by Brett Sanger [ swiftone@dumpshock.com ] and Jörg Sander [ joerg-sander@gmx.net ]
In addition to the regular review of Target: Awakend Lands, this month we have guest reviewer Jörg Sander taking a look at perhaps the most important Shadowrun book on the other side of the pond-Deutschland in den Schatten II, the German only update about Germany in the 2060s.
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Target: Awakened Lands is a hodge-podge of material, more so even than the previous Target books (Smuggler's Havens, Matrix, and UCAS). Much of the content is good, the low rating reflects the overall usefulness to the average group.
The book consists of four unequal parts. The first part is 8 pages describing different astral phenomena such as manalines, mana storms, etc. Much of this is old material collected, but there are a few new listings, and the descriptions are in character. The focus here appears to be on conveying the astral as mysterious and unpredictable. This is done well, but this short section is of use only to a GM, or a player seeking atmosphere.
The second section begins "Well boys and girls, ever since the dog sat on the tuckerbox, people have been screaming out for info on running the shadows Down Under." I don't know about the screaming, but I do know that FASA tried to get an Australia book done for years and years. I suppose this makes sense: The Dreaming and the Outback are popular in most modern fantasy settings, although it still confuses me why FASA never tried for a Japanese sourcebook, particularly in the early days when the cyberpunk connections were stronger. Nonetheless, a full half of Target: Awakened Lands is devoted to Australia. Not being familiar with Down Under beyond some research into the many (many!) poisonous beasties it features, I cannot speak of the texts accuracy and/or probability, complaints that arose with the London Sourcebook of first edition, and (reportedly) with previous attempts at an Australia sourcebook. I can, however, talk about it's general reasonableness, and here I have no complaint. Australia comes across as a land of normal people, with unusual problems that aren't that different from the unusual problems facing most of the Sixth World. A few individual cities are given writeups, and they are portrayed as different enough to be different, but still cities made of the same people. Happily, detail is given on the various running potentials of the different areas, although a GM will have to dig around to determine which of the Big 10 have their fingers in which pies.
Most of the Australia section talks of the Outback, mana storms, and the other details of Australian magic. In character, this portion reflects back to the first section, and consists of basic descriptions mixed with a bunch of "ghost stories" to make everything seem mysterious. It isn't laid too thick, and I suspect a GM will either feel an urge to run in the Outback, or not.
Australian Awakened critters are covered, but not in a terribly satisfactory manner. The first thing anyone is likely to know about Australia is that it is a land of weird critters. Certainly the awakened forms of koalas and kangaroos are offered, but the writeups for many of the creatures are brief (If I wasn't familiar with what a wombat was, the description of a wombrick(!) wouldn't help me at all.) When the Game Information section revisits these critters and gives them stats, it also lists other "standard" critters that can be found. Thus, Australia becomes a big collection of standard critters, with a handful of new ones. Surely the descriptions could have been altered to give some local names and local power variations?
The next 21 pages cover "Awakened Sites". That is, 17 areas around the globe that have some unusual magical activities at them. These range from the the well-known (Chicago) to the previously mentioned (Dunkelzahn's Rift, Crater Lake) to the brand new (Angkor, Mt. Kilimanjaro). Obviously, 17 entries in 21 pages doesn't leave a lot of room for detail. This section is all in character as well, and (surprisingly) consists of the whole of metagame advancement in the book. This section suffers from the same troubles that Year of the Comet did: It is extremely unlikely that your group will encounter even a significant minority of these areas. However, unlike Year of the Comet, not much space is wasted on areas you aren't interested in. Personally I would have liked to see this section expanded at the expense of Australia, which should either have it's own book, or be one of three or four detailed locations in a book done in the style of Target: UCAS.
The Game Information section fills out the remainder of the book, and revisits the previous sections to provide rules. The rules are adequate, but it is bothersome that they include GM-only information (what is truly happening at the new "Awakened Sites") along with player information (a new spell, a new Adept power, two new Metamagics). This new player information is likely to be popular beyond those interested in Australia, so I hope it reappears in a later work. A few pages are devoted to some adventure hooks, but nothing is provided to let you use most of the non-Australia information in connection with more of it. An index finishes up the book, and with the scattered nature of the book, it is more useful that one might at first suspect.
Target: Awakened Lands wasn't what I expected. Rather than covering three to four places in moderate detail, it covered Australia and then threw out a heavy sprinkling of other sites, but without any substance. As a result, the book is essentially an Australia Sourcebook, but without as much detail. The book was also wounded by being primarily in-character, but with only the Australia section being useful to players. As a result, there is an even smaller pool of people interested in this book for anything beyond Australia. The promise of the first few pages, of trying to keep Shadowrun magic from being dry and statistical, is not followed by enough content to justify its purchase unless one wants Australia. Nothing is wrong with Australia, but this was billed as Target: Awakened Lands, and it doesn't live up to that billing enough to justify a better rating.
