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This is going to be a review where I get into a few secrets of the game’s setting, so if you plan on playing Dread : The First Book of Pandemonium at some point in the future, you might want to avoid the paragraphs dedicated to the book’s eleventh chapter. The rest of this review is spoiler-free.
On with the show.
Style – An overall impression
Physically, Dread : The First Book of Pandemonium is 278 pages thick, with the last six pages of so dedicated to the creators’ bio, an ad for the layout company involved in the game, and promotional material about the first Dread supplement. A perfect-bound softcover, the game’s binding seems sturdy enough to survive several years of hastily flipping through the pages. The game is printed in black and white, and the paper used is of good quality.Visually, Dread : The First Book of Pandemonium is very impressive. The game’s simple color cover, a big yellow face moaning in agony or yelling in pure rage (you decide), sets the game’s visceral mood quite nicely. The interior illustrations are a mix of photos and drawings that have a gritty feel to them, and which are inserted chaotically within the text. Just to make myself clear, I mean “chaotically” in a good way, here. The end result fit the game’s feel to a tee.
Dread : The First Book of Pandemonium’s prose is also pretty good. The flavour text, of which there’s a lot, is well written and atmospheric. The game text is presented clearly as well, although the game could’ve done with a bit more examples weaved within the text in some places. Editing-wise, the book has few mistakes and typos. Moreover, as you’ll soon read, a lot of this game is dependant on the “cosmetic” aspect of some of its elements, mainly spells and demons. Those are well-presented and evocative. Finally, I think it’s fair to issue a fair warning: this is a game that aims to be edgy, and it features curse words and all-around profanity profusely. This is not something that bothered me, but it might bother some of you. Consider yourself warned.
In the end, this is a game that benefits a lot from its “style” aspect. The game relies a lot on its unique mood to create a place for itself within the RPG market. The fact that it is able to set this mood so strongly is a strong point for Dread : The First Book of Pandemonium, because it could’ve been a forgettable game otherwise.
Content – Chapter by Chapter
Dread : The First Book of Pandemonium has two first chapters, two second chapters, and so on. One of each chapter concerns the game, and the other is flavour text. For the purposes of this section, I’ll disregard the flavour text and just address the game parts.“Chapter 1: Pandemonium” presents the basic concepts of the game. It starts off by establishing the basic setting. One day, a small town 130 miles southeast of Oklahoma City got butchered by an unknown force. Then it happened again, and again, and again. Demons were invading our world. Amidst this simple premise, the characters are people who were heading straight to rock-bottom for some reason or another. At some point, they were about to be killed by a demon, until a powerful person showed up and saved them. This person, the group’s Mentor, teaches them powerful magic, arcane knowledge, and turns them into something more than human. The characters are now called Disciples, and their job fighting against the demons who threaten humanity.
In other words, the first chapter establishes the game as pure splatterpunk, with heavy gore aplenty and characters with nothing to lose fighting amongst the carnage. This said, the game leaves a lot of room for the players and GM to make the world their own. A section of the first chapter deals with the group establishing together the details of the setting through questions like “Do people believe in demons?” or “How involved are the authorities in your area?”
Also briefly covered in the first chapter are the three types of demons the player characters are going to be up against: Hunters, Defilers and Stalkers. The three types are fairly cliché, but this is splatterpunk dammit, and subtlety does not become that genre. Hunters kill people, defilers possess people, and stalkers ruin people’s life from afar. Simple archetypes of pure evil for a simple genre of gory action.
“Chapter 2: Overview” is four pages long and covers the basic mechanics, along with preliminary character concept. You can pretty much guess what the latter is like: it’s those usual “who is your character” questions you ask yourself every time you make up a character, no matter what the game is. Now let’s look at the former.
The game’s basic mechanic is a task resolution that uses a dice pool of d12s against a target number. Okay, I’m gonna say it again, just because it just feels so damn good. Indulge me. This game uses d12s by the bucket. Just in case you’re not sure what a d12 is, it’s that weird useless dodecahedron with numbers on it that you got along with those polyhedral dice you bought years ago. Turns out it’s also die, and it’s not useless anymore.
So… hm… yeah, Dread : The First Book of Pandemonium. The game’s basic mechanic is a task resolution that uses a dice pool of d12s against a target number. When it’s an unopposed task, the GM sets a target number, and if one of your d12s comes up numerically superior to that target number, you succeed. In the case of an opposed task, you both roll, and if you score higher than you opponent, you succeed. If there’s damage involved, it’s equal to the difference between your highest die and your opponent’s highest die, plus any damage bonus from the weapon you’re using. If your description is cool, you get an extra die. If it’s so cool that your fellow gamers or applauding, fainting or crying, you get two extra dice. It’s a pretty simple system that fits the game’s cinematic action bill.
