(Kindred of the East) The 1000 Hells

From time to time, maybe about once or twice a year, but more frequently in recent months and with anticipation of even greater frequency in the months to come, I get on my high horse about Orientalism in tabletop rpgs. I talk about it as if I'm some kind of expert and even at my most generous I posture like, "ooh, this is embarrassing, maybe even dangerously immoral, aren't we all glad that we know how to spot this sort of thing nowadays and are too virtuously worldly to succumb to it."

But my all-time favorite rpg is Exalted. 

It's a hypocrisy that I'm aware of. And maybe it's just the spotlight effect of social anxiety talking, but I worry sometimes that a deep, complex, self-reflective discussion of the role of the late 90s/early 00s rpg scene's Orientalism in the construction of Exalted has so far been conspicuous in its absence. It's a way of thinking highly of myself by assuming you all think so highly of me that you are capable of being disappointed by this lapse in intellectual rigor.

Truthfully, though, I'm worried about writing that post, because there's no way to get through it without deeply implicating myself. It's not like Al Qadim or the OA books, where I try to be gentle because I can acknowledge a genuine past interest in the material. The Complete Ninja's Handbook was one of teen-John's prized possessions, and so I don't want to roast it too harshly, but I also feel no need to defend it or apologize for it. I can write it off as an artifact of a less sensitive time, perhaps instrumental in my personal development, but fairly consigned to the naughty part of the library.

I can't do that with Exalted. I love Exalted. It is part of my identity, not even kidding. I can acknowledge (some of) its flaws and rue its obvious missteps, I can even suggest that it be scrubbed to the bone and rebuilt from the skeleton up, but I can never disclaim it. And I can never not be defensive when a non-fan expresses their distaste. 

Now, the relevance of all that to The 1000 Hells (and I normally cut off author citations at four credited authors because at that point the responsibility becomes too dilute and also it takes up a lot of space, but I'm going to make an exception here because of a very pertinent piece of data: Kraig Blackwelder, Tim Clancy, Geoffry C. Grabowski, and Lindsay Woodcock, with Jack Norris and Richard E. Dansky) is that, for reasons that are obvious in retrospect (I didn't look at the author list until just now), this book bears an intermittent but unmistakable resemblance to some of the more outré parts of Exalted.

(I bolded the name of Exalted 1st Edition's line developer, for those in my audience who did not immediately gasp in recognition at the list).

I actually noticed something like this in the Kindred of the East core book. One of the kuei-jin disciplines has a technique called "Flow Like Blood," which is sort of an iconic keystone to Dodge-based builds in every edition of Exalted. Then there's things like the use of the term "The Second Breath." In Kindred of the East, it refers to the damned soul returning to the body after escaping from hell, but in Exalted it refers to the moment of exaltation. Two important figures from the backstory of both games are The Ebon Dragon and the Scarlet Queen/Empress, but they have very different roles. Little stuff like that.

And The 1000 Hells could be dismissed in a similar way. Like, the fact that both games feature "Akuma" - people who sold their souls and surrendered their free will to the lords of hell in exchange for awesome powers - could just be a recycling of terminology. And the similarity between Yama Kings of Yomi (KotE's ultimate demonic figures) and the Yozis (their Exalted counterparts) might be something of a stretch ("Yomi" is a real piece of religious terminology, for one). And the fact that the last, forbidden tome of demonic lore, written about the inevitable triumph of evil in an age of darkness to come is called "The Broken Winged Crane" in both games is probably just an easter egg.

But it's not just these recurring "coincidences." As of The 1000 Hells, but maybe even foreshadowed in the Kindred of the East Companion, the two games . . . kind of have a similar vibe. In my last post, I complained about Dharmas being a poor replacement for Vampire: the Masquerade's clans, explicitly because they were set up in a way that the ideal party has one of each, but what if they weren't a replacement for clans? What if they were a prototype for Exalted's castes?

I open one of these books and see an art piece in the unmistakable style of Melissa Uran, I read about borderline-magical martial arts or an explicit distinction between infernalism (pledging your loyalty to demonic powers) and diabolism (using sorcery to compel demonic servitude), I'm inspired to imagine the epic feats of enlightened elders, who somehow mix virtue, corruption, and power into one unimaginable moral and spiritual dilemma and I think . . . "oh, no, I could be persuaded to love Kindred of the East."

The potential is there. Which is going to make the forthright discussion of Orientalism in Exalted even harder to avoid.

Though perhaps we can avoid it for now, because while The 1000 Hells does have some prototype Exalted vibes, it's probably not going to be the book that sells you on Kindred of the East.

I think the issue here is that the book's content is accurately reflected by its title. It's about hell, with all the grotesquerie that implies. I can't be sure of its religious accuracy (I suspect it owes more to Big Trouble in Little China than the traditional Chinese Diyu, though my main piece of evidence is that it has locations called "The Hell of Being Skinned Alive" and "The Hell of Upside Down Sinners" which are evocative lines from the movie but not reflected in the wikipedia article on this subject), but I can say that it fits into an ongoing rpg tradition of "alternate planes that will probably kill you but where you definitely don't want to go even if you could survive." So you know, if you were really clamoring for a White Wolf Baator sourcebook in the late 90s, The 1000 Hells delivers.

But on the off chance that's not something you're interested in, this book doesn't have a lot to offer. There's a mini-monster manual where we get stats for more than a half-dozen demonic creatures, and that's absolutely something you could use to spice up Earth-bound campaigns. And the various agendas and personalities of the Yama Kings ("king" is gender neutral in this usage, though "Yama queen" explicitly is not) could add some much-needed conflict to the setting's otherwise staid politics. But you're probably not going to want to add "field trip to hell" as a regular part of Kindred of the East's adventure repertoire. 

(Ach! I'm thinking about a campaign here - opposing the machinations of demonic forces in the looming shadow of a coming age of darkness, learning progressively more powerful magic and martial arts until you have the strength to take the fight to hell itself, where the grand champions of the demon princes, raised up from your contemporaries and arrayed with corrupt powers, bestowed by their inhuman patrons, stand ready to test your abilities to their utmost - and, like, yeah, that's an Exalted game).

Aside from the hell stuff, which you're either on board with or you're not, the main flaw of The 1000 Hells is that it continues to be extremely weird that "Asia of Darkness" is a self-contained subsetting. Here's a couple of interesting facts for you:

The Yama Kings "found that none of the realms of the spirits of the western lands was accessible to them" and "they could not affect the western world in any way."

But also, if you're a kuei-jin in the market to sell your soul, you should be aware that "the entities that the Nephandi of the West consort with are considerably different from the Yama Kings of the East."

Now, just as a reminder, the Nephandi worship powers that exist beyond the Horizon, the mystical barrier roughly coterminous with the solar system's asteroid belt, that separates the knowable parts of the Umbra (and already "knowable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting) from the primordial chaos of the Deep Umbra. Great Old Ones, basically. So the implication is somehow that these beings of the outer darkness, for whom the Earth is naught but a pale blue dot, can distinguish, with their baleful gaze that hates and envies all light and life, between the parts of the globe that are Asia and the parts that are not.

Or perhaps just as bad, that the Celestial Bureaucracy, which governs all matters under heaven, just sort of gives up when it reaches the nebulous borders of "Asia." The Yama Kings can definitely affect spirits in India, but if we go west from there, where's the line? Pakistan? (Actually pretty unlikely, because we will find in the Year of the Reckoning that the kuei-jin can be very active in Bangladesh). Afghanistan? Iran? Probably no farther west than that. And going north, the central Asian republics are kind of iffy, though they've been effectively forgotten by both Asia of Darkness and the rest of the line. But then you start getting to Russia and that definitely feels out-of-bounds. Are there Siberian kuei-jin? What border do I have to cross to exit the Yama Kings' jurisdiction?

I once described the late-90s approach to Asian-inspired fantasy as "a mental forcefield," and that actually seems pretty apt here. What Kindred of the East is doing is "Asia as genre," basically. Despite myself, or perhaps because I recognize that my favorite game is at least a little (and potentially very) guilty of doing the same thing, I think there's a possibility that a standalone Kindred of the East, which extends its cosmology to the whole world and lets heaven rule everything under heaven, could actually work. Maybe "Asia as genre" isn't so bad if you're doing it in rural Arizona, circa 1999, and the vibe is "Hong Kong cinema makes an awesomely inaccurate western." But to do it in the existing World of Darkness? Where you're now forced to racially segregate the demons of hell?

I think that is, genuinely, offensive.

