(Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition) Dungeon Master's Guide

 I'm over the hump now. I have a lot of 3rd edition books in front of me, but surely none of them will have the characteristic DMG blend of dryly picayune (tell me how a flask of holy water will bounce if a player misses with their attack roll) and the dryly abstract (explain what a "dungeon" is, keeping in mind that at this point the word is basically jargon). From this point on, at least until I read the 3.5 version of the cores, all my D&D books are going to be about something.

But it really wasn't that bad. I may have spent the bulk of my time as a Dungeon Master doing whatever I could to avoid having to crack open the Dungeon Master's Guide, but now, as an exercise in nostalgia, I had fun keeping my eyes open for little dramatic ironies. The book can say, "[rolling for AC as a] variant rule comes in handy at high levels, where high-level fighters always hit with their primary attacks and other characters rarely do," and I can jump up and down, clapping my hands and shouting, "OMG! They knew! The fundamental math of the game was broken by design!"

But, of course, the fact that this disparity was apparent even from the start serves only to raise the question - if they designed the attack-roll system to work so that warrior-types would hit often and non-warriors would hit rarely, then exactly what was the underlying design goal of 3rd edition in the first place? You're 20th level and the game the fighters are playing is fundamentally different than the game the wizards are playing and maybe that's a form of niche protection? Fighters have competitive attrition and wizards have a save-or-die slot machine, with each spell slot giving them another pull at the lever, and ideally, these divergent playstyles deliver a gameplay experience tailored to the sort of people who would have chosen those classes at 1st level?

A bold move, if true. I'm not sure I approve. At the very least, the line "Dungeon Masters who are real sticklers for class balance may want to avoid modifying character classes altogether" strikes me as . . . a bit overconfident. 

But that's just me being a smug little dork. It's only with the wisdom of hindsight that I realized being able to target your foe's weakest save with an incapacitating spell is a much more powerful tactic than whittling down their hit points. There's plenty in this book that I've been ignoring since 2001. Mostly the world-building advice. It does that weird D&D thing where it empowers you to make a hundred different variations of the same highly specific idea. Why are you telling me that "all druids are at least nominally members of [a] druidic society which spans the globe?" Why does my goblin or orc PC need to have been "reared by humans, elves, dwarves, or another nonevil race?"

The thing is, I know the future. D&D 3rd edition is going to give us a lot of material to work with. And somehow, it's going to break through to the mainstream, even though 5th edition was deliberately designed to be conservative. At some point the tide is going to turn, and we'll get more support for diverse worldbuilding than this book's sad half-page about converting the game to an east-Asian setting. I'm just not sure when it's going to happen.

But that's really the worst thing I can say about The Dungeon Master's Guide. Monte Cooke, Jonathan Tweet, and Skip Williams did not reinvent the wheel, even though they had every opportunity to reinvent the wheel, and this particular wheel was long overdue for a good reinventing (seriously, the xp award section was stultifyingly old-school in its reluctance to give xp for anything but combat encounters). However, given the basic limitations of the project - a new D&D ruleset in an environment that had not yet had the opportunity to discover a new D&D culture - these guys are at the top of their game. A book this dry could have been a hell of a lot drier, if you know what I mean.

My favorite part (aside from the magic item chapter, whose primary strength was that it preserved the best stuff from prior editions) was the introduction of Prestige Classes. These things are going to be huge, and I am here for it. 

At the risk of sounding back-handed, prestige classes offer us a peek into an alternate universe where every class is as interesting as the monk or the bard. And yes, you're better off playing a fighter than a monk or a wizard than a bard, but still, despite their relative weakness, they get interesting abilities, driven by a strong concept, narrowed into a setting and party niche . . . like prestige classes. 

The downside to most prestige classes is that you can't play them from level 1. The Assassin would be a really good class if you were getting their 4th level spells at level 8 instead of level 12. The Arcane Archer is a great concept, held back by its lack of a dedicated spell-casting mechanic (instead of delivering regular spells via arrow, it should have a list of magical arrows with spell-like effects). The Shadowdancer should just be a regular rogue build (as in, "shadow jump" should be a feat or something, that any high-level rogue can take). These are character-defining concepts, but they exist off to the side of normal class progression. 

It really gets to the dilemma at the heart of 3rd-edition's class design. Even as early as the core, it's possible to see a fully modular approach to character progression - build any character imaginable using only modular elements like feats, skills, and spells. True20 is going to do this with its Adept, Warrior, and Expert classes and it's going to be great. Alternately, you could build an entire game around a large number of highly-specific classes. . . and I can't think of a game (besides Ukss d20, that is) that does that, but it might turn out pretty interesting. Or you could do what 3.0/3.5 did in practice, which is to recklessly mix the two design tendencies, both in full and prestige classes, so the Fighter exists alongside the Druid and the Dwarven Defender competes with classes that are transparent patches to the multiclass system (though they won't actually show up until around the time of the 3.5 cores). 

Overall, I'm pretty glad to have read the Dungeon Master's Guide, and not just to quickly get it out of the way. I'm at the start of a journey into the most vibrantly creative period of D&D history, and the DMG reminds me that, though the pace is definitely going to accelerate, there was some movement even at the start.

Ukss Contribution: So let's go backwards! To a magic item that was present in both 2nd and 1st edition. The Mirror of Opposition. You look into the mirror and an opposite alignment duplicate jumps out and tries to kill you. It's my favorite kind of magic - specific and powerful and completely unclear as to why anyone would make such a thing. I'll probably give it some other use besides screwing over adventurers (it's not listed as a cursed item, but what is it if not a trap?), but the essential function will remain.

(Orpheus) The Orphan Grinders

CONTENT WARNING: Child Abuse

Ew. That name. It's never adequately explained, and the speculation for why this new breed of ex-spectres might be called "Orphan-Grinders" is so weak that I suspect the name doesn't mean anything at all. Maybe they're "orphaned" by the spectre hive-mind, or maybe they're worse than spectres "because they understand the quality of mercy and yet ignore it as a failing," or maybe someone in Orpheus brainstorming meetings came up with a clever turn of phrase and nobody could bear to strike it from the whiteboard.

Anyway, the Orphan-Grinders (ew) do address one of my issues with Orpheus' setting - the bleak reactionary cynicism behind making the fall to becoming a spectre a one-way street. Spectres so far have been one of those "dark side" groups that follows the weird fictional trope of recruiting primarily from among their victims. Like, a dark and sinister ghost who has given over completely to their most terrible passions of hate and rage, that makes sense. And it makes sense that when a serial killer like Cyrus J. Randall dies, they have only a short journey to becoming a spectre. But then the people this serial-killer-turned-dark-ghost tortures and kills, they become spectres too, and suddenly they're on the same side, working towards the same goal? You could very reasonably frame becoming a spectre as a tragedy, that the supernatural rules of being a ghost are such that even well-justified hate and rage make you lose all control, but wouldn't that out-of-control hate and rage still largely target their former enemies?

Sure, sometimes in the real world, an organization will put its recruits through an unnecessarily abusive training regimen and the result will be new members with fanatical loyalty. And sometimes an abused person will cleave tightly to their abuser, but even in those situations, there's a more nuanced psychological process at play here. The recruits can consider themselves elite because they endured the abuse. The abuser's rage is followed up by overwhelming love-bombing. 

I don't know . . . humans are complicated, I guess. However, from a pure storytelling perspective, it's one of my least favorite tropes. It's marginally justified here, because the chthonic deity, Grandmother, incorporates most of the spectres into her hive mind. And the hive-mind experience is, in fact, described as "suffused with love," so telepathy combined with crude psychological manipulation could explain a loyalty to Grandmother. But it's fucking grim. These torture victims are being exploited by their torturers to torture more people and the ratchet only turns towards "evil" because there's no terminology in the system to differentiate between living murderers who became murder ghosts and innocents who died and then because of the fucked-up cosmology became murder ghosts.

I mean, for fuck's sake, the Lost Boys. They're spectres who got their start as abused and neglected children and they never fail to give me the heebie-jeebies, and not in a way that inclines me to explore the horror genre. They have an especially gruesome appearance in this book, and I'm going to have to quote the worst of it, because it's fucking terrible in a way that I wouldn't want to write the words that could do it justice: "A fourth, had wrapped the lower half of its face in duct tape, while the upper half appeared purple and bloated."  It's such a visceral image, especially when you know the backstory - Sister Grace was a nun who "took care" of orphans, many of whom died in the abusive foster homes she placed them in because, "Grace mistook their authoritarian natures as merely strict, but loving, like herself."

And excuse me while I all-caps rant for a second:

SISTER GRACE, YOU FUCKING MONSTER, YOU WERE NOT "STRICT, BUT LOVING," YOU STRAPPED A CHILD DOWN TO A BED "AS PUNISHMENT FOR HABITUAL BEDWETTING" AND LEFT HIM THERE SO LONG HE GOT BEDSORES AND DIED OF MALNUTRITION. HE DOESN'T GET TO BE YOUR "WAKE-UP" CALL, HE WAS AN INNOCENT CHILD, ENTRUSTED TO YOUR CARE AND YOU KILLED HIM AND . . . AND, THIS WHOLE PLOT WAS HANDLED IN THE WORST WAY POSSIBLE, SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE FUCK WAS WRONG WITH OLD WHITE WOLF? IN THE NARRATION, YOU DESCRIBED THE DEAD CHILDREN WITH THE PRONOUN "IT!"

Okay, that's mostly out of my system now. It's a very uncomfortable adventure. Sister Grace is not nearly tormented enough about her deeds, and the text doesn't seem to appreciate the gravity of the story it's telling. I think you could do interesting horror about the wicked proprietor of an abusive orphanage who was tormented by the ghosts of the children she abused and who eventually came to feel such remorse that she was willing to submit herself to their violent revenge, but in order to be interesting, and not whatever the fuck this was, you kind of have to take the side of the ghosts, at least a little. White Wolf liked moral complexity, but the moral complexity here is in the audience's capacity for forgiveness. She doesn't deserve it. She can never deserve it. But she needs it. That's the terrible power of grace (I'd say "no pun intended," but I can't actually speak for White Wolf's motives in choosing the character's name).

