It Came From The Bookshelf!
Saturday, October 12, 2024
(Shadowrun) Target: Matrix
Sunday, October 6, 2024
(D&D 3.x) Magic of Faerun
Monday, September 30, 2024
(Shadowrun) Cannon Companion
Thursday, September 26, 2024
(D&D 3.x) Races of Faerun
Oh, man. These Forgotten Realms books are putting me through the wringer. I don't know what it is. Normally, I'm a glutton for lore. It's a big reason why I try and collect full sets. But there's something about this setting's lore that is aimed straight at the apathy center of my brain. It's actually kind of a mystery, because the Realms have plenty of interesting things going on. For example, this very book, Races of Faerun (Eric L Boyd, Matt Forbeck, James Jacobs), introduces the idea that the Gold Dwarves of the Great Rift ride on hippogriffs and then jump off their steeds mid-air to divebomb their enemies with specialized wingsuits. There's a whole prestige class that revolves around this activity. And somehow, it took me so by surprise that I actually pulled the Campaign Setting off the shelf to see if it was previously mentioned. Nope. Then I thought maybe it had appeared earlier in this book and I just glossed over it. This is the entirety of what the Gold Dwarf section had to say about the matter, "The hippogriff-mounted skyriders of the Great Rift are known to employ drogue wings (see appendix) and exotic military saddles." The Great Rift Skyguard wasn't even mentioned among the suggested prestige classes! You've got some dope-ass Red Bull-style shit going on and you don't even see it until the appendix. But it's vitally important that you mention five different human societies they've traded with over the last ten thousand years.
I think this might be the key to understanding my ambivalence. The way these entries are written, it's like Every Single Detail is of The Exact Same Importance. They've got this bucket-full of proper nouns and a meticulously assembled timeline and damnit, they're going to use them. . . and mumble, mumble, oh yeah, the gnomes are walking around strapped up in this medieval fantasy setting.
And by the time you're like, "hey, what was that last part," it usually moves on to the next Equally Important Fact About the World, like a page and a half detailing three thousand years of Damaran history. Who are the Damarans? Where do they live? No one can say.
Okay, that's not fair. The book says quite explicitly - the Great Dale (unrelated to the Dalelands), the Moonsea, the Vast, and a half dozen other locations that are. . . undoubtedly canonical, but I refuse to believe I was expected to come into this knowing where "the Easting Reach" was supposed to be (partial vindication: it was not in the Campaign Setting's index, and probably wasn't in the text, but it was a label on the removable map poster).
And for some reason, most other rpg settings, even the most staunchly conservative vanilla fantasy ones, don't really do this. Like, yes, you start your history at the beginning of time. And yes, your various locations have their share of baggage from The Great Capitalized War. And with enough space to play around in, it all starts to become terribly impenetrable to outsiders. But even amid the most insular, creatively moribund, world-building for the sake of world-building rpg settings, there's still a sense that things have . . . relevance(?). Like, maybe there's too much stuff on the page, but it's all being put down for a reason. Every digression or laser-focus on a picayune detail can nonetheless be traced back to something we have reason to care about.
Perhaps it's me problem. Maybe the reason I'm so aggressively uninterested in these bread-crumb trails is because I have no attachment to any of the stuff at either end. There are things in this setting that I do care about - the Dwarvish colonialism of the Vast that displaced the native orcs (unexplored in this volume) or the hypothetical good version of the Moonshae Isles that understood they are a fundamentally a different genre than regular D&D (admittedly, it would have been a real reach to expect it here) - and it's perfectly imaginable that there's someone out there who feels the same way about Mulhorand (it's Not Egypt in a way that gets a disproportionate amount of wordcount, but it also is coy about its intended genre).
Let's call it a wash. The Forgotten Realms as a whole could do more to sell itself to newcomers, but I, personally, can be a needlessly tough sell.
Now that this harmless anti-fandom griping is out of the way we can move on to more important matters - the book's frequent use of deeply problematic racist tropes. Both the elves and the dwarves have "wild" offshoots who are formerly "civilized" peoples who "descended into barbarism," losing their literacy and most sophisticated technological abilities when they went to live in the jungle. No points for guessing their skin color.
Oh no, the poor Tieflings face suspicion and discrimination everywhere they go . . . but they really are naturally inclined to criminality and wickedness.
