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Review of Revelation
I had no real bias or expectations approaching this game, besides being a fan of the genre. Revelation is, essentially, a genre game. It also happens to have one of the best descriptions for its chosen genre that I've seen: "modern day superheroic horror." I think that sums it up perfectly. Revelation is a game about larger than life characters fighting the supernatural and generally winning.
Physical Appearance
Revelation has an exceptionally ugly cover, marred by clashing colors, poor printing, and a Vampire-like green marble background that appears to have originated as a mid-quality JPEG that got blown up. Way up. I've winced at the covers of some d20 products; this is worse. The cover art itself, however, would be decent if it were in black and white.
The internal layout is quite clean and readable. The headers and footers are easy on the eyes, though they also feature pixelated artwork.
The internal artwork ranges from very nice to positively awful. There are a number of good-looking spooky or badass pictures that suit the text, but they are far outnumbered by comically amateurish graphics. It seems that Happy Nebula thought it would be better to have appropriately themed illustrations than to have exclusively good ones. I disagree. Several illustrations are repeated, most notably one of a poor fellow getting hit in the face with some kind of energy bolt. Fortunately, those repeated are among the better pieces. (I'm told that the art is being given an overhaul in the second edition.)
Oh, and if there were any doubt what the source material for Revelation was, poor renditions of Anthony Stewart Head and Sarah Michelle Gellar show up among the sample characters at the end of the book. The book's Style isn't unintelligible, but it's often pretty poor-looking.
Writing Style and Editing
Revelation features some annoying mistakes (consistent confusion of "its" and "it's" among them), but nothing so severe as to render sentences unreadable.
The writing is pretty clear, and attempts to be friendly and a little macho. It succeeds, though I wasn't especially impressed with the result; honestly, it has nothing on the humor of C.J. Carella's Buffy or the gloom-and-doom of Shadow Chasers and Hunter. Most of the text is in the third person, though Taylor occasionally (and without warning) speaks to the GM in the first person.
The Setting
Revelation is set in the modern world (mainly the United States and England, judging by the core book). The twist is that angels and demons (Shaetan) are real, and the demons want to hurt humanity. The Shaetan need to build up fear and hatred so that they can re-enter our reality on a permanent basis. The player characters try to stop them.
Obviously, this means magic. Magic runs off of "mana", and is divided into several schools; Witchcraft, Sorcery, Psionics, and Faith are detailed for use by player characters in the core book. Other than the use of mana, there's no real common theory behind these forms of magic; the book itself comments that magic doesn't make much sense.
All of this sounds pretty generic, and, trust me, it is. There's no high concept, and other than "scary" and "violent", there aren't any particular themes. On the other hand, "generic" seems to be what Taylor was going for; Revelation is meant to be a generic setting for monster hunting. There is one nasty twist worth mentioning, though: characters who die at the hands of monsters go to Hell. If played up by the GM, this is likely to create an atmosphere more reminiscent of John Steakley's Vampire$ than Joss Whedon's Buffy.
Player characters are expected to be either independent monster hunters or members of The Order, a British organization devoted to cataloging and fighting the supernatural. Imagine a more active version of the Watcher's Council from Buffy (say, the way they were vaguely portrayed in the first three seasons), or SAVE from Chill and you've hit the nail on the head. The members of the Order most likely to be player characters are Watchers (who collect information and do research) and Judges (who kill things).
Two other (sort of) good guy societies are mentioned: The Servants of St. Lucian (stereotypical religious zealots who care lots about God and very little about the innocent) and Operation: Watchful Eye (a government conspiracy to fight the supernatural). Neither of these are developed in much detail (less than two pages are devoted to both of them), but anyone who feels like including these kinds of stereotypical characters in a campaign already knows how they're supposed to act.
The Rules
Eighty-six pages are devoted to rules for players. These rules, while not ground-breaking, are functional and pretty well thought-out.
