[ChewyGranola]

The other thing to note is to look how large the NAN nations were when formed, how many citizens they had.  Even if EVERY single person of Native AMerican descent, including people who could claim 1/64th Amerind blood, moved there...  It still wouldn't come close to giving you enough numbers to match what SR had.  Which means in this alt-history, there are a LOT more Native Americans kicking around, and probably much more heavily oppressed.  I imagine the Civil Rights movements of the SR world in the 60's were a little different because of this.

<shrug>

And Handwavium.  WHich I'm fine with and am a frequent user of, because I'm more concerned with getting to the good stuff that impacts our players.

Yeah I agree. I would imagine worse Indian Wars, too. That could easily mean worse conditions for Native Americans. Which changes the whole make up of the US, changes the Civil War, changes Manifest Destiny, everything.

[Namikaze]

Well considering corporations today seem to value their employees less than a mega, yeah.

I've been staying out of this discussion, as I think it's been pretty well covered by other, more knowledgeable people than me.  But this tangent is just funny.  The megacorps have made their employees into citizens of the corp, they cannot leave the corp without some sort of reason, they often stay on corporate enclaves when possible, they use corporate-issued scrip that can only buy the items that the megacorp sells.  Add to that the fact that the kids of the corp are often automatically citizens of the corp, going to corp-sponsored schools, teaching corporate propaganda.  And somehow the corporations of today care less about their employees?  That, good sir, is a viewpoint that only a corporate wageslave would have in Shadowrun.

Corporations don't need to brainwash people to make money, and they don't need the extra costs of housing and security to interfere with their bottom line, and honestly even the whole concept of extraterritorality is unnecessary to the corporation's bottom line, after all with decisions like Citizens United corporations can just buy the government anyways...wait, I get it. That was a test. More handwavium. My bad!

If you read the SR history, you'll see why Shiawase wanted extraterritoriality.  It was tired of the US government's oversight of their nuclear plants.  That's where it started, and it snowballed from there.  That initial reason is more than enough to justify a push for extraterritoriality among the corps.  The fact that seventy years later the corporations have become the new governments was not something intended from the beginning, it just sort of became that way.  When the governments could no longer provide for their citizens, the corporations stepped in with open arms.  It may have been malicious, it may have been benign.  More likely, it was a little of both.

[ChewyGranola]

The only thing I wil say is this: corporate extraterritorality is unnecessary IRL. Shiawase could just have easily bought themselves some congresspeople and change some regulations instead of becoming their own country. The thing about megas treating their employees was mostly sarcasm, but I apparently forgot to use the sarcasm font. Of course wageslaves have it tough.

Listen, I love Shadowrun. For all its flaws and messy history, for the things that don't make sense its a great setting. I have recently gotten back into the game after a 15 year absence. I have found that 32 year old, history degree having me is far more critical of the setting's flaws than 17 year old me. That's where this comes from.

Apparently, challenging the setting is heavily frowned upon. I won't make that mistake again. Thanks for the reminder that the SR world's divergent history goes way farther back than I realized.

And for all the writers out there: I love the old books I still have, plus the 3rd and 4th edition stuff I have been reading lately. Looking forward to getting 5th edition real soon. Keep up the good work.

[Mirikon]

Except, Granola, that without extraterritoriality, eventually when something hits the fan, or some drekhead 'activist' slips in and spreads your dirty laundry all over the matrix, or one of your competitors wants to take you down a peg, and buys a few congressmen of their own... well, things get much nastier. Even today, when people see pictures of nuclear waste being dumped as part of the 'fertilizer' in the yard of their kids' pre-k, they tend to get upset. Upset enough to cause problems for corporations. And that's without even considering LAWSUITS. Have you ever read international case law? Try suing a foreign country for something. It rarely goes well. But when you're suing a corporation that isn't extraterritorial, sometimes you get massive judgements against you. (McDonalds coffee is actually hot? OUTRAGE!) When you're extraterritorial, you're another country, and aside from all the fun of anything happening on your soil being judged on your terms, there's that extra lovely legal layer between you and any lawsuits outside your land. Simply put, in addition to allowing corps to do what they like, how they like on their land, it also serves to shield them from potential consequences of their action. During the last corp war, it wasn't the governments that finally made everyone play nice, it was the Corporate Court saying not to let things get too far out of hand.

