Interesting; I had assumed they were added after the first draft to spice up the text.

Nah. The Unpublished Neo-Tokyo Fragment was entirely bluescript.

Instead, Lonsing wrote that Chibi are now a must-have equipment. I don't really see that as better, sorry.


Synner wanted to, but it didn't work out. For one arc (the 4th world legacy), there also is the Ancient files.

Welcome back Ken.

The story bible was a work in progress on my desk when I left CGL. On the other hand, since the release of SR4 (and certainly since I stepped in after Rob moved on to Eclipse Phase) metaplots have been mapped out and brainstormed 3-4 years down the road. Emergence and what became Ghost Cartelswere concieved and brainstormed over 4 years ago. I had War! mapped out (although a very different plotline than what will see print) to follow on from the fallout of Ghost Cartels, then the Artifacts and followup campaign storyline, then a Horizon story, then the Space Elevator plotline would come to a head, and later down the line the follow up to the teasers left in by the Dream Seed/Ghost Cartels. Not sure how far ahead Jason's planning things these days, but I was definitely into mapping things as far ahead as possible and structuring the release schedule to support the current direction/plot of the game (ie. A Merc/Military or Espionage book to preceed a war campaign book)


If memory serves me well you wrote that up for me after layout was mostly wrapped and it looked like we were a couple of pages short for Neo-Tokyo. Almost overnight IIRC.

This may be what it turned into but not everyone likes it this way. BattleTech did a great job of separating the two for the longest time. (I have no idea where it stands now as I have lost track of it over 12 years now)

I like the corporations, shady underworld, gritty cyber, neon light, japanese culture taking over, and a whole new world of magic evolving. (but trumping everything) As we think of new ideas I like to see the additional tech available. I don't see why it has to be tied to a timeline. The whole power struggle and politics I can especially do without. If I want a story I will get a novel. Having this story line crammed down our throats, cutting the value of a sourcebook is what I don't like about shadowrun. Late 3rd and 4th it got worse. I liked the Street Sam Catalog, Cybertechnology, fields of fire. Give me tech, give me rules, but keep the fluff out of it. I will buy a novel if it suits my taste. 2XS, fade to black, etc. I avoided all Kenson books and the dragon heart series as they all got "mary-sue" characters and plots.



This is the reason shadowrun is emo instead of punk. Give me names of these fans and addresses and I will remedy that for you.
I think some fans ask for fluff, but the company looked at it and said how can we make the most money. The company knows that they can pad technical content with fluff, usually enough to split things into multiple publications and sell more units over all than keeping just technical books that everyone will buy and fluff books that only a few will buy.

So in essence you will sell units more by having 2 books 50% tech/ 50% fluff, than you will selling 1 book 100% tech and 1 book 100% fluff because less people will buy the fluff and everyone buys the tech.

Buy a novel. Then you get all the fluff you can handle.



How is the lack of novels a bright spot?

See, this is one of those areas where I think SR4 has done a good job of balancing things. In SR1/2 you would get 1 item (cyber, vehicle, weapon, etc) per page with some game info and a LOT of fluff (I'm looking at you Rigger Black Book and Stret Sam Catalogue). In SR3 it was like an encyclopdia of game info (as stated above), and while this allowed for some new things it didn't always feel whole to me. Stats in a book are nice, but there was nothing to give a feel for them. The SR4 books give some fluff, but have higher content than older versions.

If you suggest that people buy novels if they want fluff, then it could be argued that you could go buy technical manuals if you just want gear info. In my opinion, both are foolish, to have a game world where things feel like they fit, you need more than just stat blocks.

Just my $0.02 on this part though.

Also, which novel to buy? It's not like there are any coming out.

-- That's good to hear (the planning part, not the "never finished" part). The ad-hoc system was a bit bizarre for a game line that advanced in real-time.

-- This is a huge boon to writers and overall consistency, even if you don't agree with the actual events themselves. With the stable of Shadowrun writers always in flux it's not easy to keep things coherent over time.


