An update from the official fanpro homepage on Monday 17 january 2005:

Meine amerikanischen Kollegen arbeiten im Moment mit Hochdruck an der Fertigstellung des "Loose Alliances" (dt. "Feind meines Feindes") und "Shadows of Asia" (dt. "Asien in den Schatten"). Das sind beides 'schwierige' Bücher, das LA wegen des komplexen politisch-gesellschaftlichen Hintergrundes und das SoA wegen seines gewaltigen Umfangs (alle asiatischen Staaten von Russland und dem Mittleren Osten bis hin zu Indonesien und Ozeanien werden abgedeckt ), also seid bitte nicht böse, wenn es etwas länger dauert als geplant.
Als Erscheinungstermin gebe ich dann auch vorsichtigerweise für das LA das erste Quartal 2005 und für das SoA das zweite Quartal 2005 an. Die deutschen Versionen werden wie gewohnt ca. 1 bis 2 Monate nach Erscheinen der Orignialversionen erhältlich sein, die genauen Termine gibt es hier im Newsletter, sobald sie feststehen.

The important news:

Loose Alliances presumably released in the first quarter of 2005

Shadow of Asia presumably released in the second quater of 2005

Shadow of Asia covering: Asia, Middle East, Russia, Oceania/ I believe this covers Australia, New Zealand and smaller islands in the Pacific..... A HUGE BOOK!!!!!

CAN WE PLEASE GET SOME KIND OF AN OFFICIAL US. RESPONCE TO THIS NEWS ?

Hopefully the german versions will be better translated than SOTA or SoE - both had been horrible translation and are a waste of money. I prefer the english versions.

me too. i find the german versions wholly incomprehensible.

Back in the old days, german sourcebooks had at least some extra-stuff (remember the german versions of cannon companion or man&machine?) which may or may be good but _at least_ it was something special. And the translation was flawless.

Today it seems like FanPro doesn't care if we (the players) like their work.

My very limited understanding of German is that if you don't know the jargon you can't communicate intelligently. Is this a case of having translators who are not gamers, or is the proofing just that bad?

Don't know. Seems to be both. At SOTA:2064 new people did the translation and they made really bad mistakes, like a terribly wrong translation of "track & field" or "hockey" (which means ice-hockey in the context). You don't have to know the game to translate such words in the correct manner.
Some mistakes are more in the sense of not knowing the gaming world, but they are the minority.

To respond to Blue Eyes' original post: Yes, that is the expected order of release. Loose Alliances is currently undergoing final edits and primary writing on Shadows of Asia was mostly wrapped before the end of the year. Shadows of Asia does indeed look to be pretty big since it covers the continent from the Urals to Oceania and from Yakut to Sri Lanka, with special attention going to all the major players. Like SoE, the book covers a lot of new ground and a lot of countries.

I wouldn't expect much on Australia as it's already been covered quite thoroughly in T:AL
Besides, Australia is its own continent/geographical area. It's not a part of Asia per se.

But Crazy's still around there, so why does such shit happen?

Why only the Middle East when there are also Russia/Yakut, Japan, India or Southeast Asia to name only a few other places?...

So true, I was just aiming for the one I found must interesting, but yeah here's hoping there will be a focus on all those different magic traditions in that enormous area........

Any one able to confirm or deny our hopes ????????????????????????

India as well as China could easily cover a whole sourcebook alone. Too bad this won't happen

They certainly could, but the one-nation-one-sourcebook thing doesn't work so great anymore. I know I could have written a ton more on Tibet (in fact, I have a ton more written, strewn around my hard drive). Maybe I can get some of that stuff put on the shadowrun website, or maybe I can make my own webspace for it.

Synner's wanting to put his supplemental material up on the shadowrun site as well. Maybe you guys should get together and barrage Adam with emails.

That would be cool. But i guess Adam knows anyway that we want more in-depth-material

Can you give us a brief overview about tibet, a little teaser? New Martial Arts? New Ki-powers?

it would be very, very cool if Fanpro implemented a series of web expansions for the books they put out, using excess material that was cut out for space considerations.

i'd make the web material semi-canon. it'd be basically official, but there would be no guarantee that future sb's will follow it.

Well, I think it'd be really cool, too. But I also imagine some things are cut not so much for the authors' lack of knowledge or commitment, but because it doesn't tie into the long-term canon, and even official, non-canon or semi-official publications may lend a certain imprimature to something that is inconsistent or contradicts something that will come later.

The problem is, if you extends everything from, say, Shadows of Europe, giving so much more about each cities, governments and corporations, you'd make the real book useless, and damage sales. First option is only to give stuff that is really not in the book (matrix hosts, cost of living, ...), another one would be to extend only a teaser, like covering in detail a single city for instance.

That, too. I think the type of material that has been released on the official website is in the vein of what to post; For example, the bio about Johnny Spinrad transcends SoE since he also appears in SOTA64 and has been referred to since SR1. It provides further context to these books, but doesn't make the book useless by any means. If, OTOH, they were to post pages of details about every major city in Spain, it'd make about half of the chapter useless, if not the whole chapter depending on what was in there as it related to the rest of the chapter. In detailing even cities, the information in SoE about the Church, corps, government, and shadows would be almost unnecessary (this is, of course, a worst case scenario). And that would suck, because then there'd be no more SR books.

Now I think about it, I'd prefer to see on the website materials that wasn't cut from any book. The specific example I have in mind is the UCAS Presidential Election of 2064: none of the scheduled books will come close to cover it, until SOTA:2065, which will take place one or two months after the election (not to mention the primaries).

OTOH, stuff from the website can eventually end up almost verbatim in a later SB--like the info on the Scott Commission and DIMR which wound up in Target: UCAS.

Funny, I always thought it was Us Us Us with you guys...

Nah. That'd be Gimme Gimme Gimme, usually with a large sideorder of Now.

Here's the ad that FanPro will be running in the Origins pre-registration and on-site booklet: http://www.talkinabout.com/fanpro/origins_ad.jpg