(Eberron 3.5e) Sharn: City of Towers

Eberron is so close to greatness. I can feel it. Sharn: City of Towers (Keith Baker and James Wyatt) is the first full-sized supplement I've read for this setting and almost the whole way through it was on the cusp.

The challenge before me now is to describe this . . . general cuspiness without sounding like I'm bitter the book isn't something it never promised to be. Let's start with the printing press.

I am almost certain that the world of Eberron has moveable type printing presses. Or, at least, some magical doodad that functions in almost exactly the same way. It's just something that . . . fits the vibe. You're a gnome who works at a bank, you read your newspaper on the train - Eberron!

However, when I examine the known, canonical facts about "The Sharn Inquisitive" (Sharn's hometown newspaper) they somehow don't quite fit with a historically-inspired printing press while also not elegantly fitting with any other form of known D&D-style magic or craftsmanship:

• First, it's called a "Chronicle" rather than a "newspaper," which isn't a telling detail per se, but does suggest a deliberate choice to avoid modern-sounding terminology.
• Contra this, the job title of Haftak ir'Clarn, the guy in charge, is "publisher." And while there's nothing about being a publisher that specifically requires the existence of a printing press, it does at least imply a mass distribution.
• Haftak runs a "bookstore and bindery, and uses its facilities to publish the Sharn Inquisitive." And this feels, to me, like another very careful curation of terminology. What is a "bindery?" What sort of tools do they use? Where do they get the specific papers to bind? Binderies still exist, and most use modern industrial tools, but the word itself is old-fashioned, more suggestive of hand-crafting. And this "chronicle" that's being "published" . . . it uses the "facilities" of a bookstore? I guess a bookstore could have an on-site printing press, but it hardly seems like a standard facility.
• Further evidence in the minus column - you can't buy individual issues. It's only available as a yearly subscription, with weekly issues distributed by mail. So we know for a fact that Sharn does not have adorable moppets standing on street-corners shouting about the latest extra! That's a pretty big smoking gun against the Sharn Inquisitive being a newspaper.
• On the other hand, "it's usually easy to find a discarded copy a few days after publication," which suggests that individual issues are common and disposable. At 3gp per year, that comes to roughly 6cp per issue. That's a price point and behavior that argues against being hand-crafted.

On the balance, I think the evidence argues against the Sharn Inquisitive being mass-produced by a printing press, but I'm not sure how much the "evidence" should count, considering that every time they talk about this fucking thing they sound like they're talking about a god-damned newspaper!

And yeah, it's a bit ridiculous of me to hyperfocus on less than 5 paragraphs of a 192-page book, but it sort of gets at what I mean by "on the cusp of greatness." Eberron is not quite one thing or another and so far it has attempt to coyly weave between its influences without committing to picking a lane. And to the wrong kind of mind (like mine, I guess), that can be pretty annoying, but done with deftness and skill, it can also be pretty fucking great. From what I've seen of the setting so far, it seems likely that the creators will develop that skill in time, but that they don't quite have it yet.

Case study #2: ores. Where do they come from? Where do they go? This book has two contradictory answers. From page 97:

"Cogsgate is the gateway to the Blackbone Cogs. Ore from Zilargo and Karranth is carted town the long tunnels into the darkness. . ."

And yet, from page 122:

"Brelish refineries sell much of their ore to Zilargo."

Looking at the surrounding context, I'm pretty sure this is not a matter of ore just going round and round between the two nations in an eternal circuit. And it's probably not a case of raw ore being mined in Zilargo, shipped all the way to Sharn to be refined in its vast lava-powered underground foundries, and then shipped back to Zilargo to make manufactured goods. Indeed, "Zil artificers and engineers produce many of their wares in the great factories of Breland."

However, the origins and chain of ownership of this ore and its resulting products are unclear. Zilargo mines the ore? Then ships the ore to Sharn? Then sells the raw ore to the refineries? Then buys back the refined ore? Then sends the refined ore to factories in Breland (the nation that contains Sharn) to be turned into wares? Then sends the wares all over Khorvaire?

Okay. I'm not sure why Zilargo is acting as double-middleman, and if I were the King of Breland, I'd be worried about long-term economic imperialism, but hey, capitalism, whatcha gonna do? However, we just got done with a systematic description of all the dozens of districts across all 17 of Sharn's various wards, and only one factory is mentioned . . . and that produces textiles.

Now, I know I'm in ultra-nitpick mode right now. In one of the district descriptions it mentions the existence of "workhouses," but in context it did not seem to refer to the cruel Victorian "rehabilitation" facilities, so I can only assume the word was meant to evoke a proto-industrial process of centralized, but not mechanized manufacture.

This is where I have to step back and have a modicum of self-awareness as a critic, because I've talked a lot about things that have all of jack shit to do with fantasy adventure. Printing presses? Ore shipments? Factories vs workhouses? Who the fuck cares? And more to the point - am I truly, honestly bringing this up as a lense to examine Sharn: City of Towers or am I just doing the thing I do where I pick a random subject to go off on because I have little to say about the book itself?

Well, I'm afraid to say, this time it really is about the art and these issues, as apparently unconnected as they are from fantasy adventures, really are very important to my critical assessment of Eberron.

It all comes back to Tolkien and his "electric street-lamps have no place in fairy tales." I disagree, but this disagreement is not actually about the literal aesthetics of street-lamps. What Tolkien was saying, and what I'm disagreeing with is that modernity has no place in fairy tales. See, more than the trappings of technology or "hard vs soft magic systems" or any of that stuff, the difference between fantasy subgenres (especially in tabletop roleplaying) comes down to historiography.

Eberron, so far, has attempted this (historically pretty bold) noncommittal genre-straddling, but in the process has run the risk of orphaning itself in an incoherent historiography. All this talk I've been doing about modes of production, it's been because Eberron has so far failed to acknowledge that modes of production are inherently ideological. 

Which, okay, makes me a bit of a silly goose. I'm here shouting "This Dungeons & Dragons setting needs more dialectical materialism damnit!" and in 9 times out of 10, that would be a ridiculous demand. But here in the 10th time, in a world where magic can emulate certain 19th century technologies, in a corner of the setting that "owes a great deal to classic crime and detective films and novels, such as The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon" a more modern approach is necessary.

Sharn: City of Towers should have explained what a workhouse really is. You spend all this time in a noir-style city with deep shadows, corrupt law enforcement, and terrifying criminal gangs, but you never get the context that someone joining up with the legbreakers to avoid the workhouse isn't just some lazy criminal. They're a person faced with an impossible choice. Live outside the law, do things you might find reprehensible, or subject yourself to one of the atrocities of the industrial revolution's transitional economy. A "workhouse" isn't just an old-timey name for a "factory" it's a place where you're sentenced to hard labor and gruel for the "crime" of being poor in a system that manufactures poverty. You are being judged for society's failure to plan a soft-landing for those displaced by the mechanized thresher. And in Sharn, that judgement manifests in the stunningly unsubtle visual metaphor of slumlords living in cloud palaces while the exploited poor toil in the lightless foundations of their sky-challenging towers.

More than any particular chain of logistics, it's important to think about how these things work because those answers shape how you write your history. Whether the ore comes to Sharn from Zilargo or goes to Zilargo from Sharn, the answer to "how does this all function" is "through the exploitation of labor." Or, at least, that's answer you give if you want a fantasy setting that feels like the 19th century (regardless of its tech level). It's the answer you give if you want to tell stories that feel like classic detective thrillers. Chinatown was about incest, but it was also about water use rights.

It's also why I seem so obsessed with whether or not Eberron has a printing press. Obviously, it's not really that important. If they don't have a press, we can at least infer the existence of some spell or magic item that is maybe a little slower and more expensive than a press. But what the press represents, as part of a historical narrative, is a transformation of social consciousness, a fundamental change in the way people relate to information and engage with their communities. And it's kind of important to know whether that transformation is happening in Eberron too.

Gonna go back to dragging Tolkien. For all his insight, and for all his beautiful worldbuilding, his historiography was fundamentally conservative. Like, how did the people of Gondor learn that they once again had a King instead of a Steward? Not through a newspaper, you can be sure about that. Because they were subjects rather than citizens. They didn't need to stay informed because they were never in danger of being consulted. Luckily, they were in near-unanimous agreement about the importance of adhering to tradition and ensuring the smooth transition of power to an heir of the proper bloodline (which may sound arbitrary, but remember, the bloodline also conveyed an uncommon greatness of spirit).

And look, I'm being needlessly cynical about the book's happy ending. It's not my intent to stir up shit about a beloved classic. It's just to show the way historiography can shape fantasy stories. Another rhetorical question - is there any power that Sauron claimed that King Elessar did not possess? Yeah, it's a brat question, because the whole damned book is about the temptation of the One Ring, which represents the callous and cruel exercise of power. But what I'm talking about is the distribution and possession of power.

What's to stop Elessar from killing a yeoman farmer and taking their land for the crown? Now, obviously, Aragorn would never do that . . . but what's stopping him? Let's just keep that question rhetorical, because the point here is Tolkien's historiography renders it irrelevant, perhaps even impertinent. The thing stopping Elessar from ruling unjustly is Aragorn's unshakable sense of justice. And I think Tolkien would argue that's a better guarantee than you'd get from a system of checks and balances (and honestly, given the state of the USA today, I'm not sure I could blame him if he did). This is what's known as an individual level of analysis - good government is caused by good rulers, bad government is caused by bad rulers, and the fraught history of humankind can largely be explained by the fallen nature of humanity.

I bring it up not out of any great desire to show my whole ass re: the well-trod ground of Tolkien scholarship, but to contrast it both with Eberron's ideal approach and with its actual approach. The GM chapter claims to want to tell hardboiled detective stories, but to do that you have to pull back and look at society. Because that's kind of what noir is about - a post-war disillusionment with heroism that throws into contrast the individual's powerlessness before nameless and unaccountable social forces. The villain in Chinatown got away with incest because he got away with stealing water, and he got away with stealing water because the social and political incentives of California at the time favored capitalist consolidation. The corruption goes all the way to the core of society and the horrific individual abuse is only a manifestation of that ("Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown.") 

It's debatable whether authentic noir is even something that's desirable to do with D&D, but what's not debatable is that noir is something D&D usually doesn't do. Eberron in general, and Sharn: City of Towers in particular say they want to do noir, but, well, there's not enough information in this book to tell a story revolving around water rights, that's for sure. (Though there is a character, Luca Syara, who is basically a Lost Generation playwright, so it's not entirely hopeless).

But I want to circle back to "traditional medieval fantasy," because that's the other thing Eberron claims to want to do and it's important to note that while D&D fantasy was inspired by Tolkien, it never actually shared his historiography (see, there was a point to the digression after all). There's actually a third ideology at work - mid-century American white supremacy. 

Now, Gygax's unseemly admiration for John Chivington notwithstanding, I don't think many of the contributors to D&D over the years were openly and consciously white supremacist. Rather, we're talking about a historiography here - a way of talking about cultures, states, and peoples that was shaped by the assumptions of a specifically American white supremacy. You've got "civilization" or the "good" alignment that is white-coded . . . and that is under threat by "barbaric" or "evil" forces, which are . . . not white-coded. And as long as you have monsters in the wilderness, you can never entirely get away from that, at least not in the D&D tradition.

But I have to give Eberron credit for at least visibly trying. There's a monster kingdom and it has a certain credible political legitimacy (even though that's not recognized by Breland and the monster kingdom's citizens have no rights under Brelish law). The goblinoids have an ancient history and will mingle with humanoids at border zones and in urban areas like Sharn, where they're poor (because of segregation) but regular citizens. And more broadly, decoupling alignment from creature type does blunt the racial essentialism that is a big driver of the ickiness of "traditional" D&D.

However, this more Eberron moves away from its inherited Gygaxian historiography, the more conspicuous its failure to embrace literally any alternative. So far, they've been playing it off as genre-bending, but that only works because the setting is new. Before too many supplements, it's a trick that will start to get old.

Overall, Sharn: City of Towers is a very generous setting book. It gives a complete tour of the city, covers customs and legal codes, offers a bunch of adventure ideas, and rounds it out with new feats, new magic items, and new prestige classes. It has pretty much everything I want from an rpg . . . except a point of view.

Ukss Contribution: You can pay an assassin extra to send your target's soul to hell (or, at least, an unpleasant-sounding afterlife: "the domain of the Keeper.") The assassin gang has a special dagger that will do it. I'm not sure what it says about Eberron's soteriology that this is possible, and I can't even begin to speculate what genre of crime caper this is (vanta-noir, maybe), but it's some hardcore fantasy nonsense and I find it very challenging in an interesting way.

(Exalted 3e) Many Faced Strangers

Ah, Kickstarter, the platform that dares to ask, "what if the Exalted fatsplats weren't long enough?" And in daring to ask, it also dares to answer - in the form of Many-Faced Strangers, which is no more and no less than 235 extra pages of Lunars: Fangs At the Gates.

So first off, right away I can tell you that it's a mistake to wait five years between reading the main book and reading its overflow supplement, especially for a game as jargon-dense as Exalted. Frequently, I'd be looking at an NPC stat-bloc or one of the new charms that upgraded an old one and I'd think, "whoa, I bet I'd be really impressed if I knew what the fuck they were talking about."

