(Eberron 3.5) Voyage of the Golden Dragon

 Voyage of the Golden Dragon (Nicolas Logue) is a short collection of 4 adventures that all revolve around the titular "Golden Dragon," Khorvaire's largest airship, originally meant for the Breland military, but auctioned off to a private company after the war, who turned it into a luxury cruise ship.

With the caveat that each adventure is incredibly short (maybe 6-8 linear encounters), it's a good cross-section of what you might do with a luxury cruise ship in a "post medieval, pulp-inspired, but not really (::wink::) world." There's a fancy gala event that gets taken over by terrorist infiltrators who want to hold the rich folk for ransom. There's necromancy-enhanced political intrigue between two of its high-status passengers. There's a shoreside adventure with an obnoxious explorer type. And there's an aerial attack from an implacable foe.

It's all pretty utilitarian. The book has a singular mission - get you to use the hell out of that damned airship - and it pursues that mission with maximum efficiency. And if that seems like a pretty bland thing for me to say about a series of fantasy adventures, consider it merely an artifact of the book's format. None of the adventures last long enough to do anything super cool, but they also don't leave themselves enough time to notably screw things up. They just work.

I guess it was a little . . . sketchy that the description of the ship's onboard casino took pains to tell us that, "Goblins in green-tailed surcoats scamper about, bringing patrons their beverages and exchanging their currency." It's probably nothing. But racial homogeneity among a luxury casino's serving staff strikes me as . . . a trope.

But that's literally just one sentence, and I'm probably only paying attention to it because there's so little else to talk about. The kitchen is powered by fire elementals. That's pretty neat. Of the eight named crew (though more, like the goblins, are implied to be aboard), two of them are spies for the Brelish crown, which is pretty funny. There's a canonical sexual relationship between a halfling and an elf. 

Overall, I guess it's just a decent location, with some decent NPCs, that is the subject of some decent adventures. Score one for basic competence.

Ukss Contribution: The first two adventures feature a reoccurring villain, Paldrith Malinko, a wealthy and powerful pirate prince who wants to destroy the Golden Dragon because it is slightly larger than his own still-under-construction flagship. That's impressively petty. I'm trying to avoid putting airships specifically into Ukss (because I got the idea that more fantasy worlds need to have actual airplanes, and because I think the early-20th-century vibe planes bring is interestingly different from the steampunk aesthetics of airships), but the same plot should work equally well with naval vessels.

(Exalted 3e) Miracles of the Solar Exalted

 Miracles of the Solar Exalted (John Mørke) is a nothing of a book, just 40 pages of backer charms from the Exalted 3rd Edition kickstarter. Some are good. Some will be repeated in the Abyssals book. Some are over-designed. The usual fare. If you like Exalted, you'll like this probably. 

I did have to laugh at some of the niche charms, included to round out the charm trees (or just because Mr. Mørke had a particular itch he needed to scratch). Like the Performance charm that lets an actor infer the entirety of their character's script based only on a few lines of dialogue. How many times in the developers' home games are they asking players to make a "script remembering" roll? When would this even come in handy? How is this an Essence 3 effect worth 8-10xp and 5 committed motes? Even in an unusual situation like a campaign that's a hard-core simulation set backstage at a theater troupe, well, you've just created a charm that completely bypasses the systems you presumably invented specifically for this situation. Also, your story hinges on a character getting up on stage and flawlessly performing a part for which they were unable to rehearse? By the rules of drama, that's a once-a-story event at best. Repeat the trick and suddenly it's not "Oh, wow, they're so great! They're able to fill in for the second understudy with no preparation whatsoever," but rather, "Damn that bastard! They never show up for rehearsals, I've never even seen them read a script, but somehow their lazy ass never suffers consequences. They always nail their performances, even when the rest of us are left pulling our hair out stressing about their lack of preparation." And I'm not saying that this couldn't be a compelling Solar Exalted character concept. Just that if you're making that character, it would make more sense mechanically for Divinely-Inspired Performance to be a permanent charm with no cost.

That's just a nitpick, though. If anything, the lazy actor build is inspirational in the best weird-char-op tradition. The only part of Miracles of the Solar Exalted that bothered me was the Apocryphal keyword. The short version - it has no mechanical meaning, it's only present to let us, the readers, know that a particular charm is non-canonical.

There are things in rpgs that are objectively worse, from a moral perspective, so I should definitely try to keep my annoyance in perspective, but this is just such a chickenshit move. You solicited money from these people on the premise that they would be able to leave their mark on Exalted by creating a custom charm . . . so compromise your fucking vision, okay?! I mean, the whole point of collaborative creation is that you surrender total control in exchange for the beauty (and yeah, sometimes, the cringe) of the unexpected. You invited randos from the internet with more money than sense (and/or the Exalted obsession that made this a sensible financial transaction) to become part of the process, so let them be part of the process. Because of your choice of stretch goals, Creation is now a weirder, wilder place where Solar and Lunar exalted can merge into a composite being and legendary warriors can wade shirtlessly into battle. Deal with it.

I don't know. Maybe I'm making too big a deal out of this. It just doesn't sit right with me. It's like he invented the keyword to say "I, John Mørke, am willing to perform mercenary design work to the client's specifications, but let it be known that I, John Mørke, in my role as developer, do not personally sanction these decisions." I guess I feel like maybe Exalted is a little bit more resilient than that.

