Finally read
Street Legends.
I knew from the start I wasn't going to love that one. As a gamemaster, I don't need new shadowrunner characters. The basis of the game is that players' characters are the shadowrunners. Most of the time, when they encounter other runner, they''ll have opposite objectives and it's going turn into a fight. In such case, I don't see the point in knowing how their career started and how baddass they are, and it will end up with either the NPC stats being too high from my PC, or their legendary status proven unmerited. At least, my PC earned their karma and raised their stats the hard way. Also, my impression as that the authors did not envisioned at all their characters as opponents, except maybe for a small numbers of them (Haze, Shamandar, Puck...). Most sound like they're the cool guy on the good side.
Fixers could have been more interesting to me, but, halas, a lot of them are first and foremost described through their early career as shadowrunners. It tells us how they behave, or behaved, in the field, not how they work as fixers (something the short story
I Am Legion does, though I'm still a bit unsure on how convenient it really is to look like one of the most famous person in the world).
The big names, like Lofwyr, Hestaby, Villiers, along with the less-known or new ones, use the "street legends" theme as an excuse to advance plots. Lot of interesting things going on here : Lofwyr and Hestaby at war, Aina Dupré dead and Nadja Daviar back... Jonathan Blake may become the next Seattle governor or president of the UCAS, and introducing the character ahead of time will make it a lot better.
Now, my usual row of specific comments
- Is Frosty a Lugh Surehand fangirl ? Save for Tir Tairngire black ops team habit of showing up in whatever shadowrunners are involved into, Shadowrun background never gave me the impression of Tir Tairngire head of state being anything close to "one of the most powerful, influential, and important leaders of the modern world."
- Lofwyr must have ordered the assassination of Hestaby sidekick because the hit-man used a "german-made sniper rifle"? Seriously? I mean, Walther MA-2100 and HK PSG Enforcer are standard issue sniper rifles in SR4. Had he been carrying an Ares Predator, it would prove Damien Knight sided with Lofwyr?
If you asked me, I would retcon it into "a custom-made sniper rifle, a signature work of German armorer Dietrich Färber (or whatever name), known to work with S-K Prime services" (but maybe that was actually what the author had in mind).
- Lofwyr has a knowledge skill for each of the AAA, save... Saeder-Krupp. He must also default for anything relating to a AA megacorporation. While it made perfect sense for dragons to have different, higher attributes maximums, they also have skills well above the theoretical limit at 7 (in Hestaby's case, 17 in Ritual Spellcasting).
- Tess van Hama write-up reads odd. If you read the text without the Jackpointer comments, as it should originally have appeared on Jackpoint, Rigger X actually never states the "high-ranking Mitsuhama executive" that fathered her must be Taiga or Toshiro Mitsuhama, and so speaks about the Mitsuhama family fortune without any explanation.
-
I Am Legion short story outs Jonathan Blake as tied to Wuxing, something that doesn't appear at all in his write-up.
- Jonathan Blake write-up says he bought Centurion Security. It seems like this is the same Centurion that was in
SOTA:64 and
Vice. Except that is never was described as Seattle-based or a Cross Applied Technologies subsidiary (
SOTA:64 actually described Centurion as "one of the most first major European private police corps" ; no Seattle sourcebooks mentioned it either). Since Jonathan Blake is likely to return and Seattle will be the primary theater of operations, I guess that's the reason to retcon the corp into a Seattle-based one. As for the Cross connection, maybe there's an deliberate intent to tie it to Seraphim and/or Ares Macrotechnology.
- The connection between Jonathon Reed and Nadja Daviar, Jonathon Reed and the New Revolution, and Nadja Daviar and Reality, Inc. had my brain spinning all around in a way it hasn't been since
Dunkelzahn's Secrets I think.
