Yeah, I just got spy games.

The equipment section is incredibly shitty.

I mean, seriously, was the format used in ALL the previous books just too good for the writers, or what?

I know you're all trying to distance yourselves from The Previous Management and That Book Called War, but, come on, Arsenal had some nice layout. It had good, consistent rules an tables(even if a few things for left off and had to be errata'd). THAT is the standard you should be shooting for.

However.
Whomever put Sensor types in with the drone descriptions: You are awesome. This needed to be done ages ago. Even if was only for a few sensors, its a good trend. Keep it up.

War! was 184 pages-long : 109 pages on Bogota, 11 on hotspots, and 57 on rules and equipment. Spy Games is 176 pages-long, with 82 pages on Denver, 16 pages on hotspots, 31 pages on espionage, 28 pages on equipment and 4 pages of adventures "hooks and seeds".

The first difference between War! and Spy Games is the lower number of mistakes and typos I was able to catch on the first reading. Good point. And it has a map of Denver. Another good point. I would dare to ask for several maps, with a zoom on each sector with the places of interests displayed.

Denver is a good setting, IMO. The whole thing works. Lots of NPC provided, lots of plots. It is not just four countries at each others' throats, next to ten AAA megacorporations at each others' throats. There are behind-the-scene dealings, secret agreements, cooperations and treasons going on with multiple objectives. Just what I like. Of course, this also makes it hard to give the big picture clearly. Maybe the authors went too far in some direction, especially with Ares Macrotechnology who now deals at the same time with the UCAS, the CAS, the Sioux and Aztechnology.

The three first hotspots, Austin, Brussels and Kansai, are good pick. I really hated the War! format for those. So the return to a more classical one is another good point. Kansai is slightly less interesting, but allows some general fluff on Japanese industrial espionage. An update on London is welcome after Sixth World Almanac (at the same time, I noticed the Conspiracy Theories summary on the website makes no mention of London). The spy angle may be a bit forced, to justify featuring London here. But I actually think that's the way to go with any themed-sourcebook if you want plots to move on. Actually, if I had to decide, I would have put Caracas in as the spy hotspot it should be, for the purpose of giving an update on the South America situation. The "military advisor" angle is played heavily on Nairobi (while pretty much ignored in the rest of the book). So, it should rather have been in War! (but then, it would have been covered with the War! hotspot format, so maybe it's not a bad thing it only showed up now).
I can't help thinking Tel-Aviv shouldn't be there. If the Israeli intelligence and security services were up to their reputation, no other agencies should be able to operate here, and it would not be a hotspot (at least not for the fun things that SR adventure should be made of). Nowadays, Beirut or Dubai are the hotspots, not Tel-Aviv or Tehran. In the Cold War, that was Vienna or Berlin, not Washington or Moscow.

The content of the Tradecraft, Counterintelligence and Extraplanar chapters is good, but I still don't get why they get divided that way, except because different authors wrote them. MI-5 and MI-6 is in one chapter, the Oversight Board is in another, GRU is only presented as a counterintelligence agency (as if military intelligence was not an issue), and psy ops as a CI activity. The Extraplanar Intelligence chapter is cut from the rest, but only three pages and half long (introduction short story and illustration included). The same problem goes on in the Spy Equipment chapter, which mix fluff and stats and plots. Searching for one particular piece of information is going to be a mess, even more so in the printed version. IMO, it would have been much much better to make one chapter on intelligence and counterintelligence methods, one chapter on agencies (and free spirits allied with them), one chapter on plots, one chapter on gear fluff and then gear stats and NPC stats. As far as I can tell it never was a problem to have different part of a same chapter written by different authors, with a change of voice.

The Spy Equipment chapter is... annoying. Save a few mistakes, the gear covers some needs of a spy-themed campaign. But Dr. Laura Cross memos just don't sound right to me. I barely saw the difference between the conspiracy theorist Plan 9 and the engineering scientists Dr. Cross parts, and the reason for the jump between one and the other. At some point I even expected a Jackpoint user would post to say Plan 9 probably forged those memos. At least that would explain the bogus details on Terahertz being right behind the visible spectrum "between waves and particles" or MGIC absorbing green spectrum "allowing for easy visibility under special lighting" (in common speak, something absorbing green spectrum is usually called "purple").

While not being only a Denver sourcebook, Spy Games is not a pure espionage sourcebook. Actually, the authors focused a lot on HUMINT and action : James Bond, Alias, Burn Notice, you pick your favorite. And I mean A LOT. SIGINT does not exist in this book. It is somewhat significant that the NSA only mention in the entire book is page 172, in the list of agencies. There is also no mention of reconnaissance satellites.

