Monday, December 30, 2024

(d20 Modern) d20 Past

 Well, now, what have we here? We started with d20 Modern, we proceeded to d20 Future, and now we're going to finish up with d20 Past (James Wyatt and Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel). We now have d20 rules for every conceivable point in time.

Although, playing in the past seems to mostly involve not using some subset of the modern rules. Set a game before cars, don't use the driving rules. Set it before modern medicine, lose access to the Surgery feat. Maybe just ban the techie class for any game set before the 1990s.

d20 Past only covers that part of the past that is technically part of the modern period (1500-1945) and suggests that if you want to play a medieval (or earlier) game you should just use D&D, but there really doesn't seem to be any reason you couldn't use an even smaller subset of the d20 Modern rules. . . assuming you actually need to. Most of the core book's ranged attack feats are compatible with bows and crossbows, and there's plenty of nuance to melee combat. The main thing that's missing is feats, talents, and class features that focus on riding animals. Unfortunately, d20 Past fails to correct that. You can play a cowboy or dragoon, but you can't actually do any fancy riding tricks. A bit of an oversight, to be sure, but at least there are naval combat rules suitable for any period from the classical to the contemporary.

I am, however, being a bit misleading by suggesting that d20 Past is making a serious effort at extending the game to the entirety of the past. It's only 96 pages long and while that's arguably enough for a serious rules-focused supplement, this particular book instead continues the d20 Modern tradition of including multiple alternate settings.

So far, the alternate settings have been one of the best part of this series. Not necessarily because any of them are particularly ground-breaking, but because of the way they encourage you to look at the game's rules - this is a system that's meant for rules-hacking and worldbuilding. There's something special about that. It's how I always used D&D, but it's nice to know the authors are explicitly cheering me on.

The best way to look at d20 Past's three sample settings is as the gaming equivalent of soup stock. By themselves they make for a pretty unsatisfying meal, but they serve as a base to which you can add other ingredients and whatever you wind up making is going to owe a lot to that original flavor.

The three settings are "Age of Adventure" (17th century, inspired by Dumas and pirate fiction), "Shadow Stalkers" (late 19th century, and inelegantly split between Victorian horror/mystery and the American West), and "Pulp Heroes" (1920s-1930s, and really, it bit off more than it could chew re: genre). Their chapters are almost identical in length and they're all structured roughly the same way - campaign overview (including a brief discussion of which d20 Modern rules you shouldn't use), antagonists/monsters, exactly three new classes, and wrap up with 2-3 short adventures. Taken as a whole, they are all pretty mid, but each one has a few highlights that would tempt me to come back and use this book as a reference.

"Age of Adventure" had the book's best adventure - a bit of courtly intrigue based on an actual historical incident, The Affair of the Diamond Necklace. and it probably could have supported an entire 96-page rpg supplement all on its own. It is perhaps unfair to compare the wholly fabricated stories in the rest of the book to the complexity of reality, but it was the only adventure in the book to feature a fleshed-out antagonist and compelling supporting characters. Next to it, all the others seemed a bit perfunctory.

The "Age of Adventure" also probably had the most essential collection of classes - Musketeer, Shaman, and Sorcerer. None of them especially stood out to me as being notably great, but as a set they expand the possibilities of the d20 Modern core more than their counterparts in either of the other chapters. Which makes sense, really. As the earliest of the historical settings, it's the farthest away from the core's assumptions.

"Shadow Stalkers" has the advantage of being a direct prequel to the core book's "Shadow Chasers" setting (somehow, in the intervening 120 years, they graduated from stalking to chasing), and it was moderately thrilling seeing the origins of the Fellowship (think - store brand version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Watchers Council). The Mesmerist has the best flavor of any of the book's extra classes, losing points only for having its first level be the weakest level-up option since the Commoner Class in the DMG. Also, while it wasn't as strong as the diamond necklace adventure, "Dead Men's Hands" is about a vampire who comes to an old west mining town and starts picking off the gunslingers and card sharks one-by-one, and that's a pretty great setup.

Finally, "Pulp Heroes" is hurt a bit by having the broadest genre of the three settings, but racing a Nazi expedition to the Fountain of Youth is more or less the Platonic pulp rpg adventure.

Politically, d20 Past does okay for its age. It explicitly calls Manifest Destiny a "racist view." It makes more of an issue about female characters than would be considered best practice these days, but its conclusion is "They should be able to choose whatever occupation, class, or advanced class they please, although their choice may put them outside the norms of society." I'm ambivalent about the suggestion that you remove the penalty to Disguise for women posing as men, mostly because I suspect "disguising yourself as another gender" is a game mechanic that should be consigned to the dustbin of history, but I can't deny that a woman disguising herself as a man in order to access male opportunities is a classic genre trope and I wouldn't want to deny players the chance to play out that fantasy.

(And I am absolutely not going to touch "Slave" as a background occupation. I am entirely too white for that discourse).

Overall, I really liked d20 Past. It's the least generous and least essential d20 Modern book I've read so far, but it delivers value from its very existence. The cover alone screams, "hey, dingus, you can use our rules to play Victorian occult detectives, WW2 drama, or fantasy pirates." And that reminder alone is worth the price of admission. Everything else is just bonus.

Ukss Contribution: It's funny. This book is probably the closest any book has come to my tehcnological and cultural assumptions about the world of Ukss, but that mostly means that all the best stuff is already there in the setting's background. So I'll choose the thing that diverges most from the vanilla fantasy canon - in the Age of Adventure setting, ghouls can transform into hyenas. It's fitting - carrion-eating undead becoming carrion-eating animals - and it's an unusual fantasy image. I'm not sure if Ukss' hyena-shifters will be undead, but they will definitely be anthropophages. 

Thursday, December 26, 2024

(Shadowrun 3e) Threats 2

Say what you will about FASA's fiction-heavy approach to rpg supplements, but sometimes it gets you a book like Threats 2 - a short, but densely-packed collection of campaign ideas that was incredibly easy to read because it was essentially an anthology of twelve short stories, each one about something interesting going on in the Shadowrun universe. I absolutely blazed through this thing, and it's entirely possible that it will take me longer to write the post than it did to read the book.

The main thing I appreciate about Threats 2 is its unashamedly brute force approach to the "well yes, but what do we do in the setting" question. It's just a whole bunch of things to do, presented without further context or explanation. Eclipse Phase never released a "big book of things to do," neither did Exalted or Dark Sun or Reign. Sure, those games all had extensive and inspiring setting material you could mine for "things to do," but they never drew a big arrow pointing at a condensed list of suggestions. And look, I'm not saying Shadowrun's way was better, but it was nice to get just a little bit of meathead-level support.

The biggest challenge this book poses to me as a reviewer is that its 12 chapters have 12 different authors (though it doesn't neatly break down to one author per chapter - some chapters have multiple authors and some writers worked on multiple chapters) and each one is standalone 8-10 page mini supplement. So if I try to approach Threats 2 holistically, and comment about the book as a single work, all I can really say is that it has a lot of stuff in it. 

I actually went back and looked at my post about the original Threats to see how I handled it the first time and I guess my approach was to focus on a single nagging issue that appeared in multiple chapters and just make the post about that. Unfortunately, it's not something I can pull off twice, because Threats 2 is more diverse in its titular threats - on the metaplot front we have follow-ups to Year of the Comet, Brainscan, and Bug City, as well as some Earthdawn easter eggs, a couple of things you could probably just infer from the basic setting material (but which were nice to have spelled out) and one chapter that is arguably a crime against humanity. So what am I supposed to do? Just rapidly go through each chapter one-by-one and post my most salient observation in the hopes of covering the whole book without writing a 5000-word post?

Oh, yeah, okay, I suppose I could do that.

#1: "General Saito" - In Year of the Comet, Japan's new child Emperor decides to scale back on the overseas imperialism, but in San Francisco a rogue officer chose to defy orders and declare himself dictator over northern California. In this follow-up, we learn a bit more detail about the man and his rule and he's a compelling enough villain (he employs an image consultant) but Shadowrun's decision to single out the Japanese for being especially racist against metahumans has never sat entirely well with me and we get a bit more of that here.

#2: "Dissonant Voices" - More Otaku lore. A new group of dark Otaku has popped up on the scene, claiming to be empowered by the Deep Resonance's edgy counterpart - the Dissonance. I don't hate it, but if you want me to like it, you're going to have to be a bit more explicit about what these things actually are. I crave the sort of nitty-gritty Hard Magic worldbuilding that will drive the normie player base running for the hills. (Note: I am aware that this is not a reasonable thing to want).

#3: "Imps" - A found-footage-horror-style diary of an academic researcher whose life is destroyed when he finds a magic item that's haunted by a malicious spirit. It's all in service of introducing a twist on cursed item mechanics. As a piece of fiction, I enjoyed it. Ehran the Scribe makes a cameo appearance and he definitely knows more than he's letting on. As a form of gameplay, I have my doubts. The GM is supposed to give a PC a trap item that gradually drains their karma (xp)? Who is this enjoyable for? It could potentially work if the spirit is on the more "playfully mischievous" end of the spectrum and it was clear that the GM was using the haunting to give the players a more powerful than usual item, but overall, it seems like a risk.

#4: "The Aleph Society" - a cult that claims it can reverse magical burnout through philosophical enlightenment, but really does it by making a pact with a mysterious spirit from the Fourth Age? It's sort of in an awkward place where they're theoretically a cure to Shadowrun's worst mechanic, but you don't want to get involved with them because they're tricking mundanes with false promises to get them to make regular blood sacrifices, but then maybe you don't really care that they're doing that because the sacrifices are non-fatal and the cult's overall agenda is just "keep on being this weird, seedy cult."

