for me

5. Spawl Sites - I like to take the encounters in the back and flush them out into full runs
4. Seattle - Great streettalk and run ideas.
3. Mecruial - Its pretty terrible but the ideas are fantastic, I've rewritten and ran this thing more times than I can count and my players never get tired of the rewritten versions.
2. Street Samurai Catalog - Nostalgia really, it was my introduction to RPGs and Shadowrun as something more than a board game.
1. Seattle 2072 - Great Update

London Source Book
Rigger Black Book
Field of Fire
SR4A
Street Grimoire

(in no particular order)

London Sourcebook - I like this book, particularily the lively shadowtalk and the mix of detail and interesting stuff. The most under used setting ever.
Seattle Sourcebook - my introduction to shadowrun, and the first location sourcebook I liked. (Germany SB, curl up and die)
Paranormal Animals of Europe - so many nice ideas here.
Fields of Fire - if only another book like this would be published.
Berlin (German only SR4 publication) - brings the old city books back. And sells. apparently.

Denver had to go for Berlin. Bye Denver.

No particular order, because they're all the best books ever.

1. SR4A
2. Shadowbeat
3. State of the Art 2063 / 64
4. Year of the Comet (Ooooo, I liked SURGE and Ghostwalker too!)
5. Bug City

Shadows of Europe
New Seattle - incredibly useful
SR4A (It's so pretty...)
Prime Runners - awesome art
Underworld SB - so many ideas

Target:Awakened Lands deserves honorable mention. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

1.) Threats 2
2.) Threats 1
3.) System Failure
4.) Burning Bright (Novel)
5.) Corporate Security Handbook

SR4A
Universal Brotherhood
Shadowbeat
Fields of Fire
Seattle Sourcebook

Bye
Thanee

I haven't read nearly as many of these books as I'd like. Laying hands on them with a limited budget is a bitch. So a For-Now list:

Dragons of the Sixth World - makes out just how different each GD is
Corporate Download - lots of story ideas
System Failure - exciting story
Aztlan - nasty nasty secrets and lots of politics

I liked other books too, but these really stand out for me so far. But people, please, please, elaborate on why you like those books (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Not in order:

Seattle Sourcebook (original) - Not just nostalgia, still the best version IMO.

SR4A - Good looking book and 4th ed is my favorite overall.

Harlequin (the first) - mostly nostalgia but boy did we have fun with these in the early 90's.

Feral Cities - I've gotten good use out of this one running one-shot missions to Lagos and Chicago.

DotA series - I'll likely get some flak for this but I've managed to take the core ideas and events from this flawed series and rearrange and mangle them into a form that has been very enjoyable for myself and my group. Hell, I even managed to get them to form a bond of camaraderie with Jane.

Surprised nobody's mentioned Man and Machine. That was one of my favorites for the Hatchetman fluff.

Tir Tairngire
Shadows of North America
Seattle 2072
Corporate Guide
SR4A

Oh, you want to know why? Should have asked then! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

1. SR4A - Beautiful book, well laid out, exciting to show people, really great fiction and artwork. It's *the* book I take out to show people SR nowadays.
2. Shadowbeat - Lots of cultural stuff about the Sixth World. Gets a little too punk-y for me, but still, a good birds eye view of the world.
3. State of the Art 2063 / 64 - Specifically, the culture sections in the back. Everything from news stories to the Top Ten Most Wanted for each respective year, they give you little tidbits about gambling, the current sports season, what music to listen to, private author in-jokes - just one of the best written fluff books for a gaming system ever.
4. Year of the Comet (Ooooo, I liked SURGE and Ghostwalker too!) - Lots of plot stuff. Introduced Ghostwalker and changed up Denver. SURGE. Comet Fever. The Comet Race. Just a good, thick, plot book.
5. Bug City - You know that scene in 28 Days Later when the protagonist is running through a church, and someone's written, "The End Is Very Fucking Nigh!"? That's what Bug City feels like. Or combine, as they suggest, Aliens with Blackhawk Down. The fact that it's written entirely as a set of articles posted together on a web service literally held together by glue, paperclips, and hope. And the fact that when the outside world got a look at those documents? They were six months old. Not to mention one of the best intros ever written. Bug City is scary, and it's a challenge, but the theme is, we can survive.

