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[Ouija]

Overwhelmed in anticipation at finally having a moment to crack open the 4th edition book and actually begin reading (I'm one of those cover-to-cover type readers), I actually skipped through a few "minor" history lessons and straight to the section on the Renraku Arcology (Deus's Agenda in the book).  Ever since it went offline, I've never actually found out what happened.  And why 4th edition briefly (two paragraphs to be exact) mentioned it, I'm still curious.  What really happened? I know they had a book out on it, but I was never able to get my hands on it.  In fact it has bugged me so much, that I immediately put the book down and logged in here just to post this question. Thanks.

[kv]

Yeah... we can give you the threads of what they were planning, but I think they kinda went apeshit with that plotline.

Short version: Deus is the AI for running all the systems in the Renracu Arcology. Renracu had accidently created an AI before, and they hacked it apart to make Deus. Deus went crazy, shutting down the Arcology, forming it's own band of dissonance otaku (the Banded) and then experimented on all the people in the arcology while trying to figure out how to make a metahuman body that would be able to handle the processing power needed to sustain its intelligence.

The UCAS comes in, tries to contain the situation, and learns that the CEO who is missing in Tibet was the only person who could shut Deus down. They get some shadowrunners, who take either the voice recording or the CEO himself in (I never played that campaign) in and shut Deus down.

For some reason, Deus survives the kill order, and apparently implanted thousands with cyberware to allow it to survive outside the arcology. For some reason, the earlier version of the AI fights for control of this group of individuals. Deus I guess wins out. I don't know. And then Deus decides to destroy the matrix or something, and then Winternight drops a nuke on him while the matrix crashes.

So, rather than trying to fix the matrix, the world goes to wireless matrix.

 -kv

[Gilliam]

That storyline did get really wierd... I wasn't happy with the Brainscan[tm] book... I never did get the missions to run smoothly... I went to run the segue (small interlude session) after the runners get the brain scanning tech, and my group just sold it off completely... making it pretty impossible for the group to survive the next mission...the module expects them to have the tech with them, and use it to identify a banded otaku that's been moved outside the arc, and kidnap him for a group of people opposing deus (led by Dodger and Morgan).

there were just too many opportunities for profit-minded players (most runners, actually) to make a perfectly legitimate decision to either abandon the campaign, or sell something off that they would need in the next mission, without having knowledge that they would need it.

I'm rambling now.... I'll stop.

[Ouija]

So what happen to Renraku? If I remember correctly from 2nd edition, they were probably the most powerful and now they are just gone?!

[kv]

No, they're still around. Not even a debacle like the Seattle Arcology can harm a megacorp. How many times has Aztech dodged PR bullets because they're just too big for people to be able to boycott?

  -kv

[Ouija]

True, but as I've read a little further into the book, it appears that had some problems in Japan as well...

[kv]

Yeah, the Japancorps had some of the worst racism in the entire world- they typically wouldn't even hire blacks, much less any metahumans at all. In fact, one of the megacorps turned out to be owned by a free spirit, who reversed the racist hiring practices and moved the company to Vladistock.

  -kv

[Ouija]

Yeah it was a lot for me to absorb at once, I need to go back and read over it again.  But I finally made it to Creating a Shadowrunner, and I have to say somethings I see I'll already like, but I do see how the character's are considerably weaker.  But so far I like it, but I still have a ways to go.

[kv]

Yeah, the starting characters are a lot weaker, but it just means that you have to make more streamlined characters. It also means that starting characters can't walk down the street and go toe to toe with a hardened shadowrunner. You have fewer skills, not as much magic, and are unable to get higher-level cyberwear.

It's also a LOT harder to get good tech once you start the game. Technically, it's more like the games that I like to run- gutterpunk style, but I like to have quasi-heroes in my gutterpunk campaigns, and I haven't done enough of 4th edition games to see if that's going to happen.

  -kv

[Ingo Monk]

Here are the bits and pieces from my understanding:

The Renraku Arcology is still sealed up in 2070 (SR4 beginning timeline).  I'm not sure if it's still got the people inside, or they got all the people out and just sealed it for investigations.