“Chapter 3: Characters” deals with character creation proper. The system here is a “cascading” point-based creation, where the points you invest initially in your attributes determine the options you’ll have further down the road. Characters in Dread : The First Book of Pandemonium have three attributes rating from one through six: Strenght, Sense and Soul. Character creation begins with splitting nine points among those attributes, with a pretty severe restriction added on top : one of the attributes has to have a score of five or six in order to reflect the unnatural nature of the Disciples. The end result here is that you have relatively few options on how to allocate your points, and each character you create is bound to be heavily typecast as either the tank, the brains or the spellcaster. While this means that gaming groups of more than three players might run afoul of niche-protection issues, that sort of heavy typecasting is very much in line with the splatterpunk genre.
In addition to the extra-powerful attribute, each character gets a “discipline” linked to its unnaturally powerful attribute. Characters with high strength get the combat discipline, which allows them to do more damage and attack multiple opponents. Those with high sense get the lore discipline, which helps them identify demons based on whatever evidence they find. Finally, characters with high soul get the sorcery discipline, which allows them to learn exorcisms along with regular spells, which every character has access to.
Skills are bought on a one for one basis via skill points equal to double the character’s sense score. Each skill is named after what it does, and is followed by why the character knows it in parentheses. For instance, one character can have the skill “Crime (Robber)” while another might have “Crime (Cop)”. While both skills do the same thing, the descriptor adds a touch of flavour to whatever skills the character has. Basically, skills are resolved in the same way as attributes, and they come into play whenever a certain task requires some form of training. In case you’re wondering, combat is always resolved via an attribute check, thus ensuring that the high strength character’s niche is not threatened by a character with high sense sinking all his points into combat skills.
All that’s left is filling in the blanks. Apart from contacts, life points (everyone gets a flat twelve), cash and equipment, characters also get to choose a Drive. The character’s drive is what makes him or her tick, boiled down to a single word. Whenever that drive comes into play, an extra d12 is added to the dice pool. Each character also receives 12 points of Fury that can be used to make special attacks. The book says characters receive 12 points each round, but that doesn’t make much sense since most characters can only attack once per round. I’m guessing they meant game sessions, or maybe scenes. (For the record, I have a “forgive one ‘wrong word’ mistake per 150 or so pages” policy, so this mistake doesn’t factor into the Style rating I’m giving the game at the end of the review.) The special fury attacks are essentially of two varieties: “more hurt”, or “even more hurt in exchange for getting hurt too.” Cosmetically, however, each special attack has splatterpunk-y flavour of its own.
Now that you’re done creating the main bulk of the character, you can move on to “Chapter 4: Magic” and ”Chapter 5: Exorcism”. I’m listing both chapters together here, because the latter is a few pages long, and consists of a short list of spells available only to characters with the sorcery discipline. In other words, they go hand in hand.
The magic rules in Dread : The First Book of Pandemonium are as simple as they come. You have access to a number of spells equal to double your soul score, and you can safely cast a number of spells per day equal to your soul score. If you choose to cast more spells in a day than your soul score, you roll a Soul check against a target number of 11; if you fail, you get two points of damage. Each spell cast takes a single action (i.e.: one round), and succeeds automatically (although you might need to roll to target your opponent or get past his defenses.) That’s it. Like I said, simple.
For ease of use, the list of spells opens with a quick spell list and packages of spells split along ten categories : attack, defense, flight, nonlethal combat, investigation, stealth, manipulation, grotesque, exorcism and crowd control. A lot of spells have similar mechanical effects, but every spell listed in the book – and there’s eighty-eight of them – is cosmetically different. What you end up with is a lot of gory flavour, and relatively few tactical options. Once again, this fits the fast and loose splatterpunk bill quite well.
“Chapter 6: Combat” covers the various combat rules and special rules. Since I’ve already covered the basic mechanics above, the only thing I’ve got left to say is that initiative is determined by rolling a single die, with the highest result going first. The other rules are pretty much a logical outgrowth of the basic mechanics. The rules regarding health, healing and armor are likewise simple. Armor absorbs damage and gets damaged instead, health comes back between scenarios, and character with only four health points or less get a penalty of one die on all their rolls. That’s pretty much it.
“Chapter 7: Gameplay” is a short example of play. You know the drill. A relatively novel touch, however, is how the example ends with a rundown of what the made the session fun according to the author. In this day and age of “commentary tracks on every DVD you buy”, it’s a nice bonus feature.
The next chapter is entitled “Chapter 8: Quickstart”, and a chapter’s name has never rung more true. Dread : The First Book of Pandemonium advises to start the game with a tryout session; the eighth chapter is about setting up that session and delivering on the goods. First rule: the characters created have to die at the end. This is not some kind of GM final secret twist thingie, it’s a rule spelled out up-front for everyone involved. The idea here is to make sure nobody takes too long to create a character, or plays it too safe and therefore fails to try out an aspect of the game because of that.
Basically, the chapter provides a telegraphed version of character generation, and lists a couple of pre-generated characters on top of that in case you’re in too much of a hurry to generate your own damned characters. Then you go nuts, and play. The last page of the chapter provides advice on how to handle the quickstart session. Basically, what the author advises here is a session where nobody hesitates to break out of character to ask questions about the system or discuss rulings. Basically, the idea here is to negotiate the social contract while playing a session that won’t matter anymore once the night comes to a close. Hopefully, once that session’s done, the group will have found a common ground on whatever issues might have popped up, and the focus can be on nothing but play afterwards.
