The Inside Scoop on Gaming

There are times when I regret being a reviewer of role-playing games. Case in point: Creeping Death.

Creeping Death is essentially the Monstrous Manual for Senzar, sans any interesting ideas - and given the encylopedic, interest-draining layout of the 2nd Edition Monstrous Manual, that's saying something. There are - and I swear before God that this is true - much better, and much more imaginative supplements, available on the web for free.

Let's take an example. Go and download Terror from Above from the Kargatane webpage here:

http://www.kargatane.com/sotk/netbook/netbook.html.

It's a bunch of creatures created by various authors around the web centered around the theme of flying creatures, from a contest in Dragon. There is more imagination in a single entry - the monstrous collection of black slimes that travel in a thundercloud - than in the entire width and breadth of Creeping Death. What makes it so bad? Let's start at the beginning: the authors desperately try to stay hip by sounding mock-flippant, following a bit of hype with a "Death to All Who Oppose Us!" header; the kind of gamer mock-megalomania that makes me want to grab the wall and bang my head into it until it all stops. Pinky and the #$%ing Brain have much to answer for.

Then there's an entirely needless explanation of why they used "Creator" instead of any other generic gaming term. They take great pains to assure us that they didn't mean to be sacreligious; me, I'm wondering if anybody, anywhere, thought that, ever, but apparently they needed to toss that in. (I'm beginning to think that there's no longer a need for this-is-just-a-game disclaimers anymore. Patricia "It's YOUR fault, not mine!" Pulling's long since dead, and those left are usually more fringe elements than gamers themselves.) So, this whole thing winds up including this treasure of a line:

"...now that all of the politically correct (or critically erect) BS is done..."

What does that mean? The only reason it's in there is because "erect" rhymes with "correct", and one of the authors - Beavis or Butthead, I forget which - decided to throw that in there. It's not funny, it's not cute; it just mentions "erect" because it sounds vaguely dirty. I've found that feeling vaguely dirty goes along quite nicely with Nova Eth's attempts at humor.

There's three or four pages of stats - and, wonder of wonders, it makes sense, despite the mention of "the comically farting Flander". Creatures have a "Kill Factor", which you multiply the creature's Consitution by; that gives you how many hit points it has. Mind you that it also makes most creatures identical in how hard they are to kill, but I like it a little better than AD&D's multiple dice rolls. There's a brief list of diseases - for no good reason, since, with eight different diseases, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which kind of dice to roll - and a sample combat.

There's actually some good stuff here, ranging from advice to tailoring your monster encounters to adjusting experience totals.

And then we dive into the silliness again. We have a Gor-Gar - a gigantic Tyrannosaurus Rex - Velociraptor hybrid - sneaking up on a party of adventures. According to the monster's stats, a Gor-Gar - famously described by Kevin Mowery as "a frightening, terrible monster with a eyes in its neck and its neck on its hip, which is on its back!" in his MST3K (http://www.io.com/~profbobo/download.html) - sits in the "Gigantic" weight category, which is ten thousand pounds plus. How in the hell something that weighs ten thousand pounds can _sneak_ is a complete goddamn mystery to me; I suspect that it draws inspiration from the loathsome remake of Godzilla, where a 200-foot tall lizard was able to evade detection throughout most of the movie. ("Keep your eyes peeled! He'll be hard to spot, see, 'cause he's wearing a hat.") Then again, it was published in '96, so maybe crappiness travels backwards through time.

Boatloads of damage are handed out - at one point, somebody could take around 198 points of damage - and we're informed that any creature which has a special attack can use it in every phase of every round, meaning that it could probably drop 200 points of damage, in order to "embarass, infuriate and crucify" the PCs. I have absolutely no idea why you'd want to drop these kind of creatures on your PCs; I suppose that it's a side effect of Senzar's "turn it up to 11, then until the dial breaks" ethos. So, with all of that in mind, what are the monsters like? Some are ripoffs of AD&D monsters, some of them so obvious that I'm surprised that TSR didn't sue. Some are hyper-powerful gods that are there just to provide antagonists to the players, although none of them are very inspired. Some of them are simply so goofy that they rival Synnibarr's laser-beam-eye grizzlies.

