First Impressions are: Good Book! Had a quick skim through, some really nice crunch (And some really nice stuff that you don't really need but is nice to know. For example how much a Dolphin costs ). Looks like a fair bit of Shadowtalk. Options for every character (Matrix animals look interesting, something I am going to have to look at, my Technomancer will be pleased.

The Dragons chapter is a tad brief, I would of liked a bit more expansion, but that's just because I like Dragons . It looks like it has some good stuff in there though, and I have Dragons of the Sixth Age for everything else.

As expected from what is essentially a Critters book there is an ass tonne of animal stats, enough too keep a GM happy for a long time (I always wondered what the stats for an elephant were. Strength 16 eh? *works out if he can make a Troll who can officially say he is as strong as an Elephant). Both mundane and paranormal critters seem well represented, the Paranormals all get a decent sized paragraph on a description and habits. And just a little thing I was happy to find: Stats for Megladons! Yay! I could never find them in the SR3 material even though there were tonnes of references of them.

The Spirits chapter looks quite interesting, going to have a deeper look at it later.

Technoanimals and Protosapients contains lots of nice critters to throw at your Matrix users, especially Protosapients.

All in all looks like its well written. Now, if you will excuse me I am going to go have a proper good read of it. And then I am going to start poking and prodding people for Seattle '72 and Vice

Drop Bears?

Dunno, haven't been able to get the final pdf yet, but they certainly ought to be....

edit

While I remember, Dumori, you might want to give the Spirits section a quick scan....

There are indeed Drop Bears

Do they have any sort of Infection power or is it still just fluff?

They are Carriers.

Drop bears... ROFL... we only invent the stories about them to terrorise the Americans that visit our shores.

If you included drop bears PLEASE tell me someone put in bunyips??

- J.

Nope - no bunyips that I could see. Sorry. But you've got awakened dingo, wombricks and, I kid you not, "metaroos".

Also, karma to the artist who did the Each Uisguie illustration and others. Anyone who can take something as silly as a "water horse" and make it look like something from a very bad dream, has talent.


EDIT: I have just reached the section on "protosapients". Fnord? Cryppies? Kitteh????

Wait, really!? (YEAH!)



Of course. Just do all the normal Troll stuff, and add a bit of surge. If needed, add in some military armor with the strength upgrade, and then: ELEPHANTS, BEWARE! (And Woozels, too!)

I skimmed it, myself...
But, I like that it has the rules for something that was never really covered before: Training animals. I like the idea of being a Shadowrunner with Hellhounds....Especially a magician with alot of fire-based spells...

No Talis Cat

I just got to the Drop Bear entry. Page 65, guys.

Also hit the Celaphopod entries of the Mundane Animals. Time for augmented squid.


Edit: Hellcows are mutants?

Edit II: KA-PA-PPA! KA-PA-PPA!

Edit III: It is dark, a grue may eat you.

I was trying to get my copy via Battlecorps. No chance, Paypal didn't make the transaction. What is going wrong ?
(And no, I don't think its my computer or my account, others had the same problem)

I had the same problem. Paypal didn't work last night and again this AM at Battleshop. I know my Paypal account is working (I made other purchases yesterday) so it's something at Battleshop's end.

PayPal decided not to be my buddy, too.

Right now im seriously thinking about trying the credit card...

I did use the credit card.

I've been waiting for this book for a long time. There is a basic human aversion to being eaten that makes animals very frightening. Wait, oh wait, until my players run into warform alligator biodrones. Or Great Whites.

I like the rules on animal husbandry skills. Very smoothly integrated, and easy to use.

Hm. Let's just say that the Tunnel Power is utterly broken.

I was having trouble with the Battleshop Paypal account as well, so I just decided to use the other one (DriveThroughRPG?) and it went through fine.

Having read more of the book now I can say that my first impression seemed correct. All the rules/stat tables in the book seem good, Technocritters are something I intend to have hours of fun with (Can you say packs of Trained Techno-Dogs as a Hacker concept?) and everything else is really nice. I found the HMHVV section particularly enlightening, I had never found any really good material on it.

Yeah, but we get all the dracoforms you know and love in there, plus a few more.

That is true, plus it seems the new Dracoforms are more of the kind that a GM can use against Runners without having to worry about the stupefying intellect of some of the “higher� forms. Plus it was nice to read that Loch Ness now has its very own pod of Sea Serpents, the conspiracy theorists must of gone nuts!

Mmmmm, Biodrones [drools].....

I particularly liked the Seagulls....

(and the Stalker Chimera, bwahahahahaha!)

It's fun to see the third edition leftovers, like cultured bioware references to essence cost reduction, though.

This would be as good a place to ask as any.

Dual-natured and sub-orbitals.

How high does a sub-orbital go and where does the Gaia-sphere stop?

Previously the Gaia-sphere started to tail off at 71 km and the background count went up 1 for each km past 70 until you hit the full Mana Void.

If this is still the case, and sub-orbitals are capable of reaching stations in LEO, like the failed Aztechnology one, how high do they regularly fly and what is their operational ceiling.

Dual-natured PC's need to know this stuff. Anything above 76km is fatal.

Crizh-- Suborbitals go outside the manasphere. Dual natured sapients should not travel via that method (if they are even allowed on the flight for other reasons).

Okay. I've just read some of the paracritter entries like the Greater Roc.

I knew the world was Awakened. I just didn't realise it was still in bed. It's up, now. And it's had its coffee.

