(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.

(Eberron 3.5) Voyage of the Golden Dragon

 Voyage of the Golden Dragon (Nicolas Logue) is a short collection of 4 adventures that all revolve around the titular "Golden Dragon," Khorvaire's largest airship, originally meant for the Breland military, but auctioned off to a private company after the war, who turned it into a luxury cruise ship.

With the caveat that each adventure is incredibly short (maybe 6-8 linear encounters), it's a good cross-section of what you might do with a luxury cruise ship in a "post medieval, pulp-inspired, but not really (::wink::) world." There's a fancy gala event that gets taken over by terrorist infiltrators who want to hold the rich folk for ransom. There's necromancy-enhanced political intrigue between two of its high-status passengers. There's a shoreside adventure with an obnoxious explorer type. And there's an aerial attack from an implacable foe.

It's all pretty utilitarian. The book has a singular mission - get you to use the hell out of that damned airship - and it pursues that mission with maximum efficiency. And if that seems like a pretty bland thing for me to say about a series of fantasy adventures, consider it merely an artifact of the book's format. None of the adventures last long enough to do anything super cool, but they also don't leave themselves enough time to notably screw things up. They just work.

I guess it was a little . . . sketchy that the description of the ship's onboard casino took pains to tell us that, "Goblins in green-tailed surcoats scamper about, bringing patrons their beverages and exchanging their currency." It's probably nothing. But racial homogeneity among a luxury casino's serving staff strikes me as . . . a trope.

But that's literally just one sentence, and I'm probably only paying attention to it because there's so little else to talk about. The kitchen is powered by fire elementals. That's pretty neat. Of the eight named crew (though more, like the goblins, are implied to be aboard), two of them are spies for the Brelish crown, which is pretty funny. There's a canonical sexual relationship between a halfling and an elf. 

Overall, I guess it's just a decent location, with some decent NPCs, that is the subject of some decent adventures. Score one for basic competence.

Ukss Contribution: The first two adventures feature a reoccurring villain, Paldrith Malinko, a wealthy and powerful pirate prince who wants to destroy the Golden Dragon because it is slightly larger than his own still-under-construction flagship. That's impressively petty. I'm trying to avoid putting airships specifically into Ukss (because I got the idea that more fantasy worlds need to have actual airplanes, and because I think the early-20th-century vibe planes bring is interestingly different from the steampunk aesthetics of airships), but the same plot should work equally well with naval vessels.

(Exalted 3e) Miracles of the Solar Exalted

 Miracles of the Solar Exalted (John Mørke) is a nothing of a book, just 40 pages of backer charms from the Exalted 3rd Edition kickstarter. Some are good. Some will be repeated in the Abyssals book. Some are over-designed. The usual fare. If you like Exalted, you'll like this probably. 

I did have to laugh at some of the niche charms, included to round out the charm trees (or just because Mr. Mørke had a particular itch he needed to scratch). Like the Performance charm that lets an actor infer the entirety of their character's script based only on a few lines of dialogue. How many times in the developers' home games are they asking players to make a "script remembering" roll? When would this even come in handy? How is this an Essence 3 effect worth 8-10xp and 5 committed motes? Even in an unusual situation like a campaign that's a hard-core simulation set backstage at a theater troupe, well, you've just created a charm that completely bypasses the systems you presumably invented specifically for this situation. Also, your story hinges on a character getting up on stage and flawlessly performing a part for which they were unable to rehearse? By the rules of drama, that's a once-a-story event at best. Repeat the trick and suddenly it's not "Oh, wow, they're so great! They're able to fill in for the second understudy with no preparation whatsoever," but rather, "Damn that bastard! They never show up for rehearsals, I've never even seen them read a script, but somehow their lazy ass never suffers consequences. They always nail their performances, even when the rest of us are left pulling our hair out stressing about their lack of preparation." And I'm not saying that this couldn't be a compelling Solar Exalted character concept. Just that if you're making that character, it would make more sense mechanically for Divinely-Inspired Performance to be a permanent charm with no cost.

