Quote:
Originally Posted by knasser
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.
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You're right, I didn't have any real idea of what the book was about. My FLGS doesn't order Shadowrun books for the shelf, so I bought a copy off Ebay. All it had was the back cover blurb, which billed this as, quote
"An Evolutionary Upgrade! The Emergence campaign setting involves the runners in a series of pivotal events that may change the way they view the world and the Matrix - and each other."
That suggested to me a series of connected adventures forming a mini-campaign, and possibly some cool new Technomancer tricks (suggested by the "Evolutionary Upgrade!" blurb, and perhaps a fair bit of wishful thinking). IMO, a better backcover blurb would have been:
"A series of conversations and short fiction pieces on the topics of Technomancers and bigotry, which may give readers some insight into how the Shadowrun world deals with the emergence of Technomancers."
At least that would have been a more honest description. And like
knasser, I'm suprised this book was even written in this way. Street Magic was (as far as I know) a big hit. So was Augmentation. Those are useful books, full of goodies and crunch as well as setting info. And what is the one MAJOR new character type in SR4, that could really use a sourcebook since they've never had one before? Technomancers! And lo and behold, here comes a book specifically focused on and all about Technomancers... and it has nothing of any real use. No game stats on AIs, no cool new abilities, no hardware or gadgets that can either enhance Technomancers or be used to guard against them, no stats of important Technomancers that can serve as either foes or mentors and show the different ways they are using their abilities, NONE of that! What a wasted opportunity this was!
It is about as disappointing as it would have been for Augmentations to have
no new items, merely page after page of shadowspeak on "Did your Systronic Smartgun link short out the first time it got rained on, cause mine did, and what a pain it was to return it!"