The Shadowrun Situation

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Dammit, that Attitude book actually looks really interesting. Is it terrible?

[Lokathor]

I wanted to know if Parazoology was any good.

[Username17]

I wanted to know if Parazoology was any good.

It's 33 pages long. It has 30 paracritters in it, some of which are jokes (like the vorpal beaver) or Battletech references (like the Blood Kite). The format is relatively pleasing - it's basically a return to the old Patterson Guide format with a beast on each page. The art is inconsistent and not especially good. It's all color, but I am not at all convinced that the original art was actually made in color at all.

There is no rules section, so obviously none of the outstanding problems with the critter rules were fixed. There is a general lack of attention to rules details as we have come to expect from Catalyst products. Here, I will give you an excerpt from the sting of a poisonous crab:

At low doses, people experience numbing and tingling sensations where the toxin made contact. At higher doses, the diaphragm becomes paralyzed, and the victim suffocates. Another possibility is that the heart stops beating from the toxin.

OK, it's a paralytic, right? Might even kill you given time? That poison does raw physical damage and is rated at 12P. Yeah, seriously the "numbing and tingling sensations" does more damage than being hit with a burst from a machine gun.

The fluff is similarly messed up. The entire book rants on and on about paracritters "mutating" and "evolving traits". Which since these are all meta-expressions doesn't make any fucking sense. Of course it isn't clear how a Hliodromus "evolved" from a Gryphon - it's a metavariant and transformed spontaneously. No evolution or mutation required. It just hatches that way fully formed from the previous generation of normal Gryphons or even goes through early life as a normal Gryphon and transforms spontaneously at puberty.

Formatting itself is pretty weird. There is no perceptible order to the creatures. It's not alphabetical, it's not regional, it seems to be stone cold random. There are two varieties of para-beaver, and they are not near each other in the book. Most of the creatures in the book are aquatic, for what it's worth.

Dammit, that Attitude book actually looks really interesting. Is it terrible?

I've only glanced at it cursorily. It has literally twelve authors, including several that I reflexively hate the work of. It took me reading of two paragraphs on a random page in the book before I found a grating typographical error, which indicates to me that either I am super gifted or the level of editing is about what we saw in War!. Bottom line: I am out of mead, and can't do a proper review until I am properly drunk.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

There is no rules section, so obviously none of the outstanding problems with the critter rules were fixed.

Care to comment on what some of those are? The only critters I've ever used are the Thunderbird and the Ghoul, so things seemed normal.

Sounds okay though, worth asking the internet nicely for a copy at least.

[sabs]

shouldn't that thing be 4S per dose? And it gets to inject 1 dose per simple action after it's 'penetrated' skin?

basically it's a neurotoxin that causes stun damage until it overflows you, and then it kills you beatch! I really wish the developers would have actually played the game.

[Username17]

There is no rules section, so obviously none of the outstanding problems with the critter rules were fixed.

Care to comment on what some of those are? The only critters I've ever used are the Thunderbird and the Ghoul, so things seemed normal.

Mostly it's scaling issues. Poisons, as mentioned before, were originally written by people who didn't understand that you average one hit on a body success test if you are a normal human and Orkish super ninjas only average 2 more than that. The numbers given for them look like they were written for a completely different game. Really only the Disease rules in Augmentation have managed to not be insane. Even the later attempts to write diseases for crap like Runner's Companion and Running Wild were made of insanity (by the time you're done with a bout of ghoul fever, you can look forward to a one hundred and twenty die penalty to all actions for three months or so, that is not an exaggeration).

Strength is another biggie. Animal Strength gets batshit crazy at the upper end. And the upper end of hardened armor/natural weapons doesn't work for the same reason the vehicle rules are shit. But yeah, if you run anything from Devil Rats on up to Hell Hounds and Basilisks it basically works fine.

The rules for critters in Parazoology have pretty much the same problems. The Squiddoth is basically a rabid elephant with no discernible magical powers and a tetrifurcate trunk. It is actually not as resilient as a random civilian ork who happens to be wearing an armor jacket. Nonetheless, its tusk gore is deep into assault cannon territory.

