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...
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 almost entirely agree with you on this. It's why I have a love/hate attitude towards JackPoint. It's great because it's an elite club that (generally) keeps on target with the subject at hand. On the other hand it limits exposure to the world of the "average" shadowrunner...or, rather, it limits exposure to the minds of the average runner as I'm specifically talking about the commentary posts rather than the article postings of the books. Introducing new blood is a way to do this and that new blood, in being "average" by definition, will have a high turn-over rate. We're coming into the 4th year since the Clockwork / Netcat feud and three years after Haze's tempo issues. At least one of those three should be dead. But there in lies the problem. The insular nature of JackPoint makes replacing a dead member seem trite if the new member is there to replace the function of the dead one. If /dev/grrl or Snopes or Plan9 or Clockwork or Kane dies then it would seem contrived to introduce a new youthful or skeptical or crazy or technophobic or morally lacking character to JackPoint as if all this time Fastjack knew of these other people and only kept them out because "that slot's filled" or worse that with the death of the old it is then implied that the new member has magically ascended into the elite club based solely on the other finding an early grave. The more open JackPoint is to the shadowrunning community as a whole (to post comments) then the larger more diverse sampling size.
As for the idea of revisiting past runners solely being a product of nostalgia...I disagree. Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past, may play a part, but it is not the whole of it, nor is it particularly an important part of it. I would argue that a reason to spice current products with the occasional note, reference, or inference to older runners is to instill a sense of continuity and history; it simply adds depth to the fictional universe. However this is not an argument for spending full page write ups on x or y runner from 2053.
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 like it. It adds some confusion. What was the old quote for earning karma out of 1st or 2nd edition main book (I'm away from my books)? ... it's something along the lines of "award extra karma if the run is a whirling nightmare of chaos and confusion." It's probably Villers...but Col. Sam worked or works (again, away from books/home computer) for Sam Villers. Maybe Sam is playing go-between for Sam, or Sam is Sam under a faked background and a lot of media hype, and so on.
...this is an attempt to get in on all those references and inside jokes that are peppered throughout the books.
[jokingly] "You were not put upon this earth to 'get it', Mr. Burton." - David Lo Pan [/jokingly]
Shadowrun (and the role playing game industry in general) is notorious for their odd vague references and inside jokes. Dunkelzhan's Will for example. Or one game book (I think it's either Denver Boxed set or Bug City) that says, when discussing the problems of the bugs, something like "and then there was the CrashCart Debacle," leaving it at that and only if you read the Findley novel (2XS, I think, but it's been a while) would you know what they were referring to. Or NERPS! And with all the individual authors involved in creating Shadowrun...I wouldn't be surprised if there were things that they didn't get. So while on one hand I'm saying that if you think you can understand all the inside references then "get used to disappointment" (to which Inigo responds with "'kay"), on the other hand, as someone who has painstakingly collected and read every published Shadowrun book (save the last few novels, and I haven't finished CT or SOTA:2073 yet), I'm right there with you, Mirikon...I want to know it all and feel that, while the end goal is not attainable, the endeavor of it, the Great Work, is a paramount goal in and of itself.
And I agree that the desire to figure these things out is far from nostalgia.
