All right, so I've been lurking around a bit, checking out people's reactions to the titular book, and I'm left wondering what the point is to buy it. I was extremely excited about the book initially, considering that it might lead to a canon reboot (even if that's unlikely). My group came into SR in 4e. I've not had the time to dig up old, out-of-print books to find out the finite details of the canon, so by and large, I've just been messing around with what's in front of me, and that's not exactly much. But now I look at the responses of people who've read SR2050, and I'm not seeing anything but nostalgia bon---erm, people who are over-excited about a setting from their memories. I mean no disrespect to those who have been around long before my time, but there's something of a continuity lockout that prevents me from using this setting for all its worth (this is why I like to make homebrew settings, since I know the canon therein). So, is it worth buying for me when it comes out in hardback, or should I slink back to a homebrew setting I have that has similarities in concept to SR?
I love the rules and what little I know about the setting has some serious retrocool aspects, but I'm left with a roadblock because when I look at an established setting and think about running it without knowing what's what, I feel like I'm torching a painting that someone's spent the last twenty-and-change years (in this case) creating. Please, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. As always, I thank you for your time.

It's probably best if you have a memory of the good ol' days or some adventures from 1st, 2nd or 3rd edition lying around. But there are great ones available as reprints, so if you want to explore the back story, SR2050 is worth it for you, in my opinion.
If you don't and like how 4e works and don't have a nostalgia bo ... err, are not excited and mostly use homebrew settings, it's probably not worth the expense, except for having a nice book.
As I understood it, there won't be a reboot of the setting, so it's by no means a must have and CGL was always up front about it that SR2050 mostly caters to the folks who have been around since this time

Hope to have helped you a bit

If you read the posting on here in the sticky for Clutch of Dragons, you'll see me rant a bit on the second page of comments with my opinion on this book. To sum up, I think it was written more for players like you who see the vast history of the game and want to use the familiar SR4 ruleset to play int he older setting/timeperiods than it is for players like me who are complete canon whores (I've been playing since 1991 and have about half of all the published books from 1st through 3rd edition with a goal of getting them all and I read the sourcebooks for fun even when I'm not running a game). It's meant for people like you who listen to people like me talk about the insect spirits and Harlequin and Dunkelzahn's Will and the corporate war and the Renraku Arcology shutdown and all that and want to play a game set during those events too. If you read Sixth World Almanac and thought "Wow, that sounds like a cool idea for a campaign" when reading some of the entries, pick the book up and give them a shot.

If you like the SR4 world and the 2050s era doesn't do anything for you, I'd suggest you pass. There's nothing new in here that you'd be interested in. Some of the gear and a couple of rules were changed up a bit, but nothing you'd want for your games. If you are a big fan of the canon world, I'd also suggest passing on it solely because of the many, many continuity errors with previous materials and a distinct lack of an idea of exactly when the book is set. My guess is that whoever solicited the freelance writers for the book wasn't clear with what year it was set in, so you have a big discontinuity with previous editions over who knows what (Tir Tairngire internal politics are discussed openly and people have already made the Gallivan/Knight connection but Euphoria's still around making simsense and black IC is borderline myth. Meanwhile, insect spirits are just an urban myth except when they're not and get a section detailing them with comments. My guess is that the book is simultaneously set in 2048, 2051, and 2056. It will drive you nuts if you're even a little like me.

So basically, my suggestion would be to go read the Sixth World Almanac or some of the old novels/sourcebooks like 2XS, Aztlan, Bug City, Renraku Arcology Shutdown, etc. and see if you'd like to take advantage of those events in a campaign. If so, get Shadowrun 2050. If that idea doesn't appeal to you, don't bother.

If you hate Skript Kiddies and Wireless Matrix, OTOH, then The Matrix Chapter in SR2050 is for you!

Honestly, if you prefer working with your own homebrews, then you probably don't need the book. That being said, if you want a slight taste of running 20 years ago, its a fantastic book.

My only complaint, beyond the missing costs for upgrading decks and some of the memory/program issues, is that it doesn't really address easy conversions of old material. As a standalone book, I'd have really liked some quick guidelines for altering old module stats and matrix networks. It isn't that tough, IMHO, with only converting the old combat pools into something more like Edge seeming to be too difficult.

