I'm going to have to be careful. The Complete Book of Necromancers is very good, and I'm going to be tempted to use that as an excuse to indulge in full-on anti-AD&D snark. It would be easy to smirk and say that this feels so much better than regular Dungeons and Dragons, but that would be ignoring the fact that this is, indeed, a supplement for AD&D 2nd edition, and thus by definition part of what AD&D is.
In my defense, this book feels like it's at least a decade ahead of its time, more akin to what White Wolf was doing with the New World of Darkness than anything its contemporaries were doing (as part of AD&D or otherwise). It still has some obnoxious D&D-isms. The sections about finding attributes for and applying dual-class mechanics to your NPC villains were weirdly rules-focused, as if the DM were obligated to follow the character-creation process and could only create adversaries that could theoretically be PC-legal. Yet there's something else at work here. There's an awareness of genre, and the implication that you could be doing this fantasy stuff on purpose.
It's something of a misnomer to call this The Complete Book of Necromancers. Necromancy is a running theme. It informs all the new spells. But it isn't really what the strongest parts of the book are about. A more accurate title to this book would probably be "A Guide to Sword & Sorcery, Pulp, and Gothic Fantasy."
Yes, there's necromancy involved, but the magic in this book is more the sort that is wielded by decadent sorcery-kings languidly sitting on the jewel-encrusted thrones of decaying jungle kingdoms. Or reckless natural philosophers, probing the forbidden limits of human knowledge and driving themselves mad with things man was not meant to know. Or, you know, there's like this creepy blood-soaked clown who sneaks up on you with a mad cackle, but you look past him and you see something shapeless lurking in the shadows and you know that's the real threat.
It's all just magic. Necromancy is the excuse, because it's a school of magic that never quite fit in with D&D's morally-neutral function-first approach to spellcasting. But the main thing that focusing on necromancy accomplishes is to allow the book to explore a magic system tied to a different set of genre assumptions.
There's a list of appropriate kits from other supplements that suggests the Witch kit from The Complete Wizard's Handbook would be good for necromancers. In just a few sentences, it does a better job selling the kit than the wizard book did in a page and a half. I'd attribute that to a greater appreciation for the literary and mythological antecedents of witches as a class. The Complete Book of Necromancers has a confident voice and deploys genre tropes with precision.
Overall, I think this book is kind of wasted on DMs. You can use it to create some memorable villains and settings, but if the players as a group bought into its aesthetics and priorities, you could really elevate your D&D game into something special.
Or maybe I'm just saying that because Talib is a pitch perfect Exalted character - an expert warrior, powerful psychic, and master sorcerer who ruled a city of the undead until he became estranged from his similarly mystical wife and has subsequently spent his later years hunting the most powerful liches in the world.
The best parts of this book are little things like that. Well-chosen details that suggest whole worlds just out of sight. There's an "Anatomist" kit that steals liberally from works like Frankenstein. The signature character for this kit is named "Lady Doctor Ellandra Tolbert." In one of the chapter-opening fictions, she wipes out an entire pirate ship with a single spell. "Once the distant screaming abated, the Lady warned us to leave their ship behind, as a warning to others."
It's so damned rare for a book to just get what I find appealing about playing a magic user.
Ukss Contribution: So many good choices. Almost every page in this book has something awesome (even the part about dual-class necromancer/thieves very awesomely cut the bullshit and called thieves a near-useless class).
My first instinct is to add the worshipers of the God of Suffering. I like this one because it's quite clearly riffing on the dourest strains of medieval Christian theology, but is weird and specific enough to maintain plausible deniability. Usually when games do fantasy Christianity for fantasy Europe, they stick with romantic King Arthur-esque paladins. It's a nice change of pace to see itinerant monks wandering the countryside whipping themselves in a constant reminder that life is a vale of tears.
However, every time I see the priests of the Crying God discussed, people seem to get very weird ideas in their heads about BDSM, and that's not something I want to have to deal with.
I'll go with my second choice, then - The necromancer Nebt Bhakau. He has near perfect regeneration, and was only defeated when he was dismembered into six different pieces, each of which had to be contained in a magically sealed vessel. But if the six jars containing his major organs are brought together once more, he will rise again.
Monday, September 30, 2019
Saturday, September 28, 2019
Rites of Spring
Rites of Spring is a book about magic in the Changeling: the Lost universe. In theory. Since Changeling: the Lost is a fantasy game, it turns out that Rites of Spring is about a little bit of everything.
This lack of focus makes it harder than usual for me to come up with a hook for a blog post, but as an rpg supplement, it's pretty useful. Want more information on how the Clarity (think: sanity) mechanics work? About what exactly counts as iron for purposes of faerie weaknesses? About what happens when you try to manipulate a vampire's dreams? This book has you covered.
Ultimately, its role as a book of miscellany, barely held together by a theme, means that Rites of Spring winds up embodying both the best and the worst aspects of its parent game.
On the upside, there's a lot of that great Changeling: the Lost flavor - dark fairy tale meets urban fantasy, with a timeless quality that's a little bit baroque, a little bit horror, and a little bit whimsy. There's an antique camera where, if you use it to take someone's picture, within a week they'll be dragged away by faeries to labor in servitude for a year and a day. There's a type of super-sweet fruit that if you eat the grubs that nest in its center, you'll get the ability to magically escape from handcuffs.
Changeling: The Lost has an awesomely unique voice, and this book helps you dial into it just a little more precisely.
Which brings us to this book's biggest downside - the World of Darkness. As time goes on, I'm becoming more and more convinced that the World of Darkness just does not work as a concept. Each and every individual World of Darkness game builds itself a fascinating, unique world and precisely none of them actually match up with the broader setting implied when the books try to pitch a crossover.
That wouldn't necessarily be a problem. You could just say that crossover games take place in the generic-verse and normal, single-group games are the only ones with weird fantastic settings. Alternately, you could just simulate the different supernatural factions within the rules of the particular games. There's no reason Changeling's version of "vampires" couldn't be leechfinger darklings or their "werewolves" couldn't be any number of beast kiths. Rites of Spring goes with probably the weakest option - allowing players to build other supernaturals by the rules of their native games and then half-heartedly grafting them on to Changeling's metaphysics, but even that more or less works.
Where the World of Darkness becomes a burden is when its central assumptions start intruding on a game's premises, forcing it incorporate setting and rules elements that just don't work.
The big offender here is "the Mask." In short, every one of Changeling: The Lost's magical elements has two forms. The Mien is its true appearance. A rabbit changeling's long ears. Or the diamond encrusted teeth of an enchanted skull. The Mask is how it looks to casual witnesses. A person with a really tall hair-do or a plastic skull with cheesy LED teeth.
To a certain degree, this is thematic. The idea is that Changelings, as refugees from the world of magic, survivors of horrors best unspoken, are alienated from human society. They can never go back. They can never share their experiences. Most people are blind to their world, often to the point where it starts to feel intentional. They don't want to know.
Thus there is a world of magic, hiding in plain sight. If they could somehow open their eyes to it, the average person would see that they live right in the middle of it. That's part of the tragedy and horror of Changeling: The Lost in general - people go through their ordinary, "rational" lives and never realize that the danger is closer than they think.
Where it becomes tricky is in the specific implementation of the Mask as a game mechanic. It's ridiculously comprehensive. I'll let this quote from the "Lies of the Hand" section explain it for me:
One might argue that this is all part and parcel with the game's Clarity mechanics, where as time goes on characters lose track of the boundaries between the fae world and the mortal world, and, if they're not careful, descend into a sort of waking dream-state, where images from the deepest recesses of their subconscious mind seem as real as ordinary physical matter.
If you can't trust the information of your senses, then Clarity seems like it would be a major concern. Except the rules for Clarity and the Mask manage to get the setting exactly wrong. The wondrous stuff from Arcadia and the Hedge, that stuff is real. To see a world of wonder, where, say, a vagabond's moth-eaten coat turn out to be made from stitched-together moths, is to perceive the world accurately. Yet the methods of an honest pursuit of truth are likely to lead one deeper into a lie.
"I'm actually half-human/half-goat."
"But you look just like a regular person."
"I've got horns."
"I'm feeling your head right now, and it's perfectly smooth."
"Did you analyze that fur sample I gave you."
"I did. Regular human hair."
"You're the hundredth person to tell me that. Maybe those weirdos who tell me they can see my goat persona are gaslighting me after all."
The trap is just too damned tight. And I blame the World of Darkness. It's axiomatic to that setting that ordinary people don't know about the supernatural. So when you've got a supernatural group like Changelings, who would be highly motivated to reveal the existence of faeries and Arcadia, both to cope with what they've been through and warn others about the danger, then you've got to be a little heavy-handed to preserve the status quo.
But maybe Changeling would be a better game if it didn't have to worry about the status quo. If the world were just allowed to be its own quirky dark-fantasy setting. Maybe the Mask is something that can be penetrated if someone makes the effort, but the price is that the clearer you see the things of faerie, the clearer they see you.
Hell, there's a part of me that's curious about what Changeling would be like if it took a page from new Scion and allowed the supernatural to be common knowledge. Maybe the faerie people are seen as a shady subculture, like hardcore drug users. Maybe Changelings keep their status to themselves because the first instinct of anyone who believes them is to blame them for their own kidnapping. Maybe people could see the things of faerie, they just don't want to.
Just speculating here. While I would advise against making the Mask as durable as this book suggests, it's nonetheless a fairly workable concept. Most everything in this book works fairly well, and if it never goes so far as to suggest the wholesale ditching of WoD themes, it at least offers plenty of advice to tweak those themes into more comfortable subgenres.
UKSS Contribution: There's plenty of weird magic here to choose from, even if I don't fully respect its dual nature. The best candidate, though, is The Book of Tales. It's a magic book that helps its reader navigate their immediate future, but the neat thing about it is that it isn't a magical biography. It doesn't describe the literal details of the reader's life. Instead, it tells fictional stories that are applicable to the reader's life. Bob is worried about an upcoming meeting with his boss, so he relaxes with the Book of Tales and reads about Roberto, who goes head to head with a dragon with some oddly familiar mannerisms.
I like magic like that. The kind that's useful, but also a bit mystical and revelatory. Ukss' Book of Tales will probably be a bigger deal than Changeling's. Maybe it's a unique artifact instead of just a thing that often happens when you leave a book unattended in the Hedge. Maybe it's infamous for showing up in people's lives, completely upending them, and then mysteriously disappearing. But it's definitely going to be the case that people have a habit of doing great things right after they're inspired by reading a good book.
For some reason, that theme appeals to me.
This lack of focus makes it harder than usual for me to come up with a hook for a blog post, but as an rpg supplement, it's pretty useful. Want more information on how the Clarity (think: sanity) mechanics work? About what exactly counts as iron for purposes of faerie weaknesses? About what happens when you try to manipulate a vampire's dreams? This book has you covered.
Ultimately, its role as a book of miscellany, barely held together by a theme, means that Rites of Spring winds up embodying both the best and the worst aspects of its parent game.
On the upside, there's a lot of that great Changeling: the Lost flavor - dark fairy tale meets urban fantasy, with a timeless quality that's a little bit baroque, a little bit horror, and a little bit whimsy. There's an antique camera where, if you use it to take someone's picture, within a week they'll be dragged away by faeries to labor in servitude for a year and a day. There's a type of super-sweet fruit that if you eat the grubs that nest in its center, you'll get the ability to magically escape from handcuffs.
Changeling: The Lost has an awesomely unique voice, and this book helps you dial into it just a little more precisely.
Which brings us to this book's biggest downside - the World of Darkness. As time goes on, I'm becoming more and more convinced that the World of Darkness just does not work as a concept. Each and every individual World of Darkness game builds itself a fascinating, unique world and precisely none of them actually match up with the broader setting implied when the books try to pitch a crossover.
That wouldn't necessarily be a problem. You could just say that crossover games take place in the generic-verse and normal, single-group games are the only ones with weird fantastic settings. Alternately, you could just simulate the different supernatural factions within the rules of the particular games. There's no reason Changeling's version of "vampires" couldn't be leechfinger darklings or their "werewolves" couldn't be any number of beast kiths. Rites of Spring goes with probably the weakest option - allowing players to build other supernaturals by the rules of their native games and then half-heartedly grafting them on to Changeling's metaphysics, but even that more or less works.
Where the World of Darkness becomes a burden is when its central assumptions start intruding on a game's premises, forcing it incorporate setting and rules elements that just don't work.
The big offender here is "the Mask." In short, every one of Changeling: The Lost's magical elements has two forms. The Mien is its true appearance. A rabbit changeling's long ears. Or the diamond encrusted teeth of an enchanted skull. The Mask is how it looks to casual witnesses. A person with a really tall hair-do or a plastic skull with cheesy LED teeth.
To a certain degree, this is thematic. The idea is that Changelings, as refugees from the world of magic, survivors of horrors best unspoken, are alienated from human society. They can never go back. They can never share their experiences. Most people are blind to their world, often to the point where it starts to feel intentional. They don't want to know.
Thus there is a world of magic, hiding in plain sight. If they could somehow open their eyes to it, the average person would see that they live right in the middle of it. That's part of the tragedy and horror of Changeling: The Lost in general - people go through their ordinary, "rational" lives and never realize that the danger is closer than they think.
Where it becomes tricky is in the specific implementation of the Mask as a game mechanic. It's ridiculously comprehensive. I'll let this quote from the "Lies of the Hand" section explain it for me:
When he runs his hand over the horned brow of his Runnerswift lover, he does not see his hand encounter an invisible (to him) barrier where her horn sprouts. As far as he (and other mortals watching), his hand slides across smooth, unbroken skin. Changelings, ensorcelled humans, and others who can pierce the Mask see the truth: his hand caresses her horns and the skin around or between them.That is absolutely bonkers. It goes beyond merely allowing Changelings to remain discreet in an otherwise mundane world and crosses the line into an all-out assault on the characters' epistemology. It calls into question their very ability to know the world through the information provided by the senses. If the Changeling sees themselves as a horned goat-person and has full sensory impressions of things like their horns, hooves, and fur, but 99% of the rest of humanity sees them as just a regular person, and their senses report smooth skin and normal feet, can we really say that the Mien is the truth and the Mask is the lie?
One might argue that this is all part and parcel with the game's Clarity mechanics, where as time goes on characters lose track of the boundaries between the fae world and the mortal world, and, if they're not careful, descend into a sort of waking dream-state, where images from the deepest recesses of their subconscious mind seem as real as ordinary physical matter.
If you can't trust the information of your senses, then Clarity seems like it would be a major concern. Except the rules for Clarity and the Mask manage to get the setting exactly wrong. The wondrous stuff from Arcadia and the Hedge, that stuff is real. To see a world of wonder, where, say, a vagabond's moth-eaten coat turn out to be made from stitched-together moths, is to perceive the world accurately. Yet the methods of an honest pursuit of truth are likely to lead one deeper into a lie.
"I'm actually half-human/half-goat."
"But you look just like a regular person."
"I've got horns."
"I'm feeling your head right now, and it's perfectly smooth."
"Did you analyze that fur sample I gave you."
"I did. Regular human hair."
"You're the hundredth person to tell me that. Maybe those weirdos who tell me they can see my goat persona are gaslighting me after all."
The trap is just too damned tight. And I blame the World of Darkness. It's axiomatic to that setting that ordinary people don't know about the supernatural. So when you've got a supernatural group like Changelings, who would be highly motivated to reveal the existence of faeries and Arcadia, both to cope with what they've been through and warn others about the danger, then you've got to be a little heavy-handed to preserve the status quo.
But maybe Changeling would be a better game if it didn't have to worry about the status quo. If the world were just allowed to be its own quirky dark-fantasy setting. Maybe the Mask is something that can be penetrated if someone makes the effort, but the price is that the clearer you see the things of faerie, the clearer they see you.
Hell, there's a part of me that's curious about what Changeling would be like if it took a page from new Scion and allowed the supernatural to be common knowledge. Maybe the faerie people are seen as a shady subculture, like hardcore drug users. Maybe Changelings keep their status to themselves because the first instinct of anyone who believes them is to blame them for their own kidnapping. Maybe people could see the things of faerie, they just don't want to.
Just speculating here. While I would advise against making the Mask as durable as this book suggests, it's nonetheless a fairly workable concept. Most everything in this book works fairly well, and if it never goes so far as to suggest the wholesale ditching of WoD themes, it at least offers plenty of advice to tweak those themes into more comfortable subgenres.
UKSS Contribution: There's plenty of weird magic here to choose from, even if I don't fully respect its dual nature. The best candidate, though, is The Book of Tales. It's a magic book that helps its reader navigate their immediate future, but the neat thing about it is that it isn't a magical biography. It doesn't describe the literal details of the reader's life. Instead, it tells fictional stories that are applicable to the reader's life. Bob is worried about an upcoming meeting with his boss, so he relaxes with the Book of Tales and reads about Roberto, who goes head to head with a dragon with some oddly familiar mannerisms.
I like magic like that. The kind that's useful, but also a bit mystical and revelatory. Ukss' Book of Tales will probably be a bigger deal than Changeling's. Maybe it's a unique artifact instead of just a thing that often happens when you leave a book unattended in the Hedge. Maybe it's infamous for showing up in people's lives, completely upending them, and then mysteriously disappearing. But it's definitely going to be the case that people have a habit of doing great things right after they're inspired by reading a good book.
For some reason, that theme appeals to me.
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
Monster Mythology
Where to even start with this book. There are things about it that are so bad I could fill out a thousand word rant without breaking a sweat. There are also things that are so good that I could rapturously gush over them indefinitely. Also there's some mediocre stuff too, so it's got the whole gamut covered.
I feel like I've been overly negative lately, so let's just start with the good and maybe meander our way down to the bad as we get towards the end. I will share with you the single most brilliant sentence ever written for any edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Fair warning - this is going to seem a little bit backhanded, because Monster Mythology clearly didn't know what they had, but I mean this in all sincerity. Hell, I've had this book for more than 20 years and I only just now noticed it, so I'm hardly one to cast aspersions.
