Dispatches from the Eccentric Frontier

Legends of Anglerre is the first general-purpose high fantasy variant of the Fate roleplaying system, from the same publishers who brought you Starblazer Adventures. It looks like they learned from their first publication, since this book is much more compact than the 600-page behemoth I reviewed earlier; they are much more sparing in their use of panels from the comic.

Legends of Anglerre makes use of many of the same ideas as Starblazer Adventures (career stunts, plot stress, etc.), but stands on its own as a fantasy setting; you could certainly use both books together if you want to crash your blaster-wielding galactic heroes on a magical planet, but you don’t need to lug the Starblazer tome around for reference if you’re just running high fantasy. The magic system is different from the Dresden Files RPG: each category of magical power is its own skill with particular trappings and stunts. They do a good job with the “Fate Fractal” for dealing with fleet battles; the game should scale up nicely if you need to have epic clashes between grand armies. (And speaking of epic, they have sections for both epic and mythic heroes— the latter being more on the order of Glorantha-style heroquesting.)

Brad Warner has had an interesting life: playing guitar in the early-1980s punk scene in Ohio, making cheesy monster movies in Japan at Tsuburaya Productions (makers of Ultraman), and officially receiving Dharma Transmission, which makes him technically a “Zen master”— though his punk sensibilities horrified him at the thought of becoming an authority figure of any sort. He provides a fascinating perspective on Buddhism, flavored by his own life experiences, that he calls “Hardcore Zen”, which cuts through much of the accretion of ideas around Buddhism, starting with some of its own practitioners and continuing with Western perceptions.

Hardcore Zen is about seeing reality as it is. Warner provides his own take on some of the standard Buddhist ideas (including his own commentary on the Heart Sutra). His view of the classic Buddhist “life is suffering” view is that it’s about idealism: suffering is what happens when you allow your idea of how the universe should be clash with the reality of how it is, and this is different from mere pain. Desire is not something you ever escape— but you can just let the desires be and get on with your life. No enlightenment, no bliss, no life-transforming mystical visions, no pharmacological shortcuts, and quite a lot of sitting around staring at the wall (zazen)— but all that zazen does give you a chance to deal with reality as it is, without the additional burden of expectations.

Bacigalupi spins a cautionary tale of genetic engineering, giving us a look at a future that merits averting: amidst the carnage of rising seas, “calorie companies” release genetically engineered diseases and pests to create a market for their own resistant varieties. The action is set in Thailand, the sole holdout in its portion of the world, able to keep ahead of the plagues and famines through the foresight of maintaining a seedbank and keeping genetic engineering talent on tap. The story follows a tangle of plot threads: the “calorie man” sent to Thailand to gain access to the government seed bank by any means necessary, a Chinese refugee from a Malaysian ethnic purge, a genetically engineered “windup girl” from Japan abandoned in a country where her very existence is illegal, and two members of the government’s Environment Ministry who each have to deal with endemic corruption in their own department and others.

The story is good and well-paced, with very believable extrapolation of current trends. Even the “calorie man” sent to perform corruption on behalf of corrupt masters manages to be a sympathetic character. The science seems tweaked for effect— there is an astonishing shift to muscles, fire, and high-tech springs, with occasional mentions of burning coal, without a single nod to the biofuels and windmills that should be easily possible with the same underlying technology. Not a feel-good story, though; it isn’t quite postapocalyptic, but it has the same flavor of “count survival as a victory” rather than offering hope that things will get better.

The author of the Uglies trilogy begins a foray into steampunk alternate history. He sets up an alternate World War I where the Central Powers are heavily into hardtech with zeppelins and giant walking machines, while the Allies have comparably powerful biotech pioneered by Charles Darwin. Like his work in Uglies, he slips a lot of good science into the story. We then get to see his alternate Great War unfold from two perspectives: Aleksandar, the teenage son of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (in this history, the only child— Westerfeld notes the liberties he took in an afterword to the book) fleeing political hot water in Austria, and Deryn Sharp, a girl of similar age who has disguised herself as a boy to become a midshipman on a living dirigible in Britain’s air navy.

This is excellent young-adult fare, with plenty of action, and is still a good read for adults; anyone who enjoyed David Weber’s Honor Harrington books should have a great time with Leviathan. It also has lots of well-imagined biotechnology; the alternate history could make a good scenario for gamemasters with a campaign featuring time travel or parallel worlds.

Eclipse Phase: the Roleplaying Game of Transhuman Conspiracy and Horror is a new near-future transhuman setting, which immediately invites comparison to the GURPS-based Transhuman Space. This game is built from the ground up to accommodate the notion that almost everyone can have their minds backed up and restored into different bodies, and has mechanics for handling both monetary and reputation-based economies.

