Shadowrun: Emerald City is a setting book for the Sixth World Edition of Shadowrun covering that most Shadowrun of all cities, Seattle. If you are running a Seattle-based campaign, obviously this book is going to be extremely useful while not indispensable but close. For non-seattle-based campaigns, it is a fun read and gives you some information of things that will have rippling effects on the rest of the Sixth World. However, the lack of district maps and an index do badly compromise its usability during a game.

Shadowrun: Emerald City is the Setting Book for Shadowrun’s hometown, the Metroplex of Seattle. Designed to link into the new city edition of the core and providing a detailed look at the city and its situation following the city’s declaration of independence.

As is usual, it begins with a brief introduction about why Seattle remains important and one of the shadowrunning centers of the world. Next is a short fiction section to set the mood and it does an alright job of showing a new runner in Seattle.

Following is the Weight of History, which gives a brief (Shadowrun alternate and future) history of Seattle. Then it pivots to looking at the current political situation in Seattle and how the other power players, both national and corporate, are approaching the new situation.

Seattle Basics, well, covers what it says, overall population numbers, getting in and out and getting around in the city all get covered in this section. All useful information for the runner (or other visitor to the city). Personally, some more information on public transportation would have been welcome and the cab fare seems way too low.

Next we move into the city, section by section, giving each a breakdown by population and other useful information including a color-coded “average security rating” which is not defined, so not as useful as it could be (also to make things more confusing, within each district, the old letter codes for security rating are often referenced and are also not defined). Each chapter ends with a few new qualities, mostly positive and a few negative, all themed to the district being covered.

There is little point in going through the districts chapter by chapter, each has a bit about local politics and what is happening there, some of the power players -individuals and groups- noted, interesting locations, and a lot of implied adventure hooks. Though perhaps some straight up, ‘here is what you as runners are likely to be hired to do’ in this district might have been helpful to focus the options for games masters and players alike. As is usual, some of the writing appeals to me more than others, but that is just the way of things.

However, the style of the writeup of the downtown section pleases me the most, just stylistically. While it might have broken up the “stream of consciousness” style of some of the reports, bolding the names of people, places and groups in the paragraphs would have been amazingly helpful in finding things when you go back to look for them especially when a character or place is mentioned halfway through a paragraph. Ease of use is important for game supplements, really people, it is. Also, though most sections are good at this, if you include a bar or restaurant, have a sentence or two describing the decor/feel of the place and maybe the food not just who you can meet there.

Now, this being Shadowrun, there is not much that breaks my suspension of disbelief (anti-grav technology aside), generally, maybe an eye-roll or two but even then, most things this reviewer will let slide. But a mercenary strike carrier? Specifically, a nuclear strike carrier. A helicopter carrier, that would work, but those big carriers? That is on the order of a minimum 6.2 billion just for the ship (or more than 13 billion for the new ones), air wing extra, and operating costs of 400 million or more a year! No mercenary company can afford that, just no. Especially as the next largest ship in the mercenary navy is a corvette, which pretty much the smallest warship you can have and still call it a “ship.”

As has been the case when they have done the qualities by chapter (I am looking at you Power Plays) there is no place in the book that gathers them in a single list for you to reference and be able to quickly find them in the book. Additionally, like all of the qualities, the price for effect is all over the place with many of them being with group X, you get one bonus edge for social tests, with sometimes an additional benefit. The social bonus should have been broken out and made into a general quality that anyone could take and define who it applied to and then the secondary part could have been made into it own quality (with the ability to combine with the previous one to get around limits on number of qualities possessed by a character). This would have made it more flexible (“I am not playing in Seattle and my character has ties with the Gulf Coast Smugglers”) and unified the pricing of Quality mechanics, which, as I mentioned, are all over the place when it comes to price for effect.

Now, for people, like this reviewer, whose campaign does not have Seattle becoming an independent city-state, how useful is this book for them? Well, obviously not as useful as if you are following the current official metaplot, but my guess is at least 85% of it will remain useful for any campaign set in Seattle (independent or not). It certainly has my mental gears turning with interesting ideas and runs set in districts rarely visited in my campaign.

