(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.