Okay, so I have a few questions...I know the game-year was 2060 when SRIII was born, but what was the game year when SRII and SRI came out?

Also, is there any website or something which lists the year of invention for specific gear?

2050 and 2053 for SR1 and SR2, respectively.

I believe there's a list somewhere on one of Gurth's sites that lists the game year for each sourcebook; referencing that would give you a pretty good idea of when most of the gear became available.

I just saw a thread with this exact subject on page 3 of the posts.

EDIT: Not page three, but anyways.

Here

You have to scroll down a bit.

D'OH!

Heh heh...I'm stupid!

Wouldn't the IC dates IN the gear books (especially with SSC and FoF, but also references from the Capt. Chaos intros, for example) suffice?

But they quit doing that in SR3 . The bastards.

Funny, I opened SOTA 2063 to page 5 and saw

Ga-wha? Really. Sweet. I haven't seen SOTA. All of the SR3 books I have lack the date/time tags. Like CC and M&M.

That's because they made (the rather disappointing) decision to kill shadowtalk in "rules" books for 3rd Edition.

CC and M&M are classified as "core" books, they don't have flavor text because they are just compilations of rules. The scenario, and new stuff books don't have the timestamp on every post anymore, but still have some indication of when they fit in. (check page 5, it's probably there)

Nevertheless, Man & Machine, Matrix and Rigger3 contains corporate information that could be interesting to date.

If unsure of a date something happened in Shadowrun and can't find a specific date in the book, find the book it's located in and check the publishing date of that book. Add 59 years and 6 months (plus or minus a few months as needed). That'll get you your date. Thus if a book is published in March of 1995, it probably happened between September 2054 and June 2055. I know that's a big gap, but you can usually pin it down further from supplimental info in the book itself.

The Abstruse One

But do check out FoF, Cybertechnology (lots of stuff from M&M, 2055-56), Shadowtech (Bioware since 2053), Rigger 2 toys since 2058 (after Big D's death), and VR 2.0 (most decker stuff since 2056), Corporate Security (CCSS, Fiber-optic magic, and FAB since 2055-56) and that's all that I can think of off the top of my head.

Don

Except...

Some of the stuff published in (for instance) M&M is already available because it was in Shadowtech. (My own SR pet peeve is that gear based books aren't included in previous later versions, but still have another seperate book, yet some items are included in SR3..).

And...

The timestamps in books are generally sequential (SSC springs to mind) - comments on page 1 are early in the year and the last page is Christmas day.

Anyway.

Yes, but, for example, in the case of SSC, the entire catalog is posted on the day listed first in the book.

All the shadowtalk being numbered sequentially is just another of the annoying things about writing old-style shadowtalk: coming up with dates that, except in few situations, mean absolutely jack shit, yet still make sense.

I didn't mind the time/date stamps and rarely noticed them. I don't see why they had to be sequential though. I mean it's just like on here. Take the three longest threads out of one month and you'll find posts all over the place on it. Someone reads it on Monday and only has something to say when they get to the end, but someone on Friday wants to say something right away. The only real advantages to the time/date stamps were it was easy to figure out when something happened, it allowed for a couple of good gags (PAoNA had the best ones I think), and it let you know who the REAL Billy Bad-Ass deckers were, because they didn't leave time/date stamps.

The Abstruse One

Well, they were probably sequential to preserve the sanity of the good folks having to write them. Having them linear and sequential (as far as dates go) made it easier to keep them organized in the long run and easier to slide into position in the books.

At least, that's what I think.

Aside from the rather funny mistake in FoF, when Matador refers to comment that he'll make in 1 year.

Don