However, and this is enough to cost it a star on DriveThru, no maps, at least one in the electronic version I have access to. There should be a big city map and each of the district sections should have started (or ended) with a map of that district. Without maps, the product is much less usable and gamer friendly. And, of course, no index either. So good luck finding a place or person if you remember the name but not the district they are in.

3.5 Stars rounded up to 4.

Read more of my reviews and articles at my Gaming Journal

Shadowrun: Double Clutch is a sourcebook, specifically a “Core Rigger Rulebook” for the Sixth World Edition of Shadowrun covering vehicles and more things that can be done with them. This book is an essential addition to a GM’s collection for seeing the state of play for vehicles in the Sixth World and the rules for chases and repairing and modifying vehicles. Obviously, anyone playing a rigger or other vehicle specialist will want access to this book but GM should be careful about letting people go crazy with vehicle modifications.

Shadowrun: Double Clutch, is the Core Rigger Rulebook for Shadowrun, Sixth World Edition, providing a look at the current state of play for vehicle and drone technologies along with expanded rules for piloting vehicles and using drones.

It begins with an introduction, as expected, this one talks about why riggers are important and why you want one on your team. One of the ubiquitous fiction sections follows then we begin with: Zen & the Art of Vehicle Maintenance, a look at what rigging is like in the Sixth World, who does it and what sorts of jobs are performed by riggers. While this is all good practical advice of where and what riggers do, I would have liked a bit more about how riggers sense and perceive the world when they are rigged in, it is referenced.

Next is Hot Rods & Cool Rides, a selection of new ground vehicles. Ranging from motor cycles to tanks and everything in between. Mostly these are wheeled vehicles, as you would expect, though there are some tracked and several ground effect craft (hovercraft). Some additional information of how the ground effect vehicles interact with the environment would have been useful. How high can they get off the ground? What are the effects of moving from land to water and vice-versa? There are also a pair of exotic vehicles, a highly adaptable and versatile, but rare and distinctive, gyro-car, and a jet-powered skate board (no really).

Angry Water looks at (surprise!) water craft. The section on watercraft is well written, enjoyable to read and, unfortunately, it is about half useless for gaming purposes. Speedboats, jet skis, patrol boats, all of these vehicles could conceivably be encountered or used by the runners or both. But while four different types of sailboats are interesting how likely are they to be used? This goes double for the replica of the Cutty Sark, cool idea for a ship, but when will it (or its game statistics) ever matter? A lovely, truly lovely world background piece though. The same goes for the Aztechnology corvette, the new UCAS Battle Cruiser, and the Japanese Imperial Navy’s hunter-killer submarine, interesting to know they are out there but do their game statistics matter? Equally, there is useful information that can be provided for cruise liners, massive container ships, and factory ships but knowing their acceleration, body and armor is not part of that and is nearly pointless. My feeling is this chapter could have served a better purpose by providing game information on the small craft and a slightly higher level discussion of navies and shipping for the rest of it. But, of course, this is still the toys section of the book so everything has to have statistics and prices (because runners can certainly afford the 180 million NuYen for their own corvette).

Next up (pun intended) Rare Air, a look at available air vehicles. These are vehicles that runners are more likely to encounter, even if only to cower until they have gone past. There are some hints of wackiness that the ground and water sections could have used, with a jet-pack and glider packs. There are a variety of gliders, copter, small planes and (so nice to see them again) zeppelins. Everything runners are likely to need for smuggling or landing in restricted areas, things to highjack or get rescued by (DocWagon vehicles and such) and things to avoid, such as armed helicopters in various sizes. Overall generally useful and likely to appear in campaign using air vehicles, well except for the two fighters and the spacecraft, but also just good background material (medical tilt-rotors for example). Except, except, grav vehicles, as I mentioned in my review of Power Plays, I do not think anti-gravity technology belongs in Shadowrun, most everything else in Shadowrun is an evolution or extrapolation from existing tech (yes, AIs are off the scale tech too, but very much embedded in cyberpunk fiction) but anti-gravity . . . that is serious handwavium. Worse, if you are going to include this sort of tech and mention that it can do amazing things, you had better have rules for said amazing things!

