Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Serbitar on <07-15-19/1335:05>
-
Shadowrun, being cyberpunk, was also always about showcasing how man was destroying the earth. In the 80s we had sour rain, pollution, forest decline and hole in ozone layer and such. Natives and magic fighting back and sometimes winning but mostly loosing.
I havent read a lot of shadowrun background since 4th. And nowadays we have climate crisis.
Is this (the climate crisis and its effects) being showcased in Shadowrun? 5th 6th? Should it be?
-
North America, for example, was torn up by the Great Ghost Dance. Outside the Metroplexs it's usually described as desolate, toxic, and hostile with occasional small to medium sized corp towns.
Any sprawl that I can think of has some kind of toxic, polluted, area, usually where the SINless and other undesirables are crammed into.
Man made pollution and it's impact on the environment are certainly themes in Shadowrun fiction and in-game material and modules. "Climate Change" not so much, it's more like Chernobyl and other localized disasters, that seem to be everywhere in Shadowrun.
-
Man made pollution and it's impact on the environment are certainly themes in Shadowrun fiction and in-game material and modules. "Climate Change" not so much, it's more like Chernobyl and other localized disasters, that seem to be everywhere in Shadowrun.
Very much this. Toxic zones are an important aspect of the setting, and they're usually the result of some combination of greed and ambivalence as opposed to disaster areas caused by climate change.
As far as the SR setting is concerned, the awakening was much more of a climate shift than anything that corresponds to the real world. Not just in a rhetorical sense, but literally, the climate got changed by the reintroduction of magical energy. Meteorology is still catching up with how weather patterns work in the sixth world, even without man-made ecological disasters. There was a bit of fluff from one of the early books that mentioned how tomorrow's weather forecast in the sixth world is about as vague and unreliable as next week's forecast is in the fifth.
-
Whenteh game started back in 89, and when it was being written before then, climate change wasn't really a Thing, but pollution as. The days of rivers being on fire and casual littering weren't that far behind us and those who grew up in that time still recall the messaging.
So, when Cyberpunk was invented, and Shadowruncane about, things like Acid rain were the "new hotness" and got featured. if you started it TODAY, you'd probably see high levels of water, coastlines changed, and so on, but in 89, not so much.
That said, the Great Ghost Dance (GGD) mucked up the weather something awful and in some areas it's just freaky. Rain that erupts from the ground, blood rain, hundred degree hail, and so on. The closer you get to old Ute territory the worse it gets.
-
Here in the real world in the Sixth world's FRFZ we see hail in 90 degrees days... 100 degree hail doesn't sound that fantastical :D
-
Whenteh game started back in 89, and when it was being written before then, climate change wasn't really a Thing, but pollution as. The days of rivers being on fire and casual littering weren't that far behind us and those who grew up in that time still recall the messaging.
So, when Cyberpunk was invented, and Shadowruncane about, things like Acid rain were the "new hotness" and got featured. if you started it TODAY, you'd probably see high levels of water, coastlines changed, and so on, but in 89, not so much.
Exactly my point. Just like SR4 updates Shadowrun with wireless, shoudnt SR6 update the world with climate change?
-
Well, again, magic has done more climate changing than climate change has.
-
Well, again, magic has done more climate changing than climate change has.
And in a lot of cases, for the better (more trees, less global warming, etc.)
-
So the only game i can recall leaning into climate change or at-least sea level rise was/is Rifts.
I do think the setting could benefit from a remind that the NAN won the war against the old USA via Volcanoes. Most folks don't really get the level of catastrophe that could occur if Yellowstone Erupted, the scope just doesn't register. To me that fact that those early mass rituals have never been employed again strikes me as odd. Magic wise the setting is now many time more sophisticated then the early Shamanic rise. But no one seems to be ready to play the Volcano card any where else?
-
I mean, it did take a few hundred people sacrificing their lives to power the ritual that had dozens of shamans directing the flow of the much mana, so maybe there's just not been an organization with that many disposable people and that many magically active to guide it all since then. It's possibly others have tried and failed to pull it off. Even the second Ghost Dance and the spike blood ritual that guy down in Aztlan was doing in the 50s didn't hit that high of mana.
-
I mean, it did take a few hundred people sacrificing their lives to power the ritual that had dozens of shamans directing the flow of the much mana, so maybe there's just not been an organization with that many disposable people and that many magically active to guide it all since then. It's possibly others have tried and failed to pull it off. Even the second Ghost Dance and the spike blood ritual that guy down in Aztlan was doing in the 50s didn't hit that high of mana.
