[The Tekwych]

New drop today, Shadows in Focus: Sioux Nation, (Drive Through RPG) Just got it but this looks to be a fun series. Hope they keep on this and work their way around all the continents

It’s a big, big Sixth World out there, with lots of danger and weirdness and shadowruns waiting for the right team. At the august and elegant Shadowrun headquarters,we’ve been pondering the best way to give Shadowrun fans a chance to explore the various parts of the world, and the solution we’ve hit upon is the Shadows in Focus series. For this series, we will pick nations that have not been covered recently in Shadowrun products, or places that have not been covered at all, and get an in-depth look at that spot. For each location we pick, you’ll get a national overview, detailed looks at two large cities in that nation, two adventures set in the selected nation, and an Enhanced Fiction short story to help immerse you in that locale.

[AJCarrington]

Also available from BattleCorps

Quite like the look of this...will be downloading shortly. I also like the idea of a series of releases focusing on various locales...

[Sendaz]

Many players asked for more location materials and someone upstairs answered.

The nice thing is if they continue to provide location e-books like this a GM can pick and choose what regions he wants as not everyone will be going off to all regions.

First you have to get in so they start with border crossing info, legit and otherwise. They even tip their hat to the system provided in Coyotes for rating crossings.

Once inside it gives you a quick layout of locales of interest and the people you will be dealing with, covering civilian, corp, security/law enforcement and the government agencies.

Not a lot of stats anywhere, this is written mostly as the travelogue and corresponding shadowtalk. 
So don't expect to see the BGC of Devil's Tower or stats for a 11 man Sioux Wildcat squad, but again the fluff and skill packages (see below) give you a good starting point to lay them out yourself.

With 4 pages devoted to Sioux Shadowrunners you will have plenty to tease out little details about your character for added flavour.

While they do not have Life Modules, they do have Skill packages like Sioux Army Veteran below which a GM could then add stat bonuses and qualities to turn it into a LM easily enough.

SIOUX ARMY VETERAN
(25 SKILL POINTS)
After mandatory service you re-enlisted and joined the
Army as a full-time professional. You traded the skills of
an insurgent for the much more rewarding task of an armored
cavalry and training officer.
Active Skill
Automatics 1 (Assault Rifles +2)
Demolitions 1
Disguise 1 (Camouflage +2)
Electronic Warfare 2 (Communications (+2)
Etiquette 2 (Military +2)
Gunnery 3
Heavy Weapons 2
Instruction 2
Leadership 2 (Command +2)
Pilot Ground Craft 4

There is no new equipment/spells/vehicles, but then this is supposed to be a locale book afterall.

Overall I like it and if you want some ideas for taking your runners out to Sioux country this gives a good starting point.

[PiXeL01]

At first glance - The cover art is AWESOME

[Namikaze]

While they do not have Life Modules, they do have Skill packages like Sioux Army Veteran below which a GM could then add stat bonuses and qualities to turn it into a LM easily enough.

Life Modules for the Sioux are already in the NAN Life Module.


I'm enjoying the book so far.  Good idea writing this as a smallish PDF though - there's only so much one can talk about the Black Hills and Great Plains before they want to shoot themselves out of boredom.    Just kidding about that, I spent a wonderful week in that area going to Yellowstone and such.  There are some good story hooks in the book for the creative GM, and some more blatant ones for the less creative GMs.  I am REALLY curious though about the exchange between Slice, Iya, and Ehawee on page 12.  I feel like there's a story there that I don't know about.

[Ursus Maior]

While they do not have Life Modules, they do have Skill packages like Sioux Army Veteran below which a GM could then add stat bonuses and qualities to turn it into a LM easily enough.

Life Modules for the Sioux are already in the NAN Life Module.

While I like fluff books, I also like them to incorprate some rules. It's also incites people to buy books to have access to all the rules. In this cas however, I think it's a shame the Sioux don't get any Life Modules, because it shows Catalyst doesn't support the system very much and might not do so in the future. And that's a shame. I like the LM-system.

Additionaly you might argue that the number of Sioux and NAN modules is rather low in RF. While you can simply take existing modules and work with them, that is not the point of the system. If I want to work arround, I do point buy from the start.

So, I sincerely hope we get some modules in the future that are covering regions and special biographic pathes like "Anglo" for someone from the Sioux Nation or "Cajun" for those CAS that are not simply non-UCAS Americans. Not to mention modules for places not in the former USA.

[Backgammon]

While I like fluff books, I also like them to incorprate some rules. It's also incites people to buy books to have access to all the rules. In this cas however, I think it's a shame the Sioux don't get any Life Modules, because it shows Catalyst doesn't support the system very much and might not do so in the future. And that's a shame. I like the LM-system.

Sioux was written way, way, waaaaay before Run Faster was anywhere near in sight. It's not a matter of not supporting it, it's that it didn't exist as of time of writing.

