World of Darkness: Demon Hunter X

 Oh, wow, I am constantly going back and forth on where to place Demon Hunter X (Jim Moore) in the White Wolf canon. At first, I had carelessly lumped it in with Kindred of the East partly out of the sense that Asia of Darkness was its own distinct subsetting, partly because the gold-leaf-style treatment on the front cover resembled similar detailing on various Kindred of the East supplements, but mostly out of a blithe, unreflective Orientalism in myself that I've only recently begun to examine. Later, I moved it over to the general "World of Darkness" umbrella, due to finally confronting my latent racism, noticing that the book's title literally contained the words "World of Darkness," and not being able to find it on the White Wolf wiki's official list of Kindred of the East books. However, after reading the book for the first time in more than 20 years, I am once again thrown into uncertainty, because on page 46, under the "Storyteller Notes" in the Character Creation chapter, it says "Demon Hunter X is a supplement for Kindred of the East."

Could it be that no one actually knows what the fuck is going on? I should be so lucky. It'd make what I do so much easier. Oh, John is confused and rambling again? Maybe it's because he's a completely typical human being. 

Oh, right, I was trying to build to some sort of point. Which is that Demon Hunter X is perhaps worth the grace of this strategic ambiguity because while it is definitely part of the Kindred of the East milieu (the Shih - traditional martial arts demon hunters - are mentioned frequently in other books, even if Strike Force Zero - sci-fi cyborg demon hunters - are never seen again), it has the redeeming quality of actually being somewhat fun.

There are monsters lurking in the shadows! What can anyone do? Be an orphaned child, mentored in the mystic arts by a wise hermit for 20 years until they are ready to dispense justice and preserve the cosmic balance? Fake their death and be recruited by a clandestine government agency staffed by a cast of quirky outcasts like something out of a Joss Whedon fever dream (literally, they stopped recruiting elite soldiers and now "New ones come from the unemployment line . . . Many agents are the very people least likely to fit into normal society . . . Most are more adept at video games than at speaking to the opposite sex. In short, they are 'goobs' - dreamers and outcasts who spend more time surfing the Internet or playing roleplaying games than trying to fit in.")

Yeah, that's the good stuff, White Wolf. Pander to me more! And if you parsed the above as sarcasm, you are unfortunately mistaken. I really mean it. Demon Hunter X is tantalizingly close discovering a version of the World of Darkness with broad crossover appeal. The very title screams "CAMP!" Big guns. Kick ass fight scenes. Bloody spectacle. Gothic punk as an aesthetic backdrop, but not a theme. It's "superheroes with fangs," but without the fangs. 

Or, perhaps, more on point, its the Storytelling Chapter's blinkered take on anime ( it "tends to explore more aspects of human nature than most Western animation; it also involves a great deal more violence, sex, violence, carnage, and violence.") Yeah, maybe it's a bit problematic that Mr. Moore mentioned "violence" three times, but you have to remember, it was 1998. It was a time when basing your entire view of an artistic medium on your sketchy collection of bootleg La Blue Girl fandubs practically qualified you as a citizen of the world.  The overall vibe of this book is like watching someone try to reverse engineer anime when all they've ever been exposed to is Japanimation.

And yes, I'm aware that what I just said could be seen as incredibly mean-spirited. But I don't mean it as an insult. It's actually almost a compliment. Not entirely, not exactly, but in the ballpark of complimentary. It's more of a bittersweet observation. Reading this book is like seeing the first part of a video where a raccoon is trapped at the bottom of a dumpster and some kind stranger helps it out by lowering a 2x4 they can climb. There's a pathos that comes from knowing that the poor creature's distress comes from a gulf in understanding and maybe an element of judgement, because they wouldn't be in this situation if they didn't dive snoot-first into the abyss in search of garbage, but you are nonetheless 100% on the raccoon's side. It is genuinely amazing to see them escape the trap.

That's how I feel about Demon Hunter X. I want my campaign to be the 2x4 that's lowered into the dumpster. Maybe that's a little bit (okay, a lot) condescending, but I don't feel that way about Kindred of the East as a whole (okay, maybe also Half-Damned Dhampyr and to a lesser extent 1000 Hells, but definitely not the rest of it).

Although, I should make clear that Demon Hunter X's faults are largely artistic, rather than moral. There's a certain suspicion of Orientalism that comes with being associated with Kindred of the East, but the Orientalism is actually fairly mild. Like, there's a bit where Asia is described as having super criminals "Take everything negative you've ever heard about the Mafia in the United States and multiply it by a heavy factor." And that looks especially silly when you combine it with the credulity the book expresses towards the idea that the Yakuza or the Triads could be a "neighborhood protection society." Taken together these contradictory ideas are a bit Orientalist, of the "Asians are adept at stoically enduring something uniquely awful" variety, but as with Japan's hypothetical technophilia (based, presumably, on sci-fi anime), it's a minor factor in the overall work. Basically, it's only there as a warning that if you play the magic cops, you won't necessarily be able to count on the support of the populace.

A little trickier is the Shih's general "traditionalist" attitude that supernatural creatures have a role ordained by heaven and thus should only be slain when they overstep the bounds of their celestial mandate. It's an interesting, humane, and nuanced attitude, to be sure, but again, if you were inclined you could read it as a form of "Asian stoicism." that skirts Orientalist stereotypes. But honestly, that's a little subtle for me. It's as likely as not an artifact of having specific, named pieces of Asian media as your inspiration, rather than the vague ambition to make Asia of Darkness that afflicted the core book.

Where Demon Hunter X really gives me a "raccoon in a dumpster" feeling is in its overall execution. I think, despite its lukewarm take on anime, it is on the right side of the cultural appropriation/cultural inspiration line, but it lacks the audacity of conviction. It names 22 distinct action and/or horror titles as inspiration, one of which I know for a fact is a hentai series, and yet the book this canon inspired has relatively little camp. If Vampire Hunter D and Akira are your starting points, then where is your end? In order to be a truly great tabletop rpg, there needs to be more distillation, more recontextualization. You need to create a world where 3-5 main characters can each have the full gamut of genre adventures.

A good example of where Demon Hunter X goes wrong is in its advice for games where the PC party contains both Shih and Strike Force Zero characters. The whole section focuses on differences between the two groups' ideologies and methodologies, presenting the crossover as a significant roleplaying challenge and at no point does it seem to realize that it's pitching an occult procedural where a traditionalist martial arts magic cop must join forces with a super modern cyborg magic cop, in an "odd-couple unlikely partners" dynamic with a support team made up of quirky almost-NEETs in a hyper-violent monster-of-the-week format and if you could somehow put that shit on television they'd make a hundred episodes and fans would be throwing conventions until approximately the end of time. This is a book that wears its influences on its sleeve, but doesn't seem to internalize the lessons of those influences. That, to me, betrays worrying signs of Kindred of the East's exoticism. Maybe it is the way it is because it thinks "being anime" is enough.

Although, to be fair, Demon Hunter X is, indeed, enough . . . barely. It has appealing characters with an appealing gameplay model, presented in an appealing way. It's one of the few parts of Kindred of the East you could reboot today.

Ukss Contribution: One of the signature magic weapons is a set of war fans. I always thought they were one of the cooler East Asian weapons. Although I'm slightly disappointed to learn they were historically wielded while folded, like a short club . . . Eh, if the local movies can take liberties then so can I. Ukss will have iron fans with their own signature martial art.

Nobilis Antithesis Minibook 1i: A Diary of Deceivers

 I have repeatedly in my personal life and once as a youtube comment referred to Jenna Moran as "the Picasso of rpgs" and Nobilis Antithesis Minibook 1i: A Diary of Deceivers is sort of the perfect illustration of what I mean by that. It is sooo good, but if you came to me and said, "What is this? It's too weird. I don't like it at all," I'd understand where you were coming from.

