(Shadowrun 3e) Target: Awakened Lands

I find myself faced with a test of my basic pettiness. Should I judge Target: Awakened Lands on what it is or do I judge it on what it could have been, if it had followed the hypothetical path teased in the introduction? Because what it is is a guide to the Sixth World's version of Australia, with a few tidbits of extra information thrown into a brief second chapter. But what it could have been is a sourcebook about "the places in the world of Shadowrun that are deeply affected by magic. . . Australia . . . Amazonia, Cambodia and possibly even a few places like Tibet."

I must confess a bit of disappointment. That other book sounds really interesting. What I can't figure out is why you'd even bring it up. The only thing I can think of is that the books' titles and synopses were announced to the community before the books were actually written. Then, you get a 64-page chapter for Austalia and it's just as Captain Chaos says: "I quickly realized that I needed to allocate more storage space to the Land Down Under than I expected." Oops. 

Though I'm a bit curious about what sort of file format Shadowland is using. I have to assume that the information that appears to us as plain text and still images is actually, in setting, a fully immersive VR experience. 

In any event, I guess I should focus on the book that actually exists - Shadowrun's Australia supplement. And by that standard, it's fine. One of the effects of an increasingly globalized economic system is that everywhere starts to feel a bit like everywhere else and that's something that's reflected in the text. You've got powerful megacorporations, urban sprawl, organized crime, and essential public services decayed through privatization. It's all very comfortable if you're coming in from a Seattle-based game.

The main difference, the thing that makes Australia an "awakened land," is the Outback, its accompanying folklore, and the fantasy nonsense that was invented to flesh it out. Of these, the best part is the folklore but that has the unfortunate side effect of requiring naked cultural appropriation to use effectively. It's actually kind of funny. When discussing Aboriginal magic, the text-within-the-text says, "we don't have any Shadowland users with inside knowledge of Australian magic and a willingness to share that knowledge with us. So I've gone to a secondary source - a text put out by Pentacle Press called Into the Dreamtime by Dr. Richard Cowan."

Once more, Captain Chaos, in his role as moderator of a fictional message board, articulates something that rings very true to the process of developing an rpg. Doing research for a game about Australia, you seek to create fantasy elements based on native Australian religion and traditional stories, but because of the deadly legacy of colonialism, the natives don't actually trust you with that information (and probably wouldn't approve of you making a game about it), so all your knowledge must be mediated by foreign scholars.

From a design perspective, there's one thing this book needs to be (assuming it couldn't go back to being the book's original pitch). It needs to be a new fantasy setting, nested in the overall Shadowrun setting. You're going out into the Outback and having magical adventures, with challenges and stakes that reflect a distinctly Australian conception of magic, separate from the corporations-and-rules-based-magic of the broader Shadowrun world. That's what makes it worthy of being released under a specialized title - "Target: Awakened Lands" instead of "Shadows of Australia."

However, from a moral and political perspective, it was probably always irresponsible for the book to try and be that. It therefor makes the reasonable compromise of paying lip-service to Aboriginal beliefs but being so vague about them that it seems extremely unlikely that you'd accidentally debase something sacred. I couldn't say for sure, because this is not a subject I know a ton about, but I think the worst thing you can say about this book's presentation of Indigenous Australians is that it's completely consistent with its presentation of Indigenous peoples of other continents. There are a couple new metamagic techniques, but nothing requiring new rules for the game.

Which just leaves the invented fantasy nonsense. Australia is known for its dangerous mana storms - Fortean weather phenomena that can cast spells on those caught within. It can rain frogs or make a rain that turns you into a frog (or, I suppose, rain frogs that turn people into frogs). It can be a fog that intoxicates anyone caught within. As far as rpg random charts go, it's a pretty good one, but it never answers the question "why Australia?" Near as I can tell, it's because Australia has a lot of room for these storms to happen in. Likewise with the other new astral phenomena - astral shallows, where even mundanes can see into the astral plane; alchera, which are physical spaces that phase in and out of existence, and which usually have some spiritual mystery at the heart of them; mana ebbs and flares, which change the force of a caster's spells.

All of those things are very useful new tool's in the GM's box, but they don't really build on a theme. "Go into the Outback and weird shit will happen." Okay, fair enough. The locations and characters in Australia's overview are compelling enough to want to use them, but at the end of the day, you're still playing Shadowrun.

The next chapter, "Awakened Sites" is interesting enough, but it rushes through things that would really have benefitted from more time to cook. We learn a little bit of what we might have seen in a Cambodian supplement - nagas, merrow, and other sentient awakened creatures have moved into the ruins of Angkor and are rebelling against the human government - but this plot mostly has the effect of making me resent the fact that this book didn't get a whole Cambodia chapter.

Overall, this book was fine. It's very comfortably in the middle of the curve for Shadowrun setting content. I was hoping for something a bit weirder, which challenged the main game's genre, but I suppose I had no real reason for expecting that. So, yeah, I could see myself running a game set in Australia, but I probably won't.

Ukss Contribution: One of the example mana storms turned half a village's population into rabbits and the other half into dingoes. Then, when it passed, it changed the survivors back. That's an impressive level of horror and an even more impressive level of social awkwardness.

(d20 Modern) d20 Past

 Well, now, what have we here? We started with d20 Modern, we proceeded to d20 Future, and now we're going to finish up with d20 Past (James Wyatt and Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel). We now have d20 rules for every conceivable point in time.

