For everybody who doesn't know me, I'm Bobby Derie and I used to write for Shadowrun. Several weeks back I terminated all my contracts with Catalyst Game Labs, the current license holders of Shadowrun, and withdrew all of my drafts for upcoming products. I made a promise then that I would release these drafts free to the public at some point, and now seems like a good time.

For anyone that might be interested in what might have been, these are my original final drafts for the Shadowrun sourcebooks Runner's Toolkit, Sixth World Almanac, Corporate Guide and Attitude. I had to edit and proof them mostly on my own, so you know who to blame if you come across a typo or something that doesn't add up correctly.

Disclaimer: The Topps Company, Inc. has sole ownership of the names, and/or any proprietary material used in connection with the game Shadowrun. The Topps Company, Inc. is not affiliated with the author, Robert Derie, in any official capacity whatsoever. The information contained in these documents is for non-commercial entertainment purposes only.

The following draft was originally submitted for Runner's Toolkit:

• Pre-Generated Auxillary Character and Kit System (PACKS)

The following drafts were originally submitted for the Sixth World Almanac:

• The Year 2029
  
• Amazonia
  
• Aztlan
  
• Canton Confederation
  
• Caribbean League
  
• Confederation of American States
  
• Indian Union
  
• Japanese Imperial State
  
• Peru
  
• Tír na nÓg
  
• Yakut
  
• All Sixth world nation drafts

The following drafts were originally submitted for Corporate Guide:

• The Megacorporate Shuffle
  
• Mitsuhama
  
• Manadyne & Mangadyne
  
• All three corporate drafts

The following draft was originally submitted for Attitude:

• The Untethered Life

Astonishing work !!

Thank you. I love downloading SR stuff for free!

Downloading now. I've never been so disappointed to see your work.

HAHAH.

I don't have to buy the RTK to get PACKS now! Suck it, loren greedman!

AH, i think i love you.

I'm with Otakuensei on this, many thanks bobby and a damn shame we have to see this on Dumpshock

Bobby I really appreciate you giving this stuff to us. I would pay you for it directly but I know you couldn't legally except it anyway! Thanks for giving this to your fans and the fans of the game, at least this way if the stuff that does come blows we can use what you wrote!

Why can't you pay him ??

Surely, you can donate cash to a paypal a/c ??

I cannot accept any money for these. Shadowrun is copyright of Topps, if I accept any money then I would be profiting on their property. I have very specifically included a disclaimer that these are being released for non-commercial entertainment purposes only.

More specifically, I also refuse to accept your money. You've been great fans, you deserve it, and this stuff goes to waste without anyone to read it.

Fair enough - thank you for clearing that up.

As a related topic, does that also apply for fan produced material ??

Yeah, you really aren't supposed to profit on any Shadowrun material you produce. I believe it's fine to make it for your own satisfaction, to trade it around with your friends, to post it to the internet (please use Topps' disclaimers, available from Shadowrun4.com), but not to sell it or receive money for it.

Thanks for these Bobby.

I never really got any good feedback previously, would you be willing to discuss some of the PACKS stuff?

Specifics that spring to mind are the Pilot 1 agents in the Bot-net Herder and everything about the Gunsel Karcist. I'd love to see the community polishing these up in the way CGL ought to have been over the last year....

just looking through PACKS, and i'm a little confused. in many of the profiles you have a 'required' logic + intuition. however, in the main writeup, you tell us that the knowledge skills are considered to be bought with BP... and so far as i can tell, the log + int wouldn't usually cover the BP cost anyways.

which makes me wonder... what exactly is the log + int required for?

(and on a side note, your gunsel karcist really needs more resonance, or his essence loss will take away that minimum resonance entirely, but i presume that was just something you hadn't caught in your self-proofreading)

edit: or is minimum resonance/magic supposed to be minimum *after* essence loss?

Thanks AH, you're a champion, and when I win the lottery, you'll write all the sourcebooks in Fifth Edition.

