[OSSR]Bug City

[Stahlseele]

The only one good enough reason i would ever see for going in there has not been mentioned here for some reason:
Hide from something.
Pissed off a MegaCorp? Go on a road trip there.
Stole from a Dragon? Why hello Chicago, have a bit of hiding left over for little old me?
Crossed a Crime Syndicate like Mafia or Yakuza? They may have teppodama, but the military has more bullets and then there are the spirits who want you for food, so your cost/use balance for getting at me will be screwed all kinds of ways . . granted, shadowrun had the SOX and Ausfalia for something like that before, so i guess this the alternative for the geographically challenged then . .
But yeah, they were less worried about true form spirits (seldom and usually fuck hueg astral becaons so easy to find) going through oder over the wall and more about the hundreds MAYBE thousands of hybrids in their physical forms . . or the good merges sneaking out of there as far as i remember this bit of alien/ghoulapocalypse . .

So technically, the getting into Chicago is the goal of your run and the highlight and the final fight for freedom/run just not from the cops for a change . . or maybe even that, if you pissed the star off enough to give chase to Chicago.

And it would give the decker and face something to do on the way as well.
making sure you are not leaving a data trail, faking stuff like licenses on the fly, shmoozing people into helping you get there. And getting supplies to last you a while.

As for the actual enemies being kinda weak sauce . .
Yes, in compaison to most player characters, probably.
In relation to the rest of the world, including rank and file military?
A bit more scary i guess. These usually do not come with double digit physical attributes and skill levels and augmentations that will make them look more like OMAC than Franken Castle . .


Already half asleep but:
No ie or dragon ever interacted with chicago at all right?
Not even talking about it? At least i don't remember reading any of their names in this context anywhere.
The closest was, i think, somebody using the term invae...

[TheFlatline]

The problem with that logic is that if I, John Q Shadowrunner, can get into Chicago, then Lofwyr can easily get as many crack shadowrunners/assassins/teams into Chicago as he wants, and once in there they can go loud without worrying about law enforcement showing up.

At *best* it might make you a little harder to find physically.

[Stahlseele]

And astrally, after the bullshit that went down there.
And not through the matrix at all it seems.
Which is why i said hiding. It's not hard to know people go in there.
It's a bit harder to keep track of them after that though.
At least, that's what i gather from the general description of the place.

[Nath]

No ie or dragon ever interacted with chicago at all right?
Not even talking about it? At least i don't remember reading any of their names in this context anywhere.
The closest was, i think, somebody using the term invae...

My understanding was that Dunkelzahn convinced Damien Knight to use Ares Macrotechnology resources against the insect spirits, culminating in the Chicago events (and once the dragon was dead, Knight started searching a way to make a profit out of it). Which would be just as subtle and discreet as a it should for a great dragon.

Interestingly enough, detonating a small-yield nuke inside a powerful magical barrier was unofficially said by Michael Mulvihill to be Dunkelzahn's last actions. So it's possible that it was after studying of Cermak incident that the dragon elaborated the technique he used.

[Stahlseele]

*blink blink*
i actually had never heard of these before, thanks for that O.o

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Bug City
Chapter 4: Insects Among Us


Booga Booga.

AncientH:

The magic stuff with hibernating insect spirits on the astral plane came through a thinly-veiled version of Tommy Talon, star of the novel Burning Bright, which pretty much is "the story of what led up to the Cermak Blast."



Aside: Ze Germanz have a much better title for this same novel, which being typically German takes all the guesswork and mystery out of it.



Burning Bright is not a terribly good novel. It's basically a less-interesting rehash of 2XS, which dick jokes. No, seriously, not even making that up. Burning Bright is to 2XS what Universal Brotherhood is to Queen Euphoria: the exact same concept, except supposedly on a bigger scale. Which is kind of the nutshell for Bug City as well - the idea that you can take the same basic idea (oh shit, insect spirits!) and continue making it fresh by increasing the stakes.



