(D&D 3.0) Dragonlance Campaign Setting

One of the recurring themes of this blog is my ambivalence about "vanilla fantasy," i.e. the stuff that D&D does - vaguely Tolkien, with its elves and dwarves and hobbits, halflings, kender, vaguely swords and sorcery with necromancers and thick-hewed men of action, and vaguely weird fantasy with all of these other elements used with scarcely any thought given to the overall effect ("sure, Cthulhu can be here too, why not?"). It's the genre that got me started with the hobby and there was a time when I eagerly devoured any variation I could find. And then I grew a little older, and I became too cool for it, and I would only touch fantasy that was conspicuously and consciously "not D&D." And then I grew a little older than that and became too cool for too cool, and I resolved to approach the genre with an open mind, in the process discovering a new, adult perspective that allowed me to appreciate "vanilla fantasy" as a sort of ongoing community project, where the very things that seemed so stultifying about it were actually fascinating historical artifacts, fossilized elements of a culture long-passed, preserved in a deep strata of obscure setting lore (for example: gnomes - nobody knows why they should be there, but leave them out and you will hear about it).

And overall, the general arc of my new, grudgingly laid-back approach to vanilla fantasy is towards Being Less of a Dick About It. It's not something I always do well (heck, even just now, my "new perspective on the genre" was about 90% faint praise), but it is something I'm working on.

The Dragonlance Campaign Setting (Margaret Weis, Don Perrin, Jamie Chambers, Christopher Coyle) really threatens to make me backslide.

See, this is a series that I have a great deal of personal nostalgia for. When I talk about young John eagerly devouring vanilla fantasy, this is the exact thing I'm talking about. I must have read the Chronicles series at least three or four times. And Legends at least twice. And when I talk about becoming disillusioned with the genre, well, having read Chronicles and Legends so many times is undeniably part of it.

The funny thing is that I was already done with vanilla fantasy by the time I bought this particular book. Even in 2003, I was buying the Dragonlance Campaign setting purely out of nostalgia. I've had it since it was brand new, more than 20 years, and this is the first time I've ever read it all the way through.

Now I'm left wondering if I ever truly hated vanilla fantasy at all. Maybe I just hated Dragonlance. 

No, "hate" is a strong word. Younger me would have used it shamelessly, but when I invoke it here, I'm doing it as a memory. I used to get far too invested in these things. I used to have passionate opinions about the fantasy genre. I'm not like that anymore.

I am very deliberately trying to not be like that anymore.

I didn't hate this book. There were parts that were dangerously close to hate - the racial alignment sections veered a little eugenics-y ("Half-ogres tend towards a neutral alignment. They have too much ogre blood to be completely good but don't automatically embrace evil."), the "balance between Good, Evil, and Neutrality" is the cringiest fucking thing I've ever read and ZOMG, what the fuck are you even trying to do here, you can say in the DM chapter that "no one ever wakes up in the morning and decides to be evil," but you literally have a big group of guys that get up every day and base their sartorial choices on signaling to the world at large their allegiance to an order of explicitly Evil wizards that gain their powers from the Dark Moon Nuitari, God of Evil Magic and honestly, that's not the worst part of it - it could be potentially the funny sort of cartoon evil - because who the fuck are these "neutral" people who can see the guys who are all "we stand for the use of supernatural power for the degradation and subjugation of all life and we're going to wear a uniform to let you know that it's not an accident" and think, "hey, we gotta make sure to keep some of these guys around."

Okay, let me take a breath here. This is getting a little ranty. . .

And another thing - yeah, no shit people blamed the Cataclysm on the gods. It's literally something that they did. On purpose, knowing what would happen. "Okay, so we dropped a meteor on the most densely-populated city on the planet, killing thousands instantly and many thousands more in the slow agony of climate-change-induced famine, but have you ever considered reflecting on your own faults? There's plenty of blame to go around. Us for doing it. You for making us do it."

I mean, the Kingpriest of Istar was supposed to be this cautionary tale of "good" overreaching and causing harm, thereby validating the setting's insistence on the necessity of cosmic balance, but he was just kind of this racist authoritarian who implemented a program of slavery and genocide. I think the angle here is that his "Proclamation of Manifest Virtue" wasn't so transparently full of shit in the context of the setting. Certain creatures were, in fact, evil by nature. Too much ogre blood even stops the half-ogres from being good. So if fighting an ogre when they are inevitably out and about doing their evil ogre things is good, then wouldn't preemptively stopping them from doing evil ogre things be extra good? But that's just the standard-issue apologia for genocide, so thankfully we've got the Neutral forces around to point out that just because something's Good, that doesn't make it good, and the universe needs a balance where nobody is allowed to commit genocide. But don't just say that the Gods of Good are against genocide. Because sometimes genocide is Good. That's why you need Neutrality.

Arrgh! I'm going in circles. Dragonlance's "morality" system makes my brain run in circles. It's always like this. It's always been like this. It will always be like this. I am drowning in the Discourse.