Ehhhh...the Matrix chapter also looks like it suffered from a lack of development time. The rules feel...clunky. And that's coming from someone who understands SR3's Decking rules. But, dear lord, they tried. They really, really tried.

If you've played previous editions of Shadowrun, you'll know that the decking rules are right next to the rigging rules as "Stuff No One Ever Bothers to Learn and Just Has an NPC Do It". They're not exactly user friendly, even in 3rd Edition. There was an epic thread hosted by Synner back in the day just before 4th Ed came out where the rules for decking were dissected and discussed over the course of a year or two, complete with a sample run. Without that, I wouldn't understand the rules for decking whatsoever and again, I grew up with this game. And if you think SR3's decking rules were bad, you really don't want to see the pre-Virtual Realities 2.0 rules. It's like a Lovecraftian tome where you lose sanity just by trying to read it.

I'm not a big fan of the 4th Edition of Shadowrun, but one thing they did get right (at least after the errata) were the rules. Once you understand the rules for one thing, they transfer pretty well into every other system. So if you know combat, you also pretty much know hacking, magic, rigging, etc. as well (unlike previous editions where you were basically playing three or four different games all at once depending on what PCs you had). The hacking rules are probably the high point of 4A to me because it didn't require a massive 30 page long Dumpshock thread to understand them.

The Shadowrun 2050 Matrix rules are an attempt to take those nice, streamlined, "we started completely from scratch and rewrote everything from the ground up" hacking rules and then tries to apply them to the ancient and abstruse rules for decking. And the two concepts do not play well together. What resulted is a batch of rules that are both hard to understand and that have little intricacy. The broad strokes that make the 4A hacking rules so elegant are broken down so much that any advantage to those rules are lost, while at the same time so much crap is dragged in from the SR1 and SR3 rules that they screw things up.

The decking rules in SR3 took up 32 pages in the core rulebook, an entire separate sourcebook (Matrix), and somewhere around a third of another (Target: Matrix). The hacking rules in 4A take up 35 pages of the core rulebook and a second entire sourcebook. The Shadowrun 2050 Matrix rules are 15 pages. So not only did they have to get those two clusterfrags of rules systems to work together, they had to do it in less than half the space in the core rulebooks for their respective editions (rules that themselves are so basic that you almost can't really run the game without the 100-200 page sourcebooks that accompany each edition).

So as much as I hate the rest of the book, I at least give them credit for trying with the Matrix chapter. It still doesn't work, but you can see the effort there.

Oh, and whoever wrote p. 35 and p. 38? I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills -- skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you...

Damned straight I really, really tried! Forcing the two systems to work together required the precision of a scalpel and the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

10-pound sledge, in case you want it to be more precise.

I freely and fully admit my mistakes made in the chapter, however.

Cheer up, you still have Safehouses!

But really, I think a lot of folks are too critical of your treatment of the decking rules. Yeah, the memory thing is a little wonky and yeah those charts or whatnot got left out by mistake, but as far as I'm concerned, you really did the best you could to make things the old 'Trix while using 4e rules. I for one think it turned out great, or rather, will once the Errata comes out.

In my opinion, the decking rules would've been a lot better rules-wise if you just reskinned the 4A hacking rules. Instead, you tried to cram a topic that should've been given at least 40 pages into 15 pages on a deadline that must've been short as hell considering no one looked over the fluff half of the book for the massive, massive continuity errors (no one knows Buttercup's a free spirit (publicly announced in early 2050), but everyone knows Loftwyr's on the Council of Princes (only discovered by the shadow community with the Tir Tairngire sourcebook published on Shadowland in 2054)? Any one of those fifteen pages show more imagination and energy and honest-to-god effort than the other 181 pages put together (well, except the Magic section because those rules actually work while staying true to the form, but they went the lazy reskinning route I talked about before).

Even though the end result is a tremendous clusterfrag, I appreciate that you actually tried.

Dammit! Now I have to buy the book to see what's on pages 35 and 38!!!!

