Picked this up at the FLGS the other day, but haven't seen a lot of comments on it on the board. A few random observations....

I like the cover art, but I'm not sure why it was repeated twice in the book itself. Surely one of those pieces could have been the missing Jackpoint page instead?

The art goes from awesome (p.10, 33, 56, 93, or 99, for example) to OK to "hey, were you going to do more than pencil it in?" (p. 183, etc. - the art is fine, but looks unpolished to me); most of the art is portraiture with some action/story scenes scattered about.

The layout isn't quite as nice as in previous books, IMHO. There's a lot of white space on some pages, for instance, and lack of consistency in the look of sidebars.

It's a bit of a different beast from Corporate Download; most of the info from that book was more conversational and shadowrunner-central than what I've found here. But the new book has much more information on corporate culture and what it's like to be a wageslave. It also consolidates all of the "doing runs" style material into the last chapter, and doesn't differentiate what it's like to work for Ares vs., say Renraku nearly as much as the old book did.

Another good detail about the new book is that it has info on more than just the Big 10; there's even an update about what Lone Star's been doing, for instance.

What do you think about the book?

Doing a slow read through of the book. Compared to corporate down load and corporate shadow files, I'm still mulling through it all.

So far, I 've liked the artwork and viginettes. The corporate descriptions of the big ten are not covered in the same way though (somewhat different from the previous corporate books). They all (so far-I still am reading the book) seem to cover the major divisions of the corp in some detail.

In all a good resource for the GM, and Players (to develop back grounds). Veteren players who haveread older editions will like the fact that most of the material is new.

But here's the real question: do we know who the father of Netcat's baby is?

strictly speaking we don't know 100%, but based on the shadow talk, it's slamm-o. or at least everyone else seems to assume it is, and nobody else makes much sense.

That was my guess, too. Now i just have to wonder if it's sad that all the great, well-written information in the book and I have more fun imagining TM soap opera plots on the 2070's version of Springer

Wait... What? Man, I have to wait until I get 6WA, then Corp Guide.

More Shadowbabies, another generation of 'Runners growing up in the Shadows.

Don't forget that this baby, if he/she becomes a runner, will be third generation since Slamm-O! is second generation himself.

Not just that, but among the first kids of technomancers, which brings an interesting wait to see what that's going to bring. Though the bit where Netcat goes into technomancer morning sickness IMHO is actually GREAT background material, bringing some depth into the shadowtalk.

I'm a bit worried at the lack of JackPoint, to be honest. I thought it was a good return to the old Shadowland days, even down to the recurring joke in the early bits about the virtual pets eating one another... But all in all I kinda like the bits about the fiction and then the information. But different stuff here and there, I notice you only seem to get one or two of the corps that actually shows percentage of ownership, where in the old books you got ownership stakes even for the private corps (except Aztech IIRC). But it's good to see the evolution of how things have gone. Just finished S-K, and the evolution there is fun, watching the power players shift around and enter and exit like players on a chess board. I've always enjoyed the mystery and things left unsaid; I'm actually glad they left out the true field of what MCT's Rose Garden is for instance, though if you can get pieces from different books and the info offered you can guess.

I just want JackPoint bad, dammit.

Heh just to throw them a curve, Slammo and Netcats kid is going to be a gunbunny phs ad.

*18 Years Later*: "NO! I hate you! I hate you both! And your Neo-anarchistic mentality! I'm going to run off to school and become an Accountant!"

Wait when did she get knocked up.

And yes she will be an accountant.

Hmmm... Swinging from desk to desk, as he floats down the numbers of Accounts Receiving... The Invoices! The Estate Tax! The mighty Fiscal Year End! With his best calculator at his side.. He'd sing... Sing.. SING....

*Record scratch* Where were we again?

His professor in college turns out to be the Chrome Accountant and he is hired by the Dawkin's Group.

Wasn't the Chrome Accountant able to buy an island?

And I'd bet he is retired, or else he'd be on JackPoint. Then again, he might be Mr. Bonds?

Mr. Bonds is probably a protege, and I could swear I've seen CA in the shadowtalk here and there.

I used to have a spreadsheet that detailed all the Jackpointers and where they made comments.

But Slamm-o! fried the sucka when it got to 25 mb...

Wow, that... is quite a project. Did it count all the old-school SL'ers and if they carried over past System Failure? I'd put something like that together but I have a few holes in my collection.