For example, the first monster we see is the airshark, which is a Great White shark that has vestigial legs and a pair of wings.

Remember how cool Jaws was, when the shark first came out of the water and nearly bit Roy Scheider's head off? And when you got the feeling that it wasn't a shark at all, but some inhuman force of nature almost akin to a mythical dragon that was intent on killing anybody who went in the water?

Wouldn't it be cool if that shark had wings, and could both walk and fly and swim?

No.

It would be silly.

And the first time that you throw an airshark - or airsharks - at the PCs, they're going to laugh themselves silly. You can turn a simple creature - a shark, or a grizzly bear, or a swarm of army ants - into a terrifying opponent, especially when the PCs don't have access to their usual resources. Strip them down to a few hit points and two weapons for a party of six, then send a grizzly after them. On the other hand, take a normal creature and give it a dozen special powers and it'll wind up silly. AD&D only got away with it because it was first.

There are, to be sure, some interesting monsters. The Morphmaw is essentially living scenery - a harmless hillock suddenly grows a mouth or two, or the ground opens up a mouth. The Omnithrax and the Ripper have some nice artwork, although there's nothing truly innovative about them - they're just big monsters, one of which looks like a gnarled black oak tree. The funny thing is that there's only a few "common" monsters listed, and most of them would be counted as fairly high power in another fantasy game - basklisks, gorgons, enormous spiders, so on and so forth. Nova Eth's penchant for lame jokes shows up in the description of the Venom Squirrel - don't even bother asking - and the Slorr, whose dung is used by the Saurans for everything from housing to - god help us - utensils.

You'd think that the common monsters would have proportionally larger representation, but it's not so. Most of the book is taken up with different types of monsters - dinosaurs, dragons, demons, spirits and so forth.The dinosaurs are fairly sterile - most of them just have a picture of a familiar dinosaur - Triceratops, say, or a Stegasaurus - with a different name, like "Shellback", or "Fin-Back", or "Spear-Beak". Not terrifically useful.

Then there's the Dragons. They get the usual "X Dragon", where X indicates a quality and/or color of the dragon in question. In Senzar, we get Acid, Black, Blood, Celestial, Ice, Ki, Lightning, Sea, and a handful of Wyrms and Hydras. We don't get the Great Ejaculating or Closeted Transvestite dragons, but I'm sure that it's only a matter of time. What are they like? Like Dungeons and Dragons-type dragons, basically, with various elemental attacks. There's nothing interesting here _at all_. If you've read the Monstrous Manual, then you've seen these dragons before. Same thing with the elementals, really, except for the time elemental - but it's got an attack that instantly kills you by withering you into dust if you fail a save. That's got to be fun.

And then there's giants and trolls. Nothing new here; all of them ripoffs of D&D creatures, right down to the way that they're based around various elements - ice, fire, so on and so forth. The golems are hyper-powerful, including one that delivers a hideous strike against a character _every single time it's hit_ - and who has 125,000 hit points. There's also some charts for golem creation, although the listed golems are acknowledged to be outside of the rules. (They want to show us "the depths of depravity some artificers will sink to in pursuit of the ultimate killing machine." In other words, if it isn't the best thing in the entire universe, there's no point in including it here.)

There's demons. Ho hum. There's some named demons - three. They're all, of course, ultimate killing machines. I sometimes wonder if Senzar's populace is composed of ordinary people who are also, just by coincidence, ultimate killing machines. They probably have Ultimate Killing Machine Barn Dances now and then.

Then there's the Nebular, thirteen "Deific Gods" - because God only knows that's what the enemies for every RPG should be like - who have various fun spheres of influence, ranging from cannibalism to senseless destruction to lust. Surprise! - they're all ultimate badasses, and uniformly uninteresting. Oh, demon lords, too. What we see for these creatures, incidentally, is basically a bland rundown of who they are, their worshippers, what they were in the first place, what kind of twink attack they can launch, what their worshippers like - none of which managed to tweak even the faintest shred of interest from me.

