Parabotany, the latest PDF-only product for Shadowrun, is now available (Battleshop, DriveThruRPG). Here's what it's got:

GARDENS OF SHADOWS

It’s so easy to forget about plants, especially for sprawl-hardened runners who never have anything underfoot besides plascrete. But you forget about them to your peril. After all, where do you think your deepweed comes from? How about those useful, memory-wiping doses of laés? And what was it about the Brazilian kiwi that made Dunkelzahn so interested in it?

Ignoring plants means ignoring a possible source of income, and what self-respecting runner would ever do that? Parabotany is the guide runners need to help them locate plants that will enhance their abilities and grow their income, and it also provides useful tips, such as how to avoid plants that might be inclined to devour you.

Along with descriptions and full-color art for dozens of plants and a garden full of plot hooks, Parabotany has new rules on creating Awakened flora, gathering reagents, and creating powerful new magical compounds. Unlock the secrets of Sixth World plants, and use your knowledge to give your foes a defeat they’ll never forget—unless, of course, you dose them with laés.

Parabotany is for use with Shadowrun, Twentieth Anniversary Edition.

I picked it up. It's an interesting read. I've gotten about half through it.

Art: Eh..... I'd say lower end of the Shadowrun spectrum. That being said it's plants and flowers. It's not like they have to be spectacular. They are color.

It's presented like a much more 'gentle' Parazoology' as, one might generally expect with plants. Not really in a bad way. There's plot hooks here if you want them. There seems to be alot of "Magical uses" of the plants. The write ups tend to be kinda small. It's interesting, but you won't "USE" tons of this stuff all the time. What it is and will be good for, is to grab one of these and sprinkle them over top of other adventures or something as flavoring. Where in they can come in handing to help with immersion and flavor of the world.

The PDF tops at 50 pages, So 48 after you take the cover and Jackpoint off.

The pages are..... sparse. You see quite a few pages with a paragraph or two of carry over from the previous page. It's not 'every entry' but when you pay $8.00 for 50 pages, and you get maybe..35 to 40, with 10 to 15 pages worth just being blank (( that's not even counting the quarter to half page art)) It feels a little bad. And it's not like there's entire blank pages. You'll see one page that's 50% blank, another that's 20% blank, one that's 75% blank. They just add up. I'm not trying to sound picky, but there's ALOT of blank space on those pages.

I liked it. For flavor sprinkles it's nice. Some surprises (( As not many runners pay overly much attention to plants UNLESS you're around Bogata where the trees eat you, they can certinly be surprises. Not all will kill you. Mages will find alot of use here. (( ALOT of use)).

Oh dear, it's Kat Hardy again...a clear "buyer beware" for me

ooh - roll your own plant rules

Okay, after a full read through, I gotta say I really like this book. I was skeptical at first because of the subject the book covered. "Plants" I thought "really?" but I was pleasantly surprised on my skim of the book and am liking it more on after a complete read. Some of the plants we've seen before but most are new with some just plain fun ones, the Zieba Tree being my favorite, with the Tumblenaut Weed aka the Rumbleweed being a close second.

The book has new items introduced that are made from the various plants in the book, such as a spray from the Metadrake which melts spirits faces off, it's expensive though. There are also rules for creating and mixing compounds along with new ones. Lol at Alice and her intrepid band of Runners.

Lastly, but certainly not least, alcohol and chocolate!

Please tell me they didn't do awakened pyracantha.

Okay, I won't. I don't even know what that is.

Alright - I finally had a chance to look this over, and I'm a very happy camper!

We get 36 awakened plants, with some new toxins a magical compound pricing and availability (including prices and availability for the plants from SOTA 2073 --- a big THANK YOU on that!); 4 pages on the latest in agriculture, alcohol and other beverages (with price charts), and chocholate; 5 pages of rules dealing with specific rules for plants, how to create your own awakened plants, and expanded rules on creating magical compounds; we get 16 new Magical Compounds of the types 'poultices' and 'paints', two new awakened drugs, and finally a compiled plant index listing plants not only from this book, but from other books as well!

