(Shadowrun 3e) Brainscan

WARNING: Heavy spoilers for Brainscan.

Metaplot is kind of a double-edged sword. Brainscan is a well-constructed mini-campaign with varied challenges, meaningful stakes, and a tone that covers the full range of the cyberpunk experience - from cynically humorous to full-on for-profit capitalist body horror. And that is made possible by the groundwork laid by Shadowrun's metaplot. The AI, Deus, took over the Renraku Arcology and in the process created the opportunity for a hundred different shadowruns. But metaplot gives with one hand and takes with the other. Now that it's time to close this chapter of Deus' story, by inviting the PCs to participate in a series of adventures that revolve around the resistance's attempts to shut him down, there is a ruthless inexorableness to the book's canon ending - Deus is not destroyed by the kill codes, but rather downloads portions of his code into the brains of his victims, who will gather on the anniversary of his "death" and reassemble him in the Matrix.

To some degree, this is inevitable. In order for the next thing to happen, the next thing needs to happen. But when you take these events and play them out in a living campaign, it makes for some pretty dubious adventure design. There's a point near the end where the PCs have just emerged from cyberspace and have every reason to believe that Deus is trapped on a hard drive. While they are still getting their bearings, some Renraku loyalists (specifically the scientists who helped create Deus in the first place) barge into the room, grab the drive and basically go "thanks for the assist, we'll take it from here" but like in a really mean and rude way (the exact dialogue ends with Sherman Huang shooting the body of the late Renraku CEO, dropping a gun into the lap of one of the PC's NPC allies, and saying to one of his lackeys, "if they're smart, they'll lay low and keep their mouths shut. Otherwise they'll have an entire megacorporation after them for kidnapping and murdering a CEO.")

Maybe it's a personal hang up where I get irrationally angry at smug bullies, but my finely-honed GMing instincts tell me that this is a prelude to a fight scene. I figure, 16D stun damage from dumpshock or not, if any PC is conscious enough to witness this denouement, they are conscious enough to unload a clip of automatic fire at the traitors. Even in a perfectly static story like a movie or a novel, Ronin would have picked up the gun Huang tossed in his lap and put a half-dozen rounds in the hard drive. Or, at least, he would have if I were writing it. Some evil scientist is walking away with the AI that killed and tortured thousands of people, and maybe you're not strong enough to stop them, but you can sure as hell ruin the data.

So it's a little weird that the book treats this as just an inevitable part of its climax. "Any attempts to pursue them and retrieve the Mousetrap will be difficult. . . the arcology will be bursting with rampaging drones, escaping residents, shell-shocked Banded and invading military troops. This chaos should be more than enough to distract and confound any pursuers."

I don't know, though. It seems like all of that would be more of an obstacle for a bunch of corporate executives and data scientists than it would for a team of hardened mercenary criminals.

Although, maybe I'm just running afoul of a mismatch between genre and medium. Deus' original designer (apparently) walking away with his source code, stealing credit for saving the arcology (when it was actually the PCs who rescued him from Deus), and being ideally positioned to be promoted to the next CEO of Renraku is a classic bleak cyberpunk ending. Terrible things have happened and the rich people responsible for them will not only escape justice, they will thrive, whereas the working schlubs who cleaned up their mess will have to live in fear. Because everything they did to save the day is potentially blackmail material and it's only a matter of time before the powerful will want to clean up that loose end.

It is perhaps a fitting comeuppance for Huang that Deus isn't actually in the hard drive. He used his vast intellect to reprogram the purge routine and download himself somewhere completely unprecedented. But whatever satisfaction there is in this ending (and it's not much, because Deus is awful) is undermined by the fact that there's no way for the PCs to see it.

This is another case of a medium informing a message. The double-twist is only communicated in the book, not the game (though it's sure to come up in a future book because the metaplot must march on) and even if it were, how do you make a game out of "your actions were ultimately pointless, the villains will just start up their work exactly where they left off, the system will always protect itself?" I want my players to look me in the eye and say, "Thank you, John, that story we told together was cynical and miserable and ended on the perfect downer note. We were all really impressed by the way you absolutely sold our lack of agency." How do I do that?

Maybe I should run Brainscan in Chuubo's . . .  Genre XP Action: Take a beat to experience despair at the unmanageable vastness of your own socioeconomic context.

That was, of course, a 1% joke, but it touches on something I think is important in rpg design. Successful adventures are rewarded with treasure and xp, but there's often a more powerful intrinsic reward in simply completing the adventure successfully. And this works out great in genres like epic fantasy, space opera, and 4-color superheroes. The players are fighting their hardest to make a happy ending, but so are their characters, and so is the world. Star Wars is supposed to end with the defeat of the Empire. But there are other types of story to tell. 

In a cyberpunk story, the characters are fighting just to survive and may feel a certain degree of terror at the prospect of being responsible for a happy ending because such things are not supposed to be possible and the world will punish them for challenging the system. But the players in a cyberpunk rpg still have that fundamental rpg instinct. They are trying for a happy ending. Not necessarily consciously. I'm sure there are a lot of Shadowrun players out there who, if you asked them if they'd prefer for Brainscan to end with Deus destroyed, Sherman Huang facing justice, and Renraku having its charter stripped and its assets seized as reparations to the arcology victims, would say, "no, obviously not. That's not remotely the setting I signed up to play in." And yet, when the time comes, that belief will be nowhere near strong enough to stop them from fighting to get the Mousetrap back.

So how do you make getting bushwacked by your money-grubbing erstwhile allies feel like a reward?  How do you make the bleakness and the futility feel like a successful conclusion to the story?

