Anyone have got the goods from the con? I was peeking in from time to time on Neoncons live feed this year but never got to see any SR stuff. Missed it or they never covered any of it. I did catch the ennies live which was cool.

Well I'm home with my print copies of Spells and Chrome and 6WA. Unfortunately I wasn't there for the "What's up" session; and I can't talk about anything else I heard

Gencon was a blast. Next year my team and I will actually run the 8-hour TT/LARP event. I'm still not sure what the Who's Run folks knew what to do with us.

Did they manage to proof Spells and Chrome yet? Or did they go to print with PCC and PPC switching out several times in the same paragraph?

Right! Because the story is TOTALLY unreadable with that mistake.

If it breaks the flow of the story, then it's going to be a problem. I didn't pick it up - I was more concerned getting a hold of the 20th anniversary edition.

Oh sure, twist the knife that my pre-order of that STILL hasn't arrived. I don't mind.

So, folks that picked up 6WA, worth the buy? I'm wondering if I want to Special Order it from my FLGS.

Did you order the leather-bound, SuperUltraGoddamnFantastic version? I didn't.

Differences between the .pdf and hardcopy aside, it's worth the buy IMO. I'm still wishing I had a few more ducats so I could've gotten one of the limited edition Attitude cover art prints in BigSize™.

No, just the PDF/Print Combo. The PDF I have.

Funny part, it was an early birthday gift, and another birthday just rushed past me.

I'm starting to feel old... Time to upgrade.

You should contact them about this.

I have.

Let's get back to GenCon news.

Indeed. SOMEBODY must have gone to the Shadowrun seminar.

Probably still "recovering".

I didn't go to the Seminar, but I played some Missions games, the Scramble, and picked up 6WA and Corp Guide.

The missions I played in were a lot of fun and things really start going over the top near the end of Season 3! The Scramble was also cool, adding in a part where we had to run around the whole convention area and find people and drag them from hotel to hotel as other shadowrun teams tried to jump us.

I haven't had a chance to do anything more then flip through corp guide, but I've read the first half or so of 6WA. Its shiny and pretty like the SR4A, I have noticed a fair number of typos indicating that it was rushed, but its still very readable and has a lot of detail on the history of the world. I am still going through the history chapter, every page is a year of the SR history from 1999 on. I'm up to 2030 or so and those Vitas plagues and racial disharmonies just won't stay down! I'd recommend picking that up, I think its worth its slightly steeper pricetag.

Thanks for the update folks.

I am glad 6WA is out in print already, I look forward to picking that up. Did you hear anything about the Runner's Toolkit?

Thanks,

The Limper

Asked a few questions re: release dates at the booth, and as I recall the release schedule is as follows:

Dawn of the Artifacts pt 3
Runner's Toolkit
War!
Attitude

I might be off, there was a bit of sensory overload. It may be DotA, War, Toolkit instead.

I know the DoTA came out a while back, yet I have not seen it in my FLGS. WHen is that comming out in print? Or did it already?

The third book in the series is coming out in print - there's already Dawn and Dusk, I want to say.

Yea attitude is finally in the chelude.

If you guys were the ones that I think you were, then you were awesome I was the Who's Run "actor" that sat on the far right if you were facing us.

I went to the Shadowrun GM Bootcamp seminar. It was all right, but I wasn't really the target demographic for it.

I played in one Missions game, my first ever. It was pretty bad, as a result of:

1) Very loud room. Many gaming tables with not even curtains separating the tables. I could barely hear and understand the GM two seats away from me. He was a bit soft-spoken, but still...

2) Eight players. Whose bright idea was this? A four-hour one-shot at a con with eight people competing for face time and attention equals frustration for all. This issue was aggravated by #1.

3) The GM seemed only passably conversant with SR4 and admitted to having been roped into GM'ing our scenario at the last minute. The results were predictably bad.

#3 became especially insulting when near the end of our session a large number of CGL staff and volunteers(I presume) started a big meeting in the same room we were playing in to talk about the SR tournament. So you can put together twenty people to have a meeting about the tournament but you can't muster a person to run a Missions game who knows the scenario or the rules? Color me unimpressed.

I have no real complaints about my fellow players, except that there were too many of them. The GM seemed a good guy but out of his depth. Anyway, I hope my experience was the exception to the rule.

