Which cover for Attitude? Are there previews for it?

The cover for Attitude is on shadowrun4.com.

Maybe. Though looking at the products at the time, Shadowrun was getting new material, while Battletech was in the process of reissuing material that was in part reprinting material that had come out under Fanpro. The core rulebook which had just come out under Fanpro was being reprinted, as well as the core tech book, and the major product after that was a new core box set. Those core rulebooks were also very slow to come out at that time, because of their size and complexity.

Sadly, the original article it references is gone.

I doubt it, contracts in the I.T. world are signed as soon as the lawyers make sure their company is ok from any shinanigans anyone pulls. I would guess lawyers for both sides are ironing out the wording and as soon as thats settled it will be signed.

Nothing on the internet is ever gone.



http://replay.waybackmachine.org/200707131...adowrunrpg.com/

The quote is from the article entitled: Origins, and Clearing the Air

Oh, that explains why I don't remember saying what was attributed to me ... because I didn't write it.

Right, so it's apparently time for me to pop in to this thread again.

For the record:

The idea of a conspiracy, or that I (or David or Stephen) quit working for CGL to hurt their chances for license renewal, is completely and totally false.

We each quit for different reasons.

I quit because I was asked by Loren L. Coleman to not include foreign royalties on a royalty report. This was the final straw for me, after seeing and having to work with Loren L. Coleman's various ways of doing business. It was an ethical choice, and a difficult one, since I'm a single mom solely responsible for my two little munchkins, and the prospect of having no job was a very frightening one. In the end, I had to do what was right for me and my family - which was to hold strong to my personal ethics.

David quit before I did. For his own reasons, which I will not presume to state here, but had absolutely nothing to do with Shadowrun, BattleTech, or the licenses. After David quit CGL, HE was approached by a midwestern investment firm that was starting a company within the gaming/publishing industry. They hired David as the General Manager of the company. I did not know about this company until several weeks after I'd quit CGL. In fact, I had already had several interviews and was waiting to hear back from one very fun sounding company, when David approached me with my current job opportunity. David approached and hired the rest of the staff. We didn't have a plan nor jobs lined up when we quit. We are employees of Sandstorm, not owners.

Frankly, while I love Shadowrun, and still play in a weekly game (Animal Adept with a pet Bandit in LA, atm), I'm not working on SR. There are a heck of a lot of other great games out there that don't come with so much freaking baggage. Eclipse Phase is an awesome game. CthulhuTech is tons of fun. There are yet to be announced projects that are taking up my time.

So, please - don't say, or insinuate, that my decision to leave CGL had anything to do with CGL's license status or with a pending job offer from Sandstorm. There was, and is, no conspiracy.

Thank you for your time, your eyeballs, and your attention. I'm going back to working on some awesome games. In fact, I have one to playtest in 30 minutes with my coworkers. At our office, we play a new game every Tues and Thursday. This one is a board game, and I've played it once before with my 5 & 8 year olds, and they loved it. (I love that my kids are not only welcome in my office, but are used as active guinea pigs for playtesting purposes - how many moms can say that? Frankly, that right there was enough to sell me on working for Sandstorm.)

Are you guys hiring

-M&P

[envy]
I wish I had a job where I could bring my girl to work and play games as part of my job duties.
[/envy]

I, personally, am a bit confused about why you keep getting singled out in 'the group of people trying to undermine CGL/IMR's license renewal hopes', when you aren't in that group. Possibly it's because you're an easy mark for trolling (you always respond), or maybe they just have a crush on you and can't think of anything else.

Oh, so the Sandstorm name has nothing to do with the Sandstorm Engineering Conglomerate corporation of Shadowrun ?

Is Sandstorm hiring?

We aren't hiring at the moment. But... we will be at Origins and GenCon, and would love for anyone who's interested in saying hi or learning more about us to stop by. We'll have games to play, fun folks to talk to, and some really great demos (for grownups and for kids!).

(Unless you're an artist, author, writer, or game designer interested in contract work... in which case you can always send a sample of your work to us via our contact info on our website, www.Sandstormllc.com)

All that talk about her belly button ring! Drove some people to distraction I guess.

