The ENnie nominations came out this morning, and Shadowrun received two nominations and an honorable mention. The honorable mention was for Sixth World Almanac's cartography, while Attitude snagged two nominations--Best Supplement and Best Cover Art. I'm excited that the fine work of our writers and artists was recognized. Thanks to the judges, and congrats to all nominees!

Jason H.

Hm... Attitude got "Best Cover-art"?

Umm... Titties? Looks like they got the jury in a weak moment *g*.

Hehe. But seriously though: Congratulations then. Let's see how it turns out.

Well, it sure looks pretty, and I guess they didn't care about fluff accuracy, so all is well.

Congratulations!

The nomination for Best Supplement is more off, then.

Not really - Attitude is a fine supplement alright.

Yeah, I mean, even here the worst we could think of it was that "It wasn't as good as the old style book.", which was a fragin' masterpiece!

6WA cartography is nice, but it's full of mistakes. But I guess the award didn't take that into account.
At least War! didn't get the award for its cartography

As for Attitude! it's still too bland and "2011 in 207x" for my tastes.

As opposed to the '80s in the 2050s that we started out with?

As opposed to the "future of the 80s in the 2050s".

Nah, it's worse. Attitude lacks any vision for 207+ other then "it's cool in 2011, it has to be cool in 2070. With elves!".

gagaistic, anyone?

QUITE, yeah.


Not to mention entire chapters in Arsenal and Unwired don't mesh well with the bit on copyright. Some parts are acceptable, others are right down there with War. And overall, it lacks a unifying concept.

At least it seems we'll be spared more NPC lists in the Deep Shadows books, those seem to be relegated to Street Legends. Which apparently will be full colour. Dunno if that's really a sound business strategy.


There're not even elves in the really shitty bits. It's more like "Farenheit 247, with data".

As I wrote over at the official boards, they might as well have given the HM to Google Earth, that shows exactly the same content. Only with less clutter (it's a WORLD map, not a "everyone finds his hometown" map) and one can use coordinates there.

Plus, it does not spam you with an American/Eurocentric "world history" and denotes most of Africa as "here be [not that bad word hermit!]".

You know... I am still waiting for that Higher Quality Writing that you keep touting yourself capable of...

Great, TJ. Fucking great post.

I still hate that I can never tell them apart until after the fact, damn forum images being the same always throws me off (yes, it's bad that I ID fellow posters by picture).

That said: As opposed to the "future of the 80s in the 2050s".

I have to agree with that full-heartedly. But look, we know that trends tend to be cyclical, so yes, eventually the 80s style would cycle out and 90 and 2000's stuff would roll in, but rather than a transition it's like someone just dumped new style all over the old style with no real explanation.

Well, the author does mostly advertising, so if her art influences the jury in a not-so-professional way it's mission accomplished

Nevertheless, when compared to many other RPG illustrations her art is solid workmanship. Just the "IN! YOUR! FACE!" colours and anatomy should be reduced a bit.

IIRC, that was actually a RL model, so the colours and anatomy might actually be spot on.

Why should we care if it's a sound business strategy for CGL right now? It's a win-win situation for us either way - both if CGL goes under and the rights go to someone else competent, improving the quality of new releases, or if CGL makes a bunch of money and pulls its stuff together, improving the quality of new releases further. The worst case for the IP is a poor publisher with just enough resources to print low-quality books.
So I feel we should be taking those bits of good news, like industry award nominations and record sales, with joy.

Indeed. Any Good news is Excellent News.

Yeah, we could be stuck with a company that has an ancient mimeograph machine putting out books.

Or they could use nothing but Comic Sans!

"Hey, when did FastJack get remade to appeal to a Tween market?"

In my case it's not about the style (though I sometimes feel like the 80s style fits cyberpunk better) but more about the technology and society. Back in the 90s, Shadowrun's tech was future tech that mostly existed in Sci-fi and the society was what people feared it would become. Later on, the tech became tech that people started working on and society closer to ours.

But in the last two books (Attitude and Spy Games) both tech and society are just from 2011 with a little bit of magic&cyber sprinkled on top. Just to give a few examples: The 'Iron Will' from Attitude is nothing more than today's exoskeleton prototype, Fastjack's DRM piece could be copy-pasted from a 2011 blog with just a few change in terminology, the part about movies in Attitude could be set in 2011 by just removing the few parts about magic (there's nothing about Simsense!) and the difference between what there is in Spy Games and Burn Notice lies in a few pages about magic.

This, mostly, though Spy Gamers at least tries a bit to have more of a vision.

But Attitude totally fails there. And that's sad.