It Came From The Bookshelf!

Once again, the antagonist section is the best part of a Scion book. Though I feel I need to clarify something from the equivalent section of my Scion: Hero review. When I said the antagonist chapter was 99% good, I was referring only to the antagonist descriptions, the flavor paragraphs where they explained what these things were and how they interacted with scions. The creature statistics were actually pretty bad. I point this out because the monster descriptions in Scion: Demigod are even better, and the stats go from bad to unconscionable.

The reasons for this are largely what I complained about in my previous post, so I will just leave you with one specific observation - the antagonist section contains an NPC band of scions that's meant to be a parallel to the sample PCs and act as their rivals in the included adventure. One member of this group, Victor Fingers, Scion of Ares, can solo the entire PC band. The only default PC that can damage him is Eric Donner, who has an accuracy of 7 dice to hit his defense of 17. The only PC that can hit him is Yukiko Kuromizu, who does 10 damage against his soak of 13. And nobody's Epic Stamina is even close to countering Victor's damage. They might as well have listed his stats as "Victor kills 1 scion per round, except for Yukiko, who might survive for 3-4."

Okay, one more comment on the antagonist section. It's nice that they have a heroic trans woman as a signature character, but it's kind of embarrassing in retrospect to see the sloppy job they did in addressing her gender. A trans person's pronouns don't need to go in quotes, guys, even if you are talking about her before she came out. I can't say I was any better in 2007, so this is officially not a scolding. Just a heads-up for anyone picking up this book today.

Working backwards, the next thing to address is the sample adventure. It's okay. Nothing offensive like in Scion: Hero, though like its predecessor it comes across as a little bit railroady. I like the idea of racing to the ruins of Atlantis under the ice of Antarctica to stop a dark ritual from ushering in the apocalyptic winter that will spell the doom of the gods, but the start of the adventure seems to be written under the assumption that the players won't take the bait and you have to trick them into it. I don't know. Once you get into it, it's basically just a dungeon crawl, so very little can go wrong, but I'm not sure you'd want to run it without the player buy-in.

Finally, I can talk about the first chapter of Part 2. It's setting, guys! At last, some direct indication of what the Scion universe actually looks like. It's all pretty good, with mystical shortcuts through the realm of platonic ideals, hidden lands that house villages of spirit-folk or long forgotten sorceresses, and detailed descriptions of the various pantheons' lands of the dead. I love it. I really want to play in this world (Circe, of course, is problematic, and the minotaurs are terrible, but . . . source material?)

The tricky thing here is that as we get a closer look at Scion's setting, the clearer it becomes that some of its assumptions would work better if they were explicitly spelled out. Like, there's not a Masquerade, per se, but people don't really believe in the gods, and everyone can see what the PCs are up to, but nobody puts two and two together? It's a little confusing.

Overall, Scion: Demigod is a book of dizzying highs and terrible lows. It's a beautiful mess. Borderline unusable, but with some inspired ideas. I love it, but I hate it for not being what it could have been.

UKSS Contribution - Shit-eating vampires!

No . . . no . . .

On a more considered opinion, that would not be optimal. I guess I just felt compelled to inform you that Scion: Demigod suggests the existence of shit-eating vampires, though mercifully it neglects to provide their statistics.

Let's go with something that actually impressed me. The Yokai village. I did some cursory research to make sure I wasn't trampling on something real and holy, and my 5 minute Google search suggests that this is one of those "fun" myths that is suitable to be adapted to entertainment (though the name of the specific town in the book, Horai, seems to be associated with something entirely different than the book suggests).

The idea is pretty simple. A small town, inhabited by ghosts, spirits, and monsters. Some friendly, some not. Hidden deep in an inaccessible forest, where humans dare not tread too deeply, thanks to the signs and portents that surround it.

I like this sort of thing. I'd probably make it a bit lighter and a bit friendlier than the book, but a hidden monster town, where the ferocious-seeming inhabitants regard the human interlopers with a mixture of curiosity and fear, is just a delightful image.

