Wildscape

 Before I started reading Wildscape (Mike Mearls) I was filled with a familiar dread - was this book going to explain weather to me? It's a well that has been visited many times, by many different rpgs. You're imagining a place, places often have weather, so you gotta imagine the weather too. Has anyone ever taught you how to imagine the weather? Maybe we can write an rpg supplement about that.

(And I realize I'm being something of a hypocrite here, explaining the practice of explaining weather, and then writing a parenthetical aside, explaining that, but the difference is that I'm being a cute little troll, who has never in his life done anything wrong).

However, upon actually reading the book, I am relieved to relate that Wildscape only explains the weather a little bit. There's a bunch of random tables for generating it, and those tables have little paragraphs explaining what the tables are for, but that's the extent of it. Most of this book is devoted to what the Wilderness Survival Guide from AD&D 1st edition should have been - rules for terrain hazards and fantastical environmental conditions. Each chapter is devoted to a different biome (desert, forest, arctic, etc) and is split evenly between mundane stuff like what DC Strength check you need to roll if you fall in a mud-hole (it depends on how deep the hole is) and magical stuff like the long-term effects of travelling through the blasted ruins of an elder civilization that was smote by the gods for its hubris (a minor, but cumulative penalty to all checks and a narrative effect of persistent bad luck).

Conceptually, it has the same basic problem as City Works - it's more of the DMG, the least essential of the three core books - but Wildscape has the advantage of being full of novel ideas. It's an entertaining read even if it undermines itself a couple of times when Mearls acts the buzzkill and warns us not to use all the ideas in the same campaign setting, because apparently "over-the-top features are memorable but using them too often can turn your campaign world into a mishmash of strange lands." 

To that, of course, I say "bah!" 

I mean, restraint has its place, but I see it more as a matter of picking elements that work well together and support your campaign's themes and genre aesthetics. It's good to have more options than I'd want to use, but I think "don't use too many colors" is unnuanced advice, and a poor explanation of the advantages of having a large palette.

Then again, I'm not the one who went on to be lead designer for D&D 5th edition, am I? (And even I don't know whether I meant to be humble or sarcastic just now).

Overall, I liked this book quite a bit and unlike its companion volume, that "like" is not the least bit qualified or whimsical. It's full of ideas that I would love to steal - a volcanic mountain that gets its heat from a slumbering dragon, a desert made up of tiny fragments of semi-precious gems, towering grasslands where dinosaurs roam free, a mountain range at the top of the world, whose peaks scrape against the dome of the sky and create extraplanar gates - and its only real flaw is that it's still basically a pre-game book. I'd be more likely to reference it than City Works, but I'd rather just copy its rules into my prep notes than carry it around.

I will close out this post by saying I'm still baffled that this book got made at all. I really don't understand FFG's strategy of releasing these unglamorous workhorse books about broad, abstract subjects aimed purely at GMs. This one proved to be worth it, but the only reason I ever found that out is because I saw it on a bookshelf 20 years after its release and said, "fuck it, it's only 5 dollars." Were people really that hungry for d20 content back then? And if so, why not just print more copies of Grimm (the book previewed at the end of Wildscape which continues what I can only assume is a series tradition of using these books to advertise more interesting books)?

Then again, I'm not the who went on to be bought out by Asmodee, so what do I know? (My price is 200k, btw, in case anyone's interested).

Ukss Contribution: Lots of choices this time. Mirror ice, that's so shiny it reflects spells? The brass dragon that's so starved for conversation it built a luxury resort at a desert oasis? Ghouls in underground ruins who create pit traps to capture surface-dwellers? This is a book that throws a lot at the wall, just to see if it will stick, and I love it for that.

However, I think I'm going to go with the giant grass. Ukss already has dinosaurs, so giving them some memorable flora to frolic around in is a no-brainer.

(Shadowrun) New Seattle

Aw, man, I was setting such a good pace in June, then politics happened and now I'm most of the way through July and I've only finished my second book for the month. It's a real shame, because New Seattle (Stephen Kenson) is exactly the sort of book that I'd normally finish in the space of a day. It's a guide to Shadowrun's signature setting that rapidly moves from subject to subject, most of which are pretty interesting. We've got Matchsticks, an old-fashioned jazz nightclub for our futuristic cyberpunk/fantasy setting? Great, I can read a paragraph about that. Or the Scatterbrains, the obligatory clown-themed gang of psychopaths? Yeah, sure, let's hear what the Shadowland comments section has to say about that (mostly, it's pretty predictable, but the suggestion that they get along so well with the Kabuki Ronin due to their shared love of whiteface is going to live rent free in my brain).

New Seattle was a bit of a challenge for me, as a long-time Shadowrun fan because it summarized, but did not advance the game's metaplot. Why am I getting a synopsis of Bug City in this book set halfway across the country? Did something new happen? Is there some Seattle-specific angle I'm missing?  No? It's just an early 3e setting book getting everyone on the same page? I can live with that, but I pay for these books so other people can get lost in the sauce, so maybe try to step up your game WizKids.

