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Game Quote
“Blood Games is about courage, self sacrifice, and desperate heroism with no hope of reward.”
Summary
Blood Games is a game in which the player-characters hunt evil beasties. Some of the slayer-types are regular Joes, and some are magically-enhanced regular Joes. So the group can tweak the power level to suit what they like. The rules are mostly pretty crunchy, and the background’s quite a different take on the horror genre. I’d love to play it, but if I had to GM it, I’d try some other rules. FATE would work brilliantly.
My Biases
I’m a game designer, which makes me more critical of other game designers than a regular customer would be. I like writing styles which are simple and unpretentious and easy to read. I’m very much in favour of small-press pdf publishing in general. I think that it allows some unusual ideas to get out there which might otherwise never see the light of day.
I’ve known one of the authours, Clash Bowley, for a little while online. We get along well, and may do some projects together in the future. But nothing yet.
Style and Substance ratings are daft, which is why everything I review gets three (average). That means “no rating” rather than “average”. There’s no absolute scale for how good a game is. So long as it’s readable, it’s just a matter of whether the game helps you or stops you from doing what you want to do in a game session.
Presentation of the book
Blood Games is a pdf product, and has a zipped size of about 7Mb, unzipped about 10Mb. That makes it pretty chunky for a pdf. It took me about 25 minutes to download. But then, it takes longer than that for me to get to the FLGS. The main text is a simple readable Times New Roman font, but the titles and contents are all in some kind of celtic font. This is attractive, but difficult to read, especially in the contents pages.
It has 18 illustrations over its 182 pages, not including the cover art. This is a little thin on the art. All the art is standard rpg stuff. Well-drawn, with a slightly “graphic novel” feel. The interior art is all black and white or greyscale. The art looks good overall. It decorates the text, it doesn’t illustrate it – what’s happening in the text doesn’t come up in the pictures that much.
As with other Flying Mice products, probably half of the book is character creation information, careers and skill descriptions and so on. None of these are illustrated. So there’s a big chunk in the middle of the book which is just text, though setting some of the information in boxes breaks up the tedium a bit.
Viewing and Printing
This book will suck up about two-thirds the ink in the average gamer’s cruddy inkjet printer. At 182 pages, it’ll also cost a fair bit to print it all out at the store.
The contents page is ridiculously long – 8 pages, as long as some other entire pdfs. However, each entry in the contents and the index is hyperlinked, so you can click on it and get to that spot in the book. That’s very convenient for viewing on computer.
It’s pretty obvious they don’t expect anyone to print this thing out. It’d cost a lot, and wouldn’t look as good as it does on the monitor. The problems with viewing this on a monitor are, of course, its length, and the hard-to-read title fonts. And so, this pdf has not solved the almost-universal problem of pdfs, that they try to look good and readable in both print and screen form, and fail at both. Overall, though, it does a better-than-average job at being readable on a monitor.
There’s a print version available, though.
Flavour Fiction
Flavour fiction, from “a novel by El Zambo” (whoever he is – I think I might have had a 7th Sea character called “El Zambo” once) takes up a total of one-sixth the book. The fiction illustrates the text better than the art does, giving you a feel for what the game world’s like. It reads like a roleplaying game log, not like a novel (maybe it is one, El Zambo's listed as a playtester).
The Setting
The setting is one in which humans face off against the Big Bad. The story of the gameworld is told from the perspective of the regular humans. The introduction tells us that the evil beasties were burning around murdering and eating us all back in cave man days. Then a god-type guy showed up, taught us agriculture, brewing, baking, arse-kicking and other useful skills. We humans kicked arse, and this was the “Golden Age.” Then along came nasty Science and buggered it all up for us.
Science killed off magic, because magic requires belief, and science eroded belief. This is an old theme in stories of the late twentieth century, present most famously (for gamers) in Mage: the Ascension. This dissolving of magic Blood Games calls “the Nullility”. Trying saying that with a mouthful of cheetos! So, since magic can be used for evil as well as good (for the evil beasties as well as against them), the demons decided to possess some people are create the Great War, the Holocaust, all that stuff. This display of the evil that technology could do would erode faith in technology, and turn people back to magic.