Compare this to Oblivion, from Wraith, or the four Chaos Gods from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. They've been carefully crafted - 'specially Oblivion - to be interesting characters in their own right, with specific goals and modus operandi, and their followers reflect that. A thirteen-year old fresh from reading through the demons section of the Monstrous Manual would come up with much similar ideas, but I doubt that he'd publish them.

For that matter: I'm awfully tired of seeing these things, so do me a favor - go and read Doomslayers, for Wraith: The Oblivion, especially the sections on Spectres and the nature of Oblivion itself. It's like a cool shower after a hot day in the stupidity and failure of imagination present in Creeping Death. Even my review will do, if you're desperate.

The undead. There's some interesting stuff here, by which I mean "not directly torn from AD&D."

Nope, shit, I was wrong: On page four, there's a "Death Knight" along with the Fell Dragon, which is the size of an aircraft carrier. It's likely that the two creatures that I thought original are probably more imaginative AD&D creatures with new names and more boring powers.

If you notice my descriptions getting somewhat shorter, it's not by accident. I'm just growing bored with how everything looks much like AD&D with the serial numbers rubbed off and a heavy layer of dork painted on. Voom the Destroyer is a city-sized monster that looks vaguely like the Green Goblin's rocket sled with a ton of crystals on the top. Just in case somebody was going to do something interesting with it, it deals out instant death within a mile's radius unless you make a save. You're apparently supposed to engage the thing in combat, although I think that the average GM might have something more interesting to do, like slowly pushing red-hot railroad stakes through his ears.

And the Gargantuas. Ever wanted to include Godzilla and his cronies in your AD&D games? Hell no, because you are, in all likelihood, sane. (I'm not talking about comedy adventures, either. I mean as something that permanently exists in your game world. No, the tarrasque does not count.) Not Senzar; we've got an ice man gargantua, a Godzilla-looking thing, and a gigantic tarantula with fly wings. They were "bound into The Sceptre of Jacoor Thrax by the eponymous 1st Overlord of Zengara", incidentally. Silly? Hell yes, but not even in the good way.

And then there's the Mokaar, who are sort of like the Ringwraiths, except much, much lamer - they're loaded to the teeth with enough weaponry to stock a magic item shop, while acting as the evil equivalent of a Marine RECON team. In a description that's surely within many Marine tactical manuals, they "strike by stealth and strike with overwhelming force" - which is to say that they'll attack when they have the exact situation that an author imagines would be effective. This is not the stuff of which anybody's tactics should be made. What's slightly interesting is that the Mokaar usually run things according to a script, and get angry when the characters don't follow that script. Half a second's worth of thought might suggest a dozen other tactics, but I guess that the authors were in a hurry. Or couldn't think of anything. I favor the latter.

And the Nine Evils. Some of these - some - are mildly interesting. Malaki, a cannibalistic demon-chimp-thing, can only be killed if somebody takes on his curse and then eats him, which is kind of a neat reversal. On the other hand, there's Zebrina, who always appears at the top of a flaming staircase and can only be killed if somebody makes her walk down all nine steps and steps off. It must have seemed like an interesting idea to somebody at some point.

Then, just in case that the case hasn't been made that Senzar isn't ludicrously overpowered, there's stats for yet ANOTHER goddamn list of evil lords, this time taking the name of the Shadar and including the game's signature villain, Lord Valthrustra. He's as Evil as Evil Can Be, which neatly removes any need for characterization - ditto the rest. There's a hint or two here and there, such as one member of the squad loving another, or one of the Golem creators wanting to slip something "good" into his creations for Lord Valthrustra, but it's - well, it's what gaming supplements were like circa 1975 or so.

Finally - and at this point, I believe that I can feel the frontal lobes of my brain frying themselves in their own juices - we get the character packages. Gargoyles, arachnoids, the Illithid-ripoff "Kalamari" - and if you know what calamari is, you'll appreciate how unfunny that joke is.

Yes, George Lucas did it too. In Return of the Jedi. Remember the Ewoks? Not a good place to find inspiration.

