Sunday, January 26, 2025

(d20 Modern) Cyberscape

 One of the big advantages of stubbornly reading your entire rpg collection (and of foolishly collecting random books out of a misguided sense of completionism) is that occasionally you'll come across a dark horse that is much more interesting than its bland title and generic back-cover blurb make it seem. A big disadvantage is that sometimes, as is the case with Cyberscape (Owen K.C. Stevens), said dark horse will be too short to fully develop its best ideas. I guess that's why it's a dark horse, though. If it were twice as long and consistently as good as its best parts, it wouldn't have been so easy to overlook.

At its outline, Cyberscape is a book that hews closely to the standard d20 Modern gameplan. It offers a broad but shallow cross-section of different approaches to its core idea (cybernetic implants) for purposes of allowing GM to pick and choose a la cart, which elements they want to use to build their own custom setting. And to be clear, it does nothing particularly special with the format. It's exactly the same sort of book as d20 Past or d20 Apocalypse, except the subject matter was narrower and it only had one sample setting instead of three. . . 

Although, in fairness, there's a bit at the end where it suggests mixing "Cyberrave" with some of d20 Modern's other mini-setting, and while the suggestions are only a paragraph each, half of those paragraphs are sublime:

Cyberrave + Bughunters: Privately contracted mil-sf among the stars as cybernetically-enhanced mercenaries fight hostile aliens to work off the debt from their implants and vigilante gangs defend the slums because defending against an alien invasion is just another hollowed-out public utility that turns a profit by immiserating the poor.

Cyberrave + Wasteland: Megacorporations control the few oases where human life is still possible on a blasted Earth.

Cyberrave + Star Law: Humanity survives its cyberpunk era to become a peaceful and democratic interstellar civilization, but government agents must be on constant guard for corporate revanchists who threaten to turn isolated planets into new capitalist hellscapes.

Also, one of the suggestions was to throw Urban Arcana into the mix, but that was just an even more on-the-nose version of "store-brand Shadowrun.

Which sort of captures the duality of d20 Modern as a whole. It has some absolutely delightful high points, but the median experience conveys a kind of stoic pride in offering the blandest take possible. And I don't mean that as an insult . . . exactly. In a way I kind of admire is imperial ambition to put the d20 flag in the exact mathematical center of every genre's bell curve.

Case in point: the "Computer Networks" chapter. It adds d20 rules for the genre-standard inexplicable virtual reality internet and the deckers . . . um, "node-runners" who specialize in it. And you can just copy-paste all my wool-gathering from Shadowrun's Matrix supplement. The vrnet adds nothing to anything, but it's not uniquely pointless. It's something that you've come to expect in every cyberpunk game and it's here and it's presented in a pragmatically middle-of-the-road way (node-runners have "avatars" instead of physical bodies, and instead of some elaborate alternate ruleset, the avatars have their own character sheet and basically just do normal adventuring stuff in the vrnet . . . the obligatory online night club even has washrooms, used exclusively for "private encounters").

What makes Cyberscape a dark horse is that the workhorse stuff is peppered with inspired details. There's an entire chapter of "Alternate Cybernetics" that fit better into different fantasy or sci-fi milieus - golemtech, nanotech, etc. And one of the alternatives is necrotech. As in, you use the stats of the cybernetic implants, but instead of being advanced technology, they are chimerical grafts taken from dead bodies and animated through necromantic rituals. 

In true d20 fashion, the book gives bad advice on how to use this information - "Necrotics are never common even in the most magic-heavy campaigns." Are you fucking kidding me? That should have been the entire book. It's the sort of idea that can anchor a campaign setting.  The best way to use it is as the world's central fantastic conceit.

Luckily, the comic-book-style cyberpunk-meets-horror practically writes itself. In addition to the standard implants, there's a bunch of new implants, many of which involve attaching a vampire's internal organs to yourself to gain its powers (gaseous form, charm gaze, energy drain). And necrotic implants don't heal naturally. The main way to repair them is through "coffin nails," cigarettes enchanted with dark magic. They'll fix your superhumanly strong zombie arm, but still give you lung cancer.

Sometimes you are invited to witness perfection. I'm imagining a world where vampires are an endangered species, hunted not to protect humanity but to provide raw materials for high end weapons and luxury enhancements for the super-rich. A mercenary monster hunter for hire takes a long drag off a cigarette, knowing that it's slowly killing them, but also that it's that very death energy that gives them the edge they need. 

And that's not an isolated incident. From the description of a prestige class: "As the cyberwarrior grows more experienced, his cybernetic devices literally grow with him, eat away at his biological organs and replacing them with more effective cybernetic alternatives."

I mean yes, please. Or on the goofier end, you can buy a full-body conversion kit that changes your character into a centaur or a mermaid. In between is the "proverb chip," a purely grid-filling implant that exists to boost your Wisdom score, but because of d20's weird legacy attribute names is called a "proverb chip." The book is unclear about how exactly it works (it's "programmed with the common sense of a lifetime of experiences") but I'm imagining that it monitors your environment and occasionally prompts you with a relevant proverb. 

Aside: the implications of this are unfortunately not explored, but there is canonically a necrotic version of the proverb chip, which I guess means that in a game world that uses that option, your character can pay a dark sorcerer to desecrate the body of a holy man, remove the portion of the brain responsible for their wisdom, and then magically torture the flesh back to a semblance of life so that it can provide you with spiritual and emotional guidance. And if there's a worse thing to have surgically implanted in your skull, I'd be very interested to hear what that might be.

