Ah, yes, Wacky Hijinks with State Employees not paid by yourself . . i know these <.< . .
Good to see you are doing what you like and seeminglyx having fun doing so ^^

Well, there aren't a whole lot of reviews of Shadowrun material, even at RPG Net. Which is a problem, I agree. But I think it's hard to judge the accuracy of the reviews when there are so few of them there. I'm certainly not willing to use the reviews as evidence of the success or failure of a format when there are only one or two of them.

As for Augmentation, that's a core rules sourcebook, not a setting book. The value groups get out of a core rules sourcebook will very likely be different than a setting book.



I understand that view, but the new format Frank pitched above is no more hard mechanics than the current format. It even cuts out locations. That's why I wonder if they'd be of more value to groups like yours. I do think Frank's format would be fun to write and probably fun to read, if the topic of the theme is of interest to the reader. You seem to be advocating a different format, though.

It'd probably be good for the Shadowrun in space Book that's been asked for in another thread.
nothing that the majority will use, but usefull for those that want it.

At a glance perhaps. But surely it's not mere coincidence that the one location he liked happened to have the most detailed locations? I don't want to presume too much though. Hell, it could have been an oversight by Frank. But I'd rather hear it from him.
- J.

THat sound pretty like a pretty conrete on no locations to me Jake.

If you were going to do Prague, you'd throw down a discussion on the foreign police, a bit on the opera, a bit on the metro, and a shout out to our ridiculous fairy tale architecture and oppressively retarded bureaucracy. But you wouldn't bring up any of the bars or night clubs. It's not the Praha doesn't have them. Heck, Czechia is famous for them. But they don't matter. You can go to Mecca, the club where they shot Blade. You can go to Molly's, the bar that they used as the hooligan bar in Eurotrip. And so on. But the fact is that a bar is just a bar. A club is just a club. If you can't make up a club or bar on the fly you don't deserve to run Shadowrun.

Now, a discussion of getting in and getting out of the country is important. Talking about Prague Airport is useful and helpful. Talking about the Train Station would be helpful as well. Because the players are Shadowrunners, and the chance of them wanting to get their stuff or themselves into and out of town is very close to 100%. But let's open Runner Havens to page 23 for a moment. See the entire right hand of the page? That's useless. You're in a major city, there are hotels that are glitzy and hotels that are crap. Actually describing any of them specifically is a waste of space.

----

Shadowrun is Space! would be exactly the kind of book I'm talking about. The problem with Target: Wastelands is that there actually isn't any connection between space, the antarctic, and the desert. Those are incredibly different regions in terms of what kinds of campaigns go there, and the book ends up giving relatively little value to the people who want one or more parts of it.

Space is actually incredibly attainable in Shadowrun. The major space vessels travel essentially by exploding hydrogen bombs rather than by burning hydrogen fuel. So they actually do zip around the solar system at 1 gravity of acceleration. Transport times are measured in days, not months. There is a frickin pirate space station in Shadowrun Canon. An entire book about hijinks up the gravity well would have a very polarized fan base. Some people would totally dig it, and they'd know that they would dig it and they'd be all over it. Other people would have no interest in it. But that dynamic is actually better than one in which the book is tempting - but not very tempting - to a broader section of the fanbase.

-Frank

Space is cool and interesting to most people, especially nerds like us ^^
But it does not really fit into the Shadowrun Game, that's the main problem.
Same with underwater Cities. But because of that, Franks Approach would be pretty much perfect for those things.
Especially, if you don't actually print but only do PDF's of those.

Totally in agreement there, and the locations were the hardest part of Hong Kong for me to write, because I didn't really feel like most of them were necessary. You can even see in the way I broke out the locations that I tried very hard to give a shadowrunning purpose to each category, but yeah, I feel that bars and hotels and such as things that GMs should be able to make up and the word count could be better used on something else.

But, not all the customers agree. There's been a lot of feedback from the readers about how they actually miss the original Seattle sourcebook location blocks. Don't ask me why, but they do. And I wouldn't be surprised if they appeared again in the Seattle 2072 book. *shrugs*

I don't know, maybe what Shadowrun needs is a mix between the two, a Seattle 2072 book in the format of the original Seattle sourcebook so people can continue to use Seattle as their home base and then regional theme books for drop-in runs and background info.