The thing is: this can actually work. You see it sometimes in horror movies. The first movie starts out with one apparently unstoppable critter (like Alien, Terminator, Predator, etc.) and the second movie has a group of the same critters (like Aliens, Terminator 2 (sortof), and Predators). You can continue increasing the scale, but it generally involves a perspective shift - if the stakes are higher, it ceases to be a pure horror movie and goes into existential horror/war movie or something.

But it's not a solid fit for insect spirits, at least not as they did it - and the reason is, they jumped straight to "reveal the hive!" Bug spirits and insect shamans don't have a lot of tricks. They don't get special spells or magic items or powers. Insect shamans get to summon insect spirits, and that's pretty much it; Queen insect spirits can also summon insect spirits, and once they arrive they largely don't need the insect shaman around anymore. Insect spirit adepts are a thing, although nobody really knows why because they seriously don't have any kind of preying mantis kung fu powers.


Which is too bad, really.

The reason for this is pretty simple: by and large, Shadowrun avoided being one of those games where the good guys and the bad guys were using different rulesets. But not entirely: you have insect shamans (who can summon insect spirits), toxic shamans (who can summon toxic spirits), and blood magicians (who can use blood magic and summon blood spirits). Other than that, everybody is pretty much playing from the same handbook. That means that once you get past the shock value of seeing a giant cockroach with a human face, you've pretty much seen all that insect spirits have to offer.


Mark Hamill didn't deserve this.

If I were rebooting Shadowrun, I'd probably keep insect spirits to their own book, and I'd stretch out the discovery. Start with a lone insect spirit, something that could be a one-off. Or a crazy shaman infatuated with insects - ghost knows there are a few insect gods in various pantheons. Build up the suspense as various NPCs turn out to be "good merges," or even let them defeat one hive only for it to have turned out to not be quite so destroyed...

In fact, there's a pretty good cliffhanger which Shadowrun never really went for: if you kill the shaman and the queen, most of the remaining insect spirits should (at least potentially) go free...which means that they could scatter and try to found their own hives. And it's a fuck load harder to stop a bunch of spirits from escaping than it is to kill one big spirit.

That's not to say that Shadowrun didn't revisit, and to a degree attempt to revitalize the whole insect spirit concept. They brought in ideas like trips to the insect spirit metaplanes, and Ares cooperating with spirits to make good merges of guard animals, even paranormal guard animals. Some people even suggested (in fluff) that butterfly spirits were pretty and maybe not all bug spirits were bad. Spider shamans. Mantis spirit lesbian biker gangs. But it never quite gelled.

FrankT:

As AncientHistory said, the bugs never really had a motivation. Even the toxic shamans were presented as cardboard cutouts of polluters or eco terrorists (so that both right wing and left wing players could have two dimensional villains to fight). The Insects didn't have that. They murdered people to make new insect spirits, and you hated them because they did that. The end.

This leaves this book kind of holding its nuts most of the time. The “Why Are They Here?” subsection has nothing to offer on the actual why of anything. The bugs just do bad stuff... and that's it. Really kindof a bummer. They kill people because they need to eat people to reproduce, and that's as far as it goes. The book doesn't even try to work in a set of motivations for insect shamans. It literally just tells you not to think about it too hard and shoot them in the face. These guys have all the depth and gravitas of a D&D random encounter.

But here's the thing: spoiler alert: Insect Spirits don't need human hosts to reproduce. They could use any mammal. They kill people because it's supposed to make them bigger and tougher than eating cows like normal beef-eating Americans, but the actual rules in this book don't even support that. An insect spirit is at its strongest if they take over a host that was big and strong and go hybrid (which obvious favors cows over humans). An insect spirit is at its smartest if the host flubs their willpower check and you get a true form (which obviously favors incubating in domesticated animals). The entire war between the Invae and the Humans has only the very thinnest of pretexts, and it doesn't even make internal sense.


As good a reason as any.

