Fading Suns d20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Shadowrun 3e) Sprawl Survival Guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DragonMech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DragonMech is cool. I like it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like I said, it's weird.

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

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

Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power scaling is whimsical, at best.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Shadowrun 3e) Survival of the Fittest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BESM d20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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