(Shadowrun) Target: Smuggler Havens

After reading Target: Smuggler Havens I can't help but feel just the teensiest bit responsible for 90s FASA's absolutely chaotic supplement release strategy. The Game Information chapter, in the course of giving me rules and plot-hooks to go along with the book's smuggling-related fiction content, bid me to reference twelve different Shadowrun books (not including the core, which I have to grant as a gimme, because that's what corebooks are for). I think about this and I ponder the alternate reality where I say, "fuck my dwindling shelf space and modest budget" and proceed to collect a complete set of Shadowrun supplements and . . . it feels like seeing what happened to the other guy, after I passed on the Monkey's Paw. And maybe it doesn't make a lot of sense to feel responsible for something that happened when I was a teenager and only owned something like eight AD&D 2nd edition books, but I'm keenly aware of the fact that the target audience for this book was people almost exactly like me.

Which is probably why I enjoyed it as much as I did. I'm not entirely sold on the idea of smuggling as an alternate Shadowrun campaign model, but that's less a shortcoming of the book and more a lack, on my part, of any great experiences with "rural cyberpunk" as a genre. I can see how evading the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, and Customs Enforcement is a parallel challenge to the corporate security and privatized police forces of the game's normal heist capers, but I can't quite wrap my head around it as a team activity and Target: Smuggler Havens really didn't make a case for the illicit transport of cargo across international borders as a form of punk rebellion against satirically exaggerated capitalism. I can't help but think back to Broken Dreams and its smuggling plot-hook of outwitting the MPAA by transporting pirated movies on physical media. The contrast with this book's toothless and vague trade in telesma (spell components, basically) is palpable. That's embarrassing - being out-punked by Transhuman Space, of all things.

Target: Smuggler Havens almost gets there, when it suggests that New Orleans is a hub for zombie smuggling, but it barely scratches the surface of the concept's potential to be a 21st-century parable. Zombies "never ask for raises or strike for better working conditions?" Whoa. You may really be on to something. Take it a little farther, tie it in with the genre's overall themes of corporate lawlessness and the objectification and commodification of the human body for the sake of capitalist rent-seeking. Oh, no, we're done? Okay. I guess one paragraph is enough for this potential game-changer of a campaign arc. It just seems a shame, because this is one of the few times that Shadowrun's juxtaposition of genres actually enhances, rather than distracts from, the overall political critique that is so essential to good cyberpunk.

Another time happens a little later in this same book, when discussing Japanese whaling vessels - "Of course, the whales fight back now." Big salute to our magically-awakened cetacean comrades, organizing in community defense against imperialist aggression. Someone should make an rpg-scenario about that someday.

I'm being a little too hard on Target: Smuggler Havens, though. It's not really an adventure book, it's more of a setting expansion, taking us to corners of the Shadowrun universe hitherto unseen (I'm assuming). I can now theoretically run games based out of Vladivostok and New Orleans.

And as sci-fi/fantasy locations, they're pretty good. You've got international intrigue and different criminal factions (though, as pointed out in Mob War! it's unclear how the Mafia continues to justify its existence) and that extra Shadowrun special sauce of weird swamp monsters and insurrectionist taiga shapeshifters. But I'm feeling that same dilemma I always feel when an rpg goes to real places - it's cool to see the world through this fantastic lens, but what sort of hash is the fantasy making of the place's real culture and history?

With Vladivostok, I don't have even a glimmer of a starting point. On any average day, I spend approximately 0 minutes thinking about it. Shadowrun's Russia is going through a bit of a hard time, thanks to sectional conflict and an authoritarian central government, and I might normally say that such a depiction is in poor taste, but seeing as how neither fictional nor real-world Russia has much respect for Ukranian sovereignty, I'm kind of okay with it. It's not like they're depicting a historically marginalized group like the Lakota as a bunch of trigger-happy xenophobes . . .

Oh, right. Although, I suppose the worst you could say about that is that it's pretty typical for the setting. If you're caught smuggling almost anywhere, border patrol will shoot you. No real reason to think the Native American Nations would be the exception.

New Orleans is trickier. Call it a victim of early Shadowrun's half-assed worldbuilding, but I'm finding it difficult to square the city's history of fraught racial politics with the notion that it considers itself the "cultural and spiritual capital" of the Confederated American States. Likewise difficult to swallow - the notion that it lost the status of political capital to Atlanta. Maybe my brain has been rotted by too much contemporary politics, but having two of America's most iconically Black cities form the core of a state whose borders exactly mirror the Confederacy gives me the heebie jeebies. I once said the lack of Black characters in the Chicago book was an oops. This shoots past that to a full-on yikes.

