[OSSR]Shadowrun: Tir Tairngire and Tír na nÓg

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Shadowrun: The Elves
Tir Tairngire and Tir na nOg

FrankT:

We're setting the wayback machine to 1993 in order to discuss Shadowrun's Immortal Elf problem. But the funny thing about that time was that Shadowrun actually produced two books about wanking to the might of Elfendom: Tir Tairngire and Tir na nOg. The latter is supposed to be written “Tír na nÓg” but I am mostly not going to do that because it's annoying to make the non-standard characters and noone fucking cares. We're going to be reviewing these two books together, because they really are a set. They came out just four months apart, they covered essentially the same material, and they made a bunch of references to each other.

The physical books are somewhat different. Tir na nOg is about twenty pages longer and at least my copy was printed on what feels like sturdier paper. This makes Tir Tairngire feel almost like a magazine and Tir na nOg feel almost like a real coffee table book. So at the time, it felt like Tir Tairngire was more of a book insert while Tir na nOg was more of a “proper” book. It made it feel like Tir na nOg was the more serious offering. In retrospect, I see that Tir Tairngire was written by Nigel Findley, Robert Charrete, Tom Dowd, and Paul Hume (basically everyone who was anyone in Shadowrun), while Tir na nOg was written by Carl Sargent and Marc Gascoigne (the dream team who brought you Celtic Doublecross and some Warhammer fiction). So really, Tir Tairngire was supposed to be an A-team product, while Tir na nOg was written by the B or C team. That was not at all obvious to me during the Clinton administration.

The books aren't actually cut into proper chapters. The indices of the two books claim that there are 14 major headings in Tir Tairngire and 15 major headings in Tir na nOg. On the other hand, the fake browser that the book is formatted into has 11 tabs in Tir Tairngire and only 8 for Tir na nOg. Tir na nOg has more pages total but less pages if you only count the in-character document because Tir na nOg has an out-of-character section at the end and Tir Tairngire doesn't. The tabs and/or major headings aren't in quite the same order – Tir na nOg has all the intro gibberish under “Systems” while in Tir Tairngire it gets filed under “Geography” because that's the first tab of real information, so why not use that label for the index and introduction as well (other than it being obviously a formatting error when used in that manner)? So I'm not exactly certain how we're going to block this out – obviously the original production staff had similar misgivings. But we'll cover both books and try to compare and contrast similar sections where and when we can.

AncientH:

We're not covering any of the Elven micronations like Pomoyra (Germany), Snowdonia (Wales), or Azania (South Africa), because those are even more nuts in some ways.

Even today I get a bit of juice as "the Elf guy" for Shadowrun, because I had the Ancient Files and my Shadowrun Elvish Dictionary is still out there and in use. Hell, I'm pretty sure that the guys at FASA doing the latest edition of Earthdawn are using my dictionary. It's a fair cop.

Which brings us to the fly in this ointment: Immortal Elves. Fans of Shadowrun have bemoaned, loved, loathed, hated, conspired about and ranted on Immortal Elves in Shadowrun for a long, long time. Some like them, others hate them, some just want to shoot them in the face and maybe get paid to do it. They've featured prominently in several major arcs of the metaplot, starred in novels and lengthy adventures, and infamously served as part of the connecting bridge to Shadowrun's sister game Earthdawn. They've been movers and shakers and unkillable statless NPC dicks for twenty-plus years, and while I wouldn't say they are most remembered for the two Tirs, the fact is that while one Great Dragon owns a megacorp outright and another became President of the UCAS, the IEs got multiple countries on three or four continents, and these two books more than most established them in the setting, even if most of their sins came later.

That said, the IEs didn't start here. Immortal Elves were first hinted at in Shadowrun first edition, when talking about Sperethiel. It was a heavy Tolkien-esque reference, and probably Tolkien's talk of ages and ageless elves helped inspire it as much as Terry Windling's Borderlands/Bordertown series.


I'm pretty sure Shadowrun even reused some of their artists.

But Earthdawn came out in the same year as Tir Tairngire, and the two were tied together very early on, and fed on each other. Two games with different systems and settings but a sort of shared metasetting or metaplot wasn't unique, but the secrets across the setting were something that hadn't quite been attempted, at least not with the same degree of success. You had plenty of White Wolf games that shared more or less the same universe, but there was rarely a mystery in Vampire with a hint stuck in a Mage sourcebook, or even a Dark Ages Vampire sourcebook when the DA stuff started coming out. Shadowrun and Earthdawn, back then, both seemed to be working from a shared development bible, and the IEs were part of that, the big weird mystery behind the setting, the connecting link in the great Shadowrun promise that the world had Awakened and the magic came back.

FrankT:

Both books, indeed all Shadowrun books of the period, are set up as fake computer documents. That means that they have a layout that is supposed to look like a computer interface that you are using to access a data file.
I also noticed that the intro in Tir Tairngire is technically in the "Geography" tab, because it's the first tab and everything gets lumped into it until it gets to the second tab whether it belongs or not. This looked much more futuristic in 1993, as today the interface looks suspiciously like something you were accessing through a Mac II. Right down to the typeface being Monaco.


Putting a manuscript in Monaco today would be like writing science fiction with food pills and flying cars.

Back in 1993, this actually looked futuristic. Today it looks dated. Indeed, White Wolf stuff from the time actually looks less dated. Heck, even Games Workshop stuff from the previous decade looks less dated. The fact is that over the last twenty years, web pages and desktop publishing have done their level damndest to look as much like WYSIWYG paste-up techniques as possible. With the predictable result that something that was typed up on a fucking typewriter and literally cut and pasted together with actual paste and real cuts looks more like a modern document than the computerized stuff of yesteryear. And using default Mac fonts turns out to date your material as thoroughly as fins on cars or the unironic use of the word “negro.”

In all honesty, the goal moving forward is to make texts look as archaic as possible. In the actual 2050s, we'll probably be making documents that look more like medieval illuminated texts than early nineties computer desktops.

AncientH:

Placebooks like Tir Tairngire were not striking bold new ground terms of RPGs; designers had long ago capitalized on the idea of pointing to a name on the map and declaring they would write a sourcebook to fill it out so you could go adventure there. The great innovation of Shadowrun sourcebooks was mainly in the format - being set in a more or less future time, they could be guidebooks written by anarchists, hackers, and punks on a secret BBS, and commented on by more anarchists, hackers, and punks under colorful pseudonyms making jokes and wry observations. They could, in fact, make it out that this document contained secret information, paid for in blood and lethal feedback, and that not everyone commenting on it in real-time was who they said they were, or at least honest and trustworthy. So this wasn't just another regional book, this was a book about someplace that was hard to get into, information others didn't want you to have, and filled with witty and funny comments from posters other than the author...and that had an enticement that still has not quite faded and which other games have had a hard time really adapting. Even Earthdawn sort of mimiced it with marginalia.

Of course, you have to take a pinch of salt with this: today, anyone can perform a bit of thread necromancy and comment on something from years ago on any forum. Shadowrun books, by contrast, are static - so these documents are frozen in time; if they really existed, the comments would easily outweigh the main text by this point.

FrankT:

As we go through these books, one thing to keep in the back of your mind is the absolutely crushing timeline fail both countries operate under. The first officially recorded Elf birth is on January 13th, 2011. This means that in 2054, the oldest Elf with a valid birth certificate is 43, and every single Elf with a fake birth certificate has to be pretending to be younger than that. It also means that when the Elf Tribe was founded in 2029, that the oldest officially recognized Elf was 18, and that all the secret older Elves had to have been pretending to be younger than that.

Just keep that in the back of your mind: when we go through the history and talk about the formation of the Elvish nations, that they were created by a population whose median age was something south of ten years old. So for all the ranting about ancient traditions and long lives and shit, really we're looking at something between Red Dawn and Lord of the Flies.


Which is better--to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?

Alternate caption:
Wolverines!

AncientH:

It's also to be remembered that Tir Tairngire was written by Nigel D. Findley, a talented dude who produced many of beloved early supplements like Universal Brotherhood and GURPS Illuminati. His early death and great writing probably makes him more memorable today than he might have been. Tir na nOg on the other hand was written by Carl Sargent and Marc Gasciogne, a duo who did quite a bit of writing together (some of it atrocious - we'll talk about the London Sourcebook someday) until Sargent...well, the most popular story is he had a car accident and can no longer write, other people say he dropped out of the RPG biz entirely for some other reason under kind of mysterious circumstances. I have no idea either way, but apparently he's still alive.

