With the new possibilities that Digital publication have to offer, a PDF release might be doable, at a much lower cost to FanPro than a hardcopy run.

Then there's the possibility of a collector's pack of Shadowrun Missions after the campaign ends, which could include the high-res art that is often downsampled for ease of downloading.

I wasted no time and kept it short. I think that sums up the whole AR IP debate

Hm... "planned" was probably a poor choice of word as opposed to "set in stone" or some other signifier of permanence.

Anyway, the other books... *shrugs* Some place in Greece would be nice for Awakened Haunts, maybe. Since it is the best place never written (well, published) for in Shadowrun to date. Aside from that blurb in SOTA63 about Athens, but that's not really the feel I would hope for (hence the placing of it in AH). May I suggest a return to Fort Dauphin (Madagascar) in Feral Cities, though? That place is SO worthy of the title. And this time we can do without the poorly-inserted convo between the clown and the soda.

After a while, there are also going to have to be other places to write about. I think I'd be more interested in them to be honest.

We may be alone in wanting that one.

How about Santorini.........

....and Crete too.

I liked Madagascar, even used it a bit for a game where I had my players take a spin as Cyberpirates for a while. I'd love to see it included

I wouldn;t mind seeing something like this, but... I hate to say it, dumbed down a bit. I think the porblem with Corp Shadowfiles is that it read more like a Business 301 Textbook than like a shadowrun sourcebook. As I have no real interest in business practices, I was simply bored with it. And I can seasily see it going over the heads of a lot of folks.

They need to take the concepts from that, strip them down, and re-present them in a way that's easier to read and understand, and present them in a way that shows the practical usage side to them for a Shadowrun game.

Bull

Corporate Shadowfiles could be considered pretty dry writing, true. But I think you could take the same material and explain it in a way that has some more personality, as well as in-setting examples (how Ares takes over So-And-So-Corp, etc.) and plot-hooks. There are tons of plot hooks you could relate to that information, but Corporate Shadowfiles just didn't include any example ones.

No I could go for that too.

Somewhere in Africa and somewhere in Australia for Awakened Haunts?
Somewhere in the UK, I suspect, for Feral Cities.

GURPS is the only game I can think of off hand that actually has an official character generator (and it took them until late 3rd edition to get it). They seem to be leading the pack in this respect, though, as they also develped an official vehicle creation program. I think Hero has a character generator too. d&D used to have one but they dropped it shortly after they made it (giving it over to a 3rd party). D&D had grand ideas about creating this all encompassing program pack unlike anything in the past. But shortly after the release of 3rd edition they scrapped the idea for a slimmed down version. I can make many, many guesses as to why they did this, but they would just be guesses.

I think there are two reasons for this. First, and more appropriate, is the fact that so many rpg companies don't hold the computer rights for their own world. This seems to happen when they give over the title to a computer game company to get a digital version of their game onto the shelves. This was sort of the case with the Star Wars RPG (wotc). lucasarts held all the digital rights to the Star Wars title so WotC was not allowed to develop a computer based character generator. They even went so far as to actively squash the only "unofficial" generator out there. Silly, I agree, but true none the less. shadowrun might fall into that category. That may be why the only generator is a third party program (that i'm aware of). It may be a sort of "don't ask don't tell" policy in that regard.

The second reason is that gamers in general are a bunch of scoundrels who will pirate whatever information they can get. If an "official" software package is made it will get copied and distributed illegally. The companies will lose money. And forget about copywrite protection. In the circle of adventure gamers, especially those that enjoy the cyberpunk element, I'm sure we all know someone who can make copywrite protection "go away." That's just my guess, though.

It's going to be really weird sharing initials with a book.

Dark Eye, not Black Eye . The old computergames were published under 'Realms of Arkania'.
The german Dark Eye v3 had an official generator that wasn't to bad (it wasn't free, though).

