The Shadowrun Situation

[Semerkhet]

An artist I know who did some work for CGL refereed to Randall as "A joke who seemed like he was delivering pizzas yesterday and has no idea how to do the job he's been handed today". Randall hired Jason.

I haven't worked with Jason Hardy long enough to make any judgments about skill. I can say that he has been extremely generous with his time when I've asked questions and very receptive to feedback when I've offered my opinions. I may not always agree with his philosophy or decisions but I cannot say that he isn't listening.

Good luck getting some order back in the place. It does seem like once you're in they will give as much work as you will take. Just make sure you're compensated for it.

Proofreaders get comped a copy of the books they help proofread. That's not enough compensation to give it a high priority. I hardly looked at the middle chapters of Attitude because other things in my life took priority at that time. There is a large enough pool of proofreaders that at least a few people will be looking at a given chapter. That said, a handful of the proofreader pool did the lion's share of the work on Attitude as a whole, and I do not include myself on that list.

[Username17]

An artist I know who did some work for CGL refereed to Randall as "A joke who seemed like he was delivering pizzas yesterday and has no idea how to do the job he's been handed today". Randall hired Jason.

Good luck getting some order back in the place. It does seem like once you're in they will give as much work as you will take. Just make sure you're compensated for it.

Sort of.

Catalyst's output is really small. Remember, Attitude had twelve authors. Consider Critias' word count for the moment. 5.3k words. That's something I squeeze out in two or three days when I am writing prose working on alt.war. Obviously formatting charts takes longer, but he wasn't asked or allowed to do any of that. And he wasn't supposedly doing his own editing or typesetting - that's even more people.

So put that in perspective: Critias was allowed to do as much directed writing as I do after school on the days my girlfriend works late in one week. And he joined their illustrious crew in august. To do "emergency writing" for a book that was already months overdue. That experience is not unique by a longshot.

Catalyst has a labor glut. As it has always had. It's one of the reasons I do not understand why or how bad writers or writers with poor English or writers with a poor grasp of the rules are allowed to keep their jobs. Catalyst does not need them. It doesn't need any specific person at all, and it never did. If they had half as many people writing on Attitude, that would still be too many people. And the really insulting part is that it's so shallow that it honestly could have been done in a month. It's not like anyone was asking them to write 70 years of Siamese military history or anything. They are writing petty internet flame wars about basketball players. Pretty much everything could be phoned in with little or no research. Those few places where research was done actually made the book more annoying, by giving writeups of singers who died twenty years in the past as if they were hip and relevant.

But sure. If you suck the right wang, you could make it all the way up to being one of the writer's with first pass on sections for books. But you're still looking at writing 10-20k a book and the schedule seems to be about 4-6 books a year. And most of the regulars don't even get that much. If you got a long piece in every book, and they hit quotas that they haven't made ever, you'd have over a hundred thousand words a year. At my levels of output, I could seriously be juggling five companies like that without a lot of strain.

But since what actually happens is that Jason sits on his ass for four months at a time and then hands you a writing or rewriting assignment that is double secret urgent, it's still too much of a pain in the ass for someone like me to put up with.

-Username17

[adamjury]

This mostly just suggests that whoever was managing you and Semerkhet was not doing their job.

By the time the proofreaders are going over the laid-out PDFs, the authors are not consulted for every change (in my experience, they are rarely consulted at all -- only if they are needed to help solve a problem in the text). This is after the authors have handed in the second draft, after the dev-edit has happened, after it has gone through to layout.

By this time, hopefully, the authors are busy writing first or second drafts for another project.

[Semerkhet]

This mostly just suggests that whoever was managing you and Semerkhet was not doing their job.

By the time the proofreaders are going over the laid-out PDFs, the authors are not consulted for every change (in my experience, they are rarely consulted at all -- only if they are needed to help solve a problem in the text). This is after the authors have handed in the second draft, after the dev-edit has happened, after it has gone through to layout.

By this time, hopefully, the authors are busy writing first or second drafts for another project.