[Tenlaar]

(McDonalds coffee is actually hot? OUTRAGE!)

It's so off topic, but people bringing this up in such a way is a pet peeve.  There is quite a difference between "hot" and "hot enough to cause third degree burns in as little as two seconds."

[ChewyGranola]

Except, Granola, that without extraterritoriality, eventually when something hits the fan, or some drekhead 'activist' slips in and spreads your dirty laundry all over the matrix, or one of your competitors wants to take you down a peg, and buys a few congressmen of their own... well, things get much nastier. Even today, when people see pictures of nuclear waste being dumped as part of the 'fertilizer' in the yard of their kids' pre-k, they tend to get upset. Upset enough to cause problems for corporations. And that's without even considering LAWSUITS. Have you ever read international case law? Try suing a foreign country for something. It rarely goes well. But when you're suing a corporation that isn't extraterritorial, sometimes you get massive judgements against you. (McDonalds coffee is actually hot? OUTRAGE!) When you're extraterritorial, you're another country, and aside from all the fun of anything happening on your soil being judged on your terms, there's that extra lovely legal layer between you and any lawsuits outside your land. Simply put, in addition to allowing corps to do what they like, how they like on their land, it also serves to shield them from potential consequences of their action. During the last corp war, it wasn't the governments that finally made everyone play nice, it was the Corporate Court saying not to let things get too far out of hand.

I get what you are saying, but I think my point still stands. Corporations have no problem making money and writing  law without nationhood, so going for it seems unnecessary.

Then again, Shadowrun universe is different. And the trope is key to the cyberpunk setting. I have no problems with it.

And besides, remember what I said? I will never again criticize the SR canon, not here. Lets let this go, move on to more fun questions like what the heck is Sybil?

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

It isn't a matter of questioning, it's a matter of requesting clarification - which you did, albeit in a slightly clumsy manner.  (Anyone who can get Critias to rant on his Professorial topic deserves a bronze star just for that, in my book - in part because I love to read Critias ranting.)  Always ask for clarification.

You should, however, understand that the 'point of divergence' really isn't 'way back' - the point of divergence is pretty much when SR was first published in 1989, because that's when they were writing the first sixty-one years worth of 'future history'.  1999 didn't see a massive strike in NYC, food riots, and an attack on a Seretech Corporation truck and facility; 2001 didn't see a nuclear plant owned by Shiawase, Inc. go online and get attacked by ecoterrorists.  The three-plus-aborted terrorist attacks in the USA in 2001 didn't happen - and yet Tom Dowd et. al. conceived of a terrorist attack that would make America sit up and take notice - but they put it in 2009, and put it in the hands of a home-grown faction, i.e. the Native Americans, probably because they had a map they wanted to use (a Balkanized North America) and needed a way to get there.  (Story does tend to lead results.)

The Re-Education Act ...

... called for the confinement of anyone connected in any way to SAIM. On the same day, Canada’s Parliament passed the Nepean Act, legitimizing internment camps for Native Americans. Not surprisingly, abuses of both laws were rampant. Throughout 2010, thousands of innocent Native Americans got shipped off to “re-education centers” (my personal favorite euphemism for concentration camps). Many of them never returned.

So legally, a lot of NAms shouldn't've been there; 'abuses', see.  And yeah, people died.  A lot of them.  OTOH, a surprising number of people were saved (per se) by being in the camps, because 2010's 25% culling of the world population via VITAS gave the camps a miss - the camps were isolated.

