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I always used to love the old AD&D Monster Manuals (with their Mind Flayers and Tarrasques and Invisible Stalkers). I don't know why, but there's something about a list of monsters that appeals to me. The bestiary is always the first thing I turn to in any horror or fantasy game I pick up.
Sad, isn't it? There's something in a list of monsters and bad guys which brings out the Top Trumps player in me, and I always look forward to seeing what a game line does with its monsters. Traditionally, monster descriptions have always taken second place in White Wolf's World of Darkness games, since most of the best monsters are the player characters. With honourable exceptions (eg. The Bygone Bestiary, which is half a splatbook anyway), monsters which you can't play as characters have generally taken up a couple pages at the back of the book. Even in WW's woeful Hunter: The Reckoning line, you always got the impression that they were really only doing those monster books because they had to.
Which brings us to World of Darkness Antagonists, a guide to bad guys who are not vampires, werewolves and witches. Second of the generic supplements to the game, this is supposed to be the place to go for all your generic horror bad guy needs. Does it work?
The Artefact
It's a hardback book, 136 pages long (including 4 pages of ads at the back). It's got the same matte cover with glossy accents that the other WoD2 hardbacks have. The cover illustration is of a scarecrow wearing a gasmask. It's kind of spooky-looking, but it's got nothing to do with the insides. The artwork inside is mostly OK, often good and rarely bad, the design is in the same attractive, open style as the WoD2 rulebook.
Is it worth twenty-five dollars (or, for that matter, fifteen pounds)? Hmm. I don't know. I'm not sure I agree with the idea of making everything hardback. It looks good on your shelf, but I'm not sure every game supplement really warrants that. This is a skinny book. And I mean, it's nice enough... but is it worth it? I'll get back to you on that.
Deathless Prose
The writing and editing in the book is, although affected by a few typos and frankly mystifying errors (why is the word "bloomer" randomly inserted into the middle of the zombie powers description?) is actually pretty passable.
Of course there isn't an index.
Each of the four chapters is preceded by a two-page splash illo, accompanied by game fiction, which is completed at the end of the chapter. Most of the sections of the book begin with a bit of fiction too. The game fiction is, well, mostly game fiction. If you don't like game fiction, you're not going to be converted.
There are a couple of exceptions: a short, unsetling Stepford Wives-style piece in the cults section is referenced in the main text with hints as to what it could mean (here's your set-up: here's a couple of ideas about what's behind this), and the kid-trapped-in-the-house-with-Zombies-everywhere piece that bookends the Zombies chapter is clichéd, but well done.
Each chapter is also introduced with a quote. Of five quotes (four chapters and the introduction), only maybe one of them is really appropriate. I mean, you sort of get why they chose these quotes, but they're decontextualised and sort of shoehorned in. Take the one at the start of the cults chapter.
"The acolytin' is not really what you might call laborious employment in the middle of its busy season." - Neil Gaiman, "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar"
Eh? OK, it sort of has a peripheral connection, but what does Neil Gaiman's Lovecraft parody have to do with the flavour of what is actually quite serious stuff?
The Meat (and Brains)
It becomes clear that the aim of this book is less to provide a list of bad guys and beasties and more a set of guidelines for making your own. The designers felt that three sets of adversaries dealt with in detail and a general chapter about monsters would work. Let's see.
Chapter One: The Living Dead deals with zombies, the "imbued" (animated jigsaw-people, like Frankenstein's monster, and not the hunters from Hunter: the Reckoning, which can only be a relief) and revenants (as in The Crow, and about four Edgar Allen Poe stories).
It does exactly what it says on the tin, basically. Now I never saw the old Walking Dead supplement for Hunter, so I don't know how this compares (I'm sure someone from the forum will be along presently), but essentially, it provides treatments for these three (three-and-a-half, actually: revenants are split into those which are Come Back, for whatever reason, and those who are simply bodies animated by Outside Forces) types of walking dead. They give you shopping lists of powers and characteristics, ideas about how to use them, examples of each type, and plenty of story ideas.
This "come on, guys, make your own story" attitude is, however, kind of hampered by a "...but please don't mess with our setting" subtext. Hence the paragraph which basically says, "yeah, we think a 28 Days Later style apocalypse with zombies might make a great story, but please don't, because it's not what's suposed to happen with our setting". Well, duh. So what? It's a minor gripe, really, but I think it deserved mentioning because it kind of shows that "this is how to play the game" attitude which (probably because of the lack of backgrou8nd material) was so absent from the main rulebook. Now in Vampire: The Requiem, this worked, because it was designed as a gothic game, but I had been led to the impression that the WoD corebook was actually a generic horror game - it's why I liked it so much. It's like they don't trust the players not to break their setting.
I'm almost tempted to run a zombie apocalypse just to spite 'em. I certainly could. They've got your zombie movies covered. If you want to do Night of the Living Dead and its sequels, or The Crow, or 28 Days Later (which the designers rate highly - me too) or even, God help us, Shaun of the Dead ("I'm sorry, Shaun. No - I'm sorry"), this is your General Zombie toolkit.
