GURPS PDF Challenge Reviews: Horror: Beyond the Pale

We're almost done.  This is the penultimate release from the PDF challenge, and it's unique in that it's an adventure that isn't for a framework, but for "vanilla" horror itself.

The executive summary is this: This doesn't work as an adventure.  It's alright as a "Creatures of the Night" entry, though I'm not the biggest fan of the monsters, but as an adventure, the book puts too much attention on the introduction and the resolution, gives you details you don't need, and shrugs at getting the players from point A to point B.

I would skip this one.

A Glimpse From Beyond the Pale

This is the point where I'd normally launch into the construction of the book, but before we do, while you're fresh and curious, I want you to close your eyes for a moment and picture yourself as a player. In that context? Great. Okay, given that, assume you receive the following information from the GM:

• There have been several grisly murders.
• They caught a guy covered in blood who was muttering something about "They made me watch," but the detective who contacted you doesn't think he did it.
• When you investigate the bodies, you are given a wealth of detail, such as the following: "Decent health. Cause of death was internal puncturing of all major organs, including brain. (Punctures caused by irregularly sized spikes of bone, grown in  from his own skeleton. There are medical conditions where  this could happen, but not this quickly. While Jules broke his  left humerus four months ago, X-rays show no sign of this."

There are additional details (such as who these people were, but for the most part entirely normal people), but from this, I want you to pause and think.  The GM has given this information to you. Can you solve the mystery?

Did you guess: manifestations of an entirely white dimension called the Drawn that can only be harmed by magic and kill people for the lulz? If so, well done, you win the game!

We'll come back to this point.

The Structure of Madness

There's only one chapter, which is the adventure itself. We get the "Backdrop" which is the introduction fo the adventure, "the Truth" which details the monsters themselves, three and a half pages of crime-scene notes, more details on the monsters (about a page), and then another page on the final fight and an epilogue.

The core idea, as I can glean (some of it is a little vague) is that there's an artist who insists on painting in monochromatics (all shades of red, all shades of blue, etc) and when he did art in all shades of white, he accidentally tapped into "the Pale," this dimension of pure whiteness and these Drawn came out.  They're perpetually bored, so they murdered nearby families for their own amusement, using their ability to reshape bodies, and the guy accused they let live because he was psychologically indisposed to providing them the emotional nourishment they sought, so after failing to incite a reaction from him with their gory parades, they ignored him.

If the players don't act, the monsters will come back out and start murdering more people and/or cops "until their time runs out," though I'm not clear from my reading how long that is.  They can evidently shapeshift to try to fool people and will do so to facilitate their rampage.  They can only be meaningfully hurt by magic.

The Tediousness of White

So how do I feel about this adventure? Well, I think you can break down the book into two broad parts: the monsters and the adventure itself.

The Drawn read like something out of Creatures of the Night, and they're not too bad as an encounter. Check out this bit of text:

In their native form – at least as  humans perceive them – the Drawn  appear as wispy, thin humanoids  formed of white light, with hideously swollen hands and heads.  When hunting, however, they  assume the guise of their intended  prey’s lost loved ones. Their stolen  identities are grotesquely imperfect, with light-bulb heads and  distorted voices, but usually close  enough to fool their targets. -- Page 8

Setting aside for a moment the dissonance between "grotesque imperfections" that sound pretty blatant, and the fact that they can somehow fool people into believing that they're the target's closest and most well-known companions (it's probably your horror-movie approach of "You can clearly see something is wrong with this person, but nobody else seems to mind for some reason"), the first bit is wonderful and has a weird, dreamlike quality to it which I think is great for this sort of monsters.

I also can't help but wonder if Cultist Simulator had some hand in inspiring this.  It too features painting in its game, and has deeply occult white pigmentation, and would use names like "the Drawn," and would have the sort of weird, spooky references to these creatures scattered across mythology and antiquity as this one does.  If so, then you, sir, have excellent taste.  If not, well, great minds think a like, I suppose.

All that said, I'm not especially a big fan of these monsters. Their weakness to magic is awfully binary: you either have it or you don't. A variety of vulnerabilities make for a more interesting encounter, and most traditional monsters have vulnerabilities to something an ordinary person can gain access to for a reason.  If you can kill a vampire with fire and garlic,then you go get fire and garlic.  If you need magic and you don't have any, you're out of luck.  There should be some sort of superstition, some legend, that non-magical players can learn of and exploit to at least protect themselves from the warping touch of the Drawn, and perhaps even drive them back to their endlessly achromatic realm.

Second, I've never particularly liked the chaotic evil monsters "who do it for the lulz." Horror, to me, is not about the sudden explosion of gore, especially in a table-top RPG where your ability to get across the shock factor of people-as-intenstinal-pinatas is somewhat limited, but about the slowly dawning horror of dread, which is why I think Cthulhu and his ilk are generally more popular with horror gaming than slasher killers. Even "gory" things like zombies tend to be more about "how do you survive zombies" rather than lurid descriptions of zombies eating people's faces.

