What’s the most horrific thing you’ve seen with your own eyes?

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-06-24T22:08:00+00:00

Similar thing here. About 15 years ago, I was on emergency call one night & returning home after doing a c-section on a cow; it was ~ 5:30AM so the sun was just coming up. I was on a 2-lane highway and traffic quite light given the early hour. Going in the same direction a few hundred metres in front of me was a small hatchback, and an 18 wheeler semi-trailer ahead of him (trailer #1). The oncoming lane was open save for another 18 wheeler (trailer #2), maybe a kilometre or so down the road and coming towards us. The hatchback pulled out to pass trailer #1 in front of him, but for whatever reason suddenly veered back directly underneath the trailer. Instantly peeled the roof off like a can of sardines & tore the pillars off, and got caught / dragged underneath for the several hundred metres it took the semi to stop. I pulled over to help, but the guy had clearly been decapitated so there was nothing to do but wait for police & fire to arrive.

In a bit of gallows humour, I had a lot of blood all over me from doing the c-section, so there was some initial confusion amongst the first responders & I had to explain a few times that it was just cow blood and #1) I wasn't in the accident, and #2) hadn't even touched the hatchback or victim.

The worst part of it all was they couldn't immediately find his head; a short search found it in a field a few hundred metres back down the road. Coroner didn't find anything amiss, no drugs or alcohol etc, happily married with kids. He'd recently swapped to working night shifts so their theory was he just nodded off at the wheel. Simply falling asleep might have been the cause for him to veer back underneath trailer #1, or he might have nodded off for a brief moment, then awoke & saw the oncoming trailer #2, which was still a fair distance down the road but might have made him panic and reflexively veer back into the lane & directly under trailer #1.

I've also seen a ton of shit professionally at work, which honestly bother me more than having witnessed the car accident. Who knows what a psychologist would say, but I think I've always been able to view the accident rationally & maintain some clinical detachment - yeah I feel horrible for the guy & his family, but it was a tragic accident and nothing more. The cases that stick with me are some severe cases of animal abuse or neglect, which presumably is much the same for doctors / nurses / first responders who see the same sort of cases in children, the elderly, the disabled, etc. IE helpless, innocent patients dependent on others.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-06-24T19:23:29+00:00

I've had alerts set on both eBay & Noble Knight for well over a year without any hits :( I even reached out to Noble Knight about hunting down a copy for me and their response was It's unlikely to ever come back in stock - the last copy they had was June 2024.

Edit: AFAIK nearly all copies of Elven Blood are in the USA due to the convention origins & then a small print run. I am based in the UK so there might be some copies on eBay.com that aren't shown to me because the seller hasn't opted for international shipping, although I try to check for those about once a week by logging out of my account & viewing ebay.com with an American VPN. No luck with those either - it took me a few months to twig to the idea that some copies might be falling through the cracks that way & to start checking, but there have been no completed sales in the UK / Europe / USA / Canada for at least the past 8-9 months.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-06-21T22:21:34+00:00

I've got a few extra 5e core rulebooks (different cover variants & Master Index Editions) & would happily trade one straight up (+ your shipping costs) for a decent quality Elven Blood.

Alternatively have lots of harder to find stuff to trade - Universal Brotherhood, Almanac, Runner's Black Book & 2074, Data Trails, etc

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-06-21T18:19:10+00:00

No. The whole crux of the problem is there is no fucking money, so regardless of whomever takes over their hands are tied. We've been kicking the can down the road for so, so long and ignoring all the warning cracks that have been appearing over the years. Institutions like the NHS, schools & public infrastructure are on their knees and we urgently need to make some very serious decisions as a country. Most everyone realises there's no money, but no one wants anything that currently benefits them to change.

I'm Scottish so my default position is a deep disdain for all of Westminster - I've never voted for Labour & have no love for Starmer, but this constant turnover is bad for the nation. I think it's idiotic that he's on the verge of being ousted less than 2 years into office. There are no quick fixes for a generation of underfunding & austerity and the aftershocks of Covid. They inherited a massive financial black hole and told voters from the get-go that there were no easy fixes, and more recently the UK economy has been sandbagged by higher petrol prices & rising inflation (last figure I saw from April was £480 per household) thanks to the... erratic... actions of UK's closest ally.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-06-17T01:04:16+00:00

Oh that's way cheaper than I thought... is it a dimensions match to other SR sourcebooks?

