Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Mystic on <01-22-11/0114:09>
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Ya know, I had a few minutes here at work to myself (a rarity of late) and was listening to a local radio station playing "Big 80's Friday". And it got me thinking, sense the sixth world is for all intents and purposes an alternate reality of our own time that diverged sometime near the early 1990s; what "retro" stuff do you use in your games?
I mean, there have been some neat stuff in pop culture in the 20+ years SR has been around. Did Nirvana ever hit it big? Did "reality" TV ever truly take off? Did video (or in this case tridio) REALLY kill the radio star????
And have you ever had a character that used a lot of pop culture that happened between the 90's and "today" in an SR game?
In short, what do you maniacs out there consider or include to be "retro" in YOUR sixth world?
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Madonna UGE'd into a 8' tall troll. ;D
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Hehe, Madonna, hehe, troll, hehe.
I generally consider anything that's mindless/soul-sapping/please-the-largest-common-denominator as having made it through.
Reality TV...hell yeah, look at Urban Brawl and other 'runner-oriented TV coming from Horizon (among others).
Hannah Montana/Mily Cyrus, anyone from American Idol, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, yeah, they're all there under false names so as to not infringe or risk libel/slander.
The less I have to make up as a GM the better, so defaulting to real-world, even though the timeline split in early 90's, helps.
I've been meaning to do a Top Artist/TV Shows/Movies from 2010 - 2072, (using Shadowbeat to fill in the 50's) but just haven't gotten around to it...when I do...look for it in fan fiction :)
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Madonna UGE'd into a 8' tall troll. ;D
I'm never going to be able to listen to a Madonna song the same way again...or maybe I WILL listen, just to laugh at that mental image.
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Living in a metahuman world
And I am a metahuman girl
You know that we are living in a metahuman world
And I am a metahuman girl
Some trolls bite, some trolls fight
That's part of my race
If they can't bruise me then I
Have to break their face
Some trolls shoot and some trolls scoot but
I don't see them hon
Only trolls who carry a Panther
Avoid my smartgun, 'cause they are
Living in a metahuman world
And I am a metahuman girl
You know that we are living in a metahuman world
And I am a metahuman girl
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Hehe, Madonna, hehe, troll, hehe.
I generally consider anything that's mindless/soul-sapping/please-the-largest-common-denominator as having made it through.
Reality TV...hell yeah, look at Urban Brawl and other 'runner-oriented TV coming from Horizon (among others).
Hannah Montana/Mily Cyrus, anyone from American Idol, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, yeah, they're all there under false names so as to not infringe or risk libel/slander.
The less I have to make up as a GM the better, so defaulting to real-world, even though the timeline split in early 90's, helps.
I've been meaning to do a Top Artist/TV Shows/Movies from 2010 - 2072, (using Shadowbeat to fill in the 50's) but just haven't gotten around to it...when I do...look for it in fan fiction :)
Don't forget SOTA:2063 and SOTA:2064 had some stuff listed as well. And Attitude may have some too.
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20-40% of the World population died of VITAS and then again with VITAS 2.
That's probably more culturally significant than "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills."
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VITAS culturally (and socially significant), yeah, it's huge; VITAS, UGE, Magic's Return, Ghost Dance War, Goblinization, VITAS II, Crash '29, Eurowars, etc., are all world spanning major socioeconomic events with after effects lasting generations if not for the next millennium.
But Pop-culturally they aren't much for fun distractions and the corps make a lot more nuyen from selling bubble-gum idoru one-hit-pop wonders to the tweens (and their parents) than selling trid downloads of the Public Access Network's five part documentary, "A World Diminished: How VITAS Changed Us."
Today's American zeitgeist has reality tv as large portion of its essence (I'd say more so during the first few years of American Idol). It's not all of it, but it's there. In the 2070's, VITAS wouldn't be much a part of any culture's present-significance as it's ~60 and ~50 years in the past. WWII in all its aspects is far more culturally significant than any reality tv show...but today WWII is not significant as far as pop culture goes.
Now, for the VITAS years...with such a huge fraction of the population dead would movies be put on hold, would the MTV Music Awards be canceled? Production in the arts would surely have slowed if not crawled as the world was brought to its knees...but what were some of the biggest hits during the Great Depression in the US...Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), King Kong (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs [sic] (1937), The Wizard of Oz (1939), etc. The movie, Sullivan's Travels (1941), addresses (successfully or not) the issue of why pop (specifically unreflective comedies) becomes so important during times of hardship.
