Shadowrun RP (characterinfo+gameplay)

[b]Matrix 2.0
The times, they are a-changin’, but people are nothing if not adaptable. Even before Crash 2.0 took down the Matrix and caused widespread chaos on multiple fronts, the seeds of wireless network connectivity were already sown. By 2070, the new wireless Matrix is mostly in place, and the whole Matrix model has shifted from wired virtual reality to wireless augmented reality. That’s not to say that you can’t still go for the full-immersion experience, but AR has proven itself to be more practical in most situations. Most people by now have embraced the new technology, to the point where even the poorest sprawl denizens are likely to have commlinks that connect them to the Matrix on a constant basis. What this means is that everybody’s wired (or, rather, wireless) and everybody’s connected. For most people, the question isn’t whether to be connected, but how much.

The Network is the Consumer
Every time you go out to the mall or the Stuffer Shack or that new club downtown, you’re surrounded by computer networks. Everybody’s heard of LANs and WANs, but 2070s society brings a new one: PANs, or Personal Area Networks. People don’t just belong to networks these days—they are networks. All hooked together by a commlink (a combination cellphone, PDA, wallet, and network router), PANs are accessed and controlled by a wide array of useful devices, including goggles, contacts, or cybereyes that let you perceive the sights of augmented reality; headphones or cyberears that give you the sounds; gloves for the touch; clothing that regulates your temperature and lets you change its color with a thought; simsense modules that let you experience sensations, emotions, and even others’ senses; weapons and peripherals tied directly into your conscious control; and a whole lot more. It’s called a “mesh network,” and it means that all your goodies talk to each other seamlessly, keeping each other up to date with status reports and working together to enhance your computing experience.

Sharing the Love
All this PAN stuff is wiz, but just like the dinosaur days of the Internet, networking isn’t much fun if you can’t share it. When you open up your PAN to the outside world (or whatever part of it you choose to allow in), you open the door to a myriad of interactions. Heading down to the mall to check out the latest gear, you can subscribe your PAN to the mall’s network and view arrows (AROs, or augmented reality objects) that show you everything from a map of the place to current sales to recommendations your friends have left for you last time they were there. You can connect your commlink to your friends’ networks and hold private conversations completely inside your head. You can (if you’re not careful) be bombarded by advertising and spam—but you can also hook up with other people who read the profile you’re broadcasting and want to meet you. You can play a video game in your head with a friend on another continent as your opponent. In short, pretty much anything you can think of that can be done with a computer, you can do it wherever you happen to be. No wires, no clunky cyberdeck—just you, your commlink, and the airwaves. Of course, those who want to take things a little further can do a lot more—hacking into systems (including other people’s commlinks), controlling vehicles with their thoughts, even injuring other users. That’s where the real fun is—but that’s a topic for another time and another place.

Tagging, 2070’s Style
What can control shoplifting, keep track of your cat (or your kid, or your employees), mark gang territory, or give you the skinny on that weird statue in the park? If you answered RFID tags, you get a gold star. Radio Frequency Identification tags are even more ubiquitous than Matrix connections in 2070s society, and almost as useful. Since your commlink can read the data on a tag from about 40 meters away, they’re used for all kinds of purposes where some small message needs to be broadcast over a short distance. For instance, every item in almost any store you walk into will have an RFID tag embedded within it, to help track inventory and keep the items from wandering out of the store. They also help you when you’re ready to buy—you simply pick up the items you want, they’re scanned automatically, and the charge is deducted (with your permission) from your cred balance.
Tags have lots of other functions, too. When viewed with AR, the data from an RFID tag is called a dot (DOT, or Digital Object Tag). Some dots are beneficial, helping you find your way around unfamiliar areas or giving you information about local historical sites or areas to avoid. You can also program your own to offer items for sale, look for lost items, or anything else for which your grandmother might have posted flyers on the street corner. Tags also have less savory purposes—corps routinely implant tags in their employees, while gangers use spray-painted dots to mark their turf. Regardless of how they’re used, tags are cheap and easy to get, which means the world is awash in them. Better get used to it.