That's just a nitpick, though. If anything, the lazy actor build is inspirational in the best weird-char-op tradition. The only part of Miracles of the Solar Exalted that bothered me was the Apocryphal keyword. The short version - it has no mechanical meaning, it's only present to let us, the readers, know that a particular charm is non-canonical.

There are things in rpgs that are objectively worse, from a moral perspective, so I should definitely try to keep my annoyance in perspective, but this is just such a chickenshit move. You solicited money from these people on the premise that they would be able to leave their mark on Exalted by creating a custom charm . . . so compromise your fucking vision, okay?! I mean, the whole point of collaborative creation is that you surrender total control in exchange for the beauty (and yeah, sometimes, the cringe) of the unexpected. You invited randos from the internet with more money than sense (and/or the Exalted obsession that made this a sensible financial transaction) to become part of the process, so let them be part of the process. Because of your choice of stretch goals, Creation is now a weirder, wilder place where Solar and Lunar exalted can merge into a composite being and legendary warriors can wade shirtlessly into battle. Deal with it.

I don't know. Maybe I'm making too big a deal out of this. It just doesn't sit right with me. It's like he invented the keyword to say "I, John Mørke, am willing to perform mercenary design work to the client's specifications, but let it be known that I, John Mørke, in my role as developer, do not personally sanction these decisions." I guess I feel like maybe Exalted is a little bit more resilient than that.

Later books in the line would take to bundling these backer charms in with the campaign's stretch goals to make one larger supplement. That's probably a superior approach (and would likely have saved the core book, in particular, a whole lot of trouble, to the extent of changing the direction of 3rd edition's development as a whole). As it stands, Miracles of the Solar Exalted was just a somewhat useful, but utterly forgettable book. There's only one reason to consult it (you want more choices for your solar's charms), but that reason is hardly a compelling one (the corebook has a lot of fucking charms).

Overall, I approve, but only on the balance, and probably only because I'm a soft touch for all things Exalted.

Ukss Contribution: It wasn't an intended rules outcome, but setting is a bit thin on the ground and I'm a bit salty about the Apocryphal keyword still, so I'm going with the "impossibly lazy, but infuriatingly talented actor" that is implied to exist by a strict reading of the mechanics of Divinely-Inspired Performance. I think they'd be fun as both a quest giver and a macguffin.

(Eberron 3.5) Player's Guide to Eberron

 The Player's Guide to Eberron (James Wyatt, Keith Baker, Luke Johnson, Stan!) has the sort of format that paradoxically either makes me read really fast or makes me read really slow. It's divided into a series of encyclopedia-like entries that are all some precise multiple of two pages long. So I can either finish a section quickly and say to myself "this seems like a natural stopping point, I'll just take a little break" (followed by four hours of video games) or I can finish a section quickly and say, "wow, that was easy, I'll just do another one right away." There's no middle ground between these two reactions, but each one is equally likely.

The real tie-breaker in these situations is how interesting I find the subject matter. And in this case, I found the subject matter very interesting indeed . . . but like 85% of it I've already seen before. This book calls itself a "player's guide," but it's not clear to what end it's meant to guide players towards. Like, maybe it's just the case that players empirically don't read core books (let alone supplements) so they tried to manifest a similar outcome by giving a player-oriented title to a condensed lore compendium. The same thing happened in Planescape with the Planeswalker's Handbook. 

Also, frustratingly, like the Planeswalker's Handbook, the Player's Guide to Eberron is probably the best entry point into the series. It's a broad cross-section of things you need to know about the world of Eberron, but just enough that you can pluck each individual topic out of context and be done with it in a couple of minutes. You want to play a warforged, you turn to the "warforged" section near the end (they're arranged alphabetically, like an encyclopedia) and you get a bit of information from the main campaign book, a bit of information from Races of Eberron, and maybe a very little bit of information from the adventures and it's all very functional. But it doesn't actually tell you how to build a warforged character, and only offers two extra feats, so you still actually need the main book. I guess that means that the Player's Guide to Eberron is meant for people who have all the other books . . . but don't read them?