Speaking of "self-proofreading," that wasn't all that was done on this document. It appears that this is the version that was reviewed by 5 proofreaders and received some development work by me. I see that Mark Dynna is mentioned in your header--did you talk to the other proofers about giving away the results of their efforts? Personally, I don't recall hearing from you about that.

Which makes me wonder about the other articles. Are they first drafts, or ones that were edited by others? Are you giving away the work of anyone else?

Jason H.

EDIT: Later in the thread, Bobby said that all changes made were made by his own proofing pass. So my statement that he was using work done by others was incorrect, and I retract it.

Glad to see that San Antonio finally got some love from someone in the Aztlan section, but I got to point out that according to the Neo-A guide to North America, the Alamo was moved to Dallas/Ft.Worth before the Azzies took San Antonio.

Hmmm, ok.

Thanks for that - much appreciated.

Seeing as you're like, who know, line dev and all; couldn't you just look it up?

Thanks, AH.

Thanks...
Good stuff
Rojo

Sure. Just giving Bobby a chance to set the record straight first.

Jason H.

errmmm... i should point out, the author himself indicated this is a *draft*.

now, some of it, perhaps even *most* of it, is quite solid. but if you go through it with a fine-toothed comb (which, so far as i can tell, has not been done, at least for the entire document... for example, it looks like many of the rigger kits (not profiles) have combat drones with no weapons for them...) you're likely to find at least a few spots that could use some polishing. (i believe there's also a few examples of software that can't run on the owner's hardware, to provide a further example).

so... yes, an absolutely tremendous amount of work went into this. but there's still a tremendous amount of work to be done to bring it to the point where it would be ready for print, still (which i'm sure would have been done if circumstances weren't what they are). which, so far as i am concerned, most likely means that anything CGL comes out with along these lines in the near future is either going to be a *lot* less comprehensive (ie nowhere near as many profiles/kits), or it's going to be really, *really* full of errors. (or both).

this is an awful lot of work to share with us. thank you, Bobby, for letting us have a look.

I was not aware that proofreading a text made the proofreader co-author or gave him a similar position.

Didn't say they were. But it's work, isn't it? Is there some reason there work should be unacknowledged, or they should have no say in how it is used?

Jason H.

No. Proofreading shouldn't give you any say about what the author of the text can do with it.

Oh, okay. So using other people's work for free or without their permission is bad. Unless it's proofreaders. Got it.

What about editors?

Jason H.

Right, so he should include the names of everyone he talked to while working on it? Why not just mention God and Dumpshock while he's at it?

Jason, your previous comment sounded more disparaging than a helpful request to include names of proofreaders. It is not becoming of someone in your position to be doing that, especially to someone who is no longer a part of the line because of a decision you made. Perhaps you should PM or email Bobby if you have a concern?

As usual, Fuchs is wrong. As a general rule, readers should ignore any contention he makes about rights, obligations and responsibilities.

Proofreaders are not authors. That's the main difference. I don't want to make light of what proofreaders do - I did proofread a relative's book, it's a lot of work - but I'd never think that gave me any say about what he could do with it.

I don't know about editing. Does the editor of the last Stephen King novel get a say about what King can do with it?

You proofread King's new novel, and he has to ask you before he publishes it?

I don't get it. AH wasn't going to get reimbursed for his work anyway, he can't do anything with it besides give it away. What's the problem here?

Jason Hardy contends that AH should have asked permission of everyone who came in contact with these drafts, that IMR refused to use, before he released then for free here.

Makes perfect sense, right? I mean, they might have never wanted their proofing and editing to ever see the light of day.

This.

An editor 'suggests' changes to an author's copyrighted work. He doesn't make the changes as that would be a derivative work that would almost certainly be infringing. The original author chooses to make or not make any suggested changes to his own work.

I imagine if you were to ask someone like Harlan Ellison if editors or proofreaders retain any copyright in his works you would get a clearer and more authoritative explanation.

King's editor is acting as an agent of his publisher and pursuant to his agreement therewith. Here, an agent of a license holder apparently reviewed a work arising within the bounds of a third party's copyrighted universe and offered comments. It's a totally different ballgame.

