Penta sums up things nicely.

I firmly believe even and especially with some of the writers I like are leaving due to financial issues that the best thing for the brand and therefore for the fans is if CGL gets it's house in order and continues to make books.

I think it's a difference in opinion toward Catalyst that the players have, based on how they've seen their game change.

The general opinion of how Catalyst has handled Battletech has been very positive. In part because of real improvements of the game production quality that started toward the end of Fanpro's run and blossomed under Catalyst. Also, the 'faceless corporate villain' for most of that run has been WizKids, who had restrictions put on Catalyst to keep Battletech from conflicting with MechWarrior. Battletech is also a game that's had very little change in mechanics since 2nd edition back in the 80s.

Put all that together, and you have a lot of Battletech players who are pretty happy with Catalyst.

Not that there aren't unhappy people, but it is also an official Catalyst forum. While there might be some particularly negative opinions that get weeded out, it's still a popular forum. On top of that Battletech is a game where the rules changes that have taken place are mostly tech additions. If you don't like something, you can play in an era prior to it existing. That's something else Catalyst has done more to encourage.

BattleTech got a head start in several respects: color books sooner, they had a large fact checking/proofreading pool built up [something we were working to build on a Shadowrun side and making some good momentum with,] and the BattleTech developer job has been stable with one person since Catalyst started, unlike the Shadowrun developer job. And of course, the 20th Anniversary plans, of which only some of the announced titles have yet to materialize.

Unfortunate, very unfortunate. I can only wish it had played out differently.

For my part, I can do little but Howl at these proceedings:

"What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up
their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!"

To AH, Adam, Jessica, and all the others I hope the best for you.

Speaking as an expert more than an insider, how would you have done things differently? We all know you've done excellent work on many game lines; as a game developer, how would you have handled things?

AH: we might have had a few differences, but I have nothing but respect for you. Best of luck in your future endeavors.

Great question. I highly doubt Adam will answer it.

Quick question, but if the freelancers who have been posting here are breaking their NDA's by doing so, does that mean they forfit any payments?

I have no idea if they do or not just interested.

NDA aren't total blackouts of information.

As an aside, CGL certainly doesn't pay enough or have enough to be worth those kind of NDAs.

Check out the big brain on Malachi!

It ends up being simple--if your work gets published, you deserve to be paid. Period.

Jason H.

RE: NDAs, my day job has a stricter and more complicated NDA than Catalyst has. While I can't and won't disclose the specifics, Catalyst's NDA is fairly basic. "Don't post or discuss out of house information that the general public doesn't already know or can't find out about through other sources".

All NDAs have that as the base of their legalese, but some go further than that. Some authors (not CGL types) have told me of NDAs so strict that they can't even tell anyone they've ever worked for the company until the product gets published. And if the product gets shelved, they have to keep completely mum.

OK, that's it, i'm calling SR dead as of now.
Without Ancient History and all the rest, it basically is, anyway.
No matter what happens to CGL, Shadowrun will never be what it was again.

As far as i understood most of the freelancers, while they would not work anymore for CGL they might work again for SR.
Therefore CGL might be dead but SR only will be if it stays with CGL

That, or we're being set up for the biggest April Fool's Day joke ever.

Wonder if the Freelancers would/could consider contacting Pegasus Spiele.

If it already wasn't what it was, how can it ever be what it was again? Your aiming at: It won't be what it is now, but it already wasn't what it was... Now I'm confused

Smart allec/know it all <.<

Huh? Come in off the ledge. Not to minimize AH, or his fan archive, but I don't believe he contributed any official material prior to 4e.

"Always in motion is the future."

You mean this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEu0o62ycmg

If i am not mistaken, he was there from 2nd Edition on. Maybe even 1st.
Certainly in 3rd. That man basically IS the Shadowrun Universe incarnate.
There's not much he does not know about the universe and the background.

