You heard me.

What does everyone else think?

Would you care to give those of us whose FLGS have yet to receive them a decent capsule review of the book? Parsing through the other thread is a p.i.t.a.

I give this thread a -9.7 due to use of leet. And that's on a scale of 5.

As for me, I think you should give a full review. Like the previous poster said.

I am currently 1/3 of the way through it and I am pleased at the production quality and the fact that nothing appears broken, or underpowered, or overpowered.

Large kudos to everyone involved.

I've gone through about 60% of the book, although not in a linear fashion. So I can't really comment on parts of it, especially The Awakened World chapter. My biggest quibble so far is a small one, what I see as confusing wording for the Adept's Power Throw. On the flip side I see some excellent and creative defusing of some old bugaboos without resorting to just flat out cutting, such as converting Geasa to a Negative Quality and the new implementation of Magic Loss and Adept Centering.

All in all I concur with Jrayjoker, excellent book. Outshines the BBB in quality. I'll save up the full round of kudos till I finish it, though I don't see any reason to expect that it isn't coming.

Biggest negative to the book - power creep.

3 of the 4 new spirit types (available only to the new traditions, not a hermetic or shaman) have access to the "Magical Guard" power (effectively counterspelling) - NO hermetic or shamanic spirits have this power.

Otherwise, pretty good.

I've had a quick look through it all and am about 50% thru reading carefully. So far a big thumbs up 8 or 9 out of 10.

I just hope Arsenal and Unwired will be as good.

At about the halfway point through I have to say that SM has rekindled my interest in SR4, after the new BBB almost completely killed it. Suffice it to say, I'm impressed. I particularly like the focus on new flavors for traditions and the focus on the grittier side of magic--particularly in the corporate context.

My biggest complaint is that many of the game effects are percentile-based (i.e., an ordeal reduces the cost of initiation by 20%, rounded down). Given that no other element in the SR4 system is percent-based, it seems a bit jarring.

Those aren't percentile, they're decimal. You don't lose 20% of your essence for installing something, you lose 0.3.

Doh! Yeah.

I haven't finished it yet, I'm about 40% through it due to limited time. But so far I would give it 10/10.

I was going to give it 9/10 because I really think it's that good. But then to be fair, I asked myself what could be better and I honestly couldn't think of anything. I asked myself what I didn't like and I came up with a mild conflict between the way I want to portray the metaplanes and the way they're described in the book which is purely personal and easily omitted from a game anyway, and that I haven't quite made up my mind on what I think of the Islamic Magic section, though I don't find it offensive and it's well written.

Without going into specific content, the book is beautifully laid out and polished, clearly written, has a good balance (and separation) of fluff and rules, is very clear with almost no ambiguity in the rules that I have found so far, easy to read and delightfully dense.

In terms of content itself, there is obviously a lot of stuff from previous books such as Magic in the Shadows but this isn't a problem for me and I doubt for most people. It's all been rethought and rewritten. You want it. There is also a lot of new stuff. lots of variety and lots of imagination.

So as I say - 10 out of 10. It sounds outrageous but there's nothing in the book so far that I can really point to and say this should have been done better. The best that I can come up with is that some of the narrative introductions aren't amazing. You could ask for more artwork as there's not so much, but that would eat up word space and they've used every available inch. You definitely cannot say that you don't get value for money.

Get it. Enjoy. Manaball shit up.

I hate friggin' magicians. I'd be playing Cyberpunk 2020 except that I can't condone any game system where hair bands are character classes. Nevertheless, I wanted to play a mage after reading it.

Shhhhhh. You'll ruin his undeserved air of righteous superiority.

KILL THE BEAST!!! (I mean Geekake)

A big, big sigh of relief.

When 4th ed. came out, a giant and finely textured world went pretty much out the window - Shadowrun was reduced in size to one volume. And the BBB could only give us an idea what 4th ed. was like. We couldn't know until the core rulebooks started coming out.

I am thrilled with what I know.

The densely packed Street Magic is worth every cent of its $25 PDF price. There's a wealth of new character options sufficient to keep your magicians going for the next five years. It broadens the scope of 4th ed. enormously. It a great book, and I hope it is the mold for the core books to follow.

