You know how snakes, when confronted, will spend a lot of time curling themselves up and hissing and rattling and flaring their hoods and what-not? The Book of Vile Darkness kinda feels a little like that - not because the internal contents are full of ultimate darkness, but because - well, it really isn't that bad.

Oh, sure, it's got some bad stuff in it, but there's nothing here that I've seen that's really unique. There are points where the evilness takes on such a juvenile quality that I literally winced - come on, a "Nipple Clamp of Exquisite Pain"? - and there's other points where I found myself comparing the material favorably to some of the stuff in Warhammer Fantasy, which currently owns the record for an evocative, lively evil in a fantasy environment. It's a mixed bag of a book, but the useful material outweighs the bad.

The first chapter deals with the definition of evil in Dungeons and Dragons, including a very valuable discussion of whether your world's evil is absolute or relative - whether that guy charging you is actually a servant of the Devil or just a guy who believes that Umlat the First is the true god and that you're intruding on his holy land. Unfortunately, the book doesn't really allow for both in the same universe; sure, Umlat is a bit strict, but he's basically good, if not a touch territorial, while the Living Badness converts human beings into maggot-skinned abominations and sends them to kill anything they see. L5R did this very well, where you had noble samurai allowed to kill peasants at will in the same universe as Fu Leng - subjective evil living in the same universe as absolute evil. There is a valuable discussion - which is brought up at length later in the book - about accidental killing and how it relates to evil, but it's followed up with a list of bad acts - murder, lying, betrayal - and why they're bad. There's little plot hooks included, but most of them are - well, pretty lame, like an evil cleric encouraging families with healthy children to leave so that the town will be weakened in twenty years time. (You're evil; just kill them now, for crying out loud.)

One of the things that bothers me about D&D in general - and this is something that's been a hallmark of D&D from the time it was born - is that it tends to do two things: It avoids storytelling - there's no sense of a coherent universe, like you get in Fading Suns, or 7th Sea, or Legend of the Five Rings. The game's always been aimed towards providing tools to a GM, but at the cost of negating any potential sense of atmosphere that could come from a book like this.

The obvious rejoinder to that would be that making it specific to a campaign setting would injure its modular nature; but I keep thinking about the magic items in L5R - rather than just being, say, a magic knife, it's the same knife that Hida Suzume used to cut her throat to prevent her capture by goblins, which now sings sadly whenever a minion of Fu Leng comes near.

To be sure, there's something like that in the book itself, but it usually takes the form of Evil Deed Mad Libs - "During the year of in the epoch of , a group of conspired to attack but was repulsed by the of <made-up name>." There's something to be said for keeping it universal, but when you're doing something as potentially unique and flavorful as, say, cancer mages, it's time to pull out all the stops and make your villains truly memorable. (But I should also note that L5R and 7th Sea both frequently suffer from being too wrapped up in their own storylines to pay attention to the people buying the game.)

One of the book's most major problems is its inability to come to terms with evil. You can tell that the people who wrote it weren't really going to get into it; it's missing the moral complexity and shading that you get in White Wolf's games. In The Book of Vile Darkness, being evil is an all-or-nothing situation; in an evil society, everybody's enaged in evil, backstabbing their neighbors and generally acting like a bastard. Compare that to, say, the Ventrue. They're vampires, they drink blood, they kill people - but some of them at least try to do some good for the world, or at least do some incidental good while they're supporting their own interests. And they also make the Tzimisce look that much more screwed up. You may drink blood; they sculpt their genitalia, and look that much worse as a result. Or so I'm inclined to think.

For example, there's a village of evil Halflings described, but as they're described, they're all blackhearted bastards who are into killing and murder and evil and so on and so forth; there's no goodness, which means that they lack both realism and a sense of contrast. It's unpleasant to have to chop up a Halfling village because they're all openly worshipping Gozar the Gozarian, but it's pretty dull. It's absolutely terrifying to spend a day in an idyllic Halfling village, sit down at the communal table with people that you regard as good, and then watch as the central meal is unveiled -- the roasted heads of the people that the heroes were looking for in the first place, split open to allow using the brainpan like a fondue pot, especially when you realize that (1) they outnumber you, (2) they'll swarm you and kill you if you fight them, even with your magic and swords, and (3) they expect you to dig right in; after all, halfling courtesy is renowned the world over, and it'd be a grave insult to the chef and the hunters if you didn't at least taste it. What was normal and placid a second ago just became a deathtrap, the escape from which is almost worse than dying.

They also follow up with some example villains; more on them in a second. I came to realize after reading the first chapter that it may have started life as an article in Dragon magazine, judging from the fact that you've got three or four villains and a pair of evil locations stuck at the back of the chapter, instead of being distributed among the other sample villains and locations in the book. There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're going to include material from the magazine, bust it up so that it doesn't interrupt the natural flow of the book.

