(Shadowrun) Target: Matrix

One thing I realized during the reading of Target: Matrix is that I have no idea how the internet works. I have a certain amount of familiarity with the experience of using it, in our real world, with our comparatively unsophisticated screen-based computer technology. But then I read something about accessing the local Seattle grid by visiting a virtual Space Needle and then selecting your ultimate destination by looking out one of the many windows that each show one of the various Seattle-based businesses in the form of distant landmarks . . . and I think, Is that how it really works? You know, behind the scenes? If I want to go to the website of a place headquartered in some distant location, is my computer sending messages up a geographical hierarchy until they reach the smallest network that contains both myself and my intended destination, whereupon they get passed back down the ladder to successively smaller and more specific networks until they reach the website I'm trying to access? It's all so seamless and automatic in real life, but I guess it must be a computer-to-computer relay with a small number of possible paths, where the bulk of the exchange happens between large internet service providers, each of which must have a physical location somewhere. 

And maybe it actually makes sense for Shadowrun's various matrix locations to have temporary or teleporting SANs (System Access Nodes) that only appear on particular local grids at specific times, and which savvy criminal hackers need to track down via their poorly articulated "computer skills." You want to access the semi-secret Shadowland data haven, it's not merely a matter of entering an address in to a browser, you have to manually perform all the tedious routing business. And even that will only get you as far the data haven's "killing jar" which is described as if it were a room with no exits where the system administrators can scan your hardware, run a background check, and potentially fry your computer (and brain) with hostile programs. But that could only work if Shadowrun's matrix works by actually transferring your consciousness to distant computers. If there's something more substantial being exchanged, above and beyond a series of encoded instructions, where Shadowland is telling your cyberdeck how to render its environment and your cyberdeck is telling Shadowland what operations you want to perform.

It's probably best not to think about it. The matrix is all about sending your brain on a little trip and never mind that the virtual reality form-factor doesn't really add anything to about 90% of the suggested use cases. You want to look up a particular piece of information and instead of just typing your question into a search bar, you have to wander through the streets of a virtual city or explore a haunted forest where everything is expressed as a mythological metaphor. And maybe this is faster in practice, due to the matrix operating at a far higher speed than meat-space, but maybe you could get even faster than that by just having your thoughts be the search bar and then the information comes to you?

But is that as interesting, narratively? You know, for the purposes of a role-playing game. Would I rather have a book of "locations," including fantastic architecture and human adversaries or would I prefer a book describing a series of blandly functional drop-down menus?

I think it's tempting fate to say, "the menus," because then someone might actually give it to me and I'd be obligated to read it. So I'll say, instead, that I liked the book best when the VR environments were an end in themselves. It was a hoot reading about the "Dawn of Atlantis" matrix game, with its "sprites, lizard men, and earth elementals." I'm not sure I entirely buy that high fantasy is a popular genre in the Shadowrun universe, but I do like the sly Earthdawn Easter Egg and I'm working on the theory that it's actually a canonical connection between the game lines. Some immortal from the previous age of magic got a job as a developer or consultant for this computer game and its seasonal metaplot is based on real events, possibly with some hidden agenda (maybe simulating the fall of Thera so as to make a planned Thera 2.0 more resilient?)

Overall, this was a decent enough book, but you have to spot it quite a bit re: the silliness of its basic premise. Actually, people will enjoy having elaborate virtual environments act as an intermediary between themselves and the work they want their computers to do. Not only that, but it will be more efficient than our boring old internet. That's the sort of world that must exist if you want to depict hacking as a thrilling activity where quick-witted rogues go on action-packed adventures.

Ukss Contribution: There's a bit in this book that is weirdly, specifically, a 2000-2006 period piece. People find these strange custom PDAs marked with a big red X. The PDA will send them messages asking for innocuous-seeming favors like "pick up this hitchhiker" or "take a picture of these particular pages from an occult book" (occult books are innocuous in the Shadowrun universe). And if you do it, you are "karmically rewarded" by other PDA-holding strangers doing small innocuous favors for you. 

Nowadays, this plot would focus on people with ordinary smart phones using a special app, but I like the idea of a network of strangers, none of whom can see the big picture, all doing a series of small-seeming favors for each other, blissfully unaware that the network would require some vast computational resources to work the way it appears to (because it doesn't answer requests, it anticipates future needs). I figure it's being driven by a strange intellect that is trying to butterfly-effect its wishes into the physical world because it's good at seeing chains of consequences but bad at understanding how things actually work.

Ukss is going to have something like that.

