It's been just a little over a year since the big discussion thread that covered events that broke mid-2010 finally closed for the last time.

I'm wondering what's the fallout from what happened?

Clearly, Catalyst is still in business, and printing Shadowrun and Battletech.

They've fended off the bankruptcy proceedings, and have apparently kept Topps happy, as they've been able to retain the licenses so far.

It also seems like new releases have gotten back on track again.

On the periphery, it seems that Sandstorm ended up dropping their RPG publishing business this year, leaving Wildfire (Cthulhutech) out in the cold, while Posthuman (Eclipse Phase) went independent. It looks like Posthuman might have gone independent before Sandstorm's decision to stop publishing RPGs, I'm not clear on the timing.

So has Catalyst come out of this for the better? For the worse? Or is it just the same old, same old?

The big thing I'd like to know: have they cleaned up their act when it comes to paying authors and artists? I think that's what a lot of the more tempered observers wanted to see. When given a second chance, did Catalyst clean up its act?

I speak for no one but myself here. Not for Catalyst, and not for the other freelancers.

With the possible exception of some proofing credits (which I don't think are actually due yet; gotta check the records when I get back home to them), I am completely up-to-date; Catalyst owes me nothing for the contracts I have completed for them to this point.

I have one outstanding contract, for "Another Rainy Night," but I only just turned in my final draft. It's gone through the first editorial pass, art has been commissioned and turned in (and I think it's pretty sharp), but it's just now ready for the final editing pass and layout. Should still be out by the end of this month, and if things go as they have recently, I should see a meager check sometime in March.

So, basically, things are going swimmingly on this front from my perspective.

From what I've read, it looks like they've cleaned up their acts as far as paying/rewarding the freelancers/artists/writers is concerned. They're releasing a whole lot of books and small PDF.

So it looks like Catalyst in itself got out alright.

As for the line in itself, it's another story. The line still suffers from the loss of what was a very fine team of freelancers.
Sure we get plenty of releases, but the quality is far from what we were used to, both on the outside and on the inside. Maybe it's just personal taste, since it looks like some people here enjoyed the latest releases (with the exception of WAR!), but to me it feels like the line lacks vision and direction. Freelancers with greatly different visions of the game write things of varying quality (from good (and sometimes even excellent) to terribly bad) with little fact/consistency checking behind and it's all put together in some book.

I'm not sure if the staff is 100% recovered, truth be told. There's no web monkey, for example, and I don't know how the editorial staff is at the moment. (Note to self: Contact Jennifer, see how her work schedule is.) As long as I don't bring the freelancers down with my general rookieness, they should continue to improve ... each book is getting better and, eventually, strides will be hit. Shadowrun's the #4 RPG right now, and the PDF side of things is doing well. The Missions line is solid, and metaplot stuff is starting to find fruition ... lots of arcs are hitting the high notes in the not-so distant future, and the kerfluffle that cost us many a good writer is, hopefully, past.

Overall, I'd say there's a rosy prognosis. You are, of course, free to ruthlessly mock my stuff. New guys get hazing; that's SOP.

#4 means we only need to crush three enemies, see them driven before us, and hear the lamentation of their fanbois!

Lamination of their fanbois would be much funnier though.

Who's #s 1, 2, and 3? I need to start planning the attacks.

D&D is #1 and Pathfinder #2, but the third I don't know.

EDIT: If I had to guess though, probably White Wolf and the nWoD.

WoD (as a whole, or maybe just Vampire)?

I see we had the same thought.

While we have a tendency to romanticize the past, I do feel like the signal to noise ratio is losing.

I can't even say what it is I want anymore, but I'm not really getting it. Maybe a really compelling setting book? Like Bug City Chicago or the Arcology during shutdown. I used to daydream about stories and the setting, but nothing new has done that. I guess another election book could do well, but I feel like the books are losing their grip on the street.

Pretty much my sentiment. The new books are decent, but nothing in them really makes you say "wow". Just look - a pretty minor story about /dev/grrl and Kane has gotten quite a lot of both praise and flak, because nothing gripping seems to be going on elsewhere.

Tangentally related, PHS was an independent group prior to Sandstorm closing up. However, they cooperated with Sandstorm for some of the processes on the business side. PHS wasn't in danger of getting shut down with Sandstorm, but I doubt it's helped their production schedule.

Losing Cthulhutech is too bad, though. It was an excellent game.

