Review: Shadowrun, Fourth Edition 20th Anniversary

Yet again my love for Shadowrun over powered my love of money and purchased a digital copy of the new Shadowrun Core book (I also preordered a hard copy).

This book is simply awesome. There have already been six printings of the core book with various errata and fixes included. This book is different as it includes a new D&D 4th edition inspired color layout, 90%+ new art, all new short fiction, rewrites for the more confusing sections, updates to all of the tables, and a new frankly amazing index that covers all of the core source books released so far.

(More after the break...)

The new color layout is very pretty and besides a few instances of slightly unfortunate color choices enhances the readability of the book. Headings are now colored and a happy light blue frames the pages. After years of recycled artwork Catalyst has been doing a great job of producing new artwork for each book. This book represents a quantum leap of that effort, only a scant few pictures are recycled; I actually had to look to find them. Quality of the illustrations has also improved. There are also very few pictures (only one or two) where I looked at them and wondered how they were supposed to connect to the text. If you like shadowrun inspired art this book is a treasure trove of basically cover quality imagery.

They also swapped out the start of chapter teasers with actual short fiction. Up until now each chapter in the core books would start with a small few paragraph story meant to get you in the future noir mood. Those teasers have been replaced by stores with a plot, beginning, middle, and end. I didn't really have any complaints about the old teasers except I would have liked 'more'. This edition provides something a little meatier to read between chapters. These are actually my only complaint in terms of layout, they invert the colors (dark back ground and light text on these pages). I'm sure that this will help you navigate the book in a hardcopy. My issue is that I don't want jarring pink / red / green / etc backgrounds mixed in with the nice light blue pages of the rest of the book.

This book is still the core rule book for 4th edition, which means that you already own a majority of the content if you already have a copy. What little they have rewritten has been for clarity, not for content. So if you aren't enthused by the other features you aren't going to get anything new out of the book. In other words, this isn't the Shadowrun 3.5 that some of the forum goers on other sites have made it out to be. It does have a few new changes (some pretty major actually), but it is essentially the same book with all of the existing errata and a few new ones. If you have an old broken first printing of the core book, you should probably consider buying the new book just for the errata.

Some of the new changes that I consider major are that drain on direct combat and illusion spells has skyrocketed, one key adept power is cheaper, and the cost for some equipment has drastically increased. For those who haven't played Shadowrun the drain thing is a big deal. I don't think that it breaks Mages, but it means that they will not be the marathon damage dealers or crazy ninjas that they were previously. Even with the previous drain system my character occasionally got into trouble with drain, with the new system I don't think that my previous characters spell selection would even be viable.

With the new color layout the tables in the books really jump out at you. Character creation in shadowrun is about navigating many tables (well, depends on the character you want to make). With the black and white layout it sometimes took a bit of page flipping to find the needed tables. While the page flipping is still there at the very least there is now a table index and the tables themselves are a distinct color. It is a nice and subtle change.

Now on to the big new addition; the integrated master index. This thing is awesome. It is color coded so that you know immediately which book the information is in. It covers pretty much every topic and it is huge! This bad boy was clearly a work of love and has been the more useful feature so far. While they did include a separate index strictly for tables, I wish they had included a table appendix (like they have with some of the expansion books). I imagine that all those color pages didn't come cheap, so I can forgive them for not having a mass of tables duplicated at the end of the book. However, apparently they are going to release a seperate booklet that is going to include all of the table from all of the core rulebooks in one place which is even better!

If you are a fan of Shadowrun or curious about the game preorder a copy of this book, you'll be glad that you did! It combines all of the eye candy of a book published by a much bigger company and all of the refinement of a book that has had 4 editions and 6 revisions in this edition alone. With any luck all of the mistakes that people have caught in the pdf will make it into the print version and it will be an even better book!

For new players, I'd also recommend all of the other core expansions besides Augmentation (unless you want a slightly weird fluff book about the technology in the Shadowrun world). Each expansion builds on the world and includes a ton of information about how to be a pro at the field in question. Reading Unwired will help you play a better hacker. Reading Street Magic will help you play a better mage. Arsenal is a sweet equipment book. And the Shadowrunners Companion has a lot of interesting things to say about living in the Sixth world and offers several alternative systems that are fun to include in your game (custom lifestyles, better contact system, better quality system, etc). The best things I can say about Augmentation is that it reintroduced the classic Move by Wire cyberware, and introduced a new tool for GMs to use to scare the hell out of players; Bio Drones (that's right remote controlled cybered up animals!). Also the cover of Augmentation burns my eyes and makes me embarrassed when I carry it around (even in the store).

(Don't go read my old Augmentation review, at that time I was starved for Shadowrun expansions.)