Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => The Secret History => Topic started by: SpatulaODoom on <06-16-13/1202:13>
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When I was writing a story in the Fic sub-forum a question arose.
Is there a magical equivalent to the Grid Overwatch Division
GOD was supposedly created (in a vein similar to Echo Mirage) in response to computer problems great and small, from the Crashes and AI scares down to simple scamming and cyber-crime.
Why can I find no mention of anything even somewhat similar in regards to magic?
If you need a big "nuclear bomb" type scare well there's the Great Ghost Dance. Really, is there anything bigger? Oh wait Chicago. And of course there's more recent Tempo. On top of that you've got smaller things like toxic/blood mages, free spirits, and even the common man's perception that any magician out there can mind rape you and blow up your house. And that's only the stuff the public is aware of.
As far as I can tell there are tons of magical organizations from the Atlantean Foundation to the Dunkelzahn Institute, but none of them act as anything resembling a police force. They have no actual legal powers that I'm aware of. Am I just missing the book where such an organization is located? Considering the relative scarcity of magicians I'm sure it wouldn't be as large as the internet police, but still it seems to me there'd be plenty of demand.
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When I was writing a story in the Fic sub-forum a question arose.
Is there a magical equivalent to the Grid Overwatch Division
Nope.
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When I was writing a story in the Fic sub-forum a question arose.
Is there a magical equivalent to the Grid Overwatch Division
Not by Mortal hands...
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It's much more difficult to control mana than it is the matrix. I'm sure people have tried but all have failed. With the exception of technomancers matrix jockeys need tools to do their work, tools can mostly be controlled, while magicians are born with their powers. . That's not counting that the matrix is a creation of man, magic on the other hand isn't so it's like trying to control the tides.
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I think of this as wrong, cause indeed you can't control mana (and actually, you could, thanks to geomancy, feng shui or careful "sterilization"), but you can control actions.
Most of the control of hackers was on program and gear indeed, but also on a local level with IC and so on.
Now it will be on decks, as it is by protocols.
But regarding magicians, they might be born with it but they have to respect a bunch of constraining laws, it you read Magic in the Shadows/of the 6th world. So I don't think of it as "more difficult" for such powerful and large entities as governments and corps. Indeed, they can't achieve the same degree of control than if they were owning the whole thing, but I think this is relatively equivalent.
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Magic is freedom, all you need is your magic, your bike, and the open road.
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Magic is freedom, all you need is your magic, your bike, and the open road.
Drugs help too. (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/112345/Shadowrun%3A-Sim-Dreams-%26-Nightmares) ;D
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Magic is freedom, all you need is your magic, your bike, and the open road.
Drugs help too. (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/112345/Shadowrun%3A-Sim-Dreams-%26-Nightmares) ;D
That's how you pay for gas.
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Individual security companies, police forces, and nation-states might have magical security divisions, but there's nothing as cohesive, world-spanning, and omnipotent as the GOD, no.
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Lone star had the department of paranormal investigation (DPI)
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Magic is freedom, all you need is your magic, your bike, and the open road.
Well, I'll guess with new developments, we'll taste a lot more freedom as Ares made some breakthrought...
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So the question of "who you gonna call?" Is answered with a shrug?
It seems really odd that you wouldn't have need of something like that.
Every argument and situation that went into the creation of Grid Overwatch seems to have a magical parallel. Of note is the Astral/Matrix cross jurisdictional problem. You move at what, 6000kph when you're astral? If a guy who's meat body is in the CAS goes astral and heads over to Seattle to summon up some spirits on Aztech property to commit a crime in a Renraku facility who deals with it?
Sure individual police companies have their own magical investigation groups, but then again they also have their own cyber-crime specialists and hackers. Yet Grid Overwatch is still a thing.
Magic is freedom, all you need is your magic, your bike, and the open road.
And we all know how the Corporations feel about freedom. I'd also question the implied statement that the matrix can be easily controlled just because it's a creation of man. If that were true then why have so many organizations out policing it and yet still things are still so wild west. In addition there's things like AI's and sprites and ghosts in the machine. Sure individual nodes and components can be controlled, but the trix as a whole? In theory sure. In reality, good fragging luck chummer. I understand what you're saying, and to a degree I agree that it's a matter of degree, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it's not something that would be attempted.
The parallel is there with magic as boomstick indicated. Sure you can't control magic as a whole, but you can control individual mages and entities and localized regions.
