I just received my e-mail from Rob Boyle confirming that Shadows of Latin American and Shadows of Asia are still on schedule. I don't have a date as to when they are supposed to come out.

I think it's a good news because those two books were pormised since Shadows of Europe came out. Since i think SR as never been so complete on world detaisl before SR3 then we can all rejoice that the only regions that will lack details are Arabia/Africa.

This had already been confirmed and FanPro's Catalog (including upcoming releases) is available here.

Before wrapping up SR3, FanPro will be releasing Loose Alliances (the sourcebook formerly known as Sixthworld.org) which details many of the most important non-corporate and non-underworld players (and now that I think of it some of those too) in the Sixth World. Then comes Shadows of Asia and Shadows of Latin America in quick sucession, adding to the overall global picture and also building/wrapping/developing existing plotlines. Finally you have System Failure which will wrap SR3 with a major event.

FYI - The Middle East, and Arabia specifically will be in SoA.

yes but not Africa or North Africa (which is an important part of the Islamic world)...another complaint is tha lack of that fascinating region which are the Balkans (Serbia, Greece, etc...)......well, after all one cannot have anything...it is anyway good to have SOA and SOLA.....

there is another point I do not understand.
In SoE the Balkans and all East Europe was cut due to problems of space......how can be possible that you want to put lands so distant like Syria and Korea all in the same, big, book?
I liked SoE, there are flaws like in any book (I have some complain for Southern Italy), but, in general, it is an inspiring, glorious book. I should say much better than SoNA to my view. SoE did not have time to give you all the detail but, at least, they give you some detail.
The Authors of SoE were obliged to cut off Eastern Europe to give us decent detail of the rest of Europe....how can you pretend to have detailed pictures of a continent (Asia) which is three times Europe?
I understand that so many readers are not interested in things like "what makes Tajikistan different from Kazakistan" (as far as I can see, most people in the West thinks they are just the same because the word end similarly..). But in any case, how can you give us the same level of detail of SoE for such a big area?
I'm angry for the cutting of the Balkans (they must appear somewhere! Please, Synner, post somewhere the draft you were talking about!) but I can understand it was necessary.....so what do you want to cut from Shadows of Asia?
Asia is a complicated land, with complicated history and cultures (the most ancient urban civilizations, as far we can say), much more complicated than North America so you cannot simply resolve it with a sourcebooks all dedicated to modern corporations. What the awakening brought to Mesopotamia or India must be wonderfull and the if the awakened past will be mixed with the complicated future, anything will be just fantastic.
Please, do a good book, not just a small summery of what are the funny names of all those funny countries.

i'd like some info on Desert Wars that makes it brutal again. maybe you could just say that the Desert Wars competition is a pale mockery of the real desert wars, which occured (and are now over) elsewhere in the desert. back in the day, being a DW vet made you badass. now, it makes you a punk trid wannabe whose only qualification is that you didn't get shot in one battle.

Yeah, I was thinking tht Asia is going to be sketchy, sketchy. Everything from Moscow to Tokyo, from the Arctic Circle to the Arabian Peninsula? In one book?

Don't hold me to it but I think SoA will be even larger than SoE. I too thought it would end up being sketchy simply because of the scale of the enterprise, but I believe we pulled it off.

There will be places which are given only the briefest treatment, but all the major hotspots will get at least as much space as the Euro and American ones did.

Big scale book like Asia? More pages than SoE?
I hope anything will be fine but....What is this? Maybe a kind of haste or rush to publish as much as possible before August when, as anybody knows, the 2060s' will be finished?
I really hope SoA will be a good book.

so... 300 pages?

Maybe they're focusing on some regions like india, china, japan and some arabic states and treat the rest the way they did with greece and the baltic states in SoE, only shortly mentioning what's up there. And i mean very short.

One thing to remember about this whole deal...

SoE was originally a net project that managed to get the attention of the Blue Fairy. Many of the authors for the project were doing it for love of their home country, and not simply as a writing project. They had extensive knowledge about the area they were writing about, and there was a ton of info that got hacked out due to space.

