(D&D 3.5) Eberron Campaign Setting

J.R.R. Tolkien once famously claimed that electric street lamps have no place in fantasy. And because he shortly thereafter wrote one of the most influential classics of modern fantasy, we have been saddled with that hot take for decades. It's actually kind of shocking how ubiquitous "vaguely and selectively medieval, with thousand-year anachronisms" became in fantasy worldbuilding. Somehow, everyone just sort of decided that swords and horses and castles and monarchies went hand-in-hand with wizards and monsters and never mind that the cannon predates plate armor. That's just what fantasy is - a world without gunpowder and electricity.

Eberron (Keith Baker) doesn't quite break with that tradition . . . but sometimes it feels like it does. I'm going to sound real weaselly talking about this, but I swear, it's the book being weaselly, not me. There's this thing, called "The Korranberg Chronicle" and it really sounds a lot like a newspaper. I think that's how you have to interpret "folded broadsheets, nested together to form simple books." But what is not mentioned, even in the description of Korranberg itself, is the existence of the printing press.

A printing press must exist. It's the only thing that can possibly explain Eberron's news industry, but the closest we get to confirmation is "magic and the arcane arts allow for effects that in some ways mimic technological marvels that didn't appear in our world until the 1800s." Which marvels, you might ask . . . well, that's something that's present on an ad hoc basis, occasionally requiring extra-textual inferences.

Which seems like kind of an odd choice, for a setting that was really trying to do something different. I mean, there's a train, and that's cool. But the extent of the railway network is unclear because each nation gets its own separate map and . . . I guess the red-dashed line represents the course of the lightning rail, but it's only a guess because there isn't a map key and it's sometimes difficult to remember where the various nations are, relative to each other. I'm pretty sure the longest possible rail journey is from Sharn in Breland to Krona peak in the Mror Holds, but I'm not sure sure. I had to consult something like four different maps to reach that conclusion.

It's not a big deal, but it does speak to a misalignment of priorities. Why is there a train? Obviously, so there can be murder mysteries on a train. So that spies carrying important documents can be waylaid and bamboozled with the ol' switcheroo. So that you can have dramatic fights on top of a train, or even grapple with a villain on a rain-slick rail bridge while an oncoming train bears down on you and your friends are screaming "Let them go! It's not worth it!" and you're screaming back, "I can't let them get away, not after what they did!" and screech! It's too late! Together, you and your nemesis tumble over the side, into the turbid waters below!

And maybe you don't actually need a complete rail map for that. In fact, you probably don't. But c'mon. If you don't even think to include one, can you really say you're as horny for trains as the pulp genre demands?

That's Eberron all over, though. It carries itself like it's trying to get away with something. You'll see modern aesthetics and themes - trains, private detectives (called "inquisitives"), urban noir, the geopolitical fallout from a continental war that used weapons of unprecedented destructiveness and ended in a fragile treaty regime that no one quite trusts - but then it takes pains to remain D&D fantasy. As the introduction puts it, "The setting combines traditional medieval fantasy with pulp action and dark adventure . . . Even so, it is a 'same but different' approach that allows us to make elements of the new campaign attractive to all D&D players."

On the balance, I really enjoyed Eberron, but make no mistake, that "traditional medieval fantasy" is basically dead weight. You've got these feudal monarchies and bucolic villages with their artisan crafts and it all seems woefully insufficient to explain the best parts of the world. In fact, it often seems like it's only there because that's what you'd expect a fantasy world to look like, in the absence of some force that would make it otherwise.

Sharn is a city of 200,000, living in skyscrapers that no one really knows how to build, and what are they even doing there? It's got working class neighborhoods, but nothing like a factory. And I wonder if this is another one of those things where I should assume that they're there, because that would make the world make sense, or whether it's a very deliberate choice. Magic replicates some 19th century technology, but it's still an individual craft, so you can't automatically expect a 19th century world. This is a setting with a purely secular cure to every disease, but it's under the control of medieval craft guild/merchant family. It exists. Your character can say, "Oh no, I've got cholera. I'll have to go to the Healer's Guild to get it cured. That's 125gp I won't see again." But that 125gp is beyond the reach of the 99%. Magic has been commodified, but it's so expensive that it barely changes the world.

I don't think it's possible to square these influences, at least not without going into a level of sociological detail that the book is clearly uncomfortable with. I think, if you're going to get the most out of Eberron, you have to go off book and assume that its industrial magic is as transformative as the real world's industrial technology. You are playing a game set in a world recovering from a century-long war in which the belligerents deployed massive armies of robots (warforged). After the war, a fanatical splinter group of those robots decided to retreat into an environmentally devastated wasteland and plot the downfall of humanity. Just own it. There's no part of this that needs to be backported into Greyhawk. Literally, the only people with anything to gain from that were Wizards of the Coast's sales department, c. 2004. 

Anyway, my verdict with Eberron is that it has potential. I can see why it won the open call setting contest all those years ago. However, it's going to have to pick a lane if it wants to impress me. I've got high hopes. I don't think you can make a dozen supplements for a world like this without eventually getting weird about it.

Ukss Contribution: The elves of this world worship their ancestors through a form of bullshit "positive energy necromancy." The island where they live has a "City of the Dead" where the reanimated (but not undead, I swear) elvish ancestors wander around, doing whatever they do with eternity. As a consequence, an elf character can select the "Right of Counsel" feat, representing their legal right to visit the City of the Dead and ask their ancestors for advice. In-setting, the Right of Counsel is tied to a family relationship, but I like the idea that it could just be part of citizenship in a modern administrative state. "You have an unalienable constitutional right to consult the ancient mummy."

(Earthdawn 4e) Vasgothia

First things first, answering the burning question on everyone's mind: does Vasgothia (Nick Lowe, Kyle Pritchard, Morgan Weeks) finally deliver us more Rozko the Unruly content?

