Role-Playing Games | 

• 311 pages, $29.95
• By John R. Phython, Jr.
• Published by Event Horizon Productions
• Reviewed by Mark Damon Hughes 2000Aug16
• This review originally appeared in Serendipity's SCircle. Subscribe to this fine fanzine today!

Superficial Things

   This is where most of the "bad stuff" is. There is a very brief, nigh-useless index, hidden several pages from the end. The artwork is mostly altered black & white photos, which is unique enough, but unfortunately, the images struck me as silly rather than surreal; if a game has art, it should match the tone, and I suspect snickering is not the tone the author was after. A great many pages have black text on dark picture backgrounds, or white on light, or often both. Now THAT is horror, or mystery if you can't read it. My eyes actually hurt after reading it. The game fiction that runs throughout it isn't *terrible*, and it gets the point of the setting across, but it's not good, either; the main characters are blatant fanboy clones of Scully and Mulder. And then there's the poetry. Really bad poetry. Vogon-class bad poetry, with the added spice of e.e. cummings-like typewriter tricks.

   Okay, that's the worst of it. If your eyesight allows you to read it, and you ignore the non-game material, it improves quite a bit.

Systems

   H+E is billed as a "diceless, deterministic action resolution system", but they lie. For any task, you add your stat and skill (both rated 1-5, shades of Pale Puppy games), plus any modifiers, and compare your total to a difficulty level set by the GM. If you beat it, you succeed automatically. If you don't, you can spend a "destiny point" (more on this in a moment), and draw a card from the deck. If the card is less than your total so far, you add 1 to the total; if it's higher, you add nothing; if it's a face card, you flip forward a few pages and look up the special effect on the situation. You can keep spending destiny points as long as you have them. Thus, there is a random element. In all, it's a good task system - the destiny points don't guarantee success, as they would in most systems with luck points, it should run very quickly, and doesn't have any obvious flaws.

   It's also not much of an "action system" - it has the task system, several pages of the obligatory combat rules (including "fight till you drop" hit points that were obsolete in the '80s, and a page of descriptions of medieval weaponry, for no comprehensible reason), and a terror/madness system. Examples for everything else are hidden in the various skill descriptions; especially without a usable index, you're going to be page-flipping a lot if you actually use the rules rather than just winging it. The latter is probably the better idea, anyway.

   Oh yes, the madness system. The terror rules are actually just a "do you run away screaming?" check (Scooby Doo holes in walls and doors not mentioned), and the madness system is credited to the great psychological studies of William Shakespeare. Without Bill's writing making up for the implausibility, the effect is just comical. When compared with systems like Kult, Unknown Armies, or even Call of Cthulhu or Beyond the Supernatural, this is a total failure. He states up front that it's cinematic, but it's more like Abbot & Costello Meet Dracula than Se7en.

   There's also a "Fate" system - several cards are turned up before every session starts, and you look up their effects. This might be a viable idea in plotless campaigns, but not if you have a planned adventure to run. It reminds me of GMs who roll for hunteds and dependants every session in Hero.

   Between this and the destiny face cards, I'm torn. On the one hand, they add a lot of flavor to the game. On the other hand, though, they take a lot of time to look up and remember the effects of. Unlike TORG or Masterbook's Drama Deck, the descriptions aren't on the cards, and the effects are described in a vague tarot-like fashion. I'd highly recommend not using the Fate system in play until you are far more comfortable with the game. The best use I can see for it is for the GM to deal the cards solitaire between sessions, as an adventure idea generator.

Characters

   Character creation is extremely simple and quick. You assign 30 points among your 12 Traits (stats), 1-5 points each. Then select the highest-totalled "Sphere" (group of three Traits) as your dominant sphere, the opposite one as subordinate, and the other two as neutral; tasks based on your dominant sphere get an additional bonus (on top of already having high stats), and those based on the subordinate sphere get a penalty (at least you can load the subordinate traits up to counter that somewhat). Then assign 30 points to "Characteristics", which include skills, advantages, and disadvantages (getting you more points as usual).

   The bright side is that if you know what you want, you can make a detailed character, almost exactly as per your conception (allowing for some skill-level shifting), in about 15 minutes, even on the first pass through the book. There are only two down sides. One is that any leftover points are your starting destiny for tasks, so you are left with the choice of being skilled but doomed to failure for a few sessions, or incompetent but amazingly lucky. The other is that the subordinate sphere choice is often contrary to your character concept - my test character should by rights have a strong Body, neutral Mind and Soul, and a weak Heart, but the system requires his Soul to be subordinate. Bah. This would be an excellent target for house rules.

   Destiny points are gained as experience, so you are again presented with a choice: save your butt today, or lose repeatedly while saving up to become more skilled? The destiny point awards are for specific, defined lists of activities - you gain them for finding out "the truth", interpreting visions correctly, and otherwise hitting the clue button to dispense a yummy destiny pellet. Unlike some of the game mechanics, this directly encourages playing in the intended genre.

   The magic system is based on balancing totals of a set of cards with certain restrictions, like a very short game of solitaire, and the more balanced your spell is, the easier it is to perform. It has a nice feel to it of doing something more than just making a task roll, but unfortunately the effects are totally undefined. You pick a "paradigm" of magic to work in, with no examples or guidelines, and can pretty much do anything within that paradigm. Taking a few pages of the fiction out, or that awful poetry, and using a column or so of analysis of each a half-dozen paradigms of magic and more example spells would have made an enormous difference.

   Ghosts, Angels, Demons, "Paranormals" (psychics), and possessing Spirits ("Bob" from Twin Peaks, in other words) all have modified character creation rules and specified powers, and all are at least vaguely viable PCs. They have useful and occasionally non-cliche powers, and none of them are overwhelmingly powerful (even the Angels and Demons).

Campaigning

   One of the odd quirks in this game is that troupe-style gaming is not just suggested, but you're expected to have multiple characters ranked as "Tier 1" (major stars), "Tier 2" (regulars), and "Tier 3" (bit parts). As far as I can tell, this is an attempt to do something like Twin Peaks with all player characters. It's a fine an interesting idea... except that it leaves the GM little or nothing to do, and bored GMs tend to get nasty. Worse, all characters are built with the same point totals, both Muldy the FBI agent and Milo the janitor. Even having played Ars Magica for years, I think the troupe concept is overrated, and when it's incompletely implemented, it's a major inconvenience.

   That said, the GMing and campaign design notes are extensive and reasonably good. It does stretch too far in trying to be postmodernist, surrealist, mystery, horror, and absurdist humor, all at once. I'd recommend picking one or two themes and sticking to them for almost the entire time. There's even extra advice for how to handle the various supernatural "races", which are always the hardest to understand and usually the least-explained in games.

   A very nice change from usual is that the complete background plot for the setting is explained. The setting's becoming a bit too cliche, but it's still a good idea - the christian apocalypse is coming, and Yahweh and Lucifer are both vicious, manipulative bastards who make Cthulhu look like a nice guy. The plot twist in this one is better than usual. As is often the case with games that use christian mythology, devout christians may have a hard time dealing with this game, especially when they find out what's going on.

   There's a brief overview of the town of Twin Peaks. Er, Potter's Lake. A few details are changed, like the paper mill instead of the sawmill, and it's been crossbred a bit with American Gothic, maybe, but it's not far off the source. I don't mind homages in fan material, but this is really pushing the limits for published books. It's a *good* setting, but it could be done by anyone who'd watched a few episodes of Twin Peaks. Perhaps the Potter's Lake sourcebook will differentiate it more, but that's more money to shell out.

   And finally, there's an adventure. Well, sort of. It's more of a series of scripted events for pregenerated character roles. For novice GMs and players, it's not well-defined enough, and experienced players are going to run off the rails of the adventure almost instantly. As best I can tell, it's just a campaign write-up of the playtest group's game, and lo and behold, there's a long-running series of sidebars entitled "How It Played Out". I'm an enormous fan of adventures in rulebooks, to show what the game is about and how it all comes together, but this is not it.

   Is the game worth it? A lukewarm "maybe". The task system, character creation, and supernatural materials are a very good start, though, if you're willing to put in a lot of work on the setting and fudge a lot on the grey areas (and the unreadable grey text). However, there's little in it that isn't done just as well or better by Unknown Armies, Witchcraft, or the long-awaited edited version of Armageddon.

2001 Update

   H+E's being converted to the Tri-Stat system of Big Eyes Small Mouth, which is both bad and good; H+E's system was unique, and Tri-Stat is much more heroic than H+E, but Tri-Stat's a good system, and it ought to get some real support now. More news as this comes out.

   Armageddon still hasn't been republished. Real Soon Now, we're told. Witchcraft and Unknown Armies do have solid support, though.

Last modified: 2001Aug27
Posted