...I'm sure I had a point to this, but let me try again: Tir Tairngire was written by a beloved writer at maybe the height of his powers, before the Immortal Elf thing had grown to become the goatroll it became, and Tir na nOg was written by a couple of very intelligent guys most remembered today for doing The Da Vinci Code in Shadowrun novel.


No, seriously, just take my word for it.

Introductions


We can has Elves now?

FrankT:

Both Tir Tairngire and Tir na nOg have two separate introductions. Tir Tairngire begins with two and a half paragraphs explaining how the book works to the reader, followed by about two pages worth of shadowtalk (fake in-world forum posts) separated by just a line of whitespace and a slightly different text format. Tir na nOg has a one page out-of-character “Introduction” and then three pages of in-character introduction to the in-character document (padded out with some shadowtalk interjections).

AncientH:

On the whole, introductions to SR books got shorter as the editions progressed because they kinda figured that the readers had gotten the gist by this point. On the other hand, I think that the hand-drawn linework in the Tir Tairngire frontispiece of a half-nude Native American elf in full headdress works much better than the befreckled young IRA elf with the whiskey bottle/molotov cocktail in the Tir na nOg frontispiece.

FrankT:

The format of both books is that the main document is an actual in-character document that is written by a specific person in the world. The opinions expressed in here are his own, and the commenters reply to agree or disagree with the opinions presented. It's not omniscient 3rd person, it's a biased viewpoint that is true to one degree or another. This probably doesn't sound very weird to you, because that's a pretty standard way to write game books these days. But in 1993, it was a sea change. The introduction to Tir na nOg feels the need to make double sure you know that is what's going on, and the introduction to Tir Tairngire (published just four months earlier) talks to the reader as if this was a new concept.

And it actually kind of was. This is the voice that books from this time period were trying to use. When we look at Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand (White Wolf 1994) or The Factol's Manifesto (TSR 1995), we can really see how they struggled with their in-world and out-of-world voices. How they were trying to be an in-world document and simply failing because they couldn't keep their narrative voice straight. These books may be full of garbage, but structurally they are advanced. Nigel Findley was showing people how it was done – and it took other game companies several actual years to catch up.

Unlike other Shadowrun sourcebooks, the core information given about Tir Tairngire comes mainly from a single, biased source. And like the reader posted “shadowtalk,” even this information should not be accepted without question. This biased point of view gives gamemasters greater scope to decide what of the information presented is accurate, misleading, or false in their own game.

Sounds patronizing today, but in 1993 this was revolutionary.

AncientH:

It's weird to think of that Tir Tairngire happened after The London Sourcebook came out, because the London Sourcebook was insane. Despite the name, it was supposed to cover much of the UK, and painted Ireland as having gone all the way back into the Celtic Twilight with the Tuatha de Danaan ruling shit and having friendly relations only with the Elven mini-nation of Snowdonia in Wales, and it gave us three or four of the ultimately about six kinds of Druid that Shadowrun ended up having...or put it another way, Carl Sargent and Marc Gasciogne basically created druids in SR, and it took many editions to even begin to clean up their mess. So after that Findley came along and wrote Tir Tairngire, so you could honestly say that was the first solid attempt at an Awakened Sixth World nation, and then the snake ate its own tail and Sargent & Gasciogne returned to do Tir na nOg...by pretty much ignoring everything that they had written about it and what Findley had written about it.

FrankT:

In both books, the core conceit is that it is very difficult to get information out of the two countries in question, because their security is sssssoooooo secure. I don't actually know how that's supposed to work. Both countries have minuscule economies and small populations that are mostly made out of very young people with comparatively large dissident minority populations and share proportionately vast borders with hostile nations. But we're assured that they are super secure. Somehow.

That might be it.

All in all, this core conceit is kind of like if Ireland or Oregon decided to go all Iron Curtain on their own sort of like North Korea. It... wasn't any less of a stupid idea in 1993. Really, I think this is D&D thinking. The game is about espionage, and these areas are designated “high level zones” so they must have generically high security everywhere. Sigh. Anyway...


Yeah, that.

Tir Tairngire will send ninjas to your house in Denver to try to destroy your CIA World Factbook article about them. That's right, a country with the population of Slovakia has murder squads it can send thousands of kilometers away to try to bury population statistics and dissident political commentary. For reals.

AncientH:

Basically, these are two Elven versions of the state of Israel, except instead of being surrounded by nations that don't acknowledge and probably would want to invade and kill them, they're...well, Tir na nOg/Ireland is fairly self-contained as an island, and Tir Tairngire has the NAN and the California Free State. Which is really just a hippies-on-your-doorstep kind of situation. Neither should have anything to complain about, and you probably could take over Oregon with a crack squad of teenagers if you had sufficient guns, magic, and a great dragon backing you up. But anyway, both Tirs (and, amazingly, Snowdonia) are supposed to have cyberknights/kickass Special Forces regiments that are like the elven lovechild of the Spetsnaz and Mossad.

They are also, and this is kind of amazing, supposed to be pretty much the twin fonts of "Elven" culture. A lot of this was lifted wholesale from new-agey Celtic romantic fantasy - hell, Sperethiel is about 90% straight Gaelic; the only reason Findley didn't put the accents on Tír Tairngire like they do nowadays is probably because it wasn't on his typewriter. Seriously, I was there when they started to put the "í" on, (it might even partially be my own damn fault). But I digress.

Anyway, the weirdness comes from the fact that the two Tirs do not have a large population of elves. I mean sure, they have a large relative percentage population (85% of 5.6 million in Tir Tairngire in 2054, somewhere south of 4 million in Tir na nOg in 2053)...but comparatively, that's means that there are as many elves in either Tir as there are people in the Seattle Metroplex. Hell, at standard UGE rates, that means Neo-Tokyo has as many elves in it as Tir Tairngire or Tir na nOg, and China or India have like nine elves to each elf in a Tir. So the idea that either of these places dominated or defined "Elven culture" means that they had to have PR machines on the level of Hollywood's.

FrankT:

Immortal Elves and Great Dragons comment on these files. They... don't say very much. At the time, it was like they were hinting at something deeper. In retrospect, it was just the authors twaddling around using up word count. The introduction to Tir Tairngire contains no less than five posts from Harlequin and Dunkelzahn, and not one of them says a god damned thing about anything.

AncientH:

Admittedly, most of it is drawing people's attention to the fact that these characters are here and posting, so that sets the reader up to trawl their posts for any crumbs of revelation that come later. Also, in proper Illuminati style, you've obviously got more than one group involved in this conspiracy - you've got the powers-behind-the-scenes in Tir Tairngire, and then you've got the Big 'D' who wants to maybe blow the whistle on a few things, and the Laughing Man (Ha-Fraggin-Ha!...oh wait, that wouldn't come out for a few sourcebooks) of all people is there to keep him from spilling too many of the beans; they're the insiders who are in on the joke and willing to sit in the audience and not-quite do a rifftrax on the whole thing.

Another thing you get is, well, Findley wearing his heart on his sleeve. He knew that the world of Shadowrun existed in a world where millions of people had read Tolkien, and Tolkien's depiction of elves severely colored a lot of characters' and readers' view of the world, but in Shadowrun elves are just folks. So you get pompous windbags like "Lerethian Verantin" coming in and playing high-and-mighty house elf, and other people pointing out that it's 2054 and all elven culture is about 40 years old and mostly borrowed from popular fiction. It's a lot like if you gave Goths their own nation and they took everything dead serious.


One of us! One of us!

FrankT:

The in-character introduction to Tir na nOg serves mostly to make me hate the authors. The basic framing makes little sense. The in-character author is an Elvish aristocrat who grew up sheltered by familial wealth and Tir propaganda and only recently realized that the national myth might not be all it's cracked up to be. It turns out that there are poor people and shit. Holy shit! Remember the timeframe problems this book is laboring under. The whole country is, at the time of this book's fictional writing, nineteen years old. Anyone born into the system this country put into place would by definition have to be younger than that. Anyone born into the system after it was already sufficiently entrenched that you wouldn't notice it was being made up as it went along would have to be several years younger than that. So in-character, we're basically reading the angry political writings of a recently disillusioned highschool freshman.

