(GURPS: Transhuman Space) Orbital Decay

 Sometimes, people really don't think things through. Would Orbital Decay (Patrick Sweeney) be a better adventure and better introduction to the Transhuman Space setting if it leaned into its potential to be a comedy of errors? Maybe, maybe not, but there's a strong argument to be made that there is less of a bright line between sci-fi horror and farce than one might otherwise expect.

Oops. Our biotech corporation did a teensy-weensy bit of unethical genetic engineering in our second-hand space station, far away from the legal oversight of Earthbound authorities. And oops. A tiny little mistake in our super-soldier virus led to it being contagious through biting. And gosh darn it, wouldn't you know, that's the same transmission vector as our (still work-in-progress, remember) depression-causing crowd control virus that unfortunately makes people fly into a berserk rage instead of its intended effect. And you're never going to believe it, but both viruses, along with our flesh-eating nanovirus, somehow managed to escape containment. Why, if you were to model this scenario with some sort of generic universal roleplaying system, you could probably just use the stats for supernatural fantasy zombies for the affected personnel. Funny how that works out.

Oh well, there's obviously only one thing to do - send a group of mercenaries up to investigate the out-of-contact space station. Then, naturally, we'll double-cross the mercenaries by sending a ruthless spy disguised as a company representative. And of course, we'll double-cross the spy by secretly installing a puppet implant that allows her body to be controlled by an AI program. And, should some series of implausible events happen where the shuttle pilot crashes the transport rocket into the station in a misguided attempt to stop the viruses from spreading (I guess she thinks that they'll burn up in the atmosphere rather than partially survive in air pockets in the coolest part of the wreckage and subsequently infect terrestrial investigators), I should think it goes without saying that we'll betray the AI by refusing to send a rescue vessel. It's the perfect plan. The only thing that could possibly thwart us is if terrorists from Mars show up at the last minute, lured by the rocket pilot's quarantine broadcast, under the inexplicable assumption that a space station where at least one deadly bioweapon escaped containment is the perfect place to find an easily weaponizable virus. But surely, they would not risk their lives and health on the long-shot bet that we, like, had some extra viruses that were still in containment. Why, if that happened, the surviving mercenaries could activate the station's self-destruct system and fly away on the terrorists' spaceship, potentially exposing our perfidy to the world at large. . . eh, fuck it. Worst comes to worst, we'll give 'em like $5000 or something. It'll be fine.

Okay, so I committed to the bit longer than was entirely wise, but really, Orbital Decay is a perfectly serviceable adventure. Maybe sometimes people who fail to entirely think things through are the source of horror. You never get eaten by biopunk zombies when things are going well. I'd say it's only real flaw is that, as a GURPS: Transhuman Space adventure, it doesn't do all that much with transhumanism. I guess the puppet implant and the supersoldier count in that regard, but it's kind of detail on background. With the company spy, the PCs may defeat her too early or too late and her implant never comes up. And it's an open question whether the PCs are going to want to do the detective work to find out about the virus' backstory while they're actively being attacked by zombies. I mean, biotech horror in space is plenty interesting on its own, but it barely scratches the surface of what Trannshuman Space can do. 

Maybe you could rework things a bit. The PCs are brought in by the Martian police, to help solve the theft of an infomorph ghost from long-term storage. The lead suspects are Negative Growth (the anti-terraforming terrorists who conveniently show up in the third act to give the PCs a way off the station), who may have been interested in this particular intelligence because it was the most recent back-up of a scientist who was rumored to be working on experimental bioweapons. But it wasn't actually a theft, it was a defection, because the infomorph was remotely activated by the scientist, who could think of no other way to evade the Terrel-Dieskau corporation's communications blockade than to commit suicide and then the terrorists, the corporate agents, and the PCs all converge on this derelict station that has been taken over by biopunk zombies . . . 

I don't know. It needs some work, I'll admit. I guess it speaks well for the adventure that there is enough of a base to build off of. In true GURPS fashion, there are some sidebars talking about how to adapt Orbital Decay for other genres and settings, so I can't be entirely mad at it for not being hyper-specific. Specificity is kind of the antithesis to the GURPS ethos.

Overall, I'd say "sure, okay." I think a more comic, satirical interpretation of the adventure's events would do better for a cyberpunk story, and that's probably the most interesting way to run the adventure, but GURPS: Transhuman Space is explicitly "cyberpunk without the punk," so there's no great harm in running it completely straight.

Ukss Contribution: My favorite thing about this adventure is the Terrel-Dieskau corporation's baroquely layered treachery. There's just this long ladder of people who are absolutely shocked that the people on the next rung found them expendable. It's almost enough to take the sting out of the PCs getting betrayed (I'd actually put them at the second rung, and they really should have been expecting it, considering their mission is transparently aimed at betraying the scientists and technicians aboard the space station).

But is that a setting element? Is it a trait you can give to an organization or a location? Would it not feel extremely goofy in practice? I guess we'll just have to find out.

