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A bit about me in relation to this book - I'm a fan of the Supernatural TV show. Not totally hardcore, but I do spend time on Supernatural fan sites and discussion forums, and I've seen almost every episode. Before the RPG was announced, I figured the premise would be great for an RPG. It solves a lot of problems that other premises have. The players are hunters, they hunt supernatural evil. If the GM puts out a plot hook of supernatural evil, the players will stick together since that's what they're supposed to do. If they don't, they're really breaking from the theme and you can boot them. No excuses of playing in character to be a dick.
Setting up adventures is also pretty simple. Think of a supernatural threat, create a background, some people involved, a location, and clues. Drop the hint, or start the adventure off saying they're visiting X town based on reports of Y happening. Everything will be pretty predictable. There will be a good mix of social interaction, sleuthing, problem solving and combat. Each is pretty crucial, so most players will be happy.
You've probably noticed that I haven't talked about the actual product yet. I'm disclosing my bias, I'm fully expecting to like how it will work. I'm a fan of the show, and I like this type of game. If you were nodding your head as you were reading the above two paragraphs, we're probably on the same page.
Given what I've said, I figure that whether the Supernatural RPG succeeds or fails rests squarely on how good the GM advice and support is. I'm happy to say it delivers very well. Chapter 7: The Story, which focuses on GM advice and how to run the game is a full 26 pages. I haven't counted exactly, but I'd guess it's roughly the same amount of text as Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering, which comes in at 32 pages, but the pages are smaller. The advice is very good, it addresses what makes the Supernatural TV show popular, and what you'll want to include in your game to make sure it delivers what people expect. It covers game styles (hitting the road, which is like the show, evil at home, which would be fighting consistent evils locally, like Buffy or Angel, and professionals, which would be like X-Files). It covers atmosphere. It covers player management. And finally, and most importantly, it covers how to set up an adventure in the vein of how episodes in the TV show were set up. I wouldn't say this chapter itself is worth $30, particularly when you can get Robin's Laws and apply that to the TV show if you prefer your own system, or even skip that entirely as it's fairly self explanatory, but I got some good stuff out of it, and it does cover what needs to be covered.
Chapter 8: The Supernatural covers the bad guys the characters will be facing. The categories are Demons, Ghosts, Shapeshifters, Shtriga, Vampires, Wendigo and Zombies. From 1-3 examples of each are given, some of them are from the TV show and some of them are new. Some people might think this isn't enough, but if you think back to the TV show, a good portion of the bad guys are ghosts. The trick is figuring out where the body is, burning it, and then figuring out that there's either an object or body part left over that's still holding the ghost back. You can get a lot of play out of ghosts that way. Shapeshifters also showed up in multiple forms, so should be able to get some good secondary play there. Demons also showed up quite a bit, and dealing with them is fairly similar to dealing with a ghost, although each one has a slightly different solution. Shtriga I was surprised to see in there, I didn't see them as having much replay value. Vampires, Wendigo and Zombies I can see somewhere in the middle. It's not bad, the hunters could just specialise in certain types of enemies - some even hunted Vampires exclusively. It's a good amount to start with, although eventually you'll have to start inventing your own villains.
Chapter 9: The Mundane provides stats for a bunch of animals, a bunch of sample humans, and multiple sample locations with suggested plots. The animals I don't see getting much use out of, but having stats for humans they'll be interacting with helps a lot, and the locations I think are invaluable. You can basically take a location, take a supernatural villain, figure out how they interact, and then populate the local municipality. Combined with some of the advice on different regions of the US, you even have the type of temperament of the locals.
The GM material is good. It's not quite like the 4e DMG in terms of giving advice for different types of games (con games, weekly sessions, etc), but it's far better than most RPGs I have read which seem to assume you've just figured it out from playing D&D and want a better system.
The rule system is Cortex. I didn't know anything about it before reading this (I was a fan of BSG, but couldn't see at all how it would make for a good RPG setting). It's not quite bog standard point buy, but it's pretty close. If you know point buy RPGs, you already know 90% of the Cortex system - the last 10% is just details. A couple things stood out to me that I really liked. The first was specific advancement point numbers for accomplishing different tasks. Most point buy RPGs leave it entirely up to GM discretion. Supernatural gives something a bit more concrete.
The really cool thing about the system is complications. While like in a conventional point buy system, complications give you extra character points to start with, they also tie in with plot points. Plot points are pretty standard action point/hero point analogues - you can spend them to improve results of a roll, or to introduce a story element (such as Bobby Singer showing up out of nowhere to save Sam and Dean, not quite Deus Ex Machina, but it's close). They tie in with complications in that when you roleplay dealing with a complication, you get plot points. So not only do the complications make things interesting, they're also crucial to get the plot points so you can survive. That's just a sweet point as far as the system goes itself. Supernatural RPG takes it a step further by integrating them nicely into the setting. Demons (and to a lesser degree Ghosts) can possess people with emotional chinks in their armour. These chinks are the complications. If you're dealing with a complication, it sets you on edge and makes you susceptible to demonic possession. Slick! If it weren't for that I wouldn't care much for the system, and would just run things using ORE (Nemesis or A Dirty World) or recommend everyone just use their existing system of choice. The way complications are merged with demonic possession is very crucial to the setting, and would take some work to duplicate it in another system. This combined with the supernatural villains and pre-statted mundane encounters and locations makes it a worthwhile system for the game.
