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.

(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.

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.

(Shadowrun 3e) Matrix

I was worried that Matrix (Rob Boyle, Michael Mulvihill) would be terribly boring . . . and I was right to do so, because Matrix was, in fact, terribly boring. One of the benefits of experience, I guess. I can see that oncoming truck miles before it actually hits me. But at the risk of becoming somewhat tedious myself, I'll repeat what I said about Rigger 2, Shadowrun Companion, Magic in the Shadows, Man and Machine: Cyberware, and Canon Companion (and give you guys a little sneak preview of my Rigger 3 post into the bargain) - It's the very particular type of boring that is Shadowrun's intended mode of play. You are going to have a lot of things to fiddle with, a lot of extremely important rolls to make, and it is this process of making decisions, weighing tradeoffs, and going through an exhaustive step-by-step process that makes the world feel real.

(Possibly real quote from me, "ahh! you modify the difficulty of evading Trace IC by the ratio of your Persona file size to your jackpoint's available bandwidth - I have achieved enlightenment [derogatory]") 

But seriously, it is far too late for have a problem with it now. So I'll conclude how I always conclude - I don't have the guts to run Shadowrun the way it's meant to be run, and maybe that makes me a little wistful, but I've largely made peace with it. 

But while my knee-jerk reaction was "oh, wow, thanks, but maybe that's just a little too much fantasy internet for me," that doesn't mean I found Matrix to be completely useless. There were some tantalizing canon mysteries - powerful AIs with their own inhuman agendas, the so-called "children of the matrix" aka "otaku" who can run sophisticated computer programs in their brains (for purposes of hacking, mostly). They got an unfortunately small portion of the book's overall page-count, but I liked that they were there. It helps me get a sense of what's possible in this science-fiction/fantasy universe.

The stuff near the beginning, about the Matrix's effect on society, was similarly welcome, even if it couldn't help feeling like a discarded retro-future. Like, the Matrix has thousands of channels and you would not believe how advanced their pager technology is. It's funny. I lived through this time. I was eighteen years old when this book first came out and first read it when it was relatively new. I know there was a time when it felt impossibly futuristic. I experienced it. But it all feels like a million years ago. Here in the far-off year of 2024, I'm like, "sorry, Shadowrun, but unlike your fictional megacorporations, real capitalists will reject work from home for . . . real estate reasons?"

It's easy to get annoyingly smug about this, as if I'd somehow earned this wisdom, instead of having it foisted upon me by the inevitable and universal passage of time, but I'll try to avoid giving in entirely to my worst impulses. Just one more quick observation, though - there's something quaint and cozy about revisiting old sci-fi. Nowadays, we have a name for this aesthetic - cassette futurism - but back then it was just general cyberpunk and it's humbling to know that I could not recapture it if I tried. 

What's most interesting about Matrix as a gaming supplement is that it's not quite retroactively cassette futurist. It's right on the cusp. Some aspects of its future seem like a modern future - there's online shopping, internet socializing (even if it's in the form of message boards, which could still make a comeback, you know) and it's experienced enough to know that everyone is going to hate video phones (corporate executives frequently use AR filters for their conference calls, and though nothing in the text suggested it, I couldn't help imagining a boardroom full of vtubers).

And yet there's still no satisfying explanation for the ubiquitous VR. You log onto a sculpted server and "menus appear as scrolls written in Latin" and . . . what is the appeal of that? I mean, tech companies releasing products that nobody wants, what could be more modern than that, right, but . . . An engineer had to make that. Some senior developer called up an underpaid coder and through their anime avatar said, "hey, I really need you to put in some crunch time getting those menus translated into Latin and put on a scroll, if we don't ship by Q-4 the C-suite is going to be on my ass."  And then, I guess, armed criminals break in and steal the source code to sell it to their competitors.

Although, now that I put in these terms, maybe there's something there. Shadowrunning as an unprofitable form of late-capitalist excess. Megacorporations constantly stealing each other's "top secret research" but 90 percent of the time it's just a buzzword-driven boondoggle that was never going to work. And somehow, they never learn. They never connect the dots between the useless crap they get from their shadowrunners and the "bleeding edge tech" stolen by rival shadowrunners. So the constant low-level warfare continues, becoming an end in itself, a way for the execs to flex the power their wealth gives them over the physical world. It's something you can snidely allude to in inter-corporate negotiations, just to make the other guy squirm and then go red in the face when they turn it back on you.

Except it's all happening online and so it's one vtuber avatar saying it to another. ::anime giggle:: "I heard your Renton facility had a break in last night, tee hee!"

But is the world ready for a really goofy and mean-spirited form of cyberpunk? It wasn't in the year 2000, which is probably why Matrix is mostly pretty dry.

Ukss Contribution: There's probably no way to translate the concept of vtubing to the early-20th century meets fantasy milieu of Ukss, even with the Astral Web taking the place of the internet. So I'll go with the overall vibe surrounding the AI, Mirage. He started out as a hardcore military program, designed to combat an adaptive computer virus, but once the virus was defeated he was put on an isolated server in some Fuchi basement and forgotten about for decades. Then some hacker kids broke in, found the cool tech and they mutually adopted each other. Now, he's learning the value of human life and the meaning of love as he mentors a bunch of scrappy orphans, while still being highly military and ruthlessly sending his child soldiers/found family out on dangerous missions for the good of the world (as his alien computer mind understands it).

I could probably find a way to translate that to fantasy.

Dungeon Crawl Classics

Dungeon Crawl Classics (Joseph Goodman, Michael Curtis, Harley Stroh, Dieter Zimmerman) is an odd beast. On the one hand, it's exactly the sort of rpg that I absolutely love - a quirky labor of love driven by a highly specific point of view. On the other hand, the particular quirky idea at the heart of the game comes with certain intrinsic pitfalls . . . which were not always successfully avoided.

The main thing you need to know about Dungeon Crawl Classics is that it's going to throw the words "Appendix N" at you as if you're expected to know what they mean.  And look, the actual literal definition of "Appendix N" is relatively simple - it's the list of "Inspirational Reading" that appeared at the end of the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. But when this book talks about Appendix N, it's not just referring to an old bibliography. Appendix N is an ideal, an aspiration. We are meant to be drawn into Joseph Goodman's dream of Appendix N, and Dungeon Crawl Classics is as beautiful and as revelatory and as tedious and as alienating as listening to any articulate stranger wax poetic about their dreams.

Sometimes it works, and for a moment I believe. Yes, it's ridiculous from a mathematical perspective to add Zocchi dice to your dice chain. The difference between a d5 and a d6 amounts to a +0.5 bonus. But if you look past the facts of the dice to the dream of dice . . . there's this moment, when you first start the hobby, where your whole life up to that point you've exclusively used cubic 6-sided dice and now you're being asked for a four-sided and eight-sided and twenty-sided die and what even are those? Polyhedral dice?! These weird little plastic trinkets that you've never seen before, never even heard of before have the specific, esoteric use of playing this strange new game. You can't just raid the Monopoly box for supplies, you have to go to a specialty store and maybe even mail order them. And in the subsequent 20 years you can never have this experience again because every other rpg uses some subset of the Standard D&D Dice.

Except Dungeon Crawl Classics does manage to snag a little bit of that magic, in a way that proprietary dice like Fudge Dice or Genesys Dice do not. A d7 or a d24 feels like a discovery. They're not just a set of new labels on something I've seen before. The result is the best kind of nostalgia - an echo of a once-in-a-lifetime experience. You can only have one first encounter with the full range of Platonic solids, but this evoked a similar feeling, and that's more than enough to justify what would otherwise be a pretty pointless game mechanic.

But it's unclear whether the creators of this game fully understood the nature of the magic they were working with, because sometimes the good nostalgia and pure enthusiasm for the source material would be interrupted by weird gatekeepery bullshit like, "Modern role playing games include complex rules for encounter levels, challenge ratings, and other systems for balancing encounters. These rules do not capture the glory of classic fantasy! The DCC RPG has no such rules beyond the generalities of hit dice and dungeon levels. Let the characters learn when to charge, when to retreat, and when to bid their time until they are powerful enough to win. If they don't learn, let them suffer the consequences."

