Well, yeah, if you consider giving half-baked history info with more errors than you can fit on an A4 page (including sidebars missing altogether) and an overview of the countries already covered multiple times (with blatant errors to match at that) a damned hard job, sure, they did a decent job at it.


Well, we are discussing the upcoming release and if it's worth something - obviously we have no way to induce its worth unless we take the quality of its predecessors into account.

OK, final decision, I had forgotten the issues with Acceleration in "This Old Drone" that has never been addressed. Thank you for reminding me.

I'll get MilSpecTech, but it will be CGL's last shot at winning me over for PDF items. Their next full book will also be their last shot at keeping me as a customer completely.

One thing I remember from Retail days is that it's very damned hard to win a customer, but very, very easy to lose one. My family has proved that with a few restaurants. CGL is lucky they have IPs that have such a cult following in a cult-fan supported market.

Were this any other industry, they'd be looking at closing doors from lack of sales by now.

Huh, what cover image?

Nevermind, found it on Pegasus' board.

Same source also yielded two other links I did not see before:

http://catalystgamelabs.com/download/sells...%20Intrigue.pdf
Big Book o'Plot Hooks. Well, the other two "Corporate..." books were a bit lacking in the GMing department. Nevertheless, another full-price product on that matter? Better have some good content (and maps )

http://catalystgamelabs.com/download/sells...%20Theories.pdf
"new magical gear, spells, and reagents that will enhance the options players have for how magic is used in the shadows." Eehh, sounds like more super-epic ancient ubermagic. And the common factor of conspiracy theories is that the perpetrators are out of reach for the average person - secretive cabals, government officials, old-boy networks, you name it. If something has rules and can be learned by players, where's the shroud of mystery, again?

RabenAas did that image, by the way.

Here's a link for all the rest of the CGL product sellsheets availebul

-- The gear part of War! was sort of ok. At least I don't feel the need to simply ignore it. There's nothing salvageable in the fluff sections, I'm afraid I don't have the vitriol for it that some do, but I just get a "eh, not for me" vibe (I have a hard time getting my interest up for non-North America settings in Shadowrun though).

Wow, they still plan to produce it, apparently.

A book of plot seeds shouldn't be called a campaign, though, but 'books that are actually loose ends with some sues and shit thrown in'. And alas, my poor, beloved London setting is next in line to be raped. Poor setting.

Also interesting: Comparing the amount of Battletech and Shadowrun products released.

Also: If MilSpec gear is a pdf job, will it even be canon?

Wasn't Alachia once Queen of England?

Yes, but then she was deposed and never tried again. Also, that was in the 1600s.

And now she's Queen of the (un?)seelie-court, which resides . . somewhere . . around there right?

Unseelie? Alachia? Hardly. The Unseelie are the opposite of what she wants (Brane Deigh's chair, even though nobody would let her because everyone does not want another Bloodwood). The Unseelie are headed by malignant Fae.

Nice! I like the books coming down the pipeline. Looking forward to the Conspiracy Theories and Corporate Intrigue. I usually don't pdfs so I don't know if I will get Milspec.

i tend to get these things mixed up <.<
one faerie court led by an female immortal elf looks like the other to me ^^

Hermit, I can only address the things I can address. I'm not working on errata, it's not my place to make announcements about errata, I've got nothing, personally, to do with errata. I was just out to hop onto a thread and let folks know I've seen MilSpecTech, and assuage some paranoia about it being War! Mk. II or something.

And, in unrelated news, for those of you who are at the "Alright, they get one last pdf purchase from me!" stage of breaking up with CGL, do me a favor. Skip MilSpecTech, and buy The Adept's Way when it comes out, instead. It's my baby, cover to cover, so pretend you don't want more milspec gear and wait to make that your last-chance pdf buy, instead, would'ja?

More Adept-Run Stuff Critias? Heresy! *snickers*

Paranoia? Sorry, but that comes off as rather arrogant. What do we have to go on? You don't honestly expect positive excitement after the shit CGL has been producing ever since Hardy had to actually develop things himself.

And The Adept's Way isn't even in the sales sheets yet. This is the first time I hear about it. Is it yet another high magic supplement? Or can you otehrwise give us a glimpse into what's to be in it?

As for errata, if CGL would want to not fuck over it's customers, posting those they've been sitting on for years (yes, that's verifyable, since they were worked into the German releases) would be a start. Not saying that to you, but more as a general statement. I know that's not your call to make.

But... I want the explosions... *Pouts*

Y'know, Hermit, you sure don't make it very easy to casually pop into a thread and just make a few light-hearted comments, a few informative comments, make a joke out of advertising my e-book, and then to go on with the rest of the day.

Have a good one.

