(Eberron 3.5) Secrets of Xen'drik

My first order of business before writing about Secrets of Xen'drik (Keith Baker, Jason Bulmahn, Amber Scott) is determining exactly how many secrets Xen'drik actually has. Because by my least generous count, it's only one and the book should really be called "Secret of Xen'drik." 

Although, to be fair, it's entirely possible that I'm just being an asshole and my standards for what qualifies as a "secret" are way too high. Sure, there's no way that the layout of the city of Stormreach is a secret, but you could probably argue that the death giant Prokres doesn't want to advertise his scheme to reassemble the Shard of Arcane Endowment to all and sundry. However, stuff like that is only really a secret in the context of the setting. I kind of feel like the title of the book is something directed at me, the real-world human reading the book, and thus for something to be a "secret" of Xen'drik, it can't just be new information about Xen'drik that I'm learning for the first time, it has to be something that the creators of Eberron already knew before this book was written and just deliberately decided not to reveal until now. And of the stuff I learned about Xen'drik from this book, only one fact rose to a level of "surprising but fundamental backstory" that makes me consider deploying a spoiler warning before discussing it here.

SPOILER WARNING (it's not going to be blocked because I'm going to have to talk about it for a considerable length of time, so this is your last chance at turning back if you're invested in being surprised by Eberron canon):

The very first warforged were created by the quori of a previous age, to use as a weapon against the giant civilization of Xen'drik c. 40,000 ya.

Whoa.

Okay, if you really parse it down, that's actually two secrets in one, because we're also getting the first explicit talk about the cyclic nature of Dal Quor and how each turning of a Dal Quor age sort of "resets" the quori and changes the nature of their existence, with the previous age being centered around "The Dreaming Heart" instead of "The Dreaming Dark." But I'd argue that's less a secret of Xen'drik and more a secret of Dal Quor that just happens to be relevant to a secret of Xen'drik. So really, the title of the book should be "A Secret of Xen'drik and a Secret in Xen'drik and Also Some Useful Information About Xen'Drik for DMs Who Want to Run Games There, Some of Which They May Wish to Keep Secret from Players, but Which Won't Actually be All That Surprising to People Reading the Books for Pleasure 20 Years from Now."

I could just be overthinking it, though. "Secrets" is a fair enough substitute for "information" in casual usage that the title of the book doesn't actually feel like a lie. If I make too big a deal of it, it's just going to look I'm hamming it up for content. . . 

(You're welcome.)

Anyway, about that secret. I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, I really, really like that a dangling lore question got a canonical answer. Previous books were oh so coy with their "Merrix d'Cannith claimed to have invented the warforged, but ruins in Xen'drik suggest that something very much like the warforged existed for far longer than the people of Khorvaire believe" so it's both surprising and welcome to get a definitive who, when, and why for this. I understand why rpgs do it, but I always find "the real answer is whatever works best for your game" to be an unsatisfying way to fill these lacunae.

On the other hand, thematically, it's kind of a frustrating reveal. I'd have greatly preferred it if the warforged were a novel invention of the Last War. Because that would have been a genuinely post-medieval story. New inventions leading to new weapons and tactics, with unprecedented destructive potential. Are humanity's knowledge and power growing faster than their wisdom? Yeah, you can do a story that's post-medieval by way of post-apocalyptic and frame it as "humanity reinventing a technology that helped destroy a previous civilization that once thought of itself as powerful, and it appears that they're making all the same mistakes." But that's a 20th century theme, and for Eberron I'd really prefer a 19th century theme. 

My real diagnosis is that it's just D&D's genre conservatism sneaking in. If you've got something that looks like advanced technology, it's okay only so long as it is the salvaged legacy of a forgotten golden age. People in laboratories, learning things about nature, and then writing papers about what they learned so engineers can make new inventions based on the papers . . . that's out of bounds. Because nostalgia over a lost past is a fantasy vibe, and abandoning the past for the temptation of the new is a science-fiction vibe. 

DAMNIT, WIZARDS OF THE COAST, LET ME PLAY A KOBOLD THAT EXPERIENCES MODERNIST MORAL VERTIGO! Is that really too much to ask?

