The Shadowrun Situation

[Lokathor]

I say you and frank do your own shadowrun. With blackjack and hookers!
And fluff/crunch that fits together and makes a certain ammount of sense . .

Frank already wrote his part. We just need sane vehicle rules and we can shove it all together.

[cthulhu]

I honestly don't even know where Bogota is.

[Kaelik]

I honestly don't even know where Bogota is.

It's a shitty city that no one should ever go to in Columbia. Not least because you'll be anally searched if they know you go there regularly. Primary airport in Columbia.

[Otakusensei]

They should have gone with Santos in Brazil so they could do a plot tie in to the Xbox game...

[JongWK]

They should have gone with Santos in Brazil so they could do a plot tie in to the Xbox game...

No. Just no.

[Username17]

With the expansion of Aztlan south and the expansion of Amzonia north, Bogotá is in Aztlan's border province (the north half of Columbia plus a bit of Venezuela is a province of Aztlan, with the rest and most of Venezuela being a province of Amazonia). For Jason's big plotline, they decided to put the dividing line right next to Bogotá and then have Aztlan put a bunch of carnivorous trees next to the city and then have Amazonia flip out over that. I don't even know what to say about that.

It's a regional capitol, it's close to the border, it has a lot of people in it, and it would be a reasonably important target in a war between Amazonia and Aztlan. Of course, every single thing I just said applies just as much to Caracas. So why is War! completely about Bogotá and completely not about Caracas? I don't know. Among Jason's many faults is the complete lack of understanding that if you wanted to have a war, you would probably want to flesh out the strategic objectives of both sides. As is, you can tell that Amazonia is going to win, because the places that they might lose aren't written up. Really bad storytelling.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

I still can't believe they made Amazonia go to war over trees they don't like - the one country in the 6th world that usually put trees over people.

[Fucks]

As much as I hate it, but I agree with you, Fuchs.

[Stahlseele]

WORK BRINGS FREEDOM
Oswiecim was under a spiritual barrier for a number of years. Oswiecim was home to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most well known of the Nazi party’s concentration camps. During the Holocaust, 1.1 million people died within its walls. This led it to become one of the most haunted places on the planet. Ghosts of all shapes and sizes dwelled within, frightening out or murdering all residents of Oswiecim. Because of the sheer magnitude of the haunting, a great number of other things found home there. For the inclined occult investigator, Auschwitz-Birkenau is a treasure trove. It’s also a remarkably dangerous trap. Earlier this year, an entrepreneur named Tetsuo Shuumatsu hired a cabal of sorcerers, charging them with the removal of the barrier. He’s an arms dealer, one who specializes in the weapons necessary to take down ghosts. With such an infestation of ghosts, only a silly buyer would hesitate to pay top dollar for his wares. His greed opened this treasure trove to the public, allowing those without a sense of self-preservation to have a unique opportunity to drudge for necromantic artifacts.
The town proper is effectively still a town, albeit a town inhabited by the angry and hungry dead. They don’t take kindly to the living, but aren’t necessarily hostile unless provoked. Many are simply living out echoes of their past existences as harmless villagers.

Someone did not pay attention on several levels . .

[Fuchs]

Yeah, apart from the question of whether or not one should use Auschwitz as a dungeon crawl location, "weapons to take down ghosts", "necromantic artifacts", "angry and hungry dead", "cabal of sorcerers" and "spiritual barrier" all sound like they author rewrote some D&D-plot without having a clue of the magic system and fluff of Shadowrun.

And the editors let that through....

[Juton]

WORK BRINGS FREEDOM
With such an infestation of ghosts, only a silly buyer would hesitate to pay top dollar for his wares.

None of its Shakespeare, but this sentence in particular strikes me as horrid.

EDIT: Sorry about that.

[Fuchs]

Tags are broken.

