(Scion 2e) Demigod

How much do I deserve to be pandered to? Or, at the very least, how much pandering can I reasonably request before I start to sound ungrateful? Those are the questions at the forefront of my mind as I try to come up with a coherent reaction to Scion: Demigod (2e).

Because what I want from the demigod book is actually pretty simple - divine-themed superheroes in the power tier between street-level and cosmic. And when I ask myself whether Scion: Demigod delivered on that, my honest answer is "yeah, on page 187 of Scion: Hero, where it describes Feats of Scale." It's finally time to play a character that can dropkick the Statue of Liberty or sway multitudes with a speech and that's represented by a certain number on my character sheet going from 1 or 2 to 3 or 4. Demigods don't need new powers because the Scale system is robust enough that they can just use their old powers . . . more.

Yeah, okay, but I was expecting a bunch of cool new Boons, and I'm kind of disappointed (the new Knacks were pretty good, but I can't get over my distaste for Knack slots and swapping out your active Knacks). Tell me how to inundate a small town with a thunderstorm, damnit! I am a little baby and remembering to invoke a Feat of Scale through one of my Legendary Titles while using a Purview Marvel is just too many steps for me.

And speaking of too many steps, the new Demigod mechanic: Dominion Boons. So, technically, there are new Boons in this book, and they are universally underwhelming in their outlines, but may in fact be good if they're invoked judiciously enough to shape the overall tenor of the game. The way they work is you spend two Boons (remember you get precisely one per Legend rating, and it's unclear whether you can retrain your existing Boons or whether you just have to bank the Boon you get at Legend 5 to unlock your first Dominion at Legend 6) and you get sort of a magical aura related to a particular purview. This allows you to perform minor (read: "not mechanically helpful") miracles for free and for your allies to benefit from extra options for spending their excess successes (called "stunts" in Scion jargon - i.e. when you make a melee attack roll, you can spend one of the roll's successes to knock your down or, if your friend has the Darkness Dominon active, you can spend 2 successes to steal the target's dreams and get the equivalent of a point of armor for the rest of the scene).

I mean, I kind of get it. You're a magical being, and that magic is spilling out into the world around you, manifesting through casual gestures and the smoothing of mundane details. That's what the Dominion aura does - ensures that you are surrounded by manifestations of your divine power, and it's not really that big a deal to you because it doesn't require resources to maintain. However, I have two nitpicks.

Nitpick the first: stunts aren't really that good. I mean, they're great as a mechanical innovation of the Storypath system. Your characters will be using stunts all the time and every single time they're going to be like, "oh, sweet, a stunt." But extra successes are not going to be so abundant that spending 3 successes to benefit from the Scion of Dionysius' Bacchanal Dominion Stunt is going to be anything but a niche move (oh, I only rolled 2 extra successes on that Encourage Behavior roll, I guess I'll stick with the universally useful Enhanced, Complicated, and Difficult stunts). Most of the Dominion stunts are pretty cool, but they're another thing to remember and another thing to compete for your limited successes.

Nitpick the second: when you enable Dominion Stunts, that's your magic, but it's your friends who are using the magic. I'm so in touch with the universal concept of Death that people standing nearby me can animate dead corpses as zombies. If my Dominion is Epic Strength, then my allies get the ability to toss around cars. That seems a little weird. I mean, sure, if my concept for the character is just "a strong god" rather than "the god of Strength" then I don't have to take Epic Strength as a Dominion. And I'm in control of what stunts get handed out, so I could easily avoid my Demigod of Death being necromancy patient 0 by just, you know not enabling necromancy, but sometimes the Dominion mechanics feel like they're diluting the characters' theme. You're the Lord of Winter and you can make people as unbothered by the cold as you are - perfectly fine. Or you can give people the power to decide to be as unbothered by the cold as you are, if they're willing to make the effort. Functionally very similar, but I can't help feeling that the person who has the power should be the one with the agency.

Still, I don't dislike Dominions as a mechanic. They do definitely add something and I can see how they could shape a campaign's feel. I'm not sure they're worth two whole boons, or even just one. They could probably stand to be baked directly into the Legend progression chart (the main benefit to giving them a cost seems to be that it allows for the option of not having one), but it makes sense that a player would want one (or two, if they're willing to go the entire Demigod tier without buying any more Boons). There's a part of me that's a little salty that we got Dominions instead of larger-scale Demigod Boons, but I just have to calm myself and remember that the larger scale of Demigod games is baked into the foundational logic of the system. I don't need the book to explicitly remind me that I can do bigger, cooler stuff now.

Except I kind of do. Just on an emotional level. Which brings us back to the question of pandering. I've probably never felt less pandered to than I have when reading this book. Open with the storytelling advice chapter? Why the fuck not? Open the storytelling advice chapter with an offputting and highly specific campaign arc that ties your mechanical progression to a series of five predetermined literary themes in the apparent aim of making this squad-based game of modern-day occult action into a solitary, introspective look at the nature of divinity? Yeah, sure. (I mean, some kind of alarm must have sounded when you were commissioning the interstitial fiction about the signature character Brigitte de la Croix and the plot is about how she has to say goodbye to all her friends because the journey to apotheosis is one that can only be completed alone).

