A future preview will show off some of the cartography goodness, as I said earlier in the thread.

Well, more previews will be forthcoming, including one with a map and "Crime Scene" description. While the maps in the book are black and white, the PDF release comes packaged with color higher rez versions of the maps that can be printed out. Those waiting to buy the print copy needn't worry we have something planned for you too.

To tide you over though, DriveThruRpg apparently has a preview of the first eight pages of the book including one of the full color maps: here. The actual maps in the book are accompanied by location descriptions and stats when appropriate.

Hehe, search agent Wanderly...

You ain't seen nothin' yet.

um,I got it...now someone tell me how to put it down...I'm on page 20 and have to work in the AM..maybe I could call in sick or something...

I also love the maps... A+job

The writing and story is great also. can hardly wait to get done posting and get back to it.

The art is spectacular.

(sniff! sniff)(kanis tears up) Man, I Love you guys!!!!

I am still digesting the book. So far, I like what I saw (the first part), but I haven't gone much into the actual campaign info. I especially like the fact that while the campaign is global, it's not "earth shaking" - no megacorp imploding/merging, no Crash 3.0, no city getting "chicagoed". etc. The consequences of the arc seem to be able to handled as temporary or lasting as one wants to, which is a definite plus compared to other products.

I'll post more once I try the adventures out in actual play.

Did anybody like the new Exchange message system?

I like the hints that the Exchange may have Emerged.

Unless you believe in the Great Coder, who comes out of the Code Patch once a year and gifts patches to all the good little hackers and riggers.

I liked the sensible discussion the posters were having about how it could be subverted, how it could protect itself, how anyone would know if either of these were happening. Infallible cool ideas are bad to me. Cool ideas that have to stand or fall on their own merits in a realistic world, I like a lot.

I've read more of this now and I really like it. I shall be using a modified version of this campaign for my own game, I think. And that means a lot.

Regards,

K.

*thwap*
=iP

There is no reason that either is contradictory.

I'll rather stick the the Code-O-Mat running teamworking Agents patching selfwritten software and the Spoof program for getting updates for cracked software, thank you very much.

Obviously not an accident, the people on JackPoint have histories and some of them tie to major characters in the setting.

I picked it up yesterday. It looks pretty good so far and I will be starting my group on it tomorrow night

Big thanks.

Carl

Top notch piece of work.

Something for everyone.

Thanks!

The nice thing is that the starting missions are basic enough that I can throw my group into it right now and get the rest of the book digested in the two weeks between games.

Carl

oh yeah, I can't wait to get the full book and hunt for stuff. Of course I was looking soooooo forward to this after talking with you anyway and the previews I have seen put it over the top for me.

One of the things I like most about it is its similarity to the Missions format. I've been running Denver for the past year and just looking through it last night and right now, I like the format. It makes it a lot easier for me and gives me lots of space to roam.

A quick note too, I like the bookmarks setup with the information in one set and the sets of sidebar bookmarks.

Crashing on A Stranger In Our House right now. (need some Seattle maps... Google here I come)

Carl

Usually when you buy a campaign book/module you play it through once,maybe twice and then it goes and sits on the "pretty stuff" shelf.

Ghost Cartels isn't one of those prissy "oh,look at me!" books. It goes right into the "drag wherever we're playing"bag to be beaten,abused ,used ,referenced, argued over, and treated to all the injustices that a core book usually encounters.

I didn't even make it to the 2nd chapter before my evil mind was planning nasty things for my players. The plot hooks and opportunities for personal touches such as side jobs, new NPC's (outside of the great bunch put together by the Dev's), and just a humongous amount of background info. make this a must have.

My favorite stuff so far:

1) The Jackpoint stuff. The writing is great. It really made the characters...real. There is a depth to the "usual suspects" that for me was enlightening. They aren't just people with funny names jabbering back and forth. They are real folks, with problems and issues and yes, dammit...Feeling. Big group hug for the writers.

2)The Art. Top notch! I just went back through to see if could find anything that even slightly didn't fit in. I couldn't find anything. Now granted, I'm no art critic, but being married to an artist I have picked up a little bit of appreciation for detail and composition. and I really like the art. I doff my beret to art team.

