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Dread, as I said last time, does NOT fuck around. It’s clear, it’s direct and it’s never over-written. It knows what it’s about and it tells you. And it’s about taking no prisoners. It’s about full-contact, balls-to-the-wall monster hunter roleplaying. It’s about skull-fuckingly brutal ass-kicking, spitting out hails of bullets and hellstorms of sorcerous fury at demons so messed up they make Hannibal Lecter shit his pants. It’s about Quentin Tarantino crossed with Clive Barker. And – best of all – it’s about nothing else.
I mentioned last time, because there was a last time. I reviewed the first edition of Dread back in 2002. Now it’s five years later and we’ve got the second or Unrated edition as author Rafael Chandler has dubbed it. And it’s everything you want in a 2nd ed: it’s light years above the original edition in quality but so seamlessly preserves all that was great about the first one that I had to go back to it to figure out exactly what had changed. This is Dread as it should have been, as I think Chandler really wanted it to be, and the game – and the world – is better for it.
The most obvious improvement is the art. First editions often suffer when it comes to art, and Dread suffered badly, with ridiculous cartoons, clumsy photos and crappy sketches thrown about bodgy layouts. That ship has sailed. While Dread’s art varies a lot in style and quality, there are now only a few moments when it lapses into the cartoony or the pathetic. Gone is the old blue-rinse blur cover, and replacing it is a picture of some crazy-ass girls with crab-claws and swords for hands. It’s a little lurid, a little blatant, a little Palladium-in-the-nineties cluttered, and it does feature three scantily clad babes which isn’t exactly inclusive, but at least the girls are armed to the teeth and at least the cover gets your attention.
Inside, we kick off with a fantastically detailed contents (which is also complemented by an equally detailed index at the end) and then get down to the fiction. As mentioned last time, the fiction in Dread is fucking brilliant. Chandler is a great writer and it was like a drug to be back inside his world again. It’d been five years since I’d walked with Hush, Morlock and his other characters., but it felt like I’d never left. And it was good to see them. Nicely, although some of the story sections are similar in content, they’ve all been rewritten and are much better for it. And as before, just because you can recognise that Chandler could and should be writing novels doesn’t mean the RPG isn’t there to be played, or that the fiction doesn’t serve its purpose. It does exactly what it should do: demonstrates precisely how the game is played.
So what is the game about? Players take the role of Disciples. A little while ago, you were a normal person with nothing left to lose, living the second last chapter of a book which ends with your character getting iced or eating his own gun. Then something from beyond your worst nightmares almost beat you to death. Something like an angel stopped it, and gave you a bit of magic to do the same. Now you’ve got nothing to live for except the struggle – to win the war between good and evil which is already burning across the globe.
This focus on very tight character concepts illustrates the key design principles of Dread. Too many RPGs are defined so expansively they become vague or loose-ended: it’s had to know what kind of characters to make or what to do with them. Dread is tightly focussed, so it is always clear what role you will play and what kinds of thing you will be doing. Nobody will ever make a useless character in Dread.
The game isn’t limited though. Within its setting you can run any number and any variety of mysteries – it’s only as limited as say, Call of Cthulhu. Meanwhile that focus gives it real strength, allowing its rules to create very strong characters and very strong set-pieces which help communicate the visceral, explosive feel. Another example of this is in the attributes: PCs have nine points to split between Strength, Sense and Soul – but one of them has to be five or six. Two is the human average. So no matter who you are, you will be exceptional at something. What’s more, depending on which stat you choose to be high, you also get an ability tied to that stat: Strength fans get combat bonuses, Soul bunnies can exorcise demons from humans and Sense heroes have an instinctive knowledge about the demons and their habits. This is an improvement on the old breakdown where Soul got the demonology and Sense got Spot Hidden, because, hey, everyone likes to Spot Hidden. The problem now is that exorcism really doesn’t appear that useful (it only works on one of the three demon types, for starters) but it is compenstated by the fact that Soul powers all the magic – and magic in Dread is awesome.
