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Mailing List Logs for ShadowRN

Message no. 1
From: "Fisher, Victor" <Victor-Fisher@******.COM>
Subject: Re: My Least Favorite Sourcebook
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 17:19:22 -0500
This is probably going to throw alot of people into na uproar, but
I didn't like the Seattle Sourcebook. Presentation was mediocre 5,
photographs and pictures were a 5, relavent information was a two (I
pulled more from the Shadowrun 2nd edition and a good travel guide of
the area, and a bit of imagination}, and interesting places was a 1.
Sorry. Seattle just doesn't do it for me, so maybe I prejudiced.

Victor
Quote of the Day:
* Wyatt Earp: I spent my whole life not knowing what I want out of it,
just chasing my tail. Now for the first time I know exactly what I want
and who... that's the damnable misery of it.
* - from the movie _Tombstone_
Message no. 2
From: Brett Borger <bxb121@***.EDU>
Subject: Re: My Least Favorite Sourcebook
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 17:35:15 EST
> This is probably going to throw alot of people into na uproar,
> but
> I didn't like the Seattle Sourcebook. Presentation was mediocre 5,
> photographs and pictures were a 5, relavent information was a two (I
> pulled more from the Shadowrun 2nd edition and a good travel guide
> of the area, and a bit of imagination}, and interesting places was a
> 1. Sorry. Seattle just doesn't do it for me, so maybe I prejudiced.

I have no complaints with Seattle, but I too got no real use from the
book. It seemed to be a collection of buildings, which I have no
trouble coming up with myself. Most other place books gave more info
on the attitude of the town.

-=SwiftOne=-
Message no. 3
From: Fredrik Lindblom <fredrik.lindblom@******.KALMAR.SE>
Subject: Re: My Least Favorite Sourcebook
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 11:59:09 +0100
At 17:35 1997-12-11 EST, you wrote:
>> This is probably going to throw alot of people into na uproar,
>> but
>> I didn't like the Seattle Sourcebook. Presentation was mediocre 5,
>> photographs and pictures were a 5, relavent information was a two (I
>> pulled more from the Shadowrun 2nd edition and a good travel guide
>> of the area, and a bit of imagination}, and interesting places was a
>> 1. Sorry. Seattle just doesn't do it for me, so maybe I prejudiced.
>
>I have no complaints with Seattle, but I too got no real use from the
>book. It seemed to be a collection of buildings, which I have no
>trouble coming up with myself. Most other place books gave more info
>on the attitude of the town.

True, and I miss some really useful things, like, city maps that actually
have a scale... Location maps (go ahead, halve the number of locations and
phony ads and instead insert small maps of the more important places (space
needle, club penumbra, etc). would make _me_ a lot happier...)

Heck, when the players are in Redmond and have ten minutes to reach Mr
Johnson and their nuyen in Downtown and the car's shot to hell, will they
make it? I can only guess, 'coz I have _no_ idea how far it is...

Plus some other things I cannot recall right now...

As for my least favorite sourcebook... Well, I'm not sure, but my least
favorite adventure module is definitely "Total Eclipse". It just stinks! :-P

/FL
Message no. 4
From: Les Ward <lward@*******.COM>
Subject: Re: My Least Favorite Sourcebook
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 18:42:19 -0500
> This is probably going to throw alot of people into na uproar,
> but
> I didn't like the Seattle Sourcebook. Presentation was mediocre 5,
> photographs and pictures were a 5, relavent information was a two (I
> pulled more from the Shadowrun 2nd edition and a good travel guide
> of the area, and a bit of imagination}, and interesting places was a
> 1. Sorry. Seattle just doesn't do it for me, so maybe I prejudiced.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. The Seattle Sourcebook is one of
the best role-playing supplements ever written. The criticisms above are
valid, but the source book had more adventure seeds than anything else I've
ever seen. I'm not talking about huge epic runs, but "here's what's
happening in your neighborhood" style runs that always seem to make the
best Shadoruns, at least for the people I played with.

The best part, both as a GM and a player, is that _all_ the information in
the SS is considered to be public. No special GM section. This lets every
player have a copy. As a GM it is immensely satisfying to create several
weeks of gaming around a single sentence in the book, and then -- months
later -- have the players randomly discover that sentence, and suddenly
realize how screwed they were during those sessions. If I relied solely on
stuff I wrote, that could have never happened, because what I wrote would
not have been long enough to sufficiently hide the sentence for that long.

So, a warning to FASA about Seattle II: Don't screw it up. Oh, and give it
a friggin index. I'm not going to save your ass this time by publishing my
own for the net.

Wordman

Further Reading

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Disclaimer

These messages were posted a long time ago on a mailing list far, far away. The copyright to their contents probably lies with the original authors of the individual messages, but since they were published in an electronic forum that anyone could subscribe to, and the logs were available to subscribers and most likely non-subscribers as well, it's felt that re-publishing them here is a kind of public service.

Thwap!