I must confess a bit of disappointment. That other book sounds really interesting. What I can't figure out is why you'd even bring it up. The only thing I can think of is that the books' titles and synopses were announced to the community before the books were actually written. Then, you get a 64-page chapter for Austalia and it's just as Captain Chaos says: "I quickly realized that I needed to allocate more storage space to the Land Down Under than I expected." Oops.
Though I'm a bit curious about what sort of file format Shadowland is using. I have to assume that the information that appears to us as plain text and still images is actually, in setting, a fully immersive VR experience.
In any event, I guess I should focus on the book that actually exists - Shadowrun's Australia supplement. And by that standard, it's fine. One of the effects of an increasingly globalized economic system is that everywhere starts to feel a bit like everywhere else and that's something that's reflected in the text. You've got powerful megacorporations, urban sprawl, organized crime, and essential public services decayed through privatization. It's all very comfortable if you're coming in from a Seattle-based game.
The main difference, the thing that makes Australia an "awakened land," is the Outback, its accompanying folklore, and the fantasy nonsense that was invented to flesh it out. Of these, the best part is the folklore but that has the unfortunate side effect of requiring naked cultural appropriation to use effectively. It's actually kind of funny. When discussing Aboriginal magic, the text-within-the-text says, "we don't have any Shadowland users with inside knowledge of Australian magic and a willingness to share that knowledge with us. So I've gone to a secondary source - a text put out by Pentacle Press called Into the Dreamtime by Dr. Richard Cowan."
Once more, Captain Chaos, in his role as moderator of a fictional message board, articulates something that rings very true to the process of developing an rpg. Doing research for a game about Australia, you seek to create fantasy elements based on native Australian religion and traditional stories, but because of the deadly legacy of colonialism, the natives don't actually trust you with that information (and probably wouldn't approve of you making a game about it), so all your knowledge must be mediated by foreign scholars.
From a design perspective, there's one thing this book needs to be (assuming it couldn't go back to being the book's original pitch). It needs to be a new fantasy setting, nested in the overall Shadowrun setting. You're going out into the Outback and having magical adventures, with challenges and stakes that reflect a distinctly Australian conception of magic, separate from the corporations-and-rules-based-magic of the broader Shadowrun world. That's what makes it worthy of being released under a specialized title - "Target: Awakened Lands" instead of "Shadows of Australia."
However, from a moral and political perspective, it was probably always irresponsible for the book to try and be that. It therefor makes the reasonable compromise of paying lip-service to Aboriginal beliefs but being so vague about them that it seems extremely unlikely that you'd accidentally debase something sacred. I couldn't say for sure, because this is not a subject I know a ton about, but I think the worst thing you can say about this book's presentation of Indigenous Australians is that it's completely consistent with its presentation of Indigenous peoples of other continents. There are a couple new metamagic techniques, but nothing requiring new rules for the game.
Which just leaves the invented fantasy nonsense. Australia is known for its dangerous mana storms - Fortean weather phenomena that can cast spells on those caught within. It can rain frogs or make a rain that turns you into a frog (or, I suppose, rain frogs that turn people into frogs). It can be a fog that intoxicates anyone caught within. As far as rpg random charts go, it's a pretty good one, but it never answers the question "why Australia?" Near as I can tell, it's because Australia has a lot of room for these storms to happen in. Likewise with the other new astral phenomena - astral shallows, where even mundanes can see into the astral plane; alchera, which are physical spaces that phase in and out of existence, and which usually have some spiritual mystery at the heart of them; mana ebbs and flares, which change the force of a caster's spells.
All of those things are very useful new tool's in the GM's box, but they don't really build on a theme. "Go into the Outback and weird shit will happen." Okay, fair enough. The locations and characters in Australia's overview are compelling enough to want to use them, but at the end of the day, you're still playing Shadowrun.
The next chapter, "Awakened Sites" is interesting enough, but it rushes through things that would really have benefitted from more time to cook. We learn a little bit of what we might have seen in a Cambodian supplement - nagas, merrow, and other sentient awakened creatures have moved into the ruins of Angkor and are rebelling against the human government - but this plot mostly has the effect of making me resent the fact that this book didn't get a whole Cambodia chapter.
Overall, this book was fine. It's very comfortably in the middle of the curve for Shadowrun setting content. I was hoping for something a bit weirder, which challenged the main game's genre, but I suppose I had no real reason for expecting that. So, yeah, I could see myself running a game set in Australia, but I probably won't.
Ukss Contribution: One of the example mana storms turned half a village's population into rabbits and the other half into dingoes. Then, when it passed, it changed the survivors back. That's an impressive level of horror and an even more impressive level of social awkwardness.
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