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Deadlands has, at its very tone, a weird disjunct between comedy and horror. It wants to be both, and is neither.
Monsters, Muties and Misfits walks this line. Sometimes, it's effectively horrific; other times, it applies horrific descriptions to funny stuff, like a straightforward description of a clown who kills you with whoopee cushions. On the other hand, there's enough good ideas here to cancel out the bad ones, so as a whole, it's not bad.
The book opens up with a series of descriptions of the various monsters, which manage to describe monsters without falling into too predictable of a routine - it's not the best gaming fiction that I've ever read, but it's solid enough to keep your attention. Almost all of them are oral descriptions of the monster and their encounter with it, with the exception of a single written report by a Combine soldier. Wisely, the game statistics are seperated from the monsters themselves; they're in the second part of the book, well away from the text writeups.
They do tend to fall into the trap of "this is the monster we saw, it killed a few of us horribly, and we killed it or didn't" - but on the other hand, there's parts where it's told from a relatively unusual perspective. We don't get the in-the-head-of-the-Z'Bri insight that Tribe 8 grants, or the remarkable innovation that Delta Green did with the Mi-Go. On the other hand, for a game that's pitched at about the level of Evil Dead 2 and/or Escape from L.A, you're not necessarily going to want any of that. Deadlands isn't a game designed for deep thought, and the book tends to reflect that. There's a fascinating segment on how the ecology of the Wasted West has slowly become self-sustaining - creatures feeding on fear are in turn fed upon by other creatures - but more on that later.
Splitting the difference between the monster writeups and the monster statistics are details for creating your own animal companion - Mad Max had his dog, whom I believe was named Dog, while your Wasted West character can get an undead horse who's got nerves of steel and the presence of mind to guard a particular object. There's a lot of options here, but just like anything in the Wasted West, there's a bunch of potential stingers - especially when your Marshal starts drawing Jokers. It'll be a useful resource for screwing with players who are getting too overconfident.
The monsters themselves. Hm. One of the things that I dislike about reviewing gestalt products is that it's difficult to pick on stuff - if an entire chapter is briliant, or stupid, then I can criticize it on that level. Going over each monster, however, is utterly pointless, since if you don't like that one, you can move on to the next. So, high points and low:
The Alexander 9000 - literally a haunted tank, one armed with a boatload of weaponry and a rather unpleasant Harrowed brain. The story behind it the usual goofiness - a car crash victim with a penchant for Alexander the Great has his brain wired into a tank - but it might be fun to play a game of OGRE with the PCs in the role of the hapless fools who have to take down a giant on their lonesome.
The Bloat bellies remind me a lot of the Wights from Myth and Myth II - creatures who are essentially walking bags of toxic gas, wandering around the Wasted West and exuding it whenever cut. In this case, they're out to destroy food supplies for towns - but since the Reckoners feed off of fear, you'd think that they'd want to keep people alive as long as possible, Famine's modus operandi notwithstanding. This seeming inconsistency is explained later on - but not terrifically well. More later.
The Bloodwave and the Creepin' Gulch - are both pretty wonky, geographic features that attack whoever wanders into view. While the Bloodwave is simply - well, utterly baffling in respects to what the people who made it up were thinking - the Creepin' Gulch is an interesting idea that just doesn't translate to the Wasted West. It's a depression in the ground that uses a particular treasure as bait, gets anybody who's inside of it fighting with each other, and then closes up, like a Venus flytrap. The only way to kill it is to find the original treasure that caused the gulch's formation and to destroy it.
But: Unless the GM is going to have the treasure nearby - which seems forced - it's going to be almost impossible for them to find it. There's no way to track down a specific truck, or missile launcher, in a setting in which all of the libraries are radioactive ash and the spaces in between towns are populated by hideous monsters. The book doesn't give any suggestions to GMs as to how to use them, and I guarantee you that novice GMs that are going to have problems using these in anything but a carefully tailored adventure. I suspect that the Gulch is a leftover from the Weird West that Pinnacle threw in.
That's one of my primary problems with Deadlands: It frequently omits so much information that's practically standard in other games that it makes its target audience - younger players who are in the mood for something goofy - much less likely to enjoy it. It attaches a clunky, dice-heavy, prop-heavy system and a setting that's wildly inconsistent in tone to a game that should play as quickly and easily as the transcedent simplicty of Ghostbusters. That - plus the wild supplementitis - are among the things that have pretty much driven me off of Pinnacle for keeps.
The Explodjinn. A Djinn - the classical Arabic kind - in a post-nuclear environment.
You know what? Enough said.
The Gallos Terrible are actually pretty neat - gigantic roadrunners that scream around the desert, kicking up huge dust clouds and pecking anything that they catch down to the bone. You could easily use Road Warriors to play a Gallo Terrible / car race; perhaps that's what the creators had in mind.
The Night Stalker officially wins a prize for the description that made me roll my eyes and go "Okay, that's just so over the top that it's completely stupid." Get this:
"The person is lifted screaming into the air by an unseen force, and while the stalker watches, the victim shimmers, then begins to unravel like a grotesque and bloody ball of yarn - skin and muscle alike spinning off the body in great organic loops of cord, starting with the outer layer of the epidermis and working in to the bones. The loose end of the fleshy yarn snakes around to the stalker for a moment, then runs up to the wide grinning maw. The stalker devours its prey by slowly sucking his mass up like a long strand of spaghetii. The most horrific aspect of the whole process is that the stalker saves the head and vital organs for last - for a long, long time, the victim can see what's happening to him."
I've found that the capper to that description is imagining the Night Stalker with a big, white chef's hat and an apron that reads "'AT''S A SPICY MEAT-A-BALL." It's such a perfect mixture of Grand Guignol and pure silliness that it'll stop the game dead with a twenty-minute laughing jag. And this comes after a description of how the Night Stalker follows its intended victim three steps behind for as long as the victim can walk, so it's kind of like swapping the reel of Psycho with the Benny Hill show just before the shower curtain comes open.
Anyways. There is a fascinating bit in the book where the authors discuss the ecology of a horrific environment - essentially, the Reckoners may have created an ecology that doesn't rely on human beings to provide fear. The fear-mongers in a particular environment are themselves being preyed upon by much larger monsters, and it may be growing beyond the control of the Reckoners themselves. Cool? You betcha.
If you play Deadlands, you've probably realized that I'm not a huge fan of it. You'll definitely find some useful material in this book; for every monster that flops, there's one that might provide useful cannon fodder, or an evening's entertainment. I can't really recommend it for any other game but Deadlands, however, just because the game is too unique for the monsters to properly transfer over - well, a few of them are, but not enough to justify $20.
-Darren MacLennan
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