[Username17]

So I said I probably wasn't going to read War!, certainly I was never going to buy it. However, I got set an author's copy and a challenge by [Name Withheld] and I finished the ophthalmology practical today, so I will eat those words and do a reasonably fair review of it. Fortunately for my sanity, I have discovered that my favorite Czech mead (Jan Halada Zlata) comes in three different strengths (12.5%, 18%, and 21%) so with a quick trip to the Christmas market I now have a good sampler and can get drunk enough to make it through this.

However, I did promise to be as fair as possible, and I'll tell you what that means to me. First of all, I know that the best gearheads and fluffnazis quit or got pushed out of the compay. I also know that the scabs they brought in to replace them largely know little or nothing about the Shadowrun 4 rules or the Shadowrun story. So to review this as if it was an extension to the Shadowrun story or an expansion to the Shadowrun 4 rules would be unfair. This product really has nothing to do with the talent pool that made Shadowrun 4 what it is, so it should be reviewed on its own merits. I'll consider the story as if this was a stand alone story in a world that was very similar to Shadowrun, and considering the rules as if they were a set of test balloons for possible inclusion in a 5th edition. If I just nerd raged out every time I found something in this book that doesn't jive with the continuing story or the rules for the current edition, I'd pretty much just nerd rage the whole way through and the reader would get no actionable information. It would be like stressing out every time an episode of Go-Bots failed to live up to Transformers canon.

The first thing that really jumps out at you, and I mean right as soon as you open the book, is that this book has no introduction. Now I know, many people skip introductions, especially when it is a book that is part of an ongoing series of RPG materials. But in this case it probably would have been helpful, because the book is supposed to be about War! and yet the first section of the book hops right directly into... demographic facts about the capital city of a province in Aztlan. Why does it do this? It's not clear on reading, eventually they tell you that this city is in the middle of a war, but they probably should have established this sometime between the cover where they promise you War! and the first page, where they start talking about dry demographic details of a city you have probably heard of like twice.

It was probably supposed to be sort of In Media Res, but really the first chapter is just incoherent. Even if you know the plotline to SR and you've been sneaking regular peaks at the development process of the book like I have, you're still left scratching your head. A lot. The book really needed to begin with at least a one page summary of what countries were at war, and why, and why we would care about Bogotá. It didn't. It opens with some demographics of Bogotá and an in-character rant about how the narrator will tell you everything you need to know about Bogotá, starting (no shit) with a discussion of the weather. This discussion fails to mention that Bogotá is 2600 meters above sea level and has thin air. I'm going to take a drink and move on, because the whole first chapter puts crap like the rules of fútbol and music stations in Bogotá front and center and never does get around to telling you what the fuck is going on. This reads like it was supposed to be chapter 3 and may have been padded for length. I'm left making my Lewis Black face fairly frequently.

Right. And just in case you were afraid they wouldn't get to the point of telling you what the fucking hell is going on by the time you get to the end of chapter one: they don't. Your hopes are slightly buoyed by the fact that the next chapter is a "history" chapter, and even though it bills itself as History of Bogotá they start by ranting about the war. Again, in character, and by someone who is specifically biased, so even if they got down to the nitty gritty, you still wouldn't be sure of what the fuck was happening. This is also where you are really glad that you're evaluating this as a stand alone product, and not part of the continuing story of Shadowrun - because the history you read there doesn't look a lot like the history you read elsewhere. You'd also be pretty annoyed at the fact that all the characters in this book are talking with totally different voices than they do in other books. But again, that kind of nit picking will only drive you to drink more of this delicious mead. The key is that it starts at the beginning - in the 2040s, even though the action is in 2072. And it takes time out t have people have off-topic discussions about drug cartels. Also it keeps wandering in and out of "overview" mode. Sometimes it is talking about the actions of individual street gangs, other times it is flipping through multi-year periods. It's exhausting when it finally gets to the point.

