(Adventure 2e) Stampede of Justice

 I'm not going to keep you in suspense. I just know the first question you're going to have about Stampede of Justice (Hiromi Cota, Violet Green, Eddy Webb) and yes, there is a stampede. Though it's arguably not "of justice." A Nazi causes the stampede in order to stymie the player characters. Maybe the PCs can turn it around, cause it to backfire, make it serve justice in the end, but that's not a suggested outcome or anything. It's more like wishful thinking on my part and the rules of the game don't explicitly forbid it . . . 

Although, don't let the thoughtless instinctual behavior of these innocent creatures fool you. This is the most overtly anti-Nazi adventure I've ever read. My historical ignorance was enough that I thought "why are they letting the German American Bund off the hook" when I saw that the villains were "The Friends of New Germany," but it turns out that the Friends of New Germany weren't fictional off-brand Nazis. Rather, they are the exact same organization, the Friends just rebranded to the Bund in 1936, and this book is set in 1934. Score one for research. I officially Learned Some History from this book.

The most notable thing about the adventure is that it's based around a fake newspaper clipping from the core book that revealed that, in this timeline, aviation pioneer Bessie Coleman survived the plane crash that killed her in the real world. The clipping was specifically about an integrated airshow that was sabotaged by racists, where Coleman survived an attempt on her life (this is an entirely fictional incident, not related to her actual death, which just appears to have been a tragic accident). Stampede of Justice has the PCs investigate that attempted murder, revealing the Nazis' plan to gain influence over Houston's oil fields using their agents in The Friends of New Germany (this plot is only slightly exaggerated from real history, where the leader of the Friends was tried for being an unregistered foreign agent).

And that description is basically all you need to know. You follow clues, get in a firefight, avoid a stampede, and eventually corner the Nazi mad scientist in his lair. It ends with the suggestion that maybe these events were tied to the Rational Experimentation Group (which acts as a facilitator and source of capital for mad scientists the world over). That could, potentially, be seen to dilute the evil of the Nazis by shifting it onto a more cartoonish fictional organization, but honestly it just feels like a conspiracy myth arc. Like there's no way you're going to investigate the Rational Experimentation Group and come to the conclusion that they're not really Nazis. Maybe a little too genre in an adventure that has hitherto been plausible alt history, but that's just a matter of execution. It's easy to see how it could work.

The only part of the book that I'd call a flaw is the sidebar that talks about the setting's racism. It's not that it's a bad sidebar, but the last line - "players should not be forced to roleplay discrimination and racism during this adventure" - strikes me as just a little bit disingenuous. They're taking something that is generally true for the game of Adventure! as a whole - that roleplaying in the pulp 1930s doesn't have to mean depicting the trauma of characters from historically oppressed groups, you can just focus on the fun sci-fi/fantasy elements of the setting - and they're applying it to a specific adventure that could only exist because the option of "not roleplaying discrimination" was consciously declined.

Even setting aside the fact that the villains are Nazis, the driving force behind the whole adventure is the fact that Houston is a segregated city. It's about the jim crow system's deputizing of white vigilantism to punish a successful Black woman. In order to enter the venue, the PCs have to make their way past protestors who object to the very idea of an integrated airshow. How are you supposed to depict that without "roleplaying discrimination?" Yes, the players should not be forced roleplay discrimination, but the way you accomplish that is by telling a different story entirely. Adventure! has a million of them. They could have written a jumpstart about the mole people stealing cattle or Baron Zorbo holding the oilfields hostage with his fleet of airships and still had the sidebar pointing out that Houston was a segregated city and reminding players of how optional the racism is. But, instead, they decided to tell a story where the racism was load-bearing. That requires a different approach.

I suppose the sidebar could have meant that nobody should be forced to roleplay explicit racism, and that we can use veils to include this material by referring to certain events with abstract statements rather than in-character dialogue. Yes, the story is about racists who commit a racially-targeted crime to achieve their racist goals, but you can engage with those ideas from one remove. Using "Nazi" as a general shorthand for those kinds of behaviors instead of going into detail leads to more a comfortable, light-hearted game. 

However, if that's what they meant to say, they could have just said that. I have to figure it's more a matter of the right hand not knowing what the left was doing.

Still, as flaws go, it's pretty minor. Overall, Stampede of Justice is about as much as you can reasonably from a jumpstart. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the jumpstart format just isn't for me, but it definitely has its place and it's absurd of me to complain about it when nobody forced or tricked me into buying these books in the first place. The only reason I own this thing in PoD is out of an irrational desire for completionism and my knowledge of the Trinity Continuum does indeed feel more complete (if only by a small amount) than it did before. So what else is there to say but "good job."

Ukss Contribution: This one is tough because the adventure is filled with cool characters, but the thing that's cool about them is the way they resist and defy systems of discrimination that Ukss doesn't have. So I guess I'll just go with Arjun Kelly's giant wrench:

I know there are ludicrously big wrenches in real life, but that thing looks like it's pushing the bounds of plausibility. It must weigh 100 pounds, at least. Either that or it's a normal 60-inch pipe wrench and Arjun is just a tiny little guy. 

(Eberron 3.5) Eyes of the Lich Queen

 Eyes of the Lich Queen (Stephen Schubert, Tim Hitchcock, Nicolas Logue) is the 591st book I've read for the blog (hazzah! only 379 to go! here's to another six years!) and it's fair to say, when it comes to rpgs, I'm a little . . . jaded in my tastes. You give me a story where heroic adventurers explore a mysterious ruined temple, only to discover a deadly curse, leading to a daring prison break where they must free a pirate tattooed with a map to a mysterious tomb so that they can confront the ghost of the last explorer to suffer the curse, who reveals that the curse is in fact the lingering energies of an ancient weapon, one sought by a dragon who is at that very moment claiming possession of the weapon's power source, the one thing that can lift the curse, and so the adventurers must travel to the forbidden dragon continent in order to fight for their very lives in the middle of a mysterious dragon observatory . . . 