“There is no great conspiracy.” (page 15)
Well, I was disappointed by that! But that’s the setting of the game. There’s no great over-arching organisation fighting back the Big Bad. There’s just little isolated desperate groups – of player-characters. “Us against the world, boys and girls!” There are a few small organisations, though.
Character Creation
Well, let’s face it, every roleplaying game since Gary Gygax said, "I'm not dead! I was only wounded!" to his little brother has offered some variant on the four basic character types: Magic-User, Fighter, Cleric, Thief. Blood Games ain’t no different.
There’s the Hunter. They’re the magically-boosted fighter. There’s the Templar – another fighter, they’re your basic D&D Paladin. “Turn Undead.” There’s the Witch – duh, Magic-User. There’s the Cambion – that’s a half-vampire, your multi-classed Magic-User. There’s Normal Humans. Well, they have to be sneaky Thieves, or they get squished. And then there’s the Turned-Vampire. That’s for all those V:tM players who used to like saying, “sure, he exists by drinking the blood of the living. But he feels bad about it, man. He, like, whacks other vamps and stuff. Yeah.” Thank you, David Boreanaz.
There’s other types of characters, too. More below. Every character type except the Normal Human has got the K3w1 Pw0rz. There are no character levels, just skill levels.
An interesting aspect of character creation in this game, as in other Flying Mice games, is that there’s no real distinction made between character creation, and character advancement. “ Adventures typically define a year in your character's life, even if they only take a few weeks to complete. For the balance of the year, your character should be doing whatever characters do in their boring hum-drum lives. At the end of the adventure, your character should age another year on the worksheet.” (page 22) So there’s no difference between a character that gets created at age 10, advanced to age 20 with no adventures, and a character that gets created at age 10, has an adventure at 15, and is then advanced to age 20. The difference is a roleplaying one – the adventure might make them change careers.
Attributes are much the usual stuff: Strength, Co-ordination, Agility, Endurance, and Charisma; all from 2-12. IQ makes it in there, and is an actual IQ score of 70 (Forrest Gump) to 140 (Stephen Hawking). The there’s PSI. That’s for your K3w1 Pw0rz attribute. Money’s in there, too. You can do these all randomly, or buy them with points, as the group decides. Points give you slightly above-average in everything overall.
That brings you up to age 10. After that, you go through Middle School, High School, and then on either to College or some career. It’s all done in one-year blocks. These stages slowly boost your stats and abilities. Want to go on to 100 years old? Every three years after 34, you start losing from your attributes. However, you never lose skills. If you were a champion football player at 16, you’ll still be one at 34. I guess all Blood Games characters have a great memory, or practice every day or something.
After this, there’s a whole swag of careers, with listed skills and attributes that’ll be improved by each. Then, descriptions of those skills. This area makes up the single biggest block of the book.
There’s no advantages or disadvantages, virtues and flaws, or anything like that. Just attributes, and careers that give you skills.
There’s none of the usual suggestions of writing up a character background, philosophy, nature, demeanour, or any of that stuff. You get a bunch of numbers and make a story out of that if you want to – you don’t make a story, and then get numbers out of that.
K3w1 Pw0rz!
Hunters are the fighters, remember? So they need good attributes. Hunters are made (by magic), not born, and the making gives them the attribute boost they need. They get Dash, which is the Wire-Fu power. Ba-doing. They also have Luck. It’s the “I’d like to save my arse now, please, Mr GM, sir,” factor. Buffy on wires.
The Cambion is the half-Vampire. Some mean old Witch came along and gave them the blood lust. Most of them have “seen the Light” as the game puts it, and decided to hunt out their half-brothers and cousins amongst the evil beasties of the world. Cambions have an Angst mechanic like our old friend the World of Darkness. Any time they smell blood, they get hungry, and might go nuts. If they fail to resist, they can give up one of their K3w1 Pw0rz in exchange for another chance. So they sway back and forth between being more human (less powers) and more beastie. Keep your eyes on these bastards.
