The End

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual violence and misogyny

The End bills itself as "theological horror," so right out the gate, that's two things I'm woefully unqualified to talk about. "There were things in this book that made me uncomfortable," I'd say, in some hypothetical timeline, and you'd reply, "was it the theology or the horror?" And I'd just stand there looking foolish, completely unable to answer.

Don't worry, hypothetical John, I've got your back - it's mostly the horror. The theology I just find a little confusing.

Why do bad things happen? When I ask this question of theology and get an unsatisfying answer, I come away with the feeling that I know something other people don't. When I ask it of horror, I feel like maybe I've just missed something. I think it's because the goal of theology is to have you walk away feeling good and the goal of horror is . . . to make you feel bad?

Right? Being scared is a bad feeling. Being grossed-out is a bad feeling. The weighty despair and utter moral vertigo at the scope of human depravity that comes from witnessing imaginative cruelty - that's a bad feeling. But if you walk away from horror media having never felt fear or disgust or faithless dread at the indifferent moral order of the universe, you're probably going to be pretty disappointed.

I guess that means The End is not a disappointing horror experience. You've got a world where the apocalyptic disasters of the Book of Revelation happened, leaving only a small scattering of survivors - the so-called "Meek," who sided with neither heaven nor hell (this is the part where the theology gets confusing). God abandons the Earth to these fence-sitters, closing the gates of both afterlives in history's biggest flounce. This poses the ultimate moral test to those who have previously refused all religious conviction - what do you do if this life is all there is, and the only consequences of your actions are those that can be imposed by the exercise of worldly power?

And one of the possible answers is The Atlanta Confederation - a group of men who decided to band together to capture every woman and girl they could find, pump them full of drugs, and keep them as slaves in a system that is exactly as bad as you're imagining.

What am I supposed to say about that? I hate these guys. I'm not happy I read about them. But maybe that makes them antagonist material? Like, Freddy Krueger was a pedophile. And it's not as if I think Jason or Michael Myers are charming dinner party companions. I can see how a horror game would want to have a bunch of guys the players are really, really going to hate (ah, hate, another bad feeling I forgot to list before).

I can't even really say that it seems gratuitous. From a philosophical perspective, the Atlanta Confederation is kind of interesting. The first, knee-jerk question you're going to ask yourself is "how did these assholes manage to dodge hell?" And the book's implicit answer is that they didn't do anything hell-worthy until after the end of the world. They were too chickenshit to do the really bad stuff when they thought God was around (the founder was a member of the KKK and a regular churchgoer, and . . . the theology is confusing), but as soon as they're sent a prophetic dream saying that God no longer cares what happens on Earth, they act on the darkest impulses imaginable.

This could, potentially, just be a version of that obnoxious question theists sometimes ask - "If you don't believe in God, what's to stop you from raping and murdering?" - but I'm choosing to interpret it more generously because I can distinguish between a healthy atheism and a collapsing theism. 

However, where it gets a little sketchy for me is when we look at the Atlanta Confederation's sworn enemies, the Swamp Rats, a guerrilla resistance movement of former slaves who live in the dangerous areas near the outskirts of the colony and do everything in their power to take it down. The Swamp Rats are all female, because the Confederation kills or chases off any men it doesn't recruit and they're having a crisis of leadership - Rachel Duvalier wants to focus on freeing the enslaved women, and Mary Colwell, former US Marine, want to kill every man she sees, even innocent travelers who might not know what the Confederation is doing. A certain degree of anger is understandable, and operational security means you can't afford to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who looks like they might be friendly to the Confederation, fair enough. But also, Mary and her faction are man-hating feminists who will literally crucify men based on nothing more than guilt by association (Mary even goes so far as to drop the f-slur in relation to a gay man who is feeding the Swamp Rats information).

It's a bit of a caricature, not helped one bit by the implication that camp tensions are exacerbated because the ladies need dick ("It is also impossible for any heterosexual woman in the camp to get any R and R. This has led to a lot of edgy, violent inhabitants in an edgy and violent colony.")

And what am I supposed to say about that? Taking a step back and trying to see the game's broader context, I think it's less internalized misogyny worming its way into a fictional feminist conflict and more that the Tyranny Games crew is just really bad at nuance.

It's kind of fascinating, actually, because the whole game is about nuance. People who were neither particularly good nor particularly bad (though we have to talk about the way this idea is conflated with belief in monotheism) and what happens when they are no longer subject to the usual moral constraints. In addition to the Atlanta Confederation and Reverend Tommy Thrillkill, there is a holy man who is described as a "living saint" and a Voodoo priestess who is basically a superhero.

But in-between? That's where they have some trouble. Take a less fraught example than the Swamp Rats, the Archangel Gabriel. His story is that as God was opening the seals and killing most everyone on Earth, he felt pity for humanity, so much so that he was distracted at a critical moment and locked out of Heaven. 

He crash-landed in Denver and his angelic majesty absolutely broke the minds of the human survivors he encountered. They rely on him utterly for protection, sustenance, and shelter. Not out of any sort of negligence or laziness, but because they can't do anything but worship him day and night.

And there's a really obvious, nuanced, and fascinating story to tell here. Gabriel's immense compassion means that he can't abandon the people he destroyed, even though it was just a terrible misunderstanding. And maybe, as time goes on, he falls to the sin of pride and resents God, for abandoning both him and the helpless apes he has grown to love. You know, the story of a mostly good person who nonetheless causes inadvertent harm by their own inalienable nature.

