Trinity Continuum: Adventure! (Adventure 2e)

I once speculated that colonialism was an inalienable part of the pulp genre, and that the only way to change that was through a total genre parody that made its ostensible heroes into buffoons (I referenced Don Quixote at the time, though Inspector Gadget likely would have been more apt). Trinity Continuum: Adventure! was already written when I made that comment, but it nonetheless feels like it's trying to prove me wrong.

(Gasp! What if I wasn't the first person to notice the pulp adventure genre's reliance on the colonialist gaze and this has actually been a matter of concern for quite some time? I may not be as original as I thought!)

As to whether the book succeeds at its (presumed) goal, that's a bit of a trickier question. I can say, with confidence, that Trinity Continuum: Adventure! is an action-adventure rpg set in the 1930s that is fair-minded and consciously inclusive and which makes a compelling case for using the era's political conflicts as inspiration for progressive alt-history roleplaying. There are probably more specific, named African characters in this book than in every game and supplement published by White Wolf prior to 2012 combined (Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom might skew this figure a bit, though. I haven't actually read it).

But is it good pulp? It's definitely a good something, and I don't necessarily want to come across like I'm gatekeeping pulp here. The elements of pulp are present. You can tell a tale of two-fisted justice where your iron-jawed Moroccon freedom fighter chases a corrupt French colonial official-turned-mad scientist across the top of a speeding train in order to stop him from running away with a stolen magical jewel of incalculable destructive potential. The rules for that are in this book. 

But I kinda had to work to come up with that example. Like, I created a scenario that fit in with the book's competencies and sensibilities, but the reason I was able to make it a pulp scenario is that I already knew what pulp was. Could I have done it with no prior knowledge, using just things I learned from the book?

Maybe. Trinity Continuum: Adventure! is a really well-made rpg. The Storyteller advice is both expansive and actionable. The setting information seems well-researched and the conflicts described could easily serve as inspiration for thrilling pulp-style stories. There are plenty of options for a variety of mechanically-distinct low-level superheroes, ranging from implausibly competent swashbucklers all the way through weather-manipulating superhumans. And the Trinity Continuum as a whole is richer for the introduction of the new environmental condition rules.

I suppose the way I'd describe it is that Trinity: Continuum: Adventure is really good at describing pulp, and less so at embodying pulp. The biggest culprit here is probably just the loss of the interstitial fictions. The original Adventure! had something like three or four full short stories that each demonstrated the type of fiction the game was meant to emulate. And then there's the form-factor of the book itself. First edition styled itself like a pulp magazine, it had yellowed pages, a 10 cent pricetag on the cover, and an overall grainier feel. Second edition looks first and foremost like a Trinity Continuum game. It's just a bunch of little things, like the switch between unreliable first-person narrators who were rarely afraid to get florid and an objective third-person voice that is generally very respectful.

When I look back at Trinity Continuum: Adventure!'s presentation of The French Protectorates of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco I'm left feeling like these are real places with serious concerns rooted in a long history and not just backdrops for my pulp adventures. The "problem," such as it is, is that my main use for these locations are as backdrops for my pulp adventures. The book spends so much time telling me about the structural racism encoded into agricultural subsidies for different varieties of wheat that it neglects to tell me about the area's climate or fashions or architecture or customs. I even had to look on Wikipedia to verify that Morocco had a railway at this time.

And to be absolutely clear, the first edition of Adventure! didn't do this either. It's more a case of a new edition putting me into the mindset of looking at something new, and then second edition's increased transparency and introspection opening my eyes to flaws that were always present. The old edition came with a lot of extra-textual baggage that the new edition thoughtfully addresses, which ironically means that even though the two games have many of the same blind spots and gaps, first edition feels more like a complete experience, because your mind automatically fills in the blanks with the baggage.

(Note: this is not necessarily a good thing, because that baggage was often racist as hell).

Or to put it another way, Trinity Continuum: Adventure! convinced me I was wrong about the pulp genre. You could reconstruct it around another axis, keep its stark moral conflicts and globe-trotting action by making the European colonialist project into a font of villainy and casting the protagonists as the resistance to colonialism, using the literary and visual language of early superheroes and detective stories to tell the same sort of stories, but with different cultural and political values. That is something you can do, but if you do attempt it, you probably should not do it by reading vintage comic strips like The Phantom. 

It's probably not a fair thing to lay on the shoulders of Trinity Continuum: Adventure!, but the book's greatest flaw is that it doesn't step up to fill this vacuum. It never successfully models the new, woke pulp.

Though it sometimes wafts tantalizingly close. Like with the Seven Brothers and the fate of the Ubiquitous Dragon. In first edition, the Ubiquitous Dragon was a criminal mastermind with the ability to makes clones of himself. He would send these clones on missions and sometimes directly control their bodies when he needed to pay personal attention to a particular matter. Second edition takes place a decade after first, and in this hypothetical interregnal decade, the Ubiquitous Dragon schemed to release a virus into San Francisco's water supply that would turn the affected into more clones, potentially giving him thousands of bodies to work with. Fortunately, the plot was foiled and the Ubiquitous Dragon was killed. All around the world, his clones started to spontaneously combust thanks to the dragon tattoos that were put in place to eliminate traitorous or inconvenient clones. But seven of the clones had either lost or removed their tattoos and thus survived the purge. 

The eponymous Seven Brothers subsequently found each other and realized they could use their physical resemblance to the Ubiquitous Dragon to take over his criminal network and pick up where he left off, but this time, they wouldn't ruthlessly exploit their agents. They would instead be like a family to each other. Just the sort of family that's financed by drug dealing, gambling, and prostitution.

There is definitely something here. It's weird in a very comic-book-y way. But it doesn't quite feel like a threat. The Seven Brothers have too much affection and respect for each other. They are more like sympathetic anti-villains than a ruthless criminal syndicate in dire need of immediate thwarting. So it all winds up being a bit of (fascinating and cool) setting color. 

Now, with all that being said, there was a lot about this book that I absolutely adored. I have so many notes I didn't use, and approximately 90% are things that I thought were interesting or beautiful or awesome. 

A mad scientist is building 100-ton spider tanks on behalf of Nazi Germany!

Sherlock Holmes exists in this universe. He mentored a Black woman in the art of detection and survives to this day as a sort of professor emeritus in the International Detective Agency.

An Australian successionist movement is assembling a "secret army of battle-ready emus."

The Order of Murder is back, still faking the deaths of the rich and powerful, but this version gives Anne Boleyn a lot more agency in her own rescue and canonically establishes her as one of the Order's founders.

The Ponatowski Foundation works really well in this new edition as a dark foil to Aeon, essentially playing the "gentleman adventurer travels to another continent and 'discovers' things the natives have known for a thousand years" trope entirely straight. Which makes all the stuff with their leader's plot to restore the Russian monarchy and crown himself the new czar seem a bit superfluous. Like putting a hat on a hat.

Max Mercer is now officially and explicitly asexual, and despite falling in love with Michael Donighal, patronized his future arch-rival by preemptively breaking up with him "for his own good." I think this is as openly flawed as we've ever seen the Continuum's golden child and it puts an interesting wrinkle in a ship that I'd otherwise been lukewarm about.

Though, while we're on the subject, where does Maxwell's son, Michael Mercer, come from? I'm not sure I entirely approve of putting an unsolved mystery in a section of the book titled "Setting Secrets."

 And while I'm of the opinion that this book could have used more Strange Places, I'm largely happy with the ones we got. In the Trinity Continuum, the Bermuda Triangle is real!

Finally, I thought it was a really sweet gesture to have an in-character newspaper clipping revealing that real-world aviation pioneer "Queen Bess" Coleman (the first woman, first Black person, and first Native American to earn a pilot's license) did not die tragically young in this alternate universe and instead became a fearless action hero. Alt history doesn't have to be all world-shaking events. Sometimes it can just be a way of paying tribute to some of history's lesser-known badasses.

