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.
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