This is not as off-the-wall a theory as you might suppose. There is some novel information here - three new prestige classes, a bunch of new feats, a couple of new organizations - but the bulk of the stuff that expands the actual Eberron setting comes in the form of references to things you'd originally find in various non-Eberron D&D supplements. Want to know how to play a xeph or a raptoran? How to incorporate Magic of the Incarnum into the setting? There's a sidebar for that. I've heard it said that "if it exists in D&D, it has a place in Eberron" and this book here is the proof that they at least put some thought into fulfilling that promise. Most of these little cameos feel like an afterthought, but afterthoughts are a kind of thought, so I think it's fair to say that Eberron has earned the right to call itself a kitchen-sink setting. 

I wouldn't necessarily call it a satisfying sort of kitchen-sink worldbuilding, however. It's very uneven in the degree to which all of these disparate elements are given something significant and cool to do. Incarnum magic is largely confined to The Island Where They Do Incarnum, the thri-kreen "wander the wastes, though they are hardly numerous," and yeah, it turns out that the various nations of Khorvaire have militant philosophical organizations that resemble the Samurai class. On the other hand, the Elan get a cool new backstory (they are living prisons that trap quori spirits deemed criminal by the Dreaming Dark - the spirits are forced to possess the body, but bound to have no control over its actions, and the composite creature is an ageless, psionically-active being with no memory of its previous life), the shujenja class represents the priests of a dragon-worshipping religion, and swashbucklers are so integrated into the themes and aesthetics of the setting that they're barely worthy of comment (in a good way).

I'm in the unusual, though likely not unprecedented position of having read every Eberron book published thus far and most of mainline D&D books being referenced in the sidebars. I've got very close to maximum context (somewhere between 92% and 95%, I'd say) and what the Player's Guide to Everron feels like to me is a bunch of old-hat information sprinkled through with trifling little tidbits. On the one hand, I'm not necessarily opposed to the old hat per se, and I absolutely live for little tidbits, but on the other hand I'm hard-pressed to imagine a significant use for this thing. A book where they went through all of 3.X edition's obscure sourcebook and gave me a paragraph of canonical Eberron backstory for every random prestige class and monster with an Int score would likely be one of my all-time favorite rpg supplements (period), but wedding a partial implementation of that idea to a rather unambitious recap of Eberron as it stood in January of 2006. . . well it commits the cardinal sin of kitchen-sink worldbuilding: it doesn't make space for the new material by making the world feel bigger. Rather, the boundaries of Eberron feel very similar to what was established in the main campaign book, and it's just the margins that feel a little bit more crowded.

I have a certain experience with this very tension in the world of Ukss. It's easy to just keep adding new stuff without any regard for what has come before, and at the start it can feel like an expansive bigness, but if you don't make the effort to fit the pieces together, the whole thing can become so expansive that it loses coherence. New elements can't just be for the gaps, because that's making the new stuff subordinate to the old, but if you're always making room for the new elements, that's just the same problem seen from the other side. You need both an openness to expanding the horizons of the possible and a dedication to finding connections between your ideas and fitting them all into a single context. That's hard enough when you're scrupulously curating everything to go into the melting pot. I shudder to think of how it might feel to just inherit all of D&D's vast and sprawling canon all at once (oh, the writers of Races of the Wild thought it'd be cute to have catfolk . . . they can live in the jungles of Xen'drik, I guess).

Overall, I'd say that I have no strong feelings one way or another about the Player's Guide to Eberron. I like Eberron as a whole . . . and this is certainly Eberron, all right.

