OSSR: Street Samurai Catalog

[Ancient History]

Probably the first thing you see is the katana held in his right hand, hanging over his shoulder. Then maybe you take in the half-seen porn star 'stache and multicolored hair, how the armored legs are akimbo so his native loincloth hangs down perfectly between his jeans, the big frakkin' gun he's holding. Here and there are things plugged into him, bits of hardware poking out from beneath his skin. The ghouls bearing down on him barely register.

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 first version of this book, with a lighter blue-gray cover, was published for Shadowrun first edition (SR1); the book was revised and republished for Shadowrun second edition (SR2) to conform to the new stats - much as happened with Grimoire. Each version went through multiple printings - at least four in the case of the SRII version - and there are some small differences in at least some of the printings. More on that anon.

Written by Tom Dowd, illustrated by cut-price luminaries like Tim Bradstreet and Jeff Laubenstein, it's hard to overemphasize how seminal and influential the Street Samurai Catalog was in the development of Shadowrun and its sourcebooks. Aside from the gear and mechanics the SSC introduced, the formatting and structural style continue to to inform Shadowrun to this day.

>>>>>[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>

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).

This book is so old that the contact information might as well be ancient Egyptian:

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!

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'.

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:

BANNED!
THIS ITEM
PURGED IN SHADOWRUN II!

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.**

*

Basically, damage in SR was given in stages (Light, Medium, Serious, Deadly) and accorded a certain number of boxes (1, 3, 6, 10). In SRI each weapon had an individual damage staging number used for determining when a weapon did more damage than normal - SRII standardized this to 2 and then removed all the extraneous staging numbers, simplifying the weapon codes. This was a good thing. Take notes. If you ever design a system, streamline.

**

The German Strassensamurai-Katalog (1993) is a mixture of both: It has the 1st Edition grey cover with the first 2nd Edition censoring option. The items are printed over with
STOP!
GEGENSTAND
IN SHADOWRUN II
GESTRICHEN
with text and artwork still partially visible in the background.

Firearm Accessories were hotshit back in the day, so much so that rulespace was devoted to how many and what kind a given firearm could accept. Important firsts in SSC include ultrasound, which presumably seemed less retarded than oD&D's ultravision and wasn't just for imaging fetuses anymore.

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:

This option should only be used to add fun to the game, and not as an excuse for sudden character mortality.

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.

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.

[Taishan]

The commentary in the SSC was the best part. My SR1/SR2 group still throws out comments like 'Great, now I can flatten light ammo against body armor faster than ever before' even though its been 15 years since we played Shadowrun.

[PoliteNewb]

Nice review. I don't think I ever actually sat down and played Shadowrun, but I still enjoyed looking through the books. I actually made a character who used an Ares laser (once they brought the price down to 200K...Fields of Fire, right?).

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.

I loved those! I think I still have 3-4 of 'em.

[Username17]

For first edition, damage varied on three axes for each weapon. It had a power number, which was the target number for damage resistance dice. It had a base level of damage (Light, Medium, Serious, or Deadly). And it had a staging number, which was the number of successes needed by the attacker to increase the damage level and the number of successes needed by the defender to reduce it. This system was really complicated, and had several failure points.

The first and most obvious failure point was power numbers. You see, once power numbers got substantially above five, the numbers of successes rolled per die was very low. At TN 8 and above the defender could expect just a handful of successes for every thirty six dice thrown - meaning that you just weren't moving the damage value much with your soak dice. Not even if you were a dragon. This meant that any die rolling on the defender's side was an exercise in time wasting if the gun being fired was even a little bit "big". If someone pointed a biggish firearm at you, you were dead. End of story.

Shadowrun resolved this problem by instituting automatic successes for armor. A Dragon's soak dice were still useless, but they had armor plating that reduced damage levels off the top and the net result was that it took several shots to bring down a feathered serpent. But this created a new problem, which is that since armor was virtually 100% of what counted for purposes of you not dying the first time someone looked at you funny, everyone wore it. In fact, pretty much everyone went everywhere with an armored jacket and motorcycle helmet, because being a safety conscious biker was the most armoring you could conveniently and legally have. And with Armor being scored as automatic success in damage resistance, all the small arms were simply useless. You fired them at targets and you rolled a bunch of dice and it did not matter because the automatic soaks would soak 100% of the incoming damage and you accomplished nothing.

That's the context behind the "flatten light ammo against body armor faster than ever before" comment. But it's also the context behind the Firepower Ammo and the IPE Grenades. Basic weapons like pistols and grenades simply did not do enough damage in the ubiquitous armor environment that Shadowrun's First Edition created. And so they revamped the rules for those things by producing superior grades of equipment that everyone would use instead of the stuff in the basic book that didn't work.

