Someday, somebody will make a
D&D product about horror that may, someday, actually be scary. Heroes of Horror isn’t it.
Heroes of
Horror feels like an attempt to create a generic horror setting which can be
expanded upon by the GM; having lost (or sold) the rights to Ravenloft to White Wolf, Heroes of Horror uses many of the
same general concepts without borrowing any of the specific ideas, like the
Mists. It’s also an attempt to explain how to use horror in a D&D universe,
but falls prey to the same genial niceness that’s killed every horrific D&D
product ever made. They ape the music, but wind up with a cacophony of clashing
noise.
The most
maddening thing about Heroes of Horror is its reluctance to address horror as a set of themes, rather than as a bunch
of mechanical cogs that can be stuck together to produce something that looks
like the original. Think of a baby made out of an Erector Set – it looks like a
baby, and it has two legs and two arms like a baby, but it’s cold, mechanical,
unpleasant, and can never accurately simulate what a baby is like.
Take, for
example, the suggestion that Samara/Sadako, the
villain from The Ring, could easily
be done with a phantasmal killer
spell cast on a cursed painting or tapestry. As soon as you reduce a powerful
metaphorical concept down to a single spell – phantasmal killer - you immediately drop out
of the mindset of horror and into the mindset of Magic: The Gathering, where
your Ancient Ooze isn’t so much a crawling, primeval life form running amuck in
a world that long since evolved out of a need to defend against it, but more of
a X/X creature, where X represents the converted mana
cost of all of the creatures that you have in play. In addition, when the
bumbling, apple-cheeked mage down the street can cast the same spell that
Samara uses to kill, then you’ve gone from making her something uniquely wrong – a potent spiritual force
without defined limits and an unbounded malice towards human beings – and more
into somebody who’d might as well have graduated from the typing/magic school
down the street.
Call of Cthulhu
does the exact same thing with its statistical breakdown of monsters. But one
of the reasons why it works, however, is because it relies on the idea of a
broken universe to make itself scary. If the fruit that you’re eating turns out
to have human teeth, it’s not because there’s a vampire up the road; it’s
because you’re treading into an area where the natural laws of the universe are
breaking down, and they’re breaking down according to the whims of a creature
that regards you as a walking cold virus. There’s constant reinforcement of the
idea of the game as simulating fiction.
To be sure,
Call of Cthulhu
isn’t the only horror game out there; neither is Lovecraft the only horror
author to ever exist. The new World of Darkness books have done an excellent
job of creating an atmosphere that feels like a colder, more alien version of
Stephen King. Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing is a horror-fantasy
game that feels like 15th-century Germany being invaded by death
metal. Little Fears derived its
source from children vs. monsters fiction – It,
for instance. And while the old World of Darkness books frequently fell into
superheroes with fangs, there were a lot of moments in Wraith that could be genuinely scary. (I don’t know much about Don’t Rest your Head, but I’ve heard
good things.)
What glues
those games together is their insistence on theme. Horror says something about
ourselves, whether it’s our fear of aging, or cancer, or nature. That’s what
makes it scary. Remove that from the equation, and you don’t have horror; you
just have a bunch of monsters and spells. And that’s basically what this book
is.
So, then,
what does it have? The opening chapter attempts to lay down some ground rules
for horror while simultaneously demonstrating that it doesn’t know the first
thing about it. It suggests that the heart of every good horror story is a
villain, but then brings up stolidly high-fantasy characters like Saruman, Darth Vader and Voldemort
as examples. Those aren’t the villains of horror; they’re the villains of children’s entertainment. There’s a
middling list of horrific events, but nothing that’ll really scare anybody
who’s got access to a wand of fireballs. The sample adventure, To Grandmother’s House, features a
central image that’s more suited to a clunky heavy metal album than a horror
story; Annalee’s Baby has a nice bit of role reversal,
but isn’t developed enough to really make it spooky.
We also get the stats for Cas, the demigod of rage, who has the…head of a moose. What’s the connection between a moose – basically a cow with big horns – and rage? I don’t know. Therein liesthe true horror.
