What, no entrepreneurial spirit?

Which would be...?

Yes. I've bashed it at length in other threads you can search for. Seattle was a great book. A book where runners lived at the YMCA. A book which can actually be called "gritty." NS and RH don't even come close.

Denver was a $25 boxed set back when most of the sourcebooks were $15 and some books were $12 (which seems like a long damn time ago as I think about the copy of Street Magic I saw at Barnes & Noble for $35). It was a commitment purchase. Other sourcebooks didn't sell well because, let's face it, they suck. Germany SB deserves to still be sitting in warehouses 13 years after its English-language release because it's just that bad.

I LOVE that thing!!!!!!!!

I don't suppose there'd be someway to, oh I don't know, update those maps so that we're not conducting runs in the industrial sprawls of some green forest on the map...? That would be wicked cool.

Consider yourself lucky you never read the original... or the new versions.

1. New Seattle relays just how really prominent Lonestar is in downtown.
2. Lonestar actually sends out mages regularly in response to threats
3. In less policed areas Lonestar hits with more force. The only place I saw in runner havens about this was Redmond Barrens, and it was a comment. This still didn't paint the full picture and what Lonestar's actions would be elsewhere. So I was thinking this was a Redmond thing only.

I am still reading New Seattle, so I am sure more will come up. There was another thing about the Eighty Eights, but I can't remember what it was now. I am just getting a fuller picture.

I agree there. On one hand, I do like to see those cities mentioned, but I agree they are too short. I almost think it would have been better to use that word count to expand the section on "Making your own Runner Haven" and instead put longer sections for those cities online.

I agree with this statement in general, just not in this specific case. I *am* relatively new to Shadowrun, though with a lot of GM experience, and I didn't feel like I could GM a Shadowrun game until I read New Seattle. I mean I could do infiltrations through the world, and keep very local adventures, but I really wanted maps and stuff to run car chases and I wanted to be able to show how places change depending on where you go and I love the fact that I have a general location for where each contact is and an idea of how to make that place different/special. I also have solid reasons why you do *not* take runs Downtown as a rookie solo op.

I found the whole listing of restaurants and conventional stuff to be useless and I skipped most of it. What I really wanted were the maps and descriptions of the various neighborhoods, if, for no other reasons, my players could now take Knowledge Skills in various aspects of Seattle, like Knowledge(Redmond), for example. There are other apsects beyond geography, too.

I would have preferred a lot less focus on "conventional" stuff like hotels and restaurants, and more focus on Seattle landmarks, and places of importance to a Shadowrun GM. For example, I had to start a thread on dumpshock about where the docks in Seattle were so that I could get a conceptual picture of how my Shadowrun was going to go as they move through various parts of the city. I figured with all the talk about Seattle smuggling, and smuggling being a whole run type, there would have been some "smuggling" section to help setup those kind of runs. Perhaps a few examples of "senstitive" common Shadowrun areas and descriptions, as opposed to, you know, the burger joint.

But overall, I consider New Seattle almost required reading.
Whereas Corporate Download, I feel, isn't necessary for a newbie GM or player because its just too much information with too little use; the basic descriptions of corporations in SR4 are so much better to get started with.

I totally understand the desire for more maps. Again, this is something the authors actually wanted, but it just couldn't be done (in the book, at least, I still feel we should have more on the website).

As for neighborhood descriptions, can you give me some specifics about what you feel is missing from the Districts section of RH? The intent of that section is to inform the GM and players of the feel of each section of the city, so I'm curious what you find missing.

Ummm... well, no.

1) The section you are quoting is being taken out of context. That was a response to the "new players don't need to be barraged by information" argument, not a statement that RH had insufficient information in this area.

2) I didn't buy Runner Havens. I could buy Runner Havens or New Seattle. Runner Havens seemed to have a cool idea with guidelines on how to "create a runner haven", but they didn't really seem like rules or anything I wouldn't automatically do on my own when setting a shadowrun somewhere. I had a choice of buying Runner Havens or New Seattle. New Seattle was cheaper and seemed to convey more information and rules, while RH seemed to have less of both. Also, since I had already set my campaign in Seattle, the Hong Kong stuff seemed more or less useless to me (even though, by coincidence, my campaign features a Triad operation smuggling in some technomancers from hong kong as part of a major power play happening).

3) If Runner Havens had the information you're suggesting then maybe it's layout was lacking somewhat, because I didn't see it when I flipped through it in a bookstore whereas New Seattle looked immediately useful, like I could start enhancing my campaign immediately with it.

I'm not saying I didn't like Runner Havens, because I didn't buy it, just that New Seattle was really cool. Some people on this forum are saying that Seattle is even better, but I haven't seen it.

They actually meant something in Seattle, but yeah, in NS it's empty wordcount.

Yeah, but New Seattle is there. And generally speaking available. (is it or Seattle been converted to PDF yet?).

P.S. I think your feeling about not being able GM a Shadowrun game until reading New Seattle is more than a little illusionary. You might not GM a Shadowrun game set in Seattle that measured up to the requirements of a canon stickler. But to do that you should expect to drop the cash for a few books given the enormous breadth of SR material. On the otherhand running a Shadowrun game is very possible with just the core book alone and virtually no other SR experience or knowledge.

