It's 1989 or 1992 or 2050 or 2053*, and for the next ten years this is what a street samurai looks like. I have three copies.
*
The conceit of this book is that it is an actual in-universe catalog of weapons, gear, vehicles, and cyberware, laid out like gun porn - one item to a page - that was cleverly hacked by enterprising deckers and put up for a group of people to comment on. This formed the basis for both the popular gun porn style that would stay with SR until third edition (books like Shadowtech, Cybertech, etc.), as well as the general form of the annotated sourcebook which is Shadowrun's stock in trade (and Earthdawn's as well, at least under FASA).>>>>>[Hey, has anybody out there been able to figure out why a bunch of deckers are commenting on stuff we'll never have any use for? Just thought I'd ask.]<<<<<
-The Neon Samurai <15:31:32/12-19-50>
>>>>>[Because somebody has to?]<<<<<
-Fastjack <23:12:31/12-21-50>
>>>>>[Because we're really vile, malicious, back-stabbing, rumormongers at heart?]<<<<<
-Findler-Man <03:42:45/12-23-50>
>>>>>[I'll buy that.]<<<<<
-Nightfire <13:31:42/12-24-50>
>>>>>[You would. You get paid enough. Oh and hey, Merry Christmas.]<<<<<
-Fastjack <02:33:16/12-25-50>
This book is so old that the contact information might as well be ancient Egyptian:
This wasn't technically the first time players had heard of FastJack, but it was the first time to really meet what would become the most legendary decker in the Matrix - mainly because he continued to exist when so many handles were one-shot jokes that were used once and then forgotten. Jokes-in-passing like Neil the Ork Barbarian quickly became perennial staples of the setting, while shout-outs like "Zapper Weisman" sort of get lost in the noise. The first appearance of Dunkelzahn posting on the Matrix is also a treat, back before he started calling himself The Big 'D'.FASA COrporation can be reached on the GEnie computer network (E. Mail--FASA) on SCORPIA'S Roundtable (page 805) and on America Online (E. Mail--FASALou (Earthdawn), FASABryan (BattleTech), FASAMike (SHadowrun and General Harrassment) or FASA Art (Art Comments) in the Online Gaing area (Keyword "Gaming")). Via InterNet use <AOL Account Name>@AOL.COM, but please, no list or server subscriptions. Thanks!
I should mention that I love Tom Dowd's writing, for striking that perfect balance between the artificially enthusiastic salespitch description of the equipment versus the cynical, dry undercutting of the decker's comments below.
The weapons are a mix between modern firearms and bizarre efforts to create technological versions of magical weapons, like the monofilament sword and laser crescent axe. Forearm snap-on blades for Wolverine cosplay enthusiasts.
Some of these weapons are questionable - the survival knife, okay, is just a slight improvement on the basic knife available in SRII at fifteen times the price ("Manufactured to UCAS Marine specifications.") probably because of the trauma patch, glow stick, and compass in the handle. Other weapons are just bizarrely antiquated - the combat axe, special arrows for composite bows, that sort of shit - it's really just D&D stereotypical medieval gear tweaked and enhanced for a high-technology setting. We're lucky they didn't have power gloves...oh wait, shock gloves. Never mind.
I can't speak much on the gun porn, because I'm not much into gun porn. My favorite gun porn was a 12-issue comic book limited series called "The Punisher Armory" which talked in loving detail about ammo capacity, recoil, and little doodads and things that only matter to people who know what the fuck they're doing. Me, I know enough about guns to know you don't point them at anything or anyone you don't want to shoot. I do also know enough to recognize that the SSC references a lot of real-world firearm manufacturers and brands in addition to the fictional stuff, which again helps set the tone for the setting.
Still, I will mention the first bit of what I like to call "upgrade equipment" - the Ares Predator II and Browning UltraPower. I don't know when exactly the Ares Predator became the default and characteristic weapon of street samurai and player characters, but I know why - it was the best heavy pistol available in the main sourcebook, with the Browning MaxPower a close second. The Ares Predator II was the first in a line of guns, with the Predator getting a new version about every edition, sort of a rolling benchmark for default badass. Similarly, the Colt Manhunter series begins in this volume.
The idea of newer and better equipment as the setting advanced in time was actually very clever; the technological improvement gave a better reason for PCs to upgrade through equipment than finding older and more powerful magical goods.
The Beretta 200ST wasn't quite the forebearer of the machine pistol in SR, but it did introduce the idea of playing with the firing modes - this means nothing to anybody that didn't play the game, but you can see this reach it's fullest expression many years later in Cannon Companion when they finally introduced a system to design and build your own gun.
One thing the Street Samurai Catalog got right was that it was the Big Gunz book in addition to just the Different Gunz book. This is important to understand if you've ever faced a table full of different kinds of polearms with only minimal differences between the guisarme and the bill-guisarme in terms of price and effectiveness. So the SSC wasn't just about introducing new stuff that any character could pick up and use, it was catering to the more combat-oriented characters with combat shotguns, sniper rifles, and later on more heavy military-grade equipment - and this, as someone notes, in a civilian weapon's catalog being pitched by the guys that write SkyMall today.
