Well, perhaps I am biased. I still have the Encyclopedia of Espionage sitting in a pile in my kitchen and a folder full of declassified manuals and documents from the National Security Archive as reference for campaigns I was running when SOTA64 came out, and so a lot of the stuff wasn't new to me. I never really liked Szeto's writing (apart from things like the Atomic Kiva in SoNA being based on completely made-up nuke tests) because it reads like a textbook. I will never understand the line in his CAS chapter about why his narrator didn't get why people keep asking about canon militaries (Uh, gee. For character backgrounds? Nah...). I'm more interested in things like the fact that four of the five women CIA officers who immediately come to mind were mothers, and the one who wasn't was the one who was in the least amount of danger (One was pregnant on ops in the Middle East. Another was the team leader of the CIA team killed in a suicide bombing in Khost, Afghanistan).
There are three quotes I keep in mind as I write SG:
"Espionage is always political"—Zviad Baakovi (as written by Greg Rucka and Eric Trautmann), Checkmate v2 #23. DC Comics (2008).
"You see, everyone’s been treating this like it’s a game of chess. But you only play honourable games if you don’t care about the pieces. If lives and nations are at stake--one cheats."—Pete Wisdom (written by Paul Cornell), Captain Britain and MI13 #15 (Marvel Comics. 2009).
"Look, killing isn't about weapons... It's about the humans who use them."—Victor Bout, New York Times Magazine, August 17, 2003.
Now, I'm not trying to dog on Szeto or anyone. What his writing may lack in elegance, at the very least makes up for in useful detail. But I have a different perspective and writing style when it comes to Shadowrun, and that's how I approach things. Because the policy on Shadowland was that canon had to be adhered to to make sure everyone was on the same page even when it became clear that we didn't need to worry about new people trying to jump in, there was no end of bitching about some of the canon aspects. If you look at the foreword of TNF, there is an outright backhanded compliment to the System Failure writing team.
However, that campaign is evidence that the true value of the material is in the gaps that the players are left to fill. Everything that we did except for one scene description was rules legal and canon (none of which, AFAIK, has been retconned or contradicted) because the material hasn't delved into the details of what happened during that time period in SR lore.
I can honestly say that for as much as some plots drove me and others nuts at the time that we were able to do some of our best gaming ever because we still had the leeway and opportunity to build our own adventures from that. That is what I'm hoping to do with my writing, and what I am trying to say is that the books are just the beginning of the adventure--and it took almost 20 years for me to consciously realize that's how I'd been playing. I thought Ghostwalker was kind of stupid; that he appears out of this rift a mile from the White House, scares the shit out of everyone, then disappears only to emerge and pull a Godzilla on Denver. Only instead of destroying it, he becomes its political governor. But can you imagine all the different jobs a runner could pull off while that was going on? Because it was going on? Those are character-defining events. Superheroes and villains have emerged from lesser spectacles.
In the same thread that lead to the creation of this one, someone was talking about how there's nothing for runners to do in Lagos. A third of Feral Cities is about Lagos. That's patently false. Aside from that it's just incomprehensible to me. Now, I made my opinion about SR's Africa pretty clear on my tumblr, but I now look at it as a work in progress rather than something to just bitch about. However, maybe it's just the perspective seems off.
One of the things that I like about this forum and the power of DS is that it provides an opportunity to connect authors and fans. I never really appreciated that until now from the other side. I understand intellectually that not everyone has been following espionage or certain other subjects like I have, and whether one realizes it or not that informs writing styles and can make or break a book. I get frustrated to the point of jackassery (see above) about some stuff because I already know it, or I know the subject better than the author. I think that was the issue with Szeto, where so many of our apparent interests/expertise overlaps a lot of the time it's "Yeah. Yeah. Get to the point." The same is true with Bobby Derie in certain areas. In others I don't get the joke (and his writing seems to be full of little references and jokes about stuff that go over my head). But other people don't, and it's a careful dance to not lose the reader by being too inside baseball on tradecraft, but also keeping a piece on military fresh for, say, the many vets and active military SR players out there.
I think Jay Levine's chapter on Hong Kong in Runner Havens is fantastic because it really paints a picture. And part of that is in the fact that it is self-referential, and really emphasizes that everything is connected by not being afraid to discuss something twice. It has some pretty high concept ideas like the Yama Kings controlling Kowloon, TMs backing up their own memories (which doesn't have rules for it, but it doesn't have rules
prohibiting it either), and the Legion of Doom swamp base on Lantau Island. I've never been there, and neither has he, but I'd swear he had been if I didn't know better.
Grant Morrison made a memorable comment at SDCC this year when he discussed how people start losing their ability to accept fiction at face value as they get older. That sometimes you have to accept that characters are just that, and that to a certain extent you have to let it be what it is. I don't pine for the older cyberpunk days I grew up in. I accept that we're living in the dystopia that they feared would come. But I also look at the course of human history and know that life is getting better overall. Topps could kill the game tomorrow and there will still be one guy a hundred years from now who's still running a campaign either set in 2172, 2050, or 4645 just like there are now. For every moment I've forgotten it's a game set in a fictional world when something is wrong or different (and this used to drive me nuts about military and security stuff) I now know that I can take a fistful of those magnetic word tiles and throw them at a fridge, and then pair off words and probably come up with the name of a real DOD special access program. I can then pluck three words from a hat of tradecraft disciplines, agencies and general mission goals and I assure you the result would be a real program. So who the fuck cares if the White Lions were made up for one line in a 15 year-old SR2 book. I bet there's a SAP somewhere with that name.
