[Ragnarok]

I got your back! A nice little cabin on a nice little lake. No cell or internet service (or electricity! ) surrounded by beautiful snow covered mountains. ... a great place to hide from them and write the next great SR book!

P.S: bring lots of paper and pens.. no electricity remember :p

So...basically Winnipeg

Don't you mean Canada? 

[Digital_Viking]

Don't you mean Canada? 

Vancouver is right pretty

I am partial to Calgary but then I'm a midwest boy.

[Ragnarok]

Don't you mean Canada? 

Vancouver is right pretty

I am partial to Calgary but then I'm a midwest boy.

The Cascades are gorgeous!  Same with the Rockies.

[Reaver]

We have electricity in Canada!

For the most part.... its only when you get far off the beaten path that the grid doesn't go there (which was exactly what I was offering CanRay You need a plane to get to my cabin, or shoot the rapids and portage in. Love it there as the air is fresh and clean, only sound is of nature. I get to wake up, make breakfast and watch the wolves frolic along the opposite shoreline.)

[Capnloco]

When I finally got back into SHadowrun after a decade of absence, I wanted to get my players to Little Rock, Arkansas.  Most of us live in Little Rock, so the good GM thing always was send your players somewhere close to home.  I found that the C.A.S. was the most underdeveloped part of Shadowrun's North America. Over twenty years, it is the only North American nation not to receive a sourcebook. Now, taken that the original writers had only rough sketches and conceptual ideas for what these nations would be and how they would work, I understand part of the reason why the C.A.S. was never covered. I have another theory about what contributed.

Originally, the AAAs were part of the world, but far from the only corporations that "mattered" to the game.  The old adventures were chock full of AAs, As, and unrated corps that were not subs of the AAAs.  As the game progressed, the writers started focusing more on the AAAs to the exclusion of the rest of the corporations.  A side effect was that the C.A.S., a country with no AAA to call its own and no specifically important plot or world point like the NAN and Aztlan, was given shorter shrift.

Because I want to send my PCs through at least one campaign in Little Rock, I started jotting ideas down that has slowly become what will be a 50-60 page sourcebook for the LIttle Rock Metro area.  I had to start working on the C.A.S. to figure out how, given the suspension of disbelief to create the SR world, the C.A.S. might function. It is fun, but can be tough.  I have worked a lot on creating a feel of a more parochial setting, using Neo-@ Guide to North America and Shadows of North America as touchpoints.  I think that the C.A.S. can be differentiated, especially early in SR history (2050-2065), by playing up the differences with the UCAS and expectations about how AAAs come into play.  This thread is covering some of the exact quesitons that had been rolling around my head.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

... that's kind of a misrepresentation.  In point of fact, there are five - maybe six - national sourcebooks: Tir Tairngire, Tir na nOg, Aztlan, the CFS, Germany (IIRC written and produced primarily by the huuuuge fanbase for SR in Germany, then translated into English), and maaaybe England (via the London Sourcebook).  You could argue that Target: UCAS was a UCAS sourcebook, but it actually only talked about a few of its cities, so as a national sourcebook, it's a pretty weak argument.  (I always practically forget about the CFS sourcebook; I'm not even sure I own a copy.)

Otherwise, all you have are chapters and portions here and there - the Native American Nation sourcebooks (1 and 2) talk about the NAN nations in general, but not even all of them get in, including the highly-influential Sioux nation.  The first North America sourcebook talks about the CAS, the UCAS, the Carib League, but apparently not the specific part you want; be sad, but not mad - there's a lot of empty space on every map.  Shadows of Europe, Shadows of Asia, Shadows of North America ... they tag a lot of countries, but none of them in intimate detail.  This is pretty much inevitable, because there simply is so much world.