Later books in the line would take to bundling these backer charms in with the campaign's stretch goals to make one larger supplement. That's probably a superior approach (and would likely have saved the core book, in particular, a whole lot of trouble, to the extent of changing the direction of 3rd edition's development as a whole). As it stands, Miracles of the Solar Exalted was just a somewhat useful, but utterly forgettable book. There's only one reason to consult it (you want more choices for your solar's charms), but that reason is hardly a compelling one (the corebook has a lot of fucking charms).

Overall, I approve, but only on the balance, and probably only because I'm a soft touch for all things Exalted.

Ukss Contribution: It wasn't an intended rules outcome, but setting is a bit thin on the ground and I'm a bit salty about the Apocryphal keyword still, so I'm going with the "impossibly lazy, but infuriatingly talented actor" that is implied to exist by a strict reading of the mechanics of Divinely-Inspired Performance. I think they'd be fun as both a quest giver and a macguffin.

(Eberron 3.5) Player's Guide to Eberron

 The Player's Guide to Eberron (James Wyatt, Keith Baker, Luke Johnson, Stan!) has the sort of format that paradoxically either makes me read really fast or makes me read really slow. It's divided into a series of encyclopedia-like entries that are all some precise multiple of two pages long. So I can either finish a section quickly and say to myself "this seems like a natural stopping point, I'll just take a little break" (followed by four hours of video games) or I can finish a section quickly and say, "wow, that was easy, I'll just do another one right away." There's no middle ground between these two reactions, but each one is equally likely.

The real tie-breaker in these situations is how interesting I find the subject matter. And in this case, I found the subject matter very interesting indeed . . . but like 85% of it I've already seen before. This book calls itself a "player's guide," but it's not clear to what end it's meant to guide players towards. Like, maybe it's just the case that players empirically don't read core books (let alone supplements) so they tried to manifest a similar outcome by giving a player-oriented title to a condensed lore compendium. The same thing happened in Planescape with the Planeswalker's Handbook. 

Also, frustratingly, like the Planeswalker's Handbook, the Player's Guide to Eberron is probably the best entry point into the series. It's a broad cross-section of things you need to know about the world of Eberron, but just enough that you can pluck each individual topic out of context and be done with it in a couple of minutes. You want to play a warforged, you turn to the "warforged" section near the end (they're arranged alphabetically, like an encyclopedia) and you get a bit of information from the main campaign book, a bit of information from Races of Eberron, and maybe a very little bit of information from the adventures and it's all very functional. But it doesn't actually tell you how to build a warforged character, and only offers two extra feats, so you still actually need the main book. I guess that means that the Player's Guide to Eberron is meant for people who have all the other books . . . but don't read them?

This is not as off-the-wall a theory as you might suppose. There is some novel information here - three new prestige classes, a bunch of new feats, a couple of new organizations - but the bulk of the stuff that expands the actual Eberron setting comes in the form of references to things you'd originally find in various non-Eberron D&D supplements. Want to know how to play a xeph or a raptoran? How to incorporate Magic of the Incarnum into the setting? There's a sidebar for that. I've heard it said that "if it exists in D&D, it has a place in Eberron" and this book here is the proof that they at least put some thought into fulfilling that promise. Most of these little cameos feel like an afterthought, but afterthoughts are a kind of thought, so I think it's fair to say that Eberron has earned the right to call itself a kitchen-sink setting. 

I wouldn't necessarily call it a satisfying sort of kitchen-sink worldbuilding, however. It's very uneven in the degree to which all of these disparate elements are given something significant and cool to do. Incarnum magic is largely confined to The Island Where They Do Incarnum, the thri-kreen "wander the wastes, though they are hardly numerous," and yeah, it turns out that the various nations of Khorvaire have militant philosophical organizations that resemble the Samurai class. On the other hand, the Elan get a cool new backstory (they are living prisons that trap quori spirits deemed criminal by the Dreaming Dark - the spirits are forced to possess the body, but bound to have no control over its actions, and the composite creature is an ageless, psionically-active being with no memory of its previous life), the shujenja class represents the priests of a dragon-worshipping religion, and swashbucklers are so integrated into the themes and aesthetics of the setting that they're barely worthy of comment (in a good way).

I'm in the unusual, though likely not unprecedented position of having read every Eberron book published thus far and most of mainline D&D books being referenced in the sidebars. I've got very close to maximum context (somewhere between 92% and 95%, I'd say) and what the Player's Guide to Everron feels like to me is a bunch of old-hat information sprinkled through with trifling little tidbits. On the one hand, I'm not necessarily opposed to the old hat per se, and I absolutely live for little tidbits, but on the other hand I'm hard-pressed to imagine a significant use for this thing. A book where they went through all of 3.X edition's obscure sourcebook and gave me a paragraph of canonical Eberron backstory for every random prestige class and monster with an Int score would likely be one of my all-time favorite rpg supplements (period), but wedding a partial implementation of that idea to a rather unambitious recap of Eberron as it stood in January of 2006. . . well it commits the cardinal sin of kitchen-sink worldbuilding: it doesn't make space for the new material by making the world feel bigger. Rather, the boundaries of Eberron feel very similar to what was established in the main campaign book, and it's just the margins that feel a little bit more crowded.