Focusing the first part of the apotheosis arc on the supposition that you are on the path to usurp your divine parent and recapitulate their defining myths - that is probably a step too far. I mean, the text later swings back around and advances the much more palatable notion that you'll forge your own destiny and become an entirely new god, but it's weird that this is the afterthought. Right? Like, I'm not some kind of pervert coming into this book with the idea that it would be more team-based, divine-themed superhero action, just on a bigger scale. I didn't really need to break down Legend levels 4-8 into five thematic steps: The Second Calling, the Parting, the Threshold, the Descent, and the Theophany. I was content with: The ass-kicking, the ass-kicking in the underworld, the monument drop-kicking, the more bigger ass-kicking and the token philosophy episode. And even if I wasn't, why would I want to usurp my divine parent? Like, the whole reason I chose them as a parent is because I liked them in the role of a patron or an antagonist, what with the being of a whole separate person and all as parents and children usually are, and even to the extent that I might want their job, I've probably become at least somewhat attached to my personal brand. 

It's weird that this is a thing. And it's even weirder that it's the first thing that book decides to do. The book as a whole isn't bad, and I wouldn't even say that it's bad that this material exists, but it's not what I expected, and it's not what I wanted, and at times it made me feel like I accidentally picked up the wrong book by mistake. But maybe it's okay that I didn't get exactly what I wanted, because what I wanted was embarrassingly basic - 1st edition's Demigod book, but with mechanics that actually worked. This is a unique thing with a unique point of view. It challenged rather than pandered and it made me think about the middle chapter of a Scion game in a new way. I grudingly respect it.

Ukss Contributions: One of the "casual miracles" of the Order Purview is "Impel animals to obey human laws (squirrels obey traffic Do Not Walk signs, rats vacate a building after closing time, etc.)" - it does not yet make much sense to me as a setting conceit, but it's an adorable and hilarious image, so I'm going to figure out a way to make it work.

(Dark Sun) Defilers and Preservers: The Wizards of Athas

As I get older, it becomes harder and harder to resist the urge to become a reactionary crank. "This isn't how they did it in my day," I'll think, and the only thing that will stop me from looking like a ridiculous old person is my ability to preemptively remember that my day has passed. The new generation is doing things in a new way, and they are not misusing the legacy of my youth, they are merely adapting it to needs I could scarcely have imagined. That is the fate of all things that were built to last.

Where this becomes surreal is when your hobby is reading decades-old roleplaying books and you have the exact same emotional response to changes that have long-since been settled. "Why-oh-why have they absolutely butchered the setting's backstory. Can't this 27-year-old book go back and recapture the magic I felt when I first read its 31-year-old prequel?"

Which is to say, Defilers and Preservers: The Wizards of Athas, by Nicky Rea, has a "history of magic" section that summarizes the 1st edition metaplot (at least as far as arcane magic is concerned), and it kind of bums me out, seeing it all in one place. I think it's because of how impressed I was by the original boxed set's restraint. It had a melancholy vibe to it - "as far as anyone remembers, this is the way things have always been, though, of course, we can see the scars that prove otherwise." Here, we learn that history has a protagonist, his name is Rajaat, and the reason things suck is because Rajaat sucks. He invented both preserving and defiling magic and taught defiling to his secret, evil students in order to further his goal of global genocide. The ensuing war lasted so long and used so much defiling magic that Athas was rendered barren. Also, at various points in its history, people drained magical energy from the sun, turning it from blue to yellow to its current-day red.

At the risk of being a grump, none of this really called out for an explanation. I just assumed that the world was barren because the ancients used it up, that the sun was red because it was impossibly old. Call it a lack of intellectual curiosity, if you will, but I was perfectly willing to accept the status quo. I only really needed to know how the PCs were going to change it.

That's a lot to lay on a 96-page class-focused supplement, though. Really, the contentious part was when TSR decided that Athas was going to have a backstory that would be fleshed out in various adventure modules and tie-in novels. I can't blame Defilers and Preservers: The Wizards of Athas for summing it up.

Nor can I blame it for the new cosmology. Presumably it followed the same trajectory from novels to revised boxed set to the supplement on my shelf, and it is only my relative lack of investment in the line that has led me to first encounter it here. Nonetheless - the Gray? The Black? I won't say I hate that these demiplanes are so blandly named, because that's pretty close to my standard naming aesthetic. What I will say, however, is that they are transparently a hack to keep Planescape out of Dark Sun. The Gray "separates Athas from the Astral and the Ethereal, making planar travel difficult." Also, it's where ghosts are, and it would be completely unnecessary if you didn't insist that all the TSR settings had to share a single over-arching meta-setting (actually, they share two, and we also learn that Athas' crystal sphere is similarly impenetrable to normal spelljammers).

The hardest part of reading this book was trying to put all of my inane, old-man complaints to the side so I could consider the book on its own. What would it be like to come into this without baggage or expectations, simply as a wizard enthusiast looking for a new variation on their favorite class?

I would say that it's the third-best wizard book in all of AD&D, but with, like, huge gaps between 2nd and 3rd and between 3rd and 4th. It fundamentally gets the point of kits, unlike The Complete Wizards Handbook or The Will and the Way, but it doesn't quite have the sense of whimsy and inventiveness that make up the best kit selections. Most of the kits are social roles like "arena wizard" or "tribal wizard," that make sense for the setting, but are otherwise pretty straightforward. Then there are a few like the Cerulean Wizard, the Shadow Wizard, and the Necromancer which fiddle with energy sources but don't dramatically change things up.

