[Shadowrun] Shadows of Latin America

[JongWK]

Hello everyone,

Panama Pan-Corporate Zone and Bolivia are available for download now. More will follow.

Feel free to use them for non-commercial purposes.

Enjoy!

[Semerkhet]

Thanks for making these available.

[Surgo]

Yeah, seriously. Thanks!

[mean_liar]

Thanks a ton!

[Lokathor]

This is really cool, but doesn't this count as copyright infringement against the license holder of shadowrun since you're using concepts like "Aztlan" and such?

[JongWK]

This is really cool, but doesn't this count as copyright infringement against the license holder of shadowrun since you're using concepts like "Aztlan" and such?

No.

[JongWK]

I should note that two other authors have also posted their works for free:

• French Guiana, by Ancient History (Bobby Derie).
  
  Aztlan and Caribbean League, by Jason Levine.

[Surgo]

Huh, all this stuff is in PDF format. Just a note, then: if anyone is interested in setting up a wiki for good Shadowrun content, I can lend my experience in this matter.

[JongWK]

I've just uploaded my Caracas draft. Feel free to use it for non-commercial purposes.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Awesome; thanks. There are a lot of great ideas in there. If I get around to running another SR game I'm going to bring up the option working with WTF: Panama to sabotage AZT's new canal.

[Username17]

The Panama situation is really a big reason I wish SoLA had come out back then. The reasoning for the Nicaragua Canal is well laid out in the SoLA material. But as a toss off in Runner Haves it didn't make sense or have much context.

-Username17

[JongWK]

Argentina, by Peter Taylor (Synner).

[JongWK]

Peru, written by José Barbe and Hugo Medina.

[Calibron]

Wow, thank you very much.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Is this the stuff that you guys withheld copyright on?

If so, you dudes are hella classy. Do you have an e-tip jar?

[Username17]

Is this the stuff that you guys withheld copyright on?

If so, you dudes are hella classy. Do you have an e-tip jar?

The Shadows of Latin America collapse was something happening in the latter days of Shadowrun 3. Basically the short version is that various people left the project, including the developer of the project. And it got sidelined, and left in that state indefinitely.

With the company collapsing, people who had been sitting on their drafts on the increasingly remote hope that the project (which was nearly finished) would be picked back up and see publication in some form have just said "fuck it" and given the drafts to the fans for free.

And yes, that's the classy response to a situation that sucks.

-Username17

[Jay Levine]

Yeah, we held onto the drafts until there was really no more reason to. All of us would have preferred to see the book in print (a long dead possibility) or at least as a free e-book (a more recently dead possibility). So, with all of those avenues leading to dead ends, there was no more reason to keep my drafts sitting in my My Documents folder where only I could read them.

[JongWK]

Crime in Latin America is available for download now. As with the previous files, feel free to use this for non-commercial purposes.

Merry Xmas everyone.

[JongWK]

Full version available now. Enjoy what might have been, folks:

Shadows of Latin America v1.2 (PDF - 90.4 MB)

Shadows of Latin America v1.2-1 (lowres PDF - 22 MB)

Massive thanks to Tobias Grunow for assembling a quality PDF.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Nice. That's some polish.

[Kot]

No, that's some good English.

Sorry, couldn't resist. I know it's a lame pun, but still...

[Libertad]

Free Shadowrun. I approve of this thread.

[Username17]

So someone has made a complete Shadowrun Book about Latin America. You know what that means... time for Frank Trollman to drink a fuck tonne of mead while reading it and give a review. We have two of Jan Halada's concoctions: the zlata and the klašterni. They will be competing for my affections as we proceed.

OK, the first thing we notice is the map. Actually, that's a damn lie. The first thing we notice is a picture of Danny Trejo playing a classic Shadowrun Decker. Apparently the Machete hacks. I'm not drunk enough for puns like that, they should have put it later in the book. Still, it looks pretty cool, so we're already two points above War! in that the art appears to be decent and there's a fucking map. We will now no longer keep score against War! because with the amount of own goals that abortion managed, it is no longer possible for Shadows of Latin America to not win. Apparently we have to judge it against old Shadowrun products, which is probably to be expected because it is one.

The map itself isn't super revealing, it doesn't list all the major cities or any roads, rail connections, or anything. Still, it's the actual Shadowrun map of South America, so there's that. For those of you who care about trying to maintain continuity with whatever the fuck is going on with Catalyst's nonsensical plotline: this map doesn't line up with it any better than theirs did. Bogota is thoroughly in Aztec territory (although it's not even listed on the map, you have to compare to a globe or read the text to see this is true). Still, the lines are crisp and it's useful. Could do with some more map clutter, but it's better than having the mountains drawn in until you can't tell where the borders are or something.

