I have been doing this for twelve years now. Writing against RPG-a-Day. Against. Again and again. Every day, every August, since 2015. Most often on my own, sometimes collaboratively with others here on d6ideas or across different (German) blogs.
2015: ArtifactaDay
2016: Loot-a-Day
2017: Rival-a-Day
2018: Ad-Blog
2019: RPG+Ally+a+Day
2020: Not One Step Back
2021: Veteran-a-Day
2022: The Thousand Titles of the Cat Emperor
2023: Sommerverdichtung (German only)
2024: CampaignConceptaDay
2025: A-Piece-of-History-Every-Day / Calculating World(s)history
And now? The German next door neighbours at Kritischer Fehlschlag have issued the rallying cry “Crime Scene” (German).
But here? After twelve years of doing this dirty work? There is but one possible answer:
The Dirty Dozen.
Interpreted via the lense of the so called Dirty Dozen of persistent organic pollutants such as DDT and dioxins (although an earlier thought was the likewise so called Dirty Dozen of biological weapons and this might still colour some of the entries).
One-hundred-and-fourty-four poisons and pollutants (in the widest, freest sense). Twelve each for twelve systems. Thirty-one days. Twelve years. Against RPG-a-Day. Again.
Shadowrun is not in a good place for me, when it comes to this topic. The background is full of pollution. All manners of it, everywhere, and some of it extremely high profile. And yet, exactly that leaves me wondering what to do with it. If this is not to turn into me just quoting/ paraphrasing from books (old or new or inbetween), then what is even there for me to do? What to write about? (What to add?) I do not know. So the following is (probably) to turn out pretty whelming, if not under.
- Telesma plague – here it is not so much about the pollutant, any number of those will do, but their effect, their destruction of the hard to grasp nature of a thing, a rock, a branch, a feather, a bone, a conch shell, that would have made it a ideal base for enchantment were it not for coming into contact with the poison
- Permanent background count – this is of course both at one, an (astral) environment that has been polluted, but also a (magical) pollutant itself, a potential chain reaction waiting to happen, a potential poison without a substance to it
- BTL code fragements – (if I am writing about Shadowrun – and about poison – then yes, the likelihood was high I would somehow worm a BTL into it) BTLs as drugs can of course be easily read as poisons, however for them to become environmental poisons, whole networks and systems would need to be polluted, every download, each program potentiall hiding, no, simply containing code that can cause addiction or damage susceptible brains, not as malicious code, not the product of an attack, but as environmental damage so often is caused by neglect, disinterest, a lack of care, a wrongly set parameter in the SimSense configuration, a mood track not properly scrubbed from a source recording, a sample that has not been thoroughly scanned
- Toxic spirit industry – environmanetal pollution, toxic spirits, done, right? Well, perhaps one thing to consider on top – the Sixth World has a market for poison, there is a demand, so someone is going to supply, a perversion of nature yet further perverted, from finding purpose within itself, to one more link in the value chain
- Awakened waste – nonviable specimens from biotech processing, but possessed of a magical spark, living pollution
- Immune suppressants – mass implants mean mass immune suppression mean mass presence in the environment
- Proprietary foodstuffs – one more means of engineering brand loyalty, food that is lacking something (only properly digested and metabolized in specific combinations), that is addictive, that marks the consumer, and that gets out into the environment and into foodchains it was not intened for with all of its
deficienciesfeaturest - Reforestation – whether in Amazonia or in other newly (re-)awakened jungles, uncontrolled growth is potentially just another type of destruction
- Deforestation – the more obvious other side of the coin be it in Yucatan or in other megacorp operations
- Extraterritoriality – is of course not a pollutant (unless you want to go out on a philosophical limb) and no polluted environment either, it bears remembering though that it indeed is a result of (the threat of) pollution, of allowing corporations to safeguard dangerous waste (of all things), looking at it from that angle, pollution must be something reassuring to megacorporations, after all, there is precedence of having something dangerous at hand will get you the concessions you want – nice land do you have here, be a shame if there were to be a toxic spill on it
- Chemical weapons – the Sixth World is chock full of chemical weapons, NarcoJect and NeuroStun, Green Ring, Gammascopolamine, the catalogues, the arsenals, the backrooms, the stuff is everywhere, it gets used everywhere, and thus, it stands to reason, it is in the environment everywhere
- Nanites – just the next step in this tech escalation