Two kits deserve special mention, though. The Restorationist is bland, but functional, being a kind of preserver+ that uses plant magic to reverse ecological damage to Athas. A valid niche that can be contrasted with a preserver that's just trying to get along. But then you've got the Exterminator, which is a defiler who is not just careless, but is actively waging a war against all plant life. It's baffling, even when you consider that someone might have a grudge against dangerously mutated carnivorous plants. It only really makes sense as forced symmetry. If preservers can get a kit that's more preserver than preserver, why can't defilers get their own version of defiler+? (Because it's silly, that's why.)

The rest of the book is mostly what you'd expect. A few new Proficiencies to compete for your already-limited slots, more spells, and the decision to reprint only the wizards' chapter of Dragon Kings. All very useful if you want to play a wizard in a revised-era Dark Sun, but nothing that's going to break through the jaded exterior of a grognard who's determined not to enjoy something new.

Final verdict - my opinion is worse than useless. Objectively, this is a well-made book with a lot of potential to spark the imagination. But it's not my version of Dark Sun, so I couldn't help sulking about it.

Ukss Contribution: I did like some of the new spells, though. My favorite was "Cooling Canopy." The wizard summons a small cloud to hover over their head and shelter them from the harsh desert sun. Pure flavor for any game that does not have a dedicated sunstroke system (note: revised boxed set might), but it's so cute an image that I don't even care. Casual cloud parasols as low-end weather magic is absolutely something I can get behind.

Monster Ambulance

 Where to get it: drivethrurpg

The thing I enjoy most about reading a new Colin Fredericks rpg is that I never have to wonder "why does this exist" or "what's the point." It's always very quickly obvious that I'm seeing something with a unique point of view and a strong central thesis. Sufficiently Advanced was about far-future sci-fi, where technology had grown so powerful that virtually anything was possible. Sorcerously Advanced was that, but with magic (and somehow, despite that 100% accurate description, managed also to be better than the original). And Monster Ambulance continues that tradition. It's a high-stakes medical drama as your predefined team - paramedic, EMT, driver, and dispatcher - race through the city streets to save lives, but it's also a comedy because your patients and coworkers (and maybe you yourselves) are monsters and you all work for Grendel's Mother's Memorial Hospital.

Chef's kiss. Perfect pitch. No notes. Netflix, offer this guy a series already because this is exactly the sort of premise that we would all pretend to be heartbroken over when it's cancelled after two seasons, but would secretly agree lived up to its potential after precisely 20 episodes, and thus would binge watch approximately a hundred times.

That might have come off a bit snarkier than I intended, but I really do mean it as the highest praise. A given group is only ever going to get one campaign out of this game, but it's going to be a campaign they'll talk about for the rest of their lives. It's just so tight a setup.

You've got your emergencies, which take place in the ambulance and primarily use your career attributes. And then when you're back at the hospital, you've got situations, which involve drama, romance, and light comedy with your coworkers (and key off of relationships, which work a lot like attributes) and that's it. You're only ever saving lives from bizarre, nonsense medical conditions or trying to talk your weird monster coworkers into taking their pants off. Everything else fades to black and you just alternate between the two types of scenes. It would take actual, active work (or maybe just a really dull GM) to have a scene that wasn't both interesting and relevant.

But I can't speak for its longevity. Monster Ambulance seems to me to inhabit an awkward limbo where a one shot isn't quite long enough - you want to establish the slow-burn sexual tension between the rookie EMT and the immortal gorgon who works the reception desk, or the rivalry between the brilliant, but troubled paramedic and the cyborg chief of surgery whose human brain lost out to her for valedictorian in medical school - but a full campaign might seem to drag - the basic setup is 1)medical emergency, 2)interpersonal drama, 3)goto 1.

Then again, ER ran for 15 seasons.

The system is dead simple - roll dice based on your attributes (career + drive + hallmarks for emergencies, relationship + drive + hallmarks for situations) and then compare that to what the scene rolls on its dice pool (set by the GM, based on difficulty and pacing). If you win, the scene's dice become weaker, if you lose then either the scene becomes stronger or one of several countdown tracks advance (exhaustion, insecurity, [vehicle] breakdown) and in an emergency, you're trying to avoid being knocked out before drawing the hospital card from the map deck and in a situation you're just trying to reduce the dice pool to nothing, only failing definitively if it gets too powerful. 

It's super bare bones and thus faces the same dichotomy as all other bare-bones systems - there's no conceivable scenario where this system can't work, but also it's so abstract that you might come to feel that you're playing the dice rather than playing the story. If you've been in this hobby any length of time, this is something you've already come to terms with - you either enjoy rules-lite or you don't. I know some people don't like scene-resolution mechanics, but given the game's emphasis on teamwork and ensemble drama, it's as well-justified here as it's ever been.

Overall, this game was a delight. Probably one of the few that feels legitimately exciting even without a combat system, and perfect for people who are keen to really sink their teeth into the medical procedural genre. And while its fun and goofy atmosphere amuse the hell out of me (one of Monstropolos' other hospitals is called "Behemoth Israel," heh), it would also be easy enough to adapt this into a straightforward, modern-day hospital soap opera game. Once again, it's a thing with a strong reason to exist. That's the highest compliment I know how to give.

Ukss Contribution: I loved most of the colorful cast of suggested NPCs like the Chupacabra psychologist or the Fair Folk radiologist, but the one that was easiest to adapt was Unlight, the mimic health inspector. Oversight in the form of an untraceable shapeshifter who could be watching even at this very moment is a concept broad enough to work in almost any genre.

