(Shadowrun 3e) Loose Alliances

I don't care much for Captain Chaos as a forum moderator. And maybe some of that is on me, the reader, not entirely understanding the nature of Shadowland as an online community. I'm sort of imagining it like a threaded message board, and so I see the Captain wandering into the comments nuking 10.2 Mp of discussion about the secrets of the mysterious Atlantean Foundation and I think "oh, wow, way to miss the entire point of putting this online and allowing for comments," but I guess, from the mod message ("I haven't the space or the inclination to include them all here. And now back to our regular broadcast.") that what's really happening is that Shadowland comments are in-line annotations of the posted documents, and so a long discussion among the "commentators" would actually interrupt the reading of the document. The physical form of the gaming book in our reality is, in fact, a diegetic representation of the fictional technology of the Shadowrun universe.

But even conceding that Loose Alliances is an in-setting artifact, I think Captain Chaos' moderation choices leave a lot to be desired. Like, seriously, what is this curation? "Lately, however, more and more of you have been clamoring for a download that dives behind the scenes on the smaller-scale, more localized contenders."

Don't get me wrong. That's a great idea for a Shadowrun supplement. In fact, I have strong empirical evidence that such a supplement might be one of 3rd edition's best books. But c'mon, what's the SEO target on something like this? "Um, I am in desperate need to know everything I can about the Atlantean Foundation, the Tanamous organ-legging ring, and the UN, but I don't have time for three different downloads. What do I search for . . . I've got it! 'Organizations that are smaller than a megacorp.'"

I guess what I'm saying is that the different chapters of this book could, quite easily, have been separate in-setting documents, posted at different times, to different Special Interest Groups, and I don't think I'd have had a problem with that. Certainly, less of a problem than I had with Captain Chaos popping into a potentially interesting comment chain about Atlantis and scolding the room about being insufficiently mid.

But that's not actually why I have a problem with the Captain's moderation. I get fiction, really. I'm not a humorless grump. . .

I'm a humorless scold, and me and the cap have beef because, when he was called out for posting Humanis (fantasy KKK) propaganda in a document about potential employers he said, "Your objection is noted, but Shadowland does not filter access by creed or ideology. Fact is, we do have some Humanis supporters logging in and fact is, some runners out there may end up working for Humanis or their ilk some day . . ."

And then he follows up with some nonsense about the board's responsibilities as a repository for professional knowledge and sunlight being the best disinfectant, but the commentor "Antifa" says it best, "Liberal drek. If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."

Again. In the context of an rpg supplement, I'm glad this information is here, to round out the worldbuilding. And you don't get a hero like Antifa without some fa for them to be anti, but if I'm a Shadowland regular, I'm giving Captain Chaos the side-eye from here on out.

Of course, that's a rhetorical two-step Shadowrun books use quite a lot (so much so that I was certain they'd do something similar in the section about feminism, enough that I preemptively made a snarky comment in my notes . . . that proved to be completely unfair, so I guess Fanpro wins this round). I guess, if I'm really going to be a Media Literacy Guy, I kind of have to be cool with it, but it does mean that I'll occasionally have to read fantasy-racist propaganda written in a realistic-seeming racist voice and there'll be a treacherous part of my brain that thinks "are they trying to get away with something?"

And I'm like 99% sure that they aren't. I don't think you write such a glowing recommendation of anti-fascist action in 2005 unless you're broadly on the side of the good guys. And maybe the brief discussion of transgender women is a little awkward and off-point from the perspective of modern best practices, but when you compare it to the mainstream discourse at the time . . . it's pretty okay (though maybe they could have pointed out that 2064's established level of biotech pretty much rendered all potential anti-trans arguments entirely moot). However, when they round out the feminism section with radical organizations that go too far, and one of the examples a commentor gives is "On a good day they'll 'out' a rapist to every corner of the real world and the Matrix. On a bad day, the police will be lucky to identify his remains. . ." there's room for that 1% doubt to creep in. It's just . . . a little weird when people start condemning vigilantism on a message board where hackers and mercenaries gather to discuss the best way to commit (often violent) crimes for pay.

Also, I'm pretty sure that being broadly on the side of the good guys does not apply to Islamophobia, largely for reasons discussed in previous posts but continued here in Loose Alliance's depiction of The Islamic Renaissance Movement. I think the IRM is a conscious effort to go against America's implicit bias by depicting a group of good, reasonable, pro-democracy, pro-diversity, and pro-science Muslims . . . but it's one of those positive depictions that is so conspicous in its efforts to dispel stereotypes that it very clearly reminds you of what those stereotypes are in the first place. The fact that IRM offices are a frequent target for fundamentalist bombings doesn't really help matters.