It's a tension that's apparent even in the title. It's "Minibook 1i" and that's weird. The "1i" is bad mathematical notation, a redundant but not technically inaccurate representation of the square root of negative one, but it's not a mistake, because if she called it "Minibook i" you might mistake the "i" for a lowercase roman numeral. It's a bit of disambiguation meant to make clear that the numbering scheme for this (sadly not continued) series will use imaginary numbers because the characters under discussion are not real. (Not just in the sense of being fictional, but also in the sense that they are monsters from the void waging war on reality itself.) She put a thematically on-point joke that relies on a knowledge of college algebra on the cover of the book, in the series numbering and look, I'm not going to pretend that imaginary numbers are some esoteric knowledge that only the elite will recognize, but it is something that not everyone is going to get. It's a little bit alienating, a little bit self-consciously elevated and I think a reaction of "oh, she thinks she's super clever, doesn't she" is entirely justified.

But, actually, yes, she is extremely clever and her work makes you feel clever by proxy. It's fucking great. Nobody else is doing what she's doing. She's a genre unto herself. If she chose the military, she'd be a general. If she chose the priesthood, she'd be the Pope. But she chose rpgs, so she's Jenna Moran.

The best thing about A Diary of Deceivers is the way it deftly wields Nobilis' trademark mood whiplash. There's a character called Iolithae Septimian.

"If you should meet her walking in the world, bow before her for she is sacred; bring her oil and fine cloth; bow before her, three times bow; but she is Iolithae Septimian and you must not let her speak.

I do not know how you can prevent it, but you must not let her speak."

It's a chilling bit of horror. Very effective. There's a sacredness that is inimical to life. The cosmic implications are dizzying. There is something that is hateful to us, and rightly so, but we must treat it with respect, because we are not significant enough to be the yardstick by which sacredness is measured. And even so you must not let her speak.

Like I said, sooo good. But what makes it great is the juxtaposition between what came before and what came after.

The setup to this punchline is the story of how the Lies of Iolithae Septimian turned the seas to salt. It's told in this poetic, almost scriptural style, but the story itself is deconstruction of that kind of narrative. There's this ancient stone tablet. The words carved on it are sacred but must not be spoken. Iolithae Septimian is an illiterate temple girl, whose job is to wash the stone. She can't read the words, but she knows them anyway. She confides in the priest and out of fear, he whips her and cuts out her tongue.

But the important thing is that this brutal display of male rage is totally impotent. She doesn't speak the forbidden words out of pain or revenge. She's got her own story going on. The end was always inevitable and his abuse of this girl does absolutely nothing to derail it. He eventually destroys the stone itself, but then that's it. "He goes home and forgets the words of the stone." He doesn't even merit a comeuppance. "He forgets the Lies of Iolithae Septimian," but the implication is that it is safe for us, the readers, to forget him. He's done. What happens next will change the entire world and have ramifications for millennia to come, but he's not part of that. He defiles something sacred and his punishment is that he doesn't get to witness the horror he unleashed. The Lies of Iolithae Septimian will turn the seas to salt.

And there's something sad and beautifully human about this, but also there's feminist subtext and epic grandeur and an invitation to reflect on the idea that maybe even a fact so anodyne as "the ocean is salty" is not inevitable and could have been different. And it's all building up to that absolutely perfect capper. "I do not know how you can prevent it, but you must not let her speak."

That's what came before, but what makes Jenna Moran such a singular voice is the absolute audacity of what comes after.

It's cute chibi drawing of this terrifying character, with a speech bubble saying "Nobody can really know whether God exists or not" annotated with the footnote "still not the worst thing she ever caused to be a truth."

Remember that invitation to contemplate a world where the seas were not salt? Take that same mental process and imagine a world where it's possible to know whether God exists or not. What Jenna is saying here is that in the world of Nobilis, that is something that a creature stole from you. That and more. There's some lie, only hinted at, that's worse. 

