Shadowrun Companion (Revised for 3rd edition) |
Sourcebook |
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Pros: Much better balance than the original Companion. |
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Cons: Very little new information, inheirits most basic flaws of the original. |
First, some of you may have troubles getting this for a while, as FASA released it with the same FASA book number (#7905) as the original Companion (The ISBN Number is different though, 1-55560-380-7) so if your local distributor orders by the Company number, you will either have to point this out to them or wait for the supplies of the original Companion to run low.
When the original Companion came out, I was thrilled. I loved the point based creation system, and if I was less than enthused about the metahuman varients, I could deal with it. When 3rd Edition came out, though, the Companion wasn’t worth much since the point system no longer worked. I returned to using the Priority system as given in the main book, and found that the changes wrought in the system by third edition corrected almost all of my previous complaints.
Now that I have the 3rd edition Companion, it has remain almost entirely unused, other than some basic playtesting for this review. Other than smoothing out the large jumps in Resources, the point-based system offers me little, and Edges and Flaws were too overused by my group with the original Companion for them to hold much appeal, although many of the outrageously abused ones have had their values altered. Happily, Otaku have found their way into the point system, although it points you to Virtual Realities 2.0 and Renraku Arcology Shutdown for rules. It was annoying that while they are reprinting all sorts of rules, they don’t bother to compile the Otaku rules into a logical place.
Also included are Ghoul PCs, pretty much as found in Target:UCAS, the Edges and Flaws from Cyberpirates and Rigger2, and the Twenty Questions previously found in the 2nd edition main book. Shapeshifters undergo slight clarification, and there is a very nice additional section on dealing with common GM troubles, such as incorporating deckers into the group.
On the whole, the revised Companion is just an update of the original, with very little new material, but quite a bit of updated material. The new book is a must get if you find the original Companion essential, and useless if you found the original Companion useless. For anyone without experiences in the original Companion, I wouldn’t recommend picking the new one up until you have a decent amount of experience with the system.