There are ten core attributes: Agility, Speed, Strength, Vigor, Appearance, Demeanor, Intelligence, Knowledge, Perception, and Tenacity. Each attribute is represented by a particular die or dice, with the number of faces on the die reflecting the character's skill. I've never been a particular fan of systems like these, but there's a quirk that makes this one particularly irksome: some attribute levels use more than one die. For example, an attribute at 5 uses 1d10, and an attribute at 7 uses 1d20. Right in the middle, an attribute at 6 uses 2d8. Now, even excluding the issue that this makes it possible to roll a 1 at some attribute levels and not at others, there's a serious problem. If I roll 1dX, I'm equally likely to get any value between 1 and X. If I roll 2dX, the results are going to cluster around the middle. Effectively, this means that attributes at 1-5 and 7 are more likely to roll mins or maxes than attributes at 6 (2d8) or 8 (2d20). Given that the rules have special conditions for rolls of min or max. (I've been told that these statistical imperfections will be fixed in the second edition.)
Characters are constructed via a point-buy system that includes skills, virtues, and faults. This is pretty conventional, being familiar if you've ever looked at GURPS, Tri-Stat, or Unisystem games.
Combat is also fairly straightforward, using opposed skill checks. The damage system deals with minor wounds (hits that don't do damage to a specific location) and major wounds (which tick off "wound boxes" on the character sheet for specific regions of the body). For those of you wondering, the groin has only one wound box.
Overall, the rules system is pretty heavy, but it's also pretty straightforward. It's probably about as difficult to learn as d20.
The Game Master Material
One of the more admirable design choices in Revelation is the devotion of half of the book to stuff for the GM. Taylor appears to realize that the heart of a horror setting is material for the GM. I will say, however, that calling the GM the "Game Operations Director" isn't quite so clever as the Happy Nebula folks thought.
There's about four pages of general advice for new GMs, followed by guidelines for awarding Peril Points. Also, there's a "Hell on Earth" table with nifty suggestions for what happens when powerful bad guys manifest themselves.
After that, we get a quick history of the world. There was a war between the Seraphim and the Shaetan, and the Seraphim put the Shaetan behind seven seals. The Shaetan now need energy and souls to break through. Meanwhile, life evolved on Earth, starting with evil lizard men called the Ssidth, followed by Neanderthals and humans. Humans eventually built Atlantis, which came to be ruled by the Seraphim. In response, the Shaetan created vampires by mixing their blood with that of humans. Ultimately, the Shaetan flooded the planet and thus destroyed Atlantis. After that, both the Seraphim and the Shaetan decided to keep things low-key. In disguise, they shaped all of the world's religions, with the possible exceptions of Judaism and Christianity. (It should be mentioned that, although the Seraphim and Shaetan are integral to the setting of Revelation, God is considered optional.)
A brief section on NPC organizations (both good and evil) is then provided. There's also a detailed breakdown of what it's like to work for the Order, and a sample Chapterhouse for New York. I have a strong suspicion that the two very powerful, rather rebellious agents described in this section are the player characters of Happy Nebula staffers.
Taylor then provides an extensive bestiary, covering pretty much all of the standbys of horror games, as well as a few original creations. Like Chill, Revelation makes an effort to present these creatures in their pop-culture forms. Worth mentioning, however, is the treatment of vampires, which are given a fairly detailed five stage evolution path from mindless New Dead to powerful Methuselahs.
The GM section finishes with descriptions of standard-type magic items, occult texts, and evil magic. The texts are each specialized in a particular area of occult lore, and most contain a few spells. Notably, the Necronomicon makes an appearance here, but it's been transfigured from a collection of strange mythologies to a hand book on the undead.
Final Opinions
Revelation is a thorough, generic treatment of the superheroic horror genre. It's also clearly a labor of love: a game that exists because the designer wanted to play it. Ultimately, however, you could get the same mileage out of adapting GURPS. You could also run the more recent Buffy roleplaying game as is- Revelation, at its heart, is Buffy minus the life lessons. You could do worse than to add it to your library, but you could also do better. With this in mind, I give it a Substance rating of Average.
Revelation's first supplement, New Revelations, has recently been released, though I have not read it. I also recommend looking at the Revelation support materials at Happy Nebula's site, as it features some fun additions which could be useful for any monster hunting game, and which have a more distinctive feel than the materials in the core book itself.
