So someone has made a complete Shadowrun Book about Latin America. You know what that means... time for Frank Trollman to drink a fuck tonne of mead while reading it and give a review. We have
two of Jan Halada's concoctions: the zlata and the klašterni. They will be competing for my affections as we proceed.
OK, the first thing we notice is the map. Actually, that's a damn lie. The first thing we notice is a picture of Danny Trejo playing a classic Shadowrun Decker. Apparently the Machete
hacks. I'm not drunk enough for puns like that, they should have put it later in the book. Still, it looks pretty cool, so we're already two points above War! in that the art appears to be decent and there's a fucking map. We will now no longer keep score against War! because with the amount of own goals that abortion managed, it is no longer possible for Shadows of Latin America to not win. Apparently we have to judge it against old Shadowrun products, which is probably to be expected because
it is one.
The map itself isn't super revealing, it doesn't list all the major cities or any roads, rail connections, or anything. Still, it's the actual Shadowrun map of South America, so there's that. For those of you who care about trying to maintain continuity with whatever the fuck is going on with Catalyst's nonsensical plotline: this map doesn't line up with it any better than theirs did. Bogota is thoroughly in Aztec territory (although it's not even listed on the map, you have to compare to a globe or read the text to see this is true). Still, the lines are crisp and it's useful. Could do with some more map clutter, but it's better than having the mountains drawn in until you can't tell where the borders are or something.
So let's go chapter by chapter. The first real chapter is called "The Hidden Quarter". This is a chapter about major players in the region, which dovetails with the Hidden Quarter motif like... well
not at all to be honest. The overall theme for the chapter is supposed to be "big things are happening and you don't hear about it" and instead it's about how there are major players that you've totally heard of and incidentally, did you remember some of them have major bases in Latin America? I have several issues with this chapter and the first one is one of
language. Shadows of Latin America uses old edition slang (chummer, slitch, hoop, etc.), but for some reason this chapter also takes it upon itself to use obscure words from Urban Dictionary like "rukes". Maybe it's supposed to be futuristic, but really it's the kind of thing that makes the future seem almost as dated as when Attitude went off on a Lady Gaga tirade in their spiel about cool things in 2073. But the other one, the real feathered serpent in the room, is Aztechnology. There's no way around it: Shadowrun's handling of the Big A has historically been incredibly retarded, and Shadows of Latin America continues in that fine tradition. Apparently, if you scan the headlines you'd think that Aztechnology has received a bunch of setbacks, but they control the media and are masters of spin so you wouldn't think that. I'm sorry, but what the fuck is that supposed to mean? I'm only two cups of mead from each bottle in and I am totally fucking confused by this shit. And if they are masters of spin that everyone loves, why the fuck are we supposed to be reflexively rooting for them to fail? If they have different brand names everywhere, why does the public have a favorable impression of them, or even have an opinion about them at all? And how are we supposed to take them seriously as villains if their track record is as bad as Skeletor's? This is a problem that Shadows of Latin America had coming in, the previous
fifteen years of SR products had portrayed as the big cartoonish villain that always lost all the time and despite being a bunch of openly human sacrificing douchebags who were constantly trying and failing to destroy the world and getting caught on camera while doing it, the whole "high public approval rating" shtick never got retired. Still, this was the big chance to retcon in some fucking sense by slipping in some sort of Tylenol Poisoning leading to Tamper Seals PR coups for Aztechnology or maybe some sort of Xanatos Gambit where it turns out that they kept losing in all the previous episodes because they were really after something else entirely or
something. But no, completely wasted opportunity. Aztechnology: still nonsensical, contradictory, cartoonish buffoons as of Shadows of Latin America. Such a waste.
Much of this chapter goes on for page after page of lists of people you may or may not care about. It talks about individual board members of Aztechnology for way more ink than could possibly be justified being spilled on them. I mean, it's not as bad as Attitude, which
literally goes on for a whole page
twice in
two different chapters about the same Orkish rapper that you don't give a shit about - but it's still overly verbose. Each board member (there are
nine) gets a full paragraph and all but one get a shadowtalk comment or two. It's way too much about a group of people that the runners will likely never meet or care about. The rest of them aren't nearly as painful, but it's still basically a dog and pony show where they drag out old characters to see if we notice. Did you catch that the scientist who wanted to vat grow a girlfriend back in Shadowtech had succeeded? Of course you did, because they specifically remind you about the quote by mentioning that he had said so in an interview. That kind of Easter Egg would be much less painful and much more clever had it actually been
hidden, as Easter Eggs are supposed to be. For example:
Clark's new girlfriend has red hair, green eyes, and legs up to here. Her background is a clumsy forgery, anyone know where she came from?
Since it comes right after the vatgrown human research, people would be able to guess even if they hadn't read Shadowtech, and if they had it would appear a clever reference instead of a clumsy one. Special bonus nitpick: it is not plausible that a company mines "in the Andes
and also in Peru, Chile and Argentina" for
anything.
OK, now there's the criminal organizations section. This is sort of a new chapter and sort of not. The book is divided into chapters poorly. There are major headers in the PDF ToC that are not major headers in the actual book. Anyway, the criminal organizations chapter(?) is nonsensically called "Surviving Among Giants", which is some nod to the fact that they are keeping it real when surrounded by nations and corps. Or maybe it's the fact that they are really big and it's supposed to give you a head's up about dealing with them. I don't actually know, because the witty chapter name is once again not particularly tied into the chapter contents. There are some discussions of awakened drugs (BADs), but not enough of a list of profitable criminal enterprises to get to the human trafficking and stuff. Some simple discussion about various criminal organizations. Generally in the gossip column format I hate about how one person or another doesn't like what so-and-so said about such and such. These are much more condensed run ideas than appear in shit books like War! and Attitude, but they still use up a lot of text speculating about what the next change is going to be without actually telling you how things currently work.
The discussion of Air Piracy is surprisingly fleshed out and pretty cool. Even though I've always rolled my eyes at the notion of Shadowrun's LTA cargo ships, this section makes air piracy sound cool and a good fit for a mission or a campaign. Smuggling gets a much paler reference, it should have gone into a
little bit of detail about what people actually
do rather than simply where people
go. Still: I wanted more from this chapter. We have adequate (if spatially separated) discussion on drugs and air piracy, and an overly short writeup of smuggling routes. Could have used something on Pepsi Barons, Voodoo Slavery, Prostitution, Human Trafficking, Political Intimidation, Protection Rackets, or something. slightly too much information about girlish infighting between South American mobsters who will be dead before I meet them because their fucking name is in a Shadowland document, and not enough information on the crime that as a Shadowrunner I will be being paid to participate in.
The chapter is concluded with a 3 page diary about getting your ass lost in the jungle. This has fuck-all to do with anything else in the chapter. And i mean
anything else in the chapter. Maybe the guy is supposed to be a smuggler and so it's supposed to tie into the air pirates from the previous page? Fuck, I have no clue. Every single other entry in the subchapter and overchapter are about non-governmental organizations and this section is about getting lost in the woods. For some reason there is apparently a law that you are required to put a rambling tirade about
the jungle in some wildly inappropriate chapter whenever you write about Latin America for Shadowrun. This was
less out of place than the multiple jungle rants in War! (at least this one was given its own heading rather than just getting plopped in the middle of a discussion of a
city in the
mountains), but it's still pretty fucking bad.
Well chummers, we are 21 pages into a 156 page document. Don't worry: most of the rest of the book is country writeups, so reviewing them will go
much faster. There's only 3 pages of rules shenanigans at the end to tie it up.
-Username17
