Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => The Secret History => Topic started by: psycho835 on <06-05-18/1145:01>
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So, I've been out of touch for a while. Last thing I read about the Boston situation was Lockdown. Now I came back and just got Dark Terrors and... Well, I've got a feeling that there was some big reveal about Boston that I've missed. Can someone give me the titles of the book(s?) I'm missing in this puzzle?
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That is about it, really.
They dropped hints of dramatic things to come in Market Panic and The Complete Trog, but I never saw anything actually happen from those hints (no adventures, novels, documentation of horrible things, etc). There was some progress on CFD cures (not specific to the Boston strain) in some of the other books.
Honestly Dark Terrors has the most information on what is happening that I can recall seeing.
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Hmmm, that's a li'l... Anticlimactic.
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Maybe the intent was for part of that to play out inside Shadowrun Chronicles expansions.
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Yes this was the intent (AFAIK). The Shadowrun Chronicles guy (namely Jan Wagner aka Primetide) asked Catalyst to give them a city they could "mess with" and thus arrived the idea of a Lockdown. Sadly, the game did not perform as well as they would have liked and they only did a couple of extension (namely Infected and Mission - and this one did not move forward the story).
So the story develops in the Shadowrun Chronicles barely covers the few, first weeks of the Lockdown - exactly like the source book. What happening between July 2076 to the end of the QZ in ~2080 is a more/less a complete mystery, short of the few notes in Dark Terror.
(There might be a little bit about it in the upcoming Street Lethal book - as far as I understand, but I may be wrong. This book was supposed to be released before Dark Terror and maybe will fill up some gap).
My understanding of the outcome is that apparently Eliohann survives and recovers (maybe helped by the Witch of Salem, Damon and the Dragon aligned Ley Line), but I don't know if he is restored to himself or more of a functionnal Cereus infected Dragon. No idea what happened to the Dissonant Technomancer or PAX.
One thing however: if you read careful the book (which I did not at the time and only catch recently, as I'm starting a new Boston Lockdown based campaign): the original infection lasts only 3 days. After that, the original nanites dies off, making the spreading of the sickness far less quick. So, contrary to my impression, at first, you don't need a solution to "kill off" the nanites. You just need to kill off the infected ones (or cures them) and apply usual quarantine procedure to reopen the city.
If you have more precise question about the setting feel free to post them here. We may be able to collectively paste together the missing nuggets spread apart the books and the hints in the video game...
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It would actually be kind of nice to pull together all the post-Lockdown mentions from various books into one place. Even for those of us who have most or all of them, we've probably never looked at all the bits in a focused way.
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The Neo-Anarchist podcast has an exhaustive episode on the lockdown. Everything you ever wanted to know.
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I put together a guide of the entire SRC dialogue if anyone would like it as a reference and springboard point (and it's as extensive as it sounds- even including the PA voice-overs from inside some of the runs):
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=859974620
Haven't checked out the podcast... thanks for mentioning that! I'll have to look into it when I have time!
Crunch~
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There's at least one novel that's been announced and should, judging by the summary given, shed some light on the Boston crisis: Identity Crisis by Phaedra Weldon (https://www.gtsdistribution.com/Books-and-Magazines/SHADOWRUN-IDENTITY-CRISIS-NOVEL.asp). It's supposed to be released this year... hopefully.
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Oh cool, I hope it will clarify some details of the all PAX / Dissonance stuff along with Eliohann / Salem Witch stuff!
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Oh, also, there's *this* little gem from the SRC Steam forums:
The idea was, that the cure would be specific to the dragon's nanites being re-programmed, so basically the dragon became the only place you could "harvest" the nanites that could cure ANY form of the nanite virus (so even the ones outside Boston). That in turn would have led to a gold rush and battle for the dragon - who had crashed in the lake north of Boston (if memory serves) into a coven of witches. We would have major corps scrambling for that, the dragon council's servants and of course the witches and a bunch of crazy indiviuals with NeoNet being torn apart by the internal struggle.. This is so long ago, by now canon has continued without us, but if we had the last chapter (ending in a battle vs a dragon), that would have been SR history...sigh
(Primetide, for those who don't know, is the lead Developer for SRC: Boston)
Since it hasn't been fully addressed anywhere, this may still be canon (Hope I get to play it out one day). Of course, one of the beautiful things about Shadowrun is that historically there have been multiple 'rumors' about what *really* happened at any number of events, that GM's can kind of pick which one is their favorite as the 'chip truth' if any.
My 4th ed. Seattle campaign ended with a contact of one of the player's calling from Boston and screaming about a dragon attack on the NeoNet tower (right after they resolved the 3 year campaign dealing with mysterious AI's seemingly going after another one, and uncovering a weird nanite infection that was altering people) ;D
Crunch~