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.