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davybaby's review
4.0
The Book of Unremitting Horror is a source book for the GUMSHOE role-playing system, which I've been considering running with a Fear Itself game. It's an interesting type of source book, with most of the text taken up by various monsters whose descriptions imply a mystery. A flash fiction horror story introduces each monster, followed by sample clues that they could leave for enterprising investigators, and then stats. It's an interesting setup, because it inspires creativity and gives enough information to convey a tone, but allows the reader to plug them into their own stories where appropriate.
The book then takes a similar approach to various artifacts/relics, which in most cases complement the monsters that came earlier, and gives another story hook or two for each. Finally, it contains several sample storylines for The Esoterrorists and Fear Itself games that incorporate the monsters. Like the entries themselves, these serve as an example of how to build an investigation game around the themes and tone of the monsters, without it seeming like a monster-of-the-week pulp TV show.
While it was a great resource for the game, I had to knock it down a star because the creator seems to like different horror elements than I do. I tend toward creepy horror focused on building atmosphere, whereas a fair number of the monsters were more body horror, big monsters, or slasher types. And they were good examples of those, but not really my bag, so I could only really picture using a few of the monsters in a game.
But even so. It was a really interesting imagination-sparker, and worth checking out for fans of horror gaming or writing.
The book then takes a similar approach to various artifacts/relics, which in most cases complement the monsters that came earlier, and gives another story hook or two for each. Finally, it contains several sample storylines for The Esoterrorists and Fear Itself games that incorporate the monsters. Like the entries themselves, these serve as an example of how to build an investigation game around the themes and tone of the monsters, without it seeming like a monster-of-the-week pulp TV show.
While it was a great resource for the game, I had to knock it down a star because the creator seems to like different horror elements than I do. I tend toward creepy horror focused on building atmosphere, whereas a fair number of the monsters were more body horror, big monsters, or slasher types. And they were good examples of those, but not really my bag, so I could only really picture using a few of the monsters in a game.
But even so. It was a really interesting imagination-sparker, and worth checking out for fans of horror gaming or writing.
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