Ukss Contribution: But probably not directly offensive enough to trigger my temporarily strict standards for what qualifies for exclusion from Ukss. 

And I'll admit to a conflict of interest here, because this book has a subsetting that I think could legitimately be spun-off from Asia of Darkness the same way Asia of Darkness should have been spun-off from the WoD. It's called "The Wicked City" and it's the best kind of Mad-libs-style rpg gibberish. Here's the pitch:

Cyberpunk. Demon. Ninja. Afterlife.

They should have sent a fucking poet. Chief among the torments of hell is economic precarity. Literally.

"Those victims who show the capacity to return to the same dull position they held in life - textbook salesman, telemarketer, burger-flipper, export agent - do so, day after day and week after week, with no hope of improving their lot. Such prisoners are give enough salary to barely cover rent, so they can almost support themselves while enduring the agonies of hell . . ."

And then, in the streets, shadowed by the looming high-rises, there are gangs of outcast demons and damned souls who have blasphemous cybernetic implants and serve to advance the Yama King's grand design of immiserating the poor, even as they ostensibly rebel from his rule.

Someone needs to make this rpg. Like, yesterday.

I'm far too busy to do it myself, but I think the least I can do is tweak the presentation of Ukss' infernal courts to make it fit.

(GURPS: Transhuman Space) Orbital Decay

 Sometimes, people really don't think things through. Would Orbital Decay (Patrick Sweeney) be a better adventure and better introduction to the Transhuman Space setting if it leaned into its potential to be a comedy of errors? Maybe, maybe not, but there's a strong argument to be made that there is less of a bright line between sci-fi horror and farce than one might otherwise expect.

Oops. Our biotech corporation did a teensy-weensy bit of unethical genetic engineering in our second-hand space station, far away from the legal oversight of Earthbound authorities. And oops. A tiny little mistake in our super-soldier virus led to it being contagious through biting. And gosh darn it, wouldn't you know, that's the same transmission vector as our (still work-in-progress, remember) depression-causing crowd control virus that unfortunately makes people fly into a berserk rage instead of its intended effect. And you're never going to believe it, but both viruses, along with our flesh-eating nanovirus, somehow managed to escape containment. Why, if you were to model this scenario with some sort of generic universal roleplaying system, you could probably just use the stats for supernatural fantasy zombies for the affected personnel. Funny how that works out.

Oh well, there's obviously only one thing to do - send a group of mercenaries up to investigate the out-of-contact space station. Then, naturally, we'll double-cross the mercenaries by sending a ruthless spy disguised as a company representative. And of course, we'll double-cross the spy by secretly installing a puppet implant that allows her body to be controlled by an AI program. And, should some series of implausible events happen where the shuttle pilot crashes the transport rocket into the station in a misguided attempt to stop the viruses from spreading (I guess she thinks that they'll burn up in the atmosphere rather than partially survive in air pockets in the coolest part of the wreckage and subsequently infect terrestrial investigators), I should think it goes without saying that we'll betray the AI by refusing to send a rescue vessel. It's the perfect plan. The only thing that could possibly thwart us is if terrorists from Mars show up at the last minute, lured by the rocket pilot's quarantine broadcast, under the inexplicable assumption that a space station where at least one deadly bioweapon escaped containment is the perfect place to find an easily weaponizable virus. But surely, they would not risk their lives and health on the long-shot bet that we, like, had some extra viruses that were still in containment. Why, if that happened, the surviving mercenaries could activate the station's self-destruct system and fly away on the terrorists' spaceship, potentially exposing our perfidy to the world at large. . . eh, fuck it. Worst comes to worst, we'll give 'em like $5000 or something. It'll be fine.

Okay, so I committed to the bit longer than was entirely wise, but really, Orbital Decay is a perfectly serviceable adventure. Maybe sometimes people who fail to entirely think things through are the source of horror. You never get eaten by biopunk zombies when things are going well. I'd say it's only real flaw is that, as a GURPS: Transhuman Space adventure, it doesn't do all that much with transhumanism. I guess the puppet implant and the supersoldier count in that regard, but it's kind of detail on background. With the company spy, the PCs may defeat her too early or too late and her implant never comes up. And it's an open question whether the PCs are going to want to do the detective work to find out about the virus' backstory while they're actively being attacked by zombies. I mean, biotech horror in space is plenty interesting on its own, but it barely scratches the surface of what Trannshuman Space can do. 

Maybe you could rework things a bit. The PCs are brought in by the Martian police, to help solve the theft of an infomorph ghost from long-term storage. The lead suspects are Negative Growth (the anti-terraforming terrorists who conveniently show up in the third act to give the PCs a way off the station), who may have been interested in this particular intelligence because it was the most recent back-up of a scientist who was rumored to be working on experimental bioweapons. But it wasn't actually a theft, it was a defection, because the infomorph was remotely activated by the scientist, who could think of no other way to evade the Terrel-Dieskau corporation's communications blockade than to commit suicide and then the terrorists, the corporate agents, and the PCs all converge on this derelict station that has been taken over by biopunk zombies . . . 

I don't know. It needs some work, I'll admit. I guess it speaks well for the adventure that there is enough of a base to build off of. In true GURPS fashion, there are some sidebars talking about how to adapt Orbital Decay for other genres and settings, so I can't be entirely mad at it for not being hyper-specific. Specificity is kind of the antithesis to the GURPS ethos.

Overall, I'd say "sure, okay." I think a more comic, satirical interpretation of the adventure's events would do better for a cyberpunk story, and that's probably the most interesting way to run the adventure, but GURPS: Transhuman Space is explicitly "cyberpunk without the punk," so there's no great harm in running it completely straight.

Ukss Contribution: My favorite thing about this adventure is the Terrel-Dieskau corporation's baroquely layered treachery. There's just this long ladder of people who are absolutely shocked that the people on the next rung found them expendable. It's almost enough to take the sting out of the PCs getting betrayed (I'd actually put them at the second rung, and they really should have been expecting it, considering their mission is transparently aimed at betraying the scientists and technicians aboard the space station).

But is that a setting element? Is it a trait you can give to an organization or a location? Would it not feel extremely goofy in practice? I guess we'll just have to find out.

Kindred of the East Companion

It is perhaps poetic that Kindred of the East's greatest flaws all seem to stem from its original sin. As I read Kindred of the East Companion and I was struck by how utterly disconnected it all was from anything I'd previously given a shit about, by the shallowness of its politics and philosophy, by the overall unpleasantness of the Kindred (kin-jin) vs Kuei-jin (Cathayan) narrative.

I can't help but think this is all happening because Asia of Darkness is supposed to be "exotic." We can't go in knowing anything about what to expect, so everything has to be rebuilt from scratch, meaning the unfamiliar new factions and conflicts have approximately half a book of development behind them. And because White Wolf can't do rules or setting updates without metaplot explanations, it's all justified in-setting by the Eternal Vampire Race War.

But I think maybe the creators of Kindred of the East might have succumbed to their own Orientalist branding. Call it a hunch, but some parts of this book feel like the writers were trying to create something that felt exotic to themselves. It's the only explanation I can think of for why, when tasked with making a parallel knockoff of their popular game, Vampire: the Masquerade, they got the fundamental building blocks entirely wrong.

See, Vampire: the Masquerade had a gameplay loop embedded directly into the structure of the setting. The politics of the setting revolve around a conflict between two incompatible sects with mutually opposed goals - the status-quo-preserving Camarilla and the recklessly millenarian Sabbat - and each were credibly global threats. You could set a game in the biggest Camarilla stronghold in the world and "some Sabbat assholes show up to cause trouble" is a viable plot. But also, the sectarian conflict could generate internal conflicts - like, someone who wants to become powerful within the Sabbat vs someone who wants to make the Sabbat as a whole more powerful vs characters who are only part of the Sabbat because they were victims of its power.

And then, at a narrower taxonomic level, you got the clans. Which are like character classes that are not strictly voluntary. So there's clan vs clan conflict, advancement in the clan conflict, clan vs sect conflict, clan advancement in the sect conflict, and players can never entirely escape these jokers for the same reason it can be so difficult to escape your family - they made you what you are, and you were never in a position to consent to the act until long after the fact. 

Finally, the narrowest level - city politics. All of the above is reified through the expedient of some dude and his cronies. That's the scope and scale of politics. Somebody is talking shit about you at Elysium and it can be a proxy for sect or clan issues, but it's also entirely possible that you just don't like each other.