3)Technical stuff. we haven't played it yet, but from reading through the adventure, i don't forsee any problems keeping the players on track. My players get bored easily and if the adventure drags they get antsy and start robbing liquor stores and torturing people. The format for Ghost Cartels seems smooth and very clean, which makes my job as the GM go easier so I can focus on the fluff and story. I love that. I raise my Code Red Mountain Dew and toast the whole design team.

I know I sound like a big suck-up,but I really,really love this book(er,PDF)

Great Job CGL!!!

The comments and reviews are much appreciated. Keep 'em coming, I'm very keen on hearing how the campaign plays out at your tables (and whether or not the players kick themselves at the end for not picking up on the clues regarding tempo's secret).

I'm particularly pleased people seem to like the new approach to the campaign track sections. As a gamemaster I've always been a fan of the campaign track format, all the way back to Blood in the Boardroom and Mob War. However, I did want to find a solution/format that addressed the (understandable) criticism that Adventure Frameworks, while flexible and freeform, were harder on the gamemaster (particularly new GMs) to bring to the table—given the amount of work needed to flesh out NPCs, grunts, and locations.

Ghost Cartel's new format attempts to provide those tools to the GM while keeping the plot frameworks relatively freeform and easy to adapt to any playing style—which is why I'm keen to see what gamemasters think and to hear how this plays out at the table.

OK, got the book (stoked!) but I've only had time to read a little of it.


I've really been enjoying the inlcusion of the Jackpoint posts in along with the rest of the subject matter. The related articles, and especially the want ads are great to see. One of my favorite things from the old editions was the inclusion of little bits not directly related to what was going on, but still interesting. Even the advertisements were fun.

Going along with the whole mystery of "what is tempo?" , only on pg 37, I've noticed, what is it 3 great dragons so far that are warning people away from Tempo? Interesting.

Onto the Aztlan section where it discusses Caracas, I'm remembering talk in Runner Havens about all those labs and such on the city and surrounding areas. An example of that cross pollination between books?

GHOST CARTELS is a disappointment. It's a radical deceleration after the triumphs of ARSENAL and AUGMENTATION, and the excellent UNWIRED and RUNNER'S COMPANION.

GHOST CARTELS is riddled with grammatical errors, which are sloppy and unprofessional. The Jackpoint page alone has three. Two are in the personal alerts in the sidebar on the left: "you have 2 new message", "agent has an 2 urgent messages for you". Another in the second news item, "travel advisory warning for the Caracas". The rest of the book suffers similarly.

The events detailed in GHOST CARTELS begin in early February, 2071, and continue to November. The problem is that in the three years since the release of the 4th edition basic book, many Shadowrun campaigns have advanced more than six or eight game months. Many GMs who have been telling their players that it's March 2072 or later are going to have trouble involving them in things that happened ten months ago - and were, according to canon, happening in the background of their world all along, although they've never heard of them. At best, if their campaigns are occurring in the right game months, GMs are left with the choice of either leaving this material out of their campaigns, or letting it hijack all previous plans. GHOST CARTELS should have been set in 2072 at the earliest, to give GMs a chance to catch this bus.

The organization of this book is deplorable. Sourcebooks are first, foremost, and above all things, reference books. The table of contents is the next thing to useless, as well as the PDF bookmarks. Vague and arty headings like "I'm Your Pusher" are very little use in trying to locate specific facts. For example, I cannot find tempo's game statistics. Are they even in GHOST CARTELS? No table of contents or PDF bookmark points to them. Searching the PDF for "tempo" is useless, it comes up with scores of hits. Searching for "vector" did not produce the drug's game statistics.

Compare that to RUNNER'S COMPANION, where the GM in search of rules for Changeling characters looks in the PDF bookmarks and finds "Alternative Character Concepts", and under that, "Changelings". Compare it to ARSENAL, where "Weapons" leads to "Firearms" leads to "Submachine Guns", and the GM in search of the things GMs actually need, like game statistics, has reached his goal quickly and easily.

A sourcebook is a bad sourcebook when it is laid out like fiction. GHOST CARTELS is constructed to read like a mystery. The problem is that the majority of people reading it are going to be GMs who need it to be a reference book.

