(Exalted 3e) Abyssals: Sworn to the Grave

When you read any Exalted 3rd Edition fatsplat you have to accept a certain implicit risk - that you will blow through the interesting lore stuff in a single day and then spend the next two weeks trying to muster the enthusiasm to read the subsequent 230 pages of charms. Can you believe I actually forgot my own opinions on the new lore? I had to look at my notes to remind me.

Abyssals: Sworn to the Grave is an interesting book because it is (for obvious reasons) the most . . . skilled 3e book yet, the one that is best at embodying all the unique virtues of 3rd edition as a game. But its subject matter - the dark Exalted who swore an oath to eternally-dying primordial gods to destroy all life in exchange for a delay in their fated hour - is the one that benefits least from 3rd edition's approach. I know this is going to be a controversial opinion in the fandom, but they didn't need to be softened, or rounded out, or made more human. The tits-out goth chick with the wild eyes that screamed "I'm horny for BLOOD" was peak and yeah, she was conceived in misogyny and when I get around to reading Scroll of Exalts I'm going to have some harsh words about that, but this book was definitely missing an essential level of camp. I mean, really, this is the Abyssals book. If you're not going to take this opportunity to celebrate women's wrongs, when are you ever going to do it?

Okay, less flippantly. . . there's always been this constituency in the fandom that objected to Abyssals being presented as a "villain" splat. You know, death is a part of life, so maybe it doesn't need to be viewed solely as an evil. And if death is sometimes not an evil, then death's exalted shouldn't have to always be evil. Maybe you could have an Abyssal who was a psychopomp or a counselor or just a hero for the ghost kingdoms.

I mean, I get it. Sometimes you just want to put on the leather plants and the eyeliner and be a little spooky in a way that is exactly as safe as the shiny golden hero, because why should the psychopaths get to hog the dark aesthetic? And to be fair, the villainous Abyssals haven't always been the fun kind of villain-core. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, they were just these scatological bullies who were like "I'm going to STOMP on the KITTEN and then make a HAT from its GUTS."

But I can't help feeling the "Abyssals should be shepherds of the dead" perspective is one that . . . unduly privileges respectability. Truth of the matter is, no matter what our various religions tell us to the contrary, death sucks. Even if you stipulate the maximum cause for optimism ("they're up there right now, hanging with history's coolest celebrities, knocking back some cold ones and saving you a place at the table") it's still an involuntary separation in which one of the parties has no way of knowing for certain that it's temporary. No matter what you believe happens to your loved ones after they die, you still grieve for them. And the inevitability and heaviness of that grief, it sucks. 

It makes sense to me, then, that death's exalted are, themselves, guys who kinda suck. As much as I might empathize with the desire to orient oneself differently towards death, to embrace the optimism that comes with the continuance of the soul, I feel like, literarily, it loses the plot. A "morally neutral" Abyssal exaltation says nothing instead of something about the nature of death.

This might seem like a confusing take to some of you who've read my previous posts ragging on D&D's alignment system, so let me clarify - I don't mean by this that Abyssals should be an "always Evil" splat. Rather, I mean that the Abyssal exaltation should be something conceived and deployed in malice, representing the odious, unjust, and unclean nature of death . . . and that's going to prove a real challenge for Abyssal Exalted who want to do good.

I am perfectly aware that I'm taking a hardline, unpopular position in an ancient flame war that had, hitherto, been safely dead and buried (ha! necromancy humor!), but I bring it up now because this tension in the design of the Abyssal Exalted is critical to understanding 3rd edition's presentation of the splat.

On the most abstract, conceptual level, I think they nailed it. I think the combination of "to survive the Abyssal Exaltation you must swear an oath to kill all life (yes, 'even the birds'), the lack of mechanisms for anyone with any agency as a character to directly enforce this oath, and the twisted and loophole- ridden logic of "the chivalry of death" manages to thread the needle perfectly. Yeah, you can be a benevolent shepherd of the dead, and with the proper sort of trickster attitude, you can even toe the line of death's chivalry in a way that will leave your conscience largely intact, but for all of your immortal existence you will be burdened with the knowledge that in extremis you did the most unforgivable thing anyone could imagine. Very cool. Just the right amount of angst.

So by and large I'm content with the direction that 3rd edition takes Abyssals. The main issue I have with this book is that, having negotiated this compromise among the fandom, it then proceeds to present the Abyssals and the Deathlords in a way that feels . . . well, maybe not safe and respectable, exactly, but safer and more respectable than they've been in the past. There's no one at all in this book that I'd believe would stomp on a kitten and make a hat out of its guts.

The case study here would have to be The Eye and Seven Despairs. Like I'm sitting here contemplating past books, racking up the mental abacus, and I think on sheer points count, they are the most improved character in the entire book. The Princess Magnificent is a strong runner-up, having gone from "the spare Deathlord who had her agency subordinated to the First and Forsaken Lion" to "Cool Assassin Socialite" (who would maybe stomp on a kitten, if it were a particularly heroic kitten), but in previous editions, the Eye's presentation was actively transphobic.

So it's good that those elements of the character were allowed to pass gently into the fog of memory. The new Eye is probably the most fun out of all the Deathlords now - they're an amoral mad-scientist who sells discount WMDs because they're curious about what will happen when they're set off. Another great example of an immaculate balance between "this person kind of sucks" and "this person is someone we're going to want to hang out with week after week."

However . . . sigh . . . I'm going to make myself vulnerable here and admit that I'm a little nostalgic for certain elements of the transphobic presentation of the character. I gotta tread carefully, because I recognize that I'm a hair's width away from saying "the transphobia brought something to the table," but I also gotta speak my truth. The old version of the The Eye and Seven Despairs was just a little bit #goals.

In the context of being a comic-book villain, and with allowances made for comic-book-style plots that would absolutely not be okay in real life.

The short version is that the Eye was a Deathlord who just sort of slouched into the gig, and when it came time to create his own Exalted, they didn't respect him at all. So he did what anyone would do - he swapped bodies with the beautiful courtesan they were all obsessed with and sexually manipulated them into betraying "him," secure in the knowledge that the being they all thought was the Eye and Seven Despairs was actually the courtesan in disguise and that they would really be destroying the very woman they all imagined themselves to be in love with. Then, having faked his own death, he would continue having sex with all three men while stoking their paranoia and their greed in hopes of getting them to betray each other. And you kind of get the feeling that he's willing to stretch this last phase of the plan out for as long as it takes.

The second edition version elaborated his backstory in a way that seriously weakened his character (he was tormented by certain Solars in the First Age and specifically sought out their reincarnations to make Abyssals in order to get revenge) and was probably more overtly transphobic as a result (because the Eye taking female forms is called out as a pattern and described in pretty uncharitable terms). 

And to be absolutely clear - this plot was weird and uncomfortable and good god, how was it ever intended to be used as part of a roleplaying game. The new canon is 100% better in terms of "stuff I'd be willing to say at a gaming table." But if we're talking about what's appealing about the fantasy of being a villain. . . say what you will about the original recipe Eye, but he was locking down the D with elaborate psychosexual mind games and I love that for him. 

There's a certain paradox to queer representation. As it gets more respectful and more nuanced and more common, it also loses that ineffable transgressive thrill that makes you feel vicariously awesome for daring to be queer. I know that the moral guardians think my bisexual proclivities mean I've got a one-way ticket to hell. So just give me my plastic horns and pitchfork already, so I can leer at oiled-up hunks on my way down.

No, no, that was a joke. Don't cancel me. It's just, I recently saw Aladdin for the first time since hitting puberty and maybe it's because I'm now middle-aged and a bit scrungly myself, but Jafar was . . . hot? Totally an offensive stereotype. The queer-coding was not subtle. But that eyeliner? That sneer? That annunciation? He can mince right across the screen and straight into my bedroom. . . and yes, I know that makes me even more hell-bound than the crack about the oiled-up hunks.

And I can't help relating that experience back to my experience with Abyssals: Sworn to the Grave. The new Eye and Seven Despairs is your schlubby NB frenemy who you always invite to the book club because their opinions are guaranteed to be both fascinating and infuriating, but the old Eye and Seven Despairs was a toxic goth mommy who'd get you so twisted up inside you'd find yourself committing treason for sport. Force me to choose, and obviously you go with the new version. Easy fucking choice for any context except "spicy fanfic." But there's part of me that wonders why we couldn't have both - irresponsible WMD-crafting mad scientist with a conspicuous habit of including "transform into a hot chick and seduce this man" as a vital step in all of their supervillain schemes.

I promise, this digression was not purely to make incredibly horny engagement bait, it's also part of a broader point about the book. Which is that its more subdued, cautious, and humanist tone is not entirely to its benefit. The over-the-top, borderline-offensive grotesquerie of the previous editions served a purpose. Specifically, they took the subject matter out of the realm of the "realistically grim" and into a sort of purely make-believe dark humor. The rib-cage corsets and six-foot meat cleavers, dripping with blood, they were actually load-bearing camp. And while I wouldn't go so far that the 3e version isn't camp enough, I would say that it's right at the edge, where losing even some of the camp it does have would run the risk of making it entirely too self-serious.

