People make mistakes all the time; but people making mistakes like the one described do not live to have billions of bounties assigned on their heads.
Besides, having the very same bounties in effect means you're never safe from bounty-hunters...

Can't deny that.

I wonder how many bounty hunter heads Kane has hanging as trophies on his wall? ... Not arguing, just a thought.

Bounty hunters are mostly skip-tracers, grabbing people who got out on bail and made a run for it. I couldn't tell you the last one who actually hunted down and brought down, say, someone on the FBI's most wanted list or the like.

Guys like Kane are generally brought down by someone in their own crew.

It's a valid point. One I thought about, even.

Basically, it boils down to a couple things, for me...

1) This is the most salient point for me. This is Shadowrun. In Shadowrun, there is NO way runners would ever get away with most of what they do. They'd certainly never survive more than a short while and a few runs. Between magic, spirit powers such as Search, technomancers and their Resonance "I can find anything that's ever been recorded to the matrix" thing, the omni-present security and camera system, etc, etc, etc. There's no way Shadowrunning is the least bit viable in a world like that.

And yet, we suspend our disbelief enough to allow for it. Because it's more fun that way. The game would suck if you were never able to play more than a couple game sessions before you were inevitably captured. And there's be a LOT fewer runners out there.

2) Kane is pretty cocky. Almost suicidally so. He just doesn't give a frag.

3) However, Kane is also at least partly cautious. Basic cosmetic surgery is something he routinely gets done. Not a ton, he doesn't drastically alter his appearance, but it's just enough to fool facial recognition software.

4) And finally... It never says he didn't have any guards. Just doesn't mention them one way or another. Maybe they were taken out of play by /dev/ and her hired guns. Or bribed to go take a break. Or whatever.

5) It's cool if you still don't like it. I'm not going to be heartbroken. As Patrick mentioned, back after I wrote my first draft we knew immediately that this would be a Love It or Hate It piece. Some would think it was awesome, some would find it stupid or unrealistic. And I'm fine with that, because Shadowrun always walks the line between the two (and usually has one foot on both sides.)

Bull

I'm probably one of the harshest critics of the Pink Mohawk style of play, and I like Kane. I'll never use him-but he is a fun over the top read, a throw back in my mind to the 80's action movies I loved so much. Now if I were to use him, I'd have a very sinister reason behind his exploits-ever wonder how he gets away? All the time? And always gets pieced back together with all that expensive tech...a lot like he had a corporate or national backer....Naw. Not Kane, that dude's totally against the man...Isn't he?

Yeah, I'd thought that speculation was kind of the point behind the character, but from the 90s to today, the properties have changed hands so much, a lot of what was clearly intentioned for characters earlier has been taken in a very new direction. Doesn't trouble me, because I'll just keep using the old direction, which I prefer, but it does sometimes make for apparent contradictions and oddnesses. [I mean, do you think this is where Caroline Spector was headed when she wrote Scars?

Heh. Never discount that as an option either. That's the fun thing with seeing things just from certain characters perspectives... We're often only getting one side of the story. For me, I just wanted to go over-the-top crazy 80's, which obviously worked. But as it notes in the fiction even, Kane cuts deals with the corps, playing them against each other. A lot. That could lead to some rather interesting (and sinister) ideas.

Bull

Read through all but the last two entries last night. Going to sit down here in a bit and read them.

1) I don't really "Like" SlammO! But I like Netcat.... SlammO! Was always the type of prick I hated in school. That being said I LIKE the write up for him. You aren't supposed to like everyone in the world.

2) Bull, I loved Kane's write up. It was totally fitting in my view. Kane didn't have tons of guards.. because.. he's KANE. He doesn't need big bullies watching his back. He watches his own back. Had someone really TRIED to capture him, he'd have done some damage and taken them out. Or paid them off. Ect. It never got "That far" due to the nature of the story. Heck he was playing cards with a Senator. HE had guards, you can be sure. And as pointed out, this IS explained at least partially in the story itself. How he plays sides off them middle and can call in favors or blackmail threats all around the board.

3) I love Dev. Always have liked her, even though I "understand" why some don't. I love her. She's great. Bull you have to do HER write up for the next one. You 'took her over' with the Kane thing... now it's on you to get her right when she gets her own one.

Good work man. That one was easily my fave of the book.