Speaking of Rotten Apple, what immediately and irreparably turned me off the book was that as I read it I realized that it "sounded" exactly like Corporate Enclaves and Feral Cities. And not because of the same cast of characters, but because the writing and the writers were the same. Going back I noticed that the PDF had over half a dozen credited authors (though Demonseed was not one of them, which was curious since I'd read that he'd pretty much pared down the piece in Enclaves from a much larger writeup) and it occurred to me that is a huge problem for me of the newer books--they all sound the same. Combined that with the fact that I cannot stand the tone of that writing because it's trying so hard to be cooler than the reader, smarter than everyone, and generally just isn't written well because in trying to make every specific thing sound so fucking awesome, it misses the big picture. I mean, one of the things that drove me nuts about L.A. is the totally lack of cognizance of the socio-political situation that has been created through Horizon's power plays and the fact that it's been a decade since southern California was integrated into the PCC. There's the usual "Azzies bad, knocking on the door" shit that's been in books for twenty years, but to say it downplays the fact that the fundamental basis of the PCC as a Native American Nation has ceased to exist is glaring. PCC was founded as being a state where Native people are outnumbered by Mexicans (who were given NAN cover because of Aztlan, which is hilarious in and of itself) up to five or six to one--and actually it's probably double that since so many Pueblo people were wiped out of existence thanks to the camps. But the whole situation has pretty much made Los Angeles the de facto capital, especially after Mary Sue, Inc. made themselves technically indispensible to the second-most technologically advanced country on the planet. All of that is fine, and you can explain away all of that--the majority gave away much of its political capital in return for the filthy lucre that came with the brilliance of the PCC's governance and the benefit of it becoming a wealthy state in what was a relatively impoverished area when it was part of the United States. But with that no longer the case, you'd think that might merit some thought or mention even just once, especially combined with the fact that there are people in the former Ute that are still really pissed that they're Pueblo citizens now. I mean, the country extends north to Boise. That hasn't happened to a political entity like Pueblo since the Mexican-American War.

Point is: Frank's right.

What is lacking--besides better writing--is a lack of theme and the awareness of theme. It's a little easier when trying to incorporate the daily and overarching intrigue inherent to fictional entities like the megacorps and magic it all of its forms. But the wheels come off and the axles break when actually reading a book that just jumps from one thing to another. And that is why IMO Hong Kong has stood out as the best-written sprawl in Fourth Edition. Because it is the only entry that has really come close to expressing the sprawl as a living, breathing thing that exists in its world. At first glance, some of it looks repetitive. But that's its strength because as you read on and re-read it you see how all of these possibly, seemingly disparate things come together to make a functioning city. That is something none of the other entries have come close to achieving is the internal consistency and cohesion that comes with the people of Hong Kong being the glue of the city of Hong Kong. And as a part of that the runners are not glue (though to stretch the metaphor, they are not necessarily a solvent that tears it apart either). The fact that it's well-written helps it tremendously as well.

But compare that to Los Angeles. The argument as I understand it for being in Corporate Enclaves was because it is the home of Horizon (as opposed to being in a country that has Corporate in the name), which basically always struck me as "We need to showcase how much more awesome Horizon is than you and anything that's ever come before it." Because that's basically what a good chunk of the entry does, and unsuprisingly fails because of this attitude, and it becomes inside baseball to the extent that it is exactly like, and written like, the studios subchapters of L.A. in the California book--and I've said before, that is probably one of the worst location books and chapters I've ever read of any game. That said, the concept is salvageable. Los Angeles a corporate city and sprawl. But the entry had no theme or tone or soul when it came to the people who live there. This is of course disregarding the entire end of the world disaster shit Frank mentioned--a situation which would inherently dissuade one of the ten largest sovereign corporations on Earth from setting up residence there because corporations do not thrive on risk like the risk that if part of the basin and mountains were able to sink into the Pacific, who knows what might come next? No corporation is going to take that risk. But anyway, the entry here failed in that regard. It failed to show how the Los Angeles metroplex is a community of communities and cities. That is what makes it. There are plenty of cities with downtown cores that empty out like Bunker Hill does at five. There are plenty of cities with bedroom communities one hundred miles away. Going back, Los Angeles is a corporate city. Its economy dwarfs many countries'. It's chock full of banks, traders, commerce of all sort that takes place in offices and not studios; business that has nothing to do with how cool or popular one is. But at the end of the day, it's still a metroplex of almost half of California's entire population in an area where most people don't have a damn thing to do with the entertainment industry and the identity around it. A lot of people are just trying to make a living. It's like the author forgot that Los Angeles is a real place.

