to understand that this is wrong.

You can't have Wenchi, a town of less than forty thousand people, be an independent enclave that has a separate foreign policy with regards to German corporate interests. That's just not something that's remotely reasonable.


I'm sure Wenchi's yam festival is very nice, and they still can't have their own foreign policy. Because that would be stupid.

AncientH

Keeping in mind that for the bulk of humanity, many bullshit small communities have been very stupid for very many years. You can totally have independent towns which would rather slot the next village over by turning the empire on their doorstep on them. It's called Wales. But that shit gets old and in contemporary society the basic concept of cooperate and graduate is well understood. While it's not impossible to have lots of individual communities with relative autonomy because of a breakdown of central authority, or even having those places cut deals with megacorps and pirates, long-term viability is something else again. Such places and agreements would be notoriously unstable and probably short-lived.

Frank

A big problem with this is that every time it asked “Wouldn't it be cool if?” rather than asking “Wouldn't it be useful information to convey?”

I think this is exemplified by “The Final Message.” It's a pirate group from Azania who do “stuff” in the woods. And they don't talk about it. And no one knows what bases they have or where they sell things they acquire or fucking anything. It's a complete waste of space, and it fills almost half a page because of speculative comment crosstalk.

AncientH

A lot of this is just echoing stuff from earlier in the book - various groups to do business with/target, how to operate while you're here, what's the major goods to trade in, yadda yadda. It isn't bad, but it's a bit routine. Probably the most interesting bit was the difference between river pirates and ocean pirates, because we haven't really talked about that yet - the Philippines and Carib both being primarily about island-hopping, and West Africa having a number of navigable rivers where it's totally legit to raid deep into the interior and then try to escape without going overland.

Frank

This is getting kind of long, so we'll do the Madagascar portion of Africa separate like.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Cyberpirates!

Long Haul Piracy and the Pirate Island

AncientH

We're not quite at the end, but we're getting there. After doing the razzle-dazzle Pirates of the Caribbean (PG-13), the rebellious Pirates of the Philippines (hard R), and the frankly hardcore Pirates of the Gold & Ivory Coast (NC-17), we're now on...the place where pirates fear to tread: Madagascar (X, but not XXX).

Frank

This chapter is 22 pages and part of it is about Madagascar, and parts of it are about... other stuff. It looks like there just wasn't enough material for either a worldwide piracy overview chapter or a Madagascar chapter and they just ended up splicing them together. This is a natural hazard of using freelance writers, they don't necessarily write all the things you want them to write and sometimes they also write other things you didn't ask for and then you just have to either scrap the project, cobble something together, or get other writers to chip in and write additional space-filling material. This book basically is the baby of the Heplers, they did almost all of the writing and so when they quit Mike Mulvihill mostly just massaged things into something that was vaguely publishable. But you can kind of see why this sat in development hell for a long time – this chapter is incomplete and incoherent even on its own terms – two wholly unrelated concepts mashed together end to end to make it look like the chapters are the right size.


The last chapter was too short.

AncientH

They take a while to actually discuss what "long haul piracy" is, but basically you're the middle man in the global trade. You buy from criminals in one place and sell the hot goods to a fixer somewhere else. It isn't as sexy as actually stealing shit, and the profit isn't immediate because it takes days or weeks or months to get to your destination port, so it feels a lot more like smuggling...and, of course, you might have to fight off other pirates.

This is probably the least attractive of the piracy options for action-oriented shadowrunners, but for those that like a slower game where you take fewer chances drawn out over a longer period...it could work, at least for the occasional job. Especially if you're on the run and need to get out of town for a while.

Frank

The framing device for all chapters is that someone in-world is writing it, usually posting it as a Reddit-style Ask Me Anything type thing or how-to blog post. Very frequently they use the “and this was the last thing this guy posted, so it must be super important!” gimmick. Anyway, the bit on Piracy Around the World is written by a Greek guy who is on the run from a German Dragon. It seems even in 1998 that everyone knew that Greeks would get screwed over by the moneybags in Deutschland. Anyway, I find the whole speculation about whether it's unpossible to get away from a dragon who is mildly annoyed with you when you have a several thousand kilometer head start to be tiresome.

Shadowrun's Dragons are not actually all that terrifying. Like sure, they are very individually rich and smart and powerful and shit, but they live in a world that has rocket launchers and fighter jets. Pissing off Lofwyr isn't really different than pissing off George Soros.

AncientH

First he'll kill ya. And then he'll go to work on ya.

The thing about piracy is that travel is part of the package, and it is actually very good for the writers to emphasize that. Most people don't think of their life in terms of "I've got most of my bits intact, so let's keep moving," because we're not geared that way. We get attached to houses, apartments, vans, etc. Humans can be nomadic, but most of us learn to put down roots and accumulate shit.

If you move past that, then if you're willing to keep going farther when the other guy just wants to go home to their own bed, you win. If it becomes too much of a hassle to track you down and put a bullet in you, they write off the loss and go home. Or maybe they run out of money and get stuck somewhere. You don't care. You're somewhere else. There's a kind of freedom to that.

Frank

The Long Haul in this chapter refers to taking stolen goods to the other side of the planet so they can be sold. Maybe you stole them, maybe you bought them from someone who did. This book wants you to know that despite the truly titanic amounts of money involved, there are a lot of ways for you to get screwed and not end up with a separate room for your shoes. Some of these are pretty reasonable, others less so. The central issue that the book dances around is the old adage that if you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars you have a problem, but if you owe the bank a hundred million dollars the bank has a problem.

Essentially when you've traveled fifteen thousand kilometers with a ship full of stolen goods, you do not have the bargaining power that you might hope for. You're far away from your home turf. You are holding a very large amount of incriminating evidence. You've just used a lot of fuel. You probably had to go into debt to get the cargo you have now. If your prospective buyer decides to walk away, you're out a lot of money. And you might be stranded on the ass end of the world awaiting the tender mercies of some law enforcement agency. So yes, you have a bunch of shipping containers full of black market designer label shoes, but you're probably selling them for shockingly less than what the huckster stalls on the street corners are going to be selling them for. Your margins probably aren't that good.

But of course, now we break out the calculators again. A “Handysize” freighter is considered a very small cargo ship and has a capacity of 15-35 thousand deadweight tonnes. Such a small ship filled with soy sauce or maple syrup is carrying something like twenty million liters of the stuff. Every penny you make on a liter of cargo is like ¥200,000. Razor thin margins are still very large piles of money simply because the number of units is so large. And remember: the Panamax shipping vessels of the Caribbean have a capacity of 65,000 Displacement Tonnes and are like 3 times that of a Handysize ship.