Big Brother is Watching
As wiz as all this technology is, don’t think it’s all a big hacker party. The downside of the fact that everything’s networked and the Matrix is everywhere (especially for shadowy types) is the fact that this gives authorities and other nosy folks the means to make some serious inroads into your privacy, especially when you’re out in public. Sensors and cameras are everywhere, almost every transaction you make is tracked in one way or another, and if you’re not careful, your every movement—in the Matrix and in the meat—can be traced, monitored, and analyzed. Paranoid yet? Think of this: in most major sprawls, sensors on every street corner in certain ’hoods can not only monitor sights, sounds, and chemical odors, they’re also smart enough to automatically recognize aberrant patterns—say, a gunshot or an abnormally large crowd of people gathering near a business. This info is automatically transmitted to the proper authorities, and unwary miscreants can be in custody before they can say “What happened?” Naturally there are ways around Big Brother, and savvy shadowrunners are wise to study up. Life in the shadows isn’t easy but fortunately the all-knowing Big Brother isn’t without his failings.

Use the Matrix Before it Uses You
Congratulations! You’re probably reading this because you’re old enough to leave your KidLinkâ„¢ behind and get your own fully-featured commlink. There’s a big bad virtual world out there for you to explore, but if you’re not careful, it will eat you up and spit you out. Not to worry, you’re reading this guide, and soon you’ll be surfing the digital waves with the best.

The Basics
The first thing you’re going to need is a commlink. You’re also going to need an operating system, or OS. Always try to get the best commlink model and OS you can afford. The electronics store is not a place to skimp in a wireless world. You’re also going to need some interface gear. Sure, you can use the commlink’s built-in screen and thumb-buttons, but that’s pretty lame. Get an image link so you can see AR objects and data; it can be built into shades, regular glasses, goggles, or even contact lenses for that natural look. Grab some ear buds or headphones (depending on your look) so you can catch your tunes and other audio. A microphone will let you make commcalls without having to use your †˜link’s mic. Add some AR gloves to complete the ensemble; you can get them as gloves, paste-ons, or even as a set of full-finger rings. Whatever your look, you can use the Matrix in style.

Direct Neural Interface
Be wary of people who tell you that DNI is the only way to fly. You might think that you can get a datajack even though it’s illegal in most places to buy a DNI before you’re 18 or 21, but be careful. You’re probably not done growing, so a datajack is not a good idea yet. But even with trodes, DNI is a gateway directly to your brain, and a person can get seriously messed up through that interface. Nevertheless, the ability to simply think your commands is an incredible ease-of-use factor that makes trodes worth the risk. To roll with a DNI trode interface, you’ll first need to spend a few minutes configuring your trodes to your brain the first time you use them. Your trodes will slave themselves to your sim module, and then your commlink will give you a series of mental exercises to do. Don’t come crying to me if something nasty happens to your wetware.

Getting the Hook Up
Chances are, your family, enclave, or arcology already has a Matrix service provider, or MSP. Despite what the ads say, you don’t really need an MSP to get onto the Matrix, your commlink has all the hook-up you need. But MSPs provide you with storage space and a messaging service that will hold on to your messages when you’re offline, not to mention programs (usually Browse class programs and Edit class programs) that you would otherwise have to buy yourself. The more expensive ones let you use agents to do things for you.

Call Me, Baby
One thing an MSP is good for is to get a commcode. You need a commcode if you want people to be able to call you and send you text, image, and voice messages. Some MSPs will give you more than one. If you don’t use an MSP, you can get a commcode from any number of providers. Don’t give your commcode to just anybody! Once it’s in the hands of a marketing node, your commcode will be on a hundred thousand spam lists. And don’t worry about getting software to make calls. All the stuff you need to chat with your buddies is built into your OS.

Nightlife
The world of 2070 rarely sleeps, and most of the interesting stuff (at least from a shadowrunner’s point of view) happens after the sun goes down. Mainstream nightclubs—with their synthahol specials, DJs, and dance floors—are a dime a dozen. Some are more choosy than others, meaning you need to look good, dress well, or sport your exclusive-membership RFID tag implant to gain entry. Even the less exclusive clubs might have areas that the general public will never even know about, let alone hope to get in—including private rooms perfect for secure biz. Besides the standard clubs you can usually find a large number of “niche-market” nightspots in most major sprawls.

Under their skins the mainstream clubs are all essentially the same, but in the niche clubs you’re more likely to find a wider variation of themes catering to a narrower range of customer—everything from the magically active to metahuman groups to lovers of Japanese anime (especially since Japanese culture shows no sign of giving up its hold on the world anytime soon). Newcomers who show a genuine interest in (and understand of the social conventions of) a particular theme are welcomed; others might be looked on with suspicion until their motives are determined. Some of these clubs are private and don’t admit new members without sponsorship by an existing member.

