OK, let's get this out in the open. This book was the media sourcebook for First Edition Shadowrun. It was supposed to be co-equal to Street Samurai's Catalogue, the Grimoire, Virtual Realities, and Rigger Black Book. Because the character types of "Reporter" and "Rocker" were supposed to be co-equal archetypes to Deckers, Street Samurai, Riggers, and Mages. And it is basically the fact that this book didn't succeed in presenting us with mechanics that would make that happen that made the whole thing fall through. There wasn't really a Shadowbeat for all of 2nd and 3rd edition pretty much because the Shadowbeat mechanics failed to work well enough to justify a second attempt. When I suggested taking another go at it for 4th edition (under the working title "Destroying News"), FanPro rejected it. Another attempt wasn't made until Catalyst came out with Attitude... and we know how that turned out.
I don't believe that a Media Sourcebook was impossible, and there are lots of things that Shadowbeat makes sound pretty cool. It was mostly the mechanics that failed to live up to the fluff. Heck, this book is dramatically superior in every possible way to Attitude, not that that is hard. With those caveats out of the way, it is time to finish my first glass of bourbon and begin rereading Shadowbeat.
The "Contents & Credits" page pretty much tells you what you're in for. Not because of the jaunty font sizes, but because right in the middle of the page, there's a picture of a troll wearing a kilt with a no dachi and a theorbo crossed across his back. You know life's about to get crazy, and you are not wrong.
Introduction
The book has this to say about itself "In no particular order it describes rock and rockers, the popular media, journalism, and sports as they have come to be in the Sixth World, at least in North America." That probably sounds eclectic to you, and like it would make it hard to narrow this book down into something that would be relevant to the PCs. It claims that there will be rules and guidelines for playable rock stars and crusading reporters, and then starts going off about how they will also describe the rules for some of the stupider future sports: Urban Brawl and Combat Biker. These are not remotely connected. It also tells you that they are introducing the "Open Test", something which continued to exist in Shadowrun all the way through 3rd edition despite not actually being a good idea.
Looking back on it, I see this introduction as basically an admission of defeat: the editor's frank analysis that they didn't get something coherent together but had to go to print anyway because deadlines.Shadowbeat wrote:In the fragmented society of Shadowrun, the media are also fragmented, alienated, maybe even a touch paranoid. Certainly this book seems to have fought bitterly against any unified theme or central vision, and if it sometimes seems like it is flicking from one channel to another on some manic network, well, that may be inherent in the subject matter.
It's Only Rock & Roll
"Music is the messenger no one can silence."
-Maria Mercurial
Books like these pretty much defined how K and I do our own work. You get little pithy italicized quotes at the beginnings of chapters because 1st edition Shadowrun did it that way. It stands the test of time. It was cool then, and it's cool now.
The Rock-n-Roll chapter is more than a little weird. In some ways, it's quite ahead of their time, as they are straight up talking about digital distribution channels, home studio production, and even next-gen Autotune (called "Song-o-Mat"). All of the cultural references are to the 1960s and '70s, which is a bit weird. On the one hand, it gives those things long enough to get enough perspective to note that Elvis and Nixon are not fads that would be soon forgotten. On the other hand, it makes the work seem even older reading it from the future. This contrasts sharply with Attitude referencing Lady Gaga and looking bush league for doing so. Still, I can't help but think that they might have done better to have a Madonna or Metallica reference in there. Well, better to be too conservative than to really blow it and do a Color me Badd or Milli Vanilli reference.
The big future reveal is that starting in 2032 music got totally changed forever (for reals!) by the introduction of cybernetic musical instruments by the band Concrete Dreams. it seriously goes on for half a page about how awesome Concrete Dreams are, and how they totally change up their styles all the time so their albums sound different but still awesome.
