Dungeons and Shadows

Table-top Roleplaying has had a big year. There have been a number of important releases from several of the well-known product lines. Sales and turnout from August's Gen Con Indianapolis event would tend to suggest that the downturn the industry has experienced recently is a temporary problem. That's good news for Wizards of the Coast's well known Dungeons and Dragons line and the FanPro published Shadowrun campaign setting. Both are heavy hitters in the world of Table-top gaming, and today I have details and opinions on what you can expect in your Friendly Local Gaming Store from the latter half of the year. Read on for a hardcore dose of nerd. City of Splendors: Waterdeep
Eric L. Boyd
Wizards of the Coast
$29.95, 160 pages

Waterdeep is one of the largest cities on the Sword Coast, the western shore of the continent known as Faerun. Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms setting for Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is the most popular setting supported by Wizards of the Coast (WotC). Stretching back more than a decade, it has an enormous backstory that can be somewhat intimidating to dive into. Waterdeep attempts to allay the fears of a Dungeon Master (DM) looking to set a campaign in the most well known city of the setting. The book offers up political intrigue, mercantile callousness, and an endless parade of Non-Player Characters (NPCs). Unfortunately, Mr. Boyd's effort to capture the richness of the setting falls somewhat short. The issue at hand is a complaint I have about several WotC products. Waterdeep is a mere 157 pages and retails for $29.95. Within those pages, the book is packed tight with information. A history of the city, notable NPC guilds and organizations, and important personages flesh out the bulk of the book's front-end. As with most D&D books there are new prestige classes, monsters, and spells. This stems from WotC's determination that every book has something for both players and DMs. At the center of the 157 pages is a mere 20 pages worth of localities within the city. It seems to me that describing the city would be the primary purpose of the book, but almost as much time is spent on prestige classes as in providing an understanding of the city's layout. At $30 a pop it's imperative that a tome either be focused on DMs, focused on players, or have good integration of the two types of content. While City of Splendors provides copious details, the inclusion of relatively weak player-oriented content dilutes the purpose and impact of the book. Players will be severely under-served by this offering, and DMs should only consider purchasing it if they know they're going to be running a long-term campaign in this particular corner of the Realms.

Weapons of Legacy
Bruce R. Cordell, Kolja Raven Liquette, Travis Stout
Wizards of the Coast
$34.95, 224 pages

Weapons of Legacy is an 'options' book that provides players and DMs with something that every gamer wants in droves: crunchy stuff. The pages of this book are filled with descriptions of noteworthy items with sometimes sordid but always interesting histories. As a result of the weight of history around the items in this book, not only are they magical but powerful to boot. Each item, whether weapon, armor, or amulet, has a detailed history associated with it. When found by a player character it appears to be a simple (usually underpowered) magical crafting, but detailed study and rituals can unlock the potential within. The enhanced features of the item are only available to someone who has followed specific rituals that directly relate to the item's history. Additionally, they must take feats to allow them access to the unlocked power. Requiring characters to invest themselves in order to get the most out of an item ensures balance. Whereas Waterdeep's diluted focus resulted in a mediocre offering, Weapons of Legacy offers plenty for both DMs and players by integrating the content for both groups into a cohesive whole. While there are classes and spells, they tie directly into the overall legacy item theme of the book and do not seem the least bit out of place. The mechanics for using the weapons are sound and DMs can chortle with glee, as the in-depth backstories associated with each item are tremendous hooks to hang adventures on. Above and beyond simply moving a campaign's plot forward, the specific rituals associated with the item provide a sense of history to the gameworld and willingly have players insinuating themselves into a campaign's plot. For folks that just need to tweak, there are even rules provided for creating new Weapons of Legacy. This book isn't for everyone, of course. Legacy items are a neat idea and the book's ideas are executed very well, but not every campaign or character is going to benefit from this tome. Despite that, if the idea intrigues you'll find a well-integrated sourcebook with interesting ideas and a lot of backstory just waiting to get your gears moving.

Five Nations
Bill Slavicsek, David Noonan, Chris Perkins
Wizards of the Coast
$29.95, 160 pages

The newest campaign setting that Wizards of the Coasts supports is Eberron. Developed after an exhaustive search through thousands of proposals, Eberron is a unique style of D&D play. Incorporating elements of pulp mystery, Indiana Jones, and gritty war stories, Eberron is very different than the high fantasy nature of the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk. Five Nations is the first sourcebook for the setting which details the world at large. It describes the nations that once made up the ancient kingdom of Galifar. At war for over a hundred years, they've only recently found peace. Each nation has a dedicated chapter and provides a host of details for both players that might want to know about a character's homeland, and for DMs looking to set an adventure there. Besides basic histories and geography, there are some great fiddly bits strewn throughout the book. Sidebars in each of the chapters details five things that every countryman knows, for example, and there are 'daily life' examples for each nation. Each chapter also contains prestige classes and adventure hooks, the occasional monster or spell, and wraps all of these elements together into a detailed overview. The book conveys a lot of information in a surprisingly thin pagecount, and is well worth the pricetag. Simply put, this is a must-have for anyone planning on running a game in Eberron. It fills in many of the gaps the core book leaves open and offers a bevy of opportunities for adventure and intrigue. Players will find it extremely enjoyable as well, with lots of crunchy elements to empower characters and a satisfying amount of detail about a PC's homeland. Every chapter is a mini-sourcebook, and taken together Five Nations is a solid reference for every Eberron campaign.