Sadly, it does not. It was always a longshot, but I figured if there was anywhere that Earthdawn's gayest character would appear in 4th edition, this would be it. Last time we saw him, he was Throal's envoy to the Crystal Raiders and Vasgothia has kind of a similar vibe. This is the land where screaming marauders wield big axes and wear bearskin armor. It can be quite . . . unruly.

Though maybe not unruly enough. I'd sort of forgotten that Vasgothia was a province of Thera, and so it came as a bit of a surprise to have about a third of the book devoted to Thera being a total buzzkill. I mean, I should have seen it coming because Vasgothia has always very, very clearly been classical Germania, and would Germania even be Germania if it didn't have some imperialist pricks oppressing it?

I am trying real hard to pin down my feelings about all of this. You've got these axes of conflict in the setting - an imperial aristocracy of ethnic Therans oppressing the Theranized urban Vasgothians (called "Empirists") with racist laws and institutional discrimination, while the Empirists, at the behest of their Theran overlords, wage a low-intensity war with the rural Vasgothians (called "Barrites"). And then, on top of this there are the lingering perils of the Scourge, the vague machinations of the dragons, and the unpredictable consequences of the deaths of the local Passions (i.e. "gods").

And it's all potentially very interesting. Hell, it is often actually interesting. But . . . I couldn't entirely escape the feeling that the setting was somehow . . . holding something back? The book had a subtle, but persistent "coloring inside the lines" feel to it. Like, damnit, it was going to be fantasy Roman Germania one way or another.

I think the culprit here is the Dread Yearning and the Place of ReNaming (and let me tell you, I am not a fan of Earthdawn's find-and-replace-esque habit of capitalizing "Name" mid-word, so I won't be doing it again, even if it results in a misquote). See, Vasgothia indulges in one of the primordial ideas of English-language fantasy: the Spooky Forest that Will Kill You. Classic fantasy. Almost universally beloved. And as far as Spooky Forests go, the Deep Forest is actually pretty damned cool. It's the astrally-corrupted remains of an epic battleground between the Passions and the Horrors, and even to this day you can find the physical remnants of the combatants, which, if consumed, will give you divine or profane magical powers, respectively. So, as you might expect, there are weird creatures who may or may not have been influenced by those remnants, and strange monuments to dead gods, capable of bending mortal minds into unnatural shapes.

All very well and good. If you are of Vasgothian descent, or if you wander to close to a particular cave, you may feel a magical call in the depths of your soul - the Dread Yearning - that will cause you to venture to the deepest part of the Deep Forest and go into a magical cave that will absolutely ruin your life. I have no problem with this. It's great. Where it veers away from the good kind of spooky into the realm of "coloring inside the lines" is in what happens inside the cave.

Those who enter the Place of Renaming ("cave") will (usually) lose their memories and emerge with a totally new Name and personality. Specifically, they will change from an Empirist (or even a Theran) into a Barrite. 

See, the fundamental justification for Thera's imperial ambitions is that they had the foresight and the political will to spend vast resources developing magical apocalypse shelter technology and so everyone who used that technology to survive the apocalypse basically owes them everything forever. And in Vasgothia, the Empirist/Barrite split existed even before the Scourge. The Empirists partially assimilated into Theran culture and swore fealty to the distant Theran government, so they were allowed to build shelters using Thera's tech. Whereas the Barrites followed the uncompromising ideals of their leader, Barri, and fought both the Therans and the Horrors to the very last, suffering a very badass, but thorough extinction in the Scourge.

Until, that is, the Dread Yearning began luring the Empirists out of their cities to the Place of Renaming, where they had their minds rewritten to believe themselves the reincarnations of the dead rebels and inheritors of the lost Vasgothian culture. And the how and the why of this is never fully explained.

Now, I have a theory. I think the Place of Renaming was the Vasgothian Passions' inhuman alternative to Thera's kaers. When the Horrors emerged at the height of the mana cycle, the lives of the rebels were inevitably forfeit . . . but their culture, their values, their memories could potentially survive. So the gods made this spooky cave, a sort of soul kaer, to house the Barrite spirits, and wove it with powerful protective magic so those spirits could not be consumed by the soul-eating Horrors. It was in defense of this sacred ark that they eventually perished. 

Then, centuries later, the blessing/curse came to fruition and the traitorous blood of the Theran collaborators was called to the Place of Renaming, to serve as a vessel for the rebirth of the Vasgothia they abandoned in their fear.

This is a theory that does not, technically, contradict anything in the book, but neither is it particularly supported by it. The book just doesn't bother to explain it. 

I think rpg writers believe that there is a magnanimity in not explaining things. Why, if there had been a concrete explanation for how the Place of Renaming worked, I would not have had the space to come up with my totally awesome personal theory! Except . . . from my perspective, it didn't feel like a writing prompt, it felt like homework. There was a mystery there, but it was a kind of question-killing mystery. The book's default presentation was a series of events without a theme. A partial story, in other words.

And my theory was an attempt to add themes, to complete the story in a particular way. If the Dread Yearning was an intentional act, then that has a certain mythic resonance, but it's also an immense violation, an atrocity, an injustice by the past against the future. A ghost story, in other words. But are the Barrites meant to be a ghost story? In the rest of the book, they're mostly presented as regular folk - the rural Vasgothians who are maybe a little disconnected from the region's past, but they're working it out, joining ideological camps, organizing into rival anti-Theran alliances who hate each other almost as much as they hate the occupiers.

The strangeness of their origin largely exists in the past. The Barrites have a mysterious origin, but they are not, themselves, treated as a mystery. Nobody really expresses disbelief that these people inexplicably exist. The mystery stays where it belongs.

Which is what I meant by "coloring inside the lines." The Place of Renaming didn't feel sacred to me, it felt like The Weird Cave That Makes This Germania.