I'm not sure I'd call much of it "news".
I went to the GM seminar, a run, and the What's Up thing.
It was some of the most informative and fun stuff I saw all 4 days.
Most of the What's Up stuff was common knowledge, but it's nice to meet the people who actually build the game.
They toyed with space exploration and the upcoming Attitude and War releases.

Didn't Catalyst win second best overall or some crap?
I did a bunch of D&D and Rio Grand games, but the Shadowrun rooms were definitely worth the 6 hour drive.

*I will add that the game room was loud and most of the games were overpopulated.*
That will probably just motivate people, possibly me, to run a few games next year.
I had trouble getting into a run as most of them were full up only a few short days after prereg.

Hmm, now I'm wondering which person you were in the GM seminar.

I was the tall guy on the right talking about exploiting min/maxers weaknesses.
I did want to mention that I found some urban tile terrain that I really liked.
I still need building interiors/exteriors but the packs I got will cover street placement much better than I had thought.
Check it out.
Now, if I could just find decent character figs.

@Semerkhet
Sorry to hear that your Mission went poorly. Re: the tournament meeting, I was a little put out by that as well. I ran two games in the 4PM to 8PM slot on both Friday and Saturday just prior to the Tournament and was a little miffed that I was asked to wrap up my games at 7:30PM rather than the scheduled 8PM so that the Tournament could start on time. On the other hand, since the Tournament is scored and has prizes and stuff, having one table that starts later than the others would be something of a detriment to that team. Regarding the noise level, that's an issue every year. I think it was actually better this year since we were in the Embassy Suites and at the end of the hallway. Might not make you feel better, but last year the room was in the Hyatt right next to some of the open gaming tables on the second floor so you were not only contending with the other noise from the Catalyst tables but also a lot of hallway sounds! Maybe next year when the convention center is fully completed things'll be better, but I suspect the noise issue will remain the same until we invent select sound filters.

Nice to see that some DSF-ers were attending the GM boot camp. I suspect I know the answer to this question, but which was better for you: the first 70-75 minutes about general GMing or the remaining time when we focused on rules, and by rules I mean hacking

Hee hee hee! I'm making sure the blood spatter goes across the shirt next year - ran out of preliminary funds to finish the runner costume.

And next time I'll probably have a little more cyber-ish bling on me, if I'm not doing an entirely different character instead. I was the only one who didn't actually have a costume, so my camo was an on-the-fly idea.

For me the greater issue was the lack of organization that resulted in a relatively inexperienced GM running a scenario he had little or no time to prepare for. Also, do you have any idea why there are eight slots in those events? It seems like the standard in all of my other events was six, which worked much better.


Since this was my first GenCon since 2002 in Milwaukee, the distributed hotel layout was new to me. I had a couple of events in small hotel meeting rooms with only one other table or, in one case, we were the only occupants. So it seems like it's possible at Indy to have less noisy surrounding, just not in CGL's area apparently.


Well, as I said before, I don't think I was the right demographic for that seminar. I was the (probably) over-talkative guy with brown hair and graying beard sitting on your right (our left). For people new to GM'ing SR I'm positive the first part was more useful. BTW, you handled the woman with nearly zero RPG experience of any kind with great aplomb.

For where I am at as an SR GM, a more focused discussion of specific rules and situations would have been more useful. For instance, I had it in my mind to have a discussion about the "air superiority" theory of magical support and how to handle upping the ante as PC magicians gain more power. Overall, a good seminar and I hope my contributions were constructive.

All the books were for sale at the Catalyst booth, along with dice, patches, tshirts, etc. I bought some dice and a patch.

The new book, Sixth World Almanac, was for sale. New global map of the campaign is pretty nifty.

As for the modules at GenCon. Well... to be honest... I was kinda disappointed. They weren't bad or anything, and they were still lots of fun to RP through. I had a good time with the two I had time to play. Well, what as disappointing you ask? The CMP modules weren't anything special. The CMP modules were disconnected stories you could go through and play, and still go back to your story arc in Denver or New York. The gear access wasn't better, nor were the karma awards. You just got to play outside your normal story arc (Denver or NY) and go back... so you basically get some more karma and nuyen for that character. Which I suppose is neat and all, but not really what I was looking for... I was looking for a new story interconnected story arc that you could only play at conventions... which the CMP modules are not.... Oh wells. And because of this lack of an interconnected story in the CMP modules, I just played two of them.

They did give out some "bonus cards" that you can use for your character's on single dice rolls which were neat, and you can continue to use them elsewhere.

