(Trinity 1e)Alien Encounter: Invasion

 Alien Encounter: Invasion is, unsurprisingly, an rpg adventure about an alien invasion. But this time, the humans are the aliens and they're the ones doing the invading. The book doesn't have quite as much fun with the inversion as I might have liked, but it is, nonetheless, a pretty interesting story.

The planet being invaded belongs to the Chromatics, a species who, until the past 20 years or so, had a culture and technology are meant to evoke humanity's distant past. Shortly before Trinity's start date, they were technologically uplifted by the Doyen (the series' resident jerks) who wished to exploit their naivete and powerful innate psionic abilities to create an army of fanatics to attack and destroy the human race.

The rough sequence of events is that humanity captures a high-ranking Chromatic, the PCs interrogate him to learn the location of the missing teleporters, there's a quick sideplot where he's kidnapped by mercenaries, then after the PCs recover him, they take him with them to Chrome Prime for reasons that are not adequately explained. The mission to rescue the teleporters goes sideways, and the group escapes into the desert. Along the way, the PCs learn about Chromatic culture and begin to suspect there's more to the aliens than just antagonists, while the prisoner learns that not all humans are hopelessly corrupt and maybe the Gods of Light (the Doyen) were . . . misinterpreted.

In the end, the PCs get a second chance to complete their mission, if they can successfully team up with Chromatic outcasts, a move that requires freeing their captive from his psionic restraints. With their combined forces, they can take out the psionic dampener that's keeping the teleporters from escaping, but only if they can survive the Aberrants that show up at the last minute to wreck things for everybody. In the end, if there's to be any hope of peace between the species, the PCs must intervene with their superiors and ensure that the bomber squadron that comes to rescue them from Chromatic territory only attacks the Aberrants, demonstrating to these aliens that they share a common enemy and are honorable enough to hold up their part of a truce.

As an outline for a novel, the story works great. As an adventure for four to six random characters . . . it's fragile. Ultimately, it comes down to the pacing of the emotional arc. The PCs have to go from viewing the Chromatics as an implacable alien foe to respecting them as a people and as individuals, and they've got to hit the right beats at the right time. It's easy to imagine a group that remains prejudiced up until the very end, wrecking any chance they had at rapprochement, but just as damaging is a group that trusts too quickly and gives Vermillion (the Chromatic captive) too much slack. He has his own arc to go through, and he's supposed to start off hostile and borderline violent. In theory, his attitude warms as the PCs' does, but the thing that worries me is that first impressions might last forever . . . or that the PCs trust him while he's still an avowed enemy, and I'd feel compelled to make them regret that trust.

It's a balance, to be sure, though maybe I'm overthinking it. Suffice to say, if you can manage to reach roughly the correct relationship milestones at roughly the correct time, the adventure will be a memorable one.

Provided, of course, that you don't get derailed by the anthropological and linguistic mystery at the start of the story. That's the other failure point I foresee - that talking to a genuine alien is so much more interesting than whatever else you might have planned (and that talking as an alien might be too interesting a roleplaying exercise for the GM). On the one hand, that's a good problem to have. On the other, it's not something you need a whole book for.

That's probably why there's a kidnapping. When in doubt, send some mooks in with guns to shake things up. It winds up being a completely pointless digression, but it's undeniably a kick in the pants when it comes to pacing.

The main question I have, after reading this book, is "where, exactly, are the Chromatics as a species." They're described as "bronze age" on several occasions, but when it comes to their culture and especially language, they seem more paleolithic. They call spaceships "high-far-rafts." They do not have verb tenses or articles, giving all their talk a real "caveman" vibe. Seeing as how classical human cultures had sophisticated astronomy, philosophy, and theology even before they started using bronze, we really should be seeing more depth to their language.

It's a tricky thing to puzzle out - what parts of this are an alien species with a totally different physiology and way of speaking (if people communicated using flashing lights, you can bet that the grammar would be different), which parts are a legitimately different path of cultural development (the Mayans had all that artistic and scientific stuff, even if they never learned metal working, so why can't aliens get it the other way around), and which parts are just White Wolf being lazy about giving us a shorthand for "primitive" people (the word "savage" is tossed around as a noun at least a couple of times, though never in a way that gave me the impression the book approved)?