I read something like that and think "Who is this for? Who is this message directed to?" It's the bad kind of nostalgia, the sort that equivocates between change and decay. 

Don't mistake this for a commentary on playstyle, though. I can be sold on the idea of sandbox dungeons that don't automatically scale to the PCs' level. But tell me how to fairly telegraph to the players that an encounter is too hard. Help me explain to them the appeal of this style. Hell, advise me to thrown in the occasional too easy encounter, because the idea is a world independent of the PCs, not a world explicitly designed to screw them over (or, if that is actually the idea, then help me explain the appeal of that). If you're going to sell me on an idea, sell me on an idea. Don't present your game to me like the act of playing it is picking a side in an ideological controversy.

And, again, Dungeon Crawl Classics is capable of doing this right. The suggested character creation method of rolling up 2-4 disposable 0-level characters, running them through a too-tough dungeon with a high level of character attrition, and then playing whoever survives is an amazingly fun and creative idea. It's didactic to a particular game style, but in a way that feels very natural. The DCC RPG wants you to think of dungeon crawling adventurers as these sorry bastards who stake their lives on what is essentially a roll of the dice - "the race is not to the swift" and all that - and I think this might do the trick. Hard to get too irrationally attached to a character when you don't even know which character you're going to play. 

Likewise, the magic system is similarly thematic - it's unpredictable and dangerous, it will inevitably ruin your wizard character with random mutations, but it's potentially very powerful. The allure of being a low-level caster, rolling a natural 20 on a casting check, and just machine-gunning a routine magic missile would present a terrible temptation. Each time you cast a spell, it puts your body, mind, and soul at a terrible risk, enough that being a warrior or thief starts to look like a good deal, but to be a wizard is to be the sort of person who will gamble with their life for the prospect of power.

All good. So why couldn't the same sort of thoughtful "mechanics give rise to intended modes of play" approach be applied to magic items? We're told that they're meant to be rare. We're given a demographic explanation for why it makes sense that they're rare (because the people who create them are scarce and don't like to share knowledge or techniques . . .  due almost entirely to the game's genre), but we're not given a reason to be glad that they're rare. It's a thing that is the way it is in emulation of a genre, but it's taken for granted that emulating the genre is something we're going to want to do.

If I had one wish-list item for a potential second edition of Dungeon Crawl Classics, it would be to ban all use of the words "Appendix N" from the main body of the text. If you want me to love the source material as much as you do, show me what the source material looks like, don't just assure me it exists. Sometimes, I got the impression that they loved Appendix N so much not out of any intrinsic merit of the cited works, but because the list was curated by Gygax in 1978. Is this a game about swords-and-sorcery-inspired dungeon-crawling adventurers or is it a game about trying to capture and fossilize the style of roleplaying you imagine existed at the start of the hobby?

Not to present it as a hard dichotomy or anything. Obviously, it's both. I guess I just enjoy one of those goals much more than the other.

Which brings me, sans elegant transition, to the other big pitfall of focusing on Appendix N, specifically. As a potential Canon For All Roleplaying (or even just the canon for a single game) it . . . reflects a very particular and narrow set of attitudes about gender, race, and sexuality.

That doesn't necessarily stop a modern game from approaching the tropes with a critical eye, to recreate the general overall feel of the genre with a more inclusive atmosphere . . . but Dungeon Crawl Classics doesn't really do that at all. To be fair, it also does not seem to deliberately lean into the problematic aspects of its inspiration, but bits and pieces do manage to break through, especially in the monster chapter. There's an enemy type that is literally called "subhumans." The section on regional variations for monsters begins, "Just as the men of one nation may be smarter, hardier, or more dangerous than their neighbors . . ."

Please, I beg of you, creators of DCC RPG, we have learned more in the past 50 years than just "AC makes more sense as an ascending value." But like I said, I don't think there was any malice too it. Just carelessness. "Degenerate Deep One hybrids" is something straight out of the source material and it's easy to just focus on the horror element of half-human fish monsters without realizing that in its original context it was anti-race-mixing propaganda. That's not an excuse for thoughtlessly repeating it, of course, but it's more on the level of an error than a crime.

Overall, I'd say that Dungeon Crawl Classics piqued my curiosity, but didn't make a compelling case for itself outside a very temporally specific form of nostalgia. Like, to me, the idea of going back to the proto-D&D source material and reverse engineering a new game based on those same sources is . . . an interesting thought experiment. Something that may, potentially, give me new insight into the hobby, but not anything like a much-needed-return-to-form-in-a-hobby-environment-that-has-sadly-lost-its-way. Like, my first thought after completing this book is that I'd like to see a WoD-OSR, where someone gives the DCC treatment to the Anne Rice novels and late-80s goth music that inspired the original Vampire: the Masquerade. And I'm fully capable of admitting that this is a needlessly perverse takeaway, but also, that's just who I am, and so I'm bound to appreciate Dungeon Crawl Classics more as a work of genre commentary than as an actual game.

Ukss Contribution: Each and every spell in the 200-page-long magic chapter (out of 466 pages total, because the one thing no D&D-derived game can ever escape is giving disproportionate attention to magic-users) is accompanied by a set of possible "spell manifestations" to reflect the fact that in-setting, there are actually hundreds of different spells that each do subtly different things. The setting element I'm picking here is more of an abstract concept that shows up a couple of times - the Mending spell variant that works by summoning hundreds of tiny gnomes. Or the Flight spell that has thousands of small birds lift you into the air.

I think that's a great magical image - absurd numbers of absurdly small beings working together to accomplish absurdly out-of-scale tasks. Maybe there will be a wand that just summons hordes of tiny creatures.

(Shadowrun) Target: Matrix

One thing I realized during the reading of Target: Matrix is that I have no idea how the internet works. I have a certain amount of familiarity with the experience of using it, in our real world, with our comparatively unsophisticated screen-based computer technology. But then I read something about accessing the local Seattle grid by visiting a virtual Space Needle and then selecting your ultimate destination by looking out one of the many windows that each show one of the various Seattle-based businesses in the form of distant landmarks . . . and I think, Is that how it really works? You know, behind the scenes? If I want to go to the website of a place headquartered in some distant location, is my computer sending messages up a geographical hierarchy until they reach the smallest network that contains both myself and my intended destination, whereupon they get passed back down the ladder to successively smaller and more specific networks until they reach the website I'm trying to access? It's all so seamless and automatic in real life, but I guess it must be a computer-to-computer relay with a small number of possible paths, where the bulk of the exchange happens between large internet service providers, each of which must have a physical location somewhere. 

And maybe it actually makes sense for Shadowrun's various matrix locations to have temporary or teleporting SANs (System Access Nodes) that only appear on particular local grids at specific times, and which savvy criminal hackers need to track down via their poorly articulated "computer skills." You want to access the semi-secret Shadowland data haven, it's not merely a matter of entering an address in to a browser, you have to manually perform all the tedious routing business. And even that will only get you as far the data haven's "killing jar" which is described as if it were a room with no exits where the system administrators can scan your hardware, run a background check, and potentially fry your computer (and brain) with hostile programs. But that could only work if Shadowrun's matrix works by actually transferring your consciousness to distant computers. If there's something more substantial being exchanged, above and beyond a series of encoded instructions, where Shadowland is telling your cyberdeck how to render its environment and your cyberdeck is telling Shadowland what operations you want to perform.

It's probably best not to think about it. The matrix is all about sending your brain on a little trip and never mind that the virtual reality form-factor doesn't really add anything to about 90% of the suggested use cases. You want to look up a particular piece of information and instead of just typing your question into a search bar, you have to wander through the streets of a virtual city or explore a haunted forest where everything is expressed as a mythological metaphor. And maybe this is faster in practice, due to the matrix operating at a far higher speed than meat-space, but maybe you could get even faster than that by just having your thoughts be the search bar and then the information comes to you?