However, The End goes another way with it. "Now he regrets his moment of weakness and refuses to be damned to this god-forsaken place. He has gathered up his worshippers to fill him with the power of faith. When their faith flows through him, he will storm the gates of Heaven . . . or die trying. He cares nothing for the humans worshipping him. All that matters is returning to heaven, to this end he will happily sacrifice each and every one of them."

Gasp! The angel is secretly evil! Who could have ever seen that coming?

Less superciliously, this reversal of the direction of abuse is really just the game's go-to tool. One of the other main conflicts is between a small society that has grown up around a survivalist bunker in Waco Texas and a significantly larger (approx 2800 vs 4000 population) group of organized Native Americans. Basically, the Native Americans were politically radical, before the apocalypse, rejecting the God of the white man without actually worshipping the devil, so they got left behind. And now they have a vision of reclaiming all of the continent's stolen land from the other survivors, potentially returning the entire hemisphere to indigenous control. And they plan on accomplishing this by . . . you guessed it - barely discriminate violence ("Anyone who cannot prove at least one-sixteenth American Indian heritage is scalped." Oof. I can think of at least two things wrong with that sentence).

The practical upshot of these clumsy attempts at nuance is that frequently, the ideas inspired by the book are more interesting than the actual words printed inside the book. And how much credit do I want to give The End for that. I could be really mean and interpret this feeling as "The End is occasionally interesting by accident," but I don't think it's truly accidental. I don't think the authors were unaware of the interesting ideas at work here. I think maybe they just didn't have the breadth of experience necessary to explore them in a satisfying way. You know what they say, if you're attempting theology before your 40th birthday, you're doing it wrong.

(Actually, I have no idea if "they" say anything like that, it just feels like something that might be true.)

So let's teach those callow young Christians a lesson by having a middle-aged atheist attempt theology instead!

No, really, the theology of The End is very weird. According to the FAQ at the beginning of the book:

The thing that took everyone by surprise is how generous God was. If you believed in a single, benevolent God and lived your life according to the doctrines of the religion you practiced, you were admitted into heaven. Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Buddhists. People who followed a polytheistic religion still had some hope, provided that they followed their religion's most benevolent god and followed the virtues of humility, self-sacrifice, and love.

If you had truck with the forces of evil in any way, shape or form you were damned. Most Pagans, practitioners of Magic, and roleplaying gamers (ha ha) were all thrown into the pit. Those who used religion for their own ends were also damned, like televangelists, faith healers, and mediums.

The feeling I got while reading this was that the author had never, in their entire life, been asked a difficult question about their religious beliefs. I think they legitimately thought this was a less arbitrary set of conditions than usually put forth by rapture-believing Evangelical Christians. And it's not. It's just more inclusive. Why is monotheism even entering into this at all? What correlation does believing in a singular god even have with basic human decency? 

You don't necessarily want a coherent soteriology, rooted in ethical philosophy. This is "theological horror" after all, and so arbitrary, whimsical, or even odious criteria for salvation all have the potential to say something really interesting about the problem of evil and the limitations of the various belief systems that attempt to grapple with this problem.

This is especially the case against the backdrop of the grotesque, baroque cruelty of the apocalypse itself. The book is unreflective about this issue, considering everyone who went to heaven to be "saved," without ever asking the (to an atheist) obvious question - at what point, during the unrelenting plagues, famines, wars, and global gigadeaths did the heaven-bound decide they were backing the right side? Right? You look out your window, see the skies darkened by flesh-eating locusts, and you think, "hey, whoever unleashed those things, that's who I want to entrust with my immortal soul."

To someone like me, what makes the Christian Apocalypse such fertile ground for horror is confronting the fear that the worst people I've ever met might be right about the nature of the universe. To that end, their ridiculously and offensively short list of who gets into heaven is a feature, rather than a bug. In exploring how awful the world would look if it followed their views, you're exposing the awfulness of those views. God is sending all the gay people to hell . . . and you want to side with God? What's wrong with you?

Casting a wide net for salvation mitigates that, possibly to a fatal degree. If God is so chill with so many kinds of people, why is he even destroying the Earth in the first place? And if he has a good reason for doing so, why would he do it so painfully? Why does this good God care so much about the worship of a benevolent deity and apparently not at all about people making the choice to embrace benevolence as a virtue and direct it towards their fellow human beings? 

Maybe it's a bias on my part, but a good way to test whether a person's theology is full of shit is to ask them, "why are atheists capable of benevolence." Bad theologians will deny that it's even possible and try and convince you that any benevolent-seeming atheist is just pulling a con. Good theologians will realize that the question is a sort of philosophical compliment to the general problem of evil. Like I'm pretty sure the mainstream Christian answer is that God's grace is what allows us to know and choose goodness and it was given equally to all human beings, so someone might never even suspect the existence of God as a factual matter and still, broadly speaking, be "good."

But any theology that cleared even that low bar of generosity is going to have a very difficult time squaring itself with the standard presentation of the Apocalypse. All humans know grace, even if it's tainted by Original Sin, but the Apocalypse looks a lot like a failure of grace. If my wicked heart, which is but a pale image of God's immaculate love, will quail at the thought of my fellow humans starving to death, catching painful diseases, or getting eaten by some weird beast, how can the Almighty's do any less? He has the power to just turn off the world like a light switch. So why doesn't he?

