OK, when reviewing War! it is tempting to fly into a rage constantly at the conflicts it has throughout with established Shadowrun material. Shadowrun has 21 years of books written for it and it has a well established storyline. The fourth edition of the game was pretty well received and is now fairly "mature" having all the basic rulebooks produced. So you might think that new books could be produced procedurally from the material they already have.

But the company is in the middle of some huge financial problems and failed to live up to a bunch of contracts. The vast majority of their writing staff walked out earlier this year. This book is written primarily by new people who have admitted in public that they don't know Shadowrun's history or rules. So getting upset that stuff in War! does not fit with established Shadowrun canon is a waste of time. It's a new developer, it's a new writing staff, and the company's license to produce Shadowrun material is currently stuck on a six month renewal cycle, so they have to bring out product. For a review, we should consider this to be "similar" to Shadowrun from the standpoint of both rules and fluff.

Unfortunately, even within that context the book does not present itself well. Editing is atrocious, with major typographical or structural errors on every page. Editorial voice is nonexistent, with the book speaking to you as if you were a character in-world reading a forum post and then breaking character and speaking to the game master preparing an adventure within a single paragraph. Characterization is at best schizophrenic, with characters speaking as if they were totally different people with totally different viewpoints even within the same page. Language use is shockingly poor for a company that at least until recently had native German and Spanish speakers on staff, with the use of both languages being inconsistent and often cringe-worthy. Development is not to a particularly high standard, even for it being a "first effort" for the new developer and staff.

The book War! is mostly about a war between two countries in the Shadowrun world: Amazonia and Aztlan. That is very key information that you will need before you pick up the book because the book does not have an introduction and starts talking to you about the demographics of the city of Bogotá. It is revealed much later that this city is on the front lines of the war that is being talked about in much of the book, but you could really be reading for some time before you get even a tenuous grasp of why you are supposed to care about Bogotá's population or weather.

All told, the book spends 6 chapters and 115 pages devoted to Bogotá and the war between Amazonia and Aztlan. However, having read the whole book I am unable to tell you what the war is about, where it is being fought, what it is being fought with, what it is being fought over, or what objectives either side has. There are no maps in the book, no battle reports, no discussion of troop disposition, and in general: nothing you would find in any documentary on the History Chanel about how a war might go down. Honestly, I can't really tell you what any chapter is about either, since all of them call time to describe street gangs or list NPCs (some of whom are at best tangentially related to the matter at hand), or put in some stat blocks for trees (yes, really), or do something else entirely. The chapter about "Culture of Bogotá" has a discussion about warfare in the deep rain forest far away from civilization right next to a list of corporate sponsored festivals in town.

The book spends the next 80 pages frenetically switching betwee in-character and out-of-character discussion (even in the "Game Information" chapter), gives extremely short writeups of some other "warzone hotspots", and then proceeds to write up some new rules and new equipment. These chapters are also hard to follow, for example: the rules for morale and psychology are broken up with a 7 page intermission about explosives and tank armor. I was deeply unimpressed with the hotspots section, as 2 of the 5 listed locations are Czech Republic and Poland - I live in that area and the descriptions are wholly unrecognizable even in terms of spatial relationships between things.

From a rules standpoint, it pretty much looks like numbers for everything were pulled out of a hat. Even disregarding such subtleties as the Amazonian magicians having an incomplete magical tradition (which in turn isn't even written up in the "Game Information" section despite being game information), the numbers within the book don't make internal sense. After a statement that they won't stat up nuclear weapons because they are plot devices, they do it anyway (and stat up some orbital bombardment WMDs). And the conventional missile they write up does more damage than that. And the rules for setting off more than one grenade are so ridiculous that you can outdo even that with a sack full of mini grenades. This clearly is not a stable set of rules assumptions on which to build the next edition. Which is a shame, because signs point to it being used for that anyway.

From a fluff standpoint, it is painfully obvious that a lot of research was not done. For a book that takes place primarily in Bogotá, they never really get around to mentioning the fact that most of the city is a kilometer higher than Mile High Stadium, and the entire region has thin air. Things are written in vague terms to the point that it really reads like someone writing in deliberate generalities about a place they know nothing about in the hopes that no one will notice if they don't nail down any specifics. The lack of maps in a book about armed conflict really serves to drive that point home.

The main thrust of the book is hard to nail down because there are no thesis statements or attempts at synthesis. Sometimes essay topics are repeated by different authors, but no attempt is made to compare or contrast the different viewpoints. I'm still not even sure what the war in War! is about. Apparently the ecology worshiping, technology hating Amazonians are angry at the corporate minded Aztlaners because the Aztlaners are planting trees. That is a real plotline in this book. It's like the end of The Happening, but near the beginning of the book.

Still, for all the fact that every chapter is a jumbled mess of seemingly unrelated essays I can't in all fairness give the book a 1. Some of the essays are competently written and even related to war in general and/or the specific war that War! is apparently supposed to be focused on. I could even see using some of these in an otherwise acceptable book. Although obviously edited properly to avoid referring to "rogue sells of guerrillas" or the "Capitolio National".

Crap. I really hoped Shadowrun would be ok. I hope the scumbags who ruined Catalyst are all in jail.

QuoteI hope the scumbags who ruined Catalyst are all in jail.

No, they're still running the company.