Not quite sure as to why that is though. Gear books for SR have mostly bored me, ever since the exitement over the very first street samurai catalog had past.

You are the exception from the norm then, I guess. Core rulebooks with more options for characters are the major seller of any RPG line, followed by gear books. Fluff books come third, with adventures a distant fourth.

Yeah, we do not allow Infected or Shifters at our table either. And we are far happier for it.

No offense taken; I quite understand.

So any idea if Regen was supposed to be removed from Shifters or maybe they meant to include a growth plan similar to what Infected have but for some reason it didn't make it into the end product?

Because I have a Werebison Burger stand (where we promise it's always the freshest cuts!) that this will be impacting on.

You probably are, I just want more (and better) cyberware options to work with!

One of my standard runs revolves around a one-tiger shifter pelt farm in the basement of a meat supermarket, done by a street doc keeping the tiger as an aside to boost income. Though the grow-back beef also is a nice idea I might eventually steal.

I actually like the modular growth system for Infected. Nerfs them without doing away with powerful vampires, and makes them easier to handle as PCs. Not that I'd admit them for a variety of other reasons, but it's a good idea that would have made me hate them significantly less in SR4.

Questions!

1) Will there be more PACKs once ne stuff hits the ground (Cyber book, Matrix book)?

2) Will there be "Way of the Rigger" and "Way of the Cyborg" advanced rules PDFs along the lines of Assassin's Primer?

3) What happened to Missions?

Oh I am quite aware, it is just the Shadowrun gearbooks, that mostly bore me.

It does not have to be a total homicidal maniac who revels in sacrificing cute fluffy animals and thinks Mr Darke was a liberal Hippie, seriously, how much more special snowflake does it get than a guy who only feeds on death row inmates after making sure they are rightfully there? And his friend who feeds on rapists certainly wasn't a critical comment on the dehumanization of sex offenders, but rather should also come across as a nice guy who only culls people we're not supposed to feel sorry about any more. Why not a vampire who makes people sign a consent form after a psychiatric evaluation to make sure they are capable of judging the scope of their decision?


Oh yes, the vampiric lizardmen. I doubt too many people would want to play one


Given that I had come up with a similar idea, I could hardly bring out the Napalm. The new allergies hurt of course, but vampires are supposed to take actual damage in sunlight according to our shared subconscious.

PS: But what happened to the Ghouls' Charisma, do they really just get -1 and the lower maximum?

I didn't miss anything.
It is allowed RAW. (At least in the core book, which is what I was takling about)
If you would care to point out how it is not, I will be happy to read that.

The part you quoted was my opinion on it being allowed RAW,
not a point about whether or not it should be.

Not a freakin' clue, I'm afraid. Sorry.

Well, here I made a statement about not buying this, and I get it for Christmas from one of my players.

Reading through the character creation seems to confirm it. Nowhere do I see anything stating that Shapeshifters can't have cyber or bio anymore.



Same is true for Infected. I really wonder if they playtested this...

Edit : The 'DOMESTICALLY DISTURBED' short is great.

I know the Infected stuff was heavily playtested, and a lot of changes incorporated into the final draft. That, incidentally, was one of the changes the playtesters brought up. They wanted some backwards compatibility, and Infected could have deltaware in SR4, so they wanted it here, too. I'd come out in my draft saying, "Too bad."

There were a lot of other instances of playtesters asking for changes in the final doc, so while I can't speak to anything else, I know that my section got looked over a great deal.

It's a nice, happy little story, ain't it?

Glad to hear it. I hope it doesn't become the issue in play that I feel like it will, guess we'll have to see.

So, more questions pop up as I go along.



Wasn't this the whole point of everything being wireless? You know, not needing a datajack for that kind of thing? I guess I'm not really sure about the whole point of the 30-odd page PACKS section in total. Much of it is a single item with a bit of advertising copy attached, in a format that takes up a lot of page space to reprint gear from SR5.

But I think it makes sense for something like Vampires to not be allowed to get cyber/bio since their regeneration power would kick in too quickly. Maybe the docs can cut off the vamps arm with wood or UV light to force regeneration to not work.

But, I guess its not a real problem. Delta great is expensive and moderately impractical to get. So maybe it should be allowed. Its not like it'd through game balance out the window or anything.

I would guess that it's been a while since you've been a new player of Shadowrun. The #1 issue I've had convincing people to play is that they think of it as "the shopping game". It takes a long time to make a character, especially compared to other RPGs. Anything they decide to do to streamline that process is welcome. As for the utility of having 30 odd pages of a sourcebook on it; well, they could have had 30 pages less? I don't think it took a lot of effort to put together, so it's an item that's useful to new players without really taking anything (read: developer time) away from the rest of the book.

