Pyramid Review
Target: Wastelands (for Shadowrun)
Published by FanPro
Written by Rob Boyle, Steve Kenson, Michelle Lyons Ken Peters, Lucien Soulban, John Schmit, and Jon Szeto
136 b&w pages; $20.00
Shadowrun, as the back cover of this book states, is a game about going places you're not supposed to. Cracking a corporate mainframe, sneaking into an archeology, or sleazing into a Bavarian castle, standard intrusions are what the game is all about. With Target: Wastelands, we get a guide to places that you seriously wouldn't want to go.
Target: Wastelands, as its name implies, is about the most hostile places in the world. It divvies them up by terrain type instead of geographically; so two deserts on opposite sides of the world are listed together, and the north and south poles share a chapter.
The cover is a nice piece by Mark Zug, showing a pair of Shadowrunners under attack by some type of toxic spirit. The good news is they have a secret weapon of some kind; the bad news is it won't do them any good if the woman on the left doesn't get her knee off the hose. The gallows humor of it was worth a chuckle.
The first portion of the book details Toxic environments. Shadowrun has always had a bit of a "green" bias to it, with nature-loving Shaman PCs as the good guys and Toxic Ravager Shamans as the bad guys. The best way to tell if a corp is a bad guy is to look at its environmental record (hint: very few of them have good environmental records).
The book details what toxic locations . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: September 6, 2002
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