| From: | "Robert A. Hayden" <hayden@*******.MANKATO.MSUS.EDU> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Review of NAGEE 5 |
| Date: | Sun, 17 Apr 1994 19:50:32 -0500 |
All is IMnsHO, of course.
First, I was rather let down by the size. NAGEEs 1-4 averaged about
sixty pages, with their size gradually increasing. #5 is only 48 pages
long.
It does start out with a nice, full colour cover page, with an absolutely
great Matrix-painting by Karen Weatherbee, but from there it begins to go
down hill.
NAGEE is no longer edited by Jerry Stratton, but is now edited by Tony
Moller. I suppose like many people, Jerry passed the torch due to lack
of time, and when I was asked to edit NAGEE, I passed for the same
reason. Tony does do a very good job, and I don't fault him for the
drawbacks in this issue. I think it's pretty evident that the available
materials were pretty sparse. Hopefully NAGEE 6 will improve in that
area.
After the standard 'Bulletin Board' section, NAGEE 5 begins with a
two-page review of the Germany Sourcebook. Next comes the first in a
series of short stories by Tom Down called 'Wyrm Talk'.
After Dowd's work, we get a five-page review of the city of Las Vegas in
205x. While not up to the verbosity of Pueblo in NAGEE 4, it is quite
well done and I enjoy seeing cities written up that FASA chooses to
ignore.
Next is another short story, followed by a listing of recent and future
FASA releases. It's interesting to note that in September, FASA plans
'Prime Runners', a book of NPCs. This will come about 4 months after a
NERPS release of the same topic (NERPS: Who? What? Where?).
Next is an integrated system for multiple datajacks designed for use with
the expert system rules from NAGEE 4 witten by yours truely. It's
interesting to note that I submitted this at the same time as my writeup
with Vincent Esposito on multi-tasking, but when it didn't appear in
NAGEE 4, assumed it was rejected, and this both this article and a reprint
of the multi-tasking rules appears in the recently released NERPS ShadowLore.
Next we enter 'The Meat Market', and are given a couple of archtypes and
another section listing several deckers of varying ability.
Four new decking utilities appear on page 34, followed by 'The Spirit
Guide', which gives us the Horse and Dove Totem. Incidently, Dove also
appears in NERPS ShadowLore.
Next is a nice writeup that tablizes all the accessories that come free
with your favorite weapons.
Page 41 brings us rewites of the archetypes in NAGEE 1, to make the
compatible with Second Edition.
Finally, we get a chapter that brings us eleven new spells to make things
interesting for your magic-bored runners.
Of course, I recommend that everyone get this tome, and despite my
criticisms, I think it is an admirable production. There is such a lack
of non-FA$A material that it is nice to see things happening. It's my
hope that future versions of NAGEE are larger and better and I look
forward to them.
NAGEE 5 (and previous versions) is available for anonymous FTP at
teetot.acusd.edu:/pub/Beelzebub/Role-Playing/Shadowrun/NAGEE. It is
available in PostScript, ASCII, RTF and MS Word formats.
____ Robert A. Hayden <=> hayden@*******.mankato.msus.edu
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