What is so great about Sprawl Survival Guide? I listened to just about everyone praise just about every part of this book, especially the reporter giving an account of life on the street. I wasted my money when I bought this book, partly because the GM was implementing the lifestyle rules and I was tired of getting an almost identical set from a fansite that hadn't been updated in a few years. No, they didn't include the edges and flaws, but that wasn't needed to figure my lifestyle cost.

Just goes to show some fan material does find its way into books somehow.

The lifestyle edges/flaws are the only thing I use this book for. The rest was pretty useless to me. Maybe it was written for kids who are still living at home, I don't know. Why do I need to try to remember some fluff, when I can make my own up on the fly?

My problem with the metaplot is it appearing in the adventures. Please keep it in the novels. Oh, but then there would need to be novels. My other problem with the adventures is the power scale. I must be the only person to think 3rd edition PCs are are lower powered than previous editions. But the adventures are so high powered they are silly. First run, you go from stuffer shack to meeting, wheeling and dealing with and having to save the head of a megacorp? Please. Renraku Arcology Shutdown: better known as how to have your players make new characters. At least then they can go through first run again and be rewarded for saving the head honcho. Survival of the Fittest: better known as how to tell your players to retire their characters.I wouldn't mind if an AI took over a corp research facility on a remote island in the middle of nowhere. But it is in the biggest (?) building in downtown Seattle. It casts a huge shadow.

How about some adventures that don't concern the metaplot or rubbing elbows with CEOs and Great Dragons?

The problem with the shadowtalk is it is used to express opinions in a way almost as dry as the regular text. There is little personality coming through. The comments may actually be too long. I liked the shadowtalk in Shadowtech; it helped explain the equipment. It gave pros and cons for the equipment. I liked the shadowtalk in the SSC. I know of no one that ever bought or used a Sandler TMP, because the shadowtalk said it would likely fall apart in your hands. Think about the power of that one short comment. No one in nearly 15 years of playing.

Actually the last three books I bought, Dot6W, SSG and SotF I have gotten little use from. I bought them because the gaming store allotted us space to play the game.

The early adventures in Brainscan are pretty managable for newb runners, as are the first couple of runs presented in Corporate Punishment. Although maybe I shouldn't mention Brainscan, since it deals with the dreaded metaplot.

The shadowtalk for the Savalette warned of some problems, too, but I don't think that kept anyone from using it. I suspect that the TMP's disuse is due to there being "better" guns. And I find it strange that you're praising the fact that a page was wasted by a gun that no one uses and not even the book likes.

That being said, I really liked the pics and shadowtalk for each gun, although it sometimes ended up a little on the silly/stupid side. Shadowtech has some really dumb entries.

On the one hand, I agree that the SSG is currently the most overrated Shadowrun book (not that it wasn't good, it just wasn't, IMO, particularly special).

On the other, I disagree. The published adventures are exactly where the metaplot should be showing up and advancing. Certainly we need some more adventures on the lower end, but those are generally taken care of by the GM. How much fun would Brainscan have been if all the players did was the first two runs and then similar low-level shadow activity during the entire thing? It can be fun to put players out of their depth as long as it leaves them itching to get back to their depth rather than wanting to learn to swim better, but the Arcology has a way of handling that.

And if an AI took over a remote facility, no one would care. Shadowrun isn't just a miscellaneous rulesystem, like pure GURPS, it also has this whole setting, this world attached to it. You aren't required to use it, but cut the developers some slack for wanting what they do to it to actually matter.

~J

But if it's just some nuclear weapons off away from Seattle somewhere, the uniqueness of the threat vanishes. It's not this looming disaster right outside your back door. Hell, a two-bit warlord who got lucky could accomplish the same thing.

If you're not going to use it, don't buy the book. Or buy it and use it like you'd use any other book, as potentially enjoyable reading material. I mean, I'm not much of a fan of Romeo and Juliet, as a play. As such, I'm not going to go buy some tickets to see it, but if I did, I'm not going to complain about how I can't do much with those tickets except watch the play.

As for adventures, I think you hit on it. I've purchased some adventure books because they contain metaplot stuff. I wouldn't purchase them if they didn't. Hell, I don't even purchase most of the ones that do. I'm a single anecdote, yes, but from what I can tell not nearly enough people buy adventures purely to run them to sustain production without the metaplot hook.

