(Earthdawn 4e) Empty Thrones

Metaplot. A contentious issue, subject to many strong opinions both for and against. There was a time when it ruled the rpg scene, with several popular games churning out supplement after supplement, exapanding their fictional worlds while also advancing their calendars, making the things that came before at least partially obsolete. And then there was a period where it fell out of fashion, where games aimed to be smaller, more self-contained, and eternally evergreen.

I'm not sure where on the spectrum the current scene's sensibilities lie. Whether the newcomers brought in by the popularity of Actual Play performances are enchanted, as us oldsters once were, by the novelty of ever-advancing lore, or whether the honeymoon period has worn off, and they have become weary of always having to chase the newest thing. 

Or perhaps there has been a total transformation of consciousness, and the old breakdowns no longer apply. Certainly, a lot of what made keeping up with the supplement treadmill so onerous was just that niche books like optional rpg supplements were hard to find in the days before the internet and were as often as not completely out of print by the time you'd heard about them. Ebooks, Print on Demand, and online shopping have made it easier than ever to just jump into an ongoing story and fill out the gaps as needed. It's entirely possible that advances in technology have completely changed the ways rpg supplements are made.

But not for FASA, though. Empty Thrones (Kyle Pritchard) is an old-fashioned metaplot sourcebook that would not have felt surprising even 20-30 years ago.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. There's a certain romance to these types of books. The feeling of promises kept. Several previous Earthdawn books have been telling us that the Denairastas (the dragon-descended mage-aristocrats of the totalitarian city-state of Iopos) were going to get up to no good, and here they are getting up to no good. 

So there was, for me, nostalgia even in the book's form factor. An rpg I'd been following for years had a shake-up in the status quo, rendering previous books semi-obsolete and fundamentally changing the nature of the adventures I could expect going forward? Yeah. That's a familar sensation. Used to happen to me once every 2-3 months.

There's a part of me that threatens to lapse into a kind of fandom atavism. I'm reading a book that feels like it fell out of a time portal to 1998 and maybe that means I should revert to that era of internet discourse - "Noo! Denairastas suck! They've ruined Earthdawn forever!!!"

Except, there's nothing in Empty Thrones that merits that sort of drama. It's not an ideal metaplot supplement, because at best it leaves the situation in Barsaive exactly as interesting as it was before (and honestly, I think a fair assessment leaves it one or two ticks below even that), but it's not a bad metaplot supplement, because at least the campaign that accompanies these changes is one the players will probably enjoy.

A quick recap - Empty Thrones is a series of five loosely-connected adventure arcs related to the mysterious death of Uhl Denairastas and the subsequent accession of Jada Denairastas to Iopos' Malachite Seat. The first adventure is a sort of prelude where the PCs just happen to be in Iopos, doing mercenary work for a less prominent Denairastas, when Uhl suddenly explodes for no adequately explained reason. The last adventure takes the PCs hundreds of miles away from Jada's coronation in search of a rogue WMD that they can hopefully destroy before it causes an atrocity (i.e. an impressively slick way of allowing the characters to foil a Denairastas scheme without them ever being in position to derail the campaign's main plot). In between you engage in espionage shenanigans in a city colonized by Iopos in all but name, navigate racial tensions in a borderland region that's still trying to find its own national identity, and slink through the shadowy underworld of the City of Thieves . . . outlying suburb. 

As a campaign book, it's incredibly generous. It's like three mini geographical sourcebooks in one, with dozens of new NPCs and suggested plot hooks above and beyond the ones tied to the titular power vacuum. There's a lot of value packed into this little volume.

Regrettably, though, a metaplot book can't simply be treated as a utility rpg supplement. It's also part of a tradition of serialized storytelling aimed at the sort of people who read rpg books instead of running them (it's something we, as a hobby, are in denial about, but we all know it's true). So I also have to evaluate Empty Thrones by the standard of how it works as a new chapter in the ongoing story of Earthdawn.

Unfortunately, it is much weaker as a storybook than it is as a campaign. I think it comes down to something that perhaps reached full flower in 4th edition, but which was latent in the line as early as 1st edition's Prelude to War - The Denairastas are not as compelling villains as the Theran Empire.

And you can't blame Empty Thrones for that, because it's just continuing a plot that has been a throughline of 4th edition as a whole. And I don't even blame 4th edition for that, because I understand perfectly the desire (and perhaps the need) to move away from Barsaive vs Thera stories. The game was running out of things to say about Thera and there's no better way to ruin a good villain than to keep them on-screen after their plot has run out. Part of having a season 2 is introducing a season 2 baddie.

I just remain unconvinced that the Denairastas can handle the role. The problem is that they're "master manipulator"-type villains and unless your PCs are specced to be the heroic version of this trope, that type of villain can get very tiresome very fast. Who really wants to fight a shadowy cabal that is always (almost definitionally) one step ahead of everyone else?

Hey, the master Thief, Garlthik One-Eye runs Kratas, City of Thieves, with an iron fist, thanks to the magical amulets he gives to all his subordinates, which are enchanted to allow him to see and hear from their location at any time and with no display that would give away his eavesdropping. And the sorcerer Zahm Denairastas can covertly tap into that network . . . because there's a spell that does that, apparently. And it's not like he was a great guy you wanted to see succeed or anything, but he had . . . texture. A certain villainous charisma that would linger in the memory after you went up against him. The only Denairastas that had anything like it was Uhl and he got mysteriously exploded in the first chapter, in a canon event that only has about a 10% chance of ever being explained.

So there's this inexorability to the campaign's plot. Garlthik's downfall came about because there was some nerd with a hard counter to his greatest advantage. The coronation of Jada Denairastas goes off without a hitch. Even the rebellion in Jerris is run by a Denairastas (though one who has fallen out of favor and sworn revenge on his family). They're like this entire faction of guys who steeple their fingers and go "all is proceeding according to plan" no matter what the PCs do, and you can barely even punch them in the face because "escaping instead of dying" is right in their wheelhouse.

Seriously, there are two separate characters who do this as a major plot point. Kine Denairastas has a "walk through walls" spell prepared in an armored spell matrix (making it resistant to disruption) and his base just so happens to have an escape route that is only accessible by walking through walls. Smart . . . maybe too smart. And certainly poor form when you consider that the only reason Jada Denairastas is getting crowned in this book is because she pulled a similar trick in Prelude to War (even to the point where Empty Thrones quite recklessly suggests retconning her death if the PCs somehow managed to stop her from doing that in the previous adventure). 

It all still might be worth it, if in some subsequent book, the PCs get a change to give the Denairastas a much-deserved bloody nose, but that's the problem with rpg-metaplot as a genre of fiction. It is entirely possible that the denouement to this story was always intended to be written by the players, which means that I'm almost certainly never going to see it.

Overall, though, I'd say I enjoyed Empty Thrones. It's good to see that someone's out there, keeping the tradition of rpg metaplot alive.

Ukss Contribution: House T'kambras is a T'skrang (lizardfolk) aropagoi (hereditary merchant company/proto-nation) that is a modern reconstruction of an ancient aropagoi that was almost entirely massacred. The only survivor put all of her traumatic, grief-stricken memories of that terrible night into a magical memory gem that overwhelms all who touch it with sorrow and fear.

