(Shadowrun 3e) Brainscan

WARNING: Heavy spoilers for Brainscan.

Metaplot is kind of a double-edged sword. Brainscan is a well-constructed mini-campaign with varied challenges, meaningful stakes, and a tone that covers the full range of the cyberpunk experience - from cynically humorous to full-on for-profit capitalist body horror. And that is made possible by the groundwork laid by Shadowrun's metaplot. The AI, Deus, took over the Renraku Arcology and in the process created the opportunity for a hundred different shadowruns. But metaplot gives with one hand and takes with the other. Now that it's time to close this chapter of Deus' story, by inviting the PCs to participate in a series of adventures that revolve around the resistance's attempts to shut him down, there is a ruthless inexorableness to the book's canon ending - Deus is not destroyed by the kill codes, but rather downloads portions of his code into the brains of his victims, who will gather on the anniversary of his "death" and reassemble him in the Matrix.

To some degree, this is inevitable. In order for the next thing to happen, the next thing needs to happen. But when you take these events and play them out in a living campaign, it makes for some pretty dubious adventure design. There's a point near the end where the PCs have just emerged from cyberspace and have every reason to believe that Deus is trapped on a hard drive. While they are still getting their bearings, some Renraku loyalists (specifically the scientists who helped create Deus in the first place) barge into the room, grab the drive and basically go "thanks for the assist, we'll take it from here" but like in a really mean and rude way (the exact dialogue ends with Sherman Huang shooting the body of the late Renraku CEO, dropping a gun into the lap of one of the PC's NPC allies, and saying to one of his lackeys, "if they're smart, they'll lay low and keep their mouths shut. Otherwise they'll have an entire megacorporation after them for kidnapping and murdering a CEO.")

Maybe it's a personal hang up where I get irrationally angry at smug bullies, but my finely-honed GMing instincts tell me that this is a prelude to a fight scene. I figure, 16D stun damage from dumpshock or not, if any PC is conscious enough to witness this denouement, they are conscious enough to unload a clip of automatic fire at the traitors. Even in a perfectly static story like a movie or a novel, Ronin would have picked up the gun Huang tossed in his lap and put a half-dozen rounds in the hard drive. Or, at least, he would have if I were writing it. Some evil scientist is walking away with the AI that killed and tortured thousands of people, and maybe you're not strong enough to stop them, but you can sure as hell ruin the data.

So it's a little weird that the book treats this as just an inevitable part of its climax. "Any attempts to pursue them and retrieve the Mousetrap will be difficult. . . the arcology will be bursting with rampaging drones, escaping residents, shell-shocked Banded and invading military troops. This chaos should be more than enough to distract and confound any pursuers."

I don't know, though. It seems like all of that would be more of an obstacle for a bunch of corporate executives and data scientists than it would for a team of hardened mercenary criminals.

Although, maybe I'm just running afoul of a mismatch between genre and medium. Deus' original designer (apparently) walking away with his source code, stealing credit for saving the arcology (when it was actually the PCs who rescued him from Deus), and being ideally positioned to be promoted to the next CEO of Renraku is a classic bleak cyberpunk ending. Terrible things have happened and the rich people responsible for them will not only escape justice, they will thrive, whereas the working schlubs who cleaned up their mess will have to live in fear. Because everything they did to save the day is potentially blackmail material and it's only a matter of time before the powerful will want to clean up that loose end.

It is perhaps a fitting comeuppance for Huang that Deus isn't actually in the hard drive. He used his vast intellect to reprogram the purge routine and download himself somewhere completely unprecedented. But whatever satisfaction there is in this ending (and it's not much, because Deus is awful) is undermined by the fact that there's no way for the PCs to see it.

This is another case of a medium informing a message. The double-twist is only communicated in the book, not the game (though it's sure to come up in a future book because the metaplot must march on) and even if it were, how do you make a game out of "your actions were ultimately pointless, the villains will just start up their work exactly where they left off, the system will always protect itself?" I want my players to look me in the eye and say, "Thank you, John, that story we told together was cynical and miserable and ended on the perfect downer note. We were all really impressed by the way you absolutely sold our lack of agency." How do I do that?

Maybe I should run Brainscan in Chuubo's . . .  Genre XP Action: Take a beat to experience despair at the unmanageable vastness of your own socioeconomic context.

That was, of course, a 1% joke, but it touches on something I think is important in rpg design. Successful adventures are rewarded with treasure and xp, but there's often a more powerful intrinsic reward in simply completing the adventure successfully. And this works out great in genres like epic fantasy, space opera, and 4-color superheroes. The players are fighting their hardest to make a happy ending, but so are their characters, and so is the world. Star Wars is supposed to end with the defeat of the Empire. But there are other types of story to tell. 

