Quelle, en: Cyberpirates: The Developer's Say

INTRODUCTION

Once brought to mind, the images stay with you forever. Trolls swinging out and over another boat on ropes, emptying their SMGs into the poor saps below. A rigger racing his boat toward his quarry, while an ork on the boat he is chasing aims a harpoon gun straight at him. An underwater fight with spearguns and exploding air tanks that attracts the attention of sharks and megalodons-the survivors get to pillage the sunken vessel, which is full of gold doubloons. Locations that many have only dreamed of, each as different as it is deadly. That's the life of a pirate and a smuggler-a life of daring and danger and big hauls, fully described in Cyberpirates.

Cyberpirates exposes a previously neglected side of the Shadowrun universe: the smugglers and pirates who are the shadowrunners of the high seas. These are the people who live by bold raids and smuggled goods, and who sometimes even fight the good fight.

This sourcebook introduces players and gamemasters to piracy and smuggling in A World of Piracy, which shows the differences between pirates and shadowrunners and reveals the who, how and why of piracy from the pirate's point of view. This section offers a comprehensive overview of a piracy/smuggling operation, from hitting ships on the sea to negotiating a good price for your stolen wares on the dock.

From there it's off on a grand tour of hot spots for piracy, beginning with the Caribbean League. The Swashbucklers of the Caribbean introduces pirates who live as much on reputation and bravado as on nuyen. These ruthless braggarts can make nuyen off of anything, including making and selling vids of their own raids. Many are nothing more than glorified gangs, but some are powerful enough to rule islands as pirate kings. The Swashbucklers of the Caribbean also displays the Caribbean League in all its sordid glory, from the British island of Bermuda to the Mafia-controlled docks of Havana and Miami. Get the latest scoop on the voodoo war, metahuman experiments in Haiti, and how the UCAS, Ares, the CAS and Aztlan respond to pirate activity in Caribbean waters.

The next stop is the Philippines, where piracy and freedom-fighting go hand in hand. In the Philippines, pirates either work for the yakuza or belong to the Huk, a band of freedom-fighters/terrorists/revolutionaries sponsored by the great dragon Masaru and bent on ridding their homeland of the oppressive Imperial Japanese government. The Rebel Pirates of the Philippines show piracy in a different vein, including the harsh realities of life under Imperial Japanese control and the methods by which the yakuza, corp patrols and the Huk attack each other.

Africa, always a continent rich in natural resources, is one big fat target for the corps in 2059. The Smugglers of the Gold and Ivory Coasts shows the virtually unrestrained corporate pillaging of West Africa, through the eyes of the pirates they use to do their dirty work. More like classic shadowrunners than the flamboyant pirates of the Caribbean League or the Philippines revolutionaries, West African pirates are usually corp backed. And because there is no law in Africa save what the corps claim is law, the actions of these pirates are frequently big, bold and brutal. The enemy in Africa is not Lone Star or some government, but the place itself-from the mysterious ghoul kingdom of Asamando to the tribal city-states that change leaders more often than the pirates change clips in their guns, to the hazards of an Awakened world almost wholly untamed.

Finally, Long Haul Piracy and the Pirate Island gives an overview of piracy all over the world: which ports are the places to go to sell, trade and smuggle everything, from sugar runs in the Arctic Circle to selling contraband telesma in Tir Tairngire. The section ends with an open forum on Madagascar, also known as the Pirate Island, that describes the rough-and-tumble pirate havens on the coasts and includes a host of speculations on who (or what) really lives in the island's wild, mysterious interior.

The several sections of Game Information give players and gamemasters all the information they need to play pirates in any of the locations described. Using the Book suggests ways that the gamemaster can create adventures based on the themes highlighted in the fiction, and offers new rules for creating pirate player characters, including new skills and Edges and Flaws. The section also covers the workings of magic, paranormal animals and totems specific to each region, as well as rules for local oddities such as ancestor spirits and the Bermuda Triangle.

Underwater Adventuring covers rules for swimming, diving, underwater combat and using magic underwater. Ship Rules applies the rules from the Rigger 2 rulebook to ship-to-ship combat. Finally, Equipment is a smorgasbord of new toys, from peg legs and hook hands to spear guns, torpedoes and hunter-killer submarines.

Though they are not necessary to use this book, Rigger 2 and the Shadowrun Companion will aid players and gamemasters in fully exploring the themes and ideas presented in Cyberpirates.

THE DEVELOPER'S SAY

The book you hold in your hand is not a typical Shadowrun "place" book.

I know what you're thinking: "Come on, FASA, of course it's a place book. It's got places in it-that makes it a place book. You may have killed a dragon and created a Mafia war in Seattle but you aren't going to make us believe this isn't a place book. No way, no how."

The statement stands: Cyberpirates is a not a place book. It is a theme book.

It's not about the Caribbean League or the Philippines or West Africa. In fact, it's not about any place at all.

This book is about stretching the borders of what you can do with the game and world of Shadowrun.