Kindred of the East Companion

It is perhaps poetic that Kindred of the East's greatest flaws all seem to stem from its original sin. As I read Kindred of the East Companion and I was struck by how utterly disconnected it all was from anything I'd previously given a shit about, by the shallowness of its politics and philosophy, by the overall unpleasantness of the Kindred (kin-jin) vs Kuei-jin (Cathayan) narrative.

I can't help but think this is all happening because Asia of Darkness is supposed to be "exotic." We can't go in knowing anything about what to expect, so everything has to be rebuilt from scratch, meaning the unfamiliar new factions and conflicts have approximately half a book of development behind them. And because White Wolf can't do rules or setting updates without metaplot explanations, it's all justified in-setting by the Eternal Vampire Race War.

But I think maybe the creators of Kindred of the East might have succumbed to their own Orientalist branding. Call it a hunch, but some parts of this book feel like the writers were trying to create something that felt exotic to themselves. It's the only explanation I can think of for why, when tasked with making a parallel knockoff of their popular game, Vampire: the Masquerade, they got the fundamental building blocks entirely wrong.

See, Vampire: the Masquerade had a gameplay loop embedded directly into the structure of the setting. The politics of the setting revolve around a conflict between two incompatible sects with mutually opposed goals - the status-quo-preserving Camarilla and the recklessly millenarian Sabbat - and each were credibly global threats. You could set a game in the biggest Camarilla stronghold in the world and "some Sabbat assholes show up to cause trouble" is a viable plot. But also, the sectarian conflict could generate internal conflicts - like, someone who wants to become powerful within the Sabbat vs someone who wants to make the Sabbat as a whole more powerful vs characters who are only part of the Sabbat because they were victims of its power.

And then, at a narrower taxonomic level, you got the clans. Which are like character classes that are not strictly voluntary. So there's clan vs clan conflict, advancement in the clan conflict, clan vs sect conflict, clan advancement in the sect conflict, and players can never entirely escape these jokers for the same reason it can be so difficult to escape your family - they made you what you are, and you were never in a position to consent to the act until long after the fact. 

Finally, the narrowest level - city politics. All of the above is reified through the expedient of some dude and his cronies. That's the scope and scale of politics. Somebody is talking shit about you at Elysium and it can be a proxy for sect or clan issues, but it's also entirely possible that you just don't like each other.

Vampire: the Masquerade may not be my favorite game, but there's no denying it has an airtight formula for stirring up rpg-type shit at the gaming table. This is catnip for theater kids. So it's unclear why Kindred of the East takes the formula and tosses it out the fucking window.

It's got a sort of "splat and local government" dynamic, but the only source of conflict seems to come from mortal nationalism.

At the highest level of kuei-jin organization is the Court and a court is like . . . a local culture. Like, you set the game in Changan and that's Jade Court territory and it's just . . . a scholarly vibe. It's somehow allied with the rest of the Five August Courts of the Quincunx, so there's no real court vs court conflict, but it also means that its culture feels like a specialist function of an ill-defined larger organization (the Quincunx, presumably, though I assume that it's only called that because its an alliance of five courts) that . . . devotes itself to conservative Chinese imperialism?

There are non-Quincunx courts, and it's clear that the Quincunx doesn't like or respect them (and that the feeling is mutual), but it's unclear what they would even fight over. The Blood Court is in Beijing and the Golden Court is in a grab-bag of Southeast Asian countries, and never the twain shall meet ("No other court can approach the Golden Courts' range of cultures and it's questionable whether the Chinese Courts would even want to").

It's not that there's nothing to do. There are plots here - continuing to fight WW2 decades after the fact, endlessly relitigate the Meiji Restoration, become a fashion pervert for God, over the dead bodies of those who would try to stop you - but those are incidental to the Court structure, rather than an intrinsic part of it.

And somehow, the character splats are even worse. The dharmas are like character classes that are voluntary (so voluntary, in fact, that people can and do change dharma canonically and there's even a high-tier power that forces someone to do so) and the ideal party composition is exactly one of each. So I think there's an argument that it might be kind of fun to play a Devil Tiger or Thousand Whisper (et al) and have their distinct aesthetics/philosophies inform your character, but each one is a personal path. I can imagine a clash of personalities between characters of different dharmas, but I can't foresee any situation where a dharma would lead to divided loyalties. They are explicitly supposed to complement each other and make the unit stronger from diversity. The closest WoD counterpart is Werewolf: the Apocalypse's auspices (moon phase divisions).

Actually, that's a pretty good analogy. Kindred of the East is like Werewolf: the Apocalypse without the Tribes and without the ongoing futile war against the Wyrm. It's unclear who it's even for . . .

Oh, wait, I think the Kindred of the East Companion might have provided a helpful picture:

Though, now that I put it that way, there may be more overlap between me and the average Kindred of the East fan than it's comfortable to admit.

Ukss Contribution: So there is a certain degree of racial chauvinism in this book, but I can't quite pin down its motives or origin, because it mostly takes the form of an absolute conviction that the Kuei-jin totally outclass the Kindred. Is this an in-character bias or the opinion of the authors? I can't tell.

And because I can't tell, and because I wouldn't know what to make of it even if I could, I'm going to include Kindred of the East Companion in Ukss. However, I'm going with something abstract.

