(Exalted 3e) Tomb of Memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Eberron 3.5) Explorer's Handbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe the giants? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yikes.

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

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

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

(Exalted 3e) The Three Banners Festival: An Exigents Jumpstart

 In a shocking turn of events, I don't have a lot to say about The Three Banners Festival: An Exigents Jumpstart (Anahita Lange, John Maytus, MJ Monleón). Though in my defense (to my shame?) this is only because the book itself is so short - 55 pages, divided into three parts. Part one was just a recap of the Exalted 3rd Edition rules, and was more selective than condensed. I relearned all about withering attacks and the social influence system, but none of the Abilities or Attributes were described and so things like "feats of strength" or "establishing a fact" are presumably left for me to reinvent on my own (and if this is your only exposure to the Exalted rules, you'll have to, because they are referenced in the PCs' charms). This took up 17 pages. Then, skipping ahead, part three was all about the preconstruct characters, which had canonical backstories, complex mechanics, and two-page character sheets, taking up 20 pages. That left part 2, the actual Jumpstart Adventure itself, with a mere 13 pages to work with. (The fact that these don't add up is down to the title page, table of contents, credits page, and two full-page chapter illustrations).

So yes, I may have spent longer breaking down the page count than I did reading the adventure, but that's not a commentary on the adventure itself. Hell, it's barely commentary at all, except perhaps to give y'all a heads-up if you were planning on buying this to run the adventure with the full rules. There's not a lot of meat on these bones, but there's some good flavor, if you were merely Exalted-curious and wanted to try it out.

The story is classic Exalted in that it is a mildly interesting plot, happening in a more-interesting-than-average setting, involving more-interesting than average characters. The set-up: a local big shot got his hands on a valuable item and needs protection while he works out what to do with it. Unfortunately, a small-time criminal syndicate gets word of this and tries to make a big score, assaulting the big-shot and framing the main characters for the theft. Working their underworld contacts, the protagonists corner the toughs, brawl it out, and in the process the valuable item is ruined. Ah well, they tried their best. The only thing to do now is have the main characters team up permanently, to solve mysteries.

But, you know, the local big shot is "a lesser but well connected god of rumors," the valuable item is the Divine Exigence, capable of turning an ordinary person into an immortal champion of the gods, the gang of toughs are the Goddesses of Pottery, Baking, and Weaving (as well as a rogue lion-dog who gave up on the whole "guardian of sacred sites" deal), and of course the main characters are a motely group of fantasy superheroes, blessed with the powers of the aurora, peasant agriculture, puppetry, and urban planning.

If you're familiar with Exalted, it all comes across as very sensible, perhaps even inevitable. Mad-lib mock epic meets the most elemental of noir plots (the storyteller advice at the start of part two even says "reading a Raymond Chandler novel in advance might be helpful"). However, I can't help wondering what it might be like for this product to be used in its intended role - as an entry point to the series for total newcomers. I'm not sure I'd be able to parse the logic of its choices. A town that's sort of (but not really) ruled by gods. . . and the gods can have different purviews and power levels, ranging from a single field to the concept of defensive warfare . . . and the gods can empower mortals to use extremely specific magical abilities . . . but doing so is risky and transactional, so the gods have their own mafia for all of this . . . and that's what you have to know before you can start playing The Three Banners Festival: An Exigents Jumpstart.

I guess it's not the biggest ask in my collection (that would probably be The Far Roofs, when I finally get around to reading it), but it is a bit of a niche. Of course, being a niche is part of what I love about Exalted, generally, so . . . at least it's a better adventure than the dream quest from Tomb of Dreams.

Ukss Contribution: Pakpao the Puppeteer. She's probably one of 3e's best signature characters (when the book isn't pretending her charmset could be used for anybody) - messed up golddigger, inadvertent(?) class warrior, hustler out for number one, master of mind control and the ruthless objectification of flesh, but also just a huge nerd for those damned puppets. She's like a hero made specifically for the Internet Age.

(Eberron 3.5) Five Nations

In the world of Eberron, the continent of Khorvaire is a place defined by the interwar tensions and cutthroat espionage and diplomacy of Europe in the 1920s and 30s, mixed with the liberalization and nation-building of the early modern era, but then aesthetically and culturally it is almost, but not quite, a completely "standard" medieval fantasy setting. Yes, there are magical items that evoke 19th century technology, but you are stepping off that train into what is, essentially, a "fairytale kingdom."

