As I'm immersing myself back into the game and picking up any missing items from my collection I got to wondering what people would consider the best for setting and background info. Since we don't usually run the later years most 4th edition stuff wouldn't be particularly useful to me.

So 1st-3rd editions, what are your top 3(ish) sourcebooks?


Since it's my thread I claim privilege to include a 4th (because I can't decide which to axe):

7107 Virtual Realities (although it's a 'rulebook' it's got a lot of flavor items and fluff that just really stood out to me).
7113 Corporate Shadowfiles (somewhat dry if you're not into business/econ, but indispensable for those that want to be).
7109 Shadowbeat (yeah, I know, it's cheesy, but somehow it really speaks to me as an immersion tool).
7125 Corporate Download (more specific information than in 7113, providing you get the whole corp vibe first).

It's not the first time I see Shadowbeat beeing quoted in this forum. I've read this book some month back and, well, it's bad... Aren't you working there on memory? Did you really read that one again?

First Music: ok, their anticipation of music was pretty accurate so it's fun to see that the authors foreseen future in an accurate manner. It's followed by rules to play a rocker... totally out of date and pretty useless.

Networks weren't treated deep enough and there's nothing about media control....

The rules for reporters are 20 pages long, have interesting ideas but filling 20 pages with that! As a GM, I can rule out the result of a reportage without using 20 pages of rules...

Urban brawl rules, cyberware authorised for basketball, are trolls good linebackers.... It could be fun, but, just 3-4 pages, not 20....


It's a useless book. I would have prefered one describing media control, independance, has the use of shadowrunners any mediatic impact on megacorps.

It's not, IMO, a good sourcebook. It's a useless one.

Opinions vary, but the vast majority, from my experience, consider ShadowBeat to be an exemplary sourcebook for Shadowrun. Yes, I would count myself amongst them. And yes, I read that particular book jut recently (less than 2 weeks ago, in fact).

That's crunch, not fluff.

That said, I would rank Lone Star above Shadowbeat.

Tir Tairngire, Shadowbeat, Fields of Fire...maybe Lone Star, SotA 2064, Shadows of North America? I get lots of mileage out of those three, but the first three were the ones that jumped right into my head (perhaps surprising no one at all, ever).

Oh I agree it's not perfect by any stretch...always wanted a 3rd edition reboot for it in fact. It just somehow really helped with immersion, and to spark things outside of corp/mafia/nan/yak/gang runs. An entire book about things that are usually just in the background, if remembered at all. That's my kind of fluff.

Yeah, LoneStar is one I need to find again. I remember liking it a lot, but so far haven't found a good enough deal on it.

Neo-Anarchists Guide to Real Life
Lone Star
Threats

My favorites are Portfolio of a Dragon, Aztlan(more for the shadowtalk than the actual book I guess) and NAN vol 1. In reverse order I guess.
My favorite shadowtalk/fluff in any book was Shadowtech.

I love System Failure, Corp Download, Dragons of the Sixth World, Aztlan, Shadows of series, and Loose Alliances, in no particular order.

Lordy. Trying to narrow to three, and putting them in order? Gah. Gah!

I mean, Shadowbeat is friggin' Shadowbeat, a book so good that we've never gotten a sequel. (As an aside: Why do you not see anything about media control? Because it wasn't really a core concept circa 1992. The Big Three networks had a core, but cable was breaking out large and there were dozens, sometimes scores of channels available at one time. Newspapers were at least in every city, often several in the big ones, fair media laws were still roughly in enforcement, giving equal time to each side of a debate and restricting partisan coverage, and the media was seen as neutral and above the fray a sthe 4th Estate. Pirate broadcasting was still cool, and, well, the media as you younger folks know it flat-out didn't exist. The idea of a corporation buying a media outlet to use as a mouthpiece was around, but only in a "Plucky underdog fends off corporate control and exposes the Truth!" way, fictional badguys, not, you know ... reality.

Aztlan gave us a peek behind the curtain, but isn't that hot if you pull out the secret Shadowtalk.

