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Hell, "not fucking around" is sort of its design philosophy. This attitude runs rich in the rules, the setting, the layout and most of all, the excellent writing style. And this is a good thing.
I apologise for the swearing on a family site, but Dread demands it. It's that kind of game.
It's balls-out, viscreal, straight-for-the-throat is evident from the first page, and it's something to be celebrated. One thing that continually frustrates me about this hobby is that despite being one of the most simple and most basic ideas in the world, it is constantly hampered by the complex and time-consuming start-up processes that most games have - and the gamers who have grown used to such hand-holding. Even many so-called rules-light games can't be explained in thirty seconds, and no game in these post-White-Wolf days comes without a deep and intricate setting that, in most cases, has to be deeply understood by every player if the game is going to work. D&D and Vampire got around this by inventing a sub-culture where its setting conventions became the genre conventions, but most RPGs aren't so lucky.
I'm not saying that complex rules or settings are bad things - they're wonderful - but I'm a busy man and it's a crowded universe. Sometimes, I want something that goes for the throat and I can kickstart in five seconds flat. That's why I've always liked games like Ghostbusters and Buffy; as well as their popular universes making them easy to instantly understand, they also have very very clear briefs for the kind of stories they involve. In both cases, in fact, this brief is in the title: Bust ghosts, and slay vampires.
Dread isn't licensed, and it's title is unfortunately not very evocative but its concept couldn't be more simple or visceral. You're a person who has nothing to live for. There are demons out there using pre-schoolers as dental floss. You have a gun, and you're not going to fucking take it any more. Go.
Comparisons abound. It's like Little Fears grown up, the dark mirror of Inspectres, Cthulhu without all the boring book-learnin' or Unknown Armies without the post-modern magic. It's tempting to say it is what Hunter: the Reckoning should have been, but there's a very important difference: Hunter's creeds allow for many different approaches to monsters, and thus to play style. This is the antithesis of Dread. As the introduction makes clear, you are always somebody with nothing left to live for and nowhere else to go. You are not an adventurer or an investigator or somebody caught up in events. You are a Disciple. You aren't part of a group, you're part of a Cabal. You all have a Mentor. She arrives, tells you where the demons are and you try and kill them before they rip your head off and shit down your neck. There's nothing else left in your life; indeed the characters in the ongoing fiction threaded between each chapter don't even have names anymore. Much like the characters of Reservoir Dogs, this helps dehumanise them, which helps up the carnage level significantly.
Indeed, Reservoir Dogs is a great example. Replace Mr Blonde with a Cenobite and it would be the archetypal Dread game. Tarantino filming Barker is the core of this game. Of course, you CAN play it differently, and within that brief, you can focus more on combat, or more on investigation, but mostly, there isn't much room for fucking around.
And that's what's so exquisite about it. Not only does it erase the question that comes up with so many RPGs these days: "what do I do with it?", the narrow focus means it fulfills Costikyan's quote about a game doing one thing really well. Because it is only about being a Disciple fighting a blood-drenched gun-battle in the Tarantino-Barker universe, it can make every rule and every single sentence of the book drip with this essence. Which means that Dread is incredibly stylish, and for once is a game where the bad-ass 'tude seems not totally undeserved.
Of course, when I say stylish, I mean the text. The art in this 180 page softback book is, apart from a few cool photographs, just atrocious, from the blurred inkstain on the cover to the character sheet done by Print Shop circa 1984. There's also a lack of pretty fonts, borders and backgrounds, but that's much less of an issue. The large typeset used in places and the excess of white space may irritate people, but it does help readability greatly. If you're worried, decrease the page count by 40% and then make your buying decision.
Readability is also enchanced by Chandler's writing abilities. His style, as mentioned, more than makes up for the art work, but he never makes the mistake of putting style before clarity or communication. Like I said, I'm a busy man, so a game as quick and easy to read, and so direct and to the point is a rare joy. Even Chandler's game fiction (a portion of which opens each chapter) is exceptional, actually making me care about its protagonists and want to read further, which is so rare. It also includes such great phrases like "[the demon] unzipped her like a dress".
It's also worth mentioning that every rule, skill, spell and many other facets of the game have a "fiction" example accompanying it, as was done in Adventure!. As in that game, this goes a long way to establishing mood and style also.