I have a certain experience with this very tension in the world of Ukss. It's easy to just keep adding new stuff without any regard for what has come before, and at the start it can feel like an expansive bigness, but if you don't make the effort to fit the pieces together, the whole thing can become so expansive that it loses coherence. New elements can't just be for the gaps, because that's making the new stuff subordinate to the old, but if you're always making room for the new elements, that's just the same problem seen from the other side. You need both an openness to expanding the horizons of the possible and a dedication to finding connections between your ideas and fitting them all into a single context. That's hard enough when you're scrupulously curating everything to go into the melting pot. I shudder to think of how it might feel to just inherit all of D&D's vast and sprawling canon all at once (oh, the writers of Races of the Wild thought it'd be cute to have catfolk . . . they can live in the jungles of Xen'drik, I guess).

Overall, I'd say that I have no strong feelings one way or another about the Player's Guide to Eberron. I like Eberron as a whole . . . and this is certainly Eberron, all right.

Ukss Contribution: One of the critical pieces of technology in the world of Eberron is Khyber dragonshards. Arcanists use these crystals to bind elemental spirits into the locomotive systems of airships and rail carts and a bunch of other useful items. These crystals are found, naturally occurring, in the vast system of caves that is Eberron's equivalent to the Underdark. 

The Ukss contribution for this book is a weird bit of trivia about these Kyber crystal deposits - that sometimes they will randomly ensnare passing demons. Obviously, this is mainly meant as a cool hazard for dungeon-delving adventurers, but I can't help looking at this phenomenon from the perspective of the demons. A slight, but not insignificant danger to wandering around underground is that you might get trapped in some bullshit rock. I find the cultural implications to be fascinating.

(Exalted 3e) Deeds Yet Undone

 Oh, wow, an Exalted adventure book that isn't a jumpstart . . . but does somehow recapitulate the jumpstart adventures' worst quality by putting three of them into a 64 page book. . .

Wait, am I just outright saying that Deeds Yet Undone would have been better if it was three times as long . . . 

I mean, yeah, probably. 

It's a tricky thing, because quality isn't strictly a function of length. If that were the case, then Ukss Plus would be one of the greatest rpgs ever made (instead of merely being, like, in the top 10% or so). However, one of the dangers of working with such tight page counts is that you'll leave out important (possibly even vital) information.

Take the city of Kiliran, for example. It's a completely new location, never before covered (or even mentioned) in one of Exalted's myriad setting books, but its pitch is so good that it immediately feels like it could have been part of Creation since the very beginning -  "Kiliran, upon the edge of the wheel of creation, the farthest mortal port." This is both something that would logically exist in the world and an exceptional bit of rpg utility. You'd pretty much want to use it in exactly the same way as the adventure - as a staging point for naval expeditions into the vast and endless sea that contains indescribable mysteries from the chaos that preceded Creation.

Paradoxically, it is the very strength of Kiliran's pitch that makes its presentation in the book so weak. This lonely place, this last, fragile resting point before the literal end of the world, it's going to be something with immense cultural, political, and mythic significance to the entire world. It is somewhere that would inevitably be celebrated, romanticized, and objectified by people thousands of miles away. So, naturally, you give it two and a half paragraphs, most of which are pretty vague (oh, this sea port has "a district wherein bowls of noodles and fried rice are sold to the local sailors" - I never would have guessed).

That's not a matter of design or writing skill, it's a matter of curation. The main thing a more thorough description of Kiliran would accomplish is to set the stage for all the countless different adventures that did not involve leaving town at the first opportunity. There's a world where "The Thousand Milk-Churning Strikes" gets a 64-page book all to itself, and in that book Kiliran takes up an entire chapter with its own mini-supplement, and maybe it's a beautiful world. It might even be a better world, but it's not the world we live in.

That's not necessarily a complaint. It's unreasonable for me to ask for the deep structural changes needed to make this book into a full adventure/mini supplement instead of a sampler pack of adventure seeds offered as a crowdfunding stretch goal. However, it does make me question exactly how useful a sampler pack of adventure seeds really is.

I guess the main strength of Deeds Yet Undone is that it offers a pretty persuasive cross-section of iconic Exalted plots - a dungeon crawl/creature of the week mystery that could easily be adapted to (high level) D&D, a highly abstract sandbox with a broad goal like "win this war," and a journey into absolute fucking nonsense with a weirdly mythological vibe.

The first adventure, "The Crucible of Progress" is the most traditional of the three. It's basically "CSI: Kaiju Crimes Division." A giant monster is intermittently attacking a town, but after each attack, it disappears without a trace. Can the PCs find out where it's coming from and put a stop to it? It's got some characteristic Exalted flair - the setting is described as "[taking] after imperial China both in economy and aesthetics, merging those elements with aspects of Italian medieval communes such as Florence and Venice." The main villain, who is using a First Age artifact to covertly summon and banish the monster, is the Goddess of Silkworms. Her main goal is to use the monster attacks to destabilize the town's relationship with the Realm so that the Guild can come in and take over the local silk trade (which she regards as more likely to strengthen her power and help her become the Goddess of Silk itself, instead of just the worms). One of her main strengths is that she has manipulated the Exigent Exalted of Fireworks to view her as the town's most important divinity.