And the answer to that is the same answer I wish the adults had given young me when I first started questioning the theological horror of Noah's Ark - it's just a story. It doesn't actually reference real events, either past or future. Rather, Revelation is an allegory and a prayer. It's about how even unassailable worldly power is destined to fall before the power of the Lord. It's God's promise - even tyrants die. And there is a kind of hope in that.

If you want to know the difference between theology and theological horror, that's a pretty good guide. Theology is about the hope to be found in the Book of Revelation, and theological horror is about the pain and terror we'd all feel if the events depicted actually took place.

As interesting as The End could be sometimes, it never quite got that distinction, and so it never truly lived up to its promise.

Ukss Contribution: Full disclosure - this book repeatedly disturbed me with its habit of using violence against women to provoke a cheap emotional reaction, and if it was a fantasy setting that just happened to take place after the Apocalypse, I probably wouldn't forgive it for that. But the introduction to the game billed itself as horror, so I have to acknowledge that making me uncomfortable is not automatically a deal-breaker.

That said, my favorite thing in this book was not one of its unique inventions, but rather something it took from the Bible, by way of pop culture - the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. I don't know what it is, but there's something about the "not quite a boy-band" vibe these guys have that really appeals to me.

(Shadowrun 3e) State of the Art: 2064

These "State of the Art" books really do task me. I love the premise, love the format, and even love the books as a whole. But I do not love getting lied to by blurbs. They absolutely do not "examine the latest groundbreaking developments in five aspects of the Shadowrun world." They are, in fact, anthologies of mini-supplements, and usually, four of these are about topics of general interest that belong to no particular place or time. State of the Art: 2063 was very upfront about updating out-of-print material for 3rd edition, and there's slightly less of that in State of the Art: 2064 (only the "Behind the Badge" chapter this time, though "The Path of the Adept" may also benefit from the context provided by a 2e book). But both books very much felt like they could easily have "State of the Art: 2050." After reading this book, I don't believe for a second that there have been significant advancements in espionage, police procedure, or European occultism, and only slightly believe that people have been making new discoveries about adept magic.

On the other hand, nearly everything in this book will help me run better, more complete games of Shadowrun, so what am I complaining about, exactly?

 

Branding. I guess. Is that anything? Reading a cyberpunk rpg and coming away with a vague distaste for the necessity of branding in a capitalist economy? Maybe. But it's a petty annoyance at most. Not worth a blog post (or even the time I've spent on it thus far, mwah! ha! ha!)

So let's treat this book as five separate mini-supplements. 

"Games of State" (John Szeto) is an extremely workable alternate campaign model, but spy stories run into a single fundamental issue that the book itself was kind enough to express with perfect eloquence: "If you really think about it, espionage is a broad term that describes just about everything that ever takes place in the shadows."

The chapter asks, "what if Mr Johnson worked for the CIA?" And the answer was, "very little would actually change." Love it. No notes. Even though it was the exact opposite of groundbreaking, it helped to get a little nudge to think about a whole new set of potential employers and their unique motivations for hiring mercenary criminals. It adds a bit of variety to the party's legwork checks.

And don't let my dismissive tone fool you. I really liked this chapter. Beyond being moderately helpful to me as GM, it also did more than any chapter except the last to flesh out the Shadowrun setting. Did you know all of the Big Ten megacorps possess nuclear weapons? That certainly puts a new angle on extraterritoriality and the Business Recognition Accords (which I always thought was kind of a goofy idea for an international treaty regime, but it looks like I didn't have all the information - oops.)

"The Path of the Adept" (Joshua Howell, James Nugent, and Peter Taylor) might be my favorite of the first four chapters, largely because Adepts are my favorite Shadowrun character type, but also a little because I want to believe it's at least somewhat "state of the art."

Have they just printed more Adept powers, or are people in the setting discovering new Adept powers? The book works just as well with either assumption, but I don't know, maybe it's silly of me to be on the lookout for signs of the progression of the mana cycle. The timeframe of the game is far too short for any significant changes to take place. But when this chapter started talking about "The Way of the Artist" or "The Way of the Speaker" as if they were new things people were just now learning about, there's a part of me got excited at the thought that Sixth World might be rediscovering some form of Earthdawn's Disciplines. Obviously, that's more of a multi-century project (though when a commentor says the Danaan families' elite knightly orders are "not yer average adepts" that's exactly the sort of cruel backstory tease that always gets me riled up).

From a mechanics perspective, the chapter merely exacerbates the biggest problem with the Adept archetype - the resource you use to grow "vertically" is the same as the one you use to grow "horizontally" and you have a very strict budget. It might be tempting to buy six points worth of separate powers, and this book offers some great new options like Gliding, Facial Sculpt, and Commanding Voice, but a more optimal choice would be to buy one point of powers six times.

Honestly, Adpets just need a better set of rules. Maybe your Initiation level could unlock new Power choices and you could spend karma points to improve these powers individually, up to a cap determined by your Initiation . . .

(I'm a regular scamp, I am.)

"Behind the Badge" (Robyn King-Nitschke and Malik Toms) is absolutely essential material that should have been in the core book (or, at least, in the Shadowrun Companion). Player characters are criminals, and this chapter explains how law enforcement works. I don't think I need to draw a diagram here.