"I do not know how you can prevent it, but you must not let her speak."

Because of the format, and the cuteness, it's presented as a joke and it is a joke. It's really fucking funny (maybe less so, now that I've spent so much time dissecting it, but still). And the joke is a part of it. That's the cosmic horror of it all - that humanity's biggest questions are so small and absurd that they are brushed aside to a joke in the marginalia. And the joke works.

This same character, in the space of a few pages, is played for pathos and spectacle and terror and humor and it all works and the whole would be diminished if any part was lost. The only comparable thing I can think of is Jobu Tupaki from Everything Everywhere All At Once (not coincidentally one of my favorite movies) and this book is a guide to creating rpg antagonists (or even player characters!) in a similar vein.

I think it would be . . . understandable (not right and not fair, but understandable) if you dismissed all of the above as hopelessly tryhard and my opinion as obnoxious fanboy gushing. However, I read a lot of fantasy and I read a lot of rpgs, and there's no author I trust more to show me something new. Even picking up a book from 2012, I can come away with the conviction that the genre could be doing more, that games could be doing more. There's something magical about it. It may not be for everyone, but so far, every Jenna Moran book I've ever read has been a confirmation that I am not yet too jaded to feel surprise and delight.

My overall verdict for A Diary of Deceivers - if you liked Nobilis 3rd Edition, you'll like this. If you didn't, you probably won't. And that's okay, because rpgs are big enough and diverse enough that even after reading 600+ books, there's still room for surprise.

Ukss Contribution: Morrowen Hollow is an infectious sound that spreads through patterns in ambient noise and takes over living victims, stripping them of agency and causing them to endless echo her with their own voices. And the great thing about Nobilis generally and A Diary of Deceivers specifically is that there is a running series of character creation examples that show you how to build her as a PC-legal character. 

There's also this great interstitial fiction that's all about the military trying to quarantine the small town (and surrounding region) where she originated, using massive noise-making machinery to drown her out and stop her spread.

My choice is not Morrowen specifically, but rather the idea of a modern military trying to use technology to outwit a creeping cosmic horror that manifests as an abstract pattern. It's so thematic I could spit.

(Exalted 3e) Alchemicals: Forged by the Machine God

 It's new Exalted book day! Like two weeks ago! Because every fucking one of these monster tomes has hundreds of pages of charms and I'm finding it harder and harder to muster the concentration for getting through them in a small number of long sittings, so I'll just read a dozen or so, "take a break" by playing a video game and then three hours later remembering that I have a lifelong obsession I'm trying to succumb to here. I got through the setting lore damned fast, though. That you can believe.

So I guess I should talk about the charms first, seeing as how they're so fresh in my memory and all. Alchemicals are weird because they're almost exactly the same as every other form of Exalted, but it's to their and your benefit to pretend that they're not. Their charms are presented as technomagical devices that need to be installed onto the Alchemical's body, but there's no setting implications to them. The devices don't actually exist. They're just little exception-based rules packets. Pump in the cost and the benefit comes out and like maybe, on your body, some gears are whirring or something, but don't worry. It's all seamless, automatic . . . magical.

You can get a Piston Driven Megaton Hammer installed and it looks like a big thing you attach to your arm to make you punch harder, but it has no other object-like qualities. You go down to the lab to get it swapped out for another charm, but "Uninstalled Charms dissolve into Essence and subsume into the Alchemical's Anima until she has need of them again. No magic can interfere with uninstalled Charms."