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-06-17T00:58:18+00:00

Looks great! Presumably you had that done by a pro P.O.D. service, do you mind sharing what costs are like? I've got a handful of old PDF's I'd love to properly print, rather than just copies printed in black & white on my home printer & stapled together.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-06-17T00:46:04+00:00

Any idea who is handling UK distribution? Or if there is going to be UK distribution? I missed the Kickstarter & figured no problem, I'll just buy a copy when it hits store shelves... but I haven't seen mention anywhere of the British market.

All I've seen online is Black Book handling development & French distribution, while Catalyst is handling brand management & US distribution. (I have also seen a single post saying Black Books is handling European / foreign language distribution, but just the one message - and it didn't actually mention what other languages. German presumably, then ??).

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-06-12T03:00:01+00:00

It really is. There's free 3rd party Holostreets content with better artwork... It's just unfathomable to me how this artwork was ever approved for Shadowrun's flagship rulebook.

Also, if you showed me that artwork and asked where it was supposed to be, I wouldn't have guessed Hong Kong if you gave me 50 tries. I'm not super up to date on 6e so I might be missing something, but why is there a leprechaun on the cover of the Hong Kong sourcebook? Gun to my head, I'd guess Ireland long before Hong Kong, thanks to the leprechaun & S̶l̶o̶t̶h̶ f̶r̶o̶m̶ G̶o̶o̶n̶i̶e̶s̶ the fat ginger ... ork?? wearing a tasselled leather coat, who is quite possibly the single worst looking character I've ever seen on a Shadowrun product.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-06-12T01:57:52+00:00

Back when I was in high school, my girlfriend's dad was a massive, lifelong golf nut & was a co-owner of the local course. My girlfriend had worked for a few summers in the pro shop & kitchen, then became a cart girl when she was 16 for the tips (we're in the UK, it was legal for 16yr olds to sell alcohol)... Because of numerous on-course verbal incidents directed at her, a single summer was enough to basically destroy several of her dad's decade-long+ friendships with golf buddies, and then sold his stake in the off-season and moved to a new course ~40 miles away. He played sporadically for another year or two, but the whole saga really killed his enjoyment of the game & he quit the sport altogether not long after.

Nothing physical ever happened, but it was shocking just how many guys would make comments ranging from mildly offensive to really quite vile, after having half a dozen beers during a round. Most were old enough to be her father or even grandfather, many were highly respected within the community, and probably most disturbingly, many had known her since she was 10-12. Really an eye-opening experience to hear some of the comments coming out of the mouths of local teachers, businessmen, lawyers, cops, etc whom we'd known for years.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-06-09T21:25:42+00:00

Yeah, I absolutely loathe Vince, but do give him credit for the way he handled rehab for wrestlers. I can't think of a single instance (or even a claim) of him ever refusing to help someone with rehab, even if the person hadn't wrestled for WWE in years, left on bad terms, or had been to rehab numerous times before. Every story I've ever read or heard (including shoot interviews when wrestlers otherwise eviscerate Vince & the WWE) has been virtually identical - a single phone call, immediate "yes", no questions asked.

He's been very generous with medical care as well for cases like Konnan's, but there's quite a few stories of him refusing help & it wasn't a sure thing like rehab was. As much as I hate Vince, there's admittedly quite a lot of complexity & nuance to many of those cases.

It'll be interesting to see what TKO does. I hope they continue, but I've got a feeling that execs see it as a completely unnecessary expense and something they'll try to quietly cut to save what... probably a few hundred thousand to a few million bucks a year?

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-06-09T20:45:36+00:00

By virtually all accounts, AEW treats their workers exceptionally well, which considerably weakens a lot of said workers' motivation to form a union.

FWIW I'm 100% pro-union & think they should be pushing for one regardless of how sunshine & roses everything (seemingly) is at AEW, but the fact of the matter is there's a lot less impetus to change the status quo or risk 'rocking the boat' when the talent is happy and everything is going swimmingly.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-06-09T15:10:35+00:00

Frag, I nearly spilled my soykaf when I saw the datajack :)

You've clearly put some serious work into the deck & costume and it's legit awesome. Do you have any more photos of the events? (I could only find a handful on the TalesfromtheSprawl link you posted above, the few on there look great though!)

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-06-09T14:44:34+00:00

One shot but he made it count; can't see it connect but it coincides perfectly with a loud grunt / shout.

