(Shadowrun 3e) Loose Alliances

I don't care much for Captain Chaos as a forum moderator. And maybe some of that is on me, the reader, not entirely understanding the nature of Shadowland as an online community. I'm sort of imagining it like a threaded message board, and so I see the Captain wandering into the comments nuking 10.2 Mp of discussion about the secrets of the mysterious Atlantean Foundation and I think "oh, wow, way to miss the entire point of putting this online and allowing for comments," but I guess, from the mod message ("I haven't the space or the inclination to include them all here. And now back to our regular broadcast.") that what's really happening is that Shadowland comments are in-line annotations of the posted documents, and so a long discussion among the "commentators" would actually interrupt the reading of the document. The physical form of the gaming book in our reality is, in fact, a diegetic representation of the fictional technology of the Shadowrun universe.

But even conceding that Loose Alliances is an in-setting artifact, I think Captain Chaos' moderation choices leave a lot to be desired. Like, seriously, what is this curation? "Lately, however, more and more of you have been clamoring for a download that dives behind the scenes on the smaller-scale, more localized contenders."

Don't get me wrong. That's a great idea for a Shadowrun supplement. In fact, I have strong empirical evidence that such a supplement might be one of 3rd edition's best books. But c'mon, what's the SEO target on something like this? "Um, I am in desperate need to know everything I can about the Atlantean Foundation, the Tanamous organ-legging ring, and the UN, but I don't have time for three different downloads. What do I search for . . . I've got it! 'Organizations that are smaller than a megacorp.'"

I guess what I'm saying is that the different chapters of this book could, quite easily, have been separate in-setting documents, posted at different times, to different Special Interest Groups, and I don't think I'd have had a problem with that. Certainly, less of a problem than I had with Captain Chaos popping into a potentially interesting comment chain about Atlantis and scolding the room about being insufficiently mid.

But that's not actually why I have a problem with the Captain's moderation. I get fiction, really. I'm not a humorless grump. . .

I'm a humorless scold, and me and the cap have beef because, when he was called out for posting Humanis (fantasy KKK) propaganda in a document about potential employers he said, "Your objection is noted, but Shadowland does not filter access by creed or ideology. Fact is, we do have some Humanis supporters logging in and fact is, some runners out there may end up working for Humanis or their ilk some day . . ."

And then he follows up with some nonsense about the board's responsibilities as a repository for professional knowledge and sunlight being the best disinfectant, but the commentor "Antifa" says it best, "Liberal drek. If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."

Again. In the context of an rpg supplement, I'm glad this information is here, to round out the worldbuilding. And you don't get a hero like Antifa without some fa for them to be anti, but if I'm a Shadowland regular, I'm giving Captain Chaos the side-eye from here on out.

Of course, that's a rhetorical two-step Shadowrun books use quite a lot (so much so that I was certain they'd do something similar in the section about feminism, enough that I preemptively made a snarky comment in my notes . . . that proved to be completely unfair, so I guess Fanpro wins this round). I guess, if I'm really going to be a Media Literacy Guy, I kind of have to be cool with it, but it does mean that I'll occasionally have to read fantasy-racist propaganda written in a realistic-seeming racist voice and there'll be a treacherous part of my brain that thinks "are they trying to get away with something?"

And I'm like 99% sure that they aren't. I don't think you write such a glowing recommendation of anti-fascist action in 2005 unless you're broadly on the side of the good guys. And maybe the brief discussion of transgender women is a little awkward and off-point from the perspective of modern best practices, but when you compare it to the mainstream discourse at the time . . . it's pretty okay (though maybe they could have pointed out that 2064's established level of biotech pretty much rendered all potential anti-trans arguments entirely moot). However, when they round out the feminism section with radical organizations that go too far, and one of the examples a commentor gives is "On a good day they'll 'out' a rapist to every corner of the real world and the Matrix. On a bad day, the police will be lucky to identify his remains. . ." there's room for that 1% doubt to creep in. It's just . . . a little weird when people start condemning vigilantism on a message board where hackers and mercenaries gather to discuss the best way to commit (often violent) crimes for pay.