One of the things I keep thinking of when I ponder why the sprawls don't really work is that I think of places I've been, and because of physiology, one of the first things I think of whenever I remember a city I've visited or lived in is its smell and how the air feels. And then I think of the people I see walking down the sidewalks. I think of how disturbingly quiet Washington D.C. was in 2005 compared to when I went in early 2001 because everyone was on their bluetooth headsets or iPods or just not talking. Cities aren't just places on a map; they're the people who live there. Someone should remind the current devs of the line lifted from Ronin that's on the back cover of Shadows of North America: The map is not the territory.

Frank's book idea is neat, but it still feels like a campaign book. It's a well-traveled, detailed campaign book, but it's still a campaign book feeling. And maybe that's the way to go. One of the things that seemed to draw focus away from Seattle for Fourth Edition was the sheer amount of stuff that happened there that was globe-shattering. But that wasn't a problem of the setting, that was a problem of globe-shattering campaigns and novel events being set in the city. And maybe a Ghost Cartels-type jaunt (or Harlequin for that matter) would have been better. I mean, I don't ever recall hearing people complain about Harlequin's global scope. The NAN books tried that concept early on and then went away. So maybe it just wasn't this type of book's time. It's a shame that overland smuggling got stuck in the back of Smuggler Havens and forgotten when it could have incorporated New Orleans a lot better as a destination or throughway instead of creating what was IMO the best part of the book and then disregarding the idea for good. But I got a piece of Korea and northern Europe I've never used since. But those charts and routes in the back? Those got pulled out for constant reference and led to me creating an awesome smuggler with the Pirate Family Edge who used small towns instead of islands.

Going back to Frank's comments about the "Cities of ..." books, by this metric a Hell of an improvement would be to pick a theme/story and focus there instead of shotgunning the world. Pick the UCAS/CAS low-intensity conflict that people have talked about for years. Even if you do keep the current layout:

Chapter 1: DeeCee Sprawl (so Washington, Baltimore, Philly, Richmond and the border)
Chapter 2: Atlanta Sprawl (Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee)

Kansas City
St. Louis
Austin
New Orleans
Wichita
Charlotte

But that's for another time. Right now I'm just disappointed in this book here.

Wait, what? CE and FE used regular freelancers, Rotten Apple was the Missions guys. There's not a lot of crossover between the two groups at all.

Perhaps I did misinterpret that post but if you read closely enough, you'll notice he does talk about detailing some locations.

E.g. like detailing airports and train stations, even if you ignore pubs and bars.

Edit -
The more I read, the more it seems the writers are unrelenting and intractable on their stance of the current format of location books. It's disappointing that such feedback is so swiftly dismissed. I've bought 3 so far and I've come to the conclusion that they really are rather useless to me as a GM as they really don't function much to give me any aid. If I have to spend more time detailing a city so completely then I feel that a location book as failed. I don't expect a thesaurus like the old style Seattle Sourcebook of locations - but a handful of locations such as ways in and out of a city, the most popular night spots, places where organised crime frequent, corporate offices, government/mil bases, etc. I realise its impossible to make a book everyone likes but I've definitely given the new format a chance and just find it too inconsistent. How come Neo Tokyo does and the others dont'?

I think I will hold off on further purchases of location books. The time I save on not reading a new location book I can spend researching and designing a new city.

- J.

Well it read exactly the same to me as the last couple of books, which is why I actually said that out loud as I was reading it. What does that make it? Generic?

No offense meant mate, but I'm tempted to question your reading and comprehension. If you can't tell the difference between Rotten Apple and Feral Cities, or Chicago and Neo-Tokyo, I'm guessing you don't put a lot of effort into your reading at all.

Oh, yeah. No offense taken. I guess it was just that generic and boring.

That said, I'd actually be fascinated by a response to the bulk of my post rather than some half-assed insult.

Good post, martindv. I largely agree with you.

Also, before any gives me too much credit in regards to Hong Kong, I feel like I have to make clear that I carefully picked what I proposed to write. Catalyst could not have gotten me to write a Los Angeles entry in a million years and I give Jennifer (aka Tiger Eyes) a lot of credit for writing it. It was a disaster of a sprawl long before she wrote the Corporate Enclaves entry and for a reason I've never understood, no matter if it's FASA, FanPro, or Catalyst, they always seem to want to kick a good sprawl when it's down and make Los Angeles even more intractable to write or run. I wish I had been in the room when they decided to sink L.A.; my jaw would have hit the floor. But that was a decision made without a whole lot of feedback, probably over beers at a convention. I believe, with all honesty, that Jennifer is a great writer and I was thrilled to hear she took over my Ghost Cartels material when I left that project halfway in, because I trusted her with the material and I wasn't disappointed. But I think trying to make sense of 2070-era Los Angeles is a Sisyphean task for any writer.