Although, playing in the past seems to mostly involve not using some subset of the modern rules. Set a game before cars, don't use the driving rules. Set it before modern medicine, lose access to the Surgery feat. Maybe just ban the techie class for any game set before the 1990s.

d20 Past only covers that part of the past that is technically part of the modern period (1500-1945) and suggests that if you want to play a medieval (or earlier) game you should just use D&D, but there really doesn't seem to be any reason you couldn't use an even smaller subset of the d20 Modern rules. . . assuming you actually need to. Most of the core book's ranged attack feats are compatible with bows and crossbows, and there's plenty of nuance to melee combat. The main thing that's missing is feats, talents, and class features that focus on riding animals. Unfortunately, d20 Past fails to correct that. You can play a cowboy or dragoon, but you can't actually do any fancy riding tricks. A bit of an oversight, to be sure, but at least there are naval combat rules suitable for any period from the classical to the contemporary.

I am, however, being a bit misleading by suggesting that d20 Past is making a serious effort at extending the game to the entirety of the past. It's only 96 pages long and while that's arguably enough for a serious rules-focused supplement, this particular book instead continues the d20 Modern tradition of including multiple alternate settings.

So far, the alternate settings have been one of the best part of this series. Not necessarily because any of them are particularly ground-breaking, but because of the way they encourage you to look at the game's rules - this is a system that's meant for rules-hacking and worldbuilding. There's something special about that. It's how I always used D&D, but it's nice to know the authors are explicitly cheering me on.

The best way to look at d20 Past's three sample settings is as the gaming equivalent of soup stock. By themselves they make for a pretty unsatisfying meal, but they serve as a base to which you can add other ingredients and whatever you wind up making is going to owe a lot to that original flavor.

The three settings are "Age of Adventure" (17th century, inspired by Dumas and pirate fiction), "Shadow Stalkers" (late 19th century, and inelegantly split between Victorian horror/mystery and the American West), and "Pulp Heroes" (1920s-1930s, and really, it bit off more than it could chew re: genre). Their chapters are almost identical in length and they're all structured roughly the same way - campaign overview (including a brief discussion of which d20 Modern rules you shouldn't use), antagonists/monsters, exactly three new classes, and wrap up with 2-3 short adventures. Taken as a whole, they are all pretty mid, but each one has a few highlights that would tempt me to come back and use this book as a reference.

"Age of Adventure" had the book's best adventure - a bit of courtly intrigue based on an actual historical incident, The Affair of the Diamond Necklace. and it probably could have supported an entire 96-page rpg supplement all on its own. It is perhaps unfair to compare the wholly fabricated stories in the rest of the book to the complexity of reality, but it was the only adventure in the book to feature a fleshed-out antagonist and compelling supporting characters. Next to it, all the others seemed a bit perfunctory.

The "Age of Adventure" also probably had the most essential collection of classes - Musketeer, Shaman, and Sorcerer. None of them especially stood out to me as being notably great, but as a set they expand the possibilities of the d20 Modern core more than their counterparts in either of the other chapters. Which makes sense, really. As the earliest of the historical settings, it's the farthest away from the core's assumptions.

"Shadow Stalkers" has the advantage of being a direct prequel to the core book's "Shadow Chasers" setting (somehow, in the intervening 120 years, they graduated from stalking to chasing), and it was moderately thrilling seeing the origins of the Fellowship (think - store brand version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Watchers Council). The Mesmerist has the best flavor of any of the book's extra classes, losing points only for having its first level be the weakest level-up option since the Commoner Class in the DMG. Also, while it wasn't as strong as the diamond necklace adventure, "Dead Men's Hands" is about a vampire who comes to an old west mining town and starts picking off the gunslingers and card sharks one-by-one, and that's a pretty great setup.

Finally, "Pulp Heroes" is hurt a bit by having the broadest genre of the three settings, but racing a Nazi expedition to the Fountain of Youth is more or less the Platonic pulp rpg adventure.

Politically, d20 Past does okay for its age. It explicitly calls Manifest Destiny a "racist view." It makes more of an issue about female characters than would be considered best practice these days, but its conclusion is "They should be able to choose whatever occupation, class, or advanced class they please, although their choice may put them outside the norms of society." I'm ambivalent about the suggestion that you remove the penalty to Disguise for women posing as men, mostly because I suspect "disguising yourself as another gender" is a game mechanic that should be consigned to the dustbin of history, but I can't deny that a woman disguising herself as a man in order to access male opportunities is a classic genre trope and I wouldn't want to deny players the chance to play out that fantasy.

(And I am absolutely not going to touch "Slave" as a background occupation. I am entirely too white for that discourse).

Overall, I really liked d20 Past. It's the least generous and least essential d20 Modern book I've read so far, but it delivers value from its very existence. The cover alone screams, "hey, dingus, you can use our rules to play Victorian occult detectives, WW2 drama, or fantasy pirates." And that reminder alone is worth the price of admission. Everything else is just bonus.

Ukss Contribution: It's funny. This book is probably the closest any book has come to my tehcnological and cultural assumptions about the world of Ukss, but that mostly means that all the best stuff is already there in the setting's background. So I'll choose the thing that diverges most from the vanilla fantasy canon - in the Age of Adventure setting, ghouls can transform into hyenas. It's fitting - carrion-eating undead becoming carrion-eating animals - and it's an unusual fantasy image. I'm not sure if Ukss' hyena-shifters will be undead, but they will definitely be anthropophages. 