OK, the point is retarded. Carnivorous trees. I know, I've ranted about this in the past, and I hold to those convictions. This plotline makes no sense at all in the context of previous SR writings. Even on its own, we're supposed to take carnivorous tree planting as an affront that drove the two nations to war. I can't say enough about how stupid that is, so I won't. It's just there: chapter two is a history rewrite (except it's in character so maybe it is just wrong) and the big reveal for what the war is about... is a dispute over gardening. This is possibly more inane than the Soccer War. Now, this is Latin America, which actually brought you the Soccer War, so I'm not saying it couldn't happen - I am just saying that this book does not sell this possibility. The piece after that about how even now there are deadly trees growing in the neighborhood makes for possibly the most unintentionally funny horror section I've seen in some time. It's like the end to The Happening.

Blow by blow of what the fuck is happening only starts on page 28. This is nominally a continuation of the history of Bogotá by the same author, but it feels like a completely different chapter. Here it starts going into hyper detail of individual events and even individual people in the war. This could really use a map with lines and division symbols on it, but instead we get a blurb about how an influential priest in Tenochtitlan has become more influential over the last few years.

The next chapter is supposed to be about Bogotá's culture, thus veering farther away fro the book topic once again. Actually there is relatively little discussion of the actual culture. Mostly it s whining about how the culture is getting trod upon by the fact the area is at war. Also discussions about different orders within the Catholic Church (I am not making that up). I think this chapter was supposed to present the human face of the victims of war or something. Mostly it's just a waste of space. The latter half of the chapter lists some political movements, street gangs, important NPCs, unimportant NPCs, and wildernss survival tips (why is that in Bogotá culture, the wilderness is outside Bogotá). It's like a whole separate chapter of "other stuff" which is just an incongruous as that sounds.

What comes next is a pretty decent chapter. I'm so surprised I'll drink. It's a chapter on mercenary units and each mercenary unit gets a writeup by a member of a specific mercenary unit. He starts by puffing up his own CV by talking up the action his unit had seen during the conflict. Then he talks about some other mercenary units. It introduces things that matter in the context of war in general and this war in particular. It would have been better if every unit had been being talked up and related to the unfolding events, but even as-is, the chapter gets the job done. Definitely needs tinkering, in that some of the stuff is labeled "pregen" and appears to be in omniscient 3rd person narrative game text despite being inside a section that is nominally in-world, but other than that it mostly holds up. Worth the page space.

Next chapter, we are back to fappery. It's called "The War" and you'd think it would be about the war in progress. It gets there eventually, but the first page is dominated by an essay about how brown people like fútbol. Anyway, there is then a discussion of motivations for the different countries. Unfortunately, it's motivations in general rather than motivations for the current conflict. That part is still relatively unexplained. Or rather, the explanation still seems to be that Aztlan has been encroaching on Bogotá for no reason and then they planted trees for no reason, and then the ecological religious zealots determined that was the last straw for no reason. Then there is some discussion of other factions.

I'll do the rest later, right now I am going over to my girlfriend's place.

But sure. That's a chapter by chapter breakdown. But what about the major themes? Why am I so relentlessly negative all the time? Let's count the ways:

Errors
Typographical errors run amok in this document. There's one (or more) on practically every page. It doesn't look professional. I personally write unprofessional work in my free time that I release to the public for free, and it has less typos than this. Prepositions appear to be largely optional, different spellings are used for the same thing on different pages, and so on. But the thing that really grates on me is that the book doesn't keep its own internal facts straight. Little details like where things are, who did what, and when events occurred should at least be consistent in the book, whether or not they agree with previous books in the series or real world details.

Jackpointers
OK, Shadowrun has a cast of contributing writers who are posting on a forum that is the books you are reading. It has ever been thus. There has been a complete turnover of authors and it is unreasonable to expect them to read back through all the old canon material and have the people talking with the same "voice" they used in the past. But this is just really bad. The people don't keep the same voice within the book. They can't even keep their voice consistent within the same page. Here are two comments by the same character on the same page:

Revolting. They call this a “clash of cultures?” Hardly. Feels more like an eradication of a culture to me. This is far worse than any alleged atrocities Amazonia may have committed fi ghting this war. And frankly, given the crap Aztlan is trying to pull in Bogotá, you can hardly fault Amazonia for fi ghting so hard against Aztlan’s tyranny.

