I don't have a need for a separate PDF file, so i'm waiting on the hardcopy. However in the meantime i do have one question. I'm not looking for all the gritty details, but could someone give me a quick idea of who/what/why of the new government of Poland and who externally backed the revolution?

Guys, keep the System Failure threads in the general SR Forum.

The Shadowrun 4 forum is specifically for Shadowrun 4 discussion.

Bull

Waste your own money

Bitter much?

Some rebel general dude. Corp sponsored. heis fellow rebels dont like that. Hope thats both vague and specific enough for ya.

nope, the book is sexcelent

Elf porn? Yeah.

Why that?

Terribly American and Hollywoodian movie-style with a drekload of horrible clichés.

There is also a awful lot of typo errors.

Basically, since the book is for "ending" SR3, it's worth almost nothing for GMing SR except if you want to "end" your campaign.

So What I hear in this is that the Sovies either got their hoops booted out of my homeland or pulled out because of the situation in Yakut (SoA). This would basically outdate the Divided Poland entry in SoE.

So my next question, What about the Balkans? Have things changed there too or is this region still a mercenary free for all?

This reminds me of someone telling me he was terrified of reading the Tir Tairngire chapter because he hasd a character so heavily invested in the goings-on there. I told him to relax, since there's only one sentence about anything that happened in TT surrounded by a horribly non-sensical plot hook.

Unless you're really interested in Poland or Tsimshian, there's really nothing in the book about the fallout, and even if you are, I'm sure as hell not going to give out any more spoilers than I already have.

Just once I'd like to see a SR plot that wasn't a poor rip- off of a bad movie, bad novel, or bad anime.

The book can be used to have a team of runners be pawns for various actors, but I don't see why unless it's to kill time, or you have a burning desire to role-play the Brainscan blackout ... again.

I cannot even begin to describe how poorly edited and written some of this book is. There are typoes, there are sentence fragments, there are things that just trail off. It's pathetic. They don't mention which cities are EMP bombed, or even targeted, for several pages into the chapter that specifically relates to them, and they spend more space on a fictional character asking why nukes don't work than in the whole bomb plot, because it's not like your PCs are going to stop them. The closest a PC team might get to acting is during the Crash itself, but if you've seen references to the WMDs in the book, you may as well piss on your character sheets as try and act because your PCs will probably die horrible deaths before they know what hits them.

The specific part of the book I was looking forward to was less than worthless, and it was poorly-written (Oh, look, another overly verbose James Bond-style villian explaining the plot before they kill the protagonist. Original! Clever! Yeah, Synner, I'm the one running James Bond espionage. Sure, that's it.) and devoid of even the slightest amount of thought, logic, or attention to detail. Apparently every major country in North America was involved in the coup simultaneously, but there's barely any explanation (UCAS in chaos? Who'd have thought?) of what happened. It's like they didn't even bother to think about what they were doing when they did it. The sum total of the fallout is, like, a paragraph or two. It's shit. It's shitting on the customers, too.

I'd have been better off smashing my balls with a claw hammer. You'd think that at some point I'd have learned my lesson after the last year or so.

The only good thing about it was that it gave me an opportunity to have complete discretion to write a 16 page story about the assassination attempt and disappearance of Nadja Daviar without worrying about having to wade through more of the excrement Fanpro saw fit to dump on its customers.

Your post lacked panache.

Duly noted.

Well, for what its worth, I thought the book was great. Although I do agree that the fallout chapter spent far too much time on Poland and Tsimshian and not nearly enough on NA. Personaly I would have loved to have seen a book the size of SF solely on the revolution.

There were alot of important information missing in SF - mainly information on the aftereffects (which, lo and behold, are conveniently missing from SR4 too... we have 5 years of status quo 'clean-up' that somehow radically alters the entire society without really changing much as far as countries or politics go)

We do get lots of hints and new threads though, which should all play out over those 5 years...

That said, there is alot of good stuff in SF too - I thought alot of the fiction was good, and there are alot of plot-hooks where the PCs can make a difference, albeit a small one.

There are opportunities or street-level campaigns, as well as for higher-end runners, and for top-of-the-line runners. I was (am?) actually tempted to make a separate, high-powered short campaign based in europe...

I don't think either of your posts had any panache, just a lot of adjectives and extreme nouns thrown together in a subjectively pleasing manner. Just "talking to hear yourself talk", so to speak. I thought I was reading a filibuster. When the two of you are done patting yourselves on the back for contributing absolutely nothing to the discussion, can you step aside so that others can talk about the topic at hand?

At any rate, Poland is given a relatively large section in System Failure. You'll be pleased when you get it, if you are all about the Poland plot.

I wouldn't say that either of them had panache, but from what I've read thus far the criticisms may be more justified than you're giving credit for.

~J

may i say:

stop complaining and start writing.

kinda like the rpg version of the old open source mantra:
show me the code.

You're right Synner when you say "You don't like it, don't buy it". I shouldn't have bothered. This is not a total piece of drek, it's only not my type of book/story, that's all.

I thought I was persona non grata to you, Synner. What do you care what I think?

[/edit] You're very negative, James. If all you do is kvetch, it does tend to rub off on people.

Just because someone lowers the bar, doesn't mean you have to limbo.

Regarding your original question Gen.Marszalik and his Liberation Army win. However his new government is seen by some as a front for outside forces who helped finance and support the revolution (most of which are detailed in SoE and SOTA64), and this leads to further schisms with the Domestic Army (AK) and leaves the country divided and in a very awkward situation.

...and a new generation of Russian military hardware enters the shadow markets of the world.

Winternight is a fanatical terrorist organization that wants to bring about the end of the world through the Norse Mythology of Ragnarock. Their "schtick" is the magically-enhanced nukes (whether or not they actually worked wasn't answered until System Failure) and the God chip (an "uber"-BTL that makes people go into a berserker rage). It's been around since Threats, and makes appearances in a variety of sourcebooks and a couple of novels ("Ragnarock" for one). I don't really get the Al-Quaeda vibe from them, mostly because Winternight is trying to bring about the end of the world.

SoA and Loose Alliances have discreet Winternight references, but I was actually indicating the various Islamic terrorist groups™ that they detail.