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Let's Read the 4e Moster Manual/Vault: Oni
Copyright 2008 Wizards of the Coast This is part of a series! Go here to see the other entries.
Oni are inspired by Japanese mythology and have been in the game since the beginning. However I believe this is the first time in official D&D history in which they’ve been called by this name. Before, they were known as “ogre mages”. Here, they are only in the Monster Manual.
The Lore
If I recall correctly, the name “oni” translates roughly into “ogre”! The portrayal of oni in Japanese mythology varies depending on which story you’re hearing. Some are just big dumb brutes best represented by the standard ogres we just looked at. Others are still big, but they’re also smart and capable of sinister sorceries. This is the type represented by this entry.
4th Edition oni look a lot like their mythological counterparts, and a bit like ogres, though the two species are not related. Despite their great size and strength, oni are clever and prefer subtle tactics to advance their own goals and hurt their enemies. Most of them know how to assume illusory disguises and turn themselves to mist, in addition to a repertoire of other spells and rituals that match their preferred tactics.
The typical oni sees itself as a mighty lord deserving of respect, and is quite vengeful to anyone whom it sees as not giving it that respect. Oni measure their status by the wealth they’ve accumulated, along with the number and quality of the slaves they own. They build hidden strongholds to live in and surround themselves with all manner of luxury, and go out to enact their plans and/or inflicting suffering on the surrounding population.
The Numbers
Oni are Large Natural Humanoids, proving that “Natural” doesn’t mean “Mundane”. They have darkvision, a ground speed of 8, and a flight speed of 8 (clumsy).
They also have a couple of signature powers: Deceptive Veil allows them to take the form of any Large or Medium humanoid. Piercing the disguise is an opposed Insight vs. Bluff roll, and Oni tend to be good at Bluff. Gaseous Form allows them to become insubstantial mist with a flight speed of 8 (hover), but since it requires standard actions to sustain they can’t do anything but move around while in this form. It’s useful for escaping, or for sneaking up to the PCs prior to the fight starting.
Oni Night Haunter
This is a Level 8 Elite Controller with 180 HP, and it’s ironically a bit of an exception to the typical oni portraited in the lore section. Night Haunters live in small huts or caves, disguising themselves as elderly hermits. At night, they fly out to sneak into villages and towns and devour sleeping victims.
They don’t just eat the flesh of those victims either! When faced with an unconscious victim, the night haunter can use Devour Soul (melee 1 vs. Will)! A hit deals psychic damage, heals the oni for 10 HP, and doesn’t wake the victim up.
If its enemies are awake, it can try to put them to sleep with its Hypnotic Breath (close blast 5 vs. Will; recharges when first bloodied). This does no damage, but dazes on a hit (save ends). After the first failed save this worsens to unconsciousness, and then it’s Devour Soul time.
If its enemies stubbornly refuse to sleep, then the oni has to resort to its Reach 2 Morningstar and bash their heads in. When it looks like it will lose the fight, it likely uses Gaseous Form to escape.
Oni Mage
According to the book, these are often and mistakenly called “ogre mages” by ignorant mortals, which means they’re the classic model.
Oni mages are Level 10 Elite Lurkers with 172 HP. They wear mail, so their ground speed is only 7, but their flight speed remains the same.
In addition to Deceptive Veil, oni mages can become invisible at-will as a standard action, which lasts until they attack. They deal extra “sneak attack” damage on melee attacks when they have combat advantage.
Before engaging in melee, though, they’ll likely fire off a few attack spells: Freezing Blast (close blast 5 vs Fortitude; recharge 6) does cold damage and slows (save ends); and Lightning Storm (area 2 within 10 vs. Reflex; recharge 5-6) does lightning damage with no riders.
When they finally engage in melee, they’ll use finely crafted Greatswords for those sneak attacks while they wait for their spells to recharge.
Sample Encounters and Final Impressions
The sample encounters each feature one oni and a variety of other angry humanoids like ogres, orcs and trolls, which illustrate well who it is that the oni usually enslave. Depending on the individual in question, they might do it through overt conquest, or by disguising themselves as an ogre or orc and taking over the tribe that way. As accomplished mages, oni might also be surrounded by summoned creatures or other more exotic monsters.
I like oni! They work well as fairytale horrors despite their Natural origin, and are smart enough to be used in situations where the party is forced to negotiate with them. They’re one more type of monster that might be in possession of a secret or ritual the PCs need to avert a worse evil.
