(Star Wars d20) Rebellion Era Sourcebook

 I think it's time to face a difficult truth - I may be losing faith with the systematic nature of my mission. I've been doing this blog for 8 years and I'm starting to show noticeable signs of fatigue. I thought it might have been social media addiction that was slowing me down - I spend an absolutely shameful amount of time scrolling reddit, despite inevitably feeling bad emotionally and mentally when I notice how much of the night has passed. But I'm starting to think that's more of a symptom than a cause. It should not have taken me two weeks to read Rebellion Era Sourcebook (Bill Slavicsek, Steve Miller, Owne K.C. Stephens). When I was in peak form, this was the sort of book I could bang out in a night.

It is about a subject matter that I'm generally positive towards. It is competently assembled. It is broken down into a series of page-long encyclopedia articles, each one about a different aspect of the rebellion-era Star Wars universe - a format that is well-suited to rapid reading. 

But, ultimately, I had to force myself to read it. I don't feel like I'm getting burned out with reading and reviewing rpgs in general. If a book is novel, a product of authorial passion, or even just controversial, I still get excited about reading it, even with my new habit of excessive doomscrolling. But when a book is paycheck-earning journeyman work from designers with a long resumes (including some absolute bangers, not currently in evidence), I inevitably start asking myself "Why am I doing this? What am I getting out of it?

For example, I got very little out Rebellion Era Sourcebook. Large parts of this book are spent recapping the movies, and those sections are broken up by recaps of various EU novels and comics. It nods towards being an rpg sourcebook by including stats for random bullshit (like the two different action-figures, sorry, specialized storm trooper units - cold troopers and scout troopers, one is a thug 1/soldier 3 and the other is a scout 4) or three different versions of Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewbacca, but it's not structered like an rpg supplement. It's not an rpg supplement in conception. It is ultimately and essentially a piece of Star Wars media. Tracking the level advancement of Luke Skywalker, comparing the combat abilities of the different trooper types - those are just a new lense for experiencing the plot of the movies.

It's not useless, exactly. Certain campaign models suggest themselves, and if you needed generic stats for one of Jabba's henchment, the book has you covered. It's just that the whole thing is best geared towards telling the one story in the entire Star Wars universe that you can't do at the table. Why are we getting so many stats for Luke Skywalker? Are we meant to fight him? How is that at all useful for playing one of the unnamed commando guys who rode in the casually-flying shuttle to the forest moon of Endor? Seriously, the main thing that Luke does with his Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi-era stats is fuck off on his own side quests. His wearabouts are well-accounted for, and it's highly unlikely that he's going to show up, even as a cameo.

And, okay, that's kind of a buzzkill attitude from yours truly, but this is a problem that could've been mitigated if Rebellion Era Sourcebook had been designed as an rpg first and a piece of Star Wars media second. What are the campaign models? Waging guerrilla warfare in a conflict of galactic-scale against one of fiction's most powerful governments? Maybe there could be sections on urban combat, influencing public opinion, and common insurgency and counterinsurgency ops. Underworld crime capers in seedy locales like Mos Eisley or Cloud City? There could be a list of seedy dive bars and upscale gambling dens, breakdowns of the criminal factions and their various rivalries, details about imperial prisons or even, forgive me younger John, a keyed map of the city.

Mos Eisley gets three-quarters of a page, approximately the same wordcount as devoted to as an imperial star destroyer's trash disposal. It should have been a whole chapter! It's like they're curating material based on the amount of screen time they got in the movies. Luke's got one good scene in the Mos Eisley cantina, Han's got one good scene where he tricks the star destroyer by floating away with its garbage (and apparently, Boba Fett was familiar with that exact trick and wasn't just waiting around on the off chance that something would give the Millennium Falcon away) and therefor the book concludes that both pieces of information would have exactly the same utility to people attempting to create their own action-adventure stories in the Star Wars universe.

Look, I like the movies. The moment-to-moment experience of reading Rebellion Era Sourcebook was fine. I enjoyed the nostalgia trip, seeing the name "Salacious Crumb" and being like, "ho, ho, I recognize that little freak." It just wasn't a very good rpg. 

I wouldn't go so far as to say that this explains why I took so long to read this book. Like I said, it was perfectly fine. However, it was very obviously going through the motions, and I saw my own behavior reflected in that. Passion is important, and when you're just checking things off a list, it shows.

Maybe I'll shake up my methodology a bit. Spend a little time picking books based on how much I want to read them, instead of going with whatever's next on my list. 

Ukss Contribution: For all the shit I gave it, the section about imperial garbage disposal does have the most interesting adventure suggestion in the entire book - someone threw away a broken assassin droid without bothering to deactivate it first. And while the book presents it as a random hazard for PCs who were hired to do the sci-fi equivalent of the rat-slaying adventure (tregoths are described as "trash bats," but it's the same concept), it's actually a strong enough idea to anchor an entire story. Sanitation workers and scavengers are turning up dead. Could there be a serial killer on the loose? Let's hire 4-6 wandering mercenaries to find out.

So yeah, it'll require some fantasy translation, but "semi-scrapped assassin droid" is an amazing thing to have in your rpg setting.

World of Darkness: Demon Hunter X

 Oh, wow, I am constantly going back and forth on where to place Demon Hunter X (Jim Moore) in the White Wolf canon. At first, I had carelessly lumped it in with Kindred of the East partly out of the sense that Asia of Darkness was its own distinct subsetting, partly because the gold-leaf-style treatment on the front cover resembled similar detailing on various Kindred of the East supplements, but mostly out of a blithe, unreflective Orientalism in myself that I've only recently begun to examine. Later, I moved it over to the general "World of Darkness" umbrella, due to finally confronting my latent racism, noticing that the book's title literally contained the words "World of Darkness," and not being able to find it on the White Wolf wiki's official list of Kindred of the East books. However, after reading the book for the first time in more than 20 years, I am once again thrown into uncertainty, because on page 46, under the "Storyteller Notes" in the Character Creation chapter, it says "Demon Hunter X is a supplement for Kindred of the East."

Could it be that no one actually knows what the fuck is going on? I should be so lucky. It'd make what I do so much easier. Oh, John is confused and rambling again? Maybe it's because he's a completely typical human being. 