Although, the new approach does have some advantages. There's less I feel compelled to try and explain away. The old style, with its "goth level cranked up to absurdity" was maybe more fun across the board, but its recklessness and its lingering gen-x insensitivity meant it was loaded with little landmines of unfun that would take a deft hand to disarm. Take a moment to contemplate how much respect you lost for me when I admitted to enjoying certain problematic aspects of the old presentation of the Eye and Seven Despairs. Now, imagine that disappointment happening in real time during a game session, as I try and turn his skeevy, gender-transformation-as-fetish sexcapades into an rpg plot. Third edition, blessedly, spares us that possibility, and it was a worthwhile trade-off to lose the Eye's baroque, Bugs Bunny-style nonsense as part of the bargain.

That said, I cannot entirely forgive 3rd edition for introducing a new signature character called "the Gallows Bride" and then making her look like this:

Her name evokes two of the most powerful elements of goth cosplay, yet her design incorporates elements of neither one. That's borderline malpractice on the part of the art design. At least put her in a novelty bola tie or something.

She's dressed like she's just at the ren faire to drop off her art major girlfriend. Not a single piece of that outfit looks like it was bought at Hot Topic. If you show up to a funeral dressed like that, it's probably because your parents wanted you to look nice when they lowered you into the ground. Clothes like that are perfect for a sensible, yet fashionable night on the town with friends.

(It's essential to my understanding of what makes Abyssals enjoyable that my fashion-based roast reads like an anti-roast).

Overall, though, I'd say that Abyssals: Sworn to the Grave is easily the best version of the Abyssals fatsplat, and is arguably the best book in 3e so far. There's a lot I didn't cover about the new paradigm for underworld locations, with its cultural and manner-of-death-based afterlives. Or about necromancy's new versatility. Or about the strange deathlord-inspired charms (that were, unfortunately, not directly labelled, making them not stand out as much as they should have). All-in-all, it's a welcome continuation of 3e's tradition of competence and creativity at the expense of audacity (even if I love audacity to an unseemly degree).

Ukss Contribution: The spell "Seat of Deadly Splendor" summons a throne made from a massive skeletal fist. Both in-character and out-of-character it makes you look like a total badass. The Ukss version will be a permanent installation rather than a spell effect, but it'll still make you so intimidating your enemies will fall to their knees before you.

(D&D 3.5) Races of Eberron

 Across the run of D&D 3rd edition, the Races of . . . series has been pretty consistent in both its strengths and weaknesses - an ideal format that presents useful, if slightly mundane information about various fantasy creatures, but the creatures themselves are either the same vanilla demihumans we've been reading about for fifty years (elves, dwarves, halflings) or complete randos we have no preestablished reason to care about (raptorans, illumians, and to a lesser extent, goliaths). Races of Eberron (Jesse Decker, Matthew Sernett, Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel, Keith Baker) breaks the pattern by retaining the series' characteristic strengths while improbably being about interesting creatures with unique mechanical and roleplaying challenges that play an important part in the overall setting . . . and also the Kalashtar.

No, no, that's too harsh. I actually quite liked almost everything about the Kalashtar. . . aside from the fact that they were being presented in a kitchen-sink D&D setting. They, along with their arch-rivals, the Inspired, never stopped feeling to me like one of those stealth pilots that got snuck into popular long-running tv shows, where the regular cast only showed up at the bookends of a story about totally new characters so that the resulting series could be sold to the public as a spinoff. (For my younger readers, this is something that used to happen before content-hungry streaming services started greenlighting a bunch of random bullshit).

I couldn't read anything about the Kalashtar or the Inspired without thinking "this really needs to be its own setting, possibly even its own game." The mystical realm that connects all mortal minds through their dreams is ruled by an evil spirit known as "The Dreaming Dark," and the lesser dream spirits, the quori, serve this malevolent force by sending people nightmares, casting the whole of the mortal world into an age of darkness and suffering. But some quori rebelled and quietly nurtured the hope of a coming age of light in which the Dreaming Dark was finally defeated. Unfortunately, the rebel quori could not defeat their nightmarish rivals and were forced to flee to the mortal world, taking up residence in human minds, which they gently and consensually possessed, leading to the creation of a strange psychic subculture - the Kalashtar. 

But the Dreaming Dark was not satisfied with this state of affairs, so it sent its own quori to the mortal world, to violently possess suitable vessels in order to hunt down and eliminate the refugee dream spirits. These nightmare quori subverted the leadership of a mighty empire and manifest generation after generation in a special class of people known as "the Inspired," who are worshipped by the people of Riedra as living gods. 

This leads to a shadow war between rival factions of spirit-channeling psychics, where insular and clannish Kalashtar communities follow strict spiritual practices to both oppose the Dreaming Dark and manifest the coming Age of Light, while the Inspired infiltrate governments to oppress an (apparent) ethnic minority, hire catspaws and cuttouts to harass them directly, and send quori spirits to hop from body to body in the hopes of taking them unaware. It's espionage, it's intrigue, it's crime drama, it's science-fantasy driven by new age spirituality, and if it was the only fantastic element in a series set in Victorian England, it would probably be one of my favorite games. 

But because it's set in Eberron, I have to shake my finger and scold, "No! You have too much going on! Dial it back a little." I know it's looking a gift-horse in the mouth to complain about this bonus game-within-a-game content, but I imagine myself sitting down to a session 0 and explaining to the table "this is going to be an all Kalashtar game . . . trust me, the payoff will be worth it" and maybe that's a game I'd enjoy running, but it's not a conversation I'd enjoy having.

So not quite in the same boat as the Raptorans, but maybe enough of an analogue to say that Races of Eberron has not entirely escaped the series' weaknesses. But enough of that. Let's talk about the book's strongest content - warforged and changelings.

Not since the genasi from Planescape have I experienced such an instantaneous and total transition from "trademarked invention of a specific campaign setting" to "essential staple of D&D-style fantasy." Like, it's one of those cases where you don't recognize a gap until you see it being filled. Oh, "fantasy robots who are confused by their own emotions" and "nonbinary pansexual gremlins who struggle with the concept of personal identity" . . . of course. It seems so obvious in retrospect.

We get a pretty good presentation of both, though I don't think they escape their Eberron-specific contexts enough to justify the introduction's rhetorical question - "Why is Races of Eberron a core D&D supplement and not an Eberron-specific book?" 

The answer given: "Changelings, kalashtar, shifters, and warforged are excellent additions to any D&D campaign, offering fun and unique play experiences and enriching any setting" is at least half correct (I'm embarrassed to admit that I forgot entirely about shifters until just now, but in remembering them, I'm thinking "good vibes . . . yeah, why not" which I guess would make them this book's equivalent to the goliaths), but as a first outing, Races of Eberron simply does not do the work to make that happen.

Also, there's a chapter where they check-in with the Eberron-specific variants of existing fantasy creatures in a way that makes it very clear that this is an Eberron book, despite the introduction's lofty ambitions.

Let's just run through them real quick, no more than a paragraph each:

Dwarves: "Dwarves have dominated banking and finance. . ." eh . . . they're still the proud warrior race guys, and the perfectionist crafter guys, so I think they're still broadly in the . . . challenging intersection between popular fantasy archetype and Tolkien's well-meaning but culturally hindered depiction of Jewish identity. But maybe, just as a change of pace, we could have a proto-capitalist fantasy setting where banking and finance aren't dominated by any identifiable racial group.

Elves: "We are totally not necromancers, we swear. . ." You're cool. I like you. But yeah, you're necromancers and I'm only humoring you because I think you'll look hot when you finally cave and start wearing the eye-liner I picked out.

Drow: They are less indigenous-coded here than they seemed in Grasp of the Emerald Claw, so I'm not ready to write off Xen'drik entirely, but it's also very obvious that someone is trying to "do something" with them, and I don't foresee the payoff as being worth it. Scorpions instead of spiders? Patriarchy instead of matriarchy? Hmm . . . 

Gnomes: Why does D&D 3.5 keep trying to make me want to fuck gnomes? Oh, they're spies? They're ruled by something called "The Triumvirate?" They've "dedicated themselves to carefully preserving their image as harmless pranksters and tricksters," but they're actually uptight and manipulative? All that stuff is too sexy. Stop it!

Goblins: Keep doing the Lord's work of chipping away at decades of bias. One day, they will be a core option and you'll be vindicated.

Halflings: It's kind of interesting to see the "we need to de-cutify these bastards" play out a second time, in a completely different direction than gnomes. They're deadly hunters who tame and ride dinosaurs? I guess it's cool that you have some guys like that, but between Dark Sun, the dungeon-punk presentation in the 3e core, and this, I kind of just feel like someone at D&D HQ shorted the waistcoat and clay pipe market and is desperately trying to claw back their investment.

Orcs: "Wise and wild." "Always on the edge of savagery." Okay. You get what people like about orcs. Now all you have to do is present this idea in a way that does not evoke the ugliness of colonialism. I give this attempt a C-. Do more with the steampunk goggles. Those had potential.

And the rest of my notes are just random mechanical observations like "Tactical Feats: make martials jump through hoops to do things that are conceptually interesting." I'm enough of a nerd that I couldn't help writing those thoughts down, but honestly, reviewing them, I hope I'm not such a nerd that I feel compelled to filibuster the internet with them. Y'all are going to have to wait until my next Exalted post for that.

Overall, I think Races of Eberron is one of the stronger 3.5 books I've read. I'm finally convinced that this setting has legs.

Ukss Contribution: Some of the undead who advise the elves of Aerenal are explicitly said to be 26,000 years old. This is, of course, merely a case of fantasy being bad at scaling timelines. The implications of that kind of age are not explored at all. However, it's a detail that really got into my head. Deca-millennia are such an interesting age for immortals because it's on the shallow end of long enough to blur the line between history and evolution. Like, you go back 26 thousand years in the real world and it's arguable that the humans who lived were only technically the same species as us. So what would a ghost from that time be like?

