Tír na nÓg

by David R. Henry (dhenry@plains.nodak.edu)

"The land of faery,
 Where nobody gets old
 and godly and grave,
 Where nobody gets old
 and crafty and wise..."

	--Yeats, "The Land of Heart's Desire"

That poem snippet, on the back, is probably the most revealing statement on Tir na nOg policies and belief that one can find in the whole book. This is also the first Shadowrun book that carries the warning that “this magical system can potentially destabalize a Shadowrun game unless handled with care.” Tir na nOg is a fascinating book on its own limited terms, but not nearly as useful for figuring out what those “damn Elves” are up to as the Tir Tairngire sourcebook. It was written by Carl Sargent and Mark Gascoigne, the folks responsible for all of FASA’s Shadow-Brit stuff to date.

Featuring the usual FASA top-notch graphic work (including artwork by Charles Vess!), Tir na nOg is in the format familiar to long-time SR readers: it’s supposedly a datafile downloaded to the Shadowland server, with typical amusing sidebars from assorted fruitcakes and deep insights from aliased shadowfolk. Like the Tir Tairngire book, most of the “top-level” information comes from one slightly biased source. Unlike Spes, though, here we have an actual name and position to put to our dissident Elf: Niall O’Connor of Meath, member of the powerful Tuatha de Danaan O’Connor clan, initiated magician of the Ways and Paths, and kinsman to Liam O’Connor, founder of the Tir.

The book follows the typical format: vacation info, historic overview, economics, political structure, and so forth. There’s the usual section on new rules at the back to let the GM use some of the stuff that’s given there (Good news, chrome-monsters! The Danaan have come up with an even more efficient way to geek people than the smartlink – The morph-seeking rifle!). Most of the rulespace is given to detail the largest section of the book, the new magic of the Ways and Paths.

The philosophy of the Ways and Paths takes up the central section of the book (Niall is, after all, an initiated member of it). What it is, in essence, is a slight bastardization of near-Celtic myth and belief, streamlined to fit the Shadowrun magic rules – but just barely. The hints given in the Tir Tairngire sourcebook were right; Followers of the Way are, for all practical purposes, both mages and shamans, with a healthy dose of the Druidical rules from the Grimoire II added in.

What allows them to act so is their unusual, Celtic-based belief system, which has a few kinks of its own. How twisted are the Danaan? Well, at one point in the dissertation of Danaan philosophy, we’re treated to the unusual sight of both Ehran the Scribe AND Dunkelzahn snorting in protest. The Danaan apparently don’t have a lot of friends in the shadowcircles behind the scenes in the SR world. Of interest to some GMs is that FASA approves the four “basic” Ways and Paths for player-character generation, reserving the Way of the King for the NPC Elves we all know and loath. :-). They point out that the unbalanced abilites of a Follower magician PC are more than balanced, in a proper campaign, with the fact that any runner Follower of the Way is a renegade from the Tir; and that means even more powerful Followers are on their trail. In a land where even museums operate in the shadows, and you can be arrested for reciting Yeats out of season, using your magical abilities for non-Danaan approved reasons carries an easy-to-obtain death sentence. And those morph-seeking rifles don’t miss by definition.

As a whole, I give Tir na nOg a B+. It’s not nearly as useful as “Harlequin” or “Tir Tairngire” in finding out “what’s really going on;” in fact, there’s almost none of FASA’s usual trick of hiding secrets in plain sight in the source material here. What there is, however, is a great sourcebook for one country, and the Ways and Paths are a fine example for gamemasters looking for guidelines for basing magical rule changes in SR on other cultures and religions.

Basically, unless you’re planning on shifting the campaign to Ireland for a while, you can safely miss this sourcebook. The Followers there, however, will have enough firepower (both physical and mana-based) to handle nearly anything your players can throw at them. Remember this bit of Irish legend turned into SR reality: Saint Patrick drove all the serpents out of Eire. And there are no Dragons in Tir na nOg at all.

The official review now being over, I’ll focus on some SR-world specific stuff, to whet the imaginations of GMs who don’t have it.

HISTORY

Liam O’Connor was a spikebaby Elf, who was a member of the IRA and arranged things behind the scenes to eventually push for an Elven country. Of note is the fact that, with him, the IRA was using magic to attack the Brits almost a year before the recognized Day of Awakening, when the dragon was sighted over Japan.

