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Shadowrun: Howling Shadows $24.99
Average Rating:4.0 / 5
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Shadowrun: Howling Shadows
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Shadowrun: Howling Shadows
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
by LIAM G. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 09/16/2016 18:16:32

Howling Shadows is riddled with editing errors, duplicate art, and cost multipliers given without a base. Whereas many of the ideas of it are good, implementing it in game requires unreasonable amounts of game master discretion. When Catalyst was approached about this and we requested a simple Table with an availability and cost for the critters in the book they doubled down and insisted that it was intentionally omited. Claiming it was an editorial choice.

This in face of the fact that several items in the game can only be aquired by multiplying X where X is the base cost of a critter (something completely unlisted in the book). Not to mention tat apparently the idea of buying a Tiger off the Black Market is impossible but you CAN somehow get top-secret military equipment and ballistic weaponry.

Catalyst really dropped the ball on this one and their refusal to so much as spend an hour throwing together an official cost list as errata has cost them my buisness in the future until this issue is addressed and I recomend you do the same.

The purple of a rule book is to provide clear and concise rules and content that can be used in the game, you should not have to spend hours crawling over it insearch of numbers and values which the company has apparently CHOSEN not to print.



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
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Shadowrun: Howling Shadows
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
by Sean H. [Featured Reviewer]
Date Added: 06/12/2016 19:25:55

Shadowrun: Howling Shadows is the latest creature book for Shadowrun and as such provides new beings and new challenges. Worth putting on the ‘pick up if you are a GM list’ as it provides so many useful tools and potential adventure ideas, not nearly so useful for players but still a good read.

Shadowrun: Howling Shadows, is a Core Critter Book for the 5th edition of Shadowrun, so it provides additional information on the strange, wonderful and dangerous creatures out and about in the Sixth World.

The book begins with one of the ubiquitous fiction sections, then it looks into how (meta)humanity and (para)animals interact from pets to the nations that include awaken animals as citizens or even rulers. An interesting section though the viewpoint of the ‘author’ (as it is written in character) is a bit annoying at times.

Then we move to the part important to the core of the game, Untamed Security, which talks about how animals and para-animals are used by corporate security with subsections on how to train animals and how to defeat them. The section ends with a quick guide to how the Big Ten megacorps approach using animals for or with their security.

Next up is mundane animals, alligator, boar, cockroaches and other animals we would recognize along with rules for basic genetic modifications (cloned, luminescent and so on) of such animals. Eight new mentor spirits, from alligator to spider, are included in this section and add some nice options for magical characters.

Following is Paranormal Animals, filled with weird and wonderful creatures from the omnipresent (and omnivorous) devil rat to cerberus hounds and vollying porcupines, a fun variety to bedevil shadowrunners with. My only complaint is that there are only a few illustrations and the descriptions are often short or nonexistent, yes, we can guess what a greater wolverine is like but what does a piasma or peryton look like? We can guess but a proper description, or better yet, illustration, would have been very helpful. A subsection covers beings altered by the HMHVV (Human-MetaHuman Vampiric Virus) which comes in three types and can infect and alter just about any sentient creature, so you have elvish banshee, human vampires, ghouls and so on. Interesting and dangerous foes or possibly friends for those that still possess their intelligence.

For fun and destruction, there is a selection of Toxic Creatures and Mutants that have been changed and empowered by toxic wastes and radiation and even a couple warped by bad juju. Lovely creatures such as Radhounds, radioactive dogs that hunt in packs, and souleater leeches that, well, I will let you work that out. Many of these creatures are scenarios waiting to happen, if your shadowrunners are up to the task, most of these creatures are really dangerous. This also has a section on the awakened creatures infected by HMHVV, so lamia (infected naga), chupacabra (which seem to be genetically engineered creatures deliberately infected) and others are covered here. In this section there are two pieces of art that showed up in the first HMHVV section which is mildly annoying.

Extraplanar Travelers talks about being from the magical metaplanes who visit or have been pulled into our world, they are manifest spirits often of considerable power and alien agenda. Interesting stuff here but using it strikes me as risking really changing the tone from fantasy cyberpunk to high fantasy with high tech trappings. That warning being mentioned, I do like the Chindi, Native American vengeance spirits, and the spirit of a city made manifest, some good plot thread could be spun off from them.

Then come Technocreatures, which are to animals what technomancers are to other people, i.e. animals that can interact in technology in unique and occasionally destructive ways. From data devouring snakes to playful hacking dolphins, fun stuff to disrupt the cozy lives of the technology dependant.

Next there are the Protospapients, creatures of resonance who live in the deep web and munge (consume) code, including the dark dwelling Grue and the Sintax who very presence makes systems vulnerable to exploitation. These are things to use carefully to drive stories not just to make life miserable for characters, which they would be perfect for, but do not be that GM.

Drakes get a more in depth write up, which admits that no one is really sure how the dragons make them but they do, and more rules for playing a drake and more options for drakes. Though they are more likely to show up as NPCs then player characters as it is so expensive to play one.

The final informational section is Building Man’s Best Friend which covers: creating chimeric creatures, that blend traits from multiple creatures, Warforms, which are genetically perfected animals, dogs being especially popular. Along with discussion of augmenting creatures through various technological means. This section concludes with rules for training animals.

The book wraps up with new critter powers, an index to all of the critter power and a guide to where to find the various creatures. Though it seems odd, and a missed opportunity, that we do not get any new qualities related to animals or other things included in this book.

Howling Shadows is a useful resource providing new tools for the GM, and possibly for the players, with a considerable amount of implied adventure ideas.