I have to hope that it isn't, because there is one type of post-medieval story that Eberron seems eager to tell, and it turns out to be kind of uncomfortable when divorced from any potential discussion of technological and scientific hubris - the story of a powerful culture sending its dangerous fuck-ups into the territory of a less powerful culture whereupon they proceed to fuck shit up for the glory of capitalism. 

There's a new creature called a Dream Serpent, whose scales and fangs are valuable commodities. One of the sample adventures has an NPC sending you to the Dream Serpent nesting grounds, to bring back said commodities (via more or less indiscriminate slaughter). And one of the obstacles you might face on this mission is a run in with the native Drow or Yuan-ti (depending on the party level) who are violently upset that you ignored the clearly posted sign that said (actual quote) "the ground beyond is holy . . . trespassers will be punished severely."

So, in the real world, we have a term for the activities described in this adventure. It's "the crime of poaching." And we have a term for what the natives are doing when they attack the PCs. It's "enforcing the law against poaching." Yet the PCs will most likely end the adventure keeping the skins and getting paid. There's, like, a good ending where they had the ecological foresight not to kill the young snakes and they're able to negotiate ex post facto with the Drow whose permission they neglected to secure and they get away scott free. And there's a medium bad ending where they kill the hunters sent out to punish them and get away scott free. (The bad bad ending of a law enforcement TPK is only implicit in the structure of the game itself). And in precisely none of these does the book seem at all aware that it's telling a story where the villains win.

I can't say for sure that this sort of story would come off better if the warforged were initially created in a Cannith laboratory. The two subjects aren't technically related, after all. However, my gut tells me that you don't tell the technological story unless you're consciously building a 19th century world, and if you're consciously building a 19th century world, you're going to tell the poaching story much more carefully than you would if you're just building a medieval fantasy world where some magic replicates certain 19th century technologies. Hunting a rare monster for personal financial gain feels very different if you're a peasant trespassing in the king's game reserve than if you're a mercenary tourist fleeing fantasy-WW1 for fantasy Africa. 

I really enjoy a certain semi-canonical interpretation of Eberron, but I do not enjoy the way Eberron tries to have it both ways. Humanist enough to treat lycanthropy as a disease worthy of compassion, not quite humanist enough to examine the colonialist hypocrisy of rampantly plundering a continent's natural resources simply because the natives regard them as merely "holy" instead of "valuable" or "critically endangered." I'd tell them to pick a lane, but I don't entirely trust them to pick the right one. So I'll say instead that they should get in the lane I picked out for them - fantasy that reflects the growing complexities of a world fitfully transitioning to modernism and is self-aware enough to question whether certain historical bad behaviors were truly inevitable. The thing that draws me to the series are the occasional glimpses that they might eventually get there. I just have to ignore my common sense intuition when it tells me there's not enough of the series left for them to stick the landing.

Ukss Contribution: There's a lot of good stuff here. Like, I can't deny that there's an element of orientalist exoticism going on with the game's presentation of the "continent of mystery," but one of the frustrating things about D&D is that orientalism is one of the few consistent ways to get the game to pull the stick out of its ass. Stormreach is a city that seems tiny in scale because it's built inside the ruins of a giant city. There's a bird who has magical properties because it feeds on magical flowers. One of the sample maps has you swimming through phosphorescent algae. These are all things that could fit effortlessly into a "standard medieval fantasy" setting, but don't because the authors rarely give themselves that sort of license to invent. 

My favorite example of this - lizard folk who fly around in hang gliders. The book makes it a point to mention that they are "primitive hang gliders" and the lizard folk are using them to attack "civilized settlements" (because of the aforementioned orientalism), but I find myself in a position to be considerably more chill about it. Glide away, you beautiful lizard people, Ukss will be waiting for you when you land!

(Exalted 3e) Miracles of the Divine Flame

 Okay, I think we finally have enough information to officially call it: The Exigent Exalted are an untenable character type. I know, I know, devastating news, but we have to face facts. Miracles of the Divine Flame was as good an Exigents supplement as anyone is ever going to make (maybe even as good an Exigents supplement as it's realistically possible to make) and it did nothing but exacerbate the fundamental problems with the splat.

