Fading Suns d20

Having just finished Fading Suns d20 (Bill Bridges, Andrew Greenberg, Andy Harmon), I'm left with one essential, burning, massively disrespectful question: Is this Dune?

I don't think it is, but when I ask myself the complementary question, "Is this not Dune?"  the "yes" sticks in my throat a bit more than is entirely seemly. But then, I could swap out Dune for Warhammer 40k and my dilemma is essentially unchanged. So I guess, by the transitive property, my opinion is dogshit.

"Fading Suns is basically Dune," said the guy who also thought Warhammer 40k is basically Dune.

I mean, it's medieval-European-style feudalism in space. There are sword duels that are made more complicated by energy shields. It takes place after a golden age of technology, that people destroyed in a religious war. The broad strokes are very similar.

There are nuances, though. The Emperor in this universe is politically beholden the Patriarch of the Space Orthodox Church (although, to one such as myself, untutored in the aesthetic nuances of schism-era Christianity, the Universal Church looks like standard-issue Space Catholicism) and is neither a holy figure like in Warhammer 40k nor an independent secular ruler like in Dune. The vibe surrounding the forbidden heretical technology of the prior age of galactic expansion feels a bit different. Like, in Dune it feels like society has zeroed in on its preferred technology level and locked it down, and in Warhammer 40k, it feels like nobody knows what the fuck they're doing and technology is used or not used according to a theory of mysticism that bears no resemblance to any recognizable earthly phenomenon. But Fading Suns has a church that is broadly against "technology" in general but will cynically play politics with what is and is not forbidden and there remains in society just enough technical expertise for this hypocrisy to really land. The technology that is vital for the maintenance of an interstellar empire is exempt from prohibition, so long as it is the noble houses who are using it, because of course it works that way, and everyone who's serious about power knows the score.

But the biggest difference is probably in the handling of non-human intelligent species. In Dune, there weren't any, and Warhammer 40k is all "suffer not the xeno to live," but Fading Suns is like, "White guilt? Never heard of it. Where would you get a silly idea like that? Ha, ha, ha, HA, HA!!!!" And you can tell they're not trivializing the issue, exactly, but they are very publicly working through it in a way that is uncomfortable to witness.

It's probably intentional. At least, I have no reason to believe that the authors were naive enough to have the human star empire expand to inhabited planets, displace the native species with aggressively-spreading colonies, render many of these worlds uninhabitable to their indigenous populations via terraforming, then have the scant survivors confined to "reservations" (the book's word, not mine) and somehow not draw the connection to real-world colonialism. In fact, the first time this happens in the canon history, the incident gets its own heading and the text directly focuses on how unjust it all was and how sad people were about it after the fact. So I'm inclined to say it's not an accident.

Also not an accident - the dozen times it happened in subsequent years without anyone mounting effective resistance (or even registering a sustained objection). This bad thing keeps happening, and we know you know it's bad, because you keep framing it as if it were bad . . . but is this a theme? Are you saying space feudalism is bad? 

It doesn't feel like the book is saying that, at least not consistently. The people who oppose the empire are "pirates" or "barbarians" (and hoo boy, is that term as loaded as it sounds - the book helpfully suggests some real-world ethnicities to look to for inspiration - "They can be Viking types, Mongol types, or Islamic types.") And there's not really a sympathetic rebel, outcast, or peasant-rights organization. 

I think what's going on is some combination of soft 90s liberalism and an understandable, if somewhat misguided, desire to have fun with the premise of the game (medieval Europe in space) instead of immediately deconstructing it in the core. It leads to a weird situation where, since the default assumption is that you'll be playing aristocrats and/or members of their entourage (because peasants are too thoroughly oppressed to adventure freely in this universe), you kind of wind up accept that their viewpoints and values are neutral. Aw shucks, those aliens keep getting very nearly wiped out and forced onto reservations . . . if only there were a nicer way to take over their planets. And gosh, who would want to attack us? Barbarians, no doubt. They're probably just jealous. By the way, did you know that the priests of our oppressive technophobic religion usually have a Good alignment? "Alas, a few are evil." But "most of them are good."

And I have to take a moment here to crow about being completely right about alignment as a mechanic. Whether priests of the religion that supports the rule of the nobles who enslave the peasants and genocide the aliens can be good or are bound to be evil is a complex and subtle question. The average priest has no power to change the system (at least not without running afoul of the violence it uses to maintain itself) and they do dedicate most of their life to helping people (ministering wounds, tutoring basic literacy, pleading for clemency, etc), but the aggregate effect of the system as a whole is deeply harmful, and that can't happen without the active participation of the priests at every level, even (or maybe especially) the lowest. Perhaps "good" and "evil" are reductive labels, that obscure as much as they enlighten. Maybe we are all just trying to navigate a complex world, and a human landscape that is shaped as much by culture and circumstances as by individual agency, and we should extend each other grace, because morality is a maze (but not too much, because that maze has a lot of obvious dead ends). 

Or, you know, you could add a tag to the character's stat block that clears up that ambiguity and lets everyone know the official position of the editor. 

I am being, of course, a massive grump about this, to an almost unforgiveable degree. It is entirely missing the point of a romantic epic to start agitating against the enabling social structures behind all these beautifully jobless aristocrats and their good-natured bootlickers. Space feudalism lets me play as a futuristic techno-knight in gleaming ceramsteel armor. I can paint a coat of arms on my spaceship (or, at least, my squire can round up an artisan to do it for me). I shall pitch woo to my courtly love and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with my comrades against the deadly symbiote threat. 

I get it. I promise. I guess I'm being such a cynical pill about it because here in the real world, I am on my last nerve re: authoritarianism's bullshit and stuff like the space colonialism and the "barbarian" vs "civilized" dichotomy and the peasants being hopelessly oppressed for hundreds of years piggybacked on that to get under my skin. Fading Suns real sin is just being a perfectly serviceable roleplaying setting that never quite connected with the part of my brain where spectacle overcomes my knee-jerk criticism.

In an attempt to redeem myself, I will now engage in some thoughtful, careful criticism - I could not find any rule in this book for how psychic or priestly theurgist characters regain wyrd points (mp, basically). I'm pretty certain that there was supposed to be a daily refresh, because whenever powers are discussed, they are spoken of as if they were something you could use every day. But this is not, strictly speaking, a foregone conclusion. D20 Modern had Action Points, which only refreshed at level up. 

Other than that, I'd say the system works fairly well. I liked the new category of feats, Social Feats. The Noble, Guilder, and Priest classes get virtually no other features, but there are enough new feats that it should be pretty easy for even high-level characters to feel distinct, and as much as they might feel drastically underpowered in combat and utility compared to the D&D analogues like Soldier (Fighter), Knave (Rogue), and Living Weapon (Monk), it does feel like they were aimed at 3e's neglected interaction niche. 

Overall, I liked this book. My favorite part was, embarrassingly, learning the canon ending for the Emperor of the Fading Suns video game, but I can always appreciate a fully fleshed out new world with more lore than can comfortably fit in a core book's pagecount. I don't think I'll ever run an rpg set in this universe, but next time I play the video game, I'm going to be able to enjoy it on a deeper level than I ever have in the past.

Ukss Contribution: Like most rpg splats, the five noble houses fall into some pretty basic archetypes. Li Halan is the religious house, Decados is the sneaky house, Hawkwood is the honorable house, al-Malik is the technological house and the Hazat are the military house.

It's this last one in particular that interests me. Normally, I have nothing but scorn for "the warrior guys" but there was a detail about the Hazat that took my scorn and turned it back against me. It is such a purely concentrated form of everything I dislike about the warrior ethos that I can't help but admire its nastily satirical edge.

"When the Hazat begin their military training at around five, they are trained for a command position. During the Emperor Wars it was not uncommon for 12-year-old Hazat knights to lead forces of hardened veterans."

The arrogance. The cruelty. The uncalled-for institutional humiliation of adult professionals as an inseparable part of a much greater war crime. This is the sort of depiction that aristocrats deserve.

(Shadowrun 3e) Sprawl Survival Guide

 The Sprawl Survival Guide is exactly the sort of science fiction content I always claim to want, a ground-level view of the most excruciating minutiae imaginable - what is it like to buy a bus ticket, how do people shop for groceries (and the more you can imply about the extant agricultural infrastructure, the better), what are the schools like, how do people consume popular entertainment (and yes, I will take the behind-the-scenes industry shop talk in the process), what is the current state of health care regulations, etc and suchforth, et al ad infinitum. . .

And I was absolutely right to want that, because the Sprawl Survival Guide was positively delightful. I feel completely vindicated right now.

Although, it would be a smidge dishonest for me to act like I learned something new here. I first read this book 20 years ago, and I distinctly remember, 18 or 19 years ago, writing a forum post to the effect of, "This is one of my all-time favorite rpg supplements. I love how it goes over the picayune details of Shadowrun's culture and society. Liking this sort of thing is going to be a part of my personality now."

The question I have to deal with now is whether the book holds up. Is it still one of my favorites? And that's a bit of a thinker.

I still very much enjoy this type of book. And of the books I own, Sprawl Survival Guide is the one most like this type of book. I appreciate and respect its curation of subject matter (for the most part, some of the stuff was a little too "this is criminal information, directed at criminals" for my taste, undercutting the book's best feature - offering a rare glimpse into the mindset of Shadowrun's normies). I enjoyed reading it, even the parts I think should have gone into a different supplement.

But I've changed. My interests nowadays trend more towards the esoteric or, failing that, towards performative spectacle. I still really want this type of book, but I want it to be about Eclipse Phase's chromosphere-dwelling Surya, or Champoor, the Nighted City from Exalted. 

Which is to say, Sprawl Survival Guide remains a top Shaowrun supplement, but Shadowrun as a whole has slipped down my list of top rpg settings. Not through any fault of its own, mind you, but just because (3rd edition at least) is a vision of the future that feels . . . aged.

Of course, this is the inevitable fate of all sci-fi, and I wouldn't necessarily say that Sprawl Survival Guide has aged particularly badly.  Yeah, it does the thing that all fin de millenaire sci-fi does where it gets the shape of our basic information infrastructure wrong (somewhere along the line, I've lost the ability to relate culturally to pirate television broadcasts, despite the fact that they were objectively badass), and one of the in-character sections is narrated by "a big-shot travel agent," and for some reason it thinks that the only reason our major railways would have to avoid switching to monorails is that they're "dinosaurs." But except for the monorail thing (which, I'm sure, even in 2003, informed people would have told you was wrong) that's just standard retro-future stuff. 

