(Shadowrun 3e) Shadows of Europe

Well, shit. It seems like the It Came From the Bookshelf! blog has a new canonical enemy - whatever government/corporate tourism council is responsible for getting people to visit Lisbon, Portugal. Not in the game. In real life. I'm not joking (actually, I am, but I'm not done yet so you have to keep playing along).

I don't blame Shadows of Europe for instigating this feud. In fact, I'm grateful to it for bringing this sinister and insidious organization to my attention. I was reading the chapter on Portugal, got to the line, "Every Thursday you can also find the traditional street market known for centuries as the Thieves' Market" and immediately lost my fucking mind. I had to know if it was real.

And it is, in fact, the case that Lisbon boasts of its famous Feira da Ladra, but golisbon.com says:

Lisbon's flea market is called "Feira da Ladra," often thought to mean "Thieves' Market" (in Portuguese, "ladra" is a woman thief) but it actually derives from "ladro," a bug or a flea found in antiques. A market of this type is thought to have been in place in Lisbon since the 12th Century, and the name "Feira da Ladra" was first mentioned in the 17th Century.

But that's a fucking lie. A rare, double-dip falsehood that misrepresents both etymology and entomology. I know, because I spent about an hour searching for a second source, and the only other one I could find is another tourism page with very similar verbiage. I checked google translate. I consulted Portuguese-English dictionaries. I searched for literature, jokes, negative hotel reviews. I even went to reddit. I couldn't find even one other person who used the word "ladro" to mean a bug. 

Did you mean a thief-bug, Lisbon Tourism Bureau?

But honestly, I needn't have bothered. Because it's an incredibly transparent lie. Oh, these bugs you're talking about, they're only found in antiques, are they? Like the kind of thing you'd buy at a flea market? Were they really selling antiques at an open-air market back in the 17th century. Is that what you'd have me believe? 

Get the fuck out of my face with this shit.

The funny thing is that google translate really does render "Feira da Ladra" as "flea market," despite translating the words individually as "fair" "from the" "thief." Which makes sense. It's just translating idiom-to-idiom. Portuguese-speakers probably just parse "Feira da Ladra" as a complete phrase and don't literally expect to encounter thieves, just as we English speakers don't expect to encounter literal fleas at our flea markets (actually, I grew up referring to this kind of market as a swap-meet, which is similarly figurative unless you mean "swapping items for cash.")

But though language prescriptivism (particularly made-up language prescriptivism) is one of my pet peeves, that's not why we're enemies now. No, the thing I can't forgive is that this is such a pointless deception.

I'm imagining some richer, more jet-setting version of myself just casually saying, "oh, yeah, I got this completely bug-free antique in Lisbon, at the . . ." ::whisper:: "Thieves Market."

And then, overhead, a cloud will morph into a bust of a mid-level bureaucrat in the tourism department who smiles down at me approvingly. I glance up and we wink at each other, secure in the knowledge that the truth about the event in question - it being a weekly occurrence that attracts far more grandmas than brigands - will be our little secret.

I look super-cool and some rube thinks, "wow, I have got to go to Lisbon." No tourism-promotion agency could ever ask for better publicity. But they had to go and ruin it.

Deception, I might be able to forgive. Incompetence? That I cannot abide.

(Anyway, if there are any Portuguese-speakers in my audience, now would be an absolutely hilarious time to inform me that I didn't dig deep enough and "ladro" is, in fact, a common word. "Oh, yeah, those ladros, they are constantly getting into my antiques, it's a real problem").

I know what you're all thinking. "Was that thoroughly hilarious and completely necessary digression the reason you took 17 days to read this book?" No. The delay was because of doomscrolling. I can't fucking help myself, even though I love reading rpgs and hate reading depressing news stories. 