Monday, March 25, 2019

Scion: Demigod - Part 1

This book really broke my heart. I suppose it's because the "Demigod" power level is generally my favorite - resilient enough that you can face some absolutely absurd opposition and engage in wide-ranging, almost cartoonish set-piece battles, but not so invincible that there's no element of risk. I like my rpg characters to be roughly as powerful as major multinational corporation. Unfortunately, Scion: Demigod completely botches the execution.

Scion: God is worse. Every flaw in the system becomes magnified by the greater scale. But somehow, it doesn't quite matter as much. Like, God is so broken you kind of just have to treat it empirically. Things happen, then other things happen, and who lives and who dies is pretty much random. Scion: Demigod still feels like it should make some kind of sense.

But it doesn't. You can add 22 successes to a Perception roll? What does that even mean? Was the GM not giving you the full story when you were only adding 16 successes to your Perception rolls? And, hey, Manipulation and Charisma at that level will allow you to beat any opposition, but it's probably overkill because social rolls are invariably resisted with Willpower + Integrity, and thus ineligible for an Epic Attribute bonus.

The only realm where ludicrous success totals have an objective, scalable meaning is combat, and the sheer range of variance here totally kills the system. Are you specced to counter the opponent's build? No? Then you're dead. Yes? Then is the opponent specced to counter your build? No? Then you're invincible. Yes? Then you most likely perfectly balance each other out and are going to wind up running the battle like you're both mortals.

It's just aggravating all around.

Boons aren't any better. There's always been an imbalance in their cost in the character creation system, but at this level it's enough to make it completely untenable. You get 10 points when you apply the demigod template, which is enough for 10 dots of Epic Attributes, each one of which brings with it a new knack. Or you can buy 2 mid-level Boons. Why do the designers hate boons?

It would be bad enough if the Boons were consistently powerful, but honestly, a lot of them are kind of underwhelming. The Sun and Moon purviews each have a level 7 Boon that summons a chariot that flies at 500mph . . . and vanishes at sunrise or sunset, respectively. It's useful, but in a modern setting, commercial airlines are more practical in almost all conceivable use cases. The GM pretty much has to design scenarios that have something time-critical happening at short notice a significant distance away.

And those are some of the better Boons. Chaos 7 starts a riot. Which sounds cool, except . . . why can't you do this with the dozens of successes you'd get from a dramatically cheaper Epic Charisma 7? Animal 6 lets you turn into your chosen animal, but then, why are you making players wait until mid-demigod tier for this power that will probably just wind up being a lateral move in effectiveness? And the less said about the Fertility Purview the better.

Okay, I'll say one thing - perfectly healthy plants with no other notable qualities, as many as you want!

I cannot convey how much I yearn to find something redeemable in Scion: Demigod's system. I mean, the cover is so fucking cool! Brigitte De La Croix is in her tophat with the cute skull decoration and she has a cane with a glowing-eyes skull topper, looking for all the world like a death-themed Broadway dancer as screaming poltergeists and mysterious green underworld energy surround her in the ruins of Atlantis. And I want to play that game.

But I can't. Not with the contents of this book. And that's why Scion: Demigod breaks my heart.

(Also, there's a bit of shady mid-aughts era political incorrectness in the opening fiction that just comes off as kind of gross now, but I'm not going to get into it because I've already panned this book enough.)

Sunday, March 24, 2019

Scion: Hero - Chapters 9 - 12

CONTENT WARNING - RAPE

There was something I could (and perhaps should) have mentioned in my first post about this game, but I knew it would be relevant again here, so I saved it. Scion: Hero made some very dubious editorial choices with the allocation of its limited page count. Nearly 40 pages for its opening fiction and a little more than 60 for a sample adventure. And while these things weren't entirely useless, I can't help but wonder what a version of Scion that devoted 80-90 pages in the corebook to discussing its setting and/or genre assumptions might have looked like.

But there's little point in speculating about what might have been. Let's talk about what we actually got. The antagonist chapter is very good. It's really fun seeing figures from ancient myth updated to the modern world. Like the alfar who moonlights as a supermodel, or the "centaurs" who are half-human, half-motorcycle. It's 99% cool.