But I'm not sure how much of my discontent I want to put on the book. Mostly it's okay. This is a very gameable region, attractively and usefully presented in a handy reference volume. It wouldn't necessarily benefit from an elaborate justification for its genre tropes . . .  except that justifying fantasy tropes has historically been Earthdawn's signature move.

So I guess my verdict for Vasgothia is that I like the outline, and I like the details, but I wish it had wasted more of my time with pipe-laying exposition. 

Ukss Contribution: It is speculated that the deadly fungus of the Fungal Grotto derives nutrients from some giant, profane creature buried deep in the earth. Exactly the sort of thing that belongs in the Spooky Forest.

Amber Diceless Role-Playing

Oh boy, another genuine classic. These are always difficult for me because the only reasonable reaction is for me to be impressed, but often as not, these classics are so steeped in a particular cultural context that my initial, instinctual reaction is to be irritated. Amber Diceless Role-Playing (Erick Wujcik) perfectly encompasses that tension by being an extremely impressive book that is nonetheless frequently irritating.

I think the Rosetta Stone for Amber Diceless's contradictions can be found on pages 142-144. This "Designing Short Term Sessions" section offers helpful GM advice on how to use these rules for "tournaments" and "cross-overs."

As a refresher: an rpg "tournament" is when different groups run pre-constructed characters through the same rpg module in a convention (or "tournament") setting and are awarded points for the speed, success, and thoroughness of their play. A "cross-over," (though less commonly used) is when you take a character from one GM's campaign and use it with minimal, negotiated modifications in another GM's campaign. 

This is a book that is radical, even by the standards of today. It didn't just get rid of dice. It was a decade ahead of the curve (if slightly clumsy) in viewing "an rpg as a conversation." It baked high player agency directly into its assumed gameplay, encouraging players to improvise environmental details, set dressing, and even whole NPCs without waiting for the GM's permission. It wrapped up its rules section by suggesting a fully free-form, GM-less experience. It is a primeval storygame, through and through . . .

And it has the same social contract as AD&D. 

Well, maybe not exactly identical - it encourages PvP far more than Dungeons & Dragons would ever dare - but certainly in its outlines. For all the various rules-systems that the wrap-up idealistically encourages you to "dump," it's still a game that assumes an adversarial GM, that foregrounds a vague idea of "player skill," that seeks to reward "tactical thinking," that wants to prepare you for running a tournament game.

An Amber Diceless tournament? Who would want that? Who would enjoy it?

Nobody, that's who, but what are you going to do, have an rpg that doesn't make provisions for potential tournaments? Sarcasm aside, it's a fascinating little dead end because it very starkly shows the normally invisible effects of culture. This is a book that was deliberately, consciously radical. It actually uses that specific word to describe itself. But for all its radicalism . . . it's still kind of AD&D?

And not in that vague way that all rpgs are at least a little bit AD&D. It carries over some very specific AD&D-isms. Thirty years later, the 5th edition DMG is not talking about tournament play. It's not talking about taking a character from your home campaign and using it in a random pick-up game. There are some very specific assumptions at work here that could only have come from the general roleplaying scene, c. 1991.

I think it's probably exactly because the rules are so radical that the social assumptions are so conservative. You're stripping away pretty much all of the identifying features of an rpg - no dice, no skills, powers that are almost purely narrative, attributes that are relative rather than absolute, weakened GM authority - so how are people going to recognize your game as a game? Why, you get downright Gygaxian in your priorities. You say things like "An experienced player with a basic power can always overcome advanced powers wielded without skill."

The combat resolution mechanic is literally two sentences: "Step 1. Compare the Attribute Ranks of the participants in any combat. . . Step 2. The character with the larger Attribute Rank wins."

I do elide a short paragraph in step one that explains which Attribute to use (Warfare for armed combat, Strength for unarmed combat), but that does nothing to diminish the absolutely unbelievable fact that Amber Diceless Role-Playing's combat chapter is 23 pages long. That's six pages longer than AD&D 2nd edition, and only 8 pages less than D&D 4th edition (funnily enough, it's exactly equal to Exalted Exalted 3rd edition).

And, on some level, this is a nothingburger. Warfare, duels, monsters, these are all an important part of the source material. So it's not like the book is imposing combat on stories where it doesn't belong. But, there's not a wilderness exploration chapter. There's not a stealth chapter. There's not a deception and intrigue chapter. Only one aspect of the Chronicles of Amber stories gets put under the microscope like this. And strangely, for all its elaboration, combat never really breaks from those two sentences. The twenty-two-and-a-half pages that follow are entirely about adding toothless narrative embellishments to your foregone conclusion. (Actually, to be fair, it could be interpreted as advice on how to telegraph the conclusion in a way that affords the weaker party the narrative space to run away and try something else . . . but you still don't need 20 pages for that, especially in a game that devotes approximately zero words to courtly etiquette).

It reveals a deep bias in the book's overall understanding of roleplaying games. Like, fundamentally, there must be a big combat chapter. It's a structural necessity, one of the things that makes a book like this into a ttrpg. And it also reveals a kind of basic naivete towards rpg theory. It is just so clear and obvious that "player skill" involves knowing the correct actions to take in any particular situation and having your character make good decisions that will justify them taking the correct actions. "Verisimilitude" is a bedrock. If you want your character succeed, just have them do something that would work in the real world. 

In modern parlance, we'd call Amber Diceless Role-Playing's approach "playing the GM, instead of the game." It's like it never even occurred to Mr. Wujcik that verisimilitude is a moving target, and "good tactics" are really "arguments the GM will find persuasive." It's an oversight that makes large portions of the book utterly unbearable. 

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Amber Diceless lacks the theoretical framework to be even remotely playable directly out of the box. Now, obviously, this is an empirically absurd claim, given all the people who have played it. But I would contend that those people were either filling in the missing pieces (whether consciously or unconsciously) or they were playing the game wrong. 

