Still has that new PDF smell to it!

Rassin' frassin' Canadians, stealin' my thunder...

I wish the pdf sample didn't focus quite so much on just revealing all the intro fiction...but I'm glad they stretched it out for a few more pages so folks get to meet Grimmy, and can see a little more of how the rest of the book looks/works/reads.

And, yes, this and Elven Blood go together very, very, well (overlapping in a few places, but complimenting each other and building off various NPCs, etc, throughout).

Oh lord, I can finally talk abot Grimmy?

I LOVE GRIMMY MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF.

I swear to God, if I can figure out a way to do it, Slamm-0! will port that little guy over to JackPoint for one day. Just ONE, until Glitch finds out and deletes it, but ... I love Grimmy so very, very much.

Do you guys know how far away PDF release of Elven Blood is?

Doing a quick browseover, I'm far more interested in this business between Renraku and the CAS.

I will more than likely pick this up though. Elven Blood was that good.

Elven Blood rocks on toast, and Land of Promise is pretty spiffy, too. I got the chance a couple years back to play the then-unreleased "Ancient Pawns" adventure from EB, run by Critias himself and featuring one of my oldest friends who I hadn't seen in ages as another of the players. I had a very large time, and I look forward to being able to run some people through AP and the rest of the EB Missions really soon now.

Montreal 2074? Nice. Wish it were Toronto 2074 but hey, I'll take it!

Must wait to get home to buy this... great intro story by the way.

Parageology . . a book about . . blinking stones . . oi . .
If there are no Obsidians in there, it's just . . no . .

And Montreal 2074?
Is there, like, anything interesting there at all?

Bull might be able to tell ya, but I've got no idea. What I've been hearing most of the year is "after convention season is over, it will be up for sale." I know Dragon*Con and PAX were both last weekend, so it feels to me like the big summer cons are behind us -- but I can't say for sure.

Montreal has every convention mankind can think of.

EVERY CONVENTION.

Really? For some reason this is the book I most want to get my hands on lately...Unless it was covered in 3e, I never really saw anything related to the idea of parageology, which is out of sync with the idea that telesma can come from minerals.

Para-Animals can attack and eat you. Also, Critter-Powers, Posions and telesma.
Para-Plants can attack and eat you. Also, Poisons and telesma. Critter-Powers? Guard against Astral beings.
Para-Stones can . . lie there and do nothing? O.o No poison or anything. *Homer Simpson: "BOORIING!" *

Boring rocks? Is uranium boring? Is it not "poisonous"?

Not in it's natural state, as far as i remember . .

[edit] Merged topics/Pinned

Yeah, like the Ancients not being run by Green Lucifer anymore. Well, more to come in terms of review when I've read, not skimmed it. Interesting format, as basically all info seems contained in Shadowtalk. Oh, and Grimmy the Grimoire. That's so painful it's appropriate. Horizon must be purged with fire.

One thing for the cover: While she's improving, it seems Kat Hardy should practice perspective a bit. Cara'Sir looks a bit like R'Lyeh.


It hurts even more if you stop a bit between two twists of that knife.


Never underestimate the power of a blinker stone.


- be orichalcum
- be telesma
- be PLAYABLE.


That sounds interesting, too. There's been quite a lack of writeups of mainland UCAS cities that are not Manhattan or Chicago ever since the NAGNA book back in the good old days. I take it my favourite Canadian is writing this? I'd like to see some place in the Midwest too eventually, what life's like in the UCAS/NAN border region.

If someone creates a Grimmy the Grimoire icon, I swear to you that it will be my avatar.

I love that little guy so very, very much.

FWIW, I wanted that particular tidbit to be more readily available and clear to people quite a while ago. They just never got around to actually publishing Ancient Pawns, where it happened (which was, like, pre-Origins last year) -- but it's a change that I, at least, expected to be "out there" a long time ago (so much so that, you'll see, we referenced it in some Jackpoint talk in books last year). For whatever reason, AP just never got printed/released, so I got them to bundle it up with the other four, in Elven Blood (because I really wanted it to be released, and I saw a way to try and get it out there).

A proper write-up for an actual Canadian City?? Hell, I'll be picking it up just for that!


My memories of Montréal (admittedly from when I was 10-years-old) tell me that running a game set there would be awesome. Montréal has some great geography, not to mention it's always been a hot zone of Francophone and Anglophone tension. Hell, earlier this week there was an assassination attempt at a victory rally for the Parti Québécois (French separatist party) who just won a Provincial minority government in Québéc. I realise that in 2074, Québéc has long since gone on to form it's own country, but there would definitely still be a lot of resentment on both sides and Montréal is a UCAS border town.

Now if I could only find the time to finish my work-up of Toronto 2074...

