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Disclaimer: I cannot review this game to my satisfaction without revealing massive spoilers. If you are considering being a player in this game, please do not read this review.

Okay, now then… Little Fears is a roleplaying game of childhood terror that has proven surprisingly controversial. Well, I've read and played it for myself now. So do I think all the controversy is justified? Let's find out…

THE SETTING

Little Fears envisions a world in which the monsters feared by children -- vampires, werewolves, witches, the monsters in the closet and under the bed, and, of course, the Boogeyman -- are real. They shamble, flap, crawl, and ooze their way out of a children's Hell known as Closetland in order to feed on the flesh and innocence of children. Adults can't help fight them because they can't see them, although they can be affected and manipulated by them. There's a countervailing Divine force for good, but it is relatively anemic and cannot directly help against the monsters. Even Fairyland has become a horrific wasteland.

In other words, this is a game about children saving themselves because no one else can do it for them.

Now, on its face, that makes for a pretty bleak setting. How bleak it is in practice depends entirely upon how much of the setting you choose to use.

You see, there are two tiers of horror in Little Fears. The first is the one I've already mentioned: The childhood horrors made flesh. The second, however, has little to do with children's fears and everything to do with adults' fears for children. These are the Kings of Closetland: Mighty beings who exemplify the Seven Deadly Sins of Greed, Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Gluttony, and Lust. Ruling them is a remote and diabolic entity known as the Demagogue and his brutal lieutenant, Branxis the Enslaver. Use of these beings in a game darkens it considerably for two reasons: One, they are adult horrors beyond a child's understanding, and two, several of them use real-world nightmares as weapons -- child abuse, neglect, incest, and pedophilia.

I wish they had decided to stick with the childhood horrors, personally. Throwing in horrors based on concepts children can't understand with names they can't pronounce -- beings like Lamashtu, Rael-Schol, and Kabaelza -- dilutes the unique feel of the game, making into a kind of "Kult, Jr.". For my tastes, the major villains of a child's horror universe should be creatures like "the Devil" or "the Bad Man". The adult horrors can be ignored, of course… but unfortunately, they are central to the setting. And if there is a reason for this division of adult and childhood horrors, it is never explained.

This is only one of several places with such an omission, by the way. At several points in the book are information gaps that could be either oversights or spaces left for GM development, but there is no way to be certain which is which. For example, we're told that Arcadia (Fairyland) was devoured by something called the "Null." Sounds ominous and important, doesn't it? Unfortunately, we're never told what the heck the Null is. Not even the slightest hint. The term appears precisely once in the entire book and is never explained.

At any rate, the children aren't entirely helpless. The very innocence that the monsters covet also provides children with the power of Belief. And in this setting, Belief can work miracles. Basically, if the child believes strongly enough about something, it may become real. If you have read Stephen King's It, you have the right idea. This is great fun -- some of the most fun my players had with the game, in fact. For example, one PC's pet rock suddenly began speaking up to offer its advice, and his plastic He-Man sword became a potent anti-monster weapon. But, again, there is insufficient guidance as to how powerful this ability is intended to be -- more on that in the Rules section.

The Child Abuse Issue

Certain people have charged that Little Fears is a game "about" child abuse. Is it? No... and yes.

This argument, like so many others, depends upon definitions. By the most literal definition of the term "child abuse", of course that's what Little Fears is about. All horror involves the abuse of protagonists, and in this case, the protagonists are children -- hence, child abuse.

But presumably, when people talk about Little Fears dealing with child abuse, they are talking about real-world child abuse -- attacks by pederasts and child-beaters, not werewolves and vampires. In that sense, "true" child abuse is only one of the many tools of Closetland and one of many elements of the game. Indeed, out of all of the horrors described in the rulebook, only the Kings of Wrath, Lust, and (to a certain degree) Sloth use real child abuse as a matter of course.

Unfortunately, we are talking about children here. Once you cross the Rubicon and introduce actual child abuse into the equation -- and as a fundamental part of the setting -- the line between the general and specific definitions of child abuse can start to look like a very finely split hair. This is especially true when some of the fantastic abuse is of the stomach-churning Kult-like variety.

Consider Rael-Schol, the King of Envy, for example. He rips the flesh from children's faces and mounts them on his wall, still inhabited by the spirits of the children. The gruesome masks plead for help and weep tears of blood, and sometimes Rael-Schol actually dons one of the animated masks and capers about in a perverse celebration of the childhood joy he so envies.

