(KotE) Sunset Empires

Sunset Empires (Michael Butler, Dean Shomshak, David Turner, and Guy-Francis Vella) is a historical supplement for Kindred of the East, allowing GMs and players to create campaigns in Asia of Darkness' 19th century. And it is completely above my paygrade as a critic.

The depicted time period is where all the problematic tropes got started - the Orientalism, the colonialism, the cultural appropriation . . . like maybe there were misunderstandings and unneccessary exoticism before the Early Modern Era, but this time, with the East India Company and the Opium Wars and Admiral Perry's gunboat diplomacy, that's when this shit turned septic. The premise of the book is that we're going to go back to the early days of modern racism so we can just sort of act it out with our friends.

But, with that being said, Sunset Empires seems almost, kind of, keeping in mind my own shallow understanding of the subject . . . responsible. I know. I can't believe I'm saying that about a White Wolf book, and a Kindred of the East book at that, but while there were about a dozen individual sentences I could quibble with (mostly those that referred to the region as "the Orient," in a way that wasn't always unambiguously from the point of view of a European NPC), the broad shape of the work is roughly on the right side of history. You are not going to come away from this text with a good impression of European behavior during this time. In fact, the naked greed and incorrigible sordid behavior of the colonizers is a running theme.

It's just, the introduction also has the doozy of a line, "What the British, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Americans did to this region is unacceptable by modern standards, but any claim Asia was entirely innocent in matters regarding its own fate is too shortsighted - at least for the purposes of this book."

That was straight out the gate, and set my expectations very low, but the subsequent chapters were not as bad as I feared. It wasn't a Killing Streets situation where the narrator was this weird white savior, incidentally insulting and condescending to Asian people in the course of condemning the bad behavior of the modern capitalist order. The editorial voice was actually a bit dry, almost academic. The history sections give the impression that they could have shipped with a bibliography and footnotes.

Which is why I say this book is perhaps above my pay grade. If the events depicted herein actually happened in roughly the way the book says they did, then it comes across as a pretty fair-minded account. You're not going to walk away from this with a great deal of respect for the Qing government, but my understanding is that this isn't necessarily a controversial stance. That even people very friendly to modern China often regard them as the wrong people to meet the moment.

But that's just the problem. My understanding is garbage. Before reading this book, I could probably have given you a rough outline of the Meji Restoration or the founding of Hong Kong, but I wouldn't have been able to go into this much detail. So, if Sunset Empires is as factual as its factual tone would have me believe, then I genuinely learned something. And if it's not factual, I have no fucking way of knowing it. I mean, aside from meticulously vetting its narrative with other sources, that is.

I did check a few things. Like, I'm pretty sure that Hitler did not get the idea for "herrenvolk" from the historical, living in India, Aryans. Wikipedia suggests the term came from a pseudo-scientific misapplication of anthropology that traced the descent of the Germanic peoples to an Indo-European proto-culture. 

Also, while I'm not sure how much it would actually affect what the book is trying to do with history, it probably would have been worthwhile to mention that the Taiping Rebellion killed, at a conservative estimate, 20 million people, making it among the deadliest conflicts in human history. Don't get me wrong, it's not like the book is trying to make it sound like a wonderful time or anything, but I just thought it was a significant detail to leave out. 

That sort of thing really makes it difficult for me to trust the book. I think I can say with confidence that White Wolf is getting better. If you ranked the Kindred of the East books based on how much they respected the fact that Asia is a real place, with real people, living real lives, with real feelings, then Sunset Empires is definitely at the top. But what is its philosophy of curation?

Like, in the section titled "The Stages of Chinese Life," in the part about "Birth," it says, "Infanticide through drowning is a real threat for female infants and occurs across society's strata."

And look, it happened. And because it happened, it's not wrong to say that it happened. But if I go to my bookshelf and pick up my copy of Victorian Ages Vampire, am I going to find a comparable passage talking about how infant exposure was a common method of dealing with unwanted children prior to the invention of modern medical abortions? 

To White Wolf's credit, I'm not actually sure what the answer to that question might be. It is definitely the sort of thing they liked to write about, and even going back to the early 90s, they were never ones to give the Europeans too much credit. So if I went back in a time machine with a copy of Sunset Empires and pointed out the double-standard, I'd probably not have to fight too hard to secure a parity of the grotesque. However, I still have to wonder. Of all the things you could have told me about life in 19th-century China, why did this make the cut? How often are infants of any sort showing up in Vampire: the Masquerade games, and of those, how many are not doomed to get eaten by a creature?

Obviously, it's just a noteworthy behavior that stands out as particularly distant from the presumed values of the book's modern American audience. But also it feeds into certain unflattering narratives about the Chinese people. 

It's a tricky issue. I'm not going to say you should whitewash history or anything, but it's a hell of a thing to publish without also mentioning that even in the Qing Dynasty, governments and religious leaders were trying to stop the practice. 

Which is sort of where I'm at with Sunset Empires. It is operating at a level above my knowledge of the subject matter. Aside from some incidental choices of wording (like using "fortunately" and "unfortunately" to refer to British victories/losses in India), there is very little that made it into the book that I can say shouldn't be there. But as a company, White Wolf has not exactly earned my trust on these issues, so I also can't be sure that there's nothing missing from the book that should be there.

I guess what I'm saying is that, from where I'm standing, Sunset Empires looks like a decent supplement for playing games set in 19th-century Asia, but you absolutely should not take my word for it.

Ukss Contribution: A mirror belonging to the sun goddess Amateratsu is one of the imperial treasures of Japan. Japanese vampires who tire of their undead existence have been known to sneak into the royal palace and commit suicide by looking into the mirror. That's a pretty cool idea. Just  on the right side of the edge where detailed worldbuilding becomes baroque over-thinking.

(SW d20) Alien Anthology

There may, in fact, be such a thing as too much backstory. I know, I know, it's a scandalous thing to suggest, and certainly something that I, a died-in-the-wool "MOAR BACKSTORY" guy would ordinarily be ashamed to express, but I read Alien Anthology (Steve Miller and Owen K.C. Stephens) and I was forced to conclude that it was possible to know too much about Max Rebo, the dumb-looking felt elephant alien that played keyboard in Jabba's palace.

He's an Ortolon, which means he's part of a people who "take great joy in music," and not that eating him is a shameful act you must hide from God, as I originally assumed. And it's like, I get it. Over the years, people freeze-framed the cantina scene and told stories about each and every one of the weird creatures, even the one that was very clearly a guy in a werewolf mask (He's a Shistavanen and "Many take advantage of their superior speed and reflexes and become bodyguards, soldiers, bounty hunters, or even big-game hunters"). Honestly, that's kind of beautiful. No irony. I love that. The Star Wars expanded universe is a big, patchwork quilt of stories, sewn by a hundred hands

However, when you're trying to rebuild the setting into a single thing, as you might do for an rpg campaign (or even just a new work in the expanded universe), the hundred streams of information can work at cross purposes. I think back to the cantina scene and what I liked about it, what it said about Star Wars as a science-fiction world. And it was something that had a singular purpose in a singular work - whoa! All these creatures are just hanging out with each other! This universe has so many weird-ass creatures!

And so, if I'm trying to capture an authentic Star Wars feel for my table, maybe the best alien to use is the one no one's ever seen before. Or better yet, a half-dozen aliens no one has ever seen before. You walk into the Space Post Office and ahead of you in line are a three-eyed bat creature, a long-armed guy with four elbows on each arm, a lizard person who snaps up a fly that wafted in behind you, two identical moppets that are hot-pink from head-to-toe, a chain-smoking letter carrier with a perfectly rectangular head, and a single token human who looks like he rolled straight out of bed and into a garbage can. One of these people is the Jedi Master you were looking for. 

Alien Anthology attempts to deliver this fantasy by giving us dozens of alien species to choose from, and that sort of works, but I think the overall effect is diminished by work that went into giving each of them a distinct identity. Not that I'm ungrateful, and of course if the PCs get a wild hair and decide to follow the Squib merchant back to their homeworld, the cultural and historical details could be pretty useful. But I kind of feel like if you're doing a Star Wars game right, most of the information is going to be irrelevant.

Because the galaxy far, far away is kind of presented, at least in the strongest works of the series, as this impossibly diverse monoculture. Chewie and Han Solo can talk to each other in their respective languages and it's not that big a deal, because they're two bros in the same line of work who frequent the same social circles. Obi-wan learned about the Millenium Falcon by chatting up Chewbacca in a bar!

So, like, I didn't need to know that Pomda Baba (the guy whose arm Obi-wan chopped off in A New Hope) was one of the Aqualish, aliens who "admire strength and are openly contemptuous and hostile to the weak," nor that "It is customary and accepted social behavior for an Aqualish to be pushy or belligerent to people he or she is interacting with for the first time."

Yeah, that perfectly explains his behavior in the cantina scene, but you know what else would explain it? Mos Eisley being a "wretched hive of scum and villainy" and Pondo Baba just kind of being like that. Maybe the gentle Aqualish matriarch, Mama Baba, cries herself to sleep every night, wondering how her son could have gone so wrong, to get the death penalty in 12 systems.

On the other hand, an undeniable part of the series is also Landing on a Planet and Learning the Folkways of the Colorful Locals. The Ewok village on Endor, the Gungan city on Naboo, even the Jawa sandcrawler on Tatooine - these interludes contribute to the adventure serial feel that is such a core part of what makes the movies enjoyable.

So I don't know, I guess I'm chickening out and taking the position that a balance is necessary. Maybe there are all these countless planets with their indigenous aliens and their fascinating customs, but when you're out and about in the more cosmopolitan systems, any aliens you meet are probably assimilated natives of the galactic metaculture. Ask Greedo where he's from and he'll say "Tatooine," rather than the Rodian homeworld of Rodia. He has more in common culturally with Annakin Skywalker than he does the jungle hunters of "his people," despite becoming a bounty hunter, in line with the "Rodian idealization of hunting" (source: wookiepedia, and yeah, Star Wars lore is frequently that on the nose).

What the game really needs is some kind of "just folk" generation system for aliens, where completely ordinary galactic citizens can have any wild collection of physical traits, with only the bare minimum of mechanical modifications (just enough to give the decision weight, really). Or perhaps the individual entries could do what modern Lineage systems do and break the modifications down between Physical and Cultural traits, allowing characters to mix and match to their hearts' content.

But I'm once again doing the thing where I wish technology existed before it was invented, so I'll just take the foot out of my mouth and say Alien Anthology was a bit of a workhorse of a supplement, but a worthwhile read.

Ukss Contribution: On Dagobah, there's a tree whose seeds resemble "knobby white spiders" and spend the early part of their lifecycle as mobile predators, devouring prey to grow progressively larger until they become the size of elephant, whereupon they plant themselves in the ground and become massive, sinister trees.

That's some pretty cool imagery and some pretty cool speculative biology. I can find a place for it.

(KotE) Killing Streets

 Evidence continues to mount supporting the theory that White Wolf game studios was in truth an elaborate false flag psy-op by the Georgia GOP to develop a way to trick goths into saying the n-word. And if it seems to you that I'm coming in a little too hot here, well let me tell you, I don't think I'm coming in hot enough because Killing Streets (Michael Butler and Guy-Francis Vella) literally tries to trick you into saying the n-word.

Or, at least, the Chinese equivalent. The word you would use if you were translating a Tarantino film into Chinese. I looked it up. There's a glossary of "Chinese Slang and Triad Terms" and one of the entries is "an insulting term for a black person" (lack of capitalization in the original) and already, by this point, 16 pages into the book, my danger sense was going off. "Oh, the guys who said, in the first paragraph of the introduction, 'In Asia, with its tyrants and poverty, criminal activity can reach depths rarely seen in the complacent and wealthy West' are now suggesting I 'spice up the dialogue' of my characters. Gee, I wonder whether this 'insulting term' is actually an unforgiveable racial slur."

And maybe it's wrong of me to act so shocked here. Like, what exactly was I expecting to find when I googled the term? What else could it have been? But that just raises the question - if the only thing it could have been was a racial slur, why the fuck is it here? You know, in the list of words we Kindred of the East players might borrow from Chinese to make our crime drama dialogue more immersive.

Now, it does not seem implausible to me that Chinese gangsters frequently use racial slurs in casual speech. It's not as if organized crime has an HR department. You can't sue them for discrimination. And, of course, cruelty to others is part of the macho mystique. But we aren't making a movie or writing a novel, we are playing a tabletop roleplaying game. How did they imagine this was going to play out? What were they thinking would happen at the table, in the story, to make "an insulting term for black people" an essential bit of information? Is there going to be a Black NPC and then all of our fictional Asian gangster vampires are going to be racist towards them? Is that an eventuality you wanted us to be prepared for when you wrote the glossary?

My most generous guess, based on the fact that they included Pulp Fiction in the bibliography, alongside a bunch of Chow Yun Fat movies, is that they wanted us to be able to authentically create a translated version of Tarantino's cameo. I think the likelier explanation is that they just weren't fucking thinking.

Because if we're talking about racist tropes in media, a big one is just the existence of the glossary as a whole. The thing they're imagining is an rpg session predominantly in English, but peppered with polyglot slang. But that's just the ttrpg version of a common exoticising translation convention. You've got a story set in China, but it's being told in English and two characters are talking. The dialogue written on the page (or shown on the screen, etc) is in English, but the characters are speaking Chinese. Easy enough concept to get one's brain around. But some words are left untranslated. A character will say, "can you get me a Sháozǐ from the drawer" and the audience will be like "whoa, what is that," but it's just a spoon. They could have just said "spoon." To not use the word for "spoon" implies there's a reason not to call it a "spoon." Like there's a notable difference between a "Sháozǐ" and a "spoon." China is such an exotic foreign land that they don't even use spoons over there. They use Sháozǐ instead.

Now, granted, this is a delicate line to walk, especially when talking about sub rosa subculture, or just jargon in general (for example the thing I just did, using "sub rosa" to mean "hidden" - a perfectly valid English usage, more common in literary criticism than in the vernacular, of a borrowed Latin phrase meaning "under the rose" which I imagine would be pretty hard to translate into Chinese, because its literal meaning, its figurative meaning, and the cultural nuance of using it instead of a more straightforward term are all different - btw google renders it "secretly; privately" when translated and translated back).

So if you've got a jargon or slang term that has a literal meaning that could be translated, but is experienced in its native context as only and specifically referring to a particular thing, then maybe a direct translation won't work, and if you want to preserve the jargon-ness of its original context, that's when you consider using the untranslated term directly.

We actually experienced a very good example of this phenomenon on this very blog, when talking about the Feira da Ladra in Lisbon, Portugal.

The direct, literal translation of those words is "thieves' market," but you'd only use that translation if you were willing to be sneaky and let people mislead themselves into thinking it's a cool, shadowy underworld event (as Shadowrun does in the book Shadows of Europe, and I would do if I ever went on vacation in Lisbon).

If you want people to have an accurate picture of the event, you'd translate it as "flea market" because that's the closest English term in meaning, and indeed it's so established as an idiomatic expression that I'm led to believe native Portuguese speakers don't even parse it as a "thieves' market" at all.

And if you want people to find it on a map, you leave it as it, because "Feira da Ladra" also does duty as a proper and noun and that's what it's going to say on the signs.

(What you would never do is falsely claim that, actually, a "Ladra" is a kind of bug, so that the "flea market" translation is both idiomatic and literal, like those rat bastards in the Lisbon tourism department, and note to future translators - I am not referring to rodents born out of wedlock).

If you really want to capture the feel of specifically Hong Kong crime drama, as Killing Streets claims to want to do, you're going to need a mixture of all three approaches. Using the term "public toilet" to refer to someone whose loyalty can be easily bought should probably be translated directly instead of being left in its original Japanese. It's an evocative bit of slang that's easy to understand. Using "the 49s" to refer to "the rank-and-file criminals making up the bulk of Triad membership" should probably be translated idiomatically, because it's clearly something with cultural meaning, but it's unclear what it might be. And "shan chu" can probably be used as-is because it's the Triad bosses' traditional title and basically a proper noun.

Although, of course, that's just my intuition as a book critic. A professional Chinese interpreter would probably have a more informed take on the matter, and it's certainly possible to assemble a list of slang/jargon that is most respectfully left untranslated. That's just not what White Wolf did in this case. And do you know how I know?

It's because they put a fucking racial slur in the glossary.

Also, their romanizations are really weird and I had a hard time using google translate to verify the words meant what they said they meant. I'm really just taking their word for it, even if I'm about 75% sure that they translated "gaki" wrong (the glossary says it means "shorty" and is a crude reference to genital length, the internet says it's derived from "hungry" and refers to a bratty kid . . . is this a case of poor research on WW's part, semantic drift over the course of two decades, the internet being unreliable, or just crossed wires in romanization causing confusion between two similar-sounding words. . . fuck if I know).

Anyway, that's 1300 words about the glossary section of the Introduction, now it's time to talk about the rest of the book!

Sigh. I don't want to. It mellows out about halfway through, modulo some really disgusting sexual assault stuff in the NPC chapter, but the first chapter is rough. I should tell you all about it, because it's rough in an interesting way, but the thought of experiencing it all again, even in the form of a critical blog post . . . it's a lot.

So I'm going to quote something extremely offensive. Like, you are not ready for how shocking this is. And if you want to understand the roughness of Killing Streets' first chapter, all you need to do is come to grips with the fact that this offensive quote is coming from a section labelled "Telling Story From Reality" and the purpose of the section is to act as a gentle reminder to prospective Kindred of the East players to not indulge in harmful racial stereotypes.

Okay, here it is, the quote urging players not to be racist:

"One of the best ways to handle this is to turn the typical view of a character that first comes to mind on its head, so a white slaver may be a suit-wearing European yuppie and not the cliched greasy Arab."

Holy shit. Normally, it's a bit fatuous to be all like "anti-racist education taught me about more racial stereotypes than racists ever did," but . . . wow, you really just had that in the chamber, didn't you? I'm definitely sure they meant to be anti-racist, because they were urging us not to do that, but also they're using the term "white slavery" without any hint of irony or self-awareness and they're like, weirdly confident that they can predict the precise horrible place peoples' minds are going to go.

(Also, since when were Arabs part of "the Middle Kingdom?")

And it's not an isolated incident. European colonialism is portrayed as this almost-supernatural form of evil, but also the Asians are "backwards" (literally, that exact word is used) and "modernization" is associated with European ideas. Drug addiction is an imported European vice, and so is democracy. At one point it refers to modern Asian governments as "the aping of Western political forms."

Look, there's a complex history here of imperialist overreach displacing indigenous power structures and imposing foreign traditions that are an ill-fit for the local culture, but you can't say that non-white people are "aping" something white people are doing. You just fucking can't.

Sometimes, it feels like the book is trying to have it both ways, implying that Oriental Despotism is the natural state of these people, but it was only when the wicked Europeans came along that these practices became dysfunctional.

"Among the poor, the concept of selling children is neither alien nor the horror that it may appear . . . Modernization and Western-style lusts turned this traditional practice into a living hell . . ."

Oh, god, I don't think I have the rhetorical deftness to do this subject justice. . . So people everywhere, in every time, we're all made of the same stuff. And one of the tools of imperial oppression is to deny this, by focusing on aspects of an oppressed culture that seem, on first glance to be dangerous or foolish or even odious and to deny the humanity of their victims on the pretext that they themselves are dangerous, foolish, or odious, as a matter of their fundamental nature. The only counter to this propaganda is to focus on our shared humanity, to take every culture on its own terms, and seek to understand the context to the practices that make us uncomfortable.

And we may find that something we initially found incomprehensible actually makes a lot of sense when we consider the context, but we might also find that the practices we found odious from the outside are also odious on the culture's own terms. We are made of the same stuff, and so we all yearn for justice. We are all made of the same stuff, and so we all tolerate invidious practices that endure out of cultural inertia. We are all made of the same stuff, so we all have reformers, abolitionists, and revolutionaries. We are all made of the same stuff, so we all have to deal with powerful conservatives who think nothing should ever change.

The practical upshot being that the people of Asia were not just waiting for Europeans to come along and save them from themselves. There have always rebels and philosophers and holy figures who tried their best to appeal to better natures of their societies, to end harmful practices. So there's no need for us to imagine some kind of edenic pre-colonial tradition of child selling. Those "scholars, ministers, and generals of humble background who came through such servitude to power and promise" that's just propaganda. Horatio Alger bullshit the rich use to placate the poor.

And look, I don't envy anyone the task of threading the needle - treating a foreign culture's self-justifications with the proper amount of skepticism while avoiding the easy moralizing of the colonialist gaze. . .

Which is why it's maybe a bad idea to base an entire roleplaying game on the most egregious sort of cultural appropriation imaginable. Bad Kindred of the East! Bad! Stop existing this very instant!

Sigh. I am both a fool and a monster for having bought this book. Reading it was my justly-deserved punishment.

Ukss Contribution: I can't with this one. I just can't. I didn't say half of what I needed to say, and I'm already so tired. Just no.

Star Wars Revised Core Rulebook

 How does hubris always sneak up on me? I'd been on such a hot streak in the month of July, I thought for sure I could keep the momentum going long enough to breeze through a chore I'd been dreading for years - making my way through Star Wars Revised Core Rulebook (Bill Slavicsek, Andy Collins, JD Wiker), a massive beast of a tome (~375 pages) that is, all things considered, the driest possible way to experience the Star Wars universe.

If we look at it as a matter of pages-per-day, it's not really that bad. I can hold my head up high reading an average of 20 pages of a d20 corebook every day for two weeks (and if you exclude the weekends where I kicked back and played video games instead of reading, it's actually more like 25). But oh man, between the attack of opportunity rules, the half-page skill descriptions, and back-to-back chapters on Vehicles and Starships, there were times when I was white-knuckling it.

Hardcore.

To the EXTREME!!!

Well, sarcasm aside, it's not as if I actually want the book to lose its dryness. Not entirely. Not even mostly. I just wish the dryness was deployed with greater precision. This is Star Wars, for crying out loud! How are you making me wish for the spectacle and excitement of an evening quietly browsing Wookiepedia? I'm not sure what exactly I want it to do differently, but it needs something. Interstitial fictions maybe? An editorial voice with a bit more pulp flair, as if we're having the text dictated to us by a 1940s news reel?

I guess it boils down to genre. Genre has always been something George Lucas has understood pretty well, to the degree that Lucas' genre fluency is the series greatest asset and most Star Wars media lives or dies by how much that it internalizes that (I think the prequels would have been much better received if someone could have gently reminded Lucas that the geopolitics stuff should have been pulp too).

The natural conclusion is that the best possible Star Wars game would be "Powered by the Apocalypse." But that's not going to be possible for several years. This book came out in 2002, to coincide with the release of Attack of the Clones, and so it is condemned to try and do genre with the d20 rules system. . .

I'd say it's actually a pretty valiant effort. It introduces a split between "vitality points," which are easily restored and represent near misses and cinematic superficial wounds and "wound points" which come back only slowly and represent serious injury to your physical body. The intended effect is to model Star Wars' pulp-inspired fights, where heroes and villains both make it through elaborate set-piece battles and only really get hurt with a final decisive blow. The implementation has a couple of problems, though. First, critical hits bypass vitality points and go directly to wound points. And humanoid characters only have wound points equal to their Constitution score. So imagine a crit-fishing build where 15 percent of the time, your character is rolling 3d8 or more damage against an average of 12 hit points. It's not even that strange an NPC build. You could stumble across it randomly. (Hilariously, Obi-Wan Kenobi not only falls into that trap with his stat block, but whoever wrote it used the busted D&D version of the Improved Critical feat, giving him a crit range of 17-20, meaning 20% of the time anyone who fights him just dies).

Don't get me wrong, this sense that someone pointing a gun at you is always a threat, regardless of your character level, is itself very genre . . . but the genre is noir, or possibly horror. It would be more pulp if wound points were lost only after vitality points ran out.

And just to rag on the mechanic some more, yeah, they come back relatively fast, but still only at a rate of one per level per hour, which means a high con character might not even top off after a night's rest (and that all characters will need at least a 3-4 hour rest to heal up). If you really want characters to move from one scrap to another, like they do in the movies, you gotta make vitality points even cheaper. Although the Professional classes, which get defenses, saves, attacks, and skill points, but no vitality points as they level up are a good idea. Players are going to be able to mow through whole hordes of thugs, but it will still be a level-appropriate challenge.

It almost feels churlish on my part to point out that Minion-type enemies would have worked even better.

But that's the Star Wars Revised Core Rulebook all over. It's almost where it needs to be. Ditch the last few lingering connections between vitality points and D&D hit points, let them restore according to the dramatic pace of the game instead of modeling "healing," get deeper into asymmetric NPC design, because in the source material, the main characters really do operate by a separate set of rules, be more generous with Force Points (metacurrency that can retroactively boost dice rolls when spent) and decouple them from the morality system to encourage bigger, more ambitious stunts. These are all things games learned subsequently to the publication of this book, so it's really unreasonable of me to ask for them . . . but if the best I can hope for is something inchoate and still kinda too-D&D, then what exactly am I supposed to gain by reading this book?

What indeed?

I guess in 2002, I was still pretty enamored with both the d20 system and the Star Wars prequels (and this book very conspicuously ties into Attack of the Clones, specifically - the "What's New" section of several of the book's chapters goes out of its way to mention added material from the new movie - bye-bye Jar Jar and Sebulba, hello Jango Fett and Count Dooku) so at the time I was just excited to have a Star Wars rpg, no matter how D&D it was under the hood (and to be fair, Star Wars is closer to D&D than most other licensed media would be). Maybe the real reason the book seemed like such a . . . chore to me is that it couldn't magically make me 20 years old again. If I'm being honest, at that age, I'm not sure I'd have known what to do with all the genre, even if the book delivered.

Let's call it an artifact and respect it for its historical context.

Ukss Contribution: So there's this group of aliens, the Yuuzahn Vong that I know only second-hand, through my two Star Wars rpgs. I've gathered that they're sort of the metaplot antagonists for Expanded Universe novels set 20 years after the end of Return of the Jedi and that like all sequel villains they try and escalate the threat by being ridiculously overpowered - they're somehow immune to the Force, despite that making absolutely no sense under the setting's metaphysics.

My choice is not the Yuuzhan Vong. Even after all this time, I couldn't so much as describe their appearance. That's how little charisma I think they have as a threat.

However, I was reminded of one really amusing fact about these guys. Their signature weapon is the ampistaff, "a serpentine creature that can become as rigid as stone and is generally employed as a quarterstaff."

What kind of berserk Flintsones nonsense is this? 

I'm choosing to imagine it less like terrifying biotech and more like "pet snek does a halp!" That's right, buddy. Turn to stone so I can bonk bad guys on the head. There's treats in it for you when we get home.