"Reality" of the situation aside, don't you think the public at large would demand some sort of Magical overwatch division? Think about their perception of things magical.
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So the question of "who you gonna call?" Is answered with a shrug?
It seems really odd that you wouldn't have need of something like that.
Every argument and situation that went into the creation of Grid Overwatch seems to have a magical parallel. Of note is the Astral/Matrix cross jurisdictional problem. You move at what, 6000kph when you're astral? If a guy who's meat body is in the CAS goes astral and heads over to Seattle to summon up some spirits on Aztech property to commit a crime in a Renraku facility who deals with it?
Sure individual police companies have their own magical investigation groups, but then again they also have their own cyber-crime specialists and hackers. Yet Grid Overwatch is still a thing.
Magic is freedom, all you need is your magic, your bike, and the open road.
And we all know how the Corporations feel about freedom. I'd also question the implied statement that the matrix can be easily controlled just because it's a creation of man. If that were true then why have so many organizations out policing it and yet still things are still so wild west. In addition there's things like AI's and sprites and ghosts in the machine. Sure individual nodes and components can be controlled, but the trix as a whole? In theory sure. In reality, good fragging luck chummer. I understand what you're saying, and to a degree I agree that it's a matter of degree, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it's not something that would be attempted.
The parallel is there with magic as boomstick indicated. Sure you can't control magic as a whole, but you can control individual mages and entities and localized regions.
"Reality" of the situation aside, don't you think the public at large would demand some sort of Magical overwatch division? Think about their perception of things magical.
No more then they require similar global overwatch for modern concerns.
There was potential when the UB affair broke, but then Ares stepped in and it appeared that the Corporate Council had it undercontrol... and since then? Magically, from the publics point of view, its been quiet. Martix though? With the Crash and Technomancers and all that valuable corporate data been exposed? There is both a public drive and more importantly, a corporate need for some sort of regulation/security at a global scale.
But there just isn't the drive from a corporate or public view for similar for magic. Local security is handled locally when it comes to magic. Except for the bugs, there is no gloval magical threat... that the corps or the public is aware off.
Also, policing magic appears to be very much a national/corporate juristriction affair. Unless something major happens on a global scale, these local authorities are unlikely to support giving up their control for some global entity... and from a Corp Council view, there is neither the profit or risk drivers for them to push for that control.
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So the question of "who you gonna call?" Is answered with a shrug?
It seems really odd that you wouldn't have need of something like that.
Every argument and situation that went into the creation of Grid Overwatch seems to have a magical parallel. Of note is the Astral/Matrix cross jurisdictional problem. You move at what, 6000kph when you're astral? If a guy who's meat body is in the CAS goes astral and heads over to Seattle to summon up some spirits on Aztech property to commit a crime in a Renraku facility who deals with it?
Sure individual police companies have their own magical investigation groups, but then again they also have their own cyber-crime specialists and hackers. Yet Grid Overwatch is still a thing.
Magic is freedom, all you need is your magic, your bike, and the open road.
And we all know how the Corporations feel about freedom. I'd also question the implied statement that the matrix can be easily controlled just because it's a creation of man. If that were true then why have so many organizations out policing it and yet still things are still so wild west. In addition there's things like AI's and sprites and ghosts in the machine. Sure individual nodes and components can be controlled, but the trix as a whole? In theory sure. In reality, good fragging luck chummer. I understand what you're saying, and to a degree I agree that it's a matter of degree, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it's not something that would be attempted.
The parallel is there with magic as boomstick indicated. Sure you can't control magic as a whole, but you can control individual mages and entities and localized regions.
"Reality" of the situation aside, don't you think the public at large would demand some sort of Magical overwatch division? Think about their perception of things magical.
No more then they require similar global overwatch for modern concerns.
There was potential when the UB affair broke, but then Ares stepped in and it appeared that the Corporate Council had it undercontrol... and since then? Magically, from the publics point of view, its been quiet. Martix though? With the Crash and Technomancers and all that valuable corporate data been exposed? There is both a public drive and more importantly, a corporate need for some sort of regulation/security at a global scale.
But there just isn't the drive from a corporate or public view for similar for magic. Local security is handled locally when it comes to magic. Except for the bugs, there is no gloval magical threat... that the corps or the public is aware off.