1: Shadowbeat
2: Shadowbeat
3: Shadowbeat
4: Shadowbeat
5: Shadowbeat

(Ok, seriously now)

There are just too many books to come up with a listing offhand, so this may be (aside from the obvious top choice) biased towards books that have been released as PDFs that I can skim to review the contents of.

1: Shadowbeat. Far and away the top—it adds a huge amount of depth and richness to the world by making the flavourful background concrete. How do you play Combat Biking? Shadowbeat gives you not only the rules, positions, and layouts, but the history and the team names. What's the culture like? Four pages of trid listings, with ads ("Half man, half machine, all heart! His only mission…destroy Antarctica! RAMBO VI", "Need money fast? Lonestar can help! Lonestar will pay up to 1,000¥ for any information that leads to a criminal arrest! Just call LTG# 307 (71-NARC) 24 hours, 7 days a week"). If you need to damage a target, and you come up with the idea of "leak damaging information to the press", will anyone care? Those rules are in there, with modifiers based on who's involved and what kind of damaging information it is, as well as what kind of risks the reporter will be running. A contender with Horrors for Best RPG Book Ever (Horrors beats it in setting-building, it beats Horrors in world-building).

2: Seattle. Like Shadowbeat, but less so; on the other hand, superior in immediate practical usefulness.

3: NAGRL. Also like Shadowbeat, but less so. More or less a whole bunch of answers to "how does foo work in the Sixth World?" Bonus points for the full-page colour ads for some of the new gear. Are we seeing a pattern here? Really, the two pillars that make Shadowrun such a great system are its impossibility-avoiding base mechanics (variable TNs, exploding dice) and the way that it has a world, not just a setting. If you want to know the hot clubs, you don't need to ask your GM. If you want to know the prisons, you don't need to ask your GM. If you want to know what's on the Trid, you don't need to ask your GM. It's just such an incredibly freeing experience, being able to separate campaign-building from world-building.

4: Rigger 3 (Revised). Probably the most obviously flawed entry on my Top 5 (*cough cough*diesel engines*cough cough*), but this makes the Rigger a fundamental component of a team, on par with the mage or decker. Notable for being the only case I'm aware of of sane design/customization rules in Shadowrun (not entirely sane, mind you—the chassis modifier thing and the miserable statlines for certain chassis/powerplant combinations need fixing, for example (you can't build a non-awful T-bird)), as well as helping expand the scope of the damage system and a whole host of other little things.

5: Lone Star. A pretty important organization. What are they like? Now you know. What can help you get away with things? Well, I'll quote a short section: "Spent my payload from both launchers and blew the [Fuchi] rotorcraft to twisted, burning scrap metal. Then the drek hit the turbofan. Lone Star light panzer dead ahead. Saw everything. Pulling its missiles on-line. Mine were spent, and going at it with my front guns would've done as much damage as throwing gum wrappers. I slowed to a dead stop. The cops in the panzer asked us who the frag we were, and I started sweating lead. We had enough restricted weapons and cyberware on us for them to send us up for a long time. Lucky me, I remembered that Fuchi had just signed a contract with Knight Errant. So when the Star boys asked what we were doing, I told them the truth. I said we'd just finished one of the wettest runs I'd ever seen, we had candy from a top-level datasteal, and Fuchi would spit teeth for a good three months if we could just dump our data on the market. Then I slid my window down and held out a bundle of ten 500-nuyen credsticks. I dropped them on the blacktop and closed my window. After a long silence, the Star cops gave us a warning about breaking the speed limit and told us to beat it."

Edit: oh hell, I don't have room for the Denver Boxed Set (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

~J

In no particular order:

Threats 1
Berlin (german-only)
Seattle 2072
SR4A
Cyberpirates

In no particular order:

Bug City.
Year of the Comet.
Shadowbeat.
Sprawl Sites.
Awakenings

There are a lot of other books that could make my list as well. A handful of adventures (Mecurial, Dragonhunt, Bottled Demon, Missing Blood/UB, Paradise Lots), a lot of the core books (Magic in the Shadows, SR4A, SR2, FIelds of Fire, Rigger Black Book, STreet Samurai Catalogue, Shadowtech, Cybertechnology), and a lot of other sourcebooks (The SOTA's, Cyberpriates).