I liked many of the others. Street Rage was a good write up. Hard Exit too. I liked this one.

Sometimes when you spend $8 on 45 pages you kinda bite your lip and go "Wow. I just spent 8 bucks on 45 pages of an Ebook.. that's steep as hell"

This one.... -Worth it-. I got every cent of my money out of this one.

Good job to all the writers here.

For old-timers it sucks, but it's totally natural, and if it didn't happen, the game would quickly get stale and insular. Ideally, old ideas would be brought to their chosen completion while whole new ideas are brought to the fore, and it's actually amazing how well SR has managed to succeed at doing this, despite all the hand-changing and talent-rotation. But, yeah, it's hard to look back at some choice Jordan Weisman made 20 years ago that even he doesn't remember the reason for, and try to keep following it wherever it was headed.

One of the major barriers seems to be that a huge amount of smaller metaplot information was simply never recorded, because who writes down every idea they offhandedly write into their book, just on the off chance that someone will need to see it through in 20 years? [I'm told this has gotten much better over the years, though; I don't think early writers really thought it'd last this long, or if it did, that someone else would be doing the writing. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) ] When Earthdawn was changing hands, we ran down Lou Prosperi [currently the documentation manager for fucking Oracle, so not exactly someone who doesn't know how to take notes! - and just wrung him dry of everything he'd ever thought of but never written down. It still took months.

Besides, a lot of new writers haven't even read all the old material, 'cause why would they? But if Nigel - what is this, old school name-dropping day or something? I'm weird - drops some hint in some paragraph of NAN2, some asshole like me is going to expect some writer who wasn't even born when the book was written to see it through to its logical conclusion. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) Of course, that's because some asshole like me would have written it all down just in case, but will they make me the doc manager at Oracle? Nooo.

Oh, agreed.

Hell, I've READ all the books, but some of them I haven't even looked at in over a decade. I certainly don't remember every hook and detail. I never had a complete collection to start with, and Over the last 12 years or so I went through two "purges" right before a move, and foolishly got rid of a lot of older books that I did have. I'ev recently rectified that, thanks to someone on Dumpshock here who was doing their own purge, so I have a pretty close to complete collection of SR1 and 2 material, and most of SR3.

When I first started working on Kane, I did a LOT of research. I was actually surprised that his first appearance went as far back as the original Shadowrun Companion for SR2. Which is the only place his motivation for being such a corporate antagonist is ever explained, and is the only place Kat is mentioned until VIce, where she comes up again (and is apparently back with Kane again). So I spent a long time pouring through books to find every reference I could so that I didn't miss or contradict anything.

PDFs help this a LOT, but sadly we still don't have everything available. That's another side project I'm working on correcting. But research is really important, especially in this day and age, because you nerds really do remember everything. And lord knows, someone will call us on it when we make a mistake (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

What's interesting is that there is a lot of stuff in the backstory that there were never any plans made for a followup to. Writers did (and we still do, honestly) write in hooks just to leave plot hooks there. Pretty much anything from Dunklezahn's Will, for example, that wasn't dealt with already? No planned story. they were just there because folks thought they sounded good. Heck, half the will items that were dealt with were stories that were created after the fact. Steve Kenson, Mike Mulvihill, and some other spent a weekend at one of the old FASA Summits working on the ideas behind Dunkies Death, the Will, and the immediate fallout, and sat around making up line items to fill out the Will.

These days, we're better about keeping communication about stuff. Even when i don;t have an immediate hook or plot for something I drop into material, I'll usually post to the freelance group about it with some thoughts, suggestions, and ideas. I may never touch it, but it's there in case someone else wants to run with it. We also have some other backend record keeping to help with things.

Bull

...aaaaand then there's computer crashes, house fires, apartments with the 'Gnomes Under The Floor Boards II' Quality, pissed off freelancers who leave and don't want their plans to be 'stolen' by others, line developers who say 'no' to what people originally intended, etc, etc...

But I agree.

There are A LOT of things in SR that I would have liked the writers to see through to the end, or be faithful to, etc. Sometimes I really like the new take on things, and other times I don't like it.



Oh, and Patrick - 'Another Rainy Night' wouldn't happen to be your piece, would it? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Resolution of some story lines would be a lot of fun for me.

It's because of this research thing (like Bull did for his work) and something I expect every author who gets paid for his work to do.