-- Many of the novels were godawful messes. For every Burning Bright there were two Forever Drugs.

You know I hate to miss deadlines and can work fast when needs be.

Ask the developers. Somehow they hear that we want fluff, but not that we want a good novel. I remember being freaked out by 2xs. The hive scenes blew my mind. Too bad Stackpole parted ways. It would be nice to find the next Nigel Findley.



I would love tech manuals. I agree that we need to have more than 1 item per page. would be easy to manage 2 possibly 3.

Wait,
Lets make a trade. For every page of tech item fluff we need, you axe one of those annoying short stories. Win Win?

BlueMax
/ would prefer beautiful whitespace and shadowtalk to short stories

Everyone has a preference so I'm not saying whether one person is right or wrong, but growing sales, a re-energized fanbase and a renewed brand in a downturn market indicate that we've made the right choice. And it's not just a question of the current formats being the preference of newcomers to the game. Plenty of people have come back to the game with SR4 who had quit because SR3 was not only percieved as too complex but the must have books made it worse by presenting the rules in a dry and out-of-context fashion.


Here's the thing: The evolving universe, the whole dynamic timeline thing, well, it goes right back to First Edition. The setting was always intended to develop and evolve. The decision to try to keep it 1 game year to 1 RL year dates back to the glory days of SR2 but if you look at the adventures and there's an obvious continuity (ie. Bug metaplot, IE metaplot, etc). Compare the Street Samurai Catalog, Shadowtech, Cybertechnology, and Man and Machine (note all prior to "late 3rd") and see the timeline advance and the tech evolve, and the fluff is there to back it up (well, it was until M&M). So, ultimately, what you dislike in terms of evolving settng is an integral part of Shadowrun since the very beginning and not a staple of late SR3 and SR4. And on the (different) subject of fluff in rulebooks: the SR2 books like Grimoire and Awakenings were far heavier in terms of fluff than Street Magic for instance. It was just the SR3 formats that didn't quite work as well because they were too dry, which is one reason the SOTA books reintroduced fluff to rulebooks.

And just for the sake of it I'm going to repeat: "evolving history" =! "storyline." The world moves on, things happen and not all of them are story or metaplot-related. The introduction of a paradigm-changing technology like Augmented Reality was not in itself a metaplot or story, and yet it changes the way the entire setting is percieved. No longer is the Matrix the domain of deckers and techheads alone. Everyone now uses the Matrix, like the books have always said they did but in practice the rules never allowed (one of many examples of the disconnect resultant from keeping rules and fluff separate). However, without the extensive fluff in Unwired this radical change would never have been properly contextualized.


I would agree to disagree. As for the fans, look at this thread and pick names. Hermit, with whom I don't always see eye to eye, just thanked me for doing it. There are plenty of others, in fact I'd say they're the vast majority of players I've talked to (before and after I became line developer).


No, the fans asked for fluff in their corebooks because the SR3 stuff in particular was dry and a turn-off. I have mails asking for answers to the questions I posted above in the relevant books. This was not a case of misunderstanding or opportunism. We could have done the core books without the fluff but its a mistake to assume that people buy rulebooks simply because of the crunch. Crunch without context adds nothing to the gameworld and hampers an understanding of the setting (ie. see the inconsistent portrayal of nanotech fluff with nanotech rules in SR2-3 and consider the backbreaking impact on the setting it could have as described).


Here's the thing though. We didn't make two books with 50/50. We didn't even try. We (and by we I mean Rob Boyle and later myself) announced right off (following the release of SR4) that we were actually going to try to destill the 15+ books it took to cover things in SR2 and SR3 into only 5 corebooks in SR4 (besides the BBB). And that's what we did. Amazingly we not only crammed all that in (well, 90% of it) but we also still managed to add in the fluff that contextualizes the technologies and gear in the game world. So no, that was never the plan.

And the mix of fluff and crunch works out well.

