Cairn

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

So what did I get out of that hour?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthropomorphize
Bait Flower

Cone of Foam

Marble Craze
Objectify
Summon Cube

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

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

Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And may God have mercy on your souls.

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

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

(Exalted 3e) Exigents: Out of the Ashes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Shadowrun 3e) System Failure

SPOILER WARNING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, so a few other odds and ends.

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

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

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

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

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

I think it may be a lot.

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

Too soon? Yeah, too soon.

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

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

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

The End

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual violence and misogyny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Shadowrun 3e) State of the Art: 2064

These "State of the Art" books really do task me. I love the premise, love the format, and even love the books as a whole. But I do not love getting lied to by blurbs. They absolutely do not "examine the latest groundbreaking developments in five aspects of the Shadowrun world." They are, in fact, anthologies of mini-supplements, and usually, four of these are about topics of general interest that belong to no particular place or time. State of the Art: 2063 was very upfront about updating out-of-print material for 3rd edition, and there's slightly less of that in State of the Art: 2064 (only the "Behind the Badge" chapter this time, though "The Path of the Adept" may also benefit from the context provided by a 2e book). But both books very much felt like they could easily have "State of the Art: 2050." After reading this book, I don't believe for a second that there have been significant advancements in espionage, police procedure, or European occultism, and only slightly believe that people have been making new discoveries about adept magic.

On the other hand, nearly everything in this book will help me run better, more complete games of Shadowrun, so what am I complaining about, exactly?

 

Branding. I guess. Is that anything? Reading a cyberpunk rpg and coming away with a vague distaste for the necessity of branding in a capitalist economy? Maybe. But it's a petty annoyance at most. Not worth a blog post (or even the time I've spent on it thus far, mwah! ha! ha!)

So let's treat this book as five separate mini-supplements. 

"Games of State" (John Szeto) is an extremely workable alternate campaign model, but spy stories run into a single fundamental issue that the book itself was kind enough to express with perfect eloquence: "If you really think about it, espionage is a broad term that describes just about everything that ever takes place in the shadows."

The chapter asks, "what if Mr Johnson worked for the CIA?" And the answer was, "very little would actually change." Love it. No notes. Even though it was the exact opposite of groundbreaking, it helped to get a little nudge to think about a whole new set of potential employers and their unique motivations for hiring mercenary criminals. It adds a bit of variety to the party's legwork checks.

And don't let my dismissive tone fool you. I really liked this chapter. Beyond being moderately helpful to me as GM, it also did more than any chapter except the last to flesh out the Shadowrun setting. Did you know all of the Big Ten megacorps possess nuclear weapons? That certainly puts a new angle on extraterritoriality and the Business Recognition Accords (which I always thought was kind of a goofy idea for an international treaty regime, but it looks like I didn't have all the information - oops.)

"The Path of the Adept" (Joshua Howell, James Nugent, and Peter Taylor) might be my favorite of the first four chapters, largely because Adepts are my favorite Shadowrun character type, but also a little because I want to believe it's at least somewhat "state of the art."

Have they just printed more Adept powers, or are people in the setting discovering new Adept powers? The book works just as well with either assumption, but I don't know, maybe it's silly of me to be on the lookout for signs of the progression of the mana cycle. The timeframe of the game is far too short for any significant changes to take place. But when this chapter started talking about "The Way of the Artist" or "The Way of the Speaker" as if they were new things people were just now learning about, there's a part of me got excited at the thought that Sixth World might be rediscovering some form of Earthdawn's Disciplines. Obviously, that's more of a multi-century project (though when a commentor says the Danaan families' elite knightly orders are "not yer average adepts" that's exactly the sort of cruel backstory tease that always gets me riled up).

From a mechanics perspective, the chapter merely exacerbates the biggest problem with the Adept archetype - the resource you use to grow "vertically" is the same as the one you use to grow "horizontally" and you have a very strict budget. It might be tempting to buy six points worth of separate powers, and this book offers some great new options like Gliding, Facial Sculpt, and Commanding Voice, but a more optimal choice would be to buy one point of powers six times.

Honestly, Adpets just need a better set of rules. Maybe your Initiation level could unlock new Power choices and you could spend karma points to improve these powers individually, up to a cap determined by your Initiation . . .