Shadowrun's solution is to not even try. Whenever the story needs a betrayal or a setback, the event happens, regardless of what the PCs do. For example, earlier in the story, the PCs are present when Deus' minions try to capture Sherman Huang. "If the Banded are driven off without capturing Huang, they manage to do so a short time later." And I can't really disagree with the approach - I find it best when things that the PCs are going to object to happen off-screen - but it makes me a little uncomfortable to tell a story about the characters lacking agency by making sure that the players really do lack agency.

Now, forget everything I just said, because there's another perspective - if you, as a GM, are good enough at selling the highs and lows, then a lot of the time the players will experience a railroad as a rollercoaster (i.e. fundamentally the same thing, but really exciting). There's an art to it. You can't ever let the players know you're cheating, but you do it by hiding your cheating in the ambiguity of their blind spots. Then, when the unavoidable thing happens, the reaction is not "this would have happened no matter what," but "oh no, why didn't we think to cover that blind spot." There's actually a good example of that in this adventure. Deus needs to track the PCs to a certain location and the book suggests several ways he could do that. The method he uses is always going to be one of the ones the PCs think to look for plus a redundant back-up plan that uses one of the ones the PCs overlooked.

(Sometimes you get a group of players whose take away from these tricks is "we should be hypervigilant and spend a long time at the table trying to cover every contingency" but that's really a sign that you're playing with a group that would prefer a sandbox).

Overall, I think Brainscan is a fine set of adventures, but if I ran it for a group, they would almost certainly break the plot. Which isn't even remotely a flaw in most adventure modules (because they would otherwise need to be 1000 pages long to cover every possible contingency), but does give me pause in the context of Shadowrun because I just know that the conclusion to this metaplot-driven adventure is going to be the setup for the next metaplot-driven adventure and it's a weird sensation to realize that you're inevitably going to obsolete a book that hasn't even been written yet (c. 2000, my understanding is that System Failure picks up where this one left off).

Ukss Contribution: One of the intrusion countermeasures in Deus' ultraviolet server (a Matrix environment indistinguishable from the real world because it's a weird setting premise that the most computationally intensive processes take place in high-resolution metaphors) is a nest of chromatic snakes. The book doesn't go into as much detail about these creatures as I'd like, but I thought it was a neat image.

(d20 Modern) Urban Arcana

Oscar Wilde once said, "It is absurd to divide people into 'good' and 'bad.' People are either charming or tedious." Urban Arcana (Eric Cagle, Jeff Grubb, David Noonan, Bill Slavicsek, Stan!) is technically a good book, but I didn't find it particularly charming.

Let's start with the good then. On a technical level, it is well executed. Ideas are communicated effectively. The prose is breezy and engaging. The book as a whole delivers a lot of value - new classes, new equipment, new creatures, new spells and a series of sample adventures that work equally as well as an introduction to the world or as a standalone mini-campaign. It was rare for a section of the book to feel like it was dragging on beyond its welcome (the GM advice chapter did have two separate and redundant "Pacing" sections, but that's more an ironically funny error than something I need to complain about). All-in-all, it's an exceptionally useable reference guide that was made to a professional standard.

And I think it's that very professionalism that is fueling my ambivalence about the book. Urban Arcana feels to me like it exists as part of a product line. It is almost oppressively inevitable.

This is most apparent in the fact that half the book is devoted to generic d20 Modern content. The GM advice chapter runs us through the process of designing an adventure, stringing adventures into a campaign, and assigning character rewards at the end of a story. The equipment chapter ends with a bunch of new not-especially-fantasy-themed vehicles and the Locations chapter details mostly mundane floorplan maps and setting agnostic urban districts.

And of the stuff that was plausibly Urban Arcana-specific and not just core overflow, about half of that was just the D&D 3.0 SRD ported over with minimal modifications. Oh, wow, because they might be carried over by refugees from Shadow we're getting stats for both the glaive and the guisarme? I can only assume the reason we didn't get the glaive-guisarme is because someone at Wizards of the Coast chickened out of a bet.

But I think the worst part of the obviously-just-D&D stuff is that it's often used without any thought about how it's going to fit into d20 Modern's fictional and mechanical framework. For example, the 3.X half orc has famously suffered an unjust attribute modifier spread: +2 Strength, -2 Intelligence, -2 Charisma. In D&D, the authors attempt to justify this by saying that Strength is so much more valuable than the other attributes that a +2 is balanced by a total of -4 in other areas. And that's somewhat plausible. Unless you're playing a spellcaster or a crossbow rogue, you're going to make hundreds of times more melee attacks than you are Intelligence or Charisma-based skill checks.

However, in the modern world those calculations play out a bit differently. For one thing, most of the fighting is going to be done with guns, rendering Strength a bit redundant. For another, talking your way out of trouble or making clever use of your skills (of which, the half-orc has fewer than almost anyone) are much bigger parts of the sort of stories you're going to want to tell. 

It's not a huge deal, on the whole, because the thoughtlessly-used old stuff is mixed in with new material that does seem to have at least some thought put into it. I liked the Synchronicity spell, which "subtly rearranges reality so that the subject isn't inconvenienced by the minor delays in modern life. It's especially useful in car chases, where you're guaranteed to hit every green light and the person you're chasing/fleeing from is not. Or the magical Armor of Sponsorship, which has all the stats of regular magic armor, but a lower purchase price because it's festooned with ads. It doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense from a setting or mechanical perspective. It functions like an armor special quality, which means someone had to put it there, and no one who knows about Shadow is going to want to advertise like that . . . but at least it's an attempt to bring the two genres (modern and fantasy) together and the overall effect is kind of funny.