Part of the problem is, you cannot really draw a line between shadowrunners and spies. It's not like industrial espionage and deniability were of no concern to spies. Shadowrunners were the answer to the ethnic homogeneity of Japanese corporate intelligence services, the absence or relative weakness of "patriotism" among their employees, and the generalization of biometric border controls (compare to Mahmoud al-Mabhoud assassination in Dubai IRL, where Mossad likely burned two dozens of elite operatives whose biometrics are now known by every security services in the world). As far as Spy Games goes, the difference only lies in assets handling and costly hi-tech toys. Everything else spies do, the runners do as well, just on a different scale. A SIGINT chapter would have been carved out of Unwired for the most part (which would still have been better that, say, introducing a Terahertz radar that does the same thing than the Arsenal ultrawide band radar, with different rules).

The same thing goes for magic. The 3-pages chapter on "extraplanar intelligence" is just about free spirits involved in the Great Game. When you look at spells like Mind Probe or Influence, they should be "Great Game-breaker" just as they often are a game-breaker. Mental Manipulation Spells only get two passing mentions. If you asked me, rule-wise, field operatives should be recruited only among the people with the Magic Resistance quality and Exceptional Attribute (Willpower) just because of this. Well, in my game, the CIA would have something like three mages with Mind Probe, and they would become priority targets for every other agencies when their presence somewhere is known (and I would make sure my players know about this when they pick up their spells).

My main comment on Spy Games is about what the authors assume the reader knows. It happens all over the book, in almost every chapter. If you read things in order, you have to wait till page 55 to learn what that "treaty" you keep reading about actually is (as the author of the History of the FRFZ chapter consider that nothing that happened before the arrival of Ghostwalker is actually relevant). Okay, most people reading Spy Games should have read the SR corebook at some point and maybe remember about the Denver Treaty. But it's not like this is the only occurrence. Users' comment mention people like "Cuthbertson" or "Kasigi" before they are actually introduced. You're only told who these people are a few paragraphs later in the best case, but it can also be a dozen of pages. Sometime, you can guess : I understood that Sheba should be a country with Asmara as the capital, as I am not one of people who owns the Sixth World Almanac and remembers the entire map. I do know what the "CID" and "Lone Star's DPI" are and that calling MET 2000 a "little merc outfit" must probably be irony. I still don't know what "Sze Kau" and "zigs" are. And I have yet to check what type of vehicle the Lockheed Sparrow is to know what the Icarus is.
I admit this is somehow logical "in-context" as the Jackpoint users themselves know who/what those are and would post their comment when it is relevant, not only after one name or term have been covered in the download. But OOC, as a reader, I found this to be very annoying.

One odd subset of this issue is the History chapter. This chapter has three and half pages of text. There are exactly three dates given : "November 1" (the Crash), "2070" (Calcutta Olympics) and "2072" (Denver Olympics). No date is given for the arrival of Ghostwalker, the actual year of the Crash, the technomancers crisis and the tempo connection. If you don't remember them, you'll have to search another book.

I'll comment some specific points later.

To start, I don't know if it's intentional, but the wordplay on the Denver Olympics and "Spy Games" had me rolling on the floor.

Anyone reading the news in the past few month would know that big financial players certainly are able to affect the European economy through their currency.

As far as the book went, Mitsuhama left Tsimshian in 2064. So the protest would be something like a decade late. Note this can be retconed with Mitsuhama having returned to Tsimshian (under Salish-Shidhe control) at some point since, or by one major trial taking place in Tsimshian around the same time than the Olympics in Denver, with several Tsimshan and MCT officials involved in the mining operations charged.

A Mafia-controlled club in Chinatown, what a strange idea... The story about the Mafia taking over the place is told later in the book.

Just kidding, right ? Right ?

I read Threats 2 and Corporate Guide, so I know what UnlimiTech is doing ad why Soaring-Owl left (or so I think). But to people who do no, this sentence absolutely makes no sense.

Nobody took the time to remind people that may not know that this Aztechnology board member is not (as far as we know) related to the Denver Mafia Chavez family.

So, Horizon Internal Intelligence is selling to outside, European powers ? As a side note, Horizon Internal Intelligence does not appear in the final agencies list, page 173.

Tease.

The sole fact that Haze comment is taken seriously by a guy like Mr. Bonds makes me wanna laugh. Income tax and VAT in a city the size of Denver would represent several hundreds millions of dollars a year nowadays. Just spending a day of tax on drugs would result in a death by overdose, whatever the drug is.