Then we get drones in Spies, Snipers and Force Multipliers (terrible chapter name), now, drones are just fun and so flexible but much of this chapter just seems off. Again, too much space is given to high end military drones (automated tanks, mini-assault copters, drone fighter jets, submarines) and not enough domestic drones and no building or construction drones at all. Also, the prices are all very odd as there are no really low end drones (pricewise). Right now, here in the modern world, online you can get a flying quadroter drone with a camera for less than $100 but the slightly more capable (?) MicroSkimmer (from the core) is ¥850, the Bust-A-Move toy drone is ¥2,500 (!! pricy toy) and the size of an Elmo doll, while the Man-at-Arms, a man-sized armored humanoid drone capable of using weapons (up to an LMG!) Is ¥4,500? Just odd and does not fit well in a reality that I can understand how it works. However, there are a couple of fun things, the Bust-A-Move being one of them, but also a security drone that is disguised as a (working) vending machine, now that is brilliant. More weird and wacky stuff like that and less high end military hardware would have made this a much more interesting and useful chapter from this reviewers point of view.

Making it Yours in the chapter on how to modify vehicles, adding everything from sensors to alternate forms of mobility, and providing new rigger cyberware options and uses. Chapters like this are always interesting and frustrating, interesting because you get to see the interesting way you can kit out vehicles to suit just about any purpose, frustrating because some player will always find ways to abuse them and because you get weird things like you cannot make a pigeon sized drone that appears particularly realistic (maximum of two levels of realistic appearance, which anyone with an average perception will tag as a fake). Still, fun stuff for all that.

Build Your Dreams are the actual rules for building a vehicle from the ground up, so take all of my comments from the previous chapter and apply them again here. And, of course, every player is going to argue that their custom vehicles can be a junkyard frankenstein because it halves the cost to build with no disadvantages at all. Still, it gives you an idea of why the prices for some of the drones seem so out of whack with reality, they are slaved to the pricing system here. Nice idea, unconvinced about the execution.

The Grease Monkey Way talks about repairing vehicles and provides the rules for the same, defining some of the items available from the core book (tool kits, shops and facilities) and what they can be used for. Again, used parts from junkyards are the cheapest option and come with no issues which is just weird. But a solid chapter for those who wish to take the time to carefully Detail vehicle damage and repair.

Gearhead Anatomy is a wide selection of new qualities focusing on piloting and working with vehicles, not unexpected right? Fifteen Positive, including five driving styles which half the edge costs for a set of themed maneuvers, and some which open up new edge actions for technical characters. And thirteen Negative Qualities. Some quite fun additions to the options, Silver Lining, which lets you gains some benefit from a glitch and Junkyard King, which lets you find just what in needed through various routes. However, among all of this good stuff there is one terrible design choices: Attribute Mastery, which takes the mistake made by Analytical Mind in the core book and doubles down on it. Giving Edge just because you use a skill linked to that attribute goes against the entire purpose of the Edge system as I understand it, what bother to be creative when you just get an edge by doing what you built you character to do? Counterproductive at best and actively corrosive to the Edge system at worst.

The final section is The Rigger Advantage with chase rules and new Edge actions. The chase rules have variants so you can use the system to represent racing or shadowing (something which should probably show up more in Shadowrun actually).

There is an index of sorts, an alphabetical list of the vehicles, modifications, and so on. Which is great . . . if you can remember the name of what you are looking for in the first place. And as the longest section is 38-pages, for drones, which is already neatly chopped into the sub-types of drones, finding things should not be that difficult. So nice to see an index, too bad it is not as useful as it could be. What would have been more useful, from my point of view, would have been a combined table of core book and new vehicles so as a GM you could grab the statistics for, say a van, knowing you had all of the basic options at your fingertips. Also, one of the great sections of the core book was the “Other Makes and Models” section so you could rapidly produce the names of equivalent vehicles, seeing something like that here would have been nice.

Overall, a useful sourcebook verging into vital given the way it expands both the available vehicles and their uses. Every GM should add this to their list of books to pick up at some point. Though I wish it had spent less time and space on military vehicles, especially absurd things (from the point of view of a shadowrunner) like tanks, warships and fighter aircraft. While it is interesting to read have how they have adapted military gear to Sixth World technology, my campaign will never need to use them and that is just as well, my campaign would have been better served with more low end (but useful) drones and civilian vehicles.