But that's not what makes it an Ukss contribution. What caught my fancy about this particular item (called the River Song) is that, despite being too psychically dangerous to come into contact with bare skin, the River Song is nonetheless a priceless treasure of House T'kambra. So much so that they will go to war with the City of Thieves to get it back.

That fascinates me. It's sacred because it's cursed. The worst thing to ever happen to your family was frozen forever in time, and you keep the token, not because you get any use out of it (as far as I can tell it was kept in a vault and never taken out), but because no one else has the right to have it.

(Kindred of the East) Dharma Book: Devil Tigers

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual Violence

It was probably only a matter of time before Kindred of the East got its first completely typical White Wolf book. "Exoticism" as a theme couldn't last forever. Sooner or later you get to know these guy well enough that you start to empathize with them, and dare I say, roleplay as them. And you can't roleplay being exotic, at least not honestly, because no one is exotic to themselves.

So Dharma Book: Devil Tigers (Geoffry C. Grabowski) is the first book in the series where it really doesn't feel like it's being driven by racism. The titular Devil Tigers are weird, even by the standards of their surrounding cultures, and thus you're never meant to parse them as anything but purely fictional. 

I'm not going to absolve it of Orientalism or anything, and I'm sure that a sensitivity reader with an appropriate background would find plenty to object to, but for me, with my cursory knowledge of Asia and deep knowledge of White Wolf, this book feels like a return to form. It feels less like an "Asia doesn't quite fit into the World of Darkness" book and more like a regular White Wolf book, for an alternate action-horror setting.

Which means it's offensive for an entirely different set of reasons. If you read the content warning at the beginning of the post, you can probably guess where I'm going with this, but the opening comic repeats one of the company's most toxic patterns. It conveys that a  character is evil by showing him doing evil things, and it doesn't apologize for him, exactly, but it does center his viewpoint without critiquing it. Which would be fine, if they remembered they were making genre schlock for goofballs, but they think they're making Extremely Serious Games for Mature Roleplayers, so the evil deeds they use to illustrate a (PC stand-in) character's villainy are the icky, repellent kind of evil and not the "allow the theater kid with the heavy eyeliner to absolutely devour the scenery with a self-pitying villain protagonist monologue" kind of evil.

And I recognize that part of this is on me. White Wolf never promised me that their games would be fun. In fact, they commonly warn me of the opposite. In a section labeled "Boundaries," which sort of broad-strokes lays out a precursor to modern safety tools, Mr Grabowski says, "You should come to a horror game understanding that you may not find the experience entirely amusing." 

There is some justice to that. I'm not built for horror, so I will be the first to admit that I am slow to see the virtues of even well-executed horror. But with that caveat in mind, and with the understanding that this is directed as much to White Wolf's whole stable of developers, writers, and artists as it is to Mr Grabowski in particular:

YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH AT YOUR JOB TO BE TAKING YOURSELF THIS SERIOUSLY.

And if that comes across as an insult, good. I meant to be insulting just now. However, you should interpret it as a very mild insult. Because I'm not sure that anyone is that good. Stephen King on his best day, maybe. So look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, honestly, "have I ever created anything as sublime as The Jaunt?" If the answer is "no" (and let's be frank, as much as I love Exalted, it probably is) then you have not earned the right to say, "If you're not willing to experience some potentially unpleasant stuff, you're probably not in the right place" or "You shouldn't be dreading the next session of a game, but it is a Storytelling game of personal horror."

Although I might be coming down a little too hard on that whole section. The general tenor of the three paragraphs is that you shouldn't intentionally set out to upset people, even if it is perhaps more sympathetic to the person giving offense than the person taking offense. I guess I'm just a little salty seeing something like that so soon after the intro comic has its viewpoint character say, of the innocent woman he seduced, "The night we eloped, I had two bakemono violate and excruciate her, and I oversaw the agonies."

And it's a fucking stepping stone on his path to enlightenment. Later, he realizes his mistake, "I had learned something, a lesson about the banal character of evil . . . I had been motivated in my action by nothing more than childish curiosity, mixed with childish cruelty."

Oh, good, you've experienced personal growth from your rape and torture. The denoument is kind of too fantastical to take seriously, but it is important thematically, so I'll just keep going - he traps the spirit of the woman he betrayed inside a magical crystal and the final words of the story are, "I keep her with me always, to remind me of this lesson. If you listen closely, you can hear her heart break, again and again."

And look, I'm not going to deny picking up on the horror vibe. In the right context, it may even be effective horror. If I'm hearing this guy's narration as part of a series of audio logs as I wend my way through the catacombs, I'm going to be both highly scared and highly motivated to face off against him in the boss chamber. But there's something going on here with the framing and it's subtle and difficult to describe. It would be much easier if you could see the art, so I think I'm just going to post it.

WARNING: NSFW image (also, it's pretty offensive on a moral level).

The horror of this scene is driven by sexual assault, but if I wanted to shift gears and talk about how sexual assault in media is sometimes used as a vehicle for objectification and the male gaze, this image is so on the nose it's practically a fucking pun. You see, a woman has been reduced to a literal object and a male is literally gazing at said object.

But it's also something that's going on in a literary sense. The woman's role in the story is to be a motivating factor in a male character's journey (and specifically, and most offensively, in her rapist's journey) and look, there's no delicate way to put this so I'm going to just be briefly crude - underneath her artistically beautiful tears, it's full tits and full bush. How much of this was a creative choice and how much was just the misogynist id of the 90s gaming scene, it's impossible to say, but it sure as hell doesn't read like intentional self-parody.

Although, the most important part of the visual language of the scene, the thing that might elude notice if you're not familiar with White Wolf's oeuvre, is the sluttly little fishnet top being worn by the male character. That, even more than the 1st-person narration, is a clear signal - this person is meant to be a player character. 

I threw a lot of heat at Grabowski earlier, but the bulk of the blame here should probably go to the artist, Melissa Uran and the art director, Rich Thomas, although the fact that it takes a team effort to be this bad at your job is why I generally prefer to treat the nebulous "White Wolf" as the primary actor in these situations. There's a culture at work here, and the fact that it keeps happening is probably due to the economic necessity of maintaining the White Wolf brand. So really, in a sense, the fans are equally to blame.

(And that's not just me being glib. I believe I've mentioned a couple of times that c. 2001, two years after the publication of this book, I wrote a fan supplement for the NWO, and it . . . had some similarly gross stuff going on. I won't go into details, because I'm embarrassed to relive them and am content to allow you to assume the worst, but I want to bring it up now to emphasize that there was a culture, I was an enthusiastic part of it, and if I seem angry at "White Wolf," you should know that I'm using an expansive enough definition to include myself in there as well. If 1999 Grabowski was no Stephen King, then you better believe that 2001 John Frazer was no Geoffry Grabowski.)

Okay, so that's approximately 2% of the book out of the way. The question is, does the other 98% redeem it?

