(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.