And you better believe we get creepy, borderline-eugenics discussions of blood quanta. Half elves still explicitly operate on one-drop logic. You need to have "at least one-eighth elven blood" to qualify for the Spellsinger prestige class.
All told, it's a relatively small portion of the book, and I don't think there was any conscious malice at work. But it would just keep happening, and a lot less deniably than what you'd see in a modern product.
It's hard to put into words, because it's not as crude a matter as "fantasy race X = fantasy race Y" (except when it comes to the Roma . . . there's always a Roma analogue and in Faerun they're called the Gur). Instead, it's like the relationships between the races and the setting are governed by racist modes of thought. Human-on-human racism is wrong, but you can draw a box around a group of creatures (the demihumans) make them "white" and then create a humanoid species for each white "anxiety" about minorities. Who are the cultureless barbarians who lurk beyond the borders of civilization and seek to destroy it (orcs)? Who are the sinister followers of an ancient religion who exploit the fact that they look just like regular people to infiltrate society and weaken it from within (Yuan-ti)? Who are the inferior garbage people who are no match for a decent citizen one-on-one, but who breed so fast that they threaten to overwhelm their betters with superior numbers (goblins)?
There's kind of a double bind. You try to directly critique them by drawing a one-to-one connection between the fantasy race and its most likely real-world inspiration and you will be quite understandably (if perhaps unfairly) accused of being gross. But try to indirectly change or remove them and you run the risk of losing the vibrant culture of re-appropriations, re-imaginings, and deconstructions that grew up around them. Queer gamers have largely embraced tieflings, and so they have to stay, but at least as recently as 2003 their presence in Faerun meant it was sometimes useful for a Player Character to think like a racist.
The trick seems to be trying to thread the needle of woobifying the creatures enough that the racists are visibly disgusted (they don't like orcs, but they like the game with orcs), but not smoothing them down so much that they lose the edge that made them appealing in the first place. Goblins become the fun kind of chaotic garbage-lover. Tieflings still look like they could plausibly do crimes (sexily). And of course we cannot lose the incoherent orc screaming, but maybe it could be FOR JUSTICE!!!
Overall, I can't really recommend this book. It doesn't elevate the material, like at all, and at its best it's just more Forgotten Realms. But I reckon it would take the average gamer multiple decades just to use all the Forgotten Realms we got from the campaign setting. Maybe if you're really into historical minutiae, or you want to bully your DM into letting your gnome character carry a gun. There are some cool feats, prestige classes, and bits of equipment. The heavy aspergillum is straight-up WH40K nonsense (it's a hollow rod with a round, hole-filled head meant for sprinkling holy water, but this one is tough enough to act as a mace and can hold 3 flasks of holy water, for all your vampire-hunting needs). I'm not sure the good parts are worth wading through the dusty old tropes, though.
Ukss Contribution: The coolest thing in the book also neatly demonstrates the mind prison that is D&D-style racial essentialism. The Urdunnir are a dwarvish "subrace" (and it's absolutely unclear what this means from a biological perspective, though in terms of rules they basically have a totally new set of racial abilities). And "Thanks to the blessings of Dumathoin, the urdunnirs can walk through earth and stone as if it were air and shape metal or stone with their hands."
And, obviously, this should be a prestige class, right? I can't be the only one to see this. Call them "Deepearth Mystics" or something and they're a spiritual community that is so in tune with the earth that it gives them special earth themed abilities. That's basically what they are already, but for some reason they need to be physically different than "regular" dwarves. Their relationship with the god is something they're born into, rather than something people can cultivate. Just a tragic waste of potential which probably came about because urdunnirs first appeared in some obscure Monstrous Compendium Appendix. I have a theory that many of the high ECL "monster character" options came about because of AD&D's asymmetric monster statting, so that certain creatures that should just be regular demihumans with class levels (hags, ogre magi, drow, centaurs) are given extra hit dice and/or innate magic abilities when they become PC legal because whoever did the conversion acted on the assumption that the Monster Manual stats represented a 0-level commoner.
Luckily, I don't have to work under that constraint with Ukss and so these mystical earth-lovers can be the disciples of an obscure goblin religious tradition (as a reminder, my personal attempt to avoid falling into the same trap as Races of Faerun is to make all the vanilla fantasy small creatures - dwarves, gnomes, halflings, goblins, etc - into members of the same species, with different cultures and/or personalities).