AncientH

Of course, on top of that you have to pay for food, crew, repairs, bribes, etc.

Anyway, same general issue with smuggling applies. The whole economics of shipping means that you're trying to take advantage of economies of scale by shipping as much as possible as cheaply as possible (10,000 trideo sets, a dozen cars, etc.) or extremely small, high-value goods (a packet of drugs, cut diamonds, orichalcum ingots, etc.)

I'm amazed they didn't try to cram salvaging and wrecking in here - hack into a long-haul freighter's navigation software and have it hit some rocks, have a crew standing by the salvage as much of the cargo as possible. Instead, we get very brief coverage (a couple paragraphs) of the Arctic and Australia et al.

Frank

This book really needs a merchanting subgame. And someone needed to mathhammer the fuck out of it. If you just come up with reasonable sounding ballpark numbers for percentages of street value of captured cargo, you get straight into money numbers that Shadowrun just wasn't equipped to handle.

But also there isn't enough text in here to describe all the key information. Between climate change and magic arising, the weather in the Arctic is unrecognizable in Shadowrun's 2059 to what it was like in 1998. The first cargo ship to make a freight transport through the Northwest Passage did so in 2013 – two years after Shadowrun's future history starts having like vampires and shit. Shadowrun has magic polar storms and shit, so questions about whether, how, and when freight shipments can make it through are important but importantly unanswerable using any information from non-Shadowrun sources. I can't read a book about trans-polar freight through the twentieth century because there fucking wasn't any until climate change made it possible. I can't look up on Wikipedia for current freight routes and schedules because Shadowrun's mana storms make that data irrelevent.


That's a trans-polar freighter. When this book was written they did not exist, but this book correctly predicted that with a bit more global warming under the belt they would.

And it's not just the Arctic that has mana storms. Shadowrun has mana storms all over the place, and apparently it limits the amount of ways you can get into or out of Australia. OK fine, but without a world map, actually planning these sorts of mercantile adventures is functionally impossible.

Shadowrun wouldn't get a proper world map... ever. The 6th World Almanac was put together by shitty hacks who drew some lines on Google Earth and didn't even bother having their proposed borders match the fucking text they wrote. There has never been a book that would actually allow you to properly plan a future shipment of vanilla extract and designer sportswear from where it was stolen in Amazonia to a market in Greece. That kind of thing apparently happens, but there isn't enough world detail in this book to work out precisely how. And this book is the most ambitious Shadowrun ever got. Future attempts were even more half-assed. Quarter assed you might say.

And the consequences of the lack of maps do definitely get felt in here. The book casually mentions Czechs taking to the sea, and I'm like What fucking sea? Czechia is and always has been land locked.


Arrr... there not be quite as much water in this not-an-ocean as we had surmised.

AncientH

Okay, I'm going to go on a bit of an explanation here, so I'm going to let Frank get his rant out of the way first.

Frank

I have a huge problem with the terminology of “human trafficking” because I feel that it conflates the illegal but not immoral smuggling of humans out of warzones with the illegal and extremely immoral practice of keeping people in bondage to coerce them into unpaid labor or sex or both. Fortunately, the whole “human trafficking” terminology got popularized in 2003, and in 1998 they just called it “Slavery.”

This book's discussions of shipping slaves around is not inaccurate, but it is callous and horrifying. So like, you could ship Chinese women to buyers in the Middle East for people to buy the chance to rape them. Because there's a market for that, and that is a thing you could do to make money.


In case you saw this and said “Gosh, how can I make a buck off of that?

I'm not saying this book handles this issue in a prurient way. The existence of sex slaves is merely mentioned literally alongside discussions about smuggling medicine and food. Which brings the larger question of how fucking dark this dark future storytelling is supposed to be. I don't mean how dark the world is, because obviously it's a corporate dystopia where few people live outside grinding poverty. But in how much misery tourism we're actually supposed to be wallowing in. The dials offered by this book go to eleven.

AncientH

Okay, so the reason why "human trafficking" is prevalent as a term these days is because of racism. The term you heard a lot in the 1920s to 1970s (or even 80s) was "white slavery." This was problematic and loaded as hell, because the idea behind it was that white women would never willingly enter sex work, so instead there must be dastardly bastards who held them as virtual slaves to force them into prostitution.

Which is bullshit, and as you can tell is very specifically implying a lot of shit about sex workers who aren't white women. And it didn't cover a lot of very real crimes that were going on, such as illegally importing workers or holding your live-in maid hostage by keeping her visa and threatening to turn her into immigration services if she asked to be paid or go home. So "white slavery" was faded out and "human trafficking" was faded in.

If all that sounds like an extra dollop of terrible on top of lots of really heinous shit...you're not wrong.




By the way, this is one of Bobby's Rules of Shadowrun: Anyone Who Kills A Slaver Gets 10 Karma. Flat reward.

Because if there's any thing most people can agree on, it's that There Are Worse Things...but there's not many things that are worse than people that enslave other people.

Frank

Madagascar doesn't really get a separate section within the chapter. It's ranting about Southern Africa and then in the middle of the fucking page it just segues off into ranting about Madagascar. And like, it just stays talking about Madagascar for another eleven and a half pages. I kinda get the impression that all of the “other areas” were supposed to get similarly sized rants (that is: about 8000 words) but somewhere between “artistic differences” and “freelancer issues” and “development hell” the expansions to The Arctic and The Mediterranean and shit just never actually happened.

Anyway, Madagascar has a map on it that is supposedly current to 2011. That's 48 years before the setting of the book in question. And while there is an explanation of sorts, it's mostly just exactly as WTF as it sounds like that would be. It's an artistic choice, but I don't think anyone involved would be prepared to defend it.


This is what a 48 year old map looks like. You're welcome.

AncientH

So, the thing about Madagascar is that it is an effort to weaponize the blank spot on the map. This is "Hic Sunt Dracones" - sometimes literally. It's a place for the gamemaster to go wild and crazy. Fill the player's heads full of stories. Let them imagine how weird and terrible it must be...and then make it ten times worse.

I can't throw stones. I did a lot of the same thing when talking about Kowloon Walled City. You can throw as much explicit description as you want in a chapter, and it is never going to equal the depraved heights and depths of the reader's imagination. It is the power of suggestion that is worth everything...