. . . and my instinctual, knee-jerk reaction is "what is this D&D bullshit? Wake me up when something interesting happens."

I fully recognize that this is a me problem. I'm ridiculous. There's nothing here that I can willfully misinterpret as a commentary on transportation infrastructure or a model of fantasy geopolitics and I get grumpy. "Don't you see, people, they not doing anything but going into dungeons and fighting dragons!" (Actually, one of the fights was against a dragonne, which I will forever associate with early TSR's fumbling attempts to nudge us away from fighting public domain foes and towards using creatures they could successfully trademark).

I guess the most interesting part of this adventure, to me, was an unusual twist on the "macguffin chase" formula. After you finish searching the first temple, the last thing you find before being cursed is a series of alcoves, all of which contain treasure except for the last one. Then, after you leave, you're confronted by an agent of the Blood of Vol, who demands you turn over the "Dragon's Eye" and you're meant to think "ah, the Dragon's Eye must have been whatever was originally in that alcove," but actually, the Dragon's Eye is the curse. You go through the whole adventure seeking the macguffin and nobody, not you, not the villain, not the dragon who sponsored you, ever realizes that the macguffin was with you the whole time.

It "does not exist as a material relic," but is rather a process of transformation that kills because it cannot be completed without the energy source. You end the adventure with a free Dragonmark feat, and all it cost you was jumping through a bunch of hoops.

There are other high points - one of the pirates is named Damog Hellscurvy, which isn't so much "on the nose" as it is outright parodic, and it deserves to be in a funnier adventure. His rival, Captain Krail Sorrowbringer is both a ninja and a pirate (as per her character class and role in the story, respectively) which had to have been intentional, but is sadly not explored. (I think they were going for only the standard D&D background levels of incidental camp, that's why these are "high points" and not reasons for me to regret my earlier intemperate words).

But the high point also comes with a low. When you're doing the prison break, you're able to infiltrate this incredibly secure facility because the warden has a side-business of running a slave-operated mine out of the prison's basement. This allows you steal a pirate ship (on behalf of your partner, Damog Hellscurvy, from the notorious Captain Krail) that has been used to deliver slaves to the mines (because, apparently, prison oversight is a bit better in the world of Eberron than in ours and people started noticing that some of the prisoners were going missing). Then, after you free the prisoner you came to free, the adventure anticipates that you might be tempted to free the other slaves too, but "the PCs know the Lucky Lady is not equipped to handle a large number of refugees. If the characters balk at leaving the enslaved prisoners behind, Jukkeam announces that once he and the party have made a safe escape, he will useshis father's resources to see the shard mining operation shut down."

Jukkeam is the son of a pirate-turned-merchant who was close friends with Damog Hellscurvy, and his rescue buys you the pirates' aid, but isn't actually related to the reason you're there in the first place (a different, entirely unrelated pirate). The reason this plot is merely a "low point" and not a "yikes" is that Jukkeam is as good as his word. Nonetheless, it feels like a hard misread of player psychology ("the PCs know the Lucky Lady is not equipped to handle a large number of refugees, so expect them to get real creative with their Bags of Holding.")

Overall, I'd say that Eyes of the Lich Queen is . . . a D&D-style adventure. The Lich Queen is less involved than the title might suggest, but otherwise it's fine. As a book, it was visibly high-effort, in a good way. Full color all the way through, attractive glossy pages and every single one of the combat encounters got its own 1-2 page subsection, with a zoomed-in map, list of relevant lighting and environmental conditions, and suggested tactics for the monsters. Which maybe wasn't so fun to read, but I am not yet so lost in my own mission that I've forgotten that a book like this wasn't meant for reading, it was meant for at-table utility. And on that count, my gut tells me it's gonna be all right.

Ukss Contribution: Another high point - Ship Eater, a "great orca slain by whalers years ago . . . now an undead monstrosity with an insatiable hunger for living flesh and an unquenchable need for vengeance."

Awesome. Kind of wasted here, as a means of slowing down the story pacing and getting your daily encounters in, but Ship Eater has definitely got the star power to anchor an adventure all by his lonesome. I'll probably go with a slightly more sympathetic take. Like instead of being reanimated by the out-of-control necromantic energies of a nearby tomb, maybe he'll just be a revenant who pulled himself out of the grave to punish the injustice of his death. . . but not in an overly precious way. He's still an orca and it would be somewhat hypocritical for him to be too outraged about the crime of murder (which, of course, is exactly what makes it a great ghost story).

(Adventure! 2e) Adventure! Addendum!

 What do I even want to say about Adventure! Addendum! (Danielle Lauzon, Ace Simonelli, John Snead, H. Ulrich)? It's not all that great as a book qua book, because it's only 41 pages, divided into four sections of seemingly random subject matter. But as 41 pages of rpg material, floating in a void, presenting itself as yet more Adventure!, it was pretty good. Three-quarters of this book is solid, pulp-style nonsense in the form of basic mechanics for non-human characters (like a gorilla bartender or a robot on the run from the law for killing in self-defense), more elaborate secret bases, and a variety of Inspired (read: "magic") items, locked away in the Antarctic vault of a moderately sinister trans-governmental spy agency. And I have abolutely nothing critical to say about any of that. It's my favorite type of rpg material to read, and I enjoyed reading it.

I also enjoyed reading the remaining quarter of the book, about the alternate timelines created by Max Mercer's time travel shenanigans, but I do have critical things to say about it, so it felt awkward lumping it in with the others.

I guess my issue with the alt universes is that all three worked just fine as setting pitches - a world where Mercer helped "a version of Nikola Tesla not involved with a Martian invasion" bootstrap paradox the internet into existence 100 years early, a world where the Strange Places that exist in mainline Adventure! are not confined to out-of--the-way locales, but are so common and prominent that Britain is being invaded by the interdimensional Roman Empire, and a world where the Hollow Earth is real . . . kind of, it's complicated - but when you consider them less as alternate ways to run Adventure! and more as beats in a time travel story, they just feel a little . . . timorous.