Also, I'm pretty sure that being broadly on the side of the good guys does not apply to Islamophobia, largely for reasons discussed in previous posts but continued here in Loose Alliance's depiction of The Islamic Renaissance Movement. I think the IRM is a conscious effort to go against America's implicit bias by depicting a group of good, reasonable, pro-democracy, pro-diversity, and pro-science Muslims . . . but it's one of those positive depictions that is so conspicous in its efforts to dispel stereotypes that it very clearly reminds you of what those stereotypes are in the first place. The fact that IRM offices are a frequent target for fundamentalist bombings doesn't really help matters.

I am certain that there are vastly more interesting things one could do with cyberpunk-fantasy Arabia than what they eventually went with. I'm hesitant to suggest what they might be, lest I give away my own shallow knowledge of the region, but, like . . . the class stratification of Dubai? A European dragon owns a major corporation with interests in the region . . . could a jinn own a rival corporation? Would that be interesting? (Actually, I have no idea whether Arabians would even find that acceptable fantasy fiction . . . my gut tells me that opinions would vary greatly). The established tech for 2064 includes fusion reactors and electric cars . . . so, like, the changing face of the energy industry, global warming, and the spontaneous re-wilding that accompanied the Awakening? I'm just pitching here. Things you might do instead of a New Islamic Jihad and the counteracting social movement it inspired.

Which is all to say, time makes fools of us all. I invite certain things upon myself by reading 20+ year old books, and I'd probably do well not to get too judgmental about them . . . but man, does Shadowrun's depiction of Islam bum me out.

Other than that, and a couple of examples of the book being way too on the nose about the parallels between orks and Black people (the leader of the Ork Rights Committee is described as being "Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and Huey Newton rolled into one"), I really liked Loose Alliances. It's an oddly-curated cross-section of parts of the setting that get frequently referenced but have not yet been fully explained.

On a more setting-nerdery level, I suppose it's okay but frustrating that some of the entries left me with nearly as many questions as I had at the start. The book cruelly teases me by casually mentioning the Atlantean Foundation's work in Ukraine, without actually drawing any actionable conclusions from the matter. And somehow, none of the commentors see fit to point out that "this elf's background check only goes back to 2012, as if they suddenly and mysteriously appeared out of nowhere" is a thing that happens so much it's practically a cliche. And even though the OOC section directly mentions the immortal elves, it doesn't actually establish how much influence they have over the Atlantean Foundation's work. 

Are they trying to reestablish Thera? Find its big-ass sorcery to put to another use? Get ahead of the Horrors for a change? What's the plan? Exactly how full of shit are the Danaan families? Tell me, I have to know!

Also, because I'm running out of places to mention it - VITAS, that's some bullshit, right? When talking about the UN, the book mentions that India and Africa lost a third of their population when international aid organizations were redirected towards richer nations (which, to be fair, still wound up losing a quarter of their populations, on average) and . . . what the fuck are we even doing here?

I don't hate it as a setting element. The whole "indigenous populations were closer to real magic and thus had a leg up when the Awakening happened" plotline is a little problematic, but if you go with it and assume that they had a magical cure to a disease that was ravaging the colonialist population, then certain . . . demographic inconsistencies start to be a little less relevant. 

And, on a broader genre note, "The Shadowrun setting is actually a narrowly-averted apocalypse" would do quite a bit to make the fantasy elements more of an equal partner with the cyberpunk elements. You could have these vast tracts of wilderness that exist because of a well-timed one-two punch of rapidly-accelerated reproduction of wild plants/animals and the rapid depopulation that accompanied the virus. People fled to the sprawls because when you're laid out with a virally-induced toxic allergy that's the worst fucking time for a giant tree to burst from the ground and tear your home's foundation a new one.

The metroplexes could be these high-tech, glittering Points of Light, claustrophobically hemmed in by encroaching, Awakened lands whose spirits are furious at the despoilation of the Earth, and all your food is synthetic and vat grown, not purely out of contemporary anxieties capitalist frankenfood, but because deadly paracritters are a major problem and if you tried to clear a farm in the vast sea of trees that is now rural Ohio, you will get fucking eaten. But the ruins of the old cities are still out there, and they are full of modern-day treasure. Maybe your off-the-books mercenary will go and brave the Manticore's lair to retrieve a legendarily lost bitcoin wallet or maybe it's a corporate-sponsored attempt to recover an advanced prototype lost during the . . . migration.

