RPGPundit Reviews: Ghostories

Ghostories: Supernatural Mystery Roleplaying is an RPG by Precis Intermedia, for their "Genre Division i" system.  The book is a complete game by itself, but can be used in combination with any other GDi game as well. I'm reviewing the print version, which is a softcover 75 page book.  The book seems to be physically well put-together and I suspect it could put up with prolonged wear-and-tear.

GDi is a good system for what it does, but I don't see it having a lot of range past the kind of "gritty, playing regular humans" sort of deal. There's a reason why it wouldn't fit well with a game genre like high-fantasy, for example.
Ghostories is Precis' attempt to enter the Call of Cthulhu club; and I get the feeling that such a game would be straining the limits of what the GDi system can do. Straining, but not breaking.

That said, whenever I see a "Modern investigative horror" game, I ask myself: "Is there any reason to play this game instead of just playing Call of Cthulhu?".  In most cases the answer is no.
In this case, the answer would be "not enough reason, unless you are already a big fan of GDi or want to incorporate some of the ideas in this book with those of the other GDi games".
Nevertheless, there are some interesting new mechanics here that could be appealing especially to fans of the GDi system, and possibly to people who are just whores for this sort of "occult horror" RPG genre.

Brett Bernstein, the author, states that the purpose of the game is "a toolkit for your own paranormal mystery adventures- designed to be versatile".  It certainly fulfills the first requirement (though again, not in any really original or better way compared to what's already out there), as for the second, it has about as much versatility as the GDi system allows; which is to say, a medium amount. It isn't a hard system, so its not a hard system to add your own skills and powers to.

The GDi system is based on a 2d6 mechanic; where characters have a set of five abilities (ranging from 0-5 in value) , and a bunch of skills (ranging from 1-8; 0-8 if you count "untrained").
Players must select a role for their character, an occupation or vocation; in the case of Ghostories you get the standard gamut of Cthulhu-esque occupations: clergyman, detective, dilettante, doctor, journalist, professor, etc etc. There are a few others, none too unusual. Interestingly enough, no role for "soldier" or "military" is included; though it'd be easy enough to create one.  Your role determines your required starting gimmicks and some recommended starting skills.

Characters in Ghostories in particular also have another, new, mechanic called "pursuits". A pursuit represents an obsession for the character, no doubt what leads them into a world of occult-investigating.  This obsession is powerful enough that the PC has to make composure rolls to manage to tear himself away from anything related to his pursuit when there's something more pressing that needs to be done (ie. a character obsessed with ancient texts would have to make a composure roll to remember to pick up his kid from school rather than just keep trying to translate that new aramaic manuscript he found). Pursuits can be psychological, religious, magical, occult, scientific, or "vigilante" (this last one seems an odd choice, but it has to do with another innovation related to the default setting of the game; where there are ancient powers that give special (mostly physical) abilities to those who fight injustice; I suppose that this is meant to be a Buffy-esque sort of deal).

Each pursuit determines either additional gimmicks or skills for your PC, and each has its "tainted" version (ie. the way your pursuit is changed after your initial encounters with the "dark powers"), which gives you access to particular powers or special ability gimmicks.

Skills represent areas of training: both in regular education, and also in special powers; magic or divine abilities, etc. all work through granting access to powers that work as new skills.
Gimmicks are your "feats", which range from social gimmicks, cultural gimmicks, natural talents, and also "detrimental gimmicks" (ie. disadvantages). Each of the various occult powers also grant access to new power-related gimmicks.

For those who haven't read my previous reviews regarding the GDi system; task resolution is very simple: you roll 2d6 and need to roll under the value of your ability+skill. Harder tasks can require you to beat the roll by more than 0.
Composure, a special skill of sorts that has appeared in most other GDi games, becomes more important in this game in particular, since it determines one's ability to resist one's Pursuit, and also to resist the maddening effects of the supernatural.

As in other GDi games, there are five levels of damage, and two kinds of (regular) damage: fatigue and injury.  But to this we add, for Ghostories, a third track: Dementia.  Taking Dementia damage affects your mind, and is essentially the Ghostories version of Sanity Points.
Any of the three damage tracks will, as you progress along them, create increasing penalties to all your resolution checks, and marking all five boxes on any of the three tracks will basically take you out of commission (either unconscious, dead, or delirious).

The chapter on task resolution is particularly good in this book; it includes details not just on combat and composure, but also on how to resolve other tasks, like using your various connections during the process of an investigation and such.

Now, as I'd mentioned before, each of the different pursuits can, once the PCs become aware of the supernatural world (ie. become "tainted"), allow the PCs to have access to particular powers.  These are detailed fully in chapter 3 of the game, and include "second sight" (ESP, basically), Divine Arts (the power of faith), Sorcery (the power to conjure up objects and illusions, and to create magical wards or barriers), Unholy Arts (which lets you summon, banish, or make pacts with "phantoms"), Binding (which lets you trap a spirit inside a magical object), and Heritage of the Egis (the aforementioned "vigilante-buffy powers").
Of all of these powers, there is definitely something of a range of both usefulness and clarity to them: Second Sight and the Buffy-powers are pretty straightforward; Unholy Arts seem like something cultist NPCs would be better off using and don't seem overly practical for those Players who want to be "evil"; and Sorcery and Binding seem somewhat vague and (I would figure) open to player abuse; they could easily be abused to be way more broken and game-unbalancing than any of the other powers.
An additional problem is that each of these is linked to your PC's pursuit. You choose a single pursuit, and whatever pursuit you choose, those are the powers you get. So if you don't want to allow a given power in the game, you have to not allow a given pursuit. Sorcery and Binding are tied to the Magic and Science pursuits, so if you don't want PCs to end up with these potentially unbalancing powers, you basically have to end up not allowing any scientist or magician PCs.