Mechanically, they do need an update. Like all mid- or high- level MM elites, they need a damage boost and something equivalent to the ability to make two basic melee attacks per action. I’d also increase the mage’s sneak attack damage to something more than a piddly 1d6, and probably make it apply to the spells as well.
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Let's Read the 4e Monster Manual/Vault: Ogre
Copyright 2008 Wizards of the Coast This is part of a series! Go here to see the other entries.
Ogres have been a part of D&D since its beginnings, when they were the bridge between the Humanoid and Giant power ladders. Here, they are present in both books.
The Lore
Ogres are big, dumb, strong, and mean. So much so that there’s probably the picture of an ogre near all of these words in your typical Nerathian dictionary. They famously can’t count to ten even with all their fingers in front of them, and their greatest technological achievement is wearing the skin of their last meal as a loincloth so they can appear in official D&D illustrations.
Ogres live alone or in small nomadic bands. In both cases they settle into a region, eat all available food, and move on. They don’t build complicated shelters, instead using natural ones like caves and such. Ogres will hunt and forage if they have to, but they always prefer to raid caravans or villages if those are nearby. In combat, they use improvised weapons that allow them to employ their great strength, such as tree clubs and big rocks.
You might be thinking this sounds a bit similar to the description for hill giants that we already covered, and you’d be right. The main differences between them is that hill giants are bigger, smarter, less bestial-looking and more technologically developed, in a neolithic vs. paleolithic way. Hill giants have some agriculture and built villages/steadings of their own. It also feels like it’s easier to parley with hill giants than with ogres.
Despite their strength, ogres are easily recruited into service by monsters who are more powerful or more numerous than them. This usually happens through a combination of intimidation and food bribes. Ogres can be found working as shock troops for orc or gnoll bands, or as auxiliaries and menial labor for hags, dragons, and giants. Some of these patrons provide their ogre lackeys with combat training and improved weapons, making them more dangerous. Smarter ogres willingly seek out the mercenary life, working for money and arranging that improved gear and training by their own initiative.
The Numbers
The traditional role of ogres in older editions of D&D is as the star of a “not-quite-boss” fight. Something that’s really hard for beginning adventurers to face, but which they can defeat once they gain some XP and their players become a bit savvier. Maybe you put them near the stairs to the second dungeon level, or guarding some prime loot in a corner of the goblin lair or kobold warren. When fighting ogres became easy for a group, they knew they had made it out of the junior leagues. With some thought given to encounter design, it’s still possible to have ogres in these roles.
Ogres are Large Natural Humanoids. The Monster Vault also gives them the Giant keyword, in which is surely a callback to early D&D. They move at Speed 8, and seem to not be very compatible with magic of any kind: all the ogre varieties in both books fight exclusively with physical attacks.
There’s quite a few varieties. The MM clusters them around the late heroic and early paragon tier, the MV widens that band a little. I’ll look at them roughly on the order of level, but pairing equivalent monsters from both books where appropriate. When an ogre has equivalent versions in both books, the Monster Vault version is usually the better one, so it gets more attention.
All ogres presented here are Chaotic Evil and speak only Giant, though the MM says they might know a few words of Common such as “mine!”, “hungry!” and “kill!”.
Ogre (MV)
Ogres are the quintessential brutes, and this is the quintessential ogre. A Level 6 Brute with 90 HP and Int 4, it wields a Reach 2 greatclub in melee and throws big rocks at up to range 10.
Once per encounter the ogre can perform a Grand Slam, which does double the damage of a normal club attack and
yeetspushes the target 2 squares on a hit.A pair of these might fulfill the classic ogre role of “not-quite-boss fight” for a level 1 or 2 party. Their ranged attacks make them more dangerous than old D&D ogres, though, since the party can’t just snipe at them with impunity.
Ogre Savage (MM)
This is Monster Manual’s take on old D&D ogre. This one is a Level 8 Brute with 111 HP and the same greatclub as its MV successor. However it has no ranged attacks, and its special melee attack is an Angry Smash (recharge 6) that allows it to make two attack rolls and take the best result.
Despite being 2 levels stronger than the Vault ogre, the vagaries of the early math make this one have the same attack bonus and damage. The only difference in their basic stats are the 21 extra HP and defenses 1 point higher. You can still have that not-quite-boss fight using the Ogre Savage as written, only you might want to use one of them backed up by a troupe of weaker minions. Their lack of ranged attacks might mitigate their extra power depending on your party composition.