But this gets us to the heart of what's wrong with Orpheus' (and really, Wraith: the Oblivion's) presentation of spectres so far. You can't introduce characters like the Lost Boys and then assign them "it" as a pronoun, or, at least, you can't unless your story is about the tragedy of their objectification. Because they are not the monsters. The Sister Graces of the world are the monsters. The violence of the Lost Boys is her violence, translated forward into the future. It's not proportionate, and it's not just, and it's directed towards the wrong people, but so was what she did to those children. The pain caused by a tormented ghost is just the pain of an uncorrected injustice, made literal through the power of metaphor. The Lost Boys don't need redemption, they need healing. 

And you can certainly interpret this book's de-spectre-izing mechanics in that way, if you wanted to, but the presentation doesn't make it easy. When you're done with the redemption, what you're left with is an "Orphan Grinder," a dark antihero with powers related to the spectre hive mind, who is constantly in danger of backsliding and become a new, more powerful form of spectre known as a Lawgiver. There's a sweet-spot where that plot works, like with the signature character Tom Hayes, who was an Orpheus agent who died in the raid, then his daughter died from the mass pigment poisoning and he became a spectre to try and rescue her soul, but he failed and came to regret his actions, becoming an Orphan Grinder out of his overwhelming guilt, and so now he's a free agent in the anti-spectre resistance, too ashamed to return to his old comrades, but too responsible to give up the fight, making deals with sinister entities and running the risk of pushing things too far . . . That's an arc. It's good. Now, let's do one for Maria, the former Lost Boy (Girl) who is being mentored by Beth Savitch, former spectre whose main crime was failing to get revenge on the Chupacabra that killed her sister. . . Oh, right, it would be weird to have a character that was the ghost of an innocent little girl who fell into a terrible rage after her untimely death and was subsequently adopted by a grim antihero and trained to be an antihero instead of a vengeful shade and now seeks redemption for the dark deeds she performed before being raised to full awareness of her condition. And, sure, I'd watch that anime, but it would only be good if it somehow acknowledged how weird it was.

All these words and I haven't even talked about the main plot - the worldwide spectre invasion. It's a perfectly adequate plot, and has been fairly foreshadowed in the books so far, but it draws upon the weakest part of Orpheus' original pitch - its tenuous connection to the larger World of Darkness. As we get deeper into Grandmother's motives and origins, we're being introduced to more and more of Wraith: the Oblivion's terminal metaplot. Turns out Grandmother's hive mind isn't the only spectre game in town, she's opposed by Mr Jigsaw, a potent spectre who works for the Malfeans, and that information only makes sense if you knew that the Malfeans were the old enemies of Stygia, the grand kingdom of the dead that no longer exists because Grandmother ate everyone.

In one sense, this is White Wolf just doing the thing that White Wolf always does - introducing a change to canon as a metaplot event. One of the (arguable) weaknesses of Wraith: the Oblivion is that it introduces a whole new afterlife that's not connected to any real-world beliefs or anything the players are familiar with or care about, which is fine for a pure fantasy game (it's used to great effect in Exalted, for example), but maybe a modern horror game about ghosts should focus on haunting the real world . . . I know, let's blow up Stygia and everything in it. Likewise, the shadowguide system was a little weird and intense, so let's change it so that ghosts have exterior spectre dopplegangers and then instead of just pretending that's how it's been all along (considering that this is ostensibly an entirely new game with a new title and branding), we'll have the canon NPC drop a hint that the nature of the ghost-shadow relationship changed around the same time as the shit that went down in the Underworld.

It all adds up to a growing sense that we were never actually playing Orpheus at all. That such a game never even existed. Rather, it's a soft reboot into Wraith: the Oblivion, revised and all this Orpheus business is White Wolf taking another approach to the transitional woes that plagued Mage: the Ascension. We're seeing what it would be like if they'd called the M:Rev core The Bitter Road and then slow-dripped the old factions, apres retcon, into the setting as part of an Apprentice-to-Disciple level mini-campaign.

And to be entirely fair, it's probably a good way of doing a radical edition change, especially in an interconnected universe as complex as the World of Darkness. But I'm on the record as never really liking the World of Darkness that much (even as I enjoyed many of the individual games), and I have the same problem here. The best parts of Orpheus were the parts that were distinctly Orpheus and they are gradually falling to the wayside. 

So I don't know how I feel about this book. I like Grandmother as a villain, but I don't care for her backstory. I like that spectre-hood is no longer a hopeless condition, but I don't like the way it conflates victims with villains. I liked the hives blossoming into their final form, but I felt like the spectre invasion was one-sided to the point of overkill. I guess the best way to sum it up is that the farther we get away from the core, the farther we get away from the core . . . and I fucking loved the core.

Ukss Contribution: Frick and Frack, the identical twin ghosts who independently and simultaneously murdered each other at exactly the same time and who have carried their grudge into the afterlife. The names are a little twee, but I enjoyed the horror with a tinge of farce.

PS: Donate to RAINN, if you can.

Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook (3rd Edition)

 Oh, wow, the nostalgia. This is another one of those books where it hasn't quite been twenty years, but those twenty years ago, I must have read it a dozen times. And revisiting this beloved treasure, my main thought was, "damn, was I ever that young?"

Until very recently, my main thought about this book was as an improvement over AD&D 2nd edition, because when I was eighteen years old, in winter of 2000, my experience was that this allowed me to do things I'd long wished for - demihuman characters can go all the way to level 20, a versatile multiclass system that allows you to make a wide variety of character concepts, a rational skill system, a consistent roll-over system, instead of the weird stuff with  ability checks being roll-under, and attack rolls and savings throws being roll-over, but with lower scores being better.

And aside from my main thought, my secondary thought was that this game is the driving technology behind a lot of great games - Blue Rose and Mutants and Masterminds, d20 Modern and, of course, Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. This is the start of a creative explosion in the rpg scene, and while many people would describe its era with unflattering terms like "bloat" or "glut" or "bubble," I'm just kind of thrilled that the OGL exists and I love the diversity of the games it inspired. It's a big reason I decided to make Ukssd20 the official rpg of this blog. 

Which is why it comes as such a shock to me that the fatal flaws of the baseline d20 system were so glaringly obvious even from the beginning - its creative new multiclassing system will destroy your core competencies, rogues have thirty-one class skills, spells still take up half the book. I noticed none of this at the time, and I have to assume it was because I was still a child, with only a child's breadth of knowledge. I loved D&D 3rd edition because it was not AD&D 2nd edition, the only other game I could compare it to.

But I could spend all day waxing poetic about the superior hindsight powers of middle age. Yes, this book has deep shortcomings, but some are just assumptions that should have been questioned, but weren't. It introduces "Item Creation Feats," but they spellcaster levels as a prerequisite, because tactical-scale spellcasting, story-scale magic rituals, and background activity crafting magic are all the same basic skill. . . and there's no real reason for that. Other shortcomings are things that were improved, but not by enough. Non-caster classes at least get something at high levels. What that Barbarian is going to do with 4 points of damage reduction or how the Monk is going to benefit from not aging, the book does not say, but they only seem like weak powers when you compare them to bringing back the dead or stopping time. Only a few were genuinely a design dead-end - like the split between combat, skill, and magic competence and being able to sacrifice one to improve the others.

But as much as this book could sometimes seem like a catalogue of ideas we've collectively outgrown, it's also the first game in a long time where I felt tempted to make a character in the middle of reading (it was actually infuriating - this pointless distraction character had the best stat roll of my entire roleplaying career - a total of 84 attribute points, with my lowest roll being a 12). It has a vitality to it, a sense that we're going to have Dungeons and Dragons, but now it's going to be intentionally designed. The chassis is versatile enough that you can build almost anything on top of it. It's taking a tenative, but real step in questioning the old magic system with the introduction of the sorcerer class. I may be jaded by the two decades worth of innovative rpgs that came in its wake, but I did also get the feeling of being present at the turning of an age. Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition is peak 90s design, in both the good and bad senses of the term.

Ukss Contribution: A lot of the flavor of this book is legacy material, with all the weird cruft that entails ("Stone to Flesh" is still in here), and in that tradition, the best type of stuff is the extremely niche spells that are absolutely delightful as character powers, but which are not reasonably worth the opportunity cost in D&D's system of limited spell slots. My favorite example is the "Shrink Item" spell. You take a regular item (which can include an actively burning campfire!) and reduces it to a cute little cloth patch. Then, at some later point, you toss the item onto the ground and it returns to its normal size and composition. Yeah, you can have a whole host of useful mundane items available on demand, but you have to renew the spell every few days and you're giving up "Fly" or "Fireball" to do it. It's the sort of spell you only use during downtime, which means it doesn't really need to be a spell at all.

But it's an incredible image. And Ukss doesn't have to cleave to spell slots as a mechanic, so I might be able to implement it in a more practical way.

(Orpheus) Shadow Games

Ah, the gradual transformation of Orpheus into a new edition of Wraith: the Oblivion is proceeding nicely. But don't let my sarcastic tone fool you, I'm largely okay with it. The antediluvian mystery of the old spirit world is one of the key elements of Orpheus' spooky atmosphere, and it continues to develop nicely here - a dread tower of imperishable ghost metal is hurled by an apocalyptic storm through the barrier between worlds, where it strikes the earth like a meteor, causing a terrible earthquake in the physical realm. Meanwhile, the baleful intelligence coordinating the spectres' reign of terror is becoming bolder, revealing itself to the psychically sensitive through recurring nightmares. She is a chthonic death goddess, known only as Grandmother, and through her agents in various cults, she's spreading the cursed street drug, Pigment, which causes anyone who dies with it in their system to become a weak and tenuous shade. Soon, she will herself breach the barrier and her army of fanatical ghosts will reap a terrible harvest of souls.