~J

Edit: and I noticed you didn't mention Brainscan, but you did mention RA:S which is, if anything, a place book and not an adventure like some people oddly insist, so I assumed you meant the companion adventure (find me a "tell it to them straight" section and I'll admit it's an adventure)

Just read through this entire thread and the one question that has been avoided ,it seems to me, is what exactly is making SR cartoonish? It doesn't seem to be any more cartoonish to me than 1st and 2nd edition. As for any new source material, it does seem a little lifeless. It doesn't seem to have the energy it once did. The books still relay the info in a more or less logical manner but the lack the flavor omph they once had. Now I don't know wether this is do to editorial changes in the line or that I've gotten older.

I see one place were people may be getting the cartoonish/munchkin feel. Right here. Especially munchkin. There are definitely more thread here on rule tweaking and munching. I like talking about the 6th world as a whole. I like, for the most part, the meta plot (not that I use it a lot but it is entertaining).

As for cartoonish. Maybe the art in some of the books but the art doesn't always reflect the sprit or tone of the books. The art in my opinion has gone down hill since 2nd ed. Sure there are some nice pices but over all quality has gone down.

Thanos

It's probably that a piece of cartoonish art is prominently displayed on the BBB cover as opposed to just tucked away throughout the books.

~J

So does that mean the money spent on writting and produceing adventures would be better spent on sourcebooks and supplementals?

How much would people miss adventure books? That is to say if th emetaplot was moved to other books. Honestly we bought the adventure books for the gear it added and contacts/archetypes. One character I have still has the van from the NAN adventure in one of the NAN sourcebooks, the one with the bug shawman (Jesse?). The metaplot has generally never played a big part in our games. ven though I own every book that has been produced for SR.

@ Kagetenshi: That and some people's problems with SURGE. Personally, I love the stuff. Nothing like a wakiyambi SURGEd otaku with an affinity for skateboarding.

I think I like using 1st and 2nd edition adventures. I usually run through them with every group I get together. I have yet to run a 3rd edition module for anyone. I don't even recall trying to familiarize myself with one. I guess because the format changed.

Well, if we are talking about the art, I've disliked the art in all 3 editions. FASA and FanPro have hired some really bad artists on occasion.

For 3rd edition, MiTS and SoNA both have some very nice, and some very bad art. The Basic Black Book has OK art, until you see that second set of color plates. Ew. I liked the Archetype color plates, though.

I liked many of the M&M illustrations.

My wife was happy to see a good picture of a female orc in the SSG.

I think having metaplot affect the adventure material is a good thing. It allows lazy GMs to have a large plot arc to take their players through without having to do much work beyond buying just about any adventure and running it. For less lazy GMs they're pretty easy to modify, or to just not involve any of the metaplot stuff.

If you don't want the runners to meet Lanier in First Run, have it be some other corp guy. It won't really change the module at all.

The Shutdown module, which I've never run, seems to be a great module if your players just want to go in someplace and shoot stuff up. Sure, they'll probably die if you run it at full power, but the GM can easily adjust things to let the characters survive as long as possible.

I certainly don't agree with everything in the metaplot, and my group has our changes to it, but I don't see anything wrong with publishing one in modules and other sourcebooks. The only person to bitch at if you don't like your game is the GM. He's the one with the power over the world, and he can make the metaplot as big or little a factor as he wants.

SSG does seem to be a bit over-rated, unless you're new to the game. I think everyone is really excited about having a book again that give new players a lot of good fluff material to get a feel for the Shadowrun world. Some of the newer players in my group still have my copy of it... It's a great book for that. Did I need the reporter story about her falling into the Shadows? No. Did some of my players who didn't play 2nd Edition benefit from it? Yes. It had a lot of good fluff text in an easy to access book, for that it was well worth my investment in it. It's a great way to show people the basics.

Back to the modules thing... If you don't want to play a game where you're running for dragons, then don't buy SotF. If you want to run a street level game, it's pretty easy to write your own adventures. The published stuff does a great job of working for a lazy GM or for giving the GM a good plot framework to weave his own material with.

And I really don't get why everyone hates YotC so much... I've always considered that one of the better books to be put out recently. Maybe people forget that SURGE isn't supposed to affect but a very very tiny percentage of people. I think it was like a few thousand in the Seattle area... I definitely see that as more freaky than cartoonish.

