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Horror Week - vs. Monsters Deluxe Edition
Once upon a time, Philip J. Reed entered a humble little contest wherein authors were challenged to design a role-playing game in just 24 hours. His entry, called vs. Monsters, became an unexpected hit. In the four years that have followed, Reed has built a very successful game company called Ronin Arts and, more germane to this review, has expanded upon the original vs. Monsters to create a fun little game called vs. Monsters Deluxe.
Once Upon a Midnight Dreary...
The first thing I noticed when I paged through vs. Monsters Deluxe is the artwork. Now, I'm not a fan of artwork in games. I prefer little to no art in my gaming books the way that your picky cousin prefers that the green beans not touch the mashed potatoes on his dinner plate at Thanksgiving. Reed, though, has chosen wisely. From the very beginning, the masterful work of Gustave Doré fills the game with exactly the right atmosphere. Reed obviously spent a lot of time finding art that is complementary and evocative while not seeming more important than the game itself.
I also like Reed's writing style. He writes simply and directly, but with a wry sense of humor that peeks out from around the eldges of the game and makes sure that we remember that, even though it's a monster game, we should be having fun. Not many authors can do that without making it look like it took a lot of work. Reed seems to do it without effort and it makes vs. Monsters Deluxe a fun read.
The PDF clocks in at 41 pages, which makes it a breeze to print and, with just a little effort, you can jigger then around and fold them in half to make your very own digest-sized booklet out of them. That's a handy thing to be able to do with a PDF and I'd like to see every game with a relatively small page count go that route.
"...a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore..."
The game is set in a place called The Town, from which you can take The Road, which leads through The Forest to The Mountains. Out from The Town is The Village near which is The Church. The only named NPC is Father Andrews, the lonely minister and monster-fighter. Beyond that, the entire field is left to your imagination. Is The Town located in rural New England? How about on the windswept plains of Kansas? Perhaps it sits at the bottom of a holler in the Appalachians? Sure, yes, why not?
The beauty of the open nature of the locations is that you an fill them with whatever you want. This leaves you with a dizzying choice of options. vs. Monsters Deluxe can handle The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Lottery, and The Dunwich Horror equally well, depending on where you'd like to put your The Town and Surrounding Environs (though for the last one, I'd swap out The Mountains for The Sea). There's also a great appeal to running a game in the 19th Century, before instant communications and powerful weapons like the semi-automatic firearm. The sense of isolation is a very important element of horror fiction and having your scary story set in a time where you could be isolated completely in a farm house just miles from "civilization" is a very powerful tool for the GM. The GM can also make ample use of the inherent scariness of having to take down a horrible slavering beast with a melee weapon, or a firearm that you had to reload by hand, from the muzzle. You can't discount the mileage a creative GM can get from those two things alone.
But as neat at the background and the time period may be, the rules really make the game sing. The heart of the vs. Monsters system is a basic deck of cards that you can get off the counter of pretty much any liquor store...err...supermarket. Here's how basic task resolution works: draw a number of cards equal to the attribute. Find the highet value card and, if it beats the target value of what you're trying to do, you succeed. If not, you fail. Couldn't be simpler.
There are some additional rules add-ons under a heading Reed has titled "Unnecessary Complexities" and they are, as Reed notes "not absolutely necessary to enjoying a game of vs. Monster. But he thinks you might find them fun and useful and, as he has demonstrated before in this game, he's right. You might not need to use Fear Checks, or Called Shots, or other combat rules such as using two weapons at once, but if you want them, they're there and they're simple.
Character creation is just as easy. First, pick a good 19th Century name for your character, and write down a little blurb describing them. Then move on to the numbers. Your character has four attributes (Fighting, Defending, Thinking, and Running) and you are given four numbers to apportion among them. So you'll spend a little time deciding which attribute you want to be the nest, which will be second-best, and which two will bring up the rear. There aren't that many combinations, so choosing one won't take much time. After that, pick Stuff. You can choose Good Stuff which works to your advantage such as Courageous or Lucky but be careful. For every Good Stuff you pick, you also have to pick a Bad Stuff, which works against you such as Poor or Sickly. There are recommended limits to how many Stuffs you can have to start (and more Good Stuffs start costing you more, as you would expect).
After you have your attributes and Stuffs, you write down your Health number, pick some equipment, add some descriptive Fluff and you're ready to take on the Monsters.
It really doesn't get too much easier. There are even a few recommended ways to advance characters, for longer campaign-style games. They are simple, uncomplicated, and give some tangible benefit, from extra Stuffs to being allowed to hold a card for use later on. Folks who are used to heavier rulesets with lots of numbers and maybe even a spreadsheet lurking somewhere in the all-concealing shadows are going to be disappointed. There's not a lot of "there" to the nuts and bolts of the game. The real appeal of vs. Monsters Deluxe is that it gives you the basic wherewithal to resolve tasks, then gets out of the way.
Beyond that, all that's really left are the Monsters that will be vs. you. Reed populates the game with a good assortment of beasts, spooks, and Things That Gibber in the Night. There is a good assortment of challenges here, from your basic Giant Rat to the Cthuloid Terror. The real challenge, though, comes in the form of The Misters - beings who would be right at home in a Neal Gaiman or Clive Barker novel (or, as I envision them, walking right out of the award-winning "Hush" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Reed also throws in a monster with no stats at all, but which would serve as an excellent vehicle on which to hang any number of great adventures.
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!
Is vs. Monsters Deluxe going to be your cup of tea? I'll say that it probably will be. It's a graet pickup game for when you want to get your haunt-on but can handle the rigors of a longer game relatively well. I wouldn't trust it to handle a truly epic campaign, because I don't think it's quite robust enough for that, but it'll give you a lot of chills and thrills.
At $7.00 for the PDF or $15.00 for the book from Lulu, the price isn't bad at all. Reed also offers a few low-cost add-ons to the game as well as a free version of the original vs. Monsters and a free version of the vs. Engine that you can use to power your own games (and that he's using to power the current vs. Outlaws and the coming vs. Pirates). As price goes, you can do far worse.
In the end, I think Reed has written himself a real winner. vs. Monster Deluxe is sufficient to tell the fun "run around and whack the zombies" kind of stories or the atmospheric spine-tinglers of Shirley Jackson and Washington Irving. The game is full of good writing, great illustrations, a simple but effective rule set, and enough monsters to keep your players jumping for many games to come.
And there's nary a Poe reference there to be found.
Nevermore.
(Sorry...couldn't help it!)
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