Blood Games

Game: Blood Games
Publisher: Flying Mice LLC
Series: Blood Games
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 21st, December 2004
Reviewer’s Rating: 7/10   [ Good ]
Total Score: 20
Average Score: 6.67

Blood Games has “Occult Horror Role-Playing” printed on the front cover twice. It’s printed in text and it’s spelt out with the cover illustration.

We see a morbid white hand with long, dangerous, nails hanging idly in the foreground while I weary, blood-splattered, t-shirt wearing man rests against a red brick corner. Someone’s in trouble.

A key question is whether Blood Games is an occult horror role-playing game. It’s certainly a horror game with vampires and werewolves in a battle against mankind. The US$10.00 PDF ladles on the atmosphere with fiction text/favour pieces which bridge the chapters.

Although skills and education are core in Blood Games there’s no meaty chunk of rules for research, libraries and obscure knowledge. In fact, Blood Games is not about finding lost artefacts to use in a protective ritual.

Blood Games is about not being wiped out by packs of werewolves or assassinated by angry vampires. As the introduction of the RPG points out; mankind was once a prey species.

Blood Games uses the StarCluster 2 rule system. You don’t need the space epic itself to play Blood Games as the horror RPG is entirely independent. In fact, I found Blood Games easier to read and understand even though there very little difference to the text.

There are just an economy of scale in Blood Games with more authors and time to enhance and tinker rather than write from scratch.

Blood Games is quite nicely presented. At times the text has a large left margin (sometimes a right margin instead) in which various chapter sections sit. This simple trick is enough to break up the sea of text a heavy PDF can become and is kind on your printer.

When a wide table is needed the PDF just prints the wide table and breaks the margin. It works. It’s much better than squeezing up the table. For a long while – and Blood Games is 182 pages long – I wondered whether there were any illustrations in the product at all. There are. Just keep reading and you’ll find the rare gems.

Finding your way around Blood Games is an experienced mixed with pros and cons. The large PDF has a “click contents” and index. You can click on the entry of note and leap to the right page in the right place.

Blood Games has bookmarks – but only an alphabet to take you to the contents panel. So you need two clicks, generally, to navigate the PDF but with these two clicks, you can accurately target just about anywhere. Click a third time and the document annoyingly zooms in a magnification level and starts to scroll horizontally (at least on my system).

There’s a lot to navigate in Blood Games. There are dozens of pages of education and career options for characters. This is a game which uses very many terribly short tables.

Your character begins at the age of 10. You’ll either roll dice to get here or spend points. I don’t tend to like the random method for character generation. Even with a table to round the curve, I think a d100 roll for IQ is just too great, for example.

Once you’ve established these basic settings, as appropriate to your 10-year-old character, you work forward through education and career. You stop when you reach the age your character is. This is, of course, more accurate than a gaming system which assumes a 17-year-old police rookie is on equal terms with a 36-year-old detective because both are core classes and both are level 1.

Blood Games also ages characters; you get weaker as you get older and so an old academic who tumbles down the stairs is in big trouble (rather than being in the position of having more hit points than his young apprentice because he has more levels).

The first collection of years your character progresses through in the chargen process are the educational ones – their time at school and college. You can dice or pick.

The drawback which stands out for me is that the system simply presents the American education system. It’s very different elsewhere in the world. Looking at Blood Games it seems as if you can get your Masters Degree in two years in the States (with the required education before that). Here in Scotland, you’ll take four years over your Bachelor Degree and then think about doing a Masters.

Once you’ve some experience with the system it should be easy enough to adapt these rules to suit your setting. We’re encouraged to adapt the career options. Career options work, pretty much, in the same way as the education modules. You can stay in a career for a year and continue to learn its skills and bonuses or move onto another one. You have to balance having a wide range of skills against having expertise in a set of skills. There is actually an example of creating a new career.

Above and beyond career our heroes might have a Path. In actual fact, characters might have a path or might be a non-path character. In the latter case, a hero is a normal person. He might be a cop, gipsy, mad scientist or acrobat but they’re just an average Joe who’s become broiled in the fight against Darkness.

Characters with Paths are not average Joes.

Hunters have super-human power. Hunters, created by Witches and other certain types of magical people, could go toe-to-toe with vampires. In fact, that’s exactly what Hunters want to do.

A group, we’re told, is likely to have about one Hunter. The Hunter is the group’s muscles. There could be a Witch or an Esotericist in the group too. There are Templars, Magi and Shaman too. Each of these paths is perhaps most simply thought of a character class or themed ability modifier. There are significant stat differences between each Path (equivalent too a couple of years extra on each stat, at times) and an even wider range of magical and supernatural abilities.

When there are “spell casting” abilities they do tend to vary heavily between the Paths.

Some of the more eldritch Paths are able to interact with the Spirit World. In fact, the Spirit World seems to have some importance in Blood Games as it’s one of the first game features we’re told about.

If a demon manages to cut the silver cord of a spirit world traveller then it has a percentage chance of being able to possess the physical body in such a way that exorcisms are mute against it. Why you would want to journey in the spirit realm is really up to the GM.

There are werewolves and vampires. Humans don’t tend to believe in either and rationalise sightings away. Once there was magic but now, with the rise of technology, hardly anyone believes in magic and hence magic is terribly weakened.

It’s very easy to compare a setting like this to White Wolf’s original World of Darkness (although Stellar Games’ Nightlife came out first and did the werewolf and vampire thing). It’s wrong to do so but hard to stop your players thinking along those lines.

There are no conspiracies in Blood Games. There are no clans of vampires. Vampires are loners and selfish. Vampires get more attractive with age but get more bestial as they get hungry.

The Cambion Path is likely to be popular; half-human and half vampires. The Cambions are very powerful but need only three drinks of human blood to succumb and become a full vampire.

Most of Blood Games’ cosmology comes out in the powers of the Paths. There are totem spirits and we read about what they can do in the Shaman path. There are angels too and we’re given a list of names and translations for various religions in the Magi section. Magi can, as a power, call on the intercession of angels.

In truth Blood Games is a hard setting to write up; it’s our world, only slightly different and without the conspiracy of organisation there are no shadowy empires to discuss. There is a bestiary though. As a personal quirk, I really do prefer illustrations with bestiaries and Blood Games is art light.

Blood Games lives up to its name. It’s a brutal RPG. Thankfully the StarCluster combat system is inclined to quickly take enemies (or heroes) down to unconscious quickly but does require that extra push to produce fatal results.

Blood Games is a hefty dose of rules that are spliced with fiction and reality. The result is a roleplaying game. Blood Games is pretty good. For $10 you get a thorough system with a lot of scope. The career character system encourages games in which characters have one adventure a year, age and mature. Yet the gameplay is likely to be quick and intense at times.

Though the game doesn’t seem to have much of a focus on research and discovery it does hold plenty of information on Judo-Christian mythology and can certainly adopt the occult mantle from there.

I quite like Blood Games. It’s a no-nonsense horror game and through that can be quite scary at times – do or die scenarios seem common. I think the biggest challenge in the game might also provide to be the biggest win.

If the group can cope with a power imbalance in their own ranks; one hunter and several non-path characters for example, then there’s a whole sway of interesting opportunities. On the other hand, an unbalanced group must be one of the most common causes of games to break up.

I think Blood Games is best with an experienced GM. Blood Games might be even better with an experienced GM and fresh-faced players.