Shadowrun
Catalyst Game Labs => Catalyst's Shadowrun Products => Topic started by: Backgammon on <12-19-12/1608:08>
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Great White Shadows
Bikers and go-gangs roam the streets of Montreal in 2074. Organized crime outfits struggle for territory. And neo-anarchists add spice and danger to the streets. All this would seem to be nothing more than lawless chaos except for one thing—money. Cheap real estate and savvy moves by the megacorporations have brought some cash into town, and a new city is being built on the remains of the old. And as every runner knows, when you shine the light of money onto the darkness of a ruined city, you get one thing: shadows
Montreal 2074 gives adventurous runners the chance to take their talents to a new locale, doing business on the isle of Montreal. Whether they are dodging the gangs of the West Island or looking to bargain with the Mafiosi of Saint Leonard, runners will find plenty of opportunities in Montreal. They just need to make sure they don’t end up as part of the piles of rubble—and they also need to watch out for the fast, brutal group known as Les Frères Chasseurs.
Montreal 2074 contains information on neighborhoods, gangs, and activities that bring the city to life in the Sixth World setting. With plot hooks and NPC stats, the book provides everything players and gamemasters need to take a trip to the Great White North.
Battleshop (http://www.battlecorps.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=3088)
DriveThruRPG (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/109297/Shadowrun%3A-Montreal-2074)
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Yeah, but when is the French Language version coming out? ;D
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Or the last Mission so I can nab them at the same time?
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Got to say I am totally impressed with this product. First it gives more lore on the fallen seraphim. Next it brings Montreal to life! I live in Seattle and our group enjoy's the local familiarity we have in SR. Now though I want to start a game in Montreal.
It has the perfect feel for some awesome stories and plots. Do I want to start a campaign about street level war between the biker gangs, immerse the party in a Neo anarchist plot to fight off the incoming Corps, have them interact with the native population of northern Quebec, help the mafia regain the lost grôund they suffered almost 50+ years ago from the Hellsouls, or cast a dark shadow over the group and pull them into "horror" influenced (that is what it sounds like to me) North Montreal?
In the end I think I will do all the above.... And there are still plot points sitting unused in this wonderful little book:) thank you Olivier Gagnon for cramming the perfect amount of lore in such a small space :) cheers and happy fraggin X-mas!
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Montreal is a very beautiful and fun place to visit. I've often considered moving there. So I will probably wind up getting this book and the little writeup about it has my interest :)
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Have lived there...very much looking forward to picking this up :)
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Wow, thanks for the great feedback guys! Montreal 2074 is currently sitting in the #2 Best Selling spot of DriveThru, thank you all for making this book a success :)
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Alright, time for me to be the sour grape.
I was unhappy the second I opened my Montreal PDF. 21 pages is a tad paltry for me. When I read [City] 2074.... I was thinking a book on par with Seattle 2072 (A book which remains my favorite). I was expecting pages upon pages upon pages.... I got 21. Now don't think I hate the content, just wishing I had more. Lots more.
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Alright, time for me to be the sour grape.
I was unhappy the second I opened my Montreal PDF. 21 pages is a tad paltry for me. When I read [City] 2074.... I was thinking a book on par with Seattle 2072 (A book which remains my favorite). I was expecting pages upon pages upon pages.... I got 21. Now don't think I hate the content, just wishing I had more. Lots more.
I don't mean to belittle your concern -- please don't get me wrong, here -- but this sort of complaint has always kind of mystified me...not because I think it's totally unwarranted to want larger products or something, but because it says right there how big the book is. Right there on the margin over at DrivethruRPG, for instance, it tells you right there that the thing is 21 pages long.
Is it that folks are just so excited about a new book they don't check that, or what? I'm not trying to be snarky, just really curious about this type of thing, ever since I saw some similar comments about WotA.
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It must be one of the top ten rules of customer service. Never expect that customer to 'read' anything. And that's not a jab at anyone, its just the nature of sales and customer service. Even if you make every effort to draw attention to something prior to purchase, you will have customers who will buy the product without checking the info first. Its actually, in its own way, a form of compliement. The customer wanted the product so much, they didn't stop to read the product info first. I certainly do that. Bang, new shadowrun product, straight in the cart. I'm not checking authors, page count, file size etc until... perhaps... after I begin reading the product.
But it could be other things. DrivethruRPG has the product info in a column on the left of the product summary. Its visually seperate from the product, enough so anyway that its easy to ignore. So perhaps the information is not presented well, from an Accessability stand-point.
So it could be a combination of things...
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Still haven't got the time to read it but as soon as I do, comments will follow. I'm sure glad to have some information on the city I currently resides IRL. Well any info on Quebec is welcomed.
