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I picked up the Hell on Earth role-playing books at the behest of one of my gods - specifically, the one named Stupid Money, who represents my tendency to buy goddamn near anything when the price happens to be discounted a bit. A running gag in my family is that I'd buy toxic waste if it were on sale for five bucks for two barrels. (And you know, I probably would.)
Anyhow, I picked up Deadlands: Hell on Earth when one of my employers mentioned that the Pinnacle Entertainment Group had just undergone some kind of split from a former business partner and was selling off some of its less succesful stock to generate quick capital. One of the deals had three books - the main Hell on Earth rulebook, the worldbook and the GM's screen - for about $30, which resulted in the firm pressing of the Stupid Money button in my head.
So here I am, looking at the Hell on Earth rulebook.
It's got one of the weirder pedigrees that I've seen so far. It's a post-apocalyptic game based on a Wild West game, two genres that aren't too far removed from each other. The best post-apocalyptic movie ever made, The Road Warrior, had a plot that could easily resolve itself as a Western - a lone stranger who aids a small community against a horde of enemies. So, technically speaking, there's nothing wrong with the idea of using a Western theme for a post-nuclear game.
For better or for worse, Hell on Earth draws heavily from its progenitor game, The Weird West. That was a Western game in which all of the stereotypes of the Old West were played to, heavily, but given a twist of their own. You had gunslingers, card sharps, priests, Mounties, cowboys and so forth - but you also had the undead, Blessed miracles, kung fu, mad scientists, a menagerie of different hideous creatures and the Reckoners trying to turn the West into a fear-ridden wasteland.
In Hell on Earth, the Reckoners won, using irradiated ghost rock - a super-fuel which turns out to be the concentrated souls of the damned - in nuclear weapons, which destroyed the Earth and most of the population. The result is a mutant hybrid of the Weird West and every post-nuclear movie ever made, with a lot of stuff that's an extrapolation of the Weird West's ideas. Instead of Blessed, you have priests of radiation and Templars; instead of mad scientists, you have Junkers; instead of hucksters, you have psykers. The survivors have huddled up into small communities, but they're constantly menaced by an array of threats, ranging from killer robots to vampiric werewolves to blast shadows to wormlings. The player characters are the heroes of the setting, trying to reduce the overall fear level by killing the major fear-creating creatures and/or beings who plague various centers of population. The game is fairly broad, somewhat campy, but feels fun - your chance to throw Mad Max up against a blubber-coated creature that can only be killed with diet pills. It ranges between campy and grim, which, I suppose, isn't an entirely bad thing.
The system is straight out of Deadlands: The Weird West, which uses dice and a deck of playing cards to determine results. Determining your attributes involves drawing twelve cards, dropping two - except for jokers and deuces - and assigning the remaining cards to your different attributes. The value of the card tells you what dice type you get to roll - the more sides, the better - while the suit tells you how many dice you get to roll for that particular attribute. A Jack gives you a d8, and if it's hearts, you roll three of them. A four of Spades gives you 4d6.
The Deadlands system is a modified shotgun system; you try to beat a target number, with 3 as an easy task and an 11 as almost impossible. Instead of rolling 4d8 and toting them up, though, you pick the highest result and hope that beats the target number you're after. If you happen to roll the maximum on a particular dice - which the book calls “rolling an Ace” - you can re-roll that dice and add on your next result, which'll allow for better attributes occasionally generating superhuman results - getting, say, a 15 on a roll of one eight-sider through the Ace.
There's also the question of how the d4 type might work out in terms of scoring the maximum result possible to that dice type - the game calls them “aces”. I believe that you have a 25% chance of rolling a 4 on a d4; therefore, you’ll be quite likely to max out if you’re rolling more than one dice. Since you can get multiple Aces, your odds of Acing on a d4 are relatively good, which means that the worst dice type in the game may generate better scores than the moderate kind. Sort of weird, I’d think. On the other hand, I'm not a statistician.
And the issue of the way that attributes interact with skills; which is to say, they don’t. Well, they do in a minimal sense. The dice type of your attribute determines how many dice you get to roll, so if you’ve got a Knowledge of 4d10, and you’ve got a Medicine skill of 3, you roll 3d10 against whatever the target number happens to be. If you go over the target number by 5, you get a Raise, which basically translates to extra success.