The villains themselves range from the cool to the lame; the lame belonging to the Dread Emperor, whose imaginative title indicates about what kind of thought went into him. Any attempt to attack him, mind you, is greeted with haste, meteor shower, a corrupted maximized fireball and a corrupted quickened fireball - in a single combat round. I don't even want to imagine how much damage that inflicts, but they would have been better off depicting him as carrying an atomic bomb strapped to his back, rather than four kids chained to his armor - it'd be more to the point. I mean, he is twentieth level, but he's got no motivation other than gathering magical power - which isn't a motivation at all, really - and to give PCs something to get murderized by. A half-orc / medusa spellcaster team has a sadomasochistic relationship, but it's sort of difficult to regard S&M as going hand in hand with evil when half the regulars on rpg.net seem to have at least experimented with it, if not more. There is a neat bit where the half-orc imagines that it'd be the ultimate high to be turned to stone by the medusa - and I remember reading about a serial killer whose fantasy was to be disembowelled by a beautiful woman - but it just doesn't seem to click for me.

On the other hand, I did like the ancient blue dragon who'd been possessed by a devil - shades of the possessed Chaos Dragon from Games Workshop, except much scarier. I'm also a huge fan of the description of a warp pit which a particular tribe of goblins use to warp their tribe members - they wind up stumbling out of it strengthened, but hideously warped. It's a pretty cool idea, if not a little bit reminiscent of Warhammer Fantasy's warpstone. As a matter of fact, I'm going to go on at more length about WFRP and its relation to The Book of Vile Darkness, but I'll leave it until the demons chapter. You can wait; it's not long.

The next chapter deals with possession and some of the special rules regarding it -- it's decent stuff, allowing for everything between human hosts to objects, like a wagon wheel, or a patch of ground. (Not so lame as it sounds; think of any place where you simply Do Not Go, and you've got a patch of demon-possessed ground.) There's rules for sacrifice, which are alright -- you beat a particular difficulty number in order to gain a benefit, with bonuses depending on what kind of sacrifice it is -- good-aligned more than evil-aligned, more followers vs. less followers and so forth. It would be interesting to see an adventure where the PCs arrive late and wind up facing off against a horde of worshippers who just got divine power thanks to their sacrifice of a good-aligned cleric and a lucky roll. The section on curses was done a lot better in the Ravenloft core book, especially because that book focused on the appropriate level of the curse, how it can be lifted, and so forth. There's a section on diseases -- the kind spawned deliberately by evil, and there's some excellent diseases in here. (Imagine the fun when the heroes break into the laboratory of the Pustulant, get into a fight with some plague zombies, accidentally knock over a beaker -- and then watch as their flesh begins to rot right off the bone. Good, clean, wholesome fun!) I love the warp touch disease, too, although -- but I said that I'd get to that later on, didn't I? No jumping the gun just yet.

I also liked the "lingering effects of evil" chart -- well, let me be more specific: I like the idea; I'm just not fond of the imagination-free effects that you get out of them. For each stage of wrongdoing, there's an associate effect, but it's left so vague that there's nothing for a GM to sink his hooks into.

Like, okay: Say that you've got a location where a lich hung around for a long time. According to the book, anybody who lives nearby may be marked with nightmares or neuroses, and the location itself is marked with a constant cold wind, or an absence of plant life, or objects might change color or become unusually cold. Even as a rough guide, it's kinda weak: What kind of neuroses? What object is most likely to become cold? I've seen this kind of thing done before in L5R and Call of Cthulhu, and it's pretty damn clear what's about and what it's done to the landscape in those games. When the trees spontaneously grow into the shapes of screaming faces, or when their bark is twisted into chains, or when blood seeps out of the ground at every footstep, or when somebody blows their nose and has their face fly off into the handkerchief, something is wrong, and the GM isn't going to have to make up most of the effect himself based on the vague suggestion of the book.

The next chapter includes various equipment for evil bastards. Torture devices: Myself, I wouldn't even bother to go into details as to what kind of torture device is being used; I'd just make, say, Fortitude checks at an increasing difficulty and leave the torture unspecified, but if you want 'em, they're in here. You also get execution devices, a situation where rules are almost totally unnecessary; most of the devices listed either kill you instantly or give you a slim chance of getting out of it if the executioner happens to screw up. (Fans of Hang 'em High, and any scene where a hero is slowly strangling will be happy to see that there's rules for strangulation by rope. I'm almost tempted to work a scene like that into a game just to watch the players fight to cut their compatriot down.) There's a variety of drugs, all of which will provide great delight to the stoners in any game. ("Dude! Mushroom powder! That's, like, just like weed!") There's also Terran Brandy, which I suspect to be some kind of in-joke -- I'd say Star Trek, but I'm not sure, so if you happen to know, please feel free to post it into the sassback forums; I'd be most appreciative.