The Witch is the typical Magic-User. Zappy zap, die if exposed to a strong breeze in combat. They have a moral and magical code – what goes around, comes around, three-fold. They use their Witchcraft skill in combination with their schtick, their wand or crystal ball or nasty dagger or the like. Witches use Incantations, Charms, and Divinations. Incantations are done by calling on spirits, with lots of roleplaying, and they funky up your game numbers, like healing rate. Charms pretty much just act as specific Incantations in some object. Divination is your basic “scrying”, seeing things distant to you. Witches also get to change Normal Humans into Hunters.
The Esotericist is, well, it’s Giles from Buffy. They potter about in a library, and cast magic – but only with the use of their books. There’s no mention of tweed, though, which is pretty disappointing.
And so on. There’s K3w1 Pw0rz galore in this game. And they’re not formulaic. Many games have a bunch of magical effects, and being one or the other character type just means you’re better or worse at this or that type of magical effect. But in Blood Games, each character type’s magic is unique. There’s little or no overlap. If you like creating the Jack-of-all-trades character in games, you’ll be in trouble here.
Confronting the Big Bad
The first confrontation with the Big Bad is psychological. The game says the average human’s got to overcome their disbelief at the weirdness they just saw. Usually, they’ll just rationalise it away. But this First Contact will sometimes kick in any supernatural abilities the character has latent in them. “Hey, evil beastie had k3w1 pw0rz. So do I!” This is an unusual perspective for a game, but makes sense. There’s good opportunities for some interesting roleplaying here.
Crunchy crunchy
Following this is a section on skill use. This is mildly crunchy, requiring a bit of multiplication and so on. It will make Fudge players cry, and Hero players laugh in derision at its simplicity. Skills are rated by a number, and from this number you calculate a percentage. Why you don't just start with a percentage in the first place is beyond me.
”Do you have Faith, brother?”
Most horror games ignore the issue of religious faith. This is a little strange, really, since it’s very relevant to the whole horror genre. Probably just comes from being politically correct or something. “We can have demons and vampires and werewolves and ghosts and tentacle rape and mummies and guys with faces growing out of their penises, but we can’t have, you know, religion and stuff. That would be wrong! Plus, it would mean more research.” Blood Games puts the Faith back in horror gaming. It gives a description of several religious faiths, and the powers they give the faithful relative to the evil beasties: Catholic, Zoroastrian, and Judaism. The descriptions of rituals are simple yet accurate, and will be interesting to most people. You don’t have to use it, but it’s there for you if you want. Can I be a Ninja Rabbi? Maybe better not.
Vamps get old, too
There’s an interesting section on the creation and development of vampires. No other game I’ve seen gives consideration to the fact that a 1,000 year-old person is going to have a different perspective on things than a 50 year-old person, whether or not they’re a blood-sucking freak. The game presents vampires as having several stages of life, at each of which they grow stronger, but more aloof and distant from humanity as a whole. They also get old-fashioned. Must be why so many live in old castles instead of becoming rock stars.
“What’s a frickin’ Blood Game, anyway?”
The Blood Games of the game’s title are simply the style of feeding of the vampire. This is another innovative part of the way the game sees vampires. We have Ravers (prey on clubbers), Hackers (prey on those they meet online), Hero (feeds on criminals, protects the “innocent”), Bottom Feeders (prey on homeless and street-bound addicts, etc) and so on. Like regular human serial killers, vampires prefer a particular kind of victim. This is really nasty, and could make for some interesting plots. If the local vamp is going around knocking off paedophiles, do you really want to slay him?
More crunchiness
Now comes more number-crunching. Opposed contests of characters are determined by rolling under the skill or attribute. If one rolls over and the other under, the rolling-under guy wins. If both roll under, the guy who rolled under by the highest amount wins. What happens if they tie, or both fail? Game doesn’t say. Maybe they just blush in embarrassment.
