(Eberron 3.5) Secrets of Sarlona

Keith Baker, you sly dog, you somehow managed to trick Wizards of the Coast in to publishing your unmarketable psionics-based campaign setting by pretending it was just another continent on Eberron, and you barely had to compromise your vision at all (I have to assume the Xephs are so perfunctory because they were part of an editorial mandate). Which is to say, I enjoyed Secrets of Sarlona (Keith Baker, Scott Fitzgerald Gray, Glenn Mcdonald, Chris Sims), but I was not for one convinced it was ever meant as a companion for the rest of the game's Khorvaire setting.

(By contrast, I did think Xen'drik, as problematic as it could be sometimes, was intended to be used alongside Khorvaire).

Secrets of Sarlona was more or less the issue I noticed in Races of Eberron, writ large:

"[The Kalashtar], along with their arch-rivals, the Inspired, never stopped feeling to me like one of those stealth pilots that got snuck into popular long-running tv shows, where the regular cast only showed up at the bookends of a story about totally new characters so that the resulting series could be sold to the public as a spin off."

There's a really good campaign you can make from this material - about oppression, the hope that drives rebellion, finding freedom in the cracks of a system that seems total in its control, the destructive cost of imperialism. But would that be an Eberron campaign? I mean, yes, but only so far as the option was also snuck into a few of the other books.

You see, Sarlona doesn't interact with the rest of the world. It's the continent of "it's okay if you don't use psionics, because those people are so xenophobic you'll never meet them." It works as its own setting, but it never shakes that sense of conspicuous modularity. It's a tendency that isn't entirely to the game's benefit.

Sarlona's overall situation, ruled by nightmare spirits from the land of dreams, harnessing the psionic potential of a nation to bring the worlds into alignment, at war with rebels trying to put a stop to it - that's a story of global scope. The stakes are so high that the conflicts and their consequences should spill over into other lands. And that spillover should cause blowback. And the blowback should drive more Sarlona stories. 

Sigh. There's a little of that, but not enough. It mostly feels like the "stealth pilot" problem in reverse. Sarlona feels like a barely justified spinoff from Khorvaire. But if you take Sarlona as the default game, Khorvaire feels like an entirely vestigial piece of lore. You don't get the sense from this book that the rest of the world is entirely real, nor that it matters.

Take the dreamlily trade. It's a traditional Sarlona drug, grown, harvested, and sold by a Sarlona crime syndicate. Here's what the book says about it:

"The Path of Inspiration forbids recreational use of dreamlily, but the Dream Merchants do a brisk trade with outlanders in the foreign quarters of Dar Jin and Dar Ulatesh. Although the Inspired claim to oppose the dreamlily trade, they have been remarkably ineffective at curbing its spread into Khorvaire. In truth, the Inspired are all too pleased to see foreigners fall prey to the addictive power of this drug."

Technically, that's a connection. But . . . it's not? The Khorvairians are being terribly objectified. The Inspired chuckle down their sleeves, "oh, ho, ho, those foreigners are getting addicted to drugs," and it all feels like the Inspired have their hands firmly on the wheel. It doesn't exactly say as much, but the implication is that the dreamlily trade is only a problem for foreigners. If the Inspired didn't tolerate it, it wouldn't exist.

Except, the Dream Merchants are enemies of the state, aren't they? And there's talk of dreamlily going out, but no discussion of what comes back. Khorvaire is getting this dangerous drug (with super punitive mechanics, because drugs are bad), but the Dream Merchants are getting money and weapons and forbidden magic and perhaps worst of all, from the Inspired's tyrannical perspective, exposure to Khorvaire's culture and ideology. These are all things that will propagate back up the supply chain, perhaps encouraging the populace to do the drug themselves, and definitely encouraging them to use the money and weapons and magic to resist the power of the state. Even if the government takes a cut, demand in drug consuming-nations leads to civil unrest in drug-producing nations. 

So you've got Khorvaire doing things in Sarlona and Sarlona doing things in Khorvaire, but there's a lack of a general sense of interconnectedness, that things going on in one location matter to the other. Anti-Inspired dissidents are building expatriate communities and the Inspired are sending agents to harass and destroy them, but it's like there's nothing at stake because when we talk about the port cities and their well-contained foreign quarters it feels anything beyond Sarlona's shores effectively drops off the face of the earth. Likewise, you've got dragonmarked houses coming into Dar Jin and being heavily regulated and there's no sense that the government realizes the danger it's in. "oh, we're a closed society around here, but I'm sure that those foreign corporations will respect that and confine themselves to our designated trade areas."

Of course, realizing this, you could make a conscious effort to bring Sarlona and Khorvaire closer together, and the book wouldn't necessarily fight you all that much, but I wonder if there's not a more fundamental bias at work here. The Inspired rule over Riedra (the main nation in Sarlona) is this sort of perfect, clockwork tyranny and you don't necessarily want to scuff up the paintjob. The nightmare spirits have a plan - control humanity's dreams by creating a society that was both obedient and stagnant, suppressing all dissent and so thoroughly indoctrinating the rest that interfering with the Quori's plan is unthinkable. . . and inexplicably, they're really good at it. Their system stood for a thousand years, and all their internal enemies have either bent the knee or have gone so far underground that they're little threat to the status quo. Even the ogres have bought into the propaganda and believe they are one favorable reincarnation below human beings.

The book makes it a point to repeatedly point out how content, or even happy the Reidrans are and at no point is it clear why that would be something the Quori would even want. Shouldn't they prefer a society steeped in misery, where the populace is so crushed that they can no longer even dream of hope? Stranger still, when it describes Reidrans moving to other lands, one of the biggest bits of culture shock for them is simply having uncontrolled dreams. These guys are living in a nightmare-run state, but they don't actually experience nightmares until they leave. It's very strange. I think you could turn this around, make it intentional, like the Quori who become Inspired become corrupted by the material world and Reidra's strange system is a matter of mission drift.

I think it would make for a better game if the situation weren't so cut and dried. If the Quori looked like they had to work for it, like maybe uniting twelve fractious kingdoms into a unified empire, when your subjects are as sloppy and complicated as any other human beings and you're an alien squid from beyond the stars is a difficult thing to do. That makes Adar more of a threat. And the kalashtar communities in Khorvaire a source of dangerous radicals. And the trade cities a necessary compromise. And the diplomatic missions to Khorvaire's governments, to sew division and uncertainty, a real conflict with real stakes.

My overall take is that Secrets of Sarlona is a good starting point. It's got a lot of the things I really value in an rpg setting - nuanced portrayal of both heroes and villains, weird magic like the darklight (a magical lantern that allows you to add or remove darkness from a room), and, of course, descriptions of the clothes. However, the main thing it lacks is the sense that anything in this continent could ever change, for better or worse. Let's call it a diamond in the rough.

Ukss Contribution: I really like the overall dynamic between the quori spirits, the Chosen (humanoid vessels conditioned and genetically engineered to be hosts for said spirits), and the general populace of Rierda, who view the Chosen as aristocrats and the Inspired (Chosen who have been possessed) as living gods. They're like evil Trill. I think there could be a nation on Ukss with a similar feel.

NOTE: This post was edited to add an extra paragraph about the strangeness of Reidra's nightmareless empire of nightmares. It was a sentiment I meant to express first time round, but forgot. Possibly because I was falling asleep when I wrote this post. Thanks to Evil Midnight Lurker on the rpg.net forums for pointing this out.