I suppose the close relationship to the SR game and the SR metaplot cause a lot of issues. It doesn't seem to affect any other game I've ever played. I know my group doesn't let things we don't like affect stuff, but I also don't go around complaining because there's an adventure module centered around dragons.

I just don't see why people who have a problem with just about every unique aspect of Shadowrun would bother to play it.

Somewhat off topic addendum:

The published adventure Bottled Demon got me started in Shadowrun. I had played a horrifically changed version of the game and wasn't that impressed, but I bought a copy of the main book anyway. Mostly to piss off my parents, because 2nd edition had a huge "satanic" symbol on the cover. And nearly naked lady. Anyway.

I picked up bottled demon and thought "my god, I could write this.. this is exactly what I would do in this situation, here and here and here" and it just blossomed from there.

I'm messing with the metaplot for the first time in my St. Louis campaign. I'm starting the game before the Election, so my PC's will get a chance to see Big D elected, and I don't think I'm going to run the assasination plot, so I can keep him around for background flava.

The Satanic symbol on the cover of 2nd ed, is that the para-skull, or the ATM?

And I hope that bit about keeping Dunklezahn alive works well for you. For all the bitching I do about the Metaplot, I DO like Dunklezahn as a background character that the PCs will never meet or interact with in even an indirect way. Of course, part of why I like him so much is that I'm fascinated by the idea of him running a feudal kingdom up and bossing a lot of Canadians around (Lake Louise is in Canada, no?)

Well for someone who most would consider a lurker,

I have been playing SR since it first came out. I own everything that is ever been made. Some of the art has been cartoonish, like the cover of the 3rd ed. rules, but that has not stopped me from enjoying the game. the atmosphere hasn't changed. At least not as far as I feel, but the game has grown and matured. I agree that munchkins are a product of gamers, not systems. I have been playing rpg's for 25 years, ever since my parents bought me the little red box for D&D and as of 1989 when SR came out I have not played anything else. I love this game and hope to continue playing for more years to come.


Trevor

p.s. let me slide a GM looking for players in WI call

Given that I've been on the boards since the very tail end of 2002, and this is the first I've seen of you, I'd say you most definitely qualify as a lurker by this point

~J

When all other new ideas fail, do what they do in South Park. Write a parody of your experiences.

Jacky Cablabidus first heard about the shadows in school. The kids talked about runners like they were gods. It must be cool to live a life evading every possible crevice of the information grid to be non-existent in the world, free to break the law to the highest bidder without worry of consequence from the government.

At age 17, Jacky ran away from prep school and her father's multi-million nuyen corp-funded apartment with two months of saved up spending cred, which she changed at the swipe-n-go for hard currency.

Quick to attain a pair of smartgoggles and a few Ares Predators, she felt she was ready to take on the corps. First stop, Dante's Inferno and a generous tip to one of the troll bouncers that she was told was known as Klondike, for his cold demeanor, but sweet and fuzzy side when you get to know him as a good friend.

(To make a long story short, Jacky gets laughed at by some other runners at the Inferno due to her lack of knowledge of the "real world" And tries her best ever so persistently till she gains respect in the shadow community.)

Well I know I don't post as much as some of you but I am on looking everyday.

Usually the point I have to make no one listens to . The last 3 times I posted they post went no where. Well I will try to help out more, I don't want to see my favorite game die out.

Trevor

Having played the game since 1st ed, I have to agree that the atmosphere has shifted from gritty to something else over the 3 editions, but I've always put that down to the amount of meta plots released.

For example, 1st ed really had little meta plot, 2nd ed had the bugs, horrors and the Otaku. 3rd is expanding on all these, adding the comet and so forth. The world in which the runners operate has been expanded beyond the simple steal-the-suitcase-but-don't-ask-whats-in-it frame.

On the topic of where the old guard went, does anyone know what happened to the mighty Blackjack?

I remember reading in another of these threads that he's now writing flavor for d20 games somewhere, but have no way of knowing if that's even remotely true.

Miss him, though. His website was the ultimate GM resource for those of us too lazy to come up with original thinking of our own.

I've been playing SR since the very beginning of 2nd edition (I have a Timothy Bradstreet signed hardback 2nd Ed BBB), and I noticed a definite change at the beginning of third edition too; the change in the art and the lack of shadowtalk and the munchkiny tone of the stuff in the first round of books after the 3rd Ed BBB did turn me off. I had bought almost every SR book published up to that point, but it just wasn't interesting me and the rules were getting a bit too complex for me. I left it and went to play Heavy Gear, mostly.