(Dark Sun) Thri-Kreen of Athas

 I'm going to do something highly unusual (i.e. "bad") and start this post by looking at the advertisement at the end of the book. Coming soon is Beyond the Prism Pentad and it promises major changes to the Tyr region. The Dragon is dead, as are three of the six remaining Sorcerer Kings, and the terrifying new threat that's responsible for this carnage is . . . safely locked away once more, presumably by NPCs in book five of the pentad. We've finally reached it - the border between the boxed set's initial compelling pitch and the metaplot rigmarole. I have to say, I've been dreading this. It's just too much change, too far offscreen. Plus I don't think much of Rajaat as a threat. My understanding is that his goal was to genocide every sapient species on Athas except the halflings, which is not only boring in its own right, but reinforces the assumed ubiquity of orcs and gnomes, et al by providing an explanation for their absence. Just let Athas be its own thing, TSR! It doesn't actually gain anything by being tied into the larger brand.

Luckily, Thri-Kreen of Athas by Tim Beach and Dori Hein is mostly metaplot neutral. You could use the bulk of it straight out of the core. But then, there's a bit about the Thri-Kreen population in Raam openly eating elves and getting away with it because of the chaos on the streets, and that doesn't quite track unless Abalach-Re is dead. However, it mostly deals with the insect people who live deep in the desert and don't really stay abreast of current events, so it has a kind of timeless quality.

Except when it's setting the table for its own metaplot. There's an empire far in the north that was previously inaccessible due to a large mountain range blocking the way, but a recent earthquake has created a navigable rift in those mountains, and like all empires, the northern mantis people are looking to expand. 

It's an interesting potential conflict, and a good look at a hitherto undetailed part of Athas, but it suffers from the logic of the metaplot - it felt like a lot of stuff was being held back for some future adventure. The book even comes right out and says it, "future releases will deal with the civilized tohr-kreen and other creatures of the northern lands beyond Tyr" and presumably, that's why, if the PCs decide to try and follow the tohr-kreen back to their homelands, they "are not meant to pass the barrier in the Rift at this time."

Hey, if you've got something to say to me, just say it. Do you not realize how annoying this is going to be decades in the future when those supplements are long out of print and only available for hundreds of dollars? Or do you think that summer is going to last forever? This just feels like a tease.

Of course, maybe it's okay to tease the tohr-kreen in a book that advertises itself as being about the thri-kreen, like, I don't know, it's a related, but not identical subject matter and so it gets touched on, but not fully detailed. Maybe if they gave me the full scoop on the tohr-kreen and their imperialistic society, that would scarcely leave room for the nomadic hunting packs of the thri-kreen.

Which brings us to the touchy subjects of species, race, and culture. Namely, what the fuck are we even talking about with this tohr-kreen business? I always thought that "thri-kreen" was the name of the species. And in 1982, when they were first created, it probably was. But we're in a new edition now and old canon is being stripped down to be repurposed into new. "Kreen" means "people" and "thri" and "tohr" mean "nomadic" and "settled" respectively. Which leaves us with no good name for the species. Except that we get six of them - six separate types of let's-call-them-"kreen" with different physiology and appearance. They all have different colored chitin and different variations on their mandibles and antenna and that's fine as far as it goes, but then the text volunteers abstract information like how the Jeral are "cultured" and the J'ez are "militant" and the Tondi are "reclusive" and it starts to feel a little uncomfortable when the book is also cagey about mixed parentage, saying "though interbreeding is possible, the physiology of members of different species differs enough to make successful procreation rare."

That just feels like the worst possible implementation of diversity to me. Maybe making them fully separate species would be worse, but that's hard to say, because this version still has all the implications that race-mixing is unnatural, but in a package that feels more like human races. Or maybe it's something that should feel like human races, but exaggerates their physical differences, making something that should be simple needlessly fraught. So, to sum up - yes to more diverse kreen, no to making their differences anything more than cultural and/or cosmetic.

So, about the Tohr-Kreen. Their empire is made up of all six sorts of kreen (and three of the six types also have individual nations of their own, though all of them have diverse residents), and it is implied that the thri-kreen of the Tyr region were a subjugated race (the To'ksa) and their overseers (the Jeral) who split away thousands of years ago. Possibly they escaped, possibly they were a failed colony, but the two groups were isolated enough from each other to follow completely different paths of social development.

Or, at least, they would be, were it not for the species ancestral (the book calls it "racial") memory. That's the explanation for why these completely isolated groups can share the same language (they learn it almost as soon as they are born), why thri-kreen NPCs don't necessarily need class levels to pose a threat (what, you thought those Monstrous Manual stats were a convenient shorthand?), and why, when thri-kreen explore up north in the included adventure, they get ominous warnings at crucial points in the plot. 

I don't hate the idea of a species driven by ancestral memory. It's a speculative fiction concept with a lot of potential, but it's deployed in a pretty perfunctory manner here. It mostly exists as a substitute for the childhood education that becomes impractical for a species that lives 25 years. It gets into some good territory, with the thri-kreen preferring to lay their eggs in graveyards, in hopes of unlocking more of the wisdom of their ancestors, but it stops where it should start, and never really creates an alien psychology that explores the tension between this indelible cultural legacy and the short and brutal life of the present.

