Some Favorite Shadowrun Sourcebooks
So we'll go back to the earlier days here for this; I'll go over three I really loved. Shadowbeat, Fields of Fire, and Shadowtech.
These won't be massive reviews, but more just a bit of discussion.
Oh, I loved more than these. Lots more. Lots, lots more. But these are 3 I wanted to go over today.
Shadowbeat was basically a media-oriented sourcebook. Released in 1992(wow, is it 23 years old? Arg), Shadowbeat dealt with entertainment and the media of the early 2050s. It had sections describing rules for playing musicans, reporters/media members, trid broadcasters/pirate broadcasters, the news, sports in Shadowrun(like combat biking and Urban Brawl) and the like. (Of course, you could be established runners and dabble in other things!)
The entire flavor of the book was amazing, as was many of these old books. This was the sort of book that mixed rules with a whole lot of setting stuff; reading it makes you sort of feel like you're reading just how things are in the 2050s. And it's awesome. Re-reading it makes me nostalgic for making my first character as a teenager and wanting to play again. (My first character was a human Street Samurai dude.) Whenever I think old Shadowrun this is a book that comes to mind very quickly.
This book even gives hard numerical/skill rules on how to handle stuff like filing stories for reporters and performances, for those who want to get really in depth with it. It had a killer gear listing in it too with any of the stuff discussed in the book.
Fields of Fire was known as the 'Mercenaries' Handbook' but some of us affectionately. Coming out around '94 or so, this book was basically chock full of weapons, equipment, and gear for all things merc. Which meant yes-grade A bang-bang is located in this one. And all sorts of other neat things like drones and such too! Body armor, you name it, if you like military stuff, this book had it. (Which, of course, I did and still do.)
That being said, it also had excellent RP opportunities too, with the description of the life of a merc from a famous NPC called Matador(name in the game was Juan Samuel Pererya.) His idea of the merc lifestyle and code was always amazing to me, and it was wonderful to read. He was a very professional type of guy in the book, and while I do prefer the more 'Pink Mohawk' style of play, Matador's stuff always struck me as really well written, and how folks responded. I really like the feedback on the gear, too; all of the various runners in their Shadowtalk(which I missed later on-the way they did it in the older editions, anyway.)
Finally-Shadowtech. This was one of the nerdiest, techiest type of cyberware/bioware guides I have ever read, and it was *awesome*. One of the characters who was answering shadowtalk was a developer/scientist, and everything was written in such technical speak that seeing some of the shadow-chat from the runners was a wonderful contrast.
Some of the tech-talk could confuse readers at times, but I actually thought this was part of the charm to be honest. It really felt like you were sitting somewhere in a cyberpunk cafe, surfing the 'net while being plugged in, looking at this catalog and for ways to spend that nuyen to make yourself better. Besides cyber and bioware, it also has compounds and other substances in the book that get described, as well as other rules and such. It's probably like the super one-stop-shop for all things cyberware, and I STILL use the book along with Man and Machine when I play 3e(since we play a sort of combination of 2e and 3e.)
Anyway it's a short blog but I figure it would be neat to discuss a few fav sourcebooks. I ought to do this more often. I do plan on having an update again soon with a little more story behind some more characters.