After the opening story about fighting demons, he cuts right to the heart of the setting, such as it is. It's our world, but on July first, the 956 inhabitants of the small American town of Haywood were found slaughtered in ways that normally only exist in a Garth Ennis comic, and every blood-soaked image made the evening news. Two days later, the same thing happened in Uganda. Due to an accident, the Americans think a white power group was behind the slaughter, and the world has gone into a post-9/11 like crackdown. You know the truth, however. You were attacked by a demon, and rescued at the last moment by a super-powerful Mentor. She introduced you to your Cabal, granted you a few magic spells and told you a bit about the demons, then pointed you in their direction. And that's the setting.
The mechanics are equally simple. Stat plus skill equals the number of d12s you roll. Like Storyteller, you have to beat a difficulty, but successes don't matter, it's just pass or fail on the highest dice. Like Godlike, pairs can help too. Two nines becomes nine plus two, eleven, allowing you to hit target numbers above twelve and do the impossible. You get an extra dice (one only) if you describe your actions well. It's Storyteller with d12s, but much simpler and faster and with far less bookkeeping. Particularly since combat is exactly the same mechanic, but with the difference between attacker and defender being the damage done.
Character generation is similarly simple. PCs have three stats: Body, Mind and Spirit. As is typical of so many games, Spirit is the "miscellaneous" category that covers anything that isn't the first two, but it also governs magic (or "Cathexis") so it's not so bad. Stats are rated from 1 to 6, you have nine points to spend and in great style, one of them must be above four. Just a little reminder that this is not a game for boring average people.
The second step of chargen, before skills, is defining Contacts, which can either be Declared (which are cheaper) or Undeclared (can be set to what you want when needed). The game stresses that Conacts belong to the PCs, not the GM, and are completely under their control. While this helps with the rough gangster feel of things, and replacing people as your most important asset (not Virtues or Equipment) is evocative, it's never really explained how these people might help greatly with fighting demons. They certainly can never join the front line, so they're basically just handy resources to do the boring stuff. They may have personalities, but a GM will need to work hard to remind his players of that.
Next we have skills. First of all, the PC gets to choose either Combat, Occult Lore or Perception. The rules on these all vary, which is annoying, and are unclear anyway, but I think they provide one dice to every test involving these things (tests which use Body, Mind and Soul respectively, I think). What I like about them is that they cover the three main things you need to roll for in an RPG: killing things, figuring out what to kill and how to kill it, and getting hints from the GM (Perception being both notice and like the Know roll in Call of Cthulhu). Players then have their Mind+3 in other skills, which are very broad categories like Medic, Soldier, or Driver, even including very vague concepts like Hunter, Empath or Intimidator. Skills are hard to increase, so diversifying makes sense.
Finally, players get a Drive (why they fight the demons) which can also add a bonus dice. They also start with no injuries (eleven of them equals death) and no Redemption points. The latter represent the few sparks of valour and goodness the Disciple achieves, and work like Drama Points and XP rolled into one. It is much easier to add contacts, heal damage or roll well than it is to improve your skills. This isn't that sort of game. Nor is it the sort of game where Redemption can save your ass. Being significantly heroic gives you one point, total self-sacrifice will get you two, and the price to re-roll one dice roll is five. Valour and goodness are in short supply in the bleak world of Dread.
All PCs also get magic spells - twice their Soul stat - which is a nice touch. They help remind the player that their character is a Disciple, not a normal human, and they also firmly stamp the unique style of the game onto any session.
Why? Because for once the kewl powerz are fairly unique, in style and substance. A lot of the fifty four presented are pretty off-the-wall in effect, such as making your victim start screaming uncontrollably, or have your intestines turn into worms, burst from your chest and strangle anyone in the way. Then there's familiar, but twisted like becoming invisible to everyone except the one person you want to torture, or causing two great tusks to erupt painfully from your abdomen as an attack. Others find new ways to do classic powers, like the armour spell covers you with ever-burning lighter-fluid that causes no pain when lit, or the healing spell which involves the caster exhaling a sort of living blood-cloud which surrounds your body before going to work. Finally, all the spells, even the familiar ones, have some very cool and interesting names, like the fireball spell entitled Dresden, and the whirling blades spell called Excoriate.
Then there's my favourite spell, Haemophage. It's difficult to cast (most spells require a Soul or Body roll at varying difficulty), but when successful, it causes dozens of foot-long albino leeches to cover the target and suck their strength until they pass out. This is the kind of game Dread is.