I mean, just let that stew around in your head a little. The thing that makes a species demihuman is . . . the ability to return the dead to life. There are creatures out there every bit as sapient, but they lack this spark of magic, so for them death is final. Two classes of people - one who needs not fear death and another whose days are numbered. The first group lives beautiful, prosperous lives in elegant tree villages, intricately carved cavern vaults, bucolic country villages, or really anywhere else rich in the blessings of the earth. The second group ekes out an existence in barren wastelands, sewers, haunted ruins, or really anywhere else that is only marginally fit for habitation. And the groups are at eternal war, separated by irreconcilable racial divisions.
The first group is "good" and the second group is "evil," but who is assigning those labels?
I can't be alone in seeing this, right? That this one sentence is a whole campaign pitch, the sort of thing you put at the center of your worldbuilding and let inform the bulk of your design decisions. That's the only reason I didn't choose it as my Ukss contribution. It's too big of an idea. D&D 3rd edition had this thing where its art is described as "dungeonpunk," but this is the real dungeonpunk.
You're a goblin. You're born into a world that's rigged against you. The very metaphysics of life itself mean that you're never going to be one of the beautiful people. You'll never have what they have. But you and your people, you've found the gaps in the system. The places they don't want. The things that are too broken down, dirty, and dangerous for them to even acknowledge.
Of course, of course, these places aren't safe forever. Their system doesn't allow any scrap of value to remain overlooked for long. When they start pushing in to your lands, you push back. You'll die. They won't. But they'll have to live in a world they don't completely control.
Monster Mythology doesn't develop this idea. In fact, it's never mentioned again. But I don't think this is just me pulling a single sentence out of context and going inappropriately gaga over it. There's a bit of that, sure, but it's not the only example of the book being insightful and recklessly creative as part of a throw-away line that's only brought up once.
The story of the first gnomish blimp is that a gnome culture hero stole the tail from the god of the lizard-folk and cured it into a giant balloon. The god of the derro (evil dwarves) doesn't have "priests," instead he directs his people by choosing particular pregnancies and magically manipulating the fetuses during gestation to create a caste of mystically potent leaders.
Amman, the god of giants, is dual-natured. His dreams provide the substance for base matter, but he's also an earthy father to the giant race, visiting the mortal world to find lovers and then using his magic to ensure he only has sons - a move that he comes to regret when he meets the daughter that was hidden from him and realizes his vanity and sexism is the reason so many giants are cruel and aggressive.
I'd say, as a rough estimate, that about 30% of this book is genuinely great, doing AD&D-style "generic" fantasy as well as it's ever been done. Which gets us into Monster Mythology's deepest structural flaw (although not the worst thing about it - that would be the oddly pointless dig it makes about East Asian mythology: "Obviously, selecting the Chinese or Japanese pantheons is a step likely only to be taken by a DM who, with his players, wishes to adventure in an Oriental game world and setting." Obviously.)
When I say "structural flaw" I mean something that is fundamental to the conception of the book itself. The writing mostly ranges from good to great, so I'm guessing the reason this exists is an editorial mandate. I imagine the writer was given certain instructions when he was hired and those instructions inexplicably sabotaged the whole book. It was well-executed, but poorly conceived.
No delicate way to put this - Monster Mythology has too many gods. They aren't bad, per se, but they do weigh down the book and steal focus away from the strongest entries. Do we really need three bugbear gods? Hell, do we even need one? Bugbears aren't really a thing. Hey, AD&D, stop trying to make bugbears happen.
It often feels like Monster Mythology is going down a checklist, looking at the Monstrous Manual page-by-page and creating a new god for every intelligent species it finds. The selkies have a god!
That's not intrinsically an absurd idea. Selkies are an affecting myth. They're seals who can shed their skins to become human. They visit land and sometimes fall in love with a human, but are inevitably called back to the sea. Or maybe the human falls in love with them and tries to force them to stay by stealing and hiding their skin.
It touches on some really potent themes. You've got two worlds, in close physical proximity, but largely inaccessible to one another. Your main characters transgress the boundary of those worlds, discovering new things about themselves and the world around them that they've taken for granted. There is romance, heartache, and betrayal. You could get a lot of mileage out of centering a goddess in this narrative. It is the sort of passionate mystery play out of which religions are built.
Surminare, the selkie goddes, has half a page devoted to her. Of that, half is reserved for the game stats of her avatar. It's a more efficient use of space than 1e's Legends & Lore, but not by much.
Being confined to 1-2 paragraph of description means that most of the gods in this book just wind up feeling like large and powerful versions of whatever species they're the god of. Surminare is just a selkie who happens to be a Paladin/Druid. Kurtulmak is a boss kobold (though, with kobolds specifically, "our god is a bigger, pettier kobold" is actually an apt bit of characterization). You could easily reskin the bulk of this book to be about high-level humanoid adventurers and very little would be lost.
Ironically, it is the "hero" entries that often wind up feeling the most godlike, probably because they're on average longer, in order to explain why this mortal person deserves to be listed alongside the gods.
Yet there are some real gems here. If you dropped the "these are the gods of monstrous humanoids" angle, you could assemble a really stellar pantheon out of the highlights.
The lesser entries are not bad. You could use them as a starting point in developing some memorable divine antagonists/allies for your game. But if, say, the weaker two-thirds had been ripped out and their space cannibalized to extend the entries of the best of the gods? Or, hell, if avatar stats had been left out entirely so the average entry could nearly double in length? We would at this very moment be having the "does this book live up to its legendary reputation" conversation.
In the end, Monster Mythology is merely very good. It's rare to see an rpg book this densely packed with useable ideas. It's only 128 pages, but it has enough interesting stuff inside it to fuel dozens of campaigns. A true forgotten gem.
Ukss Contribution: I'm going to have to choose a god, aren't I. That's not a problem, really. There's been a god-shaped hole in Ukss for awhile. The real problem here is narrowing it down to just one.
My instincts run towards the gnomish pantheon. In this book, they are largely wasted space. They're overly specific and theologically simplistic. But, you could make a great trickster deity out of them if you treated them as a composite entity. If they're distinct aspects/moods of a single being, then that being feels a lot like a god should, especially if you put them all in the body of Chiktikka Fastpaws, the gnomish nature god's racoon familiar.
I'm just not sure that counts as a contribution. I'd be grabbing a lot of stuff at once and then fundamentally rewriting it. It's always a bit fuzzy how much of that is okay.
So instead I'll go with my runner up - The Great Mother. She's the Beholder goddess who "mates" with monsters and demons by eating them and then laying eggs that hatch into a million and one types of beholder. I think a spooky, floating fertility goddess in the shape of an all-consuming orb manages to capture the unique tenor of terrifying awe that I associate with the divine.
I feel like I've been overly negative lately, so let's just start with the good and maybe meander our way down to the bad as we get towards the end. I will share with you the single most brilliant sentence ever written for any edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Fair warning - this is going to seem a little bit backhanded, because Monster Mythology clearly didn't know what they had, but I mean this in all sincerity. Hell, I've had this book for more than 20 years and I only just now noticed it, so I'm hardly one to cast aspersions.
Alone of all the nonhuman races, their gods have the precious power of conferring returned life to those who have fallen; the spells raise dead and resurrection are known only to these priests and those of humanity.That's from the introduction to the chapter about the demihuman pantheons. Remember when I said in my Complete Book of Humanoids review that anyone who could define the difference between a demihuman and a humanoid would have to be a D&D genius? I didn't realize at the time that I was being literal.
I mean, just let that stew around in your head a little. The thing that makes a species demihuman is . . . the ability to return the dead to life. There are creatures out there every bit as sapient, but they lack this spark of magic, so for them death is final. Two classes of people - one who needs not fear death and another whose days are numbered. The first group lives beautiful, prosperous lives in elegant tree villages, intricately carved cavern vaults, bucolic country villages, or really anywhere else rich in the blessings of the earth. The second group ekes out an existence in barren wastelands, sewers, haunted ruins, or really anywhere else that is only marginally fit for habitation. And the groups are at eternal war, separated by irreconcilable racial divisions.
The first group is "good" and the second group is "evil," but who is assigning those labels?
I can't be alone in seeing this, right? That this one sentence is a whole campaign pitch, the sort of thing you put at the center of your worldbuilding and let inform the bulk of your design decisions. That's the only reason I didn't choose it as my Ukss contribution. It's too big of an idea. D&D 3rd edition had this thing where its art is described as "dungeonpunk," but this is the real dungeonpunk.
You're a goblin. You're born into a world that's rigged against you. The very metaphysics of life itself mean that you're never going to be one of the beautiful people. You'll never have what they have. But you and your people, you've found the gaps in the system. The places they don't want. The things that are too broken down, dirty, and dangerous for them to even acknowledge.
Of course, of course, these places aren't safe forever. Their system doesn't allow any scrap of value to remain overlooked for long. When they start pushing in to your lands, you push back. You'll die. They won't. But they'll have to live in a world they don't completely control.
Monster Mythology doesn't develop this idea. In fact, it's never mentioned again. But I don't think this is just me pulling a single sentence out of context and going inappropriately gaga over it. There's a bit of that, sure, but it's not the only example of the book being insightful and recklessly creative as part of a throw-away line that's only brought up once.
The story of the first gnomish blimp is that a gnome culture hero stole the tail from the god of the lizard-folk and cured it into a giant balloon. The god of the derro (evil dwarves) doesn't have "priests," instead he directs his people by choosing particular pregnancies and magically manipulating the fetuses during gestation to create a caste of mystically potent leaders.
Amman, the god of giants, is dual-natured. His dreams provide the substance for base matter, but he's also an earthy father to the giant race, visiting the mortal world to find lovers and then using his magic to ensure he only has sons - a move that he comes to regret when he meets the daughter that was hidden from him and realizes his vanity and sexism is the reason so many giants are cruel and aggressive.
I'd say, as a rough estimate, that about 30% of this book is genuinely great, doing AD&D-style "generic" fantasy as well as it's ever been done. Which gets us into Monster Mythology's deepest structural flaw (although not the worst thing about it - that would be the oddly pointless dig it makes about East Asian mythology: "Obviously, selecting the Chinese or Japanese pantheons is a step likely only to be taken by a DM who, with his players, wishes to adventure in an Oriental game world and setting." Obviously.)
When I say "structural flaw" I mean something that is fundamental to the conception of the book itself. The writing mostly ranges from good to great, so I'm guessing the reason this exists is an editorial mandate. I imagine the writer was given certain instructions when he was hired and those instructions inexplicably sabotaged the whole book. It was well-executed, but poorly conceived.
No delicate way to put this - Monster Mythology has too many gods. They aren't bad, per se, but they do weigh down the book and steal focus away from the strongest entries. Do we really need three bugbear gods? Hell, do we even need one? Bugbears aren't really a thing. Hey, AD&D, stop trying to make bugbears happen.
It often feels like Monster Mythology is going down a checklist, looking at the Monstrous Manual page-by-page and creating a new god for every intelligent species it finds. The selkies have a god!
That's not intrinsically an absurd idea. Selkies are an affecting myth. They're seals who can shed their skins to become human. They visit land and sometimes fall in love with a human, but are inevitably called back to the sea. Or maybe the human falls in love with them and tries to force them to stay by stealing and hiding their skin.
It touches on some really potent themes. You've got two worlds, in close physical proximity, but largely inaccessible to one another. Your main characters transgress the boundary of those worlds, discovering new things about themselves and the world around them that they've taken for granted. There is romance, heartache, and betrayal. You could get a lot of mileage out of centering a goddess in this narrative. It is the sort of passionate mystery play out of which religions are built.
Surminare, the selkie goddes, has half a page devoted to her. Of that, half is reserved for the game stats of her avatar. It's a more efficient use of space than 1e's Legends & Lore, but not by much.
Being confined to 1-2 paragraph of description means that most of the gods in this book just wind up feeling like large and powerful versions of whatever species they're the god of. Surminare is just a selkie who happens to be a Paladin/Druid. Kurtulmak is a boss kobold (though, with kobolds specifically, "our god is a bigger, pettier kobold" is actually an apt bit of characterization). You could easily reskin the bulk of this book to be about high-level humanoid adventurers and very little would be lost.
Ironically, it is the "hero" entries that often wind up feeling the most godlike, probably because they're on average longer, in order to explain why this mortal person deserves to be listed alongside the gods.
Yet there are some real gems here. If you dropped the "these are the gods of monstrous humanoids" angle, you could assemble a really stellar pantheon out of the highlights.
The lesser entries are not bad. You could use them as a starting point in developing some memorable divine antagonists/allies for your game. But if, say, the weaker two-thirds had been ripped out and their space cannibalized to extend the entries of the best of the gods? Or, hell, if avatar stats had been left out entirely so the average entry could nearly double in length? We would at this very moment be having the "does this book live up to its legendary reputation" conversation.
In the end, Monster Mythology is merely very good. It's rare to see an rpg book this densely packed with useable ideas. It's only 128 pages, but it has enough interesting stuff inside it to fuel dozens of campaigns. A true forgotten gem.
Ukss Contribution: I'm going to have to choose a god, aren't I. That's not a problem, really. There's been a god-shaped hole in Ukss for awhile. The real problem here is narrowing it down to just one.
My instincts run towards the gnomish pantheon. In this book, they are largely wasted space. They're overly specific and theologically simplistic. But, you could make a great trickster deity out of them if you treated them as a composite entity. If they're distinct aspects/moods of a single being, then that being feels a lot like a god should, especially if you put them all in the body of Chiktikka Fastpaws, the gnomish nature god's racoon familiar.
I'm just not sure that counts as a contribution. I'd be grabbing a lot of stuff at once and then fundamentally rewriting it. It's always a bit fuzzy how much of that is okay.
So instead I'll go with my runner up - The Great Mother. She's the Beholder goddess who "mates" with monsters and demons by eating them and then laying eggs that hatch into a million and one types of beholder. I think a spooky, floating fertility goddess in the shape of an all-consuming orb manages to capture the unique tenor of terrifying awe that I associate with the divine.
Saturday, September 21, 2019
Aurora Australis - Psi Order Legions & Austronesia Sourcebook
I'm going to have to tread carefully here, because much of this book is about something that absolutely infuriates me in real life - mercenaries (I refuse to call them by the euphemistic term "private military contractors"). Of course, fiction can be a way to safely engage with ideas that repulse or frighten us in real life, and when you get right down to it, most rpg heroes would qualify as some sort of mercenary or another. So really, the worst thing you could say about Aurora Australis is that it doesn't seek to pose any particularly difficult questions about its genre.
It's just that it bugs me. The Legions are heroic mercenaries. They get the bulk of their funds by agreeing to fight on the side of whoever pays them (sometimes, this means different squads wind up on opposite sides of the same conflict!), and that's . . . yikes. If The Legions existed in real life, I'd be demanding that they be brought to justice for their crimes against humanity.
But they're really just operating on comic-book logic. They're like "the assassin with a code" - something that is still pretty awful and anyway doesn't exist in real life because no one who is capable of adhering to a code has the slightest interest in being an assassin, but which is an accepted heroic archetype because nerds like me go absolutely bonkers for stories about people who excel at violence and there are only so many character backgrounds where that's a plausible skill set.
I wonder why that is. Violence isn't particularly interesting. It's, at best, captivating. It's something that you have to pay attention to, because if you don't you could find yourself in serious danger (or, the characters you care about could find themselves in serious danger). And I won't deny a certain fascination with the creative ways people throughout the ages have found of doing violence to each other.
There's something different about genre violence, though. It lacks an element common to real violence, of degradation. The operative theory of all violence is that you can reduce the complexity of a person - their wants, their needs, their histories - to the simple realities of meat. That you can cut away the parts of them that resist your desires or force them, through threat of pain, to hide away those parts on their own. It starts with a conception of another human being as a victim, too weak to withstand your attack, and then treats this projected weakness as cause for utter contempt. You never start a fight with someone you respect.
Except in fiction. Then you can fight an "honorable foe" and win or lose know that simply trying your best means you've earned their respect under the "warrior's code." It's a cheesy trope made terrible by the fact that people don't always understand that it's an invention, as much a fantasy when referring to your nation's armed forces as when you're talking about the Knights of the Round Table.
The Legions, even when working as mercenaries, do not deliberately target civilians. I think this is supposed to make them sound noble, but as far as heroic codes go, it's grossly insufficient. I noticed that they're not so scrupulous about collateral damage that it has stopped nation-states from hiring (and, in fact, it's directly stated that the leader of the Legions' mercenary division is lax about enforcing the "no civilian targets" code and views it as more of a PR than a moral issue). There's also no mention of the Legion restricting itself to defensive battles. Nor to lawful, democratically accountable employers.
They're basically monsters. Anyone associated with this organization in any capacity is tainted with blood money to an almost unforgivable degree. But for some reason the book doesn't seem to acknowledge this.
I think because it's just supposed to be straightforward military sci-fi. The Legions fight genocidal aliens and power-mad mutants and the moral clarity of those battles carries over to the organization as a whole. Certainly, in all the discussions of the psi order's political maneuvers and role in society, they never face a foe who's like, "what the fuck, people?! They're a private army! They shouldn't be allowed to be that! For fuck's sake, they will straight up shoot deserters! Who is allowing them to do this?! Where do they get the right?!"
The rest of the book is about Australia and that material is ??? I think it's all right. It's got a more confident voice than some of the past Trinity books. It knows what it's about and is set on producing a guide to sci-fi Australia. But sci-fi Australia doesn't really have a gimmick. It's just a country, in the future. The material is useful, but I don't know enough about real Australia to tell you whether it's good.