An interesting shadowtheory is advanced that the VITAS plague was engineered to wipe out a specific genotype before the Awakening happened and triggered an unknown metahuman type. This chilling suggestion works in well with the claim in the Tairngire book that VITAS was created in “Elven” labs.

Liam married an unknown lesser Elven noblewoman, who took over his “moral authority” as heir when he vanished in the ’40s. This woman, of course, is Lady Brane Deigh, now Queen of the Seelie Court. The Seelie Court isn’t the legal authority in the Tir. There’s a parliament and senate for that. Instead, the Court acts as like the moral and philosophical authority for the Ways and Paths. Since all of the ruling Danaan (Elven) families follow the Ways and Paths, and since only the Danaan are in power politically, and since she is in control of the Arcana of the Ways, she’s not really in political power… but there’s no authority above her to say no.

PLACES AND THINGS

The Danaan have a serious hate on for toxics of any sort. Apparently, they even have a global strike team who’ll pinpoint toxic infestations and offer their services to the local government as long as they get the honor of fighting the toxic at the front ranks. Most governments, of course, go “You want to fight in the front ranks? Hey, go on ahead!” This could be an interesting scenario for a GM.

To keep up with the current Irish focus on arts and literature, the Tir is also an extrememly-arts conscious place. In fact, you can be arrested for misinterpreting favorite pieces of Irish artistic folklore; grumble too loudly about James Joyce, and you could be spending over a week in jail. There’s also laws prohibiting bad art from being produced, meaning that if the authorities find no artistic merit in your work, you can be sentenced at the national level for it.

STUFF

The whole rules for the Ways and Paths are a bit long to go into, now; if there’s interest, I can post them up here for all to see and wonder at.

There’s magic all over the place in the Tir; even the highways are foci! There’s also more ley lines (cairn lines in the Tir), and the daoineann draoidheil, which are magical storms created by having the background count so high the whole mana weave just erupts. The manastorms also have the only typo in the book: references are made to finding the Force of the storms on the map that shows where they are, but no Forces are to be found on the map. Maybe someone should contact the DLoH and ask for this classified information.

Stats are given on the Veil which surrounds the Tir. Basically, it’s a magical wall of Chaotic World, varying from Force 4 - 9 per Turn, which can not be dispelled, and is 600 meters thick and 20 meters tall. It has the unusual effect that any random movement caused by the spell will never be towards the Tir.

Yes, the Lady Brane Deigh can summon the Wild Hunt.

As a good sign that even the Elves don’t know everything that’s going on, those secretive Welsh Druids from the London Sourcebook are up to their old tricks again, which means that no-one knows what they’re up to. These aren’t the hermetic Druids that rule England and have the special rules in the Grimoire, but the shamanic druids that have somehow managed to befriend the Welsh Dragons, the County of Snowdonia, and the local rulers simultaneously. Their counterparts in the Tir are capable of plugging into the same cairn lines as the Followers of the Ways, which really annoys the Danaan, because according to their cosmology nobody else should be able to do that. Local shamanic druids in the Tir tend to be non-Elvish, and follow normal shamanic rules, and we get five new, Tir na nOg only totems: Boar, Bull, Horse, Serpent, and Stag.

The standard LTG Matrix security level in the Tir is a _RED-_5! Gack!

The only big name multinationals in the Tir are Renraku and Gaeatronics. Seems it’s national law in the Tir that there are no private security forces. Therefore, if a corp wants to have security for their facilities, they have to ask nicely for Tir government troops to guard it for them. You can imagine the love and trust that folks such as Aztechnology have for an arrangement like this. Ares had a toehold, but the entire corporation was banned from the Tir when a passerby caught sight of a visiting samurai within the Ares compound.

A new type of focus, the Ogam Stone (lesser and greater) is introduced, and a new form of Nature Spirit, the Spirits of the Great Fiery Firmament are also debuted. There’s also the Armor of Cu Chulainn, a scary item made more so when you realize that it’s mass-produced. The Armor gives some idea how those funky armors talked about in Snowdonia and Tir Tairngire might work.

Once again, a fun book for those who enjoy Celtic myths and stories; a great book for adventures set in Ireland; not at all needed if you never plan on going there.