Ogre Hunter (MV)
This one is a little more sophisticated, though that’s not saying much since it still has Int 4. It’s a Level 7 Skirmisher with 84 HP.
The ogre hunter uses a one-handed Reach 2 club as its main melee weapon, and carries a brace of stone-tipped javelins for fighting at range (Ranged 20). It’s Hurling Charge technique (recharge 4-6) allows it to throw a javelin and make a charge if that hits.
If surrounded, the hunter can Clear the Ground by stomping really hard (Close Burst 2 vs. Fortitude; Minor Action), which pushes everyone it hits 2 squares. If anyone is hit by this attack, the ogre can move its speed. Who would have thought the words “agile” and “highly mobile” would ever apply to an ogre?
Ogre Skirmisher (MM)
Aside from being level 8 with 91 HP, this is pretty much the same monster as the Ogre Hunter above. Its damage is lower due to the math bug, Hurling Charge is an encounter power that always allows two attacks, and it lacks Clear the Ground. It also has a Skirmish trait that gives it a damage bonus on any turn where it moves more than 4 squares. I think it’s safe to say it has been entirely superseded by the MV Hunter.
Ogre Mercenary (MV)
One of those smarter ogres who works for gold. This one is a Level 8 Soldier with 93 HP and an Int of 7. It fights in melee with a Reach 2 morningstar that marks for a turn on a hit, and throws Range 10 handaxes to fight from afar.
Instead of focusing on a single target with the morningstar, the Mercenary can use a Brutal Sweep to attack everyone in a Close Blast 2, dealing a bit less damage but knocking prone on a hit. This is an at-will attack! Alternating both attacks makes the mercenary quite good at keeping the party busy.
Ogre Warhulk (MM)
A level 11 Elite Brute with 286 HP, the Warhulk is otherwise equivalent to the Mercenary above. Its flail basic attack knocks prone instead of marking, and the Brutal Sweep equivalent is an encounter power that otherwise works the same.
This results in a lackluster elite, since it only has one attack per round. If you need an elite ogre, use an upgraded version of the Mercenary above.
Ogre Juggernaut (MV)
This is a Level 10 Brute with 131 HP, representing a larger and stronger ogre than the basic level 6 version. It’s still Large as far as the rules are concerned, though.
Ogre juggernauts have the same attacks as their smaller cousins, a greatclub and rocks, which do more damage due to their higher level. Their signature move is the Juggernaut Push (Melee 1 vs. Fortitude; recharge 5-6). If this hits, the juggernaut knocks the target prone, pushes them 1 square, and shifts to occupy the vacated square. They can then keep repeating the push-and-shift loop until they have shifted their whole speed! They can stop early if that’s not practical, but for every square they push the target beyond the first they do 1d8 damage do it!
7d8 damage is in line with a level 10 “limited use attack”, but it looks extra impressive because that’s a lot of dice and your PC just got kicked all over the battlefield like a soccer ball.
Ogre Minions (MM)
When fighting an ogre becomes easy, you’ve left the junior leagues. When you routinely face hordes of them, you’ve joined the major ones. Ogre minions come in two varieties: level 11 Ogre Thugs and level 16 Ogre Bludgeoneers. Both use their considerable bulk to pad out the forces of onis, hags, and other powerful paragon-tier bosses. Aside from the level difference, they’re identical.
I’m tempted to make “Bludgeoneers” an official unit name for a bunch of ogre minions. Like Mouseketeers, but with more violence.
Arena-Trained Ogre (MV)
If you take a typical ogre and train them for a few years at the blood-sport arenas of the Black Eagle Barony, this is what you get.
These ogres are Level 14 Brutes with 173 HP and an Int score of 8. They wield greataxes in combat, and aside from their beefy basic attack they can often make Vorpal Sweeps (Close Burst 2; enemies only; recharge 6) that do a bit less damage to each target and deal ongoing 10 damage (save ends).
Simple, but effective. And while this isn’t stated in their stat blocks, those 4 extra points of Int mean this ogre is much more capable of understanding tactics and effectively coordinating with its teammates.
Sample Encounters and Final Impressions
The sample encounters in the Monster Manual are rather typical:
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Level 8: 1 ogre savage, 1 orc eye of Gruumsh, 8 orc warriors, 2 dire boars. An ogre working as a heavy for an orc party.
