(Shadowrun 3e) Shadows of Europe

Well, shit. It seems like the It Came From the Bookshelf! blog has a new canonical enemy - whatever government/corporate tourism council is responsible for getting people to visit Lisbon, Portugal. Not in the game. In real life. I'm not joking (actually, I am, but I'm not done yet so you have to keep playing along).

I don't blame Shadows of Europe for instigating this feud. In fact, I'm grateful to it for bringing this sinister and insidious organization to my attention. I was reading the chapter on Portugal, got to the line, "Every Thursday you can also find the traditional street market known for centuries as the Thieves' Market" and immediately lost my fucking mind. I had to know if it was real.

And it is, in fact, the case that Lisbon boasts of its famous Feira da Ladra, but golisbon.com says:

Lisbon's flea market is called "Feira da Ladra," often thought to mean "Thieves' Market" (in Portuguese, "ladra" is a woman thief) but it actually derives from "ladro," a bug or a flea found in antiques. A market of this type is thought to have been in place in Lisbon since the 12th Century, and the name "Feira da Ladra" was first mentioned in the 17th Century.

But that's a fucking lie. A rare, double-dip falsehood that misrepresents both etymology and entomology. I know, because I spent about an hour searching for a second source, and the only other one I could find is another tourism page with very similar verbiage. I checked google translate. I consulted Portuguese-English dictionaries. I searched for literature, jokes, negative hotel reviews. I even went to reddit. I couldn't find even one other person who used the word "ladro" to mean a bug. 

Did you mean a thief-bug, Lisbon Tourism Bureau?

But honestly, I needn't have bothered. Because it's an incredibly transparent lie. Oh, these bugs you're talking about, they're only found in antiques, are they? Like the kind of thing you'd buy at a flea market? Were they really selling antiques at an open-air market back in the 17th century. Is that what you'd have me believe? 

Get the fuck out of my face with this shit.

The funny thing is that google translate really does render "Feira da Ladra" as "flea market," despite translating the words individually as "fair" "from the" "thief." Which makes sense. It's just translating idiom-to-idiom. Portuguese-speakers probably just parse "Feira da Ladra" as a complete phrase and don't literally expect to encounter thieves, just as we English speakers don't expect to encounter literal fleas at our flea markets (actually, I grew up referring to this kind of market as a swap-meet, which is similarly figurative unless you mean "swapping items for cash.")

But though language prescriptivism (particularly made-up language prescriptivism) is one of my pet peeves, that's not why we're enemies now. No, the thing I can't forgive is that this is such a pointless deception.

I'm imagining some richer, more jet-setting version of myself just casually saying, "oh, yeah, I got this completely bug-free antique in Lisbon, at the . . ." ::whisper:: "Thieves Market."

And then, overhead, a cloud will morph into a bust of a mid-level bureaucrat in the tourism department who smiles down at me approvingly. I glance up and we wink at each other, secure in the knowledge that the truth about the event in question - it being a weekly occurrence that attracts far more grandmas than brigands - will be our little secret.

I look super-cool and some rube thinks, "wow, I have got to go to Lisbon." No tourism-promotion agency could ever ask for better publicity. But they had to go and ruin it.

Deception, I might be able to forgive. Incompetence? That I cannot abide.

(Anyway, if there are any Portuguese-speakers in my audience, now would be an absolutely hilarious time to inform me that I didn't dig deep enough and "ladro" is, in fact, a common word. "Oh, yeah, those ladros, they are constantly getting into my antiques, it's a real problem").

I know what you're all thinking. "Was that thoroughly hilarious and completely necessary digression the reason you took 17 days to read this book?" No. The delay was because of doomscrolling. I can't fucking help myself, even though I love reading rpgs and hate reading depressing news stories. 

Unlike the similar delay that afflicted me while reading Shadows of North America, I am not now going to claim that this cyberpunk version of Europe is somehow more optimistic than our current reality. Its vision of the continent is fucking grim. Aside from a few notable exceptions it would be in poor taste to talk about in an rpg review, almost everywhere is worse off than its real-world counterpart.

Though often in that goofy Shadowrun way. You know, the Catholic church is undergoing a behind-the-scenes schism because the reactionaries in the Curia are actively resisting a progressive pope who is attempting to reduce bigotry . . . against magic users and metahumans. Or the nation of Ireland has become an oppressive police state that serves the religious, political, and commercial interests of an aristocratic class . . . of elves.

I often wonder why they keep doing this and I'm forced to consider that maybe they're doing it because it's goofy. You can do a story about Switzerland doing ethnic cleansing and it's okay because it's not actually ethnic cleansing, it's metatype cleansing. You can roll on the racism chart and divide an NPC's "racism points" (yes, those quotes mean I'm quoting the book) between elves and trolls in a way that would be extremely inappropriate to do to real-world groups. You've got something with the shape of bigotry and which fulfils the role of bigotry, but you don't have to do actual bigotry.

Is it okay for them to do this? Hell if I know. I've not learned anything new since the last time we've had this exact same conversation. Luckily, I think we'll only have to have it once more, when I finish Shadows of Asia. I'll just save it for then.

However, I will take a moment to address some of the real-world bigotry that snuck into the book. The Roma are referred to, several times, by the g-word which is normally something I attribute to ignorant Americans thoughtlessly assuming that's simply what they're called. But this time, "the vast majority of  the authors and artists who contributed to this book hail from Europe, so the perspective is as authentic as we can manage" and that's . . . weird.

But this book's greatest sin is a kind of low-grade, possibly subconscious Islamophobia. The general overarching narrative of the book is that Europe is in such rough shape because it's coming off the aftermath of two major wars - Russia invading from the east and Muslims invading from the south.

And the reason I say the Islamophobia may be subconscious is that I think the whole driver of this particular plot is just sci-fi worldbuilding. You kind of have an end-state in mind for Europe - weakening of state power, collapse of quality of life for the masses, and an interruption in international cooperation that allows powerful corporations to divide-and-conquer - and you kind of have to find a path to there from the present.

Except that they do this thing that near-future sf and alt-history worldbuilders often do (and I've done it myself, so don't think I'm throwing stones, I'm just pointing out that the street we all live on has a lot of glass houses) where they RISK-ify borders and peoples, blobbing them together until they power scale in the right approximate ballpark. Why do I think the Muslims attack Shadowrun's Europe? Because the states to the immediate south of Europe are mostly majority Muslim.

And yet, if the origin is so innocent, why am I insisting this plot is Islamophobic? Because it's a fucking war between Islam and Christendom. There's simply no way to unbundle this idea from the colonialist and orientalist idea that all of Europe's enemies (or even the set of nations who are hostile to even one European state) are all part of a giant "anti-civilization" coalition.

(To be fair, the book does take pains to say that the Muslims might have some genuinely legitimate grievances, but it's really a band-aid that doesn't address the fundamental problems with the concept itself).

Although, in the interest of 100% transparency, as much as I'd like to say that my opposition to this plot was purely because of woke, there's an unseemly portion of my brain that simply hates the name of the hostile Muslim organization - The Alliance for Allah.

Like nails on a fucking chalkboard. But, strangely, it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly what bothers me about it.

Normally, I enjoy really on-the-nose names. If a game has a really big hole that people call "the Pit," I love it every time. 

Often when a name gives me the ick, it's because it subtly defies the rules of poetic euphony, sneaking in some ill-placed trochees or dactyls and shit. But while "Alliance for Allah" is a bit unwieldy for everyday use, I think you can fit it pretty easily into iambs, the alliteration is . . . not unpleasant, and it's got a certain visual symmetry that would work well in a typographic logo.