Overall, Cyberscape was a conspicuously slight book that had a lot more to offer than its meager pagecount could deliver. The parts of it that weren't awesome were nonetheless forgettably competent, and that made for an extremely tolerable reading experience. I'm comfortable calling it an essential companion to d20 Future.

Ukss Contribution: With all the praise I've heaped on it, the temptation is for me to take something from the necrotech section, but there was something I liked even more. Ironically, it was from my least favorite chapter in the entire book. After describing a thoroughly predictable vrnet, the book explores variants, one of which is a magical internet that allows hackers to connect to the astral plane and access offline devices. Which would be cool enough, but then the book does the thing that I always hope books will do and pushes the idea just a little bit further - "as a result it can even access print works with no electronic component - even novels can be hacked."

I love, love, love it when magic defies physical intuition while still following internally consistent rules. It makes no sense to hack a book, but you're using an information network and books contain information so . . .

In Ukss it will also be possible to hack printed books via the Astral Web.

Monday, January 20, 2025

(Shadowrun 3e) Target: Wastelands

Target: Wastelands has me thinking about the power of attention. We have this enormous ability to perceive the world, but only a little bit at a time - a bright light shone through a peephole. To be perceptive, aware of what is happening all around you, is largely a matter of sheparding your limited attention, making sure it is pointed at the right things at the right time, and that over time it makes a comprehensive survey of everything.

World-building works the same way, but even more powerfully, because when you're building a fictional world, what you pay attention to becomes real.  Indeed, the longer you focus on something, the realer it becomes. Go back to one location or subject often enough and you'll discover new textures and nuances and relationships. And in service to this new complexity, a sort of fuzzy penumbra will start to form at the periphery of your attention, things that must be true, in order for all the detail to be possible, but which are not quite real, because you've never turned your attention to them.

In a way, this is kind of the curse of science fiction. It is often about changes in society, or the world as a whole, but the bulk of those changes must exist in the penumbra because narrative, as a form, focuses its attention on specific characters. The starship Enterprise is real, because that's what the show is about, but the utopian society of the broader Federation is vague and in flux, because it's only the background that supports the show's various plots.

The reason I call this a "curse" is because a lot of the time our peephole into a sci-fi setting is centered on characters and situations that are at odds with the world. You've created a utopia, but the only things that are real inside that utopia are the restless adventurers who can't be content with utopia. Or, to bring it closer to our topic of the day - you have the decaying late-stage capitalism of cyberpunk, a world driven by consumerism and conformity and corporate control, but your attention is mainly aimed towards criminals and outsiders, who don't directly experience the bulk of the world's disfunction. I've read how many of these books now and I still don't know what it's like to apply for a job or rent an apartment or go to an emergency room in the Shadowrun universe.

Which speaks to the power of attention. I can infer, from the penumbra, that these things must be pretty bad, but I don't know. This discussion is also, believe it or not, actually, specifically relevant to Target: Wastelands in that this book turns our attention on parts of the Shadowrun world I've never seen before.

But more than just a bunch of new locations, this book turns our attention to a category of places that had hitherto been neglected - the physical terrain of the planet Earth. "Wastelands" is a bit of a perjorative title, but it really just means "places with a low population density," which makes the terrain the star. This is the book you use if you want to tell stories of "Shadowrunners vs nature."

At its worst, it could be a bit "Wilderness Survival Guide," but at its best, it was about people, and the way they adapted to their environment. The challenges here are not purely physical, but are sometimes cultural. You're not just going to the desert or the arctic, but to meed the Bedouins or Inuits. I can't say for sure whether the book did them justice, but it was nice that they were there.

But what I found most interesting about Target: Wastelands was the way it expanded the setting's penumbra. Megacorps have WMDs. Warfare is a professional sport. Space is a lot more active than I'd have previously assumed, though I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with an off-world population that is canonically just large enough to support a single mafioso (actually, it's unclear how many other people work with Lee Calder to "[run] a good share of vice at Apollo and Icarus," but whoever he's working with is probably not officially in the Mafia), but it helps flesh out a tech level that's been tantalizingly vauge thus far in the series.

What's becoming clear is that there is a tier of technological power that is beyond the mercenary equipment shown thus far. People live in space. There are space prositutes (who have to be discreet, due to the small size of the communities, but nonetheless are able to carve out a living). Megacorporations can build underwater cities. Shiawase Atomics controls multiple fusion reactors. There is some serious edge of the singularity shit going on. Or, at least, I have to assume there must be, in order for this book to make much sense.

And I really wish I could turn my attention that way, focus on what the system looks like to the winners, not just the outcasts. What are these corpos scheming for

Obviously, it was never a realistic possibility in a book that purports to be about "hostile environmnets," but the very fact that the powers that be are making a profit off these places suggests that their reach is a lot longer than I'd previously assumed.

Ukss Contribution: One of the new pieces of equipment you can buy is chainmail socks to help protect against snakebite. I have to assume that "titanium micromesh" is a more practical than it sounds as a clothing material, but I like how weird and specific a precaution it is.

Monday, January 13, 2025

(d20 Modern) d20 Apocalypse

About a week ago, I started playing Horizon: Zero Dawn.  Wednesday morning, I started reading d20 Apocalypse (Eric Cagle, Darrin Drader, Charles Ryan, Owen K. C. Stephens). It's not something I planned on happening, but I can't shake the feeling that it's significant. A video game, where you play a heroic wanderer in a post-apocalyptic world. An rpg sourcebook that aims to help you create post-apocalyptic worlds for heroes to wander around in. Is this serendipity? Do I just have the end of the world on my mind? Or is it just a weird coincidence?