Now, as horrible as this imagery is, a game like Kult can include it and still not be labeled a "child abuse game". A "sick" game, maybe, but not a "child abuse game". Why? Because children are not the focus of Kult. But take this same imagery and mix it in with all sorts of other horrors specifically inflicted upon children -- including real-world child abuse -- and you have a game that some people understandably are going to see as a "child abuse game". Whether or not that label is valid is a matter for personal interpretation. I, personally, do not think that it fits, but I can certainly see why others think that it does.

THE RULES

The Basics

Little Fears makes use of a core mechanic that rivals that of Over the Edge in its simple elegance.

Characters have five Stats, rated from 1 to 5: Muscle (strength), Feet (agility), Smarts, Hands (dexterity), and Spirit. Die rolls come in two varieties: Quizzes and Tests. Quizzes are non-contested actions that require the player to roll his PC's relevant Stat score or less on 1d6. Tests are contested actions that require the player to roll over an opponent's relevant Stat, while the opponent does the same against the PC. For example, if Mary (Hands: 2) is trying to punch Jane (Feet: 3), Mary would have to roll higher than a 3 and Jane would have to roll higher than a 2. If both succeed, whoever rolled highest wins - a rule that penalizes characters with higher Stats but allows for faster play than would a degree-of-success calculation. If you prefer to use the latter calculation, however, it is a trivial change.

Characters also have positive and negative Qualities that function as both advantages/disadvantages and skills. For each Quality that applies for a given Quiz or Test, the player can roll an additional die and take the best result (for a positive Quality) or the worst result (for a negative Quality). Positive and negative qualities cancel each other out, so there will never be a roll that includes both positive and negative dice. In practice, this means that no character can be an "expert" at a given skill, although multiple positive qualities may apply in a given circumstance.

Incidentally, while character age has no effect on possible Stat levels for PCs (more on this in a moment), adult NPCs automatically roll an extra die for Quizzes and Tests as if they had an applicable positive Quality. Neither concept is particularly realistic -- an athletic 6-year-old can beat a typical 12-year-old and go toe-to-toe with a typical adult? -- but it works well enough for a game centering on child heroes.

Virtues of Childhood

In addition to Stats and Qualities, PCs have three Virtues: Soul, Innocence, and Fear.

Soul

Soul is the most nebulous of the three Virtues, and the least likely to come into play. Soul defaults to a score of 10, and it can only be reduced by a magical attack known as the Darkening. While there are technically no game mechanic effects of Soul loss, the noticeable physical and mental effects nevertheless grow rapidly with even small losses. At zero Soul, the child is clinically dead.

Innocence

Innocence is, perhaps, the most vital attribute in the game. It is the Virtue that the monsters most wish to destroy, and it is the children's most powerful weapon against them.

The default Innocence score depends upon age. Innocence begins at a score of 8 at age 6 and decreases one point per year. Age 12 is the maximum age for PCs -- after the age of 13, PCs lose their last point of Innocence and become blind to the dangers of Closetland.

Innocence powers Belief. To determine if a child's Belief is strong enough to produce a magical effect, a Quiz is rolled against half the child's Innocence score, rounded down. (A failed Fear roll adds an extra positive die to this roll, simulating a child's desperate need to Believe under duress.) In addition, the physical Stats of material objects such as Teddy bears animated by Belief are determined in the same manner as the Belief roll itself. (The mental Stats of such golems are the child's own.)

Incidentally, Belief can have negative effects as well. Step on a crack and you break your mother's back…

Obviously, the effectiveness of Belief drops markedly with age. While this makes sense thematically, the problem is that there is no countervailing benefit that increases with age -- again, youth places no limits on Stat levels. True, older children may have more respect in the eyes of adults… but adults can't really help against the monsters anyway, while Belief is a vital weapon against them. So, from a purely mechanical standpoint, it makes the most sense to play the youngest child possible. Granted, the biggest fans of Little Fears will likely scoff at such purely mechanical concerns, but the problem is there, nonetheless.

Fear

Unsurprisingly, Little Fears includes a Fear mechanic. It's a simple Spirit Quiz, with the consequence for failure being a 1d6 roll on a random Fear result table. The various results all serve to take the PC out of the action for varying lengths of time. The main wrinkle occurs on a result of 6, which gives the PC a point of Fear. Fear starts at zero. As Fear points increase, the child gradually grows more mentally unstable, picking up increasing penalty dice after five points. At ten points, the child is completely insane.

Combat

Generally speaking, combat takes the form of a Test pitting the attacker's Hands against the defender's Feet. On a successful hit, the damage is the degree of success, plus a possible modifier for high Muscle (unarmed) or weapon type (armed). Strangely, high Muscle doesn't affect armed combat, which means that there's no incentive for the strongest possible child -- which, again, could be a 6-year-old just as easily as a 12-year-old -- to use any weapon smaller than a hand axe. Remind me not to piss off any large first-graders… Fortunately, this problem is easily corrected by applying the unarmed damage bonus to armed combat. Much more appropriate is the massive amount of damage done by firearms -- as you might expect, a child just isn't going to survive a shotgun blast.