Unlike the similar delay that afflicted me while reading Shadows of North America, I am not now going to claim that this cyberpunk version of Europe is somehow more optimistic than our current reality. Its vision of the continent is fucking grim. Aside from a few notable exceptions it would be in poor taste to talk about in an rpg review, almost everywhere is worse off than its real-world counterpart.

Though often in that goofy Shadowrun way. You know, the Catholic church is undergoing a behind-the-scenes schism because the reactionaries in the Curia are actively resisting a progressive pope who is attempting to reduce bigotry . . . against magic users and metahumans. Or the nation of Ireland has become an oppressive police state that serves the religious, political, and commercial interests of an aristocratic class . . . of elves.

I often wonder why they keep doing this and I'm forced to consider that maybe they're doing it because it's goofy. You can do a story about Switzerland doing ethnic cleansing and it's okay because it's not actually ethnic cleansing, it's metatype cleansing. You can roll on the racism chart and divide an NPC's "racism points" (yes, those quotes mean I'm quoting the book) between elves and trolls in a way that would be extremely inappropriate to do to real-world groups. You've got something with the shape of bigotry and which fulfils the role of bigotry, but you don't have to do actual bigotry.

Is it okay for them to do this? Hell if I know. I've not learned anything new since the last time we've had this exact same conversation. Luckily, I think we'll only have to have it once more, when I finish Shadows of Asia. I'll just save it for then.

However, I will take a moment to address some of the real-world bigotry that snuck into the book. The Roma are referred to, several times, by the g-word which is normally something I attribute to ignorant Americans thoughtlessly assuming that's simply what they're called. But this time, "the vast majority of  the authors and artists who contributed to this book hail from Europe, so the perspective is as authentic as we can manage" and that's . . . weird.

But this book's greatest sin is a kind of low-grade, possibly subconscious Islamophobia. The general overarching narrative of the book is that Europe is in such rough shape because it's coming off the aftermath of two major wars - Russia invading from the east and Muslims invading from the south.

And the reason I say the Islamophobia may be subconscious is that I think the whole driver of this particular plot is just sci-fi worldbuilding. You kind of have an end-state in mind for Europe - weakening of state power, collapse of quality of life for the masses, and an interruption in international cooperation that allows powerful corporations to divide-and-conquer - and you kind of have to find a path to there from the present.

Except that they do this thing that near-future sf and alt-history worldbuilders often do (and I've done it myself, so don't think I'm throwing stones, I'm just pointing out that the street we all live on has a lot of glass houses) where they RISK-ify borders and peoples, blobbing them together until they power scale in the right approximate ballpark. Why do I think the Muslims attack Shadowrun's Europe? Because the states to the immediate south of Europe are mostly majority Muslim.

And yet, if the origin is so innocent, why am I insisting this plot is Islamophobic? Because it's a fucking war between Islam and Christendom. There's simply no way to unbundle this idea from the colonialist and orientalist idea that all of Europe's enemies (or even the set of nations who are hostile to even one European state) are all part of a giant "anti-civilization" coalition.

(To be fair, the book does take pains to say that the Muslims might have some genuinely legitimate grievances, but it's really a band-aid that doesn't address the fundamental problems with the concept itself).

Although, in the interest of 100% transparency, as much as I'd like to say that my opposition to this plot was purely because of woke, there's an unseemly portion of my brain that simply hates the name of the hostile Muslim organization - The Alliance for Allah.

Like nails on a fucking chalkboard. But, strangely, it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly what bothers me about it.

Normally, I enjoy really on-the-nose names. If a game has a really big hole that people call "the Pit," I love it every time. 

Often when a name gives me the ick, it's because it subtly defies the rules of poetic euphony, sneaking in some ill-placed trochees or dactyls and shit. But while "Alliance for Allah" is a bit unwieldy for everyday use, I think you can fit it pretty easily into iambs, the alliteration is . . . not unpleasant, and it's got a certain visual symmetry that would work well in a typographic logo.

Hmm.