I am certain that there are vastly more interesting things one could do with cyberpunk-fantasy Arabia than what they eventually went with. I'm hesitant to suggest what they might be, lest I give away my own shallow knowledge of the region, but, like . . . the class stratification of Dubai? A European dragon owns a major corporation with interests in the region . . . could a jinn own a rival corporation? Would that be interesting? (Actually, I have no idea whether Arabians would even find that acceptable fantasy fiction . . . my gut tells me that opinions would vary greatly). The established tech for 2064 includes fusion reactors and electric cars . . . so, like, the changing face of the energy industry, global warming, and the spontaneous re-wilding that accompanied the Awakening? I'm just pitching here. Things you might do instead of a New Islamic Jihad and the counteracting social movement it inspired.

Which is all to say, time makes fools of us all. I invite certain things upon myself by reading 20+ year old books, and I'd probably do well not to get too judgmental about them . . . but man, does Shadowrun's depiction of Islam bum me out.

Other than that, and a couple of examples of the book being way too on the nose about the parallels between orks and Black people (the leader of the Ork Rights Committee is described as being "Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and Huey Newton rolled into one"), I really liked Loose Alliances. It's an oddly-curated cross-section of parts of the setting that get frequently referenced but have not yet been fully explained.

On a more setting-nerdery level, I suppose it's okay but frustrating that some of the entries left me with nearly as many questions as I had at the start. The book cruelly teases me by casually mentioning the Atlantean Foundation's work in Ukraine, without actually drawing any actionable conclusions from the matter. And somehow, none of the commentors see fit to point out that "this elf's background check only goes back to 2012, as if they suddenly and mysteriously appeared out of nowhere" is a thing that happens so much it's practically a cliche. And even though the OOC section directly mentions the immortal elves, it doesn't actually establish how much influence they have over the Atlantean Foundation's work. 

Are they trying to reestablish Thera? Find its big-ass sorcery to put to another use? Get ahead of the Horrors for a change? What's the plan? Exactly how full of shit are the Danaan families? Tell me, I have to know!

Also, because I'm running out of places to mention it - VITAS, that's some bullshit, right? When talking about the UN, the book mentions that India and Africa lost a third of their population when international aid organizations were redirected towards richer nations (which, to be fair, still wound up losing a quarter of their populations, on average) and . . . what the fuck are we even doing here?

I don't hate it as a setting element. The whole "indigenous populations were closer to real magic and thus had a leg up when the Awakening happened" plotline is a little problematic, but if you go with it and assume that they had a magical cure to a disease that was ravaging the colonialist population, then certain . . . demographic inconsistencies start to be a little less relevant. 

And, on a broader genre note, "The Shadowrun setting is actually a narrowly-averted apocalypse" would do quite a bit to make the fantasy elements more of an equal partner with the cyberpunk elements. You could have these vast tracts of wilderness that exist because of a well-timed one-two punch of rapidly-accelerated reproduction of wild plants/animals and the rapid depopulation that accompanied the virus. People fled to the sprawls because when you're laid out with a virally-induced toxic allergy that's the worst fucking time for a giant tree to burst from the ground and tear your home's foundation a new one.

The metroplexes could be these high-tech, glittering Points of Light, claustrophobically hemmed in by encroaching, Awakened lands whose spirits are furious at the despoilation of the Earth, and all your food is synthetic and vat grown, not purely out of contemporary anxieties capitalist frankenfood, but because deadly paracritters are a major problem and if you tried to clear a farm in the vast sea of trees that is now rural Ohio, you will get fucking eaten. But the ruins of the old cities are still out there, and they are full of modern-day treasure. Maybe your off-the-books mercenary will go and brave the Manticore's lair to retrieve a legendarily lost bitcoin wallet or maybe it's a corporate-sponsored attempt to recover an advanced prototype lost during the . . . migration.

I can feel in my bones that this is potentially a great genre synergy. Cyberpunk societies where capitalism is more powerful than ever, but a fantasy world where not even capitalism can pretend to own the Earth . . . the melancholy grandeur of decaying suburbs turned mass graves, in the shadow of neon-lit skyscrapers whose close-packed density merely performs the illusion of strength. Elves and orks, dwarves and trolls, still human enough to cling to technological society, but something inside them was empowered by the very force that humbled the 20th century, and they know that they could thrive out there in ways that untouched humans could not. And worse, the humans know it too, deep down, and that's the crack that lets anti-meta sentiment thrive. 