Not to sound heartless, but in times of war, civilians have always paid the price for war being fought in close proximity to them. No matter how hard you try, you’re always going to have civilian casualties. It comes with the territory.

I a not making that up. Those are both posts nominally from the same character made on the same page of the same book.

Watch Your Language
I'll fully admit that my own Deutsch and Español are rusty and were never that good to begin with. Nevertheless, when I read the bits that are supposed to be in German or Spanish, I find myself cringing constantly. It's not even consistent. One page will talk about "The Capitolio Nacional" and on the next it will talk about the "Capitolio National". Weird juxtapositions of English words and other languages. Like some of the drafts had auto-correct on at some point? I don't even know, but it looks really bad. The weird thing is, last time I checked, they had natives on staff for both languages. None of them worked on this particular project, but you'd think they could have sent over an email asking "Dude, how badly are we butchering your native language?"

Mega Damage
Rob left them something of a land mine in the SR4 rules as regards making military grade numbers work out. That is, he moved to a non-proportional damage system for SR4. As long as we keep things human level for the most part, it kinda works OK. Suffers a bit from the "two hits" problem, but it's generally OK. For larger things it doesn't work so well. The reality of hardened armor is that for every one point of Body you get 1/2 a health box and 2 points of armor, for a total average damage reduction of 1 damage. But to penetrate that much more armor, an attack would need to do 2 more damage. So for a bigger vehicle, you'd need a weapon so big that it is unreasonable to expect to do anything other than vaporize it in one hit just to scratch the paint. You'd think that a book about War! would be a good place to reintroduce proportional damage rules and put things on some sort of log scale where tanks could suffer minor damage again. They didn't do that. The big weapons just do stupidly titanic piles of damage and the bigger vehicles simply can't suffer minor damage from anything. So the answer to the question of "This part of the rules doesn't really work very well, I wonder how they are going to work around it?" is, unfortunately: They Didn't.

Is That True?
A good rule of thumb is that if text is being written by someone in-world, then that text is someone's opinion. And like all points of view, it probably contains some elements of truth and some elements of falsehood. An equally good rule of thumb is that if something is omniscient game text that is talking directly to the actual reader of the actual book, that this text is "true" within the context of the game. That dichotomy has held up for years over multiple editions. I can't tell what the truth value of anything in War! is supposed to be. They have rules text boxes with stat lines and such right in chapters that have fictional authors in the fictional world.

Stay on Topic
A lot of stuff just sort of wanders around. Like the chapters had a completely different focus right before editing or something. Maybe the writers just had too much pot. I don't really know. But you keep running into subsections that have nothing to do with the book as a whole, and often aren't even tangentially related to the stuff immediately surrounding them. This is an actual excerpt from an entry in the Bogotá Culture chapter:

Peter Hunt is an elusive gure. From what I could tell, he doesn’t work in Bogotá, but rather is working out of another undisclosed Horizon location somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.

This isn't even the worst example, just the punchiest. There is quite a bit more page space given over to revealing that the author doesn't know who this person is or why we should care. Don't ever write something like that.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Thanks for the writeup Frank.

And now for a bitter little question from me:
If we were to take this book, remove all mentionings of the shadowrun universe and replaced it with the Battletech Universe . . would it still be bad?
Seems as if most stuff people are bitching about is stuff many people both inside and outside of the universe would want for Battletech . .
I'm kinda surprised there's no mentioning of multiples of 30m (one battletech hex) in all of this . .

[TheFlatline]

Mead is a delicious delicious drink. I make my own in fact it's so delicious.