So let's go chapter by chapter. The first real chapter is called "The Hidden Quarter". This is a chapter about major players in the region, which dovetails with the Hidden Quarter motif like... well not at all to be honest. The overall theme for the chapter is supposed to be "big things are happening and you don't hear about it" and instead it's about how there are major players that you've totally heard of and incidentally, did you remember some of them have major bases in Latin America? I have several issues with this chapter and the first one is one of language. Shadows of Latin America uses old edition slang (chummer, slitch, hoop, etc.), but for some reason this chapter also takes it upon itself to use obscure words from Urban Dictionary like "rukes". Maybe it's supposed to be futuristic, but really it's the kind of thing that makes the future seem almost as dated as when Attitude went off on a Lady Gaga tirade in their spiel about cool things in 2073. But the other one, the real feathered serpent in the room, is Aztechnology. There's no way around it: Shadowrun's handling of the Big A has historically been incredibly retarded, and Shadows of Latin America continues in that fine tradition. Apparently, if you scan the headlines you'd think that Aztechnology has received a bunch of setbacks, but they control the media and are masters of spin so you wouldn't think that. I'm sorry, but what the fuck is that supposed to mean? I'm only two cups of mead from each bottle in and I am totally fucking confused by this shit. And if they are masters of spin that everyone loves, why the fuck are we supposed to be reflexively rooting for them to fail? If they have different brand names everywhere, why does the public have a favorable impression of them, or even have an opinion about them at all? And how are we supposed to take them seriously as villains if their track record is as bad as Skeletor's? This is a problem that Shadows of Latin America had coming in, the previous fifteen years of SR products had portrayed as the big cartoonish villain that always lost all the time and despite being a bunch of openly human sacrificing douchebags who were constantly trying and failing to destroy the world and getting caught on camera while doing it, the whole "high public approval rating" shtick never got retired. Still, this was the big chance to retcon in some fucking sense by slipping in some sort of Tylenol Poisoning leading to Tamper Seals PR coups for Aztechnology or maybe some sort of Xanatos Gambit where it turns out that they kept losing in all the previous episodes because they were really after something else entirely or something. But no, completely wasted opportunity. Aztechnology: still nonsensical, contradictory, cartoonish buffoons as of Shadows of Latin America. Such a waste.

Much of this chapter goes on for page after page of lists of people you may or may not care about. It talks about individual board members of Aztechnology for way more ink than could possibly be justified being spilled on them. I mean, it's not as bad as Attitude, which literally goes on for a whole page twice in two different chapters about the same Orkish rapper that you don't give a shit about - but it's still overly verbose. Each board member (there are nine) gets a full paragraph and all but one get a shadowtalk comment or two. It's way too much about a group of people that the runners will likely never meet or care about. The rest of them aren't nearly as painful, but it's still basically a dog and pony show where they drag out old characters to see if we notice. Did you catch that the scientist who wanted to vat grow a girlfriend back in Shadowtech had succeeded? Of course you did, because they specifically remind you about the quote by mentioning that he had said so in an interview. That kind of Easter Egg would be much less painful and much more clever had it actually been hidden, as Easter Eggs are supposed to be. For example:

Clark's new girlfriend has red hair, green eyes, and legs up to here. Her background is a clumsy forgery, anyone know where she came from?

Since it comes right after the vatgrown human research, people would be able to guess even if they hadn't read Shadowtech, and if they had it would appear a clever reference instead of a clumsy one. Special bonus nitpick: it is not plausible that a company mines "in the Andes and also in Peru, Chile and Argentina" for anything.

OK, now there's the criminal organizations section. This is sort of a new chapter and sort of not. The book is divided into chapters poorly. There are major headers in the PDF ToC that are not major headers in the actual book. Anyway, the criminal organizations chapter(?) is nonsensically called "Surviving Among Giants", which is some nod to the fact that they are keeping it real when surrounded by nations and corps. Or maybe it's the fact that they are really big and it's supposed to give you a head's up about dealing with them. I don't actually know, because the witty chapter name is once again not particularly tied into the chapter contents. There are some discussions of awakened drugs (BADs), but not enough of a list of profitable criminal enterprises to get to the human trafficking and stuff. Some simple discussion about various criminal organizations. Generally in the gossip column format I hate about how one person or another doesn't like what so-and-so said about such and such. These are much more condensed run ideas than appear in shit books like War! and Attitude, but they still use up a lot of text speculating about what the next change is going to be without actually telling you how things currently work.

The discussion of Air Piracy is surprisingly fleshed out and pretty cool. Even though I've always rolled my eyes at the notion of Shadowrun's LTA cargo ships, this section makes air piracy sound cool and a good fit for a mission or a campaign. Smuggling gets a much paler reference, it should have gone into a little bit of detail about what people actually do rather than simply where people go. Still: I wanted more from this chapter. We have adequate (if spatially separated) discussion on drugs and air piracy, and an overly short writeup of smuggling routes. Could have used something on Pepsi Barons, Voodoo Slavery, Prostitution, Human Trafficking, Political Intimidation, Protection Rackets, or something. slightly too much information about girlish infighting between South American mobsters who will be dead before I meet them because their fucking name is in a Shadowland document, and not enough information on the crime that as a Shadowrunner I will be being paid to participate in.