Oh, right, I was trying to build to some sort of point. Which is that Demon Hunter X is perhaps worth the grace of this strategic ambiguity because while it is definitely part of the Kindred of the East milieu (the Shih - traditional martial arts demon hunters - are mentioned frequently in other books, even if Strike Force Zero - sci-fi cyborg demon hunters - are never seen again), it has the redeeming quality of actually being somewhat fun.

There are monsters lurking in the shadows! What can anyone do? Be an orphaned child, mentored in the mystic arts by a wise hermit for 20 years until they are ready to dispense justice and preserve the cosmic balance? Fake their death and be recruited by a clandestine government agency staffed by a cast of quirky outcasts like something out of a Joss Whedon fever dream (literally, they stopped recruiting elite soldiers and now "New ones come from the unemployment line . . . Many agents are the very people least likely to fit into normal society . . . Most are more adept at video games than at speaking to the opposite sex. In short, they are 'goobs' - dreamers and outcasts who spend more time surfing the Internet or playing roleplaying games than trying to fit in.")

Yeah, that's the good stuff, White Wolf. Pander to me more! And if you parsed the above as sarcasm, you are unfortunately mistaken. I really mean it. Demon Hunter X is tantalizingly close discovering a version of the World of Darkness with broad crossover appeal. The very title screams "CAMP!" Big guns. Kick ass fight scenes. Bloody spectacle. Gothic punk as an aesthetic backdrop, but not a theme. It's "superheroes with fangs," but without the fangs. 

Or, perhaps, more on point, its the Storytelling Chapter's blinkered take on anime ( it "tends to explore more aspects of human nature than most Western animation; it also involves a great deal more violence, sex, violence, carnage, and violence.") Yeah, maybe it's a bit problematic that Mr. Moore mentioned "violence" three times, but you have to remember, it was 1998. It was a time when basing your entire view of an artistic medium on your sketchy collection of bootleg La Blue Girl fandubs practically qualified you as a citizen of the world.  The overall vibe of this book is like watching someone try to reverse engineer anime when all they've ever been exposed to is Japanimation.

And yes, I'm aware that what I just said could be seen as incredibly mean-spirited. But I don't mean it as an insult. It's actually almost a compliment. Not entirely, not exactly, but in the ballpark of complimentary. It's more of a bittersweet observation. Reading this book is like seeing the first part of a video where a raccoon is trapped at the bottom of a dumpster and some kind stranger helps it out by lowering a 2x4 they can climb. There's a pathos that comes from knowing that the poor creature's distress comes from a gulf in understanding and maybe an element of judgement, because they wouldn't be in this situation if they didn't dive snoot-first into the abyss in search of garbage, but you are nonetheless 100% on the raccoon's side. It is genuinely amazing to see them escape the trap.

That's how I feel about Demon Hunter X. I want my campaign to be the 2x4 that's lowered into the dumpster. Maybe that's a little bit (okay, a lot) condescending, but I don't feel that way about Kindred of the East as a whole (okay, maybe also Half-Damned Dhampyr and to a lesser extent 1000 Hells, but definitely not the rest of it).

Although, I should make clear that Demon Hunter X's faults are largely artistic, rather than moral. There's a certain suspicion of Orientalism that comes with being associated with Kindred of the East, but the Orientalism is actually fairly mild. Like, there's a bit where Asia is described as having super criminals "Take everything negative you've ever heard about the Mafia in the United States and multiply it by a heavy factor." And that looks especially silly when you combine it with the credulity the book expresses towards the idea that the Yakuza or the Triads could be a "neighborhood protection society." Taken together these contradictory ideas are a bit Orientalist, of the "Asians are adept at stoically enduring something uniquely awful" variety, but as with Japan's hypothetical technophilia (based, presumably, on sci-fi anime), it's a minor factor in the overall work. Basically, it's only there as a warning that if you play the magic cops, you won't necessarily be able to count on the support of the populace.

A little trickier is the Shih's general "traditionalist" attitude that supernatural creatures have a role ordained by heaven and thus should only be slain when they overstep the bounds of their celestial mandate. It's an interesting, humane, and nuanced attitude, to be sure, but again, if you were inclined you could read it as a form of "Asian stoicism." that skirts Orientalist stereotypes. But honestly, that's a little subtle for me. It's as likely as not an artifact of having specific, named pieces of Asian media as your inspiration, rather than the vague ambition to make Asia of Darkness that afflicted the core book.

Where Demon Hunter X really gives me a "raccoon in a dumpster" feeling is in its overall execution. I think, despite its lukewarm take on anime, it is on the right side of the cultural appropriation/cultural inspiration line, but it lacks the audacity of conviction. It names 22 distinct action and/or horror titles as inspiration, one of which I know for a fact is a hentai series, and yet the book this canon inspired has relatively little camp. If Vampire Hunter D and Akira are your starting points, then where is your end? In order to be a truly great tabletop rpg, there needs to be more distillation, more recontextualization. You need to create a world where 3-5 main characters can each have the full gamut of genre adventures.

A good example of where Demon Hunter X goes wrong is in its advice for games where the PC party contains both Shih and Strike Force Zero characters. The whole section focuses on differences between the two groups' ideologies and methodologies, presenting the crossover as a significant roleplaying challenge and at no point does it seem to realize that it's pitching an occult procedural where a traditionalist martial arts magic cop must join forces with a super modern cyborg magic cop, in an "odd-couple unlikely partners" dynamic with a support team made up of quirky almost-NEETs in a hyper-violent monster-of-the-week format and if you could somehow put that shit on television they'd make a hundred episodes and fans would be throwing conventions until approximately the end of time. This is a book that wears its influences on its sleeve, but doesn't seem to internalize the lessons of those influences. That, to me, betrays worrying signs of Kindred of the East's exoticism. Maybe it is the way it is because it thinks "being anime" is enough.

Although, to be fair, Demon Hunter X is, indeed, enough . . . barely. It has appealing characters with an appealing gameplay model, presented in an appealing way. It's one of the few parts of Kindred of the East you could reboot today.

Ukss Contribution: One of the signature magic weapons is a set of war fans. I always thought they were one of the cooler East Asian weapons. Although I'm slightly disappointed to learn they were historically wielded while folded, like a short club . . . Eh, if the local movies can take liberties then so can I. Ukss will have iron fans with their own signature martial art.