(Shadowrun 3e) Threats 2

Say what you will about FASA's fiction-heavy approach to rpg supplements, but sometimes it gets you a book like Threats 2 - a short, but densely-packed collection of campaign ideas that was incredibly easy to read because it was essentially an anthology of twelve short stories, each one about something interesting going on in the Shadowrun universe. I absolutely blazed through this thing, and it's entirely possible that it will take me longer to write the post than it did to read the book.

The main thing I appreciate about Threats 2 is its unashamedly brute force approach to the "well yes, but what do we do in the setting" question. It's just a whole bunch of things to do, presented without further context or explanation. Eclipse Phase never released a "big book of things to do," neither did Exalted or Dark Sun or Reign. Sure, those games all had extensive and inspiring setting material you could mine for "things to do," but they never drew a big arrow pointing at a condensed list of suggestions. And look, I'm not saying Shadowrun's way was better, but it was nice to get just a little bit of meathead-level support.

The biggest challenge this book poses to me as a reviewer is that its 12 chapters have 12 different authors (though it doesn't neatly break down to one author per chapter - some chapters have multiple authors and some writers worked on multiple chapters) and each one is standalone 8-10 page mini supplement. So if I try to approach Threats 2 holistically, and comment about the book as a single work, all I can really say is that it has a lot of stuff in it. 

I actually went back and looked at my post about the original Threats to see how I handled it the first time and I guess my approach was to focus on a single nagging issue that appeared in multiple chapters and just make the post about that. Unfortunately, it's not something I can pull off twice, because Threats 2 is more diverse in its titular threats - on the metaplot front we have follow-ups to Year of the Comet, Brainscan, and Bug City, as well as some Earthdawn easter eggs, a couple of things you could probably just infer from the basic setting material (but which were nice to have spelled out) and one chapter that is arguably a crime against humanity. So what am I supposed to do? Just rapidly go through each chapter one-by-one and post my most salient observation in the hopes of covering the whole book without writing a 5000-word post?

Oh, yeah, okay, I suppose I could do that.

#1: "General Saito" - In Year of the Comet, Japan's new child Emperor decides to scale back on the overseas imperialism, but in San Francisco a rogue officer chose to defy orders and declare himself dictator over northern California. In this follow-up, we learn a bit more detail about the man and his rule and he's a compelling enough villain (he employs an image consultant) but Shadowrun's decision to single out the Japanese for being especially racist against metahumans has never sat entirely well with me and we get a bit more of that here.

#2: "Dissonant Voices" - More Otaku lore. A new group of dark Otaku has popped up on the scene, claiming to be empowered by the Deep Resonance's edgy counterpart - the Dissonance. I don't hate it, but if you want me to like it, you're going to have to be a bit more explicit about what these things actually are. I crave the sort of nitty-gritty Hard Magic worldbuilding that will drive the normie player base running for the hills. (Note: I am aware that this is not a reasonable thing to want).

#3: "Imps" - A found-footage-horror-style diary of an academic researcher whose life is destroyed when he finds a magic item that's haunted by a malicious spirit. It's all in service of introducing a twist on cursed item mechanics. As a piece of fiction, I enjoyed it. Ehran the Scribe makes a cameo appearance and he definitely knows more than he's letting on. As a form of gameplay, I have my doubts. The GM is supposed to give a PC a trap item that gradually drains their karma (xp)? Who is this enjoyable for? It could potentially work if the spirit is on the more "playfully mischievous" end of the spectrum and it was clear that the GM was using the haunting to give the players a more powerful than usual item, but overall, it seems like a risk.

#4: "The Aleph Society" - a cult that claims it can reverse magical burnout through philosophical enlightenment, but really does it by making a pact with a mysterious spirit from the Fourth Age? It's sort of in an awkward place where they're theoretically a cure to Shadowrun's worst mechanic, but you don't want to get involved with them because they're tricking mundanes with false promises to get them to make regular blood sacrifices, but then maybe you don't really care that they're doing that because the sacrifices are non-fatal and the cult's overall agenda is just "keep on being this weird, seedy cult."

#5: "Can You See the Real Me" - a mystery/horror tale whose only purpose is to introduce a new type of creature - the advanced Sheddim, who possess recently-dead bodies, but, unlike regular Sheddim, have the ability to heal those bodies well enough to return them to a convincing semblance of life, thus allowing them to infiltrate metahuman society and work their wicked schemes without alerting the monster hunters to their presence. Yeah, okay, that's a pretty good pitch for a monster.

#6: "One Nation Under God" - a revanchist conspiracy that works to restore the old United States of America by sponsoring terrorist violence and political turmoil in the UCAS, the CSA, and the NAN. It wasn't quite bold enough to make explicit the law-enforcement-to-right-wing-extremist pipeline, but the theme was there, if you wanted to look for it. Using them as a campaign antagonist would probably make for a pretty unusual Shadowrun game, but I think it might be worth it.

#7: "Betrayal" - OMG! Ares Macrotechnology is secretly experimenting on the insect spirits it was tasked with eliminating, attempting to monetize and weaponize a deadly threat to the entire human species?! Who could have ever seen this coming? Good, Shadowrun, good.