That's a question I wouldn't mind exploring in Ukss.

(Exalted Essence) Pillars of Creation

So . . . it's kind of weird that we've got two editions of Exalted running in parallel, right? I mean, Pillars of Creation is just a crowdfunding stretch goal addition to the Exalted: Essence book, so I probably shouldn't count it as "support for the line," but I'm reading it in the context of a recent crowdfunding campaign for the Exalted: Essence Player's Guide, and by my count that will make a total of six different books for this not-quite-an-edition-alternative-to-the-3e-rules. I feel like all Exalted: Essence needs is a tiny little push to take on a life of its own.

Pillars of Creation is not quite that push, but it is a noticeable step forward. All of the Exalt types feel more playable after this book, and there's a little bit more of the world of Creation, so you're a little less dependent on the main line for lore. It's not quite enough, but two or three more of these (or perhaps these two books, plus the upcoming Player's Guide plus Across the Eight Directions) and you might feel like it's enough. 

I can't decide whether or not I approve. I think it's because I'm so immersed in the lore that I could run an Exalted: Essence game with just the two books and the facts in my head. Like, yeah, I can explain to you what a Lunar exalted is and why they're so angry all the time. All you have to do is select a caste and pick out some charms. Being in that position makes Exalted: Essence feel functional. 

But then I think about what I might have to do if the PCs picked Getimians or Liminals and I realize that I would feel massively unprepared. I'm inclined to use that feeling as a guide to what it might be like to truly use Exalted: Essence as an entry-point to the series.

I guess I feel like this partial lore is spoiling me on books that may or may not one day exist. If I were to one day read a Getimians' hardcover, that explained their whole deal in exacting detail, I would do so with certain preconceptions and expectations that I would not otherwise have. Will that have a negative impact on the experience? It's hard to say, but internet etiquette certainly implies that it will. That's why we're supposed to use spoiler tags for sensitive information.

On a personal level, I never put a lot of stock in spoiler prophylaxis, at least not at the most extreme levels. It's only in a minority of specialized cases (such as works where the gradual unfolding of a mystery is the entire point of the story) that spoilers make much of a difference to me. So it's unlikely that anything I learned in Exalted: Essence or Pillars of Creation is going to ruin future books (oh, no, I wanted to be surprised that Rakan Thulio is a master of Quicksilver Hand of Dreams Style), but I do find it at least a little bit annoying. I've got these playable rules for exalts I know almost nothing about, and to the extent that I'm intrigued and want to learn more . . . I can't, because their books aren't even on the upcoming projects list.

Although, one factor to consider is that between the core book and this one, the ten exalted types have 180 pages of charms. Which means we're averaging 3/5 of a mainline fatsplat's charm chapter per book. With ten exalted types, that means we'd need 50/3 (approx 17) Exalted: Essence books to get the exact same amount of material. And thinking about it that way - what if the Sidereals book was broken up and spread out among 17 volumes - I'm not sure this approach is actually any better. Exalted: Essence works fine as a one-and-done (or even, due to the economics of crowdfunding, a two-and-done with Pillars of Creation as a companion), but eventually there's going to be a point where adding more books to the line just means you're doing the same thing as mainline Exalted, but worse. Call it a hunch, but I suspect that the companion volume to the Exalted: Essence Player's Guide will probably come right up to the edge of the breaking point.

I guess, in the meantime, Pillars of Creation is an acceptable expansion to the game's crunch. The new charms fill some conspicuous gaps in the Exalted: Essence core's curation (The Sidereals get Neighborhood Relocation Scheme back, we can now take a watered-down version of Dreaming Pearl Courtesan Style, which the Getimians are unusually skilled with, for no-doubt fascinating lore reasons), we're getting rules for Dragon Kings and god-blooded, and the selection of antagonists is an absolutely vital supplement to the core book's generic stat-blocks.

My only real complaint is that almost all of the martial arts have exalt-specific modes (Black Claw style works better for Infernals, Fist Pulse for Architect Exigents, etc), which kind of misses the mark when it comes to the martial arts' traditional role in the game. This is especially the case with Sidereal Martial Arts, which inherit from mainline 3e the problem that they are high essence charms in an edition that compresses the 1-10 essence scale to a range of 1-5. Sidereal Martial Arts are already the best essence 4-5 combat charms in the game, so giving the sidereals an extra benefit while using them kind of makes them feel like the best combatants in the game. There's a difference between "Essence Shattering Typhoon is one of the few Essence 7 charms in the game" and "Essence Shattering Typhoon beats Protection of Celestial Bliss" (actually, I'm not entirely sure whether that's true, though for Sidereals, it might inexplicably be a better defensive charm).

And in mainline 3e, this isn't that big a deal, because charm interactions are complex and you could argue the minutiae of mote costs and combinations and the varying mote pools of the different exalted (very significant in 1e, a minor but real consideration in 3e). But in Essence where the differences between exalt types are conspicuously flattened, that extra little tag starts to feel like a big deal.

Overall, I'd say I'm still cautiously optimistic about Exalted: Essence and Pillars of Creation is more or less the exact right amount of extra content for the game. Which is ordinarily something you'd interpret as unqualified praise . . . but here it also means that I'm more inclined to put future Essence releases under the microscope. Only time will tell this marks a new beginning or the beginning of the end.

Ukss Contribution: The antagonist section has a rather extensive entry for the semi-canonical Heart-eaters, the corrupt exalted of a slain god who act as a social contagion, turning their victims into mindless thralls and surviving their own destruction by hopping from body to body. They were a standout in Exigents: Out of the Ashes and they are a standout here. It kind of makes me wish they could get a standalone adventure path, but that sort of book is so far not something 3e has attempted, so I think I'll just have to settle for adding a version of them to Ukss.

(Eberron 3.5e) Grasp of the Emerald Claw

 Well, that didn't take long. Grasp of the Emerald Claw (Bruce R. Cordell), despite being only the fourth ever supplement for the Eberron campaign setting, managed to step on the biggest rake in the pulp genre - the story where "adventurers" travel to another "mysterious" continent and trespass on the decaying ruins the "dark-skinned" (and those words are in quotes because that's literally how the drow are described) natives hold sacred as a temple to their "god" (and that word is in quotes because it is also in scare quotes in the text) who is really just a big scary creature. 

Now, to be entirely fair, the claim that "most eat humans and halflings if they can catch them" is uttered by an NPC who is subtly racist-coded (he's a Khorvarian [i.e. "European"] river-boat captain in a pulp adventure story set in Xen'drik [i.e. "Africa"]) But look, the Heart of Darkness vibes are real.

Is this okay? I don't fucking know. Probably not. It's just a subplot, though. The drow are an obstacle, but they're not really mad at the PCs, they're mad at Garrow (the wannabe vampire guy, still pretending to be a vampire) for busting into their temple and burning them out of the "mud tube dwellings" they added to the exterior. The PCs are just catching strays because they're similarly dressed and have no compunction about "searching for treasure" (up to 3 rolls on Table 3-5 in the DMG) in their hastily abandoned homes.

Oh, man, colonialism is a hell of drug.

. . .

Now, there's no way for you to see this, but the ellipses represent me taking a break from the post, walking around a bit, and changing my plan about what to write next. Instead of continuing the recap (it's a serviceable chase and dungeon crawl where whoa! it turns out the four pieces of the macguffin are dangerous if brought together!) I'm going to think long and hard about the way subtext will freaking sneak up on you.

See, I don't think we are dealing with intent here. And note, I'm not using the exonerative case  - I don't mean "there was no ill-intent" except as logical other half to "there was no good-intent" - because there was no intent, period. I believe this was a case of a writer operating on pure cultural autopilot.

Let's play a game. Guess the movie I'm thinking of. It's that one where these people are on a river-boat going through the jungle and then they hear drums in the distance and the captain says, "the natives are tracking us."

Right? It's surprising how little that clue narrows it down. That's why I called it "stepping on a rake" at the beginning of the post. Because when you're sheltered in a bubble of white privilege, what this feels like, having your white explorers face danger from (maybe) cannibal natives who take exception to you treasure hunting in the cyclopean ruins where they worship their giant scorpion, is not perpetuating colonialist narratives. It feels, instead, just like you're quoting a thousand movies.

My evidence for this is just the fact that drow are generally presented in a fair-minded way. Their leader has a name (Amoxtli). He's got pretty decent stats for an NPC (in particular Int 12, Cha 10). He's got a Neutral alignment. And overall, the drow's motives are pretty reasonable "Garrow didn't attempt to parley - he ordered his men to wipe out the drow . . . In the day since Garrow and his task force entered the ruin, the drow have returned to reclaim their home. They have vowed to destroy the intruders, and the adventurers are seen in the same light as the Emerald Claw in the wake of the terrible disaster that has befallen the tribe."

Completely reasonable. I wouldn't even call it a case of mistaken identity. The PCs and Garrow are there for exactly the same reason - to find the priceless treasure at the heart of the ruins and take it back to their wealthy sponsor. The only difference is that the PCs are working for the family of ruthless capitalists whose ancestor originally drew the treasure map and Garrow is working for the militant arm of an undead-worshipping religion which recently stole the treasure map from the capitalists.