Which is to say Exigents: Out of the Ashes gave us a 400-page book that allowed us to play 8 distinct characters, its crowdfunded stretch goal gave us 200 more pages that allowed us to play 8 different distinct characters, and my main take-away from both is that it would be both super cool and super onerous to play a 17th distinct character. 

The new characters are amazing. Play the Foxbinder and you're in this magical buddy cop story. You can ride a giant fox! He can turn into a sword, or a hat, or switch places with you to confuse your enemies. He's also a naughty little scamp who will take advantage of your lapses in concentration to play pranks on you. It's wholesome. It's whimsical. It's funny. It's an eloquent demonstration of the strengths of asymmetrical, exception-based splat design. 

It's also an eloquent reminder that you're never going to fucking homebrew this stuff, who the fuck do you think you're kidding with that shit? I mean, each of the new Exigents had between 40-50 charms, which is on the far side of realistic, and enough to get you up to a 280xp game, even assuming you spent your xp on nothing but favored charms. That's more than a year of weekly sessions. You could pace yourself. Whip up the first 15 charms prior to session 0, then three more every five weeks. It's not like a full-time job or anything.

But that's not how these things work. You don't build a character around the selection of your first 15 charms. You select your first 15 charms based on your plans for your character. The stuff deeper into the charm tree is the bait on the hook. Nobody's salivating over the phenomenal cosmic power of getting double 9s on a persuade roll that cites a popular aphorism, they're looking forward to the day when they can scribe magical laws on floating scrolls of fire that will burn alive any who transgress against them. This sense of charm sets as, basically . . . shopping lists, that's important. In fact, it's the whole point of the exercise.

So you could probably get away with just writing the first 15 charms, but you couldn't do it without the idea of the shopping list. If you're going to be excited about the character (and you should, it leads to better games), then you're going to have to be excited about the charms you plan to write. It's dangerously close to a circular problem. You can avoid writing a whole charm set by just writing the beginning, but in order to write the beginning, you have to know how it's going to end. And it would be a lot easier to know how it will end if you actually wrote the ending. But if you write the ending, then you haven't actually saved yourself all that much time.

It's not necessarily an intractable problem, but it's something that could benefit greatly from the sort of high level design work that doesn't always come easy. The Chosen of Plentimon, God of Dice gets a cool ability called the "Fortune Pool," where they skim off extra successes from easy rolls to add them back into hard rolls and a lot of their charmset involves expanding the Fortune Pool, coming up with new uses for the reserved dice, and eventually doing tricky stuff like saving failed dice to add to your enemies' rolls. That's a whole-ass vision. It's taking the idea of splat asymmetry and using it to experiment with storyteller system mechanics. Which is wholly great, sure, but it sets a high bar if I ever want to make an Exigent of Iphira, Goddess of Fermented Apples. 

Which is why I've come to the reluctant conclusion that Exigents are untenable. They're a splat powered by the optimistic assumption that the fandom's energy and passion is effectively infinite. I absolutely want to play as Pakpao the puppeteer or Tamako the Foxbinder or, honestly, any of the completed (or mostly completed) Exigents, but the cost/benefit split for literally any of the unrealized options (even the really strong contenders like Five Days Darkness or Madame Marthesine) is simply not there. At least not for me, and I'm about as passionate about Exalted as it's possible to get.

So I guess, overall, I'd say that Miracles of the Divine Flame is a really good book, almost pure value from cover to cover and arguably the most essential of the crowdfunded stretch goal books. The fact that it's the book's high quality that winds up arguing most persuasively against Exigents as a general idea is a fascinating artistic paradox.

Ukss Contribution: Surprise! My favorite thing was Pakpao again! She gets a charm where her shadow swallows up an enemy, chokes them to death, and then spits out a puppet that looks a lot like them.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how Ukss will ever be able to handle double Pakpao, so I have to go with my second choice (which sort of resembles Pakpao's whole deal, but only coincidentally) - the patron deity of the Thousand Venoms Mistress, Whirling Lady Koro-Bana, Goddess of Self-Made Widows.

