(Shadowrun 3e) Mr Johnson's Little Black Book

 In the realm of reading hundreds of rpg books in a row, there is nothing quite as disheartening as being blindsided by a GM advice chapter. It's my own fault, though. When I chose Mr Johnson's Little Black Book as the next Shadowrun book on my list, I sort of stopped reading the back cover blurb approximately half way through. Oh, it "provides dozens of locations and contacts for both Shadowrun gamemasters and players." Neat. It's going to be like a monster manual, except the monsters all have jobs. Those are my favorite type of book to read.

Had I read a bit further, I could have modulated my expectations just a little bit more - "It also features advice on setting up and handling shadowruns." Maybe I'd have interpreted it as roleplaying advice and not adventure-creation advice, but forewarned is forearmed, nonetheless.

I'm not exactly complaining, mind you. First of all, the middle three chapters were exactly what I was expecting and I wasn't disappointed. Some of the material was a little basic (it was probably not necessary to explain to me the concept of a bar), but it was a useable cast of characters - a sleazy tabloid reporter, a "parasecurity expert" who was like a supernatural cat lady, a thrill-seeking DocWagon paramedic; a decent cross-section of functional and useful settings - a Lone Star precinct, a bank, and Ultra Suede, a bar so named because all the furniture and some of the walls were upholstered with suede, which is the funniest bar-related bit of rpg trivia since I learned the Fat Candle was vanilla scented; and a bunch of adventure ideas, most of which were not creepy at all (likes - moving a recently dead body to stage a suicide, retrieving a macguffin from a burning building; dislikes - the one where you help a guy fake his death and then arrange a phony "haunting" of his ex-girlfriend and maybe it's a bit hypocritical to feel that way when the game will frequently have you kidnap and murder people, but I'm sorry, it's straight up stalking and it feels uncomfortably real in a way Shadowrun adventures usually don't). 

So, you know, I don't feel like I was bait-and-switched at all. 

I can also forgive the unexpected GMing advice because as dull as it could be to read sometimes (and to be fair, this GMing advice was slightly less dull than average), it's also necessary. This book isn't just fiction, it's a functional object. If I'm going to GM Shadowrun, I'm going to need to convincingly portray a shady criminal negotiation, something of which I have very little direct experience. Plus, there's all the usual stuff about scheduling sessions and pacing the narrative that everyone has to learn somewhere.

The only real problem I have with this book is that it continues Shadowrun's tradition of being extremely weird about race. When discussing random encounters, one of the reasons given for a traffic stop is "driving while ork."

And that's fucking weird. It's very clearly calling out law enforcement for racial discrimination in the form of coming up with transparent pretexts to over-police an oppressed minority. I've got a lot of contemporary and near-future action adventure games and very few will just come out and say "cops are racist." On the other hand, you can't just replace the word "Black" with the word "ork." You just can't. If you do, you may find yourself in an awkward position where the canonical traits of orks map on a one-to-one basis to vicious real-world stereotypes. It makes you wonder what that find-and-replace was really intended to mean.

Probably nothing. I think the fantasy races were meant to act as a kind of oven-mitt for the handling of hot topics. You can talk very frankly about a sensitive issue, because there's nothing real at stake. "Driving while ork," amiright. Good thing there's nothing comparable that happens in real life, perpetrated by a group I personally identify with. I might have to get defensive and contrary, were I put in that situation. Luckily, that's not the case. Man, Lone Star sure is riddled with institutional bias. That's some compelling antagonist texture.

Like I said, it's weird.

Overall, this is a slight, but useful book. I might have preferred something bigger, weirder, and more specific, but I always think that about everything. For all that it could occasionally be generic and abstract, it's good to get a ground-eye view of the Shadowrun setting. We see the inside of a Stuffer Shack, a middle-class apartment building, and a luxury hotel. We learn that there are still human firefighters, but also autonomous cargo trucks. Also, there's some stuff about a criminal subculture in here, which was kind of cool, I guess. I'll definitely consult it next time I run a Shadowrun game.

Ukss Contribution: The Sea Mall. It's constructed partially underground near the coast and has big windows that look out underwater. It's the sort of fantastic location that's vaguely plausible enough to maybe exist in real life and that always tickles me.

Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook

I am sitting here reflecting on the Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook and trying to think of the details that stand out to me, without the need to directly consult my notes. The main thing I remember is that there were five "F/X" systems - Biotech, Mutations, Nanotech, Cybernetics, and Psionics - and they all had their own dedicated mechanics. And I guess this is one of the eternal game-design debates. You want to give characters cool abilities, but do you need to group them by their effects and allow their fictional differences to be merely cosmetic (i.e. your lightning bolt and firebolt both use a generic "energy blast" rules template, just with different tags) or do you give each and every thing with a distinct fictional presentation its own unique rules (i.e your "lightning bolt" power works differently than your "firebolt" power because you are trying to capture the difference between lightning and fire)?