Read more of my review on my gaming journal: https://seaofstarsrpg.wordpress.com/

Lots of Gun, Drone, and vehicle pictures, something the other SR4 books lacked, to give GMs and players an idea of what goes with those stats. I'm going to be turning a lot of these into tokens for my preferred VTT. Stats and balance remain to be tested, but as I tend to customize what ever I use I'm just glad for the inspiration.

Very well written. Definitely reminded me of the "Secrets of Power" trilogy in the way Picaro finds his power and makes his choices. This was written by someone who loves and understands Shadowrun, especially since Opti has a whole podcast dedicated to the history of the 6th world. I highly reccomend this book for anyone who loves Shadowrun, especially if Ork is your favorite Metatype.

I enjoyed reading the material and attempting to design campaign game and invidual scenarios.

Jad

Just one star for multiple reasons.

1: 6e has none of things that I suspect most existing players really wanted in a new edition. I think all anyone really wanted was for 5th (or tbf even 3rd) to be streamlined, have it's imperfections smoothed, made a little more elegant, and the bloat from splat books to be rationalised or undone. Y'know, just clean the mess already made, not make another even bigger mess. 6th does attempt to streamline some things, but generally the wrong things and it guts others messily, and then makes all of that a wasted endeavour by introducing a ...

2: Badly broken new rules system that in fact adds new things to track during play (AR vs DR) so its actually more complex and unbalanced turn by turn, and is heavily focused around tracking an 'edge' system that no one asked for. This mechanism is so dominating that it frequently feels like it's reduced every character down to how much edge they have. The whole idea of expanding edge could have been awesome, it's just been done really badly. So even after the extra complexity of generating and tracking it, all the ways you might have used edge to save your bacon (rerolls etc) are so expensive in edge cost compared to the caps in place to stop you abusing the broken system that your character is probably just going to fail/glitch/die repeatedly until you stop playing. Bravo!

3: Where did multiple actions and initiative passes go? That's been part of the basic flavor signature of SR since 1e! It always had issues, and if it had all gone that would be at least have made some sense, but instead now we're left tracking and nit picking over 'minor actions' that are acquired inconsistently along with more 'edge' system abuse. So again, it's more complex, not less, and even less fair than the system it replaced.

4: Appalling writing and editing. For gods sake give the writing to people who give a hoot, and then actually edit it. At the moment, neither thing seems to be happening - but then, this wasn't happening for most of 5th edition either.

5: giving gear descriptions to people who clearly have no idea about technology to make up ridiculous 'wireless' bonuses for everything, even when it makes no sense. Essentially 'Wireless' is just a word used in the way Apple uses the word 'Pro'. Yes I know this is the same as point 4 really, but OMFG.

6: The worst til last. Argle Bargle on p127 - if this new city edition is meant to contain all errata, what on earth is this shameful, mocking paragraph still doing here? I had previously assumed this was copypasta that hadn't been edited out in 6e's first printing, which was bad enough, but apparently all the errata is included now? If this wasn't a glaring copy error that needed replacing then it shows an utter contempt for the material and for me the reader who's bought pretty much everything shadowrun since 1989. Way to go. Again, yes I know this is the same as point 4 really, but OMFG mk2.

There's more, but that ended up being longer than I intended already. When the product is this bad, it's the gift that keeps on giving.

If CGL had any sense they'd admit to being wrong on this one, do an open beta of a v6.5 ruleset to re-engage with the fanbase, fix things and then reprint the rules and offer a free pdf to exisiting players. But I can't see that happening. CGL just charged into a reprint of the same mess apparently thinking all that was needed was some typos fixing, so they are hardly going to do another until city edition has sold out. Well, I don't see that happening any time soon. Perhaps CGL doesn't get that the product is this bad, perhaps it's that I (my group, and the vast majority of existing SR players I've spoken with) are just 'toxic fans' and 'grognards' who will never be happy - It's us, not them. Never mind I never complained once (never mind this bitterly) at any other edition, it's all me.

