Paratype

 Where to get it: itch.io page 

First, an order of business to get out of the way: Ew, gross bugs! Yech! Yes, you have at last discovered my shameful secret - your friend, John Frazer, the vegan who is intellectually curious about non-human intelligence and who believes in the essential interconnectedness of all living things, is one of those hypocritical "nature lovers" who subconsciously slots insects into a different mental category than "regular" animals. Yes, if you ask me in an abstract context whether I think mosquitos and jumping spiders and what have you are an important part of the ecosystem and worth protecting, I will say "of course," because that is what I believe . . . but it's not a belief that echoes in my heart. If I saw a giant porcupine, the size of a horse, I would say, "Aww, cute," but if I saw a giant cicada the size of a horse, I would almost certainly shit myself and cry.

Which makes Paratype (Mars Drake) a little bit difficult to enjoy, through ::gritted teeth:: no fault of its own. If you can get past the screaming willies that accompany even imagining its fictional world, it's actually a fun and breezy rules-light rpg with a well-organized integrated campaign that you can play right out of the box.

The high concept pitch is simple - it's a post-apocalyptic world thanks to those wacky government scientists, who genetically engineered a bunch of giant insects as part of a secret bioweapons program. Those insects were released into the wild by a malicious rogue AI and apparently they were a pretty effective bioweapon, because global civilization collapsed. It's unclear whether the first batch of insects merely bred so fast that they were able to conquer the world, or whether it was some kind of virus that led to wild bugs growing giant, but as a practical matter, it's not that important. This is a world of isolated human settlements separated by a wilderness full of weird creatures that will eat travelers alive. Classic Points of Light.

I must reluctantly concede, through white-knuckle typing, that this is an elegant and effective set-up for a sci-fi action game. One of the biggest challenges of populating a creature-infested wilderness is simply coming up with unique and interesting creatures. What do they look like? What do they eat? Do they have any unusual habits that might translate into challenging combat maneuvers? You've got to balance the memorably alien with the biologically and ecologically plausible. Working from scratch, it can be a real pain to come up with ideas, but in Paratype you can just consult an encyclopedia of entomology and make a giant version of whatever catches your fancy.

So, you know, the sample campaign has PCs running into two separate groups of giant ants - one that's infested by the "zombie fungus" that causes them to seek high places and wait for death, and another that engages is fungal agriculture like leafcutter ants. And that's just one type of bug. You can encounter locusts, territorial male butterflies, carnivorous fireflies lurking among otherwise harmless swarms, and a cuckoo bee whose counterfeit pheromones inexplicably work on humans (even to the point where the humans can have conversations with the creature, who will use the information to be a better infiltrator). 

I guess there's never been anything stopping us from plagiarizing wikipedia and making, say, a species of dragon that has a similar lifecycle to encarsia perplexa (just read the link, my recap couldn't possibly do it justice), but I think we have to give Paratype some well-earned props for actually going there. Potential was seen. Opportunity was seized. And the result is a one-of-a-kind rpg setting.

If Paratype has a flaw, it's . . . that it's rules-light . . . mwa, ha, ha! Take that, popular rpg style that is outside my personal preference! No, actually, even as an unreformed tome-and-bloat lover, I quite enjoyed this game's level of mechanical complexity. It's a very simple base, but it's got about 150 special character widgets (which range from 3.0 feat-level bonuses, to roleplaying flaws, to full on inhuman powers like flight). Each one is only about a sentence long, but they work well with the game's minimalist rules. It feels to me like a happy compromise.

The games real "flaw" is genre. It never quite dials into a compelling tone. A big way to get access to the character widgets is through "splicers," sci-fi devices that allow you to transfer genetic traits from insects to humans, creating superhuman "hybrid" characters. And the body horror you're (probably, if you're like me) feeling right now is not entirely incidental. The acknowledgements section lists The Fly (1989) as inspirational media.

But this isn't really a horror game. In general, it's much more flippant with its hybrid characters. One of the antagonists is a New York City landlord who's also a hybrid tick. And a major setting villain is a mosquito hybrid named Ragtag, who gets some absolutely adorable art that is strongly reminiscent of a Borderlands boss' splash screen, complete with hand-drawn arrows pointing at her with the captions "Super cool!" "It's not a cult!" and "I heard she does graffiti."

Damnit, Paratype, you made me love the mosquito woman! I'm not going to forgive that any time soon!

Unfortunately, the game doesn't really explore the reckless transhuman element. It doesn't turn genehacking bug-splicers into a proper subculture.

So it's not horror, it's not biopunk, and despite the testimony of the Acknowledgements, it's not 50s B-movie kaiju either. It has elements of those things. And it could be made into those things, but aesthetically, its biggest influence seems to be indie roguelite video games. The campaign is a linear hexcrawl where your progress hinges on careful management of highly abstracted "fuel" and "rations" resources, which you track with a box-based inventory system. And, on a broader level, the whole thing just has that particular breed of slightly-glossy/slightly cheesy quirk that you will instantly recognize from any of a dozen pixel graphics rpgs.

Now, forget everything I just said, because none of it fairly applies to a single-author, rules-light ttrpg. I'd say, rather than being a true flaw, Paratype's genre-squishiness is more of an "area where further development is low-hanging fruit." The only part of this world we see is a stretch of I-95, near the American east coast, and I see no reason why other regions can't lean more into one particular genre or another, if you were inclined to homebrew a larger Paratype world.

Overall, I'd say Paratype punches above its weight class, considering that it fits in that odd middle-ground between "hefty zine" and "slim corebook." Which seems fitting for a game that wears its love for insects proudly on its sleeve.

Ukss Contribution: There's a broken-down lighthouse that the keeper wants to bring back online by using giant fireflies instead of electric lights. Yeah, that's a solid gold idea for weird fantasy if I ever saw one.

Feng Shui

Time has a way of sneaking up on you. That's not just a pun about Feng Shui's (Robin D. Laws) setting, it's also a common cliche. And like many cliches about things sneaking up on you, you'll go most of your life thinking it doesn't apply to you . . . until, without warning, it does.

At some point, I can't pinpoint exactly when, I'd crossed a generational rift and the world I remembered from my youth, the technological and cultural assumptions that grounded my view of "how the world work" . . . it all just disappeared. Even to myself. The old world exists in my memories, but not in my daily praxis. I have to remind myself to be a proper curmudgeon.

So I'll read a book like Feng Shui and I'll express a certain cynicism - "ah yes, pirates vs ninjas, how wacky," and that's a very jaded, modern sort of cynicism. Ah, yes, of course, the brakes are off. What other way would I expect them to be? 

But that's not what I would have felt as a kid. When I was 14 years old, I'd have been, "Pirates vs ninjas? That's hilarious! How do you come up with something like that?! So random!" And I would have had a nostalgic soft spot for your rpg until my dying day.

