The latest tabletop roleplaying offering from Humble Bundle is this rather cool selection of ebooks for the fifth edition of Shadowrun, the venerable cyberpunk RPG. Going back to fifth edition will give yet another opportunity for the Shadowrun community to engage in the activity that it holds most dear: arguing over the merits of different editions.
Seriously, they do that a lot.
Now, as is usual with these bundles, this one is split into tiers at different price thresholds. Spend enough to unlock a specific tier and you also get the items from the previous tiers. I’m not going to break the tiers down for this bundle because Humble Bundle has continued their practice of horrible bundle construction.
The point of low level tiers is meant to be to give the inexpensive entry point to a particular game. This bundle, as with many recent Humble Bundles, does not give you the core rules until the final (most expensive) tier. This irks me more than it rightfully should. So, with no core rules, I don’t especially value the lower tiers.
The lower tiers cost £0.83 and £8.34, getting you 2 and 7 supplements, respectively. The upper tier, netting you all 17 items including the core rulebook, will set you back £15.02. Here are the full contents of the bundle:
You’re getting a huge amount of content here for a relatively small asking price. I’ve picked out a few highlights from the bundle.
The core book is obviously the most important item in here. It’s got all the rules you need both for the gameplay, and for character creation. It’s got loads of background and art as well. You know what a core book is. It’s pretty crucial to the whole thing.
Run Faster is an interesting supplement. There’s a lot here for both the player and the GM, especially in the information about how people live, and some stuff on metatype communities and metatype variants. This slice-of-life type content is complemented by the tables at the back of a book which give prices for everyday goods and services, to help you establish your world that little more firmly. There’s also the life path approach to character creation which is very fun and lets you grow a character organically as part of the world, rather than just having them emerge as fully formed, experienced characters.
I also really like the look of the Seattle Sprawl digital boxed set. It’s got s fair bit of content, with some cards, maps, map cards, and three books. These are slightly shorter book, at around 90, 50, and 30 pages. Taking them in order from longest to shortest, we have:
- Emerald Shadows: 90 pages of background on Seattle and its districts.
- Ruling the Queen City: 50 pages about the organisations active in the city and some key people.
- Tangled Threads: 30 pages covering 8 key locations, plus a small adventure.
This alone is worth the price of admission for the bundle, I feel.
There are loads of other good books here, with Market Panic being one that often receives a lot of praise. All in all, a really good deal at around 15 quid. I always look at the content before the price, and I was expecting to be paying at least £20 to £25, so the price was a nice surprise. Solid. Of course, I’m still not happy with Humble Bundle’s approach to constructing these tiered bundles, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to change.
You can click here to visit the bundle page over at Humble Bundle.
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