It's a good use of the setting, and not quite something you could do in just any old fantasy world, but it lends itself to a linear narrative. This monster situation has a definite solution, and the follow-up plots really revolve on the players becoming invested in the fate of the town, rather than moving on to the next one. That's neither a strength nor a weakness, per se, but yeah, I kind of wish there was more setting there to work with.

The second adventure, "A Shadow Falls" is a bit more in Exalted's unique niche, in the sense that it's a zombie attack story that is framed as a slow-burn war story, requiring PCs to demonstrate their political, strategic, and organizational aptitude in addition to personal valor on battlefield. As compensation for its mechanical scale, it's probably the most generic in terms of setting elements. The zombies are under the control of some Abyssal Exalted, in service to an unnamed Deathlord, but it could be any necromancer, really. I like it as support for a particular style of play, but it was probably my least favorite of the three stories.

Which leaves Chapter 3: "Ten Thousand Milk Churning Strikes." Hoo boy. It's my favorite of the three . . . but mostly because it's the most creatively challenging. In terms of rpg-style gameplay, it's the weakest. It's a race to a magical macguffin and it's structured like it's meant for one session - 1) Meet your rivals and bargain with the monarch for your official permission to launch an expedition. 2)Some light sabotage and dirty tricks before setting off. 3)Slice of Life at sea. 4) "Random" encounter with a sea monster. 5) A three-to-four-way naval battle as all the various rivals reach the destination at more or less the same time (extraordinary success with the sabotage or the sea monster notwithstanding). 6) Get the macguffin.

But specifics matter. Somehow, it is simultaneously both maximum Exalted and something thoroughly disconnected from anything Exalted has ever done before:

"In an age unnamed, when the gods thundered across the sky like mortals would walk upon puddles, there was a distant sea of infinite milk. This milk was sweet like honey, thick and viscous like cream, and intoxicating like wine. This Milk of Immortality was once the favored drink of the gods and is what caused the gods to be immortal . . .

"To share it among themselves perfectly, the far western sky and earth gods of Kiliran decided to take a great mountain - taller than Creation itself - and turned it into a pestle, and then they reached out to Vandr, the Serpent That Encircles the World and mount of the Lord Luna, and wound them about the mountain pestle . . ."

And this is, on one level, absolute gibberish. It doesn't fit with any previous conception of Exalted's pre-history. It doesn't even mesh metaphysically. It's like a backstory from a different game. But it's also the first thing I've read in 3rd edition that came close to making me feel like I did when I was reading the game for the first time. On considered reflection, I'm not the biggest fan of the "in the murky depths of the Time Before, literally anything could have happened" approach to the setting's history, and I actively disapprove of the notion that Creation could have multiple "equally true" creation stories. . .

But there's something there. An infinite sea of milk . . . timelines that don't line up with known facts . . . a physical scale that makes a mockery of naive intuitions about mass or volume or distance . . . you could make a case for this being a new, spooky presentation for the action of the Wyld. The primordial chaos isn't just a mutation-causing radiation field or a LOL-random monster factory. It's alternate universes, alternate histories, alternate cosmologies, stitched together in a geography of dreams. The Sea of Milk is exactly as big and exactly as important as the stories say, but only in the context of its own tenuous reality. 

Or, at least, that's one possible theory. Maybe there's just a Sea of Milk out there and the stories are merely a folkloric attempt to explain why it exists. Still, it's a delightfully off-putting thing to place at the center of your macguffin race. It kind of sounds like a joke. It kind of sounds like someone's religion. Because there's a grandeur in its absurdity. There's a noticeable chain of reasoning: milk - motherhood - life - the sea. Enough, at least, to believe that it's a plausible legend that people would be plausibly motivated to pass along. And in this world, that legend is gloriously literal. An imperial navy officer, a pirate, a merchant-sorcerer, and the PCs are gearing up to launch an expedition to find it. Maybe it's mostly an allegory, but it's also a place where people can go. And that stubborn literalism around the sublime, even to the point where you start to be a bit of a buzzkill about it, that to me is the game's signature move.

But it wouldn't be such a tough sell if the book simply had enough of a pagecount to thoroughly explain itself.

Overall, I'd say that Deeds Yet Undone left me wanting more, but not necessarily in a good way. I found it enjoyable enough, but I'm not sure I want to do the necessary amount of work to actually use it.

Ukss Contribution: My favorite thing is the city of Kirilan. I'm probably going to port that into my Exalted games from now on. However, because Ukss is not flat, it doesn't actually make sense to have a "most distant mortal port." So I'll go with something from the backstory of the second adventure - "The Rain Wars." The adventure doesn't explain what they actually were (cause it's so short, you see), but the name suggests intriguing possibilities.

(Eberron 3.5) Magic of Eberron

 Oh no, I may be in trouble. Eberron looks like it's shaping up to be exactly the sort of fantasy rpg setting that's guaranteed to activate my worst instincts as a critic - a high-concept subversion of a familiar genre that nonetheless feels compelled to play it safe and reassure readers that it's not going to stray too far from genre conservatism.

