(Eberron 3.5) Adventurer's Guide to Eberron

 The thing about being a completionist when it comes to rpg collecting is that sometimes rpgs will release books that are absolutely not meant for completionists. An Adventurer's Guide to Eberron (Logan Bonner and Chris Sims) told me precisely nothing that I didn't already know. It's basically just a recap of the concept of Eberron. Sixty beautifully illustrated pages, covering 50 different topics ranging from Warforged to Dragonmarks to Xen'drik. Honestly, the whole thing read like the pamphlet Wizards of the Coast might create if they were trying to sell the IP to Hollywood. 

I'm very much at a loss for words about this book. It's a rapid-fire tour of the setting, seemingly created for total newbs, so basic it explains in a parenthetical that an inquisitive is a detective, a lich is "an intelligent undead spellcaster," and that divination magic is "used to read the future and the past." I enjoyed reading it, it was a nice way to wrap up the series, but it very clearly wasn't for me.

I guess I'm kind of curious about the strategy behind this book. It was published in 2008, more than a year before the 4e Eberron book and I guess people were just supposed to read it and be reminded that Eberron exists? Rush out and buy the third edition overstock before the edition change? Get excited for a campaign setting months in advance?

Whatever it was, they must have done something right, because I'm talking about it.

Overall, An Adventurer's Guide to Eberron was sort of like those clip show episodes old tv shows used to do to save on their budgets. It wasn't as good as the series was at its best, but it wasn't as bad as the series was at its worst. You just have to wonder if maybe this is what the creators think is a representative cross-section of the series as a whole. I'd say it's too superficial to get at what makes Eberron special, and the format can't help but highlight the unevenness of its worldbuilding (the "Technology" pages have lightning rails and airships, but the "Dwarves" page has daring little tidbits like "a male dwarf values his beard" and "all dwarves value gold and other precious metals"), but if this were my first exposure, I think I'd probably say, "why not, I'll give it a shot."

Ukss Contribution: Okay, what's my favorite thing in all of Eberron? Because in the broad strokes, it's all here. My problem is that I greatly prefer small, specific details to broad strokes. Like, honestly, the thing I enjoyed most was learning that "magic even allows for sophisticated picture IDs." This is the sort of pseudo-modern texture that makes me love Eberron, but it's not particularly interesting, except as a contrast with the way D&D usually does things. So I guess it has to be the really tall buildings in Sharn. That was a fun adventure town. But I'm cheating here. This pick owes as much to Sharn: City of Towers as it does to An Adventurer's Guide to Eberron.

(AD&D 2e) Chronomancer

 I have something of a dysfunctional relationship to AD&D. Let's call it . . . toxic nostalgia. Every time I see or handle (or yes, read) one of these old books, it's like this visceral sense memory. I'm instantly transported back in time, to when I was a teenager . . . and then shortly thereafter I remember all the reasons I hated being a teenager.

I first learned of the existence of Chronomancer (Loren Coleman) approximately one month ago, but as soon as I did, the lingering bit of teenager inside me immediately activated and tracked down a copy. And now, the adult me has to explain (to both you and myself) why that was a bad idea.

And it's tricky, because the main thing that's wrong with Chronomancer is just that it's AD&D. It does stuff like introduce the Temporal Champion class, a spellcaster/warrior hybrid that specializes in time manipulation magic and the ability minimums to qualify are Intelligence 17, Wisdom 16, Strength 15, and Constitution 14. And, it's like, are we just openly cheating at character creation now? Is that the state of Dungeons & Dragons circa 1995? Or maybe the game was just designed around the assumption that you'd only get to play the character you want one time out of nine (that's how many tries it took me to roll the necessary stats using the 4d6, drop lowest method that would not become standard until 3rd edition).

So there's this open question of how much I'm willing to tolerate AD&D's system nonsense for the sake of a high concept and it turns out the answer is "basically not at all." In a way, my toxic nostalgia is vindicated. Chronomancer is exactly the sort of book 13-year-old me would have gone absolutely feral over and exactly the sort of book that 20-year-old me would have been completely jaded about. Reading it for the first time in my forties leaves me largely confused as to why it exists at all.

See, the titular Chronomancer class is a wizard variant that knows unique spells related to the Demiplane of Time (and there is an extremely important discussion here about why that name is inappropriate and a better term would be "The Temporal Prime," but I can't be mad at it, because there's a dark part of my heart that understands why we should really be calling Time Elementals "Time Dimensionals" instead.) These spells allow the Chronomancer to travel into the past and future as early as level 3. And I don't need it explained to me why someone would want to play a time-travelling wizard. What I need explained to me is why you would ever run a campaign where only some of the characters are time-travelling wizards.

It's such a classic D&D blunder. Making a character class out of what should have been a campaign model. I want to believe that Chronomancer was conceived, written, and published entirely independently of the video game Chrono Trigger and the timing (no pun intended) is tight enough for this to plausible (Chrono Trigger was released March of 1995, Chronomancer was published in August of 1995), but a treacherous part of me thinks, "OMG, what if it wasn't?"

Because I can get behind that particular brand of corporate cynicism. Take one of the best jrpgs ever made and file the serial numbers off for a D&D game? Absolutely beautiful. But it kind of depresses me to think that they were deliberately trying to imitate Chrono Trigger . . . and missed the point so badly. Nooo! We're supposed to be a band of plucky heroes dashing around through time, trying to avert some terrible doom by finding and defeating it while it's still weak enough to be killed. Why are you telling me about the extremely abstract perils of this monochrome transit tunnel?

There's this weird assumption that the players' time (no pun intended) in the Temporal Prime (which is basically a big fog cloud with "timestreams" running through it - travel through time is effected by moving up and down said streams) is going to receive a lot of focus in the game, though maybe the book is just assuming that once the characters are back inside the normal flow of time, the DM can take things from there. So the new information we need are the logistics of the time travel process itself. AD&D could be like that, assuming that a mechanics-parsing puzzle (such as figuring out how long you have to travel up the timestream to get to a particular time) was the most engaging form of gameplay, even when DMs would be better served by a discussion of storytelling tropes. And I will give Chronomancer credit, it did get there eventually. The last chapter, with its discussion of how magic and technology might vary over time, and its sample setting, showing the same kingdom in four different time periods, was exactly what I'd want out of a D&D time-travel supplement. However, it's only partial credit, because that chapter was exactly as long as the previous chapter - one of the most tedious collections of highly-specific spell interactions I've ever read.

