Evolve?

MORE SURGE!!!

My money's on a new edition.

Will we finally get BattleRun?

I would be happy with any large supplement/adventure/edition that ties together and makes coherent all the massive amount of content they've released during the 4E phase. I don't have the time to pore over all the books and cobble together what's actually going on the SR universe. Though I sure wish I did!

No argument here.



The answer is two-pronged;
1) Mathematically, the 3rd edition mathset worked fine. It offered superior granularity and functionality, at the cost of some minor complexity. I never had any trouble with that complexity (in fact, it was that complexity that I enjoyed - it's the difference between a game of checkers on an 8x8 board and a game on a 4x4 board). I understand not everyone likes math. 4th "streamlined" it away. I'll run 4th for my kids. But I don't enjoy playing it for myself; not for a tactical game.

2) Setting-wise, SR3 did have some issues. SR4 removed most of those issues (and a lot of other stuff too). But what they replaced it with wasn't great. In my SR3 game, I steal liberally from the SR4 core book. There's more wireless matrix, cheaper cyberware, etc. There is quality material there, and it does fix some issues with my game. But they took it too far, and I don't enjoy at least 30% of the other material (with a good chunk of the remainder either being the same, or good but not applicable to my game). I like an 80s cyberpunk setting, with hermetics being substantially different from shamans and so on, and SR4 isn't that.

This isn't a knock on SR4. I just don't like it, and that's okay. I don't like D&D either, but that doesn't mean the hundreds of thousands of D&D players are playing a worse game.

If SR4 were revised, to either be a more granular, tactical game, like SR3, or to be a rules-ultra-lite, story-driven game, or something crafted like Eclipse Phase, I might enjoy it more, and get back on board. If SR5 is SR4 with a new cover, obviously I still won't like it (although SR4 could use a new cover ...)

The only Storm Front I'm familiar with is the greatest CP2020 adventure ever produced. An adventure so good we played it thrice.
Storm Front: Shockwave
followed by
Storm Front: Firestorm
followed by
Storm Front: Aftershock - actually, forget about releasing that one. We'll talk about it for years, leave it, bring it up again with talk of a new edition 10 years after it was promised, then forget about it again and just brush over it. Grr.

Stormfront the absolute best Cyberpunk 2020 mega adventure hands down. Rache Bartmoss goes out in style destroying the world from his kitchen fridge. World wide corporate war done right. Would pay triple if we could have replaced CP 3rd Edition for the third book Aftershock any day.

Rache Bartmoss's guide to the net second favorite CP book. Worth reading just for the Rache commentary. He's like a cross between Fastjack and Harleaquin.

Timer still ticking over at Catalyst game labs but speculation petered out two days ago. Lack of interest or lack of exposure?

http://www.catalystgamelabs.com/. Timer at top of page not labeled for anything though. Even the teasers are secret.

Seeing second video tonight?

Tick-tick-tickity.

There's only so much speculating people can do with the given information (which is all of nothing, it seems)

♪ It's the end of the world as we know it ♪

Well, when you look at recent sourcebooks, you'll see the term evolve used a lot in the bug spirit context (although what's happening to them is totally not evolution in a Darwinist sense).

Then there's a bug spirit in the trailer at 0:13.

Calling it now, it's a campaign book about a breakout of bugs in NYC. Conspiracy Theories mentions the hives in that city way too often for it to happen someplace else.
Prepare for insect spirits that escaped from an Ares lab and have a delta clinic of their own to augment their hosts before incubation.

I thought Ares did their bug research in deep space.

Helios Station at the LaGrange point on the other side of the sun?
That's where Ares mages start their raids into the bug metaplane, yes.
But that's not what I'm talking about. Ares's work with the bugs always had a dark underside. They're basically to the bugs what Weyland-Yutani is to the xenomorphs. They didn't only fight the bugs, they also tried to utilize them as bioweapons.
The experiments where Ares' insect shamans fused bugs with guard animals took place on Earth, not on Apollo station. Complex 68G in the Algonkian-Manitou Council got cleared in time, but several hundred bugs from the labs in Shaanxi and India escaped during the Crash 2.0, and it seems they both want to get back at metahumanity for what they did to them and have learned a lot from their captors.

Bugs seem like a major event from a past edition. Why not create something new and fresh. Had a prolific universal brotherhood campaign back in the day. Used them as rare boogie man since then. SR could stand a fresh mind shattering threat. I always thought that was where ghost cartels was taking us before it was dropped. And the Artifacts series had potential to change the game like that before it was reinvisioned.

The Bugs were THE Major Event of SR3.

Here's a juicy one... Ignore for a minute that it's never ever going to happen as they put in big plot elements to explain why it won't in the next millenia or so.
How much would a full on scourge totally wreck SR?