I guess it's time to wrap up. My final verdict on Trinity Continuum: Adventure!? It's a very fun rpg that sometimes feels like it treats its genre inspirations as an intellectual exercise. It's about a form of fiction that was essentially audacious trash, but it keeps its own audacity and trashiness firmly in check. On the other hand, almost every gaming group I've ever played with has had those qualities in excess, so it might just be a case of looking at an inert solution before the catalyst has been added. It seems likely to me that when players get ahold of this book, they will create better pulp than they would with almost any alternative (including the previous edition of the game). Let's call it an unreserved recommendation.

Ukss Contribution: This one is tricky because of all the stuff in this book, the idea that I would most want to add to an rpg setting is a noxious bit of real-world history - the cozy relationship between the US government and United Fruit, and the brutal unchecked imperialism that resulted from this partnership.

If United Fruit were fictional, invented entirely by an author as part of an anti-capitalist fantasy world, I would think it too outlandish to be believed. They're a fruit company that kills people so they can make slightly more money selling bananas? Ridiculous.

But I don't think I can put United Fruit in Ukss. Firstly, it's insensitive. I live in the country that originated this injustice and I very much benefit from the low price of bananas. Secondly, it's not something Trinity Continuum: Adventure! invented. And while I've used real-world things in the past, either because the supplement was historical or I admired the author's daring in choosing to use it (Sparta and Santa Claus, respectively), this book has plenty of amazing fictional things to pay tribute to.

For example - Ornithopter Hoplites, elite soldiers that wear bird-like wings to conduct surface raids for Baron Zargo, Tyrant of the Skies. I think the image of aerial warriors staying aloft with rapidly-beating mechanical wings is delightfully baroque. 

(Eberron 3.5) Dragonmarked

Dragonmarked (Keith Baker, Michelle Lyons, C.A. Suleiman) is a good book. It's well-made, it accomplishes the remarkable feat of making its thirteen families of magical capitalists feel both gameable and distinct (even the two families of elf artists/illusionists/spies at least had a reason to exist as separate entities), and aside from occasionally getting a little eugenics-y (mainly in the animal-breeding house, but also in the house of half-elves who were adamantly opposed to any further race-mixing, because apparently their ancestors got the balance exactly right) it didn't step on any rakes, politically speaking.

It's like this - if you picture Eberron, the setting, as a big bucket, and then every individual Eberron supplement as liquid being poured into the bucket, then Dragonmarked brought the bucket from 1.1L to 1.2L. It expanded my knowledge of the setting and was a gross positive all the way across the board. There's nothing in this book I want less of.

Which means, you guessed it, my grumpy ass is going to act all petulant and ungrateful because I'm left wanting more. Yes, you heard me, if I had my way every rpg supplement would be 1000 pages long, written according to some abstruse philosophical or ideological schema, and would meticulously describe everyone's clothes (and the logistics chains and modes of production that made those clothes possible). And if it seems, by that description, that I am quietly comparing every book I read to Mage: 20th Anniversary Edition . . .

Yikes, I really am doing that. I should stop immediately.

I guess I've made no secret of my desire to have a version of Eberron that was more explicitly modern and less . . . D&D, and the longer I let that go on, informing my reviews, the less charming a habit it becomes (I assume you all were initially very charmed), but I swear, sometimes it felt like Dragonmarked was deliberately goading me on.

I just wonder if anyone, during the course of writing this book, realized they were just a half dozen random sentences of Marxist political economy away from making the dragonmarked houses into full-on cyberpunk megacorporations.

They're these transnational organizations that rival states in power and can dictate terms over broad sectors of the economy. And this book focuses on their familial relations, the insular (and sometimes borderline incestuous) consolidation of power, and the methods both natural and supernatural (one of the houses has plenipotentiary law enforcement powers and sells its services as mercenaries, another house is composed bounty hunters who sell the services of ogre mercenaries, etc) through which they pursue their ambitions, the least of which is the reckless pursuit of limitless wealth. 

It's all the ingredients for a megacorporation, to the degree that I can't entirely believe the similarity was an accident. And yet, if they were doing it on purpose, I have to believe that they'd do it . . . better.

Not, like, better better. Not objectively better. Just "better at communicating the sort of things the cyberpunk genre has to say." These are powerful economic actors who can dictate terms to states, and House Cannith's niche is "manufacturing." It's so incredible I have to repeat it. The economic niche of this dragonmarked house is manufacturing.

When you consider that House Medani's business is personal protection and private detectives, you can't help but think that all thirteen of these guys were designed somewhat whimsically.

But you could get to megacorporations, if you wanted to. Each of the thirteen houses has its own prestige class and Medani's is The Medani Prophet, who combine their natural dragonmark abilities with divine spellcasting to foretell the future. And some of them "accept long-term positions as advisors for important clients of the house, providing the twin benefits of divination and divine insight." Which is still maybe not on the level of all manufacturing, but is something.

Profane mercenary priests of the god of knowledge, whispering in the ears of ruthless industrialists, telling them secrets gleaned from their miraculous visions, keeping them safe even from the onset of justice. An entire guild of Raincallers who sell their expertise in creating irrigations systems . . . and the rain to fill those systems up. An order of magical healers who take a sacred oath to never heal a patient for free, and it's taken so seriously that they can't even accept services in-kind from their closest friends. 

House Jorasco will literally dispatch adventurers to "hunt down healers who have violated their vows."  Nobody tell me their policy on preexisting conditions. I don't think my heart could take it. 

You could build an adventure arc, maybe even a campaign around House Orien's private security "searching Sharn for black market conductor stones." 

Excuse me, what? In just a quick throwaway line, this book is telling me that conductor stones have value on the black market and I'm supposed to just gloss over that? People are stealing small bits of infrastructure from the family of magical capitalists that owns the railways, and they're reselling them for profit. Who's buying them? For what purpose? Are there pirate railways in the shadows of Sharn's megalithic towers? Is the street finding its own uses for things?

How could you do this to me? And more to the point, how could you do this to me and still act like Eberron's target genre is "slightly post-medieval medieval fantasy?"

Although I will confess that the lingering bits of medieval fantasy do bring something to the table. The dragonmarked houses are not megacorporations in the traditional sense because they have their origin in the Kingdom of Galifar, where they were organs of state power, a parallel aristocracy, forbidden to intermarry with the landowning gentry and denied certain traditional privileges in exchange for royal monopolies. There was no neoliberal privatization. Rather, the Last War lead to the government collapsing underneath the dragonmarked and the houses became "independent" and "neutral" (read: the worst kind of war profiteers). Manufacturing, medicine, transportation, even the fucking weather are all controlled by an imperialist rump state that's been retooled to operate exclusively for profit. It's like this world completely skipped the bourgeoise. Feudalism meets neofeudalism. 

I can't tell if that means Eberron is a really interesting setting or if it's merely a setting that's just complex enough for me to project my interests onto. Or, in other words, it's exactly what I look for in an rpg, and is shaping up to be one of my favorites.

Looking back, I've done the Thing again. I read a perfectly serviceable workhorse of a book and I got into my own head thinking about what it would be like if they made an entirely different book. So let me end this post with a genuine complaint (that'll show 'em what we think of "perfectly serviceable" round these parts) about the actual book - it doesn't adequately explain what an aberrant dragonmark is supposed to be.

Part of the setting backstory is the War of the Mark, where the dragonmarked houses with their normal, or "true" dragonmarks fought and eliminated all the bearers of these hundreds of different "aberrant" dragonmarks, many of which were (according to the history books) basically magical WMDs. And I always just sort of assumed that this distinction was political. That the War of the Mark happened for more pedestrian reason and the losers, by dint of not surviving long enough to ally with the Kingdom of Galifar, were labelled "aberrant" as a sort of ex post facto justification for the war's violence. And that the aberrant dragonmarks of the contemporary era emerged in the same way the Houses' marks did originally, but simply haven't been around long enough to form the social identity of a powerful extended family.

However, this book introduces new mechanics for aberrant dragonmarks and talks a bit about them in the abstract, and wouldn't you know it, they actually are different. Theu behave a bit differently re: inheritance and consistency of appearance, and they're conveniently color-coded so you can always tell an aberrant dragonmark when you see one.