On the surface it’s a simple spell system: you know double your Soul in spells can cast your Soul per day – or more, if you’re willing to risk health damage. But the spells are something else entirely. Their effects are familiar in many of their broad effects (fend off blows, put people to sleep, rain down fire) but the devil is in the descriptions – and the names. The blow-fender makes your hands turn into stone swords which can block bullets. The sleep spell causes ten-inch albino leeches to latch onto the victim and suck him into unconsciousness. The fireball spell is called Dresden. To cast the shockwave spell, you drive your fist into the ground. That last one’s new – one of the thirty-plus new spells added in this edition, bringing the total to about 84, and making the world’s best spell list approximately 60% bigger and four times more awesome.
What’s also nice about the spells is almost every one is followed by an example of game play. This demonstrates not just how the spell might be useful but also, once again, the style, feel and flow of the game. Dread understands the most important rule of RPGs, and that is that every part of your rules should be telling people how to play, from the punctuation down. Dread knows this, and chooses its words accordingly.
The same approach is also done for the skills, which are broad and simple – stuff like Science, Journalism and Crime (although then it gets weirdly detailed with Charm, Empathy and Intimidate). You won’t get many of them so the precise ones make even less sense, but it’s not a huge issue because you don’t get many of them. Players also get two Contacts they can call for help and Equipment, which they have to roll to get, in what is perhaps the simplest and most elegant wealth system I’ve ever seen, and one which fits perfectly with the street-hunter setting. Players then get to pick a Drive, a chief motivation which can get them an extra die when it applies to a situation. And finally, they get Fury, which allows them to heal, get an extra die, get a re-roll and a few other twists. Annoyingly, some of the more elaborate of these (the cock-punch, the clusterfuck, the middle wayne etc) have some tricky mechanics and changing costs which make them really hard to remember on the fly. They should be on the character sheet, or perhaps made more optional – or more clear. Fury is however a much better name for this stat than Redemption, as it was in the first edition. Fury’s much more in line with what it’s used for.
Speaking of dice, the system is deadly simple. Roll a handful of d12s, the number equal to your stat or skill (and because you don’t add your skill, players tend to be specialists). Beat a difficulty number, between 7 and 13, and you win. Roll any duplicate numbers and you can add the number of duplications to the number rolled. In other words, roll two nines and you get nine plus two or eleven. This allows for exploding dice rolls without exploding too much, so it’s a very elegant mechanic. You do need a stack of d12s but they’re easier to get than Fudge dice, after all.
Combat works the same as any attribute check except you check against your opponent’s defensive roll. Every point you beat is a point of life lost. And hidden in the combat section is one of the best mechanics I’ve seen is years: when you run out of life, you immediately get it all back and 24 Fury – on the understanding that you aren’t going to live past the end of the adventure. This forces dead PCs to go out in an nuclear blaze of glory, and I’m probably going to steal it for all my games from now on.
There’s a very beautiful little vehicle combat system in here as well, that I’ll probably also use in every game from now on. So while Dread in the main is a visceral, splatter action-horror game, it’s also a great source for any modern-day action game. If you’ve been missing things like Millenium’s End or Blood, this could be the game for you.
After all these rules we get some quick start characters, and a quick start chargen process, the latter of which should have been at the start of the book, because chargen always needs a good summary, and then it’s on to the GM’s section. This kicks off with a detailed look at how to craft Dread scenarios, and it’s here I’m going to have to digress for a moment.
One of the best thing about being a reviewer is very, very occasionally, you actually get to participate in the design process. And because Chandler listened and listened well when I reviewed the last edition, I got this chance with Dread. Maybe I’m egotistical, but I can see the influence my comments have had throughout this work, and that feels great for me, and more importantly has made Dread better for it. Never ever let it be said that critics aren’t a key part of the RPG craft. John Wick, I’m looking at you.
So yeah: last time I complained that Dread didn’t seem to know itself what to do with it. The rules were for gun-blazing craziness but the included scenario was like HP Lovecraft writes Leaving Las Vegas. Nor was it clear how to get to the gun-blazing craziness, because it wasn’t really clear how the investigative procedure worked. This time, throughout the whole book, Chandler has worked hard to solve this problem, and for the most part, succeeded. He’s explained, most importantly, how to weave in action scenes into the plot. He’s actually specified the default structure for a Dread adventure with the kind of precision I’ve never seen outside of Ghostbusters or Paranoia – yet this is something so vital to GMing it belies belief how often it is absent. For example, just as Paranoia adventures typically involve a visit to R&D, you can bet that every Dread adventure involves inadvertently crossing paths with criminals. It should have been obvious because of all the examples, but it’s not until you see it written down like this that you get it. Act three is always criminals for the Disciples to kill relatively easily – to get their blood pumping for the final demonic showdown. That’s great to know and it makes adventure design so much easier.