Last year I went to GenCon and I was at the Shadowrun talk with Rob and Adam. I looked at the new stuff that had come out since I stopped playing -- and I was surprised. I think things have definitely gotten better recently. I had tried to modify the SR setting to suit my tastes before that -- after reading SoNA, T:WL and T:AL, I actually like SR a lot better as a setting than I did before. I am not thrilled with all the metaplot stuff -- I like to run SR as more of a cyberpunk horror game than a cyberpunk fantasy game (so I really liked the Bugs, and frankly I'm sort of sad to see them disappear in recent years) but I do like the stuff that FanPro has put out. The location books are fun to read and I think they have plenty of shadowtalk again. I thought SSG was a good starter book for people who had never played the game before -- and I have some players like that, so I picked it up. But I like the setting again. Now, I still am not a big fan of the system and I graft Shadowrun onto Silhouette when I want to run it, but I think things have gotten a lot better recently.

The art has always been kind of uneven -- I despised the Baxa art that seemed to be everywhere in 2nd edition (but then, he was in a lot of other games' art too, so this isn't just a FASA problem) but there was Larry MacDougal art, which I love (I would really love to buy movie-poster size prints of some of his stuff), and other great artists that I think got the dirty, gritty part of the setting down. I don't think the stuff these days is any better or worse than some of the earlier art (some of the earlier Laubenstein art is....weird) -- what is so "cartoony" about the 3rd edition cover, anyway?

That said, there's a couple things I miss -- I liked the slice-of-life stuff like the magazine profiles and TV schedule in Shadowbeat, the ads in the Seattle and London sourcebooks, and "fluff" like that that made the game world feel more alive -- but I know that takes up space and money (especially the full-color glossies), so I understand why they aren't there anymore. But overall, I think SR is getting better -- if you don't want to run over the top adventures and the like, that's easy enough to do -- write them yourself. The for-sale adventures are probably one of the best places for the metaplot-tied stuff, especially since the novels situation is up in the air.

Maybe us old-timers were spoiled by Dowd/Findley, who put out some of the best books for any RPG I've ever seen -- and now we're getting stuff that is "merely" pretty damn good. It's hard for anyone to top stuff like Universal Brotherhood, Corporate Shadowfiles (okay, maybe YOU didn't like the Business 101 section...but I did), the Aztlan sourcebook, 2XS, Burning Bright, Fields of Fire, etc....but the people writing these days are sure trying their damnedest.

<Pee-Wee Herman>And I'm going to start a Shadowrun fansite right now!</Pee-Wee Herman>

The way the industry works now makes it harder to pull off some of Dowd and especially Findley's best tricks. The little hints over a string of books before the whole situation is explained and it hits the fan. You can't do that as well these days as people are less inclined to buy several books to get the full story as they used to (remember, those of us on here aren't the typical gamers). After FINALLY getting Threats 2, I realized that this was done slightly with the shedim and drakes, but nothing on the scale of the bugs, the horrors, the election, etc. or with the skill the otaku were presented with. And even then, it was just a one-two punch. Book 1: There are drakes out there. Book 2: Here's how you make a PC drake! Book 1: Here's how you use shedim to screw over your players. Book 2: Here's how to REALLY ruin their day with Master Shedim! Plus the novels aren't around anymore to add to the fun.

That does bring up an interesting question I've been curious about. What is Mr. Dowd up to these days?

The Abstruse One

Yeah, I know the industry has changed fundamentally and I'm somewhat disappointed by that. That isn't Fanpro's fault or any particular author's though, so really, what can you do about it? The loss of the novels is very disappointing from that end, but frankly, a lot of RPG tie-in novels are the gamer equivalent of bodice rippers, and I can do without that -- for every Burning Bright or 2XS there's 4 or 5 silly, munchkin, "look at how much more badass my character is than the last author's character" books (not just in Shadowrun, but in all RPG lines together). It's the same problem as the munchkin syndrome in sourcebooks, where every book has a better gun, better spell, better vehicle than the last one. Very few game lines manage to avoid that.