(D&D 3.x) Magic of Faerun

Magic of Faerun (Sean K Reynolds, Duane Maxwell, Angel McCoy) is the fifth full book I've read for Forgotten Realms and it's the first that I can unambiguously say that I liked. I didn't like it a lot, mind you. But my feelings were consistently mildly positive almost the entire time. This is a functional workhorse of a book that gave me a reasonable amount of Forgotten Realms lore. Some of it was super specific - like the Abbey of the Shining Truth, which gets a full dungeon write up - but it's all the relevant type specific. They're talking about mage guilds or bardic colleges and then they show me an example mage guild or bardic college. It works because I'm primed to be interested, and if all of Forgotten Realms were like that, I think I'd think it was pretty bland, but basically all right.

My only real problem with this book is the fact that the middle of my personal wavelength is probably just slightly beyond the most extreme thing it's willing to do. Like, in the section on gems with magical properties, it tells us about the Rogue Stone. They're rainbow-colored with an almost liquid, iridescent sheen and have the curious trait of always being found alone. They can be found in a wide variety of mineral deposits, but it's always just one rogue stone that happens to be trapped in a fissure. Furthermore, "some primitive human tribes believe rogue stones to be the sentient essences of dragons or mighty heroes, but sages hold this view to be folk nonsense."

And here is where Forgotten Realms really starts to task me, because I love everything about rogue stones. They sound pretty. It would be fun to explain to a group of player characters what these things are and why they're valuable. The low-key strangeness of their origin implies that the world has this ongoing background magic - no mundane geological process could explain the existence of these things, but that's all right because there's no reason to think that all of the world's geological processes are mundane. However, instead of just leaving it an inconsequential mystery, they had to add on that last little bit for me to get mad about.

Why the fuck would you do this to your own fantasy setting? You must realize that "the sentient essence of a mighty hero gets stuck in the rock and becomes a unique, beautiful gemstone" is just something you can decide to be true . . . right? Like, I didn't mind when rogue stones were just a weird phenomenon with no explanation, but I also think this new thing would be pretty cool to have in an rpg. I would have been fine with that explanation. Now, I have to wonder - who are these "primitive tribes" who are these "sages" and why did you decide that the sages know so much more than the tribes (by enough that you're comfortable labeling a cool fantasy idea "folk nonsense" even)?

Walk me through this. You're a sage in the city of Waterdeep. Actual wizards are fucking everywhere. There's a damned prestige class for just the ones in your hometown. Some merchant comes in with a remarkable, shiny rock that looks like nothing you've ever seen. Tells you they traded it from a tribe who says gems like this are always found by themselves, nestled in ordinary rock, because they contain the essence of a dragon or mighty hero. What part of your regular life experience causes you to dismiss this as "folk nonsense?"

And to bring things back to a Doylist perspective - what part of your training or instincts as a writer prompts you to imply that sage is correct for thinking this?

Although, I should perhaps not rant so much about this. It's only one sentence in a throwaway entry in a relatively unimportant part of the book. It's just a personal pet peeve. I do think it's emblematic of my ambivalence to the setting as a whole though. Forgotten Realms is capable of doing interesting things (I refuse to believe the butterfly-riders are no longer canon). You might even infer that it's pretty weird in its outline (high-level wizards in this world are so common that the Silverymoon arcane guild restricts itself to non-evil wizards who can cast 5th level or higher spells, and apparently this is more than just three or four people) but it so often refuses to stick the landing. Isolated ideas (whether they're weird fantasy or vanilla D&D) get maybe a sentence or two before moving on to the next thing and the social, philosophical, and cultural implications of its big ideas are never even slightly explored. Like, logically speaking, items with the continual light spell must be absolutely fucking ubiquitous, giving the Realms-folk a practically modern relationship to the concept of "nighttime" despite otherwise sharing so many traits with medieval Europeans. How does this manifest, culturally? The books are never going to say.

And it's not so much that I want them to (oh, who am I kidding? I definitely do) but when they don't, it gives me the impression that the Forgotten Realms takes itself completely for granted. It grew up in parallel with the primordial D&D, incorporating, from the very beginning, the oral tradition in-jokes, poorly-compensated magazine articles, and general 70s/80s nerd culture osmosis that would become the bedrock of "D&D lore." Hell, it spawned a lot of that lore itself. So I think by the time the setting's twentieth birthday starts coming around (and I'm counting from the first batch of Dragon magazine articles because while the Realms existed in some form since the 1960s, I doubt they were the D&D realms prior to the existence of D&D) it's kind of burdened by the weight of its own success. It only really needs to be "the world of Dungeons & Dragons" and never quite realizes that should be a floor, not a ceiling.

