(Kindred of the East) Dharma Book: Thousand Whispers

 LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) has long been a significant (perhaps even unforgivable) gap in my knowledge of roleplaying games as a medium. I have no great excuse for it except that a LARP, even more than a regular roleplaying game, feels like a party, and I'm the sort of person who doesn't get invited to a lot of parties. Could, perhaps, my ignorance be driven by bitterness and resentment? Since I, by both inclination and habit, have been confined to the shy, bookish, indoor version of roleplaying, I must therefor dismiss the sexy, convivial, outdoor version of roleplaying.

Shamefully, I must confess that there is an element to truth to that. Everything I have ever learned about Mind's Eye Theater has been against my will. But I've had this weird notion lately, that maybe this project of mine is an education. When it's all over, I'm going to be able to look at rpgs with maximum context, but in order for that to happen, I'm going to have to make an effort to understand LARPs.

(And if you think that perhaps I am just angling to guilt my way into an invitation to someone's LARP, well, I take umbrage at such a scurrilous accusation . . . I'm also desperate for a slot in someone's AP podcast).

I bring this up now, in relation to Dharma Book: Thousand Whispers (Steve Kenson) for a couple of reasons. First, it's just long overdue. 

Every one of these Kindred of the East books, with the exception of the core, has carved out space for Mind's Eye Theater rules and they have universally been a bit of a drag. It's not something I want to lay on the MET rules, per se, but it's a structural problem for a book when you read through a bunch of ritual and magic item descriptions and then are presented with a 5 and a half page sidebar repeating everything you just read (flavor text an all), but with a new set of mechanical widgets.

And while I'm indulging my inner crank, there's another thing I need to get off my chest. I do not believe for a minute that there was a large enough Kindred of the East LARPing constituency for this to be at all a good use of White Wolf's time and resources. Like, I know there was a Vampire: the Masquerade LARPing scene, and that in some places it's still going to the current day. And I know that the other various World of Darkness splats sometimes make appearances in these LARPs. So the notion that someone would want to play as a kuei-jin in a LARP is not prima facie ridiculous. However, when Bruce Baugh and/or Peter Woodworth (credited authors of the MET adaptations) pop in to say,

"As always with MET play, players should give a little thought to how bystanders may see things. Meticulous cross-dressing, for instance, looks just fine in a theater or other closed play space but could create problems for the player going to and from games."

My knee-jerk thoughts are: 1)This feels like it's coming from a good place, so I don't want to be too judgmental, but also, nowadays, we would call that victim-blaming and normalizing anti-queer violence. If you're going to go into business creating catnip for drag queens/kings, you need to have their backs a bit better than this. And 2)There's no way two or more people are ever going to need this advice. Messrs. Baugh and Woodworth would have been better served by finding the one, specific person in their social circle this passage was transparently directed towards and having a heart-to-heart talk as friends.

Also, if you're a white person LARPing Kindred of the East, there's a whole other discussion you need to be having and it's probably for the best that no one at White Wolf attempted to have it c2001, but just . . . think about what you're doing.  At least a little bit, especially if your costume is elaborate enough to "create problems going to and from games."

Now, that's all stuff that's been a long time coming. It's a diatribe that could have been attached, in slightly reworded form, to any of the books I've read so far (much as if I'd started screaming and weeping towards heaven about the illegibility of the page backgrounds). However, there's another reason I chose now to talk about the LARP rules. The Thousand Whispers, as a society of vampires, as a philosophy of unlife, as a means of coping with the trauma of hell, whatever you want to call them. . .  they are all about LARPing.

It's something the book notices. "Fortunately, players in a storytelling game have something of an advantage in understanding the Whispers . . . Hollow Reeds [ed note: "Thousand Whispers"] carry roleplaying to a level even the most skilled method actor can scarcely imagine." Maybe it's a bit precious ("we heard you like roleplaying . . ."), but it's a strong idea.

