(Shadowrun 3e) Dragons of the Sixth World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(d20 Modern) Critical Locations

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. Okay. Let's go with bowling. 

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

(Shadowrun 3e) State of the Art 2063

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

Nope. I can't figure it out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(d20 Modern) d20 Future Tech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Shadowrun 3e) Shadows of North America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, damn.

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

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

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

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

(d20 Modern) Cyberscape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Shadowrun 3e) Target: Wastelands

Target: Wastelands has me thinking about the power of attention. We have this enormous ability to perceive the world, but only a little bit at a time - a bright light shone through a peephole. To be perceptive, aware of what is happening all around you, is largely a matter of sheparding your limited attention, making sure it is pointed at the right things at the right time, and that over time it makes a comprehensive survey of everything.

World-building works the same way, but even more powerfully, because when you're building a fictional world, what you pay attention to becomes real.  Indeed, the longer you focus on something, the realer it becomes. Go back to one location or subject often enough and you'll discover new textures and nuances and relationships. And in service to this new complexity, a sort of fuzzy penumbra will start to form at the periphery of your attention, things that must be true, in order for all the detail to be possible, but which are not quite real, because you've never turned your attention to them.

In a way, this is kind of the curse of science fiction. It is often about changes in society, or the world as a whole, but the bulk of those changes must exist in the penumbra because narrative, as a form, focuses its attention on specific characters. The starship Enterprise is real, because that's what the show is about, but the utopian society of the broader Federation is vague and in flux, because it's only the background that supports the show's various plots.

The reason I call this a "curse" is because a lot of the time our peephole into a sci-fi setting is centered on characters and situations that are at odds with the world. You've created a utopia, but the only things that are real inside that utopia are the restless adventurers who can't be content with utopia. Or, to bring it closer to our topic of the day - you have the decaying late-stage capitalism of cyberpunk, a world driven by consumerism and conformity and corporate control, but your attention is mainly aimed towards criminals and outsiders, who don't directly experience the bulk of the world's disfunction. I've read how many of these books now and I still don't know what it's like to apply for a job or rent an apartment or go to an emergency room in the Shadowrun universe.

Which speaks to the power of attention. I can infer, from the penumbra, that these things must be pretty bad, but I don't know. This discussion is also, believe it or not, actually, specifically relevant to Target: Wastelands in that this book turns our attention on parts of the Shadowrun world I've never seen before.

But more than just a bunch of new locations, this book turns our attention to a category of places that had hitherto been neglected - the physical terrain of the planet Earth. "Wastelands" is a bit of a perjorative title, but it really just means "places with a low population density," which makes the terrain the star. This is the book you use if you want to tell stories of "Shadowrunners vs nature."

At its worst, it could be a bit "Wilderness Survival Guide," but at its best, it was about people, and the way they adapted to their environment. The challenges here are not purely physical, but are sometimes cultural. You're not just going to the desert or the arctic, but to meed the Bedouins or Inuits. I can't say for sure whether the book did them justice, but it was nice that they were there.

But what I found most interesting about Target: Wastelands was the way it expanded the setting's penumbra. Megacorps have WMDs. Warfare is a professional sport. Space is a lot more active than I'd have previously assumed, though I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with an off-world population that is canonically just large enough to support a single mafioso (actually, it's unclear how many other people work with Lee Calder to "[run] a good share of vice at Apollo and Icarus," but whoever he's working with is probably not officially in the Mafia), but it helps flesh out a tech level that's been tantalizingly vauge thus far in the series.

What's becoming clear is that there is a tier of technological power that is beyond the mercenary equipment shown thus far. People live in space. There are space prositutes (who have to be discreet, due to the small size of the communities, but nonetheless are able to carve out a living). Megacorporations can build underwater cities. Shiawase Atomics controls multiple fusion reactors. There is some serious edge of the singularity shit going on. Or, at least, I have to assume there must be, in order for this book to make much sense.

And I really wish I could turn my attention that way, focus on what the system looks like to the winners, not just the outcasts. What are these corpos scheming for? 

Obviously, it was never a realistic possibility in a book that purports to be about "hostile environmnets," but the very fact that the powers that be are making a profit off these places suggests that their reach is a lot longer than I'd previously assumed.

Ukss Contribution: One of the new pieces of equipment you can buy is chainmail socks to help protect against snakebite. I have to assume that "titanium micromesh" is a more practical than it sounds as a clothing material, but I like how weird and specific a precaution it is.