In a way, though, the Armor of Sponsorship is emblematic of Urban Arcana's whole approach to blending our real world with high fantasy - a superficial juxtaposition of elements that seems to actively spurn coherent worldbuilding. Sometimes, as with the Armor, it works despite itself. Mostly, though, it doesn't.

What it feels like to me is being near someone who has unknowingly drank a ton of non-alcoholic beer, and subsequently acts extremely, performatively drunk because that's what happens when you drink a lot of beer. "Ooh, look at us - we're doing fantasy but it's in the modern world! Whee! Has anyone ever done that before?!"

It's not that the modern-day fantasy is an after-thought or an affectation, per se. There are plenty of things, especially in the Organizations chapter, that seem like they could be elements in building a setting. You've got Draco Industries, which is run by an Efreeti who is disguised as a human (whose pseudonym just happens to be "Franz Draco"). Or St Cuthbert's House, a vigilante church based on a Catholic-inspired Greyhawk deity that completely fails to address the elephant in the room re: real Catholicism.

The problem is more that these elements are used without any apparent vision. This is not a setting that parodies high fantasy by bringing dungeon-crawling tropes into the real world. Nor does it comment on the modern world by depicting its fantasy creatures with brutal realism. It is not speculative fiction that explores how the world might change if magic were introduced. It's not an epic fantasy that spans multiple worlds, allowing for parallel stories in both realities. It's not even cinematic trash entertainment, that favors pointless spectacle over sophisticated characters and themes. It's just D&D stuff added to modern stuff, and even the 30-page-long GMing chapter completely failed to make a genre out of that.

The root cause is probably the choice to make Shadow kind of unreal in the context of the setting. Travel between worlds is entirely one-way. Creatures of Shadow enter our world, but nothing from our world (including the newly arrived creatures of Shadow) can travel to the other world. The only evidence that this world exists at all is the fact that creatures keep washing up from there. This is further exacerbated by the fact that Creatures of Shadow have vague and fragmentary memories about their world of origin. Even the basics of geography and history are forgotten. So this world that we can only infer exists also has no verifiable properties. The fact that things of Shadow conceal their existence by fading away when destroyed and confabulating plausible-sounding memories for uninitiated witnesses, only adds insult to injury.

Taken together, these properties of Shadow are laser-targeted to destroy any broader worldbuilding before it begins. Urban Arcana is a setting perpetually in its day-0 status quo. There are no conflicts among shadow immigrants that began in the old country. There's no sense that the magical world is in any danger of capitalist neo-colonialism driven by the real-world's advanced technology. You can't even guarantee that people directly affected by the magical world will be able to remember it the next day.

The overall effect is something timorous and bland, that fails to rise to the level of either of its source genres. You could probably use its semi-generic rules to power your own take on real-world-meets- fantasy, but that's going to require a level of conceptual work the book absolutely did not prepare you for ("make the GM do the work" isn't necessarily a fatal flaw in an rpg supplement, but if it's going to be abstract, it needs to speak towards abstract concerns). I can't even really say that there's a decent campaign setting underneath the pitch. The pitch is all there is, and it's not enough on its own.

Ukss Contribution: But I don't want to end on a dour note. It's not that the book is bad. There's good and interesting material here. Only the larger context is tedious. I mentioned a couple of things I liked in the main body, but there was also Vaporex, the name brand Gaseous Form potion or the Umbrella of Feather Falling or the Engines of Infernal Speed, which will shoot flames out the back of your car while giving it a speed boost.

My favorite, though, was the Muse Statuette. A small statue that can become a beautiful miniature woman who will "provide suggestions" about your art. As someone who does his fair share of writing (and more than his fair share of criticism), this is just an absolutely hilarious thing for a person to own. If someone bought one for me as a punishment, I'd probably deserve it.

(Shadowrun 3e) Corporate Punishment

Corporate Punishment (Elissa Carey, Malik Toms, Andrew Frades, Richard Tomasso) is an almost platonically middle of the road collection of Shadowrun adventures. What did I like about it? Almost everything. What did I love about it? Ehhhh. . .

Each of the three adventures follows the Elemental Shadowrun Adventure Pattern - An anonymous corporate executive hires you to commit a crime, you break into a secure corporate facility to commit the crime you were hired to do, in the liminal space between committing the crime and getting paid for committing the crime something goes wrong, can you survive the thing that goes wrong and still get paid for committing the crime?

And despite my somewhat snarky way of summarizing the book, I actually think it's extremely good that it exists. Everyone wants to break the mold, but before that happens somebody has to make the mold and Corporate Punishment serves that role admirably. If it weren't for the large rewards and high degree of difficulty, I'd even say that this book serves as a better introduction to the game than First Run.

Although, when it comes to setting baseline expectations for the Shadowrun setting, it would probably be more functional (though definitely not more accurate) to run an adventure where the PCs were not betrayed by Mr. Johnson.

That's the theme that ties the book together - the corporations are ruthless and when you're done working for one, you're going to have to survive the wrath of the one you worked against and at best Mr Johnson is going to be no help at all. At worst, they're going to be one off the ones piling it on.

Technically, only the first adventure, "Double Take" features a direct betrayal. Mz Johnson works for Telestrian Industries. She hires you to steal confidential data from Universal Omnitech's branch office in Tir Tairngire, but because of the elven nation's cutthroat feudal/capitalist politics, she's going to frame Saeder Krupp (Lofwyr is on the Council of Princes for some reason) and make the shadowrunners the patsies for the entire operation. 

Classic Shadowrun.