At the risk of sounding crass, it's too bad (in respect to this topic) that the Spanish Flu had to hit during WWI; as an isolated Spanish Flu (~10% world population killed) would provide a better historical barometer for VITAS's cultural effects than the Great Depression. Then again, 1917 1918-1919 pop-culture wasn't exactly the mass-media-powerhouse that it is today (or in the 2070s).
EDIT: Correct date of Spanish Flu.
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Also to consider, the world's population has more than tripled since 1917. The logistics of disposing of 3 billion corpses is insane. We're talking about complete societal collapse.
What happened to pop culture is that everyone learned to shoot and started wearing body armor to the store.
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No matter the game, the forum, or the weather...Kid is still an evil, evil man. That's just wrong.
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This link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GPGQoR6f6w&feature=related), people. :)
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Also to consider, the world's population has more than tripled since 1917. The logistics of disposing of 3 billion corpses is insane. We're talking about complete societal collapse.
What happened to pop culture is that everyone learned to shoot and started wearing body armor to the store.
Yeah... I don't know if I buy this. The Decameron was written during the Black Death. The Wizard of Oz was released in the middle of the Great Depression. No matter how bad things get, people still seek to escape. Therefore, pop culture. No matter how many times you whack it with a combat axe, the towering, chattering, bubblegum-pink colossus of pop culture will rise again.
Personally, I like to remind myself that Shadowrun isn't really set all that far in the future. Sure, it's an alternate timeline, but fandoms and fads can have a very long shelf-life once you factor in the occasional nostalgic resurgence. One of my character, Eight-Stone, has an obsession with Starcraft. Starcraft in the real world is a forgettable video game to most people, but it has a rabid fanbase. And in South Korea, it's bizarrely, hugely popular... practically a national sport. I could think of no compelling reason why millions of fans would disappear over sixty years. In fact, it could even grow. So, I decided for the purposes of my character at least, it did.
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(So, I'm nearly done writing this wall-of-text of mine when I notice your link, Kot. I watched. OMG! Woa. I'm kind of glad I saw it now and not when I first started playing back in 1990, but I love it now in a cringing kind of gamer love, hehe).
Yeah, even the Spanish Flu gave rise to it's own pop culture:
"In 1918 children would skip rope to the rhyme (Crawford):
I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza." http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/
And of course the 1665 Great Plague of London (Bubonic plague) "Ring around the Rosy"
Back to the Spanish Flu;
"Those who were lucky enough to avoid infection had to deal with the public health ordinances to restrain the spread of the disease. The public health departments distributed gauze masks to be worn in public. Stores could not hold sales, funerals were limited to 15 minutes. Some towns required a signed certificate to enter and railroads would not accept passengers without them. Those who ignored the flu ordinances had to pay steep fines enforced by extra officers (Deseret News). Bodies pilled up as the massive deaths of the epidemic ensued. Besides the lack of health care workers and medical supplies, there was a shortage of coffins, morticians and gravediggers (Knox). The conditions in 1918 were not so far removed from the Black Death in the era of the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages." http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/
The chaos of the 2009-2012 years would have been near black hole-ish in force, Lone-Eagle leading to Re-Education centers only to be followed by one out of every four people dying from VITAS, then magic. With the Spanish Flu, one of the reasons (one of several) that it hit the US so hard was because much the medical community were over-seas for the war, "the medical students were left to care for the sick. Third and forth year classes were closed and the students assigned jobs as interns or nurses (Starr,1976)." ibid. Luckily 2010 US wasn't in a war (Ghost Dance war hadn't started), so hospitals would have been staffed-as-normal for the most part.
I would point out that medical science is/was far more advanced in 2010 than 1918 medical science...but VITAS killed around 8 times as many people as the Spanish Flu...so a lot of good the medical advances did...which is I would point out how much better medical science is/was but instead will only point out that I almost pointed it out, hehe.
I definitely would say that pop culture, during 2010 (or 2010 - 2011 if VITAS followed normal flu emergence patterns) would have stopped most large media productions; If the director didn't die then there's a good chance the producer, editor, executive-to-green-light-final-film, or lead actor(s) would have...each postponing release. Same with music, etc. Concerts, movie theaters, live performances, all would have been canceled in order to stop spread...but TV would have chugged right along (save for the stations/operations that were hit particularly hard and didn't have enough living staff to keep things working). Air Travel would have been halted save in the most extreme circumstances (military/official/government use only, recent Icelandic volcano halting Euro air travel is a great example of the effects of this...only it would have been global). Etc. Effectively by the end of the ordeal, 1/4 of everything could be closed because of the population loss. A quarter of hospitals, public schools, etc, could be closed with surviving medical personnel, teachers, students diverted to the 3 other facilities (who also lost 1/4 of their people). The gaps would close in other industries as well. The effects would be felt for long after, but within a year of the final deaths of VITAS the projects that had been put on hold would be released, with new "now what do we do, who can we cast, what directors are still alive" projects being started.