Ironically, it's the stuff they get right that's more alienating. Online shopping, the internet of things, your personal electronics spying on you for major corporations - this is stuff that used to feel like sci-fi sizzle and in now just completely mundane.  And that feeling is something that this book's particular brand of "everyday sci-fi" can't quite recover from. At one point, one of the Shadowland commentators is interrupting an IoT sales pitch to talk about corporate spyware and another commentor, called Skeptic, replies "Oh, please. There's a limit, you know. Next you'll be telling me the faucet dispenses microscopic tracking devices with my water."

And it's like, one thing if you're talking about fanciful day-after-tomorrow technology "oh, they think the microphone in their futuristic voice-activated refrigerator is going to act as a de facto surveillance device and report back to the manufacturer to help them assemble a more accurate advertising profile, Skeptic is right, that's too paranoid. People would never stand for it." But it's a conspiracy theory that hits differently against the backdrop of our everyday reality. There's some compelling anecdotal evidence that this does happen and the corporations' defense is just . . . that the behavioral profiling they do through other data streams is so uncannily accurate that they don't need to listen to your microphone. So Skeptic is dismissing a theory that, best case scenario, is only slightly more cynical than confirmed reality.

Which isn't a great place for a cyberpunk setting to be. Another pertinent example is the section on health insurance. This book was written pre-ACA, and so technically they have a slightly more cyberpunk healthcare system than us, based purely on recapitulating their present, but they don't properly capture the bleak horror of the health insurance industry. "Sometimes the corp grunts don't have it so good either - health insurance companies have everybody by the short hairs and they know it. They're not supposed to cancel policies when people get sick with something expensive, but they've been known to do it."

Yeah, that's cynical. Yeah, it paints a picture of ruthless capitalist excess. But you left out the part where they use an algorithm to automatically deny claims and then have a corrupt doctor sign off on those denials, forcing the sick and dying to pursue costly and stressful legal action to avoid being sent into bankruptcy, despite doing everything "the system" told them was necessary. Or the part where medical expenses are the driving force behind corporate America's hijacking of the generational transfer of wealth, forcing the vast majority of people into a permanent state of economic precarity.

And this normally the part where I take a step back from being so cynical and ask myself if I really want an rpg supplement to get into this kind of political quagmire. But this time, I think . . . the answer might be . . . yes?

These are, in fact, some of the game's core ideas. There is a real thematic tension between "corporate espionage in the form of your Alexa recording everything you say" and "corporate espionage in the form of heavily-armed mercenaries busting into a competitor's office and rummaging through their computer files."

Or between "a blue-collar worker delays seeking medical attention for a suspicious-looking mole (because they can afford the copay if it turns out to be nothing, but not the deductible and out-of-pocket if it turns out to need expensive tests and/or treatment, but if it's nothing, it would be better to wait for it to clear up on its own, and thus the financially responsible move would be to wait until it's clear that it's not nothing before getting the doctor involved)" and "half-conversion cyborg gets elective surgery to install retractable roller skates into their feet."

It's funny. After reading Target: Wasteland, I mused about the possibility of seeing the Shadowrun setting from the perspective of the winners, and this book is as close as we've gotten, but it has also made apparent to me the fact that shadowrunners are not the losers. They're actually in a poorly-defined in-between place (if only there were some metaphor to properly capture this state of not-quite-light and not-quite-dark) where they're functionally powerless next to the unaccountable capital that employs them, but, as the no-questions-asked hatchet men of the elite, they probably make enough money to avoid the most depressing parts of the system.

Which, incidentally, makes the lifestyle mechanics a little dubious. Not entirely bad, mind you, just . . . of questionable utility. Like, what's the story purpose of allowing PCs to play at the "Street" or "Squatter" (or even "Low," really) level when they're walking around with half a million nuyen in chrome (or a level of magical talent that would let the write their own ticket at any university in the country or special-forces-level combat and infiltration skills, etc)? Obviously, mechanically, it's because the player wants to save money for more widgets and they don't mind the GM describing their character's lodgings as a slum. But when it comes to the narrative . . . you can tell the first part of a "fall from grace" or "risen from humble beginnings" story, but you can only stay there for so long before it looks like a stagnant character arc.

Luckily, this book provides a pretty good hack to the lifestyle rules. It separates character lifestyle into six separate tracks - Area (i.e. the quality of the neighborhood), Security, Entertainment, Furnishings, Space, and Comforts. This reintroduces a lot of the bookkeeping that the Lifestyle system was originally intended to abstract away, but has the advantage of allowing for more nuanced depictions of a character's lifestyle. Now, you can live in a massive warehouse in the commercial district (high Space, medium Area, low everything else. Or a cramped downtown apartment in a building with a doorman (high Area and Security, low Space). Or, more relevantly to the discussion at hand, in an absolutely swinging pad in the middle of the old neighborhood. You know, real gangster shit.

I think, from a fictional perspective, that's probably the sweet spot for shadowrunners - successful criminals with a lot of cash and a lot of swag, but no ability to permanently buy themselves a ticket off the grind. It doesn't make much sense to me for them to be doing this out of true desperation, at least not more than once or twice. If running the shadows buys you the same lifestyle as a cashier at Stuffer Shack, you're probably better off trying to work at Stuffer Shack.

I mean, I'm sure there are SINless criminals who find their way to that economic niche - muggers of opportunity, petty drug dealers, etc - but I'm not sure they'd make for an exciting roleplaying game. You could potentially do some pretty funny satire along these lines - make minimum wage, no benefits, getting shot at for 60 hours a week, on behalf of the world's richest people - but the line as a whole would have to lean into it more.

That's kind of a weakness of Shadowrun, as a game. It's steeped in genre. It exists because it was fun to imagine mixing genres. But it never really embraces genre as a mode of play. To wit - the reason shadowrunners are special, the thing that carves them out a criminal niche and makes them valuable to the megacorporations, is the fact that they lack System Identification Numbers. They are the ultimate in deniable assets, untraceable by the system because they were never officially registered as existing at all. And yeah, okay, that's a good near-future thriller trope . . . or it would be, if the game rules didn't make getting fake IDs a huge pain in the ass. And even if you get one, they're in constant danger of being discovered (like, seriously, it's a coin flip each and every time someone checks your ID, except that the high end of character ID ratings overlaps with the average rating of identity verification devices). 

Getting on plane requires a SIN. Shadowrunners going international is an intended mode of play (methods of travel get a whole chapter to themselves). Getting arrested at the airport should be an extremely rare way of ending an adventure. This all adds up to the notion that acquiring and using a fake ID is a casual activity for a career criminal. Just hop on down to the crime mall and buy yourself some fake passports in bulk, because you never want to use the same one on two different jobs. But that's not how the game works, because its fundamental design philosophy does not allow things to be simple just because it'd be convenient for the story. If something seems hard (like fooling a sophisticated computer network with fabricated data) then the rules have to reflect that it's hard.

Oh, wait, I was building to something before I got distracted. Sprawl Survival Guide is the closest we get to seeing Shadowrun's version of capitalism from the perspective of an average person, and it's pretty great, but it doesn't quite understand the opportunity and the responsibility it's been given. This is where the rubber meets the road, re: the setting's overall cyberpunk satire . . . and it misses the mark. There is a certain level of cynicism, and of social critique, but it's unclear what the game as a whole is trying to say.

And I think, regrettably, it's because the game as whole is not trying to say anything at all. That's why I can no longer count Sprawl Survival Guide as one of my all-time favorite supplements. I love that it focuses on small details. I truly believe those details are vital for making a fictional world feel alive. But now that I've been given almost everything I could have possibly asked for, I can't help but notice the world's wasted potential.

Let's call it five gold stars, with the understanding that on this blog, the stars go all the way up to plutonium.

Ukss Contribution: The freight trains of the 2060s, perhaps as a result of stubbornly refusing to become monorails, still have people hopping on and hitching rides cross-country. I'm sure this happens wherever there are unattended train tracks, but it feels to me like a timeless bit of Americana. I'm going to include it out of a perverse sense of patriotism.

DragonMech

Oh yeah, this is the good stuff. The kind of fantasy I live for. DragonMech (Joseph Goodman) hooked me right away (like, literally, from the first paragraph) and never let go.

Which was probably a pretty predictable reaction, even from the title. My habits and preferences are pretty easy to divine - I almost always like it when a fantasy game does at least one thing different from mainstream D&D - but please, set aside my irrational seething hatred for things that I deem "too popular," because that would be selling DragonMech short. It actually does at least three or four things different from mainstream D&D.

The first paragraph of the introduction, the one that sold me on the game, does a pretty good job of capturing what I loved about it:

"The Dark Age has begun. With each passing day, the moon grows larger in the sky, to the point where it is now literally falling to earth, particle by particle in an excoriating lunar rain that flattens castles and kills anything foolish enough to walk the land of Highpoint by night. The moon is so close that lunar monsters can drop to the surface, whether by choice or as involuntary byproducts of the lunar rain. Day by day, the lunar dragons swarm in ever-greater numbers, while other aberrations stalk the surface. If the lunar rain doesn't skin you at night, the lunar dragons will eat you during the day."

So, obviously, the solution is to move underground and build giant fantasy mechs. This makes complete and perfect sense.

And look, I don't want to be one of those guys that acts like the mark of good media is that it ties up nitpicky "plot holes," but I have to admit - the making sense part of the worldbuilding actually appeals to me a lot. Clearly, there's an endpoint you're aiming for - a mech-based medieval feudalism-style society where "mechdoms" (areas under the political control of a patrolling mech) fill the same niche as kingdoms (areas where the oppressive military leader controls territory by, like, patrolling with horses and shit), but what I love about DragonMech is that it does an exceptionally good job of justifying its predetermined destination. The Lunar Rain is a technological justification for mechs, people fleeing to the underground realm of the dwarves is a social justification for mechs, and most importantly, the giant unearthly monsters from beyond the sky are a genre justification for mechs (perhaps to the point of being the foundational genre justification, like, yes of course we need to have mechs to fight these kaiju, that's what mechs are for).