#5: "Can You See the Real Me" - a mystery/horror tale whose only purpose is to introduce a new type of creature - the advanced Sheddim, who possess recently-dead bodies, but, unlike regular Sheddim, have the ability to heal those bodies well enough to return them to a convincing semblance of life, thus allowing them to infiltrate metahuman society and work their wicked schemes without alerting the monster hunters to their presence. Yeah, okay, that's a pretty good pitch for a monster.

#6: "One Nation Under God" - a revanchist conspiracy that works to restore the old United States of America by sponsoring terrorist violence and political turmoil in the UCAS, the CSA, and the NAN. It wasn't quite bold enough to make explicit the law-enforcement-to-right-wing-extremist pipeline, but the theme was there, if you wanted to look for it. Using them as a campaign antagonist would probably make for a pretty unusual Shadowrun game, but I think it might be worth it.

#7: "Betrayal" - OMG! Ares Macrotechnology is secretly experimenting on the insect spirits it was tasked with eliminating, attempting to monetize and weaponize a deadly threat to the entire human species?! Who could have ever seen this coming? Good, Shadowrun, good.

#8: "Dealing with Dragons" - Drakes are just a weird idea overall. The dragons have magically engineered servants who can switch between humanoid form and the form of a miniature dragon. Why is this appealing to them? It would be like a human having a sheepdog that could transform into a little gnome in their off hours. I can see some niche uses for such a thing, but it's probably not worth the effort. I'd only ever really use drakes in a game if I wanted to characterize dragons as being a bunch of weird little freaks.

#9: "Beneath the False Face" - Per wikipedia: "The Haudenosaunee Grand Council issued a statement online in 1995 about the Haudenosaunee policies regarding masks. These policies prohibit the sale, exhibition or representation in pictures of the masks to the public. They also condemn the general distribution of information regarding the medicine societies, as well as denying non-Indigenous People any right to examine, interpret, or present the beliefs, functions, or duties of these societies." Bad, Shadowrun, bad.

#10: "The Network" - A bit of resolution to the cliffhanger at the end of Brainscan. Turns out my interpretation of the ending was incomplete. Deus did download his code into the brains of his victims, and did psychologically condition them to reassemble that code on the Matrix once the immediate threat had passed, but this was not as clean or as quick a process as I was imagining, and a rival AI's code got mixed in there with his. So the next plot being set up is a semi-conscious Matrix cold war between the Deus fragments and the Megara fragments over control of the network of organic computers that could potentially reconstruct either, both, or a hybrid of the two. And because the organic computers also happen to be people, the network nodes also have a say in the outcome. It's an interesting plot, but it borders on the overly baroque.

#11: "Order of the Temple" - The Knights Templar are back. The plot has the potential to read as anti-Catholic, but it's a staple of the modern occult conspiracy genre. Then again, the modern occult conspiracy genre does have a bit of an anti-Catholicism problem. I think this particular presentation manages to dodge the worst of it, because it incidentally highlights how fucked-up it is that the Shadowrun backstory turned two prominent Catholic countries (Mexico and Ireland) into weird fantasy lands (Aztlan and Tir na Nog). Not sure if that's enough to make me use it in a game, though.

#12: "Those Who Have The Gold" - There's a joke entry in Dunkelzahn's will where he leaves 34 billion dollars to some rando, because the guy's ancestor leant him a gold piece hundreds of years ago (although, with typical draconic parsimoniousness, this figure was calculated with a 1% APR). Apparently, the beneficiary of this largess was a skilled accountant who was laid off from Fuchi, hit rock bottom, became addicted to BTL chips, and then swore revenge when Richard Villiers snubbed him at a high society party, post-inheritance. It works well enough as a plot. But I think something this silly should probably have a funnier presentation.

So, to sum up - Threats 2 is mostly very good. There were some rough patches, but as a whole it added a lot of value to my Shadowrun collection. I'm glad to have read it.

Ukss Contribution: The advanced Sheddim. They're a versatile monster type - murder mystery, social/political threat, physical threat, or even potentially just a misunderstood visitor from another reality (the latter isn't something Shadowrun really does, but I might give it a try).

Monday, December 23, 2024

(d20 Modern) d20 Future

Finally! One of these books is exactly what I remember it to be! d20 Future (Christopher Perkins, Rodney Thompson, JD Wiker) is a broad, but shallow overview of the sci-fi genre for d20 Modern games. It's jam-packed with intriguing new ideas and useful systems. We get rules for genetic engineering, robotics, starships, dimensional travel, mecha, cybernetics, and comics-style mutants. There are nine suggested campaign models, ranging from the mystical sci-fi horror of "From the Dark Heart of Space" to the mil-sf of "Bughunters" to the post-apocalyptic adventure of "The Wasteland." There's also a ton of new character options - new feats, new advanced classes, and rules for playing eight different alien species.

The main drawback is that all of this good stuff ends just as it's getting started. There's a one-and-a-half-page write-up of "Star*Drive" that captures approximately none of the setting's appeal. The brief overview made a complex, ambitious, and distinctive space opera setting sound like a knock-off Star Trek. And look, the nature of d20 Future as a book may have demanded that one of its nine campaign models be a knock-off Star Trek, but as someone who saw Star*Drive in all its glory, I couldn't help but notice the wasted potential.

I'm not mad at d20 Future, though. In order to waste potential, you must first have potential and to an experienced GM, there's something just a little bit magical about a book that gives you plenty of potential to work with. This is a book that practically dares me to do the worldbuilding legwork for any of a dozen different settings . . . and that's a challenge I'm eager to accept, because I love worldbuilding legwork.

On the other hand, I'm not sure there's much of a specific use-case for this particular book. It's kind of a book you read if you don't know what you want to do. It's got that weird D&D-adjacent . . .  aspiration for genericness, much like Alternity, pre-3.0.  Why, we've got a book we can use equally well for every type of sci-fi, but once we narrow in on any one singular type of sci-fi, something specific would work much better. As a thought experiment, I imagine running Eclipse Phase with the d20 Future rules and I think you could almost do it, but you'd run into the problem that a lot of the stuff you earn with your level ups would be classified as morph traits but the structure of the game really needs levels, skills, and feats to be tied to an ego. Likewise, doing Star Wars would require a custom variant of the psionics rules. Star Trek would probably work fine, though even then the rules don't really capture the feel of the setting. 

I think the blame for this "kind of okay at everything, no better than sort of good for anything" vibe can be laid firmly at the feet of the "Progress Level" concept. 

Progress levels are what you'd come up with if you looked at the history of technology with a kind of naive modernism - it started with the Stone Age (PL 0) when people used stone tools because those are the easiest kind of tool to build and no one knew how to make better ones. Then, over time, people learned about metal and how to work it to make better tools, so it became the Bronze/Iron age (PL 1) and so on and so forth, through successive eras that map quite well to the chapters in a European History textbook until PL 5, the Information Age, when human beings finally figured out computers, the past turned into the present, and all subsequent ages (it goes up to 9) are pure sci-fi speculation.

However, this approach has serious problems. For one, it's misleadingly Eurocentric. Sort of. Progress levels don't actually capture the true history of European technological development, but they do reflect the common colonialist technological tropes. Technology is universal. Progress is linear and directional, from the past to the present, and as a result, you can say one group has "more" technology and another has "less." There's no geographical or cultural component to the account, no acknowledgement that a people's tools are shaped by locally available materials and the people's ongoing needs. Like maybe there are methods of stone working that have been perfected over hundreds or thousands of years to be every bit as sophisticated as a complex industrial process. 

Which isn't to say that a science-fiction game needs to devote pagecount to detail maximally-efficient flint-knapping, but it does need to think of its future technology as something more akin to a theme or set of genre trappings, than as a historical narrative of "progress." The purpose of technology, in a (good) sci-fi story is to put some aspect of society or the human condition under the microscope and ask "what if this thing that we all thought was immutable somehow changed?" You introduce mind back-up technology not because it's a logical outgrowth of developments in biotech and cybernetics, but because you want to delve into heady issues - identity, mortality, authenticity, the objectification of the self and what life is like in a society that not only places a price on human life, but sets that price equivalent to a relatively small amount of computational power. 

Likewise, it's not particularly useful information to tell me that time machines are a PL 8-9 invention. Because a story about a society that must cope with the invention of time travel (which is what the assigning of a progress level implies) is very different than the story of a group of adventurers with access to a time machine (which is almost certainly what you're going to want to do in a d20 Modern game). There's a reason most time travel stories have the time machine being built in some weirdo's garage. And I think, if you want to make a generic reference guide for science fiction stories, this is a distinction that you need to make. You can't just count on the readers making it for themselves.

And it's not as if d20 Future is notably bad at this. You're not going to have to fight the book to tell interesting sci-fi stories. It's more that its presentation doesn't synergize with the book's ostensible goals. The equipment lists are organized by Progress Level, but the Progress Levels aren't really considered as whole units. They're more like tags in the equipment stat block, so the whole thing reads like a leveled treasure table. The stuff with the smaller bonuses appears before the stuff with the larger bonuses and instead of feeling like four different equipment lists for use in four separate campaigns, it feels a lot like one big list that a character might work their way through. The setting and mechanical implications of a 1st level character picking up a plasma pistol or cybernetics that give them +8 to skill checks (because such things are completely mundane equipment in their respective progress levels) are never fully explored. We're given no useful advice (or even a courteous warning) that playing in a PL 7-8 game will effectively compress d20 Modern's first 3-5 character levels into one long, highly unpredictable mega-level.

