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The Prologue of this book is entitled "Color-Blind," but I like to call it "Five Pages That Hurt My Soul." The premise of the story is neat, with two Hunters having decided to track down the wizard known as Purple, who first appeared in the main Hunter rulebook. Unfortunately the story has a number of flaws, all of which prevented my enjoying the tale. By the numbers:
1. He's an ex-druggie who's turned his life around after being imbued! She's an attorney gone mad after being imbued, and believes the only good monster is an extinguished monster! Together, they fight crime----I mean, make the world a better place. I swear I could hear the Odd Couple theme playing as I read through this section.
2. Marco, the ex-druggie Imbued, is hardly the kind of real-life kind of character we're always being told the story of Hunter is all about. While we're always hearing how becoming a Hunter changes a person's life forever, usually in a downward cycle leading to ruin, Marco would seem to be some sort of poster boy for Imbuement. He gets imbued, gives up on drugs and everyone he knows in the drug scene, becoming a freelance computer programer who makes a "three-figure hourly rate" who doesn't stay at jobs very long, because he gets bored easily, but he always manages to stay employed. Oh, and he makes more money than all his friends combined, is a prodigy, looks younger than his age, works only twenty-five hours a week, and is both "brilliant" and "street smart."
You know, I think I know why I hate the character of Marco so much. Rather than sounding like a real person, like almost every other character to have appeared in the Hunter line, he sounds like one of the overachievers that seemed to litter the pages of all the Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage books when I used to read them on a regular basis. Perhaps the fact that Marco comes off as an uber-man, would-be cooler than thou character is why I disliked this story so much, since that's not what Hunter's about. That, and apparently he sticks with the violent Hunter because she makes him feel tighty in his whities, despite his feeling that she's a psychopath.
3. The story doesn't flow well at times, though I think that could have easily been fixed by breaking up sections of it with asterisks or those little crosses used in later sections of the book.
The Introduction of the book just says how Spellbound is a resource for using mages in Hunter, and goes over what is to be found in later chapters. As in several previous Hunter releases, one chapter covers things from one perspective, with a later chapter covering the same events from another.
Chapter One, entitled "A Terrible Thing to Waste," is fairly well-written, and impressed me when the author brought out a very cliched story at one point, only to turn it on its ear. The chapter details a Hunter who believes one of his students is a new Imbued, only to be mistaken, and the consequences of that misjudgement.
I didn't really enjoy the work, mostly because, as in previous Hunter books, a Hunter encounters someone who appears to be a fellow Imbued, but never bothers using Second Sight on the supposed Hunter because, hey, then we wouldn't have the whole mistaken identity deal to base the story off of.
Seriously, if I was a Hunter and someone seemed to have supernatural abilities or similar powers to mine, the first thing I would do is check to see if he was wrong; much like looking away when religious artifacts start emitting light, if this simple rule was followed countless lives could be saved each year.
Also, there's two bits of the story that don't make sense, rules-wise. One of which involves the finale of the tale, and I admit my confusion may come from the fact that I haven't read a Mage release since that game's first edition, and rules may have been changed since then. The second thing, however, is something that's popped up in previous Hunter books on several occasions, and either the author got their knowledge about dying undead mixed up, or they just didn't want to address the subject in their story, and so had a cop-out resolution for it. That's really too bad, as the resolution of the subplot would have been far more interesting to me than the actual end to this story, which left me shrugging my shoulders and saying "Oh, well, too bad, next chapter please."
Lastly, and I just don't understand this, the word "fuck" is written as "f---," but "fucked" is written out totally. Why one is more offensive than the other I do not know. As it is, if you can ignore these bits, I'm sure you'll enjoy the chapter. I wasn't so fortunate.
Chapter Two, "Playing With Fire," had some real good stuff in it and some real bad stuff, some of the latter of which may not have been the author's fault. The story of this chapter revolves around a series of church, synagogues, and mosque burnings being perpetrated by mages, and the team of Hunters which gets together to deal with them.
The author produced an excellent tale for this chapter. He details the characters, but at no time does he go into such description that you feel he's being paid by the word; with a minimum of words he manages to give you a good feel for each character. Their actions make sense and the unexplained portions of the story feel as though they're unexplained because the characters could not figure out what was going on, and not because the author wrote himself into a corner and decided to hell with trying to explain things. I do have to tip my hat to the author, as one portion of this chapter left me going "What the Hell?" repeatedly, and wondering how something this dumb could be in a Hunter book. As it turned out in the connecting chapter later in the book, it was a sign that the character involved in the WTH experience is many fries short of a Happy Meal, something that I had not expected, and caused the annoying bits to make perfect sense.