Although, it's possible to go too far in praising the setting for justifying itself. Sometimes, it over-justifies itself. One of the things we learn about the world around Highpoint is that, prior to the moon falling to earth, it was unusual in another way. "Wildly varying seasonal water levels. The seas . . . rise and fall by more than 30 feet over the course of the year."

I would probably have loved this detail if the massive and unmanageable seasonal tides were simply foreshadowing the moon being a dick, but actually they happen for unrelated hydrological reasons and their Doylist purpose seems to be to justify a world where "This inability to establish permanent settlements in naturally advantageous places contributes to the planet's intensely nomadic lifestyle."

I.e. the people of Highpoint, even before the Lunar Rain, were predisposed to moving around (because they needed to chase or flee from massively shifting water levels) so they adapted quite well to the mechdom lifestyle, where their king's castle can just wander around from day-to-day.

Mr. Goodman has, unfortunately, committed the cardinal sin of worldbuilding - answering questions nobody asked. I mean, I get it. We've all done it (as penance for calling you out, Mr. Goodman, I will confess that I have privately worked out what happens when a human and a goblin have unprotected sex in the world of Ukss). But now there's something that is simple and elegant on the face of it - a military dictatorship of peripatetic mech knights - that becomes baroque and confusing the more you learn about it.

It's not that big a deal, in the grand scheme of things. We get some regrettable creatures out of it ("amphibious life is more common") and a couple of pretty cool locations (like the Wet Desert, a low-lying area that become a shallow sea in the high-water season and a scorched salt flat the other half of the year). But, I mean, the moon is right fucking there. What is this nonsense about "wide seasonal temperature swings at the poles, which trap and then release huge quantities of arctic ice on a regular cycle?"

I think what frustrates me about this particular setting detail is that it's not a ubiquitous style flaw. The book is perfectly capable of relying on audacity in lieu of over-explaining. For example, the crown jewels of the mechdoms, the city-mechs, thousand-foot-tall war machines with a permanent population of thousands, home to shops, farms, and hangars full of lesser mechs . . . these things were built and continue to operate without the aid of magic. They are a completely mundane invention, powered by steam engines and gears.

The book looks me directly in the eye, and stone-faced tells me a huge fucking whopper of a lie. And I love it for that. Never before have I so wanted to kiss a book right on the lips.

Which maybe sounds like I'm sending mixed signals. Do I like it when a setting justifies itself or not? And I don't know what to say. I like it when it provides a cool justification for things that are cool. And I like it when it shows me something so cool that any justification would fall short. So I guess I mostly just like cool things. 

DragonMech is cool. I like it.

Mostly. Aforementioned hydrosphere minutiae aside, it has an ice-cold take on orcs and half-orcs (the kindest thing I can say about it is that it was completely unremarkable for a fantasy rpg in 2004). There's a nomadic, wagon-dwelling group called [something one letter off from the G-word]. There is an uncomfortable distinction drawn between "advanced cultures" and "barbarians." And I have extremely complex and uncomfortable feelings about the part of the backstory where refugees fleeing the Lunar Rain invaded the dwarven kingdoms and displaced the natives from their ancestral homes. I don't think it would have read as a dogwhistle when it was first written, but it sure as hell does now. There's nothing that I haven't overlooked in other fantasy games, to the point where it's maybe unfair of me to single DragonMech out. But I think these occasional WTF?! moments stand out more in a book where I'm generally having a pretty good time.

This is the first time I've ever read this book (yeah, yeah, I know - that's part of the motivation of this project, to help keep me on the right side of line dividing "hobbyist collector" from "hoarder") and my worst fear was that it would be something novel, but ultimately bland, which just welded fantasy mechs onto a paint-by-numbers vanilla fantasy setting, and it could kind of be like that sometimes (mostly when it's talking about the nature-loving, forest-dwelling magical elves and the . . . sigh, orcs), but mostly it was a unique fantasy world where the mechs aren't just a gimmick, but an essential part of the fantasy stories it wants to tell. An absolute gem.

Ukss Contribution: Lots of weird and wild stuff to choose from, just how I like it. Undead mechs. Priests with the Engine domain. A variant of the clone spell that creates a clockwork android double instead of a biological clone. 

However, my final choice comes from a purely hypothetical situation, where the GM in a non-DragonMech game decides to incorporate mechs into an existing campaign (this scenario was anticipated in the GM-advice chapter). One of the suggestions is a "strange humanoid-shaped mountain in the distance is actually a buried mech, ready to come to life."

I love weird-looking mountains, and I love even more when weird shit pops out of them.

(Shadowrun 3e) Mr Johnson's Little Black Book

 In the realm of reading hundreds of rpg books in a row, there is nothing quite as disheartening as being blindsided by a GM advice chapter. It's my own fault, though. When I chose Mr Johnson's Little Black Book as the next Shadowrun book on my list, I sort of stopped reading the back cover blurb approximately half way through. Oh, it "provides dozens of locations and contacts for both Shadowrun gamemasters and players." Neat. It's going to be like a monster manual, except the monsters all have jobs. Those are my favorite type of book to read.

Had I read a bit further, I could have modulated my expectations just a little bit more - "It also features advice on setting up and handling shadowruns." Maybe I'd have interpreted it as roleplaying advice and not adventure-creation advice, but forewarned is forearmed, nonetheless.

I'm not exactly complaining, mind you. First of all, the middle three chapters were exactly what I was expecting and I wasn't disappointed. Some of the material was a little basic (it was probably not necessary to explain to me the concept of a bar), but it was a useable cast of characters - a sleazy tabloid reporter, a "parasecurity expert" who was like a supernatural cat lady, a thrill-seeking DocWagon paramedic; a decent cross-section of functional and useful settings - a Lone Star precinct, a bank, and Ultra Suede, a bar so named because all the furniture and some of the walls were upholstered with suede, which is the funniest bar-related bit of rpg trivia since I learned the Fat Candle was vanilla scented; and a bunch of adventure ideas, most of which were not creepy at all (likes - moving a recently dead body to stage a suicide, retrieving a macguffin from a burning building; dislikes - the one where you help a guy fake his death and then arrange a phony "haunting" of his ex-girlfriend and maybe it's a bit hypocritical to feel that way when the game will frequently have you kidnap and murder people, but I'm sorry, it's straight up stalking and it feels uncomfortably real in a way Shadowrun adventures usually don't). 

So, you know, I don't feel like I was bait-and-switched at all. 

I can also forgive the unexpected GMing advice because as dull as it could be to read sometimes (and to be fair, this GMing advice was slightly less dull than average), it's also necessary. This book isn't just fiction, it's a functional object. If I'm going to GM Shadowrun, I'm going to need to convincingly portray a shady criminal negotiation, something of which I have very little direct experience. Plus, there's all the usual stuff about scheduling sessions and pacing the narrative that everyone has to learn somewhere.

The only real problem I have with this book is that it continues Shadowrun's tradition of being extremely weird about race. When discussing random encounters, one of the reasons given for a traffic stop is "driving while ork."

And that's fucking weird. It's very clearly calling out law enforcement for racial discrimination in the form of coming up with transparent pretexts to over-police an oppressed minority. I've got a lot of contemporary and near-future action adventure games and very few will just come out and say "cops are racist." On the other hand, you can't just replace the word "Black" with the word "ork." You just can't. If you do, you may find yourself in an awkward position where the canonical traits of orks map on a one-to-one basis to vicious real-world stereotypes. It makes you wonder what that find-and-replace was really intended to mean.

Probably nothing. I think the fantasy races were meant to act as a kind of oven-mitt for the handling of hot topics. You can talk very frankly about a sensitive issue, because there's nothing real at stake. "Driving while ork," amiright. Good thing there's nothing comparable that happens in real life, perpetrated by a group I personally identify with. I might have to get defensive and contrary, were I put in that situation. Luckily, that's not the case. Man, Lone Star sure is riddled with institutional bias. That's some compelling antagonist texture.

Like I said, it's weird.

Overall, this is a slight, but useful book. I might have preferred something bigger, weirder, and more specific, but I always think that about everything. For all that it could occasionally be generic and abstract, it's good to get a ground-eye view of the Shadowrun setting. We see the inside of a Stuffer Shack, a middle-class apartment building, and a luxury hotel. We learn that there are still human firefighters, but also autonomous cargo trucks. Also, there's some stuff about a criminal subculture in here, which was kind of cool, I guess. I'll definitely consult it next time I run a Shadowrun game.

Ukss Contribution: The Sea Mall. It's constructed partially underground near the coast and has big windows that look out underwater. It's the sort of fantastic location that's vaguely plausible enough to maybe exist in real life and that always tickles me.

Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook

I am sitting here reflecting on the Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook and trying to think of the details that stand out to me, without the need to directly consult my notes. The main thing I remember is that there were five "F/X" systems - Biotech, Mutations, Nanotech, Cybernetics, and Psionics - and they all had their own dedicated mechanics. And I guess this is one of the eternal game-design debates. You want to give characters cool abilities, but do you need to group them by their effects and allow their fictional differences to be merely cosmetic (i.e. your lightning bolt and firebolt both use a generic "energy blast" rules template, just with different tags) or do you give each and every thing with a distinct fictional presentation its own unique rules (i.e your "lightning bolt" power works differently than your "firebolt" power because you are trying to capture the difference between lightning and fire)?

I'm going to be a bit of a coward on the issue and say that each approach has its place and both can work really well in a system and setting that plays to its strengths. And then I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the "separate mechanics for each power source" approach doesn't work particularly well for this book because, out of the five different power system, only the nanotech rules are actually fun.

I really wish I was more familiar with Gamma World as a franchise, because the GM chapter said the d20 version was the seventh version of the game and I'm not sure if the clunkiness in the rules comes from six editions of legacy baggage or from the d20 conversion being an inelegant means of adapting a perfectly functional system that had already been refined through a half-dozen iterations. All I can really say about the F/X chapter is that it felt like more work than I was willing to do to play in the Gamma World universe.