Like all things, the list will eventually run out, but for new Disciples, a lot of these powers will feel as terrifying, unnatural and confusing as the things they face, and that's good. The only problem is the rules say that magic is also supposed to be dangerous, but it rarely is mechanically.
The players section closes with complete rules for combat, including such things as armour, weapon damage and range modifiers. As you would expect, these are dirt simple. A pistol gives plus one, a shotgun plus two and an uzi plus three. Armour takes off two points or one point. Enough for some situations to be different, but not even close to enough to slow you down. There's also some sweetly simple and cinematic car combat rules, designed mostly so you can shoot the car with a single bullet and make it flip over and explode, while you just stand there and watch it burn. Overall, the system is quite brutal deadly if things go bad (as injury penalties are harsh) but fast and furious, and with Redemption points and Cool dice just nudging things into cinematic territory.
Then we hit the GMs section, and it all starts to go wrong.
For one thing, the fiction suddenly stops, which is a great shame because it was just getting good. And a greater shame because it was the only thing explaining how to run this game, which is where the whole problem lies.
I said above that it's very clear what to do with this game. But that's only true in terms of what the PCs do in general. The game is designed to tell players and GMs alike exactly who the characters are, how they act and what kind of shit they can expect to have dumped on them. Then the game completely evaporates when it comes to telling the GM what kind of plots they might be involved in, specifically. We know that when they catch the demon, they go Tarantino on its ass while it rips off their arms and beats them with it. But how do they go from talking about Like a Virgin to shooting the shit out of Michael Madsen? In Cthulhu and Buffy, investigation involves Library Use and ocassional reconaissance (mixed with the odd society ball or date at the Bronze), whereas Ghostbusters and Inspectres involve loading up with toys and poking the haunted house until it goes boo (mixed with the odd pratfall or meeting with the IRS). It's very hard to see how this phase of the game is supposed to work in Dread.
There are clues though, and we can extrapolate. The block-point style GMs section explains that every session should have a Trigger (like the original call in Inspectres/Ghostbusters) which demands immediate action. Said Trigger should be part of a complex and ongoing story between the participants, and demand immediate, drastic action. Then the section talks about there being an interplay between Villian, Victim and Extras, and keeping your players in the dark about who is actually who, but using symapthetic Victims to keep hope alive. So suddenly, this is a dark human drama - something which is hinted at in some of the examples in the players section, but far from obvious. It's also something completely absent from the fiction. Not that the fiction has to be a perfect example of gameplay, but since I had little else to go on, I wished it was.
The demon section has exactly this problem as well. All twenty seven of them are dangerous, horrifying predators with unnatural physiology, big gnashy claws and a selection of terrible powers called Imprecations (which, nicely all work differently from player powers). Some of them are truly scary and wrong, like the demon that makes men bleed out of their orificies (the Nethasq), or the sewer squid made out of screaming faces of everyone you've ever loved who died (the Naissante). But along with this, we also find out that each demon preys on some aspect of human misery, fear, cruelty or depravity, be it child abusers, rapists, scarred war veterans or just lonely teenage girls. Ostensibly, this makes some sense - they allow you to turn a predator into a full, human tragedy - turn Hellraiser into Seven, or Millenium, which is great. A demon which kills your friends in front of you, rips out their organs, stuffs them in your hands and then calls the cops - as the Xarualac demon does - is scarier than a simple predator...but I still don't know what to do with it. It would make sense in a horror novel or comic (like say, Swamp Thing or Hellblazer), because we can focus on these "NPCs" as the true horror of their situation is set up, then plays out, as the demon possesses the child abuser, then takes things right up to their blood-soaked, violent limit...at which point, I suppose, the PCs get the trigger event, and wander in to play clean-up. It strikes me that the PCs might be better as NPCs in some adventures.
Obviously, they can talk to people, get involved in a mule-headed Constantine fashion or doddering Swamp Thing style, but that's not much of a plot driver. And it's not like Joe Suburbia will talk to three vagabonds with uzis, nor is this game about going to the library or the hall of records. There is a hacking skill, though, so I guess that could help. As would the emphasis on intimidation. But what are they trying to find out? The Occult Lore skill seems to allow the heroes to figure out which demon they are facing out of the ones listed; indeed the fiction implies that this is done a lot; we open with a character finding a bowl of children's teeth and deducing that he is facing the demon that eats these like sweeties. This would definitely help identify Villian from Victim and whether they need to Exorcise or Excoriate, but to build up this sort of knowledge the game would need to be played as a campaign, teaching players (not characters) about the beasties. So suddenly the quick start-up visceral one-shot game has become a campaign about playing a demon zoologist. While there are a lot of cool, interesting and varied demon to make this interesting, it's not exactly what I signed on for. It would work if one or two players had read the demon section and could play detective, but that destroys the whole quick start-up approach, and thus, the heart and soul of the game.