...but you can't do it too much. People want things to grab onto. Making Madagascar the pirate isle is fine; nobody really gives a shit about it who is reading this book in Europe or North America. It is far away and exotic and 99 out of a 100 people have never been there, but they can recognize the name and maybe point it out on a map. You couldn't do this with, say, Chicago unless you were writing this RPG in China or something, and even then some big American-o-phile would point out it was all bullshit and wrong.

Because it's all relative, see.

Frank

For artistic reasons, the entire description of Madagascar is done in Shadowlands Crosstalk. So you aren't getting a file full of useful information, you're given what is the equivalent of of a Reddit thread. Or like, just one of these message board threads where no one is composing things in Word for bulk upload. It's kinda fun to read, but it's meandering as anything and information density is incredibly low.

The central conceit is that plagues killed off pretty much everyone in Madagascar except some of the people living on the coast, and now the interior of the island is haunted. And the coast of the island is run by and for pirates and smugglers. That probably doesn't sound like it needs eleven and a half pages to describe... and it does not.

I know everybody's been saying “around here, there's no government” throughout this psot, but Madagascar really doesn't have one.

Almost literally everything written after that one sentence is not strictly speaking necessary. It's an enjoyable – if ADHD addled discussion, but it doesn't provide much in the way of “world building” in the sense you might actually be able to make your own stories set in this world. It's just nearly twelve pages of in-your-face attitude.

AncientH

It gets worse when the fucking Immortal Elves and Great Dragons start dropping into the conversation explicitly to troll the shadowrunners. Which, don't get me wrong, was seriously amusing when I was 15. It was inconceivable at that point in time that Important People would interact with basically nobodies via the internet.

Now, of course, politicians are on twitter and will call you out if you say something bad about them. If you're really unlucky, random senators might send you unsolicited dick pics. The world is terrible.

Frank

Some of the text in here is outright garble text. Writing shadowland comments is actually super fun, and the authors here just fucking go ham. There's people ranting about janky conspiracy theories, there's an actual flame war. The mods have to give people time outs for violating the CoC. It has it all. Assuming by “all” you mean a reasonably accurate piece of futurism about how the comments might look in a Twitter or Reddit thread following a sincere question about politics or racism.

I'm less enamored with this piece than I used to be. It's funny and it's tolerably well written, but mostly there are things this book doesn't have that it should. And I can't help feeling that some of that stuff didn't make it into the book to make room for people telling stories about the time someone got into a bar fight in a shanty town in Madagascar or some jokes about conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories were more fun to make fun of when the President of the United States wasn't literally using bribery and extortion to try to get the President of the Ukraine to fabricate evidence to support an incoherent conspiracy theory from 8Chan. I also wish I was making that part up.

But the other reason I'm less enamored with it is that Catalyst era freelancers thought that one of the flame wars in this book was so awesome that they should continue it. In later books, this flame war goes on for fifteen actual years and involves people actually fighting to the death. Someone dies in 2074 over an internet flame war in 2059. It's... it's just wow.


Fifteen years. Of this.

AncientH

One of the "jokes" in here that actually made it into the game are chupacabras, which are explicitly inexplicable probably genetically engineered lifeforms that test positive for HMHVV but aren't actually carriers of the disease. Like a lot of things, people liked them so much that they went from being one-off jokes to actual parts of the setting.

The Cost of Living on the Sea

Frank

Several times through this book, I've called time to say that really there needs to be more economics in it. How much do things cost? How much can you get for things? How much money are you burning every day that your boat is sitting idle? How much money do you burn on fuel to travel an extra kilometer or get to your destination slightly faster?

There's an actual chapter heading that is for putting that kind of information in. But it doesn't actually have that information in it. We get two pages that have a brief discussion on how wholesalers don't get street retail and some suggestions for what kinds of goods and services are more or less expensive than Seattle in The Caribbean or Southeast Asia. But as we've already noted those areas are incredibly large and most of what we'd be interested in is what the pirate's take was from fencing it and also what the difference between selling in the Bahamas versus selling in Cuba for various hauls. That kind of information is not attempted.

I will say that it is in bad taste for a list of goods and services by type that doesn't distinguish between different kinds of cybertech or different kinds of drugs to have dedicated lines for Escorts and Sex Slaves. Although I am totally at a loss as to how to use this information. I mean, apparently the street value of a sex slave in South Africa is 120% of “normal” but I legit have no idea what you would consider the “normal” street value of a sex slave to be in the first place. Pimping may be easy, but it kind of sounds like an accounting nightmare.

AncientH

The table here is a distant descendant - and one of the last - of several similar tables, which is how they handled the variation in cost of living and goods in 1st edition Shadowrun books. The basic idea was that you can't keep up with the day-to-day variation in prices, but you can give a rough percentage difference of things to give people an idea.

It's...not the cleanest solution, and you end up with odd bits like consumer electronics being absurdly cheap (40% Seattle prices) in the Philippines and absurdly expensive (300% Seattle prices) in the Arctic. This would suggest that there is a constant stream of goods from one place to another, because you can more than double your money. This does not generally happpen. Not because it can't, but because players generally have less interest in smuggling shit than they do stealing shit.

Frank

Next up: Game Information and wrapup.

[OgreBattle]

do they get into building pirate boats and ship combat and maybe airships

[Ancient History]

Building vehicles is a different book, airship piracy is not really a thing. I mean, Shadowrun has manned and unmanned cargo dirigibles so it probably could be, but the logistics for getting your Robur on would make that a very edge case.

[Nath]

The addition of Miami makes rather less sense. Basically I think Miami was originally included in the Caribbean League as a joke, because “It's basically Cuban” or something. This book suggests that the Southern states kicked Miami out because there were too many brown people and then it joined the League because it was that or starve.

Shadowrun's oldest map of North America was featured in the 1st edition Matrix chapter, with the list of North American Regional Telecommunication Grids. It had a South Florida RTG as part of the Carribean League. The map in The Neo-Anarchist's Guide to North America also had the southern tip of Florida as part of the league. But none of those book gave any clue about what happened. I have no idea if Brandes and Helper received any indication eight years later, beyond the twenty lines or so about Miami from the Gunderson Corporation entry in Dunkelzahn's Secrets: Portfolio of a Dragon.

At the time, Grenada had Orange-4 rating, which made it the third sturdiest RTG in North America, after Tir Tairngire and Tsimshian Orange-5, on-part with the Pueblo. Cuba had the second highest rating in the league, Orange-3, while South Florida Green-2 was one of the weakest (or more permissive, depending on how you look at it) grid in North Am', with Québec and the Trans-Polar Aleut.