Synner, I certainly think your approach was the right thing to do. I know very few people who buy into an RPG just because of the game system. Most people jump in because they see a great setting. A good rules system will manage to complement the setting.

I concur. Settings get me to try games. Systems determine how much time, and money, I eventually put into it. I've even been in games where we used one setting, but the rules from a similar genre setting because of dislike for the rules of the setting. I don't have the time anymore to create bastard games like that though. I waited on SR4 for a long-time because the system was so different; eventually I gave it a look and came to see it as my favorite SR rules.

The two best Shadowrun sourcebooks ever made (don't argue with me, you know I'm right) were Shadowtech and Shadowbeat. Neither advanced any particular meta-plot, were internally consistent, mixed rules and fluff (hell the rules were the fluff in no small part!), and fleshed out the world.

I think that we need to get to a common definition of fluff in order to truly understand each other. For me fluff is metaplot, events, timeline. Optional rulesets that compliment crunch, and source material about agencies or locations, haven't been in my definition of fluff.

Sr3 wasn't popular because nothing was new. It was a rehash. Carl, MikeM didn't develop anything revolutionary just regurgitated the old. The artwork had changed and it seemed more like a reprinting than anything else. It's hard to justify spending the money when only a few things are different. We do, but begrundgingly. That will factor heavily into sales. Again no good novels were written, and with all of the ownership changes it detracted from things.

sr4's timing had so much to do with things. The xbox game generated some atttention, the distinctive game mechanics made a clear distinction from the old that people either adopted it or or abandoned it.

I agree with everyone that the genre is the draw of whatever gamesystem. Shadowrun has the sweet spot of magic and cyber.

That post has a number of mistakes or misconceptions.


I believe you'll be hardpressed to find anyone who subscribes to that distinction of what constitutes fluff, and the main reason for that is that the source material about "agencies and locations" is intimately tied to the events surrounding them in a game with an evolving timeline (which I reiterate has been there since SR1). Shadowrun was never conceived to exist in a static setting, it was designed so that the things shadowrunners do actually impact the world and have consequences which means the setting itself cannot be locked in time.

It's not like D20's Urban Arcana which sets you up with a generic urban fantasy setting with a bunch of interesting locations, powerplayers and organizations, goes on to establish some sketchy background that fails to contextualize anything, and then says that you're free to make of it what you want because it makes no difference in the long run since there's no intention of keeping a common universe alive. On the other hand in Shadowrun, for better or worse the characters' actions over the years have contributed to the outcome of presidential elections (Shadows of the Underworld), to the fates of thousands of lives (Brainscan), to the unveiling dangerous conspiracies that threaten the entire world (Double Exposure) and dozens of other important and not-so-important events, all of which come together with non-metaplot events and developments (such as the emergence of Augmented Reality and wireless technologies or the appearance of alchaera) in the rich tapestry of an evolving and ongoing history.


Nobody said it wasn't popular. Quite to the contrary SR3 was the overall bestselling and longest running edition of the game for a reason (despite the market slump).

What I did say is that the format of the rulebooks wasn't popular, and that because even though they (a) included significantly more crunch, gears and advanced rules than the SR2 equivalents and (b) they expanded and updated the subsystems, they were in fact a dull and encyclopedic read. Meaning the problem wasn't the contents it was the lackluster and dry presentation. Also note that the setting books for SR3 also sold particularly well. Sales were good, despite the issues I pointed out. Which in turn is why with SR4 we followed SR3's best-selling model in terms of content but adapted the format to include what was lacking - ie. fluff. (and by fluff I mean everything that isn't crunch/rules, from information on the major players and sites to the current status quo and SOTA).


For that to make sense the timeline would have to have been different. In reality Shadowrun 4 was released at GenCon 2005 almost 2 years before the XBox game came out, and a year before it was even presented to anyone outside FASA Studios.