Similarly, I thought the "clutch-mind" was an idea that could have been polished into something special. The thri-kreen have this hormonal and pheromonal process by which they bond with other intelligent creatures, usually, but not exclusively thri-kreen, and subsequently become exceptionally loyal to and protective of the bond-mate. I enjoyed reading about the ways that differing expectations in relationships made communicating with humans difficult. I just wish there had been more about personality conflicts inside the clutch-bond, different thri (or tohr)-kreen cultural expressions surrounding the bond, and philosophical schools that tried to make sense of the bond and its relation to individual freedom and identity. A human might balk at implementing what amounts to self-imposed mind-control (the bond "transcends alignments," forcing kreen to act lawful and good towards clutch mates even if they are chaotic and evil by inclination) just to fit in better with their friends, but the kreen can't seem to live without it. What does that mean?

Overall, I'd say that Thri-Kreen of Athas is a decent sourcebook. It contains the seeds to quite a few good ideas and I can't entirely blame it for not having enough room to let those seeds fully blossom. I wish there was less metaplot and more philosophy, but I can't necessarily count that as a flaw because if I had my way then every rpg supplement would be nothing but speculative noodling. I'd use most of this material in a Dark Sun game, even if the words "prism pentad" fill me with a nameless dread.

Ukss Contribution: The kreen don't sleep. They are biologically incapable of it. But the detail that most amused me is that they also don't understand it. They think it's some kind of character flaw, like mammals are just choosing to sleep because they don't want to be active all night. That sort of stubborn misunderstanding is my favorite part of playing a non-human character. I probably won't have mantis-people in Ukss, but there will be some kind of unsleeping creature that is under the mistaken impression that everyone else is just super lazy.

(Aberrant 2e)Swine and Cheese Party

Did you know these posts of mine could technically be considered gonzo journalism? I mean, okay, technically anything "can be considered" anything, but to the degree that book reviews are a form of journalism and to the degree that said reviews normally attempt to focus on things relevant to the book, my habit of making pointless personal asides and telling meandering stories about the experience of shopping for the book I'm reviewing could fit the broadest definition of gonzo journalism as a genre. Because what separates worthwhile gonzo from just doing a bunch of drugs and then being bad at reporting is that gonzo seeks to grapple with the problem of objectivity. The reporter makes themselves part of the story because, by being a part of the culture the story is about, they are already a part of the story.

You know, you write a story about a pizza parlor being raided by the police as a suspected money-laundering operation, and you disclose your conflict of interest if you're a shareholder in the pizza parlor, but not if you watch six episodes of Law and Order a week and have internalized its implicit lessons about the inconvenience of due process. If you'll forgive me for using a problematic expression, "the inmates are running the asylum" necessarily implies that the inmates are also the ones reporting on the asylum. You are not the one sane man in a world gone mad, so you might as well stop acting like it.

(And that's why my timorously confessing a passive participation in America's white supremacist culture right before I point out a book is racist is exactly the same as Hunter S Thompson's legendary drug-fueled rampage through the Nevada desert).

I don't bring this up in the context of Swine and Cheese Party to make some supercilious point about being gonzolier than thou (though I may have been influenced by a desire to show off my cleverness at coming up with the phrase "gonzolier than thou"), but to highlight how weird it is to try and write gonzo fiction.

And I don't mean "weird" in the sense of "LOL, gonzo," but "weird" in the sense of weird. It's a genuine literary paradox. Like, the whole point of gonzo is to undermine the authority of the objective stance. The reporter is not outside of the story, dryly relaying facts, but rather inside the story, desperately trying to wrangle the chaos of real life into a coherent narrative (and the fact that gonzo so often seems incoherent is part of it, the point is you can't).

But being outside the story, knowing exactly what's happening to who, when, where, and why is already how fiction works. You have the authority to relay facts because you are literally the author. Anything you say about the fiction is by definition objectively true about the fiction. There's no wall to break down.

You might be able to do it with the grimmest forms of literary fiction. Combine a thinly veiled personal account with heavily telegraphed editorializing by the author whose personal account it is ("this story is true, the facts have been changed to protect the guilty"), but even then, I'm not sure how you'd tell if you succeeded. "Oh, wow, that fiction you wrote feels super unreal. I can't believe it actually went down that way."

In other words, the one and only piece of genuine gonzo fiction has already been written and it's called Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 

When you make the jump from literary fiction to genre fiction, gonzo becomes nearly unthinkable. You're too deep into fantasy. There's nothing at stake. You can try, as this book does, to indulge in the hypothetical. You're not really doing gonzo fiction, you're just imagining what gonzo journalism might be like in your fictional world. And to his credit, Justin Achilli has gotten better at it since Aberrant: Fear and Loathing. This book has less over-the-top vulgarity and thus may not sound entirely like the iconic Hunter S Thompson you're remembering, but it's also more political, and thus truer to the spirit of his work. It's just, by nature of its subject matter, it can't be a journey into the surreal. I'm not challenged when Duke Rollo tells a story of camping out in the woods of Romania to capture a live bear, in imitation of the new superhero fad of bear tossing because I have no complicity in that. It's like, maybe people in his world would have to think carefully about the way they applaud whatever novas do, and how that might encourage them to engage in such pointless and elaborate cruelty, but I'm only guessing because everything I know about that world comes from these books and this is the first I'm hearing about it.