It probably worth noting the first edition was written (in 1988-1989) with the USSR falling in 2030 or 2031, so the original context regarding Cuba may have been different as well.

What you do get is an acceptable future history of the islands of the Caribbean losing contact with their old imperial masters and joining together rather than allow new imperial masters such as Aztlan to fill the void. It works tolerably well.

As a side note, Cyberpirates! introduced Guatanamo Bay Naval Base as an Ares facility (pages 34 and 50). But since the book was released in 1997, the place was a lot less famous, as it was used to house only cuban and haitian refugees at the time.

Hidden on page 41 is also the mention of "Gumel Haibibulai and Nzitunga Ngayabarambirwa, the former dictators of Nigeria and the Kinyarwanda Rwandans" as living on Bermuda. This is, as far as I know, the only piece of information Shadowrun ever had on Rwanda (in The Sixth World Almanac, the country does not even appear on the map, and belongs to the infamous "Congo Tribal Lands" that spread from Maputo, Mozambique to Niamey, Niger). On the other hand, Haibibulai was not mentionned in Feral Cities, which covered Nigeria some years later.

[Username17]

Hidden on page 41 is also the mention of "Gumel Haibibulai and Nzitunga Ngayabarambirwa, the former dictators of Nigeria and the Kinyarwanda Rwandans" as living on Bermuda. This is, as far as I know, the only piece of information Shadowrun ever had on Rwanda (in The Sixth World Almanac, the country does not even appear on the map, and belongs to the infamous "Congo Tribal Lands" that spread from Maputo, Mozambique to Niamey, Niger). On the other hand, Haibibulai was not mentionned in Feral Cities, which covered Nigeria some years later.

This almost certainly has to do with the Heplers doing minimal research and discovering that there is a Niger-Congo Language Family whose farthest extent is Kinyarwanda. The fact that Nigeria and Rwanda are in fact 1700 miles away from each other is probably not something they noticed while writing that line and no one fact checked it because Wikipedia didn't exist.

The African Dictator in exile thing was probably inspired by Mobutu Sese Seko who went into exile after his dictatorship of Congo was overthrown in 1997.

-Username17

[Nath]

Hidden on page 41 is also the mention of "Gumel Haibibulai and Nzitunga Ngayabarambirwa, the former dictators of Nigeria and the Kinyarwanda Rwandans" as living on Bermuda. This is, as far as I know, the only piece of information Shadowrun ever had on Rwanda (in The Sixth World Almanac, the country does not even appear on the map, and belongs to the infamous "Congo Tribal Lands" that spread from Maputo, Mozambique to Niamey, Niger). On the other hand, Haibibulai was not mentionned in Feral Cities, which covered Nigeria some years later.

This almost certainly has to do with the Heplers doing minimal research and discovering that there is a Niger-Congo Language Family whose farthest extent is Kinyarwanda. The fact that Nigeria and Rwanda are in fact 1700 miles away from each other is probably not something they noticed while writing that line and no one fact checked it because Wikipedia didn't exist.

I think Gumel Haibibulai was supposed to be the former dictator of Nigeria, and Nzitunga Ngayabarambirwa the former dictator of the Kinyarwanda Rwandans, with both of them settling in the same neighbourhood in Bermuda.

Nzitunga seems to be a surname in Burundi and Rwanda, Ngayabarambirwa another surname in Rwanda. Gumel is a city and a former emirate in northern Nigeria ("Haibibulai" on the other hand, gives no result in a websearch).

[Whirlwind]

"Haibibulai" is probably a mis-spelling of Habibulai, which is a variation of Arabic "Habibullah" ("darling of God")

[TheGreatEvilKing]

I wouldn't expect too much here, these people did write Dragon Age 2.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Cyberpirates!

Game Information



Apologies for lateness: Frank's mother was visiting from the US.

AncientH

Cyberpirates explores new terrain in Shadowrun, both literally and figuratively. The world of Mr. Johnson and "sprawl crawls" gives way to smuggling operations and boat attacks in broad daylight. [...] Much like the Underworld Sourcebook and California Free State, Cyberpirates deals with themes that reflect the real world. We pride ourselves on the level of realism in our products, but we also realize that gritty reality may not be everyone's cup of tea.

Which is maybe as good a place as any to reflect on how weird this book is in context. Because you don't normally get Dungeons & Dragons books about smuggling, or World of Darkness books about piracy. GURPS, I'll grant you, will go you one better.



But the thing is that it is unusual for players to roleplay explicitly as criminals, and more unusual for that to be done in a contemporary setting. Cyberpirates! was essentially Shadowrun's reaction to the whole "take the adventure out of the dungeon" phase of roleplaying development, and thematically that's brave and kind of interesting in its own right.

Because plenty of players are happy staying in the sprawl with day-glo mohawks for the rest of their lives.

Frank

Shadowrun had a much more complete and effective firewall between in-world information that your character might know and game information that you the player needed to know than other games of its era. Discussions about whether characters in D&D “know what level they are” or “know that they are Fighters” or whatever are fucking exhausting because it's not actually clear and probably the answer is actually different for different characters classes and shit (one would assume that Clerics know they are Clerics but probably also too that Scouts don't know they are not Rangers and vice versa). Anyway, in Shadowrun a Street Samurai knows that they are a Street Samurai but they don't know how many dice they roll in combat. It's clean in a way that other games are not and never were.

So it is that Shadowrun books of this period had Game Information sections that present information about things the players might want to know that the characters do not. Some of this is nitty gritty details about dice pools that the player characters have no frame of reference for, and some of this is world information presented in omniscient third person perspective that reveal things individual player characters have no business knowing.

Which is not to say that everything in the game information chapter of this book seems like it belongs there. There's some bits about the ship designation letters of different navies that is written in omniscient 3rd person and tucked away into the game information chapter for no immediately obvious reason. Like, obviously someone could have written a one sentence intro as to how some in-world character was posting this information in a place the player characters could read it – but no one actually did that. It happens to be written in out-of-character voice so it has to go in the out of character chapter.

Cyberpirates is a late 2nd edition // early 3rd edition book and as such the firewall between in and out of game information is rigidly and effectively imposed. This portion of the book has some amount of it written or contributed to be Mike Mulvihill and John Szeto. I have no idea how much of this part was written by the Heplers and how much of it was left unfinished when they bounced. I just have no way of confirming that. This could be mostly a Hepler joint or it could be something that they contributed relatively little to, history just hasn't preserved that information save to note that unlike the previous chapters they are no longer the sole authors.

