The Gaming Den

Earthdawn spells could raise the dead, cause hurricanes, capture cities in bottles, and use blood magic to fertilize the crops.

Fuchs, if you want to go into the nitty gritty comparison of actual Earthdawn spell effects versus Shadowrun spell effects, I will go there, and you will lose and be proven wrong. Because you're trying to apply logic to a game, and games are not logical. I don't actually want to have that debate, be...

Okay, so your theory is that a civilization that had a couple thousand years to get spellcasting down pat should be worse than one that's only had a couple decades practice? Granted, technology moves faster these days, but not that fast.

*cough* Well, actually there are. Not "Lofwyr owns your house, your wife, and your soul." but...well, that gets into some of the more embarrassing books, like the Theran Empire sourcebook, and dragons got their own ED porn in the unpublished Dragons sourcebook.

Oh, I like the idea of an earlier age of magic. I simply hate how they did it, and I loathe the stupid "and ED is so much better than SR, tech is nothing!" clichee. But...that doesn't exist, really. Point out to one instance where tech is nothing in SR. Hell, even dragons are threatened b...

Before Earthdawn was ever put to paper, one of the conceits of Shadowrun was that the magic came back . It implied a secret history or prehistory, and left open questions of strange survivals, hidden immortal puppeteers, and other things. It was a history referred to in hints and scraps of conversat...

That sort of thing is essentially what bughunts were for. In the few IE adventures, the PCs rarely confront IEs, GD, or Elder Evils directly - notable difference being Harlequin's Back . The big problem with Harlequin , Survival of the Fittest , and Dawn of the Artifacts was sidelining the PCs too d...

Keep in mind the constraints being worked under: the people in charge mandated a plot with IEs, and they were not going to take a plot without IEs.

Basically. If you're going to stretch a stupid idea out to four separate adventure books and a campaign - about $100 of product for a single GM - you need a slightly greater justification than "old people collecting useless shit."

I never really expected that document to ever see the light of day...to give some context, that was the final draft of the planned "follow up" to the Dawn of the Artifacts storyline, a doc I insisted on writing just so we'd have some frickin' clue where things were headed. I'd been arguing...

Yeah, I think it is. Art is evocative, it accesses different parts of the brain than what you use to read. Really good art, presented correctly, complements and reinforces the text, enhancing the experience of reading the book. The best example I can think of off the top of my head is Clanbook Baali...

Yeah, sorry, wasn't being clear there. I should probably have separated that out with a space or something for clarity. The point my left brain was trying to make when it took control of the typing fingers was that there are advantages and disadvantages to when and how you do the art. Ordering the a...

Fair enow. I remember for Seattle 2072 they asked me to generate a bunch of art notes for the short fiction and the pieces weren't all assigned yet. I couldn't tell you whether it's easier for a writer to do a piece based on a piece of artwork or an artist to do a piece based on a bit of writing.

One of my main arguments with Jason pre me terminating my contracts was his absolute and steadfast refusal to fix certain errors we'd caught in PACKS (not the PACKS that I eventually published, but the one that had gone through two rounds of proofing and playtesting already). This was literally a ca...

Shadowrun has had an ambitious schedule of products for years - the problem is, things have been running so far behind that it's practically been the same schedule. Most line devs have wanted to get eight books out a year, and that's totally possible with good freelancers, a good development team, a...

<shrug> I finally got my last comp copies in the mail.

This next part is about Ancient History. People involved in the Games Industry know his work. They know the great quality of writing skills. They also know that he became disgruntled with his manager. He did not believe what his manager was telling him was the truth. He has been accused of saying h...

14 October

Y'know, the entire reason I terminated my contracts and blew off over two grand of drafts is so I wouldn't have to do business with your particular brand of asshole. Take the hint.

[/edit]Ran down some of Herb Beas' posts. He doesn't strike me as Caldazar's raving fucktard tone. Jason and Randall have completely different and distinctive "voices" than shit-for-brains here...Jason isn't that stupid or full of himself, and while Randall is that full of himself he also ...

Yeah, the "private, unimpeachable" sources comment annoys the hell out of me, if only because an unimpeachable source doesn't exist. In your mind, it does not. However, in the real world, it does. You should really get out of the mindset of the Shadowrun era Bobbie. I believe your outlook...

T'be fair, the fact that CGL did find another printer stupid enough to work for them boggles the mind, and CGL is still hideously behind schedule on...everything SR.

[/edit]Well at worst you could still terminate your contract, but then it gets dicey.

Frank used a touch of hyperbole, but he was accurately reflecting the worst-case scenario. CGL (and FanPro before them, and apparently FASA before them) have been chronically delinquent in paying freelancer, to the tune of months or years and up to thousands of dollars. One tactic for freelancers wa...

Yeah, the "private, unimpeachable" sources comment annoys the hell out of me, if only because an unimpeachable source doesn't exist. Bills and Coleman (and their wives) would feed him this line of crap, but they lie through their teeth on a regular basis and wouldn't show some random inter...

That's a rather blatant falsehood, as evidenced by...nothing has happened. I don't think Topps or CGL are even aware of the document you've got such a hard-on about. Hell, they haven't done anything about the real, actual copyright violations up on Scribd, like the entire Nosferatu novel . Is it? D...