I would be interesting to figure out what would happen to unemployment rates, the unemployed would be able to step in and fill the jobs (at all levels and sectors of the economic range), but would businesses fail as well?
Sorry for any strange ramblings, VITAS is exceptionally interesting but also trying to keep in on topic with the post as well.
PS...does this means that Madonna is the actual starting point/emergent source for Goblin Rock?
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This link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GPGQoR6f6w&feature=related), people. :)
Mom? Dad? Aunt Sally???
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No matter the game, the forum, or the weather...Kid is still an evil, evil man. That's just wrong.
Yet so right.
;)
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Effectively by the end of the ordeal, 1/4 of everything could be closed because of the population loss. A quarter of hospitals, public schools, etc, could be closed with surviving medical personnel, teachers, students diverted to the 3 other facilities (who also lost 1/4 of their people). The gaps would close in other industries as well. The effects would be felt for long after, but within a year of the final deaths of VITAS the projects that had been put on hold would be released, with new "now what do we do, who can we cast, what directors are still alive" projects being started.
I would be interesting to figure out what would happen to unemployment rates, the unemployed would be able to step in and fill the jobs (at all levels and sectors of the economic range), but would businesses fail as well?
Sorry for any strange ramblings, VITAS is exceptionally interesting but also trying to keep in on topic with the post as well.
Are there enough engineers alive and willing to work to keep the lights on? World trade is completely shut down, how do people get the things they're used to?
Really, VITAS changed how society operates in a way that people were still recovering from it for the next decade... which is when VITAS II hit. Sure there was still culture but I imagine it as a time when the power was off and people were starving in the streets. There was probably a resurgence of folk forms of art and a conservative "off my land" backlash in general culture.
And the Wizard of Oz was a book and a play before it was filmed. Just because the film was made and released in the 30s, that doesn't make it a cultural milestone, just a technological one.
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Just to go off on a little tangent before coming back to this, I think Wizard of Oz is a cultural milestone. It was one of the first major color motion pictures and, it was so popular, it became an annual staple on television before almost any other movie (which, for you young 'uns out there born after the VCR means it was a tradition to watch it over the holidays like Charlie Brown Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). The movie adaptation also borrowed a lot from the current climate of the Great Depression as the Kansas backdrop.
Now, back on topic: VITAS killed off 25% of the population on the first go-round and 10% on the second. If VITAS had hit in 2009 (according to the SR timeline), we'd be reset to the population size of the early 80's (just under 5 billion). Add in some growth (because people will make babies, especially in dire times), and the 2nd VITAS in 2022 would probably knock the population to around 4½ billion. That's a lot of people dying, but (unfortunately) most of that would take place in "third world" conditions, so the big nations would get hit, but not as hard as the others. Which, I think, would lead to those "first world" countries increasing their bubble-gum/pop culture/happy-happy-joy-joy entertainment to offset the dire news from around the world.
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Yeah, African rates were quoted around 3/4ths of the population. Picks up a lot of slack from the more developed countries, but it also highlights the kind of precautions the 1st world would have had to take to avoid what happened in India, China and Africa. It's a highly communicable disease, which means that population centers would be extremely exposed and, therefore, extremely paranoid and shut off.
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When you consider how mobile our society is today, the next pandemic will make the Spanish Flu look like a joke. Air travel vs. ships crossing the ocean, well there simply isn't any comparison.
You lose enough personnel at crucial areas, electrical grid, oil refineries, and gasoline pipelines...the wheels would come of this wagon real fast. Anyone who has worked stocking big box retail stores will tell you that there isn't a lot of leeway in terms of =extra= stuff on the shelves. Retail has learned how to turn their stock far more efficiently than even 20 years ago, if the worst should happen stores will be emptied in a matter of hours (i.e. like prior to a hurricane making landfall).
The thing that cracks me up is when I hear people say, "Oh that can't happen in the United States." I really should start carrying the Webster's Dictionary definition of 'Hubris'.