Hong Kong, by contrast, was a clean slate. I had my idea of how I wanted Hong Kong to be and there was little in the way of Shadowrun canon that I had to bend to. Except maybe for the way the Executive Council was explained in Shadows of Asia, but I took the opportunity to change that in Runner Havens. Point is, Shadowrun Los Angeles is a rough starting point for any writer and in my opinion it was a horrible choice to be a signature sprawl, but the devs have a real hard-on for Horizon and Los Angeles became a vehicle for it. Personally, I would have used Horizon's HQ as a vehicle for the prominence of another sprawl (like, say, Portland).

On the idea of cohesion of theme that martindv brought up, I agree with that too. It's something I worked very hard to try to accomplish with Hong Kong and Bobby (Ancient History) will probably remember me bringing up that topic more than once when we were working on Neo-Tokyo. And that is so much easier to accomplish with single-author works, when you have one person writing a whole piece from start to finish. This forum speaks with reverence about Nigel Findley and Tom Dowd, but I think part of what makes their work memorable is that they were given the opportunity to write entire books. Different authors have different styles and different visions and when a piece is a combination of their ideas, it can feel conflicted, confusing, or watered-down. Don't get me wrong, I think multi-author works can work, but I think they will come out better with as few writers as possible and if there have to be multiple writers, use writers who are used to working with each other and know where they are coming from.

By the way, regardless of any criticisms one might have about Peter Taylor's time as lead developer, he knew his writers. It's unfortunate that Catalyst didn't listen to him more in that regard, because Shadowrun has gone downhill in terms of its relationship with its writers. Though, to be fair, that started before Catalyst, I just wish it had turned around. The talented writers they have left are overworked on too many simultaneous projects with short deadlines, or used to fill in gaps on pieces being written by half a dozen different people.



Heh, about that. There's a whole story behind that, but it basically boils down to what I said above about the relationship with the writers. My frustrations dealing with Catalyst came to the boiling point during the early work on the Rotten Apple e-book because they couldn't do something as simple as e-mail me a boilerplate contract before expecting me to hand over the first drafts. FanPro burned me on a good amount of money for my writing for them and I told Catalyst up front that I at least wanted signed contracts before handing material over to them. I thought that was fair, especially for a writer who had been writing for Shadowrun since FASA. But they couldn't be bothered to e-mail me the contract and my delay handing over the drafts was deemed unacceptable. So as painful as it was for me to turn my back on that project that I really wanted to do, I told them to find someone else to write it. Hilariously, the contract showed up in my e-mail a couple days after that (by then too late).

I don't think that is the case at all. The writers and the devs read the feedback and I'm sure they consider it. I know I did when I was a writer and I know I've had many discussions with the other writers where we've brought up feedback from the readers on earlier books.

Keep in mind that the writers don't determine the format of books, so it's not like they could just decide to change up how the location books are done. And if you're responding to my posts here, I'm not a writer anymore and I'm not ignoring Frank's points. I think he has some good ones, I'm just not sure it's the magic pill that would fix the reception of the location books.

Quite possibly because I don't care for wading through massive blocks of dense text. Since you ask:


I would say that this is not the general tone of the books. It happens, yes, particularly with newer writers, but it isn't universal.


Cutting to the short of it here: I'm not thrilled with L.A. either. It wasn't my assignment and the particular way said assignment was handled was not ideal. The author did the best she could with what was handed to her, and like all of us has some areas of interest that pervade over others and show pretty prominently in her writing. That said, it was a chapter on L.A., not the PCC. You wouldn't expect someone writing a travel guide to Calgary to discuss the cultural and political disposition of Canada in all of its glory, so any expectation you had about a section on one city describing the entire country is a little outlandish.


I like Hong Kong too. Don't get me wrong, Jong-Won and I worked superhard on Seattle, but we had impossible expectations and had to work with two other people. There was no way in all the fiery rings of Hell we were going to get the singularity of vision Jay managed in Hong Kong, or make everyone who wanted a new Seattle Sourcebook happy. We just didn't have the wordcount for the latter, especially, and that is an admitted weakness of the format.

I'd argue against HK being the only city with a real theme or awareness of theme, mainly because I think we did pretty spiffy jobs on Neo-Tokyo and Chicago, whether you agree or not. It might be important for you to realize that in real life (I know, I know, dragging real life into a conversation about fictional metropoli) cities generally don't have anything you can point to as a unifying theme. Hell, getting a city its own identity is its own small miracle. Most "themes" are the distillation of highly cognizant observations of the actions of the city populace.