 You can't loan your unused Megaton Hammer to a friend, nor can you salvage it for parts. No one can steal it or sabotage it. There's no part of this that resembles taking something off a shelf. The book talks about charms being made by skilled human technicians, installed by surgeons in special vat complexes, but at the end of the day, they are always and only something that is written on your character sheet. It's all very convenient from a gameplay perspective, but it's thematically dull. The Alchemicals have a sort of technological gloss to them. but they don't engage with technological ideas, the chief of which is that doing something for the first time is hard, but it gets easier the more you do it. Once you've proven a device is possible, by building a prototype, you can make as many copies as you can afford. This is something the book (hell, the line) tries to avoid. The Alchemicals and their charms may look like machines, but each one is a miracle.

It's not something I have a problem with per se, but I do think that it steers away from what is most interesting about the splat. They wind up having this "Saturday Morning Cartoon Action Figure Battle Royale" feel about them. On first glance it parses as science-fiction, and you can do awesome stuff like double-jump, swing around on an electric grapple, and shoot people with your built-in energy cannon, but there's precious little depth to it. There are gears and shit, but they don't do anything.

Which is as good a segue as any into the lore. In contrast to the charms, there is a bit of science-fiction depth here, because it puts some thought into things like where the Autochthonians get their food, the way their settlements adapt to and even exploit the strange environmental conditions of the Machine God, the way their unique circumstances affect their politics and culture. It would almost be churlish to point out that extremely old Alchemical Exalted can be retrofitted into living cities and their Municipal Charms are described as factory-sized pieces of civic infrastructure that more or less amount to "Address a Particular Problem Complexes" (no, seriously, their names get pretty on-the-nose, like "the Atmospheric Purification Web" that protects the city of Xexas from the deadly smoke of Autochthon's recycling region or the "Rat Slaying Electrification Grids" which are apparently ubiquitous.)

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not about to rag on sci-fi for not explaining super-tech in excruciating detail. "There is a problem that exists today, but this future society solved it by means of a device made from unobtanium and argle-blargle" is practically its own subgenre. It's just that there doesn't seem to be any limit to this. I kind of feel like whatever the problem, the Metropolitan Exalted can just pull another charm out of the hat. The thing about speculative fiction is that you need to speculate and while I'm not about to say you need a full-on hard magic system to do that, you do at least need some scaffolding to build off of. What is your magic/technology (or in this case magical technology) actually doing? What limitations does it remove? What limitations does it leave in place? What new limitations does it impose? The premise of this setting is that eight whole nations of humans, along with their associated rats, cockroaches and fungi are living in this giant world-sized machine, driven by a vast intelligence that welcomes their presence but only has a limited amount of patience for their disruption, and sometimes that comes across as Autochthon being wall-to-wall industrial nonsense.

But also, like maybe that's okay. There's also the implication that the nonsense isn't actually nonsensical, but rather it's part of an order too large and too complex to be entirely understood. They're in a machine so big it has weather patterns, and what, I'm demanding an explanation for why there are all these electrified cables, pipes filled with every variety of rarefied organic compound, and big-ass gears everywhere? I'm acting like I need to understand what it means for the nation of Sova to occupy "vast chamber-shafts within an organ continent and the spaces between."

The whole point is that it's a super strange world, but that humanity is still recognizable. High status people might wear a luxurious rat fur cloak, because rats are one of the few species that can survive here almost as well as humans. The bulk of the nations' food comes from organic chemicals leeched from Authochthon's massive system of pipes and then subjected to a variety of industrial processes, the secrets of which are under the control of a powerful guild. Some brave people respond to the grim prospect of a life of unceasing toil under an autocratic regime of artisan/administrator-aristocrats by agitating for democracy and the agents of the state treat them like a demon-worshipping cult.

Which is to say, I think that the mortal-eye-view of Autochthonia is actually pretty good speculative fiction. It's only the titular Alchemical Exalted that I'm iffy about.

I don't know. I guess it's because they are canonically, and by way of direct editorial mandate, Not Robots. Rather, they are constructed beings of "clay and magical materials" and have a "crystalline Essence reservoir" instead of a heart. The book insists on calling them "human." What they actually are is a general vibe. They're robots in (almost) all the ways it's cool to be a robot and not a robot in most of the ways it sucks to be a robot. Also, nobody knows how they work, not even themselves. You basically just have to get a bunch of specialists into a factory setting and the God of Invention sends them into a trance, after which a new Alchemical emerges.