Wink-wink-nudge-nudge crap. p35 is a bunch of shadowtalkers talking about how "no program is going to come to life and murder a bunch of people" and the "wireless matrix is only 15-20 years away". Only they go on for the entire damn page. Well, half page including art. It's the same damn joke that isn't funny and they wasted an entire page on it. p38 does the exact same thing only spending a quarter of a page with shadowtalkers saying that a dragon would never be elected to a public office and someone saying "Dunkelzahn for Mayor of Denver!" Oh, and that's also the page where they say Lofwyr is on the Council of Princes as if it's public knowledge even though that information wasn't presented until 2054 in the Tir Tairngire sourcebook and then only to the Shadowland community (meanwhile, no one knows Buttercup is a free spirit even though she came out publicly to the world at large in early 2050).

Those two pages sum up exactly why Shadowrun 2050 was a horrible idea in my opinion.

On the other hand, it's somewhat truer to the spirit of the 1st and 2nd editions in that regard: they could afford wasting pages on similar jokes, useless trivia and online arguments back then.

The change I think came with 3rd edition. Authors started fighting an epic war against the wordcount, trying to cram the maximum amount of information in every sentence, and still loosing entire chunk of texts in the battle. Now a book like Conspiracy Theories can barely afford to use the conditional tense...

I don't think that was nearly as much of a problem until FanPro. There was also a shift in writing styles around the mid 90s too, where a lot more information was put into the "article" with less coming from the shadowtalk. You pick up some of the 1st Ed books and they'd have two or sometimes three pages of conversations about the topics that were very enlightening. Fast forward a couple of editions and you get none of that now. Best you get are those "Here's where you can tell your story" which is followed by someone calling bulldrek (with or without arguments), someone confirming the original, and then a change of topic.

And the joke bits in 1st edition? They actually worked. The shadowtalkers were either one-offs that rarely showed up again or they spoke in-character. This book has Matador (a mercenary who works mostly in outside North America and Europe) commenting on corporate politics and great dragons. And the chatter isn't building the world or advancing a plot, it's just making a gag. It's like setting a TV show in the 70s then doing nothing but making jokes about how disco will last forever, Nixon is uncorruptable, and cassette tapes are only a fad that will be passed on for 8-tracks. It's jarring, unfunny, and annoying. If I had a physical copy of the book rather than the PDF, I couldn't describe what I would do to those two pages because it would violate the ToS of the forums and probably several local and state laws.

Good thing you don't need to buy or use it.
BTW: Other people enjoy the tongue in cheek tone. If it isn't for you, that's okay for an opinion, but it doesn't make it fact.

Sorry if it wasn't clear that it was my opinion. I tried to make my prejudices transparent. CGL's got to be doing something right if they're still selling books.

Besides, for some reason, I keep buying CGL's 4e stuff even though I run a 3rd Ed game and all that happens is I get angry with the material. I blame them for tempting me. "Here's a nice retro version of 4A's rules. Oh, here's a sourcebook on dragons. Wait, wait, how about one on Tir Tairngire?" I just know the next release announcement is going to be a Threats-style book and a Harlequin adventure because that's about the only thing left I know I wouldn't have the willpower to resist buying just to take a look.

No biggie, I just got kinda annoyed with a lot of absolutes in your postings. I get why you don't like it, believe me. I can see your point. I'm just diametrically opposed. I play for about as long as you do, judging from your GC, but for me this is a fond reminder, not a memory rape
I smirk, because I played most of these adventures but don't think of them all the time. When I read such comments (even if they may be off a bit sometimes), I smile because it dregs that back up.
So yeah, I'm a nostalgic at heart. And I don't take things very seriously

Though the first real "dry" book ought to be Fanpro's Shadows of North America in 2001, the change was already underway in the late FASA period. New Seattle and Corporate Download already were well into that territory in 1999. CDL "duet chapter" with the Chromed Accountant and Wobbly possibly was the last departure from the then-on standard format. Threats and Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzahn's Secrets in 1996 were I think the last of their kind, a sort mythical era of free-form, "write-what-you-want," sourcebooks. Those who came after (Underworld SB, Target: UCAS, Cyberpirates, Target: Smuggler Havens...) were already setting the trend for the following edition.

Of course, being a "Fan[Pro] Boy" myself, though for a short time and with limited success, my point of view may be biased. But I don't think the move from FASA to FanPro resulted in an actual shift in style and format. If there was a change, it came a little bit later, after 2004, when ultra-orthodox canon whore like me or Ancient History started having their say in the books.

I don't know, Dragons of the Sixth World was always the "last good book" to me. It had a lot of great info, some good humor, a few off-topic discussions, and dove into the metaplot without splashing around too much.