In the second adventure, "Second Effort," Mr Johnson's betrayal is less direct. He hires you to sneak a spy into a rival corporation's secret research laboratory (which is actually a pretty fun inversion of the more typical "extraction"-type missions), but while you're doing that, he himself is (voluntarily) extracted by another corporation and when you arrive at the meet to collect your pay, Mr Johnson's boss (aka "Mr Johnson") says "Whoa, we gotta situation. The guy who hired you is probably going to burn our spy to ingratiate himself to his new employer. So now you have to go back and extract the person you just inserted. But don't worry, I'm authorized to double your pay."

Structurally, it's the best of the three adventures and it potentially ends with you very righteously killing the SOB who put you into this situation. However, the plot of the story is that the original Mr Johnson is a racist who works for the militantly racist Yakashima corporation, setting up a run against the pragmatically racist Proteus AG, before deciding to jump ship for the fanatically racist Brackhaven Investments corporation (which you may remember from Super Tuesday as belonging to the right-wing radical who lost the 2057 election to Dunkelzahn in no small part thanks to a scandal so bizarre, potentially offensive, and critically challenging that I don't have the heart to summarize it here).

And I guess what I'm saying is that Shadowrun's take on fantasy racism is . . . not something that brings a lot of value by being foregrounded.

Finally, in the third adventure, "Legacy," Ms Johnson passively betrays you by not adequately preparing you for the magnitude of the shitstorm you're walking into. You're hired to steal the Scrolls of Ak'le'ar, bequeathed by Dunkelzahn to the dragon Hualpa. And when you do, you suddenly find yourself on the shitlist of seven different corporate and criminal organizations. Technically, if you deliver the scrolls back to your original employer, she'll keep her end of the bargain and pay you the agreed-upon fee. But in order to get that point, you have to escape a literal 8-way gun battle and the only way you're going to do that is with the unsolicited help of an annoying NPC of the "smug crimelord who knows everything about you despite never interacting with you in any way" variety.

"Legacy" is probably the weakest of the three adventures, due to the aforementioned deus ex machina, the fact that the Scrolls are a pure Macgufffin ("they seem more like a vanity item than something authentically magical"), and my gut instinct that the heist is probably impossible (you have to get through layered magical and physical security on a crowded college campus where a tightly-knit group of researchers are active at unpredictable hours in order to steal an item that has no reason to ever move from the pedestal that is under 24 hour surveillance for the scant two weeks it's available before returning to a dragon's horde). But it does technically involve you in the metaplot. The last page of the book features a form you can photocopy and mail in to vote on which of the eight competing interests will canonically wind up with the scrolls (unfortunately, an internet search was unable to tell me who won that particular vote).

Overall, I'd say that Corporate Punishment is a perfectly fine book. It's got a good balance between map-based and plot-based adventures, a tolerably thematic level of backstabbing bullshit, and it takes your Seattle-based characters to some interesting new destinations (though I could not figure out why the Johnsons wouldn't just hire Portland-based or Boston-based runners in lieu of arranging forged travel papers). 

Ukss Contribution: In describing Boston, the book says, "giving bad directions to tourists is a spectator sport." As someone who has aspirations to one day travel, it gives me anxiety by proxy, but I have to admit it's a funny turn of phrase, so one of Ukss' cities will be similarly welcoming to visitors.

d20 Modern

By now you'd think I'd be used to the blog becoming a funhouse-mirror time portal where I encounter something from my distant past and only passingly recognize it, not because it has changed in the intervening decades, but because I have. And yet . . . d20 Modern (Bill Slavicsek, Jeff Grubb, Rich Redman, Charles Ryan). I remember it being a refreshing change of pace, solidly middle-of-the-road in its fundamentals but with some bold new ideas. And I guess it probably was that, in the transitional period between the 3.0 PHB and Star Wars Saga Edition, but looking back with the benefit of hindsight, that 3.0 chassis is really showing its age.

Some of the classes get a full Base Attack Bonus progression and others get the Half progression, leading to a 5-point gap at level 10 (all the classes max out at 10 now, because d20 Modern leans into the lego-block-style multiclassing mechanic, which is really something that needs its own paragraph). And that would be bad enough, but then classes also get a Defense Bonus progression and that ranges from +8 to +3.

I can see the advantage, from a gameplay perspective, of rebalancing attack and defense so that attacks hit on 8+ instead of 10+ (and, in fact, for Ukss Plus, I balanced monsters on the theory that heroes should hit on 7+), and I can see why, constrained as it is by 3.X's obsession with NPC-PC symmetry (almost all your antagonists in this modern setting will be regular humans with class levels) it leads to PCs getting hit more often (Ukss Plus math assumes PCs get hit by 11-12+). But I cannot, for the life of me, remember what the hell we were thinking, putting up with the 7-point gap between attack and defense. That's a to-hit on 3 or higher, for two equal level characters going head-to-head. And that's only for a single-class progression. If you look at a level 20 build with only a single multiclass, the gap is +20 to-hit vs +6 defense. Granted, that's a Strong Martial Artist fighting a Charismatic Personality (i.e. "celebrity"), but that's still ass-backwards design. Level 20 should mean something, damnit!

And, okay, maybe there's some symmetrical ratfucking going on because the Martial Artist needs to roll a natural 20 to resist the Personality's "Winning Smile," but even that's just the equivalent to a 1st-level Charm Person spell and it doesn't work if combat has already begun. 

And that's comparing two very basic and obvious builds. Most of your d20 Modern characters are not going to be so straightforward. The underlying philosophy of the game is that you will frequently multiclass to narrow in on your own very specific character concept. This is encouraged by the nature of the basic classes. Rather than being based on jobs like "Fighter" or "Wizard," the six basic classes are each based on one of the six attributes: The Strong Hero (Str), The Fast Hero (Dex), The Tough Hero (Con), The Smart Hero (Int), The Dedicated Hero (Wis), and The Charismatic Hero (Cha).