It's that last one, definitely, but it's the sort of coincidence that gets my brain working. So I'm not going to do the obvious thing and try to compare them. They're trying to do different things. However, I am now thinking about setting an rpg in the Horizon universe. Could I use d20 Apocalypse for that?

And the answer to that question is . . . "sort of." It has rules covering the traversal of ancient ruins, mounted combat, overland travel, and the barter economy. So it definitely brings value to the table. You're mostly going to want a weird combination of d20 Past and d20 Future, but d20 Apocalypse adds a bit of necessary spice.

The book works better if you're trying to recreate Fallout (because of its rules for fallout) or Mad Max (because of the Road Warrior class and new rules for doing reckless stuff with cars) but that's only to be expected. The post-apocalyptic genre had a different vibe in 2005, one shaped by the existential threats that seemed most pressing at the time. 

Although, with the benefit of hindsight, I think the mid-aughts were a particularly fallow time for the genre. It wasn't an idyllic time by any means, but I can't think of a time in my life when the end of the world has felt less imminent. My early childhood was in the waning days of the Cold War, and those duck and cover drills made nuclear war feel like a real possibility. And my teenage years were at the turn of the millennium, which didn't carry a particularly plausible threat of global destruction, but did get people talking about the end of the world, more or less constantly, as if the universe were designed to end when the Christian calendar reached a nice, round number. And, of course, everything that's happened since the pandemic has felt like the prelude to a collapse in the global order. But 2005 . . . I guess the biggest apocalyptic anxiety I personally felt was the worry that some black swan event would come out of nowhere and wreck our shit - an undetected asteroid, an escaped bioweapon, a distant gamma ray burst, that sort of thing. Whether those fears were directed towards the right thing, I'll leave as exercise for the reader. It's entirely possible that my experience was not universal.

However, if I take it as a lens for examining d20 Apocalypse, I can sort of bend facts to make it fit my narrative. There are three mini-campaign settings in this book and only one of them feels like it's expressing any sort of anxiety.

The first setting is "Earth Inherited," the least religious rapture story anyone has ever told. All the notably good or evil people are whisked away to heaven or hell (respectively) and the world is left to "the meek" who are "noted for a lack of faith or belief in almost anything of a spiritual nature." Meanwhile, angels and demons are using the Earth as a battleground for their final celestial war.

It's too much of a mess theologically to be particularly offensive and too inoffensive to be particularly interesting, but it does have the advantage of being set in the not-too-distant future, so human beings have access to "advanced weapons, cybernetics, and mecha." It's not nearly as Neon Genesis Evangelion as you're imagining, but it could potentially be made into the good kind of trash entertainment if you're willing to heighten its absurdities. Lean into the morally uncomplicated violence of big machines vs the demonic hordes and the humanist soap opera of the central "rage against the heavens" theme.

But there's probably no version of this campaign that can properly be described as "anxious." That's what separates meaningful post-apocalyptic fiction from trash post-apocalyptic fiction (no slights on trash intended, mind you). In this case, it comes down to a basic failure to understand the role of eschatology in the Christian faith. The original Book of Revelations might be summarized (half-assedly, by me) as "Our oppressors control the whole world, but have hope - even the world's not going to last forever." And the modern-day rapture-theology that mutated out of that is essentially the same thing except that the "oppressors" in this case are the objects of right-wing cultural resentments, and they don't so much "control the world" as they maliciously continue to exist, despite the right wing's very clear preference that they do not. Revelations then becomes a revenge fantasy against a secular modern world that refuses to let religious reactionaries be in charge. And further, even beyond that, there's a branch of third-hand postmodern rapture fiction that is extremely anxious about the possibility that the right wing might be correct about the nature of God, and that we're all doomed to live through their revenge fantasy.

If you're going to tell a meaningful post-rapture story, you're probably going to have pick one of those three lanes. "Earth Inherited" doesn't come close to any of them, and it's an open question how much of that is attributable to the fact that 2005 was a little too late to be jumping on the millenarian rapture bandwagon. It would be immensely helpful to my thesis if it was a lot, but it's much more likely a result of WotC being risk-adverse in its portrayal of real religion.

The second setting is "Atomic Sunrise" and it's got a little bit of anxiety to it - "A rogue organization, friend to none of the great nations, detonated a nuclear warhead inside an American city and in the anger and confusion that followed, a larger war could not be avoided." But even that anxiety is just as I said - a black swan event. I remember having that conversation, in the post-cold war window where even our biggest fears were tainted by hubris. "What if something tricks us into using our nuclear arsenal accidentally?" Because, obviously, we were much too enlightened to think of them as viable weapons of war (although, to be fair, there was also parallel talk of developing ways to use nuclear weapons in limited wars, now that disarmament had been rendered obsolete by America's eternal victory over the communists).

On these matters, "Atomic Sunrise" is fairly agnostic. It's not quite like the previous chapter, which misses the point entirely re: its central disaster, but it nonetheless fails to take a strong political stance. It makes a very straightforward promise - roleplay in a world ravaged by nuclear war - and it delivers on that promise in a very straightforward way. It hits the exact right tenor for a generic book that is merely providing a scaffold on which to build more specific games, but outside that use case it's pretty forgettable.

The final setting, "Plague World" is the worst of the three, and by "worst" I mean "best." It's like someone once heard the theory that alien invasion stories sublimate the guilt felt by colonialist societies by allowing them to imagine themselves in the role of the victim and then instead of doing literally anything with that, they instead decided to keep adding themes until the allegory was unrecognizable. 