Nobilis Antithesis Minibook 1i: A Diary of Deceivers

 I have repeatedly in my personal life and once as a youtube comment referred to Jenna Moran as "the Picasso of rpgs" and Nobilis Antithesis Minibook 1i: A Diary of Deceivers is sort of the perfect illustration of what I mean by that. It is sooo good, but if you came to me and said, "What is this? It's too weird. I don't like it at all," I'd understand where you were coming from.

It's a tension that's apparent even in the title. It's "Minibook 1i" and that's weird. The "1i" is bad mathematical notation, a redundant but not technically inaccurate representation of the square root of negative one, but it's not a mistake, because if she called it "Minibook i" you might mistake the "i" for a lowercase roman numeral. It's a bit of disambiguation meant to make clear that the numbering scheme for this (sadly not continued) series will use imaginary numbers because the characters under discussion are not real. (Not just in the sense of being fictional, but also in the sense that they are monsters from the void waging war on reality itself.) She put a thematically on-point joke that relies on a knowledge of college algebra on the cover of the book, in the series numbering and look, I'm not going to pretend that imaginary numbers are some esoteric knowledge that only the elite will recognize, but it is something that not everyone is going to get. It's a little bit alienating, a little bit self-consciously elevated and I think a reaction of "oh, she thinks she's super clever, doesn't she" is entirely justified.

But, actually, yes, she is extremely clever and her work makes you feel clever by proxy. It's fucking great. Nobody else is doing what she's doing. She's a genre unto herself. If she chose the military, she'd be a general. If she chose the priesthood, she'd be the Pope. But she chose rpgs, so she's Jenna Moran.

The best thing about A Diary of Deceivers is the way it deftly wields Nobilis' trademark mood whiplash. There's a character called Iolithae Septimian.

"If you should meet her walking in the world, bow before her for she is sacred; bring her oil and fine cloth; bow before her, three times bow; but she is Iolithae Septimian and you must not let her speak.

I do not know how you can prevent it, but you must not let her speak."

It's a chilling bit of horror. Very effective. There's a sacredness that is inimical to life. The cosmic implications are dizzying. There is something that is hateful to us, and rightly so, but we must treat it with respect, because we are not significant enough to be the yardstick by which sacredness is measured. And even so you must not let her speak.

Like I said, sooo good. But what makes it great is the juxtaposition between what came before and what came after.

The setup to this punchline is the story of how the Lies of Iolithae Septimian turned the seas to salt. It's told in this poetic, almost scriptural style, but the story itself is deconstruction of that kind of narrative. There's this ancient stone tablet. The words carved on it are sacred but must not be spoken. Iolithae Septimian is an illiterate temple girl, whose job is to wash the stone. She can't read the words, but she knows them anyway. She confides in the priest and out of fear, he whips her and cuts out her tongue.

But the important thing is that this brutal display of male rage is totally impotent. She doesn't speak the forbidden words out of pain or revenge. She's got her own story going on. The end was always inevitable and his abuse of this girl does absolutely nothing to derail it. He eventually destroys the stone itself, but then that's it. "He goes home and forgets the words of the stone." He doesn't even merit a comeuppance. "He forgets the Lies of Iolithae Septimian," but the implication is that it is safe for us, the readers, to forget him. He's done. What happens next will change the entire world and have ramifications for millennia to come, but he's not part of that. He defiles something sacred and his punishment is that he doesn't get to witness the horror he unleashed. The Lies of Iolithae Septimian will turn the seas to salt.

And there's something sad and beautifully human about this, but also there's feminist subtext and epic grandeur and an invitation to reflect on the idea that maybe even a fact so anodyne as "the ocean is salty" is not inevitable and could have been different. And it's all building up to that absolutely perfect capper. "I do not know how you can prevent it, but you must not let her speak."

That's what came before, but what makes Jenna Moran such a singular voice is the absolute audacity of what comes after.

It's cute chibi drawing of this terrifying character, with a speech bubble saying "Nobody can really know whether God exists or not" annotated with the footnote "still not the worst thing she ever caused to be a truth."

Remember that invitation to contemplate a world where the seas were not salt? Take that same mental process and imagine a world where it's possible to know whether God exists or not. What Jenna is saying here is that in the world of Nobilis, that is something that a creature stole from you. That and more. There's some lie, only hinted at, that's worse. 

"I do not know how you can prevent it, but you must not let her speak."

Because of the format, and the cuteness, it's presented as a joke and it is a joke. It's really fucking funny (maybe less so, now that I've spent so much time dissecting it, but still). And the joke is a part of it. That's the cosmic horror of it all - that humanity's biggest questions are so small and absurd that they are brushed aside to a joke in the marginalia. And the joke works.

This same character, in the space of a few pages, is played for pathos and spectacle and terror and humor and it all works and the whole would be diminished if any part was lost. The only comparable thing I can think of is Jobu Tupaki from Everything Everywhere All At Once (not coincidentally one of my favorite movies) and this book is a guide to creating rpg antagonists (or even player characters!) in a similar vein.

I think it would be . . . understandable (not right and not fair, but understandable) if you dismissed all of the above as hopelessly tryhard and my opinion as obnoxious fanboy gushing. However, I read a lot of fantasy and I read a lot of rpgs, and there's no author I trust more to show me something new. Even picking up a book from 2012, I can come away with the conviction that the genre could be doing more, that games could be doing more. There's something magical about it. It may not be for everyone, but so far, every Jenna Moran book I've ever read has been a confirmation that I am not yet too jaded to feel surprise and delight.

My overall verdict for A Diary of Deceivers - if you liked Nobilis 3rd Edition, you'll like this. If you didn't, you probably won't. And that's okay, because rpgs are big enough and diverse enough that even after reading 600+ books, there's still room for surprise.

Ukss Contribution: Morrowen Hollow is an infectious sound that spreads through patterns in ambient noise and takes over living victims, stripping them of agency and causing them to endless echo her with their own voices. And the great thing about Nobilis generally and A Diary of Deceivers specifically is that there is a running series of character creation examples that show you how to build her as a PC-legal character. 