There are six preregistration slots per game but we're usually told to go up to eight if there are generics. I think the idea is just to seat as many people as possible if possible in order to get people exposed to the game, but it can be unwieldy (at best). I think -- and this is anecdotal, i.e. not backed up by any real evidence -- that Missions are a bit more popular than one-shots since they're a "living campaign" sort of thing. I ran two one-shots and not even all the pre-regs showed up so I was able to seat generics to fill those slots.



Back in 2004 or 2005 we were in the convention center which worked a little better, but since then we've always been distributed. For a few years, we were all over the place. It's only been the last year and this one that we were able to consolidate our games into a central location.

@The Who's Run attendees -- were you the one's with the camera? If so, are the pictures publicly available anywhere?

Don't quote me on this one, but I think the idea was to make sure that the CMP modules wouldn't end up taking away from local games back at home that might be doing missions. If you run Mission A through G at GenCon and then go home to find that for the next few weeks your FLGS is hosting Missions A through G, you're left without anything to do, to some extent. By making the CMPs outside of the normal arc, this is circumvented to some degree. I'll make sure that your feedback makes its way to the missions coordinators, though.

That's up to ze posessor of ze camerah. I do know that once I have my copies I'll throw them up, but that'll be a week or so.

Also: Yes. That was our team.

No one asked to see the 1st Ed. manuscript I brought while I was working the booth. Though I did loan it out to Jason for the WUwSR then got called away on an errand to deliver SR fliers.

Re: Kid Cham: Yeah, the booth was generally so crowded and crazy, and most of the con goers probably didn't know you had it. Hell, I only flipped through it briefly at the Freelancer get together. Something like that usually goes over "Better" at Origins, since it's a smaller and much more sane convention.

Re: Table Sizes

Fortunately (Or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it ), Shadowrun is freaking popular, and we have far more players than we do GMs. GMs have the option of taking more than 6 players, and most are willing to do so, because we all know how much we love Shadowrun, and we know that there are lots of other folks who likewise love it and want to get into a game at the con. I can run for 8, and have done so many time in the past, but yeah, the table is definitely better with a smaller group. It just an issue of logistics and the fact that we hate turning anyone away that wants to play.

Re: CMPs

THe idea behind these is that we release (in theory) 12 "regular" Missions per month. That means one per month, which is easy enough for home groups or players with an "open Play" available to them at their local game store to hit all of the games outside of the convention. And even at a con, if you attend more than a couple per year, it's easy enough to "Play out" the available Missions. So the CMPs are adventures that are exclusive to our conventions for a year, before they'll be released to the wild in some form. This gives players who've tapped out Season 3 already (or were closing in on it at Gen Con) some additional adventures to play though with their Missions characters.

Plus, they offer up a couple additional benefits... They're not confined to the current Mission city, which means that you get the opportunity to travel and the adventures can bit a bit open to being something a little different or more unusual. Secondly, some players like the Living Campaign format, but may not be fond of the current storyline, the current city setting, or the current theme for the adventures. So again, this gives them an oppurtunity to play without being confined to a campaign they don't care for.

Think of the CMPs as bonus adventures. They're designed to replace the older non-Mission "One Shots", for the most part, that we would run at conventions. They're not taking the place of any Seasonal Missions, we're still running as many of those as ever.

Bull

I also attended the GM boot camp this year and I found the last part of the block very helpful. I was the guy in the back of the room that asked about Hacking. I understand that you guys have to balance the topic for brand new players/gms and folks with more experience seeking guidance on specific topics. Hard to do in a two hour block.

Regarding table size, I lucked up in my SR one-shot this year and had Grendel running it with only five players. Four of us were together and we had one other guy play (dressed like a Doc Wagon employee) and it worked out great. The other three in my group had no experience in SR and Grendel handled them just fine while balancing the me and the other player. All in all, it was a positive experience. I talked two of my friends into buying the SR4A book. Can't argue with results.

Weirdly, part of the problem at our table (aside from eight people and noise) was that everyone at the table seemed to be a veteran SR player. So you had eight people with very firm ideas about *everything* we were going to do and it quickly became a question of who was the most assertive in capturing and holding the GM's limited attention. I, myself, decided it wasn't worth my energy and stopped trying to crowbar into the planning after a while. I felt sorry for the guy playing the hacker. He seemed the shy and retiring type and therefore he didn't get to do a damn thing the whole session.