Hmm.

The Alliance for Allah
Needs some more coleslaw
At least that's what I saw

On the show with Phil McGraw

(If you ever wanted to figure out my accent, there's a clue for you)

Nonsense, of course, but I think I can rule out poetics as the source of my issue. I think it may be ideological after all. It's an alliance of various states that's named for the one thing the authors could be bothered to know about them. I can't help but think about the way "Allah" is technically an accurate and respectful endonym, but is often used passive-aggressively (at least in English) to exoticize and other Islamic religion. "The Alliance for God" has an identical Arabic translation, but if you went with that, it might be harder to efface the differences in motives and incentives that make such an alliance so improbable. It takes a very different sort of mind to do something for explicitly religious reasons than it does for a generically anti-western mascot. That's a worldbuilding question that demands you put some thought into it.

Which I guess is at the heart of my complaint. "Alliance for Allah," has a first draft stink to it, like it was pitched early in the process and never iterated. And that suggests a kind of carelessness when it comes to the presentation of Muslims, which is maybe not in line with FASA's company values, but might possibly reflect the limitations of their editorial resources. Even so, that lack of refinement and specificity opens the door to lazily falling back on the white-supremacist "clash of civilizations" narrative that permeates Anglosphere discussions of Islam.

c.f. Shadows of Europe, 2004.

Let me move on to one more complaint, which I don't even want to talk about because it's deeply unpleasant, but it's sort of indicative of the pattern we've been discussing - building something up through a series of logical-seeming steps without thinking about what those steps add up to.

CONTENT WARNING: The Holocaust

Apologies in advance if I seem to be too fast-and-loose here. I'm not trying to be flippant, this subject just makes me extremely uncomfortable.

So, Auschwitz is haunted. 

And under the rules of ghost folklore, this is kind of inevitable. It's also pretty inevitable that those ghosts would be dangerous to the living because that's the entire point of a ghost story - they are dangerous because they are souls in pain. 

Already, we're somewhere we probably shouldn't be. These people suffered the most arbitrary, unjust, and brutal cruelty imaginable and then, more than a century later, they're still suffering. I'm not saying nobody can tell this story, but I'm certain that goyim like me can't.

But we're not done yet. It's not just the prisoners who left ghosts behind. Some of the guards did too. For obvious reasons, the guard ghosts are mercilessly tortured by the prisoner ghosts. This all flows naturally from everything that came before, but what are you going to do with that in an rpg? Rescue a Nazi ghost?

Don't think about it too much, because we're about to get to the worst part. Because they are so dangerous to the surrounding countryside, the ghosts of Auschwitz are trapped inside an astral barrier created and maintained by an order of Catholic monks.

Sometimes, a mistake is so profound, so total, that you can't even point out what's wrong with it. They should have fucking known better. Someone should have said something. Fucking careless.

Anyway, that's 5% of the book down. I should probably say something about the other 95%. They were mostly unobjectionable, and often even good, but it's tricky to shift gears after offering such pointed complaints. In a book with a single author (or even just two or three), I probably wouldn't bother, but Shadows of Europe has eighteen credited authors and eighteen "additional contributors" across 16 different chapters, most of which felt like standalone mini-supplements with little to no connection to what I've been complaining about (that Alliance for Allah rant was a long time coming and wasn't based purely on this book.) 

I'm not going to break down the chapters one-by-one, but I am going to toss out a few things I especially liked and a few lingering questions that piqued my curiosity.

Regarding the behind-the-scenes Catholic schism. The Spain chapter suggests that the competing factions will hire shadowrunners to steal relics from each other. Which is just melting my brain in the best possible way. . . with the caveat that in Shadowrun's specific milieu, it's possible that these relics have magical powers that make them serious strategic assets and I have no interest in that particular interpretation (or, at least, no more interest than I have in any bog-standard Shadowrun plot).

But I can't help thinking about real relics, these centuries old churches that have dedicated reliquaries where they preserve human remains like the alleged fingerbones of saints and their whole value lies in the cultural, the historical, and the symbolic. And it's such an old-fashioned thing to care about. So what does it mean to hire a cyborg to steal it?

My keenly-honed writerly instincts tell me there's a fascinating story there, but I personally don't know enough to tell it (if only there were some book I could read that would explain European spirituality in the context of a sci-fi/fantasy setting that focused on unique criminal opportunities not available in the United States).

Nah, forget that last bit of griping. That's not me complaining. That's me loving something so much that I want more.

Now for something I'm not sure if I like or not - Tir Na Nog. My gut tells me that if I were Irish, I'd probably find this annoying, maybe even offensive. Your country, which you love very dearly, which has long labored under foreign oppression, has been taken over and turned into elfland.

This is something with the potential to go really wrong, to erase Ireland entirely and replace the land and its people with the magical themepark Irish. But whenever these situations come up, I can't help thinking about how in The Avengers, aliens blew up New York City.  In a world where magical shit is happening, it's not really an honor for the magic to pass you by. There's something in all of us that wants to see our hometowns crushed by a kaiju. 

The question then is whether Tir Na Nog is a satisfying version of this, for the people of Ireland. I can't really say, but I have noticed a fascinating angle. The elves who took over Ireland claim to be the direct descendents of the Tuatha de Danann . . . and in the secret expanded backstory of Shadowrun that's a more complicated and less immediately ludicrous claim then it first appears. 

There are elves that are just ordinary metahumans, whose ancestors are completely indistinguishable from the rest of humanities until c. 2012, when either they or their parents mutated in the womb to have pointy ears and long lifespans. Then there are the immortal elves, who survived since a previous age of magic. And it's mostly implied, but sometimes directly stated that events in the previous age of magic have . . . inspired human folklore.

So it's entirely possible to have a group of elvish families that are closely related to the "real" Tuatha de Danann. In fact, some of those elves could even be the "real" Tuatha de Danann. And that's a pretty interesting group of people to take over Ireland.

How do you square a country that has a history of colonial oppression with a police state run by figures from its mythic past? Are they a source of indigenous strength, to resist foreign imperialism or has the modern-day country simply been colonized by its own past? What if they don't live up to the myth, and are just regular people? What if they do live up to the myth, and it turns out they're something regular people cannot endure?

Shadowrun hedges here, acting as if there's no good reason to take the Danann families at their word, but also not closing the door on the possibility that something more is going on. Which is an approach that I find unsatisfying.

But only because I think either explanation could be interesting in its own right. An elite conspiracy whose plan is to take advantage of the return of magic to recast themselves as folkloric figures and seize political power. It's not just a political coup, but a cultural one and it works. The people (or, at least, enough of the people) go along with it. Why weren't they more skeptical about it? What are the consequences of letting this lie go unchallenged? What if the "real" Tuatha are out there biding their time, waiting to avenge this reckless appropriation?

Like I said, two good paths. Sadly, what this means for the book is that it can't include setting details that work too well with either one, for fear of confirming one and shutting down the other. It's good that the potential is there though.

There's a bunch of other stuff I liked, but this post has gone on long enough, and is all over the place tonally. Overall, I enjoyed Shadows of Europe, though I suspect it was not written for me as an American. For all its detail and incident, it doesn't get too deep into cultural differences and local mindsets. At best, they're mentioned briefly and then sort of sprinkled throughout the text in the form of persistant biases. I think that adds up to the supplement's intended audience being European Shadowrun fans who want to play in their own backyard. If so, good for them. I may not have always connected emotionally with the book in the way its authors intended, but I appreciate knowing that I am part of something global.