No, it doesn't. If anything, the rest of the book makes the opening comic even worse. Because we learn more about the Devil Tigers, and the "enlightenment" the comic narrator was searching for, and not only was a woman's rape used as motivation for a man's character growth, but the character that man was growing into was so fucking . . . ridiculous that a rape is just a shocking degree of overkill as motivation.

See, the Devil Tigers have a creed - they escaped hell, to be reborn as wicked spirits, and if they are to be damned souls, haunting the earth, then they are going to be the best (i.e. "worst") damned souls anyone's ever seen and haunt the fuck out of the earth. 

I don't hate that. In fact, I think it could be kind of fun, especially since they see their role as harrowing the most sinful humans, arming up for (and incidentally hastening) the apocalypse, and ending the coming age of darkness by slaying the Demon Emperor and all his minions ("we will make sure nothing survives, not even ourselves").

That's some potentially awesome pulp bullshit, so why is your "Boundaries" section telling me to treat it like personal horror? No part of this feels personal. Some of it's a bit gross, like pranking a necrophiliac by swapping out the corpse he was planning to abuse with a vampire playing dead, and some of it is pretty horrifying, like the performance artist who was damned to hell after she committed suicide by locking herself in a basement with a bunch of hungry dogs (and recorded the whole grisly affair, to release as her final work "without weighing concerns other than artistic"), but I can't believe for a second that we were ever meant to take any of it seriously. And if we're not meant to take it seriously, then why should any of us tolerate being made uncomfortable, even for a second? Why should we accept that "rapist creep" is a necessary step along the road to being the sexy fishnets S&M demon guy? What game are you trying to make? How did you imagine this playing out at the table?

That's sort of the paradox of White Wolf. They were really good at making bad games and really bad at making good games, so their games were good to the extent that they were allowed to be bad and at their worst when they were trying hardest to be good. . .

Okay, maybe I'm over-generalizing. Certainly, I'm being less than entirely coherent. White Wolf's main strength as a company is this impeccable genre fluency, but with only a few exceptions, it's the fluency of a native, not the fluency of a scholar. This is undoubtedly the source of much of their notorious offensiveness. Not Grabowski, nor Kindred of the East, nor White Wolf generally invented "the sexy brooding rapist" as a character archetype, but rather it would be parsed, in context, as a genre idiom. It also the reason so much of their metagame advice can seem so cringe. They know what words to use, when, but they are groping in the dark for a "why."

Dharma Book: Devil Tigers represents an inflection point, I think, where there's a handoff between genres - The gothic horror tradition of Vampire: the Masquerade, which demanded that Chinese vampires be portrayed with an offensive yellowface accent gives way to some sort of 90s anime fan-dub subculture, where the yellowface accent is performed with such aggressive enthusiasm that it almost has a disarming sincerity.  The "personal horror" in Kindred of the East is almost entirely vestigial, but I suspect that it will take several more books for the developers and authors to notice.

Ukss Contribution: I was genuinely offended by the opening comic, but I figure the disproportionate amount of time I spent complaining about it is punishment enough. 

My choice this time is a little convoluted. It's a whole. . . social dynamic. Basically:

Revered ancestors can stick around as ghosts.

Kuei-jin can eat ghosts.

When the Devil Tigers go to war, they eat their enemies' ancestors.

It's so fucking petty, I love it. I'm not sure where in the setting it will go, or who will do it, but, like, tactical necrophagy will definitely be a thing.

(GURPS: Transhuman Space) Toxic Memes

Recently, on my personal youtube channel (it's great, if you enjoy what I do here but wish it was somehow even more half-assed), I speculated on what it means to "like" something. You know the score - how something can be notably well-made, admirably virtuous, or fill a niche you've been desperately craving, but you still don't like it, or the opposite, where something is grotesque, detestable, roughly made, or completely unnecessary and yet, despite yourself, you do like it. That's a weird phenomenon. And my conclusion, as half-assed as it was, was that pleasure and pain were transitory experiences, meaningful only to the degree that they are intermittent and contingent, but that "liking something" was a sustainable state of being. If you "like something" it's because you recognize in it a potential to sort of . . . be in your life. That it's something that is neither diminished by repetition nor a distraction in its absence (which is what separates "liking something" from addiction.)

It was a kind of a silly thing to speculate about, but it shed some useful light on an issue that I've been dealing with for a while - that I can be a total curmudgeon about things I claim to enjoy. It's a pattern I fall into. I spent most of my time with Eberron complaining that it wasn't 19th century enough, my general take on Planescape is "Planescape is bad," and I've repeatedly and unreservedly said that Mage: the Ascension should not exist. And those three of my favorite games. Seriously. 

I worry that it makes me look like an unpleasable grump. "Oh, John just likes complaining about things, how . . . ordinary." But I don't think that's it. Or, at least, I hope that's not it, and I'm willing to latch on to any alternative to get me out of this jam, no matter how much sophistry it requires. What I think is going on is that the games I enjoy are those which provide a sustainable provocation of curiosity. The displeasure I feel when Planescape leans on the alignment system or fails to contemplate the scope of infinity, that's just an intermittent sensation, quickly brushed aside and vastly outweighed by the satisfaction I derive from imagining what the setting would look like if those issues were mitigated. 

It's an instructive distinction to make, because it also helps me understand something about the games I don't like. Such as Mage: the Awakening. Now, if we were to get into some ill-advised flame war about the relative merits of various versions of White Wolf's Mage, I would gladly stipulate that Awakening is superior. I say "Mage: the Ascension shouldn't exist," but I don't think that about Mage: the Awakening. Not only is it permissible for Awakening to exist, I think it's good that it does. The world is a better place because White Wolf made Mage: the Awakening, which is not at all a sentiment that I would extend to Ascension. (Look, I don't know what to say. It shouldn't exist. It arguably makes the world a worse place by existing. And if you experience it, it will most likely make you a worse person as a consequence, at least temporarily. But it's great. I love it.) 

However, despite Mage: the Awakening being the superior game, the part that causes me the most displeasure - its overall Gnosticism - is the best thing about it. "Mage: the Awakening without the Gnosticism" is a ridiculous thing to want, and it wouldn't make the game better (and yes, yes, I know I've asked for exactly that on multiple occasions, and I do believe that it would be a game genuinely more in line with my preferences, but this latest round of self-reflection has convinced me that my preferences, in this case and this case only, are hopelessly pedestrian). It would make the game less interesting, less unique. I can't really have a sustainable relationship with Mage: the Awakening because sometimes it causes me pain and sometimes it gives me pleasure, but it only rarely provokes my curiosity. I don't really care what it might look like if my issues were somehow addressed.

Which brings us, at last to Transhuman Space. All of the above conversation was completely necessary because it clarifies my relationship to this setting - it's right on the line. Everything that is more interesting (to me) than Transhuman Space, I enjoy, and everything that is less interesting (to me), I don't enjoy. And as far as Transhuman Space itself is concerned . . . eh, it's about 50-50.