There's also this great interstitial fiction that's all about the military trying to quarantine the small town (and surrounding region) where she originated, using massive noise-making machinery to drown her out and stop her spread.

My choice is not Morrowen specifically, but rather the idea of a modern military trying to use technology to outwit a creeping cosmic horror that manifests as an abstract pattern. It's so thematic I could spit.

(Exalted 3e) Alchemicals: Forged by the Machine God

 It's new Exalted book day! Like two weeks ago! Because every fucking one of these monster tomes has hundreds of pages of charms and I'm finding it harder and harder to muster the concentration for getting through them in a small number of long sittings, so I'll just read a dozen or so, "take a break" by playing a video game and then three hours later remembering that I have a lifelong obsession I'm trying to succumb to here. I got through the setting lore damned fast, though. That you can believe.

So I guess I should talk about the charms first, seeing as how they're so fresh in my memory and all. Alchemicals are weird because they're almost exactly the same as every other form of Exalted, but it's to their and your benefit to pretend that they're not. Their charms are presented as technomagical devices that need to be installed onto the Alchemical's body, but there's no setting implications to them. The devices don't actually exist. They're just little exception-based rules packets. Pump in the cost and the benefit comes out and like maybe, on your body, some gears are whirring or something, but don't worry. It's all seamless, automatic . . . magical.

You can get a Piston Driven Megaton Hammer installed and it looks like a big thing you attach to your arm to make you punch harder, but it has no other object-like qualities. You go down to the lab to get it swapped out for another charm, but "Uninstalled Charms dissolve into Essence and subsume into the Alchemical's Anima until she has need of them again. No magic can interfere with uninstalled Charms."

 You can't loan your unused Megaton Hammer to a friend, nor can you salvage it for parts. No one can steal it or sabotage it. There's no part of this that resembles taking something off a shelf. The book talks about charms being made by skilled human technicians, installed by surgeons in special vat complexes, but at the end of the day, they are always and only something that is written on your character sheet. It's all very convenient from a gameplay perspective, but it's thematically dull. The Alchemicals have a sort of technological gloss to them. but they don't engage with technological ideas, the chief of which is that doing something for the first time is hard, but it gets easier the more you do it. Once you've proven a device is possible, by building a prototype, you can make as many copies as you can afford. This is something the book (hell, the line) tries to avoid. The Alchemicals and their charms may look like machines, but each one is a miracle.

It's not something I have a problem with per se, but I do think that it steers away from what is most interesting about the splat. They wind up having this "Saturday Morning Cartoon Action Figure Battle Royale" feel about them. On first glance it parses as science-fiction, and you can do awesome stuff like double-jump, swing around on an electric grapple, and shoot people with your built-in energy cannon, but there's precious little depth to it. There are gears and shit, but they don't do anything.

Which is as good a segue as any into the lore. In contrast to the charms, there is a bit of science-fiction depth here, because it puts some thought into things like where the Autochthonians get their food, the way their settlements adapt to and even exploit the strange environmental conditions of the Machine God, the way their unique circumstances affect their politics and culture. It would almost be churlish to point out that extremely old Alchemical Exalted can be retrofitted into living cities and their Municipal Charms are described as factory-sized pieces of civic infrastructure that more or less amount to "Address a Particular Problem Complexes" (no, seriously, their names get pretty on-the-nose, like "the Atmospheric Purification Web" that protects the city of Xexas from the deadly smoke of Autochthon's recycling region or the "Rat Slaying Electrification Grids" which are apparently ubiquitous.)

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not about to rag on sci-fi for not explaining super-tech in excruciating detail. "There is a problem that exists today, but this future society solved it by means of a device made from unobtanium and argle-blargle" is practically its own subgenre. It's just that there doesn't seem to be any limit to this. I kind of feel like whatever the problem, the Metropolitan Exalted can just pull another charm out of the hat. The thing about speculative fiction is that you need to speculate and while I'm not about to say you need a full-on hard magic system to do that, you do at least need some scaffolding to build off of. What is your magic/technology (or in this case magical technology) actually doing? What limitations does it remove? What limitations does it leave in place? What new limitations does it impose? The premise of this setting is that eight whole nations of humans, along with their associated rats, cockroaches and fungi are living in this giant world-sized machine, driven by a vast intelligence that welcomes their presence but only has a limited amount of patience for their disruption, and sometimes that comes across as Autochthon being wall-to-wall industrial nonsense.

But also, like maybe that's okay. There's also the implication that the nonsense isn't actually nonsensical, but rather it's part of an order too large and too complex to be entirely understood. They're in a machine so big it has weather patterns, and what, I'm demanding an explanation for why there are all these electrified cables, pipes filled with every variety of rarefied organic compound, and big-ass gears everywhere? I'm acting like I need to understand what it means for the nation of Sova to occupy "vast chamber-shafts within an organ continent and the spaces between."

The whole point is that it's a super strange world, but that humanity is still recognizable. High status people might wear a luxurious rat fur cloak, because rats are one of the few species that can survive here almost as well as humans. The bulk of the nations' food comes from organic chemicals leeched from Authochthon's massive system of pipes and then subjected to a variety of industrial processes, the secrets of which are under the control of a powerful guild. Some brave people respond to the grim prospect of a life of unceasing toil under an autocratic regime of artisan/administrator-aristocrats by agitating for democracy and the agents of the state treat them like a demon-worshipping cult.

Which is to say, I think that the mortal-eye-view of Autochthonia is actually pretty good speculative fiction. It's only the titular Alchemical Exalted that I'm iffy about.

I don't know. I guess it's because they are canonically, and by way of direct editorial mandate, Not Robots. Rather, they are constructed beings of "clay and magical materials" and have a "crystalline Essence reservoir" instead of a heart. The book insists on calling them "human." What they actually are is a general vibe. They're robots in (almost) all the ways it's cool to be a robot and not a robot in most of the ways it sucks to be a robot. Also, nobody knows how they work, not even themselves. You basically just have to get a bunch of specialists into a factory setting and the God of Invention sends them into a trance, after which a new Alchemical emerges.