I think, overall, the most valuable thing I got from Chronomancer was a permission structure to run a time-travel fantasy game with AD&D, which isn't something I particularly need nowadays, but it would have done me a lot of good in the late 90s. I admire the book's audacity, if nothing else.

Ukss Contribution: My absolute favorite thing in this book is the addition of day planners to the equipment section. It's just such an un-D&D piece of equipment, and if the book had leaned more into the idea that the PCs' time travel shenanigans would become so complicated they'd need to carry a heavily annotated calendar with them at all times, well I'd have been positively delighted. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a one-off.

So I'm going with my runner-up - the suggestion that in the future, magic would become so advanced that they'll teach low level spells in public schools. It's a pretty unusual way of looking at magic - that there could be a standardized magical education that doesn't need something as specialized as a "magic school."

(Eberron 3.5) City of Stormreach

For the long-term health of the blog, I think I'm going to have to develop some standardized methodology for reviewing Lankhmar. Yes, the title of the book in question is City of Stormreach (Keith Baker, Nicolas Logue, James "Grim" Desborough, C.A. Suleiman), but . . . it's Lankhmar.

Now, there are two things I want to make clear. First, I don't think it's any special insight on my part to notice that Stormreach is Lankhmar. There are essentially two types of people in this world - those who can recognize the debt Stormreach owes to Lankhmar and those who have not yet heard of Lankhamar.

And the more important, second thing to get absolutely straight - my saying that Stormreach is Lankhmar is in no way meant to diminish or minimize Stormreach. Complaining about a fantasy city being Lankhmar is like complaining that a renaissance painting is just the Pieta or the Holy Family.

But it does put me in a terrible spot as a critic, because "Fantasy city X is clearly inspired by Lankhmar" barely counts as an observation, but it does basically sum up my feelings about the book. It's a corrupt, virtually lawless city, with magical secrets and dangerous gangs/militias that blur the lines between criminal power and civic authority. It's pretty much the perfect place to have sword and sorcery-style pulp fantasy adventures in an urban setting. That's why every fantasy rpg takes a crack at it sooner or later, often multiple times.  What am I even supposed to say? Yeah, it's great. If you're at all interested in playing an Eberron campaign, you're going to want this book.

So maybe I spend my time trying to develop some sort of Universal Lankhmar Scorecard that I can apply to Stormreach and Nexus and Kratas and Sigil and Ankh Morpork and all the rest. How engaging are the thieves' guilds? How corrupt and decadent are the magic users? How spooky and irreverent is the Temple District? Are the street names anywhere near as inspired as "Cash Street" or "Cutthroat Alley?"

It's a fun idea, though I think I'd have to make it an Actual Project if I didn't want the whole thing to come off as insultingly reductive. For now, I think I'll have to take a more intuitive approach.

My gut reaction is that Stormreach is probably a B+ Lankhmar. It's got some of the horror edge - buried under the city is a slumbering demon, sealed away by ancient sorcery but recently disturbed by the reckless, greedy delving of House Kundarak. It's got some of the humor. The local gladiatorial games, despite being a terrible atrocity, even by the standards of the genre, are governed by the Blood Council, who hold an annual gala event known as The Feast of Blood. Also, the powerful and mysterious sorcerer who inexplicably maintains a loot-and-monster-filled dungeon underneath the city streets is a kobold, so that's fun. And the criminal gangs are high-concept enough to be memorable, at least - The Bilge Rats, who are governed by wererats and keep dire rats as pets; the Hollow Shards, who forge everything from relics to maps, for both profit and sport; the Golden Lions, who are just bored rich kids playing around; the Shrouds, who are child pickpockets led by the century-old ghost of a child.

There's an endless amount of incredibly seedy adventures, in other words. My main complaint would be that the parts of Stormreach that are most distinctly Eberron tend to tread dangerously close to Eberron's worst quality - its barely deniable laundering of the colonialist tropes of late 19th/early 20th century adventure fiction. Two things we know about the Wayfinder Foundation: it makes the bulk of its money guiding ecologically devastating safaris and artifact-looting "research expeditions," and its members regularly reenact the plot of Heart of Darkness.

That unpleasantness aside, City of Stormreach was a pretty solid fantasy book. I really liked the feathered yuan-ti (not the first time they showed up, but maybe the first time they got playable rules) and the two full pages devoted to the Stormreach art scene. More stuff worthy of comment:

The mysterious Xen'drik precursor to the modern warforged, built by the ancient quori were referred to as "quorforged" which is a delightful portmanteau that feels like it somehow escaped containment from an internet message board.

The silliest thing in the book is the suggestion that you could blackmail a "philanderer" because he "lets his scruples fall by the wayside" at the Feast of Blood. It boggles the mind just to think about it. Whoa! That guy is cheating on his wife! At the event that celebrates kidnapping people and forcing them to fight to the death! Whatever happened to his scruples? Surely it will ruin his life if this blatant immorality was ever revealed.

The book takes a step backwards with regards to alignment by telling us that becoming a wererat automatically shifts your alignment to Neutral Evil and that all of Xen'drik's yuan-ti "truly seem to be evil by nature." It's just disappointing.

Gnomes continue to be used oddly. There's one here who is a champion arm-wrestler whose body is . . . notably described. The idea that Wizards of the Coast was deliberately trying to make gnomes fuckable is seeming less and less like a conspiracy theory with each passing day.

Overall, I'd say I enjoyed City of Stormreach, but as we near the end of the line, I can't help but feel like it was a little too mainline D&D for the setting's penultimate outing. Eberron is at its best when it's offering something you can't get anywhere else, and frankly, you can get a halfway decent Lankhmar almost anywhere.

Ukss Contribution: There was a lot of interesting stuff in this book, but nothing that I found more interesting than the setting's elevator pitch - a human city built inside the ruins of a giant city. Just the coming together of these two incompatible scales, where the new inhabitants have to build scaffolds and rigging just to climb a giant staircase or bridges to cross a giant storm drain . . . it's a really effective fantasy image. I'll probably play it up significantly more than the book did, though. 