Now, in my defense, there was a four year gap between the books' release dates, so there was no really elegant way to read them back-to-back (aside, perhaps, from leaving the Lunars book untouched for all that time). I think I just have to accept it as the price of being an Exalted fan - 3rd edition has a slow-drip release schedule and getting a "complete" line will almost certainly take longer than the lifespan of 1st and 2nd edition combined (if you start the timeline count when the 3rd edition core was announced, rather than when it was released, this has already happened). Am I happy about this state of affairs? No. Has it negatively impacted my enjoyment of Many-Faced Strangers? Yes. But I don't call it my "ride-or-die fandom" because I expect it to be easy.

The best way to view Many-Faced Strangers, as a standalone read, is to think of it as a quick dip in a broad but shallow pool, bathing me in a refreshing cross-section of random Lunar lore. We get new martial arts styles, including one that makes you into a jrpg villain by surrounding you with a mantle of floating swords (or axes or hammers or chains or whatever your favored weapon might be). We get a quick character write up for Leviathan, one of the setting's most divisive characters (is he "would be cool if he didn't suck" or "would suck if he wasn't cool" - we may never get a definitive answer, but personally, I'm on team "he's cool because he sucks.") In other words, it's got a lot of cool stuff in it.

In other other words, the cool stuff doesn't build to anything. That's not surprising, given the book's form, its origin, and its relationship to its companion volume, but it is the sort of book where you're going to ask yourself why you're reading it. And I have the misfortune of knowing exactly why I'm reading it - because it's the next in line on my blogging project. That's a bad reason to read a book like this. Don't get me wrong, I love Exalted enough that I enjoyed the experience, but it was definitely something I did at a bad time and for bad reasons.

The good reason to read parts of this book is because you're going to play or run a Lunar Exalted game and you need just a little bit more of that Exalted special sauce. Nothing in here is essential, but there's lots of stuff that would be nice to have. Some of the backer-suggested charms are the sort of thing you can build a character around: dealing full damage when you are in a miniscule insect form, hunting down ghosts and stealing their mortal form, drawing on the power of your bonded territory to enhance sorcerous workings. Once again, having a clear starting point (in the forms of the mega-fans' wishlists) leads to stronger charm design overall. Certainly beats rerolling 6s and doubling 8s.

If you're a GM, you might also be interested in running the scenario at the back of the book - "War for the Caul." It's well-designed, in that super open-ended Exalted way where you can never be entirely sure about the capabilities or motivations of the PCs so the most it can do is suggest categories of challenges. I think you could definitely use it as the starting point for developing a fun and memorable campaign. My main caveat would be that the island continent of The Caul is terribly mysterious.

Yes, here I go again, being the sort of GM who will hate on an rpg just for leaving room for GM creativity, but damnit, this is important. The Caul is not just "mysterious" because it's never gotten a continent-sized write-up, it is mysterious in the context of the story and by the standards of Creation. This mega-island is a literal lost world. It faded out of existence for hundreds of years and then suddenly came back, as if no time had passed. It's sacred to both Lunars and Dragon-Blooded because it has a (dare I say it) mysterious connection to their patron deities, Luna and Gaia. If a Dragon-Blooded goes on a pilgrimage to all five of the shrine cities, their next child is guaranteed to exalt . . . and that's a pretty big deal. 

And that's just the stuff we've seen in print. The adventure implies that there's a lot more stuff we haven't seen. In fact, the Caul is explicitly called a "cradle of mysteries and wonder." The land itself is supposedly a "sibling" to the Lunar Exalted in some kind of poorly-defined way, and if they controlled all five of the shrine cities, they'd be able to do the pilgrimage for a similar Big Deal Reward. And if you read all three of the major sources of information about the Caul (this book, The Realm, and Lunars: Fangs at the Gates) you'll have only the vaguest idea what any of that is supposed to look like.

Obviously, you're supposed to make it up, but I'd have appreciated a more frank, direct, and . . . helpful discussion about how you're supposed to make it up. It's not a dealbreaker or anything. The adventure is plenty usuable without. It's just . . . am I supposed to know the difference between a sacred land, worth warring over for 500 years, and just, like a manse or something. (I mean, I probably should, given how much Exalted experience I have, but the same experience that makes me theoretically able to develop my own version of The Caul also puts me in relatively little need to have The Caul as an excuse).

The other thing I'd change about the adventure, while we're on the subject, is His Divine Lunar Presence Sha'a Oka. I wish he were just a bit . . . more. Part of this, of course, is down to the Quick Character format, which is more or less custom-designed for making big NPCs seem less impressive, but if you make the proper allowances, he's probably beefy enough. He's just not "give him the most ostentatious fucking title"-level impressive. He's best known for repeatedly coming back after his apparent death and his stat bloc implies that this is simply a result of skillful use of the standard Lunar toolkit (which, to be fair, is well-suited to repeatedly faking your death). I'd have preferred something more explicitly out-of-context like "thanks to a solar-circle sorcerous working, bestowed upon him by the Caul's Luna-descended spirit courts, this motherfucker absolutely cannot be killed while the shrine cities still stand." It's rules legal, fits in with 3e sorcery's "unsettling sword and sorcery-style forbidden magic" vibe, and would actually explain why this guy gets the big title.

That may be my habitual mystery-hatred at work, though. "They gave him a big title because they think he's real cool for keeping the holy war going for 500 years" is probably explanation enough. Needing every little thing to have a canonical "justification" is how 2e got so . . . 2e. But damn, I miss 2e sometimes.

Speaking of trolling up just the absolutely most picayune edition-warring bullshit - this book puts a new wrinkle in the origin of Creation's solar eclipses. As a brief refresher, the theories we've seen are "it's just astronomy, dude" from Across the Eight Directions' appendix and "heaven-sent omen of the Unconquered Sun" from the 1e core. Now, we also have Kama-Soth, "the Moonshadow Prince, a mischievous bat spirit that holds domain over solar eclipses - those moments when Luna interposes herself between Creation and the brilliance of the sun."

And look, Creation is flat and has no fixed size. It just sort of blends at the edges into the limitless primordial chaos that preceded shaped existence. There aren't intersecting orbits or anything like that. Across the Eight Directions was cagey about what the sun and moon actually are (and to be fair, we've gotten some pretty bad answers in the past), but what they most definitely aren't is a massive flaming ball of gas at the center of the solar system and a cold, dead rock that sometimes happens to get in the way of that. 

My main evidence that eclipses are an Unconquered Sun thing comes from the fact that the Solar Exalted have a whole caste named after it. But that's not, like, definitive or anything. The Solars also have a Night caste and it would be pretty fatuous to claim that the Unconquered Sun causes night by going away. I can get on board with the idea that Luna has an important role to play in Creation's solar eclipses. The very fact that an eclipse requires coordination between different celestial gods is probably why the Eclipse caste have the role of diplomats. So what the hell is Kama-Soth doing?