The Alliance for Allah
Needs some more coleslaw
At least that's what I saw

On the show with Phil McGraw

(If you ever wanted to figure out my accent, there's a clue for you)

Nonsense, of course, but I think I can rule out poetics as the source of my issue. I think it may be ideological after all. It's an alliance of various states that's named for the one thing the authors could be bothered to know about them. I can't help but think about the way "Allah" is technically an accurate and respectful endonym, but is often used passive-aggressively (at least in English) to exoticize and other Islamic religion. "The Alliance for God" has an identical Arabic translation, but if you went with that, it might be harder to efface the differences in motives and incentives that make such an alliance so improbable. It takes a very different sort of mind to do something for explicitly religious reasons than it does for a generically anti-western mascot. That's a worldbuilding question that demands you put some thought into it.

Which I guess is at the heart of my complaint. "Alliance for Allah," has a first draft stink to it, like it was pitched early in the process and never iterated. And that suggests a kind of carelessness when it comes to the presentation of Muslims, which is maybe not in line with FASA's company values, but might possibly reflect the limitations of their editorial resources. Even so, that lack of refinement and specificity opens the door to lazily falling back on the white-supremacist "clash of civilizations" narrative that permeates Anglosphere discussions of Islam.

c.f. Shadows of Europe, 2004.

Let me move on to one more complaint, which I don't even want to talk about because it's deeply unpleasant, but it's sort of indicative of the pattern we've been discussing - building something up through a series of logical-seeming steps without thinking about what those steps add up to.

CONTENT WARNING: The Holocaust

Apologies in advance if I seem to be too fast-and-loose here. I'm not trying to be flippant, this subject just makes me extremely uncomfortable.

So, Auschwitz is haunted. 

And under the rules of ghost folklore, this is kind of inevitable. It's also pretty inevitable that those ghosts would be dangerous to the living because that's the entire point of a ghost story - they are dangerous because they are souls in pain. 

Already, we're somewhere we probably shouldn't be. These people suffered the most arbitrary, unjust, and brutal cruelty imaginable and then, more than a century later, they're still suffering. I'm not saying nobody can tell this story, but I'm certain that goyim like me can't.

But we're not done yet. It's not just the prisoners who left ghosts behind. Some of the guards did too. For obvious reasons, the guard ghosts are mercilessly tortured by the prisoner ghosts. This all flows naturally from everything that came before, but what are you going to do with that in an rpg? Rescue a Nazi ghost?

Don't think about it too much, because we're about to get to the worst part. Because they are so dangerous to the surrounding countryside, the ghosts of Auschwitz are trapped inside an astral barrier created and maintained by an order of Catholic monks.

Sometimes, a mistake is so profound, so total, that you can't even point out what's wrong with it. They should have fucking known better. Someone should have said something. Fucking careless.

Anyway, that's 5% of the book down. I should probably say something about the other 95%. They were mostly unobjectionable, and often even good, but it's tricky to shift gears after offering such pointed complaints. In a book with a single author (or even just two or three), I probably wouldn't bother, but Shadows of Europe has eighteen credited authors and eighteen "additional contributors" across 16 different chapters, most of which felt like standalone mini-supplements with little to no connection to what I've been complaining about (that Alliance for Allah rant was a long time coming and wasn't based purely on this book.) 

I'm not going to break down the chapters one-by-one, but I am going to toss out a few things I especially liked and a few lingering questions that piqued my curiosity.

Regarding the behind-the-scenes Catholic schism. The Spain chapter suggests that the competing factions will hire shadowrunners to steal relics from each other. Which is just melting my brain in the best possible way. . . with the caveat that in Shadowrun's specific milieu, it's possible that these relics have magical powers that make them serious strategic assets and I have no interest in that particular interpretation (or, at least, no more interest than I have in any bog-standard Shadowrun plot).