I think, overall, though, you have to give d20 Future credit for taking some risks and trying something new. It fills a niche in d20 gaming that wasn't really being served by other WotC products (maybe Star Wars d20, at a stretch) and there is something undeniably fun about being given a big box of pieces to play with, even if you need to figure out for yourself how those pieces are meant to be assembled.

Ukss Contribution: Abandoned and malfunctioning utility fog (a cloud of general-purpose nanomachines) will sometimes just build pointless roads. It combines three of my favorite things - infrastructure, melancholy at the lingering detritus of a bygone age, and the existential absurdity of a useful thing, deployed without purpose.

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

(Shadowrun 3e) Rigger 3

 Whew! I made it. Rigger 3 (John Szeto with Rich Tomasso) is the last of my rules-heavy Shadowrun books. It's all lore from here on out!

The biggest challenge facing me right now is just resisting the urge to copy and paste my post about Rigger 2. The books aren't exactly the same. It's been half a decade between the books. Technology has advanced. Rigger 3 has rules for airbags and a strangely detailed procedure for resetting your wi-fi mid-combat. But the gist is essentially the same. This is the book you pick up if you want to be a total nerd about your fictional vehicles.

The most excited I ever got while reading it was in the gear (I refuse to call them "New Toys") chapter. You can outfit your car with an oil slick and a smoke screen and a forged license plate made of smart materials that can morph into any other fake license plate, even changing color if necessary (ejector seats were inexplicably in another chapter, but don't worry, they're here). And to me, that's the essential Rigger fantasy. I want to drive the car from Spy Hunter. For other people, the fantasy is apparently to track your fuel consumption with a spreadsheet and that is what the bulk of the book is geared towards, but in that moment, I felt seen.

So half my notes are some variation of "hey, get a load of this hyper-specific rule, can you believe they expect us to actually use this" and somewhere in the middle of the book, I started to satirize myself about it (real example: "gotta have all the dongles for your cyberware, manage your ports, oh, yikes, I'm still doing the thing"). And given that I even started to find myself tedious for this type of commentary, I think I just have to stop commenting on the book's mechanics entirely. Suffice to say, Rigger 3 is a book for players who want to get into the mindset of their gearhead characters by being gearheads about the game's rules. It has a niche.

The main thing I appreciated about the book was the snippets of setting that would pop-up in the implications of the rules. Naval combat gets its own chapter because commercially available submarines have led to a new age of piracy. A humanoid drone with a high enough pilot rating can act as a butler. Self-driving car technology exists and apparently there's a hierarchy at work here - regular human drivers < state of the art autopilots < riggers who use cyberware to fuse a network of sensors into their organic proprioception. It's a little disappointing to me as a sci-fi aficionado that Shadowrun focuses on criminal subcultures rather than the day-to-day lives of law-abiding citizens, because I think a world where they can replace your skills with software but they can't cheaply build a computer more efficient than your peripheral nervous system is both fascinating and topical.

I guess, on some level, I get that the criminals make for a more exciting game, but I couldn't help but notice that sometimes the technology worked in precisely the way it would have to work to guarantee niche protection for an rpg class. Like, interfering with a rigger's drone network requires entirely separate equipment than the core book's electronic warfare rules and that's handwaved away by saying that, despite being based on radio waves, rigger networks used a different protocol than standard transmissions. 

And the robotics technology has the precise level of utility that you need a rigger character to operate them. You could, theoretically, buy a robot with a high enough pilot rating and enough installed autosofts that you essentially have an extra member of the team, but it's not cost effective. Even a good robot is going to be hyper-focused on its Prime Directive, making a rigger who can directly control the drone chassis immensely valuable.

I can't help feeling like this is a volatile time in Shadowrun's history, though. Maybe the autopilot only needs to get a little bit better. Maybe data-transmission needs to get just a little bit more efficient before you can justify hot-swapping Prime Directive packages. Maybe it's a race to the bottom as human labor needs to be cheap enough to keep the robot butlers from taking the jobs at Stuffer Shack. And what would a rigger be in a society that crossed that line? A neural network, optimized through 500 million years of evolution to run on 20 watts of power, a human being reduced to the reality of meat, a piece of bulk capital to be used and expended by the logic of the balance sheet. 

You have to figure that's something that the corporations would notice in this setting. Criminal riggers are probably only a 1-in-10,000 phenomenon when it comes to people who use the Vehicle Control Rig technology. The other 9,999 are probably controlling drones in a factory or cargo transports on the road, their bodies a mere hardware platform for an economic system whose benefits they will never see. OMG! Grid Guide is made of people!

Or, at least, I have to assume that this is going on in the background. Rigger 3 only briefly talks about it and doesn't really explore the broader implications of the technology. But it does suggest a form of cyberpunk that Shadowrun could probably stand to go to more often. Usually shadowrunners are portrayed as paramilitary professionals using unregistered military equipment, but what if the basic shadowrunning kit was primarily hacked and corrupted civilian technology and your average shadowrunner was actually a piece of rogue industrial equipment that broke free and was trying to live a human life at the fringes of society.

"What's your rigger's backstory?"

"I was strapped into a chair for 16 hours a day while my VCR repeatedly ran a box-stacking algorithm at a fulfilment warehouse. One day, there was a fire and luckily my Reticular Activation System Override failed before the flames reached my pod. I fled to the barrens and was presumed dead. Now I drive getaway for the mafia."

Overall, I'm glad to have Rigger 3 in my library, as a reference book, but reading it once was probably enough for a lifetime. I'm really looking forward to doing story-focused books from here on out.

Ukss Contribution: I think I'm going to go with "the concept of riggers, as a whole," or at least an abstracted fantasy version of the concept - a school of adepts who can merge their mind with a vehicle and control it as if it were their body. I imagine it takes a peculiar sort of person to choose that as their career.

Saturday, December 14, 2024

(D20 Modern) Menace Manual

 The Menace Manual (JD Wiker, Eric Cagle, Matthew Sernett) is an antagonist book for d20 Modern that is divided into three distinct chapters. "Chapter One: Creatures" is a fun little romp that asks the traditional modern rpg question, "Which sci-fi movie, long-running paranormal procedural tv series, or urban fantasy novel can we shamelessly rip off to flesh out our bestiary?" "Chapter Two: GM Characters" is a bland but functional series of preconstructed characters that asks, "What real-world profession can we explain in an extremely basic way that presumes our readers are space aliens who have never encountered human culture prior to reading our book?" And "Chapter Three: Factions" is . . . a definite experience, which asks, "What extreme right-wing conspiracy theory can we present in a completely straightforward and uncritical manner that doesn't quite imply that we believe it's true in the real world but does make abundantly clear that someone, somewhere in the pipeline had detailed and extensive experience with the dregs of 90s talk radio."

Oh, man, day one of reading this book was so fun, you guys. You don't even know. I saw the Star Doppleganger entry and I was eager, nay exuberant to tell you about this Great Value the Thing (seriously, the monster entry recaps the movie with precisely minimal plausible deniability). I love monster books. I am on the record as believing they can do no wrong. And the first chapter of the Menace Manual is better than most.

Seriously. Drop Bears! Alien drones that look like "deadly Christmas ornaments!" 13- gallon containers of mysterious evil goo (the entry was very specific about the volume)! Multiple entries that were clearly aimed at getting maximum value out of the development work done on Alternity! It was all enough to make me forgive their use of the cowardly 3rd edition version of the Thought Eater (get that "undead griffon" ass design out of my face - a Thought Eater is a psychic platypus skeleton, it will always be a psychic platypus skeleton, and if you're too ashamed to just own that fact, you should never have included it in the first place).

And the second chapter was . . . fine. Did we really need separate entries for "Lawyer" and "Attourney?" Or for "Security Guard" and "Security Specialist?" Or for "Government Agent," "Government Investigator" and "Government Bureaucrat?" Maybe, maybe not. But I did have fun speculating about what level Clergy the Pope would be. The book is pretty consistent about assuming that high levels correllate to a higher position in various organizational hierarchies, but it tops out at level 10 and that level is reserved for "mature priests, ministers, and rabbis, mothers superior, and so forth."

It's towards the end of the second chapter that the cracks start to show. After it gets done with the generic NPCs, it starts to detail specifc NPCs and they're not bad exactly, but some of them felt to me like yellow flags. Obviously, the college anarchists were always going to be ideologically shallow. And I can't really say with eloquence what's wrong with having a Black hacker named "Skillz" or a short-haired feminist who calls herself "Queen B" and wears a shirt that says, "My Goddess gave birth to your GOD!" But it feels like a caricature, especially when contrasted with the survivalist militia which was presented with a . . . generous neutrality.

Like, you can compare this description of a man radicalized "after witnessing the attack on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas":

"Derek Osterman is 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 200 pounds. He wears his blonde hair in a military buzz, which frames his steely blue eyes. He boasts a scar that extends from his neck to his left cheek - a trophy that he acquired during his career in the military."

With this description of a woman radicalized after she "became immersed in the counter-culture that the university had to offer, focusing heavily on environmentalism and women's rights:"

"Queen B is a stocky woman with short, spiky brown hair who stands 5 feet tall and weighs 132 pounds. She sports numerous piercings and dresses to inflame controversy - rarely going out in public without some sort of t-shirt bearing a message."

Maybe it's the trauma of contemporary politics, but this feels like a dog whistle to me. Like maybe you could post this book to Twitter with the caption "Hey, remember when WotC was based?"

At the time, though, I tamped that feeling down. My literal note was "I guess, technically, they're in the Menace Manual."

After reading Chapter Three, though, I'm not sure my initial instinct was wrong.