We bought it, and the most used feature was, of course, to let the own char fight against someone else, critter or PC or NPC, for ten thousand fights or so, and see who won the most...

That programm must be about 10 years old, and, when I think about it, it had some really usefull features.

"Click the checkbox to turn off my annoying voice".

It came free on a CD with the first printing of the D&D. I still use that program, although it's utility is now shrinking with the advent of my D&D group switching fully over to 3.5. It was great, especially when first learning the system. I wish it would be done more. Although I understand that having the budget to sink into building a good quality character generator is a bit beyond most game's markets. Especially to have one that is ready in time to ship with the game.

It wasn't really handed over to the 3rd party, as that 3rd party was the company that WotC originally paid to developed it and the plan right from the start was that that company would market an expanded version themselves. Which they did. In some ways that freebie was like a marketing sampler.

I never bought the full product myself, but someone in our group did. It did canon random generation of monsters and loot. Had a catography ability of some sort. Along with the PC/NPC/monster creation aspects.

You can still try to change the name of the book. And strangely my first quoted sentence makes sense.

hmm, i wonder what kinds of wierd critters will come from that.
killer moose maybe? oh wait, its the most lethal animal in the norwegian forest allready.

Actually that's exactly the reason they allow unprotected PDFs. Steve Jackson, for instance, said that they would have paid far more in attempts to keep it "secure" than they would have made off the product. And, they figured, since the security would have been broken within a matter of hours, it wasn't worth the time and effort.

You can do a lot of crazy stuff with what would be considered military tech already just using Rigger 3 and CC. The problem is that most of the cool stuff is too expensive to go into much use. Kind of like now. Just as an example, a PC who has access to way too much free time, cash, and vehicle construction facilities (note the plural) in my primary campaign has powered armor, a drone designed solely for breaching (uses missiles, shaped charges and a bulldozer face), a drone packed with wire-guided missiles, Heimdal (Simply put: A heavy railgun with legs) and my favorite... Infantry. Infantry are anthroform robots packing 20mm autocannons like regular soldiers carry rifles and are integrated into an encrypted tactical network functioning semi-autonomously. I've had to design actual military systems (since the total OPFOR for all of the PCs is about 500 UCAS and corporate military soldiers and at least that many drones) that are as bad or worse than his toys, such as the Cheetah, based on the Medusa design. Three of them (pack hunters) slaughtered four well-armed soldiers whose stats were equivalent to the Ghosts in Double Take before they knew what hit them.

In other words, you do, but you really don't. OTOH, there are military vehicles and some basic gear SR should have had for a while in SOTA63 I'm sure will be in Arsenal.

The sad thing is, they never made the product what it was supposed to be when 3.0 was originally released. It was supposed to have all sorts of DM tools including an isometric dungeon mapping tool. But the final version was not only visually a lot different than the free version packaged with the PHB, but they had dropped proably 75% of its intended features. All this and it was so far beyond the intended release date that it was laughable. Then, just a couple after they did release it, they dropped it an left it to Code Monkey. So it has more or less slipped into the "unofficial" status.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA

and some sharp or blunt items for when you run out of ammo...

and given that it will contain much in the way of wheels, i belive it will contain a fair bit of rigging material allso. the rest will probably be in unwired as riggers are in many ways a subclass of hackers now...

I like this prediction.

Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex is the 5th largest city in America dude. Its also has the highest crime index in America right now.

You tell me that wouldn't make for a good area setting for 2070 Shadowrun.

*cough* Austin *cough*

Miami is still likely safer, because of its lawlessness. Cuba in SR actually has a fairly effective navy and intelligence branch and its navy is led by an Aztlan defector, which means the movement between the two nations is probably watched closely by both nations.

Stop being fair, SL James, it messes up my whole world view. What's next? Water running uphill? Emo railing against power gaming? My neat, ordered world is falling apart...

hmm, that kinda reminds me of the syntetic alcohol thats described in CP2020 i think...