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It's available through RPGNow for $18. I bought it a couple hours ago. Thoughts: So far, I like it, and I've read the Hong Kong and Seattle sections. There's a lot of neat, gameable setting info without too much detail and without the 'crazy setting-breaking distinctiveness' to make each location interesting that soured me on a few location books in the past. On the other hand, there's no crunch at all, so if you're looking for something crunchy, this isn't the sourcebook. My only complaint is that there are just a couple of tiny places -- and only a couple -- where I thought, "This should be cooler." The Blacklist in the Seattle section, for instance, had some pretty mundane characters written up -- I figure if they're bad enough to blacklisted and rate paragraph space, they should be really interesting "HOLY SHIT I HAVE TO USE THESE GUYS" NPCs, which really wasn't the case. The Hong Kong section was well written and unique, but it didn't feel as distinctively "Hong Kong" as I would have wanted -- it's cool and subdued rather than gonzo, which could either be a point for or against, depending on your conception of the place. On the other hand, Seattle is vividly distinctive, and this is probably the best presentation of it I've seen so far (although keep in mind it's shorter than previous discussions of the city, so it's all killer-no filler, whereas earlier iterations had to fill more than a hundred pages by themselves.) There are one or two editing errors, but the most glaring of them so far has been a badly concatenated sentence which made it hard to understand what exactly was being said. More eagle-eyed readers may find more, but I've found it well edited enough for my tastes. The art is good. I haven't seen anything that really makes me gasp in wonder, but there's no porkchops, either. It's good art, appropriate for the section and evocative. That's more than a lot of companies do. Overall, it gets a thumbs-up. Other than 4e, it's the first Shadowrun product I've bought in years, and I'm not disappointed at all with what I've read so far. --Eric |