You can always haul it on the back of a trailer. Or just steal one from a convenient warehouse nearby."Shut up and eat your mushroom. There's starving ghouls in Africa that don't have it as good as we do!"

Special Machinery Mod. Done.

2073

My first thoughts are as follows.

It is kindo short compared to the other SOTAs, but the price is consummate with that. ...and yes my players have had more than one occasion to use a forklift creatively where stats would have been helpful.

The reason Chicago ghouls run pig farms is the fact that they have stolen some corp's pigs with transfused human genes, don't remember which (and they are rumoured to satisfy at least a part of their dietary requirements, too).

Can't say I read Attitude past the crunch bits, but I can easily imagine a bunch of situations in SR where a cab with an actual driver would be needed. You know, the kind that calls for any other type of human servant.

Yeah, and that is covered with weapon mods/accessories in the system.

Do you not see the difference between being mounted on a truck or towed after a van and being placed INTO a van like the shadowtalk seems to suggest?

Note that most Riggers use a Cargo Van (Sometimes called a Cube Van) that could easily fit a forklift and some cargo, as well as a few uncomfortable 'runners. Two up front, one sitting in the forklift holding on for dear life, two on each side of the forklift hoping like hell the straps hold...

Uhm, no. RW says that the pig farms have been around for more than a decade, and the following on the transgenetic pigs:
Provided my entire arse. The Ghoul Liberation League stole them
from a piggery in Snohomish last year.
> Winterhawk

If I recall, it was in older editions' books on Chicago, Sengir.

It seems English people will always get it wrong half of the time. That's "Esprit". I would add "The Oven" is an odd name for a tugboat.

Maybe they had French-Canadians doing it?

I understand we don't get it right either. No matter which group of French-Canadians you're talking about.

Um, I was just saying it would have been nice if it were the type of forklift that latched onto the outside rear of a vehicle, rather than the type that was presented.

Exactly as I posted.

That's all. Wasn't criticizing you or anything.

I'm pretty sure the shadowtalk was meaning a box truck style cargo delivery van, in any case, not a passenger van. You see forklifts go into those all the time to move cargo.




-k

Finally managed to read a copy of this, and I'd have to say: I'm not as disappointed as I expected to be. Which, considering my powerful dislike of pretty much everything Shadowrun-published in the last decade or so, is high praise. A couple offhand observations:

• It's a little schizophrenic, but a book like this is naturally going to be that way. This style of book arguably goes back to Neo-Anarchist's Guide to Real Life, and while that has common themes [and is superb], it's pretty scatterbrained, too. That common theme helps, though.
• Gear should be grouped the way it usually is: guns [small to large] and vehicles [small to large], et cetera, not "military gear" [vehicles and weapon] and "civilian gear" [vehicles]. These sections should always follow the same gear divisions the main book uses, for convenience and order.
• There are some genuinely interesting, novel, inventive vehicles in the civilian section. I could nitpick here and there, but overall, I'm really pleased. Good work, somebody.
• Same with the Awakened Plants. I've used that stuff, like, once or twice in my games, tops, but I like that it exists, and it makes the game world deeper and more interesting to me. I thought this was well-done, too.
• That said, some of the vehicle art, as usual, was a bit iffy, but there's never been a bunch of Shadowrun vehicles published that didn't have some wonky art somewhere.

Things I'd like to see more of:

• Contacts. The big dossier on Carter was fine, but 4 or 8 or 12 Contacts would be even more useful. Do we still own the art from previous editions? Wouldn't take me long to convert every single Contact ever written for the setting into SR4; do you need some kind of formal proposal...?
• Locations. Nations are interesting things, but also useful are neighborhood places with decent maps, for those of us with no talent in that department.
• More vehicles. [I write shorter descriptions, too, you know: I just do the GEARHEAD! stuff for a laugh. My rates are very low. I'm really pretty, and I'll let you do stuff to me, and I swear I'll never tell anyone.] Different types, yes, but also don't be afraid to revisit themes: there really are a lot of sports cars in the world that differ by only a little bit, and that variety makes the world a deeper place. Shadowrun has fewer cars than Grand Theft Auto, it seems like.
• Other gear, too, and I don't just mean guns: survival equipment, future consumer awesomeness, children's toys, kitchen appliances, holiday decorations, trade tools. I don't need rules for welding, but it doesn't hurt to know how much a decent welder costs, what types of welder are available, and what mischief a determined shadowrunner might make with one.
• Pop culture. Music, art, sports, bullshit. What's hot in video games, text media, telecommunications etiquette. Pornography. What are teenagers doing for fun? [Besides pornography.] Is Shadowrun still on trid, and are there spin-offs? More importantly: NERPS.
• Who knows how much more we can suck out of this well before all we can drink is dust, but metamagics and spells are always nice to have.
• Critters, too, although we seem to be well-stocked with them. Maybe specific critters, in specific locations. [Swamp Thing. Ant Queen CHI-19. The Wizard of Waverly Place.] New types of Threats, too, but only when they're too good to pass up, never just because "we've got an opening in this year's SOTA for a Threat. Can someone make one up?"
• I don't know if these things are PDF-only or if there'd be some other way to do this online, but it sure would be nice if every book with gear in it included a new full set of gear tables. It's got to be done, anyway, internally: without paper, publishing it is free.