Then we're straight into the game mechanics for Rocker characters until the clever title "Rock and Role". This is the book's first major stumbling block, because 1st edition Shadowrun doesn't separate background skills from active skills. So if you wanted to, for example, sing and dance, that used up two sets of skill points... and you did not get many skill points no matter what Priority you stuck into skills. And you want to try being a performer without dumping all your skill points into various otherwise useless performance skills? Forget about it. The rules for defaulting in 1st edition Shadowrun were fucked. Then it just kind of... trails off. The moment it tells you that being a Rocker is going to cost more skill points than the Chargen rules are comfortable letting you have, it has a bit on Song-o-Mats, a list of instruments, a discussion of how synthesizers work, a rant about MIDI formats, a tirade about how awesome synthlinks are, a discussion about recording contracts (they predict that future iTunes will sell one-hour albums for 5¥, while getting it on a data chip in a fancy package from future Walmart will cost 20¥, this seems fairly plausible even now), a thing on live concerts, and none of that had fuck all to do with playing a fucking Rocker character. We hop back into actual game mechanics that influence your character with the rules on Impact Tests.
Impact Tests were an interesting, but ultimately terrible idea. The fundamental conceit is that instead of playing Shadowrun, you would roll a pile of dice, take the highest die, and then add or subtract modifiers from that die. Remember that 6s explode, so one out of six dice was 7+, one out of 36 dice was 13+ and one out of 216 dice was 19+. As such, the fact that you got a +3 bonus for having the coolest possible synth-link or from having a Sasquatch in your group (yes, really. Bigfoots in Shadowrun are genetically gifted musicians. Fucking deal with it) really didn't mean much in the face of the truly epic swinginess between one concert and the next. They also wanted you to spend permanent experience points to boost individual performance dice because First Edition Shadowrun had many bad ideas. The practical results of this were that if you stayed in the bizz for a few years, you would probably have a truly epic album, and then you'd better fucking retire on the money you made from that, because you are going to massively disappoint everyone who checks out anything you do for the foreseeable future. Which is disturbingly realistic I suppose, but not particularly playable and even less playable when you realize that the rest of the players are Shadowrunners, meaning that the complete lack of interaction between this ruleset and anything else anyone does makes things pretty hard.
Songwriting had its own special rules, which fundamentally boiled down to you having to flush a bunch more skill points down the drain or pay a songwriter. Nominally you could write songs with your guitar skill (or even your dance skill as I understand it), but since this involved the dreaded Skill Web, this did not actually work. But wait, there's more algebra! Your impact Rating gets multiplied and modified by various stuff to make your Performance rating, which is a different number, which affects your distribution rating, your booking tests, and ultimately your Rocker Status (which is like lifestyles, but more complicated). It spends two paragraphs explain what kind of average results you can expect with various inputs, and they are in fact totally wrong. This leads me to believe that the authors did some sort of major change to the way they were calculating things at some late stage, because they talk about this as if the outputs were way less swingy than they actually are.
There is a half-hearted attempt to allow people to do "stuff" with music. You can give up "money points" for "message points" by supporting a cause with your music. We are told that for 90 message points, you can achieve the desired result. Uh... yeah. Really seems like there needs to be some kind of social effects rules here, but there isn't. The rest of the chapter is a discussion of "metahumans in rock", this can mostly be boiled down to "Charisma is super important in calculating your Performance rating, and therefore Elves are really good at making money and Trolls are not." But that is dragged out for two pages.
Broadcasting
The opening is fairly clever and a good setup for the mood. They describe how public opinion is shaped in the future by having people who all support the status quo have debates where they pretend that there are vast differences between how they support the status quo and that these relatively minor differences run the gamut of acceptable positions to have. This seems like a relatively plausible future. Also they come out and say that various words like "broadcasting" are still used even though signals are transmitted by tight beams and cables and stuff. They say the technical word for a podcast in the 2050s is "matcast", which wins points for explicitly predicting that podcasts would even exist.
After that, it bogs down into minutiae. It gives a history of future broadcasting technology (including HDTV in 2008), it talks about how a sat dish cost 100¥ at Radio Shack (yes, Radio Shack), and gives about half a page each on Satellites, Cable, Home Trideo Receivers, and Matrix podcasts. They really miss the mark in my opinion by predicting that high-tech FAX is going to be a thing in normal homes in the 2050s. There is rather a lot of space taken up describing various communications and home entertainment appliances that can be expected to be in your apartment at different lifestyles. It's not that there isn't cool information here, it's that this is a terrible use of space. Essentially it spends 3 pages telling you what kind of features the TV has in a high lifestyle apartment that it doesn't have in a low lifestyle apartment.