(Mage: the Awakening 1e) Summoners

Like, seriously, what was going on with Mage: the Awakening, 1st edition? Every time I read a new supplement for this game, there's something awful and weird, that throws a monkey-wrench into any notional ambition of coherent worldbuilding. My operating theory, after reading Summoners, is that they're doing it on purpose. That if we could subpoena the emails of White Wolf, circa 2005-2009, we would see a conspiracy at the highest levels, where the people in charge of the editorial direction of the line knowingly, and with malice of forethought, pursued a calculated strategy to make the overall cosmology of the game as janky and unpleasant as possible, so that there was not even a shadow of a possibility that nuMage could accidentally develop into a beloved urban fantasy game. Mage: the Awakening was conceived as gnostic horror in a world of dark neo-platonism and the only fucking escape from that is through mythos horror. Tentacled monsters might crawl out of the Abyss to eat your soul, but fuck you if you ever think you're going to ride a dragon. The ratchet only turns towards "grim."

And now I'm going to do my trademark move where I support this scurrilous (and possibly even libelous) assertion with some oddball quote that seems to make another point entirely:

The tales of the Forest Primeval remind Thyrsus mages of the Primal Wild, and legends of tricksters the world over, beneficent or malevolent, remind the Acanthus of their trip to Arcadia. To the Awakened, it's not hard to see where humanity got these stories - they are remnants of memories from before the Fall.

Mages with a slightly broader experience of the world, though, disagree. Yes, the "Fae" of Arcadia resemble legends of faeries, but there are other beings in the World of Darkness that claim the title, and they don't seem to have any Supernal understanding about them.

And there it is. It's subtle, but unmistakable: someone is fucking with me, and I'm like 99% sure they know they're doing it. This book tells you how to summon faeries from Arcadia, but, you know, you can't just take that at face value because the game is set in a world where an entirely different group of godlike eldritch beings calls themselves "faeries" and the inaccessible world of magic they hail from is also called "Arcadia," and so it is vitally important that you understand these two things are completely different (probably, unless you want them not to be, in which case no one can stop you, just like they can't stop you from doing any other non-canon interpretation).

I will grant you, it's more than a bit risible that I'm letting this bother me, but it's a pattern. In the Pandemonium section there's a sidebar titled "Demons and Other Demons" because, you know, you can't have a realm of self-described demons named "the place of all demons" and not address the fact that "Awakened scholars generally accept that the inhabitants of Pandemonium are not 'demons' in the classical sense."

Oh, they generally accept that, do they? These "Awakened scholars?" There's a consensus in the field. That's what you're saying?

And I'm sorry for the dangerously high sarcasm levels there, but they fucking do it again! From a sidebar in the Thyrsus section, "Are Totems, in fact, spirits . . . It's possible, but that isn't the sort of question that needs a definitive answer in a game book, because it's not the sort of ting that a cabal is going to realistically be able to answer anyway."

(Incidentally, the sidebar's overall answer to its own rhetorical question was, paraphrased, "yes . . . but no.")

So, on the one hand, I'm being an utter pill about something with a very obvious Doylist explanation. Mage: the Awakening isn't actually Mage: the Awakening. It's more like World of Darkness: Mage: the Awakening. And the World of Darkness is a place of multiple parallel and redundant cosmologies, none of which are subordinate to any of the others and maybe that doesn't always make for satisfying fiction, but there are incentives, both social and economic, at a deep structural level that ensure it's going to always be that way. If you were designing a standalone setting, you wouldn't have both a Stygia and an Underworld, a Forest Primeval and a Primal Wild, or an Arcadia and an Arcadia. You'd instead think long and hard about why you were including different elements. What are you hoping to gain from including faeries and demons and angels and how does including the places where these things come from help you achieve your goals?

Maybe it's unreasonable of me to expect standalone worldbuilding from nuMage. Certainly, the books never exactly promised it. (Indeed, the necessity of the nwod core practically argues against it). And I think if I were merely dealing a situation where the mage cosmology failed to elegantly account for things that only exist because they are part of other WoD games, then I would not have such a problem. I fully believe that Mage would rather not have vampires, rather not have werewolves, so these creatures' fraught relationship with awakened magic is very clearly a compromise. Where Mage: the Awakening loses me, however, is that I don't think demons, angels, faeries, nature spirits, and the souls of the dead are afterthoughts or concessions. I believe they are fully intentional parts of the setting, with plenty to say about the game's themes. I think a lot of thought was put into the Supernal inhabitants. Which makes it weird that the book seems to only grudgingly admit their inclusion. 

I'm brought back to this other sidebar:

It bears repeating, here: the central struggle of the Awakened is to be found in the Fallen World, rather than in far-flung realms peopled by strange beings and alight with unearthly magics. This is particularly important to recapitulate with respect to the Realms Supernal, given the drive that many mages feel to attempt a return to the Watchtowers and the worlds in which they stand. But the attempt to do so is a fool’s errand. When, and if, a willworker is ready to return to the higher worlds, she will know; in the proper time, nothing will need to be forced and the road to the Supernal will reveal itself. No loopholes exist in the laws of the cosmos to make this process any easier. If they did, they would invalidate the entire Awakened journey.

(There's more, but it continues in a similar vein). It's an expression of a design ideology (that's like a design philosophy, but they get mad at you if you try and subvert it) that places an extreme emphasis on a particular type of story. As long as you're telling the right kind of story, Mage: the Awakening has your back. Step out of the lines, and it starts to get ugly. What's maybe a bit unusual, though, is that the humorless nuMage canon scolding does not revolve around lore, it revolves around vibes. That's what the duplicate faeries and demonless Pandemonium are really about. Yes, it wants to stay in crossover-friendly "demons and other demons" territory, by not giving the Supernal any sort of special priority over elements inherited alongside the broader world of darkness, but it also serves to keep the Supernal . . . pure. Things of the Supernal are unknowable and profound and abstract, so if there's something you're expected to fight or talk to or beat in a pie-eating contest, it can't be Supernal. It has to be a thing of the Fallen World.