That last part was a direct quote, by the way. It's how Five Nations (Bill Slavicsek, David Noonan, Christopher Perkins) described the Kingdom of Cyre, before it was swallowed up by a magical death cloud to become the Mournland.

Basically, what I'm saying is that despite all the robots and newspapers and antiquity-stealing universities, Eberron is the rpg equivalent of this:

And look, Neuschwanstein Castle is iconic, even if it took me three guesses to successfully google the name. So if it feels like I'm dragging on Eberron right now, well that's pretty perceptive of you. I did not mean this comparison entirely as a compliment. But also, like Neuschwanstein Castle, Eberron is, for all of its faults, pretty damned iconic. 

Also like Neuschwanstein Castle (I'm going to keep name-checking the castle until I can spell it from memory), Eberron would be significantly better if the creators read more 19th century newspapers and less medieval fantasy. 

Five Nations is a book that practically embodies this contradiction. In many ways, it's one of the best setting books I've ever read. Four of the five titular nations get a "style" section that discusses their art, architecture, cuisine, and fashion. All of the NPCs have associated agendas and challenges. The locations suggest potential adventures. It's very well made. But it's a well-made medieval fantasy setting.

Let's look at some hard figures here - Breland is a kingdom with a land area of 1.8 million square miles. And a population of 3.7 million. For reference, that's more than half the continental United States (Alaska really skews the figure, so I left it out) and approximately the same number of people counted by the 1790 US census (3.9 million). Or to put it another way, as of the Day of Mourning the five nations of Galifar had a combined land area 20% greater than Europe and a population (approximately 12 million) that is lower than Europe's has ever been. . . at least in the past two thousand years.

The low populations might be explained by the century-long war they just got done fighting, but the war itself is pretty inexplicable, given the distances involved. Logistics are probably much better than they were IRL, thanks to magic, but since the primary driver of the war seems to have been the egos of those involved in the beginning (who started fighting because they could not abide Galifar's absolutely ludicrous succession laws), it doesn't actually make much sense that their descendants would carry on for decades after their deaths.*

*Except, of course, for King Kais III of Karrnath, who was the cover identity of Kais I who became a vampire and then stole the identity of his great-grandson, and thus one of the bastards who started the war in the first place.

I mean, obviously, people do foolish and immoral things for thinner motives than "nuh-uh, it was my great-grandma who should have been queen," but, like, queen of what? Breland has half the population density of the Australian outback. These "nations" are not even exerting political control over their own territories, definitely not to the extent of a modern state, and probably not even to the extent of a classical empire. Banditry and rebellious local aristocrats should be endemic. Like, I kind of thought that King Oraev's plan to carve off a piece of Breland to turn the refugee land grant of New Cyre into the independent kingdom of New Cyre was ungrateful and treacherous, but honestly, would Breland even miss it? 

You could argue that the sparse population, lower than even real medieval times, is actually an adaptation for D&D's particular style of fantasy. Not enough people for the land, sure, but if you add up the people and creatures, maybe it makes a bit more sense. Those Karrnath Bulettes, which can pop up through the floorboards to spread endemic illnesses they originally contracted through eating undead. . . they probably discourage a more uniform pattern of settlement. It might be wise to look at the book's description of the nation as occupying 1.3 million square miles and mentally discount that by 70-80%, to account for fantasy shenanigans.

It's just, if that was the intended interpretation of the material, they could simply have said as much. There's a world where the five nations are scattered Points of Light, strung together with a magical railroad and united by a shared cultural heritage of Not Being Eaten By Monsters, but that world is not Eberron. Eberron is a world that talks about the five nations as if they were modern states who are barely held back from repeating a generationally-traumatic war by a tenuous and unenforceable treaty. Breland has an "industrial heart of the nation," for crying out loud. How are they getting there? "Oh, Ma, Pa, I know the bank is threatening to foreclose on the dirt farm, but I saw in the chronicle that the factories down by the Dagger River are hiring. I'll cross the 500 miles of manticore-infested wasteland and send back money every week."

The better solution would be to assume that their figures are off by approximately an order of magnitude. A Khorvaire with a population of 120 million makes more sense even in a medieval setting, and could actually support the conflicts and themes the text keeps teasing. That's a level of population where you start needing railroads and factories, and which might even result in battles as wide-ranging and destructive as to deserve the sobriquet of "The Last War."

