[Wakshaani]

Personally, I'd call it "Get offa my lawn!" and make it about the Old Guard and the up-n-comers. We get Hatchetman and Sally Tsung, but we'd also get the guys running with /Dev/Grrl or Picador's protege (Like she took up for Matador).  That'd give us coverage of the old stuff and coverage of new people as well.

As for old stuff in general, I know I'd love to roll around in it all day long, but, you have to remember your market; Shadowrun isn't composed only of 22 year vets who want to know what Concrete Dreams are currently playing and whatever happened to Mr Clean. You also have fifteen year vets who never really knew the old guys (Really? DNA-DOA was first ed! Who played that? Second ed forever baby, woo!) and six year vets (Pfft. With *that* art? Third edition was amazing!) and rookies who got the Shadowrun core book for Christmas today.

Focusing only on the old guard is, well, mastrubatory. It isn't fair to the fanbase at large and, as Shadowrun involves ongoing stories and an ever-evolving world, you have to keep moving or you'll die. Now, this doesn't mean you can't look back for stuff that you can pull forward; much as fashion and music is built on the shoulders of those who came before, so to do stories... if you can make a story better by tapping Big D's Will, or if you want to have the runners in an adventure run into Euphoria's sister, well, that's a neat thing.

The trick is to find the right balance that can make everyone happy. There's no perfect formula (5% old school, 85% current plots, 10% seeds for the future? No, let's see...) and goodness knows that each writer, and reader, wants different things. The goal is to make quality STUFF, and let it find, or create, an audience. I can promsie that, whenever I write something, if a nod to my generation makes sense, I'll happily throw it in there, but if it doesn't, then I won't.

Of course, I'm also reminded of Stan Lee's Golden Rule: Every issue is someone's first issue. It's good to have a small summary or "What has come before" section to help keep people up to speed or to ease people into things.

...

I'm rambling. Sorry. Up too late wrapping stuff, then woke up early to UNWRAP stuff, then took a nap, and now I'm back awake. Oh Xmas, you play such havok with my internal clock.

[CanRay]

Kham we heard about last in 2070, in Runner's Havens, where he's in the Old Ork's home.

His family runs the Bot'Kham, a group of Shadowrunners/Smugglers that occasionally are muscle for hire outside of their regular routine.  The character I refer to in my stories, Murphy, is a distant relative (Second Cousin or something.  Hard to tell with all the family that Orks have), and my usual narrative character, Jon "Money" Johnson, hires them a lot.  They have a better code of honor than most, and he's got family vouching for him as well as his rep.

That said, I'm hoping that Kham's able to go out some way other than just dying in his sleep...  He's a tough old ork and deserves better than that.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Are you kidding me?  Best way to die.  Seriously, going out in a hail of gunfire is still not a good way to die.  Never has been.

[Fizzygoo]

Are you kidding me?  Best way to die.  Seriously, going out in a hail of gunfire is still not a good way to die.  Never has been.

Unless gunfire is a euphemism for post-coitus bliss.

[Mirikon]

Well, I get almost all my stuff as PDFs now. Having one or two computers at the table is a lot easier to deal with than dealing with a pile of books. For my D&D games, I would use to bring a couple suitcases of books to the game. That's not something I want to fool with now, so I just bring my laptop loaded up with the PDFs, and enjoy. Plus, that also means I can read the sourcebooks at work. 3rd shift at a gas station means you have a LOT of time to read.

So yes, the moment any Street Legend supplements are available, I'll be downloading them.

[Wakshaani]

I guess that I'm the opposite. I tend to use just one book for Shadowrun (At the table, at any rate), or four for D&D. The rest are needed rarely, so are kept nearby, but on a shelf and not in the way. Laptops are so much bulkier than books, IMHO, that trying to passone around would drive me mental.

I realize, here, that I'm and old fogie, so, you know. Kids, lawn, etc etc etc.

[CanRay]

Are you kidding me?  Best way to die.  Seriously, going out in a hail of gunfire is still not a good way to die.  Never has been.

Beats living for months hooked up to machines that breathe for you, make your heart work, all those wonderful things, only to end up dying anyhow.

[Grinder]

His family runs the Bot'Kham, a group of Shadowrunners/Smugglers that occasionally are muscle for hire outside of their regular routine.  The character I refer to in my stories, Murphy, is a distant relative (Second Cousin or something.  Hard to tell with all the family that Orks have), and my usual narrative character, Jon "Money" Johnson, hires them a lot.  They have a better code of honor than most, and he's got family vouching for him as well as his rep.

Fanfic or official stuff?

[Simagal]

A new book with a great cover on a brick and mortar store shelf will attract more new players than all the pdf's ever produced.