Then come the rules for stealing cable and the like. This is all flavor, since for fuck's sake we're talking about stealing fucking cable and the costs for these things are normally abstracted into lifestyle and don't much matter in most instances. Nevertheless, stealing cable involves literally four skills under 1st edition rules. Stealing premium matrix access is actually insanely difficult, requiring you to hit a target number of 18. This is even weirder when you remember that the entire game revolves around stealing premium matrix access without even rolling dice by breaking into corporate installations and plugging in to the premium matrix access there. We're literally just talking about stealing premium matrix access for your flavor text home. And that's the chapter. It's basically all fluff.
The Nets
The chapter begins with a history lesson about how in 1960, 80 percent of media outlets were independently owned, but how in 1980, 50 companies owned 80 percent of the publishing and broadcasting, and predicts an increasing concentration of media control by an increasingly small group of media powers. Obviously, this being 1992, someone had read Ben Bagdikian. Of course, the dystopic vision they present of media power concentration is actually not as bad as the last 20 years of history have actually gone. The frightening numbers they predict for 2020 are actually less concentrated than what we already have. ClearChannel and Newscorp have tightened the noose more than corporate power fearmongers were warning us about back then. That's actually a bit scary.
Then the chapter goes into a rundown of what the major networks are in the 2050s. This could have set the tone for what media empires were about in future Shadowrun works, but the writers who came after only sporadically remembered to look this information up, and the major networks like CBC and NBS got ignored in favor of real world networks as often as they got referenced. There's an uncomfortable amount of information on these networks. Enough that it takes up space, but not really enough that you could do much with them in game. I think that's why ultimately this segment failed to have lasting impact.
Then there's a bit about independents and another about pirates, and a pretty cool bit about "legal pirates". That last one is about how apparently in Shadowrun you are allowed to show pretty much whatever you want through a satellite feed if the feed originates in a country that doesn't give an actual fuck. So there's 24/7 pornography and ultraviolence from satellite channels that run that sort of thing interspersed with commercials for random stuff, because it's totally legal and they can get commercial sponsors so they do. Basically, they totally called the .tv extension and the 24/7 Arabic Porn stations that operate out of Austria.
There's a section about getting broadcasts out on pirate channels and even cutting in to commercial broadcasts to issue ultimatums like a bosssupervillain. The rules aren't great, and they are interspersed into the flavor text (which makes them hard to find), but at least they exist. You totally can dress up in a color coordinated outfit, interrupt a popular show or sporting event, and issue demands to the city.
That's Entertainment
Begins with a great anecdote about an adventure show with procedurally generated scripts that has totally incoherent plots that is nonetheless wildly popular. There follows over-the-top descriptions of future shows in various genres. The thing is: Pit of Slime, while stupid, isn't really different from Fear Factor. And Lucky Lady is actually less stupid than Deal or No Deal. Things get a little more "Running Manish" with the introduction of lethal games, where condemned criminals fight trained professionals to the death for freedom and money. That's pretty Roman (and we are told that in North America, they are broadcast from Aztlan), and seems vaguely plausible. Some of the other ones, where random civilians and even kidnap victims go all Hunger Games, seem less plausible.
All in all, the format of spending a few sentences on each of a whole bunch of shows all hammered into paragraph rather than list form is fairly hard to follow, and is pretty low information density. But it's actually pretty good NERPS. There's also a channel guide. It is four pages long, and mostly filled with arcane jokes.
Ka-Pow!