AncientH:

The intro to Tir na nOg sort of misses the joke from both directions. A comparison of the dates shows that nominally this book was set four months before the Tir Tairngire collection came out; which is weird because Tir Tairngire came out first, and you can sort of tell that neither of the authors was properly talking to each other. Both books have the basic format of a whistleblower document, but where Spes in Tir Tairngire is at least a little cynical, Niall O'Connor was pretty much spoonfed propaganda in the womb and lives and breathes the whole Oirishness of it.


We desperately need more hair products.

FrankT:

There's a bizarre story about file formatting and worms corrupting files and shit to explain why some of the time stamps are fucked up. The real story is that Tir na nOg was at some point supposed to come out in 1992 or 1994, but it didn't. And rather than go back and edit all the time stamps, they just said “fuck it.”

AH's Note: Part of that was just Sargent & Gasciogne having the European timestamps be different, because 'muricans like Month-Day-Year and 'peans love Day-Month-Year, and wanted them easily distinguished so they did that for all of the Eurofiles. But yes, it is bizarre and terrible.

[fectin]

I like that elvish prosecutors are apparently "ashit" when you address them.

[talozin]

In one of my previous places of residence there was a game shop that I visited regularly for on the order of 10-12 years, pretty much stopping by on a weekly or semi-weekly basis to see what new cool shit they had come up with. Basically every single time I stopped in for the entirety of that period, they had a shrinkwrapped copy of Tir na Nog on the shelves. It migrated slowly from the front of the Shadowrun section to the back of the Shadowrun section to the front of the bargain bin to the back of the bargain bin, but it was more of a fixture than some of the people who worked there.

The last time I went in, not long before the place closed, it was still there. I can't help but think this is indicative.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Is that Peter Murphy? First this, then being a Twilight vampire. Fire your agent, dude.

[kzt]

I used to game with the guy who became the marketing guy at Fasa. I remember being at GenCon talking to Rett and some guy comes up to the booth and asks about FASA doing an updated version of one of these. His comment was along the lines of "You can't get there, you can't do anything if you get there. Why would we want to do that?"

[Lago PARANOIA]

Seriously, have there ever been nations -- especially nations that existed after the Industrial Revolution -- that had strong policies of exclusion and weren't known for being crappy beyond crappy in economics and military strength?

[Username17]

Seriously, have there ever been nations -- especially nations that existed after the Industrial Revolution -- that had strong policies of exclusion and weren't known for being crappy beyond crappy in economics and military strength?

Crappy in economics? Absolutely not. No isolationist country has ever managed to not have a shitty economy since the decline of the Ming Dynasty. Militarily is another matter. Isolationist countries have a tendency to give not the slightest fuck what their people think about things and are thus able to squander amazing amounts of the labor force and GDP on militarization. Isolationist countries tend to eventually get bulldozed by big empires and/or fall sufficiently behind technologically to be flattened by high tech up-and comers (see Perry vs. Japan). But for a time they tend to punch way above their weight class by dint of having simply insanely large militaries for their population and economies.

For example: West Germany was bigger and wealthier than East Germany, but there was absolutely no way they could have won a fight without NATO help even if the Soviets didn't step in. North Korea's people may be starving (and I'm saying "may" literally because at any given moment the chances of people starving in that country are pretty good and it takes so long for news to get out of that country that I can't answer the question of whether people are starving or not at any given moment), but I'm pretty sure they could and would destroy Seoul and burn South Korea to the ground if the three biggest militaries on Earth didn't promise to turn Pyongyang into a field of glass if they tried. Myanmar is justifiably a laughingstock, but they have nearly a half million soldiers and could stomp the crap out of any of their neighbors if their neighbors didn't include fucking China and India, the two most populace countries that have ever existed.

Isolationist countries tend to be able to spend absolutely absurd amounts of their economies into military. Which, to be fair, is money they aren't spending on education or industrialization and is leaving them farther and farther behind economically. But Burma spends 4.75% of their GDP on their military - more than Russia or the United States. This certainly ruins their long run economic prospects - but it does make them unappealing military opponents.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Facts at Impressions
First Your Fingertips

In Tir Tairngire, the section that has basic statistics is called “First Impressions,” while in Tir na nOg the section is called “Facts at Your Fingertips.” Both are supposedly file addenda taken from tourist brochures. Tir Taigngire's bit goes on for 8 pages, Tir na nOg's version is 12 pages.

FrankT:

Tir Tairngire begins with basic demographic data, Tir na nOg doesn't bother with demographic data because numbers are for squares. Tir na nOg instead spends 13 pages mostly ranting about how difficult it is to get into the country and how they put explosive tracking chips into your spine if you visit their country through legal channels (yes, seriously). I'll rant about that in a bit. Mostly I think we need to get it out in the open how fucking absurd all this is.

Both Tir Tairngire and Tir na nOg have long meandering rants about how people were born as Elves in different numbers in different places. More Elves were apparently born in Oregon and Ireland than in other places, as a proportion of the population. Harlequin assures us that this is an important and fruitful line of inquiry, but I honestly can't see how it makes a fuck width of difference. Tir Tairngire isn't a successor state to Oregon, it's a successor state to The United States of America. Tir Tairngire has less humans in it than were born in 2010 and 2009 – and since those guys would be in their mid forties in 2054, it's not like their lack of presence could be explained by population growth measures alone. Obviously there has been heavy migration, and Tir Tairngire's recruitment pool was “Elves in North America” which is more than ten times as many Elves as they actually have.

Oregon is a large state with nice weather that is nonetheless sparsely populated. There are a lot of woods that you can set up a cult compound in, and there are seven counties with a population of less than five thousand that a decent sized cult could simply move to and win election. It has happened before (seriously: that happened). If your cult had a million people in it and was willing to relocate, you could probably just take over much of the state, and if it had four million people in it you could just plain outnumber the locals even if you got no converts from the Oregonian population at all. Taking over Oregon is a pretty modest and achievable goal for a 21st century utopian cult to have.

The European versions don't have that excuse. They posit separate Elvish enclaves in Wales, Germany, France, Italy, and I'm probably forgetting a few and parts of Europe were never actually described. Rather than representing a migration of disaffected minorities from a large area (like the formation of Israel), they are just local minorities demanding their own state (like the Basque separatists). So the fact that Ireland is even smaller and more bullshit than Oregon doesn't help this narrative at all. Yes, it doesn't take many people to take over Ireland, but you don't have many people if all you're doing is recruiting from the children born in Ireland. So all in all, it's probably for he best that Tir na nOg doesn't give us the hard numbers up front, because the hard numbers are fucking insane and don't add up at all.

Of course, it's important to remember that neither Tir Tairngire nor Tir na nOg in any way “voted” for independence. Because when they declared themselves independent, not one in twenty Elves was old enough to vote. The existence of racial states in Shadowrun is probably Shadowrun's biggest plot hole. Yes, Israel came into being just 15 years after the Ha'avara Agreement, but the Jews who declared Israel weren't literally 15 years old at the time. For fuck's sake. So despite the chatter about higher Elvish birth rates in these regions, we're still basically stuck with the image of a Khmer Rouge style child soldier uprising forcing all the humans out. The only difference is that Tir Tairngire theoretically had access to enough Elven kids to do that, while Tir na nOg blatantly obviously did not.

AncientH:

It's the Native American Nations problem writ large. You have racially-pure states in fantasy games pretty much because Tolkien, but in games nominally set in the real-world you can't even get a single comprehensive geographic region for every ethnicity or nationality. People move, and the Irish Diaspora is larger than the current population of Ireland by at least an order of magnitude. But, you have to look at this from the 1989 perspective when they were making the game: a mysterious nation of elves in a modern, shattered America sounded cool. Why not put it geographically close to Seattle, which was the heart of the setting?

And before anyone asks how this stacks up with Elven nations in Earthdawn, which at least is a straight fantasy game: well, it doesn't really. Barsaive == The Ukraine and while there are some rather vague references to other elven nations farther away, none of them are in fucking North America. So there's no direct correlation between Shadowrun and Earthdawn on Elven nations, and that's probably deliberate. There are some indirect correlations we'll get too, and that's probably deliberate as well.

