As for Seraphim, the Tamanous file was a proposal I made for Loose Alliances that got rejected. It didn't stop me from finishing it (almost, since it lacks comments signatures). In Tamanous' case, LA covered it with another author. That's where you see how different can a coverage be depending on the author. The chapter finally published it a novel, suggesting a lot of things on Tamanous, but ultimately giving even less hard facts than the few lines there was in Man & Machine. My file is a much more cold approach, giving lots of details on business and people involved. Obviously, as a matter of fact, I prefer the way I did it. It's probably further from the street level now prevailing in Shadowrun. It's more or less true, depending on how you imagine crime syndicate leaders : like multinational corporations executive or rather like glorified thugs.

The most inspiring thing about Tamanous is the name. I think the first Shadowrun author who used that name referred to the Black Tamanous cannibel society that existed within the Kwakiutl tribe in the late XIXth century. In spite of such precise reference, Man & Machine stated the organization origin was still a mystery. According to Native American Nations, the kwakiutl population was about 40'000 in the early 2050ies, a repressed minority in the Tsimshian state. If Tamanous organization origin was there, the trail would have been easily followed. So, like the Seraphim, I played with all the possible alternatives for the name's origin.

Criminal organizations rarely choose their names nowadays. Media or law enforcement agencies choose for them. Mafia families actually keep the name of the boss in charge when the police first identified him. It may lead people to believe sons inherit the control of a Mafia family from their fathers, which is not the case. The current head of the Gambino family in New York would be Nicholas Corozzo. Thomas Gambino, the son of Carlo Gambino, is "only" a caporegime. The same way, there also was a lot of debate on the name al-Qaida and if who used it first.

Another key in my take on Tamanous, is the organization is not controled by vampires or ghouls like it is often suggeste. I put Daniel Kahn to keep a bit of mystery (if a GM wants) but, the way I see it, Tamanous organlegging business is first about something completely human: greed.

Kahn character is not a success. To let the door opened to vampiric conspiracy theories, I realized it looks a lot like that's actually what I had in mind. Theway I saw it, Kahn is just like Kyle Hayden: a human with a quite particular disease, keeping on doing business. Their competitors and allies don't age much more than they do, thanks to leonization gene treatements. In a century or two, that will be a different, indeed, but we're not yet there.

Michael Aldi is an NPC straight out of my so-called NMA campaign, where my PC took part in his arrest. The WMD smugglers I refer to is none other than Winternight. Victor Osawa did not appear in the campaign, but one of the "violent arrest attempts" that claimed the life of the other Salish-Shidhe connection boss was a PC's feat.
I got the inspiration for all the characters, especially Pieter Brunner and colonel Makebo, from the Alias TV show, and to a smaller extent for Makebo from the Triumvirate in The Pretender. They're a lot like the bad guys in these shows. The CIA operation to seize Brunner laptop in Cape Town would have perfectly fit as an Alias episode.

Among the tiny details, the North American Association for Technologies for Organism (NAATO) was a proposal to catch up a mention in Shadows of North America of NATO investigating biowarfare weapons use in 2062. According to most people, it was unlikely NATO survived in Shadowrun after the US did not officially intervene to stop Russian troops closing on Berlin. I first introduced NAATO in an NSI article, to wink at Peter Taylor, as he was one of those who noticed this disturbing mention in SoNA.