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Level 10: 1 ogre warhulk, 2 ogre savages, 2 ogre skirmishers. And this is a typical “small ogre band”.
Ogres are one of those monsters which I have a hard time finding sympathetic. They’re the embodiment of a particular type of crass cruelty and they fill that role well, even better than hill giants IMO.
Nevertheless, if your main cultural reference for ogres is Shrek then it’s perfectly possible to make them more sympathetic along those lines. While I like the default presentation I wouldn’t mind seeing them in that light either. Just keep those Pathfinder ogres away from my game.
Mechanically the Monster Vault stat blocks are better and you should use them if possible. If you can’t, updating the damage of the MM ogres and giving the Warhulk a second attack (or making it a regular instead of an elite) should make them workable enough. Ogre stat blocks can also be used to represent younger or weaker hill giants, like they were in the classic Against the Giants adventures.
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Let's Read the 4e Monster Manual/Vault: Nightwalker
Copyright 2008 Wizards of the Coast This is part of a series! Go here to see the other entries.
I think Nightwalkers have been in the game since 3e - at least, that’s when I first saw them along with other “Night-something” high level undead. Here, they’re only on the Monster Manual.
The Lore
The Shadowfell is the antechamber of the afterlife. Whenever someone dies, their spirit spends a time here before the Raven Queen sends it to its final destination. If an extremely strong-willed evil person dies, though, they might be able to hold on and stay in the Shadowfell through sheer orneriness. These eventually become Nightwalkers.
This origin is actually quite similar to those of Devourers, evil people who also avoid being sent to the afterlife and make new undead bodies for themselves. Could it be that the two are related? Maybe a Nightwalker is what you get when a Devourer eats enough souls. Or maybe they’re simply the luckier psychopaths who got to make themselves a body of solid shadow instead of having to settle for corpse bits.
As mentioned above, Nightwalkers have bodies made out of the stuff of the Shadowfell. This gives them the ability to control the energies of that plane to some extent, which manifests as a series of cold and necrotic powers in combat. They’re also expert ritual casters. One of the rituals they know is the one that makes bodaks, though power-hungry PC wizards will be disappointed to know it only works on the Shadowfell when cast by a nightwalker on someone they themselves killed.
Nightwalkers communicate through telepathy, and understand Common. They’re highly intelligent and no doubt always have an evil scheme or two cooking, with bodaks acting as their agents in these matters.
The Numbers
Nightwalkers are Large Shadow Humanoids with the Undead keyword. They’re Level 20 Elite Brutes with 464 HP and a host of passive traits. Darkvision, immunity to disease and poison, 20 resistance to cold and necrotic, and 20 vulnerability to radiant. They walk at speed 8.
They also emit a 5-square aura of Void Chill, which does 5 cold and necrotic damage to anyone caught inside.
The nightwalker’s basic attack is a Reach 2 slam that does some physical damage plus bonus cold and necrotic damage. Once per round as a minor action they can use a Void Gaze (close Blast 5 vs Will) which does a bit of necrotic damage, pushes the targets 4 squares, and give them a -2 penalty to all defenses (save ends). This is not a fear effect, so protection from fear doesn’t work against it.
Once per encounter, it can use the dreaded Finger of Death spell (ranged 5 vs. Fortitude). This can only be used against a bloodied target, but if it hits the target immediately drops to 0 HP. Necrotic resistance is useless against this! It’s a nice thing to use with an action point as soon as someone becomes bloodied.
Sample Encounters and Final Impressions
We have two:
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Level 20: 1 nightwalker, 4 bodak reavers. Master and minions!
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Level 22: 1 nightwalker, 1 tormenting ghost, 3 death giants. This would be more of a gathering of equals.
Those encounters cover the basics of how you can meet a nightwalker: they bow to no master, and surround themselves with either servants (all of the bodaks) or with other creatures they respect as equals.
I like the concept of nightwalkers a lot, though I have to say I prefer the 3e illustration that included nightcrawlers and nightwings. Those shadowy indistinct shapes were a lot scarier than the thing pictured here. I can see why the crawlers and wings didn’t make it here - they were basically the same monster with different shapes and levels. It would be relatively easy to homebrew them back into the game.
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Let's Read the 4e Monster Manual/Vault: Nightmare
This is part of a series! Go here to see the other entries.
In the real world, a nightmare is a bad dream. In D&D it’s a bad pun that nevertheless became somewhat iconic. They’re only in the Monster Manual.