Also, weird note: anyone else think it bizarre we're looking at tourist info for the 2050s equivalents of North Korea?


You wanna elf wit' me?

FrankT:

An interesting thing is that the tourist brochures talk about climate in a way that's crazy. Tir Tairngire reports climate as it existed in 1993. Global warming has come a long way since 1993, and the temperatures they speak of are already out of date. The idea of coastal Oregon “often” getting to minus twenty degrees in the winter seems absurd today and will doubtless seem even crazier in 2054. Tir na nOg goes the other way, and if we're being generous we're going to say it tries to predict global warming, claiming an average temperature of 21 degrees in July and an average temperature of 11 degrees in February. That's a lot warmer than Ireland is even in 2014, so either they are anticipating a fair amount of climate change or they are pulling numbers straight out of their ass. 11 degrees is the projected high for Dublin for the entire month of February this year, not an average of anything. Also it claims 30-50 centimeters of rainfall per year, which is a bit less than half of what it actually gets so I'm guessing there's an Imperial to Metric problem going on there.

AncientH:

Numbers straight out of the arse seems appropriate, because Shadowrun has classically relied on bizarre weather patterns and weird climactic changes in high magic countries. It sounded weird when they first said it, and twenty years on it looks like a straight ass pull.

FrankT:

Both books spend quite a bit of time ranting about various ways to get into the country, which are actually there to talk about how difficult it is to get into the country. Because of all the security. As alluded to earlier, the security posited on these podunk countries is nothing less than insultingly insane. Tir Tairngire is the size of Slovakia. Tir na nOg is like half that. Yet somehow we are expected to believe that these countries maintain border control as strict as North Korea or maybe even more extreme than that. Really.

Actual North Korea requires universal conscription to achieve that level of security insanity. They literally have more military and paramilitary workers than Tir na nOg has total people. Yet we're expected to believe that Tir Tairngire can have their own security teams that perform multiple background checks, magic scans, chem sniffers, X-rays, luggage searches, and once-overs by K9 units on each passenger in every foreign airport that has flights to Tir Tairngire. And also in every spaceport, because Shadowrun totally had space stations you were supposed to be able to visit. It's like no one stopped even once to wonder how many fucking people that was, and how totally ridonkulous it would be for a country with less than six million inhabitants to actually maintain such a huge and expensive security detail in every major city on the continent and many more elsewhere. For comparison: the United States TSA is basically a hot mess and only tries to do a small fraction of this crap and they have over fifty thousand employees and a budget in the 8 billion dollar range.

Tir Tairngire attempts to do sixty times this guy's job with a work force one sixtieth the size.

Tir na nOg is even more insane than Tir Tairngire is. They have about half the population, and a basically even more unpoliceable border. But we are assured that their border control is even tighter. This involves having to show all kinds of documentation, some of which has to be written by hand by qualified Tir citizens. Also you have to undergo elective surgery to have a bomb planted in your spine for the duration of your visit. Since no player characters will ever consent to that shit, and anyone with a water elemental can fucking walk from Cornwall, I have no idea what the hell any of this is for. They could just have set the price or the expected wait time for a visa application to a large number and player characters would still always sneak in anyway and it would be vaguely plausible. But the whole stuff about doing invasive elective surgery on every person who comes into the country is totally incomprehensible.

AncientH:

Part of this is due to "Tir exceptionalism" - while the rest of the world is bent over backwords by the megacorps and muffling "Please sir may I have another?" into their gag, both of the Tiers wear the pants in their dealings with the Corporate Court, which is weird because as far as anyone knows none of them have Ghost Dance magic or nukes. But they do have some slick dudes running the show, and Tir na nOg has the Veil (Tir Tairngire was working on the Great Ward, but we'll get to that too).

All jokes aside, the idea is that it's somehow tricky to get into the Tirs illegally. Flying in under a proper SIN on an airplane seems to be rather more straightforward, even if the government owns the airline and all their ticket counters double as embassies for whatever reason.

FrankT:

Tir Tairngire gets the barest nod in discussing their transport system. They highlight their helicopter skycabs and maglev commuter train to remind you that this is the future, but don't much discuss anything from city buses to highways to river boats. Tir na nOg gets a lot more of that, but only to remind you that everything in the country is under constant lockdown by the dreaded Garda. They discuss how the police monitor all the trains, planes, roads, and waterways, and sing the praises of Tir na nOg's omnipresent police force. The absolute weirdest part of this is where they talk about how old codgers near retirement are stuck monitoring boats. I think it's important to remember at this point that there are no fucking codgers near retirement in this fucking country. The oldest official Elf in 2054 is only 43 years old. Elvish retirement is supposed to be later than it is for humans (though how anyone would know when the oldest Elf is forty three fucking years old is something I've never understood), so now dude in his early forties is near retirement. Actually the Elf fappage is supposed to be that they still have taut brown nipples even as they age. So not only is noone in the country remotely close to retirement age, but even if they were they wouldn't look or act like old people. Fuck.



While ostensibly discussing how badass the Irish gestapo are, they inadvertently give the game away: there are no local police forces in Tir na nOg, just as all police work is done by the federal police in the Republic of Ireland of today (and of 1993 for that matter). This is supposed to sound hard core (“The Tir police force is a formidable organization.”), but the fact of the matter is that Ireland works that way because it is bullshit small. It's like noticing that you're confronted with the Minneapolis Sheriff's department everywhere you go, because Tir na nOg has the fucking population of Minneapolis. Seriously. Look it up.

AncientH:

A word on money: Tir Tairngire is part of the 21st century and uses the nuyen, but has its own special all-natural fiber bills for when it needs something to snort pixie dust up a delicate elven nostril. Tir na nOg uses the Irish punts. Tir na nOg, like the UK, did not really come aboard to this whole global currency idea like the rest of the world because Carl Sargent & Marc Gasciogne were writing them, and either could not be fucking bothered or thought it made their home countries special. Whatever. Also (hah) the punt is worth 2.2 pounds. Yeah, keep dreaming guys.

I can't throw too many stones though, because back when I was writing Shadowrun I wanted to put in special orichalcum coins for Tir Tairngire - basically a square gram of metal foil in a disc of artificial quartz - but I was younger and more foolish and it wasn't like we were ever going to do another Tir book anyway.

FrankT:

Medicine in Tir Tairngire is socialized and operates on the basis of a national health service. This is totally reasonable, but the comments point out that this is fairly bad for Shadowrunners, because in a socialized healthcare system everyone has to register with the government if they want to get healthcare services of any kind. This is a nice way to set up a “high level” scenario for undercover espionage characters – the healthcare sector is set up in a plausible fashion that simply happens to make life difficult for the player characters. It's much more reasonable than all the luggage screening and anal probes you're expected to go through to fly into Portland.

Tir na nOg kicks it up a few notches. They loudly and repeatedly insist that Tir na nOg has one of the greatest healthcare systems in the world, and the starving masses of the Earth are lining up to try to get access to their sweet high tech medicine. This is bullshit. This is so much bullshit that it hurts my head. OK, in the real world, Ireland has the 19th best ranked healthcare system in the world. Helped to a huge extent by leeching off the 18th best ranked healthcare system in the world – the United Kingdom.


But being a pretty good (by international standards) healthcare system doesn't mean that they are a medical “destination.” Their numbers are pretty good because they are physically small and have good medical coverage (and decent ambulance response times), and also have communist medicine like the UK so that people get the preventative care they need at affordable personal costs. And that's abou as good as you're ever going to get out of Ireland. When this book was written, they were still doing symphysiotomies on woman without their knowledge or consent because lol catholicism. Actual medical destinations pretty much require large hospitals with lots of patients. You can't specialize in handling rare diseases without having a large number of patients to draw upon. That's why when you go to a high tech medical destination in the US you go to California or New York and not to Montana or Idaho. It's why even countries that have really awesome medical systems like Denmark have to ship patients with rare diseases off to specialists in Germany or France. It's why in the real world one of the main drivers of Ireland's relatively good healthcare profile is that their hospitals have referral rights to specialists in London.

Not only is Ireland never ever going to be a tower of medical super science, but if they went the full North Korea and cut diplomatic ties with the United Kingdom their medical profile would sink like a rock.

