The first supplement for the Buffy The Vampire Slayer RPG is the unsurprising but not unwelcome screen and booklet combo.
The screen itself is very nice. Sturdy card, lots of useful tables on the inside like Combat Maneuvers and Fear Tests, with the outside viewable here, and well printed. There ends my review of the screen. The rest of this review concerns the adventure booklet that comes with it.
(Please note, SPOILERS ahead. Fasten seatbelts.)
The booklet that comes with the screen contains a chapter of advice on running the game and three short "Episode" adventures, intended for a session or two of play each.
The advice is all good. Although largely secondary to the equivalent chapter in the rulebook, the pointers on problems with players and how they may be influenced by out of game issues are excellent advice that a lot of new GMs (and quite a few experienced ones I've played with) would do well to take on board.
The adventures all spin around the concept of the Djinn, the Wishmaster-style evil granter of wishes who first appeared in the adventure contained in the core rulebook. There are notes on removing him if you don't like him. Oddly enough, the suggestions never involve Vengeance Demons, the wish-granters from the show itself.
The first Episode, "When Giants Clash", involves warring vampire gangs lead by a pair of wish-empowered undead with references to The Vampire Lestat in their names. The second, "All A-buzz", concerns a garden-variety Big Bug on the rampage. The third, "The Bricklayer", features a mysterious British occultist coming to town.
"Zombie vampire? Zompire? Well, it was that or Vambi, and I'm not gonna fight anything that sounds that much like a cartoon deer."
"When Giants Clash" is the longest and probably the weakest of the three. Two gangs of vampires fighting each other give the players' characters (PCs) relatively little to do except evacuate innocent bystanders and work out ways to flatten the leaders, who are now more powerful but not smarter than the average vamp due to wishes. Perhaps I'm overly jaded to undead turf battles due to years of playing Vampire: The Masquerade. (Incidentally, you could get a cheap laugh out of Vampire players by using the Revised edition's illustrations for the Brujah and Ventrue for the leaders here.)
It builds from a good premise - that vampires might be less than impressed with their powers compared to those of fiction - but it doesn't explore it in any way the players can interact with. There's one aside about possibly meeting the smarter of the two in public, but it's left to individual Directors to develop and I can see new GMs finding that tricky. Likewise, an example of the extremes of the smart one's power can discovered by the PCs - but there's no way included for them to understand its significance. By comparison, the scenes that are fully mapped out include three pages on a central fight scene, out of fifteen pages for the whole Episode. Another smart aside is treated more thoroughly, going to the human ex of the smarter vampire (from when he was human), but even here, when she gets mixed up in the setpiece battle her role is barely touched upon.
"Oh look, it's a big bug! Yay!"
By comparison, "All A-buzz" seems to be the strongest, despite being a Big Bug adventure. It may well be the best Big Bug adventure I've seen. It's also the most thoroughly helpful Episode to new Directors of the three here.
The Big Bug in question has a consistent MO that isn't too obvious, the solution may involve using a magical spell that was originally designed to lay waste to cities and hoping it doesn't do that anyway, and the adventure includes advice on drafting in a subplot that is directed squarely at the PCs, using the Drawbacks their players took when creating them. This is a very clever device for personalising pre-written adventures.
"Hey! Where's my terrible doom? You promised me terrible doom!"
"The Bricklayer" is structured so that it might work better as a subplot over a few Episodes rather than a stand-alone story. The aforementioned mysterious occultist turns up in town and is mysterious for a few days, possibly a few weeks, before the adventure proper gets moving. One significant flaw in the structure is that if the players are less than favourable in their reactions to him, he avoids them for most of this period and they'll miss about half of the Episode in this way. I would have included more advice on keeping him around at this point. I would also have offered more options for what he's up to, enabling the PCs to be right, or wrong, about him all along, whatever they decide.
Some oddities emerge from having the same writer produce most of three Episodes and an advice chapter in the same book. Most notably, the same idea of a vampire as information source appears in all three adventures (and they're not the same vampires), and in an example of Episode construction in the advice section. Given that this game is at least partially about slaying vampires, this is definitely overuse of this concept. This continuity of ideas but not specifics also appears through the use of the Djinn. It takes part in all three stories, but at the end of the first one it threatens that the PCs "next time, I expect you will beg me to take your souls". And the next time they see it, it makes a cryptic joke and leaves. What happened to the begging to take their souls? If you're going to threaten terrible doom in the first adventure, you should at least refer to it in one of the next two.
Terrible doom aside, the three adventures are generally workable and grounded in good ideas, and "All A-buzz" is full of enough helpful suggestions to be of great use to novice Directors, along with the advice chapter in the booklet. Between that and a nice screen, this is all told a good package for Directors of Buffy games.
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