Speaking of which, apparently magazines still exist in 2050 because the May issue of Street Fighting Man declared the Ingram Smartgun "The Street Samurai's Sidekick."
PP.34-5 are perhaps the most famous, because these are the "Banned" items - Firepower(TM) ammo and IPE grenades. Which were, simply, slightly more powerful (in terms of damage) ammo and grenades available in the SRI version of the SSC, removed in SRII because the damage system had received a minor overhaul to remove damage staging*. Because roleplaying printing was primitive back then and all the page numbers and whatnot were actual graphics, instead of deleting the two pages FASA just printed something blocking the pages - but there are two distinct versions. The first, and most common has huge black letters saying:
Which completely conceals the artwork, stats, shadowcomments, everything on the page. The second, and I believe rarer, version has a solid black box concealing the stats/shadowtalk area, with the same text as above (though not sized), leaving the artwork for the entries visible. Both versions say they are the "Corrected Third Printing." So I dunno.**BANNED!
THIS ITEM
PURGED IN SHADOWRUN II!
*
STOP!
GEGENSTAND
IN SHADOWRUN II
GESTRICHEN
with text and artwork still partially visible in the background.
Also new in this volume: forearm guards and form-fitting body armor, beginning a never-ending cycle of rules and rule-patches and arguments over layering body armor which would not reach it's zenith until gel pack armor mods came in with Fields of Fire. Seriously though, all this shit is the distant, primordial forebear to reams of equipment in later books - the vast majority of which was updated and included in each edition. The sheer amount of crap in SSC and related books is at least partially why the one-page one-image format had to go - there was too much stuff; the Cannon Companion would have been a three-inch thick phonebook and the FBI probably would have come knocking...
I'm on p.52, and I should have mentioned this before, but it appears Czechoslavakia is still a going concern in SR1. And they have Mechanized Forces.
Another weapon set up for continual upgrade is the Area MP Laser, which started off as the most expensive, least practical weapon in the game (2.5 million, 30 kilograms, 20 shots but your buddy has to carry the battery because it's too damn heavy). It proved so popular new versions would come out ever so often, generally cheaper, more powerful, and more practicable. Which is true of SR equipment in general.
Also introduced: Narcoject(TM) ! Which is sort of like the Drow Sleep Poison of SR, except the way that Shadowrun's Stun damage overflows to physical damage, woefully overpowered. You can kill just about anybody with these things but shooting them unconscious and then shooting their body until they were corpses.
Armor-piercing ammunition, riot shield, net guns, general purpose heavy machine guns, yadda yadda...a riot-control vehicle that cost upwards of three and a half million nuyen, but don't worry because you can blow out its tires with your two-and-a-half-million dollar laser...
Cyberware! Because grade-A bang-bang is not all that makes a Street Samurai, the SSC also included some the first cyberware outside the main book, with the standard format of showing the implant in relation to where in the body it would be placed. Most of it's pretty standard, unexceptional stuff that would be generic in later editions; space fillers like the Select Sound System that I have never ever ever actually seen used in play.
Skill Hardwires were permanently removed, probably because they were too suck (if you got them low) or too awesome (if you got them high). They were cyberware that permanently gave you a given Active skill at a designated rating, which could never be lowered, improved, or altered in any way - so if you were implanted with Unarmed Combat 1, you became everybody's bitch. Forever.
Working The Streets
After the goodies, there's an in-character section on being a street samurai that last two pages.
Then we get rules for Cyberware damage, repair, upgrading, and customization - I love that in upgrading they never bothered to correct "cybrware" in the header. I don't think they could. I think this whole book was put together old-school style, the different parts printed out, cut and pasted together, and then scanned and memexed or whatever the fuck they did back when Xerox was the bleeding edge of self-publishing.
Bargain basement or "Second hand" cyberware wouldn't really come into it's own until Shadowtech, when you could be used superhearts from shady men in trenchcoats, but this was basically a way you could get expensive cyberware a little cheaper if you didn't mind buying used and maybe having it fail hilariously at the worst time. The last line of this section:
Then we get a selection of character Archetypes. Now, originally character Archetypes in the main book were basically sample characters, and later on in Sprawl Sites were sort of stock characters, so I was never clear if they were all supposed to be characters you could potentially put together using standard character generation or not, but in later books they definitely went with "stock characters." Anyway, the archetypes in this book include Dwarf, Elf, Ork, and Troll Street Samurai - the artwork is by Laubenstein and bares only the tiniest relevance to what equipment the characters may actually have listed, and because this was the early 90s, the Ork has a mullet and the troll is wearing fishnet sandles. I swear to Ghost, you can see his toes through them.This option should only be used to add fun to the game, and not as an excuse for sudden character mortality.
Then we have the Big Table o' Stuff, which were quite critical in Shadowrun back in the day and continue to be popular today. Much of the major supplemental books for SR4 include pages of tables.
And finally we end with a standard SRII character sheet, with "Permission to Photocopy" granted along the bottom. Very typical for its day.