Indeed, the whole structure goes Trigger – Investigation – Conflict (the killing criminals bit) – Revelation (about the demon) – Takedown. Each is explained pretty well but there’s still a few gaps remaining. Most importantly, it’s still not clear what kind of investigations can lead to the demons. Those who max out their Sense stat can find out stuff about demons based on its habits but it’s not something players can do themselves, really. They can’t go “ah, baby teeth in a pile, it’s a Vouzire”. Not without playing for years, of course, but the beauty of having 42 demons in the book is you don’t need to repeat yourself. Of course, the GM can hand over this stuff but I wish it’d been made a little bit more explicit. For example, every demon listed contains a section headed “Takedown” which is basically a suggestion for how an adventure involving that demon might be triggered or play out. What could have been added as well is a short list of Clues that can point to that demon being active, so GMs know what to put in the Investigation and Revelation parts of the adventure without too much work. That would make the game ten times easier to run. Clue trails are really the heart of what makes Cthulhu so easy to run, and it’s painful that this last little step is missing here.
Even the included adventures run into this problem – there are a few times when investigation routes are described without any clear indication of how the players would get there, and vice versa too – clues are given with no indication of where they lead. I feel like Chandler knows himself how it all fits together, or GMs so loosely that to him it doesn’t matter, but on the written page, it remained just that bit unclear.
But hey, ten hundred points for including not one but two sample adventures, even if the first one is a bit sketchy and vague. They don’t have any great progression to them – they occupy that half-space between adventure and list of protagonists and set-pieces – but even with that assumption the first one’s still a bit dodgy for the reasons outlined above. But as I said, there’s kudos for even providing them. Plus we also get a handful of adventure hooks and the lovely fun of a random adventure generator. This is another reason why this is such an awesome second edition: Chandler has gone above and beyond, filling the book with double the information of the last one, adding all the really useful stuff too many books would tuck in a GM’s guide, making the product four times more useful.
Speaking of increases, we’ve also gone from about 25 demons to over 40 of them, and each write-up is bigger, tighter and much clearer. And more disturbing than ever. Dread’s demons are absolute ball-tearers, mixing the face-shredding horror of Clive Barker with the child-raping awfulness of an episode of Special Victims Unit. Dread’s demons not only cause human misery, they feed off it and encourage it, turning the whole world into their hell. This double whammy assaults all the senses at once – splattering us with gore at its most disturbed level while at the same time holding up a mirror to the worst of human nature. Examples include the Mursallic which finds poor people who desperately need money for medical or legal expenses, and rescues them, only to then manipulate them into a hideous devil’s bargain – before slaughtering them all, and the Phoriag which systematically kills men of authority in a young woman’s life, leaving her with the impression that she was raped – an impression she gets over and over again, as the killings continue. Put the kids to bed, people, this is messed up stuff. These bad boys could definitely go toe-to-toe with the stuff in Hite’s Book of Unremitting Horror, and did I mention, there are almost twice as many of them now. For the same price. This really is the bumper book of holiday fun edition.
But as well as stuffing the turkey, Chandler’s also trimmed the fat. Last time, I mentioned that the six page backstory on the demons was both dreary and irrelevant. This time, it’s gone. Completely. Chandler had the balls – and the creative insight - to edit himself to that degree, to cut out the entire thing. That’s a rare thing in any creative field, and I have unending respect for it. And I wonder if I can make some suggestions in this review that he will slavishly obey for the next edition. Chandler! Giant yellow birds! Monotreme-based magic! Zeppelin combat rules!
Maybe not. But a man can dream. And in the meantime, he can play Dread, assured in the knowledge that he’s got a game where the designer not only knows precisely what he’s doing, and doing it damn well, but also works his ass off to go the extra mile and fill his books with almost everything you could wish for. If you liked Dread before, then this is a must-have, it’s like upgrading from tofu burgers to a fresh piece of rib-eye, just past rare. If you’ve never tried Dread before, then you picked the right time to come to the table, because everything just fell into place in the kitchen. Grab a knife and get stuck in. And wear a napkin – this is going to be messy. In the best possible way.
Style 4 (mostly gets its point across) Substance 5 (right on the money)