Anyway, overall, decent stuff. If anyone's considering it, even I think it's probably worth eight bucks, and I'm a cheap and angry [but pretty!] old man who doesn't like anything.

Spirits, too. Free spirits, I guess, but new types of bound spirits, too. Maybe new types of conjuring. Examples of free spirits, replete with adventure hooks.

Believe it or not, 3278, we're on similar (but likely not teh same) page. I'm a fluffbunny, with a side of crunch. The *flavor* is what's important on my end and things you mentioned are on my shortlist (And, heck, in some of my proposals!) for the future. There's a few of us with similar thoughts, but, plot is going to win out over color in most (but not all!) cases. Thankfully, the world has given us PDFs, and I'd lay good odds that future PDF products will tickle your fancy. They're things that can be slotted in "As time allows" rather than on the schedule that a plot needs, and since they're bonus material in a way, they can focus more on the flavor, appealing to those who want a taste.

So, if I wanted to prep, say, "Ten Fixers", a short suppliment full of NPCs to fill niches that you might not have even noticed you didn't have until one was handed to you, I could make big ol' Bambi eyes at the honchos, to see if the investment would be wise. Similarly, my love letter to name brands, which could be as small as "The following guns have the same stats as the Ares Predator..." could be followed up with other people's stuff, expanding the world without tromping on the story.

In essence, PDFs are giving us more "Directors Cut" footage and "commentary tracks", which may well change how things work.

Now, I'm not saying that getting Jason Hardy and a half dozen of the big guns together in a room, talking over 4th edition page-by-page, explaining why certain archetypes were chosen, why certain rules work as they do, why wireless hacking became the norm, etc, is a future thing, but it's something that *could* be put together some day, without disrupting the normal produt flow as it could be assembled in bits and pieces, to be put up once it was ready.

Keep an eye out.

Hell, we started proposing a lot of this 11 or 12 years ago, when Acrobat was in its fourth edition and Shadowrun in its third, but I'll keep keeping my eye out, anyway.

You find the room, I'll bring the giant chain and padlock to keep them in there until it's done.

Yes, by all means: get everyone involved in the creation of Shadowrun 4 into one room and chain it shut. No, no, that's fine: you run along now. I'll take care of things here.

I hear a bit about the pig farms, and then I remember the last book I read by Margaret Atwood.

Then I wonder if that would be on par with the setting-changing capability that Ghouls are looking for.

Longpig farms?

If it's good enough for Spider Jerusalem...

And honestly yeah. I think about piggoons and wonder if they would qualify since the organs harvested are completely compatible with human biology.

If not, well, longpig doesn't need to grow brains - just stems. Keeps the rest going.

That wouldn't be very fair since, as far as credits go, Jason Hardy wasn't involved at all in the 4th edition, and only wrote a piece of fiction for the 20th Anniversary edition.

There's this thing called "similar vehicles". We do NOT need 20 sport cars that are essentially the same when there are so many wondrous new classes of vehicles to explore out there.
Yes, it's always either-or.

With that, I can't agree more. Actually, some of those I ended up houseruling.

Uh, see Attitude?

Frankly, I do not feel we need metamagics that much - a typical runner mage for a reasonably long campaign only initiates this many times.

I think that country write-ups can really benefit from critter stats (especially minding that many of the SR critters are based on local folklore). 6WA really dropped the ball with the way they describe countries.

But that'd require actual work!

But it doesn't have to be. And I'm curious what other classes of vehicles are new? See If you're saying "Wait, not just sports cars!" then I'm totally on board. If you're saying something else, well I'm curious as to what you mean.