It's clear that there has been some thought put into this behind the scenes. The book ends on an ominous note - the aberrant dragonmarks are increasing in both frequency and power, and though they have little in common with each other, they have a troubling tendency to cluster around "common themes" of "cold, fire, fear, death, and the ability to influence the minds of others." Spooky.

But not terribly useful. The book pitches (or at least hints at) a forthcoming War of the Mark, part 2, but it doesn't tell us what's at stake. The aberrant dragonmarks are explicitly called out as different, but does "different" automatically mean "bad?" I'm sure Eberron would not do something quite so obvious, but I'm very curious what non-obvious thing they were thinking of, exactly. 

I gotta count that as a flaw in an otherwise unobjectionable book. Consider yourself officially on notice, early 2000s Eberron, you get only six more chances from me!

Ukss Contribution: The Raincallers' Guild. A corporation that sells weather to people is absurdly frightening in a way that really speaks to our current historical moment. The externalities of that business model are wild to contemplate.

(Planescape 2e) A Guide to the Astral Plane

 Whoa! Surprise Planescape! It wasn't part of the plan, but I managed to find a copy of this rare book for 73 dollars, which is . . . maybe twice what is reasonable to pay but less than half of what it was going for at its peak so . . . I'm a smart shopper who makes responsible decisions?

Sigh. Who am I kidding? That gap on my list was driving me to distraction. If I ever find anything even close to a similar deal on Faction War, I'll probably try for a complete Planescape collection.

I think the reason A Guide to the Astral Plane (Monte Cook) became such a white whale for me is because, despite my occasional posturing, I'm exactly as vulnerable to the grid-filling compulsion as the authors of D&D. This here is a book that only exists because all of the other planes got their own individual or shared books and they couldn't consider the setting "complete" until they did them all. And I only bought it for the exact same reason. So if I ever gave the impression, what with my repeated statements of "Planescape is bad" or merciless mocking of end-page advertisements that claim Planescape is "Fantasy . . . Taken to the Edge", that I was somehow above it all or thought that I was better than you then let me clear it up once and for all: I'm not. I love what you do, and I'm honored to be here with you at the very bottom of the checklist, when you have run out of other things to do and are finally getting to the Astral Plane.

Actually, that's not entirely fair. I looked up the publication order and A Guide to the Ethereal Plane and The Inner Planes both came after this one. And upon reflection, I think those two books, in very different ways, felt more like late-period grid-filling than this one. A Guide to the Ethereal Plane felt like "the line is basically dead, so I might as well throw out all my wildest ideas and see what sticks." The Inner Planes felt like "the line is basically dead, so I might as well get this over with." A Guide to the Astral Plane, by contrast, feels like a book that was written under the assumption that Planescape had a future.

Lest you think I'm being too harsh here, I am absolutely certain that Monte Cook also thought the Astral Plane was a dud location and I have the textual evidence to back it up. The margin quote at the start of the Introduction:

"Boring? Where do you go for an interesting time?" - Someone who has visited the Astral talking to someone who hasn't?

And then, lest you think it was a one-off, a similar sentiment from a margin quote in Chapter One:

"Astral Plane? Oh, yeah, that's the place between us and them. Nothing there but conduits and dead gods. Hardly worth calling a plane." - Someone showing that planars can be as bad as the clueless.

The book never quite gets over this defensiveness. It's conspicuous. Also, hilariously, if you go by the subject matter of the book's chapters, the main shortcoming of the misguided planar in the second quote is that they forgot to mention the Githyanki. Other than that, the assessment is pretty spot on. This book is very much about proving wrong the conventional wisdom that the Astral Plane is boring.

And I guess it kind of succeeds. Like, I'm still of the belief that the only reason to go to the Astral Plane is because you're on your way to somewhere else, but I will concede that a game where the players spend a lot of time on the Astral Plane because they were waylaid on their way to somewhere else wouldn't necessarily be boring. You could be ejected from a damaged Astral Conduit, land on the petrified body of a dead god, and come into martial conflict with the Githyanki. It would be a memorable adventure.

At the risk of sounding impossibly back-handed and arch, I think the perfect encapsulation of this book (and perhaps even Planescape as a whole) comes from the tagline of the advertisement on the last page: "Fantasy . . . Taken to the Edge." That's exactly what Planescape does - it takes you to the edge and then sets up guard rails to make sure you don't actually go over.

For example, consider Anubis' new job, the self-appointed Guardian of Dead Gods. The book gives us an infinite, starry void where the bodies of dead gods float, stirring fitfully in their quiescence, unable to live and unable to truly, permanently die. The strange ichors that seep from their stony remains carry both temptations and dangers for those who would seek their power, but the scavenger mages must tread carefully, for the nightmares of an eternally dying god are themselves monsters of legend. . .

Also, if the Egyptian jackal-headed god of the dead spots you, he'll fucking nuke you from orbit. Not necessarily instantaneously or automatically, but also with no canon limitations that would stop him from doing it instantaneously or automatically. It's such a weird design decision, because it's unclear what you're even supposed to do with him as a DM. His mission is to stop mortals from desecrating and exploiting the corpses of the dead gods, but there's no difficulty dial there. If he doesn't show up, the PCs will get away with it (nightmare monsters notwithstanding) and if he does show up, they won't because he has literal godlike powers. And there's no reasonable way to predict or delay him showing up. He's basically a veto button that allows the DM to shut down any PC shenanigans that threaten to make the dead gods too disruptive to the campaign.

And it's like, yeah, dead gods floating through space, that's the edge of fantasy, at least in terms of D&D's conception of the genre. Planescape takes you right up to it. But in taking you to that edge, it kind of pushes the edge a little farther away and then refuses to take you there. You can raid a Githyanki outpost built on top of a dead god, or buy bootleg potions made from their extracted essences, but you can't break the magic item economy. You can't topple mortal kingdoms by coaxing the gods to dream apocalyptic nightmares. You won't gain mystic knowledge to overthrow the Lady of Pain. Hell, even the Athar citadel is built between the bodies of the dead gods, not touching any of them lest they draw the ire of Anubis.

I suspect that it's this unwillingness to break AD&D that keeps A Guide to the Astral Plane so closely tied to its "no, really, it's not boring, we promise" mission statement. The book doesn't talk enough about the rewards of venturing in the Astral. You can find something as breathtakingly monumental as a dead god, but you can't use the discovery to fuck shit up. It's the realm of pure thought, that transforms even those who enter physically into spiritual forms, but that mostly results in substituting your Intelligence score for your Strength score. You quite explicitly can't shape reality with the power of your mind. "This isn't the plane of wishes. A berk's mind just doesn't have that kind of power over the infinite Astral."

Likewise, time sort of stops for Astral travelers, holding the aging process in abeyance (though the years instantly catch up to you if you ever leave), but with the possible exception of (spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3) the Githyanki lich-queen Vlaakith, nobody seems to take much advantage of it. And despite all the mindstorms and psionic breezes and other weather-like phenomena that will bleed other people's thoughts into your head, there's no apparent way to weaponize or control the Astral plane's connection to individual minds. Basically, there are things to do in the Astral plane, but little reason to choose it as a destination in itself. It never escapes being "the place between us and them."

I guess writing this book was probably always a thankless task. Take the most interesting and original idea in the whole book - the Living Sea. Through some kind of magical nonsense, a permanent conduit to the Astral Plane opened up underneath some prime world's oceans. The result is a massive sphere of water, containing all manner of sea life that is slowly, but uncontrollably growing around the Astral end of the conduit. And because the Astral plane is the realm of thought, the water is now developing its own form of consciousness, as yet unable to communicate with interlopers but still showing troubling signs of becoming something beyond human comprehension.