Which means, by definition, if you're playing Mage: the Awakening, then everything you interact with kind of sucks. That's the world you live in. The World that Unnecessarily Sucks Thanks to Humanity's Hubris. Summoners breaks this model a bit, by introducing Supernal summoning, allowing you to directly (but briefly) interact with genuine Supernal entities, but it never really sells those entities as characters in a story, nor the Supernal Realm as a "place" where "events" can "happen." There's always this insulating layer of abstraction and "you are not enlightened enough to solve this mystery." I know it's all meant to serve the overall gnostic horror, but apparently "gnostic horror" means "you are trapped in a world that sucks, and we're going to dangle cool stuff over your head, the horror comes from it being permanently just out of reach."

And yeah, I guess that's a pretty solid bit of horror, but as a game, it suffers the fatal flaw of requiring players to buy into a world that sucks. In a way, my journey as a player mirrors the journey of the characters. I yearn for a bright isekai version of this setting, where Earth is at the intersection of the spheres of interest of these five magical realms, a battleground between the reflexively adversarial demons of Pandemonium and the . . . morally uncomplicated inhabitants of the Aether, who appear to us as terrible angels, where shades descend into Stygia and the ancient powers of Faerie and the Primal Wilds move across the land with their own inhuman agendas, and the player characters are hapless individuals, plucked from their lives for a life-changing adventure in these other realms, only to come back changed, able to impose the rules of these alternate realities onto the mundane Earth, and some of these mages are willing agents, others are catspaws, and some are exiles, who would resort to any means to get back. Crossing over might be rare in this version of the game, but since the Realms are merely other and not Supernal, it's really more of a matter of the needs of the story. And even if only the great powers of the Watchtowers can call souls across the void, there's still room for messages, ancient curses, and small discreet packages to make the trip. It all happens because the beings in every place are persistent individual characters with memories and comprehensible motives and defined powers and limitations that are able to drive plots and alternatively aid or hinder the PCs based on the particular situation at the table.

It's a beautiful, enticing vision, but I can never have it, because I am stuck in the goddamn World of Darkness. I don't know whether to sit in awe of this perfectly constructed genre trap or to roll my eyes because I'm at least 50% sure this only exists to preemptively avoid a repeat of the contentious transition from Mage: the Ascension 2nd Edition to Mage, Revised. The book is telling us, in no uncertain terms, that we are to stay the fuck away from the moons of Jupiter. I will give Summoners credit for giving us a tantalizing glimpse of what could be, but I will then remind you that Tantalus was being tortured.

Still, if you accept that Mage: the Awakening as a whole is a game that never quite found a compelling voice, and you extend it the grace to enjoy it for what it is and not what it could be (and I must confess, I can do this only in theory, I don't think I have it in me to play it as written), then Summoners is a pretty top tier supplement for the game. Unlike some others, I don't think it suggests a superior mode of play. It is pretty much an extension of all the virtues and flaws of the original core. But it is also a monster book, and that format rarely misses. Some of the entries were a little tryhard, like the suggestion that you could summon a spiritual manifestation of a character's "positive pole oedipus complex" from out of the dream realms, but the bulk ranged from "okay" to "good."

Although I do need to talk a bit about the exceptions. CONTENT WARNING: Sexual assault.

So, one of the credited authors on this book was exposed as a rapist. And some parts of this book lean a little bit on White Wolf's notorious brand of edgy horror that is willing to use rape as a source of shock value. And because this was a company-wide habit, and because the book was written at a time when Matt MacFarland was still incognito, it's possible that this is just a coincidence. You can summon a "courtesan" from the Abyssal realms and her deal is that she desperately wants to be the victim of a violent sex crime and will actually think less of you if you don't try to rape her and it makes me uncomfortable enough just at face value. The thought that this could be the product of an undiscovered rapist, projecting his fantasies onto a fictional demon, it makes me feel gross.

Although, the part of the book that most feels like it was written by a rapist was the Men in Black entry. Again, if I put my "generous interpretation" glasses on, it's possible that this could just be an unfortunate, but coincidental interaction between several White Wolf habits. Like maybe the only reason it reads as bad as it does is because of the company's otherwise laudable habit of switching between he/him and she/her pronouns when the gender of the characters doesn't matter. If the Men in Black think can't convince you to lie about a supernatural event you witnessed and "accept" their mundane explanation, they'll torture you until you do. Fair enough. That's in line with what we'd expect these mysterious (beings? people?) to do, especially in a dark and gritty horror world.

When you then continue the next paragraph by telling us "They attempt to grab the victim and hold her down." and then proceed to describe five distinct and lurid forms of violence in specific detail . . .  it gets sketchy. There's nothing inherently gendered or sexual about pouring drain cleaner in someone's ear, but it came at the end of a list of things the Men in Black would do to "her" and the rhythm of the list felt . . . oddly enthusiastic. Either someone was so entranced by the intellectual challenge of describing the Men in Black's quirky and nonstandard methods of torture that they completely neglected to consider the gender politics of the pronoun choice (and this seems plausible, given that the section also had to pass the scrutiny of an editor, who as far as I know was not implicated in any sex crimes) or someone really enjoyed imagining and describing violence towards women.

I don't know enough about the behind the scenes production process to come to a conclusion. It's possible that I was just being too sensitive because I was primed towards vigilance by an infamous name in the writer credits. There are six other credited authors, so it's not even a case of "separating the art from the artist." It's more of an example of a bad apple spoiling the bunch. Because I can't be certain this section wasn't written by a rapist, I can't simply dismiss it as me being a bad fit for the horror genre as a whole (which I am. I would like Mage: the Awakening much, much more if they let the horror elements wither away to vestigial bits of unexpected spiciness instead of foregrounding them as part of the intended genre). For now, I'm going to chalk it up to being part of the burden of hindsight and not necessarily something that I should allow to ruin the book for me.

Overall, I'd say Summoners was a valiant effort, but I realize, now that I've come to the last of my Mage: the Awakening books, that I never really got to a point where I truly enjoyed the series. I think I kept being just interested enough to repeatedly give the game yet another chance to ensnare me, and it never did. Summoners didn't really move the needle for me, but looking at it as a complete work, I think it was a pretty fair test - if this book couldn't convert me into a Mage: the Awakening fan, it's likely nothing could.

Ukss Contribution: The book introduces a new kind of magical object called a "supernal echo." These are random-seeming items that, when brought to a Hallow (wellspring of magical power) will absorb the Hallow's power and start magically terraforming the surrounding area into something that resembles the Supernal realm it came from. They're all kind of cool, but my favorite was the Thyrsus example. It was a cat statue that, when powered up, would attract both cats and cat spirits, and mages with the ability to talk to spirits find that cat spirits are unusually cooperative.

