Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2015 5:32 pm
I remember the anti-technology fields. Gah.
Both of those are afaik Pre-Pegasus. München Noir was the last Fanpro/Freelance book before the Pegasus sale, and the immortal dwarfs are from Das zerrissene Land, which was a funny read, but 0% Shadowrun. Ok, 1% SR, but they had shoppingmalls with autocannon-rototurrets on top, so ... yeah.Ancient History wrote:Oh, we're not even talking FanPro - I think the Bavaria sourcebook was third-party, wasn't it? And the whole Immortal Dwarf nonsense.
Seriously??? Oh, boy. As Stahlseele pointed out, Pegasus has quite a reputation here.FrankTrollman wrote:I don't know if you'd read the SR5 writing credits, but German freelancers are writing the Catalyst shit. And it's bad. Really bad.
Not only is that one of the things that are slowly being retconned away with the new ADL-Unity in the new books, it doesn't really matter. I played SR several years, and I never met anyone, on- and offline, who played outside Hamburg, Berlin or the SOX for more than 2-3 weeks. Rhein-Ruhr got a new shiny book, but still, those three places are really the only one that matter, in my opinion.(W)e're talking about "Me Tooisms" for all the North American splinter countries inside fucking Germany.
I laughed at this more than I should've.Ancient History wrote:Like that, but with ghouls and cyberware.
Despite Bug City book sucking for content evidently, Is Feral Cities conductive to more content with that set-up? Doesn't sound as exciting, once have Chicago's storyline "resolved" (although with shattergraves, didn't need that storyline in the first damn place).AncientHistory wrote:Bug City was an prison filled with desperate people struggling through daily horror and deprivation, shellshocked masses stuck in a ghetto with monsters,
Chicago in Feral Cities, then, is the cyberpunk grey area, the "open space" that can allow extralegal communities to bloom. Chicago in Bug City is...not.
Immortal Dwarves sound fraggin awesome, and I see why not. If SR is allowed to have stupid pointless Mary-Sue Elves, then we can have efficient Illuminati Dwarves. Immortal Ork Lich thief I think also sounded awesome, and curious what details on him, as I'll bet he'd make for a cool SR story-arc than any of the Mary-Sue Elf BS or Kefka Elf (aka Harlequin).And the whole Immortal Dwarf nonsense.
Oddly enough when I brought this up to our SR group, the DM mostly ignored the fact they eat dead bodies, and think just like eating dead bodies in general. Is the ficiton on Ghouls eating people in general so strongly suggests to common readers they just eat people like zombies in general, opposed to wanting to be the guys that eat Zombies?FrankTrollman wrote:But like everything about this book and it's understanding of ghoul issues, it's really quite terribad.
Or we might do some of the more gonzo location books like Cyberpirates!
Well, that's the rub. You already have locations in Seattle which are basically lawless no-man's-land types where gangs and mobs rule. So for Chicago, we really had to break out the jams and try and find good reasons why 1) people would still be there, and 2) why player character shadowrunners would want to go there. I'd like to think we did that, but I'm biased.Aryxbez wrote:Despite Bug City book sucking for content evidently, Is Feral Cities conductive to more content with that set-up? Doesn't sound as exciting, once have Chicago's storyline "resolved" (although with shattergraves, didn't need that storyline in the first damn place).AncientHistory wrote:Bug City was an prison filled with desperate people struggling through daily horror and deprivation, shellshocked masses stuck in a ghetto with monsters,
Chicago in Feral Cities, then, is the cyberpunk grey area, the "open space" that can allow extralegal communities to bloom. Chicago in Bug City is...not.
Wouldn't this have been a substantial nerf to possession mages?Frank wrote:If I'd had my way, inhabitation would have simply been the binding alternative to possession magic, which would have meant that Loa Zombies and Insect Hybrids would use the exact same rules.
Why? If I read this right, then Inhabitation would be stronger than Possession, not Possession weaker than it currently is. And since Inhabitation is like Blood Magic - for deathevil mages only, butthurt of houngans shouldn't be all that great.Orion wrote:Wouldn't this have been a substantial nerf to possession mages?Frank wrote:If I'd had my way, inhabitation would have simply been the binding alternative to possession magic, which would have meant that Loa Zombies and Insect Hybrids would use the exact same rules.