I do wish there were more plots like the Bugs storyline -- unbelievably well-written, well thought out, and scary as all hell, yet not so unbelievably pie-in-the-sky that if you want to really participate (and know you're participating) you have to be uberpowerful and go up against the "ultimate boss" (one of the problems I had with the Deus storyline). You can get the full effect from Universal Brotherhood by raiding some little chapterhouse, or from Bug City by spending a month in the CZ. I don't think anything before or since has been carried off as well with Shadowrun, and few other games manage to do anything close to it either (I think Heavy Gear managed to do it with their storyline up to the point of the Peace River Incident, but that's the only thing I can think of at the moment).

As far as Tom Dowd....last I heard he was still working for FASA Interactive/Microsoft. Anyone know anything more recent?

I don't really consider the Bugs gone. They're paid some attention to in Threats 2. I can imagine after trying the whole Universal Brotherhood angle, the bugs are just doing something more low key. This just makes them even scarier to bring in, because they could be anywhere, doing anything. Kind of like the Master Shedim stuff. Just imagine a Bugs/Shedim alliance!

It seems like lately there has been less concentration of any one particular story line, and lots of hints about each of them. This approach definitely has it's advantage in that nothing gets old after two or three sourcebooks of nothing but <blah>. Although there has been a lot of Great Dragon activity since YotC. Not that it's a bad thing in my opinion.

Sorry it took me so long to reply- I don't check back as often as I used to.

There have been a number of questions about where the cartoonish feeling toward the game comes from.

First of all- yes, the GM does set the tone of the game. But the game is increasingly marketed toward cartoonish style gamers. That makes finding players you can tolerate increasingly difficult.

It also makes finding contacts on-line increasingly incompatable.

And, of course new material that doesn't remind you of being 8 years old on saturday morning gets hard to come by.

The art is a big part of it- but it goes deeper than the art.

The cover art is critical. New players see the cover art and that is what draws them (or not) to pick up the book and flip through it to see if they are interested.

The cover art should communicate what the feel of the game is. When the cover art screams "cartoon" then you are going to draw players oriented to that style of play.

The next thing people look at is the interior art- same story (though not all of it is cartoonish- quite a lot is, and more than what was in prior editions).

After that, when people want to understand the game world- they read the introductory fictional work at the start of the book.

Read Plus ca Change in SR2- it really gives a gritty, underdog, fighting against the overbearing and evil corporations feel to the game- and it actually developes the personality of the characters.

Now read that tripe that replaced it in the SR3 book- it's just a munchkinized running gun battle with zero character development, near zero believability, and characters who are nothing special but are somehow able to break into a highly secured facility.

Moving on from the fiction, lets look at what published support materials are out there.

I have to start with Survival of the Fittest. That was really the breaking point for me. How damn rediculous do you get- Shadowrunners, above average but still (meta)human, playing in the realm of the Great Dragons?!?! Breaking into a Great Dragon's primary lair in the very first advanture?!?!?!

AND IT WASN'T EVEN CHALLENGING TO DO!!!!!!

I mean come on. When I want to be uber-powerful and get everything handed to me on a silver platter, I put in my Rainbow Six CD and type in "teamgod."

When I play Shadowrun I like to avoid doing ten rediculously impossible things before breakfast. You give some room for the fantasy setting, but it at some point you still have to be able to suspend disbelief.

That's not to say that there haven't been some good sourcematerial published. I agree that Sprawl Survival Guide is nice and useful. Threats 2 had a lot of nice plot twists that are available or ignorable- and (more importantly) usually believable given the setting.

Dragons of the Sixth World was actually useful, if you know how to apply it (as background).

But overall it seems that each new developement of the game system makes the game a little bit more munchkinized and a little bit more bizarre. The game started out with a nice blend of fantasy and cyberpunk- but that balance has been lost, in favor of trying to top the last sourcebook with something bigger, newer, stranger.

The game is no longer marketed to the same people that older editions were marketed to. Now the game is marketed toward players who don't bother with realism, or character development but just want to be able to kill stuff and feel powerful.

Now that's a legitimate style of game play. My problem is not that that style of play is out there- my problem is that the Shadowrun that I know and love is not set it that style and support of the old style is lacking and intermixed with developments which destroy the style.

True- I can ignore anything published that I don't approve of and I can set the tone of my own campaign- but then we come back to the problems of finding players, finding online contacts, and advancing the game world.

I'm not saying Shadowrun is a bad game. But it no longer the game that I enjoy playing.