Anyway, as much as I want to like Five Nations for being the exact style of rpg setting book I prefer, I can't entirely get over the disconnect between my expectations and what the game delivers. Personally, I want a fantasy rpg that takes place in a magitech 19th century Europe. I am on board with that premise. Give me conflicts rooted in modern nationalism and Enlightenment political ideology, in the form of espionage, mercenary work, or scientific archaeology. Hell, give me a D&D detective story. You wanna be pulp? Then be pulp. But this thing where you also want to be able to plausibly deliver (at least on a surface level) "traditional medieval fantasy?" Honestly, it's making you worse at medieval fantasy too.

Now, give me a moment to savor my own audacity in roasting Neuschwanstein (got it in four!)

Ukss Contribution: Okay, this is a silly one. The king of Breland has a companion animal called a "magebred tiger." It's almost exactly like a tiger, but it's smarter, easier to train, and with higher physical attributes across the board ("hey, what if we increased this apex predator's land speed by 25% and its stealth rating by 33%") and it was given to the king as a gift from the dragonmarked house that specializes in creating abominations of nature.

But that's not what I'm adding to Ukss. What I'm adding to Ukss is the king's . . . strange reaction to receiving such a gift. "Boranel instantly fell in love with the animals and spent several years populating his rainforests with them. Boranel has decreed that killing magebred ghost tigers in the King's Forest is a crime punishable by incarceration or death."

Now, I'm sure someone will tell me if it's just me who thinks this - but that's a recipe for an out-of-control invasive species, right? They took a creature that was already a top-tier predator of humans, then genetically modified it to be even more deadly than that, and then they set it loose in a protected habitat where it would be safe from its only conceivable predator. . . 

I don't know, maybe the King's Forest is full of manticores or something, and so nature will find a balance, but I kind of find that sort of ecological short-sightedness to be absolutely hilarious. Hey, Boranel - at any point of this plan, did you find even one other person who thought it was a good idea? It's actually fascinating. There's no level of analysis or way of breaking this down that makes it even accidentally persuasive. What was the end goal here? Getting mauled to death in your own forest?

Anyway, some monarch or other on Ukss will have a similarly reckless relationship with an artificial animal, but when I depict it, I'm not going to be at all subtle about how bad that's going to backfire.

(Exalted 3e) Abyssals: Sworn to the Grave

When you read any Exalted 3rd Edition fatsplat you have to accept a certain implicit risk - that you will blow through the interesting lore stuff in a single day and then spend the next two weeks trying to muster the enthusiasm to read the subsequent 230 pages of charms. Can you believe I actually forgot my own opinions on the new lore? I had to look at my notes to remind me.

Abyssals: Sworn to the Grave is an interesting book because it is (for obvious reasons) the most . . . skilled 3e book yet, the one that is best at embodying all the unique virtues of 3rd edition as a game. But its subject matter - the dark Exalted who swore an oath to eternally-dying primordial gods to destroy all life in exchange for a delay in their fated hour - is the one that benefits least from 3rd edition's approach. I know this is going to be a controversial opinion in the fandom, but they didn't need to be softened, or rounded out, or made more human. The tits-out goth chick with the wild eyes that screamed "I'm horny for BLOOD" was peak and yeah, she was conceived in misogyny and when I get around to reading Scroll of Exalts I'm going to have some harsh words about that, but this book was definitely missing an essential level of camp. I mean, really, this is the Abyssals book. If you're not going to take this opportunity to celebrate women's wrongs, when are you ever going to do it?

Okay, less flippantly. . . there's always been this constituency in the fandom that objected to Abyssals being presented as a "villain" splat. You know, death is a part of life, so maybe it doesn't need to be viewed solely as an evil. And if death is sometimes not an evil, then death's exalted shouldn't have to always be evil. Maybe you could have an Abyssal who was a psychopomp or a counselor or just a hero for the ghost kingdoms.

I mean, I get it. Sometimes you just want to put on the leather pants and the eyeliner and be a little spooky in a way that is exactly as safe as the shiny golden hero, because why should the psychopaths get to hog the dark aesthetic? And to be fair, the villainous Abyssals haven't always been the fun kind of villain-core. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, they were just these scatological bullies who were like "I'm going to STOMP on the KITTEN and then make a HAT from its GUTS."

But I can't help feeling the "Abyssals should be shepherds of the dead" perspective is one that . . . unduly privileges respectability. Truth of the matter is, no matter what our various religions tell us to the contrary, death sucks. Even if you stipulate the maximum cause for optimism ("they're up there right now, hanging with history's coolest celebrities, knocking back some cold ones and saving you a place at the table") it's still an involuntary separation in which one of the parties has no way of knowing for certain that it's temporary. No matter what you believe happens to your loved ones after they die, you still grieve for them. And the inevitability and heaviness of that grief, it sucks. 