I can feel in my bones that this is potentially a great genre synergy. Cyberpunk societies where capitalism is more powerful than ever, but a fantasy world where not even capitalism can pretend to own the Earth . . . the melancholy grandeur of decaying suburbs turned mass graves, in the shadow of neon-lit skyscrapers whose close-packed density merely performs the illusion of strength. Elves and orks, dwarves and trolls, still human enough to cling to technological society, but something inside them was empowered by the very force that humbled the 20th century, and they know that they could thrive out there in ways that untouched humans could not. And worse, the humans know it too, deep down, and that's the crack that lets anti-meta sentiment thrive. 

So much was lost in the fall of the old world, so many people fell through the cracks. The corporations use them as deniable, expendable pawns, but for all their wealth and power, money cannot truly buy control. The mysteries of nature are alive and aware once more and there be dragons in the dark places, lost to human oversight. But then, even here, a person's got to eat and the hustle never really ends. The new world fights over the scraps of the old, and maybe even dragons could learn a thing or two from the endless chase for increasing shareholder value. . .

Except, that's not quite Shadowrun. I honestly think the writers forget VITAS even happened, except when it comes to putting an unspecified devastation in the backstory. In the real world, human populations took 80-200 years to recover from the Black Death, but everywhere, even regions that canonically lost nearly a billion people, are described as being bigger, busier, and more crowded versions of the places they are now. There's relatively little discussion about the potential effects of a mass casualty event on Seattle's notoriously overheated real-estate market.

Though, now that I have it all out, and now that I'm thoroughly convinced that a Shadowrun knock-off, set 200 years in the future, when advanced transhumanist technology could plausibly exist as dungeon loot, is a great idea and that I should immediately get to work on that . . . it's time to remember what got this started in the first place. Loose Alliances, a fun grab-bag of miscellaneous Shadowrun topic that has next to nothing to do with the last few paragraphs. It may have had a few rough patches, but overall I think it was pretty great.

(Even if Captain Chaos is a terrible forum moderator).

Ukss Contribution: "Vat brains to operate fighter drones." A simple idea, creepy as hell, that can easily be integrated into the setting. It's a no-brainer.

(I'd say "no pun intended," but I came up with that line accidentally, groaned when I realized what I'd done, and then decided to go with it anyway. You're welcome.)

I wrote a book!

 They are a demon-haunted people!

The sun-scorched coast of the Bay of Blood is a land of petty warlords and terrible sorcerers, where the strongest rule and the weak are sacrificed in the rite of conquest! At the heart of its eastern shore, the cursed city-state of Dazul labors under the thrall of the cruel Priest-Kings, a council of 91 sorcerer-exorcists who together subjugate a population desperate for hope. Scoured by the unnaturally deadly desert wind and befouled by the decaying stench of a poisoned sea, it is a land out of time, where the eternal rhythms of survival defy even the natural progress of change.

But nothing built by men or demons can ever truly be eternal, and change is coming, whether the city is ready or not. Thanks to:

Zenir, a common laborer and prodigy in the art of sorcery, recruited to the Priest-Kings as part of a secret bargain.

Mekharu Kestrel, sole heiress to a Palace Family who tried to change the city's fate . . . and failed.

And

Orlan “The Griffon” Saberman, grizzled mercenary and vigilante adventurer who bears a magical mask and a holy mission to stop evil, whatever the cost.

The three heroes' lives will intertwine as they each follow their own path, through romance and ambition, murder and mystery, false friends and unlikely allies, towards the dark secret at the heart of Dazul, an ancient crime and the legacy of a thousand years of unredressed sin!

(Also, sometimes it's funny, like, on purpose. Wouldn't want you to be surprised by that).