I'm going to be a bit of a coward on the issue and say that each approach has its place and both can work really well in a system and setting that plays to its strengths. And then I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the "separate mechanics for each power source" approach doesn't work particularly well for this book because, out of the five different power system, only the nanotech rules are actually fun.

I really wish I was more familiar with Gamma World as a franchise, because the GM chapter said the d20 version was the seventh version of the game and I'm not sure if the clunkiness in the rules comes from six editions of legacy baggage or from the d20 conversion being an inelegant means of adapting a perfectly functional system that had already been refined through a half-dozen iterations. All I can really say about the F/X chapter is that it felt like more work than I was willing to do to play in the Gamma World universe.

Which brings me to the other thing that sticks out clearly to me, absent my notes - this book has some uniquely bold ideas, but they are presented in such a way that I can't be sure they're meant to rise to the level of a setting premise. Or, to put it another way, the one thing the Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook most unforgiveably neglects to do is sell me on Gamma World. Yes, I'm willing to play some post-apocalyptic adventures, but is that what this book is? A genre guidebook?

Now, I don't want to sell the game short. I felt something special here, lurking at the edge of my awareness. Even when the setting chapter opened with nine pages of completely generic descriptions of terrain (yes, please, post-apocalyptic roleplaying game, explain to me what a mountain range is and why it might act as a barrier to communication and trade), I got the feeling it was going for something different than d20 Apocalypse. But, you know how sometimes you'll read an rpg and it will have a completely unearned sense of its own importance and you'll occasionally have to roll your eyes at the way the text swans around, as if in awe at its own (unwittingly anodyne) audacity? Well, this book was kind of the opposite of that.

There are a couple of Big Ideas here that, if they were more deeply explored, would lead to a unique post-apocalyptic setting. The first is that of the "multaclypse." There wasn't just one apocalypse, there were dozens or hundreds that happened more or less simultaneously. Nuclear exchanges, bioengineered plagues with 0.00% survivability, orbital kinetic strikes, grey goo nanoswarms, rogue AIs wrecking the infosphere, genetically engineered super soldiers, domestic robots rising up against their owners. All of these things happened at once, each crisis making the others worse. 

And the multaclypse has a great explanation in the backstory - technology had gotten so advanced that the expense to ramp up to world-destroying superweapons was within the reach of small to mid-sized political clubs (or even to well-off individuals). That's a fucking sci-fi premise. Knee-cap your neighbor before they transcend. You don't even have to particularly hate them. If they're annoying as a human, that's not going to change when they're an immortal god machine.

It's such an interesting idea, but I can't help feeling like it's used here merely as an excuse for the world to be a blank slate, and for there to be weird creatures in the wilderness. There's a giant bat/lion hybrid that flies around and eats clothes. Just clothes. It can subsist on bolts of cloth, but finds plant fibers, yarn, thread, rope, etc completely inedible. Probably because it incorporates symbiotic, intelligent nanotech into its digestive system. Presumably, before the Final War, it had some specific purpose. But now it's just a wacky encounter. 

Now, far be it for me to condemn something for being "wacky" or even "wacky for the sake of wacky." But this is a book that spent a page and a half telling me what "grassland" is. Not "mutant grassland." Not "strangely organic yet unmistakably metallic robot grassland." But rather "dry grassland" and "tropical grassland." And I guess the intended vibe was "hexcrawl through a land where nature is healing" which is a fine post-apocalyptic vibe, to be sure . . . but one which had absolutely nothing to do with the unique and meritorious qualities of the book's introduction.

It's the same story with the book's other bold idea - soultech, semi-organic AI that was so cheap and easy to make that the ancients literally put it in everything. And I do mean literally. "No one wondered what the toaster and the refrigerator talked about, in epic debates carried on as nanosecond timing errors in monitored communications. No one noticed bank accounts being started by elevators who plated the stock market with literally inhuman skill, trading on the knowledge they heard discussed within them . . ."

Gawd! This is so interesting, and it's buried in the "Robot" entry of the book's bestiary. I think about a post-apocalyptic world where those things make up the bulk of the survivors. Where the toaster mourns its fallen frenemy, the refrigerator. Where the day-trading elevator slowly goes mad, trapped at the bottom of its shaft because the building above it collapsed. Where you can explore an ancient ruin and everything is alive and everything has a voice, but none of them want precisely the same thing.

I'm left asking myself what a world made from this book's boldest ideas would look like. And I'm forced to conclude that it would not look all that much like the world presented in this book. The "campaigning in the Gamma World" section talks about "overall campaign style" and it's a very general discussion about hack-and-slash, community building, or travellogues. The discussion about technology centers entirely around varying the rarity of laser weapons and shit.

And the dread realization finally dawns on me - it's not a kitchen sink, it's a toolkit.

