Modern (Horror)
Postmortem Studios
2006
Complexity: 4
It’s time to start the Spooktober festivities with a spooky horror game. Blood! Is a game that more-or-less seeks to emulate modern horror films—or since the original came out in 1990, horror films of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Both versions are also notably British, which I guess is only relevant if you know about the banning and censorship of horror films that was going on there in the 1980s. Anyway, video nasty history aside, Blood! is a game with a lot to offer, some might even say too much—I would be one of those people. Let’s just say there’s a reason I added a complexity rating to my review format.
Setting: N/A
As a game of “modern horror,” Blood! Takes place in the modern world. Pretty much anyone who isn’t a time traveler should have a pretty good grasp on the setting.
Character Creation: 2/3
Okay, I’m going a little more in-depth than usual here, but I feel it’s important to understand what kind of game this is.
The character creation system in Blood! Is a bit… let’s say ‘involved.’ Characters have nine primary attributes, which are generated with a d100 roll. Each attribute has a specified range—e.g. Strength 30–80—which a score needs to fit within in order to be assigned to that attribute, which strikes me as a little weird. After that players generate their twenty-two derived attributes, which range from as simple as referencing a table, or as complicated as adding Stamina and Strength, dividing the result by five, and adding 2d10 and another derived bonus. If you’re thinking that maybe I made a mistake, no, twenty-two derived attributes. Admittedly, some of them are just bonuses added to another derived attribute, or are closely related—so far the only game I’ve encountered with separate hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch attributes. Included in these various attributes are Hit Points, Blood Points, Energy Points, and Mind Points, which will be discussed later. Players are then asked to write a paragraph describing their character and assign them some ‘quirks’ to aid in role-playing. At this point you could assume we’re done, but then you notice this section continues, just thought I’d take a break and say hi.
After a character’s attributes and general description are determined the player must select a ‘profession’ which provides a base skill and lists of main and related skills. Skills are divided into physical and mental, and characters get skill points of each type based on their attributes. Each skill has a base—usually an attribute divided by two—and an ‘advance’—a die that determines how much a skill is increased by. Skills are bought at the cost of 10 points plus 10 per advancement, with main and related skills getting free advancements when the base is bought. Characters then get an additional 80 points to spend on combat skills, and spend any remaining points to up skills at a cost of +1%/1 point. And at this point we actually are done, although I would like to briefly mention advancement. Skills that have been used in game have a chance of of being advanced—adding an advancement die to skill total—but also skills that aren’t used have the possibility of ‘degrading’ and losing an advancement.
Okay, so that was complicated, but was it really that bad? Honestly, yes. The issue here is that Blood! makes something of a point of the fact that characters are intended to be average to below-average people, and that character death is extremely likely. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t want to spend an hour or more making an unremarkable person who’s probably going to die.
Mechanics: 3/5
The base mechanics of Blood! are a standard percentile roll-under system, rolling against a character’s skill value with success on a roll equal to or under—with certain skills having specific variants. Of course things get more complicated from there. Each round a character gains a 1–5 ‘actions’ determined by their attributes. Actions are spent to do things, moving or dodging cost 1 action, whereas reading a chainsaw costs 2 and attacking with it costs 4. Characters can save their actions for future turns, but can never have more than 5 at once. Characters also have Hit Points and Blood Points, attacks do Hit Point Damage plus Blood Point damage determined by the Hit Point damage and type of weapon used—there’s a table, there’s lots of tables. Blood Points are like your actual hit points and Hit Points are something of a buffer, being at 0 Hit Points doesn’t kill or incapacitate a character, but makes any successful hit a critical—which will be discussed later. There’s also Mental Points which are basically sanity, and Energy Points, which are a fatigue system—so if you like tracking points, boy howdy is this the game for you. Characters also need to make Willpower saves when they see something spooky—Mind Point damage—and Shock saves when taking massive damage—yes, if a spooky dude stabs you you may need to make a save against spookiness, take Hit Point and Blood Point damage from the attack, and possibly make a save against Shock, assuming said spooky dude doesn’t get a one-hit kill critical. And now let’s talk about the criticals, Blood! doesn’t handle crits like some kind of pedestrian game, no in Blood! after a critical is rolled you roll on a specific critical table based on the weapon used, which can range in effect from losing an Action to death.
Are these rules complicated? Yes. But are they unnecessarily complicated? That’s more of a tricky question. To me, this seems way too complicated to be really enjoyable. However, I can see how someone could want that level of complexity in their game. The rules are super heavy, but they do all serve a purpose in the game.
I will say that one aspect I really like is the inclusion of an Exert Strength attribute, which is something most games do, but don’t bother having specific rules for.
Writing and Presentation: 3/5
The book is competently—if not somewhat dryly—written, my biggest complaint is a lot of things are introduced without being fully explained, and you just kinda need to keep them in mind until you reach the relevant sections. I also don’t like how much information is exclusively found in tables—e.g. Skill base and advancements could have easily been included with the skill descriptions, but is not. Overall there’s a lot of hunting through the book for the right table, and this book has itself an abundance of tables. There’s a few types and bad column/page breaks, but I’m willing to overlook them since this is a 156-page book put together by one person.
There’s a decorative border on the pages that bleeds into the text and makes things a little difficult to read at times, but I did eventually get used to it. You know what I didn’t get used to though? The tables. Oh god, the tables in this book are awful. The cells have really think strokes and no padding—i.e. text literally touches the edge of the cell—or background—i.e. that border is visible through the tables—and in cells with multiple lines of text there’s this really awkward leading between lines. There’s also a fair bit of inconsistent cell sizing, but relative to everything else that’s nothing. Seriously just look at this, this is not an anomaly, they’re all like this.
I like a lot of the art in this book, good old fashioned creepy black and white illustrations are my jam. There is something of a lack of stylistic consistency, but that's just down to being done by multiple artists—Bradley K McDevitt’s illustrations being by far the best. However, only a handful really illustrate specific points. They’re all thematically appropriate, but a lot of them feel like “spooky picture because I needed to fill space.”
Content: 3/3 [+]
Well, I guess one advantage of an overly-complicated game is an abundance of stuff. There are literally hundreds of weapons, everything from shotguns, to nunchaku, to claw hammers, to wire brushes, power drills, chainsaws, and wallpaper steamers, it’s all here—although electric floor buffer seems to have somehow been left out. Need stats for smashing a coffee mug on someone’s head? Probably not, but it’s there. Also as noted previously are the critical hit tables, twenty-seven of ‘em, which each provide around 10–20 weapon-specific graphic descriptions and mechanical effects of the crit. There’s even critical hit tables for burns, dissolving, and low and high speed vehicle collisions. Are these things necessary? No. But games are just kinda unnecessary in general. The one area that falls short is creatures. Each creature is thoroughly written up and even includes adventure seeds for using them, but there’s only nine. Admittedly though, other games have done pretty well for themselves with only zombies.
Final Remarks
In the book’s introduction it’s mentioned that the original version didn't do very well when it was released in 1990. The author blames this on “trends” towards rules-lite games, without seeming to understand that said trends were a reaction to games getting too damn complicated—and computer games being able to do all those complicated calculations instantly. And yeah, this game is too damn complicated, especially for a genre that's supposed to be about atmosphere and fast stupid action.
That being said, if you want a highly-complex horror game, Blood! is absolutely that game.
Base Points: 8
Character Creation: 2/5, Mechanics: 3/5, Presentation: 3/5
Adjustments: +1
Setting: N/A, Writing: +0, Content: +1
Overall Score 60% (9/15 Points)
More than you could ever need—or want.
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