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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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