Go back to the history introductions of 2nd or 3rd edition, and give it a closer read; pay very close attention, also, to the sequence of events.  Resource Rush > Lone Eagle > Re-Education Act > Camps > Awakening & Howling Coyote > NAN Ultimatum > Redondo Peak & Los Alamos > Extermination Order > Three Years of the Great Ghost Dance's Biggest Hits > USA Finally Gets Its Hammer Together > Hood/Ranier/Adams/St. Helens Blow Their Tops > Treaty of Denver.  Pay attention to the order of things - like how the Extermination Order comes after Los Alamos, how the Re-Education Act comes after the Lone Eagle incident.  I'm not saying that the NAN didn't have perfectly valid reasons for protesting and acting (and I agree vociferously with Critias about 'people are evil enough, don't read conspiracy theories into everything', something Sendaz apparently ignores in his post suggesting Black Lodge etc. influence), but considering we were facing nuclear war, well ...

I've always felt that SR's future-history hung together remarkably well, presuming you dial yourself back to pre-1990 thought patterns.  Yes, the Holocaust was horrifying; I know this and believe it, and you will rarely find a more emphatic opponent of genocide, ethnic cleansing, etc. than I.  But y'know, here's the thing - everyone focuses on 6 million jews and ignores the other fourteen million victims of Hitler's extermination activities - Romany gypsies, homosexuals, intellectuals, POWs, political opponents, and people who just got in the way.  And how many people know about, much less discuss, Stalin's purges that killed yet another 20,000,000 people in the USSR territories, from 1924 through 1953?  This sort of thing can happen, even in the First World; the panic and the fear simply have to be hot enough, and nothing gets your blood boiling faster than nuclear war and a death toll roughly four times higher than the World Trade Center attacks.  And yet we still focus on Hitler's hatred of Jews, despite him clearly hating a lot of other people even more, and Stalin just spreading 'the love' out across a few decades instead of a few years.

Remember to step back and look at the whole picture and how the questionable part fits into it all, is all I mean to say.

[Critias]

And besides, remember what I said? I will never again criticize the SR canon, not here.

Which is, I feel, the altogether wrong message to take away from the thread.  No one has leapt to the canon's defense and said everything is perfect.  We're just trying to offer up explanations and reminders of how to patch it together enough that you can say "So yeah, that's what happened, moving on to stuff that actually matters in-game, we've got..."

[ChewyGranola]

Wyrm- Great stuff. That's a fantastic answer and good enough for me. I'm not sure what was so clumsy about my initial question, but since I wrote it that's no surprise!

Critias- The answer of "It's a different world going far back" is good enough for any historical question that may come up. It seems as if people just take canon for what it is, maybe debate some specifics (corporate citizenship or something) and that's it. I'm ok with that. It just seems that my question elicited a general sense of "Hey, this person must be either naive/mentally deficient to ask this". It's not a big deal. I appreciate your answers to my questions. Also, I bought Neat on my Nook. It's really good!

[Namikaze]

It just seems that my question elicited a general sense of "Hey, this person must be either naive/mentally deficient to ask this".

I don't think that's the right thing to take away from all this.  The thing is that the canon of SR is different from our history.  So to look at one through the lens of the other is just going to result in these kinds of questions.  I don't think anyone here has implied that you are naive or mentally deficient.  Maybe a little naive, but once things got clarified I'd hope that people changed that opinion.  The fact that you were looking at the SR canon through the lens of reality is what caused that disconnect, no naivete on your part.

[ChewyGranola]

Up until now I thought the PoD for Shadowrun was 1989. I now realize that it make much more sense for the PoD to be earlier in the 20th century or even before, with the differences really becoming noticeable in the 90s and later

I don't understand why people thought me naive. My reasoning was based on what I think is a valid interpretation. I never stated that people are inherently good or something. I suppose people do like to assume...

Anyways, my questions are answered, and future questions will be in canon context only. No problem! I appreciate the answers.

[SlowDeck]

Up until now I thought the PoD for Shadowrun was 1989. I now realize that it make much more sense for the PoD to be earlier in the 20th century or even before, with the differences really becoming noticeable in the 90s and later

I don't understand why people thought me naive. My reasoning was based on what I think is a valid interpretation. I never stated that people are inherently good or something. I suppose people do like to assume...

