Gallows Humor

 Finishing up Stephen Kenson's Talon Trilogy with The Burning Time, which wraps up Talon's story quite well. 

I'm technically skipping the second book here, Ragnarock, since I read it last year, but ok.

Anyway, Talon and his crew get sucked into a new adventure thanks in part to a run gone bad. (I mean, that's pretty much Shadowrun for "You meet at the local tavern"...) In this case, trying to get something from Cross Applied Technologies, which ends up bringing Roy Kilaro involved. Roy, who wants to become a Seraphim, is in Boston from Montreal investigating an odd data stream he found from one of Boston's chip heads. 

On the home front, Trouble, the cabal's Decker, falls back in with her ex, since the gay street mage obviously ain't interested in the slotting she's offering. Talon, in the mean time, keeps running across his ex's ghost. And it would seem Mama Iaga is using Gallow to help pull off whatever plan she has for the Christmas return of Halley's Comet. (I get the distinct impression this particular book was written right before a new edition, since a second wave of goblinization known as SURGE starts happening towards the end, who lead to less rigid character creation in the system.)

By the end, everyone gets something akin to a happy ending, other than Mama Iaga, who pretty much gets what she had coming. 

I rather enjoyed this book, particularly towards the end when Talon more or less takes an Orphic journey to find Jason, his ex. While my love life has never been QUITE as dramatic as Talon's, the emotions we get through his adventures ring quite true. These are well worth picking up if you can find them.

Bawston

 If you can't tell, I'm on a Shadowrun kick of late, mainly because I bought the recent Harebrained Schemes games set in the world. Any rate, this inspired rereading Stephen Kenson's Talon centered books. Crossroads, the first Talon centered book, takes us from DC to Boston as someone in Talon's past has an axe to grind. 

Talon, a street mage, starts as part of Assets Inc., an established Shadowrunning group who made a name for themselves stopping an astral incursion. When we meet him, he's knee deep in trouble as an Ant Shaman is trying to turn a young girl into a Queen. (Gee, I feel like this was part of the plot of Shadowrun Returns!) Anyway, he gets back to his apartment in DC to find a female decker waiting on him. The femme fatale, Trouble, ends up dragging him back to Boston 

Here, we meet the runners who played a part in Technobabel, as Talon hires the group to help track down the person hunting him. What follows is a game of screw your neighbor, as several villains emerge, and Talon must learn to control his anger. (But honestly, I found myself sympathizing with him for much of it. I mean if someone killed my lover, I'd be inclined to summon a fire elemental to burn them myself.) 

Of interest in particular is Kenson's descriptions of how Mage magic works in the setting. Without getting really technical, of the three magic classes, Shamen run on Charisma and have a totem, Adepts are much more physical, and their magic gives them combat edges, Mages run on Intelligence, and generally work more with elemental forces. Given the Mr. Kenson's husband is a fairly famous author of books concerning modern witchcraft, the focus on the details of magic shouldn't probably be a surprise. 

As I've stated previously, seeing any kind of gay representation in an RPG book was a nice surprise. While the first time I read this, I knew next to nothing of the setting, Now, it's more fun, feeling like I have an in to the story. A lot of fun for fans of mildly pulpy scifi.

A vision of the future

 So, I managed to find my Shadowrun collection again, finally... (They've started repriniting some of the original series as Legends now. Me, being someone who doesn't mind used books, has the original pulpy paperbacks mostly.) Anyway, I started at the beginning of Stephen Kenson's original 4 novels prior to the return of the comet and the newer editions of the game that revamped a lot of system. (As a side note, much of this got dug out thanks to me starting the Harebrained Schemes Shadowrun games.)

Which brings us to Technobabel, which doesn't concern Talon, the gay Mage who figures prominently in the other 3 books, but instead gives us a vision of the 6th World's Corporate Court, infighting between Fuchi and Renraku, and some really interesting portraits of Technoshamen, folks who's personal totem spirit is the net (or Matrix, in this setting.) 