The phrase "New World Order" comes from H.G. Wells but was later used by the Brandt Commission, which included President George H. Bush, Robert MacNamara and other political movers and shakers. At a 1991 meeting in Germany, they gave definition to the NWO: "a supranational authority to regulate world commerce and industry; an international organization that would control the production and consumption of oil; an international currency that would replace the dollar; a world development fund that would make funds available to free and Communist nations alike; an international police force to enforce the edicts of the New World Order."

 The quotes there are very misleading. It seems like they're quoting Bush or MacNamara or even the Brandt Report. But they're not. They're actually quoting a right wing magazine called "The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor" which appears to be offering a bad-faith paraphrase, filtered through cold-war era anti-communist and anti-internationalist paranoia, of a rather anodyne set of policy recommendations aimed at addressing economic inequality between the global north and the global south. It's hard for me to say for sure, because all these events occurred when I was a child and I have no practiced intuitions for any of the actors.

However, what I can say is that the "United Nations Elite Security Force" write-up in the Menace Manual definitely reads as if it was written by someone whose brain was marinated in right-wing propaganda. It is pitching us a campaign where the UN's secret army and its signature black helicopters have hidden bases around major American cities in order to use "interment tactics pioneered by the Nazis" when it "removes its mask of secrecy and makes its final overthrow of the world's governments."

And honestly, I'm not sure how I'm meant to cope with that. Nor with the secret conspiracy of globalists who run a prestigious news network and selectively downplay stories that would portray socialists in a negative light. Nor about the international cabal of Satan worshippers who ritually sacrifice white babies (not an exaggeration on my part, btw - "Blue-eyed, blond haired virgins are a favorite target, as are green-eyed red-haired wantons - the younger the better. Women matching these descriptions are sometimes abducted and forced to bear children, which are then sacrificed").

Part of me feels obligated to consider the broader context. This is an rpg book, and these organizations are being presented as villains in a sci-fi/fantasy campaign. "We are quoting your sincere beliefs word-for-word to create content for our silly game of make-believe" isn't exactly an endorsement. But it is an editorial choice. Also an editorial choice - the lack of a sinister corporation that pollutes the environment and uses coerced and exploited labor. Which is strange, because there is an ecoterrorist organization that is so ruthless they have no qualms about working with the KKK.

But I think what's most telling is the book's presentation of the CIA. Yes, the "Factions" chapter does have some largely factual, encyclopedia-style write-ups of real government organizations - the DoD, the FBI, FEMA, and the CIA. 

Gather Information DC 25: "After [being] charged with spying on US citizens and attempting to overthrow foreign governments during the 1970s, the CIA made a concerted effort to act within the boundaries of its mandate."

Research DC 25: "Making matters worse, news leaked that the CIA had funded arms sales to Iran and Nicaraguan rebeles - despite laws and presidential orders forbidding them to do so. This led some to believe that the CIA was carrying out its own agendas of doing what was 'best for America,' whether America wanted it or not."

And those two bits of lore are the only negative things the book has to say about the CIA (okay, there's also a suggestion that a plot could revolve around "rogue agents" trying to control the government through targeted political assassinations, but it's only a hypothetical). The other government sections are even more deferential to their subjects.

(Oh, "Some people believe that the FBI routinely taps telephone lines and implants bugs in people's houses." Why do "some people believe" that, Menace Manual? Hmm?)

And maybe it's neither surprising, nor that big a deal that a Wizards of the Coast product leans conservative, but it does convincingly argue against the "globalist news media, satanic ritual abuse, and UN black helicopters are just the late-90s conspiracy theory genre" theory. Because there was a big drop of MKUltra documents released via FOIA in 2001 and if you're really fucking serious about doing conspiracy stuff in 2003 why wouldn't you put the MKUltra stuff in your fucking CIA entry!?

Although, I must now confess that all of my griping about Chapter Three has been a mere prelude to the thing I really wanted to talk about. I did it to establish a preemptive explanation for why I'm unwilling to give the next thing the benefit of the doubt.

The description of Al-Jambiya, "a terrorist organization modeled roughly on Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network" probably crosses the line into genuine hate speech.

Now, I don't want to be entirely insensitive to the national mood c. 2003.  If you're writing an action-espionage thriller in America at that particular point in history, it's probably inevitable that you have some kind of al Qaeda analogue. Especially if it's an rpg. "I'm going to stop the next 9-11" was a common and sympathetic fantasy.

Where Menace Manual crosses the line into "not cool" is with the line, "The members of Al-Jambiya operate in small cells of no more than five men, but they frequently work with (and receive financial support from) sympathetic pro-Muslim groups."

Why, exactly is a group of "over 60 murderers and rapists [who] traveled to America under false identities" getting support from generically "pro-Muslim groups." What is "pro-Muslim" about al-Jambiya's activities?

Later, this is clarified with a weakly not-all-Muslims statement, "Al-Jambiya's meager funding comes from charitable Muslim families (the majority of whom have no idea what al-Jambiya uses the money for."

But honestly, that mild qualifier isn't really doing it for me. A "majority" can mean as little as 51%. I'd really feel a lot more comfortable if the book understood that "Muslim" as an identity, belonged almost exclusively to non-terrorists and, in fact, that terrorists are a vanishingly rare aberration. Maybe the PCs could Gather Information to that effect.

"DC 35: The hero can learn the names of local Muslim families who have welcomed 'relatives' to their homes in the month before a killing spree began (Note: Eighty percent of these leads turn out to be for legitimate family gatherings. Only about 5% of the others are connected to al-Jambiya operatives.)"

And look, if I were inclined to be generous, I could entertain the argument that the book is saying that someone who does the maximum level of legwork to narrow down the suspect pool (you'll likely be in the late teens before you get a +20 modifier to the check) would still only have a 1% chance (1/20th of 1/5th) of finding a genuine al-Jambiya terrorist through racial profiling, but taken literally that's a) still an asinine mechanic ("with your Holmsean deductive abilities, you may now roll a d100 to determine if this has been a wild goose chase") and b) something they could have just left out entirely.

It's likely, maybe even probable, that whoever wrote this sincerely believes "not all Muslims," but they sure as hell didn't know how to say it persuasively.

The funny thing about this section, though, is that if you wanted to read it with wacky literalism, it almost comes across as pro al-Qaeda. That's because, despite the fact that al-Jambiya was meant to be a fictional stand-in for al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda is still canon in this universe. Jabbar Husam al Din's backstory is that he was a regular, largely secular serial killer who switched to religiously motivated serial killing after he killed an "immodestly dressed" businesswoman and felt strangely more righteous about it. (so . . . yeah) After this realization, he sought out Osama bin Laden to pitch him on a bespoke murder version of terrorism and "bin Laden seemed faintly disgusted by al Din's proposal . . . Though bin Laden promised to consider the idea, al Din felt that al-Qaeda simply didn't match his vision and determined to start his own anti-American terrorist faction."

And I shouldn't laugh, because the whole section was intensely Islamophobic, but I could never have come up with the idea that bin Laden would reject a potential recruit because he was an over-eager weirdo who threatened to throw off the vibes. The intended effect was probably meant to be "Whoa! These al-Jambiya guys are even worse than al-Qaeda." But it just comes across as making international terrorism seem like this clique-driven hipster subculture. "Yeah, 9-11 was kind of cool . . . if you like that mainstream sell-out shit. I used to like bin Laden too, until I found out what a phony he was."

I do, however, count this as more evidence that Chapter Three was written by Bush voters for Bush voters, because it's like the author didn't really understand why you wouldn't want to use al-Qaeda, directly, as a villain (it'd be too easy to accidentally lean on anti-Muslim tropes) and so they wrote an organization that was technically different but which stepped on every rake they'd have avoided if they just left the concept out entirely.

Overall, I enjoyed Menace Manual right up to the point where it got overtly ideological, but the ideological parts were some of the most intensely uncomfortable reading I've done in awhile. Like, no kidding, it's an open question if the conspiracy-theory literature that inspired Chapter Three had already been scrubbed of direct mentions of the Jews by the time the authors consulted it or if that was something the authors had to do themselves. I don't necessarily want to get mad at the book, because I understand that there's a historic tradition of "ha, ha, look at what these conspiracy freaks believe, let's all gather round and laugh at them some more" but that really wasn't the energy I was picking up. I think, if you're going to set a roleplaying game in the Alex Jones extended universe, you have an active obligation to be more punk about it.

Ukss Contribution: I'm going to sit this book out. If I lean into my most generous interpretation of the book (it was written center-right conservatives who dismiss the radical right as harmless cranks and so appropriate their language for a silly rpg without truly understanding the identitarian subtext) then it's probably on the bubble of what I'm willing to call "evil" but even if I extend that grace, it's undeniable that there were parts of the book that made me feel gross after reading them. It's a shame, though, because I did really enjoy Chapter One.

Tuesday, December 10, 2024

(Shadowrun 3e) Brainscan

WARNING: Heavy spoilers for Brainscan.

Metaplot is kind of a double-edged sword. Brainscan is a well-constructed mini-campaign with varied challenges, meaningful stakes, and a tone that covers the full range of the cyberpunk experience - from cynically humorous to full-on for-profit capitalist body horror. And that is made possible by the groundwork laid by Shadowrun's metaplot. The AI, Deus, took over the Renraku Arcology and in the process created the opportunity for a hundred different shadowruns. But metaplot gives with one hand and takes with the other. Now that it's time to close this chapter of Deus' story, by inviting the PCs to participate in a series of adventures that revolve around the resistance's attempts to shut him down, there is a ruthless inexorableness to the book's canon ending - Deus is not destroyed by the kill codes, but rather downloads portions of his code into the brains of his victims, who will gather on the anniversary of his "death" and reassemble him in the Matrix.

To some degree, this is inevitable. In order for the next thing to happen, the next thing needs to happen. But when you take these events and play them out in a living campaign, it makes for some pretty dubious adventure design. There's a point near the end where the PCs have just emerged from cyberspace and have every reason to believe that Deus is trapped on a hard drive. While they are still getting their bearings, some Renraku loyalists (specifically the scientists who helped create Deus in the first place) barge into the room, grab the drive and basically go "thanks for the assist, we'll take it from here" but like in a really mean and rude way (the exact dialogue ends with Sherman Huang shooting the body of the late Renraku CEO, dropping a gun into the lap of one of the PC's NPC allies, and saying to one of his lackeys, "if they're smart, they'll lay low and keep their mouths shut. Otherwise they'll have an entire megacorporation after them for kidnapping and murdering a CEO.")

Maybe it's a personal hang up where I get irrationally angry at smug bullies, but my finely-honed GMing instincts tell me that this is a prelude to a fight scene. I figure, 16D stun damage from dumpshock or not, if any PC is conscious enough to witness this denouement, they are conscious enough to unload a clip of automatic fire at the traitors. Even in a perfectly static story like a movie or a novel, Ronin would have picked up the gun Huang tossed in his lap and put a half-dozen rounds in the hard drive. Or, at least, he would have if I were writing it. Some evil scientist is walking away with the AI that killed and tortured thousands of people, and maybe you're not strong enough to stop them, but you can sure as hell ruin the data.

So it's a little weird that the book treats this as just an inevitable part of its climax. "Any attempts to pursue them and retrieve the Mousetrap will be difficult. . . the arcology will be bursting with rampaging drones, escaping residents, shell-shocked Banded and invading military troops. This chaos should be more than enough to distract and confound any pursuers."

I don't know, though. It seems like all of that would be more of an obstacle for a bunch of corporate executives and data scientists than it would for a team of hardened mercenary criminals.

Although, maybe I'm just running afoul of a mismatch between genre and medium. Deus' original designer (apparently) walking away with his source code, stealing credit for saving the arcology (when it was actually the PCs who rescued him from Deus), and being ideally positioned to be promoted to the next CEO of Renraku is a classic bleak cyberpunk ending. Terrible things have happened and the rich people responsible for them will not only escape justice, they will thrive, whereas the working schlubs who cleaned up their mess will have to live in fear. Because everything they did to save the day is potentially blackmail material and it's only a matter of time before the powerful will want to clean up that loose end.

It is perhaps a fitting comeuppance for Huang that Deus isn't actually in the hard drive. He used his vast intellect to reprogram the purge routine and download himself somewhere completely unprecedented. But whatever satisfaction there is in this ending (and it's not much, because Deus is awful) is undermined by the fact that there's no way for the PCs to see it.

This is another case of a medium informing a message. The double-twist is only communicated in the book, not the game (though it's sure to come up in a future book because the metaplot must march on) and even if it were, how do you make a game out of "your actions were ultimately pointless, the villains will just start up their work exactly where they left off, the system will always protect itself?" I want my players to look me in the eye and say, "Thank you, John, that story we told together was cynical and miserable and ended on the perfect downer note. We were all really impressed by the way you absolutely sold our lack of agency." How do I do that?

Maybe I should run Brainscan in Chuubo's . . .  Genre XP Action: Take a beat to experience despair at the unmanageable vastness of your own socioeconomic context.

That was, of course, a 1% joke, but it touches on something I think is important in rpg design. Successful adventures are rewarded with treasure and xp, but there's often a more powerful intrinsic reward in simply completing the adventure successfully. And this works out great in genres like epic fantasy, space opera, and 4-color superheroes. The players are fighting their hardest to make a happy ending, but so are their characters, and so is the world. Star Wars is supposed to end with the defeat of the Empire. But there are other types of story to tell. 

In a cyberpunk story, the characters are fighting just to survive and may feel a certain degree of terror at the prospect of being responsible for a happy ending because such things are not supposed to be possible and the world will punish them for challenging the system. But the players in a cyberpunk rpg still have that fundamental rpg instinct. They are trying for a happy ending. Not necessarily consciously. I'm sure there are a lot of Shadowrun players out there who, if you asked them if they'd prefer for Brainscan to end with Deus destroyed, Sherman Huang facing justice, and Renraku having its charter stripped and its assets seized as reparations to the arcology victims, would say, "no, obviously not. That's not remotely the setting I signed up to play in." And yet, when the time comes, that belief will be nowhere near strong enough to stop them from fighting to get the Mousetrap back.

So how do you make getting bushwacked by your money-grubbing erstwhile allies feel like a reward?  How do you make the bleakness and the futility feel like a successful conclusion to the story?

Shadowrun's solution is to not even try. Whenever the story needs a betrayal or a setback, the event happens, regardless of what the PCs do. For example, earlier in the story, the PCs are present when Deus' minions try to capture Sherman Huang. "If the Banded are driven off without capturing Huang, they manage to do so a short time later." And I can't really disagree with the approach - I find it best when things that the PCs are going to object to happen off-screen - but it makes me a little uncomfortable to tell a story about the characters lacking agency by making sure that the players really do lack agency.

Now, forget everything I just said, because there's another perspective - if you, as a GM, are good enough at selling the highs and lows, then a lot of the time the players will experience a railroad as a rollercoaster (i.e. fundamentally the same thing, but really exciting). There's an art to it. You can't ever let the players know you're cheating, but you do it by hiding your cheating in the ambiguity of their blind spots. Then, when the unavoidable thing happens, the reaction is not "this would have happened no matter what," but "oh no, why didn't we think to cover that blind spot." There's actually a good example of that in this adventure. Deus needs to track the PCs to a certain location and the book suggests several ways he could do that. The method he uses is always going to be one of the ones the PCs think to look for plus a redundant back-up plan that uses one of the ones the PCs overlooked.

(Sometimes you get a group of players whose take away from these tricks is "we should be hypervigilant and spend a long time at the table trying to cover every contingency" but that's really a sign that you're playing with a group that would prefer a sandbox).

Overall, I think Brainscan is a fine set of adventures, but if I ran it for a group, they would almost certainly break the plot. Which isn't even remotely a flaw in most adventure modules (because they would otherwise need to be 1000 pages long to cover every possible contingency), but does give me pause in the context of Shadowrun because I just know that the conclusion to this metaplot-driven adventure is going to be the setup for the next metaplot-driven adventure and it's a weird sensation to realize that you're inevitably going to obsolete a book that hasn't even been written yet (c. 2000, my understanding is that System Failure picks up where this one left off).

Ukss Contribution: One of the intrusion countermeasures in Deus' ultraviolet server (a Matrix environment indistinguishable from the real world because it's a weird setting premise that the most computationally intensive processes take place in high-resolution metaphors) is a nest of chromatic snakes. The book doesn't go into as much detail about these creatures as I'd like, but I thought it was a neat image.

Tuesday, December 3, 2024

(d20 Modern) Urban Arcana

Oscar Wilde once said, "It is absurd to divide people into 'good' and 'bad.' People are either charming or tedious." Urban Arcana (Eric Cagle, Jeff Grubb, David Noonan, Bill Slavicsek, Stan!) is technically a good book, but I didn't find it particularly charming.

Let's start with the good then. On a technical level, it is well executed. Ideas are communicated effectively. The prose is breezy and engaging. The book as a whole delivers a lot of value - new classes, new equipment, new creatures, new spells and a series of sample adventures that work equally as well as an introduction to the world or as a standalone mini-campaign. It was rare for a section of the book to feel like it was dragging on beyond its welcome (the GM advice chapter did have two separate and redundant "Pacing" sections, but that's more an ironically funny error than something I need to complain about). All-in-all, it's an exceptionally useable reference guide that was made to a professional standard.

And I think it's that very professionalism that is fueling my ambivalence about the book. Urban Arcana feels to me like it exists as part of a product line. It is almost oppressively inevitable.

This is most apparent in the fact that half the book is devoted to generic d20 Modern content. The GM advice chapter runs us through the process of designing an adventure, stringing adventures into a campaign, and assigning character rewards at the end of a story. The equipment chapter ends with a bunch of new not-especially-fantasy-themed vehicles and the Locations chapter details mostly mundane floorplan maps and setting agnostic urban districts.

And of the stuff that was plausibly Urban Arcana-specific and not just core overflow, about half of that was just the D&D 3.0 SRD ported over with minimal modifications. Oh, wow, because they might be carried over by refugees from Shadow we're getting stats for both the glaive and the guisarme? I can only assume the reason we didn't get the glaive-guisarme is because someone at Wizards of the Coast chickened out of a bet.

But I think the worst part of the obviously-just-D&D stuff is that it's often used without any thought about how it's going to fit into d20 Modern's fictional and mechanical framework. For example, the 3.X half orc has famously suffered an unjust attribute modifier spread: +2 Strength, -2 Intelligence, -2 Charisma. In D&D, the authors attempt to justify this by saying that Strength is so much more valuable than the other attributes that a +2 is balanced by a total of -4 in other areas. And that's somewhat plausible. Unless you're playing a spellcaster or a crossbow rogue, you're going to make hundreds of times more melee attacks than you are Intelligence or Charisma-based skill checks.

However, in the modern world those calculations play out a bit differently. For one thing, most of the fighting is going to be done with guns, rendering Strength a bit redundant. For another, talking your way out of trouble or making clever use of your skills (of which, the half-orc has fewer than almost anyone) are much bigger parts of the sort of stories you're going to want to tell. 