This is what I was talking about when I said d20 Modern had some bold new ideas. The way the classes stake out a niche, allow for specialization into that niche, but then come together to give the player flexibility when making their character - that's inspired, like a hybrid of class-based and point-buy experience systems. And when I talk about the d20 chassis showing its age, I mean that the class-levels fail to do the one thing class-based systems are supposed to do (guarantee rough parity between characters of equal level) and most of the things you can buy with your points are simply not worth the expense (this book has an unprecedented number of the infamous "+2 to two different skills" feats as well as the original, terrible version of the Toughness feat).

I think you could make the argument that in a modern setting "combat" is more of a specialist niche than it is in D&D style fantasy, and so the fact that you can carelessly sink your BAB by injudicious multiclassing (with a crack build, you could have a +2 to hit at level 20, but even a fairly reasonable Smart 3/Charismatic 3/Field Scientist 4 character could have a +4 at level 10) might not be all that big a deal. Generally, these days, we don't fault the people who choose to have a well-rounded academic background for failing to train for pro-level MMA fights. But counterpoint: the GM chapter takes pains to explain:

"Why should a Smart hero's base attack bonus, for example, improve as he [sic] goes up in level? Because he [sic] goes up in level by participating in adventures, and adventures almost always involve combat of some sort."

Preach it. Love that "the story is what happens in the game" swagger. Just a quick follow-up question from my position of having 20 years of hindsight - if the Smart hero gets better in combat because they are primarily an adventurer who uses their smarts, why do they improve their BAB so little? 

Because what's really going on here is that the Strong Hero has the same numbers as the D&D Fighter and the Smart Hero has the Wizard's numbers, despite the fact that the Smart Hero does not get spells and the Strong Hero's niche of melee combat would be considered quaint and archaic in the game's modern setting.

But I don't want to rag on d20 Modern too much. Its main weakness is just that it's a 22-year-old game that never got another edition, so all of its 3.0-era mistakes got frozen in amber, preserved so that a cynical blogger, decades hence, could call them out as if he (not "sic" because I'm talking about myself) were discovering some new and terrible flaws. My overwhelming thought while reading this book was "someone should make a spiritual successor to d20 Modern . . . wait, I'm someone . . . should I remake d20 Modern . . . no, no nobody wants to see that . . . do they . . . should I test the waters by sarcastically floating the idea in a parenthetical . . . eh, people would probably see right through that, better to put it on the wait list of potential projects that's already a mile long."

Needless to say, I loved this book.

It's also, for lack of a better word, the most generous book WotC put out in the 3.0 era. It is a complete core, with all the character stuff you expect in a player's book, an abbreviated, but thorough GM guide, and also a source of monsters, magic items (though I don't love that it refers to magic and psionics collectively as "FX") and three separate campaign models, each of which has two unique Advanced (i.e. "prestige") Classes. It's overall . . . 3.X-ness keeps it from placing on my list of all-time top one-volume rpgs, but it can never be accused of deliberately leaving something out. d20 Modern is packed.

The campaign models were attractive in their outlines, even if they sometimes felt like Store Brand World of Darkness (except "Urban Arcana" which felt like Store Brand Shadowrun). I expect that's as much a function of their brevity as anything else, though. They've each got 15 pages to sell me on a whole campaign world and so they rely a lot on the power of genre, but WotC's in-house style tries to stick to a soft PG-13 so it's hard for the genres to land.

"Shadow Chasers" is basically "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." The various D&D monsters are here in their most dangerous and evil form, they're called "Shadows" and the PCs chase them. And lest this seem too glib on my part, I'll point out that the introductory fiction contained the (apparently) unironic in-charcter dialogue: "Ready to chase some shadows?" It's all perfectly serviceable. Maybe a little on-the-nose, but it has the advantage of being instantly understandable and easily gameable.

I guess it's a little weird that, in lieu of spellcasting, the Occultist class gets a fixed number of randomly chosen scrolls every time they gain a class level, but I don't hate it as a mechanic in a low-magic setting. The basic body of the class probably needs buffing, though. It's built like a spellcaster but its spellcasting abilities are extremely limited. If you GM this campaign, you're going to have to drop a lot of scrolls as loot. Strangely enough, its counterpart, the Shadow Stalker would probably be one of the better Fighter prestige classes if backported into D&D, so maybe this is just what caster-martial balance looks like in a 3.0 context.

"Agents of Psi" I can't take seriously because it has the line "Reality is a construct create by group consensus" and I just have to shake my head and say, "Mage: the Ascension spent 25+ years and 70+ books failing to make that concept work, so get out of here with your 15-page mini-campaign." But aside from that, it's a sci-fi fantasy setting inspired by 90s conspiracy theories and media like The X Files where you play as government agents who must defend the Earth against aliens, genetic experiments, and rogue psionics all while keeping the truth from a general public who is not ready for the revelation. I can't help wondering if it's politically significant that White Wolf took this premise and cast the PCs as rebellious outsiders, but WotC's first instinct was that the PCs should be the cops. It probably isn't, but when considering d20 Modern as a whole I couldn't help but notice that heist capers are conspicuous in their absence.

