The Shadowrun Situation

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sun Jan 23, 2011 7:02 pm

Please understand...none of the Shadowrun freelancers were even allowed to submit stories for Spells & Chrome, except for Jen. The reason the anthology as held up so long is because many of the stories are fucking bad, and display a tremendous lack of understanding of Shadowrun. Steve Kenson's short story wasn't bad, though.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sun Jan 23, 2011 7:36 pm

hermit wrote:
AND THEY PULLED THE FUCKING NECRONOMICON STRAIGHT FROM AN ALTERNATIVE REALITY WHERE THE BELIEF IN THE HP LOVECRAFT HAD MADE THE BOOK REAL!
What. WHAT?!

jup.

Ancient History wrote:Please understand...none of the Shadowrun freelancers were even allowed to submit stories for Spells & Chrome, except for Jen. The reason the anthology as held up so long is because many of the stories are fucking bad, and display a tremendous lack of understanding of Shadowrun. Steve Kenson's short story wasn't bad, though.

Steven Kenson wrote the Kellan Colt SR Novel Series i think . .

Otakusensei · Post by **Otakusensei** » Sun Jan 23, 2011 8:22 pm

I'm halfway through Spells and Chrome right now. I'm going slow because I keep raging and need to stop too frequently. Also because I can't read it before bed, I've found it gives me badly edited nightmares.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sun Jan 23, 2011 10:01 pm

Half way through?
OK then it only gets worse for you from now on ^^

raben-aas · Post by **raben-aas** » Sun Jan 23, 2011 10:08 pm

As someone was wondering about the cover of MilSpec Tech:

Yes, that pic was done by me. ALL of the pix were. As was the entire style of depicting them, that is: more along the lines of current video games concept art (with extra tags indicating what this or that piece on that aircraft actually is or even an e xplosion graph that of some corporate guard with ALL of his equipment (stares dreamily at the screen)).

The pic itself is just one of the equipment pix. It was never intended to be "the cover". Just as the Mercurial pic on missions 04-00 was "just" an inside illustration that I did in full color instead of BW because I need the practice and love doing color pix (and was/am a little afraid to be pushed too far into the BW corner, or the digital photo manipulation corner, or the goddamn scifi corner (I love scifi. But I also love Fantasy).

I am more than happy that the art director went with my ideas (Uin both cases), and think that MilSpec Tech rocks, as it combines cool pix (some updated and totally re-done, some new) with a Street Samurai Catalogue like format. Concerning the content or certain details, I would have liked things to be different, but that is ALWAYS the case. I usually don't get 100% what I want

(the Berlin sourcebook being around the 80% bracket (90% if we factor in time and other real-world production factors).

All things considered, I like the cover pic in the sense that it's a pic fitting the product (esp from an ingame POV). Sure: Having a swarm of drones gun down a team of runners with a seriiously injured female Troll wielding twin Panther Cannons would have been even better, but ...

hermit · Post by **hermit** » Sun Jan 23, 2011 11:17 pm

the Berlin sourcebook being around the 80% bracket (90% if we factor in time and other real-world production factors

And the 70-odd pages on your blog are the remaining 10 to 20%?

also, MilSpec looks better than war! from the preview.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 12:01 am

female Troll wielding twin Panther Cannons

Well, it'd be a deviation from the elf porn at least *snickers* ^^

hermit · Post by **hermit** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 12:06 am

Why the hell not? I'm all for equal opportunity porn.

Please understand...none of the Shadowrun freelancers were even allowed to submit stories for Spells & Chrome, except for Jen.

Why weren't they? Are random short story writers more cost effective? I cannotimagine a published novelist being cheaper than a gaming book freelancer ...

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 12:19 am

You'd have to ask Randall or Loren, but my understanding was they hoped "established authors" would have more of a draw than the poor schlubs actually writing the game.

Given, writing sourcebooks is not the same as writing short stories, but it was a dick move to not even let them submit.

Otakusensei · Post by **Otakusensei** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 1:08 am

Ancient History wrote:You'd have to ask Randall or Loren, but my understanding was they hoped "established authors" would have more of a draw than the poor schlubs actually writing the game.

