First things first: I gotta do a little rhetorical two-step where I say my favorite thing about a book is its format without sounding back-handed, because actually the content is pretty okay as well. . .
Nope. I can't figure it out.
My favorite thing about State of the Art: 2063 is its format. It's really more like a compilation of mini-supplements, each one detailing a niche topic that didn't quite fit in other recent Shadowrun books. Ostensibly, they are connected by the theme of being "relevant trends and technological developments in the fictional year 2063," but really they're just a grab bag. In fact, three of the five chapters are devoted to recapping specific chapters of out-of-print supplements. "Genetech" (Eleanor Holmes) was an update of the genetic engineering rules from Shadowtech, "Soldiers of Fortune" (Jon Szeto) reworked the mercenary culture material from Fields of Fire, and "Keeping the Rabble Out" (Peter Millholland) was 3rd edition's answer to the Corporate Security Handbook.
As a group, I'd say the chapters are plausibly on-theme, but some of them require more stretching than others. It's easy to believe that there have been significant new breakthroughs in genetic technology in the three metaplot years since the 3rd edition core, but there was nothing in the chapter that immediately leapt out to me as a must-have new discovery. In fact, I'm pretty sure that immunity treatments were depowered from where they were in Shadowtech:
>Didn't they used to offer full-spectrum immunity against everything, all in one neat package?
>Bespectacle>Yes, until they found out it was impractical and didn't actually work . . .
Obvious retcon is obvious. Which is a shame, because full-spectrum immunity is easier for bookkeeping, more likely to actually prove useful in a game ("oh, sorry, you just bought immunity to anthrax, unfortunately you were exposed to the ebola virus"), and closer to the "genetically engineered superhuman" fantasy that draws people to these sorts of characters in the first place. I suppose the downside is that you then have to do your worldbuilding on the assumption that it's possible to buy a perfect immune system, but that . . . actually fits in pretty well thematically with your cyberpunk universe, so I don't know, blame mid-school simulationist/narrative game design, I guess.
The chapter on mercenaries was, by contrast, timeless in its subject matter, but could reasonably be argued to be topical in terms of the broader Shadowrun metaplot. Shadows of North America suggested a few potential border conflicts and insurrections that might offer employment to mercenary armies, though I suspect that they are less "current events of 2063" and more "the sort of thing that happens all the time."
That same chapter also attempts to draw a distinction between shadowrunners and full-on mercenaries, but doesn't quite hit the mark. However, I can't quite blame them. It's just the essential nature of the problem - there is very little difference between shadowrunners and mercenaries.
At the other end of the spectrum, the chapter on corporate security isn't even remotely plausible as being "state of the art." Oh, what, we're talking about the central premise of the game, referring to concepts as basic as defensive landscaping and putting a security light near a locked door, and I'm supposed to believe the Shadowland regulars are only hearing about this in 2063? Come on.
I liked it, though. It was useful for GMs to help create more realistic and challenging shadowrunning environments. I did feel, at times, that if I followed too much of the chapter's advice, I'd wind up with a target that was too secure, but the "Game Information" section anticipated that impulse and quite reasonably advised me to show some damned restraint.
The only chapter I couldn't quite place on the continuum was the one about metamagic. This is the only one of the mini-supplement chapters that was not based on a previous Shadowrun book, so it could fairly be called "state of the art" re: the game's rules, and it is a canonical fact of the setting that people are constantly researching new magical techniques. So it's not absurd on the face of it. It's just that two of the new metamagic techniques are Sympathetic Magic and Psychometry. You know, staples of European occultism.
The tricky part about magic in the Shadowrun universe is that sometimes it's a technological commodity and people do new things because they've discovered new techniques. And sometimes it's an ancient mystery, reborn from the turning of a cosmic cycle and people do new things because they are survivors from a previous age and the magic level has finally risen enough to allow them to use their old techniques. "Charmed Life: New Metamagic" (Elissa Carey) doesn't really get into it, either way, but I wish it did because I find the tension very interesting. Lofwyr owns Saeder-Krupp and funds its magical research department. Is he doing so because he hopes to learn something genuinely new or is he trying to have an outlet where he can launder the magical techniques he hopes to monetize and disguise the true capabilities of dragonkind by passing them off as new advances in the science of thaumaturgy? Maybe he mostly does the second thing, but then his team of puppets accidentally makes a genuine discovery and in the brief window of time where he's freaking out about it, the research is stolen by shadowrunners who have no reason at all to suspect that they've stumbled onto something that nova-hot.
Something to think about, anyway. My verdict is that the new metamagic is plausibly "state of the art," but I'm not at all convinced that's why it was included in this compilation.
Which only leaves the final chapter - "Culture Shock" (Michelle Lyons). It's all about the pop culture trends of 2063 and I absolutely love that the Shadowrun team made space for this kind of low-stakes worldbuilding. Enough so that I'm willing to overlook Captain Chaos' introduction where he implies that his in-setting readers would be surprised by any of this stuff. I think it may be an artifact of the early 2000s, where you might still be able to draw a distinction between keeping up with pop culture folderol and being a terminally online computer nerd.
As far as the specific content of the chapter was concerned, I found it a little shallow, but I appreciated the setting texture. The descriptions of the top ten moviess of the year were less interesting to me than what the curation of the list as a whole said about this culture's priorities and obsessions and if I had any notes for the chapter at all, they'd be "more sci-fi Roger Ebert, less sci-fi Buzzfeed". I did find the trendy restaurant that served a wasabi martini to be suitably hair-raising, however.
(These are apparently real, but I have a hard time believing it was something from the author's lived experience. The description of Shinpi no Sekai says "oriental drinks are a specialty of the house" and my knee-jerk reaction is that the wasabi martini was a mad-lib attempt to come up with an example. My apologies to Mz. Lyons if she was really that hip in 2002).
Overall, State of the Art 2063 made me really excited to read State of the Art 2064. I'm eager to see what they can do with the format once they no longer have old 2nd edition books to cannibalize.
Ukss Contribution: This is silly, and it's going to be hard to incorporate, but there was one detail that stuck in my mind from the last time I read this book, ~20 years ago. As a security measure, some facilities will have walls that are mirrors in infrared while looking normal in the visible spectrum. This allows security forces with the right kind of occular implants to look around corners while unaugmented people waltz around unsuspecting. I'm not sure how practical that is in a world filled with trolls and street samurai (in fact, one of the Shadowland commentors reminisces about how they turned it to their advantage), but I really like the detail as something that genuinely engages with the idea of superhuman augmentation. These guys don't just have mechanical eyeballs, they have a new way of experiencing the world, of accessing information that other people are oblivious to. How would that change you? Would it make you something other than human?
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