Downloaded. I'll haul my laptop into work tomorrow and check them out. I'm so sad that its come to this. It'll be interesting to compare your work to the books and see how similar it is and, if not, which of the two better represent the game I want to be playing.

I'm working on a homebrew game. Let me hurry up and hit the powerball so I can hire AH and my other favorite freelancers to flesh it out. I'd do it too. God I'm a geek.

Thanks - this is great reading!

My proof-reading contribution: in CAS, it probably should be "Lew-eez-ee-an-ah"

Just sayin'...

What exactly was/is this book.

new ShadowBeat.

Would it not be better to bump them to Rating 2 or 3 and reduce their number? Eight Rating 3 Agents would be quite useful whereas Rating 1's are a bit like Watchers, quite pretty but mechanically useless.



I was more interested in how you saw the mechanics of the various parts of the Karcist actually operating in play. I was never able to quite parse what you intended for a player to do with all that stuff, I could vaguely apprehend the edges of it but never grasped the meat, so to speak.

The only real concern I have is if there will be any legal ramifications to releasing this information? Either to Ancient direction or towards Dumpshock indirectly. While the only thing I actually have a stake in is the IRC server, I'd still hate to see others go down in flames due to a potentially messy situation.

Very nice work there Mr D

I too am having that torn between to emotions moment here, Glad to see the work as it is good but Sad to see how its all played out.


The whimsical part of me wishes that feuds could be ended and bridges rebuilt. But that could be me being selfish and wanting the best possible material for my games

Aww, and here I was expecting that in 2070 the Norfolk, VA entry would have been replaced by the Hampton Roads Metro.

You are the man, AH.

The Caribbean part (first I looked over in detail) looks nice, I'll adapt a number of things from that for my on-going Miami and Caribbean campaigns.

@.@
That's a load of reading to be done . .
Ah well, 4 free days, 3 of which will be spent at Nordcon, the biggest RPG convention in Northern germany.
I'll meet up with some of the german shadowrun guys. Maybe even soe officials too . .

Please receive a free huge can of THANKS YOU VERY MUCH for releasing thoses amazing draft.

I love reading anything from ancient-history it is the reason why I play SR, because of the cross-over with ED.

Keep on the good work and please inform me if you release anything on the paying market I will gladly pay for some of your writings

Thanks a lot for this material, AH.

Sad to see it published in this way, though.

Ah, so you have concerns…

Well… take a look at the SoLA thread.

Thanks AH, just read most of the Corporate Shuffle, and even though some of it is known or hinted at before, I couldn't stop reading. Explains some of the power structures of the 6th world that no other supplement has managed in quite the same way. In short, the world makes sense.

Great work!
Thanks a lot, AH.

Great work AH. Lets see how CGL will do now.

I wouldn't say useless, but yes, there is something to be said for going for quality over quantity. As I said, these profiles are building blocks, they're not designed to be optimized.


Somewhere between Judge Dredd's Lawgiver, the Pistol Packin' Polaris Packrat's talking pistols, and Robocop. The Savalette Guardians are drones with a punch - stick a Machine sprite in each and the Gunsel Karcist can do all sorts of wild tricks. Throw a gun into a room and have it fire while spinning, surrendering a firearm and having it not shoot, leaving a gun propped at the doorway to guard it, say "incendiary rounds" and have the gun switch ammo, that sort of thing. It was something of an effort to make a technomancer with a significantly different but valid focus from the traditional one.

In hindsight, it would have been better to go with the Smartlink Complex Form (p. 136, Unwired) rather than an actual smartlink. I can probably guess my reasons for not doing it, but it feels like an oversight in hindsight.

This is not the first nor the last time that freelancers or former freelancers have released unpublished material on to the web. Steve Kenson has had a site up with his material for over 10 years and I can name a dozen others myself included. Catalyst and Topps have a published policy on the publishing fan material on the web (here). As long as Ancient includes the relevant disclaimers and given the decades of precedent the only reason for CGL to take action would be out of spite.

AH,

All I can say is wow! Hell, my eyes even misted up while reading the intro to 'The Untethered Life'.