The setting is darker and more desperate than that of Transhuman Space; Earth is an off-limits hellhole full of dangerous nanotech swarms, the remnants of humanity are scattered across the solar system and divided into squabbling factions, and the only aliens who want to talk to us are rather unhelpful. Both settings are rife with opportunities for conflict, but this one has much more of a tense Cold War feel to it, with existential threats looming in many places.

I was impressed by the well-written detail depicting the setting; I’ve read much of the material in their References section and didn’t spot them taking any shortcuts assuming that the reader is already acquainted with them. If you’re planning a game with transhuman elements in it, this is worthwhile to pick up for its perspective.

I think the Fate system finally hits its stride with The Dresden Files RPG. The folks at Evil Hat took their time putting this one together, and it was well-spent. This is nicely polished, with an advancement system that looks like it should stand up well to campaign play, a magic system that can handle the split between adventurous spellslinging and occult ritual, and a flexible vocabulary for describing a broad variety of characters.

The books are written as if they come from within the world of the Dresden Files; in that universe, Dracula was secretly a manual for taking down Black Court vampires, and these gaming books are putatively a late draft of a roleplaying game created by Billy the Werewolf to serve a similar function for cluing in new entrants to the supernatural world. The book is thus full of marginalia conversations between Billy, Harry Dresden, and Bob the Skull, providing extra exposition, a good deal of humor, and a number of “get rid of this or at least change the names before publishing” notes to show that some of the details really are secret within that gaming world. (When Billy uses a writeup of Harry as an example, he describes him as being played by a guy named Jim. About whom Harry grouses a great deal.)

The rules and examples are set up to be able to describe everything within the storyline of the Dresden Files tales, up through Small Favor but not Changes. (What we know as novels and short stories are what Harry calls “case files”.) It includes a system for quickly writing up locations and faces around town for a campaign, making it possible for a group to collaboratively create a setting, and fleshes out Baltimore as an example. It doesn’t go anywhere it doesn’t have to, but it fulfills its goal of making Jim Butcher’s novels into a playable setting well enough that a gamemaster can use the rules as a basis for telling their own kind of story. (It would be easy to stat out cybernetic upgrades as comparable to supernatural powers, for instance, and use the system for Shadowrun.) The rules include guidelines for gaming at different power levels, ranging from Feet in the Water (when it comes to the occult) all the way up to Submerged.

Your Story is the first Fate book I would hand to any prospective player.

Starblazer Adventures is the first space opera game for the Fate system; the reference is to a long-running UK comics anthology, but you could certainly adapt the system to tell a Space Battleship Yamato story if you wanted to.

The book is a tome: over 600 pages, with enough full-page and half-page illustrations from the comic that I wonder if they could’ve done a little cropping and made the book considerably lighter, or split it into two volumes with one being targeted at game masters. Like Spirit of the Century, the emphasis is on storytelling, with only a bit of attention paid to character development during a campaign; there are some new ideas like career-related stunts (which manage to get filed in a different chapter from the skill-related stunts). The developers did a good job of fleshing out Fate to support space opera trappings like weapons, armor, high-tech gear, robots, alien races, starships, and fleet battles.

The systems for starships and organizations are good examples of the “Fate Fractal”: the principle in Fate games that any entity is another kind of character, still with aspects and skills and stunts and stress tracks and consequences, all following the same underlying mechanics as all other characters.

Overall, an excellent effort that could use some more tightening up if there’s a second edition, and a worthwhile investment for Fate gamemasters.

A worthy followup to the first New Space Opera anthology; like the first volume, the editors give you all the information you need to track down more stories by the authors you like. The stories are all engaging, and range from swashbuckling space piracy to galaxy-spanning wars to grim murder investigations. If you know someone who needs to catch up on recent trends in science fiction, the two volumes in this series are a great starting point.

The story is presented as the posthumous publication of the journal of a writer, Sarah Crowe, who moves to a small town in Rhode Island and becomes embroiled in an investigation of eerie events surrounding an ancient red oak dating back to pre-colonial times, which gradually grows into psychological horror. Kiernan puts a lot of herself into the character of Crowe (from following her on greygirlbeast, it’s clear that she’s drawing on personal experience), and grounding Crowe’s personal traumas makes her more mysterious ones seem all the more real. The story particularly appealed to my Fortean sensibilities, with the narrator being skeptical but refusing to deny the evidence of her own senses, and the author having done a good job of delving into Fortean background material.

The City Imperishable is an ancient, gods-beset metropolis like Lankhmar or Tai-Tastigon, boldly rendered in a New Weird style. Lake (jaylake) gives us three protagonists, all of whom show loathsome traits from the start, and puts them into situations where they are forced to save their home city from destruction. The tale is well-told, and while the main characters certainly seem to deserve the hell they’re put through, I enjoyed seeing how that brought out their more noble impulses. The world is richly imagined, though one that I wouldn’t want to stay in.