But I guess that 1% is something that I need to talk about. Scion: Hero is just the teeniest bit rapey. Not as rapey as it could be, given that Zeus is a major character, but well, 2007 was at the cusp of the Great Internet Wokeness Explosion, and this book in particular just happens to fall on the wrong side of the cultural divide.

To be concrete - there is a modern-day nymph, called Peggy Bluewater who is a bit of an urban legend. She threatens a small town with plague unless, one per year, they send her a virginal young boy for her to have sex with. No subtext here. It specifically calls out an age range: 14-17. Gross.

But maybe you're thinking "well, it is the antagonist chapter," and I'll admit, she'd be an interesting villain. But Peggy is listed as a potential 4-dot Guide. Immortal child molester is a mentor. (Also, while I'm calling things out, I'm just going to go on record with my discomfort in the book describing her migration to the Americas as "strange, red-skinned natives discovered . . .")

I don't necessarily want to give the impression that this is a dominant theme in the book. I mean, the real thing that's wrong with Peggy is the sexual double-standard that will hopefully be unintelligible to the next generation of scholars citing my blog in 20 years (hi there, keep up the good work!) And the thing with Horace Farrow's backstory, where he was conceived via rape-by-impersonation, well that was probably just a thoughtless recapitulation of a common mythic trope.

The only thing that's truly unforgivable is the scenario in the sample adventure where Dr Aaron Tigrillo has to kidnap a woman for his god to rape.

The book doesn't explicitly say that's what's going on, but it does dance around the issue. It describes the scenario as a test of Dr Tigrillo's morals. And it does come out and say that the reason Tezcatlipoca assigned him the mission is because he wants to have sex with Iseldia Alvarado. And the art that accompanies the scenario has the God looming on an altar while Iseldia lies supine and crying in a revealing evening gown. And it never actually talks about her agency or motivations. And an uncomfortably large portion of the scenario is about potential approaches to kidnapping.

Technically, it never uses the r-word. I'm not sure what else "kidnapping, coercion, potential adultery, or worse" could be referring to. But technically it gives you an out. I mean, describing it as "potential adultery" sounds consensual. Maybe you could approach it as a matchmaker. After all, gods tend to be pretty hot. And though Iseldia's marriage is described as happy, maybe she's open to a fling.

Let's be real, though. The scenario is about a woman getting raped by a dark god. And it very disgustingly centers the narrative on a male character's moral anguish at fulfilling his religious duties. The book's squeamishness at calling the crime by its proper name is not to its credit.

Maybe, maybe, the story could work as an arc on a prestige drama. But trying to run this scenario as a tabletop rpg is a surefire disaster.

And now it's time for me to move on and talk about the rest of the book!

Okay, now that I've written it out, it turns out that scenario affected me more than I realized. It was deeply uncomfortable to read, and I knew I would have to say something about it, but until I got the words down on the page, it wasn't really my dominant impression of the book. It would feel weird, after that, to go on to examine the intricacies of the fate system or to come up with some cutesy little contribution to my fake campaign setting.

Maybe I'm being too sensitive here. It's only three pages, out of 330. And it's not as if it's saying that rape is good. It's merely a piece of entertainment that uses gratuitous and shocking violence against a female character as part of a male character's motivation. And even that is only implied. Maybe it's not even there. Maybe I'm reading too much into the text.

I think what I'm going to do is call it a misstep. I am of a certain age, and though I've always considered myself on the side of social progress, I too have made mistakes in my attempts to write "mature" and "gritty" fiction. It's not an easy distinction between "depicting a bad thing doesn't automatically equate to endorsing that thing" and "it's not okay to casually use a terrible trauma that affects real-life people as a superficial shorthand for a bad character, especially in an otherwise light-hearted genre piece."

It's not a pass, because that's not in my power to give. But it is the difference between "the author should be embarrassed" and "the author should be ashamed."

UKSS Contribution: Because I mostly liked the book, I'm not going to let a single awful scenario completely derail me from tradition. I'm choosing the Shinobi, cultists so devoted to a sinister Titan of Shadows that they give up their voices, becoming stealthy and perfectly silent assassins.

