In the realm of reading hundreds of rpg books in a row, there is nothing quite as disheartening as being blindsided by a GM advice chapter. It's my own fault, though. When I chose Mr Johnson's Little Black Book as the next Shadowrun book on my list, I sort of stopped reading the back cover blurb approximately half way through. Oh, it "provides dozens of locations and contacts for both Shadowrun gamemasters and players." Neat. It's going to be like a monster manual, except the monsters all have jobs. Those are my favorite type of book to read.
Had I read a bit further, I could have modulated my expectations just a little bit more - "It also features advice on setting up and handling shadowruns." Maybe I'd have interpreted it as roleplaying advice and not adventure-creation advice, but forewarned is forearmed, nonetheless.
I'm not exactly complaining, mind you. First of all, the middle three chapters were exactly what I was expecting and I wasn't disappointed. Some of the material was a little basic (it was probably not necessary to explain to me the concept of a bar), but it was a useable cast of characters - a sleazy tabloid reporter, a "parasecurity expert" who was like a supernatural cat lady, a thrill-seeking DocWagon paramedic; a decent cross-section of functional and useful settings - a Lone Star precinct, a bank, and Ultra Suede, a bar so named because all the furniture and some of the walls were upholstered with suede, which is the funniest bar-related bit of rpg trivia since I learned the Fat Candle was vanilla scented; and a bunch of adventure ideas, most of which were not creepy at all (likes - moving a recently dead body to stage a suicide, retrieving a macguffin from a burning building; dislikes - the one where you help a guy fake his death and then arrange a phony "haunting" of his ex-girlfriend and maybe it's a bit hypocritical to feel that way when the game will frequently have you kidnap and murder people, but I'm sorry, it's straight up stalking and it feels uncomfortably real in a way Shadowrun adventures usually don't).
So, you know, I don't feel like I was bait-and-switched at all.
I can also forgive the unexpected GMing advice because as dull as it could be to read sometimes (and to be fair, this GMing advice was slightly less dull than average), it's also necessary. This book isn't just fiction, it's a functional object. If I'm going to GM Shadowrun, I'm going to need to convincingly portray a shady criminal negotiation, something of which I have very little direct experience. Plus, there's all the usual stuff about scheduling sessions and pacing the narrative that everyone has to learn somewhere.
The only real problem I have with this book is that it continues Shadowrun's tradition of being extremely weird about race. When discussing random encounters, one of the reasons given for a traffic stop is "driving while ork."
And that's fucking weird. It's very clearly calling out law enforcement for racial discrimination in the form of coming up with transparent pretexts to over-police an oppressed minority. I've got a lot of contemporary and near-future action adventure games and very few will just come out and say "cops are racist." On the other hand, you can't just replace the word "Black" with the word "ork." You just can't. If you do, you may find yourself in an awkward position where the canonical traits of orks map on a one-to-one basis to vicious real-world stereotypes. It makes you wonder what that find-and-replace was really intended to mean.
Probably nothing. I think the fantasy races were meant to act as a kind of oven-mitt for the handling of hot topics. You can talk very frankly about a sensitive issue, because there's nothing real at stake. "Driving while ork," amiright. Good thing there's nothing comparable that happens in real life, perpetrated by a group I personally identify with. I might have to get defensive and contrary, were I put in that situation. Luckily, that's not the case. Man, Lone Star sure is riddled with institutional bias. That's some compelling antagonist texture.
Like I said, it's weird.
Overall, this is a slight, but useful book. I might have preferred something bigger, weirder, and more specific, but I always think that about everything. For all that it could occasionally be generic and abstract, it's good to get a ground-eye view of the Shadowrun setting. We see the inside of a Stuffer Shack, a middle-class apartment building, and a luxury hotel. We learn that there are still human firefighters, but also autonomous cargo trucks. Also, there's some stuff about a criminal subculture in here, which was kind of cool, I guess. I'll definitely consult it next time I run a Shadowrun game.
Ukss Contribution: The Sea Mall. It's constructed partially underground near the coast and has big windows that look out underwater. It's the sort of fantastic location that's vaguely plausible enough to maybe exist in real life and that always tickles me.
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