Saturday, September 14, 2024
(Shadowrun) First Run
Friday, September 13, 2024
(D&D 3e)Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting
There's a reason I prefer to use the term "Vanilla Fantasy" over the perhaps more commonly accepted "Generic Fantasy." And that reason is The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (Greenwood, Reynolds, Williams, and Heinsoo). This is corebook-implied-setting D&D in its purest form, but also the single most specific fantasy book I've ever read. It is gleefully specific. Maybe even sadistically specific. It's got a 4-page long timeline, full of canon events, locations, and characters. Want to know when Castle Waterdeep was built and how long that is after the location of the future city of Waterdeep was first settled? This book has you covered.
There's an unapproachable grandeur here. In many ways, it's a perfect rpg supplement. And I don't use that word lightly. It's hard to imagine a book with more D&D per page. It may not be physically possible. There's a sidebar which lists 23 "Lost Empires." Later, over a stretch of several pages, we get more than 40 example dungeons. And neither of those things is even in the setting chapter. The "Geography" chapter takes up half the book and has literally hundreds of specific locations, each with their own potential rpg plot. You buy this book because you want to play a game of D&D, and it gives you a lifetime of D&D games to choose from.
It's a shame, then, that so many of these choices are basically interchangeable. That's the dark side of specificity - you can have a thousand snowflakes, each of them unique, but you need to put them under a microscope to appreciate it. Did we really need 11 fucking 'Dales? Eleven?!
I mean, yeah, probably. My nose would be growing pretty long if I tried to claim I was against that sort of thing in the abstract. The whole reason my rpg collection is this big and unwieldy is because I am exactly the sort of person to care about the nuanced differences between all 11 'Dales. However, in the context of this specific book, I'm not sure having such a thorough list was worth butchering your presentation of Moonshae.
As the DM chapter would have it, "The Moonshae Isles offer a locale with a Celtic or Viking flavor. Chult in the far south could be home to a campaign featuring primitive technology (not to mention marauding dinosaurs). Calimshan and the Vilhon Reach offer settings similar to that of The Arabian Nights. The eastern end of the Sea of Fallen Stars has a Mediterranean or North African flavor."
Or, to put it in the words of the Geography chapter, lolwut?
I mean, it's there. D&D's long history of racial coding is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but if you know that's what they were going for, you can see how they were going for it. Take Calisham. "Its people are heirs to an old empire founded by genies . . . renowned for its chauvinism, exotic markets, thieves' guilds, decadent harems, desert landscapes, and wealthy ruling class, as well its enormous population and many slaves."
First of all, yikes. Second of all, doing a ctrl+F for the word "wizard" and replacing it with the word "genie" does not an Arabian Nights-inspired setting make. We're still getting the same kind of information, presented in the same list-based format. We've still got orcs and dragons. One of the antagonist plots involves "powerful undead spellcasters (including a blue dracolich)." Almost the entire section could be transported unchanged to the vicinity of Waterdeep . . . and that's the most distinctive one. If you can find a hair's worth of difference between Moonshae and Shadowdale, based only on this book's text, you are a much more perceptive reader than I am.
It's a problem that's most apparent when the book "tries" to expand beyond its vanilla fantasy wheelhouse, but it's persistent throughout the whole thing. The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting does not give you the tools to engage the setting from a genre level. It eschews spectacle in favor of a flood of proper nouns. In glorying in the specific, it foreswears the power of the abstract. Like, maybe a list of 40+ dungeons wouldn't be necessary if it just took a couple extra pages to explain what a dungeon was supposed to be.
But would addressing those issues leave us with a better book, overall? That's a question that's tough to answer. On the one hand, yes, obviously. But on the other hand, we would be losing the beauty of a pure thing. I called it "perfect" before and I meant it. This book is the epitome of "loredump as worldbuilding." And that's something that certain playstyles can get a lot of use out of. Much like an old-school module will have a series of connected rooms, all described down to the last piece of furniture, in order to facilitate a very direct and literalist style of engagement, the Faerun Gazetteer is like an old-school worldmap, connecting those old-school dungeons. It creates space for "player skill" in the form of knowing the lore, even if it sometimes comes at the price of making its locations feel like geography-scale furniture.