Ukss Contribution: The more I think about it, the more I enjoy the realist interpretation of the Danann families. There's something delightfully fucked-up about a group of immortal aristocrats disappearing for thousands of years and then one day showing up and saying, "hey, thanks for keeping up with the maintenance while we were gone, but we can take it from here now."

Fading Suns d20

Having just finished Fading Suns d20 (Bill Bridges, Andrew Greenberg, Andy Harmon), I'm left with one essential, burning, massively disrespectful question: Is this Dune?

I don't think it is, but when I ask myself the complementary question, "Is this not Dune?"  the "yes" sticks in my throat a bit more than is entirely seemly. But then, I could swap out Dune for Warhammer 40k and my dilemma is essentially unchanged. So I guess, by the transitive property, my opinion is dogshit.

"Fading Suns is basically Dune," said the guy who also thought Warhammer 40k is basically Dune.

I mean, it's medieval-European-style feudalism in space. There are sword duels that are made more complicated by energy shields. It takes place after a golden age of technology, that people destroyed in a religious war. The broad strokes are very similar.

There are nuances, though. The Emperor in this universe is politically beholden the Patriarch of the Space Orthodox Church (although, to one such as myself, untutored in the aesthetic nuances of schism-era Christianity, the Universal Church looks like standard-issue Space Catholicism) and is neither a holy figure like in Warhammer 40k nor an independent secular ruler like in Dune. The vibe surrounding the forbidden heretical technology of the prior age of galactic expansion feels a bit different. Like, in Dune it feels like society has zeroed in on its preferred technology level and locked it down, and in Warhammer 40k, it feels like nobody knows what the fuck they're doing and technology is used or not used according to a theory of mysticism that bears no resemblance to any recognizable earthly phenomenon. But Fading Suns has a church that is broadly against "technology" in general but will cynically play politics with what is and is not forbidden and there remains in society just enough technical expertise for this hypocrisy to really land. The technology that is vital for the maintenance of an interstellar empire is exempt from prohibition, so long as it is the noble houses who are using it, because of course it works that way, and everyone who's serious about power knows the score.

But the biggest difference is probably in the handling of non-human intelligent species. In Dune, there weren't any, and Warhammer 40k is all "suffer not the xeno to live," but Fading Suns is like, "White guilt? Never heard of it. Where would you get a silly idea like that? Ha, ha, ha, HA, HA!!!!" And you can tell they're not trivializing the issue, exactly, but they are very publicly working through it in a way that is uncomfortable to witness.

It's probably intentional. At least, I have no reason to believe that the authors were naive enough to have the human star empire expand to inhabited planets, displace the native species with aggressively-spreading colonies, render many of these worlds uninhabitable to their indigenous populations via terraforming, then have the scant survivors confined to "reservations" (the book's word, not mine) and somehow not draw the connection to real-world colonialism. In fact, the first time this happens in the canon history, the incident gets its own heading and the text directly focuses on how unjust it all was and how sad people were about it after the fact. So I'm inclined to say it's not an accident.

Also not an accident - the dozen times it happened in subsequent years without anyone mounting effective resistance (or even registering a sustained objection). This bad thing keeps happening, and we know you know it's bad, because you keep framing it as if it were bad . . . but is this a theme? Are you saying space feudalism is bad? 

It doesn't feel like the book is saying that, at least not consistently. The people who oppose the empire are "pirates" or "barbarians" (and hoo boy, is that term as loaded as it sounds - the book helpfully suggests some real-world ethnicities to look to for inspiration - "They can be Viking types, Mongol types, or Islamic types.") And there's not really a sympathetic rebel, outcast, or peasant-rights organization. 

I think what's going on is some combination of soft 90s liberalism and an understandable, if somewhat misguided, desire to have fun with the premise of the game (medieval Europe in space) instead of immediately deconstructing it in the core. It leads to a weird situation where, since the default assumption is that you'll be playing aristocrats and/or members of their entourage (because peasants are too thoroughly oppressed to adventure freely in this universe), you kind of wind up accept that their viewpoints and values are neutral. Aw shucks, those aliens keep getting very nearly wiped out and forced onto reservations . . . if only there were a nicer way to take over their planets. And gosh, who would want to attack us? Barbarians, no doubt. They're probably just jealous. By the way, did you know that the priests of our oppressive technophobic religion usually have a Good alignment? "Alas, a few are evil." But "most of them are good."

And I have to take a moment here to crow about being completely right about alignment as a mechanic. Whether priests of the religion that supports the rule of the nobles who enslave the peasants and genocide the aliens can be good or are bound to be evil is a complex and subtle question. The average priest has no power to change the system (at least not without running afoul of the violence it uses to maintain itself) and they do dedicate most of their life to helping people (ministering wounds, tutoring basic literacy, pleading for clemency, etc), but the aggregate effect of the system as a whole is deeply harmful, and that can't happen without the active participation of the priests at every level, even (or maybe especially) the lowest. Perhaps "good" and "evil" are reductive labels, that obscure as much as they enlighten. Maybe we are all just trying to navigate a complex world, and a human landscape that is shaped as much by culture and circumstances as by individual agency, and we should extend each other grace, because morality is a maze (but not too much, because that maze has a lot of obvious dead ends). 

Or, you know, you could add a tag to the character's stat block that clears up that ambiguity and lets everyone know the official position of the editor. 

I am being, of course, a massive grump about this, to an almost unforgiveable degree. It is entirely missing the point of a romantic epic to start agitating against the enabling social structures behind all these beautifully jobless aristocrats and their good-natured bootlickers. Space feudalism lets me play as a futuristic techno-knight in gleaming ceramsteel armor. I can paint a coat of arms on my spaceship (or, at least, my squire can round up an artisan to do it for me). I shall pitch woo to my courtly love and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with my comrades against the deadly symbiote threat. 

I get it. I promise. I guess I'm being such a cynical pill about it because here in the real world, I am on my last nerve re: authoritarianism's bullshit and stuff like the space colonialism and the "barbarian" vs "civilized" dichotomy and the peasants being hopelessly oppressed for hundreds of years piggybacked on that to get under my skin. Fading Suns real sin is just being a perfectly serviceable roleplaying setting that never quite connected with the part of my brain where spectacle overcomes my knee-jerk criticism.

In an attempt to redeem myself, I will now engage in some thoughtful, careful criticism - I could not find any rule in this book for how psychic or priestly theurgist characters regain wyrd points (mp, basically). I'm pretty certain that there was supposed to be a daily refresh, because whenever powers are discussed, they are spoken of as if they were something you could use every day. But this is not, strictly speaking, a foregone conclusion. D20 Modern had Action Points, which only refreshed at level up. 

Other than that, I'd say the system works fairly well. I liked the new category of feats, Social Feats. The Noble, Guilder, and Priest classes get virtually no other features, but there are enough new feats that it should be pretty easy for even high-level characters to feel distinct, and as much as they might feel drastically underpowered in combat and utility compared to the D&D analogues like Soldier (Fighter), Knave (Rogue), and Living Weapon (Monk), it does feel like they were aimed at 3e's neglected interaction niche. 

Overall, I liked this book. My favorite part was, embarrassingly, learning the canon ending for the Emperor of the Fading Suns video game, but I can always appreciate a fully fleshed out new world with more lore than can comfortably fit in a core book's pagecount. I don't think I'll ever run an rpg set in this universe, but next time I play the video game, I'm going to be able to enjoy it on a deeper level than I ever have in the past.

Ukss Contribution: Like most rpg splats, the five noble houses fall into some pretty basic archetypes. Li Halan is the religious house, Decados is the sneaky house, Hawkwood is the honorable house, al-Malik is the technological house and the Hazat are the military house.

