Re: [HOE] Gamers Beware! A word of warning!!!

[Robert Holland <robert@macauley.com>]

>> I also hear that the Book of Vile Darkness isn't actually all that vile or
>> dark.  But whatever floats peoples' boats, I guess.
>
>It's pretty lame. Of course, you have to wonder about a game where casting a
>fireball in the middle of a goblin village is somehow basically *good* but
>sucking the blood/bones/skin off just one poor shmuck is automatically
>*evil*.
>
>What really bugs me is that most RPG companies seem to take the attitude
>that "mature" material is anything that gives a 15-year-old male a
>hard-on... which I think is safer to call "immature" material.

Heh, you know, that's exactly what I was thinking. My first thought on reading
the Evil Book was "Gee, this reminds me of the stuff the death metal kids I
gamed with in high school came up with." Immature audiences, indeed. It's much
more oriented towards shock and gross-out stuff that any sort of serious
addressing of mature themes. Who really needs detailed rules for the cost,
damage inflicted by, and ability to resist interrogation from a list of several
dozen different torture devices, or game mechanics for hiring a prostitute?
Things like the necromantic spell that requires you to, um, have relations with
a zombie make me chuckle, not shiver.

That's not to say there isn't some decent material in there, if you're into D&D.
The section describing various demon and devil lords could be quite useful for
an outer-planar campaign, and the new spells could really flesh out (so to
speak) the spell list of a necromancer PC--though you'd want to strip the "Evil"
descriptors from most of them; there's no reason why a spell that summons a
cloud of gnashing teeth to strip the flesh from your enemies should be evil
while a spell that summons a cloud of spinning razors to strip the flesh from
your enemies (Blade Barrier, from the Player's Handbook) is morally neutral. But
all in all, it's about as dark and evil as an Alice Cooper concert.

--Robert Holland