#8: "Dealing with Dragons" - Drakes are just a weird idea overall. The dragons have magically engineered servants who can switch between humanoid form and the form of a miniature dragon. Why is this appealing to them? It would be like a human having a sheepdog that could transform into a little gnome in their off hours. I can see some niche uses for such a thing, but it's probably not worth the effort. I'd only ever really use drakes in a game if I wanted to characterize dragons as being a bunch of weird little freaks.

#9: "Beneath the False Face" - Per wikipedia: "The Haudenosaunee Grand Council issued a statement online in 1995 about the Haudenosaunee policies regarding masks. These policies prohibit the sale, exhibition or representation in pictures of the masks to the public. They also condemn the general distribution of information regarding the medicine societies, as well as denying non-Indigenous People any right to examine, interpret, or present the beliefs, functions, or duties of these societies." Bad, Shadowrun, bad.

#10: "The Network" - A bit of resolution to the cliffhanger at the end of Brainscan. Turns out my interpretation of the ending was incomplete. Deus did download his code into the brains of his victims, and did psychologically condition them to reassemble that code on the Matrix once the immediate threat had passed, but this was not as clean or as quick a process as I was imagining, and a rival AI's code got mixed in there with his. So the next plot being set up is a semi-conscious Matrix cold war between the Deus fragments and the Megara fragments over control of the network of organic computers that could potentially reconstruct either, both, or a hybrid of the two. And because the organic computers also happen to be people, the network nodes also have a say in the outcome. It's an interesting plot, but it borders on the overly baroque.

#11: "Order of the Temple" - The Knights Templar are back. The plot has the potential to read as anti-Catholic, but it's a staple of the modern occult conspiracy genre. Then again, the modern occult conspiracy genre does have a bit of an anti-Catholicism problem. I think this particular presentation manages to dodge the worst of it, because it incidentally highlights how fucked-up it is that the Shadowrun backstory turned two prominent Catholic countries (Mexico and Ireland) into weird fantasy lands (Aztlan and Tir na Nog). Not sure if that's enough to make me use it in a game, though.

#12: "Those Who Have The Gold" - There's a joke entry in Dunkelzahn's will where he leaves 34 billion dollars to some rando, because the guy's ancestor leant him a gold piece hundreds of years ago (although, with typical draconic parsimoniousness, this figure was calculated with a 1% APR). Apparently, the beneficiary of this largess was a skilled accountant who was laid off from Fuchi, hit rock bottom, became addicted to BTL chips, and then swore revenge when Richard Villiers snubbed him at a high society party, post-inheritance. It works well enough as a plot. But I think something this silly should probably have a funnier presentation.

So, to sum up - Threats 2 is mostly very good. There were some rough patches, but as a whole it added a lot of value to my Shadowrun collection. I'm glad to have read it.

Ukss Contribution: The advanced Sheddim. They're a versatile monster type - murder mystery, social/political threat, physical threat, or even potentially just a misunderstood visitor from another reality (the latter isn't something Shadowrun really does, but I might give it a try).

(d20 Modern) d20 Future

Finally! One of these books is exactly what I remember it to be! d20 Future (Christopher Perkins, Rodney Thompson, JD Wiker) is a broad, but shallow overview of the sci-fi genre for d20 Modern games. It's jam-packed with intriguing new ideas and useful systems. We get rules for genetic engineering, robotics, starships, dimensional travel, mecha, cybernetics, and comics-style mutants. There are nine suggested campaign models, ranging from the mystical sci-fi horror of "From the Dark Heart of Space" to the mil-sf of "Bughunters" to the post-apocalyptic adventure of "The Wasteland." There's also a ton of new character options - new feats, new advanced classes, and rules for playing eight different alien species.

The main drawback is that all of this good stuff ends just as it's getting started. There's a one-and-a-half-page write-up of "Star*Drive" that captures approximately none of the setting's appeal. The brief overview made a complex, ambitious, and distinctive space opera setting sound like a knock-off Star Trek. And look, the nature of d20 Future as a book may have demanded that one of its nine campaign models be a knock-off Star Trek, but as someone who saw Star*Drive in all its glory, I couldn't help but notice the wasted potential.

I'm not mad at d20 Future, though. In order to waste potential, you must first have potential and to an experienced GM, there's something just a little bit magical about a book that gives you plenty of potential to work with. This is a book that practically dares me to do the worldbuilding legwork for any of a dozen different settings . . . and that's a challenge I'm eager to accept, because I love worldbuilding legwork.

On the other hand, I'm not sure there's much of a specific use-case for this particular book. It's kind of a book you read if you don't know what you want to do. It's got that weird D&D-adjacent . . .  aspiration for genericness, much like Alternity, pre-3.0.  Why, we've got a book we can use equally well for every type of sci-fi, but once we narrow in on any one singular type of sci-fi, something specific would work much better. As a thought experiment, I imagine running Eclipse Phase with the d20 Future rules and I think you could almost do it, but you'd run into the problem that a lot of the stuff you earn with your level ups would be classified as morph traits but the structure of the game really needs levels, skills, and feats to be tied to an ego. Likewise, doing Star Wars would require a custom variant of the psionics rules. Star Trek would probably work fine, though even then the rules don't really capture the feel of the setting. 

I think the blame for this "kind of okay at everything, no better than sort of good for anything" vibe can be laid firmly at the feet of the "Progress Level" concept. 