So much was lost in the fall of the old world, so many people fell through the cracks. The corporations use them as deniable, expendable pawns, but for all their wealth and power, money cannot truly buy control. The mysteries of nature are alive and aware once more and there be dragons in the dark places, lost to human oversight. But then, even here, a person's got to eat and the hustle never really ends. The new world fights over the scraps of the old, and maybe even dragons could learn a thing or two from the endless chase for increasing shareholder value. . .

Except, that's not quite Shadowrun. I honestly think the writers forget VITAS even happened, except when it comes to putting an unspecified devastation in the backstory. In the real world, human populations took 80-200 years to recover from the Black Death, but everywhere, even regions that canonically lost nearly a billion people, are described as being bigger, busier, and more crowded versions of the places they are now. There's relatively little discussion about the potential effects of a mass casualty event on Seattle's notoriously overheated real-estate market.

Though, now that I have it all out, and now that I'm thoroughly convinced that a Shadowrun knock-off, set 200 years in the future, when advanced transhumanist technology could plausibly exist as dungeon loot, is a great idea and that I should immediately get to work on that . . . it's time to remember what got this started in the first place. Loose Alliances, a fun grab-bag of miscellaneous Shadowrun topic that has next to nothing to do with the last few paragraphs. It may have had a few rough patches, but overall I think it was pretty great.

(Even if Captain Chaos is a terrible forum moderator).

Ukss Contribution: "Vat brains to operate fighter drones." A simple idea, creepy as hell, that can easily be integrated into the setting. It's a no-brainer.

(I'd say "no pun intended," but I came up with that line accidentally, groaned when I realized what I'd done, and then decided to go with it anyway. You're welcome.)

I wrote a book!

 They are a demon-haunted people!

The sun-scorched coast of the Bay of Blood is a land of petty warlords and terrible sorcerers, where the strongest rule and the weak are sacrificed in the rite of conquest! At the heart of its eastern shore, the cursed city-state of Dazul labors under the thrall of the cruel Priest-Kings, a council of 91 sorcerer-exorcists who together subjugate a population desperate for hope. Scoured by the unnaturally deadly desert wind and befouled by the decaying stench of a poisoned sea, it is a land out of time, where the eternal rhythms of survival defy even the natural progress of change.

But nothing built by men or demons can ever truly be eternal, and change is coming, whether the city is ready or not. Thanks to:

Zenir, a common laborer and prodigy in the art of sorcery, recruited to the Priest-Kings as part of a secret bargain.

Mekharu Kestrel, sole heiress to a Palace Family who tried to change the city's fate . . . and failed.

And

Orlan “The Griffon” Saberman, grizzled mercenary and vigilante adventurer who bears a magical mask and a holy mission to stop evil, whatever the cost.

The three heroes' lives will intertwine as they each follow their own path, through romance and ambition, murder and mystery, false friends and unlikely allies, towards the dark secret at the heart of Dazul, an ancient crime and the legacy of a thousand years of unredressed sin!

(Also, sometimes it's funny, like, on purpose. Wouldn't want you to be surprised by that).

So sharpen your sword and load your pistol as you prepare to enter a land left behind by the modern age and unravel the mystery of:

The Hands of Nebt Bhakau

Volume One of the Nebt Bhakau Saga

Just one of a thousand:

TALES FROM THE BAY OF BLOOD

Dropbox Link

The Red Star Campaign Setting

SPOILER WARNING: For the Red Star comic series (I'm guessing)

 It is a logical inevitability that one will always underestimate their ability to be surprised. For example, you could be a person who read 548 rpg books over the past few years, was approaching the end of an epoch with their last few miscellaneous d20 books, saw that one of the remainder was The Red Star Campaign Setting (T.S. Luikart and Ian Sturrock), a licensed tie-in to a comic series you'd never heard of, which presumably found its way onto your bookshelf by accident (it's been known to happen to people like me, who will never not buy random rpgs at yard sales and consignment stores), and you may think "this is going to be boring and cheap, at best an experience geared towards a specialized audience that I am not part of, with no real reason to exist except to appeal to the fandom."

And then, you're going to read the book and find it complex and challenging, and maybe a little awesome, but in a way you're not entirely sure it's appropriate to make an rpg about and it's just going to completely suck you into its world and become . . . maybe not one of your favorite books, but certainly one that it'll be thrilling to blog about.

Oh, and in case it wasn't clear, this hypothetical was actually about me this whole time.

In order to understand what The Red Star Campaign Setting is, we must first define what it isn't. It is not an alternate history where a Soviet-style communist republic engages in a Cold War-style conflict with a USA-style capitalist republic, getting involved in an Afghanistan-style invasion before collapsing into a Russian Commonwealth-style kleptocracy and facing a Chechnya-style rebellion, all the while using sorcery, psychic powers, and absurd diesel-punk technology like city-sized flying battleships and transforming tanks.

