Once, long ago, the Earth cooled. Mountains rose, rivers flowed to the sea. This was before these forums. This was before Dumpshock. This was before Jackpoint. This was before the dinosaurs nobly sacrificed themselves to save the ascending mammals from the massive chunk of rock that fell from the sky and spelled their own doom.
This story is about one of those mammals. Indirectly, at least.
Before the forums mentioned above, there was the ShadowRN mailing list. I was a member there once, as was a chap named Erik Jameson. I frequently spoke on that mailing list about things I did and didn't like in the Shadowrun universe, and I often spoke of some of the home-grown things in my own campaign. One of these was a company called Cavalier Arms (named, for those who care, after a former girlfriend's preferred class in AD&D; she and I were still on speaking terms then...she was also this close to being the governor of Texas in Shadows of North America, but then things got ugly and I managed to get Jon Szeto to change it in time for submission).
Erik was writing for Mike Mulvihill at the time, for Corporate Download. Erik being (for reasons which surpass my understanding) a Fuchi fan, he had bid for (and won) the Novatech writeup for CDL. He wanted Miles Lanier to have his own personal weapons company, and asked me one day if I objected to him using Cavalier Arms. I did not, and told him so. Not much else was said about it for some time.
Then Corp Download hit the streets, and I buy it, and I go see how Cavalier fits into all of this. And I discover that there's a character named "Patrick Goodman" running the company and still owning a minority stake. It was at this point that I noticed how thin the fabric of reality actually was in places. It was also at this point that my own attempts to get involved in the freelancer pool for Mike and FASA both became a little ironic and a moral imperative.
I've been trying to get back at Erik Jameson ever since. Someday, perhaps, I'll succeed, but it's been harder than I thought it might be.
It's hard writing about a character with your own name; you frequently get accused of trying to write yourself into the game, the ultimate "Mary Sue" character, without the imagination needed to give them a different name. So it also became a moral imperative to kill my doppelganger, which I finally managed to do in SOTA64. So there's step 1 of my cunning plan accomplished. Now I just need to work out the time and the "give a damn" to fill in some of the blanks.
Okay, it's a clumsy ending, but there's the story of how I wound up as a character in the game world and what I've been trying to do ever since to correct it.
EDIT: Correcting a typo.
