In a Nutshell:
The Heaven and Earth Second Edition Game Master’s Guide is an above average sourcebook marred by too much fiction and a mixed message, but whose high points include some excellent ideas for conspiracy and occult games and one of the best collection of tips for horror GMs I’ve ever seen in one place. Those latter features make this not just a good buy for Heaven and Earth GMs but for any horror or conspiracy GM.
What it’s about:
At first glance, H&E is another RPG about the end-times. God and the Devil war for souls, with the fate of the Earth as the prize. Jesus has decided to get involved, however, only he’s not playing for any of the other teams—he’s playing for humanity. Players are slowly, and I mean slowly, introduced to this web of celestial and infernal plotting over the span of an H&E campaign.
Unlike other games of this stripe, the game isn’t about high-powered maneuvering or doomed special-ops missions—it’s about normal people who slowly see the true nature of the universe unveiled in horrific adventures. In addition, unlike a lot of games in which God and the Devil seem to make up the power-players, H&E doesn’t seem to have anything to prove. The setting doesn’t seem to set off any “blasphemy meters,” as if the designers went out of their way to slaughter some sacred cows. This is a good thing—it means the game can be played and revolve around faith for one GM, and revolve around blasphemy for another. I like it when a game leaves room for GM freedom.
One downside is that the game hasn’t revealed everything about the “metaplot.” Future supplements will fill in a few gaps about Potter’s Lake. Oddly enough, this didn’t bother me—I had enough clues and enough to work with that the few blank spots needing to be filled in can easily be avoided while running a Potter’s Lake campaign.
Production Values:
The Heaven and Earth Second Edition Game Master’s Guide (hereafter abbreviated to the GM’s Guide) is 128 pages long, with black and white illustrations. The margins are fair-sized but the text in the body of the book is two-columns, with a small font. The art varies from average to excellent. The back of the book includes a massive index for both the Players and GM’s Guide.
Content:
The majority of this book is made up of ideas—there are very few hard rules outside of a couple outstanding sections on Ghosts and the Possessed, since much of the rules one would need are in the Player’s Guide. On the one hand, that makes this book less valuable to the average Heaven and Earth GM who wants to veer off on his own and essentially use it as his own Tri-Stat horror system without the H&E background—why buy the book if its only got ideas, rather than crunchy bits? At the same time, it makes the book useful to GMs of Unknown Armies, Conspiracy X, Mage: The Ascension, or any other occult or conspiracy game. The forces at work in the H&E world are varied and interesting, and easily extrapolated out to other games, and the GM’s Guide is a veritable idea mine.
In addition, Potter’s Lake, the core location for H&E, is an interesting blend of small town America and H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King—it seems the perfect setting, quite frankly, for a horror game. Potter’s Lake is one part Cicely, Alaska and one part Derry, Maine. There’s a vague sense of wonder wedded to the uneasiness that the GM’s Guide tries to create.
The game has a wonderful sense of itself and what it’s trying to achieve, marred only by the in-game fiction and the adventure. The fiction is overly long, and while well done, it eats up a quarter of the book. I can honestly say that I enjoyed the fiction on the first read through, but on subsequent peeks through the book I was amazed at just how little it did for me as a GM, and how I wished it would’ve been replaced by more info on Potter’s Lake or more info on other areas of the H&E world. Additionally, I felt that the fiction would’ve better served the game by being aimed at Potter’s Lake. As it stood, it was centered around one of the conspiratorial factions and a drug smuggling operation on the Mexican border.
The adventure falls into the same trap the fiction does—as an adventure that might be likely to kick off a campaign, it should serve to back up some of the core ideas of the game, i.e. that PCs are Potter’s Lake residents or based around that locale. Instead, the game imports FBI agents into the area to solve a murder. The problem with this is that it really takes the introductory adventure and makes it indistinguishable from one I’d see for Delta Green or Conspiracy X—in my opinion, it doesn’t play up to the strengths of the game. It’s a solid adventure, but just seems too generic to fit into such a vivid setting as Potter’s Lake.
The best part of the book are the lengthy GM sections on how to GM, as well as how to integrate the various supernatural and conspiratorial elements of the setting into the game. These sections contain good advice not just for H&E GMs but any horror GM, and touch upon everything that really needs to be dealt with to make a good horror campaign: Player death, how to make it creepy, how to make a great villain, and how to work with Players so that they’re not just along for the ride. Honestly, this is one of the best “how-to” sections on horror, despite its length, and compares favorably with “Nightmares of Mine.”
Scoring:
Style: The Heaven and Earth Second Edition Game Master’s Guide is a solid product that doesn’t break the mold, so it gets a 3.
Substance: The Heaven and Earth’s Second Edition Game Master’s Guide gets a 4. It would’ve easily scored a 5 without the fiction and adventure, but neither of them really captured the great feel or (in my opinion) aims of the game, and the fiction ate up a lot of space.
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