Urban Arcana

Overall score:

I’m trying to think of a suitable metaphor for Urban Arcana—perhaps a pile of hot, crispy bacon covered in minty toothpaste. What this means, of course, is that Urban Arcana is full of wonderful ideas that get used very poorly. They’ve got a solid foundation to work with, but once they start working with it the whole thing goes haywire.

The premise is simple: using the very nice, very flexible d20 Modern rules, create an RPG that allows you to play with all of the classic D&D magic and monsters in a modern setting. Visit a nightclub run by affluent Drow who use it as a front for an alchemical drug ring. Do a dungeon crawl in the musty basement of a Natural History museum. Track down an Internet Hacker who’s using an email virus to polymorph people into monkeys. The possibilities, as you can see, are pretty cool. Where could such an idea go wrong?

Fortunately, it doesn’t go wrong at a very deep level. I gave the book a relatively high score because the rules and information are all solid—you can pick up this book and play just about any setting that involves the blend of magic and the modern world. With a little tweaking (some cybernetics, for example) you could use this to simulate stuff like Shadowrun and Rifts. Where the game falls apart is in its core concept—the setting itself. This is too bad, since the book is ostensibly a campaign setting, but it’s not as damaging as you think because the setting is presented so poorly that it’s easy to throw away.

How do you rationalize the presence of magic in the modern world? The simplest option is, of course, the one they went for—magic and monsters exist in secret, and nobody knows about them. This idea, while mildly interesting, has been done to death by things like Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and (if you substitute magic for aliens) Men in Black; they’re derivative, but at least those properties came up with a reasonable background. They give their worlds a strong history and a compelling dilemma—they spend a lot of their time just trying to keep the hidden world hidden. Urban Arcana, on the other hand, fails on almost every point—you get the feeling that they thought, "hey, let’s bring all this D&D stuff into the modern world!" and then tried to retrofit some good excuses for why it was there. Let’s go through their excuses one by one.

Their excuse for why monsters and magic are in the modern world: There is a thing (which may or may not be a dimension) called Shadow, which connects our world to that of D&D (which setting is unexplained—a generic one, I guess). Right now the Shadow tide is in, so to speak, and creatures and people from the fantasy world are getting washed into ours in a very random, very Rifts-like way—a Displacer Beast will suddenly pop out of the ether into an old tenement or something, and start wreaking havoc. Sort of kind of interesting, I guess, except that Rifts has been doing this much more cleverly for over a decade. This explanation also fails to explain why some spell books make the transition as ancient tomes, while others end up coded into web pages.

Their excuse for why the game deals with local adventures when there’s all of this dimensional travel going on: the people who come over have selective memory loss—they don’t know where they’re from or what their old world was like, but they know who they are and how to properly menace our society. Convenient, huh? This also means that they can’t really plan to come here from wherever they were, so there’s no overarching evil or ulterior plot possibiliites. Oh yeah—it’s also impossible to travel through Shadow in the other direction, so once you’re here you’re stuck. This "stranger in a strange land" idea could be interesting but they don’t explore it; they limit Shadow to the point that it ceases to be an interesting phenomenon and becomes, as mentioned, merely an excuse. "Magic is here because we said so, now pipe down and play the game."

Their excuse for why nobody knows that magic and monsters have infiltrated our world: the logic for this is so mind-bogglingly stupid that I have to repeat it verbatim so you won’t think I’m making it up: "The answer is as simple as it in insidious: We do see them—we just don’t notice them….Say, for example, that a person sees a gang of goblins on the rampage, or a dragon committing arson by breathing on an apartment building. Surely that person would notice that something odd was going on. Absolutely. But the minute the bizarre stimulus disappears, human nature takes over. We are assured as children that monsters don’t exist. So even when someone sees a monster, he still doesn’t remember seeing a monster. In his mind’s eye he sees a ‘big dog’ or a ‘large man’ or a ‘blur at the edge of vision’—anything except a creature that he ‘knows’ doesn’t exist."

So in other words, nobody notices the monsters because the game designers were too lazy to come up with a real reason. The thought that the human mind would edit out weird stuff is so dumb that it’s almost insulting to read it—if it were true, then things like special effects and magic shows wouldn’t work, and I think we can all agree that they do. Psychological and biological studies have proven that the human mind is designed to notice and deal with anomalies as our most basic survival tactic. I guarantee that every single person reading this has, at least once in his or her life, seen something he or she couldn’t explain…but I’ll stop ranting now. Once we’ve established that this is a really stupid premise for a game, there’s no need for me to go on and on about it.