I lurk more in the bigger german board, the SR-Nexus and there, the new books get bad rep and IMO it is justified.
Before the Fallout, german-speaking audiences preferred the english works for their accuracy in rules and writing, now Pegasus does objectively "a better job than the original devs". The added material also looks better than the OP'd stuff from the third edition.
The many many (low-quality) PDF releases are simply a method to just rake as much money in as possible before the ship vanishes into the deeps.

The drop in quality was noticeable and it doesn't seem likely that the line will go back to its former glory. I personally jumped to Eclipse Phase and back into Werewolf the Apocalypse.

Maybe it's because the metaplot is stalled?

I know there are people out there who detest the metaplot, but honestly, it's what makes ShadowRun, well, ShadowRun.

Sounds to me like we get little snippets of some minor actor who does nothing of importance, but that the world at large is in a state of non-action. The corps exist and are Doing Stuff, maybe. The dragons are around and Being Themselves, probably.

But we don't know what any of it is, because if it's happened, it hasn't made the front page news.

Big fan of Werewolf: the Apocolypse, here.

I'd agree that the past few books have been a bit ... big. Sweeping changes, globe-hopping, etc. I'd like to see things on a smaller scale, but epic tends to be sexier. Might be room to squeeze something in at some point.

Heck, bouncing around in the back of my text files is a loose series of notes for "Thirteenth Street", a setting book which is, essentially, a few blocks of the Redmon Barrens. Locations, NPCs, a few plots, and ready to be used as a campaign setting for low-level Shadowrunners. Liquor stores, pawn shops, cash advance/check cashing places, run-down apartment complexes, and the people who live there. Would it be useful? I dunno. It's certainly *different*, but is there a market for it? I dunno. Just one of those "Ideas I should polish some day" that's not ready for a transition to prime-time.

A suppliment should be usable in the form that it's presented in, but it should also seed other ideas from it. "Oh, I didn't even think of an approach like this. You know, if I started from this base, but did this and this ... neat!" or "Oh man, there's an organization mentioned here of Troll Yodellers? A good way to communicate in the Barrens without anyone knowing what it means, to help drive off Lone Star invasions? I gotta use that!" (Not that I have anything on Troll Yodelling, but.) ... little nuggets like that can launch many a concept to GMs, and that's big.

There are a *ton* of ways to play Shadowrun. Getting a book that's perfect for you is the tricky part.

I would buy 13th street.

That's pretty much on the nose, as far as I'm concerned. People may hate immortal elves and Or'zet and draconic machinations, but if you take those away Shadowrun loses a huge amount of its flavor.

That said, I think this "dragon civil war" - which is a shitty term, it's more like "dragon infighting" since dragons aren't a NATION - has the possibility of returning some of that to the game, as well as the info on the bug resurgence. I would also like to see something distinctly new and shadowrun-specific, too. Not another corporate collapse or anything, but some new cutting-edge tech that changes the playing field, like cybermancy and the original Grimoire did, when it added physads.

For New, well, Technomancers and AIs should fit the bill.

Unless you want to go all kinds of transhuman up in this house, with nano-consciousnesses or aliens.

I'll just drop this here, for potential ideas, spawned from the real world (there's some good material halfway down*).

*

Technomancers and AI's don't really count, since Technomancers are now OOCly 7 years old. Think about it: SR4 was released in 2005, and although Emergence was released in 2008, it was a stalled effort due to the fact that people had been PLAYING technomancers since 2005, and suddenly their existence was retconned into "Oh nobody knows about your shit yet." Plus the whole fact that I've always felt they were a conceptual offshoot of otaku anyway. By the metric of when SR4 was released, Technomancers are right now older hat than Cybermancy was when SR4 was released - 2005 to 2012 is 7 years, while 1999 to 2005 is only six.

AIs, yeah, I agree with that, but there hasn't been anything DONE with them other than "Here, have a new character type option." Same deal with full borg capsules. If there was some plot around this kind of thing, I would be happier.

Anarchy Subsidized spoiler alert:

Transhumanism in SR can, as far as I'm concerned, die a horrible death.

Where does this # come from?

They are obviously working hard to generate a lot of cash is short time, but that could mean a lot of things. In no particular order, an extremely not exhaustive list of possibilities:
- The Colemans want to resolve the, ahem, "unfortunate co-mingling of funds", for that they need some income...
- CGL needs money for a project but are considered about as creditworthy as Greece, hence they have to stock up on cash
- The cow is dead, so it needs to be milked as much as possible before it starts smelling rotten


And if one things needs to die a horrible flaming death, it's the ubiquitous magic nanotech .