That's probably the high point of your post.

As for expecting freelancers to go over the previous SR4 books to see their layout and capture the "voice" of the in world characters, it's not asking *that* much.

The guy who picked up the end of the Wheel of Time series read the 11 books written at least once specifically for that reason, and I want to say twice. That's like 10,000 pages just for research. What are we talking about here for SR4? Maybe a dozen books that have a couple hundred pages in them? Reading through 3 or 4 isn't a tall order.

It seems like nobody really cared about the book. The authors all worked on it in a vacuum and the editor when "oh my god" and just kind of Frankenstiend the bits and pieces together. Maybe it'd be more accurate to say whoever was the project leader didn't break down how the book was supposed to flow, and thus the authors were working on individual projects without any guidance.

[Stahlseele]

Well, one of the Battletech Writers has at least started reading the SR novels.

[Surgo]

The guy who picked up the end of the Wheel of Time series read the 11 books written at least once specifically for that reason, and I want to say twice. That's like 10,000 pages just for research. What are we talking about here for SR4? Maybe a dozen books that have a couple hundred pages in them? Reading through 3 or 4 isn't a tall order.

It seems like nobody really cared about the book. The authors all worked on it in a vacuum and the editor when "oh my god" and just kind of Frankenstiend the bits and pieces together. Maybe it'd be more accurate to say whoever was the project leader didn't break down how the book was supposed to flow, and thus the authors were working on individual projects without any guidance.

We're not talking about the same scale though. Wheel of Time is extraordinarily popular, more so than Shadowrun by at least one order of magnitude, and Brandon Sanderson spent a year writing each book. A freelancer isn't going to spend a year writing his section of a roleplaying book, that's a titanic waste of resources.

[Fuchs]

They should have written a book about war though, not "A travel guide to Bogota".

[Stahlseele]

http://forums.shadowrun4.com/index.php?topic=1858.30
*snickers*

[TheFlatline]

We're not talking about the same scale though. Wheel of Time is extraordinarily popular, more so than Shadowrun by at least one order of magnitude, and Brandon Sanderson spent a year writing each book. A freelancer isn't going to spend a year writing his section of a roleplaying book, that's a titanic waste of resources.

I agree the scale is way different, but nobody *made* Sanderson go back and re-read the entire series. That wasn't a condition of his employment. In fact, he started before he actually got the job. He took pride in his work.

My point is that it would only take a fraction of the time to catch up on Shadowrun 4, and in theory, the freelancers are going to be turning out a lot more Shadowrun, so it's in their best interest to get caught up and familiar with the tone, setting, timeline, and signature characters.

Otherwise, they really either A. Aren't professional enough to care or B. Didn't think that they'd be writing a lot more Shadowrun down the road or C. Was put under extremely unrealistic expectations/time constraints.

[fectin]

I have discovered that my favorite Czech mead (Jan Halada Zlata) comes in three different strengths (12.5%, 18%, and 21%) so with a quick trip to the Christmas market I now have a good sampler and can get drunk enough to make it through this.

That's pretty strong for mead.

[Username17]

Alright, so it's lunch tie so I went home to do ore of what I said I was going to do: read War! and give a fair assessment of it. We open up the book to where they finally say they are going to tell us what the fuck is going on. This is page 72. Possibly just to piss you off, it opens with this:

We’ve heard enough about why the war’s going on, and why every kid and his mother’s got an interest in shooting someone or another. For those that are going to be here, let’s talk about what’s going on, who is shooting who, and what they’re shooting with. This is important.

Yes. That is in fact important. It's so important that it probably should have been in the introduction that this book does not have. Of course, they haven't really gone into the actual motivations of the war. They have had some in-character discussions about how the official reasons (which are not gone into in great detail) are wrong and some hand-wringing where various people argue over what real motivations other people have. This could have all been done much more cleanly by putting in a two page description in omniscient 3rd person narrative about what the basic setup was, then put in two or three different one-page descriptions of events by Aztlan and Aazonia for internal consumption at different levels of classification. Honestly, the "whys" shouldn't have been more than 8 pages and should have been uch tighter and more informative.