(d20 Modern) d20 Apocalypse

About a week ago, I started playing Horizon: Zero Dawn.  Wednesday morning, I started reading d20 Apocalypse (Eric Cagle, Darrin Drader, Charles Ryan, Owen K. C. Stephens). It's not something I planned on happening, but I can't shake the feeling that it's significant. A video game, where you play a heroic wanderer in a post-apocalyptic world. An rpg sourcebook that aims to help you create post-apocalyptic worlds for heroes to wander around in. Is this serendipity? Do I just have the end of the world on my mind? Or is it just a weird coincidence?

It's that last one, definitely, but it's the sort of coincidence that gets my brain working. So I'm not going to do the obvious thing and try to compare them. They're trying to do different things. However, I am now thinking about setting an rpg in the Horizon universe. Could I use d20 Apocalypse for that?

And the answer to that question is . . . "sort of." It has rules covering the traversal of ancient ruins, mounted combat, overland travel, and the barter economy. So it definitely brings value to the table. You're mostly going to want a weird combination of d20 Past and d20 Future, but d20 Apocalypse adds a bit of necessary spice.

The book works better if you're trying to recreate Fallout (because of its rules for fallout) or Mad Max (because of the Road Warrior class and new rules for doing reckless stuff with cars) but that's only to be expected. The post-apocalyptic genre had a different vibe in 2005, one shaped by the existential threats that seemed most pressing at the time. 

Although, with the benefit of hindsight, I think the mid-aughts were a particularly fallow time for the genre. It wasn't an idyllic time by any means, but I can't think of a time in my life when the end of the world has felt less imminent. My early childhood was in the waning days of the Cold War, and those duck and cover drills made nuclear war feel like a real possibility. And my teenage years were at the turn of the millennium, which didn't carry a particularly plausible threat of global destruction, but did get people talking about the end of the world, more or less constantly, as if the universe were designed to end when the Christian calendar reached a nice, round number. And, of course, everything that's happened since the pandemic has felt like the prelude to a collapse in the global order. But 2005 . . . I guess the biggest apocalyptic anxiety I personally felt was the worry that some black swan event would come out of nowhere and wreck our shit - an undetected asteroid, an escaped bioweapon, a distant gamma ray burst, that sort of thing. Whether those fears were directed towards the right thing, I'll leave as exercise for the reader. It's entirely possible that my experience was not universal.

However, if I take it as a lens for examining d20 Apocalypse, I can sort of bend facts to make it fit my narrative. There are three mini-campaign settings in this book and only one of them feels like it's expressing any sort of anxiety.

The first setting is "Earth Inherited," the least religious rapture story anyone has ever told. All the notably good or evil people are whisked away to heaven or hell (respectively) and the world is left to "the meek" who are "noted for a lack of faith or belief in almost anything of a spiritual nature." Meanwhile, angels and demons are using the Earth as a battleground for their final celestial war.

It's too much of a mess theologically to be particularly offensive and too inoffensive to be particularly interesting, but it does have the advantage of being set in the not-too-distant future, so human beings have access to "advanced weapons, cybernetics, and mecha." It's not nearly as Neon Genesis Evangelion as you're imagining, but it could potentially be made into the good kind of trash entertainment if you're willing to heighten its absurdities. Lean into the morally uncomplicated violence of big machines vs the demonic hordes and the humanist soap opera of the central "rage against the heavens" theme.

But there's probably no version of this campaign that can properly be described as "anxious." That's what separates meaningful post-apocalyptic fiction from trash post-apocalyptic fiction (no slights on trash intended, mind you). In this case, it comes down to a basic failure to understand the role of eschatology in the Christian faith. The original Book of Revelations might be summarized (half-assedly, by me) as "Our oppressors control the whole world, but have hope - even the world's not going to last forever." And the modern-day rapture-theology that mutated out of that is essentially the same thing except that the "oppressors" in this case are the objects of right-wing cultural resentments, and they don't so much "control the world" as they maliciously continue to exist, despite the right wing's very clear preference that they do not. Revelations then becomes a revenge fantasy against a secular modern world that refuses to let religious reactionaries be in charge. And further, even beyond that, there's a branch of third-hand postmodern rapture fiction that is extremely anxious about the possibility that the right wing might be correct about the nature of God, and that we're all doomed to live through their revenge fantasy.

