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| new Dragonfall campaign is ok by jeep 03/01/2014, 3:03pm PST | ||||
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| It feels shorter that the base one though that may just be me. The changes since the first one was released make for a smoother ride overall. Again there's no sort of mission generator which I'm feeling the lack of now that I burned through the few money generating missions they crafted.
It's weird to me to make an authenticity argument for game writing but this game is effectively tabletop Shadowrun 4e, was kickstarted and sold as that, and the original campaign got that aspect of it right even though the writing overall was just kind of mediocre, so it feels like a little bit of a slip when you come across stuff that doesn't match up: In the original tabletop game which I played a lot in the 80s and 90s there was no christian representation, magic came back and it was native culture's religion that worked and not christian beliefs because the metaphysics didn't line up or w/e. This has a huge impact on every part of Shadowrun, because it's a future alternate earth where all political lines in North America have been redrawn by magic wiping out American nuclear stockpiles. US power has been smashed, the South seceded again, and South America has become a world power to match or even exceed what's left of the old US and Canada. It also has a huge impact on the art style of the tabletop game, on the kind of characters you can play, on the style of magic available to the player, and because the old game was centered on Seattle which ends up surrounded by native american territory, it affects pretty much everyone's campaigns who ever played it. It wasn't until much later in the game's publishing that there was even mention of Christian Gnosticism or something getting some results, and when they reprint a new version it's gone again because it isn't 'canon'. One character is a shaman who worships a fucking combat totem and yet responds to a surprise setback with "Jesus." which would make sense in a modern context even I do that sometimes but in Shadowrun it's completely out of place. That's only the smallest part of it, though. The first game has a lot of writing weaknesses but it's very carefully Shadowrun in every respect, this writer can't fucking help himself so get ready for some really edgy teen bible horseshit. Even if you don't know the original setting really well you are going to notice how bad that bit is. There's a really ambitious mod in the steam workshop with a huge hub design, just tons of stuff to do and come back to this home base it's really impressive. However the writing has a ton of modern-day racism in it which is pretty jarring since in terms of Shadowrun's historical timeline ethnic prejudice was eliminated by the split into the different metahuman species. Basically now people have actual biological differences to be racist about so the old forms die off and the klan becomes "humans only." it's core to a ton of history, plot and campaign writing in the game so that's even more jarring. This isn't some SJ crusade, these developers pride themselves on their adherence to the history and detail of Shadowrun's alternate timeline, so it's weird to see them purposefully inject modern racial prejudice into a setting where it was really explicitly been made obsolete and replaced with something else that should affect every part of the writing...and somehow doesn't. |
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new Dragonfall campaign is ok by 03/01/2014, 3:03pm PST  You will probably roll your character, get to the 1st act, then reset. by 03/01/2014, 6:13pm PST SMGs get short burst as a single ap instead of two by 03/01/2014, 6:31pm PST Also: There was a christian bit, I forget which sourcebook it was by 03/02/2014, 7:49am PST Yeah that's what I said by 03/02/2014, 10:58am PST "One of the most memorable and complex RPG stories of the decade." NT by 03/04/2014, 3:41pm PST this month marks the 10th anniversery of the 10th anniversery I canceled my NT by 03/04/2014, 5:53pm PST These reviews have been irritating me a lot by 03/05/2014, 10:11am PST Re: "One of the most memorable and complex RPG stories of the decade." by 03/05/2014, 11:44am PST Re: new Dragonfall campaign is ok by 07/07/2014, 10:36am PDT |