As far as writing for the players go, it's quite thorough. Chapter 1: Be Afraid of the Dark covers the premise of the TV show. If you've watched it, you can skip it although there's useful information in it for anyone. Someone who's never watched the show should read this chapter to be up to speed. Chapter 2: The Basics is a pretty bog standard rules overview, you can skip it if you want. Chapter 3: The Hunters (aka Character Creation) assumes you haven't read it and pretty much goes over everything in Chapter 2 in more detail (the stuff it doesn't elaborate on in Chapter 3 is covered in detail in Chapter 6: The Rules). Chapter 4: Traits and Skills I couldn't bring myself to read through in detail, the only interesting bit was the complications mentioned earlier, but you need to read Chapters 4, 6 and 8 to put together how complications affect the game. Chapter 5: The Gear is also pretty fucking boring to read all the way through. The two points I'd like to highlight is it uses a lifestyle/wealth mechanic rather than the niggling details of keeping track of money. Good stuff - it's really annoying in D&D. Also, vehicles are statted out just like anyone else. It's nice to see a system that goes the simple route rather than making things excessively complicated (I'm looking at virtually every other point buy system out there).
Chapter 6: The Rules deserves special mention - it has one of the best done examples of play I've seen. There are a lot of rules and situations covered (which you'll be used to from any system like GURPS), and the example of play takes a scene from the TV show, and integrates a very solid chunk of the rules examples. I'd say it's rules medium, so it might take a couple reads through to really get a handle on things, but read chapter 6, read the example of play, and then go back and double check some things you weren't sure of and you should have a good handle of the rules.
The Appendix covers a glossary of terms which are pretty useful, although a bit misleading at times (and it warns of this) if you compare what is written to what happened in the TV show. It's all good. There's also a list of music to hunt by, which is a nice touch for only taking up a page. The character sheet is nice, and the sample filled out one in Chapter 3 is pretty self explanatory so that I could figure out how derived stats worked just by looking at the sheet.
Readability is very good, it certainly wasn't tiring to read the whole thing, but I really enjoyed reading the GM chapters more than the player chapters. Apparently the goal was to have a voice like Dean in the writing. If I concentrated I could read it imagining Jensen Ackles' voice, but it went from being easy to read to being tiring by forcing his voice overlay in my head. Instead what it ended up being like was reading a less annoying version of Smiling Jack (who was the really fucking annoying mascot of Savage Worlds, for those of you who don't know). The intentional register shift also ended up being a problem. I can't criticise them per se for not using proper grammar for writing, since they clearly did it intentionally and kept it consistent, but I ended up finding myself re-reading a few clauses which were grammatically correct because I was so used to reading the vernacular.
As far as being a PDF goes, the two columns were pretty annoying, having to scroll up and down, but I figure it should be fine for the physical copy. The pictures were also a bit annoying, for some reason a lot of them took up about a quarter of the page on the top left hand side, which was the worst possible place for a picture in a PDF (best being top right hand quarter of the page). It's also not at all printer friendly, but again the physical copy doesn't suffer from that.
My style rating reflects the fact that it's easy to read, but the writing style is also a bit annoying. Also, given the fact that in the TV show the Ghostfacers secured the rights to the Supernatural RPG (some breaking the 4th wall, perhaps?) they could have done something very cool by writing it from their point of view, and naturally their register would have been much more appropriate for writing but would have been equally fun to read. I honestly don't know why MWP didn't run with that angle, and I must say I'm a bit disappointed.
The substance rating is based off the fact that while it is good, $30 is pretty hefty for a PDF (and even a hardcopy), and while it is a good product with solid and useful information, certainly I'd expect a fan of the show with no RPG experience to do fine with the information presented, there's also nothing really stellar about the rule system (beyond the aforementioned excellent multi-way integration of complications) and most of the GM advice could be figured out by yourself. There aren't any glaring holes or omissions from it, but it also didn't go above and beyond and deliver anything really superb.
Hopefully you can draw your own conclusions by now about whether you think it's worth buying or not, but I'll throw in my two bits. There's nothing in there that is new information. It's not like Star Wars which provided the extended universe. Everything covered in the book is old news to anyone who watches the show, it's just a well done packaging of what's found in the show. Given that there's no reason to buy it for any secret information, I would look at it two ways: If your gaming group will play supernatural with whatever your system of choice is, you might as well stick with it. If your gaming group somehow seems more willing to play Supernatural if it's the official RPG, then it's certainly worth getting. If you're one of the few people reading this review who is just a fan of the TV show, found out about the RPG and doing some research before you buy it - go ahead buy it, you won't be disappointed. Everyone, including me, has their opinions about what system would be best for it, but Cortex is certainly more than capable of handling it.
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