Review of HoL

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So you're tired of the same old tripe that White Wolf periodically barfs out to pay off the collection agencies. You're sick of the clan books, tribe books, kith books, craft books, tradition books, whatever. It's all been done to death. The entire premise of the Storyteller world can be summed up like this: "Life sucks. You look cool. Sometimes you get laid, but then angst follows. Have a machine gun." You don't need yet another book telling you that Malkav was really the God father of the first abomination White Howler who later fucked Lilith's ugly and useless sister, Tipper Gore to produce the first bloodline_cum_tribe that has access to spheres and cantrips. Or whatever.

You just want a game that doesn't take itself all that seriously. You just want to crack open a case of beer, do a couple lines of crushed ritalin tablets and game until the hallucinations begin. You're not interested in writing a forty page background for a character that spent his/her life as a Swedish prostitute with a burning passion to become a med-surg nurse in a high intensity ICU only to be embraced by the Toreador who mistook him/her for some sort of half-assed artist with a nice ass. You just want to get the gaming over with and pray to God that none of your real friends see you hanging out with these deplorable geeks.

If this is you, then you need to get your hands on HoL. HoL is de facto anti-gaming, anti-character showcasing, anti-twink, anti-rulse lawyer RPG bible. It is as depraved as one of your divorced mother's 'uncles' and it is as intestine-wrenchingly funny as watching a yuppie being slowly ripped apart by rabid pit bulls.

First of all, the game designers make no attempt to sell their product. They really, genuinely don't seem to care about the desgin. The entire game is hand-written, betimes illegibly, and the artwork is comically cheezy. There are two sections, 'How to kill things' and 'Things that can kill you', which roughly approximate the 'player's' and 'storyteller's' sections.

And then there are the pre-gens. Yes, you are not trusted with the ability to generate your own characters, the game designers are so terrified of any actual -gaming- taking place that they have decided to provide the masses with pre-gen PCs that perfectly fit the chaotic, tumultuous world that is HoL. The pre-gens include, but are not limited to: a pedophiliac monk, an eight year old boy with a massive fucking plasma rifle and no conscience whatsoever, a parody of the Silver Surfer (covered in zinc and sporting a motor-driven, intergalactic surf-board), Elvis and an angsty, noir detective that really needs to get a life.

What could be better than a game that tells you in no uncertain terms that you are a cretin for gaming in the first place and should be treated as such? They dumb down -everything- to prevent the less-witted gamers amongst us from developing pathological obsessions or delusions related to the game. There are no elves, no faggy vampires, no maidens in distress. HoL is a world of carnage, sodomy, massive drug intake and six-minute life expectancies.

Ah, hell with it. I'm not getting paid for this, I won't expatiate any further. Just go out and buy the damn book. You'll burst a kidney laughing and if you can bribe some people to be your friend for the night you can run a wicked cool game. G'wan, you know you want it.

Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 5 (Excellent!)