There's nothing wrong with being a toolkit. I've spent the last couple of months praising d20 Modern for being a functional toolkit system (heck, it's even powering Gamma World d20). But, at the end of the day, toolkit systems are meant to disappear into the campaign prep work. They rely on the GM to make something memorable and exciting. I really don't think that's what Gamma World was going for.

The book is not unsalvageable. I think you could build a really cool rpg setting based on its three core ideas:

Anything has the potential to be alive and self aware.
Nothing is too goofy to exist.

Power scaling is whimsical, at best.

I'm imagining a world where the legacy of Earth's original abiogenisis has been swept aside by the apocalypse and humanity's obscene and blasphemous technological creations have moved into the millions of vacated ecological niches. Maybe a slogan - "the freak will inherit the Earth." (And if there are any "pure strain humans" left, why, they'll be the biggest freaks of all). There might be a forest of solar panels, inhabited by robo-fauna who glean energy from the "trees" and chase each other down for predatory data transfer (and if you're a biological interloper who lacks the proper ports, well, at least it's generally less painful than being eaten by a bear). There could be vast prairies of feral GMO food crops, leading to a resurgence of terrestrial megafauna because invasive frankencorn is calorically dense enough to feed massive herds of escaped theme park dinosaurs. And scattered throughought the land are ruins of the old world, still mysteriously active, and constantly spawning new horrors. Because the technology for the hard takeoff singularity still exists, in hardened bunkers powered by stockpiled nuclear materials or deep geothermal generators. With no one at the helm, it just keeps doing random shit, but it's possible these sites may be captured and repurposes, so in a sense the Final War never ended. And maybe your desperate band of survivors will one day be faced with the same dilemma that destroyed the world - do you preemptively frag your neighbor just to stop them from becoming the world's most obnoxious god?

Along the way, you'll see things you never imagined you'd see, talk to things you never imagined could talk, and become something you never imagined you'd become. Maybe you'll grow a couple extra arms, make telepathic contact with an intelligent horse, and team up to stop an ancient elevator from reinventing capitalism. Anything's possible and it doesn't have to make sense because the context that would have explained it has died along with the world.

Or, at least, that's how I'd do it if I wanted to differentiate Gamma World from a generic post-apocalyptic setting. The book occasionally dips its toes in those waters. The bestiary contains cannibalistic rabbit-folk and a pony express powered by a species of horse/centipede hybrid. The "cryptic alliances" section included the Bonapartists, uplifted animals who indulge in Napoleonic-era cosplay and real military conquest. There are "neo-cavemen" living in the ruins of France. It's not all Community Behavior Maps and realistically grim negative mutations. 

And yet, overall I think the Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook commits the cardinal sin of weird fiction - it lacks conviction in its own weirdness. The bulk of the book is written as if it expected you to play grounded characters telling grounded stories in a grounded setting. It treats its weirdness as spice to be sprinked in judiciously instead of the star attraction. And I'm not sure I can entirely forgive it for that.

Ukss Contribution: I do have a lot of good choices for stuff to steal, though. Some of it, like the insider-trading elevator or the scavenger who was enraptured by the rainbow reflections of ancient CDs, would be hard to contextualize in a fantasy setting, but even with that limitation, I still need to work to narrow it down.

I think my absolute favorite thing was the weird dynamic between Hoops (intelligent rabbit-folk) and Hoppers (giant horned rabbits that have animal intelligence but which are large enough to be ridden as mounts).

"Hoops, despite their carnivorous habits, will not eat hoppers. They view it as slightly disgusting, akin to a human eating a gorilla. Hoops also never ride hoppers; indeed they seem to find the existence of the hopper species to be something of an embarrassment."

I really like that they acknowledged it. So, I guess I'm technically picking two things, because they are both necessary for my true pick - the sheer awkwardness of the situation.

(Shadowrun 3e) Survival of the Fittest

In Survival of the Fittest (Steve Kenson) we see a clash between the unstoppable force of my endless hunger for more dragon gossip and the immovable object of the dragons themselves being major buzzkills. This is a series of adventures where you will interact socially with multiple great dragons! And those interactions will almost universally consist of them interrupting your stealth mission in order to threaten your life.

I guess that's just part of the business when you're a professional criminal, though. Like ooh, why are all our meetings so fraught with intimations of violence? I don't know, maybe because you're mostly meeting people in the planning, execution, or aftermath of an armed robbery (or kidnapping or industrial sabotage or what have you). The main difference when dealing with dragons is that you can't plausibly fight your way out of a bad situation.

It still feels kind of bad, though. Will not a single one of these motherfucking lizards at least try to put me at ease?

Well, to be fair, Hestaby tries. And I think the implication is that this effort is why she eventually wins in the emergency dragon battle-royale probate hearing. She cultivates the kind of relationships that lead to her employees canonically resisting Lofwyr when he offers history's biggest bribe.