I would say L.A. has a theme, and is very aware of it: Hollywoodland. It's what you get when people think that how you act on television is how you act in real life. It's false faces and image-is-everything. Granted, things like P2.0 turn up the ridiculous factor to eleven.


There are certain mundane things these write-ups leave out, on purpose. The name of the local supermarket chain that everybody knows and shops at. The price of apartments. Smells. The gangs that fire off their guns every Friday at 3AM when you get home from work. The local trid show that comes on at nine. While most writers would love to delve into the detail, we don't have the wordcount for it, and frankly most people don't want to hear how positive, uplifting, soulcrushing, and claustrophobic it is to actually live in a city. They get enough of that shit in real life.

So it's a legitimate complaint, but there's a legitimate reason why the less flashy and glitzy bits of Your Favorite Sprawl may be glossed over. There's more important stuff to write about.


Hah. I do.


Russia. Vladivostok is in Russia.

I'm going to call bullshit on anyone knowing what the fans want. Seriously. Seems to me the RPG industry in general is incredibly misinformed about its market, compared to any other industry. All they have are sales figures, meeting people at conventions and the forums and such. That's very ad hoc, but as little as they know, I will bet my left testicle they know more than fans who think they have all the answers. Maybe its the engineer in me and the fact I work with ERP systems all day, but show me market research figures and then I'll think you know what you're talking about. Specifically, the debate between fleshed out locations and high-level descriptions - there's no answer. I am in the camp that if you're running a roleplaying game, you should be able to come up with a freakin bar name. Does everyone think that? No! What's the proportion, 50-50? I don't know and neither does anyone here.

I understand what martindv means by the "generic flavour" of the books. I agree. I really do. I actually don't agree though it's a problem or even an issue any time at all should be spent on. That's some hardcore nitpicking. The setting books are first and foremost information books. The writting just has to be clear. Sticking, what, creative grammar and poetry in there is NOT a good idea. You want that, you go read a novel. Why does Rotten Apple have the same "feel" as Feral Cities, even though they don'T share the same authors? Could be that everyone who wrote the books insinctively (or rather, through experience) knew that was the right way to write it.

Who sets that decision and how do I express my discontent to that person/people/group?

I think its been very easy (for me at least) to blame the writers for that decision. For that I apologise. I've been unduly harsh in my criticism.

- J.

PS: AH/DS - what are your _personal_ thoughts of P2.0 and how it fits into SR?

There's a broader point here. SR4 location have exactly the same problem than described here with Target: Wastelands. Runner Havens worked because, all the way, everyone wanted the 2070/4th Edition update on Seattle, and Hong Kong was a nice, playable addition.

Then came Corporate Enclaves : no matter how controversial the Los Angeles setting might be, LA and Tokyo just don't add up. I came to enjoy the LA setting for a particular type of play. It's just that the kind of players and PC and team I'd have running in LA will never ever fit into the Tokyo setting, and vice-versa. LA is not a corporate enclave. It's a "media buzztown" or however you wanna call that (and actually, I don't think you could find many other cities in the world to fill a location book on that topic). My personal guess (as good as anyone else's) is that the primary reason to pick LA was to fill the datahole on Horizon.
Tokyo is, so to speak, the "Nightmare Difficulty Level" of shadowrunning. What's written in Corporate Enclaves (or Shadows of Asia for that matter) doesn't count ; twenty years of SR material gave a picture of Tokyo as the center of the world. To try a comparison, a run in Tokyo is like, a Cold War spy game in Washington or Moscow, when Seattle would be Berlin or Vienna.
I guess only a little number of people would find every page of CE useful. Most game style would fit in only one or the another, making half of the book useless, and the aforementioned controverse upon LA setting even make the whole book a waste for a significant number of people.

For different reasons, there's the same problem with Feral Cities. It requires both a sadistic GM and masochist players (for real !) to use both Chicago and Lagos settings.

There is a lot to that. The problem is that good market research isn't cheap. Particularly of an already small niche like SR. They could certainly make better use of dumpshock than they do, but I have no idea how representative of the SR buyer dumpshock is. But if they had a market researcher design a good survey and email everyone on dumpshock to participate and coerce everyone they could at a con to take it they would at least have some serious data, even if was just the particularly active and involved fans.

