Ya know! I have allot of old source books, (such as Renraku and the like.) and was wondering if anyone else ever uses out of date source books for inspiration in their games.

I just get sentimental and don't like to wave goodbye to some of the old dusty volumes I have.

I would love to take a team through the brainscan Renreaku adventure, but was wondering if anyone else found they were paranoid about the results of making such a decision?

Obviously SR4 is going to make life EVEN more interesting (though I can't wait to get my dirty mitts on it! ).

Any views on this would be nice.

I would say 'Yes.'

If the PCs haven't run it, they should at least have heard of it. It goes a long way to build the universe and provide a much richer environment to roleplay when all the oldies are used now and again.

All the time, in fact I have the recurring habit of dredging up characters and storylines that date back to SR1 material - Johnny Spinrad, the Moonlight/Midnight Thorns and some surprises in upcoming books.

My answer's "not often". Trick is, I'm going to redefine all of your terms on you—very few sourcebooks are truly "out of date", as in "inapplicable". Only ones I can think of off the top of my head are the Native American Nations books, being as they were largely declared to be the fevered delusion of a weak mind. The original Seattle sourcebook, the Denver boxed set, the Lone Star sourcebook—none of these are out of date, though the material within may be in some late-2050s and beyond games.

~J

Didn't Nigel Findley write the two Native American Nations books? I thought that as far as Shadowrun authors go around here he was the one most well-regarded.

Yes he wrote them and yes, he is considered one of the finest SR writers.

So far as writing quality goes, the books are outstanding. The problem is the logic creep - numbers of Amerindians, percentages for tribes, etc. I'd like to blame that on setting requirements rather than, say, poor research.

Hmm.

If I couldn't accept the existence of the PCC, let alone the existence of metas, magic, and megacorps, I don't think I'd play the game. What the hell does it matter how well they predicted anything?

Prediction is one thing, internally consistent logic and world settings are another entirely.

I have been rereading a lot of the old 1st and 2nd ed books for ideas that I can weave into the capital P Plot of my campaign. The little p plot takes care of itself usually.