And the reason it's not that is because the allegory is even more on the nose than I made it sound, to the degree that you can't really call it "alternate" history. It's the same history, but seen through a lens of comic-book-style nonsense. Also, not-Stalin is a deathless necromancer who plans to enslave the not-Soviet dead in spiritual gulags so he can harvest their Post Human Energy to become a god and the not-CIA are not so much trying to thwart this plan as convince their friendly dictators to recreate it on a smaller scale so the not-USA can use that same energy to develop advanced weapons in order to secure the nation's status as sole superpower and neo-colonialist center in a global capitalist empire.

Like I said. A little awesome.

But also, I can't help but wonder if I should enjoy it as much as I do.

I think it's probably okay to enjoy the Red Star comic. Just from what I gathered through NPC write-ups and references to canon events, and making a generous guess based on the nuanced, humanist rpg setting it inspired, it seems like a work of singular vision that has interesting, worthwhile things to say about the complexity of geopolitics, the role of heroic individuals in systems that are not worthy of them, and the way even the most hopeful of ideologies can curdle into horrors when subject to the cynical logic of power.

But as a world in which players are expected to improvise new comics-style narratives, I worry that maybe it's just a little bit too much fun.

For example, during the Great Patriotic War, the Aryan Nationalists of the Volksreich, under the leadership of the occult-savvy dictator, Krieger, created massive death factories to render captive populations into raw spiritual energy in order to sweep aside all existing life and create a new age where they alone would rule an empty Earth. 

And that's fun. Or, at least, it's more fun than what actually happened.  And I can't help wondering - is it actually allowed to be that particular kind of fun?

To be clear, I don't think this choice was made to be Nazi-apologist. In the backstory of the game, everyone who might even remotely be protagonist material is very much against the Volkreich, and no one has a good word to say about them even decades after the fact. It's a close allegory. The main victims of the death factories were vaguely-described "ethnic and religious minorities that couldn't effectively fight back."

But . . . you have something very much like Nazis, who started something very much like WW2, and perpetrated something very much like the Holocaust, yet you don't have anything that looks all that much like the Jews.

And I don't think the intent was erasure. I wasn't joking about how on-the-nose this setting was. If it exists in the real world, some version of it probably exists here (canonically, China = "The Lands of the Dragon" so Israel  = something like "The Kingdom of the Covenant," probably). Because of that, I think the intent was to make the backstory for the game (and possibly the comic) a little less fucking grim.

I can't tell you this approach is definitively worse. It may be better. It could even be correct. You have something with the stakes and the spectacle of WW2, but which doesn't recapitulate the trauma of history's worst atrocity. And it's not technically erasing the victims, because this is an "alternate" history where the belligerents were the Volksreich, the Isle of Lions, Gallia, the Western Transnational Alliance from across the sea, and the United Republics of the Red Star (or U.R.R.S. for short).

Honestly, as a gentile, I think I prefer this approach. But also honestly, as a gentile, it's not my fucking call to make.

And this issue isn't confined to the backstory. This is a complex, sensitive setting that doesn't let anyone off the hook (especially the two Cold War superpower-equivalents), but it does make its depictions just a little less fraught. Safer. Replacing the most repulsive of the Cold War excesses with something that is technically worse, but in that exaggerated villain-core sort of way.

I think, for the purposes of this post, that I have to assume it is okay for them to do this. And operating under that assumption, the thing I appreciate most about this setting is how fair-minded it is. The U.R.R.S. is the protagonist faction, but it's not the heroic faction. This isn't an alt-history that presupposes the Internationalists (communist-equivalent) walked the walk. You're not playing the champions of a paradise of the proletariat, that stands in stark contrast to the exploitation of the Transnationalists (capitalist-equivalent).

The U.R.R.S is a tyrannical dictatorship, and a bad one, even without all that spirit world nonsense. It censors its artists. It sends people to labor camps in the polar tundra, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, and sometimes without even telling them what crimes they were accused of. Political officers of the Internationalist Party will assassinate politicians in broad daylight, if it seems like they're too receptive to liberal reforms.

It's a dystopia. You're playing the bad guys (or, at least, one faction of bad guys). But your player characters are neither depraved boogeymen nor paragons of the propagandized ideals of the state, existing in ironic contrast to a depraved system. Rather, the advice the setting chapter gives about the people of the U.R.R.S is very grounded, very human. It talks about the cultural trauma of the Great Patriotic War and the feudalism that came before it, about strategies for socially navigating a totalitarian society that are both practical and psychological, about the unspoken hypocrisies of the system, divisions of class and status that can never be escaped but can be mitigated by military service.