Even if not a border town, Montreal is a Port Town (Thanks to the St. Lawrence River lock system), which means there's people from all over the place coming to it.

Hell, it might even have a huge amount of displaced non-elven Irish as part of its population!

Gunnerkrigg Court Reference detected

HOW? x.x
If there ain't Obsidimen/Obsidians in there . .

Anglophone Irish gang in the West End near the airport, Italian mafia in the northeast, Chinatown, bikers pretty much everywhere else... The Underground City would probably allow someone to walk directly from one extraterritorial zone to another without going outside or leaving corporate property. Did some research for a game a while ago, loved what I found.

As promised, a more detailed look at Land of Promise.

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. 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.

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.

The best part, though, was the update on the Princes, and a few other important NPC. So Brightlight’s not become dragon chow after all … The nearly all shadowtalk writeup was a nice touch (and a shout out to the ‘Open Forum’ chapter of the original Tir book?), and the info was compact but had content enough to be useful, and didn't give the impressionj of only a solid infodump. The character art for all princes was a nice touch too. Oh, and aside from Brightlight, other old faces reappearing – the Dodger (still Laverty’s man?) and Blackwing. One of the players in my group loves your writeup for Blackwing, she’s had a crush on that guy ever since Elven Fire. And is Amy who I think she is?

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.

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). 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.

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.

8/10


Yet, Stahlseele. Yet.

Mr.D had them written out of existance or planned to at least, if i remember correctly.

For what it's worth (pretty much nothing), obsidimen get a mention in the Runner's Companion april fools preview

So is there any new interesting gear in the book? Or is it setting fluff, setting fluff all the time?

Lol doublepost.

Hell yes. And every festival, don't forget about that. Speaking of, we have comicon very soon now...You should come down . Or east, as it were.

I keep meaning to go to a Just for Laughs festival.

GenCon broke me.

Check out the guest list. Maybe two Enterprise captains and Jayne could put you back together again

He was booted. What he wanted doesn't count for much anymore.


All setting fluff, unless you count renamed equipment with the stats of known equipment.

Huzzah!

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.

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.

QUOTE

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.


Cool, I'm glad you liked it. It was really the "meat" of the book, to me.

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!


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.


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.


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.


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.

Knife? What knife? I have no idea what you're talking about.... *whistles innocently*

From an upcoming JackPoint login page:

SEATTLE—An oddly cartoonish volume of ancient spellcraft was found destroyed on a train from Cara'Sir late last night. Investigators believe it was hit by as many as eight different knife blows. When questioned about the incident, eight freelance writers who were on the train smiled and walked away, whistling to themselves.

Jason H.

Grimmy! No, NO! Somebody get me some glue! And for God's sake, somebody call a Bookbinder!!!

Grimmy ... I'm here buddy. Stick with me...

*Whistles and hides ceramic knife*

EDIT: And I used to be a librarian, that's how much that thing pissed me off!

I can see where you're coming from there, but to me, the old, TT book Tír always was good for two things: Background stories, and being a boss stage; maybe a challenging run to scare players thrown in for good measure once ina while. It wasn't a main, default setting for a group, and I was fine with that, myself. The setting needs places that make even walking around a challenge, because ocasionally, as a GM, you want to present an elusive, distant threat that cannot be gunned down by a sniper PC camping outside the zero zone enclave. That is why, for instance, the Human Nation HQ is in Switzerland, which in it's so far only writeup has downright insane security. Because if being metahuman makes walking overe the street alive a challenge, you cannot easily blow them up as you would the local humanis chapter, or the MCT big bad in his zero zone.

I'm a bit on the fence about making the Tír a more open setting; on one hand, I resent giving up my boss stage, on the other, I can use it more regularly. I'd hate to see evetry setting in the game opened up like this, though. Just as it needs accessible places, it also needs places where you really have to think on your toes to even buy a pack of cigs, nevermind a weapon.


I was, to be honest, pretty pissed about the treatment the Tír got during Taylor's era. His disapproval of the elves' writeup showed a bit too much for my taste. The fall of the Tír was just the crowning moment, especially this never getting anywhere with it afterwards. I know it drove one player away from SR4 in disgust. So I'm pretty happy to see the setting's being developed, and that in a way I can deal with. I'd like to see a more complete writeup soemtime, maybe with some higher security cities, though. I'd not want to miss my boss stages, after all.


It also makes more sense. I'm still annoyed at the writeup of - i think it was Russian - soldiers in one 3E module that gave them Ares Alpha and Ares Predator guns. Yeah, way to transport the feeling they're Russian.

Also, what are the colors of the Soul Drinkers? Just curious about their name really.

On my phone, so don't have my book handy. I want to say black and gray, or black and silver. They're an old-school original-Tir book gang, I just fleshed 'em out a little and gave 'em stats.