Magic of Faerun, by virtue of being about magic, is slightly less like that than some of the other Realms books I've read (though, if I'm picking a favorite, it's got to be Moonshae - it has lower lows, but higher highs, and I'm the sort of person who can forgive a low for the sake of a good high). Since it's fundamentally about More Stuff For Wizards to Do, it has to at least make a case for why the stuff wizards were already doing wasn't enough. And that shows through in the writing. It's one of the few Forgotten Realms books where I feel like I'm being pitched to. Why yes, I will be interested in this weird enemies-to-frenemies dynamic between Azuth the God of Wizards and Savras, the patron of oracles and diviners. Savras used to want Azuth's job, was turned into a magic scepter for awhile, and now that he's back to human form, the two deities have a somewhat cordial working relationship. Now, if you could maintain that exact level of focusing on the personalities and motivations of significant actors in all your future history sections, I think I could actually begin to like you, Forgotten Realms. 

Aside from having more-digestible-than-average lore, this book is also crammed with a bunch of doodads and trinkets for spellcasting characters. And spellcasters get a lot of love here. All of the prestige classes (with the exception of the technically non-magical Gnome Artificer and the spell-absorbing Spellfire Shaper) gets 10 caster levels, on top of their special abilities. Which make them a pure power boost for any caster who takes them. There's a long chapter crammed with new spells, many of which are bland, but functional, though there are a few standouts - like silverbeard, which either transforms an existing beard into metallic silver or causes you to grow a metallic silver beard, thereby increasing your Armor Class and giving you a Diplomacy bonus with dwarves. And the non-casters are not entirely left out. The magic item chapter contains plenty of new treasure including airships and contraceptive potions, a dagger that can transform into a viper, and regenerating rope made of troll guts (it's gross, I hate it, but I respect it for being so unabashedly gross and hateable).

Twenty years ago, when I was still actively playing D&D 3rd edition, I mostly ignored this book's lore and used it only as a source of bits and bobs for my unrelated campaign settings. Now . . . I still think that's probably the best use for it. It adds a bit to the dense tapestry that is Faerun lore, but it's also mastered the trick of moving past "vanilla" to become truly generic (or, at least, as generic as implied-setting D&D ever really gets) and that gives it a lot of versatility.

Ukss Contribution: Rogue stones, but I'm giving them the "primitive tribes'" backstory, damnit!

(Shadowrun) Cannon Companion

I actually bought Cannon Companion (Robert Boyle, Dan "Flake" Grendel, Mike Mulvihill) very recently - about a month ago. See, I was looking through Wikipedia's list of Shadowrun books, in order to read my collection in something vaguely approaching publication order, and I realized I was missing a book! I had forgotten Cannon Companion entirely.

And after reading the book, I think I was probably right to do so. It's not that it's bad. It's more or less as much as you could reasonably ask for in a MOAR GUNS book for Shadowrun. But . . . yeah. It takes the most thoroughly trodden territory in the game and slightly expands it. We get a few new guns (including the Street Sweeper shotgun, which fires any old junk you stuff in the barrel), a few new melee weapons (including one of my personal favorites, the Macuahuitl), and a couple of new war crimes (white phosphorous grenades and land mines). In addition, there are new rules for some niche combat scenarios - fighting underwater or with indirect fire artillery. Nothing I really feel the need to complain about, but also you could go a long time before you felt this book's absence. 

So I guess I liked it? On the few occasions it managed to move the needle away from the dead center of the scale, the direction was positive. I enjoyed the first few pages of the "Armor and Gear" chapter, where they discuss various prominent fashion houses and their product lines. My trench coat and katana guy can now specifically wear "The Chairman" from the London Fog Line by Armante. I think I would get a kick out of explaining that to people, in-character. "Yeah, it's a genuine Armante. I had a big score a couple years back and decided to treat myself. You can really feel the difference between the knock-offs and the real thing."

The best chapter in the book was probably "Applied Simsense," that discussed Skillwires, Better Than Life chips, and using cybernetic implants to edit someone's memories. It's a little disappointing that the book focuses mostly on mechanics and not the staggering sci-fi implications of this technology, but I suppose I can't be entirely mad that they left the fun part to me as a GM. Like, there's a flash drive you can stick in your brain that will completely change your personality (called a "Personafix BTL") and maybe it's a failure of imagination that this is relegated to the role of a disreputable street drug. Imagine being able to slot in the motivation and discipline of a Type-A workaholic right before you have a big project to do. Or you're on your way to a party, why not become extra gregarious and the fun kind of shameless? Everything you don't like about yourself? Everything other people don't like about you? There's a patch for that.

It is, of course, a sci-fi horror scenario. I shudder to think of the damage those Youtube self-help grifters could do if they could bottle the sigma grindset and sell it for 49.99 a hit. Or, like, someone in a failing marriage who slots the personality they think their partner wants, and every day they lose a little bit more of themselves. . .

I'm not sure how many of these ideas would actually translate all that well to a Shadowrun game, but it's a subject that fascinates me. Maybe import the idea into Eclipse Phase or Transhuman Space. Extend those settings' extreme morphological freedom from the body to the mind. I can see some definite possibilities.