Anyways, my questions are answered, and future questions will be in canon context only. No problem! I appreciate the answers.

In my case, it was not so much thinking you are naive as not certain why you were not understanding the answers I had given as being towards their history being much more divergent than our's on lessons learned. Admittedly, that's an expression problem on my end; I stopped replying at one point because I was getting frustrated and just sat back and watched. For that, you have my apology.

[Crimsondude]

The earliest in-story departure that I could point to was actually in 1986, and that's in the original Shadowrun book, so yeah ... It's just a different world. Plus, with ED being in SR's past, there's all sorts of clandestine changes that could have and did happen that we just don't know about (mini-Awakenings during the middle ages per Loose Alliances, etc.).

As for this, I think SR's people and politicos were just more ruthless and willing to take action than we are, and that's fine. It's a fictional world, but I could easily see it happening IRL. This is a world that saw a lot of chaos and violence as opposed to our relatively peaceful and safe 1990s and 2000s. The Seretech Decision arose because there were massive food riots in New York City in 1999, and it's suggested that there was an escalation in domestic terrorism in the 1990s. TerraFirst! fired a man-portable SAM at the fucking space shuttle as it landed at this time. Something had to give, and a group of assholes nearly starting World War 3 seems like a good enough reason to pin them as the scapegoats and raw dog them but good out of fear, anger, and good old-fashioned spite.

I really can't stand calls to retcon the Shadowrun history. First, because no one has proposed anything even remotely as good or better (which is the absolute minimum requirement), but also the whole history of SR seems to annoy or frustrate people exactly because it's predicated on many really hard or even inhuman decisions and actions that we could not fathom occurring IRL. Considering how much of the collected cyberpunk dystopia came to pass in Shadowrun's lifetime, those are the situations that still make it fundamentally different and harder than real life. Otherwise we're playing with RL + magic, which isn't that helpful when the distinctive setting is a character of/in the game itself.

As the character of the game has lost a lot of the Neo-A romance for cold-blooded player pragmatism, it's worth noting that at this point it seems like the game has to work at making the darker elements and villainy exceed the horrific nature of reality in the 21st century. There's an old Family Guy joke from the first season about how NYC Mayor Giuliani secretly had all the homeless killed. That seemed hyperbolic, but then his successor literally buses homeless people to Florida, and that is public knowledge. If secret NYPD death squads were to be revealed tomorrow, would it really surprise anyone? There is an NYPD Intelligence Division that has been established to be and has been described as a "mini-CIA" that has conducted illegal espionage operations in foreign countries. It's not that far a step to believe that if they'd spy in secret to stop another attack on NYC that they'd be willing to whack some people.

I figure that Shadowrun has to be at least a little darker than RL, and one of the few things that still keeps it that way when trying to play catch-up to reality is that when the U.S. was faced with domestic terrorism and insurrection on a level that put the Civil War to shame as an existential threat to the Union, it reacted in a way that seems perfectly and terrifyingly plausible.

I always wondered if maybe the Executive Action was an attempt by certain parties within the government to head off the coming Ghost Dance and buy time for the US military to knock down the emerging NAN.

Maybe. Especially since Tír Tairngire wouldn't exist without the NAN forming. It's a lot easier to oust the fledgling SSC Rangers than the entire U.S. military.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

I always wondered if maybe the Executive Action was an attempt by certain parties within the government to head off the coming Ghost Dance and buy time for the US military to knock down the emerging NAN.

Well, this is what I mean by re-reading the timeline and paying close attention to the sequence of events.  The Executive Order - and the assassination that preceded it - only occurred after the first Great Ghost Dance strike.  A year after, in fact.