Ukss Contribution: One of the critical pieces of technology in the world of Eberron is Khyber dragonshards. Arcanists use these crystals to bind elemental spirits into the locomotive systems of airships and rail carts and a bunch of other useful items. These crystals are found, naturally occurring, in the vast system of caves that is Eberron's equivalent to the Underdark. 

The Ukss contribution for this book is a weird bit of trivia about these Kyber crystal deposits - that sometimes they will randomly ensnare passing demons. Obviously, this is mainly meant as a cool hazard for dungeon-delving adventurers, but I can't help looking at this phenomenon from the perspective of the demons. A slight, but not insignificant danger to wandering around underground is that you might get trapped in some bullshit rock. I find the cultural implications to be fascinating.

(Exalted 3e) Deeds Yet Undone

 Oh, wow, an Exalted adventure book that isn't a jumpstart . . . but does somehow recapitulate the jumpstart adventures' worst quality by putting three of them into a 64 page book. . .

Wait, am I just outright saying that Deeds Yet Undone would have been better if it was three times as long . . . 

I mean, yeah, probably. 

It's a tricky thing, because quality isn't strictly a function of length. If that were the case, then Ukss Plus would be one of the greatest rpgs ever made (instead of merely being, like, in the top 10% or so). However, one of the dangers of working with such tight page counts is that you'll leave out important (possibly even vital) information.

Take the city of Kiliran, for example. It's a completely new location, never before covered (or even mentioned) in one of Exalted's myriad setting books, but its pitch is so good that it immediately feels like it could have been part of Creation since the very beginning -  "Kiliran, upon the edge of the wheel of creation, the farthest mortal port." This is both something that would logically exist in the world and an exceptional bit of rpg utility. You'd pretty much want to use it in exactly the same way as the adventure - as a staging point for naval expeditions into the vast and endless sea that contains indescribable mysteries from the chaos that preceded Creation.

Paradoxically, it is the very strength of Kiliran's pitch that makes its presentation in the book so weak. This lonely place, this last, fragile resting point before the literal end of the world, it's going to be something with immense cultural, political, and mythic significance to the entire world. It is somewhere that would inevitably be celebrated, romanticized, and objectified by people thousands of miles away. So, naturally, you give it two and a half paragraphs, most of which are pretty vague (oh, this sea port has "a district wherein bowls of noodles and fried rice are sold to the local sailors" - I never would have guessed).

That's not a matter of design or writing skill, it's a matter of curation. The main thing a more thorough description of Kiliran would accomplish is to set the stage for all the countless different adventures that did not involve leaving town at the first opportunity. There's a world where "The Thousand Milk-Churning Strikes" gets a 64-page book all to itself, and in that book Kiliran takes up an entire chapter with its own mini-supplement, and maybe it's a beautiful world. It might even be a better world, but it's not the world we live in.

That's not necessarily a complaint. It's unreasonable for me to ask for the deep structural changes needed to make this book into a full adventure/mini supplement instead of a sampler pack of adventure seeds offered as a crowdfunding stretch goal. However, it does make me question exactly how useful a sampler pack of adventure seeds really is.

I guess the main strength of Deeds Yet Undone is that it offers a pretty persuasive cross-section of iconic Exalted plots - a dungeon crawl/creature of the week mystery that could easily be adapted to (high level) D&D, a highly abstract sandbox with a broad goal like "win this war," and a journey into absolute fucking nonsense with a weirdly mythological vibe.

The first adventure, "The Crucible of Progress" is the most traditional of the three. It's basically "CSI: Kaiju Crimes Division." A giant monster is intermittently attacking a town, but after each attack, it disappears without a trace. Can the PCs find out where it's coming from and put a stop to it? It's got some characteristic Exalted flair - the setting is described as "[taking] after imperial China both in economy and aesthetics, merging those elements with aspects of Italian medieval communes such as Florence and Venice." The main villain, who is using a First Age artifact to covertly summon and banish the monster, is the Goddess of Silkworms. Her main goal is to use the monster attacks to destabilize the town's relationship with the Realm so that the Guild can come in and take over the local silk trade (which she regards as more likely to strengthen her power and help her become the Goddess of Silk itself, instead of just the worms). One of her main strengths is that she has manipulated the Exigent Exalted of Fireworks to view her as the town's most important divinity.