Aztechnology is the fourth world biggest megacorporation and a major in the defense and food industries, and Aztlan has a population of 168 millions. If they need a "smuggling pipeline" from Denver to fight a war, then someone is doing something fuckingly wrong somewhere.

Comments continued.

IRL, almost every country in the world has a law banning espionage. In the US, the Espionage Act prohibits "unauthorized possession" of any information that "could be used to the advantage of a foreign nation". And all those countries also have intelligence services that can work because the law authorizes them to do so.

This is just a call for help. I'm not a native English speaker and no matter how many times I read this sentence, I still don't understand what it means.

What did it say in the previous chapter, "if you're firing a gun, you're doing it wrong" ? And now we're talking about shooting people in the face so an analyst somewhere can get a clearer graph in the Powerpoint he is going to show to his boss ?

No. This is not "true" espionage and this is not espionage at all. There is a difference between political communication and psy ops at large, and there's another difference between psy ops at large and espionage. Obviously, someone wanted to give an update to the CAS political scene and explain the Technocrat mistake in Sixth World Almanac. As I said about London above, it is okay by me to play an angle to develop something not directly related to a sourcebook central theme. But in this case, that's stretched too thin. At least, I would have McMulkin campaign manager being a former CAS Army psy ops specialist or something.

Compare to Somalia as described in War!, which boasts no mention of NeoNET and NeoNET plan at all.

So, Laguiller is spying one Knight Errant to learn if Soaring-Owl, who left KE, has been talking (about KE trade secrets I guess). So, by doing so, Laguiller is going to know if Soaring-Owl has been talking only when KE itself get wind of it. Which will be also the moment when KE will take steps to prevent those leaks from having any effect. Doesn't seem such a smart move.

IMO, considering what hackers and technomancers can do, fluff-wise and rule-wise, isolated networks and face-to-face interactions should be the norm in any corporations, intelligence services or organizations that value a bit of secrecy.

Best guess from another non-native:

Flipped, a bureaucrat that have been convinced to spy on their own nation or similar.

walk-in, someone that shows up with classified info. As they where not approached they could be trying to pass off false info as the real thing.

Hell, i think there is a real life example from WW2 where a British agent supposedly worked for the Germans as a double agent. But in reality he was still working for British intelligence. So the Germans thought they where dealing with a British agent that was spying on the British for the Germans, while he was actually feeding the Germans false data on behalf of British intelligence.

And during the cold war i think there was at least a couple of Russians that presented themselves to the British and US agencies and where questioned and held in isolation until their claims could be verified via independent sources. If one do not, then one get events like the the wedding that got bombed in Afghanistan because someone claimed it was a Taliban gathering. Later it was found that the source was a rival clan to the one that got bombed...

Well she is learning from the best...

No, I knew what a walk-in is (it is actually explained in the paragraph that follows the sentence I quoted). I understand the first part of the sentence this way : handlers ("HUMINT officers") usually focus on what their contacts ("assets") can provide to their new master when they are flipped (rather than stealing documents from their employer for instance). My problem rather lies in the second part : "the professional operatives who are recruited or “walk-in” volunteers are run by counterintelligence simply because they have to control someone volunteering for treason." What is the meaning of the verb "run by" here and what kind of control does that give ?

supposedly every agent has a handler of some kind that they report to. I guess counterintelligence do the handling of volunteers as they are better equipped to spot double agents and such.

Btw, i suspect counterintel have some of the most paranoid and twisted minds of their nation...

Aren't embassies everywhere considered to be part of the soil of the nation they represent?

IEs are back, aren't you glad?

How do you know, maybe he's into sniffing shed dragon scales or whatever?

Yes, but did it have to translate into a confusing chapter layout? This would have been fine in a novel, but not in something that's supposed to be used as reference. Answering "Where can I found out about weird conspiracies in this book?" with "In the gear chapter!" is a little counter-intuitive. Of course, not owning the book, I don't know how extensive that section is - it might have been meant simply as filler joke. If it was meant to be used by a gaming group, though, it should be in its own section.



"You must read the website to grok this book" is not really any better than "you must know the metaplot". It's a picket fence marking the material as "Insiders Only", which is kinda silly for RPG books, the Nineties notwithstanding.

I imagine that's more ok on the RPG market, where there's a high percentage of returning customers (who are likely to know said metaplot)...

Shadowrun has been around for over 20-years real time, AND 20-years game time. Metaplot kinda gets very thick...

Hell yes. Embassies of every country, in every capital, have been extraterritorial ever since the 1961 Vienna Convention. Diplomatic extraterritoriality did inspire the corporate extraterritoriality in the first place.