I do know that the demographics section near the back is totally wrong. It says most psi orders have a 5% mortality rate and the Legions have a 30% mortality rate. But that's complete and utter bullshit. American forces in WW2 had approximately a 3% mortality. The Legions' losses are comparable to the Soviets' (roughly triple the British deaths). Aberrants are deadly, but the conflict has been presented as fairly low intensity. It boggles the mind to think that one of the psi orders is engaged in a conflict comparable to the Eastern front in WW2.
The other notable thing about this book is that it lacks the glossy front section that every other Trinity book has had so far. The in-character blurbs are scattered throughout the relevant sections and are in black-and-white, just like the rest of the book. It's not a change that's particularly damaging, but knowing that this was the last Trinity book to see print (or close to it), it's a little bittersweet, as if they knew the line was dying and released a compromise book as a last hurrah.
I won't say that Aurora Australis is my favorite of the Trinity supplements. In fact, it's arguably my least favorite (though mostly because the line itself was uniformly good), but it was a solid end to a solid run, and I hate that the last three books never saw print.
Oh well, my copy of 2nd Edition is on it's way! Let's hope it lives up to its legacy.
UKSS Contribution - Hey, steely-eyed space warriors with cool psychic powers battling tentacle monsters on Mars, screw you! My choice is phytomining. Technically, it's not something that Trinity invented (I found the 1998 scientific paper which undoubtedly inspired its inclusion here, but it was behind a paywall), but it was a neat bit of unusually plausible science-fiction flavor. It may not be economically viable until certain metal prices reach historic highs, but on Ukss they've been doing it for years.
It's just that it bugs me. The Legions are heroic mercenaries. They get the bulk of their funds by agreeing to fight on the side of whoever pays them (sometimes, this means different squads wind up on opposite sides of the same conflict!), and that's . . . yikes. If The Legions existed in real life, I'd be demanding that they be brought to justice for their crimes against humanity.
But they're really just operating on comic-book logic. They're like "the assassin with a code" - something that is still pretty awful and anyway doesn't exist in real life because no one who is capable of adhering to a code has the slightest interest in being an assassin, but which is an accepted heroic archetype because nerds like me go absolutely bonkers for stories about people who excel at violence and there are only so many character backgrounds where that's a plausible skill set.
I wonder why that is. Violence isn't particularly interesting. It's, at best, captivating. It's something that you have to pay attention to, because if you don't you could find yourself in serious danger (or, the characters you care about could find themselves in serious danger). And I won't deny a certain fascination with the creative ways people throughout the ages have found of doing violence to each other.
There's something different about genre violence, though. It lacks an element common to real violence, of degradation. The operative theory of all violence is that you can reduce the complexity of a person - their wants, their needs, their histories - to the simple realities of meat. That you can cut away the parts of them that resist your desires or force them, through threat of pain, to hide away those parts on their own. It starts with a conception of another human being as a victim, too weak to withstand your attack, and then treats this projected weakness as cause for utter contempt. You never start a fight with someone you respect.
Except in fiction. Then you can fight an "honorable foe" and win or lose know that simply trying your best means you've earned their respect under the "warrior's code." It's a cheesy trope made terrible by the fact that people don't always understand that it's an invention, as much a fantasy when referring to your nation's armed forces as when you're talking about the Knights of the Round Table.
The Legions, even when working as mercenaries, do not deliberately target civilians. I think this is supposed to make them sound noble, but as far as heroic codes go, it's grossly insufficient. I noticed that they're not so scrupulous about collateral damage that it has stopped nation-states from hiring (and, in fact, it's directly stated that the leader of the Legions' mercenary division is lax about enforcing the "no civilian targets" code and views it as more of a PR than a moral issue). There's also no mention of the Legion restricting itself to defensive battles. Nor to lawful, democratically accountable employers.
They're basically monsters. Anyone associated with this organization in any capacity is tainted with blood money to an almost unforgivable degree. But for some reason the book doesn't seem to acknowledge this.
I think because it's just supposed to be straightforward military sci-fi. The Legions fight genocidal aliens and power-mad mutants and the moral clarity of those battles carries over to the organization as a whole. Certainly, in all the discussions of the psi order's political maneuvers and role in society, they never face a foe who's like, "what the fuck, people?! They're a private army! They shouldn't be allowed to be that! For fuck's sake, they will straight up shoot deserters! Who is allowing them to do this?! Where do they get the right?!"
The rest of the book is about Australia and that material is ??? I think it's all right. It's got a more confident voice than some of the past Trinity books. It knows what it's about and is set on producing a guide to sci-fi Australia. But sci-fi Australia doesn't really have a gimmick. It's just a country, in the future. The material is useful, but I don't know enough about real Australia to tell you whether it's good.
I do know that the demographics section near the back is totally wrong. It says most psi orders have a 5% mortality rate and the Legions have a 30% mortality rate. But that's complete and utter bullshit. American forces in WW2 had approximately a 3% mortality. The Legions' losses are comparable to the Soviets' (roughly triple the British deaths). Aberrants are deadly, but the conflict has been presented as fairly low intensity. It boggles the mind to think that one of the psi orders is engaged in a conflict comparable to the Eastern front in WW2.
The other notable thing about this book is that it lacks the glossy front section that every other Trinity book has had so far. The in-character blurbs are scattered throughout the relevant sections and are in black-and-white, just like the rest of the book. It's not a change that's particularly damaging, but knowing that this was the last Trinity book to see print (or close to it), it's a little bittersweet, as if they knew the line was dying and released a compromise book as a last hurrah.
I won't say that Aurora Australis is my favorite of the Trinity supplements. In fact, it's arguably my least favorite (though mostly because the line itself was uniformly good), but it was a solid end to a solid run, and I hate that the last three books never saw print.
Oh well, my copy of 2nd Edition is on it's way! Let's hope it lives up to its legacy.
UKSS Contribution - Hey, steely-eyed space warriors with cool psychic powers battling tentacle monsters on Mars, screw you! My choice is phytomining. Technically, it's not something that Trinity invented (I found the 1998 scientific paper which undoubtedly inspired its inclusion here, but it was behind a paywall), but it was a neat bit of unusually plausible science-fiction flavor. It may not be economically viable until certain metal prices reach historic highs, but on Ukss they've been doing it for years.
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Arms and Equipment Guide
The Arms and Equipment Guide should be an important setting book for Dungeons and Dragons - it describes most of the items from the equipment section of the Player's Handbook, often with historical context and illustrations. This is an immense help in visualizing your character and their possessions. It could also aid in getting a sense for what a medieval-esque fantasy world is like, and perhaps even allow players to develop an intuitive sense for the medieval technology level and the medieval way of doing things.
There was a moment like that, when the book stopped to explain the purpose of horseshoes. It said that sometimes a pebble would get between the horse's shoe and its hoof, and that if you wanted to take care of your horse you would have to periodically check and remove any you found. This didn't come as a surprise to me or anything, but it wasn't something I would have thought about. For a brief moment, the reality of owning a horse became a bit more real to me.
But it was just a moment. Most of that chapter dealt with the subject of barding in exhaustive detail. Do I need to know the difference between poitrels and flanchards? Are those even really words? Is this going to have any bearing on play whatsoever?
This is the sort of book that is, technically, obsolete in our modern day. I can search for any random weapon in here and most likely find a youtube video of someone testing it out (I tried this with the halberd and it went exactly as I predicted). There are so many educational resources available to us that make a simple list of medieval equipment kind of pointless. But it does have a niche. The very abundance of sources makes it hard to find information that is accurate, relevant, and accessible to the layman. Collating and paraphrasing a wide range of information into a single reference is pretty valuable.
Unfortunately, the book's accuracy is all over the place. I'm sure we all know by now that studded leather armor didn't exist. Armed with that bit of knowledge, there's a lot in this book that's pretty dubious (for example - the terms "longsword" and "bastard sword" were more or less used interchangeably until quite recently).
Also, its relevance could be hit-or-miss. To wit: Why are there so many fucking polearms? Far be it from me to criticize someone for being too obsessed with the minutiae of their hobby, but Dungeons and Dragons' attempt to convert all of us into polearm enthusiasts is deeply misguided. For crying out loud, the book's whole paradigm for understanding the weapon is flawed. In the real world, the polearm is like a snowflake. A lot of them were different for the sake of being different. You've got 18 different types here, and that's either far too many names for 3-4 different design tendencies or far too few for the literally hundreds of variations that are historically extent. Either way, AD&D's combat system is not detailed enough to actually care about them. A metal bit at the end of a stick. That's a polearm.
And that's the biggest flaw of this book. That it pancakes history into one sort of homogeneous, unrecognizable mass, substituting detail for genuine understanding. The main take away from the polearm explosion should have been that there were a lot of people, over a long period of time, and a wide region of space, doing things very differently. Maybe some of that diversity could have made it into the various D&D worlds.
I mean, for fuck's sake, they listed the medieval fashion terms alphabetically. How is that supposed to help anyone understand how medieval people actually dressed?
The weirdest thing about this book, though, was the little "in-character" narratives that accompanied the weapon descriptions. I put "in-character" in scare quotes because at least half of them directly reference the game's mechanics ("it makes sense to fire darts at their maximum rate.") It was so jarring that the stories had more or less the opposite of their intended effect, taking me out of the fantasy mindset and reminding me that I was reading a reference book.
You can't use the Arms and Equipment Guide to help you build a good fantasy setting, but you can use it to help you easily build a bad one. And that is a much more practical use. To be honest, meaningful storytelling experiences where you use the medium of rpgs to connect to real history are probably going to be pretty rare, even if that's what you're aiming for. A more realistic approach to setting is as a backdrop for improbably fantasy adventures. And for that, the Arms and Equipment Guide is good enough.
UKSS Contribution: There are a few pure fantasy conceits here (elven chain and the like), but one especially caught my eye - Coin Armor.
It's like scale armor, but instead of scales of overlapping metal, it's coins. There's no way in hell that could possibly be practical or effective, but I imagine it looks . . . spectacular.
I am imagining some sort of flamboyant, over-the-top warlord who has enough followers that they don't need to fight on the front lines, but who deliberately projects an image of crass wealth and profligate spending. The coin armor is their signature outfit, something so garish and wasteful that no one else would dare imitate it.
There was a moment like that, when the book stopped to explain the purpose of horseshoes. It said that sometimes a pebble would get between the horse's shoe and its hoof, and that if you wanted to take care of your horse you would have to periodically check and remove any you found. This didn't come as a surprise to me or anything, but it wasn't something I would have thought about. For a brief moment, the reality of owning a horse became a bit more real to me.
But it was just a moment. Most of that chapter dealt with the subject of barding in exhaustive detail. Do I need to know the difference between poitrels and flanchards? Are those even really words? Is this going to have any bearing on play whatsoever?
This is the sort of book that is, technically, obsolete in our modern day. I can search for any random weapon in here and most likely find a youtube video of someone testing it out (I tried this with the halberd and it went exactly as I predicted). There are so many educational resources available to us that make a simple list of medieval equipment kind of pointless. But it does have a niche. The very abundance of sources makes it hard to find information that is accurate, relevant, and accessible to the layman. Collating and paraphrasing a wide range of information into a single reference is pretty valuable.
Unfortunately, the book's accuracy is all over the place. I'm sure we all know by now that studded leather armor didn't exist. Armed with that bit of knowledge, there's a lot in this book that's pretty dubious (for example - the terms "longsword" and "bastard sword" were more or less used interchangeably until quite recently).
Also, its relevance could be hit-or-miss. To wit: Why are there so many fucking polearms? Far be it from me to criticize someone for being too obsessed with the minutiae of their hobby, but Dungeons and Dragons' attempt to convert all of us into polearm enthusiasts is deeply misguided. For crying out loud, the book's whole paradigm for understanding the weapon is flawed. In the real world, the polearm is like a snowflake. A lot of them were different for the sake of being different. You've got 18 different types here, and that's either far too many names for 3-4 different design tendencies or far too few for the literally hundreds of variations that are historically extent. Either way, AD&D's combat system is not detailed enough to actually care about them. A metal bit at the end of a stick. That's a polearm.
And that's the biggest flaw of this book. That it pancakes history into one sort of homogeneous, unrecognizable mass, substituting detail for genuine understanding. The main take away from the polearm explosion should have been that there were a lot of people, over a long period of time, and a wide region of space, doing things very differently. Maybe some of that diversity could have made it into the various D&D worlds.
I mean, for fuck's sake, they listed the medieval fashion terms alphabetically. How is that supposed to help anyone understand how medieval people actually dressed?
The weirdest thing about this book, though, was the little "in-character" narratives that accompanied the weapon descriptions. I put "in-character" in scare quotes because at least half of them directly reference the game's mechanics ("it makes sense to fire darts at their maximum rate.") It was so jarring that the stories had more or less the opposite of their intended effect, taking me out of the fantasy mindset and reminding me that I was reading a reference book.
You can't use the Arms and Equipment Guide to help you build a good fantasy setting, but you can use it to help you easily build a bad one. And that is a much more practical use. To be honest, meaningful storytelling experiences where you use the medium of rpgs to connect to real history are probably going to be pretty rare, even if that's what you're aiming for. A more realistic approach to setting is as a backdrop for improbably fantasy adventures. And for that, the Arms and Equipment Guide is good enough.
UKSS Contribution: There are a few pure fantasy conceits here (elven chain and the like), but one especially caught my eye - Coin Armor.
It's like scale armor, but instead of scales of overlapping metal, it's coins. There's no way in hell that could possibly be practical or effective, but I imagine it looks . . . spectacular.
I am imagining some sort of flamboyant, over-the-top warlord who has enough followers that they don't need to fight on the front lines, but who deliberately projects an image of crass wealth and profligate spending. The coin armor is their signature outfit, something so garish and wasteful that no one else would dare imitate it.
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Stellar Frontier - Upeo Wa Macho and Extrasolar Space Sourcebook
Is this the best Trinity book or is it merely my favorite? It's not noticeably better-written than the other books in the series, but it is the one that's deepest into the science fiction elements of the game. And because it doesn't deal with real-world locations, it runs a much lower chance of saying something so fraught that I need to put it under a microscope.
Lower chance, but not zero.
I'm probably reading too much into it. My brain is in a weird place after The Complete Book of Humanoids. It's just if I'm reading the book super critically, there a bit of . . .unfortunate imagery.
Like, a sci-fi plot where the psi orders become suspicious about the trouble the psionic teleporters might get into while gallivanting around the universe, so they assault their headquarters in order to capture them and put them in psionic dampeners - that's probably fine. It raises some uncomfortable characterization questions about the various Proxies, but it is in line with the "trust no one" mood of the time.
But if you reframe it as the psi orders landing a military force in west Africa to capture some of the people there and put them in collars so that the captors can exercise greater control over their labor?
I doubt there was anything at work there, even on a subconscious level, but it's kind of an oops. Making the African-American business mogul the driving force behind the plan was just a tone-deaf coda.
But like I said, I don't think there's any intent. And as near as I can tell, I'm the only person who ever even noticed. In fact, I'm fairly sure the culprit here is well-meaning color-blindness. The decision to have the teleporters flee the psi orders out of fear of being restrained and the decision to base the teleporter order out of Africa were made completely independently. As was the decision to make the setting's most prominent black character the mastermind.
And that, dear readers, is why color-blindness is inadequate as a solution to racism.
Then again, maybe the connection is all in my head. I feel a little self-conscious even bringing it up. It certainly wasn't enough to negatively impact my enjoyment of the book.
Stellar Frontiers places Trinity into kind of an awkward place in the sci-fi genre. Let's call it "proto space opera." There are FTL spaceships and weird aliens and strange worlds, but there's only, like, 5 of them. Everything you're given is very interesting, but for a game set in space, it feels oddly confining.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a worse approach than Star Wars, though. Star Wars planets can often just feel like re-skinned adventure towns. Trinity's planets tend to be much more well-drawn and distinct. Each of the worlds feels different and there's more thought put into things like climate and ecosystems.
That said, there is still sometimes the problem of bad sci-fi scale. One of the planet's plot revolves around a labor dispute between a mining colony and its Brazilian government sponsors. It's an interesting human drama set against a fantastic sci-fi backdrop, but there's just no reasonable understanding of the law of nations that would allow Brazil to claim a whole planet. Not even one that's doomed to be swallowed by a supernova in the next 2000 years. Maybe if inhabitable planets were a lot more common in the Trinity setting, but it stretches the bounds of disbelief a little that the workers have no options when literally 10s of millions of square miles are going uninhabited.
Still, I really like detailed sci-fi worldbuilding, so this was a pretty easy read for me. It could have been a lot more boring and still caught my attention ("now, tell me what the low-gravity algae is like").
The most exciting thing to happen in this book was the introduction of non-malevolent Aberrants, who call themselves Novas. This didn't come as a surprise to me, because my first Aeonverse game was actually Aberrant, and I played it for years before I ever explored Trinity, but, well, there's an advertisement in the back that features the lead Aberrant, Divis Mal posing in a sinister way, but captioned with the tag-line "It's not what you think it is." So clearly this book was a teaser for White Wolf's upcoming new game and just as clearly they expected the reveal that the Upeo wa Macho were on friendly terms with some Aberrants to come as a shock to long-time Trinity fans.
I wonder what it must have been like to have been a part of the fandom at that time. When White Wolf felt emboldened to just publish massively game-changing metaplot in its supplements and then expect you to keep up. I remember getting into the internet world of darkness fandom a couple of years after that, 2001, I think, and that was pretty wild. A lot of flamewars about Mage: the Ascension. It took me awhile to get clued in to what the arguments were actually about, but eventually I started getting a bit heated myself (and I can say that any average post here at ICFTB would probably have gotten me torn apart by rabid wolves back then).
Still, to have been plugged in to peak White Wolf, when it seemed like they were actively encouraging that kind of dissent . . . I can't say I'm sorry I missed it, but I must admit I'm a little bit intrigued.