While reading Magic of Eberron (Bruce R. Cordell, Stephen Schubert, Chris Thomasson), I experienced a rollercoaster of a moment that exemplified this tension. At the start of Chapter 4, there are three section headers all in a row that seemed ready to sell the high concept: "Life in a Magic-Suffused Society," "Post Medieval World," and "Professional Spellcasters." I saw those in the Table of Contents and I thought to myself, "Aw, yeah, let's fucking go!" . . . Then I noticed that all three sections were on the same page.

"Post Medieval World" was only two paragraphs. And one of those paragraphs was about the setting's resemblance to a medieval world: "The benefits provided by the wide-scale manipulation of magic are not provided by arcane factories of mass production. Instead, Eberron's magical wonders remain the purview of individual practitioners, artisans, and expert crafters."

Nooo! My (hypothetical, implied) infrastructure! If there's no mass production, what is the train for? What are you putting on that train that's worth the expense of maintaining a continental rail network? Maybe passenger service is enough to pay the bills, but that's not the main reason people built railroads historically. It also doesn't say anything particularly interesting about the changing demographics of the urban-rural divide that came about because farm work was getting less labor intensive while manufacturing increased vastly in scale. You know, the very specific sort of "post medieval" where it "shares many elements of a later renaissance society," but none of those elements are things that would make it incompatible with Forgotten Realms.

The story of Eberron is not the story of increasing volumes of cargo traveling increasingly long distances through increasingly complex networks of supply chains. It is not a story of society's adaptation to the changing nature of work. It's not even the story of the transformation of warfare from being dominated by well-armed aristocrats to being won or lost by conscript soldiers wielding off-the-rack weapons with a month's worth of training. Rather, Eberron's story is simply: "D&D, but there's also a train."

And that's sort of what I mean when I say it brings out my worst instincts. "D&D with a train" is a perfectly acceptable thing to be. I'm not sitting here thinking, "actually, I prefer D&D, but with no trains." It's like the airship in the original Final Fantasy - something that should maybe feel industrial but is really just a bit of set dressing. 

However, I can't stop thinking that maybe Eberron is afflicted with the same malaise that brought down Planescape - it breaks from one of the core assumptions of the implied setting, in a way that opens up a lot of possibilities, but it can't quite overcome its terror at the fact that in order to do something genuinely new you have to try something genuinely new. 

But Eberron has a leg up on Planescape in the fact that its claims of being about a "pseudo medieval culture [that] shares many elements of a later renaissance society" are a transparent, calculated lie. Magic of Eberron is even generous enough to provide a concrete, specific example of this process in action.

Page 91:

"While the streets of many cities are illuminated with everbright lanterns, their magic is individually cast and maintained by ranks of professional spell chandlers." 

Vs page 122:

"A House Cannith magewright might use a simple pattern to quickly create hundreds of continual flame stones for use in streetlamps."

It's the same fucking item. Thirty-one pages. That's how long it took to go from "don't imagine mass production" to "here's the magitech they use to do mass production." Now, this is largely explicable as a lack of communication between the different authors, but I also think the system itself is pulling a little trick on us. Because the section on page 122 is about "minor schemas" and minor schemas are not capable of quickly creating hundreds of streetlights. In practice, they act as a sort of reusable scroll you can cast from once per day. The magic that can mass produce items is called "patterns" and while patterns are made out of schemas (both minor and otherwise), Magic of Eberron doesn't actually give us rules for combining schemas into a pattern or for using a pattern to create larger scale effects. We know it's possible, because the book goes out of its way to tell us its possible, but it's not a feat that PCs are meant to replicate.

And I think that's the key to understanding Eberron's genre trouble. It can't present us with any sort of magic that allows individuals (or small groups) to act on an industrial scale, because industrial scale actions are not accounted for in D&D's standard power curve or magic item economy. A 5th level wizard in post-medieval times cannot be any more powerful than a 5th level wizard in a medieval setting. Perhaps just as importantly, a healing potion, a magic weapon, or generalized spellcasting services all have to cost the same amount as in the core book, in both absolute and relative terms. You've got House Jorasco, which is an entire family of people with the hereditary power to cure wounds and remove disease, and they're numerous enough to have a presence in every major city on the continent, but you can't just pop into one of their franchises and slip 'em 5gp to cure your mummy rot. You have to pay the same 150gp you'd pay a spellcaster in the standard setting. The ubiquity of magic hasn't made magic any cheaper.

Which pretty much means that the technological and social assumptions of the core book will transfer over to Eberron, whether they're meant to or not. It's called "a magic-suffused society," but the only specific magical conveniences they bother to list are lanterns and expensive transportation like airships or the lightning rail. They're missing something important about technological change - it tends to make average people significantly more powerful. In the 21st century, a person can pay the equivalent of less than 10gp (approximately 2 weeks wages) to fly halfway across the world and back. I regularly carry in my pocket an amount of computational power greater than existed in the entire world c. 1965. In other words, if Eberron is truly a "magic-suffused society" then there should be types of magic you can buy in a store and just casually use like it's no big deal. Unfortunately, Magic of Eberron doesn't tell us what any of those might actually be.