Is there a moral difference between them? Yeah . . . But I'm not sure it's a difference the drow are obligated to care about. I don't think any of us are seriously entertaining the idea that if the PCs got to the ruins first and encountered a thriving drow settlement in map area 2, that they'd take "um, sorry, but that temple and everything in it belongs to us and we'd prefer that the sacred treasures of our ancestors stay where they are rather than be taken to a foreign antiquities market" for an answer. I mean, that creation pattern needs its fourth and final schema, right?

And this is the dark side of autopilot. Because if you go beyond "fair-minded, considering your privilege" to "actually fair" then obviously this is a much more important conflict than whatever Lady Elaydren d'Cannith was getting mixed up in. 

But you know what? I think achieved some kind of justice for the drow by proportionately inverting the word count devoted to them in this review. I don't need to spend much more digital ink on a 32-page adventure that was just kind of okay. The broader question of whether pulp as a genre is ultimately salvageable or whether you're destined to always step on these damned rakes is one I can leave for when I read Adventure! 2nd Edition.

Ukss Contribution: The very first book I ever deliberately skipped was The Complete Barbarian's Handbook and maybe it wasn't the first one I should have skipped, but it was the first one whose flaws were so obviously out in the open that they broke through my white privilege brain and made me feel . . . bad about including it in my silly fantasy rpg project.

I don't feel nearly as bad about Grasp of the Emerald Claw. The only reason I spent so much space talking about its . . . issues is because, despite my intent to just throw off a quick paragraph and move on, I found that once I started talking about, it felt wrong to suddenly change the subject and act like nothing happened. 

This book didn't leave me disgusted and ashamed like Complete Barbarians Handbook did, but there is a broad, straight path between what I hated about the CBH and what I "noticed" here. And the path isn't even "racism, generally." It is literally "the adventure fiction genre's legacy of viewing indigenous people through the colonialist gaze." The only real difference is that Grasp of the Emerald Claw is sipping at that legacy through a reverse osmosis water filter and the Complete Barbarian's Handbook drank straight from the fucking hose.

On the other hand, I always feel so judgmental after skipping a book (pointing my finger and shrieking "EEEVVIILLL!!" has a way of doing that) and really, this book's worst crimes are those of omission (it really should have said . . . something about the PCs attempting to loot the "drow nests"). So let's compromise. Instead of something I really liked, let me pick something that made me uncomfortable, but in a way that challenges me to be more mindful in my own work - the colonialist theft of indigenous antiquities.

It's not a "cool" thing to add to an rpg setting, but in heroic fiction, you often show your values through the villainous schemes you choose to have your heroes thwart.

(Exalted 3e)Sidereals: Charting Fate's Course

I just spent the bulk of the last five days reading Sidereals: Charting Fate's Course and it was . . . nice. Just in general it's pretty great to be immersed in Exalted again, and specifically the Sidereals books have always been a great place to get a glimpse into the deep setting lore. The Sidereal Exalted are one of the few groups to have a direct organizational continuity since the First Age and they work in Heaven, alongside the highest of the high gods. One of the sample artifacts was a magical seven-section staff owned by Mars, the Maiden of Battles herself and the description directly references her meeting and judging several of the staff's wielders. 

That's something that generally only happens in Sidereals games - you might get eyeballed by someone from the Board of Directors of All Reality. And because it happens here, you can subsequently use it as a model for what might happen in other Exalted games (if the Unconquered Sun is a dude you can meet, who has several nepo-babies out there causing havoc in the Celestial Bureaucracy's various departments, then it no longer seems absurd for the Zenith caste to say, "you know what, I think I need to have a little talk with God, mano a mano.")

Which kind of means that a Sidereals fatsplat is a turning-point for an edition of Exalted. It's when cosmic scale games are officially On the Table. You could, of course, have kludged together something from previous scraps of lore (or, indeed, prior editions' Sidereals books), but it wouldn't have been official. Not until now, when the greatest mysteries of the universe finally have a street address. 

Naturally, this poses a problem to an edition that has so far preferred a more grounded version of the setting. You know, Game of Thrones-style political intrigue with the Realm's looming civil war vs doing Celestial Cocaine with Chor Lan, the God of Bad Choices.

Where does Sidereals: Charting Fate's Course fit on the spectrum? Well, it did mention Celestial Cocaine and Chor Lan is a real character, introduced in this book (via a genre of theater that is ostensibly about his life before he "reformed") but there's something subtle at work here. Somehow, all the various tweaks to canon have resulted in a Yu-Shan and Celestial Bureaucracy that feel less like "the place you go to fail your futile first plan when the Big One finally drops" and more like a place that's dysfunctional but somehow, improbably. . . tenable. This version of Yu-Shan feels much more like a place where you could run a long-term game that was just about living in Heaven, planning and fixing destiny, and it's a workplace comedy/fantasy horror where sometimes you're fighting strange creatures that puppet the nightmares of the innocent and sometimes you're dealing with the fallout from the boss' incompetent kid totally mismanaging the Department of Rainbows ("The only part of their job Ardis-Iara takes seriously is the actual design of the rainbows.")

I'm okay with this direction. One thing you have to give 3rd edition credit for - new books make the setting feel larger. That's something 2nd edition really struggled with. And I enjoyed almost all the new locations and characters. Hell yeah, let's hang out with Let Mountains Fall, the blue-collar weather worker who never forgot his roots. I've got thrilling new tales of my adventures on Black Ray Island, the colossal semi-petrified manta ray that became a haven for the pirates who ply Heaven's quicksilver seas.

Certainly, the only negative thing I felt compelled to write in my notes was "Daystar?" in reference to one of the Unconquered Sun's other children, Nysela, Charioteer of the Daystar. And that's really more out of an abundance of caution. Here in 3e land, the Daystar is described as a "resplendent war chariot" whereas in 2e it was . . . one of the Ink Monkies' (developers collective that produced semi-canonical extra material, such as Throne Shadow style martial arts, which appears in this book) more controversial creations. I don't really want to get too deep in the weeds here, but the old Daystar was the peak of 2e's "magitech sci-fi and cosmic plots" excess and as much as I sometimes wish 3e would go a little farther in that direction, there's something to be said for artful restraint.

Besides, Heaven has a train, and there's an implication that trains used to be a common technology that was lost with the fall of the First Age. That's probably the right balance. That and airships. The two technologies that everyone can agree are compatible with fantasy. When you consider all the possible ways 3e's first foray into the cosmic scale could have gone, Sidereals: Charting Fate's Course's choices look like well-considered compromises. It's a conservative new edition. It doesn't take any big swings. But it explores new ground and isn't just a retread of what came before. It's as much as you could reasonably expect from any new edition.

Woe unto you then, for underestimating how unreasonable I can be!

No, I'm kidding. I liked this book. I'm naturally suspicious of "this isn't familiar to me, so it must suck," but I'm also (slowly) learning to be just as skeptical of its compliment "this is too familiar to me, so it must suck." I'm 43 years old. I may open up each fresh Exalted book hoping to see something that will make me feel like I did when I read Exalted for the first time, but I have to acknowledge that basic logic implies that the franchise's ability to do that must always diminish over time. 

How did I feel when I first read Exalted? Like I was seeing something new, a way of framing character power and player agency and ownership of the setting that was unlike anything I'd ever seen, though at the time I didn't express it in those terms (I believe a rough paraphrase of my actual words would be "in this game the Fighters can do cool shit" that and Rune of Singular Hate blew my fucking mind, it was the first thing I had to show all my friends.) 

And Exalted: the Sidereals was an important milestone on that journey. I was already all-in, of course, but the revelation of Charcoal March of Spiders style and its ultimate charm that let you punch people and turn them into animals or inanimate objects or full-on alternate identities. . . that was special.

And yes, it's obvious in retrospect that D&D already had Polymorph Any Object and in terms of level-gating and restricting the power to certain specific character types, the two systems are actually deceptively similar, but it just feels different when your polymorph attack is the capstone of a spider-themed martial art.

But of course, it's all just a magic trick. The tools available to us are talking, bookkeeping, and dice, and you can do a lot with those tools, but you can't do it all at once. A franchise, like Exalted, spends a certain amount of time inventing itself, discovering through trial and error what it means to be Exalted, but a successful franchise doesn't invent itself forever. At some point it becomes itself. And a mature franchise, one that has survived becoming itself, that can produce some great things . . . until it gets stuck. 

Because success can be a trap. Having a strong identity means a core of things that are definitely you, a penumbra of things that could be you, and a vast surrounding wasteland of things that are very clearly not you. And that penumbra, it's your room to grow, but damn, it gets thinner and thinner all the time.

That's what happened to Exalted 2e, I think. It reached the limit of the thing it was and didn't have anything else to be. Heroin-pissing dinosaurs were unironically great, but they boxed the setting in and not even Masters of Jade could break out of that box (because, ironically, nothing in Masters of Jade was as cool or as interesting as the heroin-pissing dinosaurs).

Hence 3rd edition. The franchise re-inventing itself. And as great as it's been to see, a franchise in the process of reinventing itself can never recapture the feeling of experiencing it for the first time, at least not for us old timers. Because the first time I read Exalted, I wasn't expecting it to become it to become Exalted. That's a unique burden every reboot and new edition must, in its own way, learn to bear. 

Anyway, back to the subject of Sidereals: Charting Fate's Course. It's a book that felt, to me, like the last little bit of struggle to reach the top of the hill. Third edition has, finally, become Exalted. It has entered the "mature franchise" stage of its life-cycle. My prediction for the Abyssals book (which is coming my way as soon as DTRPG finishes the POD), the Alchemicals book (which I could read in the backer draft, but won't), and the Infernals book (in production, according to the Onyx Path website) is that they will be recognizably 3e-ish (yes, it has its own feel, but no I can't quite put it into words just yet, it's the sort of thing you blog about years after the fact and then feel smug for noticing in retrospect) reconstructions of prior editions' work and that they won't so much expand the setting as fill in the outlines that have been laid down for them by earlier books.

It's telling to me that we're very close (at least in a "having enough of a manuscript to justify crowdfunding" sense) to having a "complete" 3rd edition and the only two "missing" books are Alchemicals and Infernals, which were, respectively 1st and 2nd edition's attempts to push back their own penumbras and establish a beachhead into new territory for the franchise to explore. Alchemicals went from "experimental" to "essential" in between 1e and 2e, and Infernals repeated the pattern between second edition and third, but once they're out, once we have the "essentials," then 3rd edition will be in the same transitional place. What comes after the essentials?

It's left itself a bit of wiggle room. The answer at the top of my mind, after reading this book, is "Getimians." They're presented as foils specifically to the Sidereals, beings from a timeline that never was who by their very existence threaten the smooth functioning of fate. The chapter fictions share a recurring Getimian antagonist who is defeated, but manages to escape, implying future conflict to come. And even the rules make a little space for them, listing them as one of the few groups who can learn Sidereal Martial Arts and the only ones who even potentially get access to the "Enlightenment" keyword. 

And so it seems likely, but not inevitable, that we will get a Getimians book. But will that book be third edition's foray beyond the penumbra? Will it be weird and confusing and run the credible risk of being fairly labeled "not-Exalted?" Because that's what it will need to be, if it's going to carve out new ground be explored in 4th edition. . .

Though maybe it's a bit too early to be thinking about that. Truthfully, despite being new, the Getimians feel to me like the sort of thing that could slot easily into a mature 3rd edition. The Exigents book opened up a lot of space for these sorts of corner-cases . . . and I think I'm starting to see the shape of "3e-ness" actually. I compared Exigents: Out of the Ashes to Games of Divinity and Wonders of the Lost Age out of a sense that it was a key part of 3rd edition becoming Exalted . . . or, at least, a particular manifestation of Exalted, and the bullet points are starting to fall into place. A 3rd edition book will:

• Have way too many fucking charms.
• Introduce places and characters you've never heard of.
• Establish that those new things have a conspicuous, though probably somewhat tenuous connection to things you've seen before.
• Ensure that when something familiar does show up, it will be more human, less in-control, and less cruel than it has been depicted in the past.
• Present both problems and opportunities as things that will be largely local.
• Take a softer approach to inter-exalted tier preservation (i.e. between Dragon-Blooded and Sidereals) in contrast to extra-exalted tier preservation (i.e. between Sidereals and the Celestial Gods) that remains hard while pretending to be softer. For example: allowing the God of Martial Arts to practice Sidereals Martial Arts, but establishing that he gave himself a permanent spiritual wound by doing so. Or continuing 2e's bizarre tradition of insisting that not even the really high gods can use Solar Circle Sorcery.
  
• Be vague and noncommittal about things that are supposed to be "prehistory" even when they are in the living memory of characters being discussed.

These aren't just predictions, they are all also properties I would attribute to Sidereals: Charting Fate's Course. If you detect a hint of ambivalence there, well, I won't deny it, but I will insist that for now, it's just a hint. I've called 3rd Edition my favorite edition of Exalted in the past, and I think that assessment will hold out to the end. And this book definitely demonstrates many of the edition's strengths - its humanism, its willingness to explore, its commitment to preserving "blank spaces on the map," its aspiration towards evergreen gameplay through sheer fucking volume of content. But maybe it's also the first time a 3rd edition book has made me feel like I could see the end of the line.

Once there was a maiden. . .
Who found herself climbing up an earthen path.
Her footsteps made no sound.
There was a silence in the air.
She walked for years, and then, came to a cliff. The road gave way to clouds, and she could go no further.
"There's always an ending," said she.

Ukss Contribution: The God of Roads travels with "a much-put-upon donkey who once ate a Peach of Immortality." I like that a lot. A humble creature, in its innocence snacked upon the forbidden fruit, and now it is done with the celestials' bullshit. 

(Eberron 3.5e) Sharn: City of Towers

Eberron is so close to greatness. I can feel it. Sharn: City of Towers (Keith Baker and James Wyatt) is the first full-sized supplement I've read for this setting and almost the whole way through it was on the cusp.

The challenge before me now is to describe this . . . general cuspiness without sounding like I'm bitter the book isn't something it never promised to be. Let's start with the printing press.

I am almost certain that the world of Eberron has moveable type printing presses. Or, at least, some magical doodad that functions in almost exactly the same way. It's just something that . . . fits the vibe. You're a gnome who works at a bank, you read your newspaper on the train - Eberron!

However, when I examine the known, canonical facts about "The Sharn Inquisitive" (Sharn's hometown newspaper) they somehow don't quite fit with a historically-inspired printing press while also not elegantly fitting with any other form of known D&D-style magic or craftsmanship:

• First, it's called a "Chronicle" rather than a "newspaper," which isn't a telling detail per se, but does suggest a deliberate choice to avoid modern-sounding terminology.
• Contra this, the job title of Haftak ir'Clarn, the guy in charge, is "publisher." And while there's nothing about being a publisher that specifically requires the existence of a printing press, it does at least imply a mass distribution.
• Haftak runs a "bookstore and bindery, and uses its facilities to publish the Sharn Inquisitive." And this feels, to me, like another very careful curation of terminology. What is a "bindery?" What sort of tools do they use? Where do they get the specific papers to bind? Binderies still exist, and most use modern industrial tools, but the word itself is old-fashioned, more suggestive of hand-crafting. And this "chronicle" that's being "published" . . . it uses the "facilities" of a bookstore? I guess a bookstore could have an on-site printing press, but it hardly seems like a standard facility.
• Further evidence in the minus column - you can't buy individual issues. It's only available as a yearly subscription, with weekly issues distributed by mail. So we know for a fact that Sharn does not have adorable moppets standing on street-corners shouting about the latest extra! That's a pretty big smoking gun against the Sharn Inquisitive being a newspaper.
• On the other hand, "it's usually easy to find a discarded copy a few days after publication," which suggests that individual issues are common and disposable. At 3gp per year, that comes to roughly 6cp per issue. That's a price point and behavior that argues against being hand-crafted.

On the balance, I think the evidence argues against the Sharn Inquisitive being mass-produced by a printing press, but I'm not sure how much the "evidence" should count, considering that every time they talk about this fucking thing they sound like they're talking about a god-damned newspaper!

And yeah, it's a bit ridiculous of me to hyperfocus on less than 5 paragraphs of a 192-page book, but it sort of gets at what I mean by "on the cusp of greatness." Eberron is not quite one thing or another and so far it has attempt to coyly weave between its influences without committing to picking a lane. And to the wrong kind of mind (like mine, I guess), that can be pretty annoying, but done with deftness and skill, it can also be pretty fucking great. From what I've seen of the setting so far, it seems likely that the creators will develop that skill in time, but that they don't quite have it yet.

Case study #2: ores. Where do they come from? Where do they go? This book has two contradictory answers. From page 97:

"Cogsgate is the gateway to the Blackbone Cogs. Ore from Zilargo and Karranth is carted town the long tunnels into the darkness. . ."

And yet, from page 122:

"Brelish refineries sell much of their ore to Zilargo."

Looking at the surrounding context, I'm pretty sure this is not a matter of ore just going round and round between the two nations in an eternal circuit. And it's probably not a case of raw ore being mined in Zilargo, shipped all the way to Sharn to be refined in its vast lava-powered underground foundries, and then shipped back to Zilargo to make manufactured goods. Indeed, "Zil artificers and engineers produce many of their wares in the great factories of Breland."

However, the origins and chain of ownership of this ore and its resulting products are unclear. Zilargo mines the ore? Then ships the ore to Sharn? Then sells the raw ore to the refineries? Then buys back the refined ore? Then sends the refined ore to factories in Breland (the nation that contains Sharn) to be turned into wares? Then sends the wares all over Khorvaire?

Okay. I'm not sure why Zilargo is acting as double-middleman, and if I were the King of Breland, I'd be worried about long-term economic imperialism, but hey, capitalism, whatcha gonna do? However, we just got done with a systematic description of all the dozens of districts across all 17 of Sharn's various wards, and only one factory is mentioned . . . and that produces textiles.

Now, I know I'm in ultra-nitpick mode right now. In one of the district descriptions it mentions the existence of "workhouses," but in context it did not seem to refer to the cruel Victorian "rehabilitation" facilities, so I can only assume the word was meant to evoke a proto-industrial process of centralized, but not mechanized manufacture.

This is where I have to step back and have a modicum of self-awareness as a critic, because I've talked a lot about things that have all of jack shit to do with fantasy adventure. Printing presses? Ore shipments? Factories vs workhouses? Who the fuck cares? And more to the point - am I truly, honestly bringing this up as a lense to examine Sharn: City of Towers or am I just doing the thing I do where I pick a random subject to go off on because I have little to say about the book itself?

Well, I'm afraid to say, this time it really is about the art and these issues, as apparently unconnected as they are from fantasy adventures, really are very important to my critical assessment of Eberron.