And I get it. Alt history is a tough genre. You're not just playing a fun little game of "what if," you're exposing your values. If, in this alternate timeline, an empire rises where one did not exist historically, you're making a statement about what you believe causes empires to rise, and which people are likely to pursue imperial domination. If you prevent a group of people from experiencing a well-known historical genocide, then every new bad thing that happens in that setting becomes a bad thing that could have been prevented by genocide. It's high risk, low reward, and in a goofy good-time game like Adventure! maybe it's better to keep things light.

But look, let's just address the elephant in the room here. It's an issue that was present in the core, and it is nothing but exacerbated by giving it a direct spotlight here - Onyx Path has made a game with a prominent time-traveling character and they set it right before the number one historical event that we all say would be the first thing we'd use time travel to try and prevent.

Now, to be fair, in one of the timelines Mercer does succeed at preventing WW2. It's the one where Tesla "invents" the internet. And leaving aside how poorly "the internet would have prevented the rise of Hitler" aged in the year and a half following the book's publication, it's still a time travel story where the prevention of history's greatest disaster (as well as the Aberrant War, the Trinity Continuum's greatest fictional disaster) is treated as an afterthought. It doesn't say anything interesting or real about the historical forces that led to the war in the first place, nor of Max's feelings about accomplishing something the time travel genre largely assumes is impossible, nor of the terrible weight of responsibility that must have landed on his shoulders when he realized that even if the prime timeline remained unchanged, a better world was possible.

Would exploring those issues have made for a better pulp rpg? Probably not. Arguably, it would make the game worse. But it would have made for a better time travel story, without a doubt. As far as Adventure! Addendum! is concerned, the compromise was conspicuous.

In my ideal world, I'd have made the "Exploring Alternate Timelines" section more daring, more challenging (and yes, it would undoubtedly have been more offensive . . . damn, alt-history is difficult), but I didn't dislike reading it. I'd even say that I'd be happy to play in any of those alternate universes. So I guess Adventure! Addendum! did what it set out to do. It's just a wonderful addition to the game.

Ukss Contribution: I don't even know what the item in quetion does (I'd have to cross-reference the TC: Adventure! core to look up the "No Barrier to Entry" gift), but the Impossible Orb of Dr Mysterious does have an amazing bit of backstory. It was apparently created by the good (i.e. "bad") doctor as a means of pursuing "the World Tour of Thievery, an unsuccessful plot . . . to travel and commit a single major heist in every country in the world."

I love that. It should be a long-running Manga. Netflix should option it as a series. Ocean's 11 as a travelogue, spotlighting a different country and its national treasures each an every week. I may gripe about wanting psychological realism in time travel stories, but I know an absolutely perfect bit of fluff when I see it.

(Eberron 3.5) Secrets of Sarlona

Keith Baker, you sly dog, you somehow managed to trick Wizards of the Coast in to publishing your unmarketable psionics-based campaign setting by pretending it was just another continent on Eberron, and you barely had to compromise your vision at all (I have to assume the Xephs are so perfunctory because they were part of an editorial mandate). Which is to say, I enjoyed Secrets of Sarlona (Keith Baker, Scott Fitzgerald Gray, Glenn Mcdonald, Chris Sims), but I was not for one minute convinced it was ever meant as a companion for the rest of the game's Khorvaire setting.

(By contrast, I did think Xen'drik, as problematic as it could be sometimes, was intended to be used alongside Khorvaire).

Secrets of Sarlona was more or less the issue I noticed in Races of Eberron, writ large:

"[The Kalashtar], along with their arch-rivals, the Inspired, never stopped feeling to me like one of those stealth pilots that got snuck into popular long-running tv shows, where the regular cast only showed up at the bookends of a story about totally new characters so that the resulting series could be sold to the public as a spin off."

There's a really good campaign you can make from this material - about oppression, the hope that drives rebellion, finding freedom in the cracks of a system that seems total in its control, the destructive cost of imperialism. But would that be an Eberron campaign? I mean, yes, but only so far as the option was also snuck into a few of the other books.

You see, Sarlona doesn't interact with the rest of the world. It's the continent of "it's okay if you don't use psionics, because those people are so xenophobic you'll never meet them." It works as its own setting, but it never shakes that sense of conspicuous modularity. It's a tendency that isn't entirely to the game's benefit.

Sarlona's overall situation, ruled by nightmare spirits from the land of dreams, harnessing the psionic potential of a nation to bring the worlds into alignment, at war with rebels trying to put a stop to it - that's a story of global scope. The stakes are so high that the conflicts and their consequences should spill over into other lands. And that spillover should cause blowback. And the blowback should drive more Sarlona stories. 

Sigh. There's a little of that, but not enough. It mostly feels like the "stealth pilot" problem in reverse. Sarlona feels like a barely justified spinoff from Khorvaire. But if you take Sarlona as the default game, Khorvaire feels like an entirely vestigial piece of lore. You don't get the sense from this book that the rest of the world is entirely real, nor that it matters.

Take the dreamlily trade. It's a traditional Sarlona drug, grown, harvested, and sold by a Sarlona crime syndicate. Here's what the book says about it:

"The Path of Inspiration forbids recreational use of dreamlily, but the Dream Merchants do a brisk trade with outlanders in the foreign quarters of Dar Jin and Dar Ulatesh. Although the Inspired claim to oppose the dreamlily trade, they have been remarkably ineffective at curbing its spread into Khorvaire. In truth, the Inspired are all too pleased to see foreigners fall prey to the addictive power of this drug."

Technically, that's a connection. But . . . it's not? The Khorvairians are being terribly objectified. The Inspired chuckle down their sleeves, "oh, ho, ho, those foreigners are getting addicted to drugs," and it all feels like the Inspired have their hands firmly on the wheel. It doesn't exactly say as much, but the implication is that the dreamlily trade is only a problem for foreigners. If the Inspired didn't tolerate it, it wouldn't exist.