But is that as interesting, narratively? You know, for the purposes of a role-playing game. Would I rather have a book of "locations," including fantastic architecture and human adversaries or would I prefer a book describing a series of blandly functional drop-down menus?

I think it's tempting fate to say, "the menus," because then someone might actually give it to me and I'd be obligated to read it. So I'll say, instead, that I liked the book best when the VR environments were an end in themselves. It was a hoot reading about the "Dawn of Atlantis" matrix game, with its "sprites, lizard men, and earth elementals." I'm not sure I entirely buy that high fantasy is a popular genre in the Shadowrun universe, but I do like the sly Earthdawn Easter Egg and I'm working on the theory that it's actually a canonical connection between the game lines. Some immortal from the previous age of magic got a job as a developer or consultant for this computer game and its seasonal metaplot is based on real events, possibly with some hidden agenda (maybe simulating the fall of Thera so as to make a planned Thera 2.0 more resilient?)

Overall, this was a decent enough book, but you have to spot it quite a bit re: the silliness of its basic premise. Actually, people will enjoy having elaborate virtual environments act as an intermediary between themselves and the work they want their computers to do. Not only that, but it will be more efficient than our boring old internet. That's the sort of world that must exist if you want to depict hacking as a thrilling activity where quick-witted rogues go on action-packed adventures.

Ukss Contribution: There's a bit in this book that is weirdly, specifically, a 2000-2006 period piece. People find these strange custom PDAs marked with a big red X. The PDA will send them messages asking for innocuous-seeming favors like "pick up this hitchhiker" or "take a picture of these particular pages from an occult book" (occult books are innocuous in the Shadowrun universe). And if you do it, you are "karmically rewarded" by other PDA-holding strangers doing small innocuous favors for you. 

Nowadays, this plot would focus on people with ordinary smart phones using a special app, but I like the idea of a network of strangers, none of whom can see the big picture, all doing a series of small-seeming favors for each other, blissfully unaware that the network would require some vast computational resources to work the way it appears to (because it doesn't answer requests, it anticipates future needs). I figure it's being driven by a strange intellect that is trying to butterfly-effect its wishes into the physical world because it's good at seeing chains of consequences but bad at understanding how things actually work.

Ukss is going to have something like that.

(D&D 3.x) Magic of Faerun

Magic of Faerun (Sean K Reynolds, Duane Maxwell, Angel McCoy) is the fifth full book I've read for Forgotten Realms and it's the first that I can unambiguously say that I liked. I didn't like it a lot, mind you. But my feelings were consistently mildly positive almost the entire time. This is a functional workhorse of a book that gave me a reasonable amount of Forgotten Realms lore. Some of it was super specific - like the Abbey of the Shining Truth, which gets a full dungeon write up - but it's all the relevant type specific. They're talking about mage guilds or bardic colleges and then they show me an example mage guild or bardic college. It works because I'm primed to be interested, and if all of Forgotten Realms were like that, I think I'd think it was pretty bland, but basically all right.

My only real problem with this book is the fact that the middle of my personal wavelength is probably just slightly beyond the most extreme thing it's willing to do. Like, in the section on gems with magical properties, it tells us about the Rogue Stone. They're rainbow-colored with an almost liquid, iridescent sheen and have the curious trait of always being found alone. They can be found in a wide variety of mineral deposits, but it's always just one rogue stone that happens to be trapped in a fissure. Furthermore, "some primitive human tribes believe rogue stones to be the sentient essences of dragons or mighty heroes, but sages hold this view to be folk nonsense."

And here is where Forgotten Realms really starts to task me, because I love everything about rogue stones. They sound pretty. It would be fun to explain to a group of player characters what these things are and why they're valuable. The low-key strangeness of their origin implies that the world has this ongoing background magic - no mundane geological process could explain the existence of these things, but that's all right because there's no reason to think that all of the world's geological processes are mundane. However, instead of just leaving it an inconsequential mystery, they had to add on that last little bit for me to get mad about.

Why the fuck would you do this to your own fantasy setting? You must realize that "the sentient essence of a mighty hero gets stuck in the rock and becomes a unique, beautiful gemstone" is just something you can decide to be true . . . right? Like, I didn't mind when rogue stones were just a weird phenomenon with no explanation, but I also think this new thing would be pretty cool to have in an rpg. I would have been fine with that explanation. Now, I have to wonder - who are these "primitive tribes" who are these "sages" and why did you decide that the sages know so much more than the tribes (by enough that you're comfortable labeling a cool fantasy idea "folk nonsense" even)?

Walk me through this. You're a sage in the city of Waterdeep. Actual wizards are fucking everywhere. There's a damned prestige class for just the ones in your hometown. Some merchant comes in with a remarkable, shiny rock that looks like nothing you've ever seen. Tells you they traded it from a tribe who says gems like this are always found by themselves, nestled in ordinary rock, because they contain the essence of a dragon or mighty hero. What part of your regular life experience causes you to dismiss this as "folk nonsense?"

And to bring things back to a Doylist perspective - what part of your training or instincts as a writer prompts you to imply that sage is correct for thinking this?

Although, I should perhaps not rant so much about this. It's only one sentence in a throwaway entry in a relatively unimportant part of the book. It's just a personal pet peeve. I do think it's emblematic of my ambivalence to the setting as a whole though. Forgotten Realms is capable of doing interesting things (I refuse to believe the butterfly-riders are no longer canon). You might even infer that it's pretty weird in its outline (high-level wizards in this world are so common that the Silverymoon arcane guild restricts itself to non-evil wizards who can cast 5th level or higher spells, and apparently this is more than just three or four people) but it so often refuses to stick the landing. Isolated ideas (whether they're weird fantasy or vanilla D&D) get maybe a sentence or two before moving on to the next thing and the social, philosophical, and cultural implications of its big ideas are never even slightly explored. Like, logically speaking, items with the continual light spell must be absolutely fucking ubiquitous, giving the Realms-folk a practically modern relationship to the concept of "nighttime" despite otherwise sharing so many traits with medieval Europeans. How does this manifest, culturally? The books are never going to say.

And it's not so much that I want them to (oh, who am I kidding? I definitely do) but when they don't, it gives me the impression that the Forgotten Realms takes itself completely for granted. It grew up in parallel with the primordial D&D, incorporating, from the very beginning, the oral tradition in-jokes, poorly-compensated magazine articles, and general 70s/80s nerd culture osmosis that would become the bedrock of "D&D lore." Hell, it spawned a lot of that lore itself. So I think by the time the setting's twentieth birthday starts coming around (and I'm counting from the first batch of Dragon magazine articles because while the Realms existed in some form since the 1960s, I doubt they were the D&D realms prior to the existence of D&D) it's kind of burdened by the weight of its own success. It only really needs to be "the world of Dungeons & Dragons" and never quite realizes that should be a floor, not a ceiling.

Magic of Faerun, by virtue of being about magic, is slightly less like that than some of the other Realms books I've read (though, if I'm picking a favorite, it's got to be Moonshae - it has lower lows, but higher highs, and I'm the sort of person who can forgive a low for the sake of a good high). Since it's fundamentally about More Stuff For Wizards to Do, it has to at least make a case for why the stuff wizards were already doing wasn't enough. And that shows through in the writing. It's one of the few Forgotten Realms books where I feel like I'm being pitched to. Why yes, I will be interested in this weird enemies-to-frenemies dynamic between Azuth the God of Wizards and Savras, the patron of oracles and diviners. Savras used to want Azuth's job, was turned into a magic scepter for awhile, and now that he's back to human form, the two deities have a somewhat cordial working relationship. Now, if you could maintain that exact level of focusing on the personalities and motivations of significant actors in all your future history sections, I think I could actually begin to like you, Forgotten Realms. 