So sharpen your sword and load your pistol as you prepare to enter a land left behind by the modern age and unravel the mystery of:

The Hands of Nebt Bhakau

Volume One of the Nebt Bhakau Saga

Just one of a thousand:

TALES FROM THE BAY OF BLOOD

Dropbox Link

The Red Star Campaign Setting

SPOILER WARNING: For the Red Star comic series (I'm guessing)

 It is a logical inevitability that one will always underestimate their ability to be surprised. For example, you could be a person who read 548 rpg books over the past few years, was approaching the end of an epoch with their last few miscellaneous d20 books, saw that one of the remainder was The Red Star Campaign Setting (T.S. Luikart and Ian Sturrock), a licensed tie-in to a comic series you'd never heard of, which presumably found its way onto your bookshelf by accident (it's been known to happen to people like me, who will never not buy random rpgs at yard sales and consignment stores), and you may think "this is going to be boring and cheap, at best an experience geared towards a specialized audience that I am not part of, with no real reason to exist except to appeal to the fandom."

And then, you're going to read the book and find it complex and challenging, and maybe a little awesome, but in a way you're not entirely sure it's appropriate to make an rpg about and it's just going to completely suck you into its world and become . . . maybe not one of your favorite books, but certainly one that it'll be thrilling to blog about.

Oh, and in case it wasn't clear, this hypothetical was actually about me this whole time.

In order to understand what The Red Star Campaign Setting is, we must first define what it isn't. It is not an alternate history where a Soviet-style communist republic engages in a Cold War-style conflict with a USA-style capitalist republic, getting involved in an Afghanistan-style invasion before collapsing into a Russian Commonwealth-style kleptocracy and facing a Chechnya-style rebellion, all the while using sorcery, psychic powers, and absurd diesel-punk technology like city-sized flying battleships and transforming tanks.

And the reason it's not that is because the allegory is even more on the nose than I made it sound, to the degree that you can't really call it "alternate" history. It's the same history, but seen through a lens of comic-book-style nonsense. Also, not-Stalin is a deathless necromancer who plans to enslave the not-Soviet dead in spiritual gulags so he can harvest their Post Human Energy to become a god and the not-CIA are not so much trying to thwart this plan as convince their friendly dictators to recreate it on a smaller scale so the not-USA can use that same energy to develop advanced weapons in order to secure the nation's status as sole superpower and neo-colonialist center in a global capitalist empire.

Like I said. A little awesome.

But also, I can't help but wonder if I should enjoy it as much as I do.

I think it's probably okay to enjoy the Red Star comic. Just from what I gathered through NPC write-ups and references to canon events, and making a generous guess based on the nuanced, humanist rpg setting it inspired, it seems like a work of singular vision that has interesting, worthwhile things to say about the complexity of geopolitics, the role of heroic individuals in systems that are not worthy of them, and the way even the most hopeful of ideologies can curdle into horrors when subject to the cynical logic of power.

But as a world in which players are expected to improvise new comics-style narratives, I worry that maybe it's just a little bit too much fun.

For example, during the Great Patriotic War, the Aryan Nationalists of the Volksreich, under the leadership of the occult-savvy dictator, Krieger, created massive death factories to render captive populations into raw spiritual energy in order to sweep aside all existing life and create a new age where they alone would rule an empty Earth. 

And that's fun. Or, at least, it's more fun than what actually happened.  And I can't help wondering - is it actually allowed to be that particular kind of fun?

To be clear, I don't think this choice was made to be Nazi-apologist. In the backstory of the game, everyone who might even remotely be protagonist material is very much against the Volkreich, and no one has a good word to say about them even decades after the fact. It's a close allegory. The main victims of the death factories were vaguely-described "ethnic and religious minorities that couldn't effectively fight back."

But . . . you have something very much like Nazis, who started something very much like WW2, and perpetrated something very much like the Holocaust, yet you don't have anything that looks all that much like the Jews.

And I don't think the intent was erasure. I wasn't joking about how on-the-nose this setting was. If it exists in the real world, some version of it probably exists here (canonically, China = "The Lands of the Dragon" so Israel  = something like "The Kingdom of the Covenant," probably). Because of that, I think the intent was to make the backstory for the game (and possibly the comic) a little less fucking grim.

I can't tell you this approach is definitively worse. It may be better. It could even be correct. You have something with the stakes and the spectacle of WW2, but which doesn't recapitulate the trauma of history's worst atrocity. And it's not technically erasing the victims, because this is an "alternate" history where the belligerents were the Volksreich, the Isle of Lions, Gallia, the Western Transnational Alliance from across the sea, and the United Republics of the Red Star (or U.R.R.S. for short).

