SPOILER WARNING
Ah, the book of tying up loose ends. With the publication of System Failure, practically nothing established during or prior to third edition will ever again have more than historical relevance. . .
Or, at least, that's how it felt sometimes. Cross Applied Technologies is no more! Lucien Cross perished in a plane crash and his arch-rival Damien Knight went on a gravedancing hostile acquisitions spree. I'm sure this was devastating news to the small but loyal group of Shadowrun fans who eagerly awaited each new bit of information about Quebec's premier AAA megacorporation. Likewise, the oppressive Tsimshian government has been overthrown, Ibn Eisa has been finally outed as a Sheddim, and Ares is canonically the winner of the Probe Race (though, of course, nothing seemed to have come of it).
I suppose, in the broadest sense, this book delivered on the introduction's promise to "put the smackdown on the world of Shadowrun." Most of it is transparently setting the stage for 4th edition's upcoming rules and setting changes, but those changes are significant enough to qualify as "a smackdown."
The main plot of the book is that Winternight's scheme to destroy the world, the dissonant Otaku of Ex Pacis' scheme to take over the Matrix, and Deus the AI's scheme to reconstitute himself from the brains of his torture victims all dovetail with Richard Villiers' oddly reluctant scheme to make a bazillion nuyen by taking Novatech public to result in a worldwide crash of the Matrix, leading to it being rebuilt according to 4th edition's revised decking rules.
And it's a weird series of adventures, because the scope and the stakes are as high as they can get (multiple nuclear devices are detonated, all over the world), but the PCs are just kind of there, being these hapless little guys. I wouldn't even necessarily level the Standard Metaplot Adventure Critique against it. The PCs aren't even hired as agency-less spectators to NPC shenanigans. It's just a thing that happens that's too big and too rapid for them to even understand until well after the fact. Even if you run the suggested adventures, at no point is the fate of the world in the hands of any individual, not even Deus or Richard Villiers. Shit just stacks up all at once and for the PCs to have any effect, they'd have to be in like four or five places at once.
That's probably the best way to handle a major metaplot event - don't let the PCs near it until it's too late. Like, jewel thieves in west coast criminal circles probably had very little opportunity to affect the subprime mortgage crisis, even if they did occasionally pull off a daring heist against wealthy dowagers whose fortunes were made by investing in commercial lenders. Yeah, the PCs commit crimes for hire, but they don't often engage in global counterterrorism ops for hire. That's a whole different set of guys.
I just wonder how something like that would play at a table. The players are just happily bumbling along, doing their typical Seattle-based crime hijinks and BAM! The Matrix crashes. Lights go out. Planes start falling from the sky. No warning. No indication of a possible cause. No ability to do anything but react to your immediate circumstances. All because a homicidal AI and a sophisticated (possibly magical) computer virus got into a code fight at the Boston stock exchange.
Heroes reacting to sudden and unexpected disasters is a type of story people enjoy. You probably wouldn't think much of a narrative set on the Titanic if they somehow managed to dodge the iceberg. But that kind of event, it dramatically changes the genre of the story. It's a sedate upstairs-downstairs drama, but BAM, it's now about surviving the unforgiving elements of the North Atlantic. It's a low-key stoner comedy, but BAM, they're fighting aliens now. And that sort of turn is fine in a book or a movie, but in a collaborative medium like rpgs, maybe your players were prepared to tell gritty crime stories and not "survive the collapse of the modern world" stories.
Or maybe they'd thrive under the challenge and I've just been denying them and me of a potentially wonderful experience by keeping most of the plot firmly on screen. System Failure is betting that's the case, and that's probably why it's labeled a sourcebook instead of an adventure.
I think I just have to toughen up and be okay with it. Because I mostly enjoyed the book as a work of fiction. It was thrilling. The characters were . . . broadly drawn, but broadly compelling. I definitely felt like I was witnessing significant events.
Though my biggest takeaway from the book is that I've been greatly underestimating the threat posed by Winternight. Maybe because their goal of triggering Ragnarök and becoming the new generation of Norse gods was fucking ridiculous. There's no way that plan was ever going to work. But I guess it could be pretty dangerous in the course of failing. Somehow, these guys got their hands on dozens of nuclear weapons, experimental flesh-eating nanofog, and the personnel and resources to deploy this stuff in a coordinated attack on five different continents. They caught the Corporate Court with its pants down and very nearly destroyed the bulk of human knowledge and international commerce. Plus, they were also responsible for using weather control magic to create the coldest winter on record. This is a significant step up in threat level from how they've been depicted in the past.
I guess it's just a case of supervillain logic. The story needs an antagonist, and so the chosen foe was always going to be able to generate a credible threat. There's a lot of ambiguity in the things that have so far been left unsaid, so we can just fill it in with "yeah, their ideology is a joke, but they've got one of the world's most powerful magicians, one of its most brilliant engineers, one of its most dangerous warriors, and all the wealth and influence those three can gather (which turns out to be a lot)." Nonetheless, they feel like they should be in a Spiderman story or something. They even forced Saeder-Krupp to hunker down and weather the storm.