Lonestar was groundbreaking and rewrote the way we looked at law enforcement in Shadowrun.

Dunk's Will has some adventures, but the main part is pure fluff, and it's the book that launched a thousand campaigns.

Tir Tangire is huge to me, building a society from nothing but 'memories' and making it new. Kind of Mary Sue, true, but the culture is keen.

Man.

No way can I narrow it down.

Yeah same boat here, I'd go with NEO-A's guide to real life as one of the top SR books though along with NEO-A Guide to North America, and the original Seattle Source Book. The SR4 version came close to matching it, but not quite the detail at the district level.

I love the one that I stole my profile pic from... System Failure maybe? Anyway, I just read that book as a novel almost, and found it horrifyingly good. Just a shame I moved past that in the storyline, I couldn't really play Deus's hostile takeover of the Renraku Arcology.


Too much work translating all that to 2070 tech anyway, right?

I actually did a Top 10 list for someone on the Shadowrun.com forums a while back. They're also not all fluff books. But I figure why reinvent the wheel, so here's my Top 10 Shadowrun Game Books:

10. “Food Fight”. I admit the #10 spot is a bit of a cheat. Food Fight was originally published in the back of the Shadowrun 1st Edition core rulebook as an introductory adventure. It’s been converted (to my knowledge) to 3rd and 4th Editions in the books First Run and On the Run, respectively. It is to Shadowrun what Keep on the Borderlands is to D&D – the quintessential starting adventure. It put a lot of players on the dreaded Pink Mohawk path due to being nothing more than a shoot-out with a gang in the bastard offspring of a 7-11 and Walmart, but it also was the beloved first run many Shadowrun players took (including one of the players in my current 3rd Ed group, who had never played before and enjoyed the hell out of it).

9. Dragons of the Sixth World. Going in the opposite direction, this book was the last “great” Shadowrun sourcebook in my opinion. It was the last one to carry on the traditions started by Findley, Dowd, and Hume when it came to planting plot seeds and tending lovingly to them. It also explored one of the last great mysterious parts of the Shadowrun world, draconic society. There’s a lot of humor and sharp writing with lots of good information for those who aren’t into diving into the deep end of the metaplot, but there’s also a lot of juicy tidbits for those of us who remember the Fourth World. It’s also one of the few post-1st Ed sourcebooks in which comments from Harlequin were used well – cuttingly witty and hinting at something deeper, while still being sparse enough to leave an air of mystery.

8. Cybertechnology. Finally, we got a fluff-heavy book for the chromed warrior on the team. The many musings by multiple shadowtalkers about the nature of cyberware and how it affects them outside of life on the run gave a breath of fresh air to the munchkin’s favorite playground. Hatchetman talking about how cybereyes made him feel detached from reality “like watching myself through a trid” and another poster talking about not paying attention and his cyberarm being in a different position than he thought it was due to phantom limb syndrome, this book has everything you need to justify your min-maxing to that White Wolf drama queen in your game.

7. Shadowtech. I must admit, this one’s more personal than the others. This was the third Shadowrun book I ever bought and, while I enjoyed the core rulebook and the Street Samurai Catalog, it was this book that really opened up my eyes to what Shadowrun could be. The shadowtalkers are more than just ways for the author to add in a few extra tidbits of information. They have actual personalities with unique motivations, experience sets, rivalries, etc. This is the prototype for everything a Shadowrun sourcebook should be.

6. Aztlan. I’m a bit of a sucker for the “big metaplot books”, especially ones that have layers within layers. And by god, this is one of the best. First, you’ve got the typical Shadowtalk musings about what’s going on in Aztlan combined with the “cabal”‘s notes of how screwed up things are down south of the Rio Gran– err, I mean Colorado. Grrrr. Anyway, under that layer, you can try to put together the pieces that Dunkelzahn’s trying to show the others as they do. On top of that, you’ve got the tensions between the various Cabal members and trying to figure out who exactly they are (a few are obvious, one even Ancient History couldn’t figure out). On top of THAT, you have the tiny hint of otaku at the very end of the book. Just put a cherry on top of the awesome sundae, why don’t you.