I have textual support for this position. Whenever Mr Wujcik takes a moment to relay anecdotes from his personal games, he always sounds like he's inadvertently confessing to a crime: 

Don Woodward came up with Carolan, noble and forthright, an honest innocent among the cynics of Amber. . . Carolan was a Good Stuff kind of guy. Trusting, honest, and earnest about Amber. As Game Master I stomped all over him, abused his trust, and sent the worst of the elder Amberites to manipulate him shamelessly. . . Carolan, embittered by fate and his own gullibility, managed to maim a feared Uncle, and kill a beloved Aunt. He experienced betrayal of his every honest emotion. And turned to denial, denying responsibility for his own actions.

Don, the player, complained bitterly about a game where nothing was "fun" and where he found pain everywhere. Worse, he seemed to bring pain to everyone he loved.

Eventually he got through it. Full circle, Carolan faced his guilt, and conquered it.

As a GM, you would not be able to drag that story out of me. Hell, as an author, if I ever felt compelled to write, "playing Amber is not always a pleasant experience . . . sometimes it's sheer mental torture" I'd be forced step away from the draft and contemplate my life choices. I mean, I trust I'm not being too much of an uncultured swine by believing that these silly little games where we get together with our friends and tell each other stories should, in almost all circumstances, be fun. Or, at least, attempted fun.

But I don't actually believe Erick Wujcik tortured his friends with manipulative mind games. I think he's trying, without the proper vocabulary, to inculcate an author-stance approach to character ownership. The idea that seeing your character face hardship, and suffer defeat are actually a reward, because having things to react to, having melodrama to milk for spotlight time, having hooks for unexpected character development - these are also fun. 

And this, too, is a cultural bias. It's aiming for pure story in an environment where "there's an attitude among some people that roleplaying games have to be cold and calculating. . . that players shouldn't get emotionally involved in their characters." We're seeing the shape of Amber Diceless's ambition in the ideas it feels compelled to push back against. 

I can't help but see an ironic echo in the OSR movement. Amber is out here feeling like it's using solicitousness to the scene's sensibilities as a way of buying the opportunity to be radical in its mechanical form, whereas OSR is trying to use a conservative approach to mechanics as a way to recapture older scene sensibilities. I also can't help but think about White Wolf's storyteller system, which saw its debut in the same year as Amber Diceless. White Wolf would push, in its Storyteller chapters, a sensibility very much at odds with the "old school" scene, even as the actual rules of their games were about as traditional as it's possible to get. If, somehow, you could combine Amber's near-free-form rules anarchy with White Wolf's English major approach to gamemastering, you could make the most pretentious indie game anyone's ever seen. It's wild to think that the technology for this theoretically existed as early as 1991.

I suppose I should, at some point, address the game's setting. The premise of Zelazny's Amber novels is that our Earth and everything in it is not "real." It is, in fact, but one of an infinite number of "shadows-" alternate universes that are somewhere between dreams, fictions, and unrealized possibilities. The "real" world is a place called Amber, and Amber's royal family has the unique magical ability to "walk through shadow," essentially allowing them to use the infinitely varied multiverse as their personal playground.

Metaphysically, I find this concept to be absolutely fascinating. In our everyday lives, we can notice a difference between the experience of dreaming and the experience of being awake. . . but only when we are awake. While we are awake, we notice an extra "realness" to our perceptions, and when we are asleep, we are not capable of perceiving the lack. So what if our waking lives were not the bottom of that particular hill? What if there were a deeper experience of realness, a waking beyond waking, and we forget it, just as we forget normal waking while in the throes of our dreams? What if your whole life was spent in this middle ground, this . . . dare I say it, shadow? And then, one day, your life was interrupted by one of the truly real people?

What would that feel like? What would it even mean? Sadly, the Amber novels don't really get into it. The infinite shadows are primarily used as a backdrop for some interesting, well-written, but fairly unchallenging pulp adventures. Though I doubt it was an intended message, the series kind of gives off the vibe that only aristocrats are real human beings.

But as a setting for an rpg, the world of Amber and its shadows are an admirable compliment to Amber Diceless Roleplaying's near-freeform system. Having a private universe where everything is exactly as you want it costs 1 character point (out of 100 for a standard character). The default attributes are enough to put you at a "comfortably superhuman" power level (I'd say upper street-level scaling) and you can buy additional supernatural powers on top of that. You definitely get the feeling that your characters are reasonably beyond the need for dice.

The fly in the ointment is that, for all the PCs' power, the canon characters from the books basically run the place. They're called the "elder Amberites" and the PCs are meant to be their children. You're a badass compared to almost everyone in the multiverse, but as far as mom and dad are concerned, you will always be a baby. This is only barely a metaphor. Corwin, the narrator of the books, ranges from 300 to 500 character points. Player start with 100 points and are supposed to get 5-20 per major adventure. It's theoretically possible to triumph over them, if you can persuade the GM that your plan is sound, but you'll never get out from under their shadow. 

I suppose it's properly thematic, all things considered, but there's a timidity to it, like we couldn't really be trusted with the keys to the Amber universe. I do appreciate that each canon character has multiple possible interpretations (both character-wise and in their stats). The setting may be a playpen, but at least it's not a railroad.

Overall, I'd say I . . . toxic frenemied Amber Diceless Role-Playing. Like, I'm kind of obsessed with how cool it can be, but I am definitely not up for paying the price of admission. I want something almost exactly like you, but without the . . . you know . . . baggage. So let's say instead that it's one of my favorite historical artifacts, and leave it at that.

Ukss Contribution: Going real basic with this - an aristocratic family where everyone is constantly scheming against each other. Sometimes the classics are the classics for a reason.