Like many fictional depictions of the police, it runs the risk of becoming Copaganda. . . and honestly, it's a bit surreal to watch this dance, with the hindsight provided by the BLM movement. Because the text will absolutely shoot off some uncompromising critiques of the police . . . by putting them in the mouths of the Shadowland commentors, who are notoriously unreliable narrators. Now, the main text that the "comments" are riffing off isn't exactly pro-police, at least not with the level of enthusiasm that conservatives demand, but it will say things like, "breaking the rules in some ways can lead to mass outcries and riots or worse - investigation and punishment from higher authorities. . ."

And, like, it's cynical. You're a sheltered white kid in 2005 and you're reading this, you're going to think "whoa, this chapter was written by criminals for criminals, bias much?" It's saying that some police officers plant evidence, escalate conflicts with minorities to justify lethal racist violence (though the minorities in question are trolls and orks, natch), and even use torture to coerce confessions. But then it also says these practices are kept in check by fear of public accountability. Why, if there were inconvenient video of the police using unnecessary force on a subject, violating their fifth amendment rights in process, those police could get fired, and maybe even wind up in jail themselves. 

I hate to be the doomer guy, but that's not quite cynical enough for real life. It's definitely not cynical enough for cyberpunk's dystopian satire of capitalist excess. It is highly unlikely that the legal phantom zone created by extraterritorial corporations contracting municipal policing services to toothless civil governments will lead to greater respect for proper police procedure. I'm pretty sure the Business Recognition Accords are like Qualified Immunity on steroids. 

If you make the necessary allowances, however, it's a very useful chapter.

"Old World Magic" (Audun Bergwitz and Peter Taylor) is almost pure setting material about European occultism and I have basically nothing to say about it. It's good stuff, but you're not likely to use most of it. Maybe as NPC texture? You could create about a dozen distinct character backgrounds, which is great if you're going to play a dozen different characters and you want them all to be European spellcasters. 

I guess the Aesir aren't anti-nazi enough for my tastes (in the Shadowrun universe, the magical Norse pagan revival has its roots in the neo-nazi movement). I also became a little uncomfortable when they contrasted European shamanism with Native American and African analogues (one is a "complex philosophical patchwork" and the others are "more primal.") But aside from those two things, it was just a bunch of extra worldbuilding, presumably done entirely for its own sake (and possibly to satisfy the appetite of the European Shadowrun fandom for more locally relevant material).

The last chapter, "Culture Shock" is pretty much the only one that lives up to the book's title. This version catered a bit more to shadowrunners than the last one, talking about unsolved crimes, the ten most wanted criminals, and paranormal mysteries in lieu of more mainstream stuff like movies and television. I am on the record as wanting more pop-culture fluff in my sci-fi games, so it feels like a step backwards to me, but I'll admit, it's probably more useful for games.

I am also on the record making a joke about how the frequent too-on-the-nose comparisons between orks and Black people would inevitably lead to a discussion of orkish rap music, and it's clear in retrospect that I was not being prescient but actually remembering this book. There's no direct evidence that orxploitation music sounds all that much like late-90s hip hop, but the biggest star of the recent trend was an ork with attitude who goes by the pen name "CrimeTime." Also, many of these artists have connections with street gangs and will blur the lines around their personas as performers by assassinating rival musicians over petty feuds. 

Great material for a crime drama, of course, but damn.

Overall, bait-and-switch title notwithstanding, this was a great book. Just a bunch of interesting stuff, given enough space to show why it's interesting without wearing out its welcome. Now, "State of the Art: 2065" that's when they're finally going to start talking about the state of the art, right?

Ukss Contribution: Link clubs. There's this global franchise of trendy nightclubs, with locations in some of the world's hottest party towns, and they use augmented reality so that the crowds of all their locations blend into one giant mega-party. It's kind of a nifty idea, even if it might prove challenging to adapt to fantasy.

Testament: Roleplaying in the Biblical Era

 Oh, no, I've finally done it. I've read the book that's going to get me canceled once and for all. Testament (Scott Bennie) is a book devoted to roleplaying in the mythic history of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Levant c. 2000 BCE - 135 BCE and my feelings about the source material are . . . complicated.

Maybe I'd get into less trouble if my feelings were predictably negative. Grr. Me atheist! Me no like bad book! Me feel scared at reminder that majority believe it real! And then you'd all nod your heads knowingly and say, "Atheists are notoriously bad at religious nuance. Let's just let him tucker himself out and put a new monster manual on his pillow for when he wakes up."

Sadly, I am capable of at least a little bit of religious nuance, but only at that awkward level where I know just enough that I cannot easily be forgiven for screwing it up.

Nuance #1 - this book is about Judaism, not Christianity. I'm not going to claim to have picked up on this on my own, because the text outright says as much, particularly when it is counseling us not to use anachronistic Christian elements. Which leads inevitably into potential screw-up #1 - a lot of the stories in this book, I experienced first-hand as "Christian" stories. And I don't know how contemporary Jews teach their children about the book of Joshua, but I can say that early 90s Mormon Sunday school pedagogy on this particular subject was fucking traumatic.

And so, I actually really enjoyed this book, in general - its technology level, its stakes, its anthropological complexity, the general mythological vibe of its spells, classes, and monsters. But I absolutely do not want to create a PC who will lay siege to Jericho, conquer the Canaanites, and chop down Asherah poles. In fact, I'm kind of tearing up just thinking about it.