I helped kill CC back in System Failure...some people might disagree with me, but I thought it was a good time to bring him back.

I will ask the two questions that I thought of at once and no one else has brought up:
1) With these being withdrawn from the publisher will it delay the books they were supposed to go into? I was hoping to get snow fox one of the named books for her birthday but it was delayed. I wondered if this is the reason.

2)Why? After being one of the best known voices in the SR world, did you suddenly severe all ties? Yes I know this is potentially personal but I do not think it hurts to ask.

It did delay these books, some other freelancers have been brought in to re-write the drafts that I withdrew.


This is dealt with in more detail here, but basically I was banned from the freelancer forums for speaking my mind in a private conversation (i.e. I said Jason Hardy was a liar), and I decided I no longer wanted to be associated with the company.

I think that you need to look at yourself first. Do you really think this statement contributes anything useful ?

AH,

I should have looked at this long before now. I've had so little time to visit DS recently. This looks great. I don't seem to be able to download them. The site you're using says "direct downloads are forbidden". Is there any other way I can get these? I'd like to save them to my computer in case they vanish, or print them out.

If you like, I can put them on my site so they remain findable when this thread starts to sink.

K.

I also put them up on my website. I think the problem is they want you to open the file and /then/ save them, but you can just use the links to my website. As long as we don't have hundreds of people do it, it shouldn't crash the server.

Sweet stuff.


Thanks all

Damm you AH, i almost dropped from my chair when i read the Carolyn Winters personal quote

I think I stated out that spell after an argument.

Strange, I didn't have any trouble downloading them. What method did you use to save them?


EDIT: Nevermind, I downloaded from his site, not the links on the first page.

PACKS is pretty cool. I had created some similar packages for some of my players in a campaign, but certainly not that extensive. That is certainly a lot of work. Thanks for sharing!

SR4 is certainly screaming for a good building block concept like this.

Just wanted to echo my thanks. Wow. I've been a fan of AH's work since I stumbled on his SR web page years ago, and my respect just keeps going up.

For what little it's worth - you not being involved officially any more (with cause or without) is not just your loss, or Catalyst's loss - it's our loss.

Up on AH's site

Thanks AH

PACKS needlessly overcomplicates things.

WTF? O.o
is that even possible with the SR4 Build-Systems? x.x

Well, he's right in a way. I had particular design principles in place when I made PACKS (which I should remind was initially a collaboration of ideas between myself and Synner), and those are very evident - every item has a listed cost/price, every category has a summation of cost/price, and then the entire profile/kit has a cost/price. That's more complicated than it strictly needed to be - I could have just slapped a price on the profile/kit as a whole and left it at that.

But you being you, you decided to make it transparent enough to see where the numbers are coming from right?

Well, I wanted to make it easy for people to swap out entries they didn't like. I mean, it's a nice exercise in character building to put all these profiles together, but I don't pretend that they're perfect for everybody. That's why I gave that example for customizing a profile. You know what a pain in the ass that would be without individual costs for each entry?

Jup.
Having to look up the price of something you don't want in there, then deducting it from the module cost, then adding in the other thing.
Like this, you don't need to look up the prices for the stuff you want to kick out, only the price for the stuff you want to add in.

Downloaded them, looking forward to reading them, just wanted to say thanks for sharing your work and all of your contributions to SR.

You've obviously put a lot of work into PACKS since you split with CGL.

Lots of fixes, Activesofts mostly, the weird halving of Essence costs in Off the Shelf Sam' and Posthuman Op'.

Sniper still lists a Desert Fox instead of Desert Strike and doesn't clarify whether the silencer is a mod or an accessory.

Anthrorigger has an Evo Orderly with mimic. Arsenal errata removed Orderly from the anthropomorphic category AFAIK.

More to follow.

Maybe.

Ancient was also working on a more elaborate "template" creation system when I proposed we dumb it down into PACKS for the Runners' Toolkit.

