The third Saturday of the month is rapidly approaching, and that means that it’s time for the monthly Catalyst Game Labs Shadowrun chat. This month, we’ll be opening things up to a general Shadowrun Q&A. So, come with your questions in hand, and the Shadowrun team will do their best to field them.

As usual, this will be held at the BattleCorps Shadowrun web chat. So, stop by Saturday, May 17th at 10AM Pacific Daylight Time.

Over on the Shadowrun LiveJournal community, there’s some a promo video and a bunch of pictures of a recent Shadowrun LARP in Switzerland, plus some explanations of the plot and how they handled combat. Cool stuff!

A couple of weeks back, Catalyst held its first “in character” Shadowrun Fan Chat. Fans got to don their own Matrix personas and join some (in)famous JackPoint regulars on an open chat on the ShadowSEA forums. The topic of the day was the new street drug “tempo” and the underworld upheaval it is generating—the central elements of our upcoming campaign book Ghost Cartels.

Our goal was to hint, tease, and foreshadow some of the plot elements and surprises to be featured in the campaign book, and to do so in a decidedly different and fun way. Suffice it to say that it was a lot of fun. We decided to run with this unscripted and unmoderated, and it turned out quite well—if a bit chaotic. We will definitely do something like this again in the future.

We want to thank the freelancers who played the roles of the JackPointers and everyone who participated in the chat. And without further ado, here’s the transcript.

Disclaimer: While we’ve did do some editing, we decided to leave the chat as fluid and chaotic as it was on the day.

April Chat Transcript

Catalyst Game Labs will be holding our monthly SR Chat next Saturday, April 19. This month we’ll be doing something somewhat different from our regular Q&A with the developers and authors. Instead, to promote our upcoming campaign book Ghost Cartels, we’ll be giving fans the opportunity to participate in an “in character” chat with some of our regular JackPoint posters. In the guise of a Matrix discussion between our regular fictional characters, we’ll be offering fans teasers about the upcoming campaign and the events depicted therein.

The premise is simple: sometime in mid-August 2071, several JackPointers meet up on an open ShadowSEA chat host to talk with a few friends and acquaintances about recent events taking place in the Sixth World at large and Seattle in particular during the preceding months. The hot topic is the escalating drug war that’s sending shockwaves through the shadow community.

Feel free to join in and ask questions about what’s going on in the Sixth World and specifically recent events depicted in Ghost Cartels – just remember to post in character. Log on with your own character’s street name or just use your internet handle and join the fun.

For the answers to those questions and many more, log on next Saturday… The chat will be held as usual on Battlecorps Shadowrun Chatroom at the usual time 10AM PST [17:00/5PM GMT].

Wow. This has been so much more fun than I ever thought it would be when the idea originally hit me. Yes, people, the “Runner’s Companion Preview” (and the Dragon and Obsidimen PCs in it) was our annual April Fools’ offering. Sorry to disappoint those of you who liked the idea.

As my first go at an April Fool’s joke as developer, I thought I’d be a little subtler and less blatantly tongue in cheek than usual. I wanted this year’s offering to be both convincing and to kill several birds with this particular stone. I think we were successful on both counts.

Just to show we don’t take ourselves too seriously, when it became obvious we weren’t going to get this out on time (yeah, Adam’s not the only one whose been swamped, what with Unwired, Ghost Cartels, and Feral Cities all on final approach), we chose to take a self-indulgent poke at all the whining about SR books never coming out on time by releasing the “preview” a day late. Putting it up unedited, is not only a nod at recent reviews, but given some people’s expectations actually lent the piece more credibility!

More than just taking the opportunity to pimp Runners’ Companion, I wanted to do this in such a way that it showcased how robust the basic SR4 system is, and presage not only some of the options that will be in the book but also the core rules framework fans can expect. The joke being not the rules themselves, but the context and the presentation, I wanted the rules to be as solid as possible, both to be convincing (gotcha) and to provide a baseline for those of you who did like them to expand on them in your own game (who knows I might get round to doing that myself some time).

Runners’ Companion will indeed feature a number of basic character race/species options unavailable in previous editions, including several surprises. However, our focus in this book is very much on providing variety and options for runners, and introducing dragons would skew the game away from the feel and style of what we’re aiming for.

It’s been fun, particularly since the whole thing (rules included!) was put together in less than 12 hours (many thanks to Adam for the last minute layout work). Nice to see the rules themselves so well received, bodes very well for Runners’ Companion.

For those who haven’t caught the obvious clues here are just a few (there are more, I particularly liked the “obsessive-compulsive hoarding” and wish I’d managed to squeeze in the Young Dragons in Estrus section though that would have been a dead giveaway):

Runners Companion “preview”: When was the last time Catalyst Game Labs released a preview this far in advance of a book’s release? Runners’ Companion is four books down the line (after Unwired, Ghost Cartels, and Feral Cities). That said Runners’ Companion is being written and I’m looking at the first drafts as I speak… er… type and they look nice…

Obsidimen: We have repeatedly told people — iirc the latest SR Dev Chat being the most recent instance — it’s too early in the manacycle for them to be popping up if they did survive the downcycle.

The asterisks in the Dragon Attribute Table are all over the place.

Dragons and Technology offers two completely different prices for dragon-compatible nanotrodes.

The Transcendence Metamagic box: A little too big, don’t you think?

The Dragons and Ranged Combat Modifiers: “they may apply a modifier between +2 and +4 (gamemaster’s discretion; standard of -3)”