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"When we put it all together we were surprised how big it turned out." That's the first comment I heard about FanPro's new Deutschland in den Schatten II (DidS2, or in English, "Germany in the Shadows II") sourcebook from one of the creators. The size is indeed the first thing that stands out - at 344 pages, DidS2 is nearly as big as Shadowrun's core rulebook. And that makes it without a doubt the biggest collection of background information ever produced for Shadowrun.
The second thing you'll probably realize is that it's written in German. Certainly that means that quite a lot of people will be unable to get to the information presented in this book. But with FanPro becoming the driving force behind Shadowrun, everything in DidS2 will be considered canon.
So, what's it all albout? Well, Germany, all of it in 2062 and in depth. The authors of this book had two basic concepts in mind. First of all, previous publications never were able to treat every region of the German Allied States equally. While several got lots of developments in FanPro's various German language publications and magazine articles, some areas got hardly a mention. In addition, most of the available information was well out of date following Dunkelzahn's Will, the corporate war and the Year of the Comet.
DidS2 does a lot of work in this direction. Following a brief introduction about Germany's general history in the 21st century, three quarters of the book are an in-depth look at all the states in the alliance as well as every major metroplex. The only area which gets short mention is the elven duchy of Pomorya, which has already been dealt with in Fan Pro's Länder der Verheißung. There are still differences in size between the various chapters, but DidS2 indeed gives a pretty good overview of all of Germany.
The second major concern was the number of inconsistencies between FanPro's German work and some of FASA's original publications, sourcebooks and the novels, and between the ideas of the previous and current authors. DidS2 set out to bring Germany back into line with the English language publications and to remove some of the problems that made certain aspects of the setting rather unplayable. The corp war presented the perfect backdrop to let some smaller corporations change hands, and let Richard Villiers outmaneuver nearly every Japanacorp to gain a presence on German soil. Various developments happen in the big sprawls, some already hinted at previously. Some of the more extreme states in the alliance like Westphalen and the Troll Kingdom of the Black Forest, where the king mysteriously vanishes but his government and closest advisors seem to be too well prepared for it all, get major updates as well. And apart from that, ever dragon in Germany gets something to do or at least a rumor surrounding him.
Having a new SysOp tell you that Shadowland Germany had been undermined in recent years with a fair deal of misinformation at first looks like a convenient way to tell readers to just forget what had come before, but used sparingly it does work. Nothing is totally contradicted, but most material is cleansed of its main problems (not without missing some and presenting the odd new inconsistency).
Starting on page 282 there are a number of short descriptions (the shortest is just a single page) about many aspects of life in the Allied German States. These topics range from organized crime and secret societies to traffic and even fashion. The masterpiece, however, might well be the final chapter which discribes a very recent event in German history that will not remain without consequences. The title has been cause for some speculation around the net already: "Lofwy: 1 - Nachtmeister: 0". (If you have to ask, just take a look at the cover. You'll get the picture.)
So, how is it all presented? DidS2 doesn't have any rules or game stats, just descriptions and comments along with quite a lot of shadowtalk. The quality of the material is all of a fairly high standard, although there are variations in style that simply cannot be avoided with the number of authors. Nearly everything, however, seems well researched. There are still a couple of problems, though; for example, some corporations' histories don't seem to completely match up.
The shadowtalk from time to time presents an additional problem for me. Shadowtalk, in my opinion, has to have a function and convey some information. While there are undoubtedly interesting pieces of shadowtalk in DidS2, some even spanning multiple chapters, there is still a fair number of instances where it follows the template "I hate all metas," "Die, scumbag!" which only fills space with comments that aren't useful.
That leaves us with the final question: Is Deutschland in den Schatten 2 worth reading? Generally speaking, if you plan on running an extended campaign inside the German Allied States, DidS2 is the ultimate reference work. If, on the other hand, you and your group never plan on going to Germany, there might not be a lot for you here. But then again, the same could be said for basically every regional sourcebook ever published.
And what about those people who don't speak German and are still interested in Germany in the Sixth World? Unfortunately the situation doesn't look very good in this regard. FanPro LLC is all but certain not to produce an English translation of DidS2 with its predecessor selling rather badly. And if you consider the fact that even reducing the size of DidS2 to just a third would still leave you with a standard shadowrun sourcebook, even what might appear in future compilations will be a very shortened version. Thus the German edition seems to be the only alternative as long as FanPro cannot be persuaded to produce a translation, perhaps using the new webpage.
(From the Editor: FanPro LLC plans to produce a book called Shadows of Europe for release in 2003, which will likely contain some material derived from Deutschland in den Schatten II.)