It's this last one in particular that interests me. Normally, I have nothing but scorn for "the warrior guys" but there was a detail about the Hazat that took my scorn and turned it back against me. It is such a purely concentrated form of everything I dislike about the warrior ethos that I can't help but admire its nastily satirical edge.

"When the Hazat begin their military training at around five, they are trained for a command position. During the Emperor Wars it was not uncommon for 12-year-old Hazat knights to lead forces of hardened veterans."

The arrogance. The cruelty. The uncalled-for institutional humiliation of adult professionals as an inseparable part of a much greater war crime. This is the sort of depiction that aristocrats deserve.

(Shadowrun 3e) Sprawl Survival Guide

 The Sprawl Survival Guide is exactly the sort of science fiction content I always claim to want, a ground-level view of the most excruciating minutiae imaginable - what is it like to buy a bus ticket, how do people shop for groceries (and the more you can imply about the extant agricultural infrastructure, the better), what are the schools like, how do people consume popular entertainment (and yes, I will take the behind-the-scenes industry shop talk in the process), what is the current state of health care regulations, etc and suchforth, et al ad infinitum. . .

And I was absolutely right to want that, because the Sprawl Survival Guide was positively delightful. I feel completely vindicated right now.

Although, it would be a smidge dishonest for me to act like I learned something new here. I first read this book 20 years ago, and I distinctly remember, 18 or 19 years ago, writing a forum post to the effect of, "This is one of my all-time favorite rpg supplements. I love how it goes over the picayune details of Shadowrun's culture and society. Liking this sort of thing is going to be a part of my personality now."

The question I have to deal with now is whether the book holds up. Is it still one of my favorites? And that's a bit of a thinker.

I still very much enjoy this type of book. And of the books I own, Sprawl Survival Guide is the one most like this type of book. I appreciate and respect its curation of subject matter (for the most part, some of the stuff was a little too "this is criminal information, directed at criminals" for my taste, undercutting the book's best feature - offering a rare glimpse into the mindset of Shadowrun's normies). I enjoyed reading it, even the parts I think should have gone into a different supplement.

But I've changed. My interests nowadays trend more towards the esoteric or, failing that, towards performative spectacle. I still really want this type of book, but I want it to be about Eclipse Phase's chromosphere-dwelling Surya, or Champoor, the Nighted City from Exalted. 

Which is to say, Sprawl Survival Guide remains a top Shaowrun supplement, but Shadowrun as a whole has slipped down my list of top rpg settings. Not through any fault of its own, mind you, but just because (3rd edition at least) is a vision of the future that feels . . . aged.

Of course, this is the inevitable fate of all sci-fi, and I wouldn't necessarily say that Sprawl Survival Guide has aged particularly badly.  Yeah, it does the thing that all fin de millenaire sci-fi does where it gets the shape of our basic information infrastructure wrong (somewhere along the line, I've lost the ability to relate culturally to pirate television broadcasts, despite the fact that they were objectively badass), and one of the in-character sections is narrated by "a big-shot travel agent," and for some reason it thinks that the only reason our major railways would have to avoid switching to monorails is that they're "dinosaurs." But except for the monorail thing (which, I'm sure, even in 2003, informed people would have told you was wrong) that's just standard retro-future stuff. 

Ironically, it's the stuff they get right that's more alienating. Online shopping, the internet of things, your personal electronics spying on you for major corporations - this is stuff that used to feel like sci-fi sizzle and in now just completely mundane.  And that feeling is something that this book's particular brand of "everyday sci-fi" can't quite recover from. At one point, one of the Shadowland commentators is interrupting an IoT sales pitch to talk about corporate spyware and another commentor, called Skeptic, replies "Oh, please. There's a limit, you know. Next you'll be telling me the faucet dispenses microscopic tracking devices with my water."

And it's like, one thing if you're talking about fanciful day-after-tomorrow technology "oh, they think the microphone in their futuristic voice-activated refrigerator is going to act as a de facto surveillance device and report back to the manufacturer to help them assemble a more accurate advertising profile, Skeptic is right, that's too paranoid. People would never stand for it." But it's a conspiracy theory that hits differently against the backdrop of our everyday reality. There's some compelling anecdotal evidence that this does happen and the corporations' defense is just . . . that the behavioral profiling they do through other data streams is so uncannily accurate that they don't need to listen to your microphone. So Skeptic is dismissing a theory that, best case scenario, is only slightly more cynical than confirmed reality.

Which isn't a great place for a cyberpunk setting to be. Another pertinent example is the section on health insurance. This book was written pre-ACA, and so technically they have a slightly more cyberpunk healthcare system than us, based purely on recapitulating their present, but they don't properly capture the bleak horror of the health insurance industry. "Sometimes the corp grunts don't have it so good either - health insurance companies have everybody by the short hairs and they know it. They're not supposed to cancel policies when people get sick with something expensive, but they've been known to do it."

Yeah, that's cynical. Yeah, it paints a picture of ruthless capitalist excess. But you left out the part where they use an algorithm to automatically deny claims and then have a corrupt doctor sign off on those denials, forcing the sick and dying to pursue costly and stressful legal action to avoid being sent into bankruptcy, despite doing everything "the system" told them was necessary. Or the part where medical expenses are the driving force behind corporate America's hijacking of the generational transfer of wealth, forcing the vast majority of people into a permanent state of economic precarity.

And this normally the part where I take a step back from being so cynical and ask myself if I really want an rpg supplement to get into this kind of political quagmire. But this time, I think . . . the answer might be . . . yes?

These are, in fact, some of the game's core ideas. There is a real thematic tension between "corporate espionage in the form of your Alexa recording everything you say" and "corporate espionage in the form of heavily-armed mercenaries busting into a competitor's office and rummaging through their computer files."

Or between "a blue-collar worker delays seeking medical attention for a suspicious-looking mole (because they can afford the copay if it turns out to be nothing, but not the deductible and out-of-pocket if it turns out to need expensive tests and/or treatment, but if it's nothing, it would be better to wait for it to clear up on its own, and thus the financially responsible move would be to wait until it's clear that it's not nothing before getting the doctor involved)" and "half-conversion cyborg gets elective surgery to install retractable roller skates into their feet."

It's funny. After reading Target: Wasteland, I mused about the possibility of seeing the Shadowrun setting from the perspective of the winners, and this book is as close as we've gotten, but it has also made apparent to me the fact that shadowrunners are not the losers. They're actually in a poorly-defined in-between place (if only there were some metaphor to properly capture this state of not-quite-light and not-quite-dark) where they're functionally powerless next to the unaccountable capital that employs them, but, as the no-questions-asked hatchet men of the elite, they probably make enough money to avoid the most depressing parts of the system.

Which, incidentally, makes the lifestyle mechanics a little dubious. Not entirely bad, mind you, just . . . of questionable utility. Like, what's the story purpose of allowing PCs to play at the "Street" or "Squatter" (or even "Low," really) level when they're walking around with half a million nuyen in chrome (or a level of magical talent that would let the write their own ticket at any university in the country or special-forces-level combat and infiltration skills, etc)? Obviously, mechanically, it's because the player wants to save money for more widgets and they don't mind the GM describing their character's lodgings as a slum. But when it comes to the narrative . . . you can tell the first part of a "fall from grace" or "risen from humble beginnings" story, but you can only stay there for so long before it looks like a stagnant character arc.

