Yeah, we don't want to do that either. Although it effects what we want to write pretty severely

I like your idea of an AMZ sanctioned run even better than my Agent Orange idea.. although I guess they could be the same thing. Well, let us know so that you guys can use the setting in a direction you like

Tailchasers within tailchasers. Everyone double-crosses everybody, and Caracas explodes.

I love it.

and more importantly.. who the heck knows the truth. It's a beautiful plot hook for someone who wants to run a game based on that pre-war time period.

Either we basically follow War!'S setup, or we focus our efforts on one region only and release a comprehensive guide for the war there. Issue 1: Az/Am, Issue 2: Desert/Rad Wars, Issue 3: Five Kingdoms (The Chinsese Land Wars), Issue 4: You say Jihad, I say Crusade (Frank's scenario, could also involve Israel and Venice), Issue 5: Russia/Yakut/Baikal, Issue 6: PPG/Japan trade war (oceanic war).

Why not release this in episodes?

There's nothing stopping us from writing about the wars in all their glory - but there are many. Let us start with the rewrite/remake of what War! is, then we can branch out where we want to go - Desert Wars, Survivor, Asia, Pirates of the Seven Seas, and so on.

I think we already had enough brainstorming to move on and start writing.

So, how are we going to do this? Google docs?

Can we ask the Happy Dumpshock people for a locked sub-forum?

We need a manager to define deadlines and divide the work.

Who knwos the DumpShock admins and can ask for a sub forum?

you need a style guide. It's really important. When the entire project comes together, you want to be using the same sorts of spelling and the same general format. It's not just as simple as "do what Shadowrun does" because the style guides have morphed over the years. Classically, Shadowrun has used the plural "dwarfs" but in SR4 they have started also using the plural "dwarves" in some places. Switching back and forth between the two spellings in a single book is bad.

Since this is a netbook, I would suggest using a format very similar to what you see in Ends of the Matrix, with the additional caveat of having the authorial voice be a jackpoint posting with comments and a defined Game Information section where you put the stat lines. That means that you'll want a section to look something like this:


This Is The Chapter Title
"This is where we put a pithy comment that will be the tag line for the entire chapter."

We are going to have an introduction. Introductions are important because people want to know what they are getting in to. They are vitally important for a net-book, because the reader won't be familiar with the format and will want to know if this book is "worth reading". Since it is unofficial, the book has to sell itself with its ideas and presentation, and can't get people to pay money for it merely on the basis of power creep.

This Is The Title Of The Section
"Here is where we put an eye-catching and pithy comment related to the topic."
Posted By: The Name of a Character In-World

This is where the body of the text goes. We speak directly to the reader in this section, but we assume that the reader is someone who exists within the Shadowrun world, just as the author of this section is also someone who is in-world. While the actual author and reader are both people living 65 years before the current events of Shadowrun, this section is written as if both author and reader were living in the 2070s. That means that the context of the written text has to be one that excuses giving the reader the kind of information they need. It could be a primer for mercenaries from a different continent, or a corporate historical analysis segment, or some other thing where it is plausible that the fictional author would feel the need to tell the fictional reader the things that the actual author needs to know about the subject.

This section is going to be in multiple paragraphs. Because the intended viewership is on a computer screen rather than in a book, it is customary to mark paragraph breaks with a double break - that is an empty line between paragraphs, and no indentation at the beginning. This is because your reader is going to be adjusting their text size and font for better personal legibility, and you have no way of guarantying that other standards of paragraph notation (such as initial tabs) are going to be comprehensible to your reader.

* After dropping a particularly juicy hint, you can underline it by having a JackPointer comment on it. Remember to have them stay in character and consistent through the work.
* Name of the specific JackPointer making the comment

* You can have more than one JackPointer weigh in on some issue, but remember that too many comments in a chain breaks the flow of the "main" document, so if you want to have a real JackPointer conversation, stick it at the end of the section.
* Name of another JackPointer


Once you've used a JackPointer comment, your next paragraph of the main text is going to go on as if the JackPointer never said anything. Remember that within the fictional world, the entire document was written and posted, and the JackPointers added their comments afterwards. So this paragraph should make narrative sense both with the JackPointer comments (as the actual reader will actually see them) and without the comments (as the piece was supposedly written). If you can't make the piece work both ways, the JackPoint comment has to get binned, no matter how clever or spooky it is.

Subsections Also Get Titles
"Subsections should also get pithy lead-in tag lines."

A subsection is virtually by definition written and posted by the same hand that made the main section it is part of. This means that it doesn't need a "posted by" tagline on it. Subsections can be about anything, and you can even have a JackPoint comment in there somewhere that there were other irrelevant subsections that have been cut out by the SysOp in order to get to the "good stuff". In this manner you can make it totally plausible for there to be a great big cognitive gap between the main section or the previous subsection and this one. But while acceptable, it is lazy. If at all possible, you should get the previous piece to fit with this piece like a link in a chain.

A subsection doesn't have to have more than one paragraph, you could have a subsection that was just a single standalone thought or a description of some minor element that you wanted to include but didn't have room for in the conceptual space of one of the other sections. But if you do produce multiple paragraphs, use the same formatting as you would for a main section. Remember: only the heading of a subsection is reduced, otherwise treat is as a normal section.