All very exciting, but I still miss Orpheus. It was the game's most interesting invention, that single-handedly shifted it into a new genre of horror/fantasy, and nothing in any of the books has filled the gap caused by its absence.

Oh, the book tries. It introduces a new replacement - Lazarus Redux - which at least tries to be ethical to both living and dead and whose entire reason for existence is to prepare against the possibility of a new underworld apocalypse. Which, okay, I'd have to be some kind of cynical turd to hate it for that . . . but maybe I'm just learning a thing or two about myself in the course of this blog.

First of all, it misses the entire point of having "projector firms" in the first place. Like, the theme of this book is the player characters' transition from reactive to active, from victims of shadowy conspiracies to a bold resistance movement, but is this something I even want? Shadow Games gives us a vision of what early-2000s White Wolf thought a well-run projector firm might look like (the local coffee shop, Spooky Brews, is an unofficial satellite office!), but I was much more invested in the story of a poorly run operation. If you're going to pitch me something you insist on calling a "coalition against entropy," at least do so in the shadow of the late-stage capitalism that would make such a thing unthinkable.

Also, Lazarus Redux is officially founded by the game's signature NPCs, who canonically survived the destruction of Orpheus, and that's the worst kind of metaplot shenanigans. The purpose of signature characters is as a placeholder for PCs, so that when you're reading the book, you can imagine the sort of things the players might get up to. Unfortunately, there is no suggestion anywhere in this book that you might want to run a "PCs found their equivalent of Lazarus Redux" campaign. The suggestion that "if you ask, you're certain to find that each player has a favorite signature character" was . . . adorable in its optimism. That you might exploit these preferences to feed missions to the PCs does not strike me as tenable.

But the worst thing about Lazarus Redux is the name. Just yikes on that branding. You could have just named it "Lazarus," and people would have gotten the picture. Or, if you were feeling bold, you could have gone with "Redux." It's modern, it's vague, and it has all the exact same connotations as "Lazarus." Combining the two just comes across as goofy.

I know I've been a bit harsh on LR in this post, and most of that has just been resentment at the fact that it's replacing the main thing that drew me to the game in the first place. Honestly, you could run a ghost-hunting game as heroic fantasy. And you could make the new heroic small business into an NPC operation in order to spare the PCs the tedium of securing permits and zoning and whatnot. But the thing with the name, that's not even my opinion. It's commented on in the opening fiction. By the second paragraph of the book, the narrator calls it "stupid" twice. Before we know literally anything else about it. Maybe, if you find yourself in the position where you're going to publish the words "Damn stupid name if you ask me" you can just take a few minutes and brainstorm something else.

Anyway, Lazarus Redux is the sort of business where the founder is the CEO, and the CEO is the main point of contact for clients and contractors, so that makes it a more wholesome form of capitalism. None of those tedious dark and sinister secrets lurking around in the background, threatening to become subplots.

Yeah, okay, I could very well have just held off on running the Crusade of Ashes story until the conspiracy stuff was fully played out, using the shocking swerve in the game's direction as a signal for the beginning of the campaign endgame, and the canon story actually works pretty well if you assume that each subsequent sourcebook has an accelerating pace. It's just a weakness that the Lazarus Redux plot acts contrary to that tendency (they are set up to act as a new patron, suggesting this stage of the story is in it for the long haul.) And that's exacerbated by Shadow Games' mishandling of the series main villain - the mass murderer turned ghost by Orpheus' unethical experiments, who now serves as Grandmother's point man in the physical world, the practical and ruthless intellect behind the spread of pigment - Uriah Bishop.

Now, Bishop is a good villain, but book 4 is too late in the series to be learning this vital information. It's revealed that he's Crusade of Ashes' "Mysterious Antagonist #1" and the information just completely fails to land. Oh, the guy who was name dropped in the core, then barely showed up in the next two books, is actually the one behind everything? I guess that's more economical than having a second named NPC suddenly show up out of nowhere. 

The only things we definitely knew about Mysterious Antagonist #1 is that he had a strange ability to secure the cooperation of the spectres and his pockets were deep enough to afford to keep NextWorld on call indefinitely, even as it deliberately drew-out its murder-for-hire scheme. And we learn here the reasons for those traits. He can cooperate with spectres because he made a bargain with the dark goddess that controls their hive mind. And he has a lot of money because his cult is a linchpin of the pigment trade.

This just goes to show the weakness of the information slow-drip, though. Because the plot only works if it's established that someone out there is making Pablo Escobar-scale money off the pigment trade. And the fact that the head of that cartel has a connection to Orpheus only works if the PCs know who the head of the cartel is. And the PCs can only know about the head of the cartel if he has a presence in the campaign. And if he has a presence in the campaign, then it's also super relevant that he is the leader of a cult.

If I were to try and fix this plotline, I think I'd have to largely reverse its course. Baseline, the core Orpheus experience is this sci-fi/fantasy world where science establishes the existence of ghosts. Orpheus advertises on prime time, imitators have been spawned, and the idea has permeated into pop culture. And part of that, as something that's a big setting element even from the beginning, is a religious reaction. The Missionary Works of the Holy Ghost presents itself as a mainline Protestant denomination that is at the forefront of incorporating these scientific revelations about ghosts into its theology and practices. It has developed post-life sacraments and offers its fellowship to Christian ghosts. And at the start it serves mainly as a foil to Orpheus, an ostensibly altruistic organization that underbids the Orpheus Group for many of its so-called "fumigation" or exorcism services, but respects the spiritual gravity of what it's doing.

Then, you dig deeper and discover some disturbingly cult-like behavior among its upper echelons. It turns out the head of the church is himself a ghost! Then you find out that the church is super-rich, thanks to its role in the pigment trade. Then the Crusade of Ashes plot happens. The ghostly head of this wealthy mega-church is the prime suspect, but why? So you dig deeper . . . OMG, he's the ghost of a dead mass murderer, and he has a connection to Orpheus' sinister Project Flatline. Was this just about revenge? Maybe it seems that way at first, but then the poisoned pigment thing happens, and that traces back to Bishop too, which seems contrary to his well-established interests. And that is when you learn about his connection to Grandmother.

Of course, I may have to reassess this position, pending the withheld information from upcoming books. The thing I'm discovering about Orpheus, reading it from the position of a more experienced consumer of media, is that it has a lot of great parts, but that the whole suffers greatly from being spread out among six books. It seems like a prime candidate for a cleaned-up 20th anniversary edition.

Ukss Contribution: The Maggot Revolver. It's a magical revolver that shoots maggots. The wounds are exactly as awful as you're imagining. Gross, but I'm going to remember it forever (in fact, I do remember it, not just from Orpheus, but from Exalted: the Abyssals. I suspect that it got its start in Wraith: the Oblivion, because it definitely seems like the sort of idea that you want to reuse as often as possible.)

(Alternity) StarDrive Campaign Setting

Normally, when I take more than two weeks to read a book, it's because I spent a lot of time goofing off, doing something else. I'd read the book in a total of three days, but only after I spent 13 playing video games or watching youtube videos. This time, however, I kept up a relatively stable pace. I took a few days off, sure, but mostly I read this 253 page book in 12 sessions of 20-30 pages per day. 

It's very dense. It describes seven major star systems, and each one gets approximately 20 pages worth of detail. First it talks about the high concept, and then the history, and then the geography of the most populous world, then various adjunct lieutenants and smuggler captains of that world, and then the less inhabited worlds and their flora and fauna and mid-level functionaries, and then a few dangling plot points, and by the time it's all over, I was like "I've been a very good boy, studying all this new information and taking notes, time to cool down by playing a video game."

I think I have to count this as a strength of the work. David Eckelberry and Richard Baker were clearly setting out to lay the groundwork for not just an rpg campaign, but an entire franchise, and, well, it definitely captured the feeling of clicking on a random article on Wookiepedia and discovering that the background character who was in that one movie for 5 seconds had an entire series of novels based on their life and they are so filled with incident that even reading the summary takes the better part of an afternoon. In many ways, it was even better. At no point did I read something in this book and feel the need to exclaim, "oh, come on, there's no way that's a thing."

Well, maybe with the Picts, a group of ultra-violent space pirates who form one of the six Baronies that control a former prison colony while maintaining a brutal system of medieval-style serfdom. I kind of felt like, balance of power or no, the other five Baronies would not really want these guys as neighbors. Also, their poor economic output and lack of technical acumen might be a bad fit for a world where humans can only survive inside sealed habitats. But, aside from that one thing, almost everything else felt like someone put some serious thought into it.

Where it gets awkward for me is that while StarDrive is clearly aiming to be a franchise, it was not a franchise I have any emotional connection to or nostalgia for in any way. In retrospect, this is not my first encounter with the setting - it's one of the campaign models pitched in d20 Future, and I've read that book at least one and a half times, but it had a very unassuming presence, with no more wordcount than the half-dozen other campaign pitches which were not based on existing properties with hundreds of pages worth of canon. And it's not like I need to draw on nostalgia to enjoy these books . . . but it helps.

On the other hand, it's not like I didn't enjoy it. It's more that I spent the entire book on the cusp of enjoyment. I read through the whole thing, chapter-by-proper-noun-stuffed-chapter with the recognition that I could come to really enjoy it, were I willing to put in the effort to become invested in its splatbook-friendly factions and ongoing plotlines. The only thing really standing in my way is my own lack of exciting stories to recount about the StarDrive universe.

Which is weird, because I am all-in on other settings where I have a similar deficit. Never ran a game of Changeling: the Lost, but I love the setting to bits. Same thing with Eclipse Phase, Reign, and Earthdawn.  

I could just chalk it up to timing - I happened to encounter this elaborate science-fiction world when I was in grumpy mode and had no inclination to try and immerse myself in it. However, I don't think my disconnect is so circumstantial. I think there really is something holding me back and that something is theme. Namely, I'm not sure it has one.

