he shows up in Emergence (Dr. Shalberham or something), and his work shows up in Augmentation (cyborgs, biodrones).

that's only true until the lack of realism begins intruding on the readers' ability to enjoy the story. which is one of the complaints here.

Have a look at this official Emergence preview, even while a few sections were blacked out for spoiler reasons, this should give you some more information, including the list of authors and contributors (read: the ones to blame).

Ha! Not when we went to see it. The whole group I was with started going "What? Are they joking?" to each other. And I know from talking afterwards that two of us were actually thinking it was deliberate and that Morpheus was setting up some trick or something. It's a rare Keanu Reeves film where the plot is less convincing than his acting.

I realize that, but how much of that is personal taste and how much of that is really a flaw with the work?

I dislike romantic comedies and their sappy melodrama impacts my ability to enjoy watching them, but that doesn't mean a particular romantic comedy is a flawed work. It may be flawed for other reasons, but my personal tastes aren't one of them.

And I always had you down as such a big Julia Roberts fan, DE.

But doesn't that come down to knowing (or rather choosing) your audience?

I thought it was believable. Then again, I liked the Core, too

It does, yes. When you do drift away from realism for the benefit of the story, you want to make sure you're doing so in a way consistent with the setting.

The idea of technomancers in general skirts that line for me, personally. But nothing specific to Emergence seems outlandish for the setting, to me.

Since you bring up "knowing your audience", and given that the same naysayers seem to be as vocal on this thread as the previous one, I thought I might as well pimp my book and put those reviews into perspective by quoting some the numerous positive opinions of Emergence as written:

Heh. Even I stated that I liked Emergence better than System Failure.

Hehe, there's that word again: "especifically". I love it.
Okay, I'm really not trying to be an ass here, but I'm searching SR4 and I can't find where it especifically says how rare they are; in comparison to magic or otherwise. Can I get a page ref? All I can find is page 232 which talks about how they're the next generation of Otaku, and that rumors and reports have cohered and that there is no doubt that there was a new generation of Otaku.

It also talks about how scientists and magicians are baffled as to how their abilities work.
I can't find anything about how rare they are, and that section seems to be saying that people already know about them.

Ah, I noticed that a lot of them mentioned System Failure. I never read anything from SR3 and I don't even know what System Failure is. That's probably the source of my confusion because Emergence seems to be assuming that the audience experienced System Failure. I started in SR4 and don't know anything about that stuff (I read SR2 decades ago). Emergence almost seems like an SR3 book set a few years before SR4 because (as moon hawk mentioned) in the SR4 core book everyone seems to know what a technomancer is and there's no mention of them being hated or blamed for anything. In fact, the entire Crash seems to have blown over by SR4.

Maybe if the Crash had occurred in Emergence and technomancers were introduced there instead of the core book, and everyone knew it was AI-engineered technomancers that caused the Crash, it all would have made more sense. Something to keep in mind for SR5 I guess.

That was helpful. Thanks for the vague pot shot. I thought you were above that kind of thing.

In fact, it is amusing that even somebody who did not read System Failure is suggesting that Emergence should have merged/doublefeatured with it...

It's what I have come to call with my group "The President Was A What?" syndrome,

There's a huge backstory to the Shadowrun seting and it's richer for it. But there's very little of this collected and available for players new to Shadowrun 4th Edition. Things like the last crash are massive events that are incredibly easy for a new GM to not pick up on, let alone the players. Bug spirits, native american nations, AI's and revolutions. What Buster is saying, and quite understandably I think, is that for a new group that has never played the previous editions, the last crash is a minor reference in chapter one and wont have much impact for them or lead them to see the events of Emergence as arising naturally without a lot of GM shoe-horning. It's something I am very concious of with a group of new to Shadowrun players.

There's a related problem I call "Can I buy a Unicorn" syndrome, which is where, without all the careful and slow development that led up to each piece of whackiness, players simply take all the crazy elements of the setting such as Dragon Presidents and marauding half ant people and go straight into High Fantasy mode. Hence 'Can I buy a Unicorn?' It requires a GM awareness of the problem to reign it in, but it can also affect GMs.

At any rate, Buster has a fair point in saying that the background that is critical to Emergence making any sense, really needs to have more of a presence in the same edition in which it takes place. That which took place in 3rd edition is remote to many of us.

-K.

I know this wasn't addressed to me, but I've also been critical of Emergence here. It is up to the usual 4th edition quality in presentation and writing. The prose chapter introductions are exceptional. For pieces of artwork, I also think the full piece on page 7 is excellent. The book is not what I want but it is fine at what it wants to be, i.e. 100 pages of Shadowtalk with adventure frameworks placed throughout. The PDF is not expensive. I would have bought it whatever it was with the SR4 logo on the front.

-K.

But you need to understand the second Crash... which the history section of SR4 doesn't lead to. It provides details (partly unnecessary), but leaves out the secondary effects of the breakdown in infrastructure... and thus, the Bigger Picture.

As far as the main book is concerned, it was just 'Rinse & Reboot'.

That sums up most of my complaints behind Emergence and how it ties into SR4. The BBB treats Crash 2.0 as a casual affair. Emergence made a much bigger deal of it.

Toss that into the mix of differing release dates and you get a main rule book which white washes a significant & major event followed by a book that rightfully should have come out BEFORE the main rule book or at least had the BBB give the Crash 2.0 a much more important slant.

Did I like the work put into Emergence? Yes. I liked the shadow-chatter. I liked how Netcat took the tongue of Clockwork. But as a book fitting into the SR4 setting... it's not so good. It's not a good fit at all, IMO.