This is probably as good a time as any to come clean about the inhabitation rules: they are bad. I mean, really bad. They do not do the things the designers of those rules said they did. If you actually roll the dice and generate the numbers... things are weird. Nothing at all like they way they are described in the fiction. The inhabitation rules first came out in 1st edition and they were basically gibberish all the way through 3rd. The only time they ever made any sense was when I was allowed to rewrite half of them in 4th edition and actually mathhammered the fucking things.

And they still weren't all that, because I only got to write half of them. 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. But I was overruled because Germans* are assholes. But that's the closest it ever got. The rest of Shadowrun history is full of people deliberately writing special case rules for insect spirits and then not having the slightest fucking idea what the rules they wrote actually generate and everything going to fuck. And by “full of” I mean that I am literally the only person who didn't do it that way in an actual quarter of a century of this fucking game.

*: The German playtesters wanted us to change the name of Worker Spirits to something that sounded “Less Communist,” and Peter Taylor approved the plan by a German author of having Voodoo Tasks Spirits be game mechanically distinct from Insect Worker Spirits instead of laughing in their fucking faces because that is the dumbest fucking objection I have ever heard. Fuck Germans. They can't write or evaluate RPG materials for shit. And listening to their ideas always makes things worse. Always. No exceptions. It's like listening to their theories of economics.

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. Even when my standards were low, they weren't that low.

I feel we've done a lot of ranting already without telling anyone what this chapter actually is: an in-character rehash of bug spirits. It may be, in fact, one of the first in-character detailed efforts at bug spirits after Universal Brotherhood, and basically is the first book to tell you the player how much of the stuff in Grimoire your character should know in-character. Which isn't a lot, but then bug spirits don't get a lot in the way of character development. Like zombies, they primarily exist for you to have something to shoot in the face.


Not in the face, bro. Bzz.

You'll also notice that Frank called them the invae. This started out in Earthdawn and then carried over when Harlequin called them that in Harlequin's Back. The thing is, in Earthdawn the insect spirits aren't the horrific monsters they are in Shadowrun; they're literally just random encounter insect dudes you stab in the face with your prehistoric crystal sword. None of the inhabitation rules or splitting them up by different species or any of that mucking about. I think the assumption is that the Horrors ate them first, but nobody really cares about that.

Insect shamans are also pretty much by definition pants-on-head crazy. Which is kinda sad, t'be honest.

Creepy, but sad.

The idea is that insect shamans never started out that way. They were regular shamans, following some perfectly normal totem like Walrus, Chihuahua, Penguin, Wyrm, Moon Maiden, Prometheus, Fire!, or whatever, but something made 'em slip to the dark side and their totem shifted to an Insect totem. Could be they went on a bad astral quest, or touched the wrong artifact, or spent too many hours at the insect zoo, or had a traumatic life event...whatever. From then on, they start a downward mental slide as contact with the Insect totem derides their sanity, and the shaman - even if well-meaning at first! - becomes twisted into doing what the totem wants, kidnapping people to invest as insect spirits, yadda yadda.

Which is...not great? I mean, it's bad enough that insect spirits lack any motivation beyond "create more insect spirits," but you'd like to have a human facilitator villain that has enough marbles rolling around in their noggin that they don't just automatically put on a hat with bug antennae on it and start kidnapping kids.



Even if you don't give insect magicians spell bug-related powers (I for one would think twice about dealing with any magician with a spell to turn into a mass of cockroaches or flies), they should at least be able to have some human motivations - and rather than go straight to "cackling insanely as they tie the virgin sacrifice to the altar," they should have some more authentic and interesting descent into insanity.

For example: a guy getting divorced who invests insect spirits into his wife and kids to make them stay, forming his own perfect little family. Except it's not quite perfect, is it? One of the kids isn't a good merge. Or the neighbors notice. Or the kids get in trouble at school. Or the queen spirit was invested in his wife, and now she's trying to take over. Or maybe despite his best efforts, they don't act quite human, and he's under a lot of stress to maintain the masquerade. Hell, maybe they aren't even his kids. Maybe he had to try it out a few times, first, to make sure he would get it right. "Don't go down in the basement, that's where daddy keeps his work..."

