Another monster manual review.
I have been advised by a trusted source to add more of an introductory blurb to these posts, so here I am doing that:
Back in trade school, when I wired my first furnace and it worked, I was quite pleased with myself - until the instructor (a man who had made the big bucks until his arm became paralyzed in a motorcycling accident, and now was paid peanuts to babysit shitheads like me and hotbox his truck) came over, looked at the rat's nest I'd made of the wiring, and said "Take some fucking pride in your work". Since then my wiring has been much cleaner.
Blog posts are one thing, and works you expect other people to pay you for are another - you should take pride in the latter, be able to take pride in them. Unconfirmed Contact Reports is listed at the price of $29.00. That is about 8.5 Sapporo Super-Dry tallboys (if you buy them individually), or what some would call 'a night of moderate drinking'. It's not cheap, and it's got stiff competition for my money.
Full disclosure: I have not played Gumshoe, I have not played Mork Borg, I have not played D20 Modern. I have however played Mothership, and enjoyed it. Unconfirmed Contact Reports is not third-party material - it is made by the same people as the main RPG, people who can make good things, things that work. Did they bring that capability to this book, or did they slack? Let's find out:
The 4YourEyez Algorithm
Off to a bad start. The basic idea - a computer virus with the contradictory compulsions to both spread and cover up any evidence of its own existence - is a good seed. Monstrous like cancer, like the parasite that kills its own host. That it infects 1% of all electronics is a neat worldbuilding detail. But it doesn't go beyond the seed.
Every entry in this book is a single page. The actual, gameable text (and that's pushing it, as I'll touch on in a bit) is about 1/6th of the 4YourEyez's page. The rest is blurbs of "flavour text", and a picture of a post-it note that has a sub-title with the text on the post-it note. Are they flavourful? They have the appearance of being flavourful, but like Lacroix it's a faint resemblance. Basic, useful stuff like how it tries to get rid of you if it knows you know about it is missing, as is what clues you into its existence - is it just looking at the code of an infected device?
As for the pushing it of the gameable text, it commits the sin of "maybes" - maybe the 4YourEyez is a mindless program, maybe it's the work of some conspiracy, or a rogue AI. You get to decide! Well how about you pay me to write the fucking book then?!
Two goblins.
Angels
An old spacer's tale about angels popping out of warp-gates or somesuch in space, instilling in people a sense of some grand cosmic conflict between good and evil. Kind of reminiscent of Frailty, but the strength of Frailty is in doing its own thing, and not indulging the liberal, secular mores of the majority of its audience - God is real, demons are real, God wants you to kill demons and killing demons is the right thing to do.
One of the flavour blurbs has 'Hail victory' in it. Are these Nazi angels? The problems with 4YourEyez repeat here - vagueness, a layout which seems to hate usable material (text, flavour or otherwise, doesn't even start until 2/3rds of the way down the page). Again, too, the seed is good, but it's being thrown into empty space without soil or water or light.
One and a half goblins.
Belladonnas
They're the alien monsters from Pitch Black - a fine inclusion, but again the execution is lacking. We're told strong light damages them, but not how much damage. We're told they've got a mind-dulling toxin, but in their stats the toxin just does straight damage (and it seems that for my life up until now I've had a totally-wrong definition of toxin). It doesn't really need that much, if you've seen Pitch Black you know what's up, so the layout and flavour text issues don't bother me as much - but come on people, I glanced over the page and those two things jumped out at me, this is stuff that should've been caught on the first read-over.
As I was thinking about how to approach this review, I got to considering a Robert Eggers quote:
"A lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself. It's all about them. They have mastered the Star Wars or Star Trek universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion. Anyone who would camp out in a tent on the sidewalk for weeks in order to be first in line for a movie is more into camping on the sidewalk than movies. Extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills. If you are Luke Skywalker and she is Princess Leia, you already know what to say to each other, which is so much safer than having to ad lib it. Your fannish obsession is your beard. If you know absolutely all the trivia about your cubbyhole of pop culture, it saves you from having to know anything about anything else. That's why it's excruciatingly boring to talk to such people: They're always asking you questions they know the answer to."
