You know what I like about licensed games? They make shopping so much easier.
Never heard of, or don’t like, the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Then you need not concern yourself here. If you’re looking for a generic occult-fighting RPG, grab Witchcraft instead – it uses almost the same system, and you can check out the few rules changes on the net if you’re mad curious. Or get Jared Sorensen’s Inspectres for just ten bucks. Either way, you’ll be better off.
Know of and enjoy the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Then all you really want to know is whether the game is any good. Well, yes. It’s good. It’s very, very good.
Style 5, Substance 5
What’s that? You want more?
Well, there’s hot lesbian wiccans, too. How can you lose?
What, that's not enough for you?
Oh FINE then. We’ll do it your way.
Let’s start by judging a book by its cover. And what a cover – glossy, hardback, with the big Buffy logo and well-chosen pictures of almost all the big stars – Buffy Giles, Angel, Spike, Willow, Xander, Oz and Cordy. Around it all – and completing the inside page margins - is a funky pattern of entwined crosses, hearts and swords. It’s set against a purple background on the front, but it’s colour-coded for each chapter. Yes, attractive AND functional.
Also inside, some 95% of the artwork is show stills, and mostly good ones. Exactly what you’d expect for an RPG based on a TV program, but the preponderance and quality of them demonstrates the high production values Eden have applied here. It looks, indeed, like the Sunnydale High Yearbook or the various Watcher’s Guides, and would not be at all out of place on the shelf next to them. Should the game end up there, the designers have taken every step they can to maximise cross-over potential.
Original art is used in the game in two sections – for sketches of the bad guys in the bestiary and the adventure, and in the pregenerated PCs section. For the former, they’ve chosen the works of Mr Chistopher Shy. A lot of people love Christopher Shy’s work. I am not one of them. His style is also, I feel, often at odds with what he’s been asked to do. For example, the adventure includes a character who is basically Captain Kirk (it is a more silly episode of Buffy that is being recreated) but the sketch is once again burdened with the dark, ominous shading that is Shy’s trademark.
What they should have done is hired Mr rk Post, who did the character archetypes. I consider the art for this section to be the most vital part of the presentation of any game – because its job is to sell sample playing-pieces to those who will play them. Mr Post comes through with style at this crucial moment. Some may find the face shapes a little odd, but the New Slayer looks playable, cool and very hot, all at once. In other words, the job gets done and gets done well.
That last phrase sums up this product very well indeed: it gets the job done, and done well. Buffy is living proof that RPG design hasn’t just settled into a comfortable format over recent years, but has actually learnt a lot about what really works and what doesn’t within that format. Buffy is cut like a tailored suit to do exactly what it should do in the most stylish way possible, and every single line shows that the tailor is a master with the scissors, someone with years of experience about what looks good on the body, not just on the hanger. I’m not sure how to fit playtesting into this cool suit metaphor I’ve got going here, but it’s also clear they did a lot of that and listened hard to the feedback.
But back to the visuals. Moving past the short contents, we get a double-splash page combining two pictures: a lovelorn Angel and a pensive Buff. It serves little purpose but to make the game look like all the other Buffy products out there. It is fannish fluff, but that’s the whole point. And speaking of fannish fluff, next we get a short story by the grand master of Buffy fiction, Mr Christopher Golden. Mr Golden has written quite a few Buffy novels (including one trilogy and a brand new tetralogy), and writes prodigiously for both the Buffy and Angel comic lines. The story itself is nothing amazing, although it is certainly well-written; the point is that once again, the non-roleplaying Buffy fan will find herself on very familiar territory. Lots of pictures. Double-splash photo pages. And Mr Golden. The only thing they could do to make it feel more like home is include ads for merchandise or instructions on how to join the Buffy fan club at the back.
Oh wait, they DO.
I feel like stopping the review there. I mean, if you can’t tell from the sheer devotion and skill applied to the presentation that this is a game of exceptional quality, then you’re not really listening. And you know the setting. So what more do you need to know?
Ah, you don’t care about this, you say? So they got the look right, and the marketing is brilliantly done – so what?. What about the content, man? What lies within the pages of the actual RPG? Stop babbling and get to the point!
Alright, keep your knickers on, sunshine. I’m getting there.