Which brings us to Religious Nuance #2 - D&D's notorious alignment system being deployed with a soul-destroying recklessness I've never before encountered (and hope never to see again). It could quite justifiably be argued that it would be antisemitic of me to express skepticism that Joshua, Samuel, and David are LG, CG, and LG respectively, but in my experience, every Christian who's ever told me how great these guys were has been intellectually and morally bankrupt like you wouldn't believe.

The best way to resolve this cultural contradiction? Don't think about it. That's right, I am literally advocating that you spend precisely zero mental effort trying to figure what alignment prominent Biblical figures would be. There is no payoff. It won't make running a Testament campaign any easier. Best case scenario, it's only a hate crime against cultures that have been extinct for a thousand years.

That's not a flaw that's unique to this book. Alignment has always done this - allowed a simplistic editorial tag to elide the complexity of human behavior. It has always been best practice, even in a setting like Forgotten Realms to just lay out a character's past actions and current motivations and use those as a guide to future roleplaying, leaving any moral judgements for the audience to make for themselves. Testament merely serves as the ultimate example of what can go wrong if you don't. Saul was cursed by God to lose his kingdom and have his family fall into ruin because he took one prisoner and did not kill one-hundred percent of the farm animals in a town he was ordered to utterly destroy, and Samuel was the one to deliver the Lord's rebuke that absolute obedience trumps every other moral, political, and practical concern. Now, try to put that on your little 3x3 meme grid.

So yeah, there may be some unresolved religious trauma there. On the other hand, easily-missed meta-narrative-tag inside a dense 3.0 statblock aside, Testament actually does a pretty good job of being even-handed and secular. It divides its history sections between the four major nationalities (Israelite, Canaanite, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian) and each section sort of advocates for its subject's point of view (though none would actually rise in my mind to the level of "anti-Israel," even when you might expect the Canaanites to raise an objection or two). Ramses II also gets to be Lawful Good. Which does make the sidebar where the book discusses the historicity of Exodus and names him as a leading candidate for the Bible's Pharoah a little awkward.

Alignment. Not even once.

I think the book's big problem is the same one that plagues many historical games set in less contentious time periods - there's only so much you can change canon events and still have it be a historical game. You're not going to have a game where Benedict Arnold successfully invades Canada, leading to America becoming an imperial dynasty instead of a republic, and you're not going to have a game where Moses dies during the Exodus, leading to . . . whatever the fuck that leads to (I didn't have a good idea for this second one because it wasn't my example, it was the book's). This weakness is especially apparent in the chapter about Israel's history. It's mostly a recap of various Bible stories, giving us information on the exact stories in each time period that we're not going to be able to tell.

So, putting aside any thoughts of using Moses' character stats (yeah, he's a multiclass Paladin/Levite Priest/Prophet of the Lord) to run him as an end-boss for a Midianite campaign, what use is left for this book if lurking around the edges of major events is unsatisfying and alternate histories are potentially problematic?

I think it would probably be really good for creating pre-classical Southeast Asian and North African-style cultures in a secondary world. It goes into some pretty good detail about clothes and food and architecture, and the way religion dovetails with a society's cultural expression and shared morality. It gives you a real sense of the importance of calendars and what textured religious or imperial conflicts might look like. The magic classes are interesting and flavorful in a way that you wouldn't normally account for in a general-audience rpg. The Levite Priest class gets the ability to talk to serpents . . . and some special anti-serpent class features. This amused me greatly. ("I only learned your language so I could tell you how much I hate you.") But more than that, it's not the sort of connection you'd make when building a cleric for a made-up god. And the spells themselves are similarly connected to a different set of priorities and values than corebook D&D. You probably shouldn't go so far as to make not-Israelites, not-Canaanites, etc but it definitely got me thinking about different ways people could be.

Getting back to the subject of nuance, I'm not sure I can untangle the three major strains of Big Feelings that Testament inspires. On the one hand, it's a well-executed implementation of some fascinating folkloric concepts from some of history's most influential cultures. And the part of me that appreciates religion as a cultural practice and narrative tradition really appreciates it. No other book on my shelf does fantasy quite like this and as a purely secular form of entertainment (as per the blurb on the back cover "You've read the book, now play the game") it looks like a lot of fun.

On the other hand, this is a very deliberate bit of representation for a marginalized minority religion. As even-handed as it could be with Israel's historical rivals, this is very much a game about Jewish history and religion. And I think it's good that something like this exists, but I have no idea whether Testament is an appropriate and respectful example of "something like this." I just have no context. It seems okay, but then I think about recent discussions in D&D circles about the offensive appropriation involved in Liches' phylacteries and here we have a game where you can play characters who have phylacteries in the original sense of the word . . . Obviously, these two things aren't the same. They're likely not even comparable. But is the second one okay? It seems like it should be, but I've had similar intuitions be disastrously wrong in the past.

Finally, on no hand, because it's kind of an asinine way to feel (on multiple occasions, the book itself enjoins me to not do this), we have a book about some very specific stories that certain hegemonic religious nationalists both in the contemporary United States and various other places historically have frequently used in some odious ways (to pick a mild example - forcing classrooms to post the Ten Commandments). And aside from suggesting that the Canaanites were regular people instead of total monsters, there's very little in this book that would challenge those people. The thing that would upset them most is probably just the use of "BCE" for dates.  It's probably too much responsibility to put on a silly rpg book, of course, but that just means it's definitely too much responsibility to put on me as a GM.

So what's my final verdict? 

Um . . . 

I like reading fascinating things for the blog, and on that account Testament did not disappoint.