Except, the Dream Merchants are enemies of the state, aren't they? And there's talk of dreamlily going out, but no discussion of what comes back. Khorvaire is getting this dangerous drug (with super punitive mechanics, because drugs are bad), but the Dream Merchants are getting money and weapons and forbidden magic and perhaps worst of all, from the Inspired's tyrannical perspective, exposure to Khorvaire's culture and ideology. These are all things that will propagate back up the supply chain, perhaps encouraging the populace to do the drug themselves, and definitely encouraging them to use the money and weapons and magic to resist the power of the state. Even if the government takes a cut, demand in drug consuming-nations leads to civil unrest in drug-producing nations. 

So you've got Khorvaire doing things in Sarlona and Sarlona doing things in Khorvaire, but there's a lack of a general sense of interconnectedness, that things going on in one location matter to the other. Anti-Inspired dissidents are building expatriate communities and the Inspired are sending agents to harass and destroy them, but it's like there's nothing at stake because when we talk about the port cities and their well-contained foreign quarters it feels like anything beyond Sarlona's shores effectively drops off the face of the earth. Likewise, you've got dragonmarked houses coming into Dar Jin and being heavily regulated and there's no sense that the government realizes the danger it's in. "oh, we're a closed society around here, but I'm sure that those foreign corporations will respect that and confine themselves to our designated trade areas."

Of course, realizing this, you could make a conscious effort to bring Sarlona and Khorvaire closer together, and the book wouldn't necessarily fight you all that much, but I wonder if there's not a more fundamental bias at work here. The Inspired rule over Riedra (the main nation in Sarlona) is this sort of perfect, clockwork tyranny and you don't necessarily want to scuff up the paintjob. The nightmare spirits have a plan - control humanity's dreams by creating a society that was both obedient and stagnant, suppressing all dissent and so thoroughly indoctrinating the rest that interfering with the Quori's plan is unthinkable. . . and inexplicably, they're really good at it. Their system stood for a thousand years, and all their internal enemies have either bent the knee or have gone so far underground that they're little threat to the status quo. Even the ogres have bought into the propaganda and believe they are one favorable reincarnation below human beings.

The book makes it a point to repeatedly point out how content, or even happy the Reidrans are and at no point is it clear why that would be something the Quori would even want. Shouldn't they prefer a society steeped in misery, where the populace is so crushed that they can no longer even dream of hope? Stranger still, when it describes Reidrans moving to other lands, one of the biggest bits of culture shock for them is simply having uncontrolled dreams. These guys are living in a nightmare-run state, but they don't actually experience nightmares until they leave. It's very strange. I think you could turn this around, make it intentional, like the Quori who become Inspired become corrupted by the material world and Reidra's strange system is a matter of mission drift.

I think it would make for a better game if the situation weren't so cut and dried. If the Quori looked like they had to work for it, like maybe uniting twelve fractious kingdoms into a unified empire, when your subjects are as sloppy and complicated as any other human beings and you're an alien squid from beyond the stars is a difficult thing to do. That makes Adar more of a threat. And the kalashtar communities in Khorvaire a source of dangerous radicals. And the trade cities a necessary compromise. And the diplomatic missions to Khorvaire's governments, to sew division and uncertainty, a real conflict with real stakes.

My overall take is that Secrets of Sarlona is a good starting point. It's got a lot of the things I really value in an rpg setting - nuanced portrayal of both heroes and villains, weird magic like the darklight (a magical lantern that allows you to add or remove darkness from a room), and, of course, descriptions of the clothes. However, the main thing it lacks is the sense that anything in this continent could ever change, for better or worse. Let's call it a diamond in the rough.

Ukss Contribution: I really like the overall dynamic between the quori spirits, the Chosen (humanoid vessels conditioned and genetically engineered to be hosts for said spirits), and the general populace of Rierda, who view the Chosen as aristocrats and the Inspired (Chosen who have been possessed) as living gods. They're like evil Trill. I think there could be a nation on Ukss with a similar feel.

NOTE: This post was edited to add an extra paragraph about the strangeness of Reidra's nightmareless empire of nightmares. It was a sentiment I meant to express first time round, but forgot. Possibly because I was falling asleep when I wrote this post. Thanks to Evil Midnight Lurker on the rpg.net forums for pointing this out.

Trinity Continuum: Adventure! (Adventure 2e)

I once speculated that colonialism was an inalienable part of the pulp genre, and that the only way to change that was through a total genre parody that made its ostensible heroes into buffoons (I referenced Don Quixote at the time, though Inspector Gadget likely would have been more apt). Trinity Continuum: Adventure! was already written when I made that comment, but it nonetheless feels like it's trying to prove me wrong.

(Gasp! What if I wasn't the first person to notice the pulp adventure genre's reliance on the colonialist gaze and this has actually been a matter of concern for quite some time? I may not be as original as I thought!)

As to whether the book succeeds at its (presumed) goal, that's a bit of a trickier question. I can say, with confidence, that Trinity Continuum: Adventure! is an action-adventure rpg set in the 1930s that is fair-minded and consciously inclusive and which makes a compelling case for using the era's political conflicts as inspiration for progressive alt-history roleplaying. There are probably more specific, named African characters in this book than in every game and supplement published by White Wolf prior to 2012 combined (Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom might skew this figure a bit, though. I haven't actually read it).

But is it good pulp? It's definitely a good something, and I don't necessarily want to come across like I'm gatekeeping pulp here. The elements of pulp are present. You can tell a tale of two-fisted justice where your iron-jawed Moroccon freedom fighter chases a corrupt French colonial official-turned-mad scientist across the top of a speeding train in order to stop him from running away with a stolen magical jewel of incalculable destructive potential. The rules for that are in this book. 

But I kinda had to work to come up with that example. Like, I created a scenario that fit in with the book's competencies and sensibilities, but the reason I was able to make it a pulp scenario is that I already knew what pulp was. Could I have done it with no prior knowledge, using just things I learned from the book?