AncientH:

This goes back to the Tir economies, which despite having a low level of megacorporate involvement or employment have an implausibly high level of high-tech and high-magic research, development, and production. For example, each is supposed to have the equivalent of a delta-level cyberclinic able (if not willing) to do cybermancy. This doesn't really seem all that likely on the face of it, because as the man said, where's the money coming from? The implication should be that some people somewhere are bankrolling the nations, or else this is all touristy propaganda, but because this is 1993 we're left with the rather depressing explanation that the Elves just do it better.

FrankT:

The last part of the Tir Tairngire tourist intro is a bit about Portland. In Shadowrun, Portland was surrounded by a wall. Like the Berlin Wall. Specifically. I know, you may be thinking “Lolwut?” And I can't really help you. The idea was that People from the outside could get into Portland by plane or train or boat, but to get out you had to pass more Soviet-era iron curtain bullshit. Of course, East Germany was three times the population of Tir Tairngire and was backed by the second largest empire in the world. These guys seem to be doing it out of pocket for the lulz.

Tir na nOg, on the other hand, ends with a rant about aristocratic families and their important family names. I remind you, the whole country is less than twenty years old at this point, and the oldest Elf is still 43. There hasn't been enough time for even one person to grow old and die and hand things off to their children. Indeed, anyone born into the system isn't old enough to have graduated from college. The vast majority of people born in this country haven't graduated from highschool. There can't be any hereditary anything, because not enough time has passed for anything to be passed down. We're looking at Eastern European “godfathers” not noble families. There are no lineages there are no family trees. If somebody put on a crown, it's because they have bad fashion sense, not because they are an ancient anything. Fuck!


Putin just stole your ring, but he still isn't of “noble blood.”

AncientH:

There is the Gaelic nobility of Ireland, and there are Chiefs of the Name in the nation still even if the Irish don't have a House of Lords anymore. But it's not a ready-made ruling class just waiting for the world to come around to feudal thinking again; the idea that either Tir should have this quasi-nobility bit embedded in it is supposed to be "destiny" (as sold to the elves on the bottom of the pyramid) and a deliberate plot by the IEs that are really behind founding both these nations so they can be princes and princesses again.

Except, well...it doesn't quite work like that. Yes, you have this vaguely Magic Kingdom pseudo-royalty thing going on, but the IEs aren't exactly front and center in the whole thing, even if they seem to be behind it and enjoying the perks. A lot of it, I think, is just people trying to graft - for whatever reason - the political system of Rivendell onto a contemporary nation.

It's a lot of elfplonk, and it makes you wonder what's in the water, exactly. But if you were relatively young and imagined Shadowrun as being a literal mashup of Lord of the Rings and Neuromancer, where elven castles can look down over Portland and beefy elves with cyberarms toting submachine guns is the cutting edge of fantasy fiction...


SERRAted Edge.

...well, compared to the Master Race's Handbook which had come out the year before, by 1993 standards this was all fairly progressive.

[/edit]I forgot to talk about Taengele! Yeah, I'm not going to fuck with the accents. This was supposed to be a special elf-liquor distilled from honey and anise, like ouzo made from mead. The closest you can get in the real world is Xtabentún.

[Ancient History]

How It Came To Be
History

FrankT:

The second tab in both Tir Tairngire and Tir na nOg is the “History” tab. This is begun with the major heading “HOW IT CAME TO BE” in Tir Tairngire and less prosaically under “HISTORY” in Tir na nOg. The timeline rundowns are ten pages in both books, so we'll do them together. However, in Tir Tairngire there is an actual heading called “Geography” and talks about various points of interest for five pages first. It's actually the nominal reason why all the previously discussed parts of the Tir Tairngire book are nominally under the heading “Geography” because of an aforementioned formatting error. Anyway, it's only five pages, so I guess we might as well get it out of the way.

The geography section of Tir Tairngire obviously should have been after the history section because all of the points of interest are only interesting because of the history as discussed in the history section, and they tell you to go read the history section several times rather than explain themselves twice. It's like they realized they had fucked up before they were even done with primary writing, but I have no idea why they didn't just jiggle the chapter order.

Anyway, Tir Tairngire has a disputed border, which is not really a thing that an isolationist country that is impossible to sneak into should have. I think one of the very first things you should do when deciding that you want to be very careful about who you allow into your country is not to not claim that major cities that are not literally in your zone of control are actually part of your country. It really undermines the immigration controls all to hell. Maybe they were trying to make a political point about Taiwan? It doesn't really work because we're talking about a country the size of Slovakia attempting to extort land from California. I know that in Shadowrun history all bad things have to happen to California, and none of them have to make sense, but this is really pushing it.

AncientH:

The big thing in the Tir Tairngire geography section is Crater Lake, which is a real place - it's a volcanic caldera filled with water to become a lake, and it has an island in the middle of the lake. Unfortunately, for all the mystery and brouhaha surrounding it, nothing much was ever done with Crater Lake. For what it's worth, this is about where orichalcum mining started, near as I recall. First mention of it. Laughing Man and the Bid D show up to be ineffable and useless and let us know that this is a BIG SECRET.

On the other hand, in Shadowrun it looks like the panther and the gray wolf are both extinct by 2009. Doin' okay in our reality though. Also, because Elves Oregon Tir Tairngire is now 80% forest. Tir na nOg has some really weird plant growback stuff of its own going on we'll get to later. What I do like about Findley is that he's occasionally able to take the piss out of himself, as when he has a stand-in poster named DNF rant on for a couple paragraphs that for all this new-agey "back to the land" shit, the only thing keeping the current homo sapiens population fed was advanced technology.

FrankT:

Much ink is spent discussing mysterious goings on with measured mountain heights and people having meetings at Crater Lake. Crater Lake even gets a map! Honestly, it's hard to know why we were supposed to care. There are some novels that tie in to Crater Lake, and this isn't the last Shadowrun book to pontificate about the mystery of Crater Lake. But you know what? All that was stupid. There is nothing any player characters could do that interacts with the Crater Lake shenanigans in any way. It was all hype for events that made no difference to any PCs in the history of ever.



Dunkelzahn comments that he could make a helpful comment, and then he doesn't. Fuck this book.

AncientH:

Geography seems like something that should be important to a location book, but often gets ignored - mainly because the people that write these things are rarely geography majors. No, they're history majors or history buffs, and so we get history. That's always misliked me - I know why people do it, but it's one of the things I try to avoid myself in RPG writing, because a sourcebook is not a textbook. What you kind of want is to keep the player in the eternal now, and reveal some of the history as it is needed. Focus too much on it, and well...you get this.

FrankT:

The history sections of both spend a fair amount of time ranting about shit that happened in the 2020s, which we don't really care about. First of all, the oldest of the main wave of Elves turned ten years old in 2021, so the highlight of this entire decade as far as any of these assholes should be concerned is whether Suzielle would go to the prom with them or not. And secondly because Shadowrun history gets vaguer and dumber the farther back you go. Tir Tairngire at least tells you that you don't need a primer on events before 2018, Tir na nOg goes the extra mile by ranting for nearly two pages about events in the 1970s. Yes, really. Not the 2070s, the 1970s.

See, Ireland had a whole shadow war with a couple of gangs on various sides blowing things up to denounce Catholicism or Protestantism and make known that they really wanted Ulster to be part of or not part of the United Kingdom and/or the Republic of Ireland. These were called “The Troubles” and they continue to this day, although at this point even the people in Ireland don't really care. By the nineties, the troubles had wound down to the level of being just crime. In the year these books were written, the troubles claimed the lives of 23 people (many of them in the United Kingdom), a year when Minneapolis saw the murders of 70 people. The Republic of Ireland saw the murders of 28 people that year not connected to the troubles, so not only was the whole situation simply enough to take the crime rate from “very low” to “moderately low” it wasn't even a majority of the major crime. So even in 1993, rants about Bloody Sunday were a little bit weird and out of place, and when you start up a discussion about Shadowrun with it – well we're talking about the murders of 14 people of a different species in a different century as part of an ongoing struggle between two countries that don't exist using the pretext of religious differences between two religions that are both banned in the present day. It's difficult to imagine something that could be more irrelevant to Elves of the Tir. But Gascoigne really really hates the British, and so here we are.