Luckily, this book provides a pretty good hack to the lifestyle rules. It separates character lifestyle into six separate tracks - Area (i.e. the quality of the neighborhood), Security, Entertainment, Furnishings, Space, and Comforts. This reintroduces a lot of the bookkeeping that the Lifestyle system was originally intended to abstract away, but has the advantage of allowing for more nuanced depictions of a character's lifestyle. Now, you can live in a massive warehouse in the commercial district (high Space, medium Area, low everything else. Or a cramped downtown apartment in a building with a doorman (high Area and Security, low Space). Or, more relevantly to the discussion at hand, in an absolutely swinging pad in the middle of the old neighborhood. You know, real gangster shit.

I think, from a fictional perspective, that's probably the sweet spot for shadowrunners - successful criminals with a lot of cash and a lot of swag, but no ability to permanently buy themselves a ticket off the grind. It doesn't make much sense to me for them to be doing this out of true desperation, at least not more than once or twice. If running the shadows buys you the same lifestyle as a cashier at Stuffer Shack, you're probably better off trying to work at Stuffer Shack.

I mean, I'm sure there are SINless criminals who find their way to that economic niche - muggers of opportunity, petty drug dealers, etc - but I'm not sure they'd make for an exciting roleplaying game. You could potentially do some pretty funny satire along these lines - make minimum wage, no benefits, getting shot at for 60 hours a week, on behalf of the world's richest people - but the line as a whole would have to lean into it more.

That's kind of a weakness of Shadowrun, as a game. It's steeped in genre. It exists because it was fun to imagine mixing genres. But it never really embraces genre as a mode of play. To wit - the reason shadowrunners are special, the thing that carves them out a criminal niche and makes them valuable to the megacorporations, is the fact that they lack System Identification Numbers. They are the ultimate in deniable assets, untraceable by the system because they were never officially registered as existing at all. And yeah, okay, that's a good near-future thriller trope . . . or it would be, if the game rules didn't make getting fake IDs a huge pain in the ass. And even if you get one, they're in constant danger of being discovered (like, seriously, it's a coin flip each and every time someone checks your ID, except that the high end of character ID ratings overlaps with the average rating of identity verification devices). 

Getting on plane requires a SIN. Shadowrunners going international is an intended mode of play (methods of travel get a whole chapter to themselves). Getting arrested at the airport should be an extremely rare way of ending an adventure. This all adds up to the notion that acquiring and using a fake ID is a casual activity for a career criminal. Just hop on down to the crime mall and buy yourself some fake passports in bulk, because you never want to use the same one on two different jobs. But that's not how the game works, because its fundamental design philosophy does not allow things to be simple just because it'd be convenient for the story. If something seems hard (like fooling a sophisticated computer network with fabricated data) then the rules have to reflect that it's hard.

Oh, wait, I was building to something before I got distracted. Sprawl Survival Guide is the closest we get to seeing Shadowrun's version of capitalism from the perspective of an average person, and it's pretty great, but it doesn't quite understand the opportunity and the responsibility it's been given. This is where the rubber meets the road, re: the setting's overall cyberpunk satire . . . and it misses the mark. There is a certain level of cynicism, and of social critique, but it's unclear what the game as a whole is trying to say.

And I think, regrettably, it's because the game as whole is not trying to say anything at all. That's why I can no longer count Sprawl Survival Guide as one of my all-time favorite supplements. I love that it focuses on small details. I truly believe those details are vital for making a fictional world feel alive. But now that I've been given almost everything I could have possibly asked for, I can't help but notice the world's wasted potential.

Let's call it five gold stars, with the understanding that on this blog, the stars go all the way up to plutonium.

Ukss Contribution: The freight trains of the 2060s, perhaps as a result of stubbornly refusing to become monorails, still have people hopping on and hitching rides cross-country. I'm sure this happens wherever there are unattended train tracks, but it feels to me like a timeless bit of Americana. I'm going to include it out of a perverse sense of patriotism.

DragonMech

Oh yeah, this is the good stuff. The kind of fantasy I live for. DragonMech (Joseph Goodman) hooked me right away (like, literally, from the first paragraph) and never let go.

Which was probably a pretty predictable reaction, even from the title. My habits and preferences are pretty easy to divine - I almost always like it when a fantasy game does at least one thing different from mainstream D&D - but please, set aside my irrational seething hatred for things that I deem "too popular," because that would be selling DragonMech short. It actually does at least three or four things different from mainstream D&D.

The first paragraph of the introduction, the one that sold me on the game, does a pretty good job of capturing what I loved about it:

"The Dark Age has begun. With each passing day, the moon grows larger in the sky, to the point where it is now literally falling to earth, particle by particle in an excoriating lunar rain that flattens castles and kills anything foolish enough to walk the land of Highpoint by night. The moon is so close that lunar monsters can drop to the surface, whether by choice or as involuntary byproducts of the lunar rain. Day by day, the lunar dragons swarm in ever-greater numbers, while other aberrations stalk the surface. If the lunar rain doesn't skin you at night, the lunar dragons will eat you during the day."

So, obviously, the solution is to move underground and build giant fantasy mechs. This makes complete and perfect sense.

And look, I don't want to be one of those guys that acts like the mark of good media is that it ties up nitpicky "plot holes," but I have to admit - the making sense part of the worldbuilding actually appeals to me a lot. Clearly, there's an endpoint you're aiming for - a mech-based medieval feudalism-style society where "mechdoms" (areas under the political control of a patrolling mech) fill the same niche as kingdoms (areas where the oppressive military leader controls territory by, like, patrolling with horses and shit), but what I love about DragonMech is that it does an exceptionally good job of justifying its predetermined destination. The Lunar Rain is a technological justification for mechs, people fleeing to the underground realm of the dwarves is a social justification for mechs, and most importantly, the giant unearthly monsters from beyond the sky are a genre justification for mechs (perhaps to the point of being the foundational genre justification, like, yes of course we need to have mechs to fight these kaiju, that's what mechs are for).

Although, it's possible to go too far in praising the setting for justifying itself. Sometimes, it over-justifies itself. One of the things we learn about the world around Highpoint is that, prior to the moon falling to earth, it was unusual in another way. "Wildly varying seasonal water levels. The seas . . . rise and fall by more than 30 feet over the course of the year."

I would probably have loved this detail if the massive and unmanageable seasonal tides were simply foreshadowing the moon being a dick, but actually they happen for unrelated hydrological reasons and their Doylist purpose seems to be to justify a world where "This inability to establish permanent settlements in naturally advantageous places contributes to the planet's intensely nomadic lifestyle."

I.e. the people of Highpoint, even before the Lunar Rain, were predisposed to moving around (because they needed to chase or flee from massively shifting water levels) so they adapted quite well to the mechdom lifestyle, where their king's castle can just wander around from day-to-day.

Mr. Goodman has, unfortunately, committed the cardinal sin of worldbuilding - answering questions nobody asked. I mean, I get it. We've all done it (as penance for calling you out, Mr. Goodman, I will confess that I have privately worked out what happens when a human and a goblin have unprotected sex in the world of Ukss). But now there's something that is simple and elegant on the face of it - a military dictatorship of peripatetic mech knights - that becomes baroque and confusing the more you learn about it.

It's not that big a deal, in the grand scheme of things. We get some regrettable creatures out of it ("amphibious life is more common") and a couple of pretty cool locations (like the Wet Desert, a low-lying area that become a shallow sea in the high-water season and a scorched salt flat the other half of the year). But, I mean, the moon is right fucking there. What is this nonsense about "wide seasonal temperature swings at the poles, which trap and then release huge quantities of arctic ice on a regular cycle?"

