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Slasher Flick: Deleted Scenes is an eleven page PDF (ten once you get past the title page) of rules options and material removed from the main game book. Cost of purchase at major PDF sites such as RPGnow.com is $1.99.
Section One
This is a short blurb explaining the point of the book: Designers, either for space purposes or otherwise, often have material left over when working on a book. Here is the material she had left over.
Section Two
We get some rules additions here, including player versus player combat. The main rulebook assumes that all combat will be handled with Primary and Secondary characters versus The Killer, but here you can have intense confrontations pushed to the breaking point (ala Night of the Living Dead) or even just bullies picking on nerds in physical contests.
“Fisticuffs” (non-lethal hand to hand combat) and lethal combat are covered here. The lethal combat rules are designed to ensure that while two characters may rough each other up, it is still difficult for one to actually kill the other…so you don’t wind up with a player deciding to steal the killer’s thunder.
Also, there’s an option for extending a combat scene, so you two can recreate the awesome fight scene between Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live!
Optional rules are then included for weapons, which are glossed over in the main rules as scene props (and rightfully so, in many instances). The author provides new rules for both killers using weapons and non-killers using weapons, the latter option giving the characters the chance to do more damage when fending off the killer.
The last rule in this section adds Performance Points, which allows for players beefing up their Primary Character in the sequel, even though their characters in the original “film” probably didn’t make it.
This last rule probably leaves me the most cold…this is definitely an RPG where advancement seems fairly irrelevant (especially seeing as how if the survivor of one film shows up in the sequel, it’s usually to get bumped off early on). The best addition in this section, in my opinion, is the player vs player combat rules, something I’m sure I could get use out of.
Section Three
Here the author adds more goodies for character creation, including Special Abilities like Wholesome (which gives the Girl Next Door even more resistance to the killer) and Resourceful (which allows a character to trade in Survival points for more Genre points in order to, say, power a Special Ability or utilize one of the five Metagame options for Genre Points such as Just What I Needed).
The author wraps up this section with a list of common items for the characters, from cell phones (which everyone knows are useless in a horror movie) to condoms (which probably mean you’re on the road to getting yourself killed) to pot (instant death).
Section Four
Here the author provides some additional tips for the Director, starting with the Early-Flick Kill (see the recent Friday the 13th remake). The caveat to using this being that if you do off a character in an Early Flick Kill, the death should be worth an additional Genre Point for removing a character so soon.
Next, we move onto more Character-Centric flicks, in which the Primary Characters are far more central to the flick, and are harder to kill. This is accomplished both by modifications making the Primaries harder to kill and mowing through Secondary and/or Tertiary characters in order to build your baddie up, or just having a much lower bodycount.
Finally, we get to Surviving Characters. This is when Tommy Jarvis returns to Crystal Lake or Nancy Thompson shows up to tell the kids in the psych ward she knows about the nightmares they are having and leads the charge to take on Freddy…or Scream where Sydney, Dewey and Gale just keep coming back for more.
In Conclusion
There are some nice bits in here. Everything added makes sense from the stance of genre emulation, which isn’t a surprise given the author’s other works…but is it worth the $1.99 asked for it? I would say yes, particularly due to Player vs Player Combat, the new Special Abilities and the whole Director’s Section. If you didn’t pre-order Slasher Flick but you did decide you like the game, do yourself a favor and pick this up…there are some very nice touches for the genre in here.
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