Combining sourcebook information, like the updates to various cities in GHOST CARTELS, with adventure modules coerces me into paying for modules I don't want in order to get sourcebook material that I do. I resented it in NATIVE AMERICAN NATIONS I & II, and I resent it now.

This model of campaign book should be rejected in favor of the model of YEAR OF THE COMET, which was easier to reference and a better value.

"Man, it's the future and shit still doesn't work!"


Not to be a grumpy monkey, but many people hated YotC


I see a bit of a misconception here: Ghost Cartels is not a sourcebook, and was never advertised as such. It does include very brief descriptions of the various sprawls that the events take place in, in some cases necessitating a bit of elaboration, but it is not "Drug Nexuses counterpart to Runner Havens and Corporate Enclaves."


Eh. I'm as fond as extensive book-marking as the next guy, but this book out is laid out linearly to follow the campaign. You really can't argue with that as a top-down level of organization. Aside from the opening chapter, which is primarily fiction, all the other chapters are laid out identically.


<shrug> Bumping the timeline forward generally results in people wondering what the hell happened during the "missing six months." This is less of an issue for games that happen in a kind of "perpetual now," but one of the speedbumps on the highway of life with games like Shadowrun. Since we can't match the sourcebooks to every table and group of people playing the game, we at least try to be consistent.

Ancient History:

Are you suggesting that the grammatical errors on the Jackpoint page were deliberate verisimilitude? Even if that's the case, the rest of the book is badly edited.

GC may have not have been advertised as a sourcebook, but it still contains information on important and influential events that any GM would want access to. Many GMs will choose not to run the adventures included in GHOST CARTELS, but will want to include the tempo wars in their campaigns; GC itself acknowledges this by including the section "To The Beat Of A Different Drum". Even gamemasters who do run the included adventures will be refering back to GHOST CARTELS later. Making the book easier to use as a reference book is better in all cases.

The organization would have been more user friendly if the first section of the book had been presented in a sourcebook format, detailing what tempo is, where it comes from, and including entries on the various factions and personalities involved. The adventures would come in later sections, with page references back to the first section. This would make the book easier for any gamemaster to use, whether they were currently running the included adventures or not. The fact remains - I can't find tempo's game stats using the PDF bookmarks or the table of contents.

Setting GHOST CARTELS in 2072 or later would have been better. It's easier to answer the question, "What happened in the meantime?" with, "nothing very significant," or even, "this and this and that," than it is to explain how GMs are going to involve their PCs in events that have already gone by in the game world. Of course an individual GM can rule that the events of GC don't happen until 2072 or later, but then their timeline will conflict with the canon timeline, especially when the canon timeline goes on to specify the events of 2072, which in canon will derive from the events of 2071, but which in the individual GM's campaign will be happening simultaneously.

On the table of contents, the last item in the first column is titled: "Tempo" -- pg 58. That is where you will find the stats as well as the background info on tempo. If you go to page 58, at the end of the column (below the Header "Tempo") you will see the Duration, Effect, Street Value, and Description for the drug.

Again, looking on the table of contents (second page, 1st column), the section labeled "The Secret of Tempo" -- pg 133 -- would be the logical place to look regarding the secret of tempo.

I think there were few people who took Emergence apart for its lack of applicability to an actual with as thoroughness as I did. And I have to say that Ghost Cartels is a very great improvement in this regard. Although there is still a fair bit of shadowtalk that will probably never be passed to the players for reasons I went into with Emergence, there are some significant mitigating factors. Firstly, it's a very much smaller proportion of the book and the rest of the book is so packed with material, that I didn't feel the shadowtalk took away from the usefulness of the book as a tool for GMs. Secondly, the shadowtalk is quite frankly very good and quite pregnant with atmospheric details and ideas that a GM will benefit from in communicating the setting and adventures to her players. Thirdly, I think there has been greater effort to make it something you could pass on to players in part (though this is still limited to the odd snatched Lone Star report, etc.). Also, it is nicely grouped at the start of the book, meaning it doesn't detract from the book as a reference tool when running the game.

The criticism of the indexing in the PDF, I just have to flat out reject - I found it adequate to my needs. Production values were also very high. Whilst everyone is entitled to criticise a product (and developers should be tolerant of that), I personally disagree with your review quite a lot.