That being said, it's still a fun and fascinating D&D supplement. You can graft an elemental onto your body, gaining magical powers like immunity to dehydration (because the inside of your mouth is entirely water . . . which hurts my brain to even think about). You can play an Impure Prince, the prestige class that sounds like the title of an r-rated anime (and for good reason - it's a dark anti-hero with a symbiotic relationship to an eldritch monstrosity who hunts abominations from beyond the stars). You can magically conjure a wardrobe full of outfits suitable for any occasion, visit a castle with a giant enchanted windchime that repels invaders with massive sonic attacks, or buy a mechanical arm to attach to your belt and protect you with a shield. Some of this stuff does feel borderline-industrial, but most of it just feels like more D&D (not that that's a bad thing).

Overall, I guess my opinion of Magic of Eberron is that it's a great D&D supplement, but a frustrating Eberron supplement. I love the weird new magic, but I have desperately burning questions about the world's manufacturing infrastructure that stubbornly remain unanswered.

Ukss Contribution: The Green Spire - so-called because "the rock is home to many lichens." I just thought it was a cool image.

(Exalted 3e) Tomb of Memory

 I'll just get this off my chest, straight at the start - I picked Tomb of Memory as my next read purely because I anticipated it would be a chore I wanted to get over with as soon as possible. Not out of any shade towards the book itself, but just because the jumpstarts do not condense the core rules by enough. For one or two days, it feels like reading the core book all over again. It's almost as if someone who has been an Exalted fan for 20 years has no particular need for a minibook directed at newcomers and would only own such a thing out of a misguided (and frankly, decadent) urge towards completionism.

But that's just ridiculous . . . ha! HA! . . . ha . . .

I will give Tomb of Memory credit for being a jumpstart adventure that makes the bold choice to use an advanced adventure structure. Instead of presenting a linear story or dungeon crawl, it just gives us some locations, some characters, and an overall situation and encourages the GM to turn those elements into a story. And sure, that's generally how all Exalted games eventually turn out, but its adventure books usually like to pretend otherwise.

The story is dead simple - a First Age WMD lies buried under a sleepy town. For more than a thousand years, it was sealed so tight that people just sort of forgot about it, but now the containment is leaking and the people on the surface are feeling strange side effects. The sort of side effects that allow ill-intentioned nerds to infer the presence of something powerful and dangerous. Now, the nerds and the proxies of nerds are converging on the town to see who can get the macguffin first.

Tomb of Memory sets itself apart by having a better macguffin than most. The WMD in question is something called "The Sip of Lethe" and it has a truly mythic origin - a legendary warrior died, and as her spirit was entering the River of Forgetfulness, to peacefully transition to her next life, her heart rebelled against the thought of forgetting her true love, so she swam her way out of the river and back to Creation, to see her beloved one last time. In the process, she carried with her a mouthful of the Lethe water she refused to swallow. Tragically, it was too late, the hero forgot her mission at the very last moment, and the beloved, being a living person who was never meant to touch the waters of the Lethe, forgot the hero shortly thereafter.

But the lover was also a Solar Exalted mad scientist, so while she didn't entirely understand why this amnesiac dolphin spirit came to her home to spit water at her, she was able to recognize that the water itself was a mystic substance of unfathomable power. So she turned it into a bomb. And then accidentally detonated some of the leftover water, killing herself and everyone in the surrounding geographic region. Later, some other Exalted came along and realized they did not understand how the bomb worked or how to dispose of it safely, so they buried it underground and allowed the turning of the age to completely erase even the memory of the potential danger.

As a starting situation, I like it. It's a little afield from previous Exalted canon, which treated the Lethe as more of a metaphor than a literal river, being a state of completeness that ghosts could achieve by coming to terms with the passions that stole them from the grave, but I think you could make it work. Maybe the fact that there is no actual spatial location that contains the River Lethe is the reason a sipful of its "waters" is such a potent mystical boon. The Sip of Lethe came from nowhere and is made purely of a mystery forbidden to the living. That's why it explodes when you put it inside a bomb. . .

Okay, so maybe the Sip of Lethe and Exalted's unique brand of nonsense don't jibe together as elegantly as I might like. Exalted is a very technical game, both in rules and setting, and while "turn a sublime spiritual mystery into a bomb" is well within its thematic wheelhouse, the very fact that it's weaponizable in the first place means that the Sip of Lethe can't be quite as epochal as it needs to be. I think "Lethe water shows up in the living world and is extremely dangerous" would be an amazing plot for a modern occult game or a more grounded heroic fantasy setting, but for Exalted that's just a Tuesday.

Still, I'll give it a "better than most." The only thing really missing from the adventure is a clearer picture of how the Lethe-bomb actually works (both in terms of the in-character appearance and use of the device and the out-of-character mechanics for what happens to people in its blast radius). As it is, the Sip of Lethe's function is mainly to loom ominously over events, encouraging the PCs to do whatever it takes to keep it out of the hands of people who would use it.

My favorite aspect of this book, though, is that it delivers on the Exalted: Essence promise of making all Exalt-types playable by providing us with a whopping ten new signature characters. Well, nine technically. The Exigent representative to the PC delegation is none other than our friend Strawmaiden Janest. 

Look, she's an appealing character with a great design. And I think the world is ready for a cottage-core superhero. But every time I see her, I can't help feeling like I'm looking at the company-approved mascot for 3e as a brand. It's a silly sort of impulse, to be sure, but even in 1e when you had Dace popping into stories where he was not needed, to remind people that the "white male fighter guy" was still a viable Exalted archetype, there was less of a sense that one, specific signature character would always be invited to the party, no matter what. Maybe it just comes from reading Tomb of Memory and Three Banners Festival so close together, though.