I loved that box set!I'm tempted to draw parallels between Bug City and the Parlainth Boxed Set released the previous year, because they're both essentially stand-alone tourist destinations in their respective settings, more or less. Parlainth was even more of a ready-made dungeon setting, however, complete with a fucking town attached that was literally named "Haven" and existed for the same purpose as villages in goddamned Diablo 3.
This is correct. However, you also get your bound spirits for an amount of time rather than an amount of services. So Houngans have to carry their zombies around in a van rather than having bound spirits teleport in to possess whatever happened to be around. But they also would get to have their spirits do whatever was required of them for weeks at a time. So they'd get to use bound spirits for trivial tasks like concealing cars or harvesting sugar cane. And the big "evil" inhabitation option was to bind spirits into living hosts to extend their stay indefinitely.Orion wrote:I interpreted it to mean that when you use the Binding skill on a possession spirit, you have to bind it permanently into one vessel. This means that Houngans lose the ability to keep a huge bound spirit in their back pocket and use it to possess enemies, or just use it to to bind spells or sustain powers without having to carry anything physical around with them.
The John Carpenter film Escape from New York best exemplifies the Containment Zone in Chicago--with the added distraction of the horrifying, voracious, alien bug spirits.
Bug City wrote:Information on insect spirits previously appeared in the second edition Grimoire sourcebook (Grimoire II) and in the adventures Queen Euphoria, Universal Brotherhood, and Double Exposure. The game statistics, as well as the methods and powers of insect spirits, Queens, and insect shamans varied from each of the products to the next, mainly to keep both players and characters unsure of what they faced. These rules change the insect spirits yet again, but game masters should feel free to use the version of the insect rules that best fit their game. The numbers really don't matter – the horror of the bugs goes deeper than mere game statistics.
It's not writing that's lazy and bad, it's mysterious. And maybe also a little bit lazy and bad.Bug City's advice to Gms wrote:Feel free to make these tasks seem utterly senseless and unrelated.
Albeit its from theMain SR thread, this is a burning question I promised myself I would re-ask to the Reviewing authors, once the review ended. Albeit I feel part of the review may've "quasi" answered it with the Renraku Arcology adventure, and likely the general notion behind SR scenarios are that:Longes wrote:Since we are talking about Bug City, which places in the SR universe are actually worth visiting for the team of runners not native to those places?
However, all the same, I am quite curious to the "better" SR locations, or even just ones the authors would suggest, and why.I think it's important to realize that when Bug City came out it was well-received, and even today is remembered very fondly. Not so much for the actual writing or the thought that went behind the logistics - it was the concept and art that sold it, much like Dark Sun.
One big problem is that every location book, and I mean every single one has some real wall bangers in it. Some it's more than others.Aryxbex wrote:However, all the same, I am quite curious to the "better" SR locations, or even just ones the authors would suggest, and why.
Basically none of the responses to Insect Spirits make a lot of sense. In Threats 2, the plotline where Ares is working with some hives that are planting their spirits into animals and not people is called "Betrayal" and we're all supposed to get super mad at Ares for selling out the human race... by successfully convincing space monsters to not kill humans and then fight against other space monsters who do. I don't even know why I'm supposed to get upset about that decision. It's like the authors were so used to writing up various groups as Team Red Laser that they forgot that villains actually have to do bad things to be worthy of the title.Juton wrote:I had never stopped to think about how the UCAS government tried to handle this but how they did it in this book just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Thanks for writing this, it was quite entertaining.
Or maybe you just wanted an excuse to post a rainbow colored horse cock...Ancient History wrote:Fuck, the Vulgar Unicorn didn't stay the same throughout half a dozen anthologies! Evolve or die.
Goddamnit I can't find an appropriate depiction of the sign of the Vulgar Unicorn, so here's a rainbow colored horse cock. NSFW.
What did they ask you to put in?Ancient History wrote:AncientH:
I can't throw stones; when we were writing Neo-Tokyo for Corporate Enclaves the Japanese asked we change a couple references - an atomic-bomb themed restaurant and a WWII memorial protest - and we did it. Mostly because at that point we ignored all the shit they did ask us to put in, because it sounded like something out of an anime.
Ok folks, as one of the people who kickstarted Shadowrun Online (now known as Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown), I got the ebook of Lockdown and spent the last few hours reading it. So, I came up with a thread for spoilers for Lockdown, and will post here. This is massive spoilers, please do not look any further if you do NOT want to be spoiled.
In short, major shit happens that changes the Sixth World forever, we get a lot more info on headcases (mostly because we have a massive dragon assisted outbreak of those) and adventures that can literally change the Sixth World and its players.