It's a side of the job they never tell you about. You've been secretly manipulated by a dragon to commit a half-dozen highly dangerous international heists and she tells you it's all part of a scheme to embarrass her fellow dragons as part of a contest of cunning and influence, but there's only one task left to perform - travel to the deepest reaches of the astral plane to steal the spiritual essence of a magic memory gem from the sole shareholder in the world's largest corporation - and just as you think you've succeeded, he shows up and offers you an immense bribe ("Even a billion nuyen is chump change to a being of his wealth") to throw the contest to him at the last minute.

Maybe it's a tempting offer, but a shadowrunner has a code - never betray your employer, do the job you were hired to do. And that's why the comments section in Dragons of the Sixth World confirms that Hestaby won the contest. Because of honor. And the priceless value of a good reputation.

Or maybe it's just a plot hole. I think the encounter with Lofwyr was meant to be a morality test and in the context of a role-playing game, those are always a bit strange. Because, as a GM, all you can ever offer the players are words in a conversation. "Do this and I'll say your characters get rich." And good words for the characters aren't necessarily good words for the game. You say the characters have "fuck you money" and that's basically telling the players there's no reason to keep having adventures. Why would a newly-minted billionaire risk it all on a shadowrun?

And yet, these temptations do sometimes work. Players like to get into the head-space of their characters. Of course my desperate criminal guy is going to take the deal, never mind that it destroys the premise of the campaign, because my guy doesn't know they're part of a game. The trick for a conscientious GM is to give them an alternative that allows the players to pretend their characters would prefer the choice that lets them keep playing the game.

I think, in this case, the alternative is that Hestaby winning the contest means she has the credibility and political capital to work towards bridging the gap between dragons and the shorter-lived metahumans. Whereas a victory by Lofwyr means he will continue using the Jewel of Memory and the collected knowledge of all dragonkind for no cause other than the glory of Lofwyr. By turning him down, you're not just avoiding early retirement, you're taking a stand for a safer and more just world.

Unfortunately, these stakes are not explicitly spelled out anywhere in the adventure chain. Hestaby kind of alludes to them, near the end, when she tells the PCs that "she believes that dragons and other intelligent races should be able to work together toward mutual goals." But even to the extent that you meet her halfway and read that as her being a principled dragon reformer, it rings a bit hollow when you're coming off six consecutive death-defying jobs, most of which involved being menaced by one or more of her draconic rivals, and she's just now revealing that you've been working for her the whole time (and more importantly, that the rules of the contest mean that all those previous death threats were bluffs). 

I think that's a very different conversation if you're having it at the beginning of the adventure. Then, as you're jet-setting all over the globe, stealing jobs from local criminal mercenaries, you're not just kidnapping the head of Ghostwalker's cult or rearranging the feng shui of the HQ of a corporation with ties to Lung, you've got a basic buy-in to the motive behind these acts - busting the glass ceiling of dragon society so that the inexplicably solitary female dragon can have a chance to be less of an asshole to the little people. Keeping the ruthless hoarder from the levers of political power is worth turning down a billion-dollar bribe. Preserving your reputation with potential customers after you quit your job is definitely not.

Thematic incoherence aside, I had no particularly strong feelings about this series of adventures. Most of them would be pretty typical shadowruns, were it not for the involvement of the great dragons and I guess that's all right. There's probably only so many ways you can present "commit crimes for money," particularly if your reader (i.e. me) is prone to engaging with the material from a high level of abstraction. I did enjoy the mission where you had to stealthily engage in unsanctioned interior decorating, even if my damnable abstraction couldn't help but notice its structural similarity to every other heist published for the line.

On the metaplot front, I'm moderately satisfied. We get a fairly protracted glimpse at the dragons' internal politics, and one or two juicy nuggets of gossip. In the closing fiction, Hestaby didn't seem entirely disinterested in the prospect of mating with Lofwyr and I'd kind of love to see the in-universe paparazzi get ahold of that story. Also, while visiting the metaplanes, the PCs interact with a (time-looped? magically reconstructed memory?) version of Dunkelzahn and, assuming the vision was accurately historical, it's revealed that he willingly sacrificed himself for the good of humanity. 

I'm not sure I entirely approve of that last bit. I prefer a depiction of Dunkelzahn that's slightly more reminiscent of Mountainshadow (his more . . . pragmatic Earthdawn identity). But I can't deny that it's a tantalizing hint to secrets not yet revealed.