They're cool, but also kind of a bummer. I kind of feel like a version of the Alchemical Exalted that leaned more into their robot-ness would make for a more interesting setting. Unfortunately, I have certain extra-textual evidence (decades worth of fandom discourse) that avoiding what I consider "a more interesting setting" is an explicit design goal. If people actually knew how to build an Alchemical, they might try to build a lot of them. Or some nefarious power might steal the secret of building them and build one or more Alchemicals that had no connection to Autochthonia's culture. If they could simply be built, people, both characters in the setting and players in the real world, would ruthlessly objectify them. They would not treat the Alchemical Exaltation as a sublime miracle, or the Alchemical Exalted as glorious heroes, but rather items on a balance sheet, tools to be used.

And I'm sitting here like, "yeah, that sounds like awesome sci-fi all right," but Exalted doesn't really want to do sci-fi, it wants to be its own brand of epic fantasy, so it puts barriers up whenever things threaten to go too much in that direction.

Barriers like the Seal of Eight Divinities. The first appearance of Alchemical Exalted, in Time of Tumult, had the Seal already breached, with mysterious "Locust Crusaders" scouring Creation for natural resources, like some sort of setup for a long-term epic fantasy arc. In second edition, they pushed that back a bit, putting the starting point at a time when breaching the Seal was imminent due to a rapidly-progressing ecological crisis. And third edition, in characteristic 3rd edition style, pushed it back even further, so that it's mentioned as possible, but no one is currently trying to do it, because there's no specific crisis that would demand such extreme measures (there are challenges, which if you were inclined to read into them, might eventually escalate into the 1e/2e plots, but which are presented as being at worst at the outer edges of Autochthonia's routine dangers).

On the one hand, this new steady-state Autochthonia has the advantage of presenting the Alchemicals and their world in way that's well suited to pure Alchemical games of indefinite duration. Authochthonia doesn't need Creation to be interesting. On the other hand, the name of the game is Exalted. It wasn't a weakness of the 1st and 2nd edition presentations that the fate of Autochthonia was tied to the fate of Creation, it was actually the main reason we were even in a position to care about this world.

Alchemicals: Forged by the Machine God is a fine book, and I enjoyed reading it, but "A new fantasy game by the makers of Exalted" isn't exactly something I need or want from an Exalted supplement, even if it does technically share a continuity with the main line. Now, obviously, this is all stuff I can backport in, using material from prior editions and my own imagination, but I do have to count its absence as a weakness. "Not needing to integrate with rest of the setting" is also, in some ways, "not being able to integrate with the rest of the setting" and if the book is not giving us officially sanctioned advice on how to do it, I really have to question who the book is for?

So to sum up - I found this book to be alternately brilliantly inventive and excruciatingly dry, mushy on genre, but with powerful vibes. It's a little worrying that it seems to be a book directed at the most insular and niche of the game's hardcore fans, but I have to concede that a large portion of that worry is simply me suspecting that the line as a whole has lost the ability to connect with a new audience and is slowly trailing off into being a living museum for legacy fans. Of course, as one of those legacy fans, I'm delighted with the book itself, but my imagination falters at the prospect of introducing this world and these characters to Exalted newbies. If you're on the fence about it, don't let my ambivalence dissuade you. If you are at all in a position to know what this book is or why you should care about it, then you won't be disappointed by it.

(Or maybe you will, I don't know your life, but I can say that you won't be disappointed by it for any reason that doesn't also apply to Exalted 3rd Edition as a whole).

Ukss Contribuiton: Fuck it - giant, culinary-grade cockroaches. They're a delicacy because they're one of only a handful of natural proteins to migrate to this environment where the only native sustenance is chemically-enhanced nutrient paste.

(KotE) Sunset Empires

Sunset Empires (Michael Butler, Dean Shomshak, David Turner, and Guy-Francis Vella) is a historical supplement for Kindred of the East, allowing GMs and players to create campaigns in Asia of Darkness' 19th century. And it is completely above my paygrade as a critic.

The depicted time period is where all the problematic tropes got started - the Orientalism, the colonialism, the cultural appropriation . . . like maybe there were misunderstandings and unneccessary exoticism before the Early Modern Era, but this time, with the East India Company and the Opium Wars and Admiral Perry's gunboat diplomacy, that's when this shit turned septic. The premise of the book is that we're going to go back to the early days of modern racism so we can just sort of act it out with our friends.

But, with that being said, Sunset Empires seems almost, kind of, keeping in mind my own shallow understanding of the subject . . . responsible. I know. I can't believe I'm saying that about a White Wolf book, and a Kindred of the East book at that, but while there were about a dozen individual sentences I could quibble with (mostly those that referred to the region as "the Orient," in a way that wasn't always unambiguously from the point of view of a European NPC), the broad shape of the work is roughly on the right side of history. You are not going to come away from this text with a good impression of European behavior during this time. In fact, the naked greed and incorrigible sordid behavior of the colonizers is a running theme.

It's just, the introduction also has the doozy of a line, "What the British, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Americans did to this region is unacceptable by modern standards, but any claim Asia was entirely innocent in matters regarding its own fate is too shortsighted - at least for the purposes of this book."

That was straight out the gate, and set my expectations very low, but the subsequent chapters were not as bad as I feared. It wasn't a Killing Streets situation where the narrator was this weird white savior, incidentally insulting and condescending to Asian people in the course of condemning the bad behavior of the modern capitalist order. The editorial voice was actually a bit dry, almost academic. The history sections give the impression that they could have shipped with a bibliography and footnotes.

Which is why I say this book is perhaps above my pay grade. If the events depicted herein actually happened in roughly the way the book says they did, then it comes across as a pretty fair-minded account. You're not going to walk away from this with a great deal of respect for the Qing government, but my understanding is that this isn't necessarily a controversial stance. That even people very friendly to modern China often regard them as the wrong people to meet the moment.

But that's just the problem. My understanding is garbage. Before reading this book, I could probably have given you a rough outline of the Meji Restoration or the founding of Hong Kong, but I wouldn't have been able to go into this much detail. So, if Sunset Empires is as factual as its factual tone would have me believe, then I genuinely learned something. And if it's not factual, I have no fucking way of knowing it. I mean, aside from meticulously vetting its narrative with other sources, that is.

I did check a few things. Like, I'm pretty sure that Hitler did not get the idea for "herrenvolk" from the historical, living in India, Aryans. Wikipedia suggests the term came from a pseudo-scientific misapplication of anthropology that traced the descent of the Germanic peoples to an Indo-European proto-culture. 