But I didn't hate this book. Not really. All of those problems are old problems. This particular volume only occasionally flirted with that nonsense (mostly at the beginning and in the history section). It's actually set after the first 100 novels (that is not a joke, that figure is from the introduction) in the Age of Mortals, and it kind of just reads like a world that is burnt out on high concepts. In the past two generations, there have been something like four near-apocalypses and now that it's time for DMs to take over for their home games, you're left with a bunch of Extremely Normal stories to tell.

The parts of the book that were being normal were actually . . . okay. The elves of Silvanesti were driven from their homeland by invading minotaurs. That's a plot. I could do something with that. Maybe some sort of drama with their rivals, the nation of Qualinesti that was founded by elves who were exiled for being less rigidly isolationist. There could be a nice irony in the reversal of roles. Oh, wait, they too were driven from their homeland by an invasion of Dark Knights under the command of the dragon Beryllinthranox?

Maybe 100 books was too many.

But jokes aside, the geography section is pretty useful. Moreso than the 1e version. There is a definite sense of there being more stories to tell, beyond the scope of canon. I'm not sure it ever really makes a case for itself as an alternative to its contemporaries, but if you want a not-quite generic fantasy world (that differs from core D&D largely in providing options for some of the most annoying characters you've ever seen), then the Dragonlance Campaign Setting provides. It could sometimes, particularly in the "Timeline of Krynn" and "Other Eras of Play" sections, have the extremely insular feeling of a long-running series that had accumulated an unmanageable number of deaths, resurrections, time-travel shenanigans, betrayals, villain redemptions, unlikely romances, carbon-copy "new generations" and definitively series-ending threats that needed to one-up the last definitively series-end threat. But I feel like, for a Dragonlance fan, that's perhaps a selling point. The reason you're picking up this book is because you want to play in the world of the novels. . . all the novels.

On a personal level, I spent a large part of the last week and a half thinking about how I could write this post and not come across as needlessly mean. I don't think I succeeded. Which is a shame, because I really am deeply ambivalent about this series. I don't like it, but I remember liking it, and in reading it again, after a 20+ year hiatus, I can see the shapes of what I used to like about it. It's a very . . . digestible setting. The color-coding of its "good" vs evil conflict is bad worldbuilding, sure, but it's easy to self-insert. You could make a buzzfeed-style quiz "Which color Robe would you wear" no problem. Everything has the superficial gloss of something you expect to see in D&D-style fantasy. The Knights of Solamnia are extremely knight-like. The elves are the perfectly memed variety of elves that approach being fey and occult mainly through the expedient of being really snotty and not talking to you. You better believe the dwarves are gruff everyman warriors. And I have to admit, the kenders' deal of constantly stealing shit and telling transparent lies when they're caught is kind of funny. It could sometimes feel like Tolkien after three or four rounds of the telephone game, but that's part of the appeal. It's a world that's easy to vibe with, even if it doesn't always make sense.

Ukss Contribution: Not going to do anything backhanded. There were a number of things that were perfectly trash fantasy - the Knights of the Lily looking extremely goth, the draconians with the fanfic ready healing saliva, the magical bard who "has the ability to recall all the stories of Krynn's past - whether the stories were true or not." And while I would say that I unironically enjoyed them, it was a chaotic trash panda sort of enjoyment. "Nom. Nom. Nom. Shovel that garbage directly into my mouth. I am a mean, cynical adult who wants to redeem the media he enjoyed at 12 years old by making it about the cringe of adolescence."

However, I have to acknowledge that Dragonlance brings out the worst in me. And aside from the eugenics and borderline-offensive theodicy, it hasn't really done anything to deserve it. So I'm going to pick something that I not only enjoyed, but also genuinely thought was cool.

When the Sivak draconians die, they reflexively shapechange into the form of the person that killed them (size and creature type permitting). Unlike the other draconians' death throes, (exploding for AoE damage or becoming a pool of weapon-dissolving acid), this doesn't seem like a particularly good move, tactically. But it is creepy as fuck. There are no rules attached to it, but I can imagine being a soldier fighting the implacable armies of Takhisis and landing a telling blow, only to see my own face stare back at me, dying on my own blade, and that would definitely stick with me for years and years after the battle. 

Shadowrun Companion (revised for 3rd 3dition)

 Ooh, goody, more Shadowrun rules. . .

No, that level of sarcasm is uncalled for.  I can't claim to be the victim here. When I bought the Shadowrun Companion, I wanted more Shadowrun rules. And even though I'm currently going through a period in my life where reading a rule-packed book is mostly a form of endurance trial, I kind of like the fact that Shadowrun is the way it is. Like, now that I'm out of the thick of it, I can maintain a certain gratitude for the existence of the Electronic Counter-Counter-Measures system or the elaborate cyberware installation mechanics. I feel a jolt of terror when I contemplate using all the rules, but then I allow myself to succumb to the thanatotic temptation and I smile an evil smile. It's something I could do. I won't. I shouldn't. But I could.