Overall, I though Cannon Companion was a perfectly fine book. Maybe a little dry at times, but not to a level out of line with other mechanics-focused rpg supplements. I probably won't use it directly, but I have no regrets about adding it to my collection.

Ukss Contribution: Personafix BTLs. The implications are simply too interesting to ignore. Obviously, in Ukss, they're going to be a form of dark magic, but I think they'll make for a particularly compelling school of forbidden sorcery.

(D&D 3.x) Races of Faerun

 Oh, man. These Forgotten Realms books are putting me through the wringer. I don't know what it is. Normally, I'm a glutton for lore. It's a big reason why I try and collect full sets. But there's something about this setting's lore that is aimed straight at the apathy center of my brain. It's actually kind of a mystery, because the Realms have plenty of interesting things going on. For example, this very book, Races of Faerun (Eric L Boyd, Matt Forbeck, James Jacobs), introduces the idea that the Gold Dwarves of the Great Rift ride on hippogriffs and then jump off their steeds mid-air to divebomb their enemies with specialized wingsuits. There's a whole prestige class that revolves around this activity. And somehow, it took me so by surprise that I actually pulled the Campaign Setting off the shelf to see if it was previously mentioned. Nope. Then I thought maybe it had appeared earlier in this book and I just glossed over it. This is the entirety of what the Gold Dwarf section had to say about the matter, "The hippogriff-mounted skyriders of the Great Rift are known to employ drogue wings (see appendix) and exotic military saddles." The Great Rift Skyguard wasn't even mentioned among the suggested prestige classes! You've got some dope-ass Red Bull-style shit going on and you don't even see it until the appendix. But it's vitally important that you mention five different human societies they've traded with over the last ten thousand years.

I think this might be the key to understanding my ambivalence. The way these entries are written, it's like Every Single Detail is of The Exact Same Importance. They've got this bucket-full of proper nouns and a meticulously assembled timeline and damnit, they're going to use them. . . and mumble, mumble, oh yeah, the gnomes are walking around strapped up in this medieval fantasy setting. 

And by the time you're like, "hey, what was that last part," it usually moves on to the next Equally Important Fact About the World, like a page and a half detailing three thousand years of Damaran history. Who are the Damarans? Where do they live? No one can say.

Okay, that's not fair. The book says quite explicitly - the Great Dale (unrelated to the Dalelands), the Moonsea, the Vast, and a half dozen other locations that are. . . undoubtedly canonical, but I refuse to believe I was expected to come into this knowing where "the Easting Reach" was supposed to be (partial vindication: it was not in the Campaign Setting's index, and probably wasn't in the text, but it was a label on the removable map poster).

And for some reason, most other rpg settings, even the most staunchly conservative vanilla fantasy ones, don't really do this. Like, yes, you start your history at the beginning of time. And yes, your various locations have their share of baggage from The Great Capitalized War. And with enough space to play around in, it all starts to become terribly impenetrable to outsiders. But even amid the most insular, creatively moribund, world-building for the sake of world-building rpg settings, there's still a sense that things have . . . relevance(?). Like, maybe there's too much stuff on the page, but it's all being put down for a reason. Every digression or laser-focus on a picayune detail can nonetheless be traced back to something we have reason to care about.

Perhaps it's me problem. Maybe the reason I'm so aggressively uninterested in these bread-crumb trails is because I have no attachment to any of the stuff at either end. There are things in this setting that I do care about - the Dwarvish colonialism of the Vast that displaced the native orcs (unexplored in this volume) or the hypothetical good version of the Moonshae Isles that understood they are a fundamentally a different genre than regular D&D (admittedly, it would have been a real reach to expect it here) - and it's perfectly imaginable that there's someone out there who feels the same way about Mulhorand (it's Not Egypt in a way that gets a disproportionate amount of wordcount, but it also is coy about its intended genre). 

Let's call it a wash. The Forgotten Realms as a whole could do more to sell itself to newcomers, but I, personally, can be a needlessly tough sell.

Now that this harmless anti-fandom griping is out of the way we can move on to more important matters - the book's frequent use of deeply problematic racist tropes. Both the elves and the dwarves have "wild" offshoots who are formerly "civilized" peoples who "descended into barbarism," losing their literacy and most sophisticated technological abilities when they went to live in the jungle. No points for guessing their skin color. 

Oh no, the poor Tieflings face suspicion and discrimination everywhere they go . . . but they really are naturally inclined to criminality and wickedness.

And you better believe we get creepy, borderline-eugenics discussions of blood quanta. Half elves still explicitly operate on one-drop logic. You need to have "at least one-eighth elven blood" to qualify for the Spellsinger prestige class.

All told, it's a relatively small portion of the book, and I don't think there was any conscious malice at work. But it would just keep happening, and a lot less deniably than what you'd see in a modern product.