If there was a petition to get Topps to take this IP away from CGL and give it to someone else, like Pegasus who do the german version, or someone new like cubicle 7, or even for Pinnacle to do an official Savage Worlds version (a la savage worlds pathfinder), I'd sign it in 5 seconds flat.

As a long time BT fan, I've been really intrigued to see CGL backfilling a lot of gaps in the Inner Sphere/Clan timeline. This is a really wonderful supplement. Go buy it if you are a Mech head!

I recommend waiting for a sale or leaving it be. The plot developments themselves are good to know, but clearly do not take up the 178 pages in this book, what with all the dilly-dallying the authors did in the first few sections. Later parts of the book are good, so it's kind of a pain that it starts rough.

The "Detroit Rupture" section itself is just what the jackpointers keep saying it is- Bug City all over again. The fallout from the events is more interesting, but I think too much time was spent on the event itself (Which was pretty much just a Bug City/Boston CFD rehash).

The next section, "Ghost Army," is dialogue focused. Unfortunately, the dialogue's not that great, unless you enjoy killer lines like "Bravon wun tree this foxtrot Zulu wun wun." The reader can infer that they're using the NATO phonetic alphabet for military radio chatter, there's no need to show the dialect. Personal dislike of mine, I don't like when people write things like "runnin" or "gotta" in dialogue, either. It becomes distraction, rather than enhancing the reader experience. It also feels a lot less authentic when later on they say "Sitrep is red, repeat red." I don't really expect perfection in military lingo, but saying repeat on the radio means you want to repeat the last barrage of artillery fire. It doesn't mean the english meaning. It just bothered me that the author went to the effort of getting the authentic pronounciation of the NATO alphabet/numbers, and kept throwing in things like "fubar" for the sake of it, but still made easy mistakes like that. Honestly, the level of forced military lingo in the rest of the section makes it almost comical- I don't mind over the top, but there's no substance to the characters beyond the fact that they use military lingo.

No major complaints about the Blackout section, but kind of boring to read. Possibly my fault, since I listened to the SCN podcasts and I loved those a lot.

I liked the UCrASh section quite a bit- a lot of places got love that normally wouldn't. The Seattle independence has been a long time coming.

Detroit Now and Atlanta Now were also well written, and "As the Dust Settles" was useful for folks who got bored during the first few sections of the book, but wanted to know what happened.

It's a little odd that a "chiark" (Cheetah-shark?) monster was introduced in "Ghost Army," but not placed in Game Information. There was plenty of white space available for a stat block.

One thing I noticed is that there isn't really all that much art in the book, which is fine for a plot book, but it made the boring sections worse. (I'd also rather them have less art, than hire more artists and not pay them. So there's that.) There's also lots of typos- things that a spellchecker won't catch, but a human editor would ("All most", "Bravon", etc). Some weird grammatical things, too. "Saeder-Krupp controls the rest of the building, renting out half of it. Everything else is rented." So, half of it is rented, and the rest is rented? Par the course for the SR line, but this stuff is still annoying.

Edit: Revising to 4/5, Dani made a good point, and it was only a small chapter of the book. Def won't go to 5/5 though, because of the editing issues and other issues in the book.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

I liked this a lot. Perfect end to the trilogy. I love the way chapters are structured in this, too, I got some arsene lupin vibes out of it. The bookend scenes were great, and I absolutely adored the character development of a particular character during that big climax scene (Not mentioned due to spoilers).

Excited to see what you do next!

Okay, so this is more in line of what I was expecting from metaplot/plot/campaign books than what Cutting Black was. It seems to be completely disconnected to the 6th edition metaplot and I'm not particularly well versed with Shadowrun MO to know if this is because its essentially standalone book or if stuff in it will be important or come back later. Anyhoo so this is about mysterious piece of code named after a japanese youkai which when activated manipulates markets in semi legal fashion to produce lot of money. There is bit long in universe article about market manipulation and coding which isn't really super interesting to me since not that interested in stocks and economy, but I like how adventure/investigations presented in book demonstrate different way codes can be used and different stories you can tell with it. I didn't read everything in detail because I never read sixth core rules in first place so I have no idea how it works rules wise in practice, but the investigations seemed solid and varied. They seemed like they would be easy to use as is and work as inspirations to build more adventures to do with subject matter. I do think the in universe conspiracy theories about trying to figure the origin and purpose of the code went perhaps bit too long since it started to feel as frustrating as reading real conspiracy theories :D