Anyway, the game information chapter is 42 pages.

AncientH

The first couple of pages are devoted to gamemastering a pirate/smuggler campaign and how that's different from a normal Shadowrun campaign and reminds me a lot about the bit in the Shadowrun Companion where they tried to get you to care about how different and exciting it would be to be an Emergency medical services team like DocWagon or starting your own gang. Then it goes into "Creating Pirate Characters" which involves several references to the Shadowrun Companion rules, including some new Edges and Flaws.

There aren't bad so much as "meh." I don't know if anybody has read these in their entirety since they were first put on paper. The most important aspect of creating a pirate group is buying a "home port" for 50k nuyen, which gives you access to the docks & whatnot for 30 days after the game starts, vessel registered, etc. I'm not sure that's ever come into play. It certainly was dropped afterwards.

Frank

It's very possible that the game mechanics in this book have never actually been used as written by anyone in the history of the world. This book came out at the end of SR2 and the beginning of SR3, and it's references are to rules in SR2 – but people including this book were switching over to SR3. I'm not sure it was really possible to use the mechanics without some heavy on-the-fly modification. And honestly, I haven't checked the original SR2 page citations to see how well they actual fit with their original intended rule context. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the answer was “not very.”

Either because of this very issue or simply because the Heplers didn't actually care much about the ruleset of 2nd Edition Shadowrun (and the additional writers were simultaneously working on 3rd edition Shadowrun and presumably cared even less), much of the game information is not actually rules information. That is, a lot of it is chin stroking about how to set up the game from a social dynamics standpoint rather than how to resolve individual actions with dice rolls and initiative tracking and stuff. The kind of thing that Robin Laws would be famous for just a few years later (Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering came out in 2002).

So quite a bit of the chapter is coming to talk directly to the players and the GM about the kind of sandbox mission development that the in-character bits were discussing from the character side. So before we were talking in character about researching shipping routes and picking your own targets and living life without a Mr. Johnson giving you specific missions. Here we're talking about how the GM is going to prep up a couple potential targets and the players get to pick which one they go after. It's... OK. The information here isn't terribly deep and we don't get useful stuff like tables of random shipping container contents or lists of goods that appear regularly on various piracy infested shipping lanes, but as a baby step it's definitely pointed in the correct direction.

AncientH

Edges & Flaws are more of a GURPS and World of Darkness thing; they were introduced in Shadowrun in the revised character generation rules in the Shadowrun Companion and have never...really...worked great. It's the kind of thing which is implicitly easy to understand and also explicitly easy to try and abuse. For example, you've got a -4 Flaw called Sea Madness which causes you to go insane when you're out of sight of land for 24 hours. That's sort of a Call of Cthulhu level weak hack, but it's the type of thing that a landbound shadowrunner would gleefully take to offset some edge they do want.

Frank

Suggested changes to rules for character generation have some logic to them, but it's important to remember that these are referencing the optional character creation rules from expansion books for 2nd edition while being semi-converted into the format of the 3rd edition of the rules. So even for people quite familiar with Shadowrun, this part of the book may as well have been written in Chaucerian English.

One effect this did have moving forward is that since the direction character generation ended up going through 4th edition was very much based on the 2nd edition Shadowrun Companion, that the various Edges and Flaws from this book ended up appearing in later editions. The way this worked is that the Shadowrun Companion was partially written by the Heplers in 1996 and it offered an alternate point-buy character creation system that was basically better than the priority system offered by the basic book. And it gradually became more and more popular and was nearly universally used in the early 2000s such that point-buy was the default offering of fourth edition. But back in 1997 and 1998, the whole point-buy thing was an “optional rule” that the game designers who weren't either Chris Hepler or married to Chris Hepler weren't paying any attention to it. And when the Heplers left the company there was pretty much no one paying attention to it in the company while it quietly became more and more popular on the ground.

The end result of this is that when you look at lists of official edges and flaws, a disproportionate number of them are shit like “sea legs” and “pirate family” and shit that have to do with being a cartoon pirate. Because the first of the “theme books” written by people who cared about such things was also the last for about seven actual fucking years.

AncientH

We also get some skill modifications and stuff, the kind of thing that would be more familiar when D&D3.x did its extreme environment books like Stormwrack and Sandstorm a few years later. Mostly you don't care: Diving becomes a skill, "Underwater" becomes a concentration for Unarmed Combat, Etiquette (Maritime)...exists...

"Etiquette" was one of those stupid open skills that allowed endless variations with lots of weird gaps and overlaps. It recognized that there are different social conventions among different groups, but completely outsized how this shit was supposed to work. It's annoying.

Decking is given the smallest of bones: pretty much every ship and island has a satellite uplink (from Virtual Realities 2.0) so is fair game to be hacked by the resident Matrix expert.

This was actually a plot point in the movie Hackers.

Frank

This is in fifth fucking edition!

Shadowrun authors notoriously and specifically don't throw things away. Even things that were bad ideas just stay on the table getting recited edition after edition down the years like a bizarre Haggadah of rules. For whatever reason, Mike Mulvihill very specifically wanted there to be expanded rules for like swimming and holding your breath and fighting underwater and shit in this book and very specifically brought in John Szeto to help do it. The results are gibberish. I can't even tell if it's possible to parse these things and play them in the context of a second edition Shadowrun game. As anyone who has ever seen Thunderball can tell you, frogman combat is boring and confusing and this section captures that. It really looks like someone just brainstormed a bunch of ideas and crapped them onto the page without mathhammering any of it.


The idea of the scuba battle at the end of Thunderball is certainly much better than the experience of actually watching it.

Just to give you an idea of how this is going down: combat rounds are 3 seconds long and there is an ability that increases your breath holding timer for twenty seconds. Yes, that's an extra 6.67 combat rounds you can have under water!

So these mechanics were a rabbit hole of insanity that didn't function even on their own terms, right? So you'd think we'd never see this again. But later writers kept coming in and “updating” these rules to future editions. Why? I don't know! The updated versions exist in totally different contexts and appear in books that are not even nominally about sailing for adventure on the big blue wet thing. And they also are completely nonfunctional in their own contexts. The above fifth edition version of the treading water rules would involve rolling dozens of dice to determine exactly when I would pass out and die after treading water from somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes – and at the same time it's trivially easy to make a starting character who is strong enough to tread water indefinitely barring the GM declaring an ad hoc end to hit buying; which of course renders it wholly pointless to call that a “rule” at all. It's way too fiddly and also the outputs are bullshit.