Oh, and the Luckster, who can create miracles by burning off power points. And the Vampyr and an angel-lookalike. The worst problem with this book isn't so much that it's full of bad, stale ideas and characterization that wouldn't pass muster in one of TSR's worst supplements. It isn't that it mercilessly rips off TSR's work without borrowing a smidgen of their invention. It isn't that the art is just-out-of-high-school, and actually looks worse than much of the original D&D monster art. It isn't that it has three seperate sets of Really Evil Things, with no word as to how they fit together. It's not that the thing is $18 when it actually takes its toll in the form of draining years from your life. No, its problems are twofold:

(1) For a game that's supposed to be over the top, Creeping Death isn't much more than a ripoff of D&D. I've said that before, and I'll say it again. BUT: You'd think that with the over-the-top reputation of Senzar, you'd be getting monsters that were so ludicrous that they actually became enjoyable - say, a building-sized creature that's covered with various animal heads that fire lasers and missiles, or something. But instead, all that Senzar has is a pale, pale imitation of D&D's monsters. There is literally almost no innovation here, and this is _twenty-five years_ after D&D was released. If you've got your own line, why spend time rehashing the same monsters everybody has seen before?

(2) It's not so much that it's bad. It's that the bad ideas sucked good ones out of my head, so by the time I finished skimming through it, I had lost just about every good idea that I'd ever read in another role-playing game, including ones that I'd come up with on my own. It's an idea parasite. I'm going to have to spend long hours re-reading Doomslayers, and Unknown Armies, and Bearers of Jade, and Terrors from Above, in order to recover from this.

I feel like Gollum, having been pushed into the fires of Mordor in order to prevent the One Ring from doing any more evil; like stepping in front of a bullet named Senzar so that nobody else has to review this thing ever again. I want to seal it away using the same precautions you'd use to bury toxic waste. I want to forget I read it. I want to get new eyes. I want to read something that indicates talent, rather than plagiarism heavily spiced with a near toxic-level of munchkinism.

You all owe me.

