Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Player's Handbook

 Well, that wasn't as much of an ordeal as I originally feared. Though the Player's Handbook is a dry read, even under the best of circumstances, the impact was blunted by the knowledge of my imminent completion of another blog milestone.

I can't say for sure what exactly I was expecting to gain from the experience of reading this book, so soon (a mere 16 months!) after the 3.0 PHB, but I can say that I feel fully prepared to run a D&D 3.5 campaign. The rules, already familiar due to decades worth of adaptations, revisions, and deconstructions, are now etched ever so slightly deeper into my brain. It's a shame, then, that I only have, like, 20% of a desire to actually play the game.

I suppose I could take the opportunity here to just shut my yap for once, limit my remarks to "okay, so this is approximately 90% similar to a book I already read, and though there are noticeable improvements to various niche issues (rangers get 6 skill points per level now, crit-fishing builds have been nerfed by making keen effects non-stackable, spells are better organized and easier to reference) the fundamental flaws of the edition as a whole remain." 

And you know what? I think I will do that (this paragraph acknowledging my plan for uncharacteristic brevity notwithstanding). The 3.5 Players Handbook did actually inspire me to take notes and write commentary, but almost all of that commentary could have applied to the original PHB as well (like, why is the monk's Slow Fall ability so fucking useless - they're deliberately making it worse than an extremely niche 1st level spell). If I didn't say it the first time round, is it really necessary to say it on my second chance? Am I really so in love with the sound of my own voice that I need to write nearly identical commentary on nearly identical books?

Um, let's not think too hard about the answer to that question. I've still got two more of these core books to go.

Ukss Contribution: Monks get an ability called Tongue of the Sun and Moon that has an unusually simple natural language description - "A monk of 17th level or higher can speak with any living creature." 

That's literally all of the rules guidance we're given. For an ability with absolutely staggering philosophical implications. Apparently, there's just a random Nobilis-style power tucked away where no one will ever encounter it, as a high level class feature of a single-class monk. It's such an un-3.5 detail to include, particularly in a class that very conspicuously doesn't get access to Feather Fall.

As a fantasy element, I love it. Refined mystics who can communicate with animals and plants and every human or nonhuman culture. They won't necessarily be martial artists in Ukss, but they will have a monastery.

(Shadowrun) Mob War!

Organized crime occupies a strange niche in the cyberpunk genre (and arguably real life). The megacorporations are above the law. The biggest ones have literal extraterritoriality, allowing them to write their own laws within the confines of their facilities. So why wouldn't the mafia's traditional businesses - drugs, gambling, prostitution, etc - just be another product for the megacorps to package and sell? BTLs (better than life chips, shadowrun's censor-friendly sci-fi drug stand-in) may be illegal in UCAS territory, but is there any reason you couldn't just walk into the Renraku arcology and buy them off the shelf? Maybe you have to use them on-site, but that's just another profit opportunity, really.

Although, this works the other way too. What's to stop the existing criminal cartels from designing their own letterhead, issuing stock, and becoming true megacorporations themselves? They already shroud themselves in the trappings of legitimate business, for purposes of money laundering. If the general direction of the economy is trending towards corporate lawlessness, wouldn't that mean that organized crime and international corporations would gradually converge? As the corps start hiring shadowrunners to commit crimes on their behalf, the criminals become more and more mainstream until it's impossible to tell the difference?

It might be an issue of scale. It's hard to research exact figures online, but even if you use the larger estimates, groups like the mafia and the yakuza have a fraction of the revenue of the biggest corporations. A hundred billion a year would not get you onto the top 50. . . but it might get you close enough to be a valuable acquisition for one of the big players.

Mob War! (Stephen Kenson) at one point speculates that all of the Japanese megacorporations have been infiltrated by the Yakuza, and that criminals are calling the shots at Mitsuhama, in particular, but how realistic is this? The reverse situation seems more likely. At most, they could be a highly-organized faction of shareholders, but would they even want MCT to do anything besides its usual business? If the criminals were really in charge, would you even be able to tell?

It presents a challenge for me as a potential Shadowrun GM, because the PCs are criminals for hire, in a criminal subculture, and they usually work for the megacorporations as deniable assets, but this book posits a series of adventures where they work for organized crime instead, and I can't quite figure out what the dynamic is supposed to be. What is the mafia's social and economic niche? Why does it matter that Seattle's capo was assassinated?

Near as I can tell, they're the biggest fish in a small pond. If you're a regular criminal, like the PCs, you have to tread carefully around them, because they're organized enough to ruin your day, even if you successfully kill some of their goons. But if that's the case, it's unclear why they wouldn't just monopolize the shadowrunning racket like they do with vice? Why is Mr Johnson going to a random dive bar to hire freelancers when they could instead drop a few choice words to a "business associate" in the comfort of their country club and then know that the situation will be taken care of by someone on the boss's regular payroll?

I think it's a case where sci-fi is just recapitulating the modern world without really examining it. The mafia exists and are kind of the scary apex predators of the criminal underworld because that's how it worked in the 1990s, when Mob War! was written. You've got the independents doing whatever hustles they can and above them the street gangs, who control territory and watch each others' backs, so you don't want to mess with them, and then above them are the true syndicates - the mafia, the yakuza, the triads - who are able to call upon international resources and large numbers of full-time professionals. 

But that only really makes sense in a world where crime is illegal. When the megacorps are immune to consequences, then maybe the mafia is just another mid-tier corp to take over and subsequently hollow out. You're not buying drugs from the mafia, you're buying Mafia (tm)- brand drugs, manufactured by Aztechnology, available at Stuffer Shacks across the nation! Just circle round to the back alley and "Ask for Rocco" (tm)!

I should be kinder, though. It's tough to satirize capitalism in a way that is not immediately eclipsed by the absurd reality of the contemporary world.

So let's assume that it makes sense for the mafia to exist in the world of Shadowrun and that you can know what they're like by watching literally any mafia movie. If that's the case, then Mob War! gives you the tools to make a pretty good mafia movie. The don is killed and his daughter comes back from Harvard Law School to buck tradition, take over the family business, and get revenge, all the while dodging traitorous underlings, aggrieved traditionalists, and rivals from competing syndicates. I'd watch that movie.  It also makes perfect sense that in this situation, the normally closed-off criminal organizations would want to bring in freelance criminals to fill some of the gaps. It's a satisfying premise for an adventure that is executed well . . .

From a certain point of view. Personally, I have no issues with the way Mob War! does things. It's not technically an adventure. It's just a single event and a list of various factions and NPCs who are reacting to this event. Its main use is to run a sandbox campaign in the aftermath of the mob boss' assassination, and while it has a couple dozen suggestions for specific adventures, those suggestions are incredibly bare bones (the book itself is only 64 pages long, which is why my post took a swerve straight from the start). Normally, I'd whine about having to do most of the work by myself, but in this case the suggestions are so tightly related, and tied to detailed, interesting NPCs that they really do feel very helpful for building a starting situation. It's not like those drive-by adventure hooks that leave me frustrated by highlighting a gap in the setting ("Ooh, what's at the bottom of the mysterious dungeon . . . you have the power to decide"). Most of my lingering questions are about the future - i.e. the thing that's going to be highly dependent on how the PCs deal with the starting situation.

Overall, I'd say that I really enjoyed Mob War! It hits a good sweet spot for a metaplot-driven rpg supplement, where it really shakes up the status quo, but it doesn't make you feel like you're playing a whole new game. Even if you'd been involved in a long-running Shadowrun game where the PCs worked for the mafia and developed a major personal relationship with James O'Malley, the players are going to be emotionally prepared for the possibility that he's been assassinated off-screen. That sort of thing happens to mafia bosses all the time. So it's got a weird thing going on where the more it disrupts your existing game, the more it makes your game resemble the genre it's emulating. Definitely a top-tier supplement.

Ukss Contribution: My choice today is a kind of silly detail that nonetheless tickled me greatly - the boss of the Yakuza has an estranged daughter who fled from home and became a shadowrunner. Her birth name: Keiko. Her street handle: Kiku. I get that it's "a play on her real name" but that's the opposite of what an alias is supposed to do. I can't help but think that she'd be an incredibly funny NPC for the players to try and set straight.

(D&D 3.5) Complete Champion

Dungeons & Dragons is an odd beast, because I have a lot of D&D books. It was my first game. It is, by dollar value anyway, my most-collected game. It was, for a long time, my most-played game (I've got an inkling that Exalted may have surpassed it, though I don't have precise figures). It's probably the game I'd have the best change of recreating from memory, if that was ever required of me for some reason. Hell, I chose the d20 system as the basis for Ukss Plus, the most elaborate rpg shitpost since Dungeons: the Dragoning 40k 7th Edition, and even as a joke, you don't write a quarter of a million words because you hate the subject matter. 

And yet, despite all that, I'm permanently at war with the game's implied setting. It never fails. Every time they show me something from the blobby, half-formed recesses of inchoate D&D-land, my first thought is "well, that's something I'm going to need to fix." I think it's because, more than any other rpg setting I own (including approximately half a dozen official D&D campaign worlds), D&D-land has that "designed by committee" feeling. It's a consequence of being the first and the biggest. So many ideas, from so many sources, get dumped into the trough and in one sense, everything that makes its way into a book is D&D, but in another sense, people will write the books in an attempt to fit in with existing D&D, and the result is that you begin to treat paths of least resistance as if they were some kind of grand master plan. So the implied D&D setting, the product identity of the brand, if you will, is half made up of weird one-off ideas so memorable that they were preserved long after the death of their context and the other half is areas of smoothness, where ideas passed from hand-to-hand have been polished into a kind of flatness that betrays deep biases and cultural assumptions.