Maybe. Trinity Continuum: Adventure! is a really well-made rpg. The Storyteller advice is both expansive and actionable. The setting information seems well-researched and the conflicts described could easily serve as inspiration for thrilling pulp-style stories. There are plenty of options for a variety of mechanically-distinct low-level superheroes, ranging from implausibly competent swashbucklers all the way through weather-manipulating superhumans. And the Trinity Continuum as a whole is richer for the introduction of the new environmental condition rules.

I suppose the way I'd describe it is that Trinity: Continuum: Adventure is really good at describing pulp, and less so at embodying pulp. The biggest culprit here is probably just the loss of the interstitial fictions. The original Adventure! had something like three or four full short stories that each demonstrated the type of fiction the game was meant to emulate. And then there's the form-factor of the book itself. First edition styled itself like a pulp magazine, it had yellowed pages, a 10 cent pricetag on the cover, and an overall grainier feel. Second edition looks first and foremost like a Trinity Continuum game. It's just a bunch of little things, like the switch between unreliable first-person narrators who were rarely afraid to get florid and an objective third-person voice that is generally very respectful.

When I look back at Trinity Continuum: Adventure!'s presentation of The French Protectorates of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco I'm left feeling like these are real places with serious concerns rooted in a long history and not just backdrops for my pulp adventures. The "problem," such as it is, is that my main use for these locations are as backdrops for my pulp adventures. The book spends so much time telling me about the structural racism encoded into agricultural subsidies for different varieties of wheat that it neglects to tell me about the area's climate or fashions or architecture or customs. I even had to look on Wikipedia to verify that Morocco had a railway at this time.

And to be absolutely clear, the first edition of Adventure! didn't do this either. It's more a case of a new edition putting me into the mindset of looking at something new, and then second edition's increased transparency and introspection opening my eyes to flaws that were always present. The old edition came with a lot of extra-textual baggage that the new edition thoughtfully addresses, which ironically means that even though the two games have many of the same blind spots and gaps, first edition feels more like a complete experience, because your mind automatically fills in the blanks with the baggage.

(Note: this is not necessarily a good thing, because that baggage was often racist as hell).

Or to put it another way, Trinity Continuum: Adventure! convinced me I was wrong about the pulp genre. You could reconstruct it around another axis, keep its stark moral conflicts and globe-trotting action by making the European colonialist project into a font of villainy and casting the protagonists as the resistance to colonialism, using the literary and visual language of early superheroes and detective stories to tell the same sort of stories, but with different cultural and political values. That is something you can do, but if you do attempt it, you probably should not do it by reading vintage comic strips like The Phantom. 

It's probably not a fair thing to lay on the shoulders of Trinity Continuum: Adventure!, but the book's greatest flaw is that it doesn't step up to fill this vacuum. It never successfully models the new, woke pulp.

Though it sometimes wafts tantalizingly close. Like with the Seven Brothers and the fate of the Ubiquitous Dragon. In first edition, the Ubiquitous Dragon was a criminal mastermind with the ability to makes clones of himself. He would send these clones on missions and sometimes directly control their bodies when he needed to pay personal attention to a particular matter. Second edition takes place a decade after first, and in this hypothetical interregnal decade, the Ubiquitous Dragon schemed to release a virus into San Francisco's water supply that would turn the affected into more clones, potentially giving him thousands of bodies to work with. Fortunately, the plot was foiled and the Ubiquitous Dragon was killed. All around the world, his clones started to spontaneously combust thanks to the dragon tattoos that were put in place to eliminate traitorous or inconvenient clones. But seven of the clones had either lost or removed their tattoos and thus survived the purge. 

The eponymous Seven Brothers subsequently found each other and realized they could use their physical resemblance to the Ubiquitous Dragon to take over his criminal network and pick up where he left off, but this time, they wouldn't ruthlessly exploit their agents. They would instead be like a family to each other. Just the sort of family that's financed by drug dealing, gambling, and prostitution.

There is definitely something here. It's weird in a very comic-book-y way. But it doesn't quite feel like a threat. The Seven Brothers have too much affection and respect for each other. They are more like sympathetic anti-villains than a ruthless criminal syndicate in dire need of immediate thwarting. So it all winds up being a bit of (fascinating and cool) setting color. 

Now, with all that being said, there was a lot about this book that I absolutely adored. I have so many notes I didn't use, and approximately 90% are things that I thought were interesting or beautiful or awesome. 

A mad scientist is building 100-ton spider tanks on behalf of Nazi Germany!

Sherlock Holmes exists in this universe. He mentored a Black woman in the art of detection and survives to this day as a sort of professor emeritus in the International Detective Agency.

An Australian successionist movement is assembling a "secret army of battle-ready emus."

The Order of Murder is back, still faking the deaths of the rich and powerful, but this version gives Anne Boleyn a lot more agency in her own rescue and canonically establishes her as one of the Order's founders.

The Ponatowski Foundation works really well in this new edition as a dark foil to Aeon, essentially playing the "gentleman adventurer travels to another continent and 'discovers' things the natives have known for a thousand years" trope entirely straight. Which makes all the stuff with their leader's plot to restore the Russian monarchy and crown himself the new czar seem a bit superfluous. Like putting a hat on a hat.

Max Mercer is now officially and explicitly asexual, and despite falling in love with Michael Donighal, patronized his future arch-rival by preemptively breaking up with him "for his own good." I think this is as openly flawed as we've ever seen the Continuum's golden child and it puts an interesting wrinkle in a ship that I'd otherwise been lukewarm about.

Though, while we're on the subject, where does Maxwell's son, Michael Mercer, come from? I'm not sure I entirely approve of putting an unsolved mystery in a section of the book titled "Setting Secrets."

 And while I'm of the opinion that this book could have used more Strange Places, I'm largely happy with the ones we got. In the Trinity Continuum, the Bermuda Triangle is real!

Finally, I thought it was a really sweet gesture to have an in-character newspaper clipping revealing that real-world aviation pioneer "Queen Bess" Coleman (the first woman, first Black person, and first Native American to earn a pilot's license) did not die tragically young in this alternate universe and instead became a fearless action hero. Alt history doesn't have to be all world-shaking events. Sometimes it can just be a way of paying tribute to some of history's lesser-known badasses.

