In the near future Jason plans to release Artifacts Unbound, Jet Set, Conspiracy Theories, Corporate Adventures, and "more". These books will be compiled out of a series of ~5000 word essays by different authors who may or may not be talking to each other - each of which is about some vague topic and presents "possible adventure and plot ideas" that a GM might want to fit into their campaign. In short: someone convinced Jason that the White Wolf Time of Judgement books were a great idea.
So buckle up and wait for things to get extremely stupid. Each book is going to present alternate and wholly incompatible progressions of the metaplot that are not discussed amongst the writing staff or checked against the history that Shadowrun has. So internal contradictions are basically impossible to avoid with the way Jason is acting as developer, so he has given up even trying to not have them. From now on: internal contradictions are a feature because he's putting the power to resolve them in the hands of the game master (because he is too fucking lazy to notice or fix them himself).
Furthermore, Jason has totally thrown in the towel as regards to keeping Shadowrun history straight. From this point forwards, the Shadows of XXX books are off the required reading list for authors of upcoming books. But don't worry, Jason has also thrown in the towel as regards to keeping Shadowrun rules straight - the secondary core books are off the required reading list too. So for example, the people who write Artifacts Unbound are not expected to have read or be able to reference Street Magic, let alone Ancient History's artifact guide.
It's not just that the books are going to be a file dump of incoherent postulates, it's that in addition to being rughly 120,000 words of wild speculation no more interesting or official than a forum discussion about where the plot might go, they will also be written by people whose knowledge of Shadowrun begins and ends at the SR4A Core Book and the atrocious Sixth World Almanac.
Yeah: and the big reveal for Artifacts Unbound: the artifacts are Dragon Balls. If you put them together you get powerful one-off magic effects, but then the artifacts fly away and hide themselves again. I'm not making that up.
By the way, I would send letters of complaint by mail to:
- Topps Incorporated
One Whitehall Street
New York, NY 10004
USA