No, wait, what am I saying? I actually do not need new metaplot with every title. What I am, in fact, looking for in a city-centric setting book is information that allows me to run games set in that city. And by that metric, New Seattle has its highs and lows. The "History" chapter was largely unnecessary, but the "Welcome to Seattle" chapter had a ton of useful and oft-overlooked specifics - weather patterns, local tv stations, a list of chain restaurants and department stores. I wish it was twice as long and just super condescending. I normally dislike when an rpg book over-explains some basic concept, but even though I already know what a fast-food restaurant is, I'd love to know exactly how that has failed to prepare me for a cyberpunk/fantasy fast-food restaurant. Especially in a city-book, the minute difference between "the good Denny's" and "the sketchy Denny's" is exactly the sort of local savoir-faire that makes a place feel lived-in.

Though let me rein myself in a little bit. I'm not going to start criticizing a book for failing to adopt an untested experimental format (though feel free to picture me standing on a rooftop, screaming into a thunderstorm, "'The street finds its own uses for things,' means that a cyberpunk book should be 90% devoted to cultural, intellectual, and literal paths of desire!"). I do, however, feel like New Seattle, more than any other Shadowrun book I've read so far, lives and dies by the strength of its Shadowland comments. Sometimes the main text will blandly describe a building and the comments will be "yeah, I heard that place contains valuable items a rival megacorporation might want to hire someone to steal" and it's like, I guess technically that's useful information. I'm not going to say its unwelcome or pretend that if the book had just stopped at the building description I would not be complaining about how it didn't present me with any plot hooks. But then, some other sections will have comments along the lines of "oh, yeah, that bar is absolutely riddled with shapeshifters" or they'll just casually ruin some dude's life by outing him as an undercover cop and as unrealistic as it is, I kind of wish they could all be like that.

Overall, I really liked New Seattle. It didn't give me any new gossip, of the sort I love to rant about, but it was on the upper half of the usefulness curve. The last twelve pages were nothing but a long list of no-context business names, accompanies by meaningless addresses and micro-descriptions, and as a longtime GM, it brought a tear of gratitude to my eye. I may not get any particular pleasure from reading that McKuen's Scrap and Salvage Yard is on 3rd Avenue and Madison Street and "A continual eyesore amid the splendor of downtown, but an excellent source of parts," but I just know that a smartass player is going to ask me for those kinds of details. And really, providing a quick answer to the sort of questions you'd never think to ask is the highest use to which an rpg setting book can aspire.

Ukss Contribution: Seattle's fire control services are contracted to a private company that also sells fire insurance. Though it's not technically part of the contract (the company is paid by the city, from tax revenue, and not directly by individuals), people who have insurance with the company have a higher priority than the uninsured. It's somehow the most cyberpunk detail in the entire book and also a reference to one of the world's oldest protection rackets, which is pretty much the sweet spot for the genre and a great bit of worldbuilding that I'd love to riff on.

City Works

The fascinating thing about City Works (Mike Mearls) is how completely boring it is. This here is a book written by a future Head of All D&D, with the infinite possibilities of the Open Game License, and it's just dull as hell.

That's not necessarily a huge fault in a utilitarian rpg supplement, but it makes me curious about the early 2000s' d20 ecology. Some things, like Blue Rose or Dragonstar make sense to me as passion projects. Wizards of the Coast threw open the gates of the kingdom, allowed 3rd parties to make whatever they wanted, and that was an opportunity - to address a need, to fulfill a wish, to eliminate a frustration. And oftentimes, even the "bloat" was about something (if only a gratuitous desire for MOAR OF MY FAVORITE THING).

And then you have . . . this. Not a bad book, by any means, but . . . who asked for it? What commercial or creative opportunity did Fantasy Flight Games see that justified its existence? Hell, what was I, the reader, hoping to gain when I picked this up?

In my case, at least, it was easy. Sometimes I just wander into my FLGS, walk over to the rpg shelf, and buy the most discounted thing I can find (in fact, I did exactly that thing just the other day when I got a copy of SLA Industries for 10$ . . . I look forward to finding out what I bought in another few months or so). However, that's a fucking trivial motive. It sheds no light at all onto City Works as a book. In fact, I am clearly wasting everyone's time be even bringing it up . . .

Anyways. I could at least put myself into the hypothetical shoes of a hypothetical customer, c. 2003. "Oh, look, here's City Works, by Mike Mearls . . . a name I've never heard before. . . Oh, but it's been published by Fantasy Flight Games. I know them from such titles as Dragonstar and Midnight, I wonder what fascinating genre twist they're cooking up next. I'm sure this 'definitive d20 system resource for designing and running exciting adventures and campaigns in fantasy cities' will live up to the high standards they've set for themselves. Certainly, it will be worth the 24.95 MSRP, which is just 5 dollars less than the Player's Handbook itself."