Note: Read more reviews and other gaming articles at my journal https://seaofstarsrpg.wordpress.com/



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Shadowrun: Howling Shadows
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
by Jacob A. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 06/12/2016 13:37:35

Howling Shadows is a fine example of the quasi-useful material we are coming to expect from Catalyst for 5th edition Shadowrun.

It contains a notable amount of new, good, artwork. But this addition is stained by reuse of artwork within the same book, and a lack of labels and placement to make it easy to identify what art matches what critter. Which is a minor complaint since it is possible to figure these things out by reading all the entries. Sadly, some of the entries fail to describe the critters accurately, leaving a fair amount of room for interpretation.

It contains a review of numerous sapients already in Run Faster, such as Centaurs, Infected, and Naga. But it limits its content for shifter, the actual animal sapients, to fluff about their nation, offering no new rules or clarification of questions asked in the forums. You can now armor your shifter, which is necessary since Run Faster took away their regeneration. But that also means you are a walking armored animal and lose all chances of guards thinking "meh, it's just a dog". Yet in the entry of Demon Rats it says shifters have regeneration.

A little tip for Catalyst. Stop letting your writers copy-paste from 4th edition books.

Finally you have rules for a trained wolf for your wolf shaman to run with..... accept you don't have any listed means to aquire a regular dog much less a wolf or tiger. In the official forums, a couple authors stepped in to address this issue by saying "house rule it", "it's too hard", and "we intended animals to come from adventures not contacts". This means we are meant to allow our players to buy smart missile drones used to bomb large areas by Grid Overwatch Division from Rigger 5.0 but have to make them go on an adventure to get a kitten. If this was intened, it should have been a sidebar "How to Adopt a Pet", not telling us through the forum. Even if we are intended to allow our player to purchase pets, the modifications are based on the "base cost" which is not given, so that entire section is either useless because animals are "priceless" therefore augments are impossibly expensive, or the augments are free because the animals have no value. Furthermore, if things like hell hounds are raised and used for security, that means there is a supply and demand market for them. Raising a pup into a trained animal takes years, which is generally outside the time scale of a game like Shadowrun.

So it is official from Catalyst, don't buy more books, just house rule everything.

I also must add that one of the writer's posts were so full of grammar and spelling mistakes that it makes one question their qualifications as a writer.

So another tip for Catalyst. Play test your work, especially if you are going to make us wait for a convention before getting the book.

There is a lot of good fluff. Poachers, who must be killing purely for sport since the animals have no value on the black market.

Nice stories that mention creatures not listed in this book.... Catalyst planning a $10 suppliment already?

A great story of a mage using techo-critter ants to spy and murder by borrowing their senses through magic, included their ability to see through cameras they hack, but conveniently the author forgot the long standing rule the magic and matrix do not mix.

Another tip, check that the fluff and fiction does not break the fundimental rules of the system. Since you are delivering much more fluff than system, we are forced to treat the fluff as offical ruling, and some things come up contradictory.

As your writers tell us to house rule the system, we are put into a bad position where one game doesn't match the rules of another. That is why we need rules to go with the fluff.

Drakes are back, and with an interesting twist for the rules. A bit underpowered and their dracoform is next to useless since you can augment your human body and it doesn't effect the drake body. And their fluff fails to explain why they are hunted, but make a big deal about it. So talismongers want my body for reagents? Does that mean I generate reagents from claw trimmings every week? Dragons want me to be a servant? Why? +1 or +2 to a few attributes is nothing. The powers can all be reproduced by a mage, and you could hire a mage with much better skill since I spend 75 out my 25 starting karma to play a drake..... who is hunted.... plus all the negative qualities I took..... and has no drake powers or benefits until I sink 25 more earned karma into him....



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
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Shadowrun: Howling Shadows
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
by Matthew O. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 06/10/2016 22:40:44

It did what I hoped it would do. i like having monsters in my roleplaying games and I am pleased to add more to Shadowrun.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Shadowrun: Howling Shadows
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
by Kent C. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 06/10/2016 13:16:00

This is another good source book for Shadowrun 5th. I am a little disapointed in the small amount of pics for the creatures, but the descriptions are awesome.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Shadowrun: Howling Shadows
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
by A customer [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 06/07/2016 18:50:42

Another m'eh supplement from Catalyst. They're just horrific when it comes to editing these books (Street Grimoire was the worst with extensive copy-pasta from 4ed that was nonsensical due to missing items), heck some of them (see Data Trails with nothing for Technos) were just planned poorly to start with.

Howling Shadows is better edited, for the most part, compared to previous catalyst works but thats a pretty low bar to exceed.

Once again however the editing fails at a critical juncture. Specifically the lack of a critter/ animal cost table even though those base costs are referenced elsewhere in the book by calling for multipliers of the missing base costs.

When this was pointed out to Catalyst by many people in the community the line editors response was "this was a conscious choice!". Which is obviously just CYA nonsense as there are base cost multipliers in the book for various animals/ critters but no base cost to apply them to!

All of this points to failure at the Line Editing level.

Really sad stuff.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
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Shadowrun: Howling Shadows
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
by Oliver S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 05/30/2016 11:13:37

This book is a good and surprisingly well structured catalogue of all kinds of critters that can be used in various runs. And while some may complain that not every previously mentioned critter has been updated to the 5th edition, there are more than enough mundane, magical, mutated and technological beasties with a wide assortment of powers to surprise your runners. I was pleasantly surprised by the well made index that groups the critters both by region and another that groups them alphabetically. The only resaon I am not giving this product 5 stars is the anoying fact that it is impossible to add further bookmarks into the barely marked, but otherwise stellar pdf.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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