Case in point: Complete Champion. This is one of those late-period 3.5 books where they're just really good at making Dungeons & Dragons supplements. The edition changeover is just a few months away, and at last they know how to write for 3.5. You want to play a character who is a divine champion of one of D&D-land's various default gods? You're going to find a lot of useful material for doing that, some of which is even competitive with just taking extra levels in cleric or druid (on the lower end of optimization, let's not go wild here).

But it's also about the religion of D&D-land. And the religion of D&D-land is . . . well, not Christianity, exactly, but like . . . various extruded substances poured into a Christianity-shaped mold, and the final result is . . . something. It's like, religion without theology, without culture, without history, without art. A thing in the shape of a religion, but without substance.

Maybe that's fair. Maybe we aren't going into D&D for stories of great substance. Slap a cassock on that guy, give him an Aspergilum (a new vocabulary word that I'm likely to immediately forget), and have him shoot lasers at a zombie. That's enough for the game's limited ambitions.

It just feels a little off. Halflings have tent revivals. What are they reviving? The eternal and unanimous worship of Yondalla, the goddess of halfling supremacy?

No, that's unfair, all of the "racial" gods are offputtingly militant. Corellon's "church" (every god has a church, which I'm choosing to interpret as a broad term for "any religiously motivated form of social organization") has an absolutely hair-raising approach to Drow: "killing Drow is holy work, because each dark elf soul sent to the Abyss is another step towards completing the work begun by Corellon Larethian so long ago."

Yikes.

All told, Complete Champion is a competent execution of an area of the implied setting that I have particularly little use for. It comes from being an atheist, I think. My approach to fantasy religion is culture-first. This is an activity that human beings (and human-like creatures) engage in, and so it's always something the society needs, or wants to express about itself, or, in my more cynical moments, is burdened with. The truth or falsity of a particular belief is irrelevant.

Digression: this is another reason that I favor doing away with the arcane/divine split. Wizards are often theurgists who use spiritual and religious reasoning and people who work divine miracles often wind up being a lot like secular magic users, whether the theology is on their side or not. In either case, the validity (or "truth" if you prefer) of a religious belief is orthogonal to the pragmatic power of a magical practice. There's a very thin line between binding a demon to servitude by speaking its seven secret names and gaining power from a god by prayer and a pledge of service. The notion that the relationship between god and worshipper must be one of genuine reverence and not a transactional bargain for services rendered is characteristic of modern monotheism and not necessarily something you even want to translate into an rpg.

Anyway, D&D throws a serious wrench into religion-as-worldbuilding-element by insisting that each and every religion must be associated with a literal god that definitely, truly exists. So religion in D&D-land isn't primarily a cultural phenomenon and does not necessarily serve human needs.  Not only does this lead to shallow worldbuilding on the face of it, it also places an incredible amount of pressure on the gods themselves to be charismatic enough (IRL, to the readers) to make an organization staffed by their flunkies seem like a vital part of a living world. Not all of them are able to pull this off.

I was probably never going to love Complete Champion, but I do respect it. The prestige classes take some interesting chances, design-wise, such as having multiple different classes for a single NPC organization, so that characters with different classes can approach the same concept from different starting positions. As a reader, I prefer it when the Prestige classes are all distinct, but having two or three different interpretations really helps when centering a campaign around a particular organization. You don't need to be a spellcaster to benefit from membership in the Paragnostic Assembly. You can simply be an Initiate instead of an Apostle (although, the main ability of Initiates is "assist casting", which I kind of hate).

I've now read all of the Complete* books, many of 3.X's most prominent supplements, and a bunch of obsolete 3.0 material. All I have left is specific campaign settings - Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Eberron. Looking back at the edition as a whole, I think I love it, but in a really backhanded way. I enjoy what it might (and will) become, but a lot of what it actually was, doesn't really hold up. The math (and the balance issues created by that math) undermines the game's ambition to become a universal toolkit, but I absolutely adore that it had that ambition. This was an edition that did not recognize its own limitations, even when it really should have, and I think that energy is infectious. 

Ukss Contribution: Dragon Rubies. A dragon eats a gemstone. Later, it shits that gemstone out. Thanks to its harrowing journey, the gem has magic powers now. Be sure to wash your hands after handling one.

(Shadowrun) Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzahn's Secrets

I had a hard time concentrating on the fantastic conceit of Portfolio of a Dragon (Steve Kenson, Mike Colton, Todd Bolling, Jon F Zeigler). I was too distracted with thoughts of wealth inequality.

I mean, it's not as if I didn't care about the book's plot. A dragon is elected President of the United Canadian and American States! He is promptly assassinated on the night of his inauguration! Everyone's a suspect! Ooh, he left a mysterious will!

It's just, he leaves behind an open-ended bequest to whoever can develop communications between humans and dolphins, elephants, and/or satyrs that includes "the Cayman Island of their choice." It shouldn't really be possible for a person to own something like that, let alone give it away as a prize in an inventing contest. Even in a cyberpunk universe where the ultimate rule is that of the almighty dollar, it seems . . . excessive. I get that they were trying to go for a modern take on the gleaming dragon hoard, but damn, this guy owns Prince Edward Island (generously returned to the UCAS government), a lost da Vinci notebook, and several original Shakespeare folios? He should not have been allowed to own those things. I feel like even admitting to possessing them could very reasonably be interpreted as a mishandling of antiquities and a crime against the global heritage. And what on Earth gives him the right to bequeath Excalibur to Harlequin, of all people? It's not even in his possession. He had to offer a bounty to whoever could find it.

Then again, his will also disbursed funds to pay for an assassination, so I have to figure that the legalities here are deep into the realm of speculative fiction.

Nonetheless, it somewhat irks me that even the signature "good guy" dragon is such a hoarder. I guess that's part of the whole dragon shtick, though. They are a metaphor for greed, relentless accumulators who can never be satisfied and who barely seem to appreciate or enjoy the riches they've gathered. Dunkelzahn could have replaced the random car he destroyed at any time. He didn't have to make restitution as a bequest in his will. But apparently, he just couldn't stand to part with his 1964 -1/2 candy apple red Ford Mustang convertible while he was alive. . . 

Although, it occurs to me that maybe he replaced the car at the time of the incident and then on the occasion of his death decided that the person whose car he totaled would be a good destination for his much nicer personal car. That's not how it comes across in the text, but it's a valid interpretation. But even with the benefit of the doubt, this whole will thing comes across as someone trying to pull strings and exert control even from beyond the grave. When you consider the tiny size of his bequests, relative to the speculated size of his fortune (estimated to be around 100 trillion nuyen, with an average bequest size of a few million nuyen), well, maybe it's a bit of overdue characterization. Perhaps Dunkelzah was not as different from other dragons as he liked to pretend.

It's something that tracks if you dig into the game's Earthdawn connections (and if you're a fan of those kinds of easter eggs, this is definitely a book you want to read). Mountainshadow, the 4th age dragon most likely to be Dunkelzahn, was aristocratic and haughty, and was strange among his cohort for relying so heavily on humanoid agents, but he never really thought of them as equals. His transformation into a charming talk show guest and approachable man-of-the-people always struck me as a minor inconsistency, but I'm getting a picture here of a guy with a massive stick up his ass who nonetheless wants to convince people he's chill. He's not, as evinced by the fact that even in his will he gives away less than 1 percent of his fortune (and even this figure is skewed by one guy who got 30 billion nuyen and the assumption that things like Prince Edward Island and the megacorp stock transfers are in the 10s of billions range - I'm not sure the author of that one line quite understood how big 100 trillion actually is).

I could see it as something of an arc. Perhaps the events of the last 8000 years have humbled him and he was in the process of becoming the person he was pretending to be. It's a tough call, because the "master manipulator" archetype is usually villain-coded, but theoretically, there's nothing stopping a hero from using similar methods (in much the same way that someone who was really good at fighting and constantly solved problems by punching people in the face would be insufferable in real life, but in rpgs, they're like 90% of the characters you're ever going to play). Still, at the risk of armchair psychoanalyzing a fictional dragon based on nothing but a few scraps of lore and the contents of his (dubiously legal) will, I'd say that need for control, along with its accompanying conviction that you deserve to exercise that control, is a major character flaw that needs to be corrected. There's a fine line between "social responsibility" and "aristocratic paternalism" and it's not clear the Dunkelzahn is on the right side of it.

Of course, this is Shadowrun we're talking about and things being "not clear" is right in its wheelhouse. I can't be entirely mad at Portfolio of a Dragon for being an rpg murder mystery that leaves a bunch of unanswered questions, because answering those questions is one of the goals of playing the game. But I can say that it's one of those cases where ambiguity works at cross purposes to nuance. Is this mystery actually solvable? Is the Draco Foundation working on some kind of posthumous master plan or not? What's the deal with the Jade Dragon of Wind and Fire? I'd feel better if I had more to work off of than a series of writing prompts.

But would that leave enough room for FASA's signature style of punctuating their in-character narration with unproductive asides from the peanut gallery? Seriously, one exchange of comments was "What's the point of this bedtime story?" answered by "Read to the end of the paragraph, drekhead." Well observed. I really feel like I'm on a lightly moderated message board (Captain Chaos is definitely one of those "free speech" mods - when someone complained about a pro-Humanis post, he threatened to ban the complainer for "name-calling." Ah, the 90s.) But is reading this really helping me to better GM an adventure based on Dunkelzahn's will?

Maybe a little. I guess it helps to get into the Shadowrun mindset. I think as a reader, though, I'd prefer more of that hot goss. 

In the end, Portfolio of a Dragon performs better than average on that metric, so I can unreservedly recommend it, even if I think there was more fascinating content to be mined from Pesident Dragon.

