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For a full discussion of the Buffy RPG upon which this game is based I point readers to the excellent reviews of that game by Dan Davenport and Steve Darlington.
I would also refer readers to Cam Banks’ review of Angel which, at time of writing, is the only other review of Angel. It is an excellent overview of the game and, I’m sure, not coloured by the fact that he got the game for free in order to review it.
Call me weird but I like green people. I do. Besides the Jungian rubbish I think that green people are central to sci-fi and fantasy; their colouring so weird and unnatural that they represent the alien and the exotic and the outsider better than anything else. Forget Camus killing Arabs for no reason… green people are the real strangers.
Therefore, I take a keen interest in how the sci-fi and fantasy community treat green people. Ang Lee treated one green person badly. He turned him into a badly thought out and overbearing Freudian nightmare. We didn’t even get a “Hulk Smash!” for our troubles… and sitting through the film two rows back from a dozen people with Down’s syndrome made for quite substantial troubles in my case. Compare this sad creature to the one singing Lady Marmalade in Vegas while forced by the evil casino owner to help him steal people’s destinies and sell them to the highest bidder, leaving them empty directionless husks doomed to spend their lives playing fruit machines.
Now, of the two green people above, which is cooler?
Come on comic book geeks… Lady Marmalade! The Lornettes! Dancing girls dressed as demons! Aaaah sod you!
I know which I prefer; it’s the green person from Joss Whedon’s spin-off show from his universally successful Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Angel charts the continuing adventures of Angel the ensouled vampire and Buffy’s first love. It is set in Los Angeles and is supposed to be a more grown-up and adult take on the Buffyverse. Instead of geeky teenagers with powers we have hard-boiled detectives, evil lawyers and femme fatales. What’s not to like? I’m guessing that’s what Eden thought.
To say that expectations were high for the Angel RPG would be an understatement. If game shops had opened at midnight on the release date I’m sure a number of gamers would have braved the December cold to get their mitts on this particular beauty. Not only was it the newest game from Eden, a company that saw its popularity and critical successes multiply like bacteria during 2003, but it was a follow-up to the widely adored Buffy RPG AND a license that was pretty damn hot considering the end of the Buffy TV series and the epic nature of Angel’s series 4. I can’t judge whether these expectations have been met but I can try to not be a fan-boy for the time it takes me to write this review, and believe me that’s far more difficult than it is for most RPGs.
Chapter 1 – Angel’s Path.
A third of this chapter is devoted to the traditional newbie-schooling, communicating the basic concepts of RPGing and what makes up a session of Angel, the rest of this chapter is worthy of some comment.
2 games, or 1? We start with a paragraph stressing the hardship of the life of Angel and his fellow do-gooders. This is clearly meant to set the tone for the game and is only partly successful for the most part because it sounds like the speech Buffy gives in season 7 and pretty much matches the tone of Buffy’s series 7 down to the ground. Evil comes and will keep coming… you fight because that’s what you do… you fight the good fight.
Herein lies the problem… are Buffy and Angel so separate and different that they deserve separate games? A box in the first chapter says that Buffy’s about growing up and female empowerment and Angel’s about the choices and problems we face as adults. The two series clearly are about different things but here’s the problem… neither the Buffy RPG, nor the Angel RPG are about the things their respective shows are about. To the extent that we can talk of RPGs being “about” things without lapsing into Forge style jargon, they’re both about emulating a genre. The genre in question is one that stresses that even heroes have home lives, that heroes have friends and psychological issues and they watch TV. The genre that both Angel and Buffy emulate is about fighting evil, having real lives outside of fighting evil and looking and sounding cool when you’re doing it. The difference between the Angel and Buffy TV shows is that they focus on different themes within that genre. As a result, in many ways the Angel and Buffy RPGs are distinctions without a difference. The games are about the exact same thing only Buffy is tooled to facilitate the construction of campaigns that focus on one set of themes and Angel is tooled for campaigns with a different theme.
The result of this problem is that a lot of the material found in Angel is a repeat of the material found in Buffy. Without there ever being a real sense of this being a different game… it’s just Buffy with some rules that weren’t present in Buffy and without some rules that were. How much of a problem this ultimately is depends upon whether you own Buffy and whether you’re willing to pay the asking price for the material you DO get that isn’t present in Buffy. But be warned… you could just as easily run an Angel campaign with Buffy as you could a Buffy campaign with Angel.