Given, writing sourcebooks is not the same as writing short stories, but it was a dick move to not even let them submit.

Well, the choice shows in the product. I don't know if I'm enough of a masochist to finish that turd.

raben-aas · Post by **raben-aas** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 6:56 am

hermit wrote: And the 70-odd pages on your blog are the remaining 10 ?.

No. Those 10% are Little Details, i.e. Individual writeups/Chapters/voices I would have handled differently. Like I Said: the usual "Personal preference issue"

Tycho · Post by **Tycho** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 8:09 am

raben-aas wrote:As someone was wondering about the cover of MilSpec Tech:

Yes, that pic was done by me. ALL of the pix were. As was the entire style of depicting them, that is: more along the lines of current video games concept art (with extra tags indicating what this or that piece on that aircraft actually is or even an e xplosion graph that of some corporate guard with ALL of his equipment (stares dreamily at the screen)).

The pic itself is just one of the equipment pix. It was never intended to be "the cover". Just as the Mercurial pic on missions 04-00 was "just" an inside illustration that I did in full color instead of BW because I need the practice and love doing color pix (and was/am a little afraid to be pushed too far into the BW corner, or the digital photo manipulation corner, or the goddamn scifi corner (I love scifi. But I also love Fantasy).

I am more than happy that the art director went with my ideas (Uin both cases), and think that MilSpec Tech rocks, as it combines cool pix (some updated and totally re-done, some new) with a Street Samurai Catalogue like format. Concerning the content or certain details, I would have liked things to be different, but that is ALWAYS the case. I usually don't get 100% what I want (the Berlin sourcebook being around the 80% bracket (90% if we factor in time and other real-world production factors).

All things considered, I like the cover pic in the sense that it's a pic fitting the product (esp from an ingame POV). Sure: Having a swarm of drones gun down a team of runners with a seriiously injured female Troll wielding twin Panther Cannons would have been even better, but ...

The Art is cool and the format is nice, but if the authors are not able to put together the rules, it does not make a great product:
e.g.
several tanks have explicit marked NBC Filters and no Life Support Mod, the Striker has a missle Launcher an the pic but not in the rules and he is less armored than a Ares Roadmaster and so on...

I have to say, the book is not as bad as War!, but it is not great either. It is nice to have, because of the art and format, but you don't really need it, nor will you miss it in any game.
Also it is bad taste to publish a book about war and just release a pdf about MilSpec afterwards, the should have just put the Milspec Stuff in War! or the War! Gear in the Milspec pdf...

cya
Tycho

raben-aas · Post by **raben-aas** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 8:49 am

Meh.

I dunno if there actually ever was something like a GREAT product for SR.

Back in the day, my top 4 SR products (look, feel, content, use at my gaming table) were Sprawl Sites, Street Samurai Catalogue, Rigger Black Book and the Seattle sourcebook.

All of these products had unbelievably crappy artwork (i.e. vehicles with wheels that had never heard anything about perspective), errors, rules bits that made no friggin sense, cheesy and unnecessary shadowtalk, author wankery and - concerning Sprawl Sites - a whopping lot of wasted space (a meager 6 random encounters on TWO pages? Seriously?).

Unfortunately -- or fortunately, depending on the POV -- we will never see a web 2.0-style review/forum discussion of their weaknesses.

All 4 products get referenced again and again by oldschool SR fans the nets over, out of pure nostalgia.

I still like them, too, but I also like products that follow the same basic design, like MilSpec. Sure there is always room for improvement, sure a lot of that info could/should have been in WAR!, but it's a move in the right direction, at least for my gaming table (the chance that any of that tech pops up in my campaign is less than zero, but then again I am a tech nerd that likes to have a gazillion pieces of tech he never uses – that's why I love Battlelords of the Twenty-Third Century (http://www.battlelords.com) no matter how hard it gets bashed for sporting some immature humor bits).

hermit · Post by **hermit** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 9:42 am

You'd have to ask Randall or Loren, but my understanding was they hoped "established authors" would have more of a draw than the poor schlubs actually writing the game.