Saturday, March 23, 2019

Scion: Hero - Chapters 4-8

It feels a little bit like cheating for me to draw on my knowledge of Scion: Demigod and Scion: God when critiquing Scion: Hero's system chapters, but I can't pretend to an innocence I don't possess. Scion as a whole breaks in some pretty spectacular ways, and though it's not quite unusable yet, you can already see the cracks.

The biggest flaw in Scion: Hero is that Epic Dexterity is so much better than anything else you might want to buy, and by quite a large margin. Especially if you took the totally broken "Untouchable Opponent" perk (and it is to my lasting shame that I, in a sense of misguided loyalty, defended it on message boards for far longer than reasonable; with the clearer perspective of distance, it's shocking that such a thing made it through editing). It's such a good choice that it pretty much boils down to a binary choice - do you want to be a combatant or not. If the answer is yes, then maximum Epic Dexterity is a must.

But it's important to note that, as of Scion: Hero, Epic Dexterity was merely disruptively optimal, allowing a character to have a consistent baseline that was roughly in line with a lesser character's peak performance. It could be overcome. You wouldn't want to bet on an Epic Dex 2 over an Epic Dex 3, but it's possible that the less dexterous character could have other advantages that would tilt the fight in their favor. By the time you reach Scion: God, that will no longer be true.

However, this particular unbalanced choice is just the tip of the iceberg. Scion: Hero is full of trap builds, overpowered bombs that look harmless on the surface, and basic mechanics that practically force players into particular builds.

Take the combat system. Its foundation is taken from Exalted 2nd Edition. Despite that game's notoriety, its fundamental mechanics actually worked pretty well. It only really fell off the rails when powered individuals got involved (which, admittedly, was not a small problem). What's fascinating about Scion is that it only makes a few small tweaks, but these changes cause the system to fall apart in completely different ways than the issues that would plague its inspiration. For example, the change to soak (damage resistance). In Exalted, soak would subtract from raw damage, reducing the amount of damage dice you roll. In Scion, you roll your entire raw damage and then soak subtracts from the successes on the damage roll.

Maybe it's not entirely clear why this should be a problem . . . until you take into account that the average character's damage and soak is not significantly changed between the games. So without doing anything special, every PC, enemy, and monster in the game has double the damage resistance it would have in Exalted. You also have to consider that unlike Exalted's soak system, Scion's could reduce the effective damage of an attack to zero. In practice, this meant that it would take an optimized fist-fighter to consistently take down average noncombatants with unarmed attacks (and mirror-match brawler vs brawler would have a predicted fight time that approaches infinity as their absolute skill level increased).

I haven't even gotten into the character creation system yet, whose point-based approach allows PCs of wildly different power levels right from the start, and which is so unbalanced that the order in which you spend character creation points can net you significant amounts of experience points down the line. Or the fact that a serious mismatch in point costs makes Epic Attributes dramatically more cost effective than Boons (the thematically appropriate powers of the gods, like Zeus' thunder or Hermes' ability to fly). Or that non-physical attributes and abilities have no robust systems attached to them, requiring GMs to basically bullshit their way through, say, a 10 success Intelligence + Academics roll. Or the way that a straightforward reading of an otherwise unobtrusive Boon would seem to suggest that it could provide double-digit dice pool bonuses for a span of weeks.

Or . . .

Look, this game has a lot of problems. I would not blame you if, based on this post, you chose to give this game a pass. It's probably the right call, honestly. Because the one thing that a simple rundown of the mechanics can never capture is the electric feeling of what it was like to be there. You are telling new epics for a modern age! Look at the geometric progression of the Epic Attribute bonuses and imagine how awesome it's going to be when you're character is a god! Check out that sweet-ass cover with Eric Donner looking all buff and determined, surrounded by lightning and crows, holding an implausibly huge revolver while standing in front of a skyscraper!

What I'm saying is that it took me far longer than it should have to even notice these flaws. I wanted to believe.

Which, I suppose, is thematically appropriate.