This is a book that is very clearly trying to deliver a fully-formed alternative to Star Wars, and if that's the goal, I'd say that it almost succeeds. StarDrive is a more complex and dynamic setting, with more points of entry for new players and new stories, and a greater versatility in the kinds of stories that it's able to tell. I'd say, for worldbuilding, it even compares favorably to Star Trek, the other expansive science-fiction setting that serves as a clear source of inspiration. However, it lacks something vital that lies at the heart of both of those franchises - an articulate moral vision of humanity's place in the universe. At times, it felt like reading one of those "the empire did nothing wrong" or "the Federation is as corrupt as all its rivals" fanfics that pop up to plague us from time to time.

The book used the objective voice for things that absolutely were not being described objectively. "Heretics grew in number and the normally reclusive and peaceful Brethren were forced to put down several splinter groups." Forced, you say? Anything more we should know about these splinter groups and the nature of their specific heresies? No? Well, I guess I'll just take your word for it that these religious wars were uncharacteristic for the Brethren.

Or the whole deal between Voidcorp and the Sesheyans. The Sesheyans were an alien species that lived a hunter-gatherer type lifestyle until Voidcorp made contact with the planet and "offered" them a "contract" that purported to exchange advanced technology for the entire species' indefinite servitude. Ahhh!!! 

It is, of course, villain behavior, and it's no great crime for a sci-fi setting to have realistic villainy. The problem is that the book has very little pro-Sesheyan editorializing. It says that their "attempts to win freedom are crushed whenever they are discovered," which does convey something of Voidcorp's ruthlessness, but later on in the book, when it talks about the Sesheyan colony on Grith, it portrays them as criminals and outlaws. Escaped slaves made their way to a distant planet, set up a thriving colony, and came up with a cover story where they pretended to be transplanted by a friendly elder civilization a thousand years before the Voidcorp "contract," and that's called "a monstrous lie." Oh, no, when they arrived as refugees, they attacked the previous human colony and drove off the settlers from the theocratic Hatire Community! Couldn't they see that this was an entirely different group of humans than the ones that condemned them to eternal slavery?

Which isn't to say that they should have attacked those uninvolved colonists, but seeing as how there were mitigating circumstances, maybe the book could have been a little bit more sympathetic. At the very least, it should push back on the idea that Voidcorp has a claim on their descendants, hundreds of years later. Because that's how the conflict is framed - if the Grith Sesheyans' secret is ever revealed, then they'll fall back under Voidcorp's jurisdiction. The book doesn't seem to understand that it's describing the Fugitive Slave Act in the Year 2501.

I think the setting as a whole would work better if it was presented from the perspective of the Galactic Concord. The Concord is kind of a space-UN, established after the Second Galactic War as a neutral peacekeeping force that has a responsibility to arbitrate disputes in "Open Space" (areas not controlled by the surviving nations as of the end of the last war).  There are times when the book flirts with them as the Obvious Protagonists, but it winds up settling on portraying them as just another galactic power, of roughly equal status to the nations it deals with (it actually controls territory made up of the colonies of nations whose capital-worlds were destroyed and/or conquered in the Second Galactic War, which strikes me as a bit of a conflict of interest).

What the book doesn't seem to understand is that it's portraying humanity in a really terrible light - a parasitical, planet-devouring species that runs roughshod over other species as it pursues infinite expansion driven by an unstoppable exponential population growth (roughly 10 trillion humans as of the start date, and that's after a war that killed billions). And you have to assume that maybe the reason each of the 14 surviving stellar nations seems driven by one bad idea or another is because no one sensible could have possibly committed the atrocities necessary to be a "victor" of the last war. But they did one reasonable thing and gave their space UN an independent military so that international law might actually have some teeth, and that's really what the game should be about - a group of idealists running themselves ragged riding herd over these ravenous colonialists.  The bulk of the setting focuses on the Verge, an area of space that lost contact with the stellar nations for more than a century during the last war. The Galactic Concord has jurisdiction over this entire area. Yet the book doesn't quite recognize the pattern of the stellar nations repeatedly coming in and "claiming" entire societies that have had generations of independence. It could say something interesting about colonialism, but it doesn't. It never even seems to occur to it that the Klicks, who attacked humanity's most distant colony, might possibly be waging a war of defense.

Overall, I think StarDrive features some masterful worldbuilding, and as a result the book has a lot of utility in running any number of games set in its universe, but I think it would benefit greatly from having a stronger thesis and a little less gritty 90s "nuance."

Ukss Contribution: About 50 years before the game's start date, everyone on the planet Bluefall mysteriously vanished. All 10 million of them. Then, a decade later, a bunch of colonists found the deserted world, listened to the scavengers tell them the tale of how nobody knows how or why it happened, but it was so sudden that the machines were left running, and then said to themselves, "sweet, free buildings," and settled down without coming even one iota closer to figuring out whether it might happen again. 

There's something about this oblivious bull-headedness that rings true to me. So Ukss will have a city-state or an island with a similar backstory - the previous residents disappeared under mysterious circumstances and new people moved in without first establishing that the danger has passed.

(Orpheus) Shades of Gray

Man, why do the supplements for this sci-fi/horror rpg always have to feature such grim events? Oh, right. I like this particular shocking twist a bit more than the shocking twist from Crusade of Ashes, primarily because it doesn't overturn the fundamentals of the setting, but it makes up for it by being even more grim.

Although it's probably not the plot that's especially grim. You've got a drug, pigment, that when you take it you can see ghosts. And if you die while high on pigment, you automatically become a weak type of ghost known as a "hue." So, if the villains were to suddenly need a lot of ghosts very quickly, they could poison a big batch of pigment, and take advantage of the horde of weak and confused hues to advance their nefarious underworld schemes. A classic supervillain scheme.

But then, the authors of Shades of Gray made the choice to luridly describe the symptoms of strychnine poisoning, and the grief and chaos that would naturally happen in the wake of a mass poisoning, and it stops being a superhero plot and starts being an atrocity.

I suppose it's an artistic line that I don't often notice. I can watch Spiderman thwart a mugging or a bank robbery and think "ah, this is a fun adventure," but realistically, there's nothing fun about this at all. Even in a robbery with no casualties, people get PTSD from having armed men screaming and pointing weapons at them, and the stolen money that seems so abstract in a comic book is, for a real person, a rent payment or a month's worth of meals, or a child's medicine. To describe the perpetrators as "villains" or even just "criminals" is to put a blanket of bland words around some actually pretty horrifying behavior.

So, of course, when your genre is horror, maybe you just lean into it. I can respect that, even if it occasionally makes for a painful read. However, now that I'm at the halfway point in the series, I can officially say that I'm conflicted about Orpheus as a whole. It's still my third or fourth favorite World of Darkness game (maybe even second, if it turns out that both Hunter and Demon are less cool than I remember), and it's probably the one most likely to withstand the test of time. Yet I'm coming to think that I only really like a watered-down version of the creators' original vision. I like the occult/sci-fi procedural element, where you're working for this mysterious corporation, using its sinister technology and the ghost stuff is merely spooky. Ooh, there's life after death, and humanity is recklessly charging ahead in its exploration (and exploitation) of the most primordial mystery of the human condition, but maybe you're just solving a difficult murder or bringing peace to a haunted house and it all stays very PG-13. 

Orpheus wants to do more than that, though. It also wants to present a frightening horror experience . . . by which I mean it wants to creep you out . . . by which I mean it sometimes feels like it was written by a bunch of creeps. 

Okay, that may sound a little harsh. I meant "creep" in the horror-genre sense of the word. Like "that clown with the big knife is a total creep." Or like, "that Jessica Fletcher, she's a real creep, isn't she?" It's obvious that they're trying to push our buttons, is what I'm saying.

The reason the villains need so many helpless ghosts is because they are building a Spectre Hive, an underworld structure that influences victims in the living world towards self-harm or depraved acts of violence. Helpfully, there are specific suggestions. And yeah, they go there. 

This isn't 90s White Wolf. They didn't revel in specific imagery, but that's something I had to read. My day was made worse by reading this book. And I suppose it's allowed. This is entertainment for adults, and some adults like being creeped out. I just have to accept that I'm going to keep feeling ambivalent.

Another source of ambivalence - the fact that the main plot sets the PCs up to fail. This is one of those delicate situations where failing to thwart the plot leads to a more interesting outcome than going in and being a big hero. The question is how to do this without annoying your players. The book suggests withholding information until it's too late . . . which is maybe realistic enough to be forgivable, because, seriously, how often are the PCs privy to drug deals, let alone extra-secret deals where ghosts have tainted the product with strychnine? There's a balance to navigate. If the players know about the poisoning before it happens, but can't stop it, they might feel cheated. If the players don't know about the poisoning in advance, and then later find out about it, that's not an rpg blot - it's just a background event in the world. You might be able to present it as a mystery to be solved, just like the hauntings in a regular procedural game, but the solution this adventure aims for is making mitigation feel like a victory. The players get there just in time to save some of the victims, but it's still a total shitshow.

It could work, especially if you're playing with a group that's more into the horror elements, but I think it would be tricky to pull off. That may be why the book has a sidebar literally titled "This Sucks," which I might as well have quoted in its entirety because it makes all the same points I did in the previous paragraph. Still, I'm glad it was there, because it does at least make me feel like the book has my back. It knows it's trying something difficult, and encourages GMs to rise to the challenge. It's kind of funny, though. I don't think I've seen any rpg company be more willing to point out its own flaws, "yeah, we see those red flags, but we're going to just charge right ahead." It's a tendency that aggravates me when White Wolf is being maximum gross, but I appreciate it here.