Paratype

 Where to get it: itch.io page 

First, an order of business to get out of the way: Ew, gross bugs! Yech! Yes, you have at last discovered my shameful secret - your friend, John Frazer, the vegan who is intellectually curious about non-human intelligence and who believes in the essential interconnectedness of all living things, is one of those hypocritical "nature lovers" who subconsciously slots insects into a different mental category than "regular" animals. Yes, if you ask me in an abstract context whether I think mosquitos and jumping spiders and what have you are an important part of the ecosystem and worth protecting, I will say "of course," because that is what I believe . . . but it's not a belief that echoes in my heart. If I saw a giant porcupine, the size of a horse, I would say, "Aww, cute," but if I saw a giant cicada the size of a horse, I would almost certainly shit myself and cry.

Which makes Paratype (Mars Drake) a little bit difficult to enjoy, through ::gritted teeth:: no fault of its own. If you can get past the screaming willies that accompany even imagining its fictional world, it's actually a fun and breezy rules-light rpg with a well-organized integrated campaign that you can play right out of the box.

The high concept pitch is simple - it's a post-apocalyptic world thanks to those wacky government scientists, who genetically engineered a bunch of giant insects as part of a secret bioweapons program. Those insects were released into the wild by a malicious rogue AI and apparently they were a pretty effective bioweapon, because global civilization collapsed. It's unclear whether the first batch of insects merely bred so fast that they were able to conquer the world, or whether it was some kind of virus that led to wild bugs growing giant, but as a practical matter, it's not that important. This is a world of isolated human settlements separated by a wilderness full of weird creatures that will eat travelers alive. Classic Points of Light.

I must reluctantly concede, through white-knuckle typing, that this is an elegant and effective set-up for a sci-fi action game. One of the biggest challenges of populating a creature-infested wilderness is simply coming up with unique and interesting creatures. What do they look like? What do they eat? Do they have any unusual habits that might translate into challenging combat maneuvers? You've got to balance the memorably alien with the biologically and ecologically plausible. Working from scratch, it can be a real pain to come up with ideas, but in Paratype you can just consult an encyclopedia of entomology and make a giant version of whatever catches your fancy.

So, you know, the sample campaign has PCs running into two separate groups of giant ants - one that's infested by the "zombie fungus" that causes them to seek high places and wait for death, and another that engages is fungal agriculture like leafcutter ants. And that's just one type of bug. You can encounter locusts, territorial male butterflies, carnivorous fireflies lurking among otherwise harmless swarms, and a cuckoo bee whose counterfeit pheromones inexplicably work on humans (even to the point where the humans can have conversations with the creature, who will use the information to be a better infiltrator). 

I guess there's never been anything stopping us from plagiarizing wikipedia and making, say, a species of dragon that has a similar lifecycle to encarsia perplexa (just read the link, my recap couldn't possibly do it justice), but I think we have to give Paratype some well-earned props for actually going there. Potential was seen. Opportunity was seized. And the result is a one-of-a-kind rpg setting.

If Paratype has a flaw, it's . . . that it's rules-light . . . mwa, ha, ha! Take that, popular rpg style that is outside my personal preference! No, actually, even as an unreformed tome-and-bloat lover, I quite enjoyed this game's level of mechanical complexity. It's a very simple base, but it's got about 150 special character widgets (which range from 3.0 feat-level bonuses, to roleplaying flaws, to full on inhuman powers like flight). Each one is only about a sentence long, but they work well with the game's minimalist rules. It feels to me like a happy compromise.

The games real "flaw" is genre. It never quite dials into a compelling tone. A big way to get access to the character widgets is through "splicers," sci-fi devices that allow you to transfer genetic traits from insects to humans, creating superhuman "hybrid" characters. And the body horror you're (probably, if you're like me) feeling right now is not entirely incidental. The acknowledgements section lists The Fly (1989) as inspirational media.

But this isn't really a horror game. In general, it's much more flippant with its hybrid characters. One of the antagonists is a New York City landlord who's also a hybrid tick. And a major setting villain is a mosquito hybrid named Ragtag, who gets some absolutely adorable art that is strongly reminiscent of a Borderlands boss' splash screen, complete with hand-drawn arrows pointing at her with the captions "Super cool!" "It's not a cult!" and "I heard she does graffiti."

Damnit, Paratype, you made me love the mosquito woman! I'm not going to forgive that any time soon!

Unfortunately, the game doesn't really explore the reckless transhuman element. It doesn't turn genehacking bug-splicers into a proper subculture.

So it's not horror, it's not biopunk, and despite the testimony of the Acknowledgements, it's not 50s B-movie kaiju either. It has elements of those things. And it could be made into those things, but aesthetically, its biggest influence seems to be indie roguelite video games. The campaign is a linear hexcrawl where your progress hinges on careful management of highly abstracted "fuel" and "rations" resources, which you track with a box-based inventory system. And, on a broader level, the whole thing just has that particular breed of slightly-glossy/slightly cheesy quirk that you will instantly recognize from any of a dozen pixel graphics rpgs.

Now, forget everything I just said, because none of it fairly applies to a single-author, rules-light ttrpg. I'd say, rather than being a true flaw, Paratype's genre-squishiness is more of an "area where further development is low-hanging fruit." The only part of this world we see is a stretch of I-95, near the American east coast, and I see no reason why other regions can't lean more into one particular genre or another, if you were inclined to homebrew a larger Paratype world.

Overall, I'd say Paratype punches above its weight class, considering that it fits in that odd middle-ground between "hefty zine" and "slim corebook." Which seems fitting for a game that wears its love for insects proudly on its sleeve.

Ukss Contribution: There's a broken-down lighthouse that the keeper wants to bring back online by using giant fireflies instead of electric lights. Yeah, that's a solid gold idea for weird fantasy if I ever saw one.