Moving on from the fiction, the first chapter is your classic introduction piece. Here, for the first time, we get introduced to Mr Carella’s prose. Here, for the first time, we realise that Mr Carella is a genius.
I don’t know how he did it, but this book is written with exactly the same kind of verve, mockery, self-parody and straight-talking that made the television show so appealing. Okay, he’s not quite as funny as Joss Whedon, but like Buffy, there are lines in here that you will want to quote elsewhere. Lines which are laugh-out-loud funny or just seriously damn cool. Lines which are refreshing in their candour and their reference to popular culture. Every now and then it teeters on the edge of being annoying, but it pulls it back every time. Unless you have an extremely low tolerance for colloquial styles, you shouldn’t find the jokes ever becoming irritating, or inhibiting the communication of the rules.
This communication is helped immeasurably by the highly stylish and very clear layout. Thanks to the full colour throughout, different types of information is in both different fonts and different colours. It’s the same kind of sharp, easy to reference presentation that made Star Wars Revised and Expanded so well regarded when it was released. Quotes are used extensively throughout the book, although often with little relevance at all to the surrounding text. That can be annoying, but as they’re usually choice examples of Buffy at it’s most amusing, it matters little. They still makes you laugh.
The introduction chapter’s content is devoted to describing how to play roleplaying games, how the rules are laid out and how to get started. It’s pitched at total newbies so is slightly longer than in most modern games, but this doesn’t stop it from giving the gist clearly and succinctly, or from assuming the reader is intelligent. We close this chapter with a brief summary of the cosmology of Buffy, and then a massive review of everything that has happened on the show in the first five series. By putting the Buff before the stuff (ooh, there’s a catchphrase for all you budding marketeers!) newbies will see the resemblance to a series guide and still be feeling on familiar ground.
But Steve, you say, you’re still preaching to the choir! I care not one wit for this crapola you’re waffling on about. I’m not a newbie. I’m a long-time roleplayer who wants you to get to the damn point and talk about what the RPG actually does – modelling the Slayer and her universe – before I wrap you in a daiper and mail you to Michael Jackson.
Okay. Let’s get rulesy.
Some Assembly Required (an episode title and a chapter title, all in one) is the guide to making those who live the Scooby life. At 36 pages, it’s the longest chapter in the book, and then has 38 pages of examples on top of it. Never let it be said that this game is rules-skimpy, or just another series guide with a few rules tacked on at the back. Of the 250-odd pages, less than 50 are devoted to setting. More importantly, the rules sections don’t simply provide rules, they teach you how to apply them, every step of the way. This is a rulebook designed from page one to be a how-to guide, not simply a list of rules. For proof of that, you only need to check those first page numbers I listed – 36 pages of chargen rules, 38 pages of examples. That, my gaming friends, is true dedication to the application, and it’s a joy to behold.
The chapter kicks off explaining briefly your options for setting up a new series, an idea explored much deeper later on in the book. Here they simply talk about how many slayers you might want in your group, and how to fudge, bend or break the so-called “rules” of the setting to make this come about. It’s nice to see cosmology taking a back-seat to Doing Whatever The Hell You Want, even up to the point of discussing a game about Slayo the Slayer-dog! Without apology, too - the chief caveat offered being that, should you have five slayers, you should not, under any circumstances, allow them to wear sailor suits.
One thing you do have to know before going in, however, is whether your character is a White Hat, a Hero, or an Experienced Hero. White Hats are basically heroes who aren’t combat ready – your standard Scooby or Slayerette. Heroes are people like Slayers, Angel and Riley who can take on a vamp or two without breaking a sweat. Heroes get more points for attributes, skills and qualities (points for each section are specified, rather than an overarching total), but the White Hats get 20 drama points instead of 10. These numbers are for beginning, first season heroes; stats for those who want to start off with a more series-five level Buff are under Experienced Hero. No listing for Experienced White Hat for some reason, but it’s easy to extrapolate.
No doubt you’re curious as to whether the Heroes and White Hats are balanced. Answer is no, not really. When it comes to combat, Buffy and Angel are going to steal the show, no matter what. Scoobies can use their drama points in many different ways and think outside the box to contribute to combat effectively and entertainingly, but they still can’t do the kewl kung-fu, and they go down in a crumpled heap a lot faster. And because of all those extra skill points, Heroes won’t be slouches in other fields either, such as book-learnin’, breaking into military installations or chatting up hot guys.
