Pyramid Review
Cannon Companion
Published by FASA Corporation
Written by Robert Boyle, Dan "Flake" Grendel, Michael Mulvihil and others
126 Pages, $20.00
Guns!
That will be the first thought to creep into your mind on seeing the subtly titled Cannon Companion resting on your game store's shelf. At least, it should be if you're the typical Shadowrun player. You might expect a third-edition reprise of the Street Samurai Catalog, hopefully tossing in the various new goodies collected over the years. And you might be sort of right, too.
The Cannon Companion is an "everything fighty" book for Shadowrun, third edition. Yes, it has guns -- the first third of the book covers everything from handguns to SAMs, with a substantial nod toward other ways to kill people, too. There's another thirty pages of armor and potentially useful knickknacks before you hit a gun design system, advanced melee combat and a slew of additional combat rules. Just like Man and Machine: Cyberware (reviewed in Pyramid, 1/17/00), this book dispenses with the full-page, single-item layouts and witty flavor text of prior works. Instead, it's text and tables, illustrated nicely but unobtrusively by the new cadre of Shadowrun artists.
The weapons are a mix of revision, collection and new ideas. Expect to see mostly familiar arms from the Street Samurai Guide, Neoanarchist's Guide to Real Life, Fields of Fire and possibly a few other sources. For the uninitiated, what this means is a variety . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: April 21, 2000
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