The part that's "time sneaking up on me" is the fact that it wasn't until the final chapter, where Robin D. Laws is fannishly recapping his favorite Hong Kong action movies, that I consciously registered that this book was contemporary with my 14-year-old self and not with the cynical adult that boy had become.

"Pirates vs ninjas" is a bit of a yawn in 2025, but in 1996? A decade before the meme hit the internet? It gave me pause, made think that maybe this thing actually had some audacity after all.

You have to understand, the chapter on Hong Kong cinema actually went out of its way to explain the career of Jackie Chan. He gets a big 18 pt section heading all his own. "One of the jarring things about Jackie movies is their credit sequences: he ends with a blooper reel, except that the bloopers inevitably contained failed stunt attempts. . . At first, you're just enjoying the stunt, as you would any Hollywood shot. Then you realize, holy @#$%! he's really doing this!" 

I'd forgotten how large the world used to be. Mr. Laws wouldn't have bothered to tell us this in a time period where it was simply a well-known fact about one of the world's most popular movie stars. In 1996, we still had to learn about Jackie Chan via word of mouth from our clued-in friends who got to see foreign films in a major market like Vancouver. It would still be a couple of years before I'd receive a dozen Golden Harvest movies on VHS as a birthday gift. This was, in fact, the year when I got my first AD&D 2nd edition Players Handbook. I had no idea something this cool even existed.

I'd used "pirates vs ninjas" earlier, not as a literal description of this book's contents (it has ninjas, but the only pirates are just regular criminals at sea and not the iconic Age of Sail swashbucklers), but as an easy metonymy for the internet's routine variety of excess ("Oh, just toss another trope on the pile, the rabble demands MOAR"). But this is not an internet book. It recommends we learn more about Hong King cinema by subscribing to alt.asian-movies.

Which means its clownish, barely coherent, recklessly inclusive worldbuilding was something Robin Laws decided to do all on his own. And I respect the hell out of that. When you're stupid on the internet, people assume you're doing a bit (for example: this blog's own hot takes are probably some kind of irony . . . is what I'd prefer you believe on those occasions where I put my foot in my mouth). But when you're this stupid over mail order, that takes real conviction.

Keep in mind, I'm using words like "stupid," "clownish," and "pirates vs ninjas (derogatory)" as a compliment. It's just that before I fully comprehended this book as an artifact of the 90s, it was a mild compliment ("oh, it's trope-laden gibberish that takes genre as a dare, my favorite kind of rpg, but nothing I haven't seen before") and now that I've placed it in the context of my own burgeoning cultural awareness, it's an enthusiastic compliment ("oh, it's trope-laden gibberish from long before tvtropes.org was even a glimmer in the milkman's eye . . . that's breathtaking.")

I think the best way to describe Feng Shui is "Kung Fu fantasy epic meets occult conspiracy thriller meets gritty modern crime drama meets dystopian near-future sci-fi" but with the understanding that the strangest part of this description is the word "meets." All the characters from all the named action movie sub-genres literally meet each other. A 19th century Chinese nationalist rebel, a contemporary mafia assassin, and a cybernetically uplifted ape supersoldier all meet in a bar, following the invitation of an ancient Chinese wizard. . . and that's how a completely average game of Feng Shui begins.

Notionally, this all happens because of time travel, but I think the way this setting handles time travel really puts the cart before the horse (Wait, is that why the cart was before the horse originally? A time traveler got confused? New head-canon alert!). You could call it a sprawling time-travel story where secret warriors from throughout history wage a shadow war for control over the history of all humankind . . . but that feels to me like an ex post facto explanation. I think the clash between milieus came first and it turned out that time travel was the only type of plot that could even possibly explain it (except maybe a multiverse, which . . . probably would have worked better, actually).

My main evidence for this theory is the fact that Feng Shui is a time-travel game that really seems to go out of its way to shut down all the major time travel plots. The mechanics of time travel conspire to make all four of its time periods (or "junctures" in the jargon of the game) into semi-stable sub-settings. 

The first guardrail is that there's only four specific points in time you can travel to - CE 69 (which is cast as a high-magic period in Chinese history), 1850, 1996 ("contemporary" times), and 2056. And time passes at the same rate in all four junctures - if you spend a year in 1996 having adventures, then when your calendar says 1997, you'll be able to travel to CE 70, 1851, and 2057.  This means it's virtually impossible to intercept your own timeline. Events in your personal history (especially in the time covered during gameplay) are more or less unchangeable. Although, there's a bit of a loophole in the fact that 1996 and 2056 are both within a single human lifetime. You can't go back to last week and stop yourself from making a mistake, but a 74-year-old from 2056 could visit his 14-year-old self and, say, hand him a copy of an obscure indie rpg he'd probably enjoy, thereby changing the entire trajectory of his life. Certainly, giving stock tips to your grandparents is easily within the grasp of any experienced time traveler.

But that oversight aside, the timeline also protects itself through the power of immense historical inertia. Even if you go back to 1850 and prevent the birth of Hitler (the book directly addresses this specific use of time travel, almost as if they knew it would inevitably come up), some other similar figure will rise up and take his place. In fact, except for certain superficial details, it is virtually impossible to affect history one way or the other. . . without gaining control over the titular Feng Shui sites.

Yes, having powerful feng shui can lead to many positive shifts in fortune, including (apparently) the entire arc of human history bending towards your personal vision (provided you control a significant fraction of all the world's most powerful feng shui sites). You may recognize this as complete nonsense that transparently serves to keep the game's focus on the sort of factional conflicts that can be solved with kung fu and gunplay, rather than a cerebral navigation of temporal paradoxes. Really, each of the junctures feels like its own separate campaign world, that can be influenced by the other junctures with physical force, but which have nothing to fear from time tourists accidentally stepping on the wrong butterfly. You know, as if the time travel were merely a plot device. That's why I think a multiverse setup would have given GMs a freer hand, without tempting the players with the sort of fantastical time-based problem-solving that the book is begging them not to explore.

Still, that's an absolutely wild problem for the game to have had in 1996. "Your time travel mechanics are too optimized towards shutting down meme builds" is the kind of criticism that almost makes me think that Feng Shui itself might be the product of time travel. Like, how are you so over the concept of time travel, when nobody even asked you to put ninjas and cyborgs in the same game to begin with?

I think, overall, I probably love Feng Shui. I can recognize it as the sort of thing that I would have felt nostalgic about, if I'd had a hipper childhood, and I think I'd enjoy both running and playing in a Feng Shui game. However, I think I'd be happier with a book that kept the eras separate and merely used them as examples of how you could fine-tune the rules to allow for multiple sub-genres of action adventure. There's a difference between playing an rpg that feels like an action movie and playing an rpg that tries to be every action move, all at once.

So, you know, 10/10 for the audacity and 1/10 for the audacity. Which I think counts as a perfect score.

Ukss Contribution: I liked the "godhammer" pistol from 2056. It didn't quite live up to the grandiosity of its name (doing 12 base damage, compared to the desert eagle's 11), but I figure I can come up with something suitably epic for its fantasy counterpart.