Now, let's switch gears and talk about this book as a miscellaneous supplement for Orpheus as a whole. It's exciting, because it adds a whole new Shade (ghost type) and some fun new Backgrounds, but there's no reason, aside perhaps for space reasons, that Phantasms couldn't have been in the core. I guess the lore reason is that their Nature group is rare in the setting and Orpheus hadn't found any yet, but Phantasms are largely drawn from "Architect, Avant-Garde, Celebrant, Dreamer, Gambler, [and] Visionary" Natures, which are going to be highly appealing to a certain type of player. It feels really arbitrary that they were excluded. 

And, look, it probably was. They have to put something in the "Unearthed Players' Guide" chapters, and the one in Shades of Gray was probably already running short as it was. That's the only explanation for the inclusion of new Roles. Those are brief suggestions for a character concept, accompanied by some suggested traits. Like the "Prospector" who is super imperialist and prioritizes both Physical Attributes and Knowledges. Roles are as useless here as they were in the core, and, really, they should have been taken out to make room for the extra Shades (although it might be premature for me to lump them all together. I have a vague memory of the later ones being a bit better justified as late game surprises).

The book also has a new tier of ghost powers, the level 3 Horrors, and while I'm certain they were core in Wraith: the Oblivion, they do at least feel legitimately like a game-changing revelation to be discovered along with the new lore.

Overall, I'd say that Shades of Gray is a successful supplement. I feel significantly less jerked-around than I did after Crusade of Ashes, yet somehow I also feel like the stakes have been raised and the players are being drawn into entirely new kinds of conflicts. Don't mistake my ambivalence about the tone and genre for a disinterest in the mysteries.

Ukss Contribution: My favorite of the new Horror powers was "Beckon Relic" where you just sort of reach into the depths of the underworld and draw out a random item. You can control the size, based on how much Vitality you spend, but other than that, you can only control the purpose for which the item will be used. Reach for a weapon and you might get a broadsword or you might get a tommy gun. Go for broke and summon a car, and you could get any model from the entire history of the automobile. It's the fun sort of chaos power, and maybe Ukss could have a magic wand or enchanted bag that does something similar.

PS: Remember RAINN

Alternity Gamemaster Guide

Oh, right, I've committed myself to reading a whole bunch of core books. I mean, it's fine. These sorts of books are, dare I say, the core of our hobby, so I wouldn't be in this position if I didn't, on some level, enjoy reading them. However, that enjoyment has always been a sort of mercenary, transactional enjoyment. I like a core book because of what it can do for me, because it enables me to play a game in a fantasy or science fiction universe. And while my opinion of Alternity (by Richard Baker and Bill Slavicsek), after reading its two cores, is positive, I can't deny that it came with a cost - having to force myself to remain engaged while the book explained the concept of gravity.

It was a bit harder with this volume than the Players' Handbook, and my knee-jerk explanation is just that I've already used up all the novelty. This is a similarly dry book, with a similar subject matter, but there was very little inside it that I was encountering for the first time. But it's probably not completely superfluous. I've already forgotten most of it, and my notes are of little help, but it's got the starship creation rules, and stats for various animals and alien creatures and . . . um, a social status system . . . and, look, these two 240 page books could have been a single 300 page book and it likely would have been better, but this is peak 90s game design here. There are charts with modifiers that would have taken up a lot of space in a combined book.

Plus, there's plenty of GMing advice. And maybe most of it is technically supernumerary, like we need the book to tell us that you can use the racing rules for swim races or that "the primary purpose of [the Fortitude Perk] is to give the hero an edge in resisting exhaustion and knockout" (seriously, that got its own header). But you do get a TSR product with a bunch of now-standard GM advice "set a scene," "establish a mood," that sort of thing.

And I think I might be running out of things to say (a real awkward position for someone who likes to hear himself talk). It's bland. It's functional. It doesn't do anything notably good or bad. You could probably get away with running Alternity without it, but there's something like four chapters (out of 17) that you're going to miss. 

Funny thing is, I have a bunch of notes, but they don't build to any particular idea. Just a bunch of unconnected observations.

"The katana is superior to the primitive spear" - maybe an uncontroversial opinion in 1998, but I'm pretty sure I've seen a half dozen youtube videos disproving it.

The radiation rules say, "The risk of contracting leukemia 10 years down the road doesn't come into play in most roleplaying game scenarios," but they also don't say that your characters won't get leukemia. Since this is an extremely plausible turn of events, I have to assume that it canonically happens all the time, but is simply outside the scope of the rules.

Oh, also, this book does pitch what is probably the weirdest campaign model I've ever heard. "No Statistics!" (Exclamation point is in the original, but it does also mirror my feelings.)

No Statistics mode is not, as you might guess, a freeform version of Alternity. Characters do, in fact, have all of their usual statistics, used according to the standard rules. It's just that players are not allowed to know what they are. Seriously. "You think you're pretty strong. . ." and the GM rolls all the dice.

(Calm down, John. Breathe. It's just a sidebar. It can't hurt you. Clearly, someone was just dicking around and they decided to leave it in. It could have been worse. You could have first encountered this idea in an Exalted storytelling chapter).

::Shudder:: The very idea stresses me out. I consider myself a fairly democratic and easygoing GM, but I do have one rigid rule that I generally try to stick to - "Each player is solely responsible for knowing what their character can do." It's something I implemented not just to save myself the mental load of remembering everyone's character sheets (because, honestly, back in the days when I was regularly GMing, I was also in the habit of frequently re-reading the core books to try and internalize the rules), but also as a kind of hedge against the temptation to kibbitz. I can't intrusively suggest a course of action if I don't know precisely what you're capable of. Poor GMing technique is often satirized by suggesting the GM should just go and write a novel, but No Statistics mode seems to demand that style of play.

Alternity is kind of at an awkward historical moment where it's GMing advice has graduated from old-school adversarial, but hasn't quite discovered player agency. "What the gamemaster says, goes," but also the player characters "need to be the center of the story" (so the GM should arrange for that to happen.

In the end, I can't say I enjoyed reading this book (it was . . . tolerable), nor can I say that I'm inspired to run an Alternity game (it still needs a setting), but I can say that I'm confident that if I did run an Alternity game, it would turn out more or less okay.

Ukss Contribution: Giant, carnivorous, land-dwelling starfish. My kind of weird.

(Orpheus) Crusade of Ashes

While I eventually mellowed on this book, the first 50 pages or so of Crusade of Ashes were viscerally unpleasant to read. My notes are filled with sad-boy comments like, "ensuring the canon events happen by making the attack brutally unfair" and "the meticulous planning of this attack makes me feel dirty as a GM."  Maybe it's because I'm not really a horror guy. The mercenaries of NextWorld attack Orpheus headquarters and slaughter everyone, from upper management, to the scientists, the facilities workers, and the projecters lying helplessly in their cryogenic cradles. Then, a bunch of specters come and capture the ghosts of the dead, either devouring them on the spot or dragging them to some unknown, terrible fate. And the PCs are so helpless in the face of this brutality that the book actually suggests that they should be somewhere else entirely and only hear about it after-the-fact. 

It depressed me, because it's a cruel plot, with few options for heroes to even mitigate the damage, let alone stop it, but also because Orpheus has so far been my favorite part of Orpheus, and canonically it is no more. There was a part of me that was like, "shut up about your damned 'movie model' for five damned minutes, okay? I'm still trying to grieve." However, upon more sober reflection, I can acknowledge that it was in many ways an inevitable development. "Pride cometh before the fall," and all that. One of the things I enjoyed about Orpheus (the organization) was the foolishness of their pride, and my own genre-savvy smugness that the fall was coming, so I guess it's a little hypocritical of me to see this quite dramatic fall and think, "what the hell is this bullshit?"

I think the problem might be the suggested theme, "loss of control." That makes me uncomfortable. . .

Now let me be real for a second. After writing that last line, I asked myself the question, "what is it about a loss of control that makes you so uncomfortable," and I realized that I am teetering on the brink of turning this post into a therapy session. Maybe it's sufficient to reiterate that I'm not a horror guy, and so I wouldn't necessarily even be able to appreciate the good kind of poking at my deepest fears and insecurities.

However, as a GM, it makes me uncomfortable because I'm not sure I can properly convey the difference between "loss of control" as a literary theme that is indelibly linked to Orpheus' scientism and hubris and "loss of agency," a poor GMing technique that is indelibly linked to me being a dick. Especially because it's not just that Orpheus gets blown up, the player characters are framed for the crime and hunted by the FBI (as well as NextWorld mercenaries and freelancers who are being paid to finish the job). The FBI doesn't care about the characters' guilt or innocence, because it just wants a scapegoat. Their real agenda is to persuade the public (and presumably the Congress who would need to write the enabling legislation) that it should act as the sole regulatory agency for projection technology. Meanwhile, the book also has basically nothing good to say about the media, who are apparently eager to hype up the manhunt for the sake of ratings (though we bloggers are the true heroes - "'blogs' are actually the characters' best hope").

The net effect is a serious discussion about shutting down all the PCs Background points and player advice about how to get along when the entire system is against them (even though most of that advice boils down to a variation of "you probably can't").

I guess a Kafkaesque nightmare where the machinery of law has prejudged your guilt and refuses to entertain evidence of your innocence is also a kind of horror, right? Though if the GM really wants to do it right, they'll have to "ensure the game's hostile tone contains unpredictability and variety."

Ah, hell. I think this book is describing hell.

Oh, I shouldn't be such a grump. I can kind of see the intended game, the fun version of all this that players are going to want to play. You're a noble fugitive, who may be wrongly accused, but who won't let that stop them from doing good deeds, helping the helpless, and investigating the dark secrets that led to Orpheus' downfall. Eventually, you'll turn the tables, find the architect of your shattered life, and bring the fight to them. I mean, that's a Season 5 plot if I ever heard one, given the title of the whole fucking game, but I could see it working, once the players started growing jaded about the game's procedural elements.

I'd feel a lot more sanguine about it if I could remember the identity of Mysterious Antagonist #1 (that's what they're called in the book). This story is going to have a payoff in one of the future supplements, and maybe that will be enough to retroactively redeem it in my eyes (I kind of feel like it must have happened, because my overall memory of the series is positive).