So, then, how does the game address this issue? The short answer is that it doesn’t. The book takes its cue from the show, with the line that drama and ass-kicking are not the same thing. White Hats contribute by being dramatic, funny and entertaining, and it’s up to the GM (and the players) to make sure that these things are as important to the game as killing vampires. A challenge, to be sure, but it emulates the show, and is far more satisfactory than say, a botched attempt to make Heroes less “worldly” beyond the combat arena. Plus, the usefulness of drama points is very high, and will keep your Scoobies from wilting like lillies, while also allowing them to contribute significantly to each and every fight – it’s just that they’ll be possibly kicking a vamp in the goodies while Buffy is whirlwind-kicking two in the face while staking a third.
Chargen also introduces us to the basics of the Unisystem system, also used for other Eden games like All Flesh Must Be Eaten and Witchcraft. Those of you familiar with those games will find the same six attributes – Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Perception and Willpower – and find them rated once again from 1 to 5 (for humans). These are bought with points, with the cost increasing for stats above 5 (should you be supernaturally gifted).
Next come Qualities and Drawbacks. These do not have to balance – indeed Drawbacks are deliberately capped lower, and it is not recommended that you take all the Drawbacks you can. Drawback points go towards Qualities and skills, and as such it is possible to min-max this system just like any gifts and flaws system. The system offers no protection against this, except in the feel of the Qualities and Drawbacks themselves. A great number of them provide a small or negligible stat bonus, and more importantly, they’re focussed on describing your character, rather than kitting them out with powers or limitations.
What I mean is that things like Nerd, Jock, Misfit and Teenager all make the list, as do Emotional Problems, Tragic Love and Show-off. Yes, there are also stat- or combat-bonuses like Fast-Reaction Time and Situational Awareness, but the emphasis here is on taking what describes who you are first, then what you can do. The Qualities list on a character sheet thus ends up reading like a HeroQuest character sheet and less like the Feat list in D&D. Attractiveness levels are in here, too, and it’s a power at least as useful as levels in Occult Library. Finally, there’s Templates such as Slayer, Vampire, Werewolf and Watcher. Whether it’s a career, a social niche or a horrific curse of undying hunger, it’s all handled the same way. Neat and easy.
Skills are next; and there’s only eighteen of them. I’ve always been a fan of this narrower approach, and in listing skills on the character sheet, which they can easily do here. Yes, it results in all melee weapon fighting coming under the brilliantly named “Getting Medieval” skill, but this agrees with the show, makes things much easier and yanks the emphasis away from combat and back into character interplay. Characters wanting to specialise in nunchuks can use their Wild Card skill slot to bone up on their weapon of choice.
Of course, the emphasis shouldn’t be totally off combat, given that butt-kicking is a big part of the Slayer milieu (I’ve always wanted to say ‘butt-kicking’ and ‘milieu’ in the same sentence). So instead of having lots of different skills, characters will instead have lots of different combat manoeuvres listed on the bottom of their character sheet, pre-calculated with all the appropriate modifiers. The result is that instead of a character sheet reading “pistol, rifle, knife, axe, glaive-guisarme”, it now reads “throw, punch, stake, head-butt, flying roundhouse”. With those choices right in front of the players, they cannot help but be inspired to use them.
I’ve always believed that character sheet design was vital to a good game, not only to make the rules application flow easier but also because it is a key factor – of equal importance to the mechanics themselves – in how the game is actually played. Buffy proves this beyond doubt.
At the end of chargen, we get twelve gorgeously illustrated double-page archetypes. These work as examples of chargen and also can be plugged into any game at a moment’s notice, for not only are they game-ready in terms of stats, but come complete with background, personality, roleplaying notes and relations to the other template characters. They’re fully plug and play, and they’re so well designed they beg to be used. Add good variety, an incredibly hot new Slayer, a hacker-sorcerer and a cameo from Corey Feldman’s character in The Lost Boys and you’ve got the coolest set of pregens the hobby has seen since Paranoia.
Want to play the heroes of the TV show instead? Check out full character sheets for Buffy, Angel, Riley, Giles, Oz, Willow, Dawn, Tara, Anya, Xander, Cordy and Spike as they appear at the end of series five (the book has no information about series six). Want to scale the heroes back to your series of choice? Turn the page and find Seasonal Adjustments listed for all of them. Once again, Buffy excels at providing tools, not just rules. Tools not rules, dedication to the application, the Buff before the stuff - suddenly I’m the Johnny Cochrane of gaming. If I roll a crit, you must acquit!
