Shadowrun
Shadowrun Play => Gamemasters' Lounge => Topic started by: Redman on <08-21-12/0821:57>
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So I have wanted to post some of my campaign ideas, because starts want they are at the moment. Just ideas.
I need some help or inspiration to flesh the out.
First idea is:
Oil is said to go out (run dry) at ca 2070... shadowrun4 is set 2073. Who would you make a campaign or just an adventure (mission) out of this?
What consequences are there globally or locally? Are the corp racing for the best alternative fuel? Is there a war for the last oil supplies? What is happening with oil rich countries? Can the governments control the fuel ? Is crime syndicate with hidden fuel deposits at play?
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I wanted to get an answer for this for awhile.
Is there an offical book stating anything about the end of the oil?
I can just imagine the middle east collapsing into chaos as the "kings" and oil barons over there steal the last of the drying monies and move to other nations to live out their days and let the rest rot in the underdeveloped husks they sucked dry.
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I wanted to get an answer for this for awhile.
Is there an offical book stating anything about the end of the oil?
I can just imagine the middle east collapsing into chaos as the "kings" and oil barons over there steal the last of the drying monies and move to other nations to live out their days and let the rest rot in the underdeveloped husks they sucked dry.
As far i can tell. No there is no official book detailing any kind of fuel business.
What about - a taliban like regime that takes over in the middle east. But instead of just one country that dominate 2/3 thirds. 1/3 is still conventional middle east.
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Well without all the extra oil money to fuel their exploits they really wouldn't pose that big of a problem internationally. Which is all the corps care about.
The corporate court council would be fine to leave them in their sandbox.
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unless the last decade's supplies are still there
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I'd suspect there will be a lot of instability in the resource-rich regions, and not just for oil - metals, especially rare earth ones. So, expect corps fighting proxy wars in the Third World. South America is already involved, Africa and Siberia are the next likely targets. Plot-wise, suppose that all the Latin countries that are facing against Aztechnology are secretly backed by several megacorps looking for entry into Amazonia. What can happen if runners get a hold of this info? Or get actively involved in the resource wars?
Although peak oil is nothing. Peak food is when the manure will really hit the fan.
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Peak oil leads to peak food. Petroleum is the lifeblood of American farms.
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Have to remember lots of "little" things have changed over the course of SR cannon.
Remember that the prediction of Oil running out by 2060/2070 is based of known, managable, and tapable oil reserves of today. There is oil in many places that we currently can not get to or have no will to get to (off the coast of vancouver Island for example.) As the tech level increases, so does our ablility to refine and extract the oil with less waste. In the 1950s to the 1970s it took 1 barrel of oil to extract 1 barrel of oil! (yes, a 50% wastage!) today that is down to about a 15% wastage in some countries.
In the SR universe there are a few other factors:
Over a quater of the world's population has been killed off in the VITAS epidemics. This would have an effect of streaching oil reserves a long way, depending on the country in question and what it's consumption of oil was before the pandemics struck.
Shiawase and other Corps have had huge break throughs in other forms to energy production usch as Fission reactors. This has lead to the development of cheap electric power that in turn has lead to a reduction in the world's demend for coal and petrochemicals, thus allowing coal and other matter to be converted to Oil and their byproducts. With the cheap,."clean" stable electricity, the development of GridGuide was possible, and that lead to cars being powered eletrically by grid guide itself (course, you're hooped if you have a GG powered car and go out of the GG powered zones! but what wageslave would?) Productiona nd manufaction would have moved to almost entirely to electricity. The polution filled coal burning electric plants would have been either shut down to converted (if possible) to Fission power as well due to the fact that they couldn't keep up with the costs of electrical manufaction with the price of coal/oil increasing.
I believe it was in an SR2 sourcebook that had gas pegged aorund 5 neuyen for a liter (that would be 3.83 liters to a US gallon, or 4.6 liters to an Imperial gallon) so oil products are VERY expensive (based of a late 1980s early 1990s gas price model) in 2073 I would imagine that fuel would be around 8 to 12 Neuyen a liter (depending on your country of play).