It's not a huge deal, on the whole, because the thoughtlessly-used old stuff is mixed in with new material that does seem to have at least some thought put into it. I liked the Synchronicity spell, which "subtly rearranges reality so that the subject isn't inconvenienced by the minor delays in modern life. It's especially useful in car chases, where you're guaranteed to hit every green light and the person you're chasing/fleeing from is not. Or the magical Armor of Sponsorship, which has all the stats of regular magic armor, but a lower purchase price because it's festooned with ads. It doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense from a setting or mechanical perspective. It functions like an armor special quality, which means someone had to put it there, and no one who knows about Shadow is going to want to advertise like that . . . but at least it's an attempt to bring the two genres (modern and fantasy) together and the overall effect is kind of funny.

In a way, though, the Armor of Sponsorship is emblematic of Urban Arcana's whole approach to blending our real world with high fantasy - a superficial juxtaposition of elements that seems to actively spurn coherent worldbuilding. Sometimes, as with the Armor, it works despite itself. Mostly, though, it doesn't.

What it feels like to me is being near someone who has unknowingly drank a ton of non-alcoholic beer, and subsequently acts extremely, performatively drunk because that's what happens when you drink a lot of beer. "Ooh, look at us - we're doing fantasy but it's in the modern world! Whee! Has anyone ever done that before?!"

It's not that the modern-day fantasy is an after-thought or an affectation, per se. There are plenty of things, especially in the Organizations chapter, that seem like they could be elements in building a setting. You've got Draco Industries, which is run by an Efreeti who is disguised as a human (whose pseudonym just happens to be "Franz Draco"). Or St Cuthbert's House, a vigilante church based on a Catholic-inspired Greyhawk deity that completely fails to address the elephant in the room re: real Catholicism.

The problem is more that these elements are used without any apparent vision. This is not a setting that parodies high fantasy by bringing dungeon-crawling tropes into the real world. Nor does it comment on the modern world by depicting its fantasy creatures with brutal realism. It is not speculative fiction that explores how the world might change if magic were introduced. It's not an epic fantasy that spans multiple worlds, allowing for parallel stories in both realities. It's not even cinematic trash entertainment, that favors pointless spectacle over sophisticated characters and themes. It's just D&D stuff added to modern stuff, and even the 30-page-long GMing chapter completely failed to make a genre out of that.

The root cause is probably the choice to make Shadow kind of unreal in the context of the setting. Travel between worlds is entirely one-way. Creatures of Shadow enter our world, but nothing from our world (including the newly arrived creatures of Shadow) can travel to the other world. The only evidence that this world exists at all is the fact that creatures keep washing up from there. This is further exacerbated by the fact that Creatures of Shadow have vague and fragmentary memories about their world of origin. Even the basics of geography and history are forgotten. So this world that we can only infer exists also has no verifiable properties. The fact that things of Shadow conceal their existence by fading away when destroyed and confabulating plausible-sounding memories for uninitiated witnesses, only adds insult to injury.

Taken together, these properties of Shadow are laser-targeted to destroy any broader worldbuilding before it begins. Urban Arcana is a setting perpetually in its day-0 status quo. There are no conflicts among shadow immigrants that began in the old country. There's no sense that the magical world is in any danger of capitalist neo-colonialism driven by the real-world's advanced technology. You can't even guarantee that people directly affected by the magical world will be able to remember it the next day.

The overall effect is something timorous and bland, that fails to rise to the level of either of its source genres. You could probably use its semi-generic rules to power your own take on real-world-meets- fantasy, but that's going to require a level of conceptual work the book absolutely did not prepare you for ("make the GM do the work" isn't necessarily a fatal flaw in an rpg supplement, but if it's going to be abstract, it needs to speak towards abstract concerns). I can't even really say that there's a decent campaign setting underneath the pitch. The pitch is all there is, and it's not enough on its own.

Ukss Contribution: But I don't want to end on a dour note. It's not that the book is bad. There's good and interesting material here. Only the larger context is tedious. I mentioned a couple of things I liked in the main body, but there was also Vaporex, the name brand Gaseous Form potion or the Umbrella of Feather Falling or the Engines of Infernal Speed, which will shoot flames out the back of your car while giving it a speed boost.

My favorite, though, was the Muse Statuette. A small statue that can become a beautiful miniature woman who will "provide suggestions" about your art. As someone who does his fair share of writing (and more than his fair share of criticism), this is just an absolutely hilarious thing for a person to own. If someone bought one for me as a punishment, I'd probably deserve it.

Monday, November 25, 2024

(Shadowrun 3e) Corporate Punishment

Corporate Punishment (Elissa Carey, Malik Toms, Andrew Frades, Richard Tomasso) is an almost platonically middle of the road collection of Shadowrun adventures. What did I like about it? Almost everything. What did I love about it? Ehhhh. . .

Each of the three adventures follows the Elemental Shadowrun Adventure Pattern - An anonymous corporate executive hires you to commit a crime, you break into a secure corporate facility to commit the crime you were hired to do, in the liminal space between committing the crime and getting paid for committing the crime something goes wrong, can you survive the thing that goes wrong and still get paid for committing the crime?

And despite my somewhat snarky way of summarizing the book, I actually think it's extremely good that it exists. Everyone wants to break the mold, but before that happens somebody has to make the mold and Corporate Punishment serves that role admirably. If it weren't for the large rewards and high degree of difficulty, I'd even say that this book serves as a better introduction to the game than First Run.

Although, when it comes to setting baseline expectations for the Shadowrun setting, it would probably be more functional (though definitely not more accurate) to run an adventure where the PCs were not betrayed by Mr. Johnson.

That's the theme that ties the book together - the corporations are ruthless and when you're done working for one, you're going to have to survive the wrath of the one you worked against and at best Mr Johnson is going to be no help at all. At worst, they're going to be one off the ones piling it on.

Technically, only the first adventure, "Double Take" features a direct betrayal. Mz Johnson works for Telestrian Industries. She hires you to steal confidential data from Universal Omnitech's branch office in Tir Tairngire, but because of the elven nation's cutthroat feudal/capitalist politics, she's going to frame Saeder Krupp (Lofwyr is on the Council of Princes for some reason) and make the shadowrunners the patsies for the entire operation. 

Classic Shadowrun.

In the second adventure, "Second Effort," Mr Johnson's betrayal is less direct. He hires you to sneak a spy into a rival corporation's secret research laboratory (which is actually a pretty fun inversion of the more typical "extraction"-type missions), but while you're doing that, he himself is (voluntarily) extracted by another corporation and when you arrive at the meet to collect your pay, Mr Johnson's boss (aka "Mr Johnson") says "Whoa, we gotta situation. The guy who hired you is probably going to burn our spy to ingratiate himself to his new employer. So now you have to go back and extract the person you just inserted. But don't worry, I'm authorized to double your pay."

Structurally, it's the best of the three adventures and it potentially ends with you very righteously killing the SOB who put you into this situation. However, the plot of the story is that the original Mr Johnson is a racist who works for the militantly racist Yakashima corporation, setting up a run against the pragmatically racist Proteus AG, before deciding to jump ship for the fanatically racist Brackhaven Investments corporation (which you may remember from Super Tuesday as belonging to the right-wing radical who lost the 2057 election to Dunkelzahn in no small part thanks to a scandal so bizarre, potentially offensive, and critically challenging that I don't have the heart to summarize it here).

And I guess what I'm saying is that Shadowrun's take on fantasy racism is . . . not something that brings a lot of value by being foregrounded.

Finally, in the third adventure, "Legacy," Ms Johnson passively betrays you by not adequately preparing you for the magnitude of the shitstorm you're walking into. You're hired to steal the Scrolls of Ak'le'ar, bequeathed by Dunkelzahn to the dragon Hualpa. And when you do, you suddenly find yourself on the shitlist of seven different corporate and criminal organizations. Technically, if you deliver the scrolls back to your original employer, she'll keep her end of the bargain and pay you the agreed-upon fee. But in order to get that point, you have to escape a literal 8-way gun battle and the only way you're going to do that is with the unsolicited help of an annoying NPC of the "smug crimelord who knows everything about you despite never interacting with you in any way" variety.

"Legacy" is probably the weakest of the three adventures, due to the aforementioned deus ex machina, the fact that the Scrolls are a pure Macgufffin ("they seem more like a vanity item than something authentically magical"), and my gut instinct that the heist is probably impossible (you have to get through layered magical and physical security on a crowded college campus where a tightly-knit group of researchers are active at unpredictable hours in order to steal an item that has no reason to ever move from the pedestal that is under 24 hour surveillance for the scant two weeks it's available before returning to a dragon's horde). But it does technically involve you in the metaplot. The last page of the book features a form you can photocopy and mail in to vote on which of the eight competing interests will canonically wind up with the scrolls (unfortunately, an internet search was unable to tell me who won that particular vote).

Overall, I'd say that Corporate Punishment is a perfectly fine book. It's got a good balance between map-based and plot-based adventures, a tolerably thematic level of backstabbing bullshit, and it takes your Seattle-based characters to some interesting new destinations (though I could not figure out why the Johnsons wouldn't just hire Portland-based or Boston-based runners in lieu of arranging forged travel papers). 

Ukss Contribution: In describing Boston, the book says, "giving bad directions to tourists is a spectator sport." As someone who has aspirations to one day travel, it gives me anxiety by proxy, but I have to admit it's a funny turn of phrase, so one of Ukss' cities will be similarly welcoming to visitors.