To an almost ludicrous degree of precision. If the final book I'd read for the line was Under Pressure, my retrospective for the series would be "It's fascinating, in its own way, but on the balance I have to call it [weak]." But since my final book is actually Toxic Memes (James Cascio with "additional material and contributions" from a dozen people), my final opinion is that Transhuman Space is fascinating . . . in it's own way.

I have no idea what to make of it, but it's probably a relevant data point that Mr Cascio is the author of Broken Dreams, the other major book that stops the setting from being hopelessly neoliberal. Toxic Memes is not quite as challenging as Broken Dreams, but I think that largely boils down to subject matter. This book is about ideas that exist inside the Transhuman Space universe, and it always engages with those ideas as ideas, so when we consider Toxic Memes as a tabletop roleplaying resource, it's kind of fuzzy about which parts are pop culture ephemera that can serve as background setting texture, which parts are major ideological and technological conflicts that can serve as campaign themes, and which parts are fringe ideas that can serve as inspiration for one-off adventures.

The most interesting use of the book would probably be to lean into this fuzziness and depict a world in the throes of "the democratization of the meme" where "a cognitive arms race" has ensured that "even reality is considered contingent." And it's a use that's held back only by Transhuman Space's stubborn refusal to be cyberpunk. This is the first book in the series to actually understand the internet, but it's still a setting that refuses to make sci-fi 2100 an absolute dumpster fire.

This is a world where you can pay $5000 for access to ParadigmMaker 2.1, consumer software that uses advanced AI modelling of human cognition to allow the users to craft unnaturally persuasive advertising campaigns, but operates on the assumption that countermeasures have kept pace and so the result is a world where memetics technology largely cancels itself out. It tells us that memetics is limited "most notably by the presence of other memeticists able to identify nascent memes and engineer their own memetic campaigns to stop or reshape them." But it doesn't really show us much of the times or places where "other memeticists" are not available. 

So there's good stuff here. An advertising campaign backfires because the meme engineers screwed up and now there's a "58% likelihood that consumers will purchase Happy Cola for sexual or laundry uses." There's a subculture called "Epistopunks" that we sadly learn very little about. There was a weird mad-scientist guy who released a nanovirus to make about a thousand random European goths into pseudo-vampires and "at least some of them would appreciate the gesture," leading to a situation where "European authorities are about to track down, arrest, and forcibly cure the remaining viral vampires before their numbers grow."

But instead of putting these things in a world that has completely lost the plot, where "some two-bit fraud [can] buy some software and build himself up as the next coming of Osiris" is the ground state of existence, Toxic Memes takes the stance that conspiracy theories are fragile because widespread access to information means that it's easy to find the evidence to debunk them. Our real world is probably a hundred years behind Transhuman Space in terms of meme technology, and . . . Donald Trump is the fucking US President. 

This is a book that has good ideas. Good insights. But it needs more audacity. Great apes are extinct in the wild and Exogenesis and GenTech Pacifica both released a version of the Erotopus ("a pleasure variant" of the uplifted octopus) and the setting still needs more audacity.

That's why I have to put Transhuman Space right on the line. Sometimes, I think about the more audacious version of the setting and it inspires me to speculate and sometimes I have the same thought and it inspires me to play Eclipse Phase. And now that I've read every book in the series, I'm forced to accept that I'll never get a decisive resolution that pushes me one way or the other. I feel pleasure at its highs (such as the bulk of Toxic Memes) and displeasure at its lows (such as its delicate treatment of the Green Duncanites) and I can't decide whether my ambivalence is sustainable or unsustainable.

Such is life, I guess. Join me in another 20 years, after I restart my blog from scratch and look back at the setting with 40 years of hindsight.

Ukss Contribution: ParadigmMaker 2.1. It's such a ghastly idea, that somehow perfectly encapsulates the banality of evil. Ukss doesn't have software per se, but I think I can find a corner of the setting where I might give "commercially available mind control" the sci-fi horror treatment it deserves.

(Kindred of the East) Shadow War

The toughest part of reading a series like Kindred of the East (at least to me, a white guy who has no personal connection to any harmful stereotypes that may be present and is likely to overlook half of them when they show up) is disentangling the racist elements from the genre elements. I sometimes use the phrase "Asia as genre" to describe a common rpg approach to Asian culture and that can range anywhere from "extremely racist" to "well-meaning liberal-type racist," but how can one even be certain that "Asia as genre" is what's happening? Maybe something just gives off "Asia as genre" vibes because it's meant to occupy a genre of Asian origin. "This does not resemble the real China, but rather a heightened-reality version of China because it takes its cues from Chinese literature and/or cinema" is something to not only be not avoided, but actively encouraged. And then you have the third option, which is telling a by-the-numbers story in a genre of "Western" origin that just so happens to be set in Asia, but then your completely conventional story beats that would not be out of place in an Anne Rice novel accidentally wind up dovetailing with Orientalist stereotypes because you didn't fully contemplate how your standard tropes would look when placed in a new geopolitical context.

Suffice to say, Shadow War (Edward MacGregor and Bryant Durrell) might fall into the first category and might fall into the third category, but probably doesn't fall into the second (though I don't want to rule it out because my knowledge of Asian literature and cinema is shallow as hell). Let's get started with the most generous possible interpretation of the material - that it is a Vampire: the Masquerade supplement, set in Asia.

There's an argument to be made for this. It is one of the foundational pillars of the vampire genre, especially in White Wolf's interpretation, that elder vampires beyond a certain age are out of touch weirdos who are full of mysterious ancient secrets, but are a nightmare to deal with because they'll make you do dumb shit for no reason (except it's actually 500 year-old dueling etiquette and you'd have made a total ass of yourself in the court of Louis XII carrying on like that). Get two of these guys together and let them do your event planning and that's a surefire recipe for boring-ass rituals that you have to grit your teeth and sit through because they will literally tear you to shreds for signalling the wrong thing with the flower code.

And that's one possible interpretation of Shadow War's system of highly-mediated kuei-jin vs kuei-jin conflict. You got beef with another vampire and your modern sensibilities might encourage you to get a couple of your friends, maybe a bigass wolf or something, and jump them in a darkened alley. But, of course, the ancient ghoul who thinks the Industrial Revolution is just a bad dream humanity is going to wake up from any day now, who can survive a ground-zero blast of 20 pounds of C-4, that guy is going to insist you do things by the old forms. Agree beforehand to the scope of conflict, declaring either a limited-scale "twilight war" or a nearly-full-scale "midnight war." And if it's a twilight war, you need to engage the services of a professional twilight war matchmaker, who can pick a suitable challenge for you and your rival to test your essential vampire skills (like smuggling 100 pounds of jade across international borders or manipulating a particular politician to visit one of two unlikely locations without directly interacting with politician). But if it's a midnight war, that's a whole other thing where you have to give some very precisely staged public speeches, exchange gifts with various bystanders and revered elders, and commit to the destruction of your declared enemy even if you later  learn that they were framed for the offense which inspired the war.