That's my thinking at least. Next time I get to run a game, I'll be able to quickly run a new player through gear rather than flipping back and forth through the gear section to make sure they got everything. I hate the "gotcha" GM aspect that can happen, i.e. "Oh, you didn't purchase a commlink, something I neglected to explain was vital but you may have glossed over in the gear section? I guess you aren't going to make the meet!" The PACKS is both an homage to the original PACKS creator (who i'm sure did it for utility), and a good way to explain what gear is necessary- "You'll need X PACK because you have to sneak around a lot, Y PACK because your gun needs this type of ammo.." etc. etc.

YMMV.

-DrZ

Yeah, I think I can honestly say it's been a while. Couple decades, even.

I preferred it when they were doing the same sort of thing via Shadowland comments and expanded descriptions in the main book, though. The original Street Sam Catalog is in nearly the same format, but is more useful in my opinion because it gave advertising copy, runner commentary on how it would be used in-game, and a picture to give you an idea what things looked like.

I do appreciate the way they flavored the PACKS, though. Pointing out that the high end gear like the Ares Alpha is vanishingly rare for 'runners to actually carry around, and laying out some of the classic archtypal builds is a nice way to set new players' expectations.

Probably the same reason as the entire page of Karma costs in the BBB, they think players are a bit slow with math. But at least somebody seems to have noticed there is potential for improvement in the gear purchases...

As far as deltaware is concerned, I'm a bit on the fence. Regenerating bio-adepts are something I fully support, on the other hand we were previously told about the vampire who started to reject his cybereyes. A throwaway line about this having been an isolated case would have been nice, ditto for the fact that HMHVV lost its immunity to ARV drugs (I assume that is an intentional change).

Finally got a bit to sit and read the Infected rules tonight, and I've got to say, they're well done. The two perspective pieces from Red and Hanibelle are well done as well, although I really don't like the possible implication that Red's an HMHVV carrier that's older than the Awakening.

That said, my favorite line is at the start :

"The description of the Infection power in the Shadowrun, Fifth Edition states that Infected PCs become NPCs and pass to gamemaster control. These optional rules offer a way around that."

Making these rules explicitly optional takes a lot of pressure off of GMs to allow Infected characters, and I appreciate that.

Thank you kindly. Appreciate the kind words.

It does get explained later, and it's not unprecedented in the game fluff over the past 25 years. Kevin Czarnecki, my writing partner on this, has a novel coming out sometime next year that talks a lot about Red.

Happy to help out.

If you pick up the Dark Resonance Novel there is an 2 chapter excerpt from Crimson, Mr. Czarnecki's forthcoming novel on Red, at the back which touches on his circumstances so its a nice start off.

Though if he keeps having these circumstances putting him to 'sleep' for long periods the boy is going to end up in the BattleTech or Eclipse Phase setting (depending on how your pathing goes. )

Oh, sure, I'm just seeing a slow trend of more and more magic that existed before the Awakening, and it makes me wonder why the Awakening was such a big deal sometimes. Just me being picky, I guess.

If it helps, none of my characters Awakened before the Awakening. And I don't plan any exceptions.

for clarity, the official "awakening" is marked by the sighting of the first dragon. not necessarily by the return of magic, but specifically the day that the first dragon is seen (which may or may not even be the day that the dragon woke up).

so consider that while the awakening officially happened on a certain date, magic was almost definitely gradually returning for years, perhaps even centuries, before that. it's not like the world was at zero magic energy the day before, and then jumped up to the appropriate level as soon as ryumyo showed himself.

Unless you believe HMHVV popped into existence spontaneously and just in time for the Awakening, carriers are a must.


Although interestingly, Run Fasta eliminated all mentions of HMHVV passing in the germ line...any particular reason for that?

Honestly? I ran out of room and time. I have not, however, forgotten about the concept, and plan on addressing it in the future. Preferably the near future.

Nah, I generally run on the view that HMHVV is just like metatype expression. It's existed in the DNA of a particular virus, but didn't express into what it is until mana levels were high enough. That makes a full-fledged pre-Awakening vampire hit the same twitch notes that the ever-increasing cast of Immortal Elves used to for me, though.

Oh, also, Patrick, did you have a hand in the section on Codes of Honor? I really enjoy them, as they paint a picture of shadowrunners as something that lives in the setting's social structures, but is far more than the usual Murder Hobos that are the default behavior for RPG player characters.

I did not have a single solitary thing to do with those, sad to say, and I'm not sure off the top of my head who did. I could ask, if you'd like.

