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A friend lent me his copy of LITTLE FEARS to read with the instructions “read it for the color and flavor at the very least”. Spot on, Jim, thanks.

LITTLE FEARS is an RPG where the players are to play children in a world that, like Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, is outwardly identical to our own, but with a secret heart of horror that is know only to a few. In LITTLE FEARS, those in the know are children, who know that something is out to get them, and it’s hiding in the closet, under the bed, in the shadows, or has possessed Timmy from next door. The source of all badness is ClosetLand, another world where soulless children and monsters wander and seven Evil Kings (personifying Greed, Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Gluttony and Lust) rule. There is a ruler over those kings, but he’s such a major character he’s offstage (think Sauron).

Here’s the best thing about LITTLE FEARS: It reads very well. The text and terms have been styled so that reading it gets you in the mood to be an eight year old. One reviewer I read disliked this ‘talking down’, but for me it worked, and since I’m not going to be playing it with children, that’s who is important. The next best thing is the concept of belief magic and the centrality of the character to resolution mechanisms. If a character believes it will happen, and has plenty of innocence and good reason to expect that a result will occur, then it’s likely to happen. When I read this my general feeling that the author had read Stephen King’s IT and attempted to make a system in which IT would be playable gelled into near certainty. If you wanted to create a plot similar to IT, LITTLE FEARS will work for you.

The flavor text is also far superior to most RPG books, and in particular to generic fantasy in which a general effort seems to be made to write badly. LITTLE FEARS starts with a ‘nice’ diary. Read it and you’ll get a foretaste of what the book’s about.

A quick word about the layout: The text is legible and well-indexed. That’s an immediate win. Even the white on black text is OK, and it’s not used for core parts of the book, which give us pleasant, old-fashioned, eye-relieving black on white. Thank you. The graphics vary from mostly good/pleasant to a cartoonish style that was too 2D for me. The mix of ‘adult horror’ style images with ‘child cartoon’ style didn’t work for me. YMMV.

So, would I buy the book? Well, not really, to be honest. Once I’ve read it I’ve pretty much got all I need from it. The basic concept, belief magic, and ‘monsters from elsewhere’ is well detailed from a flavor point of view, but I can translate the game mechanic concepts into EVERWAY, Call of Cthulhu or BESM without much difficulty. Now if you don’t play a good light system, you definitely will benefit form using LITTLE FEARS. The thought of applying the complexity of d20 to it is more horrific than the italicized text on page 96. Well, almost.

Overall, for people who play a few systems, I would suggest looking at LITTLE FEARS as a genre book you can use for when your Big Eyes Small Mouth “Mecha-Alien Space Patrol LoveBoat Alpha” campaign needs a break. Maybe you’re fed up of cultists and ghouls in your CoC campaign. Maybe you loved IT. Maybe you want something way different from your epic fantasy or vampire politics campaign. LITTLE FEARS isn’t as ground-breakingly revolutionary as it has been hyped. It’s simple, it’s well-written, it’s thought provoking and can be used with many systems. It’s just plain good.