It all feels very real. Which is hardly surprising, because this book has this entire time been peaking over reality's shoulder and copying its homework. Plus, you can learn to summon a gun with your mind that shoots 10,000 ghost bullets per minute.

But the fair-mindedness isn't limited just to the protagonists. The enemies of the U.R.R.S. are treated in a similarly nuanced way. It would have been easy to exaggerate the Western Transnational Alliance (USA-equivalent) into something so grotesque the U.R.R.S. would seem heroic by comparison. It would even have been easy (especially for a game created in the USA) to make them the uncomplicated world police of American propaganda and just lean into the U.R.R.S.'s "evil empire" vibe.

But The Red Star Campaign Setting does neither. The W.T.A. is a fucking plague on the world, propping up dictators, immiserating the poor, putting its hands deep into the pockets of even its closest allies . . . and expecting to be thanked for its service, but it is also freer, less nakedly imperial, and better able to provide a high standard of living than its arch-rivals in the U.R.R.S.

It's not a particularly flattering depiction of my homeland, but it is undeniably, recognizably American (one alt-history quirk of the W.T.A. is that it so loves guns it never got around to outlawing dueling, which is . . . not something that was strictly necessary to make it a worthy antagonist, but is something I'm going to have to give a reluctant "touche.")

Although, its most impressive and daring bit of humanism might just be that it's a book written in 2004, that spends a lot of time covering the U.R.R.S.'s invasion of Al'lstaan (i.e. the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), without being noticeably Islamophobic. 

I mean, there are a couple of "infidels" and "jihads" thrown around, but in context they feel very fair. Assuming the allegory is as on the nose as it was for WW2, you're going to leave this book with a better understanding of Afghanistan's grievances with both Russia and the West (or, at least, I feel like I did).

And this empathy is not just safely confined to things that happened in the 70s and 80s. The history section ends with the sort of perfect literary bookend that makes you think real history was written by a hack - the W.T.A., now sole global superpower in the wake of the U.R.R.S.'s collapse, is about to launch its own invasion of Al'lstaan and "to the government's chagrin, the questions have not stopped. What will happen next is not yet written."

That doesn't get any particular points from me, because it's the sort of ending I, as a writer, would gnaw my arm off to get a chance to use. However, there's a part a little before this, explaining the W.T.A.'s reaction to the Imperial City Bombing (the satire here is not subtle) - "A significant majority of their populace had so bought into their government's propaganda they could not even understand why other groups would wish them harm for any reason other than mere jealousy."

Damn.

No, not just damn. Damn . . . in 2004. That's genuine courage. It's genuine empathy. And it earns a lot of leeway from me re: the things I mentioned earlier, that made me nervous about this book's point of view.

It's so rare to see an rpg that does "shades of grey" really well. It's not an easy, cheerful "there were heroes on both sides." Nor an edgy, cynical "everyone's a villain." Rather, people do both good things and bad, because of systemic incentives and personal motives that are tragically understandable. . .

Except for Imbohl. That guy's just a dick.

So I guess you could say that, overall, I liked The Red Star Campaign Setting. Will that translate into me using it for a game? Maybe. And that's saying a lot for a book I don't even remember buying.

Ukss Contribution: I promise myself that I'm not going to start picking entries just to make my worldbuilding easier, but there's a thing where the U.R.R.S.'s sorcerous academies are teaching people to cast spells, but they call them "protocols" in a deliberate to make them seem less mystical. And it's such a neat dovetailing between the setting's fantasy elements and the real U.S.S.R.'s ideological approach to science. The fact that it fits well with my early-industrial-meets-fantasy setting is just a nice little bonus.

(Shadowrun 3e) Shadows of Asia

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual Abuse of Children

Waahh! Why do I keep running into situations where I'm expected to have an intelligent opinion about orientalism? One day, someone's going to say to me, "Hey, aren't you just a white guy who's taken it upon himself to say when things are and are not racist?" And I'm going to have nothing. Best I'm going to be able to do is mumble, "Yeah, but I'd just read Shadows of Asia."

Is it really as bad as all that? I don't know. Probably not. But it does have the line, "Manchuria: the most inscrutable of lands among the inscrutable Chinese." And you can't just say that. Plus, the title of the whole chapter is "Chinese Puzzle," so I guess we're talking about orientalism now.