Progress levels are what you'd come up with if you looked at the history of technology with a kind of naive modernism - it started with the Stone Age (PL 0) when people used stone tools because those are the easiest kind of tool to build and no one knew how to make better ones. Then, over time, people learned about metal and how to work it to make better tools, so it became the Bronze/Iron age (PL 1) and so on and so forth, through successive eras that map quite well to the chapters in a European History textbook until PL 5, the Information Age, when human beings finally figured out computers, the past turned into the present, and all subsequent ages (it goes up to 9) are pure sci-fi speculation.

However, this approach has serious problems. For one, it's misleadingly Eurocentric. Sort of. Progress levels don't actually capture the true history of European technological development, but they do reflect the common colonialist technological tropes. Technology is universal. Progress is linear and directional, from the past to the present, and as a result, you can say one group has "more" technology and another has "less." There's no geographical or cultural component to the account, no acknowledgement that a people's tools are shaped by locally available materials and the people's ongoing needs. Like maybe there are methods of stone working that have been perfected over hundreds or thousands of years to be every bit as sophisticated as a complex industrial process. 

Which isn't to say that a science-fiction game needs to devote pagecount to detail maximally-efficient flint-knapping, but it does need to think of its future technology as something more akin to a theme or set of genre trappings, than as a historical narrative of "progress." The purpose of technology, in a (good) sci-fi story is to put some aspect of society or the human condition under the microscope and ask "what if this thing that we all thought was immutable somehow changed?" You introduce mind back-up technology not because it's a logical outgrowth of developments in biotech and cybernetics, but because you want to delve into heady issues - identity, mortality, authenticity, the objectification of the self and what life is like in a society that not only places a price on human life, but sets that price equivalent to a relatively small amount of computational power. 

Likewise, it's not particularly useful information to tell me that time machines are a PL 8-9 invention. Because a story about a society that must cope with the invention of time travel (which is what the assigning of a progress level implies) is very different than the story of a group of adventurers with access to a time machine (which is almost certainly what you're going to want to do in a d20 Modern game). There's a reason most time travel stories have the time machine being built in some weirdo's garage. And I think, if you want to make a generic reference guide for science fiction stories, this is a distinction that you need to make. You can't just count on the readers making it for themselves.

And it's not as if d20 Future is notably bad at this. You're not going to have to fight the book to tell interesting sci-fi stories. It's more that its presentation doesn't synergize with the book's ostensible goals. The equipment lists are organized by Progress Level, but the Progress Levels aren't really considered as whole units. They're more like tags in the equipment stat block, so the whole thing reads like a leveled treasure table. The stuff with the smaller bonuses appears before the stuff with the larger bonuses and instead of feeling like four different equipment lists for use in four separate campaigns, it feels a lot like one big list that a character might work their way through. The setting and mechanical implications of a 1st level character picking up a plasma pistol or cybernetics that give them +8 to skill checks (because such things are completely mundane equipment in their respective progress levels) are never fully explored. We're given no useful advice (or even a courteous warning) that playing in a PL 7-8 game will effectively compress d20 Modern's first 3-5 character levels into one long, highly unpredictable mega-level.

I think, overall, though, you have to give d20 Future credit for taking some risks and trying something new. It fills a niche in d20 gaming that wasn't really being served by other WotC products (maybe Star Wars d20, at a stretch) and there is something undeniably fun about being given a big box of pieces to play with, even if you need to figure out for yourself how those pieces are meant to be assembled.

Ukss Contribution: Abandoned and malfunctioning utility fog (a cloud of general-purpose nanomachines) will sometimes just build pointless roads. It combines three of my favorite things - infrastructure, melancholy at the lingering detritus of a bygone age, and the existential absurdity of a useful thing, deployed without purpose.

(Shadowrun 3e) Rigger 3

 Whew! I made it. Rigger 3 (John Szeto with Rich Tomasso) is the last of my rules-heavy Shadowrun books. It's all lore from here on out!

The biggest challenge facing me right now is just resisting the urge to copy and paste my post about Rigger 2. The books aren't exactly the same. It's been half a decade between the books. Technology has advanced. Rigger 3 has rules for airbags and a strangely detailed procedure for resetting your wi-fi mid-combat. But the gist is essentially the same. This is the book you pick up if you want to be a total nerd about your fictional vehicles.

The most excited I ever got while reading it was in the gear (I refuse to call them "New Toys") chapter. You can outfit your car with an oil slick and a smoke screen and a forged license plate made of smart materials that can morph into any other fake license plate, even changing color if necessary (ejector seats were inexplicably in another chapter, but don't worry, they're here). And to me, that's the essential Rigger fantasy. I want to drive the car from Spy Hunter. For other people, the fantasy is apparently to track your fuel consumption with a spreadsheet and that is what the bulk of the book is geared towards, but in that moment, I felt seen.

So half my notes are some variation of "hey, get a load of this hyper-specific rule, can you believe they expect us to actually use this" and somewhere in the middle of the book, I started to satirize myself about it (real example: "gotta have all the dongles for your cyberware, manage your ports, oh, yikes, I'm still doing the thing"). And given that I even started to find myself tedious for this type of commentary, I think I just have to stop commenting on the book's mechanics entirely. Suffice to say, Rigger 3 is a book for players who want to get into the mindset of their gearhead characters by being gearheads about the game's rules. It has a niche.