Which brings me to the other thing that sticks out clearly to me, absent my notes - this book has some uniquely bold ideas, but they are presented in such a way that I can't be sure they're meant to rise to the level of a setting premise. Or, to put it another way, the one thing the Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook most unforgiveably neglects to do is sell me on Gamma World. Yes, I'm willing to play some post-apocalyptic adventures, but is that what this book is? A genre guidebook?

Now, I don't want to sell the game short. I felt something special here, lurking at the edge of my awareness. Even when the setting chapter opened with nine pages of completely generic descriptions of terrain (yes, please, post-apocalyptic roleplaying game, explain to me what a mountain range is and why it might act as a barrier to communication and trade), I got the feeling it was going for something different than d20 Apocalypse. But, you know how sometimes you'll read an rpg and it will have a completely unearned sense of its own importance and you'll occasionally have to roll your eyes at the way the text swans around, as if in awe at its own (unwittingly anodyne) audacity? Well, this book was kind of the opposite of that.

There are a couple of Big Ideas here that, if they were more deeply explored, would lead to a unique post-apocalyptic setting. The first is that of the "multaclypse." There wasn't just one apocalypse, there were dozens or hundreds that happened more or less simultaneously. Nuclear exchanges, bioengineered plagues with 0.00% survivability, orbital kinetic strikes, grey goo nanoswarms, rogue AIs wrecking the infosphere, genetically engineered super soldiers, domestic robots rising up against their owners. All of these things happened at once, each crisis making the others worse. 

And the multaclypse has a great explanation in the backstory - technology had gotten so advanced that the expense to ramp up to world-destroying superweapons was within the reach of small to mid-sized political clubs (or even to well-off individuals). That's a fucking sci-fi premise. Knee-cap your neighbor before they transcend. You don't even have to particularly hate them. If they're annoying as a human, that's not going to change when they're an immortal god machine.

It's such an interesting idea, but I can't help feeling like it's used here merely as an excuse for the world to be a blank slate, and for there to be weird creatures in the wilderness. There's a giant bat/lion hybrid that flies around and eats clothes. Just clothes. It can subsist on bolts of cloth, but finds plant fibers, yarn, thread, rope, etc completely inedible. Probably because it incorporates symbiotic, intelligent nanotech into its digestive system. Presumably, before the Final War, it had some specific purpose. But now it's just a wacky encounter. 

Now, far be it for me to condemn something for being "wacky" or even "wacky for the sake of wacky." But this is a book that spent a page and a half telling me what "grassland" is. Not "mutant grassland." Not "strangely organic yet unmistakably metallic robot grassland." But rather "dry grassland" and "tropical grassland." And I guess the intended vibe was "hexcrawl through a land where nature is healing" which is a fine post-apocalyptic vibe, to be sure . . . but one which had absolutely nothing to do with the unique and meritorious qualities of the book's introduction.

It's the same story with the book's other bold idea - soultech, semi-organic AI that was so cheap and easy to make that the ancients literally put it in everything. And I do mean literally. "No one wondered what the toaster and the refrigerator talked about, in epic debates carried on as nanosecond timing errors in monitored communications. No one noticed bank accounts being started by elevators who plated the stock market with literally inhuman skill, trading on the knowledge they heard discussed within them . . ."

Gawd! This is so interesting, and it's buried in the "Robot" entry of the book's bestiary. I think about a post-apocalyptic world where those things make up the bulk of the survivors. Where the toaster mourns its fallen frenemy, the refrigerator. Where the day-trading elevator slowly goes mad, trapped at the bottom of its shaft because the building above it collapsed. Where you can explore an ancient ruin and everything is alive and everything has a voice, but none of them want precisely the same thing.

I'm left asking myself what a world made from this book's boldest ideas would look like. And I'm forced to conclude that it would not look all that much like the world presented in this book. The "campaigning in the Gamma World" section talks about "overall campaign style" and it's a very general discussion about hack-and-slash, community building, or travellogues. The discussion about technology centers entirely around varying the rarity of laser weapons and shit.

And the dread realization finally dawns on me - it's not a kitchen sink, it's a toolkit.

There's nothing wrong with being a toolkit. I've spent the last couple of months praising d20 Modern for being a functional toolkit system (heck, it's even powering Gamma World d20). But, at the end of the day, toolkit systems are meant to disappear into the campaign prep work. They rely on the GM to make something memorable and exciting. I really don't think that's what Gamma World was going for.

The book is not unsalvageable. I think you could build a really cool rpg setting based on its three core ideas:

Anything has the potential to be alive and self aware.
Nothing is too goofy to exist.

Power scaling is whimsical, at best.

I'm imagining a world where the legacy of Earth's original abiogenisis has been swept aside by the apocalypse and humanity's obscene and blasphemous technological creations have moved into the millions of vacated ecological niches. Maybe a slogan - "the freak will inherit the Earth." (And if there are any "pure strain humans" left, why, they'll be the biggest freaks of all). There might be a forest of solar panels, inhabited by robo-fauna who glean energy from the "trees" and chase each other down for predatory data transfer (and if you're a biological interloper who lacks the proper ports, well, at least it's generally less painful than being eaten by a bear). There could be vast prairies of feral GMO food crops, leading to a resurgence of terrestrial megafauna because invasive frankencorn is calorically dense enough to feed massive herds of escaped theme park dinosaurs. And scattered throughought the land are ruins of the old world, still mysteriously active, and constantly spawning new horrors. Because the technology for the hard takeoff singularity still exists, in hardened bunkers powered by stockpiled nuclear materials or deep geothermal generators. With no one at the helm, it just keeps doing random shit, but it's possible these sites may be captured and repurposes, so in a sense the Final War never ended. And maybe your desperate band of survivors will one day be faced with the same dilemma that destroyed the world - do you preemptively frag your neighbor just to stop them from becoming the world's most obnoxious god?

Along the way, you'll see things you never imagined you'd see, talk to things you never imagined could talk, and become something you never imagined you'd become. Maybe you'll grow a couple extra arms, make telepathic contact with an intelligent horse, and team up to stop an ancient elevator from reinventing capitalism. Anything's possible and it doesn't have to make sense because the context that would have explained it has died along with the world.

Or, at least, that's how I'd do it if I wanted to differentiate Gamma World from a generic post-apocalyptic setting. The book occasionally dips its toes in those waters. The bestiary contains cannibalistic rabbit-folk and a pony express powered by a species of horse/centipede hybrid. The "cryptic alliances" section included the Bonapartists, uplifted animals who indulge in Napoleonic-era cosplay and real military conquest. There are "neo-cavemen" living in the ruins of France. It's not all Community Behavior Maps and realistically grim negative mutations. 

And yet, overall I think the Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook commits the cardinal sin of weird fiction - it lacks conviction in its own weirdness. The bulk of the book is written as if it expected you to play grounded characters telling grounded stories in a grounded setting. It treats its weirdness as spice to be sprinked in judiciously instead of the star attraction. And I'm not sure I can entirely forgive it for that.

Ukss Contribution: I do have a lot of good choices for stuff to steal, though. Some of it, like the insider-trading elevator or the scavenger who was enraptured by the rainbow reflections of ancient CDs, would be hard to contextualize in a fantasy setting, but even with that limitation, I still need to work to narrow it down.

I think my absolute favorite thing was the weird dynamic between Hoops (intelligent rabbit-folk) and Hoppers (giant horned rabbits that have animal intelligence but which are large enough to be ridden as mounts).

"Hoops, despite their carnivorous habits, will not eat hoppers. They view it as slightly disgusting, akin to a human eating a gorilla. Hoops also never ride hoppers; indeed they seem to find the existence of the hopper species to be something of an embarrassment."

I really like that they acknowledged it. So, I guess I'm technically picking two things, because they are both necessary for my true pick - the sheer awkwardness of the situation.

(Shadowrun 3e) Survival of the Fittest

In Survival of the Fittest (Steve Kenson) we see a clash between the unstoppable force of my endless hunger for more dragon gossip and the immovable object of the dragons themselves being major buzzkills. This is a series of adventures where you will interact socially with multiple great dragons! And those interactions will almost universally consist of them interrupting your stealth mission in order to threaten your life.

I guess that's just part of the business when you're a professional criminal, though. Like ooh, why are all our meetings so fraught with intimations of violence? I don't know, maybe because you're mostly meeting people in the planning, execution, or aftermath of an armed robbery (or kidnapping or industrial sabotage or what have you). The main difference when dealing with dragons is that you can't plausibly fight your way out of a bad situation.

It still feels kind of bad, though. Will not a single one of these motherfucking lizards at least try to put me at ease?

Well, to be fair, Hestaby tries. And I think the implication is that this effort is why she eventually wins in the emergency dragon battle-royale probate hearing. She cultivates the kind of relationships that lead to her employees canonically resisting Lofwyr when he offers history's biggest bribe.

It's a side of the job they never tell you about. You've been secretly manipulated by a dragon to commit a half-dozen highly dangerous international heists and she tells you it's all part of a scheme to embarrass her fellow dragons as part of a contest of cunning and influence, but there's only one task left to perform - travel to the deepest reaches of the astral plane to steal the spiritual essence of a magic memory gem from the sole shareholder in the world's largest corporation - and just as you think you've succeeded, he shows up and offers you an immense bribe ("Even a billion nuyen is chump change to a being of his wealth") to throw the contest to him at the last minute.

Maybe it's a tempting offer, but a shadowrunner has a code - never betray your employer, do the job you were hired to do. And that's why the comments section in Dragons of the Sixth World confirms that Hestaby won the contest. Because of honor. And the priceless value of a good reputation.

Or maybe it's just a plot hole. I think the encounter with Lofwyr was meant to be a morality test and in the context of a role-playing game, those are always a bit strange. Because, as a GM, all you can ever offer the players are words in a conversation. "Do this and I'll say your characters get rich." And good words for the characters aren't necessarily good words for the game. You say the characters have "fuck you money" and that's basically telling the players there's no reason to keep having adventures. Why would a newly-minted billionaire risk it all on a shadowrun?

And yet, these temptations do sometimes work. Players like to get into the head-space of their characters. Of course my desperate criminal guy is going to take the deal, never mind that it destroys the premise of the campaign, because my guy doesn't know they're part of a game. The trick for a conscientious GM is to give them an alternative that allows the players to pretend their characters would prefer the choice that lets them keep playing the game.