I don't know what it is, but the phrase "self-made widow" tickles me greatly. It's fun to imagine they have their own goddess.

(Eberron 3.5) Voyage of the Golden Dragon

 Voyage of the Golden Dragon (Nicolas Logue) is a short collection of 4 adventures that all revolve around the titular "Golden Dragon," Khorvaire's largest airship, originally meant for the Breland military, but auctioned off to a private company after the war, who turned it into a luxury cruise ship.

With the caveat that each adventure is incredibly short (maybe 6-8 linear encounters), it's a good cross-section of what you might do with a luxury cruise ship in a "post medieval, pulp-inspired, but not really (::wink::) world." There's a fancy gala event that gets taken over by terrorist infiltrators who want to hold the rich folk for ransom. There's necromancy-enhanced political intrigue between two of its high-status passengers. There's a shoreside adventure with an obnoxious explorer type. And there's an aerial attack from an implacable foe.

It's all pretty utilitarian. The book has a singular mission - get you to use the hell out of that damned airship - and it pursues that mission with maximum efficiency. And if that seems like a pretty bland thing for me to say about a series of fantasy adventures, consider it merely an artifact of the book's format. None of the adventures last long enough to do anything super cool, but they also don't leave themselves enough time to notably screw things up. They just work.

I guess it was a little . . . sketchy that the description of the ship's onboard casino took pains to tell us that, "Goblins in green-tailed surcoats scamper about, bringing patrons their beverages and exchanging their currency." It's probably nothing. But racial homogeneity among a luxury casino's serving staff strikes me as . . . a trope.

But that's literally just one sentence, and I'm probably only paying attention to it because there's so little else to talk about. The kitchen is powered by fire elementals. That's pretty neat. Of the eight named crew (though more, like the goblins, are implied to be aboard), two of them are spies for the Brelish crown, which is pretty funny. There's a canonical sexual relationship between a halfling and an elf. 

Overall, I guess it's just a decent location, with some decent NPCs, that is the subject of some decent adventures. Score one for basic competence.

Ukss Contribution: The first two adventures feature a reoccurring villain, Paldrith Malinko, a wealthy and powerful pirate prince who wants to destroy the Golden Dragon because it is slightly larger than his own still-under-construction flagship. That's impressively petty. I'm trying to avoid putting airships specifically into Ukss (because I got the idea that more fantasy worlds need to have actual airplanes, and because I think the early-20th-century vibe planes bring is interestingly different from the steampunk aesthetics of airships), but the same plot should work equally well with naval vessels.

(Exalted 3e) Miracles of the Solar Exalted

 Miracles of the Solar Exalted (John Mørke) is a nothing of a book, just 40 pages of backer charms from the Exalted 3rd Edition kickstarter. Some are good. Some will be repeated in the Abyssals book. Some are over-designed. The usual fare. If you like Exalted, you'll like this probably. 

I did have to laugh at some of the niche charms, included to round out the charm trees (or just because Mr. Mørke had a particular itch he needed to scratch). Like the Performance charm that lets an actor infer the entirety of their character's script based only on a few lines of dialogue. How many times in the developers' home games are they asking players to make a "script remembering" roll? When would this even come in handy? How is this an Essence 3 effect worth 8-10xp and 5 committed motes? Even in an unusual situation like a campaign that's a hard-core simulation set backstage at a theater troupe, well, you've just created a charm that completely bypasses the systems you presumably invented specifically for this situation. Also, your story hinges on a character getting up on stage and flawlessly performing a part for which they were unable to rehearse? By the rules of drama, that's a once-a-story event at best. Repeat the trick and suddenly it's not "Oh, wow, they're so great! They're able to fill in for the second understudy with no preparation whatsoever," but rather, "Damn that bastard! They never show up for rehearsals, I've never even seen them read a script, but somehow their lazy ass never suffers consequences. They always nail their performances, even when the rest of us are left pulling our hair out stressing about their lack of preparation." And I'm not saying that this couldn't be a compelling Solar Exalted character concept. Just that if you're making that character, it would make more sense mechanically for Divinely-Inspired Performance to be a permanent charm with no cost.