And I know I'm being the asshole here. What we're really talking about is a couple of stories, told in an unusual way, as a tribute to a beloved author. And the stories are fun, and they are told in an interesting way, and the tribute is fucking lovely. So what's with the stick up my ass?

I certainly don't want to come across like I'm trying to gatekeep gonzo (and I can already anticipate the comments, "then why do you sound exactly like you're gatekeeping gonzo?" My reply - "No I don't, shut up!"), but I can't help wondering why the Duke Rollo character even exists. The likeliest explanation is that Justin Achilli likes writing him, and if you can get the developer of Vampire: the Masquerade onto your roleplaying game, even in this minor capacity, why wouldn't you. But when it comes to his larger role in helping to establish the voice of the Aberrant line, I can't help but think that maybe he exists to further the game's media satire. With a guy like this running around, you can never have true superheroes, you can just have tough guys in spandex bodysuits.

The problem with bringing him back for Swine and Cheese Party is that second edition has so far not been satirical. It plays superheroes mostly straight, with maybe just a bit more humanism than your typical comic book setting, but with the implication that the ones calling themselves the good guys are at least on the right track. That's probably why Duke Rollo was banished from the core and exiled to what will likely be a pretty inessential supplement (although, if he gets back in to more prominent products later in the line, remind me to eat my words).

If there's a gonzo story worth telling in the Aberrant universe, it's going to be one that puts Onyx Path squarely in the crosshairs. Not because OP particularly deserves to be taken down a peg, but because that's the sort of force you're tampering with when you borrow Hunter S Thompson's credibility. Imagine, creating a simulacrum of one of America's great counterculture critics and not turning him on yourself . . . or your audience. If you're not biting the hand that feeds you and fucking with the money, what are you even doing?

And there's definitely room for this. The superhero genre has issues. They historically exhibit a reverence for the status quo and an unspoken great-man driven proto-fascism. The wicked get beaten up, and except for the times when the author is trying to Make a Point, the guys at the wrong end of the fist aren't the imperialists or the capitalists or their agents of state violence, but rather nebulous "criminals" or "terrorists" who just happen to look a lot like the people we're trying to colonize. Aberrant is less guilty of this than most, and indeed, one of the stories in Swine and Cheese Party is about a terrible nova warrior, The Lady of Wounds, who leads her cult in some ill-defined insurrection in rural Armenia, and Duke Rollo talks about the connection with the capitalist foreign policy of the west, but why is he in Armenia? Why does he go to Romania for a story on petty animal cruelty? Why is he not at the heart of the American Dream, wherever that happens to be in fictional 2028, reporting on things that are extremely normal (like religiously-driven violence and animal cruelty)?

It all feels very safe. I am extremely normal for liking superheroes and this extremely normal roleplaying game is presenting me with superheroes who are easy to like. The not normal stuff happens in Eastern Europe. I have no further questions.

Ukss Contribution: There's a line here that really intrigued me. As Duke Rollo is trying to track down the true story of the Lady of Wounds, he speculates that there's more of it than will logically fit into the 9 years since N-Day. Because of that, he wonders, "Maybe we have another Maxwell Mercer on our hands."

That's not the Ukss contribution, it's just a question I hadn't thought to ask before, suggesting an answer I would never have dared to give - that Mercer has a high enough superhuman profile in the Aberrant era that people have theories about him. However, I do like what this says about the Lady of Wounds. I like the idea of a major figure emerging out of a murky and uncertain past.

It probably won't be the Lady of Wounds herself. It's probably a coincidence, but she reminds me too much of the Lady of Pain, and there's a reason I didn't pick her from any of my Planescape (she's too iconic and too edgy - pun unsuccessfully resisted).

So it's super abstract this time - a monster with a history that doesn't add up. I'll worry about the specific implementation later.

(Dark Sun) Road to Urik

 Oh, man, I was not a properly responsible steward of this book. I suppose I had no way of knowing at fourteen that my fun new toy would one day become part of my future self's collecting hobby. There are penciled-in notes on some of the pages and I actually removed the preconstruct characters from the spiral binding. It was a physically painful thing to witness. Yikes.

Still, the unique, two flip-book Dark Sun-style adventure was mostly intact and still entirely useable, so I guess have to just accept that maybe it's a miracle that it survived my childhood at all. Then again, most of my other D&D books from this era are still in pretty good shape . . . except for my first Player's Handbook, Monstrous Manual, and Complete Psionics Handbook, which all disintegrated and had to be replaced. Survivorship bias, maybe?

But this is a very personal and not-at-all-relatable experience, let's talk about the actual text.

It's a little weird to read a completely normal adventure from 1992. It's ambitious. It puts the PCs at the center of Tyr's military mobilization against invasion by the neighboring city-state of Urik by presenting a series of non-linear encounters where you interact with the Tyr's various factions, persuading them to contribute to the war effort, and then uses the mass combat rules to allow the PCs to make a fair, objectively determined contribution to the actual battle. It's big on social interaction, in-character problem solving, and using reasonable consequences to give meaning to player agency. So maybe it's even better than a normal adventure. David "Zeb" Cook knew what he was doing.

Yet it was also from 1992, so it could be a little weird about it. The introduction warns us about the strange nature of this adventure:

This adventure does not follow the progression used in many other modules. The characters do not spend all their time journeying or exploring an underground setting. . . Instead, player characters are involved in a swirl of events . . .You cannot simply describe what is waiting behind the next door: you must create situations, conflicts and sometimes interpret your players' unstated desires to fashion an exciting adventure.