Also, while I'm not sure how much it would actually affect what the book is trying to do with history, it probably would have been worthwhile to mention that the Taiping Rebellion killed, at a conservative estimate, 20 million people, making it among the deadliest conflicts in human history. Don't get me wrong, it's not like the book is trying to make it sound like a wonderful time or anything, but I just thought it was a significant detail to leave out. 

That sort of thing really makes it difficult for me to trust the book. I think I can say with confidence that White Wolf is getting better. If you ranked the Kindred of the East books based on how much they respected the fact that Asia is a real place, with real people, living real lives, with real feelings, then Sunset Empires is definitely at the top. But what is its philosophy of curation?

Like, in the section titled "The Stages of Chinese Life," in the part about "Birth," it says, "Infanticide through drowning is a real threat for female infants and occurs across society's strata."

And look, it happened. And because it happened, it's not wrong to say that it happened. But if I go to my bookshelf and pick up my copy of Victorian Ages Vampire, am I going to find a comparable passage talking about how infant exposure was a common method of dealing with unwanted children prior to the invention of modern medical abortions? 

To White Wolf's credit, I'm not actually sure what the answer to that question might be. It is definitely the sort of thing they liked to write about, and even going back to the early 90s, they were never ones to give the Europeans too much credit. So if I went back in a time machine with a copy of Sunset Empires and pointed out the double-standard, I'd probably not have to fight too hard to secure a parity of the grotesque. However, I still have to wonder. Of all the things you could have told me about life in 19th-century China, why did this make the cut? How often are infants of any sort showing up in Vampire: the Masquerade games, and of those, how many are not doomed to get eaten by a creature?

Obviously, it's just a noteworthy behavior that stands out as particularly distant from the presumed values of the book's modern American audience. But also it feeds into certain unflattering narratives about the Chinese people. 

It's a tricky issue. I'm not going to say you should whitewash history or anything, but it's a hell of a thing to publish without also mentioning that even in the Qing Dynasty, governments and religious leaders were trying to stop the practice. 

Which is sort of where I'm at with Sunset Empires. It is operating at a level above my knowledge of the subject matter. Aside from some incidental choices of wording (like using "fortunately" and "unfortunately" to refer to British victories/losses in India), there is very little that made it into the book that I can say shouldn't be there. But as a company, White Wolf has not exactly earned my trust on these issues, so I also can't be sure that there's nothing missing from the book that should be there.

I guess what I'm saying is that, from where I'm standing, Sunset Empires looks like a decent supplement for playing games set in 19th-century Asia, but you absolutely should not take my word for it.

Ukss Contribution: A mirror belonging to the sun goddess Amateratsu is one of the imperial treasures of Japan. Japanese vampires who tire of their undead existence have been known to sneak into the royal palace and commit suicide by looking into the mirror. That's a pretty cool idea. Just  on the right side of the edge where detailed worldbuilding becomes baroque over-thinking.

(SW d20) Alien Anthology

There may, in fact, be such a thing as too much backstory. I know, I know, it's a scandalous thing to suggest, and certainly something that I, a died-in-the-wool "MOAR BACKSTORY" guy would ordinarily be ashamed to express, but I read Alien Anthology (Steve Miller and Owen K.C. Stephens) and I was forced to conclude that it was possible to know too much about Max Rebo, the dumb-looking felt elephant alien that played keyboard in Jabba's palace.

He's an Ortolon, which means he's part of a people who "take great joy in music," and not that eating him is a shameful act you must hide from God, as I originally assumed. And it's like, I get it. Over the years, people freeze-framed the cantina scene and told stories about each and every one of the weird creatures, even the one that was very clearly a guy in a werewolf mask (He's a Shistavanen and "Many take advantage of their superior speed and reflexes and become bodyguards, soldiers, bounty hunters, or even big-game hunters"). Honestly, that's kind of beautiful. No irony. I love that. The Star Wars expanded universe is a big, patchwork quilt of stories, sewn by a hundred hands

However, when you're trying to rebuild the setting into a single thing, as you might do for an rpg campaign (or even just a new work in the expanded universe), the hundred streams of information can work at cross purposes. I think back to the cantina scene and what I liked about it, what it said about Star Wars as a science-fiction world. And it was something that had a singular purpose in a singular work - whoa! All these creatures are just hanging out with each other! This universe has so many weird-ass creatures!

And so, if I'm trying to capture an authentic Star Wars feel for my table, maybe the best alien to use is the one no one's ever seen before. Or better yet, a half-dozen aliens no one has ever seen before. You walk into the Space Post Office and ahead of you in line are a three-eyed bat creature, a long-armed guy with four elbows on each arm, a lizard person who snaps up a fly that wafted in behind you, two identical moppets that are hot-pink from head-to-toe, a chain-smoking letter carrier with a perfectly rectangular head, and a single token human who looks like he rolled straight out of bed and into a garbage can. One of these people is the Jedi Master you were looking for. 

Alien Anthology attempts to deliver this fantasy by giving us dozens of alien species to choose from, and that sort of works, but I think the overall effect is diminished by work that went into giving each of them a distinct identity. Not that I'm ungrateful, and of course if the PCs get a wild hair and decide to follow the Squib merchant back to their homeworld, the cultural and historical details could be pretty useful. But I kind of feel like if you're doing a Star Wars game right, most of the information is going to be irrelevant.

Because the galaxy far, far away is kind of presented, at least in the strongest works of the series, as this impossibly diverse monoculture. Chewie and Han Solo can talk to each other in their respective languages and it's not that big a deal, because they're two bros in the same line of work who frequent the same social circles. Obi-wan learned about the Millenium Falcon by chatting up Chewbacca in a bar!

So, like, I didn't need to know that Pomda Baba (the guy whose arm Obi-wan chopped off in A New Hope) was one of the Aqualish, aliens who "admire strength and are openly contemptuous and hostile to the weak," nor that "It is customary and accepted social behavior for an Aqualish to be pushy or belligerent to people he or she is interacting with for the first time."