It makes sense to me, then, that death's exalted are, themselves, guys who kinda suck. As much as I might empathize with the desire to orient oneself differently towards death, to embrace the optimism that comes with the continuance of the soul, I feel like, literarily, it loses the plot. A "morally neutral" Abyssal exaltation says nothing instead of something about the nature of death.

This might seem like a confusing take to some of you who've read my previous posts ragging on D&D's alignment system, so let me clarify - I don't mean by this that Abyssals should be an "always Evil" splat. Rather, I mean that the Abyssal exaltation should be something conceived and deployed in malice, representing the odious, unjust, and unclean nature of death . . . and that's going to prove a real challenge for Abyssal Exalted who want to do good.

I am perfectly aware that I'm taking a hardline, unpopular position in an ancient flame war that had, hitherto, been safely dead and buried (ha! necromancy humor!), but I bring it up now because this tension in the design of the Abyssal Exalted is critical to understanding 3rd edition's presentation of the splat.

On the most abstract, conceptual level, I think they nailed it. I think the combination of "to survive the Abyssal Exaltation you must swear an oath to kill all life (yes, 'even the birds'), the lack of mechanisms for anyone with any agency as a character to directly enforce this oath, and the twisted and loophole- ridden logic of "the chivalry of death" manages to thread the needle perfectly. Yeah, you can be a benevolent shepherd of the dead, and with the proper sort of trickster attitude, you can even toe the line of death's chivalry in a way that will leave your conscience largely intact, but for all of your immortal existence you will be burdened with the knowledge that in extremis you did the most unforgivable thing anyone could imagine. Very cool. Just the right amount of angst.

So by and large I'm content with the direction that 3rd edition takes Abyssals. The main issue I have with this book is that, having negotiated this compromise among the fandom, it then proceeds to present the Abyssals and the Deathlords in a way that feels . . . well, maybe not safe and respectable, exactly, but safer and more respectable than they've been in the past. There's no one at all in this book that I'd believe would stomp on a kitten and make a hat out of its guts.

The case study here would have to be The Eye and Seven Despairs. Like I'm sitting here contemplating past books, racking up the mental abacus, and I think on sheer points count, they are the most improved character in the entire book. The Princess Magnificent is a strong runner-up, having gone from "the spare Deathlord who had her agency subordinated to the First and Forsaken Lion" to "Cool Assassin Socialite" (who would maybe stomp on a kitten, if it were a particularly heroic kitten), but in previous editions, the Eye's presentation was actively transphobic.

So it's good that those elements of the character were allowed to pass gently into the fog of memory. The new Eye is probably the most fun out of all the Deathlords now - they're an amoral mad-scientist who sells discount WMDs because they're curious about what will happen when they're set off. Another great example of an immaculate balance between "this person kind of sucks" and "this person is someone we're going to want to hang out with week after week."

However . . . sigh . . . I'm going to make myself vulnerable here and admit that I'm a little nostalgic for certain elements of the transphobic presentation of the character. I gotta tread carefully, because I recognize that I'm a hair's width away from saying "the transphobia brought something to the table," but I also gotta speak my truth. The old version of the The Eye and Seven Despairs was just a little bit #goals.

In the context of being a comic-book villain, and with allowances made for comic-book-style plots that would absolutely not be okay in real life.

The short version is that the Eye was a Deathlord who just sort of slouched into the gig, and when it came time to create his own Exalted, they didn't respect him at all. So he did what anyone would do - he swapped bodies with the beautiful courtesan they were all obsessed with and sexually manipulated them into betraying "him," secure in the knowledge that the being they all thought was the Eye and Seven Despairs was actually the courtesan in disguise and that they would really be destroying the very woman they all imagined themselves to be in love with. Then, having faked his own death, he would continue having sex with all three men while stoking their paranoia and their greed in hopes of getting them to betray each other. And you kind of get the feeling that he's willing to stretch this last phase of the plan out for as long as it takes.

The second edition version elaborated his backstory in a way that seriously weakened his character (he was tormented by certain Solars in the First Age and specifically sought out their reincarnations to make Abyssals in order to get revenge) and was probably more overtly transphobic as a result (because the Eye taking female forms is called out as a pattern and described in pretty uncharitable terms). 

And to be absolutely clear - this plot was weird and uncomfortable and good god, how was it ever intended to be used as part of a roleplaying game. The new canon is 100% better in terms of "stuff I'd be willing to say at a gaming table." But if we're talking about what's appealing about the fantasy of being a villain. . . say what you will about the original recipe Eye, but he was locking down the D with elaborate psychosexual mind games and I love that for him. 