In a cyberpunk story, the characters are fighting just to survive and may feel a certain degree of terror at the prospect of being responsible for a happy ending because such things are not supposed to be possible and the world will punish them for challenging the system. But the players in a cyberpunk rpg still have that fundamental rpg instinct. They are trying for a happy ending. Not necessarily consciously. I'm sure there are a lot of Shadowrun players out there who, if you asked them if they'd prefer for Brainscan to end with Deus destroyed, Sherman Huang facing justice, and Renraku having its charter stripped and its assets seized as reparations to the arcology victims, would say, "no, obviously not. That's not remotely the setting I signed up to play in." And yet, when the time comes, that belief will be nowhere near strong enough to stop them from fighting to get the Mousetrap back.

So how do you make getting bushwacked by your money-grubbing erstwhile allies feel like a reward?  How do you make the bleakness and the futility feel like a successful conclusion to the story?

Shadowrun's solution is to not even try. Whenever the story needs a betrayal or a setback, the event happens, regardless of what the PCs do. For example, earlier in the story, the PCs are present when Deus' minions try to capture Sherman Huang. "If the Banded are driven off without capturing Huang, they manage to do so a short time later." And I can't really disagree with the approach - I find it best when things that the PCs are going to object to happen off-screen - but it makes me a little uncomfortable to tell a story about the characters lacking agency by making sure that the players really do lack agency.

Now, forget everything I just said, because there's another perspective - if you, as a GM, are good enough at selling the highs and lows, then a lot of the time the players will experience a railroad as a rollercoaster (i.e. fundamentally the same thing, but really exciting). There's an art to it. You can't ever let the players know you're cheating, but you do it by hiding your cheating in the ambiguity of their blind spots. Then, when the unavoidable thing happens, the reaction is not "this would have happened no matter what," but "oh no, why didn't we think to cover that blind spot." There's actually a good example of that in this adventure. Deus needs to track the PCs to a certain location and the book suggests several ways he could do that. The method he uses is always going to be one of the ones the PCs think to look for plus a redundant back-up plan that uses one of the ones the PCs overlooked.

(Sometimes you get a group of players whose take away from these tricks is "we should be hypervigilant and spend a long time at the table trying to cover every contingency" but that's really a sign that you're playing with a group that would prefer a sandbox).

Overall, I think Brainscan is a fine set of adventures, but if I ran it for a group, they would almost certainly break the plot. Which isn't even remotely a flaw in most adventure modules (because they would otherwise need to be 1000 pages long to cover every possible contingency), but does give me pause in the context of Shadowrun because I just know that the conclusion to this metaplot-driven adventure is going to be the setup for the next metaplot-driven adventure and it's a weird sensation to realize that you're inevitably going to obsolete a book that hasn't even been written yet (c. 2000, my understanding is that System Failure picks up where this one left off).

Ukss Contribution: One of the intrusion countermeasures in Deus' ultraviolet server (a Matrix environment indistinguishable from the real world because it's a weird setting premise that the most computationally intensive processes take place in high-resolution metaphors) is a nest of chromatic snakes. The book doesn't go into as much detail about these creatures as I'd like, but I thought it was a neat image.

(d20 Modern) Urban Arcana

Oscar Wilde once said, "It is absurd to divide people into 'good' and 'bad.' People are either charming or tedious." Urban Arcana (Eric Cagle, Jeff Grubb, David Noonan, Bill Slavicsek, Stan!) is technically a good book, but I didn't find it particularly charming.

Let's start with the good then. On a technical level, it is well executed. Ideas are communicated effectively. The prose is breezy and engaging. The book as a whole delivers a lot of value - new classes, new equipment, new creatures, new spells and a series of sample adventures that work equally as well as an introduction to the world or as a standalone mini-campaign. It was rare for a section of the book to feel like it was dragging on beyond its welcome (the GM advice chapter did have two separate and redundant "Pacing" sections, but that's more an ironically funny error than something I need to complain about). All-in-all, it's an exceptionally useable reference guide that was made to a professional standard.

And I think it's that very professionalism that is fueling my ambivalence about the book. Urban Arcana feels to me like it exists as part of a product line. It is almost oppressively inevitable.

This is most apparent in the fact that half the book is devoted to generic d20 Modern content. The GM advice chapter runs us through the process of designing an adventure, stringing adventures into a campaign, and assigning character rewards at the end of a story. The equipment chapter ends with a bunch of new not-especially-fantasy-themed vehicles and the Locations chapter details mostly mundane floorplan maps and setting agnostic urban districts.

And of the stuff that was plausibly Urban Arcana-specific and not just core overflow, about half of that was just the D&D 3.0 SRD ported over with minimal modifications. Oh, wow, because they might be carried over by refugees from Shadow we're getting stats for both the glaive and the guisarme? I can only assume the reason we didn't get the glaive-guisarme is because someone at Wizards of the Coast chickened out of a bet.

But I think the worst part of the obviously-just-D&D stuff is that it's often used without any thought about how it's going to fit into d20 Modern's fictional and mechanical framework. For example, the 3.X half orc has famously suffered an unjust attribute modifier spread: +2 Strength, -2 Intelligence, -2 Charisma. In D&D, the authors attempt to justify this by saying that Strength is so much more valuable than the other attributes that a +2 is balanced by a total of -4 in other areas. And that's somewhat plausible. Unless you're playing a spellcaster or a crossbow rogue, you're going to make hundreds of times more melee attacks than you are Intelligence or Charisma-based skill checks.