Cairn

What's this, my second grumpy post on a single grumpy day? Well, yes, but Cairn (Yochai Gal) has left me considerably less grumpy than V20 because at least it didn't make me read 500 pages before I could have a neutral opinion about it. Cairn is only about 20 pages, and those pages are about half the size of an average rpg book . . . but the text size is also smaller . . . but also there were a lot of tables. Let's just say it took less than an hour to read and leave it at that.

So what did I get out of that hour?

Like all rules-lite rpgs, Cairn reminded me that the core of the hobby is just "saying things happen." The players say what their characters are going to do, based on the nouns and adjectives written on their character sheets, and then I, as the GM, say what happens based on my logical assessment of the likelihood that those actions will have an effect. Sometimes, there's an element of uncertainty in the likely outcome, and in those situations, I'd have the players roll a "Save" against one of their three Abilities, and assign good or bad outcomes based on the quality of the roll (though, in this game, low rolls are better than high ones).

There's also a very simple combat system. It's streamlined even compared to other rules-lite d20 games. You have no to-hit roll. Everyone just rolls damage. The main tactic just seems to be picking your battles by persuading the GM not to call for a fight. 

I don't want to get too backhanded, though. I knew, upon picking this book up, that it would be minimalist. Do I really want to penalize it for that?

On the other hand, why do I need it? What am I getting out of it? And those aren't really questions I can answer. I've been doing this hobby for 30 years. I could make a more complex game than this in the space of a day. I'm fairly certain I have. But would "more complex" automatically mean "better?"

I guess that's the lesson that rules-lite games teach us. What is it possible for us to live without? How much can you take away and still have the essential heart of the hobby? And if we're talking about the essential heart, then Cairn persuasively argues that you can take away quite a lot. . . Even if I, personally, cannot live without exception-based design.

Anyway, this is a short book, featuring a game with more random charts than pre-defined rules and I think it would probably work. You can tell a fantasy adventure story by just saying what happens and occasionally rolling dice. Who knew?

I do, however, have to take a quick moment to give credit where credit is due and say, for only being one (half-sized, small print) page long, the "Principles for Wardens" section gives some pretty useful general GMing advice, like "Players do not need to roll dice to learn about their circumstances" or "Use binary 'so A or B?' responses when their intentions are vague."

Overall, this was not the book to make me a convert to rules-lite OSR, but I kind of liked it. And that was enough to briefly make me forget my cold.

Ukss Contribution: There's not a lot of room for setting flavor in this book, but the spell-list, which is little more than a name and a brief (1-2 sentence) description does manage to do some fantasy worldbuilding. Based on the names in the Random Spellbook Table alone, I'd narrowed my choice down to:

Anthropomorphize
Bait Flower

Cone of Foam

Marble Craze
Objectify
Summon Cube

And while some of those are more useful than others, when I finally got around to the descriptions, it could only be Marble Craze: "Your pockets are full of marbles, and will refill every 30 seconds."

That spell was some mage's senior thesis at magic academy. I can just feel it.

Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition

I am so fucking grumpy about having to write a post about Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition. (Justin Achilli, Russell Bailey, Matthew Macfarland, Eddy Webb) Mostly, because I have a cold, and I am really eager to climb under my covers and take a nap. But also because this book is . . . is . . . fine.

Normally, I'm able to forgive something for being fine. Maybe I'll wag my finger and say, "you're on thin ice, Mr. Fine" but it'll be a playful sort of teasing. I'd have to be a real ogre to get actually mad at a book for being fine. But here we are. My nose is running. My head is swimming. I am barely conscious, and all I can think is, "What the hell do you think you're doing, being all uncontroversially conservative and blandly competent? Why can't you be more like your brother, Mage 20? He was an absolute shitshow, in a way that pays tribute to the true spirit of the White Wolf games studio we've all come to love and fear."

I mean, there are still hints of the old White Wolf. A couple of slurs, here and there. One of the rules examples suggests the PCs meet "behind a coffee shop in an ethnic ghetto." The lore has been rolled back to the pre-Revised status quo and that means they've completely tossed out the institutional memory for why the Ravnos were a bad idea (well, maybe they're toned down a little bit, but yeah, the g-slur shows up again).

But honestly, these are minor quibbles. Bad habits that might inevitably emerge from the "Vampire: the Masquerade voice," but nothing you'd be surprised about. I think I'd almost be disappointed if I'd read a 500 page Storyteller-system corebook and not seen a bad-guy NPC commit a hate crime. The real flaw, that condemns this book to an unforgiveable fineness is simply that it doesn't really adopt a point of view. You've got a game with a decade's worth of rollercoaster metaplot and a mandate to create a new edition that draws on everything that came before, to be a luxury collector's edition for nostalgia-addled xennials and the approach you decide on is . . . archival?

This shit is barely pretentious. You've changed, man.

You might be tempted to look at the immense size of this volume (513 pages vs Revised edition's 308) and think that it's MOAR VAMPIRE. But at the risk of revealing myself an unbearably shallow thinker, if you compare the books' Tables of Contents you find - the V20 version of "A World of Darkness" is 8 pages shorter, "Clans and Sects" is 4 pages longer, "Character and Traits" is 4 pages longer, "Rules" is 2 pages longer, and Revised's "A History of the Kindred" is removed entirely. The bulk of the extra pagecount comes from the "Disciplines" chapter (Revised: 44pgs, V20: 118pgs) and the all-new "Morality" and "Bloodlines" chapters. What it all adds up to is an extremely conventional Vampire: the Masquerade core book with a couple of big lore dumps bolted on.

Now, fair's fair. My ambivalence right now is being fed by my general bad mood. If I were in a good mood, I might, at this very moment, be going "ZOMG, they remembered to include the Kisayid! Faerie-tainted vampire scholars that inexplicably work with the Sabbat! This game is so camp!"

But I can't quite do that, because when that mood dial swings back towards pessimism, I can't help but feel like the camp is tucked away. They just gave each of the canonical bloodlines two pages and a Discipline write-up (which, if you're keeping track, that's 154 pages, more than 30%, of the book devoted to "kewl powerz" - Justin Achilli must be rolling over in his grave), but no extended worldbuilding, no mandatory canon events, nothing that would at all annoy someone looking to play a "serious" game. Hell, the Storytelling chapter doesn't even mention "superheroes with fangs," not even derisively. Excuse me, what game are we playing? Because it sure as hell doesn't seem to be Vampire: the Masquerade.

Or, at least, it doesn't seem to be all of Vampire: the Masquerade. I'm out here looking for the game where closeted bisexuals can discreetly slut it up (am I speaking from experience . . . I'll never tell). I'm looking for the game where you can get a trenchcoat and katana and pump blood points into your shotgun's accuracy. (Actually, I went back and checked my old core books and only Mage: Revised had a separate stat line for katanas, which means I need to cut V20 some slack . . . or, at least, I would if I didn't remember Vampire as being the game with the katanas.) Why, this is a 20th anniversary party and it looks like you just completely forgot Samuel Haight's invitation. Shameful. 