Feng Shui

Time has a way of sneaking up on you. That's not just a pun about Feng Shui's (Robin D. Laws) setting, it's also a common cliche. And like many cliches about things sneaking up on you, you'll go most of your life thinking it doesn't apply to you . . . until, without warning, it does.

At some point, I can't pinpoint exactly when, I'd crossed a generational rift and the world I remembered from my youth, the technological and cultural assumptions that grounded my view of "how the world work" . . . it all just disappeared. Even to myself. The old world exists in my memories, but not in my daily praxis. I have to remind myself to be a proper curmudgeon.

So I'll read a book like Feng Shui and I'll express a certain cynicism - "ah yes, pirates vs ninjas, how wacky," and that's a very jaded, modern sort of cynicism. Ah, yes, of course, the brakes are off. What other way would I expect them to be? 

But that's not what I would have felt as a kid. When I was 14 years old, I'd have been, "Pirates vs ninjas? That's hilarious! How do you come up with something like that?! So random!" And I would have had a nostalgic soft spot for your rpg until my dying day.

The part that's "time sneaking up on me" is the fact that it wasn't until the final chapter, where Robin D. Laws is fannishly recapping his favorite Hong Kong action movies, that I consciously registered that this book was contemporary with my 14-year-old self and not with the cynical adult that boy had become.

"Pirates vs ninjas" is a bit of a yawn in 2025, but in 1996? A decade before the meme hit the internet? It gave me pause, made think that maybe this thing actually had some audacity after all.

You have to understand, the chapter on Hong Kong cinema actually went out of its way to explain the career of Jackie Chan. He gets a big 18 pt section heading all his own. "One of the jarring things about Jackie movies is their credit sequences: he ends with a blooper reel, except that the bloopers inevitably contained failed stunt attempts. . . At first, you're just enjoying the stunt, as you would any Hollywood shot. Then you realize, holy @#$%! he's really doing this!" 

I'd forgotten how large the world used to be. Mr. Laws wouldn't have bothered to tell us this in a time period where it was simply a well-known fact about one of the world's most popular movie stars. In 1996, we still had to learn about Jackie Chan via word of mouth from our clued-in friends who got to see foreign films in a major market like Vancouver. It would still be a couple of years before I'd receive a dozen Golden Harvest movies on VHS as a birthday gift. This was, in fact, the year when I got my first AD&D 2nd edition Players Handbook. I had no idea something this cool even existed.

I'd used "pirates vs ninjas" earlier, not as a literal description of this book's contents (it has ninjas, but the only pirates are just regular criminals at sea and not the iconic Age of Sail swashbucklers), but as an easy metonymy for the internet's routine variety of excess ("Oh, just toss another trope on the pile, the rabble demands MOAR"). But this is not an internet book. It recommends we learn more about Hong King cinema by subscribing to alt.asian-movies.

Which means its clownish, barely coherent, recklessly inclusive worldbuilding was something Robin Laws decided to do all on his own. And I respect the hell out of that. When you're stupid on the internet, people assume you're doing a bit (for example: this blog's own hot takes are probably some kind of irony . . . is what I'd prefer you believe on those occasions where I put my foot in my mouth). But when you're this stupid over mail order, that takes real conviction.

Keep in mind, I'm using words like "stupid," "clownish," and "pirates vs ninjas (derogatory)" as a compliment. It's just that before I fully comprehended this book as an artifact of the 90s, it was a mild compliment ("oh, it's trope-laden gibberish that takes genre as a dare, my favorite kind of rpg, but nothing I haven't seen before") and now that I've placed it in the context of my own burgeoning cultural awareness, it's an enthusiastic compliment ("oh, it's trope-laden gibberish from long before tvtropes.org was even a glimmer in the milkman's eye . . . that's breathtaking.")

I think the best way to describe Feng Shui is "Kung Fu fantasy epic meets occult conspiracy thriller meets gritty modern crime drama meets dystopian near-future sci-fi" but with the understanding that the strangest part of this description is the word "meets." All the characters from all the named action movie sub-genres literally meet each other. A 19th century Chinese nationalist rebel, a contemporary mafia assassin, and a cybernetically uplifted ape supersoldier all meet in a bar, following the invitation of an ancient Chinese wizard. . . and that's how a completely average game of Feng Shui begins.

Notionally, this all happens because of time travel, but I think the way this setting handles time travel really puts the cart before the horse (Wait, is that why the cart was before the horse originally? A time traveler got confused? New head-canon alert!). You could call it a sprawling time-travel story where secret warriors from throughout history wage a shadow war for control over the history of all humankind . . . but that feels to me like an ex post facto explanation. I think the clash between milieus came first and it turned out that time travel was the only type of plot that could even possibly explain it (except maybe a multiverse, which . . . probably would have worked better, actually).

My main evidence for this theory is the fact that Feng Shui is a time-travel game that really seems to go out of its way to shut down all the major time travel plots. The mechanics of time travel conspire to make all four of its time periods (or "junctures" in the jargon of the game) into semi-stable sub-settings. 

The first guardrail is that there's only four specific points in time you can travel to - CE 69 (which is cast as a high-magic period in Chinese history), 1850, 1996 ("contemporary" times), and 2056. And time passes at the same rate in all four junctures - if you spend a year in 1996 having adventures, then when your calendar says 1997, you'll be able to travel to CE 70, 1851, and 2057.  This means it's virtually impossible to intercept your own timeline. Events in your personal history (especially in the time covered during gameplay) are more or less unchangeable. Although, there's a bit of a loophole in the fact that 1996 and 2056 are both within a single human lifetime. You can't go back to last week and stop yourself from making a mistake, but a 74-year-old from 2056 could visit his 14-year-old self and, say, hand him a copy of an obscure indie rpg he'd probably enjoy, thereby changing the entire trajectory of his life. Certainly, giving stock tips to your grandparents is easily within the grasp of any experienced time traveler.

