[knasser]

Originally Posted by Droogydroog

Which is a good indication of why his review leaves a lot to be desired. There's a lot in Emergence, even if you're just going to bitch about it. Not even giving a decent description of the book or its organization, for example, is neglectful.

Thank you for the feedback. I have submitted a review for Augmented that isn't up yet, that does take a more detailed approach to what is inside. But that is more of a content book. In Emergence, a quick count up of the pages marked as game information in the table of contents, gives me roughly 26 pages marked as Game Information out of 120 page book. Barring one page micro-fiction chapter openings and some artwork (mostly sparse), the remaining 90-odd pages are either Shadowspeak (online forum dialogue) or information provided by the Shadowspeak characters such as information they boosted and are sharing, or news reports, et al.

Having around 80% of the book be in character material, dialogue, etc, makes it difficult to give a chapter by chapter break-down of the content given to the reader, which is perhaps why you felt my review lacked information on its organisation. It is difficult to provide this without producing a very spoiler-heavy review because you essentially end up saying "In Section One, the forum posters talk about rumours they've heard about X, in Section Three they talk about the blowing up of Y," etcetera.

I very much didn't want to impair the enjoyment of anyone who buys this product by essentially paraphrasing the storyline, which is for the most part what Emergence consists of.

And I feel I should address your points from earlier as well:

Originally Posted by Droogydroog

I take issue with some aspects of your review.

Emergence was never billed as an adventure.

Indeed not. Nonetheless, a lot of people expect it to be one which is why I began my review with a clear clarification of that. From what Jedira Dakhan posted, he was even more disappointed than I was and that may well be because I had a better idea what this book was going to contain whilst he had greater expectations of it being something that could be played. I think it's important that people don't approach Emergence with the wrong idea. It's not even close to a runnable adventure.

Originally Posted by droogydroog

Obviously you missed the boat on magicians...and metahumans...and hackers...and shadowrunners in general (hey, there are criminals). Everybody faces prejudice and fear for what they are at some point or another.

No. I'm sticking very strongly to this point. I am not unaware of magicians, metahumans, hackers or Shadowrunners. Any of these roles can play any social role. I can have socialite mages, elves who like to hang out at the Colloseum and Orks that like to be seen in the Inferno. Rich, corp-paid hackers and a poverty-stricken anarchist-type fighting The Man. In all of your examples, the social niche of the character is independent of their "class." Your pick of "Shadowrunners" was a particularly bad example because there are many, many different styles of Shadowrunning. Any character who picks a Technomancer to play however, is in the role of hunted fugitive. Emergence really doesn't allow you to play it any other way. This murderous purge of anyone suspected of being a technomancer is the big plot hook of the first part of the book. I pity any player that just picked a Technomancer because they thought the class looked cool.

Originally Posted by droogydroog

Yes, it's going to be a challenge to established player character technomancers-but that's not a bad thing. Life throws you curveballs.

For established characters its going to be even more complicated. There is no hint in the core book that Technomancers are "undiscovered." I would expect most TM characters to have been openly advertising their abilities and most NPCs have been interacting with those characters quite normally. Only when Emergence is released two years after the core book do GM's suddenly realise that the correct response for an NPC to a PC Technomancer is "IMUSTKILLYOUNOW!". That's a problem.

As to "sometimes life throws you a curveball," another point I made in the review is that life is throwing one particular member of the party a curveball. Actually an entire campaign arc of curveballs. That sort of one-sidedness is a big problem for a group of friends playing together.

Originally Posted by droogydroog

Probably my biggest complaint is your lack of review, you spend more time bitching about how this will affect your home game than actually addressing the material in the book. Hell, you skipped AIs entirely.

I did talk about AIs. I even recommended that GMs bring them in early as a possible explanation for the otherwise hard to understand Technomancer hysteria. What I did say is that there are no rules for AIs in Emergence. I think that's important because AIs are very interesting to some and people may buy the book thinking that it will help run AIs.

As to spending more time bitching about how it will affect my game than talking about the material in the book, I felt it was relevant to discuss what I saw the impact of this book being and there isn't really much content to discuss in terms of actual solid information. I have over ninety-pages of fictional forum posts and news feeds. I don't like to just narrate from a book. I even more particularly don't want my players to be stuck in the role of lurkers on a chat-room. They wouldn't be happy anyway - they'd start posting replies forcing me to branch the conversations rendering the remainder of Emergence useless and leaving me to role-play twenty different NPCs I didn't create and have almost no personality indications for.