Finally, there are Matrix clubs. In the Matrix nobody knows you’re a dog—or a 12-year-old hacker, or a middle-aged ork pretending to be a cute Japanese schoolgirl—and nobody really cares, as long as you’re cool. Matrix clubs exist only in cyberspace, and thus aren’t constrained by those pesky real-world laws like physics and gravity. Naturally, hackers think this makes them far more fun than your typical meat market. Wizzer still are the clubs-within-clubs that can be reached only by that time-honored custom of hacking your way in. If you’re good enough to make it past the IC, you might be amazed at what you’ll see. After all, you don’t think they share the good stuff with anybody who can plug into an off-the-shelf commlink, do you?

Sometimes people ignore the clubs entirely, arranging meets on the fly, flash-mob style, or setting up their own venues by staging “break-in parties” inside closed businesses or street raves in abandoned urban areas.

Music
Music is everywhere: in your house, your car, the places you shop, the ad kiosks you pass—even inside your head, thanks to your subdermal implants. Whether it’s the squeaky-clean, corp-sponsored Top 40 “hits” or any of a dizzying number of genres from goblin rock to elven acoustic to synthrash to neo-classical to everything in between, music is an integral part of 2070s life. In many places it seems like everybody’s listening to music—and if you get bored with your own sounds, you can always pick up something new by tuning your commlink in to whatever the people around you are broadcasting.

These days, music-makers enjoy many more options than their grandparents back at the turn of the century did. The old-style acoustic instruments still exist, of course, along with their old-school electric counterparts, but in the seventies they are joined by some wiz goodies that Grandpa could only dream about. Without a doubt the most important of these is the synthlink, which permits musicians to plug directly in to their instruments and create the music they hear in their heads. The synthlink was a breakthrough because it removed one of the last barriers to musical composition, opening up the creative floodgates for many talented musicians who lacked the formal training or the knowledge to produce songs the old-fashioned way. These days, most music (except for genres that emphasize their “natural” sound) is produced using synthlink-enhanced instruments, and with few exceptions, musical idols come and go with the fleeting vagaries of the public’s hunger for the “next big thing.”

Sports
Sports are big business in the seventies, every bit as much about making piles of cred for their corporate sponsors as they are about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Equal parts contest of athletic prowess and media extravaganza, 2070s sports can be summed up in one word—intense. With the kind of nuyen that rides on the outcome of every contest in major sports, the field is wide open for every kind of edge that team, player, or technology can employ.

That’s not to say that enhancements like cyber implants and magical augmentation are universally accepted. Take technological upgrades, for example: debate rages stronger than ever these days on the subject of cyberware, drugs, nanotech, and genetic manipulation. Some leagues ban them, some have split to accommodate them, others have begun to reluctantly accept them in limited forms, and a few have embraced them. Many top athletes don’t want to touch them anyway, since there’s always the chance they’ll fail at the wrong time and put the athlete out of action; it’s the up-and-comers and the over-the-hillers who most often look for the quick fix, but this is changing as attitudes change.

Magic, on the other hand, is frowned on pretty much everywhere. Even though lots of big-league sports boast adepts on their teams, spellcasting is a major no-no in almost every sport except urban brawl (a game that’s part war, part football, part large-scale urban renewal), and leagues often employ trained magicians and spirits as referees to make sure everything stays firmly in the realm of the mundane.

One controversy that still surrounds major sports is the participation of metahumans. Some sports, like football and urban brawl, don’t care and allow everyone to participate; others, like some baseball and soccer leagues, are humans-only clubs. Efforts continue to get these bans removed.

In addition to the classic major sports that have been around forever (auto racing, hockey, baseball, basketball, soccer, football, boxing, and so forth), more modern sports have fan followings every bit as large: urban brawl, combat biking (soap opera mayhem on motorcycles), court ball (ancient Aztec game akin to basketball, but with the loser’s captain sacrificed at the game’s end), and stickball (a Native American sport that’s popular because it’s one of the few that allows magic.)

Simsense
Why just watch a show when you can be part of the action? Why only get what your eyes and ears are telling you, when you can have the full spectrum of sensations and even feel the same emotions the characters are feeling? Simsense lets you do that.
The technology’s mature these days, having been around since the middle part of the century, but as progress marches on, simsense just keeps getting better. How it works is easy—you experience it through a sim module (either implanted or part of your commlink), a standalone simsense player called a simdeck, or even electrically-sensitive nanopaste that you can apply directly to your body. Depending on the type of rig you have (and what kind of sim you’re slotting), you can step into the main character’s shoes and get the same sensory data she’s getting, piped directly into your very own brain. Used to be that the lower quality sims only gave you the sensory side, but these days they all give you the whole shebang complete with emotional response.