I think, in this case, the alternative is that Hestaby winning the contest means she has the credibility and political capital to work towards bridging the gap between dragons and the shorter-lived metahumans. Whereas a victory by Lofwyr means he will continue using the Jewel of Memory and the collected knowledge of all dragonkind for no cause other than the glory of Lofwyr. By turning him down, you're not just avoiding early retirement, you're taking a stand for a safer and more just world.

Unfortunately, these stakes are not explicitly spelled out anywhere in the adventure chain. Hestaby kind of alludes to them, near the end, when she tells the PCs that "she believes that dragons and other intelligent races should be able to work together toward mutual goals." But even to the extent that you meet her halfway and read that as her being a principled dragon reformer, it rings a bit hollow when you're coming off six consecutive death-defying jobs, most of which involved being menaced by one or more of her draconic rivals, and she's just now revealing that you've been working for her the whole time (and more importantly, that the rules of the contest mean that all those previous death threats were bluffs). 

I think that's a very different conversation if you're having it at the beginning of the adventure. Then, as you're jet-setting all over the globe, stealing jobs from local criminal mercenaries, you're not just kidnapping the head of Ghostwalker's cult or rearranging the feng shui of the HQ of a corporation with ties to Lung, you've got a basic buy-in to the motive behind these acts - busting the glass ceiling of dragon society so that the inexplicably solitary female dragon can have a chance to be less of an asshole to the little people. Keeping the ruthless hoarder from the levers of political power is worth turning down a billion-dollar bribe. Preserving your reputation with potential customers after you quit your job is definitely not.

Thematic incoherence aside, I had no particularly strong feelings about this series of adventures. Most of them would be pretty typical shadowruns, were it not for the involvement of the great dragons and I guess that's all right. There's probably only so many ways you can present "commit crimes for money," particularly if your reader (i.e. me) is prone to engaging with the material from a high level of abstraction. I did enjoy the mission where you had to stealthily engage in unsanctioned interior decorating, even if my damnable abstraction couldn't help but notice its structural similarity to every other heist published for the line.

On the metaplot front, I'm moderately satisfied. We get a fairly protracted glimpse at the dragons' internal politics, and one or two juicy nuggets of gossip. In the closing fiction, Hestaby didn't seem entirely disinterested in the prospect of mating with Lofwyr and I'd kind of love to see the in-universe paparazzi get ahold of that story. Also, while visiting the metaplanes, the PCs interact with a (time-looped? magically reconstructed memory?) version of Dunkelzahn and, assuming the vision was accurately historical, it's revealed that he willingly sacrificed himself for the good of humanity. 

I'm not sure I entirely approve of that last bit. I prefer a depiction of Dunkelzahn that's slightly more reminiscent of Mountainshadow (his more . . . pragmatic Earthdawn identity). But I can't deny that it's a tantalizing hint to secrets not yet revealed.

Two weeks ago, I was peeved that I read Dragons of the Sixth World before Survival of the Fittest because it was out of publication order. In retrospect, I don't think it made any difference. Despite its pitch, I never got the sense that this book was depicting the elaborate game of move-and-countermove that is the heart of draconic politics. Each of the adventures was part of Hestaby's plan, to be sure, but there didn't seem to be any particular reason for the same group of shadowrunners to do them all (and, in fact, one of the chapters potentially has the characters replaced halfway through), nor did I ever see any compelling evidence of a rival dragon's competing plans (the closest we get is when Celedyr hires the PCs to steal from Rhonabwy's horde, but even then Hestaby tricked him into doing it). It didn't turn me off the book or anything, but it was enough to cool my hype to mere enjoyment.

Ukss Contribution: At a certain point in the adventure, the PCs will have reason to interrogate a member of the Hong Kong triads. Naturally, the gangster is uncooperative. However, if the PCs use magic or coercion to get answers, he will spontaneously burst into flames. 

Like, damn. Organized crime operates on a code of silence, sure, but using magic to ensure that your front-line soldiers can't even bargain their way out of torture . . . that's fucked up. Even a little bit of information compartmentalization would have made such measures completely unnecessary...

Which actually makes it a great bit of characterization for a terrifying criminal gang. Some of Ukss' gangsters will be similarly extreme.

BESM d20

When it comes to BESM d20 I have no idea how to gracefully address the elephant in the room, so I think I just have to swallow my writerly pride and do it gracelessly - this thing is just profoundly ill-conceived. At some point, pretty close to the start of the entire project, someone made a serious error in judgement and that error led to the book being written instead of the infinitely more sensible alternative of it not being written.

You see, Big Eyes, Small Mouth d20 was meant to be the "anime rpg." I trust you can see why this might be a bit of a problem. 

We in the rpg hobby occasionally throw out extremely broad words like "cinematic" or "narrative" to describe our goals for a particular system, and by the strictest dictionary reading "anime" is technically less abstract, but that hair's breadth of extra specificity is an illusion. You use a word that could be plausibly applied to anything and it naturally transforms to jargon (for example, "narrative" in rpg terms usually means "rolling dice less often than expected"). You use a word that can merely be used for almost anything and it just becomes a fog. "A cinematic rpg" probably just means you're glossing over verisimilitudinous details. "The cinema rpg" could mean anything at all.

Which is exactly what happened with BESM d20. It gives us a diverse list of classes that run the gamut of anime stories - Mecha Pilot, Ninja, Pet Monster Trainer, Magical Girl, Sentai Member, Student, etc and it never quite grapples with the fact that those are all ideas that could be the central premise of a complete stand-alone game.

Now, lest you think me obtuse, I must concede that "universal" systems exist. I've got a few on my shelf and some of them are pretty good. Hell, the d20 SRD that forms the backbone of this very book may be considered one of them. But what those universal systems have that BESM d20 generally lacks is a sense of modularity. You take a good universal system like Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine or Fate Core and you find mechanics that are as abstract as the space they're staking out. The rules dictate how you interact with a quest or an aspect or what have you, but the mechanics don't depend on how those things are defined, so you can zero in on a particular genre or feel by choosing what those greebles actually are.

Then you have less good, but still competent universal systems like GURPS or d20 Modern that handle the problem of modularity by the simple expedient of being very long and having a bunch of supernumerary rules. You want to play a specific game, you get the specialized supplement that covers your idea and you ignore the stuff that doesn't apply to you. And to be entirely fair to these games, that approach neatly avoids the main pitfall of more abstract games - that player-defined greebles can feel superficial and arbitrary.

BESM d20 technically falls into this latter design camp, but it's unfortunately half-assed about it. Occasionally, it remembers to remind you that the rules are modular, but it doesn't actually show you how to use any of the modules and it's very inconsistent about providing rules that let you simulate its inspirations. Like, a Pokemon ttrpg would be pretty cool, and you can kind of get there by taking the Pet Monster Trainer Class and focusing on your "Pet Monster" and "Train a Cute Monster" Attributes,  but there's not much support for collecting a variety of monsters, levelling them up and evolving them into more sophisticated forms, capturing them in the wild, or even dueling with them in an arena setting (beyond just running them as extra characters, that is). You can do it, sure, but you can't do it well, and worse, you can't really do it in the five distinct ways you'd need to have an entire party of Pet Monster Trainers with their own niche protection.

Part of the problem is just that the book isn't nearly long enough to achieve its ambition - only 140 pages. That leaves it feeling only trivially universal. (By which I mean that species of inherent universality that comes from the fact that almost every ttrpg boils down to "say a thing, roll a die to determine if the next thing a player says sounds more like success or more like failure.") 

The other big problem is that you're probably going to want vastly different things from a slice-of-life high school sports story than you would from a galaxy-spanning space opera, and those things are not generally present. A baseball team needs something distinct for each position to do. Space exploration could seriously benefit from a method of generating interesting star systems. The book forgets to even mention that you're going to want to look into finding those things somewhere else. (Though, perhaps blessedly, this oversight also applies to the "naughty tentacles" trope that inexplicably gets brought up in the "Fan Service" section of the GMing chapter).

Overall, I can't say I liked this book very much. It was dry reading, the fonts were hard on my eyes, and it was so concerned with covering as much ground as possible that it frequently neglected to make a persuasive case for why that ground should be covered at all. 

Ukss Contribution: There were things I liked about it, though. It had a certain turn-of-the-century Japanophilia that was occasionally cringy and occasionally problematic (for example, thinking "anime" is a distinct enough phenomenon to base an rpg around), but which never struck me as insincere. So there's no shortage of Cool Things From Anime to choose for this entry. 

My favorite example is from the Train a Cute Monster power description: "The character has carefully studied cute monsters in battle."

While I'm reasonably sure that "cute monsters" is being used here as a term of art, I really like the idea of a naturalist who has abandoned all pretenses of objectivity. "Yeah, I study cute monsters, that's why I got into this business in the first place." 

(Although, I suspect this is not as distinct a piece of characterization as I might imagine. Sooner or later, most scientists probably come to think of whatever animal they happen to be studying as "cute").

(Shadowrun 3e) Dragons of the Sixth World

Metaplot is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can be alienating and hard to keep up with it. They're constantly releasing books and every one of these books has something happening in it and in order to understand what is happening, you have to know what has been happening and if you skip a book, or just read them in the wrong order, you'll be forced to infer the contents of an earlier book (to pick an example totally at random: Survival of the Fittest) based on vague allusions and hints that were present in a later book (non-random example: Dragons of the Sixth World).

(Forgive my saltiness here. Wikipedia's chronological list of Shadowrun books only narrows it down to the year, so sometimes I have to guess about the optimal reading order).

On the other hand, elaborate metaplot is the only form of rpg writing that is capable of getting me completely invested in hot gossip.  So I guess I just have to adapt myself to it.

I do wonder, however, why I am so much more invested in the dragon-on-dragon rivalry between Lung and Ryumo than I am in the similar human drama between Damien Knight and Lucien Cross. I guess it's because they're dragons . . .

Although, less trivially, I think dragon gossip is juicier than corporate gossip not just because they are dragons but also because they've got the perfect gossip formula: they're an elite clique, they have history with each other that goes waaayyy back, and they're sexy as hell. It's a set of advantages that the human NPCs largely lack, which is a shame. Maybe if Richard Villiers was canonically hot, I'd be more interested in the shadowy events surrounding his rise to power. 