It's hard to put into words, because it's not as crude a matter as "fantasy race X = fantasy race Y" (except when it comes to the Roma . . . there's always a Roma analogue and in Faerun they're called the Gur). Instead, it's like the relationships between the races and the setting are governed by racist modes of thought. Human-on-human racism is wrong, but you can draw a box around a group of creatures (the demihumans) make them "white" and then create a humanoid species for each white "anxiety" about minorities. Who are the cultureless barbarians who lurk beyond the borders of civilization and seek to destroy it (orcs)? Who are the sinister followers of an ancient religion who exploit the fact that they look just like regular people to infiltrate society and weaken it from within (Yuan-ti)? Who are the inferior garbage people who are no match for a decent citizen one-on-one, but who breed so fast that they threaten to overwhelm their betters with superior numbers (goblins)?

There's kind of a double bind. You try to directly critique them by drawing a one-to-one connection between the fantasy race and its most likely real-world inspiration and you will be quite understandably (if perhaps unfairly) accused of being gross. But try to indirectly change or remove them and you run the risk of losing the vibrant culture of re-appropriations, re-imaginings, and deconstructions that grew up around them. Queer gamers have largely embraced tieflings, and so they have to stay, but at least as recently as 2003 their presence in Faerun meant it was sometimes useful for a Player Character to think like a racist.

The trick seems to be trying to thread the needle of woobifying the creatures enough that the racists are visibly disgusted (they don't like orcs, but they like the game with orcs), but not smoothing them down so much that they lose the edge that made them appealing in the first place. Goblins become the fun kind of chaotic garbage-lover. Tieflings still look like they could plausibly do crimes (sexily). And of course we cannot lose the incoherent orc screaming, but maybe it could be FOR JUSTICE!!!

Overall, I can't really recommend this book. It doesn't elevate the material, like at all, and at its best it's just more Forgotten Realms. But I reckon it would take the average gamer multiple decades just to use all the Forgotten Realms we got from the campaign setting. Maybe if you're really into historical minutiae, or you want to bully your DM into letting your gnome character carry a gun. There are some cool feats, prestige classes, and bits of equipment. The heavy aspergillum is straight-up WH40K nonsense (it's a hollow rod with a round, hole-filled head meant for sprinkling holy water, but this one is tough enough to act as a mace and can hold 3 flasks of holy water, for all your vampire-hunting needs).  I'm not sure the good parts are worth wading through the dusty old tropes, though.

Ukss Contribution: The coolest thing in the book also neatly demonstrates the mind prison that is D&D-style racial essentialism. The Urdunnir are a dwarvish "subrace" (and it's absolutely unclear what this means from a biological perspective, though in terms of rules they basically have a totally new set of racial abilities). And "Thanks to the blessings of Dumathoin, the urdunnirs can walk through earth and stone as if it were air and shape metal or stone with their hands."

And, obviously, this should be a prestige class, right? I can't be the only one to see this. Call them "Deepearth Mystics" or something and they're a spiritual community that is so in tune with the earth that it gives them special earth themed abilities. That's basically what they are already, but for some reason they need to be physically different than "regular" dwarves. Their relationship with the god is something they're born into, rather than something people can cultivate. Just a tragic waste of potential which probably came about because urdunnirs first appeared in some obscure Monstrous Compendium Appendix. I have a theory that many of the high ECL "monster character" options came about because of AD&D's asymmetric monster statting, so that certain creatures that should just be regular demihumans with class levels (hags, ogre magi, drow, centaurs) are given extra hit dice and/or innate magic abilities when they become PC legal because whoever did the conversion acted on the assumption that the Monster Manual stats represented a 0-level commoner.

Luckily, I don't have to work under that constraint with Ukss and so these mystical earth-lovers can be the disciples of an obscure goblin religious tradition (as a reminder, my personal attempt to avoid falling into the same trap as Races of Faerun is to make all the vanilla fantasy small creatures - dwarves, gnomes, halflings, goblins, etc - into members of the same species, with different cultures and/or personalities).

(Shadowrun) First Run

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the fuck, Shadowrun?

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

(D&D 3e)Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Shadowrun) Magic in the Shadows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(D&D 3.0) Dragonlance Campaign Setting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe 100 books was too many.

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

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

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

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

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

Shadowrun Companion (revised for 3rd 3dition)

 Ooh, goody, more Shadowrun rules. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arcana Unearthed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Shadowrun) Man and Machine: Cyberware

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wildscape

 Before I started reading Wildscape (Mike Mearls) I was filled with a familiar dread - was this book going to explain weather to me? It's a well that has been visited many times, by many different rpgs. You're imagining a place, places often have weather, so you gotta imagine the weather too. Has anyone ever taught you how to imagine the weather? Maybe we can write an rpg supplement about that.