Damage is divided into five wound levels, which in turn are divided into 1-5 check boxes based directly upon the child's Muscle Stat. The player checks off one box for each point of damage done, and as all the boxes for a given wound level are filled in, the child takes the next wound level of damage. Negative die penalties kick in at higher levels of damage.

In an appropriately eerie touch, the wound levels are listed as follows:

"I feel…

"Fine
"Sore
"Bad
"Dizzy
"Nothing"

This is an excellent mechanic, worthy of a far more rules-intensive system.

Character Creation

Character creation, like the core mechanic, is beautifully simple and elegant; yet, again like Over the Edge, it demands serious thought on the part of the players.

As previously mentioned, the PCs have five Stats on a 1-5 scale, defaulting to 2. Players receive six "Playaround Points" with which to customize their characters. These points can be used to increase Stats, purchase positive Qualities, or increase Innocence; more points may be earned by decreasing Stats or Innocence, taking negative Qualities, or increasing starting Fear. In my playtest, this took all of 20 minutes.

The true genius of the character creation system, however, starts where the number crunching (such as it is) leaves off. The bulk of the character sheet asks the player to describe his character in terms of such things as favorite toys and people, fears and reactions to fear, and what the child wants to be when he grows up. In many games, these would be interesting character details, but in Little Fears, they can have actual effects during play. For example, a child who hides under a favorite blanket when scared may actually be protected courtesy of the power of Belief.

The Monsters

You may be wondering why I am including a "Monsters" section in my Rules portion of the review. The reason is that after creating the aforementioned finely crafted rules, Little Fears chunks almost all of them out the window when it comes to the monsters.

Again, if you are a player and have ignored my disclaimer up until this point, please heed it now: Do not read any further if you want to get the most out of this game.

Here's the deal: The monsters don't have stats.

There is a good setting rationale for this: The monsters are constructs of children's fears. Hence, when facing them, every roll is a Quiz, not a Test. The children must overcome their own shortcomings and inadequacies in order to survive. So, for example, a child hitting a monster is a Hands Quiz for the child. A monster hitting a child is a Feet Quiz for the child.

This offers the same advantage as the base mechanic for Whispering Vault: It minimizes GM dice rolling, allowing him to focus on description. Unfortunately, the same lack of guidance that crops up repeatedly in the book is nowhere as onerous as it is here.

Some examples:

Some of the monsters have a damage rating for their attacks, while others do not. Does this mean that the monsters without a damage rating do no more damage than would the weakest unarmed child? I have no idea. The poltergeists are capable of destroying an entire house and the monsters under the bed can pull 400 lbs. into Closetland, so I'd think that they'd be able to deliver a powerful wallop… but they have no damage ratings to back this up.

Some monsters have listed weaknesses -- such as stakes and sunlight for vampires -- while others do not. We are told, however, that the monsters are dead when the children find a way to kill them. So what does this mean? Are the monsters with no listed weaknesses only vulnerable to the power of Belief? Can a monster with a listed weakness only be killed by that weakness, or would the power of Belief work on it as well? And if all of the monsters are vulnerable to the power of Belief, why do the kids need to "find" a weakness at all? The book has no answers to these questions.

There is no way for any one monster to be any more dangerous than any other monster, aside from damage ratings (when they're used), immunity to Belief (if applicable -- see above), and GM fiat. A Quiz is a Quiz is a Quiz. There are no difficulty levels or the like.

There is no way to "wound" a monster, because the monsters do not take damage. So, there are only three possibilities when a monster is hit: (1) It dies instantly if the attack is its vulnerability or if the child Believes it will work; (2) it is completely unharmed, because it is not vulnerable to the attack or because the child's Belief roll failed; or (3) the attack is effective, but the GM decides not to let it work through fiat.
(I had to use the latter method to keep combat even remotely interesting, due to that kid with the monster-killing He-Man sword. So long as he made a Belief roll, the sword would automatically kill the monster, unless I decided otherwise via fiat. And if I had to decide via fiat, what was the point in the player rolling at all?)

In several places, the text suggests that certain monsters may come into direct conflict. (In fact, one monster, the Yeti, might actually help children.) But monsters don't have stats. So how do you determine which monster wins? Dunno. GM fiat, I suppose.

Basically, the mechanics feel like a freeform diceless game grafted onto a clever rules-light but otherwise standard game system. I have no problem with one or the other, but the rulebook supplies far too little guidance to make the combination a seamless one.

