They are. I think only about 5 items were dropped from SR3, mostly because they were redundant by 2070 standards. On the other hand I think we added upwards of 75 new augmentations spread out among all the major.

And that's not even the biggest coolness about the book in my mind. The best thing IMHO is that every chapter gets a fiction section giving you the low-down on the technologies, their advantages and disadvantages, who the prime industry players are, what's SOTA and what isn't, and why you should care (quite a few adventure seeds) - all from the perspective of Jackpoint regulars and some old friends...

So do you people have access to the real time statistics of PDF downloads from Battlecorps, etc., now that the companies are tied? Do you all sit there hitting refresh to see how many copies are sold? That first IP address is going to be mine, btw.

EDIT: This sounds very, very good. Can't wait!

I'm such an addict I get both.

That sounds great virtually all the old plus a heft amount of new. But we still don't know if augmentations made cyberlimbs non-suck. Mechanically they are so bad in the core rules it would of been better not to even have them.

I can honestly give that question a confusing and muddled answer. A global fix to cyberlimbs to make them decent and comprehensible would be relatively easy (for example: "capacity limitations no longer apply to cyberlimbs, Orks and Trolls start with limbs that are proportionately tougher and stronger"). But unfortunately, while such a fix would take up less than a paragraph in the book it is also incompatible with the explicit design guidelines that the cybertech chapter author labored under - namely that at no time was the basic book to be contradicted.

The intention behind that restriction is good of course, we don't want the game to descend into Icelandic Law, with people pulling out secret rules that contradict other peoples' secret rules. However, in a case such as this where there is a glaring error it is galling, as you can well imagine.

However, what has been done is to throw in additional cyberlimb options, some of which are worthwhile in some contexts even without fixing the core rules on the matter. Interestingly, if you do fix the basic rule, the new items don't break anything, so assuming for the moment that you have a house rule to make cyberlimbs work at all in your own game, the Augmentation rules can be incorporated without pain. And even if you don't, there are now cases in which a character might actually want a cyberlimb for reasons other than esthetics.

-Frank