I mention this not because I feel it’s a real problem for the game but because it’s a theoretical issue and, given the number of threads on the RPGnet forums about the relationship between these two games, it’s a practical one too.
Campaign ideas in chapter 1
The bulk of chapter one is a discussion of the first three series of Angel. These are substantially longer and more detailed than the summaries in the Buffy RPG and the extra-length (due to the fact that we’re dealing with less series) allows one of the pleasures of this game to manifest itself. One of the pleasures of Buffy as a game line is the thinking Eden put into the basis for campaigns. In the Slayer’s Guide we had a few of these developed for us but throughout the game-line Eden gives us little ideas and suggestions for campaigns or adventures. For each series of Angel, Eden consider important events and propose campaign settings based on places and events glossed over in the series and also alternative settings based upon what would have happened if events in Angel had gone differently. Suggestions include playing one of Daniel Holst’s 17th Century vampire hunters seeking out Angelus or working for a Wesley, still pretending to be Angel after Angel went AWOL following the events with Darla. Not only are these ideas good they’re also beautifully placed in the first chapter so that before you even read about character generation you’ve already got ideas for future campaigns running through your head.
Design philosophy
This is one of Eden’s exceptional characteristics. They do not treat their books as a form of art in themselves but ultimately as very practical things. This design philosophy gives us the light and amusing tone and the excellent advice. Eden understand that role-playing books are entirely instrumental to your creating a game, the book is a midwife to the creative act… it’s not part of the creative act. Compare this to something like Nobilis, what the first edition lacked in practicality of advice it made up for with fiction and themed description. Eden made a design choice and I think it was the right one.
Chapter 2 – Chosen Champions
Unisystem Chargen
Character creation in Unisystem games is interesting. It seems to combine a number of different approaches to character creation but the result is, to my knowledge, unlike anything out there for a game this rules light.
Angel follows Buffy in being ultimately points based. Three different power levels are available, each offering you more or less attribute, skill and quality points with maximums imposed on the number of drawback points you can take to spend elsewhere.
As an aside, I think that the authors of Angel did not get the labels right for the three power levels. In Buffy, one of the pleasures of the three power levels was that they matched up so well with the source material. You had White Hats, you had experienced heroes like Buffy and in the middle you had people like Riley that were a hero without being White Hats or all that experienced. Angel has Investigators, Champions and Veterans. I have no problem with the investigators but I feel that the authors misunderstood the term “Champion” in the series. In the series the term Champion is used exclusively to refer to Angel, there are prophecies about him and he is seen by the Powers That Be as a big player in the war of good against evil. Eden describes champions as anyone who’s a good fighter and isn’t an investigator; Gunn for example. This is a minor quibble but I think that the source material would be better emulated by having Investigator, Hero and Champion as the most powerful character. This is a minor quibble though.
I will not go through the skills or attributes but rest assured that they are the same as in Buffy.
Unisystem is rules light, it is also like Basic Role-playing in that it is an invisible system. It is constructed so as to impinge as little as possible on play. In effect, the aim is to banish rules discussions from the RPG experience by being so simple and straightforward that you understand the rules quickly and need only roll once to act. Indeed, it’s possible to run the game without the GM touching the dice at all. Compare this to games like D20 and Exalted where part of the fun is exploiting the system and understanding the feats and charms well enough to make the right tactical decisions. It is my experience with both kinds of games that the heavier and pervy-er the game, the more deep and textured character creation is. For example, compare D&D with Cthulhu. D&D character-types have clear roles and skills that make them individual, even within each class and type of character there are more rules decisions to make, personalising your character even more. The same is true for Exalted. Cthulhu, however, sees you rolling stats, getting a number of points and distributing them in accordance with the nebulous game concept of profession. Torg is another rules-light game that suffers from a similar problem; the lighter the rules the more simple character creation and the less your character feels like an individualised being and more like a list of skills. This is because, for simplicity’s sake there are little limitations on where you can put your points so the decisions you make in character creation matter less and serve less to create an identity for your character. Who hasn’t played a retired marine turned academic in Cthulhu?
Unisystem completely evades this problem.
Along with the usual strengths and weaknesses found in most RPGs, Unisystem uses packages. Packages are groups of strengths and weaknesses that are clumped together so that you can’t really get one without the other. These packages are the heart of Unisystem character creation, despite being fully integrated in principle, the attribute, skill and quality systems are kept separate from one another. This means that if one wants to buy up one’s mental attributes beyond the initial set of points you have to make decisions about your character’s life and personality. If he’s an intellectual then chances are he’s not as socially skilled as others as a result of having his head buried in a book the whole time. So, if you want a brainy character you’ve got to allow for his being an introvert. This is an example of a rules-light, point based system making character creation decisions meaningful beyond simple point allocation. By buying that package, the player has started to create a living breathing character, something that is simply not the same if it’s just a question of putting a point in intelligence or buying up knowledge instead.
Some packages are more costly and therefore define the character to an even greater extent. In some cases this can mean making decisions about your character’s profession, is he a former watcher with all of that baggage? Did he go through the police academy? Or is he supernatural? The supernatural packages are one of Angel’s selling points and also a problematic area as presented if not in practice.
Angel’s qualities are presented as either mundane or supernatural. Either one is human or a vampire or one is part demon. I find this problematic. For starters, the book states that one is limited to one package. To my mind this is an anti-munchkin device but a pretty clumsy one at that. They argue that it’s silly to be a demon and a trained demon hunter. Clearly this is so that you can’t benefit from multiple packages where they’re not appropriate but there’s no in-game reason for this and in practice isn’t really that much of a problem. My second problem is that, according to the game, if you have supernatural powers then you’re by definition part demon. This is completely non-canonical, the series is full of psychics and freaks with powers who clearly aren’t demons. The reason for this decision must be found in the demon creation rules.
Demon Building
There’s a fine balance to walk when putting together packages for Angel and Buffy. Eden have always stopped short of giving us a system for creating our own packages and this is, in my opinion, a wise decision. If Unisystem games included package construction rules then you might as well not have packages as the temptation to create exactly the type of character you want by simply assigning points would be too great. Packages force you to make decisions about your character, they’re not just shorthand for point distribution. Demons, however, are tricky. Playing a neutral demon is so part of the Angel universe that it would be impossible for Eden to put together an Angel game without allowing you to play demons. However, there are so many kinds of demons that a full list would be impossible, therefore Eden decided to let us build our own type of demon from a list of powers and weaknesses.
About half of these powers have been seen before in Buffy and its supplements. This is perhaps Angel’s biggest let-down. Most of the creative work in the Qualities and Drawbacks was made for Buffy and its supplements. This has the two-fold disadvantage of making the game seem less useful to Buffy owners and making the Qualities seem more generic and less tailored to Angel’s universe. In fact, the only truly unique to Angel Quality is Nanjin, the ability to see without using your eyes.
This is not to say though that the Qualities are dull. They fit with the source material perfectly allowing you to buy demons with special weaknesses, demons that are human or inhuman looking or ones that, like Vampires, have “game faces” and psychic and armoured demons. Apart from the more exotic powers of some demons like soul stealing or wish granting I think that the demon rules will keep most demon fans happy, at least until the relevant supplement comes out.
However, I would be remiss for not saying that Eden could have done much much better with this. There is even one Quality allowing you to buy up Attributes on a 1-to1 point basis. The result of fluff-free Qualities like this mean that the depth of character creation given to human PCs is not extended to demon PCs. For creating a demon, no decisions are required beyond which powers to buy and which points to spend. In terms of design philosophy this is slightly odd… clearly Eden thinks that character creation choices should be meaningful beyond points and skills but the thinking that went into human PC packages is simply not present for demon PC packages.
This is partly because Angel has freaks with just some psychic powers so a psychic demon package would be inappropriate for those characters. So in order to allow plain psychic characters, the freaky powers are included in demon creation. This design tension flows from the desire to allow you to build psychic humans and demons that have psychic powers as one of their defining characteristics. A better way to handle this would have been to build demon packages and keep human powers separate but the result of this would have been that two thirds of the demon powers disappear leaving you with not much to work with. So we see that lack of new material forcing the Angel game into an awkward design and presentation position of choosing between demons that are just lists of powers or the need to create loads of new powers and packages for demon characters. It’s pretty clear which choice Eden made and I don’t think it’s the right one as it means that the demon creation rules aren’t as good as they could have been and the game as written doesn’t actually make sense; many of the “demons” this game allows you to create are freaky humans, not demons. This is a distinction that Eden should have made and followed up on in the writing of this book. Having said that, the rules are not broken or unbalanced and are perfectly workable. They’re just not what they could have or should have been if the design compromises underpinning these rules hadn’t been made.