Yes, yes it did. I was putting it together so that it could be used as an index to look up any of their posts, and also tracked their real ID's and current status.

I'm seriously considering restarting the project (I do have some bits and pieces left over), especially since originally I had been doing it in Excel 2K, and with the new office bundles, Excel has a LOT more processing power (to the point where the 25mb would now only be a 4mb).

But, it has to wait a bit. Right now I'm working on a BattleTech TO&E project that tracks all published units and their locations (which is actually a MUCH bigger project than the Jackpoint/Shadowland project had been).

Hmm.. If you don't mind, I could start working on that for you. I do OpenOffice but the stuff carries over. That sort of thing just seems to scratch my mild OCD organization of facts and details, hehe. I might have to work from the modern stuff backwards though since like I said, holes in books.

I just read the Horizon chapter, and now I'm really wondering what's going on there. The bit about how they seemed to know about crash 2.0 more than a year in advance, the part about the Cline scam (did he exist before 2065?)... Discuss, if you please...

Oh, I'd really like a shadowtalk index, also, with informed speculation about who's who. I mean, discovering who's who is fun, but at some point my memory starts blurring again..

Well, I COULD make it Unsolved Mystery #3, but that's way too big and besides, it's not really part of that... idiom. So that's a good discussion.

Horizon is an odd duck. A CEO that may or may not have existed before 2062, a corp started as a charity that sort of tripped into AAA status after buying up half of LA, a corp supposedly trying to be good guys while at the same time still operating mental manipulation to get people to buy their products, a corp doing its best to piss in Lofwyr's Corn Flakes so much that he's probably hoarding most of that new money just so he can damn well eat it whole, while at the same time giving the one-finger salute to the Azzies. (My bet? Horizon pissing off the wyrm is what's saving NeoNET from being extra tasty crispy in Europe.)

Horizon fills the role of Wuxing and later Cross, that AAA that came out of no-fragging-where enough to make players blink and go "whaaaaa?" It literally didn't exist before 4e. I remember thumbing through 4e when I bought it brand spanking new in September '06 and seeing that sunrise logo and going "What the hell's Horizon?" I knew that things were going to be different with the 6 year hop (LA's Big One, Ute going pfft, Tshimshian getting eaten by S-S, General Corp, er, Colloton being Prez), but a new AAA was kinda cool. And a media one! The one area that seemed to be left unfilled by any of the others in the 20 year history (oh sure, the others owned media, but this one was "the media corp" like Ares is "the weaponry corp"). Aside from the grand mal lunacy of Shiawase's reinvention and MCT's tantalizing Rose Garden vivisection of technomancers, getting to finally peek into Horizon is I think the most gold portion of CG.

So the implications that Horizon is a new UB (you sorta got that hint a few other books, LA had it sorta hinted and then there was that fiction in Seattle '72 with the Horizon VP) just makes it that much more interesting. Honestly? I'm kinda torn. Except for the Draco Foundation, there hasn't been a group in Shadowrun that could be considered at least sortof "good". Evo has a sort of claim with the meta-friendly thing, but they're starting to become a Vory front. So this very creepy and sinister underpinning to Horizon's SoCal lifestyle kinda is jarring, it really could be UB Mark II, this time without the bugs. Is it another Deus-like collective? Possibly. THat's where my biggest money is, especially when combined with the whole Consortium thing. It would also sorta make sense when you think about it.

Yamatetsu/Evo is largely run by a free spirit. Saeder-Krupp? Dragon. Shiawase? Literally married into the Japanese Empire. Azzies have the blood mages directing some part of it. Wuxing is HIP deep into wujen. NeoNET now has a dragon on its own BoD and personally overseeing its R&D, and if that's not original they're big with technomancers now. MCT is lock stock a Yakuza operation. Ares and Renraku are now the exceptions to the freaky stuff in the higher-ups and even that's a little thin with both of them (Damien Knight reinventing himself from Gavilian with Dunkelzahn's help to buy Ares in '32 and Renraku farming out all it can learn from Deus' experiments). So Horizon having some freaky thing as part of its gestalt is... Normal really. At least being run by an AI or some other collective intelligence would make it unique.

I'm sure we'll see a lot about Horizon in the future, either as another corp war breaks out with it and Saeder-Krupp (since the Azzies are now officially turning their sights on Amazonia later this year) or something with what's behind it finally sees light. I'm pretty damn sure it's not going the Cross route and existing for all of 4-5 years.