I'll start with the bad:
- Some of the write-ups are a bit short, leaving big chunks of empty page here and there.
- Some of the art is a bit too 'cutsey' and vibrant, and some of it feels off in a way that I can't really put my finger on.

Now to the good:
- There's a whole slew of useful plants here: some for security applications, some for making drugs and compounds, and some that can be used to add flavor to certain locales or even the homes and offices of npcs. The write-ups are good, and in a consistent form, with a little box that mentions 'habitat', 'range', 'frequency', 'plant type', 'description', 'usage', 'availability', 'powers', and 'notes' for each plant.
- There are side-boxes discussing various related topics, like the possibility of Emergent plants, craters around the world, sapient plants, man-eating plants, and more.
- There's a new Magical Compound that can be used to fight spirits! It's expensive, but seems efficient.
- Some of the art is quite good, and fits the theme well.

None of the plants feel silly or badly thought out imo (though some are better than others), and several of them come with a bit of history and background fluff that really adds to the world. Some of it can easily be used as material for runs as well, which is always nice.

While this book may not see huge amounts of use in a game, I think the group of compounds and drugs, combined with all the added detail and background expanding on the 'feel' of the sixth world, make it quite good value.

This amuses me, because the same day this came out, I had the PCs encounter an orc bar where the owner had a small mushroom just beside the front door that went 'eeeee!' when someone approached it. It was his door alarm. The technomancer in the group was so enamoured of it, she wound up buying one of his 'spares' from the back.

I called it a 'screaming mimi'.

Bought it, looked it over. Definitely useful (got some interesting ideas already, for example, Slum Slime and my Compulsively Neat PCs...), but the guidelines in the back are what really make this useful to me. Dad's old botany and trail guide books suddenly justified their space on my (crowded) bookshelves.

As an aside, there's a book called "Wicked Plants". That is basically a 'real life' field guide for this sort of stuff. It's written pretty tongue and cheek. If you liked the parabotany book, grab this one to couple with it and the rules there in and you can really REALLY REALLY Expand your awakened plantlife (( Or non awakened))

http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Plants-Lincol...4122&sr=8-1

I like the upcoming products as well

Which corps have a higher interest in parabotany than the others?

Aztechnology is probably in the lead (being majorly invested in agriculture and thaumaturgy), with Wuxing (with an interest in natural magics) a close second.

At least, that'd be my read.

SnS wasn't enough?

if SnS isn't enough, just use a tazer. 8S(e) should handle most spirits you encounter fairly easily.

Thanks. I remember there being a list in one of the sourcebooks in SR3 pertaining to what each corp prioritized. Corporate Download? Does such a list exist in any of the new SR4 sourcebooks?

Yes, that was in Corporate Download. And no, there have been no equivalent list made in the 4th edition era.

...umm, Corporate Guide?

It lists of all of the subsidiaries that each mega owns, and they do list each field that are their main business. (S-K does heavy industry, Renraku does data management and infrastructure, Evo does bioware for everyone, ect.)

Haven't read Corporate Download, so I don't know how well it stacks up in comparison to that.

Corporate Download featured lists of subsidiaries and a table of "corporate asset ratings" in the Game Information chapter, that gave a number for each of the Big Ten in a dozen of sectors (for example, Saeder-Krupp had 11 in Heavy Industry, Yamatetsu had 3). The Net Rating calculated by summing up all the asset ratings was a bit silly on the other hand, since it made "Cybernetics" or "Mystic Goods" weighting as much in the total as "Heavy Industry" (which was construction+nuclear energy+oil+automotive...) or "Services" (security+restaurants+data services+transportation...).

Corporate Guide does give lists of subsidiaries, but those can be pretty misleading : for an extreme example, Ares Macrotechnology only has one division and two subsidiaries listed for armament (Ares Arms, Fleche Armements and Israel Military Industries), and twice as much in electronics and software. Yet there is little doubt on which of those two sectors is Ares priority.

Don't know how I missed this when the thread was new ...

Is this book useful for an SR3 campaign? For other modern/future sci-fi/fantasy games?
Does it include the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary?