(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.