There's a certain paradox to queer representation. As it gets more respectful and more nuanced and more common, it also loses that ineffable transgressive thrill that makes you feel vicariously awesome for daring to be queer. I know that the moral guardians think my bisexual proclivities mean I've got a one-way ticket to hell. So just give me my plastic horns and pitchfork already, so I can leer at oiled-up hunks on my way down.

No, no, that was a joke. Don't cancel me. It's just, I recently saw Aladdin for the first time since hitting puberty and maybe it's because I'm now middle-aged and a bit scrungly myself, but Jafar was . . . hot? Totally an offensive stereotype. The queer-coding was not subtle. But that eyeliner? That sneer? That annunciation? He can mince right across the screen and straight into my bedroom. . . and yes, I know that makes me even more hell-bound than the crack about the oiled-up hunks.

And I can't help relating that experience back to my experience with Abyssals: Sworn to the Grave. The new Eye and Seven Despairs is your schlubby NB frenemy who you always invite to the book club because their opinions are guaranteed to be both fascinating and infuriating, but the old Eye and Seven Despairs was a toxic goth mommy who'd get you so twisted up inside you'd find yourself committing treason for sport. Force me to choose, and obviously you go with the new version. Easy fucking choice for any context except "spicy fanfic." But there's part of me that wonders why we couldn't have both - irresponsible WMD-crafting mad scientist with a conspicuous habit of including "transform into a hot chick and seduce this man" as a vital step in all of their supervillain schemes.

I promise, this digression was not purely to make incredibly horny engagement bait, it's also part of a broader point about the book. Which is that its more subdued, cautious, and humanist tone is not entirely to its benefit. The over-the-top, borderline-offensive grotesquerie of the previous editions served a purpose. Specifically, they took the subject matter out of the realm of the "realistically grim" and into a sort of purely make-believe dark humor. The rib-cage corsets and six-foot meat cleavers, dripping with blood, they were actually load-bearing camp. And while I wouldn't go so far as to say that the 3e version isn't camp enough, I would say that it's right at the edge, where losing even some of the camp it does have would run the risk of making it entirely too self-serious.

Although, the new approach does have some advantages. There's less I feel compelled to try and explain away. The old style, with its "goth level cranked up to absurdity" was maybe more fun across the board, but its recklessness and its lingering gen-x insensitivity meant it was loaded with little landmines of unfun that would take a deft hand to disarm. Take a moment to contemplate how much respect you lost for me when I admitted to enjoying certain problematic aspects of the old presentation of the Eye and Seven Despairs. Now, imagine that disappointment happening in real time during a game session, as I try and turn his skeevy, gender-transformation-as-fetish sexcapades into an rpg plot. Third edition, blessedly, spares us that possibility, and it was a worthwhile trade-off to lose the Eye's baroque, Bugs Bunny-style nonsense as part of the bargain.

That said, I cannot entirely forgive 3rd edition for introducing a new signature character called "the Gallows Bride" and then making her look like this:

Her name evokes two of the most powerful elements of goth cosplay, yet her design incorporates elements of neither one. That's borderline malpractice on the part of the art design. At least put her in a novelty bola tie or something.

She's dressed like she's just at the ren faire to drop off her art major girlfriend. Not a single piece of that outfit looks like it was bought at Hot Topic. If you show up to a funeral dressed like that, it's probably because your parents wanted you to look nice when they lowered you into the ground. Clothes like that are perfect for a sensible, yet fashionable night on the town with friends.

(It's essential to my understanding of what makes Abyssals enjoyable that my fashion-based roast reads like an anti-roast).

Overall, though, I'd say that Abyssals: Sworn to the Grave is easily the best version of the Abyssals fatsplat, and is arguably the best book in 3e so far. There's a lot I didn't cover about the new paradigm for underworld locations, with its cultural and manner-of-death-based afterlives. Or about necromancy's new versatility. Or about the strange deathlord-inspired charms (that were, unfortunately, not directly labelled, making them not stand out as much as they should have). All-in-all, it's a welcome continuation of 3e's tradition of competence and creativity at the expense of audacity (even if I love audacity to an unseemly degree).

Ukss Contribution: The spell "Seat of Deadly Splendor" summons a throne made from a massive skeletal fist. Both in-character and out-of-character it makes you look like a total badass. The Ukss version will be a permanent installation rather than a spell effect, but it'll still make you so intimidating your enemies will fall to their knees before you.