All-in-all, I liked Alien Encounter: Invasion. My gut instinct is that the way to play it is as an inversion of a 50s B-movie about aliens who come to Earth only to learn that it's possible to coexist in peace after befriending a plucky teenager, but even without the genre twist, it's a good expansion to the Trinity Universe's setting.

Though, I was floored by the part about the Lunar crime boss, who was known only as "The President" being really into US Presidents, even to the degree that she calls her advisors "the Cabinet," decorates in a red-white-and-blue motif, and says things like "four score and seven years ago" for no reason. I've read almost every other Trinity book in existence, and this is the first I'm hearing about it. Maybe they decided it was unworkable to have a major antagonist also be a huge dork.

Ukss Contribution: I liked that the Bronze-age Chromatics also just randomly had hologram technology. When you can shoot a laser with your mind, why not use them to etch 3-D images into crystals?

(Trinity 1e)Darkness Revealed 3: Ascent Into Light

I have to open this post with a correction. In my review of Stellar Frontier, I assumed that I was the only one to notice the unfortunate confluence of imagery between how the Psi Orders wanted to treat the Upeo wa Macho and historical African slavery. Turns out that White Wolf noticed too, enough to put a sidebar into this book, where the plot is introduced. They just decided that since the motivation wasn't racial, and because the Upeo recruited from all nations, that it was okay to include, so long as it was handled with sensitivity (they even predicted my complaint about the awkwardness of making Cassel a mastermind, albeit by pointing out that Cassel, especially, wasn't concerned "with who the Upeo were, but with what they could do").

Umm . . . Geez, I always feel like such an imposter when I have to untangle these sort of complicated representation issues. One time, with The Orphan's Survival Guide's weird crack about bisexuality, was I able to talk with anything approaching a position of real experience. This . . . ?

I guess my original guess that this was all a bit of well-meaning 90s colorblindness was pretty close to the truth. Except . . . they knew how it looked. I mean, slavery is an odious part of the human condition, but it has never not existed, so it's not wrong to put it your fantasy and science fiction, not inherently. Shitty people with power are always going to hate paying wages and allowing their workers to quit, so it's an easy sort of villainy to understand. And in a story with heroes, the villains have to be doing something to warrant a response.

However, this evokes a very specific real world atrocity, one that even today many people refuse to condemn or address, and it's obvious enough about it that it merited a sidebar in 1998, so I guess, in my position as self-appointed, half-assed judge of the historical context of problematic rpg content, I have to call a foul ball on this one.

Though there is a dark humor here. It reminds me of the episode of The Magicians where Penny is enslaved by the Library, and the white Librarian reassures him "we shackle people of all races and colors here." A slaver desperate to distance himself from the racial implications - "I only wanted to enslave you for your abilities," like no shit. That's where all slavery begins. The Europeans invented whiteness and blackness to try and justify it to themselves.

On a related, but tangential, note, I did not buy the "Theme" section's framing of the issue. "The Upeo wa Macho made a bad moral choice (and indirectly helped kill millions) by valuing personal freedom over their duty to help other psions get to the Esperanza (although Proxy Atwan had every reason to suspect it was a trap)."

This is why I hate trolley problems. That statement was way too strong. I think you could argue that the Upeo's decision was an error, in the sense that the worst case scenario for them staying was still less damaging than what actually happened when they, but they had no way of knowing what was going to happen, and from their perspective the likely consequence of them staying was much, much worse than the likely consequence of them fleeing, and it's not their fault that an unlikely event happened at almost the exact same time. Ten people escape slavery, and by coincidence on the very same night there's a fire that kills 100 innocents, a fire that the escapees could have extinguished if they aborted their escape and diverted across town to assist the sheriff that would have been tasked with hunting them down.

The Upeo made the best possible decision, given their situation. The blame, in both situations, lies with the slavers.

But between this and the Huang-Marr coverup, Trinity seems really determined to let Cassel get away with everything.

Oh, right, there was an adventure that we were supposed to discuss. The weird thing about Ascent Into Light is that it's about stopping an alien invasion, but it's set against the backdrop of the UN's hearings on the Huang Marr conspiracy. In the first half, Aeon sends the PCs to another star system to prevent them from testifying in open court (don't worry, Aeon's counsel has prepared a statement on their behalf). In the second half, the PCs have to bust in to UN headquarters to completely derail the proceedings with news of an imminent Chromatic invasion

But don't worry, guys, the psi orders make it through with their reputations intact.