Archetypes and Major characters
We then move on to archetypes, which are basically examples that players can use to help them come up with a character or to play “straight out of the box”. These are excellent across the board. However, they differ from Buffy’s approach by not so much being genre archetypes as they are models of what kind of characters this game can create and support; Crow-style Undead Champion to Reformed Assassin and Barbarian Queen… these are all well designed and hugely fun.
This chapter concludes with full character sheets for the major characters from the series and some less important ones (like Doyle, the Groosalugg and Kate Lockley) and a series-to-series guide of power levels for the different characters allowing you to know what a series 2 Wesley would be like if you wanted to use him in your game. This complements the first chapter’s campaign settings quite nicely. This is very customer friendly as most RPG licenses tend to see major characters statted out at their most powerful, not only does Angel not do this but the characters are not massively more powerful than a group of experienced PCs would be. This contrasts nicely with the approach exemplified by MERP’s character books where even Merry and Pippin could quite happily take out an entire group of experienced PCs on their own.
Chapter 3 – Helping the Helpless
This chapter contains the bulk of the rules for Angel. We have normal conflict resolution, combat rules for most common actions and the fear mechanics. I will not go into any depth describing these as they have been discussed elsewhere but I will make a few comments.
Give Me More!
While Unisystem is rules light, I had a feeling after Buffy that maybe the descriptions of the rules were a little too light. For example, Buffy does not include rules for healing up in hospital. Angel does not suffer from this problem. This chapter is worth reading even for Buffy players because the descriptions are better written and the explanations clearer. Where familiar ground is covered we are given more useful things almost as a reward for reading through it again. More combat moves, More combat complications, More weapons… More Everything! We even have some nice vehicle rules and some stats for cars from the Angel universe (as well as for Gunn’s truck mounted stake cannon). Though no helicopter gunships… “Angel is not a wargame” apparently.
Some Quibbles
Experienced Buffy players will remember the box that said that Buffy and guns didn’t go particularly well together. This box makes a return appearance in Angel. This is despite Wolfram and Heart routinely using guns, Wesley’s Woo-style theatrics and pump-shotgun use and a number of other instances in the show. Guns DO form a part of the Angel universe so the box’s presence is misleading.
I also noted the rules for the use of a grappling gun, which is nice, but they’re included under movement rules. Admittedly given Angel’s lack of equipment lists it’s not clear where else one could put these rules and there is a listing for them in the appendix but it is a weird choice to give rules for this bit of technology but not for any other.
Chapter 4 – Arcane Approaches
This is perhaps the weakest chapter in the book. On the plus side it’s short at only 8 pages but on the minus side IT’S ONLY 8 PAGES!
Basically this chapter gives us a skeleton version of Buffy’s magic rules followed by two and a half pages of spells from the show. The problem is that while functional these rules are so abstract that they lose many of the source-material emulating qualities of the more complete Buffy rules. We get a description of the different power levels in very abstract terms followed by some indication of how to buy down the power level using rare ingredients and the need for additional casters. This is a missed opportunity.
Angel differs from the Buffy show in that it lacks a witch or warlock as a main character. Eden therefore clearly felt that they were justified in giving us minimal magic rules. This is to miss some of the beauty of Buffy magic. Willow is so powerful because she is a magical natural , she can cast spells with a click of her fingers that take most normal occultists ages to prepare and cast. Buffy’s magic is intensely ritualistic when not performed by Witches and Warlocks. In my view, the ritualistic nature of the Buffy magic system was not adequately explored by Eden until the Magic Box supplement when we got a more detailed set of modifiers for constructing spells. Angel’s lack of a resident mage was an opportunity for Eden to develop the ritualistic magic that’s available to all characters, even non-witches. We could have seen some rules governing research or translation or an expanded system of spell failure mechanics. This would have been an added reason for buying the Angel book but instead we got a minimalist account of the Buffy magic rules. A missed opportunity to explore what demarcates Angel from Buffy.
Chapter 5 – Cabals, Covens and Agencies.
This chapter describes another of Angel’s great selling points; its organisation creation rules. Whereas Buffy was about family and friends, Angel is very much about being an adult and going to work. As a result the characters in Angel work for Angel and for Angel Investigations. In the early series of Angel a lot was made of Cordie trying to find as many paying customers as possible. The most recent series of Angel is about the team trying to live within and control a huge organisation. In short, organisations form one of the pillars of the Angel experience and rules were an absolute necessity.