However, in the modern world those calculations play out a bit differently. For one thing, most of the fighting is going to be done with guns, rendering Strength a bit redundant. For another, talking your way out of trouble or making clever use of your skills (of which, the half-orc has fewer than almost anyone) are much bigger parts of the sort of stories you're going to want to tell. 

It's not a huge deal, on the whole, because the thoughtlessly-used old stuff is mixed in with new material that does seem to have at least some thought put into it. I liked the Synchronicity spell, which "subtly rearranges reality so that the subject isn't inconvenienced by the minor delays in modern life. It's especially useful in car chases, where you're guaranteed to hit every green light and the person you're chasing/fleeing from is not. Or the magical Armor of Sponsorship, which has all the stats of regular magic armor, but a lower purchase price because it's festooned with ads. It doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense from a setting or mechanical perspective. It functions like an armor special quality, which means someone had to put it there, and no one who knows about Shadow is going to want to advertise like that . . . but at least it's an attempt to bring the two genres (modern and fantasy) together and the overall effect is kind of funny.

In a way, though, the Armor of Sponsorship is emblematic of Urban Arcana's whole approach to blending our real world with high fantasy - a superficial juxtaposition of elements that seems to actively spurn coherent worldbuilding. Sometimes, as with the Armor, it works despite itself. Mostly, though, it doesn't.

What it feels like to me is being near someone who has unknowingly drank a ton of non-alcoholic beer, and subsequently acts extremely, performatively drunk because that's what happens when you drink a lot of beer. "Ooh, look at us - we're doing fantasy but it's in the modern world! Whee! Has anyone ever done that before?!"

It's not that the modern-day fantasy is an after-thought or an affectation, per se. There are plenty of things, especially in the Organizations chapter, that seem like they could be elements in building a setting. You've got Draco Industries, which is run by an Efreeti who is disguised as a human (whose pseudonym just happens to be "Franz Draco"). Or St Cuthbert's House, a vigilante church based on a Catholic-inspired Greyhawk deity that completely fails to address the elephant in the room re: real Catholicism.

The problem is more that these elements are used without any apparent vision. This is not a setting that parodies high fantasy by bringing dungeon-crawling tropes into the real world. Nor does it comment on the modern world by depicting its fantasy creatures with brutal realism. It is not speculative fiction that explores how the world might change if magic were introduced. It's not an epic fantasy that spans multiple worlds, allowing for parallel stories in both realities. It's not even cinematic trash entertainment, that favors pointless spectacle over sophisticated characters and themes. It's just D&D stuff added to modern stuff, and even the 30-page-long GMing chapter completely failed to make a genre out of that.

The root cause is probably the choice to make Shadow kind of unreal in the context of the setting. Travel between worlds is entirely one-way. Creatures of Shadow enter our world, but nothing from our world (including the newly arrived creatures of Shadow) can travel to the other world. The only evidence that this world exists at all is the fact that creatures keep washing up from there. This is further exacerbated by the fact that Creatures of Shadow have vague and fragmentary memories about their world of origin. Even the basics of geography and history are forgotten. So this world that we can only infer exists also has no verifiable properties. The fact that things of Shadow conceal their existence by fading away when destroyed and confabulating plausible-sounding memories for uninitiated witnesses, only adds insult to injury.

Taken together, these properties of Shadow are laser-targeted to destroy any broader worldbuilding before it begins. Urban Arcana is a setting perpetually in its day-0 status quo. There are no conflicts among shadow immigrants that began in the old country. There's no sense that the magical world is in any danger of capitalist neo-colonialism driven by the real-world's advanced technology. You can't even guarantee that people directly affected by the magical world will be able to remember it the next day.

The overall effect is something timorous and bland, that fails to rise to the level of either of its source genres. You could probably use its semi-generic rules to power your own take on real-world-meets- fantasy, but that's going to require a level of conceptual work the book absolutely did not prepare you for ("make the GM do the work" isn't necessarily a fatal flaw in an rpg supplement, but if it's going to be abstract, it needs to speak towards abstract concerns). I can't even really say that there's a decent campaign setting underneath the pitch. The pitch is all there is, and it's not enough on its own.

Ukss Contribution: But I don't want to end on a dour note. It's not that the book is bad. There's good and interesting material here. Only the larger context is tedious. I mentioned a couple of things I liked in the main body, but there was also Vaporex, the name brand Gaseous Form potion or the Umbrella of Feather Falling or the Engines of Infernal Speed, which will shoot flames out the back of your car while giving it a speed boost.

My favorite, though, was the Muse Statuette. A small statue that can become a beautiful miniature woman who will "provide suggestions" about your art. As someone who does his fair share of writing (and more than his fair share of criticism), this is just an absolutely hilarious thing for a person to own. If someone bought one for me as a punishment, I'd probably deserve it.