Honestly, in the new Catalyst structure, I'm not sure. I guess Randall Bills might be making those decisions now, but I couldn't say for certain. As for how to get in contact with them, my only suggestion is the Catalyst Labs contact page. Though feedback here does get seen by the writers and does get passed up the chain, if it's not directly seen by the devs themselves (they read this forum too).



I think L.A.is portrayed as a crazy, over-the-top setting and I think P2.0 fits with that setting. That's not how I typically imagine a Shadowrun campaign, but I think you could build a special campaign around it. And I think it acknowledges the old days of Shadowrun when you had Rocker archetypes as a viable shadowrunner type and mechanics in Shadowbeat for how to make a hit album or start a tour.

You're right; there's very little formal market research in the RPG field. It's just something that's out of the scope of most game publishers, and sadly, no publishers -- to my knowledge -- have cooperated to get some done, and GAMA has never -- again, to my recollection -- stepped up and done any serious market research, either.

We're always listening, and trying to listen to as many sources of information and different types of gamers as possible.

I'm more a fan of Feral Cities than I was of Corporate Enclaves FWIW....

- J.

Agreed. Los Angeles paired up with Neo-Tokyo in the same book is just weird. They don't play even remotely alike, which is strange when the idea of these sprawl books is portray a style of play. As I said in the post above, I actually like the over-the-top, even ridiculous, aspects of Los Angeles' media fever, but the "corporate" theme on the city seemed really forced. Which was even more obvious when the corporation it was forcing was the entirely-too-perfect Horizon. And then you're left balancing media hype, corporate dominance, and a half-submerged, racially and socially divided, foreign-occupied city and it's just too many ideas coming from too many directions to feel natural.

I just re-read this post and I'm amazed I didn't reply sooner.

One thing I hear from them - and anyone else who has been to Prague - is that it has the BEST nightclubs in the world and most attractive women in the world - bar none. Infact, it is probably the one consistent thing I keep hearing from so many people I know who have been there.

Now, if you're telling me that this isn't worthy of a writeup or at least a nod of approval, then I am sadly disappointed.

- J.

Hey! You sank LA.

Or rather, you upgraded the "Los Angeles sinks" from a rumor to an explicit astral sapper job. I never understood, and will never understand, why you did that. I agree that a lot of stupid things have happened to LA, but let's call a spade a spade: one of the key links in that chain of disaster is straight up your fault.

-Frank

We do have the best beer on the planet for the price, a nightclub scene that rivals Ibiza, and sexy sexy ladies that are conditioned from birth to put up with crap from relationships that men from pretty much anywhere else in the western world wouldn't even contemplate putting them through. They make pornography in my house, and not skeazy porn, but reasonably high class porn with beautiful women. This is all true. But honestly, so what?

The fact is that a nightclub is just a nightclub. A bar is just a bar. When you walk through Lucerna or Futurum or Karlovy Lazny you get the same dance music that you do anywhere else in Europe. It's not even important that you're in Czechia instead of Italy or Bulgaria. The fact that you could go to Roxy or Radost or Chapeau or Cross is definitely cool. And you should probably mention how advanced the dance scene is here. But actually writing up any one of those clubs is a waste of space.

-Frank

A link to a web site showing them wouldn't be a waste of space. It might not be too useful in 5 years, but heck in the long run we will all be dead. And if someone really wants to, they could use a URL redirect on the main SR site to maintain link integrity.

Just to clarify my words, I wasn't taking a shot at CGL or even the RPG industry. I undertsand how difficult it would be for RPG companies to perform serious market research, and I don't blame them one bit for not being able to go further, and praise them for going as far as they are capable of going.

But I think it's an important - if not defining - point that RPG books and supplements come out guided through only best guesses. So nobody should claim they know what would sell, or know "what gamers want".

This would actually make a fairly awesome web supplement to any expansion - "And if you want to see the inspiration for XYZ, here is the frankly bizarre ABC that actually exists and you can have a look at" with some links and an overview and some ads for related products. (by the developer)

BOOOOooo...

You've clearly become desensitised to all that fitness and sleaze all around you.

Lucky bastard.

- J.

No, I did not sink L.A. Nor did I upgrade it from a rumor to canon; it was already in the SR4 Core Book before I wrote the Deep Lacuna entry in Street Magic. You can dislike that explanation, but I'm not sure I saw a better one.

Biggest Problem in this relationship?
It is frigging IMPOSSIBLE for you to know what we Fans want.
Heisenbergs uncertainty Principle comes to mind.
You can either know where Fans are or where they are moving.
And if you know where they are, they start moving somewhere else.
And if you know where they are moving, they stay somehwere else.
And most of the time, we, the fans, don't even know what we want.