And the issue of just how many attributes there are. There are ten attributes overall, but there seems to be a considerable amount of overlap, and the names of the attributes themselves lapse into silliness. For example, for a simple skill like, say, Dexterity, there’s Deftness for shooting, Nimbleness for athletics and dodging, and Quickness for determining when you move within a turn. For something simple like Intelligence and/or Wisdom, there’s Cognition, Knowledge and Smarts. Charisma gets saddled with the unwieldly moniker of “Mien”, and while it’s possible that some fancy Eastern newspaperman used the term to describe a gunshooter, it’s highly unlikely that it would be a household word in the Old West.
There’s also the question of why they split their attributes up so much. For example, according to the book, Deftness is “hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity”, Quickness is “reflexes, speed and the ability to concentrate during stressful situations”, and Nimbleness is “Agility and overall physical prowess” - but in any other game, they’d all likely default to Dexterity.
Maybe they were split up in order to avoid one person maximizing his Dexterity attribute, since it does affect a lot in this game, and combat is pretty important. It doesn’t really make sense for a man who’s really quick to be clumsy, or a clumsy man to be quick, or for a man who can do a dozen cartwheels to be unable to draw a straight bead with a crossbow. The ultra-clumsy naming system strikes again in the mental attributes - Cognition sounds like it might be your ability to understand what’s going on, but it’s just Perception under a different name.
Further contributing to this situation is the way that the skills have been portioned out. There’s a lot of skills that should default to different attributes, and some of them are almost funny. For example: what attribute would you use to bluff somebody? In D&D, Charisma, in Storyteller, Manipulation or maybe Charisma - but in Deadlands, you use Smarts. The rational choice would be Mien, since that includes Leadership, Overawe (intimidation), and Persuasion. But nope, it defaults to Smarts. Why? Why do Streetwise, Gamblin’ and Ridicule default to Smarts, instead of Mien? For that matter, most of the skills in the game are under either Knowledge or Smarts; you can be, if you want, the dumbest doctor in the world and still be a perfectly competent surgeon - possibly a brilliant one, if your skill is an indication of how competent you are and if you’re taking advantage of the Aces rule.
Is this a major problem? Not too much - but the game’s skill system feels scattershot, as if it was built first for emphasizing combat and then tacked on some skills as an afterthought. I don’t mean that it’s as bad as the 1st edition of AD&D was, or as bad as Palladium is today, but it just seems odd to have most of the skills crowbarred into one or two attributes.
As for the how many skills you get - you just tote up the dice types of your Cognition, Smarts and Knowledge by the number on the die. If you’ve got a d6 in each of them, you get 18; if you’re got 10, then you get 30. How your Cognition - perception - affects your mastery of skills, I don’t know, but it does somehow. Each skill point gives you another dice to roll; the dice type’s determined by your attribute. In practice, this is much simpler than it sounds - you just toss a handful of dice and look for successes or Aces.
The book includes Advantages and Hindrances, most of which have the usual down-home old-time grizzled old coot naming convention; you’ve Ailin’ instead of Sickly, have Big Britches instead of being Overconfident, or you’re a Geezer instead of being Old. I sometimes wonder if the guys at AEG don’t have an Old Coot-itator, where you stick, say, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave into one end and get a lengthy story about the time an old coot had to climb inside the still-warm body of a buffalo to survive the horrible winter of 1878. I don’t have anything against old coots, but it seems very out of place in a game like Hell on Earth.
Just in case you don’t feel like going through the mechanics of character creation - which, to be sure, aren’t so drastic that it makes character templates attractive by comparison. They cover most of the major character types in the game - Doomsayers, Templars, Law Dogs, Savages, Tale-Tellers and so forth. The artwork is pretty nice here, and you could do much worse than to photocopy them and hand them out to your players if you’re in the mood to play the game in a hurry.
The combat system. I’m not too much of a mechanics wonk, so bear with me through this. One of the neat aspects is that you draw cards from a standard deck in order to determine your initiative; every success you get increases the number of cards you draw, which means that you can potentially get up to three cards. Three actions per round makes the Quickness attribute look pretty damn sweet; maybe the ten attributes do more than I think. You can also keep a cheat card up your sleeve, which lets you interrupt anybody’s action with an opposed attribute check.