It's all quite elegant. Very civilized. A lot of pointless jumping through hoops, but I think it's a gauntlet the players are going to want to navigate. You wouldn't be playing a vampire game if you wanted to interact with sensible people doing reasonable things out of relatable motives. Shadow War really does make you feel like you're putting up with some thousand-year-old creature's bullshit. It presents a series of scenes that the characters are going to absolutely hate, but which the players will eat the hell up.

And more relevantly, it's right in Vampire: the Masquerade's wheelhouse - a veneer of elegance concealing the deep rot of cynicism and ambition.

It's probably the best way to look at Shadow Wars: it is the Book of Humoring Old People in China, and as such is a pretty decent sourcebook for any vampire-type game. It's got good general advice about vampiric manipulation and conflict - laying out the pros and cons of using your mortal family as catspaws in your schemes, suggesting tactics and resources that young vampires might use successfully counter the amazing mystic might of the ancients.

That's the good news. The bad news is that this book might not actually be about vampires. It might be about Asia. Or, at least, White Wolf's fantasy version of Asia. A vampire's mortal proxies are called their "scarlet screens." Young vampires who rebel against the elders call themselves "Bamboo Princes." 

Now, those terms aren't necessarily more poetic than "catspaws" or "Anarchs," but, well, "catspaw" is just the English word for that kind of relationship whereas "scarlet screen" is almost certainly a White Wolf invention and "Anarch" has a clear derivation from "anarchist," an apt description of their goals, whereas it seems highly unlikely that "Bamboo Prince" has a similar degree of cultural transparency.

There's no delicate way to put this - giving flowery, obfuscating names to straightforward concepts is one of the main tools in the exoticism toolbox. And in general this is an area of overlap between vampire fiction and Orientalism (for example, calling the vampires' plan of hiding from humans "the Masquerade" is also a use of this trope), but take it from me, the vibes in Shadow War were not that fun.

Some kuei-jin want to change the world. To a Westerner, that may not sound like a radical idea, but the Middle Kingdom has been a world unto itself for millennia. Its societies have grown from a foundation of ancient polytheism, Confucianism, and Taoism. It has been a place where elders are honored and old ways are revered, where the foreigner is distrusted, the innovative ignored, and the different shunned.

That's from the beginning of the chapter that focuses on elder vs neonate conflict and the next paragraph implies that there are certain attitudes that were cultivated by the elders in order to encourage obedience to the elders, but it never quite makes clear that paragraph I just quoted was meant to apply to vampires and not to Asians. Likewise, all that stuff about twilight and midnight wars I was telling you about, it was inundated with talk of "honor."

Sigh. So honor is definitely something that survivors of ye olden tymes would care about, but it's also something that, stereotypically, Asians care about. And if there's one thing I learned from the Asians Represent Podcast it's that white people talking about "Asian honor" is like bad bad. I don't really understand all the nuances of "honor" as an Orientalist trope, but my gut tells me that Shadow Wars was on the wrong side of the line, which makes all the baroque ceremonial stuff kind of a drag in retrospect.

On the other hand, there were some signs that Kindred of the East is becoming marginally less Orientalist as time goes on. One of the chapters is about the ongoing vampire race war between kuei-jin and kindred and it's . . . not great, but the general thrust seems to be "maybe they aren't so different after all." The kuei-jin as a whole are presented on the same level as a vampire sect, so the conflict is more like "Camarilla vs Sabbat vs the Five August Courts and House Genji" and less like "white vampires vs Asian vampires," even if it often shakes out that way in practice. So the theory is that it is basically inevitable for organized conspiracies of vampires to try and muscle each other out, and that the reason it's happening now is nothing more mysterious than recent advances in travel and communications technology.

It's an explanation that could work, if Kindred of the East had banked more goodwill, but this is still the game that mixes Japanese and Chinese terminology willy-nilly, which covers an area spanning "from Mongolia to Burma and from Hokkaido to Xianjang," but gives vampires a common culture almost everywhere inside that box (and a "basically Chinese" culture at that). I think it's destined to always be hopelessly problematic, such that even when it shows us things that should and could be baroque vampire nonsense, we'd be fools to trust it.

Ukss Contribution: When two kuei-jin are engaged in a (theoretically) low intensity twilight war, the rest of the court will enthusiastically bet on the outcome. That's pretty funny. Betting on a blood feud, behind the backs of the people involved (though, of course, they know all about it because they themselves have bet on other peoples' feuds).

(GURPS: Transhuman Space) Under Pressure

Once more I'm confronted by the warring impulses aroused in me every time I read a full Transhuman Space supplement - do I rant about the detailed-to-the-point-of-uselessness mechanics related to the book's physical environment, or do I obsess to the point of distraction over the utter incomprehensibility of its politics. I can, of course, do both, and Under Pressure (David Morgan-Mar, Kenneth Peters, and Constantine Thomas) definitely gives me fodder for both, but it's still agonizing deciding which to do first.

"People with blocked sinuses or other air cavities such as decayed teeth will feel increasing discomfort and pain when compressed, even slowly, as the cavities are squeezed. Such pain causes a -1 penalty to DX and IQ-based rolls until it is relieved."

Now, I don't know a lot about diving. It never occurred to me that high ambient atmospheric pressure, such as you might find on a deep-sea habitat, could exacerbate dental pain. So that's a very interesting bit of setting texture. It makes descending into the stygian darkness of the ocean depths feel just a little bit more real to me. But a million people could play this rpg for a million years, and not one would ever apply that fucking penalty. Who the fuck are you trying to fool here? What is wrong with you?

PLAYER: All right! I've loaded up on supercaviating ammunition, taken a shot of Myelin Replacement Nanovirus to help with gas narcosis, and am ready to get in the pressure chamber for our transition to the deep parts of the Elandra colony.

GM: *Makes a roll behind the screen* Oh, sorry, but I've been tracking how many times you've mention brushing your teeth before taking a long rest and I'm afraid you have tooth decay. The pressure will impose a -1 DX and IQ penalty until you see a dentist.

I'm imagining this game. It probably also uses an adapted form of the seatbelt rules from Rigger 2 and the protein-percentage provisions rules from The Wilderness Survival Guide. What is the social contract? If you're playing in this game, do you get mad when the GM doesn't blindside you with some bit of extremely granular forced "realism." Like, you made a point of tracking on your character sheet exactly how many meters of fishing line you bothered to pack, so at some point the GM needs to make that matter. I won't say that I don't get it. Because a part of me, the part of me that enjoys hypothermia and food spoilage in my survival video games, that part of me understands the appeal. But what kind of mind do you need to run a game like that in a tabletop environment? To be harsh but fair, and more inconceivably, fair but harsh?

It's staggering to contemplate. Though I suspect that we were never meant to actually apply this rule. "A -1 penalty to DX and IQ-based rolls" is just GURPS' way of saying, "this is significant, but not 'stop the game' significant."

But don't let my complaining fool you. There are virtues to this sort of "every damned thing gets a rule" approach. It's rare for me to leave an rpg setting section feeling like I've learned something. But I definitely had my mind expanded by Under Pressure. A few fun facts that I found so surprising I had to verify them on the internet:

The Sun affects the tides. I guess it shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. I'd have thought the Sun was so far away that its gravitational influence could be considered uniform over the whole globe. Nope. The solar tides are about half the strength of the lunar tides. Wow.