Honestly, as a gentile, I think I prefer this approach. But also honestly, as a gentile, it's not my fucking call to make.

And this issue isn't confined to the backstory. This is a complex, sensitive setting that doesn't let anyone off the hook (especially the two Cold War superpower-equivalents), but it does make its depictions just a little less fraught. Safer. Replacing the most repulsive of the Cold War excesses with something that is technically worse, but in that exaggerated villain-core sort of way.

I think, for the purposes of this post, that I have to assume it is okay for them to do this. And operating under that assumption, the thing I appreciate most about this setting is how fair-minded it is. The U.R.R.S. is the protagonist faction, but it's not the heroic faction. This isn't an alt-history that presupposes the Internationalists (communist-equivalent) walked the walk. You're not playing the champions of a paradise of the proletariat, that stands in stark contrast to the exploitation of the Transnationalists (capitalist-equivalent).

The U.R.R.S is a tyrannical dictatorship, and a bad one, even without all that spirit world nonsense. It censors its artists. It sends people to labor camps in the polar tundra, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, and sometimes without even telling them what crimes they were accused of. Political officers of the Internationalist Party will assassinate politicians in broad daylight, if it seems like they're too receptive to liberal reforms.

It's a dystopia. You're playing the bad guys (or, at least, one faction of bad guys). But your player characters are neither depraved boogeymen nor paragons of the propagandized ideals of the state, existing in ironic contrast to a depraved system. Rather, the advice the setting chapter gives about the people of the U.R.R.S is very grounded, very human. It talks about the cultural trauma of the Great Patriotic War and the feudalism that came before it, about strategies for socially navigating a totalitarian society that are both practical and psychological, about the unspoken hypocrisies of the system, divisions of class and status that can never be escaped but can be mitigated by military service.

It all feels very real. Which is hardly surprising, because this book has this entire time been peaking over reality's shoulder and copying its homework. Plus, you can learn to summon a gun with your mind that shoots 10,000 ghost bullets per minute.

But the fair-mindedness isn't limited just to the protagonists. The enemies of the U.R.R.S. are treated in a similarly nuanced way. It would have been easy to exaggerate the Western Transnational Alliance (USA-equivalent) into something so grotesque the U.R.R.S. would seem heroic by comparison. It would even have been easy (especially for a game created in the USA) to make them the uncomplicated world police of American propaganda and just lean into the U.R.R.S.'s "evil empire" vibe.

But The Red Star Campaign Setting does neither. The W.T.A. is a fucking plague on the world, propping up dictators, immiserating the poor, putting its hands deep into the pockets of even its closest allies . . . and expecting to be thanked for its service, but it is also freer, less nakedly imperial, and better able to provide a high standard of living than its arch-rivals in the U.R.R.S.

It's not a particularly flattering depiction of my homeland, but it is undeniably, recognizably American (one alt-history quirk of the W.T.A. is that it so loves guns it never got around to outlawing dueling, which is . . . not something that was strictly necessary to make it a worthy antagonist, but is something I'm going to have to give a reluctant "touche.")

Although, its most impressive and daring bit of humanism might just be that it's a book written in 2004, that spends a lot of time covering the U.R.R.S.'s invasion of Al'lstaan (i.e. the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), without being noticeably Islamophobic. 

I mean, there are a couple of "infidels" and "jihads" thrown around, but in context they feel very fair. Assuming the allegory is as on the nose as it was for WW2, you're going to leave this book with a better understanding of Afghanistan's grievances with both Russia and the West (or, at least, I feel like I did).

And this empathy is not just safely confined to things that happened in the 70s and 80s. The history section ends with the sort of perfect literary bookend that makes you think real history was written by a hack - the W.T.A., now sole global superpower in the wake of the U.R.R.S.'s collapse, is about to launch its own invasion of Al'lstaan and "to the government's chagrin, the questions have not stopped. What will happen next is not yet written."

That doesn't get any particular points from me, because it's the sort of ending I, as a writer, would gnaw my arm off to get a chance to use. However, there's a part a little before this, explaining the W.T.A.'s reaction to the Imperial City Bombing (the satire here is not subtle) - "A significant majority of their populace had so bought into their government's propaganda they could not even understand why other groups would wish them harm for any reason other than mere jealousy."