I tease because I love. Obviously, one of the things the designers learned in the previous 20 years was how to be less cringe, and while I don't think that tendency works entirely to the book's benefit, I can at least concede that I understand the temptation to seize the opportunity to at last create a version of Vampire: the Masquerade that was darkly decadent gothic punk personal horror. I think I need to interpret the book's curation as a show of faith that we'll be able to discover the goofy version of the game on our own.

So, session zero, we've got a Kisayid, an escaped gargoyle, and a dark and gritty Salubri antitribu, and we're all following Paths of Enlightenment that reward us for diablerizing elders, and except for the katanas, all of this is completely by the book. I really have nothing to complain about. It's just that's it's all so perfunctory. Maybe because "the whole of 90s Vampire" is just too much to put into a single book, even one that's 500 pages long. I find myself asking, "why are you doing this?" and the only answer that makes sense to me is "because it's the 20th anniversary of Vampire: the Masquerade."

And don't get me wrong. That's enough. This book is enough. It's fine. If you were on the fence about whether to buy V20 or Revised, and money was no object, then you should definitely get V20. But . . . whatever issues I may or may not have with Brucato, he very clearly had some axes left to grind re: Mage: the Ascension and that came through in the text. And maybe it's only because I came into M20 having read all the extant Mage books and V20 having only a few Revised-era supplements under my belt, but I could not detect any axes being ground. It's all very professional, but it yields a book that you'd barely have to hold someone's pet hostage in order to extort them to read. Nostalgia entirely without regrets.

In the end, I'm forced to confess to my personal perversion - I'd rather have bad novelty than a good version of something I've seen before. And except for a few of the more obscure bloodlines, this book is entirely made of things I've seen before. 

And so, from the depths of my sickness, I must point a trembling finger and level the worst insult this blog has to offer: Creators of Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition, you did a good job updating a familiar classic. I have no substantial complaints. You should be proud of your work.

And may God have mercy on your souls.

Ukss Contribution: I like the Sabbat's practice of creating "shovelheads." Basically, they do a bare-minimum Embrace to a bunch of randoms, bury them in a mass grave so they awaken as scared, confused, furious, and hungry vampires, and then they just sort of unleash them on a city as a kind of biological terror weapon. They can't be controlled, but control isn't actually salient to the Sabbat's goals.

It's a pretty effective action-horror plot, no matter what setting you're working in.

(Exalted 3e) Exigents: Out of the Ashes

 It's been almost exactly one year since I last read an Exalted book and two years since I last read a new Exalted book. So Exigents: Out of the Ashes was very exciting for me, all the more so for not retreading a subject previously covered in first and second edition. We are talking all new Exalted types here - from the fully-playable Architects, Chosen of the City Gods to the canonical but undetailed like the Chosen of Plentimon, God of Dice to the hypothetical like the Chosen of the God of Rice to the frustratingly semi-canonical like the Umbral Exalted, Chosen of Nebiru, the Traitor Incarna of an invisible planet that bears his name.

And oh, man, it feels good to see more Exalted-style fantasy, even if some of it feels a little strained, like it was included to check off a list, and only really fleshed out as it was being written. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the worst offenders were the "optional canon" Exalted of the "Creating New Exalted" appendix. They all feel like . . . okay, in first edition, there was a book called Time of Tumult, one of the first printed for the entire line, that had an appendix which introduced the Alchemical Exalted. When they first appeared, they were just these weird robot guys who didn't really fit in with anything else in the setting. "Oh, yeah, there are robots," the book seemed to say, and then the next 20 books refused to elaborate. Until three years later when Exalted: the Autocthonians was released and whoa! they come from a whole other planet, with a weird machine ecosystem, and this book has new societies, new creatures, a new exalted type, and a selection of campaign models that present them as a late-game out-of-context problem. It was super cool and totally out of left field (if you were like me and didn't get Time of Tumult until after 2nd edition had mostly run its course).

And the three "new" Exalted types felt to me like they were originally destined to get similar gazetteer/exalt type/campaign arc supplements. The Dream-Souled were empowered by a great power of the Wyld, a mysterious being called Ketu the Dream Prince, who appears to be on the same level as the Incarnae or the Primordials. And while they were generally fairly benign, it's pretty easy to imagine a harder-edged version of their "driven by impractical utopian ideals to the point where they don't entirely perceive reality" shtick that could be an apocalyptic threat. 

Likewise, the Hearteaters were once a "friendly" exalted type, until their patron Incarna was slain and they were cursed by the enemies of the gods to become these insatiable social vampires who use their unparalleled mind-control powers to hollow people out until they became will-less thralls. And though they are maybe not individually powerful enough to be a threat to Creation's Exalted, they are near-impossible to kill because whenever they are slain, their memories and power just go to one of their thralls. And honestly, that's a pretty great campaign there . . . or would be, if they got the full villain treatment.

Also, the Umbrals fit into this pattern, even if I think their hypothetical book would be the weakest of the three. A secret Incarna, who refused to join the divine rebellion, was imprisoned by his siblings and sealed away for an age until, out of pure spite, he dumped all his power into creating a new exalted type that gained strength from their own suppressed malevolent urges. 

I can definitely see some potential with these guys, but the book's diffidence about their inclusion, combined with their tenuous connection to existing lore . . . it made me feel like they only exist to explain that one illustration in the 3rd edition core, and they were developed just enough to get people to shut up about them. I don't normally go in for behind-the-scenes speculation, but I do know that 3rd edition had a rather dramatic change in developers and I suspect that the old crew had plans for a bunch of Authocthonians-style "event books" and the new leadership quietly abandoned them.

But okay, enough about that. What about the bulk of the book, you know, the stuff that is definitely actual canon?

It's . . . interesting. Occasionally even great. But it's shaking the foundations of the setting and stretching the limits of the system, to such a degree that I think Exigents: Out of the Ashes is a watershed book for the series. Only time will tell what its lasting legacy might be, but I think it's fair to think of 1st edition before and after Games of Divinity, 2nd edition before and after Wonders of the Lost Age, and 3rd edition before and after this book.

Which may seem like a bit of an overstatement, considering that Exigents were first introduced in the 3e core, and first got playable rules in Exalted: Essence, but the difference between those earlier books and this one is huge - Exigents: Out of the Ashes demonstrates quite persuasively how fundamentally unworkable Exigents are under the 3rd edition rules. . . and it still managed to sell me on playing one.

Strawmaiden Janest gets her own chapter. Conceptually, this is a good idea. She is an appealing character whose story players are going to want to emulate. A better showcase for the potential of Exigents as a character type, you are not going to find. And this one, incredibly specific (no matter what sort of "she has no canon identity" hedges the sidebar tries to introduce) character gets 55 pages of charms, just for her.