It's a good use of the setting, and not quite something you could do in just any old fantasy world, but it lends itself to a linear narrative. This monster situation has a definite solution, and the follow-up plots really revolve on the players becoming invested in the fate of the town, rather than moving on to the next one. That's neither a strength nor a weakness, per se, but yeah, I kind of wish there was more setting there to work with.

The second adventure, "A Shadow Falls" is a bit more in Exalted's unique niche, in the sense that it's a zombie attack story that is framed as a slow-burn war story, requiring PCs to demonstrate their political, strategic, and organizational aptitude in addition to personal valor on battlefield. As compensation for its mechanical scale, it's probably the most generic in terms of setting elements. The zombies are under the control of some Abyssal Exalted, in service to an unnamed Deathlord, but it could be any necromancer, really. I like it as support for a particular style of play, but it was probably my least favorite of the three stories.

Which leaves Chapter 3: "Ten Thousand Milk Churning Strikes." Hoo boy. It's my favorite of the three . . . but mostly because it's the most creatively challenging. In terms of rpg-style gameplay, it's the weakest. It's a race to a magical macguffin and it's structured like it's meant for one session - 1) Meet your rivals and bargain with the monarch for your official permission to launch an expedition. 2)Some light sabotage and dirty tricks before setting off. 3)Slice of Life at sea. 4) "Random" encounter with a sea monster. 5) A three-to-four-way naval battle as all the various rivals reach the destination at more or less the same time (extraordinary success with the sabotage or the sea monster notwithstanding). 6) Get the macguffin.

But specifics matter. Somehow, it is simultaneously both maximum Exalted and something thoroughly disconnected from anything Exalted has ever done before:

"In an age unnamed, when the gods thundered across the sky like mortals would walk upon puddles, there was a distant sea of infinite milk. This milk was sweet like honey, thick and viscous like cream, and intoxicating like wine. This Milk of Immortality was once the favored drink of the gods and is what caused the gods to be immortal . . .

"To share it among themselves perfectly, the far western sky and earth gods of Kiliran decided to take a great mountain - taller than Creation itself - and turned it into a pestle, and then they reached out to Vandr, the Serpent That Encircles the World and mount of the Lord Luna, and wound them about the mountain pestle . . ."

And this is, on one level, absolute gibberish. It doesn't fit with any previous conception of Exalted's pre-history. It doesn't even mesh metaphysically. It's like a backstory from a different game. But it's also the first thing I've read in 3rd edition that came close to making me feel like I did when I was reading the game for the first time. On considered reflection, I'm not the biggest fan of the "in the murky depths of the Time Before, literally anything could have happened" approach to the setting's history, and I actively disapprove of the notion that Creation could have multiple "equally true" creation stories. . .

But there's something there. An infinite sea of milk . . . timelines that don't line up with known facts . . . a physical scale that makes a mockery of naive intuitions about mass or volume or distance . . . you could make a case for this being a new, spooky presentation for the action of the Wyld. The primordial chaos isn't just a mutation-causing radiation field or a LOL-random monster factory. It's alternate universes, alternate histories, alternate cosmologies, stitched together in a geography of dreams. The Sea of Milk is exactly as big and exactly as important as the stories say, but only in the context of its own tenuous reality. 