Khadim.

It's rather easy to simply add 1 or 2 years to GC's dates, and play it in 207X.

Not me!

I don't have a copy of it in my hands yet, but it's always been described as an adventure module with additional information tacked on. So they put out information you can hand out to your players in the form of Jackpoint posts and from there ran the adventure. Sounds to me like you went into this expecting a sourcebook and was surprised that you found an adventure module instead.

Editing errors are always going to happen. It's the way of things. It's why this is a .pdf (which can be edited on the fly) and the hardcover hasn't come out yet.

No, sorry, I was being cheeky.

Tiger Eyes: Thanks for pointing out where I can find tempo's stats. I had overlooked them when I glanced at that section, because I was expecting an entry that conformed to the established format for drug statistic blocks, with the name of the drug in bold face, followed by Vector, Speed, Power, etc., followed by description.

Fuchs: Yes, an individual GM can say that GC takes place in 2071 +X, but then their timeline will conflict with the canon timeline, especially as the canon timeline will go on, and canon events of 2072 will derive in some part from the tempo wars, which, in canon, happened in 2071. The GM who moves GC on their timeline will either wind up with the tempo wars and their aftereffects happening simultaneously, or will have to rewrite canon timeline forever after.

Which is not really that difficult. Just keep adding one year. And it's not clear how many GMs actually run campaigns that last as long as to actually see an impact from such differences in the timeline.

(Personally, I run my game "somewhere in the 50s or 60s", with the wireless matrix being retconned in, no crash 2.0, and a lot of otehr stuff never happened either.)

Sorry to hear you're disappointed. Particularly when reviews have been exceptionally positive thus far. It does seem though that you were expecting more of a sourcebook or at least a campaign book similar to Emergence. Unfortunately, if there's one thing you learn as developer it's that you'll never please everyone.


This is a legitimate criticism, unfortunately several mistakes did get through multiple rounds of proof reading and editing.


Ghost Cartels is first and foremost a campaign book. It was promoted and designed as such. It isn't a book about the tempo wars but rather a story and a mystery (well, three in fact)—the player characters' story. While a lot more is going on in the world (addressed in To The Beat of a Different Drum), the details of what that might be beyond the immediate plot described in the rest of the book are left to individual gamemasters. The remaining chapters of the book are devised to move the plot forward and provide enough contextualizing information that gamemasters can add their own twists and turns to the central story or make their own spin-offs (as illustrated by the Tempo World Tour section). It is intended to spawn numerous plot seeds, but not to provide a play-by-play of the tempo wars worldwide.

In terms of design philosophy it's more appropriate to compare Ghost Cartels with previous like products such as Mob War, Blood in the Boardroom or Survival of the Fittest and Brainscan rather than Year of the Comet (which is a sourcebook and has no character driven plot) or even Emergence.

I noted several times in the fan chats and in the build up to the release that Ghost Cartels melds aspects of our stand-alone adventure format, the sequential campaign format and the track campaign format. While the track campaign format is indeed similar to a sourcebook, the main criticisms leveled against it are that it usually lacks a central character driven plot and it lacks the ready to use elements of canned adventures and episodic campaigns. I wanted to tackle that in Ghost Cartels by providing a middle ground, enough background to build your own stuff but a clearly dominant story threading everything together.


That organization would have made perfect sense if our goal was to do a setting book, or even one of the old track campaign books. It wasn't. Our intent was never to produce a sourcebook.

We wanted a series of interlinked adventures that told a gritty street-level story with tied into global events. We wanted something like Emergence but with a character-focused story to thread events together—a campaign in the strict sense. We also wanted to the framework to be flexible enough that gamemasters felt comfortable in adapting and adding their own twists to that plot. And obviously, we also wanted to launch a new metaplot (for those who've read it to the end, it should be obvious this is the beginning of a new long term plot).

In short, we wanted a campaign book rather than a setting book and structured Ghost Cartels as such. It was organized to facilitate life for the gamemaster who wants to play through it—regardless of whether he wants to play individual story arcs or play the whole book as a single metacampaign. Consequently we chose to group relevant information by story arc.

