The discussion regarding the cover art for SOA has focused something for me.

The large-scale format of recent SR books has taken the game in a Chris Carter direction. Books like the SHADOWS OF series, DotSW, LA, and the intelligence service info in SOTA64 have pulled Shadowrun toward a global conspiracies angle. While I like to have that sort of thing at my disposal as a GM, I think that the old-school mean streets of Seattle (or New York, Berlin, New Orleans, Saigon, fill-in-your-city-here) style of play is being allowed to wither by the game designers.

There should be a Street Bible book, that would focus on hardcore high-tech and low life. It should cover gangs & gang culture, organized crime, how corporations intersect with the streets, and patrol-level law enforcement and investigations. It could also cover things like charitable and government/corp funded organizations that generally work in these neighborhoods; like the Planned Parenthood of the future, and the CDC. It would also include a section of paranimal urban predators and their ecology. It would not be particularly city or region specific.

I wouldn't mind writing it, if FanPro is listening.

I like your thoughts, now go read the submission guidelines http://www.srrpg.com/fanpro/writers_guidelines.shtml and get to work!

Not a bad idea, although I'm not a particular fan of Chris Carter.

*#1 on the CDC's Most Wanted List...and dropping!*

Let's be fair, the first season or two of X-Files was good stuff, as was the first season of Millennium (never saw the rest of that one).

I'd go so far as to say the first five seasons were pretty good (though slowly declining towards the end). I liked the movie, but… well, we'll pretend that the show just went straight to the final episode after that.

~J

I think the "problem" with Shadowrun's direction is that the community, tht is the say those who produce material as well as those who consume it, no longer accept things because they sound cool. Material has to be not only believable, but logically attainable from today and sustainable in the game world.

For example, take Lonestar's services. Previously, the Star was known to be very violent and didn't care about shooting people. We went "that doesn't make sense, they'd lose the contract, poeple wouldn't stand for that kind of thing". A brutal repressive police force is a cool cyberpunk theme. But it doesn't stand, so Lonestar was explained as being "kinda rough, but not too much, and not in nice neighbourhoods".

It goes the same for everything that made Shadowrun a *dystopic* world. It was true cyberpunk atmosphere, very cool, but it wasn't possible that the world would be so. We demanded credibility. So we lost flavour for believability.

The closest we can maintain are evil conspiracies, because inherently they are unprovable and un-disproavable. We can accept them in our games, the closest thing to playing cyberpunk we have left.

I don't find a brutally repressive Lone Star to be unbelievable in the least. Shadowrunners and Troll gangers would be there to help them stay popular.

~J

Excellent points, but with CP being the "parent" genre there will be many adherents that still want the feeling to carry through.

Another way to think of the evolution is that the gamers companies were looking for in the 80s and 90s were the people on the fringes and attracted to anarchy and CP themes. We are now in our 20s and 30s, and take a less mioptic view of the world, shades of grey and all that.

That's another thing I don't like: we've been seeing a shift towards shades of grey. We need to move back to shades of black

~J

I for one enjoy both Street-level play (not necessarily Gang or Crime campaigns, but just not involved in global geopolitics, etc) and "higher" play-- a book (or PDF, for us intrepid people) should be released on each.

Another aspect of Shadowrun that I miss (as in it doesn't seem to be paid any attention to anymore) are those aspects covered in the original, 1st edition Shadowbeat. I love that book, and I've always wanted to run a good "snoop" storyline. Unfortunately, I've been without a game group for at least three years now.

Cheers!

Tim

I think he means for street campaigns a book on low level shadowruns. What the local Mr. Johnson needs rather than what cutting edge biotech Universal Omnitech will implant in you for saving their corp from destruction by an evil wendigo/immortal elf alliance. How do you keep a campaign motivated without the use of massive insect hives, heads of state, IE's, horrors, plots to take over the world, and great dragons?

At the same time, the high sourcebook ought to pack all the rules and grand conspiracy stuff into one place so that the DM has a single reference to turn to.

Actually, I am quite happy about the turn SR took. Classic Black-and-White Cyberpunk (like Cybergeneration) seems a bit cheesy now that I am out of my teens. SR offers something for everyone: you can play the star brutal and abusive (though they won't be when lots of cameras are watching), you can play low-level ganger campaigns or Dragonballs-style campaigns where Ryan Mercury would look like a rookie low-level street punk. You can also play cops and corps and all sorts of other things.

Only thing I really would love to see would be a new edition of shadowbeat, because I sorely miss rules and background for snoops.

Don't even get me started on believeability. Look at Amazonia, no tech, no industry, no use of natural resource, absolutely no reason for tourists to come by. Hell I can't begin to fathom how they can maintain even basic relations with anyone else. For all intents and purposes economically, it should have imploded in a matter of day of it's founding

I want to see evil villians that have no redeeming qualities, street level violence with little or no hope, people getting shot all aorund and surviving off the skin of ones teeth, burning atleast one karma a session.

On second thought, that is how I run my game already... Try setting your game in 2050, and using the old sourebooks with the new rules. A lot of fun.

I want to make clear that I'm not talking about power level. Taking Gibson's NEUROMANCER as an example of gritty street campaigning, they deal with AIs, go up the well, rub noses with enormously powerful corporate figures...but Case and Molly are still concrete animals, not CIA agents.

A merc with the exact same stats might be a MOSSAD operative or a hired gun for the Atlantean Foundation, but he could also be setting himself up in a black market gun business in Manhattan.

So I'm talking about tone, not power.

yeah, i was going to point out that Gibson isn't really the model you want to use for low-level campaigning. street, definitely; low-level, no.