There's an adventure, but this just shows up the problems above. It's the story of three dirt-poor and dirt-stupid junkies who killed a clerk in a record store robbery and who are now being stalked by his possessed corpse and a hired assassin. The focus of the adventure is on the relationships between the three criminals (two brothers fighting over a girl) and really, that's the story you want to hear about. There's no real way for the PCs to get involved, and I'm not sure why you'd want them to. Again, I am reminded of Swamp Thing or Constantine, in those moments where they just stand still and watch the horror unfold around them. Great storytelling. Lousy roleplaying.
Apparently more scenarios are available on line, maybe they clear all this up. I haven't looked.
Are there long term goals for a campaign? Um. Maybe. The GM chapter briefly mentions creating Adversaries who are humans using demons for their purposes, but nothing else in the game supports this idea. There's also a background chapter which I guess your players could find out about, but frankly, nobody deserves to find out about that chapter. It's so monumentally stupid it casts a shadow over the rest of the book. It's uninteresting, unclear and completely pointless, as it has no bearing on the game whatsoever. Only in the last two paragraphs of this eight-page story is there anything that might effect the PCs ever, and that's not expanded upon. It's like someone explaining the plot of Reservoir Dogs with the Silmarillion.
This section also suddenly brings up Jesus (he's well, Jesus, basically, the only twist being that Judas was his god-powered father, and he also went on to be Paul as well). There are other sudden mentions of religion in the book that then fade away with no point. Maybe in the Bible Belt "demon" makes people think of the Judeo-Christian mythos, but not among geeks who've grown up with Buffy and Lovecraft. It's not a big thing, but it's another example that points to the general confusion about exactly what the game is about. Chandler has a very, very good idea of the style and mood of his game, who the heroes are and the fucked-up shit they will be seeing and doing. But then it appears he suddenly realised he needed some kind of reason and back-story to give it all structure and meaning, and that part never really came together.
This was a problem that haunted Paranoia too: a game which was really about PCs having lots of fun reasons to shoot each other being burdened with excessive back story and explanation. At least there they mocked it, with such things like the Transparently Bogus Rationale. Personally, I would have loved for the GM section of Dread to just say: "There is no why. Just pick a demon and fuck them with it, hard, until somebody dies or something explodes."
Thing is, you can still play Dread like that, and that makes for a fine game. You just pick a demon and give them guns and cars and wing the rest. So I will be keeping Dread on my shelf because although the last eighty pages are confused and unclear, the first one hundred make up one of the easiest, quickest and most fun games to GM I've encountered in a while, with a visceral concept and a brutal, in-your-face style to match. Rules, setting and concept are all designed to make the game instantly runnable, instantly playable and the style instantly obvious and extremely prevalent. It's probably the fastest start-ups since Ghostbusters and easily the most stylistically interesting. Indie games have always lead the industry in terms of stylistic writing because their tight focus allows them to concentrate every word into emphasising that focus (look at Sorensen's work, for example), but even amongst this field, Dread stands out as an extraordinary example of the craft. It drips style from every syllable without ever sacrificing clarity - indeed, it uses the style to *enhance* clarity. It should be required reading for anyone interested in learning how to actually write an RPG, rather than just design one - and its rules are no slouch either, with the amazing magic spells list and the car combat rules being just two highlights. Which is why its such a tragedy that it fails to hang together and provide a play structure. I dearly hope there is a second edition that makes it the game it deserves to be.
However, assuming you can find a way to get and keep the players shooting at demons in a frenzy of terror and rage, this is a great quick-start game that makes a great and useful addition to any shelf, particularly in a hobby so overgrown with slow start-up games. Most quick-start games tend to be humorous too, so it's a breath of fresh air to have a dark horror game step into this niche. Indeed, if Dread resembles anything, it's a dark horror version of Stuperpowers, because it works the same way: hand out some strange powers, then go break things. And nothing else matters, nor is worth talking about. These are games, as mentioned, that do not fuck around, and God bless them for it.
Style: 4 Substance: 3
Find Dread here: http://www.malignantgames.com