(I'm a regular scamp, I am.)

"Behind the Badge" (Robyn King-Nitschke and Malik Toms) is absolutely essential material that should have been in the core book (or, at least, in the Shadowrun Companion). Player characters are criminals, and this chapter explains how law enforcement works. I don't think I need to draw a diagram here.

Like many fictional depictions of the police, it runs the risk of becoming Copaganda. . . and honestly, it's a bit surreal to watch this dance, with the hindsight provided by the BLM movement. Because the text will absolutely shoot off some uncompromising critiques of the police . . . by putting them in the mouths of the Shadowland commentors, who are notoriously unreliable narrators. Now, the main text that the "comments" are riffing off isn't exactly pro-police, at least not with the level of enthusiasm that conservatives demand, but it will say things like, "breaking the rules in some ways can lead to mass outcries and riots or worse - investigation and punishment from higher authorities. . ."

And, like, it's cynical. You're a sheltered white kid in 2005 and you're reading this, you're going to think "whoa, this chapter was written by criminals for criminals, bias much?" It's saying that some police officers plant evidence, escalate conflicts with minorities to justify lethal racist violence (though the minorities in question are trolls and orks, natch), and even use torture to coerce confessions. But then it also says these practices are kept in check by fear of public accountability. Why, if there were inconvenient video of the police using unnecessary force on a subject, violating their fifth amendment rights in process, those police could get fired, and maybe even wind up in jail themselves. 

I hate to be the doomer guy, but that's not quite cynical enough for real life. It's definitely not cynical enough for cyberpunk's dystopian satire of capitalist excess. It is highly unlikely that the legal phantom zone created by extraterritorial corporations contracting municipal policing services to toothless civil governments will lead to greater respect for proper police procedure. I'm pretty sure the Business Recognition Accords are like Qualified Immunity on steroids. 

If you make the necessary allowances, however, it's a very useful chapter.

"Old World Magic" (Audun Bergwitz and Peter Taylor) is almost pure setting material about European occultism and I have basically nothing to say about it. It's good stuff, but you're not likely to use most of it. Maybe as NPC texture? You could create about a dozen distinct character backgrounds, which is great if you're going to play a dozen different characters and you want them all to be European spellcasters. 

I guess the Aesir aren't anti-nazi enough for my tastes (in the Shadowrun universe, the magical Norse pagan revival has its roots in the neo-nazi movement). I also became a little uncomfortable when they contrasted European shamanism with Native American and African analogues (one is a "complex philosophical patchwork" and the others are "more primal.") But aside from those two things, it was just a bunch of extra worldbuilding, presumably done entirely for its own sake (and possibly to satisfy the appetite of the European Shadowrun fandom for more locally relevant material).

The last chapter, "Culture Shock" is pretty much the only one that lives up to the book's title. This version catered a bit more to shadowrunners than the last one, talking about unsolved crimes, the ten most wanted criminals, and paranormal mysteries in lieu of more mainstream stuff like movies and television. I am on the record as wanting more pop-culture fluff in my sci-fi games, so it feels like a step backwards to me, but I'll admit, it's probably more useful for games.

I am also on the record making a joke about how the frequent too-on-the-nose comparisons between orks and Black people would inevitably lead to a discussion of orkish rap music, and it's clear in retrospect that I was not being prescient but actually remembering this book. There's no direct evidence that orxploitation music sounds all that much like late-90s hip hop, but the biggest star of the recent trend was an ork with attitude who goes by the pen name "CrimeTime." Also, many of these artists have connections with street gangs and will blur the lines around their personas as performers by assassinating rival musicians over petty feuds. 

Great material for a crime drama, of course, but damn.

Overall, bait-and-switch title notwithstanding, this was a great book. Just a bunch of interesting stuff, given enough space to show why it's interesting without wearing out its welcome. Now, "State of the Art: 2065" that's when they're finally going to start talking about the state of the art, right?

Ukss Contribution: Link clubs. There's this global franchise of trendy nightclubs, with locations in some of the world's hottest party towns, and they use augmented reality so that the crowds of all their locations blend into one giant mega-party. It's kind of a nifty idea, even if it might prove challenging to adapt to fantasy.

