(Eberron 3.5e) Sharn: City of Towers

Eberron is so close to greatness. I can feel it. Sharn: City of Towers (Keith Baker and James Wyatt) is the first full-sized supplement I've read for this setting and almost the whole way through it was on the cusp.

The challenge before me now is to describe this . . . general cuspiness without sounding like I'm bitter the book isn't something it never promised to be. Let's start with the printing press.

I am almost certain that the world of Eberron has moveable type printing presses. Or, at least, some magical doodad that functions in almost exactly the same way. It's just something that . . . fits the vibe. You're a gnome who works at a bank, you read your newspaper on the train - Eberron!

However, when I examine the known, canonical facts about "The Sharn Inquisitive" (Sharn's hometown newspaper) they somehow don't quite fit with a historically-inspired printing press while also not elegantly fitting with any other form of known D&D-style magic or craftsmanship:

• First, it's called a "Chronicle" rather than a "newspaper," which isn't a telling detail per se, but does suggest a deliberate choice to avoid modern-sounding terminology.
• Contra this, the job title of Haftak ir'Clarn, the guy in charge, is "publisher." And while there's nothing about being a publisher that specifically requires the existence of a printing press, it does at least imply a mass distribution.
• Haftak runs a "bookstore and bindery, and uses its facilities to publish the Sharn Inquisitive." And this feels, to me, like another very careful curation of terminology. What is a "bindery?" What sort of tools do they use? Where do they get the specific papers to bind? Binderies still exist, and most use modern industrial tools, but the word itself is old-fashioned, more suggestive of hand-crafting. And this "chronicle" that's being "published" . . . it uses the "facilities" of a bookstore? I guess a bookstore could have an on-site printing press, but it hardly seems like a standard facility.
• Further evidence in the minus column - you can't buy individual issues. It's only available as a yearly subscription, with weekly issues distributed by mail. So we know for a fact that Sharn does not have adorable moppets standing on street-corners shouting about the latest extra! That's a pretty big smoking gun against the Sharn Inquisitive being a newspaper.
• On the other hand, "it's usually easy to find a discarded copy a few days after publication," which suggests that individual issues are common and disposable. At 3gp per year, that comes to roughly 6cp per issue. That's a price point and behavior that argues against being hand-crafted.

On the balance, I think the evidence argues against the Sharn Inquisitive being mass-produced by a printing press, but I'm not sure how much the "evidence" should count, considering that every time they talk about this fucking thing they sound like they're talking about a god-damned newspaper!

And yeah, it's a bit ridiculous of me to hyperfocus on less than 5 paragraphs of a 192-page book, but it sort of gets at what I mean by "on the cusp of greatness." Eberron is not quite one thing or another and so far it has attempt to coyly weave between its influences without committing to picking a lane. And to the wrong kind of mind (like mine, I guess), that can be pretty annoying, but done with deftness and skill, it can also be pretty fucking great. From what I've seen of the setting so far, it seems likely that the creators will develop that skill in time, but that they don't quite have it yet.

Case study #2: ores. Where do they come from? Where do they go? This book has two contradictory answers. From page 97:

"Cogsgate is the gateway to the Blackbone Cogs. Ore from Zilargo and Karranth is carted town the long tunnels into the darkness. . ."

And yet, from page 122:

"Brelish refineries sell much of their ore to Zilargo."

Looking at the surrounding context, I'm pretty sure this is not a matter of ore just going round and round between the two nations in an eternal circuit. And it's probably not a case of raw ore being mined in Zilargo, shipped all the way to Sharn to be refined in its vast lava-powered underground foundries, and then shipped back to Zilargo to make manufactured goods. Indeed, "Zil artificers and engineers produce many of their wares in the great factories of Breland."

However, the origins and chain of ownership of this ore and its resulting products are unclear. Zilargo mines the ore? Then ships the ore to Sharn? Then sells the raw ore to the refineries? Then buys back the refined ore? Then sends the refined ore to factories in Breland (the nation that contains Sharn) to be turned into wares? Then sends the wares all over Khorvaire?

Okay. I'm not sure why Zilargo is acting as double-middleman, and if I were the King of Breland, I'd be worried about long-term economic imperialism, but hey, capitalism, whatcha gonna do? However, we just got done with a systematic description of all the dozens of districts across all 17 of Sharn's various wards, and only one factory is mentioned . . . and that produces textiles.