Now, the tragedy of A Guide to the Astral Plane is that as interesting as this is, it is not half as interesting as the incidental revelation that there's no known way to close the conduit and so the Living Sea will continue to grow until the unknown prime world's oceans are completely drained. Even though it talked for less than a paragraph about the impossibility of going through the conduit backwards to visit the implied material world that would be experiencing this as a terrifying apocalyptic event where their sea levels are rapidly dropping for no apparent reason, just that little bit of speculation was enough to remind us that the Astral plane is vastly less interesting than the worlds it connects. The Astral side of the conduit is a scaled-down version of the Elemental Plane of Water and the Prime side of the conduit is epic cosmic fantasy in a world facing a rapidly-approaching doom. 

And I don't want this to sound like I'm down on Mr. Cooke's work. He created both sides of this story. I'm not reaching or inferring like I usually do. He tells us about drained seas, about how no one has yet contacted the prime world through other means, about the cultural implications of the sunken ships that have already been drawn through. I am certain that the thought of viewing this phenomenon from the other side has occurred to him and if it did, he almost certainly came to the same conclusions I did. What I'm saying here is that this dilemma, where interesting things in the Astral imply the existence of more interesting things on the worlds they came from, is probably inevitable. The only way to conceivably make it otherwise is to elevate the Astral Plane's importance, make it a source of power too potent to be ignored. And that would break AD&D, which sort of needs the Astral Plane to just stay "that place that makes the Teleport spell work."

Planescape - Fantasy . . . taken to the edge.

Ukss Contribution: A lot of extremely not boring things to choose from here, which makes my decision to choose something kind of boring especially ironic. You don't need to eat on the Astral plane and you don't get hungry if you don't. But when you leave, all those skipped meals catch up with you, just like your aging. So some enterprising planeswalkers have set up restaurants near the exits of prominent Astral conduits. That sort of cynicism is . . . enchantingly human.

(Eberron 3.5) Faiths of Eberron

 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Is Faiths of Eberron (Jennifer Clarke Wilkes, Ari Marmell, C.A, Suleiman) a D&D religion supplement that's actually good? I think it might be. Is it, in fact, the best religion supplement D&D has ever released? Quite possibly. I haven't read every D&D supplement to ever exist, but certainly none of the other books in my collection even come close. Does that mean that Faiths of Eberron is . . . great. . .

No, I think that might be going a little too far. No religion-focused rpg supplement can ever be great if it contains references to the alignment system. Alignment is like what would emerge if you gave the world's worst theologian their own daily podcast and they had to keep saying outrageous shit to fill out the runtime. Jordan Peterson never played a game of D&D in his life, accidentally invented a version of the alignment system based on Jungian psychology, and as a result nearly killed himself with an all-meat diet. The alignment system inspired something like four halfway decent memes before it ruined Batman. One big reason Faiths of Eberron is so good is that uses alignment sparingly.

But "sparingly" is different than "not at all."

The Silver Flame is Lawful Good. Canonically. (Oh, wait, in this context, that's a pun. . . I just gotta play it cool. . . it's going to be all right.)

Ahem. According to the book, The Silver Flame is Lawful Good. That doesn't necessarily tell us anything about any individual member of the Silver Flame, not even the high-ranking Cardinals. Eberron in general is cool like that. But the overall structure of the church itself? The intent behind its policies and those policies' effect on the world? Lawful Good.

And all I can think is that they're really taking these guys at face value. They're a hierarchal, militant, expansionist religion that orchestrated the theocratic takeover of a modern state and their stated goal is to purify the entire world, down even to the souls of mortal-kind, with a (sometimes literal) sacred fire and the book is like, "yeah, that basically tracks." They see the world as filled with evil and themselves as the only ones who can defeat that evil and there's a sidebar that gives us a nice little two-word thumbs up saying, "ulterior motives not detected."

Not that I'm saying the Silver Flame should be secretly evil or anything. I just wonder what criteria are being used to make these determinations. A little later, the kalashtar Path of Light gets a similar sidebar and it is pegged as Lawful Neutral. Their entire religion is based around ushering in a new age of hope through unwavering benevolence in both thought and deed. Is it because the Path of Light sometimes seems ineffectual ("they led the war against darkness through regular meditation")?

An even more pertinent contrast would be the worshippers of the Dark Six, specifically the ones who follow The Keeper. According to the lore of the Sovereign Host (Khorvaire's dominant religion) the Dark Six are evil gods who represent the dangerous and unpleasant aspects of the natural world. They also believe it is the fate of every soul (whether they worship the Dark Six, the Sovereign Host, or any other deity) after death to go to the plane of Dolurrh where they waste away in eternal purgatory. The Followers of the Dark Six believe that the Sovereign Host is lying about that. Dolurrh is really a place of punishment and the gods are secretly saving the elect, removing their souls to an unknowable paradise. The Sovereign Host says that when a soul appears to go missing, it's because the Keeper eats it. The Dark Six say the souls are missing because the Keeper lifted up the velvet rope.

The frustrating thing about alignment and the reason it's so toxic to a book that does seem to be genuinely trying to approach the subject of religion with sensitivity and nuance is that we know canonically which side of this argument is correct. The Sovereign Host, collectively as a pantheon, is Neutral Good. The Dark Six, again as an overall pantheon, are Neutral Evil.

So you've got the Silver Flame, whose main deal is "We've given ourselves a license for unlimited violence purely at our own discretion, and we've determined that the werewolf genocide was completely justified" (enough that there's a whole monastic order of shifters who seek atonement for their very existence) and they're positioned as being essentially truthful, or at least well-intentioned. But the followers of the Keeper are saying "the gods have perpetrated a monstrous fraud on mortal-kind and that's why we worship the creepy death god that they've so unfairly maligned" and the implication is that they are either lying or, at best, useful idiots.

The obvious rebuttal would, of course, be that this bias is not arbitrary. The gods themselves are specific characters with well-defined personalities and if the book says that the Keeper is Neutral Evil then. obviously, he can't be the good guy his followers say he is.

I'll let the Introduction answer that objection for me:

The gods of Eberron do not actively involve themselves in the world as the gods of other settings do. They are distant - if they exist at all. A commune spell contacts outsiders such as angels, not the gods themselves. Clerics gain their spells from their own faith, not from divine intervention.

But the people of Eberron know what is true as far as their faith is concerned. Never mind that one truth might completely contradict another. The gods' presence in the world is real, although seen in different ways. This book presents religious information through the eyes of believers, often stating as fact events that more properly belong in myth or legend.

And don't get me wrong, this approach is often reflected in the text and when it is it makes Faiths of Eberron D&D's best religion book. But what holds it back from greatness is that this culture-first methodology isn't always followed with a great deal of rigor.

I'm pretty sure the sidebars are meant to be out-of-character and objective, both because they contain mechanics information like a list of cleric domains and because I'm absolutely certain that the followers of the Path of Light do not see themselves as Lawful Neutral. If a cleric gains spells from their own faith, then shouldn't their class mechanics reflect what they believe that they're doing?

An important bit of context I deliberately left out is that followers of the Keeper practice human sacrifice. And I'm sure some of you are screaming at me for wasting everyone's time with this deception, because of course the cult that is trying to bribe the god of death with ritual murders is Neutral Evil, even if they do have a legitimate grievance with the other gods. 

But the Introduction gives more context to that context - namely, no one asked them to do that. It's something they decided to do on their own. The ritual murder isn't something they're doing to appease their dark god, the character of the dark god is whatever it needs to be to justify their ritual murder. And yeah, people don't always choose what to believe, so it's not as cut-and-dried a situation as I'm making it sound, but the general reversal in the direction of causality is something that should change how you talk about these beliefs.

Most people do not think of themselves as evil. Even when they're actively hurting others in undeniable ways, they'll frame it as defending themselves from danger or punishing a crime, which is why you must always be wary of rhetoric that refers to minority populations with the language of contagion or criminality. It often comes from a dominant group trying to talk itself into committing an atrocity. If I were going to create an "evil" religion for a fantasy setting, I'd probably give it a bunch of "good-coded" trappings coupled with rhetoric about cleansing the world of evil, an unaccountable inquisition that enforces orthodoxy as interpreted exclusively by people fanatical enough to join the office of the inquisition, and then have them slot people who don't obey them or conform to their social standards into the category of "evil that must be cleansed." (The Silver Flame only openly does the first two things. The book reassures us that the third doesn't happen . . . much).