Or, at least, that's one possible theory. Maybe there's just a Sea of Milk out there and the stories are merely a folkloric attempt to explain why it exists. Still, it's a delightfully off-putting thing to place at the center of your macguffin race. It kind of sounds like a joke. It kind of sounds like someone's religion. Because there's a grandeur in its absurdity. There's a noticeable chain of reasoning: milk - motherhood - life - the sea. Enough, at least, to believe that it's a plausible legend that people would be plausibly motivated to pass along. And in this world, that legend is gloriously literal. An imperial navy officer, a pirate, a merchant-sorcerer, and the PCs are gearing up to launch an expedition to find it. Maybe it's mostly an allegory, but it's also a place where people can go. And that stubborn literalism around the sublime, even to the point where you start to be a bit of a buzzkill about it, that to me is the game's signature move.

But it wouldn't be such a tough sell if the book simply had enough of a pagecount to thoroughly explain itself.

Overall, I'd say that Deeds Yet Undone left me wanting more, but not necessarily in a good way. I found it enjoyable enough, but I'm not sure I want to do the necessary amount of work to actually use it.

Ukss Contribution: My favorite thing is the city of Kirilan. I'm probably going to port that into my Exalted games from now on. However, because Ukss is not flat, it doesn't actually make sense to have a "most distant mortal port." So I'll go with something from the backstory of the second adventure - "The Rain Wars." The adventure doesn't explain what they actually were (cause it's so short, you see), but the name suggests intriguing possibilities.

(Eberron 3.5) Magic of Eberron

 Oh no, I may be in trouble. Eberron looks like it's shaping up to be exactly the sort of fantasy rpg setting that's guaranteed to activate my worst instincts as a critic - a high-concept subversion of a familiar genre that nonetheless feels compelled to play it safe and reassure readers that it's not going to stray too far from genre conservatism.

While reading Magic of Eberron (Bruce R. Cordell, Stephen Schubert, Chris Thomasson), I experienced a rollercoaster of a moment that exemplified this tension. At the start of Chapter 4, there are three section headers all in a row that seemed ready to sell the high concept: "Life in a Magic-Suffused Society," "Post Medieval World," and "Professional Spellcasters." I saw those in the Table of Contents and I thought to myself, "Aw, yeah, let's fucking go!" . . . Then I noticed that all three sections were on the same page.

"Post Medieval World" was only two paragraphs. And one of those paragraphs was about the setting's resemblance to a medieval world: "The benefits provided by the wide-scale manipulation of magic are not provided by arcane factories of mass production. Instead, Eberron's magical wonders remain the purview of individual practitioners, artisans, and expert crafters."

Nooo! My (hypothetical, implied) infrastructure! If there's no mass production, what is the train for? What are you putting on that train that's worth the expense of maintaining a continental rail network? Maybe passenger service is enough to pay the bills, but that's not the main reason people built railroads historically. It also doesn't say anything particularly interesting about the changing demographics of the urban-rural divide that came about because farm work was getting less labor intensive while manufacturing increased vastly in scale. You know, the very specific sort of "post medieval" where it "shares many elements of a later renaissance society," but none of those elements are things that would make it incompatible with Forgotten Realms.

The story of Eberron is not the story of increasing volumes of cargo traveling increasingly long distances through increasingly complex networks of supply chains. It is not a story of society's adaptation to the changing nature of work. It's not even the story of the transformation of warfare from being dominated by well-armed aristocrats to being won or lost by conscript soldiers wielding off-the-rack weapons with a month's worth of training. Rather, Eberron's story is simply: "D&D, but there's also a train."

And that's sort of what I mean when I say it brings out my worst instincts. "D&D with a train" is a perfectly acceptable thing to be. I'm not sitting here thinking, "actually, I prefer D&D, but with no trains." It's like the airship in the original Final Fantasy - something that should maybe feel industrial but is really just a bit of set dressing. 

However, I can't stop thinking that maybe Eberron is afflicted with the same malaise that brought down Planescape - it breaks from one of the core assumptions of the implied setting, in a way that opens up a lot of possibilities, but it can't quite overcome its terror at the fact that in order to do something genuinely new you have to try something genuinely new. 