Whoa, really? The PCs are going to get "involved" in "events?" I'm not sure I can cope with such a radical idea.

Okay, sarcasm is fun and all, but what is not sarcastic at all is the visceral, full-body clenching I felt upon reading this line: "Allow the players ample time to make their plans, up to as much as a full gaming session: remember that their characters have four or five hours to plan."

No, no, no, no, no! I understand that the early 90s were a different time for rpgs. People had different expectations. You had to spell out that they were allowed to interact socially with NPCs, but . . . real time planning of imaginary military operations? Did people really do that? I'm thinking about various Shadowrun session where huge chunks of time were lost to excessive planning driven by player risk aversion and I'm aghast that anyone would try to cultivate that on purpose.

But if you filter out the weird early AD&D stuff, Road to Urik is a solid adventure. The plot is thin - recruit your army, march your army, fight with your army, but in theory you could spin off the related-but-independent recruitment encounters into a whole huge story about the city's politics. Sequel potential - where the PCs are popular military heroes who must deal with the jealousy and ambition of Tyr's aristocratic class - is through the roof. And the whole thing is early enough in the Dark Sun line that it's not hopelessly bound up by canon. There's actually a suggestion that the PCs might screw up so thoroughly that they put King Tithian's throne in jeopardy.

In the end, there is some table-setting for the novels. It just outright states that people interested in continuing the war story should read The Crimson Legion. It's pretty mild as far as metaplot railroading is concerned, but it's clear to me from reading this book that Dark Sun is going to be a pioneer in the genre.

Overall, though, my assessment stands that Dark Sun is AD&D at its best. Road to Urik, with few modifications, could be published today and it would still feel like a bold attempt at something outside the norm (though mostly for its high degree of player agency and tier-straddling aspects, rather than the fact that it tries to tell a coherent story). It's enough to make me bitter that my copy looks like total garbage.

Ukss Contribution: This one is tough, not because the adventure was boring, but because it was so basic. The locations are a market and a villa and the desert. The NPCs include an aristocrat who's jealous of your growing popularity and tries to sabotage you to further his political ambitions, a templar-turned-general whose gross incompetence becomes a military liability, a hot-headed gladiator whose eagerness to fight causes its own set of problems.

Stock characters, basically. It wasn't bad, and I have to consider the possibility that using stock characters was as new an innovation in adventure design as "involving PCs in events." But they bring basically nothing to a new context.

So I'm going to go broad and take the entire city of Tyr. That is not a stock location, and actually does something that you rarely see in fantasy - it is a fledgling democracy. Popular organization is still slapdash, ineffectual, and corrupt, but that's because no one knows how to properly do it. Plus the city is saddled with the lingering problem of being in the aftermath of an especially bourgeois revolution. One of the grievances against Kalak is that he commandeered slaves, and maybe that did mobilize the landowners against him, but preserving the slaveholding aristocracy intact, even in the face of emancipation, is going to cause trouble down the line (trust me, as an American, I speak from experience here). 

It all makes for some fascinating internal conflicts that serve to elevate the entire adventure just by being in the background. I imagine it will work similar magic in Ukss.

(Planescape) Monstrous Compendium Appendix III

This is another one of those books that I have a fraught history with. Appendices I and II were treasured items of my youth, but I didn't even know there was an Appendix III until something like 2012. My reaction, roughly speaking, was, "what the fuck?!" Having two volumes of a three-volume collection irritated me like you wouldn't believe.

It's something I struggle with as a collector. Well, maybe "struggle" is the wrong word. "Should struggle," maybe. "Am afflicted with," perhaps. I am two PoD volumes away from having a complete Kindred of the East collection, and I don't even really like that game.

I do like Planescape, however. And that's a struggle. A full collection of Planescape books would be great, and the only reason I don't have one is because they're ridiculously expensive.  I'm only eight books away, and the estimated price is more than 2300 dollars. A good chunk of that is in a couple of outlier books, but even the skinny adventure books are 50 dollars. Since I'm always a bit ambivalent about adventures anyway, I've resigned myself to the notion that the full collection is going to stay out of reach. And yet, The Monstrous Compendium Appendix III felt like an exception. I don't know what to say. The volumes were numbered and I only had two out of three. It bugged me.

So every few weeks I'd check. People were asking 90 dollars for this thing, and I just couldn't justify it to myself. But these things fluctuate. There's a trick to it. You check frequently and prepare yourself emotionally to pounce on a deal when it comes up. I'd done it before. That's how I got a copy of the Trinity Player's Guide for $15 when it customarily hovered around $60. But it's something that requires a weird combination of frugality and spend-thriftness. 

Anyway, it worked. In October of last year, I got my hands on a copy of this book for "only" 50 dollars . . . except that it never arrived. Maybe the boat ride from England was more treacherous than I imagined. Hard to say, because I never got a tracking number. I have a cynical suspicion that someone listed the book, and then after they made the sale, finally decided to check ebay, saw it was regularly closing for 2-3 times that price, and decided to wait me out. It wasn't until late December that I reluctantly asked for a refund.

