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Introduction

Hi. I'm Stephen Lea Sheppard. I go by "Stephenls" on, oh, any given place where White Wolf stuff is discussed and a few other places besides. This is my review of World of Darkness: Antagonists (hereafter referred to as just Antagonists). The previous, embryonic not-actually-a-review version can be found on the forums, here, and it's a good read (if I do say so myself), as it goes on for sixty-three posts and the developer of the book makes a brief appearance. It deals with a lot of stuff I only touch upon here, and may be worth perusal. I love that word. Peruse peruse peruse.

Anyway, Antagonists.

It's a book about antagonists. Occult antagonists. Yeah. Seriously, it comes across as the last chapter of The World of Darkness corebook, cut for space -- not that it is, because it isn't, but that's how well it integrates into that material. I tend to be a really big World of Darkness fan, so take it with a grain of salt when I say that if you've got the WoD corebook you really should get this, too. And the grain of salt disclaimer aside, I mean it.

Not that it's perfect, but I'll get to that in a bit.

It's 136 pages long, and it's a hardcover, and the last four of those pages are advertisements for other WoD products. It's got prologue fiction, an introduction, and four content-filled chapters.

The prologue fiction is about what happens when you raise zombies without proper reverence for the forces to which you're praying to make the zombies rise. It's... average. It didn't bother me, and it didn't make me want to throw the book, but at the same time it's not something I remember all that fondly. But that's okay. It's intro fiction.

The introduction of the book is exactly like every other introduction in every other White Wolf book every published ever. It has a How To Use This Book and everything. Oddly, the intro fiction for the introduction seems to be an early look at Mage: The Awakening, and I quite like it.

So that's done, then. On to the actual substantial bits.

Chapter 1: The Living Dead

Contents

Chapter 1 is all about the vitally impaired, and not just zombies. What it covers is either three or four different types of animate dead, depending on how you look at it.

• Zombies are what you'd expect. They're relatively mindless things, usually fairly strong, sometimes rotting, sometimes well-preserved. They can be shambling hords hungry for the flesh and/or brains of the living, they can be voudoun servants with their mouths all sewn shut, or they can be a wide variety of other things, depending on what you want to do with the custom zombie creation rules.
• Imbued are Frankenstein's monsters; they're stitched-together bits of flesh that have been, well, imbued with life thanks to the ambition of their creators. (The book specifically does not cover golems -- only things made of flesh. But it'd be easy enough to adapt the rules, if you wanted to.)
• Revenants are lone walking dead created when a ghost with unfinished business inhabits a corpse -- usually its own, but sometimes not. These are The Crow, or, alternately, any number of walking corpses from Tales from the Crypt, who return to deal death to their murderous cheating husbands or whatever.
• Intruders are like revenants, except the spirit possessing the corpse was never human. They use the revenant rules, and are more of a bonus "Hey, for extra spooky, make a revenant with an inhuman mindset!" suggestion than an actual fourth type of living dead.

The chapter finishes up with samples of each type. Two types of zombie ("Voodoo Zombies" with their mouths all sewn up, and "Chalice-Born," corpses animated by a magic chalice who kill people and steal their tongues, returning them to the chalice in an effort to raise from the dead the ancient creator of the cup), an imbued ("Doll," a near-perfect porcelain doll created by an overprotective mother after her children left her stifling home environment -- except that Doll is made of the flesh of children, kidnapped and murdered, rather than porcelain), a revenant ("Trevain Williams," the angry result of the opening fiction), and an intruder ("Carl Wilton," some alcoholic who's corpse got possessed by an unpleasant spirit after he died).

Opinions

I like this chapter. I've never actually read All Flesh Must Be Eaten, so I can't make the appropriate comparison, but I'm happy with the three sets of zombie creation rules this chapter gives.

