The monolithic "enemies" of the Shadowrun world (borrowing heavily from cyberpunk mythos) are the Corporations, dubbed "Megacorporations", "Megacorps", or simply "megas" or "corps" for short. Megacorporations in the 21st century are massively global, with all but the smallest corps owning multiple subsidiaries and divisions around the world. They are the superpowers of the Shadowrun universe, with the largest corporations having far more political, economic, and military power than even the most powerful nation-states.
In Shadowrun, corporations are effectively "ranked" by the amount of assets under their control, including materiel, personnel, and property, as well as profit. These ranks are A, AA, and AAA; AAA corporations are top tier. Most corporations in the AA and AAA level are immune to domestic law, responsible only to themselves, and regulated only by the Corporate Court, an assembly of the ten AAA-rated corporations.
All AAA-rated and most AA-rated corporations also exhibit a privilege known as “extraterritoriality”, meaning that any land owned by the corp is sovereign territory only to the corp and immune to any laws of the country within. Corporate territory is not foreign soil but corporate soil, just like its employees are corporate citizens, though dual citizenship in a corporation and a nation is common.
I've mostly played and GMed the TTRPG but I really enjoyed Shadowrun Hong Kong
Corporate territory is not foreign soil but corporate soil
I think the canon position is that it literally is sovereign territory the way an embassy is, and that a corporate office park belonging to one of the megas is functionally a microstate with border controls even if it may be a soft border if its in an urban area (unless it's MCT territory, in which case it's a line with "literally everyone who steps over this line without express permission and an escort will be shot, no questions asked" posted on it, or Saeder Krupp in which case it's a fence that says "staring at this fence for more than one minute is a criminal offense that will result in pre-emptive intervention by a death squad", to only mildly exaggerate their canon approaches to security).
The 5e book on smugglers (it's called Coyotes IIRC) talks about extraterritorial corporate holdings in its section on border controls and security, and explicitly talks about them as being legal borders akin to those between literal states.
dual citizenship in a corporation and a nation is common.
That actually raises a good question, because SINners get their SIN from either a state or a mega (and when a mega goes under they can suddenly find themselves citizens of a different corp or end up SINless nonpersons if their department gets dissolved, as happened to NEONET in 2079), but there's also talk elsewhere about IIRC Renraku getting issued tens of thousands of unused criminal SINs by Seattle to issue to workers in the Seattle Underground which implies that SINs are something that's limited and rationed by the actual sovereign states to such an extent that even a mega can't just magic up as many corporate limited SINs as it pleased.
Yea the SIN rules can get a little wild but honestly that's shadowrun. The PCs I've played have all been gang or syndicate affiliated so either sinless or criminal sin so important to pay for a high rating SIN especially when trying to go to higher security regions.
https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/System_Identification_Number
Yeah. I'd say once you get past the setting rules and conventions that are immediately applicable to SINless players the world starts getting fuzzier and more inconsistent, but if we're being honest it's fuzzy, inconsistent, or outright incomplete pretty much everywhere, although I generally feel the community has a more solid grasp of the setting and rules than Catalyst does and with enough googling for old discussions and the absolutely beautiful times the literal author of a book shows up to explain mechanics that somehow didn't make it into the book one can get a pretty solid understanding of how it's supposed to work.
Although even there it can be fuzzy, like for example I'm still not sure how sensors at security checkpoints should be written since RAW you can like have a sensor able to clearly detect and image literally every piece of metal or cyberware out to 5-15 meters (depending on what type of sensor you're talking about) that fits inside a pen, a pair of glasses, a bee-sized drone, or hypothetically even contact lenses, so you could hypothetically have a MAD scanner inside every single door and light fixture in a building for pretty minimal expense (or at least fitted to every single security guard), which makes some narrative sense but is absolute bullshit from a gameplay perspective where you want the party to solve puzzles cleanly and not just sit for several hours while the decker makes literally hundreds of hack on the fly and control device tests to let the party sneak through a building, so I usually just consolidate it into a single device at formal security checkpoints because I don't want to make a hundred defense rolls either (and often just treat opposed roles as threshold tests if they're not too narratively important).
Thankfully, the vague and inconsistent rules seem to have contributed to a culture that's way more accepting of "the GM can literally just arbitrarily declare rulings on nearly any situation" than something like D&D which in my experience was notorious for rules lawyering players trying to twist the system to breaking.
Don't the sensors use their rating as a perception to detect? So yea a cheap low rating MAD to keep out obvious cyberware users but also its a great chance to use some fast talking "Oh of course the scanner picked up my state of the art headware, I couldn't do my job as a corp security assessor without it, don't worry about the cyberspur it's been disabled but havn't had the spare nuyen to get it removed"
I totally agree about the community having a better head for the game than Catalyst, but Ima be honest with you while I love the world & lore actually playing/gming the game kinda gets me depressed with how close it is to actual society just without the cool shit.
Don’t the sensors use their rating as a perception to detect?
