(D20 Modern) Menace Manual

 The Menace Manual (JD Wiker, Eric Cagle, Matthew Sernett) is an antagonist book for d20 Modern that is divided into three distinct chapters. "Chapter One: Creatures" is a fun little romp that asks the traditional modern rpg question, "Which sci-fi movie, long-running paranormal procedural tv series, or urban fantasy novel can we shamelessly rip off to flesh out our bestiary?" "Chapter Two: GM Characters" is a bland but functional series of preconstructed characters that asks, "What real-world profession can we explain in an extremely basic way that presumes our readers are space aliens who have never encountered human culture prior to reading our book?" And "Chapter Three: Factions" is . . . a definite experience, which asks, "What extreme right-wing conspiracy theory can we present in a completely straightforward and uncritical manner that doesn't quite imply that we believe it's true in the real world but does make abundantly clear that someone, somewhere in the pipeline had detailed and extensive experience with the dregs of 90s talk radio."

Oh, man, day one of reading this book was so fun, you guys. You don't even know. I saw the Star Doppleganger entry and I was eager, nay exuberant to tell you about this Great Value the Thing (seriously, the monster entry recaps the movie with precisely minimal plausible deniability). I love monster books. I am on the record as believing they can do no wrong. And the first chapter of the Menace Manual is better than most.

Seriously. Drop Bears! Alien drones that look like "deadly Christmas ornaments!" 13- gallon containers of mysterious evil goo (the entry was very specific about the volume)! Multiple entries that were clearly aimed at getting maximum value out of the development work done on Alternity! It was all enough to make me forgive their use of the cowardly 3rd edition version of the Thought Eater (get that "undead griffon" ass design out of my face - a Thought Eater is a psychic platypus skeleton, it will always be a psychic platypus skeleton, and if you're too ashamed to just own that fact, you should never have included it in the first place).

And the second chapter was . . . fine. Did we really need separate entries for "Lawyer" and "Attourney?" Or for "Security Guard" and "Security Specialist?" Or for "Government Agent," "Government Investigator" and "Government Bureaucrat?" Maybe, maybe not. But I did have fun speculating about what level Clergy the Pope would be. The book is pretty consistent about assuming that high levels correllate to a higher position in various organizational hierarchies, but it tops out at level 10 and that level is reserved for "mature priests, ministers, and rabbis, mothers superior, and so forth."

It's towards the end of the second chapter that the cracks start to show. After it gets done with the generic NPCs, it starts to detail specifc NPCs and they're not bad exactly, but some of them felt to me like yellow flags. Obviously, the college anarchists were always going to be ideologically shallow. And I can't really say with eloquence what's wrong with having a Black hacker named "Skillz" or a short-haired feminist who calls herself "Queen B" and wears a shirt that says, "My Goddess gave birth to your GOD!" But it feels like a caricature, especially when contrasted with the survivalist militia which was presented with a . . . generous neutrality.

Like, you can compare this description of a man radicalized "after witnessing the attack on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas":

"Derek Osterman is 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 200 pounds. He wears his blonde hair in a military buzz, which frames his steely blue eyes. He boasts a scar that extends from his neck to his left cheek - a trophy that he acquired during his career in the military."

With this description of a woman radicalized after she "became immersed in the counter-culture that the university had to offer, focusing heavily on environmentalism and women's rights:"

"Queen B is a stocky woman with short, spiky brown hair who stands 5 feet tall and weighs 132 pounds. She sports numerous piercings and dresses to inflame controversy - rarely going out in public without some sort of t-shirt bearing a message."

Maybe it's the trauma of contemporary politics, but this feels like a dog whistle to me. Like maybe you could post this book to Twitter with the caption "Hey, remember when WotC was based?"

At the time, though, I tamped that feeling down. My literal note was "I guess, technically, they're in the Menace Manual."

After reading Chapter Three, though, I'm not sure my initial instinct was wrong.

The phrase "New World Order" comes from H.G. Wells but was later used by the Brandt Commission, which included President George H. Bush, Robert MacNamara and other political movers and shakers. At a 1991 meeting in Germany, they gave definition to the NWO: "a supranational authority to regulate world commerce and industry; an international organization that would control the production and consumption of oil; an international currency that would replace the dollar; a world development fund that would make funds available to free and Communist nations alike; an international police force to enforce the edicts of the New World Order."