The Lore
A nightmare looks like a horse, but is darker and edgier. Night Mare, get it? These creatures are native to the Shadowfell, and the only equine thing about them is their general shape.
Nightmares are intelligent, carnivorous, and evil. In the wild they roam in packs, like wolves, and have a taste for sapient flesh. They can be ridden and are particularly prized as mounts by powerful servants of evil. Getting a nightmare to agree to work as a mount involves defeating it in combat and making it choose between service and death. Therefore, having a nightmare of your own is a sign that you’re a badass in addition to being an edgelord.
Though they are native to the Shadowfell, their high resistance to fire and fiery appearance make me think they have something of Hell in them as well.
The Numbers
We only get a single Nightmare stat block: it’s a Large Shadow Magical Beast with the Mount keyword, and a Level 13 skirmisher with 138 HP. It has Darkvision and trained Perception, and both land and teleport speeds of 10. This does mean it can teleport at will as a move action.
Nightmares have 20 fire resistance, and get +2 to AC against opportunity attacks. Their mount trait is Hell’s Ride, which grants 20 fire resistance to the rider.
Nightmares fight in melee with their flame-wreathed hooves, which do a bit of physical damage and ongoing fire damage (save ends). Their special attack is Hooves of Hell (recharge 5-6), in which they run the speed and leave a 10-foot tall wall of fire in their wake. The wall lasts for a turn and deals 10 fire damage to anyone who enters it. Anyone who attacks the nightmare while it makes this move also takes the same damage.
I imagine a nightmare has little reason to stand still while Hooves of Hell is charged. It will play Fire Tron with the PCs for as long as it can, only stopping to kick someone while it waits for the power to recharge. And unlike a Tron bike it can run through its own walls just fine, even with a rider. A whole pack of them would be, well, a nightmare to fight for PCs who aren’t resistant to fire.
Sample Encounters and Final Impressions
There are two:
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Level 13: 1 nightmare, 1 battle wight commander (the rider), and 6 battle wights.
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Level 13: a medusa archer and a medusa warrior riding nightmares.
It looks like the mount rules give enemy riders and their mounts separate actions, so that wight and the medusas can still attack the PCs while their nightmare mounts run around setting the map on fire. When they provoke opportunity attacks, the PCs can choose whether to target the mount or the rider. In this case I would also have an opportunity attack against the rider cause those 10 fire damage.
Despite the somewhat punny name, nightmares are cool. An evil knight type should have an evil mount to go with it, and evil fire-horses are one of the classics (the other being some kind of skeleton or wyvern).
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Better Than Bad: A Shadowrun Supplement Review
Older Shadowrun core books used to include this charming in-world dictionary entry that defined the term “shadowrunning” as doing illegal or semi-legal acts for money. A shadowrunner a criminal by definition, but in a setting where the laws are written by evil corporations and their bigoted puppet governments, that definition leaves plenty of room for heroic characters of many kinds.
From the tail end of Fourth Edition onwards, however, it seems the game’s publisher started interpreting that dictionary entry in the narrowest way possible: “Criminals are bad, m’kay?”. From that point on it portrayed shadowrunners as amoral assholes who work for truly horrible monsters doing truly horrible shit as long as the money is good. And that’s not the game I want to play. Shortly after the dismal supplement “War!”, I got out of the game1.
Whenever I write about my feelings on the matter in the RPG.net forum, a couple of very nice freelance Shadowrun authors always point me towards Better than Bad, a 2018 supplement for Fifth Edition, telling me it’s an attempt at reversing this trend. When it came up as part of a Bundle of Holding alongside a couple other setting books, I decided to check it out. This is a review of Better Than Bad. Reviews of the other books might come later.
The goal of Better Than Bad is to provide support for “hooding” campaigns. Hooding is a bit of Shadowrun slang that’s been around for a while, and originally referred to missions where the goal was to “rob from the rich and give to the poor” Robin Hood style. This book broadens the definition to any mission where the PC’s main goal is more altruistic than financial.
Does the book succeed at its stated goal? Well, it tries to, while fighting itself every step of the way. It fights itself with such tenacity that I wonder if there was a corresponding real-world struggle between its writers and editors.
The supplement starts with a real downer of an introduction: “Are your do-gooder runners going to change the world? Probably not - too much money and power are arrayed against them.” Gee thanks, book. I was nurturing some hope there for a moment.