The Amazon war didn't heave enough magical talent to do this? I don't buy that for a second. Their numbers were large enough to hold of an army and they had bunch next level magic going on including special magic trees and even their own weird tradition.
-
Well, my question was more like:
Shadowrun is a projection of certain things into the future. One of them is tech, and as tech SOTA changes in our world, so does the projected tech in shadowrun (via ret-cons mostly, we are not having 80s tech in SR4-6).
A second theme of shadowrun is man destroying nature. Shouldnt this be ret-conned, too, to reflect the way we are destroying our climate today (in contrast to what was the vibe in the 80s)?
Of course this means changes (ret-cons), but we had them, as mentioned, in the tech department, why not have them in other departments, too?
(Or for example, the predominance of Japan vs China, much different today than it was in the 80s)
-
Well, my question was more like:
Shadowrun is a projection of certain things into the future. One of them is tech, and as tech SOTA changes in our world, so does the projected tech in shadowrun (via ret-cons mostly, we are not having 80s tech in SR4-6).
A second theme of shadowrun is man destroying nature. Shouldnt this be ret-conned, too, to reflect the way we are destroying our climate today (in contrast to what was the vibe in the 80s)?
Of course this means changes (ret-cons), but we had them, as mentioned, in the tech department, why not have them in other departments, too?
(Or for example, the predominance of Japan vs China, much different today than it was in the 80s)
The main thing to remember is that the Shadowrun universe branches off from ours as of (officially) 1999 with the Shiawase decision. Climate change was happening twenty years ago, but it was nowhere near the calamity of 2019. With a couple of events, magic coming back, etc., it's hard to compare if the SR universe is better, worse, or the same as ours.
-
I mean, it did take a few hundred people sacrificing their lives to power the ritual that had dozens of shamans directing the flow of the much mana, so maybe there's just not been an organization with that many disposable people and that many magically active to guide it all since then. It's possibly others have tried and failed to pull it off. Even the second Ghost Dance and the spike blood ritual that guy down in Aztlan was doing in the 50s didn't hit that high of mana.
The Amazon war didn't heave enough magical talent to do this? I don't buy that for a second. Their numbers were large enough to hold of an army and they had bunch next level magic going on including special magic trees and even their own weird tradition.
Oh, no, the Az-Am war had some, but it was the Az-Yucatan war where the Big Blood happened. No one's really talked about it of late, but the whole penninsulagot astrally WRECKED, after which both sides leaned back and went, "Yeah, that … was dumb. Let's … make with the peace. Deal?" "Deal."
There's still fallout in the region over it. Mind you, it's never been stated exactly *what* happened, but it wa sbig, it was magic, and it screwed things up a LOT. The spirits in the Yucatan want nothing to do with Metahumans in the astral and will let you know it at top speed.
-
The main thing to remember is that the Shadowrun universe branches off from ours as of (officially) 1999 with the Shiawase decision. Climate change was happening twenty years ago, but it was nowhere near the calamity of 2019. With a couple of events, magic coming back, etc., it's hard to compare if the SR universe is better, worse, or the same as ours.
Sure, but as I mentioned they retconned tech. Wireless was never in SR1-3. Also Augmented reality. They retconned it in because real life overtook the SR developments.
-
I'm not sure what you're envisioning when you say retcon.
What would you want to see that you aren't seeing now? IIRC some of the more recently written books do actually refer to climate change as a contributing factor to various ecological/meteorological disasters.
-
They didn't retcon tech though. The old wired matrix went down in the late 2060s to a combination of massive viral code attacks and physical destruction of backbone server sites. Wireless tech had been mostly experimental or niche before that, but was able to be quickly deployed following Crash 2.0 and the world became wireless.
Besides, if you think about it, environmental stuff in Shadowrun is in some ways actually worse then in real life, though in some ways better. Here we just have science to tell us how bad we're fragged (and it's been known since long before the 80s, just kept under wraps by Exxon while they planned to take advantage of the lower arctic ice and higher sea level for building drilling platforms). In the 6th world, any awakened can shift their senses astral and see the very soul of the world itself dying as they watch. People know how bad pollution harms the world on both the physical and spiritual levels, and still largely ignore it (mostly because they can't do anything about it).
That and the three main green-house gas contributes are virtually gone from Shadowrun. Cars are now mostly all electric and charge from grid-guide as you drive. Meat farming is a small fraction of what it was, with vat-grown meat and textured soy taking it's place. And finally coal and gas as a form of power generation isn't nearly as common, since stuff like nuclear power and transmitted solar power is more cost efficient for the Mega's to run.