Aside from having more-digestible-than-average lore, this book is also crammed with a bunch of doodads and trinkets for spellcasting characters. And spellcasters get a lot of love here. All of the prestige classes (with the exception of the technically non-magical Gnome Artificer and the spell-absorbing Spellfire Shaper) gets 10 caster levels, on top of their special abilities. Which make them a pure power boost for any caster who takes them. There's a long chapter crammed with new spells, many of which are bland, but functional, though there are a few standouts - like silverbeard, which either transforms an existing beard into metallic silver or causes you to grow a metallic silver beard, thereby increasing your Armor Class and giving you a Diplomacy bonus with dwarves. And the non-casters are not entirely left out. The magic item chapter contains plenty of new treasure including airships and contraceptive potions, a dagger that can transform into a viper, and regenerating rope made of troll guts (it's gross, I hate it, but I respect it for being so unabashedly gross and hateable).

Twenty years ago, when I was still actively playing D&D 3rd edition, I mostly ignored this book's lore and used it only as a source of bits and bobs for my unrelated campaign settings. Now . . . I still think that's probably the best use for it. It adds a bit to the dense tapestry that is Faerun lore, but it's also mastered the trick of moving past "vanilla" to become truly generic (or, at least, as generic as implied-setting D&D ever really gets) and that gives it a lot of versatility.

Ukss Contribution: Rogue stones, but I'm giving them the "primitive tribes'" backstory, damnit!

(Shadowrun) Cannon Companion

I actually bought Cannon Companion (Robert Boyle, Dan "Flake" Grendel, Mike Mulvihill) very recently - about a month ago. See, I was looking through Wikipedia's list of Shadowrun books, in order to read my collection in something vaguely approaching publication order, and I realized I was missing a book! I had forgotten Cannon Companion entirely.

And after reading the book, I think I was probably right to do so. It's not that it's bad. It's more or less as much as you could reasonably ask for in a MOAR GUNS book for Shadowrun. But . . . yeah. It takes the most thoroughly trodden territory in the game and slightly expands it. We get a few new guns (including the Street Sweeper shotgun, which fires any old junk you stuff in the barrel), a few new melee weapons (including one of my personal favorites, the Macuahuitl), and a couple of new war crimes (white phosphorous grenades and land mines). In addition, there are new rules for some niche combat scenarios - fighting underwater or with indirect fire artillery. Nothing I really feel the need to complain about, but also you could go a long time before you felt this book's absence. 

So I guess I liked it? On the few occasions it managed to move the needle away from the dead center of the scale, the direction was positive. I enjoyed the first few pages of the "Armor and Gear" chapter, where they discuss various prominent fashion houses and their product lines. My trench coat and katana guy can now specifically wear "The Chairman" from the London Fog Line by Armante. I think I would get a kick out of explaining that to people, in-character. "Yeah, it's a genuine Armante. I had a big score a couple years back and decided to treat myself. You can really feel the difference between the knock-offs and the real thing."

The best chapter in the book was probably "Applied Simsense," that discussed Skillwires, Better Than Life chips, and using cybernetic implants to edit someone's memories. It's a little disappointing that the book focuses mostly on mechanics and not the staggering sci-fi implications of this technology, but I suppose I can't be entirely mad that they left the fun part to me as a GM. Like, there's a flash drive you can stick in your brain that will completely change your personality (called a "Personafix BTL") and maybe it's a failure of imagination that this is relegated to the role of a disreputable street drug. Imagine being able to slot in the motivation and discipline of a Type-A workaholic right before you have a big project to do. Or you're on your way to a party, why not become extra gregarious and the fun kind of shameless? Everything you don't like about yourself? Everything other people don't like about you? There's a patch for that.

It is, of course, a sci-fi horror scenario. I shudder to think of the damage those Youtube self-help grifters could do if they could bottle the sigma grindset and sell it for 49.99 a hit. Or, like, someone in a failing marriage who slots the personality they think their partner wants, and every day they lose a little bit more of themselves. . .

I'm not sure how many of these ideas would actually translate all that well to a Shadowrun game, but it's a subject that fascinates me. Maybe import the idea into Eclipse Phase or Transhuman Space. Extend those settings' extreme morphological freedom from the body to the mind. I can see some definite possibilities.

Overall, I though Cannon Companion was a perfectly fine book. Maybe a little dry at times, but not to a level out of line with other mechanics-focused rpg supplements. I probably won't use it directly, but I have no regrets about adding it to my collection.

Ukss Contribution: Personafix BTLs. The implications are simply too interesting to ignore. Obviously, in Ukss, they're going to be a form of dark magic, but I think they'll make for a particularly compelling school of forbidden sorcery.

(D&D 3.x) Races of Faerun

 Oh, man. These Forgotten Realms books are putting me through the wringer. I don't know what it is. Normally, I'm a glutton for lore. It's a big reason why I try and collect full sets. But there's something about this setting's lore that is aimed straight at the apathy center of my brain. It's actually kind of a mystery, because the Realms have plenty of interesting things going on. For example, this very book, Races of Faerun (Eric L Boyd, Matt Forbeck, James Jacobs), introduces the idea that the Gold Dwarves of the Great Rift ride on hippogriffs and then jump off their steeds mid-air to divebomb their enemies with specialized wingsuits. There's a whole prestige class that revolves around this activity. And somehow, it took me so by surprise that I actually pulled the Campaign Setting off the shelf to see if it was previously mentioned. Nope. Then I thought maybe it had appeared earlier in this book and I just glossed over it. This is the entirety of what the Gold Dwarf section had to say about the matter, "The hippogriff-mounted skyriders of the Great Rift are known to employ drogue wings (see appendix) and exotic military saddles." The Great Rift Skyguard wasn't even mentioned among the suggested prestige classes! You've got some dope-ass Red Bull-style shit going on and you don't even see it until the appendix. But it's vitally important that you mention five different human societies they've traded with over the last ten thousand years.

I think this might be the key to understanding my ambivalence. The way these entries are written, it's like Every Single Detail is of The Exact Same Importance. They've got this bucket-full of proper nouns and a meticulously assembled timeline and damnit, they're going to use them. . . and mumble, mumble, oh yeah, the gnomes are walking around strapped up in this medieval fantasy setting. 

And by the time you're like, "hey, what was that last part," it usually moves on to the next Equally Important Fact About the World, like a page and a half detailing three thousand years of Damaran history. Who are the Damarans? Where do they live? No one can say.

Okay, that's not fair. The book says quite explicitly - the Great Dale (unrelated to the Dalelands), the Moonsea, the Vast, and a half dozen other locations that are. . . undoubtedly canonical, but I refuse to believe I was expected to come into this knowing where "the Easting Reach" was supposed to be (partial vindication: it was not in the Campaign Setting's index, and probably wasn't in the text, but it was a label on the removable map poster).

And for some reason, most other rpg settings, even the most staunchly conservative vanilla fantasy ones, don't really do this. Like, yes, you start your history at the beginning of time. And yes, your various locations have their share of baggage from The Great Capitalized War. And with enough space to play around in, it all starts to become terribly impenetrable to outsiders. But even amid the most insular, creatively moribund, world-building for the sake of world-building rpg settings, there's still a sense that things have . . . relevance(?). Like, maybe there's too much stuff on the page, but it's all being put down for a reason. Every digression or laser-focus on a picayune detail can nonetheless be traced back to something we have reason to care about.

Perhaps it's me problem. Maybe the reason I'm so aggressively uninterested in these bread-crumb trails is because I have no attachment to any of the stuff at either end. There are things in this setting that I do care about - the Dwarvish colonialism of the Vast that displaced the native orcs (unexplored in this volume) or the hypothetical good version of the Moonshae Isles that understood they are a fundamentally a different genre than regular D&D (admittedly, it would have been a real reach to expect it here) - and it's perfectly imaginable that there's someone out there who feels the same way about Mulhorand (it's Not Egypt in a way that gets a disproportionate amount of wordcount, but it also is coy about its intended genre). 

Let's call it a wash. The Forgotten Realms as a whole could do more to sell itself to newcomers, but I, personally, can be a needlessly tough sell.

Now that this harmless anti-fandom griping is out of the way we can move on to more important matters - the book's frequent use of deeply problematic racist tropes. Both the elves and the dwarves have "wild" offshoots who are formerly "civilized" peoples who "descended into barbarism," losing their literacy and most sophisticated technological abilities when they went to live in the jungle. No points for guessing their skin color. 