Yeah, that perfectly explains his behavior in the cantina scene, but you know what else would explain it? Mos Eisley being a "wretched hive of scum and villainy" and Pondo Baba just kind of being like that. Maybe the gentle Aqualish matriarch, Mama Baba, cries herself to sleep every night, wondering how her son could have gone so wrong, to get the death penalty in 12 systems.

On the other hand, an undeniable part of the series is also Landing on a Planet and Learning the Folkways of the Colorful Locals. The Ewok village on Endor, the Gungan city on Naboo, even the Jawa sandcrawler on Tatooine - these interludes contribute to the adventure serial feel that is such a core part of what makes the movies enjoyable.

So I don't know, I guess I'm chickening out and taking the position that a balance is necessary. Maybe there are all these countless planets with their indigenous aliens and their fascinating customs, but when you're out and about in the more cosmopolitan systems, any aliens you meet are probably assimilated natives of the galactic metaculture. Ask Greedo where he's from and he'll say "Tatooine," rather than the Rodian homeworld of Rodia. He has more in common culturally with Annakin Skywalker than he does the jungle hunters of "his people," despite becoming a bounty hunter, in line with the "Rodian idealization of hunting" (source: wookiepedia, and yeah, Star Wars lore is frequently that on the nose).

What the game really needs is some kind of "just folk" generation system for aliens, where completely ordinary galactic citizens can have any wild collection of physical traits, with only the bare minimum of mechanical modifications (just enough to give the decision weight, really). Or perhaps the individual entries could do what modern Lineage systems do and break the modifications down between Physical and Cultural traits, allowing characters to mix and match to their hearts' content.

But I'm once again doing the thing where I wish technology existed before it was invented, so I'll just take the foot out of my mouth and say Alien Anthology was a bit of a workhorse of a supplement, but a worthwhile read.

Ukss Contribution: On Dagobah, there's a tree whose seeds resemble "knobby white spiders" and spend the early part of their lifecycle as mobile predators, devouring prey to grow progressively larger until they become the size of elephant, whereupon they plant themselves in the ground and become massive, sinister trees.

That's some pretty cool imagery and some pretty cool speculative biology. I can find a place for it.

(KotE) Killing Streets

 Evidence continues to mount supporting the theory that White Wolf game studios was in truth an elaborate false flag psy-op by the Georgia GOP to develop a way to trick goths into saying the n-word. And if it seems to you that I'm coming in a little too hot here, well let me tell you, I don't think I'm coming in hot enough because Killing Streets (Michael Butler and Guy-Francis Vella) literally tries to trick you into saying the n-word.

Or, at least, the Chinese equivalent. The word you would use if you were translating a Tarantino film into Chinese. I looked it up. There's a glossary of "Chinese Slang and Triad Terms" and one of the entries is "an insulting term for a black person" (lack of capitalization in the original) and already, by this point, 16 pages into the book, my danger sense was going off. "Oh, the guys who said, in the first paragraph of the introduction, 'In Asia, with its tyrants and poverty, criminal activity can reach depths rarely seen in the complacent and wealthy West' are now suggesting I 'spice up the dialogue' of my characters. Gee, I wonder whether this 'insulting term' is actually an unforgiveable racial slur."

And maybe it's wrong of me to act so shocked here. Like, what exactly was I expecting to find when I googled the term? What else could it have been? But that just raises the question - if the only thing it could have been was a racial slur, why the fuck is it here? You know, in the list of words we Kindred of the East players might borrow from Chinese to make our crime drama dialogue more immersive.

Now, it does not seem implausible to me that Chinese gangsters frequently use racial slurs in casual speech. It's not as if organized crime has an HR department. You can't sue them for discrimination. And, of course, cruelty to others is part of the macho mystique. But we aren't making a movie or writing a novel, we are playing a tabletop roleplaying game. How did they imagine this was going to play out? What were they thinking would happen at the table, in the story, to make "an insulting term for black people" an essential bit of information? Is there going to be a Black NPC and then all of our fictional Asian gangster vampires are going to be racist towards them? Is that an eventuality you wanted us to be prepared for when you wrote the glossary?

My most generous guess, based on the fact that they included Pulp Fiction in the bibliography, alongside a bunch of Chow Yun Fat movies, is that they wanted us to be able to authentically create a translated version of Tarantino's cameo. I think the likelier explanation is that they just weren't fucking thinking.

Because if we're talking about racist tropes in media, a big one is just the existence of the glossary as a whole. The thing they're imagining is an rpg session predominantly in English, but peppered with polyglot slang. But that's just the ttrpg version of a common exoticising translation convention. You've got a story set in China, but it's being told in English and two characters are talking. The dialogue written on the page (or shown on the screen, etc) is in English, but the characters are speaking Chinese. Easy enough concept to get one's brain around. But some words are left untranslated. A character will say, "can you get me a Sháozǐ from the drawer" and the audience will be like "whoa, what is that," but it's just a spoon. They could have just said "spoon." To not use the word for "spoon" implies there's a reason not to call it a "spoon." Like there's a notable difference between a "Sháozǐ" and a "spoon." China is such an exotic foreign land that they don't even use spoons over there. They use Sháozǐ instead.

Now, granted, this is a delicate line to walk, especially when talking about sub rosa subculture, or just jargon in general (for example the thing I just did, using "sub rosa" to mean "hidden" - a perfectly valid English usage, more common in literary criticism than in the vernacular, of a borrowed Latin phrase meaning "under the rose" which I imagine would be pretty hard to translate into Chinese, because its literal meaning, its figurative meaning, and the cultural nuance of using it instead of a more straightforward term are all different - btw google renders it "secretly; privately" when translated and translated back).

So if you've got a jargon or slang term that has a literal meaning that could be translated, but is experienced in its native context as only and specifically referring to a particular thing, then maybe a direct translation won't work, and if you want to preserve the jargon-ness of its original context, that's when you consider using the untranslated term directly.

We actually experienced a very good example of this phenomenon on this very blog, when talking about the Feira da Ladra in Lisbon, Portugal.

The direct, literal translation of those words is "thieves' market," but you'd only use that translation if you were willing to be sneaky and let people mislead themselves into thinking it's a cool, shadowy underworld event (as Shadowrun does in the book Shadows of Europe, and I would do if I ever went on vacation in Lisbon).