AH has been a well-informed fan for a long time, but he hasn't been a freelancer that long!

Very little. I helped with some background in the SOTA books (hellcows, Or'zet, etc.) and I did some ghost writing to clean up System Failure (for example, I helped Lars kill Captain Chaos). Pretty much everything else was SR4.

Thanks again to everyone for the kind words and thoughts.

Ok, then i got something mixed up a bit there somewhere . .

Ah, so your first credited work was the SR3 -> SR4 character converter web freebie?

I would hope Pegasus doesn't overstretch itself, like FanPRo id. But they seem to be a bit more solid than CGL, truely, never mind how I dislike some of that team.


I'd wager the only thing he does not know are those Findley and Sargent took to their early graves. Pity those are among the most important parts to make the SR background fit, but such is life.

I wish all those departing the best of luck. As Adam said, a damn shame it played out like this. Just when SR4 was starting to look nice.

There are a large number of Freelancers who are not under NDA, Jennifer and Bobby are among them.

No, that would be SOTA:64 (additional writing) and I think my "official" webfiction story Dog Days was before that. SoLA of course did not happen, so my first main writer credit on an official product was the SR3->SR4 character converter freebie, and my first main writer credit in a published book was Runner Havens.

Edmonton? EDMONTON? I'm an hour and a half out of that city and can't find anybody to play. And an SR writer is in Edmonton?

#&$#&^

Just out of curiousity's sake i grabed the oldest SR book i had on the shelf and flipped through the cover pages. For those of you who are curious this book was Seattle Sourcebook.* Then just for curiousity sake I flipped through dragons of the sixth world a product from the fanpro era. You know how many names they had in common? Zero.

I could go from DotSW to System Failure and on into fourth but the point of this little exercise is there have been lots and lots of turnover amongst development personnel over the years.

Yes current freelancers some of whom I respect a lot, departing is concerning, but turnover hasn't killed the line before and I see little reason to believe it will now. To be honest until I started coming around dumpshock frequently (a fairly recent occurance) I never paid much midn to who was on the team, as long as they put out books I'll generaly buy them. Some will be pretty amazing, others will be Year of the Comet and Dusk. The point i'm making is for all the noise and shock value I have neither the ability nor the desire to influence where the license goes. CGL has done right by me as a customer and that's good enough. If the license stays with them excellent I hope they get the release schedule back on track and I can continue to send them my money. If not well then things get a lot more uncertain as even though SR is a profitable license theres always a learning curve on a new product line.

So in short: I'm not so upset with the company over people leaving that I'm going to stop buying shadowrun from them. I can sympathize with writers withholding copyrights although I'm not sure it's a wise move at this juncture, then again at some point if you havn't been paid long enough it starts to look like theft, and I suffer no one to steal from me.

So yea, once again, here's hoping CGL gets their acts together, either pays, or works out an arrangement to pay their freelancers, and life goes on. Personally i'm going to only really be annoyed and affected by all this is if delays the SRM release schedule further.

Dude, Whitecourt. Whitecourt. A nice place to drive through on the way to Swan Hills.

Swan Hills! *spit*

And you'd be mistaken. I had a hand as writer or developer in pretty much every project since Dragons of the Sixth World as did Rob Boyle, and in fact at least a couple of my projects for Catalyst as developer have yet to see the light of day. Serves me right for taking a break. A year and I'm already forgotten

Hi folks. Yes, I'm back.

Two out of how many over a twenty year period?

Who are you again... ;-)

Welcome home, Synner. Hope you and the family are well!

And what a nice time to come back eh?
Hey there, long time no see. You OK?

Nice to have you back! Its about time

Well, looking at your Signature, just how back are you anyway?

Does your punkass town have a Class I landfill and hazardous waste incinerator? No? I didn't think so.

Swan Hills, Alberta's Garbage Dump.

I should point out that I heard the "More lance, less free" quote from my pal Leah Jones of Natiiv Arts & Media; although she phrases it "less free, more lance."