Sixth World Almanac was the closest I've found in 4e books that had that sort of feel to it. I think the biggest detriment to Shadowrun "fiction" writing in gamebooks was the massive delay during the "financial troubles" and losing several freelancers during that time for various reasons. Because of that, the market's just flooded with Shadowrun books. There's one or two new Missions per month, one sourcebook, usually one non-Missions adventure, and one or two "mini-sourcebooks". I don't know what CGL's production schedule looks like, but it's got to be insanely tight to put out product of the "quality" we're getting. Lots of errors (both in terms of canonical history and just grammatical errors and typos), bad layout and design, rules that haven't been properly playtested, etc.

They really, really need to slow the hell down. Give the people involved more time to proofread, edit, research, playtest, just flat out develop their ideas. I'm sick of reading what looks like rough drafts and half thought out ideas slapped together and shoved on Drive Thru. I've seen fan-produced products with better production quality than some of the Shadowrun releases recently in terms of design. Quality over quantity!

Yeesh, yet another rant...I guess I've got a lot of them in me these days. Again, insert "IMO" where necessary.

I think the problem here is what the company is competing with. There seems to be a new Pathfinder, D&D, and other major publisher book every day, and it would appear the CGL may have been caught up in that. While I quite like the mini expansions because it's a small amount of additional material at a fairly low price, it is starting to feel like shovel-ware. How many of these have come out in the last 6 months. While they started as additional material for expansions and small ideas that couldn't fill their own book, now they seem to be random ideas and half-cocked schemes that are getting constantly released.

As for the rest of the books, I hold my original stance. I'm only buying essential expansions and really good background material. I tend not to look at the adventures or basic background books, since I'm not going to end up using them anyways. I too think that CGL should turn it down a bit, mostly from the standpoint that there is too much material that players and GM's might feel they need to buy. I can only budget a new gaming book (at best) a few times a year. If I wasn't playing Shadowrun already, it would really turn me off to see som many products I can't hope to own. I haven't noticed the quality issue, but like I said, I don't tend to buy a lot of the newer material.

Here's the opinion of someone who didn't get to start buying the 3rd edition stuff until only recently...

I really love the way 3e stuff was written, presented, and meant to be used. Of course, this is with the exception of the pure crunch books like Man and Machine and Matrix, by the way, though those books are informationally useful.

Dragons of the Sixth World and SOTA: 64 used to be my go-to books for examples of awesome fluff and crunch in the same book, but as I've expanded, I've really noticed that 3e seemed to have the right way of things. Up there among my favorite books now are Shadows of North America, Europe and Loose Alliances. The only books from CGL I've really got the same vibe from were the early 4e corebooks and Emergence - oh, and the Chicago chapter of Feral Cities.

Here's what I like about these books. All of them are written by people that were just snagged by Cap to write a quick blurb on something they'd seen or done. People commented on it, and little snippy sidewars would come out (Hestaby and Laughing Man sniping jokes at each other at Dragonslayer's expense). They felt like real documents that people had witnessed.

It also doesn't hurt that 3e really tried to expand the scope of Shadowrun outside of North America and regular Jane and John shadowrunners. There were discussions on the Vatican, mercenaries, pirates, all sorts of things. Loose Alliances, which is fresh in my mind because I just read the book, does a great job of showcasing a whole range of different interests, groups, cultures, and backgrounds. Nowadays, it really seems like the focus has returned to North America, mostly on Seattle and the environs there. And I really (sorry) don't care about Seattle (give me a full on write-up / update of Boston or something! Hell, I'll write it for you!).

But the biggest thing for me is that you can take these chapters, give them to a player, and let them read it - and then there's the GM stuff in the back of the chapter really laying out everything. Not answering everything, but giving you rules, stats, and guidelines for how to use it. That's really helpful.

I haven't bought a whole bunch of current 4e stuff (like I've said previously on here, we've bought Clutch and Elven Blood, and I really enjoy those) but it seemed like there was a real downswing for awhile there on giving good, solid crunchy info instead of fluff. Elven Blood especially (I'm not doing this just for Critias' enjoyment ) did a great job incorporating lots of crunch to steal and modify, so I'm hopeful for the future.

But can we please go back to expanding the Shadowrun scope?