Now, I know I'm in ultra-nitpick mode right now. In one of the district descriptions it mentions the existence of "workhouses," but in context it did not seem to refer to the cruel Victorian "rehabilitation" facilities, so I can only assume the word was meant to evoke a proto-industrial process of centralized, but not mechanized manufacture.

This is where I have to step back and have a modicum of self-awareness as a critic, because I've talked a lot about things that have all of jack shit to do with fantasy adventure. Printing presses? Ore shipments? Factories vs workhouses? Who the fuck cares? And more to the point - am I truly, honestly bringing this up as a lense to examine Sharn: City of Towers or am I just doing the thing I do where I pick a random subject to go off on because I have little to say about the book itself?

Well, I'm afraid to say, this time it really is about the art and these issues, as apparently unconnected as they are from fantasy adventures, really are very important to my critical assessment of Eberron.

It all comes back to Tolkien and his "electric street-lamps have no place in fairy tales." I disagree, but this disagreement is not actually about the literal aesthetics of street-lamps. What Tolkien was saying, and what I'm disagreeing with is that modernity has no place in fairy tales. See, more than the trappings of technology or "hard vs soft magic systems" or any of that stuff, the difference between fantasy subgenres (especially in tabletop roleplaying) comes down to historiography.

Eberron, so far, has attempted this (historically pretty bold) noncommittal genre-straddling, but in the process has run the risk of orphaning itself in an incoherent historiography. All this talk I've been doing about modes of production, it's been because Eberron has so far failed to acknowledge that modes of production are inherently ideological. 

Which, okay, makes me a bit of a silly goose. I'm here shouting "This Dungeons & Dragons setting needs more dialectical materialism damnit!" and in 9 times out of 10, that would be a ridiculous demand. But here in the 10th time, in a world where magic can emulate certain 19th century technologies, in a corner of the setting that "owes a great deal to classic crime and detective films and novels, such as The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon" a more modern approach is necessary.

Sharn: City of Towers should have explained what a workhouse really is. You spend all this time in a noir-style city with deep shadows, corrupt law enforcement, and terrifying criminal gangs, but you never get the context that someone joining up with the legbreakers to avoid the workhouse isn't just some lazy criminal. They're a person faced with an impossible choice. Live outside the law, do things you might find reprehensible, or subject yourself to one of the atrocities of the industrial revolution's transitional economy. A "workhouse" isn't just an old-timey name for a "factory" it's a place where you're sentenced to hard labor and gruel for the "crime" of being poor in a system that manufactures poverty. You are being judged for society's failure to plan a soft-landing for those displaced by the mechanized thresher. And in Sharn, that judgement manifests in the stunningly unsubtle visual metaphor of slumlords living in cloud palaces while the exploited poor toil in the lightless foundations of their sky-challenging towers.

More than any particular chain of logistics, it's important to think about how these things work because those answers shape how you write your history. Whether the ore comes to Sharn from Zilargo or goes to Zilargo from Sharn, the answer to "how does this all function" is "through the exploitation of labor." Or, at least, that's answer you give if you want a fantasy setting that feels like the 19th century (regardless of its tech level). It's the answer you give if you want to tell stories that feel like classic detective thrillers. Chinatown was about incest, but it was also about water use rights.

It's also why I seem so obsessed with whether or not Eberron has a printing press. Obviously, it's not really that important. If they don't have a press, we can at least infer the existence of some spell or magic item that is maybe a little slower and more expensive than a press. But what the press represents, as part of a historical narrative, is a transformation of social consciousness, a fundamental change in the way people relate to information and engage with their communities. And it's kind of important to know whether that transformation is happening in Eberron too.

Gonna go back to dragging Tolkien. For all his insight, and for all his beautiful worldbuilding, his historiography was fundamentally conservative. Like, how did the people of Gondor learn that they once again had a King instead of a Steward? Not through a newspaper, you can be sure about that. Because they were subjects rather than citizens. They didn't need to stay informed because they were never in danger of being consulted. Luckily, they were in near-unanimous agreement about the importance of adhering to tradition and ensuring the smooth transition of power to an heir of the proper bloodline (which may sound arbitrary, but remember, the bloodline also conveyed an uncommon greatness of spirit).