The rules are excellent and incredibly bold. Apart from Ars Magica, I can’t think of any game that puts as much effort into removing the organisation from the realms of GM fiat and equipment lists. Angel tries to not only allow players to create a wide range of different organisations in which they can be involved at different levels but it tries to give mechanics for the weight an organisation can put behind a person, they simulate this through the concept of clout.
Depending upon the amount of power characters have in an organisation (from leaders/CEO’s to foot soldiers) the players get between 10 and 30 points with which to buy clout. With these organisational points, players can buy different levels of clout, different, different levels of quality of their quarters and different levels of quality of gear.
Clout comes in the form of Criminal, Financial, Governmental and Supernatural. The levels of clout can be added to intelligence rolls to allow the character to use the weight of the organisation to get things done or to influence rolls to try and use the social prestige of the organisation to convince people. Purchasing clout is complicated by the fact that to gain higher levels of certain forms of clout you have requisite minimums in other spheres. Having good clout also allows you to get better quarters and gear.
These rules work very well and allow you to have a lot of fun building organisations. But beyond that there is some confusion.
A few Concerns
The organisational rules allow players to create their own organisations with chosen characteristics and even their own position in the organisation’s hierarchy. The points are up to the players. This is a very bold move as it basically gives the players a huge hand in the structure of your campaign. For example, the problems you choose to set your players will be affected by the type of organisation you had so a cool adventure where the players have to steal something to pay a demon can be bigfooted by the players just using their organisation’s clout. Similarly, I doubt that the players would be very happy to spend time creating an organisation centred in LA only to find that the campaign sees them hopping around outside LA for most of the campaign. These kinds of problems are easily solved by the GM and players having a discussion beforehand about the kind of adventures they’ll be facing but if not handled correctly, these rules could mess up campaigns for GMs more comfortable with traditional social contracts depositing all narrative and creative power with the GM.
These rules are also strangely balanced within themselves in the ways they distribute narrative control. We are frequently reminded that GMs can bend the rules this way or that and there are no organisational advancement rules, these are supposed to be handled entirely by GM fiat. So the principled reviewer must ask himself… why have rules regarding the number of points the players have to create their organisation with? If the choices they made can be overturned by the GM and the future of the organisation is entirely up to the GM, why not just give different options but attach no point values to them so the GM can create what he wants out of a PC organisation?
The thinking behind the organisation rules is excellent but I feel that Eden hesitated in taking their thinking to the logical conclusion. As a result we see a system that partially empowers players but not too much and not in a logical manner. Clearly this is because introducing the kind of narrative control that these organisational rules potentially grant to players is a big step, particularly for a mainstream RPG like Angel. Many GMs might be turned off with the idea of having to fit their campaign around the players’ organisation. So rather than grant narrative control or give no rules for player input Eden come down somewhere in the middle, again hinting at greatness but not quite following through. Thankfully this chapter is good enough to allow either school of GM to easily adapt the rules to their style of campaign but it is still a design compromise that could have been handled better.
Chapter 6 – City of Angel
This chapter deals with notable landmarks from Angel’s LA including Lorne’s much lamented Caritas and the Hyperion hotel as well as some strange choices like the East Hills Teen shelter which featured in one episode of season 2. This section isn’t bad at all but does seem a little short. The numerous underground demon fighting areas and magical shops aren’t mentioned but a shelter is. The amount of space given over to these entries are on the short side too, I imagine that if this game does well then a supplement on Angel’s LA will appear sooner or later but until then these brief descriptions might remind GMs of interesting settings for their games.
The Chapter also includes some generic NPC stats and a few minor non-monstery NPC’s such as David Nabbit and Merl. Again, a touch on the short side but perfectly serviceable.
Chapter 7 – Something Wicked
This chapter deals with all the evil nasties from the series, it’s worth noting that early series of Angel did not follow the Big Bad structure of Buffy so this book lacks the foot soldier/Big Bad dichotomy of Buffy, instead opting for a mixture of monster creation rules, generic low level antagonists and major evil NPC’s. The result’s a little bit confusing but they’re grouped more or less thematically so the presentation isn’t a complete mess.
Monster Creating
The monster creation rules are quite interesting. We start off with some rules about differentiating between different kinds of monsters and the roles they play in the story. This section is very well written and is very inspiring, particularly on the use of monsters as metaphors.
Later in the chapter, we get a stat-less discussion of demonic powers such as empathy and insubstantiality, possession to special attack. These are good descriptions but a bit cheeky considering how little new material there actually is in the demon creation rules in chapter 2. Wait for the supplement then, eh?
