The Gaming Den

That sounds kinda like how game of thrones is praised for surprise killings

Frank Trollman wrote: Shadowrun's lack of Africa content is a disgrace. It's not a unique disgrace in the sense that I legitimately cannot think of a major low fantasy title that how non-disgraceful treatment of any part of Africa other than perhaps Egypt.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying I have an OSSR request:
http://palladium-store.com/1001/product ... frica.html

Although Rifts is in a gray area for whether it's low fantasy or not. Germany and Texas still exist but Paris doesn't and NYC is run by mutants and laser knights. The Dying Earth and Elric novels are both High Fantasy even though it's supposed to be our own earth or something. Rifts is about halfway there.

Rifts has "Racial Character Classes" and some of these are pygmies. But, the treatment of Medicine Men and Rainmakers is almost respectful! It'll be an interesting review.

OgreBattle wrote:That sounds kinda like how game of thrones is praised for surprise killings

I think that's a good point of discussion. The Death of Ned Stark is actually one of the greatest pieces of fantasy writing in the modern era. The death of Rob Stark is a vapid waste of the reader's time that takes hundreds of pages of reader investment and plot development and just throws it away for absolutely nothing.

The deaths of point of view characters in Shadowboxer are more similar to the death of Rob Stark. Although they also aren't even artistic and horrifying or anything. The people who were interacting with the plot as the reader understands it simply die and parts of the plot stumble on as if the remaining characters have any motive or ability to interact with it despite that being obviously not true.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:So from the standpoint of being a Shadowrun book it does a very bad job and causes a lot of fan rage. It fails in ways a standalone book couldn't.

Eh, far from alone in that. Oh the long lost days of CS Goto and marines with multilasers, which was somehow worse than anything else he wrote. And that was pre-Matt Ward, didn't know when we were well off.

Anyhoo, how would you have done the book (Cyberpirates!) better? I've always thought that if you were coming up with political boundaries for the future, you could just draw lines randomly on a map and say it was due to politicking from some major powers somewhere else (Border between North Korea and South Korea style) rather than anything that made lots of sense on the ground. Only in areas where the major powers aren't, of course.

Goodness, that (I hesitate to call it a novel) piece of garbage sounds like the sort of thing I'd ditch within half an hour of sitting down to read it.

Yeah, Ned Stark's death actually represented both the heroes and the villains taking a big complicated L and set the table for a bunch of other stuff to happen. Sure, it takes some convenient developments and a big swerve to get there, but the swerve happens because smart people are taken by surprise when an entitled shit weasel continued to act like an entitled shit weasel. So even if the events are kinda convoluted the characterizations felt on point and satisfying. In retrospect my biggest criticism of the series is that it wasn't smaller in scope. If it had just been the Ned Stark arc leading up to war and Joffrey's comeuppance that could have been a really satisfying story right there. Kid was basically just a human-shaped turd.