Go deep enough underwater and you have to start breathing a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. Apparently it's a real thing called hydrox . . . and man, those cookie guys really screwed up with their choice of name.

You can build a ship with a concrete hull. I mean, I work through this logically, thinking about water displacement, and the related but incidental fact that if I wanted to ship a bunch of concrete across the ocean, I'd trust a boat to get the job done, and it all seems to check out, but some part of my brain still rebels against it. I want my boat to not sink so why wouldn't I make it less like a stone? And yet, concrete boats have been a thing since the mid-19th century. You couldn't make this shit up. Literally. I would not believe you. I would say, "science fiction nonsense is one thing, but you have gone too far! Stay here while I look something up on wikipedia, I want to see your look of humiliation when I prove you're full of shit . . . "

But, of course, truth is stranger than fiction and now I'm the jackass here. Although I worry that maybe the existence of concrete ships was common knowledge and my harping on it is doing naught but reveal my ignorance.

So I guess, all told, Under Pressure's oceanic lore dump is probably worth the terrible burden of knowing that somewhere, there's an alternate universe where people are using the ballast rules for the ship construction system ("For added realism, multiply the time required to empty the tanks by the square root of the outside pressure in atmospheres times the percentage of the tank being emptied.")

Which means all that's left is to talk about the book's politics. Libertarian seasteading. Releasing GMOs into the wild. Lobotomizing an orca and fitting it with cybernetics so that it can be piloted around like a remote drone. Some people might complain about these things. But Under Pressure reserves the label of "terrorist" exclusively for those who would take up arms against these practices.

It's possible that "ecoterrorist" is meant as a nonjudgemental, morally neutral term. One of the suggested campaigns is called "Taking a Stand," and it's about being a member of an ecoterrorist group . . . or infiltrating them on behalf of law enforcement. However, my gut tells me that any empathy extended to ecoterrorism is part of a deliberate effort to embrace a high-handed neutrality. The narration is rarely overtly judgmental, but there's a difference in tone between the way it treats activists - like they may do some good, despite their crimes - and the way it treats corporations - like they may commit crimes, despite being good.

The best example of this is from something we've discussed before, with the book Deep Beyond - The War Beneath the Ice.

To quickly recap - scientists discover that Europa has its own biosphere. A faction called the Green Duncanites moves to Europa to oxygenate the ocean enough to change its biochemistry and allow for the release of invasive species with the eventual goal of terraforming the planet enough to allow genetically modified transhumans to colonize. There is an organization called The Europa Defense Force that is set on stopping the Green Duncanites by any means necessary.

Even more than Deep Beyond, Under Pressure treats the War Beneath the Ice like it's a political controversy. 

"While the Europan biosphere appears to be largely intact, the EDF claims that indigenous life near the Avatar (Ed: Green Duncanite) farms has been adversely affected by increased oxygen toxicity in the water and competition from imported Avatar bacteria. Avatar strenuously denies this, but it is enough justification for the EDF to step up their offensive."

Not stated: what's actually happening. I guess "appears to be largely intact" is close to an objective voice. But it's a really bland way of framing the conflict, one that obscures more than it reveals. "Largely intact?" So you mean "partially damaged." As in, the sort of state you might expect the biosphere to be in when Avatar has only made 5 years of progress on their thousand-year plan? It's "largely intact" after the EDF's efforts to constrain and thwart Avatar as much as possible?

It's clear to me that the author didn't really know how to make the EDF's case persuasively. The closest we get is the head researcher of Genesis station (the scientific mission sent to study Europa's biosphere, before Avatar or the EDF arrived) describing the Duncanites as engaged in "irresponsible tinkering with a virgin ecosystem."

That rather undersells the issue . . . by, like, a lot. Later we learn that the researcher guy "sympathized with the Preservationist view, [but] he could not condone the EDF's violent approach. As a result, he attempted to keep [the research station] out of the conflict."

And how do I put this? You're Giovanni Montaldo, the "fiery Italian microbiologist." They put you on a rocket ship and shot you 500 million miles across the solar system, with an opportunity to become the 22nd century's Charles Darwin. But when you get to the Galapagos, you find that pirates have beaten you there, and not only are they hunting the finches for sport, when they're done, they're going to bulldoze the islands and build a series of shopping malls. 

Maybe you don't care for the EDF's methods. Maybe the thought of killing a fellow human being disgusts and horrifies you. I can certainly relate to that. But the nearest government is so far away that light itself would take a half hour to reach them. And for all the EDF's violence, they have still not found the minimum amount of force necessary to get the Duncanites to stop.

That's the reality of the situation. You either organize to recreate the state's monopoly on violence or you let the Duncanites keep doing what they're doing. There's no middle ground there. If you stay out of the conflict, you are siding with the Duncanites. 

But it's unclear whether the authors of Under Pressure even realize that the Duncanites are committing a crime. It's established that an EU and a Chinese military vessel are each on their way to Europa . . . to apprehend the EDF. The Avatar group is actually looking forward to their arrival. Not sweating it at all. It seems like such an oversight. The EDF gets the scuffed-up villain treatment - they kidnapped a journalist and some of their members celebrate their kills with unseemly enthusiasm, but the Duncanites are completely normal.

Like, seriously, here's how the campaign section pitches a game where the PCs are outside law-enforcement, sent to resolve the situation on Europa - "They will have to judge the situation carefully, whether they come offering an olive branch to the EDF or bringing its destruction."

Not discussed: giving them a fucking medal and hanging those Duncanite bastards from the 21st-century space equivalent of a yardarm. 

And maybe I'm getting a bit heated here, but what the Duncanites are doing, it would be like if a biotech corporation "had been releasing gengineered food fish into the wild, causing the decline of several natural species by competition for food sources." And the text's sort of casual acceptance of their activities would be like if they brought up the invasive frankenfish as an off-hand reference and then never mentioned them again . . .

Anyway, Transhuman Space as a whole is pretty hard to peg down ideologically. I don't think I've ever encountered a science-fiction setting so enamored with futurism while simultaneously being so reflexively solicitous of the status quo. It's like . . . the politics that eschew "politics." Right libertarianism fares better than most other points of view, but I think that's only because that's what the creators of the game genuinely believe and so they don't really notice it enough to scrub its influence.

It's fascinating, in its own way, but on the balance I have to call it a weakness.

Ukss Contribution: Finpants. They're pants that make you a mechanical mermaid. I trust I need not elaborate further. 

(Kindred of the East) The 1000 Hells

From time to time, maybe about once or twice a year, but more frequently in recent months and with anticipation of even greater frequency in the months to come, I get on my high horse about Orientalism in tabletop rpgs. I talk about it as if I'm some kind of expert and even at my most generous I posture like, "ooh, this is embarrassing, maybe even dangerously immoral, aren't we all glad that we know how to spot this sort of thing nowadays and are too virtuously worldly to succumb to it."

But my all-time favorite rpg is Exalted. 