(And I realize I'm being something of a hypocrite here, explaining the practice of explaining weather, and then writing a parenthetical aside, explaining that, but the difference is that I'm being a cute little troll, who has never in his life done anything wrong).

However, upon actually reading the book, I am relieved to relate that Wildscape only explains the weather a little bit. There's a bunch of random tables for generating it, and those tables have little paragraphs explaining what the tables are for, but that's the extent of it. Most of this book is devoted to what the Wilderness Survival Guide from AD&D 1st edition should have been - rules for terrain hazards and fantastical environmental conditions. Each chapter is devoted to a different biome (desert, forest, arctic, etc) and is split evenly between mundane stuff like what DC Strength check you need to roll if you fall in a mud-hole (it depends on how deep the hole is) and magical stuff like the long-term effects of travelling through the blasted ruins of an elder civilization that was smote by the gods for its hubris (a minor, but cumulative penalty to all checks and a narrative effect of persistent bad luck).

Conceptually, it has the same basic problem as City Works - it's more of the DMG, the least essential of the three core books - but Wildscape has the advantage of being full of novel ideas. It's an entertaining read even if it undermines itself a couple of times when Mearls acts the buzzkill and warns us not to use all the ideas in the same campaign setting, because apparently "over-the-top features are memorable but using them too often can turn your campaign world into a mishmash of strange lands." 

To that, of course, I say "bah!" 

I mean, restraint has its place, but I see it more as a matter of picking elements that work well together and support your campaign's themes and genre aesthetics. It's good to have more options than I'd want to use, but I think "don't use too many colors" is unnuanced advice, and a poor explanation of the advantages of having a large palette.

Then again, I'm not the one who went on to be lead designer for D&D 5th edition, am I? (And even I don't know whether I meant to be humble or sarcastic just now).

Overall, I liked this book quite a bit and unlike its companion volume, that "like" is not the least bit qualified or whimsical. It's full of ideas that I would love to steal - a volcanic mountain that gets its heat from a slumbering dragon, a desert made up of tiny fragments of semi-precious gems, towering grasslands where dinosaurs roam free, a mountain range at the top of the world, whose peaks scrape against the dome of the sky and create extraplanar gates - and its only real flaw is that it's still basically a pre-game book. I'd be more likely to reference it than City Works, but I'd rather just copy its rules into my prep notes than carry it around.

I will close out this post by saying I'm still baffled that this book got made at all. I really don't understand FFG's strategy of releasing these unglamorous workhorse books about broad, abstract subjects aimed purely at GMs. This one proved to be worth it, but the only reason I ever found that out is because I saw it on a bookshelf 20 years after its release and said, "fuck it, it's only 5 dollars." Were people really that hungry for d20 content back then? And if so, why not just print more copies of Grimm (the book previewed at the end of Wildscape which continues what I can only assume is a series tradition of using these books to advertise more interesting books)?

Then again, I'm not the who went on to be bought out by Asmodee, so what do I know? (My price is 200k, btw, in case anyone's interested).

Ukss Contribution: Lots of choices this time. Mirror ice, that's so shiny it reflects spells? The brass dragon that's so starved for conversation it built a luxury resort at a desert oasis? Ghouls in underground ruins who create pit traps to capture surface-dwellers? This is a book that throws a lot at the wall, just to see if it will stick, and I love it for that.

However, I think I'm going to go with the giant grass. Ukss already has dinosaurs, so giving them some memorable flora to frolic around in is a no-brainer.

(Shadowrun) New Seattle

Aw, man, I was setting such a good pace in June, then politics happened and now I'm most of the way through July and I've only finished my second book for the month. It's a real shame, because New Seattle (Stephen Kenson) is exactly the sort of book that I'd normally finish in the space of a day. It's a guide to Shadowrun's signature setting that rapidly moves from subject to subject, most of which are pretty interesting. We've got Matchsticks, an old-fashioned jazz nightclub for our futuristic cyberpunk/fantasy setting? Great, I can read a paragraph about that. Or the Scatterbrains, the obligatory clown-themed gang of psychopaths? Yeah, sure, let's hear what the Shadowland comments section has to say about that (mostly, it's pretty predictable, but the suggestion that they get along so well with the Kabuki Ronin due to their shared love of whiteface is going to live rent free in my brain).

New Seattle was a bit of a challenge for me, as a long-time Shadowrun fan because it summarized, but did not advance the game's metaplot. Why am I getting a synopsis of Bug City in this book set halfway across the country? Did something new happen? Is there some Seattle-specific angle I'm missing?  No? It's just an early 3e setting book getting everyone on the same page? I can live with that, but I pay for these books so other people can get lost in the sauce, so maybe try to step up your game WizKids.