It doesn't help that Shadowrun also has this weird thing where the fantasy races act as a stand-in for racial prejudice, but also the real world races they're standing in for are still there, just hanging around (this shows up in the Vladivostok chapter too, where a lot of the city's population are metahuman refugees who fled persecution in Japan, but then there's a thing where the nearby oceans are unsafe because Japanese corporations will hire Chinese and Korean pirates as expendable assets). The absolute recklessness of this approach is perfectly captured in the following quote:

"Because voudoun began as the magic of the oppressed, it touches the outcasts of New Orleans, especially the poorer metahumans pushed to the outskirts of the metroplex. The tradition is strongest among orks and trolls. . ."

Ahhh!!! I am not nearly smart enough to do this work. I feel like I'm just one or two supplements away from reading about the vibrant and creatively rich tradition of orkish rap music. Like, you can't just take a Black thing and make it a goblin thing, right? Not in a world where Black people exist. Not even if you're overall positive about the culture you're borrowing. 

I think that's probably the essence of Shadowrun, though. This is a future where much of the world is decolonized . . . because indigenous people are just that more magical than the rest of us (not just in America - Russia lost a large chunk of its territory to native Siberian shamans). It's probably a pretty bad form of representation but . . . do they get point for trying? I don't fucking know.

Now I feel a little guilty for ragging this book about its missed opportunities for anti-capitalist satire, because it turns out that a big part of the game's appeal for me is a similarly shallow "but the elf has a machine gun." By that standard Target: Smuggler Havens is exactly the sort of book I'm looking for.

Ukss Contribution: I really like zombie smuggling as the premise of a mini-campaign, even though I'd prefer the PCs to be trying to shut it down. However, reading this book has made me keenly aware of the fact that Ukss does not have anything like the Free City of Kronstadt - an anarchic stateless port of call for pirates, smugglers, and rogues of every description. Every fantasy setting needs a place like that. Sorry, zombies, I don't make the rules.

Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide

The Dungeon Master's Guide is the quintessential book that you read exactly once and then only intermittently reference for all the rest of time. I think I may actually be at precisely three full reads - one that I finished just now, the 3.0 version I read six months ago, and the 3.0 version I read 20 years ago. At no point between those occasions have I ever felt the urge to do it purely for pleasure.

But don't let that give you the wrong idea. I'm not down on the DMG at all. I think it's a perfectly fine reference book. In many ways, I greatly admire it. It aspires to a kind of transcendent blandness, to be such a perfect non-entity in itself that you'll be tempted to use it for everything. Whether it succeeded or not is hard to say, though the history of the d20 boom suggests they made some progress in that direction. Certainly, there were long stretches where it felt like I was reading a generic gaming encyclopedia (normally, I dislike using the word "generic," but when a book spends seven straight pages describing various types of architectural features - including door hinges and tapestries - I feel like maybe it's a little bit warranted).

Now we come to the part where I comment on my more specific observations. Just for fun, I went back to my post on the 3.0 DMG, to see if I already covered anything from my current round of notes. Amusingly, I jotted down the exact same quote both times through - "high-level fighters always hit with their primary attacks and other characters rarely do." I guess there's to pretending that wasn't an intentional design feature, despite the fact that it makes no fucking sense.

But aside from the stunning revelation that I have the exact same opinions about two books that are 75% identical (the 3.5 DMG is approximately 50 pages longer than the 3.0 DMG, but most of those extra pages are devoted to butchering Planescape or making a less functional version of the Epic Level Handbook), most of my observations are tiny, almost annoying, nitpicks. Like, I understand the game balance logic behind putting divine spells onto scrolls, but theologically, it's absolutely wild to think about. You've basically got an IOU from God for one future miracle, redeemable by whoever happens to hold the scrap of paper it's written on. I would say "make it make sense," but I don't actually want it to make sense. I want to port the idea into Nobilis or Unknown Armies or Mage: the Ascension and make it the centerpiece for the world's dumbest heist story.

Is that really a D&D 3.5 thing, though? It might just be a bit of general D&D weirdness. . . time to consult the archives!

It's actually in every version of D&D (and both editions of Pathfinder) except D&D 4th edition. So I can't blame 3.5 for how weird an idea it is (if a Cleric of Erythul grabbed a Resurrection scroll scribed by a Cleric of Pelor, they could just, what, bring the world's most depraved necromancer back from the dead using Pelor's divine energy and there's no mechanism anywhere in the planes to stop that kind of shit from happening). But the lone counterexample also means that I can't just give it a pass either. The game doesn't have to be that way. 

Let's see, what else?

Complaints about the alignment system? Yawn.

They nerfed the Ring of Jumping for no real apparent reason. A bonus of +30 feels like a genuinely cool magic power, but what is this new +5 version supposed to do? Is it one of those things where the level 2 characters need a bit of trash treasure to make them appreciate the cool stuff they'll get later on? Or is it just a matter of finding big numbers to be scary? Perhaps a bit of tactical rebalancing? If you give a martial character the ability to extend their horizontal leaps by 30 feet, that might make them too effective at positioning themselves. I don't know. All I can say is that it's a bit of a personal bugbear. I love making characters who can do massive jumps and the old Ring of Jumping was one of my most wishlisted items.