The Shadowrun Companion actually ranks pretty high on the list of useable rules expansions, probably because it's a grab-bag of topics. We get a few new systems, but since they are all for different topics, we don't get subsystems or subsystems of subsystems. It's all very manageable. And the point-buy character creation may even be a simplification of the core's priority-based character creation (the new math could potentially be fiddlier and there's more scope for choice paralysis, but technically it's one fewer step and there's no single moment where you have to preemptively compromise your character-creation wishlist). Also, the new athletics rules are completely standard for any tactical rpg and should probably have been in the core.

The only system that your players are guaranteed to despise is the State of the Art (SOTA) rules. Basically, it's trying to model the relentless march of technological progress and the related obsolescence of older technology, but it does so in a very "adversarial GM" fashion. Every so often (the book suggests somewhere in-between the two extremes of "after every adventure" and "once per in-game year") you roll on a chart to determine which category of tech has advanced the most and then the characters must spend some of their hard-earned cash as a kind of tax to keep up with the State of the Art. If they don't pay the fee, any gear they have in the affected category is reduced in rating, and they might even have to reduce their characters' related skill ratings.

And I don't know. This is like a one-two punch of things that are guaranteed to irritate me as a player. I'm potentially losing things I spent experience points on and I'm losing them to a single roll on a random chart, without any opportunity to mitigate or prevent it (aside from spending money, I guess). I'm emotionally prepared to risk my character's life in combat, to spend expendable resources like ammo or nuyen, and to even lose permanent equipment (if a dragon is picking up my car in its talons and dropping it on my head, that's not an event I relish, but it's a memorable story). But "your gun does less damage because someone in a lab somewhere invented a better gun" would just make me grumpy.

A better way to do it would be to have the SOTA give your NPC opposition higher ratings, forcing you to get new equipment to keep up. Your gun doesn't lose damage, but rather Lone Star is wearing stronger armor. Although, I can see why they didn't go that route. It would lead, inevitably to an arms race where numbers keep getting higher without changing the overall balance of power. You'd get to a point where you're wielding 20-power handguns against rating-19 body armor and it would start to feel absurd.

But then, that absurdity is exactly the sort of thing the system is meant to model, so is it really that big a deal? Maybe, maybe not.

Maybe you could handle it with something like a SOTA pool. Like the characters' karma or combat pools it would allow you to add dice to various tasks, but it can only be replenished by spending money on equipment upgrades and supplemental training. That way, it's a bonus for making a special effort to keep ahead of the curve, and the only penalty for falling behind is the lack of a reward. You wouldn't even need to have the targeted SOTA advances, because players would define the march of technology through the specific rolls they chose to spend their SOTA pool on.

Although, I would be remiss if I didn't "on the other hand" this. It's perfectly possible to reframe the SOTA rules so that, instead of representing the march of progress, they are actually a form of cyberpunk commentary on capitalism - they represent planned obsolescence, lack of right-to-repair, and encroaching enshitification. Like, "my gun works worse because someone invented a better gun" is an aggravating bit of game design, but "my gun works worse because the manufacturer forced a firmware update to disable certain features in order to sell me a new, nigh-identical gun" is . . . still aggravating, but at least it's satirically aggravating.

It doesn't come up often, since I stopped blogging about video games, but I absolutely adore the survival-crafting genre and sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have an urban survival-crafting game based on cyberpunk themes that was absolutely brutal about capitalist rent-seeking, forcing you to marshal all of your skills just to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. My current thinking is that such a game would be immensely depressing if it was good, and immensely offensive if it was bad ("I call it 'Homelessness Simulator'"). And neither of those things is particularly good for a tabletop roleplaying game, so maybe it would just be for the best to not use the SOTA rules at all.

The Shadowrun Companion is also Shadowrun's answer to a gamemaster's guide. It has advice on dealing with problem players. There are instructions for structuring adventures. Theme is briefly addressed. It's all a little basic, but fine. Definitely contributes to the vibe that this book is mostly 130 pages that got cut from the core, but that's not such a bad thing to be. Not everything can be Mage 20th Anniversary Edition (nor should it, yikes!).

Overall . . . I am content. At peace, even. There are parts I could object to. Sometimes it leans a bit too much into the adverarial-gm mode. If you play a ghoul, you have to make a check to survive character creation. Elves are inexplicably expensive in terms of character points. It suggests that people with albinism and the Irish are inherently magical. On a list of questions meant to help you flesh out your character's background, it asks "Does your character have an ethnic background?" ("Nope. I have no ethnicity whatsoever. I am a meat popsicle.") But in general, I feel like this book brings value to the game.

Ukss Contribution: Shapeshifters are animals that turn into humans, not humans that turn into animals. I think this is a concept worth exploring.

Arcana Unearthed

Yeah. I guess you could use this book in place of the D&D 3rd edition Player's Handbook. That's what Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed (Monte Cook) promised on the back cover - "What if there were a whole new player's handbook, presented just like the original, but with different character classes, races, skills, feats, and spells?" 