And look, I don't want to call hypothetical me a hypothetical chump, but it would have been a bad decision, and I find it hard to believe that there were enough people making enough bad decisions to justify FFG's business strategy.

I should probably unpack that, though. What I mean here is that City Works would have been a bad purchasing decision, not necessarily that City Works is a bad book. I can, from time to time, be a bit whimsical in my use of value-judgement words like "good" or "classic" or "trash" or "bad." Sometimes, when I say a book is "bad" I mean "it's fundamentally flawed, but in an interesting way" (like Planescape or Mage: the Ascension) and sometimes I mean it's just ineptly made (eh, I don't feel like calling anyone else out today, but I'm sure an archive binge would turn up a couple). City Works is neither of those things.  It is "good."

Scare quotes because I'm using that word whimsically as well. It's good in the sense that I can read it and at no point am I going "whoa, how did this clown con his way into the job at WotC?" I get it. This is an effective audition for the role of Primate of All DMs. Mr Mearls is a skilled communicator who gives relevant, actionable GMing advice, his mechanics for things like rooftop chases and the spread of plague are reasonable, and his custom classes are all comfortably tier 4 (i.e. the tier closest to what you imagine fantasy adventurers to be like). I have my nitpicks with this book - it warns us against overusing the stunt system, lest our games lose focus on attacks and spells in favor of wild use of the scenery, which strikes me as the sort of "problem" I'd love to have - but I have no major complaints. It is a perfectly fine GM book.

Which is why it would have been such a mistake to purchase at full price, and why it's so baffling it got the green light at all. I once described the 3.5 DMG as "the quintessential book you read exactly once and then intermittently reference for all the rest of time" and City Works is exactly the same way, except that you're never going to reference it. There are parts you would reference, if they were in the DMG, but you're not going to lug an extra book to your game, or even make an extra trip to the bookshelf. It's good, but it's not that good.

Which really only leaves the random city creation rules as a reason to use City Works at all. I think they'd be fun to use once or twice, just as a goofy little project, but the cities they create are just kind of there. Like, how useful is it, exactly, to have a precise count of residential blocks in your fantasy city? Maybe there's a niche for "I want a highly detailed map, but I don't want to just bullshit it," but it strikes me as a basic weakness that DMs are expected to provide the special sauce on their own. You can create potentially thousands of technically distinct city maps, but nothing about them is distinctive or memorable. And maybe it's just that "making the game memorable" is supposed to be the DM's responsibility, but then what am I buying the book for?

I think a better approach would have been to incorporate a life-path system that tied into the history and politics stuff of the previous chapter, add an additional "wild card" table full of purely fantasy nonsense (i.e. "the city was built around a magical spring whose waters cure leprosy"), and actually give your d100 tables something close to 100 entries each (a lot of these were clearly made with another die type in mind, with exactly 10 entries that each spanned 10 percentage points or 20 entries that stepped up 5 points at a time). I feel like if the streets, blocks, and districts were associated with particular historical or political events, then that would add some sorely needed life to your randomly-generated city maps.

Overall, it's a bit of a stretch to say I "liked" City Works, but I didn't exactly dislike it either. At the end of the day, it's a GM book, and as necessary as those might be for educating and informing GMs, they're always at least one step removed from the things that make a game exciting. Running a game as a GM involves talking about the game, but preparing someone to be a GM involves talking about talking about the game, and that can't help but be at least a little bit dull. This book is no more worthy of complaint than White Wolf's "Theme" and "Mood" sections . . . but hey, I'll complain about those all day long, you have no idea. 

Ukss Contribution: This book does have one major, hilarious flaw however. The last 15 pages are just a preview of Fantasy Flight Games upcoming book "Steam and Sorcery" and I can't quite figure it out. Why would you do this? End your book with an excerpt from a much better book. Why couldn't I have found that book at my FLGS instead?  Are the rpg gods testing me?

Most of my favorite things from this book are actually from that preview section (one suggestion - a campaign setting where a high-tech kingdom of werewolves use giant adamantine chains to hold the moon in place, for infinite power), but I feel like picking something from that would be cheating. It's technically something I read in this physical volume, but it's not really part of City Works, you know.

Instead, I'll go with something that caught my eye for being a refreshing breeze of weirdness in an otherwise pretty staid history section - "The armory is the frequent target of robberies, while some folk use it to dispose of murder weapons or temporarily hide magic items. Sometimes, thieves use it to transfer stolen goods. One crook deposits the item, while his customer uses a disguise to later claim it."

This revolving-door armory genuinely delights me. I keep contemplating it, and I keep coming back to the thought, "that's the opposite of how armories are supposed to work. It'd have to be a pretty strange city to have something like that."

Lucky for me, then, that "strange" is right in my wheelhouse.