UKSS Contribution: This book has yet another sample NPC that's too fabulous for gender and it's making me a little self-conscious that Ukss' first (and so far only) nonbinary character is in a similar mold. Ideally, I'd like to take this as the wake up call it is and put in a frumpy work-a-day NB character as a gesture of true inclusiveness. However, it is somewhat stretching the spirit of this challenge for me to read something in a book and get inspired to do the opposite. So I'll just have to keep my eyes open for a better opportunity.
Instead, I'll go with my second choice - the myriasoma. Strange alien creatures that are entire ecosystems. A sort of eusocial hive creature, except that some of the individuals look like plants, some look like animals, and they all sort of cooperate to maintain the whole. I don't yet know whether this is going to be an enchanted forest, a bizarre lunar landscape, or the defining characteristic of some new celestial body, but I do think it's pretty cool.
Lower chance, but not zero.
I'm probably reading too much into it. My brain is in a weird place after The Complete Book of Humanoids. It's just if I'm reading the book super critically, there a bit of . . .unfortunate imagery.
Like, a sci-fi plot where the psi orders become suspicious about the trouble the psionic teleporters might get into while gallivanting around the universe, so they assault their headquarters in order to capture them and put them in psionic dampeners - that's probably fine. It raises some uncomfortable characterization questions about the various Proxies, but it is in line with the "trust no one" mood of the time.
But if you reframe it as the psi orders landing a military force in west Africa to capture some of the people there and put them in collars so that the captors can exercise greater control over their labor?
I doubt there was anything at work there, even on a subconscious level, but it's kind of an oops. Making the African-American business mogul the driving force behind the plan was just a tone-deaf coda.
But like I said, I don't think there's any intent. And as near as I can tell, I'm the only person who ever even noticed. In fact, I'm fairly sure the culprit here is well-meaning color-blindness. The decision to have the teleporters flee the psi orders out of fear of being restrained and the decision to base the teleporter order out of Africa were made completely independently. As was the decision to make the setting's most prominent black character the mastermind.
And that, dear readers, is why color-blindness is inadequate as a solution to racism.
Then again, maybe the connection is all in my head. I feel a little self-conscious even bringing it up. It certainly wasn't enough to negatively impact my enjoyment of the book.
Stellar Frontiers places Trinity into kind of an awkward place in the sci-fi genre. Let's call it "proto space opera." There are FTL spaceships and weird aliens and strange worlds, but there's only, like, 5 of them. Everything you're given is very interesting, but for a game set in space, it feels oddly confining.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a worse approach than Star Wars, though. Star Wars planets can often just feel like re-skinned adventure towns. Trinity's planets tend to be much more well-drawn and distinct. Each of the worlds feels different and there's more thought put into things like climate and ecosystems.
That said, there is still sometimes the problem of bad sci-fi scale. One of the planet's plot revolves around a labor dispute between a mining colony and its Brazilian government sponsors. It's an interesting human drama set against a fantastic sci-fi backdrop, but there's just no reasonable understanding of the law of nations that would allow Brazil to claim a whole planet. Not even one that's doomed to be swallowed by a supernova in the next 2000 years. Maybe if inhabitable planets were a lot more common in the Trinity setting, but it stretches the bounds of disbelief a little that the workers have no options when literally 10s of millions of square miles are going uninhabited.
Still, I really like detailed sci-fi worldbuilding, so this was a pretty easy read for me. It could have been a lot more boring and still caught my attention ("now, tell me what the low-gravity algae is like").
The most exciting thing to happen in this book was the introduction of non-malevolent Aberrants, who call themselves Novas. This didn't come as a surprise to me, because my first Aeonverse game was actually Aberrant, and I played it for years before I ever explored Trinity, but, well, there's an advertisement in the back that features the lead Aberrant, Divis Mal posing in a sinister way, but captioned with the tag-line "It's not what you think it is." So clearly this book was a teaser for White Wolf's upcoming new game and just as clearly they expected the reveal that the Upeo wa Macho were on friendly terms with some Aberrants to come as a shock to long-time Trinity fans.
I wonder what it must have been like to have been a part of the fandom at that time. When White Wolf felt emboldened to just publish massively game-changing metaplot in its supplements and then expect you to keep up. I remember getting into the internet world of darkness fandom a couple of years after that, 2001, I think, and that was pretty wild. A lot of flamewars about Mage: the Ascension. It took me awhile to get clued in to what the arguments were actually about, but eventually I started getting a bit heated myself (and I can say that any average post here at ICFTB would probably have gotten me torn apart by rabid wolves back then).
Still, to have been plugged in to peak White Wolf, when it seemed like they were actively encouraging that kind of dissent . . . I can't say I'm sorry I missed it, but I must admit I'm a little bit intrigued.
UKSS Contribution: This book has yet another sample NPC that's too fabulous for gender and it's making me a little self-conscious that Ukss' first (and so far only) nonbinary character is in a similar mold. Ideally, I'd like to take this as the wake up call it is and put in a frumpy work-a-day NB character as a gesture of true inclusiveness. However, it is somewhat stretching the spirit of this challenge for me to read something in a book and get inspired to do the opposite. So I'll just have to keep my eyes open for a better opportunity.
Instead, I'll go with my second choice - the myriasoma. Strange alien creatures that are entire ecosystems. A sort of eusocial hive creature, except that some of the individuals look like plants, some look like animals, and they all sort of cooperate to maintain the whole. I don't yet know whether this is going to be an enchanted forest, a bizarre lunar landscape, or the defining characteristic of some new celestial body, but I do think it's pretty cool.
Monday, September 16, 2019
The Complete Book of Humanoids
Oh, AD&D, why are you the way you are? What happened to you that inspired you to release a book like The Complete Book of Humanoids? It's a good idea in conception - a book that acts as a quick-and-easy guide to playing a grab-bag of interesting fantasy species - but then you had to go and make it weird.
And not the good kind of weird. The kind of weird where you keep tossing around the word "humanoid" as if it meant something, and wasn't just a way of saying "miscellaneous." The kind of weird where Ogre Mages can't actually advance that far in the mage class and have an affinity for "oriental weapons." The kind of weird where you recycle the gross racist stuff from The Complete Barbarian's Handbook, but since you're applying it to literal subhuman monsters, that makes it . . . okay?
This book is so close to being great. The only thing standing in its way is every terrible thing about AD&D 2nd edition. I really don't understand it. I know they were capable of inventive, compelling fantasy. This book landed right in the middle of a time when TSR was releasing one classic rpg setting after another. Yet, given the opportunity to dig deep into their back benches and release playable versions of some of their most iconic creatures, they wound up backing as far away from strange fantasy as is conceivably possible in a book that contains Wemics (they're like Centaurs, but half-lion instead of half-horse).
The Complete Book of Humanoids is very clear about the titular humanoids' role in the campaign - as one-off characters, conspicuous in their oddness, adventuring with a party of "normal" PCs. It gives four suggestions for how to integrate a humanoid character into your game (and is very clear that there should be only one at a time) - humans saved their life, they saved a human's, unlucky roll with the Reincarnation spell, and the party is paying them.
But the most obvious scenario never seemed to occur to them - that maybe you're in a fantasy world where they fill the niche of demihumans (and if you can come up with definitions of "demihuman" and "humanoid" that make a damned bit of sense, you are officially an AD&D genius). Maybe you're in a world that has swanmays instead of elves and minotaurs instead of dwarves. Maybe the lizard-folk are the remnants of an ancient civilization of necromancers (although where could I have gotten that idea).
Yet The Complete Book of Humanoids seems fixated on the idea that most humanoids live in "tribes." It then proceeds to paint a picture of tribal life that is uncomfortably colonialist. Humanoid cultures are a blank slate . . . except for their horrifying habits, which justify the widespread Intelligence and Charisma penalties and the evil alignments. They are mostly good for killing and driving out of the land . . . but not the PCs, of course, they're some of the the good ones.
Literally. There's a space on your character sheet where you can write "Good." And if you do, you're officially good. That means that your evil deeds don't count if you direct them towards people who have "Evil" written on their character sheets.
I only slightly exaggerate. There's a section near the end of the book called "Campaign Complications," that's all about the various mishaps a humanoid can suffer in human and/or demihuman society. Many of these are variations on "society fears and hates the character because of their race," and one of them even ends with "a good cleric decides to eradicate the monster."
Presumably, a truly good cleric will relent when they find out the character means no harm. And nobody explicitly said society itself was good. But it's of a theme.
The low point is in the Mongrelmen write-up. Mongrelmen are the result of magical experiments and are basically every type of creature stitched together in a vaguely humanoid form. Canonically, they're incredibly ugly (they have an effective Charisma of 1 for all non-mongrelmen), though half the art ever drawn of them come out looking cute in a "so-pathetic-I-want-to-nurture-it" sort of way (the illustration in this book falls in that category). Here's what the book says about them:
If you accept that "good" and "evil" are words with real meaning, though, then mostly what The Complete Book of Humanoids seems to be aiming for is a level of description that is sufficient to allow players to play as members of "primitive" societies, but not actually so empathetic that the more photogenic races have to stop stealing their land.
If you think that's a hot take, I dare you to read this book and The Complete Barbarian's Handbook back-to-back and then say that there's no connection between D&D's central plot of "wilderness monsters attacking the frontiers of civilization" and imperialist attitudes towards aboriginal people. I mean, there's a kit in this book called The Witch Doctor. Do I need to spell it out? So much of D&D's presentation of "monstrous humanoids" is directly traceable to "African natives" in old racist adventure fiction. The only real question is how much of that inspiration is it appropriate to overlook.
The thing that bugs me most (so much so that this is my third time pointing it out in one of these reviews) is the way humanoids are treated as "superstitious." How does that even work? Did the book forget that many of these creatures are what real people are superstitious about? Outside of the D&D bubble, "bugbear" is literally an English word that describes an irrational fear. The most ridiculous is the way Firbolg (giant-kin) "have an innate fear of human and demihuman mobs."
"Gee, Carl, I'm starting to think running into that mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers was bad luck."
Of course, what's really going on is a noxious trope. "Primitive" people are only barely allowed to have a religion, and not at all expected to possess true knowledge. So their very human fears and anxieties are exoticized into "silly superstitions." Explorers may laugh at the shaman for believing a statue contains a link to his ancestors, but the party missionary is sure in no hurry to use the pages of the Bible as kindling.
I guess with all that, you may be under the impression that I disliked this book. In truth, I'm more ambivalent. Yes, the worldbuilding advice is severely misguided, but I can't tell you how hungry I was for something like this book as a young man. So much of what's flawed about AD&D is its failure of imagination. This probably applies more to 2nd edition than 1st. It just feels to me that early D&D was recklessly inventive, basically inventing the modern fantasy genre with every new book, magazine article, and year-long letters-page debate.
By the time AD&D 2nd edition came around, maybe the mission shifts, and the new goal is to curate and refine what came before. People come in with expectations of what "standard" fantasy is, and it's the duty of core books like the Player's Handbook Supplement series to establish the baseline in print. Bold experiments in pushing the boundaries of fantasy are for campaign box sets.
It's no coincidence that all of my AD&D 2e campaign settings are the "weird" ones - Planescape, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and Council of Wyrms. Since almost the beginning of my time roleplaying, I've wanted to go somehow beyond the books, into worlds that looked nothing like anything I've ever seen or read before. The Complete Book of Humanoids, however flawed it might be, gave me a glimpse of what that could be like.
UKSS Contribution: If you mentally set aside the "evil societies of primitive tribes" element, this book has a lot of neat stuff in it. I'm really spoiled for choice. So of course, I'm going to go with something completely ridiculous.
Towards the end of the book, there is a list of proficiencies with special relevance to humanoid characters. Most of these are what you'd expect, like Intimidation and Wild Fighting, but two in particular stood out to me - Winemaking and Cheesemaking.
I don't know why they'd wait until this book in particular to introduce those skills, but it made me think of goblins stomping grapes or minotaurs making cheese. That made me smile.
So in Ukss, the very best wine and cheese are going to come from Goblins. Not sure how I'm going to work that in, but it's a fact.
And not the good kind of weird. The kind of weird where you keep tossing around the word "humanoid" as if it meant something, and wasn't just a way of saying "miscellaneous." The kind of weird where Ogre Mages can't actually advance that far in the mage class and have an affinity for "oriental weapons." The kind of weird where you recycle the gross racist stuff from The Complete Barbarian's Handbook, but since you're applying it to literal subhuman monsters, that makes it . . . okay?
This book is so close to being great. The only thing standing in its way is every terrible thing about AD&D 2nd edition. I really don't understand it. I know they were capable of inventive, compelling fantasy. This book landed right in the middle of a time when TSR was releasing one classic rpg setting after another. Yet, given the opportunity to dig deep into their back benches and release playable versions of some of their most iconic creatures, they wound up backing as far away from strange fantasy as is conceivably possible in a book that contains Wemics (they're like Centaurs, but half-lion instead of half-horse).
The Complete Book of Humanoids is very clear about the titular humanoids' role in the campaign - as one-off characters, conspicuous in their oddness, adventuring with a party of "normal" PCs. It gives four suggestions for how to integrate a humanoid character into your game (and is very clear that there should be only one at a time) - humans saved their life, they saved a human's, unlucky roll with the Reincarnation spell, and the party is paying them.
But the most obvious scenario never seemed to occur to them - that maybe you're in a fantasy world where they fill the niche of demihumans (and if you can come up with definitions of "demihuman" and "humanoid" that make a damned bit of sense, you are officially an AD&D genius). Maybe you're in a world that has swanmays instead of elves and minotaurs instead of dwarves. Maybe the lizard-folk are the remnants of an ancient civilization of necromancers (although where could I have gotten that idea).
Yet The Complete Book of Humanoids seems fixated on the idea that most humanoids live in "tribes." It then proceeds to paint a picture of tribal life that is uncomfortably colonialist. Humanoid cultures are a blank slate . . . except for their horrifying habits, which justify the widespread Intelligence and Charisma penalties and the evil alignments. They are mostly good for killing and driving out of the land . . . but not the PCs, of course, they're some of the the good ones.
Literally. There's a space on your character sheet where you can write "Good." And if you do, you're officially good. That means that your evil deeds don't count if you direct them towards people who have "Evil" written on their character sheets.
I only slightly exaggerate. There's a section near the end of the book called "Campaign Complications," that's all about the various mishaps a humanoid can suffer in human and/or demihuman society. Many of these are variations on "society fears and hates the character because of their race," and one of them even ends with "a good cleric decides to eradicate the monster."
Presumably, a truly good cleric will relent when they find out the character means no harm. And nobody explicitly said society itself was good. But it's of a theme.
The low point is in the Mongrelmen write-up. Mongrelmen are the result of magical experiments and are basically every type of creature stitched together in a vaguely humanoid form. Canonically, they're incredibly ugly (they have an effective Charisma of 1 for all non-mongrelmen), though half the art ever drawn of them come out looking cute in a "so-pathetic-I-want-to-nurture-it" sort of way (the illustration in this book falls in that category). Here's what the book says about them:
Mongrelmen find no welcome in lawful and good societies. Among evil and chaotic groups, they meet with enslavement and abuse. Most of these reactions are in response to mongrelmen appearances - they look like deformed monsters and are treated as such by society at large.Good - what does it even mean? I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again - alignment is a bad mechanic that obfuscates more than it reveals.
If you accept that "good" and "evil" are words with real meaning, though, then mostly what The Complete Book of Humanoids seems to be aiming for is a level of description that is sufficient to allow players to play as members of "primitive" societies, but not actually so empathetic that the more photogenic races have to stop stealing their land.
If you think that's a hot take, I dare you to read this book and The Complete Barbarian's Handbook back-to-back and then say that there's no connection between D&D's central plot of "wilderness monsters attacking the frontiers of civilization" and imperialist attitudes towards aboriginal people. I mean, there's a kit in this book called The Witch Doctor. Do I need to spell it out? So much of D&D's presentation of "monstrous humanoids" is directly traceable to "African natives" in old racist adventure fiction. The only real question is how much of that inspiration is it appropriate to overlook.
The thing that bugs me most (so much so that this is my third time pointing it out in one of these reviews) is the way humanoids are treated as "superstitious." How does that even work? Did the book forget that many of these creatures are what real people are superstitious about? Outside of the D&D bubble, "bugbear" is literally an English word that describes an irrational fear. The most ridiculous is the way Firbolg (giant-kin) "have an innate fear of human and demihuman mobs."
"Gee, Carl, I'm starting to think running into that mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers was bad luck."
Of course, what's really going on is a noxious trope. "Primitive" people are only barely allowed to have a religion, and not at all expected to possess true knowledge. So their very human fears and anxieties are exoticized into "silly superstitions." Explorers may laugh at the shaman for believing a statue contains a link to his ancestors, but the party missionary is sure in no hurry to use the pages of the Bible as kindling.
I guess with all that, you may be under the impression that I disliked this book. In truth, I'm more ambivalent. Yes, the worldbuilding advice is severely misguided, but I can't tell you how hungry I was for something like this book as a young man. So much of what's flawed about AD&D is its failure of imagination. This probably applies more to 2nd edition than 1st. It just feels to me that early D&D was recklessly inventive, basically inventing the modern fantasy genre with every new book, magazine article, and year-long letters-page debate.
By the time AD&D 2nd edition came around, maybe the mission shifts, and the new goal is to curate and refine what came before. People come in with expectations of what "standard" fantasy is, and it's the duty of core books like the Player's Handbook Supplement series to establish the baseline in print. Bold experiments in pushing the boundaries of fantasy are for campaign box sets.
It's no coincidence that all of my AD&D 2e campaign settings are the "weird" ones - Planescape, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and Council of Wyrms. Since almost the beginning of my time roleplaying, I've wanted to go somehow beyond the books, into worlds that looked nothing like anything I've ever seen or read before. The Complete Book of Humanoids, however flawed it might be, gave me a glimpse of what that could be like.
UKSS Contribution: If you mentally set aside the "evil societies of primitive tribes" element, this book has a lot of neat stuff in it. I'm really spoiled for choice. So of course, I'm going to go with something completely ridiculous.