The whole incident really undermined my resolve to wait for a "reasonable" price. Maybe I was wrong and that 90 dollar price tag wasn't an aberration, but the new normal. Maybe, as copies got progressively removed from circulation, it would climb, 120, 150, 200 . . . sky's the limit. I would need to do as I'd done with A Guide to the Astral Plane (the only other Planescape book who's absence from my collection feels like an acute oversight) and write it off, hoping some day for a possible PoD. Then the Colorado government sent me a check for $750 and I was like, "how can I most irresponsibly use this unexpected windfall?" and by coincidence, there was a copy with an asking price of $80, a mere 5 dollars over what I'd previously pretended was my ceiling price for a 128 page softcover supplement for a vintage rpg I never wanted to play again.

Never mind that this is only 10 dollars less than a price that I had, years before, decided to try and wait out. I think I can accept my C-minus-level consumer savviness. The real question is - after all that, was it worth it?

Hell, no! Of course not.

But this is why I prefer not to do reviews, and instead just randomly start some of these things off with tedious shopping anecdotes. Because "not being worth the years of obsessing and bargain hunting and eventually overpaying for" is not the same thing as "bad." (Funnily enough, this also works in reverse - a book can be incontrovertibly bad, but also absolutely worth it, like certain parts of Mage: the Ascension).

Although, to be clear, The Monstrous Compendium Appendix III is kind of . . .not "bad" exactly (and, in fact, often the exact opposite of "bad") but maybe . . . terrible? In the original sense of the term, as in we should all be feeling terror that this thing exists. A whole series of events had to go wrong for me to be in the position I am now, and it's kind of breathtaking to contemplate.

This book should never have been conceived, but having been conceived, it should never have been green-lit. But having been green-lit, it should never have been made. But having been made, I never should have bought it.

And yet, here we are.

Keep in mind, if this were a review, it would be a positive one. We assigned the class a personal essay and the weird kid turned in a harrowing account of his summer working at the sausage factory and intellectual honesty demands I give it a B+.

This is a book filled with interesting fantasy creatures, made at the pinnacle of AD&D monster design and presentation, authored by Monte Cook, who has an rpg bibliography to die for. It's a book that is firing on all cylinders.

But . . . It's all in service of Planescape's worst campaign pitch. This isn't just a book filled with 3rd-string monsters, neither iconic nor obvious enough to make it into the first two volumes. It is, in fact, a companion to The Inner Planes, and thematically centers on weird elemental creatures to make these strange and dangerous places feel more alive. And the thing about The Inner Planes (the book, not the planes) is that no book I've ever read, tabletop rpg or otherwise, has made it so obvious that no one involved really wanted to be doing the job.

The MC3 is a fun book, filled with unique creatures that you're absolutely going to want to meet, but all these creatures live in places you're absolutely not going to want to go (except, perhaps for the Mineral Quasielementals). "This plane of loneliness and desolation offers visitors nothing." Oh, good. I wonder what sort of encounters they're going to have when they get there.

Actually, to be fair, I chose one of more pointless quasielemental planes for that quote (Dust) and the MC3 had no specific native creatures (except the quasi-elementals) for that plane. Still, the point stands that the environments covered in this book are going to be used only in extremely niche adventures, and I'm not sure that it's a niche anyone really asked for or wanted. The big feeling of this book is that TSR was a machine for churning out supplements and MC3 is one of the last irregular, unsightly products to come off the line before they shut the machine down for being irreparably broken.

I cannot emphasize enough how un-iconic this book is. I seriously doubt anyone has ever been planning a game and thought, "hold up, I really need the stats for a devete and a khargra and can't go any farther until I have them, why, oh why weren't they in the first Monster Manual?" At best, this is a book you flip through and say, "why not?"

Which isn't actually a bad thing to be. There's a real sense of discovery here, and I quite enjoyed the sensation of never knowing what was going to be on an upcoming page. However, there was a reason I never suspected its existence prior to being blindsided by its entry on Amazon. Unlike the inner planes, ethereal, and astral books it supplements, it wasn't even obligatory. Its strangeness doesn't fill in the setting's noticeable gaps so much as emphasize how rote those gaps were to begin with. The opening line for the ooze sprite entry sums it up "Is every creature that hails from the plane of Ooze just a big joke?"

It's a rhetorical question, but it gets at the heart of the issue - did Planescape even want to incorporate the inner planes? For all of its virtues, this book does not offer compelling evidence that the answer was "yes."

Ukss Contribution: I say, even as this proves to be one of the more difficult Ukss entries to narrow down. I really liked a lot of the individual entries, precisely because they were just pointless noodling. No one's yearning for the Garmorm, a mind-absorbing worm-like creature that grows multiple humanoid mouths in grotesque imitation of its victims, the better to sing its warlike chants in harmony with itself, but it's going to be a memorable encounter.

My favorite of these inexplicable one-offs was the Ravid. Despite featuring the unfortunate line, "Would you rather face a creature of negative energy that wants to drain you or a beast of positive energy that wants to pump you full of life," it's actually a pretty fun creature - a more or less benign floating snake thing that causes absolute havoc wherever it goes by having an aura that brings inanimate objects to life. It isn't really intelligent enough to understand the chaos it causes, but it does like to see things move, so it's constantly on the lookout for new objects to animate, all the while avoiding the already-living creatures that seem to resent its presence. So really, it's a single creature that is multiple encounters all by itself. PCs are most likely to stumble upon the aftermath of its passage and then be compelled to solve this mystery before things get totally out of hand.

I love it, because this is what I think gods should be like - miraculous power, wielded in innocence. Changing the world just by existing within it. Having a tread too heavy for ordinary reality to bear. This is definitely something I can work with.