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Introduction

The name's Davenport. I review games.

So the other day, that Summers dame was back in my office. Said the Eden boys wanted me to review a new Buffy book: the Slayer's Handbook.

"Now why," I says to her, "would anyone wanna read a book fulla musty rules written by a buncha tweed-wearin' Limey codgers?"

"First of all," she says, "they aren't all codgers. Some of them are just a little… non-youngish.

"And secondly, the Slayer's Handbook isn't the Slayer's Handbook. I mean, it is, but it's not the old one written by the cod-… by the Watchers. That's just what the sourcebook's called. Because it has info for playing Slayers."

"So let me get this straight. The Magic Box wasn't about the Magic Box. The Slayer's Handbook isn't about the Slayer's Handbook. What's Welcome to Sunnydale gonna be about? Tulsa?"

"Cute," she says.

"Okay, fine," I says. "It's a Slayer sourcebook. So s'pose there's no Slayer in my game? Why'd I want this book?"

"Oh, good question!" she says. "Because, you know, all sourcebooks are written with you in mind."

"Cute," I says.

"But seriously," she says, "it's got more than just Slayer-y stuff in it. There're new settings, weapons, characters... It's kinda like a big Buffy buffet!" She paused for a sec. "Okay, bad choice of visual..."

"So not only is it not the Slayer's Handbook," I says, "it's not even really a handbook about Slayers?"

She sighs real big. "Look, do you wanna review it or not?"

"I'm thinkin' about it."

"It's got pulp stuff..."

"Gimme."

Content


Chapter One: The Slayer's World

First off, the book explains that the Slayer's Handbook is not the Slayer's Handbook – that is, not the Slayer's Handbook within the Buffyverse, the book of Slaying tips and Watcher propaganda.

After going on to explain what the book is – which your humble reviewer shall relate shortly – the chapter takes an in-depth look at the various aspects of a Slayer's (likely short) life: the early years, becoming the Slayer, training, the nature of the job, the "real" Slayer's Handbook, Cruciamentum (the 18th birthday no-powers do-or-die Slayer test), and death. Each topic includes a "Motivation" section to help players portray Slayers and a "Drama" section giving GMs story ideas to challenge them.

If you've ever had a question about Slayers, chances are good you'll find the answer here – along with some intriguing ideas that may never have occurred to you. For example, who has it better: Clueless Slayers (who become Chosen out of the blue, like Buffy) or former Slayers-in-Training (identified and trained pre-Slayerhood, like Kendra)? What must life be like for Slayers-in-Training who are never Chosen, their childhoods wasted on fruitless training? If these "non-Chosen" girls become Watchers, what will their relationships be like with their assigned Slayers? And suppose a given Slayer simply refuses to slay? Well, a new one will be Chosen if she dies… and the Watchers do have those anti-rogue-Slayer "wet works" teams…

From the Slayer's lot in life, the chapter moves on to brief discussions of past Slayers mentioned in the series, however offhandedly. The section includes quick-stats for the First Slayer (a.k.a. the Primitive) – along with rules for invoking her, and why that might not be such a hot idea – the Boxer Rebellion Slayer, and Nikki, the bad stake-totin' mama of the Seventies. Wrapping up the chapter in the present, Slayers Kendra and Faith get both detailed histories and full character sheets.

Playtest: Ever wonder if the First Slayer was really tough enough to have routed the demons and vampires overrunning the ancient world? Well, I put her up against two PC Slayers and a PC psychic in combat. The Primitive proceeded to beat the living crap out of one Slayer while being only slightly inconvenienced by the other and practically ignoring the efforts of the psychic. And that was with me going easy on them, never using her Drama Points offensively. If the situation hadn't had a built-in time limit, I have little doubt that the Primitive would have killed the lot of them. The lesson: Do not f*ck with the First Slayer.

Chapter Two: Heroes 'R Us

When it comes right down to it, the Slayer's Handbook isn't so much of a Slayer sourcebook as it is a "More Stuff!!" sourcebook. And boy, does this chapter have more stuff.

For starters, it offers seven new Qualities and one new Drawback:

• Cop/Ex-Cop
• Criminal
• Mental Problems (Phobia)
• Nosy Reporter
• Occult Investigator
• Slayer-in-Training
• Totem Warrior

The Cop/Ex-Cop, Criminal, Nosy Reporter, and Occult Investigator are career package deals consisting of Qualities, Drawbacks, skill and attribute bonuses, and perks – a concept about which I'm somewhat dubious. To my mind, a Quality should describe what the character is (such as Vampire or Robot) rather than what he does (such as Criminal or Nosy Reporter). I just don't see the value of making packages like this as opposed to simply buying the relevant abilities separately. These career package Qualities may not cause any real harm, but they do set up an awkward precedent – if you want to play a dentist, for example, do you need a Dentist Quality?