Towards the end of the book, there is a list of proficiencies with special relevance to humanoid characters. Most of these are what you'd expect, like Intimidation and Wild Fighting, but two in particular stood out to me - Winemaking and Cheesemaking.
I don't know why they'd wait until this book in particular to introduce those skills, but it made me think of goblins stomping grapes or minotaurs making cheese. That made me smile.
So in Ukss, the very best wine and cheese are going to come from Goblins. Not sure how I'm going to work that in, but it's a fact.
Sunday, September 15, 2019
Field Report: Alien Races
The difficult part of writing this review is going to be making sure that it's not longer than the source material. Field Report: Alien Races can't really be called a book. It's more like a pamphlet. It's roughly 20 pages of fiction about three of the game's alien species.
The most notable thing about this book is what's absent - any new information about the fourth alien species. The shadowy psionic entities, lurking in the background of the setting's major events, pulling strings and manipulating the psi orders for their own ends. I know they exist because I read the "Setting Secrets" section they added to the back of the 2nd printing core book. With that piece of information in mind, they are conspicuously absent from the descriptions of the species they were exploiting.
That's just how Trinity did things, though. Release a slow drip of information, from book to book, so that if you read all the supplements, in the order of their release, you'd get a dramatic build, as the full scope of the setting reveals itself, hidden agendas are revealed, and shocking events threaten to forever change the world you thought you knew.
It's mostly kind of a bummer. I don't have direct confirmation, because I never read the adventures, but I suspect this book serves mainly to summarize and curate the alien-specific information in the Darkness Revealed and Alien Encounters series. It does this through short, in-character narratives about Aeon operatives running afoul of the setting's aliens.
Taken on it's own terms, it's pretty entertaining, but as a strategy for the line as a whole, it's a disaster. There's a Qin embassy on the Moon. But information about the Qin is scattered through a half-dozen books, so you can't just add Qin to a game that uses Luna Rising. You've got to have them all, in order to piece things together. Then you have later books taking for granted that you're all caught up and if you read them out of order, you'll be baffled by the gaps.
Ultimately, this was a nifty bit of fiction, presented in an appealing glossy pamphlet form, but it doesn't tell us enough to be particularly useful as an rpg resource. Too much is being held back for future Trinity books that never got written. There are plot hooks here, but none of the worldbuilding necessary to flesh those plot hooks out. It's more of an invitation for GMs to write their own version of the Trinity setting than an attempt to explain what that setting actually is.
Also, the rape aliens are back and they don't really work better here than they did in the core. I guess they're meant to be these sci-fi horror creaures, creating monstrous hybrids of human-alien DNA to control our minds and enslave our society. And I guess it's pretty effective. If I saw a movie about the Coalition, I'd be scared.
It's just . . . sometimes I wonder if White Wolf forgot that it was making rpgs. If I'm the storyteller, I've got to look my friends in the eye and tell them what happens if the aliens catch up to them. And while I probably would have done it without hesitation back in 1998, in the year 2019, it's pretty fucking awkward.
UKSS Contribution: Hoo boy, I've not got a lot to work with. For all that this was an interesting look at Trinity's aliens, there's not a lot of depth or nuance here. None of the incidental details that I usually like to latch onto. I'm pretty much left with no choice but to include one of the alien species themselves.
I'll go with the Chromatics. They're lizard-like creatures with the ability to psychically manipulate light. They're a stone age culture, but the missing aliens, the Doyen, technologically uplifted them and drafted them into a fight against humanity.
I'll probably leave that last part out, but glow-in-the-dark lizard illusionists is something that I can definitely use.
The most notable thing about this book is what's absent - any new information about the fourth alien species. The shadowy psionic entities, lurking in the background of the setting's major events, pulling strings and manipulating the psi orders for their own ends. I know they exist because I read the "Setting Secrets" section they added to the back of the 2nd printing core book. With that piece of information in mind, they are conspicuously absent from the descriptions of the species they were exploiting.
That's just how Trinity did things, though. Release a slow drip of information, from book to book, so that if you read all the supplements, in the order of their release, you'd get a dramatic build, as the full scope of the setting reveals itself, hidden agendas are revealed, and shocking events threaten to forever change the world you thought you knew.
It's mostly kind of a bummer. I don't have direct confirmation, because I never read the adventures, but I suspect this book serves mainly to summarize and curate the alien-specific information in the Darkness Revealed and Alien Encounters series. It does this through short, in-character narratives about Aeon operatives running afoul of the setting's aliens.
Taken on it's own terms, it's pretty entertaining, but as a strategy for the line as a whole, it's a disaster. There's a Qin embassy on the Moon. But information about the Qin is scattered through a half-dozen books, so you can't just add Qin to a game that uses Luna Rising. You've got to have them all, in order to piece things together. Then you have later books taking for granted that you're all caught up and if you read them out of order, you'll be baffled by the gaps.
Ultimately, this was a nifty bit of fiction, presented in an appealing glossy pamphlet form, but it doesn't tell us enough to be particularly useful as an rpg resource. Too much is being held back for future Trinity books that never got written. There are plot hooks here, but none of the worldbuilding necessary to flesh those plot hooks out. It's more of an invitation for GMs to write their own version of the Trinity setting than an attempt to explain what that setting actually is.
Also, the rape aliens are back and they don't really work better here than they did in the core. I guess they're meant to be these sci-fi horror creaures, creating monstrous hybrids of human-alien DNA to control our minds and enslave our society. And I guess it's pretty effective. If I saw a movie about the Coalition, I'd be scared.
It's just . . . sometimes I wonder if White Wolf forgot that it was making rpgs. If I'm the storyteller, I've got to look my friends in the eye and tell them what happens if the aliens catch up to them. And while I probably would have done it without hesitation back in 1998, in the year 2019, it's pretty fucking awkward.
UKSS Contribution: Hoo boy, I've not got a lot to work with. For all that this was an interesting look at Trinity's aliens, there's not a lot of depth or nuance here. None of the incidental details that I usually like to latch onto. I'm pretty much left with no choice but to include one of the alien species themselves.
I'll go with the Chromatics. They're lizard-like creatures with the ability to psychically manipulate light. They're a stone age culture, but the missing aliens, the Doyen, technologically uplifted them and drafted them into a fight against humanity.
I'll probably leave that last part out, but glow-in-the-dark lizard illusionists is something that I can definitely use.
Saturday, September 14, 2019
The Complete Book of Gnomes and Halflings
This may be the best of the AD&D red books so far, and, ironically, the most unnecessary. The final chapter says, "It is important to remember when playing a gnome or halfling, that halflings are not short humans, nor are gnomes scrawny dwarves." And that is a complete and utter lie.
It was probably because it was a lie that they even felt the need to say it. There wasn't a comparable warning in the Dwarf book, nor the Elf. But I'm sure, after writing 125 pages of this book where you describe gnomes as dwarves who like to party and halflings as humans - full stop, that maybe you need to point out that all of that preceding material was meant to contain a bit more nuance. I shouldn't frame this as a complaint, though, because I'm sure the author was doing the best he could with the source material. It's just . . .
Halfling have the exotic race-specific character kits of Archer fighter, Burglar thief, and Healer priest. The Tunnelrat kit relies on halflings being small and the leaftender kit relies on them not being able to take the druid class under AD&D rules, but ultimately there's very little in the entire halfling presentation that couldn't apply to a small-town everyman character.
That's almost certainly down to the fact that halflings exist primarily to placate Tolkien fans. Did you know that wizards often have a fondness for halflings? Because that one wizard in that one book said as much. So much of the halflings' presentation in this book is a naked attempt to reverse engineer hobbits.
But hobbits themselves were just an idealized caricature of English yeomanry. They are the British pre-industrial countryside viewed through a lens of willful naivety. They are a human culture that is alien only insofar as its citizens are incapable of human vice.
I'm not going to sit here and second-guess the literary necessities in Tolkien's writing ("the Lord of the Rings would have been better if the hobbits like to fuck!"). He's the classic author whose works have an eternal place in the canon of English literature. I'm just a jerk who (technically) writes a blog. But I can tell you, in D&D worlds halflings are redundant. There's not a damned thing about them in this book that couldn't just be relabeled as a description of a "good-aligned village."
Which isn't to say it's bad. It's actually very helpful to have an appealing description of the sort of pastoral idyll that is the starting point of storybook fantasy and an early casualty in darker heroic fantasy. You know that eager farm boy who left his life behind to search for adventure? He absolutely could have come from the sample village of Lindenbrook, and you would barely have to change anything about it.
Gnomes are even less necessary. Everything about them is just "dwarves from the mirror dimension where Disney is a bigger influence on early D&D than Tolkien." Dwarves are good at working metal, Gnomes are good at carving gems. Dwarves wear their beards long and scraggly, Gnomes prefer their beards trimmed and well-groomed. Dwarves mine by aggressively pursuing the richest veins, Gnomes mine by meticulously scraping up every trace of a vein before moving on.
Hey, Dungeons and Dragons, you know that just because someone once had an idea for a dwarf with a sense of humor, that doesn't mean you have to spin them off into a whole new fantasy race? Gnomes barely qualify as an alternate dwarvish culture. They're more like an alternate dwarvish personality.
But again, this book here is pretty good. If you could somehow meld this book directly into The Complete Book of Dwarves, sacrificing only the parts that are the most glaringly inconsistent (mostly the stuff about gnomes loving practical jokes), you'd get a richer dwarven culture that feels much more alive than either of its constituent parts.
If you are to take as a given that gnomes and halflings should exist and have important distinctions from the species they spun off from? Then The Complete Book of Gnomes and Halflings is a near-flawless player's resource. Its only fault is that it includes material from Dragonlance.
Fucking Dragonlance. Base D&D already has an unfortunate tendency to treat its small races as comic relief, but somehow Dragonlance manages to crank that up to 11. It bugs me how little dignity Tinker Gnomes get. They have a tendency towards needlessly baroque and recklessly unsafe technology? Sure. That's a fun fantasy niche. But at least allow much of it to work. Let the dedicated seekers into truth occasionally find some fucking truth.
Somehow, though, Kender are even worse. Hilariously, the book warns you about allowing them into your game. Twice. Their presentation here is considerably toned-down from mainline Dragonlance, noting that they are completely fearless, but neglecting to mention that they will steal everything not nailed down and the act theatrically innocent when confronted. No justifications here of how completely ignoring the boundaries of everyone you meet is just "having childlike wonder."
But some of us remember. The author was apparently one of them.
Overall, though, I seriously enjoyed this book. Despite being split between two races, it didn't feel rushed. Information was very efficiently presented, and the fantasy races were well-drawn. In fact, the shorter wordcounts may have been to the races' benefit. Less space to include something bewildering or ill-conceived.
UKSS Contribution: The last couple pages of this book contain adventure hooks for all-gnome or all-halfling games. They are all pretty good (though only the one where human children are kidnapped by small-sized creatures who live in dens too narrow for adult humans to enter really seems all that race-specific), but one stood out as being downright bizarre: The City of Illusions.
The idea behind this adventure is that illusion spells stop working because the various illusionary creatures created with Phantasmal Force, Shadow Creatures, et al have gained sapience and escaped the control of their spellcasters. They've gathered in a city of their own and are agitating for Illusion Rights.
As a D&D adventure, this is so far outside the bounds of what the rules say are possible (and, indeed, makes a hash of the metaphysical underpinnings of the spellcasting classes) that if you were to try and run it, your player would revolt. But as a stand-alone fantasy conceit? I kind of love it.
I'll probably tinker with the causality here. Make it so the spellcasters responsible for the City of Illusion only thought they were creating illusionary creatures. But a whole city where nothing is real and its residents are but images with thoughts? That has potential.
It was probably because it was a lie that they even felt the need to say it. There wasn't a comparable warning in the Dwarf book, nor the Elf. But I'm sure, after writing 125 pages of this book where you describe gnomes as dwarves who like to party and halflings as humans - full stop, that maybe you need to point out that all of that preceding material was meant to contain a bit more nuance. I shouldn't frame this as a complaint, though, because I'm sure the author was doing the best he could with the source material. It's just . . .
Halfling have the exotic race-specific character kits of Archer fighter, Burglar thief, and Healer priest. The Tunnelrat kit relies on halflings being small and the leaftender kit relies on them not being able to take the druid class under AD&D rules, but ultimately there's very little in the entire halfling presentation that couldn't apply to a small-town everyman character.
That's almost certainly down to the fact that halflings exist primarily to placate Tolkien fans. Did you know that wizards often have a fondness for halflings? Because that one wizard in that one book said as much. So much of the halflings' presentation in this book is a naked attempt to reverse engineer hobbits.
But hobbits themselves were just an idealized caricature of English yeomanry. They are the British pre-industrial countryside viewed through a lens of willful naivety. They are a human culture that is alien only insofar as its citizens are incapable of human vice.
I'm not going to sit here and second-guess the literary necessities in Tolkien's writing ("the Lord of the Rings would have been better if the hobbits like to fuck!"). He's the classic author whose works have an eternal place in the canon of English literature. I'm just a jerk who (technically) writes a blog. But I can tell you, in D&D worlds halflings are redundant. There's not a damned thing about them in this book that couldn't just be relabeled as a description of a "good-aligned village."
Which isn't to say it's bad. It's actually very helpful to have an appealing description of the sort of pastoral idyll that is the starting point of storybook fantasy and an early casualty in darker heroic fantasy. You know that eager farm boy who left his life behind to search for adventure? He absolutely could have come from the sample village of Lindenbrook, and you would barely have to change anything about it.
Gnomes are even less necessary. Everything about them is just "dwarves from the mirror dimension where Disney is a bigger influence on early D&D than Tolkien." Dwarves are good at working metal, Gnomes are good at carving gems. Dwarves wear their beards long and scraggly, Gnomes prefer their beards trimmed and well-groomed. Dwarves mine by aggressively pursuing the richest veins, Gnomes mine by meticulously scraping up every trace of a vein before moving on.
Hey, Dungeons and Dragons, you know that just because someone once had an idea for a dwarf with a sense of humor, that doesn't mean you have to spin them off into a whole new fantasy race? Gnomes barely qualify as an alternate dwarvish culture. They're more like an alternate dwarvish personality.
But again, this book here is pretty good. If you could somehow meld this book directly into The Complete Book of Dwarves, sacrificing only the parts that are the most glaringly inconsistent (mostly the stuff about gnomes loving practical jokes), you'd get a richer dwarven culture that feels much more alive than either of its constituent parts.
If you are to take as a given that gnomes and halflings should exist and have important distinctions from the species they spun off from? Then The Complete Book of Gnomes and Halflings is a near-flawless player's resource. Its only fault is that it includes material from Dragonlance.
Fucking Dragonlance. Base D&D already has an unfortunate tendency to treat its small races as comic relief, but somehow Dragonlance manages to crank that up to 11. It bugs me how little dignity Tinker Gnomes get. They have a tendency towards needlessly baroque and recklessly unsafe technology? Sure. That's a fun fantasy niche. But at least allow much of it to work. Let the dedicated seekers into truth occasionally find some fucking truth.
Somehow, though, Kender are even worse. Hilariously, the book warns you about allowing them into your game. Twice. Their presentation here is considerably toned-down from mainline Dragonlance, noting that they are completely fearless, but neglecting to mention that they will steal everything not nailed down and the act theatrically innocent when confronted. No justifications here of how completely ignoring the boundaries of everyone you meet is just "having childlike wonder."
But some of us remember. The author was apparently one of them.
Overall, though, I seriously enjoyed this book. Despite being split between two races, it didn't feel rushed. Information was very efficiently presented, and the fantasy races were well-drawn. In fact, the shorter wordcounts may have been to the races' benefit. Less space to include something bewildering or ill-conceived.
UKSS Contribution: The last couple pages of this book contain adventure hooks for all-gnome or all-halfling games. They are all pretty good (though only the one where human children are kidnapped by small-sized creatures who live in dens too narrow for adult humans to enter really seems all that race-specific), but one stood out as being downright bizarre: The City of Illusions.
The idea behind this adventure is that illusion spells stop working because the various illusionary creatures created with Phantasmal Force, Shadow Creatures, et al have gained sapience and escaped the control of their spellcasters. They've gathered in a city of their own and are agitating for Illusion Rights.
As a D&D adventure, this is so far outside the bounds of what the rules say are possible (and, indeed, makes a hash of the metaphysical underpinnings of the spellcasting classes) that if you were to try and run it, your player would revolt. But as a stand-alone fantasy conceit? I kind of love it.
I'll probably tinker with the causality here. Make it so the spellcasters responsible for the City of Illusion only thought they were creating illusionary creatures. But a whole city where nothing is real and its residents are but images with thoughts? That has potential.
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
The Tingleverse - The Official Chuck Tingle Roleplaying Game
Adding this book to my list was probably a mistake. Oh, I don't regret buying it, and I certainly don't regret reading it. In a lot of ways, it's an absolute delight. But it is also the sort of thing that is nearly impossible to critique. If it is what it presents itself as (indeed, what I most want it to be), then it is beyond our petty categories of "good" and "bad."
And now I guess I have to explain who Chuck Tingle is. I knew it was coming. You can't work in this particular internet niche forever without having to explain Chuck Tingle. Oh, none of us know the day or hour of its coming. It's just something you accept as one of those facts of life.
Here's what you need to know about the inestimable Dr Tingle - He published Pounded by the Pound - Turned Gay by the Socioeconomic Implications of Britain Leaving the European Union and he did it one day after the brexit vote. His online persona is even weirder than that bit of trivia makes him sound, and his upbeat positivity and mischievous opposition to certain right-wing trolls have made him a bit of a patron saint/in-joke among socially progressive and extremely online science fiction fans.
Chuck is an ever- unfolding mystery. It kind of hurts to think about him for too long. Is he good? Is he bad? Is he good, pretending to be bad? Is he living proof that, in the arts, you can be bad at the technical craft while still also having a uniquely inspired imagination? Is he a working professional with a goofy alter-ego or an amateur who happened to be at the center of a certain historical moment? Are we, ourselves, simply characters in a Chuck Tingle novel, unaware, except in the darkest moments of the night, that the highest level of the Tingleverse is far, far above us?