Oh no, the poor Tieflings face suspicion and discrimination everywhere they go . . . but they really are naturally inclined to criminality and wickedness.

And you better believe we get creepy, borderline-eugenics discussions of blood quanta. Half elves still explicitly operate on one-drop logic. You need to have "at least one-eighth elven blood" to qualify for the Spellsinger prestige class.

All told, it's a relatively small portion of the book, and I don't think there was any conscious malice at work. But it would just keep happening, and a lot less deniably than what you'd see in a modern product.

It's hard to put into words, because it's not as crude a matter as "fantasy race X = fantasy race Y" (except when it comes to the Roma . . . there's always a Roma analogue and in Faerun they're called the Gur). Instead, it's like the relationships between the races and the setting are governed by racist modes of thought. Human-on-human racism is wrong, but you can draw a box around a group of creatures (the demihumans) make them "white" and then create a humanoid species for each white "anxiety" about minorities. Who are the cultureless barbarians who lurk beyond the borders of civilization and seek to destroy it (orcs)? Who are the sinister followers of an ancient religion who exploit the fact that they look just like regular people to infiltrate society and weaken it from within (Yuan-ti)? Who are the inferior garbage people who are no match for a decent citizen one-on-one, but who breed so fast that they threaten to overwhelm their betters with superior numbers (goblins)?

There's kind of a double bind. You try to directly critique them by drawing a one-to-one connection between the fantasy race and its most likely real-world inspiration and you will be quite understandably (if perhaps unfairly) accused of being gross. But try to indirectly change or remove them and you run the risk of losing the vibrant culture of re-appropriations, re-imaginings, and deconstructions that grew up around them. Queer gamers have largely embraced tieflings, and so they have to stay, but at least as recently as 2003 their presence in Faerun meant it was sometimes useful for a Player Character to think like a racist.

The trick seems to be trying to thread the needle of woobifying the creatures enough that the racists are visibly disgusted (they don't like orcs, but they like the game with orcs), but not smoothing them down so much that they lose the edge that made them appealing in the first place. Goblins become the fun kind of chaotic garbage-lover. Tieflings still look like they could plausibly do crimes (sexily). And of course we cannot lose the incoherent orc screaming, but maybe it could be FOR JUSTICE!!!

Overall, I can't really recommend this book. It doesn't elevate the material, like at all, and at its best it's just more Forgotten Realms. But I reckon it would take the average gamer multiple decades just to use all the Forgotten Realms we got from the campaign setting. Maybe if you're really into historical minutiae, or you want to bully your DM into letting your gnome character carry a gun. There are some cool feats, prestige classes, and bits of equipment. The heavy aspergillum is straight-up WH40K nonsense (it's a hollow rod with a round, hole-filled head meant for sprinkling holy water, but this one is tough enough to act as a mace and can hold 3 flasks of holy water, for all your vampire-hunting needs).  I'm not sure the good parts are worth wading through the dusty old tropes, though.

Ukss Contribution: The coolest thing in the book also neatly demonstrates the mind prison that is D&D-style racial essentialism. The Urdunnir are a dwarvish "subrace" (and it's absolutely unclear what this means from a biological perspective, though in terms of rules they basically have a totally new set of racial abilities). And "Thanks to the blessings of Dumathoin, the urdunnirs can walk through earth and stone as if it were air and shape metal or stone with their hands."

And, obviously, this should be a prestige class, right? I can't be the only one to see this. Call them "Deepearth Mystics" or something and they're a spiritual community that is so in tune with the earth that it gives them special earth themed abilities. That's basically what they are already, but for some reason they need to be physically different than "regular" dwarves. Their relationship with the god is something they're born into, rather than something people can cultivate. Just a tragic waste of potential which probably came about because urdunnirs first appeared in some obscure Monstrous Compendium Appendix. I have a theory that many of the high ECL "monster character" options came about because of AD&D's asymmetric monster statting, so that certain creatures that should just be regular demihumans with class levels (hags, ogre magi, drow, centaurs) are given extra hit dice and/or innate magic abilities when they become PC legal because whoever did the conversion acted on the assumption that the Monster Manual stats represented a 0-level commoner.

Luckily, I don't have to work under that constraint with Ukss and so these mystical earth-lovers can be the disciples of an obscure goblin religious tradition (as a reminder, my personal attempt to avoid falling into the same trap as Races of Faerun is to make all the vanilla fantasy small creatures - dwarves, gnomes, halflings, goblins, etc - into members of the same species, with different cultures and/or personalities).

(Shadowrun) First Run

Once more, I am going to tempt the wrath of the writing gods by openly declaring my ambition to write a short post about a short book. First Run (Michael Mulvihill) is a slim, 64-page volume that contains three very short adventures which are connected by no theme other than the fact that they are purportedly suitable for acting as an introduction to Shadowrun's rules and setting.

And I don't know, I guess anything can be an introduction if it's the first thing you encounter, chronologically. However, if I make a checklist of all the things I'd want to include in an introductory adventure - a thorough cross-section of the game's different mechanics, low stakes, setting baseline expectations that may later be defied, an open-ended conclusion that can segue into further adventures - then none of the three really qualify.

However, I don't want to single out First Run as being especially bad or anything. The Exalted 3rd edition introductory adventure took place in a dream. It's a difficult thing to get exactly right.

Even so, it was probably a mistake for the second adventure, "Supernova," to end with a face-to-face meeting with Richard Villiers. There's failing to set realistic expectations and then there's ostentatiously setting false expectations, and I think Mr. Mulvihill must have at least subconsciously realized he was doing the later because Villiers' presence in the story was awkward af. So much of the text is given over to punishing the PCs if they decide to harm or double-cross him, and the whole time, I'm like "this is supposed to be the players' first encounter with the setting, so they're not going to know he's a Big Fucking Deal to the metaplot, they're just going to see him as a smug rich guy who killed Mr. Johnson." 

"Never screw over someone more powerful than you" is just a terrible moral on which to end a punk story. A better one would be, "you're never going to get a shot at someone like Villiers, because guys like him pay other people to take their risks for them" or "it's not about screwing over this or that particular rich guy, because the system has plenty of second-stringers scrambling to take their place." But those are more endgame lessons than starting ones. It's actually probably trivial for a priority-A cyborg to just absolutely body both Villiers and his henchman Miles Lanier (who, despite the book's description, probably doesn't have more than slightly above average combat skills for a retired soldier). The real trick is to get into the room with them in the first place. Guys like them don't generally attend criminal meet-ups. Hell, they don't even leave the house without a cadre of elite bodyguards, magical and matrix overwatch, and an obscene amount of backup at the other end of a panic button.

Which is why the end of "Supernova", as written, doesn't make a damned lick of sense, to the degree that it undermines the rest of the adventure up to that point.

The first adventure, "Food Fight", reprinted from the 1st edition core, works a bit better. It falls short of being an ideal introduction by the fact that it's almost purely a combat tutorial, but it describes the interior of a Stuffer Shack, which is an important bit of setting information. Its main fault is that it's noticeably sexist in its treatment of its female characters. "The elf girl behind the counter looks like an angel; even the fluorescent lights can't dull her beauty. Her vacant stare indicates that she probably only has one asset and you've already noticed it." 

Still, having the players learn the combat system by putting them in a convenience store as its being robbed is an admirably naturalistic setup. You could even use it as a first meeting, as an alternative to the mysterious robed figure in the shadowy tavern.

The third adventure is fine. It takes the characters out to the wilderness, where they encounter a spirit who doesn't follow the usual rules of summoning. So maybe it would work better as a change of pace, but if you're trying to set a tone for a game about paranormal mysteries, or if you want to segue into a smuggling campaign, then it could still theoretically be an introduction.