But I digress.
Speaking of rolling crits, time to get to the real heart of the issue here. Chargen paints a pretty picture, but how does it all actually work? Does the system at the heart of the game actually have what it takes? Is it cool, and more importantly, does it work?
Let’s get crunchy.
Once again, the system will be staggeringly familiar to those of you who know Unisystem. Unisystem is to my mind one of the better house systems out there – simpler than GURPS, more generic than D20, but not as simplistic as BESM. And yet, I still wasn’t a great fan of Unisystem in practice until I read this particular execution. The difference is small but significant; it’s like Unisystem with tail-fins - it goes just that tiny bit faster, and it looks a lot cooler.
All rolls are D10 plus stat plus skill (or doubled attribute if it’s an attribute test). Beat a 9, you succeed. The average person will have a stat and skill both at 2, so they’ll hit this 60% of the time - about the right level for a challenging-but-still-fun game like Cthulhu. Of course, one look at the character sheets reveals that your typical new Slayer has a kung-fu plus Dex base of twelve before even rolling the dice, so our heroes aren’t going to be failing a lot unless they take severe penalties. The flipside is that (much like the Storyteller system), you can get greater levels of success as well. In another great moment in character sheet design, these are listed right there on the sheet so the players can do it all themselves. To summarise, it’s about one success level for every two points above nine, stretching out to one per three for higher numbers.
Extra successes allow you to do more difficult things, or wear down lengthy tasks faster, but are not wired into the system explicitly, apart from combat. In combat, the success levels simply add to damage, which is generally a flat number by weapon type, or modified by strength. Damage can be multiplied up if the weapons are more lethal – x5 if staking someone through the heart! - so success levels can really pay off. And even if they don’t, you get random damage and the attack roll with one toss of the dice. Again, neat and easy.
There are special rules for fear tests, but they basically boil down to a Willpower test with a handful of pretty gentle modifiers. Beat nine not to wig, how far under you get determines how much you freak. Someone with average willpower facing Texas Chainsaw Massacre level horror must roll a 3 or more on a d10 not to go postal, so getting the major wiggins will be fairly rare. Which is true to the show, and your Scoobies will still be running scared thanks to their combat squishiness anyway. All is good.
Research does not get special rules – it’s just a Occult Intelligence roll – apart from being modified by the Occult Library Quality. Combat, however, is just bursting with small special rules, but in truth retains the same simplicity that is found everywhere else. Roll Dex Attack Skill, beat a 9 or your opponent’s dodge score (which is the higher) to hit. Ties go to the defender. Calculate damage, apply any multipliers, and move on to the next round. Go under 10 life points and you start taking negative modifiers, go under 0 and you have to start testing to stay alive. Hit –10 and only a convenient Scooby with a drama point and a brief course in CPR can bring you back. It’s all very simple and clean. In fact, the emphasis is so strongly placed on simplicity that the basic rules don’t even bother with an initiative system, but an optional one is still provided.
The complications to combat come mostly in the form of the aforementioned manoeuvres. From the simple (kick, punch, headbutt) to the more complex (grapple, feint, choke) to the way-kewl (spin-kick, jump-kick, catch weapon) to the simply ouch-worthy (snap neck, decapitation, kick to the goodies), the list has it all. If it’s kewl and Buffy or Faith has done it, it’s here. The idea of copying these onto your character sheet means you’re players will never have to look up the attack and damage mods associated with them…right up until the point they try something that isn’t listed on their sheet yet. At which point the system falls down as the GM has to flip through the pages again.
Ultimately, however, this flaw is unavoidable in any game that wants to have different manoeuvres feel different. And it can be turned into a strength – every time the player uses something not on their list, they can then add it to their sheet just as they add it to their character’s arsenal. Now they have it in front of them and will think of it more often, and at the most opportune times. The verisimilitude is drool-worthy.