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

d20 Modern

By now you'd think I'd be used to the blog becoming a funhouse-mirror time portal where I encounter something from my distant past and only passingly recognize it, not because it has changed in the intervening decades, but because I have. And yet . . . d20 Modern (Bill Slavicsek, Jeff Grubb, Rich Redman, Charles Ryan). I remember it being a refreshing change of pace, solidly middle-of-the-road in its fundamentals but with some bold new ideas. And I guess it probably was that, in the transitional period between the 3.0 PHB and Star Wars Saga Edition, but looking back with the benefit of hindsight, that 3.0 chassis is really showing its age.

Some of the classes get a full Base Attack Bonus progression and others get the Half progression, leading to a 5-point gap at level 10 (all the classes max out at 10 now, because d20 Modern leans into the lego-block-style multiclassing mechanic, which is really something that needs its own paragraph). And that would be bad enough, but then classes also get a Defense Bonus progression and that ranges from +8 to +3.

I can see the advantage, from a gameplay perspective, of rebalancing attack and defense so that attacks hit on 8+ instead of 10+ (and, in fact, for Ukss Plus, I balanced monsters on the theory that heroes should hit on 7+), and I can see why, constrained as it is by 3.X's obsession with NPC-PC symmetry (almost all your antagonists in this modern setting will be regular humans with class levels) it leads to PCs getting hit more often (Ukss Plus math assumes PCs get hit by 11-12+). But I cannot, for the life of me, remember what the hell we were thinking, putting up with the 7-point gap between attack and defense. That's a to-hit on 3 or higher, for two equal level characters going head-to-head. And that's only for a single-class progression. If you look at a level 20 build with only a single multiclass, the gap is +20 to-hit vs +6 defense. Granted, that's a Strong Martial Artist fighting a Charismatic Personality (i.e. "celebrity"), but that's still ass-backwards design. Level 20 should mean something, damnit!

And, okay, maybe there's some symmetrical ratfucking going on because the Martial Artist needs to roll a natural 20 to resist the Personality's "Winning Smile," but even that's just the equivalent to a 1st-level Charm Person spell and it doesn't work if combat has already begun. 

And that's comparing two very basic and obvious builds. Most of your d20 Modern characters are not going to be so straightforward. The underlying philosophy of the game is that you will frequently multiclass to narrow in on your own very specific character concept. This is encouraged by the nature of the basic classes. Rather than being based on jobs like "Fighter" or "Wizard," the six basic classes are each based on one of the six attributes: The Strong Hero (Str), The Fast Hero (Dex), The Tough Hero (Con), The Smart Hero (Int), The Dedicated Hero (Wis), and The Charismatic Hero (Cha).

This is what I was talking about when I said d20 Modern had some bold new ideas. The way the classes stake out a niche, allow for specialization into that niche, but then come together to give the player flexibility when making their character - that's inspired, like a hybrid of class-based and point-buy experience systems. And when I talk about the d20 chassis showing its age, I mean that the class-levels fail to do the one thing class-based systems are supposed to do (guarantee rough parity between characters of equal level) and most of the things you can buy with your points are simply not worth the expense (this book has an unprecedented number of the infamous "+2 to two different skills" feats as well as the original, terrible version of the Toughness feat).

I think you could make the argument that in a modern setting "combat" is more of a specialist niche than it is in D&D style fantasy, and so the fact that you can carelessly sink your BAB by injudicious multiclassing (with a crack build, you could have a +2 to hit at level 20, but even a fairly reasonable Smart 3/Charismatic 3/Field Scientist 4 character could have a +4 at level 10) might not be all that big a deal. Generally, these days, we don't fault the people who choose to have a well-rounded academic background for failing to train for pro-level MMA fights. But counterpoint: the GM chapter takes pains to explain:

"Why should a Smart hero's base attack bonus, for example, improve as he [sic] goes up in level? Because he [sic] goes up in level by participating in adventures, and adventures almost always involve combat of some sort."

Preach it. Love that "the story is what happens in the game" swagger. Just a quick follow-up question from my position of having 20 years of hindsight - if the Smart hero gets better in combat because they are primarily an adventurer who uses their smarts, why do they improve their BAB so little? 

Because what's really going on here is that the Strong Hero has the same numbers as the D&D Fighter and the Smart Hero has the Wizard's numbers, despite the fact that the Smart Hero does not get spells and the Strong Hero's niche of melee combat would be considered quaint and archaic in the game's modern setting.

But I don't want to rag on d20 Modern too much. Its main weakness is just that it's a 22-year-old game that never got another edition, so all of its 3.0-era mistakes got frozen in amber, preserved so that a cynical blogger, decades hence, could call them out as if he (not "sic" because I'm talking about myself) were discovering some new and terrible flaws. My overwhelming thought while reading this book was "someone should make a spiritual successor to d20 Modern . . . wait, I'm someone . . . should I remake d20 Modern . . . no, no nobody wants to see that . . . do they . . . should I test the waters by sarcastically floating the idea in a parenthetical . . . eh, people would probably see right through that, better to put it on the wait list of potential projects that's already a mile long."

Needless to say, I loved this book.

It's also, for lack of a better word, the most generous book WotC put out in the 3.0 era. It is a complete core, with all the character stuff you expect in a player's book, an abbreviated, but thorough GM guide, and also a source of monsters, magic items (though I don't love that it refers to magic and psionics collectively as "FX") and three separate campaign models, each of which has two unique Advanced (i.e. "prestige") Classes. It's overall . . . 3.X-ness keeps it from placing on my list of all-time top one-volume rpgs, but it can never be accused of deliberately leaving something out. d20 Modern is packed.

The campaign models were attractive in their outlines, even if they sometimes felt like Store Brand World of Darkness (except "Urban Arcana" which felt like Store Brand Shadowrun). I expect that's as much a function of their brevity as anything else, though. They've each got 15 pages to sell me on a whole campaign world and so they rely a lot on the power of genre, but WotC's in-house style tries to stick to a soft PG-13 so it's hard for the genres to land.

"Shadow Chasers" is basically "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." The various D&D monsters are here in their most dangerous and evil form, they're called "Shadows" and the PCs chase them. And lest this seem too glib on my part, I'll point out that the introductory fiction contained the (apparently) unironic in-charcter dialogue: "Ready to chase some shadows?" It's all perfectly serviceable. Maybe a little on-the-nose, but it has the advantage of being instantly understandable and easily gameable.

I guess it's a little weird that, in lieu of spellcasting, the Occultist class gets a fixed number of randomly chosen scrolls every time they gain a class level, but I don't hate it as a mechanic in a low-magic setting. The basic body of the class probably needs buffing, though. It's built like a spellcaster but its spellcasting abilities are extremely limited. If you GM this campaign, you're going to have to drop a lot of scrolls as loot. Strangely enough, its counterpart, the Shadow Stalker would probably be one of the better Fighter prestige classes if backported into D&D, so maybe this is just what caster-martial balance looks like in a 3.0 context.

"Agents of Psi" I can't take seriously because it has the line "Reality is a construct create by group consensus" and I just have to shake my head and say, "Mage: the Ascension spent 25+ years and 70+ books failing to make that concept work, so get out of here with your 15-page mini-campaign." But aside from that, it's a sci-fi fantasy setting inspired by 90s conspiracy theories and media like The X Files where you play as government agents who must defend the Earth against aliens, genetic experiments, and rogue psionics all while keeping the truth from a general public who is not ready for the revelation. I can't help wondering if it's politically significant that White Wolf took this premise and cast the PCs as rebellious outsiders, but WotC's first instinct was that the PCs should be the cops. It probably isn't, but when considering d20 Modern as a whole I couldn't help but notice that heist capers are conspicuous in their absence.

The final campaign model is probably the one with the most potential - "Urban Arcana." In this urban fantasy setting, the Earth operates on a slow cycle of rising and falling magic (called "Shadow") levels. Over the past few years, the magic level has risen to the point where creatures of Shadow (the various D&D monsters) have begun to arrive in our reality from the mysterious far shores of Shadow. Unlike "Shadow Chasers" the forces of magic aren't intrinsically antagonistic and much of the drama of the setting is driven by the complementary processes of modern things adopting magic and fantasy things learning to use modern technology. You know, mischievous (but not evil) goblin stealing cars and taking them out for joyrides, despite not knowing how to drive. An illithid gangster with minotaur muscle. An ancient knightly order getting reactivated when its magic relics start working again.

But I won't say too much about "Urban Arcana" because it's got a full campaign book that is next on my d20 list, so I'll save my thoughts for when I see it in its final form.

Overall, I thought d20 Modern had a lot of potential as an offshoot branch of the d20 family tree, but without the campaign models it was probably too conservative to really do what it had to do. It wanted to occupy a niche of "cinematic reality," but it never saw that the most obvious use of its level system was to dial in on particular levels of action-adventure - everyman heroes and gritty thrillers at low level, over the top explosion and bullet ballets at high level. I think, if it had gotten a second and third edition, to keep pace with mainline D&D, it would probably have developed into one of the best rpgs out there . . . but it didn't get them, so I guess I have to file it away as an "almost was."

Ukss Contribution: I kind of hate that I'm doing this, not because the entry is unworthy on its own merits, but because my reason is almost entirely that the name rhymes, but I have to go with the Crystal Pistol. It's a neat looking device - a handgun whose top part is made of psionically active crystal. Instead of bullets it fires bolts of concussive telekinetic force. The Ukss version will be able to be recharged and will probably be the signature weapon of the moon goblins.