Or as a slightly more disturbing variant, it's an endogenous retrovirus. People had it inside their genome all the time, passed it down to their offspring, and when exposed to the right mana level...
Of course this somewhat conflicts with the statement from RC that ghoul descendants do not carry the virus...or maybe the endovirus is just how HMHVV hibernates through low-mana periods, which would again fuel some interesting theories about its origins.

And since Patrick seems to be in the mood to answer questions, could I get back to my previous question?

I'm away from my research at the moment, exhausted, and caffeine-deprived, so this might sound snarkier than it's intended to be (and I intend to give a more serious answer later, when I've rectified a couple of these other issues), but what exactly is the issue with that?

Yeah, that came out way snottier than I intended. Sorry about that.

Nor worries, what I'm wondering about is that ghouls get -1 to their current CHA, but (except for elf gouls) their maximum is reduced by 2...same with Bandersnatches

I was a secondary resource for the writer that tackled Codes of Honor (I contributed a few names and some fluffy stuff for one code in particular, it shouldn't be hard to guess which one)...but I'm never comfortable pointing fingers at folks without knowing for sure they want their specific sections attributed to them (even when it's something positive like this).

I'll let 'em know the thread is here and folks are saying stuff, and if they wanna drop by they can.

Edit :Ignore.

Of course the one page I didnt read before posting did contain the answer to my question...

Is this book out yet?
Not finding it on Amazon...

It's available as PDF so far. Print not so much, to my knowledge.

Feb 18 if you want the hardcopy: http://www.catalystgamelabs.com/2015/02/03...y-street-dates/

Also Amazon is a terrible source for Catalyst books, as we don't deal directly through them. Anything Amazon is selling is either another company partnering with them or Amazon got them the same way game stores do, from our distributor.

Also, fun fact... Despite the street date just being announced a few days ago, some copies pre-ordered from the CGL Battleshop were actually sent out early, apparently, as a couple of folks who pre-ordered showed up to some Catalyst Demo Team SR events at Ohayocon with their copy last weekend.

Me on this one. I was thrilled to get a chance to take a swing at the codes (Lead-in fiction's me as well, but edited with a better ending!) ... I was a tad worried that they were going to be a bit same-y, so I went in a few times and made some switch-arounds. The different flavors of how Shadowrunners act is a personal thing of mine.

I don't have a physical copy of the book yet, so I don't know exactly how it looks in the end tally.

On the Datajack? I confess, it was a complete kneebend to the format. I needed another 1K spent, and it was the best fit. A lil' throwback for older players who like Smartlinks plugged in or who do diagnostics on their systems.

10,000 words for that! It was budgeted in the book, so I was happy to tackle it, but... probably more than I needed. Still, more options is better than less, and otehrwise the book would have been shortened, so it didn't -replace- any content, it -was- the content. Not as useful for a seasoned player, but the whole section had two big uses:

First, for new players it's a godsend. Shopping is -the- timesink of chargen, and having a nice list in hand will speed that up immensely while making certain that the things that they -have- to have.

Second, for con games (or similar pickup and play settings) ... having stacks of gear that people can just go, "Okay, I have 20 Grand? Alright, I take this for 10, then this this this annnnnd... why not, this. Okay, ready to play!" ... that's HUGE, and why things were set up in 2K blocks, rather than handy numbers of stuff with odd costs.

After teh alpha and beta versions had been passed around, the one comment that I wished I could have adjusted more for was the "FatPACK", where several PACKs were stuck together, like the classic Street Samurai PACK. They were popular, and I'll have to slip more of those in for the future.




They -shouldn't- have an Agent mentioned, since Agents can't run on Skilljacks.

And now I wonder if the eratta on skilljacks made it into the final draft. Hrm! More on this aspect when I get a copy to review.




Can't help on #'s 2 and 3, but for the first, I hope so! They're handy to have around, and if nothing else, I'll ask the upstairs people if I can put some together after each book, to showcase some of the new content.







Oh, and for those curious about the one-thing entries, those -should- have just been in the vehicle section. I very nearly pulled them out, but after testing the PACKs concept here and there, I found that people would always forget to get a dang vehicle, and taking a bus to teh crimescene's always a bad idea. So, with that in mind, putting them in there to build the habit of "Buy a car!" was worth them being boring.

I plan on expanding them a LOT if we ever get vehicle tweak rules.

Hopefully, this helps!

Okay, thanks.


Indeed, especially for new players it's super handy to have mix and match building blocks for characters. Shopping for gear often is tedious, especially the last few thousand.

Are you sure the Muscle Augmentation "pack" would have belonged to the vehicle section?

And from my experience, the main problem with teams lacking transportation is less that player forget to buy a van...it's just that everybody assumes someone else bought the van