The short version - Aliens invade Earth, overcoming our defenses with their superior technology. In order to reduce the human population and clear the way for their cryogenically suspended colonists, the aliens unleash terrible bioweapons. A mysterious private organization, convinced the governments of the world cannot defeat the aliens through force, builds a series of "Rip Van" chambers to cryogenically preserve an elite group of experts who will emerge and rebuild civilization after humanity unleashes its WMDs. Except that time never comes because alien nanotech was too good at targeting advanced weapons. So it would seem that all hope is lost, but then the aliens' biotech backfires, mutating to target the invaders' systems as well as Earth's. Foreseeing the loss of their technological advantage, the aliens then genetically alter themselves to become powerful predatory monsters, losing their intelligence in the process. Eventually, after 300 years, the orbit of the last alien ship (who's crew was long dead because they could not dare to resupply from the infected Earth) decays, triggering the Rip Van chambers to open and release the PCs into a ruined Earth where humanity clings to survival, the aliens rampage as near-mindless beasts, and remnant bioweapons still linger in the ruins of once-great cities.

It's total nonsense, of course, but I am almost perfectly balanced between thinking it's the interesting kind of nonsense and thinking it's the boring kind of nonsense. I suppose execution is really going to count for a lot, but I'm not sure how I, as a GM, would want to run this setting. The obvious campaign model - PCs emerge from the tubes, become adventurers - strikes me as the weakest possible entry point, but if the PCs began as regular future humans, what's the angle? I could see comedy, horror, or political intrigue, but not in a form that's useable right out the box.

But that's d20 Modern all over for you, isn't it? It's a series that's very generous about offering you suggestions, and very onerous in burdening you with the work necessary to bring those suggestions to life. That's honestly one of things I like best about it. It's a big toolset and a mandate to tinker. d20 Apocalypse remains true to form.

Ukss Contribution: The barter rules refer to various tables that categorize everyday items and assign them a Trade Point value. One table was all about food and it had a category called "Cheer Food."

"Luxury foods from before the apocalypse - candy bars, coffee, cans of soda or beer."

I like this detail quite a bit. It's very human. I'm sure I'll be able to find a place for it.

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

(Shadowrun 3e) Target: Awakened Lands

I find myself faced with a test of my basic pettiness. Should I judge Target: Awakened Lands on what it is or do I judge it on what it could have been, if it had followed the hypothetical path teased in the introduction? Because what it is is a guide to the Sixth World's version of Australia, with a few tidbits of extra information thrown into a brief second chapter. But what it could have been is a sourcebook about "the places in the world of Shadowrun that are deeply affected by magic. . . Australia . . . Amazonia, Cambodia and possibly even a few places like Tibet."

I must confess a bit of disappointment. That other book sounds really interesting. What I can't figure out is why you'd even bring it up. The only thing I can think of is that the books' titles and synopses were announced to the community before the books were actually written. Then, you get a 64-page chapter for Austalia and it's just as Captain Chaos says: "I quickly realized that I needed to allocate more storage space to the Land Down Under than I expected." Oops. 

Though I'm a bit curious about what sort of file format Shadowland is using. I have to assume that the information that appears to us as plain text and still images is actually, in setting, a fully immersive VR experience. 

In any event, I guess I should focus on the book that actually exists - Shadowrun's Australia supplement. And by that standard, it's fine. One of the effects of an increasingly globalized economic system is that everywhere starts to feel a bit like everywhere else and that's something that's reflected in the text. You've got powerful megacorporations, urban sprawl, organized crime, and essential public services decayed through privatization. It's all very comfortable if you're coming in from a Seattle-based game.

The main difference, the thing that makes Australia an "awakened land," is the Outback, its accompanying folklore, and the fantasy nonsense that was invented to flesh it out. Of these, the best part is the folklore but that has the unfortunate side effect of requiring naked cultural appropriation to use effectively. It's actually kind of funny. When discussing Aboriginal magic, the text-within-the-text says, "we don't have any Shadowland users with inside knowledge of Australian magic and a willingness to share that knowledge with us. So I've gone to a secondary source - a text put out by Pentacle Press called Into the Dreamtime by Dr. Richard Cowan."

Once more, Captain Chaos, in his role as moderator of a fictional message board, articulates something that rings very true to the process of developing an rpg. Doing research for a game about Australia, you seek to create fantasy elements based on native Australian religion and traditional stories, but because of the deadly legacy of colonialism, the natives don't actually trust you with that information (and probably wouldn't approve of you making a game about it), so all your knowledge must be mediated by foreign scholars.

From a design perspective, there's one thing this book needs to be (assuming it couldn't go back to being the book's original pitch). It needs to be a new fantasy setting, nested in the overall Shadowrun setting. You're going out into the Outback and having magical adventures, with challenges and stakes that reflect a distinctly Australian conception of magic, separate from the corporations-and-rules-based-magic of the broader Shadowrun world. That's what makes it worthy of being released under a specialized title - "Target: Awakened Lands" instead of "Shadows of Australia."

However, from a moral and political perspective, it was probably always irresponsible for the book to try and be that. It therefor makes the reasonable compromise of paying lip-service to Aboriginal beliefs but being so vague about them that it seems extremely unlikely that you'd accidentally debase something sacred. I couldn't say for sure, because this is not a subject I know a ton about, but I think the worst thing you can say about this book's presentation of Indigenous Australians is that it's completely consistent with its presentation of Indigenous peoples of other continents. There are a couple new metamagic techniques, but nothing requiring new rules for the game.