The evil feats are kinda interesting, letting you stack some neat bonuses onto your favorite villain -- a twisted claw-hand (shades of Brotherhood of the Wolf), or a mutilated eye that lets the villain see invisibility for a minute a day, or a number of feats that let you corrupt a spell -- changing a fireball from fire to half-fire, half-"vile" damage. We also get the feat "lichloved", which makes the character appear as an undead to other undead and sticks on a 1 bonus against mind control and what not.

And you will never guess how you get this feat.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

Nope.

Nope.

I'll spill: You get it, according to the book, by "repeatedly committing perverted sex acts with the undead".

If you'd have been in the room with me when I was reading the book, you would have seen me look up and mouth "what the fuck?" just like in Blade, which in turn stole the joke from Kentucky Fried Movie.

One of the most annoying things about the book is its insistence that necrophilia, sadism and masochism are somehow related to evil. Sadism? Well, the case could be made, although there's a dozen subtle shadings of sadism -- ranging from the Midnighter to the Marquis de Sade to Sascha Vykos to your friendly local dom. Masochism? As an "evil" trait, it just doesn't fly -- a bad guy who wants a beating is a bad guy who's recognized his place in the cosmic order with unusual accuracy, but it's not necessarily evil. And necrophilia isn't done by evil people; it's done by people who are just broken, or who are looking for a cheap date. (Incidentally, that's the funniest webcomic on the net. Read through 'em all.) The evil characters in this book aren't sadists, or masochists, or necrophiles; the book says they are, but it doesn't say why, leaving the villains as paper cutouts with "sadist" written across the face. You can't say "this villain is a necrophile" without going into detail as to why, which is why the book comes off at points as essentially hollow.

So having a feat that requires you to essentially rape the dead is... well, just stupid. Spending a lot of time with the undead, torturing the souls of the undead, rubbing yourself with undead flesh until it's embedded in your skin -- sure, but having sex with them? No.

And for that matter, how do you explain to your buddies when they catch you putting the boots to a zombie? ("I... was polishing my shoes... with my pants down... and I slipped... and I... fell on the zombie... and, uh, that's my explanation!") Even evil buddies will spend the rest of their lives ribbing you until you kill yourself; and then the jokes will really get started.

The prestige classes are actually what I bought the book for the in the first place; or, more specifically, I bought it for a few particular prestige classes. The cancer mage, for example: brilliant. A mage who's crawling with every disease he comes into contact with, able to take a sentient cancer as his familiar, able to create an intelligent virus with which he has a telepathic link -- this is the kind of quirky stuff that I love.

Of course, you've also got the more standard villain types, and they really aren't quite as interesting. There's approximately ten different disciples or thralls of various dark gods, all of them centering around a single theme -- for example, the Disciple of Asmodeus emphasizes magic and spying, while the Thrall of Orcus becomes more and more vampire-like as time goes by. Not terrible, and there's some fun surprises to throw at overconfident PCs, but a little repetitive -- the opening quote for each Thrall or Disciple all take the same form, which leads to no real insight into the character of the villain. (They're all chants to the god in question, if you're curious.)

Some of them seem vaguely redundant. The Lifedrinker is a prestige class for vampires, as if they weren't already big fat cracklin' bags of power as it stands; they spend "lifewell" points, drawn from victims, to increase their armor, life points, or what have you.. The Mortal Hunter has kind of a neat trick -- tracking down and capturing mortals, then releasing them for hunts in Hell; but instead of capturing powers, the Mortal Hunter primarily focuses around disguising itself as a human and laying the smackdown on humans that it encounters. The Soul Eater works on something along the same lines as the Lifedrinker, replacing lifewell points with the ability to use the negative levels acquired from energy drain. The Ur-Priest is pretty interesting, a priest who literally steals his spells from the people or creatures nearby, rather than getting them from his god -- he'd actually make a pretty good character class, if you wanted a unique prestige class bouncing around your campaign world. The vermin lord focuses on vermin where the cancer mage focuses on disease; if you want a really, really creepy villain for an urban campaign, you couldn't go wrong but to have a vermin lord as the head of a sewer kingdom.

The spells are actually pretty good. I remember a thread on the rpg.net forums where they were complaing about a spell that impregnated somebody with a demonic baby, male or female; that's not a really accurate picture of what the book's like. Most of it focuses around spells that make a villain's life a lot easier -- for example, befouling water (for breaking sieges), summoning monsters, eating the flesh of monsters to gain a portion of their strength, creating swords out of bones... all good stuff, and some of them would work just fine as non-evil spells for a Hollowfaust necromancer, say. Some of them seem somewhat overpowered -- for example, there's a spell called grim revenge that removes the target's hand, then causes it to attack him -- shades of Evil Dead II, of course, but it's only a Sorcerer/Wizard Level 4 spell. You have to be undead to cast it, mind you, but that's pretty impressive anyways, especially for the fourth level. Heartclutch is even worse, a 5^th level cleric spell that causes the target's heart to appear in his hand, inflicting instant death if you don't happen to have a heal spell handy. The only requirement is that you have to have the disease soul rot, which probably isn't that difficult.

