I really liked this book until I got to the Technocritters chapter.

Then I read about how there are now cockroaches with TM powers, and it made me want to stick the author in a cannon and shoot them into a brick wall for being stupid.

Between the trained attack thunderbirds, the exploding attack seagulls, and the trained guard bees I think I have quite a few ideas for what to throw at my teams now.

Edit: and oh yes, the PSIONIC LAND SQUID that pretends its an Elf joygirl.

But yeah, the Technomancer critters made our hacker's player damn near have an aneurysm.

Sounds Kind of Lame... But I have yet to actually read the text, so I am a littele uninformed myself...
But... A Land Squid that pretends to be an Elf Joygirl... Are You Kidding Me?

Incubus, man. Desire reflection.

he's only slightly kidding you. some of them pretend to be other things also

Back in the day they were in the yes the military could take them out but it would cost too much category. So unless they were actively threatening a community they were let be. But back then you could drop a anti vehicle missile on them and barely scratch them. They were both more fun and I hate to say it but made more sense at least for the setting. Maybe in a street gang campaign these could work as a threat. Outside of that I am not sure what use they provide. And for the realism guys out there, its hard to get past the logical hurdles for why they haven't been wiped out or at least controlled enough that you wont bump into one. I don't see how it works out to be fun for the pink Mohawk crew or the tactical realism crew or any flavor in between.

someone needs to dig up the exact numbers of the thing from sr1, along with the weapons, so one can do a proper compare...

This ones been around since 1st ed. A fine critter, vaguely remember a piece of fiction from earlier book about meeting a hot "girl" on the docks at night.

I remember that. Think it was in PAoNA

Yep, Ye Ol' PAoNA, page 91 in the Shadowtalk.

Thats one of the things I miss about the old critter books- those anecdotal Shadowtalk sections were full of great ideas.

Sweet book. I like the art.

AND this lovely little critter also appeared in the even-more-lovely SNES RPG in the late 90s....just played it again some months ago....aaaaah....nostalgia is hitting me every time i think of it.^^

SNES version of SR... lovely? You are generous with your praises, sir.

Ladies and Gentleman, i present the Toxic Shambler, a isolatory creature that lived in the Wörther Lake in Carinthia, Austria. Three meters high, Armor as tough as a light tank. Almost killed 10 unwary people before it was put down with Electricity and Fire.

Ew . . and ona related note:
I just got my grubby paws on a copy of running wild.
Where is Martin DeVrieß?
And please don't tell me that the vampire vampires from Blade 2 are now in shadowrun too . .

heh, i wonder how many times i have made that very request...

When I heard about running wild I was hoping it would give me the skills and equipment to raise a few hounds for my hunter character. I didn't see any skills or prices for anything besides the more expensive things like warforms. It was my friends copy so I didn't have long to look through it. Did I miss something or are they not in there?

I also thought the emergent animals were kind of...off I suppose. I can understand the weird AI in the matrix because technology is a weird thing and it's not that much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine in a world where people can control tech with nothing but their minds that a few programs could "mutate" and turn into sentient and semi sentient beings. Its the animals that really confuses me. If they explained them with something similar to the renraku arcology incident and since they were created in such a way had rules that resembled the old school Otaku I could actually get behind it as long as, reflecting they were created in controlled environments, their numbers were kept low. It would still be weird but accounting for low numbers, the way they were made, and the possible mission that would go along with their discovery it would make a lot more sense then just saying "Ya, animals can be technomancers too"

There are the new Animal Husbandry skills (Page 33.) that cover things such as training animals and handling them, the ruleset that goes along with those rules, and a nice table of costs (including costs to get pretrained animals if I remember right) on Page 34-35. But yeah, this is more of a book for the GMs than the Players, which honestly is what I expected from it. Its like the D&D Monster Manual, only better!

(P.S, any book that gives me a NuYen cost for buying myself a Mount-Trained grizzly bear for my Dwarf to ride about on is OK by me! *EDIT. EMERGED Mount Trained Grizzly Bear!)

Oh thank you. Now I can get started on my Parahunter.

and people say punk is dead

Is an cerberus hound trainable?

Everything is trainable, given the right ammount of time, money, equipment and skill.

Ok, so there is no "untrainable, you become food as soon as it notices you"-remark? Great. I need some guys that get me a puppy. Hmmm...is he eating 3 times the amount of a normal dog?^^

I rather like the Emergent animals, actually. If human beings mutate to control computers with their minds, why shouldn't other species? The ability to read the RFID tag on a sealed package, and learn that the package is full of food, is a huge evolutionary advantage for a rat, for example.