Also, it was nice to see a story where mystic artifacts show up wrong to Second Sight, not to mention them now being able to be Trailed by Hunters.
Now, for the bad of the chapter....
Like I said before, my main beef with this chapter comes from something that probably was not the writer's fault. Soldier91 pops up in this story. For those of you who have been reading the Hunter book series, you know that in the First Contact book Soldier was supposedly on his way to Haiti, looking for a missing friend and soon to run into the big batch of horror introduced (but never explained) in The Walking Dead sourcebook. After talking to one of the regular contributors to the Hunter line, who dropped all sorts of hints about Haiti I was psyched for the return of Soldier, sure that when he reappeared it would be a grand thing, revealing all about the horrors of Haiti and probably unleashing some really nasty stuff on Hunters.
Instead we get Soldier saying "I can't explain why I'm back in this country. I have my own reasons."
Well, that makes sense in the game world, but for those of us in the real world following this story it just makes us sigh and wonder when the heck (if ever) we'll find out what went down in Haiti. Building up to what sounds like an ultra-cool story and then having the character show up and be like "I don't want to talk about it" is a shanking to the reader. It reminds me of the Shadowman comic that was published in the mid-90s. One of the big deals was the true secret behind his origin. Around issue seventeen of the book someone tells Shadowman his true history, but all the reader saw of it was a panel or two of him sitting around going "Wow, that's was just amazing" after he had his origin explained to him off-panel. I think it was almost a year and a half later before his origin was actually revealed to the reader, but by that point I'd lost interest and moved on to other things. I'm getting that same feeling with the Haiti storyline in Hunter.
Another problem is that the author decided to throw in a Twin Peaks homage in this story, having a character narrating his escapades into a tape recorder for an unknown person known only as Diane. Several times throughout the story I was really getting into it, only to have the mood broken as it switched to this character's perspective and he started talking to Diane. Given the "realistic" tone that is supposed to Hunter, I found this annoying and, well, dumb. Maybe the author didn't think too many of the readers would be familiar with the series, and so thought the joke was subtle, but for me it was annoying.
Finally, there's the healing portion of this chapter. At one point one of the characters is near-death, and another Hunter decides to kiss him, which as it turns out activates his hereforto-unknown Respire power, bringing the injured Hunter back from near-death.
Now, this could have been cool, if say the healing character suddenly had some sort of inspiration about his power and instinctively used it to heal his injured comrade. Unfortunately, the paragraphs before and during the healing come off as a bad combination of a trashy romance novel and wound fetish porn, with talk of "His mouth tasted like blood, but that just made it more intense" and "I wanted to give it all to him, to give him back the life that he risked to save us." Frankly, it seemed as though the character was just trying to play some tonsil hockey before his compatriot's demise, and the healing was just a lucky coincidence.
Then, of course, there is the reaction by one of the other Hunters to the kiss. At first I thought White Wolf was going to handle this in a really cool manner. The way the healing is described, it seems as though the Hunter who witnessed the healing didn't make the correlation between the kiss and the healing---indeed, she doesn't seem to understand that any sort of healing took place, as though the injured Hunter somehow revitalized himself. I figured the Hunter was appalled by the kiss because she saw it as one of her comrades taking advantage of another during his injured state, and thus violating the sanctity of the latter's body. The idea that your body is your own is very important to me, for a multitude of reasons. With that perspective, I was really excited to see how the author was going to handle this.
Sadly, the author drops the ball on this one, making the Hunter who witnessed the kiss to be nothing more than a homophobe, whose fate in a later chapter seems to stem from her feelings and opinions, but more on that when we get to it.
Chapter Three, "Serpent in the Fold," details contact between Hunters and Technomancers---those mages who focus their warping of reality through technology. This is a very good chapter, well-written, excellently detailing how a Hunter might view mages and both their activities and infighting. The conflicts between Hunters because of differing viewpoints is also well-done. My only gripe is what appears to be a small nod to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I would never have picked up on if not for the cover art of the book. Mayhaps the editor of the book was an Initiative fan.