And I have never resided in Edmonton.

Sherwood Park? Leduc? I thought somewhere in the area....don't tell me Calgary or I'll freakin' scream because I just moved last summer (to Houston).

Yeah, with a few exceptions, the lifespan of a Shadowrun freelancer seems to be at most 5-6 years. Some manage to hang in a bit longer, many a bit shorter. A few tend to bounce in and out every couple years.

Sometimes it's issues with contracts or money or lack of payment. THat has always been an issue stretching back to FASA. Sometimes it's people moving on to other games and game lines. Sometimes it's simply burnout. And sometimes it's that life, jobs, and family happen, and you have to prioritize, and simply put those have to come first, always.

I've been a "bouncer", mainly because as much as I enjoy working with Shadowrun, I don't consider myself a great writer, and I'm not a prolific writer. I enjoy working on development and management more, and there are a lot fewer of those opportunities. I've been involved for about 13 years now in one form or another. Other than myself, the only two that have worked on anything official for Shadowrun in the last couple years that come close to that is Steve Kenson (Who was involved several years before I was) and Adam Jury, who got involved not too long after me. I don't believe that anyone who's been involved with Freelancing for Shadowrun in the last year or two had any involvement with FASA at all besides the three of us.

My point is that SHadowrun's always had turnover. I don't believe there was anyone left from the original First Edition crew by the time I joined the freelancing team, which was about 3rd editions launch. By the time Catalyst took over, there was almost no one left from the FASA crew.

Hey Synner. Good to see you.

The high turnover in Line Developers is a pretty recent development. Michael Mullvihill took over from the original creators (Weismann, Hume, Dowd, et. al) and handed things over to Rob Boyle who took the game well into SR4.

So by my reckoning: Original creators --> Mullvihill --> Boyle --> Taylor (Synner) --> Hardy.

If I'm not missing anybody, thats a pretty short list. Especially when you consider the volume of material written over the last 20 years.

You're missing Carl Sargent, who was developer briefly before Mulvihill, and there was a period of time after Peter Taylor where myself/Jennifer/John Dunn split development duties until Jason Hardy could be hired.

I thought that was the case but I wasn't sure if that was official.

I was there too. My first book was Brainscan and my last was Ghost Cartels. In between that, I worked on...hmm...Matrix, Target: Matrix, Year of the Comet, Shadows of North America, Threats 2, Shadows of Asia, System Failure, Street Magic, Unwired, Runner Havens, and Corporate Enclaves. I think that might be all of them.

My feeling on the subject of turnover is that if you want to produce great writing, you want writers who build up experience. Both with your setting and with their own comfort and skill as writers. You won't get that if you keep running new freelancers through the meat grinder. You certainly won't get any Nigel Findleys or Tom Dowds writing entire, awesome books by themselves for Shadowrun if you never give your writers the opportunity to grow.

And that's not just limited to writers. CGL lost a hell of a good layout designer in Adam, who built up his skills over time on many Shadowrun books.

EDIT: Psst, Bull, I worked for FASA too.

This whole thread makes me sad...

I hate seeing bad things happen to my ShadowRun.

Just want to point out that I was talking to Mike Mulvihill about writing a Shadowrun novel right before FASA shutdown (he told me that it was a fine proposal--for two years earlier. Then he was nice enough to talk to me about how to bring it up to date). I've done some work for every line developer since then. And I've liked them all.

Jason H.

Me. I was quite involved during the end of FASA's run, from Man & Machine onward.

Man, I've got to start dressing differently or something; I'm blending in with the scenery again....

So....with all the Freelancers leaving...

Is this a good time to try and break into the CGL SR Freelancer pool?
Mr. Hardy, care to tell us what you look for in Freelancers?
And how we, too, can help fill the influx of vacancies?(Which seems to be ALL the SR writers except Bull
and, maybe, Synner)