Which just leaves the invented fantasy nonsense. Australia is known for its dangerous mana storms - Fortean weather phenomena that can cast spells on those caught within. It can rain frogs or make a rain that turns you into a frog (or, I suppose, rain frogs that turn people into frogs). It can be a fog that intoxicates anyone caught within. As far as rpg random charts go, it's a pretty good one, but it never answers the question "why Australia?" Near as I can tell, it's because Australia has a lot of room for these storms to happen in. Likewise with the other new astral phenomena - astral shallows, where even mundanes can see into the astral plane; alchera, which are physical spaces that phase in and out of existence, and which usually have some spiritual mystery at the heart of them; mana ebbs and flares, which change the force of a caster's spells.

All of those things are very useful new tool's in the GM's box, but they don't really build on a theme. "Go into the Outback and weird shit will happen." Okay, fair enough. The locations and characters in Australia's overview are compelling enough to want to use them, but at the end of the day, you're still playing Shadowrun.

The next chapter, "Awakened Sites" is interesting enough, but it rushes through things that would really have benefitted from more time to cook. We learn a little bit of what we might have seen in a Cambodian supplement - nagas, merrow, and other sentient awakened creatures have moved into the ruins of Angkor and are rebelling against the human government - but this plot mostly has the effect of making me resent the fact that this book didn't get a whole Cambodia chapter.

Overall, this book was fine. It's very comfortably in the middle of the curve for Shadowrun setting content. I was hoping for something a bit weirder, which challenged the main game's genre, but I suppose I had no real reason for expecting that. So, yeah, I could see myself running a game set in Australia, but I probably won't.

Ukss Contribution: One of the example mana storms turned half a village's population into rabbits and the other half into dingoes. Then, when it passed, it changed the survivors back. That's an impressive level of horror and an even more impressive level of social awkwardness.

Monday, December 30, 2024

(d20 Modern) d20 Past

 Well, now, what have we here? We started with d20 Modern, we proceeded to d20 Future, and now we're going to finish up with d20 Past (James Wyatt and Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel). We now have d20 rules for every conceivable point in time.

Although, playing in the past seems to mostly involve not using some subset of the modern rules. Set a game before cars, don't use the driving rules. Set it before modern medicine, lose access to the Surgery feat. Maybe just ban the techie class for any game set before the 1990s.

d20 Past only covers that part of the past that is technically part of the modern period (1500-1945) and suggests that if you want to play a medieval (or earlier) game you should just use D&D, but there really doesn't seem to be any reason you couldn't use an even smaller subset of the d20 Modern rules. . . assuming you actually need to. Most of the core book's ranged attack feats are compatible with bows and crossbows, and there's plenty of nuance to melee combat. The main thing that's missing is feats, talents, and class features that focus on riding animals. Unfortunately, d20 Past fails to correct that. You can play a cowboy or dragoon, but you can't actually do any fancy riding tricks. A bit of an oversight, to be sure, but at least there are naval combat rules suitable for any period from the classical to the contemporary.

I am, however, being a bit misleading by suggesting that d20 Past is making a serious effort at extending the game to the entirety of the past. It's only 96 pages long and while that's arguably enough for a serious rules-focused supplement, this particular book instead continues the d20 Modern tradition of including multiple alternate settings.

So far, the alternate settings have been one of the best part of this series. Not necessarily because any of them are particularly ground-breaking, but because of the way they encourage you to look at the game's rules - this is a system that's meant for rules-hacking and worldbuilding. There's something special about that. It's how I always used D&D, but it's nice to know the authors are explicitly cheering me on.

The best way to look at d20 Past's three sample settings is as the gaming equivalent of soup stock. By themselves they make for a pretty unsatisfying meal, but they serve as a base to which you can add other ingredients and whatever you wind up making is going to owe a lot to that original flavor.

The three settings are "Age of Adventure" (17th century, inspired by Dumas and pirate fiction), "Shadow Stalkers" (late 19th century, and inelegantly split between Victorian horror/mystery and the American West), and "Pulp Heroes" (1920s-1930s, and really, it bit off more than it could chew re: genre). Their chapters are almost identical in length and they're all structured roughly the same way - campaign overview (including a brief discussion of which d20 Modern rules you shouldn't use), antagonists/monsters, exactly three new classes, and wrap up with 2-3 short adventures. Taken as a whole, they are all pretty mid, but each one has a few highlights that would tempt me to come back and use this book as a reference.

"Age of Adventure" had the book's best adventure - a bit of courtly intrigue based on an actual historical incident, The Affair of the Diamond Necklace. and it probably could have supported an entire 96-page rpg supplement all on its own. It is perhaps unfair to compare the wholly fabricated stories in the rest of the book to the complexity of reality, but it was the only adventure in the book to feature a fleshed-out antagonist and compelling supporting characters. Next to it, all the others seemed a bit perfunctory.

The "Age of Adventure" also probably had the most essential collection of classes - Musketeer, Shaman, and Sorcerer. None of them especially stood out to me as being notably great, but as a set they expand the possibilities of the d20 Modern core more than their counterparts in either of the other chapters. Which makes sense, really. As the earliest of the historical settings, it's the farthest away from the core's assumptions.