The chapter
about how to run a horror game manages to miss everything that actually
involves horror. For instance, it’s suggested that in order to drive home the
idea that a villain is particularly nasty, you make their victims more innocent
and turn up the level of the villain’s atrocities. You either wind up turning
the volume up to 11 in a futile attempt to shock your players (“The goblins got
into the monastery, and they killed eighty women! Who were pregnant! And also virgins!”) or sick the
players out. There’s some interesting notes on mood, but it’s worth noting that
what might scare a CoC investigator – say, something
skittering across the roof – will cause your D&D wizard to whip out the scrying spells to see just what that was, and where it
went, and how many Hit Dice it has. The advice about using loved ones as
victims is good, but Call of Cthulhu got there first and drained all of the blood
out of that idea a long time ago. Nowadays,
if you mention any relation, the players will immediately assume that they’ll
be used against them.
There are a
lot of problems, too, with using D&D as a horror-themed game, and these are
problems that this book does nothing to fix. For one thing, the fundamentals of
the game are based around getting more powerful as time passes on – more
spells, more feats, more hit points and so forth.
There’s no sense that the characters are vulnerable, because their players
create them so that they’ll survive. If you one-shot them, then they’ll have a
justifiable complaint about how much time it took to develop their character
versus how much time it took for that character to be killed. If you give them
ten levels, then they can minmax to their hearts
content in order to have survivable characters; give them three, and they’ll
complain about the lack of options. The book doesn’t offer suggestions for as
to how to fix it.
Probably
the worst problem is that horror is a medium best written for adults. One of
the things that I loved about Call of Cthulhu was that it was explicitly aimed towards an
adult audience. They were not aiming at fifteen-year old kids, but at guys who
were in college or grad school; and for a guy who loved the idea of college, I
felt motivated to rise to their level rather than sticking with stuff that was
aimed at my age level. And I was rewarded with what were some of the best
scenarios ever written, even though the fundamentals of Call of Cthulhu really evaded me until I
was older. (The sort of nihilistic responsibility that goes with Call of Cthulhu does not sit well with the adolescent mind.
Nihilistic irresponsibility is
usually the order of the day.)
Ken Hite pointed out that Call of Cthulhu
was one of the few games aimed at adults – you know that you’re going to die,
as adults do; what are you going to do with the time that you’ve been given?
How will you overcome a sense of cosmic impotence, accept limits on what you
can and can’t do? What will you sacrifice? When you’re immortal, as every
teenager thinks of himself, those considerations are never foremost on your
mind. So that’s a problem when you’re writing a horror game aimed at a younger
audience – but the book doesn’t acknowledge this problem, or even consider the
difference in age levels.
Another
problem is that the book doesn’t really get out of its fantasy mindset and into
a horror mindset. Generally speaking, most of the scenarios presented in the
book are focused around the idea of the heroes as part of a larger society, and
the villains or horrors are part of the aberration; Darth Vader is an
aberration, Voldemort is an outsider, Sauron is just the descendent of a single evil god, opposed
by a bunch of “good” gods. In Warhammer, Chaos and humanity are interlinked, and Chaos is
too influenced by humanity to be an aberration. In Vampire, humans – former humans – are the monsters, and the most potent creatures in the setting are
the inhuman, monstrous Antediluvians. It isn’t the villain that’s scary; it’s
the world that’s scary. (Even in Dracula and Frankenstein, the monsters were
aberrations in a strictly regimented world – Dracula was scary because he was a
weirdo foreigner intent on seducing English women with something other than
stultifying boredom.)
There’s
advice on how to keep your villain unkillable, just
to pound home that the PCs are essentially playing in a game of The GM’s Pet
Villain – not horrific; even in Call of Cthulhu, you
wouldn’t win only to have the victory jerked out from your feet. (The human
race was still doomed, but it wasn’t doomed today.) It talks about happy endings and note that the players might not get one – but it lacks the context that makes a good horror game fun – it isn’t that you
lose, it’s why you lose.
And, see,
you’d think that I’m just against the idea of horror in D&D, but there is
ample precedent for horrific D&D campaigns. One of the best examples that
I’ve ever seen wasn’t a published product, but an article in Dragon Magazine; it wasn’t even one of
the Halloween issues, if I remember correctly. It was a piece, written
in-character, about a university-sponsored planar expedition with the intent of
discovering the home planet of the Illithid, using
the guidance of some secondary planar race in order to find it. When they
arrive, they’re in a world with a dim, dying sun, but there are more questions
than answers – and if they’re detected, it’s their ass. It wasn’t perfect, but
looking back on it, I can see just how amazing the
article was.