This was the age of color plates. Shadowbeat comes with an insert that is composed of glossy, full color pages. These pages are not numbered, and appear stuck into the middle of another chapter. But what the hell, I guess I might as well talk about them right now. These pages really hurt the eyes. There is text that is printed over an entire page full of purple and black concentric circles. There are sample characters who have inane in-character chatter scrawled in amongst the stats on their sheet. The section is addressed to, and I am not making this up: "Shadowteens". The characters are almost unbelievably terrible, until you remember that this was 1st edition Shadowrun and all the sample characters were unbelievably terrible until you were convinced to believe it through weight of evidence by how terrible all the other sample characters were. I'm talking about how an "Elven Rocker" spends 9 skill points on singing and harp (yes, harp, for a rocker), and doesn't max out either one even though the only thing that counts for shit is your highest performance skill. Argh.
And That's the News
Having spent the last couple of chapters faffing about with various world background stuff, the book condescends once again to mention something that is supposed to be a playable class: the News Reporter. Unlike the Rock & Roll chapter, this pretty much jumps right in to describing mechanics. Stories, which are called "beats" (already off to a terrible start, because "beats" are the type of story you are assigned to write about, rather than the individual stories themselves), have Pix, Punch, and Proof. Kind of cool that the story functions all start with P, making it alliterative. Unfortunately, it gets way more complicated here, with stories have a "Beat Sheet". Yes, you are expected to have a separate character sheet for each adventure you go on, because Pix, Punch, and Proof all have substats such as separate impact numbers and such. It's a hairpulling nightmare actually.
Probably the biggest flaw with this section is that it is all geared towards a character being a reporter. But Shadowrun is and always has been a team game with a group of protagonists. Integrating the reporter into the rest of the Shadowrunning Team, or at least running a full investigative news crew as all of the player characters should have been front and center. But... it's not. I genuinely don't know how anyone is supposed to play this, and judging by what I've heard from other people over the years, no one else ever did either.
I could go into how insane these mechanics actually are, but I don't think it's necessary. There are multiple open tests, and long lists of modifiers and the different impact ratings of the pictures and the narrative interact in weird ways, there's multiple pages on different kinds of interviews, and it's all madness. Bonus points: there is a totally off-the-cuff section on brain hacking people to have false memories in order to convince them to give false first-person testimony that they believe. Old school brain hacking took a bunch of days, and was done with the same skill you use for First Aid. To give you an example of how many steps are involved, here is a thing that actually happens:
Yes, you have to roll a die and fail it every day for each one of your pieces of visual evidence to not lose that piece of visual evidence you acquired for your "beat".Shadowbeat wrote:The snoop makes a test for each pix he is filing. The target number is the Impact of the shot. The number of dice he rolls is the number of days that have passed since he shot the trid. If the test succeeds, the images have lost their value, and that pix is dropped from the beat.
This is the crunchiest chapter, and it should have been game defining. But the mechanics just fall flat. The numbers are basically completely random and the system is sufficiently inelegant as to be essentially unplayable. Both stand-alone and in conjunction with the rest of the team.
Sports
This gives you an incredible amount of detail on how various games are played in the 2050s. This is frankly, more information than I actually care about. There are some cybernetic modifications that are allowed, and others that are not allowed, and these are different in the main Basketball, Gridiron, and Baseball leagues, and even if I was playing a character who was a sports fan or a former sports star, I don't think I'd actually need to have this information in a book. They write up the team components of the various leagues, which is something that is actually necessary to have any sports-related (or even tangentially sports-related) adventures, so good on them. I don't thing they went out-there enough, in that they didn't add nearly enough expansion teams or moved teams or whatever. Hell, they still have the Rams in Los Angeles and don't even have a team for Nashville. But it's better than nothing.
There was a whole plotline set up where the 2056 Olympic Games were going to be held in Japan, and the racist Japanese government was refusing to allow metahumans to participate and there was going to be a whole thing. Like every other Olympics related plothook (like the 2072 games in Denver), this never amounted to anything. The devs have just never been able to successfully launch an Olympics-themed year event book. Even though they of course have many years of lead time to do one every time.
Also of note is that they came up with new sports of the future for Shadowrun: Combat Biker and Urban Brawl. These are sports which are played with actual guns and live ammunition and actual vehicles that you are expected to run over the other team with (in the case of Combat Biker), and exist as parody on about the level of Death Race. They go ahead and tell you the gram specification of the mace that a combat biker is allowed to hit people with while riding them down with a god damn motorcycle, which is a level of detail for a piece of ludicrous absurdism that I don't think is at all warranted. These games make about as much sense as Smash TV. It gives out actual team lists for the leagues, which is really all the information you really need about Combat Biker (although sadly, Attitude lacked that).