-Darren MacLennan Darren MacLennan

Creeping Death: Campaign Builder Number One
Item type: game Review by: Darren MacLennan Product Name: Creeping Death: Campaign Builder Number One Author: Todd King, Joseph Giacone Jr, THE BRUNE, and, I believe, Satan himself. Company/Publisher: Nova Eth Publishing Line: SenZar SKU: NTH 1001 Cost: $18.00 Page count: 116 ISBN: 0-9656145-8-1 Ratings: Style: 1 (Unintelligible) Substance: 1 (I Wasted My Money) Review type: Capsule Review Genre tags: Horror, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Comedy	There are times when I regret being a reviewer of role-playing games. Case in point: Creeping Death. Creeping Death is essentially the Monstrous Manual for Senzar, sans any interesting ideas - and given the encylopedic, interest-draining layout of the 2nd Edition Monstrous Manual, that's saying something. There are - and I swear before God that this is true - much better, and much more imaginative supplements, available on the web for free. Let's take an example. Go and download Terror from Above from the Kargatane webpage here: http://www.kargatane.com/sotk/netbook/netbook.html. It's a bunch of creatures created by various authors around the web centered around the theme of flying creatures, from a contest in Dragon. There is more imagination in a single entry - the monstrous collection of black slimes that travel in a thundercloud - than in the entire width and breadth of Creeping Death. What makes it so bad? Let's start at the beginning: the authors desperately try to stay hip by sounding mock-flippant, following a bit of hype with a "Death to All Who Oppose Us!" header; the kind of gamer mock-megalomania that makes me want to grab the wall and bang my head into it until it all stops. Pinky and the #$%ing Brain have much to answer for. Then there's an entirely needless explanation of why they used "Creator" instead of any other generic gaming term. They take great pains to assure us that they didn't mean to be sacreligious; me, I'm wondering if anybody, anywhere, thought that, ever, but apparently they needed to toss that in. (I'm beginning to think that there's no longer a need for this-is-just-a-game disclaimers anymore. Patricia "It's YOUR fault, not mine!" Pulling's long since dead, and those left are usually more fringe elements than gamers themselves.) So, this whole thing winds up including this treasure of a line: "...now that all of the politically correct (or critically erect) BS is done..." What does that mean? The only reason it's in there is because "erect" rhymes with "correct", and one of the authors - Beavis or Butthead, I forget which - decided to throw that in there. It's not funny, it's not cute; it just mentions "erect" because it sounds vaguely dirty. I've found that feeling vaguely dirty goes along quite nicely with Nova Eth's attempts at humor. There's three or four pages of stats - and, wonder of wonders, it makes sense, despite the mention of "the comically farting Flander". Creatures have a "Kill Factor", which you multiply the creature's Consitution by; that gives you how many hit points it has. Mind you that it also makes most creatures identical in how hard they are to kill, but I like it a little better than AD&D's multiple dice rolls. There's a brief list of diseases - for no good reason, since, with eight different diseases, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which kind of dice to roll - and a sample combat. There's actually some good stuff here, ranging from advice to tailoring your monster encounters to adjusting experience totals. And then we dive into the silliness again. We have a Gor-Gar - a gigantic Tyrannosaurus Rex - Velociraptor hybrid - sneaking up on a party of adventures. According to the monster's stats, a Gor-Gar - famously described by Kevin Mowery as "a frightening, terrible monster with a eyes in its neck and its neck on its hip, which is on its back!" in his MST3K (http://www.io.com/~profbobo/download.html) - sits in the "Gigantic" weight category, which is ten thousand pounds plus. How in the hell something that weighs ten thousand pounds can _sneak_ is a complete goddamn mystery to me; I suspect that it draws inspiration from the loathsome remake of Godzilla, where a 200-foot tall lizard was able to evade detection throughout most of the movie. ("Keep your eyes peeled! He'll be hard to spot, see, 'cause he's wearing a hat.") Then again, it was published in '96, so maybe crappiness travels backwards through time. Boatloads of damage are handed out - at one point, somebody could take around 198 points of damage - and we're informed that any creature which has a special attack can use it in every phase of every round, meaning that it could probably drop 200 points of damage, in order to "embarass, infuriate and crucify" the PCs. I have absolutely no idea why you'd want to drop these kind of creatures on your PCs; I suppose that it's a side effect of Senzar's "turn it up to 11, then until the dial breaks" ethos. So, with all of that in mind, what are the monsters like? Some are ripoffs of AD&D monsters, some of them so obvious that I'm surprised that TSR didn't sue. Some are hyper-powerful gods that are there just to provide antagonists to the players, although none of them are very inspired. Some of them are simply so goofy that they rival Synnibarr's laser-beam-eye grizzlies. For example, the first monster we see is the airshark, which is a Great White shark that has vestigial legs and a pair of wings. Remember how cool Jaws was, when the shark first came out of the water and nearly bit Roy Scheider's head off? And when you got the feeling that it wasn't a shark at all, but some inhuman force of nature almost akin to a mythical dragon that was intent on killing