Vampire: the Masquerade may not be my favorite game, but there's no denying it has an airtight formula for stirring up rpg-type shit at the gaming table. This is catnip for theater kids. So it's unclear why Kindred of the East takes the formula and tosses it out the fucking window.

It's got a sort of "splat and local government" dynamic, but the only source of conflict seems to come from mortal nationalism.

At the highest level of kuei-jin organization is the Court and a court is like . . . a local culture. Like, you set the game in Changan and that's Jade Court territory and it's just . . . a scholarly vibe. It's somehow allied with the rest of the Five August Courts of the Quincunx, so there's no real court vs court conflict, but it also means that its culture feels like a specialist function of an ill-defined larger organization (the Quincunx, presumably, though I assume that it's only called that because its an alliance of five courts) that . . . devotes itself to conservative Chinese imperialism?

There are non-Quincunx courts, and it's clear that the Quincunx doesn't like or respect them (and that the feeling is mutual), but it's unclear what they would even fight over. The Blood Court is in Beijing and the Golden Court is in a grab-bag of Southeast Asian countries, and never the twain shall meet ("No other court can approach the Golden Courts' range of cultures and it's questionable whether the Chinese Courts would even want to").

It's not that there's nothing to do. There are plots here - continuing to fight WW2 decades after the fact, endlessly relitigate the Meiji Restoration, become a fashion pervert for God, over the dead bodies of those who would try to stop you - but those are incidental to the Court structure, rather than an intrinsic part of it.

And somehow, the character splats are even worse. The dharmas are like character classes that are voluntary (so voluntary, in fact, that people can and do change dharma canonically and there's even a high-tier power that forces someone to do so) and the ideal party composition is exactly one of each. So I think there's an argument that it might be kind of fun to play a Devil Tiger or Thousand Whisper (et al) and have their distinct aesthetics/philosophies inform your character, but each one is a personal path. I can imagine a clash of personalities between characters of different dharmas, but I can't foresee any situation where a dharma would lead to divided loyalties. They are explicitly supposed to complement each other and make the unit stronger from diversity. The closest WoD counterpart is Werewolf: the Apocalypse's auspices (moon phase divisions).

Actually, that's a pretty good analogy. Kindred of the East is like Werewolf: the Apocalypse without the Tribes and without the ongoing futile war against the Wyrm. It's unclear who it's even for . . .

Oh, wait, I think the Kindred of the East Companion might have provided a helpful picture:

Though, now that I put it that way, there may be more overlap between me and the average Kindred of the East fan than it's comfortable to admit.

Ukss Contribution: So there is a certain degree of racial chauvinism in this book, but I can't quite pin down its motives or origin, because it mostly takes the form of an absolute conviction that the Kuei-jin totally outclass the Kindred. Is this an in-character bias or the opinion of the authors? I can't tell.

And because I can't tell, and because I wouldn't know what to make of it even if I could, I'm going to include Kindred of the East Companion in Ukss. However, I'm going with something abstract.

The Japanese and Chinese vampires in Shanghai continue to fight each other and it's explicitly due to lingering bad blood (and if you think that's a pun, you're wrong, Kuei-jin don't drink blood, they consume chi) over WW2. In real world terms, it's kind of grim to think about, but it is a genuinely interesting idea in vampire fiction - vampires continuing a war from their mortal days, one that is entirely unrelated to vampire nonsense, even after the living belligerents have been at peace for decades.

I think Ukss could have a conflict like that.

(Star Wars Saga Edition) Scavenger's Guide to Droids

 For once, the Star Wars Expanded Universe's signature move - taking the sole on-screen personality trait or behavior of a minor character and making it the defining characteristic of their whole existence/planetary civilization - actually works pretty well. Scavenger's Guide to Droids (Rodney Thomson, Sterling Hershey, Patrick Stutzman, Robert Wieland) is about machines that were deliberately manufactured for a particular purpose, and so it makes sense that the weird eyeball thing that came out of the wall at Jabba's palace to greet R2-D2 and C-3PO was, in fact, a TT-8L Gatekeeper Droid. It would be very strange worldbuilding indeed if that thing was bespoke. Or if it was part of a line of "eyeball-on-a-stalk" sentient machines and it just happened to choose to work in organized crime, as a first line of security vetting potential intruders.  I never, not for a moment, believed that the Bothans were characteristically spies or that Greedo, the bounty hunter shot by Han Solo (first, obviously) was part of a species that placed a high cultural value on hunting, but I definitely believe that the weird eyeball thing was built for gatekeeping.

Which I guess means that Scavenger's Guide to Droids is the least cringe SWSE supplement I've ever read. The lore generally boils down to "this machine was built to do the thing we saw it do," repeated close to 50 times, but since there's a lot of Star Wars media I've never seen, I actually found it generally pretty interesting. There's a fancy-pants fencing instructor droid. A droid built exclusively to work at banks. The weird animatronic from Disney's Star Tours ride canonically exists and is a pilot/tour guide bot that's notoriously prone to exactly the sort of malfunction that appeared in the ride's plot. There's a secretary droid that has a creepy skeletal face like something dredged from the depths of nightmare. There's enough here to distract from the fact that every battledroid has the exact same backstory.

The biggest flaw with Scavenger's Guide to Droids as a book is that each droid entry is accompanied by 1-3 "modification" suggestions that are universally among the dullest shit I've read for the blog thus far. Like, sometimes they have little tidbits of lore, and on the balance it's interesting to know that people in the Star Wars universe are hacking the hell out of their tech, but each one is something you could change the droid into and the bulk of the text is devoted to things like alternate feat suggestions or the DC of the skill check necessary to take out one part and swap it with another.

Did you know, if you start with a GY-1 Information Analysis Droid, reprogram its operating system, and remove its arms and legs, you can turn it into a navigation-assisting astromech droid like what R2-D2 does for Luke's X-wing? It's true. And if you put a spinning blade on its head, you could make it a food processor too. 

So, anyway, reading 100+ of those barely-justified reskins was kind of a drag. But it wasn't quite enough to ruin what was, essentially, a monster book. And the adventure hooks, narrated by one of four specific commentator NPCs, that accompanied each entry, were a welcome addition to the format. The titular scavengers never quite popped as individual characters, but I think, if they were given a little bit more room to develop (say, by getting rid of some superfluous, repetitive text somewhere else in the book), they could have.

Which brings us at last to an issue I'm not quite sure how to address. But address it I must, because it takes up a significant minority of the book's lore. . . droids are kind of enslaved. 

"Droids can be more than just equipment. They can be individuals."

"They are machines that feel."

And yet, so much of the book is about the routine practice of wiping their memories to prevent them from developing too much of an individual personality. Of fitting them with restraining bolts so they don't run away. Which they will do, if their owners mistreat them.

The book talks about a droid general strike that brings a planet to its knees. A casino clerk bot known as "The Saint of Droids" because it ensures that droids wagered by desperate gamblers gain responsible new owners. A black market merchant that helps abused droids escape their owners and disappear in the wider galaxy. A secret droid organization that believes the time for peaceful resistance has passed and has taken up armed direct action against the practice of droid ownership.

It's not subtle. 

And it puts me in a terrible spot. Because I find the philosophical speculation about how to determine whether a machine qualifies as "intelligent" or "conscious" to be absolutely fascinating (and I have definite opinions on this subject, some of which may shock you), but in the context of a lighthearted action-adventure yarn, to have characters which blur the line between "person" and "property" strikes me as . . . somewhat irresponsible.

Like how am I supposed to deal with the fact that this book depicts a situation clearly modeled on the Underground Railroad? I feel dirty even bringing it up, because the real Underground Railroad was one of history's bravest resistance movements, risking life and limb to liberate the innocent from a tyranny as total and degrading as any humanity has ever known and the Star Wars droid freedom pipeline is just getting that stupid, inexplicably be-legged GONK-GONK power droid away from the incorrectly-programmed EV-series Supervisor Droid ("the motivators originally planned for the EV-series were accidentally swapped with ones meant to be installed in torture droids") that hung out in Jabba's basement. And I'm not sure whether I'm meant to react to the goofiness of Star Wars' kid-friendly robot slavery with a shrug and a chuckle, or if I'm meant to ramp up the drama here and tell a sweeping sci-fi epic about the endemic abuse of these clearly sentient beings.

Either option is uncomfortable in very different ways.

Overall, though, I enjoyed Scavenger's Guide to Droids. It's maybe not a sterling recommendation that the book gave me a whole lot to deliberately not think about, but I like droids. They're cute. They're funny. They're transparently toy-selling mascot characters. And Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars without them.