Verisimilitude is also the word of the day when it comes to how the combat system runs. White Hats will get bounced quickly, but if they work together or roll well, can hold their own. Heroes, meanwhile, will be slaying back and forth with impressive alacrity, and highly appropriate kung-fu flips, kicks and throws. My playtest was with five complete newbies to the system and the feel of the fight was uncannily accurate. The best example of this is when fighting vampires – a stake to the heart does five times its damage IF that hit will take it below zero. So a 10-point hit will dust a vamp who is down to 50 Life Points or less, but that guy on 51 only drops to 41. The end result is that for all but the weakest vamps, Slayers will be forced to pummel them for a while first, then go for the heart. Just like on the show. It just takes a bit longer with dice – but thanks to these quick kills, not that much longer.
The combat chapter also has modifiers for multiple attacks or defences, striking from behind, ganging up, etc, that might push your tolerance for such things, particularly in such a cinematic genre. They can also slow the game down a lot if the GM insists on using all of them. However, the excellent example that follows makes it clear when to use the rules and when to ignore them, and once a GM gets used to it, it will be balanced nicely and flow well. Newbies may find it difficult to get this balance right at first, but even if they follow all the rules, it’s still no more complicated than D20, so no harm done.
Overall, Buffy walks the hard line, halfway between balls-to-the-wall, quick-and-dirty cinematic fun and having modifiers for everything so that all the little things really do count. For my money, it succeeds in walking this line more often than not, coming up with the modifiers but then working very hard to make them simple and easy to use in practice. It sits in the middle nicely, and thus should provide something for everyone.
The rules chapter closes with the rules for Drama Points. These have five handy-dandy uses for everyday Slaying – 10 to one attack or skill check, halve all damage taken so far in a fight, have a plot twist go in your favour, gain 5 for an entire combat (but you must be sufficiently ticked off to use this one) and, last but not least, if the price is right you can even come back from the dead. The first two will be used the most, and they quite extensively – the game recommends about 2-4 drama points per session, or about one per fight. White Hats may use double that, unless they prefer to save them for plot twists so they can shine outside combat. The point is that these aren’t big time world-changers like Force Points; rather they mostly let Buffy wax vamps with style instead of just quotidian functionality.
Few guidelines are given on how to apply or adjudicate the plot twists or the 5 Righteous Fury requirements, beyond that it’s always the GM’s call. Familiarity with the series however comes to the rescue here, with a plethora of examples leaping out from every series. Equally masterful in drawing from the source is in how players may gain Drama Points: XP, heroic sacrifice and coming up with quotable quotes aside, they gain points for suffering tragedy and emotional trauma, and roleplaying this out. If the Heroes reach rock bottom and start willingly taking penalties (like being unable to spend Drama Points and –2 to all actions), they get even more payout – assuming they can be recovered by their loving Scooby support network. And the White Hats also get points for helping out like this. One of the classic tropes of Buffy is the Scoobies supporting their Slayer exactly in this manner, so it was very nice to see these rules.
Another classic trope of Buffy is Giles being knocked on the head to further the plot. Should the GM need to pull this kind of railroading manoeuvre, he can appease his players with Drama Points. Giles, no doubt, has a ton of them. Probably burned them all that time he fought Angelus one-on-one, though. Either way, this is one hell of a brilliant mechanic, topping off an already classy plot-point system. It’s quick, easy, fun, powerful, clever, dramatic and models the show to perfection. The bar has most definitely been raised.
The rules chapter ends with rules for XP, and it’s nice to see that even the fairly pointy season one Slayer can go a long way in five years (Combat skill for Buffy in season one: 12. Combat skill for Buffy in season five: 18), so the buzz of “levelling up” is still somewhat present. There’s even room for White Hats to mature into fully-fledged Heroes as well, should they go from being, say, a bookish wallflower to a bad-ass wicca as time marches on.
Speaking of messing with primal forces, the next chapter is on magic. Alas, it’s the weakest of them all, and at times suffers from suplementitis. The system doesn’t just look simple, it looks incomplete, even knobbled. There is a strong sense that they had more to say, but ran out of space. Guess you better buy the soon-to-be-released Magic Box supplement. On the other hand, the show has always tended to make magic work however they might need it to for that particular episode, and the text even makes mention of this, so the whole make-it-up-yourself approach is, thankfully, not overly harmful.
The chapter kicks off with a spiritless discussion of how magic works on the show, which can probably best be summarised as “variably”. Trying to wring a cosmology out of something that clearly has none makes for somewhat dull and ungainly text. And then the information is repeated almost exactly, but this time with a few numbers added on. Fleh.
