Genuinely curious. Like?

I wouldn't say that. I'd say there was an emphasis on bad parts with long rants about how bad they are, while good parts were dismissed with a simple "actually pretty good". There might be some things presented as "facts" but that are debatable (such as how useless and universally hated the short writeups really are), but I haven't seen any misquote.

It does make me feel like an angry and exultant person is shouting at me about how bad it is and how retarded the writers are. It isn't very effective with me (I dislike the tone so I try to dissociate myself from the review) but I guess it could be with other people.

The side note on nuclear weapons. Lot of people (frank was not alone in this) did not read the section as an example and rather took it as an absolute.

Naturally there would be; War! was a piece that vindicated Frank's views on the company as a whole. I've read the review, and I've reviewed it myself - with varying degrees of success - and I've seen his salient points.

There is a nugget of truth in his review: There was an editing failure with this book. Despite his axe to grind, or anyone's axes to grind, this is an undisputable fact. Some of the nonsensicals that were in Frank's review are a direct result of that failure; such as some of the vehicle names and subsequent explanations as an example. I have a high hope that they were able to get at least some fixes in before the file got to the printer so those who chose to wait for a paper copy will get a higher quality product than those who purchased the .pdf (of which I do near-exclusively now). I hope the lack of a map was a layout failure and not simply a lack in general. I hope the errata team is hard at work and that said errata will be published (as Aaron has helpfully,er...helped me get a few suggested fixes to said team directly). I am saddened that the team is hard at work in a way as it means it's been cut out for them, but as long as the end result is a better product then I suppose I'll live with it.

I disagree. It's not written like this. Everyone, see for yourself.


Bold part is mine. I see no indication this is a suggestion. There are different suggestions to the handling of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons above and below, but if this is intended to be an example, it omits to tell us so. Maybe you read what you want to read there? Maybe it was intended to be, but Aaron missed to tell us that, then. Reading it as a suggestion rather than a rather weird rule (which goes well with the equally absurd rules on kinetic weapons, btw) is entirely interpretation, the text does not support it.

It's the words "more conceivable" and "generally" that paint it to sound more like a suggestion to me, rather than a hard game rule.

But you're right in that the text really needs to separate talking about hard rules and fluff better.




-k

I read that section like this:



I think that section is actually written perfectly fine.
And the part about "nukes aren't reliable" Is fine too.

If you're looking for a more "realistic" nuclear device, you might try a "small" nuke of 10 tons (a la the discontinued Davy Crockett mortar or the W54). If you go by Arsenal, that's 400P, -2/m. If you want a "more realistic" Damage Code for that, based on blast studies, I'd recommend about 3800P. Call it -8/m for the blast.

A so-called suitcase nuke would be more likely to be a dirty bomb than an actual nuclear device. Arsenal already has rules for radioactive areas.

What damage does the largest aerosolic bomb do again?

Not to mention that it is really, *really* easy to fuck up a nuke's ability to go critical-as-planned, either resulting in a smaller than expected blast, or a total fizzle. No lie, nukes are easy to disable - if I had 30 seconds and a hammer, I could disable any nuke in any country's arsenal (as long as it wasn't encased). You don't even need to know what you're doing - you just hit it repeatedly, and you'll probably break it.

Disclaimer: it will still explode and kill you. It just won't be a *nuclear* explosion.

A Tsar Bomba would be 50 Megaton.

So 1kg of TNT is a rating 4 explosive according to Arsenal

so the damage rating would be 4+hits x sqrt 50,000,000,000 = 4+hits x 223606 dv

Noone's soaking that

Which is why Nukes are a Plot Device, more than anything else... We do not need stats for such things...

We have stats for them.
TNT is Rating 4 for 1 kg.
A Ton is 1000kg, A Kiloton is 1 million kg, A Megaton is 1 billion kg.

But I totally agree with you

You need to stat the hard radiation and the neutron wave too, though. Those are just as lethal as the shockwave itself.

No,
No you don't

And Arsenal has rules for Radiation already. You can use Google to do the radiation ranges for you.

Agree...or you could drop a satchel of grenades next to it. Nukes are really hard to make work, and the smaller they are, the harder they are to make work correctly. So hit it with a hammer instead of cutting the red wire.

But if you drop a satchel of grenades sufficiently big, it deals the same damage as the nuke!


