oh snap i done got served
anyway
Spoilers for current (scum swarm tier) part of campaign - I have a plan for our current situation:
[spoiler]First off, Tom should contact his new mercurial buddies to get their support "Hey I stopped that snuff XP operation as a favor to the humans and they get angry at me? Typical human behavior! Blame the uplift! He can't possibly judge humans, even if they are kiddie killing psychos! - burn some rep with them to get their support.
Tom will also be our spokes uplift - our cover story is simple. NO ONE ELSE TALKS ABOUT THE INCIDENT. We're rebooting Release the Kraken as an anarchist XP show and after seeing the abuses of Somatek we wanted to investigate to see if the scum swarm had any dark secrets. We found one - the snuff XP production - and we decided to go undercover to report on it. However, the meet went bad and instead of letting them flee we decided that we wouldn't let them get away so they could commit their crimes again somewhere. This led to a rushed assault and Drew's character flubbed his exit out of the habitat but we had to stop them or they'd be free to kill again. Good intentions and slightly flawed execution.
Plus if they press us, we can shift blame onto the militia - they were the ones that let this happen in the first place - we stopped it. The people of the scum swarm should be OUTRAGED that such an atrocity was going on under the watch of Sing and company. If they had DONE THEIR JOBS this would never have happened. They just want to blame us so no one will criticize them. That's obviously going to piss them off so that's a last resort but some of our allies can spread that rumor in a way that maintains plausible deniability. This is absolutely key so Sing doesn't decide to burn us. If he thinks the swarm's turned against him authentically then he'll be pressed to make amends and what better way to do that than help us?
We can also offer to instantiate the poor child and pay for therapy/finding him/her a new family - Tom's cash reservoir is vital. If the swarm needs Khalid's blood money, they'll want our money too.
We can do a whole new Release the Kraken about the SNAFU and of course subtly show our POV. "Crime and Punishment on the Swarm."
I'll use my allies and Jason will use his patron for support - obviously his patron will have more pull in an anarchist swarm than he did on Luna. These are both 30 point advantages neither of us have used in a while.
Can Aaron get sympathy for the fact that the LLA put out a deletion order on all SAIRACS? 'They're killing my people off!"etc. Probably not, but worth asking.
Maxwell could volunteer all his Moxie to do grunt work for the militia or whoever as repayment, perhaps.
the key to PR is to take responsibility for the act and then take control of the narrative "We had good intentions but mistakes were made. We'll fix them and we're sorry that our actions scared anyone. But we aren't the real story, the Snuff XP producers are and we need to talk about how to make sure this never happens again. We saw quite a few coverups and crimes in hypercorp territory but the scum swarms aren't immune to that." etc.
ALSO
I have a plan to deal with the Triads. Setting up a conventional crime niche will inevitably lead to conflict on the swarm. But if you think of the Triads and the local gang as competing business enterprises then you have to analyze each organization's assets and unique competitive advantages. The local gang has a firm niche, soldiers on board and the tolerance of the swarm.
But the Triad has something the local gang could never compete with - smuggling channels throughout hypercorp territory. This sounds like a useless asset when you look at the customers of the swarm - anarchists, idealists, etc.
But what do they all want? Authenticity. They strive for a life that is authentic - free from the hypercorp lifestyle and mindset. So they dedicate their lives to being authentic - extreme morph, drug use, free of laws, etc. But what's more authentic than that?
The Struggle. Against hypercorp tyranny, against the evils of restrictive society. Which is easy to say when you live on a free scum swarm but harder to enact without getting yourself killed by Oversight. I would imagine even most of the anarchists aren't bloodthirsty terrorists so the bar would be low for the Struggle - and what's more romantic/idealistic than living among the clanking masses of Luna and learning about their lives - perhaps creating citizen journalist XPs/blogs/whatever about it or helping them out?
In other words, I propose the Triads set up a clandestine poverty tourism operation. At first, live among the clanking masses for a week to gain rep among your autonomist buddies on the swarm! You're more authentic than they are! You've seen how bad it gets and know what's like 'on the ground'.
Then as that get passe, you offer more extreme options - offer them a chance to go on a raid with the Steel Liberators or free some infugees from a hypercorp cold storage unit! Of course, in reality, these are overhyped minor operations - the 'raid' means sneaking up on a biomorph hyperelite and beating him up or vandalizing a maglev train - or elaborate mockup operations where the 'security teams' are just drones with nonlethal rounds - depends on the budget of the customer - the idea is to get them back safely to the swarm so they tell their friends. Word of mouth is vital.
We get Fayun's fork as the local contact - she gets a slice and favor with the Triads.
In order to kickstart it, I create a BRILLIANT and HAUNTING simulspace narrative about a young and sheltered scum named Akaja - she is nice and idealistic. But when she dreams, she finds herself as a helpless victim among the clanking masses on Luna. However, when a riot breaks out in Nectar, she saves a child hyperelite and convinces several Steel Liberators not to kill the child, she feels more fulfilled than she has in her life. Of course she has to be saved by a heroic team of outsiders who tell her that the Struggle is a lifelong conflict - but seeing it firsthand is the first step to making the universe a better place.
This simulspace is engineered to make people want to see the reality of Nectar, etc. and then also fight against Akaja's meme by hijacking it - she isn't a villain, she's a nice and naive young girl.
This gets Fayun 1 off Thad's back, fights against Akaja and hooks up the Triads with a new criminal niche. This operation also provides a side benefit - they could smuggle people into the swarm for gangsters on the run, looking to lay low - the contact can make cut-outs for gangsters to buy when they want a new clean identity with a work history on the swarm. This way, the operation never has to come into conflict with the local gang - they can't compete in the markets that the Triad is working.[/spoiler]