As you might guess, the best simsense performers aren’t necessarily the best actors, but rather the people who can experience the widest and most intense range of emotions. All the A-list sim stars have implanted simrigs, which are required to record the full experience. They have to keep themselves in top shape physically, mentally, and emotionally—after all, who’d pay to assume the personality of a flabby headcase? (Okay, some people would—but that’s for the niche studios, not the majors).

Simsense comes in all varieties: action, romance, comedy, sports, children’s, documentaries, educational, and so on. Pornography is huge, as you might imagine—as, unfortunately, are a wide variety of illegal sims that remove the safeguards designed to keep emotional and sensual responses to manageable levels. Of course, there’s also the seedier stuff—but that’s a subject for a little later in this file.

Trideo, Radio and Cinema
Simsense is great, but most of the time you don’t want to experience your news or your idle channel-surfing in full-spectrum sensory glory.

For this more casual form of viewing, there’s trideo—3DTV. The name its mom calls it when she’s angry is “digital high-definition three-dimensional holovision,” but most people just call it “trid.” Modern trids are hyper-real—it’s something of an experience to project a dinosaur action-sim, war movie, or sexy thriller right into your living room.

Though a huge variety of trid shows are broadcast via Matrix or satellite to suit your fancy, including pay-per-view, you can also program your own preferences and schedules and create your own personalized media feeds, from your favorite trids to the keyword-tagged news items—uncluttered by commercials, news, or other shows you don’t care about.

If you prefer the big-screen experience, you can also head down to the nearest multiplex to watch the latest trid blockbuster with all your friends. Trideo cinema isn’t as popular as simsense, but it does have its plus sides—after all, if you’re the square-jawed hero in the latest bad action-adventure sim, you can’t exactly take a break from the fight and start throwing popcorn at the bad guys, can you?

Radio is still alive and well in the 2070s. Most of it is corp-sponsored these days, but if you look around a little bit you can still find a few independent stations holding on to their small market niches and trying to fly under the corps’ radar. Like trideo, radio comes in free and pay varieties, broadcast by local transmitter, satellite, or Matrix. Most forms come with their own AR “sense-spam” to supplement the audio portion of the broadcast.

Finally, this section wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the pirates. Pirate trid and radio shows, broadcast using illegal mobile (and often highly sophisticated) tech, are a staple in most larger sprawls. Their content ranges from the near-professional (underground news organizations broadcasting the news the corps don’t want you to hear) to embarrassing (the rantings of bigots, fringers, and tinfoil-hat types with too much nuyen), but the fact remains that these dissenting voices—for however long they last before they’re caught and replaced with new ones—are a valuable part of the broadcast landscape. So too are the myriad of small broadcasters—after all, in 2070, anybody with a commlink can send out whatever content they want, albeit for a very short distance. Anywhere people gather in any numbers, the airwaves are clogged with live linkcasts of every media imaginable.

Advertising
Advertising is literally all over the place. Unless you live on a desert island (and it had better not be a corporate-owned desert island, or all bets are off ), you’re bombarded by advertising from the moment you wake up to your alarm-clock radio to the moment you go to sleep with the hymns of trid commercials dancing in your head.

Ads come in all forms, from simple billboards and print spots to animated graphics, holographic images, catchy jingles, commlinkpropagated word-of-mouth campaigns, targeted odors, and even subliminal cues and viral ads that replicate themselves to reach more markets. They show up on almost every surface that’ll hold still long enough to slap an ad on it, and some guerrilla marketing organizations even specialize in altering other companies’ ads to fit their own message—the Madison Avenue version of ganger graffiti wars. Memes (self-propagating units of culture) are prevalent, with Horizon being the acknowledged master of inserting these insidious bits of information into the public consciousness.

These days, targeted marketing has been raised to an art form. Because information about your every transaction is recorded, plugged into a relational database, data-mined within a millimeter of its life, and then shared with countless “affiliates,” advertisers quite possibly know more about your buying preferences than you do. Using RFID tags and the information broadcast by your commlink, they can tailor ads to your preferences on the fly and beam them to your PAN from all angles every time you walk into a store. Sure, this can get annoying (and usually does), but isn’t all the spam worth it for that one time when the clothing store points you at the perfect jacket you’ve been seeking for weeks—in your exact size, color preference, and price range?