That was a hard call but I continue to believe Rob made the right decision. Not only was the system percieved as too complex but it was littered with "legacy" bugs. An overhaul of the SR3 rules would have still left the impression that the game was fundamentally unaltered, remained complex and had a steep learning curve. We knew Shadowrun needed a fresh start to last another 20 years. Losing some diehard fans of the older rules was a gamble that needed to be taken, and one that more than paid off with not only a huge infusion of new blood into the fanbase but a return of many a gamer estranged by the previous edition's rules (ironically enough despite loving the fluff and setting.)

I can't say that I fully subscribe to that notion. Give me some examples of where this exists in sr1. Look at Shadowbeat, NAN, Grimoire, please tell me where they were tied into the then current events and timelines instead of historic?


There is a clean line, pretty much at Super Tuesday, where the outcome of a run would not have affected the entire mainstream perceptions of the world. What I mean by this, is if you look at Harlequin or Harlequin's back, all of the runs were in the shadows. Meaning they might make a single line in a screamsheet somewhere at most like 4 guards dead at the West wide of town, shadowrunners suspected to front page news like "The president was killed" Maybe it's just me and the players I hang around but the people I know were generally put off by the shift to a high profile. I think the closest we came before that to fame was Mercurial.


This is just marketing spin. Roleplaying itself has become more popular. Shadowrun had lost overall marketshare. Mind you cyberpunk faired worse, but d20 ruled the era. I would have to look at numbers and market numbers to draw and real conclusions.



I still do not follow what you mean by crunch. the only definition I get is, everthing that is not fluff, and for fluff I get everything that is not crunch.
Many things were missing in the books, new exciting content, decent shadowtalk, quality artwork. The gear wasn't nearly as enhanced as you are leading me to believe. They really could have added so much new tech, and didn't deliver. Personally I found that the content was lackluster, not the formatting. Nothing of real substance was released in sr3.



I messed up te times a little, but the fact is it threw some momentum behind the game. Much like the original did for sr2.



You will always break some eggs to make an omlet. I recognize that. If you ever manage to make 80% of the target base happy you have succeeded greatly. I think the execution of Rob's decisions sucked. I will mention that I don`t have all the pieces to the puzzle and I might have made some of the same decisions if I was in his shoes. I would have approached them differently.

Too late, we already thoroughly hijacked this thread I believe

Do we think there is a current Story Bible? Any chance of knowing what you HAD planned if it is no longer in the works?

-M&P

Personally, I think the way you did it with SR4 was the right mix, including keeping it to 5 books. I have some issues with some of the rules themselves, but I think you hit the right balance.

-M&P

The sudden fall of the Soviet Union, the first background retcon in SR history, comes to mind. Though I don't think Synner wanted to stress this, I think his point was that the SR timeline itself was set to develop and evolve from the beginning, taking the setting and rules/crunch along. Evidence of this is plenty, from the Horror timeline going through most SR1/2 books somewhere to the development of cyber- and nanotech in Shadowtech via a few novels to Cybertech.

The biggest point where player decisions first mattered was a long way off, though, the Dunkelzahn election. However, even in SR1, with Harlekin, PC had a chance to change the world and do things that matter - and were picked up later in bits and pieces in official publications.


Sure, it didn't generate media attention for the runner, but since when does something have to be well media covered to have an impact on the world?


Where would you gain fame in Brainscan, the last major campaign book in SR3? Reku would be out to kill you, but they'd hardly announce it publically. I don't see where you come from there.

Also, what about Euphoria? It has the runners star in a box office hit simsense. Isn't that fame, too?


It appears they did. Just, you're one of the remaining 20%, apparently.

Personally, if they wanted to make a point of an evolving and growing world of Shadowrun, why didn't they do it properly...
...With proper annual updates in the form of a compendium - news, gear, locations, etc.

I know they did this with State of the Art, but surely that would have been the best vector for such a growing world ??

That would have let stories and gear and ideas develop in a more natural way.

It worked reasonably well for TORG and their infiniverse newsletter.