That could be a sticking point with some people, I suppose. Each type of living dead gets its own mechanics, and the creation rules aren't really built to easily mix and match. Zombies don't even have the same stats as imbued and revenants -- they just get Power, Finesse, and (for some reason) Resilience ("Resistance" would have been more consistent, but oh, well).

Special note goes to the fiction that opens and closes it. Remember how I said the book's opening fiction doesn't stick with me? Well, this piece does. It's just a page and a half or so, but it's appropriately creepy, and manages to cover "survival horror" without resorting to postmodern commentary on consumer culture.

Chapter 2: A Need For Vengeance

Content

Chapter 2 covers mortals who hunt the supernatural.

The hunters presented in this chapter are a very down-to-earth lot. There are no big conspiracies, no government funding, not even any ex-Special Forces people. There are just people who stumble onto something that motivates them to pick up their tack hammer and go hunting. Actually, it's a lot like Hunter: The Reckoning, but with the superpowers removed.

It mostly covers tactics hunters are likely to use; what ways in which they can effectively fight the supernatural given their complete lack of an edge beyond being underestimated. There is a sidebar devoted to the subject of unreasoning hatred, and sections get titles like "Legal Considerations" and "Joe Average vs. the Wolfman."

It's written from the perspective of using hunters as antagonists. It says, for instance, that vigilante-style hunters often find each other and come together in groups, because there's a better chance for survival that way and also it's more fun for players to match their characters' wits against multiple canny opponents working as a team, but it doesn't say how they find each other, because it presumes that happens before the hunters enter the campaign. I originally saw this as a weakness in the material... but I get ahead of myself. Incidentally, this chapter is the one chapter of the book that will be least useful in mortal campaigns, since mortal investigators don't often find themselves the targets of monster hunters.

The chapter ends with five sample hunters -- the most intriguing is a fifty-something-year-old support group counselor who recently had a close experience with the supernatural and who is now getting into contact with everyone she ever met over the course of her career who's stories now make a lot more sense than they did back when she didn't believe what they had to say. Aside from the stats given to the sample hunters, this chapter has no mechanical material. No new Merits, no weapon lists, nothing.

Opinions

Again, I like this chapter. As I was saying earlier, I originally saw the tight focus of the material as something of a flaw, but given the limited word-counts, I think I'm glad now that it focuses so strongly on the bits you need for running them against monster PCs, and less on the bits you'd need to run a campaign about them. I'm sure there'll be a general World of Darkness supplement at some point in the future that addresses the topic of running mortal monster-hunter campaigns.

A lot of the material here was covered by the Hunter: The Reckoning game line, but if Hunter never caught your fancy, this is a good place to look.

One actual weakness that occurs to me as I type this is that it doesn't spend much space on ways hunters often mess up. It's a bit conflicted on whether it wants to be a Storyteller's chapter on how to run hunters, or a "How to hunt" guide that just puts more emphasis on the bits that are useful to Storytellers. Hunters run using the material in this chapter will be competent -- perhaps unreasonably competent -- unless STs compensate for that. For me, though, this is a small complaint, because it's not difficult to think up ways for hunters to act stupid in a logical and in-character manner.

Also, I want to thank the writer of this chapter for something he did with the NPC writeups. Instead of just listing Virtue and Vice with one word, he gives a short description of how the character approaches those things. For instance, the Virtue and Vice writeups for Leanne Wallis, the survivor support group leader NPC mentioned above, look like this:

Virtue: Charity. Leanne lives to help people. She works endlessly to make their lives easier. Although she acknowledges the fact that her altruism makes her feel better, she is a sincerely selfless person. It is the way she has lived her entire life, and despite her current troubles and fears, it is the way she will always live.
Vice: Pride. There have been very few problems in Leanne's life that her direct approach and diligence could not overcome. Those few that have occurred are like wounds in her self-respect, and she reacts petulantly and childishly to any of her own perceived failings.