For a group to openly and willingly identify as evil . . . well, I'm not saying it doesn't happen. And I'm definitely not saying that we should be as skeptical of their self-assessment as we are of the Fantasy Church of Violent Purification's and assume they're secretly good. It's just, there's probably something deeper and stranger at work there.

The Dark Six are a part of the Sovereign Host's theology. The Nine represent forces or impulses that are believed to strengthen the dominant culture of Khorvaire and the Six represent forces or impulses that are believed to weaken it. The Dark Six exist so that the Sovereign Host can say "this is what we are not." They are antagonists and outsiders, but they are inextricably bound to the pantheon that "exiled" them. Therefor, any open worshippers of the Dark Six must be people who were encultured in the faith of the Sovereign Host and then decided to embrace an identity as antagonists or outsiders. It's the only way their behavior makes any fucking sense.

A group like the cult of the Keeper who are so antagonistic and such outsiders that they kidnap and murder people in the name of their god, they probably don't think of themselves are heroes and maybe don't even believe their violence is justified. And they are definitely not "good from a certain point of view" or any other soft subjectivist nonsense. But that sort of values collapse doesn't just happen for no reason. In the world of Eberron, the likeliest explanation is trauma from the Last War. If the religion you were raised in teaches that the afterlife is little more than a landfill where the leftover life energy of deceased mortal goes to slowly decay, and you'd just witnessed a generations'-long war, where millions have died, come to a tenuous and inconclusive end, then thought of all those beautiful young men and women, spent and wasted so callously by so-called "pillars of the community," only to earn the slow rot of the grave for their sacrifice might fill you with an incalculable rage and grief. Perhaps it will even be great enough for you to shake the hand of the devil himself and offer him anything he asks to spare you and your remaining loved ones the same terrible fate. That might be enough to explain how you became a Neutral Evil priest when it was only ever your personal beliefs that stopped you from being literally anything else.

But the book doesn't really do that. Despite the Introduction, it largely acts as if the gods are real. The behavior of their followers is determined by the character of the god, rather than the character of the god being revealed by the behavior of their followers. 

To the book's credit, this is usually just a starting point though. What makes it a "good but missed opportunity for great" supplement is the way it devotes space to talking about things like casual religious observances, weddings and funerals, calendars, and occasionally even fashion. If it doesn't quite center humanist explanations the way I might prefer, at least it remembers to present religion as culture in addition to all the fantasy nonsense. 

Faiths of Eberron was a late purchase for me, bought for more than was entirely sensible, and only after it became clear that a complete 3.5 collection was in reach. Despite all that, I'm glad I bit the bullet here. It's my favorite Eberron book yet.

Ukss Contribution: This is a book of ideas, and I fucking love ideas. My notes are longer than they've been in a long time, and I barely used any of them (I might not be the most . . . conscientious reviewer out there).

Priests of the Traveler (a Neutral trickster god lumped in with the Dark Six) will perform services in the nude. 

In the description of the Sovereign Host, it takes pains to remind us that "evil people farm the land as well as good," which is just a remarkable line. Fantasy fiction needs more evil farmers. 

The Aereni elves are back with their rainbow sprinkle princess necromancy that they insist is totally different than the Blood of Vol's chocolate sprinkle goth necromancy. 

The warforged followers of the Becoming God (alignment: neutral, presumably because "totally metal" wasn't an option) believe that they must manufacture a body for their god and whenever they find a likely-looking part they take it to a priest who attaches it to their body until such time as they find the lost First Creation Forge where the warforged were born. Experienced priests look like walking junk piles as they carry both the metaphorical and the literal burden of their people's hopes.

And all those things and more delighted me, or intrigued me, or surprised me. But there's one thing above all others that inspired me - The Blood of Vol uses a slightly different calendar than the rest of Khorvaire. One of its important holidays occurs "during Cyra, the thirteenth and 'lost' month of the year."

Later, we learn the (by fantasy standards) mundane explanation for this - the calendar was reformed after Eberron's thirteenth moon vanished from the cosmos with the sealing of the plane of madness - and the Vol calendar is just the regular year divided into thirteen months rather than twelve. But when I first read it, I flipped my fucking shit. A lost month?! What kind of high-grade time-fuckery is this? I'm thinking a month that happens between days, that you can only experience if you fall out of sync with the rest of the world, and which you can't escape until it's over. I have only the vaguest idea about how I'm going to realize this, but I'm excited to try.

(Exalted 3e) Arms of the Chosen

 Arms of the Chosen is one of those rare books where I love everything about it except certain fundamental, load-bearing design decisions so I kind of feel obligated to effusively praise it even as I propose tearing it down to its foundations and rebuilding it from scratch.

Might as well get started, I guess. Step one: explaining the premise of the book. Basically, in Exalted 3rd Edition (aka "the one with a shit load of charms") the most powerful magic items have the ability to grow in power alongside your character, unlocking "Evocations" (aka "a shit load of charms") that allow you to use appropriately themed special moves. Get yourself the Black Jade sword known as "Mistweaver" and at Essence 1 you're calling up fog in your immediate vicinity and at Essence 4, with 5 charm purchases, you're calling up climate-altering cursed mists that blanket regions hundreds of miles across. Broadly speaking, this is both cool and good. I liked it when it was called "thread items" in Earthdawn and when it was called "weapons of legacy" in D&D, and I like it here.

Now to step two: the "but." I like the idea of Evocation trees in the abstract, but scaling a magic item's power to keep pace with a character's power is not so straightforward a task in an exception-based point-buy system where your power stat is less of a strict level mechanic and more of a character advancement chokepoint. Like, to get that deadly megafog from Mistweaver, you have to both be near the apex of character power (having played for at least 40 sessions at the default xp gain rate) and you've got to spend five charms worth of xp (about 10-15 sessions depending on whether you spend general or solar xp, though potentially as few as 6 if you spend both and always get the full bonus). By my most generous estimates, that's 15% of your character advancement resources tied up into this thing, so that you can use your (admittedly impressive) super move once per story. 

On its own, that's a neutral piece of data. Maybe it compares poorly to investing in Solar Stealth or Solar Melee, but you can slow walk it by only buying Evocations with Solar xp, so you're not necessarily facing a huge opportunity cost. The worst thing you can say about it is that it's a lateral move from being a character without an artifact and that you're only getting benefits proportional to your investment, just like you would with any other form of character advancement. And even that's underselling it a bit. Generally speaking, it's better to buy charms than mundane traits, which is why Exalted 3e gives you a second kind of character advancement currency that can't normally be spent on charms. It's a significant advantage that artifacts let you bend the rules by giving you charms that you can buy with your "mundane" budget. 

Where the Evocation system loses the plot is in equating the potential to invest more xp with an increase in item power. The guidelines are Artifact 3: 10 evocations, Artifact 4: 15 evocations, Artifact 5: unlimited evocations. And the book doesn't seem to realize that a longer shopping list is simply a promise to eat up more of your resources, nor that player characters don't actually benefit from higher ceilings they're never going to reach. In fact, you could make an argument that the best artifacts are the ones with short, tight evocation trees that let you access the artifact's gimmick right away and then beeline to its ultimate form with no more than 1 or 2 charm purchases per Essence level. 

From a char-op theorycrafting perspective, the unlimited evocations of Artifact 5 might technically be worthwhile, in the sense that they would allow you to convert 100% of your solar xp into charms, but this is something we can put concrete numbers to because xp progression in Exalted 3e is rather rigorously metered out. You get 5 regular xp per session, and advance Essence level after 10, 15, 15, and 20 sessions respectively. You can also get a maximum of 4 solar xp every time you gain regular xp. So the optimal evocation progression is one that lets you spend 40 solar xp on Essence 1 evocations, 60 each on Essence 2 and 3, 80 on Essence 4, and then unlimited on Essence 5. In other words, the theoretical maximum number of useful evocations is 24 at Essence ratings 1-4, plus one for every 2.5 sessions your game endures at Essence 5. Except that you're probably not going to get the full solar xp bonus every time, and even with the potential for evocations you're probably still going to want a few dots of mundane traits to meet charm prerequisites and round out character weaknesses, and your year-long Essence 5 game is probably not going to last too much longer than 65-75 sessions. So it's entirely reasonable to cut that maximum in half and still be pretty close to optimal. That's 12 evocations at Essence 1-4 and 2-3 at Essence 5. In other words, an Artifact 4. 