What the hell man, those books have a way more fluff then the current corebooks, especially Street sam catalog.
Too bad full on fluff gear books like that arent financially possible these days. i would love a new books like that


Well ofcource my first statement isnt true if you make-up your own wierd definitions o what is fluff.
Fluff is everythink in the book that isnt purely rules.

I'll just confirm that Peter was planning years ahead with SR4 when I was a writer. I've seen his projections, as have a few other freelancers who post here. Like I've mentioned elsewhere, Ghost Cartels was originally the starting point of a story arc that stretched years and connected a number of books, including the early prototypes of books like War! and Spy Games, which have changed since Peter's projections.

I doubt Peter's going to spill what he had planned, because there's been some talk among the former freelancers of using some of it for unofficial fan material.

Also, I'm just going to go on the record saying that I think SR4 does it right when it comes to the balance of fluff and crunch in its books, as well as how they handle story arcs and metaplot. I've never been 100% in agreement with all of SR4's decisions (I wish technomancers never came to be, for instance), but I really do feel, as a former writer and fan, that they made strong steps forward in book formatting (and hell, in book layout too).

Seconded. The Jackpoint login pages will sorely be missed. And SR4A is very pretty. Full color, mmmmh!


As in, a free web book? That'd be very cool. Where and how might this be published, via DDH? Or is this still too much in the planning stage for that?

Still too early to say. But there's a crew of former freelancers who still would like to write Shadowrun material and all helped brainstorm those ideas in Peter's projections, so naturally there's been some talk about what we can do and what we want to do.

Demonseed has mentioned one of the reasons I won't spill the beans on my metaplot plans and there are others. Regarding a current story bible, I seriously doubt Catalyst will follow down the path I laid out (particularly since to the best of my knowledge things have already veered significantly from my initial proposals), whether or not they have a new story bible for the next few years I'm not sure.

To keep things clear note that I was actually talking about two separate things with Tzeentch above:

• first there's the "metaplot bible" (which summarises each major past and current metaplot in a couple of paragraphs and offering a list of book references for each) which is part of a bigger document "A Sixth World Primer: a writer's guide to the Shadowrun universe" which goes into a lot of other things besides metaplot. Think of it as a development bible/document to ease the learning curve for new freelancers. This is something that was sorely missing and neither Rob nor I really had the time to put together. When Jennifer came on as my assistant developer, I finally got my head above water long enough to start laying down the groundwork. While still not complete it's sitting on my HD and clocking in at 80+ pages already.
  
• A "metaplot roadmap" which outlined my planning for future metaplots and the general evolution of the setting and the key plot points over the next few years. This was part of my integrated approach to the release schedule and allowed me to map out specific books in such a way that they played off each other and provided complementary content (ie. for instance Ghost Cartels intentionally plays off the setting material in Runner Havens and Corporate Enclaves while at the same time making use of the advanced gear and options in the 5 advanced rulebooks, and had I had my way you'd have Awakened Haunts coming out this year which would provide ideal setting to put into play some of the off-beat character races/species from Runners Companion by spotlighting the Metrópolesprawl.)

As for what exactly I had in my metaplot roadmap, all I will disclose for now is what I've already posted above: I had what became War! mapped out to follow on from the fallout of Ghost Cartels (though not the plot than what will see print), then the Artifactsarc and follow-up campaign, then a Horizon story, after that the Space Elevator plotline that's been rolling since Runner Havens would come to a head, and later down the line the big payoff to the teasers left by The Dream Seed/Ghost Cartels and which would be threaded through out the books in between.

The details of exactly what all that entails will remain secret for now. Who knows you might still get to read it someday.

What does it contain, then? Listings of corporations from canon and their structure and the likes? Brands? Known paranimals? Important NPC characters? All of the above? Or something else entirely?