Are multiple players going to all play different versions of Janest in the same campaign? Is one player going to keep playing Janest in multiple different Exalted campaigns? Could Janest's highly flavorful and well-tuned charmset be repurposed for other, similar Exigents (Chosen of the God of Peasants, maybe)? You don't have to say "yes," not even out of loyalty to Exalted as a game. It's okay. She's just an example of the sort of thing you can do with Exigents. 

"See what an interesting and gameable Exalt we professional designers were able to make out of a concept as simple as 'an unremarkable local harvest god?' Now imagine the potential that exists with the god of gambling, or the goddess of toxins, or the god of artificial flight. You're welcome."

Except I don't feel welcomed. I feel burdened. Burdened with the knowledge that "exception-based Nobilis" is apparently really fucking awesome, because Janest's chapter was followed by yet another chapter that gave dozens of pages to one specific character - Pakpao, the Puppeteer, Chosen of the god of an idiosyncratic local theater style - and she too is super cool. She has the power to bring puppets to life (even giant parade puppets created for special festivals), tangle people up with phantom strings, and even turn into a puppet herself. Wah! It almost makes me think that a hundred pages of charms for just two characters might actually be worth it. Almost.

And I think about this world of infinite Exalted, with its bottomless wells of time and energy and creativity, and it's amazing and weird and wonderful. Like, really dig into the game's fantasy superheroes vibe. You can hit the super-hero element by giving each character their own highly specific branding and the fantasy angle by making that branding something fragile and mystical, like farmland or puppetry. This is a world where Calendar Man is going to wreck some serious shit and . . . it's not exactly Exalted anymore, but maybe it's something better.

Yet, for as awesome as it is, I'm not sure Exigents: Out of the Ashes is an rpg product that's fit for human consumption. Because no human, not even the really obsessed homebrewers who will do entire charmets by themselves (imagine me looking shiftily at the corners right now) can bring its vision to life. Don't get me wrong. I could, over the course of a couple of years, probably do 2-3 credible Exigents, share them online, and . . . give internet strangers the ability to play my 2-3 specific characters, just like they could play Janest or Pakpao. Maybe, over time, with a large and active enough community, there would exist the thousands of pages of available content to fulfill the book's promise, but honestly, even with the abstract advice from the charm design chapter, quality control is sure to be intermittent.

You could probably mitigate this problem by making Exigent varieties that were less singular. The Architects, Chosen of the City Gods, are a good start, though they run into the basic Exigents problem in microcosm - they really would benefit from custom content that helped make them Chosen of specific cities, rather than of urban life in the abstract. Partly this can be mitigated by the choice of Foundation Attributes (i.e. a scholarly city that focuses on Intelligence, Perception, and Charisma gives a very different character than a warlike city that focuses on Strength, Stamina, and Appearance), but there really should be individual charm trees that reflect the iconic character of Creation's major cities.

On the other hand, those charm trees needn't be more than 10-15 charms long, even under 3e's charm-heavy paradigm, and so supplementing the Architects' base utility with customization is not terribly onerous. The bigger problem with them as a character type is that there's an innate logistical impracticality to having multiple Architects in the same party - the Chosen of Nexus and the Chosen of Chiaroscuro may have similar powers, but their interests and attention are likely to be very far apart.

The only chapter that could actually support a campaign was the Sovereigns of Uluru. It's a little awkward how close they are in themes to the Dragon-Blooded, being super-powered aristocrats with cutthroat family politics, but I'd probably just overlook the similarity if it weren't for the fact that the Sovereigns are squabbling over the power vacuum left behind by their recently-deceased queen, so maybe that's something that could be tweaked.

The real problem with these guys is that (I can't fucking believe I'm saying this) their charms section needs to be 2-3 times as long. They are ability-based exalts, but all of their charms are based on the same 5 abilities. The book tries to play this off as a bit of setting lore, but it is quite transparently a pragmatic adaptation to the fact that they had only 1/6th of a hardcover to work with. Those 5 Abilities are already supporting charms that very clearly belong to another Ability. It wouldn't be too hard to cut those 5 trees down to half their size and make one tree for each of the 25 Abilities. That way you can have a party that uses the whole character sheet, you know, like you would if you were trying to play a game of Exalted.

I don't mean to be so grumpy, though. I mostly enjoyed this book, as much of a mess as it could be sometimes. I don't think the setting is ready to handle the basic question it poses - what if supernatural power were significantly less scarce and less openly under the control of a limited number of tightly-knit cliques? But I think you could tweak the lore to create a new, Exalted-adjacent setting where the blessings of the gods were less predictable and more widely-distributed. The main use I can think of for the material is to ditch the "diminishment" concept and use Exigent-style rules for god-blooded, strange magical prodigies, and the surviving pre-human peoples. But honestly, Exigents: Out of the Ashes saves me very little effort in realizing that vision. I'm not sure it fits with the Exalted 3rd Edition rules at all. It could probably work with Exalted: Essence, if you had a large enough list of abstract charm modes to just assemble a quick new Exalt type on the fly (fleshing out with custom charms as necessary). It might also work with a less charm-intensive edition, like 1e. And it would thrive in a narrative or effect-based alternative to the Exalted rules.

Final verdict - Exigents: Out of the Ashes is a monument to hubris, which in many ways makes it the perfect Exalted book.

Ukss Contribution: So much great stuff here. I kind of want to just rattle off a list of runner-ups from the sheer intoxicating joy of being back in Exalted. Like, Janest can trap a god inside a seed, then grow the seed, and the god becomes one with the plant that grows from the seed, possibly changing its essential nature. There's an undetailed example Exigent, the Foxbinder, where a trickster god was forced to create an Exigent as punishment, and so their Exalt is both their parole officer and protégé (basically, the Exalt takes the fox spirit as a familiar in order to gain their Exalted powers). The Chosen of the Firmament "led an army of devil stars" and I don't know what the hell that means, but I am enthralled by the possibilities.

However, I think my ultimate choice is civic festivals that incorporate giant puppets. This is such a cool cultural detail that I kind of wanted to hear less about the magical Puppeteer and more about the town she came from.

(Shadowrun 3e) System Failure

SPOILER WARNING

 Ah, the book of tying up loose ends. With the publication of System Failure, practically nothing established during or prior to third edition will ever again have more than historical relevance. . .

Or, at least, that's how it felt sometimes. Cross Applied Technologies is no more! Lucien Cross perished in a plane crash and his arch-rival Damien Knight went on a gravedancing hostile acquisitions spree. I'm sure this was devastating news to the small but loyal group of Shadowrun fans who eagerly awaited each new bit of information about Quebec's premier AAA megacorporation. Likewise, the oppressive Tsimshian government has been overthrown, Ibn Eisa has been finally outed as a Sheddim, and Ares is canonically the winner of the Probe Race (though, of course, nothing seemed to have come of it).

I suppose, in the broadest sense, this book delivered on the introduction's promise to "put the smackdown on the world of Shadowrun."  Most of it is transparently setting the stage for 4th edition's upcoming rules and setting changes, but those changes are significant enough to qualify as "a smackdown."