They use their rating as the limit on a perception+INT or electronic warfare+INT test*, which opens up a whole other can of worms to where a normal quality camera (or any other kind of sensor) physically cannot detect someone most of the time if they have a sneak pool of 9 or more without the GM ruling that "no, you can't sneak through open ground that's covered from multiple angles by security cameras regardless of how well you roll on a sneak test"**.
* Now what's actually making those tests is another question altogether: if its the sensor array itself it'd be something like sensor rating x 2 for the dice pool; if it's an agent program it's either agent rating -1 or agent rating x 2 (because RAW agents don't have perception or ewar skills, but it makes narrative sense for one created to watch sensor grids to have it), a pilot program would be pilot rating + clearsight or ewar autosofts, and a security guard would be rolling the normal perception or ewar checks.
** Unless there's some enabling conditions like a ruthenium polymer coating on your armor or at least a chameleon suit.
I've gone and researched this entirely too many times and the best I've gotten is pretty much "tailor the narrative description to suit gameplay needs and minimize excessive dice rolling."
Now from a player perspective I jam sensors in absolutely everything, especially drones because if there's anything I've learned as a GM it's that GMs absolutely love it when you ask them to describe in meticulous detail the cyberware and weapon loadouts of literally every single person nearby, and the more pointless dice rolling you can make the more fun it is for everyone! (Or more accurately, to cover my ass and give a clear narrative impetus to spoil ambushes and any other unwelcome surprises with the implicit understanding that superfluous details don't matter and don't warrant lots of rolls.)
but Ima be honest with you while I love the world & lore actually playing/gming the game kinda gets me depressed with how close it is to actual society just without the cool shit.
Yeah. I kind of work around that as a GM by following one golden rule: the lazier and more absurd whatever description or plot point I'm giving is, the more it becomes both realistic and fantastical at the same time.
We think about SINs about some block-chain type thing (fridge logic) with track records that aren't just controlled by 1 corp, explain why you don't issue them non stop. It is in the best interest of the corps to keep the system going as they are able to control people (and have quite a bit of back up SINs in their private suit cases).
OK thank you for the nuance. It wasn't the yes/no answer I was hoping for, but it does give me some background. What powers do nation-states have in this universe then ? Link me the rules if it's easier.
Some more than others and usually the ones that have a dragon backed corp or syndicate tend to have more influence but usually in their region. Like Lofwyr & Saedur-Krupp pretty much run the United German States, Lung & Triads in China.
But honestly the governments of nation-states are essentially puppets for the megacorps or syndicates.
Like the Great Ghost Dance is an example of how the UCAS wasn't really able to do much to stop the creation of the Salish-Shidhe and elves + a dragon were able to carve out the Tir Tairngire
The monolithic "enemies" of the Shadowrun world (borrowing heavily from cyberpunk mythos) are the Corporations, dubbed "Megacorporations", "Megacorps", or simply "megas" or "corps" for short. Megacorporations in the 21st century are massively global, with all but the smallest corps owning multiple subsidiaries and divisions around the world. They are the superpowers of the Shadowrun universe, with the largest corporations having far more political, economic, and military power than even the most powerful nation-states.
In Shadowrun, corporations are effectively "ranked" by the amount of assets under their control, including materiel, personnel, and property, as well as profit. These ranks are A, AA, and AAA; AAA corporations are top tier. Most corporations in the AA and AAA level are immune to domestic law, responsible only to themselves, and regulated only by the Corporate Court, an assembly of the ten AAA-rated corporations.
All AAA-rated and most AA-rated corporations also exhibit a privilege known as “extraterritoriality”, meaning that any land owned by the corp is sovereign territory only to the corp and immune to any laws of the country within. Corporate territory is not foreign soil but corporate soil, just like its employees are corporate citizens, though dual citizenship in a corporation and a nation is common.
I've mostly played and GMed the TTRPG but I really enjoyed Shadowrun Hong Kong
I think the canon position is that it literally is sovereign territory the way an embassy is, and that a corporate office park belonging to one of the megas is functionally a microstate with border controls even if it may be a soft border if its in an urban area (unless it's MCT territory, in which case it's a line with "literally everyone who steps over this line without express permission and an escort will be shot, no questions asked" posted on it, or Saeder Krupp in which case it's a fence that says "staring at this fence for more than one minute is a criminal offense that will result in pre-emptive intervention by a death squad", to only mildly exaggerate their canon approaches to security).
The 5e book on smugglers (it's called Coyotes IIRC) talks about extraterritorial corporate holdings in its section on border controls and security, and explicitly talks about them as being legal borders akin to those between literal states.
That actually raises a good question, because SINners get their SIN from either a state or a mega (and when a mega goes under they can suddenly find themselves citizens of a different corp or end up SINless nonpersons if their department gets dissolved, as happened to NEONET in 2079), but there's also talk elsewhere about IIRC Renraku getting issued tens of thousands of unused criminal SINs by Seattle to issue to workers in the Seattle Underground which implies that SINs are something that's limited and rationed by the actual sovereign states to such an extent that even a mega can't just magic up as many corporate limited SINs as it pleased.