Even aside from the basic structural issues at work here (there being no single location critical enough to the plot for the PCs to be there to alter its course), this amped-up version of Winternight is probably too much for most characters. They're only likely to get involved at the periphery. The book actually suggests they might work for Winternight, inadvertently. You know, just unremarkable shadowrunner shit - breaking one of their conspirators out of prison, guarding their mages while they manipulate the weather at an unauthorized power site, delivering mysterious packages to unremarkable-seeming locations.
Having the PCs contribute to the apocalypse in this way is kind of interesting, thematically, because it only happens if they're careless about verifying who they work for and are indifferent to the morality of their missions (If the GM is good at their job, that is. A bad GM would just use this as an untelegraphed rug-pull). But it's a type of interesting that has the potential to feel really judgmental, so I'm not sure it's a good idea.
In general, I'd say that the Crash 2.0 plot was fine for what it was - utility metaplot - but I'm not super tempted to run it as a game. It was always destined to be a bullet point in future editions' history chapters, and it never escaped that feeling.
Okay, so a few other odds and ends.
Captain Chaos is dead, having sacrificed himself in a desperate last stand against the magical computer virus that threatened Shadowland. I may have had my issues with his moderation style, but not to the extent that I wished for his death. I'd be very interested in learning the reasoning behind this development. It feels like the end of an era, but what were their hopes for the new era to follow?
Also, the Novatech IPO feels like a really weird plot to me. I guess it's because stock prices are such a fundamental part of the wealth of our real-world oligarchs. Like, Richard Villiers is really out there running the world's 12th largest corporation with mostly his own money? It's implied in the epilogue that he preferred not having to answer to shareholders, but is that really an onerous enough burden to forgo all the advantages of playing the game with other peoples' money? Theoretically, Elon Musk has to answer to shareholders and when has that stopped him from being an utter disgrace? Maybe that's just one of the effects social media has had on our society. Previously, it was possible to think of billionaire CEOs like Villiers and Lofwyr as these cold-blooded masterminds whose greed was subordinate to a greater business savvy (as the S-K representative put it, Lofwyr has no interest in changing "the focus of the company from doing things that make sense to doing things that make shareholder value go up at all costs.")
It's always weird when I notice a cyberpunk story be less cynical than real life. Look at these corporate guys, valuing things other than having a bigger number than all their peers. Next thing you're going to tell me is that "Corporate Court anti-trust regulations don't allow one AAA corporation to own part of another?"
So, like, do these guys hate money or something? What's the point of even having a Corporate Court if it's going to prevent cartelization, monopoly, or hyping up meme stock to leave retail investors holding the bag? Does private equity exist in this world? Why is Richard Villiers having such trouble loading Novatech subsidiaries down with debt, stripping them of assets, and writing them off when they inevitably fail? Does the Corporate Court have an equivalent to the SEC?
Of course, I'd be lying if I said I understood these issues well. Maybe the economy of 2025 is vastly different than the economy of 2005. It seems plausible. It's been a fifth of a century. In the 20th century, 1959 was a whole other game than 1939. It's just, if that's true, if our fiction needs to be so much more cynical because reality itself has gotten proportionately more cynical, then how fucked are we?
I think it may be a lot.
Oh, I guess I should mention something about the off-hand revelation that the New Revolution attempted a coup that briefly looked like it might be successful. It got as far as armed insurgents in the White House, killing President Kyle Haeffner, but then the book inexplicably shut it down almost as soon as it began. Maybe rebooting the Matrix was already enough of a status-quo shakeup for one book, but the entire plot wound up feeling pointless. At the very least, they should have left Senator Jonathan S Braddok alive and free so he could run for president and win in 2068.
Too soon? Yeah, too soon.
Anyway, System Failure was a pretty satisfying end to Shadowrun 3rd edition. Maybe some of the metaplot threads got swept aside with undue haste, and I'm enough of a pot-stirrer that I'd prefer a metaplot book that took some bigger swings, but it managed to check in with almost all of the most interesting of the edition's plotlines. It's enough to whet your appetite for the next edition without leaving you with any burning sense of unfinished business, which is pretty much all you can expect from a season finale.
Ukss Contribution: One of the new setting elements introduced with the rebooted Matrix is something called "Idols." They get very little detail here, appearing only in a transcript of some lady's conversation with her psychiatrist, but they seem to be American-Gods-style neo divinities attached to the Matrix. The two names we get are Gossamer, who appears as a shimmering aurora of multicolored light and The Branded Lady, who appears as a woman whose body is covered in tattoos of various corporate logos.
Ukss has its Astral Web, which is not quite an internet, but is close enough that it would be distinctive and meaningful for it to have its own crop of home-grown divinities.