But yes, the super fast carnivorous antelope are not particularly dangerous, but their stats are not unreasonable.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Squiddoth?
Really?
They changed 2 letters from squiggoth?
http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Squiggoth

[Lokathor]

The rules for critters in Parazoology have pretty much the same problems. The Squiddoth is basically a rabid elephant with no discernible magical powers and a tetrifurcate trunk. It is actually not as resilient as a random civilian ork who happens to be wearing an armor jacket. Nonetheless, its tusk gore is deep into assault cannon territory.

Sounds like alt.War could use a section or subsection on critters under the new combat framework.

[Wesley Street]

It has 30 paracritters in it, some of which are jokes (like the vorpal beaver) or Battletech references (like the Blood Kite).

The Blood Kite was first listed in Paranormal Animals of North America. If it's a BattleTech joke, it's over 20 years old.

[Username17]

So in order to assist me in reviewing attitude, I felt it necessary to acquire and consume some of the local booze. So for the purposes of getting through this book, the use of medovina (Czech mead), and praděd (Czech chartreuse basically), and slivocice (Czech plum liquor), and good old fashioned cream liquor (like, for girls) have been employed. This is so that the reader of the review (you) and the reader of this truly phenomenally poorly put together book (me) can better enjoy ourselves.

Once again, I think it's pretty unfair to harp over much on the book's adherence to the established plots, characters, or events of Shadowrun's 22 year history. It's written by people who don't know what the fuck is going on and we can't expect them to spontaneously know all this information. I mean, we used to, but that was before. This is a new crew and they are basically writing “Ultimate Shadowrun” for better or for worse. As it happens: it is for worse. But it is worse because of how it stands and fails to stand on its own merits, not based on how it stacks up to what was previously canon.

So let's start in on what I find to be the most fundamental flaw in this book: basic writing mechanics. That shouldn't ever be something you even notice in a supposedly professionally produced piece of literature, but there it is. Specifically, let's talk about pronouns, and their friend's: implied clauses. You use a pronoun to stand in for a name or description when it is contextually obvious what you are talking about. So the declaration “Sally went to the store, she bought some milk.” is totally acceptable. We assume that the use of “she” refers to “Sally” because in context Sally is the feminine agent who was in a position to buy milk. On the flip side, the statement “Sally and Carla went to the store, she bought some milk” would be no good, because “she” could refer to Sally or Carla. Similarly “Some people were at the store, she bought some milk” is completely fucked, because “she” could refer to any fucking person at all.

So to give a solid example of how Attitude fails this very basic test of English grammar, here are the first sentences of several chapters. Since they are the first sentence in the chapter, there is by definition no context for them, and thus nothing they could be referring to.

We’ve all seen her.

Have we? I genuinely don't know, because as of this sentence I don't know who “she” is. In fact, while the rest of the paragraph is also about “her”, “she” is never named. The rest of the section just wanders off the topic, so I genuinely don't know if the character is supposed to be talking about a specific trid star or the generic portrayal of runners in media. It could be either or both or neither because the paragraph uses pronouns and doesn't use the context necessary to interpret those pronouns.

Did that get your attention?

No. “That” did not grab my attention, because there is nothing before it in the chapter. The sentence is apparently referring to a recruitment flier printed later on the page, but since it doesn't come immediately before the statement asking your reaction to it, both the statement and the flier are total non sequiturs.

Before any of you out there get offended, let me say that this is not for you.

Is “it”? I have no idea. I assume they mean “this post” or “this chapter” or something, but even then why not? The rest of the paragraph implies that “this” is geared towards someone new to Shadwrunning who may need a primer in the basics, but shouldn't that include Dev/Grrl? She's one of the “you” that the book is fictionally talking to, right? What the fuck?

I know what you’re thinking.

Do you? How? Since there hasn't been anything in the chapter yet, how could we possibly be thinking anything?

