One of the most unique things about the Shadowrun sourcebooks is their format - taking the form of an online document which various players in the metaplot comment on. And one way they managed to make that format believable is by injecting some unique personality into the various players.

Like most internet (or Matrix, as the case may be) message boards, there's denizens of Shadowland we as readers love and hate (or love to hate).

So what are some of your favorite (and least favorite) Shadowland denizens from the SR sourcebooks?

Fortune!

I like Dragonslayer. And the Dragons. And the IEs.

I have to say my most loved Shadowland posters would have definitely been Captain_Chaos (RIP), Dodger and Fastjack.

Personally I always liked the various one-offs better because they could spout off all types of nonsense from book to book.

the Laughing Man(Har Lea Quinn[Harlekin]) and BigD(whose online name i can't seem to remember for the life of me) of course . . virtually the only ones of the whole bunch who seem to have something akin to a sense of humor really . .

I agree that the one-offs are often the most amusing, but I really liked Matador and Hatchetman (although Fastjack is often good for a laugh).

...<the smiling bandit...strikes again! hahaha!>

The Big D, Kane,... The Big D was the first matrix dragon for me, back in SR2. And I find Kanes attitudes morbidly amusing.

I love The Lone Gunman's conspiracies. I love how after the Matrix Crash, he posts and someone says something like "of all the people to survive."

I love the Big D and Laughing Man. I like Fastjack, Dodger, and Twist. The Chromed Accountant is good too.

Oh man, the Chromed Accountant and Nuyen Nick and the Keynesian Kid!

Not that I dig economics or anything...

...yeah SPD was pretty cool.

On the other side there was Wappler the Weatherman, named after a RL meteorologist who used to work for KIRO 7 news.

alien queen is/was pretty cool too *g*
finally someone who doesn't give a crap as to social repercussions because of obvious cyber and instead just has fun with her stuff *g*

I always enjoyed the back and forth between Neon Samurai and the guy (handle escapes me) who supposedly worked for Ares. There was quite a bit in the Street Sam CAtalogue, something about Neon Samurai's father being offed by Ares over his work on lasers.

Nightfire.

He's a company man decker (he has an essay about being a company man in Corp Download), and the exchange was in Fields of Fire.

It was in both. Yay subplots in gun books!

Not really. Samurai Guide just had Neon Samurai flipping a nut over the sale of man-portable lasers. The interchange was in Fields of Fire.

Not really. Samurai Guide just had Neon Samurai flipping a nut over the sale of man-portable lasers. The interchange was in Fields of Fire.

I've enjoyed The Smiling Bandit, Old Gringo, and Electron Sorcerer.

Some of my favorites:

-Bung: He should tone down the snark on occasion, but some of his comments just beg for a background rim-shot. Other times, the sarcasm is just great. Plus, he took Skeptic down a peg in "Target: Wastelands"

-Slamm-O!: Always a fun time with this guy. I just like the guy's attitude.

-Matador: A warrior with a code of honor - something definitely to be admired.

-Smiling Bandit - smart guy, and good at presenting the info in an interesting way. Wish I had more teachers like that in college.

LEAST favorites:

-Buzz: Humanis punk. I'm not a fan of the Sons of Sauron, but is it too much to ask that they curb-stomp this punk-ass in the near future?

-Dragonslayer: "The stock market's fallen 200 points?! IT'S A DRAGON! Aztlan declares war on Texas? A DRAGON'S BEHIND IT! The next big comet is about to crash into the earth? THE DRAGONS CALLED IT HERE, THOSE SCALY BASTARDS!" It just wears thin after a while.

-Priest: "Want to know the color of Nadja Daviar's bedsheets? Fork over 1,000 nuyen and then we'll talk." C'mon, Shadowland's supposed to be about the FREE exchange of info - give us SOMETHING!

-Tish Bite: She's a vampire. Vampires kill people. Need I any other reason?

And an honorable mention into "least favorite," because i'm not quite sure where he stands: Captain Chaos.