Although, I would be remiss if I didn't address the fact that some percentage of this worldbuilding is less old-school "the world is established even if the PCs aren't there to see it" and more "we've got hundreds of books worth of material and if we leave out someone's favorite location, we'll probably hear about it." There are definitely areas that have been transparently Touched by Metaplot, and you can usually tell which ones they are by the fact that they are long on incident and short on atmosphere. Why does Citadel of the Raven get a longer entry than Balder's Gate? Presumably because Fzoul Chembryl was featured in more than a half-dozen novels and short stories (actually, about a dozen by now, but half of them were published post-2001).
As far as metaplots go, Forgotten Realms actually seems to use a fairly light touch. It's not quite as heavy-handed as FASA or White Wolf, and it definitely doesn't drive the whole setting, like with Dragonlance. It just sort of peeks in every now and again, as if to say, "wow, that happened." I think it might be a function of its over-abundance of detail. Oh, the Tuigan horde is invading and Cormyr has to ally with the Dalelands and Sembia to fight them off? Well, Amn and Neverwinter barely noticed. Likewise, you can have an entire Avatar Crisis, where the gods are forced to take mortal form and battle it out until they learn the true meaning of personal responsibility, and it's kind of a shrug. A few of them died, and some powerful mortals stepped in to take their place. There's a sense that none of this shit is load-bearing.
That's the main strength of Forgotten Realms as a setting - it's a world where a lot of D&D is happening, everywhere, all the time. Its weakness is that it's mostly just D&D. Wherever you go, there's a good chance that you and 3-5 of your friends are going to travel through monster-infested wilderness to find monster-infested ruins and plunder them for gold and magic items. You could also do political intrigue, slice of life, philosophical transhumanism, or even punk, but you'd be building almost everything from scratch.
As an entry point to the series, I think the AD&D boxed set works better, despite being an objectively inferior book. The 3e book has smoothed out many of the setting's rough edges and is much more dialed-in to the Forgotten Realms' voice, but I think its greater sophistication wound up making me feel more like an outsider to the fandom. Plus, the gray box had elves riding giant butterflies, which is a baffling omission from the new edition.
Overall, this is another one of those books that I admired a lot more than I enjoyed. It's something that gets the fundamental construction of a setting book exactly right while being primarily about a setting I don't particularly like. Strangely, though, I think I might be okay with reading specialized Forgotten Realms supplements about individual areas of the setting. I think a tighter focus would inspire the authors to try and justify their choices, whereas, like I said about the previous version of the setting, Forgotten Realms as a whole often acts like it doesn't need to justify shit.
Ukss Contribution: One day a year, the air god Shaundakul turns his priests into mist and lets the wind blow them to some random location, where they will reform and have to figure out what to do on their own. I like it because it's both an incredibly rude thing for the god to do and something that's probably a primary motivation for people becoming priests in the first place.
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
(Shadowrun) Magic in the Shadows
Let us open this post about Magic in the Shadows (Stephen Kenson) with the ceremonial pointing out that fuck, man, Shadowrun rules expansions really love expanding the rules. Set your minds at ease - you will need to make a lot of dice rolls, some of which are for incredibly piddly shit (after your roll to gather wild alchemy materials, you will need to make a roll for refining those materials into "radicals" and then another roll to turn those radicals into magic items) - all is right in the world.
I suppose the rules feel a little less intrusive here than in Rigger 2 and I think that comes down to the fact that we're talking about magic. You've got a rule for everything because the rules legitimately define what you can do. There's no background reality that allows you to infer the existence of quickening spells or great form spirits, and thus each new rule gives you a genuinely new thing to do that you couldn't before. It feels less onerous. At no point are you in a situation where, say, you want to jam a radio signal with a civilian transmitter that has been illegally boosted in violation of FCC regulations and the GM is like, "sorry, but there's nothing in the electronic countermeasures rules about this." When you're asking, "hey, can I use the macguffin to make unobtanium?" then "no, you can only do what the description says you can do" is a perfectly valid response.
Which isn't to say that there's no room for hard feelings and contentious rules arguments. They just mostly come in the form of power interactions. Like, can the new Adept power "Delay Damage (Silent)" which allows you to gently touch a target and then, up to 24 hours later, have them take full melee damage, as if you'd hit them full force, combine with "Distance Strike" power, which allows you to make melee attacks at range, so that you can just harmlessly gesture at someone and have them drop dead of no apparent cause?