Thus, a big part of a good horror RPG scenario is coming to understand the true horror of the monster, and why they do what they do. "Because it's fun" is up there with "a Wizard did it" for a non-reason.  A vampire does it because they need blood to survive.  Cthulhu does it because he's so vast and beyond you that he doesn't even realize he does what you would consider evil, anymore than you worry about the morality of swatting a fly, or destroying millions of bacterium with a single injection of anti-biotics.  The Cenobytes do it to liberate you from the confines of maudline existence and elevate you into a world of sensual intensity (via unending agony;  you're welcome!). The creature in Annihilation did it because... that was in its nature, it was just by its nature this sort of reality prism. It didn't mean to harm and perhaps, even, was curious about us and was unaware that it was destroying us with its very touch, or its exploration.  

The Drawn do it because they're bored and then they cackle and run about, splashing in blood puddles.  That sort of monster doesn't really interest me.  There's a bit of art in here that really captures how I feel about them "Oh no. Blood.  So much blood.  How scary. Can I go now?"

Broken Bodies, Broken Adventure

This adventure spends an inordinate amount of time feigning that it's a police procedural.  It has an enormous amount of detail on the lives of each of the people killed, exactly how they killed them, and these cruel little implications in each one. But other than underlining how gleefully sadistic the Drawn are, I don't really see what purpose this serves. Once the adventure was done, I felt like the author had been frolicking in blood-puddles a bit, exulting in a glee for gore that I just didn't share.  I'm not sure that was their intent, but that was the after taste it left me with.  If this serves no purpose, if the players cannot draw reasonable conclusions from it, then what's the point of all that detail? It's wasted word-count.

This grasps the shape of a good horror "police procedural" mystery, but I think it fails in its execution.  A good horror mystery presents something that could plausibly have been done by a human suspect, only there are small inconsistencies that the police might overlook, but the PC investigator, savvy to the genre, does not.  A good example of this in the story might be the lack of blood.  A bad example of it is "the characters died from having their bones grow into their brains." If the murder is obviously supernatural and the police ignore it, they look like morons.  If the murder is subtly supernatural, then the players begin to question their own sanity, and the approach of the police is more sensible. When they finally prove the high weirdness of events, the player gets a moment of triumph.

The second big problem here is that the Drawn are an entirely novel creation.  The players cannot be expected to know what they are. Thus, if you had people who were beaten to death, but seemed particularly anemic, then Crane as the suspect is plausible, but maybe there's a vampire involved and the PCs should arm up with garlic and fire and go hunting at night.  However, given the clues,  you cannot possibly expect the players to know what they're up against.  The only way for the players to know what they're up against, and the adventure explains this, is for them to roll Occultism, succeed, and then receive an info-dump.  Presumably the whole info-dump all at once, with the GM explaining all the things.  

Which brings me to the second problem with this adventure: the structure.

You have the beginning, which looks like an overly detailed police procedural full of gory details.  The players look for clues, find a wealth of useless information, spin their wheels guessing what the GM "has in its pocketses" ("Is it a vampire?" "No." "Is it a warlock?" "No." "Is it a demon?" "No.") until a miracle happens and someone makes their Occultism roll and then the GM explains all the things and if they have magic, they can fight it, otherwise, people die. The end.

When I read this adventure, I can't help picture the GM sitting behind his screen with this smug expression on his face, glorying in the detailed gore of each, individual description, and going over the deliciously creepy interrogation with the weird suspect, and then watching his smile get bigger and bigger as the increasingly exasperated players guess again and again, always getting it wrong, and then triumphantly revealing his weird, maniacal creation.  I don't think this would be an especially fun experience.

If you're going to do an adventure like this, it needs to either be a familiar monster with the twist built into sussing out the reality of the creature from the clues left behind, or a slow set of revelations about the nature of this novel creature to the players, where the entirety of the adventure is built around getting to know this new monster, it's motivations and its world.

One last aside: what's with the weird point totals? A typical Horror character clocks in around 75 points.  A typical Monster Hunter Sidekick clocks in around 200.  This is 150-200. If it's aimed at default Horror, shouldn't it be 75 points? And if it's aimed and MH Sidekicks, wouldn't you attach this to the Monster Hunter series? It just feels like an odd choice.  It could be that the idea is you start with 75 point horror characters, and then some 15 games later, you encounter the Drawn, but that seems an odd choice.  Adventures, in my experience, are aimed at beginning parties, not veteran parties, because beginners often need help getting going, while a long-running campaign usually has some momentum.

Meditations on an Empty Canvas

So, I'm not really a fan of this as an adventure.  There's not much in it that I would salvage for something else.  I don't really need the overly detailed description of the personal lives of these random people, I don't really need the overly detailed descriptions of their tortured bodies.  If I wanted to run something like that, I would use a different monster, and thus need different sorts of deaths, and so that part is useless to me.  It's passable as a "Creatures of the Night" entry, because you could use the Drawn elsewhere, but I'm not particularly fond of them either, as they're uninteresting when it comes to motivations, inaccessible when it comes to exploring their strange origins, and too narrow in their vulnerabilities.  But I've read worse Creature of the Night entries than that!

But given that you can pick up a half dozen Creatures of the Night for ~$6, is it worth it to pay $3 for one entry? I don't think so.

Give this one a miss.