It all comes back to Tolkien and his "electric street-lamps have no place in fairy tales." I disagree, but this disagreement is not actually about the literal aesthetics of street-lamps. What Tolkien was saying, and what I'm disagreeing with is that modernity has no place in fairy tales. See, more than the trappings of technology or "hard vs soft magic systems" or any of that stuff, the difference between fantasy subgenres (especially in tabletop roleplaying) comes down to historiography.

Eberron, so far, has attempted this (historically pretty bold) noncommittal genre-straddling, but in the process has run the risk of orphaning itself in an incoherent historiography. All this talk I've been doing about modes of production, it's been because Eberron has so far failed to acknowledge that modes of production are inherently ideological. 

Which, okay, makes me a bit of a silly goose. I'm here shouting "This Dungeons & Dragons setting needs more dialectical materialism damnit!" and in 9 times out of 10, that would be a ridiculous demand. But here in the 10th time, in a world where magic can emulate certain 19th century technologies, in a corner of the setting that "owes a great deal to classic crime and detective films and novels, such as The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon" a more modern approach is necessary.

Sharn: City of Towers should have explained what a workhouse really is. You spend all this time in a noir-style city with deep shadows, corrupt law enforcement, and terrifying criminal gangs, but you never get the context that someone joining up with the legbreakers to avoid the workhouse isn't just some lazy criminal. They're a person faced with an impossible choice. Live outside the law, do things you might find reprehensible, or subject yourself to one of the atrocities of the industrial revolution's transitional economy. A "workhouse" isn't just an old-timey name for a "factory" it's a place where you're sentenced to hard labor and gruel for the "crime" of being poor in a system that manufactures poverty. You are being judged for society's failure to plan a soft-landing for those displaced by the mechanized thresher. And in Sharn, that judgement manifests in the stunningly unsubtle visual metaphor of slumlords living in cloud palaces while the exploited poor toil in the lightless foundations of their sky-challenging towers.

More than any particular chain of logistics, it's important to think about how these things work because those answers shape how you write your history. Whether the ore comes to Sharn from Zilargo or goes to Zilargo from Sharn, the answer to "how does this all function" is "through the exploitation of labor." Or, at least, that's answer you give if you want a fantasy setting that feels like the 19th century (regardless of its tech level). It's the answer you give if you want to tell stories that feel like classic detective thrillers. Chinatown was about incest, but it was also about water use rights.

It's also why I seem so obsessed with whether or not Eberron has a printing press. Obviously, it's not really that important. If they don't have a press, we can at least infer the existence of some spell or magic item that is maybe a little slower and more expensive than a press. But what the press represents, as part of a historical narrative, is a transformation of social consciousness, a fundamental change in the way people relate to information and engage with their communities. And it's kind of important to know whether that transformation is happening in Eberron too.

Gonna go back to dragging Tolkien. For all his insight, and for all his beautiful worldbuilding, his historiography was fundamentally conservative. Like, how did the people of Gondor learn that they once again had a King instead of a Steward? Not through a newspaper, you can be sure about that. Because they were subjects rather than citizens. They didn't need to stay informed because they were never in danger of being consulted. Luckily, they were in near-unanimous agreement about the importance of adhering to tradition and ensuring the smooth transition of power to an heir of the proper bloodline (which may sound arbitrary, but remember, the bloodline also conveyed an uncommon greatness of spirit).

And look, I'm being needlessly cynical about the book's happy ending. It's not my intent to stir up shit about a beloved classic. It's just to show the way historiography can shape fantasy stories. Another rhetorical question - is there any power that Sauron claimed that King Elessar did not possess? Yeah, it's a brat question, because the whole damned book is about the temptation of the One Ring, which represents the callous and cruel exercise of power. But what I'm talking about is the distribution and possession of power.

What's to stop Elessar from killing a yeoman farmer and taking their land for the crown? Now, obviously, Aragorn would never do that . . . but what's stopping him? Let's just keep that question rhetorical, because the point here is Tolkien's historiography renders it irrelevant, perhaps even impertinent. The thing stopping Elessar from ruling unjustly is Aragorn's unshakable sense of justice. And I think Tolkien would argue that's a better guarantee than you'd get from a system of checks and balances (and honestly, given the state of the USA today, I'm not sure I could blame him if he did). This is what's known as an individual level of analysis - good government is caused by good rulers, bad government is caused by bad rulers, and the fraught history of humankind can largely be explained by the fallen nature of humanity.

I bring it up not out of any great desire to show my whole ass re: the well-trod ground of Tolkien scholarship, but to contrast it both with Eberron's ideal approach and with its actual approach. The GM chapter claims to want to tell hardboiled detective stories, but to do that you have to pull back and look at society. Because that's kind of what noir is about - a post-war disillusionment with heroism that throws into contrast the individual's powerlessness before nameless and unaccountable social forces. The villain in Chinatown got away with incest because he got away with stealing water, and he got away with stealing water because the social and political incentives of California at the time favored capitalist consolidation. The corruption goes all the way to the core of society and the horrific individual abuse is only a manifestation of that ("Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown.") 

It's debatable whether authentic noir is even something that's desirable to do with D&D, but what's not debatable is that noir is something D&D usually doesn't do. Eberron in general, and Sharn: City of Towers in particular say they want to do noir, but, well, there's not enough information in this book to tell a story revolving around water rights, that's for sure. (Though there is a character, Luca Syara, who is basically a Lost Generation playwright, so it's not entirely hopeless).

But I want to circle back to "traditional medieval fantasy," because that's the other thing Eberron claims to want to do and it's important to note that while D&D fantasy was inspired by Tolkien, it never actually shared his historiography (see, there was a point to the digression after all). There's actually a third ideology at work - mid-century American white supremacy. 

Now, Gygax's unseemly admiration for John Chivington notwithstanding, I don't think many of the contributors to D&D over the years were openly and consciously white supremacist. Rather, we're talking about a historiography here - a way of talking about cultures, states, and peoples that was shaped by the assumptions of a specifically American white supremacy. You've got "civilization" or the "good" alignment that is white-coded . . . and that is under threat by "barbaric" or "evil" forces, which are . . . not white-coded. And as long as you have monsters in the wilderness, you can never entirely get away from that, at least not in the D&D tradition.

But I have to give Eberron credit for at least visibly trying. There's a monster kingdom and it has a certain credible political legitimacy (even though that's not recognized by Breland and the monster kingdom's citizens have no rights under Brelish law). The goblinoids have an ancient history and will mingle with humanoids at border zones and in urban areas like Sharn, where they're poor (because of segregation) but regular citizens. And more broadly, decoupling alignment from creature type does blunt the racial essentialism that is a big driver of the ickiness of "traditional" D&D.

However, this more Eberron moves away from its inherited Gygaxian historiography, the more conspicuous its failure to embrace literally any alternative. So far, they've been playing it off as genre-bending, but that only works because the setting is new. Before too many supplements, it's a trick that will start to get old.

Overall, Sharn: City of Towers is a very generous setting book. It gives a complete tour of the city, covers customs and legal codes, offers a bunch of adventure ideas, and rounds it out with new feats, new magic items, and new prestige classes. It has pretty much everything I want from an rpg . . . except a point of view.

Ukss Contribution: You can pay an assassin extra to send your target's soul to hell (or, at least, an unpleasant-sounding afterlife: "the domain of the Keeper.") The assassin gang has a special dagger that will do it. I'm not sure what it says about Eberron's soteriology that this is possible, and I can't even begin to speculate what genre of crime caper this is (vanta-noir, maybe), but it's some hardcore fantasy nonsense and I find it very challenging in an interesting way.

(Exalted 3e) Many Faced Strangers

Ah, Kickstarter, the platform that dares to ask, "what if the Exalted fatsplats weren't long enough?" And in daring to ask, it also dares to answer - in the form of Many-Faced Strangers, which is no more and no less than 235 extra pages of Lunars: Fangs At the Gates.

So first off, right away I can tell you that it's a mistake to wait five years between reading the main book and reading its overflow supplement, especially for a game as jargon-dense as Exalted. Frequently, I'd be looking at an NPC stat-bloc or one of the new charms that upgraded an old one and I'd think, "whoa, I bet I'd be really impressed if I knew what the fuck they were talking about."

Now, in my defense, there was a four year gap between the books' release dates, so there was no really elegant way to read them back-to-back (aside, perhaps, from leaving the Lunars book untouched for all that time). I think I just have to accept it as the price of being an Exalted fan - 3rd edition has a slow-drip release schedule and getting a "complete" line will almost certainly take longer than the lifespan of 1st and 2nd edition combined (if you start the timeline count when the 3rd edition core was announced, rather than when it was released, this has already happened). Am I happy about this state of affairs? No. Has it negatively impacted my enjoyment of Many-Faced Strangers? Yes. But I don't call it my "ride-or-die fandom" because I expect it to be easy.

The best way to view Many-Faced Strangers, as a standalone read, is to think of it as a quick dip in a broad but shallow pool, bathing me in a refreshing cross-section of random Lunar lore. We get new martial arts styles, including one that makes you into a jrpg villain by surrounding you with a mantle of floating swords (or axes or hammers or chains or whatever your favored weapon might be). We get a quick character write up for Leviathan, one of the setting's most divisive characters (is he "would be cool if he didn't suck" or "would suck if he wasn't cool" - we may never get a definitive answer, but personally, I'm on team "he's cool because he sucks.") In other words, it's got a lot of cool stuff in it.

