I'm not certain where the confusion about Elven Blood came from. It's been a Missions project from day one.

It has a little information, but most of the stats and stuff are also in Land of Promise.

YEAAAHHHHSH!!! I bought it last night, but a review will hav to wait till I either read it, or played it. Currently looking to get someone to run it for me.


They won't have these glasses unless they are Special Forces or Tir cops, again going by the templates. And even then; while blacklight lamps are readily avilable, real-life gang criminals use UV tattoos frequently enough that Canada's Border Guards feel the need to adress this in this catalogue of gang tattoos. Sure, cops will try and adapt, in both scenarios, but they face ever constraining budgetary limits, usually good for little more than keeping things running along. I can't see how this is not going to worsen if you run the police on shareholder vaue principles.

Ugh, horribly taken pics, re-sized badly, and I'm willing to bed that they screwed up at least half the meanings.

On the flipside, I got to enjoy some Tattoos that wasn't Flash #48 out of Book #2.

It's like you people know when I get paid. Wellsir, let's play the wait-till-I-get-home-and-run-to-my-computer-and-chew-through-the-latest-pdf game.

I don't suppose you guys upped the release for EuroWar Antiques as well?... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

That one, I've got nothin' to do with, sorry. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Rating 1 Glasses 25¥, Thermographic vision enhancement +100¥, 125¥ total. Hardly unaffordable. A cop could very well buy those on his own dime. RL police officers aren't the best-paid profession either, yet often buy additional equipment out of their own pocket that helps them get through the night a bit safer.

And you can only reduce expenses up to a certain point until it starts to seriously affect your ability to perform the mission. Because then you'll lose more in profits than what you save in expenses.

I'm assuming that you're referring to the sample "grunts" in the main book, when you talk about templates? IMHO you're misunderstanding the purpose of those. I'd contend they are there to simply provide the GM with basic game stats for when he needs some opposition quickly but doesn't have any NPCs prepared, not to give an exhaustive writeup of those NPC types. There's a lot of stuff that gangers, cops, etc might plausibly have that's simply omitted from the templates to save space. Notice that none of the templates mention any ammo in the gear section? So by your line of reasoning corpsec squads, Lone Star patrols and Red Samurai troops get sent out to do their job with empty guns because the template doesn't say otherwise. Must be those budgetary constraints...

Would, Could, Should. Point is, the templates don't show them to. Most people could also easily finance an all-5 commlink, but apparently they don't.


1. Yes, I am thinking of these, and similar writeups in more recent books. Because those stats are meant to illustrate what people of different persuasions - enemies of different power levels - have access to. Cutting-edge smartglasses seem out of reach for most cops. There's got to be an in-world reason for this, as much as there has to be one for everybody having crapsack comlinks.
2. Ammo is the least important gear for NPC. Really. In a shootout they'll barely get off one to two round, if that. Unless we're talking about special ammo, it's best just not written in and wasted word count on.

But I guess we better agree to disagree. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I guess by "people", you mean shadowrunner with assets value between 50,000 and 250,000¥ ? Because otherwise, I don't see that many people walking around with a smartphone that would cost the price of a small car, or two-month of the national average income.

Pretty sure that is what Hermit Meant... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

-- Well, cost-effective gear packages for military/paramilitary NPCs was mulled over a long time ago. The problem being that this doesn't necessarily make the NPC as good as he should be "on paper" since it adds an additional layer of complexity for the GM with regards to tracking down rules references and effects (and Shadowrun has material spread over a lot of books even in 4e). Maybe this could be solved with a better short-form summary or going purely 'effect based' like the D&D 4e monsters? Also, you have to remember that some of the 3e material was written as a reaction to the "so badass we don't even give them stats, you just DIE" stuff from 1st and 2nd edition when it came to anything with the barest whiff of "military" on it and that toned-down assumption appears to have carried over. Maybe next edition will see every UCAS trooper running around with exoskeletons and drone packs?

One of my biggest complaints with the Corebook is that the provided NPC statblocks are worth bunk. They aren't useful, they require looking up rules, and, let's be honest, don't stand up well against optimized players (which I'm thankfully not "blessed" with).

I realize that it's quick mental math to figure out dicepools, but they should already be in there. I shouldn't have to look up armor and damage for weapons. There should be more than one adept, one mage, and one decker (at Professional Rating 2, I think it was?) archetype. All of this adds up to me either having to bog down a game by checking page after page, or write down the statblocks the way I need them to be when I play (which I've done).