And I can definitely answer that hypothetical. The classes would be all right. The races would be pretty good. The skills, feats, and spells would be largely the same, with a few newcomers, but mostly just subtle tweaks with new names. But it would all be perfectly workable. You could pick up this book in lieu of the PHB and have a perfectly functional fantasy roleplaying game. Mission accomplished, Mr. Cook.

The temptation in these situations is to pit the books against each other. "Okay, you've acknowledged that both can get the job done, but which is better?" But I think in this case, that's a fruitless approach. Arcana Unearthed doesn't appear to be coming onto the Variant Corebook scene with any particular axe to grind. It's not trying to work in a different genre, or to revolutionize D&D's basic gameplay loop (and, in fact, still uses the standard Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual), or even to fix any broken rules or bad mechanical assumptions. It's just different for the sake of being different. Sometimes obnoxiously so (The D&D spell "Fly" is listed here as "Flight" and there are enough differences between the two to justify being different spells, but it's also clear that Flight was created by taking the Fly spell from the SRD and substituting one number and one sentence while leaving the rest of the text untouched), but never in a way that implies the original core book was doing anything wrong.

I suppose the magic system is overall improved. Arcana Unearthed eliminated the arcane/divine split, though only the Witch class does anything interesting with the new combined spell list. The big innovation is a variant of Vancian casting that would later become the default in D&D 5th edition - you ready a certain number of spells in advance and then you have an entirely separate pool of spell slots that you can use to cast any of your readied spells. It was enough to send me running to the credits page of the 5e PHB (he's on there, but it's unclear what degree of influence his ideas had on the final design). It solves one of my main problems with 3.X prepared casters - having to second-guess the DM while determining your spell loadout - but I still can't shake the feeling that getting 8th and 9th level spells is dramatically better than anything any other class gets, and even low-level casters have enough utility to crowd other classes out of their own niches.

However, I'm not sure how much that actually matters in the context of Arcana Unearthed as a whole. Because the class list doesn't have a designated Rogue class. The closest thing is the Unfettered, who lean into the "swashbuckler" interpretation of the class. And they get half the skill points, a weaker sneak attack, and no automatic stealth/infiltration utility (instead, many of the best rogue features got changed into feats, which the Unfettered has no special access to).

There is another skill-focused class, the Akashic, which gets 8 skill points per level and has every skill on its class list. They could be built like rogues, but it would be a flavor clash (their deal is that they access the world's collective memory to give themselves access to skills and information they would otherwise have no way of learning).

So it's not as clear a case of the casters stepping on the non-casters' toes. The toes in question have largely been withdrawn. However, I can't really call that a triumph of design, because you've still got characters getting the equivalent of 5th-7th level spells, once per day, at a level where the casters are getting access to things like Greater Dominate and Immortality. 

However, if you ban the Greenbond and Magister and just focus on the non-casters and 3/4 casters (generally, they have mid-BAB and cap out at 7th-level spells), then you get a system that is not quite a well-balanced C-tier-only experience, but which gets closer than anything in 3.X before or since.

On the balance, I quite liked Arcana Unearthed. It somehow does something different with the "D&D fantasy" genre without ever actually moving the needle on the genre even a little bit away from the center. The biggest change in flavor comes from its unconventional race lineup - you can play a giant or a sprite or a lion-person or a jackal-person . . . among others. And just the novelty of not having any of the PHB alumni (humans notwithstanding) was enough to avoid some of the most tired worldbuilding tropes, but you've still got ancient empires, mysterious ruins, and high-level magic users getting into shenanigans. Like I said earlier, I'm not ready to call it better, but I can give it credit for being distinct.

I think I'd have a stronger opinion about this book if I'd bothered to pick up The Diamond Throne campaign setting. Throughout the lore-heavy early chapters (and a bit in the magic chapter), there were numerous intimations of a well-worked-out world that, due to the Variant Player's Handbook format, was being kept tantalizingly out of reach. And the more I think about it, the more I think that all the Diamond Throne stuff should have been in one volume that used the regular PHB in an irregular way. Despite the blurb on the back, Arcana Unearthed makes a much stronger case for itself as a supplement than it does as a new core book.

Ukss Contribution: I am, in general, pretty down on this book's habit of taking a PHB spell, tweaking the rules slightly, and then renaming the spell to something that is not covered by the SRD. However, I did enjoy one of them. Mordenkainen's Sword became the nearly word-for-word identical MASSIVE SWORD (I thought it deserved to be in all caps).

Which just goes to show what a difference a single word can make. The Ukss version will probably play up the "massive" a bit more, but, yeah, I can picture it in my head - a sorcerer, confronted by their enemies, shouting, "Back off, or else I'm gonna summon a MASSIVE SWORD!" I can dig it.

(Shadowrun) Man and Machine: Cyberware

There are certain risks that I knew I would be subjecting myself to when I started this project. Certain experiences that could very well be anticipated as unpleasant, but necessary. So I really should not be coming at this like some kind of martyr. I knew what I was getting into.

But man, these Shadowrun rules expansions are going to kill me.