...but, we don't get that in Shadowrun. We could, but we don't. It's a waste of potential.

FrankT:

One thing the book plays up, but should probably play up more, is that insect spirits don't perceive things the way humans do. They have some in-character rambling about how they usually don't perceive technology to be a threat because they operate by smell or something, which is actually some pretty good writing. The real answer is that they are spirits and operate on astral perception, where hi-tech gadgets are nearly invisible. It's a pretty neat setup in that it's monsters who operate by different rules than the players do, but they still operate by rules. You can have a rational discussion about what a bug spirit can or cannot get fooled by. It's an answerable question, and that's cool.


To bug senses, those three dudes are glowing human-shapes, and everything around them is featureless gray blobs.

Apparently the shamans eventually get turned on by the queens and eaten. This is so the evil high priest can die in a cliché fashion screaming “No! I am your master!” as he's carted off for eating. This sort of betrayal by the big villain of the lesser villain is there to show you that the big bad is ultimately honorless and how being on Team Evil is foolish in addition to bad. But it's a really heavy handed trope application and doesn't make a lot of sense. The only motivation the queen is given is that she wants to poop out more hive members. No reason is given for why they might want to have one less hive member by killing the guy who knows sorcery.

AncientH:

The biology is a bit weak here; all bug spirits use cocoons because...because.



Some spirits don't found hives. Just to fuck with you, basically. It pretty much kills the build-a-hive insect shaman dynamic. They also don't talk at all about free insect spirits, although that's a thing.

FrankT:

The book tries to get us to believe that even at the point that there are bug monsters going on rampages and thousands dead in the street and shit that people don't believe that the Universal Brotherhood is bad. That's just... dumb. The big reveal was already made several books ago, it's just not plausible that there's any kind of confusion on this point. It's like if people were trying to claim that lots of ordinary New Yorkers were like “Al Quaeda? Those are such nice boys, no way they'd blow up the WTC” in November of 2001. It's just dumb.

Basically, you can have your secretly evil organization that no one believes are secretly evil, or you can have the big reveal and blood running in the streets. You can't have both. Once you've done your big reveal, there are no take backsies. There just aren't.


It's like how running the Matrix sequels back to Neo having to learn what it's all about and people doubting whether he's the one and shit was bad storytelling.

AncientH:

I think part of the justification for the Bug City coverup is that they released Universal Brotherhood years ago and there wasn't a lot of blow-up about it in the universe. It's a problem that Shadowrun has dealt with more than once; probably the most notorious example was Emergence being about the reveal of cyberkinetics...which were already in the main book.

FrankT:

Terminology about Insect Spirits wasn't nailed down all that well. If you talk to Shadowrun fans now, they will talk about three categories of Insect merges: True Form, Hybrid Form, and Flesh Form. The True Form looks like a Bug, the Flesh Form looks like a person, and the Hybrid Form looks like Jeff Goldblum from The Fly. But that nomenclature came out more than a decade later and was written by me to clean this shit up. In this book, the inhabitation table had four results on it, but only two distinct names for those results. Things could be either True Form or Flesh Form, and the fact that there were four different flavors of these fucking things and that it didn't make any sense at all to use the terminology interchangeably like that was apparently completely lost on the original authors.


All of these are Flesh Forms according to this book. Fucking hell.

Shadowrun has never been terribly deep when it comes to philosophy. Nor has it been terribly committed to logical consistency. Nowhere is that more apparent than in its treatment of Flesh Form Insect Spirits. A Flesh Form (or if you're using the outlandishly terrible nomenclature of this book: a “stage four good merge flesh form”) looks like the person, has all the memories and skills of the person, and can think like the person. While they may have “died” in the cocoon, the Flesh Form is very definitely alive and can pass any test you care to give that it is the same person. And you could make an argument that they totally aren't the same person because of essential natures or vital essences or the discontinuity of being or whatever but... Vampires. Shadowrun has Vampires, who are also killed and then come back as supernatural creatures with new powers and life goals but all the same memories and stunning good looks. It's philosophically exactly the same fucking thing. But Shadowrun has always fallen on the side of the argument that Vampires are the same person while Flesh Forms are not. Which is logically indefensible. Nevertheless, these completely incompatible positions are taken consistently both by people in-character and by omniscient out-of-character rules text. It's very odd.