It's a hypocrisy that I'm aware of. And maybe it's just the spotlight effect of social anxiety talking, but I worry sometimes that a deep, complex, self-reflective discussion of the role of the late 90s/early 00s rpg scene's Orientalism in the construction of Exalted has so far been conspicuous in its absence. It's a way of thinking highly of myself by assuming you all think so highly of me that you are capable of being disappointed by this lapse in intellectual rigor.

Truthfully, though, I'm worried about writing that post, because there's no way to get through it without deeply implicating myself. It's not like Al Qadim or the OA books, where I try to be gentle because I can acknowledge a genuine past interest in the material. The Complete Ninja's Handbook was one of teen-John's prized possessions, and so I don't want to roast it too harshly, but I also feel no need to defend it or apologize for it. I can write it off as an artifact of a less sensitive time, perhaps instrumental in my personal development, but fairly consigned to the naughty part of the library.

I can't do that with Exalted. I love Exalted. It is part of my identity, not even kidding. I can acknowledge (some of) its flaws and rue its obvious missteps, I can even suggest that it be scrubbed to the bone and rebuilt from the skeleton up, but I can never disclaim it. And I can never not be defensive when a non-fan expresses their distaste. 

Now, the relevance of all that to The 1000 Hells (and I normally cut off author citations at four credited authors because at that point the responsibility becomes too dilute and also it takes up a lot of space, but I'm going to make an exception here because of a very pertinent piece of data: Kraig Blackwelder, Tim Clancy, Geoffry C. Grabowski, and Lindsay Woodcock, with Jack Norris and Richard E. Dansky) is that, for reasons that are obvious in retrospect (I didn't look at the author list until just now), this book bears an intermittent but unmistakable resemblance to some of the more outré parts of Exalted.

(I bolded the name of Exalted 1st Edition's line developer, for those in my audience who did not immediately gasp in recognition at the list).

I actually noticed something like this in the Kindred of the East core book. One of the kuei-jin disciplines has a technique called "Flow Like Blood," which is sort of an iconic keystone to Dodge-based builds in every edition of Exalted. Then there's things like the use of the term "The Second Breath." In Kindred of the East, it refers to the damned soul returning to the body after escaping from hell, but in Exalted it refers to the moment of exaltation. Two important figures from the backstory of both games are The Ebon Dragon and the Scarlet Queen/Empress, but they have very different roles. Little stuff like that.

And The 1000 Hells could be dismissed in a similar way. Like, the fact that both games feature "Akuma" - people who sold their souls and surrendered their free will to the lords of hell in exchange for awesome powers - could just be a recycling of terminology. And the similarity between Yama Kings of Yomi (KotE's ultimate demonic figures) and the Yozis (their Exalted counterparts) might be something of a stretch ("Yomi" is a real piece of religious terminology, for one). And the fact that the last, forbidden tome of demonic lore, written about the inevitable triumph of evil in an age of darkness to come is called "The Broken Winged Crane" in both games is probably just an easter egg.

But it's not just these recurring "coincidences." As of The 1000 Hells, but maybe even foreshadowed in the Kindred of the East Companion, the two games . . . kind of have a similar vibe. In my last post, I complained about Dharmas being a poor replacement for Vampire: the Masquerade's clans, explicitly because they were set up in a way that the ideal party has one of each, but what if they weren't a replacement for clans? What if they were a prototype for Exalted's castes?

I open one of these books and see an art piece in the unmistakable style of Melissa Uran, I read about borderline-magical martial arts or an explicit distinction between infernalism (pledging your loyalty to demonic powers) and diabolism (using sorcery to compel demonic servitude), I'm inspired to imagine the epic feats of enlightened elders, who somehow mix virtue, corruption, and power into one unimaginable moral and spiritual dilemma and I think . . . "oh, no, I could be persuaded to love Kindred of the East."

The potential is there. Which is going to make the forthright discussion of Orientalism in Exalted even harder to avoid.

Though perhaps we can avoid it for now, because while The 1000 Hells does have some prototype Exalted vibes, it's probably not going to be the book that sells you on Kindred of the East.

I think the issue here is that the book's content is accurately reflected by its title. It's about hell, with all the grotesquerie that implies. I can't be sure of its religious accuracy (I suspect it owes more to Big Trouble in Little China than the traditional Chinese Diyu, though my main piece of evidence is that it has locations called "The Hell of Being Skinned Alive" and "The Hell of Upside Down Sinners" which are evocative lines from the movie but not reflected in the wikipedia article on this subject), but I can say that it fits into an ongoing rpg tradition of "alternate planes that will probably kill you but where you definitely don't want to go even if you could survive." So you know, if you were really clamoring for a White Wolf Baator sourcebook in the late 90s, The 1000 Hells delivers.

But on the off chance that's not something you're interested in, this book doesn't have a lot to offer. There's a mini-monster manual where we get stats for more than a half-dozen demonic creatures, and that's absolutely something you could use to spice up Earth-bound campaigns. And the various agendas and personalities of the Yama Kings ("king" is gender neutral in this usage, though "Yama queen" explicitly is not) could add some much-needed conflict to the setting's otherwise staid politics. But you're probably not going to want to add "field trip to hell" as a regular part of Kindred of the East's adventure repertoire. 

(Ach! I'm thinking about a campaign here - opposing the machinations of demonic forces in the looming shadow of a coming age of darkness, learning progressively more powerful magic and martial arts until you have the strength to take the fight to hell itself, where the grand champions of the demon princes, raised up from your contemporaries and arrayed with corrupt powers, bestowed by their inhuman patrons, stand ready to test your abilities to their utmost - and, like, yeah, that's an Exalted game).

Aside from the hell stuff, which you're either on board with or you're not, the main flaw of The 1000 Hells is that it continues to be extremely weird that "Asia of Darkness" is a self-contained subsetting. Here's a couple of interesting facts for you:

The Yama Kings "found that none of the realms of the spirits of the western lands was accessible to them" and "they could not affect the western world in any way."

But also, if you're a kuei-jin in the market to sell your soul, you should be aware that "the entities that the Nephandi of the West consort with are considerably different from the Yama Kings of the East."

Now, just as a reminder, the Nephandi worship powers that exist beyond the Horizon, the mystical barrier roughly coterminous with the solar system's asteroid belt, that separates the knowable parts of the Umbra (and already "knowable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting) from the primordial chaos of the Deep Umbra. Great Old Ones, basically. So the implication is somehow that these beings of the outer darkness, for whom the Earth is naught but a pale blue dot, can distinguish, with their baleful gaze that hates and envies all light and life, between the parts of the globe that are Asia and the parts that are not.

Or perhaps just as bad, that the Celestial Bureaucracy, which governs all matters under heaven, just sort of gives up when it reaches the nebulous borders of "Asia." The Yama Kings can definitely affect spirits in India, but if we go west from there, where's the line? Pakistan? (Actually pretty unlikely, because we will find in the Year of the Reckoning that the kuei-jin can be very active in Bangladesh). Afghanistan? Iran? Probably no farther west than that. And going north, the central Asian republics are kind of iffy, though they've been effectively forgotten by both Asia of Darkness and the rest of the line. But then you start getting to Russia and that definitely feels out-of-bounds. Are there Siberian kuei-jin? What border do I have to cross to exit the Yama Kings' jurisdiction?