Do I have more? Yes. Is it all similarly inane bullshit? You'd better believe it. 

I suppose it speaks well for my mood. I was a little worried that having to read a second set of 3rd edition core books was going to be an unbearable chore, but it turned out to just be a regular chore. Core books, by their very nature, spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about boring stuff (or else they are so abstract that don't feel like they're talking about much at all), and the 3.5 DMG was no exception. My overall opinion - on the balance an improvement over the first version (anti-jumping bullshit notwithstanding), but maybe not by enough to justify its existence. Even looking into the future and giving it credit for all the great supplements it supported, that's balanced out by all the stuff it suddenly invalidated. 

Even with all that ambivalence, though, it's sobering to think that this is almost certainly the last time I'm ever going to read this particular book (but then again, I thought the same thing back in 2001, so who knows what the future will hold . . . )

Ukss Contribution: I'm thinking of something that's been in every version of the DMG I've read thus far, but is silly enough that I strongly suspect it's my last change to pick it - The Broom of Animated Attack.

It's something that only exists because of early D&D's weird antagonistic relationship between the players and the DM, but it's never failed to make me smile. The players think they've found an enchanted flying broomstick, hop on, and try to make it go, but then BOOM! It starts beating the shit out of them. 

From a world-building perspective, it's a bit of a challenge. Flying on brooms has to be common enough that people will see a broom and think, "wow, that's one of those flying brooms," but then there has to be some quirk of the enchantment that leaves open a possibility that one of those brooms is going to be a complete asshole. I think I'm up for it, though.

(Shadowrun) Rigger 2

Hoo boy. This was tough. My level of investment started low and then it just stayed low, the entire time. I would turn a page and congratulate myself for enduring the trial of the Electronic Countermeasure rules, only to find myself facing the Electronic Counter Countermeasure rules. Is this punishment for my hubris? Is it a test of my faith in the beauty of rules-heavy systems? Or is it just that I decided I was going to try and read my Shadowrun books in something approaching order of publication, and because I didn't really understand the edition change when I bought Rigger 2 (Jonathan Szeto) and thus am burdened to read a rules-focused book before I read the game that I bought it for?

Actually, it's none of those things. It's more that I'd gotten used to thinking of Shadowrun books as metaplot driven pseudo-fiction and I forgot that some of them are actually here to work. The only way I was ever going to be invested emotionally in this book is if I were planning on playing a Rigger (or GMing for a rigger player) in a game of Shadowrun. Luckily, I don't need to be emotionally invested to have an opinion.

Now I just need to decide what my opinion actually is. The problem here is that to truly evaluate Rigger 2 you need to wade into one of the longest and most contentious controversies in the rpg discourse - rulings vs rules.

Eh, I feel a little dirty even writing that. Imagine me on the edge of a cliff, with arms outstretched, waiting for the incipient flames to take me. . . 

And now that the drama is out of my system, I can back this up with a quote: "The existing Shadowrun rules relegated the rigger to the status of a non-player character; not because his role was insufficiently thought-out, but because the rigger was not given enough rules within the system to spread his wings. . ."

That's probably as eloquent a summation of the pro-rules side as we're ever likely to see. The idea being that objective, pre-established rules are a way of enhancing player agency. If there's something you want your character to do, you can figure out how to do it and you don't have to ask permission. The book tells you directly what conditions you need to meet and what the outcome is likely to be. You can then trust yourself to the purity of the dice.

Rigger 2 also has the distinction of eloquently demonstrating the strongest counterargument to that approach. To wit, the bulk of the actual text. A particularly notable example: "Because of the special nature of the MSST (mobile subscriber simsense technology) system for remote control networks (the protocol remote-control decks use to communicate with their drones), the rules for electronic warfare against remote control networks differ from the rules for electronic warfare against standard radios (p 184, SRII) and the Electronic Countermeasures rules for Sensor Systems (see Electronic Countermeasures, p.31)."

I left the page references in not out of any passive aggressive urge to pad the quotation's length, but because they convey an essential piece of information - these three very similar activities, that are likely to be performed by a single character, under very similar sets of circumstances, are found in three different locations spanning two different books. And you have to know them all. That's the price you pay for purity.

The question then, is whether or not it's worth it. I think, in the case of Rigger 2, specifically, it probably is. Though my reason for thinking that is nothing more exalted than some intuitive behavioral profiling. I'm making some pretty big assumptions about the sort of player who really wants to play the getaway driver/techhead in a futuristic sci-fi/fantasy rpg. Like me, personally, maybe I would cry if my character was about to fly away in an airplane and the GM fired back with "all the airport has is low-grade fuel, and once you add the loot to the cargo bay, you're going to be overweight, so consult the tables on pages 82 and 83 to determine your overall fuel efficiency and then we'll cross-reference it with this topographical map to see if you can find a safe landing space within your flight range. But a person who really likes airplanes, on the other hand . . .