Now, it’s
been pointed out to me that I’m perhaps too enamored of Lovecraft – or Lovecraftian gaming – to really appreciate different kinds
of horror. On one level, that’s entirely true, yeah; I’ve read a lot of horror,
but Lovecraft is the best way that I’ve found to freak players out. On the
other hand, there are other kinds of horror. Somebody mentioned Buffy, and
that’s something that I’m totally unfamiliar with – but there’s no advice in
the book about how to run a Buffy-inspired campaign.
The book
also uses the idea of Taint, borrowed from
Oriental Adventures, to make the hero’s fight against evil more potent. In
its original context, the Taint was a powerful metaphor for radiation damage,
which had extraordinary resonance with the pseudo-Japanese setting of L5R. Here,
it’s an excuse to start throwing crippling deformities on player characters,
but given that D&D’s model has always been to
make characters stronger as they go along, I can see player complaints
eventually forcing GM’s to remove it as a play mechanic – or to create a way in
which it can be removed, as the book suggests restoration spells can remove the Taint. In L5R, there was almost
no way in which Taint could be removed. It was entirely a function of
controlling it, and items or spells that could remove it were rare as hen’s
teeth. (Until Way of the Shadowlands, but I don’t really count that as
canonical. AEG do; I don’t.) Without knowing what the Taint is a metaphor for, it’s useless.
It isn’t
all bad. There’s a neat bit in a sample campaign – which is a pretty dog-simple
investigative outline for a campaign involving hunting down a lich – which
involves the PCs investigating a madland, where a
dryad steps out of her tree and tries to consume her own flesh in an attempt to
drive the taint from her body. There’s a big list of corruption effects that
have a little resonance, which can take down adventurers a peg without straight-out
murdering them. There’s various land types which affect magic – abyssal black
grass prevents all natural healing,
while blood rock, which forms at massacre sites, doubles threat ranges of
everybody’s weapons.
Put it this way: The choice that
they made in how to portray horror is not the way that I would choose to
portray horror, and I wish that they’d gone in a different direction for this.
While I could go over it step by step – and in large part, already have – I’m
going to leave it at that.
Character classes: The Archivist is a cleric with a specialty
in the intellectual, with the ability to cast spells and give minor buffs by
using his special dark knowledge ability – at worst, you’re looking at +1 to
hit here, +1 to save there. I’m reminded of Sandy Petersen’s observation about
quad damage modifiers in Quake, but I suppose that if you’re ever in need of a
+1 bonus and can’t be bothered with the eight thousand spells that do the same
job better, the Archivist is your man.
The Dread Necromancer is an NPC class, for
the most part, and has a small boatload of special abilities to go with it. At
first level, you’ve got the ability to do 1d8 damage with a
touch attack – at a distance, if you use spectral hands – and as time goes on, you gradually turn more and
more into a lich, complete with DR/2 at second level. It feels unbalanced in
comparison to the traditional wizard classes, but not having the time to playtest it, I wouldn’t know for sure.
The Corrupt Avenger – a prestige class – is
a character class that lets you bolt on some arcane spellcasting
and some of the Ranger’s ability to pick a chosen foe. The neat part is that
you’re not corrupt because you’ve gone over to evil; you’re corrupt because
you’ve become so Tainted. Actually, I really like this
character class; I initially mistook it for a version of the Blackguard, but
it’s actually more subtle than that. It would be interesting to see a campaign
world based on this kind of idea, sort of like the tainted Crab berserkers of
L5R.
The Death Delver is also a neat idea. If
you’ve dropped below 0 hit points at some point, and have a few minor skills,
you pick up the ability to cast divine spells, cause
fear and boost morale, and even resist coup de grace attempts, ending with the
“nine lives” ability – a chance to recover from -10 hit points nine times. It’s
kind of a neat idea, but if you’ve made it to 10th level as a Death
Delver, the chances are good that you’ll have enough magic and/or skill to keep
that from happening.
The Dread Witch sacrifices spells in
exchange for manipulating fear – the scarier your opponent, the more your
effective caster level goes up. It’s again a neat idea, but it seems that it’d
be more effective as less an NPC villain class and more as a version of a
Paladin. Just seems kind of odd to me.
The Fiend-Blooded.