Perhaps FanPro (and FASA- some of these changes came from FASA) did all this in order to market the game to a new generation of players who have different style of play. Perhaps I'm a dinosaur who doesn't have the same preferences as the younger gamers (who may be a larger market niche).

So maybe it's a wise move from a business stand-point. If they have to chose between a large market of players who prefer one style and an increasingly small market of old-time players who prefer another style- well, there is more money in the larger market.

But me, I'm moving on.

There are other games out there that are promising and which do not create the issues I'm having with Shadowrun. Instead of buying new Shadowrun products (if any were out- which is another problem, regardless of who's fault it is), I'm buying new games to try out.

I miss Tim Bradstreet's art. It defined Shadowrun. It was gritty. It was the epitome of cyberpunk. I bought several SR1 books just because of his art. I suppose he's too much in demand and too expensive for Fanpro these days.

Larry McDougal also had that gritty look.

But it isn't the art that has changed the game, it's the damned metaplots. Nowadays the game seems to be about fighting corporations, fighting horrors from other dimensions and saving the world. That's not Shadowrun, that's James Bond.

Original SR was gloomy, nasty and hopeless. You didn't fight Renraku, you worked for them. You didn't defeat the Universal Brotherhood, you simply tried to stay alive when they came for you. Sure, there were immortal elves and such from day one, but you were their pawn, not their nemesis.

These days shadowrunners are like some sort of commando international jet-set, scooting from one exotic locale to another to save the world. As someone else said, cyberpunk is local. It's fighting to a few dollars on the streets of Seattle, not saving Chicago from alien invaders.

Meh, nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

Well I see where your coming from Squire and I think that the last thing SR needs is more rules or funky cyber/bio ware. Really after the BBB and the four major complementary rule books do we really need any more rules or stats for weapons. I mean how many 9m heavy pistols do you need? Different guns same stats. Let the GM's give names so the sound exotic. Do a google search for Turkish names and slap one on a gun. There you go. New gun. New what ever.

I do love the source books. The fluff is were you get the flavor. I belive that's what really makes Shadowrun the setting. The game world. I was out of SR for a while and came back about a year ago. The only books I have besides the main 5 are DotSW, Threats 2, T:AL, T:WL. Currently reading DotSW and it's pretty good so far, hope the others are as good.

Thanos

Squire, did it occure to you that many of the freelancers responsible for the recent writings are not new to the game, oblivious to its "grand" past?
For my part, I played Shadowrun since the 1st ed. I bought all the books I could afford when I was young, and since I got a first job 6 years ago, I bought all of them.
Now, thanks to some stubborness, I wrote a bit in SoE, and my broken english will appear in a few upcoming books. I can tell you that we don't intend to make the game "cartoonish" (even if I'm still not sure to grasp the broad generalities this word means). The discussions of the freelancers and the developper are sometimes tough, and we try our best to come with something fresh and new, but not falling in the "bigger, faster, stronger" trap. The discussion on the adept stuff for Sota 64 for instance, is a hot debate, and Loose Alliance will definitively not be able to be cataloged in the "cartoonish" category...
We can't dwell on Bugs forever, nor cultivate to death the Earthdawn link (especially when that game development is out of FanPro's hands), or all the past things we all came to love.
I don't see Shedim more cartoonish than Bugs (quite the contrary actually). Playing with dragons is something that was hinted at for years, and while it was not developped in an adventure until SotF, I can assure you that many GM didn't wait for that book to do it. Are they munchkin groups for that?

IMO, the game didn't change to attract a different kind of players. I'd rather believe that the average player did change, and that includes the players of Shadowrun. You're not happy with the new trend in the roleplayers, but you can't blame Shadowrun for being responsible for that.
People change with society. Video games are in every house, japanese anime "educate" children as much as their parents now, etc. The new players are bound to be different than the older generation, and that's not due to a game in particular, though some commercially (and successfully) exploit the trend.

I've played SR on and off since the middle of second edition, approximately. I've been out of the loop for a year or two, and I'm just now picking up my early 3:ed books again.

It seems the game has changed a bit. Not necessarily for the worse, but it's not quite the same. This might be horribly wrong, since my last bought book is YotC/Threats II, but I'd like some minor changes to the adventure and campaign modules as I remember them.

I think the focus of most supplements is a bit too high-powered. Just this evening I GM'ed the first of the Brainscan adventures, and it worked ok. I would've done it another way though...