But it all started with a weird fucking table that tells us that Elves float and Trolls sink. It's weird and bad.

AncientH

We finally get the traditional Shadowrun databox for the Carib...in the GM-only section. So that's weird. Anyway, it has a population of 38.5 million compared to... 44.42 million today, according to Google. The big thing about the rules for the Carib is that it introduces Obeah adepts.

Back in SRII, "Adepts" were limited magicians with specific skills: Sorcerers could only use sorcery, Conjurers could only use conjuring, Enchanters could only use Enchanting (there were also "Astral adepts" that could only use Astral perception and Astral Combat, but those rules were so fucked nobody tried).

Beyond that, there were some slightly more funky flavors of adept - "Elementalists" were hermetic mages who could only use spells/summon spirits related to their element, "Totemic adepts" were like shaman but could only use magic their totem gave them bonuses for; Cornish bards were a kind of quasi-druid that started out with the Centering metamagic but could never initiate; there was some godawful Priority D option in the Germany sourcebook that let you astrally perceive but only if you paid 1 Karma each time...and there's these guys, who are basically "the voudoun equivalent of shamanic conjuring adepts."

All of this is basically adding complexity to the system by agglutination. Obeah adepts ("Obeyifa") have the ability to use Conjuring AND Enchanting, but have to store their spirits in specially-made fetishes. They can't summon loas, only nature spirits, which sort of defeats the "voudoun" portion of the idea too. So that's...weird. I honestly can't say anyone was exactly clamoring for these guys, or that they fill a niche. Hell, I can't remember if there were ever any Obeyifa NPCs.

Frank

One word comes to mind when gaming in the Caribbean: voodoo.

Now aside from the tone deaf racism of that bit, I just want you to know that the lack of capitalization makes my inner pedant rage. See, for most words it genuinely doesn't make any difference whether you capitalize them or not. White Wolf was always capitalizing Game Terms and major Themes and shit and it didn't mean fuck all. But specifically “voodoo” and “Voodoo” are different words. The religion is capitalized, it is “Voodoo” while the noun or adjective meaning “hokum” is not capitalized. So it's “voodoo economics” and a “Voodoo priest.” That's important. If you do it the opposite way, you are wrong. It's like using “their” for “they're.” Sometimes in English alternate spellings and orthography carries actual meaning and that is the time when it actually matters to get it right. The rest of the time it is acceptable to do whatever you want with letters and punctuation.


Well... almost anything.

Anyway, uncapitalized voodoo is a word with a fundamentally racist origin. When capitalized it's the name of a religion of people exported as slaves from West Africa, and when uncapitalized it is a judgmental term that takes as given that the reader and the writer consider the spiritual beliefs of black people to be primitive and uneducated as compared to the spiritual beliefs of white people. Casual racism is totally a thing in English. See: Indian Giving, Gypping or Jewing people in deals, etc. It's not that using those words makes you racist, it's that the origin of those words is racist and learning that and choosing to not use those words makes you a better person.

AncientH

For reasons unknown, the whole Bermuda Triangle is a constant Mana Surge and the critters there have 1d3 mutations as per the batshit insane California Free State rules. Which, okay, keeps things...interesting.

Also, we get rules for Chupcabra and Sukuyan (Carib vampire variant). The big thing about the latter is they require salt, which is, uh...not difficult when you're surrounded by salt water? I dunno, I feel this might be one of those things that doesn't translate well when you're dealing with postindustrial societies where salt production is at such a scale that you basically don't even think about getting enough salt in your diet.

Frank

Each region is given some GM advice on how to “set the mood.” These are not long essays, but they are alright at what they do. I don't think there's enough meat here to really run a campaign set in the Caribbean or the Philippines; but it is enough to have the player characters visit these areas and feel like you're still in Seattle but more people are black.


This could be any airport anywhere in the world. But there's enough – just barely – to make Manilla feel different from Denver.

Like much of this book: there is more of stuff you want than in other books, but not as much of it as you want. It's in many ways just enough to whet the appetite without satiating it. Reading this book raises issues that it does not resolve. Like, why don't we have some chapter somewhere that gives us the skinny on starting our campaigns in fifty different cities located in different parts of the world? Like, that would be really useful.

AncientH

We get a lot more critters for the Phillipines, and they are impressively less fun and interesting. Shadowrun had at this point streamlined the critter entries down to about 4-5 lines on average, which was very economical but not good for telling you what the critter actually looked like or do. Most of these are HMHVV or shapeshifter variants.

West Africa gets even more love and attention, as well as about a dozen new totems. Which is good, because this is about as much look as we'd get at African critters and magic for years. The big noise are Ancestor Spirits, which are a new type of Spirit of Man which only African shamans (and later, some Voudoun houngans/mambos) can summon. This requires three special fetishes and...

...you don't care, really. Shadowrun tried really hard to avoid the whole "what is life after death" thing, because it was easier and less offensive to say "we don't know" than it was to confirm that any existing religion got it wrong or right. Basically the exact opposite direction that D&D and World of Darkness went for. Which is a little frustrating, but at least you can content yourself with the idea that the ghosts you're busting are just echoes of the person's violent death, not the actual person come back to haunt the fuck out of you.

Frank

So Ancestor Spirits bumbled around 3rd edition as one of the many pieces of spiritual content bloat. They aren't even the worst example of that, which would of course be spirits of the firmament, which are thematically indistinguishable from fire elementals except that they are Irish. In 4th edition they became the Guidance Spirit because I wrote it that way as part of the first (and so far only) edition to take a stand against spiritual content bloat. And that should have included Bug Queens too, because it fucking could have. But instead the splitters insisted on making unplayable rules instead of playable ones and everything written after that continued to make new things that were game mechanically different in trivial ways for no real reason. Argh.

But anyway, the Guidance Spirit I wrote for SR4 was a unification of the Ancestor Spirit from this book and some of the Loa from Awakenings. The magic rules in this book weren't playable, but the world building was solid enough that people ran with it. And I was one of the people who did the running.

AncientH

There were also cheats, if you had the right Edge you could just add one spirit to your list of summonable spirits. Which could have gone a different way where each magician had their own "summoning list," but that didn't happen. Shadowrun recognized it was easier to just specify who-could-summon-what. For the most part.

You don't really care about the new totems. Totems were one of the easiest things for people to write, and people wrote a lot of them. Balance is all over the place. Some of the things they talk about I'm not sure exist. Like "+2 dice to conjuring jungle spirits" probably means forest spirits, but who the fuck knows?