Wait, I think I might be finding my inspiration after all. Not as a gearhead, per se, but setting it out like that does speak to a longing I've experienced before. The strange urge to go full sim. I make fun of things like Sunward's Martian Time Zones, The Wilderness Survival Guide's fish protein percentage table, and Flying Circus's . . . um, variable weight airplane fuel efficiency calculations, but there's a part of me that gets it. No, more than gets it. Yearns for it. 

But there's always something that holds me back. I think it's the dread that I may one day have to look my friends in the eye, mid car chase, and ask "so who was wearing their seat belt?"

Because there are rules in Rigger 2 for wearing a seat belt. In order for those rules to be worth anything all, there has to be a circumstance in which it's beneficial to wear a seat belt. In order to apply those benefit, you have to establish whether the seat belt was being worn. And since this is a game largely driven by talking, you can only really establish that kind of preparedness by asking the players. But who would say "no" to that question? Most RPG players understand context. They're going to be able to figure out that the GM wouldn't be asking unless the seat belts were going to imminently become very important. There's no upside to not wearing one.

But it can't just be automatic, can it? The whole point of having this level of granularity is to provide options and tactical challenges. Maybe you do put in some benefit to not wearing a seat belt - (it's harder to shoot out the window, perhaps). But then, is the GM left to enforce that? 

If I recall, the last time I used these rules, the way I handled it was "roll an INT check to see if you remembered to buckle your seat belt," which always got a laugh at the table, but is probably bad game design. I probably should have just gotten into the habit of asking every time. It would have been a lot to keep track of, but that's part of the appeal of playing a deep-sim-type game, is it not?

Nonetheless, I can't help but think of the narrative I'd be creating. Even assuming I could muster the focus to remember to ask the question in advance and to remember the answers at the appropriate time and even assuming this was the sort of game my players wanted to play, and they weren't fixing to throttle me for my nitpicking - a truly faithful execution of the seat belt mechanic would require me to ask every time the players got in their vehicle and then for nothing to come of that question nine times out of ten. It completely undermines a simulation if there is a causal relationship between asking about seat belts and the car getting into an accident. Those events must be unconnected. Yet doing it that way flaunts the deepest and most fundamental storytelling rules. It's adding entirely superfluous information. In any halfway competent story "who's wearing their seat belt" is foreshadowing a crash. Because people only have so much bandwidth and so you have to respect that with an economy of detail.

The result is that however much I may fantasize about doing a nitty-gritty game with a million different subsystems, the thought of actually doing it for real scares the hell out of me. Shadowrun 3rd Edition is probably not going to be the game to cure me of this ambivalence, but I'm looking forward to seeing how the past 20 years have changed my perspective.

Ukss Contribution: A lot of perfectly fine vehicles in this book that completely fail to fit in with the aesthetics of Ukss thus far. I'm also at a loss for things like characters, locations, or political concepts that I could adapt (there are a couple of fiction pieces, but they're mostly a showcase for vehicles). Which means I'm going to have to do the thing where I reluctantly expand my vision of Ukss to fit something new.

I guess my favorite thing was a borderline slapstick image - using the Mana Wall spell to knock someone off the back of a motorcycle. See, in Shadowrun, mana spells only affect living creatures and completely ignore technological devices. So the motorcycle passes harmlessly through the barrier, but the rider runs smack into a wall. If something like that happened organically in one of your games, you'd talk about it more or less forever. (The way it interacts with enclosed vehicles is strange - so long as the mage can't see the passengers, the Mana Wall will not affect them, which is why it's vitally important in the Shadowrun universe to always have tinted windows).

I'm not sure how to turn this into a setting element, though. Therefore, I will instead just be adding motorcycles to Ukss. I owe them that much for their role in making me laugh in a book otherwise filled with dry vehicle statistics.

Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Player's Handbook

 Well, that wasn't as much of an ordeal as I originally feared. Though the Player's Handbook is a dry read, even under the best of circumstances, the impact was blunted by the knowledge of my imminent completion of another blog milestone.

I can't say for sure what exactly I was expecting to gain from the experience of reading this book, so soon (a mere 16 months!) after the 3.0 PHB, but I can say that I feel fully prepared to run a D&D 3.5 campaign. The rules, already familiar due to decades worth of adaptations, revisions, and deconstructions, are now etched ever so slightly deeper into my brain. It's a shame, then, that I only have, like, 20% of a desire to actually play the game.