I suppose Man and Machine: Cyberware was a bit smoother than Rigger 2, probably because I find the subject matter - cybernetic implants for illicit, off-the-books mercenaries - to be slightly more interesting. But then I get to stretches like the new Implant Stress rules, where it implies that every single damage roll in the game should have a new additional step where you compare the die result to the attack's final adjusted damage total in order to determine whether you need to roll on a chart and apply location-based wound effects (which can render specific, individual pieces of cyberware inoperable), and I wonder "what has my life become?"

I've confessed in the past that there's a part of me that's tempted to run one of these ultra-granular games, complete with individual limb damage, a seatbelt-remembering minigame, and daily protein consumption tracking, and this book does an admirable job of bringing that fever-dream to reality. However, when I think about what I want from a Shadowrun game specifically, I'm not sure that punishing reckless gunplay and making the magic users constantly fear the possibility of losing their schtick is really a part of the picture. I mean, there is literally a piece of equipment in this game where if you have it and fail the wrong roll, your character gets leukemia. There's a context where that is hilarious, but it's not "sci-fi/fantasy heist capers."

All-in-all, I cannot bring myself to recommend this book's rules expansions. They mainly serve to create an environment where subjecting yourself to invasive, unnecessary, elective surgery is a total pain in the ass, when, in reality, all I've ever asked of a cyberware book is "let me be big, scary robot man plz."

Luckily, Man and Machine: Cyberware is not just a rules expansion, it's also an equipment book and in that latter role, it serves admirably. Some of the new cyberware is questionable - why would you install a flashlight in your eye-socket when you can just carry a flashlight. Some of it is a little goofy - extendable limbs is just some straight-ass Inspector Gadget shit. But there was some solid stuff here. You can get a machine implanted in your inner ear that is so effective at improving your balance that you need to re-learn how to drop prone voluntarily. The Data Filter - which temporarily shuts down its owner's ability to form new long-term memories and is mostly installed involuntarily on various servants and administrative assistants who don't need to be remembering their employer's meetings - is an effective bit of cyberpunk horror and a good excuse to kick off any number of plots, even if it's an unlikely choice for PCs. When I wasn't being drowned in new rules, I was having fun.

The strangest thing, overall, about this book has got to be the conspicuous absence of transhuman ideology. I'd say it was a generational thing, but transhumanism has been a thing since at least the 50s, and in any event this book was only 3 years prior to GURPS: Transhuman Space, so it's likely either an oversight or an intentional omission. I'm not sure it's a theme the game needs, per se. It might interfere with the punk elements to have both the transhumanist enthusiastic objectification of the body and the capitalist coerced objectification of the body existing in the same context. However, the absence of a positive motivation towards transformation did make me wonder, on multiple occasions, why anyone would be doing this to themselves. Maybe the existence of smart phones has made me jaded, but I just can't imagine wanting to get part of your skull removed to allow yourself to send faxes with your mind. Not when there's a handy pocket-sized device that does it for me.

I don't necessarily think it's a significant flaw - having chrome body parts is just a part of the overall genre aesthetic and would probably need to be there even if they were merely superficial - but I do think that maybe a lack of ideological drive might have negatively influenced the curation of the book's cyberware. Like maybe, if you realized that giving a person entirely novel senses would change their most fundamental perceptions of reality and subsequently have knock-on effects on how they chose to exist within the world, and if you realized that this change could be an end in itself, and you wrote your fiction around the idea that society was rapidly transforming under the weight of a new and unprecedented epistemological diversity, then maybe you'd get more heady, thought-provoking stuff like the Data Filter and less silly stuff like Cyberskates.

Which is not to say I'm entirely down on whimsy. A character who, faced with the Faustian power of unlimited body modification, chose to get integrated roller skates installed into their feet, can be fun and funny and challenging. The objectification of flesh could lead to the triviality of flesh, making the fact that Cyberskates are kind of a joke into a theme. It's just that I'm pretty sure that's not what Man and Machine: Cyberware is trying to do.

I can have this confidence because of the Cybermancy chapter. The premise behind cybermancy is that corporate engineers, surgeons, and sorcerers have developed a process in which they load down a victim with so much cyberware that their biological body would die without the application of foul necromantic rituals that bind the soul to a terrible prison of cold steel and cancerous, subjugated flesh. These cyberzombies rank as the corps' ultimate weapons and shock-troops, but they must be fed a continuous supply of drugs, alchemical reagents, and electronically-induced memories of their human existence, lest they lose the will to live and rot away in a melancholic yearning for the freedom of the grave.  And the bulk of the chapter is devoted to complex rules that assume the PCs will want to become one.

It's not my place to yuck anyone's yum, but that is a thematic whiff if ever there was one. On the one hand, kudos to Shadowrun for not making a major setting element "NPC-only," but on the other hand, get yourself sorted out, Shadowrun. Like, really.

Overall, I did not especially enjoy reading Man and Machine: Cyberware, but I can respect it as the sort of book that wasn't really meant to be enjoyed. I guess I can use the equipment and some of the rules and supply my own themes as a GM.