That's been the creepiest part of the Darkness Revealed series so far, all three books of it. This repeated theme of "won't someone think of the reputations of these abusers."

It's weird that in a story with fanatical alien warriors and beings of pure psionic energy who possess and manipulate human beings for sinister purposes, that Aeon feels like the biggest villain of all.

Not even kidding. A major turn in the second chapter comes when the Aeon representative meets with the PCs and an Upeo agent who decides to break the boycott to warn Earth about the aliens. The Aeon rep uses a covert psionic dampener to prevent her from teleporting away . . . which is exactly what the Upeo were afraid was going to happen, and thus completely justifying their decision to flee.

I think you can build an interesting story out of the Darkness Revealed books, but you're going to have to dig into their guts and assemble your own theme. Sometimes, Trinity wanted to be a bright and hopeful superhero game and other times it wanted to be a dark and grim game of dueling conspiracies, and maybe it's okay for an rpg to be that versatile, but once you start getting into specifics, like with this adventure, it gets muddled. There were times when I felt like it was expecting me to interpret the cynical "we must commit these crimes for the greater good" aspects as if they were a morally uncomplicated superhero plot. Aeon is the bad guy here, and they are called out as such, but they survive with their reputation unscathed, and that's presented as a victory.

Then again, Proteus (one of the three arms of the Aeon Trinity) is headquartered out of an underwater base, so maybe that should have tipped me off that "Aeon is not exactly the kindling organization it presents itself to be."

Ukss Contribution: I liked Ravit Simon, the clairvoyant space pilot. She's just a backup character, in case there's no PC who can fly the ship, but she's pretty cool.

(AD&D 2e)A Mighty Fortress Campaign Sourcebook

 Man, these AD&D historical reference books are an emotional rollercoaster. One minute, they're telling me about Elizabethan cutlery and the politics surrounding neck ruffs ("size was limited by royal decree"), and I've got a huge grin on my face (seriously), but then it starts talking about using these terrible historical atrocities as the backdrop for a game and I'm like, "Dude . . . too soon."

I don't know what it is, but A Mighty Fortress has crossed the invisible line in my brain between "distant enough that it's basically most of the way towards fantasy already" and "recent enough that it's relevant to current politics and culture." Maybe it's Jamestown. This book covers the years 1550-1650, and while the USA wouldn't exist for another 130 years, it's still a period that's deep enough in our cultural mythology that Ted Cruz sees fit to lie about it.

Although, that may not actually be it at all. "The New World" gets precisely one page and barely shows up in the timeline. The focus is almost exclusively on Europe. I guess the sense of immediacy comes from the fact that this is a time and place that actually tends to get covered in high school history. There are parts, especially when it's summarizing the era's wars, where it feels a lot like the first chapter of an American History textbook (for those of my readers who were not educated in the USA, these things usually began with 20 pages or so that can best be described as "why the world was incomplete until the founding of the USA" and 16th century European religious wars feature prominently).

It's a little uncomfortable to see a discussion of this time period that doesn't cover the slave trade, colonialism, or the ongoing genocide of the Native Americans. Not necessarily because I want those things in my fantasy rpg, but because they are such foundational elements of the modern world that their absence makes the history feel overly curated. 

Not that I'd call it especially racist or anything. It's Eurocentric as hell, but I feel like that's mainly because it chooses to center itself on Europe. It wants to be about Catholics versus Huguenots and not about the equally interesting things going on China and Japan (despite mentioning them in its timeline), and that narrow focus might even be acceptable were it not for the fact that the European nations were in the process of becoming global powers.

I think the worst you can say about it though is that it's slightly Spanish-apologist:

In spite of the black legends surrounding the Spanish in America, their rule was probably less severe than that of most other European colonizers. Legally, at least, managers of the Spanish encomiendas (manors) had to treat their Indian subjects nearly the same as they would have treated Spanish subjects back home. The extent to which such laws were enforced in the remote American wilderness is anybody's guess. But it is noteworthy that only the Spanish and the Portuguese left any lasting European influence in their colonies; all other colonial powers treated  native people with undisguised disdain.

I'm not even sure what to do with that. It's not wrong, exactly, but I couldn't tell you what it was for, especially considering that this is the bulk of the book's text concerning political interaction between Europeans and the Americas. I think it might be a generational divide. Maybe the author is correcting a misconception from his own history education and reminding us that we can't just offload the sins of colonialism onto the Spanish.

Unfortunately, the book doesn't get far enough outside its Eurocentrism to actually justify attempting nuance with colonialism. You want to talk about the Europeans deplorable conduct in the Americas, do it through the perspective of an American.

But you know what, I've talked a lot about what the book isn't, maybe I should spare a paragraph or two to talk about what it is.

A Mighty Fortress is the supplement you reach for when you want to turn your Europa Universalis save into a tabletop roleplaying campaign. You can be a mercenary in the 30 Years War. A Calvinist preacher. A vagabond with an old-timey-sounding criminal specialty (my favorite was the the Prigman - "A vagabond who appears to wander aimlessly but in fact steals drying clothes from hedges").

It's a fascinating time period to set a D&D game in, because it almost, but not quite escapes the technological and social trappings of "standard" fantasy - there are still swords and princesses and eccentric alchemists and such, but they're starting to be subjected to modernist criticism. The sword is an affectation. The princess might marry a bourgeois merchant for his money. The alchemist is a crackpot.

My main complaint about A Mighty Fortress is that it focuses on these dour religious and political conflicts and not on early-modern European folklore. A lot of our current fairy tales date from this period of history and there's a lot of great fantasy potential there. We do get a brief chapter about the subject, but it feels perfunctory. Stories aren't linked to places and they don't do a great deal to integrate with the setting.

Mechanically, A Mighty Fortress is decent. Clerics get their spellcasting nerfed to hell, in exchange for nothing, so it's questionable why anyone would even want to play one. Wizards have their casting times increased, instantly obsoleting all of their combat magic, but hilariously their main drawback is that DMs are encouraged to actually enforce the rules about spell learning failure chances and material components. There's an interesting new rule that allows thieves to swap their thief skill percentage points for extra nonweapon proficiency slots, but that's less a creative innovation and more the game gradually stumbling towards a coherent skill system.

My final verdict on this book is confusion. It does a stellar job in building a world, so much so that I can heartily recommend it as a source of authentic-sounding details for anyone who wants to make a similar fantasy setting. But maybe it builds its world a little too well, because it sounds like absolute hell to live through, and I'm not sure I want to make light of that.

That's the central dilemma of historical roleplaying, though - in the words of the book "Please excuse us if we seem to glorify war." 

Ukss Contribution: My favorite thing from this book is actually a misapprehension I had for about an hour before breaking down and looking it up on the internet - Pope Sixtus V. My mistake was mixing this name up with Sextus V, meaning roughly "Sixth, the Fifth," but apparently the two names are etymologically unrelated. It was still pretty cool to learn that there was a Pope whose name sounded like an anime robot, though.

My second favorite thing is the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Unfortunately, I don't think I should use it because the thing I like about it is how much I don't like it. I've got an idea for a cool fantasy religion, but it would undoubtedly be rooted in an antagonistic understanding of Calvinism, and that would be kinda uncool. Maybe, as an American, I have a right to satirize them (the USA is a country that aims to turn you into a Puritan, regardless of what religion you are), but why take the risk?

Third choice - ruffs. A ridiculous bit of fashion, but it's undeniably a look. I may be the first person to combine neck ruffs and mirrorshades, however.

(Trinity 1e)Darkness Revealed 2: Passage Through Shadow

 This adventure is not about institutional accountability. It should be. If you're running it in 2020, you're probably going to want to make it be. There are events and characters that evoke the now-familiar ways that corporations, governments, and powerful individuals avoid answering for their wrongdoing, but they aren't what the adventure is about. The adventure is a manhunt followed by a chase followed by a brawl, and it works, but it also has lines like:

"I understand that some of you take the  rumored - I repeat rumored - improprieties at Beaulac as fact. Whatever the true circumstances that took place on Luna, there is no cause to mistreat the former Lunar personnel who now work here; allegations against them have yet to be proven"

And you wind up with the sense that the real bad guys are going to get away with it. Zweidler here is talking about remaining open-minded and forgiving of people who were credibly accused of abetting kidnapping, torturous medical experiments, and mass murder. Maybe some of the low-level people are innocent, but the Aesculapian Order has absolutely not done the due diligence necessary to make that call.