I once described the late-90s approach to Asian-inspired fantasy as "a mental forcefield," and that actually seems pretty apt here. What Kindred of the East is doing is "Asia as genre," basically. Despite myself, or perhaps because I recognize that my favorite game is at least a little (and potentially very) guilty of doing the same thing, I think there's a possibility that a standalone Kindred of the East, which extends its cosmology to the whole world and lets heaven rule everything under heaven, could actually work. Maybe "Asia as genre" isn't so bad if you're doing it in rural Arizona, circa 1999, and the vibe is "Hong Kong cinema makes an awesomely inaccurate western." But to do it in the existing World of Darkness? Where you're now forced to racially segregate the demons of hell?

I think that is, genuinely, offensive.

Ukss Contribution: But probably not directly offensive enough to trigger my temporarily strict standards for what qualifies for exclusion from Ukss. 

And I'll admit to a conflict of interest here, because this book has a subsetting that I think could legitimately be spun-off from Asia of Darkness the same way Asia of Darkness should have been spun-off from the WoD. It's called "The Wicked City" and it's the best kind of Mad-libs-style rpg gibberish. Here's the pitch:

Cyberpunk. Demon. Ninja. Afterlife.

They should have sent a fucking poet. Chief among the torments of hell is economic precarity. Literally.

"Those victims who show the capacity to return to the same dull position they held in life - textbook salesman, telemarketer, burger-flipper, export agent - do so, day after day and week after week, with no hope of improving their lot. Such prisoners are give enough salary to barely cover rent, so they can almost support themselves while enduring the agonies of hell . . ."

And then, in the streets, shadowed by the looming high-rises, there are gangs of outcast demons and damned souls who have blasphemous cybernetic implants and serve to advance the Yama King's grand design of immiserating the poor, even as they ostensibly rebel from his rule.

Someone needs to make this rpg. Like, yesterday.

I'm far too busy to do it myself, but I think the least I can do is tweak the presentation of Ukss' infernal courts to make it fit.

(GURPS: Transhuman Space) Orbital Decay

 Sometimes, people really don't think things through. Would Orbital Decay (Patrick Sweeney) be a better adventure and better introduction to the Transhuman Space setting if it leaned into its potential to be a comedy of errors? Maybe, maybe not, but there's a strong argument to be made that there is less of a bright line between sci-fi horror and farce than one might otherwise expect.

Oops. Our biotech corporation did a teensy-weensy bit of unethical genetic engineering in our second-hand space station, far away from the legal oversight of Earthbound authorities. And oops. A tiny little mistake in our super-soldier virus led to it being contagious through biting. And gosh darn it, wouldn't you know, that's the same transmission vector as our (still work-in-progress, remember) depression-causing crowd control virus that unfortunately makes people fly into a berserk rage instead of its intended effect. And you're never going to believe it, but both viruses, along with our flesh-eating nanovirus, somehow managed to escape containment. Why, if you were to model this scenario with some sort of generic universal roleplaying system, you could probably just use the stats for supernatural fantasy zombies for the affected personnel. Funny how that works out.

Oh well, there's obviously only one thing to do - send a group of mercenaries up to investigate the out-of-contact space station. Then, naturally, we'll double-cross the mercenaries by sending a ruthless spy disguised as a company representative. And of course, we'll double-cross the spy by secretly installing a puppet implant that allows her body to be controlled by an AI program. And, should some series of implausible events happen where the shuttle pilot crashes the transport rocket into the station in a misguided attempt to stop the viruses from spreading (I guess she thinks that they'll burn up in the atmosphere rather than partially survive in air pockets in the coolest part of the wreckage and subsequently infect terrestrial investigators), I should think it goes without saying that we'll betray the AI by refusing to send a rescue vessel. It's the perfect plan. The only thing that could possibly thwart us is if terrorists from Mars show up at the last minute, lured by the rocket pilot's quarantine broadcast, under the inexplicable assumption that a space station where at least one deadly bioweapon escaped containment is the perfect place to find an easily weaponizable virus. But surely, they would not risk their lives and health on the long-shot bet that we, like, had some extra viruses that were still in containment. Why, if that happened, the surviving mercenaries could activate the station's self-destruct system and fly away on the terrorists' spaceship, potentially exposing our perfidy to the world at large. . . eh, fuck it. Worst comes to worst, we'll give 'em like $5000 or something. It'll be fine.

Okay, so I committed to the bit longer than was entirely wise, but really, Orbital Decay is a perfectly serviceable adventure. Maybe sometimes people who fail to entirely think things through are the source of horror. You never get eaten by biopunk zombies when things are going well. I'd say it's only real flaw is that, as a GURPS: Transhuman Space adventure, it doesn't do all that much with transhumanism. I guess the puppet implant and the supersoldier count in that regard, but it's kind of detail on background. With the company spy, the PCs may defeat her too early or too late and her implant never comes up. And it's an open question whether the PCs are going to want to do the detective work to find out about the virus' backstory while they're actively being attacked by zombies. I mean, biotech horror in space is plenty interesting on its own, but it barely scratches the surface of what Trannshuman Space can do. 

Maybe you could rework things a bit. The PCs are brought in by the Martian police, to help solve the theft of an infomorph ghost from long-term storage. The lead suspects are Negative Growth (the anti-terraforming terrorists who conveniently show up in the third act to give the PCs a way off the station), who may have been interested in this particular intelligence because it was the most recent back-up of a scientist who was rumored to be working on experimental bioweapons. But it wasn't actually a theft, it was a defection, because the infomorph was remotely activated by the scientist, who could think of no other way to evade the Terrel-Dieskau corporation's communications blockade than to commit suicide and then the terrorists, the corporate agents, and the PCs all converge on this derelict station that has been taken over by biopunk zombies . . . 

I don't know. It needs some work, I'll admit. I guess it speaks well for the adventure that there is enough of a base to build off of. In true GURPS fashion, there are some sidebars talking about how to adapt Orbital Decay for other genres and settings, so I can't be entirely mad at it for not being hyper-specific. Specificity is kind of the antithesis to the GURPS ethos.

Overall, I'd say "sure, okay." I think a more comic, satirical interpretation of the adventure's events would do better for a cyberpunk story, and that's probably the most interesting way to run the adventure, but GURPS: Transhuman Space is explicitly "cyberpunk without the punk," so there's no great harm in running it completely straight.

Ukss Contribution: My favorite thing about this adventure is the Terrel-Dieskau corporation's baroquely layered treachery. There's just this long ladder of people who are absolutely shocked that the people on the next rung found them expendable. It's almost enough to take the sting out of the PCs getting betrayed (I'd actually put them at the second rung, and they really should have been expecting it, considering their mission is transparently aimed at betraying the scientists and technicians aboard the space station).

But is that a setting element? Is it a trait you can give to an organization or a location? Would it not feel extremely goofy in practice? I guess we'll just have to find out.