Not on hard radiation. I'd use the Radioactive Wave spell as a basis there.

a troll max augmented can't carry a satchel of grenades that big ;L)

and they have rule for DEADLY, Intense, and lower radiation.

You can fudge something fairly close.
Really, it's good enough and I'd rather do that.. and not make other specific rules for something that should be in plot device land.

I personally wouldn't need rules at all. Maybe something loose with death zones, and varouls levels of autodamage that allows for no resistance.

-- The nuke rules are silly weak at the low end, and at this kind of scale they are ridiculously over the top. Consider that even with -6/m damage drop-off, with 7 hits and the above you get about 1,575,000P (rounded) damage. That's basically "vaporized" in Shadowrun damage terms for over a 160 mile radius (and then at the edges it peters to a light wind within the space of about 10 meters). The broken damage scaling in 4e leads to some rather bizarre situations, and should probably be glossed over in actual gaming unless people want to know why mininukes won't scratch the paint beyond about 30 meters and their big nukes glass massive swaths of countryside. Don't get me wrong, nukes are damaging, but not like how they are currently modeled in Shadowrun. The mininuke fix of stepping up their damage drop-off to be the same as for the THOR shots just means the big nukes get even more crazysauce.

-- From the authors perspective they could have not mentioned nukes except in vague terms, but then the complaint would be "But they gave a damage code to THOR shots!" I have some sympathy on the tightrope that had to be walked here, especially given the inadequacy of the rules.

In the case of a nuclear detonation, the forces
unleashed in a full-scale nuclear blast are beyond
the scope of the rules of a role-playing game. Small
“suitcase nukes” are more conceivable; in game
terms, the Damage Code for the smallest feasible
nuclear device would be over 130P, –6/m. Generally,
though, a nuclear device is mainly a plot device;
simply choose the area devastated (a minimum of
a 20m radius).
Use the following guidelines to determine the
radiation effects of a nuclear blast. The area devastated
will be an area of deadly radiation poisoning,
with a concentric circle of equal radius beyond that
is a severe radiation zone, another radius will have
moderate radiation, and the radius beyond that will
be an area of mild radiation poisoning (see Radiation,
p. 167, Arsenal).

First it was a sidebar to GMs on how to generally deal with Nukes in game. Note it gives generalities about Nukes with minimums and even then it is up to GM fiat. I consider that a guideline rather than a definitive rule. Kind of hard to argue even in the strictest terms that a suitcase nuke will do X damage when it gives no less than 130P (it could be much greater) and no less than 20m (again could be much greater).

Good for you. It can be interpreted differently though.


That the SR4 system breaks down hard with anything above punks in the gutters with guns level has been known sicne Arsenal. There are possible fixes to this, like a differnet dmage scale for massive and mega damage - scaling things back like SR3 and SR2 did with Big Stuff. Bit instead they just ran with it and wrote up bizarre rules. So no, they wrote that tightrope themselves.

I'm pretty sure CGL got this message already regarding the general quality of the release.

Almost a month ago, in fact.
Multiple writers have commented that there's a lot of internal flak about this release, and Big Daddy Bills has even acknowledged that mistakes were made.

But sloppiness isn't what upsets me.
If this was just about a PDF that costs less than my underware, it would be an excessive outpouring. For me though, it's not about War as a product, but War as a promise.
I'm upset that the setting is being constantly retconned so that things aren't as bad and cultures never clash . If the ideas in War are what we're left to replace that with, then this setting is ruined.

It's like they're saying, "Well, we'll just get rid of the conflicts between ideologies that form the basis of cyberpunk, because they make some people uncomfortable. Really, who needs to look at the idea of a future where technology has made humanity obsolete and the disenfranchised masses are left helpless but to cling to cultural identity just to stay afloat and try and justify their existence. That's not relevant or interesting. But you know what is? KILLER TREES."

It's not a bad book that I find unacceptable. What I find unacceptable is that this bad book is representative of what's being offered in return for what's being taken away. Is the face of post-cyberpunk really epileptic trees?


Okay, now you can go back to arguing about the rules some more.

Reading that for the first time there. A link would be appreciated.


Yeah, and from there, they go to kill Jews and Roma. Because the way to be less offensive by scrapping a fictional conflict between fictional ideologies is of course, antisemitism, antiziganism and generally everything that made the Nazis as popular as they are.