I actually like the idea that there's a Lunar spirit who does naughty gremlin shit during solar eclipses. That's a fun encounter. But he doesn't need to be anything but reactive. The eclipses themselves should come down from the top of the celestial hierarchy.

Although, I'll admit, I'm putting way too much thought into this. I guess it's just sentimentality. I remembered that quote from the 1e core instantly. Turned straight to the correct page and found it exactly where I was expecting it to be. Because as small a detail as it was, it was one my pivotal moments of being sold on Exalted. "Oh, in this world solar eclipses can be turned off for a thousand years and then turned back on when something cool happens . . . that's, like mythic."

But I suppose every generation has its own myths. I really enjoy Exalted 3rd Edition, but it's not exclusively for me. Overall, though, I'd say that Many-Faced Strangers had the distinction of being more for me than not, so I'm happy to welcome it to the Exalted family, even if it would have been much more useful four and a half years ago.

Ukss Contribution: Kama-Soth, the god of eclipses. In Ukss' Cosmic Sphere, the sun is actually a distant celestial body, and the moon does interpose between it and the planet of Ukss, so having a bat gremlin dude who stirs shit up on those occasions poses no cosmological problems whatsoever.

(Eberron 3.5e) Whispers of the Vampire's Blade

 When I read Shadows of the Last War I unforgivably neglected to mention that the leader of the Emerald Claw detachment had a very peculiar character quirk - he was a changeling who was obsessed with vampires, to the point of using his innate shapechanging ability to pose as a vampire.

That's absolutely wild. In real life, it just makes you a goth, but in the world of Eberron, where vampires are definitely real and people definitely know about them, it's a hard core commitment to the goth lifestyle. There are hunters out there. They're going to come after you for looking like a vampire (especially if you use a combination of Obscuring Mist and Invisibility to fool people into thinking you have a vampire's Gaseous Form ability, like the villain did in the adventure). And when they come after you, you're not going to have a vampire's unholy might to protect you.

I'm not sure how I feel about all this - it's somewhere between the good kind of goofy and the bad kind of goofy - but it certainly left an impression. So much so that when I saw that the title of the follow-up adventure was Whispers of the Vampire's Blade (David Noonan), I was left agog. Did Garrow finally achieve his life-long dream of becoming a vampire? Or was the title sarcastic and mean, like Whispers of the "Vampire's" Blade. My mind reeled with the possibilities. I kind of want to read a series of adventures where this guy keeps coming back, each time with a more elaborate means of faking vampirism. Let's go head-to-head with the world's most dangerous poseur. I'm ready.

Except, unfortunately, the adventure's titular vampire was not Garrow. It was someone else entirely. Garrow shows up. He's kind of a secondary villain that interferes with you trying to chase the vampire. But he could be removed from adventure with relatively little effort. And yet, somehow, he got a major credibility boost from his appearance here.

There's just something about having your vampire hunting interrupted by a wannabe vampire that sinks its hooks deep into my brain. After the first adventure, I kind of dismissed Garrow as an overly precious joke villain, but now I want to know everything about his life. I can't stop fantasizing about casually bullying him (to be clear, he definitely deserves it) - "Sorry, Garrow, I don't have time for your bullshit. There's a vampire on the loose!" And while I don't normally countenance GM cheating, as both player and a gamemaster I have to insist that the GM do whatever it takes to ensure that Garrow never dies and never achieves his dream. You can't squander something so beautiful on something as nebulous as "player agency." Your players would never forgive you.

Now, as for the 90% of the adventure that did not focus on the recurring joke villain . . . I don't have a lot to say about it. It was pretty short. Compared to Shadows of the Last War, it did zero in a bit more on Eberron's unique genre bending (and so is probably a better introductory adventure overall). You're not just hunting a vampire, you're tracking down a rogue spy who stole a powerful weapon from a secure government vault and is threatening to bring it to a hostile power. You've got to go to a high-class masquerade ball, survive an airship battle, and then corner your target on a train. All classic pulp.

And then, in the end, you mix in a bit of D&D because the vampire jumps off the train and takes shelter in a nearby monster-infested ziggurat. You know, of the sort that you frequently find near major railways.

Do I hate the way this adventure turned out? No. Do I like the way this adventure turned out? . . . eh, yeah, I guess. Do I wish it had significantly more detail about this world's fantasy industrial infrastructure? You better believe it.

Ukss Contribution: It's got to be Garrow. He's just so fascinatingly weird.

(Exalted 3e) Across the Eight Directions

Aw, yes, this is the good stuff. Inject it directly into my veins. There's very little on this Earth I love more than Exalted setting material . . .

Though I'm left wondering what, specifically, it is about Exalted that makes me feel this way. Why does Across the Eight Directions delight me so, when the comparably dense Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting left me cold?

It's an especially pertinent question here, because Across the Eight Directions is probably the most system-agnostic supplement the game ever released, even to the point of downplaying the setting role of the Exalted themselves (for example, the Halta entry failed to mention even a single Lunar Exalted, despite the fact that Rain Deathflyer and Silver Python were an essential part of its story since Halta's 1st edition supplement).  And don't get me wrong, I don't mind this "ground's eye" view of the setting. Quite the opposite, I find it a refreshing opportunity to think carefully about the ways PCs can change the world. However, there's no real reason that a location like the Dayfires couldn't exist on Toril (after some minor reskinning, like "The Realm = Red Wizards" or something) and so the difference of my reactions makes me feel a bit of a snob.

Not coincidentally, the Dayfires were one of my least favorite parts of the book. There's nothing wrong with it. Across the Eight Directions' style of presentation - centering food and clothes and stories and their accompanying economic and social implications - is a really attractive and interesting way to learn about a fantasy world. If it were in Forgotten Realms, I'd think it was the most well-drawn location that wasn't called a 'dale. But also, it's kind of just a place. The Grand Duchy of Karameikos was more fantastic.

The kind of Exalted world-building that most excites me is found in places that are very strongly shaped by the setting's magical nonsense. There was nothing wrong with the Dayfires, but the nation wasn't built on the seafloor, with the surrounding waters being held back by a giant circular First Age dam, nor was it ruled by wolves who, thanks to a chance mutation from a Wyld zone, had near-superhuman intelligence and decided to emulate and replace the nearby human aristocrats, nor was it a wind-swept heath where nomadic clans avoided the most fertile lands for fear of rousing the psychic screams of a buried titan. Its deal was more like . . . the clans . . . they don't always get along. . .

And I suppose you couldn't build an entire world where each individual location was some kind of high-concept weirdness. Like, I'm not sitting here thinking Ukss is peak game design (. . .or am I?) You gotta have some kind of baseline, or else the old staples of "it was built around a malfunctioning manse," "some jerk is abusing an Artifact," or even "the Exalted done fucked around and found out" would lose their sting. It's just that by the time we got to the Dayfires, we'd just finished reading about Nandao Danh Nhân, a place that was also not notably weird (unless you count having a canonical relationship to the Dragon-Blooded Realm as "weird," which you really shouldn't).

