Possibly. Taking SSC as an example though whilst some of the shadowtalk was very good other bits were rubbish that took up word count IMO. Good ones that stick in my memory though are Steel Lynx's sarcastic comments about the Crusader machine pistol or FastJack relating Wedge breaking his shoulder with an AUG-CSL.

Another thing about the book that struck me was the absolutely massive amounts of freaking wasted space in it. Seriously, look at all the blank/white spaces on the page. You've got a quarter of each page down the left or right hand side being wasted with the little box of icons that are the same on every page and the oversized page numbers, plus the illustrations are to my mind a little on the large size since they then take up another quarter of the page. Not to mention the four pages or so that had BANNED written in bold all over them so you couldn't see the page.

Thanks Carl.

Will find out tomorrow if it is high enough rez.

As an X-mas gift to my fellow players, I want to have the emblem engraved on a mug, along with their street names.

Save me from drinking by mistake, from any of their glasses again.

Remember, that at the time the SSC was first published, back in late '89 or early '90, the only place anyone had seen online product catalogs would have been in SciFi movies. You did have online BBS services, but even national ones like Compuserve and GEnie were text based. Graphical online services, such as Quantum Link/Apple Link (the forerunners to what would later become AOL) did exist, but the bulk of the images used in their interface were locally cached on the client side, since dial-up speeds at the time were in the 4.8k-9.6k bits per second range at the time.

Laying out the book in that format was very effective in helping to convey the futuristic nature of the Shadowrun setting to an audience that had no other sourcebooks, and only a core rule book and a trilogy of novels to go by.

As we know though, that portion of the future came very quickly. These days, you don't need a whole book's worth of page after page all sporting a catalog interface to get a feel for what kind of impact ubiquitous matrix access has on even mundane tasks like shopping, because nearly all of us have been exposed to an online world directly.



And the pages with "Banned" splashed over them? Those were only in the Second Edition reprint, and they have their own story. At some time after the release of the core rules and during the development of the SSC, FASA determined that certain portions of the first edition core rules were seriously deficient. Heavy pistols and grenades didn't do enough damage to be worth it, clip capacities were woefully small, and the rate of fire rules for semi-automatics just sucked.

Unlike today, it was a lot harder to issue an errata and communicate it to your fanbase. FASA's alternate solution was to make the fixes items in the SSC that any player would have to be crazy not to take, giving us Firepower Rounds, IDE Grenades, extended clips, and the Reactive Trigger firearm mod. The rules fixes these items represented were then later rolled up into second edition, so they were no longer needed (though IDE Grenades were later brought back by popular demand -- everybody loves grenades with more boom).

New items could have been put in their place, but there would have been an outcry from people who had the first edition version and would have had to buy it again for just 4 new items. The pages could have been deleted, giving them four extra pages for ads in the back, but that would have mucked with the page numbers, meaning any earlier book that referenced the SSC would have been off. So they just took the path of least resistance, and tagged those pages with a notice that those items weren't needed because they were already rolled into the second edition base rules.