Testament: Roleplaying in the Biblical Era

 Oh, no, I've finally done it. I've read the book that's going to get me canceled once and for all. Testament (Scott Bennie) is a book devoted to roleplaying in the mythic history of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Levant c. 2000 BCE - 135 BCE and my feelings about the source material are . . . complicated.

Maybe I'd get into less trouble if my feelings were predictably negative. Grr. Me atheist! Me no like bad book! Me feel scared at reminder that majority believe it real! And then you'd all nod your heads knowingly and say, "Atheists are notoriously bad at religious nuance. Let's just let him tucker himself out and put a new monster manual on his pillow for when he wakes up."

Sadly, I am capable of at least a little bit of religious nuance, but only at that awkward level where I know just enough that I cannot easily be forgiven for screwing it up.

Nuance #1 - this book is about Judaism, not Christianity. I'm not going to claim to have picked up on this on my own, because the text outright says as much, particularly when it is counseling us not to use anachronistic Christian elements. Which leads inevitably into potential screw-up #1 - a lot of the stories in this book, I experienced first-hand as "Christian" stories. And I don't know how contemporary Jews teach their children about the book of Joshua, but I can say that early 90s Mormon Sunday school pedagogy on this particular subject was fucking traumatic.

And so, I actually really enjoyed this book, in general - its technology level, its stakes, its anthropological complexity, the general mythological vibe of its spells, classes, and monsters. But I absolutely do not want to create a PC who will lay siege to Jericho, conquer the Canaanites, and chop down Asherah poles. In fact, I'm kind of tearing up just thinking about it.

Which brings us to Religious Nuance #2 - D&D's notorious alignment system being deployed with a soul-destroying recklessness I've never before encountered (and hope never to see again). It could quite justifiably be argued that it would be antisemitic of me to express skepticism that Joshua, Samuel, and David are LG, CG, and LG respectively, but in my experience, every Christian who's ever told me how great these guys were has been intellectually and morally bankrupt like you wouldn't believe.

The best way to resolve this cultural contradiction? Don't think about it. That's right, I am literally advocating that you spend precisely zero mental effort trying to figure what alignment prominent Biblical figures would be. There is no payoff. It won't make running a Testament campaign any easier. Best case scenario, it's only a hate crime against cultures that have been extinct for a thousand years.

That's not a flaw that's unique to this book. Alignment has always done this - allowed a simplistic editorial tag to elide the complexity of human behavior. It has always been best practice, even in a setting like Forgotten Realms to just lay out a character's past actions and current motivations and use those as a guide to future roleplaying, leaving any moral judgements for the audience to make for themselves. Testament merely serves as the ultimate example of what can go wrong if you don't. Saul was cursed by God to lose his kingdom and have his family fall into ruin because he took one prisoner and did not kill one-hundred percent of the farm animals in a town he was ordered to utterly destroy, and Samuel was the one to deliver the Lord's rebuke that absolute obedience trumps every other moral, political, and practical concern. Now, try to put that on your little 3x3 meme grid.

So yeah, there may be some unresolved religious trauma there. On the other hand, easily-missed meta-narrative-tag inside a dense 3.0 statblock aside, Testament actually does a pretty good job of being even-handed and secular. It divides its history sections between the four major nationalities (Israelite, Canaanite, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian) and each section sort of advocates for its subject's point of view (though none would actually rise in my mind to the level of "anti-Israel," even when you might expect the Canaanites to raise an objection or two). Ramses II also gets to be Lawful Good. Which does make the sidebar where the book discusses the historicity of Exodus and names him as a leading candidate for the Bible's Pharoah a little awkward.

Alignment. Not even once.

I think the book's big problem is the same one that plagues many historical games set in less contentious time periods - there's only so much you can change canon events and still have it be a historical game. You're not going to have a game where Benedict Arnold successfully invades Canada, leading to America becoming an imperial dynasty instead of a republic, and you're not going to have a game where Moses dies during the Exodus, leading to . . . whatever the fuck that leads to (I didn't have a good idea for this second one because it wasn't my example, it was the book's). This weakness is especially apparent in the chapter about Israel's history. It's mostly a recap of various Bible stories, giving us information on the exact stories in each time period that we're not going to be able to tell.

So, putting aside any thoughts of using Moses' character stats (yeah, he's a multiclass Paladin/Levite Priest/Prophet of the Lord) to run him as an end-boss for a Midianite campaign, what use is left for this book if lurking around the edges of major events is unsatisfying and alternate histories are potentially problematic?

