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.