I'd be inclined to allow it, because it's a really specialized build, basically requiring all of your starting power points to get off the ground, but I'd be a little nervous about it. Normally, I scoff at charging PCs for "natural weapons" because real weapons are trivial to acquire in all but a few very specific scenarios, but a perfectly concealable, perfectly inalienable gun does become something a bit more than "yeah, okay, you're armed in prison/the fancy dinner party/bank lobby, but so are the guards" when you can also use it undetectably and then act really shocked when your target drops dead.
On the other hand, we're talking about heist capers here. You can spec to be the perfect assassin all you want, but when the fight is against militarized corporate security because your overly-specialized ass accidentally tripped an alarm, you're probably going to want some more overt firepower.
The more interesting question is what implications these powers have for the setting? If there are people who can wave at you and make your head explode, how does this change things like the public appearances of politicians and celebrities? What is this doing culturally?
There is some talk about these issues, unfortunately it's pretty brief. We learn that mages who commit crimes are basically tortured, because the only way to stop them from using their powers is to blind them, immobilize them, and drug them. Oof. Also, healing magic is treated with skepticism by the medical community, and the main commercial applications of sorcery are extremely specialized high-tech research and trivial stuff in the entertainment industry, with absolutely nothing in between.
I'm a little disappointed, but I suspect it's an intentional choice. Shadowrun is a blend of cyberpunk and fantasy, but the cyberpunk is the senior partner in that relationship. Magic is used as a kind of anti-cyberpunk - it is small scale, bespoke, fleeting, and incompatible with most technological or industrial processes. It's a thing for anarcho-primitives, traditional communities, hermits and renunciates, and other people who don't fully participate in modern capitalism. It's extremely useful for living by yourself out in the woods, but you can't package it for mass consumption. That's probably thematic.
Though I also suspect it's a theme that's partially driven by game balance. Almost all the magic we see in the books (with the exception of the ritual magic used by the Native American Nations to defeat the United States government) has been stuff that's been relatively safe to give to Player Characters. The limitations of magic - it's rarely permanent, it doesn't scale, it needs prodigious amounts of xp - are also the rules you'd put in place to prevent magician characters from breaking the game.
On the whole, it works. I like Shadowrun's world just fine. You can be an elf ninja, using your arts of invisibility to steal from a corporation and the corporation will maybe be a little frustrated that they can't monetize invisibility for themselves, but they'll also just respond by putting hellhounds and fluorescing astral bacteria (a type of magic that can be mass-produced, but doesn't do anything but hinder PCs, so it's okay) in your way. You're never going to worry about the philosophical or political implications of high-fantasy ideas like bringing back the dead or floating sky castles because things need to stay within a fairly narrow sci-fi aesthetic. And maybe I'm wired to be more curious about questions like "can you use detection magic to observe subatomic particles" or "can sorcery and/or conjuring build a house faster or cheaper than manual labor and modern machinery?" But what genre is that? Fermi-core? Post-Scarcity-Punk? The aesthetic is narrow because it's a good aesthetic.
In the end, the best and worst thing I can say about Magic in the Shadows is that it's a great supplement if you're interested in rules-heavy low fantasy that focuses on small unit mercenaries who commit elaborate heist capers for pay. That is its wheelhouse and so long as you stay in that box, it offers a lot of fun new content - different magical traditions like voodoo or wuxing; new types of spirits like blood elementals or ally spirits (like familiars, but a bit tougher . . . if you're willing to invest obscene amounts of xp); new totems for shamans, including crab, prairie dog, and goose (putting me in the awkward position of having to decide between condemning the egregious cultural appropriation and indulging my intense desire to play a magician who gets his powers from a magic goose). I think, overall, it's probably the second best kind of new Shadowrun content. . . just behind Important New Metaplot That Will Change Everything Forever.
Ukss Contribution: "The Mojave Desert is aspected against Conjuring, making any use of the Conjuring skill there more difficult - much to the satisfaction of the spirits there."
And I don't know why, but this is such a Shadowrun detail. Like, the whole game is thoroughly American, and it can be bad like America is bad, but it has this . . . yearning. It manifests in this particularly 90s form of romanticism where somehow the goodness and the holiness that has been systematically pushed out of our capitalist economy will manifest in the land. You go out into the Mojave and experience the starkness of its wide horizons and you think "here live the gods we have abandoned for our greed."
I could make fun of them, because this is sort of thing that seems like it was included because it feels vaguely Native American, but if I'm being honest, it's something I've experienced personally.