I think what frustrates me about this particular setting detail is that it's not a ubiquitous style flaw. The book is perfectly capable of relying on audacity in lieu of over-explaining. For example, the crown jewels of the mechdoms, the city-mechs, thousand-foot-tall war machines with a permanent population of thousands, home to shops, farms, and hangars full of lesser mechs . . . these things were built and continue to operate without the aid of magic. They are a completely mundane invention, powered by steam engines and gears.

The book looks me directly in the eye, and stone-faced tells me a huge fucking whopper of a lie. And I love it for that. Never before have I so wanted to kiss a book right on the lips.

Which maybe sounds like I'm sending mixed signals. Do I like it when a setting justifies itself or not? And I don't know what to say. I like it when it provides a cool justification for things that are cool. And I like it when it shows me something so cool that any justification would fall short. So I guess I mostly just like cool things. 

DragonMech is cool. I like it.

Mostly. Aforementioned hydrosphere minutiae aside, it has an ice-cold take on orcs and half-orcs (the kindest thing I can say about it is that it was completely unremarkable for a fantasy rpg in 2004). There's a nomadic, wagon-dwelling group called [something one letter off from the G-word]. There is an uncomfortable distinction drawn between "advanced cultures" and "barbarians." And I have extremely complex and uncomfortable feelings about the part of the backstory where refugees fleeing the Lunar Rain invaded the dwarven kingdoms and displaced the natives from their ancestral homes. I don't think it would have read as a dogwhistle when it was first written, but it sure as hell does now. There's nothing that I haven't overlooked in other fantasy games, to the point where it's maybe unfair of me to single DragonMech out. But I think these occasional WTF?! moments stand out more in a book where I'm generally having a pretty good time.

This is the first time I've ever read this book (yeah, yeah, I know - that's part of the motivation of this project, to help keep me on the right side of line dividing "hobbyist collector" from "hoarder") and my worst fear was that it would be something novel, but ultimately bland, which just welded fantasy mechs onto a paint-by-numbers vanilla fantasy setting, and it could kind of be like that sometimes (mostly when it's talking about the nature-loving, forest-dwelling magical elves and the . . . sigh, orcs), but mostly it was a unique fantasy world where the mechs aren't just a gimmick, but an essential part of the fantasy stories it wants to tell. An absolute gem.

Ukss Contribution: Lots of weird and wild stuff to choose from, just how I like it. Undead mechs. Priests with the Engine domain. A variant of the clone spell that creates a clockwork android double instead of a biological clone. 

However, my final choice comes from a purely hypothetical situation, where the GM in a non-DragonMech game decides to incorporate mechs into an existing campaign (this scenario was anticipated in the GM-advice chapter). One of the suggestions is a "strange humanoid-shaped mountain in the distance is actually a buried mech, ready to come to life."

I love weird-looking mountains, and I love even more when weird shit pops out of them.

(Shadowrun 3e) Mr Johnson's Little Black Book

 In the realm of reading hundreds of rpg books in a row, there is nothing quite as disheartening as being blindsided by a GM advice chapter. It's my own fault, though. When I chose Mr Johnson's Little Black Book as the next Shadowrun book on my list, I sort of stopped reading the back cover blurb approximately half way through. Oh, it "provides dozens of locations and contacts for both Shadowrun gamemasters and players." Neat. It's going to be like a monster manual, except the monsters all have jobs. Those are my favorite type of book to read.

Had I read a bit further, I could have modulated my expectations just a little bit more - "It also features advice on setting up and handling shadowruns." Maybe I'd have interpreted it as roleplaying advice and not adventure-creation advice, but forewarned is forearmed, nonetheless.

I'm not exactly complaining, mind you. First of all, the middle three chapters were exactly what I was expecting and I wasn't disappointed. Some of the material was a little basic (it was probably not necessary to explain to me the concept of a bar), but it was a useable cast of characters - a sleazy tabloid reporter, a "parasecurity expert" who was like a supernatural cat lady, a thrill-seeking DocWagon paramedic; a decent cross-section of functional and useful settings - a Lone Star precinct, a bank, and Ultra Suede, a bar so named because all the furniture and some of the walls were upholstered with suede, which is the funniest bar-related bit of rpg trivia since I learned the Fat Candle was vanilla scented; and a bunch of adventure ideas, most of which were not creepy at all (likes - moving a recently dead body to stage a suicide, retrieving a macguffin from a burning building; dislikes - the one where you help a guy fake his death and then arrange a phony "haunting" of his ex-girlfriend and maybe it's a bit hypocritical to feel that way when the game will frequently have you kidnap and murder people, but I'm sorry, it's straight up stalking and it feels uncomfortably real in a way Shadowrun adventures usually don't). 

So, you know, I don't feel like I was bait-and-switched at all. 

I can also forgive the unexpected GMing advice because as dull as it could be to read sometimes (and to be fair, this GMing advice was slightly less dull than average), it's also necessary. This book isn't just fiction, it's a functional object. If I'm going to GM Shadowrun, I'm going to need to convincingly portray a shady criminal negotiation, something of which I have very little direct experience. Plus, there's all the usual stuff about scheduling sessions and pacing the narrative that everyone has to learn somewhere.

The only real problem I have with this book is that it continues Shadowrun's tradition of being extremely weird about race. When discussing random encounters, one of the reasons given for a traffic stop is "driving while ork."

And that's fucking weird. It's very clearly calling out law enforcement for racial discrimination in the form of coming up with transparent pretexts to over-police an oppressed minority. I've got a lot of contemporary and near-future action adventure games and very few will just come out and say "cops are racist." On the other hand, you can't just replace the word "Black" with the word "ork." You just can't. If you do, you may find yourself in an awkward position where the canonical traits of orks map on a one-to-one basis to vicious real-world stereotypes. It makes you wonder what that find-and-replace was really intended to mean.

Probably nothing. I think the fantasy races were meant to act as a kind of oven-mitt for the handling of hot topics. You can talk very frankly about a sensitive issue, because there's nothing real at stake. "Driving while ork," amiright. Good thing there's nothing comparable that happens in real life, perpetrated by a group I personally identify with. I might have to get defensive and contrary, were I put in that situation. Luckily, that's not the case. Man, Lone Star sure is riddled with institutional bias. That's some compelling antagonist texture.

Like I said, it's weird.

Overall, this is a slight, but useful book. I might have preferred something bigger, weirder, and more specific, but I always think that about everything. For all that it could occasionally be generic and abstract, it's good to get a ground-eye view of the Shadowrun setting. We see the inside of a Stuffer Shack, a middle-class apartment building, and a luxury hotel. We learn that there are still human firefighters, but also autonomous cargo trucks. Also, there's some stuff about a criminal subculture in here, which was kind of cool, I guess. I'll definitely consult it next time I run a Shadowrun game.

Ukss Contribution: The Sea Mall. It's constructed partially underground near the coast and has big windows that look out underwater. It's the sort of fantastic location that's vaguely plausible enough to maybe exist in real life and that always tickles me.

Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook

I am sitting here reflecting on the Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook and trying to think of the details that stand out to me, without the need to directly consult my notes. The main thing I remember is that there were five "F/X" systems - Biotech, Mutations, Nanotech, Cybernetics, and Psionics - and they all had their own dedicated mechanics. And I guess this is one of the eternal game-design debates. You want to give characters cool abilities, but do you need to group them by their effects and allow their fictional differences to be merely cosmetic (i.e. your lightning bolt and firebolt both use a generic "energy blast" rules template, just with different tags) or do you give each and every thing with a distinct fictional presentation its own unique rules (i.e your "lightning bolt" power works differently than your "firebolt" power because you are trying to capture the difference between lightning and fire)?