I guess it's time to wrap up. My final verdict on Trinity Continuum: Adventure!? It's a very fun rpg that sometimes feels like it treats its genre inspirations as an intellectual exercise. It's about a form of fiction that was essentially audacious trash, but it keeps its own audacity and trashiness firmly in check. On the other hand, almost every gaming group I've ever played with has had those qualities in excess, so it might just be a case of looking at an inert solution before the catalyst has been added. It seems likely to me that when players get ahold of this book, they will create better pulp than they would with almost any alternative (including the previous edition of the game). Let's call it an unreserved recommendation.

Ukss Contribution: This one is tricky because of all the stuff in this book, the idea that I would most want to add to an rpg setting is a noxious bit of real-world history - the cozy relationship between the US government and United Fruit, and the brutal unchecked imperialism that resulted from this partnership.

If United Fruit were fictional, invented entirely by an author as part of an anti-capitalist fantasy world, I would think it too outlandish to be believed. They're a fruit company that kills people so they can make slightly more money selling bananas? Ridiculous.

But I don't think I can put United Fruit in Ukss. Firstly, it's insensitive. I live in the country that originated this injustice and I very much benefit from the low price of bananas. Secondly, it's not something Trinity Continuum: Adventure! invented. And while I've used real-world things in the past, either because the supplement was historical or I admired the author's daring in choosing to use it (Sparta and Santa Claus, respectively), this book has plenty of amazing fictional things to pay tribute to.

For example - Ornithopter Hoplites, elite soldiers that wear bird-like wings to conduct surface raids for Baron Zargo, Tyrant of the Skies. I think the image of aerial warriors staying aloft with rapidly-beating mechanical wings is delightfully baroque. 

(Eberron 3.5) Dragonmarked

Dragonmarked (Keith Baker, Michelle Lyons, C.A. Suleiman) is a good book. It's well-made, it accomplishes the remarkable feat of making its thirteen families of magical capitalists feel both gameable and distinct (even the two families of elf artists/illusionists/spies at least had a reason to exist as separate entities), and aside from occasionally getting a little eugenics-y (mainly in the animal-breeding house, but also in the house of half-elves who were adamantly opposed to any further race-mixing, because apparently their ancestors got the balance exactly right) it didn't step on any rakes, politically speaking.

It's like this - if you picture Eberron, the setting, as a big bucket, and then every individual Eberron supplement as liquid being poured into the bucket, then Dragonmarked brought the bucket from 1.1L to 1.2L. It expanded my knowledge of the setting and was a gross positive all the way across the board. There's nothing in this book I want less of.

Which means, you guessed it, my grumpy ass is going to act all petulant and ungrateful because I'm left wanting more. Yes, you heard me, if I had my way every rpg supplement would be 1000 pages long, written according to some abstruse philosophical or ideological schema, and would meticulously describe everyone's clothes (and the logistics chains and modes of production that made those clothes possible). And if it seems, by that description, that I am quietly comparing every book I read to Mage: 20th Anniversary Edition . . .

Yikes, I really am doing that. I should stop immediately.

I guess I've made no secret of my desire to have a version of Eberron that was more explicitly modern and less . . . D&D, and the longer I let that go on, informing my reviews, the less charming a habit it becomes (I assume you all were initially very charmed), but I swear, sometimes it felt like Dragonmarked was deliberately goading me on.

I just wonder if anyone, during the course of writing this book, realized they were just a half dozen random sentences of Marxist political economy away from making the dragonmarked houses into full-on cyberpunk megacorporations.

They're these transnational organizations that rival states in power and can dictate terms over broad sectors of the economy. And this book focuses on their familial relations, the insular (and sometimes borderline incestuous) consolidation of power, and the methods both natural and supernatural (one of the houses has plenipotentiary law enforcement powers and sells its services as mercenaries, another house is composed bounty hunters who sell the services of ogre mercenaries, etc) through which they pursue their ambitions, the least of which is the reckless pursuit of limitless wealth. 

It's all the ingredients for a megacorporation, to the degree that I can't entirely believe the similarity was an accident. And yet, if they were doing it on purpose, I have to believe that they'd do it . . . better.

Not, like, better better. Not objectively better. Just "better at communicating the sort of things the cyberpunk genre has to say." These are powerful economic actors who can dictate terms to states, and House Cannith's niche is "manufacturing." It's so incredible I have to repeat it. The economic niche of this dragonmarked house is manufacturing.

When you consider that House Medani's business is personal protection and private detectives, you can't help but think that all thirteen of these guys were designed somewhat whimsically.

But you could get to megacorporations, if you wanted to. Each of the thirteen houses has its own prestige class and Medani's is The Medani Prophet, who combine their natural dragonmark abilities with divine spellcasting to foretell the future. And some of them "accept long-term positions as advisors for important clients of the house, providing the twin benefits of divination and divine insight." Which is still maybe not on the level of all manufacturing, but is something.

Profane mercenary priests of the god of knowledge, whispering in the ears of ruthless industrialists, telling them secrets gleaned from their miraculous visions, keeping them safe even from the onset of justice. An entire guild of Raincallers who sell their expertise in creating irrigations systems . . . and the rain to fill those systems up. An order of magical healers who take a sacred oath to never heal a patient for free, and it's taken so seriously that they can't even accept services in-kind from their closest friends. 

House Jorasco will literally dispatch adventurers to "hunt down healers who have violated their vows."  Nobody tell me their policy on preexisting conditions. I don't think my heart could take it. 

You could build an adventure arc, maybe even a campaign around House Orien's private security "searching Sharn for black market conductor stones." 

Excuse me, what? In just a quick throwaway line, this book is telling me that conductor stones have value on the black market and I'm supposed to just gloss over that? People are stealing small bits of infrastructure from the family of magical capitalists that owns the railways, and they're reselling them for profit. Who's buying them? For what purpose? Are there pirate railways in the shadows of Sharn's megalithic towers? Is the street finding its own uses for things?

