haven't posed in months?
You mean tey aren't a bunch of full tome posers?

With over 100 Shadowrun books [plus the novels] available over the last 17 years, keeping track of everything [especially, in this case, when it's the *non*-existance of something] is pretty tricky.

There is no concentrated effort from FanPro to ignore the history of the game, and most drafts undergo peer review before the formal editing/development process to try and catch these errors. It's getting a little easier now that we have more of the old texts available in searchable format, and we've been developing more internal "bible" resources to refer to, but Shadowrun is still a setting that sprawls over a lot of written material, and some things are going to fall through the cracks.

Over at rpg.net one of the RedBrick guys posted something about their ideas for a new push for ED/SR crossover. We'll see what the future will bring.

But I doubt that the ED license will be handed over to another company in the next years. RB is doing good work and releasing a lot of PDFs in the last months. Plus their dead-trees will be printed on demand, so there the chance of making a loss are low.

Or maybe you should check your references... See, the Loose Alliances writers actually did do their research and they got it right.

While Corporate Shadowfiles does say Nestle disbanded in 2008, the Sioux chapter in the NAN books (remember those? FASA back in the "Golden Age" when the FASA writers could do no wrong) has Nestle around in the Sioux nation as late as 2053 (trying to corrupt some government officials)...

So maybe next time you should check your facts? I know we do. Barring some oblique and obscure reference someone missed in Lone Star or Prime Runners, we make an effort to get it right.

When writing SoE the authors thoroughly research canon about all the Eurocorps and realized that the only way for this one work consistently with the apparent contradiction in SR1 canon was for Nestle to have been bought out as a brand and become a subsidiary of a mega or rebuilt with help from the Swiss government between 2008-2053 - however it's such a minor aspect of the setting we didn't have space to give it more than a passing mention there (and later in Loose Alliances).

Writers are human too, and we all fail and miss something once in a while but in this instance the continuity error dated back to the "Golden Age of FASA" and we attempted to fix it while sticking to canon.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Well, considering that ED is owned by a company that most people consider "dead" and that the ED IP is being licensed out to two different small gaming publishers, it's not surprising that the situation around ED is just a little confusing to most people.

That's a bit uncalled-for.

Try bending your mind until it appears to you that it does indeed change everything. At that point you will be walking in the shoes of the most rabid fanboys that populate DSF. I would recommend against staying there too long as your heart will wither and your soul we be lost in perpetual misery as it becomes apparent that the required perfection simply will never come to pass because mere humans are being used for the task of creating SR products.


So don't be fooled by Kremlin KOA being off about this particular canon minutia. He is still a rabid fanboy, and this level of detail does indeed matter to him and others.

Or it is an excuse to shake an angry fist at Fanpro for the misery their soul endures.

Or both.

Was that the same part that gave you the nerve to berate Synner for his sacasism when you posted like a jerk to start with?

Yes Synner should have kept it toned down. But surely you can comprehend how it would feel to have someone that puts a lot of effort and time into something having that effort belittled and discounted incorrectly.

Not offended at all. The game industry has changed a lot since Shadowrun's early days, and Shadowrun keeps adapting along with it, both in terms of presentation and content; and internally, as in how books are designed and developed. With both real world changes and setting changes, obviously, not everyone is going to like every new thing [or every old thing!]

Amen

Could be worse. Instead of Shadowrun, you could bump into a pack of rabid anti-Jihadist fanboys on a BT forum.

I do tend to take that sort of thing slightly too personally, when I'm partly responsible for writing some of this stuff, partly because its just unfounded, but especially because I know several of the writers go out of their way to conform to FASA canon (even when it doesn't make sense) and update it so it remains consistent and pertinent in the updated setting.

As for distancing the game from its roots... As a writer I don't know how much more of a homage I could pay to the creators of this great game than to use one of their Threats to (almost) bring about the end of the world - when Winternight had been languishing on a shelf for more most of the FASA years. On a smaller scale how about dredging up such dead-and-buried SR1 references as Johnny Spinrad, Mina Graff-Beloit, Madeleine Muller, the LPO, heck I even took a shot at making sense of all the contradictory SR material on the Catholic Church. Almost every other freelancer working for FanPro these days does the same and the last few books of SR3 have been littered with old FASA references (and kept consistent to boot).

For the record this is what we would have gone with had we had the chance.

There was absolutely no trolling intenting. I guess I'm going to have to stop posting to stop trolling.

Admittedly, you and Adam, and Steve Kenson for that matter have taken more than your share of lumps on the chin, but that is one of the hazards of your "fame".

As someone that has written several years for a decent sized mud, I found it quite stressful that I could not get 100% (or even more than 75% really) buy in for the game mechanic changes I made. I took a great deal of flack and some players left but in general I tried to tailor things to the vast majority. I wind up biting my tongue here more than not, but still find my comments are very synical. I am not happy with where shadowrun is at the moment, but I am 1 voice and I can tailor my game to how I need really. (A vast number of the mechanics I do want to implement are not popular either with members here so obviously you should not change it to how I want to see the game.)

We can't blame you for being defensive, especially when you followed a process, sometimes the frustration we feel gets vented in the wrong direction.

I can take the lumps. In some cases I've earned them. And I enjoy constructive criticism and feedback. I have no problem with people not liking my writing, I have no problem with people not liking the rules I had a hand in (SOTA64 comes to mind), I have no problem with people coming forward to say that they feel SR is/has been going in the wrong direction and I certainly have no problem with people pointing to flaws in my published material (heck, System Failure ended up with more than I care for).

I do, however, mind that people bring up something so minor as this (and get it wrong) to validate an opinion. Myabe if the example chosen wasn't evidence of the exact opposite of what was being suggested then I might have been more receptive.

Well, this thread has been setting oriented rather than mechanics oriented. As Adam said the game is constantly evolving and some people will like it others will not (just like in the past). Given what I've seen of upcoming books I'd say that anyone who liked what FanPro was starting to do with the setting from in SoTA63, SoE, SoTA64, Loose Alliances, SoA, and System Failure then you should like what's coming.

Minor nitpick:

Actually, yeah, he could have (UCAS doesn't have term limits on the president; that was either implied or said outright in "Shadows of North America").

Not that I have any proof to back my line of thinking