Damn.

No, not just damn. Damn . . . in 2004. That's genuine courage. It's genuine empathy. And it earns a lot of leeway from me re: the things I mentioned earlier, that made me nervous about this book's point of view.

It's so rare to see an rpg that does "shades of grey" really well. It's not an easy, cheerful "there were heroes on both sides." Nor an edgy, cynical "everyone's a villain." Rather, people do both good things and bad, because of systemic incentives and personal motives that are tragically understandable. . .

Except for Imbohl. That guy's just a dick.

So I guess you could say that, overall, I liked The Red Star Campaign Setting. Will that translate into me using it for a game? Maybe. And that's saying a lot for a book I don't even remember buying.

Ukss Contribution: I promise myself that I'm not going to start picking entries just to make my worldbuilding easier, but there's a thing where the U.R.R.S.'s sorcerous academies are teaching people to cast spells, but they call them "protocols" in a deliberate to make them seem less mystical. And it's such a neat dovetailing between the setting's fantasy elements and the real U.S.S.R.'s ideological approach to science. The fact that it fits well with my early-industrial-meets-fantasy setting is just a nice little bonus.

(Shadowrun 3e) Shadows of Asia

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual Abuse of Children

Waahh! Why do I keep running into situations where I'm expected to have an intelligent opinion about orientalism? One day, someone's going to say to me, "Hey, aren't you just a white guy who's taken it upon himself to say when things are and are not racist?" And I'm going to have nothing. Best I'm going to be able to do is mumble, "Yeah, but I'd just read Shadows of Asia."

Is it really as bad as all that? I don't know. Probably not. But it does have the line, "Manchuria: the most inscrutable of lands among the inscrutable Chinese." And you can't just say that. Plus, the title of the whole chapter is "Chinese Puzzle," so I guess we're talking about orientalism now.

"As a European Orientalist once surmised, Hinduism as 'what Hindus do'. . ." Oh, sorry, that's another quote, from the part of the book where it explains India's caste system. But it's as good a jumping off point as any to get to the thesis of this post - this book has a particular point of view, and that point of view is "The first book in this series was Shadows of North America, because Shadowrun originates in North America, the second book in this series was Shadows of Europe, because Shadowrun has a large European player base, and the third book is going to be Shadows of Asia, because Shadowrun is cyberpunk, and cyberpunk as a genre has a huge amount of unexamined orientalist baggage."

And in true cyberpunk fashion, that baggage remains thoroughly unexamined. Like, the book makes a point of saying that the center of the tourism-for-purposes-of-child-sex-trafficking industry has moved from Bangkok to Rangoon (Yangon). And why would it do that?

No, seriously, why?

Shadows of Asia has a copyright date of 2005-2006. And I think, if you're trying to write about sci-fi Thailand in 2005, maybe the first step is to see what's going on in current Thailand and extrapolate. The headlines back then probably talked quite a bit about the country's growing problem with child sex trafficking and the government's attempts at cracking down on it and maybe the people writing this book thought they'd get it done by 2064. But where are all those sex tourists going to go now? Could be anywhere in the world. Why not nearby Myanmar?

I think that mostly demonstrates a failure of imagination. They're putting Southeast Asia in their roleplaying game and the one thing people know about SE Asia is that it's where perverts from around the world go to pay money to rape children. So, if you don't put something like that somewhere in your chapter about SE Asia, people are going to notice and probably complain. Except, I don't think even that much thought was put into it. I think, what's really going on is that child-raping-sex-tourists are so fundamentally baked into their idea of what Southeast Asia is like that if they didn't mention them, they wouldn't feel like they were authentically talking about the region. No malice. No premeditation. Just sitting down in front of the computer and putting One Night in Bangkok on repeat while you write.

It's like the association between Islam and violent fundamentalism. They're self-aware enough about this to say "Not All Muslims" in the form of two rival factions - the Islamic Unity Movement, which you know, is entirely and uncomplicatedly the Fox News version of Islam and the modern, tolerant Islamic Renaissance Movement. But I think the thing that annoys me about this is that it leads to things like the introduction to Indonesia saying, "Compared to Middle Eastern Islam, Indonesian Islam is moderate, accommodating, and the least Arabic . . . this form of Islam is more tolerant and has been referred to as 'Islam with a smiling face.'"

