Just to make me look worse I missed my mothers birthday as well. Yikes, I am neither a good friend nor a good son apparently.

I actually should have remember yours though since i knew about when it was because your parents use to get you ski equipment for your birthday (or maybe this only happened once and I expanded it in my mind as I am oft to do) and I always found this kind of funny.

Anyway… Happy Birthday!

While I wouldn’t say I feel need to adhere strictly to their world, timeline, and story, the texture is so rich I definitely enjoy soaking up details and flavor when they present it. For me the extra flavor immersion that comes from reading something like Emergence, whether or not I end up using their early ’70s plot, will probably help me improvise more readily as the Sixth World comes alive in my head.

Personally I almost prefer my base books to be rather light on fluff (though a better time line would have been nice…) as I want them to have as much game information as possible.

Over all I still think that Shadowrun does about the best at mixing fluff and crunch. Too often i have purchased a book that was on a topic I was interested in only to find out it had few to no rules in it. At that point it feels like it would be easier just to make the stuff up myself rather than spend the time reading about their specifics of it.

While I applaud the fourth edition rules as a huge step for Shadowrun and a great success, I’ll still miss the shadowtalk… but all those rules have to fit within the page limit somehow, so I’ll keep getting my fix from the plot books