Now, what would happen in the countries whose economies were driven mostly by oil and had their stockpiles reduced while the change to Fission power happened? I think others are right, and these area stability would further fall to turmoil and chaos. However, with out the big monies of oil comong in, there ability to reach beyond their boarders and have that chaos spread would also be limited. So you would end up with steaming piles of hell dotting the world that would be having an mass exidus of those who had the means to leave and a festering boil of corruption with those who couldn't get out.
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OPEC is toast.
Cars have been mostly converted to being electric, thanks to cheap fusion power, and the industrial world has followed along, which delat heavy hits to the gasoline industry ... petroleum was needed in farming and plastics, but plastics have largely evolved past it at this stage (Likely going with bio-compounds, such as chicken feathers) ... farming has had to change, and drasticly, in most areas. Horizon, for instance, is the largest agricultural producer in North America, and it raises wheat underground. Not so much of a need for petro-chemical-based sprays in an enclosed environment.
Saudi Arabia would have crumbled, and is probably little more than a memory of the would-be Caliphates at this point. Without oil, the country has no exports and retains only religious tourism as an industry.
Russia's not very much better off, which might explain the driving force behind teh Euro Wars (RUssia knew its power would vanish behind widespread Fusion tech, so made an attempt to conquer first, which failed) ... a broken shell of a failed state, the Vory criminal organization could take over as teh defacto government in all but name, which then allowed Evo to come in and king itself.
Iraq, Kuwait, and the UAE would all be hurting, but the UAE at least has Dubai and similar megacities to sustain it.
Iran took a gutpunch, but is advanced enough to have other options. They're going to be hurting, however.
Canada got absorbed into the UCAS, which, along with teh CAS, are the two countries that still burn up lots of oil. The UCAS has an ample supply of tar sands and similar options, and buys from the northern NAN. Teh CAS has coal mining like mad, but has Texas and Louisiana for oil and refining.
Aztlan has plety of oil and doesn't mind burning it.
Nigeria is still a source for oil, but the country collapsed into warlordism and now the oil is just pumped away. They have no refining capacity whatsoever.
As an interesting side effect, shipping gets weird. HUGE ships with fusion plants onboard are going to be the norm, and they can scoop up seawater to use as fuel while on the go. Smaller ships face oil prices that are too high, so drop out of business and get abandoned. There's a push for sailing vessels again, and, of course, airships. (Helium is a natural byproduct of fusion, which explains the resurrgence of airships in Shadowrun. Science!)
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Redman, if you still wanted to run a game based around this - you could always do something small scale as opposed to grand scale. Set it someplace off the grid and far away from GridGuide. Think rugged wilderness where the means of the day is self-repair and scavenge. Cascade Ork smugglers pop into mind if you like NW wilderness, some sort of Road-warriory Australian outback tribe, or Nigerian oil pirates if you want that Waterworld feel. Another option is to read into Karavan (Feral Cities/DotA: New Dawn) - with such a huge mass of 'whatever-they-can-get-their-hands-on vehicles', Oil/Fuel is certain to be a resource they're constantly on the lookout for and it's got an awesome political/supply raider feel.
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As far as cars, an internal combustion engine loses a fair amount of energy from heat where as an eletric motor loses almost none.
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In Shadows of North America, the oil industry was the central theme of the Athabaskan location. In SR timeline, the tar sands received a boost in 2011 when Biogene created a gene-engineered "oil-sucking bacteria."
The two largest local corporations were Athabascan Oil and Northern Light Plastics, which were said to secretly belong to the same holding. Aztechnology was the primary foreign presence, through the oil and mining operations of Pemex. Athabascan Oil was also dealing with Saeder-Krupp, Cross and United Oil. Yakashima, as the new owner of Biogene, stillheld the patents for the bacteria technology.
About Aztechnology and Pemex, whatever oil reserves may remain around South America may give an interesting twist to the Aztlan-Amazonian situation. The largest reserves nowadays are in Venezuela. Interestingly enough, the only part of the Aztlan-Amazonia border Sixth World Almanac map shows as not disputed lies around Maracaibo, precisely where some the largest oil deposits are. It's just a guess that the ecologists that took over Brazil would not support continued oil production, so the deposits in eastern Venezuela and off the Brazilian southeastern coast may not have been emptied.