Ukss Contribution: Carcerands, a pharmaceutical technology that creates a kind of molecular sheath around toxic or medicinal substances. The body gradually breaks down the carcerand and only then is it subject to the substance inside. This allows for all sorts of shenanigans, my favorite of which is giving someone a delayed-action poison and then blackmailing them with the antidote. It's something I would never do to a player as a GM, but it's a great start to a plot. Like maybe Mr. Johnson was on the receiving end and rather than submit to the blackmail, hires the players to steal the antidote. 

I just think it's a great thing for a setting to have in its back pocket. 

Wildscape

 Before I started reading Wildscape (Mike Mearls) I was filled with a familiar dread - was this book going to explain weather to me? It's a well that has been visited many times, by many different rpgs. You're imagining a place, places often have weather, so you gotta imagine the weather too. Has anyone ever taught you how to imagine the weather? Maybe we can write an rpg supplement about that.

(And I realize I'm being something of a hypocrite here, explaining the practice of explaining weather, and then writing a parenthetical aside, explaining that, but the difference is that I'm being a cute little troll, who has never in his life done anything wrong).

However, upon actually reading the book, I am relieved to relate that Wildscape only explains the weather a little bit. There's a bunch of random tables for generating it, and those tables have little paragraphs explaining what the tables are for, but that's the extent of it. Most of this book is devoted to what the Wilderness Survival Guide from AD&D 1st edition should have been - rules for terrain hazards and fantastical environmental conditions. Each chapter is devoted to a different biome (desert, forest, arctic, etc) and is split evenly between mundane stuff like what DC Strength check you need to roll if you fall in a mud-hole (it depends on how deep the hole is) and magical stuff like the long-term effects of travelling through the blasted ruins of an elder civilization that was smote by the gods for its hubris (a minor, but cumulative penalty to all checks and a narrative effect of persistent bad luck).

Conceptually, it has the same basic problem as City Works - it's more of the DMG, the least essential of the three core books - but Wildscape has the advantage of being full of novel ideas. It's an entertaining read even if it undermines itself a couple of times when Mearls acts the buzzkill and warns us not to use all the ideas in the same campaign setting, because apparently "over-the-top features are memorable but using them too often can turn your campaign world into a mishmash of strange lands." 

To that, of course, I say "bah!" 

I mean, restraint has its place, but I see it more as a matter of picking elements that work well together and support your campaign's themes and genre aesthetics. It's good to have more options than I'd want to use, but I think "don't use too many colors" is unnuanced advice, and a poor explanation of the advantages of having a large palette.

Then again, I'm not the one who went on to be lead designer for D&D 5th edition, am I? (And even I don't know whether I meant to be humble or sarcastic just now).

Overall, I liked this book quite a bit and unlike its companion volume, that "like" is not the least bit qualified or whimsical. It's full of ideas that I would love to steal - a volcanic mountain that gets its heat from a slumbering dragon, a desert made up of tiny fragments of semi-precious gems, towering grasslands where dinosaurs roam free, a mountain range at the top of the world, whose peaks scrape against the dome of the sky and create extraplanar gates - and its only real flaw is that it's still basically a pre-game book. I'd be more likely to reference it than City Works, but I'd rather just copy its rules into my prep notes than carry it around.

I will close out this post by saying I'm still baffled that this book got made at all. I really don't understand FFG's strategy of releasing these unglamorous workhorse books about broad, abstract subjects aimed purely at GMs. This one proved to be worth it, but the only reason I ever found that out is because I saw it on a bookshelf 20 years after its release and said, "fuck it, it's only 5 dollars." Were people really that hungry for d20 content back then? And if so, why not just print more copies of Grimm (the book previewed at the end of Wildscape which continues what I can only assume is a series tradition of using these books to advertise more interesting books)?

Then again, I'm not the who went on to be bought out by Asmodee, so what do I know? (My price is 200k, btw, in case anyone's interested).

Ukss Contribution: Lots of choices this time. Mirror ice, that's so shiny it reflects spells? The brass dragon that's so starved for conversation it built a luxury resort at a desert oasis? Ghouls in underground ruins who create pit traps to capture surface-dwellers? This is a book that throws a lot at the wall, just to see if it will stick, and I love it for that.

However, I think I'm going to go with the giant grass. Ukss already has dinosaurs, so giving them some memorable flora to frolic around in is a no-brainer.

(Shadowrun) New Seattle

Aw, man, I was setting such a good pace in June, then politics happened and now I'm most of the way through July and I've only finished my second book for the month. It's a real shame, because New Seattle (Stephen Kenson) is exactly the sort of book that I'd normally finish in the space of a day. It's a guide to Shadowrun's signature setting that rapidly moves from subject to subject, most of which are pretty interesting. We've got Matchsticks, an old-fashioned jazz nightclub for our futuristic cyberpunk/fantasy setting? Great, I can read a paragraph about that. Or the Scatterbrains, the obligatory clown-themed gang of psychopaths? Yeah, sure, let's hear what the Shadowland comments section has to say about that (mostly, it's pretty predictable, but the suggestion that they get along so well with the Kabuki Ronin due to their shared love of whiteface is going to live rent free in my brain).

