[X] My Assistant

[Backgammon]

New Enhanced Fiction out - http://www.shadowruntabletop.com/2013/09/n...ostok-gauntlet/

[Neko Asakami]

To whoever decided to make the stats a separate (and free!) download: Thank you.

[Backgammon]

I proposed it and Jason agreed.

In my opinion, it can only serve to make you want to buy the fiction! Clockwork Greyhounds? Dyadya Yarov's Titty Coffe bar??!! What's that all about?? Read the story! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Fatum]

Grognard rambling part 1

[ Spoiler ]

Hey, Oleg, do you still have that bottle of vodka you keep around?

So, a couple of Vory low-ranking members with a mission drop it to go drink vodka instead.

The man bristled a bit, mostly from being called Vovka

Any non-Russian actually understood what the issue was?

She had red hair and features Yuri guessed were foreign

I kinda wonder what counts as "obviously foreign features" in Russia, minding that it still stretches from Kamchatka to Smolensk. The only thing coming to mind is being black.

The whole city belonged to the Vory z Zakone

Not to Evo?

Every week, the naked bodies of men were found dead in the rising rays of morning light, beaten till they were purple, frozen till they were blue
It was freezing out, and misting

There is no such thing as summer in Russia.

Yuri would often see some of the past tenants on the streets, digging through trashcans or pushing their meager possessions around in a shopping cart.

Nitpicking, really: a homeless with a shopping cart might be an iconic image over in the US, but that doesn't happen in Russia for various reasons, starting with the police omnipresence.
Might've changed in seventy years, sure.

The wired reflexes were still implanted in him, but they’d stopped working about a decade ago

It's great to see a street-level story, instead of runners going pro.

He poured himself a shot of vodka and downed it.

Shall I count the number of times vodka is mentioned in this? Or is it obvious by now?

“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said. They always said that.

That's a cultural norm inherent in English. Russian doesn't have anything like that.

A full half-day had gone by.

And the Vory did not catch wind of them in half a day. In the sprawl previously said to be their turf.

[Fatum]

Grognard rambling part 2

[ Spoiler ]

This sophisticated AI waitress speaks only in Japanese, right

The following text does not indicate the program is anything more than a limited agent. Maybe an expert system, tops. What is to make it an AI?

I’m sure she tells you that’s part of her services, just nobody ever understood what she said, so it took forever for anyone to discover it.

And there was nobody in a city full of Japanese metahuman refugees and people doing biz with the Japanese Imperial State who'd speak some basic Japanese.

The Vory has an old-fashioned side—they’ll beat up men all the time, no worries, but they’re a little more gentle when it comes to women.

Really? Also, Vory is plural (singular Vor).

I am, was, the janitor over there; and I have a gun, and I know how to use it

Knowing how to use a gun is not entirely surprising in a country that has been at war for the last, what, fifty years? And has a conscript army to boot.

It was telling he hadn’t resorted to his weapon when fighting Yuri, confident in his abilities to pummel him barehanded.

This, after he had been knocked to the ground and plummeted into unconsciousness with a crowbar.

Before then, Vladivostok unquestionably pumped its sewage straight into the black waters of the Pacific

Not that Vladivostok had treatment plants built by the Soviets.

Her mother is 16. She lives here

In the world where orks mature by 13, this phrase loses most of its implied impact.

Special unit, tasked with ‘pacifying’ the Yakut rebels.

Do you think people would call the Yakut rebels fourty years after they got their independence?

But when the chips were down and I was away in lockdown, none of them turned up to care for her.

And yet even Vice states that the good old obschak is still a thing.

[Fatum]

Grognard rambling part 3

[ Spoiler ]

Assuming we survive the giant wolves trying to gut us.

I struggle to understand where this idea that Yakutian shapeshifters are necessarily wolves comes from, when SoA states openly that there are all kinds of shifters in the country, including birds, for instance; and Runner's Companion features a biography of the werebear leading the Yakut militia.

They waited until nightfall to make their way to the Stalin Industrial Complex

Seriously now?

they supplied replacement lungs and tracheae to the worst of the sufferers and only garnished five percent of their salary for pretty much the rest of their life as compensation

I'm having certain doubts as to whether that'd actually pay for the transplants, and if it'd be cheaper for the corp to just address the core issue.

They didn’t let him go back to attend her funeral.

My, how the Army rules changed.

She grabbed his shirt and pulled him down against her

I can understand why Yuri might have suicidal tendencies with his power-napping when there are Vory thugs on his tail and such, but I was under the impression Soren didn't share those? And had been badly beaten and bruised all over, to boot?

When he’d been a soldier, carrying out raids against Yakut civilian encampments in an effort to draw out the enemy, the wolves came in packs of two, three, maybe up to five.

Minding that the Yakut are an ecological dictatorship enjoying high shaman membership in their ranks, and the fact that shapeshifters!=wolves, that tactic does not strike me as particularly sound.

Yuri tried to slide up the window to open it

In the last two hundreds of years (or however long have glass windows existed?) Russia has not been using frames that slide up, instead preferring hinged ones.
Apparently that changed some time before 2075.

[Fatum]

Grognard rambling part 4

[ Spoiler ]

her voice sounding like her lower job didn’t fit right with her upper jaw

Professionally proofread by MS Word.