The Japanese and Chinese vampires in Shanghai continue to fight each other and it's explicitly due to lingering bad blood (and if you think that's a pun, you're wrong, Kuei-jin don't drink blood, they consume chi) over WW2. In real world terms, it's kind of grim to think about, but it is a genuinely interesting idea in vampire fiction - vampires continuing a war from their mortal days, one that is entirely unrelated to vampire nonsense, even after the living belligerents have been at peace for decades.

I think Ukss could have a conflict like that.

(Star Wars Saga Edition) Scavenger's Guide to Droids

 For once, the Star Wars Expanded Universe's signature move - taking the sole on-screen personality trait or behavior of a minor character and making it the defining characteristic of their whole existence/planetary civilization - actually works pretty well. Scavenger's Guide to Droids (Rodney Thomson, Sterling Hershey, Patrick Stutzman, Robert Wieland) is about machines that were deliberately manufactured for a particular purpose, and so it makes sense that the weird eyeball thing that came out of the wall at Jabba's palace to greet R2-D2 and C-3PO was, in fact, a TT-8L Gatekeeper Droid. It would be very strange worldbuilding indeed if that thing was bespoke. Or if it was part of a line of "eyeball-on-a-stalk" sentient machines and it just happened to choose to work in organized crime, as a first line of security vetting potential intruders.  I never, not for a moment, believed that the Bothans were characteristically spies or that Greedo, the bounty hunter shot by Han Solo (first, obviously) was part of a species that placed a high cultural value on hunting, but I definitely believe that the weird eyeball thing was built for gatekeeping.

Which I guess means that Scavenger's Guide to Droids is the least cringe SWSE supplement I've ever read. The lore generally boils down to "this machine was built to do the thing we saw it do," repeated close to 50 times, but since there's a lot of Star Wars media I've never seen, I actually found it generally pretty interesting. There's a fancy-pants fencing instructor droid. A droid built exclusively to work at banks. The weird animatronic from Disney's Star Tours ride canonically exists and is a pilot/tour guide bot that's notoriously prone to exactly the sort of malfunction that appeared in the ride's plot. There's a secretary droid that has a creepy skeletal face like something dredged from the depths of nightmare. There's enough here to distract from the fact that every battledroid has the exact same backstory.

The biggest flaw with Scavenger's Guide to Droids as a book is that each droid entry is accompanied by 1-3 "modification" suggestions that are universally among the dullest shit I've read for the blog thus far. Like, sometimes they have little tidbits of lore, and on the balance it's interesting to know that people in the Star Wars universe are hacking the hell out of their tech, but each one is something you could change the droid into and the bulk of the text is devoted to things like alternate feat suggestions or the DC of the skill check necessary to take out one part and swap it with another.

Did you know, if you start with a GY-1 Information Analysis Droid, reprogram its operating system, and remove its arms and legs, you can turn it into a navigation-assisting astromech droid like what R2-D2 does for Luke's X-wing? It's true. And if you put a spinning blade on its head, you could make it a food processor too. 

So, anyway, reading 100+ of those barely-justified reskins was kind of a drag. But it wasn't quite enough to ruin what was, essentially, a monster book. And the adventure hooks, narrated by one of four specific commentator NPCs, that accompanied each entry, were a welcome addition to the format. The titular scavengers never quite popped as individual characters, but I think, if they were given a little bit more room to develop (say, by getting rid of some superfluous, repetitive text somewhere else in the book), they could have.

Which brings us at last to an issue I'm not quite sure how to address. But address it I must, because it takes up a significant minority of the book's lore. . . droids are kind of enslaved. 

"Droids can be more than just equipment. They can be individuals."

"They are machines that feel."

And yet, so much of the book is about the routine practice of wiping their memories to prevent them from developing too much of an individual personality. Of fitting them with restraining bolts so they don't run away. Which they will do, if their owners mistreat them.

The book talks about a droid general strike that brings a planet to its knees. A casino clerk bot known as "The Saint of Droids" because it ensures that droids wagered by desperate gamblers gain responsible new owners. A black market merchant that helps abused droids escape their owners and disappear in the wider galaxy. A secret droid organization that believes the time for peaceful resistance has passed and has taken up armed direct action against the practice of droid ownership.

It's not subtle. 

And it puts me in a terrible spot. Because I find the philosophical speculation about how to determine whether a machine qualifies as "intelligent" or "conscious" to be absolutely fascinating (and I have definite opinions on this subject, some of which may shock you), but in the context of a lighthearted action-adventure yarn, to have characters which blur the line between "person" and "property" strikes me as . . . somewhat irresponsible.

Like how am I supposed to deal with the fact that this book depicts a situation clearly modeled on the Underground Railroad? I feel dirty even bringing it up, because the real Underground Railroad was one of history's bravest resistance movements, risking life and limb to liberate the innocent from a tyranny as total and degrading as any humanity has ever known and the Star Wars droid freedom pipeline is just getting that stupid, inexplicably be-legged GONK-GONK power droid away from the incorrectly-programmed EV-series Supervisor Droid ("the motivators originally planned for the EV-series were accidentally swapped with ones meant to be installed in torture droids") that hung out in Jabba's basement. And I'm not sure whether I'm meant to react to the goofiness of Star Wars' kid-friendly robot slavery with a shrug and a chuckle, or if I'm meant to ramp up the drama here and tell a sweeping sci-fi epic about the endemic abuse of these clearly sentient beings.