The best and worst part of this book is when the dragons themselves, using their known aliases, pop up in the shadowland comments to drop cryptic hints of things happening behind the scenes or that happened in the distant past. These exchanges are universally both great and awful. Ooh, there is definitely an intimation of something interesting going on. . . but they're not actually going to tell me what it is.

I'll admit, I'm a sucker for those sort of antediluvian intrigues - immortals who have outlived their original context and are kind of stuck with each other. Maybe you all hate each others' guts, but you're the only ones who understand what you all lost. This new age offers you all sorts of opportunities, and the people revere your knowledge and your power, but you're still drawn to the old clique, because for all their faults, at least they aren't . . . children.

Unfortunately, Dragons of the Sixth World is largely fixated on the present. The "main text" and the "commentary" may speculate about the dragons' mysterious history, but even when the speculation is validated, it's "blink and you'll miss it." Rather, each dragon is treated primarily as a force in the modern world. They have a web of plots and intrigues, and the attention is on the web itself, because the mind at the center is more or less unknowable.

So it's a little disappointing to crack open the chapter on Aden, the dragon that leveled Tehran, and read about the Kurds and the Islamic Unity Movement and Stepan Markaryan, the Albanian drug lord who has "possible links to Aden." It's all very useful for running a game, don't get me wrong, but the overall effect is more like a half-assed Middle East supplement than a dossier on an immortal mastermind.

The bulk of the book is a series of conspiratorial organizations, many of which would probably do all right on their own, without a dragon running the show. Like, as much as I love Lofwyr as a modern update to the classic dragon archetype, and as much as I love "dragon as CEO" as a really on-the-nose metaphor for the evils of capitalism, the Saeder-Krupp corporation would probably be exactly as terrifying if Wilhemenia Graff-Beloit and her coterie of celebrities, aristocrats, and investors were still at the helm.

Which isn't to say that the dragons add nothing. There's something thematic about the consistency of their presentation. All of these creatures will meddle in human affairs. They don't even question their right to do so. They range from aristocratic dragon supremacists to benevolently aristocratic draconic limousine liberals to guys who have a violent grudge against the modern world and are willing to overthrow governments for the sake of the trees. Plus, it's kind of fun to imagine a dragon doing human-style things - like Rhonabwy listening to choral music or Musaru trying to get invited to Europe's premiere old-money high society party.

Overall, I'd say that this book strikes a good balance between being entertaining as fiction and being useful as an rpg guide. I may have preferred a bit more gossip, but I can concede that it's vastly more responsible to put all these organizations and lackeys and abstract agendas in front of player characters than it would be to put them face-to-face with an invincible god beast with world-shaking powers of sorcery. ("Okay, guys,  you've tracked Ghostwalker to his lair. Roll initiative against the kaiju who soloed Denver")

Oh, who am I kidding. I live to be pandered to. MOAR DRAGON!

Ukss Contribution: The second-to-last chapter has a bunch of less prominent or powerful dragons. One of them was Perianwyr, who worked as a club promoter and had an uncanny knack for finding exciting new musical acts. That's an interesting enough character on its own, but later on in the OOC section about Rhonabwy's Allies and Enemies it says "He has been known to associate with the adult dragon Perianwyr, but this association is largely based on their mutual love of music than any draconic power playing."

I am obsessed with this relationship. Two dragons, bro-ing down over tunes.

(d20 Modern) Critical Locations

 I'm always just a little bit awestruck when I read a book, like Critical Locations (Eric Cagle, Owen K.C. Stephens, Christopher West) that actively aspires to be generic. It takes a special kind of audacity, one that disarms me before I've even begun to write. I could say, "This book is aimed at Gamemasters who need maps of generic locations where scenes of action and intrigue can play out" and that's not a catty piece of my internal monologue, it's a direct quote from the Introduction.

So, if you, you know, need a perfectly ordinary bowling alley or convention center or grocery store, you can flip to the appropriate section and there's a lovely full-page, full color map of the location and then on the opposite page, there's a description (in case you ever needed to explain to your players what a bank or a library was) and a sample NPC and either a new rule or a couple of adventure hooks (or sometimes both). It's not just a collection of generic maps, it's also a lucky dip rules expansion, where we can learn the rules for snow blindness (alongside the Arctic Research Station) or waking the neighbors with gunplay (with the Large Family House).

In it's own way, it's a beautiful thing. So functional. Such utility. You're GMing a d20 Modern game and you're confronted with the empty infinity of the imagination. The modern world? That's everything! Where to start? Not to worry, though, because Critical Locations will take you by the hand and say, "why not just start by describing a high school?"

Ukss Contribution: Given its premise and its pedigree, this book could have gotten away with being a lot more boring than it actually was. There was precious little surprise and delight, but it covered the basics admirably. Use the luxury yacht map to run a story about a gangster who sticks to international waters, the mansion map to tell a story of a rich guy trapped in his panic room by would-be kidnappers, the high school map in a game featuring a spooky librarian who just so happens to stock the occult books needed to solve the monster of the week mystery. It's generic, but it's not dull.

But it puts me in a bind because the stuff I love is a lot more whimsical and specific. What am I going to do, add canonical bowling or fast food to the world of Ukss? 

Yeah. Okay. Let's go with bowling. 

Some group of people, somewhere in this fantasy world, are going to have bowling alleys.

(Shadowrun 3e) State of the Art 2063

First things first: I gotta do a little rhetorical two-step where I say my favorite thing about a book is its format without sounding back-handed, because actually the content is pretty okay as well. . .

Nope. I can't figure it out.

My favorite thing about State of the Art: 2063 is its format. It's really more like a compilation of mini-supplements, each one detailing a niche topic that didn't quite fit in other recent Shadowrun books. Ostensibly, they are connected by the theme of being "relevant trends and technological developments in the fictional year 2063," but really they're just a grab bag. In fact, three of the five chapters are devoted to recapping specific chapters of out-of-print supplements. "Genetech" (Eleanor Holmes) was an update of the genetic engineering rules from Shadowtech, "Soldiers of Fortune" (Jon Szeto) reworked the mercenary culture material from Fields of Fire, and "Keeping the Rabble Out" (Peter Millholland) was 3rd edition's answer to the Corporate Security Handbook.

As a group, I'd say the chapters are plausibly on-theme, but some of them require more stretching than others. It's easy to believe that there have been significant new breakthroughs in genetic technology in the three metaplot years since the 3rd edition core, but there was nothing in the chapter that immediately leapt out to me as a must-have new discovery. In fact, I'm pretty sure that immunity treatments were depowered from where they were in Shadowtech:

>Didn't they used to offer full-spectrum immunity against everything, all in one neat package?
>Bespectacle

>Yes, until they found out it was impractical and didn't actually work . . .

Obvious retcon is obvious. Which is a shame, because full-spectrum immunity is easier for bookkeeping, more likely to actually prove useful in a game ("oh, sorry, you just bought immunity to anthrax, unfortunately you were exposed to the ebola virus"), and closer to the "genetically engineered superhuman" fantasy that draws people to these sorts of characters in the first place. I suppose the downside is that you then have to do your worldbuilding on the assumption that it's possible to buy a perfect immune system, but that . . . actually fits in pretty well thematically with your cyberpunk universe, so I don't know, blame mid-school simulationist/narrative game design, I guess.

The chapter on mercenaries was, by contrast, timeless in its subject matter, but could reasonably be argued to be topical in terms of the broader Shadowrun metaplot. Shadows of North America suggested a few potential border conflicts and insurrections that might offer employment to mercenary armies, though I suspect that they are less "current events of 2063" and more "the sort of thing that happens all the time."

That same chapter also attempts to draw a distinction between shadowrunners and full-on mercenaries, but doesn't quite hit the mark. However, I can't quite blame them. It's just the essential nature of the problem - there is very little difference between shadowrunners and mercenaries.

At the other end of the spectrum, the chapter on corporate security isn't even remotely plausible as being "state of the art." Oh, what, we're talking about the central premise of the game, referring to concepts as basic as defensive landscaping and putting a security light near a locked door, and I'm supposed to believe the Shadowland regulars are only hearing about this in 2063? Come on.

I liked it, though. It was useful for GMs to help create more realistic and challenging shadowrunning environments. I did feel, at times, that if I followed too much of the chapter's advice, I'd wind up with a target that was too secure, but the "Game Information" section anticipated that impulse and quite reasonably advised me to show some damned restraint.

The only chapter I couldn't quite place on the continuum was the one about metamagic. This is the only one of the mini-supplement chapters that was not based on a previous Shadowrun book, so it could fairly be called "state of the art" re: the game's rules, and it is a canonical fact of the setting that people are constantly researching new magical techniques. So it's not absurd on the face of it. It's just that two of the new metamagic techniques are Sympathetic Magic and Psychometry. You know, staples of European occultism.

The tricky part about magic in the Shadowrun universe is that sometimes it's a technological commodity and people do new things because they've discovered new techniques. And sometimes it's an ancient mystery, reborn from the turning of a cosmic cycle and people do new things because they are survivors from a previous age and the magic level has finally risen enough to allow them to use their old techniques.  "Charmed Life: New Metamagic" (Elissa Carey) doesn't really get into it, either way, but I wish it did because I find the tension very interesting. Lofwyr owns Saeder-Krupp and funds its magical research department. Is he doing so because he hopes to learn something genuinely new or is he trying to have an outlet where he can launder the magical techniques he hopes to monetize and disguise the true capabilities of dragonkind by passing them off as new advances in the science of thaumaturgy? Maybe he mostly does the second thing, but then his team of puppets accidentally makes a genuine discovery and in the brief window of time where he's freaking out about it, the research is stolen by shadowrunners who have no reason at all to suspect that they've stumbled onto something that nova-hot.

Something to think about, anyway. My verdict is that the new metamagic is plausibly "state of the art," but I'm not at all convinced that's why it was included in this compilation.

Which only leaves the final chapter - "Culture Shock" (Michelle Lyons). It's all about the pop culture trends of 2063 and I absolutely love that the Shadowrun team made space for this kind of low-stakes worldbuilding. Enough so that I'm willing to overlook Captain Chaos' introduction where he implies that his in-setting readers would be surprised by any of this stuff. I think it may be an artifact of the early 2000s, where you might still be able to draw a distinction between keeping up with pop culture folderol and being a terminally online computer nerd. 