In spite of these flaws, these new powers are something that could be particularly useful for GDi fans that would be interested in Ghostories mostly for getting additional material for their existing games; these powers could easily be adapted for use in any of the other GDi settings.

So, what would an Occult Horror RPG be without some good occult horrors, supernatural entities, evil tentacled thingies? Ghostories' chapter on its monsters gives details for the type of creatures PCs are likely to run into. Unfortunately, they seem a little dull to me. You have your ghosts, your embodied spirits (gremlins, golems, gargoyles, etc), your "phantoms" (which seem really more like Demons than "phantoms" to me; entities that delight in corrupting mortals), your "banes" (entities that possess human beings), and finally your moral opponents, be they misguided law enforcement officers or evil cultists. What you don't get are either Mythos-like creatures or some other kind of really new and original horror.  The creatures here are utterly conventional and recognizable.

You know, I get the feeling that supernatural horror isn't really Mr. Bernstein's forte.  The guy kicks ass at things like the wild west, hard sci-fi, pulp, anything relatively gritty. Asking him to do something related to the supernatural is a little reminiscent of Steve Ditko's disastrous and mercifully short run on the Legion of Superheroes; its not that the guy didn't have talent, he just was utterly unsuited by personality to present the type of atmosphere that the setting requires.

The book goes on to have a good, albeit brief and by now utterly standard section on "how to run a horror game" with some basically solid advice, and then (after the brief rules on advancement, optional rules, long-term injury rules, some conversions for other systems, and some ideas for incorporating the Ghostories rules with the Mean Streets Film Noir RPG) the book finishes off providing a set of ready-run scenarios for the game.
They aren't particularly detailed, each covering only a few pages, and while all are ok, none are particularly mind-blowing.  You have an adventure about the restless ghost of a murder victim, a conflict with a Dr.Frankenstein-esque mad scientist, a hunt for a succubus, and an adventure involving a possessing entity trying to cause a really big earthquake in San Francisco.

In conclusion, I'd have to say this is far from my favourite GDi game.  Its still got a lot of useful stuff, and if you're a real GDi fanatic, you could easily use these rules as the springboard (or the toolkit as Bernstein put it) for creating a really good supernatural horror campaign if you have the brains for it, but in and of itself it strikes me as rather unoriginal.  Its certainly no Coyote Trail.
Buy it only if you're a huge fan, or you're looking for some slightly darker-sort of supernatural powers and details for your existing GDi campaign.

RPGPundit

Thanks for the review.

You are under the misconception, however, that a) Call of Cthulhu is standard of modern horror when it is really its own type of horror and b) over-the-top Buffy melodrama is horror. Ghostories is more like X-Files or Supernatural meets Ghost Hunters. We're talking Ghosts and ghost-related activity. The Enhancement Pack has more horrors like trolls and vampires, but they are not the focus of the main rules. Most games turn the supernatural into something either totally expected or so ridiculously obscene that the game is not one of horror, but of superheroes vs. D&D monsters. Now that's fine if that's what you want, but it's not modern ghost stories.

That's a curious comment Brett, for a couple of reasons:

1. You should realize that CoC is considered the "Industry standard" of supernatural RPGs.  You really can't make a game like this without expecting a comparative review to CoC.

2. You talk about "superheroes Vs. D&D monsters"; your own game might be a lot less of the latter than some of CoC's monsters, but in the former, your game essentially has as its default that every single character (or at least, if you assume that every single character has a Pursuit) will end up having access to supernatural powers.   That's quite different than CoC, where the PCs typically have no "super" abilities at all, and what powers there are (spells, psychic powers in the D20 version) are usually way more dangerous than they're worth.

RPGPundit

I like CoC, but I would not use it for modern supernatural with real-world/modern fiction horrors. Just like D&D; it's a fine game for what it does, but I'm not in the mood to do what it does. So, we're basically approaching this genre from two very different directions. Your idea of modern horror seems to be CoC, while my idea of modern horror is ghosts, demons, and the possessed (hence the name Ghostories, which does not pretend to be CoC). Am I off track here?

Ghostories does not assume that all characters have powers. Only tainted characters can have powers. The rules explain that there are different levels of the game, from the characters having no powers to one or two characters having powers, to epic games where everyone has powers.

Like I said, thanks for the review. As always, I feel it is fair and balanced. The point I'm trying to make is that one's man's horror is another man's CoC, but they are not necessarily the same.

Yes, that's fair enough. I still think one can't help but expect comparisons to CoC whenever creating a modern horror RPG, though.

RPGpundit