I suppose I could take the opportunity here to just shut my yap for once, limit my remarks to "okay, so this is approximately 90% similar to a book I already read, and though there are noticeable improvements to various niche issues (rangers get 6 skill points per level now, crit-fishing builds have been nerfed by making keen effects non-stackable, spells are better organized and easier to reference) the fundamental flaws of the edition as a whole remain." 

And you know what? I think I will do that (this paragraph acknowledging my plan for uncharacteristic brevity notwithstanding). The 3.5 Players Handbook did actually inspire me to take notes and write commentary, but almost all of that commentary could have applied to the original PHB as well (like, why is the monk's Slow Fall ability so fucking useless - they're deliberately making it worse than an extremely niche 1st level spell). If I didn't say it the first time round, is it really necessary to say it on my second chance? Am I really so in love with the sound of my own voice that I need to write nearly identical commentary on nearly identical books?

Um, let's not think too hard about the answer to that question. I've still got two more of these core books to go.

Ukss Contribution: Monks get an ability called Tongue of the Sun and Moon that has an unusually simple natural language description - "A monk of 17th level or higher can speak with any living creature." 

That's literally all of the rules guidance we're given. For an ability with absolutely staggering philosophical implications. Apparently, there's just a random Nobilis-style power tucked away where no one will ever encounter it, as a high level class feature of a single-class monk. It's such an un-3.5 detail to include, particularly in a class that very conspicuously doesn't get access to Feather Fall.

As a fantasy element, I love it. Refined mystics who can communicate with animals and plants and every human or nonhuman culture. They won't necessarily be martial artists in Ukss, but they will have a monastery.

(Shadowrun) Mob War!

Organized crime occupies a strange niche in the cyberpunk genre (and arguably real life). The megacorporations are above the law. The biggest ones have literal extraterritoriality, allowing them to write their own laws within the confines of their facilities. So why wouldn't the mafia's traditional businesses - drugs, gambling, prostitution, etc - just be another product for the megacorps to package and sell? BTLs (better than life chips, shadowrun's censor-friendly sci-fi drug stand-in) may be illegal in UCAS territory, but is there any reason you couldn't just walk into the Renraku arcology and buy them off the shelf? Maybe you have to use them on-site, but that's just another profit opportunity, really.

Although, this works the other way too. What's to stop the existing criminal cartels from designing their own letterhead, issuing stock, and becoming true megacorporations themselves? They already shroud themselves in the trappings of legitimate business, for purposes of money laundering. If the general direction of the economy is trending towards corporate lawlessness, wouldn't that mean that organized crime and international corporations would gradually converge? As the corps start hiring shadowrunners to commit crimes on their behalf, the criminals become more and more mainstream until it's impossible to tell the difference?

It might be an issue of scale. It's hard to research exact figures online, but even if you use the larger estimates, groups like the mafia and the yakuza have a fraction of the revenue of the biggest corporations. A hundred billion a year would not get you onto the top 50. . . but it might get you close enough to be a valuable acquisition for one of the big players.

Mob War! (Stephen Kenson) at one point speculates that all of the Japanese megacorporations have been infiltrated by the Yakuza, and that criminals are calling the shots at Mitsuhama, in particular, but how realistic is this? The reverse situation seems more likely. At most, they could be a highly-organized faction of shareholders, but would they even want MCT to do anything besides its usual business? If the criminals were really in charge, would you even be able to tell?

It presents a challenge for me as a potential Shadowrun GM, because the PCs are criminals for hire, in a criminal subculture, and they usually work for the megacorporations as deniable assets, but this book posits a series of adventures where they work for organized crime instead, and I can't quite figure out what the dynamic is supposed to be. What is the mafia's social and economic niche? Why does it matter that Seattle's capo was assassinated?

Near as I can tell, they're the biggest fish in a small pond. If you're a regular criminal, like the PCs, you have to tread carefully around them, because they're organized enough to ruin your day, even if you successfully kill some of their goons. But if that's the case, it's unclear why they wouldn't just monopolize the shadowrunning racket like they do with vice? Why is Mr Johnson going to a random dive bar to hire freelancers when they could instead drop a few choice words to a "business associate" in the comfort of their country club and then know that the situation will be taken care of by someone on the boss's regular payroll?

I think it's a case where sci-fi is just recapitulating the modern world without really examining it. The mafia exists and are kind of the scary apex predators of the criminal underworld because that's how it worked in the 1990s, when Mob War! was written. You've got the independents doing whatever hustles they can and above them the street gangs, who control territory and watch each others' backs, so you don't want to mess with them, and then above them are the true syndicates - the mafia, the yakuza, the triads - who are able to call upon international resources and large numbers of full-time professionals. 

But that only really makes sense in a world where crime is illegal. When the megacorps are immune to consequences, then maybe the mafia is just another mid-tier corp to take over and subsequently hollow out. You're not buying drugs from the mafia, you're buying Mafia (tm)- brand drugs, manufactured by Aztechnology, available at Stuffer Shacks across the nation! Just circle round to the back alley and "Ask for Rocco" (tm)!