No, wait, what am I saying? I actually do not need new metaplot with every title. What I am, in fact, looking for in a city-centric setting book is information that allows me to run games set in that city. And by that metric, New Seattle has its highs and lows. The "History" chapter was largely unnecessary, but the "Welcome to Seattle" chapter had a ton of useful and oft-overlooked specifics - weather patterns, local tv stations, a list of chain restaurants and department stores. I wish it was twice as long and just super condescending. I normally dislike when an rpg book over-explains some basic concept, but even though I already know what a fast-food restaurant is, I'd love to know exactly how that has failed to prepare me for a cyberpunk/fantasy fast-food restaurant. Especially in a city-book, the minute difference between "the good Denny's" and "the sketchy Denny's" is exactly the sort of local savoir-faire that makes a place feel lived-in.

Though let me rein myself in a little bit. I'm not going to start criticizing a book for failing to adopt an untested experimental format (though feel free to picture me standing on a rooftop, screaming into a thunderstorm, "'The street finds its own uses for things,' means that a cyberpunk book should be 90% devoted to cultural, intellectual, and literal paths of desire!"). I do, however, feel like New Seattle, more than any other Shadowrun book I've read so far, lives and dies by the strength of its Shadowland comments. Sometimes the main text will blandly describe a building and the comments will be "yeah, I heard that place contains valuable items a rival megacorporation might want to hire someone to steal" and it's like, I guess technically that's useful information. I'm not going to say its unwelcome or pretend that if the book had just stopped at the building description I would not be complaining about how it didn't present me with any plot hooks. But then, some other sections will have comments along the lines of "oh, yeah, that bar is absolutely riddled with shapeshifters" or they'll just casually ruin some dude's life by outing him as an undercover cop and as unrealistic as it is, I kind of wish they could all be like that.

Overall, I really liked New Seattle. It didn't give me any new gossip, of the sort I love to rant about, but it was on the upper half of the usefulness curve. The last twelve pages were nothing but a long list of no-context business names, accompanies by meaningless addresses and micro-descriptions, and as a longtime GM, it brought a tear of gratitude to my eye. I may not get any particular pleasure from reading that McKuen's Scrap and Salvage Yard is on 3rd Avenue and Madison Street and "A continual eyesore amid the splendor of downtown, but an excellent source of parts," but I just know that a smartass player is going to ask me for those kinds of details. And really, providing a quick answer to the sort of questions you'd never think to ask is the highest use to which an rpg setting book can aspire.

Ukss Contribution: Seattle's fire control services are contracted to a private company that also sells fire insurance. Though it's not technically part of the contract (the company is paid by the city, from tax revenue, and not directly by individuals), people who have insurance with the company have a higher priority than the uninsured. It's somehow the most cyberpunk detail in the entire book and also a reference to one of the world's oldest protection rackets, which is pretty much the sweet spot for the genre and a great bit of worldbuilding that I'd love to riff on.

City Works

The fascinating thing about City Works (Mike Mearls) is how completely boring it is. This here is a book written by a future Head of All D&D, with the infinite possibilities of the Open Game License, and it's just dull as hell.

That's not necessarily a huge fault in a utilitarian rpg supplement, but it makes me curious about the early 2000s' d20 ecology. Some things, like Blue Rose or Dragonstar make sense to me as passion projects. Wizards of the Coast threw open the gates of the kingdom, allowed 3rd parties to make whatever they wanted, and that was an opportunity - to address a need, to fulfill a wish, to eliminate a frustration. And oftentimes, even the "bloat" was about something (if only a gratuitous desire for MOAR OF MY FAVORITE THING).

And then you have . . . this. Not a bad book, by any means, but . . . who asked for it? What commercial or creative opportunity did Fantasy Flight Games see that justified its existence? Hell, what was I, the reader, hoping to gain when I picked this up?

In my case, at least, it was easy. Sometimes I just wander into my FLGS, walk over to the rpg shelf, and buy the most discounted thing I can find (in fact, I did exactly that thing just the other day when I got a copy of SLA Industries for 10$ . . . I look forward to finding out what I bought in another few months or so). However, that's a fucking trivial motive. It sheds no light at all onto City Works as a book. In fact, I am clearly wasting everyone's time be even bringing it up . . .

Anyways. I could at least put myself into the hypothetical shoes of a hypothetical customer, c. 2003. "Oh, look, here's City Works, by Mike Mearls . . . a name I've never heard before. . . Oh, but it's been published by Fantasy Flight Games. I know them from such titles as Dragonstar and Midnight, I wonder what fascinating genre twist they're cooking up next. I'm sure this 'definitive d20 system resource for designing and running exciting adventures and campaigns in fantasy cities' will live up to the high standards they've set for themselves. Certainly, it will be worth the 24.95 MSRP, which is just 5 dollars less than the Player's Handbook itself."

