I recently picked up the newest Shadowrun source book War! its part of what Catalyst calls the Deep Shadows line of source books. Its soft cover with very evocative cover art depicting an airborne assault circa 2073. It comes in at 279 pages of text with a couple of pages of gear tables at the end. The primary focus of the book is moving the story forward with the out break of a war between Aztlan (Shadowrun’s re-energized and expansionist Mexico) and Amazonia (an awakened nation taking up most of northwest South America and ruled by all sorts of non human critters).
The first few chapters of the book detail the flashpoint city of Bogota detailing history, culture and major players in the city. The history of the war is detailed enough to give a good solid foundation to run in the region, but its open enough that you can mold it into your individual campaign.
Other military conflict zones are given a few paragraphs as Poland, Nepal and Somalia to name just a few. It gives the nuts and bolts of conflicts, and offers a few nuggets for a GM to run with in her or his own game.
The final section is game information on various aspects of living and working in a war zone, as well as a lot of heavy duty military gear, ranging from mines and battle rifles to orbital weapons platforms. There are also a few new spells and bunch of new military NPCs for use as contacts and or opponents. A lot of the weapons are things a team of Shadowrunners should NEVER get their hands on, but how much panic could they have as satellite fired munitions start vaporizing buildings as they are escorting their target out of the war zone?
My only complaint about the book is minor, it is the lack of a map of Bogota, with as much book space as Bogota takes up a map would have been awesome. I guess there is always Google Maps for that. I have read a few complaints about the gear being out of the range of your typical Shadowrunner, but that is sort of the point. Its not a book for your players necessarily, but for a GM its a very useful tool.
veg-geek 