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In Short

The Good: Everything about the product presentation is intensely atmospheric and really helps the reader enter the role of a child in a horror story. The antagonists and suggested story hooks help bring this sort of roleplaying home, and provide a lot of great ideas. This is a fully self contained product.

The Bad: The World of Darkness system is included again here, taking up a large portion of the product (for those not seeking another copy). Children are poorly handled by the game system, as the differences between children and adults are more roleplay oriented than mechanics oriented.

The Physical Thing

Under the Cover

The system handles children by having the Storyteller acknowledge that children tend to be weaker and less able than adults. Children are built in the same way as adults, though they receive fewer Skill points based on age. There is no mechanical difference between a child with Strength 4 and an adult with Strength 4 except that the Storyteller is expected to know that children are weaker than adults and so that’s a Strength 4 on the child scale. While I appreciate the simplicity that the designers are striving for, I do wish there was a mechanical solution to this difference.

That said, if you’re willing to hand wave the differences between children and adults then you will find plenty of mechanical examples of kids doing kids stuff. Studying for exams, skateboarding, and whatever else are easily handled by the system. While tasks like studying for a test might not seem like a big deal, I think these mechanical examples do a great job of emphasizing how horror in the life of these kids can make mundane tasks even more difficult for them to get through.

Despite my gripes, I do think the system does a good job of generally modeling life (especially the more mundane tasks) for kids and is an easy to use system for groups who want the mechanics to fall into the background. Where the product really shines, though, is in its roleplay and setting support.

The roleplay support is found throughout the product, both in the form of essays on parenting or children by the authors and in the form of explicit discussion of child development. I doubt all readers will find all of this to be useful. Certainly some of the essays were not interesting to me, and some of the other discussion can easily be found through online resources. However, on the whole there’s a lot to chew on here and the product goes out of its way to make sure to cover a large variety of viewpoints on children. Outside of game system, which encompasses at least half of the product, discussion on ways to portray child protagonists and the problems they encounter is the second most common topic to be found here.

One of my favorite resources that I’m glad to see included is the Piaget and Erickson Theories of Cognitive Development in Children. This list walks the reader through the way the brain works at different ages and provides the reader with a firmer idea of how and why children might think the way they do. While just a side bar in the product, this is an example of how useful some of the included information can be. While anyone could go look this list up online, having a large variety of similar resources all in the same place is very helpful.

While the support is good, it’s the setting that really helps to bring this book to life. This isn’t the World of Darkness you know. The book suggests it’s fully compatible with everything else, and in terms of raw rules that’s true. However, the way the supernatural is presented is through the eyes of children. Sometimes this means the World of Darkness is just different. Vampires as the suave and seductive creatures they are just don’t work as well for a story about children, so more emphases is placed on vampires that appear grotesque (at least when spied upon) or the shock of discovering lots of blood and a creature that eats blood. These sorts of twists and changes are absolutely necessary, in my view, as the World of Darkness settings have all been built with adult characters in mind.

The supernaturals themselves, though, see only a few pages of attention. A lot of work was put into adventure seeds and, mostly, adversaries. These aren’t big bad guys, necessarily, but strange and unusual entities that could easily be the center of a few sessions of play. Consider, for example, the Voices in the Dark which are malevolent spirits that take the form of dead children. It takes little effort to make these entities scary as hell, especially for players really taking on the mindset of children. A variety of NPCs and monsters like this are included to provide the Storyteller with plenty of material and, more importantly, to help the reader get a feel for the sorts of stories that Innocents works best with. I think this is an excellent way to approach the product, and it strongly aids in making this an even more independent product. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend combining Innocents with any other World of Darkness product with the possible exception of a few mortals titles (mixing it with Second Sight could be interesting and disturbing).

My Take

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