Uhhh I don't know how to put it mildly, but don't you think being aware of the previously established setting info is somewhat a prerequisite to becoming a decent pnp writer?
Otherwise, you get the peculiarities we've come to expect from CGL books of late, like taxis with metahuman drivers in a world where dogbrains are omnipresent and such.

Yes. Yes, it would. Hopefully people will like it and I'll get to write some of the other stories connected with it.

There have been rather a number of set-tos over this very subject. I think things are getting better in that regard, but it's clearly an ongoing thing.

Errrrr...manned taxis, even with dogbrained vehicles, have been an SR staple since the beginning.

Indeed. Certain areas will have unmanned taxis, but those will be for tight, contained, high-population areas with the most up-to-date software and hardware. There are still places GridGuide and the like can't handle, and dog-brains are not fool-proof. Otherwisew e wouldn't need riggers at all anymore (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Bull

Also, who says the taxi is registered as such? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

If your out in the deep end of things, the taxi may be anyone "owning" something that can be driven around and that is willing to bring you somewhere if payed.

Hell, we have every book, and half the time it still doesn't help. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) There's just such a volume of material, spanning two games and 20 years, that it's impossible to remember it all, much less the intentions that went into it. That said, if I can finish scanning everything we have, at least I'll be able to do full-text searches of everything, which makes it a lot easier.


I absolutely do. I wasn't speaking from my perspective as a consumer or producer: I was speaking from the perspective of a freelancer who might not be as serious about professionalism or setting-completionism as you, or Grinder, or myself. I was in no way suggesting it was a good idea, or something I endorse: if I haven't been clear, I value research, um, highly. [Seriously, was this somehow in doubt? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) ] My point was just that not everyone does.

Curse you all! Now I have something else that I have to buy. ARGH!

I really enjoyed it a lot. Count me in the camp of folks who loved the Kane writeup and while I wasn't too fond of the tone of the Slamm-o writeup, the last few bits made it for me.

For the next one (there will be a next one, right?) I'd really like to see writeups for /dev/grrl, Clockwork, and Netcat. Clockwork especially so I can convince my GM to put him in a game for me to shoot in the face. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

Wasn't that in the previous editions, where you needed some ridiculously high pilot rating for the vehicle to actually drive itself?


I'm obviously not in the know on how the whole publishing biz goes, but shouldn't there be some mechanism in place that'd filter that kind of contributions out?

Just browse through our technomancer fluff discussions around here, you'll see that Clockwork is right about everything! Everything!

Wow, okay I have to say this is one of my favorite realeases so far. Kane's write up was fun and done well. I also like Mrs ONI, Hard exit..... Well I like all the ones I have read.

I have a couple of questions on stats:

1) knight social skills do not reflect the fact he is labeled in SR4A skill chart as having legendary (rank 7) social skills. If we wanted to increase them, which one should we add 1 too.

2) ONI has an unarmed skill of 8 with no aptitude or reflex recorder. Should it be with aptitude 7 then +1 for reflex recorder?

Looking at ONI, I would drop her muscle toner down to 2 and add a reflex recorder: she has agility 5 with max being 7 so the muscle toner three is not needed. Heck she has two skills from that group(blades and unarmed) she could add a group reflex recorder and no change to her ESS.

The problem boils down to the fact that not everyone has been playing since 1st edition, and not everyone has access to all the books. Plus not everything is in PDF. Like I said, it's something we're trying to fix, but it often comes down to needing to find and buy a copy of an old, out of print book to have scanned in, which will destroy the book in the process (The books are usually stripped of their spine before being scanned, when we have it done professionally by DriveThru. So while some of us have a copy of the book... We're not quite willing to donate it knowing we won't get it back.)

For a little while, after Adam and others left, we were short on active freelancers who were familiar with the older material. With myself taking a much more active role, and older freelancers like Patrick getting back involved, and folks like Critias coming on board, things have been slowly improving, because we make it a point to try and read over material and catch the gaffes.

They still happen, simply because, as 32 points out, Shadowrun just has such an enormous history to it. Even with PDF searches and multiple folks reading and critiquing and helping to research, things simply get missed. But we're whittling down on how many of these there are, and catching the more flagrant ones.

Bull

It's not because he has a problem with technomancers (not too hot on them myself). It's because he comes across as a huge jackass who needs a good infusion of EX-EX surgically administered at a high velocity.