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Like many others, I was immediately impressed with Eden's BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER roleplaying game. I'd seen the company do good work before (notably the zombie-centric ALL FLESH MUST BE EATEN), but this slick, smartly done volume seemed to put them on a whole new level. It was one of those licensed games that's so successful that it makes you more interested in the source material (not that I didn't like BUFFY already, but now I'm renting DVDs and catching reruns whenever I can.) Naturally I just had to check out some of what they had planned supplement-wise.
BUFFY being a show and game about a girl fighting demons, a monster book was a no-brainer for an early entry in the line. But MONSTER SMACKDOWN defied my expectations of just what a "monster book" is; they don't just list monsters here (though they've got plenty), they make it a book on just about everything monster-ish, from help creating them to explaining their role in the Buffyverse. What results is basically a big version of the core rulebook's "Creatures of the Night" chapter, even structured a little similarly, and on that level it's very successful at expanding the game's approach to its critters.
The first chapter gets things rolling quickly- not only do we get the basic "how to use this book" jazz, and some definitions of monster types, we also get a brief listing of hypothetical Hellmouths in addition to Sunnydale (some of which provide pretty good ideas), and even descriptions of several "hellworlds" (for those not up on Buffy lore- dimensions full of nasty demons. Apparently our plane, and the ambiguous heaven Buffy visited briefly, are the only parts of existence not totally overrun by evil soulless monsters.) There's some good variety here- an evil mall modeled on Dante's Inferno, a giant demon corpse inhabited by smaller parasitic monsters, a fairy-tale zone that briefly drags in visitors to act out gruesome stories- it's nice to have choices even if the idea of PCs visiting a hell dimension never occured to you.
There follows an expanded chapter on vampires. Most of it is background, either revealing what we explicitly know about BUFFY vampires as shown/told to us on TV or hypothesizing based on the aforementioned explicit knowledge. When the book does the latter, the text makes it clear; here, as in other chapters, there's plenty of "may have been" and "it could be" and "perhaps" and so on. It's worth calling attention to this, because I think it's one of the book's strengths; the writers let you in on the process of deciding how things work, letting you see how they made certain decisions. It's like having design notes scattered throughout the text, and it encourages a flexible reading (as does the casual Buffyesque prose style.) There's stuff on origins, vamp society, vamp "reproduction", those pesky not-entirely-evil vamps that you don't know what to do with, the morality (or lack thereof) of vampires, even for some reason a coverage of people who are into letting vamps feed on them. (It's happened a couple times on the show, so I guess there's precedent.) Non-Slayer vamp hunters are given some coverage, as is- look, at this point I'm just going to say that everything the authors could think of in relation to Buffy's favored prey, they put in. There are some crunchy bits too. Enjoy.
"From Hell" is all about demons- specifically demon "races" that can appear in multiples, as opposed to unique ones. There's some brief background stuff- origins, morality, all that jazz from before in shorter form- and then it's on to the stats. The variety is excellent, from Hellhounds to Chaos Demons (there's even a dragon), and it covers most of the major demons seen through Season Six. There's a lot to choose from, and this is one of the more useful chapters seeing as many of these critters got minimal attention on the show (usually an episode at most)- there's plenty of potential left to explore. For example, the write-up for the Glark Ghul Kashma'nik- that thing that made Buffy hallucinate that she was just an insane girl- contains a metafictional adventure idea that Directors will be tripping over each other to try first. Vengeance demons also get some text to themselves, though their abilities are dealt with more fully later on. The following chapter deals with monsters that aren't demons, aren't vampires, but are something to themselves- ghosts of various kinds, the undead, "primals" (werewolves and hyena people), fairy tale monsters (the Gentlemen and Der Kinderstod), products of insane science (including the Buffybot) and finally just normal people who do scummy things (paging a Mr. Rayne, a Mr. Ethan Rayne...) Altogether I can't, offhand, think of a monster appearing in the first six seasons who isn't statted either here or in the core book. (With the exception of the squiddy dude from the first few minutes or so of "The Wish." He gets a nice picture though.)
The title of the next chapter- "Bads, Big and Small"- is self explanatory. The Big Bads covered in the core book are given full character-sheet writeups (Drusilla and Angelus are given enhanced scores- Dru to reflect her at the end of Season Six, Angelus as a hypothetical "what if he stayed evil" thing), as is Dracula because, let's face it, he's freaking Dracula (that and the fact that he was in the core book.) Also included are monsters connected to the major Bads, so Glory gets Ben and the ratlike Minions, Adam has some of his cyber-demon offspring, and the Master gets Evil Vamp Willow and Xander. (Evil Magic Willow is being saved for the MAGIC BOX book, while the Trio are presumably being held over for WELCOME TO SUNNYDALE. Sneaky bastards.) These are presented in groupings with their "masters", which is a bit disorienting because it breaks up the alphabetical order of the rest of the chapter, but you get used to it. Other unique monsters, like D'Hoffryn, Sweet and the aforementioned Drac are all given writeups. Located next to Sweet's info is, ambitiously enough, a sidebar about the possibility of running a "Once More With Feeling" episode! I'm not entirely convinced it can be done without copious amounts of booze, but it's nice of the writers to think we should be able to try it. Again, the book seems to cover all the monsters I could think of from the show. I'm sure after a while someone will point out an omission, but the chapter certainly isn't sparse.