That's just the retarded idea to put these things somewhere. The entire writing process at CGL seems to be like writing a bad fanfic. Make up some sues ("interesting characters"), then toss in some kewl, edgy and wyld stuffz (Aztlan, Nazis, Nazi magic, killer trees, genocide) and let it write itself. It doesn't work for the umpteenth Sailor Moon X Naruto fanfic, and it won't work here as well.

Hey, that fanfic had an awesome sex scene, be honest.

Mmmmh, lesbian cousins and catboys ...

This is an acceptable break from the original topic of this thread.

Aint nothing wrong with that.

-- Not to burst any bubbles, but all Shadowrun products have had an element of writer Mary Sues and in-jokes. There are a few in-jokes that only my friends and residents of Sandpoint, ID will probably understand written into my stuff in Threats 2 that are embarassing to look at now. There's a strong desire by the line developers and authors to make their stamp on the setting, fix things they don't like (even if they have to do it by stealth), and advance new viewpoint characters instead of using someone like Fastjack who is getting long in the tooth and has no more depth to explore in shadowtalk. Using big gun shadowtalkers always ran the risk of getting your stuff rewritten because another freelancer with higher seniority/priority used him differently or there was some plan for them (that happened with the Tir Tairngire speakers to some extent and Salish Shidhe in general because of a book that I don't think ever got released). I'm not ready to tar individual authors of War! because I can't be sure that what saw print is even what they wrote

-- The fact that Shadowrun has all these fictional ideologies, some of whom are barely disguised versions of real ones (Humanis = KKK, lets not pretend otherwise), actually complicates matters. You may have a background in political science, have a good understanding of, say, human smuggling. But how does that apply to all the wierd organizations Shadowrun has, like Tamanous, and canon that often doesn't make any sense (I still have no idea how world trade functions in Shadowrun and I've been looking at that problem for years), blatantly contradicts itself book to book (or worse, in shadowtalk), and has to incorporate magic, megacorporations, and metaspecies? It's a huge pain in the ass juggling canon even if you eat and breathe the setting, much less if you're just parachuted in to write to spec.

-- I'm willing to give a HUGE amount of latitude on authorial intent, even if I think the implementation is not exactly solid (I strongly disliked the old Virtual Realities 2.0 for example, and pretty much wrote as if Cyberpirates never existed). My main complaint with War! was that, frankly, it didn't have much to do with war at all. It was just a bunch of wacky ideas and some big guns slapped together. Which is fine if it was Conflict Zone: Bogota, but I thought this was going to be the book on Shadowrun warfare and was let down. It also basically guarantees that we won't see a book on Shadowrun warfare until next edition (maybe) because this one sort of fills that slot and has tainted the entire subject with the fanbase.

Quite a bit of the backlash seems to be surprise or confusion over the Bogota focus of the book, but I hope that's something people can learn to accept; in large part because it's the format for several upcoming books. Rather than looking only at warfare, and at the same time publishing a book looking only at Bogota, the new format is to use a sort of expanding image allegory, like you're slowly zooming away from something. First we'll look at Bogota, then at the war in Bogota, then at war elsewhere in the world (global hotspots type chapter), then at war in general in the Sixth World as a whole (expanded rules for war, gear for military groups, etc). This way folks aren't getting just a setting book or just a "theme" book or just a crunch book, but a little of each.

I think it's unfortunate that it seems to have blindsided so many fans, but I hope that in a book that's handled some of the layout and grammatical issues (a much more serious concern, to me), the general format will grow on people. I know that, for instance, looking at Denver->Espionage in Denver->Espionage Elsewhere->Espionage in General is what's already been advertised for Spy Games, and I really hope we don't have half the fan base complaining because we got espionage in their Denver book, and the other half that we got Denver in their espionage book.

It's my hope that it's the content of War! and not the format as a whole they're disliking (I mean, granted, I'd prefer no one disliked anything, don't get me wrong).

You got Chocolate in my Peanutbutter!

You got PeanutButter on my chocolate!


That being said:

The problem with War.. (other than.. WHY THE *#$*&$& did they pick Bogota as the focal point for war between Amazonia and Aztlan) is .. really too long.

An introduction would have helped.
Bogota doesn't FEEL like a city at war.
Bogota makes no SENSE as the focus point for a Land War in South America. It's 2+ miles above sea level in incredibly mountainous terrain.
Spitting Sap Trees
Where's the war?
CurbStomp Jew Ghosts

The Designator Spell
No pictures for the drones/vehicles
Stupid Damage codes for stuff that didn't need damage code.
No fix for the high end Damage issue.