Come to think of it, that's one of the things that I love about this book -- the fact that they've got new spell components in the form of drugs you have to take, or states you have to be in. You can't cast, say, death by thorns if you're not corrupt, or cast abyssal might unless you happen to be a demon. It also mentions that there are certain spells that can only be cast under the influence of a particular drug -- and that's an idea that I love to death. Imagine if you could only cast fireball after doing a few lines of cocaine, or a hit from a crack pipe -- you'd have socially derelict mages lingering in neighborhoods that radiate with ambient magic, or desperate mages fighting for the latest shipment of mageroot. It’d definitely be a shift from your standard campaign world.

The weapons are pretty decent -- a lot of them are viciously nasty, like a souldrinking sword that inflicts negative levels and grants bonuses to the wielder; it's possible to do Elric and Stormbringer now, if you're so inclined. (Well, kinda; you'd have to fudge it, but it is possible. And yes, there is an Elric supplement by Chaosium, but you can do it from D&D's basic building blocks instead of creating it from scratch.) Some of them are silly, like the aforementioned Nipple Clamp of Exquisite Pain, but there's enough variety here that you're not going to get bored with throwing new evil items at your PCs. (I especially like the piercing needles of pain -- where you pierce your body with specially prepared needles, thereby giving you the ability to inflict wrack with a touch, kind of like a bizarre, Hellraiser-inspired acupuncture treatment. It'd make a hell of an item for Oriental Adventures.

The Demonic Engines are also pretty good -- the Cauldron of Zombie Spewing, although given the most banal title imaginable, is going to immediately suggest The Black Cauldron to any GM, while the demonic graft machine -- again with the imaginative names -- is right out of Hellraiser II. Actually, I'm a little disappointed in the possibilities of the demonic graft machine; I found myself wishing that they'd gone into more detail. There's only five different possibilities for demonic grafts, when, if you've seen Hellraiser, you'll know that there's yards and yards of possibility for the kind of stuff that can get stuck on. Maybe some young Turk will be so kind as to come up with a list of demonic augmentations.

The archdevils and demons. Let me get what I've been leading up to this whole time out of the way right now: Throughout the book, I had the distinct impression that the book is, in some way, inspired by Warhammer Fantasy and the Warhammer world, especially the four major Chaos powers and their servants. I can't make a direct comparison, mind you, but -- it just feels that way. The disciples and thralls of the various gods very much feel like Chaos Champions, while the case can be made for paralleling some of the archdevils to Chaos deities -- Demogorgon to Tzeentch, Graz'zt as Slaanesh, Jubilex as Nurgle, and Orcus as Khorne.  There are a lot more demons and devils than that, but it's something that I noticed as an undercurrent throughout. Warp touch sounds like the effect used to create a Chaos Spawn, while we're at it, and the goblins that dip their own into a weird liquid ino order to mutate them seem to come from the Skaven, to a small degree. I'm not even sure if they are borrowing from WFRP or not; I suspect that it was a minor inspiration, and it's nice to see something of the same... energy, I suppose, in a D&D book.

There are other demons and devils listed, though, including Mammon, and -- my favorite -- Levistus, who's frozen into a mountain of ice and relatively impotent. Also listed are the details of the Blood War -- lawful evil vs. chaotic evil -- and the machinations of the devils, which might make for interesting background for a campaign set in Hell.

The monsters: Overall, pretty decent, mapping out the ecologies of Hell and which demons live where. Those that don't live in Hell -- the Eye of Fear and Flame, and the Kython -- are both particularly interesting; the Eye is a remarkably powerful undead with a fantastic illustration, while the Kython are D&D's answer to the creatures from the Alien films.

The closing section, on evil PCs... well, it's okay, but I think that anybody who's interested in this day and age in running an evil PC will just go over and play Vampire. Most of the people who want to play evil characters -- at least, as far as I know -- were into it because they were reacting against the dull, staid goodness of D&D, and wanted to see what it was like to just kill everybody, as Monte Cook points out in his book. While Cook does go into detail as to how evil campaigns can work, it's not quite as deep, or as morally complex as Vampire  I can't really complain -- it's three pages, and it does a good job -- but there's still much more to be written on the subject of villain campaigns.

I was going to say that the Book of Vile Darkness isn't worth buying, but that's not the case. It's a good book, not so much for its treatment of evil, or for its mature content, but just for the sheer bulk of evil goodies to distribute to your villains. I'd recommend it.

-Darren MacLennan