Greece and the Balkans, OTH, were areas that were pretty sparse to begin with, I believe, because there wasn't any natives working on it. What work was done on it was doen more for completion sake, and chances are it showed. Thus, when the time came to trim the manuscript a bit and focus the writing, they got the axe because there wasn't much meat there to begin with.

With SoA, we don't have many, if any, natives working on it. Shadowrun simply doesn't have the fanbase there. Thus, there's less knowledge to work from, and it's more of a "job" for the writers than a labor of love. This isn't a slight to anyone involved, just saying... It's one thing to have 300 pages written about Lithuania before the project ever even gets green lit, another one completely to get an assignment for Outer Mongolia for 3000 words.

Plus, a lot of Asia's gonna get lumped together. There will likely be more detailed books down the road, maybe in the Target style, that will focus on specific areas, such as the Middle East, Russia, or whatever.

<shrug>

Bull

Hopefully, because 192 pages aren't nearly enough to even give in-a-nutshell type information n Asia's various countries and cultures. But what would most interest me would be a Target: China and Target: Southeast Asia. Tagret: Japan would also be a great idea, of course, because I always found Shadowrun lacked something when the main villain nation never got more than passing coverage.

And for Japan, there're even fans out there who wrote up a net book; so much for the labour of love thing.

If I told you guys I was from the Tir, would I get to help out with the next sourcebook touching on stuff going on there?

Well, I'm not from Ireland, but I'm a fan of both Tirs, a history major, and I've been on vacation to Ireland a few times. For what that's worth, I remember being fairly imperssed with the geography and whatnot from the old na nOg book; the parts of Ireland I'd actually hiked around sounded about like a magically active, idealized, version of what I remembered. The parts I hadn't been to, I cross-checked with my various and sundry travel guides, and that (at least) matched up.

Which, I mean, is better than some sourcebooks have been.

I would note that the authors of the TNO chapter (Pistons, Steve and Rob) were constrained by a lot of pre-existing canon, in much the same way as we were with the UK. Given those restrictions and expectations, I think TNO turned out particularly well.

I don't remember the TNO sourcebook very well - I borrowed it off a friend a looong time ago. I didn't like it much then.

I'll have to look at it again and get my hands on SoE before I can really pass judgement honestly.
I'll keep an open mind, promise!
(And as I said, I kept my mouth shut at the "speak now or forever hold your peace" part of SoE development...)

*sigh*

Someday, Rob will give in and let me nuke the Tir's

Bull

And while I know nothing can be done to change the shit put into canon with the first Germany book ... *sigh* ... if Tir na nOg gets a makeover, I hope Germany gets one, too. Maybe a new Bismarck emerges? I'd even be happy about a Barbarossa resurrection (Troll or not, I could care less).

Gah. Like that's gonna happen.

So when are all these books coming out? I know that they're in the Fanpro catalog, but I kind of take those listings as wishful thinking.

Since SoA and Loose Alliances are mostly fluff, I suppose they could wait 'till after SR4.

Take a look at srrpg.com - there are pages for both upcoming shadow-books. Plus a preview of System Failure.

Germany really needs to be redone. Maybe some new sort of emperor gets together all of the country under one banner. Like Bismarck. Heck, even a new dicatorship like the third reich would be "better" (you know what i mean) than the crap which is now canon when it comes to germany/ags.

@Bob: For all I understand, these books need to be out before for reasons of timeline and the building of the metaplot they need for SF.

@Grinder: Yeah. Maybe the Americans can help there, though that'd surely piss ff the German audience, but ... meh. The German team at least won't be able to salvage that setting. They seems to have a weird geeky affection to anarchism. And they want to put every setting imaginable into Germany.

I hope the SR4 Germany main book will set things straight, but meh ... I have my doupts.

FYI Loose Alliances should be hitting stores in the next couple of weeks, last I heard it was ready to ship to printers. And boy is it full of goodness and more than a few surprises.