Ukss Contribution: As much as I rag on the Extended Universe for being cheesy, it can be legitimately funny and awesome at times. I don't know for sure whether the following idea was borrowed from some novel or comic book or whether it was specifically invented for Scavenger's Guide to Droids, but the more I think about it, the more it delights me.

One of the suggested modifications for the FLTCH-Series Battle Droid would make it into a Mercenary Rental Unit. A simple enough concept, but the deeper you get into the weeds of this idea, the more wildly satirical this thing has to be. Just off the bat, if the rental period runs out mid-battle, you've got to give it more money, at surge-pricing rates, no less. But also, they make you pay a damage deposit before they let you rent one. 

And . . . h-how? What?! You're charging a damage deposit on a piece of technology whose entire purpose is to get shot at by lasers. The economics of this transaction make no sense whatsoever.

But don't mistake the nature of my discourse here. It may seem like I'm poking holes in the concept, but there's a difference between a plot hole you complain about and a complaint you build a plot around. Imagine my incredulity directed not towards the authors of the book, but towards the manager of the Mercenary Droid Rental business.

In that context, this is another thing that makes me go, "Sigh . . . Capitalism." And I'll admit, I'm a sucker for it every time.

Kindred of the East

In our modern, woke rpg landscape, Kindred of the East has a reputation for just being the worst kind of sloppy cultural appropriation. A total whiff when it comes to representing East Asian folklore in an urban fantasy setting, a polyglot mess that demonstrates a colonizer's arrogance in its indifference to authentic details. And lest it seem like I'm reading White Wolf for filth right now, let me clarify - that's not my opinion. That's the opinion I feel like I should have, based on the work done by people like the Asians Represent podcast. I went into this book with my memory of having read it 20 years ago, a vague emotional ambivalence about collecting the whole series (I don't know what to say about this, except that there was a period where I was addicted to buying whole sets, and this one was really easy to collect. All of them except the Dhampir book and Demon Hunter X are going to be new to me), and the knowledge that it made some critics I really respect really angry.

However, in the interest of full disclosure, I didn't notice all that much wrong with it. Don't get me wrong, I picked up on some things that were totally out of pocket. I cringed with my whole body when the book referred to its titular vampires as "the inscrutable Cathayan." And I could fill a post just with the Orientalist tropes that I, John Frazer, personally recognized (the most obvious of which is just the repeated use of the word "Oriental,") but all of those observations would be general observations. Things that would be racist even if the book was super faithful to the source material. Even I know you can't say shit like: "Westerners have often spoken of Asia's exoticism, its alien ways and rules. In the World of Darkness, they are correct. . ."

But that thing about "Kuei-jin" being an artless polyglot portmanteau that would sound conspicuously strange, to the point of unintelligibility, to speakers of both source languages . . . that's something I only know by reputation. To me, it's just a nonsense sound that refers exclusively to this particular group of weird guys. And I'm sure that this is not an isolated phenomenon. I came into this with basically no prior knowledge of the ostensible subject matter - Asian vampire mythology - and so I have no way of distinguishing between "they got this laughably, insultingly wrong" and "oh, actually I have to give them credit for this."

So I'm not even going to try. Like, I'm pretty sure the bit about the "Yin world" and "Yang world" is nonsense, but only because these are transparently just new, Asian-sounding names for the Shadowlands and the Umbra. But that seems like sort of an edge case in cultural appropriation to me. If you've already got a weird, janky metaphysics that was entirely invented for your game, and you've hitherto applied it willy-nilly to the entire world, with no more than token attempts to integrate it with any real-world folklore, then is it really such a crime to completely mangle the myths of a new region to get it to fit in? White Wolf's spirit world can't possibly be any less faithful to Buddhism than it is to Christianity, so maybe it's just putting the "fantasy" into "urban fantasy?"

I really don't know. Same goes for its unflattering depictions of Shanghai and Bangkok. There's a reason I call this "The World of Darkness problem." I imagine there would be something vaguely insulting about looking your hometown up in the gloomy, pessimistic horror-movie world and discovering that they made it an exception to the overall vibe. It's like no, damnit! I want to be afraid of the shadowed alleys because people routinely go missing and the police are indifferent to their fate. If the creature that ate me isn't getting away with it because of endemic societal violence and the institutional corruption of those who claim to protect me, then what game are we even playing?

That said, it's weird that they refer to sex trafficking as "white slavery." Twice. I can't quite wrap my head around it. Maybe it's some sort of 90s aspirational color-blindness? Why, the good post-racial folks at White Wolf are cosmopolitan citizens of the world who believe white slavery can happen to anyone, regardless of skin color. It certain feels to me like a term that was used to convey a feeling, divorced from its etymology, but in this case the etymology is, like, super gross. This particular combination of words only exists to distinguish slavery that happens to white people from the broader phenomenon of slavery. It was created and used by people who would shrug at slavery and get outraged by white slavery. To repurpose the word to refer to specifically sex slavery, regardless of the race of the victims . . . it really seems like an outgrowth of the pathological sexual anxiety that accompanies white supremacy. Just don't do it, people.

All-in-all, I'm kind of in a weird place, regarding Kindred of the East. I can see that it is Orientalist in its very conception, and my knowledge of the broader context of the World of Darkness and the compromises it makes to fit in the same world as Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, and Changeling make it more problematic, rather than less. (I mean, is it just me or are the words "shen," referring collectively to all supernatural creatures in Asia, and "hsien," referring specifically to Asian changelings," just alternate romanizations for the same word?) But if I ignore all that and just contemplate it as a standalone fantasy rpg about hellbound sinners returned to a parody of life to immiserate the living, as an alternative, rather than a supplement to Vampire: the Masquerade . . . I'm stymied by my own incalculable ignorance.

See, as a game, Kindred of the East is both too much and not enough. It's overloaded with systems. You've got basically three different types of magic points, all tied to a different personality mechanic, and each used to power a different category of special power, but with just enough wiggle room that the resource-juggling minigame could potentially be strategically interesting . . . assuming it didn't get bogged down in play. And that complex mechanical chassis, it's too much for a game about charismatic sinners talking to each other.

Superheroes with fangs, however . . . Well, it's not enough for that. To run those sorts of games, the book needs a lot more - weird locations, wild powers, strange creatures, and other forms of cool shit to see. 

And this is where my knowledge fails me. Because what we're talking about is genre and White Wolf is just completely mushy about it. Within just a couple of pages, the Storyteller chapter claims "Kuei-jin don't give a damn about all that overwrought angst-ridden bullshit" and caution us "It's your game, but hopefully you won't cheapen it with super-powered blood brawls."

Got it? Not angst-driven personal horror or spectacle-driven action horror, but some secret third thing that threads the needle without doing anything 1998 White Wolf was too cool and jaded to respect. And when I contemplate the mystery of what that third thing can be, my reaction is "wait, does China have its own storytelling tradition of fantasy horror, with its own characteristic tropes and themes? Probably. Someone should base an rpg on that."

I know in my heart, that that's the answer. Chinese horror is the lens through which Kindred of the East should be judged. And I'm woefully unqualified to do it. My gut tells me the game misses its mark, because the genre trappings I do recognize are just White Wolf's usual brand of nonsense, done more racistly than usual, but that's just a supposition. 

I will give White Wolf this one sliver of credit, though. A lot of the discourse around cultural appropriation focuses on "respectful depictions," and in a camp-driven genre like horror, I think that misses the mark. Representation can (in my opinion) take the form of an . . . invitation to participate. "Look at us, having the time of our lives rolling around in this trash pile! C'mon, grab your garbage and get in here!"

So when it comes to moving beyond a eurocentric World of Darkness, I think people can forget that you're not aiming for a good depiction, you're aiming for trash. And here is where, out of an abundance of caution, I have to stop giving White Wolf credit (though I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate me "defending" them in this manner, regardless). Since the goal is to create something trashy, everything you choose to include becomes trashy by association. Even when working in your native culture, this is a line you have to walk carefully. Like, there are certain ideas that can survive being trashy (for example - the myriad depictions of sinister or unseemly angels in genre fiction) and certain ideas where people will never forgive you for fucking around (for example, almost none of the aforementioned genre fiction dares to muss up the spotless reputation of Jesus Christ). 

So how much more difficult must this line be to walk in a foreign culture? How much extra care must you take?

I may not specifically know which aspects of Kindred of the East were the gross kind of objectification and which aspects were the hot kind of objectification, but I know White Wolf well enough to know that they absolutely did not take the extra care to make that distinction on my behalf.