The basic story of the early history of Tir Tairngire actually goes over pretty well. You had some Elvish Highlanders, and they wore various identities to encourage racial separatism and convince a large number of them to move to Oregon and then declare a racialist identity and independence some years later. Basically the Rajneesh plan, except they had access to tens of millions of people in the country who actually were different and could plausibly be expected to go along with this plan. Only the details are stupid, and we'll get to that in a bit.

The basic story of the early history of Tir na nOg, by contrast, is batshit fucking insane. Elvish Highlanders help the IRA conquer Ulster with successful terrorist attacks, and then they spent the years up to 2034 bringing down politicians and priests with scandal mongering until the people accepted a bloodless coup to install an Elvish theocracy in a nation where all the officially recognized Elves were no older than 23. Much is made over the fact that during the “years of scandal” hardly any Elvish politicians got sacked – which is much less disturbing when you realize that for most of those years none of the Elves had graduated from fucking highschool yet and the highest office they could fall from would have been “student body president.” You have to be 21 to run for election in the Irish Dáil, and no Elves were old enough to do that until 2032, making the fact that none of them had to resign from the Dáil in 2025 a trivial fact.

AncientH:

It really isn't hard to tell that some people didn't quite think this through. One of the insane things about Tir Tairngire is that they're technically a breakaway from a made-up tribe called the Sinsearach in the Salish-Shide. You might have asked yourself at one point "Why the fuck is one of the NAN states got a half-Gaelic name?" and that is the reason. Anyway, the Sinsearach are still chilling right over the border from the Tir, because fuck knows we didn't have enough elf groups already.


Infamous fashion designer Link is still at large, the elfhunt has been expanded to a three-country area due to the continuing ramifications of his crimes against aesthetics...

FrankT:

The Tir Tairngire stupid comes with the age thing as well. It's not as bad as it is in Tir na nOg, but it's still pretty dumb. At the time the Highlanders are setting the stage for their coup by encouraging Elves and Dwarves to move to Oregon, the Elves and Dwarves in question are small children. So they are not so much creating a diaspora as setting up their long term plans by inviting child runaways to congregate in Oregon. in the mid-twenty twenties, they drive all the people out of Oregonian cities in what I assume is some sort of Khmer Rouge montage of child soldier based killing fields, because the oldest Elves doing this are 13. Then they have Elves rebuild Portland, Salem, and Eugene in their own image between 2031 and 2034, where the super majority of them are still children and not a single one of them is old enough to drink.


This is way better than our original nationbuilding plan: “Treehouse”

The more detailed the history gets, the stupider it is. Tir Tairngire spends a lot of time talking about tribal politics in the twenties. The less said about these the better. Immortal Elves pass themselves off as being members of various tribes, a feat which is supposed to have been fairly difficult because the Red Skins had a strict no Anglos policy. That doesn't make any sense. Just like Tir na nOg doesn't make any sense if they limited their membership to people born into Elfness, the Native American Nations don't make sense if they limited their membership to people with native blood. There just aren't enough people born into local minorities to take over and make homogenous states. That's just a universal truth, it's what the word “minority” means.

So while Tir Tairngire presents a weird but semi-plausible case for the creation of Tir Tairngire, it presents all the other special nations on the Shadowrun map as retarded and unfeasible. So I'm going to call that a net loss. The really crazy thing is how unnecessary this bullshit is. Magic came back in 2011, and tribal types got a working model going before the Southern Baptists. Why wouldn't a lot of Americans decide that they wanted to follow the Great Buffalo? If the Sioux and Cascade tribes had been portrayed as willing to accept pale skinned conversos, the entire map could be justified totally irrespective of the actual demographic numbers at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

AncientH:

Actually, there are some "pinkskin" tribes, but I digress. The big thing is that the people assumed to be IEs - Lugh Surehand, Sean Laverty, Aithne Oakforest, Ehran the Scribe - pop up pretty early and in charge. Really, one of the main indicators that you're an IE in this book is that you're one of the top elves in a nation of elves that you helped found. Ehran is the one most people give a fuck about, like Harlequin, because they're the ones that actually get used and do things. Lugh Surehand and Sean Laverty have done jack diddly shit since the Tir Tairngire book.

One moderate attempt made to explain away the age nonsense is Spike Babies - elves born before the technical start date of the Awakening. This was actually a deliberate X-Men reference, complete with a school for gifted youngsters such as the Dodger.



Tir na nOg also tried to use the Spike Baby excuse - supposedly 41% of the births in 2010 were elves, you'd think that would have made the news - and Liam O'Connor, the nominal head of their separatist movement, would have been born back in the 1990s.

FrankT:

Most of the history section of Tir na nOg is a frankly offensive rant about how bad the British are. There is a sock puppet called “Paisleyman” who leaves comments in favor of Ulster Unionists. He is presented as a bad person of low intelligence who is wrong. The IRA are portrayed as the good guys, the British as the bad guys, and while you could make a very good case for this being a reasonable position in the 19th century, in fucking 1993 it was just a leetle bit like writing a pro-Taliban tract.

The age problems in Tir Tairngire are bad, but they are nothing like the age problems in Tir na nOg. Liam O'Connor apparently made close ties with Elven Nobles starting in 2025. The problem of course, is that there weren't any Elvish Nobles in 2025. You don't get to receive your peerage until your 21st year, before that you're just in remainder no matter how many of your relatives died. It is literally impossible for there to have been any Elvish Nobility to make bargains with before 2032. In 2034, Liam O'Connor puts more power into the “largely Elven Senate” because apparently the previous elections of the Seanad Éireann had been changed from their current system of only allowing university graduates to even vote for the damn thing.


Still tragically underage.

There's really not much to say here. All of the history section of Tir na nOg is bullshit. The numbers aren't there. The dates don't work. The sequence of events don't make sense. The authors seem incapable of arranging numbers from largest to smallest, have no idea how to keep track of a generational cohort, and can't seem to distinguish between politically powerful people and rich teenagers. And it's all held together with a pretty icky glorification of criminal gangs who murder civilians. This book was written in the wake of the Warrington Bomb Attacks and the protagonist Liam O'Connor is portrayed as the leader of the Provisional IRA. You know, they people who blew up a couple of children while this book was being written. I'm not saying that the Black and Tans were all sunshine and roses, because they were not, but openly cheerleading the PIRA in 1993 is not and was not acceptable behavior.

AncientH:

Keeping in mind that these are supposed to be magical elven nations, there are other things that are supposed to be happening on their own while all this politicking is going on. Paracritters start appearing in large numbers, ancient monuments crop up and start looking...newer and elfier (no, I'm not kidding)...trees start growing back everywhere, catastrophic storms crop up, volcanic mountains start growing at an accelerated rate, etc.

Also, a big to-do is made of the Irish Catholic break with the Vatican, nominally because the Pope at the time put out a papal bull decrying elf and dwarf babies as monsters. Hey, he was under a lot of stress at the time.

FrankT:

Tir Tairngire's independence appears to follow the rules and structure of a James Bond plot. Surehand hacks into some comm satellites and broadcasts his evil scheme, his army of child soldiers wins a decisive battle with some stolen super weapons, and the humiliated nations of the world recognize him as master of his dominion.


Yeah, it's kind of like that.

This is, of course, not really how countries get independence for the most part. Decisive battles don't normally create big shifts in war score in the modern era, and making an unscheduled mad speech on TV doesn't usually convince anyone that you're head of state material.

No elf porn this time, I promise.

AncientH:

Maybe they were just paid off in jailbait elf pussy. Ghost knows there's stupider shit in this chapter.

The main exception to the whole "everyone recognizes Tir Tairngire" bit is Aztlan, who have their own secret ancient magical puppetmaster thing going on. Also, you might have noticed that in Tir Tairngire it's spelled "Tir Nan Og" - this isn't really super important, but it just goes to show the lack of communication.

Heh. Now that I think about it, "Land of Youth" really does sound about right for an island ruled by Elven twenty-somethings.

FrankT:

Tir Tairngire talks about war with about the sophistication of Donald Rumsfeld. In 2036 (or perhaps 2037 or 2038 if you read other books, because lol consistency), the newly established Tir Tairngire forces invade California with a techno-magical combined forces unit that used spells and lasers and armored vehicles and elves on unicorns and shit. And they attacked by surprise and totally smashed the local national guard
units in Yreka and Redding. And that meant they won the war. Because that's how it works, right? You perform a brutal sneak attack on a city of less than eight thousand people that belongs to a country with more than thirty five million people and they just give up and go home. And they totally don't respond by firing the cruise missiles, that they have, into your major cities and kill half your population in reprisal. That would be silly. The authors are Seattlites, and presumably resented California, but did they ever look at a population map fo California?