They are Otsana Kovalenka’s people

So. Apparently, Otsana Kovalenko's name could be reconned. Now, why that resulted not in her name corrected to Oksana (which is a real Russian female name), but in her surname being changed the way some Ukrainians change theirs is beyond me. In Russia, both male and female Kovalenko would have just this surname, with an -o at the end.

Now that that was done, the next part was surviving the encounter with the Red Queen

I get the impression that title is meant to imply the second Queen in a chess set, other than the White one. Apparently, making the second set of pieces black, not red, as has been since times immemorial, has fallen out of favour in the last seventy years.

Judging by the beats resonating through the walls, they were in a nightclub

And Yuri did not know where that was, despite running with the gang for a while.

The Russian character was designed to deal with the Otsanas of this world. You stood and you waited. Maybe you died, maybe not. If not, there would be vodka later, and that was that.

Really now?

He had once again talked when not being spoken to.

Not that the previous question could only have been addressed to him.

We have a disk. From the Wolf King himself

Who?

Russian Red Army 3, Shapeshifters 4, Vladivostok Vory 3, Vladivostok 3

So a professional soldier from the Red Army knows it worse than the shapeshifters? Actually, he knows his erstwhile employers and his city worse!

SINner (Criminal, National (Russian Federation))

Russia is not a federation in Shadowrun timeline for all we know. Shadows of Asia calls it Russian Republic, the other books, for all I remember, just Russia.

Active Skills: Con 5

So how did Yuri win that opposed test and did not buy her bio?

[Fatum]

Grognard rambling part 5

[ Spoiler ]

Every shapeshifter begins the game with a Magic attribute of 1

Why is the shapeshifter on p.17 Magic 0?

Gangrel ran afoul of the law and was offered a deal to join the Red Army or go to jail.

My, how the rules of conscription have changed. Not only is conscription non-common, apparently, like it is in all previously established fluff, they also take criminals in now! The legal system also changed from the current Roman one to include deals with the court, apparently.
Gangrel is said to from Yuri's unit, yet he has no Red Army knowledge whatsover. He too knows Yakut Awakened forces better than Vory and Otsana, though.

Clockwork Greyhound

Apparently has no weapons built in, not even teeth?

[Backgammon]

Many valid point Fatum. Unfortunately I don't have the time I'd need to answer each point, so I'll just do what I can -

Vodka and Stalin: Another Russian reader actually had the same objection, and I explained my reasoning here (starting at post #36)

Many Russian culture faux-pas: Apologies, I can't defend those. Those are all little things I simply didn't know, and it's not the kind of stuff some internet research will tell you (windows opening on hinges, people apparently don't say "I'm sorry" when someone is dead, etc). Regarding Kovalenka - my wife is Polish and I learned they did the o/a thing with their last name, and I incorrectly assumed it was the same for Russians. Again, I can only apologises for those kind of things.

[Fatum]

I'll have to agree with Elektrycerze3 on this one: it does seem that everyone constantly drinks vodka, and nothing but vodka. Minding that statistically Russians drink thrice more beer and twice more cocktails than vodka, about as much wine as vodka, and again about as much cognac, tequila and other hard liquors, well, it does seem to be playing into the stereotype heavily.

For Stalin, I guess, you could argue that the authoritarian Russian government whitewashed his image, since they needed a strong authoritarian figure in the relatively recent past (so Ekaterina or Peter wouldn't work), but I kinda doubt it'd be done for the same reason it's not done today: it'd empower the communists.

As for the cultural realities, yeah, I guess nothing short of a Russian proofreader could help with some of those - but it's easily possible to find one on the net, or in RL if you're in a first world nation. On the other hand, well, it's not like the vast majority of the readers will notice.

[Sendaz]

Что ни город, то норов, что ни деревня, то обычай.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

Exactly... Well said Sendaz... (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Angelone]

Ни к селу, ни к городу.

[Hamsnibit]

I have to admit, this sounds quite bad.

Probably not as bad as slaughtering your way through the spirits of deceased victims in order to salvage a "necromantic artifact" biding its time in the apparently still standing Auschwitz camp as suggested in some ... other "sourcebook"

maybe ill take a look at this thing if i get my hands on it ...

[Backgammon]

Well, certainly without saying Fatum doesn't have valid points, he may be a little exceptional in his attention to detail - he is writing a gargantuan book of Russia as a fan project, after all. Again, hes not wrong, but other reviews have focused more on what, admittedly, I focused on as well, which is the characters, the story, the flow, the mood. And those reviews have been pretty positive. So long as you don't know or dont care Russian windows open on hinges, you may walk away with a different opinion of the book.

[Angelone]

I enjoyed it.

[Fatum]

Probably not as bad as slaughtering your way through the spirits of deceased victims in order to salvage a "necromantic artifact" biding its time in the apparently still standing Auschwitz camp as suggested in some ... other "sourcebook"

On a wholly different scale not as bad.

Well, certainly without saying Fatum doesn't have valid points, he may be a little exceptional in his attention to detail - he is writing a gargantuan book of Russia as a fan project, after all. Again, hes not wrong, but other reviews have focused more on what, admittedly, I focused on as well, which is the characters, the story, the flow, the mood. And those reviews have been pretty positive. So long as you don't know or dont care Russian windows open on hinges, you may walk away with a different opinion of the book.

Basically, this. There are a couple inconsistencies that I've pointed out, but they don't affect the flow of the story, and anything not featuring uberpowered runners slaughtering their way through whatever they couldn't outthink is preciously rare.