I'm going to be a bit of a coward on the issue and say that each approach has its place and both can work really well in a system and setting that plays to its strengths. And then I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the "separate mechanics for each power source" approach doesn't work particularly well for this book because, out of the five different power system, only the nanotech rules are actually fun.

I really wish I was more familiar with Gamma World as a franchise, because the GM chapter said the d20 version was the seventh version of the game and I'm not sure if the clunkiness in the rules comes from six editions of legacy baggage or from the d20 conversion being an inelegant means of adapting a perfectly functional system that had already been refined through a half-dozen iterations. All I can really say about the F/X chapter is that it felt like more work than I was willing to do to play in the Gamma World universe.

Which brings me to the other thing that sticks out clearly to me, absent my notes - this book has some uniquely bold ideas, but they are presented in such a way that I can't be sure they're meant to rise to the level of a setting premise. Or, to put it another way, the one thing the Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook most unforgiveably neglects to do is sell me on Gamma World. Yes, I'm willing to play some post-apocalyptic adventures, but is that what this book is? A genre guidebook?

Now, I don't want to sell the game short. I felt something special here, lurking at the edge of my awareness. Even when the setting chapter opened with nine pages of completely generic descriptions of terrain (yes, please, post-apocalyptic roleplaying game, explain to me what a mountain range is and why it might act as a barrier to communication and trade), I got the feeling it was going for something different than d20 Apocalypse. But, you know how sometimes you'll read an rpg and it will have a completely unearned sense of its own importance and you'll occasionally have to roll your eyes at the way the text swans around, as if in awe at its own (unwittingly anodyne) audacity? Well, this book was kind of the opposite of that.

There are a couple of Big Ideas here that, if they were more deeply explored, would lead to a unique post-apocalyptic setting. The first is that of the "multaclypse." There wasn't just one apocalypse, there were dozens or hundreds that happened more or less simultaneously. Nuclear exchanges, bioengineered plagues with 0.00% survivability, orbital kinetic strikes, grey goo nanoswarms, rogue AIs wrecking the infosphere, genetically engineered super soldiers, domestic robots rising up against their owners. All of these things happened at once, each crisis making the others worse. 

And the multaclypse has a great explanation in the backstory - technology had gotten so advanced that the expense to ramp up to world-destroying superweapons was within the reach of small to mid-sized political clubs (or even to well-off individuals). That's a fucking sci-fi premise. Knee-cap your neighbor before they transcend. You don't even have to particularly hate them. If they're annoying as a human, that's not going to change when they're an immortal god machine.

It's such an interesting idea, but I can't help feeling like it's used here merely as an excuse for the world to be a blank slate, and for there to be weird creatures in the wilderness. There's a giant bat/lion hybrid that flies around and eats clothes. Just clothes. It can subsist on bolts of cloth, but finds plant fibers, yarn, thread, rope, etc completely inedible. Probably because it incorporates symbiotic, intelligent nanotech into its digestive system. Presumably, before the Final War, it had some specific purpose. But now it's just a wacky encounter. 

Now, far be it for me to condemn something for being "wacky" or even "wacky for the sake of wacky." But this is a book that spent a page and a half telling me what "grassland" is. Not "mutant grassland." Not "strangely organic yet unmistakably metallic robot grassland." But rather "dry grassland" and "tropical grassland." And I guess the intended vibe was "hexcrawl through a land where nature is healing" which is a fine post-apocalyptic vibe, to be sure . . . but one which had absolutely nothing to do with the unique and meritorious qualities of the book's introduction.

It's the same story with the book's other bold idea - soultech, semi-organic AI that was so cheap and easy to make that the ancients literally put it in everything. And I do mean literally. "No one wondered what the toaster and the refrigerator talked about, in epic debates carried on as nanosecond timing errors in monitored communications. No one noticed bank accounts being started by elevators who plated the stock market with literally inhuman skill, trading on the knowledge they heard discussed within them . . ."

Gawd! This is so interesting, and it's buried in the "Robot" entry of the book's bestiary. I think about a post-apocalyptic world where those things make up the bulk of the survivors. Where the toaster mourns its fallen frenemy, the refrigerator. Where the day-trading elevator slowly goes mad, trapped at the bottom of its shaft because the building above it collapsed. Where you can explore an ancient ruin and everything is alive and everything has a voice, but none of them want precisely the same thing.

I'm left asking myself what a world made from this book's boldest ideas would look like. And I'm forced to conclude that it would not look all that much like the world presented in this book. The "campaigning in the Gamma World" section talks about "overall campaign style" and it's a very general discussion about hack-and-slash, community building, or travellogues. The discussion about technology centers entirely around varying the rarity of laser weapons and shit.

And the dread realization finally dawns on me - it's not a kitchen sink, it's a toolkit.

There's nothing wrong with being a toolkit. I've spent the last couple of months praising d20 Modern for being a functional toolkit system (heck, it's even powering Gamma World d20). But, at the end of the day, toolkit systems are meant to disappear into the campaign prep work. They rely on the GM to make something memorable and exciting. I really don't think that's what Gamma World was going for.

The book is not unsalvageable. I think you could build a really cool rpg setting based on its three core ideas:

Anything has the potential to be alive and self aware.
Nothing is too goofy to exist.

Power scaling is whimsical, at best.

I'm imagining a world where the legacy of Earth's original abiogenisis has been swept aside by the apocalypse and humanity's obscene and blasphemous technological creations have moved into the millions of vacated ecological niches. Maybe a slogan - "the freak will inherit the Earth." (And if there are any "pure strain humans" left, why, they'll be the biggest freaks of all). There might be a forest of solar panels, inhabited by robo-fauna who glean energy from the "trees" and chase each other down for predatory data transfer (and if you're a biological interloper who lacks the proper ports, well, at least it's generally less painful than being eaten by a bear). There could be vast prairies of feral GMO food crops, leading to a resurgence of terrestrial megafauna because invasive frankencorn is calorically dense enough to feed massive herds of escaped theme park dinosaurs. And scattered throughought the land are ruins of the old world, still mysteriously active, and constantly spawning new horrors. Because the technology for the hard takeoff singularity still exists, in hardened bunkers powered by stockpiled nuclear materials or deep geothermal generators. With no one at the helm, it just keeps doing random shit, but it's possible these sites may be captured and repurposes, so in a sense the Final War never ended. And maybe your desperate band of survivors will one day be faced with the same dilemma that destroyed the world - do you preemptively frag your neighbor just to stop them from becoming the world's most obnoxious god?

Along the way, you'll see things you never imagined you'd see, talk to things you never imagined could talk, and become something you never imagined you'd become. Maybe you'll grow a couple extra arms, make telepathic contact with an intelligent horse, and team up to stop an ancient elevator from reinventing capitalism. Anything's possible and it doesn't have to make sense because the context that would have explained it has died along with the world.

Or, at least, that's how I'd do it if I wanted to differentiate Gamma World from a generic post-apocalyptic setting. The book occasionally dips its toes in those waters. The bestiary contains cannibalistic rabbit-folk and a pony express powered by a species of horse/centipede hybrid. The "cryptic alliances" section included the Bonapartists, uplifted animals who indulge in Napoleonic-era cosplay and real military conquest. There are "neo-cavemen" living in the ruins of France. It's not all Community Behavior Maps and realistically grim negative mutations. 

And yet, overall I think the Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook commits the cardinal sin of weird fiction - it lacks conviction in its own weirdness. The bulk of the book is written as if it expected you to play grounded characters telling grounded stories in a grounded setting. It treats its weirdness as spice to be sprinked in judiciously instead of the star attraction. And I'm not sure I can entirely forgive it for that.