I'll probably strip away the metaphysics and the specific spirit mechanics, but I like the idea of a magic statue that turns anywhere it's placed into cat central and will probably give it an analogous power to make it easier to communicate or interact with cats.

Reminder: Now might be a good time to donate to RAINN

(Eberron 3.5) Dragons of Eberron

It's always a magical time when a fantasy rpg settles in and does a dragon-focused supplement. Dragons are pretty much the quintessential monster. They've got a million different interpretations and are baked deep into the universal palette of fantasy imagery. Even a certified vanilla-fantasy hater like myself will take for granted that a magical world will have at least one dragon. (Seriously, I don't even question it as a trope. Dragons are so fundamental that they're the sort of thing you make tropes about). So when the inevitable dragon book finally comes around, it's a bit of a milestone. How a fantasy setting presents dragons will say a lot about its genre expectations, its fictional influences, and (in most cases) the high end of its overall power curve.

Dragons of Eberron (Keith Baker, Scott Fitgerald Gray, Nicolas Logue, Amber Scott) does not disappoint in this regard. Mysteries are revealed. The political machinations of these nigh-immortal beings are laid bare. We finally get to see Eberron from the perspective of those with the clearest idea of what's going on. The true nature of the world has been made apparent . . . and it turns out that I was right all along. This is a setting that is permanently at war with itself.

And I mean that only about a quarter as negatively as it sounds. At some point, you have to stop yearning for a setting's potential and start loving it for what it actually is. And here, two books away from the end of the line, it is finally undeniable that the conflicted setting, created by the friction between genres, is always what Eberron was meant to be. In the end, its pulp and fin de siecle influences were important, but "if it exists in D&D, it has a place in Eberron" was its guiding star.

Funnily enough, it wasn't actually the brand-synergy-friendly references to the rules and creatures of Frostburn or Sandstorm that convinced me of this. It was actually the willfully varied use of dragons in different antagonist roles. Early on, the book says, with regards to the secret dragon conspiracy to wield the Draconic Prophecy in pursuit of worldly power, "Such discoveries are part of the tone of Eberron - how much of what you take for granted is the result of draconic manipulation?" Then later, in the "Dragons of Xen'drik" chapter, it says "The iconic image of the lone wyrm in a remote mountain cave atop a heaping pile of gold and jewels does not fit the average sophisticated Argonnessen dragon, nor the cosmopolitan draconic movers and shakers of Khorvaire. Xen'drik is where solitary dragons find a home."

And I guess something finally clicked for me. The "if it exists in D&D" part of the game's mission statement wasn't just referring to weird creatures like the Xephs or unusual classes like the Meldshaper, it was also referring to the game's various tones. You've got dragons as these arch immortals, exploring the most refined realms of magical power, engaging with the humanoid peoples on the scale of nations, because the scope of their plans span entire ages and you've got "big lizard is a 15th level encounter that is basically a lootbox for your ECL 14-16 expected character wealth." Those two ideas coexist in the same world, not necessarily as part of a grand design, and certainly not without genre contradictions, but because it is eminently practical for them to do so.

I don't know how I feel about this. I am a fan of vision, and I can respect pragmatism, but when the vision is pragmatic . . . it really seems like someone is trying to get away with something. You want to say something, but you don't want to cut off all the different things you could have said instead, because some of your audience would prefer to hear something different than what you have to say. It's a very "corporate synergy" way of looking at the world.

I'm brought back to the strange (and as far as I know unprecedented and unrepeated) fact that Eberron was the winner of a Wizards of the Coast contest to find the next great D&D campaign setting. And look, if I'm on that panel, I'm seriously considering voting for it. I've read a few campaign settings over the course of the blog and I think it outright beats Dragonlance and Arcana Unearthed, is broader in scope than Council of Wyrms and Mindshadow, and is significantly less niche than Dragonmech and Midnight. But if I'm on that panel and all seven of these are entries (and I have no reason to assume that the contest didn't attract a hundred pitches that were at least Dragonlance-level of quality), then my strategy for the overall line is probably not "we should go all-in on Eberron, give it more than a dozen supplements in an attempt to make it the next Forgotten Realms," but rather "wow, we should do one of these contests every year." Embrace the compartmentalization of fantasy genre preferences and make a book for every taste. Then you could tell Eberron to be more Eberron because we've already got a "if it exists in D&D, it has a place here" setting and it's called Forgotten Realms.

And maybe that's not very business savvy of me. Maybe I'm just repeating the sickness that killed TSR (although I'm somewhat skeptical that "too many campaign settings" was a significant factor in its demise). But think about what crackerjack fantasy worlds we could have gotten if "magictech ww1," "biopunk USSR," "Council of Wyrms-lite," and "your uncle's uncomfortable throwback to 'classic' adventure fantasy" didn't have to coexist in the same world.

Don't get me wrong. There are ways to make it work. And of all the Eberron books I've read so far, Dragons of Eberron comes closest to tying the threads together in a satisfying way, but, well, Sarlona still feels like a separate campaign world, inelegantly grafted onto the rest of the setting. It gets its own chapter and the introduction is literally titled "A Land Apart," ending with the sentence "Sarlona remains a continent isolated from draconic culture and tradition, cut off from the affairs of Argonnessen and the machinations of the Chamber and Conclave alike."

As much as I try to hold in my mind the fact that the Draconic Prophecy plot and the "Quori age of nightmares/age of hope dream realm cycle" plot are both going on in the same world, I just can't do it. I guess there's no law against it or anything, but one world having two cosmic-level apocalyptic setting arcs just feels wrong to me. 

"Even if the worst tales of the Dreaming Dark are to be believed, the dragons once laid waste to the whole of Xen'drik and their power shows no signs of having abated in the long centuries since."

Vs

"A few hold that Sarlona is, in fact, absent from the Prophecy - an empty space at its center that terrifies the dragons because they can't comprehend it."

Is this an interesting conflict or is it a backstage meta-discussion about the direction of the setting that snuck its way into the text because the fundamental contradiction is unresolvable?