That's just a nitpick, though. If anything, the lazy actor build is inspirational in the best weird-char-op tradition. The only part of Miracles of the Solar Exalted that bothered me was the Apocryphal keyword. The short version - it has no mechanical meaning, it's only present to let us, the readers, know that a particular charm is non-canonical.

There are things in rpgs that are objectively worse, from a moral perspective, so I should definitely try to keep my annoyance in perspective, but this is just such a chickenshit move. You solicited money from these people on the premise that they would be able to leave their mark on Exalted by creating a custom charm . . . so compromise your fucking vision, okay?! I mean, the whole point of collaborative creation is that you surrender total control in exchange for the beauty (and yeah, sometimes, the cringe) of the unexpected. You invited randos from the internet with more money than sense (and/or the Exalted obsession that made this a sensible financial transaction) to become part of the process, so let them be part of the process. Because of your choice of stretch goals, Creation is now a weirder, wilder place where Solar and Lunar exalted can merge into a composite being and legendary warriors can wade shirtlessly into battle. Deal with it.

I don't know. Maybe I'm making too big a deal out of this. It just doesn't sit right with me. It's like he invented the keyword to say "I, John Mørke, am willing to perform mercenary design work to the client's specifications, but let it be known that I, John Mørke, in my role as developer, do not personally sanction these decisions." I guess I feel like maybe Exalted is a little bit more resilient than that.

Later books in the line would take to bundling these backer charms in with the campaign's stretch goals to make one larger supplement. That's probably a superior approach (and would likely have saved the core book, in particular, a whole lot of trouble, to the extent of changing the direction of 3rd edition's development as a whole). As it stands, Miracles of the Solar Exalted was just a somewhat useful, but utterly forgettable book. There's only one reason to consult it (you want more choices for your solar's charms), but that reason is hardly a compelling one (the corebook has a lot of fucking charms).

Overall, I approve, but only on the balance, and probably only because I'm a soft touch for all things Exalted.

Ukss Contribution: It wasn't an intended rules outcome, but setting is a bit thin on the ground and I'm a bit salty about the Apocryphal keyword still, so I'm going with the "impossibly lazy, but infuriatingly talented actor" that is implied to exist by a strict reading of the mechanics of Divinely-Inspired Performance. I think they'd be fun as both a quest giver and a macguffin.

(Eberron 3.5) Player's Guide to Eberron

 The Player's Guide to Eberron (James Wyatt, Keith Baker, Luke Johnson, Stan!) has the sort of format that paradoxically either makes me read really fast or makes me read really slow. It's divided into a series of encyclopedia-like entries that are all some precise multiple of two pages long. So I can either finish a section quickly and say to myself "this seems like a natural stopping point, I'll just take a little break" (followed by four hours of video games) or I can finish a section quickly and say, "wow, that was easy, I'll just do another one right away." There's no middle ground between these two reactions, but each one is equally likely.

The real tie-breaker in these situations is how interesting I find the subject matter. And in this case, I found the subject matter very interesting indeed . . . but like 85% of it I've already seen before. This book calls itself a "player's guide," but it's not clear to what end it's meant to guide players towards. Like, maybe it's just the case that players empirically don't read core books (let alone supplements) so they tried to manifest a similar outcome by giving a player-oriented title to a condensed lore compendium. The same thing happened in Planescape with the Planeswalker's Handbook. 

Also, frustratingly, like the Planeswalker's Handbook, the Player's Guide to Eberron is probably the best entry point into the series. It's a broad cross-section of things you need to know about the world of Eberron, but just enough that you can pluck each individual topic out of context and be done with it in a couple of minutes. You want to play a warforged, you turn to the "warforged" section near the end (they're arranged alphabetically, like an encyclopedia) and you get a bit of information from the main campaign book, a bit of information from Races of Eberron, and maybe a very little bit of information from the adventures and it's all very functional. But it doesn't actually tell you how to build a warforged character, and only offers two extra feats, so you still actually need the main book. I guess that means that the Player's Guide to Eberron is meant for people who have all the other books . . . but don't read them?