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It must be one of the top ten rules of customer service. Never expect that customer to 'read' anything. And that's not a jab at anyone, its just the nature of sales and customer service. Even if you make every effort to draw attention to something prior to purchase, you will have customers who will buy the product without checking the info first. Its actually, in its own way, a form of compliement. The customer wanted the product so much, they didn't stop to read the product info first. I certainly do that. Bang, new shadowrun product, straight in the cart. I'm not checking authors, page count, file size etc until... perhaps... after I begin reading the product.
But it could be other things. DrivethruRPG has the product info in a column on the left of the product summary. Its visually seperate from the product, enough so anyway that its easy to ignore. So perhaps the information is not presented well, from an Accessability stand-point.
So it could be a combination of things...
I'll say that one of the ways they deal with this over on the Battletech side of Catalyst is by using different naming conventions for the PDF exclusive products. So for instance each faction gets a Field Manual (Biggish print book set in 3067) and a Field Report (20-30 pg PDF set in the early 3080s) likewise Technical Read Outs are always sizable print books and Experimental Technical Readouts are always much smaller PDFs. So when you see a new product you immediately know relative length and content type.
I have to confess that the reuse of names like State of The Art caught me a little off guard. When I first read the title I expected a book like the first SOA book for 3rd, not a brief compilation of random articles. Now I did my homework before purchasing, but I have to say it was a little strange. Likewise, as a new customer, I would expect Seattle 2072 and Montreal 2074 to be similar books.
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While I understand your gripe, Lysanderz... keep in mind this book only costs $6.99. If it was as thorough as Seattle 2072 you would have had to pay a lot more for it.
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Is it that folks are just so excited about a new book they don't check that, or what? I'm not trying to be snarky, just really curious about this type of thing, ever since I saw some similar comments about WotA.
I got similar commentary about Another Rainy Night. Battleshop, to be fair, doesn't show page counts, where DTRPG does.
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Yes, this is what seems to be coming up a lot. The feedback about the book has been great, but a lot of people wanted more.. I'll pass the word on up about this problem and see what we can do.
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You say a book of that quality would cost more money, what if that didn't bother me? If they produced another settings book with the depth and content of Seattle 2072 for ANY CITY I would gladly pay what I did for Seattle 2072. The Tir book disappointed me in the same way. These "Pamphlets", for lack of a better term, are a little less than what I was hoping for.
Comparatively: Spy Games
Spy games covered info on multiple cities but each of those cities for more pages than Promised Land and Montreal.
Like I said before: the quality is great, the information is great, but the limited quantities just sorta depressed me. It's sorta like
"finally! I can read all about a new city. Learn some new hang outs and roads, new gangs, what's going on with the criminal families and even some local corp politics. I'll be reading this all week trying to learn this stuff." But in reality I finished the reading in an afternoon.
I know, I know.... At this point I'm just rambling and whining because I want more Shadowrun.
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Lysanderz, the Seattle book sold well because it is the base setting for the entire line. The only other cities that could really hold their own in getting such a treatment would be Denver and maybe Hong Kong or Neo-Tokyo. That isn't to say that there isn't interest in other sprawls, but the ones that generate the most interest are the ones that will get the most print. You might pay that much for it, but CGL has to think about more than just you. If they can't be reasonably sure that enough people would be willing to pay for it to justify the expense, then they're risking their livelihoods (and the continued existence of the line, when you get down to it).
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You say a book of that quality would cost more money, what if that didn't bother me? If they produced another settings book with the depth and content of Seattle 2072 for ANY CITY I would gladly pay what I did for Seattle 2072. The Tir book disappointed me in the same way. These "Pamphlets", for lack of a better term, are a little less than what I was hoping for.
Okay. Let's break something down a little bit.
These "pamphlets" are generally solo projects, pitched and written by the same person. That means we have an idea for a book, we approach the publisher with it (not the other way around) and we send them a proposal of what we'd like to write, hoping they care enough to give us the space we need to write it. The publisher gambles on us, hoping that (a) our idea is good, (b) we can pull it off, and (c) eventually they'll somehow make money on it, despite (d) our pet project likely falling outside the line-as-planned (which is to say it might not seem to have much at all to do with whatever big metaplot stuff is going on, they didn't PLAN on this product being written up until we shot them the idea, etc, etc). Taking that kind of gamble, and allocating company resources to a project that the company didn't know they wanted (much less needed), do you think they're going to gamble on giving us 20-something pages worth of budget and attention, or 200-something pages?
You may also notice just how much recycled artwork is in these, which is something of an industry sign that they're not exactly as high priority and big budget as, I dunno, Street Legends, and is another huge reason we can try to keep the price point down. Trust me when I also say that the freelancers get paid on an entirely different scale for e-book materials. On something this size, the artist is gobbling up more of the budget than the writer (who had the idea in the first place), and that's with minimal new art.