Ukss Contribution: The best part of this book was the spells chapter. It was just banger after banger, from mundane utility like Create Bricks to the slightly silly but undeniable useful like Dance of Nakedness (it doesn't make someone actually naked, it just negates their armor and equipment bonuses as if they were naked).

And the best part of the spells chapter was the alternate uses for the Bestow Curse spells. Highlights include:

• Enemy of Pack Animals (your donkey, horse, or camel will definitely attack you if you let your guard down and if they don't they'll just run away)
• Hated by Children (random kids will spit on you, curse at you, etc)
• Scorpion Attraction (yep, all the damned time)
• Flame Prone (get too close to any open flame and make a reflex save to avoid catching fire)
• Nameless (people forget your name . .  .unless it's to associate you with wicked deeds and scandal)

However, none of these things really feel like a setting element to me. So I'm going to go a little farther forward to the nearly as delightful magic items chapter and pick the Ziz egg. A Ziz is a magical crane with the curious ability to wade in water of any depth (its monster description says "even if it is standing over the deepest ocean, the ziz's legs extend to the sea floor") and if you get your hands on one of its eggs, you can use it as a "natural magic item" to cast powerful control water spells. Just be careful, because if the egg breaks prematurely, it will create a massive flood.

I'll probably also toss in the Phoenix as a freebie (it's mentioned that the Ziz is the only bird that doesn't "pay homage" to the Phoenix) because I've got this vague idea about a set of giant, element-themed mystical birds.

(Shadowrun 3e) Wake of the Comet

Hey folks, I'm beginning to have a sneaking suspicion that the Shadowrun writers had no clear idea about what they wanted to do with Halley's Comet. It's the only explanation I could possibly come up with for Wake of the Comet's aggressive, unshakeable neutrality about this particular bit of metaplot.

The Probe Race is a funky little bit of crime-drama-meets-cold-war-style-espionage that was introduced in Year of the Comet. Halley's Comet is coming towards Earth and all these various megacorps with a commercial interest in space want to earn bragging rights by sending a probe to take pictures, gather readings, etc. And the "first leg" of the race, the various attempt to intercept the comet as it was approaching Earth, devolved into a comedy of errors, as every single attempt was sabotaged by some shadowrun or another.

That's actually a pretty solid bit of metaplot. It's funny, it's high-concept, it suggests any number of adventures (my advice: have the PCs sabotage one of the probes, and then have them immediately get hired to sabotage the probe of their most recent employer - the campaign will be legendary). 

What Wake of the Comet is about is the "second leg" of the race. Halley's Comet has reached the lowest point of its orbit, swung back around, and is now heading towards deep space. The few megacorps that were too proud to just let things drop after the "first leg" debacle are now racing to send a probe as the comet flies away from Earth. And as a series of adventures, it has absolutely nothing to say for itself.

They're fine adventures, mind you. Maybe a little stuck in the published adventures' habit of sending runners to anywhere but Seattle, but it's got a good bit of variety. Run an elaborate false-flag kidnapping on behalf of a dangerously amateur Johnson in French Guiana. Engage in a tricky bit of diplomacy as you attempt to bargain a piece of Yamatetsu's space debris away from the Algonkian-Manitou village that found it first (and before the Yamatetsu security goons come to seize it by force). Go to space to plant a virus that will destroy one of the two remaining probes.

All very interesting and challenging shadowruns. But what are the stakes? What's so important about this damned comet that makes it matter who wins the probe race?

I guess, from a worldbuilding perspective, it doesn't have to matter. Corporations do pointless shit, mercenaries get paid to pointlessly thwart them, the cycle of commerce. Certainly not outside the realm of trenchant late-capitalist satire.

And the first adventure does technically have global consequences. Some weird scientist dude hires you to temporarily kidnap his rival, so that the corporation is forced to adopt his plan for the rocket's on-board tech (which I guess is something that corporate scientists might care about), but it turns out the rival is actually a deep-cover plant by Winternight, the apocalyptic cult. He was going to sneak a nuclear bomb on the rocket so it would divert Halley's Comet into a collision with Earth, somehow bringing on Fimbulwinter instead of being an utter shitshow, even by apocalyptic cult standards.

It's a strange plot, because theoretically it's possible for the PCs to behave entirely reasonably and just miss out on the apocalypse stuff. Halfway through the adventure, while the PCs are babysitting the kidnapped rival, the cult tracks down Johnson, gets all the info, and the uses a Physical Mask spell to call the runners in the guise of Mr Johnson, instructing them to release the prisoner early.

And the whole second half of the adventure (and subsequently, the fate of the world), depends on the PCs finding this suspicious enough to not just go, "okay, you're the boss, so can we just come and pick up the other half of our payment whenever . . . "

It probably helps that Winternight decided to treat the situation like a ransom hand-off, taking elaborate precautions to make sure the PCs wouldn't harm the rival. Like, sure, maybe if you just say "abort mission" the PCs will kill the guy in order to tie up loose ends, but they were hired to "keep him out of the way." If they thought their employer was going to burn them, they probably wouldn't toss in a free assassination. They're much more likely to turn the rival loose out of spite.

I know, I know, Winternight doesn't want to take those kind of chances when the fate of the world is at stake, but Brian Shoener did, in the writing of the adventure "The Messenger."