We open with doings in the Zurich Orbital, home of the Corporate Court, where the big 10 AAA corporations keep each other in check. Fuchi is bringing suit against Renraku, under the assumption that an exec from Fuchi, who received enough stock in Dunzelkhan's will to make him a board member of Renraku, has been using trade secrets to increase Renraku's share of the market. 

Then we meet a man who begins nameless, narrating his awakening in an alley, being  bodynapped by Organ Grinders, folks who sell body parts on the black market generally. As the book progresses, we find out said nameless man is now Babel, a Technoshaman (or Otaku, in the slang of the setting), able to enter the Matrix without the aid of a computer or other body modifications. As things progress, we find that Babel had a human name at one point, and he's the evidence Fuchi has been looking for. However, the spirit of the Matrix has its own ideas on how Babel should proceed. 

It's a fun story, providing all kinds of mental fodder for whenever I get around to writing up an adventure. Would I suggest it for people not familiar with the setting? Not unless they want to do a deep dig to get background information, since while things are touched on by way of explanation throughout, the world this is set in has had 6 Editions, and even with this one being set in 3rd, there's a heck of a lot of information out there. (Particularly since by the start of the next book, Fuchi broke up and one of its major players now runs Novatech.) But otherwise, it hold up well and makes for a fun read.

Never meddle in the affairs of dragons

So, I found myself rereading an old favorite this week, as sticking my hand into the bookshelf looking for for something wound up drawing out Ragnarock by Stephen Kenson. While this particular volume is not my favorite of his tales of Talon, it's probably the most plain fun of them.

This is actually set in the Sixth World of Shadowrun, an RPG set in the mid 2060's, where technology has hit Cyberpunk levels of advancement, and magic has reentered the world, leading to metahumans and dragons being prominent. (This is a largely oversimplified description of the setting, it's kind of like what would happen if D&D created a setting encompassing Philip K. Dick's writing.) Shadowrunners are essentially semi-criminals who do work for various employers, often one of the megacorporations trying to one up another one. The largest of the Megacorps is Saeder-Krupp, which is run by one very large great dragon named Lofwyr, and they're the ones employing our hero Talon for this book.

Talon is an Arcane Mage (the other type of pure mage in the setting is a shaman.... I think there's a lesser magic user called an Adept, but it's been years), who runs a fairly standard team, with two meta humans (an orc and a troll, who are brawn), a computer specialist (who more or less project their conciousness into the Matrix, think a VR version of the internet), and someone who does something similar with vehicles of all kinds. Along the way, they wind up joining forces with the Elven Paladin Speren. Talon's team gets a rather juicy contract to track down a professor who found a magical artifact that is being sold at auction in Germany and bring him to Lofwyr.

Straight forward assignment that gets complicated quickly as the Professor is working with a group of Human supremacists with some fairly large magical resources. Followed quickly by taking the artifact directly into Lofwyr's presence, where it nearly kills the great dragon. Fleeing from a very angry corporation, we eventually find out there's a lesser known great dragon behind this plot, and our climax happens at a music festival where two very large dragons have an astral battle over top of a thrash metal band.

I've pretty much mangled my description of this, and I hope if Steve ever reads this, he'll forgive me for that.

Anyway, the reason I say this isn't my favorite in this series has to do my first exposure to Talon. See, I was totally unfamiliar with the setting, and ran across Crossroads at one of the local gaming stores while dice shopping. It looked interesting, so I bought a copy and wound up getting sucked into it, getting particularly excited when I found out that Talon is gay. Given how rare this is in Science Fiction, Fantasy and RPG materials, let alone to have a main character who happens to be gay... well, it was awesome. Particularly since most of Talon's arc in the other books has to do with dealing with his shadow self, something I could relate to at the time. Anyway, I was discussing it with a friend of mine, who pointed out Steve's husband was author Christopher Penczak, whom I had never read, but who also has written a few books dealing with gays and spiritual matters. He's written more than that, and there's more to both of them, but again, simplify.

End result. Fun series, with more going for it than one would expect.