Also, policing magic appears to be very much a national/corporate juristriction affair. Unless something major happens on a global scale, these local authorities are unlikely to support giving up their control for some global entity... and from a Corp Council view, there is neither the profit or risk drivers for them to push for that control.
This. The Matrix has crashed a few times and there's now people who can change it with their minds, meanwhile on the magic front there's old man McGuiness who heals people and animals in the neighborhood and casts illusions for the kids every now and them. Sure there's bad magicians out their but they are nothing like those technomancers who can ruin your life with a thought.
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This. The Matrix has crashed a few times and there's now people who can change it with their minds, meanwhile on the magic front there's old man McGuiness who heals people and animals in the neighborhood and casts illusions for the kids every now and them. Sure there's bad magicians out their but they are nothing like those technomancers who can ruin your life with a thought.
Not like the fluff didn't tell they are portrayed in over the top ways, as well on the good than on the bad side.
Karl Kombamage. Seriously, that would not make people feel like mages are dangerous? When they are so much into what fictions usually dictate to them?
Add onto it the fact that there are really monsters that can take on your body and transform it into the aberration of the week, or else replacing you and keep on behaving like nothing happened like the Tommyknockers, the fact people had to leave their country and were brutally smacked down by these Native American they previously considered as lowly and primitive (I mean, don't think all real americans think like that, but in the context of SR, corps did their homework working PR for this during the ressources rushes) just because of Magic, a Dragon who razed Teheran (yeah, indeed, mostly not by himself, but still), others who destroyed planes, who fight above cities or make tables turn in various wars (like in California or Denver, and in Amazonia) and no, indeed, there would be no reason to be worried;)
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Karl Kombamage. Seriously, that would not make people feel like mages are dangerous?
Our cat shaman is a total Karl Kombatmage fangirl.
The Man actually has a fairly good plan in place for the Awakened. They're found as young as possible, and tricked/intimated/whatever into some kind of training program. Often they have to actually pay for this training program, like student loans, and are now debt slaves of the organization that "helped" them. Both the Corps and various criminal organizations do this. It kind of weeds down the numbers of wild magicians and Awakened are already pretty rare.
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This. The Matrix has crashed a few times and there's now people who can change it with their minds, meanwhile on the magic front there's old man McGuiness who heals people and animals in the neighborhood and casts illusions for the kids every now and them. Sure there's bad magicians out their but they are nothing like those technomancers who can ruin your life with a thought.
Not like the fluff didn't tell they are portrayed in over the top ways, as well on the good than on the bad side.
Karl Kombamage. Seriously, that would not make people feel like mages are dangerous? When they are so much into what fictions usually dictate to them?
Add onto it the fact that there are really monsters that can take on your body and transform it into the aberration of the week, or else replacing you and keep on behaving like nothing happened like the Tommyknockers, the fact people had to leave their country and were brutally smacked down by these Native American they previously considered as lowly and primitive (I mean, don't think all real americans think like that, but in the context of SR, corps did their homework working PR for this during the ressources rushes) just because of Magic, a Dragon who razed Teheran (yeah, indeed, mostly not by himself, but still), others who destroyed planes, who fight above cities or make tables turn in various wars (like in California or Denver, and in Amazonia) and no, indeed, there would be no reason to be worried;)
People have short memories, look at the current furor about the US government spying on our cell phones even though it came out years ago that they were doing it, people in the 6th world have even shorter memories. Technomancers are the current scare of the week so the population at large will have forgotten about mages. Tehran and the flight that got smacked down? Ancient history not a blip on anybodies radar. Sirrug? Covered up lest the sheep panic. Magic isn't the bogeyman right now, you even mentioned Karl Kombatmage, he's the 6th world's Rambo or John McClain. He's the hero, the good guy he's stopping the evil technomacer plots from blowing up the world.
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Magic isn't in the public mind?
Amazonia.
My reading indicates that Aztlan's propaganda machine was (is? Not sure about the current timeline) actively demonizing the scary monsters and magic using terrorists. A quick read through street magic doesn't indicate the public at large is cool broskies with magic in general.
Modern concerns? Do things like Shedim, bugs, Amazonia, and Tempo?
Regarding global threats, what is the global technological threat? Technomages aren't unified by any stretch of the imagination and with winterlight more or less gone what's left.
Sure TM's are the flavor of the week, but don't forget at their times so was magic (and still is). Why didn't a similar organization exist back then in the aftermath of the Universal Brotherhood or the Ghost Dance?
