A nice little murder mystery. The real hightlight is how well it captures the world of shadow run. A great mix of cyperpunk and magic. I particularlly like the pov character and the little touchs of her cyberware affecting her day to day life. Great story overall highly reccoment

I greatly enjoyed this novella. The characters were interesting, and it had a few good twists and turns like you expect from Shadowrun. I found the antagonist of the story quite compelling!

Most of the content in this you can find in the Alpha Strike Commander's Edition.

Praise that you don't need to buy another version of Classic BattleTech but they are taking advantage with their Alpha Strike series.

An okay attempt at a BattleTech quickplay rules; in my opinion, they went too far the other end of game design; mech's stats are abstracted so they lose quite a bit of their flavour though the core mechanics are recongnizable if you are coming from Classic BattleTech rules. Still, it has its oddness in its rules e.g. mechs only moving 1" so they can maintain their To-Hit modifier against being shot at so it took away the need to be always mobile and damage is more catastrophic since all those weapons is now boiled down to a single stat. But they kinda fixed that in the Commander's Edition which isn't updated in this version but its own standalone which means I need to buy a new set of rules which are slightly different but "updated". If they did this with Classic BattleTech, CGL would have been metaphorically lynched.

A classic game that hasn't change for decades but it doesn't mean it does not have its flaws. If you want to play this game within an afternoon or even a day, no more than 4 mechs on each side. The more mechs you play and/or the further down the BattleTech timeline (which added more weapons and advance equipment which introduces more mechanics you need to consider), the longer the game will take.

If you ask me, it's ultimate flaw is the way armor penetration works i.e. it's more of a hit point than a single stat to bypass with a high enough caliber weapon.

The diplomatic and political maneuverings in this book don't make any sense, even for a Battletech novel.

The actual campaign system is an excellent GM-less multiplayer system that's easy to use and lets a pool of players generate contracts containing multiple battles and play opposing sides in a long term, losses and gains matter set up.

It's also simple to fold in as a framework for running other systems like Chaos Campaigns (my and a club mate are using it to run Total Chaos atm!), other eras (using the generic contracts section at the back), or for Alpha Strike if you prefer that to Classic.

The rules for non-Merc forces are brief but appear workable, and different enough they're not just "call yourself a Clan force but behave like Mercs".

The era specific campaign section is flavourful and diverse, and gives great playable meat to the fluff bones of the Hinterlands setting book.

Very recommended, BUT you will need the errata from CGL's site and to carefully walk through several contradictory and awkward parts where proof reading and draft editing haven't been thorough enough to iron out inconsistencies.

Overall, very good, but not needs an experienced eye to really get the most from.

Another high quality source book for Battletech. Does a great job of putting a capstone on the first year of the IlClan era, setting up the pins to knock down again with the next set of books.

Great material, but some wonky editing. It'd be nice if an updated pdf could fix the errors.

This is a good capstone to the Dark age and now we are setting the stage for the Ilkhan era. I enjoyed the play by play for the final push on terra. The main factions are Clan Wolf, jade falcon Capellans, with help from the Raven Alliance Seafox and what remains of the republic. The Raven alliance is a favorite so that helps.

The book also has a good overview of whats going on in the rest of the sphere even if they are not involved in the war on Terra. The art was also great in the book I just wished there was more but I was happy with what I got.

Printed book: 1 stars Content: 5 stars The print quality is awful, I guess it's worth 1 star because there is paper and ink but the print quality and washout text is just sad. I would believe that the printer is broken if not from Lucas comment.

(long overdue review). This is one of my very favourite SR plot books, over all of the editions. In large part because I thought they did a great job of bringing this to the shadows. Too many of the books I've read over the years have some big event happening, with a few throwaway comments of "This is going to make a lot of work in the shadows" but with nothing really supporting that, and the work that it makes usually won't change anything. Or else there are adventures that leave the shadows behind. But in Scotophobia the crisis is largely happening in the shadows, it is set up to directly hit shadowrunners, pulling them into the plot. As a GM I love it.

I understand that a lot of people don't like the 'big bad' side of it, but in a longer running campaign I think this is a refreshing change from business as usual.

The Disian metaplot will be a lasting stain on Shadowrun for years to come. I was considering a long and drawn out dissection of this book, but no. It's not worth twenty dollars, it's not worth that amount of time, so I'll summarize. The majority of this book is spent jacking off The Aveng-, ahem, sorry, THE DEFENDERS, a group of people dedicated to SAVING THE WORLD FROM THE EVIL DISIAN PLOT to drain the world of its magic and kill literally everyone. Big surprise, Dis doesn't win. I'm not even going to bother mentioning the sheer number of plot holes and contrivances that were required for this awful excuse for a plot to happen. Suffice it to say, the Disian plot is Shadowrun writing at its lowest and worst. I might not like 6e as a system, but I'll still defend it's successes, so believe me when I say there is nothing of value in this plot.

Bryan Young knocks it out of the park again in their latest BattleTech release, with an incredible new cast of characters and some genuinely thrilling moments, as well as some very loving homages to GoldenEye. From the tiny touches of worldbuilding (a Sea Fox eating tabbouleh for the first time) to the plot-heavy beats (including a conversation about the physics of hyperspace with some grade-A technobabble that would make a Trekkie blush), Bryan knows how to sculpt a story that juxtaposes subtlety and epic bluntness. When I became a BattleTech fan almost thirty years ago, the books all very much felt like 80s pulp adventure fare - a boys' club about a world where all the protagonists had the emotional intelligence of a mildly empathic goldfish - but Bryan has once again done what he did with the Fox Patrol and breathed the new life of modernity and vitality into this legacy franchise.

The author's bias has reaches an obnoxious level.