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And people say that the world of darkness is bleak and cynical.
The Shadowrun Thread! For All Your Shadowrun Needs!
- Thread starter torrmercury
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A lot of bad shit has happened in Shadowrun since the late 80s. For the average person it is not bad though, you wake up in your corporate housing center, watch your corporate approved news while eating your high fiber name brand cereal you bought at the company store using corporate script with some soy milk, get dressed in your corporate approved attire, get in your Ford Americar in a corporate approved color, and drive from the corporate housing center to the corporate accounting office ensuring your Corporate SIN is broadcasting as you enter the accounting center.
You greet the pleasant but not overly so secretary as you walk into your cubicle region and log into your corporate secure account to begin work. You pour over datafiles all day except for your corporate approved 30 minute lunch break until the end of your shift at which point you get up to head out saying goodbye to your elf manager before leaving since as usual he will stay behind 2 hours longer than any employee below him. Then it is off to home where you will eat your REALmeat brand soy steak and imitation potatoes while watching your corporate approved media before going to sleep.
There are of course variations, like you might eat a sugary cereal instead of a high fiber one if you decided to leave the corporate enclave that week and go down to the Stuffer Shack for something different.
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Dream Logic
An offseason swallow
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I think I just felt my soul get denser. Not crushed but definitely compacted a bit while reading that.
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I can help that, notice how I specified the manager was an elf? There is a reason for that.
Now your average human worker drone enters the work force at 18 or 22 depending on college education, let us average that to 20 years of age when they enter the work force. Their life expectancy is 80 to 85 years and are expected to retire at 65. This means your average drone you will get 45 years of solid reliable work out of. Managers are important for keeping work steady and reliable so need to be your most steady, reliable, and "corporate." If we assume it takes 10 years to reach a managerial position then you can work your average manager to get 35 years out of them excluding the need to change managers for whatever reason such as not being sufficiently corporate.
Elves have an unknown lifespan but for the sake of discussion let us assume it is 120. Elves have similar expectations of maturity in most of the world so would be expected to enter the work force at 20 years of age. Now since elves live to 120 they cannot afford to retire at 65 as they cannot be expected to stretch a 20 year retirement fund over 60 years. Instead you have elves working up to 100 years of age. This means a corporation can get the exact same reliable corporate performance out of a manager for 70 years corporations absolutely love elves as your poor schlub middle management with no advancement prospects who work salary and work a couple hours extra every day because for 70 years they can expect the exact same reliable performance in that position.
If you die early in your 60s from like a heart condition that means that there are poor schmuck elves who have been working that shitty thankless job longer than you were alive.
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What, no difference in life expectancy?
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Shadowrun life expectancy is weird and quite frankly entirely dependant on economic position. I am not sure if it is in 5e but has been referenced before that the usual listed orc life expectancy is a little low because of how rare it is they die of old age.
On the other hand a sufficiently wealthy human can undergo leonization treatments to become effectively immortal.
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It's been stated before that the initial lifepans for trolls and orcs in early editions was put out by Humanis and Alamos 20K-related think tanks and labs looking for more "evidence" that they were inferior beings. Unfortunately in 5E they sort of made it legit, but my group tends to ignore that particular statement for the most part.
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Also, because it makes things a little creepy with the age line for Orcs. I mean, a sixteen year Orc is an adult Orc.
*waves hands some*
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An Orc is considered physically mature when they're ten or twelve. Sixteen is their equivalent to late 20s, early 30s.
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I thought it was something like that, but I didn't want to say "ten" and then be proven wrong, so I went with 'too young to consent in most American states, and yet a full grown adult by orc standards.'
Ten or twelve gets a...little bit creepy? Or at least, weird.
...I mean, that said, I'm a fan of Orcs of all kinds in all media.
Susano
Council Candidate
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- Volksstaat Hessen, Deutsches Reich
Eh, I've never heard anything about a retcon saying that the life expectancies for metaspecies are only Humanis propaganda. That Orcs live to maybe 45 at best has always been so since the 1st edition. Those estimates were only kinda weird because the baseline human life expectancy was so low. If we adjust that... 75-80 years for humans, 50-60 years for Trolls, 45-50 years for Orcs, 100-120 years for Dwarves and Elves... eh... over 200, possibly 300, I'd say.
Orcs are very r-selected compared to baseline humans: Quick lives, awfully high reproduction rates (three or four children per birth are the norm). That's part of Shadowrun's dystopia to me: The racists actually have a certain point.
