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Title: Shadowrun Companion: Beyond the Shadows by Zach Bush, Jennifer Brandes, Chris Hepler, Chris Hussey, Jonathan Jacobson, Steve Kenson, Linda Naughton, Brian Schoner, Michael Mulvihill, FASA Corporation ISBN: 1-55560-298-3 Publisher: Fasa Pub. Date: February, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A blessing for any GM!
Comment: The Shadowrun Companion is one of the best suppliments to the Shadowrun II role-paying game. It allows a set of more standardized rules for those who would wish to expand their game in terms of scope and creaativity.
Not only does it allow the GM to follow new venues, it also gives many ideas as to character types, and possible campaign settings. Basically put, this book is designed to get the creative juices flowing, and gives some rules, and rules suggestions to help form those ideas.
This product is just what the Shadowrun universe needed to help take it to the next level.
Rating: 4
Summary: TSS: Why do you need this book for your game?
Comment:
The Shadowrun Supplemental has fast become the most controversial publication of the twenty or so that comprise FASA's cyberpunk fantasy role playing game "Shadowrun". The edges and flaws allow you to take your character into greater depths of detail, but are also a min-maxer's paradise. The 100 point system for generating characters is far more versatile than the old priority system, but it also produces characters that are far more likely to be mages or metahumans, or both, because the cost in points of such traits is not nearly so high as it tends to be in the priority system.
The alternate campaign ideas are a good start, but they're just a start. I think that whole new game supplements based on other popular sci-fi fantasy would do very well under a Shadowrun rules system; but in order for a genuinely rich gaming environment to be created for an alternate campaign, new availability charts, street indexes, legality ratings and special rules have to accompany. A good example of this is Bug City, which is very much a cross between Mad Max and Aliens, in terms of genre and atmosphere.
Some of the suggestions for new pools are likely to make dice tests out of combat more complicated, along with increasing the raw number of dice involved, and they serve no real purpose. Combat pool can be used to dodge, or attack. Magic pool can be used for defense, drain resistance or casting spells. What would you use an athletics pool for other than adding dice to athletics tests? What would you use a social pool for except assisting social skill tests? Athletics is a straight skill roll to gain successes "Let's see... I could throw in my whole athletics pool for this test, or I could save it for.." For what? Pools refresh when you're next eligible to act, and athletics skill requires a full action. Social skills are either straight rolls or opposed tests, so what would a social pool be saved for? It would only serve to destroy the balance maintained by availabilty ratings by doubling the number of dice players can roll to find rare items and sell stolen gear; and the target numbers wouldn't change.
Paying cash for karma or recieving karma for cash can not be based on a straight scale if it is to be used at all. Like the basic factors in every field of the shadowrun game, there has to be a law of diminishing returns. If you keep spending karma to raise your atrributes, you'll find that it gets harder and harder to do so, and the results you see will become less and less significant. So it should be in the cash/karma balance. I leave it to the game masters to work this for themselves, but the system as they have it is unusable in my opinion.
Despite its shortcomings, I have to reccomend this book to anyone who has ideas for characters that they haven't been able to realize with the existing system. I reccommend this book for the possibilities it can offer and the good ideas it contains. I also offer a word of caution. This rules supplement was not constructed with the careful attention to balance and long-term insight that produced the SR2 main book, and as such, many of the options it presents could ruin your game.
That's all. Thanks for your time.
Gunnm
Rating: 2
Summary: ehhhhhh
Comment: ever wondered just how to 'entice' your players to do away with roleplaying? here it is. inside this book, you too can learn how to no longer have a 'runner who pays moms bills' but, instead have a 'dependendant' as a 2 point flaw, which allows you to purchase the aptitude edge for your Light Machine Gun, 2 point edge. also included is a revision of the old 'sum to ten' character generation, a bunch of world of darkness ripoffs, and yet more alternate camapign ideas, for those of you who skipped 'missions'. While some of the sections on, 'personality' and 'friend of a friend' contacts seem custom made ofr shadowrun, the vast majority of the book feels like an excuse to allow for deadlier characters at generation with the illusion of personality tacked over them. I would have much rather seen information from the old OOP Shadowbeat revised and included in this book instead.
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Title: Shadowtech (Shadowrun, 7110) by Karl Wu, FASA Corporation, Fasa ISBN: 1555601561 Publisher: Fasa Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Fields of Fire (Shadowrun, No 7114) by Tom Dowd, FASA Corporation, Fasa ISBN: 1555602231 Publisher: Fasa Pub. Date: April, 1994 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: New Seattle (Shadowrun) by Fasa, FASA Corporation, Steve Kenson ISBN: 1555603424 Publisher: McGraw Hill - NTC Pub. Date: March, 1999 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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