There may also be oil reserves off the coast of French Guiana, which would give Saeder-Krupp another reason (if their major spaceport being there wasn't enough) to maintain a presence in the area and back the French government to deter Amazonian forces from attacking. The Proteus arkoblok on Devil Island could also possibly doubles as a support facility for oil extraction (you got to find some reasons for them to build things that big...).
Speaking of arcologies, as far as the books went, corporations built arcologies in the SOX primarily for the coolness factor of sending PC to assault a secret lab surrounded by a nuclear wasteland.
But recently IRL, a small company announced they were expecting to find significant shale gas deposits under an area in France that will become the SOX. Still IRL, the French government so far vetoed any shale gas exploitation, based upon upon hydraulic fracturing controversy. But there would probably be a lot less environmental impacts to worry about once the area has been irradiated by a nuclear meltdown. So there would be a possible retcon here with a large part of corporate presence in the SOX dedicated to pumping untouched oil reserves. One can even imagine the SOX perimeter was specifically drawn to include the deposits, or even that the Cattenom nuclear accident was caused for that sole purpose, with a bit of an overkill.
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Have a look in the Arsenal book under vehicle mods, there it mentions cars mostly use the cities electrics unless they are off the grid, that could mean their own power source with suncell or combustion.
Out of the Arsenal (p98)
PROPULSION
In motor technology, hybrid systems are now standard.
They combine a flexible-fuel (gasoline, bio-ethanol, and biogas)
internal combustion engine with an electric motor powered by a
high-capacity battery, photovoltaic paint (embedded with cells
made from carbon nanotubes capable of converting about 50
per cent of solar energy into electric energy), and advanced technologies
like regenerative braking. The classic hydrogen-oxygen
fuel cell can also be found in all areas of transportation, from the
very small (microdrones) to the very large (sea travel, especially
submarine propulsion).
Enhanced fuel efficiency results in lower fuel consumption,
but this is in turn met by the ever rising prices of petrochemicals
and electricity generation in general. Consumers have
responded by choosing smaller and lighter commuter vehicles
with better mileage.
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Another idea: in Torchwood, a Doctor Who spin-off, they had a day where everyone stopping dying. The show went into detail, including how hospitals would change, how pain killers would be wanted by everyone, who food would become a serious need without anyone passing away, population explosion, the follow on resource consumption, the death penalty, and so on. Life and death was separated into four stages of life, with the level fours being burned alive. Really spooky stuff, all from the lack of death
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Life and death was separated into four stages of life, with the level fours being burned alive. Really spooky stuff, all from the lack of death
Reminds me of Logan's Run.
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Life and death was separated into four stages of life, with the level fours being burned alive. Really spooky stuff, all from the lack of death
Reminds me of Logan's Run.
You mean the burning alive bit? Guess anyone here over 30 would not want to live with Logan :D
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it only hurts till all your nerve endings burn off :)
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One of my ideas for a scene would be that the runners would have to get to a different country (or travel another long way), by after the fuel crisis hits.
The "theme" for the run would be a fuel crisis where almost everything stands still... maybe just for a week or a month, before corp alternatives kick in.
The mood would be: The angst, the common desperation, people looking hungry at you just because you drive down the street, gangs stealing old useless cars (or just any ones) to get the fuel.
People not knowing, but seeing the problem clearly is the background through the entire campaign.
PS: I'm rather new (Game abroad with 4th), what is this logan reference.
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PS: I'm rather new (Game abroad with 4th), what is this logan reference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logans_run
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One of my ideas for a scene would be that the runners would have to get to a different country (or travel another long way), by after the fuel crisis hits.
The "theme" for the run would be a fuel crisis where almost everything stands still... maybe just for a week or a month, before corp alternatives kick in.
The mood would be: The angst, the common desperation, people looking hungry at you just because you drive down the street, gangs stealing old useless cars (or just any ones) to get the fuel.
People not knowing, but seeing the problem clearly is the background through the entire campaign.
PS: I'm rather new (Game abroad with 4th), what is this logan reference.