Ukss Contribution: I really liked that the main headquarters of the Wuxing corporation were designed with a strict eye towards Feng Shui. My understanding is that this is a real practice that was less known to the American mainstream in the 90s (Shadowrun really dropped the ball when it came to predicting China's role as a major 21st century economic power), but I enjoy it in this context because it's implied that shaping the building's chi will lead to tangible monetary benefits, and that blend of magic and cyberpunk is the soul of the game.

(D&D 3.5) Complete Scoundrel

You know, maybe the true Scoundrels were the friends we made along the way. . . I say, because Complete Scoundrel (Mike McArtor and F. Wesely Schneider) never makes it entirely clear what, exactly, it thinks a "scoundrel" is. Broadly, I think a "scoundrel" (per this book) is supposed to be anyone who is quick-witted, strategic, and sometimes a little bit sneaky. But that really does just describe something like 90% of all D&D characters.

The book must be aware of this, though, because the inspirational media section is all over the place. Like, okay, I'll give you Indiana Jones, but Captain Kirk is a stretch, and Aragorn is a fundamental misread of the character. Then I got into the first chapter and the book starts pitching scoundrels of every alignment and every class and for a second, it annoyed me. I mean, I'm actually kind of intrigued by the idea of a Paladin with scoundrel-ish elements, but, also, there is a definite thematic tension there. Is the Paladin overcoming a scoundrel-y past? Are they using their scoundrel skill to compensate for a deficit of martial strength? Are they slowly losing the plot, re: their holy oath, performing underhanded deeds for the sake of "the greater good?" These are interesting questions, but perhaps they are too interesting for this drive-by treatment and even the Gray Guard prestige class (concept: a Paladin that's allowed to . . . generously interpret their oath for purposes of special operations) seems more like it's trying to substitute class mechanics for a literary theme. In any event, when it started talking about "Lawful Good scoundrels" my knee-jerk reaction was "is it even possible for a character not to be a scoundrel, under this book's definition?"

Eventually, however, I chilled the fuck out and just got on board with the book's jargon. And I'm glad I did, because it's a solid late addition to the game. It's a weird quirk of D&D 3.x that, despite having the most useless niche in the game, the rogue-focused books tend to have the strongest fantasy flavor. I think it comes down to the fact that "highly skilled, but basically mundane, with maybe one or two specific magical abilities" is more or less the quintessential fantasy fiction protagonist. So when you deviate from that ever so slightly, as one might do when designing a prestige class, you wind up with characters and organizations that are ideally suited for complex worldbuilding. The Psibond Agents aren't nearly as powerful as a Telepath Psion, but "what if there were people who could hijack your senses and the strongest of them could subtly nudge you with telepathic suggestions" is a premise that you could base a novel around. And sure, in the balance of the game as a whole, it's kind of a rip-off that skill-based characters have to expend valuable resources to become good at highly specific niche abilities whereas full casters can learn a variety of spells that each have comparable or superior utility (for example, a Psibond Agent needs to be an 11th level character to get Suggestion, but a telepath can get it at level 3 and a bard or wizard can get it at level 5), but when it comes to making good fiction, I really want these more focused magical elements. Give me a neat core ability that explores deeper into its implications as the character grows in power, rather than a grab-bag list of powers that aren't necessarily (or even likely to be) related to each other thematically.

When it comes down to evaluating the book as a whole, I'm torn. The best possible way to play D&D 3.5 is with a party made up of nothing but C-tier classes and if you're doing that, Complete Scoundrel adds a lot. But are you really going to do that? Because if you aren't, then Complete Scoundrel is just a bunch of new C-tier material. The Rod of Ropes is a super cool magic item that shoots grappling hooks and zip lines, but it's never going to compete with the ability to fly. Likewise, skill tricks fill a long-overlooked niche in D&D fantasy by allowing characters with sufficient ranks in a particular skill to access more efficient or effective actions (such as leaping off a horse and attacking an enemy on the way down), but the chosen power level - slightly weaker than feats with similar prerequisites - is the opposite of what it should be. There really needs to be more support for martial characters evolving into "peak human" superheroes at high levels, and Complete Scoundrel never quite gets there.

I guess my approach to these kinds of books is to view them as transitional fossils. We're less than a year and a half away from 4th edition at this point, the new mechanics are probably in a late stage of development, 3.5 is reaching the end of its lifespan, and that is the context for Complete Scoundrel. In that context, what's most interesting to me is how little 4e actually wound up in this book. I know it's theoretically possible, because Book of Nine Swords has been out for awhile, but it looks like maybe that was a one-off. We get references to the Spellthief and the Beguiler, but not the Swordsage. A real pity. What that says to me, though, is that this is a dying branch of the game. More 3.5 after 3.5 as a whole became moribund.

Unfortunately, it doesn't quite read that way. There's no real sense of throwing caution to the wind. If I didn't know better, I'd say they were planning on continuing 3.x support for another decade, at least. But if we don't get the wild experimentation of people with nothing left to lose, at least we don't also get a half-assed effort from people who've given up hope. I think the Cloaked Dancer, Master of Masks, Mountebank, and Malconvoker (a demon summoner who's deluded into thinking they can be harnessed to serve the cause of good) are great additions to the game. Likewise, many of the magic items and legendary locations would make for great loot (though maybe only the Frog God's Fane and Iron Wyrm Vault could anchor an adventure by themselves . . . and possibly also the Highest Spire, if you fleshed out the pre-competition intrigue and trash talking). 

Overall, I'd say that Complete Scoundrel is a mature D&D 3.5 supplement, with setting flavor and game mechanics done as well as 3.5 ever did. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's a recommendation or not.

Which just leaves us with one last order of business - surprise Planescape content!

Yep, one of Sigil's factions makes it into the book as a "scoundrel organization." It's kind of a shock, because as far as I know, this is an isolated incident. None of the other "Complete" books have gone into Planescape lore. And certainly, of the scattered references that pop up from time to time, I've not yet seen a recap of Faction War. So it's very clearly an intentional and loving callback to a classic campaign setting.

And yet, the faction they chose to bring back was The Free League, aka the Indeps aka the "none of the above" faction. Their leadership has been banished to an extradimensional maze, they have fled the city of Sigil, and now they are headquartered in the Outlands where they advance the cause of freedom by . . . not doing much at all, really. They are such big believers in freedom that they have no dues, no resources, no operations, no leadership, and no responsibilities. To join, you simply start wearing their symbol and maybe you, I don't know, oppose tyranny or something, when the opportunity presents itself, and maybe some shopkeepers will see your symbol and give you a discount or feed you rumors. 

I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, here. I'm really, genuinely glad that someone is keeping the torch burning on one my favorite rpg settings (seriously, all the shit-talking I've done about it comes from a place of love), but why these guys, in particular? The only thing that ever kept them together was their self-appointed role as Sigil's defiant political outsiders. It was a running joke. They were the faction that was in denial about being a faction. Take Sigil and the other factions away from them and what's left?

Not much, as it turns out. I guess it was good to see them, but it was the rpg equivalent to running into one of your brother's high-school friends at the supermarket. You vaguely remember having roughly positive interactions with them, and then at some point you'll squint and say, "hey, didn't I play D&D with you that one time?"

Ukss Contribution: This book does one thing that I absolutely adore and wish more rpg supplements would do - it illustrates its concepts and mechanics through these delightful minifictions. Hey, they're talking about a thieves' guild, let's take a peek at one of the guild's secret correspondences. My favorite appears early on. A king is being manipulated by his (dare I say) scoundrel of an advisor - "a cat-sized dragonling."

ZOMG! Sooo cuute! I want one so bad!

Ahem. In any event, there will be some nation of Ukss where the power behind the throne is an unnaturally cunning baby dragon.

(Shadowrun) Super Tuesday

Guys, I need to be real for a moment. It is sooo haard for me to read old bits of politically-themed genre fiction and not immediately try to put it into the context of the 2016 US Presidential election. It's one of those things where, on an intellectual level, I realize that the world was probably always like this, but I still have a vivid memory of my illusions crashing down around me. The only comparable experience I've ever had was back in 2010, when George W Bush published his memoirs and openly admitted to authorizing the US torture program and it became clear that he would face absolutely no consequences from doing so.

Oh, man, just thinking about it is stirring some shit up inside me. I think it might have been genuinely traumatic. I was, what, 28 at the time. I wasn't a rube. I knew the elite had a separate system of justice. But there was a part of me that still, somehow, believed in America. That thought that equality before the law was more than just a pretty slogan. I knew the government did illegal things, but I suppose I took comfort in knowing that those crimes were at least nominally furtive. I figured that if a man would openly confess to committing crimes against humanity, that would be enough to provoke a response, even if he was a President. We have a law. He broke the law. And we don't need hearsay or witnesses or search warrants because he fucking published a book bragging about it! If that wasn't enough to merit an indictment, then the USA's much vaunted rule of law would be an absolute fucking joke.

Spoiler alert: there was no indictment.

But the shocking thing to me is that, despite all that. Despite my absolute disgust at the self-serving cravenness of the Democratic party leadership in failing to hold Bush accountable, there was still a small scrap of faith left to extinguish, because the election of Donald Trump shocked the hell out of me. I'd come to terms with the notion that all my elected officials, as contentious as their public disagreements could be, were essentially part of the same social circle and had a broad consensus on issues like like elite legal impunity. But I also, apparently, assumed that they were smart, self-aware people who at least valued the appearance of competence, respectability, and just a general connection to our basic physical reality. 

And, yeah . . .