This is Shadowrun! I don't believe that they would do that, but if anyone would do something like that, it would be Shadowrun writers. I could almost see them writing a plot doc for this.... Bwahahaha!*

*in no way do I feel that this is true.

The Eggman

A lot of folks say that. But once you get a look at your first paycheck, you may understand why it sounds much better than it is.

I find it funny how a company that didn't exist at the time could be accused to sabotaging CGL's license. It's not exactly easy to start a company, let alone one with enough investment capital and reputation to pull in a major license like Shadowrun.

Here's a question. Over on RPG.net, there's quite a few people boycotting CGL products. "Voting with their wallets", so to speak. I know I haven't bought a single CGL product since this whole thing came to light. Are there other other people who might go this way?

Most people who say they'll vote with their wallets, promptly forget to when some time passes and their hankering for whatever they were boycotting gets too high. Sure it's easy to say online but like most things, what you say online isn't what do in real life.

God knows how many times I've told myself I wouldn't buy another Gold Eagle book when The Executioner, Stony Man, Deathlands or Outlanders novels they pump out are just flat out terrible. But the next month... what do I do? Buy another batch of their goddamn books!

I buy on a product by product basis. If its a good product, I buy it. There isn't time to follow every rumor about every company.
As to what I have purchased from CGL lately, Masters and Minions comes to mind. Its fantastic.

BlueMax

that's a bit hard to say.

i mean, since this whole mess got started, there has been basically one shadowrun book, one novel, and the 10 gangs supplement i think?

honestly, i only bought one of those, but i was only particularly interested in one of those. some people probably have multiple corporate guide equivalents (albeit a bit old), and won't be interested in that. some people just don't buy shadowrun fiction anyways. some people might be waiting for books. and so forth.

with such a relatively small amount of material released, and most of that kinda specialised (and none of it is in print yet to my knowledge?) it's hard to know how much actual boycotting is going on.

however, at a guess, there are probably at least a few people in addition to those on rpg.net and yourself who are choosing to boycott. obviously, i am not one of them (though i *would* like to see better editing/proofreading than i have witnessed in the past few books... corporate guide felt like it was full of minor inaccuracies, and vice had a lot of spelling/grammar errors in the first PDF release as i recall)

Ah, it's the boob window, ight. Looks better as a spread though. Is this suposed to be a normal LA shadowrunning team? Or the set for somecheap Trid serial? Well, considering it is a media book, it is okay. Atrtistically, it is very good; I just would object to this being something found on 'War' or any other book that deals with actual running and not ... whatever you want to call the farce they pull in LA.

On a side note, I don't see what boycotting will change. Boycott CGL so they won't be able to pay outstanding bills? You punish the debtors. Punish CGL for having LLC for an owner? You make it less likely Topps considers CGL worth the effort and enforces a change in ownership rather than just sinking CGL and the franchise with it.

I don't see the point.

The point is, every dollar spent is a vote.

If you support Loren L Coleman and his corrupt policies, then vote for them, by spending money. If you support freelancers getting paid on time, plus the respect they deserve, then vote for that by not spending money.

There are thousands of Dumpshockers, and many more Shadowrun players on RPG.net. Let's assume 5000 of them know and care about the situation. Of those, only 10% care enough to boycott. That's 500 books that didn't get sold. In a industry as small as this one, that's a huge statement.

* puts on conspiracy cap* So I'm seeing a flood of new Shadowrun products coming, and I have to wonder how much this has to do with license renewal. Were these products already in the pipe-line and are being pushed out early? Or is this just business as usual?

Already in the pipeline, and being worked on for over a year. The Almanac has been planned for years (And was supposed to be a 25th anniversary product, so should have likely been out last year). I remember talking to John Dunn about Attitude back in March of 2009. And we were talking about War! back at Origins and Gen Con last year.

Bull

Actually, as a freelancer, I'm happy to point out that this choice of action will actively hurt my chances of getting the monies owed me. Please don't attempt to describe my interests, even in general.

I'm not saying you have to buy anything you don't want to--just do it for your own reasons. I'm in a far better position to determine what will get me paid and respected than anyone else is. Since I'm, you know... me.