The main thing I appreciated about the book was the snippets of setting that would pop-up in the implications of the rules. Naval combat gets its own chapter because commercially available submarines have led to a new age of piracy. A humanoid drone with a high enough pilot rating can act as a butler. Self-driving car technology exists and apparently there's a hierarchy at work here - regular human drivers < state of the art autopilots < riggers who use cyberware to fuse a network of sensors into their organic proprioception. It's a little disappointing to me as a sci-fi aficionado that Shadowrun focuses on criminal subcultures rather than the day-to-day lives of law-abiding citizens, because I think a world where they can replace your skills with software but they can't cheaply build a computer more efficient than your peripheral nervous system is both fascinating and topical.

I guess, on some level, I get that the criminals make for a more exciting game, but I couldn't help but notice that sometimes the technology worked in precisely the way it would have to work to guarantee niche protection for an rpg class. Like, interfering with a rigger's drone network requires entirely separate equipment than the core book's electronic warfare rules and that's handwaved away by saying that, despite being based on radio waves, rigger networks used a different protocol than standard transmissions. 

And the robotics technology has the precise level of utility that you need a rigger character to operate them. You could, theoretically, buy a robot with a high enough pilot rating and enough installed autosofts that you essentially have an extra member of the team, but it's not cost effective. Even a good robot is going to be hyper-focused on its Prime Directive, making a rigger who can directly control the drone chassis immensely valuable.

I can't help feeling like this is a volatile time in Shadowrun's history, though. Maybe the autopilot only needs to get a little bit better. Maybe data-transmission needs to get just a little bit more efficient before you can justify hot-swapping Prime Directive packages. Maybe it's a race to the bottom as human labor needs to be cheap enough to keep the robot butlers from taking the jobs at Stuffer Shack. And what would a rigger be in a society that crossed that line? A neural network, optimized through 500 million years of evolution to run on 20 watts of power, a human being reduced to the reality of meat, a piece of bulk capital to be used and expended by the logic of the balance sheet. 

You have to figure that's something that the corporations would notice in this setting. Criminal riggers are probably only a 1-in-10,000 phenomenon when it comes to people who use the Vehicle Control Rig technology. The other 9,999 are probably controlling drones in a factory or cargo transports on the road, their bodies a mere hardware platform for an economic system whose benefits they will never see. OMG! Grid Guide is made of people!

Or, at least, I have to assume that this is going on in the background. Rigger 3 only briefly talks about it and doesn't really explore the broader implications of the technology. But it does suggest a form of cyberpunk that Shadowrun could probably stand to go to more often. Usually shadowrunners are portrayed as paramilitary professionals using unregistered military equipment, but what if the basic shadowrunning kit was primarily hacked and corrupted civilian technology and your average shadowrunner was actually a piece of rogue industrial equipment that broke free and was trying to live a human life at the fringes of society.

"What's your rigger's backstory?"

"I was strapped into a chair for 16 hours a day while my VCR repeatedly ran a box-stacking algorithm at a fulfilment warehouse. One day, there was a fire and luckily my Reticular Activation System Override failed before the flames reached my pod. I fled to the barrens and was presumed dead. Now I drive getaway for the mafia."

Overall, I'm glad to have Rigger 3 in my library, as a reference book, but reading it once was probably enough for a lifetime. I'm really looking forward to doing story-focused books from here on out.

Ukss Contribution: I think I'm going to go with "the concept of riggers, as a whole," or at least an abstracted fantasy version of the concept - a school of adepts who can merge their mind with a vehicle and control it as if it were their body. I imagine it takes a peculiar sort of person to choose that as their career.

(D20 Modern) Menace Manual

 The Menace Manual (JD Wiker, Eric Cagle, Matthew Sernett) is an antagonist book for d20 Modern that is divided into three distinct chapters. "Chapter One: Creatures" is a fun little romp that asks the traditional modern rpg question, "Which sci-fi movie, long-running paranormal procedural tv series, or urban fantasy novel can we shamelessly rip off to flesh out our bestiary?" "Chapter Two: GM Characters" is a bland but functional series of preconstructed characters that asks, "What real-world profession can we explain in an extremely basic way that presumes our readers are space aliens who have never encountered human culture prior to reading our book?" And "Chapter Three: Factions" is . . . a definite experience, which asks, "What extreme right-wing conspiracy theory can we present in a completely straightforward and uncritical manner that doesn't quite imply that we believe it's true in the real world but does make abundantly clear that someone, somewhere in the pipeline had detailed and extensive experience with the dregs of 90s talk radio."

Oh, man, day one of reading this book was so fun, you guys. You don't even know. I saw the Star Doppleganger entry and I was eager, nay exuberant to tell you about this Great Value the Thing (seriously, the monster entry recaps the movie with precisely minimal plausible deniability). I love monster books. I am on the record as believing they can do no wrong. And the first chapter of the Menace Manual is better than most.

Seriously. Drop Bears! Alien drones that look like "deadly Christmas ornaments!" 13- gallon containers of mysterious evil goo (the entry was very specific about the volume)! Multiple entries that were clearly aimed at getting maximum value out of the development work done on Alternity! It was all enough to make me forgive their use of the cowardly 3rd edition version of the Thought Eater (get that "undead griffon" ass design out of my face - a Thought Eater is a psychic platypus skeleton, it will always be a psychic platypus skeleton, and if you're too ashamed to just own that fact, you should never have included it in the first place).