The combat system was a bit obscure to me. I gave up on it after reading that ”each combat round of one minute is divided into 120 half-second initiatives.” Huh? This was because it’s pretty crunchy, lots of calculations, and there’s not many examples. In any game rules set, every step in combat should have an example. Anything less is going to leave some people scratching their heads. Maybe I’m just out of training with crunchy rules, though. I haven’t played Rolemaster for ten years. The examples that were there weren’t clearly marked. Game examples ought to be in a sidebar, or italicised, or indented from the page or something like that, so they stand out. You can’t assume that every person getting your game is going to sit and read it from start to end at one setting. If rules and examples and discussion are clearly distinct from each-other in the text, it makes it easier to zip back and forth across the book to understand things.
However, an “Integrated Game System” is given in an Appendix which is a lot simpler and better-explained. If you’re not used to crunchy systems, go for this.
Senseless Senses
There’s a little section where the game gives us numerical ratings for the capability of senses of humans, and compares them to animals. We’re told, for example, that a human’s sense of sight is 16 times as powerful as their hearing, and a hawk’s sight is 4 times as powerful as a human’s. That’s nice, but we’re not told what we should be doing with these numbers. Roll to spot the rabbit trying to hide under a rock from the oncoming hawk? There’s no rules associated with these numbers.
Evil Beasties
We get a nice description and stats for some evil beasties. There’s most of the horror and magical standards. The Basilisk, Homunculus, Succubus (I was disappointed to find they didn’t reproduce the picture from AD&D 2nd ed Monster Manual!), Sylph and so on.
Guns, guns, guns… and katanas!
There’s the obligatory list of Things You Can Hurt People With, including, happily, a flame thrower. Great at barbeques and vampire-slayings alike. And yes, there are shotgun rules. Of course!
Gamemastering and Finishing Up
There’s some interesting advice for running a Blood Games game. They suggest you base it in reality, using places, events and people from reality. Just as the Great War turns out to have been inspired by demons, maybe what looks like a random drive-by shooting could turn out to be the work of an evil beastie of some kind. They then go on with some advice about flashbacks, foreshadowing, and these sorts of things which can spice up your roleplaying game session.
There’s a nice-looking character sheet, which has a little pentacle as a fill-in. I suppose the Catholic characters cover it up with a glowing heart of Jesus or something, but the Witches will be delighted. Here on the character sheet, the title font that’s been annoying me throughout the book finally looks good and right. As is usual with character sheets, the spaces to write in are a little small. 10 or 12 point fonts are great when the computer prints them, not so great when you have to write in there by hand. At least 14 point is needed for most gamers, especially since gamers seem to all have awful handwriting. The same goes for the character design worksheet.
In the End…
The overall look of the game is professional. All the referenced tables and rules and so on are present and accurate, there’s almost no typos, and though it’s long, none of the text is useless blather; all of which is unusual for roleplaying books in general. Its length and the left-blank-space make it unsuited to printing out at home, but its links make it good for viewing on your monitor.
In terms of mechanics, character creation and advancement gives you a nice sense of the development of your character as a person, provided you apply some imagination to the numbers; but the basic combat system is a bit daunting and not well-exampled.
The background takes old ideas and stories and puts them together in a new and interesting way. It’s “realistic”, that is, realistic in flavour, more like Buffy or X-Files than Charmed. I’d be very glad to play in this game world, but if I were running a game of it, I’d probably use some lighter rules – but that’s my taste. Other people enjoy chewing on the crunchy stuff and digesting it. Me, I like to toss aside the rules and get on with the cool story. And this game will let you have some cool stories. If you have any heart, you will come to love these characters and their nasty little world. They are wild, full of faith, passionate, and ready to kick evil beastie butt. It really is “about courage, self sacrifice, and desperate heroism with no hope of reward.”
Just don't print it out. If you prefer print versions, get theirs, which also has the margin space all on the inside pages.
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