Which is to say Across the Eight Directions' curation is generally pretty good. Right after the Dayfires came the city of Decanthus, which 1000 years ago was sucked into hell only to suddenly come back horribly changed. 

Although, if I'm committed to not being a snob, I do have to concede that the Forgotten Realms also has a place almost exactly like that - Elturel - though it's perhaps an important illustration of the differences between the two games that Elturel actually existed in Forgotten Realms canon for decades before it was sucked into hell and as recently as the 3rd edition book (i.e. 20 years ago) the most relevant piece of information about it was that the paladin who ran the place made it into "the safest, best policed, and most efficient trading and farming community in the Western Heartlands." Also, their elite mounted warriors were already called "Hellriders" before being sucked into hell (maybe that's what gave them the idea?).

Contrast that with Decanthus, where one of the prominent landmarks is a granary that has been transformed into a giant wasp hive by an unholy amalgam of the city's original residents and the Agata, breathtakingly beautiful crystal demon wasps. That's the Exalted flair - a willingness to go just that little bit farther and be a little . . . extra.

(Funny sidenote, you would not believe how far down the Elturel wiki page I had to scroll before they mentioned the "being sucked into hell" thing, which is maybe more of a comment on wiki editors than the Forgotten Realms, but it feels significant to me, like maybe the Realms are the bad kind of extra).

If I'm evaluating Across the Eight Directions in general, I'd say that it has a lot of the good Exalted extraness, distributed with reasonable equitability, but maybe not all 24 of the credited authors were on the same page about what makes for a great Exalted location. And maybe that's okay. I can't even say that my particular position ("always be sure to get some nonsense in there") is historically the best supported. One of the first locations, important enough to be the homeland of a signature character, was the Marukan Alliance, which was just like "what if the people of this fantasy land had a really close bond with horses." It's just that the more grounded areas feel, to me, a bit like . . . "backstory kingdoms." Everybody comes from a place, and while your Solar hero is tooling around Nexus (Creation's premiere Lankhmar) they're going to reminisce about where they came from in between trading blows with the snake-headed spider god, and they're going to be able to point to something in a book instead of making it up on the spot.

Call it a bias. Truthfully, there's nothing in this book that merits a true dislike, from me. Closest I'd get is "there's no way to turn this into an actual Exalted game, because they've neglected to include anything that might successfully oppose an Exalt" and you can always add those things. "This is going to go to shit as soon as the PCs get involved" is hardly something that will rise to the level of a fault.

I will say that the Appendix concerned me. It sort of presents this mortal-eye view of things like the seasons, travel, communications, warfare, etc that's clearly grounded in historical research, but the net effect is to suggest a world of "mundane reality" + "magic." You know, like D&D. 

I know Exalted 2nd Edition went a little far for people with its "bricks harden because the least gods of flame sing songs of quiescence to the least gods of clay" and I would be the last to claim that 3rd edition didn't inherit a setting that was completely up its own ass, but I've got this grognardish urge to point out that "savants predict solar eclipses" is a purely new bit of canon. Solar eclipses had hitherto been an omen from the heavens that happened because the Unconquered Sun was in some kind of mood. From p 127 of the 1st edition core, "When the Solars returned, the world witnessed the first solar eclipse since the Terrestrial Exalted took power." Were the savants predicting that? An event unprecedented in 1000 years of history, which was probably only documented in texts suppressed by the Immaculate Order?

And yes, I can hear myself. I have a well-reasoned contempt for edition conservatism and my own values demand that I allow the new team to pursue its own vision. It's just, I think I like this version of Creation less than I liked previous versions. That is, of course, completely okay. They're allowed to change things and I'm allowed to have preferences.  However, I would be remiss if I didn't question whether this was an intentional, coherent direction change (let alone something with as much conviction as a "vision.")

Towards the end of the appendix there's a sidebar titled "How Common are Supernatural Things?" and the answer it proposes to that rhetorical question is apparently that it "should vary with your playgroup's tastes and the chronicle's needs."

I think, even if I didn't have this nostalgia driving me, I wouldn't respect that answer one bit. It's timorous worldbuilding. Of course, a GM can adjust the prevalence of setting elements to achieve different moods, and you know where the place to discuss that is? That's right, a 2000-word essay in Crucible of Legend. In a setting chapter, it just makes you look weak. 

The sidebar called "Can I do Science?" is just as bad. It not only recapitulates the "lol, fantasy is when no gunpowder" trope (literally "replacing firearms with firewands signposts a broader rejection of anachronistic modern technology" . . . made hilarious by a sidebar two pages later titled "Anachronisms are Okay."), but it just kind of fundamentally misunderstands the game. It dismisses "the Circle's Twilight or No Moon wielding modern science to fashion setting-transforming technologies."

And this is not an edition thing. It's out of sync with 3rd edition too. Focus on the words "setting-transforming." Remember what the celestial exalted are. Remember essence fever. Like, okay, you're wedded to a notion that there's no place for electric street lights in fantasy. I don't approve, but I do understand. However, the answer to "Can I do Science" is not "this falls outside the scope of normal Exalted play." The answer is, "of course you can, it's just called 'sorcerous workings' in this world."

Oh wow, I spent way more time complaining about the appendix than I did praising the main body of the text, which is weird because I really, really enjoyed the main body of the text. It's a great mix of old favorites and new ideas, with a few choice locations that are destined to become new setting staples. I'm left with this gluttonous wish to see all of the old canon locations redone in this book's style, but spread out over a decade's worth of annual follow-ups, each with this book's proportion of old-to-new material. It's enough to make me forgive the fact that a book titled Across the Eight Directions actually had nine different directional chapters.

Ukss Contribution: In a book filled with amazing things, any one of which (yes, even the one I called out as my least favorite) would be a worthy choice, I'm going to have to descend into self-satire and pick something conspicuously plausible - the Shellrider nomads are among the few to know the secrets to navigating a perilous "ancient cactus forest."

It never occurred to me before that cacti could grow in forests. Probably because "cactus conditions" and "forest conditions" seem incompatible. And while there are places in real life that are called "cactus forests," having seen them, it's clear that I'm imagining something much more perilous. Like, a broad expanse where cacti blot out the sun and are so densely packed that you need to bargain with the local nomads to find a safe path through them. 

Incidentally, that's the bar you need to clear if you want me to call your setting "fantasy nonsense." Not necessarily something impossible, or even something you'd be compelled to call "magic." Just a little beyond what exists in the real world.

(Eberron 3.5e) Shadows of the Last War

 I need to tread carefully with how I handle Shadows of the Last War (Keith Baker). It would be all too easy for me to demand too much from it, given its position as the first new Eberron content after the initial campaign book. "This barely expanded my understanding of Khorvaire," I could say, accurately.