I don't think that's especially true. Each individual fan often knows exactly what they want. My favorite Shadowrun Book ever was Awakenings. My favorite Setting Book was Cyber Pirates, and the worst Book was Tir na nOg. I know that this is my opinion, and I know why it's my opinion.

Unfortunately, there are people who really like the over-the-toppedness of Tir na nOg. When it goes and jerks off to powerful elven magicians, there are elven fanboys who go "Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaah!" Now, I think that book is crap. I think it's crap because the setting doesn't mesh with the rest of the world at all. They don't trade with the outside world, so if they do or don't do anything in particular nothing happens and no one cares. Anything they have worth having is just "personal magical power" that no one else can effectively spy on, steal, or purchase in any meaningful way. So they sit on their island being xenophobes and it doesn't matter because they don't have anything you want and aren't doing anything to you. It would be like having a double-sized book about the Falklands. I don't. Care.



I'm sure you didn't see a better explanation. But that's exactly why LA sucks so badly. People who didn't have good idea just wrote down an idea. That has a cost. The cost is that the setting becomes cluttered and stupid. Events and tribulation have a cost. They have a cost in page space, they have a cost in conceptual space, and they have a cost in story complexity. Events and tribulations have to be "better explanations" or they aren't worth writing.

Consider the Eden story you wrote in the same chapter. That was awesome. It advanced the plot in a way that wasn't oppressive and didn't make people with physics backgrounds froth at the mouth. It added a fresh location and plot hook that people could use or at least think about. In an upcoming Shadowrun in Space! book, it would get a fair amount of page space. And it would get that page space precisely because it was a "better explanation."

But LA doesn't have a better explanation. It's had flat parking lots "knocked down" by earthquakes, it's had countries smaller than it is conquer it, it sank into the god damn sea... and for what? What was the story imperative or advantage of any of that? I would submit that there was none. It is merely the accumulation of a bunch of people who didn't have a better explanation throwing something on the fire. The problem is that a lot of that stuff is flammable and when you do that the fires just burn bigger and hotter. Yes, while I don't think you were in any way malicious when you wrote it - the fact that you wrote it in despite not having a "better explanation" means that you are now part of the problem. You already aren't the first or the last person who is part of that problem, but it's something that you also can now never fully live down.

-Frank

What exactly is the problem with LA and why would it "make people with physics backgrounds froth at the mouth"?

Well, a cubic meter of sand weighs in at about 1.92 tonnes. A cubic kilometer of sand weighs in at 1.92 billion tonnes. The masses and energies involved when dealing with solid objects visible from space are really, really big. It takes seriously major events to cause geographical changes that would be visible on the map. The Indonesian Earthquake/Tsunami actually only moved parts of Sumatra a few meters - not really enough to noticeably affect maps of the area. On the more extreme end, the Chixulub Crater depressed land in a 180 kilometer diameter circle. That affects maps, and is fully a quarter the size of the depressed area in Los Angeles.

To put that in perspective: the Indonesian Tsunami sent waves that killed tens of thousands of people - some of them as far away as Somalia - over five thousand kilometers distant and protected by an intervening continent. The Chixulub Crater comes at the K/T barrier and caused such a ruckus that it blotted out the sun and killed all large animals on the planet.

That is what pisses people off. Not that the storyline contains an extinction level event, but that it doesn't. If you're going to write in the fabled magnitude 14 earthquake that sinks California into the sea, you could at least have the honesty and consistency to have everyone else on Earth (or at least the Pacific Rim) living in the post apocalyptic wasteland that would surely follow.

It would be like if some part of the setting started going off about an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the UCAS, but they only mentioned it in respect to its effects on Detroit.

-Frank

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Discontinuity
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Fanon

I'll somehow manage. I just can't get as worked up over it as you are, especially now that I don't write for the game anymore.

I mean, if I hadn't put in the Deep Lacuna bit, Jennifer would have had to come up with something for the Los Angeles write-up in Corporate Enclaves and it probably wouldn't have made you very happy either. I figured the Deep Lacuna could give some GMs story ideas and plot hooks, especially if they are into the whole underwater urban explorer/mysteries of the Fourth World angle. From posts I've seen, some GMs have used it and enjoyed it. The ones that don't like it...well, it's doubtful they were going to do much with Los Angeles anyway.

Hey, it's also worth mentioning that at the time I had no idea that Los Angeles would be a signature sprawl in Corporate Enclaves. Also, the Deep Lacuna did tie into some shadowtalk from my Aztlan chapter of Shadows of Latin America, which at the time I still believed would see the light of day.