(D&D 3.5) Races of Eberron

 Across the run of D&D 3rd edition, the Races of . . . series has been pretty consistent in both its strengths and weaknesses - an ideal format that presents useful, if slightly mundane information about various fantasy creatures, but the creatures themselves are either the same vanilla demihumans we've been reading about for fifty years (elves, dwarves, halflings) or complete randos we have no preestablished reason to care about (raptorans, illumians, and to a lesser extent, goliaths). Races of Eberron (Jesse Decker, Matthew Sernett, Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel, Keith Baker) breaks the pattern by retaining the series' characteristic strengths while improbably being about interesting creatures with unique mechanical and roleplaying challenges that play an important part in the overall setting . . . and also the Kalashtar.

No, no, that's too harsh. I actually quite liked almost everything about the Kalashtar. . . aside from the fact that they were being presented in a kitchen-sink D&D setting. They, along with their arch-rivals, the Inspired, never stopped feeling to me like one of those stealth pilots that got snuck into popular long-running tv shows, where the regular cast only showed up at the bookends of a story about totally new characters so that the resulting series could be sold to the public as a spinoff. (For my younger readers, this is something that used to happen before content-hungry streaming services started greenlighting a bunch of random bullshit).

I couldn't read anything about the Kalashtar or the Inspired without thinking "this really needs to be its own setting, possibly even its own game." The mystical realm that connects all mortal minds through their dreams is ruled by an evil spirit known as "The Dreaming Dark," and the lesser dream spirits, the quori, serve this malevolent force by sending people nightmares, casting the whole of the mortal world into an age of darkness and suffering. But some quori rebelled and quietly nurtured the hope of a coming age of light in which the Dreaming Dark was finally defeated. Unfortunately, the rebel quori could not defeat their nightmarish rivals and were forced to flee to the mortal world, taking up residence in human minds, which they gently and consensually possessed, leading to the creation of a strange psychic subculture - the Kalashtar. 

But the Dreaming Dark was not satisfied with this state of affairs, so it sent its own quori to the mortal world, to violently possess suitable vessels in order to hunt down and eliminate the refugee dream spirits. These nightmare quori subverted the leadership of a mighty empire and manifest generation after generation in a special class of people known as "the Inspired," who are worshipped by the people of Riedra as living gods. 

This leads to a shadow war between rival factions of spirit-channeling psychics, where insular and clannish Kalashtar communities follow strict spiritual practices to both oppose the Dreaming Dark and manifest the coming Age of Light, while the Inspired infiltrate governments to oppress an (apparent) ethnic minority, hire catspaws and cuttouts to harass them directly, and send quori spirits to hop from body to body in the hopes of taking them unaware. It's espionage, it's intrigue, it's crime drama, it's science-fantasy driven by new age spirituality, and if it was the only fantastic element in a series set in Victorian England, it would probably be one of my favorite games. 

But because it's set in Eberron, I have to shake my finger and scold, "No! You have too much going on! Dial it back a little." I know it's looking a gift-horse in the mouth to complain about this bonus game-within-a-game content, but I imagine myself sitting down to a session 0 and explaining to the table "this is going to be an all Kalashtar game . . . trust me, the payoff will be worth it" and maybe that's a game I'd enjoy running, but it's not a conversation I'd enjoy having.

So not quite in the same boat as the Raptorans, but maybe enough of an analogue to say that Races of Eberron has not entirely escaped the series' weaknesses. But enough of that. Let's talk about the book's strongest content - warforged and changelings.

Not since the genasi from Planescape have I experienced such an instantaneous and total transition from "trademarked invention of a specific campaign setting" to "essential staple of D&D-style fantasy." Like, it's one of those cases where you don't recognize a gap until you see it being filled. Oh, "fantasy robots who are confused by their own emotions" and "nonbinary pansexual gremlins who struggle with the concept of personal identity" . . . of course. It seems so obvious in retrospect.

We get a pretty good presentation of both, though I don't think they escape their Eberron-specific contexts enough to justify the introduction's rhetorical question - "Why is Races of Eberron a core D&D supplement and not an Eberron-specific book?" 

The answer given: "Changelings, kalashtar, shifters, and warforged are excellent additions to any D&D campaign, offering fun and unique play experiences and enriching any setting" is at least half correct (I'm embarrassed to admit that I forgot entirely about shifters until just now, but in remembering them, I'm thinking "good vibes . . . yeah, why not" which I guess would make them this book's equivalent to the goliaths), but as a first outing, Races of Eberron simply does not do the work to make that happen.