My complaint is that 4th ed. came out a year ago, and only now are we seeing the first of the core rulebooks. RH and CE are useful, but the core books - Street Magic - is a lot more useful, and I'd rather see the core books first.

(Also, the atunement metamagics are seriously underpowered.)

From what I've seen of the PDF previews, it appears to be the SR4 upgrade to Awakenings & Magic In The Streets. But I'm going to wait until I get the book in my hands before I make a final review.

Don't get me wrong, I love the magic books. It's one of the reasons why I still pick the books up.

Yeah, really the only thing we could have done to make the release time shorter is to have started writing Street Magic while the SR4 core book was still being written or to have held off releasing the SR4 core until the rules supplements were further along.

But I'm not sure we have enough freelancers to have done the former and I don't think we wanted to sit on SR4 long enough for the latter.

I think Street Magic has probably benefitted from months and months of observing the DSF crew tear the BBB magic rules apart, if nothing else.

edit: delete this post.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a new forum asshole!

Now emo, I wouldn't consider you an asshole. Misguided and extreme perhaps.

And after that amusing little interlude how about we stop calling people names and get back to the business at hand before a moderator has to step in?

Heh. I'm just killing time until someone posts a real review. I got the pdf but haven't had time to actually read it yet.

So, waiting silently can help. Trolling can't.


I suppose what we are doing is rating the book, not reviewing it. With that in mind I will write up a full review of the quality of writing, content, ease of use, etc. whenever the hell I get around to it. Hopefully within a week, probably never.

That being said...

The new Sourcebook, "Street Magic" (Fanpro 26004) is a well crafted, well edited, well thought out expansion to the Shadowrun 4th Ed. magical rules. It incorporates most of the rules expansions that we remember from our SR3 days, but updated and streamlined (not necessarily simplified) for use with the SR4 architecture.

Specifically regarding the crafting of the book, I have the PDF, so I can't comment on the physical structure, but it is layed out in a pleasing to view manner, and functions well. Its form is similar to SR sourcebooks from ages past (i.e., representing an online, and commented upon shadow document) with art work that ranges from "Wow, I would hang that in my house!" to "Meh." I am not an art critic, so lets leave it at that.

Much of the verbiage will seem familiar to those of us who have poured over the magic supplements from previous versions of Shadowrun, but it has been updated and re-re-edited for clarity and correctness. I am not currently reading the book as an editor, but I have not caught any glaring errors (i.e., "then" instead of "than", gross spelling errors, repeated lines, etc.). The re-use of text is not a detractor because enough of the book is new and SR4 specific that I felt more comforted by the continuity the old text supplies than feeling that the authors were trying to pull a fast one.

The information is divided into logical sections and flows well from one section to another. The table of contents is quite complete and as helpful as an index in its own way, and the index is as good as I have seen in a Shadowrun book. That is to say, helpful in general, but not like the index in the "Joy of Cooking" (check it out, seriously. The "Joy of Cooking" has an index that should be used as a paradigm).

Without going into rules and listing all the changes and additions, this book adds good, balanced rules and additions to the SR4 rule set. If you play SR4 you should seriously look into purchasing this book.

I give it a 9/10 for the 50% of it I have read thoroughly, and from what I have skimmed and peeked at, it will probably stay right about at a 9/10.

So there...

That is my general review. Any thoughts I have on the rules as written that haven't made it to other threads, well, you can ask for them.

Waiting silently can't help people read faster, or type reviews faster, so I fail to see how it can help speed this thread to it's desired goal.

Just consider yourself lucky I was in a good mood and did the general review.

Specific reviews for game balance, rules lawyering, etc. I will leave to others...

Ok. Thanks!

Invoking is awesome. When you invoke a spirit, assuming you don't meet a mage, you fucking win.

RE-binding knock outs don't result in an uncontrolled spirit; that only happens the first time you bind (SR4 pg. 181). So bind, then invoke/rebind. Don't go for it all in the first shot just because you can.

What does being great form allow now?