Ukss Contribution: Ooh, this is a tough one. In all this talk of cultural appropriation and load-bearing Orientalism, let's not forget one very important, salient detail - I own a complete collection of Kindred of the East. Nowadays, I know enough about racial politics to find this deeply embarrassing, but in the early 2000s, I thought it was . . . kind of cool, if not exactly my thing. And, as recently as 2020, I was buying these books without any thought to the broader political implications.

So I'm not prepared to get high and mighty here. I am elbow deep in the shit. Whatever is wrong with these books, I'm at least a little bit complicit.

In the case of the Kindred of the East core, I think its greatest sin can be summed up with the line:

"The mood of Kindred of the East is one of exoticism."

Now, that's a textbook no-no, so I'm not going to claim that the book is entirely non-evil (or even non-evil on balance), but the particular crime here is an enthusiasm that is reckless in its expression. It's not hatred, not contempt. The book does imply that Asians have a different variety of soul than Europeans, but I'm pretty sure it's not meant to be better or worse, so much as it's meant to play into the newly conceived personality-resource mechanics. So that's where I'm going to draw the line, for the rest of the series going forward. If a book merely indulges in exoticism, I'm going to include it in Ukss, but if I get even a whiff of an implication that it's saying Europeans are superior, it's out. 

With that in mind, my choice is pretty abstract. It's said that Kuei-jin care deeply about the appointment and condition of their graves, which I think is a pretty charming trait for undead to have. Maybe the Ukss version is a bit cozier than the World of Darkness version, but it's still going to be a whole thing. 

(Star Wars Saga Edition) Threats of the Galaxy

 I had a serious moment of self-reflection while reading Threats of the Galaxy. I was keeping a running list of "droids you can't be" vs "droids you can be," out of some critic's instinct that maybe the rules for which droids are and are not eligible to be player characters would be amusingly arbitrary, or at least feature one or two outrageously controversial calls. And it was going fine, though not in a particularly content-generating way. I was making observations like - an "assassin droid," as a broad description, sounds exactly like the sort of character someone would want to play, but maybe the non-humanoid assassin droid that tried to kill Padme Amidala in Attack of the Clones is reasonable to exclude from the list of playable droids. It was all very dull. Anodyne Star Wars nerd shit.

Then I got to the "Power Droid" entry. The name "Power Droid" might not immediately call an image to mind, but if you're a fan of the series, you undoubtedly know who this guy is. It's the incredibly useless-looking box on legs, first seen waddling around going "Gonk! Gonk!" and later seen being tortured in an uncomfortably foot-fetishy way in Jabba's palace. And the first time I read the entry, I thought it said you can't play one as a hero. But with second glance, I saw that actually you can. 

And in that moment of discovery, when my understanding of the role of the Power Droid in the rules of the game suddenly changed, I learned something about myself. Because unlike most of the other droids on my impromptu scorecard, I annotated the Power Droid's entry with my emotional response.

When I falsely thought you couldn't play a Power Droid, my extra note was "noo!" When I learned of my error, my tenor changed quickly to "what?" Do you know how rare it is to see the effects of irony poisoning in real time?

"Aww, man, I can't play as the gonk-gonk-box-with-legs? What a rip off! I will never forgive you . . . oh, I can? Ha. Ha. . . well, that's a relief. Um . . . maybe I'll think it over."

The book really did call my bluff. Actually, I think the Power Droid sucks so much that it's reasonable not include it as a playable option. Although I guess there's no particular harm in just letting a PC Power Droid slide. Deliberately underpowered character creation widgets are sometimes called "trap options," but there ain't nobody falling for that particular trap. You only pick that particular character if you're actively trying to troll the game, and the most fitting punishment is simply to let you get away with it.

Now, in my defense, I knew I was being ironic when I wrote that "noo!" I just thought I was being the charming kind of ironic and not the obnoxious kind of ironic. Lesson learned (I claim, with completely unearned confidence).

Now, I don't include this anecdote because droids (and my emotional reactions thereto) are a particularly large part of the book. It's divided into three chapters, one of which is "Droids," but the droid chapter is the shortest of the three. I tell this story because my irony poisoning is of a species with my appreciation of the Star Wars setting as a whole. It's genuine sentiment, mixed with playful affect, mixed with a little bit of unnecessary meanness that is directed more at my own embarrassment at once having been an easily-impressed child than at any particular fault of the source material.

And believe me, ,the sentiment I feel for the Power Droid is genuine. I remember seeing the movies and being like, "look at that dumb, fucking robot. They very obviously put legs on a trashcan. There's no way anyone would ever build something like that!"

. . . and there's a special cinema magic that comes from being allowed the opportunity to notice goofy things like that. Like, it's a dumb robot, but in some sense, it's my dumb robot. I noticed how dumb it was all on my own, even as a preteen. And a lot of the warmth and good will I feel towards Star Wars is just that lingering memory of a silly kid's joke, perfectly executed.

Which brings us to the . . . fraught part of Star Wars Saga Edition as a roleplaying game. It relies pretty heavily on the Expanded Universe, and the Expanded Universe . . . doesn't always have the wisdom to let the movies speak for themselves.

This is, of course, inevitable, almost to the point of tautological circularity. If the movies were enough, why would we even have an Expanded Universe? But I think there's a difference between EU materials that are in thoughtful dialogue with the movies, and EU materials that try to apologize for the movies.

Take our humble Power Droid. "The few people who are unaware of its function wonder why Veril Line Systems built it in the first place. Without power droids, however, modern society would grind to a halt."

I literally, no joking, hate that they did that. It's the right call for an rpg, because if you put these ridiculous fucking things in a game, the players are going to ask what they do, and I don't want that responsibility as a GM, but I hate that playing Star Wars Saga Edition would put me in this position. They could have just not mentioned it. Maybe I get wild hair, or the players get mischievous, and one of those gonk-gonk droids gets table focus, and then the consequences of killing the movies' magic are on me, but I don't need a book to make that call on my behalf.

But I don't blame Threats of the Galaxy for that. I know that this sort of thing was inherited from some novel or comic book or George Lucas interview. It happens often enough that it's just part of a pattern. The "Bothans are widely acclaimed as the best spies in the galaxy." Jedi frequently use the term "aggressive negotiations" as "a euphemism for combat." And that thing that swallowed R2-D2 on Dagobah is part of a species that will "swiftly spit out objects that prove indigestible and can do so with surprising force."

Man, I love Star Wars, but the EU's genre illiteracy . . . can be a lot to deal with sometimes. Though it's not all bad. There are things that I like. We learned that Luke Skywalker once faced disciplinary action because he used the Force instead of his targeting computer and wound up blowing one of his squadron-mates out of the sky due to her being an undiscovered spy. Which is kind of a hilarious situation. The Rebellion brass are chewing him out for recklessly endangering his own people, but it turns out his mystic intuition correctly separated friend from foe and it (presumably) took the whole course of a novel to get that sorted out.

And Yoda gets some . . . challenging character development. [Queen Amidala's bodyguard] "Tycho sternly disapproved, stating that the risks were too high. Despite his reservations, the captain was coerced through the Force by Yoda to proceed with the rescue." 

I'm not a huge fan of "good guy character is secretly a dick" as a general trope, but I have had my suspicions about Yoda for awhile. They go back at least as far as Star Wars: Republic Commando, the video game where he was just a little too comfortable commanding a slave army of clones.

Finally, I actively enjoy when the EU speculates about Force users who developed their traditions entirely outside the culture of the Republic, the Jedi, or the Sith. The Force was first described to us as an energy field that connects all life, and it's fascinating to me to think of different ways that various cultures could approach the same universal mystic phenomenon.

Overall, I'd say that Threats of the Galaxy reminded me of what I love about the Star Wars setting . . . eventually. It had three chapters, one about Characters, one about Creatures, and one about Droids. And the chapters about Creatures and Droids were absolutely delightful. As for characters, well, I suppose there's some utility in having stats for both a doctor and a medic, a bureaucrat and a politician, or an officer, a commando squad leader, and a mercenary captain. But I'm not going to pretend that I loved reading about them.

Ukss Contribution: Though there was plenty I did love reading about. Like, there's this EU smuggler named "Talon Karrde" and his ship is called "The Wild Karrde." Or the surreal fact that Amidala's security team included several trained bodyguards who could all pass for body doubles. 

