For those who haven't seen it yet, the second preview of the Ghost Cartels campaign book has been posted. It offers a glimpse at one of the Cast of Shadows and relevant character art. Hope you like.

Wow, artwork that looks good! Woot for good artwork!

QFT

That art looks really good.

I like the artwoork too. Very niceee

Found one small mistake at CHIKAO INOUEs char. He has


but the BBB, Page 335 says:

The Cyberlimb rules have been revisited and expanded in Augmentation.

on the mistakes departmrnt how does Dae have essence 6 when she has half a dozen pieces of ware.

@Fortune: I didnt know this.. Sorry guys, I have to apologize.

They are a definite improvement, and well worth checking out.

AUG in general is a-maz-ing. ARS, too. Don't shadowrun without them.

Essence is, unfortunately, the longest thing to calculate and often slips by proofers...as we have a couple examples here. Trust me, when you see how many statted characters are in this book, you'll understand how we could have missed it.

What you need is some kind of character generator program to help generate lots of characters!

Be nice if Herolab could get a license for SR4....

Sadly, I have to disagree - the characters look too much as if taken from a computer game to me. But well, you can't satisfy everyone.

Those illustrations are oh-so-nice! Swoon! That will make for a great in-game handout.

Oh absolutely unfogivable! I don't have word for describing how I feel about a such obvious manner to fake disservice just to force us to check for errors so you don't have to pay someone ofr doing it; and naturaly you are going to tell us about how many things your working on, that you are just humans (tch, come on AH those pointy ears say otherwise) and that you're doing your best to deliver the best product possible and bla bla bla bla .................... bla bla bla................bla bla [excessive nonsenses deleted by SysOp]

ERRARE UMANUM EST!





Can this do?
Upgraded Character Generator

Thanks, I already have checked out most of the ones available.

I'm just being cheeky because I know Catalyst was in discussion with Lone Wolf Development about a license. Which means they have within their own power the ability to solve their own little character generator issues.

The preview is certainly making me want to buy and read it, yes.

Artwork is really nice. I like Dae in particular (but being male, that's no surprise ).

Can I ask though, how does Catalyst stat NPCs? What rules do you go by?

(I mostly wing it when I play but I'm trying to figure out how to by-the-book it so that my stuff comes out fair and reasonable).

Well to be honest we usually "wing it" too, in the sense that - at least when it comes to major NPCs - we don't get bogged down with comparing stats and balancing them with hypothetical PCs (that are impossible to predict). What we do is give characters the stats that we feel are relevant to their background, status, connections, and resources, and that are appropriate within the standards of the setting as defined in SR4 (ie. we give "professionals" professional proficiency in relevant skills, we limit street level characters' access to high end implants and weapons, we try to round and flesh out their skill base, etc). For Ghost Cartels I really want to give the NPCs the full benefit of using the toys and tech available to players (when appropriate), and this is something we'll continue to do in the future. After all why put out all these cool options and rules if our own characters don't use them?

When it comes to grunts we tend to simplify in a number of ways. With Ghost Cartels though we also tailored the grunts to the desired "difficulty" level and gave them access to the gear in the advanced rule books as you'll be seeing when you compare the FBI ERT grunts in this book with the basic SWAT grunts in SR4,

Bear in mind that we license Shadowrun from WizKids, and therefore sublicensing agreements are not solely in our power.

Great previews hope we get to preorder soon, starting to get that at the strip joint and running out of singles feeling.

the preview looks very nice, indeed. Kaz seems to me a little short for a troll but maybe the perspective ist different than for the rest of the group.

what bugs me a lot more are the stats of Chiko. his attributs can't be correct. just because he has cyberarms (with anhancements) and muscle-bioware doesn't mean their bonusses stack, IMHO. and his pistol should do DV 5 as APDS doesn't give a DV bonus. plus it features a personalized grip but the RC is 0, where it should be 1 (because of the grip).

and his spur (even if his strength was really 9 - if his arms and the bioware stacked (which they don't)) would only do a DV 7 (9/2=4,5 -> 4+3=7) IIRC in SR fractions are always rounded down if not otherwise noted (e.g. for the condition monitors).

but enough of my bugging. i'm courious about the rest of the book!

Damage Value for melee rounds up. Your humble opinion is wrong by RAW. The rest of the book is available for download on Battle Corps and other fine online retailers. Of course, that is the English version, so you may have to wait awhile for the trnaslation (never shopped for non-english books and with the new agreement I'm not sure what is going on with the translation of books). I'm debating on downloading it once I get home. I really enjoyed the previews.

mea culpa. i stand corrected.

well, we will see what the rest of the book is like. and i feel very intrigued to buy the english pdf - nobody knows how long i takes for the german guys to catch up (though things speeded up very much lately).

Pegasus' 2009 schedule for Shadowrun has not yet been finalized, but I would think Ghost Cartels has a good chance of being translated sometime next year.

I'm working my way through Emergence with my group right now. But with the good feedback Ghost Cartels is getting it's on the "I Want It" list. I'll probably wait until it hits my FLGS in print form.