Overall, I don't think this is a book I'd ever use for its intended purpose. Maybe mine it for ideas. Some of the NPCs are well-drawn. The relationship between the antagonist and the spirit in the third adventure is pretty interesting (he's a bandit who thinks he's tricked this free spirit into thinking that the smugglers he robs are there to destroy the forest, the spirit knows he's full of shit but goes along with it because he likes robbing smugglers). But taken in their entirety, the stories are not quite typical enough to be used as a shakedown run and not quite thematic enough to be used as campaign seeds. It could be useful if you're stuck with no ideas about what to do with Shadowrun, but that's not a problem I've ever been afflicted with.

Ukss Contribution: There's something in the "Food Fight" adventure that's so staggeringly, mystifyingly dumb that it made me shoot right past ironic reframing, through backhanded admiration, and loop around to full philosophical vertigo.

"Dimwitted and probably insane, he talks to objects because they are friendlier than people. He'd rather just kill the people and leave the objects. He pulls his shotgun out but will not fire until a non-ganger does something to an object (the gamemaster can decide what sets him off - anything from dropping an item to tossing an object at a ganger) . . . He can be talked out of his vengeance-seeking rage if you convince him that he is hurting as many objects as you are."

Like, this is obviously just an ableist joke. Look at this wacky "insane" guy, he inverts the moral priority of people and inanimate objects. But I think about depicting him, as a GM, and I just can't wrap my brain around it. What is this guy's life? How does he experience the world? The book literally said he valued "objects" as a category. And no matter how hard I try to rebel against the thought, I'm convinced that means he's a Kantian. He doesn't discriminate against objects, nor between types of objects. He has a universal moral duty to the base physical matter of the universe. More than that, he loves that matter like a friend. Is he "insane" or is he a living saint?

And I'm not doing a bit here. That wasn't a sarcastic question. It was a genuine philosophical inquiry. What is the nature and purpose of love? Can there be a form of "love" that is not a crime, not a form of selfishness or cruelty, but is nonetheless wrong? Or am I the one who's wrong? Am I privileging arbitrary sets of atoms just because they happen to take the familiar shape of conscious human beings. 

I mean, the guy can be turned away from wrath by the fact that he loves objects so much. Have I ever experienced a love so pure? 

What the fuck, Shadowrun?

I think, for Ukss, I will use him as inspiration for a strange and inhuman god.

(D&D 3e)Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting

There's a reason I prefer to use the term "Vanilla Fantasy" over the perhaps more commonly accepted "Generic Fantasy." And that reason is The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (Greenwood, Reynolds, Williams, and Heinsoo). This is corebook-implied-setting D&D in its purest form, but also the single most specific fantasy book I've ever read. It is gleefully specific. Maybe even sadistically specific. It's got a 4-page long timeline, full of canon events, locations, and characters. Want to know when Castle Waterdeep was built and how long that is after the location of the future city of Waterdeep was first settled? This book has you covered.

There's an unapproachable grandeur here. In many ways, it's a perfect rpg supplement. And I don't use that word lightly. It's hard to imagine a book with more D&D per page. It may not be physically possible. There's a sidebar which lists 23 "Lost Empires." Later, over a stretch of several pages, we get more than 40 example dungeons. And neither of those things is even in the setting chapter. The "Geography" chapter takes up half the book and has literally hundreds of specific locations, each with their own potential rpg plot. You buy this book because you want to play a game of D&D, and it gives you a lifetime of D&D games to choose from.

It's a shame, then, that so many of these choices are basically interchangeable. That's the dark side of specificity - you can have a thousand snowflakes, each of them unique, but you need to put them under a microscope to appreciate it. Did we really need 11 fucking 'Dales? Eleven?! 

I mean, yeah, probably. My nose would be growing pretty long if I tried to claim I was against that sort of thing in the abstract. The whole reason my rpg collection is this big and unwieldy is because I am exactly the sort of person to care about the nuanced differences between all 11 'Dales. However, in the context of this specific book, I'm not sure having such a thorough list was worth butchering your presentation of Moonshae.

As the DM chapter would have it, "The Moonshae Isles offer a locale with a Celtic or Viking flavor. Chult in the far south could be home to a campaign featuring primitive technology (not to mention marauding dinosaurs). Calimshan and the Vilhon Reach offer settings similar to that of The Arabian Nights. The eastern end of the Sea of Fallen Stars has a Mediterranean or North African flavor."

Or, to put it in the words of the Geography chapter, lolwut?

I mean, it's there. D&D's long history of racial coding is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but if you know that's what they were going for, you can see how they were going for it.  Take Calisham. "Its people are heirs to an old empire founded by genies . . . renowned for its chauvinism, exotic markets, thieves' guilds, decadent harems, desert landscapes, and wealthy ruling class, as well its enormous population and many slaves."

First of all, yikes. Second of all, doing a ctrl+F for the word "wizard" and replacing it with the word "genie" does not an Arabian Nights-inspired setting make. We're still getting the same kind of information, presented in the same list-based format. We've still got orcs and dragons. One of the antagonist plots involves "powerful undead spellcasters (including a blue dracolich)." Almost the entire section could be transported unchanged to the vicinity of Waterdeep . . . and that's the most distinctive one. If you can find a hair's worth of difference between Moonshae and Shadowdale, based only on this book's text, you are a much more perceptive reader than I am.

It's a problem that's most apparent when the book "tries" to expand beyond its vanilla fantasy wheelhouse, but it's persistent throughout the whole thing. The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting does not give you the tools to engage the setting from a genre level. It eschews spectacle in favor of a flood of proper nouns. In glorying in the specific, it foreswears the power of the abstract. Like, maybe a list of 40+ dungeons wouldn't be necessary if it just took a couple extra pages to explain what a dungeon was supposed to be.

But would addressing those issues leave us with a better book, overall? That's a question that's tough to answer. On the one hand, yes, obviously. But on the other hand, we would be losing the beauty of a pure thing. I called it "perfect" before and I meant it. This book is the epitome of "loredump as worldbuilding." And that's something that certain playstyles can get a lot of use out of. Much like an old-school module will have a series of connected rooms, all described down to the last piece of furniture, in order to facilitate a very direct and literalist style of engagement, the Faerun Gazetteer is like an old-school worldmap, connecting those old-school dungeons. It creates space for "player skill" in the form of knowing the lore, even if it sometimes comes at the price of making its locations feel like geography-scale furniture.

Although, I would be remiss if I didn't address the fact that some percentage of this worldbuilding is less old-school "the world is established even if the PCs aren't there to see it" and more "we've got hundreds of books worth of material and if we leave out someone's favorite location, we'll probably hear about it." There are definitely areas that have been transparently Touched by Metaplot, and you can usually tell which ones they are by the fact that they are long on incident and short on atmosphere. Why does Citadel of the Raven get a longer entry than Balder's Gate? Presumably because Fzoul Chembryl was featured in more than a half-dozen novels and short stories (actually, about a dozen by now, but half of them were published post-2001).

As far as metaplots go, Forgotten Realms actually seems to use a fairly light touch. It's not quite as heavy-handed as FASA or White Wolf, and it definitely doesn't drive the whole setting, like with Dragonlance. It just sort of peeks in every now and again, as if to say, "wow, that happened." I think it might be a function of its over-abundance of detail. Oh, the Tuigan horde is invading and Cormyr has to ally with the Dalelands and Sembia to fight them off? Well, Amn and Neverwinter barely noticed. Likewise, you can have an entire Avatar Crisis, where the gods are forced to take mortal form and battle it out until they learn the true meaning of personal responsibility, and it's kind of a shrug. A few of them died, and some powerful mortals stepped in to take their place. There's a sense that none of this shit is load-bearing.

That's the main strength of Forgotten Realms as a setting - it's a world where a lot of D&D is happening, everywhere, all the time. Its weakness is that it's mostly just D&D. Wherever you go, there's a good chance that you and 3-5 of your friends are going to travel through monster-infested wilderness to find monster-infested ruins and plunder them for gold and magic items. You could also do political intrigue, slice of life, philosophical transhumanism, or even punk, but you'd be building almost everything from scratch. 