I'd have to dig the thing up. There's an indy site that tracks sales figures for assorted RPGs, based on sales figures that the companies are willing to share. Pathfinder passed up 4th ed recently, but the two change the top slot often. One of teh World of Darkness line (Vampire, most likely) drops in at third, then Shadowrun at 4th.

As for transhuman, I, personally, agree with Mr Goodman, but there's always been a subset of Shadowrun that appeals to the transhuman side of things. SURGE people, meta-offshoots, geneblended furries, and so on. Anything that pushes the concept of "Human" outwards is a valid balliywick. Not something I do in my games, but, the options are there for those that want o go a-viking. Humans that get upgraded to aquatic operation, or elongated for space action, or who live in a vat because their organs went wild and now they spend their life in a tank, mind in the Matrix, dreaming of how to get themselves jacked into a new cyborg bod.

Takes all kinds.

While I agree that there's been a noticable drop in quality on a few fronts - with parts of War! and parts of Artifacts Unbound being the low points in my opinion - it seems to me that things are swinging back toward the positive lately. My biggest gripes with the last few publications (pdf and dead-tree) is the cover art and the editing. Content-wise and fluff-wise, I think we're seeing quite a nice improvement, and I think the interior art is really good, overall (some exceptions being a few of the vehicles in recent pdfs).

It could fit in a new Neo-Anarchist's guide pretty well.

The street level stuff is really helpful for showing new players what it's like to live in the 6th world. It's hard to recruit fans with hazy border disputes and ancient grudges. Might be the reason why the majority of the fans are in their late 20s or early thirties. New players look at these plots like they walked into a movie halfway through.

Yeah that 13th street concept sounds interesting. Maybe it could find its place in the "Example" file I'd like to add to Style Over Substance.

Make it about 30 pages or so[Cover page, contents(2-3), intro(1-2), Fluff/rules intermixed the Sr4 way(20-25), NPC's(3-5), index(3-5), Map(1)], and it'll be my first purchase of a pdf only book[though, for a technomancer, I still prefer hardcopy]. What would anyone else pay for it? Maybe add one small[scale]/lowlevel campaign, and I'd pay about $7USD(PDF)/$20-$25USD Hardcopy.

Comes as a surprise the DnD holds the top slot in sales, given that Wizards are going all 5th edit because 4th has slumped so dramatically, 3.5 had a number of shelves to itself at my FLGS where as 4 has never had more than one and a half.

As for Catalyst and Shadowrun releases, I think are in a tricky position (only not as much as WhiteWolf were) because ALOT of people are still playing SR3. A sensible move (maybe) might be to look at WhiteWolfs recent examples (updating their oWoD PDF on Druvethru and releasing V20 plus having WtA20 on way and other bits too) and introduce some SR3 supported new material (either divergent storyline from just before System Failure, or going back an filling in more of the 2050 and 2060 stuff) there is lots that can be done.

I don't really think you need to go back as far as 3rd edition. There's been bad stuff about 4th edition all along but they didn't really start salting the earth until Runner's Companion.

IIRC, Pathfinder holds sales slots 1,2,3,4,6,7,9, and 10. D&D 4th holding 5 and 8.

My friend mentioned it to me yesterday (but that particular chat log is at home).

While I would love this, and would buy it all, I suspect it may be 'too little, too late'.

If they're pressed for money, they might even want to just release the SR3 books that have already been printed. I'd love an ebook copy of Rigger 3.

Are they really?

I mean I still play SR3 and SR2 and even freaking SR1 occasionally. I have campaigns more-often-than-not that span multiple editions and adventures that take place in bizarre edition-hybrid rules. But I always thought that's because I'm fucking weird and as a GM am obsessed with the narrative technique of intercutting between past and present to tell a story.

But anyway, reading around here and on the official forums for the past two or three years, I haven't gotten the impression that all that many people had really stuck with SR3. It seems to me like the vast majority of posters are talking about/playing SR4 and only very occasionally do you get the odd SR3 thread.

(FWIW as a mere freelancer I am in no position to speculate on Catalyst's situation like...at all.)

I hear you Neurosis, but alot of the regular posters names seem to have changed over the last few years since SR4 as well. I know of a number of Shadowrun groups in the UK who either dallied with 4th and went back to 3rd or never changed. What i have also seen is the 2nd hand books bin at my FLGS, while there has been no 4th ed appearing in it all of the 3rd ed stuff in the last year or so has been gobbled up really quick.

Most of the 4th ed players I know have never played any previous edition.

I just wanna play.