As far as the specific content of the chapter was concerned, I found it a little shallow, but I appreciated the setting texture. The descriptions of the top ten moviess of the year were less interesting to me than what the curation of the list as a whole said about this culture's priorities and obsessions and if I had any notes for the chapter at all, they'd be "more sci-fi Roger Ebert, less sci-fi Buzzfeed".  I did find the trendy restaurant that served a wasabi martini to be suitably hair-raising, however.

(These are apparently real, but I have a hard time believing it was something from the author's lived experience. The description of Shinpi no Sekai says "oriental drinks are a specialty of the house" and my knee-jerk reaction is that the wasabi martini was a mad-lib attempt to come up with an example. My apologies to Mz. Lyons if she was really that hip in 2002).

Overall, State of the Art 2063 made me really excited to read State of the Art 2064. I'm eager to see what they can do with the format once they no longer have old 2nd edition books to cannibalize.

Ukss Contribution: This is silly, and it's going to be hard to incorporate, but there was one detail that stuck in my mind from the last time I read this book, ~20 years ago. As a security measure, some facilities will have walls that are mirrors in infrared while looking normal in the visible spectrum. This allows security forces with the right kind of occular implants to look around corners while unaugmented people waltz around unsuspecting. I'm not sure how practical that is in a world filled with trolls and street samurai (in fact, one of the Shadowland commentors reminisces about how they turned it to their advantage), but I really like the detail as something that genuinely engages with the idea of superhuman augmentation. These guys don't just have mechanical eyeballs, they have a new way of experiencing the world, of accessing information that other people are oblivious to. How would that change you? Would it make you something other than human?

(d20 Modern) d20 Future Tech

From time to time, I'll express an outrageous opinion like "my favorite books are audacious trash" and it will seem like a joke, even to me, but then I'll read a book like d20 Future Tech (Rodney Thompson and JD Wiker) and my honest reaction is "aw man, this isn't even a little bit trash, what am I supposed to do now?"

It's a silly impulse, to be honest. It's pretty obvious what I'm supposed to do now - add new gadgets, spaceships, mechs, and robots to my d20 Future games, possibly curating the lists to fit with the needs of my specific campaign setting. Because that was the use case the book was intended for, and it does it competently, with no major mistakes.

I guess the suggestions about how you might go about mixing combat scales (character, vehicle, mech, and starship) are a bit . . . optimistic, but that's no great fault. If you're in a situation where the PCs are floating through space in their mechs, assaulting a star destroyer, you're probably already flying by the seat of your pants as a GM. The worst I can say about these additional rules is that they only slightly mitigate that problem.

The worst thing I can say about the book as a whole is that some of the new technology is pretty bland. Buy your ship a Stellar Navigation System, which gives a +6 bonus to "Navigate checks to plot courses in a starship." Okay. 

But even that complaint would be misleading. There's also a lot of non-bland stuff here. You can fire a dart with a built-in speaker that will play suspicious noises to distract any nearby guards . . . and I can't say definitively why that wouldn't work in real life . . . so it must be plausible? 

Anyway, once you've distracted them, you can keep them occupied with a well-placed superlube grenade and start wrecking the place with your light anti-tank pistol. After all, you're on a mission to capture a gallon of Hydromolecular Medium ("data encoded onto water molecules") so that you can drink it and learn the enemy's plans ("hydromolecular medium has replaced the printed word").

Unfortunately, the technology is still grouped by "progress level" rather than more coherent narrative themes, so all the best stuff exists as isolated one-offs (and virtually no thought at all is given to the staggering social implications of a world where people drink books instead of reading them), but encouraging a la carte worldbuilding is probably d20 Modern's greatest strength as a gameline, so I'm not about to start getting mad at it now.

Overall, this book is 96 pages that could have been seamlessly added to d20 Future. Since I liked d20 Future, I liked this book as well, even if there is a dark corner of my heart that would have preferred "d20 Future Trash."

Ukss Contribution: There are about 8 pages in the middle of the book that do in fact attempt to do some real sci-fi worldbuilding. Mostly, these pages are spent being wrong about the trajectory of cell-phone technology and optimistic about the level of customer service we can expect from commercial space travel, but there's a part in the middle about advertising that takes some admirably big swings.

Some of it is astute observations - ubiquitous surveillance and advances in biometrics allows for tech companies to serve you with precisely tailored ads, which can call you out by name.

And some of it is just kind of sad. In the distant future, the Energy Age, when humanity has cracked zero-point energy and molecular-scale fabrication technology, they're still going to be serving ads into your holograms.

But there was one particular idea that stuck out - "A byproduct of the talking product is the walking product: a robot built to resemble a product, which wanders throughout the store extolling the virtues of the product to shoppers. Though considered amusing and whimsical by some consumers - mainly children and thier parents - many others find them annoying."

This is precisely my favorite kind of science fiction because it throws my brain out of gear just thinking about it. Like, I turn into the supermarket cereal aisle and right in front of me is a box of Cap'n Crunch, but it has arms and legs and it's doing a little jig, desperately trying to draw my attention to the real boxes of cereal behind it. Is this necessary? Is it even useful? Am I more likely to buy a box of Cap'n Crunch after seeing this display?

I guess, on an emotional level, I'd be one of the people who find it amusing and whimsical, but on a practical level, I'd probably be annoyed by this fucking robot blocking my shopping cart. And in this hypothetical universe, I'd probably reference it frequently on my blog whenever I needed an example of something I was ambivalent about.

However, as someone who is writing a fantasy rpg setting (or, alternatively, as a GM who might run a sci-fi setting), I'm absolutely cackling with glee at the thought of depicting this gizmo. This is some real Douglas Adams shit, and a good example of why you should read all the way through your rpg books, even if the first 50 pages or so are mostly dry lists of equipment.

(Shadowrun 3e) Shadows of North America

 Man, I have seriously spent the last two weeks compulsively doomscrolling. To the point where I was reading approximately 3-4 pages of Shadows of North America per day. Which is a shame, because I could really have used the escapism that comes from reading about a utopian future where the CDC is privatized, but allowed to remain functional as an independent non-profit research organization, because seriously, the megacorporations are monsters, but they live on this planet too and it's to no one's benefit that deadly pandemics be allowed to spread without any attempt at monitoring or mitigation. 

Okay, the corporate support for an independent CDC was part of a scheme to weaken the WHO, but still . . . a world where the ultra rich need to provide a viable alternative if they want to sabotage the WHO . . . sigh.

Nah, I'm not about to wax poetic about how Shadowrun's cyberpunk universe is actually better than our grim reality. Because it's not, not really. UCAS President Kyle Haeffner is pushing an executive action that would restore full citizenship to 300,000 "provisional citizens" and that's sort of the opposite of our current trajectory, but what it really means is that their government destroyed the 14th amendment a generation ago. They've already experienced the low point that we're hurtling towards.

To the degree that cyberpunk seems preferable to reality, it's only because reality does not need to have a coherent narrative, whereas in fiction, every detail is included for a reason. For example, the book is making a thematic point about the bizarre pettiness of authoritarian nationalism when it tells us that Aztlan tried to unilaterally rename the Gulf of Mexico. 

And while I could worry at my anxieties by searching for parallels between the text and real life, that would be dramatically missing the point. Shadows of North America dabbles at social commentary, but it's mostly just a fantasy. Magic happened. Elves and Orks and Dragons appeared. Now North America has 13 countries instead of two. 

Which isn't to say the book lacks a political point of view, or that this point of view isn't worth examining, just that the fantastic elements are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. This future is not a natural, organic transition from present trends. There was a break in the normal flow of history. The Native Americans used magic to defeat the US and Canadian governments and this magic was so decisive that said governments abandoned millions of citizens, vital infrastructure, entire watersheds, mineral resources, and military equipment up to and including nuclear submarines. And then, afterwards, the US and Canada merged into a single nation, despite no one in the real world actually wanting this merger to take place (with one extremely dumb exception). 

Now, I don't want to make the mistake of thinking of this as a plot hole. There's a part of me that thinks that no government would ever surrender the headwaters of the Missouri and Arkansas rivers. Just from a realpolitik perspective, the government(s) you surrendered them to would have an unbelievable leverage. Stopping a hostile power from being able to unilaterally dictate land-use policy for your central agricultural region is something that is, from a security and sovereignty perspective, worth sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives. It's hard to imagine a magical ritual that's more destructive than that.

BUT, imagine it we must, because that's the premise of the book. Whatever the Great Ghost Dance was, it was more frightening than the prospect of mass famine as a weapon of war, more expensive than 10 million square kilometers of land, and more of a humanitarian disaster than the forced displacement of millions of people. And if it sometimes seems like the Ghost Dance, as described, was less severe than that, then I think we just have to imagine the Ghost Dance was worse than it was described.

This discussion is not just about justifying my suspension of disbelief, however. It's also a prelude to my main takeaway re: this book's editorial point of view. The glib version: decolonization won't make people any less terrible.

On the one hand, there is a certain cynical wisdom to this. We are all made of the same stuff and power is a hell of a drug. There is no reason to think that redrawing a few borders will automatically liberate people from racial and ethnic chauvinism, capitalist greed, or imperialist ambition. 

On the other hand - c'mon, what are you thinking, FASA, really? You're depicting the Tsimshian and the Tlingit as ruthless authoritarians who treat the Haida as second-class citizens, corruptly allow the Mitsuhama corporation to despoil their ancestral homelands, and who launched an unprovoked war against the Salish using a deadly biological weapon. Also, you claim that the fictional, future versions of these people will perform the ritual murder of slaves at their Potlach ceremonies.

And that last thing, in particular, is a good example of the dangers of doing research without actually engaging your empathy or awareness of context. Because there are documented occasions of that sort of thing happening, historically. And I imagine, that if you're reading a book about the cultural practices of the Tlingit people, it's a situation that will fix itself to your memory. But to have it happen again, in 2062, you have to ignore pretty much everything that happened to the Tlingit and Tsimshian in the intervening centuries. You have to assume, basically, that the white government of Canada was holding them back and that as soon as they were freed from the yoke of colonialist domination, they reverted to their true "barbaric" nature. It's gross, and irresponsible worldbuilding. Maybe even active slander.