But however accurate and well-observed that complaint would be, I'd nonetheless become imperceptibly less sexy when I was forced to concede that this is merely a 32-page introductory adventure, and so any expansion of my understanding of the world of Eberron would be both surprising and praiseworthy.

Shadows of the Last War very slightly expanded my understanding of Eberron. You know the introductory adventure drill - "Securing this macguffin is step 4 in our 155-part plan to conquer the world in the name of our dark conspiracy! Let us send a half-dozen units of our weakest creatures to mill about various locations where the macguffin might be found! Make sure they split up, so that any plucky adventurers in the area will only encounter one squad at a time!"

Not that this module is quite that transparent about it. But I do think that if, somehow, the Emerald Claw had assigned a second 5th-level character to the case, the PCs wouldn't have stood a chance. It's an acceptible break in verisimilitude, obviously, but if you're in the business of evaluating how an rpg module spends its precious and limited page-count, then you kind of have to write it off as purely functional. Most of these 32 pages are given over to nonsense, and that's expected, but among the nonsense, there was some useful information, which was nice.

We see a little bit more of Khorvaire's magitech - an elemental-powered land cart, which uses the magic of its bound Earth Elemental to roll smoothly over any terrain at a steady 15mph, an enchanted wash-basin that cleans and folds clothes without human intervention, a "hydra-headed eldritch machine that spat white-hot molten glass from its five heads," a series of color-coded crystal keycharms which allowed House Cannith to turn their underground headquarters into a late-90s FPS map.

Taken together, it's not much of anything, unfortunately. But it does suggest the possibility of more radical things to come, so I'll take it. However, whether I will one day look upon this adventure with fondness or with disappointment will be entirely dependent on whether or not future books give a satisfactory explanation for just what the fuck the macguffin actually is.

From the introduction: "[previously, in the campaign book's introductory adventure] the party of adventurers recovered an ancient schema - part of a creation pattern used by the fabricators of House Cannith . . . Creation patterns of all sorts exist, from those used to magically craft mundane items to those designed to craft exceptionally powerful magic items. . ."

And we get physical descriptions of the items in question. A schema is a flat metal object that can come in various shapes (a diamond and a crescent are mentioned in this particular adventure, but I have to assume that they can look like anything) and a Creation Pattern is a flat metal disc with slots for various schemas. The one the PCs find here has four open slots, implying that there are two more adventures after this one (backing that up is the last line of the book "Or you can follow the story line that continues in Whispers of the Vampire's Blade, the second in a three-part series.")

What remains unclear to me is how these items are meant to be used, just as a physical process. I've got some raw materials, a Creation Pattern, and a fabricator (which I've gathered is a job title, rather than some kind of magitech machine) - walk me through the process by which a finished product emerges from these precursors. It is no exaggeration to say that my opinion of Eberron as a setting hinges entirely on whether or not I find your explanation satisfying.

But where does that leave Shadows of the Last War? Well, like most fantasy fiction, I wish it spent less time on fantasy adventure and more time on fantasy manufacturing infrastructure, but it would be absurd of me to make that my "official" "critical" opinion. It's a very good example of the type of book that it is, and that is in no way diminished by my uncouth openness re: my preference for reading an entirely different type of book.

Which is to say, the only thing I'd actually change about this adventure is to make the first way-point closer to the train station. The first thing you're supposed to do after being charged with retrieving House Cannath's lost schema is venture to the city of Rhukaan Draal, which takes 4 days via boat or, you can take the train to Sterngate for three days and then meet up with a caravan to get to Rhukaan Draal in another 12. 

It's a small thing, but what are you even doing in Eberron if you're not making a mad dash for the train at the first opportunity? Like, yes, the boat is an elemental galleon and so, in its way, is just as much 19th-century-esque magitech, but c'mon. No one goes steampunk for the boats and we all know it. This is an introductory adventure. You gotta make 'em shake hands with the things that set this world apart.

But that's really a very minor nitpick. Shadows of the Last War actually managed to achieve a fairly remarkable feat - it persuaded me to seek out and acquire the rest of the adventure chain. I may not be particularly invested in the story of Elaydren d'Cannath, but damnit I want to know what those schema do!

Ukss Contribution: The glass-spitting hydra. We actually see the effect of this magical WMD before they players encounter it and it's spooky as hell - an entire village coated in a layer of glass, the charred corpses of the victims held suspended in its cloudy depths, with just a couple of specimens chipped out by the villain, to be animated as some gnarly fucking zombies. Very cool.

(Exalted 3e) Crucible of Legend

Whew, I'm glad I got that over with. Which is admittedly a pretty shitty thing to say after reading a book, but I can't imagine the creators of Crucible of Legend would be surprised (or even particularly dismayed) by that reaction. It's a Storyteller's Guide. The most thankless genre of rpg supplement. It would be weird if I came away from this book super pumped about safety tools or the simplified stunt system. It'd be real pervert behavior. Roleplaying games can be a lot of fun, but they can also take a lot of work . . . and this book was about doing the work.

Which I guess just means that I need to judge Crucible of Legend by a different standard. I can't sit back and reminisce about all the trash it shoveled down my gullet, like I would with a normal Exalted book (because, by that standard, I'd have to give it a mournful "not enough"). Instead, I have to take a personal inventory and ask myself whether I feel like this book improved me as a human being.

I want to say, "Sorry, Onyx Path, but I'm already too much of a GM for your silly little Storyteller's Guides," but I don't think that's true. To be perfectly honest, I've been running a semi-weekly Exalted game for a while now, and while I think my players are enjoying it, I have not been operating at 100% as a Storyteller. There were parts of this book that gave me a kick in the pants, reminding me that there's a lot more I could be doing with the game. 

For example, we haven't had a combat in, like 2 months, and it comes down to the fact that by my eyeball estimations, the Dawn caste can absolutely steamroll the elder sidereal villain, and I'm extremely reluctant to ruin her mystique by revealing the fact that she's a paper tiger. And look, Crucible of Legend really made me look hard at what I was doing. I've been playing her as a "smart villain" who, realizing she's outmatched, will just ingratiate herself with the heroes by agreeing with whatever they say, waiting until they leave, and then going back to what she was doing, more sneakily. And that's not fucking thematic at all. It doesn't fit in with any of this book's campaign frameworks - "Creation as Stage," "Creation as Threat," or "Creation as Cost." It's just bad GMing. Instead of resorting to fucking anti-plot, I should just pull the trigger, have the big fight scene, and let the PCs triumph.