Argonnessen, by contrast, could fit with Khorvaire, but it doesn't necessarily benefit from doing so. I think the issue with the Dragon Continent is that it got its start as "the Dragon Continent," and has only been given a little bit of room in which to evolve. There's something here. It reveals (I think for the first time) that Argonnessen has a significant non-dragon population. There are two major humanoid cities, plus the dragons' retainers, plus a designated wild-land called "the Vast" where young dragons go to level up on seeded monsters, practice their political manipulation skills on scattered groups of isolated humanoids, and just generally get the wild dragon lifestyle out of their system before they grow up and become mystic sages of the Prophecy (and some dragons never grow out of this stage and decide to just stay forever, becoming a sort of gadfly nuisance in the hides of the age-based republican dragon gerontocracy). 

The only thing that really holds Argonnessen back from being its own complete mini-setting is that it never quite forgets that, from its perspective, Khorvaire is "the Humanoid Continent." So there's very little pressure to make the Argonnessen humanoids compelling in their own right. If humanoid society was more of a factor of the continent's politics and culture, not necessarily as a driving factor, but as a confounding factor, something with its own worth and agency that shaped how the dragons interact with each other, it would be its own uncomfortable but fascinating setting. Like Rome, but every Senator has the personal physical power of a main battle tank and the plebians' main natural predator would be their own patrons. Combine that with an era-spanning mysticism among the aristocracy and you've got a recipe for some great dungeonpunk in the shadows of Argonnessen.

But it doesn't quite do that. The closest it gets is the scholarly city of Io'lokar, which is sort of like the Epic Level Handbook's city of Union, but with a bit more thought behind it. As a center of magical scholarship, patronized by immortal sorcerer lizards, magic use is incredibly common ("a lowly clerk . . . might well be a 7th-level expert/8th-level Adept") and the whole thing is an epic-level adventure hub where the accumulated gold of high level characters is basically worthless because they operate on a labor-theory-of-value-based communist system, made possible by potent civic enchantments (residents can effectively cast fly/dimension door at will, the communal greenhouses can manage a full harvest each and every day, etc). Which would be great . . . if adventurers coming and going were a thing that happened, like, at all.

And more to the point, I've never been a proponent of epic fantasy requiring epic characters. I think you have to build those kinds of settings on the assumption there's something to do at every scale. I.e. if the main conflict in the setting is a war between giants, then there should be a whole campaign about isolated villages in the giants' hair forests, defending themselves against giant fleas (by contrast, the natural place for epic characters is in a lower-powered world, becoming the giants that less powerful characters build their lives around). So I guess my overall feeling about Argonnessen is that it's a great level 4-8 campaign that was unceremoniously squashed because one of the things that "exists in D&D" is level 18+ campaigns, and Argonnessen is Eberron's "place for it."

So where does that leave Dragons of Eberron as a whole? Good? Useful? Beautiful? Funny? Frustrating?

Yes.

Yes to all of those descriptors.

Ukss Contribution: It is a tribute to the complex feelings this book inspired that my candidates for Ukss contribution are all over the place. Usually, what I do is write down a potential candidate in my notes, as I'm reading, marking it with a star. Then, when I look back, I compare the various starred entries and I find one obvious frontrunner with multiple also rans. Or there's a strong candidate that would require a bunch of real-world or genre context, so maybe I'll casually mention it but then go with one of my other less-complex, but still very strong stars. 

However, this time, I've got a bunch of starred entries that are all equally strong . . . in competing modes of play.

Do I go with the "ageless dragon sage" mode and pick the Sovereign Paths, where dragons bring themselves into harmony with the underlying archetypes of the Sovereign Host (and you know, weirdly, for a group of deities that don't necessarily exist, they really get around) so as to ascend to godhood after death?

Or do I go with the "epic dragon aristocrats" mode and pick the mile high pillar riddled with carved out dragon lairs, where hundreds of dragons can nest at once?

Or maybe the "dragons as game-playing manipulators" mode and pick the shapeshifted dragon reporter?

It's not an easy choice. So I'm going to swerve. Choose something only tangentially related to dragons. "Famed arcane cartographer Jolian Dan Jessel promised to present the Library of Korranberg with the first true map of Argonnessen. Before the work was completed, Jolian's workshop was burned to the ground, and the gnome himself taken with trap the soul."

There's something very particular here. You've got a powerful indigenous people protecting their security by going absolutely fucking nuclear on a foreign mapmaker working for a colonialist government. That, I think, is an amazingly succinct presentation of what Eberron looks like when it's operating at 100 percent.

(Mage: The Awakening 1e) Imperial Mysteries

 Mage: The Awakening is a cursed game line, because every so often it will release a supplement that will make you go, "huh, that's interesting . . . maybe that's what the game should have been about the whole time." Imperial Mysteries (David Brookshaw and Malcom Shepard) is but the latest example of this pattern.

Ostensibly, what it's about is the campaign endgame. You're playing a character who has already earned hundreds of xp, at the nwod's glacial pace of advancement, and you can now buy your sixth dot in an Arcana. What sort of shenanigans are you going to get up to with such terrible sorcery at your command?

Except that's not what it's really about. What it's really about is Mage: The Awakening characters finally getting access to the core of the setting. You don't just buy your sixth dot, you transition to an "archmaster" campaign model. Your character must survive an ordeal known as The Threshold Seeking (occasionally described as "a second Awakening") and if they do, the entire nature of their existence changes, such that they are inducted into the sublime mysteries that undergird reality, and are now concerned with esoteric matters of neo-platonist metaphysics that ordinary people in "The Phenomenal World" (the book's new, more diplomatic, alternative to "The Fallen World") simply can't imagine.

You may recognize this as "the premise of Mage: The Awakening," but I don't want to understate it. The new mechanics - being able to bundle up your body and spirit onto a mystic pathway across the Abyss, to actually, literally enter the Supernal Realms as part of a quest-driven magic system that allows players, through the in-setting actions of their characters, to rewrite significant parts of the setting - they're really fucking good.

Not necessarily as a system. The dice rolls and such continue to work just fine, but there isn't something that's going to make you spectacularly excited about M:tAw's spellcasting. However, as a premise to a game, it's got a definite appeal. You probably need to start thinking of Mage less as a traditional rpg and more as a collaborative worldbuilding game like Microscope, but . . . that's a good idea and it's surprising it's taken the Mage family of games so long to reach this point.