Although, in the end, I think my favorite thing was the colossal-sized construction droid. Conceptually, on it's own, it's merely interesting, but the art rendered it as a several-stories-tall beetle-like monstrosity, casually picking up a Millenium Falcon-type space freighter and gently stacking it in a salvage pile as it cleaned up and restored a devastated city like some kind of reverse-kaiju. And that's beautiful to me. 

(Eberron 3.5) Adventurer's Guide to Eberron

 The thing about being a completionist when it comes to rpg collecting is that sometimes rpgs will release books that are absolutely not meant for completionists. An Adventurer's Guide to Eberron (Logan Bonner and Chris Sims) told me precisely nothing that I didn't already know. It's basically just a recap of the concept of Eberron. Sixty beautifully illustrated pages, covering 50 different topics ranging from Warforged to Dragonmarks to Xen'drik. Honestly, the whole thing read like the pamphlet Wizards of the Coast might create if they were trying to sell the IP to Hollywood. 

I'm very much at a loss for words about this book. It's a rapid-fire tour of the setting, seemingly created for total newbs, so basic it explains in a parenthetical that an inquisitive is a detective, a lich is "an intelligent undead spellcaster," and that divination magic is "used to read the future and the past." I enjoyed reading it, it was a nice way to wrap up the series, but it very clearly wasn't for me.

I guess I'm kind of curious about the strategy behind this book. It was published in 2008, more than a year before the 4e Eberron book and I guess people were just supposed to read it and be reminded that Eberron exists? Rush out and buy the third edition overstock before the edition change? Get excited for a campaign setting months in advance?

Whatever it was, they must have done something right, because I'm talking about it.

Overall, An Adventurer's Guide to Eberron was sort of like those clip show episodes old tv shows used to do to save on their budgets. It wasn't as good as the series was at its best, but it wasn't as bad as the series was at its worst. You just have to wonder if maybe this is what the creators think is a representative cross-section of the series as a whole. I'd say it's too superficial to get at what makes Eberron special, and the format can't help but highlight the unevenness of its worldbuilding (the "Technology" pages have lightning rails and airships, but the "Dwarves" page has daring little tidbits like "a male dwarf values his beard" and "all dwarves value gold and other precious metals"), but if this were my first exposure, I think I'd probably say, "why not, I'll give it a shot."

Ukss Contribution: Okay, what's my favorite thing in all of Eberron? Because in the broad strokes, it's all here. My problem is that I greatly prefer small, specific details to broad strokes. Like, honestly, the thing I enjoyed most was learning that "magic even allows for sophisticated picture IDs." This is the sort of pseudo-modern texture that makes me love Eberron, but it's not particularly interesting, except as a contrast with the way D&D usually does things. So I guess it has to be the really tall buildings in Sharn. That was a fun adventure town. But I'm cheating here. This pick owes as much to Sharn: City of Towers as it does to An Adventurer's Guide to Eberron.

(AD&D 2e) Chronomancer

 I have something of a dysfunctional relationship to AD&D. Let's call it . . . toxic nostalgia. Every time I see or handle (or yes, read) one of these old books, it's like this visceral sense memory. I'm instantly transported back in time, to when I was a teenager . . . and then shortly thereafter I remember all the reasons I hated being a teenager.

I first learned of the existence of Chronomancer (Loren Coleman) approximately one month ago, but as soon as I did, the lingering bit of teenager inside me immediately activated and tracked down a copy. And now, the adult me has to explain (to both you and myself) why that was a bad idea.

And it's tricky, because the main thing that's wrong with Chronomancer is just that it's AD&D. It does stuff like introduce the Temporal Champion class, a spellcaster/warrior hybrid that specializes in time manipulation magic and the ability minimums to qualify are Intelligence 17, Wisdom 16, Strength 15, and Constitution 14. And, it's like, are we just openly cheating at character creation now? Is that the state of Dungeons & Dragons circa 1995? Or maybe the game was just designed around the assumption that you'd only get to play the character you want one time out of nine (that's how many tries it took me to roll the necessary stats using the 4d6, drop lowest method that would not become standard until 3rd edition).

So there's this open question of how much I'm willing to tolerate AD&D's system nonsense for the sake of a high concept and it turns out the answer is "basically not at all." In a way, my toxic nostalgia is vindicated. Chronomancer is exactly the sort of book 13-year-old me would have gone absolutely feral over and exactly the sort of book that 20-year-old me would have been completely jaded about. Reading it for the first time in my forties leaves me largely confused as to why it exists at all.

See, the titular Chronomancer class is a wizard variant that knows unique spells related to the Demiplane of Time (and there is an extremely important discussion here about why that name is inappropriate and a better term would be "The Temporal Prime," but I can't be mad at it, because there's a dark part of my heart that understands why we should really be calling Time Elementals "Time Dimensionals" instead.) These spells allow the Chronomancer to travel into the past and future as early as level 3. And I don't need it explained to me why someone would want to play a time-travelling wizard. What I need explained to me is why you would ever run a campaign where only some of the characters are time-travelling wizards.

It's such a classic D&D blunder. Making a character class out of what should have been a campaign model. I want to believe that Chronomancer was conceived, written, and published entirely independently of the video game Chrono Trigger and the timing (no pun intended) is tight enough for this to plausible (Chrono Trigger was released March of 1995, Chronomancer was published in August of 1995), but a treacherous part of me thinks, "OMG, what if it wasn't?"

Because I can get behind that particular brand of corporate cynicism. Take one of the best jrpgs ever made and file the serial numbers off for a D&D game? Absolutely beautiful. But it kind of depresses me to think that they were deliberately trying to imitate Chrono Trigger . . . and missed the point so badly. Nooo! We're supposed to be a band of plucky heroes dashing around through time, trying to avert some terrible doom by finding and defeating it while it's still weak enough to be killed. Why are you telling me about the extremely abstract perils of this monochrome transit tunnel?

There's this weird assumption that the players' time (no pun intended) in the Temporal Prime (which is basically a big fog cloud with "timestreams" running through it - travel through time is effected by moving up and down said streams) is going to receive a lot of focus in the game, though maybe the book is just assuming that once the characters are back inside the normal flow of time, the DM can take things from there. So the new information we need are the logistics of the time travel process itself. AD&D could be like that, assuming that a mechanics-parsing puzzle (such as figuring out how long you have to travel up the timestream to get to a particular time) was the most engaging form of gameplay, even when DMs would be better served by a discussion of storytelling tropes. And I will give Chronomancer credit, it did get there eventually. The last chapter, with its discussion of how magic and technology might vary over time, and its sample setting, showing the same kingdom in four different time periods, was exactly what I'd want out of a D&D time-travel supplement. However, it's only partial credit, because that chapter was exactly as long as the previous chapter - one of the most tedious collections of highly-specific spell interactions I've ever read.

I think, overall, the most valuable thing I got from Chronomancer was a permission structure to run a time-travel fantasy game with AD&D, which isn't something I particularly need nowadays, but it would have done me a lot of good in the late 90s. I admire the book's audacity, if nothing else.

Ukss Contribution: My absolute favorite thing in this book is the addition of day planners to the equipment section. It's just such an un-D&D piece of equipment, and if the book had leaned more into the idea that the PCs' time travel shenanigans would become so complicated they'd need to carry a heavily annotated calendar with them at all times, well I'd have been positively delighted. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a one-off.

So I'm going with my runner-up - the suggestion that in the future, magic would become so advanced that they'll teach low level spells in public schools. It's a pretty unusual way of looking at magic - that there could be a standardized magical education that doesn't need something as specialized as a "magic school."

(Eberron 3.5) City of Stormreach

For the long-term health of the blog, I think I'm going to have to develop some standardized methodology for reviewing Lankhmar. Yes, the title of the book in question is City of Stormreach (Keith Baker, Nicolas Logue, James "Grim" Desborough, C.A. Suleiman), but . . . it's Lankhmar.

Now, there are two things I want to make clear. First, I don't think it's any special insight on my part to notice that Stormreach is Lankhmar. There are essentially two types of people in this world - those who can recognize the debt Stormreach owes to Lankhmar and those who have not yet heard of Lankhamar.

And the more important, second thing to get absolutely straight - my saying that Stormreach is Lankhmar is in no way meant to diminish or minimize Stormreach. Complaining about a fantasy city being Lankhmar is like complaining that a renaissance painting is just the Pieta or the Holy Family.