Spy Games, conversely, had eleven writers. The line dev contacted the entire freelancer pool, told us what he wanted the book to cover, and then let the whole writer pool knife-fight over who was going to write what chapter. He then gets to pick the very best proposals that he thinks will cover what he wants the book to cover. The product is something the company had planned from start to finish, and it gets made with full company support and industry-standard budgets, which can be pretty hefty. One type of book falls under the umbrella of "large product planned from the beginning of the year, which will be written with all hands on deck and full company support" where the other is "well, this freelancer pitched me an idea that didn't sound terrible, let's give him enough rope to hang himself and hope we make a profit off his harebrained scheme somehow." Then they give us what support is available, but all while working on the next Spy Games scale product (which gets most of the attention, has most people working on it, etc).
We write these because we have an idea and the company lets us, so we cram as much awesome as we can into a very limited word count, to try and get our idea out there. You're wanting the same size and scale of performance as what a full orchestra provides, when we're basically the dude playing for change out on the corner. These type of products are basically one-man-band gigs.
So it's not a matter of "oh no, it would cost more money to make a bigger book." It's a matter of "Well, the company didn't plan on writing a book or producing any material about Tir Tairngire or Montreal in the first place this year, so the fact they're letting me write about it at all, even with a limited space, is the only reason the fans will get anything on this topic."
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Critias, your explanation pretty much answered every question I ever had about why they were shorter. I appreciate that. Like I said, top notch in quality I just want more. :P But seriously... thank you.
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Not to be a pain, but as I understand it the process isn't that much different over on the other side of Catalyst, and they manage to do a great job of developing naming conventions that clearly mark the shorter PDF products as different.
All I'm saying is something like calling it Runner's Guide:Montreal and having all future PDF city books be called Runner's Guide.
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The line dev contacted the entire freelancer pool, told us what he wanted the book to cover, and then let the whole writer pool knife-fight over who was going to write what chapter.
Oh, come on, it's nowhere NEAR as nice or polite as a knife-fight. ;D
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I'll reserve judgement untill i see how concise it is.
If its 21 it should be concise enough and descriptive enough that you can fill in the rest by yourself.
Like hers the major stuff thats going on heres a few examples of how its been affecting life on the street. Once you get a feel for how the city works then you can fill in the blanks. Way better that pages of mindless description
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Not to be a pain, but as I understand it the process isn't that much different over on the other side of Catalyst, and they manage to do a great job of developing naming conventions that clearly mark the shorter PDF products as different.
All I'm saying is something like calling it Runner's Guide:Montreal and having all future PDF city books be called Runner's Guide.
Well, naming conventions are above our pay grade. ;)
I'm not trying to excuse poor QUALITY, mind you, if that's someone's beef -- just trying to explain why the QUANTITY of material is so much less. These are meant to be snacks, not main courses.
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I loved the size of it. It's an amazing collection of info designed to be a solid hook for the city. You get a history that takes it from the real world to the sixth age. It is given some unique setting pieces, but nothing so odd to be a 'grand little snow flake.' There is a shadow war going on with the Seraphs that can be the basis for an entire campaign....or one of the PC's has them as a Contact to get some hard to find gear once in a game and that's the extend of THAT hook.
It gives a break down of gangs, crime lords, and corp interests. It sells you the surrounding area. Gives you some solid, unique to the area contacts and that's that.
As a player it was a joy to read. I told my Gm 'This is where the next campaign is going to be basis' and he agreed.
From a GM's point of view, it gives me everything I need to run the game with ideas and a deep enough of an outline that I can feel 'true' to the setting without feeling worried that I didn't use Green Lucifer or whomever and played them 'wrong.' I can easily make it mine.
And oh are there hooks. Race wars with the Francos. Corp intrique. Gang level conflict. Mafia conflict. NAN politics. Burn Notice on crack spooks. Heck, you could play a game focused on bounty hunting and exploring the wildnerness as it even gives insight into how much profit you could turn hunting down Windegos.
I find Seattle 2072 daunting. It's just SOO much material (Good material and I don't begrude why it's there) but it's just a lot there. That kind of book is something where the GM /might/ read it cover to cover, line by line and players will browse it (Or a player will read it and a GM will skim it) and the rest of the group will never pick it up. Runner's Haven I love as it basically is a bunch of 'mini chapters' and Hong Kong is probably a little bigger, but roughly the same style as Montreal 2074. It's far more digestable. 21 pages (18ish really of 'needed' reading, not counting the contacts stats, etc) is something I can read, hand another player/GM and have a high chance they'll at least skim it so everyone can be on the same page of the setting.
I hope we see more products like this as these are an eReader's dream.
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As a player it was a joy to read. I told my Gm 'This is where the next campaign is going to be basis' and he agreed.
Thanks, that's really the best compliment I can get for this book. Glad you enjoyed it!
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Well I live in Montreal and its awesome.
I am about to try SR5 and I will get the players running there.
Ca va etre fun mon chum!
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Cheers! If you need to discuss anything feel free to PM me :)