In other other words, the cool stuff doesn't build to anything. That's not surprising, given the book's form, its origin, and its relationship to its companion volume, but it is the sort of book where you're going to ask yourself why you're reading it. And I have the misfortune of knowing exactly why I'm reading it - because it's the next in line on my blogging project. That's a bad reason to read a book like this. Don't get me wrong, I love Exalted enough that I enjoyed the experience, but it was definitely something I did at a bad time and for bad reasons.

The good reason to read parts of this book is because you're going to play or run a Lunar Exalted game and you need just a little bit more of that Exalted special sauce. Nothing in here is essential, but there's lots of stuff that would be nice to have. Some of the backer-suggested charms are the sort of thing you can build a character around: dealing full damage when you are in a miniscule insect form, hunting down ghosts and stealing their mortal form, drawing on the power of your bonded territory to enhance sorcerous workings. Once again, having a clear starting point (in the forms of the mega-fans' wishlists) leads to stronger charm design overall. Certainly beats rerolling 6s and doubling 8s.

If you're a GM, you might also be interested in running the scenario at the back of the book - "War for the Caul." It's well-designed, in that super open-ended Exalted way where you can never be entirely sure about the capabilities or motivations of the PCs so the most it can do is suggest categories of challenges. I think you could definitely use it as the starting point for developing a fun and memorable campaign. My main caveat would be that the island continent of The Caul is terribly mysterious.

Yes, here I go again, being the sort of GM who will hate on an rpg just for leaving room for GM creativity, but damnit, this is important. The Caul is not just "mysterious" because it's never gotten a continent-sized write-up, it is mysterious in the context of the story and by the standards of Creation. This mega-island is a literal lost world. It faded out of existence for hundreds of years and then suddenly came back, as if no time had passed. It's sacred to both Lunars and Dragon-Blooded because it has a (dare I say it) mysterious connection to their patron deities, Luna and Gaia. If a Dragon-Blooded goes on a pilgrimage to all five of the shrine cities, their next child is guaranteed to exalt . . . and that's a pretty big deal. 

And that's just the stuff we've seen in print. The adventure implies that there's a lot more stuff we haven't seen. In fact, the Caul is explicitly called a "cradle of mysteries and wonder." The land itself is supposedly a "sibling" to the Lunar Exalted in some kind of poorly-defined way, and if they controlled all five of the shrine cities, they'd be able to do the pilgrimage for a similar Big Deal Reward. And if you read all three of the major sources of information about the Caul (this book, The Realm, and Lunars: Fangs at the Gates) you'll have only the vaguest idea what any of that is supposed to look like.

Obviously, you're supposed to make it up, but I'd have appreciated a more frank, direct, and . . . helpful discussion about how you're supposed to make it up. It's not a dealbreaker or anything. The adventure is plenty usuable without. It's just . . . am I supposed to know the difference between a sacred land, worth warring over for 500 years, and just, like a manse or something. (I mean, I probably should, given how much Exalted experience I have, but the same experience that makes me theoretically able to develop my own version of The Caul also puts me in relatively little need to have The Caul as an excuse).

The other thing I'd change about the adventure, while we're on the subject, is His Divine Lunar Presence Sha'a Oka. I wish he were just a bit . . . more. Part of this, of course, is down to the Quick Character format, which is more or less custom-designed for making big NPCs seem less impressive, but if you make the proper allowances, he's probably beefy enough. He's just not "give him the most ostentatious fucking title"-level impressive. He's best known for repeatedly coming back after his apparent death and his stat bloc implies that this is simply a result of skillful use of the standard Lunar toolkit (which, to be fair, is well-suited to repeatedly faking your death). I'd have preferred something more explicitly out-of-context like "thanks to a solar-circle sorcerous working, bestowed upon him by the Caul's Luna-descended spirit courts, this motherfucker absolutely cannot be killed while the shrine cities still stand." It's rules legal, fits in with 3e sorcery's "unsettling sword and sorcery-style forbidden magic" vibe, and would actually explain why this guy gets the big title.

That may be my habitual mystery-hatred at work, though. "They gave him a big title because they think he's real cool for keeping the holy war going for 500 years" is probably explanation enough. Needing every little thing to have a canonical "justification" is how 2e got so . . . 2e. But damn, I miss 2e sometimes.

Speaking of trolling up just the absolutely most picayune edition-warring bullshit - this book puts a new wrinkle in the origin of Creation's solar eclipses. As a brief refresher, the theories we've seen are "it's just astronomy, dude" from Across the Eight Directions' appendix and "heaven-sent omen of the Unconquered Sun" from the 1e core. Now, we also have Kama-Soth, "the Moonshadow Prince, a mischievous bat spirit that holds domain over solar eclipses - those moments when Luna interposes herself between Creation and the brilliance of the sun."

And look, Creation is flat and has no fixed size. It just sort of blends at the edges into the limitless primordial chaos that preceded shaped existence. There aren't intersecting orbits or anything like that. Across the Eight Directions was cagey about what the sun and moon actually are (and to be fair, we've gotten some pretty bad answers in the past), but what they most definitely aren't is a massive flaming ball of gas at the center of the solar system and a cold, dead rock that sometimes happens to get in the way of that. 

My main evidence that eclipses are an Unconquered Sun thing comes from the fact that the Solar Exalted have a whole caste named after it. But that's not, like, definitive or anything. The Solars also have a Night caste and it would be pretty fatuous to claim that the Unconquered Sun causes night by going away. I can get on board with the idea that Luna has an important role to play in Creation's solar eclipses. The very fact that an eclipse requires coordination between different celestial gods is probably why the Eclipse caste have the role of diplomats. So what the hell is Kama-Soth doing?

I actually like the idea that there's a Lunar spirit who does naughty gremlin shit during solar eclipses. That's a fun encounter. But he doesn't need to be anything but reactive. The eclipses themselves should come down from the top of the celestial hierarchy.

Although, I'll admit, I'm putting way too much thought into this. I guess it's just sentimentality. I remembered that quote from the 1e core instantly. Turned straight to the correct page and found it exactly where I was expecting it to be. Because as small a detail as it was, it was one my pivotal moments of being sold on Exalted. "Oh, in this world solar eclipses can be turned off for a thousand years and then turned back on when something cool happens . . . that's, like mythic."

But I suppose every generation has its own myths. I really enjoy Exalted 3rd Edition, but it's not exclusively for me. Overall, though, I'd say that Many-Faced Strangers had the distinction of being more for me than not, so I'm happy to welcome it to the Exalted family, even if it would have been much more useful four and a half years ago.

Ukss Contribution: Kama-Soth, the god of eclipses. In Ukss' Cosmic Sphere, the sun is actually a distant celestial body, and the moon does interpose between it and the planet of Ukss, so having a bat gremlin dude who stirs shit up on those occasions poses no cosmological problems whatsoever.

(Eberron 3.5e) Whispers of the Vampire's Blade

 When I read Shadows of the Last War I unforgivably neglected to mention that the leader of the Emerald Claw detachment had a very peculiar character quirk - he was a changeling who was obsessed with vampires, to the point of using his innate shapechanging ability to pose as a vampire.

That's absolutely wild. In real life, it just makes you a goth, but in the world of Eberron, where vampires are definitely real and people definitely know about them, it's a hard core commitment to the goth lifestyle. There are hunters out there. They're going to come after you for looking like a vampire (especially if you use a combination of Obscuring Mist and Invisibility to fool people into thinking you have a vampire's Gaseous Form ability, like the villain did in the adventure). And when they come after you, you're not going to have a vampire's unholy might to protect you.

I'm not sure how I feel about all this - it's somewhere between the good kind of goofy and the bad kind of goofy - but it certainly left an impression. So much so that when I saw that the title of the follow-up adventure was Whispers of the Vampire's Blade (David Noonan), I was left agog. Did Garrow finally achieve his life-long dream of becoming a vampire? Or was the title sarcastic and mean, like Whispers of the "Vampire's" Blade. My mind reeled with the possibilities. I kind of want to read a series of adventures where this guy keeps coming back, each time with a more elaborate means of faking vampirism. Let's go head-to-head with the world's most dangerous poseur. I'm ready.

Except, unfortunately, the adventure's titular vampire was not Garrow. It was someone else entirely. Garrow shows up. He's kind of a secondary villain that interferes with you trying to chase the vampire. But he could be removed from adventure with relatively little effort. And yet, somehow, he got a major credibility boost from his appearance here.

There's just something about having your vampire hunting interrupted by a wannabe vampire that sinks its hooks deep into my brain. After the first adventure, I kind of dismissed Garrow as an overly precious joke villain, but now I want to know everything about his life. I can't stop fantasizing about casually bullying him (to be clear, he definitely deserves it) - "Sorry, Garrow, I don't have time for your bullshit. There's a vampire on the loose!" And while I don't normally countenance GM cheating, as both player and a gamemaster I have to insist that the GM do whatever it takes to ensure that Garrow never dies and never achieves his dream. You can't squander something so beautiful on something as nebulous as "player agency." Your players would never forgive you.

Now, as for the 90% of the adventure that did not focus on the recurring joke villain . . . I don't have a lot to say about it. It was pretty short. Compared to Shadows of the Last War, it did zero in a bit more on Eberron's unique genre bending (and so is probably a better introductory adventure overall). You're not just hunting a vampire, you're tracking down a rogue spy who stole a powerful weapon from a secure government vault and is threatening to bring it to a hostile power. You've got to go to a high-class masquerade ball, survive an airship battle, and then corner your target on a train. All classic pulp.