Now, the Slayer-in-Training Quality I like, despite the fact that it borders on the kind of career package I just slammed. In particular, I like the option to stack it with the full-blown Slayer Quality to represent a pre-trained Slayer like Kendra.

And Totem Warrior? I'll get to that one in just a bit here…

After introducing brief but handy rules for cooperative efforts and for fast draws, the chapter moves on to new weapons and equipment.

And allow me to say, "Wow." This is one of those book sections that really made me geek out.

It's nice enough that you've got your historical weapons, from blunderbusses to six-guns to Tommy guns. And sure, it's always nice to have flamethrowers – both of the military and improvised hairspray varieties. And what horror game is complete without chainsaws?

But then I see Star Trek tech. And cyberwear. And pulp gadgets.

And lo, there was much geeking on my part.

Is it an exhaustive list? No… but it sure is a nice sampler, covering basics like ray guns, tri-corders, cyberlimbs, and datajacks, as well as Buffy-specific items like skinsuits (for cybervamps to wear in broad daylight), artificial suns, and vampire-detection goggles.

Archetypes

The book does an almost even split on the new archetypes between Slayers and non-Slayers, with most of the latter showcasing the new Qualities from this chapter:

• Slayers:
• Former Runaway (Hero)
• Reluctant Slayer (Hero)
• Dark Slayer (Hero)
• Slayer Heiress (Hero)
• Slayer-in-Training (Hero)
• Paranormal Expert (White Hat)
• Intrepid Web Journalist (Hero)
• Adventurous Teacher (White Hat)
• Slayer Poseur (White Hat)
• Night Shift Cop (Hero)
• Redemption-Seeking Criminal (Hero)

To my way of thinking, a PC archetype should utilize a concept general enough to appeal to a broad range of players – a "golden retriever," to use the term from my Book of Archetypes review – yet unique enough to avoid blandness. These examples fit my criteria quite nicely.

The Reluctant Slayer looks like an interesting challenge to run: a Slayer without the fear-defying Nerves of Steel Quality. (Okay, so that's a tweak not supported elsewhere in the rules, but it still looks like fun.) The Dark Slayer is appropriately creepy – imagine Faith, but with more outright sadism. And I can easily envision the Slayer Heiress as the focal point for a group, hiring the other PCs to be her support crew, and perhaps building a Slayercave under her mansion…

As for the non-Slayers, I like the concept behind the Paranormal Expert: an occultist dedicated to destroying everything supernatural, allying with freaks like the Slayer only as a matter of temporary convenience. And there's some classic episodes waiting to be told about the Slayer Poseur, a girl convinced that she can be whatever she wants to be in life... even a Slayer.

Chapter Three: It's a Different World

As the title implies, this chapter suggests ways to move your Buffy game beyond the default Sunnydale setting. It begins with some invaluable setting design notes, including how to incorporate those seemingly minor details that really bring a location to life: the places to have a good time, the colorful "normal" population, the important dates from holidays to inventory time, and so on. It's great advice for any game, really, and can benefit even experienced GMs with its thoroughness.

Following these basics, the chapter offers three general types of nonstandard settings – changes of location, era, or events in the series – with 2-3 examples of each:

• Change of Venue
• Slayer on Tour: The Slayer and the Scoobies go globe trotting, perhaps as members of a rock group.
• Hellmouth Home Delivery: The Hellmouth in a different city.
• Time and Time Again
• Getting Really Medieval: a.k.a. Buffy: the Dark Ages.
• Pulp Slayage: The Slayer explores lost civilizations, encounters weird science, and battles vampiric gangsters and Nazi occultists!
• Vampires and Mirrorshades: As if cyberpunk weren't a dark enough future, throw in vampires and demons.
• What Might Have Been
• White Hat's Last Stand: Playing in the grim alternate Master-controlled Sunnydale created by Anya's granting of Cordy's ill-conceived wish.
• Angelus Triumphant: What if Angel had won in Season Two?
• Fear Itself: What if Riley had made the existence of the supernatural public, resulting in a government crackdown?

Mind you, as cool as some of these ideas are, they're merely setting concepts, not fleshed out settings. For the latter, I direct your attention to…

I never really expected alternate Buffy settings to appeal to me. Maybe I've just seen one too many fanboys take his system of choice from one setting and apply it to another in a misguided effort to show that the system can do "anything" – frequently with results to the contrary.

Well, damned if this trio of settings hasn't made me painfully eager to run all three of them. I mean, they really beg to be played – not only because the concepts are solid, but also because they provide enough detail to form the basis of multiple "seasons". Each includes the history of the setting, stats for multiple friendly and hostile NPCs and monsters – including more than one Big Bad candidate in some cases – and two new setting-specific archetypes. In fact, there's enough goodness here to make the chapter worth your while even if you don't plan on using the settings whole cloth.

Lair of the Wendigo

This setting moves the Slayer and company deep into the woodsy Great Northwestern territory of Twin Peaks, supplementing the usual vampires with (as the name suggests) human-possessing wendigos, sorcerous ecoterrorists, and a really nasty Big Bad demon bear.

Most notably from a general-use standpoint, the chapter fully details the Totem Warrior Quality introduced in Chapter Two. This gives a human some of the abilities of a particular totem animal without the animal shape – essentially, a package of variably distributed attribute bonuses, natural fighting ability, one enhanced sense, and one thematic perk (e.g., Owl Totem Warriors can see in the dark). The end result is a character reasonably capable of filling the Slayer niche in a Slayer-less game – or, at least, giving the guys another nice non-Slayer ass-kicker option. And as a nice bonus, the "animal hero" concept lends itself well to teams of heroes, each one with his or her own specialty: the Bear strongman, the Puma martial artist, the Owl ninja/spy, etc.

Playtest: I've been playing a Bear Totem Warrior in a friend's game for a while now. In combat, I'd say he's easily a match for a Slayer, the main drawback being his lack of the Slayer's rapid healing. I do think that the standard Enhanced Senses Quality is inadequate to simulate animal senses, though, since it doesn't really allow for actions like tracking by scent any more than does a high Perception/Notice combo. I hadn't wanted my Bear guy to be all that generally perceptive, but to give him a decent chance of bearish tracking, I had to bump up his Notice. Otherwise, he'd have just been an unremarkably perceptive guy with a slightly above-average sense of smell.

The section includes two setting-specific archetypes: a rebellious Puma Totem Warrior (Hero) and an eager Wannabe Shaman (White Hat).

Stakes and Six-Shooters

For this setting, it would have been so very easy to just drop a Slayer into a pile of dusty clichés. And I'm so very happy that's not what happened. Instead, this is a setting every bit as vibrant and original as the other two in the chapter. (Or as Sunnydale itself, for that matter.)

It's Buffy meets Deadlands in the delightful town of Apocalypse, Texas, circa the Wild West. Here, cowpoke Scoobies face vampiric "soiled doves," Lovecraftian snakemen (complete with arcane technology and herbalism), and a True Demon hidden in a fiendishly thematic form. Again, the place is full of colorful characters with several seasons' worth of their own agendas.

Included are a slightly campy Slayer Gunslinger (Hero) and truly scary Victorian Watcher (Hero), complete with kukri knife.

Hellworld

Another "What If?" setting – in this case, what if Buffy hadn't closed Glory's portal, allowing multiple demon dimensions to come crashing into our world?

The apocalyptic result is Buffy by way of The Road Warrior. The action focuses on an enclave of desperate human survivors defended by a witch-powered magic barrier and a cadre of hardcore demon-fighting rangers, the latter led by a horribly scarred and deeply bitter Alexander "Call Me Xander and Die" Harris. The setting offers no real Big Bad beyond the setting itself, but that's more than adequate. I direct your attention to the ravenous high-speed bus-sized caterpillar demons terrorizing the wastes, for example.

Given the sheer deadliness of the setting, both archetypes are Experienced Heroes: the hard-driving, sword-swinging Road Warrior and the apocalyptically hardcore Grim Slayer. Like the setting itself, both beg to be played. (My one regret about the setting is the lack of stats for the outrageously huge and spiky Heavy Metal-style stake launcher the Grim Slayer's toting in her portrait.)

As this adventure works best if even the premise blindsides the players, I'm putting the whole thing in spoiler test. Highlight below to read:

In this continuation of the Djinn saga begun in the core rulebook, a male White Hat ( PC or NPC) accepts a mysterious dream-offer of power to save the Slayer, and awakes with the power of the Slayer himself! Unfortunately, just as his powers manifest, the true Slayer's powers start to flake out at particularly inopportune times. All this, while the group battles a demon cult trying to summon their uber-powerful master. (So what else is new?)

As you might expect, the Djinn is behind this. The White Hat's "wish" didn't actually make him a Slayer, despite what the bogus Watcher who shows up tells him – rather, he's draining away the real Slayer's life force. And that won't stop until one of them is dead.