Which is maybe too heavy a thought to bring into a silly 1996 book about a hypothetical 2057 election where one of the candidates is a literal dragon, but my reactions are my reactions and when I read Super Tuesday (Stephen Kenson with background material by Tom Dowd) and it says "Brackhaven is a racist with secret ties to the Humanis Policlub. He knows that he cannot express many of his more radical racial opinions if he wants to succeed in his quest for public office, so he has become very skilled in hiding the depths of his bigotry while subtly promoting racism and discrimination in his sphere of influence." Well, I just want to scream:

YOU KNOW JACK SHIT ABOUT POLITICS. US ELECTIONS ARE SCREAMING MAWS OF CHAOS, A CARNIVAL OF THE ID, A NATIONAL PSYCHODRAMA WRIT LARGE WHERE THE STAKES ARE HUMAN LIVES. RESPECTABILITY IS ACTUALLY A DISADVANTAGE BECAUSE IT IMPLIES THAT YOU LACK THE STRENGTH OF WILL TO FORCE THE ELECTORATE TO EMBRACE THE ABSURD!

But that's not really fair. I'm not really mad at FASA. I'm mad at my younger self.  I should probably be more forgiving, though. I can't imagine that I would ever have a political conviction strong enough to line up and execute 100,000 of the opposition's grandmas, so how could I (or anyone, really) have predicted that the 2020 Republicans would regard it as disqualifying for a candidate to not do it to their own grandmas?

It does, however, make reading a book like this into a surreal experience. It's obvious that Dunkelzahn, with his breathlessly pious yet technocratic 90s liberalism, was being set up as the "good ending" candidate. And why not? This is a fantasy game after all. It's fun to imagine a dragon president. And back in the Before Times, I loved this plot point (even if I was only familiar with it from the 3e setting recap). But now, in the year 2024?

I read his announcement speech, and when it came to the stirring message of hope and unity, "over the past three hundred-odd years, you have managed to create and sustain a civilization based not on shared blood or cultural conformity, but on shared ideals" my thought was not "wow, what a wise and perceptive dragon" or even "wow, what a cunningly manipulative dragon." It was, "wow, this clown would have absolutely adored Hamilton."

And look, I loved Hamilton too. I still think LMM is a national treasure. But looking back with the benefit of hindsight, we should have all read the fucking room. 

It's embarrassing to admit, but I spent a significant portion of my time here scrutinizing the text for parallels between Brackhaven and Trump. There were some, even aside from both being racists. They were both the scions of privilege who grew up as borderline-failing students only to graduate into a career of lucratively unethical business dealings and both had fraught relationships with their more traditionally successful (and super racist) fathers. But it's likely that those were not consciously established parallels. My memory of this time was dim, but I'm pretty sure Trump was still in his "tabloid fixture national punchline" phase and Brackhaven is meant to be a more serious, credible villain than that. The similarities likely come down to the fact that this particular kind of character has been a persistent blight on the body politic since the founding of the country. Super Tuesday might, therefor, have some insight into a dangerous tendency in American politics, were it not for the fact that it wholesale replaces the country's racial baggage with metahuman nonsense.

It's something I've come to recognize as a FASA trademark. Someone down at HQ must have been fairly well-educated about these matters, relative to the standards of the time, because they keep using progressive ideas to interrogate fantasy tropes, but because they focus on making such nuanced fantasy, they keep giving us these ice-cold takes on real world political issues. One of the commentors actually points out that America is built on stolen land and this provokes an unhinged rebuttal from the white guy - but Captain Chaos, moderator of the Shadowland BBS, brutally shuts that down, deleting 1mp worth of racist ranting . . . leaving only the racial slur the guy used to open the post.

They're sort of the anti-White Wolf in this regard. White Wolf wore its real-world politics on its sleeve, and in my opinion was sincerely and enthusuastically opposed to the various -isms, but would just consistently whiff on being good representation, thanks in large part to its unreflective use of problematic genre tropes. 

Or, to put it another way, compare the fates of the early-appearing queer characters in each franchise. The bisexual heir to a corporate fortune, first introduced in Bug City, meets his canonical end in one of Super Tuesday's adventures - he is quite predictably eaten by one of the giant mantises that was keeping him captive. Whereas the modern-day bard from Tradition Book: Verbena underoges a veritable checklist of gay trauma, to an absolutely upsetting degree, but does at least manage to survive until Revised edition. Those were our options, apparently.  A guy whose sexuality is treated with same sort of casual matter-of-factness as any straight persons, but who is unceremoniously killed off between adventures or a guy who sticks around and is a major part of the story, but the story is an anvilicious tale of highly stereotypical suffering.

I don't know how much organizational continuity exists between old FASA and new FASA, but if anyone wants to make it up to me, I am willing to accept repayment in the form of more Rozko the Unruly content.

But I'm rambling now. I'm more than a thousand words into a post about a silly, 30-year-old rpg supplement and I've made it weird and political and alienating and I've only covered, like a fifth of the actual book. And maybe, if I were a more sensible person, I'd allow this moment of self-reflection to inspire me to go back and start over from scratch. 

I'm not going to do that, however, because Super Tuesday is, in fact, weird and political and alienating. Those are its best features. I mean, it's a book that features a dragon running for president and the dragon is the least interesting thing about it. I haven't even told you Kenneth Brackhaven's big secret yet.

I should. Because it's fucked up. But I'm afraid, because it's the kind of fucked up where I'm not sure I could untangle it even as a pure fantasy conceit and if, during the course of explaining it, I allow myself for even a moment to remember that Shadowrun uses bigotry against metahumans as a stand-in for real-world racism, I will literally fucking implode from pure critical inadequacy.

But because I love what I do, here it goes - the Kenneth Brackhaven who is running for president as a crypto-fascist is not the real Kenneth Brakhaven. Charles Brakhaven's original sun transformed into an ork in the 2021 goblination event. Papa Brakhaven murdered his new ork son in his hospital bed and then some how . . . procured a new child of approximately the same age, who he brainwashed into believing he was the real Kenneth. And then that child grew up to be a huge, fucking racist.

What do I even say to something like that? There's an intuition I've developed as an amatuer critic that tells me there's a lot to say here. Someone who was good at unpacking bullshit would have plenty of material to work with. Words dance in my head. Words like "white rage" and "the intersection between the objectification of children and the objectification of subaltern classes." Maybe even, eventually, "generational trauma" and "is deploying ableist tropes in service to a story about racism more abelist or more racist."

Mostly, though, it's a ringing klaxon: "Do not UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES de-metaphorize this!!!"

There were times when my mind drifted in that direction. Where I remembered the strange quirk of genetics that could cause white parents with African ancestry to have a dark-skinned child. And what might happen if such an event occurred to a prominent member of the KKK. But then, blessedly, my brain shut down in self defense. If you find yourself drawn to continue the thought, I understand, but please do me a favor - after you win history's most inevitable Oscar, kindly leave me out of your acceptance speech.

The adventure itself was pretty good. It was a truncated noir thriller where you discover a dangerous secret about a powerful man and there are meetings and hit-men and payoffs and dead man's drops and ultimately you have to make a choice - do youreveal the truth, knowing that you'll make terrible enemies and ultimately very little will change or do you bury this secret and pretend you never heard it, knowing that once more wicked men will prosper due to your inaction? The only real flaw with the adventure is the ghost of the real Kenneth Brackhaven, who pesters the characters for justice whenever it looks like they'll be too pragmatic. Having him kick things off with a chance haunting that inspires the characters to dig deeper is a nice nod to Shadowrun's fantasy elements. But if you need him to stick around to keep the adventure on track, you shouldn't be running the adventure.

Finally, we come to the real, burning question: which of the six candidates (it's unclear how much of Canada is in the United Canadian and American States, but apparently the US's current incentives towards a two party system are not relevant) I would vote for?

The official endorsement of the editorial board of this blog for the 2057 UCAS presidential election must go to the Democratic party candidate, Arthur Vogel. An unusually effective and committed environmental lawyer, who has secured big settlements for many high profile cases, he has that rare combination of personal principles and ruthless pragmatism that makes for a truly great political reformer. He may lack Dunkelzahn's superhuman intellect, but he also lacks the dragon's aristocratic paternalism.  No candidate is more qualified to go toe-to-toe with the megacorporations on behalf of the UCAS public. 

Of course, I have the advantage of knowing Vogel's dirty little secret,  and while I'm not entirely sure how it played in 1996 (the words "protection racket" may have been used), in 2024, in the context of a crime caper rpg, it makes him look cool as shit.

Like, in the real world, I would not approve of a high powered lawyer who sued corporate polluters and then, when it looked like negotiations would stall, he'd tap his contacts in the radical environmentalist movement to engage in targeted ecoterrorism designed to bring the corporation back to the table.  However, the name of the game is "Shadowrun" and all the megacorporations he's squeezing also use deniable black ops to get their way. If people are already out there hiring criminals for the sake of shareholder profits, then it's nice to know that someone is out there doing it for the good guys too.

The way the book framed the adventure was a little weird, though. It's treated like a revenge thriller, but it's never quite clear what this guy wants revenge for. Sure, he is the sole survivor of an op that went sideways, horribly maiming him in the process, but the overall mission was a success. Vogel won the case, the chemical in question was banned, and the corporation never recovered financially from the hit.

I could see someone resenting the fact that being a deniable asset means poor post-op support or that while everyone has their part to play in the revolution, some people's part is to nearly get killed in terrorist attacks and other people's part is three martini lunches and six figure salaries. But honestly, if I'm an ecoterrorist, willing to lay down my life for Mother Gaia, then I really want someone like Vogel on my side - an educated professional with the knowledge, resources, and connections to turn my radical direct action into lasting legal victories.

So I  kind of have to assume that the antagonist is so overwhelmed by grief and pain that he's no longer thinking clearly. Otherwise, the adventure would be very weird with its "how fitting, the environmental activist, killed by the very chemical he fought to have banned, on account of its unnecessary deadliness. Ironic."

Overall, I'd say that Super Tuesday would be a very effective adventure series.  . . were it not a relic of our lost national innocence. I can only hope that coming years will leave us with a democracy for it to fail to represent. Nothing would depress me more than looking at old cyberpunk and wistfully mourning it's unrealistic optimism.