Types of Demon
We get examples of Brachen demons, Pyleans and the much under used trans-dimensional demons the Oden Tal (hot demon chicks with flame-throwery powers). All of these are statted for use as PC demon packages, which is a good thing though again it brings the demon creation rules into focus… it’s so much more fun to create a demon of an existing type than it is to just choose a list of powers.
Supernatural Foes
The choice of demony foes is quite strange and again seems to be a bit short. We get the full extended remix of details on vampires as bad guys including discussions of their weaknesses. This takes up almost a third of the chapter and seems remarkably excessive given that vampires aren’t that big a deal in Angel (as adversaries at least) and that besides the types of demons mentioned above you get a brief discussion of ghosts and zombies and a statted Sahjian and Phantom Dennis. The result is a bit of a failure as a proper bestiary. A short discussion of vampires coupled with a few extra demon types would have made this chapter seem far more useful and substantial than it is.
Hoomans
Humans and freaks get treated together separately from demons, again reminding us of the strangeness of the character creation rules that simply don’t allow for the existence of freaks as a separate category. We get two NPC freaks, one of which with powers not mentioned anywhere else in the book, Faith and Holtz. Not particularly useful or interesting.
Wolfram and Hart
This isn’t a bad section at all… we get Lindsey and Lila statted as well as generic commandos and lawyers and rentacops and one senior partner. This all holds on a little more than a couple of pages and again seems to be rather insubstantial given that it’s the show’s real Big Bad and has been involved in everything Angel has touched since he arrived in LA.
This chapter is weak but only because of the way the book is edited. Information that would have served well in this section is included in the character and organisation creation rules and discussions of Angel’s LA. The result is that there seems to be almost nothing in this chapter, despite Angel actually giving you more than enough to staff your campaign with evildoers without ever needing to buy a supplement. Indeed, I think the book might have been improved had this chapter been eliminated and the relevant information redistributed across to other chapters. This would have resulted in more demon packages in the character creation system and a more complete guide to Angel’s LA. This is due, in part, to the differences between protagonists and antagonists being more pronounced in Buffy than in Angel and Angel inheriting Buffy’s editorial structure. A pity.
Chapter 8 – Episodes, Seasons and Drama.
Like Buffy, Angel includes lots and lots of excellent GM advice from the abstract to the particular. This chapter not only gives out the same calibre of advice as Buffy but follows its sister game in giving loads and loads of campaign ideas. Indeed, a look around the existing Buffy campaign websites shows that the Buffy and Angel format of heroes and followers works extremely well and is incredibly flexible both in terms of setting, genre tropes and theme of campaign. If there were ever any doubt in your mind as to the greatness of this game and the genius of Joss Whedon then a glance at this chapter should instantly dissipate them. One page gives us good advice on running subplots (an element to plot construction often overlooked in RPGs but vital to Buffy and Angel), next we’re being told about how to write a series premiere and how to deal with the often rocky first adventure of a new campaign.
Angel’s strange editing style pops up again by including details on how to design villains and a table telling us what the different levels of monster stats mean. Clearly, Angel’s authors were intent on butchering Chapter 7 as the information should really go there. Apart from that, this chapter is superb and I think most GMs would benefit from reading it.
Chapter 9 – Blood Brothers, Part One.
I’m not a fan of pre-written adventures. I think they take as long to prepare as I take to write an adventure and they usually don’t fit the group as well as something written for them. I also confess to not being a fan of the popular campaign described in the Buffy books, though a number of adventures were fun and imaginative. From what I can see Blood Brothers doesn’t follow this model.
I have a problem with this being the first of a two-part adventure. Traditionally the included adventure serves as an example of what kind of adventure to run for the game, Blood Brothers fails in this respect in two ways. Firstly, the Angel screen has yet to come out so Blood Brothers simply cannot serve as an introductory adventure for all groups playing without the GM’s screen. Indeed, given the closeness of Buffy and Angel it’s not clear that most Buffy players would want the angel screen… except to get the second half of this adventure. I actually think that this is quite unfair. Secondly, This adventure fails to follow much of the GM advice given in this book, there are no suggested subplots, the characters are paper thin, the plot is very linear in an adventure game kind of way (go there to unlock that event) and nothing much happens. I actually doubt that as written this adventure could fill anything more than a short 4 hour session without serious work by the GM.
