And after reading the book, I think I was probably right to do so. It's not that it's bad. It's more or less as much as you could reasonably ask for in a MOAR GUNS book for Shadowrun. But . . . yeah. It takes the most thoroughly trodden territory in the game and slightly expands it. We get a few new guns (including the Street Sweeper shotgun, which fires any old junk you stuff in the barrel), a few new melee weapons (including one of my personal favorites, the Macuahuitl), and a couple of new war crimes (white phosphorous grenades and land mines). In addition, there are new rules for some niche combat scenarios - fighting underwater or with indirect fire artillery. Nothing I really feel the need to complain about, but also you could go a long time before you felt this book's absence.
So I guess I liked it? On the few occasions it managed to move the needle away from the dead center of the scale, the direction was positive. I enjoyed the first few pages of the "Armor and Gear" chapter, where they discuss various prominent fashion houses and their product lines. My trench coat and katana guy can now specifically wear "The Chairman" from the London Fog Line by Armante. I think I would get a kick out of explaining that to people, in-character. "Yeah, it's a genuine Armante. I had a big score a couple years back and decided to treat myself. You can really feel the difference between the knock-offs and the real thing."
The best chapter in the book was probably "Applied Simsense," that discussed Skillwires, Better Than Life chips, and using cybernetic implants to edit someone's memories. It's a little disappointing that the book focuses mostly on mechanics and not the staggering sci-fi implications of this technology, but I suppose I can't be entirely mad that they left the fun part to me as a GM. Like, there's a flash drive you can stick in your brain that will completely change your personality (called a "Personafix BTL") and maybe it's a failure of imagination that this is relegated to the role of a disreputable street drug. Imagine being able to slot in the motivation and discipline of a Type-A workaholic right before you have a big project to do. Or you're on your way to a party, why not become extra gregarious and the fun kind of shameless? Everything you don't like about yourself? Everything other people don't like about you? There's a patch for that.
It is, of course, a sci-fi horror scenario. I shudder to think of the damage those Youtube self-help grifters could do if they could bottle the sigma grindset and sell it for 49.99 a hit. Or, like, someone in a failing marriage who slots the personality they think their partner wants, and every day they lose a little bit more of themselves. . .
I'm not sure how many of these ideas would actually translate all that well to a Shadowrun game, but it's a subject that fascinates me. Maybe import the idea into Eclipse Phase or Transhuman Space. Extend those settings' extreme morphological freedom from the body to the mind. I can see some definite possibilities.
Overall, I though Cannon Companion was a perfectly fine book. Maybe a little dry at times, but not to a level out of line with other mechanics-focused rpg supplements. I probably won't use it directly, but I have no regrets about adding it to my collection.
Ukss Contribution: Personafix BTLs. The implications are simply too interesting to ignore. Obviously, in Ukss, they're going to be a form of dark magic, but I think they'll make for a particularly compelling school of forbidden sorcery.
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