Late to the party on this one, sorry.

Synner, most of what you suggest can also be attributed to Arabic males after 9/11. We don't know what terrorists can do, we don't know where they'll strike; and unlike technomancers, they really are out to get us.

So, where's the pogroms and rampant genocide of Arabic men? What, not even close to happening? Gee Whiz, go figure. Even when associated with the most traumatic event in recent history, identified as turban-wearing nutjobs out to eat your children, described as able to suicide-bomb anywhere and everywhere (and *has* hit us in one of the most secure installations in the country), allegedly linked to sinister religious practices... There *STILL* isn't a genocide campaign against them.

Immediately after 9/11, there wasn't a single report of a Mosque being defaced in the Pacific Northwest. I don't think there was more than a few, if any, across the whole country.

The age of bigotry is long gone; humanity as a whole has moved on. Even after major traumas like 9/11, we still don't go on shouting slogans of hatred and fear. What kind of person revels in tales of genocide and hatred?

As for the rest of the book: It isn't an adventure book, like Brainscan. It isn't even a campaign book, like Year of the Comet or Mob War! Both those books carried at least a few new rules, a few new things for shadowrunners to actually do. All Emergence amounts to is pure prejudicicial fluff. My recommendation is to take a pass on this book, unless you really want a hideously unbelieveable story about the new Otaku.

<Choke>... Wow. Just wow. That's a first. Me speechless. You seriously believe that I take it?

Wow, that must be hard. A lot of the SR4 rules don't seem to me to make any sense unless you know how SR3 works and can assume that it works the same. People in my group assume Rob only playtests with fanatic fans who know the books forward and backwards and just don't notice the vast gaping holes in the rules because they assumed it just worked like SR3 unless it clearly said otherwise.

I'd really like if people doing new versions of games would playtest them with people who don't already think they understand the game inside and out and see what they make of the rules without someone explaining how it worked "back in my day."

So you have evidence to refute it? Please provide a date and place and number of people killed and why.

I think the word you were grasping at was setting, or fiction; not rules. It was a plot book, not a rule book. And yeah, there is quite a bit that is more understandable the further back you've read, but it is strogly implied as to what happened.. and in some cases, that's good enough as it show the kind of questions that the world not in tune with what really happened in the crash would be asking.

First, I suggest you reread what I quoted and my reply. So that there is no confusion, here it is again:

Keep in mind that's a pretty far-reaching statement Cain is making, and that neither he nor I mentioned deaths.

After you've done that, feel free to tell me where you would like me to start, if there's a specific timeframe limitation (say since 9/11 or since the 1960s or whatever), and whether or not you want to limit the list to people "shouting slogans of haterd and fear," "bigotry"-spawned incidents, or actual bloodshed and deaths.

Just to give you food for thought, I could just provide this link, or this one, or maybe this. These are only recent stuff, you could also look at this for the bit about 2005 anti-Muslim hate crimes (which do not include "racial or workplace discrimination," another beast altogether under US law). Also note these were the hate crimes reported to CAIR (though I find the double pipe bombing of the Cincinatti area mosque quite illuminating). According to Associated Press, there were over 200 incidents of anti-Islamic violence, including 8 cases of arson against mosques in the US alone last year. (Also keep in mind I'm not even trying hard here and I'm sticking to anti-Muslim bigotry and hate crimes to keep things simple, if you want to open the field to anti--Hispanic and anti-Black incidents, I'm up for that too... )

Just off the stuff on my computer right now I can get post-9/11 figures for ethnic/racial/class motivated violence and protests (conveniently for me bigotry, class and racial tensions are the topic of a recent UN World Development Report on minorities and integration) in New Orleans, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Toronto, London, Madrid, Mumbai, Copenhagen, Roterdam, Shansi, Luanda, Karachi, Agra, Moscow, Paris, Marseille, Tel Aviv, Beirute, Istanbul... note I'm even leaving out the really easy ones like Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan...

And those are for the real world, not for Shadowrun's dystopic universe where you had food riots in New York at the turn of the century, where the red man brought the great superpower of the West to its knees, where people had their "freak children" killed, where the goblinized were put in camps and put to the torch in the Night of Rage, where magicians and metas were strung up in some countries (and still are), where White supremacist groups carry terror campaigns against the NAN, where an entire nation quarantined their children on an island for decades, where Human Nation sponsors eugenics in the guise of birth control programs...

So, right, things are only going to be better, more tolerant and humane in the Sixth World. Sure.

I'm not sure I'd agree with you - I think better educated people with better living conditions etc are less likely to hold irrational fears or biases.

However, education and conditions in shadow run has gone backwards, creating significant gaps between rich and poor, and huge disenfranchised segments of the population.

Disenfranchised people in the world have all sorts of beliefs that I will not comment on the validity of. Examples include: using condoms causes aids, or that evolution is a conspiracy foisted on their religion by the west to discredit key religious figures because Darwin was the son of a pastor. Poor disenfranchised with limited access to education have rioted in the street in paris! All the social factors that produced that riot exist in shadowrun, except multiplied 10 fold.

Lots of people are still out there shouting slogans of hatred and fear, and in an environment with lots of reasons to fear and less actual knowledge being possessed by large under classes of people, I don't think the situation would be better than today.

How is that ? I see one reference where it specifically says

Unless you're looking somewhere I'm not, I don't see any implication that the general public blamed them for the crash. And "Name was mud" is a lot different from "caused the Crash".