Having said that, while the example characters are creepy and everything (especially Doll, a Frankenstein construct made from murdered children by a madwoman who lost her own kids), and while the ideas are good, I get the impression that there's very little that's, you know, new. I doubt that players of All Flesh Must Be Eaten or Deadlands: Hell on Earth will find much that they haven't seen. Solid and meaty, but not earth-shattering.
Chapter Two: A Need for Vengeance is really for those Storytellers who are running chronicles for Vampires (and in the future, presumably, Werewolves and Magi). It deals with NPC monster hunters as antagonists (the best example of this I can think of is the brilliant Holtz from the third series of Angel). A lot of the stuff can be applied to player character hunters as well. In fact, in terms of its attitude (ordinary people with jobs fighting a desperate, bloody, morally ambiguous battle against creatures they really don't understand), it's the same sort of thing as Hunter: The Reckoning only - thank God - without the hokey superpowers. So all the good bits from HTR and none of the crap bits. It talks a bit about the internet (only not with the daft HunterNet chatroom), and police, and social workers and self-help groups and stuff. All pretty solid. But again, none of it's earth-shattering.
Chapter Three: The Righteous and the Wicked is where World of Darkness Antagonists shines.
No, really. I mean, when I read the release notes, I thought, yay, cults. Why do I need stuff about cults? I have about a dozen Call of Cthulhu supplements for that. The answer is, it breaks out of the CoC mould. It deals with fringe religious groups, fundamentalist terrorist extremists (in twenty years, will they look back on stuff like this and say, "ah yes, the noughties, when people thought that Islamist terrorists were everywhere" in the same way that we look back with perverse nostalgia on the nuclear paranoia of the eighties?), one-off personality-cult wacko movements, death cults both of the suicide (Heaven's Gate, anyone?) and mass murder varieties, and your basic real-world movements... but then goes on to add covens (real and charlatan), pyramid schemes, secret societies, social clubs (like Dale Coba's creepy men's club in the original Stepford Wives) and any kind of cult of personality you could think of (there is no mention of Fight Club. But I would be surprised if they hadn't at least seen the movie, even if they haven't read the book). Apart from that impenetrable Neil Gaiman quote I mentioned earlier on, there is only one passing comment to Lovecraft, buried in the game fiction.
Also included are notes on cult leaders, ways to use them in a story, and notes on cult induction techniques, real and fictional. This includes mechanics for brainwashing. Now in the real world, the jury's still out on whether brainwashing is real or not, but in a horror story, it fits perfectly. Not sure I'd actually use mechanics meself, but it's nice to have them.
I like this section. I expected to hate it, but I really like it. It breaks the Cthulhu mould, and as much as I love Cthulhu, that's a good thing (arguably, one could argue that the Delta Green setting updates the Cthulhu cults to the modern day, and it does, but it assumes you know how a cult works. This book doesn't).
I was a little disappointed to see no mention of the fact that religious cults are these days actually called New Religious Movements (NRMs), but since the chapter took a wider view of the phenomenon, you can forigive them for not knowing the terminology. Good stuff.
Less compelling is Chapter Four: Fear Given Form, a study on monsters. Essentially it's five pages of principles, followed by example monsters, designed to give the storyteller ideas. Each of the monsters is a riff on something from urban legend, folklore or pulp horror. Most are a bit dull. Some are straight out of tall stories (like the Beast of Bethlehem, which is basically your classic British Black Dog, or the Groetnich, a man-eating lake fish). Others are drawn from pulp horror (the intelligent mould-made-out-of-toxic-waste thing, for example).
The best one by miles is the Virus, which is a sentient, malevolent meme (did anyone read the Marvel Boy comic that Grant Morrison wrote some years back? The Virus reminds me of Brand Hex, the Living Corporation, which was one of the more memorable villains). Great idea. Shame they more or less repeat it with another adversary, which is a sentient website (they more or less implicitly admit that one is a variation of the other when they advise mixing the two).
On the whole, I found myself disappointed by this section. I suppose they were deliberately trying to inspire the reader to creativity by avoiding the obvious (so no Mothman, no Sasquatch, no Little Grey Men), but what they ended up doing with me was losing my attention. Apart from the Evil Meme, they're just not all that evocative. Not really, you know, mythic.
Let's Evaluate
OK. There are parts of this I really like. The first three chapters are generally pretty solid. The cults chapter is great: it's refreshing to see cults presented in a way that reflects both the real world and the conspiracy theories. The book looks nice and has no real major faults.
On the other hand, if you've played zombie stories, or if you've got (whisper it) a copy of Hunter or The Risen, you probably won't get any new ideas out of the zombie and hunter chapters; just a few mechanics for the new version of the system.
The build-your-own monsters bit doesn't really make the grade, in my view. It doesn't tell you much you couldn't work out for yourself, and it with one or two honourable expections, it doesn't present anything that makes the reader go "wow".
(I was also expecting to see some demons, too, but sadly, this is not the book. That was just me, anyway.)
Also, it's overpriced. It simply doesn't warrant the hardback treatment, in my opinion. If you have RPG material about zombies or moneter hunters, the (very good) section on cults probably isn't quite enough to warrant buying this book. If on the other hand you're looking for ideas and you haven't got anything on these topics on your shelf, you could do a lot worse than buy this book.