"Shadow Stalkers" has the advantage of being a direct prequel to the core book's "Shadow Chasers" setting (somehow, in the intervening 120 years, they graduated from stalking to chasing), and it was moderately thrilling seeing the origins of the Fellowship (think - store brand version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Watchers Council). The Mesmerist has the best flavor of any of the book's extra classes, losing points only for having its first level be the weakest level-up option since the Commoner Class in the DMG. Also, while it wasn't as strong as the diamond necklace adventure, "Dead Men's Hands" is about a vampire who comes to an old west mining town and starts picking off the gunslingers and card sharks one-by-one, and that's a pretty great setup.

Finally, "Pulp Heroes" is hurt a bit by having the broadest genre of the three settings, but racing a Nazi expedition to the Fountain of Youth is more or less the Platonic pulp rpg adventure.

Politically, d20 Past does okay for its age. It explicitly calls Manifest Destiny a "racist view." It makes more of an issue about female characters than would be considered best practice these days, but its conclusion is "They should be able to choose whatever occupation, class, or advanced class they please, although their choice may put them outside the norms of society." I'm ambivalent about the suggestion that you remove the penalty to Disguise for women posing as men, mostly because I suspect "disguising yourself as another gender" is a game mechanic that should be consigned to the dustbin of history, but I can't deny that a woman disguising herself as a man in order to access male opportunities is a classic genre trope and I wouldn't want to deny players the chance to play out that fantasy.

(And I am absolutely not going to touch "Slave" as a background occupation. I am entirely too white for that discourse).

Overall, I really liked d20 Past. It's the least generous and least essential d20 Modern book I've read so far, but it delivers value from its very existence. The cover alone screams, "hey, dingus, you can use our rules to play Victorian occult detectives, WW2 drama, or fantasy pirates." And that reminder alone is worth the price of admission. Everything else is just bonus.

Ukss Contribution: It's funny. This book is probably the closest any book has come to my tehcnological and cultural assumptions about the world of Ukss, but that mostly means that all the best stuff is already there in the setting's background. So I'll choose the thing that diverges most from the vanilla fantasy canon - in the Age of Adventure setting, ghouls can transform into hyenas. It's fitting - carrion-eating undead becoming carrion-eating animals - and it's an unusual fantasy image. I'm not sure if Ukss' hyena-shifters will be undead, but they will definitely be anthropophages. 

Thursday, December 26, 2024

(Shadowrun 3e) Threats 2

Say what you will about FASA's fiction-heavy approach to rpg supplements, but sometimes it gets you a book like Threats 2 - a short, but densely-packed collection of campaign ideas that was incredibly easy to read because it was essentially an anthology of twelve short stories, each one about something interesting going on in the Shadowrun universe. I absolutely blazed through this thing, and it's entirely possible that it will take me longer to write the post than it did to read the book.

The main thing I appreciate about Threats 2 is its unashamedly brute force approach to the "well yes, but what do we do in the setting" question. It's just a whole bunch of things to do, presented without further context or explanation. Eclipse Phase never released a "big book of things to do," neither did Exalted or Dark Sun or Reign. Sure, those games all had extensive and inspiring setting material you could mine for "things to do," but they never drew a big arrow pointing at a condensed list of suggestions. And look, I'm not saying Shadowrun's way was better, but it was nice to get just a little bit of meathead-level support.

The biggest challenge this book poses to me as a reviewer is that its 12 chapters have 12 different authors (though it doesn't neatly break down to one author per chapter - some chapters have multiple authors and some writers worked on multiple chapters) and each one is standalone 8-10 page mini supplement. So if I try to approach Threats 2 holistically, and comment about the book as a single work, all I can really say is that it has a lot of stuff in it. 

I actually went back and looked at my post about the original Threats to see how I handled it the first time and I guess my approach was to focus on a single nagging issue that appeared in multiple chapters and just make the post about that. Unfortunately, it's not something I can pull off twice, because Threats 2 is more diverse in its titular threats - on the metaplot front we have follow-ups to Year of the Comet, Brainscan, and Bug City, as well as some Earthdawn easter eggs, a couple of things you could probably just infer from the basic setting material (but which were nice to have spelled out) and one chapter that is arguably a crime against humanity. So what am I supposed to do? Just rapidly go through each chapter one-by-one and post my most salient observation in the hopes of covering the whole book without writing a 5000-word post?

Oh, yeah, okay, I suppose I could do that.

#1: "General Saito" - In Year of the Comet, Japan's new child Emperor decides to scale back on the overseas imperialism, but in San Francisco a rogue officer chose to defy orders and declare himself dictator over northern California. In this follow-up, we learn a bit more detail about the man and his rule and he's a compelling enough villain (he employs an image consultant) but Shadowrun's decision to single out the Japanese for being especially racist against metahumans has never sat entirely well with me and we get a bit more of that here.

#2: "Dissonant Voices" - More Otaku lore. A new group of dark Otaku has popped up on the scene, claiming to be empowered by the Deep Resonance's edgy counterpart - the Dissonance. I don't hate it, but if you want me to like it, you're going to have to be a bit more explicit about what these things actually are. I crave the sort of nitty-gritty Hard Magic worldbuilding that will drive the normie player base running for the hills. (Note: I am aware that this is not a reasonable thing to want).

#3: "Imps" - A found-footage-horror-style diary of an academic researcher whose life is destroyed when he finds a magic item that's haunted by a malicious spirit. It's all in service of introducing a twist on cursed item mechanics. As a piece of fiction, I enjoyed it. Ehran the Scribe makes a cameo appearance and he definitely knows more than he's letting on. As a form of gameplay, I have my doubts. The GM is supposed to give a PC a trap item that gradually drains their karma (xp)? Who is this enjoyable for? It could potentially work if the spirit is on the more "playfully mischievous" end of the spectrum and it was clear that the GM was using the haunting to give the players a more powerful than usual item, but overall, it seems like a risk.