This is a good time to point out something that has obviously changed in the time since Adam left CGL. Proofreaders are now given Word documents before layout. I can't quantify how much this impacts the overall process but I was told that this change was made to give a bit more time for proofreading and to focus the readers on text rather than layout issues.

[adamjury]

That's interesting, hope it works out well. We did that occasionally when I was there, but it wasn't the standard.

I hope you guys get to see and proof the layout drafts, too.

[sabs]

Sigh, I miss the FASA guys.. I mean, they did have some turds. But they also had some really fun stuff. I used to pick up Shadowrun books just to read the shadowtalk comments, and watch hatchetman whine about unprofessional loser runners.

[Ancient History]

To put what Frank was saying in context, my largest assignment for a single book - and that was a collection of chapters - topped out just shy of 40k words deliverable. By the time I terminated my contracts, I was writing 25-30k in multiple books simultaneously - 28k in Corp Guide, 24k in Sixth World Almanac, 39.5k for Harlequin's Gambit, and a nominal 20k for PACKS in Runner's Toolkit, on top of little stuff here and there. I never owed more than about 60k across two or three projects at a time, but I was cranking at the end there.

(Also, I once wrote 17k in a day to get something in on deadline. But that was a very unusual situation.)

By contrast, when I started out I was lucky to get a 5k section in a book, and I did a lot of collaboration work, splitting 25k or 30k projects with a partner or two.

[attackdrone]

Sigh, I miss the FASA guys...

I was reading through my copy of Shadows of North America (2002, 3rd Edition) and I must add that I miss the WizKids / FanPro era as well. 14 (17 if you count secondary authors) people are credited for the writing, yet it still manages to meld together well. I suppose the format might be the cause: create a list of nations and give information on each in sequence.

[Username17]

Sigh, I miss the FASA guys...

I was reading through my copy of Shadows of North America (2002, 3rd Edition) and I must add that I miss the WizKids / FanPro era as well. 14 (17 if you count secondary authors) people are credited for the writing, yet it still manages to meld together well. I suppose the format might be the cause: create a list of nations and give information on each in sequence.

Yeah, this was a great format for large writing pools. Check out Shadows of Asia, because it tells you who was writing which sections. There are 15 authors working on the thing, but there are never more than 4 people on any section. And even that section is merely the "Rest of Asia" section. The parts that are supposed to hold together narratively never have more than 3 cooks.

Yes, there is some stupid shit: like how Peter Taylor wrote up India as the undisputed #1 power on the planet - a unified, weather manipulating magocracy with 10 million mages in it - that miraculously hadn't been mentioned in any previous books despite wielding literally more military might than any two other countries combined because of herp and also derp. But in general the book holds up pretty well.

Mostly I credit the fact that in Shadows of Asia you had five people other than Jason Hardy editing. And in Attitude, he is editing alone. And I have reason to believe that a number of those five other people were individually much more competent and active as editors.

-Username17

[attackdrone]

Yeah, this was a great format for large writing pools. Check out Shadows of Asia, because it tells you who was writing which sections...

-Username17

I will definitely check that out; that book slipped in during the interim period between my Shadowrun 3rd campaigns and Shadowrun 4th campaign and consequently had avoided inclusion in my collection. The more pertinent question is: "Are there maps included?" A properly organized map, chart, or graph is worth more to me as a gamemaster than ten pages of filler. Filler is much faster to create myself for my campaigns than maps.

[Username17]

Yeah, this was a great format for large writing pools. Check out Shadows of Asia, because it tells you who was writing which sections...

-Username17

I will definitely check that out; that book slipped in during the interim period between my Shadowrun 3rd campaigns and Shadowrun 4th campaign and consequently had avoided inclusion in my collection. The more pertinent question is: "Are there maps included?" A properly organized map, chart, or graph is worth more to me as a gamemaster than ten pages of filler. Filler is much faster to create myself for my campaigns than maps.