I would say that the scariest part about Horizon is the e-mail that Sunsihine got after he left the corp behind, thanking him for hard work and stating that his position is still open if he ever care to return(under any of his aliases) and explaining what the Consensus is as he had find a satisfactory answer to that. And that mail came directly from Gary Gline to his Jackpoint email.
Stuff like that really makes you think twice about running against Horizon.

Isn't a bug spirit the head of Ares magical research division still?

Ah, well, there you go. I think the implication of something like that is in there, I'll have to check the Ares section again.

It's in one of the gear books: the head of magical R&D is Theresa Montgomery. She might be someone else, but if she's the Theresa Montgomery we know, she's a bug spirit.

Well double checked, it's not confirmed in Corp Guide- but the implication that bugs are in there, especially in the magic department so yeah. There, chalk Ares in the freaky stuff.

Let me see what I got laying around. Thanks!

You'd think the Corp that cut off Chicago would be a place that would know better than to allow Insect Spirits into it. Of course, the Bugs probably want revenge...

And with Knight Errant's CEO being a Shaman, IIRC...

Oh, wait, he retired, didn't he? (Shadowrun: Vice).

Implication? I'd say the intro fiction for the Ares chapter is the broadest possible hint


And another piece of strangeness which I stumbled upon just yesterday (...and today I see this topic. Coincidence you say?), when actually reading Netcat's techno-gibberish instead of treating it like "piece of random gibberish, next sentence". Deus? Save my baby? From the woman who apparently just returned from her "Where in the World is Puck" adventure, which involved some hints about Pax and other survivors of the Crash 2.0? Hmmm...

Things are heating up!

Where's Captain Chaos when you need him?

With the kind of Xanatos Roulettes that Deus likes to play, it wouldn't surprise me that he had some of his drones start up a PR corp that had an idea of what was going to happen in Boston...

After reading the Horizon chapter, I do get the idea that it's something Resonant that's running Horizon.

I'm saying Resonant, because the intense focus on pacification, synchronization etcetera doesn't strike me as Dissonant. The focus on digital media, online networking, collective behavior, technomancers and so forth suggest it's a more "techie" mystical source than a magical one.

It wouldn't really be all that unlikely, actually; we have wizard cabals scheming for a magocratic society, so why not technomancer cabals scheming for an infocratic society? And both mages and technomancers get pushed around by vague Mentor Spirits (I mean Paragons, of course.)

Wuxing is clearly the Chinese-Are-Coming Scary Wizard Conspiracy corporation, Aztechnology is rather arcane too. Evo and Horizon are more techno-transhumanist. It's the technology vs. magic split taken to a new level.

Or perhaps it's a product of our times? In ye olde days, we all thought the Soulless Greedy Corporation was the future, but now the Inscrutable Esoteric Corporation is more of a thing.

As far as potential corp involvement goes my money would be on MCT. After all Puck's search has lead him there, and I remember a bit a shadowtalk saying that they have a suprising number of techno talent despite their poor reputation, to which another talker replies that MCT made a deal with the devil...

Yeah, they listed him as retiring in a huff and a new guy taking over KE.



That actually dovetails into the implication of UnlimiTech in the writeup itself. Hmm, didn't see the Deus part, I read it as fears that the baby was resonating out within her or something, but that's an interesting take.




I think the implication of the "deal with the devil" is what they're doing to technomancers like Puck, ie vivisection, experimentation, farming out what's left to their "biomass", etc.

Clayton Wilson might be new on Ares' payroll, but he is hardly a new guy. Just sayin'

Quick fact check...





The first privately owned nuclear reactor was the Vallecitos boiling water reactor, and that only operated from October 1957 to December 1963.

I work at a privately owned reactor that was built in the 1980's...

Probably meant specifically a fusion reactor. IIRC, all the plants we have up and running today are fission.

Nope, first fusion reactor came online in 2027.

Did you really have to ask?

Yes.

First of all, I did some reading and it turns out I was wrong on two accounts
1.) The stuff about MCT having a surprising number of TMs on their staff and doing deals with the devil is in the drafts AH published. But I consider those canonical unless the "official" canon explicitly disagrees, and should this have been part of a future storyline I'm sure they will not trash all their plans because an author left.