If Brainscan would've been a thinner book, with just the outline of the campaign it would've been of easier use for me. A bit more to do with numbercrunching and detailing my own legwork info and such, but a little less hassle with tweaking the adventures to suit my needs. Instead there could be another less metaplot-heavy adventure-book that would be both easier to tweak with regards to power-level and such since no really major NPC's needs to be involved, and could give more background on the everyday life of a shadowrunner. You could still introduce some hooks for further advancement of the metaplot in that little, more 'regular' adventure though.

Seems there's no middle way between a place/setting book like RA:S and a fully fledged adventure/campaign book like Brainscan. I might have missed the newer books, but are there any new stand-alone adventures that doesn't mix in the metaplot very heavily?

Squire, I understand a lot of where you're coming from -- I don't like the fighting Great Dragons and then having cocktails with Miles Lanier on my private jet sort of games either -- but then, that's why I don't usually buy the published adventures (and if I do, it's just for either background material, with things like Super Tuesday and Brainscan, or for ideas), because there's only a handful of published adventures for any game I've ever found to my liking.

I agree that we don't need anymore gee-whiz cyberware or guns or more gear that is just bigger and better versions of stuff from the other books; Cannon Companion (or Compendium or whatever it was) was the book that turned me off of Shadowrun when 3rd edition was just coming out. I still haven't bought it or Man and Machine (I have all the 1st/2nd edition books anyway).

I don't think it's fair to say the game isn't marketed toward players interested in realism; I think a lot of the stuff in SoNA was done to make the world a little more plausible, and I liked a lot of the work done in Target: Wastelands. It did a good job of giving you a background to build adventures on. Do that many people really use the published adventures? Most people I know rarely use them, so I naturally assumed most people weren't.

On the other hand, Squire, I think you might have a bit more of a rosy view of the past than there really was. I know when I was reading back through a lot of the published adventures I do have, a lot of the NPCs just seem completely insane with regard to stats -- so I don't think that's something that has only just started showing up in the new books. If you want a lower-powered game, gear down the adventures. Make it a normal adult dragon instead of a Great. That's what I would do. Make those security guards only have a smartlink instead of wired reflexes 3. It's not that hard to adjust them to fit your tastes.

otaku mike, I haven't found the Shedim to be that frightening compared to the Bugs; admittedly, I don't have Threats 2. They are frightening in the "ack, they are going to eat me" sense, but there's no oppressive feel that the apocalypse is near like you felt reading Universal Brotherhood or Bug City. It's the difference between Aliens and a Lovecraft novel.

Maybe it's just me, but only really being familiar with First and Second editions, I've never seen anything that would suggest that scaling a Great Dragon down to "just" an adult dragon would help the players out much. Either way, you're out of your depth, pretty much no matter HOW uber a character you are. I know I always catch crap on these forums for suggesting that a normal party of shadowrunners should never in their wildest dreams be able to take on a dragon of any sort, but I think that that exact crap is one of the clearest sign of how much 3rd edition has drifted. Now people have come to expect that they can kill a normal dragon.

However, I have to say that the Second edition game I was playing in the mid to late 90s ended with most of the characters being in the "international commando jet set" (I love that term by the way--so perfectly accurate a description of the problems facing Shadowrun). None of the editions have really found a way to keep long-term characters from becoming RIDICULOUSLY powerful. Even if the GM is on the ball and assigns limits to skills, that karma is still going to SOMEWHERE. After 5 or 6 years, you've got a character who is not only a world class marksman, ninja, and B&E expert, but also is the most knowledgable person in the world on about a dozen other subjects. One other gaming system I've seen that I think is BRILLIANT in this regard is In Nomine. I've never seen rules in that game for forced retirement at any point, but the character sheet in the book is limited enough that the game obviously doesn't want you advancing beyond 18 forces.

Some 1st Ed adventures examples for you guys...

Missing Blood (from UB): Bring down a hive of Bugs in Seattle in exchange for a mere 1000¥ to be split among the group.

Mercurial: Tangle with an adult Western dragon, one featured in DotSW I might add.

Harlequin: Working for and against IEs.

Dragonhunt: Working for an adult Western dragon.

Queen Euphoria: Kill a bunch of insect spirits in their own hive again.

Now some 3rd Ed adventures...