Some of the secrets are pretty interesting, though. Orpheus tested the first intentionally build projection chamber on death row inmates, in a sinister experiment called Project Flatline, and test subjects decided they'd be happier as free ghosts than live prisoners. They are now some of the most powerful spirits haunting the world of the living, with some of them providing muscle to a criminal gang, a few following a charismatic leader known as Uriah Bishop, a few unaccounted for, and one of them anchoring a really gross mission.

Look, it's horror. A death row inmate who can physically possess the living is scary. I get it. The fact that he uses his ghostly possession powers to do really upsetting things to women . . . Ehh . . . Talk it over with your group, I guess. Crusade of Ashes is kind of a poster child for session 0. Personally, I think the Project Flatline guys should be Hannibal-esque murder wizards instead of realistic misogynists, but then, I'm not really a horror guy.

The other noticeable trend in the metaplot is that it is becoming more explicitly a Wraith: the Oblivion game. The Shadowlands are mentioned. The reason Orpheus hasn't discovered ghosts older than 3 years is explicitly because of the Week of Nightmares (alluded to in some of the Mage: the Ascension books, but never something I felt the need to address directly). The specters definitely have more backstory to be shared.

I'm a bit nervous about this development. Wraith brings a lot baggage to the story, and the proper amount can add the weight of history to the setting's secrets, but too much threatens to turn Orpheus from a bold limited-run game of its own into a really niche Wraith: the Oblivion campaign. I mean, I've made peace with the fall of Orpheus as a concept, and I understand why it happened, but we're two books in and already I'm missing the science fiction and procedural elements that made the core book such a unique world. Why couldn't Orpheus' hubris have caught up to it in book four or five instead?

Overall, I think this book can make for some enthralling reading, and killing off the titular organization a third of the way through the line is certainly a fearless move. However, I also think that if I were ever to use Crusade of Ashes in a game, I'd probably have to go with the watered-down version of the plot where Orpheus survives in diminished form. The Season 1 finale is simply too early for a late-series shakeup to the format.

Ukss Contribution: We learn that specters "hate the beach with a notorious passion." It's unclear from context whether that means all specters hate all beaches, or if it's just that the specific specters in that single Artifact write-up happen to hate the specific beach where the ghost radio was found, but since I love the beach, it makes me happy to think that evil ghosts do not. I'm not sure how I'll work it in, but the beaches of Ukss will have anti-haunting properties.

PS: It's another good time to donate to RAINN.

Trinity Continuum: Assassins

 I watched all three John Wick movies in preparation for this book (they're streaming on the Roku channel for now, if this is useful information to you) and I'm glad I did, because I don't think I'd have properly appreciated it otherwise.

Or maybe I would have. Maybe I'm the sort of sophisticated media connoisseur that just gets irony right away. "This isn't crummy world-building, it's actually hyper-stylized to evoke a particular genre feeling and the dissonance between the high stakes of the action and the aggressive indifference of the witnesses is actually a visual joke, as is the conspicuous consumption of an ostensibly covert criminal class and the mind-bending logistics it would require to make this economy possible" . . . is what I surely would have said, even if I didn't have the films as reference.

But without the films, I don't think I'd have entirely believed it was true. John Wick and Cassian trade shots with their silenced pistols in a crowded subway station and nobody has any kind of reaction and it's the dumbest damned thing I've ever seen, but also somehow it's really cool. Yeah, okay, give some gold coins to a guy and he'll come and clean up the dead bodies in your house, no questions asked . . . I suppose I'm willing to accept that this makes some kind of sense as long as I get to watch Keanu terrorize gangsters. That is a tradeoff that I'm consenting to.

And so it would be a little weird if I didn't extend the same courtesy to Trinity Continuum: Assassins. It's not John Wick, the rpg, because there's also some Assassin's Creed in there, but the tradeoff is the same. There's a secret society. It's glamorous and decadent, and the bodycount is high, but it doesn't disturb the peace, so ordinary people just ignore it. Understood.

Assassins very strangely offers a sci-fi explanation for its hyper-stylized genre conventions. Assassins are a type of Talent (reality-bender) that focuses on violence, and because of their specialization, their reality bending powers evolve from covert and deniable probability manipulation to overt supernatural techniques. And it is the concentration of this reality-bending in the Assassin societies that "keeps outsiders away but also creates anachronisms that appear where Assassins gather." They exist in a sort of close alternate dimension called Shadow that ordinary (or "Daylight") people can barely perceive without extraordinary effort, and so long as their activities remain confined to Shadow (or, at least, to the in-between criminal underground of Twilight) then they are largely immune to consequences from the Daylight world.

I'm not sure I'd accept that complex an explanation in a work of ordinary fiction. Like, "that's the genre, deal with it" is at least honest, but "here's an undirected physical process that just so happens to create a genre-establishing forcefield" leaves me with too many questions (chief of which is "what?!"). However, I can respect it in an rpg. It's reassuring the players that the genre boundary is reliable. When the Daylight NPCs ignore your killing spree because all the victims were Shadow-dwelling Assassins, this is not something the GM is simply roleplaying out for the sake of genre. Technically, the GM is not allowed to have the regular cops suddenly take an interest. To do so would violate the rules of the setting, like having an orc in D&D suddenly sue you for a personal injury claim. That orc doesn't have access to a human legal system and those bystanders are literally unable to perceive a Shadow-on-Shadow battle. You can rest easy knowing that when you finally face down your rival in a crowded subway station, you'll be able to do it in peace.

Now, all of the above may make it seem like I'm down on Assassins and its whole deal, but it's actually the opposite. I love when the genre is strong, especially when it zeros in on a very specific reference pool. You are stylish rogues committing improbable crimes in a starkly amoral world and Trinity Continuum: Assassins provides the trappings and the spectacle and advice for populating the bleak, yet striking stories that take place in this world. It's getting by purely on the vibes, but the vibes are strong. Probably the closest the Trinity Continuum has gotten to Apocalypse World.

Unlike Apocalypse World, however, Assassins takes place in a specific setting. It's not just genre trappings, it is organizations and conspiracies and NPCs with names and ideologies and individual quirks. Which places me in the awkward position of having to judge whether the new setting plays well with what's come before or, alternatively, whether it can stand on its own. The answer to both questions is "sort of."

The big problem with integrating it into the existing continuity is that it is vastly more violent the setting it's joining. The regular Continuum is about modern action-adventure, and so it's not pacifist by any means. There's already room for shootouts and brawls and murder mysteries, so at worst Assassins inflates the bodycount a bit. And yet, all of the new organizations are organizations of assassins, i.e. people who kill for money, and that means even the best of them will be at odds with the core book allegiances, and yet the new Assassin Societies are not written as villains, and I'm not sure a game can survive without taking sides.

As the introduction would have it, "Assassins never punch down . . . the idea that violence is universally a moral ill favors the powerful and the status quo. Those with a monopoly on violence do not want others to turn it against them. Assassins have the power to upend this status quo and strike fear into the hearts of the elite."

Which all seems well and good when talking about the Daughters of the Jacobins, and their goal of "freedom, liberty, and equality by eliminating anyone who stands in the way." Or The Signal, a decentralized collective of revolutionaries that targets those who exploit or abuse marginalized communities. But the Daughters have been lead by the same family for close to two centuries (because of their hereditary precognition) and the Host of the Signal's signature radio program is a friendly AI who wants to help humans by eliminating the bad ones. For all their ideals, these liberation organizations are intensely undemocratic, but that's kind of intrinsic to their very existence. Even if the Daughters of the Jacobins' elections didn't favor a political dynasty, and even if the Signal's programming was managed collectively from the bottom up, they'd still be secretive organizations whose activities are driven by an unrepresentative clique with elite skills. Not everyone can be an Assassin, and so ultimately the choice of using Assassin skills to change the world is going to fall upon the individual. The best that any Assassin organization can be is a vanguard party charged with dismantling the bourgeois state and overseeing the transition to a classless society. . . and there's something about that plan that gives me pause.

Which means that you've got to put this in contrast with the idealists of the Aeon Society. Aeon is still aristocratic in its conception, but it has the advantage of not challenging the state's monopoly on violence. Not to say that states are using that monopoly in a just or humanitarian way, but at least a state will usually operate on a theory of legitimacy. A democracy's power theoretically comes from the consent of the governed. When Assassins decide to change the direction of a government, the governed don't even have knowledge of the plan, and you can forget about consent. Say what you will about the reformism of a group like Aeon trying to work within the system, but a self-appointed vanguard movement that is not actually at the literal vanguard of a popular movement is just another kind of authoritarian coup.

If you put Assassins in the main Trinity Continuum, you have to ask yourself - are they the extremists that jeopardize legitimate political movements or are the Daylight Allegiances merely controlled opposition, failing to challenge the status quo by confining themselves to tactics that may be safely ignored? Maybe what you're doing is enough of a crime caper that the question never even comes up, but the thematic clash is real.

Now, as far as a stand-alone setting goes, Assassins works a bit better, because there's nothing to contrast the strangeness of its politics. This is a world where powerful people gift each other with professional assassinations, and so murder is just a job you do. All your friends, acquaintances, and rivals are in exactly the same business, so there's no reason to question it. However, I'm not sure that the radical factions have a robust enough conservative pushback. There's a purely mercenary Society (the corporate office-workers turned Assassins of the Swarm) and a classically aristocratic Society (the Society of Leonidas, which implausibly excludes known white supremacists), and for some reason some Russian nationalists (the Krugu Vorov), but they all only have one seat on the Council, and they don't vote as a bloc. Which really just means that our so-called radicals are in fact complicit in the whole rotten edifice of Assassin culture.