Okay, there are actually parts of corporate extraterritorial rights that the diplomatic missions don't have per the Vienna Convention. But somehow, I kinda doubt the Denver embassies have shop retailing and land mining operations going on in Denver Hub.

It's less then 2 pages and some of it is about gear.
So it's most definitely filler(well possibly a little build up towards Conspiracy Theories), but i find it to be very characterful filler.

the biggest bullshit I have read so far is:



so /dev/grrl prefers MakeUp to Nannopaste Masks, which can change your complete face in an instant instead of haven to put makeup on for a while...

But I guess that is the quality you get if you let a teenage girl write about camouflage.

cya
Tycho

Nanopaste are "unfavorable" for her, so yes. Why she gets to write about pro equipment all the time, though, beats me.

All the time?
I'm pretty sure that the Attitude has the only gear chapter written by her.

Attitude, Spy Games ... her and Plan 9. I don't really see why none of the less unprofessional and freakish shadowtalkers get to write equipment. I really would prefer a return to Arsenal-ish formating for items, and especially, those tables. Because the way it's currently done is less than ideal.

I sometimes wonder why she gets to write about ANYTHING, really. But, then again, she is on the JackPoint for a reason. Modern Fashion and Pop Culture if nothing else. After all, look at the bands shown in Attitude, obviously written by someone that doesn't know who the "Up and Comers" are, and is really over-enthused that some old bands are back or still going.

Fastjack allows her in for a reason, most likely for insider info at some corp or other.

Nothing like keeping a kid around, and then get them riled up enough that they blabber about something that they maybe should not have.

Actually, considering the group she's with, she's probably a good enough hacker on her own (Certainly good enough to hack days off from her high school classes.). The main issue a lot of folks have is that she seems to be so ignorant of the Shadows and it's history. Which, considering her majorly misinformed education she got as a Corporate Kid, is not exactly something that's hard to understand why. It does, however, make her appear like an idiot when she doesn't know how/why/when something happened and has to ask the "Old Folks" (Some of whom are only in their 20s) what is obvious to folks who have followed Shadowrun for years.

The flipside is that this allows for metagaming information to be given out to new players as well.

I think the other issue people have is the "Girly" image she has which goes against so much of what Shadowrun appears to be. After all, it's supposed to be synthleather, mirrorshades and razorblades cyberpunk. Not rainbow-farting unicorns and sundresses. That said, hey, it's her personal style, and might put a lot of Mr. Johnsons at ease by dealing with someone that "Is almost normal" rather than the usual scum (s)he's had to deal with for so many years.

I still say hand her over to me and I'll rough up those rounded edges of hers.

re: /dev/grrl


If we ever figure out why, we'll tell you. Some of us are none too happy with her being around, either.

YES. I wonder that, too.


Jackpoint =/= ShadowSEA. ShadowSEA is open to any 4chan.2070 hack who can fight their way in. JackPoint is FastJack's elitarian littlen node on the net, which he founded because ShadowSEA is too unwashed for elite runners like the Jackpointers. Except for /dev/.

My main issue with her, though, isn't her being there. FastJack can invite anyone he wants, and if he takes /dev/ under his wing, so be it. What galls me is that she gets to write the sections of the last two Deep Shadows books that SHOULD have been left to people who know their shit, not some brat who can hack a node (big deal in SR4) and considers herself a shadowrunner. A brat with few connections save FastJack and her highschool buddies, a brat with little to zero combat experience, essentially a corp kid who likes to slum it for the lulz and thrillz. Now, perfectly fine as a shadowtalker, but petrfectly shit for an informed voice on the latest in runner-related technology. See "I don't like nanopaste BECAUSE IT MAKES ME LOOK FAT" for proof. And frankly, neither is Plan 9 suited to write about serious running.

The current writers should really use characters who have a reason to write something for their in-book voices, not randomly selected characters or characters where they purposely have a bad voice describing very important things like equipment.

And damnit, learn how to format a book so it does make sense as a gaming ressource as well as work as a book on it's own. It's not fucking rocket science. It's been done by dozens of authors before you. And please, tables instead of copypasting sidebars. Because that is total crap.


Well, her being there isn't the problem, it's how she's being used.

must be getting Slamm-o riled to no end


indeed.


Hell, say when and where and lets make it a party

She is an informed voice on the latest in fashion, which makes sense.
Attitudes gear section isn't in any way "latest in runner-related technology".
In Spy Games gear section she has exactly one sidebar and thats pretty much on the same subject as Attitudes gear chapter.
Can't really figure out why her personal reference for face changing matters to you, when she did still mention the other options.