-
The main thing to remember is that the Shadowrun universe branches off from ours as of (officially) 1999 with the Shiawase decision. Climate change was happening twenty years ago, but it was nowhere near the calamity of 2019. With a couple of events, magic coming back, etc., it's hard to compare if the SR universe is better, worse, or the same as ours.
Sure, but as I mentioned they retconned tech. Wireless was never in SR1-3. Also Augmented reality. They retconned it in because real life overtook the SR developments.
Wireless WAS around, just not for VR. It couldn't handle the bandwidth and, honestly, when something as minor as line noise can kill you, going full VR by wifi is a huge risk because someone could nuke a burrito and boom, you dead.
-
While things are more tech efficient in modern era SR, its also 'balanced' by the corps being even more inclined to chuck niceties like 'environmental impact' when it comes to their bottom line. Bonus, I'm a megacorp that pollutes in your region, and YOU pay ME via my environmental cleanup company to clean up my mess on your city. :)
-
The only AAAs that really don't care or actively ravage the environment are S-K and MCT, and MCT's has mostly been focused on Tsimshian. Japan's rise to power was built on cheap, clean energy since the early 2000s. One of the most indispensable corporations in the world is an entirely renewable and clean energy producer, and Shadowrun has also had fusion power plants since 2018.
Logistics isn't really as big as it is IRL. There's no massive stream of shipping from China to the U.S. and Europe and transcontinental shipping in North America because it's not necessary compared to the genuine risks to shippers. No one is getting cheap plastic shit made in China shipped to the UCAS heartland for cheap. It doesn't exist in Shadowrun, in large part because China and the U.S. do not exist in Shadowrun in anything resembling IRL.
There are plenty of reasons why things don't get covered, mostly because that's not the focus of the books. Target: Wastelands came out almost 20 years ago and it presented a bleak picture of the environment that Hazard Pay followed up on. In Shadowbeat, the OOC text describes how any decker could make a realistic deepfake video; by SR4 anyone could. It's just background noise, though. It doesn't really factor in how people run their games much and, frankly, there's nothing 99% of PCs can or will do that is going to change it.
From the last time I posted anything significant to this forum:
From Target: Wastelands (September 16, 2062).
Page 9:
In cities, air may be severely polluted not only by trans- portation but also by burning fossil fuels (oil and coal) in generating stations, factories. office buildings, and homes and by the incineration of garbage. The massive combustion produces tons of ash, soot, and other particulates responsible for the gray smog of cities like New York, along with enormous quantities of sulfur oxides.
Google environmental photos from the '60s and '70s, basically pre-EPA & Clean Water Act, and that's the cities. Seattle has acid rain and still gets ash and shit from Mt. Rainier, which speaks volumes when you consider the natural geography of the sprawl. Then consider that's just one GGD volcano. Three GGD volcanoes are within line of sight of Cara'Sir (Portland) and also to the east (two are north in Washington/SSC).
> Air pollution can get really bad in some parts of the world. Breathing masks are considered port of your everyday wardrobe in cities like LA. Where a "bad air" day can force nearly everyone to stay Inside and you hear regular reports of people dropping dead just from breathing the air for too long.
> Big Sir
And Tenochtitlán is way worse.
Page 10:
Oil spilled accidentally or flushed from tankers and off-shore rigs (over a million metric tons annually) pollutes beaches and smothers birds, fish and plant life. In 2058, the 34 different oil spills reported worldwide Involved a total of 29 million gallons of oil (and those are just the reported ones). In addition to its direct damage to wildlife, oil takes up fat-soluble poisons like DDT. allowing them to be concentrated in organisms that ingest the oil-contaminated water and passed up along the food chain. Both DDT and PCBs are still manufactured in many parts of the world and are now widespread in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In addition, tarry oil residues are encountered throughout the Atlantic, along with styrofoam and other plastic rubbish. Plastic bits litter sections of the Pacific as far north as Amchitka Island near Athabaska. Garbage, soHd industrial wastes, and sludge formed in sewage treatment are commonly dumped into oceans.
Big Sur is a disaster area on par with the Scottish Fringe Toxic Zone, a totally dead area of the North Sea, and part of Florida's coast (presumably the gulf coast) is described as comparable.
A survey done in 2058 by the UCAS Environmental Protection Agency found that 60 percent of that nation's lakes, rivers, and estuaries were too polluted for such basic uses as drinking, fishing and swimming. The pollutants found included grit, asbestos, phosphates and nitrates, mercury, lead. caustic soda and other sodium compounds, sulfur and sulfuric add, oils and petrochemicals. Surveys conducted in the Confederation of American States revealed similarly alarming amounts of pollution.