Either option is uncomfortable in very different ways.

Overall, though, I enjoyed Scavenger's Guide to Droids. It's maybe not a sterling recommendation that the book gave me a whole lot to deliberately not think about, but I like droids. They're cute. They're funny. They're transparently toy-selling mascot characters. And Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars without them.

Ukss Contribution: As much as I rag on the Extended Universe for being cheesy, it can be legitimately funny and awesome at times. I don't know for sure whether the following idea was borrowed from some novel or comic book or whether it was specifically invented for Scavenger's Guide to Droids, but the more I think about it, the more it delights me.

One of the suggested modifications for the FLTCH-Series Battle Droid would make it into a Mercenary Rental Unit. A simple enough concept, but the deeper you get into the weeds of this idea, the more wildly satirical this thing has to be. Just off the bat, if the rental period runs out mid-battle, you've got to give it more money, at surge-pricing rates, no less. But also, they make you pay a damage deposit before they let you rent one. 

And . . . h-how? What?! You're charging a damage deposit on a piece of technology whose entire purpose is to get shot at by lasers. The economics of this transaction make no sense whatsoever.

But don't mistake the nature of my discourse here. It may seem like I'm poking holes in the concept, but there's a difference between a plot hole you complain about and a complaint you build a plot around. Imagine my incredulity directed not towards the authors of the book, but towards the manager of the Mercenary Droid Rental business.

In that context, this is another thing that makes me go, "Sigh . . . Capitalism." And I'll admit, I'm a sucker for it every time.

Kindred of the East

In our modern, woke rpg landscape, Kindred of the East has a reputation for just being the worst kind of sloppy cultural appropriation. A total whiff when it comes to representing East Asian folklore in an urban fantasy setting, a polyglot mess that demonstrates a colonizer's arrogance in its indifference to authentic details. And lest it seem like I'm reading White Wolf for filth right now, let me clarify - that's not my opinion. That's the opinion I feel like I should have, based on the work done by people like the Asians Represent podcast. I went into this book with my memory of having read it 20 years ago, a vague emotional ambivalence about collecting the whole series (I don't know what to say about this, except that there was a period where I was addicted to buying whole sets, and this one was really easy to collect. All of them except the Dhampir book and Demon Hunter X are going to be new to me), and the knowledge that it made some critics I really respect really angry.

However, in the interest of full disclosure, I didn't notice all that much wrong with it. Don't get me wrong, I picked up on some things that were totally out of pocket. I cringed with my whole body when the book referred to its titular vampires as "the inscrutable Cathayan." And I could fill a post just with the Orientalist tropes that I, John Frazer, personally recognized (the most obvious of which is just the repeated use of the word "Oriental,") but all of those observations would be general observations. Things that would be racist even if the book was super faithful to the source material. Even I know you can't say shit like: "Westerners have often spoken of Asia's exoticism, its alien ways and rules. In the World of Darkness, they are correct. . ."

But that thing about "Kuei-jin" being an artless polyglot portmanteau that would sound conspicuously strange, to the point of unintelligibility, to speakers of both source languages . . . that's something I only know by reputation. To me, it's just a nonsense sound that refers exclusively to this particular group of weird guys. And I'm sure that this is not an isolated phenomenon. I came into this with basically no prior knowledge of the ostensible subject matter - Asian vampire mythology - and so I have no way of distinguishing between "they got this laughably, insultingly wrong" and "oh, actually I have to give them credit for this."

So I'm not even going to try. Like, I'm pretty sure the bit about the "Yin world" and "Yang world" is nonsense, but only because these are transparently just new, Asian-sounding names for the Shadowlands and the Umbra. But that seems like sort of an edge case in cultural appropriation to me. If you've already got a weird, janky metaphysics that was entirely invented for your game, and you've hitherto applied it willy-nilly to the entire world, with no more than token attempts to integrate it with any real-world folklore, then is it really such a crime to completely mangle the myths of a new region to get it to fit in? White Wolf's spirit world can't possibly be any less faithful to Buddhism than it is to Christianity, so maybe it's just putting the "fantasy" into "urban fantasy?"

I really don't know. Same goes for its unflattering depictions of Shanghai and Bangkok. There's a reason I call this "The World of Darkness problem." I imagine there would be something vaguely insulting about looking your hometown up in the gloomy, pessimistic horror-movie world and discovering that they made it an exception to the overall vibe. It's like no, damnit! I want to be afraid of the shadowed alleys because people routinely go missing and the police are indifferent to their fate. If the creature that ate me isn't getting away with it because of endemic societal violence and the institutional corruption of those who claim to protect me, then what game are we even playing?