Oh yes it does. Not only does it have regional maps for each area like this one:



But it also has a pig perspective map on the whole continent at the beginning of the book:



I go to Shadows of Asia pretty much exclusively when I'm writing history and making maps for Alt.War. Unlike 6WA, the maps actually match the text. Which is why my regional maps for Alt.War look like this:



-Username17

[Fucks]

Yes, there is some stupid shit: like how Peter Taylor wrote up India as the undisputed #1 power on the planet - a unified, weather manipulating magocracy with 10 million mages in it - that miraculously hadn't been mentioned in any previous books despite wielding literally more military might than any two other countries combined because of herp and also derp. But in general the book holds up pretty well.

1 billion citizens of which 1% are magically active. So what?

[Otakusensei]

Yes, there is some stupid shit: like how Peter Taylor wrote up India as the undisputed #1 power on the planet - a unified, weather manipulating magocracy with 10 million mages in it - that miraculously hadn't been mentioned in any previous books despite wielding literally more military might than any two other countries combined because of herp and also derp. But in general the book holds up pretty well.

1 billion citizens of which 1% are magically active. So what?

That's... a lot of mages. 1% always seems low until you scale it. In a magocracy those guys are also the big players. It's kind of scary when you think about it.

In a mundane social system the other 99 people who don't have political or social power are physically as powerful as their more privileged "upper class" counterparts. In a dark alley everything is equal. Not so in SR India. In a dark alley the other 99 are engulfed in flames and mind controlled to like it that way.

That picture a few dozen pages back of the chicken farm was an eye opener. If 1% of anything is naturally paranormal, scale can be a very scary thing.

[Username17]

Yes, there is some stupid shit: like how Peter Taylor wrote up India as the undisputed #1 power on the planet - a unified, weather manipulating magocracy with 10 million mages in it - that miraculously hadn't been mentioned in any previous books despite wielding literally more military might than any two other countries combined because of herp and also derp. But in general the book holds up pretty well.

1 billion citizens of which 1% are magically active. So what?

They are presented as having normal rates of magic and have an organized network of mages running everything who adopt all the mages born in the country into the ruling classes who control the weather on a global scale. It's not an unreasonable country to exist in Shadowrun, it's just an unreasonable country to bring in at the 11th hour of 3rd edition. No one had ever said "It's going to rain tomorrow, India permitting" in any Shadowrun book. It was totally left field.

All the big countries in Shadowrun fell apart. The US, Russia, China, Germany, all shattered. Even France, Italy, and the United Kingdom have lost chunks. The super powers of the setting are Mexico, Brazil, and Japan. That's the way it has always been. Peter's section in Shadows of Asia just casually mentions that India is bigger and more powerful than any two of those countries combined.

In Shadowrun, population is power in a very substantial way. It was irresponsible, even incomprehensible to decide that there was an extra secret country with over a billion people in it that no one had happened to mention earlier. And to blithely announce that the whole country is a mage breeding program on top of that was kicking the insanity up to 11. It was also incredibly lazy: yeah a sixth of the world is just one giant super country that decides when it rains and when it shines. And we never mentioned that earlier because herp and also derp.

For India to have earned the deafening silence it received in earlier books it had to have been as fractured as China or even as fractured as Africa. Failing to write some such explanatory event into the Indian Subcontinent was the book's biggest failure.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Now that you mention it . . yeah, i don't think i remember india being mentioned ANYWHERE else o.O

[Rasumichin]

Now that you mention it . . yeah, i don't think i remember india being mentioned ANYWHERE else o.O

The only previous mentions are about how VITAS wiped out large parts of the population and how common ghouls where in the rural parts (both from the SR2 BBB).

They could have run with this, turning India into a largely depopulated, ghoul-infested wilderness with a few poorly walled-of sprawls inbetween and would have avoided the whole weather control mess.
Or they could have turned the magocracy's rise into a campaign instead of just letting it pop up out of nowhere.
They could have mentioned tens of thousands, if not millions of mages leaving the country to work in a place where they don't risk getting eaten by ghouls.
They could have combined all versions easily as well, with the breakdown of the country explaining why it took the mages so long to expand their influence internationally, and with a large number of former expatriate mages suddenly moving back to their homeland after things have turned in their favor.