New Seattle was a bit of a challenge for me, as a long-time Shadowrun fan because it summarized, but did not advance the game's metaplot. Why am I getting a synopsis of Bug City in this book set halfway across the country? Did something new happen? Is there some Seattle-specific angle I'm missing?  No? It's just an early 3e setting book getting everyone on the same page? I can live with that, but I pay for these books so other people can get lost in the sauce, so maybe try to step up your game WizKids.

No, wait, what am I saying? I actually do not need new metaplot with every title. What I am, in fact, looking for in a city-centric setting book is information that allows me to run games set in that city. And by that metric, New Seattle has its highs and lows. The "History" chapter was largely unnecessary, but the "Welcome to Seattle" chapter had a ton of useful and oft-overlooked specifics - weather patterns, local tv stations, a list of chain restaurants and department stores. I wish it was twice as long and just super condescending. I normally dislike when an rpg book over-explains some basic concept, but even though I already know what a fast-food restaurant is, I'd love to know exactly how that has failed to prepare me for a cyberpunk/fantasy fast-food restaurant. Especially in a city-book, the minute difference between "the good Denny's" and "the sketchy Denny's" is exactly the sort of local savoir-faire that makes a place feel lived-in.

Though let me rein myself in a little bit. I'm not going to start criticizing a book for failing to adopt an untested experimental format (though feel free to picture me standing on a rooftop, screaming into a thunderstorm, "'The street finds its own uses for things,' means that a cyberpunk book should be 90% devoted to cultural, intellectual, and literal paths of desire!"). I do, however, feel like New Seattle, more than any other Shadowrun book I've read so far, lives and dies by the strength of its Shadowland comments. Sometimes the main text will blandly describe a building and the comments will be "yeah, I heard that place contains valuable items a rival megacorporation might want to hire someone to steal" and it's like, I guess technically that's useful information. I'm not going to say its unwelcome or pretend that if the book had just stopped at the building description I would not be complaining about how it didn't present me with any plot hooks. But then, some other sections will have comments along the lines of "oh, yeah, that bar is absolutely riddled with shapeshifters" or they'll just casually ruin some dude's life by outing him as an undercover cop and as unrealistic as it is, I kind of wish they could all be like that.

Overall, I really liked New Seattle. It didn't give me any new gossip, of the sort I love to rant about, but it was on the upper half of the usefulness curve. The last twelve pages were nothing but a long list of no-context business names, accompanies by meaningless addresses and micro-descriptions, and as a longtime GM, it brought a tear of gratitude to my eye. I may not get any particular pleasure from reading that McKuen's Scrap and Salvage Yard is on 3rd Avenue and Madison Street and "A continual eyesore amid the splendor of downtown, but an excellent source of parts," but I just know that a smartass player is going to ask me for those kinds of details. And really, providing a quick answer to the sort of questions you'd never think to ask is the highest use to which an rpg setting book can aspire.

Ukss Contribution: Seattle's fire control services are contracted to a private company that also sells fire insurance. Though it's not technically part of the contract (the company is paid by the city, from tax revenue, and not directly by individuals), people who have insurance with the company have a higher priority than the uninsured. It's somehow the most cyberpunk detail in the entire book and also a reference to one of the world's oldest protection rackets, which is pretty much the sweet spot for the genre and a great bit of worldbuilding that I'd love to riff on.

City Works

The fascinating thing about City Works (Mike Mearls) is how completely boring it is. This here is a book written by a future Head of All D&D, with the infinite possibilities of the Open Game License, and it's just dull as hell.

That's not necessarily a huge fault in a utilitarian rpg supplement, but it makes me curious about the early 2000s' d20 ecology. Some things, like Blue Rose or Dragonstar make sense to me as passion projects. Wizards of the Coast threw open the gates of the kingdom, allowed 3rd parties to make whatever they wanted, and that was an opportunity - to address a need, to fulfill a wish, to eliminate a frustration. And oftentimes, even the "bloat" was about something (if only a gratuitous desire for MOAR OF MY FAVORITE THING).

And then you have . . . this. Not a bad book, by any means, but . . . who asked for it? What commercial or creative opportunity did Fantasy Flight Games see that justified its existence? Hell, what was I, the reader, hoping to gain when I picked this up?

In my case, at least, it was easy. Sometimes I just wander into my FLGS, walk over to the rpg shelf, and buy the most discounted thing I can find (in fact, I did exactly that thing just the other day when I got a copy of SLA Industries for 10$ . . . I look forward to finding out what I bought in another few months or so). However, that's a fucking trivial motive. It sheds no light at all onto City Works as a book. In fact, I am clearly wasting everyone's time be even bringing it up . . .

Anyways. I could at least put myself into the hypothetical shoes of a hypothetical customer, c. 2003. "Oh, look, here's City Works, by Mike Mearls . . . a name I've never heard before. . . Oh, but it's been published by Fantasy Flight Games. I know them from such titles as Dragonstar and Midnight, I wonder what fascinating genre twist they're cooking up next. I'm sure this 'definitive d20 system resource for designing and running exciting adventures and campaigns in fantasy cities' will live up to the high standards they've set for themselves. Certainly, it will be worth the 24.95 MSRP, which is just 5 dollars less than the Player's Handbook itself."