The middle adventure, "Catch a Falling Star" (Davidson Cole, Andy Frades, and Rich Tomasso) was probably the most interesting of the three in terms of structure. It's a delicate situation, calling for careful diplomacy and the navigation of competing social factions (some of the villagers want to sell the Macguffin, some want leverage it for megacorporate support of the Manitou separatist movement, and some want to chuck it in the river and forget they ever saw it). And the only real pitfall I see is that if you play it wrong, it will become the story of a bunch of white Americans coming in and stealing the Native Americans' shit. At one point, it warns against taking a violent approach by noting that "they are outnumbered at least 50 to 1, and that the Manitou are well armed, know the area and have strong magic."

Not mentioned: it would be a really bad fucking look. Like you and your friends are going to recap the session next week, freeze in horror as you realize what you did, and then take a break from roleplaying for at least a year, maybe permanently. So, you know, just a heads up there.

Though, to be fair to the adventure, the worst-case scenario isn't anywhere close to the intended resolution. I guess it just feels a little sketchy, to my contemporary sensibilities, to soft-lock the option behind a "you dumbasses are definitely going to get yourselves killed if you try this" instead of confronting it head-on in a sidebar.

The final adventure, "The Price of Liberty" (Michelle Lyons and Malik Toms) is probably the most frustrating of the three. "The Messenger" may have had the basic issue of all save-the-world plots where success means nothing interesting happens. And "Catch a Falling Star" may have concluded by saying the Macguffin was totally worthless, no matter who got ahold of it. But this adventure ends by giving your PCs the power to declare a definitive, unambiguous winner to the Probe Race, complete with one of those mail-in "vote on the future of the metaplot" sheets that we've seen from time to time, without ever communicating even a glimmer of broader setting implications tied to the choice.

But I don't necessarily want to put all of that on the adventure itself. I think it's probably a more general flaw in 3e's editorial strategy. There's kind of an implication that the stakes of the Probe Race are that the winner gets to be the first (and perhaps only) group to know what the deal is with that funky comet, but it seems like the final consensus for the line was "oh, I guess there was no deal, the comet was just a little funky."

I wonder if maybe this was tied to the transition from FASA to Fanpro? When the edition first started, they had all sorts of plans and ideas, but then the new publishers took over and all they had was a stack of notes, without any of the associated vision?

Maybe, but even if it's true, I'm guessing it's only part of the story. Except for Saito and the new Japanese Emperor, Year of the Comet seemed pretty eager to wrap up its plots right away. SURGE stopped, the natural orichalcum stopped, and the Probe Race just sort of faded from public consciousness (both in the setting and IRL - once more the Shadowrun wiki reveals that nothing ever came from these mail-in forms and it's unclear whether Halley's Comet was canonically visited at all).

Overall, I guess I would declare Wake of the Comet to be "fine." The situations, the characters, challenges - all would be welcome additions to an episodic "heist of the week" style game, of the sort that would not benefit from massive shake-ups to the status quo. The fact that, 23 years later, a more contentious book would have been more entertaining to read probably doesn't enter into it.

Ukss Contribution: When the PCs visit the Apollo space station, we discover that its various facilities are named after Monopoly spaces - Marvin Gardens, Park Place, etc. This includes less than reputable, off-the-books facilities like the Water Works bar or the Community Chest brothel.

And, I suppose, in my role as part-time SJW book critic, I should call out that last one in particular for being needlessly objectifying, but, honestly, it's such a perfect intersection of smut, pun-work, and board game nerdery that I can't find it in my heart to be mad at it.

Now, this is not something that I can directly port over to Ukss. In addition to being a little silly, there's a whole cultural framework that simply wouldn't translate. However, I can borrow the general concept of a space station with a criminal underworld and when I do, I'll try to remember to have a little fun with it, in honor of Wake of the Comet.

Call of Cthulhu d20

I was about halfway through Call of Cthulhu d20's (Monte Cook and John Tynes) "Sanity" chapter when the realization struck me like a bolt from the blue - this entire subsystem, the signature mechanic of Call of Cthulhu as an rpg franchise, was entirely vestigial. It added literally nothing to the game, nor to the stories the game wants to tell.

I figure some of you right now are staring at my words as if I were quoting the Necronomicon, but think about it. "Sanity" is a social construct which means player characters automatically "go insane" the more adventures they survive.

Hold onto that feeling of confusion. It will make my point more eloquent. In the system, the PCs lose sanity for seeing weird creatures, like say, a dead body rising up from its repose to become a murderous zombie. Now, take out the dice rolls and the charts and the Sanity Points and just think about the logical narrative consequence of such an event - the PCs would become the sort of people who believe dead bodies may suddenly start attacking people.

Maybe that doesn't seem like "insanity" to you, but let me paint you a picture. Just a couple nights past, the heroes fought a dread necromancer, and as the blade slid into his chest, he screeched out his haunting final words, "You really think this is the end? It will never end! Ha! Ha! Ha . . . gasp . . ."

And now you're at funeral of one of your party members, who your friends, families, and various mutual acquaintances know better as your college roommate. I, the GM, ask for your Spot modifier and roll a die in secret behind my screen. Then, I announce, "The recumbent body of Sasha, in the casket at the end of the room, does not appear to move."

What do you do?

I'm guessing it's not something that will terribly impress your NPC family with your calm and collected sanity. 

I know what you're thinking. It's not the same thing. The PC isn't a "raving lunatic." They're in full control of their faculties and their actions are a reasonable and proportionate response to threats they have good reason to expect. Oh, so you mean their expanded knowledge of the cosmos is causing them to act in ways the uninitiated can't comprehend?