Playtest: The "dream-wish" concept bugged my players right from the start – could an offer made and accepted in a dream really be a valid wish to the Djinn? (And the players immediately suspected that it was a Djinn-wish, by the way.) "Entrapment" was the word that kept coming up. And even if such a dirty trick could work, why, my players wanted to know, couldn't the Djinn snare all of Sunnydale overnight in the same manner? I had no explanation. Thankfully, they didn't press the issue. As for that demon cult, their ceremony requires a sacrifice on at least two out of three consecutive nights in a place where dead bodies have been stored – the longer, the better. Even eliminating the modern cemeteries and morgues, that leaves quite a few suspects – and, as a result, quite a bit of railroading to keep the plot on track. The PCs will encounter the demons on the first night, and they will fail to find them on the second night. I fudged some dice rolls in the latter case to make it look like some luck was involved, but I still didn't feel great about it. That part was just somewhat annoying. But on the last night, the demons choose the Hellmouth. Maybe I missed something, but I don't recall the Hellmouth, bad as it is, being a storage place for corpses. And even if it is, the adventure doesn't suggest how to make sure the PCs aren't off patrolling ancient burial grounds rather than staking out the high school. I had to throw in an NPC to redirect them and to explain away the discrepancy. (Speaking of those demon cultists, they're tough. Really tough. Ordinarily I wouldn't have a problem with that; however, from a dramatic standpoint, I wanted the newly christened male Slayer to really kick ass in his first outing. But faced with such powerful foes, he didn't so much kick ass as hold his own better than usual – not exactly the sort of spectacular debut I had in mind. That being the case, I would suggest pitting the male Slayer against some mook vampires or something for his first Slayer-powered fight.) The issue of the fake Slayer presents a similar combination of ham-fisted railroading and problematic clues. For example, right after the PCs in my group discovered the Slayer's affliction, nothing was stopping them from finding and using the spell capable of locating its source. The spell takes an hour. If I'd left it at that, the spell would have led them right to the fake Watcher before he'd even had time to introduce himself to the fake Slayer. Thankfully, I realized this soon enough to increase the preparation time from an hour to a day. And why, by the way, is the fake Watcher the source of the curse, anyway? Why would the Djinn need to go through a surrogate to grant this particular wish? That show of weakness seems particularly strange, given the Djinn's power in this adventure to summarily negate any successful use of either of the curse's two magical cures, thereby forcing the fake Slayer's climactic choice between his own life and the real Slayer's. (And one of those cures just happens to involve the blood of a True Demon – kinda like the one that demon cult's trying to summon. This little convenience prompted some eye rolling from the group.) Under any circumstances, this sort of negation of the PCs' efforts is a recipe for player resentment. Here, though, if the fake Slayer is an NPC, this railroading takes a key part of the climax out of the PCs' hands – never a good thing. For this reason, I strongly recommend using a PC for the fake Slayer if at all possible. However, I also recommend letting the player of the candidate for temporary Slayerhood choose whether or not to accept the role, letting him know in at least general, non-spoiler terms that some pretty high stakes will be involved. After all, if the character is the noble sort, he may well end up sacrificing himself. (Now, in my case, the White Hat in question had stored up so many Drama Points that permanent death wasn't so much of a concern. And, as it turned out, a little CPR kept him alive anyway. Still, I was glad that I'd asked first.) One other note regarding the climax: the True Demon ends up being awfully wimpy. It's not fully manifested when the PCs encounter it, so they only have to keep its grasping tentacles from dragging the intended victim through the portal to the demon's dimension. And those tentacles lop off really easily. In fact, the demon cultists on hand for the ceremony proved to be a bigger threat. The main danger from the tentacles is that they just keep coming, and will continue to do so for eight rounds, at which time the portal will slam shut. I got bored with them after about four rounds, though, and had the portal shut early. All of this might make it sound as though I hated the adventure. Far from it. Actually, it went rather well on balance. The players certainly seemed to enjoy it, and the finale turned out just as dramatically as I'd hoped. I just felt bad about the railroading it required and annoyed at having to hastily paper over the flaws before the players noticed them. But I definitely give the adventure credit for having the guts to present a very Buffy-like time for self-sacrifice.

The appendix contains two sections. The larger of the two presents an insightful look at all of the major characters in the series, discussing key aspects of their personalities with an appropriate quote for each aspect. This comes in handy if your players are playing these characters – especially if they're unfamiliar with the show. And the second simply consists of a series of tables compiling the new Qualities, Drawbacks, Maneuvers, and equipment with those from the original book. I always appreciate anything that reduces flipping through multiple books.

Style

Everything I said regarding the Buffy core rulebook also applies here, with one exception: the quick-stat character portraits are far superior in both quality and in compatibility with the remainder of the art. I particularly like the sepia tone portraits in the "Stakes and Six-Shooters" section.

Conclusion

Out of all similar books in my gaming experience, this may well be the ultimate supplement. Why? Because it's not an extension of the core rulebook – it's a supplement in the truest sense of the word. It contains nothing you need, but lots of things you might want. As such, I can't really call it a "must-buy". However, this is one seriously loaded grab bag of Buffy goodness, and fans of the game owe it to themselves to at least take a peek inside.