I'm just going to take a mulligan on that. Janest is here, but I'm going to refuse to further acknowledge her presence, leaving only nine new signature characters to choose from. And I have to say, I'm pretty impressed with the design work here. It's a noticeable step up from both the Sidereals and Abyssals books . . . which weren't bad, exactly, so much as . . . lacking a certain Exalted-style extraness. Good Exalted signature characters should be designed more like superheroes than traditional fantasy protagonists. They need eye-catching elements that allow you to read the character in both high and low detail pictures, ideally in both color and black-and-white, and especially when they are depicted by different artists. Basically a set of iconic props gathered together around the shape of a person.

It's actually kind of blowing my mind how much work must have went into this tiny nothing of a book, because all nine of the new designs are better than average and I think the Sidereal, Elyntine Kesh, the Solar, Dauntless "Audacity" Aelia, and the Liminal, Tija Returned could potentially stand alongside some of the old fan favorites. Depends on whether they can get continuing exposure like a certain well-designed Exigent I'm currently declining to name. 

I guess I don't know much about the role Jumpstarts are meant to play in the line's overall marketing strategy. I tend to think of them as disposable books I could easily skip, and thus not worth investing too many resources into, but if they're truly meant as an onboarding tool for complete innocents, then it makes sense that they'd get disproportionate resources. Put your best foot forward and all that.

Overall, like all the Jumpstarts, Tomb of Memory was not for me, but between its unique, philosophically challenging macguffin and the memorable new faces amongst the PC preconstructs, it's probably the one that I'm going to be most tempted to come back and reference in a full-core Exalted game. So . . . yeah, that's a pretty good addition to the collection.

Ukss Contribution: The Sip of Lethe. I'm not sure how I'll incorporate it into Ukss' metaphysics of death (which already has both a grim reaper-like figure and a ghost train that carries the souls of the dead into the afterlife), but that's part of the challenge of making Ukss in the first place - finding out how many ideas I can actually use before it all starts devolving into nonsense.

(Eberron 3.5) Explorer's Handbook

Starting off this post with a question that sounds like it should be rhetorical, but is in fact distressingly literal - how many times can a book use unironic racial slurs before it becomes completely unsalvageable? And let's just toss some extra amoral speculation on there - would the answer change if the book is otherwise really good?

Sadly, I think I'm going to have to grapple with both questions if I'm to at all understand the Explorer's Handbook (David Noonan, Frank Brunner, Richard Burlew). Since I know I'm coming in real hot, I'm just going to clear the air right away and say what the word in question actually is - "savage." Now, technically, this is only contextually a racial slur, but, well, the context in which it's a slur is exactly the one being used in this book. Imagine a rich white hunter type, hanging out in a lushly-appointed gentleman's club, regaling his peers with the thrilling tale of his safari to the "lost continent" and when he gets to his less than convivial encounter with the indigenous population, he uses . . . that word. Full noun. 

That's how Explorer's Handbook uses the word. It's not even a metaphor or a fantasy analogue. This book is about "explorers." You know, people who live in "civilized" areas going to distant places, where people already live, and "discovering" things that people have known about for thousands of years. "You get to name stuff after yourself. Not just little stuff either: mountains, rivers, lost cities . . ."

Talk about running afoul of the monkey's paw. Over the course of the past dozen Eberron books, I frequently wished it would draw more from its 19th century influences. And here we are. Instead of old-school adventure fiction being a background element in the implied setting's DNA, the subtext is made text and Eberron just directly emulates old-school adventure fiction. One of the prestige classes, the Thunder Guide, literally gets an ability called "Serial Hero," where a newspaper (sorry - chronicle) publishes fictionalized accounts of their deeds and pays them a healthy chunk of change (1000gp per Charisma bonus) for the privilege. Because escorting "aristocrats on safari" is part of the job class' job description, it is now canonical that those aristocrats and their safaris exist in the world of Eberron.

The most frustrating thing for me, though, is that if you ignore all that, you get the best Eberron supplement yet. It has a whole chapter on transportation infrastructure! The prestige classes allow you to make a dashing airship captain or something called a "Cataclysm Mage!" One of the sample locations suggests you can start your adventure in a "smoky nightclub" where a sexy lounge singer can slip you hints about nefarious goings-on! (Yes, all three facts are equally exciting to me.)

I'm in this awkward place where I have to do some serious self-reflection. I want the vibes but I don't want the baggage. Is it okay for me to be this way? Possibly. Maybe even probably. I'm still a Mage: the Ascension superfan, and that has all the same issues, cranked to 11. But I fear there's this temptation to try and protect the vibes by ignoring or downplaying the baggage.

So, obviously, I need to not do that. The bulk of this book is a series of interesting locations, complete with maps, resident NPCs, suggested adventures, and advice on how to adapt them to different campaigns. What makes it an Explorer's Handbook is the overall curation. You have "Points of Origin" - the aforemention smoky nightclub, a train station, an airship docking tower. Then you have "Midpoints" - a selection of adventure towns and base camps that abut treasure- and monster-laden ruins and cater to the aristocratic desperados who travel across the world to plunder them. And finally, "Destinations" - a diverse selection of dungeon-esque sites where your characters can go to do an imperialism.