And I swear, I'm not being stubborn here. Obviously, the Sanity meter is meant as a balancing mechanic. Take too many risks, learn too much, too fast, and you're forced to act in ways that are harmful to your character. But I still think it's vestigial. Because this purely emergent "sanity system," where inevitable rpg protagonist behavior is framed as insanity? It's also a case of your knowledge causing you to act in a way that harms your character, it's just along an axis of harm that rpgs don't usually measure. 

"Oh, our child suddenly quit their job, sold their possessions, emptied their bank accounts, and told us they would be traveling to Tibet indefinitely. I think they're having a serious mental health crisis."

A completely reasonable reaction for parents to have. They don't know about the Tibetan Star Squid. They can never know about it.

The same process applies to the spellcasting system. Dominate Person costs 1d6 Sanity points to cast, which is a fair chunk (PCs can typically expect to start with 50-70), but what if you got rid of the cost? What if dominating people was just something you could do? As much or as little as you want? How would having that little trick in your back pocket change how you treated people? How would it change how you viewed people? Maybe you're never rolling on a chart and potentially picking up a personality disorder, but who would ever be able to tell?

The madness of casting Dominate Person is . . . casting Dominate Person. Just as the madness of encountering mythos creatures is in changing your life to protect yourself from mythos creatures.

On the other hand, keeping the chart would be entirely worth it if your first and only madness result was Teratophilia. I mean, maybe it's a situation that could emerge organically in the course of normal play, but that game would be fucking wild.

"The cultists finish their chant and the deck of the ship rocks wildly under the sudden wave. With a long, primeval roar, the sea parts for rising R'lyeh and backlit by the waning moon you see the writhing form of the Great Cthulhu, glistening as the fetid waters of the lost city pour off his back. One of his massive tentacles reaches for you . . . and, why are you all biting your lips and staring at me? Oh, god, what's going on under the table?!"

Yeah, sometimes the dice can play an important role.

Although, I think, on the balance, I'm against it. The Sanity system simply isn't a very sensitive or nuanced way of depicting mental illness, and Call of Cthulhu d20's in particular is frozen in time. It still lists transgenderism as a mental illness.

Obviously, this is offensive as hell, but there's a certain part of me that smiles at the thought that it could be the same sort of emergent "clarity about the true nature of the universe is interpreted by society as madness" non-madness madness system as the rest of the stuff we've been talking about. "I looked into the trackless realms of infinity, across immeasurable distances and through uncountable eons . . . and I've realized I'm a girl. Yog-shothoth says 'trans rights.'"

To be clear, I don't think that should actually be something that shows up in a game, it's just something that kept intruding upon my thoughts as I tried to read my fucking 7th version of the basic d20 combat system (just over the course of this project - over my lifetime, you basically have to double that from when I read all these books for the first time)..

Eh, the mechanics aren't that bad. It's about as stripped-down as the original 3.0 rules system can get.  It's just, I can never help but think that I could just skip these chapters and no one would ever know. 

Except, of course, that I'd know. How does your Sanity system handle something like that, Call of Cthulhu?

Finally, there is one last, awkward thing I need to talk about. You all knew it was coming. White people in 2001 were just absolutely reckless with the racism.

Now, to the book's credit, it doesn't actively amplify the racism of the source material. I'm perfectly willing to believe that the monster section was assembled through a sort of oblivious bumbling that made curation choices based on "spooky vibes" and "genre legacy." But c'mon, the Tcho-tcho could not be more obvious. They are pretty much every anti-Asian stereotype, down to the haircuts, and they run weird ethnic restaurants that secretly feed people human meat. It's . . . a lot.

That one big issue aside, the racism also pops up in the sort of implicit pulp adventure structure. Find creatures in the African jungles or Harlem jazz clubs. And maybe some Native American tribes worshiped a giant evil serpent god or something. I could tell that they were trying to hedge on this a little bit, putting in some qualifiers and counterexamples that Lovecraft probably wouldn't have approved of. But that almost makes it worse. Because now I know that they knew how bad it looked.

I don't think it's a fatal flaw, because it's marginal and you can sort of write it off as the mythos being active at all places and in all times of human history (for example, the book mentions that during the Cold War, dark magic cults happened "more often among America's allies than its insurgent enemies."), but if you use this book, the genre's . . . less than reputable legacy is going to be something you're going to have to work around . . . just like the book tried to work around it. And what makes you think you're going to be any better at it than they were?

Maybe being at two removes will help. Plus, you've got 24 years more experience, most of that on the internet, where it's actually possible to hear the perspectives of marginalized people on these matters. But surely, even then, you'd want to start with a more contemporary edition of Call of Cthulhu?

What am I even doing? Don't get this book. Nobody is going to benefit from that. 

I guess my takeaway from this game is that it does pretty well when it sticks to weird creatures from a billion years in the future, or like, they're indescribable colors that will make your blood explode if you look at them, but it stumbles when it gets to depicting actual human people. It's a good source of recognizable names to attach to your spooky vibes and I'll always be grateful to it for introducing me to the Cthulhu mythos. It's a great horror sub-genre, with some unfortunate baggage. 

So, I guess I'll call this a reminder for me to track down a better version of the game. Which isn't too bad for a book this old.

Ukss Contribution: There's a creature that can "damage you by eating your shadow." Cool as shit.

(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.