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Carl Sargent and Marc Gascoigne together are the authors of the London Sourcebook (1991), Tir na nOg (1993), Celtic Double-Cross (1993), and three Shadowrun novels: Streets of Blood (1992), Nosferatu (1994), and Black Madonna (1996). On his own, Carl Sargent is also the author of Imago (1992) and Paranormal Animals of Europe (1993). Both men live in Britain, and given their publishing history could be considered FASA's designated regional experts on Europe.
The original Jack the Ripper stalked the Whitechapel district of London's East End in 1888. At least five grisly murders were attributed to him:
- Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols, 31 Aug 1888
- Annie Chapman, 8 Sep 1888
- Elizabeth Stride, 30 Sep 1888
- Catherine Eddowes, 30 Sep 1888
- Mary Jane (Marie Jeanette) Kelly, 9 Nov 1888
In Streets of Blood, the new Jack the Ripper is repeating the original sequence, killing women of the same names in roughly the same geographical area. The serial killings were carefully orchestrated by the Ripper's puppet-masters; one of the women was enticed to change her name, another was encouraged to move into the proper area. The timing is different, in that the murders all occur in the space of three weeks in November:
- Polly Nichols, 8 Nov 2054
- Annie Chapman, 15 Nov 2054
- Elizabeth Stride (Jane Dews), 21 Nov 2054
- Catherine Eddowes, 22 Nov 2054
- Mary Jane Kelly (Typhoid Mary), 29 Nov 2054
Francesca, Geraint, and Serrin knew each other 7 years ago (p.43). Geraint alludes to events that took place in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Someone close to them died there (p.57). Serrin remembers "holding a terrified young woman [Francesca] outside a restaurant full of corpses in San Francisco." (p.11). The details of this shared history are never revealed.
Geraint has limited magical ability. He is able to make fairly accurate predictions using a Tarot deck. Magic in the Shadows makes divination a metamagical power, so Geraint's ability doesn't fit neatly into SR3. Under SR2, Foretelling was a Detection spell (Awakenings, p.135), which wouldn't have required him to be an initiate. Geraint never demonstrates any other magical ability -- sorcery, conjuring, or astral perception -- though he does purchase and bond a Power Focus.
Geraint's interpretations of different Tarot cards match the ones in my own reference books (unsurprising given Carl Sargent's background in parapsychology).
p.5: "More than a century ago, the artist had given the Magician card the distinctly pointed ears of an elf; what had she and the designer of the Thoth Tarot known of the coming of the Sixth Age of the world? Had they foreseen the birth of elves and the other new races of metahumanity?"
p.6: Francesca uses a Fuchi 6 cyberdeck. MPCP 8, Hardening 4. A bit pricey at ¥334,500. The workhorse of the professional decker.
p.11: The news is reporting the first of the Ripper's murders, but to Serrin it's just background noise.
p.12: "The Crescent Hotel was neither real class nor the fake kind for Americans and Japanese with more money than true discernment; it was simply a reasonably good place to stay." Serrin's hotel is also described in the London Sourcebook (p.69).
p.16: "Striding through the hotel lobby, [Serrin] hailed one of the voluminous black trollcabs, London's finest, yanking open the passenger door as the grinning driver screeched the vehicle to a halt." Apparently, one of the major London cab companies employs trolls as drivers. I imagine that would make negotiations over cab fares a lot less complicated.
p.17: Several prominent nobles are mentioned in Geraint's conversation. Rhiannon Glendower (Countess of Harlech), Francesca Hamilton (Duchess of Cambridge), Hamish Campbell (Earl of Dundee). They are described in more detail in the London Sourcebook (p.31-32)
p.20: Francesca is a regular at the Lounging Lizard (London, p.82), an upscale private club. The barman's name is Rutger.
p.22: Francesca encounters a Jack the Ripper construct in the matrix and follows it to Transys Neuronet. This Jack the Ripper has no relationship to the decker of the same name featured in the Lorelei Shannon short story, Whitechapel Rose (Into the Shadows).