Ukss Contribution: The second adventure has the PCs dosed with a substance that erases their recent memories. Later when the people that dosed them are trying to recover a stolen item the PCs were trying to traffic, the investigation is stymied by their total and sincere lack of memory about the time period when the crime took place. Bit of an own goal by Tir Tangir. But the potential for such hilarity makes Laes, the memory erasing drug, a nice inclusion for the world of Ukss. There will probably also be a polity that uses it for routine border enforcement, just like the Tir, because I like to see the abuse of power backfire.

(D&D 3.5) Complete Psionic

Complete Psionic (Bruce R Cordell and Christopher Lindsay) is a deeply weird book. The mean way to put it is "it feels like a psionics book for people who don't like psionics." The nice way to put it is . . . "hey, man, I get it. Psionics are an acquired taste and don't exactly fit in with D&D's overall vibe."

Taken on its own merits, Complete Psionic is a fine book, but, well . . . it fits in with D&D's overall vibe. That's why you're going to want to use it. You like the Expanded Psionics Handbook's spell point system, but you want to play a cleric or a paladin.

I'm not exaggerating. One of the prestige classes is called the "Illumine Blade" and they build off EPH's Soulknife class to create a psychic blade infused with positive energy that is especially inimical to undead. They're a cool class with an attractive niche - you're exploding skeletons with a holy light sabre - but there's nothing even the slightest bit new age or weird-tales-esque about them. Call me a grump if you must, but in my day, psionics was either crystals and meditation or biopunk aliens from beyond the realms of human understanding, and paladins were something else entirely.

I mean, the book isn't totally unhip. Illithids are here, and PCs can buy a series of heritage feats to gradually transform into one. Many of the magic items incorporate crystals. There are two distinct powers that let you explode someone's head like in Scanners. And the new Synad race - human-looking aliens that have a three-part composite mind and manifest ghostly extra heads when their psychic energy is low - is properly weird. But it never quite reaches the two previous psionic books' levels of genre-bending.

Which leaves me wondering - why bother bringing psionics into this at all? Why not just give more stuff to regular spellcasters (for example, there is nothing at all that would break about the Storm Disciple class if you replaced its manifester levels with spellcaster levels)? I'm not complaining. I like psionics both as a genre and as a system. I could easily see myself running a game where the psion class is reskinned to represent the setting's wizards. But there is something inherently unsettling about seeing a fault line, even if it's in no danger of being an immediate problem.

Honestly, though, my notes for this one were pretty sparse. Mostly just nitpicking rules decisions - like why can't the granted power from a psionic location be renewed after it wears off? You go to the Crystal Node, attune with it, and gain 5 extra power points for the next year, but then once that year is up, you gain nothing by going back. And it's unclear exactly what the balance consideration is really supposed to be? If 5 extra power points are too strong to give someone indefinitely, then they are too strong to for a year's worth of adventures (which may well be an entire campaign, rendering the limitation truly moot). Similarly, if you can trust a PC to have them for a whole year, it's unlikely that something new is going to break in year 2. But really? It would be a pissant move for me to make that the book's problem. It's the easiest thing in the world to houserule.

Setting those aside, the other theme of my notes is "things I liked" - the aforementioned synads, the implication that there's a mountain range whose frequent storms are caused by frolicking blue dragons (I choose to believe that they're frolicking because the color-coded dragon alignments can kiss my ass), or the feat that lets you wear an astral construct as armor. Why are there not more ectoplasmic mechs in fiction? The world demands an answer!

Overall, I'd say that Complete Psionic will linger in my mind as "more D&D" and that's okay. I may be happiest when I pick up a new D&D book and it shows me something that's not quite D&D, but I'm also perfectly content with excess. We are a "more is more" blog around these parts, and on that score Complete Psionic delivers.

Ukss Contribution: Synads. They're strange and unprecedented enough to pose a real challenge to incorporate, but I think I'm up for it. 

(Shadowrun) Bug City

One thing I really appreciate about these old FASA books is their unabashed fiction-first approach. It makes them easy to read. Instead of feeling like I'm pushing my way through a series of encyclopedia entries, I feel like I'm listening in on a conversation, where characters with different personalities and points of view react to interesting fantasy/sci-fi happenings in a realistic way.

The downside of this is that sometimes, as happens in Bug City, you'll get a situation where you spend 2-3 pages of valuable rpg supplement real estate on technobabble error messages, characters shouting each other's names in a panicked role-call, and just generally being confused. Yeah, congratulations FASA, you effectively communicated the confusing nature of the early days of the Chicago quarantine by being legitimately confusing to me, as a reader. What's going on? Bedlam. I get it. A more responsible rpg supplement would have condensed that down to a single sentence, "The underground shadowrunner message boards were in a panic as access to the outside grid was shut down," but you do you.

And, if I'm being honest, I'd have found my suggested approach to be terribly dry, so there are advantages to doing it your way. It's just not very efficient.

Granted, efficiency isn't necessarily what you want when you're trying to tell a fantasy/sci-fi/horror story about a city being locked down and abandoned after an extradimensional invasion by body-snatching bug spirits, but just a little bit more efficiency might have helped me focus more on potential shadowrunning activities. As it was, I spent most of the book thinking, "whoa, these guys are really screwed, aren't they?"

As an adventuring environment, bug-ridden Chicago has a lot going for it. You're trapped behind these makeshift walls, and if you get too close to the barrier, the UCAS military will gun you down. There's an oppressive claustrophobia to it that really heightens the bleakness of the breakdown of public order, the roving gangs and warlords (though the book doesn't actually make clear what the difference is), and the brutal survival elements (money is basically worthless, so you have to barter and ration your essential equipment if you're going to get anything done). Then you have the insect spirits themselves as a persistent inhuman threat, combining body horror with the reflexive disgust that comes from seeing a really gross bug. 

There's a tenor of apocalyptic desperation where Bug City would work really well - you're fighting monsters with one hand and defending yourself from human threats with the other, all the while the world is falling down around you and there's a sense that it doesn't need to be that way. If the UCAS were a better government, if it actually cared about its people, it wouldn't have abandoned them. It's a pointless waste of human life and potential, driven by a timorous and indifferent response to a genuine outside context problem. You can definitely make that into a memorable game.

The only thing that really holds Bug City back is the titular bugs. So much about the insect spirits is needlessly . . .  Shadowrun-y. The fact that they're spirits, for one. It's a decision that's very logically rooted in the setting metaphysics - they're invaders from the metaplanes, those uncharted spirit worlds beyond the astral that no one's quite sure whether they literally exist or are created whenever a person thinks about them too hard - but their origin overwhelms every other interesting thing about them. The reason the locals are having such a hard time dealing with the invasion has more to do with the fact that the invaders are spirits than the fact that they are bugs. Some of the creatures spend most of their time manifested, and nobody's sure why they do that because in astral space they are immune to most conventional weapons. They need to infect physical bodies in order to reproduce, but a successful reproduction results in a new spirit and the half-bug physical creatures known as "flesh forms" are just weak merges. Someone tried to blow up a hive with a nuclear bomb, and that didn't really kill them, but it did cause inspect spirits throughout the containment zone to go into a kind of torpor where they rest inactively in the astral realm until strong magic passes too close and they wake up again. And this last thing is a big mystery because magical theory suggests a nuclear bomb shouldn't have done anything at all.

That's not how you do zerg, guys. The way I see it, the insect spirits need three traits to be an effective apocalypse/horror threat. First, they need to be primarily physical and act mostly in the physical world. You need to be under the impression that this is a threat you can answer primarily with bullets. Second, they need to reproduce and expand at an exponential rate, so that it becomes clear that containment was never a viable long-term plan. Finally, they need to be just strange enough that your most obvious ideas won't necessarily work. Nuking the hive buys you some time, but it doesn't actually decisively solve the problem.

The way I'd do it is reverse the relationship between true forms and flesh forms. As it is, only the most powerful insect spirits can exist as pure spirits, which ultimately means that their attempt to establish a beachhead in the physical world is more of a side-effect of the queens' presence in the astral than it is a direct goal. If they were weak and tenuous in astral form and only really gained their full powers in physical form, then that makes the physical world the ultimate prize in the conflict. Destroying their physical bodies would be a significant victory, but it's not decisive, because they can bounce back from spirit form.

Or to put it another way, fighting a queen is supposed to be the boss battle, but if the queens are strongest as true form spirits, then only the magical characters can truly contribute. If their power comes instead from their physical forms, then the climax of the adventure happens when the whole party is beating the shit out of them, and the part about getting rid of them once and for all by banishing their spirits back to the metaplanes can be part of the denouement. Or, maybe, the queens are just helpless baby factories that would be easily dispatched . . . if you didn't have all these flesh form workers and soldiers in the way. 

It's a minor complaint, though. I wonder if it just comes from having high-level access to the mechanics of the game. Maybe players who were encountering flesh forms as terrain hazards in unrelated heist or human v human conflict games would just view them as creepy bug monsters (i.e. all they ever had to be). 

This is also, indirectly, a sourcebook about using the city of Chicago in the Shadowrun universe. The setting chapter is very helpfully written as an "out of date" guide to Chicago as it was, with insect-invasion-related changes added on as annotations to the text. It's a useful bit of cyberpunk worldbuilding, with corporate conflict, a corrupt relationship between city hall and organized crime, and the occasional weird fantasy stuff.