Also, there's a chapter where they check-in with the Eberron-specific variants of existing fantasy creatures in a way that makes it very clear that this is an Eberron book, despite the introduction's lofty ambitions.

Let's just run through them real quick, no more than a paragraph each:

Dwarves: "Dwarves have dominated banking and finance. . ." eh . . . they're still the proud warrior race guys, and the perfectionist crafter guys, so I think they're still broadly in the . . . challenging intersection between popular fantasy archetype and Tolkien's well-meaning but culturally hindered depiction of Jewish identity. But maybe, just as a change of pace, we could have a proto-capitalist fantasy setting where banking and finance aren't dominated by any identifiable racial group.

Elves: "We are totally not necromancers, we swear. . ." You're cool. I like you. But yeah, you're necromancers and I'm only humoring you because I think you'll look hot when you finally cave and start wearing the eye-liner I picked out.

Drow: They are less indigenous-coded here than they seemed in Grasp of the Emerald Claw, so I'm not ready to write off Xen'drik entirely, but it's also very obvious that someone is trying to "do something" with them, and I don't foresee the payoff as being worth it. Scorpions instead of spiders? Patriarchy instead of matriarchy? Hmm . . . 

Gnomes: Why does D&D 3.5 keep trying to make me want to fuck gnomes? Oh, they're spies? They're ruled by something called "The Triumvirate?" They've "dedicated themselves to carefully preserving their image as harmless pranksters and tricksters," but they're actually uptight and manipulative? All that stuff is too sexy. Stop it!

Goblins: Keep doing the Lord's work of chipping away at decades of bias. One day, they will be a core option and you'll be vindicated.

Halflings: It's kind of interesting to see the "we need to de-cutify these bastards" play out a second time, in a completely different direction than gnomes. They're deadly hunters who tame and ride dinosaurs? I guess it's cool that you have some guys like that, but between Dark Sun, the dungeon-punk presentation in the 3e core, and this, I kind of just feel like someone at D&D HQ shorted the waistcoat and clay pipe market and is desperately trying to claw back their investment.

Orcs: "Wise and wild." "Always on the edge of savagery." Okay. You get what people like about orcs. Now all you have to do is present this idea in a way that does not evoke the ugliness of colonialism. I give this attempt a C-. Do more with the steampunk goggles. Those had potential.

And the rest of my notes are just random mechanical observations like "Tactical Feats: make martials jump through hoops to do things that are conceptually interesting." I'm enough of a nerd that I couldn't help writing those thoughts down, but honestly, reviewing them, I hope I'm not such a nerd that I feel compelled to filibuster the internet with them. Y'all are going to have to wait until my next Exalted post for that.

Overall, I think Races of Eberron is one of the stronger 3.5 books I've read. I'm finally convinced that this setting has legs.

Ukss Contribution: Some of the undead who advise the elves of Aerenal are explicitly said to be 26,000 years old. This is, of course, merely a case of fantasy being bad at scaling timelines. The implications of that kind of age are not explored at all. However, it's a detail that really got into my head. Deca-millennia are such an interesting age for immortals because it's on the shallow end of long enough to blur the line between history and evolution. Like, you go back 26 thousand years in the real world and it's arguable that the humans who lived were only technically the same species as us. So what would a ghost from that time be like?

That's a question I wouldn't mind exploring in Ukss.

(Exalted Essence) Pillars of Creation

So . . . it's kind of weird that we've got two editions of Exalted running in parallel, right? I mean, Pillars of Creation is just a crowdfunding stretch goal addition to the Exalted: Essence book, so I probably shouldn't count it as "support for the line," but I'm reading it in the context of a recent crowdfunding campaign for the Exalted: Essence Player's Guide, and by my count that will make a total of six different books for this not-quite-an-edition-alternative-to-the-3e-rules. I feel like all Exalted: Essence needs is a tiny little push to take on a life of its own.

Pillars of Creation is not quite that push, but it is a noticeable step forward. All of the Exalt types feel more playable after this book, and there's a little bit more of the world of Creation, so you're a little less dependent on the main line for lore. It's not quite enough, but two or three more of these (or perhaps these two books, plus the upcoming Player's Guide plus Across the Eight Directions) and you might feel like it's enough. 

I can't decide whether or not I approve. I think it's because I'm so immersed in the lore that I could run an Exalted: Essence game with just the two books and the facts in my head. Like, yeah, I can explain to you what a Lunar exalted is and why they're so angry all the time. All you have to do is select a caste and pick out some charms. Being in that position makes Exalted: Essence feel functional. 