First, I agree with the people sick of magical nanotech. Shadowrun is a cyberpunk game, transhumanists have their Eclipse Phase and should stay in their damn ghetto. While some tech advances may be good, a good deal of appeal of Shadowrun for me is that it's "future just a few steps ahead".

Second, as for the metaplot - yeah, we have the artefacts and the dragons feuding and the war for trees. But is any of these plots as interesting as, say, Arcology Lockdown? That's the problem I see with the current metaplot - it's just not engaging, and especially not for Seattle-based runners.

Third, as for the 13th street - I could make it into a pdf, given enough time. I'm not a great pdf editor, but I've been told stuff like Cyborgs Unveiled or my GMing handouts looks more or less decent.

This is me, sadly. I was in a CanRay like state of gamelessness for a long while, and it wasn't til last year I convinced my group to play Shadowrun.

I started playing late in 3rd, so much so that it was only one, maybe two, campaigns before 4E came out and we switched over.

And now I'm mostly game-less, although I will see if I can get my group to pick up Eclipse Phase (we did "ShadowRun in space" once, was rather interesting).

That's likely because the SR3 players don't really have much to kvetch about. There's no new books so nothing new happening or rules being fucked up. The known issues with SR3 are pretty well known whereas the issues with SR4 are still relatively raw and routinely get salt rubbed in them.

Plus the old books aren't really available. So the old blood that stayed with previous editions just stays away from the forums because there is literally nothing to talk about. Especially since the metaplot isn't terribly captivating right now so there's no edition-less topics to talk about.

Too true Cheops, I know I hadn't posted anything for a good number of months and probably a year or so before that. Most if the SR3 chatting is about campaigns at peoples tables and is found in other places (if you can find those places).

Yeah, I don't know where this secret cabal of 3rd edition players is lurking about - everywhere I go on the net, I see people talking 4th. It's got its flaws, but it's an easy enough system to grasp and conceptualize. Except for the Matrix and rigging; I've had to make my own flowchart for rigging rules solely because they're in like, three different places in the book. Not that there's anything wrong with 3rd! I quite like 3rd's attitude and flair and metaplot, and am eagerly filling out my shelves with stuff from that edition (and 2nd) because it's so awesome.

Really, I think the worst thing to come out of the Stupid Catalyst Situation is that CGL lost a lot of confidence in the fans. Which is funny, because the whole situation started because CGL refused to talk openly to the fans. Heck, look at how they interact with us now - we get maybe a sentence or two from Jason, but they'd rather we talked on the board that mysteriously got its legs in the middle of the shitstorm. I understand it could be a coincidence, but...

It's nice that we have freelancers that are willing to talk openly enough. On a personal level, I like Critias, Bull and Patrick (with the exception of Patrick's "fuck transhumanism" line above - Patrick, I'm disappointed in you ) and the thought of Wak freelancing makes me happy. But on the large level, I just have no confidence in CGL Shadowrun releases now.

Maybe it's a personal thing, but with each new release I get more of a, "here's your stupid books, shut up" vibe. There have been six major releases in the span of two months, and the general consensus among fans is, "meh?" There's little things that people like, but nothing "wow!" or "oo, I need to get that!" - mostly it's people kvetching over the little things but being blase about the rest of the book.

Which brings up another point - where are the hardcopy prints of these releases? Six pdfs in two months, no print books? That's curious. To note, Tehana ordered Conspiracy Theories through Amazon back when it first came out (because CGL doesn't get my money any more) and its delivery date keeps getting pushed back. I'm sorry, that's sketchy.

This doesn't mention the great freelancers and fan support we've also lost thanks to this. Ancient History is gone and took the Ancient Files with him. Aaron's resigned himself off to the nether, and half of the old crowd from around here drifted off thanks to the fallout of everything. From my perspective, it's a sad state of affairs.

Basically, I'm just saying that despite every effort Catalyst appears to be making, they still haven't done anything to regain confidence in fan's eyes. Paying people is one thing - that shouldn't have even been a question - but The Situation happened because CGL management was being shady to everyone, including their own employees, and when they got called on it, they panicked. Paying people and release books on time were only symptoms of the disease - CGL needs to come clean, own up to their mistakes, and make up for it. That's all that this really comes down to.

ETA - Oh, and I feel like I should link to the timeline breakdown Aunty Ancient posted towards the end of The Situation, so that people don't think I'm making shit up. Pretty interesting reading.

The timeline walks forward. What should the devs do? SR3 already struggled with believability in regards to its technological level.