Transys Neuronet is profiled in the London Sourcebook (p.47). They also feature prominently in the published adventure, Imago.
p.23: "HKB's last set of global estimations show that we [the U.K.] own seventeen percent of your [UCAS] gross domestic product. Almost as much as the Japanese, in fact." Great Britain is heavily invested in American business.
HKB (Hildebrandt-Kleinfort-Bernal) is profiled in the London Sourcebook (p.46).
p.32: Rani and her brother Imran both goblinized into orks at the same time. Because of this they are particularly close. This also makes Rani's disillusionment with her brother that much more bitter.
p.34: Geraint is a regular patron of Serena's (London p.72). "More than a few elven nobles counted Serena as a good friend, and it was probably their influence that allowed her to operate beyond the rigid legal constraints of the Lord Protector's Office. She didn't always need to fill out the quadruplicate paperwork or obtain the full array of permits most registered talismongers needed in Britain's highly regulated society."
p.36: According to Serena, Geraint is an adept (SR2 term for an Aspected Magician) with the ability to foretell the future. She disapproves of his cyberware and drug use because they interfere with his magical ability.
Both Serrin (p.46) and Francesca (p.49) are hired to make runs on Optical Neotech. This isn't directly relevant to the Ripper killings, but is circumstantial evidence that they have both been hired by the same corp.
p.51: Francesca confronts the Jack the Ripper construct again, and is dumped. It is never clear whether this is a straightforward human decker, a decker (possibly the Ripper himself) using stolen personafix-skillsoft technology, or some version of Semi-autonomous Knowbot sculpted to resemble the Ripper. In any case, being a Transys Neuronet black project means the construct would almost certainly outclass Francesca's Fuchi-6 cyberdeck.
p.53: Geraint discusses the Nobles in Business conference. "An event like this brings together two groups of people who need each other. On the one hand, a selection of British upper-crust, a bit short on cash, but who badly want to believe they can succeed in business... On the other hand you have greedy foreign fat cats who have money and power, but who can't buy that elusive quality, style... Both sides are doomed to disappointment, obviously. The nobles usually have as much business acumen as a lobotomized troll, and the greed merchants wouldn't know style if it sandbagged them."
p.67: The disadvantages of having a legal identity to protect -- Geraint can't go home with visible injuries or unlicensed weapons without alarming the security service in his own apartment building, who are legally obligated to report such things to the authorities.
p.69: "[Geraint] drew a wad of bills from his jacket. Thank the Bank of England for stubbornly refusing to accept that credsticks were the only way to do business these days. He flung the paper into the air, then watched as it fluttered down like a ticker tape parade of fifties and hundreds." The Bank of England still issues hard currency coins and bills in addition to electronic credit. Denominations for paper notes are £5, £10, £20, £50, £100, £200, and £500 (London, p.9).
p.80: Mohinder offers Rani £1300 for an Ares Predator 2. In Seattle, the street price would be ¥275 (¥550 price tag, street index 0.5). Exchange rate is ¥2 for £5, and firearms have a 200% mark-up (London p.141), so the street price for the Predator 2 should be £1375. Not a bad offer, considering.
p.92: Rani meets Mohinder at the Toadslab (London, p.88).
p.97: A vicious East End street gang is White Lightning. They habitually ambush metahumans, particularly orks. "Anti-metahuman, pure racist, neo-Nazi street scum." The London Sourcebook (p.50) puts the White Lightning gang in Birmingham, though. Perhaps they migrated.
The Undercity isn't mentioned in the London Sourcebook. A number of factions live in the old Civil Defense Underground, abandoned tube stations, mail tunnels, catacombs, sewers, and other structures beneath the East End. Some of them:
- Orks: Smeng and his people, scavengers and traders
- Dwarves: salvage crews strip old copper cables, etc.