Khadim.

This might not be correct anymore, but The Neo-Anarchists Guide to Real Life puts SOs at about 75000 Feet, or 23km. So they should be fine. There is in fact a bit of Shadowtalk in that section that says the Magicians (And I imagine Dual Natures) face no risk on SOs. Now a Semi-Balistic is an entire different can of worms. I would not say any Awakened beastie should even go near one of those things (But then I am of the mind that noone should. Its basically a guided missle that can land for gods sake!)

Yeah, that was a fun one. Wait til it gets its slippers on.

There, fixed that for you, AH.

Sub-orbitals hit the Mana Void by my understanding.

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When I first read that I had to take a double take at Western Dragons having 6 Limbs. Took a moment their wings to count as limbs to sink in

So the Krieger Strain retcon is now official: Three months became two weeks, curable in the first month became uncurable...

So why exactly isn't the world populated by ghouls? Since neither chemsuits nor pharmaceuticals help and it can be spread by touch... all it takes is a single carrier in a mall.

Or a contaminated Slab splash grenade. My Nosferatu with Carrier (Banshee, Dzoo-noo-qua, Ghoul) is working on this.

Oh, how I do welcome back the Juggernaut. It rolls 47 dice for running tests!

Honestly, it's been official since Runner's Companion. Basically it was to close the old "inoculation" loophole.

Good thing I retconned the whole ghouls stuff long ago. The infection can be cured before the transformation occurs, and ghouls are monsters, KOS in most civilized countries. No one argues for granting them any rights.

Fuchs--There is a Bounty Listing for the CAS and UCAS for all types of Infected in Running Wild, so you can KoS and get paid. Just avoid doing that in say...Asamando.

If by loophole you mean former kanon... then yes. There is a new loophole, though.

Not that it harmonizes with ghouls being partially recognized as a a sapient species with metahuman rights.
Rather, if HMHVV III is untreatable, ghouls will be subject to witchhunts all over the globe that make the techomancer panic from Emergence look like childs play - and Asamando will be internationally isolated, then nuked from orbit.

I know about the bounty, but the book also states that law hasn't been enforced in some time. And why not doing that in Asamando? In my game, that's a hellhole filled with monsters, nothing like the utopia depicted in Feral Cities.

Matter of fact, given the infection retconning, I can't understand why people would leave ghouls alive, KOS seems the safest startegy to handle the disease.

Yeah, I agree. (I never got the emergence panic myself - not with cranial commlinks being around for a decade already...)

Like the VITAS picture in SR3 - military in hazmat gear using flamethrowers to eradicate the disease.#

Honestly, given the low acceptance of ghoul characters in SR3 with low infection risk and a treatment during incubation, with the changes of SR4, it's out of the window now.

Uhmm... might I ask why this is considered a loophole? I don't have enough experience with the rules to see which parts don't fit together.

I don't understand it at all. Someone must be a ghoul fanboy to write that stuff.

hey,dont derail the thread about ghoul banter...

btw, seems i need to go on vacations more often, so that interesting books gets released while i'm on the road...

anyways, dracoforms? as i see no comments about it, i guess the dragons as PC's did not go into the book (would love to see it in official print at some point, for shits and giggles)

Seeing as ghouls have been presented as actual people rather than just Karma-on-the-hoof since second edition, Fuchs, I'm glad you're happy playing in your own little world.

And I literally don't understand it. I've just read the rules on the Ghoul "toxin".

If I'm reading this correctly, a character contracts it from contact with infected material (e.g. a Ghoul bite, a waterpistol filled with it in solution or whatever), and immediately rolls a Body( test. And if they fail, they lose 0.1 points of Essence. If the character is exposed ten times and fails ten times, then they have lost 1.0 points of Essence in total (it is cumulative) and they then transform into a ghoul. Or is it an extended test and you keep rolling until you've got 8 successes? In which case it is possible to catch it. I guess around a 50:50 chance for the average human. But even if not catching it, you are likely to end up losing some Essence? Or only if you fail a roll entirely.

Can someone explain this to me? My SR4 knowledge seems to have Critically Glitched.

K.

It's a disease, similar to the toxin rules but not quite. Basically 1 day (10) means you make one test ever 24 hours, ten tests in total (originally was gonna be 1 week (12) to correspond with the original 90 days thing, but that was vetoed as too long; chalk it up to a sudden increase in virulence). If they fail a test, they lose 0.1 Essence. They lose 1.0 Essence that way, they become a ghoul.

Just got my copy thank god I put some money in the bank on friday.

So, a question. How does one go about purchasing a Bastet at Character Generation?

And they have to resist 8DV with just Body dice for each test? The -6 means that no medkit with anti-viral drugs, etc. is going to make much / any difference, correct?

Bar the burning of Edge or one super-lucky troll, that means you become a ghoul. Am I missing anything? If you're a low Essence Samurai you'll escape Ghoul-dom through death, however. Wow - I hope GM's understand this before they pit the characters against some ghouls. One bite or claw cut and that character is over, unless I'm still misunderstanding.

On a separate issue, I would have preferred to see it take a few months rather than 10 days. The latter is a bit too Dr. Who. And if you're going for the horror angle, you can do a lot more with a slow, doomed transformation than you can with next week you die. It gives you time to hunt down that last enemy or pull off a final big run to make sure your daughter is set up, before you blow your brains out.