But then I think about what I might have to do if the PCs picked Getimians or Liminals and I realize that I would feel massively unprepared. I'm inclined to use that feeling as a guide to what it might be like to truly use Exalted: Essence as an entry-point to the series.

I guess I feel like this partial lore is spoiling me on books that may or may not one day exist. If I were to one day read a Getimians' hardcover, that explained their whole deal in exacting detail, I would do so with certain preconceptions and expectations that I would not otherwise have. Will that have a negative impact on the experience? It's hard to say, but internet etiquette certainly implies that it will. That's why we're supposed to use spoiler tags for sensitive information.

On a personal level, I never put a lot of stock in spoiler prophylaxis, at least not at the most extreme levels. It's only in a minority of specialized cases (such as works where the gradual unfolding of a mystery is the entire point of the story) that spoilers make much of a difference to me. So it's unlikely that anything I learned in Exalted: Essence or Pillars of Creation is going to ruin future books (oh, no, I wanted to be surprised that Rakan Thulio is a master of Quicksilver Hand of Dreams Style), but I do find it at least a little bit annoying. I've got these playable rules for exalts I know almost nothing about, and to the extent that I'm intrigued and want to learn more . . . I can't, because their books aren't even on the upcoming projects list.

Although, one factor to consider is that between the core book and this one, the ten exalted types have 180 pages of charms. Which means we're averaging 3/5 of a mainline fatsplat's charm chapter per book. With ten exalted types, that means we'd need 50/3 (approx 17) Exalted: Essence books to get the exact same amount of material. And thinking about it that way - what if the Sidereals book was broken up and spread out among 17 volumes - I'm not sure this approach is actually any better. Exalted: Essence works fine as a one-and-done (or even, due to the economics of crowdfunding, a two-and-done with Pillars of Creation as a companion), but eventually there's going to be a point where adding more books to the line just means you're doing the same thing as mainline Exalted, but worse. Call it a hunch, but I suspect that the companion volume to the Exalted: Essence Player's Guide will probably come right up to the edge of the breaking point.

I guess, in the meantime, Pillars of Creation is an acceptable expansion to the game's crunch. The new charms fill some conspicuous gaps in the Exalted: Essence core's curation (The Sidereals get Neighborhood Relocation Scheme back, we can now take a watered-down version of Dreaming Pearl Courtesan Style, which the Getimians are unusually skilled with, for no-doubt fascinating lore reasons), we're getting rules for Dragon Kings and god-blooded, and the selection of antagonists is an absolutely vital supplement to the core book's generic stat-blocks.

My only real complaint is that almost all of the martial arts have exalt-specific modes (Black Claw style works better for Infernals, Fist Pulse for Architect Exigents, etc), which kind of misses the mark when it comes to the martial arts' traditional role in the game. This is especially the case with Sidereal Martial Arts, which inherit from mainline 3e the problem that they are high essence charms in an edition that compresses the 1-10 essence scale to a range of 1-5. Sidereal Martial Arts are already the best essence 4-5 combat charms in the game, so giving the sidereals an extra benefit while using them kind of makes them feel like the best combatants in the game. There's a difference between "Essence Shattering Typhoon is one of the few Essence 7 charms in the game" and "Essence Shattering Typhoon beats Protection of Celestial Bliss" (actually, I'm not entirely sure whether that's true, though for Sidereals, it might inexplicably be a better defensive charm).

And in mainline 3e, this isn't that big a deal, because charm interactions are complex and you could argue the minutiae of mote costs and combinations and the varying mote pools of the different exalted (very significant in 1e, a minor but real consideration in 3e). But in Essence where the differences between exalt types are conspicuously flattened, that extra little tag starts to feel like a big deal.

Overall, I'd say I'm still cautiously optimistic about Exalted: Essence and Pillars of Creation is more or less the exact right amount of extra content for the game. Which is ordinarily something you'd interpret as unqualified praise . . . but here it also means that I'm more inclined to put future Essence releases under the microscope. Only time will tell this marks a new beginning or the beginning of the end.

Ukss Contribution: The antagonist section has a rather extensive entry for the semi-canonical Heart-eaters, the corrupt exalted of a slain god who act as a social contagion, turning their victims into mindless thralls and surviving their own destruction by hopping from body to body. They were a standout in Exigents: Out of the Ashes and they are a standout here. It kind of makes me wish they could get a standalone adventure path, but that sort of book is so far not something 3e has attempted, so I think I'll just have to settle for adding a version of them to Ukss.