The combat system is pretty straightforward; you try to beat the target number of 5 with your Shootin’ skill, which is then modified by various conditions - bad weather, high wind, something gnawing on your ankle and so forth. There’s a lot of different modifiers here, most of them centering around different situations, but you’d be just as well-off playing it with whatever modifiers you like; the game can be as crunchy or as quick as you want.
Weapons have speed checks, though, so if you’re firing a revolver, you have to spend one action cocking and another fire. Most of the speed factors involve whether you’ve cocked your weapon beforehand - it takes two actions to fire a gun if it isn’t loaded, but only one if it is. This is actually kind of a neat trick; I like it better than D&D’s descending through different initiative ranks, mostly because it’s easier to see what card you have at a glance vs. asking somebody what their initiative number is time and time again.
The damage system is pretty straightforward; you’ve got five different health levels for five different parts of your body. You roll dice and add up the numbers, and for every six points of damage you do - at least, to a human - you get a wound level. If you reach the fifth level of wounds on your guts or your head, you’re dead; arms and legs aren’t so bad, but they’ll still mess you up. What I really like about this - and I have to admit that it’s a bit of toy-based goobery, but it’s still cool - is that you attach colored paperclips to the side of your character sheet to indicate wound levels, sliding it back and forth and replacing it to indicate where your character’s stats are at the moment. I like it better than constantly writing and erasing, at least.
Player characters, besides having their standard wound levels, also have Wind, which meausres your ability to stay in a firefight; every wound you take sucks away a d6 worth of Wind, which then impairs your ability to fight. Since the roll is open-ended, the book assures us that your character can be put down by a light wound that sucks away all of your wind - ‘cause, I imagine, nothing says gritty Western/post-nuclear adventure than a hardened gunslinger getting nicked by a bullet and crawling away while whining like a little bitch. On the other hand, Wind seems to work quite well for stuff like simulating bleeding to death, drowning, radiation, and fatigue. It’s not a bad idea, but a cap on how much Wind you can lose from one hit would be awfully nice.
Following the combat section are the rules for the various fancy character types - junkers, psykers, Doomsayers and so forth. I have not play-tested these rules. I can say that there’s enough here to keep a player going, but if you’re seriously considering playing one of these types, then you’re going to want to buy the corresponding book. There’s enough to keep a player going for a little while, but not enough to keep them going for a while. Harrowed characters - those who have returned from the dead with a demon in their skulls - still strike me as potentially outpowered for their type. Fortunately, they’ve loosened the restrictions on counting coup. Killing a powerful monster in Deadlands usually gave the Harrowed character a special bonus, like being able to withstand all temperatures, or one of the creature’s abilities, or a special weapon or vehicle. In the new version of the rules, fortunately, the entire party can pick them up - an ability that I like; it sort of gives the party a totem spirit to follow, like Werewolf: The Apocalypse. The more experienced the party, the more benefits they have.
On the other hand, the book itself suggests that only one person within the party will pick up the coup from the slain monster, resulting in one person lucking out and getting a bonus while the rest of the party gets jack-squat, which in turn leads to jealousy, bitterness, and the sense that all of the effort they put into killing the creature doesn't matter. Guess which idea I like better?
The game also borrows an idea from TORG. The entire world has been blighted by the supernatural taint of the Reckoners, whose identity is revealed within the book; the more afraid people are, the closer their land reflects that fear, until the whole place becomes a Deadland. Once that happens, the community’s pretty much screwed. In order to reduce the fear level, the players have to hunt down the fearmonger - the creature that’s primarily responsible for killing people, tearing people’s faces off, slinking through the streets at night, leaving copies of Gor novels in people’s mailboxes and so forth. Once it’s dead, the characters can toot their own horn in front of the locals, and, assuming that the people don’t regard the heroes as a bunch of pompous self-promoting assholes, the fear level goes down.
In some respects, this is a really cool idea. For inexperienced GMs, this is a godsend. Each adventure can be structured around a single fear-causing agent, and the various complications that occur when you’re trying to track it down and kill it. The coups that the larger creatures grant give the party a reason to stick together - you only get the coup if you’re in the area when it’s killed - and the players can have a genuine sense of accomplishment as they see their community go from a twisted, malign parody of a suburban neighborhood to the real article.
