Shadow Run 2050
 

Question on a time line (if you have one). I am/was wondering when 2050 will be available or if I should 'edit' the gear myself for now. Since the gear is the biggest issue, I don't know how easy it would be for you to add this (or make us pay since your in business to make money).

2050 is going to be making a lot of changes so I can't see it being an option any time soon...

Our goal is to cover every book that Catalyst publishes for Shadorwun 4th edition, so yes, 2050 is something we'll be covering.

While I haven't had a chance to dig into HeroLab as much as I would like to (I'm only using it for one game). If it's anything like PCGen (which I AM familiar with) it would be a simple data overlay on top of the existing data. I don't think it will be as difficult as all that.

It should not be difficult, just time consuming. :)

The real question is how much material from other books to allow in a 2050s game. Catalyst hasn't printed an allowed/disallowed list, and there are things like the surivival gear from Arsenal where there's no reason it shouldn't be available in 2050. On the other hand, I can't just allow everything from Arsenal - the laser weapons are superior to what was available back in 2050.

We've been hasing it out internally today, and we're most likely going to hide the 2070s material for a 2050s game, but give you optional rules that can allow it all to be added back in.

One idea would to have a collaborative post on Dumpshock or the CGL forums and let the hardcore players comb through the books and previous books and determine when the tech was developed. That is if JH doesn't have a list already planned out.

The SR2050 book has an exhaustive gear list including prices and availabilities, which in a lot of cases are totally different from SR4A/Arsenal. I imagine further 2050 books will follow up with the gear not in the book.

As for how to handle it in HL, I'd be very tempted to have 2050 as a seperate game thus preventing any possible cross polination.

I'd really not allow this personally! It's just not plausible and would polute the timeline too much.

I can understand both sides of the coin.

There are some basic items in the main rules that should be time independent, but quite a lot of it has release dates, or something that can be traced.

Now once you add release date as a variable to all the items, you then need a mechanism for these release dates.

This goes from weapons, equipment and vehicles to class features, races, abilities and spells that just were not known in the earlier time periods.

You can split the game system to two settings, but then you have to maintain two settings... what happens when they release more time dependent material (and there is a lot of it in the setting)?

Star Wars has era's of play which I can split technology and features off into to say some of these things are not available in other periods. With this is it an options tick box to select the era's of play that items are acceptable from.

This is also a possibility with each version of the game being a different era to be selectable...