Ok, this doesn´t seem to be an answer to my question. Otherwise i would have said that i need something that gives ME an evolutionary advantage by keeping ME alive. But for the rats at all, it really IS an advantage. In older times they simply used their sense of smell to check if something was eatable or not, but reading RFID-tags is surely useful too.^^ *koff* Did the evolution proceed so far that the rat can open the sealed container? Maybe some "open locks" skill or oposable thumbs? No? But good to know that there WOULD be something to eat. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA....rats.....mutable....great.^^

3 Mouths, only one Stomach. No, he does not eat more.

There's a lot of Dogs that eat until they just throw up.
Could become a real problem for a cerberus hound.

How about hacking that sweet smelling (and "FOOD"-reading) Vending machine to spit out the snacks?

Depends on the range of this ability. I didn´t read the book and acc. to the statement they can read the sign via additional "matrix"-senses. But hacking is something completely different. If they are capable of it...cool.

Wouldn't you think they would evolve the ability to read regular old print first?

"Their training program is simplicity itself. You just stick a cattle prod up their ass and you can get a horse to deal cards. Simple matter of voltage."

Well, at least Netcats Netcat does talk to Netcat. Well, IM at least. And a bit as if it's in a bit of a hurry too.

who says they experience it as reading?

could be that some parts of the simsense signal gets interpreted as the equivalent of eatable stuff smells.

if rfids are dead cheap, it would not surprise me if the corps add a smell track to their food products simsense signal...

that way, your comlink may recognice it as something you have bought before, while you get a virtual sense of how good the product it contains smells, or will smell ones prepared for consumption...

That assumes they are reading. Perhaps its just shapes and symbols. Like cats pawing at the shiny lights.

Interpret is not always read. Animals get body language. These animals just get Nettiquette.

BlueMax

Maybe I should have made it more clear that I was being sarcastic. Zenshooter is the one that used the word "read" and I was attempting to point out how silly that is.

That...is a very good question. I have an answer or two in mind, but recent events IRL might keep me from writing them up. We'll have to see how things shake out in that arena.

Not per se; that was certainly not my intent with that little aside, as much as I enjoyed the movie in question, and as much as I enjoyed giving Slamm-0! the heebie-jeebies in that particular exchange....

That said, nothing at all has been decided; it was just thrown out there as a rumor, and as far as I'm concerned, that's all it is and all it shall be (see above about RL problems which might not have me writing a lot for a while).

And still no mentions of lynching me for drop bears. My life is all right at the moment....

You'd be surprised how long bomb-packages need to arrive from Europe

At which shop did you buy it?

I borrowed from a buddy, dunno where he got it from

Am I the only one who finds it odd that a devil rat has all around better stats then most of the larger animals? I started on my hunter and will have him raise a pack of 5 gabriel hounds with the alpha having higher stats then the others. When I realized the rat had better stats I was pretty confused. Least the hounds have more IPs

Hey, I was stationed in England for a couple of years back in the day. I remember how long the post took....

Well its grammar isn't the best, as well as its spelling...

I am surprised it didn't ask for Cheezburger.

Although I do love the emergant critters, the idea of rats using rfid tags and dogs barking when someone is trying to break into a node seems to be fun, and is a great monkey wrench to throw at a hacker/technomancer.

Agreed. Plus it puts just as much pressure on unregistered Technomancers who are traveling as Mages have. Difficult to get through security when they have sniffer hounds trained to bark at any Technomancers who pass by. Sure, its not likely, but the threat of it happening can sometimes be more effective than it actually happening.

And when they find out your Fake SIN isn't a registered Technomancer? Well then now you are in trouble. If you are in Seattle the Star will want to talk to you, as far as I am aware Brackhavens Bill for Technomancer registry went into effect no? And the riots might of stopped, but the prejudice still exists. The Tempo fiasco and the Emergence of the DI's might of taken the heat off of Technomancers, and the revelations about what the Megas were doing to them helped, but people still remember what happened in Hong Kong.

(And if your Fake SIN *is* a registered Technomancer it might be time to drop it and get a new one. Leaving a bit of a Datatrail are we?)

This is probably my favourite bit about Running Wild. It puts the fear of god/the mob back into the lives of technomancers. Constant fear of discovery should be part and parcel of having a strange and dangerous gift, and pre-E-animals, there just wasn't enough ways of doing that.

Ask him, please.

I'll try and remember, he went away for the holidays, to italy. That fat rat Bastard . .

E-mail him!

They are going camping . . i don't know how accessible internet is there for him, but yes, i will write a mail i think.

Thanks for the effort.