Fashion
Seventies fashion isn’t just about clothing—it’s about your whole body and all the wiz things you can do to adorn it. Sure, clothes are one aspect: styles change radically from year to year, from the “natural look” of the early sixties to the tribal chic of a few years later, to the current trends in techno-inspired “wearable computing” couture, and getting caught in yesterday’s threads can be the kiss of death for fashion-conscious club hoppers. But that’s not where it ends.

For the 2070 fashionista, “the look” involves expressing yourself using that most intimate of canvases: the body itself. Other fashion trends include:
†¢ Body mods: Piercings and tattoos are practically required (the more exotic the better—animated nanotats are hotter than ever),
while more extreme alterations like scarification, skin weaving, whiskers, and implanted gems and metals are gaining steady popularity. Full-body dye jobs, hot in the previous decade, have dropped some in popularity, though a new subtrend based on using slowchanging bioreactive inks is developing a small but dedicated following.
†¢ Hairstyles: You name it, somebody’s done it. Hair in non-natural colors is so common that people don’t even look twice at it anymore, while alternative fiber implants, electrically-sensitive filaments that can change color with a thought, and head shaving (all the better to display your tattoos, implants, and scars) are all popular.
†¢ Advertising: It had to happen at some point—more and more people these days are renting out their bodies as walking billboards for whichever product will give them the best deal. It’s not at all uncommon to see ads tattooed (often in full animation) on people’s foreheads, chests or backs, and in the days of the ubiquitous RFID tag, most mod providers will knock a bit off the price if you’ll let them implant a tag advertising their wares along with your new look.

Of course, for the large percentage of the population who don’t care whether they’re “fashion-forward” and just want to be comfortable, the old standbys—jeans, athletic shoes, leather and synthleather jackets, sports-themed gear and so forth—are still as popular as ever. If you really don’t care (or you just want to blend in and keep your nice clothes from getting messy, gory, or otherwise trashed), there are always “flats”—buy them from a vending machine, wear them a few times, and recycle them for a new pair. Convenient, yes; fashionable—no way! On the other hand, flats mean never having to worry about getting out those
troublesome bloodstains.

Sex
The sex trade is alive and well—if you know where to look, you can find a like-minded group of adventurers willing to share your deepest desire with you, usually for a price. Law enforcement has all but given up trying to keep control over the more vanilla end of the sex industry: strip joints and brothels (catering to all sexual preferences and metatypes and ranging from skanky street hovels to five-star luxury pleasure palaces) are common in every town of any significant size. Specialty sex clubs, usually private and invitation-only, serve the needs of all manner of sexual proclivities and desires: gay, transgendered, fetish, bondage and discipline, exhibitionism, and countless others. A quick look in the local directory should find you most of what you’re looking for, though some of the more extreme clubs advertise by word of mouth only and you’ll need to know somebody to get in.

If you’re not quite ready for an “in-the-meat” relationship, there’s plenty of fun to be had in the virtual world. Cybersex in the Matrix is extremely popular, especially with those whose chances of the real thing are limited by appearance, personality, or cred balance. There’s also a thriving pornography industry, ranging from simple trideo broadcasts to full-sensory simsense experiences that rival (and for some, surpass) the real thing. Who’d settle for the boy or girl next door when they could have the latest novahot porn star as their own personal pleasure guide?

For the magically active guy or gal looking for fun, there’s always their own private club: the astral plane. Free of their meat bodies in a way that even hackers can’t match, magicians can enjoy a staggering array of pleasures by hooking up with one or more fellow astral travelers—whether from the next apartment or the next continent. There are even rumors of good times to be experienced with willing spirits …

The Dark Side
Turn any form of entertainment over and you’ll expose the cockroaches crawling around on its underbelly. The dark side of the entertainment industry is something not many people like to talk about, but everyone except the most hopelessly naïve know that it’s out there—and that you can find literally anything if you look hard enough.

This is the stuff the vice cops spend most of their time trying to stamp out, but its purveyors are smart and mobile and frighteningly well organized—and there’s no shortage of customers. Do you like simsense? BTL (“Better Than Life”) chips promise a sensory experience like no other, without those annoying governors to make sure you don’t fry out your mind and end up drooling on a street corner somewhere. Crave something even more intense? Try a “snuff ” BTL, where you can experience the moment of (usually violent) death from the comfort of your own home—if it doesn’t flatline you in the process. Just try not to think too hard about the poor slot who “volunteered” so your “entertainment experience” could be recorded.