Printed book: 2 stars

Content: 5 stars

The printed copy is rife with inconsistent print quality, unfortunately almost all the SR 1e book reprints from DTRPG have this problem. This is the only way you're probably going to get a hard copy of Aztlan without paying a premium. I'm not sure if the issue is a low quality scan, printing issue, combo or something else but it is difficult on the eyes how text runs from light to overly dark/bold.

The writing here is top notch, Nigel Findley was one of the best RPG writers of his day and deserves mention in the G-O-A-T list. There's not much in the way of game mechanisms in the book. The focus is on setting information and plot hooks. Like almost all Shadowrun books of this type there are old BBS style postings on what people think of a given topic covered often suggesting to the gamemaster how they may spin or work a story/topic.

Excellent material -I'm just disappointed the physical copy was poorly printed/scanned.

Fast paced, action filled, and lots of fun. this game is heavy on improv and making it up. plots points make this easy and fun. the weapon system is under powered by a lot. it takes tons of slow rolling to kill anything. i suggest doubling the damage.

I've always had distaste for systems with heavy focus on advancing metaplot that outdates the older setting books and is easy to loose track of. I don't mind systems with heavy focus on campaigns with possible world changing events(such as how Pathfinder handles it), but I've preferred the setting books to not get outdated in span of same edition. But since I've only gotten chance of playing Shadowrun(5e) only once in five years and I figured out even if I get chance to play my GMs likely wouldn't follow the metaplot... Well, why not just buy the books for fiction value? I always liked reading jackpoint conversations and setting materials in player rule books, setting flavor is really best part of Shadowrun after all.

But yeah umm.... Even with that this book isn't what I expected. This was first Shadowrun plot sourcebook I had read, so I needed to check out other metaplot books to see if they are all like this or if this one was exception. More on that later. What I was expecting was something like this: Since I knew this wasn't an adventure module, I expected lot of in universe reports on the on going events, out of character text on how gm can handle the events, stats for important npcs and such, and lot of plot hooks.

Book is instead about just the on going live reporting on several seemingly disconnected events, with greater ramifications on UCAS. Basically vast majority of book is in character fiction and stats only being for token two insect spirits and the new alpha merge one. There is also that book goes through several events could have been their own adventures or even campaigns, Chigago bug war redux in Detroit, UCAS army unit disappearing, the Blackout itself, UCrash that results from all of that happening and for some reason British's person's perspective on all of these events from outside point of view to get the "how did world globally" react to it info.(note: something about that part feels off to me, like American trying to write someone who is British, but not really nailing it right)

So umm... I did get what I wanted ironically since I was going to read book just for fiction and its 99.99% fiction material with 0.01 rule stuff. But even from that perspective, it feels unsatisfying. My guess is that intended use of book is to work as inspiration for GM's own campaign that goes through same events, (but again, even in that case this is basically several different campaigns rushed through in one book) hence why it has detais like "Damien Knight is probably dead but no clue if he did heroic sacrifice, died as villain, turned out to be super bug spirit or what", its indended for GM to create their own take on matter with same end result as in the book, but they can fill in details themselves. But from my view it feels like the person causing the initial shenanigans just got bridge dropped on them out of nowhere without satisfying conclusion.

I'm not going to compare book to multiple other Shadowrun plot books I read afterwards , that would take too long, so I'm only goign to bring up Dark Terrors: That one had much better balance of in character commentary, mechanics and usable plot hooks that this one did. Unless something changed between 5e and 6e, I'm going to assume this book is more extreme case rather than the norm. Though maybe Lockdown would have been better book to buy and compare as Lockdown and this are both introductions to the new metaplot rather than deeper exploration of already known concepts(Dark Terrors is great btw).