How could you do this to me? And more to the point, how could you do this to me and still act like Eberron's target genre is "slightly post-medieval medieval fantasy?"

Although I will confess that the lingering bits of medieval fantasy do bring something to the table. The dragonmarked houses are not megacorporations in the traditional sense because they have their origin in the Kingdom of Galifar, where they were organs of state power, a parallel aristocracy, forbidden to intermarry with the landowning gentry and denied certain traditional privileges in exchange for royal monopolies. There was no neoliberal privatization. Rather, the Last War lead to the government collapsing underneath the dragonmarked and the houses became "independent" and "neutral" (read: the worst kind of war profiteers). Manufacturing, medicine, transportation, even the fucking weather are all controlled by an imperialist rump state that's been retooled to operate exclusively for profit. It's like this world completely skipped the bourgeoise. Feudalism meets neofeudalism. 

I can't tell if that means Eberron is a really interesting setting or if it's merely a setting that's just complex enough for me to project my interests onto. Or, in other words, it's exactly what I look for in an rpg, and is shaping up to be one of my favorites.

Looking back, I've done the Thing again. I read a perfectly serviceable workhorse of a book and I got into my own head thinking about what it would be like if they made an entirely different book. So let me end this post with a genuine complaint (that'll show 'em what we think of "perfectly serviceable" round these parts) about the actual book - it doesn't adequately explain what an aberrant dragonmark is supposed to be.

Part of the setting backstory is the War of the Mark, where the dragonmarked houses with their normal, or "true" dragonmarks fought and eliminated all the bearers of these hundreds of different "aberrant" dragonmarks, many of which were (according to the history books) basically magical WMDs. And I always just sort of assumed that this distinction was political. That the War of the Mark happened for more pedestrian reason and the losers, by dint of not surviving long enough to ally with the Kingdom of Galifar, were labelled "aberrant" as a sort of ex post facto justification for the war's violence. And that the aberrant dragonmarks of the contemporary era emerged in the same way the Houses' marks did originally, but simply haven't been around long enough to form the social identity of a powerful extended family.

However, this book introduces new mechanics for aberrant dragonmarks and talks a bit about them in the abstract, and wouldn't you know it, they actually are different. Theu behave a bit differently re: inheritance and consistency of appearance, and they're conveniently color-coded so you can always tell an aberrant dragonmark when you see one.

It's clear that there has been some thought put into this behind the scenes. The book ends on an ominous note - the aberrant dragonmarks are increasing in both frequency and power, and though they have little in common with each other, they have a troubling tendency to cluster around "common themes" of "cold, fire, fear, death, and the ability to influence the minds of others." Spooky.

But not terribly useful. The book pitches (or at least hints at) a forthcoming War of the Mark, part 2, but it doesn't tell us what's at stake. The aberrant dragonmarks are explicitly called out as different, but does "different" automatically mean "bad?" I'm sure Eberron would not do something quite so obvious, but I'm very curious what non-obvious thing they were thinking of, exactly. 

I gotta count that as a flaw in an otherwise unobjectionable book. Consider yourself officially on notice, early 2000s Eberron, you get only six more chances from me!

Ukss Contribution: The Raincallers' Guild. A corporation that sells weather to people is absurdly frightening in a way that really speaks to our current historical moment. The externalities of that business model are wild to contemplate.

(Planescape 2e) A Guide to the Astral Plane

 Whoa! Surprise Planescape! It wasn't part of the plan, but I managed to find a copy of this rare book for 73 dollars, which is . . . maybe twice what is reasonable to pay but less than half of what it was going for at its peak so . . . I'm a smart shopper who makes responsible decisions?

Sigh. Who am I kidding? That gap on my list was driving me to distraction. If I ever find anything even close to a similar deal on Faction War, I'll probably try for a complete Planescape collection.

I think the reason A Guide to the Astral Plane (Monte Cook) became such a white whale for me is because, despite my occasional posturing, I'm exactly as vulnerable to the grid-filling compulsion as the authors of D&D. This here is a book that only exists because all of the other planes got their own individual or shared books and they couldn't consider the setting "complete" until they did them all. And I only bought it for the exact same reason. So if I ever gave the impression, what with my repeated statements of "Planescape is bad" or merciless mocking of end-page advertisements that claim Planescape is "Fantasy . . . Taken to the Edge", that I was somehow above it all or thought that I was better than you then let me clear it up once and for all: I'm not. I love what you do, and I'm honored to be here with you at the very bottom of the checklist, when you have run out of other things to do and are finally getting to the Astral Plane.

Actually, that's not entirely fair. I looked up the publication order and A Guide to the Ethereal Plane and The Inner Planes both came after this one. And upon reflection, I think those two books, in very different ways, felt more like late-period grid-filling than this one. A Guide to the Ethereal Plane felt like "the line is basically dead, so I might as well throw out all my wildest ideas and see what sticks." The Inner Planes felt like "the line is basically dead, so I might as well get this over with." A Guide to the Astral Plane, by contrast, feels like a book that was written under the assumption that Planescape had a future.

Lest you think I'm being too harsh here, I am absolutely certain that Monte Cook also thought the Astral Plane was a dud location and I have the textual evidence to back it up. The margin quote at the start of the Introduction:

"Boring? Where do you go for an interesting time?" - Someone who has visited the Astral talking to someone who hasn't?

And then, lest you think it was a one-off, a similar sentiment from a margin quote in Chapter One:

"Astral Plane? Oh, yeah, that's the place between us and them. Nothing there but conduits and dead gods. Hardly worth calling a plane." - Someone showing that planars can be as bad as the clueless.

The book never quite gets over this defensiveness. It's conspicuous. Also, hilariously, if you go by the subject matter of the book's chapters, the main shortcoming of the misguided planar in the second quote is that they forgot to mention the Githyanki. Other than that, the assessment is pretty spot on. This book is very much about proving wrong the conventional wisdom that the Astral Plane is boring.