This is not as off-the-wall a theory as you might suppose. There is some novel information here - three new prestige classes, a bunch of new feats, a couple of new organizations - but the bulk of the stuff that expands the actual Eberron setting comes in the form of references to things you'd originally find in various non-Eberron D&D supplements. Want to know how to play a xeph or a raptoran? How to incorporate Magic of the Incarnum into the setting? There's a sidebar for that. I've heard it said that "if it exists in D&D, it has a place in Eberron" and this book here is the proof that they at least put some thought into fulfilling that promise. Most of these little cameos feel like an afterthought, but afterthoughts are a kind of thought, so I think it's fair to say that Eberron has earned the right to call itself a kitchen-sink setting. 

I wouldn't necessarily call it a satisfying sort of kitchen-sink worldbuilding, however. It's very uneven in the degree to which all of these disparate elements are given something significant and cool to do. Incarnum magic is largely confined to The Island Where They Do Incarnum, the thri-kreen "wander the wastes, though they are hardly numerous," and yeah, it turns out that the various nations of Khorvaire have militant philosophical organizations that resemble the Samurai class. On the other hand, the Elan get a cool new backstory (they are living prisons that trap quori spirits deemed criminal by the Dreaming Dark - the spirits are forced to possess the body, but bound to have no control over its actions, and the composite creature is an ageless, psionically-active being with no memory of its previous life), the shujenja class represents the priests of a dragon-worshipping religion, and swashbucklers are so integrated into the themes and aesthetics of the setting that they're barely worthy of comment (in a good way).

I'm in the unusual, though likely not unprecedented position of having read every Eberron book published thus far and most of mainline D&D books being referenced in the sidebars. I've got very close to maximum context (somewhere between 92% and 95%, I'd say) and what the Player's Guide to Everron feels like to me is a bunch of old-hat information sprinkled through with trifling little tidbits. On the one hand, I'm not necessarily opposed to the old hat per se, and I absolutely live for little tidbits, but on the other hand I'm hard-pressed to imagine a significant use for this thing. A book where they went through all of 3.X edition's obscure sourcebook and gave me a paragraph of canonical Eberron backstory for every random prestige class and monster with an Int score would likely be one of my all-time favorite rpg supplements (period), but wedding a partial implementation of that idea to a rather unambitious recap of Eberron as it stood in January of 2006. . . well it commits the cardinal sin of kitchen-sink worldbuilding: it doesn't make space for the new material by making the world feel bigger. Rather, the boundaries of Eberron feel very similar to what was established in the main campaign book, and it's just the margins that feel a little bit more crowded.

I have a certain experience with this very tension in the world of Ukss. It's easy to just keep adding new stuff without any regard for what has come before, and at the start it can feel like an expansive bigness, but if you don't make the effort to fit the pieces together, the whole thing can become so expansive that it loses coherence. New elements can't just be for the gaps, because that's making the new stuff subordinate to the old, but if you're always making room for the new elements, that's just the same problem seen from the other side. You need both an openness to expanding the horizons of the possible and a dedication to finding connections between your ideas and fitting them all into a single context. That's hard enough when you're scrupulously curating everything to go into the melting pot. I shudder to think of how it might feel to just inherit all of D&D's vast and sprawling canon all at once (oh, the writers of Races of the Wild thought it'd be cute to have catfolk . . . they can live in the jungles of Xen'drik, I guess).

Overall, I'd say that I have no strong feelings one way or another about the Player's Guide to Eberron. I like Eberron as a whole . . . and this is certainly Eberron, all right.

Ukss Contribution: One of the critical pieces of technology in the world of Eberron is Khyber dragonshards. Arcanists use these crystals to bind elemental spirits into the locomotive systems of airships and rail carts and a bunch of other useful items. These crystals are found, naturally occurring, in the vast system of caves that is Eberron's equivalent to the Underdark. 

The Ukss contribution for this book is a weird bit of trivia about these Kyber crystal deposits - that sometimes they will randomly ensnare passing demons. Obviously, this is mainly meant as a cool hazard for dungeon-delving adventurers, but I can't help looking at this phenomenon from the perspective of the demons. A slight, but not insignificant danger to wandering around underground is that you might get trapped in some bullshit rock. I find the cultural implications to be fascinating.