Anyway, all of the valuable parts of Tsimshian have made it a used-up toxic hellhole (Thanks, Mitsuhama!). The Yucatán Protectorate is equally ravaged by over a decade of brutal warfare, which has plenty of mundane toxic contamination, but also tons of toxic and blood magic contamination, and Aztechnology's use of outright chemical weapons. Borinquen's still fucked from Sirrurg and Hurricane Donald. Outside of the Yucatan peninsula situation, Aztlan was basically struck by Pestilence during and after the Dragon Civil War by Sirrurg and just bad karma (*ahem*). T:W doesn't paint a pretty portrait, and things have only gotten worse in the twenty years since. The UCAS's approach to natural resources is reclamation because it's used up everything naturally occurring that isn't tightly controlled by a combination of brutal laws and merciless weaponry. And the CAS is even more ruthlessly capitalist than the UCAS is. The UCAS has serious toxic and/or magical contaminations in Boston, Chicago, DeeCee, and Seattle. Los Angeles was a magical and toxic mess before half of the Los Angeles basin and surrounding mountains sank into the ocean or just vanished. The Mojave is still, AFAIK, teeming with mutants and its own crazy magic. The Central Valley is ... who knows. It can't be pleasant since PCC wants it and IRL agriculture in that region is already a nightmare. T:W touches on that too. Spoiler Alert: agribusiness hasn't gotten any nicer or cleaner in Shadowrun than it is IRL.
Mutants were introduced in the CFS sourcebook, but they're everywhere. T:W goes into toxic waster, nuclear waste (including, maybe especially, the low-grade shit that can't be weaponized but can still cause damage), magical contamination, and even touches on mental contamination. There's also a nice mention of how areas like the Barrens have high incidences of birth defects, deformations, infant mortality, sterility, miscarriages, etc. and how it particularly affects orks.
That's just in the first chapter. It's an interesting book.
I was just wondering how much of the land was still forested or "natural" as opposed to urban or suburban.
More "reclaimed" because it was abandoned for lack of use, lack of resources, or by government policies. The sprawls are where all the people are, which is a result of government and corporate decisions and needs that have occurred through the multiple apocalypse-level events and crisis periods that have struck most before 2050 but also everything that has happened in the game. Unlike the Black Death, which was a huge leveler of the general welfare and standard of living for Europeans after it killed a third to half of the population, people weren't able to spread out as much because subsistence agriculture isn't a thing and only one or two percent of the population will ever be needed. There's no landed peasants, petty nobility, etc. inheriting land and space; the corporations took it all. That was the whole point of the Resource Rush that began in 2002 when the U.S. privatized massive amounts of public and trust lands and it never ended. Just because they own it doesn't mean they have to use it, or use it for anything as trivial as housing. They are all about minimizing costs but not in the way corporations do now in socializing negative externalities like employees needing to commute, eat, and have shelter (although tech companies are starting to follow the cyberpunk model of global capitalism, the one that didn't change like it did IRL in 1973, by building affordable corporate housing – of course, over what was left of L.A. wetlands and worthless shit like nature). Since the megacorps did take on those externalities, they benefit from the arcology model where they can control as much of their employees and even consumers as possible and minimize externalities by keeping commutes down by building up in high-density spaces, automating everything, using landless production methods for agriculture, etc.
There's a lot of "wasted" and undeveloped and underdeveloped lands across the areas IRL that comprise the Seattle Metroplex. The population is the same as it is now (officially), but that just means that the distribution is population islands separated by natural or unnatural barrens and connected by highways – highways controlled by go-gangs that through at least the early 2050s and I think even into the early '60s used to routinely kick the asses of the Metroplex Guardsmen sent out to fight them by the dumbass colonel in charge. It was a 45-minute drive from the city of Seattle to the city of Puyallup IRL 15 years ago. In the 2080 Seattle Metroplex, there's not a lot in between that you would ever need or want to get off the highway for, not just because there's less stuff there; but because much if not the vast majority of what is there will try to rob, kill, and eat you, and not necessarily in that order.
Now, expand that to THE ENTIRE CONTINENT and factor in all the shit I quoted or posted above. That's how "green" North America is.
With regard to Tír Tairngire, I'm pretty comfortably say from my office in Portland that the population is as or more concentrated than it is now, which is already pretty much the Portland Tri-Met region and everything else. Add in Salem and Eugene and the suburbs and small communities between the three that comprises the I-5 corridor, Bend in the middle of nowhere, and Newport and Astoria on the coast. That's it. Everything else was to be protected or regrown or exploited in some other fashion. It's super green. There is no one in the eastern third of the state.