I think if you're doing a pure Assassins game, you kind of have to address head-on the ways that assassination is surely going to be used as a tool of oppression. People hire the Assassins of the Shadow for large amounts of money, and thus the most lucrative contracts are always going to serve the interests of people with a lot of money. Despite the game's Introduction, that's almost certainly the status quo. If you really want to do a radical plot in the Assassins universe, it pretty much has to start with a cynical present that leads into a crisis that breaks the characters' complacency and sets them against the very notion of the Assassin Societies as a whole.

Or, you know, you could just do stylish murder stories in a world where death comes with a price tag. Maybe don't think about how bleak it would need to be to keep itself going. The targets can be dictators and corrupt CEOs and the only thing you have to worry about is how cool your character looks while they're gunning down mooks. I'd be lying if I said it didn't sound like fun.

Ukss Contribution: One of the historical Assassin Societies was the Heavenly Immortal Corps, who used alchemy to gain superhuman killing skills. That sounds like a good idea for a fantasy organization, though I'm inclined to make them explicit villains, despite the book's easy-going attitude towards killers-for-hire.

Orpheus (Core)

I need to revise my list of White Wolf games I'd like to see adapted to television. I'd completely forgotten about Orpheus, despite its near-perfect procedural premise. It's the not-too-distant future (actually, it's 2003, but it's the not-too-distant future of 2003, not 2003 the historical era - obviously, you'd want to update the timeline) and a shady cryogenics corporation has discovered that some of its clients have seen things while they were frozen. Specifically, while they were in that twilight state between life and death, their spirits wandered through the world of ghosts. Acting on this discovery, the cryogenics company rebranded as The Orpheus Group, and now their main business is paranormal investigation and elimination. . . Though the corporation has dark secrets and mysterious benefactors, and rumors are that its astrally projecting agents can haunt the living just as well as any ghost, especially if the price is right.

It's just so good, people. This has all of the characteristic White Wolf tropes, but they're all used really well. The very fact that it's about ghosts brings in the horror element. Despite the other elements of the setting, this is consistently played straight. Ghosts are murder victims or tormented by obsession or trapped and confused and you've got to deal with them. But then, there's the conspiracy stuff too, and it's unusually satisfying because the questions are concrete. How did this mysterious corporation get its occult technology so quickly? What did board member Jane Kennedy see when she was frozen? Who made the decision to use the projectors for espionage, blackmail, and intimidation? And there's the hubris of science. Orpheus is messing with forces it can't understand or control, but because there's aspects that are quantifiable and repeatable, it can approach this sublime mystery through the lens of technology and the fools actually think that's going to keep them safe. Mage and Werewolf wish they could do "what has your science wrought" so elegantly. There are hints of antediluvian monsters, but the flood was just three years ago so it feels like an immediate mystery. Then there's the power fantasy of projectors themselves, who not only have unique superpowers, but also a kind of super-hero-like unaccountability (because the law is not yet progressive enough to deal with ghosts and astral projection). And the urban fantasy element of living in a world where (informed) people just kind of know ghosts are real, so you've got rivals like the mercenary company with its own projectors or the international gang run by ghosts possessing human bodies. The Orpheus universe somehow gets it all right.

Which brings us to a minor flaw - technically, the Orpheus universe is just the World of Darkness. I mean, the idea shows up in a sidebar about how the other supernatural conspiracies have not yet noticed Orpheus and then a little bit in the description of the Occult ability, but otherwise is quite wisely ignored. However, with the possible exception of Wraith: the Oblivion (which has unsurprisingly donated a lot of its system terminology and basic cosmology), I can't think of a single WoD crossover that would not instantly ruin this game's whole vibe. More than just about any other World of Darkness game, Orpheus needs to be its own thing, with its own worldbuilding.

I think the secret to Orpheus' success is the fact that it was conceived as a limited-run series. They always intended to make precisely six books, and so from the very beginning, they're working towards a plan and with a fairly strenuous page-count budget. As a result, this book has what is probably the least ponderous Storyteller chapter of any old-school WW core. Doesn't even talk about "theme" or "mood" at all, despite the fact that Orpheus has plenty of both. Although, you could just as easily argue that there are some things that are being transparently held back to sell the supplements. There are only two Horrors (special ghost powers) per Shade (type of ghost - poltergeist, banshee, et al) and the way Nature (personality) groups are structured indicates that there are three entire shades that have yet to be revealed. It's the worst kind of supplement slow-drip, but since we know there are only going to be five of them, that takes some of the sting out of it. . . I guess. White Wolf's first limited run series is also its first to require all six books to play the game. 

Nonetheless, this particular book shows admirable focus. It is absolutely well-tuned to play out the early chapters of a sprawling sci-fi/fantasy/horror epic, and if the book seems overly focused on setting a scene, it at least has the advantage of being a really interesting scene. The introduction uses the term "The Movie Model" to describe its approach, saying that the core is like "the opening premise of the movie, those first 15 to 20 minutes before the major plot twist," but I think there's a little bit more meat on these bones than that. It's more like the first 3-4 episodes of the first season of a long-form drama. Of course, that wouldn't have been a very relateable metaphor back in 2003, but that's the advantage of living in the future - you've got all kinds of hindsight.

Although, I may have to confess to just a wee bit of disingenuousness on my part. I'm not coming in to this book a pure, unspoiled newbie. I've actually already read all the way through to Endgame. Granted, that was something like 15 years ago, but I do remember bits and pieces of how the mysteries get resolved. And reading the book with that knowledge, I can say that it's pretty fair about telegraphing the stuff that's yet to come, but maybe it's a problem that the most enticing of its lacunae are destined to be filled. I wonder about the practicality of running a game where you, say, investigate the source of Pigment, the mysterious street drug that allows users to see ghosts when there is a definite canonical answer to this mystery, but they won't let you know what it is until book three, which won't be out for another two months after the core. It's not that long in the grand scheme of things, especially when compared to the glacial pace of current rpg releases, but it's still potentially 8 weekly sessions spent spinning your wheels or diverging from canon, for one of the setting's main plotlines.

Then again, it's all very theoretical now. The entire series has been out for close to twenty years (damn, I'm old) and any GM who really wants to get the most out of the game is probably just going to read all six books before starting anyway. . . but that swings us back around to the "limited run series" issue. Like, yes, it's good that we're not going to be strung along for years and years by a volatile metaplot the core was never meant to cope with, but the certainty of having a known end date does seem to have tempted the line developer into taking the supplements for granted.

Other observations:

Storyteller system is still Storyteller system. This version neither corrects any of its flaws nor takes any risks on new mechanics. I'm wary of the fact that you use your hp for mp, but the regeneration rate can be pretty generous (potentially as many as 5-6 per day for even the slower spirit types) and the way Vitality is usually lost doesn't seem terribly lethal for ghosts. 

The Natures/Demeanors section continues to be a major drag, but at least it has some justification for its existence here (natures now belong to one of eight "Nature Groups" and certain ghostly powers, mainly those related to freeing a ghost from its earthly fetters, can only be used on a target who is part of your same Group). I feel like it was a design error to say that the Natures' bonuses to starting Vitality, Willpower, and Spite would always add up to +5, though because that gives high-Spite Natures a double disadvantage. First, the points you lose from Vitality and Willpower, and second, the fact that Spite itself is a bad thing to have (accumulate 10 points and you'll become a Specter - an unplayable evil NPC ghost). Objectively, the best Nature is Defender, which gives +3 Vitality, +2 Willpower, and +0 Spite. It's the only Nature that doesn't increase Spite (even Caregivers get +1) and it is typically possessed by cops. So yeah . . .

Actually, Orpheus is 2000s White Wolf, not 90s White Wolf, so it occasionally says things that are problematic (for example, one of the Attribute descriptions has a character puppet another character into saying a racial slur, to get said character into a fight with his Asian criminal associates), but it doesn't revel in the grotesque. Like, there are female characters with rape as a backstory element, but no suggestions that you play out that trauma on-screen (and, in fact, a warning that you shouldn't include that element if it would make any of the players uncomfortable). 

The biggest pre-woke legacy problem for me (besides "derangements") was actually a major setting element - the fact that there's no way to heal a specter, despite the fact that it's possible to become a specter by experiencing trauma. It especially hurt in the description of the Lost Boys - they're the ghosts of children who died from neglect and their pain was so severe that they immediately skipped being normal ghosts and went straight to being evil cannibalistic ghosts. I suppose that there's something in-genre about ghost-hood being as arbitrary, unjust, and cruel as death itself, but I'm not sure I can entirely stand a universe where there's no hope for those poor babies.

Finally, a minor gripe. In fact, let's not call it a gripe at all. Let's call it a question. Two types of projectors? Sleepers, who are put into cryogenic chambers and kept on the very cusp of death so that their spirits may act as ghosts even though they are technically alive. And skimmers, who have mastered esoteric meditation techniques that allow them to leave or reenter their bodies, more or less at will. Am I the only one that feels like the existence of the second undermines the absolutely delicious techno-gothic imagery of the first? Like, the Orpheus Group's whole deal is that they are hubristically trying to technologize and commodify the soul using their proprietary machines, so to have this less macabre, more spiritual technique exist alongside the creepy pseudo-coffins could be interpreted as a dilution of one of the game's biggest themes. It serves as an interesting contrast, and I could see how Skimming might be a technique that exists in this world belonging to psychics who don't fit into Orpheus' technocratic culture, but in the hypothetical show, that would probably be a season 2 or 3 reveal (actually, it would be perfectly placed in the Crusade of Ashes section of the plot, but I'm getting ahead of myself).

Overall, this is one of my favorite White Wolf games and I think, as we approach its 20 year anniversary, it holds up better than most (although, there was probably no way for them to know that the Health Insurance Background would one day be hilarious). I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

Ukss Contribution: Ghost elephant. It's a sad story, in-context (was put down after "an incident" at the zoo), but I like the implication that elephants are sentient enough to leave behind a ghost. It rings true to me that the continuity of the tree of life would exist even in a setting where the supernatural is real.