But it does put me in a terrible spot as a critic, because "Fantasy city X is clearly inspired by Lankhmar" barely counts as an observation, but it does basically sum up my feelings about the book. It's a corrupt, virtually lawless city, with magical secrets and dangerous gangs/militias that blur the lines between criminal power and civic authority. It's pretty much the perfect place to have sword and sorcery-style pulp fantasy adventures in an urban setting. That's why every fantasy rpg takes a crack at it sooner or later, often multiple times.  What am I even supposed to say? Yeah, it's great. If you're at all interested in playing an Eberron campaign, you're going to want this book.

So maybe I spend my time trying to develop some sort of Universal Lankhmar Scorecard that I can apply to Stormreach and Nexus and Kratas and Sigil and Ankh Morpork and all the rest. How engaging are the thieves' guilds? How corrupt and decadent are the magic users? How spooky and irreverent is the Temple District? Are the street names anywhere near as inspired as "Cash Street" or "Cutthroat Alley?"

It's a fun idea, though I think I'd have to make it an Actual Project if I didn't want the whole thing to come off as insultingly reductive. For now, I think I'll have to take a more intuitive approach.

My gut reaction is that Stormreach is probably a B+ Lankhmar. It's got some of the horror edge - buried under the city is a slumbering demon, sealed away by ancient sorcery but recently disturbed by the reckless, greedy delving of House Kundarak. It's got some of the humor. The local gladiatorial games, despite being a terrible atrocity, even by the standards of the genre, are governed by the Blood Council, who hold an annual gala event known as The Feast of Blood. Also, the powerful and mysterious sorcerer who inexplicably maintains a loot-and-monster-filled dungeon underneath the city streets is a kobold, so that's fun. And the criminal gangs are high-concept enough to be memorable, at least - The Bilge Rats, who are governed by wererats and keep dire rats as pets; the Hollow Shards, who forge everything from relics to maps, for both profit and sport; the Golden Lions, who are just bored rich kids playing around; the Shrouds, who are child pickpockets led by the century-old ghost of a child.

There's an endless amount of incredibly seedy adventures, in other words. My main complaint would be that the parts of Stormreach that are most distinctly Eberron tend to tread dangerously close to Eberron's worst quality - its barely deniable laundering of the colonialist tropes of late 19th/early 20th century adventure fiction. Two things we know about the Wayfinder Foundation: it makes the bulk of its money guiding ecologically devastating safaris and artifact-looting "research expeditions," and its members regularly reenact the plot of Heart of Darkness.

That unpleasantness aside, City of Stormreach was a pretty solid fantasy book. I really liked the feathered yuan-ti (not the first time they showed up, but maybe the first time they got playable rules) and the two full pages devoted to the Stormreach art scene. More stuff worthy of comment:

The mysterious Xen'drik precursor to the modern warforged, built by the ancient quori were referred to as "quorforged" which is a delightful portmanteau that feels like it somehow escaped containment from an internet message board.

The silliest thing in the book is the suggestion that you could blackmail a "philanderer" because he "lets his scruples fall by the wayside" at the Feast of Blood. It boggles the mind just to think about it. Whoa! That guy is cheating on his wife! At the event that celebrates kidnapping people and forcing them to fight to the death! Whatever happened to his scruples? Surely it will ruin his life if this blatant immorality was ever revealed.

The book takes a step backwards with regards to alignment by telling us that becoming a wererat automatically shifts your alignment to Neutral Evil and that all of Xen'drik's yuan-ti "truly seem to be evil by nature." It's just disappointing.

Gnomes continue to be used oddly. There's one here who is a champion arm-wrestler whose body is . . . notably described. The idea that Wizards of the Coast was deliberately trying to make gnomes fuckable is seeming less and less like a conspiracy theory with each passing day.

Overall, I'd say I enjoyed City of Stormreach, but as we near the end of the line, I can't help but feel like it was a little too mainline D&D for the setting's penultimate outing. Eberron is at its best when it's offering something you can't get anywhere else, and frankly, you can get a halfway decent Lankhmar almost anywhere.

Ukss Contribution: There was a lot of interesting stuff in this book, but nothing that I found more interesting than the setting's elevator pitch - a human city built inside the ruins of a giant city. Just the coming together of these two incompatible scales, where the new inhabitants have to build scaffolds and rigging just to climb a giant staircase or bridges to cross a giant storm drain . . . it's a really effective fantasy image. I'll probably play it up significantly more than the book did, though. 

(Mage: the Awakening 1e) Summoners

Like, seriously, what was going on with Mage: the Awakening, 1st edition? Every time I read a new supplement for this game, there's something awful and weird, that throws a monkey-wrench into any notional ambition of coherent worldbuilding. My operating theory, after reading Summoners, is that they're doing it on purpose. That if we could subpoena the emails of White Wolf, circa 2005-2009, we would see a conspiracy at the highest levels, where the people in charge of the editorial direction of the line knowingly, and with malice of forethought, pursued a calculated strategy to make the overall cosmology of the game as janky and unpleasant as possible, so that there was not even a shadow of a possibility that nuMage could accidentally develop into a beloved urban fantasy game. Mage: the Awakening was conceived as gnostic horror in a world of dark neo-platonism and the only fucking escape from that is through mythos horror. Tentacled monsters might crawl out of the Abyss to eat your soul, but fuck you if you ever think you're going to ride a dragon. The ratchet only turns towards "grim."

And now I'm going to do my trademark move where I support this scurrilous (and possibly even libelous) assertion with some oddball quote that seems to make another point entirely:

The tales of the Forest Primeval remind Thyrsus mages of the Primal Wild, and legends of tricksters the world over, beneficent or malevolent, remind the Acanthus of their trip to Arcadia. To the Awakened, it's not hard to see where humanity got these stories - they are remnants of memories from before the Fall.

Mages with a slightly broader experience of the world, though, disagree. Yes, the "Fae" of Arcadia resemble legends of faeries, but there are other beings in the World of Darkness that claim the title, and they don't seem to have any Supernal understanding about them.

And there it is. It's subtle, but unmistakable: someone is fucking with me, and I'm like 99% sure they know they're doing it. This book tells you how to summon faeries from Arcadia, but, you know, you can't just take that at face value because the game is set in a world where an entirely different group of godlike eldritch beings calls themselves "faeries" and the inaccessible world of magic they hail from is also called "Arcadia," and so it is vitally important that you understand these two things are completely different (probably, unless you want them not to be, in which case no one can stop you, just like they can't stop you from doing any other non-canon interpretation).

I will grant you, it's more than a bit risible that I'm letting this bother me, but it's a pattern. In the Pandemonium section there's a sidebar titled "Demons and Other Demons" because, you know, you can't have a realm of self-described demons named "the place of all demons" and not address the fact that "Awakened scholars generally accept that the inhabitants of Pandemonium are not 'demons' in the classical sense."

Oh, they generally accept that, do they? These "Awakened scholars?" There's a consensus in the field. That's what you're saying?

And I'm sorry for the dangerously high sarcasm levels there, but they fucking do it again! From a sidebar in the Thyrsus section, "Are Totems, in fact, spirits . . . It's possible, but that isn't the sort of question that needs a definitive answer in a game book, because it's not the sort of ting that a cabal is going to realistically be able to answer anyway."

(Incidentally, the sidebar's overall answer to its own rhetorical question was, paraphrased, "yes . . . but no.")

So, on the one hand, I'm being an utter pill about something with a very obvious Doylist explanation. Mage: the Awakening isn't actually Mage: the Awakening. It's more like World of Darkness: Mage: the Awakening. And the World of Darkness is a place of multiple parallel and redundant cosmologies, none of which are subordinate to any of the others and maybe that doesn't always make for satisfying fiction, but there are incentives, both social and economic, at a deep structural level that ensure it's going to always be that way. If you were designing a standalone setting, you wouldn't have both a Stygia and an Underworld, a Forest Primeval and a Primal Wild, or an Arcadia and an Arcadia. You'd instead think long and hard about why you were including different elements. What are you hoping to gain from including faeries and demons and angels and how does including the places where these things come from help you achieve your goals?

Maybe it's unreasonable of me to expect standalone worldbuilding from nuMage. Certainly, the books never exactly promised it. (Indeed, the necessity of the nwod core practically argues against it). And I think if I were merely dealing a situation where the mage cosmology failed to elegantly account for things that only exist because they are part of other WoD games, then I would not have such a problem. I fully believe that Mage would rather not have vampires, rather not have werewolves, so these creatures' fraught relationship with awakened magic is very clearly a compromise. Where Mage: the Awakening loses me, however, is that I don't think demons, angels, faeries, nature spirits, and the souls of the dead are afterthoughts or concessions. I believe they are fully intentional parts of the setting, with plenty to say about the game's themes. I think a lot of thought was put into the Supernal inhabitants. Which makes it weird that the book seems to only grudgingly admit their inclusion. 