These are honest questions, I'm not super solid on the lore of the setting.
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Oh dear. The Matrix is entirely created and owned by the megacorps, but ultimately they still have to share the resources to some extent. To the Big Ten, it's simply a matter of protecting what is a massive, shared investment. They have allowed GOD, which was created in the wake of the events of Technobabel, to evolve into the Leviathan it has become in Storm Front/SR5. Just to recap, three things happened in that novel that changed the world:
- The Babel virus that spread through Renraku's hosts permanently erased all reference to Leonardo and destroyed every online copy of every piece of data involving him and the R&D, manufacturing, and everything else that was based upon his contributions to Renraku.
- Deus was awakened as a fully-fledged AI, and the events of Shutdown begin.
- Renraku and Fuchi had mobilized security and military forces around the world in preparation for an all-out corporate war to the death, which also prompted the other members of the Big Eight to put their forces on alert because of the inevitable collateral damage and spillover that would occur. The entire world was on the brink of global corporate war the likes of which has never been seen, and it all depended on what was going to be the outcome of the decision in Fuchi v. Renraku being decided by a completely isolated Corporate Court, which had for the first time ever sequestered itself and Zurich-Orbital from the entire world.
- Oh, yes. That conflict was based in part on the fact that the former head of Fuchi Internal Security was at the time a member of the Renraku board of directors.
There's nothing even remotely similar that has happened involving magic. Not even Winternight's coordinated, global magical terror attacks that occurred concurrently with the Matrix attack (and which has been mostly forgotten and overlooked) in System Failure were remotely that harmful.
Also, consider that the Big Ten are comprised of the following corporations:
- Saeder-Krupp: Entirely owned and operated by a Great Dragon. One of the largest suppliers of magical supplies, research, and services.
- Aztechnology: Owned and operated by figures with considerable interest in magic. Even larger supplier of magic than S-K.
- MCT: The second largest actor in the magical industry between Aztechnology and S-K.
- Wuxing: All of its success since 2057 has arguably been based on magic. So they're not going to let the others start binding them.
- Ares: We know what they think of magic. But one of their largest subsidiaries provides security. No threats, no work.
- Shiawase: Super-conservative, so they'd be opposed to anything that would've legitimized it. Until they became heavily influenced by magic and ghosts, and now there's no way they're going to start letting anyone peek under the hood.
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Magic isn't in the public mind?
Amazonia.
My reading indicates that Aztlan's propaganda machine was (is? Not sure about the current timeline) actively demonizing the scary monsters and magic using terrorists. A quick read through street magic doesn't indicate the public at large is cool broskies with magic in general.
Perhaps, but its 'over there' and hardly something that needs to be regulated 'here'. Also Horizon is countering that propagander, so the Corps are hardly unified on this and only the Corps can implement a global watch/regulation group
Modern concerns? Do things like Shedim, bugs, Amazonia, and Tempo?
I really wonder how much most people know about Shedim. Bugs were dealt with by Ares (as far as the public is aware), Amazonia is not a threat to my backyard and maybe they are the good guys and Tempo is a drug problem.
Regarding global threats, what is the global technological threat? Technomages aren't unified by any stretch of the imagination and with winterlight more or less gone what's left.
Sure TM's are the flavor of the week, but don't forget at their times so was magic (and still is). Why didn't a similar organization exist back then in the aftermath of the Universal Brotherhood or the Ghost Dance?
These are honest questions, I'm not super solid on the lore of the setting.
Magic hasn't been a big issue for almost twenty years (UB incident). Its old news.
Also, for a GOD equivilent you need to meet the following criteria, at a minimum:
- Clear and present global threat
- Threat to Corporate profits
- A williness for Corps and local juristrictions to give up local authority.
- A potential profit / reduced losses which compensates for the cost involved.
The Matrix is global, The Matrix is Profit which must be protected, The Matrix is Information which must be protected. The corps can work together to protect their common interests...
Magic is local, individual. Magic is profit... providing my customers are being regulated into prisons. Magic can provide info, but magical defences are widely used and seem effective. Are there threats people should be worried about? Hell yeah. Are they? Not really.
The only chance this could have happened was after Bug City, but the Corp War and self-interest ensured that the possibility didn't even raise its head.