SimSense
This chapter does a bit of history on SimSense tech, and goes into the technical aspects of it in rather a lot of detail. Discussions of Proprioception, what SimSense stars have to do to generate emotive tracks for their characters, what you have to do to cobble the feeds together into a high-gloss marketable track, and so on. It's a really solid chapter. There's a little rant about things you can do with magical effects to make the stars perceive and feel certain things that you can then record, and so on.
Honestly, if I had a gripe about this, it would be that they go into too much detail on the various steps and pieces of equipment. I think some of it could have been handwaved into "production time" that "required studio equipment". That probably would have been fine. But it only would have cut a few pages, and what they ended up doing was OK too. Comparing this chapter to the SimSense chapter in Attitude is ridiculous because there's absolutely no comparison. Shadowbeat's is informative and interesting and leaves you able and eager to run an adventure involving SimStars and double blind double crosses.
Archetype Additions
This is the chapter where they present rules and skill lists for the new playable archetypes: Rocker and Reporter. I know what you're thinking: weren't there already rules presented for Rockers and Reporters in the Rockers and Reporters respective chapters? Yes. Yes there were. Some of this rule stuff is reprints from earlier in the book. some of it is new information. This book is not terribly well organized.
Having a day job is a thing you have to buy with your starting cash, which is weird and counterintuitive because the whole point is that you earn a salary and you're stuck being required to do actual work. There's even a few paragraphs given over to tax evasion, which is pretty weird and somewhat incomplete (in that it talks about what happens if the authorities discover your tax evasion, but not what the chances of that happening actually are).
Gear
This is a weird chapter. Rather than doing something sensible like arrange porta-cams into quality levels and then give examples of various name brands, it decides to give you full paragraph entries for individual objects like the "AZT Micro30 StaticBrace" which is an actual item that gets its own paragraph. It's a motion negating camera mount that connects your camera to either your chest or your wrist. I think they were trying to be like the Street Samurai's Catalog here, and get people to get all gun nutty about which camera accessories they had, but I don't know of anyone who ever did that.
It's not just cameras that were supposed to come in segments, they also tried to make you care about the components of your synthesizers. This is an actual part of a paragraph in this section:
It goes on to tell you what kinds of amps, speakers, mixers, samplers, and so on you need. Someone who was working on this really cared about electronic music, but someone needed to go through this and hack down the game mechanically relevant portions into something elegant enough to actually use in a game. Interestingly, the game maxes out at 32-track samplers, but the 64-track sampler came out just five years after this book was written. So there's that.Shadowbeat wrote:The skill limit for playing a synthesizer system is based on the lowest-quality component in the system. For example, if a rocker has a fine controller, but is still using average slave synths, then he can only use a skill rating of 6 or less.
It's 1st edition, so they want you to keep track of MegaPulses and worry about how much headware memory you have.
Then there's an honest to goodness Glossary. Then they give you a couple of Beat Sheets that you can photocopy if you're sincerely trying to actually use these reporting rules. And finally, to date the piece the last page is an ad for KA*GE.
All in all, the NERPS sections, while often coming across as OCD are entertaining. They strive to set a mood for anarchic near-future dystopia and for the most part they succeed at that. The book pretty much fails to deliver in its one real mission however, which was to make Snoops and Rockers into playable characters you would play in actual games.
Fluff: A-
Crunch: F
But I really do wish that Destroying News had actually been made back when FanPro had a staff who could actually do rules.
-Username17
Obviously an inferior "slave synth" reducing your overall performance value hasn't stopped people from using old CV synths or Guitar Hero controllers or human thighbones with piezo sensors on them. Ah, the tragedy of zeerust. I suppose if I time-traveled to the writing of Shadowbeat and told them my 6-years-out-of-date laptop theoretically had infinite sampling capability, they would laugh their hitop fades right off.