 The quotes there are very misleading. It seems like they're quoting Bush or MacNamara or even the Brandt Report. But they're not. They're actually quoting a right wing magazine called "The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor" which appears to be offering a bad-faith paraphrase, filtered through cold-war era anti-communist and anti-internationalist paranoia, of a rather anodyne set of policy recommendations aimed at addressing economic inequality between the global north and the global south. It's hard for me to say for sure, because all these events occurred when I was a child and I have no practiced intuitions for any of the actors.

However, what I can say is that the "United Nations Elite Security Force" write-up in the Menace Manual definitely reads as if it was written by someone whose brain was marinated in right-wing propaganda. It is pitching us a campaign where the UN's secret army and its signature black helicopters have hidden bases around major American cities in order to use "interment tactics pioneered by the Nazis" when it "removes its mask of secrecy and makes its final overthrow of the world's governments."

And honestly, I'm not sure how I'm meant to cope with that. Nor with the secret conspiracy of globalists who run a prestigious news network and selectively downplay stories that would portray socialists in a negative light. Nor about the international cabal of Satan worshippers who ritually sacrifice white babies (not an exaggeration on my part, btw - "Blue-eyed, blond haired virgins are a favorite target, as are green-eyed red-haired wantons - the younger the better. Women matching these descriptions are sometimes abducted and forced to bear children, which are then sacrificed").

Part of me feels obligated to consider the broader context. This is an rpg book, and these organizations are being presented as villains in a sci-fi/fantasy campaign. "We are quoting your sincere beliefs word-for-word to create content for our silly game of make-believe" isn't exactly an endorsement. But it is an editorial choice. Also an editorial choice - the lack of a sinister corporation that pollutes the environment and uses coerced and exploited labor. Which is strange, because there is an ecoterrorist organization that is so ruthless they have no qualms about working with the KKK.

But I think what's most telling is the book's presentation of the CIA. Yes, the "Factions" chapter does have some largely factual, encyclopedia-style write-ups of real government organizations - the DoD, the FBI, FEMA, and the CIA. 

Gather Information DC 25: "After [being] charged with spying on US citizens and attempting to overthrow foreign governments during the 1970s, the CIA made a concerted effort to act within the boundaries of its mandate."

Research DC 25: "Making matters worse, news leaked that the CIA had funded arms sales to Iran and Nicaraguan rebeles - despite laws and presidential orders forbidding them to do so. This led some to believe that the CIA was carrying out its own agendas of doing what was 'best for America,' whether America wanted it or not."

And those two bits of lore are the only negative things the book has to say about the CIA (okay, there's also a suggestion that a plot could revolve around "rogue agents" trying to control the government through targeted political assassinations, but it's only a hypothetical). The other government sections are even more deferential to their subjects.

(Oh, "Some people believe that the FBI routinely taps telephone lines and implants bugs in people's houses." Why do "some people believe" that, Menace Manual? Hmm?)

And maybe it's neither surprising, nor that big a deal that a Wizards of the Coast product leans conservative, but it does convincingly argue against the "globalist news media, satanic ritual abuse, and UN black helicopters are just the late-90s conspiracy theory genre" theory. Because there was a big drop of MKUltra documents released via FOIA in 2001 and if you're really fucking serious about doing conspiracy stuff in 2003 why wouldn't you put the MKUltra stuff in your fucking CIA entry!?

Although, I must now confess that all of my griping about Chapter Three has been a mere prelude to the thing I really wanted to talk about. I did it to establish a preemptive explanation for why I'm unwilling to give the next thing the benefit of the doubt.

The description of Al-Jambiya, "a terrorist organization modeled roughly on Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network" probably crosses the line into genuine hate speech.

Now, I don't want to be entirely insensitive to the national mood c. 2003.  If you're writing an action-espionage thriller in America at that particular point in history, it's probably inevitable that you have some kind of al Qaeda analogue. Especially if it's an rpg. "I'm going to stop the next 9-11" was a common and sympathetic fantasy.

Where Menace Manual crosses the line into "not cool" is with the line, "The members of Al-Jambiya operate in small cells of no more than five men, but they frequently work with (and receive financial support from) sympathetic pro-Muslim groups."