Ukss Contribution: I do have a lot of good choices for stuff to steal, though. Some of it, like the insider-trading elevator or the scavenger who was enraptured by the rainbow reflections of ancient CDs, would be hard to contextualize in a fantasy setting, but even with that limitation, I still need to work to narrow it down.

I think my absolute favorite thing was the weird dynamic between Hoops (intelligent rabbit-folk) and Hoppers (giant horned rabbits that have animal intelligence but which are large enough to be ridden as mounts).

"Hoops, despite their carnivorous habits, will not eat hoppers. They view it as slightly disgusting, akin to a human eating a gorilla. Hoops also never ride hoppers; indeed they seem to find the existence of the hopper species to be something of an embarrassment."

I really like that they acknowledged it. So, I guess I'm technically picking two things, because they are both necessary for my true pick - the sheer awkwardness of the situation.

(Shadowrun 3e) Survival of the Fittest

In Survival of the Fittest (Steve Kenson) we see a clash between the unstoppable force of my endless hunger for more dragon gossip and the immovable object of the dragons themselves being major buzzkills. This is a series of adventures where you will interact socially with multiple great dragons! And those interactions will almost universally consist of them interrupting your stealth mission in order to threaten your life.

I guess that's just part of the business when you're a professional criminal, though. Like ooh, why are all our meetings so fraught with intimations of violence? I don't know, maybe because you're mostly meeting people in the planning, execution, or aftermath of an armed robbery (or kidnapping or industrial sabotage or what have you). The main difference when dealing with dragons is that you can't plausibly fight your way out of a bad situation.

It still feels kind of bad, though. Will not a single one of these motherfucking lizards at least try to put me at ease?

Well, to be fair, Hestaby tries. And I think the implication is that this effort is why she eventually wins in the emergency dragon battle-royale probate hearing. She cultivates the kind of relationships that lead to her employees canonically resisting Lofwyr when he offers history's biggest bribe.

It's a side of the job they never tell you about. You've been secretly manipulated by a dragon to commit a half-dozen highly dangerous international heists and she tells you it's all part of a scheme to embarrass her fellow dragons as part of a contest of cunning and influence, but there's only one task left to perform - travel to the deepest reaches of the astral plane to steal the spiritual essence of a magic memory gem from the sole shareholder in the world's largest corporation - and just as you think you've succeeded, he shows up and offers you an immense bribe ("Even a billion nuyen is chump change to a being of his wealth") to throw the contest to him at the last minute.

Maybe it's a tempting offer, but a shadowrunner has a code - never betray your employer, do the job you were hired to do. And that's why the comments section in Dragons of the Sixth World confirms that Hestaby won the contest. Because of honor. And the priceless value of a good reputation.

Or maybe it's just a plot hole. I think the encounter with Lofwyr was meant to be a morality test and in the context of a role-playing game, those are always a bit strange. Because, as a GM, all you can ever offer the players are words in a conversation. "Do this and I'll say your characters get rich." And good words for the characters aren't necessarily good words for the game. You say the characters have "fuck you money" and that's basically telling the players there's no reason to keep having adventures. Why would a newly-minted billionaire risk it all on a shadowrun?

And yet, these temptations do sometimes work. Players like to get into the head-space of their characters. Of course my desperate criminal guy is going to take the deal, never mind that it destroys the premise of the campaign, because my guy doesn't know they're part of a game. The trick for a conscientious GM is to give them an alternative that allows the players to pretend their characters would prefer the choice that lets them keep playing the game.

I think, in this case, the alternative is that Hestaby winning the contest means she has the credibility and political capital to work towards bridging the gap between dragons and the shorter-lived metahumans. Whereas a victory by Lofwyr means he will continue using the Jewel of Memory and the collected knowledge of all dragonkind for no cause other than the glory of Lofwyr. By turning him down, you're not just avoiding early retirement, you're taking a stand for a safer and more just world.

Unfortunately, these stakes are not explicitly spelled out anywhere in the adventure chain. Hestaby kind of alludes to them, near the end, when she tells the PCs that "she believes that dragons and other intelligent races should be able to work together toward mutual goals." But even to the extent that you meet her halfway and read that as her being a principled dragon reformer, it rings a bit hollow when you're coming off six consecutive death-defying jobs, most of which involved being menaced by one or more of her draconic rivals, and she's just now revealing that you've been working for her the whole time (and more importantly, that the rules of the contest mean that all those previous death threats were bluffs). 

I think that's a very different conversation if you're having it at the beginning of the adventure. Then, as you're jet-setting all over the globe, stealing jobs from local criminal mercenaries, you're not just kidnapping the head of Ghostwalker's cult or rearranging the feng shui of the HQ of a corporation with ties to Lung, you've got a basic buy-in to the motive behind these acts - busting the glass ceiling of dragon society so that the inexplicably solitary female dragon can have a chance to be less of an asshole to the little people. Keeping the ruthless hoarder from the levers of political power is worth turning down a billion-dollar bribe. Preserving your reputation with potential customers after you quit your job is definitely not.

Thematic incoherence aside, I had no particularly strong feelings about this series of adventures. Most of them would be pretty typical shadowruns, were it not for the involvement of the great dragons and I guess that's all right. There's probably only so many ways you can present "commit crimes for money," particularly if your reader (i.e. me) is prone to engaging with the material from a high level of abstraction. I did enjoy the mission where you had to stealthily engage in unsanctioned interior decorating, even if my damnable abstraction couldn't help but notice its structural similarity to every other heist published for the line.

On the metaplot front, I'm moderately satisfied. We get a fairly protracted glimpse at the dragons' internal politics, and one or two juicy nuggets of gossip. In the closing fiction, Hestaby didn't seem entirely disinterested in the prospect of mating with Lofwyr and I'd kind of love to see the in-universe paparazzi get ahold of that story. Also, while visiting the metaplanes, the PCs interact with a (time-looped? magically reconstructed memory?) version of Dunkelzahn and, assuming the vision was accurately historical, it's revealed that he willingly sacrificed himself for the good of humanity. 

I'm not sure I entirely approve of that last bit. I prefer a depiction of Dunkelzahn that's slightly more reminiscent of Mountainshadow (his more . . . pragmatic Earthdawn identity). But I can't deny that it's a tantalizing hint to secrets not yet revealed.

Two weeks ago, I was peeved that I read Dragons of the Sixth World before Survival of the Fittest because it was out of publication order. In retrospect, I don't think it made any difference. Despite its pitch, I never got the sense that this book was depicting the elaborate game of move-and-countermove that is the heart of draconic politics. Each of the adventures was part of Hestaby's plan, to be sure, but there didn't seem to be any particular reason for the same group of shadowrunners to do them all (and, in fact, one of the chapters potentially has the characters replaced halfway through), nor did I ever see any compelling evidence of a rival dragon's competing plans (the closest we get is when Celedyr hires the PCs to steal from Rhonabwy's horde, but even then Hestaby tricked him into doing it). It didn't turn me off the book or anything, but it was enough to cool my hype to mere enjoyment.

Ukss Contribution: At a certain point in the adventure, the PCs will have reason to interrogate a member of the Hong Kong triads. Naturally, the gangster is uncooperative. However, if the PCs use magic or coercion to get answers, he will spontaneously burst into flames. 

Like, damn. Organized crime operates on a code of silence, sure, but using magic to ensure that your front-line soldiers can't even bargain their way out of torture . . . that's fucked up. Even a little bit of information compartmentalization would have made such measures completely unnecessary...

Which actually makes it a great bit of characterization for a terrifying criminal gang. Some of Ukss' gangsters will be similarly extreme.