Yes, the Cap. The reason: the way he handles the near-race riots that break out on Shadowland. Typically the Humanis troll gets a warning, while the people who get offended enough to muster a counter-response get kicked off. Seem like a disparity there? Makes me wonder if he's got a white hooded virtual robe to add to his icon...

My favourites were
Syzygy and Slamm-O, oh and Ultra V

Disliked Dragon Slayer.

Rabid from PAOE has to be my fave! Especially the incongrous post about Meistersingers!

You can only do it once.

Peregrin,

Chromed Accountant

SPD/X-plod former cops

Synner, Ancient History, Andvare

There's one, I can't quite remember her name, on page 100 of SoE.
(If I never said it, Thank you chummer. )

I had one really great line in a sourcebook, which I shall always be thankful for.

Just to be contrary, I like Wordsmyth of the Immortal posters.

My favorite would be Buzz, the Humanis 'runner. It's amusing to watch stone cold killers get all upset when someone expresses a pro-human viewpoint. I hope the developers will show more of him in the future. I don't really have a "least favorite".

The two funniest Shadowland exchanges, IMO, are Jack Q/Rebecca Constantine, from YotC, and Wolfman/Smiling Bandit, from...I think it was Street Samurai Catalog. I'd nominate the "Macmillan Group" segment from Super Tuesday(?) as a runner up.

While an amusing interchange, the Q/Constantine piece was not shadowtalk, but a transcript of an ordinary trid broadcast.

~J

Well to be fair it is one thing to kill someone because it is a job. It is a completely different thing to do it as some kind of personal policy. Something else is that on the other end is I'm thinking some of the truly screwed up runners would hate to close off their people to kill options. Also I personally like having being rather socially blind about the people they work with as a kind of tell. "Right so you are a human, ork, and elf, and you all carry yourself like killers. I know runners when I see them."

That is the one downside of the new SR4 format for Jackpoint posters: with less one-shot posts there's less chance that any of us will see our names.

I'll admit, when the writers were told about the new format, that made me sad. I liked inserting one-shot comments from characters of people I'd met.

I will still try to fit them in as guest posters where possible, though!

What new format? I haven't picked up any of the new books yet, so I don't know what this format is.

heck, it's a hacker-board . . if you're good enough to hack it, you're free to post ain't ya? O.o

I think the corp doing the approving is the one that publishes SR. Which makes it ironic if they are the ones clamping down on such expressions.

Well, here's the thing...

It's no longer Shadowland. The new format isn't a free-for-all of whoever-can-hack-their-way-in-can-post. Instead, you have the JackPoint network with a list of regular users, each with their own personality and specialities. Guest shadowtalkers are often featured when the group needs information beyond the limited scope of the regular list.

There were a couple reasons this new format was chosen - the first being, that by the end of SR3, the number of one-shot posters was out of control. You would have upwards of fifty new shadowposters per book, often more, many of whom only were used once (and whose names were horrible puns). For two there, was no real effort to give unique (and discrete and continuous from one usage to the next in some cases) personalities and knowledge bases to many of the characters. So while authors could load in characters from their home games and posters from the boards, it got ridiculous.

One of the things you can see develop in first edition are a rough collection of "core" characters that would re-appear in book after book, and these are the characters people tend to remember and whose personalities and specialties were developed-Captain Chaos, FastJack, the Chrome Accountant, the Smiling Bandit, Man-of-Many-Names, The Laughing Man, Pyramid Watcher, etc.

I think the change to a core of posters was well done, overall. But I still pine for some of the wackjobs that popped into Shadowland with one or two comments never to be seen again. 'Course, that means it's very hard to give a "voice" to any of the posters, which has been done extremely well so far in SR4 (e.g., the Netcat/Clockwork interaction in Emergence which continues nicely into Corp. Enclaves).

I don't know. Tom Dowd gave Neon Samurai and Nightfire a pretty distinct voice each in two sets of very, very limited shadowtalk in Fields of Fire.