Explorer's Handbook
David Noonan, Prank Brunner, Rich Burlew
Wizards of the Coast
$29.95, 160 pages

Where Five Nations acts as a reference to the world of Eberron, the Explorer's Handbook is a DM-specific tome that allows for intuitive mix-and-match adventuring. Most of the book is made up of locations, self-contained areas that can be dropped into an ongoing campaign or strung together to form an adventure. In addition to the adventure locales, the Handbook begins by offering extensive details on the act of traveling within Eberron. An emphasis is placed on the idiosyncrasies of airship, rail, and sea travel. Explorer organizations, prestige classes, and some equipment is also detailed, all with the idea of preparing and provisioning an expedition to a far-off place. While this section nominally offers content for players, the rest of the book is completely focused on the needs of the Dungeon Master. The adventure locations are divided into 'Points of Origin', 'Midpoints', and 'Destinations'. Each chapter collects a handful of places grouped together around a theme. Each 'Point of Origin' is a place to find or set off for adventure, such as a nightclub or train station. NPCs to staff the location, some flavour to interest player characters, and several possible adventure hooks are offered to provide a DM with everything he needs to run the locale. 'Midpoints', in turn, are more exotic places that can offer up more clues and draw characters further into the plot. An elven city populated by good-aligned undead is one such location, a trove of knowledge held by benign beings with a truly alien outlook. 'Destinations' are all obscure or hidden locations typically fraught with danger. They're the endpoints to an adventure, allowing characters answers to their questions and opponents to defeat. A variety of end-points are offered, from a dragon's astrological observatory to an abandoned city of giants. Explorer's Handbook does a competent job of guiding the DM's hand. In addition to concrete localities, the examples hand an Eberron DM blueprints for constructing the kind of pulp high adventure the setting is known for. It's essentially of no use for the average player, but a DM looking for assistance in creating an Eberron campaign could find much worse than this particular bag of tricks.

Loose Alliances
Malik Toms, Peter Taylor, et. al.
FanPro
$24.99, 128 pages

The world of Shadowrun is a complicated place. Just over fifteen years of publications with the Shadowrun (SR) name attached makes for a phenomenally rich backstory for this cyberpunk-meets-Tolkien gameworld. Loose Alliances is a tool for Game Masters (GMs) and players to understand the heavyweights of the world more fully. With an ever-increasing number of books detailing the Shadowrun world outside the city of Seattle (the traditional setting for an SR game), there are ever more opportunities to go running around the globe. Loose Alliances breaks down the movers and shakers outside of the corporate set. In Shadowrun even political movements, religious groups and the idle rich have a use for 'deniable assets', and where there's money and interest there's a hook for a GM. As with most 'background' sourcebooks, Loose Alliances is presented as a series of electronic documents on the network of pirate Matrix (a world spanning virtual reality) sites called Shadowland. Numerous commentaries from the peanut gallery should make most Slashdot readers right at home, given the wide range of opinion and bias that run through the observations. Between the posted text and the comments, Loose Alliances gives a reader a better feel for the ways in which groups of like-minded people affect the SR world. While most Shadowrun games involve characters doing illegal things for and against world-girding corporations, the metahuman rights organization down the street or a religious group is just as likely to have dirty deeds that need doing. The best sourcebooks for this setting open up the world beyond the cookie-cutter expectations some games can fall prey to, and Loose Alliances does an admirable job of exposing GMs and players to new possibilities.

Shadows of Asia
John Szeto, Jason Levine, et. al.
FanPro
$29.99, 231 pages

The 'Shadows of' series of Shadowrun books are geographical guides. Already published Shadows of North America and Shadows of Europe are joined by this guide to the east. Besides the war-torn microcountries of China and the Japanese Imperialist state, the book goes into detail on nearby areas such as the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, and the Philippines. Though some previous sourcebooks have touched on this area of the world (specifically the Philippine's fight for freedom against the occupying Japanese), there has never before been a dedicated look at the region for the setting. The most geopolitically active areas of the region, such as China and Japan, receive long treatments discussing local history, important cities, and general trends in the country. Smaller nations receive one to two page summaries of the most important elements a runner is likely to need to know. It's difficult for me to separate my appreciation for the pure flavour information within the setting from what might be useful to the average player or GM. These types of books offer the most insight into the backstory of the gameworld, and Shadows of Asia provides GMs hundreds of little plot hooks, for localities from Neo-Tokyo to Jerusalem. They are fantastic resources for the Game Master, essentially making this book required reading if you ever plan on running a game set east of Poland and west of Seattle. For a player, though, there isn't a great reason to pick up the book. There aren't any character options and the book has more detail than most players would probably want for their backstory. If deep background is what you're after, though, both GMs and players will find that Shadows of Asia fills in a large gap in your Shadowrun worldview.