The only issues you have there is "how" are they traveling?
By air? There are 3 basic modes of air transport used for continental flight in the 6th world. Orbital, semi ballistic, and zeppelin. Orbital is just like it sounds, you get shot up to the point of breeching the atmosphere, then do a controlled fall back to earth. Too lazy to look up what rocket fuel is made from but I don't think it is crude based. Semi ballistic is using super sonic jets and jet fuel so this would be interrupted by a drop in supply... If it hasn't been converted to biogas (rotting waste based fuel). Zeppelins use photovoltaic turbines to move and helium for lift, so nothing really stops this mode (note: usually only used for cargo, as it takes days to cross the oceans)
By water, you have a host of issues. Most water engines are either still diesel or fission. All depends on the size of the ship. Passenger liners and freighter haulers are fission based.
The world may be fracked over but the corps keep an eye on the bottom line. When oil wells started to go dry, the corps simply moved on to other fuels, or made their own (ethanol, methane, bio-gas, fission, fusion, etc) after all, the ability to move goods is the lifeblood of a corp! Better believe they have that protected!
I think your issue is not understanding exactly what a "megacorp" truly is. To be a megacorp (even a small one) means you are litterally made up of hundreds to thousands of other corporations! It would be like: GMC+Colt+paramount+Sony+shelloil+microsoft+etc, all under one brand name! Megacorps usually do it all in house, they extract raw materials for production, refine them, produce the concept of the marketable object, market the object, make it, transport it to sale, and sell it (as well as produce everything in between!).
Gone are the days of a company ONLY being involved in one aspect of commerce. Companies that don't branch out are swallowed up into larger companies. I encourage you to get the corp guidebook to learn and understand move of the SR corp world and how truly dominating a megacorp really is!
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The world may be fracked over but the corps keep an eye on the bottom line. When oil wells started to go dry, the corps simply moved on to other fuels, or made their own (ethanol, methane, bio-gas, fission, fusion, etc) after all, the ability to move goods is the lifeblood of a corp! Better believe they have that protected!
I agree, resources aren't that short in SR.
Cold fusion in particular should have solved most energy problems. But there is another big advancement coming up: Gene engineered bacteria/plants/animals which produce chemicals as part of their physiology. There is a short text about this so called white biotechnology in Augmentation. However, this text also states that oil producing bacteria are still not made by 2072, although I find this questionable. They are already in development today: http://www.gizmag.com/bioengineers-rebuilding-bacteria-to-produce-crude-oil/7723/
This should counter oil scarcity quite a bit.
White biotech: A huge, fully automated cattle farm where all the cows produce some deadly acid instead of milk... so very cyberpunky 8)
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One of my ideas for a scene would be that the runners would have to get to a different country (or travel another long way), by after the fuel crisis hits.
The "theme" for the run would be a fuel crisis where almost everything stands still... maybe just for a week or a month, before corp alternatives kick in.
The mood would be: The angst, the common desperation, people looking hungry at you just because you drive down the street, gangs stealing old useless cars (or just any ones) to get the fuel.
People not knowing, but seeing the problem clearly is the background through the entire campaign.
PS: I'm rather new (Game abroad with 4th), what is this logan reference.
The only issues you have there is "how" are they traveling?
By air? There are 3 basic modes of air transport used for continental flight in the 6th world. Orbital, semi ballistic, and zeppelin. Orbital is just like it sounds, you get shot up to the point of breeching the atmosphere, then do a controlled fall back to earth. Too lazy to look up what rocket fuel is made from but I don't think it is crude based. Semi ballistic is using super sonic jets and jet fuel so this would be interrupted by a drop in supply... If it hasn't been converted to biogas (rotting waste based fuel). Zeppelins use photovoltaic turbines to move and helium for lift, so nothing really stops this mode (note: usually only used for cargo, as it takes days to cross the oceans)
By water, you have a host of issues. Most water engines are either still diesel or fission. All depends on the size of the ship. Passenger liners and freighter haulers are fission based.
The world may be fracked over but the corps keep an eye on the bottom line. When oil wells started to go dry, the corps simply moved on to other fuels, or made their own (ethanol, methane, bio-gas, fission, fusion, etc) after all, the ability to move goods is the lifeblood of a corp! Better believe they have that protected!