Why, exactly is a group of "over 60 murderers and rapists [who] traveled to America under false identities" getting support from generically "pro-Muslim groups." What is "pro-Muslim" about al-Jambiya's activities?

Later, this is clarified with a weakly not-all-Muslims statement, "Al-Jambiya's meager funding comes from charitable Muslim families (the majority of whom have no idea what al-Jambiya uses the money for."

But honestly, that mild qualifier isn't really doing it for me. A "majority" can mean as little as 51%. I'd really feel a lot more comfortable if the book understood that "Muslim" as an identity, belonged almost exclusively to non-terrorists and, in fact, that terrorists are a vanishingly rare aberration. Maybe the PCs could Gather Information to that effect.

"DC 35: The hero can learn the names of local Muslim families who have welcomed 'relatives' to their homes in the month before a killing spree began (Note: Eighty percent of these leads turn out to be for legitimate family gatherings. Only about 5% of the others are connected to al-Jambiya operatives.)"

And look, if I were inclined to be generous, I could entertain the argument that the book is saying that someone who does the maximum level of legwork to narrow down the suspect pool (you'll likely be in the late teens before you get a +20 modifier to the check) would still only have a 1% chance (1/20th of 1/5th) of finding a genuine al-Jambiya terrorist through racial profiling, but taken literally that's a) still an asinine mechanic ("with your Holmsean deductive abilities, you may now roll a d100 to determine if this has been a wild goose chase") and b) something they could have just left out entirely.

It's likely, maybe even probable, that whoever wrote this sincerely believes "not all Muslims," but they sure as hell didn't know how to say it persuasively.

The funny thing about this section, though, is that if you wanted to read it with wacky literalism, it almost comes across as pro al-Qaeda. That's because, despite the fact that al-Jambiya was meant to be a fictional stand-in for al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda is still canon in this universe. Jabbar Husam al Din's backstory is that he was a regular, largely secular serial killer who switched to religiously motivated serial killing after he killed an "immodestly dressed" businesswoman and felt strangely more righteous about it. (so . . . yeah) After this realization, he sought out Osama bin Laden to pitch him on a bespoke murder version of terrorism and "bin Laden seemed faintly disgusted by al Din's proposal . . . Though bin Laden promised to consider the idea, al Din felt that al-Qaeda simply didn't match his vision and determined to start his own anti-American terrorist faction."

And I shouldn't laugh, because the whole section was intensely Islamophobic, but I could never have come up with the idea that bin Laden would reject a potential recruit because he was an over-eager weirdo who threatened to throw off the vibes. The intended effect was probably meant to be "Whoa! These al-Jambiya guys are even worse than al-Qaeda." But it just comes across as making international terrorism seem like this clique-driven hipster subculture. "Yeah, 9-11 was kind of cool . . . if you like that mainstream sell-out shit. I used to like bin Laden too, until I found out what a phony he was."

I do, however, count this as more evidence that Chapter Three was written by Bush voters for Bush voters, because it's like the author didn't really understand why you wouldn't want to use al-Qaeda, directly, as a villain (it'd be too easy to accidentally lean on anti-Muslim tropes) and so they wrote an organization that was technically different but which stepped on every rake they'd have avoided if they just left the concept out entirely.

Overall, I enjoyed Menace Manual right up to the point where it got overtly ideological, but the ideological parts were some of the most intensely uncomfortable reading I've done in awhile. Like, no kidding, it's an open question if the conspiracy-theory literature that inspired Chapter Three had already been scrubbed of direct mentions of the Jews by the time the authors consulted it or if that was something the authors had to do themselves. I don't necessarily want to get mad at the book, because I understand that there's a historic tradition of "ha, ha, look at what these conspiracy freaks believe, let's all gather round and laugh at them some more" but that really wasn't the energy I was picking up. I think, if you're going to set a roleplaying game in the Alex Jones extended universe, you have an active obligation to be more punk about it.

Ukss Contribution: I'm going to sit this book out. If I lean into my most generous interpretation of the book (it was written center-right conservatives who dismiss the radical right as harmless cranks and so appropriate their language for a silly rpg without truly understanding the identitarian subtext) then it's probably on the bubble of what I'm willing to call "evil" but even if I extend that grace, it's undeniable that there were parts of the book that made me feel gross after reading them. It's a shame, though, because I did really enjoy Chapter One.