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Mailing List Logs for ShadowRN

Message no. 1
From: shadowrn@*********.com (Hahns Shin)
Subject: YotC: SURGE, the soft drink *Spoiler*
Date: Sun Aug 5 14:50:01 2001
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Okay, after reading the Year of the Comet thoroughly and also reading
some of the less intelligent comments on the Dumpshock forums, I was
amazed at the latent negative reaction to SURGE. People who play
Shadowrun choose to suspend their disbelief with the idea that Magic
returns to the world in 2011, yet somehow a massive change occurs in
the population of the game world, and they decry it as unneccessary
and even un-SR (if that is such a term). I like SURGE, but not because
I believe that I can turn my campaign into a Neoanime setting or turn
my characters into Striper/Quicksilver wannabes. I like it because it
introduces a wild card element... just when you think you know
everything, everything turns upside down. It allows characters to
roleplay Goblinization Day all over again, fast forwarded 50 years
into the future, with people making the same mistakes of history. It
makes the Humanis Policlub a powerful, dangerous force again. It can
make racism very real for the human characters in a group. It has such
wonderful possibilities for great role playing, and it saddens me to
see people reject an idea without giving it a chance. I know many
people who love Cyberpunk but won't play Shadowrun because "it has
elves" or love fantasy RPGs, but won't play Shadowrun because
"Cyberpunk sucks". Now I see the same thing happening with SURGE and
YotC.

I respect the wishes of GMs to make their campaign timeline
SURGE-less, or play out an alternate timeline from SR canon... in
fact, I love it when my GMs play alternate timelines with any RPG. But
I'm just wondering if I'm the only SR fan that likes SURGE...

Hahns Shin, MS II
Budding cybersurgeon
"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already
know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be
killed."
-G. K. Chesterton
Message no. 2
From: shadowrn@*********.com (Gurth)
Subject: YotC: SURGE, the soft drink *Spoiler*
Date: Mon Aug 6 05:20:08 2001
According to Hahns Shin, on Sun, 05 Aug 2001 the word on the street was...

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> Okay, after reading the Year of the Comet thoroughly and also reading
> some of the less intelligent comments on the Dumpshock forums

You shouldn't hang out at the DS forums. Everyone should post what they
have to say about SR here instead... (No smiley, this is partly serious...)

> I was amazed at the latent negative reaction to SURGE.

They were? No negative reaction from me -- I like the idea of SURGE, and am
certainly going to have all the players roll when/if our campaign reaches
that point in the SR timeline.

> It has such wonderful possibilities for great role playing, and it
> saddens me to see people reject an idea without giving it a chance.

I suspect that part of the reason is that SURGE is random, and lots of
roleplayers these days want to control every aspect of their characters
(witness the attitude against RPGs in which you have to roll for your stats
instead of assign points to them). SURGE suddenly introduces an element
they absolutely hadn't counted on, and which they can't counter -- if
something unexpected happens in an adventure you can use your skills etc.
to change it, but there's no way you're going to do much about SURGE.
Except maybe spend money on surgery, but in that case it'll seem like a
poor GM device to liberate PCs of some of their money.

--
Gurth@******.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html
Tot straks en poppelepee maar weer.
-> NAGEE Editor * ShadowRN GridSec * Triangle Virtuoso <-
-> The Plastic Warriors Page: http://plastic.dumpshock.com <-

GC3.12: GAT/! d-(dpu) s:- !a>? C+@ UL P L++ E W-(++) N o? K w+(--) O V?
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Incubated into the First Church of the Sqooshy Ball, 21-05-1998

Further Reading

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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!