Part one is full of that sort of guilty behavior - closing ranks against outsiders and the outright denialism that comes from believing a noble mission is enough to prevent a slide into corruption. It's a frustrating environment to search for a fugitive, but a convenient one for an organization that wants to escape a major scandal without doing any meaningful introspection.

Also, Alexander Cassel knew about Huang-Marr the whole time and dispatched assassins ahead of the PCs' investigation to eliminate any conspirators before they can compromise the reputation of Orgotek . . . and maybe leave a few alive, with edited memories, if their involvement can be concealed and Cassel finds them useful.

I guess the claim is that Cassel knew the Huang-Marr project would be unethical, but he didn't know it would be that unethical, and thus his murderous coverup is somehow forgivable because all he cares about is the safety of humanity (less the specific humans that get in his way, obviously). It's honestly a quite chilling characterization, made doubly frustrating because he is too powerful to confront and in the end makes away with all the sweet loot the PCs take from the aliens.

Oh yes, there are aliens. That's the biggest takeaway. First explicit mention of the Doyen in canon (assuming you don't have the updated core), and they dispatched the Chromatics to recover some of their spy technology. It's a whole thing, and the book doesn't offer nearly enough guidance on how to keep the scenario balanced, but a pretty cool set-piece to end the middle entry of a trilogy. I was a little surprised to learn that the Doyen still use tools. I thought their psionic powers had grown to the point where they were beyond such things. Also, the Chromatics are treated pretty sympathetically, which means they began getting redeemed almost as soon as they were introduced. So, overall, this was a pretty fun book for setting information.

It's just a little depressing that the PCs are "urged by Aeon to tie up the Huang-Marr conspiracy quickly, so that public-relations damage is minimal." Justice would have been better.

Ukss Contribution: The Aberrant Wycoff exploded in the middle of the USA's farm belt, creating an area of dangerous comic-book radiation called "The Blight." The fascist FSA government is encouraging corporations to move into the outskirts of the Blight by allowing them to pollute all they want.

A horrible practice, to be sure, but I kind of love how cynical it is. A supernatural event has screwed up the land, fuck it, that means anything goes from now on. I think Ukss could use a place like that - a magical atrocity exploited by capitalism.

(AD&D 2e)Celts Campaign Sourcebook

The most interesting thing about the Celts, from a fantasy worldbuilding perspective, is how uninteresting they are. I don't mean this as a slight against Celtic culture or anything, but just an observation. Dungeons and Dragons was a stew made of many influences, but almost all of them run through Celtic culture at one point or another. For example, I learned that Conan the Barbarian drew inspiration from Celtic myth, which actually didn't surprise me in the slightest once I thought about it for one second. And The Celts Campaign Sourcebook in particular often cites Caesar's The Gallic Wars, and maybe it's unfair to the Celts to have their culture described by their worst enemy, but it does go to show the influence they had on classical culture, even if only as antagonistic outsiders.

So many of their mythological themes are embedded bone-deep in English-language fantasy, undoubtedly due to the fact that they are an unalienable part of British culture. It is probably impossible to even talk in English about magic and monsters and heroes without incorporating some level of Celtic bias. Even Tolkien, who self-consciously rejected Celtic inspiration, wound up using a few characteristic tropes in building his world.

It all lends the "historical fantasy" of  the Celts Campaign Sourcebook an eerily familiar feel. I implied it was "uninteresting" in the first paragraph, but a better description would be "unsurprising" (and no, I am no going to go back and edit my opening). The Celtic-inspired fantasy of this book feels like what fantasy is supposed to feel like. And much like with the Vikings book, it falls short only in the sense that you could build a core book and a line of a hundred supplements off this book's pitch and wind up creating a very satisfying fantasy world.

It was kind of a surreal experience, seeing a version of D&D that evoked Exalted, with its over-the-top "heroic feats" (like jumping a chariot or throwing a spear with your feet) or Changeling, with its talk of faerie worlds just out of sight, where time flows differently and from which men may never return. Mainline AD&D never quite got there, and it probably couldn't handle it if it did, but it's kind of fascinating to think of a version of the game where Neil Gaiman made it into Appendix N.