I'd feel confident claiming that I have read more books about monsters and watched more monster movies than most people who are alive, have lived, or will ever live on this Earth - it is fair to say I am a fan of monsters. But what insight or ability does this actually give me? Could I make a monster movie, or even create a decent prop or script for one? Are my tastes any more refined than those of a pornography addict who's been jacking it so long he can now only get off to transgenic donkey-octopus hybrid skydiving bukkake videos?
I can point out what seem to me to be obvious flaws in design, but not why those flaws are there - I've never published any RPG materials. What was the workflow for Unconfirmed Contact Reports? Who answered to who, who kept track of what? I skipped over the list of the, uh, what do you call them? the staff? for this book, because I find that stuff boring, but looking back now I recognize a few of the people on it, have talked to a couple of them in the past.
I'd like to get my hands on the "making of" materials behind this book - concept art, emails, personal recollections, notes from brainstorming sessions, and so on and so on - behind every book I have and intend to review. Every work is about its own production, as it's said. Would anyone give me this stuff, or agree to an interview about it, when most of what I've written about it is the verbal equivalent of trying to grab them and shake them by the shoulders? Much to consider.
Two and a half goblins.
The Body Politic
It's kind of like that Clive Barker story about the rebellious hands with which it shares a name. Got an oddly-elaborate backstory compared to the previous entries. The Body Politic is a high-concept monster that could really use more than it's got. Alright, so the Body wants to infect more people to spread organ-democracy (and who is the "we" in this? the brain? a flavour blurb mentions the left hemisphere of a woman's brain being removed - does the Body support Descartes's conception of the soul?) and also just seems to want to torment the people it infects - potentially a funny satire of democracy, but again it needs more.
One and a half goblins.
The Brown Stream
I've got nothing against more abstract "monsters". If you want to put a freaky film in a monster manual then more power to you. The Brown Stream however is more of a plot hook or a background detail than even an abstract monster however.
Zero goblins.
?????
There's no name for this entry, and no stats.
Okay, turns out from the index this entry is called "C-Level", and they're statted as a regular human. If this is how it is in the actual book and not just this free copy I found online then that's either a stupid choice or a stupid mistake.
"There's no need for conspiracy when people with shared goals act within their own self interest. Only profit." - in the words of the prophet William Blake: "To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.".
The product of an imagination frozen in 1979... it's the corporations... that's what gonks don't get... it's all the corporations... Arasaka, Militech... you're talking about systems?.. it's their system, and we're all living in it... the corporations' that is... capital? yeah, Night City... capital of dreams that you wake up from and you're in a rusty bucket full of shit... because of the corporations... we're gonna wake the people up... from the corporations... with a nuke to their consciousness... and also an actual nuke... until they realize that corporations..? yeah, they're not so good as they seem in their ads... Karl Marx..? might as well be talking about techno-necromancers from Alpha Centauri with the street preachers... cuz that old century shit ain't gonna protect you from the corporations...
Zero goblins.
Cabin 102-B
It's like the room from Room 1408 but it's not just in a hotel it can be in a spaceship, any spaceship, and the first time you see it you have to do a sanity check. The room 1408 stuff is implied in a flavour blurb.
One quarter of a goblin.
Chronopods
These guys are the heptapods from Story of Your Life/Arrival, but, heh, get this: these ones? Not so nice. Plot device time powers. Unclear what they do or why and where they do it at.
One and a half goblins.
Demons
Space cenobites. I think one of the later Hellraiser movies already had those. Again, I don't hate adapting monsters from other works, but they still need a little spit and polish.
One and a half goblins.
Dorians
Pathetic bioroid used to store bad memories. Fun concept, simple enough to fit into the absurdly limited gameable text yet distinct enough to be a worthwhile addition. Feel like they'd fit better in a fantasy setting, where you could handwave something about how they have to be independent humanoids instead of a hard-drive, or at least a brain in a vat.
