| From: | Lester Ward <wordman@*****.COM> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | NERPS book idea |
| Date: | Thu, 7 Aug 1997 16:00:28 -0400 |
small ideas" book, but I think it would be best separate from it.
Basically, I want the book to be about various finanical aspects of the
Shadowrun world. In particular, I'd like to see:
1. Articles about various markets in Shadowrun, how they operate in a
mega-corporate worls, their history, and how runners might find
themselves caught in the politics of the market. This would be the main
point of the book: bascially, providing economic conflicts into which
Shadowrunners can be injected (or at the very least, campaign color).
Some of the markets which seem ripe for intrique, infighting and what
not are:
a: Diamonds. (This is the one I want to write. DeBeers is already an
evil empire. I can't wait to play with them in 2057.)
b: Cattle and other meats (emu, et. al.)
c: Oversized furnature, houses, etc. for large metahumans.
d: Magical formulae.
e: Orichalcum
f: Soy/kelp foods
g: Nukes
h: Fusion power, particularly what it did to the market when introduced.
i: Fruit. (A luxury market, I'd imagine.)
j: Personal services. (One image of the future is that large groups of
untrained workers will find jobs serving trained workers. The idea is
that time is more of a commodity to the highly paid, trained class, so
they use money to effectively buy time buy having others do shopping,
laundry, etc. This happens already, but some say it will get much more
pervasive.)
k: Petrochemicals. Who controls the gas?
l: Wood. How scarce is it?
m: Shipping.
n: Education. Do corps own schools? How do they compete for the best and
brightest students?
o: A million others...
Basically, a number of unique plot threads can be generated be answering
these questions about a given market:
a: Who profits?
b: Who wants to profit?
c: Who loses?
d: What threatens the market?
e: Where is the main action?
2. A centralized system for -- or even an agreement on -- the prices of
corporate stock. How many nuyen is a share of Ares? This is one of the
three questions I expected to find in Corporate Shadowfiles that was not
answered. Idealy, any system for prices should be able deal with first,
second and third tier corps. Perhaps this could have a web-site spin off
that ran the system for various companies dynamically (allowing everyone
to be in the same market).
3. In explaining the markets in item 1 above, there will likely be a
need to describe some second or third tier corps. This book could act as
a catalog of such corps. Of particular interest would be who owns them,
who wants to own them, and how Shadowrunners might be employed for or
against them. Perhaps a Matrix map could be provided for the corp (or
part of it).
4. As a pipe dream, a list of public megacorpoate assets. That is, what
corps publicly own, even if it is just a list of names.
I suggest a working title of this book as "NERPS: Invisible Hands". I
would very much like to edit this book. I'd also like to write the
diamond market article.
Wordman