Basically, the premise of the Thousand Whispers as  a splat is that they create a series of false identities for themselves and then they commit totally to these identities, adopting them as full-on personas and "living" the "life" of a convivence store night clerk, or a warehouse night watchman, or a hospital's night nurse (for obvious reasons, most of their false identities are primarily active at night). By investing themselves in these identities, forging new social circles around them, genuinely caring about their triumphs and losses, they learn what it might have been like to live another life. And then, when they feel like they've learned all they can, they symbolically and ritually "die," by going total scorched earth and alienating/killing all of their new friends and found family, so that all possible ties with the false life are severed and they can come one step closer to facing eternity without attachment or regret.

The biggest downside to this splat setup is that it runs the danger of making Thousand Whispers characters seem excessively uniform. It's something of a paradox. These guys are defined by the diversity of experiences they have. Each one can be any number of things, and no two ever need to be the same, but the point behind all these characters is that they efface their own identities and subsume themselves in the people they're imitating. So, in a sense, the "core" identity of the character is lost in the noise. Every single one of them is defined by the quest to become something they're not, and for most people, there is a reasonably large overlap in the universe of "things I am not."

I don't think Dharma Book: Thousand Whispers entirely avoids this pitfall. A lot of the time, it feels like it's talking about one really interesting serial killer. However, it doesn't quite fall into the deepest depths of the trap. Especially in the chapter about Courts and Directions, it valiantly tries to present an entire society of these guys, all bouncing off each other. It just never quite makes the case that they need each other.

I think, overall, it's a pretty effective splat book, though. I'm definitely more interested in playing a Thousand Whisper than I was before.

Which leaves just one last bit of unpleasantness to discuss. This is the second one of these Kindred of the East splatbooks to feature an opening comic protagonist who enacts terrible violence against his romantic partner as a stepping-stone to enlightenment. Fortunately, it's not quite as bad as the Devil Tigers book, because our guy here is systematically killing all of his acquaintances and she was simply the most intimate of his victims. 

I know, I know, I seriously just said that it was better because he killed more people, but I guess the narrow focus of the Devil Tiger just made it feel more pointlessly grotesque. Also, there wasn't any specifically sexual component to the crime. Though that's hardly an excuse. It's still a real shitty way to treat a female character. Oh, "your suffering was not in vain, my love, for it has taught me much"? That's your wife you're talking about, asshole. No matter how you cut it, it's domestic violence.

It's a risk that comes from basing your vampire factions on esoteric philosophies and then writing their books from a 1st person perspective - it's not always as clear as it needs to be that they are being self-serving and disingenuous (at least a little, and always at first). I don't necessarily need to be spoonfed "this villain protagonist is a bad person" didacticism, but it would definitely help the presentation of these vampires if the books did just a little more to let us know that the authors were in on the joke and meant for us to read them as being largely full of shit.

I can't help but wonder if the cause of this disconnect might be the theme of "exoticism" from the Kindred of the East core book rearing its ugly head. Perhaps, on some level, the creators of this setting are unironically presenting "Eastern Enlightenment" in lieu of "these clowns are pantomiming Eastern Enlightenment because if they didn't, they'd become mindless killing machines." But I have to be careful, because this is something even mainline Vampire: the Masquerade falls into. It's the same basic problem I have with the Sabbat's "Paths of Enlightenment" - a vampire's Humanity score shouldn't be an in-character artifact that they can swap out with a more convenient morality gauge. It should be the game's judgement on how much like a person the vampire is allowed to be. Maybe it shouldn't exist as a mechanic at all, because like D&D's alignment, it's just an editorial tag that tells us how to contextualize a character's actions, but if it exists, it should be universal, because "is there a sustainable way to constantly act like a dick" is simply not very interesting as a moral question.

Funnily enough, I think a book that was a bit defter at not taking the Thousand Whispers at face value would also go a long way towards clearing up the "maybe there's only one real character" problem. If the Thousand Whispers path is a lie people tell themselves, then maybe there's no escape from the original identity, and if there's no escape, then whatever false lives these vampires choose to adopt, the flaws of their essential nature follow them.

Like the man said, all happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Ukss Contribution: Call me a hypocrite if you must, but my favorite thing about this book was the Thousand Whispers splat as a whole. I think they are fascinating as both a single really interesting serial killer and as a whole cult of monstrous clowns running from conclusions they don't want to face.  And I do want to give Mr. Kenson his due. He did successfully convey that there is fascinating roleplaying material to be mined here. My previous reservations should be interpreted to mean "good start, please show me more."