Coming from New Mexico, which is over 40% undeveloped federal and state lands (forests, parks, monuments, BLM, military and civilian installations, and that doesn't even include the reservations), it's also an area of uninhabited lands or low habitation and concentrated conurbations like Albuquerque-Rio Rancho and Las Cruces (which is within spitting distance of El Paso, Texas). Arizona's the same way. Same as Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and eastern California. Los Angeles is a massive sprawl that would have to be compressed by necessity and force before the PCC came in, and then a bunch the basin sank. So it went east again, but there are functional limits to the sprawl and it still stops before San Bernardino. The CFS, northern and central California, is the same way. There's San Francisco and everything else. Sacramento was mostly an afterthought for decades before Saito, his ouster, Crash 2.0, and other events that shrank the CFS to its current size.
You could legit run a Mad Max campaign across most of North America where it feels like there is no civilization left because in a lot of ways, outside the sprawls, there really isn't. There's a whole chapter on overland smuggling across North America in Target: Smuggler Havens that was pretty much written with that in mind. There are descriptions that could be summed up as "if you make it across the border alive, stick to these routes, and don't go sightseeing." There's a reason why there are cargo zeppelins and sky pirates in Shadowrun: because they're logistically necessary for stuff that you can't put on autonomous drone-piloted semi-tractor "trains" that tear ass across what's left of the interstate highway system at average speeds of over 100mph (I want to say 180kph) or, maybe, MAYBE, railroads. Those get robbed and destroyed. Outside the sprawls it really is the wild west.
-
Shadowrun is a projection of certain things into the future. One of them is tech, and as tech SOTA changes in our world, so does the projected tech in shadowrun (via ret-cons mostly, we are not having 80s tech in SR4-6).
A second theme of shadowrun is man destroying nature. Shouldnt this be ret-conned, too, to reflect the way we are destroying our climate today (in contrast to what was the vibe in the 80s)?
I would argue that Shadowrun is a cyberpunk game, and the foundations of what that means are rooted in the '80s.
So the themes of advanced technology, transhumanism, the Matrix, "the street finds its own uses for things", and what that does to society -- you can update that to different forms of the tech without leaving the general envelope of "cyberpunk."
But cyberpunk is also, by definition, a corporate dystopia, with downtrodden masses in overcrowded cities working crappy jobs at indifferently evil megacorps, and that implies that society hasn't totally collapsed. It's difficult to square that with a full-bore climate change dystopia, as that would mean water wars, destruction of cities to rising sea levels, and massive (as in, billions of people) displacement from areas of the earth rendered uninhabitable. I think if you do that, you lose the feel of cyberpunk. You can't have both.
Aside: if you want to read some climate dystopia sci-fi, I cannot recommend Paolo Bacigalupi enough. You could actually argue this is a modern successor to cyberpunk, in the sense that it's the anxieties of our times reflected in a hypothetical future, whereas cyberpunk is the anxieties of the '80s reflected into the future.
-
Cyberpunk is rooted in the 70s
-
Cyberpunk is rooted in the 70s
Neuromancer was '84, Akira and Bladerunner were '82, Johnny Mnemonic was '81, Mirrorshades was '86... I'm not going to deny that cyberpunk built on earlier works, it didn't come about in a vacuum, but its formative and iconic period was surely the early '80s.
-
To me there are two big drivers that changed the non-urban parts of North America:
- the awakening of plants and animals. This destroyed much of the idyllic 'little town in the country' types of places, because they lacked the organization and resources to adapt to the sudden change, so marginal farms collapsed due to yield loss, people died, infrastructure broke down, and eventually most people just left. My reading is that awakened pests led to a large drop in agricultural productivity in the period shortly after the awakening (made incredibly worse by the disruption of the NAN separation, VITAS, and goblinization).
- the mass poisoning of the environment in various ways -- not the least of which was excess use of fertilizer and pesticides on agricultural land, which ruined the fertility of substantial portions of it. Some of this was just general impact of the resource rush and mega-corporate awfulness, but some of it was also a desperate response to first point. There was a huge loss of agricultural output, and some crop types were not viable in many areas for quite some time. Which meant that there was a concentrated effort to maximize the yield of what would grow (soy beans!) in those areas which could be used for high yield agriculture, just to keep people fed (and by 'people' read 'corporate citizens'. A lot of the big corps got into agriculture not to make money, but as a way to feed their workers after the existing economic system largely collapsed)
So there are areas that are abandoned because they became too toxic. And there are areas that were abandoned because they just were not that viable in the face of the awakened world. And then there are those areas where the awakened world has interacted with the toxic places, creating truly horrific dangers ...