But what's especially funny is that while Artifact 3 doesn't quite get you to the theoretical ceiling and Artifact 5 is likely to never need its excess capacity, the structure of the game is such that you don't even need to have your full ceiling in the form of a single artifact. You are practically guaranteed the opportunity to loot evocation-capable equipment from enemy Exalted and are only slightly less likely to get artifacts from dungeon-crawling, crafting, or bargains with terrible inhuman powers. Just the simple, nearly inevitable combination of a rating 3 artifact weapon and rating 3 artifact armor gives you a maximum of 20 evocations, which blows right past the practical limit and comes pretty close to the hard limit. 

Which is to say, I think all artifacts should allow for unlimited evocations. If a player is really going to go all-in on investing in the Distaff or the Heaven and Earth Gauntlets, I say that's a gift to the group more than anything else. The absolute "worst" case scenario is that they somehow get two artifacts' worth of evocations while only carrying around one artifact. And honestly, that's better, both from a gameplay perspective (see: D&D's "golfbag of weapons") and from the perspective of the essential genre fantasy that evocations were meant to enable - a legendary hero whose signature weapon is so iconic that it becomes a legend in its own right. If a player character is going to invest more than 100xp into the giant paintbrush with bristles so sharp it acts like a magical spear, well maybe that thing deserves a brevet promotion to a higher artifact level. It's not even lore incompatible. If an Exalted smith can coax magic from metal by incorporating essence into the forging, who's to say that's a process that has to end when the metal cools. Maybe artifacts are built with a certain inherent potential, but that potential can be expanded by channeling boatloads of essence into them every day for years at a time.

All I know is that on a practical level, a cap that is never reached is not a real limitation and a cap that is reached is a powerful message about player preferences, so I'm not sure what purpose the evocation limit even serves. But that's something to contemplate in step 4. Step three is "put another slice of wholesome bread on this compliment sandwich because I'm starting to sound misleadingly negative."

Almost all the artifacts in this book are really fucking cool. And I'm only saying "almost" as a hedge. I can't actually think of any examples I disliked. You can get something called a "razor parasol" and the example here is Rainwalker, which lets you mitigate falling damage and banish rainclouds, up to and including malevolent sorcerous weather like the Rain of Doom spell. There's a suit of armor that lets you cosplay as a demon. You can walk around hell, and the demons will be like, "oh, there goes Sozen, the famous demon who definitely really exists and is not just a demon-sona made up by some long-dead artisan and snuck into hell's census by a corrupt apostate priest." If people try to read your mind, they'll just learn the hypothetical demon's hypothetical thoughts instead. Oh, and then the last item in the book is a warstrider (magitech mech suit) that is not even trying to hide the fact that it's a bootleg Eva Unit-01. Magic item books in general are a great format. Exalted's magic item books have always had an appealing audacity besides. And Arms of the Chosen is worthy example of both.

Which is why step 4 - complaining about the mechanics some more - is going to be so painful. I talked a lot about scaling and reaching evocation caps, but 3rd edition artifacts have some much more immediate problems, the biggest and most easily dismissible of which is that the evocation trees in the book are not meant to be canonical. Theoretically, each and every wielder of a particular item is supposed to create their own custom tree based on their personal relationship with the item. Nobody actually wants this and nobody is going to do it, but it's only a problem conceptually because the ideal form of a 3e artifact is a charm tree 4-7 charms long that expresses a growing escalation of the item's basic schtick . . . and the published items mostly deliver that. A few of the example evocations have solar charms as prerequisites, and I don't love that as a mechanic, but I paid closer attention to them this readthrough and I didn't notice any solar charms acting as bottlenecks to an artifact's most iconic powers (for example, non-solars can access Mistweaver's deadly fog just fine, despite one of the evocations giving solar melee charms the mute keyword), so the book is only slightly less useful to other exalts. I'd much rather have a set suite of core functions and then the narrative permission to customize further, but since this is easy as hell to houserule ("no, you don't have to create your own evocations, you can just use the ones in the book"), the problem is more of chimera than a serious flaw.

The main thing that I'd call a problem in the pragmatic sense is the fact that evocations are Essence-gated. This is something that kind of works narratively, and has a practical justification in terms of gameplay, but which I really don't like as a genre element. 

Narratively, you could argue that while artifacts, broadly speaking, "do things," they don't necessarily do those things on their own. They could require a source of power. Hook your fog generator to a weak battery, get a cloud that spreads out a few dozen feet. Hook it to a big honking battery and you can spread a fog out a hundred miles and make it last indefinitely. And when it comes to characters in the Exalted universe, their "battery," so to speak, is their Essence rating. This makes sense and while artifacts have traditionally been powered by motes, making the permanent Essence rating more of a soft limit than a hard one, it's an element that's been in the series since the beginning. A daiklave in the hands of an attuned wielder is a majestic and terrible weapon and in the hands of a regular person it is nothing more than an extremely inconvenient slab of inert metal.

With the gameplay, it's even simpler. Character powers in general get stronger as the characters rise in Essence rating. If Artifact powers were not gated behind Essence rating, then you could potentially have a starting character tossing around effects better suited for an Essence 5 game.

The problem with both these points, though, is that they're kind of bullshit. As far as gameplay is concerned - well, this is Exalted. Starting characters tossing around haxxor super powers is, like, right in its wheelhouse. Previous editions let you start at Essence 4 (at the cost of nerfing your character in other significant ways) and even though 3e is the first to make you start at Essence 1, it also gives solar, abyssal, and infernal exalted a special mechanic to access Essence 5 effects as a starting character. So, like, I don't think it's terrible for the game's balance if a callow young Dragon-Blooded is able to take up their family's ancestral blade and test its top evocations against a solar's supernal melee. In fact, I think it's pretty badass. Sure, the kid is only a threat because of an item they carry, but this thing has been passed down for generations, it's okay if it lives up to the hype.

Which leads into the bullshit part of the narrative. Magic items are a form of technology and technology, even in fantasy fiction, is supposed to be a bit of an equalizer. It can take skill and knowledge and generalized "power" to wield to its utmost potential, but it should also be something you want to keep out of the hands of novices, lest they gain terrible power without the wisdom or experience to use it safely.

Ideally, a magic item should probably be like a real world tank. You take someone like me and put me up against an experienced tank driver in a tank v tank battle, I'm going to get absolutely destroyed, with no reasonable chance of victory. However, it is likely possible to teach me enough about tank operations in a shockingly short amount of time for me to pose a terrible danger to anyone not fortunate enough to be hiding behind anti-tank armor. I think evocations, conceptually, are a good way to model this, but by gating the big effects behind a high essence rating, you're backloading the good stuff to an undesirable degree.

Imagine - big news! A Scavenger Lord's dilettante child came back from a dig bearing the infamous devil blade, Gorgon, which has been known to consume souls and turn whole armies to stone with its baleful gaze. Oh, no, now they're waving it around carelessly, shaking it ominously at passersby. Not to worry, though, they're not an Essence 5 exalt, so the worst thing that can happen is the creepy eye on the side might open all the way.

Kind of a bummer, and not very thematic. Though the real issue is that this sick-ass blade has a really cool iconic power and your players aren't going to see it for sixty sessions, minimum. It's all very "when will we get to the fireworks factory?" I think there's room to do better here.