Take a look at the Sixth World Almanac, starting on p. 24, with an excerpt from the address by Daniel Coleman, nee Howling Coyote.  He gives that on 10 June 2014; the Great Ghost Dance blows the top off Redondo Peak on 12 July 2014.  During 2015, Thunder Tyee runs amok up around the Seattle area (eventually leading to that trideo show we all know and love, "Tyee!!"), until you reach 2016 on p. 27: 'Excerpts from remarks of President William Jarman following the issuance of Executive Order 17-231'.  And in order to get there, President Garrety had to be assassinated on 15 October.  The elections happened on 8 November, and Jarman (the winner) was inaugurated on 9 November instead of after the customary three month wait.  (Which makes sense, really.  It USED to be something like five or six months.)  The Executive Order was actually his first official act, on 11 November 2016 - a year and a half after Daniel Howling Coyote's ultimatum, and after almost a year and a half of the GGD being put to use.

So yeah, keep one eye on the timeline when you're hunting for cause and effect ...

[Sendaz]

I always wondered if maybe the Executive Action was an attempt by certain parties within the government to head off the coming Ghost Dance and buy time for the US military to knock down the emerging NAN.

Well, this is what I mean by re-reading the timeline and paying close attention to the sequence of events.  The Executive Order - and the assassination that preceded it - only occurred after the first Great Ghost Dance strike.  A year after, in fact.

Take a look at the Sixth World Almanac, starting on p. 24, with an excerpt from the address by Daniel Coleman, nee Howling Coyote.  He gives that on 10 June 2014; the Great Ghost Dance blows the top off Redondo Peak on 12 July 2014.  During 2015, Thunder Tyee runs amok up around the Seattle area (eventually leading to that trideo show we all know and love, "Tyee!!"), until you reach 2016 on p. 27: 'Excerpts from remarks of President William Jarman following the issuance of Executive Order 17-231'.  And in order to get there, President Garrety had to be assassinated on 15 October.  The elections happened on 8 November, and Jarman (the winner) was inaugurated on 9 November instead of after the customary three month wait.  (Which makes sense, really.  It USED to be something like five or six months.)  The Executive Order was actually his first official act, on 11 November 2016 - a year and a half after Daniel Howling Coyote's ultimatum, and after almost a year and a half of the GGD being put to use.

So yeah, keep one eye on the timeline when you're hunting for cause and effect ...

Even when Daniel Howling Coyote initially claimed responsibility for the Los Alamos strike, it was shown in later documentation that the Government still really didn't believe he was really responsible for it.  Instead they saw it as a chance to grab the renegade and they sent out the Sixth Air Cav which got promptly knocked out of the skies. So even with the opening shot of a frigging volcano going off many simply didn't realize what was going on.

The government was just barely coming to terms with the fact that they were seriously behind in a magic arms race.   The government in general had little to no idea who could or could not do magic or how rituals worked, but there may have been some bodies in the ranks who may have had an inkling of the rising power they were facing so again these persons may well have advised that they needed to cull the tribe's numbers to break the possible ritual's backs.  But Washington being Washington, it took time and an assassination to really open the door to the final solution route.
If you really wanted to go down the conspiracy route, was Garrety offed to make way for a president more amiable to signing off a death sentence for the rising NAN? But that's a whole other ball o wax.

When I mentioned the coming Ghost Dance I was referring to the Great Ghost Dance(should have had the word Great in at the start to differentiate, my apologies for the confusion) which was started in 2017 with the big show off on Aug 17, 2017 (SR1 pg 15), the one that popped the tops of Mount Hood, Mount Ranier, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Adams all in one go. This took place a full nine months after the Exec Order was issued as this took time to organize and build this kind of power.  So we were not ignoring the timeline, though I should have define the initial terms better.

If the gathering military forces had not been slowed down by the constant harassment of freaky weather and uncanny disturbances of their bases and supply routes along with the President's constant insisting that they not send out the forces piecemeal, the military might well have been able to cull enough of the native forces to have slowed that down or even stopped it from reaching epic proportions.  It was still a lot of old world thinking on the government's part and  that shot them in the figurative foot, not too unlike our own American history when British troops still marched in ranks toward American opposition while being chewed up by the colonial snipers and such. It was a failure to adapt /evolve sufficiently to the situation, but one can also forgive them a bit for this as it was a whole new world they were facing.