The main plot of the book is that Winternight's scheme to destroy the world, the dissonant Otaku of Ex Pacis' scheme to take over the Matrix, and Deus the AI's scheme to reconstitute himself from the brains of his torture victims all dovetail with Richard Villiers' oddly reluctant scheme to make a bazillion nuyen by taking Novatech public to result in a worldwide crash of the Matrix, leading to it being rebuilt according to 4th edition's revised decking rules.

And it's a weird series of adventures, because the scope and the stakes are as high as they can get (multiple nuclear devices are detonated, all over the world), but the PCs are just kind of there, being these hapless little guys. I wouldn't even necessarily level the Standard Metaplot Adventure Critique against it. The PCs aren't even hired as agency-less spectators to NPC shenanigans. It's just a thing that happens that's too big and too rapid for them to even understand until well after the fact. Even if you run the suggested adventures, at no point is the fate of the world in the hands of any individual, not even Deus or Richard Villiers. Shit just stacks up all at once and for the PCs to have any effect, they'd have to be in like four or five places at once.

That's probably the best way to handle a major metaplot event - don't let the PCs near it until it's too late. Like, jewel thieves in west coast criminal circles probably had very little opportunity to affect the subprime mortgage crisis, even if they did occasionally pull off a daring heist against wealthy dowagers whose fortunes were made by investing in commercial lenders. Yeah, the PCs commit crimes for hire, but they don't often engage in global counterterrorism ops for hire. That's a whole different set of guys. 

I just wonder how something like that would play at a table. The players are just happily bumbling along, doing their typical Seattle-based crime hijinks and BAM! The Matrix crashes. Lights go out. Planes start falling from the sky. No warning. No indication of a possible cause. No ability to do anything but react to your immediate circumstances. All because a homicidal AI and a sophisticated (possibly magical) computer virus got into a code fight at the Boston stock exchange.

Heroes reacting to sudden and unexpected disasters is a type of story people enjoy. You probably wouldn't think much of a narrative set on the Titanic if they somehow managed to dodge the iceberg. But that kind of event, it dramatically changes the genre of the story. It's a sedate upstairs-downstairs drama, but BAM, it's now about surviving the unforgiving elements of the North Atlantic. It's a low-key stoner comedy, but BAM, they're fighting aliens now. And that sort of turn is fine in a book or a movie, but in a collaborative medium like rpgs, maybe your players were prepared to tell gritty crime stories and not "survive the collapse of the modern world" stories.

Or maybe they'd thrive under the challenge and I've just been denying them and me of a potentially wonderful experience by keeping most of the plot firmly on screen. System Failure is betting that's the case, and that's probably why it's labeled a sourcebook instead of an adventure.

I think I just have to toughen up and be okay with it. Because I mostly enjoyed the book as a work of fiction. It was thrilling. The characters were . . . broadly drawn, but broadly compelling. I definitely felt like I was witnessing significant events.

Though my biggest takeaway from the book is that I've been greatly underestimating the threat posed by Winternight. Maybe because their goal of triggering Ragnarök and becoming the new generation of Norse gods was fucking ridiculous. There's no way that plan was ever going to work. But I guess it could be pretty dangerous in the course of failing. Somehow, these guys got their hands on dozens of nuclear weapons, experimental flesh-eating nanofog, and the personnel and resources to deploy this stuff in a coordinated attack on five different continents. They caught the Corporate Court with its pants down and very nearly destroyed the bulk of human knowledge and international commerce. Plus, they were also responsible for using weather control magic to create the coldest winter on record. This is a significant step up in threat level from how they've been depicted in the past.

I guess it's just a case of supervillain logic. The story needs an antagonist, and so the chosen foe was always going to be able to generate a credible threat. There's a lot of ambiguity in the things that have so far been left unsaid, so we can just fill it in with "yeah, their ideology is a joke, but they've got one of the world's most powerful magicians, one of its most brilliant engineers, one of its most dangerous warriors, and all the wealth and influence those three can gather (which turns out to be a lot)." Nonetheless, they feel like they should be in a Spiderman story or something. They even forced Saeder-Krupp to hunker down and weather the storm.

Even aside from the basic structural issues at work here (there being no single location critical enough to the plot for the PCs to be there to alter its course), this amped-up version of Winternight is probably too much for most characters. They're only likely to get involved at the periphery. The book actually suggests they might work for Winternight, inadvertently. You know, just unremarkable shadowrunner shit - breaking one of their conspirators out of prison, guarding their mages while they manipulate the weather at an unauthorized power site, delivering mysterious packages to unremarkable-seeming locations.

Having the PCs contribute to the apocalypse in this way is kind of interesting, thematically, because it only happens if they're careless about verifying who they work for and are indifferent to the morality of their missions (If the GM is good at their job, that is. A bad GM would just use this as an untelegraphed rug-pull). But it's a type of interesting that has the potential to feel really judgmental, so I'm not sure it's a good idea.

In general, I'd say that the Crash 2.0 plot was fine for what it was - utility metaplot - but I'm not super tempted to run it as a game. It was always destined to be a bullet point in future editions' history chapters, and it never escaped that feeling.

Okay, so a few other odds and ends.

Captain Chaos is dead, having sacrificed himself in a desperate last stand against the magical computer virus that threatened Shadowland. I may have had my issues with his moderation style, but not to the extent that I wished for his death. I'd be very interested in learning the reasoning behind this development. It feels like the end of an era, but what were their hopes for the new era to follow? 

Also, the Novatech IPO feels like a really weird plot to me. I guess it's because stock prices are such a fundamental part of the wealth of our real-world oligarchs. Like, Richard Villiers is really out there running the world's 12th largest corporation with mostly his own money? It's implied in the epilogue that he preferred not having to answer to shareholders, but is that really an onerous enough burden to forgo all the advantages of playing the game with other peoples' money? Theoretically, Elon Musk has to answer to shareholders and when has that stopped him from being an utter disgrace? Maybe that's just one of the effects social media has had on our society. Previously, it was possible to think of billionaire CEOs like Villiers and Lofwyr as these cold-blooded masterminds whose greed was subordinate to a greater business savvy (as the S-K representative put it, Lofwyr has no interest in changing "the focus of the company from doing things that make sense to doing things that make shareholder value go up at all costs.")

It's always weird when I notice a cyberpunk story be less cynical than real life. Look at these corporate guys, valuing things other than having a bigger number than all their peers. Next thing you're going to tell me is that "Corporate Court anti-trust regulations don't allow one AAA corporation to own part of another?"

So, like, do these guys hate money or something? What's the point of even having a Corporate Court if it's going to prevent cartelization, monopoly, or hyping up meme stock to leave retail investors holding the bag? Does private equity exist in this world? Why is Richard Villiers having such trouble loading Novatech subsidiaries down with debt, stripping them of assets, and writing them off when they inevitably fail? Does the Corporate Court have an equivalent to the SEC?

