Nice, but
Things, by Jeff R. Leason and Lee Agosta, is a bestiary for Mayfair
Games' horror RPG Chill. Actually, I find it quite nice, "but". The
big "but" about Things is that there is always a "but" for each and
every well-done and noteworthy part of the book. Everything is in some way
marred by an annoying or stupid little glitch that undermines the intended
effect.
Well, there is no "but" about the facts. For your money you get 128 pages
with about 80 new creatures from the Unknown (monsters), 33 new disciplines of
the Evil Way (black magic spells), 13 new disciplines of the Art (white magic
spells), and 12 magical artifacts. The format varies among the categories,
but basically, with every entry you get about ten lines of a faux "report" of
the unlucky fellow who discovered the creature (and lived to tell), a
description, and a stat block. This is rock-solid stuff like in any
AD&D bestiary, but there is no inspirational material such an
adventure seed, other than the "report" snippet. For a 1993 product, I find
this rather meagre.
These "witnesses' statements" are the source of another few big "buts". They
are frequently given by Indiana Jones types or Hollywood arabs, but
dated in the 1980ies and 90ies. As far as I know, the AK-47 has long since
displaced the scimitar as the standard weapon in the Near East, and all the
"Ibrahim Al-Hassan" fellows avail themselves of an annoyingly flowery
1001-nights prose that sets my teeth on edge.
There is the occasional contradiction between the "report" text and the
description. E.g., in the entry for the "Reduce" spell (p. 100), the "witness
statement" talks about a whole van being shrunk, but the spell
description says that even at Master level the target is limited to objects
(originally) smaller than 16 cubic feet. That's a cube with 2.5 feet edges!
Talking about weights and measures, while that spell's effects are fixed to
the individual cubic foot (as opposed to, e.g., "a car-sized object"), others
remain terribly vague, like that of the "Sunscreen" spell (p. 104), which
protects sun-sensitive monsters "for a short time".
In one or two cases, the "report" even conjures a false image, as in
the "Terrorize" spell (p. 107): "Although we knew the creature to
be nothing more hat a jann, the weakest of the djinn ilk, Cecil and I
had the urge to run." That's not horror, that's
Ghostbusters!
The collection of creatures from the Unknown is broad-spectrum, from beings
merely misunderstood in their intentions (e.g. Grave Worms, p. 57) via mere
nuisances (Hu-Hsien, p. 60) to evil masterminds bent on death and torture
(Afreet, p. 46). There is even a beneficial spirit (a Manes, p. 70) who might
aid the player characters. This gives the Chill Master a wide range from
which to pick monsters suitable for the style of campaign, good! Judging from
their names and "reports", Leason and Agosta lifted most of the beings from
existing mythologies, but they neglect to note from which, hampering
the occasional Chill Master who wants to do some research of his or her own.
Well, that's what Google is for, I guess.
The layout and typesetting might be considered bland in these times of
four-colour RPG glossies. I happen to like it, it is sparse, readable and
well done, with a few exceptions like the clumsily arranged table on page 51.
The images, mostly of monsters from a Bosch-ian nightmare, are nice and
atmospheric, done in the style of early Call of Cthulhu supplements.
But they bear no relation to the creatures they appear next to and
often give the impression that they are just clip arts to fill up the page.
People might have some trouble using Things with other RPGs, because
the rules of Chill aren't very straightforward. The stat blocks give
"percentages" that more often exceed 100 than not (whatever that means), and
the descriptions refer to action table results that won't make sense to people
who don't know Chill. This doesn't actually stop Things from
being useful to non-Chill-GMs, but it hampers them using it like any
other bestiary, which wouldn't work anyway. You can't just open Things
on a random page and jump a random encounter on your party, because the
monsters are often invulnerable to the 00-buckshot, chainsaws, and unlicensed
nuclear accelerators horror PCs tend to lug around. Instead, the GM has to do
some careful planning to give the PCs the necessary clues about the creatures'
specific, and often rather obscure, weaknesses.
Things is a solid tome of horror creatures limited to the Chill
audience it was written for (and enterprising GMs of other RPGs). However,
there is a number of annoying small mistakes the authors made, which, while
not severely limiting the book's use, detract from its overall image.
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