As you might be able to tell from the fact that I restricted myself to the first sentences of chapters from the first half of the book to gather these wall-bangers, the book is literally full of unimplied clauses and non-referential pronouns. These are things that with even casual editing should not ever happen, but they do constantly. It makes reading the book without liquid determination very difficult. And it's not just pronouns and clauses that don't refer to anything, often they refer to the wrong thing, which is even more painful.

The next thing to talk about is something that has become a worrying trend in Catalyst's new books: vast lists of people we don't care about filled with more information than I necessary for a list and nowhere near enough information to flesh those people out. Most emblematic of this is the chapter “The Right Crowd”. It is ten pages long and covers 7 people – 4 if you count the fact that the musicians gets separate fucking writeups in the music section. Each person is nominally written up by a different writer, but it reads like a one-man info-dump. Each person has an identically formatted bio box for them, which includes an “awards” section and that is obviously incomplete. Each of these major film makers or musicians or ball players or whatever (the chapter has no focus at all) is listed with one or two awards. So it's obviously not showing us only the biggest award, and it's also obviously not complete. The Director guy presumably has various “Best Pueblo Film” awards and shit, which are not listed.

The music section's writeups of a bunch of solo artists and bands is a better space value, getting 20 whole acts into 7 pages. Still, the lack of creativity here is stunning. Many of these are acts from Shadowrun's origins. Mercurial, Dark Angel, The Elementals, The Shadows, and DNA. While those are real Shadowrun music groups that even had adventures around them and shit, the fact remains that many of them broke up 10 or 20 years ago. For fuck's sake, Dark Angel got the bad touch from a vampire in 2053. The book has these lists of the members of fictional bands, but I honestly can't tell what the section is for. Really, I can't tell what a lot of things are in the book for. Many of the chapters seem to be piles of unedited ideas with no obvious tie-ins to anything that anyone would care about.

And yeah, remember how I said that there were 7 writeups of people in the “The Right Crowd” chapter but only 4 unique ones? There are three characters (Orxanne, Deirdre, and CrimeTime) who have complete multi-paragraph subsections in the book in two places. Why? Worse, characters writing shadowtalk on the two different entries have different and contradictory scuttlebutt on the different pages. RedAnya says that CrimeTime was an ex-BTL user and chip mule for the Vory on page 50, but when she writes the entire separate CrimeTime entry on page 141 she mentions two possible narratives, one in which he is a current BTL-head and the other in which he never was one! Basically the book has 12 different authors. And while sometimes you can take more than one person's work and combine them together to form Devastator (the most powerful of the evil Decepticons), in this case it mostly comes out like the literary stylings of Grimlock of the Dinobots. There isn't even a cursory attempt to get the different segments written by different people to hang together in a cogent narrative – and they don't.

But enough about systemic problems. Let's go chapter by chapter.

Introduction
The introduction is pretentious and incoherent, starting in with the diatribe about some nebulous female who may or may not be a specific in-world woman, I can't tell. The introduction tells you what is in the book, but it basically comes off as being an incoherent list – which at least isn't deceptive because the book is a big incoherent list. Still, a massive improvement over War!, in that it has a “what this book is about” section at all. But they still couldn't resist the urge to throw the reader into the deep end by having the first sections of the introduction be completely unreferenced

The Untethered Life
This chapter was originally done like a year ago by Ancient History, and still bears the chapter title he worked under. Nothing else remains of Bobby's work here, which is pretty much good because it means that it wasn't plagiarized like Corp Guide and 6WA were. However, that's about all I can say in the chapter's support, except for the fact that at least it doesn't go on very long. The entire chapter is a very sophomoric discussion about what kinds of people shadowrunners are. Apparently it breaks down into professionals laid low, lowlifes working their way up, and other people. Any time your arbitrary categories leaves the “other” category as the biggest, your classification system blows. There is a little bit on why people might want to be a shadowrunner, but it doesn't make the “contractor” analogy even once. Yes, it goes on and on about how you might make a big score and the work isn't steady and it doesn't ever make the contract work vs. permanent employment comparison. To say it is superficial is itself a condemnation which is overly superficial.