Of course, I'd be lying if I said I understood these issues well. Maybe the economy of 2025 is vastly different than the economy of 2005. It seems plausible. It's been a fifth of a century. In the 20th century, 1959 was a whole other game than 1939. It's just, if that's true, if our fiction needs to be so much more cynical because reality itself has gotten proportionately more cynical, then how fucked are we? 

I think it may be a lot.

Oh, I guess I should mention something about the off-hand revelation that the New Revolution attempted a coup that briefly looked like it might be successful. It got as far as armed insurgents in the White House, killing President Kyle Haeffner, but then the book inexplicably shut it down almost as soon as it began. Maybe rebooting the Matrix was already enough of a status-quo shakeup for one book, but the entire plot wound up feeling pointless. At the very least, they should have left Senator Jonathan S Braddok alive and free so he could run for president and win in 2068. 

Too soon? Yeah, too soon.

Anyway, System Failure was a pretty satisfying end to Shadowrun 3rd edition. Maybe some of the metaplot threads got swept aside with undue haste, and I'm enough of a pot-stirrer that I'd prefer a metaplot book that took some bigger swings, but it managed to check in with almost all of the most interesting of the edition's plotlines. It's enough to whet your appetite for the next edition without leaving you with any burning sense of unfinished business, which is pretty much all you can expect from a season finale.

Ukss Contribution: One of the new setting elements introduced with the rebooted Matrix is something called "Idols." They get very little detail here, appearing only in a transcript of some lady's conversation with her psychiatrist, but they seem to be American-Gods-style neo divinities attached to the Matrix. The two names we get are Gossamer, who appears as a shimmering aurora of multicolored light and The Branded Lady, who appears as a woman whose body is covered in tattoos of various corporate logos. 

Ukss has its Astral Web, which is not quite an internet, but is close enough that it would be distinctive and meaningful for it to have its own crop of home-grown divinities.

The End

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual violence and misogyny

The End bills itself as "theological horror," so right out the gate, that's two things I'm woefully unqualified to talk about. "There were things in this book that made me uncomfortable," I'd say, in some hypothetical timeline, and you'd reply, "was it the theology or the horror?" And I'd just stand there looking foolish, completely unable to answer.

Don't worry, hypothetical John, I've got your back - it's mostly the horror. The theology I just find a little confusing.

Why do bad things happen? When I ask this question of theology and get an unsatisfying answer, I come away with the feeling that I know something other people don't. When I ask it of horror, I feel like maybe I've just missed something. I think it's because the goal of theology is to have you walk away feeling good and the goal of horror is . . . to make you feel bad?

Right? Being scared is a bad feeling. Being grossed-out is a bad feeling. The weighty despair and utter moral vertigo at the scope of human depravity that comes from witnessing imaginative cruelty - that's a bad feeling. But if you walk away from horror media having never felt fear or disgust or faithless dread at the indifferent moral order of the universe, you're probably going to be pretty disappointed.

I guess that means The End is not a disappointing horror experience. You've got a world where the apocalyptic disasters of the Book of Revelation happened, leaving only a small scattering of survivors - the so-called "Meek," who sided with neither heaven nor hell (this is the part where the theology gets confusing). God abandons the Earth to these fence-sitters, closing the gates of both afterlives in history's biggest flounce. This poses the ultimate moral test to those who have previously refused all religious conviction - what do you do if this life is all there is, and the only consequences of your actions are those that can be imposed by the exercise of worldly power?

And one of the possible answers is The Atlanta Confederation - a group of men who decided to band together to capture every woman and girl they could find, pump them full of drugs, and keep them as slaves in a system that is exactly as bad as you're imagining.

What am I supposed to say about that? I hate these guys. I'm not happy I read about them. But maybe that makes them antagonist material? Like, Freddy Krueger was a pedophile. And it's not as if I think Jason or Michael Myers are charming dinner party companions. I can see how a horror game would want to have a bunch of guys the players are really, really going to hate (ah, hate, another bad feeling I forgot to list before).

I can't even really say that it seems gratuitous. From a philosophical perspective, the Atlanta Confederation is kind of interesting. The first, knee-jerk question you're going to ask yourself is "how did these assholes manage to dodge hell?" And the book's implicit answer is that they didn't do anything hell-worthy until after the end of the world. They were too chickenshit to do the really bad stuff when they thought God was around (the founder was a member of the KKK and a regular churchgoer, and . . . the theology is confusing), but as soon as they're sent a prophetic dream saying that God no longer cares what happens on Earth, they act on the darkest impulses imaginable.

This could, potentially, just be a version of that obnoxious question theists sometimes ask - "If you don't believe in God, what's to stop you from raping and murdering?" - but I'm choosing to interpret it more generously because I can distinguish between a healthy atheism and a collapsing theism. 

However, where it gets a little sketchy for me is when we look at the Atlanta Confederation's sworn enemies, the Swamp Rats, a guerrilla resistance movement of former slaves who live in the dangerous areas near the outskirts of the colony and do everything in their power to take it down. The Swamp Rats are all female, because the Confederation kills or chases off any men it doesn't recruit and they're having a crisis of leadership - Rachel Duvalier wants to focus on freeing the enslaved women, and Mary Colwell, former US Marine, want to kill every man she sees, even innocent travelers who might not know what the Confederation is doing. A certain degree of anger is understandable, and operational security means you can't afford to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who looks like they might be friendly to the Confederation, fair enough. But also, Mary and her faction are man-hating feminists who will literally crucify men based on nothing more than guilt by association (Mary even goes so far as to drop the f-slur in relation to a gay man who is feeding the Swamp Rats information).

It's a bit of a caricature, not helped one bit by the implication that camp tensions are exacerbated because the ladies need dick ("It is also impossible for any heterosexual woman in the camp to get any R and R. This has led to a lot of edgy, violent inhabitants in an edgy and violent colony.")

And what am I supposed to say about that? Taking a step back and trying to see the game's broader context, I think it's less internalized misogyny worming its way into a fictional feminist conflict and more that the Tyranny Games crew is just really bad at nuance.

It's kind of fascinating, actually, because the whole game is about nuance. People who were neither particularly good nor particularly bad (though we have to talk about the way this idea is conflated with belief in monotheism) and what happens when they are no longer subject to the usual moral constraints. In addition to the Atlanta Confederation and Reverend Tommy Thrillkill, there is a holy man who is described as a "living saint" and a Voodoo priestess who is basically a superhero.

But in-between? That's where they have some trouble. Take a less fraught example than the Swamp Rats, the Archangel Gabriel. His story is that as God was opening the seals and killing most everyone on Earth, he felt pity for humanity, so much so that he was distracted at a critical moment and locked out of Heaven. 

He crash-landed in Denver and his angelic majesty absolutely broke the minds of the human survivors he encountered. They rely on him utterly for protection, sustenance, and shelter. Not out of any sort of negligence or laziness, but because they can't do anything but worship him day and night.

