If a car is going slower than I can walk, then I can tell it's not a very good car. If I can play better games without a sourcebook than by using it, then I can say it's not a very good sourcebook. This can mean that I'm either an extremely fast runner or talented gamemaster, or that this car/sourcebook is just bad.

Obviously, it would be incredibly difficult to have several authors writing over a hundred pages of fluff that would be entirely useless. Even the much reviled War!, in spite of all its flaws, had me considering sending my players back to war-torn Colombia as a follow-up to Ghost Cartels (with some notable rewriting though). But as far as the process of reviewing a product goes, it worth saying when one chapter contribution to the overall interest of the book is small or null. Not to mention cases where simply taking into account events from a book as background would actually derail your game for no added value (like, say, if you were running a campaign based out the Genoa-Milano-Turin area).

Now, just a little extra step required and we'll be back at "If you don't like it, don't buy it."

Can you give ... let's say, five examples?


But never talk bad about it! Other people might not buy it otherwise, and that'd be very unfair.

With out trying to be rude, there's another option. That being, if someone can't find story hooks or ideas in the chapter, maybe they're not so much better than the book or the writers as a Gm.... maybe they're not as good as they think?

Again. I'm not going to sling an insult, but yes, it's easy to plot runs around that chapter. If someone can't think of anything what so ever, to the point of thinking the chapter useless or almost useless.... that possibility exists, that the fault isn't in the book, or the writers, but perhaps in the GM who can't think anything up from what's given.

Not every chapter has tons and tons of stuff you can do with it. I pointed out a few in my review. I just don't see the dragon one as such a thing.

I guess people's mileage will vary.

Ok then, leave it with that and don't continue this discussion. It's getting repetitive and is bordering on baiting.

What program(s) do you use to read PDF's on the IPAD?

Goodreader. I've got a bit over 600 RPG's on PDF on both my Ipads. Works great. Out of all of those... maybe 4 or 5 didn't work at all. Those being older stuff.

Only costs $5 as an app. it was the first app I bought on my Ipad 1 on release day. Used it pretty much every day after. I've got it on my NewIpad as well. It works on both. You can even upload wirelessly to your Ipad via goodreader. Every time I buy a PDF now, I download to my desktop, then pop open good reader, connect and toss it onto my Ipad. Takes a few seconds.

Edit

PDFs can be imported into iBooks (via iTunes on your computer) or there's the Adobe Reader app floating around on iTunes.

Heh! As I haven't read it yet, I am scrolling past and with, for me, superhuman restraint, nor looking at the spoilers. Almost seems like a tennis match: watching the "spoilers" go back and forth.

I have been wondering this too, lately. Is there a place to find a CGL bibliography of the SR 4th edition books that are in print? I have gone through the "JackPoint" sections at the beginning of the book that I have to see what is "linked". I have googled all of those listed and can't find some. Can anyone point me in the right direction, please and thanks?

I recently saw (less than a week ago) that the "Jackpoint" section at the beginning of most books has a date on it of when the person has logged in to JackPoint. Is this a way of telling/showing the order of when the books were printed?

Well, let's hope so.

Nope, some books have been dated forward or backward. But it's useful for telling when the book's content happens in-game.

This. That's our primary use for that date, though I desperately miss date stamps on shadowtalk....

Thanks for the help, all. I really appreciate it. I hope to buy my copy of Storm Front on Thursday so I can finally make good sense of what I've read here.

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=38650

I miss that breaking the date-stamp was a sign of being an uber-Decker!

actually, it was a sign of sloppy editing and later retconned into that . .

Seriously?

as far as i know/remember, yes.
it was an oversight first by the author who forgot and then by the editor who similarly overlooked that bit.

*grumbles something unintelligible and kicks a stone*

Stahlseele, I think I've lost track of the conversation. What the heck are you talking about?

The Shadowtalker without the Time/Date-Stamp in the older Books.
i am notoriously bad with names(occupational hazard) but i remember some freelancer or something like that admitting that it started out as an error and was kept in and explained away as worlds best decker who manages to outdeck fastjack by doing that . .

The Smiling Bandit, in ... Shadotech I think.

If you're talking about the Anonymous poster, yeah, I think that's true.

Ray and I were talking about the time/date stamps from 1st and 2nd edition, where only the really cool ones like The Smiling Bandit and The Big D had non-standard DTS. That seems to be where my confusion is coming into play.