But yeah so in conclusion: As fiction book, I did enjoy the jackpoint commentary and new twists and turns in the book, but book felt unfocused and felt like it threw lot of ideas that are going to get deeper exploration in later books. That and there were lot of unsatisfying elements in the focus: Like the book first feels like its going to be about the Detroit bug war and Ares shenanigans, but then its like "aaand it ended in victoy and Damien Knight died somehow"(though it does later get back to topic close to the end when discussing Motor City and later again when Betas come up). Basically, it feels like some plot threads got picked up and dropped anti climactically without reader really getting catharsis.

From GM source book point of view, the book doesn't really give any guidance or mechanics for GM to use to run this as campaign. Book just tells events and ending point of them and expects gm to get inspired and want to run them themselves and fill in their own detail(like how did climactic end with Damien Knight go and etc), which kinda feels like even worse take on metaplot railroad than I had thought. Like I had assumed most of metaplot shadowrun railroad is sort of "Okay here is adventure that says characters have to do x or Harlequin kills them" dealio, this is more of "Well this is status of plot after multiple months worth of events which each could be their own campaign. So either run multiple campaigns for years until this book also gets oudated, or make campaign that rushes through each disconnected plot point fast". Either way, if you as GM follow it's intended use, you won't know if your home campaign version of events will get invadilated because, for example, later book might explain what actually happened to Damien Knight. Its basically like railroad where you have beginning and end, but lack middle of it and compelling reason to want to buy ticket to train in first place. Like I've seen similar "you know how story starts and ends, but its up to gm how to make up the middle" books which did it much better guidance and inspiration wise and I've also seen many "here are multiple different possible options for what actually happened and how to run them" as well. This book's problems on gm side really come down to lack of guidance.

Dunno if this makes much sense since I'm writing this in morning and this is like first user review I've done in this site(at least for years) but uh yeah. There is lot I like in this book, but objectively I think it would be weird for me to give it higher rating when there is so many things I consider to be faux pas in rpg books.

Ooof. I really wanted to like this. The general plot is solid and interesting. If I was playing through it as an adventure module, I'd probably enjoy it.

However ... it's obvious that no one at the publisher actually read it before pushing it out the door. There are typos, misspellings, and author's notes about sourcebooks left in. Instead of recapping or recontextualizing events from the prior novel, the author was allowed to copy/paste whole sections into this one. The writing is generally "meh", with a few attempts to use a thesaurus that just go awkwardly wrong (should have used a dictionary, too). Characters' personalities aren't consistent from the previous book (or even scene to scene).

Finally, it's just too long. I didn't need to read about the Gary Stu protagonist having sex with the hot elf more than once. There are a number of scenes and subplots that seem to have been added to patch over plot holes. A real editor would have REMOVED the plot holes and pushed the pace of the novel fast enough to not notice the remaining problems.

I'll be charitable and assume the people at FASA gave the author a checklist of people, places, powers, gear, and worldbuilding history to refer to. I give it a second star because it does at least serve as an excellent introduction to the world of Shadowrun.

As a group we had been playing under the 6E rules (dont even try it). 6E is bad for so many reasons, but mostly because of the bad editing and the assumption you have already played 5e or prior.

Anarchy is similar in the fact it is so light on content it assumes you have other books to build the world out further. Since i had all 5E and 6E books for me and our group this became a simply conversion across.

whilst i think i converted the group badly the impact was instant. we were able to immediatley jump into the game, combat became smooth and non crunchy and the whole process became very cinematic.

there were some chats in regards to the rules in order to get going and you will need agreement in some instances how to tackle certain scenarios, but if you want to remove the crunch from the game and concentrate on having fun and building a great narrative...this is your game. so much so, we are using the Anarchy rules for other games now too (shadow amps are easy to convert)

So in summary - recommended if you have already settled nicely into the SR world and want to now move away from the drag of the rules and build a deeper/smoother narrative. be prepared for some initial discussions, but once you get past that...you will be running super fast.

Also i agree there is no need to follow the concept of round robin roleplaying...play as you would normally and you will be fine. I just wish there were more books supporting the Anarchy set up.

FYI: currently running with the "Toxic Alleys" adventure, and despite the adventure not being the greatest the Anarchy rules are easy to use.