Given, writing sourcebooks is not the same as writing short stories, but it was a dick move to not even let them submit.

Seems like that's their signature in leadership. And ugh, reading into the book (aside from eBook readers being annoying) is tough. Yes. the Necronomicon from another dimension. Who let THAT pass.

Otakusensei · Post by **Otakusensei** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 7:06 pm

hermit wrote:
You'd have to ask Randall or Loren, but my understanding was they hoped "established authors" would have more of a draw than the poor schlubs actually writing the game.

Given, writing sourcebooks is not the same as writing short stories, but it was a dick move to not even let them submit.
Seems like that's their signature in leadership. And ugh, reading into the book (aside from eBook readers being annoying) is tough. Yes. the Necronomicon from another dimension. Who let THAT pass.

The typos alone are pretty jarring. For all the insistence they had in choosing published authors, they didn't make much of an effort to support their work with proper editing.

I decided to read Happy Trails again while I was held up at the comic shop waiting for a game. The quality of the one bit of fiction over anything I've read in Spells and Chrome is telling. I don't think you can pile on enough outside experience to match the value of authors who understand the setting and have a passion for the game.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 7:20 pm

Otakusensei wrote:The typos alone are pretty jarring. For all the insistence they had in choosing published authors, they didn't make much of an effort to support their work with proper editing.

Understand: this book sat untouched for over a year. I want to say two years, but I'd have to check the dates. Every line dev from Syn until Jason Hardy who looked at the thing wanted it to be edited and/or scrapped and done over. As far as I know, it never went through an editing pass.

Otakusensei wrote:I decided to read Happy Trails again while I was held up at the comic shop waiting for a game. The quality of the one bit of fiction over anything I've read in Spells and Chrome is telling. I don't think you can pile on enough outside experience to match the value of authors who understand the setting and have a passion for the game.

Heh. Thanks. Always amazes me how people like that one.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 8:25 pm

Why?
It is a nice little story . . i like it, even if you did dare to make it look as if Fastjack were about to die . .

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 8:28 pm

I loved the moment where I figured out that was FastJacks daughter.. it was cool. The Old man, and his Otaku Child. Good stuff.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 9:33 pm

It's one of my earliest short stories; the majority of it was written quickly on the back of a set of yahoo driving directions. So there's a certain amateurish quality to it, at least in my eyes. The Thor/FastJack imagery is so obvious it's almost silly, there's a straight up rip of a bit from James Patrick Kelly's Solstice, and the whole bit with Perri is an ancient fanboy shoutout to the Denver Boxed Set. I didn't think much of the story at the time beyond a fanboy fantasy, and was really surprised at how much people liked it. Jen really, really wanted it for SR4A which is why I dug it out and edited it a bit.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 10:01 pm

Well, remember we're all Fanboys

we're posting on a thread complaining about how CGL kicked our dog, and spat in our coffee.

Clearly we like Shadowrun a bit too much.

Neurosis · Post by **Neurosis** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 1:08 am

Clearly we like Shadowrun a bit too much.

Amen. Speaking for myself, I like it far more than anyone should like anything.

If CGL was going to actually lose the license, we would definitely know by now, right? It's nearly a full month into the new year.

Otakusensei · Post by **Otakusensei** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 1:08 am

Artists should never be trusted to speak on the quality of their own work

The best ones go too low, the worst ones too high.

Neurosis · Post by **Neurosis** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 1:12 am

Frank mentioned the name of that phenomenon earlier, actually.

Tycho · Post by **Tycho** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 7:30 am

Schwarzkopf wrote: If CGL was going to actually lose the license, we would definitely know by now, right? It's nearly a full month into the new year.

I don't know, but I expect them to write a big News about it, how well they work together with Topps and so on, if they finalize the license renewal.

So if I had to guess, I would say there is nothing certain right now.

cya
Tycho

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Jan 25, 2011 7:38 am

They've worked for several months without a license in the past. The license allows them to continue working as long as they are in negotiations over the renewal. So just because it is up in a few days doesn't really mean that they'll have to stop, which is a shame.

-Username17