While hunting for images from the book, I
did stumble across the funny, explitive laced review:
http://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-an ... ernatural/
Also, if you care, here is a discussion of whether the supplements for the second edition are ever coming out:
http://palladiumbooks.com/forums/viewto ... view=print
I think the magic sourcebook came out but not the beastiary? This would be a mysterious decision, if true.
But, I remind myself, this is not a review, it is an
Anatomy of a Failed Design. For a good design, the challenges (monsters) and the player options need to be
jointly optimized. That is, all the players need to have abilities that contribute sorta-fairly to the mix of challenges that they expect to actually face.
Therefore, I'm going to do the Monsters first and then dissect the rest of the book in reverse order, but first I'm going to lay out the very steep issue with party balance in this game. Now, a Rifts party is expected to include both of these guys:
![Image](https://cdn.britannica.com/700x450/11/198711-004-D24BFB08.jpg)
and only one of those characters can render a devastating critique of the racist foundation of neoliberalism, so how is that remotely fair?
In comparison, the extremes of a BtS party aren't so bad:
![Image](http://www.roguesportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/venkman.jpg)
Since they
both have PhDs, although Peter is twice as good because he has two.
The Rifts Conversion book solves this problem by straight-up giving Noam Chomsky mutant superpowers, which are totally different from Magic and Psionics. You're welcome.
But, okay, we're looking at monsters that can challenge a party including Dr. Peter Venkman and Dr. Jean Grey.
The cover also includes a pretty cool party for a game like this. So you might ask - do I want to play Monster of the Week?
No you don't it's fucking Bear World. https://www.evilhat.com/home/monster-of-the-week/ https://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55639
So, okay: Monsters.
This opens with... I think this is a design note?
Kevin Siembieda wrote:many of the monstrous beings in Beyond the Supernatural™, including predators, delight in tormenting and terrorizing their victims before making a kill. And that, dear readers, is the essence of horror and suspense.
And it keeps going for seven paragraphs about how sadistically evil the monsters are. They're also insidious sociopaths, who like both literal and symbolic darkness (meaning ignorance, fear,
etc.).
The monsters have plausible and implausible vulnerabilities. Many are very weak once tracked down and revealed.
Monsters also have a threat level (4, 6 or 10) which is how much of a power boost the forces of good get when confronting them, and a horror factor which we'll get to but replaces a SAN roll.
So... is the design goal that they're scary, and you solve a mystery to catch them? I mean, they're mostly not really, frankly. Oh, also, each monster gets a paragraph about how
exactly it turns into dust and blows away when you kill it. After all those paragraphs of how evil they are, we've got:
[*] Banshees, which can see the future and go to where people are going to die. That's pretty creepy, and the penalties they hit you with by creeping you out are actually fairly stiff. But they're not particularly
scary, to be honest.
[*] Bogey Men, who are pretty scary, in that they live in abandoned buildings, disguised as hobos, and capture, torture and eat a child every three weeks or so. They're not clever, skilled or intelligent though they have a Brewing skill of 80% for some reason? They're really quite tough in combat, though (note to self - come back to the monster stats when I get to the combat section.) Given the limited resources of these critters it isn't much of a mystery to deal with one.
[*] Boschala are random chimera. It's a sorta cool concept (they look like random mixtures of animal bits because they're trying to blend in, and failing miserably) and they're aggressive predators but also loyal to whomever summons them. They're quite tough in a fight, and they have weird rules for reproducing by melting together, which is gross but again not especially
scary. When their pack gets big enough the summoner loses control of them, but they don't attack the summoner?
Beyond the Supernatural, Second Edition wrote:Discorporation: When slain, the Boschala's body turns into slime that dries to dust and blows away within 1D6 minutes. Analysis of the slime or dust shows it is a simple organic material similar to the composition of a snail.
(expletive deleted) SNAILS ARE MADE OF CELLS WHICH ARE JUST AS COMPLEX AS THE INDIVIDUAL CELLS OF A HUMAN.
I think there's a spell in Rifts that thinks Influenza is a bacterium. Kevin flunks middle school biology
Someone drew a picture of one of these and put it on Deviant Art:
[*] The Brain Borrower is pretty scary - but the brain worms in Wrath of Khan traumatized me as a child. They eat part of someone's brain, anesthetizing the brain (which, minor point, you don't need to do because the brain has no pain receptors) and then puppeting the person around at reduced competence but with some useful psychic powers. Then a few days later they eat the rest of the brain to finish the person off. They're usually agents of bigger baddies, employed as a terror weapon. As brain worms go, they're not the scariest, but okay.