To give choice to a magically active character. I've made up at least 3-4 metamagic abilities specifically tailored to the type of mage my character made - concentrating on summoning / binding / dismissing. Is the metamagic presented in the rulebooks the end-all and be-all for what a mage can develop? Probably not. Having everyone overlapping in a party of mages can get... annoying. Allowing some wiggle room and 'paths' of a sort helps to make these mages more unique.

Except it does. When you pay someone on per-page or per-illustration basis, you always have to choose what you want in your books - one more sports car, or something different.
As to vehicle classes not covered - well, we have next to nothing on common household and other non-armed drones like flying window cleaners, vent shaft crawlers, threaded floor cleaners, etc (while using them as either opposition or hacked help is cliche in cyberpunk); the industrial vehicles are only just starting to get the attention they deserve; cyborgs still have to choose between the ultimate creepy body and the killer bodies of awesome killiness (which cost more than the entirety of the troupe combined); alternate environment vehicles like sea sleds, space jetpacks and Mars rovers are only cursory covered etc etc etc. Trust me, there's a lot more to the human-produced machinery than sports cars.

Speaking of magic I'd get a kick out of something that was just background on how magic affects the world. "I'm Joe Mage, and here's my life." I'm hoping we can see more and more SOTA stuff. There's not much reason it can't be one of the more expansive series in the game!

"I'm Joe Mage and I have a perpetuum mobile"!

Hey the nice thing about this should be that they get to basically do an upgraded version of the TSS or the Dumpshock Datahaven.

I believe there's worth and value in both novel vehicles and additional depth in existing classes. I would not support 20 sports cars, even if many of them were different; I would support 4 or 5, particularly if many of them were unique or interesting within the class, and particularly if it were printed alongside a good selection of truly novel classes. While each vehicle is either-or, the overall selection can be a blend, and, I believe, should be.


Right, absolutely, except I wasn't listing things I've never seen, I was listing things I'd like to see more of. It's great that Attitude exists, but I would like to see more items from popular culture. Arsenal exists, but that doesn't mean we don't want to see some more guns and cars, right?

Wait, the PDF doesn't have a Table of Contents?

Who's the author of Samantha Roth's portrait? My money is on James Meiers.

Yep. Says so right on the label.

I'm disapointed that the map of Thailand is just a zoom into the Almanac map. Both completely disregard the map for Shadows of Asia, and use RL borders instead of the modified borders that resulted from 30+ years of war in Southeast Asia.
One day, I'll provide a larger version of the map I did for SoA, highlighting the border differences between RL and SR's 2070'. Maybe I'll do that at the same time I correct the wrong France/UNL border from the Almanac too.
Oooh, how I regret turning down that job now That world map is so buggy.

Edit: Done. Here's the link to a PDF that shows the intended borders for Indochina.
MEDIAFIRE LINK

A user of the German wiki did a complete world map as a response to the crappyness of the 6WA "map", AFAIK one of his sources was the aforementioned SoA map (since nothing else has been published on the area):
http://www.shadowhelix.de/images/9/95/Welt...nk_mercator.svg
Also, an overview of the differences between 6WA and canon, and the political borders of 2072 compared to 2000 (using the corrected map as reference).


Even better, he did the world map in various projections so we are not stuck with the crappy Mercator map
http://www.shadowhelix.de/Datei:Weltkarte_...nk_mercator.svg
http://www.shadowhelix.de/Datei:Weltkarte_...k_mollweide.svg
http://www.shadowhelix.de/images/c/c1/Welt...nk_robinson.svg
http://www.shadowhelix.de/Datei:Weltkarte_...blank_platt.svg

That's really neat!

Make it up to us by taking on more map work in the future! (I really like the maps in SoA, I must say...)

Will this one eventually get bundled into a printed product? I don't like having game bits in PDF form, fluff is ok or even modules, but stuff with cyber and crap you might want to buy or things with stats I'd rather have hardcopy.

Actually I was already working on the map. Though the Almanac's shortcomings were an incentive to finally get it done. I had hoped that Pegasus could get more corrections to the world map through, I was kinda convinced that they had to change Asia, and that we would see an errata afterwards. Sadly that did not happen.

And yes, SoA is the basis for Asia in my version of the world map.


Thanks.

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A security risk is posed by this site.
McAfee Security Rating: Yellow


Ok, why is the battlecorps webpage suddenly being flagged by McAfee?

Eric

Because McAfee Sucks?