[lord_shadow_666]

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

[Henzington]

it only hurts till all your nerve endings burn off

[Redman]

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.

[AndyNakamura]

PS: I'm rather new (Game abroad with 4th), what is this logan reference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logans_run

[Reaver]

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!

[Icy]

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 

[Redman]

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.

[Wakshaani]

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?!

...

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.

[DarkLloyd]

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.