I'm not sure how I feel about "ghoul rights" being framed as a civil rights issue. Yes, they are fully intelligent people, suffering from a disease that they didn't ask for (there's even talk of second-generation ghouls, who were born infected), but some of them also really sound like they want to kill and eat people. I guess I'd need a little bit more context to know for sure which side I'm on (it's unclear exactly how radical "murder for purposes of anthropophagy" is among Chicago's ghouls). Post-invasion, they make an interesting third faction - able to defend themselves against the insect spirits, thanks to their ghoul powers, but with no love lost for uninfected metahumans, who herded them into an open-air prison and threatened to wipe them out before all this shit went down. I do feel like Ghoultown's post-apocalyptic practice of hiring street gangs to bring them "food" (i.e. living humans who they will subsequently kill and eat) makes them considerably less sympathetic. But I do kind of like the idea the containment zone is trapped between an incipient bug apocalypse and an incipient zombie apocalypse, and the zombies just happen to be the doom that can be reasoned with.

Finally, I've got to say something a bit uncomfortable - this is a book about futuristic sci-fi Chicago that does not have a single identifiably Black character. A couple of the art pieces could be interpreted to have Black subjects, but it's ambiguous (because it's a black-and-white drawing with moody lighting and post-apocalyptic levels of dirt and ash). Certainly, none of the named characters in the "movers and shakers" section were identified that way (though not all are white - one of them is Sioux). I'm pretty sure this is just a 1994 oops, but it's particularly noticeable here because there is a bit of fly-by bisexual representation (the son of a powerful corporate executive who has not yet been eaten his mantis spirt domme because he's too cute). So we know for a fact that FASA was capable of remembering this sort of thing, but they inexplicably didn't. 

Overall, I thought this was a pretty fun book that pitches a campaign I'd actually want to play (with only a little bit of tweaking), but it doesn't really reach the heights of FASA at its best, so I'm inclined to judge it more harshly than if I were reading the exact same book from some of its contemporaries. Still, I bought it because it filled a metaplot gap that I'd long been curious about, and I was largely satisfied with its performance in that regard. I guess, technically, it's the second-best Shadowrun book I've read so far (Threats was more interesting and more gameable), but I have a feeling that's because I'm just getting started.

Ukss Contribution: In the old, pre-invasion Chicago, there was a series of conflicts known popularly as "the Alderman Wars." As a concept, it's not that amusing: different districts of the city competed for resources and tax dollars, so their local representatives hired criminals to wage proxy wars on each other in a mad scramble for civic graft. But I do find the name to be absolutely precious. I think it's because "alderman" is such a specific and old-timey sounding title. It adds a certain charming fin de siecle quality to your wide-ranging gang wars. There will be a city in Ukss with a similar governmental structure that is similarly corrupt.

(D&D 3.5) Complete Mage

To me, the image that will forever exemplify Complete Mage (Skip Williams, Penny Williams, Ari Marmell, Kolja Raven Liquette) in my mind is the "Rod of Many Wands." It's a magical rod that lets you slot in up to three magic wands, and subsequently activate all the loaded wands at the exact same time.

I'm trying to imagine how I would feel, as a DM, if a player came to me pitching that bullshit as a homebrew. I think I'd find it funny, but I'm haunted by the idea that I'd find it so funny that I started to be a bit rude about it. Because it really does seem like something from the depths of power-gamer parody ("let me tape these three wands together so I can use them with a single action"), so much so that it's hard to believe that idea was offered in good faith. My knee-jerk reaction would be to assume that the player was testing me, seeing what ridiculous nonsense they could get me to say "yes" to. I worry that I would so quickly leap to that conclusion that I might inadvertently quash the enthusiasm of a novice player.

And yet, here it is, in an official supplement. This baroque, power-gaming monstrosity is canon. And that is something I find very funny. But I don't wanna be a dick about it. The item is probably roughly balanced by the massive number of wand charges it consumes (one per wand per wand, so a maxed out rod would use nine total wand charges - three from each of its three wands) and the burden that would place on your expected wealth per level. My only real problem with it is aesthetic. The Rod of Many Wands feels like something that was designed backwards from its effect, rather than as something that grew organically out of the logic of the game world.

That's what makes it so representative of the book to me. Very little of the Complete Mage material is similarly laughable, but most of it shares that same function-first agenda. You've got the Eldritch Disciple and Eldritch Theurge prestige classes, which are obviously meant as Warlock/Cleric and Warlock/Wizard multiclass patches, a la the 3.5 DMG's Mystic Theurge, the reserve feats, which are meant to mitigate the notorious 15 minute workday by giving casters more endurance in exchange for not using their highest level spell slots right away, and a bunch of magical locations that, while not unappealing, were clearly designed by moving down a checklist and creating one for each school of magic.

I never got past the sense that I was reading a pure workhorse of a book, something that tweaked arcane casters by identifying mechanical hooks for new abilities, but which never quite got around to building up a fantasy universe.

It wasn't all (or even mostly) bad. I actually quite liked the direction they were going with the Eldritch Disciple. A pact mage that worshipped their patron, despite the various fey, demons, and devils being a tier below true gods, or maybe just a heretic priest who had a really inappropriately personal relationship with the faith's deity. Both of those interpretations would make for great character concepts and intriguing hooks to explore religious expression in a fantasy world. But while the text drops a few nods in those directions, it never really gets off the ground. I'd say it stops just when it gets interesting, but it actually stops some time before that point.

It's an experience that kept happening throughout the book. There were moments when it would flirt with the sublime - like the stormstrider boots that allowed their wearer to turn into a lightning bolt and flash across the battlefield or the Crystalline Memories spell, which somehow transforms the target's thoughts into a small crystal that shoots out of their head like a bullet (the accompanying art is disgusting in the best possible way, but of course it only does 2d8 damage) where the caster can later examine it at their leisure - but every time it gets close, it quickly moves on to more box-checking filler. Ultimately, it was a book about the arcane caster classes, not about characters in the setting who wielded arcane magic.

And maybe that's actually okay. It is a supplement for a roleplaying game, after all. It's entirely fair for it to cover its mechanical bases and leave the stuff about themes and worldbuilding to the players. I may not have enjoyed reading it as much as I did Magic of the Incarnum or Tome of Magic, but I am significantly more likely to use it in a game.

Just warn me before you try and buy a Rod of Many Wands, okay? It will take time for me to react appropriately.

Ukss Contribution: I once again find myself in the awkward position of having my favorite thing in the book be something incredibly goofy. I always wonder if I'm being mean by liking something like this, because I find it funny in an unironically enjoyable way, but I can't tell if it was meant to be funny, or even just understood as possibly being funny. I'm going to go forward here, though, because I'm sure they at least suspected someone would have this reaction when they wrote the Tomb of Bigby.

For those not up on their D&D nerdery, Bigby is a famous name due to a series of distinctive spells (Bigby's clenched fist, Bigby's crushing hand, Bigby's forceful hand, Bigby's grasping hand, Bigby's interposing hand, and the newcomer published here Bigby's Slapping hand . . . and those were only the official ones I could find with a 30 second internet search). In this book, we get a peek at his final resting place.

Can you guess the decorating motif?

I don't know what I find funnier, the idea that Bigby built this tomb for himself, implying that he lived his life very conspicuously being "the hand guy" (I'm picturing a b-list celebrity going around offering people high fives and then being disappointed when they don't immediately lose their fucking minds) or that he was actually kind of just a regular wizard who got on a roll with this particular magic, but after he died that was all people remembered him for and so they built him this garish, hand-themed tomb out of a misguided urge to honor him. 

Either way, it's hard to imagine using the location in a game without it rapidly devolving into farce . . . but then again, everyone loves a good farce, so why not go for it?

Eclipse Phase ( 2nd Edition )

First things first: thanks a bunch to Adam from Posthuman Studios for sending me a review copy. Even though I already had a copy thanks to the BLM bundle, I'm humbled and grateful for the vote of confidence. 

Now, to repay that honor with the most brutal takedown the internet has ever seen! Mwa, ha, ha!

Oh, wait, I actually thought Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition was pretty okay, which maybe sounds like kind of a lukewarm endorsement, but it's really more of a situation where my specific use case made me the wrong person to read this particular book at this particular time.  I have just finished reading all the 1st edition lore. The last thing I need is a condensed and streamlined version of the previous books that cherry picks the best parts of canon and presents them in an attractive volume that acts as a compelling entry point to this expansive and fascinating sci-fi universe. 

I mean gawd, what were you thinking? Real boneheaded move on your part. Know your audience, people (that audience being obsessive internet weirdos who buy the complete series, leave it untouched on a bookshelf for the better part of a decade and then stubbornly insist on reading it all at once - you know, the core fans).

Oh, I do have fun around here sometimes.  Anyway, my main experience with this book mostly involved alternating between approval that the rules are noticeably easier to use (though not light, by any means) and repeated deja vu. Going over my notes, it doesn't look like anything stood out as new or surprising, but religion and ethnicity are handled a bit better. You still get some of that atheist spicy take, but it no longer feels like something I should be apologizing for. 

The other big thing going through my mind right now is the same thing that always happens when I read a conservative new edition of a beloved rpg - I'm wishing it was considerably less conservative. 

It's probably my most broadly contentious rpg opinion, but I really like it when subsequent editions shake things up, even at the cost of being incompatible with each other. Maybe it's just projection on my part. I constantly feel the urge to tinker, even (no, especially) with things I love. Hell, I just finished writing 500 pages of Ukss d20 and I couldn't even get through the announcement thread without brainstorming a rules overhaul. 

However, I don't think it's pure projection. It's probably equal parts the collector's curse - a need for novelty sufficient to justify my expenditures. Though, the biggest factor is just that I love seeing multiple variants of the same basic idea (my second biggest hobby is video games, but 3rd place is collecting Tarot decks, and there are few things in this world that thrill me more than an artist trying their hand at the Rider-Waite minor arcana). Call me jaded if you must, but when someone impresses me with a cool new setting, the main thing I want is for them to do it again - by going back to square one and redesigning from first principles. To me, the mark of a successful adaptation is when it gives me a whole new set of things to complain about. 