Aesthetically, these are universally pretty great. You've got a crystal-filled cavern where a beholder lures people in by sparing one member of an adventuring party and then mind-controlling them to go back to town and tell everyone about this motherload of magic crystals. Or you could retrace the steps of a doomed arctic expedition and track down the frozen hulk of an important scientific research vessel to retrieve the valuable information they gathered. Or there's, like, this weird magical observatory that makes planar travel much easier, but it's run by a cranky dragon who doesn't appreciate adventurers interrupting his experiments.

But I couldn't entirely escape the looming background worry - that these aesthetics I was enjoying so much were entangled with a dangerous ideology, as aesthetics and ideology often are. Take Pra'xirek, Lost City of the Giants for example.

Perfect pulp location. Great D&D location. Imagine a dungeon-crawl where everything you do is complicated by the mismatch of scale. And though the book doesn't go so far as to suggest it or anything, you could have fun altering the treasure to match. You go through some ancient giant's long-abandoned sock drawer and find only a single gold coin . . . but it's as big as your freaking head! Very cool.

Now comes the ideology to sucker punch you in the side of the head. The ruins are inhabited. Not by foul creatures of cursed magic or deadly predators with animal cunning and claws like scimitars. No, by ordinary demihumans. Specifically, the drow, the semi-aquatic locathahs, and a small community of giants who linger in, what are to them the post-apocalyptic ruins of a more accomplished age.

The drow "believe that the city was once their ancestral home . . . [and] also covet any magic items from the lost giant civilization, viewing them as a rightful inheritance from that dead nation . . . Drow scouts look to protect 'their' ruins from grave robbers from Khorvaire, attacking all foreigners they spot."

An important bit of context here - the ancient giant civilization enslaved the elves, and while the core book PC elves fucked off to other continents, the ones that stayed behind eventually became the modern drow. Pra'xirec even has some extant slave infrastructure (elf-sized rooms attached to giant bedchambers and dining halls, a covert system of tunnels that was somehow allowed to exist, either through carelessness or indulgence, etc). And while it's entirely possible that the entire slave population of the city was wiped out in the magical cataclysm that ruined it, leaving no survivors to become the ancestors of the modern drow, it's fair to say that the drow are their descendents in spirit. If they didn't originate in this city, well, they must have come from somewhere almost exactly like it. So why is "their" in scare quotes? If these ruins don't rightfully belong to the descendents of the people enslaved therein, who do they belong to?

Maybe the giants? 

First, don't let the characters think in terms of 'clearing out' an area. Traditionally in D&D, giants live at the outskirts of human civilization, raiding and destroying as they please. This behavior makes them prime targets for trusty adventurers to wipe out in the process of collecting a nice bounty. Things don't work that way in Xen'drik.

This land belongs to the giants (in their own opinion, anyway), and for the most part, they don't pose any kind of threat to human civiliation, trapped as they are in the jungles far from Khorvaire.

Holy shit! But I am, of course, selectively quoting. This passage is clearly referencing Against the Giants and echoing Gygax's "fight to the finish" rhetoric, setting up a clear contrast between the Viking-coded giants whose babies the founder of D&D encouraged us to kill (seriously, it was gross) and the African-coded giants whose "alignments are not set in stone." Maybe it's building to something. A statement about how heroes don't generally bust into peoples' homes and kill them in order to loot their valuables. A strong conclusion could save the passage. I'll let you be the judge: 

"Wiping out an entire giant settlement will thus be as unnecessary as it is unwise. . ."

Yeah, that's ideology all right. But more than that, it's the dark side of Eberron's otherwise forward-thinking habit of downplaying racial alignments. Standard D&D uses racial alignment as a sort of narrative tag. "Hey! Good news! We've invented a make-believe type of people it's okay to genocide, so you can keep telling those fun, action-packed genocide stories we all love so much!" And there's just enough plausible deniability there that a certain segment of the fandom is going to look at that last statement as an egregious straw man.

Except when it comes to Eberron. The Explorer's Handbook explicitly ditched the tag . . . but it kept the stories. Just standing out there in the full light of day, made all the clearer for its 19th century influences. You've got a world where your fantasy adventurers from Khorvaire can go out and do in Xen'drik exactly what the Europeans went out and did in Africa and it's barely even coded. You can be sent to the ruins by a university to collect antiquities, and the first leg of your journey will be on a train to a port where you'll take a steamboat to "The Lost Continent."

Yikes.

Overall, I'd say that the Explorer's Handbook was mostly pretty fun. But the thing about being mostly fun is that you are also partially unfun, and the unfun in this book is as bad as anything I've ever seen. Proceed with caution, I guess.

Ukss Contribution: I gave Grasp of the Emerald Claw a reluctant pass, because its geneological connection to racist adventure fiction was largely relegated to subtext. The Explorer's Handbook made it into text - the cheeky in-character sidebar "Wayfinder Foundation Travel Tip: How to Deal with Dark Elves" is basically recreating the Hovitos chase from Raiders of the Lost Ark and . . . it uses the word. 

Maybe, if there were some indication that the Wayfinder society was an unreliable narrator meant to be opposed, something could be salvaged. But there's not. I've looked. As I've said before, sometimes there's a turd in the punch bowl and there's no kind of punch where that's acceptable.