But that oversight aside, the timeline also protects itself through the power of immense historical inertia. Even if you go back to 1850 and prevent the birth of Hitler (the book directly addresses this specific use of time travel, almost as if they knew it would inevitably come up), some other similar figure will rise up and take his place. In fact, except for certain superficial details, it is virtually impossible to affect history one way or the other. . . without gaining control over the titular Feng Shui sites.

Yes, having powerful feng shui can lead to many positive shifts in fortune, including (apparently) the entire arc of human history bending towards your personal vision (provided you control a significant fraction of all the world's most powerful feng shui sites). You may recognize this as complete nonsense that transparently serves to keep the game's focus on the sort of factional conflicts that can be solved with kung fu and gunplay, rather than a cerebral navigation of temporal paradoxes. Really, each of the junctures feels like its own separate campaign world, that can be influenced by the other junctures with physical force, but which have nothing to fear from time tourists accidentally stepping on the wrong butterfly. You know, as if the time travel were merely a plot device. That's why I think a multiverse setup would have given GMs a freer hand, without tempting the players with the sort of fantastical time-based problem-solving that the book is begging them not to explore.

Still, that's an absolutely wild problem for the game to have had in 1996. "Your time travel mechanics are too optimized towards shutting down meme builds" is the kind of criticism that almost makes me think that Feng Shui itself might be the product of time travel. Like, how are you so over the concept of time travel, when nobody even asked you to put ninjas and cyborgs in the same game to begin with?

I think, overall, I probably love Feng Shui. I can recognize it as the sort of thing that I would have felt nostalgic about, if I'd had a hipper childhood, and I think I'd enjoy both running and playing in a Feng Shui game. However, I think I'd be happier with a book that kept the eras separate and merely used them as examples of how you could fine-tune the rules to allow for multiple sub-genres of action adventure. There's a difference between playing an rpg that feels like an action movie and playing an rpg that tries to be every action move, all at once.

So, you know, 10/10 for the audacity and 1/10 for the audacity. Which I think counts as a perfect score.

Ukss Contribution: I liked the "godhammer" pistol from 2056. It didn't quite live up to the grandiosity of its name (doing 12 base damage, compared to the desert eagle's 11), but I figure I can come up with something suitably epic for its fantasy counterpart.

Cairn

What's this, my second grumpy post on a single grumpy day? Well, yes, but Cairn (Yochai Gal) has left me considerably less grumpy than V20 because at least it didn't make me read 500 pages before I could have a neutral opinion about it. Cairn is only about 20 pages, and those pages are about half the size of an average rpg book . . . but the text size is also smaller . . . but also there were a lot of tables. Let's just say it took less than an hour to read and leave it at that.

So what did I get out of that hour?

Like all rules-lite rpgs, Cairn reminded me that the core of the hobby is just "saying things happen." The players say what their characters are going to do, based on the nouns and adjectives written on their character sheets, and then I, as the GM, say what happens based on my logical assessment of the likelihood that those actions will have an effect. Sometimes, there's an element of uncertainty in the likely outcome, and in those situations, I'd have the players roll a "Save" against one of their three Abilities, and assign good or bad outcomes based on the quality of the roll (though, in this game, low rolls are better than high ones).

There's also a very simple combat system. It's streamlined even compared to other rules-lite d20 games. You have no to-hit roll. Everyone just rolls damage. The main tactic just seems to be picking your battles by persuading the GM not to call for a fight. 

I don't want to get too backhanded, though. I knew, upon picking this book up, that it would be minimalist. Do I really want to penalize it for that?

On the other hand, why do I need it? What am I getting out of it? And those aren't really questions I can answer. I've been doing this hobby for 30 years. I could make a more complex game than this in the space of a day. I'm fairly certain I have. But would "more complex" automatically mean "better?"

I guess that's the lesson that rules-lite games teach us. What is it possible for us to live without? How much can you take away and still have the essential heart of the hobby? And if we're talking about the essential heart, then Cairn persuasively argues that you can take away quite a lot. . . Even if I, personally, cannot live without exception-based design.

Anyway, this is a short book, featuring a game with more random charts than pre-defined rules and I think it would probably work. You can tell a fantasy adventure story by just saying what happens and occasionally rolling dice. Who knew?

I do, however, have to take a quick moment to give credit where credit is due and say, for only being one (half-sized, small print) page long, the "Principles for Wardens" section gives some pretty useful general GMing advice, like "Players do not need to roll dice to learn about their circumstances" or "Use binary 'so A or B?' responses when their intentions are vague."

Overall, this was not the book to make me a convert to rules-lite OSR, but I kind of liked it. And that was enough to briefly make me forget my cold.

Ukss Contribution: There's not a lot of room for setting flavor in this book, but the spell-list, which is little more than a name and a brief (1-2 sentence) description does manage to do some fantasy worldbuilding. Based on the names in the Random Spellbook Table alone, I'd narrowed my choice down to:

Anthropomorphize
Bait Flower

Cone of Foam

Marble Craze
Objectify
Summon Cube

And while some of those are more useful than others, when I finally got around to the descriptions, it could only be Marble Craze: "Your pockets are full of marbles, and will refill every 30 seconds."

That spell was some mage's senior thesis at magic academy. I can just feel it.

Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition

I am so fucking grumpy about having to write a post about Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition. (Justin Achilli, Russell Bailey, Matthew Macfarland, Eddy Webb) Mostly, because I have a cold, and I am really eager to climb under my covers and take a nap. But also because this book is . . . is . . . fine.

Normally, I'm able to forgive something for being fine. Maybe I'll wag my finger and say, "you're on thin ice, Mr. Fine" but it'll be a playful sort of teasing. I'd have to be a real ogre to get actually mad at a book for being fine. But here we are. My nose is running. My head is swimming. I am barely conscious, and all I can think is, "What the hell do you think you're doing, being all uncontroversially conservative and blandly competent? Why can't you be more like your brother, Mage 20? He was an absolute shitshow, in a way that pays tribute to the true spirit of the White Wolf games studio we've all come to love and fear."