So, I sincerely hope we get some modules in the future that are covering regions and special biographic pathes like "Anglo" for someone from the Sioux Nation or "Cajun" for those CAS that are not simply non-UCAS Americans. Not to mention modules for places not in the former USA.

I have no idea what you mean by your first sentence, but the I have Metropole (Amazonia) currently in the editing queue. There is no active decision to focus on the US. Locales are picked based on author interest and, as the "Focus" series explains, based on interesting place that have not gotten a spotlight yet. The NANs are interesting, period.

[All4BigGuns]

I probably will pick this up at some point. One of the players in a game I'm running now has a character from Cheyenne.

[AJCarrington]

Really good blog post covering this release (loving the cover, as others have mentioned ):

Loving PDFs…The New ‘Shadows in Focus’ Series

There are a lot of reason I love the introduction of PDFs and their use as a publishing medium. Here’s just a few:
1. From a development/author research perceptive, it’s priceless to be be able to search hundreds of PDFs simultaneously for a given word or phrase. For the continuity that is such an important part of long-lived universes like Shadowrun, this one is useful beyond measure.

2. Good game stores that stock a lot of gaming books (especially RPGs) are few and far between; if you have one of them you frequent, love ‘em, support ‘em! So having a large site like DriveThruRPG.com that acts as a virtual shop to get tens of thousands of pairs of eyes on all the hobby has to offer is great for everyone.

3. We have over half-a-decade of hard data that shows us emphatically that PDF sales actually increase print sales, creating a synergy of excitement from the electronic into gaming stores and player homes.

4. The ease of use via a variety of electronic devices at a gaming table (though admittedly I still love having a print book as well).

5. It allows for “keeping in print” virtually everything. Considering that some games have been around decades (Shadowrun is now 26!), that means “bringing something back” can be a cool, big deal. For example, go check out that DriveThruRPG.com I mentioned above and you’ll see Planescape in the top 10. A D&D setting that was arguably one of its most brilliant settings, IMO, but it’s been out of print for ages and ages…now it’s back if you want to dive in!

6. It allows for experiments (this is one of my favorite bits). Because you’ve removed the cost of printing (which can be one of the greatest costs), you can experiment with covering subjects in a manner and fashion that simply would not be profitable in a larger print book. This allows for delving into new and interesting aspects of the universe, or covering something in much greater depth.
On the last point, we’ve been doing this on a large scale for BattleTech for years, but now we’re starting to ramp up Shadowrun in the same fashion. We just released the first in a series of coming PDFs, Shadows in Focus. Below is the cover, along with two interior pages…39 pages of sourcebook fiction and rules that allow unparalleled running the shadows within the Sioux Nation…a depth of coverage that simply would never fit within a standard print book.

Check it out, and look for more PDFs along these lines in the future!

Randall

[Namikaze]

I have no idea what you mean by your first sentence, but the I have Metropole (Amazonia) currently in the editing queue.

I think the first sentence was meant to refer to people who still face racial discrimination not based on metatype in their homeland.  Anglos in the Sioux nation for instance, along with the traditionalists and isolationists.  A more detailed Life Module specific to the Sioux Nation wouldn't be a hard house rule - I'll see if I can make one and put it in my Additional Life Modules thread.  I'm really looking forward to the Metropole book - Amazonia never gets the coverage it deserves. 

[MijRai]

I definitely like this book.  More theme stuff for some of the NAN, some suggested skills, etc.  It makes me want to do a quasi-legal bug-hunter team clearing out the Black Hills or something.  Also, 'panzergirl' is an awesome sobriquet for female riggers. 

[Redman]

I agree with everything said so far. Still I would have like afew statblocks on local critters and grunts. Like how does the wildcats differ from ghosts. The pdf gives you some idea yes,but I would it on print. Maybe we well see that in a mission adventure someday

[Tzeentch]

I had additional mechanical crunch elements planned, but the wordcount bucket was not large enough to incorporate them. However, I think this new digital e-book initiative is amenable to expansions along those lines. 32-page "Paranormal Animals of the Sioux Nation" or "Shadow Ops: Sioux Wildcats" seem like reasonable possibilities.

[Ursus Maior]

That sounds great! You could also cross over as to make the focus not too narrow: "Parazoology of the NAN" or "Special Forces of the Americas".

[firebug]

I haven't gotten this book yet, but I'd like to.  More I'm very very excited about what it represents, as they said on Tumblr, about it being an example of how they're free to make much more focused books that couldn't be released if they all had to be in print.  The potential for some really lovingly written and interesting niche books is absolutely great.

It reminds me of some of the stuff Pathfinder does, where there's a lot of third-party PDFs sold for very low prices.  Some even for just a dollar.  While that has the potential to really muck up a game (if a house starts using a lot of potentially imbalanced third-party junk) it's along the same lines of "specific PDFs made much cheaper".