It's a tough call for whoever has to make these decisions. Do you release two different books, Seattle and Hong Kong? Well, then fans might complain that they need to buy too many products to get to know the setting because its fractured in a weird way. You have two better products, which probably will please the fans more, thus you can charge more for them or at the same prices we could assume fans are more likely to buy them. But your expenses increase publishing and marketing two different books (or more). Plus, your total sales get segregated into those groups who buy Seattle and those groups who buy Hong Kong, thus you might find that while you sell more products overall, the percentage of profit each book is making is considerably lower than you would have expected. It can also interfere with your intentions to release other unrelated products.

On the other hand, releasing them together saves time and marketing expense, plus it appeals to a broader market. Especially in this case because, as people have noted, Seattle was covered before and to re-release a Seattle book, it has to contain new stuff. But you've had to make some tough editing choices and cut it down to size to make it one reasonably affordable book that's easy to produce. Thus, you cover more topics ensuring more people will find some use out of it, then more specialized books that would have appealed to a smaller market but given them much more use. Individually, people are less satisfied with it, but there's more satisfaction overall (and thus more revenue).

It's just a matter of tough marketing calls. They're not easy choices. Generally speaking, the latter choice (which I tend to think of as the 'magazine' strategy) is growing very popular within the RPG industry. You can see why here on this forum from time to time, with various people expressing opinions on all kinds of things they'd like to see. Presumably, these people would buy a product that at least touched on the subjects they were asking for, even if they didn't go into as much depth as they would have liked.

Also, consider that by merely touching multiple subjects (say, Seattle and Hong Kong), they've still left themselves open to developing more specialized books with those topics later. You couldn't do it the other way around. Someone who bought Even Newer Seattle and Hong Kong would never buy Runner Havens after that. Also, by grouping the information together in a format that's even more marketable, like including Hong Kong info along with your Seattle info, you might spark interest for a subject in a reader who otherwise would have never been even briefly exposed to that information (so it would have been harder to sell a Hong Kong book after publishing Seattle than it would be to sell a Hong Kong book after publishing Runner Havens).

I understand the marketing choices and why its being done the way it is, but I, too, agree with you that I'm sorry to see this happening with Shadowrun.

What did this have in it? You're the first person I've heard say that and from the what brief look I had of the book, I didn't see any guidelines or rules at all other than "have lots of corps, have lots of crime, have lots of conflict" which is, I think, inherently obvious. I was expecting to have like a catalog of "features" or something you could use to describe/run different cities or... I don't know... something. Character generation for a city or some-such.

I think that MrJ's LBB was much better for this than Runner Havens was. Random neighborhood generators, sample locations, etc. Of course MrJLBB was better than most books I've seen in a while in terms of fluff and GM aid.

And why?

You hit the nail on the head. Publishing expenses are a major factor in these decisions now. One way around this would be to release more content on the web. A lot of these books are also available on PDF formats. That would save a lot of publishing expense, but it would do nothing about the creative expense of designing and putting it all together.

What could work would be something like a "Shadowrunner's Travelguide Pamphlet" released as PDFs. Each one could be maybe 40 or 50 pages long, give or take, and focus on a given city. It would cover the regions, some detail about them and some sample locations, like in the older books. Sort of like the Shadowrunner's Guide to North America except that the chapters would be about a single major city and its immediate vicinity.

Really? Gotta love lawyers.

Purely electronic products are the sole domain of the portion of FASA that went to Microsoft.

-Frank

Wow.

The old setting books didn't take themselves to seriously - so it was not that bad for the GSB not to make sense... though nothing beats the old Austria setting.

The new one, on the other hand, is an encyclopedia with more pages and factual errors than the main book... and finally got it's own supplement trying to make sense, especially concerning politics.

All in all, the german setting books most of the time are good examples of 'trying too hard'.

Actually, this is incorrect. It wasn't "purely electronic products" that went to FASA Interactive and Microsoft, it was the rights to any and all SR and Battletech video and computer game-related products, period.

FanPro's original license from Wizkids covered all Shadowrun and Battletech Classic-related roleplaying and table top game properties with a couple of notable exceptions. One was the novels (at the time Wizkids had other plans for those rights) and another was exclusively electronic products (chalk it up to pdf only sales being a fringe market at the time). While the former issue is in limbo for various reasons, FanPro is actively addressing the second issue.

Yep. And the "romantic" (for a lack of a better description) anarchist ideas, like Free Berlin or all the major shadowtalkers coming from the anarchist' scene.

Aehm, you know there are german ADL-specific sbs after DidS 2? Like Brennpunkt ADL, Schockwellen, München Noir, the extended Hamburg Chapter of Runner Havens, which are quite different compared to the "gagaesque" DidS 1(1994!) and the encyclopedic DidS 2(2001!)(and I agree more or less with your opinion in both of these points)? And I hardly believe European Policlubs full of Anarchists are a Fanpro(Germany) invention...