"As a European Orientalist once surmised, Hinduism as 'what Hindus do'. . ." Oh, sorry, that's another quote, from the part of the book where it explains India's caste system. But it's as good a jumping off point as any to get to the thesis of this post - this book has a particular point of view, and that point of view is "The first book in this series was Shadows of North America, because Shadowrun originates in North America, the second book in this series was Shadows of Europe, because Shadowrun has a large European player base, and the third book is going to be Shadows of Asia, because Shadowrun is cyberpunk, and cyberpunk as a genre has a huge amount of unexamined orientalist baggage."

And in true cyberpunk fashion, that baggage remains thoroughly unexamined. Like, the book makes a point of saying that the center of the tourism-for-purposes-of-child-sex-trafficking industry has moved from Bangkok to Rangoon (Yangon). And why would it do that?

No, seriously, why?

Shadows of Asia has a copyright date of 2005-2006. And I think, if you're trying to write about sci-fi Thailand in 2005, maybe the first step is to see what's going on in current Thailand and extrapolate. The headlines back then probably talked quite a bit about the country's growing problem with child sex trafficking and the government's attempts at cracking down on it and maybe the people writing this book thought they'd get it done by 2064. But where are all those sex tourists going to go now? Could be anywhere in the world. Why not nearby Myanmar?

I think that mostly demonstrates a failure of imagination. They're putting Southeast Asia in their roleplaying game and the one thing people know about SE Asia is that it's where perverts from around the world go to pay money to rape children. So, if you don't put something like that somewhere in your chapter about SE Asia, people are going to notice and probably complain. Except, I don't think even that much thought was put into it. I think, what's really going on is that child-raping-sex-tourists are so fundamentally baked into their idea of what Southeast Asia is like that if they didn't mention them, they wouldn't feel like they were authentically talking about the region. No malice. No premeditation. Just sitting down in front of the computer and putting One Night in Bangkok on repeat while you write.

It's like the association between Islam and violent fundamentalism. They're self-aware enough about this to say "Not All Muslims" in the form of two rival factions - the Islamic Unity Movement, which you know, is entirely and uncomplicatedly the Fox News version of Islam and the modern, tolerant Islamic Renaissance Movement. But I think the thing that annoys me about this is that it leads to things like the introduction to Indonesia saying, "Compared to Middle Eastern Islam, Indonesian Islam is moderate, accommodating, and the least Arabic . . . this form of Islam is more tolerant and has been referred to as 'Islam with a smiling face.'"

First of all, no shit it's the least Arabic. I'm assuming you've seen a map before. Arabia is here and Indonesia is waay over heere. We can break out the calipers and count the distance with the legend key, if you like.

But the second, more pertinent thing is what the fuck are you even talking about? If anyone ever referred to my belief system as "_____ with a smiling face" I would punch them in the fucking junk. I may have my issues with the New Atheists, but I don't believe I've ever given someone permission to tell me "you're so reasonable compared to them." (I know, I know, at this moment you're probably thinking "don't worry, no one's in danger of doing that," but I do sometimes actually try to be reasonable).

What's happened here is that they've spent some considerable time characterizing "fundamentalist" Islam as being anti-metahuman and anti-magic (you know, opposed to some of the most popular character types in the game). Then they have characters express surprise when they learn about Muslims who are not like that, without ever acknowledging that this specific form of fantastic bigotry is something they invented for their game of make-believe.

Would an Ayatollah hate an elf? I don't know, maybe, but it hardly seems inevitable.

It's like that thing with Southeast Asia. There are certain ideas that are tangled together in your brain, like Islam and sectarian violence, and you don't make much of an effort to question the connection. Islam being dangerous and unreasonable and opposed to fun is what makes it recognizably Islam and maybe over time you branch out from that simplistic depiction, but what, in other contexts, would be nuance and conflict are instead called out as deviations from expectations.

I'm no expert on orientalism, but I am an optimist re: a human being's capacity for reflection and growth. You can do better. You can learn more about what Muslims actually believe.

But like I said. I don't think it's malice. And I don't even think it's laziness, not really. I think it's in large part due to the fact that this is a game that has been around since 1989 and some part of it is always going to be frozen in the perspectives of the time of its birth. More than Islam staying recognizably Islam or SE Asia staying recognizably SE Asia, it's about Shadowrun staying recognizably Shadowrun. My evidence: "The general theme of Russia is a power play. The atmosphere is reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the mid 1980s, between Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev." Most everything that's wrong with this book is some variant of that.

There's more I could be saying. For all my complaints, the book does have some delightful fantasy/sci-fi, like mountain-sized fire elementals or high-tech robot governesses. And there are things that are a little weird without rising to the level of offensive. Like the fact that Malaysian communism "threatens the capitalist paradise that urban Malaysia has become" which is maybe a sly bit of irony in the OOC rules section, or maybe just an example of the author not really understanding cyberpunk as a genre ("it's about how neoliberal cyborgs will raise the global standard of living, right?").