#4: "The Aleph Society" - a cult that claims it can reverse magical burnout through philosophical enlightenment, but really does it by making a pact with a mysterious spirit from the Fourth Age? It's sort of in an awkward place where they're theoretically a cure to Shadowrun's worst mechanic, but you don't want to get involved with them because they're tricking mundanes with false promises to get them to make regular blood sacrifices, but then maybe you don't really care that they're doing that because the sacrifices are non-fatal and the cult's overall agenda is just "keep on being this weird, seedy cult."

#5: "Can You See the Real Me" - a mystery/horror tale whose only purpose is to introduce a new type of creature - the advanced Sheddim, who possess recently-dead bodies, but, unlike regular Sheddim, have the ability to heal those bodies well enough to return them to a convincing semblance of life, thus allowing them to infiltrate metahuman society and work their wicked schemes without alerting the monster hunters to their presence. Yeah, okay, that's a pretty good pitch for a monster.

#6: "One Nation Under God" - a revanchist conspiracy that works to restore the old United States of America by sponsoring terrorist violence and political turmoil in the UCAS, the CSA, and the NAN. It wasn't quite bold enough to make explicit the law-enforcement-to-right-wing-extremist pipeline, but the theme was there, if you wanted to look for it. Using them as a campaign antagonist would probably make for a pretty unusual Shadowrun game, but I think it might be worth it.

#7: "Betrayal" - OMG! Ares Macrotechnology is secretly experimenting on the insect spirits it was tasked with eliminating, attempting to monetize and weaponize a deadly threat to the entire human species?! Who could have ever seen this coming? Good, Shadowrun, good.

#8: "Dealing with Dragons" - Drakes are just a weird idea overall. The dragons have magically engineered servants who can switch between humanoid form and the form of a miniature dragon. Why is this appealing to them? It would be like a human having a sheepdog that could transform into a little gnome in their off hours. I can see some niche uses for such a thing, but it's probably not worth the effort. I'd only ever really use drakes in a game if I wanted to characterize dragons as being a bunch of weird little freaks.

#9: "Beneath the False Face" - Per wikipedia: "The Haudenosaunee Grand Council issued a statement online in 1995 about the Haudenosaunee policies regarding masks. These policies prohibit the sale, exhibition or representation in pictures of the masks to the public. They also condemn the general distribution of information regarding the medicine societies, as well as denying non-Indigenous People any right to examine, interpret, or present the beliefs, functions, or duties of these societies." Bad, Shadowrun, bad.

#10: "The Network" - A bit of resolution to the cliffhanger at the end of Brainscan. Turns out my interpretation of the ending was incomplete. Deus did download his code into the brains of his victims, and did psychologically condition them to reassemble that code on the Matrix once the immediate threat had passed, but this was not as clean or as quick a process as I was imagining, and a rival AI's code got mixed in there with his. So the next plot being set up is a semi-conscious Matrix cold war between the Deus fragments and the Megara fragments over control of the network of organic computers that could potentially reconstruct either, both, or a hybrid of the two. And because the organic computers also happen to be people, the network nodes also have a say in the outcome. It's an interesting plot, but it borders on the overly baroque.

#11: "Order of the Temple" - The Knights Templar are back. The plot has the potential to read as anti-Catholic, but it's a staple of the modern occult conspiracy genre. Then again, the modern occult conspiracy genre does have a bit of an anti-Catholicism problem. I think this particular presentation manages to dodge the worst of it, because it incidentally highlights how fucked-up it is that the Shadowrun backstory turned two prominent Catholic countries (Mexico and Ireland) into weird fantasy lands (Aztlan and Tir na Nog). Not sure if that's enough to make me use it in a game, though.

#12: "Those Who Have The Gold" - There's a joke entry in Dunkelzahn's will where he leaves 34 billion dollars to some rando, because the guy's ancestor leant him a gold piece hundreds of years ago (although, with typical draconic parsimoniousness, this figure was calculated with a 1% APR). Apparently, the beneficiary of this largess was a skilled accountant who was laid off from Fuchi, hit rock bottom, became addicted to BTL chips, and then swore revenge when Richard Villiers snubbed him at a high society party, post-inheritance. It works well enough as a plot. But I think something this silly should probably have a funnier presentation.

So, to sum up - Threats 2 is mostly very good. There were some rough patches, but as a whole it added a lot of value to my Shadowrun collection. I'm glad to have read it.

Ukss Contribution: The advanced Sheddim. They're a versatile monster type - murder mystery, social/political threat, physical threat, or even potentially just a misunderstood visitor from another reality (the latter isn't something Shadowrun really does, but I might give it a try).

Monday, December 23, 2024

(d20 Modern) d20 Future

Finally! One of these books is exactly what I remember it to be! d20 Future (Christopher Perkins, Rodney Thompson, JD Wiker) is a broad, but shallow overview of the sci-fi genre for d20 Modern games. It's jam-packed with intriguing new ideas and useful systems. We get rules for genetic engineering, robotics, starships, dimensional travel, mecha, cybernetics, and comics-style mutants. There are nine suggested campaign models, ranging from the mystical sci-fi horror of "From the Dark Heart of Space" to the mil-sf of "Bughunters" to the post-apocalyptic adventure of "The Wasteland." There's also a ton of new character options - new feats, new advanced classes, and rules for playing eight different alien species.