So what you've done is pretty much what plenty of others, myself included, have done - take a look at your home town and 'rebuild it'.  Create AA and A and unrated corporations to complicate the local scene; make something spooky, and lots of cool things, and a Z-zone or three to run through when you just have to lose the cops.  If you've done it well enough, and subtly enough, and smart enough, well - why not submit it to the Men In Black as a chapter or a web release for a 'Target: XYZ' book?

[Capnloco]

I probably did overstate the attention given or not given over the years.  I'll cop to that.  I will admit to being biased since I live here and, like you also noted, in SHadowrun most of us want to send players someplace close to home and deal with the new world. I've been referencing the core books from all editions, Neo-@ Guide to NA, Shadows of NA, the Target UCAS portion that references the relations with other nations, same with Tir na nOg, 6WA, and other bits and pieces of Shadowrun flotsam.  There is a lot of world out there.  If I came off as mad, that was unintended.  Shadowrun has a limited number of writers, a limited number of books, and a profit margin it needs to keep rolling.  Everything can't, and shouldn't be the responsibility of the employees and freelancers with their own loads to work on.

I added only one AA corporation not otherwise in cannon because too many would, I think, overcomplicate things but have been building on a lot of the existing companies here and what we know from what has been published. One or two of the comments come from existing cannon personas, but the shadowtalk is 99% runners based on the character sheets I made when trying to understand 4thEd. I've been making a concerted effort to track existing cannon as best I could when putting together the relationships between companies and the future while also trying to make the C.A.S. have a feel of its own.  It is a 2050 setting because when we got the group back together to play, we wanted to start there. 

I've been lurking here for a while, but finally thought I would start posting. I still want to do another edit or two before letting others rip into it, but the ideas of how running in the C.A.S. were different and what sort of runners to expect are the most intellectually interesting parts to me. I may see about submitting it, though I'll worry about that some other day. 

[Crimsondude]

You should definitely check out Dirty Tricks, which has a chapter on the CAS and gets into specifics about life in the Confederation circa 2074. There's only half a page on Arkansas, though. But that's a half-page more than was done in the previous 24 years.

[Capnloco]

I need to add Dirty Tricks to my list.  Looks like it may even preempt the work I did on "cracking, packing, and stovepiping." With 7000 reps, the C.A.S. always struck me as full of political intrigue for shadowrunners because of how easy it is to tip the balance of some of the scales.  Was that one of your contributions CrimsonDude?

[Crimsondude]

The book was my idea. It was something that I wanted to do for a long time. But it went into development at the same time I couldn't (for multiple reasons) write anything for CGL.

That said, I think it came out quite well considering it had a lot of ground to cover. I think it could've gotten stuck deep in the weeds (or up its own ass. YMMV) because it's about politics, but it actually balances out those considerations quite well.


As I recall Kong Wal-Mart is still a big player in Arkansas.

[Capnloco]

What I have gotten to absorb so far is great.  I bought it shortly after posting that to start reading.  I really am enjoying the anatomy of a scandal as that was my favorite as a player to pull off.  I am pleased to see several ideas I had about the CAS in that section, like the absurdity of the 7000 reps and the state sponsored runs against other states for economic development actions.

Kong Wal-Mart is listed as an A Corp that is rebuilding itself after getting knocked down from its previous high place in the world when Shiawase waged corporate war to knock them down a few pegs sometime between 2000 and 2075.

Politics does seem to be one of the harder things to cover, but it turned out well and seems to give a good insight on how that interacts with the shadows in the 6th World. 

[Crimsondude]

Heh

I love that Wal-Mart's computer center was so big the Crash Virus nested there before bursting forth like a facehugger to kill the Internet.

[Capnloco]

A truly beautiful image and making a disturbing amount of sense. It also makes for interesting rumors for Acxiom that I was working on.  One of the largest data mining and personnel data collation companies is headquartered in Little Rock.  FOr my 2050 game they are their own company but post Crash 2.0, they are a prime Horizon acquisition.

They have to store that data somewhere and I had them come through Crash 1.0 mostly intact.