anybody who went in the water? Wouldn't it be cool if that shark had wings, and could both walk and fly and swim? No. It would be silly. And the first time that you throw an airshark - or airsharks - at the PCs, they're going to laugh themselves silly. You can turn a simple creature - a shark, or a grizzly bear, or a swarm of army ants - into a terrifying opponent, especially when the PCs don't have access to their usual resources. Strip them down to a few hit points and two weapons for a party of six, then send a grizzly after them. On the other hand, take a normal creature and give it a dozen special powers and it'll wind up silly. AD&D only got away with it because it was first. There are, to be sure, some interesting monsters. The Morphmaw is essentially living scenery - a harmless hillock suddenly grows a mouth or two, or the ground opens up a mouth. The Omnithrax and the Ripper have some nice artwork, although there's nothing truly innovative about them - they're just big monsters, one of which looks like a gnarled black oak tree. The funny thing is that there's only a few "common" monsters listed, and most of them would be counted as fairly high power in another fantasy game - basklisks, gorgons, enormous spiders, so on and so forth. Nova Eth's penchant for lame jokes shows up in the description of the Venom Squirrel - don't even bother asking - and the Slorr, whose dung is used by the Saurans for everything from housing to - god help us - utensils. You'd think that the common monsters would have proportionally larger representation, but it's not so. Most of the book is taken up with different types of monsters - dinosaurs, dragons, demons, spirits and so forth.The dinosaurs are fairly sterile - most of them just have a picture of a familiar dinosaur - Triceratops, say, or a Stegasaurus - with a different name, like "Shellback", or "Fin-Back", or "Spear-Beak". Not terrifically useful. Then there's the Dragons. They get the usual "X Dragon", where X indicates a quality and/or color of the dragon in question. In Senzar, we get Acid, Black, Blood, Celestial, Ice, Ki, Lightning, Sea, and a handful of Wyrms and Hydras. We don't get the Great Ejaculating or Closeted Transvestite dragons, but I'm sure that it's only a matter of time. What are they like? Like Dungeons and Dragons-type dragons, basically, with various elemental attacks. There's nothing interesting here _at all_. If you've read the Monstrous Manual, then you've seen these dragons before. Same thing with the elementals, really, except for the time elemental - but it's got an attack that instantly kills you by withering you into dust if you fail a save. That's got to be fun. And then there's giants and trolls. Nothing new here; all of them ripoffs of D&D creatures, right down to the way that they're based around various elements - ice, fire, so on and so forth. The golems are hyper-powerful, including one that delivers a hideous strike against a character _every single time it's hit_ - and who has 125,000 hit points. There's also some charts for golem creation, although the listed golems are acknowledged to be outside of the rules. (They want to show us "the depths of depravity some artificers will sink to in pursuit of the ultimate killing machine." In other words, if it isn't the best thing in the entire universe, there's no point in including it here.) There's demons. Ho hum. There's some named demons - three. They're all, of course, ultimate killing machines. I sometimes wonder if Senzar's populace is composed of ordinary people who are also, just by coincidence, ultimate killing machines. They probably have Ultimate Killing Machine Barn Dances now and then. Then there's the Nebular, thirteen "Deific Gods" - because God only knows that's what the enemies for every RPG should be like - who have various fun spheres of influence, ranging from cannibalism to senseless destruction to lust. Surprise! - they're all ultimate badasses, and uniformly uninteresting. Oh, demon lords, too. What we see for these creatures, incidentally, is basically a bland rundown of who they are, their worshippers, what they were in the first place, what kind of twink attack they can launch, what their worshippers like - none of which managed to tweak even the faintest shred of interest from me. Compare this to Oblivion, from Wraith, or the four Chaos Gods from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. They've been carefully crafted - 'specially Oblivion - to be interesting characters in their own right, with specific goals and modus operandi, and their followers reflect that. A thirteen-year old fresh from reading through the demons section of the Monstrous Manual would come up with much similar ideas, but I doubt that he'd publish them. For that matter: I'm awfully tired of seeing these things, so do me a favor - go and read Doomslayers, for Wraith: The Oblivion, especially the sections on Spectres and the nature of Oblivion itself. It's like a cool shower after a hot day in the stupidity and failure of imagination present in Creeping Death. Even my review will do, if you're desperate. The undead. There's some interesting stuff here, by which I mean "not directly torn from AD&D." Nope, shit, I was wrong: On page four, there's a "Death Knight" along with the Fell Dragon, which is the size of an aircraft carrier. It's likely that the two creatures that I thought original are probably more imaginative AD&D creatures with new names and more boring powers. If you notice my descriptions getting somewhat shorter, it's not by accident. I'm just growing bored with how everything looks much like AD&D with the serial numbers rubbed off and a heavy layer of dork painted on. Voom the Destroyer is a city-sized monster that looks