[*] The Dar'Ota is a succubus. They've got, on first inspection, a legitimate skill set to be evil infiltrators and are also fearsome combat monsters once they revert to hideous saurian form. We'll have to talk about the combat in the combat chapter and the skills in the skills chapter to assess whether the Dar'Ota is a successful design. But, one reason I possibly should've reviewed the first edition instead - the Dar'Ota knows spells which are
not in this book. This is the picture from the book of the monster form (not the sexy lady form):
[*] The Devil Ghost is pretty freaky looking - it's a winged skeleton with forked insect legs. It's power is dream projection and it's modus operandi is to engage in elaborate confidence games in which it uses clairvoyance and dream projection to trick people into elaborate plots that end up spreading chaos - or sometimes it just gives motivational speeches to serial killers. Killing people in their dreams would be scarrier but we were promised demon manipulators too, so here is one.
[*] Dimensional Ghouls are fairly smart ghouls with some magical powers (especially significant teleportation), who are... mostly harmless? They occasional kill homeless people who are dying anyway, but don't hunt healthy humans. They... like to watch humans engage in "depravity", so that's worth extra gross points. You can force them to carry you through their portals although it does you damage. That's a decent creepy gimmick. I rather like this monster for atmosphere but it does nothing for the design goals.
[*] Dybbuk are a much nastier class of ghoul, which are tanks with superhuman stats that can inhabit recently deceased corpses as a disguise. Unfortunately, it's more silly than scary (it's got four arms), but as a statline for a mashup of pyramid head and the Bug alien from Men in Black it would work. They hate one another but like to be senior henchmen to demon lords with other lesser types of ghoul below them in the org chart... for some reason?
![Image](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS0ej9nRTfjOgkhAlVxfwV-pMS4ZIc3AZQnsv83dEfVqxqVAMgf)
[*] There are five entities presented - that is, purely spectral critters, pseudo-ghosts but not the spirits of dead people. All of them are PPE (spell point) vampires. You have the standard poltergeist, the generic haunter/repeater, the "syphon" - a treasure haunting ghost (which makes whoever owns the item it's servant to try and do evil), the tectonic entity which forms a body out of garbage and tries to murder you for your spell points, and the possessing entity which behaves like the demon from the Exorcist and tries to do as much harm as possible whenever it possesses people. Both the syphon and tectonic entity are cool monsters of the week, I think - the others are meh.
Lots of other Palladium products mention entities without saying what the fuck that's supposed to mean - you have to have read BtS to know that's what Kevin Siembieda calls pseudo-ghosts.
[*] Grave ghouls are totally standard ghouls. Like the more interesting dimensional ghoul, they're not that dangerous and why are they even in this book?
[*] There are Gremlins, which have the powers you'd expect Gremlins to have but don't come from Mogwai (unfortunately). They have significant technical skills and the various technology psi powers which they use "to their maximum potential for destruction and evil".
[*] There are Hell Hounds, which are vicious dogs that fight to the death when... cornered, hurt or angry... so, all the time? They're evil in spite of having normal dog intelligence - frankly, regular rabid dogs would be scarier than these things. Oh, they're immune to non-silver physical attacks, so I guess that matters.
And then the monster lists stops here at H, with an advertisement for their bestiary -
http://palladium-store.com/1001/product ... tural.html - that may not be out yet? - with an apology for hitting their page limit.
Well, having a deficient monster list in the basic book is
not excusable in a horror game which is really about the monsters, and their editorial decisions are awful because they stopped at H, and included monsters with
spells, so as an editing decision it's a trainwreck. They've also got three flavors of ghouls, which is two more than you need. That
contributes to a failed design.
So, is this a design success otherwise? Editorial clusterfuck aside, we have to delve into the skills and combat of the monsters further in other chapters, but the biggest problem is the monsters themselves. They are
at best okay. This game would've been
much better off with the public domain HP Lovecraft monsters, which are creepy, weird and evocative, than with this mix of cheesy urban legends and generic schite. If the Lovecraft monsters are more amoral and you're looking for something more actively evil, there's plenty of inspiration to crib from, from Warhammer demons to plague zombies and no excuse for having a horror RPG in which the core bestiary isn't scary!
Finally, this list of monsters does not give the players a good chance to utilize their mystery-solving or demon-cult-busting skills, with a few exceptions that have magical powers.
A successful design would have
only monsters that serve to contain their own plot hooks, and none at all of the monsters which exist
only to serve as dispensable combat flunkies of higher level demons that aren't described at all in this book.
Next section, the Lazlo Society.
NOTE: I might edit or expand this part a bit before moving on.
Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek