(Shadowrun) First Run

Once more, I am going to tempt the wrath of the writing gods by openly declaring my ambition to write a short post about a short book. First Run (Michael Mulvihill) is a slim, 64-page volume that contains three very short adventures which are connected by no theme other than the fact that they are purportedly suitable for acting as an introduction to Shadowrun's rules and setting.

And I don't know, I guess anything can be an introduction if it's the first thing you encounter, chronologically. However, if I make a checklist of all the things I'd want to include in an introductory adventure - a thorough cross-section of the game's different mechanics, low stakes, setting baseline expectations that may later be defied, an open-ended conclusion that can segue into further adventures - then none of the three really qualify.

However, I don't want to single out First Run as being especially bad or anything. The Exalted 3rd edition introductory adventure took place in a dream. It's a difficult thing to get exactly right.

Even so, it was probably a mistake for the second adventure, "Supernova," to end with a face-to-face meeting with Richard Villiers. There's failing to set realistic expectations and then there's ostentatiously setting false expectations, and I think Mr. Mulvihill must have at least subconsciously realized he was doing the later because Villiers' presence in the story was awkward af. So much of the text is given over to punishing the PCs if they decide to harm or double-cross him, and the whole time, I'm like "this is supposed to be the players' first encounter with the setting, so they're not going to know he's a Big Fucking Deal to the metaplot, they're just going to see him as a smug rich guy who killed Mr. Johnson." 

"Never screw over someone more powerful than you" is just a terrible moral on which to end a punk story. A better one would be, "you're never going to get a shot at someone like Villiers, because guys like him pay other people to take their risks for them" or "it's not about screwing over this or that particular rich guy, because the system has plenty of second-stringers scrambling to take their place." But those are more endgame lessons than starting ones. It's actually probably trivial for a priority-A cyborg to just absolutely body both Villiers and his henchman Miles Lanier (who, despite the book's description, probably doesn't have more than slightly above average combat skills for a retired soldier). The real trick is to get into the room with them in the first place. Guys like them don't generally attend criminal meet-ups. Hell, they don't even leave the house without a cadre of elite bodyguards, magical and matrix overwatch, and an obscene amount of backup at the other end of a panic button.

Which is why the end of "Supernova", as written, doesn't make a damned lick of sense, to the degree that it undermines the rest of the adventure up to that point.

The first adventure, "Food Fight", reprinted from the 1st edition core, works a bit better. It falls short of being an ideal introduction by the fact that it's almost purely a combat tutorial, but it describes the interior of a Stuffer Shack, which is an important bit of setting information. Its main fault is that it's noticeably sexist in its treatment of its female characters. "The elf girl behind the counter looks like an angel; even the fluorescent lights can't dull her beauty. Her vacant stare indicates that she probably only has one asset and you've already noticed it." 

Still, having the players learn the combat system by putting them in a convenience store as its being robbed is an admirably naturalistic setup. You could even use it as a first meeting, as an alternative to the mysterious robed figure in the shadowy tavern.

The third adventure is fine. It takes the characters out to the wilderness, where they encounter a spirit who doesn't follow the usual rules of summoning. So maybe it would work better as a change of pace, but if you're trying to set a tone for a game about paranormal mysteries, or if you want to segue into a smuggling campaign, then it could still theoretically be an introduction.

Overall, I don't think this is a book I'd ever use for its intended purpose. Maybe mine it for ideas. Some of the NPCs are well-drawn. The relationship between the antagonist and the spirit in the third adventure is pretty interesting (he's a bandit who thinks he's tricked this free spirit into thinking that the smugglers he robs are there to destroy the forest, the spirit knows he's full of shit but goes along with it because he likes robbing smugglers). But taken in their entirety, the stories are not quite typical enough to be used as a shakedown run and not quite thematic enough to be used as campaign seeds. It could be useful if you're stuck with no ideas about what to do with Shadowrun, but that's not a problem I've ever been afflicted with.

Ukss Contribution: There's something in the "Food Fight" adventure that's so staggeringly, mystifyingly dumb that it made me shoot right past ironic reframing, through backhanded admiration, and loop around to full philosophical vertigo.

"Dimwitted and probably insane, he talks to objects because they are friendlier than people. He'd rather just kill the people and leave the objects. He pulls his shotgun out but will not fire until a non-ganger does something to an object (the gamemaster can decide what sets him off - anything from dropping an item to tossing an object at a ganger) . . . He can be talked out of his vengeance-seeking rage if you convince him that he is hurting as many objects as you are."

Like, this is obviously just an ableist joke. Look at this wacky "insane" guy, he inverts the moral priority of people and inanimate objects. But I think about depicting him, as a GM, and I just can't wrap my brain around it. What is this guy's life? How does he experience the world? The book literally said he valued "objects" as a category. And no matter how hard I try to rebel against the thought, I'm convinced that means he's a Kantian. He doesn't discriminate against objects, nor between types of objects. He has a universal moral duty to the base physical matter of the universe. More than that, he loves that matter like a friend. Is he "insane" or is he a living saint?

And I'm not doing a bit here. That wasn't a sarcastic question. It was a genuine philosophical inquiry. What is the nature and purpose of love? Can there be a form of "love" that is not a crime, not a form of selfishness or cruelty, but is nonetheless wrong? Or am I the one who's wrong? Am I privileging arbitrary sets of atoms just because they happen to take the familiar shape of conscious human beings. 

I mean, the guy can be turned away from wrath by the fact that he loves objects so much. Have I ever experienced a love so pure? 

What the fuck, Shadowrun?

I think, for Ukss, I will use him as inspiration for a strange and inhuman god.

(D&D 3e)Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting

There's a reason I prefer to use the term "Vanilla Fantasy" over the perhaps more commonly accepted "Generic Fantasy." And that reason is The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (Greenwood, Reynolds, Williams, and Heinsoo). This is corebook-implied-setting D&D in its purest form, but also the single most specific fantasy book I've ever read. It is gleefully specific. Maybe even sadistically specific. It's got a 4-page long timeline, full of canon events, locations, and characters. Want to know when Castle Waterdeep was built and how long that is after the location of the future city of Waterdeep was first settled? This book has you covered.

There's an unapproachable grandeur here. In many ways, it's a perfect rpg supplement. And I don't use that word lightly. It's hard to imagine a book with more D&D per page. It may not be physically possible. There's a sidebar which lists 23 "Lost Empires." Later, over a stretch of several pages, we get more than 40 example dungeons. And neither of those things is even in the setting chapter. The "Geography" chapter takes up half the book and has literally hundreds of specific locations, each with their own potential rpg plot. You buy this book because you want to play a game of D&D, and it gives you a lifetime of D&D games to choose from.

It's a shame, then, that so many of these choices are basically interchangeable. That's the dark side of specificity - you can have a thousand snowflakes, each of them unique, but you need to put them under a microscope to appreciate it. Did we really need 11 fucking 'Dales? Eleven?! 

I mean, yeah, probably. My nose would be growing pretty long if I tried to claim I was against that sort of thing in the abstract. The whole reason my rpg collection is this big and unwieldy is because I am exactly the sort of person to care about the nuanced differences between all 11 'Dales. However, in the context of this specific book, I'm not sure having such a thorough list was worth butchering your presentation of Moonshae.

As the DM chapter would have it, "The Moonshae Isles offer a locale with a Celtic or Viking flavor. Chult in the far south could be home to a campaign featuring primitive technology (not to mention marauding dinosaurs). Calimshan and the Vilhon Reach offer settings similar to that of The Arabian Nights. The eastern end of the Sea of Fallen Stars has a Mediterranean or North African flavor."

Or, to put it in the words of the Geography chapter, lolwut?

I mean, it's there. D&D's long history of racial coding is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but if you know that's what they were going for, you can see how they were going for it.  Take Calisham. "Its people are heirs to an old empire founded by genies . . . renowned for its chauvinism, exotic markets, thieves' guilds, decadent harems, desert landscapes, and wealthy ruling class, as well its enormous population and many slaves."

First of all, yikes. Second of all, doing a ctrl+F for the word "wizard" and replacing it with the word "genie" does not an Arabian Nights-inspired setting make. We're still getting the same kind of information, presented in the same list-based format. We've still got orcs and dragons. One of the antagonist plots involves "powerful undead spellcasters (including a blue dracolich)." Almost the entire section could be transported unchanged to the vicinity of Waterdeep . . . and that's the most distinctive one. If you can find a hair's worth of difference between Moonshae and Shadowdale, based only on this book's text, you are a much more perceptive reader than I am.

It's a problem that's most apparent when the book "tries" to expand beyond its vanilla fantasy wheelhouse, but it's persistent throughout the whole thing. The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting does not give you the tools to engage the setting from a genre level. It eschews spectacle in favor of a flood of proper nouns. In glorying in the specific, it foreswears the power of the abstract. Like, maybe a list of 40+ dungeons wouldn't be necessary if it just took a couple extra pages to explain what a dungeon was supposed to be.

But would addressing those issues leave us with a better book, overall? That's a question that's tough to answer. On the one hand, yes, obviously. But on the other hand, we would be losing the beauty of a pure thing. I called it "perfect" before and I meant it. This book is the epitome of "loredump as worldbuilding." And that's something that certain playstyles can get a lot of use out of. Much like an old-school module will have a series of connected rooms, all described down to the last piece of furniture, in order to facilitate a very direct and literalist style of engagement, the Faerun Gazetteer is like an old-school worldmap, connecting those old-school dungeons. It creates space for "player skill" in the form of knowing the lore, even if it sometimes comes at the price of making its locations feel like geography-scale furniture.

Although, I would be remiss if I didn't address the fact that some percentage of this worldbuilding is less old-school "the world is established even if the PCs aren't there to see it" and more "we've got hundreds of books worth of material and if we leave out someone's favorite location, we'll probably hear about it." There are definitely areas that have been transparently Touched by Metaplot, and you can usually tell which ones they are by the fact that they are long on incident and short on atmosphere. Why does Citadel of the Raven get a longer entry than Balder's Gate? Presumably because Fzoul Chembryl was featured in more than a half-dozen novels and short stories (actually, about a dozen by now, but half of them were published post-2001).

As far as metaplots go, Forgotten Realms actually seems to use a fairly light touch. It's not quite as heavy-handed as FASA or White Wolf, and it definitely doesn't drive the whole setting, like with Dragonlance. It just sort of peeks in every now and again, as if to say, "wow, that happened." I think it might be a function of its over-abundance of detail. Oh, the Tuigan horde is invading and Cormyr has to ally with the Dalelands and Sembia to fight them off? Well, Amn and Neverwinter barely noticed. Likewise, you can have an entire Avatar Crisis, where the gods are forced to take mortal form and battle it out until they learn the true meaning of personal responsibility, and it's kind of a shrug. A few of them died, and some powerful mortals stepped in to take their place. There's a sense that none of this shit is load-bearing.

That's the main strength of Forgotten Realms as a setting - it's a world where a lot of D&D is happening, everywhere, all the time. Its weakness is that it's mostly just D&D. Wherever you go, there's a good chance that you and 3-5 of your friends are going to travel through monster-infested wilderness to find monster-infested ruins and plunder them for gold and magic items. You could also do political intrigue, slice of life, philosophical transhumanism, or even punk, but you'd be building almost everything from scratch. 

As an entry point to the series, I think the AD&D boxed set works better, despite being an objectively inferior book. The 3e book has smoothed out many of the setting's rough edges and is much more dialed-in to the Forgotten Realms' voice, but I think its greater sophistication wound up making me feel more like an outsider to the fandom. Plus, the gray box had elves riding giant butterflies, which is a baffling omission from the new edition.

Overall, this is another one of those books that I admired a lot more than I enjoyed. It's something that gets the fundamental construction of a setting book exactly right while being primarily about a setting I don't particularly like. Strangely, though, I think I might be okay with reading specialized Forgotten Realms supplements about individual areas of the setting. I think a tighter focus would inspire the authors to try and justify their choices, whereas, like I said about the previous version of the setting, Forgotten Realms as a whole often acts like it doesn't need to justify shit.

Ukss Contribution: One day a year, the air god Shaundakul turns his priests into mist and lets the wind blow them to some random location, where they will reform and have to figure out what to do on their own. I like it because it's both an incredibly rude thing for the god to do and something that's probably a primary motivation for people becoming priests in the first place. 

(Shadowrun) Magic in the Shadows

 Let us open this post about Magic in the Shadows (Stephen Kenson) with the ceremonial pointing out that fuck, man, Shadowrun rules expansions really love expanding the rules. Set your minds at ease - you will need to make a lot of dice rolls, some of which are for incredibly piddly shit (after your roll to gather wild alchemy materials, you will need to make a roll for refining those materials into "radicals" and then another roll to turn those radicals into magic items) - all is right in the world.

I suppose the rules feel a little less intrusive here than in Rigger 2 and I think that comes down to the fact that we're talking about magic. You've got a rule for everything because the rules legitimately define what you can do. There's no background reality that allows you to infer the existence of quickening spells or great form spirits, and thus each new rule gives you a genuinely new thing to do that you couldn't before. It feels less onerous. At no point are you in a situation where, say, you want to jam a radio signal with a civilian transmitter that has been illegally boosted in violation of FCC regulations and the GM is like, "sorry, but there's nothing in the electronic countermeasures rules about this." When you're asking, "hey, can I use the macguffin to make unobtanium?" then "no, you can only do what the description says you can do" is a perfectly valid response.

Which isn't to say that there's no room for hard feelings and contentious rules arguments. They just mostly come in the form of power interactions. Like, can the new Adept power "Delay Damage (Silent)" which allows you to gently touch a target and then, up to 24 hours later, have them take full melee damage, as if you'd hit them full force, combine with "Distance Strike" power, which allows you to make melee attacks at range, so that you can just harmlessly gesture at someone and have them drop dead of no apparent cause?

I'd be inclined to allow it, because it's a really specialized build, basically requiring all of your starting power points to get off the ground, but I'd be a little nervous about it. Normally, I scoff at charging PCs for "natural weapons" because real weapons are trivial to acquire in all but a few very specific scenarios, but a perfectly concealable, perfectly inalienable gun does become something a bit more than "yeah, okay, you're armed in prison/the fancy dinner party/bank lobby, but so are the guards" when you can also use it undetectably and then act really shocked when your target drops dead.

On the other hand, we're talking about heist capers here. You can spec to be the perfect assassin all you want, but when the fight is against militarized corporate security because your overly-specialized ass accidentally tripped an alarm, you're probably going to want some more overt firepower.

The more interesting question is what implications these powers have for the setting? If there are people who can wave at you and make your head explode, how does this change things like the public appearances of politicians and celebrities? What is this doing culturally?

There is some talk about these issues, unfortunately it's pretty brief. We learn that mages who commit crimes are basically tortured, because the only way to stop them from using their powers is to blind them, immobilize them, and drug them. Oof. Also, healing magic is treated with skepticism by the medical community, and the main commercial applications of sorcery are extremely specialized high-tech research and trivial stuff in the entertainment industry, with absolutely nothing in between.

I'm a little disappointed, but I suspect it's an intentional choice. Shadowrun is a blend of cyberpunk and fantasy, but the cyberpunk is the senior partner in that relationship. Magic is used as a kind of anti-cyberpunk - it is small scale, bespoke, fleeting, and incompatible with most technological or industrial processes. It's a thing for anarcho-primitives, traditional communities, hermits and renunciates, and other people who don't fully participate in modern capitalism. It's extremely useful for living by yourself out in the woods, but you can't package it for mass consumption. That's probably thematic.

Though I also suspect it's a theme that's partially driven by game balance. Almost all the magic we see in the books (with the exception of the ritual magic used by the Native American Nations to defeat the United States government) has been stuff that's been relatively safe to give to Player Characters. The limitations of magic - it's rarely permanent, it doesn't scale, it needs prodigious amounts of xp - are also the rules you'd put in place to prevent magician characters from breaking the game. 

On the whole, it works. I like Shadowrun's world just fine. You can be an elf ninja, using your arts of invisibility to steal from a corporation and the corporation will maybe be a little frustrated that they can't monetize invisibility for themselves, but they'll also just respond by putting hellhounds and fluorescing astral bacteria (a type of magic that can be mass-produced, but doesn't do anything but hinder PCs, so it's okay) in your way. You're never going to worry about the philosophical or political implications of high-fantasy ideas like bringing back the dead or floating sky castles because things need to stay within a fairly narrow sci-fi aesthetic. And maybe I'm wired to be more curious about questions like "can you use detection magic to observe subatomic particles" or "can sorcery and/or conjuring build a house faster or cheaper than manual labor and modern machinery?" But what genre is that? Fermi-core? Post-Scarcity-Punk? The aesthetic is narrow because it's a good aesthetic.

In the end, the best and worst thing I can say about Magic in the Shadows is that it's a great supplement if you're interested in rules-heavy low fantasy that focuses on small unit mercenaries who commit elaborate heist capers for pay. That is its wheelhouse and so long as you stay in that box, it offers a lot of fun new content - different magical traditions like voodoo or wuxing; new types of spirits like blood elementals or ally spirits (like familiars, but a bit tougher . . . if you're willing to invest obscene amounts of xp); new totems for shamans, including crab, prairie dog, and goose (putting me in the awkward position of having to decide between condemning the egregious cultural appropriation and indulging my intense desire to play a magician who gets his powers from a magic goose). I think, overall, it's probably the second best kind of new Shadowrun content. . . just behind Important New Metaplot That Will Change Everything Forever.

Ukss Contribution: "The Mojave Desert is aspected against Conjuring, making any use of the Conjuring skill there more difficult - much to the satisfaction of the spirits there."

And I don't know why, but this is such a Shadowrun detail. Like, the whole game is thoroughly American, and it can be bad like America is bad, but it has this . . . yearning. It manifests in this particularly 90s form of romanticism where somehow the goodness and the holiness that has been systematically pushed out of our capitalist economy will manifest in the land. You go out into the Mojave and experience the starkness of its wide horizons and you think "here live the gods we have abandoned for our greed."

I could make fun of them, because this is sort of thing that seems like it was included because it feels vaguely Native American, but if I'm being honest, it's something I've experienced personally. 

(D&D 3.0) Dragonlance Campaign Setting

One of the recurring themes of this blog is my ambivalence about "vanilla fantasy," i.e. the stuff that D&D does - vaguely Tolkien, with its elves and dwarves and hobbits, halflings, kender, vaguely swords and sorcery with necromancers and thick-hewed men of action, and vaguely weird fantasy with all of these other elements used with scarcely any thought given to the overall effect ("sure, Cthulhu can be here too, why not?"). It's the genre that got me started with the hobby and there was a time when I eagerly devoured any variation I could find. And then I grew a little older, and I became too cool for it, and I would only touch fantasy that was conspicuously and consciously "not D&D." And then I grew a little older than that and became too cool for too cool, and I resolved to approach the genre with an open mind, in the process discovering a new, adult perspective that allowed me to appreciate "vanilla fantasy" as a sort of ongoing community project, where the very things that seemed so stultifying about it were actually fascinating historical artifacts, fossilized elements of a culture long-passed, preserved in a deep strata of obscure setting lore (for example: gnomes - nobody knows why they should be there, but leave them out and you will hear about it).

And overall, the general arc of my new, grudgingly laid-back approach to vanilla fantasy is towards Being Less of a Dick About It. It's not something I always do well (heck, even just now, my "new perspective on the genre" was about 90% faint praise), but it is something I'm working on.

The Dragonlance Campaign Setting (Margaret Weis, Don Perrin, Jamie Chambers, Christopher Coyle) really threatens to make me backslide.

See, this is a series that I have a great deal of personal nostalgia for. When I talk about young John eagerly devouring vanilla fantasy, this is the exact thing I'm talking about. I must have read the Chronicles series at least three or four times. And Legends at least twice. And when I talk about becoming disillusioned with the genre, well, having read Chronicles and Legends so many times is undeniably part of it.

The funny thing is that I was already done with vanilla fantasy by the time I bought this particular book. Even in 2003, I was buying the Dragonlance Campaign setting purely out of nostalgia. I've had it since it was brand new, more than 20 years, and this is the first time I've ever read it all the way through.

Now I'm left wondering if I ever truly hated vanilla fantasy at all. Maybe I just hated Dragonlance. 

No, "hate" is a strong word. Younger me would have used it shamelessly, but when I invoke it here, I'm doing it as a memory. I used to get far too invested in these things. I used to have passionate opinions about the fantasy genre. I'm not like that anymore.

I am very deliberately trying to not be like that anymore.

I didn't hate this book. There were parts that were dangerously close to hate - the racial alignment sections veered a little eugenics-y ("Half-ogres tend towards a neutral alignment. They have too much ogre blood to be completely good but don't automatically embrace evil."), the "balance between Good, Evil, and Neutrality" is the cringiest fucking thing I've ever read and ZOMG, what the fuck are you even trying to do here, you can say in the DM chapter that "no one ever wakes up in the morning and decides to be evil," but you literally have a big group of guys that get up every day and base their sartorial choices on signaling to the world at large their allegiance to an order of explicitly Evil wizards that gain their powers from the Dark Moon Nuitari, God of Evil Magic and honestly, that's not the worst part of it - it could be potentially the funny sort of cartoon evil - because who the fuck are these "neutral" people who can see the guys who are all "we stand for the use of supernatural power for the degradation and subjugation of all life and we're going to wear a uniform to let you know that it's not an accident" and think, "hey, we gotta make sure to keep some of these guys around."

Okay, let me take a breath here. This is getting a little ranty. . .

And another thing - yeah, no shit people blamed the Cataclysm on the gods. It's literally something that they did. On purpose, knowing what would happen. "Okay, so we dropped a meteor on the most densely-populated city on the planet, killing thousands instantly and many thousands more in the slow agony of climate-change-induced famine, but have you ever considered reflecting on your own faults? There's plenty of blame to go around. Us for doing it. You for making us do it."

I mean, the Kingpriest of Istar was supposed to be this cautionary tale of "good" overreaching and causing harm, thereby validating the setting's insistence on the necessity of cosmic balance, but he was just kind of this racist authoritarian who implemented a program of slavery and genocide. I think the angle here is that his "Proclamation of Manifest Virtue" wasn't so transparently full of shit in the context of the setting. Certain creatures were, in fact, evil by nature. Too much ogre blood even stops the half-ogres from being good. So if fighting an ogre when they are inevitably out and about doing their evil ogre things is good, then wouldn't preemptively stopping them from doing evil ogre things be extra good? But that's just the standard-issue apologia for genocide, so thankfully we've got the Neutral forces around to point out that just because something's Good, that doesn't make it good, and the universe needs a balance where nobody is allowed to commit genocide. But don't just say that the Gods of Good are against genocide. Because sometimes genocide is Good. That's why you need Neutrality.

Arrgh! I'm going in circles. Dragonlance's "morality" system makes my brain run in circles. It's always like this. It's always been like this. It will always be like this. I am drowning in the Discourse.

But I didn't hate this book. Not really. All of those problems are old problems. This particular volume only occasionally flirted with that nonsense (mostly at the beginning and in the history section). It's actually set after the first 100 novels (that is not a joke, that figure is from the introduction) in the Age of Mortals, and it kind of just reads like a world that is burnt out on high concepts. In the past two generations, there have been something like four near-apocalypses and now that it's time for DMs to take over for their home games, you're left with a bunch of Extremely Normal stories to tell.

The parts of the book that were being normal were actually . . . okay. The elves of Silvanesti were driven from their homeland by invading minotaurs. That's a plot. I could do something with that. Maybe some sort of drama with their rivals, the nation of Qualinesti that was founded by elves who were exiled for being less rigidly isolationist. There could be a nice irony in the reversal of roles. Oh, wait, they too were driven from their homeland by an invasion of Dark Knights under the command of the dragon Beryllinthranox?

Maybe 100 books was too many.

But jokes aside, the geography section is pretty useful. Moreso than the 1e version. There is a definite sense of there being more stories to tell, beyond the scope of canon. I'm not sure it ever really makes a case for itself as an alternative to its contemporaries, but if you want a not-quite generic fantasy world (that differs from core D&D largely in providing options for some of the most annoying characters you've ever seen), then the Dragonlance Campaign Setting provides. It could sometimes, particularly in the "Timeline of Krynn" and "Other Eras of Play" sections, have the extremely insular feeling of a long-running series that had accumulated an unmanageable number of deaths, resurrections, time-travel shenanigans, betrayals, villain redemptions, unlikely romances, carbon-copy "new generations" and definitively series-ending threats that needed to one-up the last definitively series-end threat. But I feel like, for a Dragonlance fan, that's perhaps a selling point. The reason you're picking up this book is because you want to play in the world of the novels. . . all the novels.

On a personal level, I spent a large part of the last week and a half thinking about how I could write this post and not come across as needlessly mean. I don't think I succeeded. Which is a shame, because I really am deeply ambivalent about this series. I don't like it, but I remember liking it, and in reading it again, after a 20+ year hiatus, I can see the shapes of what I used to like about it. It's a very . . . digestible setting. The color-coding of its "good" vs evil conflict is bad worldbuilding, sure, but it's easy to self-insert. You could make a buzzfeed-style quiz "Which color Robe would you wear" no problem. Everything has the superficial gloss of something you expect to see in D&D-style fantasy. The Knights of Solamnia are extremely knight-like. The elves are the perfectly memed variety of elves that approach being fey and occult mainly through the expedient of being really snotty and not talking to you. You better believe the dwarves are gruff everyman warriors. And I have to admit, the kenders' deal of constantly stealing shit and telling transparent lies when they're caught is kind of funny. It could sometimes feel like Tolkien after three or four rounds of the telephone game, but that's part of the appeal. It's a world that's easy to vibe with, even if it doesn't always make sense.

Ukss Contribution: Not going to do anything backhanded. There were a number of things that were perfectly trash fantasy - the Knights of the Lily looking extremely goth, the draconians with the fanfic ready healing saliva, the magical bard who "has the ability to recall all the stories of Krynn's past - whether the stories were true or not." And while I would say that I unironically enjoyed them, it was a chaotic trash panda sort of enjoyment. "Nom. Nom. Nom. Shovel that garbage directly into my mouth. I am a mean, cynical adult who wants to redeem the media he enjoyed at 12 years old by making it about the cringe of adolescence."

However, I have to acknowledge that Dragonlance brings out the worst in me. And aside from the eugenics and borderline-offensive theodicy, it hasn't really done anything to deserve it. So I'm going to pick something that I not only enjoyed, but also genuinely thought was cool.

When the Sivak draconians die, they reflexively shapechange into the form of the person that killed them (size and creature type permitting). Unlike the other draconians' death throes, (exploding for AoE damage or becoming a pool of weapon-dissolving acid), this doesn't seem like a particularly good move, tactically. But it is creepy as fuck. There are no rules attached to it, but I can imagine being a soldier fighting the implacable armies of Takhisis and landing a telling blow, only to see my own face stare back at me, dying on my own blade, and that would definitely stick with me for years and years after the battle. 

Shadowrun Companion (revised for 3rd 3dition)

 Ooh, goody, more Shadowrun rules. . .

No, that level of sarcasm is uncalled for.  I can't claim to be the victim here. When I bought the Shadowrun Companion, I wanted more Shadowrun rules. And even though I'm currently going through a period in my life where reading a rule-packed book is mostly a form of endurance trial, I kind of like the fact that Shadowrun is the way it is. Like, now that I'm out of the thick of it, I can maintain a certain gratitude for the existence of the Electronic Counter-Counter-Measures system or the elaborate cyberware installation mechanics. I feel a jolt of terror when I contemplate using all the rules, but then I allow myself to succumb to the thanatotic temptation and I smile an evil smile. It's something I could do. I won't. I shouldn't. But I could.

The Shadowrun Companion actually ranks pretty high on the list of useable rules expansions, probably because it's a grab-bag of topics. We get a few new systems, but since they are all for different topics, we don't get subsystems or subsystems of subsystems. It's all very manageable. And the point-buy character creation may even be a simplification of the core's priority-based character creation (the new math could potentially be fiddlier and there's more scope for choice paralysis, but technically it's one fewer step and there's no single moment where you have to preemptively compromise your character-creation wishlist). Also, the new athletics rules are completely standard for any tactical rpg and should probably have been in the core.

The only system that your players are guaranteed to despise is the State of the Art (SOTA) rules. Basically, it's trying to model the relentless march of technological progress and the related obsolescence of older technology, but it does so in a very "adversarial GM" fashion. Every so often (the book suggests somewhere in-between the two extremes of "after every adventure" and "once per in-game year") you roll on a chart to determine which category of tech has advanced the most and then the characters must spend some of their hard-earned cash as a kind of tax to keep up with the State of the Art. If they don't pay the fee, any gear they have in the affected category is reduced in rating, and they might even have to reduce their characters' related skill ratings.

And I don't know. This is like a one-two punch of things that are guaranteed to irritate me as a player. I'm potentially losing things I spent experience points on and I'm losing them to a single roll on a random chart, without any opportunity to mitigate or prevent it (aside from spending money, I guess). I'm emotionally prepared to risk my character's life in combat, to spend expendable resources like ammo or nuyen, and to even lose permanent equipment (if a dragon is picking up my car in its talons and dropping it on my head, that's not an event I relish, but it's a memorable story). But "your gun does less damage because someone in a lab somewhere invented a better gun" would just make me grumpy.

A better way to do it would be to have the SOTA give your NPC opposition higher ratings, forcing you to get new equipment to keep up. Your gun doesn't lose damage, but rather Lone Star is wearing stronger armor. Although, I can see why they didn't go that route. It would lead, inevitably to an arms race where numbers keep getting higher without changing the overall balance of power. You'd get to a point where you're wielding 20-power handguns against rating-19 body armor and it would start to feel absurd.

But then, that absurdity is exactly the sort of thing the system is meant to model, so is it really that big a deal? Maybe, maybe not.

Maybe you could handle it with something like a SOTA pool. Like the characters' karma or combat pools it would allow you to add dice to various tasks, but it can only be replenished by spending money on equipment upgrades and supplemental training. That way, it's a bonus for making a special effort to keep ahead of the curve, and the only penalty for falling behind is the lack of a reward. You wouldn't even need to have the targeted SOTA advances, because players would define the march of technology through the specific rolls they chose to spend their SOTA pool on.

Although, I would be remiss if I didn't "on the other hand" this. It's perfectly possible to reframe the SOTA rules so that, instead of representing the march of progress, they are actually a form of cyberpunk commentary on capitalism - they represent planned obsolescence, lack of right-to-repair, and encroaching enshitification. Like, "my gun works worse because someone invented a better gun" is an aggravating bit of game design, but "my gun works worse because the manufacturer forced a firmware update to disable certain features in order to sell me a new, nigh-identical gun" is . . . still aggravating, but at least it's satirically aggravating.

It doesn't come up often, since I stopped blogging about video games, but I absolutely adore the survival-crafting genre and sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have an urban survival-crafting game based on cyberpunk themes that was absolutely brutal about capitalist rent-seeking, forcing you to marshal all of your skills just to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. My current thinking is that such a game would be immensely depressing if it was good, and immensely offensive if it was bad ("I call it 'Homelessness Simulator'"). And neither of those things is particularly good for a tabletop roleplaying game, so maybe it would just be for the best to not use the SOTA rules at all.

The Shadowrun Companion is also Shadowrun's answer to a gamemaster's guide. It has advice on dealing with problem players. There are instructions for structuring adventures. Theme is briefly addressed. It's all a little basic, but fine. Definitely contributes to the vibe that this book is mostly 130 pages that got cut from the core, but that's not such a bad thing to be. Not everything can be Mage 20th Anniversary Edition (nor should it, yikes!).

Overall . . . I am content. At peace, even. There are parts I could object to. Sometimes it leans a bit too much into the adverarial-gm mode. If you play a ghoul, you have to make a check to survive character creation. Elves are inexplicably expensive in terms of character points. It suggests that people with albinism and the Irish are inherently magical. On a list of questions meant to help you flesh out your character's background, it asks "Does your character have an ethnic background?" ("Nope. I have no ethnicity whatsoever. I am a meat popsicle.") But in general, I feel like this book brings value to the game.

Ukss Contribution: Shapeshifters are animals that turn into humans, not humans that turn into animals. I think this is a concept worth exploring.

Arcana Unearthed

Yeah. I guess you could use this book in place of the D&D 3rd edition Player's Handbook. That's what Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed (Monte Cook) promised on the back cover - "What if there were a whole new player's handbook, presented just like the original, but with different character classes, races, skills, feats, and spells?" 

And I can definitely answer that hypothetical. The classes would be all right. The races would be pretty good. The skills, feats, and spells would be largely the same, with a few newcomers, but mostly just subtle tweaks with new names. But it would all be perfectly workable. You could pick up this book in lieu of the PHB and have a perfectly functional fantasy roleplaying game. Mission accomplished, Mr. Cook.

The temptation in these situations is to pit the books against each other. "Okay, you've acknowledged that both can get the job done, but which is better?" But I think in this case, that's a fruitless approach. Arcana Unearthed doesn't appear to be coming onto the Variant Corebook scene with any particular axe to grind. It's not trying to work in a different genre, or to revolutionize D&D's basic gameplay loop (and, in fact, still uses the standard Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual), or even to fix any broken rules or bad mechanical assumptions. It's just different for the sake of being different. Sometimes obnoxiously so (The D&D spell "Fly" is listed here as "Flight" and there are enough differences between the two to justify being different spells, but it's also clear that Flight was created by taking the Fly spell from the SRD and substituting one number and one sentence while leaving the rest of the text untouched), but never in a way that implies the original core book was doing anything wrong.

I suppose the magic system is overall improved. Arcana Unearthed eliminated the arcane/divine split, though only the Witch class does anything interesting with the new combined spell list. The big innovation is a variant of Vancian casting that would later become the default in D&D 5th edition - you ready a certain number of spells in advance and then you have an entirely separate pool of spell slots that you can use to cast any of your readied spells. It was enough to send me running to the credits page of the 5e PHB (he's on there, but it's unclear what degree of influence his ideas had on the final design). It solves one of my main problems with 3.X prepared casters - having to second-guess the DM while determining your spell loadout - but I still can't shake the feeling that getting 8th and 9th level spells is dramatically better than anything any other class gets, and even low-level casters have enough utility to crowd other classes out of their own niches.

However, I'm not sure how much that actually matters in the context of Arcana Unearthed as a whole. Because the class list doesn't have a designated Rogue class. The closest thing is the Unfettered, who lean into the "swashbuckler" interpretation of the class. And they get half the skill points, a weaker sneak attack, and no automatic stealth/infiltration utility (instead, many of the best rogue features got changed into feats, which the Unfettered has no special access to).

There is another skill-focused class, the Akashic, which gets 8 skill points per level and has every skill on its class list. They could be built like rogues, but it would be a flavor clash (their deal is that they access the world's collective memory to give themselves access to skills and information they would otherwise have no way of learning).

So it's not as clear a case of the casters stepping on the non-casters' toes. The toes in question have largely been withdrawn. However, I can't really call that a triumph of design, because you've still got characters getting the equivalent of 5th-7th level spells, once per day, at a level where the casters are getting access to things like Greater Dominate and Immortality. 

However, if you ban the Greenbond and Magister and just focus on the non-casters and 3/4 casters (generally, they have mid-BAB and cap out at 7th-level spells), then you get a system that is not quite a well-balanced C-tier-only experience, but which gets closer than anything in 3.X before or since.

On the balance, I quite liked Arcana Unearthed. It somehow does something different with the "D&D fantasy" genre without ever actually moving the needle on the genre even a little bit away from the center. The biggest change in flavor comes from its unconventional race lineup - you can play a giant or a sprite or a lion-person or a jackal-person . . . among others. And just the novelty of not having any of the PHB alumni (humans notwithstanding) was enough to avoid some of the most tired worldbuilding tropes, but you've still got ancient empires, mysterious ruins, and high-level magic users getting into shenanigans. Like I said earlier, I'm not ready to call it better, but I can give it credit for being distinct.

I think I'd have a stronger opinion about this book if I'd bothered to pick up The Diamond Throne campaign setting. Throughout the lore-heavy early chapters (and a bit in the magic chapter), there were numerous intimations of a well-worked-out world that, due to the Variant Player's Handbook format, was being kept tantalizingly out of reach. And the more I think about it, the more I think that all the Diamond Throne stuff should have been in one volume that used the regular PHB in an irregular way. Despite the blurb on the back, Arcana Unearthed makes a much stronger case for itself as a supplement than it does as a new core book.

Ukss Contribution: I am, in general, pretty down on this book's habit of taking a PHB spell, tweaking the rules slightly, and then renaming the spell to something that is not covered by the SRD. However, I did enjoy one of them. Mordenkainen's Sword became the nearly word-for-word identical MASSIVE SWORD (I thought it deserved to be in all caps).

Which just goes to show what a difference a single word can make. The Ukss version will probably play up the "massive" a bit more, but, yeah, I can picture it in my head - a sorcerer, confronted by their enemies, shouting, "Back off, or else I'm gonna summon a MASSIVE SWORD!" I can dig it.

(Shadowrun) Man and Machine: Cyberware

There are certain risks that I knew I would be subjecting myself to when I started this project. Certain experiences that could very well be anticipated as unpleasant, but necessary. So I really should not be coming at this like some kind of martyr. I knew what I was getting into.

But man, these Shadowrun rules expansions are going to kill me.

I suppose Man and Machine: Cyberware was a bit smoother than Rigger 2, probably because I find the subject matter - cybernetic implants for illicit, off-the-books mercenaries - to be slightly more interesting. But then I get to stretches like the new Implant Stress rules, where it implies that every single damage roll in the game should have a new additional step where you compare the die result to the attack's final adjusted damage total in order to determine whether you need to roll on a chart and apply location-based wound effects (which can render specific, individual pieces of cyberware inoperable), and I wonder "what has my life become?"

I've confessed in the past that there's a part of me that's tempted to run one of these ultra-granular games, complete with individual limb damage, a seatbelt-remembering minigame, and daily protein consumption tracking, and this book does an admirable job of bringing that fever-dream to reality. However, when I think about what I want from a Shadowrun game specifically, I'm not sure that punishing reckless gunplay and making the magic users constantly fear the possibility of losing their schtick is really a part of the picture. I mean, there is literally a piece of equipment in this game where if you have it and fail the wrong roll, your character gets leukemia. There's a context where that is hilarious, but it's not "sci-fi/fantasy heist capers."

All-in-all, I cannot bring myself to recommend this book's rules expansions. They mainly serve to create an environment where subjecting yourself to invasive, unnecessary, elective surgery is a total pain in the ass, when, in reality, all I've ever asked of a cyberware book is "let me be big, scary robot man plz."

Luckily, Man and Machine: Cyberware is not just a rules expansion, it's also an equipment book and in that latter role, it serves admirably. Some of the new cyberware is questionable - why would you install a flashlight in your eye-socket when you can just carry a flashlight. Some of it is a little goofy - extendable limbs is just some straight-ass Inspector Gadget shit. But there was some solid stuff here. You can get a machine implanted in your inner ear that is so effective at improving your balance that you need to re-learn how to drop prone voluntarily. The Data Filter - which temporarily shuts down its owner's ability to form new long-term memories and is mostly installed involuntarily on various servants and administrative assistants who don't need to be remembering their employer's meetings - is an effective bit of cyberpunk horror and a good excuse to kick off any number of plots, even if it's an unlikely choice for PCs. When I wasn't being drowned in new rules, I was having fun.

The strangest thing, overall, about this book has got to be the conspicuous absence of transhuman ideology. I'd say it was a generational thing, but transhumanism has been a thing since at least the 50s, and in any event this book was only 3 years prior to GURPS: Transhuman Space, so it's likely either an oversight or an intentional omission. I'm not sure it's a theme the game needs, per se. It might interfere with the punk elements to have both the transhumanist enthusiastic objectification of the body and the capitalist coerced objectification of the body existing in the same context. However, the absence of a positive motivation towards transformation did make me wonder, on multiple occasions, why anyone would be doing this to themselves. Maybe the existence of smart phones has made me jaded, but I just can't imagine wanting to get part of your skull removed to allow yourself to send faxes with your mind. Not when there's a handy pocket-sized device that does it for me.

I don't necessarily think it's a significant flaw - having chrome body parts is just a part of the overall genre aesthetic and would probably need to be there even if they were merely superficial - but I do think that maybe a lack of ideological drive might have negatively influenced the curation of the book's cyberware. Like maybe, if you realized that giving a person entirely novel senses would change their most fundamental perceptions of reality and subsequently have knock-on effects on how they chose to exist within the world, and if you realized that this change could be an end in itself, and you wrote your fiction around the idea that society was rapidly transforming under the weight of a new and unprecedented epistemological diversity, then maybe you'd get more heady, thought-provoking stuff like the Data Filter and less silly stuff like Cyberskates.

Which is not to say I'm entirely down on whimsy. A character who, faced with the Faustian power of unlimited body modification, chose to get integrated roller skates installed into their feet, can be fun and funny and challenging. The objectification of flesh could lead to the triviality of flesh, making the fact that Cyberskates are kind of a joke into a theme. It's just that I'm pretty sure that's not what Man and Machine: Cyberware is trying to do.

I can have this confidence because of the Cybermancy chapter. The premise behind cybermancy is that corporate engineers, surgeons, and sorcerers have developed a process in which they load down a victim with so much cyberware that their biological body would die without the application of foul necromantic rituals that bind the soul to a terrible prison of cold steel and cancerous, subjugated flesh. These cyberzombies rank as the corps' ultimate weapons and shock-troops, but they must be fed a continuous supply of drugs, alchemical reagents, and electronically-induced memories of their human existence, lest they lose the will to live and rot away in a melancholic yearning for the freedom of the grave.  And the bulk of the chapter is devoted to complex rules that assume the PCs will want to become one.

It's not my place to yuck anyone's yum, but that is a thematic whiff if ever there was one. On the one hand, kudos to Shadowrun for not making a major setting element "NPC-only," but on the other hand, get yourself sorted out, Shadowrun. Like, really.

Overall, I did not especially enjoy reading Man and Machine: Cyberware, but I can respect it as the sort of book that wasn't really meant to be enjoyed. I guess I can use the equipment and some of the rules and supply my own themes as a GM.

Ukss Contribution: Carcerands, a pharmaceutical technology that creates a kind of molecular sheath around toxic or medicinal substances. The body gradually breaks down the carcerand and only then is it subject to the substance inside. This allows for all sorts of shenanigans, my favorite of which is giving someone a delayed-action poison and then blackmailing them with the antidote. It's something I would never do to a player as a GM, but it's a great start to a plot. Like maybe Mr. Johnson was on the receiving end and rather than submit to the blackmail, hires the players to steal the antidote. 

I just think it's a great thing for a setting to have in its back pocket.