After reading this chapter, I went on to read several other new World of Darkness books, and any situation where an NPC writeup was presented without this approach to Virtues and Vices seemed substandard. Since this is the only place in the nWoD line where this approach has been taken, that means I've been mildly disappointed with every NPC writup I've read since this book. I hope the developers encourage their authors to adopt this technique.

Chapter 3: The Righteous and the Wicked

Contents

This chapter is about cults. All kinds of cults. Here are the kinds of cults that it covers:

• Cults that are minor factions of existing faiths.
• Cults that are faiths of their own, not connected to mainstream religions. (Subheadings on sex cults and death cults.)
• Magical cults, including cults created for the purpose of seeking magical knowledge and cults created by magical beings for their own benefit.
• Secular cults, specifically fraternal cults (rich people banding together in fraternities for benefits) and pyramid schemes.

Thus, it's a somewhat more comprehensive take on the subject than the usual RPG staple of guys in hoods with wavy knives.

There is a general section in the beginning dealing with how cults operate in broad terms, system mechanics for brainwashing, info on the sort of people who typically start cults or become cult leaders, and each type of cult has information on how it tends to operate. There are also sample cults of each type, including writeups for three cult leaders.

Opinions

This is far and away my favorite chapter in the whole book.

There was commentary underneath one of the other reviews of this book that said this chapter is poorly-researched trash and a horribly inaccurate representation of cults in real life. I don't know whether that's accurate, because I'm not a real-life cult expert. I do know that I came away from the chapter with a whole lot of GM-applicable advice for inserting varied and interesting cults into games -- even if it's not as accurate as it feels (and to me, it feels accurate), it could sure make for some kickass gameplay.

Aside from the brainwashing mechanics, and NPC stats at the back, this is another chapter full of nothing but discussion. I'd almost say that I'd love to see a whole book just on cults, but that's not really the case, because one of the things I enjoyed about it is that it covers each subject in just enough depth that I wasn't bored with reading it, and then moved on to the next subject. It's clear, concise, comprehensive, and other complimentary adjectives beginning with C (and presumably other letters of the alphabet). It's one of those bits of supplementary RPG material that I've internalized and will undoubtedly use in any game involving cults I run in the future, regardless of system or setting. All together a wonderful block of text.

Chapter 4: Fear Given Form

Contents

This chapter starts out with a discussion of where and how a weird and unique monster or localized monster type could go about hiding from the public eye, and then goes into descriptions of ten different types of monsters -- not vampires, werewolves, or mages, but strange urban legend things.

•The Aswang are monsters from the Philippines -- by day, they look like attractive human women, and by night they look like hideous monsters who drink the blood of men. They came to North America as the wives of soldiers serving there during World War 2, and typically do not kill their husbands. They have morality scores but are exempt from making morality checks when it comes to drinking blood at night, and any female children an Aswang has will also be Aswang.

•The Beast of Bethlehem is the spirit of a location's unpleasant emotional resonance, manifesting as a black dog.

•The Groetnich is a cryptozoological terror -- a sort of giant piranha native to the lakes of the Midwestern United States, undiscovered by science in a manner similar to the coelacanth before it was, er, discovered by science. In other words, they're killer fish! (And, somewhat campy description aside, when you think about it, there is a lot to be scared of at the thought of a mud-sucking piranha that can grow to be twelve feet long and waddle out of the water on stubby, leg-like fins.)

•The Hunger is a sort of spiritual infection that infests certain people who've tasted human flesh, driving them to consume more.

•The Living Web is a hypnotic Internet pop-up window that implants subliminal messages in the people unlucky enough to get caught by it.

•Passion Shades are spirits that amplify a host's Virtue or Vice.

•The Thief is a thin guy in a trenchcoat who hunts down and eats supernatural creatures. Nobody knows what it is, or if there's more than one. He gets less thin the more supernaturals he eats; presumably he gets more thin during times when he's not eating any of them.

•Toxicum Mold is mutant acidic fungus -- the nWoD's equivalent of D&D's green slime, or maybe the giant ball of lake-dwelling tar from the movie Creepshow.

