poor you, i feel your pain . . i have to be at work in some hours again <.<

The one good thing to say here is you can always brush off any canon from this book as "someone high on beetles posted bullshit on Jackpoint and old man Jack didn't delete it". It's the Matrix.


ka-pow ka-pow.

So Attitude is going to be a similar disappointment?


And you do that by continually referencing it. That shows an even greater not understanding of concepts.


Are you trying to make a point or trying to bait?


Review sites and retailers are a much better idea.

Tymeaus Jalynsfein, hermit - stop it. Both of you.

I'm still torn about which one of these is the funniest:

A) The post on the official forums about the German who player who didn't want to kill any 'jewish ghosts' (other ghosts are fine? That section is in the worst of taste)

B) The fact that the book contradicts itself on literally the same page several times

C) That a book about a war in a location doesn't a have a map in it.

That link to the Freelancer dialogue on IRC makes me cry. I mean, seriously cry.

Ghostwalker seduced? A Great Dragon who is an ecoterrorist using a dirty nuke?

I think I just died inside a little reading that.

Law, sausage, and now games? (it's not just the new faces—Bull repeatedly advocates "rule of cool" as an approach to development in that log.)

~J

My Apologies Grinder...

As is much bandied about here, Shadowrun freelancers aren't really making a LIVING from it, Tymaeus. As I can sadly attest, writing in general is damn hard to make a living from.



This is incredibly true. I have read everything that anyone here has said, as well as Frank's rants on TGD, and I am still willing to buy War!...and I will admit it is for the exact reason you outlined. More and better cool toys.

The one thing...the one thing I simply cannot understand...is the absence....of a map. If I were NOT to purchase War! it would come down to that. How could they possibly not have included a map? Sure, the quest to kill Jewish holocaust victim ghosts and steal their magical treasure is horribly tasteless, offensive, and badly conceived. But I can just ignore that. By not including a map, you've essentially crippled the product.

If I could only make one change to War before it goes to the printers, it would be adding a map.

Drunken Master 3

"A whole section in a book about War! about Nepal and no one thought to mention that the most famous and feared military tradition on the entire planet comes from the place you are talking about? How did that slip by without notice?"

Another made up quote from the author: "Well, it wasn't really mentioned in the Wikipedia article that I spent 5 minutes glancing over. And I was running late. And the dog ate my homework."

Point Taken...



Yes Indeed, A MAP would be nice to have.

something tells me most of the modes of the smartstaff will never be used...

You say that as if having a combination of sex toy and bladed weapon that is totally hackable because it "needs wireless" (skinlink for a handheld weapon is such a ridiculous concept) isn't the best thing since sliced bread.

sex toy
bladed weapon
hackable
sliced bread

combine and have fun!

Yup. And according to quantum fetish mechanics, a sexual abberation has just been born. Hence:

is sadly, though understandably, mistaken.

Thank you, CGL.


Mmmh sandwiches.

Antiziganism? I dunno, although given the state of the real world, a scenario where the players have to fan such sentiments clearly is another entry in the "what the hell were they thinking" section.

And if you want to blame somebody for the German location names in Eastern Europe, blame whoever translated the Germany Sourcebook and didn't change the names.

Given the state of Gypsies in Eastern Europe especially. It's really like a writeup where players work for an ambitious German party (that remains unnamed) and fan antijudaic feelings in Germany to get that party votes.


Actually, blame the original Germany Sourcebook. However, SoE clearly gave the Czech name as alternative name of this dysfunctional little place. Research. It works.

However, if you want to tell that to Frank, you have to tell it to him here. He's permabanned on DSF.

Actually, the German poster was referring to ongoing discussions on German SR boards about the Auschwitz chapter, esp. in view of a possible translation of that topic. Killing ghosts may not be fine, but killing ghosts or people surely is a part of SR play. And while there has been some tradition of shooting undead Nazi zombies/ghosts/whatever for fun in the entertainment industry, doing the same with concentration camp victims does indeed seem a "little" bit offensive, esp. if done by Germans (players, characters, gamemasters, publishers...).

Generally speaking: Using Auschwitz for any sort of entertainment is a bad idea. Suggest sth. like that and be an American, you just may get away with it. But do the same as a German, you are in deep shit (and rightly so). SR fans in Germany were and are worried that the German publisher may be "forced" to translate that chapter as part of the licensing contract, chapter headline & all. And while I doubt that the licensing agreement is that strict, dealing with that special chapter will be one tough issue.

That's how I understood the post at the official forum, anyway (if indeed you meant the post by Medicineman – there may of course be other ones which I have missed).

Actually given the serious Anti-Nazi laws in Germany.. the German SR publisher may not be allowed to translate it.
Which, in so many ways would make the German version of War a better book

This is a much more positive response to War.