Also, Deus is alive, though in small bits and pieces all over the new matrix.  He basically took his code, chopped it up, and put it all over.  I'm sure when a new Threats book comes out there's going to be a part about Deus.  Maybe some group is putting him back together, or maybe he's putting himself back together?

In the Arcology Shutdown campaign setting the runners get help from the AI that Deus was based off of, kind of his mother you could say. Her name escapes me at the moment.  She was hiding in the matrix and came out to stop Deus.

Other than what's already been mentioned that's all that I remember.

[kv]

Megara, I think her name was- even though AIs are technically sexless, she fell in love with Dodger, so I would presume that she was a female intelligence.

Deus is a corrupted abstraction of Megara, but while he was in the Arcology, he operated on thousands of Renracu employees, implanting cyberware apparently at random. A lot of this was headware memory, hard-coded to put some of Deus' programming while that employee was accessing the matrix (or asleep, and therefore unaware of the access). Some otaku became aware of this plot, and started eliminating these "nodes" but apparently they were unaware that part of the time, at least, Megara's code was more present, and she took control of the nodes active at those times.

That was the plotline before I stopped paying attention, and shortly after that, they wrote 4th edition.

Apparently Art Dankwalther's attempt to ruin Novatech and it's founder had not gone without blood being drawn- Novatech was in enough trouble that it's owner was forced to have a public offering to gather enough money to keep it afloat. This public outing, the largest in history, formed the company into NeoNet, now publicly traded. Villiers tracked down Dankwalther and dropped a bomb on him, as far as I know, but the Novatech public offering went through other significant problems. With so many nodes online, Deus seized control of the network, coming online in the matrix fully for the first time since his desrtuction in the Arcology, and declared himself the God of the matrix. The Grid Overwatch Division fought him, and were losing, when someone dropped a train on him- almost literally. The Organization Winternight actually used an EMP Nuke on the area, crashing not only Deus' network of nodes, but the matrix as a whole.

Since the matrix was down anyway, the megacorps decided to push a new technology, a wireless matrix, rather than working to repair the old matrix. This matrix, version 2.0 if you're using old 1980s teminology, functions completely wirelessly, and has come to dominate life in a way that the old matrix never did. Oh, also Otaku no longer suffer from fading. I'm not really sure why. But they're all technomancers now. And there are no more riggers. And deckers, instead of being known by the name that they've been using for 60 years, are now called hackers, like they were back in the 1990s.
(I have major problems with the points in the last paragraph- most of my problems with 4th edition's storyline, actually)

Okay. Does that answer any other questions?

  -kv

[Ouija]

That was wonderful.  So let's clarify a few things. First I still haven't finished reading the entire book, but what the frag happened to the riggers?  Did they remove them completely? Playing a rigger was pretty much my favorite.  Second, I do understand the whole Novatech situation, and at least they way I read it from the book, Villers saved his ass thanks to clever maneuvering in merging with Erika and Transys Neuronet. Plus Megaera was "built using code ripped from Morgan." So who is Morgan, and this other guy Pax.  Or is all this explained later on in the book?  Thanks again for the explanation, it helped me understand it better. 

[Ingo Monk]

Riggers and Deckers are in the same kinda boat.  They both got replaced by 'hackers'.  You can be a vehicle hacker by buy certain skills and be a matrix hacker by buying certain other skills.  In a sense you could be a hacker that can control vehicles and hack the matrix at the same time if you got all the skills necessary.  It's a little more simple and easy to use, but they basically merged 2 archtypes into 1.  Any sense of uniqueness is gone.

[kv]

Oh, oops. I messed up the part of my explanation when I mentioned Megara.

The first AI was Morgan. They kept her locked up and never let her interact with anything. Dodger, a decker, broke in and made contact. She fell in love with his life and experiences, he fell in love with her innocence, and decided to break her out of there.

The company decided to hack apart the code that made Morgan, and use it to make a more... subservient AI. Dodger copied the code first, and escaped with it? (I'm not sure on that point), but when they hacked apart the code, Morgan went a little crazy. Megara is what was left of Morgan's personality, driven insane. Why they decided to copy the insane AI to make Deus, I'll never know.

  -kv

[Ouija]

Yeah that is interesting, thanks again for the explanation.  And as far as the hackers being riggers, I dunno.  I guess I just need to read a little more into it.