The chapter is concluded with a 3 page diary about getting your ass lost in the jungle. This has fuck-all to do with anything else in the chapter. And i mean anything else in the chapter. Maybe the guy is supposed to be a smuggler and so it's supposed to tie into the air pirates from the previous page? Fuck, I have no clue. Every single other entry in the subchapter and overchapter are about non-governmental organizations and this section is about getting lost in the woods. For some reason there is apparently a law that you are required to put a rambling tirade about the jungle in some wildly inappropriate chapter whenever you write about Latin America for Shadowrun. This was less out of place than the multiple jungle rants in War! (at least this one was given its own heading rather than just getting plopped in the middle of a discussion of a city in the mountains), but it's still pretty fucking bad.

Well chummers, we are 21 pages into a 156 page document. Don't worry: most of the rest of the book is country writeups, so reviewing them will go much faster. There's only 3 pages of rules shenanigans at the end to tie it up.

-Username17

[Username17]

Now I promised a quicker run through the next 131 pages of the book, and I intend to deliver on that. This is actually easy, because most of it is pretty decent. It's in the form of a series of articles about various countries in the region. This is important on several levels. First of all, it means that unlike shit books like War! or 6WA, it actually says something about all the countries. So you aren't left with terra incognita on the map with a vague "Here be Brown People!"

Countries get a double dip. Firstly in the basic writeup, and then again in the Game Information section. The first section is written as a forum post and the game information section is written 3rd person omniscient with incredibly random stuff statted up (or not). The game information section actually can't be fucked to talk about just game info, so they actually sneak in some editorializing into the game info section. To get you an idea of how off some of the "game information" sounds, here is an actual paragraph from that chapter:

The progressive nation of Chile isn’t the most pleasant of places to visit, let alone live. Its ambitious attempt to drag itself out of the mire of underdevelopment and corruption have made it one of the fastest growing new economies in the Sixth World—albeit one where the Resource Rush ran its full course unchecked. The price for success has been environmental breakdown and an unstable job market. If that wasn’t enough, certain forces are conspiring to avenge the damage done to the land.

That totally reads like someone thought they were writing in character and it ended up getting pasted into the game information section anyway. But let's get back to the stuff that is supposed to be in character.

Each country gets a facts at a glance text box. I cannot tell you how useful these things are or how fucking worthless the more recent books that don't have them are. Most of the time you don't really care how many people are in an area or what the GDP per person is or whatever. But the fact that the information exists is absolutely essential for the ability to meaningfully discuss international ramifications of runs, and therefore to design international runs in the first place. Without this information there is really no point in talking about the contents of other countries (and by extension, having a regional book) at all. It may be small, you may skip over it when reading the book for the first or third time, but it has to be there - and in SoLA it is.

In the game information section, each country has a section on getting in and out and a section on running there. Some of these are fairly incomplete, but the fact that they exist is again vital. Each country has a little thing on why you would want to run there, and that is incredibly important. The sections are sometimes short and sometimes a bit rambling, but there's a little blip on why I would want to work as a runner in French Guiana, and it comes off as fairly believable.

Big countries get something of a history section. These sections make good reading. It starts strong with an Amazonia writeup where the existence of the country is made to sound downright plausible. Instead of being "unstoppable Dragon Cock conquers one of the largest countries on Earth, forces tens of millions of armed humans into ghettos with his super friends jaguar, tapir, and sloth" it's talked about as a quite plausible popular uprising with the assistance of dragons being more figureheadish. It comes across well.

Other countries get much smaller writeups, but they still get basic stats and current affairs discussion. This setup worked pretty well in Shadows of Asia and it works pretty well in Latin America too. Yucatan basically doesn't get a writeup. There is a series of teasers for you to go read other books about the Yucatan situation. Kind of a shame, since as you'll recall nothing actually got resolved there with the later SR4 materials.

Now the bad parts, the parts that make me keep drinking. The book is not professionally edited. There are grammatical constructions on almost every page that make me cringe. Missing words, incorrect conjugations, mysteriously hyphenated words in the middle of lines of text, it needs an editor. The thing that blows my mind though, is that the editing is actually better than products like War! and Attitude, even though it's a free product and those were offered for money. And the next of course is Aztlan. The Aztlan section is a pretty big piece of the book (15 pages of subjective and another 4 in the Hidden Quarter and Game Information section, not including the Yucatan teasers). And Aztlan was as previously mentioned a confusing mess. We are all supposed to hate them, and to bring that across we are given only negative information about them, but one of their talents is supposed to be to get everyone to love them and we aren't shown a single thing about how that supposedly works. Then, we are all supposed to fear them, even though we have never been shown them winning at anything. They constantly lose, and the entire history of Aztlan from 2050 on is just a series of major defeats, and we're supposed to keep being afraid of these clowns because... they aren't beaten yet. Or something. It's deeply unconvincing and contradictory on many levels.

Aztlan making no fucking sense is not a new problem. But they managed to salvage something cool and plausible out of Amazonia's nonsensical dragon wanking from Dragons of the Sixth World in this book, so it's still a letdown when the manage to not write anything remotely coherent or convincing for The Big A.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Well, the long rambling parts, especially on the 9 people you mentioned, may stem from the fact that these write-ups did not have to be cut to save words/page-space.
All in all, on a 1 to 10, what would you give this book frank?
It sounds kinda like a 7 to me right now.
Which, seeing how mostly your stuff reads like 2 or 3, is saying something.