(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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