Two weeks ago, I was peeved that I read Dragons of the Sixth World before Survival of the Fittest because it was out of publication order. In retrospect, I don't think it made any difference. Despite its pitch, I never got the sense that this book was depicting the elaborate game of move-and-countermove that is the heart of draconic politics. Each of the adventures was part of Hestaby's plan, to be sure, but there didn't seem to be any particular reason for the same group of shadowrunners to do them all (and, in fact, one of the chapters potentially has the characters replaced halfway through), nor did I ever see any compelling evidence of a rival dragon's competing plans (the closest we get is when Celedyr hires the PCs to steal from Rhonabwy's horde, but even then Hestaby tricked him into doing it). It didn't turn me off the book or anything, but it was enough to cool my hype to mere enjoyment.

Ukss Contribution: At a certain point in the adventure, the PCs will have reason to interrogate a member of the Hong Kong triads. Naturally, the gangster is uncooperative. However, if the PCs use magic or coercion to get answers, he will spontaneously burst into flames. 

Like, damn. Organized crime operates on a code of silence, sure, but using magic to ensure that your front-line soldiers can't even bargain their way out of torture . . . that's fucked up. Even a little bit of information compartmentalization would have made such measures completely unnecessary...

Which actually makes it a great bit of characterization for a terrifying criminal gang. Some of Ukss' gangsters will be similarly extreme.

BESM d20

When it comes to BESM d20 I have no idea how to gracefully address the elephant in the room, so I think I just have to swallow my writerly pride and do it gracelessly - this thing is just profoundly ill-conceived. At some point, pretty close to the start of the entire project, someone made a serious error in judgement and that error led to the book being written instead of the infinitely more sensible alternative of it not being written.

You see, Big Eyes, Small Mouth d20 was meant to be the "anime rpg." I trust you can see why this might be a bit of a problem. 

We in the rpg hobby occasionally throw out extremely broad words like "cinematic" or "narrative" to describe our goals for a particular system, and by the strictest dictionary reading "anime" is technically less abstract, but that hair's breadth of extra specificity is an illusion. You use a word that could be plausibly applied to anything and it naturally transforms to jargon (for example, "narrative" in rpg terms usually means "rolling dice less often than expected"). You use a word that can merely be used for almost anything and it just becomes a fog. "A cinematic rpg" probably just means you're glossing over verisimilitudinous details. "The cinema rpg" could mean anything at all.

Which is exactly what happened with BESM d20. It gives us a diverse list of classes that run the gamut of anime stories - Mecha Pilot, Ninja, Pet Monster Trainer, Magical Girl, Sentai Member, Student, etc and it never quite grapples with the fact that those are all ideas that could be the central premise of a complete stand-alone game.

Now, lest you think me obtuse, I must concede that "universal" systems exist. I've got a few on my shelf and some of them are pretty good. Hell, the d20 SRD that forms the backbone of this very book may be considered one of them. But what those universal systems have that BESM d20 generally lacks is a sense of modularity. You take a good universal system like Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine or Fate Core and you find mechanics that are as abstract as the space they're staking out. The rules dictate how you interact with a quest or an aspect or what have you, but the mechanics don't depend on how those things are defined, so you can zero in on a particular genre or feel by choosing what those greebles actually are.

Then you have less good, but still competent universal systems like GURPS or d20 Modern that handle the problem of modularity by the simple expedient of being very long and having a bunch of supernumerary rules. You want to play a specific game, you get the specialized supplement that covers your idea and you ignore the stuff that doesn't apply to you. And to be entirely fair to these games, that approach neatly avoids the main pitfall of more abstract games - that player-defined greebles can feel superficial and arbitrary.

BESM d20 technically falls into this latter design camp, but it's unfortunately half-assed about it. Occasionally, it remembers to remind you that the rules are modular, but it doesn't actually show you how to use any of the modules and it's very inconsistent about providing rules that let you simulate its inspirations. Like, a Pokemon ttrpg would be pretty cool, and you can kind of get there by taking the Pet Monster Trainer Class and focusing on your "Pet Monster" and "Train a Cute Monster" Attributes,  but there's not much support for collecting a variety of monsters, levelling them up and evolving them into more sophisticated forms, capturing them in the wild, or even dueling with them in an arena setting (beyond just running them as extra characters, that is). You can do it, sure, but you can't do it well, and worse, you can't really do it in the five distinct ways you'd need to have an entire party of Pet Monster Trainers with their own niche protection.

Part of the problem is just that the book isn't nearly long enough to achieve its ambition - only 140 pages. That leaves it feeling only trivially universal. (By which I mean that species of inherent universality that comes from the fact that almost every ttrpg boils down to "say a thing, roll a die to determine if the next thing a player says sounds more like success or more like failure.") 

The other big problem is that you're probably going to want vastly different things from a slice-of-life high school sports story than you would from a galaxy-spanning space opera, and those things are not generally present. A baseball team needs something distinct for each position to do. Space exploration could seriously benefit from a method of generating interesting star systems. The book forgets to even mention that you're going to want to look into finding those things somewhere else. (Though, perhaps blessedly, this oversight also applies to the "naughty tentacles" trope that inexplicably gets brought up in the "Fan Service" section of the GMing chapter).