It contains some of that along with a glossary/slang list and stuff like the material I added into SR4A's Life in the Seventies "slice of life" sidebars, but mostly it outlines the basics of the setting and fiction framework from a development stand point. Mostly the stuff you mention is in appendixes that redirect you to the relevant references in an official book or books - the intent is to help writers not do their research for them (though I should note my book specs when soliciting for proposals usually included an extensive list of references and setting notes specific to the book at hand).

The content ranges from explaining what metahumans are, how the Matrix and Magic works, how astral space feels/looks like, all the way to things like "there are no flying cars/aerodynes and here is why..." or simple guidelines like "think 5 years ahead when introducing any technology, if its widespread use is going to break the back of the setting don't introduce it." Some of it is stuff that a hardcore fan would take for granted and knows off by heart, but a newcomer or outsider (such as an industry freelancer), who hasn't followed every single book released or the minutae of the setting might have missed.

For instance a would-be freelancer once asked me "if all augmented people could see Augmented Reality." Assuming the person had read the corebook that tells me they haven't really understood the fundamental concept and implications of Augmented Reality or that they are confused about what an "augmented person" means. Those basic building blocks and the rationale behind them is what the Primer was intended to provide.

mind shedding some light on this particular one? ^^

Especially because the tech is /there/
Vtol works.
Gridguide could easily handle 3d/flight.
NeoTokyo is so well organized that people with SiN's on their commlinks are guided when they're /walking/ They have the processing power to handle the pedestrian population of Tokyo. Handling flying cars would be a no brainer.

Now politically I could see fighting it. Terrorism/Shadowrunning would cause big issues.

Maybe you should keep a copy somewhere else. You know...your HDs tend to implode.

I suppose we could never see that, could we?

-M&P

I would think that the "why" is "Because there was a massive cry of protest from the fanbase when we had one on the cover of New Seattle."

Okay,okay, let me rephrase that. It's sitting on several of my HDs and in a cold storage backup drive as well. Just in case. Contrary to popular belief I do learn from my past mistakes.

Actually, no, it isn't. VTOL works, and there are air taxis that employ tilt rotor craft, but personal aerodynes are not competitive because they'Re loud, expensive, guzzle very expensive fueln, and arguably because there are some regulations about just how many flying objects are allowed to be in the air, so as that not every building is doused in burning wreckage from mid-air collisions on a daily basis.

That, and because it is a stupid scifi cliché, and belongs into SR as much as E.T.


It's of course not like three dimensionally organising things of comparable or slightly lesser density would in any way be more complex. Also, safety regulations, as stated above.

i think that was just a bad perspective . .
generally, i would like flying cars O.o

So who let the FPMV "Flying Segway" into Arsenal?

And neither had short stories spacing out the sections. Short stories that had nothing to do with the sections.
The fluff was directly related to the material covered.

BlueMax

I've mentioned before, but the short fiction in SR4 has helped a lot to bring on new players around me. I can thank the opening fiction in SR4 directly as the reason I have a GM right now.

Speaking of someone who owns most of the Torg rulebooks and all the fiction.. HUH?

In my part of the world, Torg died a fast, painful death. No one besides myself wanted to play it or look at it because it was overly convoluted. Which is a shame. I really did want to get a group together.

I cannot disagree with your statement. Fluff and Short stories are however not the same. Fluff supports the mechanics of a section.

BlueMax

What about Game Set Match? I see what you're saying though, to each their own.

Lonsing. Since he wasn't allowed to sneak his Nazi flying saucers in, they had to give the dork something. That and his Uber Chibi which would be a total must have item if you would actualy use them in-game.

Not to mention safety. If you blow a rotor you could take out multiple streams and people below.

Actually, that would have been me. However, the Lockheed Sparrow FPMV was intended as an example of light-weight recreational use vehicles rather than an everyday commuting vehicle - sort of like an ultralight today or those backfan-parachute wing things I can never the name of.

Part of me would love a escape plan that ends up on the roof with a bunch of those sitting their and the rigger just going "dont worry guys I have a plan"