And look, I don't want to call hypothetical me a hypothetical chump, but it would have been a bad decision, and I find it hard to believe that there were enough people making enough bad decisions to justify FFG's business strategy.

I should probably unpack that, though. What I mean here is that City Works would have been a bad purchasing decision, not necessarily that City Works is a bad book. I can, from time to time, be a bit whimsical in my use of value-judgement words like "good" or "classic" or "trash" or "bad." Sometimes, when I say a book is "bad" I mean "it's fundamentally flawed, but in an interesting way" (like Planescape or Mage: the Ascension) and sometimes I mean it's just ineptly made (eh, I don't feel like calling anyone else out today, but I'm sure an archive binge would turn up a couple). City Works is neither of those things.  It is "good."

Scare quotes because I'm using that word whimsically as well. It's good in the sense that I can read it and at no point am I going "whoa, how did this clown con his way into the job at WotC?" I get it. This is an effective audition for the role of Primate of All DMs. Mr Mearls is a skilled communicator who gives relevant, actionable GMing advice, his mechanics for things like rooftop chases and the spread of plague are reasonable, and his custom classes are all comfortably tier 4 (i.e. the tier closest to what you imagine fantasy adventurers to be like). I have my nitpicks with this book - it warns us against overusing the stunt system, lest our games lose focus on attacks and spells in favor of wild use of the scenery, which strikes me as the sort of "problem" I'd love to have - but I have no major complaints. It is a perfectly fine GM book.

Which is why it would have been such a mistake to purchase at full price, and why it's so baffling it got the green light at all. I once described the 3.5 DMG as "the quintessential book you read exactly once and then intermittently reference for all the rest of time" and City Works is exactly the same way, except that you're never going to reference it. There are parts you would reference, if they were in the DMG, but you're not going to lug an extra book to your game, or even make an extra trip to the bookshelf. It's good, but it's not that good.

Which really only leaves the random city creation rules as a reason to use City Works at all. I think they'd be fun to use once or twice, just as a goofy little project, but the cities they create are just kind of there. Like, how useful is it, exactly, to have a precise count of residential blocks in your fantasy city? Maybe there's a niche for "I want a highly detailed map, but I don't want to just bullshit it," but it strikes me as a basic weakness that DMs are expected to provide the special sauce on their own. You can create potentially thousands of technically distinct city maps, but nothing about them is distinctive or memorable. And maybe it's just that "making the game memorable" is supposed to be the DM's responsibility, but then what am I buying the book for?

I think a better approach would have been to incorporate a life-path system that tied into the history and politics stuff of the previous chapter, add an additional "wild card" table full of purely fantasy nonsense (i.e. "the city was built around a magical spring whose waters cure leprosy"), and actually give your d100 tables something close to 100 entries each (a lot of these were clearly made with another die type in mind, with exactly 10 entries that each spanned 10 percentage points or 20 entries that stepped up 5 points at a time). I feel like if the streets, blocks, and districts were associated with particular historical or political events, then that would add some sorely needed life to your randomly-generated city maps.

Overall, it's a bit of a stretch to say I "liked" City Works, but I didn't exactly dislike it either. At the end of the day, it's a GM book, and as necessary as those might be for educating and informing GMs, they're always at least one step removed from the things that make a game exciting. Running a game as a GM involves talking about the game, but preparing someone to be a GM involves talking about talking about the game, and that can't help but be at least a little bit dull. This book is no more worthy of complaint than White Wolf's "Theme" and "Mood" sections . . . but hey, I'll complain about those all day long, you have no idea. 

Ukss Contribution: This book does have one major, hilarious flaw however. The last 15 pages are just a preview of Fantasy Flight Games upcoming book "Steam and Sorcery" and I can't quite figure it out. Why would you do this? End your book with an excerpt from a much better book. Why couldn't I have found that book at my FLGS instead?  Are the rpg gods testing me?

Most of my favorite things from this book are actually from that preview section (one suggestion - a campaign setting where a high-tech kingdom of werewolves use giant adamantine chains to hold the moon in place, for infinite power), but I feel like picking something from that would be cheating. It's technically something I read in this physical volume, but it's not really part of City Works, you know.

Instead, I'll go with something that caught my eye for being a refreshing breeze of weirdness in an otherwise pretty staid history section - "The armory is the frequent target of robberies, while some folk use it to dispose of murder weapons or temporarily hide magic items. Sometimes, thieves use it to transfer stolen goods. One crook deposits the item, while his customer uses a disguise to later claim it."

This revolving-door armory genuinely delights me. I keep contemplating it, and I keep coming back to the thought, "that's the opposite of how armories are supposed to work. It'd have to be a pretty strange city to have something like that."

Lucky for me, then, that "strange" is right in my wheelhouse.