It's an issue that sort of dovetails with the other big mechanic I don't really care for - material resonance. Basically, it's an important bit of lore that each Exalted type has its own signature magical material and that when an exalt uses an artifact made of their signature material, they get an extra boost. Fair enough. And it is something that contributes a lot to the game's look and feel. Except that they decided, not unreasonably, that material resonance put characters into pigeonholes and cut them off from too many mechanical and aesthetic options (it also doesn't help the setting when you can look at someone holding an orichalcum sword and safely assume they're a solar exalted, because that means solar PCs are also effectively cut off from their own signature material, at least until they're powerful enough to openly defy the wyld hunt). 

But then, instead of just getting rid of resonance as something with mechanical weight, they decided to expand it by creating three states of material resonance - full resonance, neutral resonance and dissonance, and instead of downplaying the difference between these states, they made them even more important by giving evocations the "dissonant" and "resonant" keywords. And the dissonant keyword is so bad that you'd almost never take a dissonant artifact in preference to a neutral one and the resonant keyword is so good that you'd almost never take a neutral artifact in preference to a resonant one. 

I think the intent was to create a system similar to the divisions between circles of sorcery or levels of martial arts initiation, except that it completely messes up the incentives. The point is that terrestrial martial arts and spells compare favorably to terrestrial charms, celestial martial arts and spells compare favorably to celestial charms, and sidereal martial arts and solar circle spells compare favorably to solar charms. The limit of what you could access was tied to your exalt type, so that martial artists and sorcerers have options that won't unduly diminish or enhance their overall effectiveness. The resonance/dissonance split creates a similar tiered structure, except that dissonant evocations compare unfavorably to resonant evocations . . . which are mechanically identical to acquire. 

So you've got some weird outcomes where you can put a dissonant tag on a starmetal item's evocations and this only applies to liminal and (some) exigent exalted, and even then only to the ones who deliberately chose to pick the worst possible item and then invest dozens of xp into it. It's the most thoroughly useless keyword imaginable, because the only time it's ever going to apply is when a player is engaged in behavior I absolutely do not want to punish.

I figure the solution to the resonance problem and the solution to the backloading of cool powers is one and the same - replace Essence gating with a more free-form "Harmony rating" where you basically meet an item's prerequisites by checking boxes off a list - maybe there's an intimacy you can have at major/defining, a particular type of hearthstone you can socket in the item, a regular sacrifice or ritual you have to perform, or a particular deed you have to accomplish. And maybe, if your exalt type is resonant with the material, you get a little boost to your harmony score and if it's dissonant, maybe you have to buy off the penalty with an extra task, but it's all role-playing so the only real penalty to wielding a "dissonant" weapon is that you have to make it a larger part of your character's personality (which is presumably what you wanted to do when you made such an unconventional choice in the first place).

I don't know, I'm just spitballing here. I think I've gone on for too long and should move quickly to step five - closing up the compliment sandwich.

I like this book a lot. For all my complaints, it really delivers when it comes to making magic items feel like a big deal. I could see myself unironically shouting, "Holy shit! You got Stormcaller!" which isn't necessarily something I could do in previous editions. All that stuff I was talking about before are just things I might conceivably do when I inevitably write a guerilla 4th edition after the game goes on a long hiatus. For now, I respect that they tried something new and will always remember Arms of the Chosen as one of the highlights of 3rd edition.

Ukss Contribution: Another situation where I'm spoiled for choice. I liked pretty much every artifact and loved a significant portion of them - Flying Silver Dream, the sword that fights for you, the weaponized umbrella, at least three different heavy metal swords. It's almost too much.

If I have to pick just one, though, I think it will be Asphodel, the magical mace that houses the ghost of an ancient sorcerer and the ephemeral kingdom he rules. With the right evocations, you can pop in for a little visit, banish your enemies to ghost prison, and even borrow the undead sorcerer king's treasures and servants. It's like having a friendly neighbor and vacation hideaway that you carry with you at all times. Plus, the politics and metaphysics of this thing are fascinating.

(Eberron 3.5) Secrets of Xen'drik

My first order of business before writing about Secrets of Xen'drik (Keith Baker, Jason Bulmahn, Amber Scott) is determining exactly how many secrets Xen'drik actually has. Because by my least generous count, it's only one and the book should really be called "Secret of Xen'drik." 

Although, to be fair, it's entirely possible that I'm just being an asshole and my standards for what qualifies as a "secret" are way too high. Sure, there's no way that the layout of the city of Stormreach is a secret, but you could probably argue that the death giant Prokres doesn't want to advertise his scheme to reassemble the Shard of Arcane Endowment to all and sundry. However, stuff like that is only really a secret in the context of the setting. I kind of feel like the title of the book is something directed at me, the real-world human reading the book, and thus for something to be a "secret" of Xen'drik, it can't just be new information about Xen'drik that I'm learning for the first time, it has to be something that the creators of Eberron already knew before this book was written and just deliberately decided not to reveal until now. And of the stuff I learned about Xen'drik from this book, only one fact rose to a level of "surprising but fundamental backstory" that makes me consider deploying a spoiler warning before discussing it here.

SPOILER WARNING (it's not going to be blocked because I'm going to have to talk about it for a considerable length of time, so this is your last chance at turning back if you're invested in being surprised by Eberron canon):

The very first warforged were created by the quori of a previous age, to use as a weapon against the giant civilization of Xen'drik c. 40,000 ya.

Whoa.

Okay, if you really parse it down, that's actually two secrets in one, because we're also getting the first explicit talk about the cyclic nature of Dal Quor and how each turning of a Dal Quor age sort of "resets" the quori and changes the nature of their existence, with the previous age being centered around "The Dreaming Heart" instead of "The Dreaming Dark." But I'd argue that's less a secret of Xen'drik and more a secret of Dal Quor that just happens to be relevant to a secret of Xen'drik. So really, the title of the book should be "A Secret of Xen'drik and a Secret in Xen'drik and Also Some Useful Information About Xen'Drik for DMs Who Want to Run Games There, Some of Which They May Wish to Keep Secret from Players, but Which Won't Actually be All That Surprising to People Reading the Books for Pleasure 20 Years from Now."

I could just be overthinking it, though. "Secrets" is a fair enough substitute for "information" in casual usage that the title of the book doesn't actually feel like a lie. If I make too big a deal of it, it's just going to look I'm hamming it up for content. . . 

(You're welcome.)

Anyway, about that secret. I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, I really, really like that a dangling lore question got a canonical answer. Previous books were oh so coy with their "Merrix d'Cannith claimed to have invented the warforged, but ruins in Xen'drik suggest that something very much like the warforged existed for far longer than the people of Khorvaire believe" so it's both surprising and welcome to get a definitive who, when, and why for this. I understand why rpgs do it, but I always find "the real answer is whatever works best for your game" to be an unsatisfying way to fill these lacunae.

On the other hand, thematically, it's kind of a frustrating reveal. I'd have greatly preferred it if the warforged were a novel invention of the Last War. Because that would have been a genuinely post-medieval story. New inventions leading to new weapons and tactics, with unprecedented destructive potential. Are humanity's knowledge and power growing faster than their wisdom? Yeah, you can do a story that's post-medieval by way of post-apocalyptic and frame it as "humanity reinventing a technology that helped destroy a previous civilization that once thought of itself as powerful, and it appears that they're making all the same mistakes." But that's a 20th century theme, and for Eberron I'd really prefer a 19th century theme. 

My real diagnosis is that it's just D&D's genre conservatism sneaking in. If you've got something that looks like advanced technology, it's okay only so long as it is the salvaged legacy of a forgotten golden age. People in laboratories, learning things about nature, and then writing papers about what they learned so engineers can make new inventions based on the papers . . . that's out of bounds. Because nostalgia over a lost past is a fantasy vibe, and abandoning the past for the temptation of the new is a science-fiction vibe. 

DAMNIT, WIZARDS OF THE COAST, LET ME PLAY A KOBOLD THAT EXPERIENCES MODERNIST MORAL VERTIGO! Is that really too much to ask?

I have to hope that it isn't, because there is one type of post-medieval story that Eberron seems eager to tell, and it turns out to be kind of uncomfortable when divorced from any potential discussion of technological and scientific hubris - the story of a powerful culture sending its dangerous fuck-ups into the territory of a less powerful culture whereupon they proceed to fuck shit up for the glory of capitalism. 