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Scion: Hero - Chapters 1-3

I'm going to have to talk about cultural appropriation again. Is that just going to be my thing from now on? Am I going to be the guy who's always going on about cultural appropriation in rpgs? It's not as if I have any special knowledge on the subject. Hell, I barely understand it. It would be grossly inappropriate for me to position myself as an authority here. But I can't exactly ignore it when it stares me so blatantly in the face.

Now, to be clear, I don't think Scion: Hero crosses the line, but you have to take my opinion with a grain of salt. I'm an atheist, so I think that taking these figures of religious mythology and using them as the foundation for a high-action modern fantasy setting is kind of cool. I mean, the closest I'm going to get to being a religious minority is my status as an ex-Mormon. If I'm imagining the LDS mythos (and to be clear, I'm kind of a black sheep here, the rest of my family takes this very seriously) used in the most ham-fisted way possible, with the angle Moroni going around impregnating people and the prophet Lehi appearing in people's dreams to give them superpowers, then my main thought would be, "Joseph Smith was a conman, not a writer, none of his characters are cool enough to justify their inclusion here."

So, you know, my opinion on the proper use of the sacred as raw material for popular culture is not exactly one that you want to lean on. That being said, I think Scion is caught between the hammer and the anvil here.

If your pitch is "the old gods of classical mythology are running around in the modern days and the children they have with mortals are basically superheroes," then you've got a couple of "safe" pantheons. The Norse pantheon is more or less the communal property of Anglo-Germanic culture. Most of the English days of the week are named for the Norse gods. They've been used in fiction, both low and high, for centuries. If the Saxons didn't want us to make comic books and rpgs about their sacred figures, they'd have stayed in Denmark where they belonged.

And, of course, the Greco-Roman gods are part and parcel with Rome's imperial domination of Europe. It is impossible to overstate their influence on secular art from the Renaissance forward.

A version of Scion that was just Norse and Greek gods would be a pretty fun and goofy thing. You wouldn't have to worry about trampling over the theology of those belief systems, or oppressing their followers (modern revivals of these religions post-date the bulk of the pop-culturization of their traditions, so I have to assume their followers have made their peace with it). But a game like that would also be awfully white. That's the hammer.

If the only active gods are Norse and Greek, that raises questions that aren't really easy to answer. "Are Greek and Norse the only real gods?" "If the other pantheons are real, why don't you run into them when you travel the world?" "But [sacred figure x] would never act like a superhero, and even if they did, they'd never have an illegitimate child with a human" And so on.

Treating the non-European cultures with respect and dignity, while also fitting them into your casual-Saturday-entertainment, high-fantasy paradigm, especially when many of those cultures were destroyed (the meso-American pantheon) or dramatically transformed by (the Loa) the worst excesses of European colonialism - that's the anvil.

Does Scion: Hero manage to get out from between them? I can't say. I don't know enough about the individual cultures represented by the pantheons, and besides that, I'm inclined to think that inspiring an awesome superhero is a higher use for a mythological figure than as an object of worship.

However, if I were to venture a guess, I'd say they didn't quite nail the execution. And to my mind, the strongest evidence for this is the game's coyness about Abrahamic monotheism. To me, its lack of inclusion signals that the authors were aware of the boundaries of the sacred, and thus made a deliberate choice as to which traditions they didn't have to worry about transgressing.

You could make the argument that the game's premise doesn't work unless you've got polytheism (or at least henotheism), but that seems to imply that theological correctness is only really important when it comes to the dominant western religion.

You could also make the argument that you didn't want to court controversy by taking lightly the majority religion of your primary customers, but that, in a way, is even worse, because it's almost like you're saying that it's okay to offend people who are too weak to deliver serious retribution.

Of course, the counterargument to this is that the Hindu gods were also left out. So maybe the distinction is between living traditions and dead ones, but if that's the case, then White Wolf just plain got it wrong. (Also, the Hindu gods show up in both the Companion and in 2nd Edition, so that's probably not the explanation).