Personally? There should be more NPC stats in there in general, and that includes contacts. Contacts and NPCs are the lifeblood of Shadowrun, as much as figuring out how much to pay players and how to set up runs is. Shadowrun is an amazing game, but it needs to be more useful to GMs in general.

ETA:


I realize most of the folks around here would burn me for heresy for saying this, but this would actually be really useful. But I realize that the Shadowrun community is built more towards the 3.5 crowd than the storygaming crowd, and such effect based (instead of mechanic based) statblocks would probably really bother folks.

Hey, that would work for me, but it would likely drive up the prices of the physical books a bit (more word count results in more page count). Should not have too much of an impact on PDF's, though. *shrug*

Can you discuss the pro and cons of different statblock desings in a new thread?

I was talking possible, not feasible.

Another thing to keep in mind is that not every piece of gear is owned by and carried by cops at all time. An average beat cop isn't going to need thermographic vision... But if they're being sent into the barrens, they might be issued goggles by their precinct.

That said, I know I never use "straight" NPC blocks from SR4A for Missions. I rarely even reference them anymore, because much like the Sample Archetypes from the book, they were designed for a game style and power level that no one actually plays at. So I write NPCs with real characters in mind (Especially some of the min-maxed monsters that show up regularly in Missions games at Conventions).

Bull

Buying 125¥ glasses is both possible and feasible, buying an all-around R5 commlink is not.

We've discussed this at length, so please return to the original topic of this thread.

BURN THE DAMNED PAPERCLIP BOOK!!! (There, on topic. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) )

[insert a Grimmy the Grimoire "Haters Gonna Hate" image here]

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotfl.gif)

Woohoo, Elven Blood just got a pretty glowing, five-star, review from a kind of big-name geek critic. He's got it posted over at drivethrurpg among other places, and any review that ends with "It’s one of the best adventure collections I’ve read this year, and arguably the best Shadowrun release of 2012 to boot" just has me on cloud nine after a long day. It was a nice surprise when a buddy (who helped playtest them) emailed me about it.

So, hey! Tir Tairngire fans! Make sure you've got Elven Blood, sister product to Land of Promise!

Sorry to steal your thunder, but diehardgamefan are the guys (well, actually it seems to be a single reviewer all the time) who gave Shadowrun the "Best RPG" award in its very real Year of Chaos because every single product that year was great. So as flattering as a review by them might be, I'd suggest against being too vocal about it (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Just to be clear, I'm not saying the 5/5 is not warranted...they might have had their stopped clock moment, after all (no time to find out yet). But reviews from this source have repeatedly been so far off the general consensus that I consider them far beyond unreliable.

Go read their review of Romero & Juliette and tell me they're always glowing and full of praise. Yeah, this guy liked most of Shadowrun's 2011 releases (which were hardly the apocalyptic year you may like to pretend, thanks), but he's also given out his fair share of three-star or worse. Considering how thoroughly they gutted a product released literally the same day as Elven Blood, I think it's fair to say they're not just handing out cookies and pony rides to every SR product that crosses their e-desk. So I'm still gonna feel good about the review I got, thanks, and maybe even brag about it to my online friends a little bit. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

In all seriousness, though, I largely like their review because they're able to give out more details and that sort of thing. As written, the review gives potential GMs an idea of what to expect from each of the individual adventures, and whenever I can let would-be buyers read that sort of thing, I like to give 'em that chance. Hearing the general themes of each adventure (from someone besides me) is something I like to encourage. I don't get royalties for this sort of thing, I'm not sharing this link for any reason other than because I'm glad people seem to like the book. I just want the adventures to run wild and free and onto game tables all over the place, because folks have fun playing them, and because "helping people have fun" is the whole reason I took this gig.

In verbatim:
With 2011 coming to an end though, there was one franchise that stood head and shoulders above everything else. It released a slew of products in 2011 and all of them ranged from “not very newcomer friendly, but still well done” to “Holy crap, I can’t believe I’m getting this level of quality for this little Nuyen!” That game…was Shadowrun.

After such a colossal amount of sheer facepalm it doesn't matter whether Mr Lucard gives something 1/5 or 5/5, his judgment can't be trusted either way.

I very personally know staff at Diehard GameFAN. I'll vouch for their validity (and lucidity) all day and night.