But I can't help thinking about real relics, these centuries old churches that have dedicated reliquaries where they preserve human remains like the alleged fingerbones of saints and their whole value lies in the cultural, the historical, and the symbolic. And it's such an old-fashioned thing to care about. So what does it mean to hire a cyborg to steal it?

My keenly-honed writerly instincts tell me there's a fascinating story there, but I personally don't know enough to tell it (if only there were some book I could read that would explain European spirituality in the context of a sci-fi/fantasy setting that focused on unique criminal opportunities not available in the United States).

Nah, forget that last bit of griping. That's not me complaining. That's me loving something so much that I want more.

Now for something I'm not sure if I like or not - Tir Na Nog. My gut tells me that if I were Irish, I'd probably find this annoying, maybe even offensive. Your country, which you love very dearly, which has long labored under foreign oppression, has been taken over and turned into elfland.

This is something with the potential to go really wrong, to erase Ireland entirely and replace the land and its people with the magical themepark Irish. But whenever these situations come up, I can't help thinking about how in The Avengers, aliens blew up New York City.  In a world where magical shit is happening, it's not really an honor for the magic to pass you by. There's something in all of us that wants to see our hometowns crushed by a kaiju. 

The question then is whether Tir Na Nog is a satisfying version of this, for the people of Ireland. I can't really say, but I have noticed a fascinating angle. The elves who took over Ireland claim to be the direct descendents of the Tuatha de Danann . . . and in the secret expanded backstory of Shadowrun that's a more complicated and less immediately ludicrous claim then it first appears. 

There are elves that are just ordinary metahumans, whose ancestors are completely indistinguishable from the rest of humanities until c. 2012, when either they or their parents mutated in the womb to have pointy ears and long lifespans. Then there are the immortal elves, who survived since a previous age of magic. And it's mostly implied, but sometimes directly stated that events in the previous age of magic have . . . inspired human folklore.

So it's entirely possible to have a group of elvish families that are closely related to the "real" Tuatha de Danann. In fact, some of those elves could even be the "real" Tuatha de Danann. And that's a pretty interesting group of people to take over Ireland.

How do you square a country that has a history of colonial oppression with a police state run by figures from its mythic past? Are they a source of indigenous strength, to resist foreign imperialism or has the modern-day country simply been colonized by its own past? What if they don't live up to the myth, and are just regular people? What if they do live up to the myth, and it turns out they're something regular people cannot endure?

Shadowrun hedges here, acting as if there's no good reason to take the Danann families at their word, but also not closing the door on the possibility that something more is going on. Which is an approach that I find unsatisfying.

But only because I think either explanation could be interesting in its own right. An elite conspiracy whose plan is to take advantage of the return of magic to recast themselves as folkloric figures and seize political power. It's not just a political coup, but a cultural one and it works. The people (or, at least, enough of the people) go along with it. Why weren't they more skeptical about it? What are the consequences of letting this lie go unchallenged? What if the "real" Tuatha are out there biding their time, waiting to avenge this reckless appropriation?

Like I said, two good paths. Sadly, what this means for the book is that it can't include setting details that work too well with either one, for fear of confirming one and shutting down the other. It's good that the potential is there though.

There's a bunch of other stuff I liked, but this post has gone on long enough, and is all over the place tonally. Overall, I enjoyed Shadows of Europe, though I suspect it was not written for me as an American. For all its detail and incident, it doesn't get too deep into cultural differences and local mindsets. At best, they're mentioned briefly and then sort of sprinkled throughout the text in the form of persistant biases. I think that adds up to the supplement's intended audience being European Shadowrun fans who want to play in their own backyard. If so, good for them. I may not have always connected emotionally with the book in the way its authors intended, but I appreciate knowing that I am part of something global.

Ukss Contribution: The more I think about it, the more I enjoy the realist interpretation of the Danann families. There's something delightfully fucked-up about a group of immortal aristocrats disappearing for thousands of years and then one day showing up and saying, "hey, thanks for keeping up with the maintenance while we were gone, but we can take it from here now."