The most common complaint I've heard about Emergence isn't that it was a technomancer-focused story or that it "retconned" technomancer continuity because it came out too late, but that it was an "event book" that was rich on ideas but lacking in an actual story and, for lack of a better term, direct application to each game. It was particularly tough on new gamemasters (of which SR4 has many) because regardless of how cool the events depicted were, it was a lot of work to bring to the table in adventure form. It was/is a book about something that happens to the setting and that the characters are involved in, rather than a book that was easy to bring to the table. Many people liked the plot, the ideas and the characters in Emergence, but thought it difficult to implement directly because it was lacking in an actual story to draw players in. While many experienced gamemasters prefer to develop their own material, a good campaign book should attempt to strike a balance between character-oriented storytelling and setting/plot development. That is what Ghost Cartels attempts to do: offering you all the setting/campaign context of the track campaigns (like MobWar and Blood in the Boardroom offered), the episodic storytelling of the threaded campaign books (like Survival of the Fittest and Brainscan), the fiction of event campaigns (like System Failure and Emergence) and the ready-to-play NPCs and locations of canned adventures (like On the Run).

That said though, relevant setting information in Ghost Cartels is grouped together for easy reference and easy to identify sections. The overall plot elements and recurring major players are described at the end of the first chapter. Seattle plot-related material is all grouped at the beginning of First Taste, Pacific Rim material is grouped by location through-out The Source, and South American plot material is grouped at the started of Final Cut. Each section is broken down in roughly the same manner and provides information on What's Going On, geographic Flashpoints, as well as Allies, Antagonists and Complications involved in the plot. All of those seem relatively easy to reference, and they are placed before the individual frameworks that play off that information.


Regardless of where your game is at, the official Shadowrun setting is currently in early 2072. Products will continue to reference the official timeline. Unwired and Runners Companion were dated 2071, Feral Cities will be set in 2072 and Dawn of the Artifacts will play out during 2072. However, it shouldn't be difficult to move the campaign ahead a year if that suits your timeline - there's a reason we didn't put specific dates in the timeline, but weeks and months instead.

I appreciate your considered and detailed reply. I see the plan on which GHOST CARTELS was built, but I maintain that a different plan would have made for a more versatile and widely useful product.

I remain a great fan of the game. ARSENAL, AUGMENTATION, UNWIRED, and RUNNER'S COMPANION were all terrific, and I look forward to FERAL CITIES, and especially RUNNING WILD.

Unfortunately, what I like to call, "event books" like Year of the Comet, System Failure, and Emergence aren't by their nature geared towards player involvement, their contents are often hit and miss with regards to the tone and style of the individual games, and their scope is most often such that they can't focus on a character-focused story. Story-oriented campaigns tend to be easier to integrate or at least adapt and have the bonus of being focused on the characters (regardless of whether their role is decisive or not in the outcome, they play an active role and the pieces of the story come together from their perspective). As I mentioned above while Ghost Cartels was organized to best support the gamemaster running characters through the central plot, the contents were also designed to fit a wide variety of campaigns and to provide enough background for the gamemaster to develop additional material.

While a "tempo wars" sourcebook might have been a better choice as reference material, for a long time now fans have been asking for narrative-oriented campaigns with contents that are easier to bring to the table (compared to event books like Emergence).

Nonetheless the constructive criticism and feedback is appreciated and will be taken on board.

Any more?

Just finished the Ghost Cartels. I found it an excellent book on many levels. First and foremost the different adventures are great as well as the many consequences of tempo etc. I wont go into details since I dont wanna spoil it for anyone, but I personally really enjoyed the ride i got from reading the book and I cant wait to have my players experience it.

Having the adventure take you to so many different locations in the world is a great idea. I will definetely get even more out of the 4th edition setting books (Corporate Enclaves and Runner Havens) than I already have, when visiting Seattle, LA, Hong Kong etc in the campaign.

The intro, art and maps were also excellent and the index imo is easy to use.

Congratz on a great product, you guys deserve alot of praise. Gonna read it again over the weekend.