And there's a really obvious, nuanced, and fascinating story to tell here. Gabriel's immense compassion means that he can't abandon the people he destroyed, even though it was just a terrible misunderstanding. And maybe, as time goes on, he falls to the sin of pride and resents God, for abandoning both him and the helpless apes he has grown to love. You know, the story of a mostly good person who nonetheless causes inadvertent harm by their own inalienable nature.

However, The End goes another way with it. "Now he regrets his moment of weakness and refuses to be damned to this god-forsaken place. He has gathered up his worshippers to fill him with the power of faith. When their faith flows through him, he will storm the gates of Heaven . . . or die trying. He cares nothing for the humans worshipping him. All that matters is returning to heaven, to this end he will happily sacrifice each and every one of them."

Gasp! The angel is secretly evil! Who could have ever seen that coming?

Less superciliously, this reversal of the direction of abuse is really just the game's go-to tool. One of the other main conflicts is between a small society that has grown up around a survivalist bunker in Waco Texas and a significantly larger (approx 2800 vs 4000 population) group of organized Native Americans. Basically, the Native Americans were politically radical, before the apocalypse, rejecting the God of the white man without actually worshipping the devil, so they got left behind. And now they have a vision of reclaiming all of the continent's stolen land from the other survivors, potentially returning the entire hemisphere to indigenous control. And they plan on accomplishing this by . . . you guessed it - barely discriminate violence ("Anyone who cannot prove at least one-sixteenth American Indian heritage is scalped." Oof. I can think of at least two things wrong with that sentence).

The practical upshot of these clumsy attempts at nuance is that frequently, the ideas inspired by the book are more interesting than the actual words printed inside the book. And how much credit do I want to give The End for that. I could be really mean and interpret this feeling as "The End is occasionally interesting by accident," but I don't think it's truly accidental. I don't think the authors were unaware of the interesting ideas at work here. I think maybe they just didn't have the breadth of experience necessary to explore them in a satisfying way. You know what they say, if you're attempting theology before your 40th birthday, you're doing it wrong.

(Actually, I have no idea if "they" say anything like that, it just feels like something that might be true.)

So let's teach those callow young Christians a lesson by having a middle-aged atheist attempt theology instead!

No, really, the theology of The End is very weird. According to the FAQ at the beginning of the book:

The thing that took everyone by surprise is how generous God was. If you believed in a single, benevolent God and lived your life according to the doctrines of the religion you practiced, you were admitted into heaven. Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Buddhists. People who followed a polytheistic religion still had some hope, provided that they followed their religion's most benevolent god and followed the virtues of humility, self-sacrifice, and love.

If you had truck with the forces of evil in any way, shape or form you were damned. Most Pagans, practitioners of Magic, and roleplaying gamers (ha ha) were all thrown into the pit. Those who used religion for their own ends were also damned, like televangelists, faith healers, and mediums.

The feeling I got while reading this was that the author had never, in their entire life, been asked a difficult question about their religious beliefs. I think they legitimately thought this was a less arbitrary set of conditions than usually put forth by rapture-believing Evangelical Christians. And it's not. It's just more inclusive. Why is monotheism even entering into this at all? What correlation does believing in a singular god even have with basic human decency? 

You don't necessarily want a coherent soteriology, rooted in ethical philosophy. This is "theological horror" after all, and so arbitrary, whimsical, or even odious criteria for salvation all have the potential to say something really interesting about the problem of evil and the limitations of the various belief systems that attempt to grapple with this problem.

This is especially the case against the backdrop of the grotesque, baroque cruelty of the apocalypse itself. The book is unreflective about this issue, considering everyone who went to heaven to be "saved," without ever asking the (to an atheist) obvious question - at what point, during the unrelenting plagues, famines, wars, and global gigadeaths did the heaven-bound decide they were backing the right side? Right? You look out your window, see the skies darkened by flesh-eating locusts, and you think, "hey, whoever unleashed those things, that's who I want to entrust with my immortal soul."

To someone like me, what makes the Christian Apocalypse such fertile ground for horror is confronting the fear that the worst people I've ever met might be right about the nature of the universe. To that end, their ridiculously and offensively short list of who gets into heaven is a feature, rather than a bug. In exploring how awful the world would look if it followed their views, you're exposing the awfulness of those views. God is sending all the gay people to hell . . . and you want to side with God? What's wrong with you?

Casting a wide net for salvation mitigates that, possibly to a fatal degree. If God is so chill with so many kinds of people, why is he even destroying the Earth in the first place? And if he has a good reason for doing so, why would he do it so painfully? Why does this good God care so much about the worship of a benevolent deity and apparently not at all about people making the choice to embrace benevolence as a virtue and direct it towards their fellow human beings? 

Maybe it's a bias on my part, but a good way to test whether a person's theology is full of shit is to ask them, "why are atheists capable of benevolence." Bad theologians will deny that it's even possible and try and convince you that any benevolent-seeming atheist is just pulling a con. Good theologians will realize that the question is a sort of philosophical compliment to the general problem of evil. Like I'm pretty sure the mainstream Christian answer is that God's grace is what allows us to know and choose goodness and it was given equally to all human beings, so someone might never even suspect the existence of God as a factual matter and still, broadly speaking, be "good."

But any theology that cleared even that low bar of generosity is going to have a very difficult time squaring itself with the standard presentation of the Apocalypse. All humans know grace, even if it's tainted by Original Sin, but the Apocalypse looks a lot like a failure of grace. If my wicked heart, which is but a pale image of God's immaculate love, will quail at the thought of my fellow humans starving to death, catching painful diseases, or getting eaten by some weird beast, how can the Almighty's do any less? He has the power to just turn off the world like a light switch. So why doesn't he?

And the answer to that is the same answer I wish the adults had given young me when I first started questioning the theological horror of Noah's Ark - it's just a story. It doesn't actually reference real events, either past or future. Rather, Revelation is an allegory and a prayer. It's about how even unassailable worldly power is destined to fall before the power of the Lord. It's God's promise - even tyrants die. And there is a kind of hope in that.

If you want to know the difference between theology and theological horror, that's a pretty good guide. Theology is about the hope to be found in the Book of Revelation, and theological horror is about the pain and terror we'd all feel if the events depicted actually took place.

As interesting as The End could be sometimes, it never quite got that distinction, and so it never truly lived up to its promise.

Ukss Contribution: Full disclosure - this book repeatedly disturbed me with its habit of using violence against women to provoke a cheap emotional reaction, and if it was a fantasy setting that just happened to take place after the Apocalypse, I probably wouldn't forgive it for that. But the introduction to the game billed itself as horror, so I have to acknowledge that making me uncomfortable is not automatically a deal-breaker.

That said, my favorite thing in this book was not one of its unique inventions, but rather something it took from the Bible, by way of pop culture - the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. I don't know what it is, but there's something about the "not quite a boy-band" vibe these guys have that really appeals to me.