The system is based around a roll of Occult skill plus Willpower, assuming you can find the spell in your Occult Library. Get more success levels than the power of the spell (3-6 for most of them) and you successfully cast it. If you missed, however, then the higher you rolled, the worse the side effects, so big spells go bad more often. Anyone can cast spells as long as they have the required bells, books and fuzzy dice. Witches and Warlocks use the same rules, but have bonuses and (much like in the show) poorly defined abilities such as being able to fast-cast, not requiring material components and, for some reason, the ability to make pencils fly through trees using the power of your mind. It makes no sense but the damage of the telekinesis will help any witchy type in combat.
Spell creation rules are provided; they’re similarly vague but cover the basics well. Like manoeuvres players should take time building up a reliable repertoire, and the danger of botching a roll should hopefully keep them from being walking flamethrowers. Hopefully. Plenty of warnings and tips are provided about stopping this syndrome – to the point of suggesting that all spells be single use – and that set my spider sense a’tingling. I suspect that magic fans it does get will either quickly tire of building spells that rarely do anything, or rapidly develop such a massive arsenal that it turns every adventure into a simple exercise of ‘What Spell Will Do?’. I pity the GM trying to strike the balance.
For series which feature magic lightly, it shouldn’t be much of a problem, but for those of you wanting magic or magicians to play a major role in your campaign are not as well served as you could have been – as you should have been, even. They’re certainly not awful, however, and a confident GM shouldn’t find them that difficult to bring to heel. My advice for you guys is to have a quick read of the magic chapter in your store before buying, to make sure it’s up to your standards. If the staff hassle you about this, just tell them the Funny Man on the Internet told you it was okay.
Chapter Five is “Sunnydale After Dark”, a location guide and an NPC roster. People like Harmony, Amy, Jenny Calendar and Principal Snyder will be found here. Once again, what makes this chapter noteworthy is the emphasis on application. Hardly anyone remembers Crestwood College, from Reptile Boy, but as the text points out, this makes it prime material to mine for your episodes. The bestiary in the following chapter maintains this approach – the first thing mentioned is how to design monsters by identifying the niche they fill in the story (cannon-fodder, the hunter, the metaphor, the recurring menace etc).
The text then spends a few pages discussing in detail how vampirism works in the setting, a section which to my mind is as pointless rules-less material in the magic chapter. It’s hardly complex, and any fan of the show will already know it all. Of course, if you're not a fan of the show, it could be vital. And even for old hands, a handy reference guide is, well, handy, but they still could have cut down on the waffling a tad.
No waffling is found when it comes to the stats themselves. All monsters and NPCs have tightly designed stat-sheets, listing attributes, basic powers and manoeuvres in one third of a page. For ease in play, monsters also have three derived stats – Muscle, Combat and Brains. These are calculated by adding six to whatever total they would use for strength, fighting or thinking rolls, thus removing the need for the GM to roll for his bad guys. Beat their combat score with yours and you hit them. Beat it with your dodge and they don’t hit you. Beat their Brains to sneak up behind them, or their Muscle to open that peanut butter jar they just can’t manage.
The book also doesn’t spend a lot of time trying to detail every beastie we’ve seen on the screen (that’s for the Monster Smackdown book to do – also coming soon to a store near you). Instead, it focuses on giving you guidelines and examples of how to set power levels and escalate them. So you have stats for the new vampire, the vampire minion, the vampire veteran and the vampire lieutenant. Which is not to say the book skimps on monsters either – all the big bads are covered, as is Luke, Darla, Ted, The Judge, and even the praying mantis woman, among others. The selection is designed to include examples from every type of beast – shapeshifters, demons, robots, ghosts, zombies – rather than picked at random. This chapter certainly makes mention of the upcoming sourcebook to supplement it; unlike the Magic chapter, however, you are not left with any impression that you’ll ever need it.