That said, it's weird that they refer to sex trafficking as "white slavery." Twice. I can't quite wrap my head around it. Maybe it's some sort of 90s aspirational color-blindness? Why, the good post-racial folks at White Wolf are cosmopolitan citizens of the world who believe white slavery can happen to anyone, regardless of skin color. It certain feels to me like a term that was used to convey a feeling, divorced from its etymology, but in this case the etymology is, like, super gross. This particular combination of words only exists to distinguish slavery that happens to white people from the broader phenomenon of slavery. It was created and used by people who would shrug at slavery and get outraged by white slavery. To repurpose the word to refer to specifically sex slavery, regardless of the race of the victims . . . it really seems like an outgrowth of the pathological sexual anxiety that accompanies white supremacy. Just don't do it, people.

All-in-all, I'm kind of in a weird place, regarding Kindred of the East. I can see that it is Orientalist in its very conception, and my knowledge of the broader context of the World of Darkness and the compromises it makes to fit in the same world as Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, and Changeling make it more problematic, rather than less. (I mean, is it just me or are the words "shen," referring collectively to all supernatural creatures in Asia, and "hsien," referring specifically to Asian changelings," just alternate romanizations for the same word?) But if I ignore all that and just contemplate it as a standalone fantasy rpg about hellbound sinners returned to a parody of life to immiserate the living, as an alternative, rather than a supplement to Vampire: the Masquerade . . . I'm stymied by my own incalculable ignorance.

See, as a game, Kindred of the East is both too much and not enough. It's overloaded with systems. You've got basically three different types of magic points, all tied to a different personality mechanic, and each used to power a different category of special power, but with just enough wiggle room that the resource-juggling minigame could potentially be strategically interesting . . . assuming it didn't get bogged down in play. And that complex mechanical chassis, it's too much for a game about charismatic sinners talking to each other.

Superheroes with fangs, however . . . Well, it's not enough for that. To run those sorts of games, the book needs a lot more - weird locations, wild powers, strange creatures, and other forms of cool shit to see. 

And this is where my knowledge fails me. Because what we're talking about is genre and White Wolf is just completely mushy about it. Within just a couple of pages, the Storyteller chapter claims "Kuei-jin don't give a damn about all that overwrought angst-ridden bullshit" and caution us "It's your game, but hopefully you won't cheapen it with super-powered blood brawls."

Got it? Not angst-driven personal horror or spectacle-driven action horror, but some secret third thing that threads the needle without doing anything 1998 White Wolf was too cool and jaded to respect. And when I contemplate the mystery of what that third thing can be, my reaction is "wait, does China have its own storytelling tradition of fantasy horror, with its own characteristic tropes and themes? Probably. Someone should base an rpg on that."

I know in my heart, that that's the answer. Chinese horror is the lens through which Kindred of the East should be judged. And I'm woefully unqualified to do it. My gut tells me the game misses its mark, because the genre trappings I do recognize are just White Wolf's usual brand of nonsense, done more racistly than usual, but that's just a supposition. 

I will give White Wolf this one sliver of credit, though. A lot of the discourse around cultural appropriation focuses on "respectful depictions," and in a camp-driven genre like horror, I think that misses the mark. Representation can (in my opinion) take the form of an . . . invitation to participate. "Look at us, having the time of our lives rolling around in this trash pile! C'mon, grab your garbage and get in here!"

So when it comes to moving beyond a eurocentric World of Darkness, I think people can forget that you're not aiming for a good depiction, you're aiming for trash. And here is where, out of an abundance of caution, I have to stop giving White Wolf credit (though I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate me "defending" them in this manner, regardless). Since the goal is to create something trashy, everything you choose to include becomes trashy by association. Even when working in your native culture, this is a line you have to walk carefully. Like, there are certain ideas that can survive being trashy (for example - the myriad depictions of sinister or unseemly angels in genre fiction) and certain ideas where people will never forgive you for fucking around (for example, almost none of the aforementioned genre fiction dares to muss up the spotless reputation of Jesus Christ). 

So how much more difficult must this line be to walk in a foreign culture? How much extra care must you take?

I may not specifically know which aspects of Kindred of the East were the gross kind of objectification and which aspects were the hot kind of objectification, but I know White Wolf well enough to know that they absolutely did not take the extra care to make that distinction on my behalf.

Ukss Contribution: Ooh, this is a tough one. In all this talk of cultural appropriation and load-bearing Orientalism, let's not forget one very important, salient detail - I own a complete collection of Kindred of the East. Nowadays, I know enough about racial politics to find this deeply embarrassing, but in the early 2000s, I thought it was . . . kind of cool, if not exactly my thing. And, as recently as 2020, I was buying these books without any thought to the broader political implications.

So I'm not prepared to get high and mighty here. I am elbow deep in the shit. Whatever is wrong with these books, I'm at least a little bit complicit.

In the case of the Kindred of the East core, I think its greatest sin can be summed up with the line:

"The mood of Kindred of the East is one of exoticism."