- Ratskinks: street kids and runaways, leader is named King Rat
- Trolls: skinny and malnourished, relatively weak
- Blindboys: muggers and thieves, prowl topside and hide underground
p.117: Smith and Jones are manipulating Francesca, Geraint, and Serrin toward an investigation of the murders. In a debate over the clues they leave, one says "We could take the kidney option." This is a reference to the original Jack the Ripper, who mailed the kidney of one of his victims to the police.
p.164: "It was a well-known fact of life that the Sixth Age hadn't changed noble prejudices in Britain. When the first wave of unexplained genetic expressions brought elves and dwarfs, the first of the metahumans, into the world, noble families got their fair share of pretty elven children but only the rare ugly little dwarf. Registered stillbirths and neo-natal deaths among dwarf babies had been astonishingly high among society's upper echelons. Then, when the transformations brought orks and trolls into their midst, British nobles took steps to make sure they stayed elegant, handsome, and socially acceptable. Most of the unfashionably ugly creatures proved to have alarmingly short lifespans, for having an ork in the family just wasn't done."
p.184: Serrin says, "I seem to remember some crazy Jack stories in Seattle two, three years ago." It's a reference to the published adventure Dreamchipper (James Long, 1989). Global Technologies in Seattle was developing hybrid personafix-simsense and skillsoft technology (mentioned in New Seattle, p.85). The prototypes were stolen by shadowrunners employed by a rival corp, Hollywood Simsense Entertainment (HSE). One of the chips, modelled after Jack the Ripper, influenced the street samurai who slotted it to commit at least nine murders in Redmond (Dreamchipper, p.62).
p.199: Geraint and Francesca are concerned about matching their matrix icons to the Transys Neuronet system sculpture. By Virtual Realities 2.0 rules (p.69), running a sculpted system with an icon that doesn't fit the host metaphor imposes a +2 to target numbers for all system operations.
p.227: Transys Neuronet owns Hollywood Simsense Entertainment, from whom they acquired stolen copies of Global's Jack the Ripper program.
p.258: The new Jack the Ripper is a clone of Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward Windsor, who was Duke of Clarence in 1888. The press accepts this as proof that the original Duke of Clarence was also the original Ripper, though this is almost certainly not the case. However, the allegation itself is sufficient to discredit the Gordon-Windsor line (rivals of the current royal family, Windsor-Hanover), strengthening the current king's claim to the throne. At the same time, the scandal indirectly affects nobility in general, increasing corporate influence in government. Machiavellian, isn't it?
p.265: "We had hoped to break into the corp last year after they lost that wacko star decker of theirs in the Edinburgh business. Quicksilver, wasn't it?" This is a reference to Imago.
p.266: "Cloning from early fetal cell tissue isn't too hard but trying to clone from adult DNA samples, well, that's another flaskful of enzymes entirely ..."
p.267: "Clones developed from adult DNA samples turned out to be mentally unstable, hopelessly so. Seems there's something in the morphological fields of the brain during development that doesn't go quite right. The forced growth and development of a complete clone imposes too much strain on those delicate neural circuits."
p.272: "No one has any idea who the original Ripper was, well, not really. We cloned him because we wanted a Royal involvement ... He was the one Royal possible in the frame. The clone was conditioned to become a Ripper, sir. A whole year of dream conditioning, psychodrama, subliminals, neuroactives, sadistic surrogates, you name it, we pumped him full of it. We patterned his innate psychosis, or rather, our surrogates at Cambridge did. Stuffed him full of the original scenes, stories, and rumors."
Cloning duplicates the physical body based on the DNA template -- it doesn't replicate memory, personality, or any ephemeral characteristics. Furthermore, the Transys cloning process produces mental instabilities and brain damage. Using the stolen Global personafix-skillsoft simsense technology and other techniques to recreate the Jack the Ripper personality circumvents both problems.
Aftermath: supposedly, Transys Neuronet folded under the pressure of the Jack the Ripper scandal, only to be bought out piecemeal by financial giant Hildebrandt-Kleinfort-Bernal (HKB). But according to Blood in the Boardroom (p.44) and Corp Download (p.10), Transys is currently an Extraterritorial (AA) Megacorp. Transys Neuronet is an independant megacorp, though HKB is a major investor with enough clout to name its president/CEO (Liam Riley). The Great Dragon Celedyr owns enough Transys stock to keep HKB from absorbing the corp.
Serrin and Geraint re-appear in Nosferatu and Black Madonna.
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