THE BOOK

The strongest suit of Little Fears is mood. This is a very creepy book. It gave me a chill right at the start with a black and white photograph of a gnarled tree in the foreground of a leaf-blown October field with the text, "You may have forgotten them… but they haven't forgotten you."

For the most part, the art in the rest of the book maintains this atmosphere. There are, however, several drastically different styles at work, some of which are a little too cartoonish for the subject matter. And if the Kings of Closetland seem like refugees from Kult in their descriptions, their illustrations make them seem to be visitors from Tribe 8. The pictures a good, but they -- like the Kings themselves, in my opinion -- just don't quite fit with the "childhood terror" theme. On the other hand, some of the artwork nails that theme so well that it's, well, scary. The illustration on page 45 of a little girl cowering in a corner with the monstrous shadows of her all-too-human arguing parents looming above her is case in point.

The layout is easy on the eyes, with widely spaced lines. On some of the more cluttered pages, however, the book seems to have fallen prey to the "if it won't fit, force it!" typesetting mindset. There are a few typos and unclear sentences, but not enough to get annoying. If the art can best be described as "creepy", the writing can best be described as "bleak". The opening story is a heartbreaking tale of a little girl whose life with her alcoholic widower father is horrific enough even before the monster shows up. The astoundingly depressing ending of this tale starts the book on a downbeat note that makes the promise of children saving themselves seem to ring hollow. Of course, if you're looking for a bleak, dark, Kult-like game, this tone is entirely appropriate, but if you're just looking for some creepy fun, it's like going into the carnival spookhouse and finding a room full of dead puppies.

The game includes four adventures -- more like extended plot hooks, really, but with the ultra-light rules and statless monsters, anything more probably would be overkill. The first is the longest and most detailed, but it is also the most problematic in that it wanders straight through some of the murkiest aspects of the rules and setting. The monster is a possessed and mobile car crushing machine that's after both children and adults. Adults can't see monsters, so what do they see when the crusher comes for them? And since this is a possessed physical object rather than a purely fear-spawned phantom, should it have stats? Can the crusher be blown up, or is it only vulnerable to Belief now that it's a monster?

The other three adventures are shorter, simpler, and thankfully less dependent upon the GM filling rules gaps. Even better, each of the three includes three separate possible explanations for what is going on. This is not to say that there's an explanation of what the PCs can do about the situations, but given the power of Belief, that probably isn't really necessary.

Organizationally, the book is acceptable, including both a good table of contents and (huzzah!) an index. The problem isn't finding what's there, but rather looking for what should be there but isn't.

CONCLUSION

Okay, now here's the weird part.

I'm well aware that it sounds like I've been slamming Little Fears for the majority of this review -- probably because to a large extent, I have been. But my players and I had a great time playing the game. In fact, my wife proclaimed that it was the most fun she'd ever had in a roleplaying game. So, based upon this review full of criticisms, what am I to make of that response?

To be honest, I'm not sure.

I can't credit the rules, because they didn't much come into play. I would credit them as being unobtrusive, were it not for the fact that their application became so confusing when it came to the monsters. In that sense, I was working against the rules, not with them.

I can't fully credit the setting beyond the basic concept, either -- I used none of the darker creatures and subjects that are the core of the setting, which was a good thing, since my players said they wouldn't have enjoyed the game if I'd done so.

Basically, I took a little bit of the rules and a little bit of the setting and ran a completely improvised and entirely enjoyable session. The question, then, is how much credit do I give the game, and how much do I give to my players and myself? I really don't know the answer.

As to who will like this game, I will give you my best educated guess.

First, you must be open to freeform gaming in order to enjoy Little Fears. True, the game has rules and dice, but their effects on the most important aspect of the game -- the monsters -- is so minimal as to frustrate fans of cohesive, rules-light (as opposed to rules-free) systems.

Second, you should either like extremely dark settings or else not be the sort to feel cheated when you use only a part of that setting. Individual Little Fears adventures may be comparatively light, but the setting itself is dark, dark, dark. Imagine the setting as a haunted house being investigated by the Scooby Gang. Upstairs, goofy ghosts are flitting about. Child sacrifices are going on in the basement. The Scoobies -- the PCs -- may never discover the horror in the basement, but you, the GM, will know it's there.

And third, you must be willing to improvise. This may seem redundant given my statement regarding the freeform requirement above, but a Little Fears GM will need to fill in the gaps left in the setting by accident or design.

I guess I'm in there somewhere, since like I said, I enjoyed playing the game despite all of my criticisms of it.

IMHO, YMMV, BYOB.