My meagre contribution to PACKS was to give Ancient a general idea of the plug-and-play BP/Nuyen templates my players use in our game (some of you may remember me talking about this in one of run-ins with Cain), everything else was Ancient's work. He took the basic outline to a whole new level far beyond the basic runner/hacker/rigger/street sam packages I originally mentioned. His brief for PACKS was that he make it simple, customizable, and easy to implement for both players and GMs. To further facilitate things, and as has been noted, we later decided to include individual item BP and nuyen cost breakdowns to allow you to swap out elements of a Character Profile or Kit without recalculating the whole thing. We wanted something that shaved time off the two most time-consuming elements of chargen (skill and gear selection) and Ancient History delivered.

If you've mastered the creation system, have the time to spare, and/or you want to min-max the character to hell and back, PACKS isn't really targeted at you (although you could use a Profile or Kit as a reference or guideline). But if you are new to the game, want to put together a quick character, want a guideline for a character concept, want to save time looking up a bunch of gear, or are a GM needing a quick-build NPC, then PACKS should seriously simplify your task.

I'm very pleased to see this version of PACKS released since I think it is some of Ancient's best work in terms of rules. I'm also eager to see what Jason's take on PACKS is.

While it was far from finished and playtested maybe some fan pressure might get him to release that template system.

Covert Ops still has a 300 sound suppressor on an Ingram SmartgunX that already has one built in...

Yes please. [insert appropriate fan pressure here]

Template system, tell us more.......

Ah, yes, Tiered character gen - never did finish that one. The basic idea actually came from an off-hand comment that Adam Jury made years ago about reforming the character generation process around social levels, and my experience playing with the KatharSys system during the FanPro translation of Degenesis (which I think never materialized). The basic idea was based on 400 BP chargen, split into three 100 BP packages or "tiers" - Race, Life Style, Profession - and then have a selection of 50 BP kits. So you would buy a racial package (cost of race, some minimum attributes, and skills), a life style (1 month of life style cost, plus some skills, possibly other equipment, and more attributes), a profession (some final attributes, much heavier on the skills, special equipment, possibly qualities as necessary), and an equipment kit - and you would add them all up and only have to "spend" 50 BP instead of 400 BP. I never got past the very basic drafts; initially when making PACKS I intended for it to be completely compatible with the planned "tier" system with 100 BP profiles and 50 BP kits, but that proved unwieldy. The tricky bit, natch, is making sure that the character created by the layered profiles is still a legal character. I also had some ideas of a sort of gish concept instead of the separate racial/lifestyle options - taking two professions like "Mercenary" and "Shaman" and putting them together to make a Merc Shaman, or "Street" and "Samurai" to make a "Street Samurai." So a lot like PACKS, only moreso.

I´d say that given the acceptance of 750 SR4-nonA karma vs. 400 BP, deviations between the power of a PACKs char and a BP char could have been ignored. "Translate supernatural attributes and skills into BP" would have been enough.

PACKS is pretty much what I expected (that's a very good thing). I had been working on something very much like it a while back but got sidetracked and never finished. I basically made more bite sized packs that represented a year or two of character background, so you'd pick up three to five bits (...BITS? Background Inspired Training System?) to get to the point of what you have here. The key difference was that I needed to trick my players into building an actual background rather than starting with an archtype, and I wanted to speed up character building like you've done.

I wish y'all could have seen The Megacorporate Shuffle when it was laid out. Gorgeous work. With all the different styles of pull-out boxes, it was probably my single most ambitious piece, layout-wise. Originally it was three separate chapters, but things ran late and over wordcount and Syn asked me to combine them into one uber-chapter. It might not be Corporate Shadowfiles, but I think it came out very well. Second most amount of work of all the drafts I posted, after PACKS.

Sigh, what does it say when I read "conton Confederation" and I wondered if you'd be telling usd that the bridge that Julius Caesar ordered destroyed was rebuilt?

AH I'm upset to hear of the seperation but happy you shared the details with us. I guess my hopes of ending up in the shadow talk again are going down for the count- thank you Synner for the immortality you gave me.You finally gave me Montevideo but, cruelly, no details about what I was looknig for-sadistic guy! Never mnid something frakking huge by the arizona in Pearl, the Graf Spee in Montivideo harbour gives me far more ideas