I think you're mixing up two things. The original "removing timestamp is a decker thing" was in Shadowtech, where The Smiling Bandit posts were signed "The Smiling Bandit <Strikes again!/Ha-Ha-Ha>". It was addressed in the book itself, at the end, when KAM asked him how he did. Timestamp were removed from Shadowland only several years later in Dunkelzahn's Secrets: Portfolio of dragon.

The editing-issue-turned-plot rather is the nameless poster that first showed up in Corporate Guide, page 70.

iii MIGHT have gotten the anonymous poster and the time/date stamp mixed up a bit, i'll admit . .
operating on less than 3 hours of sleep in 48 hours is not an optimal setting i am afraid <.<

Ah, I see. The nameless poster is something other than the missing time/date stamp in earlier editions (either Fastjack or early Smiling Bandit had that).

You obviously need a Sleep Regulator

-----

Finally got around to read the frist ~20 pages. So far nothing really outstanding (positively or negatively), EXCEPT for the excessive and obnoxious FMC fanwanking.

At the very least, a nap. But yeah, a sleep regulator wouldn't hurt.

Or a lot of coffee, chocolate and cigarettes (and bigger guns).

Ah, back when deckers were deckers and not kids chasing otaku...though I guess NetCat wasn't that young

Ooo, I just had a thought concerning Puck concerning his "farewell" to Fastjack, their deal, and his actions in Denver. Puck stated that he wanted a free and open matrix. Fastjack isn't all too upset with him about that just his way of going about it. So what if Fastjack and Puck's deal was to try to bring about just that? Granted it's hard to do, but it seems to be a driving factor for Puck as a character.

more important:

Most novels I read, the characters were heroes and ended saving the world.


It's not really dark IMO.

Then you didn't read the same novels I did (or just the trilogies). A good, dark one is Streets of Blood.

I've read around 20 I think. It was the general feeling I had, but not all were translated back in the days. Btw, it's not like it was very very fresh in my mind.

So, apparently, Celedyr has been experimenting on AIs and technomancers in his secret facility?
But
Don't you think supporting legal recognition as sapients and granting the respective rights to someone seems like an agenda at odds with experimenting on life specimens of that someone?

It says "Housing and Imprisoning", not "Experimenting".

That could be read as "Giving aid and comfort to the friendly, and punishing the guilty" as well. And considering the history of TMs, e-ghosts, and AIs (Recent enough even in Shadowrun's "Attention-Defici... OH SHINY!" attention span!) "Experiment" would certainly be the word used if laboratories were found.

Just a possibility. I haven't been able to get through Storm Front myself due to my surgery and aftereffects, so just pointing out the wording of the quote given.

Well, the surrounding story seems to suggest they were universally glad to leave, so at the very least it was incarcerating all of them (and the bits on nano-possession suggest they were experimented upon, and seek revenge).
Apparently, to make lemonade from lemons, you have to actually know your stuff. :\

A influential "person" preaching something different than what he is doing.
Scandalous! Such things simply don't happen.

double post

Not "preaching" but "pushing on his megacorp's executive meetings, which is making him powerful enemies".

And yet, being perceived as crusader for AI rights might be worth the downsides when it hides his experiments or brings in more test subjects.
Or maybe the ghosts detained were "special" in some ways (Criminals or whatever). Maybe the KoR where there to watch what Villers is doing as a compromise between them.

There can be lots of explanations.

Thanks. Can we have the correction with less snark next time, SVP? I did put the rider in there that I can't read at the moment (literally, I cannot sit down and READ! Anything!) so I went just off of the quote given.

Knights of Rage work for Celedyr, and he was running the research facility.


Beg your pardon, that remark about lemons wasn't directed against you personally (or anyone in particular, really).

Corporate Intrigue has some more information, namely the run which is described in that side bar:
His [Celedyr's] objective is to determine whether ghosts in the machine are sentient beings that can be communicated with, although what end that and his other research may serve in the long term remains unknown.
The E-ghosts are also limited to Rating 3, so they are indeed not overly human-like and probably closer to proto-sapient AIs.

They're entirely human-like: you can even play as one.

You can play as a metasapient AI with an E-ghost quality. You cannot play as an E-ghost of the kind presented in Unwired, which are to playable metasapients what ghosts are to free spirit PCs. Now guess which of the two kinds is referenced in Corporate Intrigue

Good catch. XD