Chapter Four, "Through the Looking Glass," is a continuation of the first chapter, picking up an unspecified amount of time after it. This is a very good chapter, with e-mails between several mages as they debate what to do about Hunters. In some ways it reads like the Hunter.net postings found in the Creedbooks, only from the perspective of the enemy; the author does an excellent job of showing that some mages aren't that different from Hunters in their perspectives, beliefs, and philosophies. There's also some laugh-out loud moments, and I mean that in a good way, such as when Witness1 shows up and seems to be some sort of major-league bad guy to one of the mages.
If this chapter has any flaws, it comes near the end, involving a mage's attempts to invade Hunter.net. First, while it does not come out and say so, the last few pages could be read as though Witness1 does indeed project himself into the net, ala the Virtual Adepts or the Witness1 story in Inherit the Earth; that's not something I'm keen on, myself. Second, the ending sets up a future screwing of Hunters in later game books, which kind of makes the Messengers hands-on activity in this story less-than-effective and actually makes them look pretty impotent as mysterious cosmic beings go.
Chapter Five, "Cult of Personality," continues the tale from the second chapter. It's very well-written, and I have to admit that twice while I read it I was genuinely surprised by the plot twists the author pulled out. The only flaw concerns the homophobe character introduced in chapter two. Her final fate isn't spelled out, but it seems fairly certain she met a tragic end.
For some reason this reminded me of an Outer Limits episode, where all the victims of a strange creature are rescued, save for two men who die horrible fates, who seemed to die only because they had been portrayed as jerks earlier in the program, and the writer felt the audience would enjoy seeing the non-politically correct sorts die horribly. I got the feeling the homophobe here met her fate for similar reasons, which is sad, as she turns out to be a pretty interesting character in this chapter.
Chapter Six, "Cogs in the Machine," continues the tale from the third chapter, telling it from the perspective (for the most part) of the Technocracy mages involved in both sides of the story. It's well-written, giving a good view at Technocracy mages for those unfamiliar with the Mage line. I can't think of a single flaw to be found in this chapter.
Chapter Seven goes into the behind the scenes and rules information for Storytellers. The descriptions of mages, their backgrounds, and various belief systems are well-covered, allowing a Storyteller without the Mage rulebook to run wizards with no problem. Given space limitations not all of the groups of mages could be detailed, and I'm sure some readers will be disappointed by the lack of description regarding Nephandi and Marauder mages; perhaps a future supplement will rectify that.
The rules section of the chapter, for the most part, are great, building off the information presented in the Hunter Storyteller Companion. There are only a few problems spots in this section. Amusingly, two of the new rules (one regarding detecting Awakening mages, and the other involving mages detecting the Messengers) seem to have been written based on events in earlier chapters of the books, to make such occurrences possible in your game. What makes this funny is that the way the rules are written, neither one supports the events from earlier in the book, and one of the rules sets actually contradicts what happens in the story.
Additionally, a problem that first popped up in First Contact shows up here, with an author not seeming to fully understand the Discern Edge, among other things again writing as though the power works on normal humans just as well as it does on supernatural beings; at one point mundane humans (acolytes) who associate with mages are listed as showing up as wrong to second sight. And in just an odd note, we're informed that every single mage has at least five servants working for him/her/it. Why that is, I have no idea.
Finally, there is the art of the book. There's several pieces by Christopher Shy, which I suspect might be nice. I say "suspect" because most of the pictures are black on black, so that most of the details are not visible unless you're standing under direct sunlight, and event then some of them are hard to make out. Given the pop-culture bits I mentioned earlier, I was more than disturbed when I found that one of the creatures depicted by Shy seemed to be a fusion of the Tyrant and William Berkin from the Resident Evil series of games.
As for the other artists, their contributions range from "Wow, that's really nice," to "How did this get published?" There are several pictures that are incredibly bad, with a few that I could not figure out what they were trying to depict until I read the accompanying text, and even then I had to imagine really hard to accept that the pictures were representative of the author's tale. This book is not one of White Wolf's greatest accomplishments in RPG art.
So, do I recommend The Spellbound? Despite my aforementioned misgivings, I can see it proving very helpful to those who wish to run mages in their Hunter games without buying the Mage rulebook. If you can get past the problems I mentioned, I think you'll find it a useful purchase.
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