I'm brought back to this other sidebar:

It bears repeating, here: the central struggle of the Awakened is to be found in the Fallen World, rather than in far-flung realms peopled by strange beings and alight with unearthly magics. This is particularly important to recapitulate with respect to the Realms Supernal, given the drive that many mages feel to attempt a return to the Watchtowers and the worlds in which they stand. But the attempt to do so is a fool’s errand. When, and if, a willworker is ready to return to the higher worlds, she will know; in the proper time, nothing will need to be forced and the road to the Supernal will reveal itself. No loopholes exist in the laws of the cosmos to make this process any easier. If they did, they would invalidate the entire Awakened journey.

(There's more, but it continues in a similar vein). It's an expression of a design ideology (that's like a design philosophy, but they get mad at you if you try and subvert it) that places an extreme emphasis on a particular type of story. As long as you're telling the right kind of story, Mage: the Awakening has your back. Step out of the lines, and it starts to get ugly. What's maybe a bit unusual, though, is that the humorless nuMage canon scolding does not revolve around lore, it revolves around vibes. That's what the duplicate faeries and demonless Pandemonium are really about. Yes, it wants to stay in crossover-friendly "demons and other demons" territory, by not giving the Supernal any sort of special priority over elements inherited alongside the broader world of darkness, but it also serves to keep the Supernal . . . pure. Things of the Supernal are unknowable and profound and abstract, so if there's something you're expected to fight or talk to or beat in a pie-eating contest, it can't be Supernal. It has to be a thing of the Fallen World.

Which means, by definition, if you're playing Mage: the Awakening, then everything you interact with kind of sucks. That's the world you live in. The World that Unnecessarily Sucks Thanks to Humanity's Hubris. Summoners breaks this model a bit, by introducing Supernal summoning, allowing you to directly (but briefly) interact with genuine Supernal entities, but it never really sells those entities as characters in a story, nor the Supernal Realm as a "place" where "events" can "happen." There's always this insulating layer of abstraction and "you are not enlightened enough to solve this mystery." I know it's all meant to serve the overall gnostic horror, but apparently "gnostic horror" means "you are trapped in a world that sucks, and we're going to dangle cool stuff over your head, the horror comes from it being permanently just out of reach."

And yeah, I guess that's a pretty solid bit of horror, but as a game, it suffers the fatal flaw of requiring players to buy into a world that sucks. In a way, my journey as a player mirrors the journey of the characters. I yearn for a bright isekai version of this setting, where Earth is at the intersection of the spheres of interest of these five magical realms, a battleground between the reflexively adversarial demons of Pandemonium and the . . . morally uncomplicated inhabitants of the Aether, who appear to us as terrible angels, where shades descend into Stygia and the ancient powers of Faerie and the Primal Wilds move across the land with their own inhuman agendas, and the player characters are hapless individuals, plucked from their lives for a life-changing adventure in these other realms, only to come back changed, able to impose the rules of these alternate realities onto the mundane Earth, and some of these mages are willing agents, others are catspaws, and some are exiles, who would resort to any means to get back. Crossing over might be rare in this version of the game, but since the Realms are merely other and not Supernal, it's really more of a matter of the needs of the story. And even if only the great powers of the Watchtowers can call souls across the void, there's still room for messages, ancient curses, and small discreet packages to make the trip. It all happens because the beings in every place are persistent individual characters with memories and comprehensible motives and defined powers and limitations that are able to drive plots and alternatively aid or hinder the PCs based on the particular situation at the table.

It's a beautiful, enticing vision, but I can never have it, because I am stuck in the goddamn World of Darkness. I don't know whether to sit in awe of this perfectly constructed genre trap or to roll my eyes because I'm at least 50% sure this only exists to preemptively avoid a repeat of the contentious transition from Mage: the Ascension 2nd Edition to Mage, Revised. The book is telling us, in no uncertain terms, that we are to stay the fuck away from the moons of Jupiter. I will give Summoners credit for giving us a tantalizing glimpse of what could be, but I will then remind you that Tantalus was being tortured.

Still, if you accept that Mage: the Awakening as a whole is a game that never quite found a compelling voice, and you extend it the grace to enjoy it for what it is and not what it could be (and I must confess, I can do this only in theory, I don't think I have it in me to play it as written), then Summoners is a pretty top tier supplement for the game. Unlike some others, I don't think it suggests a superior mode of play. It is pretty much an extension of all the virtues and flaws of the original core. But it is also a monster book, and that format rarely misses. Some of the entries were a little tryhard, like the suggestion that you could summon a spiritual manifestation of a character's "positive pole oedipus complex" from out of the dream realms, but the bulk ranged from "okay" to "good."

Although I do need to talk a bit about the exceptions. CONTENT WARNING: Sexual assault.

So, one of the credited authors on this book was exposed as a rapist. And some parts of this book lean a little bit on White Wolf's notorious brand of edgy horror that is willing to use rape as a source of shock value. And because this was a company-wide habit, and because the book was written at a time when Matt MacFarland was still incognito, it's possible that this is just a coincidence. You can summon a "courtesan" from the Abyssal realms and her deal is that she desperately wants to be the victim of a violent sex crime and will actually think less of you if you don't try to rape her and it makes me uncomfortable enough just at face value. The thought that this could be the product of an undiscovered rapist, projecting his fantasies onto a fictional demon, it makes me feel gross.

Although, the part of the book that most feels like it was written by a rapist was the Men in Black entry. Again, if I put my "generous interpretation" glasses on, it's possible that this could just be an unfortunate, but coincidental interaction between several White Wolf habits. Like maybe the only reason it reads as bad as it does is because of the company's otherwise laudable habit of switching between he/him and she/her pronouns when the gender of the characters doesn't matter. If the Men in Black think can't convince you to lie about a supernatural event you witnessed and "accept" their mundane explanation, they'll torture you until you do. Fair enough. That's in line with what we'd expect these mysterious (beings? people?) to do, especially in a dark and gritty horror world.

When you then continue the next paragraph by telling us "They attempt to grab the victim and hold her down." and then proceed to describe five distinct and lurid forms of violence in specific detail . . .  it gets sketchy. There's nothing inherently gendered or sexual about pouring drain cleaner in someone's ear, but it came at the end of a list of things the Men in Black would do to "her" and the rhythm of the list felt . . . oddly enthusiastic. Either someone was so entranced by the intellectual challenge of describing the Men in Black's quirky and nonstandard methods of torture that they completely neglected to consider the gender politics of the pronoun choice (and this seems plausible, given that the section also had to pass the scrutiny of an editor, who as far as I know was not implicated in any sex crimes) or someone really enjoyed imagining and describing violence towards women.

I don't know enough about the behind the scenes production process to come to a conclusion. It's possible that I was just being too sensitive because I was primed towards vigilance by an infamous name in the writer credits. There are six other credited authors, so it's not even a case of "separating the art from the artist." It's more of an example of a bad apple spoiling the bunch. Because I can't be certain this section wasn't written by a rapist, I can't simply dismiss it as me being a bad fit for the horror genre as a whole (which I am. I would like Mage: the Awakening much, much more if they let the horror elements wither away to vestigial bits of unexpected spiciness instead of foregrounding them as part of the intended genre). For now, I'm going to chalk it up to being part of the burden of hindsight and not necessarily something that I should allow to ruin the book for me.

Overall, I'd say Summoners was a valiant effort, but I realize, now that I've come to the last of my Mage: the Awakening books, that I never really got to a point where I truly enjoyed the series. I think I kept being just interested enough to repeatedly give the game yet another chance to ensnare me, and it never did. Summoners didn't really move the needle for me, but looking at it as a complete work, I think it was a pretty fair test - if this book couldn't convert me into a Mage: the Awakening fan, it's likely nothing could.

Ukss Contribution: The book introduces a new kind of magical object called a "supernal echo." These are random-seeming items that, when brought to a Hallow (wellspring of magical power) will absorb the Hallow's power and start magically terraforming the surrounding area into something that resembles the Supernal realm it came from. They're all kind of cool, but my favorite was the Thyrsus example. It was a cat statue that, when powered up, would attract both cats and cat spirits, and mages with the ability to talk to spirits find that cat spirits are unusually cooperative.

I'll probably strip away the metaphysics and the specific spirit mechanics, but I like the idea of a magic statue that turns anywhere it's placed into cat central and will probably give it an analogous power to make it easier to communicate or interact with cats.

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