Can't wait for the next one! Hope to hear more about Dawn of the artifacts soon

I haven't read the final product yet, but Ghost Cartels was one of my favorite Shadowrun projects to work on. The brainstorming phase was real fun, I'd only put Brainscan and Runner Havens up there in my experiences of having tons of awesome ideas to work with. I think we really addressed how to come up with a plotline that didn't have to be earth-shattering to be interesting. And we also re-examined how to make adventure books more useful to a group, by trying to organize the material in a way where a GM can hand it out and also returning to things like including maps and flesh-out NPCs.

I started to introduce the drug - adapted to my campaign, which had a similar drug introduced before.

My players (Miami-Campaign), do not read further.

Fuchs: Funny that. One of the things I considered but had to discard due to lack of space was a subplot where the Voodoo crewes of New Orleans dealing in the drug caught on to the secret of tempo and figured out that making someone into a prepared vessel made it more difficult for Yagé and co. to have their way with them by somehow interfering with tempo's secondary effect.

Blue Eyes: Thank you for the praise. Hope your players enjoy playing it as much as you enjoyed reading it.

Technical question:

Would a character with Magic Resistance using Tempo be treated like a Technomancer, as both Qualities prohibit magical talent?

No.

For those who have been waiting for the hard copy... we now have a street date.

Just cause I don't think we mentioned this when the PDF was released. The e-version of the book comes with higher-rez full color versions of the various location maps (which you can print out, use as handouts, blow up to use with minis, reuse for some other purpose) by map maker extraordinaire Sean Macdonald. For those of you who will be picking up just the hard copy, we haven't forgotten you and the maps are now available for free on Shadowrun4.com.

I do agree with Zen's point in terms of timeline. It has been roughly three years since the release of SR4th and we are quickly dawning on the fourth year in about a month, but in terms of timeline it is still only 2071 (According to this thread, haven't actually picked up the supplement) with Dawn of the Artifacts and Feral Cities taking place in 2072. Unless the developers have major events still planned ahead for the SR campaign it would be great to see the timeline sped up a little bit to coincide RL time (This is just a thought). Hopefully the Catalyst team has future events planned for the gamers and if they do it should be great. I'm looking forward to seeing the SR universe unfold storyline wise and do hope the new line of paperback novels brings us back to the quality of the products back when Koke, Odom, Smith, Dowd, Stackpole, and the rest were writing. Since Catalyst has taken over the publication of the franchise, SR seems to have really taken off in terms of product quality. All that I want is for more story events to take place when compared to the storylne which took place during the SRIII regime.

Man it's good to be a Shadowrun fan again.

I'm done reading most of he fluff... ya know, the whole tempo thing has a lot of Perdido Street Station in it. And I know that's one of Synner's favourite books... Not that I'm complaining. That was (and is) a kickass storyline.

Bite your tongue and bleed to death.

Read: I can see where you're drawing the parallel, but PDS' ending me offended me greatly.

I finished the "transistory adventure", setting the runners up to be able to start the actual runs

I received my hard copy of Ghost Cartels this weekend. Overall, I really like the book for the same reasons everyone else digs it: plenty of plot hooks, NPC stats, maps, etc. etc. My only criticism is the shadowtalk. Like Emergence, some of it I'll be able to adapt into "News Briefs and Chats From Jackpoint" emails that I send to my players (I'm now wishing I'd ordered the PDF so I could do a simple cut-and-paste rather than key stroking) but much of it I won't. There's nothing wrong with the old 1st ed. format of a one page summary of what's really going on in the adventure, the antagonists' motivations, etc. and then getting on with the actual adventure content. I'm not going to say that Ghost Cartels isn't well written, because it definitely is. But when it includes content that only I, as the GM, will be reading it makes the product more entertaining for me but less so for my players, who are more important. I understand that the fiction bit is meant to set the tone but I think that should be more on the GM than on the publishers. Though the publishers should definitely give their opinions and input in the text.

If I were to re-mix Ghost Cartels a bit I would turn the shadowtalk section into handouts and designate them to be distributed at Week 1, Week 2, etc.

But that's a very minor thing. I like the book overall and would definitely recommend it.

With Ghost Cartels hard copy now hitting stores, I'd like to urge everyone who can to post their reviews of the book, positive and negative, on the various vendor and review sites. It really helps in getting the word out and showing the community is vibrant and interested in the products Catalyst is putting out.

I ran the first run last night.