Now, that's a textbook no-no, so I'm not going to claim that the book is entirely non-evil (or even non-evil on balance), but the particular crime here is an enthusiasm that is reckless in its expression. It's not hatred, not contempt. The book does imply that Asians have a different variety of soul than Europeans, but I'm pretty sure it's not meant to be better or worse, so much as it's meant to play into the newly conceived personality-resource mechanics. So that's where I'm going to draw the line, for the rest of the series going forward. If a book merely indulges in exoticism, I'm going to include it in Ukss, but if I get even a whiff of an implication that it's saying Europeans are superior, it's out. 

With that in mind, my choice is pretty abstract. It's said that Kuei-jin care deeply about the appointment and condition of their graves, which I think is a pretty charming trait for undead to have. Maybe the Ukss version is a bit cozier than the World of Darkness version, but it's still going to be a whole thing. 

(Star Wars Saga Edition) Threats of the Galaxy

 I had a serious moment of self-reflection while reading Threats of the Galaxy. I was keeping a running list of "droids you can't be" vs "droids you can be," out of some critic's instinct that maybe the rules for which droids are and are not eligible to be player characters would be amusingly arbitrary, or at least feature one or two outrageously controversial calls. And it was going fine, though not in a particularly content-generating way. I was making observations like - an "assassin droid," as a broad description, sounds exactly like the sort of character someone would want to play, but maybe the non-humanoid assassin droid that tried to kill Padme Amidala in Attack of the Clones is reasonable to exclude from the list of playable droids. It was all very dull. Anodyne Star Wars nerd shit.

Then I got to the "Power Droid" entry. The name "Power Droid" might not immediately call an image to mind, but if you're a fan of the series, you undoubtedly know who this guy is. It's the incredibly useless-looking box on legs, first seen waddling around going "Gonk! Gonk!" and later seen being tortured in an uncomfortably foot-fetishy way in Jabba's palace. And the first time I read the entry, I thought it said you can't play one as a hero. But with second glance, I saw that actually you can. 

And in that moment of discovery, when my understanding of the role of the Power Droid in the rules of the game suddenly changed, I learned something about myself. Because unlike most of the other droids on my impromptu scorecard, I annotated the Power Droid's entry with my emotional response.

When I falsely thought you couldn't play a Power Droid, my extra note was "noo!" When I learned of my error, my tenor changed quickly to "what?" Do you know how rare it is to see the effects of irony poisoning in real time?

"Aww, man, I can't play as the gonk-gonk-box-with-legs? What a rip off! I will never forgive you . . . oh, I can? Ha. Ha. . . well, that's a relief. Um . . . maybe I'll think it over."

The book really did call my bluff. Actually, I think the Power Droid sucks so much that it's reasonable not include it as a playable option. Although I guess there's no particular harm in just letting a PC Power Droid slide. Deliberately underpowered character creation widgets are sometimes called "trap options," but there ain't nobody falling for that particular trap. You only pick that particular character if you're actively trying to troll the game, and the most fitting punishment is simply to let you get away with it.

Now, in my defense, I knew I was being ironic when I wrote that "noo!" I just thought I was being the charming kind of ironic and not the obnoxious kind of ironic. Lesson learned (I claim, with completely unearned confidence).

Now, I don't include this anecdote because droids (and my emotional reactions thereto) are a particularly large part of the book. It's divided into three chapters, one of which is "Droids," but the droid chapter is the shortest of the three. I tell this story because my irony poisoning is of a species with my appreciation of the Star Wars setting as a whole. It's genuine sentiment, mixed with playful affect, mixed with a little bit of unnecessary meanness that is directed more at my own embarrassment at once having been an easily-impressed child than at any particular fault of the source material.

And believe me, ,the sentiment I feel for the Power Droid is genuine. I remember seeing the movies and being like, "look at that dumb, fucking robot. They very obviously put legs on a trashcan. There's no way anyone would ever build something like that!"

. . . and there's a special cinema magic that comes from being allowed the opportunity to notice goofy things like that. Like, it's a dumb robot, but in some sense, it's my dumb robot. I noticed how dumb it was all on my own, even as a preteen. And a lot of the warmth and good will I feel towards Star Wars is just that lingering memory of a silly kid's joke, perfectly executed.

Which brings us to the . . . fraught part of Star Wars Saga Edition as a roleplaying game. It relies pretty heavily on the Expanded Universe, and the Expanded Universe . . . doesn't always have the wisdom to let the movies speak for themselves.

This is, of course, inevitable, almost to the point of tautological circularity. If the movies were enough, why would we even have an Expanded Universe? But I think there's a difference between EU materials that are in thoughtful dialogue with the movies, and EU materials that try to apologize for the movies.

Take our humble Power Droid. "The few people who are unaware of its function wonder why Veril Line Systems built it in the first place. Without power droids, however, modern society would grind to a halt."

I literally, no joking, hate that they did that. It's the right call for an rpg, because if you put these ridiculous fucking things in a game, the players are going to ask what they do, and I don't want that responsibility as a GM, but I hate that playing Star Wars Saga Edition would put me in this position. They could have just not mentioned it. Maybe I get wild hair, or the players get mischievous, and one of those gonk-gonk droids gets table focus, and then the consequences of killing the movies' magic are on me, but I don't need a book to make that call on my behalf.