It looks like this.

The Tir Tairngire forces took zero major population centers, zero major industrial centers, and zero major military bases. But they won the minor skirmish with such style that a country six times their size just surrendered in despair. And look: now my glass of mead is empty.

Tir na nOg's understanding of how war works is even worse – more Al Qaeda than Dick Cheney. Apparently Gasciogne and Sargent think that bombing several dozen British soldiers (out of the more than two hundred thousand active personnel that they have) would totally make the United Kingdom give up and go home rather than continue to administer and protect 1.8 million of their citizens.

AncientH:

Supposedly, the Irish Elves had been using assassins to quicken the succession of British Elf Nobles over in the UK House of Lords. But seriously, this is all elfwank about trying to explain how two groups of elves on opposite sides of the Atlantic both got their own nationstates. Details aren't good for you, and they don't really help much except to try and drive home the nail "Look how fucking cool the elves are!"


Ahem. And sexy. You forgot sexy.

One of the big differences between the sections is that while Tir Tairngire has a healthy dollop of New Agey-ness tied into the whole "elven culture" spiel, Tir na nOg really doubles down on the idea by taking a healthy dose of Celtic mysticism and dialing it up to 11. This gets worse later on in the book, but keep in mind that after Liam O'Conner (founder and First Elf of Tir Tairngire) fucked off, is wife declared herself queen of the Seelie Court - which is sort of a floating body independent of the other organs of the Tir government. Not much to say about that really, except of course the implications of its connections with the Elven Court in Earthdawn. I wrote a fragment about it, back when that was a thing that I did.

FrankT:

The final sections of both history pieces are mini-rants about the rocket powered economies of the Elvish nations. Tir na nOg, for example, spends more per capita on healthcare, education, social welfare, and security than any other nation. Apparently because they have managed to save spending in other major areas. Except, I don't think there are any other major areas. That's like every major sector of government spending, and they spend more on all of it. Are they trying to tell us that they have amazingly high taxes? They crow about their growth rate of 3.7%, which is the growth rate of Lithuania, and not really something that is going to make you take over anything any time soon. You can have a growth rate like that by just being kind of basket case and playing technological catch up. I don't even know if that's supposed to be real or nominal. I doubt the authors knew the difference.

Tir Tairngire is more balanced, noting that moving most of their trade to Seattle has turned Portland into a rustbelt hellhole. It still claims that being a bunch of isolationist douchebags somehow makes you have stature on the international stage and also makes you a sought after trading partner. Because we all know how high the demand is for North Korean consumer goods.


Almost no one has a Tir-made computer, so they must be awesome, right?

AncientH:

Later on they renamed Portland "Cara'sir," because fuck, why not? It should also be noted that later authors did pop the bubble on both Tirs, with some economic stagnation and magical weirdness and eventually some political shenanigans in Tir Tairngire that even I didn't give much of a fuck about at the time Shadows of North America came out...because it wasn't about fixing what was stupid with the Tirs, it was all about writer-fan-revenge on the concept of Immortal Elves running the show. Which was depressing, really. You had one group of people ranting on and on about how if you lived for thousands of years you'd get your shit together so nothing would touch you, and another group that says "Everything dies." and starts talking nukes and sniper rifles. Nobody, as far as I can tell, sat back and asked "Okay, this history is more than kinda borked, how can we maybe get it make a fraction more sense, or at least best ignore it so that people can go to these places and have adventures?"



By the way, I love Janet Aulisio's color plates in this book. Color plates was a thing that FASA was doing at the time, these slick glossy full-color magazine page stuck in the middle of the dead-tree black and white really looked good back in the day...more or less. I mean, compared to AD&D and White Wolf. Laubenstein I think was always best in black-and-white, but some of these color plates are gorgeous.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It should also be noted that later authors did pop the bubble on both Tirs, with some economic stagnation and magical weirdness and eventually some political shenanigans in Tir Tairngire that even I didn't give much of a fuck about at the time Shadows of North America came out...because it wasn't about fixing what was stupid with the Tirs, it was all about writer-fan-revenge on the concept of Immortal Elves running the show. Which was depressing, really.

WTF are you talking about, Ancient History, that sounds awesome.

Yes, it's sophomoric and catty to use the powers of canon to deconstruct another author's wanking behind their back, but certain people who don't just consist of myself LIKE sophomoric and catty.

EDIT: In all seriousness, though, I think that a campaign setting package where you infiltrate a North Korean-style police state where everyone is indoctrinated with racialist propaganda to accomplish whatever Casablanca/Ninja Gaiden/Blade Runner style mission objectives you set out to accomplish would be a great boon to the setting. The game definitely doesn't need two locations like that, though.

[TheFlatline]

Okay, I'm down with that Lago, but why does it have to always, and I do mean always, be elves?

How about a Trollish fascist state? Or a dwarvish communist utopia, or a ghoulish meritocracy?

[Ancient History]

There is a Dwarven grand duchy, and the Black Forest Troll Kingdom, and Asamando the Ghoul dictatorship. There's also a bunch of smaller little Elf enclaves for RAISINS. So it's not always elves, but yes elves got there first and they wanked harder about them, especially in the early days of Shadowrun - and it's pretty easy to see why; same reason that most of the big megacorps are Japanese. The writers were literally mashing together Tolkien and Gibson, and those are the flavors at their disposal. Dwarfs had their mountain holds, Elves had a couple different nations, humans had some nations, and the Hobbits had the Shire. The orcs and trolls in Tolkiens didn't have their own nations as such; there was a self-declared goblin king under the mountain, but the rest of the orc-world was under the heal of Sauron, Saruman, and the Witch-King. So yeah, when they drew up the setting they threw some elf nations in there because it was a mashup.

And I like to think that they did recognize their mistake at some point. The numbers weren't right, the whole thing went from cool-to-twelve-year-olds to silly-to-seventeen-year-olds. But when you look at most of the Tir backlash in, oh, end of third edition and on into fourth, you're not looking at reforming these countries to make them work better within the context of the setting, you're looking at people killing IEs just to kill IEs and get them out of power. Tir Tairngire isn't measurably more playable now in SR5 than it was in SR1; it's history doesn't make any more sense, there's been no real effort to make it a better and more integral part of the game. But James Meiers killed Aina, so obviously someone must be on the right track. </sarcasm>

[Stahlseele]

Black Forrest Troll Kingdom.
The most formidable fighting Force in all of Germany.
Trolls on Troll Sized Horses wielding Troll-Sized bows that punch through Tanks.

Furthermore, Orks and Trolls actually have their own racist Terror Group.
SONS OF SAURON. They are to the ORC(Ork Rights Commitee) what Alamos 20K is to Humanis more or less.

James Meier is an Idiot too.
He killed the most important Character in the Background off for . . reasons . .

[Lago PARANOIA]

Okay, I'm down with that Lago, but why does it have to always, and I do mean always, be elves?

Because elves are depicted as being Better Than You and it makes the audience feel better when the snobs are knocked off their thrones. Deconstructing Neanderthal or Psychlo society to be a hellhole doesn't have the same kind of panache as doing the same to an Angel or Vulcan or Founder one. And as I noted with the Psychlo comparison, doing this kind of plot makes the PCs look like elitist bullies when done to societies that are inferior or just different. Tearing the masks off of the leaders of a society of Ogres whose average INT is 8 isn't awesome or compelling or inspiring; it just makes you look like a dick, in exactly the same manner as ruthlessly criticizing a stuck-up high school Student Council President does.

[Fuchs]

Trolls with bows the best fighting force? Lol. Any modern military could show them why cavalry went out of use long ago.

[Stahlseele]

@Fuchs
Them's the Crunch.
For the longest time, a Troll-Cavalry using Bows would have obliterated most any armored force. Especially in the Black Forrest Terrain. At least as far as the rules/crunch was concerned.

[Nath]

Liam O'Connor, the nominal head of their separatist movement, would have been born back in the 1990s.

The first mention of his age suggests 1987, but it actually gets more precise a few pages later. O'Connor would be a born in 1979 (and the information doesn't appear to be a secret).