The Celts Campaign Sourcebook wasn't quite that, unfortunately. Probably because it wasn't interested in building a coherent world. The Celts were a wide-ranging people, and the book acknowledges that. As a result, it's mostly a grab-bag of Celtic-related topics. Useful, inspirational, but it never congeals as a setting.

Strangely enough, a big culprit is the rules. I wouldn't have thought that possible, given that the Druid and the Bard are two full character classes that draw a line of descent almost directly back to Celtic culture, but they get converted in some baffling ways. Druids lose their weird organization, but also their high-level granted abilities and a huge chunk of their spellcasting. Bards lose their thief skills in exchange for basically nothing (well, the ability to use Bestow Curse, but they could already do that with their spellcasting, though admittedly not until level 10, raising a ton of balance questions).

I think what's going on is a misguided fidelity to an ideal that never existed. The two most Celtic classes get nerfed in the Celts book because their abilities don't map neatly to surviving Celtic stories, but there's no real exploration of the new stories you're supposed to tell. The Celts didn't have roleplaying games, but if they did, you can bet your ass that they'd see no contradiction between "high fantasy" and "historical fantasy," and certainly wouldn't put up with weaksauce "realistic" magic, just because a particular feat hadn't been seen yet.

Chariot-Jumping requires 4 non-weapon proficiency slots! Over and above the one you spent to get chariot driving in the first place. That's way too much to charge for a niche ability whose only real use is to look cool. It's frustrating to see something that's so close to the point of heroic fantasy and yet so far from actually getting it. But then, that split - fantastic things are caused by explicit magic, anything else has to cleave to a fairly rigid implementation of the laws of physics - is at the heart of what Dungeons and Dragons has always been. It's something that has occasionally hurt the game (as it does here), but I can't say it comes as a surprise.

Overall, the Celts Campaign Sourcebook is probably the weakest of the historical reference series. I mean, I still have two to go, so this is a verdict that might be overturned, but despite having some genuinely good information, the laws, customs, and economy of the Celts are so deeply ingrained in what we think of as "generic European fantasy," that this book sometimes feels like generic European fantasy, salvaged only by the more non-AD&D-friendly bits of Celtic cultural weirdness. I'd still recommend it, because it states a lot of things that most fantasy setting guides take for granted, but it doesn't feel nearly as subversive as Charlemagne's Paladins or Crusades (though it may be that I'm simply getting jaded after reading so many good "Medieval Europe" supplements, and Celts merely has the misfortune of being the most recent).

Ukss Contribution: Avalon, the deathless island where all wounds are healed. I like this one because it somehow manages to be both sacred and spooky. There's probably a reason why it gets reused so often.

(Trinity 1e)Darkness Revealed 1: Descent into Darkness

 The Huang-Marr conspiracy looms large in Trinity's first edition metaplot. It's mentioned in nearly every book in the series and it completely changes the characterization of two major factions. So I already had a vague idea about where this book was going. I knew that there was going to be unethical medical experimentation and a sinister coverup. What I was not expecting was that the experiments were naked atrocities and the coverup would be so cruelly cynical. 

Jerzy Grabowski, the leader of the project on the Moon, collapsed the roof over Freak Alley. Hundreds were killed, and there wasn't even a scientific justification for it. He wanted to expand his laboratory and Freak Alley just happened to be in the way. It's unclear why he couldn't just expand in another direction, but I have to assume that a big part of it was that the Freak Alley people were poor enough that no one would in power would care.

I don't want to spoil too much. Suffice to say, he gets what's coming to him, but it makes me question whether the Aesculapian Order or Orgotek even deserve to survive. A small, well-hidden cabal, performing grotesque experiments and remaining undetected is certainly the sort of thing that would require an intense reckoning, but actual premeditated mass murder, followed up by a change in assignments meant to cover-up the crime . . . it should not be possible for that to happen under your nose. Society should, in fact, operate under the assumption that it isn't. 

I mean, if they're using your resources to commit mass murder, and you don't know about, doesn't that mean you're giving people sufficient resources to commit mass murder, but not providing even the minimal oversight necessary to make sure those resources are not misused? A bulldozer can be used equally well to create or destroy, but presumably you've got some procedure in place to stop the guy with the keys from driving away and selling it to a shady dealer of used construction equipment. So why does this same procedure not stop the guy from using the bulldozer to run over schoolchildren?