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From a UCAS/CAS perspective the NAN and the Tir would be the magical boogie man in your backyard. I suspect that the public in North America views Magic much like the American public viewed nukes during the cold war.
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The only semihostile NAN state are the Sioux and with Horizon working on the Tir's image people probably think it's a real life Disneyland.
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The only semihostile NAN state are the Sioux and with Horizon working on the Tir's image people probably think it's a real life Disneyland.
Sure, and South Korea has been a US ally since the 1950s, but that doesn't change peoples gut reaction to losing a war. The NAN and the UCAS/CAS have been friends for decades, but I suspect losing a war and half the country because of the Ghost Dance makes them the exemplar for maintaining a magical deterrent.
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There's a few other reasons not to expect there to be something like GOD for magic.
For starters, GOD can work as a distributed global network for the matrix, because everything they do takes place on the Matrix, which is a global network. A GOD agent in Tokyo can police a Matrix site in Boston without any difficulty. He can go wherever he needs to, if the matrix node that he is trying to get into remains connected to the matrix. If it becomes disconnected, then the problem he was responding to has, by default, ceased to be a problem. If he needs to work with other agents, they can come together from every corner of the earth near simultaneously, and needing to physically go to the site of anything they are dealing with is an extremely rare occurrence. Most of the time, if there is physical, meat-space evidence they require, they can just tell the local authorities to gather it and ship it to them. If they need a physical presence to deal with a matrix threat, they take over a nearby drone, or order locals to do what they want. But why would they need that? After all, they can just make sure that the perpetrator is fried by black IC and attack programs, and go back to wandering their corner of the digital world.
Magic doesn't work this way. Even if you can move quickly in the Astral space, you still need to know where you are going (which does take at least enough time to be informed in the meat world, and then project, and then arrive), and showing up in the astral doesn't help you do much if the things you need to be responding to are in the physical world. Even if things are in the astral, closing down an area of the Astral for a short (or long) period of time is not all that difficult (Offensive Mana Barriers are easy to throw up and over-cast to near insta-gib levels of power for Astral form Magicians). Physically travelling to a location is usually as slow for a mage as it would be for every other person, so if you need to do that, good luck responding in a timely manner to anything but the most local of problems.
The second reason to avoid it is one of how long lasting the problems in each realm can be. A particularly nasty and dangerous AI or virus in the matrix can and will last forever, if no one actively deals with it. Responding early and hard becomes important, because they can even spread. GOD does this well. It is not widely believed that similiar effects can happen often with magic. Sure, a magician might summon a spirit or cast a nasty spell, but they do it and it is done, as far as most shadowrun historical occurrences show. The results might linger and be problematic (the spirit hunting and possessing people or summoning more of it's kind, or an area of the world being destroyed or becoming uninhabitable), but the effect that created it is typically over and done with, and now you've just got to deal with the aftermath. Most known magical effects are not persistent or capable of propagating themselves... or, if they are, they have to be dealt with as individual occurances, often in meat-space, which creates the logistics problems I mentioned above.
And the third reason one hasn't arisen is the question of what the corporations would have it protecting against. GOD has very specific areas of responsibility that they operate in. They don't care that you're making snuff BTLs or operating a bunraku parlor... they only care if you are doing something that could disrupt or endanger the users of the matrix, which all the corps universally agree is Bad For Business. While we players can look at the mechanics and the dark secrets of the world, and know that Blood Magic is detrimental to the survival of all of Metahumanity because of what it is likely to unleash, there is no consensus of that in world, because the vast majority of people don't know it. Blood magic is viewed as illegal most places because it violates other standing laws and morals: You're committing murder and/or assault, often combined with kidnapping and other mundane crimes.... but it's fine in Aztlan because the laws there have been changed to accommodate it, and the Great Ghost Dances, while technically blood magic and just as dangerous to meta-humanity as anything Aztlan is doing/has done, are regarded in an entirely different light, thought of as a sort of noble tradition of self-sacrifice. So the NAN and Aztlan aren't going to agree to establishing a group that is charged with "Preventing all blood magic," even if we as players know that they should.
You really have to deal with all three of these reasons before you would see a GOD equivalent arise, probably in reverse order: Is there a charge that could acquire sufficient backing in universe? If so, is there actually anything the group could do about it? And how would it be logistically feasible for them to do those actions, if there is anything they can do? I admit I'll be curious to see what the proponents of such a group have for answers to those questions.