If you want people to have an accurate picture of the event, you'd translate it as "flea market" because that's the closest English term in meaning, and indeed it's so established as an idiomatic expression that I'm led to believe native Portuguese speakers don't even parse it as a "thieves' market" at all.

And if you want people to find it on a map, you leave it as it, because "Feira da Ladra" also does duty as a proper and noun and that's what it's going to say on the signs.

(What you would never do is falsely claim that, actually, a "Ladra" is a kind of bug, so that the "flea market" translation is both idiomatic and literal, like those rat bastards in the Lisbon tourism department, and note to future translators - I am not referring to rodents born out of wedlock).

If you really want to capture the feel of specifically Hong Kong crime drama, as Killing Streets claims to want to do, you're going to need a mixture of all three approaches. Using the term "public toilet" to refer to someone whose loyalty can be easily bought should probably be translated directly instead of being left in its original Japanese. It's an evocative bit of slang that's easy to understand. Using "the 49s" to refer to "the rank-and-file criminals making up the bulk of Triad membership" should probably be translated idiomatically, because it's clearly something with cultural meaning, but it's unclear what it might be. And "shan chu" can probably be used as-is because it's the Triad bosses' traditional title and basically a proper noun.

Although, of course, that's just my intuition as a book critic. A professional Chinese interpreter would probably have a more informed take on the matter, and it's certainly possible to assemble a list of slang/jargon that is most respectfully left untranslated. That's just not what White Wolf did in this case. And do you know how I know?

It's because they put a fucking racial slur in the glossary.

Also, their romanizations are really weird and I had a hard time using google translate to verify the words meant what they said they meant. I'm really just taking their word for it, even if I'm about 75% sure that they translated "gaki" wrong (the glossary says it means "shorty" and is a crude reference to genital length, the internet says it's derived from "hungry" and refers to a bratty kid . . . is this a case of poor research on WW's part, semantic drift over the course of two decades, the internet being unreliable, or just crossed wires in romanization causing confusion between two similar-sounding words. . . fuck if I know).

Anyway, that's 1300 words about the glossary section of the Introduction, now it's time to talk about the rest of the book!

Sigh. I don't want to. It mellows out about halfway through, modulo some really disgusting sexual assault stuff in the NPC chapter, but the first chapter is rough. I should tell you all about it, because it's rough in an interesting way, but the thought of experiencing it all again, even in the form of a critical blog post . . . it's a lot.

So I'm going to quote something extremely offensive. Like, you are not ready for how shocking this is. And if you want to understand the roughness of Killing Streets' first chapter, all you need to do is come to grips with the fact that this offensive quote is coming from a section labelled "Telling Story From Reality" and the purpose of the section is to act as a gentle reminder to prospective Kindred of the East players to not indulge in harmful racial stereotypes.

Okay, here it is, the quote urging players not to be racist:

"One of the best ways to handle this is to turn the typical view of a character that first comes to mind on its head, so a white slaver may be a suit-wearing European yuppie and not the cliched greasy Arab."

Holy shit. Normally, it's a bit fatuous to be all like "anti-racist education taught me about more racial stereotypes than racists ever did," but . . . wow, you really just had that in the chamber, didn't you? I'm definitely sure they meant to be anti-racist, because they were urging us not to do that, but also they're using the term "white slavery" without any hint of irony or self-awareness and they're like, weirdly confident that they can predict the precise horrible place peoples' minds are going to go.

(Also, since when were Arabs part of "the Middle Kingdom?")

And it's not an isolated incident. European colonialism is portrayed as this almost-supernatural form of evil, but also the Asians are "backwards" (literally, that exact word is used) and "modernization" is associated with European ideas. Drug addiction is an imported European vice, and so is democracy. At one point it refers to modern Asian governments as "the aping of Western political forms."

Look, there's a complex history here of imperialist overreach displacing indigenous power structures and imposing foreign traditions that are an ill-fit for the local culture, but you can't say that non-white people are "aping" something white people are doing. You just fucking can't.

Sometimes, it feels like the book is trying to have it both ways, implying that Oriental Despotism is the natural state of these people, but it was only when the wicked Europeans came along that these practices became dysfunctional.

"Among the poor, the concept of selling children is neither alien nor the horror that it may appear . . . Modernization and Western-style lusts turned this traditional practice into a living hell . . ."

Oh, god, I don't think I have the rhetorical deftness to do this subject justice. . . So people everywhere, in every time, we're all made of the same stuff. And one of the tools of imperial oppression is to deny this, by focusing on aspects of an oppressed culture that seem, on first glance to be dangerous or foolish or even odious and to deny the humanity of their victims on the pretext that they themselves are dangerous, foolish, or odious, as a matter of their fundamental nature. The only counter to this propaganda is to focus on our shared humanity, to take every culture on its own terms, and seek to understand the context to the practices that make us uncomfortable.

And we may find that something we initially found incomprehensible actually makes a lot of sense when we consider the context, but we might also find that the practices we found odious from the outside are also odious on the culture's own terms. We are made of the same stuff, and so we all yearn for justice. We are all made of the same stuff, and so we all tolerate invidious practices that endure out of cultural inertia. We are all made of the same stuff, so we all have reformers, abolitionists, and revolutionaries. We are all made of the same stuff, so we all have to deal with powerful conservatives who think nothing should ever change.

The practical upshot being that the people of Asia were not just waiting for Europeans to come along and save them from themselves. There have always rebels and philosophers and holy figures who tried their best to appeal to better natures of their societies, to end harmful practices. So there's no need for us to imagine some kind of edenic pre-colonial tradition of child selling. Those "scholars, ministers, and generals of humble background who came through such servitude to power and promise" that's just propaganda. Horatio Alger bullshit the rich use to placate the poor.

And look, I don't envy anyone the task of threading the needle - treating a foreign culture's self-justifications with the proper amount of skepticism while avoiding the easy moralizing of the colonialist gaze. . .

Which is why it's maybe a bad idea to base an entire roleplaying game on the most egregious sort of cultural appropriation imaginable. Bad Kindred of the East! Bad! Stop existing this very instant!

Sigh. I am both a fool and a monster for having bought this book. Reading it was my justly-deserved punishment.

Ukss Contribution: I can't with this one. I just can't. I didn't say half of what I needed to say, and I'm already so tired. Just no.