The New Old World Order

Used to be, the law came from governments. Presidents, parliaments, kings, pick your poison. They made the rules, and corps had to play along. That’s ancient history now. We’ve gone full circle. The strongest write the rules, and surprise: it’s not the governments anymore.

What changed? One word: extraterritoriality. That’s the golden ticket. Means a corp’s land, buildings, and personnel fall under their law, not the local government’s. Once the corps got that, they stopped pretending to be citizens. Now they’re kingdoms with logos.

The Corporate Court – Wolves Policing Wolves

Eventually, the megacorps figured out that corporate wars were bad for quarterly reports. So they built themselves a referee: the Corporate Court. Thirteen judges, drawn from the top players in the game to settle disputes and keep the megas from glassing each other’s HQs over coffee contracts.

The Court also decides who gets ranked. It starts with the nobodies, Unrated Corps, small-timers who don’t matter unless they explode. Then there’s A-rated corps, they’ve got presence in multiple countries, but they’re still climbing. AA corps get extraterritoriality and that’s when you know you’ve made it.

At the top? The AAA class, aka The Big Ten. These are the corps with real teeth. They don’t just play the game…they are the game.

The Big Ten – Gods in Business Suits

Here’s the roster:
Ares, Aztechnology, Evo, Horizon, Mitsuhama, NeoNET, Renraku, Saeder-Krupp, Shiawase, Wuxing. Slot in here for a deep dive on the Big Ten.

You will work for one of them eventually — directly or through a dozen shell corps. They’ll either pay to keep you in BTLs and bullets, or they’ll screw you over once they don’t need you anymore. Probably both.

They don’t just sell products. They control industries. Each of them has subsidiaries bigger than entire national economies. They own media, banks, hospitals, tech, food, housing, private armies, you name it. Odds are, they own a piece of your SIN, your meds, and the food in your fridge.

Their turf is everywhere. Unless you’re hiding in the Mariana Trench, you’re never more than 100 klicks from corp-owned land. And even if you are in the Mariana Trench, chances are Mitsuhama’s probably drilling beneath you.

Welcome to the Machine

Wage slaves sell their lives to these corps in exchange for a flicker of stability. Retirement plans, cafeteria sushi, and a cubicle the size of a coffin. They call it job security. We call it a cage.

Shadowrunners? We dance on the outside. Corps hire us to break their own rules, screw their competitors, or clean up messes they can’t afford to be seen touching. And when it goes bad, we disappear, and they pretend they’ve never heard of us.

But make no mistake: even we play by their rules. Because they’ve got the money. And money writes the laws.

So if you’re gonna run, run smart. Know who you’re really working for. Because in this world, every job is a corporate job. Whether they put their name on the check or not.

~Grimshot, Fixer (semiretired)