If you're going to tell a meaningful post-rapture story, you're probably going to have pick one of those three lanes. "Earth Inherited" doesn't come close to any of them, and it's an open question how much of that is attributable to the fact that 2005 was a little too late to be jumping on the millenarian rapture bandwagon. It would be immensely helpful to my thesis if it was a lot, but it's much more likely a result of WotC being risk-adverse in its portrayal of real religion.

The second setting is "Atomic Sunrise" and it's got a little bit of anxiety to it - "A rogue organization, friend to none of the great nations, detonated a nuclear warhead inside an American city and in the anger and confusion that followed, a larger war could not be avoided." But even that anxiety is just as I said - a black swan event. I remember having that conversation, in the post-cold war window where even our biggest fears were tainted by hubris. "What if something tricks us into using our nuclear arsenal accidentally?" Because, obviously, we were much too enlightened to think of them as viable weapons of war (although, to be fair, there was also parallel talk of developing ways to use nuclear weapons in limited wars, now that disarmament had been rendered obsolete by America's eternal victory over the communists).

On these matters, "Atomic Sunrise" is fairly agnostic. It's not quite like the previous chapter, which misses the point entirely re: its central disaster, but it nonetheless fails to take a strong political stance. It makes a very straightforward promise - roleplay in a world ravaged by nuclear war - and it delivers on that promise in a very straightforward way. It hits the exact right tenor for a generic book that is merely providing a scaffold on which to build more specific games, but outside that use case it's pretty forgettable.

The final setting, "Plague World" is the worst of the three, and by "worst" I mean "best." It's like someone once heard the theory that alien invasion stories sublimate the guilt felt by colonialist societies by allowing them to imagine themselves in the role of the victim and then instead of doing literally anything with that, they instead decided to keep adding themes until the allegory was unrecognizable. 

The short version - Aliens invade Earth, overcoming our defenses with their superior technology. In order to reduce the human population and clear the way for their cryogenically suspended colonists, the aliens unleash terrible bioweapons. A mysterious private organization, convinced the governments of the world cannot defeat the aliens through force, builds a series of "Rip Van" chambers to cryogenically preserve an elite group of experts who will emerge and rebuild civilization after humanity unleashes its WMDs. Except that time never comes because alien nanotech was too good at targeting advanced weapons. So it would seem that all hope is lost, but then the aliens' biotech backfires, mutating to target the invaders' systems as well as Earth's. Foreseeing the loss of their technological advantage, the aliens then genetically alter themselves to become powerful predatory monsters, losing their intelligence in the process. Eventually, after 300 years, the orbit of the last alien ship (who's crew was long dead because they could not dare to resupply from the infected Earth) decays, triggering the Rip Van chambers to open and release the PCs into a ruined Earth where humanity clings to survival, the aliens rampage as near-mindless beasts, and remnant bioweapons still linger in the ruins of once-great cities.

It's total nonsense, of course, but I am almost perfectly balanced between thinking it's the interesting kind of nonsense and thinking it's the boring kind of nonsense. I suppose execution is really going to count for a lot, but I'm not sure how I, as a GM, would want to run this setting. The obvious campaign model - PCs emerge from the tubes, become adventurers - strikes me as the weakest possible entry point, but if the PCs began as regular future humans, what's the angle? I could see comedy, horror, or political intrigue, but not in a form that's useable right out the box.

But that's d20 Modern all over for you, isn't it? It's a series that's very generous about offering you suggestions, and very onerous in burdening you with the work necessary to bring those suggestions to life. That's honestly one of things I like best about it. It's a big toolset and a mandate to tinker. d20 Apocalypse remains true to form.

Ukss Contribution: The barter rules refer to various tables that categorize everyday items and assign them a Trade Point value. One table was all about food and it had a category called "Cheer Food."

"Luxury foods from before the apocalypse - candy bars, coffee, cans of soda or beer."

I like this detail quite a bit. It's very human. I'm sure I'll be able to find a place for it.

(Shadowrun 3e) Target: Awakened Lands

I find myself faced with a test of my basic pettiness. Should I judge Target: Awakened Lands on what it is or do I judge it on what it could have been, if it had followed the hypothetical path teased in the introduction? Because what it is is a guide to the Sixth World's version of Australia, with a few tidbits of extra information thrown into a brief second chapter. But what it could have been is a sourcebook about "the places in the world of Shadowrun that are deeply affected by magic. . . Australia . . . Amazonia, Cambodia and possibly even a few places like Tibet."

I must confess a bit of disappointment. That other book sounds really interesting. What I can't figure out is why you'd even bring it up. The only thing I can think of is that the books' titles and synopses were announced to the community before the books were actually written. Then, you get a 64-page chapter for Austalia and it's just as Captain Chaos says: "I quickly realized that I needed to allocate more storage space to the Land Down Under than I expected." Oops. 