The players’ part of the book ends with “Chapter 9: Appendix”, which provides a short glossary, and a full page of pronunciation guidelines for various words used throughout the book. I like fancy words for my arcane spells as much as the next guy, but when you need a full page of pronunciation guidelines, it might be a cue that you’re using too many fancy words. This said, guidelines are better than nothing, especially if you’re the type to obsess about the proper pronunciation of every weird word you come across. I know I am.
The GM section of the book (about halfway through) opens with a chapter entitled “Chapter 10: Directing”, thus promptly putting me in my place by pointing out to you that I should really be calling this the Director section of the book. Well, tough. This chapter covers all ye basic GM advice with regards to pacing, mood, and such. About half of that advice is dedicated to a step-by-step formula for building scenario’s that’s slightly reminiscent of Spirit of the Century’s structured pickup game approach. This is a good thing, because as with pulp, following the tired old formula is actually part of the genre.
“Chapter 11: History” is where we learn of the secret twist and backstory behind Dread : The First Book of Pandemonium’s setting. Basically, the demons invading the Earth really are demons, and at some point they’ll rack up enough kills to trigger Armageddon. At that point angels will descend, the demons will lose, and the world will be cleansed. Of course, chances are that the cleansing will not be of the “carebears shooting light out of their belly” variety, and that humanity will suffer. The game’s surprise twist is that the Mentors (who turn desperate humans into powerful Disciples) are actually demons trying to postpone the final battle as much as they can by trying to limit the number of humans killed. The game allows for Mentors to also be Angels aiming for the same thing because they’re merciful, but the writing style makes me feel like the author prefers the “mentors are demons” option.
Before I go on to the next chapter, I want to reassure all of you on the way this twist is handled. When I read the first lines of the twist, I got a little bothered because I thought this was going to be the sort of game that turns the table on the players by making the basic premise something else than what they bought into. Through the way this is all presented, however, that’s not the case. First and foremost, the gory tone of the special attacks and spells makes it pretty clear from the get-go that the characters in Dread : The First Book of Pandemonium are not exactly heroes of the paladin variety. Second, the fact that the Armageddon is (most likely) also bad news for the human race ensures that the twist doesn’t undermine the idea that the characters’ deeds were fundamentally good deeds. Ultimately, all the twist does is insert a nice dose of grey into the situation. In the end, it’s quite possible that the players will decide to go on fighting because they feel it’s the most morally viable decision, even though that means serving a demon who’s trying to escape his comeuppance.
The twelfth chapter, “Chapter 12: Demons” represents around 70 pages out of the 278 pages. Forty-one demons are presented here, including a detailed description of their appearance and behavioural patterns, as well as hooks and ideas on how a confrontation between the player characters and the demon might go. Each demon is fundamentally different from the others, which is quite an achievement. This (along with the spells) is where Dread: The First Book of Pandemonium distinguishes itself from the other games on the market by establishing a clear vision of what its setting is like.
The final chapter, “Chapter 13: Scenarios” provides advice on how to build scenarios, a few examples of plot hooks, a nifty random scenario generator, and two full-blown scenarios for your enjoyment, doubling as concrete examples of the process presented throughout the chapter. The advice here is sound, although it’s not the most insightful I’ve seen. Considering the limited scope of splatterpunk, it does the trick quite nicely. The two scenarios provided sound like fun, which certainly isn’t always the case with sample scenarios found in rulebooks, if you ask me.
The Bottom Line
On the Style scale, Dread: The First Book of Pandemonium scores a 5, hands down. The flavour text is enjoyable, the gaming prose is clear and concise, the description of spells and demons is excellent, the illustrations are very good, and the layout is outstanding.On the Substance scale, things get a bit more complicated. The basic premise of Dread: The First Book of Pandemonium can be done with a lot of systems already out there (Unisystem comes to mind.) By itself, the system isn’t all that impressive – it’s “dice pool v.s. a target number” at its most basic. A lot of the game’s attraction comes from its Style, which already got a stellar rating. Prior to actually writing this review, I was going for a 3, because when you take the style aspect out of it, you get a solid game that doesn’t really bring anything new to the gaming table. Moreover, if you don’t buy into the game’s setting, a lot of its material becomes useless (i.e.: the spells and the demons.) While writing the review, however, I realised how much the game is geared towards ease of play. Forty-one demons, the formula structure and the random scenario generator make Dread: The First Book of Pandemonium the sort of game that requires very little prep work prior to the gaming session. That’s a very positive point in favour of the game, and it brings its rating to a 4, final answer.
If you’re a fan of splatterpunk and you’re looking for a game that’ll deliver a lot of flavour while requiring a bare minimum of prep work, Dread: The First Book of Pandemonium is a game that might very well belong in your collection.