The Street Life
This chapter is completely incoherent. Completely. It's written as a transcript of one side of a conversation of one person giving newbie tips for a wannabe Shadowrunner. You don't get the other half of the conversation or a narrative about what the fuck is going on, so you're left wandering around the page for some time before you even figure out what was supposed to be being conveyed. The entire chapter has a “twist” that reads like something penned by M. Night Shyamalan. It's a deeply experimental piece, and the experiment is an unmitigated failure.

Special props go out to a half page rant with multiple voices talking about socks. Yes, really. But instead of being quirky and wise, this comes off as a weird foot fetish, because almost the same discussion appeared in War!. A discussion of proper foot ware in the jungle was one of the better parts of that misbegotten book (even though it was also out of place considering that Bogotá is not in the jungle), repeating the diatribe in an urban setting is just creepy. I'm starting to think one of the new crew likes feet a little too much.

It's Who You Know
This chapter doesn't know what it is doing. It actually comes out and tells you straight up at the beginning that it doesn't know why you wold want to read it and warns you that reading it might insult you. This is actually the case. The chapter gives advice for forming a Shadowrun team. This advice sounds kind of vaguely OK until you realize that Shadowrun is a cooperative storytelling game and thus having leaders and chains of command and shit is off the table. It's an ensemble cast with multiple co-equal protagonists, so all of this advice is totally game destroying. I guess when they say that this chapter is “not for you” they are referring to actual players of the actual game.

More later when I get sober enough to get drunk enough again to have enough liquid willpower to review more chapters.

-Username17

[Otakusensei]

Opening section was about that chick on the cover, Caution Tape Girl, the one who got so much hate years before the book ever came out.

While not a terrible piece of art, I don't care for it pretty much based on the subject matter. Yeah, Attitude is all about attitude, whatever. Pin-up style art used to be edgy and sexy. Now it's just sort of... done. There's no pop there, I found the background to be far more interesting. I look and think, "Great, more tits. But what are those folks up to?" Maybe that's the point, she grabs attention while the professionals work?

Either way, I can't bring myself to care much. The book would have mattered more if it wasn't funding criminals.

On that note, Google maps has updated photos of Coleman's new place. He finally got his landscaping done.

[Ancient History]

There wasn't much to steal, I was basically using my wordcount to try and cram Captain Chaos' funeral into canon.

[Username17]

Opening section was about that chick on the cover, Caution Tape Girl, the one who got so much hate years before the book ever came out.

Or she's a drawing of whoever they were talking about. Or something. She looks very much like the specific or perhaps allegorical woman referenced in the opening paragraph of the book. But I still don't know if she is supposed to be specific or allegorical after having read the damn thing, because none of the pronouns are fucking contextualized.

So some people wanted to know what the book is "about". That's a hard question to answer, since a lot of chapters are either a loose assortment of unrelated essays ("Independent Together" is just that) or a pile of rumor mongering about a small list of unrelated NPCs with no attempt to fit them into a plot of any kind (seriously, "The Right Crowd" talks about a popular Urban Brawl player from France who now plays in the German leagues, and a completely unrelated Elven traditionalist musician back to back). So to a real degree, Attitude is not about anything. There is often no connection at all between one chapter and another or even two essays back to back in the same chapter.

Still, if you had to pin it down the book is basically the incest baby of Shadowbeat and Neo Anarchist's Guide to Real Life. I say that because it has whole chapters given over to ranting about music and sports, and because it has whole chapters dedicated to ruminating over proper footwear for the hardened contract criminal. And also because it has congenital malformations.

-Username17

[Rasumichin]

One of the problems with Horizon is that no one ever sat down and figured out what the fuck to do with them. If there was a big metaplot reveal that was supposed to happen later on, it died years ago. Even early brainstorming about the corporate structure never went anywhere.