I should be kinder, though. It's tough to satirize capitalism in a way that is not immediately eclipsed by the absurd reality of the contemporary world.

So let's assume that it makes sense for the mafia to exist in the world of Shadowrun and that you can know what they're like by watching literally any mafia movie. If that's the case, then Mob War! gives you the tools to make a pretty good mafia movie. The don is killed and his daughter comes back from Harvard Law School to buck tradition, take over the family business, and get revenge, all the while dodging traitorous underlings, aggrieved traditionalists, and rivals from competing syndicates. I'd watch that movie.  It also makes perfect sense that in this situation, the normally closed-off criminal organizations would want to bring in freelance criminals to fill some of the gaps. It's a satisfying premise for an adventure that is executed well . . .

From a certain point of view. Personally, I have no issues with the way Mob War! does things. It's not technically an adventure. It's just a single event and a list of various factions and NPCs who are reacting to this event. Its main use is to run a sandbox campaign in the aftermath of the mob boss' assassination, and while it has a couple dozen suggestions for specific adventures, those suggestions are incredibly bare bones (the book itself is only 64 pages long, which is why my post took a swerve straight from the start). Normally, I'd whine about having to do most of the work by myself, but in this case the suggestions are so tightly related, and tied to detailed, interesting NPCs that they really do feel very helpful for building a starting situation. It's not like those drive-by adventure hooks that leave me frustrated by highlighting a gap in the setting ("Ooh, what's at the bottom of the mysterious dungeon . . . you have the power to decide"). Most of my lingering questions are about the future - i.e. the thing that's going to be highly dependent on how the PCs deal with the starting situation.

Overall, I'd say that I really enjoyed Mob War! It hits a good sweet spot for a metaplot-driven rpg supplement, where it really shakes up the status quo, but it doesn't make you feel like you're playing a whole new game. Even if you'd been involved in a long-running Shadowrun game where the PCs worked for the mafia and developed a major personal relationship with James O'Malley, the players are going to be emotionally prepared for the possibility that he's been assassinated off-screen. That sort of thing happens to mafia bosses all the time. So it's got a weird thing going on where the more it disrupts your existing game, the more it makes your game resemble the genre it's emulating. Definitely a top-tier supplement.

Ukss Contribution: My choice today is a kind of silly detail that nonetheless tickled me greatly - the boss of the Yakuza has an estranged daughter who fled from home and became a shadowrunner. Her birth name: Keiko. Her street handle: Kiku. I get that it's "a play on her real name" but that's the opposite of what an alias is supposed to do. I can't help but think that she'd be an incredibly funny NPC for the players to try and set straight.

(D&D 3.5) Complete Champion

Dungeons & Dragons is an odd beast, because I have a lot of D&D books. It was my first game. It is, by dollar value anyway, my most-collected game. It was, for a long time, my most-played game (I've got an inkling that Exalted may have surpassed it, though I don't have precise figures). It's probably the game I'd have the best change of recreating from memory, if that was ever required of me for some reason. Hell, I chose the d20 system as the basis for Ukss Plus, the most elaborate rpg shitpost since Dungeons: the Dragoning 40k 7th Edition, and even as a joke, you don't write a quarter of a million words because you hate the subject matter. 

And yet, despite all that, I'm permanently at war with the game's implied setting. It never fails. Every time they show me something from the blobby, half-formed recesses of inchoate D&D-land, my first thought is "well, that's something I'm going to need to fix." I think it's because, more than any other rpg setting I own (including approximately half a dozen official D&D campaign worlds), D&D-land has that "designed by committee" feeling. It's a consequence of being the first and the biggest. So many ideas, from so many sources, get dumped into the trough and in one sense, everything that makes its way into a book is D&D, but in another sense, people will write the books in an attempt to fit in with existing D&D, and the result is that you begin to treat paths of least resistance as if they were some kind of grand master plan. So the implied D&D setting, the product identity of the brand, if you will, is half made up of weird one-off ideas so memorable that they were preserved long after the death of their context and the other half is areas of smoothness, where ideas passed from hand-to-hand have been polished into a kind of flatness that betrays deep biases and cultural assumptions.

Case in point: Complete Champion. This is one of those late-period 3.5 books where they're just really good at making Dungeons & Dragons supplements. The edition changeover is just a few months away, and at last they know how to write for 3.5. You want to play a character who is a divine champion of one of D&D-land's various default gods? You're going to find a lot of useful material for doing that, some of which is even competitive with just taking extra levels in cleric or druid (on the lower end of optimization, let's not go wild here).

But it's also about the religion of D&D-land. And the religion of D&D-land is . . . well, not Christianity, exactly, but like . . . various extruded substances poured into a Christianity-shaped mold, and the final result is . . . something. It's like, religion without theology, without culture, without history, without art. A thing in the shape of a religion, but without substance.

