Yes, yes it is.

Looks like they're just rules for putting a rigger's brain in a drone. Nothing wrong with that as it's pretty much what every house rule I've ever seen on the subject ended up doing, this just makes it "official." I still don't see very many players going that route, though, and those who wanted to just jury-rigged some rules together to do so.

Nothing to really flame about, though using the term "cyborg" and the rules that were promised therein was misleading. Cyberware suites are more in line to what people were expecting, I think... and surprise, there's rules for those, too! (Though no examples of a "cyborg suite" after a quick flip-through. Probably the only folly.)

I do dig the slang term for cyborgs, though.

Did find my first major beef, though. No index. :'(

EDIT: Though though though. Wanted to add a few more since I don't think I used the word enough in this post.

If the print version of a Catalyst product includes an index, the PDF version includes it as well. This particular book does not have an index because it had an incredibly short time period in layout, and we simply didn't have time to turn around final layout files to our indexer.

$54?! And $25 for teh PDF?

Gadzooks!

I can only hope that this is in Canadian money, or Australian, or some other Moon-like measurement, rather than my beloved CAS Dollars.

...

American, I meant.

...

Yeah, American.

...

...

...

*cough*

$25 for the PDF, $54.99 gets you both the book [regularly $34.99] and the PDF [regularly $25]. Same pricing scheme as previous Shadowrun books.

BTW: 25.00 CAD = 23.7306 USD

Welcome to modern exchange rates.

I'll second this. All the cyberlimb stuff looks great. I'm tempted to run out and have my character get a pair right now.

check the exchange lately. canada is almost on par with america. won't be long till we're on top.

I can't justify buying the PDF and the download. What I'd like is to have a subscription to everything 4th edition from now till forever, charge me for the pre-order print and allow me to download the PDF. Columbia games did that for a long time. You basically subscribed to everthing they put out and got access to the PDFs.

Well, ima wait.

Cover is not up to Shadowrun usual standards, IMHO. Your interior contributing artists have come up with some amazing stuff tho, Mumah's junk is hot.

Don't mean to be a dick, don't mean to flame a soul, just my take on it.

I'm assuming you mean "the PDF and the print."

We believe that PDF products have enough added utility [searchability, bookmarks, hyperlinks, portability] that giving them away for free with print purchase simply isn't smart business.

Some sort of subscription plan isn't out of the question, though.

I took a look at the Columbia Games site and could only find information about subscribing to several of their Hârn series of publications -- could you give me a link or a summary of how their subscription program works?

It's little more than a "you can have beta-grade implants at character creation, but instead of the normal cost for beta implants, you have to pay a flat 50,000¥ fee and can only apply it to one type of implant [cyberware or bioware], not both."

Nice, but only for characters investing quite a bit of nuyen in implants. Not a bad investment for the longhaul for heavily cybered characters, but it's not a must-have quality. Especially for anyone who only wants a handful of implants. Basically comes down to "do I want to waste 10 BP at character creation for a 'I hope I get access to lots of implants after the game begins' or just using those points for something else and swallowing the nuyen cost for high-grade implants if and when they become available" quality.

I think even for heavily augmented characters, I'd rather use the BPs elsewhere. Course I have no plans on creating a walking cybermenace either, and in those cases I'd definitely get it just so I could squeeze the last few points out. Great for campaigns for "prime runners" where you get something ridiculous like 1,000,000¥ and 200 Karma after character creation.

Not at all, it's been almost 4 hours since the digital book release.
Welcome to the information age.

Anyone recall SR in the last millennium? Overseas shipping, pre-www, snail mail. The basic unit of time was the month rather than minute. I still know people who do SR that way.

Some never will...

But at least until now it seems like the masses are quite happy... you must have found "the right touch"...

*bows.slightly*,
Nyx

With Emergence and Augmentation out and no sign of a new German SR licensee I'm seriously considering buying ebooks for the first time...

BTW: US-$ 25.00 = EUR 18.21

Well, it's now here:
http://www.columbiagames.com/cgi-bin/query...an-waritems.txt

They've changed their system to a voting one I see, calling it Gameplan. I haven't been loyal to their games for a couple years, so I'm way outside the loop.

The way it worked was: when they came out with a new product, you were issued an email, notifying you of when the latest product would come available, and if you were subscribed, on what date you'd be charged. Their strategey behind this was to more accurately gauge initial printing quantities, and as a spiff for pre-ordering and this level of commitment to their product, you could recieve the PDF. It was for Harn and Harnmaster products. I believe that the only way you could get their PDF's was by this manner. It always seemed to me that the reason they offered the PDF was because they kept your pre-order money for quite some time: like a couple months, and that was used to satiate you till you recieved the hardcopy.

This wouldn't be valuable to a company that could accurately forecast first unit sales, obviously. They're a much smaller company, so really, their business model would be far different from yours anyway.

I guess I do see your point regarding increased searchability and so forth, and that probably is more defined for users with laptops. I unfortunately do not have one, so maybe that has another factor in wincing at the price of both. Obviously, the Augmentation PDF has a defined value as here I am, complaining about wanting it! I'm also not the type to pull it off of a newsgroups service, to me as a graphic artist and freelance writer, that is plain theft.

Anyway, kudos with your new product release and I'll sadly wait for it's release in print.

And yes I did mean "PDF and PRINT." I apologize, thanks for blocking my tard-fu.