•Witchcats are witches' familiars that steal the life force from babies using their nasty, Blade II Reaper-esque jaw structure.

•The Virus is a sentient meme that infects people with stories of scary urban legends, occasionally possessing people and forcing them to act out those urban legends in order to reinforce itself.

Opinions

This is my least favorite chapter. I don't like it at all. There are maybe three creatures in here I actually like (Aswang, Beast of Bethlehem, and Groetnich), and the rest, while they could be cool, more often come across as monsters from cheap B movies -- the sort with laughable acting and ridiculously low-budget special effects. Much of this can be placed at the foot of the short bits of fiction that begin each monster's entry -- they're almost universally horrible, and are written in a sort of joke-y, post-modern self-aware prose style that I can't stomach (the entry for The Hunger, for instance, ends with a movie-style catchphrase/punchline), but the monsters themselves tend to miss the mark as well.

The Hunger, for instance, tries to cash in on scary cannibal stories like that of the movie Ravenous, but fails, because what makes cannibals scary and unsettling is that they're usually the sort of person you could really be friends with -- interesting, intelligent, witty, urbane... except for the part where they want to eat you. Hannibal Lecter wouldn't be scary if all he did was groan and pound at the walls and start half-metamorphosizing into a man-shark, but that's what people infected with The Hunger do. In case after case, the monsters miss the archetype, miss what makes that particular sort of monster scary, and instead feel the author was trying to think up unique twists on monster concepts without stopping to consider whether those unique twists were actually scary or even very interesting. I hate to say it. I was expecting this to be my favorite chapter -- after all, how can you go wrong with urban legend monsters? -- but after the great quality of the other three it's just a letdown.

I'm hoping that at some point, White Wolf decides to release a book full of odd urban legend creatures that includes some Storyteller-oriented discussion on what makes things scary (a la Ken Hite's Nightmares of Mine), and how to run with themes or recurring archetypes or whatever. To be consistent with the rest of the book, that's what this chapter really should have been -- less Monster Manual and more Storyteller-oriented discussion.

On the other hand...

Were I actually running a campaign, my opinions might be different. I could certainly see taking almost any monster in this chapter and dropping it into the middle of a campaign as a one-off, a break from the main story arc, or a red herring. It's potentially useful. It's just not very ground-breaking or interesting. The other three chapters of the book are like elaborate tool boxes from which you can construct whole plot arcs, while this is more like a set of ten specific encounters -- not a toolbox so much as something that a toolbox builds.

Maybe my perspective is off from being an internet pundit without a roleplaying group. Maybe you'll feel differently about it than I did.

Now, on to a different topic entirely...

Style

I leave this to the end because there's not much to say. The cover is attractive, both in terms of art and layout. So's the inside. It uses the standard White Wolf style of a half-page horizontal or vertical art piece every five or six pages... actually, I'll dispense with the vagueness and provide actual numbers, here -- 124 pages of the book have actual text on them, including the fiction but not the legal page or the table of contents, and scattered throughout those pages are 25 half-page pieces of art, not including NPC portraits. So that's about one half-page art piece every five pages. There aren't any atrociously unreadable fonts, and it's organized such that I can find information quickly (but no index, unfortunately). The fiction pieces that open and close each chapter are serviceable, except for the ones that open the introduction and first chapter, which I found genuinely creepy and enjoyable reads. In terms of style, aside from the snippets of intro fiction to the individual monster entries in chapter 4, I have no complaints at all. It's a very pretty book.

Conclusion

Aside from the jarring final chapter, this book maintains a high standard of quality, and presents many interesting and useful ideas and tools with which STs could run entire campaigns. I can't think of a WoD game where it wouldn't come in handy somewhere, and I recommend this book to anyone who owns the World of Darkness corebook. Or, for that matter, anyone who wants a better-than-decent essay on cults.

Style: 4
Substance: 4 (It'd be 5 if not for the last chapter.)

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