Being as everything in the world of D&D has sex with everything else – up
to and including mud – and produces children, we’ve of course got the standard
hybrid template. (I envision a world in which there’s a whole mess of
goat-faced peasants whose anger at their lonely fathers cannot be
measured.) You’re mostly getting steady
attribute boosts, more spells and some resistances here and there, culminating
with a DR 10/magic at level 10.
The Purifier of Hallowed Doctrine
essentially act like a paladin bolt-on class, with
some ability to cure taint at higher levels. Me, I don’t think that taint
should be curable, but I’ve already obviously been overruled in this case.
The Tainted Scholar – is actually a character
class that’s more of a trap than an advantage. The ability to use blood in
place of a spell component is kind of neat, but neater still is the fact that
you have to pass a Will + Depravity
DC in order to take a level in
any other class. In practice, it’s actually a lot like an L5R Bloodspeaker – blooded spells, weird knowledge, taint
manipulation, taint suppression, that kind of thing. It’s a little Clark Ashton
Smith, which is good, but not enough
Clark Ashton Smith, which is not so good.
Feats: I’m
too bored and lazy to actually go through these one by one, so I’ll hit the
highlights. There’s some deformity feats that would be
cool if they weren’t so goofy – for instance, Deformity (Tall) has you being
stretched on a rack and surgically implanted in order to increase your height,
which give you an extra five-foot range. Deformity (Tongue) has you piercing
your tongue and dipping it into acid
in order to provide yourself with blindsense out to
thirty feet. You could just light a torch, of course, but, you know, why bother
with something that painful and complicated when you could just dip your tongue in acid? The idea is
good – and I like the filed teeth that give you a bite attack – but who wants
to drop an entire feat just to get blindsense? Feh.
Spells:
Same as above, bored and lazy: Chain of
Sorrow is a seemingly neat spell which rapidly makes no sense; the first
victim takes a big Charisma drop, then passes along
the same effect to somebody else as soon as he touches them. It’d be neater if
I could figure out what it’s for, or what you’re supposed to do with it, but –
well, I suppose you could make a family really sad, but…I don’t know, maybe a
royal family? It’s like the author of the spell had an idea in mind for it, but
forgot to tell us. There’s a cool spell called Fire in the Blood which turns your blood into acid, dropping damage
on whoever injures you.
The book
ends with a discussion of horror monsters, most of which are drawn from the old
1930’s films – Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, Bob Hope, Dracula, the Mummy, you
know. White Wolf’s already staked out this territory well in advance – and all
of those monsters lived in the modern day – so I’m not sure why they’re being
brought up here. (The book also notes that it’s reductive to turn Frankenstein
into a mere flesh golem, although “reductive” accurately describes D&D’s approach to mythology. Actually, that’s a lie;
D&D is so reductive of mythology that a new word must be coined to describe
it.)
We get descriptions of various
creature types and how they might be made scary. Mind flayers are really scary,
especially if you’re on their turf, but the book describes them as hovering
over an orgy/bloodbath and getting off on the mental energy, which is more
tediously gross-out than actually scary. Actually, “tediously gross-out” seems
very much in character for any attempt by D&D to portray horror; they just
don’t understand it. It’d be creepier if they were just watching a single human
woman giving birth – not helping, not hurting, just watching.
Monsters:
Corruption eaters are interesting in that they devour taint, which makes them
both beneficial and harmful – I like the idea of an ecology
of taint, and I wish that they’d developed it. The cadaver golem is a so-so
idea, but it’s got some really neat artwork that makes the undead creature in
question look kind of Flood-ish. The Gray Jester is a
good example of the idea that clowns cannot be cool – with the sole exception
of GW’s Harlequins. It’s actually not that bad; it’s
just that I associate any sort of clown monster with the Insane Clown Posse,
which is kind of like a monster themed around the idea of both eating and
fucking shit.
You know
that I was going to start swearing at some point during the review. Be glad
that I managed to get all the way to the end.
I would say
that this book is more useful as an example of how not to create a
horror-themed product than as a supplement; its advice is clumsy, its authors
obviously aren’t horror fans, and I have the impression that it was created
with the intent of just covering a base rather than with the intention of
really getting into the idea of a horror game. You would be much better off
spending your money elsewhere.
-Darren
MacLennan
Review Summary