EDIT: Oh, by the way, you should donate some money to RAINN, if you can.

Alternity Player's Handbook

Well now, isn't this a fascinating artifact. Late 90s TSR trying their hand at pure science fiction, with a system that's post-AD&D 2e, written by Bill Slavicsek and Richard Baker, who would later go on to work on D&D 3rd edition. I'm not sure how much I want to pick this apart, looking for clues that will hint at the system to come, but I will say that I'm probably reading it at the ideal time. I'm in a kind of limbo between 2nd and 3rd edition, having exhausted the one and anticipating the other at some vague point in the future - just like Alternity itself.

I can certainly see an alternate timeline where Alternity became the foundation of 3rd edition. It reads a lot like a systematized version of 2nd edition. Imagine - thief skills and proficiency checks and saving throws and attack rolls, but they all use the same dice mechanic . . . roll-under on a d20, with penalties represented by plusses and bonuses represented as minuses. Then complicate that just a little bit by getting rid of static modifiers and making your plusses (penalties) and minuses (bonuses) into extra dice you roll in a step-system. You roll your Skill  +1 and that means you have to roll under your Ability score + skill ranks using a 1d20 + 1d4. The same roll at Skill -1 would compare the target number to 1d20 - 1d4. Bigger modifiers change the size of the second die: +/-5 is 1d20 +/-1d20.

It's interesting, and it looks like it would work, but a d20-system conversion would be easy as hell and make the game much, much better. Because this has all the swinginess of d20 (seeing as how they both use d20s as their primary die), but it adds a bunch of baroque embellishments that mostly just seem to slow things down. You're going to be rolling extra dice and doing extra math and for, like, 90% of use-cases, d20+modifier vs target number is going to work just as well. 

But that's just me being churlish. I'm from this game's future, and I'm like, "hey, this is just a less sophisticated version of the thing you guys are going to do next, so I don't see why you're bothering," as if that foreknowledge (i.e. "hindsight") is at all useful. It's a new core system. It's halfway between second and third edition D&D, but it's coherent. I'm sure it has its flaws, but nothing that really leapt out at me, except that routine rolls might be a little too complicated. I could see myself playing this.

Now, onto the real question - how well does it carve out a niche for itself as a sci-fi game? This is tricky for me, because I fully understand that it's trying to be a generic science fiction game, capable of running stories in multiple genres and settings, but I don't think it's really earned the right to do that. Which is maybe a bit of a hot take, and I'll admit, I might be influenced by the game's D&D provenance to be harder on it than it deserves, but I kind of felt like Alternity was taking a very "Dungeons and Dragons" approach to being a science fiction game.

Which is to say, a typical D&D book is notionally "setting agnostic," where maybe Greyhawk or The Forgotten Realms are used as the default setting in some examples, but it is both expected and encouraged that the DM (and lately, players) will develop a homebrew campaign. So it's a "generic fantasy" toolkit and nevermind that it has a bunch of highly specific assumptions baked right into the race and class descriptions about what "generic fantasy" is supposed to look like. Most people (even, to some degree, myself) overlook this contradiction out of an (in my case grudging) acknowledgement that D&D is the inheritor to a decades-long tradition that has fundamentally shaped what modern fantasy looks like. Elves and dwarves and whatnot, all very "generic," don't you know?

Alternity feels like it's trying to catch that same vibe, but it does not have that same weight of tradition behind it. It's out here making very specific choices about sci-fi concepts like cyberspace (it's called "the Grid" and your gridpilot will use their gridcaster to create a shadow to navigate the gridscape . . . it's less "decker problem" than it appears, but not by much) and psionics (it's optional, but if you include it, it's going to work in a very specific way, within a very specific power level) and FTL (every jump through drivespace, regardless of length, takes precisely 11^2 hours, which is an idea I would like a lot more if it didn't imply that an arbitrary unit of time - approximately 1/24th of the rotational period of an unremarkable lump of rock - was an important cosmic constant, but that's probably more of a lingering social contract from my mathematics training - you only leave a value expressed as an exponent if it's exact, if it were just an estimate, you'd say "121 hours"). And so, maybe you could use this book as a starting point for any number of sci-fi settings, but if you're not playing the implied setting, you're going to have to tinker with a lot of stuff.

But like I said, Alternity hasn't really built up the trust (or, at least, the unstoppable cultural inertia) to ask that from me. I actually like the implied setting just fine, and would be happy to play in it, but first I'll need a real setting guide. I'm not going to guess. And I'm certainly not going to make it up from scratch.

Ukss Contribution: Irony alert! Not really picking something goofy per se, but I am picking something based not on how cool I think it is intrinsically, but rather because a quirk of how it was described made me smile. "Jet Ski: A form of recreation on most worlds . . ."

Usually, when a notionally generic system starts in with the "on most worlds" bit, it gets my dander up, but I this time, I was tickled at the thought that jet ski riding was a universal constant, throughout space and time and alternate dimensions, even among alien species. Maybe it's a lingering frustration that Moebius didn't get to ride one on Loki. Maybe I'm more of a sucker for branding than I thought. But this time, I am picking up the gauntlet Alternity is throwing down - I can't speak for "most worlds," but you can add Ukss to the list.

(Dark Sun) Psionic Artifacts of Athas

 There are two types of rpg supplements that are more or less impossible to screw up - monster books and magic item books. Probably because their subject matter demands a very specific and forgiving format - toss out a new idea, explain it in a maximum of 1-2 pages, move on to the next. Sure, you sometimes get some individual entries that are total duds, but no one bats 0.00. Even an average level of skill means you are hitting more often than you miss.

Psionic Artifacts of Athas, by Kevin Melka and Bruce Nesmith, is no exception to this pattern. It's a magic item book. It's good. I was a little worried on the first page, when Gulem the Gray murdered a child for asking a really obvious question - why are they teaching about "psionic magic items" in a psionics academy - but thankfully, that was just a pointless introductory fiction and the seemingly contradictory term "psionic magic items" is never brought up again. 

But in addition to being good in the expected way, Psionic Artifacts of Athas is also extraordinarily weird, and not just by AD&D's aggressively vanilla standards. The weirdness is so pronounced, in fact, that it's forcing me to contemplate and concede the good aspects of the revised-era metaplot.

At its best, it feels like it's digging into the deep periphery of Appendix N - past even the boundaries of fantasy and into science fiction. It's like a late-period Dune sequel, or Zelazny's Lord of Light, or the more jaded Foundation novels. There's this ancient sweep of history, trippy psychic powers, inhuman technologies, and a clique of antediluvians behind the scenes pulling the strings. It almost makes me forget how utterly boring I find Rajaat and his whole deal. 

Sorry, that one got away from me there - I mean that Rajaat's thinly-sketched motive of being the "ugly" pyreen and inventing magic as a way to get revenge on the rest of the world by returning it to the control of the halflings, via genocide, is the only part of the revised backstory that doesn't really work. I don't really need the Dragon to be Borys of Ebe, Butcher of Dwarves. He can just be an ancient sorcerer who used the knowledge of a previous to become the transhuman ruler of the barren wastelands of the fallen age. I mean, assuming we can't just go back to the Dragon being an allegory . . . no? Okay, a post-apocalyptic world ruled by people who were party to the apocalypse actually works pretty well. Or would, if AD&D's overall . . . AD&Dness didn't lead to one of the conspirators being called "Pixie Blight." It's like fingernails on a chalkboard.

But Psionic Artifacts of Athas is rooted in the good part of the backstory. An ancient culture mastered life-shaping technology and created many wonderous things, some of which endure to the modern day, but which seem a lot like magic because that culture destroyed itself in its hubris, and the bulk of their knowledge was lost.

So you get an AD&D book talking about the difference between a creature and a tissue, between a graft and a parasite. There are treasures that can be mistaken for monsters and a fantastic aesthetic like nothing else in D&D before or since (although a lot of the items in this book would have felt at home in White Wolf's Trinity, published the previous year, though I'm assuming it was just something in the pop-culture zeitgeist).

Also, there are a bunch of decent, if perfectly ordinary magical and psionic items that you can add to your Dark Sun game. The Wand of Desert Winds and the Aura Mirror aren't going to make it onto anyone's list of most memorable treasure finds, but they do flesh out the random tables nicely (oh, yeah, you know this book has 24 - out of 128 - pages of random tables).

Snark aside, there is a lot of great stuff here. The Erdlu Canteen - a magically enchanted egg-shell that regenerates its yolk seven times a week. The Clothworms, who will crawl over your body and weave you a one-time-use outfit over the course of a half-hour. The Jade Marquess, a carnivorous living boat that sails through earth instead of water and grows more decks if you feed it enough meat. I love when fantasy gives itself permission to strike out into the unknown and show me things I've never even imagined. AD&D needed more of that.  I wouldn't say I left the best for last (my candidates for best AD&D book are probably - Complete Book of Necromancers, Faces of Sigil, Monster Mythology, A Guide to the Ethereal Plane and the original Dark Sun boxed set, in no particular order), but I'm certainly going out on a high note.

Ukss Contribution: Are you ready for an amazing magic item that you're going to want to build a whole adventure around, regardless of what fantasy game you're currently playing (and I'm including modern horror like the WoD and Call of Cthulhu in this)?

Introducing: the Tongue of Glib the Mad. It's a disgusting leech-like creature. You put it in your mouth and it devours, then replaces your tongue. Forever after, all your lies are supernaturally persuasive. But you have only partial immunity to the tongue's effect. Botch a roll (in the d20 conversion, I'd say "if you roll a natural 1," but it's actually just a flat 5% chance per lie) and you believe your own lie. Phenomenal social power, but at the cost of slowly slipping into the dream world of your own deception. A rare artifact whose curse is completely natural and thematic, and also a ton of fun to play out (the book says you should only give it to a PC "if he is willing to play along with the curse," but I have a hard time imagining any player who wouldn't jump at the chance to chew the fuck out of that scenery.)