Also, stay in-character! A subsection isn't a place to put game information unless it is a subsection in the Game Information chapter (p. XX). For now, we are going to use Page XX placeholders as a joke, but if this gets compiled into a pdf rather than staying as a forum post, the typesetter will actually fix those XX references to genuine numbers or even links.

* Once the section is completely finished, you can go hogwild with JackPointer conversations, because they aren't interrupting anything. Just like they did in Aztlan and Cybertechnology with the big flame wars at the end.
* JackPointer Name

* It's probably tempting to use shout-outs to various friends or in-jokes to your gaming group in the JackPoint comments. Don't do it. It's hard enough getting characters to have enough voice time that we can know them or care what they say, and joke-named one-off posters make that even more difficult.
* JackPointer Name

* Remember, this book is about Shadowrun, not Barsaive. Earthdawn references are frankly kind of annoying and you should keep them to a minimum. Frosty and Man of Many Names are annoying characters and people hate them. The even more know-it-all characters like Laughing Man and Wordsmyth were even more annoying, which is a big reason for them being dropped from the posting roster for SR4. Do not bring them back.
* JackPoint Name

* I'm totally serious. Don't turn your draft into some crappy "A Beutiful Mind" knockoff where you make connections between a bunch of crazy crap in the histories of Shadowrun and Earthdawn. You're here to tell a story in the fictional Shadowrun setting, not to show how many Earthdawn supplements you personally have read.
* JackPoint Name

* Earthdawn magic really isn't that good anyway. Shadowrun magicians are much more powerful than Earthdawn magicians. Not only do they cast many times faster and have spell effects go much longer distances, but basic starting Shadowrun magical effects have a tendency to be 7th circle in Earthdawn. The actual stats on Great Dragons really aren't that impressive either. Things having magical effects from Earthdawn would generally speaking not even matter a tiny little bit to a 6th world military. There are some exceptions, but those exceptions are rare.
* JackPoint Character

Now that.. is an awesome double-cross of epic proportions.

And it doesn't have to be the team selling out their johnson.
It could be an AZT spy in Amazonia, or in Caracas.
It could be a pro AZT data analysis guy whose tracking certain shadow information. He gets wind of the run, and they let the run happen.

The Amazonians think the Shadow team double crossed them. AZT cackles with glee.

No need for Google Docs if we have sub-forum here (and we should try to stay at dumpshock, as it's much easier compared with yet another new forum) - we can open up different threads for different topics and work on them there. It's important that we make changes, comments and additions visible, i.e. by each of us using a different color for this.

I was going to volunteer Hermit
*cough*
Who knwos the DumpShock admins and can ask for a sub forum?

They may not want the IE's and the dragons coming into the thread, but if we're going to use the Locus as a possibility - who else would know about it?

Well, I can see a way around it, and still have Frosty do her 'fuck, packing bags' line to underscore what might be going on. I think less will be more when it comes down to that.

They may not want the IE's and the dragons coming into the thread, but if we're going to use the Locus as a possibility - who else would know about it?

Well, I can see a way around it, and still have Frosty do her 'fuck, packing bags' line to underscore what might be going on. I think less will be more when it comes down to that.

That's what Game Information are for. You either keep the reference anecdotal and non-central to the plot, or you need to provide enough elements for the people that do not want to read the entire Shadowrun and Earthdawn collections. And Jackpointers are not the right way to do that. Best done clearly, out of context. Obviously, it's more complicated when you have not decided, or don't want to decide exactly what is going on.

Yeah, who would want to fight an army of intelligent awakened snakes in a jungle environment?
Anybody seen Anaconda for example?

That looks like it would go well in the Land War in Asia Issue

I'm seeing a pattern of "Highly Technologically Advanced Troops" vs "Awakened Bad Asses."

I noticed that it's not exactly the same color, but very close. You should go with a gold-ish tone, as you're the boss.

Basically that.. a thread for each chapter, and sub-chapter

Might be nice if we could edit each other's posts.. and maybe only people working on it, were actually able to post.
but both of those things aren't all that important.

Do we possibly want to move the timeline of the war up some? I find it hard that Caracas saw military action from Aztlan forces in late 2071, and the war didn't really get going until 2073. Sourcebooks leading up to the November 20th, 2071 events mentioned that Caracas was a powderkeg that could throw the entire region into war. And yet the story as written by War seems to indicate that it was just... "stuff." Like, it didn't do anything. Caracas was just some tiny footnote of news buried somewhere at the bottom of page 20 and promptly forgotten about.

A good guide on how to not fall into all of the pitfalls many fan projects and War! fell into, I think. Some stuff we may not adhere that closely to (some ED references are necessary in the story we decided on) but we should keep them to hints and not be too frank about them.

The locus actually is really more of a Shadowrun thing, I don't think that it appears in Earthdawn at all.

[...]. There are also a lot of big rocks.

I've got a chummer who had to spend the night there. He swears that when he woke up, the rocks weren't in the same position.
>>> Shadowtalker 1

Come on, that guy says the same thing about the whiskey bottles in his apartment.
>>> Shadowtalker 2

A possibility of future contradiction is by definition less likely than actually and directly contradicting NOW, isn't it?

why would s.o. pick a fight by "retconning" a background that may not be official, but is established in the community

The way I see it, there is less to gain by a direct head-on canon clash than by a "canon-compliable web enhancement to 6WA and WAR".

Don't get me wrong I think you have a valid point, but don't forget Rage™ is fueling this project. And one of the things people seem to be most angry about is just how unusable the Azt/Am setting is.