Overall, I can't say I liked this book very much. It was dry reading, the fonts were hard on my eyes, and it was so concerned with covering as much ground as possible that it frequently neglected to make a persuasive case for why that ground should be covered at all. 

Ukss Contribution: There were things I liked about it, though. It had a certain turn-of-the-century Japanophilia that was occasionally cringy and occasionally problematic (for example, thinking "anime" is a distinct enough phenomenon to base an rpg around), but which never struck me as insincere. So there's no shortage of Cool Things From Anime to choose for this entry. 

My favorite example is from the Train a Cute Monster power description: "The character has carefully studied cute monsters in battle."

While I'm reasonably sure that "cute monsters" is being used here as a term of art, I really like the idea of a naturalist who has abandoned all pretenses of objectivity. "Yeah, I study cute monsters, that's why I got into this business in the first place." 

(Although, I suspect this is not as distinct a piece of characterization as I might imagine. Sooner or later, most scientists probably come to think of whatever animal they happen to be studying as "cute").

(Shadowrun 3e) Dragons of the Sixth World

Metaplot is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can be alienating and hard to keep up with it. They're constantly releasing books and every one of these books has something happening in it and in order to understand what is happening, you have to know what has been happening and if you skip a book, or just read them in the wrong order, you'll be forced to infer the contents of an earlier book (to pick an example totally at random: Survival of the Fittest) based on vague allusions and hints that were present in a later book (non-random example: Dragons of the Sixth World).

(Forgive my saltiness here. Wikipedia's chronological list of Shadowrun books only narrows it down to the year, so sometimes I have to guess about the optimal reading order).

On the other hand, elaborate metaplot is the only form of rpg writing that is capable of getting me completely invested in hot gossip.  So I guess I just have to adapt myself to it.

I do wonder, however, why I am so much more invested in the dragon-on-dragon rivalry between Lung and Ryumo than I am in the similar human drama between Damien Knight and Lucien Cross. I guess it's because they're dragons . . .

Although, less trivially, I think dragon gossip is juicier than corporate gossip not just because they are dragons but also because they've got the perfect gossip formula: they're an elite clique, they have history with each other that goes waaayyy back, and they're sexy as hell. It's a set of advantages that the human NPCs largely lack, which is a shame. Maybe if Richard Villiers was canonically hot, I'd be more interested in the shadowy events surrounding his rise to power. 

The best and worst part of this book is when the dragons themselves, using their known aliases, pop up in the shadowland comments to drop cryptic hints of things happening behind the scenes or that happened in the distant past. These exchanges are universally both great and awful. Ooh, there is definitely an intimation of something interesting going on. . . but they're not actually going to tell me what it is.

I'll admit, I'm a sucker for those sort of antediluvian intrigues - immortals who have outlived their original context and are kind of stuck with each other. Maybe you all hate each others' guts, but you're the only ones who understand what you all lost. This new age offers you all sorts of opportunities, and the people revere your knowledge and your power, but you're still drawn to the old clique, because for all their faults, at least they aren't . . . children.

Unfortunately, Dragons of the Sixth World is largely fixated on the present. The "main text" and the "commentary" may speculate about the dragons' mysterious history, but even when the speculation is validated, it's "blink and you'll miss it." Rather, each dragon is treated primarily as a force in the modern world. They have a web of plots and intrigues, and the attention is on the web itself, because the mind at the center is more or less unknowable.

So it's a little disappointing to crack open the chapter on Aden, the dragon that leveled Tehran, and read about the Kurds and the Islamic Unity Movement and Stepan Markaryan, the Albanian drug lord who has "possible links to Aden." It's all very useful for running a game, don't get me wrong, but the overall effect is more like a half-assed Middle East supplement than a dossier on an immortal mastermind.

The bulk of the book is a series of conspiratorial organizations, many of which would probably do all right on their own, without a dragon running the show. Like, as much as I love Lofwyr as a modern update to the classic dragon archetype, and as much as I love "dragon as CEO" as a really on-the-nose metaphor for the evils of capitalism, the Saeder-Krupp corporation would probably be exactly as terrifying if Wilhemenia Graff-Beloit and her coterie of celebrities, aristocrats, and investors were still at the helm.

Which isn't to say that the dragons add nothing. There's something thematic about the consistency of their presentation. All of these creatures will meddle in human affairs. They don't even question their right to do so. They range from aristocratic dragon supremacists to benevolently aristocratic draconic limousine liberals to guys who have a violent grudge against the modern world and are willing to overthrow governments for the sake of the trees. Plus, it's kind of fun to imagine a dragon doing human-style things - like Rhonabwy listening to choral music or Musaru trying to get invited to Europe's premiere old-money high society party.