On the other hand, I can’t say that I’m too fond of this whole “toot your own horn and the world gets better” stuff. If somebody comes into town, gathers everybody around and then tells about he and his buddies were able to kill the Black Badger of Anorak, in lengthy detail, I’d be annoyed, not relieved. It may turn every adventure into an boss hunt, where - even if you kill hundreds of different monsters and ensure that the taint of the Reckoners doesn't set foot within fifty miles of your town - the fear level remains the same if the "boss monster" isn't killed. And it seems a touch odd to have an actual mechanic in place to lower the fear level, as if the game world was written for the mechanic and not the other way around. For inexperienced GMs, it's perfect, but more experienced GMs will simply be able to move around it.
Fate chips. I forgot to mention these, mostly because it's kind of fluffy; each player gets bounty chips instead of experience, which can then be either cashed in for experience, or used on the fly to improve a dice roll. It's a sweet mechanic, especially since it lets you have characters who are inexperienced but lucky, or characters who are very experienced but who have to let the dice fall where they may - or a mixture of both. The game has a system for determining fear effects, ranging from the willies to a fatal heart attack; it makes the game's Guts attribute more useful, but it'll be annoying to have your character snivelling on the ground while a monster comes straight at the party.
The book rounds itself off with a list of monsters, including the Bloodwolf - what happens when a vampire turns into a werewolf, or vice-versa. They're mostly pretty campy, although there's a few - like the blast shadow - that generated a lifted eyebrow from me.
One of the primary problems that I have with Wasted West is the lack of a central, coherent tone. The book wants to be Call of Cthulhu and Toon at the same time, and when you've got that kind of tension, something is going to break; you can be funny and scary at the same time, but it's hard to pull off unless your name is Sam Raimi and you've got a healthy budget set aside for fake blood.
For example, take the Bloodwolf. It's a werewolf that's been turned into a vampire, with a wolf's skull for a head and bright red fur. The game makes repeated references to how scared your characters are going to be, how they're all going to whiz themselves when they see it, how they're going to be wailing that they wish that the GM would kill them...
...and this, insofar as I'm concerned, isn't the case. First off, the only game in the world that can make a claim to fear piss is Call of Cthulhu, where the players are going to piss themselves, much less the characters. Deadlands is, in a sense, a comedy-horror game, and the book seems to lean on the horror button too hard to let the comedy come through. It wants to be Hellraiser when it's actually Evil Dead II. And there's nothing wrong with this, but the authors just don't seem to fully go for it.
Another one of my problems with this game is: Deadlands is all over the place, in just about every sense possible. Rather than expanding into the postnuclear genre as a genre in itself, the game takes Deadlands and says “Okay, here’s automatic weapons, here’s effects for radiation, here’s a blighted landscape, go to town.” The West and a post-apocalyptic game have two entirely different settings, entirely different...themes, is the word I suppose that I’m looking for.
Fallout was successful because it took a Fifties vacuum-tube environment and showed you what happened after you drop several thousand megatons of nukes on it, not because it brought the mechanics of a Fifties-era everything-is-swell themed RPG and stuck it into a postnuclear environment. Tribe 8, which I also picked up recently, works beautifully because everything is built into the central idea of the war between the Z’bri, the humans and the Fatimas - there’s no baggage from an earlier game. Vampire: The Dark Ages worked because it discussed the golden time for the Vampires, and was fairly accurate to the feel - if not the exact history - of the setting. Hell on Earth feels like Deadlands with a new paint job.
Is it worth buying? I don't think so. While this isn't a criticism of the main book per se, the entire line is marked with a consistent sense of chasing a complete worldview - just about every product that I've purchsed for the line makes frequent reference to "There's this big cool thing here, but you're going to have to buy another supplement to find out!". The system seems okay, but not having tested it, I can't say for sure - and I've read that large combats tend to dissolve into masses of dice-rolling and record-keeping. And if you want one of the special characters, then you're going to have to drop another $20 to get the full set of rules for that class.
But if you're just starting out as a GM, and you want something fun and potentially disposable, then this isn't a terrible game to begin with; it's not as good as Ghostbusters, but it'll get you started, and you can move on to other games from there. But I can't recommend it for anything more serious than that.
-Darren MacLennan
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