And Critias I'm not blaming you for any of that it's really not your fault.

Updated info on Denver, as part of the Espionage thing.. can be cool.. if it's done well.
If 1/2 of the War book had been about Caracas, or Maracaibos, that might have made more sense. But.. Bogota? Did someone actually bring up Bogota in Google Maps and turn on the Terrain Features?

Also, can we NOT cut and paste the CIA Travel Guide when we're doing writeups about Cities in 2073? Pretty Please with Sugar on Top.

Well, right. Like I said, that's why I'm hoping that it isn't the format folks are unhappy with. If they've got to not like it, I hope they're not liking it for those reasons (which are perfectly valid, as I've said time and again), and not just the general format of city->hotspots->Sixth World->rules.

-- I'm supportive of this, I am. I just think that the elements need to reinforce each other a bit more. If War! had been theme: Desert Wars, setting: middle east, crunch: military tech it would have worked better (IMO) for example. Bogota just came out of nowhere, wasn't really a setting element I think people cared about much, and proved to be a useful target dummy for peoples other issues with the line. Not to say that it didn't have issues, but I feel far more strongly about the mechanical crunch problems (as that's my interest area) than the setting as I normally just ignore huge chunks of the Shadowrun world when gaming anyways.

-- The general idea is certainly stronger than the mix that was attempted in Fields of Fire (which is Street Samurai Catalog plus some tacked-on merc stuff).


-- Eh, I could really care less about this unless it's really egregious.

-- Denver has always kind of sucked as a setting, and been a weeping sore in canon since the boxed set. If it blew up in Spy Games along with Ghostwalker I'm sure you would get a few thank you letters My bar is really low for that location already, if that's a consolation


-- It's been done before to varying success before - Cyberpirates and Shadowbeat, for example. I hope the kinks get worked out! Maybe I'll dust off my Shadowrun Space proposals in that case

I know for me it was the espionage, not the Denver, that got me flinging in proposals left and right for SG. In the 15,000 words of Spy Games I sent in, the word "Denver" doesn't appear a single time. I'm firmly in the "other hotspots" and "general Sixth World info" camp, even personally, but I see it as a cool book of Shadowrun spy stuff with a free Denver sourcebook update.

That said, I'm pretty sure no one sent in "Nukes fell, Denver's gone. The end," for their chapter idea. Hmm. That would'a really freed up the word count for more of my stuff, though...

Moreover, can actual RESEARCH in the background happen?


The issue is not that there are MS NPC and in-jokes. The issue is that there was no outline, no thread, no discernible focus in War!. the book had no concept, and nothing to say about anything that would be interesting.

We get a book that claims to be about war! and then describes a Bogotá that neither seems at war, and doesn't even mind the real geography of the city. There is no jungle in Bogota. Trees have a maximum altitude where they can grow tall and dense, and Bogota is above that). You see, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief to a degree, but that is like making Los Angeles a mile high city in the Rockies.


The facts that:
- Bogota doesn't behave like a city in war at all
- Bogota's description makes no sense
- the global war hot spots - except for one that makes no sense - are not about wars, but about shadowruns
- killing Jew Zombies is nothing about War! Neither is a progrom on Gypsies.
- the War in General piece is stuck in parts in Bogotá, shooting your concept in the knee
- no maps
- a shitload of new vehicles and no scenario to use them (the Hot Spots MIGHT have been useful there, but instead, we get to kill Jew Zombies for Nazi treasures)

As is, War!, despite the concept as such maybe feasible (even though it gives every part too little time to shine, dragging everything dow, like how the location books failed to buiild up immersive locations by being too short and hush-hush), falls flat on it's face because the content lacks and it'S disorganised and written more as a file dump of drafts with no discernible mission.

Now, I get that this kind of mixed book might sell better (if only for the gear, I doubt a setting profits if it is described ina s few words as possible). It's something D&D does, and while I strongly dislike that system, it seems to work for them. But unless you fill that book with more than nonsense and weird to insulting content it won't make for a good book.


Aside from concerns about the setting being cut too short, I'm reasonably fine with that setup. It'S neither better nro weorse than the several-settings-in-one-books, at least (I still prefer one-setting setting books, but these have be of very strong quality to shine, so I agree, it's a bit of a risk to write them and CGL seems to squeeze the franchise for every penny now).