But what makes Imperial Mysteries work for me is not necessarily the audacity of its scope so much as it is the fact that you're genuinely engaging with the setting's fantasy elements. The Supernal/Fallen split isn't just a pretext for the Paradox rules, it's a space that can be navigated. The Watchtowers aren't just a dream you had in the campaign prologue, they are places you can go, albeit at a steep cost, with terrible risk. Even gated as it is behind an optional adventure arc, this promise that "return to the Supernal" is not just a cutscene in the epilogue, but a thing your character can do in-game is a shot in the arm to the setting as a whole. The mystery has a solution. It's not just a shaggy dog story.

Where I would criticize Imperial Mysteries is in the campaign pacing. The xp costs are ludicrous and even to the degree that's something that can be overcome, the hard break between "archmaster stories" and "regular mage stories," exemplified by the Threshold Seeking, is undesirable, apparently only existing to quarantine core-book games from archmaster material. It would be better if progress on "the Golden Road" (the book's blanket name for archmaster spiritual shenanigans) was smoother, ramping up over a mage's entire career. Engagement with the Supernal not just as endgame, but as a background theme for the whole campaign.

I'm thinking of a specific line here: "Every archmaster is a world." It's interesting because it is literally true. The Threshold Seeking involves creating a path between the physical world and the Supernal, but when the path is completed, the archmages sort of becomes the path, vanishing from the physical world and existing purely as this bridge through the Abyss, but "she adds gateways leading from herself to other worlds when they prove useful, her astral or physical body forming whenever she leaves the Road." Later, with advanced Arcana, the archmaster can create Chantries ("a personal pocket world as real as the Fallen World") and ochemata (semi-independent "sub souls" which can potentially have archmaster-level abilities of their own), and in the book's wildest pitch - "with the existence of sub-souls and living spells, it is possible - if challenging - for every player in the troupe to play different parts of the same archmaster."

I can't help wondering what the game would look like if it accounted for these abilities from the very beginning. A lot like Nobilis, I guess, but there's room to go another way with it. The archmaster transformation could be incorporated into earlier Seekings. It could be something that is constantly encroaching. You could work your way up to ochemata through familiar spirits. You could work your way up to chantries through personal dream realms in the astral. You could work your way up to being a series of gateways between realms by establishing that that's what spells always were and the gross power one has over the physical world via the arcana is just a preview of the sublime, reality-authoring power of Supernal assumption.

Although, you could fairly argue that the last point, in particular, is something the game had already been doing. But I think it could be expressed better via the mechanics. Maybe instead of relying on extended rolls to do ritual casting with the advanced spell factors chart, you could buy advanced spell factors with milestones on an astral quest, so that the larger scale and more lasting the spell you cast, the deeper you have to go into the spirit world, braving proximity to the Abyss, and knowing that if you could only manage to get all the way through, you could potentially change the whole world, forever.

It's something to think about, at least. Overall, I'd say Imperial Mysteries is a damned good supplement to a game that wasn't quite ready to be made better.

Ukss Contribution: Once again, my favorite thing is something unusable. From the "Legends of the Bodhisattvas" sidebar:

The real universe died with Atlantis. Sleepers are automata in a simulation-cosmos with five real inhabitants. The Watchtowers possess the only real souls in the world. Every mage is an incarnation of the Oracles, multiplied through billions of simultaneous cycles of rebirth.

I could do with just a little less objectification of non-mages, but that is a fascinating setting to explore. Which is exactly why it's an unusable idea. You need to build the whole work around it.

So I'm going with my second choice, but it's a strong runner up from "The Legends of the Tetrarchs" (advanced Seers of the Throne).

"Another human race sleeps beneath the earth."

Now, because the Seers are villains, it gets a little weird and eugenics-y with what those humans actually are, but I like the general idea. There's a back-up to humanity, being stored underground, created by the gods . . . just in case. You never know when you might need to reboot the world so why start from scratch if you don't have to?

(Eberron 3.5) The Forge of War

 The Forge of War (James Wyatt, Wolfgang Baur, Ari Marmell) is one of those books where it feels like the authors must have had an absolute blast writing it, to the point that you think maybe the only reason it exists at all is because a bunch of friends were goofing around and decided that if they were going to come up with a bunch of superfluous setting lore, they might as well gather it up and put it in a book.

And I know this sounds real speculative of me, because The Forge of War isn't particularly silly or goofy, but how else do you explain passages like this:

"Cyre brough forth three major bodies of troops. 2,000 elf mercenaries. 1,500 dragoons and more than 4,000 light footmen, all of which arrive by lightning rail at Starilaskur. Brelish troops amounted to 2,000 heavy horse, 500 dragoons, 1,400 light archers and 1,200 foot of the Starilaskur garrison, and 400 mercenary crossbowmen. They were backed by the First Metrol Wands, an elite spellcasting unit. In total, Cyre and Breland mustered more than 14,000 troops."

The only reason you write a passage like that, and definitely the only reason you think someone would want to read a passage like that, is because you are absolutely tickled pink at the thought of your silly 19th-century-inspired fantasy world having its own dry, dispassionate tome of military history, inspired by the 19th century's own peculiar brand of military science wool gathering. 

Am I stating this as a negative? Yeah, kind of. I'm glad everyone was having fun and all, but sometimes the book was difficult to read. I just don't like that style of talking about war. It strikes me as missing the forest for the trees. Eliding the horror of the event with a focus on details. I want my fantasy WWI scholarship to be less Clausewitz and more Hemmingway. That being said, I do respect the choice. The voice of the history recap chapter was driven by a vision and I love it when an rpg has vision. For all my disgust with the genre, it is undeniably the exact sort of book the scholars of the five nations would write so I guess I'm just complaining about the presence of roleplaying in a roleplaying book. (Which is not unprecedented. I spent a significant portion of my time with Earthdawn complaining about the same thing).

I did mostly enjoy Chapter 2, though. That was not a history-book-style narrative, but rather a series of encyclopedia-style essays about various Last War-related topics. Some of the entries, namely the ones about national armies or mercenaries, were bogged down by tedious number-listing, but we do learn some interesting tidbits about the Last War.