You were hurting your own case there at the end.

And thanks for the maps!

Well, a certain western neighbour also likes to do that, hence world and not Eastern Europe


Using German exonyms in a German text is correct, although in formal writing the German name is usually compounded with the Czech equivalent. However, translating a text while keeping the German exonyms is like keeping all instances of "Köln" istead of translating them to "Cologne". Even without any regard to the sensitivities between Germany and our eastern neighbours, it is a clear and objective mistranslation.

"German is such an untidy language." - The Dresden Files

Said laws aren't that serious as to prohibit a translation of the section in question. It really only boils down to a question of morals / taste and the displeasure within the german player community. I'm not even sure that this displeasure isn't at least in part a result of the mental (and often exagerated) self-flagellation that the majority of us germans tend to impose upon ourselves in order to avoid any situation that could even remotely suggest that one has nationalistic views (that would pass as national pride or patriotism in any other place of this world).

Well you know, it's still early.

People my generation grew up hearing stories about the War.
I've spoken to several european immigrants like me, from France, Denmark, couple other places. We grew up with the stories of our grand parents about WWII. It's a very visceral thing for us. I know that Germans of today aren't the Germans of the 1940's.. but it hasn't been that long. That self-Flagellation isn't un-earned.

I find the whole use of Auschwitz as a dungeon crawl to be in incredible poor taste.

I'll disagree, if you bought it and you dont like it you should post a negative review on Drive Thru or Amazon (providing you got it from one of those sources). I have chosen not to buy several products be it pdfs, books, a computer etc thanks to significant negative feedback. If I see 6 or so 1 or 2 star reviews of a product on drivethru I'll take the time to read them all before spending my money even if it has 50 positive reviews. The key is me seeing if the complainers have a valid point or if they just blowing hot air cus they dont like the product and or company. You'll never stop the fan boys but for those who play Shadowrun on occasion your view could matter.

Touché.


Agreed. However, to be fair, he probably looked at the Czech names with all their special markers on their letters, though "wtf" and went with the German stuff that seemed less overwhelmingly alien for him. After all, the dots on some vowels, but not all, probably freak him out enough. It still si bad, bad style and definitly should have been caught and edited.


There's the guilt about things we can be rightfully guilty of, and then here's overdrive, like Leftie nuts burining German flags a turk electronics shop hangs up to cheer for the (mainly ethnically non-German) stars of the German national team in this year's world cup because the flag "reminds them of WW2". The turkish guy bought another flag. And another, each consecutively larger. There're a couple of those stories (another good one is the black, nationalised immigrant who wears a flag-colored bracelet in a support the team egsture and is cast out of an anti discrimination seminar held by some leftie fringe group because of the bracelet). Try and imagine that in France.

I assume that's what Cochise is refering to, not whether or not we should start te revisionism.

You can take the French flag from our Cold dead hands

Which given the state of our Military.. wouldn't really be THAT hard.

Hey, your carrier is just now havin non-repair time, isn't it? You really should do something about those planes though.

Plus, you still have the Legion. Think if the German Army. We can't use our own artillery in Afghanistan (because that would look like OMG we're fighting a war there!) and hence, we have to borrow the self-propelled artillery from the Netherlands. All five pieces.

I firmly believe that the push for the EU is all about making sure that Germany is so economically intertwined with the rest of Europe that WWII can never happen again.
That reminds me.. the Legion, in 2072.. that would be an awesome write up.

Japan has the same problem Though their police force is pretty brutal.

That's actually verified. I personally wouldn't mind a military uniopn and some sort of economical governance, too, actually (and an ELECTED EU council).


Yes. That needs to be done (SR France has one, but I don't really like it). Should have been in War!, just as the Gurkhas, but I suppose it fell victim to it's authors' prejudices.


Actually, that's my impression of French police, especially police nationale. Jeez. They're that bad?

They are very polite until they decide it's time to not be polite. It's in your best interests for them to decide that it's never time to stop being polite to you.

Remember, in Japan it's illegal to beat a confession out of someone, but the confession is admissible and the cops will at most be told not to do that again.

I haven't finished reading War! yet (in fact, I'm still very early into it). I'll put together a full review once I've read it completely a couple of times. But right off the bat, I'm put off by some poor design/layout choices and some terrible editing. I found a problem with grammatical tenses just in the very first sentence of the first chapter! A few pages in and it clearly occurred to me that this book is in desperate need of an introduction. If I hadn't seen that the cover said "War!" on it, I would have thought I was reading a book about Bogota, not warfare. Dropping the reader into setting background for an event you haven't introduced yet is pretty jarring and confusing and does not serve the overall theme of the book very well.