Frankly, if I were Grabowski, I would just say that I was dong unethical medical experiments and then pocket the money. Clearly no one back at the home office is ever going to check. I guess the Huang-Marr project stays on course because the people who are in an oversight position are also in on the conspiracy. If that's the case, then the institution as a whole is compromised. The Aesculapians' book says Zweidler didn't know about it, but if so he was probably the only person in Grabowski's chain of command who didn't. At some point, the authorities in the Trinity universe have to bite the bullet and say, "we're going to have to make a new Red Cross."

Orgotek is not quite as implicated, if only because their operation is so much smaller, but they do wind up dispatching their elite commando unit to assassinate anyone with knowledge of the project. While this does implicate the highest levels of Orgotek in the coverup, it's at least possible to imagine the ruthless death squad as a punishment. It does go to show, however, how weird it is that Trinity has a heroic sinister corporation as a major setting element. They'll kill to keep their employer's secrets, but most of those secrets are being kept for the good of humanity.

It's also questionable how deniable Option 8 really is. They are highly-trained and well-equipped electrokinetics who are constantly acting in the interests of Orgotek. It seems unlikely to me that Alex Cassel's many enemies are going to trace a bunch of crimes back to Option 8 and then suddenly throw up their hands and say, "whoops, trail's cold." You don't need to prove the connection to use it as a justification for acting against Orgotek, especially not if you're a fascist state like the FSA.

But I'm most disappointed in Aeon. Their reaction to uncovering the conspiracy is pretty reprehensible. They create a cover story that pins the blame for the murders on a made-up aberrant cult. "Aeon understands that a coverup means deceiving the friends and loved ones of the murder victims. The Trinity believes that this sacrifice will be justified if all the guilty parties are brought to justice."

And I don't know. I guess I can see why you'd want to avoid releasing all the details of the case, to avoid tipping off potential suspects, but a coverup means committing to a lie, and when that lie is exposed, any trust you've built up over the years is quite rightfully compromised. 

Maybe it's a 90s thing. They liked their superheroes dark and gritty back then, which means even the good guys do shitty things. This was meant to reflect the duality of the human condition and the difficulty in making moral choices in a where the line between good and evil runs straight through the human heart. 

This is a fine theme, as far as it goes, and an important thing to consider, even in less cynical works, but seeing it out of its original context, it kind of lets these powerful people off the hook. If doing good requires evil actions, then there's no real way to criticize doing evil in the name of good. You can't really sacrifice your own morality for the sake of others, because when you are doing wicked deeds and causing suffering, it's really your victims who are doing the sacrificing. The families of the people murdered by Huang-Marr are going to grieve when they hear the cover story, and they are going to grieve again when they learn the truth, only the second time they're also going to have to deal with betrayal from a formerly trusted institution.

Of course, as with all things, there's a balance. We're in an age when earnestness feels radical, and thus 2nd edition's Aeon would likely have handled it differently, but the problem with straightforward morality is that it's easy to become simplistic. First edition didn't have that fault, but I'm going to have to see the next two volumes before I decide whether or not it's too cynical for its own good.

Overall, I'd say that Descent Into Darkness is a decent, but not great adventure. Its main flaw, aside from its moral murkiness, is that it doesn't want to commit to a campaign premise. As a result, it's full of distracting "ifs." "If the PCs are with Aeon . . ." "If they're working with the Lunar police. . ." "If they're just random busy-bodies poking their nose into things that don't concern them. . ." And that's not even getting into the occasionally bandied idea that you might just skip a chapter or two and only use one of the three scenarios (despite them being a direct sequence of events - chapter 3 literally starts with you chasing down the scientists who escaped in chapter 2).

Plus, you know, it's a murder mystery where the detectives are psychics. It's something that can work, but it's probably not a coincidence that this book introduces a rule out of nowhere that extreme violence clouds pychometric visions.

Still, I'm interested in seeing where the story goes next, even if I am spoiled on the end by various future Trinity supplements. That's worth something at least.

Now, let's end this post by taking a moment to honor the passing of the Summit Center. It was less than a week between me learning of its existence for the first time and me reading about its tragic destruction at the hands of a careless assassin, but I will always remember its pointless and impractical design and nebulous place in the Chinese government's plan to claim sole sovereignty over Mars. I mistakenly thought it revolved around a crater instead of the top of Olympus Mons, despite Hidden Agendas saying nothing of the sort, probably because I'm not used to thinking of mountains as having "rims." Hopefully, the next piece of civic architecture I choose for Ukss will endure for longer than one book.