Now, I may have already mentioned this, but did you know the Buffy RPG puts a lot of emphasis on application? If you had ever doubted this fact, Chapters Seven and Eight will convince you otherwise. Chapter Seven is a highly detailed, tightly focussed guide to creating a Buffy series. It’s excellent advice and completely avoids the usual generic twaddle that most games include in these sections – it’s purely about recreating the Whedon formula. It has a helping hand in putting this formula across though, because not only does Buffy use a tried and true formula in every series, but the characters themselves are vaguely aware of this and talk about it. The end result is that even the casual fan of the show knows the structure of a Buffy season inside and out and off by heart – it’s part of the fandom lore. They know, for example, that every series requires an Ethan Rayne episode, that the Big Bad should appear by episode three or four, that mid-season is the time for big revelations, that there is a subtle art of balancing serious episodes with humorous, and plot-arc advancement with stand-alone storylines, that the Big Bad has to be carefully paced and controlled towards the end so he remains a threat but doesn’t strike until the series finale, etc etc etc…
If you haven’t quite grasped all that yet, this chapter lays it all out, as well as how to craft whole series, and how to weave plot and sub-plot together to create the arc of each season. Then there’s even more on how to do the same plot-weaving for every episode. On top of all this are guidelines for determining stats and threat levels. Combined with five years and one hundred episodes of examples, this chapter will make even the least-confident adventure designer believe that he can churn out not just one episode, but seasons and seasons, and all of them brilliant.
Still not quite ready to fly solo, or just want an example of how an adventure should look on paper? Then Chapter Eight is for you. It’s the included adventure. But it’s not just the included adventure, because in most modern games, when this feature manages to get remembered at all, it’s typically lacklustre, or dull, or far too brief, or incomplete or just all of the above. Sweeps Week is none of these things. It’s fifteen pages of witty and sharp material, that is both a well-structured adventure and highly derivative of the show in pacing, tropes and style. While not exactly complex, the abundance of suspects (both human and less so) will give the players lots of leads to chase before it all becomes clear. The only danger is that the investigation may drag a little due to all the red herrings, but there are plenty of opportunities to slot in some violence, a shocking discovery or a new clue to keep your players interested and heading towards the right solution. Plenty of GM tips are provided too, to stop these pitfalls from happening, as are guidelines for turning the background premise into a whole campaign. Overall, an adventure of this quality is rare as a one-off; among those appearing in the core gamebook itself, it should go down in history.
The penultimate section of the book is a guide to Buffy-speak, and once again, this is not just your run of the mill glossary that’s good enough for the average gamebook. Once again, Buffy goes above and beyond, providing an actual analysis of how the show’s particular cant is produced. Replete with examples, of course, it is the perfect tool to make your game sound like it came from the pen of Joss himself.
The other appendices contain all the necessary tables (including a summary of all combat manoeuvres, so I was wrong – no page flipping will be necessary) and a thorough and detailed index. If the jargon guide demonstrates how perfect this work is at recreating the show, then these appendices demonstrate how devoted this game is to its other goal – being quick, easy, streamlined and, most of all, indisputably useful.
When Nobilis came out, it was described more than once as the perfect roleplaying game. A perfect roleplaying game, however, is simply one that succeeds unreservedly in all its goals. A perfect RPG is the perfect tool for creating the stories the author had in mind, for exactly simulating the source material, a book which feels and reads like the archetypal play sessions in this setting has been condensed down into words and paper, so that you can recreate them as effortlessly as possible. In this regard, Buffy is the perfect roleplaying game. It is the television show in paper form. You get the same buzz out of reading this book as you do watching the show, and it makes creating that same buzz at the table seem so incredibly easy that you feel you could play the game in your sleep. In play, all the promises are fulfilled - everything works as it should, the kicks and the jokes fly back and forth and all the effortlessness is retained. The same buzz that leaps off the pages cannot help but also leap off your table-top. There is simply no more perfect tool for making a session of roleplaying feel just like an episode of the show than what is contained between these covers. Not since Pendragon has a pre-existing property been emulated with such genius, passion and flair.
So if you’re a fan, you will not be disappointed. If you’re not a fan, spend your money on the DVDs instead and become a fan, then save up again for the game. And if you’re wavering in the grey area, don’t be put-off by the gloss or the newbie target marketing or the overwhelming preponderance of the merchandise out there now. The show is still a great show, and ideal fodder for gaming, and this book sits up and begs you to make it happen at your table.
It isn’t just a masterpiece; it’s a new high water- mark for design, the pinnacle of what the hobby has become, and, quite possibly, a piece of roleplaying history.
Or to put it another way:
It’s good. It’s very, very good.
Style 5, Substance 5
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