But I don't blame Threats of the Galaxy for that. I know that this sort of thing was inherited from some novel or comic book or George Lucas interview. It happens often enough that it's just part of a pattern. The "Bothans are widely acclaimed as the best spies in the galaxy." Jedi frequently use the term "aggressive negotiations" as "a euphemism for combat." And that thing that swallowed R2-D2 on Dagobah is part of a species that will "swiftly spit out objects that prove indigestible and can do so with surprising force."

Man, I love Star Wars, but the EU's genre illiteracy . . . can be a lot to deal with sometimes. Though it's not all bad. There are things that I like. We learned that Luke Skywalker once faced disciplinary action because he used the Force instead of his targeting computer and wound up blowing one of his squadron-mates out of the sky due to her being an undiscovered spy. Which is kind of a hilarious situation. The Rebellion brass are chewing him out for recklessly endangering his own people, but it turns out his mystic intuition correctly separated friend from foe and it (presumably) took the whole course of a novel to get that sorted out.

And Yoda gets some . . . challenging character development. [Queen Amidala's bodyguard] "Tycho sternly disapproved, stating that the risks were too high. Despite his reservations, the captain was coerced through the Force by Yoda to proceed with the rescue." 

I'm not a huge fan of "good guy character is secretly a dick" as a general trope, but I have had my suspicions about Yoda for awhile. They go back at least as far as Star Wars: Republic Commando, the video game where he was just a little too comfortable commanding a slave army of clones.

Finally, I actively enjoy when the EU speculates about Force users who developed their traditions entirely outside the culture of the Republic, the Jedi, or the Sith. The Force was first described to us as an energy field that connects all life, and it's fascinating to me to think of different ways that various cultures could approach the same universal mystic phenomenon.

Overall, I'd say that Threats of the Galaxy reminded me of what I love about the Star Wars setting . . . eventually. It had three chapters, one about Characters, one about Creatures, and one about Droids. And the chapters about Creatures and Droids were absolutely delightful. As for characters, well, I suppose there's some utility in having stats for both a doctor and a medic, a bureaucrat and a politician, or an officer, a commando squad leader, and a mercenary captain. But I'm not going to pretend that I loved reading about them.

Ukss Contribution: Though there was plenty I did love reading about. Like, there's this EU smuggler named "Talon Karrde" and his ship is called "The Wild Karrde." Or the surreal fact that Amidala's security team included several trained bodyguards who could all pass for body doubles. 

Although, in the end, I think my favorite thing was the colossal-sized construction droid. Conceptually, on it's own, it's merely interesting, but the art rendered it as a several-stories-tall beetle-like monstrosity, casually picking up a Millenium Falcon-type space freighter and gently stacking it in a salvage pile as it cleaned up and restored a devastated city like some kind of reverse-kaiju. And that's beautiful to me. 

(Eberron 3.5) Adventurer's Guide to Eberron

 The thing about being a completionist when it comes to rpg collecting is that sometimes rpgs will release books that are absolutely not meant for completionists. An Adventurer's Guide to Eberron (Logan Bonner and Chris Sims) told me precisely nothing that I didn't already know. It's basically just a recap of the concept of Eberron. Sixty beautifully illustrated pages, covering 50 different topics ranging from Warforged to Dragonmarks to Xen'drik. Honestly, the whole thing read like the pamphlet Wizards of the Coast might create if they were trying to sell the IP to Hollywood. 

I'm very much at a loss for words about this book. It's a rapid-fire tour of the setting, seemingly created for total newbs, so basic it explains in a parenthetical that an inquisitive is a detective, a lich is "an intelligent undead spellcaster," and that divination magic is "used to read the future and the past." I enjoyed reading it, it was a nice way to wrap up the series, but it very clearly wasn't for me.

I guess I'm kind of curious about the strategy behind this book. It was published in 2008, more than a year before the 4e Eberron book and I guess people were just supposed to read it and be reminded that Eberron exists? Rush out and buy the third edition overstock before the edition change? Get excited for a campaign setting months in advance?

Whatever it was, they must have done something right, because I'm talking about it.

Overall, An Adventurer's Guide to Eberron was sort of like those clip show episodes old tv shows used to do to save on their budgets. It wasn't as good as the series was at its best, but it wasn't as bad as the series was at its worst. You just have to wonder if maybe this is what the creators think is a representative cross-section of the series as a whole. I'd say it's too superficial to get at what makes Eberron special, and the format can't help but highlight the unevenness of its worldbuilding (the "Technology" pages have lightning rails and airships, but the "Dwarves" page has daring little tidbits like "a male dwarf values his beard" and "all dwarves value gold and other precious metals"), but if this were my first exposure, I think I'd probably say, "why not, I'll give it a shot."