Frank

Some people have asked why all this fucking diving tables and shit are in this book at all. I think it was mandated because of the book Shadowboxer that came out the year before. There had always been the idea that Shadowrun had undersea arcologies that you could go have dungeon delves in. But like with the space stations they weren't really a thing player characters had much of a means to interact with.

Anyway, the punchline is that Shadowboxer is fucking terrible and making fun of it was like a meme in Shadowrun circles for years. Ask one of the old fogeys to rant about “IRONHELL” some time.


Oh shit! I've goblinized into a dwarf!

AncientH

Shadowrun is not at its best when it tries to be GURPS. Not that rules about underwater combat and trying to use magic underwater are out of place, but the combination of three-dimensional movement, physics, and weird bullshit make them generally something you want to avoid. Even John Wick doesn't like fighting underwater.

The big thing about magic is that a lot of your normal spells don't work, for reasons. Fire and Blast spells are out, Earth, Acid, and Ice spells are less effective. Lightning spells become area spells by default, and the area may contain you. Air and fire elementals can't manifest underwater, earth elementals can but don't like it.

Also, we get a blurb about how regenerating characters don't heal drowning damage. So a good way to handle that pesky wendigo is to put them in a pair of cement overshoes and throw them into the bay.

Also also, the combination of rules for exploding scuba tanks and the "chunky salsa" rule mean that shooting a tank in a confined space makes for a very bad day.

Frank

So obviously no one uses the Shadowrun ship combat rules in any edition because fucking obviously. The vehicle combat rules have been hot garbage in every edition of the game for various reasons, and applying them to ships large enough to drive other vehicles on just makes the game grown and cry even more. These ship rules were “updated” to later editions in various books you might not expect and all of those are terrible and incoherent.

The thing that surprises me is that this book rants about ship sizes in terms of feet. That was against house style, which quoted distances and weights in metric because they weren't fucking barbarians.

Missile combat works differently for ships than for other vehicles.

….yeeeah. We're really not going to get into the weeds of dissecting those mechanics. It involves page citations to other books. All in all, this honestly looks like someone brainstormed some things that ship to ship combat ought to cover, and then someone else went through and filled in some cargo cultish Shadow game-looking numbers and page citations until it looked like a Shadowrun game supplement. And looking at the credits, that seems like a fairly plausible story of how we got here.

AncientH

Nothing much to add to that; the vehicle rules have trouble covering people in two cars shooting at each other on dry land at high noon on an open freeway of infinite length and with no speed limit. Anything more complicated than that is basically a waste of space.

Frank

The final twelve and a half pages of this book are pieces of equipment. Shadowrun loved its catalog shopping simulator and players of Shadowrun loved flipping through pages of weird future crap. Do you want cybergills? A harpoon gun? Of course you do. And new equipment sells books. People would buy a book that had a new slightly better gun in it so that their character could buy that slightly better gun and then they could shoot people in the face for money in the game story world.

Of course, this kind of content generation made actually finding anything impractical in the extreme. Would you have guessed that Shadowrun's rules for power armor would be in the book about pirates? How about gyrojet pistols? Did you think you'd look them up in the guns book? Well fuck you, try again.


Some items are hidden in some surprising locations.

This isn't a problem unique to this book or unique to 2nd or 3rd edition Shadowrun. Shadowrun's idea of stuff you own is that you track actual things that you actually own and you differentiate having a 9mm pistol that's made by one company from one made by another. At its most extreme, you have character creation where characters are spending hundreds of thousands of nuyen and some of the things they are purchasing are individual bullets and blank data chips. Once you start expanding that material, you're not only doing six or seven or even eight digits of accounting, you're also flipping through a half dozen books to find all the stuff you want. It's easy to go through all that and end up forgetting something extremely basic like transport, health insurance, or a place to live.

Again, this is not a specific failure of this book, but rather the logical extension of what Shadowrun's overly detailed equipment and funds accounting would naturally lead to.

AncientH

To be fair, Shadowrun recognized this issue and would put forther consolidated tables laying out where all the different bits of gear were, along with their relative prices, availability, etc. A lot of the stuff from Cyberpirates! was so specialized that it just became kind of standard for an entire generation or two of books - the cybergills and wetsuits in particular, but also crap like peglegs and hook hands.


Compensating, much?

Wrap Up

Frank

This book was surprisingly influential in a lot of ways that I honestly think the game and the world would have been better off if it had been forgotten. On the flip side, Cyberpirates! frankly discusses precisely the kind of expansion Shadowrun actually needed and which could really use more development both in this book and in future books.

The transition between “Mr. Johnson gives you this mission, do it” and “your research and discussions with your contacts turned up these five potential missions, choose one” is the next stage of complexity that Shadowrun actually wants. I've GMed Shadowrun for four different non-overlapping groups and every one of them has independently decided that this is the way they wanted to expand their characters' criminal activities. It is quite simply the natural progression of any Shadowrun campaign once the training wheels come off. Before extra guns or extra spells or extra metahuman subtypes or whatever, the very first expansion that actual players on the actual ground want is... extra missions to choose from at the start of the session.

Now I don't actually know if “running a game where players choose from five available missions” was in the remit of this book in the first place. The Heplers kind of dance around this point. But honestly it should have been. Once the core revelation was in place that the primary reality of the pirate life is that you have a small number of available missions and then choose one, that should have been the focus of the rest of the book.

AncientH

The book was also influential in a lot of other ways, from being the default presentation of Africa, the Phillipines, and Carib League for the next decade or so to Ancestor spirits, new HMHVV variants, and lots of equipment. A lot of the influences are understated because they get rolled up into generic ensemble packages - the Critters booklet for Shadowrun 3rd edition that came with the gamemaster screen, for example, includes all the critters in this book.

Frank was right in that Shadowrun rarely throws anything away, so even when rules for the Matrix or magic undergo major shifts and changes (Magic in the Shadows was on its way), a lot of the same basic stuff gets re-hashed and represented in later products. Also, unlike games like Call of Cthulhu, dedicated fans and freelancers would continually make the effort to reference the older setting material to keep the game more-or-less consistent.

Frank

Shadowrun's lack of Africa content is a disgrace. It's not a unique disgrace in the sense that I legitimately cannot think of a major low fantasy title that how non-disgraceful treatment of any part of Africa other than perhaps Egypt. And Egypt is arguably more Middle Eastern or Mediterranean than African in terms of its cultural, economic, and political connections anyway.