The final campaign model is probably the one with the most potential - "Urban Arcana." In this urban fantasy setting, the Earth operates on a slow cycle of rising and falling magic (called "Shadow") levels. Over the past few years, the magic level has risen to the point where creatures of Shadow (the various D&D monsters) have begun to arrive in our reality from the mysterious far shores of Shadow. Unlike "Shadow Chasers" the forces of magic aren't intrinsically antagonistic and much of the drama of the setting is driven by the complementary processes of modern things adopting magic and fantasy things learning to use modern technology. You know, mischievous (but not evil) goblin stealing cars and taking them out for joyrides, despite not knowing how to drive. An illithid gangster with minotaur muscle. An ancient knightly order getting reactivated when its magic relics start working again.

But I won't say too much about "Urban Arcana" because it's got a full campaign book that is next on my d20 list, so I'll save my thoughts for when I see it in its final form.

Overall, I thought d20 Modern had a lot of potential as an offshoot branch of the d20 family tree, but without the campaign models it was probably too conservative to really do what it had to do. It wanted to occupy a niche of "cinematic reality," but it never saw that the most obvious use of its level system was to dial in on particular levels of action-adventure - everyman heroes and gritty thrillers at low level, over the top explosion and bullet ballets at high level. I think, if it had gotten a second and third edition, to keep pace with mainline D&D, it would probably have developed into one of the best rpgs out there . . . but it didn't get them, so I guess I have to file it away as an "almost was."

Ukss Contribution: I kind of hate that I'm doing this, not because the entry is unworthy on its own merits, but because my reason is almost entirely that the name rhymes, but I have to go with the Crystal Pistol. It's a neat looking device - a handgun whose top part is made of psionically active crystal. Instead of bullets it fires bolts of concussive telekinetic force. The Ukss version will be able to be recharged and will probably be the signature weapon of the moon goblins.

(Shadowrun 3e) Year of the Comet

Like most of Shadowrun's big metaplot books, I knew the broad outlines of Year of the Comet long before I read it for the first time (i.e. before now). The SURGE mutants, naturally-occurring orichalcum, the war in the Yucatan peninsula - these are all things that are referenced repeatedly in other books from this period. I'm not sure I'd call any of it "a pressurized can of whoopass for the world of Shadowrun," but it was all very interesting.

The main difference between this book and other Big Event books like Bug City or Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzahn's Secrets is that those previous books had One Big Thing that they were all about, with alternate campaign models branching off from the Big Thing's natural consequences (insect spirit's overwhelming Chicago or an implausibly rich dragon giving away 1% of his shit, respectively), but Year of the Comet is a complete grab-bag. None of the chapters have anything to do with each other, and only the first has anything to do with the titular comet.

I mean, technically you could say that SURGE - Sudden Recessive Genetic Expression - was caused by the comet. The book is actually a little cagey about it, but it started shortly after Hailey's Comet became visible to the naked eye and it ended shortly after Hailey's Comet was no longer visible to the naked eye, so it's at worst a very strong correlation. However, there's not really anything thematic that connects people suddenly gaining random animal features with the reappearance of a short-period comet. Why is that canonically popular pornstar a horny catgirl? Because of Hailey's Comet, obviously. Comets do that to people, you know.

It's one of those frustrating things about this particular era of metaplot-driven supplement-heavy rpgs - they were eager to tell us events that happened without actually resolving any of the most obvious questions. It's like they imagine that every GM's favorite part of the game is giving volatile non-canon answers to canon mysteries. "We'll never come out and directly say that the Sixth World's rising mana level will lead to an ever-escalating power creep and the introduction of countless new enemies, treasures, and character options so that you can give your players any explanation you like for the Comet-adjacent weirdness. But if your homebrew explanation is anything other 'the comet was an unstable preview of a higher mana level' you're going to have a hard time explaining future metaplot events."

To wit: is it actually the fun kind of ambiguity to hedge on whether possession of the Coin of Luck is responsible for Sharon Chaing-Wu giving birth to quintuplets? I guess "the mysterious artifact bequeathed to our family in a dragon's will was a placebo, it doesn't really do anything, and the quintuplets are just a coincidence" is a kind of worldbuilding. But let's be real. It was the coin. I think the main source of the ambiguity hear is the line's overall reluctance to make magical items that do things. For the most part (with no counterexamples that immediately spring to mind, at least) Shadowrun's magic items are more like equipment for magic-using characters. They add dice to or reduce drain from spellcasting or they allow magically active characters to roll extra dice while using an enchanted weapon. If one of these items fell into the hands of a mundane, it would be nothing more than a ridiculously expensive paperweight. 

What this means, in practice is that something that seems like it should be powerful, mysterious, and valuable is just a macguffin. Yeah, someone will probably hire the shadowrunners to steal the thing, and then some third party will try and swoop in and steal the score, in true heist-movie fashion, but the stakes are basically "we have to move the Thing from one Place to Another!" Even as short out-of-character blurb "whosoever possesses the Coin of Luck will experience the blessings of enhanced fertility, both in their immediate family and their agricultural property. The exact details of this blessing are beyond the scope of these rules, but in the hands of a megacorporate CEO, it can mean billions in revenue" would have helped a lot.

Not that the Coin of Luck played much of a role in this book. It's just indicative of an overall attitude. The strangest manifestation of this is the way the Shadowland commentors will skeptically dismiss an event as being beyond the known limits of magic. For example, when Badr al Din ibn Eisa appears to come back from the dead (something we readers know to be possible in this universe, assuming Earthdawn is canon) most everyone just assumes he faked his death somehow. The idea that someone could come back from the dead is absurd to them. From my perspective, it's one thing for the characters to not be overly credulous and just automatically believe everything they here, but . . . where are they getting this certainty from? The reappearance of magic happened within living memory, so why are those people so sure the universe has no more surprises for them?