Let's see:
The Great Dragon Eliohann, who was seemingly taken out in the Crash 2.0/Deus wars, is still comatose, but his "soul" is still in the Matrix (in Cerberus, his Matrix icon)
Celedyr arranges for a surgery to try to reunite the two, using a version of the headcrash nanovirus to attempt to "re-write" Cerberus into Eliohann's body. Something goes wrong. It always does, but this time, it's.. um.. spectacularly bad. You see, there's two "life" forms in that nanovirus: Cerberus.. and Deus. (yes, it's back)
Eliohann/Cerberus/Deus (I'm just going to call them ECD) escapes the procedur, and in a confused state, flies away, eventually crashing into Fenway Park. Literally, as in "Great Dragon takes out the Green Monster".
The big uh-oh is that along with the problems of a Great Dragon at war with itself is that during ECD's escape from the surgery, it brought an iridescent rain on Boston. A rain full of nanobots with two Intelligences fighting each other inside those nanites.
(All together now: Uh-oh!)
People who get exposed to the rain get infected by the Headcrash virus and get overwritten. Some with a majority of Deus, some with a majority of Ceberus, some with a mix of both. Quite many die of the nanites overwriting their brain (it's being called an encephalititis attack). Others go insane (the original personality is locked out of control, but can watch everything happen).
Boston gets locked down (of course, you figured that out) hard, Nothing in or out. This is a tighter lockdown then even Bug City was, with good reason. No power except for absolute essentials (like water, sometimes). Air drops of food and other supplies more like "Fly at super high altitude, drop it technically outside Boston Metroplex borders and let momentum take it in to the City proper and trigger the parachute at some point)
There are three corps that are at risk here. NeoNET (the folks behind the experiment to "cure" Eliohann), Aztechnology (Participants in the experiment), and Evo (the original progenitors of the CFD Virus). If the players can figure out who was behind of it, those three corps are in deep stinky corp-destroying drek. In fact, one of the offers that the players receive is from a AA corp that offers 2.5 Million for the team, plus 1% voting stock for each runner (so your runner team could be 5% owners in a newly made AAA corp). The AA corp wants the info so they can take it to the Corporate Court, and strip one or more of the three corps at risk here of their AAA status (with the AA corp getting their status in return). Quite a few of the offers are "buy your own island and retire" levels, but that was the one that jumped out at me first
Apparently, they have a site set up for DM's and players to report how the deal went down, and which option their players took in their campaigns, and that Catalyst are going to take the results of this and from Shadowrun Chronicles players into changing the storyline.
What happened to "Matrix and Magic never mesh"?The Great Dragon Eliohann, who was seemingly taken out in the Crash 2.0/Deus wars, is still comatose, but his "soul" is still in the Matrix (in Cerberus, his Matrix icon)
Le Sigh. SHODAN is scarry because she actually built a race of cybermonsters to serve her, and you are stuck in a confined space with nowhere to run. Deus is locked with you in the Renraku Arcology - scary. Deus is wrecking havok around the world - call the army, don't bother with the shadowrunners.You see, there's two "life" forms in that nanovirus: Cerberus.. and Deus.
If I'm not mistaken, the nanites can form an antena and transmit via the matrix, so I don't know how much this lockdown will help.Boston gets locked down (of course, you figured that out) hard, Nothing in or out. This is a tighter lockdown then even Bug City was, with good reason. No power except for absolute essentials (like water, sometimes). Air drops of food and other supplies more like "Fly at super high altitude, drop it technically outside Boston Metroplex borders and let momentum take it in to the City proper and trigger the parachute at some point)
The SR writers had no clue about population distribution/demographics in North America and cared less. So it makes no sense. The FASA internal motto was supposedly "Sell the sizzle, not the steak", and that was certainly true for SR1. Cool concept, stories and art, terrible mechanics and crappy worldbuilding.OgreBattle wrote:What are the over all population demographics of shadowrun America? I got the idea that you had a few mega cities and lots of wilderness and maybe farms
As kzt said, the Shadowrun authors didn't really put a lot of thought into that. There was a period in 4th edition when the writer pool had detail oriented fanboys who had grown up on this shit like AncientHistory, Jason Levine, and myself who put a lot of effort into researching places and history and producing glosses to explain how it was all supposed to fit together - but that was really quite short.OgreBattle wrote:What are the over all population demographics of shadowrun America? I got the idea that you had a few mega cities and lots of wilderness and maybe farms