So I'm going to put the Thousand Whispers (in some form or another) into Ukss as a tribute, and because I feel the need to create the "more" that I want to see.

(Earthdawn 4e) Grand Bazaar

Grand Bazaar is a supplement for Earthdawn 4th edition with a deceptively radical premise - what if they gentrified a post-apocalyptic fantasy marketplace and it mostly turned out okay?

Mostly okay . . . yeah. That's something.

It's hard to convey the uncannily uniform (and some might say distressing) . . . okayness of the Grand Bazaar (both the book and the titular fantasy location). It's not a utopia. There are conflicts. Potential adventures. Someone in the Culinary Plaza might hire your group of mystic warriors to travel into the depths of Vasgothia to retrieve some Fruits of the Passions, on the misguided belief that it will help them win a cooking competition (or perhaps just impress the lizard folk adventurer-turned-chef-turned-district-administrator who is very clearly modelled on Gordon Ramsey). But, in the end, whatever problems these merchants are having, it's going to be okay. "While his demeanor is fierce in the kitchen, he is entirely cool and calm in other social settings."

The result is a book that sometimes feels like it's wearing its blandness as a badge of honor. And which, quite honestly, it should, because it's at its best when it's at its most boring. Oh no, foreign ideas from Travar, the merchant city, have led to a renaissance in marketing, where low quality goods, advertised by famous troubadours, are crowding out traditional dwarven "built for a lifetime" crafts. People don't seem to care because the newcomers are successfully competing on price. Will the noble houses be able to adapt? Is enshittification inevitable?

Anyway, there's an urban housing crisis too. It's all very relevant. You could run a variety of low-stakes adventures out of this area and stay busy for a long time, but mostly the vibe of the book is "what if we did all our shopping episodes in the same Mall."

Oh, man, I really am on the verge of self-parody here. I'm staring at this post and I'm torn between thinking it's way too short for being the first in nearly two weeks and realizing that if I keep going, it's only because I love hearing myself talk. This book is the purest grade of fluff imaginable. My notes are so low-drama, you don't even know. There are two gay dwarf couples and I ask myself if that could be a window to fatuously demand more Rozko the Unruly, but even I know my heart isn't in it.

There's a blacksmith shop called "Dame of the Flame" and that's pretty cool. It's run by an elf and an ork who were forced by the governor to share a forge (because of the "Governor's politics of mixing up hostile factions vying for favor ") and if you were writing a fanfic about it you'd 100% make it an enemies-to-lovers yuri.

I think the author of the "Culinary Plaza" chapter might be a little disconnected from the realities of animal agriculture. Like, there's this notion that you could make a combination dairy/restaurant/petting zoo that would attract families because the kids will want to pet the sheep that are being milked for cheese and . . . I don't know, I feel like maybe there are good reasons why "farm to table" restaurants aren't usually built on actual working farms. 

Also, I'm just going to say, the choice to replace Magician's Row with Gallery Row and to knock down the "haphazard chaos of stalls in every nook and cranny" in favor of a sensible grid layout . . . maybe those are good ideas in the Watsonian sense that the characters really want to gentrify the hell out of this marketplace, but it's an absurd direction to go from a Doyalist perspective. "Let's go to the clean, well-lit art gallery and not the rats' nest of alleys crammed with shady merchants hawking dubiously magical goods" . . . said no group of fantasy adventurers, ever.

And that's pretty much it. All I have to say. Grand Bazaar is a perfectly adequate book, filled end-to-end with locations, characters, and adventure hooks that are . . . consistently serviceable. Throal has been gentrified. 

Ukss Contribution: There's a magical curio shop that, in addition to its other goods and services, allows customers (for a fee) to open a sinister magic box that "delivers what the customer needs or deserves, not necessarily what they want." They then have thirty days to use the item to "accomplish their charge in life." If they can't get their business handled and return the item before the time limit, the box eats their soul.

It's got a good balance between fairy tale logic and ttrpg pragmatism ("welp, you're on an adventure now"). I think I could find a place for it in Ukss.