Well, not to be blunt, putting out e-books is cheap. The clock to pay the freelancers doesn't begin ticking until the book is printed and hits the street, for most contracts. Printing books requires an investment in cash and a printer willing to deal with you. It is generally a better sign to have a physical product than an electronic product - not always, and that's changing, but generally.

Sixth World Almanac, Runner's Toolkit and Corp Guide were extremely late in production but complete in terms of writing when I terminated my contracts, which set things back fairly substantially. Some other writers (Kid Chameleon, here's looking at you) were brought in to re-write sections, edited (Jason), proofed (I'm not sure this happened), and re-laid out (Matt) before release. Yeah, so the already horribly late and then large chunks were ripped out of them, so it took several more weeks to finish those (honestly, CG could have used another week).

I'm just repeating what other freelancers have told me. Bobby Derie and Jay Levine didn't get respect until they terminated contracts, others didn't get paid until they withheld copyright. Our voice is in our wallets.

As has been pointed out before, not every SR player buys every SR book.

Also, the "vote with your wallet" idea is neat, but "shit we have no money" doesn't directly translate into "gee we should be nicer to the freelancers". You need a PR campaign for that- i.e. an actual organized boycott.

Personally, I think such action will only hurt the freelancers, the game and the fans.

So what are you boycotting for at this point? Until they pay the freelancers(their working on it and should continue to do so), until they go out of business? Until they rehire Bobby? Until they fire Jason? What is your threshold? Maybe you should start a seperate thread to mobilize the 500 people that think as you do.

It comes down to the simple fact that you can't pay the freelancers by buying a book, so don't worry about it. It's the responsibility of the publisher.

If you trust IMR is going to do the right thing going forward and this whole mess is behind them, then by all means buy product.

If you believe that a leopard can't change it's shorts, then you might want to hang on and hope for an eventual reissue under a publisher with less baggage.

I don't have any issue with someone choosing not to buy CGL products, either because they don't like the products or don't like the publisher, but I'm not particularly trying to encourage any organized boycott.

I think it's fair to judge the products on their merit and let the freelancers deal with the publisher. If freelancers are mistreated in the future (and I hope that isn't the case), they should do the same things past freelancers have done: speak up, withhold copyright, or terminate contracts. But again, I can't fault anyone who chooses not to give money to a company they don't respect.

You need to stop 'borrowing' the Doc's Delorean.

Well, not quite. The other authors and myself asked if we could do some writing for Shadowrun. We weren't recruited, invited or asked to do writing for 6WA until after we offered.

That...is exactly what I said. Verb, "brought," phrase "re-write." I mean, you weren't led in on a little leash or anything, but I think I was pretty clear in that y'all were asked to do the re-writes because they needed the re-writes done. Is there a subtle nuance of meaning I'm missing here?

Yeah, yeah... 20th Anniversary. I blame Battletech for the confusion

Bull

Jason didn't 'bring' us in. We asked for a job and were given an assignment. I was just trying to keep things very clear, as I know you don't like things to be misconstrued.

Until they become the kind of company Jay Levine wants to work for.

And for the record, I'm not calling for any sort of organized boycott. I am suggesting that if you want to send a message, sending it to CGL's bottom line is a good place to start.

Okay, in my vernacular being "brought in" means you were not doing a job, and then someone asked you or hired you to do a job. That is my definition of brought in. I'm not imagining some Magnificent Seven round-up scene or Jason just popping into the BattleTech section of the freelancer forums and going "You, you, and you, you're now writing for Shadowrun." I think that is a fairly standard definition of the term. So again, I'm not clear on what exactly you're trying to clear up here.

My vernacular isn't your vernacular and your vernacular isn't everyone's vernacular. I just wanted to clarify the situation in which we found ourselves working on 6WA. I'm sorry if your choice of wording has caused confusion.

So this is the bottom line truth? Every single person who buys a product for SR, whether they even know of this situation or not (of which there's likely a much larger number who don't), are doing it specifically because they support Coleman's screwed up policies? They couldn't, you know, maybe just like the product?

Good to know.

Normally I buy CGL products (at least the PDF's) sight unseen. After some issues with the Corp Guide and Spells and Chrome (Caliban by Paedra Weldon was... well terrible IMO and she's apparently being tapped for a novel to boot) though I'll be waiting for some reviews in the future.