[Mirikon]

A new book with a great cover on a brick and mortar store shelf will attract more new players than all the pdf's ever produced.

I disagree. This may have been the case even as little as five years ago, but with the proliferation of laptops, tablets, and the like into every facet of life, producing more pdfs will expose your product to people who live their lives with a computer constantly at hand. In addition, it exposes your product to people who might not live near a brick and mortar store. I live in a college town, and there is one gaming store in town. Their selection of shadowrun books is, frankly, limited, and mostly consists of used copies of older material. Barnes and Noble has some of the core books, but not much else.

Honestly? The best thing that Catalyst could do is to continue working on the little pdf files like the components of Runner's Black Book and the Missions series of modules. Modules are one of the best things to have in order to help advance a game, since it encourages more people to take up the GM's chair. A supplement providing guidelines to designing your own run would be awesome, too.

What you need more than a flashy new book in a brick and mortar store is a good ad campaign, both at cons, and also focusing on some of the places where gamers congregate, namely college campuses and gaming-centric websites. There are entire websites dedicated to play by post or play by chat games out there. Get some people to get out there and run games on these sites. People see a game, see the world, and then they'll be more likely to get into the game. Speaking from personal experience, I got into Shadowrun not because of books with flashy covers, but because the DM of my Hero System group decided to switch gears for a bit and introduced me to it. And so I started looking for Shadowrun books.

[CanRay]

His family runs the Bot'Kham, a group of Shadowrunners/Smugglers that occasionally are muscle for hire outside of their regular routine.  The character I refer to in my stories, Murphy, is a distant relative (Second Cousin or something.  Hard to tell with all the family that Orks have), and my usual narrative character, Jon "Money" Johnson, hires them a lot.  They have a better code of honor than most, and he's got family vouching for him as well as his rep.

Fanfic or official stuff?

The fact that my character hires them and "Murphy" being a relative is FanFic.  The rest is heavily suggested by Shadowtalk in Runner's Havens (Page 99).

These guys operate on a strict code based on professional and familial loyalty—they’ll never betray their family or their employer.

[Simagal]

So how do people know to look for PDFs for a game they have never heard of?

[Mirikon]

Reread that last paragraph of my last post.

[Crimsondude]

I dunno if it is a case of them not liking things from older editions, but perhaps wanting to focus on moving plots forward.

Pretty much, for me.

I hate nostalgia. I think it's stupid.

I think the idea of a professional criminal having a twenty-year career that doesn't involve long stretches in prison is hard to swallow. I figure most would either die, go to prison forever, or retire as soon as they could buy an island like The Chromed Accountant (Who got into running because he didn't see the value in being an IRS company man, so he went into the private sector to make his "Fuck You" money).

I've had this conversation with the others, and I don't get it. Hatchetman's last canon appearance was in 2056/1995. Most people playing this game didn't even know him to remember him, so why should we spend precious word count on him? I'd rather not jerk off to the past, or to the same fifty plot characters, when there are 7 billion people on and above Earth. I have a compiled list of all the characters I've used, including those I've created and killed. The 100+ new characters exist to fill a niche I saw as lacking: recurring mid-level plot characters who can be used virtually anywhere. Some have reappeared. Most have not, and probably will not. They're there for players to use as they see fit because I want people to have a million little plot hooks that they can use to jump start their own PCs and adventures—which is how I've used most of the books and plots with one (significant) exception.

I don't know how I feel about SOTA73 coming out a month after CT because I knew someone was going to ask/assume the two Sams might be the same person. My plan when writing CT was that most people who care about this stuff would assume it was Villiers—someone who already has a past with FastJack—and not someone else or perhaps a new character.

I went through so many drafts of that story that it's ridiculous until I pared down the meeting descriptions to the bone because it got in the way of the story, and because I don't think you need to know if FastJack has undergone Leónization, and I certainly am not going to make it clear who he would trust to meet with when he decides to respond to Horizon. I'd rather you make up your own story. It's your game (and maybe your PC), after all.

[Mirikon]

James, I'm going to be as nice as I can with this. Not everyone has been involved in Shadowrun for decades. For some of us, it isn't nostalgia. For some of us, it is actually trying to learn about all the stuff that's come before, so we can get a better view of the world. And since a lot of the old material isn't in print any more, it is difficult for some people to find out more about the old characters and plots. I'd never heard of Hatchetman until that one line in Augmentation mentioning him. I'd never heard of Alice until someone mentioned her on these forums. The first I'd heard about Eliohann was in Street Legends. I had no clue there was a module called Dark Angel until someone pointed it out to me. Until Attitude came out, I'd never heard of Dierdre.

For some of us, this is an attempt to get in on all those references and inside jokes that are peppered throughout the books. And a bit of history helps, especially if you're thinking of running a game.