(Kindred of the East) Dharma Book: Bone Flowers

There was a moment in Dharma Book: Bone Flowers (Kraig Blackwelder) that pretty much exemplified my perspective on these guys. It's in a chapter about the Bone Flowers' beliefs and values, narrated as a series of letters from a teacher to a student. Eight of these letters are parables, demonstrating the eight major tenets of the Bone Flower philosophy. The fourth tenet is "Gather what you can from the falling leaves of knowledge."

And the parable that accompanies this is . . . memorably obnoxious. The general gist (attested in my notes) is "Oh, man, everyone but us are idiots, right?" Like, the characters in the parable, one of each Dharma, are presented with a series of obstacles and the Devil Tiger tries to cross a river by attacking it and the Thrashing Dragon tries to move a boulder by kissing it, but the Bone Flower built a bridge and a bigass lever, respectively. And the point of that parable was supposed to be "Nothing is so flexible as knowledge." But my takeaway was, "so these guys are like . . . insufferable."

To be fair to Kindred of the East, putting in an entire faction of insufferable nerds, that's just knowing your audience. (And believe me, I'm lobbing this bomb, but it's exploding right in my face). It's something you can work with. Every adventuring party needs a psychopath, a real horny one, someone struggling with personal identity, a humorless scold, and an absolute buzzkill who knows all the lore. That's just rock-solid team dynamics. I was wrong to doubt White Wolf's splat-building acumen when I read the Kindred of the East Companion. The Dharmas aren't Clans, and I'm not sold on their worldbuilding implications, but if you're assembling a team of elite assholes to fight demons, you've got a real good cross-section of the popular character types.

It's probably a weakness of White Wolf's business model that they're given a spotlight to describe themselves, though. Sorry, Bone Flowers, but for all your waxing poetic about the virtues of cold, dispassionate Yin energy, you're too close to the issue. You can't attain the proper intellectual detachment. It's one of the dangers of valuing intelligence so highly. The hardest, most important lesson to learn regards the limitations of intelligence, and if you're not careful, it'll be your last.

So I guess, overall, I'm okay with these guys. The book maybe gives them too much to do. In addition to being scholars, they can also be assassins and diplomats, which is fine when you think about the Dharmas as emotional and ethical orientations - what sort of jobs might benefit form a completely passionless pragmatism - oh, contract killer and the negotiator you tap when you have to admit you can't win by force or arms. And it does have the effect of telling you that you're allowed to make more than one Bone Flower character. But it also dilutes the strongest possible presentation of the splat - creepy bookworms who are so socially awkward that they will allow their bodies to wither away into corpse-like husks, because looking like a zombie doesn't interfere with your ability to read.

Maybe that just seems like one really narrow character concept, but it's possible that there's nuance to be discovered by digging down instead of broadening the splat by going farther afield. I don't know. I don't hate the diplomat-Bone Flowers or assassin-Bone Flowers or anything like that. It's just, we've got three more of these books to get through, and I wonder if there are going to be enough rpg-friendly jobs to go around.

I'm also getting a better line on the series as a whole. As it accumulates text, it's starting reach that critical mass where its main point of reference becomes itself, and as a consequence, it's starting to feel less racist to me (though I'm sure that if you jumped in at this point, rather than the core, you'd be just as shocked by its exoticism and careless polyglot worldbuilding). And seeing this pure "KotE is inspired by KotE" hall of mirrors, I can't help but think that this is a game that was built with no clear idea about what it was trying to accomplish. Even as the party dynamics and antagonist motivations become more thought out and persuasively engaging, I'm still not sure what a game is actually supposed to look like. It's becoming something, but did anyone in the chain of command here have any plan for what that might be?

The best way to express what I'm feeling might be through a metaphor inspired by this very book. Kindred of the East was created by shoveling a bunch of garbage (Orientalism) into a compost heap, and enough has been put on the heap that the chemical breakdown has already begun. But is this thing I'm smelling fertility or is it merely rot?

Only time will tell.