Eh, one more grrr before I check out - orks are unusually common in Mongolia and trolls are common among the Maori. And, it's like, Shadowrun orks and trolls aren't exactly fantasy orcs and trolls, so . . . maybe it's not . . . wrong? But my eye is definitely twitching at the thought of untangling the subtext.

Overall, I don't know how I feel about Shadows of Asia. I guess because it covers all of Asia (even Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and the Uighur-inhabited Chinese province of Xinjiang, which have all merged into the nation of Turkestan, presumably for purposes of map legibility) and my knowledge of 30% of the Earth's land area, containing 60% of its total population is cursory enough that I needed the book to be a guide to both the real places and the near-future post-Awakening versions of those places. And I don't feel confident that it was up to the task.

And yeah, that's massively unfair on my part. It's too much to put on a 231-page rpg supplement. Maybe there's a bunch of great stuff in here that would resonate deeply with me if I were less ignorant. Maybe someone's casually flipping through the pages and they stop with reverent awe because they absolutely nailed cyberpunk/fantasy Macao. And maybe that's a pretty far-fetched scenario, but it is entirely probable that there are large parts of the book that are good at a level above my ability to appreciate.

On the other hand, scroll back up and take a look at all the stuff I was complaining about. That's how the book looked at exactly the level of my ability to appreciate. 

Ukss Contribution: I'm going to sit this one out. I'd say that only about 15% of it is actually bad, but that 15% contained things that made me deeply uncomfortable.

(V: tM 5e) Clanbook Toreador 5th edition (deluxe)

 Where to get it: Drivethrurpg

First up, an acknowledgement. It takes a hell of a lot of courage to ask a stranger to publicly review your book. This is doubly true when the reviewer in question is a rambling jackass who often uses his reviews as an excuse to talk about metaphysics or international politics before weakly signing off with a "oh, yeah, I guess the book was pretty good too, or whatever."

Which is to say, I have no idea what the folks at Grey Gecko Games were hoping to get out of sending me a review copy of their book, but I hope they get it nonetheless.

Unfortunately, I didn't like it very much. Now, a part of that is on me. Hell, a BIG part of that is on me. I was woefully unqualified for the task in front of me. The most recent Vampire: the Masquerade book I've ever read was Gehenna, and that was more than 20 years ago. The copy of V20 I have on my shelf was a gift. I never got around to actually reading it.

As for 5th edition? Forget about it. I know all of jack and shit.

Which meant I spent a significant portion of my time with this book squinting at the page, asking myself, "is this new?" 

Google was able to satisfactorily answer most of my questions, but it could never provide me with a necessary sense of emotional connection to the material. That put Clanbook: Toreador 5th Edition (Deluxe) (Sky Bradley and Henry Langdon) in the unenviable position of not just having to sell me on itself, but of having to sell me on 5th edition as a whole.

Now, I like flatter myself that I'm not a complete asshole. It's entirely unreasonable for me to hold my shortcomings against the book. Nonetheless, I can't pretend I have any sensible plan for how to avoid doing so. There was a lot I liked about this book, but also some stuff that I found a bit too gross or silly. What if I wind up praising the book entirely for things that were present in the core? Or perhaps worse, what if I fault it for things it couldn't avoid inheriting from the core?

In retrospect, I should probably have politely declined the opportunity to write this particular review. I made an open offer to review any rpg book anyone sent me, and that offer was sincere, but I made it because I wanted to help out indie rpg authors. I don't see how anyone is going to be helped by me writing a shitshow of a review.

On the other hand, shitshow reviews are my specialty, and Grey Gecko Games had to have known that when they scrolled through my list of games, thoroughly read my backlog (I'm assuming), saw Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition nowhere in either of those things, and then decided to ask me to do this anyway. I think the least I can do for them is to treat this version of Clanbook: Toreador purely as a book qua book. Anything less would be dishonoring their (reckless) bravery.

Which means I have to go back to what I said at the top of this review ("Unfortunately, I didn't like it very much.") and put that knee-jerk assessment under the microscope. What, exactly, did I mean by that, and does it still hold up now that I'm pretending that this is a supplement for Revised edition and all the mechanics I don't understand make perfect sense.

Note: this book contains a generous helping of new Discipline powers, Merits, and something called Loresheets, which I've gathered through context are a new way of presenting backgrounds. I have no way of knowing whether these are overpowered or dysfunctional or even just redundant with things the rules already say you can do. However, assuming that the mechanics are balanced, they add a lot of value to the book. And if they're not balanced, well, disruptive non-canon character widgets are what fan supplements are for. I particularly liked the Presence technique that (if I'm understanding the rules correctly) tainted a human target's blood with particular emotional contamination, to indirectly influence other vampires who drank from that human.