As an entry point to the series, I think the AD&D boxed set works better, despite being an objectively inferior book. The 3e book has smoothed out many of the setting's rough edges and is much more dialed-in to the Forgotten Realms' voice, but I think its greater sophistication wound up making me feel more like an outsider to the fandom. Plus, the gray box had elves riding giant butterflies, which is a baffling omission from the new edition.

Overall, this is another one of those books that I admired a lot more than I enjoyed. It's something that gets the fundamental construction of a setting book exactly right while being primarily about a setting I don't particularly like. Strangely, though, I think I might be okay with reading specialized Forgotten Realms supplements about individual areas of the setting. I think a tighter focus would inspire the authors to try and justify their choices, whereas, like I said about the previous version of the setting, Forgotten Realms as a whole often acts like it doesn't need to justify shit.

Ukss Contribution: One day a year, the air god Shaundakul turns his priests into mist and lets the wind blow them to some random location, where they will reform and have to figure out what to do on their own. I like it because it's both an incredibly rude thing for the god to do and something that's probably a primary motivation for people becoming priests in the first place. 

(Shadowrun) Magic in the Shadows

 Let us open this post about Magic in the Shadows (Stephen Kenson) with the ceremonial pointing out that fuck, man, Shadowrun rules expansions really love expanding the rules. Set your minds at ease - you will need to make a lot of dice rolls, some of which are for incredibly piddly shit (after your roll to gather wild alchemy materials, you will need to make a roll for refining those materials into "radicals" and then another roll to turn those radicals into magic items) - all is right in the world.

I suppose the rules feel a little less intrusive here than in Rigger 2 and I think that comes down to the fact that we're talking about magic. You've got a rule for everything because the rules legitimately define what you can do. There's no background reality that allows you to infer the existence of quickening spells or great form spirits, and thus each new rule gives you a genuinely new thing to do that you couldn't before. It feels less onerous. At no point are you in a situation where, say, you want to jam a radio signal with a civilian transmitter that has been illegally boosted in violation of FCC regulations and the GM is like, "sorry, but there's nothing in the electronic countermeasures rules about this." When you're asking, "hey, can I use the macguffin to make unobtanium?" then "no, you can only do what the description says you can do" is a perfectly valid response.

Which isn't to say that there's no room for hard feelings and contentious rules arguments. They just mostly come in the form of power interactions. Like, can the new Adept power "Delay Damage (Silent)" which allows you to gently touch a target and then, up to 24 hours later, have them take full melee damage, as if you'd hit them full force, combine with "Distance Strike" power, which allows you to make melee attacks at range, so that you can just harmlessly gesture at someone and have them drop dead of no apparent cause?

I'd be inclined to allow it, because it's a really specialized build, basically requiring all of your starting power points to get off the ground, but I'd be a little nervous about it. Normally, I scoff at charging PCs for "natural weapons" because real weapons are trivial to acquire in all but a few very specific scenarios, but a perfectly concealable, perfectly inalienable gun does become something a bit more than "yeah, okay, you're armed in prison/the fancy dinner party/bank lobby, but so are the guards" when you can also use it undetectably and then act really shocked when your target drops dead.

On the other hand, we're talking about heist capers here. You can spec to be the perfect assassin all you want, but when the fight is against militarized corporate security because your overly-specialized ass accidentally tripped an alarm, you're probably going to want some more overt firepower.

The more interesting question is what implications these powers have for the setting? If there are people who can wave at you and make your head explode, how does this change things like the public appearances of politicians and celebrities? What is this doing culturally?

There is some talk about these issues, unfortunately it's pretty brief. We learn that mages who commit crimes are basically tortured, because the only way to stop them from using their powers is to blind them, immobilize them, and drug them. Oof. Also, healing magic is treated with skepticism by the medical community, and the main commercial applications of sorcery are extremely specialized high-tech research and trivial stuff in the entertainment industry, with absolutely nothing in between.

I'm a little disappointed, but I suspect it's an intentional choice. Shadowrun is a blend of cyberpunk and fantasy, but the cyberpunk is the senior partner in that relationship. Magic is used as a kind of anti-cyberpunk - it is small scale, bespoke, fleeting, and incompatible with most technological or industrial processes. It's a thing for anarcho-primitives, traditional communities, hermits and renunciates, and other people who don't fully participate in modern capitalism. It's extremely useful for living by yourself out in the woods, but you can't package it for mass consumption. That's probably thematic.

Though I also suspect it's a theme that's partially driven by game balance. Almost all the magic we see in the books (with the exception of the ritual magic used by the Native American Nations to defeat the United States government) has been stuff that's been relatively safe to give to Player Characters. The limitations of magic - it's rarely permanent, it doesn't scale, it needs prodigious amounts of xp - are also the rules you'd put in place to prevent magician characters from breaking the game. 

On the whole, it works. I like Shadowrun's world just fine. You can be an elf ninja, using your arts of invisibility to steal from a corporation and the corporation will maybe be a little frustrated that they can't monetize invisibility for themselves, but they'll also just respond by putting hellhounds and fluorescing astral bacteria (a type of magic that can be mass-produced, but doesn't do anything but hinder PCs, so it's okay) in your way. You're never going to worry about the philosophical or political implications of high-fantasy ideas like bringing back the dead or floating sky castles because things need to stay within a fairly narrow sci-fi aesthetic. And maybe I'm wired to be more curious about questions like "can you use detection magic to observe subatomic particles" or "can sorcery and/or conjuring build a house faster or cheaper than manual labor and modern machinery?" But what genre is that? Fermi-core? Post-Scarcity-Punk? The aesthetic is narrow because it's a good aesthetic.

In the end, the best and worst thing I can say about Magic in the Shadows is that it's a great supplement if you're interested in rules-heavy low fantasy that focuses on small unit mercenaries who commit elaborate heist capers for pay. That is its wheelhouse and so long as you stay in that box, it offers a lot of fun new content - different magical traditions like voodoo or wuxing; new types of spirits like blood elementals or ally spirits (like familiars, but a bit tougher . . . if you're willing to invest obscene amounts of xp); new totems for shamans, including crab, prairie dog, and goose (putting me in the awkward position of having to decide between condemning the egregious cultural appropriation and indulging my intense desire to play a magician who gets his powers from a magic goose). I think, overall, it's probably the second best kind of new Shadowrun content. . . just behind Important New Metaplot That Will Change Everything Forever.

Ukss Contribution: "The Mojave Desert is aspected against Conjuring, making any use of the Conjuring skill there more difficult - much to the satisfaction of the spirits there."

And I don't know why, but this is such a Shadowrun detail. Like, the whole game is thoroughly American, and it can be bad like America is bad, but it has this . . . yearning. It manifests in this particularly 90s form of romanticism where somehow the goodness and the holiness that has been systematically pushed out of our capitalist economy will manifest in the land. You go out into the Mojave and experience the starkness of its wide horizons and you think "here live the gods we have abandoned for our greed."

I could make fun of them, because this is sort of thing that seems like it was included because it feels vaguely Native American, but if I'm being honest, it's something I've experienced personally. 

(D&D 3.0) Dragonlance Campaign Setting

One of the recurring themes of this blog is my ambivalence about "vanilla fantasy," i.e. the stuff that D&D does - vaguely Tolkien, with its elves and dwarves and hobbits, halflings, kender, vaguely swords and sorcery with necromancers and thick-hewed men of action, and vaguely weird fantasy with all of these other elements used with scarcely any thought given to the overall effect ("sure, Cthulhu can be here too, why not?"). It's the genre that got me started with the hobby and there was a time when I eagerly devoured any variation I could find. And then I grew a little older, and I became too cool for it, and I would only touch fantasy that was conspicuously and consciously "not D&D." And then I grew a little older than that and became too cool for too cool, and I resolved to approach the genre with an open mind, in the process discovering a new, adult perspective that allowed me to appreciate "vanilla fantasy" as a sort of ongoing community project, where the very things that seemed so stultifying about it were actually fascinating historical artifacts, fossilized elements of a culture long-passed, preserved in a deep strata of obscure setting lore (for example: gnomes - nobody knows why they should be there, but leave them out and you will hear about it).