I don't know what to tell you, here. I like Scion. I think it's pretty neat. And there's nothing here that strikes me as offensive, per se. I do think the authors took care to be as sensitive as possible, while still making a game about demigods fighting monsters for the fate of the world. But then, the list of authors doesn't strike me as especially diverse. I could be wrong, of course. You can't tell just by a name whether someone is an adherent to Shinto or Voodoo. Maybe they did their due diligence and consulted with the represented peoples to come up with a fair and respectful depiction.

Like I said at the beginning. I am not expert on cultural appropriation. It's not bad enough for me, a white ex-Mormon atheist, to feel offended by proxy. But it is here enough for me, a white ex-Mormon atheist, to notice. So, there it is, whatever that's worth to you. And hell, maybe my intuition is wrong, and it is a common fantasy of marginalized minority religions everywhere to have their sacred figures get the super-hero treatment. Maybe there's a huge contingent of native-descended Latin Americans who are just dying for one of the Aztec gods to get a Marvel comic, just like Thor.

If so, well then . . . Scion: Hero is actually not a good fit for that, for reasons I'll get into next post, when I read the bulk of the game's mechanics and weep.

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Dragonlance Adventures

OMG, guys! Dragonlance is bad!

I knew that was going to be a possibility, going into this. In fact, it was more than a possibility. It was a likelihood. I remember reading a huge number of Dragonlance books in high school, where I was a late-blooming nerd with an incredibly shallow reference pool. And my recollections of these times were (hell, are) fond.

Poor little Tasslehoff, crying about his friend's death and thinking deeply about mortality for the first time. It really got to me.

And Raistlin, the scrawny dweeb who was bad at sports and yet still managed to be a sexy bad boy (seriously, a major plot point in one of the novels is the way he manipulates a beautiful priestess with his sexual wiles, which . . . um, okay) who took no shit from anyone thanks to THE POWER OF HIS MIND - somehow that spoke to me in a very personal way.

But I was just a boy. I'd not yet read Paradise Lost (though to be fair, I didn't accomplish that until I was, like, 30). I had almost no exposure to serious history or philosophy or the classics of the western canon. I'd never even heard of Terry Pratchett. I did not have the tools to discern good from bad.

Of course, over the years, I grew up. My experience broadened. My standards became higher. I never revisited the Dragonlance books, primarily because I had 1001 other interests that took priority, and so they stayed, in the back of my mind, as something cute and fun, and maybe a bit shallow, but generally okay. Yet there were moments, when I'd remember some plot point from the books and I'd experience a moment of dissonance. "Was Dragonlance bad?"

My first version of this review was incredibly snarky. There's a lot here to pick apart - attempts at humor that ranged from the eye-rolling to the offensive, worldbuilding that never goes anywhere, and a frankly nonsensical take on the alignment system.

But that would have been too mean. For all of its faults, Dragonlance is undeniably earnest, and I can't hate it for that. You take something like the Knights of Solamnia and they don't really make much sense as an organization. How are they funded? How can they be both the righteous defenders of the innocent and hated almost everywhere? Why would the Knights of the Rose have ever required royal blood? Where were all those nobles coming from? And so on. But then you realize that their real purpose is just to embody the tropes of chivalry while also having plenty of excuse to hang around with a party of weirdos (the odd thing about reading this book so soon after Pendragon is that it was incredibly obvious that the Dragonlance knights were skin deep, but also that the thing I'd wished for at the end of Pendragon - the romance and idealism of Arthurian fiction, without all the historical baggage - was a pretty misguided thing to want).

And a lot of Dragonlance is like that. Something that seems cool from a kneejerk reaction (the Orders of High Sorcery - Wizards who get their powers from the three moons), but then falls apart if you put even ten seconds of thought into it (wait, one of the Orders is openly and explicitly evil and people are okay with this this? They just go around wearing black robes and thus easily identifiable at all times and the reason that they're not instantly burned at stake is because the "good" and "neutral" wizards will come to their aid, in defense of the craft of magic, without regard to how it's used?")