In general, it'S a layout that could work, and has worked in cherished old books.

It is telling, perhaps, that a large amount of the problems folks complain about the book would vanish if the book had been entitled "Target: Bogota".

Not ALL the complaints, grant you, but a lot.




-k

Some of it. It would still have no maps, be incredibly disorganised and without direction, not interesting, and the Hot Spots would still be the ultimate in Shadowrun written suckage. But yes, at least it wouldn't pretend to tell you about War in Shadowrun, or even just the AzAm war (which it doesn't).

Then I hope that London is not going to be the center of a dozen parallel global conspiracies, World of Darkness style, just because it must introduce the rest of Conspiracy Theories.

I could get that, though as has been said multiple times - your Bogota focus is on the city, and not the war in the city. Or near the city. Or around the world. As I said on the SR4 forums, War! is a book that doesn't know what it wants to be, and makes a much better offering simply as a Bogota sourcebook.

The layout you...lay out isn't a bad one. I like seeing the 'zoom-out' options like that, and I hope to see it better integrated in the future, such as you suggest with Spy Games. It has a nice advantage in fleshing out cities that aren't Seattle, and gives us an idea on what's going on in that region. In pioneering it in War!, in a sense, I hope that the dev teams have seen where the shortcomings are and rectify it for future releases. I'm not incredibly certain that War! can be saved in that sense, as a great deal of the content that people were looking for in a book titled such wasn't there(which makes alt.War a viable process).

Nah. In my review of Runner Havens, I pointed out more or less the same thing-- the book should have been called Target: Hong Kong. The difference was, the Hong Kong section was of stellar quality, while Bogota is a jumbled, disorganized mishmash.

How about In Your General Direction: Bogota?

Taht's very probably exactly what will happen. Sadly, the setup of these books promotes this. Settings in SR get slapped with a hat that way. Denver gets the spy hat, London gets the conspiracy hat (to be fair though, they ended the plot of that setting in a whimper in 6WA, so it's got nothing going, because Americans seem to honestly believe that the second there are elections everything is fine and cakes and kittens).


If only they had just focused on HK. The writing was, as you say, stellar. I'd love to see a city book like that!

Elderberries: Bogota.

-- I'm not entirely clear what you mean. Certainly there is a lot of canon material to dig through, and most of the world has not been addressed for decades of in-game time. I'm not aware of any writers bible or any other good, up-to-date reference work for Shadowrun -- the freelancers (until recently, I gather) have been of the rather fanatical sort and didn't need a developer document to know what had happened in Imago or some shadowtalk in Shadowtech.

-- A legitimate complaint. The book tries to cover a lot of ground and doesn't congeal into anything I found particularly interesting.

No, but for starters, in Bogota, the writer ignored that it's a city that's 2.000 meters above sea level. That's a very basic feature of a city, it's defining. You cannot just ignore that because it's South America, which is the continent with the jungle hat.

Also, yes, they wshould read up on previous canon. It's annoying when they ignore canon as often as CGL has in recent releases. Shadowrun'S selling point is the world, a compelling universe that's more or less congruent. The rules aren'T able to sell on their own. It's like Dark Heresy, which has arguably even worse rules, but is caried by the fact it'S game world is an ancient (inn RPG terms) and beloved scifantasy world.

Shadowrun is not D&D, where you can rape any setting you like as hard as you want and it will still sell.

my 2 cents is if you bought it on Drivethru and you don't like it write a review on there. I have passed on buying several pdfs from reading the reviews. These days I always buy the pdf first if its an option.

I always prefer hardcopy to pdfs, it's a lot easier to read. I HATE reading crap on computer screen; even with a fast computer it's slow. I always prefer skimming through a book at the game store, because that's why game stores are there. Most clerks don't care if you're reading it, as long as you're not stealing it or wrecking the thing.

I'm still completely baffled by the lack of maps. Or even a single map. If you write a setting piece for an RPG, you include a map. That's RPG 101.

I'ma go out on a limb here and say something *totally crazy*...

If it's a location book and doesn't have a map, it isn't an RPG suppliment. This isn't supported by any logic, mind you, just my personal opinion. Cuz even fucking Keep on the Borderlands had a map, yo.

I tend to agree that it should have a map for any location. Else it is just a a generic supplement with no idea of where things are.