[CanRay]

Silence works amazingly well in-person, but not when the target, er ... partner is 1,000 miles away. Seriously, try it. Argument. Haggling. Just be silent and present and see what happens. It unnerves people and knocks them off-balance, but it requires patience.

Um, can anyone on this forum (Or The Other Forum) even believe for a second that I can keep quiet for a moment?

...

Didn't think so.

Oh, I can do it.  It's just not a pretty sight or a good sign.

[Critias]

You say that now. I am very persuasive.

You're not that persuasive.

[Catadmin]

Silence works amazingly well in-person, but not when the target, er ... partner is 1,000 miles away.

Wait. James can be silent? Wow. Who knew?

(hey, any runners out there willing to protect me until he forgets I said that? I pay in good chocolate. @=)

[All4BigGuns]

Is Kellan Colt in any older sourcebooks? Or the novels, none of which i have read yet? I felt a good portion of story was missing there. I know nothing about her save what Street legends said.

She was in three rather poor novels that was part of the HeroClix-like line.  Not really sure how else to describe the toys that were sold.

I rather enjoyed that novel trilogy personally, and seeing that character's stats is one reason I really like Street Legends.

[bigity]

If those things had been minis and not dolls, I might have been interested, bad novels or no

[CanRay]

I was about to have a knee-jerk reaction and go "Action Figures!".

But they didn't have any action at all, so, yeah, dolls.

[Bull]

I was about to have a knee-jerk reaction and go "Action Figures!".

But they didn't have any action at all, so, yeah, dolls.

A few were pretty posable, especially compared with the travesties that are McFarlene toys.  But for the most part, you're right.

The SR Clix line was an ambitious experiment, but sadly it just didn't work.  The game itself wasn't terrible, but the scale was way too big to be practicle.  I still say that the same game retooled for 3 3/4" toys (GI Joe/Star Wars Scale) would have been magnificent.  Plus then you could have used GI Joe weapons and vehicles with teh figures.  Could you imagine the possibilities??

(That's still a dream game of mine, to be honest)

As for the novels, I thought they were pretty solid.  Hell, they're works of art compared to earlier SR Books like Shadowboxer or pretty much anything by Lisa Smedman.  But, they had three things going against them...

1)  A forced cast list tied to the Clix line

Not a huge detriment, IMO, and I worked on some SR Clix fiction for the WizKids website.  The characters actually had a cool backstory and almost all of them had a cool web of backstory ties to the other characters.  But I think that it made the novels feel a little stifled, and combine that with the general distaste people had for the Clix game itself, and it ended upa  negative.

2)  They were not novels aimed at long time Shadowrun players

I think this effects the books a lot more than most folks realize.  Wizkids put a LOT of effort and time into the SR Clix line, and the novels were there to support it.  The hope was that the Clix game would be as popular as Mage Knight and Mechwarrior had been, and that it would draw in a lot of players who previously never played Shadowrun (Which happened in a big way with Mechwarrior).  So the novels were written and targetted at folks who had never played Shadowrun, never heard of Shadowrun outside of the Clix line, and who might be a younger crowd, so the Novels, especially the first one, felt more like "Young Adult" fiction.

3)  Players had high expectations

This I think is the biggest one...  Like the Star Wars prequals, Shadowrun fans had been clamoring for new novels for several years at taht point.  Expectations were high, probably too high.  I honestly think that any author would have gotten picked apart, especially when you combine points 1 & 2 with it.  Zombie Nigel Findley could have written this, and I think people would be talking about how becoming a zombie made him lose his writing ability.

Bull

[Critias]

I'm right there with the sort of "young adult" feel (or at least comparison).  There wasn't much that was appealing about the main protagonist to me, or that made it easy or fun for me to try and empathize with her. 

The target audience for most Shadowrun material isn't exactly "teenage girls," and yet Kellan Colt was the character they gave us to try to put ourselves in the shoes of;  on a purely visceral level that's often going to be awkward for most gamers, but to make matters worse she wasn't even an awesome teenage girl.  She was new to Seattle, not that great a shadowrunner, didn't really excel at anything, perpetually felt in over her head, and made some really stupid decisions along the way.  Rookie shadowrunner plus not exceptionally likeable plus young girl from the Midwest?  That doesn't really all add up to "awesome shadowrunner fantasy," which is what most folks expect when they open up an SR novel (and I'm shallow and/or realistic and/or cynical enough to admit that's what most fans are after, at least in my experience).

As it was, the only thing I have in common with Kellan is my man-crush on members of the Ancients.  And that alone just isn't enough to make up for the other issues (which I also agree with) you brought up concerning that trilogy.

[Bull]

Agreed, to a degree, Crit.  But like I said, the novel wasn't aimed at Shadowrun players.  A lot of folks who played Mage Knight and Mechwarrior were mini's wargamers, and that was the audience they hoped to spread to.  For taht reason, I believe, they choose a protagonist who a non-RPGer could possibly relate to.  Someone who knew NOTHING about Shadowrun, and was just an average, every day person.  This let them do a lot of plot exposition and explaining of the world directly to the protagonist (and the reader).

Like I said, the books were decent, but not great.  Steve's done much better work, IMO.  But for what they were, they served their purpose.

(I will admit, I never got around to reading the 3rd novel.  A lot of my SR books got damaged in a flood, including my regular copies of Books 1 & 2, and for whatever reason I just never got book 3.  I need to pick those up again at some point and reread them.  If nothing else, I really like Lothan and G-Dogg, and want to bring at least G-Dogg into Missions one of these days).

As for Kellen, yeah, she always felt a little flat to me.  As I mentioned at gen Con though, I like her write up in Street Legends quite a lot, and think she could be a really fun addition to the Artifact Race plot going on in Missions.

[Critias]

Honest discussion, and not one joke about my crush on the Ancients?  Bull, you're slippin'.   

[CanRay]

Well, she did horribly maim that ex-Ancient boitoi of hers...

[Bull]

Honest discussion, and not one joke about my crush on the Ancients?  Bull, you're slippin'.   

Dude, way too easy

<grin>

Bull

[bigity]

For wanting to emulate the success of the Mage Knight/Clix stuff, they sure went way to large.  Literally.

A remake of the DMZ game with minis would have work way better.

[Bull]

For wanting to emulate the success of the Mage Knight/Clix stuff, they sure went way to large.  Literally.

A remake of the DMZ game with minis would have work way better.

Agreed.  But the thought was (I think) that SR Action Figures would be cool.  Which they were.  But they were too pricey for just toys (Plus the articulation on some of them sucked), and they were too big for a mini's game.  Like I said, GI Joe/Star Wars scale would have been near perfect, and you could have gone with a squad-based tactical mini's game.

[Phylos Fett]

I still have some of the Shadowrun Duels stuff still in their original packaging somewhere - one of the local gaming shops had a close-out/clearance on them, which was cheaper than 2 for the price of 1, so I picked up two of everything they had in stock, and never found anyone that was interested in playing, so I never opened them. 

I have to agree that the 3 3/4" scale would have been better for gaming/action figures, though...