-- While we're bantering on drive-by advertising, anyone want to try to sell me on This Old Drone? I gather it has some issues with vehicle stats (not very surprising given the dartboard assignment of War!) but is it good otherwise?

Aside from the Acceleration statistic being wrong and identical in every drone, they were very well done I found.

Great if you're doing a Ghettopunk game where you're scrounging up stuff in junk yards and getting junkers to work. Also good for even High-End Shadowrunners who want something deniable. After all, these things can be found and sold anywhere.

Finally, low-end Corporations will be using items like these. As well Mercenary Companies that have a high drone turnover. Parts and replacements are cheap. Demand is next to nil, so even if the supply is limited...

But they are obsolete. Very much so in one case.

I don't really care for the connotation of saying "yet another high magic supplement," particularly if we're talking about an Adept book. Dawn of the Artifacts obviously gets people thinking high magic with the title alone and stuff but for the most part t I've felt like there's been a pretty decent spread of magical stuff vs. tech stuff in this edition, with adepts being relatively untapped resources when it comes to fluff if not mechanics.

See, I think Adepts are pretty solid in SR4, but one of the drawbacks of Improved Ability being applicable to so many different skills is that it tends to make any two Adept sheets look kinda vanilla and similar even if mechanically speaking the two Adepts are actually good at totally unrelated disciplines. It's really just a perception/visibility problem rather than any sort of campaign killer and I understand why things are the way they are-- Renaming Improved Ability: Gymnastics to Supernatural Coordination and giving it its own blurb is the kind of thing that causes needless book bloat if left unchecked, after all-- but at the same time perception does count for something, and the perception that a lot of the SR virgins at my table seem to have is that Adepts are less fleshed out than the other archetypes.

Which, would make sense, really-- Magicians deal more directly with the Astral and Spirits than your stereotypical kung fu Adept does, for example, so a lot of the stuff covering Astral Space/Spirits in Street Magic and the like end up feeling more like Magician territory even if that's not an entirely fair assessment. Likewise you could make a strong argument that Improved Ability strongly defines what Adepts are all about but it only ends up taking up 6 lines of text in the book. That's a blessing and a curse. Its rules are efficient and easy to remember, which is great, but it also means that a new player can skim the Awakened section, miss a power and end up wondering why these jokers don't get 'wared up instead.

So, as dumb as it sounds, I think Adepts could benefit quite a bit from something simple as moar page count, even if it's just to give them an extra dose of fluff to help differentiate them a bit from a mundo with reflex recorders. Particularly if we're talking about doing it in the form of a tidy li'l ebook rather than a big ol' tome.

Jesus, that was a big ass post.


I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I totally want Critias to tell me more about his book.

If you want Adept's Way get the Players' Guide for Earthdawn 3rd Edition. Great support for Adepts and it won't unbalance your Shadowrun game.

Yeah, and the stats/default mods look a bit like whoever wrote them has never read Core or Arsenal.

*Shrug* I look at it this way... They don't really make production automobiles that can outrun a helicopter anymore.

But watch "The Gumball Rally". Or read "Gunsmith Cats".

They don't build anything like they used to, and it's only getting worse.

World record helicopter speed, set last April by a Sikorsky X2: 259 MPH.

Bugatti Veyron Super Sport top speed: 267 MPH.



The previous helicopter speed record was 249 MPH, set back in 1986. I think there's like three production cars that had higher top speeds. Most fast military helicopters top out at about 230 MPH, civilian models top out at about 200 MPH.

Traditional helicopter top speeds kinda stagnated for decades because of physics limitations inherent to propellers - the backwards traveling side of the propeller creates lift and drag problems which increase the faster you go, so you reach a point where you just can't go faster. The Sikorsky X2 solves this by having a second propeller above the first spinning the opposite direction, and a third "pusher" propeller behind the craft mounted vertically to provide extra forward thrust. The company estimates they may be able to push the prototype to as fast as 288 MPH eventually.



-k

I seem to remember Top Gear testing whether a lotus could outmaneuver a an Apache. It turned out that it could, but it's ability to handle being hit by 30mm HE rounds was pretty minimal.

I bet it didn't handle rough terrain nearly as well, either.

Well, I was mostly just out to make a joke from all the folks saying they were only buying one more e-book, 'cause it'd really suck if they all got pissed at MilSpecTech (not that I think they will), and then Adept's Way only sold like four copies or something. I'm pretty sure Pete and Jason wouldn't pay me very much attention with my next proposal, at least, if me and my local gaming group were the only ones who picked it up. My intention was a quick little quip, not a total thread derailment.