Like the fact that the various nations got so tired of House Jorasco's monopoly on healing that they "attempted to train clerics devoted not to a deity, but to the philosophies of nationalism and patriotism. This would, ostensibly, have granted them the power to heal as capably as clerics of other philosophies, without splitting their loyalties."

This is a fascinating bit of lore because it's terrible worldbuilding for the genre Eberron pretends it is, but amazing worldbuilding for the genre Eberron pretends it's not. 

Like, for "traditional" medieval fantasy with magic items reminiscent of 19th century technology, the idea that "cleric spells don't come from a god, they come from a deeply held personal philosophy" is purely a game mechanic. We, the players in the real-world 21st century are the audience for that information, because we need a justification for corrupt clerics who nonetheless keep their spellcasting abilities. Or at the very least, clerics who can cast spells without the broader setting declaring one particular set of beliefs to be "correct." In setting, people are going to be operating on the theory that divine spellcasting comes from the gods, and they're going to have plenty of evidence to back that up because most of their known divine spellcasters attribute their magic to the gods.

To come up with a plan to substitute nationalism for theism, the characters in the setting have to have some way of inferring the rules of the game. Someone would have had to done a comprehensive survey of spellcasters, with a definitive way of distinguishing arcane from divine magic (remember - bards get the "cure wounds" spells too), found and documented "clerics of a philosophy," and then disseminated that information widely enough that researchers in the employ of nation states could come up with "let's indoctrinate some rando until they believe hard enough to work miracles" as a plausible plan. And that suggests an infrastructure of organized scholarship. But more than that, it suggests the presence of a very un-medieval-fantasy point of view - reductionist empiricism. "The thing all these divine magic users have in common is a set of very strong beliefs . . . so let's reverse the process and give someone very strong beliefs in order to access divine magic." That's like materialist materialist. Beyond even atheism into outright nihilism.

In other words, right at home in a fin de siecle story about how modern war spells the death of innocence and traditional values give way to a rootless scientism. Which makes it all the weirder when Eberron tries to give us knights and castles. Or more specifically, when they try to single out Karrnath as some sort of unique "necromancer kingdom" instead of zeroing in on what's really interesting about their use of undead armies. The story here is the existence of military necromancy and it's about the state's objectification of the individual. Sorry, Tommy, they gave you a white feather and shamed you into joining the corps, but when you gave them everything, that wasn't enough. You'll never rest so long as they have use for your bones.

So I'm of the opinion that fantasy, as a genre, is not connected to a specific technological milieu. You could, in fact, set a fairy tale in a modern city, with cell phones and internet and streetlights and still find a way to make it work. And a corollary to that is that is that you can also tell non-fantasy stories in a "fantasy-type" world. Okay, you don't want guns or artillery in the world of Eberron because the rules and brand identity of D&D are tied up with its medieval pastiche. Fine. That should not stop you from telling a WWI story. But you should understand the role guns and artillery play in WWI stories and realize necromancy is guns.

Although I don't want to present myself as uniquely insightful for noticing this. I'm certain "military necromancy as a shocking transformation in the nature of warfare, sufficient to cause generational trauma on the continent of Khorvaire" was a fully intentional part of the design of Eberron. Likewise, the warforged are also guns, and the slaughterstone eviscerator is a tank, and the airships are planes. It's not a difficult code to crack. I just think maybe the game is chickening out on its themes a bit, avoiding modernism's homogenizing effect on weapons and tactics, in service of giving its fantasy kingdoms their own "hooks."

Necromancy is held back from being guns so that Karrnath can be the "necromancer kingdom," the various nations need hypothetical clerics of nationalism instead of just hypocrites of the Nine because Thrane is the "paladin kingdom," and then Breland doesn't get its own military thing because it's the "vaguely republican" kingdom. Aundair gets to be the "wizard kingdom," because we're not meant to poke too hard at what all this means, and Cyre gets the "oh, we definitely had our own thing, but it's not important now because we were destroyed" thing . . . for obvious reasons. But, of course, they should all have had undead armies and clerics of questionable piety and republican agitators and (obviously, obviously) wizards because all those things are part and parcel of technomagical modernism. 

Also, trains are like, super important. The book talks about how House Orien took a beating during the Last War because the lightning rail was constantly getting sabotaged, but it fails to talk about how the lightning rail was such a vital piece of military infrastructure, and such a decisive advantage to the nations with the most robust networks, that it would have constantly been rebuilt at the governments' expense. That is, unfortunately, a genuine plothole. I don't think any state would tolerate this important bit of infrastructure being under the control of a "neutral" non-state actor. If I'm literally any government in the history of governments, I'm nationalizing the rails the first time House Orien transports enemy troops to my borders. 

And while we're at it, I don't entirely believe that House Kundarak would have lost half its wealth financing the Last War. Those debts would undoubtedly still be on the books, and continually serviced, just as a matter of national security. (Unlike the railways, it is very difficult to nationalize a bank whose headquarters are outside your borders, and almost impossible to do it in a way that will encourage them to keep lending you money afterwards). I'd be very interested in learning how those loans were structured. . .

OMG! I was wrong about preferring Hemmingway to Clausewitz! What I really wanted was Lenin!

Nooo!!!

Anyway, the last chapter of the book is also, in its own way, very strange. It starts off talking about historical games, which is a sensible use of the material, moves on to talking about flashback games (where you play two sets of characters, one in the Last War and one in the modern day, in parallel stories), which is maybe less sensible but makes up for it by being admirably ambitious.

And then, to wrap up, it talks about time travel! The book suggests you can use this historical information to tell stories where the party goes back in time!

Time travel isn't even close to a standard D&D campaign model. They actually had to suggest the (so-far unprecedented) existence of epic-tier spells and magical items to facilitate it. I don't have much to say about it as DM advice (I think they did a pretty good job at pointing out all the obvious failure points), but I couldn't let it pass without commenting on it. The Forge of War presents itself as a serious, even somber book, but it is fucking wacky.

Ukss Contribution: Filthy leftist that I am, my favorite detail of the book was the revelation that wealthy families could avoid conscription by paying for the construction of a warforged to go in their stead. That is the plot of an absolutely amazing sci-fi novel and I kind of want to make it the backstory of my next D&D character.

The only issue I have is that the current version of Ukss has no place where this plot would make sense. . . 

You know what, fuck it. I like this so much I'll make a place for it to happen.