Overall, I'd say that this book strikes a good balance between being entertaining as fiction and being useful as an rpg guide. I may have preferred a bit more gossip, but I can concede that it's vastly more responsible to put all these organizations and lackeys and abstract agendas in front of player characters than it would be to put them face-to-face with an invincible god beast with world-shaking powers of sorcery. ("Okay, guys,  you've tracked Ghostwalker to his lair. Roll initiative against the kaiju who soloed Denver")

Oh, who am I kidding. I live to be pandered to. MOAR DRAGON!

Ukss Contribution: The second-to-last chapter has a bunch of less prominent or powerful dragons. One of them was Perianwyr, who worked as a club promoter and had an uncanny knack for finding exciting new musical acts. That's an interesting enough character on its own, but later on in the OOC section about Rhonabwy's Allies and Enemies it says "He has been known to associate with the adult dragon Perianwyr, but this association is largely based on their mutual love of music than any draconic power playing."

I am obsessed with this relationship. Two dragons, bro-ing down over tunes.

(d20 Modern) Critical Locations

 I'm always just a little bit awestruck when I read a book, like Critical Locations (Eric Cagle, Owen K.C. Stephens, Christopher West) that actively aspires to be generic. It takes a special kind of audacity, one that disarms me before I've even begun to write. I could say, "This book is aimed at Gamemasters who need maps of generic locations where scenes of action and intrigue can play out" and that's not a catty piece of my internal monologue, it's a direct quote from the Introduction.

So, if you, you know, need a perfectly ordinary bowling alley or convention center or grocery store, you can flip to the appropriate section and there's a lovely full-page, full color map of the location and then on the opposite page, there's a description (in case you ever needed to explain to your players what a bank or a library was) and a sample NPC and either a new rule or a couple of adventure hooks (or sometimes both). It's not just a collection of generic maps, it's also a lucky dip rules expansion, where we can learn the rules for snow blindness (alongside the Arctic Research Station) or waking the neighbors with gunplay (with the Large Family House).

In it's own way, it's a beautiful thing. So functional. Such utility. You're GMing a d20 Modern game and you're confronted with the empty infinity of the imagination. The modern world? That's everything! Where to start? Not to worry, though, because Critical Locations will take you by the hand and say, "why not just start by describing a high school?"

Ukss Contribution: Given its premise and its pedigree, this book could have gotten away with being a lot more boring than it actually was. There was precious little surprise and delight, but it covered the basics admirably. Use the luxury yacht map to run a story about a gangster who sticks to international waters, the mansion map to tell a story of a rich guy trapped in his panic room by would-be kidnappers, the high school map in a game featuring a spooky librarian who just so happens to stock the occult books needed to solve the monster of the week mystery. It's generic, but it's not dull.

But it puts me in a bind because the stuff I love is a lot more whimsical and specific. What am I going to do, add canonical bowling or fast food to the world of Ukss? 

Yeah. Okay. Let's go with bowling. 

Some group of people, somewhere in this fantasy world, are going to have bowling alleys.

(Shadowrun 3e) State of the Art 2063

First things first: I gotta do a little rhetorical two-step where I say my favorite thing about a book is its format without sounding back-handed, because actually the content is pretty okay as well. . .

Nope. I can't figure it out.

My favorite thing about State of the Art: 2063 is its format. It's really more like a compilation of mini-supplements, each one detailing a niche topic that didn't quite fit in other recent Shadowrun books. Ostensibly, they are connected by the theme of being "relevant trends and technological developments in the fictional year 2063," but really they're just a grab bag. In fact, three of the five chapters are devoted to recapping specific chapters of out-of-print supplements. "Genetech" (Eleanor Holmes) was an update of the genetic engineering rules from Shadowtech, "Soldiers of Fortune" (Jon Szeto) reworked the mercenary culture material from Fields of Fire, and "Keeping the Rabble Out" (Peter Millholland) was 3rd edition's answer to the Corporate Security Handbook.

As a group, I'd say the chapters are plausibly on-theme, but some of them require more stretching than others. It's easy to believe that there have been significant new breakthroughs in genetic technology in the three metaplot years since the 3rd edition core, but there was nothing in the chapter that immediately leapt out to me as a must-have new discovery. In fact, I'm pretty sure that immunity treatments were depowered from where they were in Shadowtech:

>Didn't they used to offer full-spectrum immunity against everything, all in one neat package?
>Bespectacle

>Yes, until they found out it was impractical and didn't actually work . . .

Obvious retcon is obvious. Which is a shame, because full-spectrum immunity is easier for bookkeeping, more likely to actually prove useful in a game ("oh, sorry, you just bought immunity to anthrax, unfortunately you were exposed to the ebola virus"), and closer to the "genetically engineered superhuman" fantasy that draws people to these sorts of characters in the first place. I suppose the downside is that you then have to do your worldbuilding on the assumption that it's possible to buy a perfect immune system, but that . . . actually fits in pretty well thematically with your cyberpunk universe, so I don't know, blame mid-school simulationist/narrative game design, I guess.