Ukss Contribution: As the kuei-jin's premier book nerds, the Bone Flowers are basically the only people in the setting to possess a semi-legitimate copy of the Broken Winged Crane, the cursed tome that predicts the course of the coming age of darkness and instructs people how to sell their souls before it's too late.

As far as cursed tomes go, I think "Broken Winged Crane" is a pretty cool title. I also have a certain attachment to it, because it's canonically important in my favorite game. So maybe it's irrational, but I feel like its presence in Kindred of the East opens up the possibility that, when the game finally finds itself, it'll wind up kind of looking like Exalted.

(Earthdawn 4e) Empty Thrones

Metaplot. A contentious issue, subject to many strong opinions both for and against. There was a time when it ruled the rpg scene, with several popular games churning out supplement after supplement, exapanding their fictional worlds while also advancing their calendars, making the things that came before at least partially obsolete. And then there was a period where it fell out of fashion, where games aimed to be smaller, more self-contained, and eternally evergreen.

I'm not sure where on the spectrum the current scene's sensibilities lie. Whether the newcomers brought in by the popularity of Actual Play performances are enchanted, as us oldsters once were, by the novelty of ever-advancing lore, or whether the honeymoon period has worn off, and they have become weary of always having to chase the newest thing. 

Or perhaps there has been a total transformation of consciousness, and the old breakdowns no longer apply. Certainly, a lot of what made keeping up with the supplement treadmill so onerous was just that niche books like optional rpg supplements were hard to find in the days before the internet and were as often as not completely out of print by the time you'd heard about them. Ebooks, Print on Demand, and online shopping have made it easier than ever to just jump into an ongoing story and fill out the gaps as needed. It's entirely possible that advances in technology have completely changed the ways rpg supplements are made.

But not for FASA, though. Empty Thrones (Kyle Pritchard) is an old-fashioned metaplot sourcebook that would not have felt surprising even 20-30 years ago.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. There's a certain romance to these types of books. The feeling of promises kept. Several previous Earthdawn books have been telling us that the Denairastas (the dragon-descended mage-aristocrats of the totalitarian city-state of Iopos) were going to get up to no good, and here they are getting up to no good. 

So there was, for me, nostalgia even in the book's form factor. An rpg I'd been following for years had a shake-up in the status quo, rendering previous books semi-obsolete and fundamentally changing the nature of the adventures I could expect going forward? Yeah. That's a familar sensation. Used to happen to me once every 2-3 months.

There's a part of me that threatens to lapse into a kind of fandom atavism. I'm reading a book that feels like it fell out of a time portal to 1998 and maybe that means I should revert to that era of internet discourse - "Noo! Denairastas suck! They've ruined Earthdawn forever!!!"

Except, there's nothing in Empty Thrones that merits that sort of drama. It's not an ideal metaplot supplement, because at best it leaves the situation in Barsaive exactly as interesting as it was before (and honestly, I think a fair assessment leaves it one or two ticks below even that), but it's not a bad metaplot supplement, because at least the campaign that accompanies these changes is one the players will probably enjoy.

A quick recap - Empty Thrones is a series of five loosely-connected adventure arcs related to the mysterious death of Uhl Denairastas and the subsequent accession of Jada Denairastas to Iopos' Malachite Seat. The first adventure is a sort of prelude where the PCs just happen to be in Iopos, doing mercenary work for a less prominent Denairastas, when Uhl suddenly explodes for no adequately explained reason. The last adventure takes the PCs hundreds of miles away from Jada's coronation in search of a rogue WMD that they can hopefully destroy before it causes an atrocity (i.e. an impressively slick way of allowing the characters to foil a Denairastas scheme without them ever being in position to derail the campaign's main plot). In between you engage in espionage shenanigans in a city colonized by Iopos in all but name, navigate racial tensions in a borderland region that's still trying to find its own national identity, and slink through the shadowy underworld of the City of Thieves . . . outlying suburb. 

As a campaign book, it's incredibly generous. It's like three mini geographical sourcebooks in one, with dozens of new NPCs and suggested plot hooks above and beyond the ones tied to the titular power vacuum. There's a lot of value packed into this little volume.