But whatever. Now we're finally on to the "what" that the book is supposedly about, even though we are more than halfway through the section. Except... we aren't. This is a series of articles about stealing supplies or using technology and magic in a warzone in general. These are decent enough essays actually, but they don't really tell us what is going on. If someone had at any point written even a one pager of omniscience of what the fuck is going on, I would be pretty happy with these essays. Decent enough writing and close enough to on-topic to get into a book. Unfortunately, it's also disorganized. Many of these essay fragments are retold almost (but not quite) back to back by two different authors with different takes. Maybe this is supposed to be some sort of he-said-she-said, but there is no synthesis. No attempt to contrast the two different views. It reads exactly like more than one person wrote a single essay and the editor just piled them into a jumble of conceptual salad.

We don't actually start talking about actual locations until page 97. We still don't have a map. Spoiler alert: there is no map. It takes more than half the book to start describing locations and they never bother to provide a graphical representation of where those locations actually are. Places that Amazonia controls or Aztlan controls are described verbally, but this is somewhere where a picture is worth a lot more than a mere thousand words. The fact that descriptions of the zonas are very vague and don't contain any hard pictures or geographic reference points means that the whole section is fairly useless. I' sure people ore familiar with Bogotá could find all kinds of factual errors, but really it just comes off as the authors not doing any research and squeaking by using language that is deliberately vague. An abandoned gated community is talked about, but not named or fixed in space, so that whole bit could have been copy/pasted from a description of any other city. Most of the chapter on neighborhoods is like that. And... that's it. That's all there is on Bogotá. There are some keeper essays here and there, but I really couldn't tell you what any of the chapters was "about" and I have yet to be given any real battle reports, force dispositions, maps, nominally impartial history, or equipment descriptions. Someone needs to watch a few hours of the History Channel or read any book that talks about the history of a war. In just 115 pages they managed to avoid telling the reader every single thing they would probably want to know. It's quite an achievement.

Anyway, the next chapter involves spending very little time talking about other areas that are war zones. This chapter was probably done this way because someone didn't get the memo that people hated this treatment in Runner's Havens and similar books, and that no one liked those books causing them to not sell well.

Anyway, the Global Hotspots chapter gets to a rough start when the introductory paragraph changes voice between talking to people in the world and talking to the gamemaster reading the book. The rest of the chapter continues that way, with shifts mid-section or mid sentence from in-character and out-of-character voice. They don't win any points for having their first subsection being about a section of Czechia that I am personally familiar with that in turn is absolutely nothing like described. For the world book they decided to divide the Czech Republic into Bohemia, Moravia, and Marienbad. Despite the fact that Marienbad hasn't been called that since it stopped being Austrian, and Mariánské Lázně (it's actual name) is actually part of Bohemia and isn't even the regional seat (which is Karlovy Vary). The third part of Czechia is actually Silesia, part of which is in Poland. Anyway, it doesn't get a whole lot better. The very next warzone is Poland, even though that's actually the same place as far as driving tanks around would matter - Prague is less than 100 kilometers from Poland. The actual third province of Czech Republic has its historical capital in Wrocław , which is in Poland. Now, I am less intimately familiar with other countries on the list, so they aren't as nails-on-chalkboard painful to me personally. But they still lose points for being incoherent and completely unhelpful as to explaining what exactly is happening or why the PCs should care or what they might be up against if they did. Bonus negative points for having one of the "war hotspots" be a city that is not in fact at war, but merely has a bunch of corporations running shadowruns on each other.