I mean, there are still hints of the old White Wolf. A couple of slurs, here and there. One of the rules examples suggests the PCs meet "behind a coffee shop in an ethnic ghetto." The lore has been rolled back to the pre-Revised status quo and that means they've completely tossed out the institutional memory for why the Ravnos were a bad idea (well, maybe they're toned down a little bit, but yeah, the g-slur shows up again).

But honestly, these are minor quibbles. Bad habits that might inevitably emerge from the "Vampire: the Masquerade voice," but nothing you'd be surprised about. I think I'd almost be disappointed if I'd read a 500 page Storyteller-system corebook and not seen a bad-guy NPC commit a hate crime. The real flaw, that condemns this book to an unforgiveable fineness is simply that it doesn't really adopt a point of view. You've got a game with a decade's worth of rollercoaster metaplot and a mandate to create a new edition that draws on everything that came before, to be a luxury collector's edition for nostalgia-addled xennials and the approach you decide on is . . . archival?

This shit is barely pretentious. You've changed, man.

You might be tempted to look at the immense size of this volume (513 pages vs Revised edition's 308) and think that it's MOAR VAMPIRE. But at the risk of revealing myself an unbearably shallow thinker, if you compare the books' Tables of Contents you find - the V20 version of "A World of Darkness" is 8 pages shorter, "Clans and Sects" is 4 pages longer, "Character and Traits" is 4 pages longer, "Rules" is 2 pages longer, and Revised's "A History of the Kindred" is removed entirely. The bulk of the extra pagecount comes from the "Disciplines" chapter (Revised: 44pgs, V20: 118pgs) and the all-new "Morality" and "Bloodlines" chapters. What it all adds up to is an extremely conventional Vampire: the Masquerade core book with a couple of big lore dumps bolted on.

Now, fair's fair. My ambivalence right now is being fed by my general bad mood. If I were in a good mood, I might, at this very moment, be going "ZOMG, they remembered to include the Kisayid! Faerie-tainted vampire scholars that inexplicably work with the Sabbat! This game is so camp!"

But I can't quite do that, because when that mood dial swings back towards pessimism, I can't help but feel like the camp is tucked away. They just gave each of the canonical bloodlines two pages and a Discipline write-up (which, if you're keeping track, that's 154 pages, more than 30%, of the book devoted to "kewl powerz" - Justin Achilli must be rolling over in his grave), but no extended worldbuilding, no mandatory canon events, nothing that would at all annoy someone looking to play a "serious" game. Hell, the Storytelling chapter doesn't even mention "superheroes with fangs," not even derisively. Excuse me, what game are we playing? Because it sure as hell doesn't seem to be Vampire: the Masquerade.

Or, at least, it doesn't seem to be all of Vampire: the Masquerade. I'm out here looking for the game where closeted bisexuals can discreetly slut it up (am I speaking from experience . . . I'll never tell). I'm looking for the game where you can get a trenchcoat and katana and pump blood points into your shotgun's accuracy. (Actually, I went back and checked my old core books and only Mage: Revised had a separate stat line for katanas, which means I need to cut V20 some slack . . . or, at least, I would if I didn't remember Vampire as being the game with the katanas.) Why, this is a 20th anniversary party and it looks like you just completely forgot Samuel Haight's invitation. Shameful. 

I tease because I love. Obviously, one of the things the designers learned in the previous 20 years was how to be less cringe, and while I don't think that tendency works entirely to the book's benefit, I can at least concede that I understand the temptation to seize the opportunity to at last create a version of Vampire: the Masquerade that was darkly decadent gothic punk personal horror. I think I need to interpret the book's curation as a show of faith that we'll be able to discover the goofy version of the game on our own.

So, session zero, we've got a Kisayid, an escaped gargoyle, and a dark and gritty Salubri antitribu, and we're all following Paths of Enlightenment that reward us for diablerizing elders, and except for the katanas, all of this is completely by the book. I really have nothing to complain about. It's just that's it's all so perfunctory. Maybe because "the whole of 90s Vampire" is just too much to put into a single book, even one that's 500 pages long. I find myself asking, "why are you doing this?" and the only answer that makes sense to me is "because it's the 20th anniversary of Vampire: the Masquerade."

And don't get me wrong. That's enough. This book is enough. It's fine. If you were on the fence about whether to buy V20 or Revised, and money was no object, then you should definitely get V20. But . . . whatever issues I may or may not have with Brucato, he very clearly had some axes left to grind re: Mage: the Ascension and that came through in the text. And maybe it's only because I came into M20 having read all the extant Mage books and V20 having only a few Revised-era supplements under my belt, but I could not detect any axes being ground. It's all very professional, but it yields a book that you'd barely have to hold someone's pet hostage in order to extort them to read. Nostalgia entirely without regrets.

In the end, I'm forced to confess to my personal perversion - I'd rather have bad novelty than a good version of something I've seen before. And except for a few of the more obscure bloodlines, this book is entirely made of things I've seen before. 

And so, from the depths of my sickness, I must point a trembling finger and level the worst insult this blog has to offer: Creators of Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition, you did a good job updating a familiar classic. I have no substantial complaints. You should be proud of your work.

And may God have mercy on your souls.

Ukss Contribution: I like the Sabbat's practice of creating "shovelheads." Basically, they do a bare-minimum Embrace to a bunch of randoms, bury them in a mass grave so they awaken as scared, confused, furious, and hungry vampires, and then they just sort of unleash them on a city as a kind of biological terror weapon. They can't be controlled, but control isn't actually salient to the Sabbat's goals.

It's a pretty effective action-horror plot, no matter what setting you're working in.