And then, in the end, you mix in a bit of D&D because the vampire jumps off the train and takes shelter in a nearby monster-infested ziggurat. You know, of the sort that you frequently find near major railways.

Do I hate the way this adventure turned out? No. Do I like the way this adventure turned out? . . . eh, yeah, I guess. Do I wish it had significantly more detail about this world's fantasy industrial infrastructure? You better believe it.

Ukss Contribution: It's got to be Garrow. He's just so fascinatingly weird.

(Exalted 3e) Across the Eight Directions

Aw, yes, this is the good stuff. Inject it directly into my veins. There's very little on this Earth I love more than Exalted setting material . . .

Though I'm left wondering what, specifically, it is about Exalted that makes me feel this way. Why does Across the Eight Directions delight me so, when the comparably dense Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting left me cold?

It's an especially pertinent question here, because Across the Eight Directions is probably the most system-agnostic supplement the game ever released, even to the point of downplaying the setting role of the Exalted themselves (for example, the Halta entry failed to mention even a single Lunar Exalted, despite the fact that Rain Deathflyer and Silver Python were an essential part of its story since Halta's 1st edition supplement).  And don't get me wrong, I don't mind this "ground's eye" view of the setting. Quite the opposite, I find it a refreshing opportunity to think carefully about the ways PCs can change the world. However, there's no real reason that a location like the Dayfires couldn't exist on Toril (after some minor reskinning, like "The Realm = Red Wizards" or something) and so the difference of my reactions makes me feel a bit of a snob.

Not coincidentally, the Dayfires were one of my least favorite parts of the book. There's nothing wrong with it. Across the Eight Directions' style of presentation - centering food and clothes and stories and their accompanying economic and social implications - is a really attractive and interesting way to learn about a fantasy world. If it were in Forgotten Realms, I'd think it was the most well-drawn location that wasn't called a 'dale. But also, it's kind of just a place. The Grand Duchy of Karameikos was more fantastic.

The kind of Exalted world-building that most excites me is found in places that are very strongly shaped by the setting's magical nonsense. There was nothing wrong with the Dayfires, but the nation wasn't built on the seafloor, with the surrounding waters being held back by a giant circular First Age dam, nor was it ruled by wolves who, thanks to a chance mutation from a Wyld zone, had near-superhuman intelligence and decided to emulate and replace the nearby human aristocrats, nor was it a wind-swept heath where nomadic clans avoided the most fertile lands for fear of rousing the psychic screams of a buried titan. Its deal was more like . . . the clans . . . they don't always get along. . .

And I suppose you couldn't build an entire world where each individual location was some kind of high-concept weirdness. Like, I'm not sitting here thinking Ukss is peak game design (. . .or am I?) You gotta have some kind of baseline, or else the old staples of "it was built around a malfunctioning manse," "some jerk is abusing an Artifact," or even "the Exalted done fucked around and found out" would lose their sting. It's just that by the time we got to the Dayfires, we'd just finished reading about Nandao Danh Nhân, a place that was also not notably weird (unless you count having a canonical relationship to the Dragon-Blooded Realm as "weird," which you really shouldn't).

Which is to say Across the Eight Directions' curation is generally pretty good. Right after the Dayfires came the city of Decanthus, which 1000 years ago was sucked into hell only to suddenly come back horribly changed. 

Although, if I'm committed to not being a snob, I do have to concede that the Forgotten Realms also has a place almost exactly like that - Elturel - though it's perhaps an important illustration of the differences between the two games that Elturel actually existed in Forgotten Realms canon for decades before it was sucked into hell and as recently as the 3rd edition book (i.e. 20 years ago) the most relevant piece of information about it was that the paladin who ran the place made it into "the safest, best policed, and most efficient trading and farming community in the Western Heartlands." Also, their elite mounted warriors were already called "Hellriders" before being sucked into hell (maybe that's what gave them the idea?).

Contrast that with Decanthus, where one of the prominent landmarks is a granary that has been transformed into a giant wasp hive by an unholy amalgam of the city's original residents and the Agata, breathtakingly beautiful crystal demon wasps. That's the Exalted flair - a willingness to go just that little bit farther and be a little . . . extra.

(Funny sidenote, you would not believe how far down the Elturel wiki page I had to scroll before they mentioned the "being sucked into hell" thing, which is maybe more of a comment on wiki editors than the Forgotten Realms, but it feels significant to me, like maybe the Realms are the bad kind of extra).

If I'm evaluating Across the Eight Directions in general, I'd say that it has a lot of the good Exalted extraness, distributed with reasonable equitability, but maybe not all 24 of the credited authors were on the same page about what makes for a great Exalted location. And maybe that's okay. I can't even say that my particular position ("always be sure to get some nonsense in there") is historically the best supported. One of the first locations, important enough to be the homeland of a signature character, was the Marukan Alliance, which was just like "what if the people of this fantasy land had a really close bond with horses." It's just that the more grounded areas feel, to me, a bit like . . . "backstory kingdoms." Everybody comes from a place, and while your Solar hero is tooling around Nexus (Creation's premiere Lankhmar) they're going to reminisce about where they came from in between trading blows with the snake-headed spider god, and they're going to be able to point to something in a book instead of making it up on the spot.

Call it a bias. Truthfully, there's nothing in this book that merits a true dislike, from me. Closest I'd get is "there's no way to turn this into an actual Exalted game, because they've neglected to include anything that might successfully oppose an Exalt" and you can always add those things. "This is going to go to shit as soon as the PCs get involved" is hardly something that will rise to the level of a fault.

I will say that the Appendix concerned me. It sort of presents this mortal-eye view of things like the seasons, travel, communications, warfare, etc that's clearly grounded in historical research, but the net effect is to suggest a world of "mundane reality" + "magic." You know, like D&D. 

I know Exalted 2nd Edition went a little far for people with its "bricks harden because the least gods of flame sing songs of quiescence to the least gods of clay" and I would be the last to claim that 3rd edition didn't inherit a setting that was completely up its own ass, but I've got this grognardish urge to point out that "savants predict solar eclipses" is a purely new bit of canon. Solar eclipses had hitherto been an omen from the heavens that happened because the Unconquered Sun was in some kind of mood. From p 127 of the 1st edition core, "When the Solars returned, the world witnessed the first solar eclipse since the Terrestrial Exalted took power." Were the savants predicting that? An event unprecedented in 1000 years of history, which was probably only documented in texts suppressed by the Immaculate Order?

And yes, I can hear myself. I have a well-reasoned contempt for edition conservatism and my own values demand that I allow the new team to pursue its own vision. It's just, I think I like this version of Creation less than I liked previous versions. That is, of course, completely okay. They're allowed to change things and I'm allowed to have preferences.  However, I would be remiss if I didn't question whether this was an intentional, coherent direction change (let alone something with as much conviction as a "vision.")

Towards the end of the appendix there's a sidebar titled "How Common are Supernatural Things?" and the answer it proposes to that rhetorical question is apparently that it "should vary with your playgroup's tastes and the chronicle's needs."

I think, even if I didn't have this nostalgia driving me, I wouldn't respect that answer one bit. It's timorous worldbuilding. Of course, a GM can adjust the prevalence of setting elements to achieve different moods, and you know where the place to discuss that is? That's right, a 2000-word essay in Crucible of Legend. In a setting chapter, it just makes you look weak. 

The sidebar called "Can I do Science?" is just as bad. It not only recapitulates the "lol, fantasy is when no gunpowder" trope (literally "replacing firearms with firewands signposts a broader rejection of anachronistic modern technology" . . . made hilarious by a sidebar two pages later titled "Anachronisms are Okay."), but it just kind of fundamentally misunderstands the game. It dismisses "the Circle's Twilight or No Moon wielding modern science to fashion setting-transforming technologies."

And this is not an edition thing. It's out of sync with 3rd edition too. Focus on the words "setting-transforming." Remember what the celestial exalted are. Remember essence fever. Like, okay, you're wedded to a notion that there's no place for electric street lights in fantasy. I don't approve, but I do understand. However, the answer to "Can I do Science" is not "this falls outside the scope of normal Exalted play." The answer is, "of course you can, it's just called 'sorcerous workings' in this world."

Oh wow, I spent way more time complaining about the appendix than I did praising the main body of the text, which is weird because I really, really enjoyed the main body of the text. It's a great mix of old favorites and new ideas, with a few choice locations that are destined to become new setting staples. I'm left with this gluttonous wish to see all of the old canon locations redone in this book's style, but spread out over a decade's worth of annual follow-ups, each with this book's proportion of old-to-new material. It's enough to make me forgive the fact that a book titled Across the Eight Directions actually had nine different directional chapters.

Ukss Contribution: In a book filled with amazing things, any one of which (yes, even the one I called out as my least favorite) would be a worthy choice, I'm going to have to descend into self-satire and pick something conspicuously plausible - the Shellrider nomads are among the few to know the secrets to navigating a perilous "ancient cactus forest."

It never occurred to me before that cacti could grow in forests. Probably because "cactus conditions" and "forest conditions" seem incompatible. And while there are places in real life that are called "cactus forests," having seen them, it's clear that I'm imagining something much more perilous. Like, a broad expanse where cacti blot out the sun and are so densely packed that you need to bargain with the local nomads to find a safe path through them. 

Incidentally, that's the bar you need to clear if you want me to call your setting "fantasy nonsense." Not necessarily something impossible, or even something you'd be compelled to call "magic." Just a little beyond what exists in the real world.