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

(Shadowrun 3e) Year of the Comet

Like most of Shadowrun's big metaplot books, I knew the broad outlines of Year of the Comet long before I read it for the first time (i.e. before now). The SURGE mutants, naturally-occurring orichalcum, the war in the Yucatan peninsula - these are all things that are referenced repeatedly in other books from this period. I'm not sure I'd call any of it "a pressurized can of whoopass for the world of Shadowrun," but it was all very interesting.

The main difference between this book and other Big Event books like Bug City or Portfolio of a Dragon: Dunkelzahn's Secrets is that those previous books had One Big Thing that they were all about, with alternate campaign models branching off from the Big Thing's natural consequences (insect spirit's overwhelming Chicago or an implausibly rich dragon giving away 1% of his shit, respectively), but Year of the Comet is a complete grab-bag. None of the chapters have anything to do with each other, and only the first has anything to do with the titular comet.

I mean, technically you could say that SURGE - Sudden Recessive Genetic Expression - was caused by the comet. The book is actually a little cagey about it, but it started shortly after Hailey's Comet became visible to the naked eye and it ended shortly after Hailey's Comet was no longer visible to the naked eye, so it's at worst a very strong correlation. However, there's not really anything thematic that connects people suddenly gaining random animal features with the reappearance of a short-period comet. Why is that canonically popular pornstar a horny catgirl? Because of Hailey's Comet, obviously. Comets do that to people, you know.

It's one of those frustrating things about this particular era of metaplot-driven supplement-heavy rpgs - they were eager to tell us events that happened without actually resolving any of the most obvious questions. It's like they imagine that every GM's favorite part of the game is giving volatile non-canon answers to canon mysteries. "We'll never come out and directly say that the Sixth World's rising mana level will lead to an ever-escalating power creep and the introduction of countless new enemies, treasures, and character options so that you can give your players any explanation you like for the Comet-adjacent weirdness. But if your homebrew explanation is anything other 'the comet was an unstable preview of a higher mana level' you're going to have a hard time explaining future metaplot events."

To wit: is it actually the fun kind of ambiguity to hedge on whether possession of the Coin of Luck is responsible for Sharon Chaing-Wu giving birth to quintuplets? I guess "the mysterious artifact bequeathed to our family in a dragon's will was a placebo, it doesn't really do anything, and the quintuplets are just a coincidence" is a kind of worldbuilding. But let's be real. It was the coin. I think the main source of the ambiguity hear is the line's overall reluctance to make magical items that do things. For the most part (with no counterexamples that immediately spring to mind, at least) Shadowrun's magic items are more like equipment for magic-using characters. They add dice to or reduce drain from spellcasting or they allow magically active characters to roll extra dice while using an enchanted weapon. If one of these items fell into the hands of a mundane, it would be nothing more than a ridiculously expensive paperweight. 

What this means, in practice is that something that seems like it should be powerful, mysterious, and valuable is just a macguffin. Yeah, someone will probably hire the shadowrunners to steal the thing, and then some third party will try and swoop in and steal the score, in true heist-movie fashion, but the stakes are basically "we have to move the Thing from one Place to Another!" Even as short out-of-character blurb "whosoever possesses the Coin of Luck will experience the blessings of enhanced fertility, both in their immediate family and their agricultural property. The exact details of this blessing are beyond the scope of these rules, but in the hands of a megacorporate CEO, it can mean billions in revenue" would have helped a lot.

Not that the Coin of Luck played much of a role in this book. It's just indicative of an overall attitude. The strangest manifestation of this is the way the Shadowland commentors will skeptically dismiss an event as being beyond the known limits of magic. For example, when Badr al Din ibn Eisa appears to come back from the dead (something we readers know to be possible in this universe, assuming Earthdawn is canon) most everyone just assumes he faked his death somehow. The idea that someone could come back from the dead is absurd to them. From my perspective, it's one thing for the characters to not be overly credulous and just automatically believe everything they here, but . . . where are they getting this certainty from? The reappearance of magic happened within living memory, so why are those people so sure the universe has no more surprises for them?

I suppose that's what the theme of Year of the Comet was supposed to be - you think you know what possible, but here's a bunch of unexplainable shit to keep you awake at night - but half the book was about relatively mundane politics (Ghostwalker going kaiju on Denver notwithstanding, though even that settled down into mundane politics relatively quickly) and except for the continuing presence of the Sheddim (spirits who take possession of corpses, though they aren't related to ghosts at all as far as I could tell) the magical stuff goes away with the comet. The book mostly just feels like "Stuff that happened in 2061."

Which is fine. I liked reading about the stuff.  It's just, when the introduction promised me "a pressurized can of whoopass" I was expecting an event whose fallout would take decades to unravel. I suppose the new child emperor of Japan technically qualifies, but I'd have preferred for SURGE and the natural orichalcum to be permanent changes to the status quo. Or, failing that, for the presence of the comet to do something wild like temporarily step up Earth's mana level to something centuries or millennia farther along in the cycle. Give those Earthdawn survivors six months to reactivate their thread weapons and use their circle 12+ spells.

But maybe that would have been too esoteric for those fans of Shadowrun who were unaware of the Earthdawn connections (aw hell, let's face it - I was proposing it purely for an audience of 1). I guess I'm just going to have to count Year of the Comet as decent, but not quite as iconic as some of FASA's previous attempt at big metaplot events.

Ukss Contribution: Night mantas. They're manta-like creatures who float in the sky and occasionally stab people with their poisonous stingers. I like them because they create this spooky and ethereal imagery, but then they'll just attack like a normal animal. That's an interesting juxtaposition.

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

DCC - Xcrawl

Let's bang this one out quick. I'm in a very bad mood tonight, and while I would love to not think about the recent election by throwing myself into my work, this book didn't give me a lot to work with. It's a 2013 Free RPG Day release that contains one Dungeon Crawl Classics introductory adventure ("The Imperishable Sorceress" by Daniel J Bishop) and one Xcrawl introductory adventure ("Maximum Xcrawl: 2013 Studio City Crawl" by Brendan LaSalle). Altogether, they are 22 pages, which is hardly enough for one great adventure, let alone two.

But they tried. "The Imperishable Sorceress" felt like the classic Appendix N that is so central to Dungeon Crawl Classics' overall appeal. It's got strange demons and was weirdly sci-fi. The titular imperishable sorceress learned the art of crafting an immortal body from a species of underwater bug people who lived "before even the age of dinosaurs" (whatever that means in a world where dinosaurs still exist). But then she died in a freak accident before completing the ritual and her ghost haunts a level 1 dungeon (I guess because it wasn't designed to stop intruders, it's just old and haunted) and she tries to manipulate the PCs into reuniting her with her imperishable body and the magic gem that will fuse her ghost back into it.

If you help her out, she's extremely ungrateful and betrays you at the first opportunity, but there's little motivation to actively thwart her return. You can read some of her research materials that reveal her to be a pretty terrible person, but by default she's nice to the PCs as a means of buttering them up, so that feels like an easily missable clue. You could also, potentially, just ignore the ghost plot entirely and loot the dungeon, but there's not actually all that much loot there, mostly just a chaotically-aligned intelligent sword that is surely going to be more trouble than it's worth and the imperishable body itself, which only a member of the ghost's bloodline (one of whom is a randomly-chosen PC, to be fair) can transfer into. 

Overall, it just seems like a massive waste of time. Also, one of the encounters uses the word "savages" as a noun in exactly the same context as its Appendix N source material. 2013 was too late to still be doing that sort of thing, so I'm not even going to leaven my scolding. Mr Bishop, you should have known better.

The Xcrawl adventure is a bit better. The premise of the adventure is just the premise of Xcrawl itself - in this fantasy version of North America (which is apparently an empire that worships a bastardized version of the Roman gods) dungeon-crawling is a televised sports-reality gameshow with real life and death stakes! It kind of works. Instead of treasure chests, the Studio City Crawl uses the Prime Time Dance Squad, beautiful showgirls who, if you find them and tag them will award you a fabulous prize (some of which are immediately useful equipment, handed out directly, and others are treasures with monetary value, awarded once you leave the dungeon). Likewise, the dungeon is run by this over-the-top ringmaster figure called DJ (dungeon judge) Prime Time. In the end, clearing the dungeon isn't quite enough. You have to do it with enough style that the audience will vote for you over the other teams of adventurers (who have names like "The New Frogmen" or "Smash and Grab") and give you Fame Points in a system this adventure alludes to but saves for the new Pathfinder-compatible Xcrawl corebook.

It's an incredibly thin plot, but it's an effective advertisement for its parent game (which, I suppose, is what Free RPG Products are all about). I definitely came away thinking I could see myself running Xcrawl as a casual pick-up game or as a breather between more serious campaigns. 

In the end, I can't really complain about a book I got for free . . . so I won't (except about that racist bit I pointed out earlier). It's really just a thin, attractive pamphlet that very successfully achieves what it set out to do - communicate the vibes of the rpgs it's advertising. I probably won't run either of the adventurers, but I googled Xcrawl after reading this book, so that's at least one verified advertising impression.

Ukss Contribution: Not a lot to choose from. The thing I enjoyed the most was Xcrawl's weird genre mashup, but it's not something I'd want to port to any other setting (well, maybe Nobilis, but nothing less whimsical than that). 

I'll have to go with my second choice - the imperishable body. It's unaging and will survive even grievous wounds like decapitation, but it has no natural healing ability, so even if you do survive having your head cut off, there's no way to reattach it except long-lost spells first developed before the age of the dinosaurs. The result is a pretty robust form of immortality that will inevitably lead to you gradually losing various bits and pieces of yourself over the years until your trapped, conscious and undying, in a body too riddled by damage to function. It's something that strikes just the right tenor of horror for dark sorcery.