Another serious problem I have with this adventure is the style in which it is written. A sizeable chunk of the text is given over to tables telling you exactly what kinds of information players are to be given for certain levels of roll. This is completely out of keeping with the free-wheeling and fun ethos of the Buffy and Angel games and is of little actual use… surely GMs can work this kind of stuff out for themselves? The fact that these tables are included while the second half of the adventure is not just serves to irritate more.
The adventure also starts with a fight. I have no real problem with this in theory and I’m reminded of the old WEG Star Wars games that always started with reading a script and then a fight. The problem is that there’s no script here, in fact the author then goes on to tell you how to back up the adventure. Again, this means that there is no way that this adventure could be the first adventure people play as it sets up absolutely nothing… in fact the characters fight and then basically go off to research why they were fighting. The author mentions that this sometimes happens in Angel but I must admit not remembering any episode where the episode starts with a fight and then the characters go and research information relevant to the rest of the adventure and which presumably lead them to the fight in the first place.
So I’m not a fan of the adventure… If I played this adventure as a player I’d be disappointed. If I ran this adventure as a GM I’d need to do quite a bit of work on it and if I paid money expecting something on the same level as sweeps week in the Buffy book I’d be pretty annoyed. Having said that, I’ve not seen the rest of the campaign and maybe it will improve but this adventure isn’t really much cop.
Appendix – Lingo Of…
Like the Buffy book, the Angel book includes a study of the linguistic patterns that make up the Angel experience. These are a good collection of quotes but they lack the analytical accuracy of the Buffy quotes. Presumably this is because the way people speak in Angel is no different to the way people speak in Buffy and it would have seemed a jip if Angel didn’t get a similar treatment without Eden repeating themselves. I think this was a mistake, they could have used the same categories as Buffy but used examples from Angel thereby helping out people who play Angel and Buffy. Good quotes but you don’t get any insights into the TV programme and Joss’s writing style from reading this collection. Another pity.
Visually…
This is a beautiful book, the garish colours of Buffy are gone as is the shiny finish of the outside cover. Instead we have a matte black and dark colour cover with Angel in foreground and the others in blue background above the LA skyline. Very very nice.
The inside follows the colour scheme of the TV show quite well. If you watch the TV show you’ll notice a tendency towards dressing the men in brightly coloured shirts all of a sudden. The borders of Angel are tastefully done in blues to greens to yellows to reds by chapter.
The artwork inside is largely video captures which are mostly well done and not blurry and art work. The art work is pretty good but mostly concentrated on the excellent archetypes.
Well… when I say excellent I exclude the Barrio Defender because he’s wearing silly khaki shorts with black shoes (how tasteless is that?) and a red hanky in his pocket… though I’m not sure if that means that he’s in a gang or that he’s looking for action. It’s still quite good but just struck me as slightly strange and less evocative than the others.
The paper is high quality and glossy (I’m not personally a fan of glossy paper as I like to take notes in my rulebooks but it does look better) and the cover is well attached with tasteful interior.
Overall an excellent and beautiful book. 5/5
Overall…
I don’t think this book should have been an individual game. I think it would have been much better served by a similarly sized fatsplat for the Buffy game as Angel is basically nothing more than an extended campaign setting for Buffy. This is true of the series and it’s true of the Angel game that fails to innovate in a way that would help us think of it as anything more than a rules supplement for Buffy with a load of rules from Buffy included.
The need to include basic Unisystem rules means that many of the areas where Angel does differ from Buffy and where a deeper treatment would have been advantageous are cut short for what one must believe are reasons of space.
The result is that there is not that much new material here (less than in your average Buffy supplement) and the new material that does exist sometimes seems to be compressed and unfinished either because of space or because of a desire to sell us supplements later on. This game is not perfect in and of itself and it’s problematic for any Buffy player, a book of similar length with deeper demon creation rules, a clearer set of organisational rules and a better description of LA would have served both Buffy and Angel fans better.
Having said that, my problems with this game are partly due to the ridiculously high standards Eden has set themselves with their Buffy and other games. If this game had been put out by any other company I would have been able to gloss over some of these strange design choices and many of the mistakes would have been more acceptable. As a result of this I think it’s normal to grade on a curve… a good but not exceptional Eden book is still a damn good RPG when weighed against the majority of other RPGs and I did write this review with the hype and expectation in mind so I feel perfectly justified in giving this game a 4/5 because it has problems but this is still a damn good game.
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