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The Horror Recognition Guide (HRG from now on) is a fictional stack of files paid for in blood and heartbreak. Dozens of stories culled from the clandestine battle raging between them and us – only nobody knows who “they” are and “us” is defined by who you’d trust with your life, because once you are in the only way out is a zippered bag.
Overview: The HRG is many things but foremost it is a tease. A delicious peak inside the boggling world of the supernatural as told from the perspective of Hunters who are drowning in the darkness. There are no stat blocks, nor easy technical descriptions which is what attracted me since I don't play the Storyteller System. Part of the fun with this book is figuring out what – exactly – the narrator(s) is facing. There are 16 chapters/files in the HRG but another story is being told by those who are handling the document, which means 17 stories in all and a good look inside the World of Darkness but without the comforting labels of a rulebook.
Layout & Design: The black and white (grayscale) book is as bold as I can imagine a non-colored book being. It presents itself as a series of case files or folders filled with emails, pictures, prisoner transcripts, hand written notes, newspaper clippings, and more. The graphic work is superb from coffee stained photos to police reports. The only down side to such a varied page layout is that a few times I read articles out of order. However, the style gives far more to the book than the cost of scanning a busy page to see where you went wrong. The chaotic patchwork of the file-note-paperclip system breathes a stilted and uneasy feeling to the read… it enhances the goal of the book.
The Meat: This is a big book and every entry somehow seems totally unique. Part of the pleasure of the book is in the discovery so I won’t give a blow-by-blow of each chapter. I will say that inside you’ll find the usual fare inside as you would expect from the World of Darkness including vampires, werewolves, wizards, and other ghoulies. Yet, they are not strait up tropes of the bloodsucking undead or high-noon type spell slinging. The stories are twisted and told from odd angles to make the reader work for the answer. One of the stories, “The Cat Lady,” is a demonic tale rooted in every child’s nightmare of the mean old lady with the bad lawn and 10,000 cats at the end of your cul-de-sac. You remember the place, it was where the street lights don’t quite shine as brightly as they should. It serves as a good example story.
The writing of “The Cat Lady” is evocative, steering the childish fear right into adult horror. There is a huge creep factor in this story as in the stories in the HRG. The wording is fairly precise rather than a long winded rulebook speech. The writers don’t have much room to make their play and bring it home so they cannot afford too many errant words. The 13 pages of this story are crammed with information about nearly every aspect of the Vigil.
Most of "The Cat Lady" is a lone Hunters journal but there are hand written commentary, pictures of the Cat Lady and her cats (and the victims), newspaper clippings, and hand written notes from the 9-to-5 boss threatening to fire the Hunter from his crappy job if he is late again. The Hunter is obviously flying blind and getting sucked into an obsession. He’s neglecting the normal facets of life in favor of the hunt. The journal text doesn't tell you this, it shows you. "The Cat Lady" doesn’t quite bring you back to the 4th grade and that day you came home sobbing in fear that the craggy old woman was going to feed you to her cats but it sure helps you remember what that fear was and how it turned your pubescent insides into a rank gurgling that kept you awake for many nights to come.
For Storytellers the value is in the ready made adventures that demand to be inserted into your campaign - there are game mechanics but the adventure ideas literally roll off the page for you to mold into a spook fest for your campaign. For players the value is in seeing how something as simple as the ubiquitous cat lady can become something far more sinister in the World of Darkness.
My personal favorite story is Gnosopharm. It is so screwed up that I can’t use it as an example. I am not completely fluent in the World of Darkness setting but I think one group of the bad guys are Seers of the Throne, there is an unknown group, a lone hunter, and Task Force: Valkyrie. They are all trying to stick it to each other and performing admirably save for the lone hunter who is the chum that brings the sharks to the surface.
Summation: The Horror Recognition Guide is a darn fine read even if it wasn't a RPG book it is still a good read. It has plenty of applications to your Urban Fantasy/World of Darkness game as a player or as the game master. Familiarity with the White Wolf line is not a perquisite. I don’t play White Wolf game and I had not read Hunter: the Vigil before reading the HRG. It was still a fairly gripping read. Maybe I could have gotten more out of the book if I knew who was who instead of trying to discover that for myself. I am sure there are clues that I passed in total ignorance – but – the book was still a creepy little gem. I’d have liked to see this in color and with high end art. Some of the pictures were so blurry that I could not tell what I was looking at but I’ll note that they were supposed to be blurry. The art is fine save for that and being grayscale rather than full color.
I give the Horror Recognition Guide two thumbs up. If you play urban fantasy this is a book that you should look into, if for no other reason than to see how one group of people took the genre tropes and ran the ball the way they wanted to do it.
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