I suppose that's what the theme of Year of the Comet was supposed to be - you think you know what possible, but here's a bunch of unexplainable shit to keep you awake at night - but half the book was about relatively mundane politics (Ghostwalker going kaiju on Denver notwithstanding, though even that settled down into mundane politics relatively quickly) and except for the continuing presence of the Sheddim (spirits who take possession of corpses, though they aren't related to ghosts at all as far as I could tell) the magical stuff goes away with the comet. The book mostly just feels like "Stuff that happened in 2061."

Which is fine. I liked reading about the stuff.  It's just, when the introduction promised me "a pressurized can of whoopass" I was expecting an event whose fallout would take decades to unravel. I suppose the new child emperor of Japan technically qualifies, but I'd have preferred for SURGE and the natural orichalcum to be permanent changes to the status quo. Or, failing that, for the presence of the comet to do something wild like temporarily step up Earth's mana level to something centuries or millennia farther along in the cycle. Give those Earthdawn survivors six months to reactivate their thread weapons and use their circle 12+ spells.

But maybe that would have been too esoteric for those fans of Shadowrun who were unaware of the Earthdawn connections (aw hell, let's face it - I was proposing it purely for an audience of 1). I guess I'm just going to have to count Year of the Comet as decent, but not quite as iconic as some of FASA's previous attempt at big metaplot events.

Ukss Contribution: Night mantas. They're manta-like creatures who float in the sky and occasionally stab people with their poisonous stingers. I like them because they create this spooky and ethereal imagery, but then they'll just attack like a normal animal. That's an interesting juxtaposition.

DCC - Xcrawl

Let's bang this one out quick. I'm in a very bad mood tonight, and while I would love to not think about the recent election by throwing myself into my work, this book didn't give me a lot to work with. It's a 2013 Free RPG Day release that contains one Dungeon Crawl Classics introductory adventure ("The Imperishable Sorceress" by Daniel J Bishop) and one Xcrawl introductory adventure ("Maximum Xcrawl: 2013 Studio City Crawl" by Brendan LaSalle). Altogether, they are 22 pages, which is hardly enough for one great adventure, let alone two.

But they tried. "The Imperishable Sorceress" felt like the classic Appendix N that is so central to Dungeon Crawl Classics' overall appeal. It's got strange demons and was weirdly sci-fi. The titular imperishable sorceress learned the art of crafting an immortal body from a species of underwater bug people who lived "before even the age of dinosaurs" (whatever that means in a world where dinosaurs still exist). But then she died in a freak accident before completing the ritual and her ghost haunts a level 1 dungeon (I guess because it wasn't designed to stop intruders, it's just old and haunted) and she tries to manipulate the PCs into reuniting her with her imperishable body and the magic gem that will fuse her ghost back into it.

If you help her out, she's extremely ungrateful and betrays you at the first opportunity, but there's little motivation to actively thwart her return. You can read some of her research materials that reveal her to be a pretty terrible person, but by default she's nice to the PCs as a means of buttering them up, so that feels like an easily missable clue. You could also, potentially, just ignore the ghost plot entirely and loot the dungeon, but there's not actually all that much loot there, mostly just a chaotically-aligned intelligent sword that is surely going to be more trouble than it's worth and the imperishable body itself, which only a member of the ghost's bloodline (one of whom is a randomly-chosen PC, to be fair) can transfer into. 

Overall, it just seems like a massive waste of time. Also, one of the encounters uses the word "savages" as a noun in exactly the same context as its Appendix N source material. 2013 was too late to still be doing that sort of thing, so I'm not even going to leaven my scolding. Mr Bishop, you should have known better.

The Xcrawl adventure is a bit better. The premise of the adventure is just the premise of Xcrawl itself - in this fantasy version of North America (which is apparently an empire that worships a bastardized version of the Roman gods) dungeon-crawling is a televised sports-reality gameshow with real life and death stakes! It kind of works. Instead of treasure chests, the Studio City Crawl uses the Prime Time Dance Squad, beautiful showgirls who, if you find them and tag them will award you a fabulous prize (some of which are immediately useful equipment, handed out directly, and others are treasures with monetary value, awarded once you leave the dungeon). Likewise, the dungeon is run by this over-the-top ringmaster figure called DJ (dungeon judge) Prime Time. In the end, clearing the dungeon isn't quite enough. You have to do it with enough style that the audience will vote for you over the other teams of adventurers (who have names like "The New Frogmen" or "Smash and Grab") and give you Fame Points in a system this adventure alludes to but saves for the new Pathfinder-compatible Xcrawl corebook.

It's an incredibly thin plot, but it's an effective advertisement for its parent game (which, I suppose, is what Free RPG Products are all about). I definitely came away thinking I could see myself running Xcrawl as a casual pick-up game or as a breather between more serious campaigns. 

In the end, I can't really complain about a book I got for free . . . so I won't (except about that racist bit I pointed out earlier). It's really just a thin, attractive pamphlet that very successfully achieves what it set out to do - communicate the vibes of the rpgs it's advertising. I probably won't run either of the adventurers, but I googled Xcrawl after reading this book, so that's at least one verified advertising impression.

Ukss Contribution: Not a lot to choose from. The thing I enjoyed the most was Xcrawl's weird genre mashup, but it's not something I'd want to port to any other setting (well, maybe Nobilis, but nothing less whimsical than that). 

I'll have to go with my second choice - the imperishable body. It's unaging and will survive even grievous wounds like decapitation, but it has no natural healing ability, so even if you do survive having your head cut off, there's no way to reattach it except long-lost spells first developed before the age of the dinosaurs. The result is a pretty robust form of immortality that will inevitably lead to you gradually losing various bits and pieces of yourself over the years until your trapped, conscious and undying, in a body too riddled by damage to function. It's something that strikes just the right tenor of horror for dark sorcery.

