Review: Plastic Warriors – The Players Guide to Shadowrun House Rules

Edited by: Gurth
Published: March 16th, 1998
Location: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/plastic.html

Check it out, a timely net.book review! ;)

This is the 7th Plastic Warrior’s net.book, and the first in over a year – a very welcome sight! It takes a slightly different focus than the previous Plastic Warrior’s books, but is nonetheless very good.

The Players Guide to Shadowrun House Rules is a simple concept, house rules and variations upon variations of house rules, from various web sites, Gurth’s home game, ShadowRN mailing list posts, and much more.

Currently the file is only available in Rich Text Format on A4 sized paper. I loaded it into Word ‘97 and printed it without major problems; a few page breaks occured in odd places, and the bottom line of text (The name of the book and the page number) was cut off on each page. I’m fairly certain that Letter and PDF versions will be online within a week, even if a certain Archive expert has to make them himself.. :) The file has all the usual nice features that you would expect from a Plastic Warriors book, including a very thorough index and table of contents.

The big problem with this book is you won’t use it all – I skimmed through it briefly, spending maybe an hour total, and only found a few rules that I thought “Wow, gotta try that!”. One reason I may not use most of these rules is because I’ve already made house rules for alot of the situations that these rules were written for. I also skipped the Matrix section because I’m in the process of writing a rather large Book/Series of Articles/File/Whatever you want to call it about the Matrix, and I don’t want people saying “Hey, you stole that from my house rules!”.

This is one of those books that you’ll want to download, read over carefully, then decide what you’re going to use or try, and then print that out for your own usage. As a large book it’s not all that useful, as a large book that can be easily broken down it smaller parts, it is very useful! One of the more interesting aspects is due to the nature of the file – there’s well over 20 authors, which means the writing style varies wildy from entry to entry, which is cool and adds a touch of the human element to the book. There’s also some very good points made, like Blackjack’s short piece about street beggars. (No way I can picture somebody getting close enough to give them money, though!)

As a final semi-personal note, those of you who read this book will notice something – My name is in the Greets section, but not in the Credits section. I promised Gurth a submission, held off for awhile, promised him it would arrive “This weekend”, then forgot again, and he put the book out without my stuff. Thank you for the reality check, Gurth. I need a good kick in the ass once in awhile, and this was certainly a very well aimed one.

Adam Jury
Tuesday March 17th, 1998