And by that standard, Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition is not a successful adaptation. Don't get me wrong,  I'd use it in preference to 1st edition 100% of the time, but I still have all the same issues - I wish it were more openly punk, that its focus be more on factional conflict, that the TITANs and ETI were slightly less mysterious and slightly more gameable. Though only that last one comes close to being a fatal flaw for me - when a mystery is too mysterious, I'm more likely to check out than be intrigued.  . . I mean,  c'mon, why are you being so coy about the party responsible for the interdiction of Earth? Sure, there are multiple interesting answers, but they aren't so interesting that I would be served better by having the freedom to decide myself than I would by having the answer well-integrated into the rest of the setting. 

My overall opinion of Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition is positive. I still greatly enjoy the world and have high hopes for the stories that can be told in that world.  It carries the torch admirably.  . .

And I made it. I got through the entire series without getting mired in the Continuity of Consciousness debate. What? You thought I didn't notice? That I merely overlooked this major theme? No, my friends, I was sweating bullets, trying to find literally anything else to talk about. 

It's not that I find the subject uninteresting. Quite the opposite, actually.  It's more that conversations about it always seem to run in circles.  I think because the idea of copying an entire human mind is so far out of our experience that we don't have the metaphysical vocabulary to talk about it productively. 

Like, am I really going to develop a theory of asymmetrical ontology just to talk about an idea from sci-fi that is at best an untenable engineering problem on the scale of a Dyson Sphere?  It's basically the coastline paradox applied to the the most complex structure in the known universe. To even get to the point where you can talk about the implications of mind state duplicates for the nature of identity, you have to first decide how much of your brain you're comfortable losing to rounding error, because I guarantee that there's no conceivable technology that will reduce it to zero. 

Although, I'm actually probably okay with calling something a true duplicate, even with a certain amount of error.  . . provided it's the right kind of error. They say drinking alcohol causes brain damage, and you don't have people shrieking in horror about how they can't recognize themselves in the mirror every time they enjoy a glass of chardonnay, so there are probably parts of the brain it's safe to round off. I wouldn't necessarily bet my life on it, but I can see how characters in a story might be willing to take that risk.

Though on an immediate level, that means I can't really talk about this with the proper level of investment.  I'd be comfortable saying that a "suffiently similar" duplicate would truly be me, and I would then proceed to blow minds by staking out the position that this is not contradictory with the statement that "I am not the duplicate." I would then explain that I thought the mere existence of this technology would irrevocably change the very nature of our being, to become something more akin to clonal megaflora and the relative independence of each individual bud does not detract from my sense that the interconnected structure as a whole is a meaningful form of immortality. 

Except I'm not going to do that, because I don't think "suffiently similar " is a realistically achievable goal. And that belief changes what sort of questions I'm interested in. Complexity theory argues persuasively against the possibility of duplicating a specific human brain, but it also suggests that making a generic human brain might be easier than you'd expect (the Google search you want is "algorithm for creating Sierpinski Triangle"). It may even be the case that the complexity of the human brain is not a design necessity for intelligence and consciousness, but rather an artifact of biological life's low temperature tolerance, meager energy budget, and evolutionary path dependence. I.e. it's not a minimally complex intelligence machine, but rather the form an intelligence machine takes if you build it stepwise under the constraint that you can only power it with nuts and berries and thus each increase in capability must directly translate into better berry collecting abilities. 

I'm left wondering how those two tendencies - the inevitability of rounding error and the possibility that you can still achieve human-like intelligence with a simplified brain - might dovetail in a transhuman setting.  Like maybe the technology is only half baked, so that no one is claiming (persuasively) that mind state emulations are true duplicates of the people they came from, but they are still undeniably people and that's the state of the art when the singularity happens. 

The selection pressure of the apocalypse means that when the dust settles, the bulk of the survivors are the mind state emulations of those desperate, naive, or ignorant enough to think that this was a viable means of escape. Perhaps the Jovians and the inner system elites were the only ones to escape with their original bodies intact, and the punk element is driven by the fact that these guys see themselves as the only real people in a world of ghosts (not to justify their worldview, but to reify a metaphor for how bigots and the rich already view the people they oppress). After the Fall, millions of minds woke up and realized they were not exactly as they were before, and that they would never truly be the person they remembered themselves to be, but they were, indeed people and they were still alive, which means that despite the burden of that knowledge, they would have to make a life for themselves in the ashes of the world their progenitors destroyed (although, if you really want to twist the knife, increase the level of responsibility the "surviving humans" have for the apocalypse  - who built the TITANS, who deployed them in a military capacity- why it's the very same people claiming your infomorph is property/an unholy abomination).

Anyway, that's where I'm at. I read most of the published Eclipse Phase books and I'm inspired to run two fringe variants - the world of low-res ghosts and the activation of project kudzu. Maybe I'm in a pessimistic mood.

Ukss Contribution: Some asteroids deter claim jumpers by having booby traps that will fling an intruder away at the local escape velocity.  This willingness to put such a cartoon image into a role playing game with such heavy themes is precisely why I love Eclipse Phase as much as I do. 

(D&D 3.5) Complete Divine

 We're in a Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy world. What does it mean that there are gods? That they can grant their followers magic powers? That it's possible for a mortal to become a god? That it's possible for a god to die?

Complete Divine (David Noonan) doesn't even pretend to address those questions. It's mostly just a pretty decent magic book. I shouldn't fault it for taking the Cleric, Druid, and Paladin classes for granted. It would be unreasonable of me to expect it to overturn 30 years of D&D failing to understand religious magic (or even, really, Christian miracles).

But I can't entirely get past it. The gods are just these guys, you know? There's a god of slaughter. Why is there a god of slaughter? And to be clear, I'm not saying there shouldn't be. But you've given this guy a bunch of priests and made those priests the same class as the Van Helsing-inspired priests of Pelor and the total nerds who worship Boccob, and . . . why is that? What is Erythnul's role in Dnd-land's culture? What stories do people tell about him? There's a historical precedent with man-slaughtering Ares, who was often scorned, but also a part of the fabric of Greek life. Does a farmer with a shrine to Pelor in their fields call upon the dark curses of Erythnul when the militia is in pitched battle with bandits or goblins?

No, of course not. The gods all run separate and parallel organizations. The situational evocation of different deities based on the needs of the moment is too complex. It doesn't let you put people into neat little boxes. Erthnul is an evil god, and so he has a bunch of evil followers who just want to do evil all day long.

I find it kind of hard to care about this style of worldbuilding. The Church Inquisitor prestige class has an alignment restriction of "Lawful Good or Lawful Neutral." Not only do we have the priests of slaughter setting up a tax-exempt religious organization, we've also got the good kind of Inquisition. And . . . I just . . . can't.

I mean, I guess I could, if I wanted to. There's some good flavor here. I really liked the Stormlord prestige class. Again, not sure why they're priests, but "cool lightning powers" is something I can get behind. It might be possible to break down the D&D pantheon and whip up a myth cycle that puts them all into a coherent cultural context.

How would I do it, exactly? As is traditional, the first thing to go would have to be alignment. After that, I'd go after the redundancies between the human and the non-human gods. Consolidate the overlapping roles under the more interesting of the two characters - so Erythnul becomes Gruumsh, Heironeous becomes Bahamut, etc. Then I'd try to work them into a creation story - an allegory for humanity's relationship with the natural world. 

Okay, so we've got Bahamut, who represents the force of law and that can be generalized to a benevolent organizing principle. So his counterpart, Tiamat, should represent base physical matter, the primordial elemental forces that make up creation, as befits her five dragon heads. It is the union between these two (a marriage? a battle? both?) that results in the current physical world - senseless, intractable matter brought under the rule of cosmic law. That, incidentally, suggests a metaphysical basis for magic. Perhaps a branch of theurgy that seeks to recreate this fusion in the microcosm.

Then we lead into the other gods. I keep thinking about the fact that Corellon's got two major antagonists - Gruumsh and Lolth. It makes me think that maybe he's the problem, that antagonism is part of his whole deal. If we approach him from that angle, I think we can roll D&D pantheon's other big antagonist pairing - Garl Glittergold vs Kurtulmak - into him as well. Corellon is GG now too. This screams "culture hero" to me. So let's define the pantheon around Corellon's rivalries. The eldest gods are the trio of Gruumsh, Lolth, and Kurtulmak, the original children of Bahamut and Tiamat.

What I want to say here is that Guumsh, Lolth, and Kurtulmak should represent a thematic triad. Specifically, they are the natural world as it is before it was tamed by human(oid) industry. What we know is that Gruumsh is all about battle and slaughter, Lolth is a trickster who is associated with darkness and spiders, and Kurtulmak . . . is kind of a joke, actually, though his associations with traps and kobolds offers some possibilities. Let's call them, collectively, the law of pure survival. The ancient terrors. The animal emotions - rage, fear, and hunger. Civilized people want to deny them, but they are always there. They will save your life when all your arts and knowledge and values have failed you. They are invoked into secrecy and desperate times, when there is an enemy you must destroy, a secret you must hide, or an object you must possess. 

Corellon represents the ability to operate outside that rubric. He is the rebel against the rule of survival, the Author of Joy, the god of skill and knowledge in the abstract and he has a thousand stories about things he invented, tricks he played on the first gods, victories against hatred, ignorance, and greed that he won through applied cleverness. I think he's an ascended mortal. And in true D&D fashion, I think the other major demihuman deities are an adventuring party he recruited to oppose the three. Kord was chosen to counter Gruumsh - strength used for protection, self-improvement, recreation, and honest competition, as opposed to "defeat means death, and thus victory at any cost." Yollanda has most of Pelor's purview now, and she is bright and honest and nurturing, in contrast to Lolth's tendency to horde secrets, hide in darkness, and look out only for herself. And Moradin is a counter to Kurtulmak. The cunning god of hunger uses his intellect to accumulate and consume and prey on others, but Moradin is about using craft to multiply blessings, to make the whole community richer than it was before.

