QUOTE (hermit @ Sep 7 2012, 08:16 AM)

As promised, a more detailed look at Land of Promise.
Huzzah!
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1. Layers
The story builds well, and does a good job of expanding on Cara'sir/Portland's feel. Liked the makeup of the story, namedropping and pacing was just right for it's place in the book, unlike some intro fiction since the author purge.
Cool, glad you liked it. The fiction was kind of a last-minute addition (since it got lost in the e-shuffle somewhere early in convention season), but I just felt like it would be a fun way to open up.
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Also, goo to see CGL is backpedalling on making Tir Tairngire an easily accessible, disneyfied elven kingdom, as seems to have been the idea earlier in SR4's cycle.
Very much so. One of my main goals when I pitched this book was to find a middle ground between the two extremes. The original book is one of my favorites (rather obviously) of all time, but it basically made the Tir this unplayable shadowrunner-wasteland, that meant the book was awesome to read and had fantastic flavor, but was kind of actually worthless as a game book. You could add "ps, he was from the Tir" to a character background or whatever, but there was never much follow up, never a lot of stuff going on in the Tir, never an easy way to
get into the Tir at all, much less operate there illegally, since the whole book just goes on and on about how much cooler the Tir is than anywhere else.
And then we had the half-finished, half-left-blank, kind of "follow up" years later, where we found out in little bits and pieces that there'd been some sort of coup, that the Princes were on the run, that Horizon was handling PR and tourism for the Tir, and...and...and no one knows what else. Just like an uncharitable reading of the original book made it unplayable because the Tir was too secure, an uncharitable reading of the newer material kept the setting unplayable because now it was TOO open and wishy-washy and there wasn't a lot of hard evidence of what to
do once you got there, or who was in charge, or what it was really like (because
Sixth World Almanac just didn't have a lot of space for each country).
So I wanted to strike out somewhere between the two extremes, for the record, and without actually retconning everything. So there's this
veneer of DisneyLand fantasy adventures going on, but behind the curtains Princes are still doing shadowy stuff, the borders are still ruthlessly patrolled (but less
efficiently now, so 'runners can get in and do business), etc, etc. I basically wanted to scale the Uber-Elfiness down from where it had been (a 12), but higher than
6WA set it (say a 6), and leave the needle hovering somewhere around an 8 or 9 or so.
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2. The Land of Promise
Haha, Grimmy. Haha! Also like the pacing, including the little AR menu windows giving the feel you're actually browsing a travel brochure pestered by that terrifying mascot book. Though it's list of helpful phrases cracked me up. Everything seems a bit reduced though, and blanking out a bunch of options in the virtual brochure might put some readers off.
I wanted to leave the impression of it being this huge "full sized" book about the Tir (like the original), but...uh...well I just didn't have the word count to go that in-depth.
I thought the little menus would be a nice touch, and leave it feeling like a big travel brochure. Hopefully they don't put readers off, they were meant to just be a fun little nod to the classic book.
And yes, Grimmy already seems to be one of the more divisive characters ever introduced. I think Ray and Wak are going to knife fight over him soon, at this rate.
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The best part, though, was the update on the Princes, and a few other important NPC.
Cool, I'm glad you liked it. It was really the "meat" of the book, to me.
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One of the players in my group loves your writeup for Blackwing, she's had a crush on that guy ever since Elven Fire.
Blackwing has been a favorite of mine since...well...a long time. He was one of the setting's first recurrent NPCs -- certainly one of the first that was actually statted up and meant to go toe-to-toe with the PCs! -- back in Bottled Demon and then Dragon Hunt (it was all the other cool elves in Elven Fire, actually), and I've just dug the guy ever since. I know his social status has jumped quite a bit in order to get him a seat at the big kid's table, but I just felt, meta-gaming it for a bit, like the old NPC deserved to be one of the new Princes. Which also reinforces the notion that they're NOT all immortal elves and Princes-for-life and junk. They're more approachable, more human, more scaled down.
And, on the Elven Blood front (not to be a jerk and tease about it, but to make sure you and your player really want to pick it up
) -- the odds are very good she can end up with Blackwing as an actual contact, as she works through the Missions. She'll get to shake his hand, talk to him face to face, you name it. There's also another new piece of artwork for him. Be prepared for fangirl squees!
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3. Plot hooks
I really hope Elven Blood is going to be out soon. Really, really do. Because that teasing is killing me. It's like waiting for SRM 4-10.

Hooks are nice but this seems a little hollow if you know five full fledged Missions fitting this writeup perfectly are out there and unpublished so far.
I just don't know when "the powers that be" consider the summer convention season to be over. That's the only hang-up at the moment. The book's (clearly) all formatted and pretty and ready to go, so it's just a matter of time now. I can't imagine it will be long, and trust me, I'm hoping it will be very soon.
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4. Character Trove
Kudos for localized weapons variants. I'd rather have more of those and less Gun Heaven files (and swap the publishing slots for spotlight pieces like this one or, you know, Elven Blood but meh).
Thanks! That was a last-minute thing I tossed in on a lark (actually because I wanted to call the gun something else in the intro fic), and to be honest I'm not sure if the powers that be even noticed it. I just feel like "similar models" adds a lot of flavor without having to add a lot of crunch, personally. It's more fun than just calling them all Ares Predators, and simpler than statting up a whole new gun.
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Other than that, others do the rules maths better than I do, but overall, they look good and easily usable. Writing up an archetype for all named gangs is a nice touch instead of seven iterations of 'special forces soldier', too.
Most of those are -- just as fair warning -- NPCs used in the Elven Blood adventures. It felt weird not to give folks SOMEthing crunchy to play with, and I thought it would be fun to just sort of use this book to compile a "master list" of Tir NPCs. I know not everyone was able to get the adventures, and I know not everyone likes published adventures, but it felt like I should give folks some "you might run into 'em on the street" level NPCs they can use for their own plot hooks and adventures and stuff, set in the Tir.
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What I'd like to see would be a bit of background on the feel and social makeup of the country, the economy, and such things. But I realize such a writeup isn't the place for this.
If I had the word count, I might've given it a shot. But going that in-depth just doesn't quite work for a $6 pdf, y'know? I wanted to keep this fairly compact, and keep it an update to (not an attempt at a replacement for) the classic Tir Tairngire book that Findley left us.