Maybe that's fair. Maybe we aren't going into D&D for stories of great substance. Slap a cassock on that guy, give him an Aspergilum (a new vocabulary word that I'm likely to immediately forget), and have him shoot lasers at a zombie. That's enough for the game's limited ambitions.

It just feels a little off. Halflings have tent revivals. What are they reviving? The eternal and unanimous worship of Yondalla, the goddess of halfling supremacy?

No, that's unfair, all of the "racial" gods are offputtingly militant. Corellon's "church" (every god has a church, which I'm choosing to interpret as a broad term for "any religiously motivated form of social organization") has an absolutely hair-raising approach to Drow: "killing Drow is holy work, because each dark elf soul sent to the Abyss is another step towards completing the work begun by Corellon Larethian so long ago."

Yikes.

All told, Complete Champion is a competent execution of an area of the implied setting that I have particularly little use for. It comes from being an atheist, I think. My approach to fantasy religion is culture-first. This is an activity that human beings (and human-like creatures) engage in, and so it's always something the society needs, or wants to express about itself, or, in my more cynical moments, is burdened with. The truth or falsity of a particular belief is irrelevant.

Digression: this is another reason that I favor doing away with the arcane/divine split. Wizards are often theurgists who use spiritual and religious reasoning and people who work divine miracles often wind up being a lot like secular magic users, whether the theology is on their side or not. In either case, the validity (or "truth" if you prefer) of a religious belief is orthogonal to the pragmatic power of a magical practice. There's a very thin line between binding a demon to servitude by speaking its seven secret names and gaining power from a god by prayer and a pledge of service. The notion that the relationship between god and worshipper must be one of genuine reverence and not a transactional bargain for services rendered is characteristic of modern monotheism and not necessarily something you even want to translate into an rpg.

Anyway, D&D throws a serious wrench into religion-as-worldbuilding-element by insisting that each and every religion must be associated with a literal god that definitely, truly exists. So religion in D&D-land isn't primarily a cultural phenomenon and does not necessarily serve human needs.  Not only does this lead to shallow worldbuilding on the face of it, it also places an incredible amount of pressure on the gods themselves to be charismatic enough (IRL, to the readers) to make an organization staffed by their flunkies seem like a vital part of a living world. Not all of them are able to pull this off.

I was probably never going to love Complete Champion, but I do respect it. The prestige classes take some interesting chances, design-wise, such as having multiple different classes for a single NPC organization, so that characters with different classes can approach the same concept from different starting positions. As a reader, I prefer it when the Prestige classes are all distinct, but having two or three different interpretations really helps when centering a campaign around a particular organization. You don't need to be a spellcaster to benefit from membership in the Paragnostic Assembly. You can simply be an Initiate instead of an Apostle (although, the main ability of Initiates is "assist casting", which I kind of hate).

I've now read all of the Complete* books, many of 3.X's most prominent supplements, and a bunch of obsolete 3.0 material. All I have left is specific campaign settings - Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Eberron. Looking back at the edition as a whole, I think I love it, but in a really backhanded way. I enjoy what it might (and will) become, but a lot of what it actually was, doesn't really hold up. The math (and the balance issues created by that math) undermines the game's ambition to become a universal toolkit, but I absolutely adore that it had that ambition. This was an edition that did not recognize its own limitations, even when it really should have, and I think that energy is infectious. 

Ukss Contribution: Dragon Rubies. A dragon eats a gemstone. Later, it shits that gemstone out. Thanks to its harrowing journey, the gem has magic powers now. Be sure to wash your hands after handling one.

(Shadowrun) Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzahn's Secrets

I had a hard time concentrating on the fantastic conceit of Portfolio of a Dragon (Steve Kenson, Mike Colton, Todd Bolling, Jon F Zeigler). I was too distracted with thoughts of wealth inequality.

I mean, it's not as if I didn't care about the book's plot. A dragon is elected President of the United Canadian and American States! He is promptly assassinated on the night of his inauguration! Everyone's a suspect! Ooh, he left a mysterious will!

It's just, he leaves behind an open-ended bequest to whoever can develop communications between humans and dolphins, elephants, and/or satyrs that includes "the Cayman Island of their choice." It shouldn't really be possible for a person to own something like that, let alone give it away as a prize in an inventing contest. Even in a cyberpunk universe where the ultimate rule is that of the almighty dollar, it seems . . . excessive. I get that they were trying to go for a modern take on the gleaming dragon hoard, but damn, this guy owns Prince Edward Island (generously returned to the UCAS government), a lost da Vinci notebook, and several original Shakespeare folios? He should not have been allowed to own those things. I feel like even admitting to possessing them could very reasonably be interpreted as a mishandling of antiquities and a crime against the global heritage. And what on Earth gives him the right to bequeath Excalibur to Harlequin, of all people? It's not even in his possession. He had to offer a bounty to whoever could find it.