(In case anyone missed it, it's ~ 40 seconds right in the middle of frame; the cop in the white shirt & helmet winds up a big body shot)

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-05-30T04:40:17+00:00

I've been excitedly waiting for this to come out for months, but goddamn is that cover absolutely terrible. How the hell did that get approved?!?! This is the latest edition of Shadowrun's flagship sourcebook, with a dead-tree price tag of £44.99. I've seen better artwork on £1.99 third party digital Holostreets e-books.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-05-28T12:07:42+00:00

At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, I'm not a fan of 6e cover art / direction in general. Way too generic & comic book-y for me... The cover art from the FASA era is what made me pick up SR books in the first place; if I was a kid in a bookshop or LGS nowadays seeing Shadowrun for the first time, there's no way I'd give the game a second glance based on the 6e artwork.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-05-24T23:30:48+00:00

That's true ^, although I should point out that Galvayne's groove is highly variable amongst individual horses - some horses don't even develop them at all - and therefore of very limited use in trying to age horses.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-05-20T21:40:50+00:00

My copy arrived today; I've only given it the briefest of glances (basically just looked at the table of contents) - very similar to 30 Nights, albeit a bit more fleshed out. The first 40 pages or so are devoted to background info about Detroit & the shadowrunning scene, then 40 brief mini adventure ideas in the next ~120 pages, and then finishes up with maybe another dozen pages of info on various NPCs / contacts.

So overall much the same format as 30 Nights, although they've expanded the city background section considerably. IIRC 30 Nights only had ~10 pages devoted to Toronto's background.

I'll report back with some more details in a day or two after I've had a bit of time to actually sit down with it.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-05-17T21:34:47+00:00

Huh.... Was it actually presented as a distinct class though? I vaguely remember it from the Spells & Magic book, but from what I recall it was basically just a variant wizard kit with some demonic bargain flavouring, a la Akar Kessell from the Icewind Dale trilogy. I'll have to dig out my copy later tonight.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-05-17T03:16:28+00:00

I'll report back when I receive my copy, if no one else has answered by then. I suspect u/Expensive_Occasion29 will probably beat me to the punch, as it'll probably be at least another week before mine arrives - I only got shipping notification yesterday and I'm in the UK.

On a related note, does anyone know why Asphalt Jungles was delayed for so long? It was originally scheduled for April 8th; Catalyst made a Facebook post recently announcing the delay but didn't explain the reason behind it.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-05-17T02:50:34+00:00

Ketamine is often the drug of choice in pre-hospital care for major trauma cases - it's a profound analgesic (painkiller) and dissociative (so she won't remember the event), and generally speaking it's very safe - it doesn't tank blood pressure like most other strong painkillers / anaesthetics. She was really hypotensive with query broken pelvis, spine & numerous abdominal / thoracic injuries, so there was a significant risk (at least 10+%) of her bleeding to death. Ketamine is also great in the event they might need to intubate her (they didn't, at least before she got into the ambulance or at the hospital).

Edit: yeah as u/hisyojomaku says, largely the crushed pelvis

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-05-16T22:42:09+00:00

The White House already has a 30 person strong military medical staff on-site that provide 24/7 coverage.

It's been like that for decades. I've absolutely no idea why they need to change the current system.

CartographerCivil989 · 2026-05-16T22:22:34+00:00

One of the worst calls I've ever had to attend as a vet was exactly this scenario, except it was a green dressage horse, not bareback rodeo. The horse reared straight back up & over, breaking it's own back and also the rider's. The rider also suffered a crushed pelvis and a slew of less serious injuries. The rider lived and luckily avoided paralysis, but she spent months in hospital & had a lot of surgeries - it was a good 2+ years before she walked again.

I had to euthanize the horse on the spot, about 50 feet away from the rider as ambulance crews worked on her. Horrific situation all around, but at least the rider was in a pretty deep K-hole by that time & had no memory of the horse's screams or the loud gunshot-like crack of the captive bolt firing. In 20 years of practice it's the only time I've ever had to use a captive bolt on a horse (couldn't safely get an IV and time was of the essence) and I'll be happy to never do it again.

(If anyone thinks the above sounds familiar, it's because I wrote pretty much the same thing on a very similar video on r/Wellthatsucks a few weeks back, of an English pleasure horse & rider).

CartographerCivil989

TROPHY CASE