Part of what annoys me is the trend to blow up things and plots too much, and keep them going for too long.

As one of those whe liked the original Seatle Source Book, I miss them not covering specific locales such as bars and other spots where a runner might meet a Johnson or conduct business.

1. I'm lazy and having a pre-fabed nightclub makes my life as a GM easire.

2. Instead of telling me about the locales atmoshphere-it shows me the local atmosphere.

3. It helps when you decide to actuallu design your own (should that be important).

As fo LA and corporate havens-if it was designed to show how different Corp towns operate- it succeded IMHO. The LA scene is different from the Tokoyo Scene, in one you have Japanacorps and a strict control of society. In the other-a corp formed to salvage a city from a bad situation (ok-maybe just make a profit from it!!).

You are not the only one. I used to game with the marketing guy for FASA, and that was (more politely) his answer when someone asked him why he said FASA would never reprint it or revisit it.

Frank, what would be an explanation for the Deep Lacuna you could accept as "good" or "makes sense" (somehow at least)?

My explanation would be "Stop using ridiculous size in an attempt to make stuff look cool!"

I'm sorry, but I have been informed by the moderators of this site that I am not allowed to talk about page 116 of Street Magic on this forum. The reasoning is opaque to me. Apparently it is somewhere in the Terms of Service, but I sure don't see that anywhere.

I am not going to respond to other posts on this forum. I'll post up my board game in a few days, but honestly if you want to continue this discussion you'll have to make an account over at the Gaming Den, because moderators there have no problem with me discussing the contents of a section of a published book that I never saw until it was published. Apparently the ones here do.

Discussing the pros and cons of sections of books that I didn't write or sign NDAs with regards to is off limits here. At least, discussing the cons is. For me.

-Frank

Don't worry, it's a conspiracy.


That all makes sense, but do you remember what about Shadowrun does never and will never make sense? Magic. There you go. Who the fuck cares about something like that, if the plot hole can easily be filled up with Magic-goo. Sure, it can and will be stupid, but to give a fuck is a waste of time.

I think it's still amusing from a different angle. LA goes to hell and the World litereally does not care. At all.

huh, that's interesting, Frank. I wrote it and I'm fine talking about it, but oh well!

Allow me, since Frank is misinterpreting our intentions. Unintentially, I'm sure.

Basically, Frank was offered some advice from the moderating staff. His warning level from the last time he was active here is very, very high. He basically has one strike left before he's banned. And is first post back, he's jumping in and throwing down the gauntlet at folks, getting riled up. We suggested that he consider toning it down and relaxing, to avoid getting himself in trouble right away.

We also asked him to knock off the back-room politics discussions. If it's strictly about published material, that's fine. But when he starts arguing about stuff that didn't make the cut, or bitching about stuff that did make the cut, or whatever, that's a whole other story. That stuff's private business, stuff that is and should stay between the publisher and the freelancers. We (the Mods) don't feel it's appropriate for the freelancer's to be airing out their dirty laundry here.

Bull

But there is a difference between discussing what was said between the publisher/Dev and Frank, and what was said between Frank and another freelancer, especially if that happened after Frank stopped being a freelancer.

If a freelancer tells me "Oh, and I had to do this, which did not make the cut because of that", why should I not be allowed to talk about it when I never signed a NDA or promised to keep it confidential?

And there's a difference between discussion, and whining, bickering, and accusations.

If a freelancer (Current or former) is interested in discussing material they worked on, and doing so does not break the NDA they were under, that's fine. They can ask and answer questions, they can speculate on what they would have liked to have seen, what they would have done differently, that's all cool. I've done it myself. They can even say "hey, I don't particularly like the direction they went with X". Again, I've done that myself.

But, when they start degrading, insulting, and bashing the other freelancers and developers, when they start dragging out discussions and conversations and decisions that were made "behind closed doors", things that involve the company and the developers, that's when it becomes a little bit of a problem. And when they start dragging it out and yelling about the same few things over and over again, then it becomes a big problem.

This board is not the place for anyone's personal vendettas. This board exists for one reason only: To provide a place for fans of Shadowrun to come and enjoy discussing Shadowrun with fellow fans.

And when the discussion stops being something that people can enjoy, then it becomes a major problem. And trust me, there are plenty of folks besides the moderators who are sick and tired of the constant reoccurring bitch-fests, arguments, and thread derailments that pop up continuously on these boards.

Bull