2.) The"dealing with devils" is not in the section about TMs, I misremembered that:

One area that Mitsuhama does stand out in are synthetic intelligence research. MCT’s synthetic intelligence research
really took off after its capture of a few feral synthetic intelligences that had developed from their data mining agents, but even
ten years ago they managed to produce spin-off technologies for MCT’s entertainment and robotics divisions.

> I’ve heard a lot about MCT’s AI (sorry—SI) research lately. Cognitive echoes, fuzzy creativity (as
opposed to fuzzy logic) systems, virtual pets and companions that only show as much intelligence as
you’re comfortable with—but its hard to separate the hard facts from the hype.
> FastJack

> Mitsuhama Computer Technologies has employed monsters before; would it surprise you to know
they continue to collect them to secure their edge?
> Icarus

> Anyone we know?
> Netcat

> Yes.
> Icarus

Not that these implications are any better than what I though was implied...



My theory about all that is that MCT is somehow involved with dissonant TMs. Dissonants wouldn't care how many heads MCT cut open or whether they torture people, because an extremely antisocial (which does not have to equal undisciplined) behaviour seems to be the hallmark of Dissonants and Toxics. Many of them would love an order like "hit X resonant guys with Blackout so we can vivisect them", as long as they would be allowed to watch it.

Great... Dissonant-Supported Yakuza Corp.

And I thought they were bad enough just having a Zero-Zero Tolerance policy!

As for AH's work, it's very nice. Hopefully the Captain will get out of his box soon...

Must say I am not through with the book, yet, but still given less time spent on the train recently, the discussion would probably be over before I finished it. I am still missing some of the big 10 descriptions and didnt read anything else.

Generally I like it, though the CD somehow fealt cooler to me. Also there was much more usefull stuff about individual corp´s sec, spec forces and handling of runs. So I guess that I would still use it a lot!

Re: Coverart
I like the concept a lot, but not the execution - which may be a matter of taste. Too bad that the cyberarmed exec is not looking japanese, otherwise it would nicely fit young Mitsuhama. Didnt pay a lot of attention to the interior art, yet, but I saw some very nice stuff (and some very crude scatch).

Re: JackPoint
I was shocked! I hope this was some mistake and does not start a trend. I´d hate to loose the JackPoint-Page in future books!!!

Re: Ares
I like the increasing tension. For more info on Ares Bugs, read up on the Betrayal chapter in Threats 2. I guess this is the reason, why Soaring Owl left in a fuss! Aurelius seems to make friends with what´s left of the New Revolution (Threats 2, one nation under god, IIRC). My first guess on Vogel´s backer was Hestaby, but then these trips to Amazonia say s.th. else - I guess we will learn more in War!

Re: Aztech
I think there was some mixup (probably intentional) of the Aztec Warrior Orders and the Jaguar Guards - I prefered them to be separate groups. What else can I say, I somehow miss Roxie and Dark.

Re: Horizon
Didnt read it yet, but what I heard was promissing. DEUS or Network-involvement would be a cool thing, for sure. Also should fill in some big gaps, since there hasn´t been much about Horizon before. I don´t know if I will like it as much as CATCo, which I liked a lot - I whish the surviving Cross-family will see some screen time in the future. maybe they can find a new home in Horrizon.

Re: MCT
Was thinking dissonance, too. After all Pax was big in Otaku-Experimentation before the crash! Fits well with the pruning the flowers and harvesting the thorns.

Re: Renraku
Inazo Aneki as Corp. Kami is kind of cool. I like the emphasis of Renraku being the big Data-Octopus, as well. Overal nice, though I kinda liked Sherman Huang as a bad guy.

Re: Shiawase
All in all nice, the theocratic touch. Yamana as the new strong man and getting rid of this horrible medium. I miss mentioning of the Kami no Bushi.

Re: Wuxing
I dont know. Somehow the chapter didnt rock me that much, though I always liked Wuxing. Now Wu Lung-Wei is speculated to be awakened (late), but I remember earlyer speculations about him being a social adept.

The Warrior Orders are actually pretty accurate to the old Azzies (y'know, pre-conquistador). Jaguar Guards are scary, yes, but they weren't the worst the Azzies would throw.

Intriguing... "Slamm-0!" didn't fry it as much of my Shadowlanders file as I thought. Give me about a week (maybe less) and I'll see what I can post up here.