This book's attempt at Africa is a bit too gonzo. Like, I appreciate that someone went through a list and found out how many peoples there are in Ghana and Ivory Coast, but the next step of figuring out how big those areas actually were or what kind of countries you could make and what kind of future history those countries might have was not done. Fundamentally, this was not a job for two freelancers who had read a book about Gold Coast Piracy in the 18th century. Shadowrun had been going for nine years and it is literally unbelievable that they had not already had a proper developer meeting to nail down Africa at least from the standpoint of the fucking map.

Africa is a big place with a lot of people and places and stuff in it. There's a lot of history, and a lot of economics and politics and culture going on, and American society spends as much time ignoring all of it as it can. I'm not saying that getting an Africa map that was even remotely plausible wouldn't have been difficult, but it's factually true that they never even tried. This book is the best Shadowrun ever did with the continent, and that is both bogus and sad.

AncientH

To give this a comparison, Shadowrun has less content devoted to Africa than Call of Cthulhu does...and while CoC's content on Africa is almost entirely terrible, they recognized that Africa is a place you might want to go to in your games and provided coverage for at least the parts of it that they were interested in.

Most Shadowrun writers just don't have any interest in Africa. Did not then, do not now. It is far away from their American and European stomping grounds and they cannot be bothered to learn shit about it, and when I was a freelancer that was generally true about me too.

It's hard to tell if that's because there isn't any fan interest in playing in Africa, or if the developers don't think there's a market for that - and the truth might be somewhere in the middle. Except...there are a number of Africa supplements for different games. The demand could be there, if there was actually interest in Doing It Right(TM) and making the African continent as diverse and appealing as it is in real life. But...Eurocentric fantasy. It's all Tolkien-meets-Gibson for Shadowrun, and neither of them are exactly known for their sophisticated and nuanced treatments of race.

Frank

You know what's cooler than a million dollars? Circles.

Shadowrun's money system was a bad fit for what it wanted to do and be. In D&D there is a certain argument to be made to track every silver coin and whether you have spare boots or whatever. But in Shadowrun you have a car and an apartment and you live in a consumer society where you can go to the hardware store or order new underwear with a shopping app. As soon as characters leave the In Media Res scenario of dodging bullets in an alley, questions of possession revolving around what is physically within your reach simply become less important.



This becomes more and more true as wealth increases. Once you have a house with multiple bedrooms you “own” things that aren't in the same room as you, no matter where you are. Ownership has necessarily become more abstract than Shadowrun's D&D origins are equipped to handle.

The intersection of piracy with this raises immense philosophical questions. What does ownership mean when I have gone pirate and rejected the social contract of the world's nation states and corporations? If I board another ship and take their property, what does it mean that I own anything? But beyond these philosophical questions, it also raises practical questions of how to actually run this during the game. What does it cost to keep a pirate ship going? What are the expenses with going extra distance or staying away from port for another week? What can we fucking do once we convert multi-million nuyen cargoes into cash?

This deck raises the possibility of playing Shadowrun in the “C to M” portion of BECMI, but it doesn't give you enough to actually play the game at these levels. This book is mostly a fluff book that references rules that should exist but never actually got made.



Instead we got some fucking unusable rules about scuba combat. I don't even.

AncientH

But there IS an index, which warms the cockles of my dark pumping organ; more game books should have indices.

In the final analysis, I can't say that Cyberpirates! was ambitious-but-rubbish. The flaws it has are the flaws of the game and how it packages and presents information as much as anything. This was not a bad book by the standards of the time, but it wasn't particularly special either. It fell into that weird gap between editions and ended up being one of those quirky books that had a lot of influence. More than Shadowbeat, certainly.

[Hadanelith]

Ask one of the old fogeys to rant about “IRONHELL” some time.

Oh, please do. This sounds like some fascinating nonsense.

[Username17]

Ask one of the old fogeys to rant about “IRONHELL” some time.

Oh, please do. This sounds like some fascinating nonsense.

FrankTrollman: IRONHELL
AncientHistory: We don't speak of that novel.
FrankTrollman: Someone wants us to.
AncientHistory: Fuck 'em.

-Username17

[Hadanelith]

Al...righty then. Moving on...

[JigokuBosatsu]

dark pumping organ

[Username17]

Al...righty then. Moving on...

More seriously: we are definitely not doing a proper review where we find actual copies of that thing and come out with quotes. Shadowboxer is bad in pretty much every way it's possible to be bad. And that includes ways that a standalone cyberpunk book would not have been able to be bad.

Licensed fiction isn't inherently better or worse than standalone works. Some of the great genre offerings of the 20th century are Star Trek, Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, or whatever. What licensed fiction brings to the table is that much of the world building has been done for you; if you're reading a Star Wars book you don't have to tell the audience what a fucking Jedi is because your audience already knows.

So Shadowboxer is licensed fiction. It takes place in the Shadowrun world and is set in the Caribbean League. And the starting main character is someone who goblinized into a Dwarf. Goblinization in Shadowrun is the process by which humans transform into Orks or Trolls (and before the great Target UCAS retcon: also Ghouls). Humans do not goblinize into Dwarfs, what the actual fuck? So from the standpoint of being a Shadowrun book it does a very bad job and causes a lot of fan rage. It fails in ways a standalone book couldn't.

But remember that thing I said about the starting main character? This book loses the plot at least twice. None of he characters who start in the book actually end in the book and it's not at all obvious why the team as exists in the finale is pressing on with the mission since absolutely none of the characters who had any presented motivation for seeing the mission completed are still around including there not being anyone left promising to pay for any of this. This final assault happens apparently because a dungeon exists and the remaining player characters are going to raid it whether that makes any sense for any of the remaining characters or not.

And that thing about the plot getting lost at least twice? I can't tell you why certain major changes of plot direction and location happen, and I also couldn't tell you why those happen while I was reading the book. Characters enter and leave the story and change allegiances with so little explanation that I feel this almost has to be the recounting of some actual drunken Shadowrun games. It really seems like characters are entering and leaving the story because players are entering and leaving the group.

The characters steal a pirate submarine and break into an undersea fortress and then apply for a job. I just... I just can't explain why any of those things happened.

The pirate menace is called "IRONHELL" all caps like it stood for something. And IIRC the first half or so of the book is building up the secret of IRONHELL, and then the book just kind of loses interest and some other stuff happens.

I honestly can't get over the fact that the story is originally in close third person about a detective dwarf and that he fucking dies and the story just sort of waddles on despite the fact that none of the remaining characters have any established motivation to not just leave at that point

-Username17.