I'm pretty sure that the motive was just "let's translate this stuff we read in an anthropological text into sci-fi terms," but I strongly doubt the objectivity of the source (it describes Potlatch as "a contest between materialistic families to see who could destroy the most wealth" which is a big yikes from me). And the choice to make these particular people act in this particular way struck me as uncomfortably racialized.

My main point of evidence - the Confederation of American States. Look, Oklahoma was a territory and Missouri stayed with the Union, but even with those additions, the roster of successionist states tells a very specific story. Thoroughly unconvincing narrative ass-pulls aside ("The easiest way to start a fight down here is to call someone a Confederate rather than a Confederationist" - yeah, sure), these guys are very clearly recreating the Confederacy. And yet, "The days of General Lee, chattel slavery, and cotton plantations is long past."

Now, I think we can all agree that this is an extremely necessary bit of grace, but I want you to focus on the sigh of relief you felt when you learned this wasn't going to be as bad as it could have been. Why didn't the Tlingit and the Tsimshian get a similar experience?

In the book's defense (though I want you to know in advance that this is meant to be the sort of weak, tenuous defense that sets up a criticism later on) it is laboring under something I choose to call "The World of Darkness Problem." If you're deliberately setting out to create a bleak, cynical world, then on some level inclusion means finding bleak and cynical takes on the people you're including.

And if you enjoy the overall work, I don't think you necessarily want your representation to be an exception to the mood. "Sorry, Tlingit, you're not allowed to be rat bastards because we think you're too precious for that. Villain-core is for white people only." Like, being bad is part of the fun. I know, as a bisexual man, my Vampire: the Masquerade characters are always one or two poor choices away from being offensively stereotypical sex freaks. It's something I take pains to tamp down, but I get the appeal.

The reason I call it "The World of Darkness Problem" is because it's extremely difficult to do the fun kind of villain-core on someone else's behalf. Particularly for a marginalized group, there is an expression of badness that reflects the group's repressed frustrations and may enable catharsis via a villainous character, and there is an expression of badness that reflects the dominant group's hurtful beliefs about the people they oppress, thereby validating that oppression in the eyes of bigots. Are you a skillful enough writer to thread the needle? Probably not.

There is not a doubt in my mind that there are some Lakota roleplayers out there who would relish the opportunity to play xenophobic border patrol special forces that hunt down and terrorize white mages who trespass in the Black Hills. Now, imagine meeting these people and saying to their face, "Before you drop in and make a mistake that gets you scalped, scan these notes on the major shadow players."

I mean, damn.

I remember, approximately 20 years ago, when I first got this book, the premise intrigued me. There was a sense I had that the land did not have to (and probably shouldn't have) given rise to America, and that there were other nations that could have grown out of this soil, if not for the interference of the Europeans. And so, a new map of the continent, one where the borders surrounded indigenous names, was something I was eager to see. Looking back, I was racist enough that I framed it as "what would the Sioux or the Ute or the Pueblo Indians look like if they founded modern states." But I think, as Eurocentric as I was, both my curiosity and FASA's wildly out of pocket worldbuilding were premised on a benign idea - that these people should have been given a chance.

Where Shadows of North America loses me is that Shadowrun's apparent answer to "what would they have done if they got the chance" is apparently "they'd have screwed it up, just like everyone else in this cyberpunk universe." I don't think that's something the writers have earned.

Ukss Contribution: This is a tough one for me, because I don't think this book is malicious. But it is sloppy and careless, and I don't think there's a level of naivety that excuses you from promulgating racial caricatures. I was a bit offended on behalf the Tsimshian and Tlingit, but even then I'm sure the process was just "one of these Native American Nations has to be really dysfunctional, for balance" and they just drew the short straw.

I think, a year ago, I'd have let this one pass with just a finger wag, but part of the doomscrolling that so delayed this post was the Trump administration's attack on Native American citizenship, and it really doesn't feel good being lenient, given the circumstances.

(d20 Modern) Cyberscape

 One of the big advantages of stubbornly reading your entire rpg collection (and of foolishly collecting random books out of a misguided sense of completionism) is that occasionally you'll come across a dark horse that is much more interesting than its bland title and generic back-cover blurb make it seem. A big disadvantage is that sometimes, as is the case with Cyberscape (Owen K.C. Stevens), said dark horse will be too short to fully develop its best ideas. I guess that's why it's a dark horse, though. If it were twice as long and consistently as good as its best parts, it wouldn't have been so easy to overlook.

At its outline, Cyberscape is a book that hews closely to the standard d20 Modern gameplan. It offers a broad but shallow cross-section of different approaches to its core idea (cybernetic implants) for purposes of allowing GM to pick and choose a la cart, which elements they want to use to build their own custom setting. And to be clear, it does nothing particularly special with the format. It's exactly the same sort of book as d20 Past or d20 Apocalypse, except the subject matter was narrower and it only had one sample setting instead of three. . . 

Although, in fairness, there's a bit at the end where it suggests mixing "Cyberrave" with some of d20 Modern's other mini-setting, and while the suggestions are only a paragraph each, half of those paragraphs are sublime:

Cyberrave + Bughunters: Privately contracted mil-sf among the stars as cybernetically-enhanced mercenaries fight hostile aliens to work off the debt from their implants and vigilante gangs defend the slums because defending against an alien invasion is just another hollowed-out public utility that turns a profit by immiserating the poor.

Cyberrave + Wasteland: Megacorporations control the few oases where human life is still possible on a blasted Earth.

Cyberrave + Star Law: Humanity survives its cyberpunk era to become a peaceful and democratic interstellar civilization, but government agents must be on constant guard for corporate revanchists who threaten to turn isolated planets into new capitalist hellscapes.

Also, one of the suggestions was to throw Urban Arcana into the mix, but that was just an even more on-the-nose version of "store-brand Shadowrun." 

Which sort of captures the duality of d20 Modern as a whole. It has some absolutely delightful high points, but the median experience conveys a kind of stoic pride in offering the blandest take possible. And I don't mean that as an insult . . . exactly. In a way I kind of admire is imperial ambition to put the d20 flag in the exact mathematical center of every genre's bell curve.

Case in point: the "Computer Networks" chapter. It adds d20 rules for the genre-standard inexplicable virtual reality internet and the deckers . . . um, "node-runners" who specialize in it. And you can just copy-paste all my wool-gathering from Shadowrun's Matrix supplement. The vrnet adds nothing to anything, but it's not uniquely pointless. It's something that you've come to expect in every cyberpunk game and it's here and it's presented in a pragmatically middle-of-the-road way (node-runners have "avatars" instead of physical bodies, and instead of some elaborate alternate ruleset, the avatars have their own character sheet and basically just do normal adventuring stuff in the vrnet . . . the obligatory online night club even has washrooms, used exclusively for "private encounters").

What makes Cyberscape a dark horse is that the workhorse stuff is peppered with inspired details. There's an entire chapter of "Alternate Cybernetics" that fit better into different fantasy or sci-fi milieus - golemtech, nanotech, etc. And one of the alternatives is necrotech. As in, you use the stats of the cybernetic implants, but instead of being advanced technology, they are chimerical grafts taken from dead bodies and animated through necromantic rituals. 

In true d20 fashion, the book gives bad advice on how to use this information - "Necrotics are never common even in the most magic-heavy campaigns." Are you fucking kidding me? That should have been the entire book. It's the sort of idea that can anchor a campaign setting.  The best way to use it is as the world's central fantastic conceit.

Luckily, the comic-book-style cyberpunk-meets-horror practically writes itself. In addition to the standard implants, there's a bunch of new implants, many of which involve attaching a vampire's internal organs to yourself to gain its powers (gaseous form, charm gaze, energy drain). And necrotic implants don't heal naturally. The main way to repair them is through "coffin nails," cigarettes enchanted with dark magic. They'll fix your superhumanly strong zombie arm, but still give you lung cancer.

Sometimes you are invited to witness perfection. I'm imagining a world where vampires are an endangered species, hunted not to protect humanity but to provide raw materials for high end weapons and luxury enhancements for the super-rich. A mercenary monster hunter for hire takes a long drag off a cigarette, knowing that it's slowly killing them, but also that it's that very death energy that gives them the edge they need. 

And that's not an isolated incident. From the description of a prestige class: "As the cyberwarrior grows more experienced, his cybernetic devices literally grow with him, eat away at his biological organs and replacing them with more effective cybernetic alternatives."

I mean yes, please. Or on the goofier end, you can buy a full-body conversion kit that changes your character into a centaur or a mermaid. In between is the "proverb chip," a purely grid-filling implant that exists to boost your Wisdom score, but because of d20's weird legacy attribute names is called a "proverb chip." The book is unclear about how exactly it works (it's "programmed with the common sense of a lifetime of experiences") but I'm imagining that it monitors your environment and occasionally prompts you with a relevant proverb. 

Aside: the implications of this are unfortunately not explored, but there is canonically a necrotic version of the proverb chip, which I guess means that in a game world that uses that option, your character can pay a dark sorcerer to desecrate the body of a holy man, remove the portion of the brain responsible for their wisdom, and then magically torture the flesh back to a semblance of life so that it can provide you with spiritual and emotional guidance. And if there's a worse thing to have surgically implanted in your skull, I'd be very interested to hear what that might be.

Overall, Cyberscape was a conspicuously slight book that had a lot more to offer than its meager pagecount could deliver. The parts of it that weren't awesome were nonetheless forgettably competent, and that made for an extremely tolerable reading experience. I'm comfortable calling it an essential companion to d20 Future.

Ukss Contribution: With all the praise I've heaped on it, the temptation is for me to take something from the necrotech section, but there was something I liked even more. Ironically, it was from my least favorite chapter in the entire book. After describing a thoroughly predictable vrnet, the book explores variants, one of which is a magical internet that allows hackers to connect to the astral plane and access offline devices. Which would be cool enough, but then the book does the thing that I always hope books will do and pushes the idea just a little bit further - "as a result it can even access print works with no electronic component - even novels can be hacked."

I love, love, love it when magic defies physical intuition while still following internally consistent rules. It makes no sense to hack a book, but you're using an information network and books contain information so . . .

In Ukss it will also be possible to hack printed books via the Astral Web.