I'm not saying anyone's in the right or in the wrong, or does or doesn't have rights. Any legal comment I have from here on out is going to be in private. But applying your simplistic and morally driven worldview to factual and legal problems didn't work well before and doesn't work well here. It should be taken with a whole shaker of salt.

Awesome Work Ancient History... Glad that you could share it...

Keep the Faith

Actually, here I am making a moral judgement, but not a legal judgement, hence the word "should". Please do not put words in my mouth.

Nicely played. So that boils down to doing the job of 'editing' as agreed between the publisher and the author. And this is different how?

Oh, not at all.

The only difference is that King's agreement with his publisher probably permits King to retain his own copyrights. AH's original contracts would not have done when they were fulfilled on publication. They would however have been AH's copyrights being transferred to Topps and not Jason's.

Jason I think you need to pick your panties out your arse, cause you were the one that made sure these items wouldn't be used in an official capacity. Leave the guy alone and work on your products so that we can see which is better okay. Show us through YOUR WORK what you got okay. Don't be a child like this is showing you to be.

First off, thanks for the work on this stuff. Sucks that you can't get paid for it.

Second, I can't speak for Jason, but considering AH's comments in another thread about wanting to check out drafts of upcoming books to make sure none of his work is in it, could one not see Jason's comment regarding other people working on this as a bit of "taking the piss" a bit as it were?

I will say, regardless of feelings, such a post probably would have been better served in a private message.

For the record - this is based off of my final draft, which was turned in before you came on the scene, and before the final round of proof reading you are talking about. It was one of the few drafts I had left, bcause when you kicked me off Basecamp I no longer had access to any of the proofing I or anyone else had done on this document, except for some conversations between Mark Dynna and myself. This is the reason I spent several days going through that final draft and proofing it by hand. I think you will find some significant differences between this draft and the one that was in layout when I left.

And kids, don't pick on Jason. It was a reasonable question, given the circumstances.

If that's the case, then thank you. The changes I noticed were the same as the proofing changes, but it certainly is possible that you made those changes on your own. I retract, then, any suggestion that work was being used unacknowledged.

Jason H.

Glad you think so, I personally think it is childish at best...

Is this the beginning of the old school net books that we used to see in the newsgroups back in the day?

Anyway, awesome work!

If all the developers that left CGL start to put out free material that is good, will I ever need to buy anything from CGL?

The Pilot 1 agents are bare minimums, a starting point. They're not much good for real hacking, but fine for other things.

Gunsel Karcist...let me tag another post in here:

Minimum after Essence loss.

The Gunsel Karcist concept is basically a technomancer gunslinger - the root words (Adam Jury gave me the hairy eyeball on these at one point) are gunsel as in "hired gun" or "shootist" and karcist which is a world for a ritual practitioner in some obscure magical works, and also sometimes used by early UNIX programmers. It's pretty much the weirdest concept out there.


Characters receive (Logic + Intuition) x 3 Knowledge and Language Skill points for free at character gen, and []may purchase an equal number of points using BP[/i]. Bit of a weird rule. p.85, SR4A


That was actually deliberate, the programs will run at a reduced rating - and provide incentive to buy better hardware later on when you can afford to upgrade.


Yeah...the profiles and kits are almost universally not maximized, and in some cases not even complete. The idea is that they would be the building blocks to great characters, but not 1-2-3 gamebreakers. So there are some oddballs out there. Mea culpa.


Heh. Not really. This thing was deemed 'complete' and in layout back in SR4 and I had to go through it and switch everything over to SR4A, and then it went through the other round of proofing Jason pointed out, which fixed some errors and introduced others - I had to go back to the SR4A draft.

Were the proofreaders and editors paid?

Some have. But by Catalyst, for materials to be used by Catalyst. That would not include work going to other places. But Bobby says he did not use their work, so it's all fine.

Jason H.

Bugger all that's some nice stuff I would have been more than happy to pay cash for.

Great stuff!!! Thank you.

And, good to see you and Jason almost getting along. If CGL retains the license, I'd love it if everything the press releases have been saying is true and somehow, someway you're able to write professionally for shadowrun again.

AH, I do so love when you share your work with us. Thank you.