Ukss Contribution: I say this, even as I choose Freak Alley as my contribution from this book. What can I say, I like the name, even if it is something of a blank slate due to being destroyed before the PCs ever encounter it.

(AD&D 2e)Vikings Campaign Sourcebook

As the first book in AD&D's historical reference series, Vikings Campaign Sourcebook has not yet worked out the "Historical/Legendary/Fantasy" split that we see in later volumes. It is, instead, just a pure Viking fantasy game. It's set in the historical North Sea region, but there are giants and Linnorms and Dock-Alfar, and all the other elements of Norse fantasy, maybe toned down a little, but still explicitly magical and presented without much by way of explanation.

It's actually a pretty great setting that could easily have supported its own entire game line, and if this book has a flaw, it's that it's ultimately pretty shallow about something that has a lot more depth to be mined. For example, it never mentions that the seiðr was traditionally considered a feminine practice. We get as complete a list of Odin's nicknames as I've ever seen, but nothing about his gender-bending. 

Granted, it's 1991, and whoa, that would be forward thinking even for a game not as characteristically hidebound as AD&D, but on two separate occasions the book stops to point out that Viking women had an unusual amount of autonomy for the middle ages, and thus it was appropriate to make female Viking PCs . . . and maybe they could have tossed in a bone about how magic was basically considered a women's job. Every adventuring party needs a mage, and thus even the most "realism" focused D&D groups should have had no problem with at least one female character.

I mean, it's sort of brought up. "The sagas make mention of several wizardesses, some favorably." But even setting aside the awkwardness of the word "wizardesses," the book got magic completely backwards.

Which is strange to me, because it has an extensive-looking bibliography. Is this a case of historiography changing dramatically in the last 20 years? Were the books cited here guilty of projecting contemporary sexist assumptions back onto the Viking culture and it's only because my own introduction was from a new generation of scholarship that I even noticed? Possible. Maybe even likely. At least, it's something to look out for.

Although, if the fantasy elements have been done better in other products, the Vikings Campaign Sourcebook does manage to do the thing that these green books have excelled at and make us really stop and think about what life is like in a Medieval European-inspired fantasy world. It talks about architecture, diet, and fashion, as well as laws and customs, and it gives a great sense of setting. It's not the best of the series, but it's easily ahead of 90% of the pure fantasy stuff out there.

It's also the strongest, mechanically, of any of the green books I've read. Which is weird, for being the first, but I think comes down to never trying to pretend to be purely historical. The thing about allowing specialist wizards, but not mages is still a little weird, because spell schools aren't narrowly tailored enough to make those kind of blanket bans very thematic, but we are at least spared the spectacle of clerics in an ostensible "non-magic" campaign.

Plus the new classes are pretty cool. The Berserker is basically the AD&D barbarian done right, and it's fun that they get wolf and bear shapes at higher levels. "Mostly fighters, but with a few magical tricks" is a class niche that AD&D should have gone to more often. 

And the Runecaster class, despite the gender mixup, is pretty decent as well. Its powers are generally weaker than mages or priests (with the caveat that they're not leveled, so it's possible to get some unusually strong abilities at level 1), but it fits better in a historical milieu than any of the "historical" rules modifications we've seen so far.

Overall, this was a pretty straightforward book. Vikings and Norse mythology were already pretty deep in D&D's DNA, and so the setting and the system mesh unusually well, better even than many pure fantasy setting explicitly designed for D&D. The result is a book whose monsters and magic felt a lot like what D&D should have been doing all along, but also one that is not really surprising in any way. Let this be a lesson to would-be game designers, specificity is good.

Ukss Contribution: . . . he said, while preparing to come up with a new element of the most hopelessly muddled fantasy world ever devised. Anyway, Vikings ate kale. I don't know why this is such a surprise to me. I guess because I first heard of kale about five years ago when it started becoming a fad, and I just assumed that it was a new thing. You know, like those new crops they're constantly discovering. . .

Yeah, I could have preserved my mystique as a cool customer by keeping this bit of surprise to myself, but it did amuse me to think of these macho Viking guys eating like a California vegan, and so I will memorialize the smile this put on my face by adding extensive kale production to Ukss.