Maybe you like your pleasures a little more in-your-face. If that’s your thing, most sprawls boast several private clubs where you can fight for cred against all kinds of opponents—other metahumans, critters (vanilla and Awakened), drones, you name it. Some go to first blood, but for those real adrenaline junkies out there, gladiator combat clubs featuring fights to the death are always looking for new meat. If you’d prefer not to fight, you can always make some cred by placing bets on the action. Just don’t try to stiff the house, since the organized crime syndicates that run these houses have no senses of humor.

Are you a lover, not a fighter? Even in the sexually open society of 2072, there are still plenty of forbidden pleasures out there. You like little kids, furry animals, or nonconsensual sex? Guaranteed, there’s a scumb—uh, that is, an entertainment provider—who can hook you up for a price. Want to share a night with Nadja Daviar or Winona Flying Horse? The real thing might be tough, but you won’t know the difference at your local bunraku parlor, where “meat puppets” are surgically altered and equipped with personafix chips until they’re better than real—at least for their customers’ purposes. And why stop there? Bunraku puppets are just rented for the night—slaves are forever.

The Way It Is
For the majority of people, race—or more accurately, metatype—doesn’t figure too much into their view of the world. After all, it’s been close to fifty years since UGE occurred and people started changing into orks and trolls, and almost sixty since elves and dwarfs arrived on the scene. The average citizen sees other metatypes every day: we work with them, run into them at the Stuffer Shack, and party with them at bars and clubs. Our kids attend school with them every day.

For the most part, the five basic metatypes have gotten used to being around each other and problems are far less prevalent than they used to be. That’s not to say that many people don’t still prefer the company of their own kind (witness meta-heavy nations like Tir Tairngire or the Black Forest Troll Kingdom for extreme examples), but this is based as much on shared experience as it is on any overt racism.

Still, it would be naïve to say that racism doesn’t exist. If you don’t believe it, try being a troll and applying for a job as a corporate management trainee. Many workplaces still discriminate (particularly against orks and trolls) and other business establishments maintain subtle or not-so-subtle biases for or against particular metatypes. It doesn’t just benefit humans, either—a human or elf walking alone into the Big Rhino (a notorious ork restaurant in Seattle) will find this out in a hurry.

Often it’s the truly unusual who are singled out for discrimination: for example, even nearly ten years after the return of Halley’s
Comet brought SURGE and a new wave of changes, the so-called changelings” still have a hard time finding acceptance within mainstream society, while the less common regional metavariants (such as menehunes, fomori, and night ones) encounter more prejudice than their more generic “vanilla” varieties.

Pro-Meta Activist Groups
In the face of such discrimination, it’s only natural that metahumans would band together and form organizations to try to gain advantages for their group—whether they be political power, more resources or jobs, or simply the chance for their voices to be heard in government policymaking. Some of these organizations, like the Mothers of Metahumans (MOM), number all metatypes (even humans) among their membership, and their efforts aim to benefit everyone’s needs regardless of type. Others, like the Ork Rights Committee (ORC), the Ghoul Liberation League and the dwarven Stonecutters’ Guild, focus their efforts more tightly and seek to advance the cause of their own particular people. In any case, these organizations employ many tactics to get their points across: for example, ORC and MOM focus more on street-level grassroots activism (along with a healthy dose of civil disobedience) in addition to political lobbying, while the Stonecutters use their greater economic clout to advance the agendas of dwarfs. Regardless of the methods they use, there’s no arguing that the metarights groups have made—and are continuing to make—great strides toward leveling the playing field for metahumans.

Racist Organizations
Of course, in any society there are always people who aren’t content to just live and let live—they’re convinced that metatypes other than their own are somehow less than people, that they’re stealing the jobs and benefits that rightfully belong to their people, that they’re destroying the moral fiber of society, and so forth. Some of these people have such big problems with metatypes other than their own that they band together with like-minded individuals and form their own organizations—sort of the dark side of the generally nonviolent meta-activist coalitions.

Groups like the sheet-clad Humanis Policlub and the pro-troll and –ork, anti-everybody-else Sons of Sauron range in aim from glorified political action committees to terrorist organizations bent on nothing short of the destruction (or at least the subjugation) of anybody who doesn’t share their metatype. Sometimes, as is the case with Humanis, the same organization can operate at both ends of the spectrum, presenting itself as a benign pro-human social club while working behind the scenes for more nefarious purposes. The depressing thing about these organizations is that while their memberships aren’t as strong as they used to be, they’re still quite adept at manipulating the emotions of the young, the down-and-out, and the failures of society. Since none of these types is in short supply, the racist policlubs are guaranteed a steady stream of new members.