All the intelligent species honor the entire pantheon, but there are nuances. Collectively, they are called "the Four, the Three, and the Two," and there's disagreements about what the emphasis for mortal devotion should be. Like, most organized settlements will say that the Four are the only suitable objects of worship. You call upon Kord when you've got hard work you have to do, Yollanda when you have an injury that needs healing, a child that needs to be cared for, or a crop that needs tending, Moradin when you are trying to build or create something, and Corellon when you need to do something really well. The Three are frequently invoked under this paradigm, but furtively. It's dark magic, and technically forbidden, but people do forbidden things all the time. The Two are considered too abstract to be much concerned with mortal affairs. There's a paladin order that's dedicated to Bahamut, but he's more of an ideal than a patron.

(Incidentally, the demihuman gods work a bit differently here. Instead of various peoples being created by particular gods, they all just sort of emerged at the birth of the world. Corellon is associated with elves, because it's believed that Corellon was an ascended elf, likewise, Kord is traditionally an ascended human or orc, Yollanda an ascended goblin or halfling, and Moradin an ascended dwarf or gnome, though honestly, each of the gods has a hundred different depictions - the centaurs believe that all of the Four were originally Centaurs and that humans and horses came about because Corellon lost a bet with Lolth).

Although, that's not the only way people relate to the gods. Some people, not even particularly wicked people, put the Three at the heart of their religion. They are ultimately the terrible gods of nature that connect humanoid creatures with their animal roots. They are the law of survival, and groups that honor the Three often make the case that it dishonors their ancestors to act like the urges they relied on are somehow dark or dirty. They view the Three in a more naturalistic light, admiring Grummsh's fearlessness, Lolth's adaptability, and Kurulmak's pragmatism, and don't necessarily agree that surrendering themselves to the primal emotions automatically means they plan on victimizing other people.

Some people put the Two at the forefront, but it's considered a particularly intellectualized brand of theology, and thus mostly appropriate to theurgists, wizards, mystics, and dragons.

There's even a religion that speculates that there must have been a One, to precede the Two. Most people have a hard time denying that it would fit the pattern, but conventional wisdom says that if there is a One, it can have no particular properties because it has nothing to contrast itself against.

Well . . . um, I guess I wandered pretty far off course when talking about Complete Divine. That's because my overall opinion of the book was that it was pretty okay, provided you're willing to spot it D&D's ridiculous portrayal of religion. It's got a bunch of useful prestige classes, even if some of them borrow too much from medieval Christianity. The collection of feats and spells is attractive. I think the relic system has the same basic problem that crops up whenever D&D tries to do a new, themed category of magic items - the extra backstory behind the items makes them so much more interesting than default magic items that I wind up thinking I'd rather just change how magic items work than use this new category and the old-style items side-by-side.

In other words, I had very little to complain about, so I had to make something up.

Ukss Contribution: Armor of the Fallen Leaves. I just think it's a cool image.

The Traveller Book

Reading old rpgs is weird. Because there is definitely a date in the past where I would have loved The Traveller Book (Marc Miller), but it's not necessarily a date in my past. If it's the year 1983, well, then John Frazer is just a wee little baby and not in much of a position to have an opinion on the relative merits of rpgs. And if I'm 15 or 16 years old, well, that's 1998 or so and rpgs have had a lot of time to get more sophisticated. Even though I can see the line of influence that leads from The Traveller Book to White Wolf's Trinity, plain as day, young me would definitely have preferred Trinity.

But there's a hypothetical scenario where I'm magically transported as my adult self back to the early 80s, absent my knowledge of roleplaying games, and if I'm coming into The Traveller Book straight off of AD&D 1st edition, my thought is "whoa, this is an amazing breath of fresh air."

The question I'm forced to grapple with in 2024 is how much of a curve am I supposed to be grading on. Forgive my harshness here, but The Traveller Book manages to achieve absolutely astonishing levels of blandness in its sci-fi worldbuilding. I'm sitting here at my computer. I've finished reading the book less than an hour ago, and here's what I can remember without consulting my notes:

• Space feudalism: the major interstellar government is called The Imperium and it's ruled by an Emperor (not sure if he was given a specific name).
• The current government is actually the third empire, having emerged from a period of technological regression known as The Long Night.
• Some trading vessels are subsidized by the government.
• The origin of the human species is murky, but prior to recorded history there were human populations on multiple planets. No one's sure how they got there.
• There's a group called The Traveller's Aid Society. The benefits of membership are unclear, but it takes a million credits to join.
• There are psychic powers, taught by The Psionic Institute. One of the big populations of humans, who decided not to join the empire, has a noble class that trains psionically.
• There is no special FTL communication aside from FTL travel itself. The empire is held together by mail carriers who operate a "pony express" style relay service.
• The Emperor and nobles invest heavily in megacorporations, interstellar businesses so large that their various divisions don't always know about each others' existence.

And that's pretty much it. It's not bad, by any means, but it acts like it has nothing to prove, and it absolutely does. It's like if you took Star Wars or Dune and filed the serial numbers off so hard that all that was left was a series of vague bumps that communicate the idea of a setting. Though maybe I'm putting too much on a slim volume whose main purpose was to consolidate and reprint the books from the original Traveller boxed set. According to the last page, even at this early date there were almost a dozen supplements, a similar number of adventures, various boardgames and a quarterly magazine that had been running for at least two years. It's likely that this is a Forgotten Realms type situation, where you've got a setting that emerged from the primordial ur-chaos of the late 70s wargamer/speculative fiction fandom overlap in which roleplaying was born. I once dinged the Alternity core for making too many unearned assumptions with its implied setting, but in retrospect, it's obvious that they ware following a path laid down by Traveller. As they say, the devil's in the details, and I'm sure there's plenty of complex, specific canon by which Traveller fans can distinguish it from the alternatives.

Although, not much actually made it into the book. Fair enough, for a reference volume that has no greater ambition than giving you the rules to play in a pre-established science fiction universe, but not an ideal entry point for someone coming into the franchise totally ignorant.

Mostly, though, I think it's a branding issue. The Traveller Book carves out a niche for itself not by being distinct from other sci-fi settings, but by being distinct from Dungeons & Dragons. I mean, yeah, one of the adventures is a keyed map where you explore an ancient ruin, but the ruin in this case is a mysterious alien pyramid with anti-aircraft lasers on a planet where the corrosive atmosphere is gradually, but inevitably eating through the characters' space suits. It would have blown my fucking mind if my only frame of reference was AD&D.

The game itself is also pretty well designed . . . relative to its age. It feels like I've unearthed a fascinating transitional fossil between two distinct species - the "wargame with a narrative overlay" of early D&D and the "story game with a tactical combat system" of more modern games. There's a lot of talk about character motivations and interacting with NPCs to drive story-style plots, but then it's all superimposed on a table-driven hexcrawl that seems like it's going to be the bulk of the actual campaign. It's like you're trying to wrangle this mechanistic procedural generation into a coherent narrative using the power of improv. 

I think a more self-aware version of this approach could yield a really interesting game, but The Traveller Book came too early in rpg history for that self-awareness to be possible. It didn't have enough to contrast itself against to know how to play to its strengths.

Take the book's most infamous mechanic - it's possible to die during character creation. It's a weird, wild idea that burned itself into rpg legend. I've heard it talked about many times over the years, always with a tone of reverent awe at the sheer audacity, but I didn't realize until I read the character creation chapter that this was that book. 

In context, it's not as daring as I was imagining. It's more like a structural artifact of its rudimentary lifepath system - the more times you roll on the table, the more powerful a character you can get, so each time you roll there is a small, but significant chance that you'll have to scrap the whole thing and start from scratch. It's a fun luck-pushing mini-game that runs the risk of becoming dangerously addictive - no other rpg I've read so far has inspired me to create multiple test characters in my notes (I think my favorite was the naval officer who kept rolling really well for the degeneration rolls, but absolute crap for the promotion rolls so he wound up being a middle-aged junior officer who was unceremoniously discharged after 30+ years and given a one-way ticked for steerage-class passage to anywhere he wanted to go). However, it only really works because The Traveller Book hasn't entirely shaken off the idea that characters are disposable pawns. One of them dies, you just play the next one in line. 

It's actually kind of inspired, but it doesn't seem to realize it's dancing on the edge of a paradox - the lifepath system creates disposable pawns with a complex backstory. What I really want to see is more exploration of that idea. There are a couple of different ways you can go with it. You could dramatically increase the specificity and size of the tables, leading to a maze of character creation options that give you an entire history to try and make sense of. Alternatively, you could lean into the abstraction and give the table entries broad and thematic, requiring the player to provide the specifics. There's a whole range of possible synergies between the mechanistic randomness of the dice and the limitless possibilities of player creativity and The Traveller Book barely scratches the surface.

And that's where the weight of history comes into it. There was a time when that surface was totally unscratched. That we can have such bizarre mutations as Dungeon Crawl Classics' system of creating a half dozen random characters and playing the one that survives the first adventure or Nobilis 3rd Edition's challenging and abstract lifepath based on the language of flowers, that can all be attributed to the fact that someone else went there first, blazed the path that split into so many interesting directions. Looking back more than 40 years, without any particular nostalgia for the series, do I give it credit for all the things that it inspired or do I set it aside for being impossibly basic?

Cop out: I'm going to do both. It's the best tribute I can possibly pay to the game's own deep contradictions.

Ukss Contribution: There's really only one possible choice: the mysterious sci-fi pyramid. It's one of those classics that never go out of style. It probably felt really obvious, even in 1982, but also, like, you gotta have one of those things or can you even call it space opera? Don't call it a cliche, call it a staple.