vaguely like the Green Goblin's rocket sled with a ton of crystals on the top. Just in case somebody was going to do something interesting with it, it deals out instant death within a mile's radius unless you make a save. You're apparently supposed to engage the thing in combat, although I think that the average GM might have something more interesting to do, like slowly pushing red-hot railroad stakes through his ears. And the Gargantuas. Ever wanted to include Godzilla and his cronies in your AD&D games? Hell no, because you are, in all likelihood, sane. (I'm not talking about comedy adventures, either. I mean as something that permanently exists in your game world. No, the tarrasque does not count.) Not Senzar; we've got an ice man gargantua, a Godzilla-looking thing, and a gigantic tarantula with fly wings. They were "bound into The Sceptre of Jacoor Thrax by the eponymous 1st Overlord of Zengara", incidentally. Silly? Hell yes, but not even in the good way. And then there's the Mokaar, who are sort of like the Ringwraiths, except much, much lamer - they're loaded to the teeth with enough weaponry to stock a magic item shop, while acting as the evil equivalent of a Marine RECON team. In a description that's surely within many Marine tactical manuals, they "strike by stealth and strike with overwhelming force" - which is to say that they'll attack when they have the exact situation that an author imagines would be effective. This is not the stuff of which anybody's tactics should be made. What's slightly interesting is that the Mokaar usually run things according to a script, and get angry when the characters don't follow that script. Half a second's worth of thought might suggest a dozen other tactics, but I guess that the authors were in a hurry. Or couldn't think of anything. I favor the latter. And the Nine Evils. Some of these - some - are mildly interesting. Malaki, a cannibalistic demon-chimp-thing, can only be killed if somebody takes on his curse and then eats him, which is kind of a neat reversal. On the other hand, there's Zebrina, who always appears at the top of a flaming staircase and can only be killed if somebody makes her walk down all nine steps and steps off. It must have seemed like an interesting idea to somebody at some point. Then, just in case that the case hasn't been made that Senzar isn't ludicrously overpowered, there's stats for yet ANOTHER goddamn list of evil lords, this time taking the name of the Shadar and including the game's signature villain, Lord Valthrustra. He's as Evil as Evil Can Be, which neatly removes any need for characterization - ditto the rest. There's a hint or two here and there, such as one member of the squad loving another, or one of the Golem creators wanting to slip something "good" into his creations for Lord Valthrustra, but it's - well, it's what gaming supplements were like circa 1975 or so. Finally - and at this point, I believe that I can feel the frontal lobes of my brain frying themselves in their own juices - we get the character packages. Gargoyles, arachnoids, the Illithid-ripoff "Kalamari" - and if you know what calamari is, you'll appreciate how unfunny that joke is. Yes, George Lucas did it too. In Return of the Jedi. Remember the Ewoks? Not a good place to find inspiration. Oh, and the Luckster, who can create miracles by burning off power points. And the Vampyr and an angel-lookalike. The worst problem with this book isn't so much that it's full of bad, stale ideas and characterization that wouldn't pass muster in one of TSR's worst supplements. It isn't that it mercilessly rips off TSR's work without borrowing a smidgen of their invention. It isn't that the art is just-out-of-high-school, and actually looks worse than much of the original D&D monster art. It isn't that it has three seperate sets of Really Evil Things, with no word as to how they fit together. It's not that the thing is $18 when it actually takes its toll in the form of draining years from your life. No, its problems are twofold: (1) For a game that's supposed to be over the top, Creeping Death isn't much more than a ripoff of D&D. I've said that before, and I'll say it again. BUT: You'd think that with the over-the-top reputation of Senzar, you'd be getting monsters that were so ludicrous that they actually became enjoyable - say, a building-sized creature that's covered with various animal heads that fire lasers and missiles, or something. But instead, all that Senzar has is a pale, pale imitation of D&D's monsters. There is literally almost no innovation here, and this is _twenty-five years_ after D&D was released. If you've got your own line, why spend time rehashing the same monsters everybody has seen before? (2) It's not so much that it's bad. It's that the bad ideas sucked good ones out of my head, so by the time I finished skimming through it, I had lost just about every good idea that I'd ever read in another role-playing game, including ones that I'd come up with on my own. It's an idea parasite. I'm going to have to spend long hours re-reading Doomslayers, and Unknown Armies, and Bearers of Jade, and Terrors from Above, in order to recover from this. I feel like Gollum, having been pushed into the fires of Mordor in order to prevent the One Ring from doing any more evil; like stepping in front of a bullet named Senzar so that nobody else has to review this thing ever again. I want to seal it away using the same precautions you'd use to bury toxic waste. I want to forget I read it. I want to get new eyes. I want to read something that indicates talent, rather than plagiarism heavily spiced with a near toxic-level of munchkinism. You all owe me. -Darren MacLennan Darren MacLennan

Creeping Death: Campaign Builder Number One