Depends on what you call "Taylor's era"... As far as I know, Line Developper Michael Mulvihill was the first to consider changes in Tir Tairngire (through the infamous unpublished novel). Kenneth "Tzeentch" Peters introduced the Rinelle ke'tesrae in Shadows of North America, published in 2001, under Line Developer Rob Boyle. At that time, Peter Taylor was just a Dumpshock user involved in the EuroSB fan project. In the resulting Shadows of Europe, the Tir na Nog chapter was entirely written by Elissa Carey, Steve Kenson and Rob Boyle (outside of some mentions of the NEEC, I don't remember any idea for Tir na nOg worked out by the EuroSB team in the first place, but maybe by memory is failing me here). Now, when System Failure was designed (with some content foreshadowed in SOTA:2064), with the fall of the Princes and the rise of Horizon, Peter Taylor was starting to play an important role in Shadowrun.

I can't say if Peter Taylor disapproved the elves' writeup, but blaming only a "Taylor's era" for what happened in Tir Tairngire is simply not true. Sure, you may resent him for not giving it an halt when he was in charge. It started well before he even became a freelancer, with quite a few other people involved before him.

Okay, so the colours are not purple and gold. Thanks.


Okay, then it was just my impression, but yes, Rob Boyle was at the helm for a long time before him. Well, I just resented the entire "let's burn the Tirs down because accessibility and I hate elves from D&D" vibe that was going for a while.

The problem I, personally, had with what happened to the Tir during those times was that we were only hearing about it after the fact. We found out that terrorists had been rampaging around the Tir for years (and just no one knew about it, because secret elves). Then we found out that there was a coup -- literally, in a single throwaway line of text "plot hook" of just a few sentences -- and that the High Prince was on the run and being chased by Ghosts. Bwuh? Really?

It was always a matter of getting information years after things happened, instead of getting (a) rumors leading up to it, but more importantly (b) ever having the chance to put PCs in the middle of the action, where PCs belong.

One of my big hopes with LoP was to finish the "catch up" game, get things all set, and now have things ready to move forward. There are things happening in it, not just things that have happened; and with Elven Blood (and some future products and plot hooks and stuff) there's the chance to put players in the middle of it, all tangled up in the whole mess. To me, that's why the setting sourcebooks should exist in the first place. I wouldn't be a historian if I didn't love history in real life, but I know that your average gamer would rather make history in a setting than read about it years after the fact, in-universe.

Amen to that.

(That said, I'm guilty of writing something that happened then detailing it, rather than leading up to it, but, in my defense, it was to set up all kinds of things *currently* happening and *going* to happen, so, you get to mess with those instead of the other thing. But, in general, I totally get what you're saying.)

Well, obviously, lots of the time we're going to write about things that have happened after the fact. I mean, we're not...I dunno, we're not writing speculative sourcebooks or something. Of course we're going to use adventures and plot hooks to try and "do" things, but mostly be writing about things after they're done.

But my issue with what happened to the Tir? It was writing about stuff that had happened years after the fact. Or, failing that, it was not writing about things, and giving us nothing to work with (while still discussing stuff that happened years earlier). It was just a really weird little corner of the game that was kind of swept under the rug for several years, for various reasons. After wedging my foot in the door and getting their attention with a few other projects, I'm just very glad I got the opportunity to try and shine a light on the Tir again and get folks into the elf playground a little bit.

Just had to check on this -- officially their old colors were "anything that makes them look like a zombie," which I kind of updated in The Hung Over adventure from Elven Blood. I gave one of their bosses (who styles himself as a classic cinema vampire, to show that he's above the zombie rabble that makes up the rest of the gang, and so they'd have someone speaking legibly to talk to, instead of someone shambling and groaning about brains) lots of black that he likes to wear.

Just out of curiosity, though, why checking on the purple and gold in particular? I feel like I'm missing a joke or something, now.

Only thing I can think of when someone says "Purple and Gold" is Prince... Or the man formerly known as popular.

Nice. Okay, that'll make a fun thrill gang. Especially with two PCs deeply traumatised by vamps.


The Soul Drinkers are a notoriously sueishly written chapter of Warhammer 40.000 Space Marines. But I guess they'd have to be a SURGE gang because they muate all the time ... I was just wondering because of the name, but then again it's hardly extra special. They're originally from Findley's book, right?

I'll steal their motto for the gang still - "Cold and fast! Soul Drinkers!"

Ah, jeeze. Yes. I didn't even make the cross-genre connection, when I was sitting here thinking about it this afternoon. Those guys. I have their omnibus lying around somewhere.

Kill it with fire, quickly

*shrugs*
i liked the soul drinkers