Then again, his will also disbursed funds to pay for an assassination, so I have to figure that the legalities here are deep into the realm of speculative fiction.

Nonetheless, it somewhat irks me that even the signature "good guy" dragon is such a hoarder. I guess that's part of the whole dragon shtick, though. They are a metaphor for greed, relentless accumulators who can never be satisfied and who barely seem to appreciate or enjoy the riches they've gathered. Dunkelzahn could have replaced the random car he destroyed at any time. He didn't have to make restitution as a bequest in his will. But apparently, he just couldn't stand to part with his 1964 -1/2 candy apple red Ford Mustang convertible while he was alive. . . 

Although, it occurs to me that maybe he replaced the car at the time of the incident and then on the occasion of his death decided that the person whose car he totaled would be a good destination for his much nicer personal car. That's not how it comes across in the text, but it's a valid interpretation. But even with the benefit of the doubt, this whole will thing comes across as someone trying to pull strings and exert control even from beyond the grave. When you consider the tiny size of his bequests, relative to the speculated size of his fortune (estimated to be around 100 trillion nuyen, with an average bequest size of a few million nuyen), well, maybe it's a bit of overdue characterization. Perhaps Dunkelzah was not as different from other dragons as he liked to pretend.

It's something that tracks if you dig into the game's Earthdawn connections (and if you're a fan of those kinds of easter eggs, this is definitely a book you want to read). Mountainshadow, the 4th age dragon most likely to be Dunkelzahn, was aristocratic and haughty, and was strange among his cohort for relying so heavily on humanoid agents, but he never really thought of them as equals. His transformation into a charming talk show guest and approachable man-of-the-people always struck me as a minor inconsistency, but I'm getting a picture here of a guy with a massive stick up his ass who nonetheless wants to convince people he's chill. He's not, as evinced by the fact that even in his will he gives away less than 1 percent of his fortune (and even this figure is skewed by one guy who got 30 billion nuyen and the assumption that things like Prince Edward Island and the megacorp stock transfers are in the 10s of billions range - I'm not sure the author of that one line quite understood how big 100 trillion actually is).

I could see it as something of an arc. Perhaps the events of the last 8000 years have humbled him and he was in the process of becoming the person he was pretending to be. It's a tough call, because the "master manipulator" archetype is usually villain-coded, but theoretically, there's nothing stopping a hero from using similar methods (in much the same way that someone who was really good at fighting and constantly solved problems by punching people in the face would be insufferable in real life, but in rpgs, they're like 90% of the characters you're ever going to play). Still, at the risk of armchair psychoanalyzing a fictional dragon based on nothing but a few scraps of lore and the contents of his (dubiously legal) will, I'd say that need for control, along with its accompanying conviction that you deserve to exercise that control, is a major character flaw that needs to be corrected. There's a fine line between "social responsibility" and "aristocratic paternalism" and it's not clear the Dunkelzahn is on the right side of it.

Of course, this is Shadowrun we're talking about and things being "not clear" is right in its wheelhouse. I can't be entirely mad at Portfolio of a Dragon for being an rpg murder mystery that leaves a bunch of unanswered questions, because answering those questions is one of the goals of playing the game. But I can say that it's one of those cases where ambiguity works at cross purposes to nuance. Is this mystery actually solvable? Is the Draco Foundation working on some kind of posthumous master plan or not? What's the deal with the Jade Dragon of Wind and Fire? I'd feel better if I had more to work off of than a series of writing prompts.

But would that leave enough room for FASA's signature style of punctuating their in-character narration with unproductive asides from the peanut gallery? Seriously, one exchange of comments was "What's the point of this bedtime story?" answered by "Read to the end of the paragraph, drekhead." Well observed. I really feel like I'm on a lightly moderated message board (Captain Chaos is definitely one of those "free speech" mods - when someone complained about a pro-Humanis post, he threatened to ban the complainer for "name-calling." Ah, the 90s.) But is reading this really helping me to better GM an adventure based on Dunkelzahn's will?

Maybe a little. I guess it helps to get into the Shadowrun mindset. I think as a reader, though, I'd prefer more of that hot goss. 

In the end, Portfolio of a Dragon performs better than average on that metric, so I can unreservedly recommend it, even if I think there was more fascinating content to be mined from Pesident Dragon.

Ukss Contribution: I really liked that the main headquarters of the Wuxing corporation were designed with a strict eye towards Feng Shui. My understanding is that this is a real practice that was less known to the American mainstream in the 90s (Shadowrun really dropped the ball when it came to predicting China's role as a major 21st century economic power), but I enjoy it in this context because it's implied that shaping the building's chi will lead to tangible monetary benefits, and that blend of magic and cyberpunk is the soul of the game.