And overall, the general arc of my new, grudgingly laid-back approach to vanilla fantasy is towards Being Less of a Dick About It. It's not something I always do well (heck, even just now, my "new perspective on the genre" was about 90% faint praise), but it is something I'm working on.

The Dragonlance Campaign Setting (Margaret Weis, Don Perrin, Jamie Chambers, Christopher Coyle) really threatens to make me backslide.

See, this is a series that I have a great deal of personal nostalgia for. When I talk about young John eagerly devouring vanilla fantasy, this is the exact thing I'm talking about. I must have read the Chronicles series at least three or four times. And Legends at least twice. And when I talk about becoming disillusioned with the genre, well, having read Chronicles and Legends so many times is undeniably part of it.

The funny thing is that I was already done with vanilla fantasy by the time I bought this particular book. Even in 2003, I was buying the Dragonlance Campaign setting purely out of nostalgia. I've had it since it was brand new, more than 20 years, and this is the first time I've ever read it all the way through.

Now I'm left wondering if I ever truly hated vanilla fantasy at all. Maybe I just hated Dragonlance. 

No, "hate" is a strong word. Younger me would have used it shamelessly, but when I invoke it here, I'm doing it as a memory. I used to get far too invested in these things. I used to have passionate opinions about the fantasy genre. I'm not like that anymore.

I am very deliberately trying to not be like that anymore.

I didn't hate this book. There were parts that were dangerously close to hate - the racial alignment sections veered a little eugenics-y ("Half-ogres tend towards a neutral alignment. They have too much ogre blood to be completely good but don't automatically embrace evil."), the "balance between Good, Evil, and Neutrality" is the cringiest fucking thing I've ever read and ZOMG, what the fuck are you even trying to do here, you can say in the DM chapter that "no one ever wakes up in the morning and decides to be evil," but you literally have a big group of guys that get up every day and base their sartorial choices on signaling to the world at large their allegiance to an order of explicitly Evil wizards that gain their powers from the Dark Moon Nuitari, God of Evil Magic and honestly, that's not the worst part of it - it could be potentially the funny sort of cartoon evil - because who the fuck are these "neutral" people who can see the guys who are all "we stand for the use of supernatural power for the degradation and subjugation of all life and we're going to wear a uniform to let you know that it's not an accident" and think, "hey, we gotta make sure to keep some of these guys around."

Okay, let me take a breath here. This is getting a little ranty. . .

And another thing - yeah, no shit people blamed the Cataclysm on the gods. It's literally something that they did. On purpose, knowing what would happen. "Okay, so we dropped a meteor on the most densely-populated city on the planet, killing thousands instantly and many thousands more in the slow agony of climate-change-induced famine, but have you ever considered reflecting on your own faults? There's plenty of blame to go around. Us for doing it. You for making us do it."

I mean, the Kingpriest of Istar was supposed to be this cautionary tale of "good" overreaching and causing harm, thereby validating the setting's insistence on the necessity of cosmic balance, but he was just kind of this racist authoritarian who implemented a program of slavery and genocide. I think the angle here is that his "Proclamation of Manifest Virtue" wasn't so transparently full of shit in the context of the setting. Certain creatures were, in fact, evil by nature. Too much ogre blood even stops the half-ogres from being good. So if fighting an ogre when they are inevitably out and about doing their evil ogre things is good, then wouldn't preemptively stopping them from doing evil ogre things be extra good? But that's just the standard-issue apologia for genocide, so thankfully we've got the Neutral forces around to point out that just because something's Good, that doesn't make it good, and the universe needs a balance where nobody is allowed to commit genocide. But don't just say that the Gods of Good are against genocide. Because sometimes genocide is Good. That's why you need Neutrality.

Arrgh! I'm going in circles. Dragonlance's "morality" system makes my brain run in circles. It's always like this. It's always been like this. It will always be like this. I am drowning in the Discourse.

But I didn't hate this book. Not really. All of those problems are old problems. This particular volume only occasionally flirted with that nonsense (mostly at the beginning and in the history section). It's actually set after the first 100 novels (that is not a joke, that figure is from the introduction) in the Age of Mortals, and it kind of just reads like a world that is burnt out on high concepts. In the past two generations, there have been something like four near-apocalypses and now that it's time for DMs to take over for their home games, you're left with a bunch of Extremely Normal stories to tell.

The parts of the book that were being normal were actually . . . okay. The elves of Silvanesti were driven from their homeland by invading minotaurs. That's a plot. I could do something with that. Maybe some sort of drama with their rivals, the nation of Qualinesti that was founded by elves who were exiled for being less rigidly isolationist. There could be a nice irony in the reversal of roles. Oh, wait, they too were driven from their homeland by an invasion of Dark Knights under the command of the dragon Beryllinthranox?

Maybe 100 books was too many.

But jokes aside, the geography section is pretty useful. Moreso than the 1e version. There is a definite sense of there being more stories to tell, beyond the scope of canon. I'm not sure it ever really makes a case for itself as an alternative to its contemporaries, but if you want a not-quite generic fantasy world (that differs from core D&D largely in providing options for some of the most annoying characters you've ever seen), then the Dragonlance Campaign Setting provides. It could sometimes, particularly in the "Timeline of Krynn" and "Other Eras of Play" sections, have the extremely insular feeling of a long-running series that had accumulated an unmanageable number of deaths, resurrections, time-travel shenanigans, betrayals, villain redemptions, unlikely romances, carbon-copy "new generations" and definitively series-ending threats that needed to one-up the last definitively series-end threat. But I feel like, for a Dragonlance fan, that's perhaps a selling point. The reason you're picking up this book is because you want to play in the world of the novels. . . all the novels.

On a personal level, I spent a large part of the last week and a half thinking about how I could write this post and not come across as needlessly mean. I don't think I succeeded. Which is a shame, because I really am deeply ambivalent about this series. I don't like it, but I remember liking it, and in reading it again, after a 20+ year hiatus, I can see the shapes of what I used to like about it. It's a very . . . digestible setting. The color-coding of its "good" vs evil conflict is bad worldbuilding, sure, but it's easy to self-insert. You could make a buzzfeed-style quiz "Which color Robe would you wear" no problem. Everything has the superficial gloss of something you expect to see in D&D-style fantasy. The Knights of Solamnia are extremely knight-like. The elves are the perfectly memed variety of elves that approach being fey and occult mainly through the expedient of being really snotty and not talking to you. You better believe the dwarves are gruff everyman warriors. And I have to admit, the kenders' deal of constantly stealing shit and telling transparent lies when they're caught is kind of funny. It could sometimes feel like Tolkien after three or four rounds of the telephone game, but that's part of the appeal. It's a world that's easy to vibe with, even if it doesn't always make sense.

Ukss Contribution: Not going to do anything backhanded. There were a number of things that were perfectly trash fantasy - the Knights of the Lily looking extremely goth, the draconians with the fanfic ready healing saliva, the magical bard who "has the ability to recall all the stories of Krynn's past - whether the stories were true or not." And while I would say that I unironically enjoyed them, it was a chaotic trash panda sort of enjoyment. "Nom. Nom. Nom. Shovel that garbage directly into my mouth. I am a mean, cynical adult who wants to redeem the media he enjoyed at 12 years old by making it about the cringe of adolescence."

However, I have to acknowledge that Dragonlance brings out the worst in me. And aside from the eugenics and borderline-offensive theodicy, it hasn't really done anything to deserve it. So I'm going to pick something that I not only enjoyed, but also genuinely thought was cool.

When the Sivak draconians die, they reflexively shapechange into the form of the person that killed them (size and creature type permitting). Unlike the other draconians' death throes, (exploding for AoE damage or becoming a pool of weapon-dissolving acid), this doesn't seem like a particularly good move, tactically. But it is creepy as fuck. There are no rules attached to it, but I can imagine being a soldier fighting the implacable armies of Takhisis and landing a telling blow, only to see my own face stare back at me, dying on my own blade, and that would definitely stick with me for years and years after the battle.