5. Harlequin. This would be a bit higher on my list, but it seems like one of those super-adventures that really depends on the GM. You have to know your group and hit just the right balanced between being too subtle and hitting them with a cluehammer that the runs are related. However, each individual run seems pretty interesting, and the plot threads connecting them all together are just brilliant. Even better if you can find the Annotations floating around online that fix some of the issues with the adventure.

4. Bug City. Take somewhere that most Americans are familiar with and figuratively drop a nuke on it. Then have man-size insects crawl out of every corner to eat people. Then drop a literal nuke on it. The city feels more alive than any other sourcebook, probably due to the proximity to the writers (Trivia: The location of the subtactical nuclear weapon that Ares detonated was the location of the FASA offices in Chicago). The terror of the insect spirit attack and hopelessness of the aftermath really come through. A great read all round.

3. Renraku Arcology Shutdown. If HAL from 2001 took over the Saw franchise. The writing in this book is spectacular and there are a lot of plot hooks dangling out there for GMs to take advantage of, both inside and outside the Arcology. Out of all the “Event Books” (the new style of sourcebooks that started around the time of Portfolio of a Dragon where a series of events were published in a single book, rather than spread out in portions amongst several sourcebooks), this is probably my favorite. The characters are well developed, there’s a lot of tension in the air amongst the commenters, and the former stronghold of megacorporate safety became a truly terrifying place. If your heart doesn’t break a little bit reading the journals of the small child trapped inside, then you must’ve replaced your heart with chrome, omae.

2. Tir Tairngire. Very well-written with a lot of attention paid to detail. You can tell that Findley really put a lot of thought into exactly how a bunch of immortal elves would rule their private domain and how they’d carve it out using Shadowrun’s timeline of events. The biggest complaint about this book is that it’s nothing but a giant billboard proclaiming how impossible it is to do anything in Tir Tairngire, but I find that the numerous plot threads put forth throughout the book more than make up for the general attitude of “Nothing gets past the Paladins”.

1. Universal Brotherhood. If RAC is Saw brought to Shadowrun, this is The Thing. The adventure “Missing Blood” is okay, but the handout? OMFG some of the best horror fiction I’ve ever read in my life. Just amazingly well done and well told. This book and its companion novel, 2XS, are hands down two of my favorite pieces of fiction – in ANY genre or medium – of all time. If you can read this book in a silent room by yourself, you’ve got more balls than I do. The twists and turns in this sourcebook are what the Horizon adventures wishes they were. This is a great book – not sourcebook, just book.

Runners Up: Portfolio of a Dragon (lots of plot threads, but you need to read the mostly “meh” Dragonheart Trilogy of novels to get everything), Double Exposure (too railroady for my tastes as written, but the perfect transition between Universal Brotherhood and Bug City), Year of the Comet (a bit too dense to make the top 10, but lots of interesting developments and new rules to play with), Sprawl Survival Guide (good look into the day-in-the-life of the Sixth World), Sixth World Almanac (even with its many errors, still a great in-depth guide for catching up new players if you’re staring in a 2060s or 2070s era), and System Shutdown (my only real complaint about this book – but a deal-breaker for the top 10 – was it tried too hard to wrap up too many plot threads to clear the way for 4th Edition, which didn’t make me a happy camper).

I'm gonna go with the books that really go me into Shadowrun -

3. Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzahns Secrets. This book made me fall in love with Dunk, and is full of hooks, jokes, Dunk's in-jokes...plus the shadow talk.

2. Year of the Comet. Changelings, Ghostwalker, shedim, Ibn Eisa's death and return - everything that puts Shadowrun above the other cyberpunk games out there. One of my favorite SR books.

1. Bug City. Cap Chaos puts in simply the best: "this may be the single most important upload we here at the Nexus have ever posted to the Matrix." Take the feeling of dread from 28 Days Later, multiply it by the overwhelming odds of Aliens, and pit the whole thing on Facebook. The best piece of Shadowrun fiction ever (but the NPC information is still useless and fills needed space).