There's a new creature called a Dream Serpent, whose scales and fangs are valuable commodities. One of the sample adventures has an NPC sending you to the Dream Serpent nesting grounds, to bring back said commodities (via more or less indiscriminate slaughter). And one of the obstacles you might face on this mission is a run in with the native Drow or Yuan-ti (depending on the party level) who are violently upset that you ignored the clearly posted sign that said (actual quote) "the ground beyond is holy . . . trespassers will be punished severely."

So, in the real world, we have a term for the activities described in this adventure. It's "the crime of poaching." And we have a term for what the natives are doing when they attack the PCs. It's "enforcing the law against poaching." Yet the PCs will most likely end the adventure keeping the skins and getting paid. There's, like, a good ending where they had the ecological foresight not to kill the young snakes and they're able to negotiate ex post facto with the Drow whose permission they neglected to secure and they get away scott free. And there's a medium bad ending where they kill the hunters sent out to punish them and get away scott free. (The bad bad ending of a law enforcement TPK is only implicit in the structure of the game itself). And in precisely none of these does the book seem at all aware that it's telling a story where the villains win.

I can't say for sure that this sort of story would come off better if the warforged were initially created in a Cannith laboratory. The two subjects aren't technically related, after all. However, my gut tells me that you don't tell the technological story unless you're consciously building a 19th century world, and if you're consciously building a 19th century world, you're going to tell the poaching story much more carefully than you would if you're just building a medieval fantasy world where some magic replicates certain 19th century technologies. Hunting a rare monster for personal financial gain feels very different if you're a peasant trespassing in the king's game reserve than if you're a mercenary tourist fleeing fantasy-WW1 for fantasy Africa. 

I really enjoy a certain semi-canonical interpretation of Eberron, but I do not enjoy the way Eberron tries to have it both ways. Humanist enough to treat lycanthropy as a disease worthy of compassion, not quite humanist enough to examine the colonialist hypocrisy of rampantly plundering a continent's natural resources simply because the natives regard them as merely "holy" instead of "valuable" or "critically endangered." I'd tell them to pick a lane, but I don't entirely trust them to pick the right one. So I'll say instead that they should get in the lane I picked out for them - fantasy that reflects the growing complexities of a world fitfully transitioning to modernism and is self-aware enough to question whether certain historical bad behaviors were truly inevitable. The thing that draws me to the series are the occasional glimpses that they might eventually get there. I just have to ignore my common sense intuition when it tells me there's not enough of the series left for them to stick the landing.

Ukss Contribution: There's a lot of good stuff here. Like, I can't deny that there's an element of orientalist exoticism going on with the game's presentation of the "continent of mystery," but one of the frustrating things about D&D is that orientalism is one of the few consistent ways to get the game to pull the stick out of its ass. Stormreach is a city that seems tiny in scale because it's built inside the ruins of a giant city. There's a bird who has magical properties because it feeds on magical flowers. One of the sample maps has you swimming through phosphorescent algae. These are all things that could fit effortlessly into a "standard medieval fantasy" setting, but don't because the authors rarely give themselves that sort of license to invent. 

My favorite example of this - lizard folk who fly around in hang gliders. The book makes it a point to mention that they are "primitive hang gliders" and the lizard folk are using them to attack "civilized settlements" (because of the aforementioned orientalism), but I find myself in a position to be considerably more chill about it. Glide away, you beautiful lizard people, Ukss will be waiting for you when you land!

(Exalted 3e) Miracles of the Divine Flame

 Okay, I think we finally have enough information to officially call it: The Exigent Exalted are an untenable character type. I know, I know, devastating news, but we have to face facts. Miracles of the Divine Flame was as good an Exigents supplement as anyone is ever going to make (maybe even as good an Exigents supplement as it's realistically possible to make) and it did nothing but exacerbate the fundamental problems with the splat.

Which is to say Exigents: Out of the Ashes gave us a 400-page book that allowed us to play 8 distinct characters, its crowdfunded stretch goal gave us 200 more pages that allowed us to play 8 different distinct characters, and my main take-away from both is that it would be both super cool and super onerous to play a 17th distinct character. 

The new characters are amazing. Play the Foxbinder and you're in this magical buddy cop story. You can ride a giant fox! He can turn into a sword, or a hat, or switch places with you to confuse your enemies. He's also a naughty little scamp who will take advantage of your lapses in concentration to play pranks on you. It's wholesome. It's whimsical. It's funny. It's an eloquent demonstration of the strengths of asymmetrical, exception-based splat design. 

It's also an eloquent reminder that you're never going to fucking homebrew this stuff, who the fuck do you think you're kidding with that shit? I mean, each of the new Exigents had between 40-50 charms, which is on the far side of realistic, and enough to get you up to a 280xp game, even assuming you spent your xp on nothing but favored charms. That's more than a year of weekly sessions. You could pace yourself. Whip up the first 15 charms prior to session 0, then three more every five weeks. It's not like a full-time job or anything.

But that's not how these things work. You don't build a character around the selection of your first 15 charms. You select your first 15 charms based on your plans for your character. The stuff deeper into the charm tree is the bait on the hook. Nobody's salivating over the phenomenal cosmic power of getting double 9s on a persuade roll that cites a popular aphorism, they're looking forward to the day when they can scribe magical laws on floating scrolls of fire that will burn alive any who transgress against them. This sense of charm sets as, basically . . . shopping lists, that's important. In fact, it's the whole point of the exercise.

So you could probably get away with just writing the first 15 charms, but you couldn't do it without the idea of the shopping list. If you're going to be excited about the character (and you should, it leads to better games), then you're going to have to be excited about the charms you plan to write. It's dangerously close to a circular problem. You can avoid writing a whole charm set by just writing the beginning, but in order to write the beginning, you have to know how it's going to end. And it would be a lot easier to know how it will end if you actually wrote the ending. But if you write the ending, then you haven't actually saved yourself all that much time.

It's not necessarily an intractable problem, but it's something that could benefit greatly from the sort of high level design work that doesn't always come easy. The Chosen of Plentimon, God of Dice gets a cool ability called the "Fortune Pool," where they skim off extra successes from easy rolls to add them back into hard rolls and a lot of their charmset involves expanding the Fortune Pool, coming up with new uses for the reserved dice, and eventually doing tricky stuff like saving failed dice to add to your enemies' rolls. That's a whole-ass vision. It's taking the idea of splat asymmetry and using it to experiment with storyteller system mechanics. Which is wholly great, sure, but it sets a high bar if I ever want to make an Exigent of Iphira, Goddess of Fermented Apples. 

Which is why I've come to the reluctant conclusion that Exigents are untenable. They're a splat powered by the optimistic assumption that the fandom's energy and passion is effectively infinite. I absolutely want to play as Pakpao the puppeteer or Tamako the Foxbinder or, honestly, any of the completed (or mostly completed) Exigents, but the cost/benefit split for literally any of the unrealized options (even the really strong contenders like Five Days Darkness or Madame Marthesine) is simply not there. At least not for me, and I'm about as passionate about Exalted as it's possible to get.

So I guess, overall, I'd say that Miracles of the Divine Flame is a really good book, almost pure value from cover to cover and arguably the most essential of the crowdfunded stretch goal books. The fact that it's the book's high quality that winds up arguing most persuasively against Exigents as a general idea is a fascinating artistic paradox.

Ukss Contribution: Surprise! My favorite thing was Pakpao again! She gets a charm where her shadow swallows up an enemy, chokes them to death, and then spits out a puppet that looks a lot like them.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how Ukss will ever be able to handle double Pakpao, so I have to go with my second choice (which sort of resembles Pakpao's whole deal, but only coincidentally) - the patron deity of the Thousand Venoms Mistress, Whirling Lady Koro-Bana, Goddess of Self-Made Widows.

I don't know what it is, but the phrase "self-made widow" tickles me greatly. It's fun to imagine they have their own goddess.