The Tingleverse - The Official Chuck Tingle Roleplaying Game answers precisely none of these questions. Normally, I'd be content with that. Anyone who has followed Chuck Tingle for any length of time has long-since learned to just take him at face value - as The World's Greatest Author, with his own unique way.
But I've got a job to do here. Sigh.
Should I point out that this book is shoddy? I feel like it's my responsibility, as a reviewer. This is a book that has clearly been subjected to no editing process more rigorous than spellcheck. There are frequent typos, of the sort that can't yet be detected by automated software (things like substituting "now" for "not" or "tits" for "its"). There are mislabeled and missing tables (for example, it's completely unclear to me how many cool moves characters are supposed to know). The layout is sub-amateur. Headings are on separate pages from their sections, there are pages with half a paragraph on them, and cool move descriptions are consistently cut in half. It literally looks like a first draft word processor file was sent directly to a printer and published as-is.
I have a suspicion that Dr Tingle and I have a very similar writing process - sit down in front of a computer, hack away until you get something vaguely the right length, self-edit, and then hit "publish." And if that's the case, then I can say from experience that the only way you get something as sloppy as The Tingleverse is extreme carelessness. Even just a little bit of pride in your craft would result in something much nicer-looking than this book turned out to be.
Which is weird, because this book does not read like something that was cynically dashed-out in order to exploit an economic niche. I've been roleplaying for a long time. You might even say I'm pretty serious about the hobby (don't laugh). I've learned the signs that indicate when the author of a homebrew rpg system Has Opinions about its obvious inspiration.
The Tingleverse is largely a reskin of AD&D, but it is not a slapdash reskin. It's not a book that simply takes the Fighter class, renames it the Bad Boy, and goes about its day. There has clearly been some thought put into it. The movement rules are exactly what every aspiring rpg designer for the last 40 years have been looking for, but have thus far been too cowardly to actually publish:
And taking it seriously, I have to say that the most remarkable thing it does as an AD&D clone is completely solve the most fundamental flaw in AD&D's design philosophy. Namely, that the bulk of the game's mechanical widgets and fantastic conceits are confined to the wizard and priest classes, which, as a result, become so broad in their potential capabilities that they have no real flavor of their own.
The Tingleverse accomplishes this by giving every character class "cool moves," which function identically to wizard spells from standard AD&D, but which are not necessarily magical, except in a meta "in-touch-with-the-different-layers-of-the-tingleverse" sort of way.
It is here that the care that went into the game is most evident. The trots' (classes) cool move lists are very well-curated. You can often see where an AD&D wizard spell was repurposed to be a more mundane trot's heroic feat. Bad Boys get Power Word, Stun. Charmers get Power Word, Kill (but renamed "Heart Command," making it instantly about 200% more flavorful). True Buckaroos get surprisingly functional versions of Wish and Limited Wish. There are five trots in the game, and any one of them is better-designed than anything in baseline AD&D.
The funny thing, though, is that The Tingleverse's solution to class disparity is exactly the same as D&D 4e's most contentious innovation - making the classes very similar in their mechanical implementation and the relying on the specific powers descriptions to make them feel different in play. But then The Tingleverse makes the odd decision to realize that solution in what may be the worst way imaginable - by making every trot's cool moves function almost exactly like an AD&D wizard's spells, with limited slots per day pre-assigned every time the character sleeps.
As far as I can tell, there are only two possible explanations. Either Chuck Tingle is exactly the sort of genius savant he's always claimed to be. Or he is mercilessly trolling a broad swath of D&D edition warriors in an astoundingly on-point way. Or possibly both.
What is certain, though, is that The Tingleverse is not a cash-in. It was definitely written by someone who is fully engaged with rpgs as a medium.
Which makes the game's biggest flaw all the more inexplicable. In the strictest technical sense, The Tingleverse is unplayable as written. There is a huge math error in the heart of the combat system - every listed armor value in the entire game is given a negative defense adjustment, making armored characters dramatically easier to hit.
It's a trivial thing to fix, especially since every other mention of defense in the game has it the right way round - class defense bonuses get higher as they increase in level. Dexterity gives a bonus by increasing Defensive Score. Same with Cool Moves like Buckaroo armor and Weak Point, Major - they all operate on the assumption that a higher score is better. It is armor and only armor that treats a lower Defense Score as superior.
It's not the sort of mistake an AI running on a server farm in Nevada would make . . . by accident.
Not for the first time, I suspect that Dr Tingle is fucking with us. Including a deliberate flaw too big to possibly be missed, but also so easily fixed that it doesn't really interfere with the game much at all.
That gets us to the heart of what's most frustrating about being a Tingle fan. He claims that his persona is a way for him to cope with public attention given his mental illnesses. Am I the asshole for assuming that mentally ill people can't do intricate meta humor and subtle, sly jokes? Or is he the asshole for pretending to be mentally ill by playing to ableist stereotypes about mentally ill people being less disciplined and competent than everyone else.
Or maybe neither of us is the asshole, and he's genuinely ill, but very clever and is deliberately working with certain tropes to satirize ableist prejudices and I'm just picking up, correctly, on the work's artifice, but misattributing the motive out of a well-earned cynicism. That's what I like to believe, because the Chuck Tingle persona is so accepting and positive that he's almost like a wholesomely pervy Mr Rogers, and it would be a shame to lose something so wonderful. Or maybe, he's exactly what he's always claimed to be and he's just created a game that is occasionally inspired, but also has a huge math mistake.
It is impossible to follow Chuck Tingle for any significant length of time and not confront the very uncomfortable question - Am I laughing with him or am I laughing at him?
It's either the greatest didactic performance in the history of the internet, or something kind of shitty and mean, but there's no real room in-between.
The most disappointing thing about The Tingleverse is what it's not - a comprehensive guide to Chuck Tingle's Billings. Chuck Tingle's Twitter account is a thing of beauty, and over the years, it has built up a certain mythology surrounding the good doctor's life. His son, Jon, he of the amazing calves. His nemesis, Ted Cobbler, who may be incredibly evil or may just be an ordinary guy. Mysterious creatures like Truckman's Ghost or The Man With No Eyes and Wieners for Hair.
It's like a candy-coated Unknown Armies that is also intermittently x-rated. Or, to use a less rpg-specific reference - like The Island on Lost at its surreal best, but with a more coherent metaphysics. The rpg potential is immense.
And when you first pick up the book, there's a sense of hope. It's respectably hefty, coming in at 268 pages. But it turns out to be the shortest 268 pages you'll ever read, mostly thanks to its bare-bones formatting. The book contains most of the highlights of fantasy Billings, playable bigfoots, chocolate milk in every store, abstract concepts manifested physically (although I doubt it would be healthy to pound either of the ones included here). But there's not enough of it. It never really comes alive.
And to be fair, long-form fiction is never something Chuck has demonstrated any skill or interest in. The typical tingler is about 4000 words (just for reference, I'm already up to ~1900 on this post alone) and the twitter snippets that make up the bulk of the Tingleverse are even shorter. It's not surprising, then, that this book is missing a lot of necessary worldbuilding. To do something comparable to a typical rpg setting book is outside Chuck's typical style.
But it would have been glorious. Possibly even one of the all-time greats. And I think I was coming into this book expecting it. What I got was a damned decent (assuming the math error was deliberate and/or forgivable) AD&D clone that, taken on its own terms would be wildly inventive in a way that hearkens back to the days of D&D Basic. And that should be enough. I guess it's just a typical Tingle-fandom paradox that The Tingleverse - The Official Chuck Tingle Roleplaying Game would be of more interest to Tingle novices than long-time followers.
UKSS Contribution: I should probably pick something really, really filthy, but shockingly, this book is very close to PG-13. Only The Man With No Eyes And Wieners For Hair would be content-blocked from a typical D&D book. There's basically no erotica whatsoever (except the tv monster who paralyzes its victims with tantalizing glimpses of late-night Cinemax nudity).
I guess I'm going to have to go with something genuinely cool, instead.
When characters die in The Tingleverse, they find themselves at a mysterious, abandoned train station, where they await the arrival of the Lonesome Train, to carry them to realms unknown. (Incidentally, this leads to one of the book's best jokes, the Train Trap cool move for the Sneak trot, which allows them to forge a ticket to the Lonesome Train and slip into someone's pocket, thereby killing them).
I might tweak the idea a little bit, to allow characters who die to meet other newly deceased a the train station. Or maybe I'll leave it as it is, because it's a pretty haunting image and a good reminder of the loneliness of our own eventual mortality.
And now I guess I have to explain who Chuck Tingle is. I knew it was coming. You can't work in this particular internet niche forever without having to explain Chuck Tingle. Oh, none of us know the day or hour of its coming. It's just something you accept as one of those facts of life.
Here's what you need to know about the inestimable Dr Tingle - He published Pounded by the Pound - Turned Gay by the Socioeconomic Implications of Britain Leaving the European Union and he did it one day after the brexit vote. His online persona is even weirder than that bit of trivia makes him sound, and his upbeat positivity and mischievous opposition to certain right-wing trolls have made him a bit of a patron saint/in-joke among socially progressive and extremely online science fiction fans.
Chuck is an ever- unfolding mystery. It kind of hurts to think about him for too long. Is he good? Is he bad? Is he good, pretending to be bad? Is he living proof that, in the arts, you can be bad at the technical craft while still also having a uniquely inspired imagination? Is he a working professional with a goofy alter-ego or an amateur who happened to be at the center of a certain historical moment? Are we, ourselves, simply characters in a Chuck Tingle novel, unaware, except in the darkest moments of the night, that the highest level of the Tingleverse is far, far above us?
The Tingleverse - The Official Chuck Tingle Roleplaying Game answers precisely none of these questions. Normally, I'd be content with that. Anyone who has followed Chuck Tingle for any length of time has long-since learned to just take him at face value - as The World's Greatest Author, with his own unique way.
But I've got a job to do here. Sigh.
Should I point out that this book is shoddy? I feel like it's my responsibility, as a reviewer. This is a book that has clearly been subjected to no editing process more rigorous than spellcheck. There are frequent typos, of the sort that can't yet be detected by automated software (things like substituting "now" for "not" or "tits" for "its"). There are mislabeled and missing tables (for example, it's completely unclear to me how many cool moves characters are supposed to know). The layout is sub-amateur. Headings are on separate pages from their sections, there are pages with half a paragraph on them, and cool move descriptions are consistently cut in half. It literally looks like a first draft word processor file was sent directly to a printer and published as-is.
I have a suspicion that Dr Tingle and I have a very similar writing process - sit down in front of a computer, hack away until you get something vaguely the right length, self-edit, and then hit "publish." And if that's the case, then I can say from experience that the only way you get something as sloppy as The Tingleverse is extreme carelessness. Even just a little bit of pride in your craft would result in something much nicer-looking than this book turned out to be.
Which is weird, because this book does not read like something that was cynically dashed-out in order to exploit an economic niche. I've been roleplaying for a long time. You might even say I'm pretty serious about the hobby (don't laugh). I've learned the signs that indicate when the author of a homebrew rpg system Has Opinions about its obvious inspiration.
The Tingleverse is largely a reskin of AD&D, but it is not a slapdash reskin. It's not a book that simply takes the Fighter class, renames it the Bad Boy, and goes about its day. There has clearly been some thought put into it. The movement rules are exactly what every aspiring rpg designer for the last 40 years have been looking for, but have thus far been too cowardly to actually publish:
Allow your TM to decide how to treat these situations as they come. Measuring out exact movement rates would simply slow the game down, and without a physical game board, would still leave much to be desired, regardless of how intricate the rules.This is clearly the work of someone who's been roleplaying for awhile. It takes time for a novice to learn these lessons. I can't just treat this as a joke book.
And taking it seriously, I have to say that the most remarkable thing it does as an AD&D clone is completely solve the most fundamental flaw in AD&D's design philosophy. Namely, that the bulk of the game's mechanical widgets and fantastic conceits are confined to the wizard and priest classes, which, as a result, become so broad in their potential capabilities that they have no real flavor of their own.
The Tingleverse accomplishes this by giving every character class "cool moves," which function identically to wizard spells from standard AD&D, but which are not necessarily magical, except in a meta "in-touch-with-the-different-layers-of-the-tingleverse" sort of way.
It is here that the care that went into the game is most evident. The trots' (classes) cool move lists are very well-curated. You can often see where an AD&D wizard spell was repurposed to be a more mundane trot's heroic feat. Bad Boys get Power Word, Stun. Charmers get Power Word, Kill (but renamed "Heart Command," making it instantly about 200% more flavorful). True Buckaroos get surprisingly functional versions of Wish and Limited Wish. There are five trots in the game, and any one of them is better-designed than anything in baseline AD&D.
The funny thing, though, is that The Tingleverse's solution to class disparity is exactly the same as D&D 4e's most contentious innovation - making the classes very similar in their mechanical implementation and the relying on the specific powers descriptions to make them feel different in play. But then The Tingleverse makes the odd decision to realize that solution in what may be the worst way imaginable - by making every trot's cool moves function almost exactly like an AD&D wizard's spells, with limited slots per day pre-assigned every time the character sleeps.
As far as I can tell, there are only two possible explanations. Either Chuck Tingle is exactly the sort of genius savant he's always claimed to be. Or he is mercilessly trolling a broad swath of D&D edition warriors in an astoundingly on-point way. Or possibly both.
What is certain, though, is that The Tingleverse is not a cash-in. It was definitely written by someone who is fully engaged with rpgs as a medium.
Which makes the game's biggest flaw all the more inexplicable. In the strictest technical sense, The Tingleverse is unplayable as written. There is a huge math error in the heart of the combat system - every listed armor value in the entire game is given a negative defense adjustment, making armored characters dramatically easier to hit.
It's a trivial thing to fix, especially since every other mention of defense in the game has it the right way round - class defense bonuses get higher as they increase in level. Dexterity gives a bonus by increasing Defensive Score. Same with Cool Moves like Buckaroo armor and Weak Point, Major - they all operate on the assumption that a higher score is better. It is armor and only armor that treats a lower Defense Score as superior.
It's not the sort of mistake an AI running on a server farm in Nevada would make . . . by accident.
Not for the first time, I suspect that Dr Tingle is fucking with us. Including a deliberate flaw too big to possibly be missed, but also so easily fixed that it doesn't really interfere with the game much at all.
That gets us to the heart of what's most frustrating about being a Tingle fan. He claims that his persona is a way for him to cope with public attention given his mental illnesses. Am I the asshole for assuming that mentally ill people can't do intricate meta humor and subtle, sly jokes? Or is he the asshole for pretending to be mentally ill by playing to ableist stereotypes about mentally ill people being less disciplined and competent than everyone else.
Or maybe neither of us is the asshole, and he's genuinely ill, but very clever and is deliberately working with certain tropes to satirize ableist prejudices and I'm just picking up, correctly, on the work's artifice, but misattributing the motive out of a well-earned cynicism. That's what I like to believe, because the Chuck Tingle persona is so accepting and positive that he's almost like a wholesomely pervy Mr Rogers, and it would be a shame to lose something so wonderful. Or maybe, he's exactly what he's always claimed to be and he's just created a game that is occasionally inspired, but also has a huge math mistake.
It is impossible to follow Chuck Tingle for any significant length of time and not confront the very uncomfortable question - Am I laughing with him or am I laughing at him?
It's either the greatest didactic performance in the history of the internet, or something kind of shitty and mean, but there's no real room in-between.
The most disappointing thing about The Tingleverse is what it's not - a comprehensive guide to Chuck Tingle's Billings. Chuck Tingle's Twitter account is a thing of beauty, and over the years, it has built up a certain mythology surrounding the good doctor's life. His son, Jon, he of the amazing calves. His nemesis, Ted Cobbler, who may be incredibly evil or may just be an ordinary guy. Mysterious creatures like Truckman's Ghost or The Man With No Eyes and Wieners for Hair.
It's like a candy-coated Unknown Armies that is also intermittently x-rated. Or, to use a less rpg-specific reference - like The Island on Lost at its surreal best, but with a more coherent metaphysics. The rpg potential is immense.
And when you first pick up the book, there's a sense of hope. It's respectably hefty, coming in at 268 pages. But it turns out to be the shortest 268 pages you'll ever read, mostly thanks to its bare-bones formatting. The book contains most of the highlights of fantasy Billings, playable bigfoots, chocolate milk in every store, abstract concepts manifested physically (although I doubt it would be healthy to pound either of the ones included here). But there's not enough of it. It never really comes alive.
And to be fair, long-form fiction is never something Chuck has demonstrated any skill or interest in. The typical tingler is about 4000 words (just for reference, I'm already up to ~1900 on this post alone) and the twitter snippets that make up the bulk of the Tingleverse are even shorter. It's not surprising, then, that this book is missing a lot of necessary worldbuilding. To do something comparable to a typical rpg setting book is outside Chuck's typical style.
But it would have been glorious. Possibly even one of the all-time greats. And I think I was coming into this book expecting it. What I got was a damned decent (assuming the math error was deliberate and/or forgivable) AD&D clone that, taken on its own terms would be wildly inventive in a way that hearkens back to the days of D&D Basic. And that should be enough. I guess it's just a typical Tingle-fandom paradox that The Tingleverse - The Official Chuck Tingle Roleplaying Game would be of more interest to Tingle novices than long-time followers.
UKSS Contribution: I should probably pick something really, really filthy, but shockingly, this book is very close to PG-13. Only The Man With No Eyes And Wieners For Hair would be content-blocked from a typical D&D book. There's basically no erotica whatsoever (except the tv monster who paralyzes its victims with tantalizing glimpses of late-night Cinemax nudity).
I guess I'm going to have to go with something genuinely cool, instead.