(Shadowrun 3e) Matrix

I was worried that Matrix (Rob Boyle, Michael Mulvihill) would be terribly boring . . . and I was right to do so, because Matrix was, in fact, terribly boring. One of the benefits of experience, I guess. I can see that oncoming truck miles before it actually hits me. But at the risk of becoming somewhat tedious myself, I'll repeat what I said about Rigger 2, Shadowrun Companion, Magic in the Shadows, Man and Machine: Cyberware, and Canon Companion (and give you guys a little sneak preview of my Rigger 3 post into the bargain) - It's the very particular type of boring that is Shadowrun's intended mode of play. You are going to have a lot of things to fiddle with, a lot of extremely important rolls to make, and it is this process of making decisions, weighing tradeoffs, and going through an exhaustive step-by-step process that makes the world feel real.

(Possibly real quote from me, "ahh! you modify the difficulty of evading Trace IC by the ratio of your Persona file size to your jackpoint's available bandwidth - I have achieved enlightenment [derogatory]") 

But seriously, it is far too late for have a problem with it now. So I'll conclude how I always conclude - I don't have the guts to run Shadowrun the way it's meant to be run, and maybe that makes me a little wistful, but I've largely made peace with it. 

But while my knee-jerk reaction was "oh, wow, thanks, but maybe that's just a little too much fantasy internet for me," that doesn't mean I found Matrix to be completely useless. There were some tantalizing canon mysteries - powerful AIs with their own inhuman agendas, the so-called "children of the matrix" aka "otaku" who can run sophisticated computer programs in their brains (for purposes of hacking, mostly). They got an unfortunately small portion of the book's overall page-count, but I liked that they were there. It helps me get a sense of what's possible in this science-fiction/fantasy universe.

The stuff near the beginning, about the Matrix's effect on society, was similarly welcome, even if it couldn't help feeling like a discarded retro-future. Like, the Matrix has thousands of channels and you would not believe how advanced their pager technology is. It's funny. I lived through this time. I was eighteen years old when this book first came out and first read it when it was relatively new. I know there was a time when it felt impossibly futuristic. I experienced it. But it all feels like a million years ago. Here in the far-off year of 2024, I'm like, "sorry, Shadowrun, but unlike your fictional megacorporations, real capitalists will reject work from home for . . . real estate reasons?"

It's easy to get annoyingly smug about this, as if I'd somehow earned this wisdom, instead of having it foisted upon me by the inevitable and universal passage of time, but I'll try to avoid giving in entirely to my worst impulses. Just one more quick observation, though - there's something quaint and cozy about revisiting old sci-fi. Nowadays, we have a name for this aesthetic - cassette futurism - but back then it was just general cyberpunk and it's humbling to know that I could not recapture it if I tried. 

What's most interesting about Matrix as a gaming supplement is that it's not quite retroactively cassette futurist. It's right on the cusp. Some aspects of its future seem like a modern future - there's online shopping, internet socializing (even if it's in the form of message boards, which could still make a comeback, you know) and it's experienced enough to know that everyone is going to hate video phones (corporate executives frequently use AR filters for their conference calls, and though nothing in the text suggested it, I couldn't help imagining a boardroom full of vtubers).

And yet there's still no satisfying explanation for the ubiquitous VR. You log onto a sculpted server and "menus appear as scrolls written in Latin" and . . . what is the appeal of that? I mean, tech companies releasing products that nobody wants, what could be more modern than that, right, but . . . An engineer had to make that. Some senior developer called up an underpaid coder and through their anime avatar said, "hey, I really need you to put in some crunch time getting those menus translated into Latin and put on a scroll, if we don't ship by Q-4 the C-suite is going to be on my ass."  And then, I guess, armed criminals break in and steal the source code to sell it to their competitors.

Although, now that I put in these terms, maybe there's something there. Shadowrunning as an unprofitable form of late-capitalist excess. Megacorporations constantly stealing each other's "top secret research" but 90 percent of the time it's just a buzzword-driven boondoggle that was never going to work. And somehow, they never learn. They never connect the dots between the useless crap they get from their shadowrunners and the "bleeding edge tech" stolen by rival shadowrunners. So the constant low-level warfare continues, becoming an end in itself, a way for the execs to flex the power their wealth gives them over the physical world. It's something you can snidely allude to in inter-corporate negotiations, just to make the other guy squirm and then go red in the face when they turn it back on you.

Except it's all happening online and so it's one vtuber avatar saying it to another. ::anime giggle:: "I heard your Renton facility had a break in last night, tee hee!"

But is the world ready for a really goofy and mean-spirited form of cyberpunk? It wasn't in the year 2000, which is probably why Matrix is mostly pretty dry.

Ukss Contribution: There's probably no way to translate the concept of vtubing to the early-20th century meets fantasy milieu of Ukss, even with the Astral Web taking the place of the internet. So I'll go with the overall vibe surrounding the AI, Mirage. He started out as a hardcore military program, designed to combat an adaptive computer virus, but once the virus was defeated he was put on an isolated server in some Fuchi basement and forgotten about for decades. Then some hacker kids broke in, found the cool tech and they mutually adopted each other. Now, he's learning the value of human life and the meaning of love as he mentors a bunch of scrappy orphans, while still being highly military and ruthlessly sending his child soldiers/found family out on dangerous missions for the good of the world (as his alien computer mind understands it).

I could probably find a way to translate that to fantasy.