System Failure
Drew Curtis, Jason Levine, et. al.
FanPro
$29.99, 128 pages

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the Shadowrun world is that it is far from a static place. Just as time, politics, and technology move forward in real life, so too does the reality of the Shadowrun setting. Every few years setting publisher FanPro releases a sourcebook that has serious ramifications for the world at large. One classic sourcebook turned the city of Chicago into a post-apocalyptic nightmare of gang lords and killer insect spirits. Another discussed the birth of an Artificial Intelligence in the midst of a crisis situation. System Failure does more than just provide interesting color; it wipes the slate clean on the Shadowrun universe's computational otherworld called the Matrix. A terrorist attack by a group of anti-technological fanatics, combined with the machinations of the aforementioned AI manages to corrupt and destroy most of the world's communications and informational systems. The book provides the background needed to understand the players involved and the scope of the events. It's not a traditional adventure per se, but instead provides a number of tools for creating adventures. GMs can use provided adventure hooks to bring player characters into the momentous events detailed in the book, either working for or against the forces planning the destruction of a fundamental element of the Shadowrun world. System Failure is Shadowrun at its absolute best, bringing together numerous plot threads that in some cases have been brewing for over a decade. Even without the plot significance, the sheer cool factor of the events described will make for amazing campaigns with a vaguely end-of-days feel. Definitely not a book for players, GMs of the setting can use it to craft an entire campaign or just use it to fully understand the world-reshaping events that lead to the newest edition of the setting.

Comments

Re:Neat.

[Hamilton Publius]

Riots that began on the outskirts of Paris have spread into the center of the French capital and to other communities in other parts of the country. Thousands of cars have been set on fire and the police and even medical personnel have been shot at.

Like many other riots, whether in France or elsewhere, this one started over an incident that just happened and was then seized upon to rally resentments and unleash violence. Two local boys in a predominantly Moslem neighborhood tried to escape the police by hiding in a facility that transmitted electricity -- and accidently electrocuted themselves.

This was the spark that ignited volatile emotions. But those emotions were there, ready to be ignited, for a long time.

A substantial Moslem population lives in France but is not really of France. Much of that population lives in social isolation in housing projects away from the center of Paris, as unknown to many Parisians as to tourists.

Like housing projects in America, many of these are centers of social degeneration, lawlessness and violence. Three years ago, profound British social critic Theodore Dalrymple wrote of "burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere" in these projects, among other signs of social degeneration. This was in an essay titled "The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris" that is reprinted in his insightful book, "Our Culture, What's Left of it."

While Dr. Dalrymple called this Moslem underclass "barbarians," a French minister who called the rioters "scum" provoked instant outrage against himself, including criticism from at least one member of his own government. This squeamishness in word and deed, and the accompanying refusal to face blatant realities is also a major part of the background for the breakdown of law and order and the social degeneration that follows.

None of this is peculiar to France. It is a symptom of a common retreat from reality, and from the hard decisions that reality requires, not only in Europe but also in European offshoot societies like Canada, Australia, Slashdot, New Zealand -- and the United States of America.

European countries especially have thrown their doors open to a large influx of Moslem immigrants who have no intention of becoming part of the cultures of the countries to which they immigrate but to recreate their own cultures in those countries.

In the name of tolerance, these countries have imported intolerance, of which growing antisemitism in Europe is just one example. In the name of respecting all cultures, Western nations have welcomed people who respect neither the cultures nor the rights of the population among whom they have settled.

During the last election, some campus Republicans who were holding a rally for President Bush at San Francisco State University were harassed by Middle Eastern students, including a woman who walked up to one of these Americans and slapped his face. They knew they could do this with impunity.

In Michigan, a Moslem community loudly sounds their calls to prayer several times a day, without regard to whether that sound bothers the original inhabitants of the community.

The Dutch were shocked when one of their film-makers was assassinated by a Moslem extremist for daring to have views at variance with what the extremists would tolerate.

No one should have been shocked. There are people who will not stop until they get stopped -- and much of the media, the political classes, and the cultural elites of the West cannot bring themselves to even criticize, much less stop, the dangers or degeneracy among groups viewed sympathetically as underdogs.

Not all Moslems, nor necessarily a majority of Moslems, are either a cultural or a physical danger. But even "moderate" Moslem organizations in the West who deplore violence and try to discourage it nevertheless encourage their followers to remain foreigners rather than become part of the countries they live in.

So do our own intelligentsia and political and cultural elites.

Balkan

Violating the new Amazon patent?

[Morgalyn]

This feels more like a book review than a games article, other than the fact its an advertisement for /gaming/ books. How much of this is paraphrased from the book's own descriptions? I originally thought this post would be more of a 'there are many books available, they all seem to be in this general thread and I think thats cool/lame/whatever' and/or information about other tabletop aides than a book review, which I am used to seeing as.. well.. book reviews.