That said, I'll say what I think I can without violating my NDA and/or spoiling the surprise. It's more of an update to existing Adept rules than a groundshaking overhaul of anything, expanding upon existing Adept fluff and providing some crunch to go with it -- Ways have had fluff for a couple of editions now, and I wanted to lay down some actual rules to go along with them, finally. "High Magic" isn't involved, artifacts aren't involved, etc, etc, though the long-established general rise of the mana level is theorized to play some part in why things are changing, in-game. It's my hope that the rules I'm presenting will let Adept players have fun and contribute to their group without having to min/max and super-specialize (like by heavily going the cyber/bio route for the most efficient attribute boosts), while collaborating with their GM to make things fit their character just right.

I know it's in playtesting right now (though comments are coming in), and since it's my first e-book work and I'm new to the timeframe of the process in general, I can't say how long it'll be before anything hits e-shelves. To the best of my knowledge, though, it is the next original e-book after MilSpecTech (which is what prompted me to kid around like I was).

Yeah, but it's easier to get a driver's license for a Lotus than a pilot's license for an Apache.

I like the idea of moving away from super-specializing a tad. I get that PhysAds have always largely been about using magic to improve their inherent abilities, but then I look at the Shamanic Way and think that there's room for a bit of weird stuff that doesn't just give you 50% more skill dice in your main shtick.

Anyway, that's enough derailing for me.

I still want my MPUV.

Huh, i didn't see much problems in them except for the acceleration stats(and those are obliviously typos, what with all having the same)

A drone the size of a corporate jet having body 3 is weird, for instance.

What drone would that be?
Also you have to keep in mind that drones body just doesn't go higher then 4 in SR4.

Ever checked out the size of modern drones like Global Hawk (compare) or the Reaper (compare, both p8, This Old Drone)? Those aren't really small. Not to mention the only thing that apparently differs a medium drone like thenPredator and a large drone like the Reaper is top speed.

Shows only - again - that SR4 never was meant to plausibly simulate military combat.

Hmm, looks more like Rebecca Guay than what I've previously seen from Aas...not that this watercolor style is bad, but for a gear book I'd have expected something with a more "technical" style, more nurnies and less washed-out color transitions...


@hermit: Why should MST be non-canon? Is there any rule about only hardcover books being part of the canon?

While large, I'm not sure they are sturdily built. For exemple an A-10 also has a size similar to the Learjet, but twice the empty weight, while the empty drone weights about 2/3 of the learjet (and 1/3 of the A-10).

I thought there is?


Half the body would maybe be okay, something along the lines of Body 5 (Reaper) and 7 (Global Hawk). But the same body as a falcon-sized pet drone? Seriously?

For reference, the Entertainment Systems Falcon has the same body score (2) as the Global Hawk (pp118 Arsenal). The description makes clear it is supposed to be the size of a real falcon. Which are slightly larger than the common dove. A McDonnel-Douglas Nimrod has a body of 4, but makes a point of being smaller than previous combat drone models (pp.121 Arsenal).

It would be nice if vehicle size and Body were separate. :/ Nevermind asking that they not screw with drone Body to avoid overpowering the mod/damage rules.

SR4's vehicle rules are a mess anyway. Yeah, Body and Size should be separate, as they have been in SR2. Alas, they are not. If you operate within SR4's rules as given, you need to keep that in mind.

All right, I'll have a look at it. I'm also interested in your Adept book, and you had better have given better options for Social Adept metamagics in it.



YES this is what I wanted to hear. This had better not be false hope, though. I'll do some sniffing around for swag after work.

I think thats a reference to CAS wandjina, more then to the super old reaper, which is also body 4(witch is the max body attribute for drones in SR4)
Really there just not much room to diffentiate drones sizes by body attribute scale of 1-4.

Uhm, no. There are a couple drones well above that in Arsenal.

Sometimes they are! Look at the anthroform drones.

But it's not consistent.



-k

Dammit, how the hell did i miss Tomino and Otomo.
Well that's just further proof that the size and body attribute of drones is only very lightly connected, so it's not a point in the favor of your opinion that global hawk and reaper should have higher body because of their size. Really i think the reason they don't have even body 4(and 0 armor) is because they're really not that sturdy compared to modern combat drones.

Oh yes, vehicle body stats...I wish they would have changed those instead of making rules for how to sink ships. It wouldn't even require a major overhaul, simply ignore the paradigm that all drones in one size class have to have the same body. And maybe add another column for mod slots, because a Stormcloud just won't carry as many mods as a tracked medium drone.

Haha, in what now? I know you're kidding, but it's not funny. Not funny at all.


Yeah uh, how about that Reaper with FOUR weapon mounts?

What exactly your problem with that, standard upgrades aren't in anyway limited by the modification rules.

And it should have 6 weapon mounts, but i guess the writer decided that to be just too many.