When they produced the 2nd edition, they did a rescale of all the weapons and made armor behave totally differently. So specific equipment to upscale underperforming weaponry was no longer needed. And that's why the Firepower and IPE pages got stamped.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

I guess what's amazing about that is how reluctant old-school RPGs were to throw anything away. I can honestly say that the majority of the equipment in SSC survived through at least 3rd edition, and a healthy chunk of it (or their descendants, like the Ares Predator IV) perpetuated into 4th as well.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

When I was in high school, before I actually was playing RPGs foreals, I had a good friend who was really into Shadowrun, and so I got this book. I didn't play Shadowrun myself (Wouldn't for almost a decade), and this was before I actually owned D&D books. I bought it for the illustrations and the wacky commentary. I don't actually seem to still have it anymore, I think it was in the box of gaming suppliments I unloaded in the runup to my move to Washington State.

[Stahlseele]

@Ancient History:
Why would you throw stuff away that has a propper identity, that people know and like to buy?
You just try and improve slightly on it, so people still recognize it as something they know and that is good but want to buy it even more now, because it has been made better?

[Ancient History]

Put it this way: Shadowrun has more than twenty years of in-game history. Yet you can buy the same make of vehicle for about the same price in 2070 as you could in 2050. That's a little silly.

Not as silly as, say, the granny's attic that is D&D's Encyclopedia Magica, which included joke items from previous editions right next to artifacts from the latest supplements.

[Username17]

@Ancient History:
Why would you throw stuff away that has a propper identity, that people know and like to buy?
You just try and improve slightly on it, so people still recognize it as something they know and that is good but want to buy it even more now, because it has been made better?

Well, some stuff gets binned because, like Firepower Rounds it exists to fill a niche that no longer exists in an evolving ruleset. And some things get removed because like Skill Hardwires they were actually a terrible fucking idea in the first place.

The really surprising thing to me is that they kept the Shadowtech Cyberware/Bioware distinction all the way through 4th edition. Bioware never made any "sense", it was just a hotfix for the fact that Street Samurai needed to have their augmentation caps increased once people had been given access to Initiation, vehicle weaponry, and mix-n-match Cyberdecks. But moving forward into 3rd and especially 4th edition, that wasn't necessarily true.

Dramatically lower Essence costs for substantially more expensive gear is all they needed to have. They didn't need to discuss Bioware as a separate and distinct entity. But it stayed in out of pure inertia.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

The worst part about Bioware was under 2nd Edition if i remember Correctly.
Max-Bio-Index(how much Bioware can your body take) was dictated by natural Body Attribute. And Bioware always counts as natural Attribute. So the Suprathoid Gland actually gave you more body, thus giving you more Max-Bio-Index and thus allowing you to take more Bioware by taking Bioware!
It was positively silly . .

[Cynic]

Awesome review. It's pretty nice that we finally get a review of one of the better books from the period. I'm no Shadowrun fanboy but it's nice to see a review that isn't mostly focused on snark and the bad. I don't mind those sort of reviews but something different is always good.

[Koumei]

I love equipment guides that are presented as actual in-setting catalogues. SLA industries did that with a section of one of their books, complete with all the hype (but without snide remarks from hackers), but I did wonder who started the trend. Now I know. Thanks. Sounds hilarious.

There really needs to be a chapter at the bag that looks like second-hand sales in a newspaper. Tiny boxes with "Wired Reflexes, one previous owner, 43,000Y ONO, some cleaning required ((X chance of accidental spasms))" and such.

[endersdouble]

P
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.

This is pretty much exactly how you put a dog to sleep (well, modulo the shooting) so I'm missing the reason it's bad that overdoses of anesthetics are deadly.

[Koumei]

I think the problem is not with the concept of "forcing a drug overdose" but with it being overpowered. It sounds like one shot makes your opponent go to sleep, at which point you win the fight, and then you just finish them off as a formality.

[kzt]

Particularly as real-life drugs take what in SR would be multiple combat rounds (ranging from 5 or so to "many") to take effect.

[Blade]

The thing is that in SR, a single bullet will rarely kill you. Most of the time, you'll need at least two to kill someone, and that's for a not very armored character.

And then you have narcojet that can knock someone out (or even kill them) with a single dose. So with narcojet pistols (or DMSO bullets), you can get rid of an enemy with only one shot instead of (at least) two for a normal gun.

[Stahlseele]

That can work with normal Gel-Ammo too.
A Burst from a Shotgun with Gel-Ammo deals 11D Stun Damage and is resisted by Body and only Impact Armor. Which is usually lower than Ballistic Armor.
And with Assault-Rifles it goes higher up. 12D to 16D depending on how many bullets (6 to 10) you want to shoot.

The best part of the Drugs is the bypassing of Armor.
And being able to smuggle them in using the form of Slap-Patches.
If you are good at close combat, you can flatten a juggernaut, if his body roll goes badly. And it seems to everybody else as if you had just slapped him a bit.