It’s interesting that the book itself, once the opening exposition is out of the way, starts altering it’s own premise. The adventures at the back give the half-formed impression that Shadow exerts an actual illusory effect on the people and monsters it brings to our world, but how this works and why is never dealt with. The section in the middle talks about things like magic Happy Meals with animated golems for toys, but gives no explanation of how such a thing could exist in a world where nobody knows about magic. So in addition to being a bad premise, it’s full of holes.

The root of the problem here is that the designers really wanted to keep the magic a secret from the world at large, despite the fact that they couldn’t find a believable or original way of doing it. This dedication to secrets and mystery spills into the GM section and the adventures, where they recommend that Urban Arcana campaigns begin with the characters knowing nothing about Shadow or magic. This sense of mystery will be dispelled about halfway through the second adventure, as the book readily admits, but they believe that it’s direly important to include it—even though it would mean that all of the characters have to be humans with no magical talent. Why did they give us all of these player races and "Magical Heritage" feats if we’re not allowed to use them? I think it’s worth losing 1.5 adventures of artificial mystery if it means I get to play a Half-Orc private investigator with a Glock.

What they should have done, and what I recommend all of you do, is throw out this goofy, limiting, inconsistent premise of hidden magic and just do the game the way it wants to be done: a fully-integrated D&D world that happens to be on modern Earth. All the races live together, just like in D&D, and magic and technology are fully blended. This can require a little more world-building, but that’s because it’s an idea that has never been fully explored before. Animated toy golems in Happy Meals are a really cool idea, and this is the world they would have to exist in. What else would be different in a modern world full of elves and bugbears and wizards? The possibilities are endless.

Like I said in the beginning, however, the faults in the setting can be removed while keeping most of the game intact. The extensive section for adventure ideas (such as, "Illithids create a spell that lets them use their mental powers through television broadcasts") can be used either way, and the vast majority of the background info (organizations and such) actually works better in an integrated world than in a hidden one. Now that I’ve thoroughly reamed the bad aspects of the book, let me go through and talk about what I like.

The d20 Modern core book already includes a lot of material for use in Urban Arcana, like spells and monsters and some advanced classes, but the Urban Arcana book expands on that with some new occupations, some new classes, a ton of new feats (including Metamagic feats), and plenty of new spells and monsters. The spells are probably the most interesting of these, as they include a lot of very clever blends of magic and tech—there’s a spell called Degauss, for example, and another one that creates fake illusory IDs. At very high levels there’s a spell that lets you teleport yourself via instant messenger software, and clerics (here called acolytes) can enchant their guns with Cure Light Wounds so that the bullets heal instead of hurt.

Some of the new classes are pretty fascinating, though a lot of them are just translations of standard D&D classes—a barbarian is called a Thrasher, and a druid is called a Wildlord. Even these translations are different enough to be interesting, however, and it’s good to have them around. The newer classes are all pretty fascinating: the Arcane Arranger is the guy who can get you anything, the Glamourist uses magic to enhance his skills as a salesman/con artist, and the Shadowjack is the ultimate mystical hacker—and that’s not even half the list. The only problem with the classes, in fact, is inherent to the system rather than this supplement—the way the advanced classes work, you won’t even get to them until level 4 at the earliest. If you want to be a wizard, you have to slog through three levels of Smart Hero or whatever first. The basic classes are a great idea, and they can help round out a final character, but if you’re a young spellcaster it can get pretty depressing to wait through multiple adventures before you even get to start on your core character concept.

My favorite section of the book is probably chapter 8, which deals with locations. We all know how fantasy elements interact with castles and dungeons and whatnot, but how about shopping malls? Suburbs? Airports? This chapter is dense with quality material, including maps, descriptions, and tons of adventure ideas that make GMing a lot easier. If the entire book were as good as this chapter, it would get a perfect score.

Getting back to the metaphor I used at the beginning, let me change it a bit—instead of a pile of bacon covered with toothpaste, I’ll say that Urban Arcana is a pile of bacon with a poorly written recipe advising you to cover it in toothpaste. If you throw away the recipe and just eat the bacon, you’re in for a treat. And if you happen to really love bacon, as I do, and have a few ideas of your own on how to prepare and serve it, then Urban Arcana is a great deal and a recommended purchase.

And how do I know? Maybe you really like toothpaste on your bacon. There’s no accounting for taste.

Written by Fellfrosch on June 25th, 2003