I'm saying, in other words, it's an easy thing to sneer at, but its style-over-substance approach does have one benefit. It is easy to get into this setting's way of thinking. It does some things weird, but rarely are even those weird things unexpected. Play an Irdra, which is basically an ogre, but they're beautiful because they turned good before the ogres were totally corrupted by evil, and they have unique shapeshifting and magical powers, but these beautiful, talented, good-hearted people are outcasts from society, hunted wherever they go, so they must bear the burden of being scorned and hated, despite their abundant natural gifts.

And I'm doing it again. I'm going to the snarky place (and I haven't even touched on the small races, which are uniformly cringe-inducing). But I was on my way to a point. Dragonlance is bad, but it has a constituency. And I don't want to go too much into why I think the setting appeals to them, because it will surely be undeservedly condescending on my part. But this Dragonlance constituency is good. I like them. I used to be one of them. They should be able to have their fun without some pretentious blogger shitting all over them.

That being said, Dragonlance fans should not get Dragonlance Adventures. The book is a mess. The mechanics are mostly functional in that AD&D 1st edition way where balance is naught but a dream, but the bulk of the text is devoted to recapping canon. I dinged Pendragon for being too canon-conservative, but this book is a whole other level. It's less that it holds the events of the books sacred than that it doesn't bother engaging with the material as an rpg-resource. The city of Palanthas is mentioned several times as a center of trade and culture (and thus somewhere you might want to feature in Dragonlance adventures), but Dragonlance Adventures only mentions it in relation to prominent historical events. Despite being the largest surviving pre-Cataclysm city on Krynn, there's nothing about its population, major landmarks, laws, customs, fashions, or politics.

Over and over again, the book will present some setting element, but instead of providing descriptions of how it looks from a player-eye level, it talks almost exclusively about plot. That would be a weakness in any book, much less one about a setting as aggressively unambitious as Krynn. So if you're interested in Dragonlance (and despite all my mockery, I still have a fondness for it), I would suggest looking towards later supplements. This one is barely helpful at all.

UKSS Contribution: I'm going to go with Dargonesti. They're elves that can shapechange into dolphins. That's a pretty neat image, and an interesting idea for a fantasy society. I'll probably twist it, though and make Ukss' version into dolphins that shapechange into elfin-type creatures when they want to deal with humans. Put more emphasis on the alien nature of these majestic creatures.

Sunday, March 17, 2019

Pendragon - Part 3 (Mostly Setting Stuff)

Okay, so that Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is a pretty neat game. If I were still blogging about video games, I'd have a thing or two to say about it, that's for sure. But I'm not, so the only thing I'm going to say is that I lost the better part of two weeks, and that's a little embarrassing. But the rpg-reading train is back on its tracks and the time has come to wrap up Pendragon.

The last third of this book contains rules for creating female characters and magicians, which kind of irks me a little, because I gave it a pass for its lack of diversity on the theory that it was uncompromising in its specificity. It feels like the worst of both worlds to allow those characters, but make them utterly ineffective. Pendragon would have been a better game if it stubbornly stuck to its initial premise.

Putting that aside, the rest of the book is pretty good. The chapter on magic would have been better served if it had ditched the player-facing magic system and just talked about the weird occult stuff that players might encounter on their knightly adventures, but it's not totally unsalvageable. At the very least, it can be used for sorcerous antagonists.

The scenarios chapter is also mostly good. The introductory adventure gives a lot of specific, actionable advice for how to be a GM that is, frankly, missing from almost every other product aimed at beginners. Stuff like "Half of the job is for the gamemaster to propose questions to the players which they answer for their characters. . . Just let them do as they wish, describe the passive events as well you can, and keep asking questions when something exciting is happening."

It's good advice, and a lot more pragmatic than the rest of the book had led me to expect. The intro adventure is set up a lot like a video game tutorial - a trivial task to get players used to rolling dice, a low-stakes horse race to introduce the concept of opposed rolls, a friendly joust, then a hunt, and ending with a nontrivial fight against bandits. Each stage ups the challenge and complexity and introduces a new mechanic. Then it all ends with an official knighting ceremony and the players' first winter stage. Generally a well-structured start, assuming the players come in as complete newbies.