"Monster Spawning" is another dead giveaway of a chapter title, and it's basically divided into two areas- building monsters as enemies and having monster PC packages. There?s a listing of various demon powers, basically describing them and their game effects- this is about it for monster NPCs, which is a bit of a shame. As far as Cast Members are concerned, Qualities are provided for Chaos Demons, Miquot Clan Demons (that weird yellow stegosaurus guy in "Homecoming"- they get a lot of mileage out of him for some reason), Mok'Tagar Demons (Buffy's roommate from Hell in college), Vengeance Demons (with a full rundown of abilities), Trolls and Zombies (these being the fully-functioning revived dead people kind, not the "BRAAAAINS" type.) Vengeance Demons and Mok'Tagar are pretty much priced out of accessibility for starting characters, with good reason, since in their full-powered form they're both potential game-breakers. The authors recommend letting players who want to be Mok'Tagar exchange Drama Points for character points or having them use the Experienced Hero type; they seriously warn you of the dangers of having Vengeance Demon PCs, but allow that with heavy monitoring of their powers and frequent reminders of their obligations, they could theoretically work out. Anya (*sniff*) gets a character write-up of her as a Vengeance Demon, as at the end of Season Six, and there are four archetypes- Living Dead Girl (a normal gal turned zombie), Miquot Clan Warrior (like I said, they love the dinosaur guy), Questing Troll Hero and Teenage Werewolf. Since the standard BUFFY setup involves characters who interact with the normal world while fighting the supernatural, the middle two may not fit into many campaigns, but there are always more unorthodox setups out there. Or they could just lurk outside of the normal hangouts. The chapter on the whole is a bit thin, but it has some useful material.
The final chapter is an adventure, "The Once and Future HST." It's set up to handle a major turning point in the "Djinn" season, which is the premise Eden has been using for all their prepackaged stories to date. Unfortunately this is the major problem with the adventure; it assumes that you're using the Djinn, as introduced in the core book adventure "Sweeps Week", as a Big Bad. While most of the Djinn adventures can be inserted as standalone adventures in another season, or even in some cases done without him, it's almost impossible to run this one if you're not playing out a season around him. It's not that I dislike the Djinn, it's that I've got my own Big Bads to show off before I can even consider his uses. Also a bit of a problem, though not so much, is that the adventure references events happening earlier in the BUFFY series, such as Adam's uprising, and assumes you're setting things in Sunnydale. All it takes to change this is to tweak some flavor text and one or two details, but it's generally not a good idea to do a published BUFFY adventure that assumes certain events from the TV show have taken place in the Director's version of the Buffyverse. The adventure isn't bad, though it's mostly set up as a showcase for monster cameos (Clem and Whistler get write-ups here.) Of course, if you're running a Sunnydale-based post-Season Four Djinn Plot, it'll fit perfectly, but I wasn't really satisfied.
Still, the book has plenty to recommend. In keeping with the listings-and-more approach, we even get a few new spells related to specific monsters, and unintentionally disguised on page 86 is a handy rule-of-thumb for determining Ability Scores if you're stuck for guessing. Various "Canon Alert" sidebars show up to tell us just what the authors are making up from whole cloth and just what they've taken from the show, the section on animated objects and poltergeists demands and receives a bit about interacting with and damaging normal objects, and other nifties keep popping up. A few plugs show up for upcoming books in the line, and some other Eden books are mentioned as potential sources for monster ideas, but hey, they've already got you hooked buying supplements for the game at this point. As mentioned before, everything's up to date through season six, and the write-up for the First obliquely mentions its Big Bad status. Lots of quotes a-plenty, as per usual.
Artwise things are as good as ever. All the design neatness of the core book is kept here- color-coded chapter borders, text boxes with different purposes having different "looks", and of course plenty of nifty photos from the show. In particular the grody close-up of Drusilla's "game face" on page 33 is unsettling, as is a similar shot of the Hellhound on page 37. A photo or two is repeated but it's no biggie. Some original art appears with the archetypes and two original vamps from the adventure, and it's strong enough. My one beef here, and it's really minor and insignificant, is that except for on the cover (where it's tinged red), we don't get a good shot of Moloch (from "I Robot, You Jane") in demon form (as opposed to demon-robot form)- I've always thought he had one of the more impressive makeup jobs, as briefly as it appeared in the episode, so I missed that.
MONSTER SMACKDOWN is pretty much an essential book. Directors may be reluctant to re-use many of the monsters listed, for fear that BUFFY fans may recognize them too quickly and know their weaknesses (as freaky as the Gentlemen are, players who've seen "Hush" have some idea of what they're dealing with)- however, not only could you fake out these people by changing key details, you could simply use the many many stat blocks provided as templates for monsters of your own creation. Want a strong feral beast who can drain people's life force? Well, you could start with the Hellhound, add in Ampata Gutierrez's "Drain" ability, and you're mostly there. It's a book full of ideas and potential story hooks that can be dropped into any kind of BUFFY campaign, and it provides material both story-wise and on the crunchy side. I bought this book specifically because I was having trouble coming up with ideas for monsters, but I can safely say that I'm on solid ground now. A damn fine book.
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