It's just as dumb as this argument plus added hypocrisy.

AncientH:

Unlike White Wolf, which kept it's fantasy cosmology weird and contrary and bullshit because they don't want to get in trouble with denying God actually exists or anything, Shadowrun metaphysics are weird and sometimes contrary because real-world religion is weird, and there are questions that they both don't have the answer to and don't want to answer. Case in point, Shadowrun really doesn't want to get into the nitty gritty about what constitutes the human soul, or where it goes after death. They're fine with giving everyone auras, and even astral forms for magicians, but they don't want you summoning one up from your afterlife of choice and asking explicit questions.

Which isn't to say that there aren't ghosts (there are!) - but they're not the same as the people that died. Even Ancestor spirits are explicitly not the spirits of people that died, they just look like them. Which means you could totally have a music adept that conjures up the spirits of Elvis or Sid Vicious to help him jam through the Battle of the Bands.

Which is all an aside, but as Frank said, when an insect spirit is invested in someone, even if it has all their memories and can imitate them flawlessly, the person is still for all intents and purposes no longer in existence. It's a weird catch, and it's not something that everyone in the Shadowrun universe groks. Hell, in Nigel Findley's novel House of the Sun, that's explicitly a plot point.

FrankT:

There are nine bug spirit types in this book. And it's a weird list. Ant, Beetle, Cicada, Firefly, Fly, Mantis, Mosquito, Roach, and Wasp. Cicada is a Family, Beetle is an Order, Firefly is a Family that is literally inside the Beetle Order. Some of those bugs are Hive insects, some of them don't have hives but at least Swarm, and some of them don't do any of that shit and are basically just solitary animals. So this shit pretty much makes no sense. You can kinda accept that maybe a nest swarming with roaches is “close enough” to an ant hive (despite not being eusocial, not having distinct types, and most importantly of all not having any fucking queens). But Mosquitoes and Mantises aren't even close. And of course, some of these creatures have distinct cocoon delineated life stages and others just... don't. The list of types makes no sense. It's just a list of bug monsters various Shadowrun writers had wanted to write up at various points.

This image is gross and creates a visceral response, but it only makes sense in “nightmare logic” not actual logical sense.

Each flavor of bug spirit gets a very tiny amount of information. Partly this is the format – there are pictures on every page and meandering comments sections on each one. Basically it's a lot like reading a twitter feed about each bug type. But partly it's that the writing is indeed just extremely shallow. Each bug type only gets a couple of facts about them, and pretty much none of them had those facts squared with the overall plotline. Wasps spend their time flying around in the air over high buildings. Remember, these things are kill-on-sight all over the world and they were supposedly avoiding detection in the middle of a city with ten million people in it. There isn't a lot of data on these guys, but what there is completely sinks the battleship that is the entire narrative of this metaplot.


The only real fact about Cicada spirits is that apparently they make a shit tonne of noise and thus the entire storyline that they avoided detection while building up their nests in the middle of downtown fucking Chicago is too absurd to merit a reply.

Nowhere is Shadowrun's confused ethical stance standing with more of its fly open than it is for Mantis Spirits. They are Insect Spirits. They kill humans in order to make more Insect Spirits. In addition, they murder other Insect Spirits and eat them. This is presented as morally complicated. I have no idea what the complication is supposed to be, considering that you could just as easily look at it from the standpoint of say, Ants. You know, how they kill people to make more Ants but also fight Mantis spirits. Why are we supposed to have sympathy for the Mantises and not for the Ants? It's exactly the same. One is team Red Laser and the other is team Blue Laser. It's fucking retarded.