Cyberpirates takes what gamemasters and players normally do in a whole new direction. The places covered in this book serve to illustrate by example what types of piracy exist in the Sixth World and offer ideas on how to play them, or run adventures dealing with them. Each place has been rendered in glowing detail and includes enough concepts and ideas to allow gamemasters to base hundreds of hours of game play in each region (if not on each island and port or city). But the focus of this book is the theme of piracy and smuggling in the world of Shadowrun.

The settings described in Cyberpirates work because they illustrate the theme so well, but you can play pirates and smugglers anywhere that there's a body of water and/or a need to get some kind of goods in or out illegally. You prefer piracy on the Great Lakes to piracy on the open seas? The rules are the same-read the material on the Caribbean and apply it with a few twists to the St. Lawrence Seaway or Lake Superior. You want to play Tír Na nÓg freedom fighters based in Boston? Read about how the Huk works in the Philippines and use that group as a model for terrorists and smugglers in Beantown. If you want to play a fierce, proud, independent pirate who plies the North and Baltic seas, you'll find the basic information on playing an independent operator in Cyberpirates. From California's Big Sur to the coasts of Alaska and Aztlan, to the ports of New York, the Mediterranean, England and the Far East, the information provided in this book lets you play pirate adventures anywhere you want. That's the goal of a theme book: to give players and gamemasters ideas that they can use in multiple areas. You can use this book to set your pirate/smuggling campaign anywhere on the globe.

So the next question is, why piracy? Why smuggling? We created this book for three main reasons.

First, Shadowrun is a game in which deniable assets are hired by one group to perform clandestine, illegal operations against a rival or enemy group. In other words, shadowrunners are hired to commit crimes. Though the groups in question can be anyone from policlubs to crackpot religions to toxic shamans with a grudge, most shadowruns center around operations against corporations. We've expanded the possibilities to include personal rivalries and feuds, political factions, governments versus other governments and various secret organizations, but no matter who's doing the hiring or who's the target, the fact remains that shadowrunners are hired to commit crimes.

So, as always when deciding what products to publish, we looked at ways to offer you fresh ideas for adventures involving criminal/secret activities, to keep your choice of operations (shadowruns) interesting and new. Smuggling seemed like a natural for shadowrunning; we've mentioned it in multiple sourcebooks, all the way back to the Seattle Sourcebook. Lately, we've made smuggling operations a minor focal point in multiple books (California Free State, Bug City, Target: UCAS, Underworld Sourcebook and Mob War! to name just a few).

Smuggling operations make excellent shadowruns because they involve small groups doing all their own legwork, controlling the set-up and situation, and then trying to outwit those they stole from as well as the cops. Tailor-made for shadow ops. But smuggling also adds something of a new twist to the game of getting away with the goods; it tends not to depend so much on a Mr. Johnson, which gives the gamemaster and players more freedom to act. Smugglers must usually get something from one place to another, giving gamemasters the perfect opportunity to throw everything-including the kitchen sink-at the players to stop them. Finally, a smuggling operation means going into someplace blind to make the delivery. Because the recipients are also doing something illegal, the gamemaster can really throw wrenches into things-sting operations, undercover agents or other uncomfy discoveries about who the players are really dealing with. The gamemaster can use all these opportunities to improvise (and be creative).

We decided smuggling was a theme worth investigating.

Second, we have an ongoing interest in expanding the Shadowrun world and making things more interesting, fun and unique. Smuggling is interesting and fun-but not very unique. It still pretty much relies on the basic Mr. Johnson-hires-you-to-perform-[blank operation] formula, without necessarily exploring new ground. Like all roleplaying games, Shadowrun works best when players and gamemasters create a story together. And a consistent complaint about Shadowrun is that the Mr. Johnson element keeps the players from co-creating the story. Players have no say in what jobs to take: only in how to perform them. So we asked ourselves, if the nature of smuggling means that the team controls their own destiny to a much greater extent, is there any way we can expand smuggling operations to make them unique and to drop Mr. Johnson out of the picture?

To help answer this question, we started asking where smuggled goods come from, which we needed to figure out for game-universe continuity and realism. Smuggled goods are stolen, but we're not talking the cat-burglar type of theft. We're talking much bigger hauls than that-say, hijacked shipments of valuables. Then it hit us: piracy. Good old-fashioned, avast-there-matey, we're-taking-your-ship-and-everything-in-it piracy. Smuggled goods come from pirated shipments and shadowrunners can be pirates, stealing goods and then smuggling them wherever they can make the most profit. The best part is, pirates aren't hired by a Johnson to do what they do. Piracy is their life, their means of survival. They don't need a Johnson to set up their operations-they do that themselves. Centering the theme of this book on piracy allowed us to combine smuggling, mentioned but not extensively covered in previous products, with unique elements that opened up a whole different way to approach Shadowrun.

The third reason (which may be the most important, depending on your point of view) is simply visceral. It's just so damn cool cool images, cool ideas, cool things for you to do and even cooler options for the gamemaster to play with.

Oh, yeah and we managed to cover three places in one book.

Have fun!

Play games!

And remember the old sailor's rhyme:

Red sun at night, sailor's delight;

Red sun at morning, sailor take warning;

Red dragon over the hull get the drek out of there.

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