I think your issue is not understanding exactly what a "megacorp" truly is. To be a megacorp (even a small one) means you are litterally made up of hundreds to thousands of other corporations! It would be like: GMC+Colt+paramount+Sony+shelloil+microsoft+etc, all under one brand name! Megacorps usually do it all in house, they extract raw materials for production, refine them, produce the concept of the marketable object, market the object, make it, transport it to sale, and sell it (as well as produce everything in between!).
Gone are the days of a company ONLY being involved in one aspect of commerce. Companies that don't branch out are swallowed up into larger companies. I encourage you to get the corp guidebook to learn and understand move of the SR corp world and how truly dominating a megacorp really is!
Yes yes. Mega corp is mega scary. keeping the "world" or just a fitting region at bay could be fun. Like traveling in high tech sailboat looking at coaster standing still and see the desperation creep up in the wageslaves as the slowly get a glimpse of how fragile their corp lives really are. Or traveling on critter like those cybered horses or bioenginered giant wolves through rocky or desert terrain. Maybe followed by a single landrover driven by armed to the teeth humanis rednecks.
Part of the "how" is for the Player to find out also, a little sandboxing never hurt. Of course as a GM you could still hold a couple of debugging options available.
I know resources are in SR are not at that point, but for a homebrew campaign it could be if just for a short while.
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Oh AgriChem, you're so darn futuristic! When I first heard about Spider-Goats (Goats that have been modified to produce spider silk in their milk glands, allowing for rapid production and harvesting of silk), I knew that we'd started down one HECK of a freaky path. We now have critters that glow, thanks to Jellyfish DNA splicing, and goats are being seen as a vector for all kinds of pharmaceuticals. We've got meat that grows by itself on vertical farms, advanced fungus growth, and, well, the future is biotech.
And the future snuck in when nobody was looking and made itself a sammich.
Want a cool little side-story?
Years ago, the US Department of Agricultural Research Service, who are the guys that invented Tang by the by, were given a new challenge: See all these chicken feathers that we haul off and bury every day? Find something to do with 'em. Took 'em a while, but they finally invented a process where the featers could be washed clean, then run through a machine that would separate the soft 'fluff' part from the pointy 'quill' part. The quills can be harvested for gelatin, allowing them to be turned into fingernail polish, glue, and so on. The fluff could, obviously, be pillows, but, what else?
With a nearly unlimited, and free, resource (The US Agricultural Department churns out about 4 BILLION pounds of feathers a year, and pays to have them removed. Gathering them up for free is actually profitable for the farm!), they were able to do all kinds of crazy testing, and wound up with a process where they could turn chicken feather fluff into fiberglass. You can compress it down to make paneling for cars, for instance, and as your raw material cost is ZERO, the profit is enormous. In a less-compressed state, it makes for highly-effective insulation (Better than real fiberglass!), and can also be turned into air filters, cloth, and paper products.
Seriously! Chicken feathers go in, paper comes out.
How cool is that?!
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I think I'm off topic.
At ANY rate, Shadowrun has an odd mix of over-population and abandoned buildings, of cheap energy and yet resource shortages, where two different viewpoints are placed together. It's neat, and allows for GMs to nudge their games in one direction or another as they see fit.
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I think I'm off topic.
At ANY rate, Shadowrun has an odd mix of over-population and abandoned buildings, of cheap energy and yet resource shortages, where two different viewpoints are placed together. It's neat, and allows for GMs to nudge their games in one direction or another as they see fit.
Na, not off topic, that is just GM vector ideas for biocorps.
and as for the overpopulation, that was a Judge Dredd type Mega city effect of the vitas plagues and then the NAN's kicking out all those people. We had to fit all tho country into what was left. And then with the vitas, a lot of people were wiped out and smaller towns just couldn't cope so people centralized to use the government resources. I picture a hell of a lot "ghost towns" dotting the CAS and UCAS.
And that would be the norm for the NAN lands. I would suspect Most of their towns were abandoned, partially abandoned or consolidated from the amounts of population they have.