But the ones above have probably been either the most generally useful, informative, or were instrumental in shaping how I see and think about SHadowrun.

Probably says a lot about me.

And Apathy: I think you're thinking of Cybertechynology, that was the second edition book that had the story about Hatchetman going full Cyberzombie.

Bull

Man and Machine
Fields of Fire
Mr. Johnson's Big Black Book
Corporate Security Handbook
Neo-Anarchists Guide

Which one? There were two (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

~J

The long version:

1.) Threats 2 - I like conspiracies and supernatural menaces in my games. And Threats 1 & 2 are quintessentially that.
2.) Threats 1 - See No. 1.
3.) System Failure - The same as No. 1 and 2. Skyn... err... Deus is a bit boring in my opinion but Winternight is one of the greatest villain group I have seen in RPGs and it fits perfectly into the Shadowrun background as a amalgam of technological and magical threats.
4.) Burning Bright (Novel) - The most well-written Shadowrun Novel and Bug City is simply great.
5.) Corporate Security Handbook - A surprisingly profound supplemental to make "standard" runs challenging and genuine.

There were definitely some great write ups out there. Hatchetman, Renny, Franks Cyberzombie piece, Matador in Fields of Fire, and IIRC, the detective in Awakenings, death of Captain Chaos. Good stuff.

In no particular order

1. Dunklezahn's Will
2. Bug City
3. Man and Machine
4. SR4A
5. Seattle 2072

Honorable Mentions: Harely Quinn, Renraku Shutdown, Brainscan, and Super Tuesday

1. Shadowtech: Anyone who didn't list this book needs to turn in their fan card. FANTASTIC book that is in the all time top three of RPG tech sourcebooks period. Still well worth getting ahold of a copy.

2. Shadowbeat: Still my favorite genre sourcebook for a roleplaying game. The reporter/musician mechanics are a bit wonky but damn it if they were not totally flavorful wonky mechanics!

3. Tir Tairgnire: Sure a lot of the stuff still makes me grimace (and I'm a million times more laid back than when we did SONA) but it's an interesting setting if you do some selective editing (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Good god that cover art is HORRENDOUS though. Egads.

4. Burning Bright: Read this book. Seriously.

5. Street Samurai Handbook: I remember when I first got this book in my grubby little hands. Young firepower munchkins unite!

In no particular order

1.) Shadowtech
2.) Feilds of Fire
3.) SR4A
4.) Renraku: Shutdown
5.) Cybertechnology (The Hachetman story is still some of my favorite fiction)

Honorable mentions for Threats 1 and Eye Witness.

[sarcasm]I'm shocked.[/sarcasm]
(IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Yeah, don't know what might have tipped you off...

<---- (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Actually I've always been partial to the biotech/medtech/cyberware books.

1- Cybertechnology- As mentioned, the Hatchetman fiction is awesome as hell.

2- SR2 Corebook- The first book I flipped through and read. My copy literally fell apart, but I kept a few select pages. It's what introduced me to Shadowrun.

3- Cannon Companion- Gun modification rules rule! Okay, mainly it was the illustrations, they were just awesome as hell. Still, I recall a pistol I made for a hyper paranoid character, loaded with all sorts of features so he was the only one who could fire it!

4- Harlequin's Back- Huge Astral Quest. Lots of fun for the magic's sake. I loved the tweaks and what not to the various realms. And yeah, the plot of an epic plot of slowing the "Enemy's" approach isn't that bad, if you don;'t mind that aspect of the old SR/ED mix and mingle.

5- Shadowrun Companion 3rd Ed.- Again, the fiction here is awesome. The write up for alternate compaign concepts (from street gang, to DocWagon, to Spec. Ops for various governments) is awesome.

And since Shadowtech can't be excluded lest one loses their fan card, it's sort of an unofficial six. Awesome. I so wanted to include that one in here as well.

Shoud it even be suggested to make a 5 least favorite SR books? Or are there enough threads about WAR! already? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)