Wake of the Comet: Hired by some megacorp to sabotage a research project by competitors.

Corporate Punishment: A corp hires you to perform a datasteal, infultrate another corp, and escourt a magical item.

Blood in the Boardroom: Hired by corps to perform various runs.

Yeah, 1st Ed was all pure cyberpunk and 3rd Ed is such uber-fantasy cartoony nonsense with no real cyberpunk left in it.

The Abstruse One

Abtruse, exactly. These people seeing 'cartoony' and 'high-powered' are just not seeing the whole picture apparently. That or there's an extreme case of "The Good Old Days ™"

Also, I'd like to make a comment about Survival of the Fittest. It is easy to sneak into Hestaby's lair because she hired you to sneak into it! It's a test for her to see how the team operates and in a location that gives her extreme control to modify the situation as she sees fit.

Ah well, people will always complain. I'd just like to tell the current freelancers and developers to keep up the good work.

It's just as easy to be shot dead in SR3 as in SR2. IT's still way easier to die in SR than it is in most other RPGs.

I never said the published adventures were better in 1st and 2nd edition than in 3rd; I've never used a publsihed adventure for any edition. But there's a hell of a lot of players out there these days that think that taking down a dragon should be feasible, whereas in Shadowrun's heyday, dragons were used as a cautionary tale (remember the phrase "Never deal with a Dragon"?). I DO look at those as the "good old days," and I'm not ashamed of that. But I'm also not going to delude myself into thinking that 3rd edition has the same feel as previous editions. I'll even go so far as to say I find nothing appealing about the feel of 3rd, though my problems with the way things were going started back in 2nd edition (one of these days balloons are going to fall from my ceiling because I'll have complained about Super Tuesday and the cult of Dunklezahn on this forum for the millionth time).

People like Squire shouldn't stop playing shadowrun, though. I myself have had great success in only using materials from about the first half of Second edition or earlier. I think my dividing line might be anything before Dunklezahn started dominating everything, but I'm not entirely sure. Point is, just because you think everything new sucks doesn't mean you have to stop playing, just that you won't be spending money on anything new. The beauty of role-playing games is that you only need to buy sourcebooks once, in theory; once you have them you can keep them and use them for an infinite number of games. The only reason to move on is because YOU'VE run out of ideas. FASA/FanPro running out of good ideas isn't an excuse.

I see no reason to keep from using 3rd edition materials. The feel hasn't changed for me in the 10 years I've been playing Shadowrun.

Anyone who thinks a group of Shadowrunners of any skill level would be able to take down a Great Dragon just need to look at Denver and Tehran. And I doubt taking on an Adult Dragon would be much easier.

I don't feel that the tone of the material has changed over the years. The people writing the Shadowrun material of today played the Shadowrun that we all did 'in the good old days'. They're everyone's good old days.

If anything has changed it's just the younger kids who are playing RPG's these days. Shadowrun isn't any more cartoony than it used to be. None of my friends complain that Shadowrun is cartoony, none of the people I've played Shadowrun with have ever complained about that. Even though most of the guys I used to play Shadowrun with don't play SR much anymore, and for whatever reasons have been playing a lot of d20, they still regard Shadowrun as the superior game.

The only difference in the Shadowrun of today with that of the 1st and 2nd editions is the world "we" live in, and how that affects what we see in the game. We're not living in the 80's anymore. Japan isn't going to buy up the world these days. We're seeing real people test real cyberware. We're living in a different age, and that changes how we react to the fantasy and cyberpunk of Shadowrun.

To me, it seems some people are just glossing over all of the cyberpunk that's there and are just seeing the fantasy. The same people also don't seem to be able to see how the fantasy adds to the cyberpunk. For me, things like SURGE only reflect the stereotypes in the Shadowrun universe. It only brings back the old prejudices. It only gives people like Humanis more fuel for their agendas. And it only affects such a small portion of the population it should have the broad affects on PCs some people seem to be afraid of.

All of the evils of the older additions are still floating around. No one has gotten rid of the Bugs, the mechanations of the 'powerful' have only brought further disaster. There isn't any more 'hope' for the denizon of 2064 than that of 2054. In fact, I'm willing to bet the future looks even less bright. The world more uncertain in 2064. The events of the 2050's are far reaching, and nothing was ever resolved, those problems still exist, and new ones keep on coming.

The Sixth World is the uncertain, gritty future it's always been.