Too bad, it would have been very easy to do something with them.
I actually expected some big reveal after there where hints dropped in the L.A. section of Corporate Enclaves.
All that stuff about the nasty downside of their image-obsessed corporate culture, the Clockwork Orange-style prison they are running, the lab where they supposedly breed AIs in a closed-off system, and no one ever bothered to pick up on any of this?
The only explanation i have for this is Hardy's nonsensical stance on memetics and mind hacks.
Because that is exactly the kind of stuff we'd need to make something with Horizon beyond "oh, i guess they actually ARE the good guys" (an approach that is simply both unnecessary and outright setting-violating in a cyberpunk game).

SR always included highly advanced brainwashing techniques.
PAB has been around since Shadowbeat, psychotropic IC has been around since Virtual Realities 2.0, both have received a rules update for SR4 in Unwired. There have been rumors about Lone Star going Clockwork Orange on prisoners since 2nd edition.
Why not go with that and let Horizon research basilisk hacks, stand alone complexes and behavior-modifying memes?
The possibilities that arise from giving a bunch of narcissistic new economy hipsters on novacoke that kind of ressources are endless.
It would be like 99 Francs meets GiTS : SAC, and they passed up on it.

[Ferret]

Why not go with that and let Horizon research basilisk hacks, stand alone complexes and behavior-modifying memes?
The possibilities that arise from giving a bunch of narcissistic new economy hipsters on novacoke that kind of ressources are endless.
It would be like 99 Francs meets GiTS : SAC, and they passed up on it.

Fuuuuuuck, this would be awesome to play.

[Stahlseele]

query: basilisk hacks ?

[sabs]

When ever I run, I portray Horizon as Hollywood gone (even more)Soulless. I take all the worse stereotypes about Hollywood and amplify them. It's about making money by producing Entertainment. They do Trid Movies, BTL recordings, Matrix Games, advertising. They fight hard core to be /the/ Premier Online Entertainment Conglomerate. If there's a show on you like, chances are it's being produced by Horizon. They also do Black Market stuff.

Examples:
Big Brother 52: All the people are wearing full simrigs with realtime feed. And for a low low subscription fee you can ride along as your favorite Character. Sim City, Deeper Dungeons 72.
Black Market:
Death Race, Escape from X, Survivor, Running Man.

That and I'm fond of the idea that Horizon is being run by AI.

[Username17]

query: basilisk hacks ?

An Eclipse Phase term for hacking people. Since they are from hacking rules that are written by Rob and Lars, they are deeply underwhelming. But they have a very cool name. And there's no reason you couldn't have them do something good.

Th actual rules in Eclipse Phase are that you show someone flashing lights and they get nauseous. But using the term "basilisk hacks" for hacking biological systems is totally salvageable.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Ah, thank you.
Now i know.

[sabs]

And Knowing is some as yet undetermined portion of the Battle.

[Stahlseele]

The rest is glorious carnage in all it's incarnations.

[Username17]

So I said once I got sober and drunk again, I'd do more chapters. And I did pass the Rehab exam and have some free time to get tore up. So now that I've seen the bottle of a few more glasses, let's continue:

Independent Together
What is this chapter about? The “theme” is supposed to be groups that runners affiliate with or something. That's a pretty big theme, and honestly it looks like a chapter that was hacked together out of essays that didn't fit anywhere else. There's an essay about a bar chain that smugglers recruit out of, an essay about Runners who have political causes, and an IM transcript of people talking about net ghosts or something. The first bit is pretentious and over-long for what is essentially the writeup of a chain of bars you might or might not end up having a meet with a Johnson in, the second one is so superficial as to be a complete waste of space, and the third is exactly as exciting as you'd imagine reading an IM transcript (including headers) to be. I couldn't even make it through while drunk, so maybe there was a big reveal 2/3 of the way through – but I doubt it.

The Music Scene
I've complained about this chapter before: how large amounts of “the scene” are dedicated to canon musical acts that broke up and died off two decades ago. Musical styles have apparently just not advanced like at all. The entire list of stuff people listen to is just a pile of stuff from today and stuff from 2063. There hasn't been any innovation. But beyond that, stuff in this chapter is just wrong. I think it is best summed up when Snopes, the character whose entire schtick is that he knows the semi-obscure factoid that people are deafened by treble says: “Yeah, but I’m not going to buy my son cyberears because he’s gone deaf from too much bass.”