Regrettably, though, a metaplot book can't simply be treated as a utility rpg supplement. It's also part of a tradition of serialized storytelling aimed at the sort of people who read rpg books instead of running them (it's something we, as a hobby, are in denial about, but we all know it's true). So I also have to evaluate Empty Thrones by the standard of how it works as a new chapter in the ongoing story of Earthdawn.

Unfortunately, it is much weaker as a storybook than it is as a campaign. I think it comes down to something that perhaps reached full flower in 4th edition, but which was latent in the line as early as 1st edition's Prelude to War - The Denairastas are not as compelling villains as the Theran Empire.

And you can't blame Empty Thrones for that, because it's just continuing a plot that has been a throughline of 4th edition as a whole. And I don't even blame 4th edition for that, because I understand perfectly the desire (and perhaps the need) to move away from Barsaive vs Thera stories. The game was running out of things to say about Thera and there's no better way to ruin a good villain than to keep them on-screen after their plot has run out. Part of having a season 2 is introducing a season 2 baddie.

I just remain unconvinced that the Denairastas can handle the role. The problem is that they're "master manipulator"-type villains and unless your PCs are specced to be the heroic version of this trope, that type of villain can get very tiresome very fast. Who really wants to fight a shadowy cabal that is always (almost definitionally) one step ahead of everyone else?

Hey, the master Thief, Garlthik One-Eye runs Kratas, City of Thieves, with an iron fist, thanks to the magical amulets he gives to all his subordinates, which are enchanted to allow him to see and hear from their location at any time and with no display that would give away his eavesdropping. And the sorcerer Zahm Denairastas can covertly tap into that network . . . because there's a spell that does that, apparently. And it's not like he was a great guy you wanted to see succeed or anything, but he had . . . texture. A certain villainous charisma that would linger in the memory after you went up against him. The only Denairastas that had anything like it was Uhl and he got mysteriously exploded in the first chapter, in a canon event that only has about a 10% chance of ever being explained.

So there's this inexorability to the campaign's plot. Garlthik's downfall came about because there was some nerd with a hard counter to his greatest advantage. The coronation of Jada Denairastas goes off without a hitch. Even the rebellion in Jerris is run by a Denairastas (though one who has fallen out of favor and sworn revenge on his family). They're like this entire faction of guys who steeple their fingers and go "all is proceeding according to plan" no matter what the PCs do, and you can barely even punch them in the face because "escaping instead of dying" is right in their wheelhouse.

Seriously, there are two separate characters who do this as a major plot point. Kine Denairastas has a "walk through walls" spell prepared in an armored spell matrix (making it resistant to disruption) and his base just so happens to have an escape route that is only accessible by walking through walls. Smart . . . maybe too smart. And certainly poor form when you consider that the only reason Jada Denairastas is getting crowned in this book is because she pulled a similar trick in Prelude to War (even to the point where Empty Thrones quite recklessly suggests retconning her death if the PCs somehow managed to stop her from doing that in the previous adventure). 

It all still might be worth it, if in some subsequent book, the PCs get a change to give the Denairastas a much-deserved bloody nose, but that's the problem with rpg-metaplot as a genre of fiction. It is entirely possible that the denouement to this story was always intended to be written by the players, which means that I'm almost certainly never going to see it.

Overall, though, I'd say I enjoyed Empty Thrones. It's good to see that someone's out there, keeping the tradition of rpg metaplot alive.

Ukss Contribution: House T'kambras is a T'skrang (lizardfolk) aropagoi (hereditary merchant company/proto-nation) that is a modern reconstruction of an ancient aropagoi that was almost entirely massacred. The only survivor put all of her traumatic, grief-stricken memories of that terrible night into a magical memory gem that overwhelms all who touch it with sorrow and fear.

But that's not what makes it an Ukss contribution. What caught my fancy about this particular item (called the River Song) is that, despite being too psychically dangerous to come into contact with bare skin, the River Song is nonetheless a priceless treasure of House T'kambra. So much so that they will go to war with the City of Thieves to get it back.

That fascinates me. It's sacred because it's cursed. The worst thing to ever happen to your family was frozen forever in time, and you keep the token, not because you get any use out of it (as far as I can tell it was kept in a vault and never taken out), but because no one else has the right to have it.