I think it would probably be really good for creating pre-classical Southeast Asian and North African-style cultures in a secondary world. It goes into some pretty good detail about clothes and food and architecture, and the way religion dovetails with a society's cultural expression and shared morality. It gives you a real sense of the importance of calendars and what textured religious or imperial conflicts might look like. The magic classes are interesting and flavorful in a way that you wouldn't normally account for in a general-audience rpg. The Levite Priest class gets the ability to talk to serpents . . . and some special anti-serpent class features. This amused me greatly. ("I only learned your language so I could tell you how much I hate you.") But more than that, it's not the sort of connection you'd make when building a cleric for a made-up god. And the spells themselves are similarly connected to a different set of priorities and values than corebook D&D. You probably shouldn't go so far as to make not-Israelites, not-Canaanites, etc but it definitely got me thinking about different ways people could be.

Getting back to the subject of nuance, I'm not sure I can untangle the three major strains of Big Feelings that Testament inspires. On the one hand, it's a well-executed implementation of some fascinating folkloric concepts from some of history's most influential cultures. And the part of me that appreciates religion as a cultural practice and narrative tradition really appreciates it. No other book on my shelf does fantasy quite like this and as a purely secular form of entertainment (as per the blurb on the back cover "You've read the book, now play the game") it looks like a lot of fun.

On the other hand, this is a very deliberate bit of representation for a marginalized minority religion. As even-handed as it could be with Israel's historical rivals, this is very much a game about Jewish history and religion. And I think it's good that something like this exists, but I have no idea whether Testament is an appropriate and respectful example of "something like this." I just have no context. It seems okay, but then I think about recent discussions in D&D circles about the offensive appropriation involved in Liches' phylacteries and here we have a game where you can play characters who have phylacteries in the original sense of the word . . . Obviously, these two things aren't the same. They're likely not even comparable. But is the second one okay? It seems like it should be, but I've had similar intuitions be disastrously wrong in the past.

Finally, on no hand, because it's kind of an asinine way to feel (on multiple occasions, the book itself enjoins me to not do this), we have a book about some very specific stories that certain hegemonic religious nationalists both in the contemporary United States and various other places historically have frequently used in some odious ways (to pick a mild example - forcing classrooms to post the Ten Commandments). And aside from suggesting that the Canaanites were regular people instead of total monsters, there's very little in this book that would challenge those people. The thing that would upset them most is probably just the use of "BCE" for dates.  It's probably too much responsibility to put on a silly rpg book, of course, but that just means it's definitely too much responsibility to put on me as a GM.

So what's my final verdict? 

Um . . . 

I like reading fascinating things for the blog, and on that account Testament did not disappoint.

Ukss Contribution: The best part of this book was the spells chapter. It was just banger after banger, from mundane utility like Create Bricks to the slightly silly but undeniable useful like Dance of Nakedness (it doesn't make someone actually naked, it just negates their armor and equipment bonuses as if they were naked).

And the best part of the spells chapter was the alternate uses for the Bestow Curse spells. Highlights include:

• Enemy of Pack Animals (your donkey, horse, or camel will definitely attack you if you let your guard down and if they don't they'll just run away)
• Hated by Children (random kids will spit on you, curse at you, etc)
• Scorpion Attraction (yep, all the damned time)
• Flame Prone (get too close to any open flame and make a reflex save to avoid catching fire)
• Nameless (people forget your name . .  .unless it's to associate you with wicked deeds and scandal)

However, none of these things really feel like a setting element to me. So I'm going to go a little farther forward to the nearly as delightful magic items chapter and pick the Ziz egg. A Ziz is a magical crane with the curious ability to wade in water of any depth (its monster description says "even if it is standing over the deepest ocean, the ziz's legs extend to the sea floor") and if you get your hands on one of its eggs, you can use it as a "natural magic item" to cast powerful control water spells. Just be careful, because if the egg breaks prematurely, it will create a massive flood.

I'll probably also toss in the Phoenix as a freebie (it's mentioned that the Ziz is the only bird that doesn't "pay homage" to the Phoenix) because I've got this vague idea about a set of giant, element-themed mystical birds.