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The pervasiveness of air travel is likely the reason VITAS killed as many as it did. If it had hit back in the 1900's (instead of the Spanish Flu, for example) then the death toll wouldn't have been nearly so bad as it had been. The second round of VITAS highlights the advances made in prevention and restriction of the disease since it "only" killed about 10% of the population.
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@Fastjack: Totally agree with you on Oz. Slightly disagree on the math for the world population between the two VITAS hits: Rounding for ease, 2010 pop was 7 billion. 75% left after VITAS I = 5.25 billion (which is closer to 1990's pop), then 10 years later population growth would put the population around 6 billion. Then VITAS II, 6 billion - 10% = 5.4 billion. Just about any modern numbers you use (unless you assume there's massive negative or stagnant population grown for the ten years between both VITAS hits) the population of the world after VITAS II will be higher than after VITAS I.
@ John Schmidt...hehe 6 years in retail I have done and I agree with you. There would be a massive halt at VITAS's peak, but I'm still leaning towards the consolidation of resources would put major hubs (of anything, travel, transportation, exports, imports, etc.) up and running (if not continuing productivity) at a limited pace right after the "collapse". It's that very level of efficiency that you mentioned that would keep things flowing...at least once the death rates started to subside.
@ Gun Nut...yeah your reasoning is why I think the "First World" nations would be hit hardest, rapid transit to all the other modern nations would lead to massive widespread infection faster and more thorough than in third world nations (but all things considered, the better health care would help the modern nations, hinder the third-world nations, and so just average 25% for VITAS I all around).
@ Kontact...where's the 3/4 for Africa death toll from?
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Fielding query about Africa's 75% mortality rate for VITAS . . . the place I know the figure from is Cyberpirates! - a curious collection. Africa wasn't even the hardest hit - that dubious honour goes to Madagascar, AFAIK. 10.5 million out of 14 million DIED.
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@ Fizzygoo: Obviously I can't speak with any great certainty about how such an event would play out. My gut instinct screams that there would be a massive breakdown in the system though...especially transportation. Lose the wrong group of people at the oil refineries (149 spread out) in the US and you have effectively shut the pump off. Recent memories of people driving around Atlanta trying to find a gas station with gas come to mind. Gas/diesel/aviation gas...those are the life blood of our economy...cut those and you are going to see the really ugly side of people as food shipments become a trickle.
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@ Longshot23, thanks :) I'll check out when I get home. I do remember the Madagascar figure.
@ John Schmidt. Got'cha :), I totally agree with your gut instinct (and we're all in the same boat on speaking with any certainty, hehe). Now, the next question for consideration is...for how long. After the peak of a swift acting virus that kills 25% of the world's population, how long will it take to consolidate remaining man-power to get things flowing? For example, the lead Engineer at one oil refinery dies, but at another the lead Engineer survives (but other staff has died), how long until the corporation fills positions at the core plants and closes the refineries it can't staff. I agree the pumps would stop during the height of VITAS I, but I'm a bit optimistic that within a year or two the corporations (oil, transportation, manufacturing, retail, all surviving corps) would have consolidated down to where they could operate (or have gone bust, with the stronger corps taking over what the could), though at a diminished capacity. Those two years would see long lines, shortages, outages, riots, etc., but the unemployment rate (for those able to work) would shrink dramatically as well. Between two to five years I'd (optimistically) see a boom as business streamlined their processes, then after 6 years things are diminished still but the long lines, shortages, outages, riots, are few and far between if at all. Again...that's me being optimistic about it all, but I'm also basing it off there's not a lot in the SR canon that supports longer-than-two-years economic collapse (unless I'm forgetting something, natch). What do you think? Yea, Nay, somewhere in between?
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I think that, because of VITAS, you'd see a sharper rise in the Technology to run those jobs as well. With the lose of so many people, the corporations would be more inclined to move towards the automated factories and refineries that you see in present-day SR. Now you know why they out-moded so many positions from actual people to machines—to prevent the lost of production in case another epidemic hits.
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Yeah, I keep thinking that the main reason fast food jobs still exist is that automation would be bad for PR...
But, back to how VITAS would shape the foundation of the 6th world, the deaths by themselves aren't really the main issue. The paranoia and panic that would come from a disease that spreads so quickly and kills so readily would tear the populace apart. We're talking military quarantines etc. It swept across the globe and back again, like a brushfire.
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Which is what engulfed many blocks and neighborhoods of old Mexico City. They started mass burnings to try to wipe it out.