Next up is Game Information. Now I know what you're thinking: weren't there stat blocks in chapters about Bogotá? Didn't they write up game rules for magical traditions in a chapter nominally about the Second Amazonia-Aztlan war? Didn't they have game mastering advice in the chapter about other random warzones? Yes. But this is a chapter that is all game information, so it's marked "game information". The first thing they do is set out a series of adventure ideas that are in basically the same format as the adventure ideas in the Hotspots chapter. Color the reader confused. Next comes a discussion of the differences between soldiers and shadowrunners that is apparently written in-character. I don't even know what to say at this point. The chapter veers back and forth between talking about how to run a game and copy-pasteing the pay grade chart from the US Armed Forces (which I would think the people in-world would totally have access to anyway).

Thereafter it starts writing up actual rules. Rules for stuff like troop morale (you roll 5 dice and look for 3 hits, then you panic, apparently all troops in the Sixth World break at the first sign of stuff getting weird), Post Traumatic Stress (go directly to two months in a psyche ward), and Leadership (actually, these rules are pretty decent). This section is in no discernible order, it wanders from psychology rules to explosives and then back to psychology. The new rules don't play well with the old rules (of course), but they also play rather weirdly with each other. The numbers see to be kind of random. OK, really random. A bag full of mini grenades can be bigger than a cruise missile which in turn is bigger than a nuclear device. It is apparent that none of these numbers on any of these rules were compared to other numbers in the book, let alone compared to the numbers in the rest of the edition it is supposedly an expansion to.

And finally, we wrap it up with the power creep options. Extra equipment and magical effects that are supposed to make you chortle about how powerful they are. They are profoundly hit and miss. A number of these options are rather inferior, which I assume wasn't the point because it's supposed to be power creep that is selling this book. Monofilament grenades do less damage than regular explosives. Page 159 has a sidebar about how they aren't going to stat nuclear weapons because they are basically plot devices, then the book just goes right ahead and stats them anyway. It's very schizophrenic.

Much will probably be made over "Mind Over Matter", an Adept Power that allows you to completely replace one physical attribute with its astral equivalent mental attribute for purposes of dice pools. This is of course only for Hacker Adepts, because using Logic instead of Agility is 100% awesome, because adding to dicepools is literally 100% of what Agility does for you. Your other physical attributes are used in various calculations. I genuinely don't think the subtleties of that were known to the people who wrote it.

So all in all, even evaluated as its own thing it fails. The new story doesn't fit with the old story in the slightest. But it also doesn't reinforce itself. After reading the whole book I have no idea how far Aztlan has made it into Amazonia, how many troops they have, what their supply situation is like, how many people they have killed or lost, or even what their objectives are. The new rules don't fit with the old rules at all. The Amazonian magical tradition isn't a legal or even vaguely decent magical tradition and doesn't have a complete set of spirit options. But they also don't fit with themselves. Clearly this would not be a coherent system on which to base any new edition's rules.

A special shoutout needs to go to the art. Some of it is good, most of it is bad, but almost none of it has anything to do with anything near it in the book. I think the worst offender is a picture on page 48. It's a picture of a creepy looking bishop. I call it out not because it is the worst picture in here - it's rather good. It's just taking up half the page where the other half is a description of an Ork woman. Now don't get me wrong, the description of that Ork Woman does not belong in the book, because she's the leader of a third-rate terrorist organization and she doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. But the juxtaposition is hilarious. The fact that you have the character sketch of an NPC old man right next to the character description of a young woman makes the brain break while reading it. A lot of the art is just poser pieces that have been printed in grayscale, and this looks just as lifeless and terribad as it does when people use it to make pornography. But the completely random placement of all the art pieces, combined with the inclusion of zero pieces of really relevant art (such as maps or pictures of equipment or specific NPCs) make the art feel totally out of place all the time. Even when the individual pieces are of acceptable quality.

-Username17

[Orion]

Does Reaction do anything but add to dicepools?

[Stahlseele]

What, no mentioning the Arbeit macht frei part? O.o

[cthulhu]

Does it really not have a map? What the fuck?