I think that some day it will be necessary to put a stop to the timeline advance, and offer a game where you can play in different time periods, each with their own style, from light cyber/magic 80s (or even 70s) cyberpunk to cyber-heavy 90s cyberpunk to post-cyberpunk to transhumanism.

I'm bored and it's early in the morning, so I went and did some reading. Thought this was strangely prophetic -

In regards to the future of Shadowrun...



Hm.

With Patrick on the anti-transhumanism stance. Werd bro.

Also Ravenmuse, that quote from AH is very disappointed but sadly seems to fit so far. Last book I bought was Spy Games and Attitude. The rest I've not been very thrilled with to be honest.

- J.

Entirely off the CGL stuff...

For me, the transhumanism stuff is the next level of cyberpunk. Hell, it's where the genre has gone.

Cyberpunk had its roots in the 80s, where Japan was going to take over the world and people were going to become slaves to the machine when they're not stuck inside some corporate feudal state. We've moved past that. The folks that got into that stuff are now as old as the writers that were writing about it at that time.

Now, technology is everywhere, and it's making our lives easier and opening up more connections, not making it harder and closing us off to the world. It's enabling us to do things, talk to people, experience things that we never could have before. It's opening the world.

Cyberpunk is rooted in being closed off, scared, shut-in. The punk part is supposed to be about fighting that. It's a little weird to see that kind of fear in published material when right now, at quarter til eight in the morning, I'm using the internet to listen to streaming music I didn't pay for while browsing another tab on a company's terrible financial future and two seconds away from opening a new tab to pull up a link to Taqwacore - Islamic based punk I'd never heard of until I browsed another website (not 4chan, haha) for images and found out about it.

Think about it from that perspective, and then think about how a kid born in the 90s and experiencing technological revolution is going to see it.

I'm not saying that Shadowrun has to become Eclipse Phase. Far from it. But what I'm seeing is people scared to embrace the future - which, against all odds, Shadowrun always has, though (haha) usually through some major bad boogaboo. I'm not saying lets put in sleeving technology, or uplifted dolphins or anything. I'm just saying, there's nothing wrong with portraying technology, or people that use technology to improve or better their life - in a positive way.

Islamic punk is keen, but dip a toe into some of the Islamic French rap scene. You'll get a nice bite-sized chunk of Cyberpunk-style RAGE against society. Ostracised poor communities expressing themselves through music? Yeah, that's Cyberpunk right there.

Transhumanism isn't my thing, but it's one of the sub-flavors that you can find in Shadowrun and I like to keep it in there. Much like SURGE, which I didn't enjoy bu others did, it's good to have it around for those who play that style of game, but it's nt a core concept and, as such, one that I wouldn't generally feature. Mind you, with genesplicing and bio-mods being more akin to the view of the future than chrome, I'd expect to see more of that style of mod (Cat ears, retractable bio-claws, etc) than usual. Similarly, I don't think there'll ever be aliens in an official product, but I know a few games that slipped them into their own narrative... as a fan of Fifth Element, I'm cool with that, but, it's not a direction for the game's core, I don't think.

One of the NEAT things about SHadowrun is that, while you can draw on the obvious Gibsonness that's draped all over it, you have lots of fractals in the prism of the game. I like pulling from old Noir sources, for example, and HBO's old movie Cast a Deadly Spell was a *gorgeous* reflection of this. Similarly, you can go Lovecraft with the backstory thanks to the Horrors and Deep Astral, you can run a conspiracy-thick spy game, you can run Hodders against the big uncaring Megas, or you can run cold-hearted mercenaries in a Professionals game. I've seen games where you're Lone Star officers, protecting the city from the scum of society, Gun Fu stories, Doc Wagon games ... the list goes on and on.

At some point, I'm gonna have to talk about this sort of thing at length.

Dood. You're such a liar. You found out about Taqwacore because I left up a Hijab fashion blog on the computer.

Also, the world still turns. These arguments happen in every niche of every hobby. We're playing a game, to have fun. These arguments are a waste of play time IMHO

I'm gonna leave everything else in this one alone, because it's relatively early and I don't feel like getting worked up. However....


I never said "Fuck transhumanism." I said that transhumanism in SR could die a horrible death. Subtle difference, it's true, but c'mon, man, get it right!!

And you can be disappointed in me all you want. It's not an element of the game that makes any sense to me, really. What can I say? I'm old, and while I'm still relatively flexible, I'm growing more ossified by the minute.

The rest of the stuff you dredged up, especially Bobby's quotes, I'll deal with later. Possibly much later, depending on how I'm feeling at the time.