I've been looking to finally pick up a collection of SR5 Books, but I can't seem to find The SR5 Magic Book, Street Grimoire. Is it out of print? Also what is the complete list of SR 5 core books? They stopped putting the version on the books so it make it difficult when I go to my FLGS to buy books.

Finally, just a bit of a gripe, what the hell is going on with shadowrun.com and shadowruntabletop.com? They don't seem to be up to date at all.


The Eggman

For the life of me, I don’t know why anyone bothers to purchase hardcopy gaming books anymore. Just go to DriveThruRPG and pick up the books you want there. I take my entire gaming collection with me everywhere I go on my 12" Android tablet.

Not everyone has the money for a Tablet/Laptop (I sure don't - though I do use PDF's at home on my PC)...
But yes, I do like me some PDF's for ease of use, and Books for the grognard in me who likes real books. That said, I do not own Hard copies of SR5. Too Expensive.

Maybe I'm just old, but I prefer paper books for reading things like textbooks and gamebooks, I usually also get PDFs for quick reference as well. I use my Note 4 for ebooks and don't have a large version tablet, and game books do not display easily.


The Eggman

For the original poster, I too was looking for the hardcopy. Yes its out of print due to errors I guess. I ended up getting the PDF.

I also like my tabletop books at BOOKS so I can highlight and put tabs on critical rules sections. I must say the SR5 core book is kinda piss poor on layout but it works.

Also books are far more reliable than a tablet. You cant read your book while on your 4th day of camping unless its a book and we do have sessions while camping which is awesome sauce!

I do not have a tablet either....

For most PDFs, it is vastly easier to have a bunch of bookmarks in a physical copy. That's my preference. Especially for terribly edited and laid out books like the SR5 core.

You guys don't know what you're missing. PDF's are easily searchable - I can find what I want quickly, even searching multiple PDFs at once. I've purchased so many PDFs I own nearly all of D&D 1e thru 3e, at least half of the GURPS books, at least half of the World of Darkness, half of SR3, all of SR4, and much of SR5.

And I carry all of that around all the time. Give it several years, and spend over $10,000 on PDFs, and you're good to go for nearly any gaming.

They're easily searchable, but that's not too useful when the same keyword is used every two pages and you can't remember the exact wording of the phrase you're looking for. Especially when, in SR5, the rule's not in the section devoted to it in the contents, but in a fluff paragraph under a piece of gear somewhere.

Don't know what to tell you, I don't have that problem. The ability to easily search them lets me find what I want fairly quickly, far faster than turning pages in a hardcopy book, especially being able to search multiple books at once.

You should see me with a copy of, say, D&D 3.5. A book I know so well that I can flip to the right page when opening the book. Plus, books ... can always take 'em off the shelf, open 'em up, and enjoy. No need to plug 'em in, and they have the right testure. They feel heavy, they have a good push on your fingertips, and the smell?

Come on, how can you not love the smell of a good book?

Plus, any book in my library can fall off the dining room table and not shatter.

More important:
You can use them to whack unruly players with.
Or as a shield against such a whacking if you are of the unruly sort.

I'm the same way with SR2. I can flip to the weapons chart without even looking.

My FLGS have no problem getting the SR5 books for me.

The list of core books is:

Shadowrun 5th Edition
Chrome Flesh
Data Trails
Rigger 5.0
Run & Gun
Run Faster
Street Grimoire

It seems to be, at any rate you are not the first to complain that the US version of SG is hard to get. No idea why it only seems to be an issue with this particular book, though...



Yeah well, CGL is a disorganized mess.

I vastly prefer hardcopies as well (for the reasons mentioned) but in terms of "supplying a group with books" pdfs are much easier. In the end we've ended up with roughly one-hard-copy-of-each-book and then PDFs (everyone having their own copy).

That way if the book is in use, everyone still has access to the material.

That said, for Pathfinder, I'm not even sure we have one hard copy. We've all been using the PF SRD instead and find it remarkably difficult to locate anything without said website.

Yup. See also the Missions release schedule since Bull had to step away from it.



Well, PF is rapidly approaching the GURPS level of 'Screw bringing a chair, I'll just build a throne out of my sourcebooks' levels of print creep.

Because some of us like good old fashion dead tree books that we can hold in our hand, put on a shelf and look at and read. But then again I'm old school.