And the second chapter was . . . fine. Did we really need separate entries for "Lawyer" and "Attourney?" Or for "Security Guard" and "Security Specialist?" Or for "Government Agent," "Government Investigator" and "Government Bureaucrat?" Maybe, maybe not. But I did have fun speculating about what level Clergy the Pope would be. The book is pretty consistent about assuming that high levels correllate to a higher position in various organizational hierarchies, but it tops out at level 10 and that level is reserved for "mature priests, ministers, and rabbis, mothers superior, and so forth."

It's towards the end of the second chapter that the cracks start to show. After it gets done with the generic NPCs, it starts to detail specifc NPCs and they're not bad exactly, but some of them felt to me like yellow flags. Obviously, the college anarchists were always going to be ideologically shallow. And I can't really say with eloquence what's wrong with having a Black hacker named "Skillz" or a short-haired feminist who calls herself "Queen B" and wears a shirt that says, "My Goddess gave birth to your GOD!" But it feels like a caricature, especially when contrasted with the survivalist militia which was presented with a . . . generous neutrality.

Like, you can compare this description of a man radicalized "after witnessing the attack on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas":

"Derek Osterman is 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 200 pounds. He wears his blonde hair in a military buzz, which frames his steely blue eyes. He boasts a scar that extends from his neck to his left cheek - a trophy that he acquired during his career in the military."

With this description of a woman radicalized after she "became immersed in the counter-culture that the university had to offer, focusing heavily on environmentalism and women's rights:"

"Queen B is a stocky woman with short, spiky brown hair who stands 5 feet tall and weighs 132 pounds. She sports numerous piercings and dresses to inflame controversy - rarely going out in public without some sort of t-shirt bearing a message."

Maybe it's the trauma of contemporary politics, but this feels like a dog whistle to me. Like maybe you could post this book to Twitter with the caption "Hey, remember when WotC was based?"

At the time, though, I tamped that feeling down. My literal note was "I guess, technically, they're in the Menace Manual."

After reading Chapter Three, though, I'm not sure my initial instinct was wrong.

The phrase "New World Order" comes from H.G. Wells but was later used by the Brandt Commission, which included President George H. Bush, Robert MacNamara and other political movers and shakers. At a 1991 meeting in Germany, they gave definition to the NWO: "a supranational authority to regulate world commerce and industry; an international organization that would control the production and consumption of oil; an international currency that would replace the dollar; a world development fund that would make funds available to free and Communist nations alike; an international police force to enforce the edicts of the New World Order."

 The quotes there are very misleading. It seems like they're quoting Bush or MacNamara or even the Brandt Report. But they're not. They're actually quoting a right wing magazine called "The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor" which appears to be offering a bad-faith paraphrase, filtered through cold-war era anti-communist and anti-internationalist paranoia, of a rather anodyne set of policy recommendations aimed at addressing economic inequality between the global north and the global south. It's hard for me to say for sure, because all these events occurred when I was a child and I have no practiced intuitions for any of the actors.

However, what I can say is that the "United Nations Elite Security Force" write-up in the Menace Manual definitely reads as if it was written by someone whose brain was marinated in right-wing propaganda. It is pitching us a campaign where the UN's secret army and its signature black helicopters have hidden bases around major American cities in order to use "interment tactics pioneered by the Nazis" when it "removes its mask of secrecy and makes its final overthrow of the world's governments."

And honestly, I'm not sure how I'm meant to cope with that. Nor with the secret conspiracy of globalists who run a prestigious news network and selectively downplay stories that would portray socialists in a negative light. Nor about the international cabal of Satan worshippers who ritually sacrifice white babies (not an exaggeration on my part, btw - "Blue-eyed, blond haired virgins are a favorite target, as are green-eyed red-haired wantons - the younger the better. Women matching these descriptions are sometimes abducted and forced to bear children, which are then sacrificed").

Part of me feels obligated to consider the broader context. This is an rpg book, and these organizations are being presented as villains in a sci-fi/fantasy campaign. "We are quoting your sincere beliefs word-for-word to create content for our silly game of make-believe" isn't exactly an endorsement. But it is an editorial choice. Also an editorial choice - the lack of a sinister corporation that pollutes the environment and uses coerced and exploited labor. Which is strange, because there is an ecoterrorist organization that is so ruthless they have no qualms about working with the KKK.

But I think what's most telling is the book's presentation of the CIA. Yes, the "Factions" chapter does have some largely factual, encyclopedia-style write-ups of real government organizations - the DoD, the FBI, FEMA, and the CIA. 

Gather Information DC 25: "After [being] charged with spying on US citizens and attempting to overthrow foreign governments during the 1970s, the CIA made a concerted effort to act within the boundaries of its mandate."

Research DC 25: "Making matters worse, news leaked that the CIA had funded arms sales to Iran and Nicaraguan rebeles - despite laws and presidential orders forbidding them to do so. This led some to believe that the CIA was carrying out its own agendas of doing what was 'best for America,' whether America wanted it or not."

And those two bits of lore are the only negative things the book has to say about the CIA (okay, there's also a suggestion that a plot could revolve around "rogue agents" trying to control the government through targeted political assassinations, but it's only a hypothetical). The other government sections are even more deferential to their subjects.

(Oh, "Some people believe that the FBI routinely taps telephone lines and implants bugs in people's houses." Why do "some people believe" that, Menace Manual? Hmm?)