And look, I'm being needlessly cynical about the book's happy ending. It's not my intent to stir up shit about a beloved classic. It's just to show the way historiography can shape fantasy stories. Another rhetorical question - is there any power that Sauron claimed that King Elessar did not possess? Yeah, it's a brat question, because the whole damned book is about the temptation of the One Ring, which represents the callous and cruel exercise of power. But what I'm talking about is the distribution and possession of power.

What's to stop Elessar from killing a yeoman farmer and taking their land for the crown? Now, obviously, Aragorn would never do that . . . but what's stopping him? Let's just keep that question rhetorical, because the point here is Tolkien's historiography renders it irrelevant, perhaps even impertinent. The thing stopping Elessar from ruling unjustly is Aragorn's unshakable sense of justice. And I think Tolkien would argue that's a better guarantee than you'd get from a system of checks and balances (and honestly, given the state of the USA today, I'm not sure I could blame him if he did). This is what's known as an individual level of analysis - good government is caused by good rulers, bad government is caused by bad rulers, and the fraught history of humankind can largely be explained by the fallen nature of humanity.

I bring it up not out of any great desire to show my whole ass re: the well-trod ground of Tolkien scholarship, but to contrast it both with Eberron's ideal approach and with its actual approach. The GM chapter claims to want to tell hardboiled detective stories, but to do that you have to pull back and look at society. Because that's kind of what noir is about - a post-war disillusionment with heroism that throws into contrast the individual's powerlessness before nameless and unaccountable social forces. The villain in Chinatown got away with incest because he got away with stealing water, and he got away with stealing water because the social and political incentives of California at the time favored capitalist consolidation. The corruption goes all the way to the core of society and the horrific individual abuse is only a manifestation of that ("Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown.") 

It's debatable whether authentic noir is even something that's desirable to do with D&D, but what's not debatable is that noir is something D&D usually doesn't do. Eberron in general, and Sharn: City of Towers in particular say they want to do noir, but, well, there's not enough information in this book to tell a story revolving around water rights, that's for sure. (Though there is a character, Luca Syara, who is basically a Lost Generation playwright, so it's not entirely hopeless).

But I want to circle back to "traditional medieval fantasy," because that's the other thing Eberron claims to want to do and it's important to note that while D&D fantasy was inspired by Tolkien, it never actually shared his historiography (see, there was a point to the digression after all). There's actually a third ideology at work - mid-century American white supremacy. 

Now, Gygax's unseemly admiration for John Chivington notwithstanding, I don't think many of the contributors to D&D over the years were openly and consciously white supremacist. Rather, we're talking about a historiography here - a way of talking about cultures, states, and peoples that was shaped by the assumptions of a specifically American white supremacy. You've got "civilization" or the "good" alignment that is white-coded . . . and that is under threat by "barbaric" or "evil" forces, which are . . . not white-coded. And as long as you have monsters in the wilderness, you can never entirely get away from that, at least not in the D&D tradition.

But I have to give Eberron credit for at least visibly trying. There's a monster kingdom and it has a certain credible political legitimacy (even though that's not recognized by Breland and the monster kingdom's citizens have no rights under Brelish law). The goblinoids have an ancient history and will mingle with humanoids at border zones and in urban areas like Sharn, where they're poor (because of segregation) but regular citizens. And more broadly, decoupling alignment from creature type does blunt the racial essentialism that is a big driver of the ickiness of "traditional" D&D.

However, this more Eberron moves away from its inherited Gygaxian historiography, the more conspicuous its failure to embrace literally any alternative. So far, they've been playing it off as genre-bending, but that only works because the setting is new. Before too many supplements, it's a trick that will start to get old.

Overall, Sharn: City of Towers is a very generous setting book. It gives a complete tour of the city, covers customs and legal codes, offers a bunch of adventure ideas, and rounds it out with new feats, new magic items, and new prestige classes. It has pretty much everything I want from an rpg . . . except a point of view.

Ukss Contribution: You can pay an assassin extra to send your target's soul to hell (or, at least, an unpleasant-sounding afterlife: "the domain of the Keeper.") The assassin gang has a special dagger that will do it. I'm not sure what it says about Eberron's soteriology that this is possible, and I can't even begin to speculate what genre of crime caper this is (vanta-noir, maybe), but it's some hardcore fantasy nonsense and I find it very challenging in an interesting way.