So, thank you, Crucible of Legend, for that. Just a quick follow-up question. Having resolved to let the dice fall where they may, how exactly do I run this fight and not have it devolve into a pathetic anti-climax, like it did six months ago when the much weaker PCs squared off against a by-the-book Mara? Like, I'm okay with the idea that the PCs are going to come out on top every single time. That's intrinsic to any episodic storytelling medium that follows the same characters over multiple adventures. But I need to create the illusion that the victory wasn't inevitable. And towards that end, the suggestion that Quick Characters' "rarely need magic that adds dice or otherwise adjusts numbers . . . their dice pools are already assumed to account for the customary use of basic Trait-boosting powers" is . . . misguided.

I think, if you interpret it as "Exalted Quick Characters have a bland parenthetical next to their dice pools to indicate the cost/benefit of using an Excellency, so you don't have to give them Excellencies" then that's basically fine, but it's a little misleading, because you are giving them Excellencies, you're just not calling them that. On the other hand, if you interpret it as "Quick Characters don't need dice pools higher than 14 because in the long run that outpaces the mote economy" then that's just dead wrong. If an antagonist can't tank a full excellency from an optimized solar and survive to punish an ill-conceived alpha strike, then it's basically just scenery.

I love Exalted, but one of the things that frustrates me about it is the weird, unmerited assumption it makes that you can count on PCs hanging out at the center of the power curve for the sake of setting verisimilitude. "A dice pool of six is the mark of an experienced expert, who stands out from the crowd by having above-average talent (attribute 3) and advanced training (ability 3)" is something we pretend to believe in the fiction layer, because when White Wolf created the scale back in the 90s, they defined a rating of 2 as "respectably average," but on a practical level it was always so fucking easy to blow past that, especially in arenas that would mean the difference between life and death.

In the real Exalted that actually exists, six dice for a combat dice pool is deliberately de-optimized. It might emerge spontaneously, in the first session, by someone who didn't understand the rules at all ("oh, you can only put 3 points in an Ability without spending bonus points . . . that's fine, I'll just buy my primary combat Ability up to that level, it'll probably be fine,") but for anyone who's ever played a Storyteller family game, that is a choice. It's really a 4 point scale, because you're always going to reserve one of your favored slots for a combat Ability (assuming you didn't get one for free as part of your caste/aspect) and you're always going to spend the two bonus points to raise that Ability to five. Unless it is your goal to be threatened by the city guard, this is basically automatic because the system very clearly telegraphs to you that a rating 5 is important for your character's long-term development (According to the Exigents book 40% of all charms have Ability 5 as a prerequisite). This leaves the scale as:

8: Not really interested in combat (this rating will only happen if the player takes Physical Attributes as secondary or tertiary, and then decides to keep Dexterity balanced with Strength and Stamina for roleplaying reasons - there's basically never a reason to put your 4th attribute point anywhere but Dexterity, even from an rp-maximalist perspective). (This, incidentally, is where my Sidereal villain should realistically be, considering she's more of an infiltrator-mastermind type).

9: Someone who is interested in combat, but doesn't want to nakedly optimize with an unbalanced distribution of Attribute points (for Physical secondary characters, you're avoiding the 2/5/2 spread, and for Physical primary, you're intentionally picking 4/4/3 or 3/4/4 which are not optimal, but do at least have something to recommend them).

10: You understand the rules of the game and are interested in combat.

11: You do actually want to optimize, and you don't care who knows it.

That's Exalted as it actually exists, and if it's not the case at session 1, it will be the case no later than 4-5 sessions after the players experience their first peer-level combat. And it's a real problem with the game's Storytelling technology that the developers can't seem to bring themselves to acknowledge this. There are basically two types of Exalted antagonists - speed bumps and mechanically complex arms races and if you're going to give actionable Storytelling advice, you need to be able to distinguish when each type of antagonist is most useful. Quick Characters are, theoretically, a solution to the problem that arms-race style antagonists are nightmarish to create and run, but in order for them to be anything other than speedbumps, they need an answer to Excellency-driven spike dice pools, they need an answer to the action economy, they need to be able to credibly threaten hits.

Crucible of Legend does suggest answers to some of these questions (like giving a boss enemy multiple Initiative tracks, which is pragmatic, but doesn't really map to anything in the narrative aside from perhaps esoteric magic), but then it gives bad advice like "Multiple individual combatants can be fun to give each player someone to interact with, but avoid outnumbering the group to keep rounds from dragging; large combats are what battle groups are for."

And it's like, no, that's not what battle groups are for. Battle groups are for demonstrating the conservation of ninjitsu. If you actually want the villain's back-up to increase the danger faced by the heroes, you need to stat them as individual combatants for two reasons - to get more chances to hit improbable die rolls (if you assume elite mortals, with 11 dice pools, against difficulty 7, then 3 individuals, making 3 attacks, have roughly the same chance of landing at least one hit as characters with the same stats do when organized into a size 3 battle group . . . but a size 3 battle group is approximately 100 foes, and is not as accurate as 4 individuals) and to impose onslaught penalties that can be exploited by more dangerous characters. That Size 3 battle group is only imposing a -1 onslaught penalty, but the three individuals will pass their boss the equivalent of 6 non-charm dice in the form of a -3 onslaught penalty.

This has long been a bugbear of mine, because Crucible of Legend is not wrong. Confronting a 5-person solar circle with a single boss enemy and 10 individually-statted minions would be a nightmarish encounter to run, but simplifying those 10 minions into a size 1 battle group would, essentially, be the same as sending the boss in there alone. It is unthinkable that 5 PC-level combatants could not do 8 levels of withering damage in a single round. Whenever enemies are lumped into battle groups, they lose all the mechanical widgets that make fighting multiple opponents dangerous.

Here's my proposed house rule for "Creation as Threat" games - Battle Groups automatically impose an onslaught penalty on all engaged enemies equal to their size x 2 (both to aid hero characters and to give their ridiculously inaccurate AoE attacks a chance to hit) and the maximum amount of Magnitude they can lose from any single attack is capped at the attacker's Size + 3, allowing them to at least theoretically act as a health-damage buffer for their leader, like they would if they were statted individually.

Now, I'm getting pretty far afield. Combat advice is actually a very small part of the book. It's much more concerned with mood and themes, which I will concede were a much-needed booster shot for my GMing technique, which I'd let slide from "open sandbox" to "simulationist wool-gathering." However, it wouldn't be a new Exalted book if it didn't inspire me to hack the mechanics. It's an impulse the book shares - offering new systems for crafting, experience points, travel, naval combat, and more. So I feel very seen, enough that I will acknowledge that I've been avoiding the "Exalted and Orientalism" conversation that the "Storytelling Exalted" chapter bravely tackles head on (though I think the suggestion to "Introduce formally trained fighters who don't have magic powers, even if you keep formal schools of martial arts" . . . might be missing the forest for the trees. I think a better suggestion would have been to more mindfully lean into the cultivation genre that very clearly inspired this setting element, so that it's a respectful stylistic choice rather than an unthinking expression of "the western gaze" . . . and perhaps a professional company like Onyx Path might be interested in paying someone from an appropriate background to consult on how to do that and then write what they learned into a book . . . ).