Shadows of Asia and Shadows of Latin America have both been written and are now in editing stages (SoA more advanced the SoLA since primary writing was wrapped a few months back). Both are being prepped for a quick sequential release before System Failure hits.

The main reason these are going ahead is to complete the picture of the Sixth World under SR3 (admittedly a Shadows of Africa might've been nice but we can't have it all) and because their contents (with very few exceptions) will be equally valid in 2070 as they are in 206x. They will also provide the most complete picture of the Sixth World so far - those players who are reluctant to move on to 2070 will have most of the world to play with.

FanPro also wishes to provide some development and in some cases closure to several current plots, before SR4 kicks in, and in that regard SoA and SoLA do have a few surprises. Much like most of the books since DotSW these will also possess some tidbits that tie into System Failure, but they are by no means essential, anymore than say SOTA64 or SoE were.

I'd hazard a guess and say SR4 will probably adopt a different format for its location books, and these might be the last of the Shadows of format for a while at least.

Anarchism has a base in germany, sure, but not that strong as the nerdy authors of german canon would like. Kreuzberg/Berlin is loosing heavily when it comes to anarchism, much like the Hafenstrasse at Hamburg. The usual riots at may 1st are mostly done by wealthy kids who want to have some sort of weird "fun".

Germany as a country is just too small to fit all those settings in it. The elven country is a joke, likely the troll kingdom. I mean, how would they survive in the black forest? There's nothing, except dark forests!

A unity movement could be plausible i think. Maybe the southern states break away from the ags as they did in the 2030s. The church gets more influence and conquers in one way or antoher the rhein-ruhr-plex. And the eastern half falls under one dictator, backed by the corps. Sth. like this would make more sense than the current canon crap.

FanPro D is what's wrong.

It's like twins.

FanPro D is evil and screwed up and fucking insane.

FanPro US is sane.

Well, basically yeah. Though I like their compilation books. It's just that I don't like their authors. Or, for that matter, whoever translated SoE.

I would like to note, again, that many of the same German authors are responsible for a lot of other materal in SoE, not to mention the rather interesting developments and twists on Schwartzkopf, Nebelherr and Kaltensteinin DotSW and surprises in the upcoming Loose Alliances.

There's only so much you can do when your hands are tied by continuity and canon, and despite the opinion of many fans regarding the DidS setting a great many people would be extraordinarily pissed to see the background they've been using for years and years retoractively ditched and rewritten. Changes are coming, just give them time...

No apology needed, I share your concerns about the German setting, I just also happen to know some of the authors quite well and I know their views too.

I could believe that.

Excited as I am about the SoA sourcebook and the SoLA book, I'm kind of feeling squidgy about shelling out for ginormous sourcebooks that are going to become rapidly obsolete. Sure, the fluff will remain "accurate," but how forwards compatible will the fluff really be to an SR4 set in 2070? Even worse, what about the crunchy rules? What good will matrix stats and sensor stats for the various countries be when the 'trix crashes and there are no more riggers? [Sarcasm] Can we expect flying car prototypes from Chiba in the SoA? [/Sarcasm]

If the sourcebooks are really as far along as they are, and SR4 is really not as far along as it seems to be, how compatible will these new sourcebooks be? Synner? Adam? Anyone in the know?

Editted to enhance clarity.

I sure hope we WON'T see flying cars. Flying cars are a very stupid concept. It has been attempted what, five times now? And has never worked out?

Iirc someone said something about flying cars in another thread. But a lot of rumours had been spread around here, so i take most what i read with a grant of salt.

I actually read DidS2, but simply forgot the kaltenstein-thing, sorry. But anyway, it sucks.

I'm still hoping something big will happen to ags very soon. Imo the freelancers and authors can smoke whatever they want and how much they want (who's not enjoying from time to time?) as long as a reasonable change of the fucked up german setting is the result.

At least not in the current format, i hope. More dictatorships for ags!