Barely mentioning India before was a major oversight, but it could have been dealt with in ways that would have meshed with existing fluff.

[sabs]

the problem with "Vitas wiped out large chuncks, and now there's giant roving bands of Ghouls" is that.. that's what they did with Africa. It's what they've done with every 3rd world setting they couldn't be arsed to figure out properly.

[Username17]

the problem with "Vitas wiped out large chuncks, and now there's giant roving bands of Ghouls" is that.. that's what they did with Africa. It's what they've done with every 3rd world setting they couldn't be arsed to figure out properly.

Doesn't mean it's bad though. Yes, someone needed to actually write up a bunch of countries in Africa and India. They don't need long descriptions, but they do need some basic statistics. For Alt.War I have 9 countries making up the "Indian Union". For Sub Saharan Africa I have 29. Something like that should have been done a long time ago.

Writing "Here be black people" in crayon all over Africa is insulting. But it is at least consistent with not having listed any African countries or global influence before hand. Sooner or later, you need to fill that shit in. And when you do, it needs to be filled in with a bunch of countries that are individually not that powerful. If you scrawl it in with one mega-empire that dwarfs other countries, it strains credibility that you just put "here be negroes" earlier.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

however that works, if VITAS has wiped out so many people . .
first, there's not that many to change into ghouls to begin with.
second, if there's enough ghouls and not other people left over,
the ghouls start fighting/eating each other keeping themselves
down to smaller warbands scavenging for food anywhere . .

[sabs]

I'm not saying 10 Million Mageocracy isn't an issue. It's a big issue. A country organized by a ruling class of 10 Million Awakened people who are trained from birth? That shit is bad, it completely breaks the world.

What they did for India and Africa went from insulting to idiotic. Though at least with Africa they never tried to make a big african country. Africa is still basically painted with the "There Be Negroes" brush.

Of course, a lot of things breaks the world. 30,000 Catholic Mages in Quebec for example is pretty bad too.

[TheFlatline]

Considering India to be such a developing nation over the past 10 years or so, I would imagine that India would be one of the first countries to be balkanized when megas become sovereign.

Not only that, but a magocracy potentially could have a hard time culturally coming together, specifically because of the religious caste system. I could see the higher castes that aren't awakened saying that awakened babies are below untouchable, and that euthanizing them would be preferable.

That's barring the corporate balkanization of course. I'd expect India to be part and parcel property of a dozen different A-AAA megas, with all those people serving as raw human resources.

[Gnosticism Is A Hoot]

Considering India to be such a developing nation over the past 10 years or so, I would imagine that India would be one of the first countries to be balkanized when megas become sovereign.

Seriously, this. India is a federalist state with widely different sub-units right now. The fact that it hasn't balkanised already is a minor miracle.

[virgil]

Tiny question: is the awakened trait hereditary? I'm wondering whether or not there are any countries in the SR world who attempt eugenics because of this. At the very least, I can imagine the look of disappointment a mage parent would have towards their muggle kid.

[Quantumboost]

Tiny question: is the awakened trait hereditary? I'm wondering whether or not there are any countries in the SR world who attempt eugenics because of this. At the very least, I can imagine the look of disappointment a mage parent would have towards their muggle kid.

As I understand it, the Awakened trait is genetic, in that an identical twin of an awakened person is very likely to Awaken, but not hereditary in any really controllable fashion. It's also tremendously difficult to determine whether someone will ever be an Awakened until it actually happens.

[TheFlatline]

Tiny question: is the awakened trait hereditary? I'm wondering whether or not there are any countries in the SR world who attempt eugenics because of this. At the very least, I can imagine the look of disappointment a mage parent would have towards their muggle kid.

As I understand it, the Awakened trait is genetic, in that an identical twin of an awakened person is very likely to Awaken, but not hereditary in any really controllable fashion. It's also tremendously difficult to determine whether someone will ever be an Awakened until it actually happens.

But from what I understand genetic manipulation doesn't work, either for mages or technomancers.