The main drawback is that all of this good stuff ends just as it's getting started. There's a one-and-a-half-page write-up of "Star*Drive" that captures approximately none of the setting's appeal. The brief overview made a complex, ambitious, and distinctive space opera setting sound like a knock-off Star Trek. And look, the nature of d20 Future as a book may have demanded that one of its nine campaign models be a knock-off Star Trek, but as someone who saw Star*Drive in all its glory, I couldn't help but notice the wasted potential.

I'm not mad at d20 Future, though. In order to waste potential, you must first have potential and to an experienced GM, there's something just a little bit magical about a book that gives you plenty of potential to work with. This is a book that practically dares me to do the worldbuilding legwork for any of a dozen different settings . . . and that's a challenge I'm eager to accept, because I love worldbuilding legwork.

On the other hand, I'm not sure there's much of a specific use-case for this particular book. It's kind of a book you read if you don't know what you want to do. It's got that weird D&D-adjacent . . .  aspiration for genericness, much like Alternity, pre-3.0.  Why, we've got a book we can use equally well for every type of sci-fi, but once we narrow in on any one singular type of sci-fi, something specific would work much better. As a thought experiment, I imagine running Eclipse Phase with the d20 Future rules and I think you could almost do it, but you'd run into the problem that a lot of the stuff you earn with your level ups would be classified as morph traits but the structure of the game really needs levels, skills, and feats to be tied to an ego. Likewise, doing Star Wars would require a custom variant of the psionics rules. Star Trek would probably work fine, though even then the rules don't really capture the feel of the setting. 

I think the blame for this "kind of okay at everything, no better than sort of good for anything" vibe can be laid firmly at the feet of the "Progress Level" concept. 

Progress levels are what you'd come up with if you looked at the history of technology with a kind of naive modernism - it started with the Stone Age (PL 0) when people used stone tools because those are the easiest kind of tool to build and no one knew how to make better ones. Then, over time, people learned about metal and how to work it to make better tools, so it became the Bronze/Iron age (PL 1) and so on and so forth, through successive eras that map quite well to the chapters in a European History textbook until PL 5, the Information Age, when human beings finally figured out computers, the past turned into the present, and all subsequent ages (it goes up to 9) are pure sci-fi speculation.

However, this approach has serious problems. For one, it's misleadingly Eurocentric. Sort of. Progress levels don't actually capture the true history of European technological development, but they do reflect the common colonialist technological tropes. Technology is universal. Progress is linear and directional, from the past to the present, and as a result, you can say one group has "more" technology and another has "less." There's no geographical or cultural component to the account, no acknowledgement that a people's tools are shaped by locally available materials and the people's ongoing needs. Like maybe there are methods of stone working that have been perfected over hundreds or thousands of years to be every bit as sophisticated as a complex industrial process. 

Which isn't to say that a science-fiction game needs to devote pagecount to detail maximally-efficient flint-knapping, but it does need to think of its future technology as something more akin to a theme or set of genre trappings, than as a historical narrative of "progress." The purpose of technology, in a (good) sci-fi story is to put some aspect of society or the human condition under the microscope and ask "what if this thing that we all thought was immutable somehow changed?" You introduce mind back-up technology not because it's a logical outgrowth of developments in biotech and cybernetics, but because you want to delve into heady issues - identity, mortality, authenticity, the objectification of the self and what life is like in a society that not only places a price on human life, but sets that price equivalent to a relatively small amount of computational power. 

Likewise, it's not particularly useful information to tell me that time machines are a PL 8-9 invention. Because a story about a society that must cope with the invention of time travel (which is what the assigning of a progress level implies) is very different than the story of a group of adventurers with access to a time machine (which is almost certainly what you're going to want to do in a d20 Modern game). There's a reason most time travel stories have the time machine being built in some weirdo's garage. And I think, if you want to make a generic reference guide for science fiction stories, this is a distinction that you need to make. You can't just count on the readers making it for themselves.

And it's not as if d20 Future is notably bad at this. You're not going to have to fight the book to tell interesting sci-fi stories. It's more that its presentation doesn't synergize with the book's ostensible goals. The equipment lists are organized by Progress Level, but the Progress Levels aren't really considered as whole units. They're more like tags in the equipment stat block, so the whole thing reads like a leveled treasure table. The stuff with the smaller bonuses appears before the stuff with the larger bonuses and instead of feeling like four different equipment lists for use in four separate campaigns, it feels a lot like one big list that a character might work their way through. The setting and mechanical implications of a 1st level character picking up a plasma pistol or cybernetics that give them +8 to skill checks (because such things are completely mundane equipment in their respective progress levels) are never fully explored. We're given no useful advice (or even a courteous warning) that playing in a PL 7-8 game will effectively compress d20 Modern's first 3-5 character levels into one long, highly unpredictable mega-level.

I think, overall, though, you have to give d20 Future credit for taking some risks and trying something new. It fills a niche in d20 gaming that wasn't really being served by other WotC products (maybe Star Wars d20, at a stretch) and there is something undeniably fun about being given a big box of pieces to play with, even if you need to figure out for yourself how those pieces are meant to be assembled.

Ukss Contribution: Abandoned and malfunctioning utility fog (a cloud of general-purpose nanomachines) will sometimes just build pointless roads. It combines three of my favorite things - infrastructure, melancholy at the lingering detritus of a bygone age, and the existential absurdity of a useful thing, deployed without purpose.