For those with their heads not deep into metaplots.
Scourge: Horror invasion enveloping the planet like locust, soul-eating locust.

I'd say 2nd Ed, as Bug City is a 2nd Edition sourcebook, as well as Universal Brotherhood.
DEUS and the Arcology were more defining for 3rd, IMO.

As to the speculation: I don't think it'll be a new edition. A new campaign, maybe, or Storm Front, as hermit said.

I would have liked to see more from the Ghost Cartells plotline as well. It's nice to have a major threat that's not magical, matrix-based or corporate.

As for other new and fresh threats, Horizon seems to be a good candidate if they go through with this hivemind stuff they're rumored to work on.




Would wreck it a lot, but not as much as it wrecked the 4th world. There's just more options both to fight back and hide. Space is pretty safe from the horrors and when they're already tearing up the place, you may as well drop a thor shot on them here and there.
I think the main reason why S-K is so much into space research is that Lofwyr has realized how much of an asset a permanent, self-sustaining presence on the moon becomes during the Scourge.

Can they even use the scourge without the Earthdawn license?

There was supposed to be something on a war in NYC in an upcoming book.


They're OCP. OCP has a similar business plan to Weyland-Yutani though.


Yes. As in, totally destroy the game's premise.

No, they agreed to not pursue the ED-SR crossover further when the licenses went to seperate companies.
Which is why the premature coming of the Scourge was written out of the SR metaplot.




Ha, that fits.

Actually my thought when I stated the question...
Scourges kinda throws everything else to the wayside... for a very long time.

So.
"Time's up!"

Kind of anticlimactic.

It is now December 21. of 2012.
Technically, we should all be dead or starting to die by now.

https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/6815148544/h8C9A9353/

Yeah, I just looked out the window and there's no brimstone rain or zombie hordes yet.
So far, the apocalypse is a bit of a letdown. I just saw a car driving by, couldn't tell if the guy behind the wheel was undead.
Maybe it starts in Mexico?

Technically, the Maya were living in the UTC-6 time zone. There's no reason for them to have designed their calendar with regards to the Greenwich Meridian.

Then again apocalypses take time! We should be seeing something! heck it's not even snowing here right now.

But seriously: Was the countdown linked to the computer clock?

Oh no it is snowing here, I'm getting out the armor jack and smg just in case.

The countdown shows local time for each user, it seems. The actual countdown is linked to CGL's Seattle offices, so PST.

Let's see, that'd be 2 AM here, currently 9:30 PM, so, four and a half hours ... yeah, I'll be up that late.

Timer out on catalyst all of sudden paged locked in mobile version. Expected more lol
So timer wrong then?

The page is up again, but there's still nothing new.

The timer is set to whatever time zone the person seeing it is at, when in reality it's supposed to be Seattle Time (UTC-8, IIRC).

Evil catalyst, should sleep......but shiney on a stick soooooo tempting.

On the plus side, Mayan apocalypse seems to not have happened yet.

All thanks to jello, apocolypse averted.
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=ItjE3f3clQQ...ture%3Dyoutu.be

China reporting in - no apocalypse yet either.

Catalyst does have a card game, tactical miniatures game, board game and 5th edition planned, though. Mark of the beast? Four is considered unlucky in China...

A link would be nice?

Well, here's the page with all the planned things for the coming year(s): Year of Shadowrun page. Maybe it's not available in all timezones yet?

If the web page isn't available, they also have a pdf download: PDF of upcoming stuff

Thanks. Site works for me, but the announcement went past me. Seems JackPoint and Shadowlands aren't working yet, though.

So, 5th edition it is.

Not sure what to think yet.

Grittier & Deadlier: I don't think SR needs to be deadlier. Considering how much work it is to make a character and improve them, killing them off regularly is a huge pain. No problem with deadly systems, but in those cases, character creation and advancement should be quicker & easier.

Faster Character Creation and More Player Aids: maybe this is why. I like CharGen the way it is (although the karma version might be better). I don't want it dumbed-down. Maybe some options to speed it up for beginners would be appropriate, but I don't think they should remove options. It's what makes it possible for such widely different character types.

Streamlined Matrix: This is probably a good idea. I'm not sure if current matrix rules are too clunky, or if they are just hard to grasp and don't always make a lot of sense. If they make it into an attribute+skill roll with programs factoring in in different ways, that would be good.

Increased Gear Options: this feels unnecessary to me. I think gear already plays the perfect balance of being fun without making your character uninteresting without it. Having more gear options also means remembering more complicated rules about how it works. Most gear rules in SR4 are pretty intuitive. Limiting the amount you need to write on your character sheet or open the book is always a good idea.

Don't want to get too critical too early, but might as well start talking about it. I've got nothing better to do

Can't watch the vid at work, will have to czech it out later.