The Trid Scene
Now that we have a chapter about a “scene” right after another chapter abut a “scene” (and before a third chapter about a “scene”) we sort of have a theme. This chapter holds together with the previous chapter as well as paragraphs in the previous chapter hold together. Which is to say: not terribly well, but at least it feels like you are reading a book when you go from one to the other. Rather than starting by telling you anything about what trid is or how it is made or why you should care, the chapter starts with one of those unordered lists of vaguely related stuff that is too long to cover much ground, but too short to actually tell much about any specific list item. The first list contains discussions of theatrical releases and broadcasts in Trid and SimSense format, of which only two of those could charitably be considered part of the “Trid Scene”. Some of them are in special box text, but I have no idea why. Then there is a list of more of them that aren't finished yet which are I guess supposed to be plot hooks. Only then does it get to “the point”, which is apparently talking about how to be a Shadowrunner who also works in acting. Or maybe news. Then it talks about making entertainment, but the “small video studio” metaphor is so strong that they don't even appear to be talking about SimSense and Trid production – lots of discussion about “the camera” rather than evoking visceral responses in you SimSense Stars.

The BTL Scene
Poor neglected SimSense. You'd think that BTL would be part of a SimSense chapter since it's basically the same thing. But no, SimSense got jumbled jarringly and often incoherently into the previous chapter. BTL gets a chapter all its own. And this is actually the chapter where the book's “list of random stuff that all gts several paragraphs and wordcount consuming shadowtalk” is at its most jarring. Because there's a list of beetle dens from various places in the world. And there's a bunch of shadowtalk on each one! Dev/Grrl is a child and lives in North America, how the fuck does she have the play-by-play on a BTL club in London? The story on how she came by any of that information would be way more interesting than this actual chapter. All that being said, this is the best chapter in the book. The format is grating, no one acts in character, and there is a lot of padding. So much padding that they run out of wordcount before they get to some important stuff. But most of the writing is competent, and you aren't ever left wondering whether the author is talking about 2073 or 1973.

Playing Ball
I'll admit that I always found Combat Biker to be a kind of “stupid” game. So the Playing Ball chapter was probably never intended for me. I have no idea who it is for since it gives us a writeup on one team in each sport. I'm pretty sure that the bare minimum number of teams to use a game in an adventure is two, so this whole chapter seems deeply structurally flawed. Listing the leagues really doesn't do shit for us if you don't list teams that are in those leagues. We're not talking much, just a box with the current twenty members of the Premier League or something for each sport. It would have been nice if the leagues and shit had been updated a bit more. The CBL plays basketball in “China” which isn't even a country.

Pirate Media
This chapter is certainly creative, and mostly avoids the “long, yet superficial and incomplete lists” format of much of the rest of the book. It's also thoroughly insane and I'm not sure it's even about Shadowrun. It constantly conflates “independent” and “pirate”. Except, apparently those are supposedly the same thing now. The core of the chapter is the conceit that books are against the law now. This is a fairly important point, and one I think would have been brought up at some point anywhere else in Shadowrun or even anywhere else in this book. Yes, apparently giving someone a copy of War and Peace is a crime. It's a crime whether you distribute it in paper or electronic format. Lots of other stuff is against the law too – such as recording your own music on a chip and giving or selling it to another person. But this whole Farenheit 451 future that apparently exists is so omnipresent that no one even bothered to mention it during any of the other chapters. You'd think that it would have been worth mentioning in the do-it-yourself section of the trid chapter that all forms of expression were illegal in all jurisdictions of the planet. The whole premise is just so jaw dropping d left-field that I can't even really discuss the rest of the chapter. Is it good? Is it bad? I don't know, I am not really drunk enough to grant enough willing suspension of disbelief to grant their opening premise, and I can't give the rest of the chapter a fair shake. So I won't. Moving on.

Celebrity Time
This is an eleven page story about a bounty hunter who probably faked his own death. It's supposed to be a mood piece or something. It's so out of place even in this book that I don't know what to say.