AncientH:

I'll say this for Mantis spirits: they have more motivation than the others. This is because Mantis spirits explicitly eat other bug spirits; it's their whole purpose in life, besides making more mantis spirits. So the enemy of my enemy may also be my enemy, but at least they have one extra little dimension to their ambitions that makes them a smidgen more interesting.

In the Shadowrun 'verse, though, Mantis spirit cabals are a little freaky. The authors took the whole "female praying mantises may eat male praying mantises during sex" thing and somehow we ended up as lesbian biker gangs of mantis spirits.


Look, it's okay you want lesbian biker gangs without shoehorning sexualized violence against males into the mix

In the context of Bug City, mantis spirits show up pretty much specifically to chow down. Which, honestly, is fine as motivations go. The fact that their are mantis spirits in the 'Zone not openly doing that is annoying, though. C'mon, it's an all-you-can-eat insect spirit buffet! What do you need, an engraved invitation?

The color plates in this book are by Jeff Miracola. They're not terribly great, t'be honest. Pretty par for the course with Shadowrun. Color plates in general are an evolutionary middle-step between black-and-white and full-color books, back when not every RPG supplement was printed on glossy stock in China.


Remember when they had Tim Bradstreet and Janet Aulisio?

FrankT:

The color plates aren't numbered for some reason. FASA was like that a lot. So when we pass the color plate pages, the page numbers on the actual text pages are no longer the correct number of pages into the book. I dunno why that happened.

AncientH:

That's it for the insect spirit recap; now on to what you actually paid for, a rundown of post-nuking Chicago in the chapter entitled "Bug City."

[Nath]

Which means you could totally have a music adept that conjures up the spirits of Elvis or Sid Vicious to help him jam through the Battle of the Bands.

We once tried to summon the Great Form Spirit of John Morrison, and all we got instead was the spirit of Iggy Pop (un)dressed as a naked Indian.

That was a good game.

[Whipstitch]

You mean Jim Morrison. John Morrison is just a Jim Morrison themed former wwe wrestler.

[Nath]

That might explain why the summoning did not work.

[Username17]

Any chance of the Arc making it to OSSR?

There's definitely a chance. For obvious reasons, Ancient History and I do most of our OSSR bits on D&D, White Wolf, or Shadowrun. Criteria for inclusion are pretty much always "for the lulz." Some things get on the list because they were good, a lot more things get on there because they were terrible, and we'd like to do more things that were well received at the time but which in hindsight are pretty bad.

I dunno. I think the next thing I do should probably be a branch out into like R Talsorian or something. But AncientHistory has been reading a CoC sourcebook that is literally a racist hate crime that came out in 2005. So we'll see.

In any case, there will almost certainly be more Shadowrun OSSRs at some point. The Arcology Shutdown is a major plot that could get visited. Super Tuesday or the Comet shenanigans might get visited as well. Or we might do some of the more gonzo location books like Cyberpirates! or Germany. Shadowrun has game books, location books, adventures, and metaplot books, and they all overlap to some degree and some of them got really crazy. At this point, Shadowrun has gotten so sclerotic that it needs to be rebooted, but the people who currently own the license are also horrible people and horrible authors who would make something as shitty as the JMS Wonder Woman reboot if we were lucky.

-Username17

[Fucks]

And steal money! From the freelancers! And customers!

[Fucks]

In any case, there will almost certainly be more Shadowrun OSSRs at some point. The Arcology Shutdown is a major plot that could get visited. Super Tuesday or the Comet shenanigans might get visited as well. Or we might do some of the more gonzo location books like Cyberpirates! or Germany.
-Username17

Fuck Germans. They can't write or evaluate RPG materials for shit. And listening to their ideas always makes things worse. Always. No exceptions. -Username17

Oh, and OSSR full of surprises.

[Longes]

In any case, there will almost certainly be more Shadowrun OSSRs at some point. The Arcology Shutdown is a major plot that could get visited. Super Tuesday or the Comet shenanigans might get visited as well. Or we might do some of the more gonzo location books like Cyberpirates! or Germany.
-Username17

Fuck Germans. They can't write or evaluate RPG materials for shit. And listening to their ideas always makes things worse. Always. No exceptions. -Username17

Oh, and OSSR full of surprises.