Three goblins.
The Drowning
O pitiful shadow lost in the darkness, O evil spirit born of those drifting between Heaven and Earth - another solid concept - flickering multidimensional hyperspace ghosts who seek to cling to the solidly-planted like drowning people.
Three goblins.
The Engineer
A serial killer whose killing-way is to pose as a ship's engineer, stay away through a hyperspace jump, then use the time the rest of the crew is in their cryo-pods to render the ship unfit for human habitation. Players are also serial killers - either they don't know about him, so they're fucked, or they do know about him, so him and anyone else they suspect of being him are fucked. I do like the idea of including humans as monsters (and not in the 'humans are the real monsters' silly sort of way) and one of the books coming down the review-pipe has several great examples of this.
One and a half stars... wait, shit... ninja stars, one and a half ninja stars, that are also starfish because these are mer-ninjas...
Entity LKA-5
It's like the Thing, but it can't infect people (but it can detach parts which grow into their own Things), which is good because raw-Thing would be disappointingly-impossible to actually face down. What happens if this guy eats the Body Politic?
Two goblins.
Family Meal No. 5
Another evil video, like the Brown Stream but much better - this one turns you into a man-eating pig. Could use a bit more oomph, like how could you watch it enough to be seriously affected by it unless you're a captive audience?
Two and a half goblins.
Freighter 54
Haunted spaceship, would've been better as an adventure location.
One quarter of a ghoul.
Good
This sucks, zero goblins.
Ghouls
Oh nice like Pandorum but they can do the Samus ball.
Three goblins.
Granny
It's some kind of a space-witch that hides in a hole and makes you want to feed it anything you can get your hands on - including yourself. There's no mechanic for it so I guess it just works. No motive and no modus operandi given beyond this. Poem in flavour blurb seems to imply it's maybe an auto-cannibalistic graea-type? I can't even get worked up about the lackluster anymore, I'm just disappointed, especially because this book has shown it can get it right.
One goblin.
Greys
Two poems in the flavour blurbs? Really? These are radioactive little green men who molest you.
One goblin.
Hatchetman
So it's like Adam Smasher but, you know, lamer... protestors and union organizers, the two greatest threats to space-capitalism... which we have for some reason.
Two goblins.
Headjackers
Spike zombies but not quite like the spike zombies from Splinter.
One and a half ghosts.
Husks
Invasion of the Body Snatchers plant duplicates. "Formed after the 'host' was absorbed" - absorbed by what exactly we are never told.
One ghoul.
Hyperspace Raiders
Jin-roh/Helghast guys who live in hyperspace, and ooo they love hyperspace, they want you to love hyperspace with them. Unclear what relation these guys might have to the Engineer, if any.
Two goblins.
Incubus
Oh hey it's the alien from Alien. A quote repeats here from the C-Suite page, unclear if that is intentional.
One and a half goblins.
Little Gods
Okay..?
One eighth of a goblin.
Mother
Geigertacular. This is more of a geographical feature than a monster, it's only listed feature being that it produces succubi, which we will have to wait another sixteen pages to find out what those are because of slavish adherence to alphabetical order.
Half a goblin.
Monolith
They tried to make it look, like, georganic or something but it just looks like a dragon dildo. Not much else to it.
Half a goblin.
Nomads
They're space whales and they want to fuck spaceships. This could have been good, but it wasn't.
Three quarters of a goblin.
Noocentric Transmission
Not a monster, but a phenomenon - a mass mind-swap between humans in an area and another species. 2/3rds of the flavour blurbs on this page were actually good and handy for once.
Two and a half goblins.
Omnivore
Oooh shit they got the predator from Predator too, better hope he doesn't run into the alien from Alien, or they might make TWO underrated movies about it!! Too many adaptions makes you into Rick & Morty, which is a show I actually like, but then you're Rick & Morty instead of whatever you were going for instead.
One and a half goblins.