Though I'm a bit curious about what sort of file format Shadowland is using. I have to assume that the information that appears to us as plain text and still images is actually, in setting, a fully immersive VR experience. 

In any event, I guess I should focus on the book that actually exists - Shadowrun's Australia supplement. And by that standard, it's fine. One of the effects of an increasingly globalized economic system is that everywhere starts to feel a bit like everywhere else and that's something that's reflected in the text. You've got powerful megacorporations, urban sprawl, organized crime, and essential public services decayed through privatization. It's all very comfortable if you're coming in from a Seattle-based game.

The main difference, the thing that makes Australia an "awakened land," is the Outback, its accompanying folklore, and the fantasy nonsense that was invented to flesh it out. Of these, the best part is the folklore but that has the unfortunate side effect of requiring naked cultural appropriation to use effectively. It's actually kind of funny. When discussing Aboriginal magic, the text-within-the-text says, "we don't have any Shadowland users with inside knowledge of Australian magic and a willingness to share that knowledge with us. So I've gone to a secondary source - a text put out by Pentacle Press called Into the Dreamtime by Dr. Richard Cowan."

Once more, Captain Chaos, in his role as moderator of a fictional message board, articulates something that rings very true to the process of developing an rpg. Doing research for a game about Australia, you seek to create fantasy elements based on native Australian religion and traditional stories, but because of the deadly legacy of colonialism, the natives don't actually trust you with that information (and probably wouldn't approve of you making a game about it), so all your knowledge must be mediated by foreign scholars.

From a design perspective, there's one thing this book needs to be (assuming it couldn't go back to being the book's original pitch). It needs to be a new fantasy setting, nested in the overall Shadowrun setting. You're going out into the Outback and having magical adventures, with challenges and stakes that reflect a distinctly Australian conception of magic, separate from the corporations-and-rules-based-magic of the broader Shadowrun world. That's what makes it worthy of being released under a specialized title - "Target: Awakened Lands" instead of "Shadows of Australia."

However, from a moral and political perspective, it was probably always irresponsible for the book to try and be that. It therefor makes the reasonable compromise of paying lip-service to Aboriginal beliefs but being so vague about them that it seems extremely unlikely that you'd accidentally debase something sacred. I couldn't say for sure, because this is not a subject I know a ton about, but I think the worst thing you can say about this book's presentation of Indigenous Australians is that it's completely consistent with its presentation of Indigenous peoples of other continents. There are a couple new metamagic techniques, but nothing requiring new rules for the game.

Which just leaves the invented fantasy nonsense. Australia is known for its dangerous mana storms - Fortean weather phenomena that can cast spells on those caught within. It can rain frogs or make a rain that turns you into a frog (or, I suppose, rain frogs that turn people into frogs). It can be a fog that intoxicates anyone caught within. As far as rpg random charts go, it's a pretty good one, but it never answers the question "why Australia?" Near as I can tell, it's because Australia has a lot of room for these storms to happen in. Likewise with the other new astral phenomena - astral shallows, where even mundanes can see into the astral plane; alchera, which are physical spaces that phase in and out of existence, and which usually have some spiritual mystery at the heart of them; mana ebbs and flares, which change the force of a caster's spells.

All of those things are very useful new tool's in the GM's box, but they don't really build on a theme. "Go into the Outback and weird shit will happen." Okay, fair enough. The locations and characters in Australia's overview are compelling enough to want to use them, but at the end of the day, you're still playing Shadowrun.

The next chapter, "Awakened Sites" is interesting enough, but it rushes through things that would really have benefitted from more time to cook. We learn a little bit of what we might have seen in a Cambodian supplement - nagas, merrow, and other sentient awakened creatures have moved into the ruins of Angkor and are rebelling against the human government - but this plot mostly has the effect of making me resent the fact that this book didn't get a whole Cambodia chapter.

Overall, this book was fine. It's very comfortably in the middle of the curve for Shadowrun setting content. I was hoping for something a bit weirder, which challenged the main game's genre, but I suppose I had no real reason for expecting that. So, yeah, I could see myself running a game set in Australia, but I probably won't.

Ukss Contribution: One of the example mana storms turned half a village's population into rabbits and the other half into dingoes. Then, when it passed, it changed the survivors back. That's an impressive level of horror and an even more impressive level of social awkwardness.