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I'm normally pretty reluctant to slam the work of a single author, as is the case here; Jennifer Brozek is responsible for the entirety of Proverbial Monsters, so she gets to claim the lion's share of praise or opprobrium from its reviews. However, what she's done is essentially write a Shadowrun supplement in the New World of Darkness, two great tastes that go together under no circumstances whatsoever. (Actually, I have a profound antipathy for Shadowrun, but that's neither here nor there.) Once you realize that she's doing that, the utterly bizarre nature of the creatures, and the assumptions that surround them, become much more understandable. My original review contained a lot of sputtering and flailing and invocations of the luminescent, wabbling severed upside-down head of Bob Dylan, but I rewrote it slightly after I realized what was going on.

First off, the monsters in question aren't proverbial, but instead derive from superstition; if you violate the superstition, you invoke the wrath of a particular monster. For instance, you know the saying "Step on a crack, break your mother's back?" There is literally an earth golem whose wrath is incurred by stepping on a crack, which looks like a crack in the ground. If you walk underneath a ladder, you pick up a monster which gives you bad luck. Crack a mirror? Mirror monster starts hunting you? Pick up a five-leaf clover? You'll be hip-deep in goblin roaches before you know it. All that glistens isn't gold? Gold monster what eats you. Open an umbrella indoors? Monster. If you wear opals and you weren't born in October, you run the risk of getting a monster after you.

I'm not joking. I mean, this is literally what happens.

The whole focus of the World of Darkness is that the supernatural is relatively low-key; creating an entire bestiary whose existence owes entire to kid's rhymes is an action so jarring the tone of every book to date that it's a wonder that it got past the editorial phase. Vampires are deathly afraid of being found out by the human race as a whole, while these monsters seem to persecute their prey based on superstititons that nine-year-olds think are just for babies.  

And believe me, almost all of these superstitions are stupid. Don't open an umbrella indoors. Don't step on a crack. Don't walk underneath a ladder. Most of them are the result of either childish stupidity or paint thinner abuse, not actual occult lore. Treating them as if they're actual, honest warnings creates a world in which the vampires of the Ordo Dracul scream for their visitors not to step on the red parts of the rug because the red parts of the rug are lava and if the visitors step on the red parts they'll die because it's lava. This is probably going to be followed up with by a stern lecture from the visitors about how Grandpa's medicines are for Grandpa and to stay the hell out of the medicine cabinet.

I mean, maybe the problem is that the concept wasn't carried far enough. Wear white shoes after labor day? Chupacabra. Spill some salt? Rape goblin. Tear the tag off of a mattress? The moon falls out of the sky on your head. Smuggle food into a movie theater? Satan steals your car and takes it for a joyride.

Just - just - look at the Doliochton. It's created from the whole "Step on a crack, break your mother's back" idea - when you step on a crack, that's actually the Doliochton's tail, and then it comes alive and eats you. I'm not kidding. If you were going by the same rules as the rest of the World of Darkness, it'd be something like a big crack in the ground in an abandoned part of the city that you can step on to cause harm to your enemy, but only at the cost of harming yourself, or something like that - low-key, creepy, playing to the weaknesses of human beings and possibly not supernatural at all. Here, it's a monster.

And there's an adventure to go with it. The player character are hired to escort scientists into the jungle as part of an archaeological expedition. Two scout teams have gone forward and failed to report back, except for a single survivor who's gone insane and rants about a mouth in the jungle swallowing the team up. The PCs go in before grave robbers or competing scientific teams are able to reach the pyramid first; on their way, an NPC gets eaten up by the Dolichthon and it's up to the PCs to kill the Dolicthon and get the scientists to the pyramid.

First off, the new iteration of the World of Darkness is an intensely local one - the world-spanning campaigns that marked Vampire and Mage have been replaced with something much more local. Integrating this kind of thing into an existing campaign is juat about impossible. Second off, this feels very much like a Shadowrun adventure, complete with the team of mercenaries fighting off a supernatural threat while being paid by a group that's worried about its competition. Third, the disappearance of two scout teams in a movie makes for a nicely atmospheric moment in a movie, but in a role-playing game, it's a cue for the PCs to grab every single weapon that they can lay their hands on, up to and including nuclear weapons. Fourth, the Dolicthon has eight health levels, two levels of armor and an attack pool of about nine; it's not going to be difficult for regular humans to gun it down, much less a supernatural creature; its primary defense is to hide.

Fifth, and more importantly: How the hell do you find a crack in a jungle? Cracks occur when something that's very dry is struck by an external force or has its substance repeatedly heated and cooled, stressing the material until it cracks. I'm not entirely sure of the exact nature of the physics or chemistry involved, but I know that it's impossible for something to crack when it's wet; it splatters, or just blorps when you hit it with something. So how you find a crack in a jungle - one of the wettest environments on God's green earth, save the ocean or my armpits - is a mystery to me.

Or take the Goblin Roach. Goblin roaches are swarms of magic bugs that live in meadows, whose king secretes a chemical that makes clovers grow five leaves; when a king wants to challenge another king, he yanks up the clover and the two swarms fight to the death. Unfortunately, if a human being grabs the clover, the swarm thinks that the human is doing the challenging and swarms him instead.

Again, this kind of monster works really well in a magic-rich environment like Shadowrun, where there's all sorts of D&D-inspired creatures traipsing about the landscape for Shadowrunners to gun down. In the much more quasi-realistic World of Darkness, there's no way that a swarm of thousands of five-to-seven inch cockroach-looking things would go unnoticed for any amount of time. (They're described as "uncommon", so adjust your treasure charts and wandering monster tables accordingly.) The idea that there's enough of them that they can find each other's five-leaf clovers and yank them out of the ground is even harder to swallow, given the fact that the World of Darkness is supposed to look relatively normal until a supernatural creature fucks up and blows its cover.

Or take Autumne, a spirit who gets mad at you for wearing opals if you weren't born in October. He gets so mad, in fact, that if you wear opals and you weren't born in October, there's a good chance that he'll show up and demand an apology for what you did, and then slash your soul with aggravated damage if your apology isn't sincere enough. Apparently the World of Darkness wasn't complete without a Fashion Ghost wandering around tearing people's souls apart for what kind of jewelry they wear and when. ("You're wearing those shoes with that hat? That's such a major faux pas that I'm going to TEAR YOUR SOUL APART WITH MY SPECTRAL CLAWS BLEAH BLEAH BLEAH.") Werewolves, if you encounter this spirit, beat the living shit out of him and then bind him into polyester leisurewear; it's the only way he'll learn.

They're not all completely terrible. For instance, the Domons are little goblin-creatures that live in your house and keep things neat and tidy if you pay them proper respect, but start causing mischief and grief if you don't - up to and including attacking you with their poisoned claws as a final option. There is a really neat bit where the Domons can't be harmed by anything inside the house, so that kitchen knife that you're holding won't do anything - but a hunting knife from the store will. You could do a short little Gremlins-style adventure with them, but the emphasis on being properly grateful to them disjuncts from the usual atmosphere of the supernatural being inherently corruptive and creepy.

I think that if you're looking for odd monsters for your Shadowrun campaign, or for a D&D game, this will work out quite nicely, and provide a good challenge, but if you're looking for stuff that fits the tone of the World of Darkness, I would look elsewhere.

-Darren MacLennan

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