First of all, no shit it's the least Arabic. I'm assuming you've seen a map before. Arabia is here and Indonesia is waay over heere. We can break out the calipers and count the distance with the legend key, if you like.

But the second, more pertinent thing is what the fuck are you even talking about? If anyone ever referred to my belief system as "_____ with a smiling face" I would punch them in the fucking junk. I may have my issues with the New Atheists, but I don't believe I've ever given someone permission to tell me "you're so reasonable compared to them." (I know, I know, at this moment you're probably thinking "don't worry, no one's in danger of doing that," but I do sometimes actually try to be reasonable).

What's happened here is that they've spent some considerable time characterizing "fundamentalist" Islam as being anti-metahuman and anti-magic (you know, opposed to some of the most popular character types in the game). Then they have characters express surprise when they learn about Muslims who are not like that, without ever acknowledging that this specific form of fantastic bigotry is something they invented for their game of make-believe.

Would an Ayatollah hate an elf? I don't know, maybe, but it hardly seems inevitable.

It's like that thing with Southeast Asia. There are certain ideas that are tangled together in your brain, like Islam and sectarian violence, and you don't make much of an effort to question the connection. Islam being dangerous and unreasonable and opposed to fun is what makes it recognizably Islam and maybe over time you branch out from that simplistic depiction, but what, in other contexts, would be nuance and conflict are instead called out as deviations from expectations.

I'm no expert on orientalism, but I am an optimist re: a human being's capacity for reflection and growth. You can do better. You can learn more about what Muslims actually believe.

But like I said. I don't think it's malice. And I don't even think it's laziness, not really. I think it's in large part due to the fact that this is a game that has been around since 1989 and some part of it is always going to be frozen in the perspectives of the time of its birth. More than Islam staying recognizably Islam or SE Asia staying recognizably SE Asia, it's about Shadowrun staying recognizably Shadowrun. My evidence: "The general theme of Russia is a power play. The atmosphere is reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the mid 1980s, between Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev." Most everything that's wrong with this book is some variant of that.

There's more I could be saying. For all my complaints, the book does have some delightful fantasy/sci-fi, like mountain-sized fire elementals or high-tech robot governesses. And there are things that are a little weird without rising to the level of offensive. Like the fact that Malaysian communism "threatens the capitalist paradise that urban Malaysia has become" which is maybe a sly bit of irony in the OOC rules section, or maybe just an example of the author not really understanding cyberpunk as a genre ("it's about how neoliberal cyborgs will raise the global standard of living, right?").

Eh, one more grrr before I check out - orks are unusually common in Mongolia and trolls are common among the Maori. And, it's like, Shadowrun orks and trolls aren't exactly fantasy orcs and trolls, so . . . maybe it's not . . . wrong? But my eye is definitely twitching at the thought of untangling the subtext.

Overall, I don't know how I feel about Shadows of Asia. I guess because it covers all of Asia (even Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and the Uighur-inhabited Chinese province of Xinjiang, which have all merged into the nation of Turkestan, presumably for purposes of map legibility) and my knowledge of 30% of the Earth's land area, containing 60% of its total population is cursory enough that I needed the book to be a guide to both the real places and the near-future post-Awakening versions of those places. And I don't feel confident that it was up to the task.

And yeah, that's massively unfair on my part. It's too much to put on a 231-page rpg supplement. Maybe there's a bunch of great stuff in here that would resonate deeply with me if I were less ignorant. Maybe someone's casually flipping through the pages and they stop with reverent awe because they absolutely nailed cyberpunk/fantasy Macao. And maybe that's a pretty far-fetched scenario, but it is entirely probable that there are large parts of the book that are good at a level above my ability to appreciate.

On the other hand, scroll back up and take a look at all the stuff I was complaining about. That's how the book looked at exactly the level of my ability to appreciate. 

Ukss Contribution: I'm going to sit this one out. I'd say that only about 15% of it is actually bad, but that 15% contained things that made me deeply uncomfortable.