But Eberron has a leg up on Planescape in the fact that its claims of being about a "pseudo medieval culture [that] shares many elements of a later renaissance society" are a transparent, calculated lie. Magic of Eberron is even generous enough to provide a concrete, specific example of this process in action.

Page 91:

"While the streets of many cities are illuminated with everbright lanterns, their magic is individually cast and maintained by ranks of professional spell chandlers." 

Vs page 122:

"A House Cannith magewright might use a simple pattern to quickly create hundreds of continual flame stones for use in streetlamps."

It's the same fucking item. Thirty-one pages. That's how long it took to go from "don't imagine mass production" to "here's the magitech they use to do mass production." Now, this is largely explicable as a lack of communication between the different authors, but I also think the system itself is pulling a little trick on us. Because the section on page 122 is about "minor schemas" and minor schemas are not capable of quickly creating hundreds of streetlights. In practice, they act as a sort of reusable scroll you can cast from once per day. The magic that can mass produce items is called "patterns" and while patterns are made out of schemas (both minor and otherwise), Magic of Eberron doesn't actually give us rules for combining schemas into a pattern or for using a pattern to create larger scale effects. We know it's possible, because the book goes out of its way to tell us its possible, but it's not a feat that PCs are meant to replicate.

And I think that's the key to understanding Eberron's genre trouble. It can't present us with any sort of magic that allows individuals (or small groups) to act on an industrial scale, because industrial scale actions are not accounted for in D&D's standard power curve or magic item economy. A 5th level wizard in post-medieval times cannot be any more powerful than a 5th level wizard in a medieval setting. Perhaps just as importantly, a healing potion, a magic weapon, or generalized spellcasting services all have to cost the same amount as in the core book, in both absolute and relative terms. You've got House Jorasco, which is an entire family of people with the hereditary power to cure wounds and remove disease, and they're numerous enough to have a presence in every major city on the continent, but you can't just pop into one of their franchises and slip 'em 5gp to cure your mummy rot. You have to pay the same 150gp you'd pay a spellcaster in the standard setting. The ubiquity of magic hasn't made magic any cheaper.

Which pretty much means that the technological and social assumptions of the core book will transfer over to Eberron, whether they're meant to or not. It's called "a magic-suffused society," but the only specific magical conveniences they bother to list are lanterns and expensive transportation like airships or the lightning rail. They're missing something important about technological change - it tends to make average people significantly more powerful. In the 21st century, a person can pay the equivalent of less than 10gp (approximately 2 weeks wages) to fly halfway across the world and back. I regularly carry in my pocket an amount of computational power greater than existed in the entire world c. 1965. In other words, if Eberron is truly a "magic-suffused society" then there should be types of magic you can buy in a store and just casually use like it's no big deal. Unfortunately, Magic of Eberron doesn't tell us what any of those might actually be.

That being said, it's still a fun and fascinating D&D supplement. You can graft an elemental onto your body, gaining magical powers like immunity to dehydration (because the inside of your mouth is entirely water . . . which hurts my brain to even think about). You can play an Impure Prince, the prestige class that sounds like the title of an r-rated anime (and for good reason - it's a dark anti-hero with a symbiotic relationship to an eldritch monstrosity who hunts abominations from beyond the stars). You can magically conjure a wardrobe full of outfits suitable for any occasion, visit a castle with a giant enchanted windchime that repels invaders with massive sonic attacks, or buy a mechanical arm to attach to your belt and protect you with a shield. Some of this stuff does feel borderline-industrial, but most of it just feels like more D&D (not that that's a bad thing).

Overall, I guess my opinion of Magic of Eberron is that it's a great D&D supplement, but a frustrating Eberron supplement. I love the weird new magic, but I have desperately burning questions about the world's manufacturing infrastructure that stubbornly remain unanswered.

Ukss Contribution: The Green Spire - so-called because "the rock is home to many lichens." I just thought it was a cool image.