And I guess it kind of succeeds. Like, I'm still of the belief that the only reason to go to the Astral Plane is because you're on your way to somewhere else, but I will concede that a game where the players spend a lot of time on the Astral Plane because they were waylaid on their way to somewhere else wouldn't necessarily be boring. You could be ejected from a damaged Astral Conduit, land on the petrified body of a dead god, and come into martial conflict with the Githyanki. It would be a memorable adventure.

At the risk of sounding impossibly back-handed and arch, I think the perfect encapsulation of this book (and perhaps even Planescape as a whole) comes from the tagline of the advertisement on the last page: "Fantasy . . . Taken to the Edge." That's exactly what Planescape does - it takes you to the edge and then sets up guard rails to make sure you don't actually go over.

For example, consider Anubis' new job, the self-appointed Guardian of Dead Gods. The book gives us an infinite, starry void where the bodies of dead gods float, stirring fitfully in their quiescence, unable to live and unable to truly, permanently die. The strange ichors that seep from their stony remains carry both temptations and dangers for those who would seek their power, but the scavenger mages must tread carefully, for the nightmares of an eternally dying god are themselves monsters of legend. . .

Also, if the Egyptian jackal-headed god of the dead spots you, he'll fucking nuke you from orbit. Not necessarily instantaneously or automatically, but also with no canon limitations that would stop him from doing it instantaneously or automatically. It's such a weird design decision, because it's unclear what you're even supposed to do with him as a DM. His mission is to stop mortals from desecrating and exploiting the corpses of the dead gods, but there's no difficulty dial there. If he doesn't show up, the PCs will get away with it (nightmare monsters notwithstanding) and if he does show up, they won't because he has literal godlike powers. And there's no reasonable way to predict or delay him showing up. He's basically a veto button that allows the DM to shut down any PC shenanigans that threaten to make the dead gods too disruptive to the campaign.

And it's like, yeah, dead gods floating through space, that's the edge of fantasy, at least in terms of D&D's conception of the genre. Planescape takes you right up to it. But in taking you to that edge, it kind of pushes the edge a little farther away and then refuses to take you there. You can raid a Githyanki outpost built on top of a dead god, or buy bootleg potions made from their extracted essences, but you can't break the magic item economy. You can't topple mortal kingdoms by coaxing the gods to dream apocalyptic nightmares. You won't gain mystic knowledge to overthrow the Lady of Pain. Hell, even the Athar citadel is built between the bodies of the dead gods, not touching any of them lest they draw the ire of Anubis.

I suspect that it's this unwillingness to break AD&D that keeps A Guide to the Astral Plane so closely tied to its "no, really, it's not boring, we promise" mission statement. The book doesn't talk enough about the rewards of venturing in the Astral. You can find something as breathtakingly monumental as a dead god, but you can't use the discovery to fuck shit up. It's the realm of pure thought, that transforms even those who enter physically into spiritual forms, but that mostly results in substituting your Intelligence score for your Strength score. You quite explicitly can't shape reality with the power of your mind. "This isn't the plane of wishes. A berk's mind just doesn't have that kind of power over the infinite Astral."

Likewise, time sort of stops for Astral travelers, holding the aging process in abeyance (though the years instantly catch up to you if you ever leave), but with the possible exception of (spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3) the Githyanki lich-queen Vlaakith, nobody seems to take much advantage of it. And despite all the mindstorms and psionic breezes and other weather-like phenomena that will bleed other people's thoughts into your head, there's no apparent way to weaponize or control the Astral plane's connection to individual minds. Basically, there are things to do in the Astral plane, but little reason to choose it as a destination in itself. It never escapes being "the place between us and them."

I guess writing this book was probably always a thankless task. Take the most interesting and original idea in the whole book - the Living Sea. Through some kind of magical nonsense, a permanent conduit to the Astral Plane opened up underneath some prime world's oceans. The result is a massive sphere of water, containing all manner of sea life that is slowly, but uncontrollably growing around the Astral end of the conduit. And because the Astral plane is the realm of thought, the water is now developing its own form of consciousness, as yet unable to communicate with interlopers but still showing troubling signs of becoming something beyond human comprehension.

Now, the tragedy of A Guide to the Astral Plane is that as interesting as this is, it is not half as interesting as the incidental revelation that there's no known way to close the conduit and so the Living Sea will continue to grow until the unknown prime world's oceans are completely drained. Even though it talked for less than a paragraph about the impossibility of going through the conduit backwards to visit the implied material world that would be experiencing this as a terrifying apocalyptic event where their sea levels are rapidly dropping for no apparent reason, just that little bit of speculation was enough to remind us that the Astral plane is vastly less interesting than the worlds it connects. The Astral side of the conduit is a scaled-down version of the Elemental Plane of Water and the Prime side of the conduit is epic cosmic fantasy in a world facing a rapidly-approaching doom. 

And I don't want this to sound like I'm down on Mr. Cooke's work. He created both sides of this story. I'm not reaching or inferring like I usually do. He tells us about drained seas, about how no one has yet contacted the prime world through other means, about the cultural implications of the sunken ships that have already been drawn through. I am certain that the thought of viewing this phenomenon from the other side has occurred to him and if it did, he almost certainly came to the same conclusions I did. What I'm saying here is that this dilemma, where interesting things in the Astral imply the existence of more interesting things on the worlds they came from, is probably inevitable. The only way to conceivably make it otherwise is to elevate the Astral Plane's importance, make it a source of power too potent to be ignored. And that would break AD&D, which sort of needs the Astral Plane to just stay "that place that makes the Teleport spell work."

Planescape - Fantasy . . . taken to the edge.

Ukss Contribution: A lot of extremely not boring things to choose from here, which makes my decision to choose something kind of boring especially ironic. You don't need to eat on the Astral plane and you don't get hungry if you don't. But when you leave, all those skipped meals catch up with you, just like your aging. So some enterprising planeswalkers have set up restaurants near the exits of prominent Astral conduits. That sort of cynicism is . . . enchantingly human.