Be Your Own Boss
Finally one of the many fucking essays about Shadowrunning mentions the whole “contract work” angle. We have gotten to page 133 and we finally get there. Unfortunately, we do so in the context of discussing a format in which one runner is taking jobs and subcontracting work to specialists to form a team. That's the kind of shadowrunner team format that would certainly exist (see Charlie's Angels or Leverage for examples of this in TV format), but Shadowrun is still a cooperative storytelling game. All the player characters are ensemble protagonists. So this is another chapter of “ways some shadowrunner teams that aren't made of Player Characters are arranged”. That's really fucking pointless.

Diving Off The Edge
This chapter is a motivational friendship speech. Like in Yugioh or something. Be lucky! Believe in yourself! I believed in myself and totally shot a guy! It was awesome! This chapter is 100% filler. Maybe one of the authors read the title and decided they needed an essay about believing in yourself and your friends and the heart of the cards? I don't know.

The Right Crowd
I've mentioned this one before. The entire chapter is just one of those stupid unordered lists. This list is a pile of rich people who work in music or movies or sports or something. It has some of the lowest information densities I have ever seen. It's like an actual couple of pages from US Weekly or Teen People.

In Their Face!
Continuing with the US Weekly vibe, this next chapter is a he said/she said discussion of fashion. And it is written by Plan 9 and Dev/Grrl. Yes, really. Plan 9 is played up a tinfoil hat lunatic who literally blames the Aztlan/Amazonia war on color imbalances in shirt choices. Dev/Grrl is played up as an annoying and vapid teenage girl. The combination is extremely annoying. They say you should spend more time dressing Gothic Lolita or like a character from Mad Max. I happen to agree, but it's done in a deliberately irritating fashion that succeeds in its apparent goal to irritate me as a reader. This chapter is an incredible pain to slog through, and it even breaks character on numerous occasions to give you game rules for vests and shoes described in the in-character narrative. Which is even more jarring than you'd think at first because this chapter segues to the “compiled tables” (which are just from this chapter) with no chapter break. So when you're reading it, it appears as if all the tables are printed twice: once where they break up the text and make things hard to read, and once at the end of the chapter where at least they are out of the way. The tables aren't formatted differently when compiled, they still show up I “Urgent Message” blocks as if the typesetter has forgotten that other text boxes exist and that one looks really goofy if there are a bunch of them jammed together on a page like Tetris pieces. The narrative is also filled with incredibly dated references like Lady GaGa and Chia Pets.

And that's the whole book. Chapter by excruciating chapter. Going through all of it, I guess you could keep parts of the BTL chapter. Needs a lot of Shadowtalk gutted so I stop doing spit takes, but much of the writing is acceptable and a few of the plotlines even enjoyable.

Overall: I give this book an F. I have never been so fucking confused trying to figure out what an author was trying to say because of fundamental grammatical mistakes. Unless you count the emails I received from a paranoid ex-landlord who didn't really speak English who apparently thought that I forged bank deposit slips in order to avoid paying rent that had in reality been paid. But seriously: Attitude is on that level of not making any fucking sense most of the time. Reading it is painful and requires alcohol.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

The Music Scene

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhheiPTdZCw ?

[TheFlatline]

Is CGL hiring writers who aren't fluent in English or something?

[Rasumichin]

Playing Ball
I'll admit that I always found Combat Biker to be a kind of “stupid” game. So the Playing Ball chapter was probably never intended for me. I have no idea who it is for since it gives us a writeup on one team in each sport. I'm pretty sure that the bare minimum number of teams to use a game in an adventure is two, so this whole chapter seems deeply structurally flawed. Listing the leagues really doesn't do shit for us if you don't list teams that are in those leagues.

Wait, what?
There was a complete list of all professional American Combat Biker and Urban Brawl teams in shadowbeat.
There was also a complete list of German Urban Brawl teams in the first Germany Sourcebook.

You'd think that a book that recycles every canon musical act from the 2050s would also at least include information from Shadowbeat that is still relevant 20 ingame years later.