Except for the nascent space marine armour. I agree she probably knows *something* about fashion, but I'd be suprised if she could outdo Kat (Rockerbabe) or Ma'fan (face/disguise expert adept) there. Countrary to popular belief, high fashion is NOT teenage fashion.


Because it's weird, to say the least, that in a community of hackers, spies, mercenaries, thugs and bounty hunters, those least quqalified get to write sections that are very important for everyone there?

Well, her quote implies that she thinks guards with AR capability (and what guard wouldn't?) would have an easier time spotting a nano-paste mask than subtle alterations with makeup. In which case that would seem more a problem of fluff not matching rules than /dev/ being a /moron/.

rfids in the mask perhaps?

What kind of disguise device has an irremovable label saying "hello I'm a disguise device"?

Oh get real. Why should nanopaste be WiFi capable? Because it's so unwieldy to just skinlink it? Because you want your disguise utensils scream and shout they're actually a disguise?

This overreaching WiFi-is-everywhere idea of SR4's is totally idiotic. It makes ZERO sense, for runners or anyone doing clandestine things to have their weaposn, cyber and bond gadgets cheerfully messaging every bystander and security detail that they're actually illegal equipment. WiFi can be easily removed, and there is no reason at all disguise equipment should be WiFi capable in the first place. It'S not like Makeup is going to broadcast it's actually a pair of fake ears and coloured contacts either, or is it?

Actually, even having semilegal cyber - or really, ANY cyber or ANY weapon - be WiFi capable is utter lunacy in a world where computer security is a sad joke unless you happen to be the mainframe of a military spacestation. The rules books even say so. So no, that falls flat on it's face.

If that was the author's idea, just beat him with the rulebook until he knows his shit...

but I guess the rest of the chapter don't demonstrate rule-knowledge either.

cya
Tycho

Can we beat /dev/grrl instead?

I remember seeing an episode of Fringe in which number station were claimed to have already been on air when the first human switched on a radio. Maybe that's were the idea comes from.

I thought it was a reference to Lost, but you may be onto something there. Still, wtf.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w...Numbers_station

I'm quite sure everybody knows what number stations are IRL, but Spy Games has some weird conspiracy theories about them

1- They are used by governments to send messages with one-time pads to spies.
2- They are used by the Maçons, Illuminati, Majestic 12 or whatever it is the semi-secret organization of the month that is trying to take over the world to send messages with one time pads to their agents.
3- They are used as transmission tests by some radios (boooooooooring).
4- They are ghosts trying to communicate with the living by sending messages with one-time pads that only mediums can understand.

Am I forgeting something else?

Actually had to look it up, so i figured i should post the link for reference reasons.

They are the Machine God talking to you. Or rather, the Deep Resonance. Which seems to be what the blurb in the Spy Games equipment section is all about. Because 1,5 pages of weirdness really help if you want to look up the stats of that self-healing car paint or the Icarus.

Rule 34, obviously

@Hogob: OK, I assumed this to be somewhat common knowledge

I hadn't heard of them either.

Sengir, I like the way you think.

Hmm, Aztech Crawler, weapon mount, SMG (tho one could go whole hog crazy and use a LMG), drone case the shape of a shoe...

I have an issue with the Inculcate Metamagic. It provides a method of completely blasting the Augmented Skill Cap, and can be made to last days. Essentially let me borrow some extra firearms skill guys. Thanks watch as I run around and do everyones job except I now have twice the skill any normal has, and am more skilled than any Physical Adept. Was the intent to provide a single bonus die per three physical, because the way it is written it seems like you add them together, and kick ass from there.

Palantir? Palantir? Really? Really?!! I don't expect to like everything in a book, I don't even expect every rule to be very well thought out, but this is pretty lame.

Miniaturize rules, you forgot them. Then you can fit it, LMG included, into a pack of cigarettes.

The bullets, however, are also miniaturized.

Which means they might annoy a Pixie.

You can only get twice the skill any normal has if your level 6 initiate(8 if we take account aptitude) and you have enought donors you can kill to get that, after all you have to do 3 point of physical damage for every 1 point you want to get, also to make it last for weeks you have to pay 6 karma(8 if you want to have douple that of aptitude guy) assuming you started at 6, if not then it's 1 more karma for every point you where under 6.

-- I have learned that Coeur d' Alene is so close to Boise and the PCC that it merits special attention (note: CDA and Boise are on opposite ends of Idaho). I had a good laugh at that (Spy Games, p. 169).

Nah, they're still that generic SR ammo that works on every weapon in a given cathegory.

Do I have to hulk out again?