Well, from what I remember, SR Germany is a speshul snowflake, that did like Tirs and kicked all the corporations and governments out, and is run by anarchists now. The ammount of places in Shadowrun that have successfuly resisted corporate influence is really annoying.

[vagrant]

Not all of Germany. Just Berlin - anarchist Berlin is a fun place. But the rest of Germany is Lowfyr's personal backyard. (Saeder-Krupp is a mighty German company run with efficiency and productivity, after all. And you're eaten if you don't make your quarterly numbers, which surely helps morale.)

[mlangsdorf]

All I know about Germany in Shadowrun comes from the DLC for the recent computer game. Berlin is apparently some kind of semi-anarchist "Flux State" which you're supposed to support as the PC, even though there's no real reason to do so. At least until 2055 or so, when the dragon Lofwyr sends Saeder-Krupp in to establish law and order and the anarchist communes are destroyed.

[Stahlseele]

Only half of Berlin is the anarcho haven(note the spelling it's haven, not heaven), the other half decided to build a wall to not have to deal with that and pretty much became a corporate enclave.

And i am kind of surprised at how the german shadowrun people are seen here . .
pretty much everywhere else, they are seen, by now, as the people who should be in charge of the shadowrun IP because their stuff is better than the stuff produced by catalyst . .
We got more novels (bad as i might think they are), we got more sourcebooks and setting stuff and they also vetoed the auschwitz and poisoning gypsie wells in WAR and errataed out the slow spell i think . .

[Rawbeard]

There should be a ban on any german SR writing. I will never forget the unresistable 14D stun Plasma Cannon in one of the earlier german expansion books.

[vagrant]

To be fair, 'Doing a better job than Catalyst' is not that high a bar.

[Stahlseele]

true . . true . .

[Fucks]

And i am kind of surprised at how the german shadowrun people are seen here . .
pretty much everywhere else, they are seen, by now, as the people who should be in charge of the shadowrun IP because their stuff is better than the stuff produced by catalyst . .
We got more novels (bad as i might think they are), we got more sourcebooks and setting stuff and they also vetoed the auschwitz and poisoning gypsie wells in WAR and errataed out the slow spell i think . .

Dare to interfere with the writings and ideas of HIM, Frank Trollmann, and HIS eternal wrath is upon you and all of your kind!

[Ancient History]

I have nothing against PegasusSpiel, mainly because most of them will admit that the old German-only Shadowrun publications, of which the Germany Sourcebook was a partial translation, are balls-to-the-walls insane. Not as insane as the French sourcebook, but still.

[sandmann]

I have nothing against PegasusSpiel, mainly because most of them will admit that the old German-only Shadowrun publications, of which the Germany Sourcebook was a partial translation, are balls-to-the-walls insane.

This. There is a big difference between the old Fanpro-guys and the new guys from Pegasus.

Not as insane as the French sourcebook, but still.

Go on.

[Ancient History]

Oh, we're not even talking FanPro - I think the Bavaria sourcebook was third-party, wasn't it? And the whole Immortal Dwarf nonsense.

The French sourcebook was...ah...completely insane? Return of the Ancient Regime, survived the Crash of '29 unscathed, immortal elves running around everywhere. It got nerfed (or, well, ignored) pretty hard when Shadows of Europe came out, but even back in the days of 2nd edition it was the stuff of ridicule. Every "not in my backyard" self-aggrandizement possible.

[Username17]

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.

Oh, an OSSR full of surprises.

Oh, it would be. German Shadowrun writing is worse than you can believe, even taking into account that you already know that it's worse than you can believe. We're talking about anti-technology fields for when non-mage characters feel like they are accomplishing too much. We're talking about unbeatable immortal smurfs for when the players feel like their characters have too much dignity, we're talking about "Me Tooisms" for all the North American splinter countries inside fucking Germany.

-Username17

[Fucks]

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.

Are the freelancers who opposed your ideas still among them?