There was a hint on the boards (I forget what thread) that new errata was coming out for Street Grimoire, and that they may re-release the pdf with all the errata incorporated. Given that some of the errata in SG is pretty vital stuff, I’d be inclined to get the pdf rather than the book, even if the book was in print. And this from someone who generally hates working with .pdfs for stuff.
What ‘character expansion’ books are essential depend a bit on your players.
- Run and Gun introduces martial arts and develops called shots to a much higher degree, and the odds are good that your players will be wanting to use one or the other of those.
- Street Grimoire gives the rules for background count, which really is pretty essential when dealing with magic using character IMO, as well as providing development paths for adepts which aren’t in core, and which may influence which PP they use, and odds are good that you will have at least one character using magic.
- Data Trails and the Rigger book are also both important to certain character types, but I’d say that they are less apt to make a big difference to as broad a set of characters, so I’d rank them lower on the priority list.
Run Faster, well you already have that. It adds all sorts of new options, but just the core alone gives quite a lot of options for character building. I’d almost be inclined to talk to the players about their characters, then see if there were additional qualities or options from RF that might work for them, rather than throwing the whole thing their way. (aside from being an almost overwhelming amount of choices, there is much anecdotal evidence that using RF creates a much higher level of oddball characters. Up to you if that is an issue or not).
I would perhaps suggest Market Panic as a general background book. It is focussed on the ‘big 10’ AAA mega-corps, but in looking at them it tells you a fair bit about what is going on in the world in general.
One thing to consider is whether you’d like to run a Boston: Lockdown campaign. Very different from the usual SR stuff – in brief, by accident nanites get spread over Boston, causing a substantial portion of the population to be essentially zombified (actually the nanites are trying to over-write their brains with a new persona, but in most people it doesn’t take very well, leaving them much like the classic zombie). A smaller portion become something much more insidious and dangerous. Government and corporations cooperate to quarantine the Boston metroplex, air dropping in supplies. Some of the campaign is just surviving, some is running missions for people who are trying to figure out what is going on, or simply taking advantage of the situation in order to carry one shadowy business as usual. It is potentially an interesting campaign arc, although be warned that the book ends without giving the characters a way to get out from the quarantine, so you’d have to get creative if you wanted to then transition the game elsewhere.