Orcs are very r-selected compared to baseline humans: Quick lives, awfully high reproduction rates (three or four children per birth are the norm). That's part of Shadowrun's dystopia to me: The racists actually have a certain point.
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Well to be fair the base data they're working off of is incredibly skewed anyway. Given the living conditions most orcs and trolls are subjected to, their average lifespan across the board is skewed by outside influences. There's also the fact that Goblinized orcs and trolls live full human-duration lives.
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Like I said, actually looking at it, it seems like it's bleaker than nWoD. Maybe not as bleak as 40k, of course, but...
It's sorta the kind of bleakness that doesn't attract me that much, though.
Like, I like the cyber-weirdness and cyborgs are cool, and some of the aesthetics interest me (also the rules didn't seem too badly written), but...*shrugs*
Susano
Council Candidate
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- Volksstaat Hessen, Deutsches Reich
Well, at least the metaspecies are still fully interfertile with each other. That helps to keep some population cohesion of course,despite all the racist backlash against such pairings. It also makes for a good argument why all of metahumanity is still one species. In a Shadowrun scenario where the metaraces were not interfertile with each other... well...
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Gob-elf?
Susano
Council Candidate
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- Volksstaat Hessen, Deutsches Reich
Nah, there are no halfbreeds. I think if a human mates with a metahuman the offspring will usually be of the metahuman variant, and when two metahumans of two different types couple the offspring will "revert back" to human or something like that... but could be I misremember, and in any case it's a game or probability. And in any case, there are no half-breeds.
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No, I know that. I meant, "If metahumans weren't infertile with each other" then you'd have gob-elves.
But they aren't. So you don't.
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Wait. I think I misread your post. I thought you said 'infertile with each other' as in, elves and orcs can't breed together (as is also true).
So I thought you were saying, "If the metahuman species weren't infertile with each other, then..."
And thus I supplied what the result of this would be. A gob-elf or something like that.
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With cross-meta couplings, the resulting children will always be one of the metatypes of the parents. So a Troll/Human couple could have both Troll and Human children, with the human children having a much higher chance of Goblinization at puberty. Otherwise you're looking at, say a dwarf/orc pairing, they're either going to have dwarven or orcish children.
13th Bee
Worker
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- Tennessee, USA.
I'm pretty sure human is also always a possibility for mixed metatype children.
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The bleakness comes from being a Shadowrunner, you are looking behind the curtain and seeing what makes the world run. It is also why Shadowrun uses a karma system because you are trying to make the world a little bit better where you can bringing positive karma into the cycle.
For those not looking through the cracks the world is not that bad, remember that corporate drone I mentioned earlier? He likes his life, he has work friends, his boss is competent and knows what he is doing, and sometimes his lunchbreak coincides with a female corporate drone from HR he thinks is cute. He is a happy loyal drone and the company loves him for it.
Things are likely to improve for him even because he is happy and loyal. Tests have shown happy drones are productive drones and productive drones are more likely to reproduce and have productive children. Preliminary studies also show that corporate drone children raised entirely in corporate environment by loyal families have much higher loyalty ratios.
Seeing this corporate does genetic testing on male drone from accounting and female drone from HR finding that they have low odds of genetic defects and low odds of goblin iced children with above average odds of magical children. It is therefore decided that these two would make an excellent couple to strengthen the company.
They are given more coinciding lunches and maybe other things like coupons to a bar through company rewards to increase likelihood they will encounter each other. They meet, hit it off (just like the corporate personality analyzation program predicted), and after a bit get married after asking for corporate blessing in the non-denominational corporate chapel. Corporate studies have shown married couples in corporate housing with more room are more likely to have more kids so the company gives them a housing upgrade stating their marriage combined their loyal service years.
Now imagine trying to tell corporate drone about your world as a Shadowrunner.
"You are happy and loyal because you are drugged and brain washed."
"I am happy and loyal because the corporation protects and takes care of me."
"They manipulated events to bring you and your wife together to serve their interests in a Machiavellian and Orwellian plot."
"Good."
"Aztechnology is trying to create an interdimensional portal to another realm of shadow demons who want to destroy all life like they did in the 4th age and we need the immortal elves to help stop them."
"Bye."
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Actually, given what is publicly known about Aztechnology I could see people believing that this is what Aztechnology believes they are doing, even if it isn't real.