The rest of the scenarios are less detailed, but the book has a pretty efficient format for presenting them in a limited amount of space. It devotes a paragraph or two to the set up, then outlines the major characters, a couple of possible plot-twists, the expected solution, and then the rewards. Because this game is based on one of the foundational texts of western fantasy (and, indeed, storytelling in general) a lot of the individual scenarios have something of an elemental feel to them (at least three are variations on "this knight has kidnapped a woman and now you have to rescue her), but it's kind of okay.

The only real flaw is that it becomes clear that Pendragon is a little too wedded to Arthurian canon for its own good. A couple of the scenarios literally revolve around players failing at some quest the canon Knights of the Round Table later succeed at. The PCs are basically the nameless nobles who couldn't pull the sword from the stone so that Arthur's feat could be properly legendary.

To put it in perspective, an average PC knight, over a lifetime of serious, but not fanatical adventuring, might be expected to earn 10,000 glory. It might be possible to double that, though half is much more likely. Sir Lancelot is just starting out, as of the game's default start date, and he has 50,000.

Sure, you're going to want to have a few of the famous knights be really high end, in order for the PCs to have peers if they ever reach the big leagues, but that total is absurd. It's not even notionally attainable. Gawain is the next biggest at 32,000. It all serves to give the impression that players are meant to be peripheral figures in Arthur's court and stay that way.

Which, you know, is not necessarily what I want for a game about King Arthur's knights. I think I'd prefer a game that was more of an Arthurian pastiche. One that let me play out stories that were kind of like the medieval romances in a setting that resembles Camelot, but which had room for lady knights and peasant heroes and useful magicians (and, of course, I couldn't read the sections of Fine Amor, without thinking "sure, but how do I make it gay?"). Would that game necessarily have been better? I can't say. But it could probably have managed to capture everything I enjoy about Pendragon.

UKSS contribution: This one is tricky, because a lot of the setting is just England and Wales, but with old-timey names for everything and the occasional superstitious explanation for stuff that exists in the real world. Like, Merlin upgraded Stonehenge with a couple of new monoliths, which is interesting, but not really the sort of thing that can be ported over to a generic setting.

I guess the most versatile setting element would have to be the Questing Beast. I'm not sure precisely what it is except that it is obtrusively elusive. You can't catch it or kill it, but you always know when it's near and you can track it for miles. It's probably a religious allegory, but I like to think that it's an intelligent creature that trolls hunters on purpose.

Monday, March 11, 2019

Pendragon - Part 2 (Mostly Game Mechanics)

The best part of Pendragon is the Winter Phase. It's a simple enough thing - a series of checks that determine your character's education, aging, and economic circumstances, but that it exists at all is a powerful statement of the game's intent. The game has a very definite and unusual approach to the passage of time. Your knightly adventures are framed in a yearly cycle, which itself is put in the context of a generational cycle. Death, whether on the battlefield or in the sickbed, is inevitable, and yet the story goes on. Your character will adventure, yes, but he will also live. Fighting monsters, rescuing maidens, and getting into pointless and petty personality disputes with heavily armed men are your character's job, but they are not the sum total of his life.

So that's pretty neat.

Certainly, the dynastic progression is the main reason to play Pendragon, over, say, Dungeons and Dragons. A case could be made for the unforgiving wound system or the prominent role Glory plays in your characters' development, but even those things are incorporated into the cycle (a lingering wound may be the reason a character stays home from the yearly adventure, whereas gaining glory can improve your marital and economic prospects). The actual system itself is only so-so.

Its big flaw is that it's overly enamored with providing fiddly modifiers to your various actions. It's not as bad as some systems I could name, but especially in combat, the tendency is there. On the other hand, those modifiers usually amount to a 5-10 point swing on a d20 roll, so they're easy enough to just eyeball. I'd say that it works, even if I'm not especially inspired by it.

Overall, I'm glad to have gotten this middle part out of the way so I can finally focus on the meaty fantasy stuff in the final third of the book. Upcoming is magic and creatures and adventures! Huzzah!

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Pendragon, Part 1 (Mostly Character Creation)