Ooidopolis Picocivilization
Scrap Princess once wrote a micro-civilization grenade which was much better than this page. Arnold-sama once wrote about micro-civilization walkers which were much better than this page. You can't just go like "oh hey lookey here at this kooky high concept sci-fi idea" and expect people to clap. This isn't the '40s anymore. Put some elbow grease into it.
Half a goblin.
Possessed
Okay, they're like alien spirits or something that possess people, and uuuhhh come ooon. Any confidence I might have been lacking in my critique following the Robert Eggers quote is gone. I'm right, and I'm right about the very lowest hanging of fruit - have your monsters actually do something! Be something! Ghost of Mars - if you'd just copied that like you'd copied Alien and Predator and so on, you'd actually have something instead of this heap of nothing and shit you picked from between your teeth.
Zero goblins.
Pure Love
They're happy people and being happy makes people want to kill them but they just hug you and killing them makes you cUhRaZy. Should've cribbed from the Army of One from that Junji Ito story you damn lonely onlies.
Zero goblins.
Root Language
Fuck off, you're not cute. The gameable text, about an infection that reduces your vocabulary and sanity, is repeated four times, each repeating time as if the authour's being affected by the infection. You're not writing Pontypool Changes Everything here pal.
One quarter of a goblin.
SS High Gold
It's Starkiller Base from the new Star Warses, leave a Hellstar Remina-esque shelter behind when they destroy a star.
One quarter of a goblin.
The Sea of Silence
I guess it's like Solaris or something? I haven't seen Solaris. Like the haunted ship, better as an adventure location than a monster manual entry.
Half a goblin.
Sally in the Screen
Brain-uploaded digi-ghost of a young girl, does a Bloody Mary thing. Wants out and wants friends.
Two and three quarters goblins.
Spore Clouds
I'm tired of fungal horror. It's time to leave the fungal aesthetic in the past and explore new appearances. This one's basic and inoffensive.
One and a quarter goblins.
The Stain
Ooze but it retains identity and partial forms of everyone it's eaten. Nothing fancy, and it doesn't need to be.
Three goblins.
Star Shades
These just feel like a redo of the angels, but with lasers.
One goblin.
Stickmen
It's a weird grotty art installation dude who makes things break down and get filthy around him and can teleport when unobserved. Shade of SCP-173, but also kind of its own thing. Doesn't seem to do anything but random violence, but that's okay when it's got style like this.
Three and a quarter goblins.
Succubus
Finally we find out what succubuses are - alien agent saboteurs who look human but all have the same face as each other. Also if you tell them what they are they freak out.
Two and three quarters goblins.
Throat Leeches
I like throat leeches! Throat leeches will make it into the Hoard of a Hundred Horrors (as sub-entries to another monster, but still). These ones are good, good level of grotty, but entry should have included a treatment.
Two and a half goblins.
Unpersons
Invisible Mans from teleportation accidents. Hate scientists.
Two goblins.
Vitalizing Field
Kind of like the Marker and necromorphs from Dead Space, but more free-for-all which is a nice twist.
Two and a half goblins.
Whitevine
Kudzu what kills you.
One and a half goblins.
Womb
Alien idol what makes you pregnant - with what we're not told.
One quarter of a goblin.
The World Worm
Good imagery in this one, very cosmic horror. Worms that eat iron and await a later age of the universe.
Three and a half goblins.
You
It peeves me when I type "you" into the internet site bar thing and instead of taking me to youtube it takes me to google search results of which the first result is the TV show You, which I would never watch before and will never watch even less now that it's associated with a minor irritation in my mind. All that being said, this one's an evil, nasty doppelganger, and it's just there for some reason.
Two and a half goblins.
Zombies
Sure, why not.
Two and a half goblins.
Honourable Mention
There's a page of five mini-entries at the back, archetypes that can be reskinned as whatever. Bland but good to have, like white rice or something.
AND
They didn't do any flesh-labyrinths. Good job keeping a handle on that.
+ 3.5 goblins.