They're cool, but also kind of a bummer. I kind of feel like a version of the Alchemical Exalted that leaned more into their robot-ness would make for a more interesting setting. Unfortunately, I have certain extra-textual evidence (decades worth of fandom discourse) that avoiding what I consider "a more interesting setting" is an explicit design goal. If people actually knew how to build an Alchemical, they might try to build a lot of them. Or some nefarious power might steal the secret of building them and build one or more Alchemicals that had no connection to Autochthonia's culture. If they could simply be built, people, both characters in the setting and players in the real world, would ruthlessly objectify them. They would not treat the Alchemical Exaltation as a sublime miracle, or the Alchemical Exalted as glorious heroes, but rather items on a balance sheet, tools to be used.

And I'm sitting here like, "yeah, that sounds like awesome sci-fi all right," but Exalted doesn't really want to do sci-fi, it wants to be its own brand of epic fantasy, so it puts barriers up whenever things threaten to go too much in that direction.

Barriers like the Seal of Eight Divinities. The first appearance of Alchemical Exalted, in Time of Tumult, had the Seal already breached, with mysterious "Locust Crusaders" scouring Creation for natural resources, like some sort of setup for a long-term epic fantasy arc. In second edition, they pushed that back a bit, putting the starting point at a time when breaching the Seal was imminent due to a rapidly-progressing ecological crisis. And third edition, in characteristic 3rd edition style, pushed it back even further, so that it's mentioned as possible, but no one is currently trying to do it, because there's no specific crisis that would demand such extreme measures (there are challenges, which if you were inclined to read into them, might eventually escalate into the 1e/2e plots, but which are presented as being at worst at the outer edges of Autochthonia's routine dangers).

On the one hand, this new steady-state Autochthonia has the advantage of presenting the Alchemicals and their world in way that's well suited to pure Alchemical games of indefinite duration. Authochthonia doesn't need Creation to be interesting. On the other hand, the name of the game is Exalted. It wasn't a weakness of the 1st and 2nd edition presentations that the fate of Autochthonia was tied to the fate of Creation, it was actually the main reason we were even in a position to care about this world.

Alchemicals: Forged by the Machine God is a fine book, and I enjoyed reading it, but "A new fantasy game by the makers of Exalted" isn't exactly something I need or want from an Exalted supplement, even if it does technically share a continuity with the main line. Now, obviously, this is all stuff I can backport in, using material from prior editions and my own imagination, but I do have to count its absence as a weakness. "Not needing to integrate with rest of the setting" is also, in some ways, "not being able to integrate with the rest of the setting" and if the book is not giving us officially sanctioned advice on how to do it, I really have to question who the book is for?

So to sum up - I found this book to be alternately brilliantly inventive and excruciatingly dry, mushy on genre, but with powerful vibes. It's a little worrying that it seems to be a book directed at the most insular and niche of the game's hardcore fans, but I have to concede that a large portion of that worry is simply me suspecting that the line as a whole has lost the ability to connect with a new audience and is slowly trailing off into being a living museum for legacy fans. Of course, as one of those legacy fans, I'm delighted with the book itself, but my imagination falters at the prospect of introducing this world and these characters to Exalted newbies. If you're on the fence about it, don't let my ambivalence dissuade you. If you are at all in a position to know what this book is or why you should care about it, then you won't be disappointed by it.

(Or maybe you will, I don't know your life, but I can say that you won't be disappointed by it for any reason that doesn't also apply to Exalted 3rd Edition as a whole).

Ukss Contribuiton: Fuck it - giant, culinary-grade cockroaches. They're a delicacy because they're one of only a handful of natural proteins to migrate to this environment where the only native sustenance is chemically-enhanced nutrient paste.