When characters die in The Tingleverse, they find themselves at a mysterious, abandoned train station, where they await the arrival of the Lonesome Train, to carry them to realms unknown. (Incidentally, this leads to one of the book's best jokes, the Train Trap cool move for the Sneak trot, which allows them to forge a ticket to the Lonesome Train and slip into someone's pocket, thereby killing them).
I might tweak the idea a little bit, to allow characters who die to meet other newly deceased a the train station. Or maybe I'll leave it as it is, because it's a pretty haunting image and a good reminder of the loneliness of our own eventual mortality.
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
Shattered Europe: Psi Order Aesculapian & Europe Sourcebook
Shattered Europe is another Trinity sourcebook about an area that is prosperous in our (well, their) time and in serious trouble in the game's hypothetical future. The war with the early 21st century superhumans left the continent devastated, with large sections of major cities completely ruined and staggering numbers of casualties, comparable to WW2 at its worst. But in the subsequent decades, much of that had been rebuilt . . . until about 6 years before the canon start date, when the superhumans came back and dropped a huge space station on France, rendering most of northern and western Europe uninhabitable. It's the Trinity-verse's central location for post-apocalyptic style games.
On the whole, it works better for me than America Offline did. Probably because I'm less intimately familiar with the subject matter. I'm sure that there are a bunch of little details that would not ring true to the people of Europe, but I, personally, only caught a couple (referring to Ukraine as The Ukraine was merely the most obvious.)
With this added critical distance, I can see that Trinity's earth-side worldbuilding is . . . not good, exactly, but something adjacent to good. Let's call it pulp-interesting. Saying that Bohemia is a center for the arts, so much so that its Presidential nomination process skips all this business with the primaries and just automatically selects candidates from a list of the previous decade's most critically celebrated artists - that's not something I believe. In fact, it's kind of a black hole, where the more I think about it, the weirder and more untenable it becomes. However, it is something I can use.
Trinity wears its comic-book inspirations on its sleeve, and if you accept the premise that European games are supposed to draw upon post-apocalyptic tropes and themes, then artist Bohemia starts to make a certain amount of emotional sense. Europe is a place where continuity with the past was broken by disaster after disaster, but which, as a result, seeks a new connection to its past. In the Trinity era, Europe is on an opposite course from most of the rest of the world. Instead of working towards greater international cooperation and regional alliances, it is becoming fractured, with even the nation-state beginning to lose its meaning. Instead of embracing a future where humanity is without borders, it clings to a xenophobic past.
The biggest flaw in this book (from the perspective of someone who doesn't know all that much about Europe) is that its themes are a bit too far in the background. There's a lot that's implied, and it isn't presented as a coincidence that Germany is now a collection of city states, Spain is breaking up into its constituent regions, and France has no government at all. Yet it never really gets into the weeds, psychologically, and attempt to explore the realities of deprivation and continental trauma. Nor does it do a very persuasive job of tying Europe's narrative of decline to its retreat from the internationalist liberalism that is so central to the broader line's conception of "hope, sacrifice, and unity."
Ultimately, though, that's for the best. I know I keep saying this so much that it's starting to feel really backhanded, but it keeps being true. "Shattered Europe does not delve into the true horror of history's greatest atrocity" is an incredibly asinine take. It's like saying "Independence Day would have been a much better movie if, instead of going up to the alien ship, Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum stayed at the base, hugging each other and crying." The point of this game is to fight mutants in the shadow of a ruined Eiffel Tower - any potential social commentary is more of a side effect than a main goal.
Why do I keep falling into this trap? I blame White Wolf. I think there must have been something in the company culture around this period, because it keeps cropping up in game after game. As a rule, White Wolf products from this era are half dumb and half smart. Vampire: the Masquerade is a thoughtful, daring exploration of the limits of human compassion, and the day-to-day compromises that make men into monsters. It has also, with some justice, been called "superheroes with fangs."
Trinity is the same way. There are a lot of bold, unique choices that make this game a refreshing new take on the science fiction genre. But at the end of the day, they're in service to some fairly straightforward action-adventure narratives. There's a constant temptation to focus purely on the first, and just take the second for granted.
It's probably all part of old White Wolf's marketing strategy, to position its games as more sophisticated, adult alternatives to D&D. Yet as far as I know, the only people who ever bought into that were teenagers. We're probably going to see a few more cringe-inducing examples of that in books to come, but I like to think they turned a corner after The Aberrant Players' Guide and came to realize how unflattering a look it was. At the very least, they must have realized at some point that what their half-smart approach mostly accomplished was to prevent them from doing "dumb" in a smart way.
The other part of this book deals with the Aesculapian Order. The thing that most stood out to me about their presentation here was the way that a previously-released adventure path managed to advance their metaplot. The Aesculapians are now mired in controversy, thanks to the revelation of a sinister conspiracy inside the order to perform unethical medical experiments on human subjects. You can read all about those events in the Darkness Revealed trilogy!
I can't say this is a habit I love, but I made my peace with it 15 years ago. The real reason I bring it up is that this metaplot is about a powerful, respected organization that concealed abuse at the highest levels until it was dramatically revealed to the public, and then . . . nothing much of anything happened. This, I feel was well-observed sociologically.
The book tries to exonerate the lead psychic, Zweidler, by saying that he wasn't much interested in the administration of the psi order and preferred to just focus on pure research, and that's why everything was able to go on right under his nose while he was completely oblivious . . . but it kind of made him look worse to me. That sort of ignorance can only be willful, and it makes me think that maybe there's a better way to choose the leader of your international medical relief organization than just letting alien telepaths grab the most psychic guy they could find.
Overall, Trinity has yet to hit a home run with any of these setting books, but they have, nonetheless maintained a very consistent level of quality. Shattered Europe continues that pattern. It is a very useful book if you want to set Trinity games in Europe, and it's got a ton of fun, sci-fi conceits inside it. But I will admit, I'd love to see what the same writers could do with the subject matter now that they've got 20 more years of experience under their belts.
UKSS Contribution: Much of Shattered Europe featured real-world locations and peoples, and sometimes I wonder if I'm ever going to be backed into a corner where I have to pick something real. Ukss is a pulp fantasy world with magic and dragons and talking animals, and also Chicago is there. It's on the continent of Australia and its mayor is King Arthur. . . I'm kind of dreading it, but I want to reassure you all, that if the time comes, I won't back down. I'll do what needs to be done.
Luckily, this is not technically Europe, but sci-fi Europe, so I can choose something that doesn't (and probably can't) exist in the real world - The Progressive Psycho-Social Commune. It's one of those implausible speculative governments that takes its inspiration from a thought experiment that would be terribly fraught to try and implement in real life.
The idea is that everyone in the PPK undergoes periodic psychological testing, and they're placed in the job that would make them happiest. The book gets some mileage out of the impracticalities of such a system, but honestly even their most on-point jabs seem more a critique of capitalism than flaws in the system (everybody wants to work in satisfying, intellectually challenging careers - but allowing them to do so crashes the price those jobs command in the market). It's the sort of thing that could only really work if sci-fi technology smoothed out the edges, but is so appealing that it makes you wonder why we aren't currently developing the sci-fi-inspired technology to make it work in real life.
On the whole, it works better for me than America Offline did. Probably because I'm less intimately familiar with the subject matter. I'm sure that there are a bunch of little details that would not ring true to the people of Europe, but I, personally, only caught a couple (referring to Ukraine as The Ukraine was merely the most obvious.)
With this added critical distance, I can see that Trinity's earth-side worldbuilding is . . . not good, exactly, but something adjacent to good. Let's call it pulp-interesting. Saying that Bohemia is a center for the arts, so much so that its Presidential nomination process skips all this business with the primaries and just automatically selects candidates from a list of the previous decade's most critically celebrated artists - that's not something I believe. In fact, it's kind of a black hole, where the more I think about it, the weirder and more untenable it becomes. However, it is something I can use.
Trinity wears its comic-book inspirations on its sleeve, and if you accept the premise that European games are supposed to draw upon post-apocalyptic tropes and themes, then artist Bohemia starts to make a certain amount of emotional sense. Europe is a place where continuity with the past was broken by disaster after disaster, but which, as a result, seeks a new connection to its past. In the Trinity era, Europe is on an opposite course from most of the rest of the world. Instead of working towards greater international cooperation and regional alliances, it is becoming fractured, with even the nation-state beginning to lose its meaning. Instead of embracing a future where humanity is without borders, it clings to a xenophobic past.
The biggest flaw in this book (from the perspective of someone who doesn't know all that much about Europe) is that its themes are a bit too far in the background. There's a lot that's implied, and it isn't presented as a coincidence that Germany is now a collection of city states, Spain is breaking up into its constituent regions, and France has no government at all. Yet it never really gets into the weeds, psychologically, and attempt to explore the realities of deprivation and continental trauma. Nor does it do a very persuasive job of tying Europe's narrative of decline to its retreat from the internationalist liberalism that is so central to the broader line's conception of "hope, sacrifice, and unity."
Ultimately, though, that's for the best. I know I keep saying this so much that it's starting to feel really backhanded, but it keeps being true. "Shattered Europe does not delve into the true horror of history's greatest atrocity" is an incredibly asinine take. It's like saying "Independence Day would have been a much better movie if, instead of going up to the alien ship, Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum stayed at the base, hugging each other and crying." The point of this game is to fight mutants in the shadow of a ruined Eiffel Tower - any potential social commentary is more of a side effect than a main goal.
Why do I keep falling into this trap? I blame White Wolf. I think there must have been something in the company culture around this period, because it keeps cropping up in game after game. As a rule, White Wolf products from this era are half dumb and half smart. Vampire: the Masquerade is a thoughtful, daring exploration of the limits of human compassion, and the day-to-day compromises that make men into monsters. It has also, with some justice, been called "superheroes with fangs."
Trinity is the same way. There are a lot of bold, unique choices that make this game a refreshing new take on the science fiction genre. But at the end of the day, they're in service to some fairly straightforward action-adventure narratives. There's a constant temptation to focus purely on the first, and just take the second for granted.
It's probably all part of old White Wolf's marketing strategy, to position its games as more sophisticated, adult alternatives to D&D. Yet as far as I know, the only people who ever bought into that were teenagers. We're probably going to see a few more cringe-inducing examples of that in books to come, but I like to think they turned a corner after The Aberrant Players' Guide and came to realize how unflattering a look it was. At the very least, they must have realized at some point that what their half-smart approach mostly accomplished was to prevent them from doing "dumb" in a smart way.
The other part of this book deals with the Aesculapian Order. The thing that most stood out to me about their presentation here was the way that a previously-released adventure path managed to advance their metaplot. The Aesculapians are now mired in controversy, thanks to the revelation of a sinister conspiracy inside the order to perform unethical medical experiments on human subjects. You can read all about those events in the Darkness Revealed trilogy!
I can't say this is a habit I love, but I made my peace with it 15 years ago. The real reason I bring it up is that this metaplot is about a powerful, respected organization that concealed abuse at the highest levels until it was dramatically revealed to the public, and then . . . nothing much of anything happened. This, I feel was well-observed sociologically.
The book tries to exonerate the lead psychic, Zweidler, by saying that he wasn't much interested in the administration of the psi order and preferred to just focus on pure research, and that's why everything was able to go on right under his nose while he was completely oblivious . . . but it kind of made him look worse to me. That sort of ignorance can only be willful, and it makes me think that maybe there's a better way to choose the leader of your international medical relief organization than just letting alien telepaths grab the most psychic guy they could find.
Overall, Trinity has yet to hit a home run with any of these setting books, but they have, nonetheless maintained a very consistent level of quality. Shattered Europe continues that pattern. It is a very useful book if you want to set Trinity games in Europe, and it's got a ton of fun, sci-fi conceits inside it. But I will admit, I'd love to see what the same writers could do with the subject matter now that they've got 20 more years of experience under their belts.
UKSS Contribution: Much of Shattered Europe featured real-world locations and peoples, and sometimes I wonder if I'm ever going to be backed into a corner where I have to pick something real. Ukss is a pulp fantasy world with magic and dragons and talking animals, and also Chicago is there. It's on the continent of Australia and its mayor is King Arthur. . . I'm kind of dreading it, but I want to reassure you all, that if the time comes, I won't back down. I'll do what needs to be done.
Luckily, this is not technically Europe, but sci-fi Europe, so I can choose something that doesn't (and probably can't) exist in the real world - The Progressive Psycho-Social Commune. It's one of those implausible speculative governments that takes its inspiration from a thought experiment that would be terribly fraught to try and implement in real life.
The idea is that everyone in the PPK undergoes periodic psychological testing, and they're placed in the job that would make them happiest. The book gets some mileage out of the impracticalities of such a system, but honestly even their most on-point jabs seem more a critique of capitalism than flaws in the system (everybody wants to work in satisfying, intellectually challenging careers - but allowing them to do so crashes the price those jobs command in the market). It's the sort of thing that could only really work if sci-fi technology smoothed out the edges, but is so appealing that it makes you wonder why we aren't currently developing the sci-fi-inspired technology to make it work in real life.
Saturday, September 7, 2019
Elves
Elves is a fascinating artifact. It's a third-party supplement for AD&D 1st edition, published in 1983. This era of roleplaying is very mysterious to me. It's not that surprising, considering I was but a wee little baby when this game came out, but it still feels weird. I guess there's a part of me that thinks the world began the moment I was born. I've got an Amzaon wishlist filled with games from the mid-90s to early-00s, because that's what I think of as "classic" gaming. "Classic" is when I was a teenager. Anything prior is prehistoric. To learn, then, that there was a fairly sophisticated 3rd party supplement so early in roleplaying's history is startling.
Elves is a kind of hybrid adventure/campaign setting/rules expansion. It discusses the various varieties of elves, includes maps of their cities and villages that could be plopped into nearly any setting, and then ties it all together with an epic story of going from town to town collecting magical clothes so that an NPC can kill a dark god off-screen. (I know that's kind of a reductive way to refer to a by-the-numbers scavenger-hunt quest, but the part where the High Elf king leaves the party in his palace while he goes off to resolve the main plot had to have been as aggravating in 1983 as it is today).
That gets to the hardest part of this review - figuring out the exact level of world-weary condescension to heap upon this book, both in praise and in complaints. It certainly deserves a bit of a scolding. In nearly every town, there's at least one sexy female shopkeeper with a prominently listed "Appeal" stat (Elves transparently renames several AD&D terms, though I could never quite figure out if it's because it was based off a cloned rpg or if they were just covering their ass about its dubious AD&D compatibility). No male character gets their Appeal listed in that way, and the only non-shopkeepers to get that kind of treatment are the half-elven rancher's teenage daughters, who very conspicuously ride unicorns instead of horses.
And I got to figure that even in 1983, giving a 15 year old girl a numerically quantified sexiness stat was more than a little creepy, even if your audience is ostensibly 15 year old boys, but I also kind of want to give it points for remembering that teenage girls exist. Not too long after this book was released, D&D proper managed to put out a book about fantasy Arabia with zero named female characters. Is it worth it then, to have a couple of inappropriately sexualized teen virgins if that means we also get Eauoi, the arctic sculptor whose leg was crushed by a fallen statue and who recovered by carving herself an artificial leg out of whale bone and getting back to work?
That's the paradox of Elves. It's kind of awful . . . unless it's ahead of its time. Unfortunately, I have no intuitive sense for what its time was actually like.
For example, this book features a lesbian couple in a long-term, committed relationship . . . the dark elf queen and her "assistant, life mate, and lover" Crescentia Yursula. And I really don't understand what's going on here. Dark elves are really evil, in that gross, over-the-top way where every aspect of their culture features some kind of shitty, counterproductive violence (they make wonderful music . . . by putting captive slaves into giant, human-powered organs, where they are tortured into producing particular notes). So maybe the dark elf queen is only allowed to be a lesbian because she's evil.
Or maybe the whole thing is exploitative. Both the queen and Crescentia are said to be beautiful and eternally youthful. It could be that they're part of this book's whole thing with its relentless male gaze, and that they exist to titillate its young, male audience. Except, canonically during the events of the adventure, Crescentia is hundreds of miles away, ruling the eastern half of the dark elf empire with a loyalty otherwise unheard of among dark elves. I'm not sure, then, how her relationship with the queen even comes up. Is the implication that she fucks so good that she was rewarded with control over the nation's secondary capital?
In the past, artists would sometimes use the freedom allowed to villains to sneak gay representation into otherwise "respectable" works. Is that what's going on here? Did people still have to do that in 1983? Unfortunately, baby John was in no position to gauge the social mood of the time.
A similar problem crops up with the book's broader aesthetics too. At the broadest level, a lot of what's going on in Elves is kind of hokey. The way they break down the elvish species into a bunch of color-coded, geographically themed specialist varieties - high elves are the original, then there are wood elves and dark elves and ice elves and grey elves - it's textbook basic. Or was it?
The way things get basic in the first place is that first somebody does something, then people really like it, then a new wave comes along, inspired by the first, and they keep doing it, and it is only in retrospect that you look back and see that it was everywhere. Where does Elves fit into this?
It must have innovated at least a little, because ice elves never became A Thing. That makes me wonder what other innovations the book might have that are simply invisible to me because they are now ubiquitous. Ah well, at least I can finally give up my pretensions of being a scholar of rpgs.
The best part of this book is without a doubt the character names. Most are fantasy-generic and kind of forgettable, but a few are absolute gems. There's the innkeeper, Bursty Marble. Or the evil actors Mr Dark and Wanda Truly. And who could ever forget Vegan, the dwarf (I know it's probably just a coincidence and that they just chose a couple of syllables at random, but the term "vegan" was coined in 1944, so I'm just going to imagine that this guy is a berserker who followed a strict diet that eschewed all animal products)?