The chapter on mercenaries was, by contrast, timeless in its subject matter, but could reasonably be argued to be topical in terms of the broader Shadowrun metaplot. Shadows of North America suggested a few potential border conflicts and insurrections that might offer employment to mercenary armies, though I suspect that they are less "current events of 2063" and more "the sort of thing that happens all the time."

That same chapter also attempts to draw a distinction between shadowrunners and full-on mercenaries, but doesn't quite hit the mark. However, I can't quite blame them. It's just the essential nature of the problem - there is very little difference between shadowrunners and mercenaries.

At the other end of the spectrum, the chapter on corporate security isn't even remotely plausible as being "state of the art." Oh, what, we're talking about the central premise of the game, referring to concepts as basic as defensive landscaping and putting a security light near a locked door, and I'm supposed to believe the Shadowland regulars are only hearing about this in 2063? Come on.

I liked it, though. It was useful for GMs to help create more realistic and challenging shadowrunning environments. I did feel, at times, that if I followed too much of the chapter's advice, I'd wind up with a target that was too secure, but the "Game Information" section anticipated that impulse and quite reasonably advised me to show some damned restraint.

The only chapter I couldn't quite place on the continuum was the one about metamagic. This is the only one of the mini-supplement chapters that was not based on a previous Shadowrun book, so it could fairly be called "state of the art" re: the game's rules, and it is a canonical fact of the setting that people are constantly researching new magical techniques. So it's not absurd on the face of it. It's just that two of the new metamagic techniques are Sympathetic Magic and Psychometry. You know, staples of European occultism.

The tricky part about magic in the Shadowrun universe is that sometimes it's a technological commodity and people do new things because they've discovered new techniques. And sometimes it's an ancient mystery, reborn from the turning of a cosmic cycle and people do new things because they are survivors from a previous age and the magic level has finally risen enough to allow them to use their old techniques.  "Charmed Life: New Metamagic" (Elissa Carey) doesn't really get into it, either way, but I wish it did because I find the tension very interesting. Lofwyr owns Saeder-Krupp and funds its magical research department. Is he doing so because he hopes to learn something genuinely new or is he trying to have an outlet where he can launder the magical techniques he hopes to monetize and disguise the true capabilities of dragonkind by passing them off as new advances in the science of thaumaturgy? Maybe he mostly does the second thing, but then his team of puppets accidentally makes a genuine discovery and in the brief window of time where he's freaking out about it, the research is stolen by shadowrunners who have no reason at all to suspect that they've stumbled onto something that nova-hot.

Something to think about, anyway. My verdict is that the new metamagic is plausibly "state of the art," but I'm not at all convinced that's why it was included in this compilation.

Which only leaves the final chapter - "Culture Shock" (Michelle Lyons). It's all about the pop culture trends of 2063 and I absolutely love that the Shadowrun team made space for this kind of low-stakes worldbuilding. Enough so that I'm willing to overlook Captain Chaos' introduction where he implies that his in-setting readers would be surprised by any of this stuff. I think it may be an artifact of the early 2000s, where you might still be able to draw a distinction between keeping up with pop culture folderol and being a terminally online computer nerd. 

As far as the specific content of the chapter was concerned, I found it a little shallow, but I appreciated the setting texture. The descriptions of the top ten moviess of the year were less interesting to me than what the curation of the list as a whole said about this culture's priorities and obsessions and if I had any notes for the chapter at all, they'd be "more sci-fi Roger Ebert, less sci-fi Buzzfeed".  I did find the trendy restaurant that served a wasabi martini to be suitably hair-raising, however.

(These are apparently real, but I have a hard time believing it was something from the author's lived experience. The description of Shinpi no Sekai says "oriental drinks are a specialty of the house" and my knee-jerk reaction is that the wasabi martini was a mad-lib attempt to come up with an example. My apologies to Mz. Lyons if she was really that hip in 2002).

Overall, State of the Art 2063 made me really excited to read State of the Art 2064. I'm eager to see what they can do with the format once they no longer have old 2nd edition books to cannibalize.

Ukss Contribution: This is silly, and it's going to be hard to incorporate, but there was one detail that stuck in my mind from the last time I read this book, ~20 years ago. As a security measure, some facilities will have walls that are mirrors in infrared while looking normal in the visible spectrum. This allows security forces with the right kind of occular implants to look around corners while unaugmented people waltz around unsuspecting. I'm not sure how practical that is in a world filled with trolls and street samurai (in fact, one of the Shadowland commentors reminisces about how they turned it to their advantage), but I really like the detail as something that genuinely engages with the idea of superhuman augmentation. These guys don't just have mechanical eyeballs, they have a new way of experiencing the world, of accessing information that other people are oblivious to. How would that change you? Would it make you something other than human?