And look, I don't want to call hypothetical me a hypothetical chump, but it would have been a bad decision, and I find it hard to believe that there were enough people making enough bad decisions to justify FFG's business strategy.

I should probably unpack that, though. What I mean here is that City Works would have been a bad purchasing decision, not necessarily that City Works is a bad book. I can, from time to time, be a bit whimsical in my use of value-judgement words like "good" or "classic" or "trash" or "bad." Sometimes, when I say a book is "bad" I mean "it's fundamentally flawed, but in an interesting way" (like Planescape or Mage: the Ascension) and sometimes I mean it's just ineptly made (eh, I don't feel like calling anyone else out today, but I'm sure an archive binge would turn up a couple). City Works is neither of those things.  It is "good."

Scare quotes because I'm using that word whimsically as well. It's good in the sense that I can read it and at no point am I going "whoa, how did this clown con his way into the job at WotC?" I get it. This is an effective audition for the role of Primate of All DMs. Mr Mearls is a skilled communicator who gives relevant, actionable GMing advice, his mechanics for things like rooftop chases and the spread of plague are reasonable, and his custom classes are all comfortably tier 4 (i.e. the tier closest to what you imagine fantasy adventurers to be like). I have my nitpicks with this book - it warns us against overusing the stunt system, lest our games lose focus on attacks and spells in favor of wild use of the scenery, which strikes me as the sort of "problem" I'd love to have - but I have no major complaints. It is a perfectly fine GM book.

Which is why it would have been such a mistake to purchase at full price, and why it's so baffling it got the green light at all. I once described the 3.5 DMG as "the quintessential book you read exactly once and then intermittently reference for all the rest of time" and City Works is exactly the same way, except that you're never going to reference it. There are parts you would reference, if they were in the DMG, but you're not going to lug an extra book to your game, or even make an extra trip to the bookshelf. It's good, but it's not that good.

Which really only leaves the random city creation rules as a reason to use City Works at all. I think they'd be fun to use once or twice, just as a goofy little project, but the cities they create are just kind of there. Like, how useful is it, exactly, to have a precise count of residential blocks in your fantasy city? Maybe there's a niche for "I want a highly detailed map, but I don't want to just bullshit it," but it strikes me as a basic weakness that DMs are expected to provide the special sauce on their own. You can create potentially thousands of technically distinct city maps, but nothing about them is distinctive or memorable. And maybe it's just that "making the game memorable" is supposed to be the DM's responsibility, but then what am I buying the book for?

I think a better approach would have been to incorporate a life-path system that tied into the history and politics stuff of the previous chapter, add an additional "wild card" table full of purely fantasy nonsense (i.e. "the city was built around a magical spring whose waters cure leprosy"), and actually give your d100 tables something close to 100 entries each (a lot of these were clearly made with another die type in mind, with exactly 10 entries that each spanned 10 percentage points or 20 entries that stepped up 5 points at a time). I feel like if the streets, blocks, and districts were associated with particular historical or political events, then that would add some sorely needed life to your randomly-generated city maps.

Overall, it's a bit of a stretch to say I "liked" City Works, but I didn't exactly dislike it either. At the end of the day, it's a GM book, and as necessary as those might be for educating and informing GMs, they're always at least one step removed from the things that make a game exciting. Running a game as a GM involves talking about the game, but preparing someone to be a GM involves talking about talking about the game, and that can't help but be at least a little bit dull. This book is no more worthy of complaint than White Wolf's "Theme" and "Mood" sections . . . but hey, I'll complain about those all day long, you have no idea. 

Ukss Contribution: This book does have one major, hilarious flaw however. The last 15 pages are just a preview of Fantasy Flight Games upcoming book "Steam and Sorcery" and I can't quite figure it out. Why would you do this? End your book with an excerpt from a much better book. Why couldn't I have found that book at my FLGS instead?  Are the rpg gods testing me?

Most of my favorite things from this book are actually from that preview section (one suggestion - a campaign setting where a high-tech kingdom of werewolves use giant adamantine chains to hold the moon in place, for infinite power), but I feel like picking something from that would be cheating. It's technically something I read in this physical volume, but it's not really part of City Works, you know.

Instead, I'll go with something that caught my eye for being a refreshing breeze of weirdness in an otherwise pretty staid history section - "The armory is the frequent target of robberies, while some folk use it to dispose of murder weapons or temporarily hide magic items. Sometimes, thieves use it to transfer stolen goods. One crook deposits the item, while his customer uses a disguise to later claim it."

This revolving-door armory genuinely delights me. I keep contemplating it, and I keep coming back to the thought, "that's the opposite of how armories are supposed to work. It'd have to be a pretty strange city to have something like that."

Lucky for me, then, that "strange" is right in my wheelhouse.