Tir na nOg, page 30
Early in 2015, the IRA opened negotiations with the Dublin government. [...] A key figure in the Republican strategy was Liam O'Connor, commander of the Derry IRA at the tender age of 28 years.

Tir na nOg, page 34
Liam O'Connor's disappearance from public life in May 2043, at the age of 64, has never been explained to the public.

[Ancient History]

NMath! Haven't seen you in a dog's age. Glad to have you keep me honest.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I guess this is as good as any a place to ask this loaded question, but:

The IRA are portrayed as the good guys, the British as the bad guys, and while you could make a very good case for this being a reasonable position in the 19th century, in fucking 1993 it was just a leetle bit like writing a pro-Taliban tract.

About when was the switchover point towards regarding the IRA from an organization with legitimate grievances to, frankly, the terrorist organization it was today? I'll accept a range of years instead of a particular event.

[Ancient History]

Hell. 1969, when the Provisional IRA split off. Before the Long War, yeah, and you could say they were just using guerrilla tactics, but that's when civilian casualties started climbing, they were using crime to finance their activities, and then in the 80s they had arms deals with the Libyans...always beware who you end up in bed with.

[Username17]

About when was the switchover point towards regarding the IRA from an organization with legitimate grievances to, frankly, the terrorist organization it was today? I'll accept a range of years instead of a particular event.

That's super complicated. Clearly, in the 1920s the IRA had a legitimate grievance: they wanted home rule because they were third class citizens in the empire that owned them. Independence from an empire that is explicitly willing to starve your people from time to time is obviously worth fighting for.

At the beginning of the Troubles in the late sixties, the IRA had legitimate grievances again. Catholics got the short end of the legal stick in Northern Ireland. They got discriminated against in employment, housing, political representation, and medical care (not that the plight of protestants on the southern side of the border wasn't also an issue at that point - but we're talking about the legitimacy of the use of force by the IRA, which at that time was justified by the catholic Irish in Northern Ireland being frozen out of the political process). The early marches were called "civil rights marches" and were almost as necessary as the marches of the same name going on in the American South of the time.

But the use of force in politics is a slippery path and also something that requires extraordinary justification. You don't get to call yourself a good man if you take up arms just because you lose an election, but you do get to call yourself the good guy if you take up arms because you weren't allowed to sit for election in the first place. By 1972, Britain had come to the negotiating table, and the OIRA agreed to a ceasefire. That seems like a legitimate beginning and ending to the use of force. But of course, that didn't hold because the PIRA (which as AH noted had broken off from the OIRA several years earlier) refused to accept a cease fire in exchange for concessions from London and kept murdering people. That seems like it's pretty clearly not a legitimate use of force as a political tool but merely crime with some shady justifications.

So it's a gradual process. Well into the eighties you could be an IRA volunteer and still make a reasonable argument that you were a rational actor with legitimate political grievances who was willing to take up arms in response to the government denying civil rights or failing to provide adequate protection from Unionist terrorists (remembering of course that the Unionists also had a terrorist wing). You just had to part of the right splinter faction of the IRA. The PIRA itself had shown their true colors in 1972, and were probably just a murderous criminal organization from the beginning.

Certainly in 1993, supporting any part of the IRA was very dubious and speaking well of the PIRA was simply not something that could be excused rationally. Catholics in Northern Ireland are a minority, and they are entitled to equal rights and equal protections, but they are only entitled to the use of force if the government is not providing them those things and there does not appear to be a peaceful means for achieving them. And they aren't entitled to conquering the territory in defiance of the will of the majority at all.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

And they aren't entitled to conquering the territory in defiance of the will of the majority at all.

-Username17

If you're willing, I'm hoping you could elaborate. It seems that many (if not most) conflicts around separation/self-rule regard a minority that considers that majority to have settled illegally... Take Hawaii, for example. Some native Hawaiians believe that annexation of the isles should never have been permitted, so the desires of the majority of the people (largely descendents of the conquerors) should not be considered.

Effectively, it seems you're saying conquering a territory is wrong, but if you do it anyway and succeed, 'no take backs'.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Effectively, it seems you're saying conquering a territory is wrong, but if you do it anyway and succeed, 'no take backs'.

I'm not going to put words in Frank's mouth (though I think he feels the same way) but I feel that, yes, that is what should happen. Why?

[*] So what do you do with the majority population? If you keep them there, they can just vote themselves back into their old country or create a new country against the will of the minority anyway. Unless you disenfranchised or ethnic cleansed resettled them, it's almost certainly going to be a waste of time. If the majority actually did agree with the wishes of the minority creating their own distinct nation (and they weren't forcefully opposed by another sovereign), then guess what, it probably would've happened already!

[*] In many cases it's just not workable. I'm sure that there are some direct descendants of survivors of the Albigensian Crusade even to this day, but I'd be surprised if there were more than a couple ten thousand of them. Giving them control of Southern France would render the region an immediate failed state for many obvious reasons.

[*] If you do allow takebacks, where do you draw the line of determining who gets what? Territory in Europe and China has changed hands between sovereigns literally dozens of times and those are times we know about. I can't even imagine the territorial disputes made by now-conquered minorities in, say, Subsaharan Africa. And with DNA testing we'll be able to draw lines of descent further and further back.

[*] I think that 'finders keepers, losers weepers' for determining sovereignty is indefensible in of itself. It completely ignores the current needs of humans. And, yeah, that's kind of how it works today thanks to the anarchy of nations but if you were Ruler Supreme of Earth I think it would be unconscionable not to give incentives for people to move to where their labor is needed and to relieve ecological pressures. Granted unless there was some existential threat to their current location (war, natural disaster, etc.) and/or you really jacked up the incentives you're not going to get many takers on your offers to resettle people in the American Midwest or New Zealand or wherever. But still.

[name_here]

And they aren't entitled to conquering the territory in defiance of the will of the majority at all.

-Username17

If you're willing, I'm hoping you could elaborate. It seems that many (if not most) conflicts around separation/self-rule regard a minority that considers that majority to have settled illegally... Take Hawaii, for example. Some native Hawaiians believe that annexation of the isles should never have been permitted, so the desires of the majority of the people (largely descendents of the conquerors) should not be considered.

Ultimately, "settled illegally" is kind of a dumb statement. Nations get into wars for various reasons and then the winner takes the stuff of the loser, and the winner thinks this is fine and the loser thinks it's wrong. Now, for a lot of ethnic separatist movements, the winner's justification is pretty bullshit by modern standards, but they were accepted at the time.

Effectively, it seems you're saying conquering a territory is wrong, but if you do it anyway and succeed, 'no take backs'.

Honestly, yeah, it kinda is like that. At least over the long term when everyone involved in the original conquest is dead. Once that happens, the majority consists of innocent people who own stuff that was previously owned by ancestors of the minority. And any arbitrary location you select has a bunch of different groups which can plausibly claim it used to be theirs by right. Furthermore, at the bottom it's quite likely the minority group owned the territory by taking it from someone else.

[deaddmwalking]

Essentially, such a belief continues to justify conquest by the minority/outsider. If it's okay once the war is over, then as long as they win, history will forgive them.

Especially when you consider uneven distribution of economic resources, it essentially continues to justify those that 'have not' to use military means to take from those who 'have'.

Political participation in a system that has no economic resources is as meaningless as not being allowed to participate in a political system that does.

Most people will accept 'doing wrong now' for 'helping my kids later'. Whether that's illegal immigration or armed conquest is an equation that's solved by determining which is more likely to succeeed and what the specific rewards are.

I just read my December National Geographic, and it had an article on Guest Workers in Gulf States. United Arab Emirates, for example, has almost 89% of their population as 'guest workers'. They are not eligible for political participation. After reading the article, I was wondering whether a popular revolution by the majority (worker) population would qualify as a 'good' or 'bad' thing under this metric.

Most of the examples we're talking about (such as Hawaii and Norther Ireland) are the result of actions over centuries. There are no Hawaiians who have lived under a soverign king or queen alive today to potentially 'reclaim' their sovereign nation - so even if we accept that their time has passed and their claim lapsed, what if something should happen in 'real time'. If the UAE government is overthrown by guest workers who make up a majority of the population, would it be 'wrong' for the current citizens to resist the 'majority' will? Does it matter that a condition of guest status requires adherence to the current political rules?