The worst part of this book is probably the incidental sexism (until they get married, wood elf women are the literal property of their fathers, but married wood elves have full rights of citizenship, so that's nice). The second worst part of this book is the adversarial assumptions that underlie the presentation of the adventure. There are several cases where the book offers the PCs some essential advantage only if they ask. The most egregious example is when they're looking for a particular god-slaying sword and they find a decoy sword that has many of the same properties, but is intelligent and will reveal itself as a fake if the characters think to ask.
That same adventure also features a different decoy sword that is the same as the target in all respects except that it can't be used to kill a god, which makes me think that maybe there's just a disconnect between the way I like to roleplay and how this book expects players and GMs to behave.
Overall, Elves is a neat little book, occasionally frustrating, but clearly a labor of love. I can't say that it's particularly broadened my horizons regarding the use of elves in a D&D game, but hell, it's 2019 - I've already seen every possible way elves can be done. Can't hold it against the book that I'm a cynic.
PS - Dark elves getting black skin because they're so evil is a gross trope, and it bugs me here, just like it bugged me in The Complete Book of Elves, and just like it's going to bug me the next half-dozen times I see it happen.
UKSS Contribution - I'm going to chicken out here. I'm so, so tempted to go with one of the great character names. Ninefingers, the knife merchant. Melora Needletongue, the tailor. The Goat Boy tavern. However, if I'm being honest, I wouldn't be able to use any of them without being extremely broad and silly (this book could be, at times, broad and silly, but I would undoubtedly exaggerate those tendencies a hundredfold).
So I'm going to go with my fourth or fifth favorite thing, just to try and keep some semblance of dignity. The high elves have self-sailing boats made of enchanted glass. Those were kind of cool.
Elves is a kind of hybrid adventure/campaign setting/rules expansion. It discusses the various varieties of elves, includes maps of their cities and villages that could be plopped into nearly any setting, and then ties it all together with an epic story of going from town to town collecting magical clothes so that an NPC can kill a dark god off-screen. (I know that's kind of a reductive way to refer to a by-the-numbers scavenger-hunt quest, but the part where the High Elf king leaves the party in his palace while he goes off to resolve the main plot had to have been as aggravating in 1983 as it is today).
That gets to the hardest part of this review - figuring out the exact level of world-weary condescension to heap upon this book, both in praise and in complaints. It certainly deserves a bit of a scolding. In nearly every town, there's at least one sexy female shopkeeper with a prominently listed "Appeal" stat (Elves transparently renames several AD&D terms, though I could never quite figure out if it's because it was based off a cloned rpg or if they were just covering their ass about its dubious AD&D compatibility). No male character gets their Appeal listed in that way, and the only non-shopkeepers to get that kind of treatment are the half-elven rancher's teenage daughters, who very conspicuously ride unicorns instead of horses.
And I got to figure that even in 1983, giving a 15 year old girl a numerically quantified sexiness stat was more than a little creepy, even if your audience is ostensibly 15 year old boys, but I also kind of want to give it points for remembering that teenage girls exist. Not too long after this book was released, D&D proper managed to put out a book about fantasy Arabia with zero named female characters. Is it worth it then, to have a couple of inappropriately sexualized teen virgins if that means we also get Eauoi, the arctic sculptor whose leg was crushed by a fallen statue and who recovered by carving herself an artificial leg out of whale bone and getting back to work?
That's the paradox of Elves. It's kind of awful . . . unless it's ahead of its time. Unfortunately, I have no intuitive sense for what its time was actually like.
For example, this book features a lesbian couple in a long-term, committed relationship . . . the dark elf queen and her "assistant, life mate, and lover" Crescentia Yursula. And I really don't understand what's going on here. Dark elves are really evil, in that gross, over-the-top way where every aspect of their culture features some kind of shitty, counterproductive violence (they make wonderful music . . . by putting captive slaves into giant, human-powered organs, where they are tortured into producing particular notes). So maybe the dark elf queen is only allowed to be a lesbian because she's evil.
Or maybe the whole thing is exploitative. Both the queen and Crescentia are said to be beautiful and eternally youthful. It could be that they're part of this book's whole thing with its relentless male gaze, and that they exist to titillate its young, male audience. Except, canonically during the events of the adventure, Crescentia is hundreds of miles away, ruling the eastern half of the dark elf empire with a loyalty otherwise unheard of among dark elves. I'm not sure, then, how her relationship with the queen even comes up. Is the implication that she fucks so good that she was rewarded with control over the nation's secondary capital?
In the past, artists would sometimes use the freedom allowed to villains to sneak gay representation into otherwise "respectable" works. Is that what's going on here? Did people still have to do that in 1983? Unfortunately, baby John was in no position to gauge the social mood of the time.
A similar problem crops up with the book's broader aesthetics too. At the broadest level, a lot of what's going on in Elves is kind of hokey. The way they break down the elvish species into a bunch of color-coded, geographically themed specialist varieties - high elves are the original, then there are wood elves and dark elves and ice elves and grey elves - it's textbook basic. Or was it?
The way things get basic in the first place is that first somebody does something, then people really like it, then a new wave comes along, inspired by the first, and they keep doing it, and it is only in retrospect that you look back and see that it was everywhere. Where does Elves fit into this?
It must have innovated at least a little, because ice elves never became A Thing. That makes me wonder what other innovations the book might have that are simply invisible to me because they are now ubiquitous. Ah well, at least I can finally give up my pretensions of being a scholar of rpgs.
The best part of this book is without a doubt the character names. Most are fantasy-generic and kind of forgettable, but a few are absolute gems. There's the innkeeper, Bursty Marble. Or the evil actors Mr Dark and Wanda Truly. And who could ever forget Vegan, the dwarf (I know it's probably just a coincidence and that they just chose a couple of syllables at random, but the term "vegan" was coined in 1944, so I'm just going to imagine that this guy is a berserker who followed a strict diet that eschewed all animal products)?
The worst part of this book is probably the incidental sexism (until they get married, wood elf women are the literal property of their fathers, but married wood elves have full rights of citizenship, so that's nice). The second worst part of this book is the adversarial assumptions that underlie the presentation of the adventure. There are several cases where the book offers the PCs some essential advantage only if they ask. The most egregious example is when they're looking for a particular god-slaying sword and they find a decoy sword that has many of the same properties, but is intelligent and will reveal itself as a fake if the characters think to ask.
That same adventure also features a different decoy sword that is the same as the target in all respects except that it can't be used to kill a god, which makes me think that maybe there's just a disconnect between the way I like to roleplay and how this book expects players and GMs to behave.
Overall, Elves is a neat little book, occasionally frustrating, but clearly a labor of love. I can't say that it's particularly broadened my horizons regarding the use of elves in a D&D game, but hell, it's 2019 - I've already seen every possible way elves can be done. Can't hold it against the book that I'm a cynic.
PS - Dark elves getting black skin because they're so evil is a gross trope, and it bugs me here, just like it bugged me in The Complete Book of Elves, and just like it's going to bug me the next half-dozen times I see it happen.
UKSS Contribution - I'm going to chicken out here. I'm so, so tempted to go with one of the great character names. Ninefingers, the knife merchant. Melora Needletongue, the tailor. The Goat Boy tavern. However, if I'm being honest, I wouldn't be able to use any of them without being extremely broad and silly (this book could be, at times, broad and silly, but I would undoubtedly exaggerate those tendencies a hundredfold).
So I'm going to go with my fourth or fifth favorite thing, just to try and keep some semblance of dignity. The high elves have self-sailing boats made of enchanted glass. Those were kind of cool.
Tuesday, September 3, 2019
The Complete Book of Elves
The Complete Book of Elves has a dilemma. Well, it has a lot of dilemmas (like, for example, the fact that its central dilemma is both interesting and dangerous), but its most important one it never quite resolves. Hell, never quite acknowledges. But, of course, it can't do either of those things, because to even state the dilemma is to make it quite instantly obvious how far out on a limb you actually are.
The dilemma is this:
Choosing a race in the AD&D rules is supposed to be largely cosmetic, with advantages in one area being compensated by disadvantages in another. And yet, the setting background of many AD&D worlds calls for elves to be explicitly and objectively superhuman.
Man, I really wish I were somewhere else right now. Ultimately, The Complete Book of Elves has a bad reputation because it dances around its dilemma in a really clumsy way. It never comes out and says "elves have such profound advantages that if they were mechanically represented in an accurate way, they'd unbalance the game," so a lot of the elf swagger here comes across as really noxious fantasy racism. But it also kind of gives elves some unbalanced advantages based on the assumption that the fiction is accurate, so it kind of looks like the book is biased towards elves.
And honestly, I don't think there's a version of this book that could have ever worked. What we got was super muddled, because it's trying to serve two agendas at once without ever spelling out exactly what they are. But the only way it could ever have been even remotely functional is if it had done something like, "imagine if you will, a world where there really is a master race . . ."
Under the best of circumstances, this is a situation where you go, "whoa, okay, let's just calm down and talk about something else." Here, in this book, where (all non-evil) elves are presented as extremely white (literally - it points out that elves don't tan and have pale skin "by human standards" in that unfortunate way 90s D&D had of forgetting that human skin comes in a whole rainbow)?
It's to this book's advantage that it's such a mess, because if it weren't, it might be as offensive as hell.
A more responsible fictional medium could get some mileage out of the idea of superhuman elves. When we think of the continuity of the great tree of life, and how the meritorious qualities of the mind vary from human to ape to mouse to flatworm, then it is the height of arrogance for us to put ourselves at the top. There could be some form of life whose mental powers are as far beyond our own as ours are beyond a dog. And even to the degree that we'd have a friendly relationship with these super-people, it would be, from their perspective, like the relationship between a master and a pet. We'd relate to the person-like qualities they demonstrated as the shadow of their thoughts fell across our lives, in the same way that the instinctual mind of an animal can appreciate a treat of food or word of praise, but we could never know their true selves, because the bulk of their concerns would be of realms we cannot comprehend.
But tabletop roleplaying is not generally a responsible fictional medium. So much of it is improvised, spoken from the gut. It would be hard to convey the advantages of this speculative higher-order thought, and harder still to not simply have those advantages recapitulate your own prejudices as a player.
The Complete Book of Elves doesn't even try. Its approach is sort of the inverse of what we saw in The Complete Barbarian's Handbook. "Barbarians" don't get the Weaponsmithing skill, they get the Crude Weaponsmithing skill. They don't get Artistry, they get Primitive Artistry. Everything they do is just a crummier version of what "civilized" people do.
Everything elvish is better than its human version. Elvish cooking is more subtle and refined, elvish music more sublime, elvish craft more beautiful and distinctive, elvish fighting more graceful. I find it less offensive than Barbarians, because I can imagine that magical creatures might have a magical way of doing things, but it's funny to me how this book has a reputation as presenting elves as super racist and for all the wrangling about social justice in rpgs, I've never heard anyone disagree with that assessment.
(Ha! Take that, western civilization! It's not so fun when the shoe is on the other foot.)
Seriously, though, the elves in this book are super racist. I wonder, though, whether this fantasy racism has the same pathology as the Barbarians book's real world racism. If you view all human artifice in a framework of "progress" and "advancement," then maybe you'll feel tempted to pit different cultures against each other in a kind of hierarchy of technology. The dwarves have superior steel-working, but the humans are the best at traveling the sea. And because in many arts, you can establish benchmarks that are more or less objective (a steel weapon really is better for most applications than an obsidian one), there might be a temptation to extend these comparisons to the cultures themselves. It's not something that's necessarily fair or just - especially when it comes to cultural products like art or music - but if you fell to that temptation, it might seem perfectly natural that a culture that excelled in all the fields you care about would be "superior" to others.
Let this book be a lesson to you, then. If you go that route, people will, with complete justice, think you're a huge racist.
Also, that thing about the Drow getting their skin turned black as punishment for being evil? That's just super fucked-up, no matter which way you slice it. Bad TSR! Bad!
UKSS Contribution: This is tricky, because I'm stuck with the same dilemma as this book. If elves are just people, then as a fantasy race they're barely distinguishable from humans. They're the guys who wear green and have pointed ears and live in the woods. That's not much of a niche.
But if I make them inherently magical and mysterious creatures, then what, their shtick is that they're "humans, but better." I blame Tolkien, who inspired D&D elves, and thus led to a hundred different writers homogenizing the concept so that the wild edge of the original myths was almost entirely smoothed away (although, like many of these situations, Tolkien's elves were much weirder than those drawn from his work).
I think if I go back a step, to the original Alfar, that's a concept worth salvaging. They look human, but they are of the same stuff as the gods, and in fact are lesser gods of nature and fertility themselves. That will be the true nature of Ukss Elves - they are gods with human shapes and near-human scale.
But what about The Complete Book of Elves? What godly inspiration did I find in that? I'm going to go with a really shallow cut here. Drow. But only superficially. There will be black-skinned elves in Ukss, but I'm going to give them an entirely different culture and social role. I'll try to keep them as recognizable as possible, but I feel like I have to compensate for how pale the elves in this book are.
The dilemma is this:
Choosing a race in the AD&D rules is supposed to be largely cosmetic, with advantages in one area being compensated by disadvantages in another. And yet, the setting background of many AD&D worlds calls for elves to be explicitly and objectively superhuman.
Man, I really wish I were somewhere else right now. Ultimately, The Complete Book of Elves has a bad reputation because it dances around its dilemma in a really clumsy way. It never comes out and says "elves have such profound advantages that if they were mechanically represented in an accurate way, they'd unbalance the game," so a lot of the elf swagger here comes across as really noxious fantasy racism. But it also kind of gives elves some unbalanced advantages based on the assumption that the fiction is accurate, so it kind of looks like the book is biased towards elves.
And honestly, I don't think there's a version of this book that could have ever worked. What we got was super muddled, because it's trying to serve two agendas at once without ever spelling out exactly what they are. But the only way it could ever have been even remotely functional is if it had done something like, "imagine if you will, a world where there really is a master race . . ."
Under the best of circumstances, this is a situation where you go, "whoa, okay, let's just calm down and talk about something else." Here, in this book, where (all non-evil) elves are presented as extremely white (literally - it points out that elves don't tan and have pale skin "by human standards" in that unfortunate way 90s D&D had of forgetting that human skin comes in a whole rainbow)?
It's to this book's advantage that it's such a mess, because if it weren't, it might be as offensive as hell.
A more responsible fictional medium could get some mileage out of the idea of superhuman elves. When we think of the continuity of the great tree of life, and how the meritorious qualities of the mind vary from human to ape to mouse to flatworm, then it is the height of arrogance for us to put ourselves at the top. There could be some form of life whose mental powers are as far beyond our own as ours are beyond a dog. And even to the degree that we'd have a friendly relationship with these super-people, it would be, from their perspective, like the relationship between a master and a pet. We'd relate to the person-like qualities they demonstrated as the shadow of their thoughts fell across our lives, in the same way that the instinctual mind of an animal can appreciate a treat of food or word of praise, but we could never know their true selves, because the bulk of their concerns would be of realms we cannot comprehend.
But tabletop roleplaying is not generally a responsible fictional medium. So much of it is improvised, spoken from the gut. It would be hard to convey the advantages of this speculative higher-order thought, and harder still to not simply have those advantages recapitulate your own prejudices as a player.
The Complete Book of Elves doesn't even try. Its approach is sort of the inverse of what we saw in The Complete Barbarian's Handbook. "Barbarians" don't get the Weaponsmithing skill, they get the Crude Weaponsmithing skill. They don't get Artistry, they get Primitive Artistry. Everything they do is just a crummier version of what "civilized" people do.
Everything elvish is better than its human version. Elvish cooking is more subtle and refined, elvish music more sublime, elvish craft more beautiful and distinctive, elvish fighting more graceful. I find it less offensive than Barbarians, because I can imagine that magical creatures might have a magical way of doing things, but it's funny to me how this book has a reputation as presenting elves as super racist and for all the wrangling about social justice in rpgs, I've never heard anyone disagree with that assessment.
(Ha! Take that, western civilization! It's not so fun when the shoe is on the other foot.)
Seriously, though, the elves in this book are super racist. I wonder, though, whether this fantasy racism has the same pathology as the Barbarians book's real world racism. If you view all human artifice in a framework of "progress" and "advancement," then maybe you'll feel tempted to pit different cultures against each other in a kind of hierarchy of technology. The dwarves have superior steel-working, but the humans are the best at traveling the sea. And because in many arts, you can establish benchmarks that are more or less objective (a steel weapon really is better for most applications than an obsidian one), there might be a temptation to extend these comparisons to the cultures themselves. It's not something that's necessarily fair or just - especially when it comes to cultural products like art or music - but if you fell to that temptation, it might seem perfectly natural that a culture that excelled in all the fields you care about would be "superior" to others.
Let this book be a lesson to you, then. If you go that route, people will, with complete justice, think you're a huge racist.
Also, that thing about the Drow getting their skin turned black as punishment for being evil? That's just super fucked-up, no matter which way you slice it. Bad TSR! Bad!
UKSS Contribution: This is tricky, because I'm stuck with the same dilemma as this book. If elves are just people, then as a fantasy race they're barely distinguishable from humans. They're the guys who wear green and have pointed ears and live in the woods. That's not much of a niche.
But if I make them inherently magical and mysterious creatures, then what, their shtick is that they're "humans, but better." I blame Tolkien, who inspired D&D elves, and thus led to a hundred different writers homogenizing the concept so that the wild edge of the original myths was almost entirely smoothed away (although, like many of these situations, Tolkien's elves were much weirder than those drawn from his work).
I think if I go back a step, to the original Alfar, that's a concept worth salvaging. They look human, but they are of the same stuff as the gods, and in fact are lesser gods of nature and fertility themselves. That will be the true nature of Ukss Elves - they are gods with human shapes and near-human scale.
But what about The Complete Book of Elves? What godly inspiration did I find in that? I'm going to go with a really shallow cut here. Drow. But only superficially. There will be black-skinned elves in Ukss, but I'm going to give them an entirely different culture and social role. I'll try to keep them as recognizable as possible, but I feel like I have to compensate for how pale the elves in this book are.
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