Ukss Contribution: Okay, what's my favorite thing in all of Eberron? Because in the broad strokes, it's all here. My problem is that I greatly prefer small, specific details to broad strokes. Like, honestly, the thing I enjoyed most was learning that "magic even allows for sophisticated picture IDs." This is the sort of pseudo-modern texture that makes me love Eberron, but it's not particularly interesting, except as a contrast with the way D&D usually does things. So I guess it has to be the really tall buildings in Sharn. That was a fun adventure town. But I'm cheating here. This pick owes as much to Sharn: City of Towers as it does to An Adventurer's Guide to Eberron.

(AD&D 2e) Chronomancer

 I have something of a dysfunctional relationship to AD&D. Let's call it . . . toxic nostalgia. Every time I see or handle (or yes, read) one of these old books, it's like this visceral sense memory. I'm instantly transported back in time, to when I was a teenager . . . and then shortly thereafter I remember all the reasons I hated being a teenager.

I first learned of the existence of Chronomancer (Loren Coleman) approximately one month ago, but as soon as I did, the lingering bit of teenager inside me immediately activated and tracked down a copy. And now, the adult me has to explain (to both you and myself) why that was a bad idea.

And it's tricky, because the main thing that's wrong with Chronomancer is just that it's AD&D. It does stuff like introduce the Temporal Champion class, a spellcaster/warrior hybrid that specializes in time manipulation magic and the ability minimums to qualify are Intelligence 17, Wisdom 16, Strength 15, and Constitution 14. And, it's like, are we just openly cheating at character creation now? Is that the state of Dungeons & Dragons circa 1995? Or maybe the game was just designed around the assumption that you'd only get to play the character you want one time out of nine (that's how many tries it took me to roll the necessary stats using the 4d6, drop lowest method that would not become standard until 3rd edition).

So there's this open question of how much I'm willing to tolerate AD&D's system nonsense for the sake of a high concept and it turns out the answer is "basically not at all." In a way, my toxic nostalgia is vindicated. Chronomancer is exactly the sort of book 13-year-old me would have gone absolutely feral over and exactly the sort of book that 20-year-old me would have been completely jaded about. Reading it for the first time in my forties leaves me largely confused as to why it exists at all.

See, the titular Chronomancer class is a wizard variant that knows unique spells related to the Demiplane of Time (and there is an extremely important discussion here about why that name is inappropriate and a better term would be "The Temporal Prime," but I can't be mad at it, because there's a dark part of my heart that understands why we should really be calling Time Elementals "Time Dimensionals" instead.) These spells allow the Chronomancer to travel into the past and future as early as level 3. And I don't need it explained to me why someone would want to play a time-travelling wizard. What I need explained to me is why you would ever run a campaign where only some of the characters are time-travelling wizards.

It's such a classic D&D blunder. Making a character class out of what should have been a campaign model. I want to believe that Chronomancer was conceived, written, and published entirely independently of the video game Chrono Trigger and the timing (no pun intended) is tight enough for this to plausible (Chrono Trigger was released March of 1995, Chronomancer was published in August of 1995), but a treacherous part of me thinks, "OMG, what if it wasn't?"

Because I can get behind that particular brand of corporate cynicism. Take one of the best jrpgs ever made and file the serial numbers off for a D&D game? Absolutely beautiful. But it kind of depresses me to think that they were deliberately trying to imitate Chrono Trigger . . . and missed the point so badly. Nooo! We're supposed to be a band of plucky heroes dashing around through time, trying to avert some terrible doom by finding and defeating it while it's still weak enough to be killed. Why are you telling me about the extremely abstract perils of this monochrome transit tunnel?

There's this weird assumption that the players' time (no pun intended) in the Temporal Prime (which is basically a big fog cloud with "timestreams" running through it - travel through time is effected by moving up and down said streams) is going to receive a lot of focus in the game, though maybe the book is just assuming that once the characters are back inside the normal flow of time, the DM can take things from there. So the new information we need are the logistics of the time travel process itself. AD&D could be like that, assuming that a mechanics-parsing puzzle (such as figuring out how long you have to travel up the timestream to get to a particular time) was the most engaging form of gameplay, even when DMs would be better served by a discussion of storytelling tropes. And I will give Chronomancer credit, it did get there eventually. The last chapter, with its discussion of how magic and technology might vary over time, and its sample setting, showing the same kingdom in four different time periods, was exactly what I'd want out of a D&D time-travel supplement. However, it's only partial credit, because that chapter was exactly as long as the previous chapter - one of the most tedious collections of highly-specific spell interactions I've ever read.

I think, overall, the most valuable thing I got from Chronomancer was a permission structure to run a time-travel fantasy game with AD&D, which isn't something I particularly need nowadays, but it would have done me a lot of good in the late 90s. I admire the book's audacity, if nothing else.

Ukss Contribution: My absolute favorite thing in this book is the addition of day planners to the equipment section. It's just such an un-D&D piece of equipment, and if the book had leaned more into the idea that the PCs' time travel shenanigans would become so complicated they'd need to carry a heavily annotated calendar with them at all times, well I'd have been positively delighted. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a one-off.

So I'm going with my runner-up - the suggestion that in the future, magic would become so advanced that they'll teach low level spells in public schools. It's a pretty unusual way of looking at magic - that there could be a standardized magical education that doesn't need something as specialized as a "magic school."