The focus here is going to be in “fixing some damage, righting some wrongs, and making the lives of a few people better”. Which is all well and good in general terms, but still comes off as disappointing when presented as the absolute limit of what a group of PCs can accomplish.
I mean, yeah, if you want to be realistic about it, there’s only so much a group of 4-5 people can do to enact large-scale change in an unjust society, even if they’re badass action heroes. But if you’re going to be realistic about it you have to go all the way and state that the best way to enact this change is through collective action and give some support for that. Lancer does it. Sigmata does it. Does Better Than Bad do it? Eh, not really.
This introduction and a couple of short sections at the end are the only parts of Better than Bad that are written in an out-of-character, authorial voice. The rest of the text is written in an in-character voice using the traditional framing device of BBS/forum posts interspersed with comments from other users. For SR4 and 5, that BBS is Jackpoint, a small network with a more or less constant cast of commenters and the occasional invited guest. This format is known as “shadowtalk” by SR fans, a term which is also used to refer specifically to the comments.
The major sections of the book are:
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“Lights in the Darkness”: A list of activist organizations who might hire runners for “hooding”-type jobs.
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“Fixer-Upper Opportunities”: A list of specific examples of such jobs meant to act as plot hooks.
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“Pretoria, Hurrah”: A big chunk of pages presenting the Pretoria metroplex in Azania (former South Africa) as a setting. Despite the name it also includes Johannesburg and lots of other cities.
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“Jacaranda Citizens”: A large list of NPCs who live there in the Pretoria metroplex.
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“Being Less Bad”: A chapter on more general hooding advice, and on what makes a hooder different from a “standard” shadowrunner.
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“Building a Hooder”/”Hooder Runs”: The afore-mentioned short sections of mechanical bits and bobs, including a Random Hooding Run Generator.
These sections are separated by short fiction pieces.
The Good Parts
There are a few good things about this book I must acknowledge. The untitled fiction piece at the start of “Fixer-Upper Opportunities” is really good! The others are “just” okay, but still a sight better than a lot of the bleak stuff I read in other SR books.
“Being Less Bad” also contained some interesting information, and I particularly liked the way it emphasized that a hooder has a much close relationship with their community than your standard runner.
Most of the Pretoria NPCs are presented as potential employers, with specific goals and interests as well as specific types of job they like to offer. This is a very large leap in quality from older supplements like “Prime Runners”, whose NPCs seemed to be mostly intended to overshadow the PCs.
The mechanical bits and bobs seem cool, conceptually speaking. I’m not fluent enough in SR5 to say whether they’re well-implemented, and they have little to do with the theme of the book, but they’re nifty. There’s magically resistant armor and the magically resistant tattoos some geniuses made from the paint extracted from that armor. There are spells that can strip a spirit’s immunity so your gunslinger buddy can shoot them as if they were flesh. And there are several “life modules” that must plug into some sort of lifepath system and that do bear a relation to the book’s theme.
Those are the good parts. Now for the not so good ones.
Style and Organization Issues
We need to talk about shadowtalk.
The shadowtalk format works really well for “news”- or “travelogue”-style sections, since it allows the shadow-randos to chime in with the truth behind the official version of the facts and provide the reader with plot hooks. It lends the whole thing a very subjective air, emphasizing that nothing you read here is necessarily true. The main text certainly isn’t the whole truth, and most of the comments are all about rumor, hearsay, and personal opinions. These traits make it possible for a GM to take the information as a baseline and shape it as they want.
And it’s these exact same traits that make shadowtalk about the worst possible format for advice chapters. I was honestly a bit baffled when I saw that Better Than Bad chose to use it for explaining to the reader what hooding is and how to run a hooding campaign.
You can’t go two paragraphs without some amoral amoeba popping in with a hot take on how the entire concept of altruism is complete bullshit and only a fool would ever choose to practice hooding. This kinda muddles the message a bit, y’know? Makes me wonder why I spent money on a book that calls me names for being interested in its premise2.
You’re also no longer getting the official authorial stance of the game on something, but some shadow-rando’s opinion. As a result the main body of text also fights itself, with at least one instance where the “Being Less Bad” section disagrees with “Lights in the Darkness” because they’re written by different fictional authors. And since they’re separated by the huge chapters on Pretoria and its NPCs, it takes a while to get the full picture if you read through the book linearly.
Shadowtalk can also be useful to insert brief humorous exchanges that break long info-dump passages, but they don’t do that in this book. Rather, they spend space in long conversations between mysterious big shots who only ever speak in vague allusions to the lore of We’re No Longer Legally Allowed to Say It’s Earthdawn.
Plus the decision to present the Pretoria NPC list in-character means Jackpoint ends up doxxing the mysterious Zorro expy who’s supposed to be one of the city’s greatest forces for good. Way to go, chummers.
If it were up to me, the advice sections and the NPC list would have been rewritten as out-of-character, authorial-voice pieces with the extra space dedicated to a White Wolf-style discussion of themes and motifs for a hooding campaign.
Content Issues
You’d expect that a book named Better Than Bad would want you to stand up for people and things that are, you know, better than bad. The ways in which this book fights itself, however, make it so that’s not always the case.
Like, that list of activist organizations which your hooder PCs might work for? It includes a couple of literal terrorist groups. I’m not talking about “the corps say these people are terrorists but that’s a lie”. I’m talking about “these people would absolutely blow up a train station full of innocents to get at one bad guy.” Now, the text doesn’t really condone the violence, and if you go all the way to the other end of the book you’ll see that the general advice section also includes a full condemnation… but it really muddles the message to lump them in with the potential employers.
The Pretoria chapter is quite long but I’m not sure I’d use the setting as presented. In terms of real-world knowledge of the region I’m just another ignorant foreigner, so I can only speak of my own impressions of what I read in this book. And I get that this is a cyberpunk setting, so it has to focus on economic and social inequality to some extend, particularly in a book dedicated to fighting it.
But you see, the city is under a sort of er, well, apartheid. There are actual laws that make it so people are segregated into different districts based on their financial status plus tribal and/or corporate affiliation, and any citizen caught in an area “above their station” must have papers proving they’re allowed to be there.
And there’s this bit at the start where the fictional author of the piece (a shadow-rando named “Afrikaaner”) actually seems to defend this situation by calling it “a status quo that while not fair is the way of life in Pretoria”. This is in bad taste, right? It’s not just me that thinks so? Sure, the corps he’s speaking against want to put something worse in place (“everyone poor or SINless is now a slave in an diamond mine geofront”), but again this is Better Than Bad, not Settling for Segregation.
The “Being Less Bad” section, which I’ve praised before, is not without its share of “yikes!”. For starters, it lists cops as potential employers of hooders, with the example job being a detective who hires runners to plant evidence so they can arrest someone. It suffices to say that This Did Not Age Well.
It also contains several side boxes about how as a hooder you’re going to suffer from all sorts of psychological trauma and from an inevitable crisis of conscience due to the “inherent contradiction” of wanting to do good things while being a criminal. “Criminals are bad, m’kay?” is apparently still the order of the day, so the assumption here is that PCs are still doing all sorts of horrible shit and constantly hurting people even if their stated intentions are good.
Do “evil” shadowrunners get subjected to the same hazards in other books? Because if they don’t, the aggregate message kinda adds to “just be evil already”. I can definitely see your typical asshole Shadowrun GM penalizing players of altruistic PCs for not roleplaying their trauma while letting the amoral assassin live their best/worst life unimpeded.
And finally, there’s a significant chance the random mission generator gives you a run where all of the following are true: Mr. Johnson is a villain in disguise, opposition is overwhelming, completing the mission makes the world a worse place, and the group gets double-crossed at the end. I got something very close to that with my test roll. I’ll show these tables to the next person who says Shadowrun never intended this sort of thing to be common.
Conclusion
I’m told buying this Better Than Bad is a way to convince the publishers of Shadowrun that it’s worth their time to support a less relentlessly bleak vision of their setting. I sure hope that this is the case, because reading this book made it clear that they don’t really want to. It does have some good bits, unlike the completely execrable “War!”, but I don’t think I’d pay full price for it.
The now woefully out of print Leverage RPG gives the subject a much better treatment, used to cost the same, and also included a lot of other excellent rules for running cinematic heists. It wouldn’t take a lot of effort to adapt those to Shadowrun. I really wish someone made a white-label version of it available.
Alternatively, the Lancer RPG costs only a little bit more and has strong support for campaigns where PCs can enact large-scale change in a society through being part of collective action and getting into giant robot fights.
want to say I got angry when I found out Clockwork is still around and allowed to post on Jackpoint. I expected them to have better moderation standards. After what happened back in Emergence I’d also expect someone to nail Clockwork’s head to Fastjack’s front door along with a printed essay on the paradox of tolerance.
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