Yea the SIN rules can get a little wild but honestly that's shadowrun. The PCs I've played have all been gang or syndicate affiliated so either sinless or criminal sin so important to pay for a high rating SIN especially when trying to go to higher security regions. https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/System_Identification_Number
Yeah. I'd say once you get past the setting rules and conventions that are immediately applicable to SINless players the world starts getting fuzzier and more inconsistent, but if we're being honest it's fuzzy, inconsistent, or outright incomplete pretty much everywhere, although I generally feel the community has a more solid grasp of the setting and rules than Catalyst does and with enough googling for old discussions and the absolutely beautiful times the literal author of a book shows up to explain mechanics that somehow didn't make it into the book one can get a pretty solid understanding of how it's supposed to work.
Although even there it can be fuzzy, like for example I'm still not sure how sensors at security checkpoints should be written since RAW you can like have a sensor able to clearly detect and image literally every piece of metal or cyberware out to 5-15 meters (depending on what type of sensor you're talking about) that fits inside a pen, a pair of glasses, a bee-sized drone, or hypothetically even contact lenses, so you could hypothetically have a MAD scanner inside every single door and light fixture in a building for pretty minimal expense (or at least fitted to every single security guard), which makes some narrative sense but is absolute bullshit from a gameplay perspective where you want the party to solve puzzles cleanly and not just sit for several hours while the decker makes literally hundreds of hack on the fly and control device tests to let the party sneak through a building, so I usually just consolidate it into a single device at formal security checkpoints because I don't want to make a hundred defense rolls either (and often just treat opposed roles as threshold tests if they're not too narratively important).
Thankfully, the vague and inconsistent rules seem to have contributed to a culture that's way more accepting of "the GM can literally just arbitrarily declare rulings on nearly any situation" than something like D&D which in my experience was notorious for rules lawyering players trying to twist the system to breaking.
Don't the sensors use their rating as a perception to detect? So yea a cheap low rating MAD to keep out obvious cyberware users but also its a great chance to use some fast talking "Oh of course the scanner picked up my state of the art headware, I couldn't do my job as a corp security assessor without it, don't worry about the cyberspur it's been disabled but havn't had the spare nuyen to get it removed"
I totally agree about the community having a better head for the game than Catalyst, but Ima be honest with you while I love the world & lore actually playing/gming the game kinda gets me depressed with how close it is to actual society just without the cool shit.
They use their rating as the limit on a perception+INT or electronic warfare+INT test*, which opens up a whole other can of worms to where a normal quality camera (or any other kind of sensor) physically cannot detect someone most of the time if they have a sneak pool of 9 or more without the GM ruling that "no, you can't sneak through open ground that's covered from multiple angles by security cameras regardless of how well you roll on a sneak test"**.
* Now what's actually making those tests is another question altogether: if its the sensor array itself it'd be something like sensor rating x 2 for the dice pool; if it's an agent program it's either agent rating -1 or agent rating x 2 (because RAW agents don't have perception or ewar skills, but it makes narrative sense for one created to watch sensor grids to have it), a pilot program would be pilot rating + clearsight or ewar autosofts, and a security guard would be rolling the normal perception or ewar checks.
** Unless there's some enabling conditions like a ruthenium polymer coating on your armor or at least a chameleon suit.
I've gone and researched this entirely too many times and the best I've gotten is pretty much "tailor the narrative description to suit gameplay needs and minimize excessive dice rolling."
Now from a player perspective I jam sensors in absolutely everything, especially drones because if there's anything I've learned as a GM it's that GMs absolutely love it when you ask them to describe in meticulous detail the cyberware and weapon loadouts of literally every single person nearby, and the more pointless dice rolling you can make the more fun it is for everyone! (Or more accurately, to cover my ass and give a clear narrative impetus to spoil ambushes and any other unwelcome surprises with the implicit understanding that superfluous details don't matter and don't warrant lots of rolls.)
Yeah. I kind of work around that as a GM by following one golden rule: the lazier and more absurd whatever description or plot point I'm giving is, the more it becomes both realistic and fantastical at the same time.
We think about SINs about some block-chain type thing (fridge logic) with track records that aren't just controlled by 1 corp, explain why you don't issue them non stop. It is in the best interest of the corps to keep the system going as they are able to control people (and have quite a bit of back up SINs in their private suit cases).
OK thank you for the nuance. It wasn't the yes/no answer I was hoping for, but it does give me some background. What powers do nation-states have in this universe then ? Link me the rules if it's easier.
Some more than others and usually the ones that have a dragon backed corp or syndicate tend to have more influence but usually in their region. Like Lofwyr & Saedur-Krupp pretty much run the United German States, Lung & Triads in China.
But honestly the governments of nation-states are essentially puppets for the megacorps or syndicates.
Like the Great Ghost Dance is an example of how the UCAS wasn't really able to do much to stop the creation of the Salish-Shidhe and elves + a dragon were able to carve out the Tir Tairngire
This is great, thanks for the response.