Okay, it's official. I don't like you anymore. What the hell, man? "My vernacular isn't your vernacular?" How hard is it to say "I thought you meant or implied X." where X was "Jason ran a net through the BattleTech freelancers for scabs" or something along those lines? If you misconstrued "brought in" to such an extant you feel you have to make a couple posts defending it, why for the love of Ghost don't you just straight up tell me what you misconstrued about it? Because when you say "My vernacular isn't your vernacular" that sounds like an ass-cover to me, and I don't think you mean it. You had something in mind when you wanted to post a correction, articulate it. It's your opinion, it's not like it can be wrong. But we're never gonna get any sort of communication happening if we don't understand what the hell the other person is taking away from our statements. So obviously you feel that "brought in" was the incorrect term - why? Explain it to me. Tell me what "brought in" means to you, and we can progress.

Or , if its just the two of you.. use PM.

Just a suggestion.

BlueMax

I think that this is a product of miscommunication. Your constant needling, justified or not, AH, has some of the CGL guys on edge. "Brought in", coming from you, could be construed with a negative connotation, especially given your rather vocal opinion of the quality of your successors. I don't think you were being particularly malicious but some people are going to be a little more defensive when you start wading in.

Holy Toledo, you're willing to say that out loud? It sounds like you didn't like the way corporate was operating, so you took your immediate manager, whoever that was, bent them over a table and made them squeal because you didn't like what *their* manager was doing. I don't know what point you were trying to make, but it just seems vindictive to withdraw material at that point. Couldn't you have been a little more selective like, "Ok, all the stuff that's going to print is going to print, but nothing else ever again."

Every dollar spent is a vote. Buy gas at BP, you're supporting poor environmental policies, even if you like their gas. Buy something from CGL, you're supporting the Loren L Coleman retirement fund, even if you like their products.

I *love* Shadowrun. And I won't buy their products because I can't stomach what CGL has done to a lot of people I respect.

What percentage of Shadowrun players (and possible buyers of new books) know about this, I wonder? I mean, sure, everyone here at dumpshock.com does, but we're just a small part of the community.

As far as I've been able to tell there's only about 20-30 particularly loud-mouthed individuals even within the online community, and of those 20-30 I'd be surprised if even a significant fraction of them would actually boycott the game. Spamming the same basic post over and over across multiple message boards does not a large mob make.

Well, it's important to point out that:

a) Jason had just banned me from the freelancer forums because I accused him of lying (I still maintain he was being dishonest, Jason disagrees),

b) I had until that point kept to my contracts even though most of the freelancers I knew, liked, and respected had left or withdrawn their contracts, so I was feeling a bit alienated and alone, but I was determined to be professional about my contracts

c) I was butting heads with Jason constantly, having to go to extreme lengths to get the tiniest shit accomplished, and it felt like I was fighting a tide of shit when it came to everything - the metaplot, background for upcoming sourcebooks, proofing comments...just every fucking thing was turning into a battle between the two of us

d) This was at the end of a very long period of freelancer abuse. By which I mean late payments, payment only with the threat of withdrawing copyright, insincere responses, Jason accusing me of being greedy, friends not getting paid, friends getting bounced checks, bad plots handed down from on high, getting deliberately ignored for choice assignments (like contributing to an anthology) while getting desperate fucking e-mails to write stories on short notice, and getting Marc Tassin foisted on us at the last minute, which is like the Spanish Inquisition but for SR freelancers. So there was a great deal of pent-up aggravation.

e) This did not get better after Frank Trollman's initial post, the revelations about Loren and Randall's rumored shenanigans, and a lot of weird accusations were thrown out about some people I consider friends.

f) I did let Vice continue on, when the payment for it was technically late. I could have insisted the run be pulped.

No, I didn't bend Jason over the table and make him squeal, but I didn't pull the drafts just because of what Loren and Randall were doing - I didn't like what Jason was doing, is doing with the line. So yeah, I gutted a couple books. And judging by Corp Guide (at least the first chapter), I think they're the poorer for it. I know I'm the poorer for it because I'm never going to get paid. Still, I think it was the right thing to do.

As far as I understand it, boycotting BP stations doesn't really hurt BP the company in the vast number of cases. Just the poor guy owning and operating the station.