O_o

Well, it certainly is not bad enough to be actually illegal in Germany. As one might expect there have been several court cases about the use of "Arbeit macht frei", and basically it only gets illegal if the context already would be illegal anyway. Even a game show presenter who used that phrase faced no legal repercussions.

Our friends at the BPjM could see that section as "socio-ethically disorienting" and put War on the Index. De jure stuff on that list is not banned and may still be purchased by everybody over 18, de facto the heavy restrictions (no advertisement, no public presentation, no regular mail order) make such media hard to get. However, such a judgement would be unusually strict, it rarely gets that bad in practice...unless it's about computer games, where swastikas on tailfins in a flight sim = illegal.


PS: We (finally) have three howitzers in Afghanistan, although only as stationary artillery...which the crews surely appreciate, because somebody at the BWB decided air conditioning was superfluous comfort

That's consensus in Germany. Ever seen the Deutsche-Bahn-Tower building in Berlin? Look at all that glass. It has no air conditioning, and the windows cannot be opened because it is ecofriendly like that. Friend of mine works there. Imagine what it's like in summer.

Also, the censors used to have an eye on gaming too once (back in the DSA macht dich zu Satanisten days), but I think it's too niche and, age structue wise, too mature a market now to be relevant to them.

And now add the standard military bureaucracy. And remember: Zuständig für dezentale Beschaffung ist der Bereich für Zentrale Aufgaben


Yep, RPG satanism kinda got out of fashion some time ago...

And we never wanted to use these things anyway. It's a common assumption Germany can unilaterally declare world peace, after all. Especially among the Lefties (but also among the Churches).

(Deleted, wrong thread. )

question for all you who have read War!

Should I discourage my players from buying it if I'm going to run stuff out of it? Not that I am, I'll probably get it when it comes out in hardcopy so I won't know if the setting will be useful till then.

The problem is my players might pick it up for the gear.

You should discourage them from getting it if you yourself aren't running gear from it. If you are going to run with it, there's no reason for them to not get the book - good luck getting any related info out of it.

so there is nothing in there that a GM would not want the players to know if he is using the setting?

The good thing about war is the confirmation the end is near.
The unholy trimutive is confirmed.

Dragons lording over us all: Check
Immortal Elves pulling the strings: Natch
*Evil trees corrupting our young and taking over our inner cities: Ayep

Evil has revealed itself fully and now we can face off against them with some military hardware!

*Ghost Cartels & War
(This is neither a positive or negative on current discussions, just made me smile.)

I think we're saying that the setting is so.. confused and badly written that you'd have a hard time finding a setting to USE.

Unless you'Re of a mind to do a jew zombie slaying dungeon crawl for Mengele's scalpel.

From what I've read so far theres not much to act as spoilers as far as events of the war. It looks like most of the conflict will be up to the GM to flesh out. Some scattered behind the scenes stuff but maybe just ask players to avoid fluff sections of the book till you had the opportunity to decide what your using.

No. The book has been written in a voice that is almost entirely conjecture with few, if any, confirmed facts.

You aren't going to get whole arcs out of it that you don't already make yourself. When people say there is no map, they are correct. There are no maps of anything. It gives you a very good idea of how Bogota works, to avoid the flesh-eating Epileptic Trees, and how long to wait before the nanoforge will spit out your 1.2 billion THOR satellite.

Worse than that, it was Wirth's scalpel, wasn't it? You know, the director who delegated all the experiments to other people?

On the other hand, you could inject a little extra hilarity into everything by changing the item to Wirth's pen (and keeping the current stats).

~J

What is the average temperature and humidity in Berlin during summer?
If it is lower than 30ºC and 88% you guys have no right to complain

I reject the idea of wringing a Nazi artefact from the hand of Jewish ghosts, to the extent of not seeing the need for discussion. As the German perspective on that is and should be unique and individual, discussions will turn to politics, see TOS 4. For the evaluation of the book there is more than a half page to cover.

What kind of introduction would be needed? Given the strong focus on Bogota, the text on the back of the book would have to be the starting point. The whole book is mostly about a single conflict. An introductory not-Captain-Chaos post is IMO only the second step.

More as not-soon I read on.

It's pretty arid, but last summer's average was around 28 degrees, since we got a couple very continental years now. Peaks regularily are around 36° to 40°. Point is, though, this thing is an oven and there is no mechanism to counter that. I trust in Brazil, AC is a rather common thing, like in SE Asia, China and Hawaii? If not, oh my god how can you people live there. How.

@Ryu: The basic lack is they do never, ever give you any solid info about the war. The Night of the Living Holocaust Victim and Gypsy Progrom 101 are only icing on the turd, if you will.