[PeterSmith]

I have no idea how far 20k words go...

I did a quick, hack job count with the Sail Away Sweet Sister PDF, and it came in at around 29k.

[Patrick Goodman]

I have no idea how far 20k words go...

I did a quick, hack job count with the Sail Away Sweet Sister PDF, and it came in at around 29k.

That actually sounds about right. I think the story was around 27K, with the stats taking up the rest. I'd have to go look at my submitted draft to be sure.

[Kincaid]

500 words is roughly equal to one page.  That's using 12-point Times New Roman, so Shadowrun layout would be different, but it's a decent guideline.

[Herr Brackhaus]

I have no idea how far 20k words go...

I did a quick, hack job count with the Sail Away Sweet Sister PDF, and it came in at around 29k.

You made me curious, so I did the same for some of the 4th Edition location books. Here are my results (keeping in mind that these are counts of all text, including table of contents, afterwords, etc):

Corporate Enclaves: ~115k words, 138 pages (~833 words per page)
Feral Cities: ~115k words, 138 pages (~833 words per page)
Montreal 2074: ~17k words, 21 pages (~810 words per page)
Runner Havens: ~117k words, 146 pages (~801 words per page)
Seattle 2072: ~169k words, 202 pages (~836 words per page)
The Land of Promise: ~20k words, 24 pages (~833 words per page)
The Rotten Apple: Manhattan: ~24k words, 32 pages (~750 words per page)

The above certainly seems relatively consistent, so I'd expect a 20k word book to be around 24-30 pages or so.

That being said, the information contained in The Land of Promise is really good and it's at the same 20k word count that we're discussing here. To my mind, then, even at a relatively low word and page count compared to the behemoth that is the Seattle sourcebook, I think a 20k word book would cover Aztlan in an interesting way; the level of detail would be far less than how Seattle is covered, obviously, but I think it'd be an interesting book nonetheless.

For a more in-depth look at South America, though, I'd say something like the Corporate Enclaves and Feral Cities books would be more applicable; 120+ pages with 100k+ words. These are all quesstimates from my end, though, and as previously mentioned I'd be happy to see more material on everyone's "love to hate" mega, and Aztlan in general


EDIT:
While I knew about Gagarin station being a potential hot.-spot for CFD, I am thrilled that Run Faster flat out confirms it. From the Space Runs section on page 36:
"This is an especially good opportunity to have some CFD fun on Mars or one of the other space habitats (p. 166, Run & Gun) that have become a haven and breeding ground for the virus and the resulting head cases."

I can't wait for more info on this, and I would personally add a request for a space themed PDF, perhaps in the 20k word format discussed so far. Pretty please with space ships on top?

[DeathStrobe]

For 20k words I would really rather have a specific city. Tenochtitlan has very little written on it, so I think fleshing that out would be awesome.

I'm not sure if 20k words is enough for an update on Aztlan as a whole.

[Herr Brackhaus]

They managed Tir Tairngire in 20k words, so for me it really boils down to "how much information do I really need on something". The Land of Promise was great in my opinion, whereas something like Seattle 2072 went above and beyond and has more source material than I'll ever use.

A fair compromise to my mind, if they'd do an in-depth book, is to follow the format of Corporate Enclaves, Feral Cities, and Runner Havens; multiple cities that fits a specific theme all covered in one larger book.

[Namikaze]

I would love to see an in-depth look at each major country or region.  I fear that about 20-ish pages isn't going to cut it for that kind of thing.  I don't want to see Seattle 2072 about every single sprawl though, as that is probably too much and wouldn't get a good return on the investment for many people.  If the word count could bump to about 30,000 then it would probably be sufficient for a country as big and with as many recent events as Aztlan.  I could easily see Tenochitlan taking up a good 10,000 or so of those words though, as that and maybe Cali are about the major areas that runners would go to in Aztlan.  I want to get more of an idea of the culture of the country too - what do the people eat, drink, and wear?  What about the religion?  There's a lot to cover about the culture of Aztlan that wouldn't necessarily be covered in something focused on a specific city.  I also would love to know how the politics of Aztlan have changed recently - Storm Front hinted that the Aztlan army did almost all the fighting in Amazonia, with Aztechnology only providing materiel support.  It also hinted that there was some debate within the ranks on how to handle Sirrurg and such.

[Imveros]

+1 for a Aztlan book over a Tenochtitlan one.

same here

[The Tekwych]

What about a series of 'World Almanac' pamphlets, say 5 pages that sold digital for a few bucks. At 1.99-3.99 every one to two months or so we could get several cities without much cost and if they are popular a yearly hard copy omnibus could collect them.

[Mystic]

The idea behind the upcoming Shadows in Focus series is to highlight cities or sprawls that may not have gotten much attention before. But if you have suggestions for future locations, maybe start a new thread or contact Mr. Hardy or Catalyst et al.

But back on topic... 

[All4BigGuns]

You may also buy off negative qualities you may have obtained in the process with your extra Karma, and you may pick new positive
and negative qualities—but only if you are under the maximum amount of negative qualities (25 Karma total) after selecting all of your Life Modules. If you buy off
negative qualities with Karma to put you under the limit, you can then acquire more negative qualities.

I'll say one thing about this strange "module" one, it looks like the limit on Positives doesn't apply with it, at least going by the above quote which definitely makes it appear as though only Negatives are limited.

[Namikaze]

So with the life modules, I haven't checked to see if this is possible yet, but can someone have more than 25 points of Positive Qualities after picking their modules?  A casual look suggests it would be damn hard to do, but I'm wondering if anyone has looked at that more closely.

[All4BigGuns]

Not that hard. I pieced one together that got 25 points worth of Military Rank, the Hawkeye quality and Poor Link.

[Namikaze]

Not that hard. I pieced one together that got 25 points worth of Military Rank, the Hawkeye quality and Poor Link.

Does the Military Rank quality stack?  I thought that if you had a character at Military School (Rank 5) and then went on to a Military Academy (Rank 20) that the Academy's rank change overrode the School's rank.  Even if that happened though, that would be well past the 25 point limit.  Are we supposed to remove qualities to get it back to the limit?  I guess that was kind of what you were asking to begin with, huh?

For balance purposes, I'd probably make it so that the player had to lose positive qualities until they were less than or equal to 25 points.  Same would apply to negative qualities though.  This would keep the character from being out of balance with other characters.  Any positive quality the player removes would add its karma value to the player's pool.  Any negative quality removed due to being over the cap would count against the player's karma pool though too.

That's what I think the intention was, anyway.

[All4BigGuns]

I never really agreed with any sort of cap on Positives, to be perfectly honest. I mean, come on, you have to spend points to take them, so if someone has 50 points worth of Positives, then that's 50 fewer points they have for other things (generally speaking).