| From: | shadowrn@*********.com (Achille Autran) |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Shadowrun CD |
| Date: | Thu Feb 28 06:20:01 2002 |
>
>Ok, that leads us to the next question. Which would you rather see more:
>a) the core rulebooks on CD, or
>b) out of print sourcebooks on CD (and if so, which ones)?
b) would be the most interesting, and as far as I know what people are
looking for the most.
Of course, all the books would be very neat, but it's probably impractical
economics-wise. If a selection has to be made, I'd like to see books that
won't be updated in the foreseable future, or provide greater details on a
location than what will be seen in future books like Shadows of North
America, Shadows of Europe or an hypothetic 6th World Almanac.
Off the top of my head, this would include: both Paranormal Animals,
Shadowbeat, Corporate Shadowfiles, Lone Star, Bug City, Threats, Portfolio
of a Dragon, Cyberpirates for the 71xx, all 72xx up to Target: UCAS except
both NANs, Neo-Anarchist Guide to NA (books not really satisfying IMO) and
the Seattle Sourcebook. For adventures, the old landmarks would be neat:
Harlequin, the bugs trilogy (Queen Euphoria, Universal Brotherhood, Double
Exposure,) Mercurial, maybe Bottled Demon and Dragon Hunt so that even new
players will learn to love to hate the infamous Blackwing - and GMs will
learn to hate to love him. Super Tuesday, Shadows of the Underworld, Mob
War, Blood in the Boardroom and Renraku Arcology: Shutdown would be nice as
well to wrap up loose plotlines.
Another way to go could be 3 CDs, the Great Shadowrun CD-ROMs of the 71xx,
72xx and 73xx... Err, for people who don't know all books reference by
heart, let's say Shadowrun Game CD-ROM, Shadowrun World CD-ROM and
Shadowrun Adventures CD-ROM. Each one going around $20-25 would be much
more palatable for roleplayers who are not used to shell out more than
$30-35 at once, usually for a rulebook. It would be a bit mean to split the
three most sought-after books (according to casual observation of eBay:
Portfolio of a Dragon, Universal Brotherhood and Harlequin) over three
CD-ROM, but that's also what people call business savvy...
As for content itself, I believe plain PDFs would be fine and anything
fancier like a custom interface, building a cross-book index (unless
Wordman picks up the glove ;-)), or rearranging chapters between books
would be too costly for such a product. Something very cool however would
be a plain ASCII dump of the whole text of ALL the books on a CD in a
SINGLE file, which would make global searches and editing easy tasks, two
features that would make such CD-ROM(s) valuable even for people who
possess a complete or close-to-complete collection.
Well, that's an already long message. Hope it makes sense...
Achille / Molloy