Just looking at things from the high concept level, this book has a lot of great ideas. It's clear that the authors understood the Toreador and knew which vibes to center. I didn't particularly care for those Toreador who were all "we find exquisite beauty in the unveiled countenance of suffering," but there's no denying that this was an element that was always present in the clan. The worst I can say here is that it is not noticeably better than previous Toreador books at putting these creeps into the dustbin of history, where they belong.

Focusing more on the positive, there are things in this book that they didn't have to do - sections which were never obligatory in any Vampire: the Masquerade clanbook, but which are especially useful for Toreador games. There's four pages worth of sample toxic boyfriends/girlfriends, with roleplaying hints presented as dating-sim-style affection adjustments. To increase Meredith's affection the player "must act with a decisive efficiency and a ruthless approach to dealing with problems." But if you're courting Julian, "failing to provide the constant validation they crave will quickly cause their affection to wane."

Normally, I don't approve of these fucked up relationship dynamics, but this is Vampire: the Masquerade we're talking about. If I'm playing a Toreador, I definitely want to ruin that goth twink's life.

And now, I have to talk about something uncomfortable . . . actually, let me swerve into a couple more things I liked (because the thing I'm going to say after this is really going to make me feel like an ass). There's a sample adventure, titled "Drown" where a melancholic painter, haunted by these terrible spirits of loneliness, "has become obsessed with painting in the dark, using some form of pigment few can even see."

Earlier, in the Bloodlines section, there's a group called, "Il Sangue di Sabella," an 800-year-old order of vampiric knights. They were founded when a devoted husband sought a cure for his wife's illness and attracted the obsession of a Toreador manipulator. Various interesting things happened, leading to a tragic ending where both were changed into vampires and Sabella, being pure of heart, refused to feed on human blood. Before she sealed herself away in a tomb, she made her husband swear an oath to always protect their daughter, and in all the centuries since, the vampire lineage descended from the husband has been secretly protecting the mortal descendants of his mortal family.

Clanbook: Toreador 5th edition (deluxe) can definitively claim its place as a true World of Darkness book, because it's out here casually delivering a flawless dark-romance-procedural tv pilot in the interest of inspiring exactly one character per campaign, maximum. He's a medieval knight-turned vampire, she's a cynical modern woman who doesn't believe in supernatural nonsense. He's supposed to protect her from the shadows, but in the course of rescuing her from ruffians, he accidentally reveals himself. While walking her home, she's reluctantly charmed by his old-fashioned, old-world manners and he finds himself impressed by her big city savoir faire. He was never supposed to get tangled up in her life, but he has roused her curiosity, and if they don't meet on purpose, there's no telling what she'll uncover in her stubborn investigations . . . And also they're both hot, obviously.

You ever read something so inspired that you immediately have to write fanfiction about it? I just did. Remember that at the end of the next paragraph.

Now for the thing I've been dreading since I read the first page of this book - discussing its fatal flaw. From the technical perspective of writing as a craft, Clanbook: Toreador 5th edition (deluxe) is . . . inconsistent. There are sections where the prose is really good - clear and confident, poetic yet restrained, with a voice that captures both the general horror of the world of darkness and the romantic horror of the Toreador, specifically. With just a little more polish, it could easily be professionally published and no one would bat an eye. And then there are other, more common, sections that . . . do not rise to that standard.

Oof. Ordinarily, I wouldn't say anything about this at all, but this is a product you might potentially pay $9.99 for. If it were consistently as good as its best parts, it would be worth it. The book I got, for free? If I weren't reviewing it, I probably would have given up halfway through.

It doesn't feel good to say that, but it's honestly how I feel. If this were a free fan supplement, I'd heap praises on its inventiveness, its generosity, and its obvious care for the source material. It has a ton of potential, and there's something wonderful about getting to experience that. However, as a paid product, it's not ready. It would really benefit from the attention of an editor. The writers are clearly capable of delivering a polished product, but right now, they could use just a little bit of extra help. 

Ukss Contribution: Il Sangue di Sabella. It really was amazing work, no caveats or qualifications. I feel privileged to have read it.

(Shadowrun 3e) Shadows of Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get the fuck out of my face with this shit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmm.

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

On the show with Phil McGraw

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

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

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

c.f. Shadows of Europe, 2004.

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

CONTENT WARNING: The Holocaust

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

So, Auschwitz is haunted. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fading Suns d20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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