Overall, I'd say Crucible of Legend definitely fits into the GM-focused supplement tradition of being more about the work of running a game than the fun of playing a game, but that's okay, because that work is necessary. It reminded me of some important things I love about Exalted and inspired me to put a bit more effort into my GMing. At the beginning of this post, I said that writing this sort of book was a thankless task, so let me rectify that - my sincerest thanks to all 16 credited writers. I appreciate what you've done here.

Ukss Contribution: Most of the book's setting material was presented from a pretty high level of abstraction, which means there is a lot of stuff that I know for a fact is super cool when it's not being viewed from 30,000 feet. So, instead of picking any of that, I'll pick a piece of information that is still relatively new to me - the Getimian Exalted are not humans who were empowered by the gods. Rather, they are heroes from alternate timelines whose births were prevented by Creation's various destiny-planning committees. There's a certain amount of Exalted-specific esoterica that I'm going to have to trim, but I think Ukss can have a sort of manifested spirit that was a hypothetical hero from legends never told.

(D&D 3.5) Eberron Campaign Setting

J.R.R. Tolkien once famously claimed that electric street lamps have no place in fantasy. And because he shortly thereafter wrote one of the most influential classics of modern fantasy, we have been saddled with that hot take for decades. It's actually kind of shocking how ubiquitous "vaguely and selectively medieval, with thousand-year anachronisms" became in fantasy worldbuilding. Somehow, everyone just sort of decided that swords and horses and castles and monarchies went hand-in-hand with wizards and monsters and never mind that the cannon predates plate armor. That's just what fantasy is - a world without gunpowder and electricity.

Eberron (Keith Baker) doesn't quite break with that tradition . . . but sometimes it feels like it does. I'm going to sound real weaselly talking about this, but I swear, it's the book being weaselly, not me. There's this thing, called "The Korranberg Chronicle" and it really sounds a lot like a newspaper. I think that's how you have to interpret "folded broadsheets, nested together to form simple books." But what is not mentioned, even in the description of Korranberg itself, is the existence of the printing press.

A printing press must exist. It's the only thing that can possibly explain Eberron's news industry, but the closest we get to confirmation is "magic and the arcane arts allow for effects that in some ways mimic technological marvels that didn't appear in our world until the 1800s." Which marvels, you might ask . . . well, that's something that's present on an ad hoc basis, occasionally requiring extra-textual inferences.

Which seems like kind of an odd choice, for a setting that was really trying to do something different. I mean, there's a train, and that's cool. But the extent of the railway network is unclear because each nation gets its own separate map and . . . I guess the red-dashed line represents the course of the lightning rail, but it's only a guess because there isn't a map key and it's sometimes difficult to remember where the various nations are, relative to each other. I'm pretty sure the longest possible rail journey is from Sharn in Breland to Krona peak in the Mror Holds, but I'm not sure sure. I had to consult something like four different maps to reach that conclusion.

It's not a big deal, but it does speak to a misalignment of priorities. Why is there a train? Obviously, so there can be murder mysteries on a train. So that spies carrying important documents can be waylaid and bamboozled with the ol' switcheroo. So that you can have dramatic fights on top of a train, or even grapple with a villain on a rain-slick rail bridge while an oncoming train bears down on you and your friends are screaming "Let them go! It's not worth it!" and you're screaming back, "I can't let them get away, not after what they did!" and screech! It's too late! Together, you and your nemesis tumble over the side, into the turbid waters below!

And maybe you don't actually need a complete rail map for that. In fact, you probably don't. But c'mon. If you don't even think to include one, can you really say you're as horny for trains as the pulp genre demands?

That's Eberron all over, though. It carries itself like it's trying to get away with something. You'll see modern aesthetics and themes - trains, private detectives (called "inquisitives"), urban noir, the geopolitical fallout from a continental war that used weapons of unprecedented destructiveness and ended in a fragile treaty regime that no one quite trusts - but then it takes pains to remain D&D fantasy. As the introduction puts it, "The setting combines traditional medieval fantasy with pulp action and dark adventure . . . Even so, it is a 'same but different' approach that allows us to make elements of the new campaign attractive to all D&D players."

On the balance, I really enjoyed Eberron, but make no mistake, that "traditional medieval fantasy" is basically dead weight. You've got these feudal monarchies and bucolic villages with their artisan crafts and it all seems woefully insufficient to explain the best parts of the world. In fact, it often seems like it's only there because that's what you'd expect a fantasy world to look like, in the absence of some force that would make it otherwise.

Sharn is a city of 200,000, living in skyscrapers that no one really knows how to build, and what are they even doing there? It's got working class neighborhoods, but nothing like a factory. And I wonder if this is another one of those things where I should assume that they're there, because that would make the world make sense, or whether it's a very deliberate choice. Magic replicates some 19th century technology, but it's still an individual craft, so you can't automatically expect a 19th century world. This is a setting with a purely secular cure to every disease, but it's under the control of medieval craft guild/merchant family. It exists. Your character can say, "Oh no, I've got cholera. I'll have to go to the Healer's Guild to get it cured. That's 125gp I won't see again." But that 125gp is beyond the reach of the 99%. Magic has been commodified, but it's so expensive that it barely changes the world.

I don't think it's possible to square these influences, at least not without going into a level of sociological detail that the book is clearly uncomfortable with. I think, if you're going to get the most out of Eberron, you have to go off book and assume that its industrial magic is as transformative as the real world's industrial technology. You are playing a game set in a world recovering from a century-long war in which the belligerents deployed massive armies of robots (warforged). After the war, a fanatical splinter group of those robots decided to retreat into an environmentally devastated wasteland and plot the downfall of humanity. Just own it. There's no part of this that needs to be backported into Greyhawk. Literally, the only people with anything to gain from that were Wizards of the Coast's sales department, c. 2004. 

Anyway, my verdict with Eberron is that it has potential. I can see why it won the open call setting contest all those years ago. However, it's going to have to pick a lane if it wants to impress me. I've got high hopes. I don't think you can make a dozen supplements for a world like this without eventually getting weird about it.

Ukss Contribution: The elves of this world worship their ancestors through a form of bullshit "positive energy necromancy." The island where they live has a "City of the Dead" where the reanimated (but not undead, I swear) elvish ancestors wander around, doing whatever they do with eternity. As a consequence, an elf character can select the "Right of Counsel" feat, representing their legal right to visit the City of the Dead and ask their ancestors for advice. In-setting, the Right of Counsel is tied to a family relationship, but I like the idea that it could just be part of citizenship in a modern administrative state. "You have an unalienable constitutional right to consult the ancient mummy."