And maybe it's neither surprising, nor that big a deal that a Wizards of the Coast product leans conservative, but it does convincingly argue against the "globalist news media, satanic ritual abuse, and UN black helicopters are just the late-90s conspiracy theory genre" theory. Because there was a big drop of MKUltra documents released via FOIA in 2001 and if you're really fucking serious about doing conspiracy stuff in 2003 why wouldn't you put the MKUltra stuff in your fucking CIA entry!?

Although, I must now confess that all of my griping about Chapter Three has been a mere prelude to the thing I really wanted to talk about. I did it to establish a preemptive explanation for why I'm unwilling to give the next thing the benefit of the doubt.

The description of Al-Jambiya, "a terrorist organization modeled roughly on Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network" probably crosses the line into genuine hate speech.

Now, I don't want to be entirely insensitive to the national mood c. 2003.  If you're writing an action-espionage thriller in America at that particular point in history, it's probably inevitable that you have some kind of al Qaeda analogue. Especially if it's an rpg. "I'm going to stop the next 9-11" was a common and sympathetic fantasy.

Where Menace Manual crosses the line into "not cool" is with the line, "The members of Al-Jambiya operate in small cells of no more than five men, but they frequently work with (and receive financial support from) sympathetic pro-Muslim groups."

Why, exactly is a group of "over 60 murderers and rapists [who] traveled to America under false identities" getting support from generically "pro-Muslim groups." What is "pro-Muslim" about al-Jambiya's activities?

Later, this is clarified with a weakly not-all-Muslims statement, "Al-Jambiya's meager funding comes from charitable Muslim families (the majority of whom have no idea what al-Jambiya uses the money for."

But honestly, that mild qualifier isn't really doing it for me. A "majority" can mean as little as 51%. I'd really feel a lot more comfortable if the book understood that "Muslim" as an identity, belonged almost exclusively to non-terrorists and, in fact, that terrorists are a vanishingly rare aberration. Maybe the PCs could Gather Information to that effect.

"DC 35: The hero can learn the names of local Muslim families who have welcomed 'relatives' to their homes in the month before a killing spree began (Note: Eighty percent of these leads turn out to be for legitimate family gatherings. Only about 5% of the others are connected to al-Jambiya operatives.)"

And look, if I were inclined to be generous, I could entertain the argument that the book is saying that someone who does the maximum level of legwork to narrow down the suspect pool (you'll likely be in the late teens before you get a +20 modifier to the check) would still only have a 1% chance (1/20th of 1/5th) of finding a genuine al-Jambiya terrorist through racial profiling, but taken literally that's a) still an asinine mechanic ("with your Holmsean deductive abilities, you may now roll a d100 to determine if this has been a wild goose chase") and b) something they could have just left out entirely.

It's likely, maybe even probable, that whoever wrote this sincerely believes "not all Muslims," but they sure as hell didn't know how to say it persuasively.

The funny thing about this section, though, is that if you wanted to read it with wacky literalism, it almost comes across as pro al-Qaeda. That's because, despite the fact that al-Jambiya was meant to be a fictional stand-in for al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda is still canon in this universe. Jabbar Husam al Din's backstory is that he was a regular, largely secular serial killer who switched to religiously motivated serial killing after he killed an "immodestly dressed" businesswoman and felt strangely more righteous about it. (so . . . yeah) After this realization, he sought out Osama bin Laden to pitch him on a bespoke murder version of terrorism and "bin Laden seemed faintly disgusted by al Din's proposal . . . Though bin Laden promised to consider the idea, al Din felt that al-Qaeda simply didn't match his vision and determined to start his own anti-American terrorist faction."

And I shouldn't laugh, because the whole section was intensely Islamophobic, but I could never have come up with the idea that bin Laden would reject a potential recruit because he was an over-eager weirdo who threatened to throw off the vibes. The intended effect was probably meant to be "Whoa! These al-Jambiya guys are even worse than al-Qaeda." But it just comes across as making international terrorism seem like this clique-driven hipster subculture. "Yeah, 9-11 was kind of cool . . . if you like that mainstream sell-out shit. I used to like bin Laden too, until I found out what a phony he was."

I do, however, count this as more evidence that Chapter Three was written by Bush voters for Bush voters, because it's like the author didn't really understand why you wouldn't want to use al-Qaeda, directly, as a villain (it'd be too easy to accidentally lean on anti-Muslim tropes) and so they wrote an organization that was technically different but which stepped on every rake they'd have avoided if they just left the concept out entirely.

Overall, I enjoyed Menace Manual right up to the point where it got overtly ideological, but the ideological parts were some of the most intensely uncomfortable reading I've done in awhile. Like, no kidding, it's an open question if the conspiracy-theory literature that inspired Chapter Three had already been scrubbed of direct mentions of the Jews by the time the authors consulted it or if that was something the authors had to do themselves. I don't necessarily want to get mad at the book, because I understand that there's a historic tradition of "ha, ha, look at what these conspiracy freaks believe, let's all gather round and laugh at them some more" but that really wasn't the energy I was picking up. I think, if you're going to set a roleplaying game in the Alex Jones extended universe, you have an active obligation to be more punk about it.

Ukss Contribution: I'm going to sit this book out. If I lean into my most generous interpretation of the book (it was written center-right conservatives who dismiss the radical right as harmless cranks and so appropriate their language for a silly rpg without truly understanding the identitarian subtext) then it's probably on the bubble of what I'm willing to call "evil" but even if I extend that grace, it's undeniable that there were parts of the book that made me feel gross after reading them. It's a shame, though, because I did really enjoy Chapter One.

(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.