An aborted review of a Hunter: The Vigil sourcebook: Slashers, which I never finished.
I'm not really even sure how to approach Slashers, because the book itself isn't really sure what it's about. It's simultaneously a book about the ways that hunters can go wrong and become the thing that they're hunting, a book about mechanically emulating slasher films, and a book about playing those same slashers. It is, in a nutshell, a bit schizophrenic in its approach.
When I first read about slashers in the Hunter: The Vigil corebook, they didn't seem functionally different from people who picked up an axe or a knife or whatever and decided to start killing; they might have been driven by their husband's ghost, or they may have gone exclusively after vampires, but they were essentially normal people. The easiest way to explain Slashers is also the laziest: It's Friday the 13th: The Stabbening, complete with different splats for the various types of insane killer that you can play.
It's not as simple or as stupid as it sounds, but it does suffer from a fundamental sense of unease with its own premise. Slashers, as the book presents them, are essentially degraded versions of hunters - people whose personal crusades against evil have taken them from being normal people fighting the darkness to basically being the darkness themselves. The opening fiction describes a hunter whose attempts to retrieve a stolen baby from the hands of the True Fae shades from simply intense and aggressive to straight-up evil.
The book's fluff opens up with a selection of historical slashers and a number of theories as to why slashers exist, including - right up front - a reference to The Beginning Was the End, a book about how the discovery of cranial cannibalism among apes resulted in the human race being damaged on a permanent level. If it sounds familiar, it's because the very same book was the inspiration for one of the greatest nerd rock bands of all time, DEVO; so that's a point in its favor. (Even better would be stats for DEVO itself, but I will take what I can get.)
The section feels somewhat irrelevant. Serial killers exist, they kill. Any attempt to give them a common origin forces you to come up with a reason for both Jason and Dexter to kill, despite one being essentially an angry prepubescent ghost and the other a trauma victim whose coping mechanism is justice in the form of serial murder. And despite their best efforts, a crazy guy who kills a bunch of people is pretty much going be the same whether he's in 1930's Chicago, India in the 1870's, or in the trenches of World War I.
Let me take a moment to say this: When I was a kid, I used to be way into the occult - Kirlian photography, Bigfoot, horoscopes, the Bermuda Triangle, what have you. As I grew older, I began to realize that a lot of the stuff that I was reading about was omitting certain facts that might have been useful in putting the stuff I was reading in perspective, like, say, ACTUAL TRUTH. So the claims about Kirlian photography were false, horoscopes were bullshit, the Bermuda Triangle mystery was SOLVED! (love that book) - once the mask came off Old Man Withers, it was difficult to believe in the monster again.
The new World of Darkness sort of feels like an extended episode of In Search Of, or Kolchak, where all of the various baloney theories that kept people's mind off their hideous 70's decor and their awful 70's haircuts and their awful 70's lives are treated semi-seriously. And really, I just do not understand why the new World of Darkness takes inspiration from old 70's TV shows - I mean, there's a plot hook in Tales from the 13th District that's almost a direct steal from the first episode of Kolchak. I wasn't even a sperm when these shows had their heyday, and yet it's almost thirty years later and they seem to be the new hot thing. Why? What am I missing here? What's going on? I've got an interest in the culture of the 70's, but mostly because it was just such an astonishingly ugly and vulgar decade. One of the reasons why White Wolf was so successful was because it was able to hone in on the zeitgeist of the 1990's and ride it like a tiger until around 2000, at which point the adolescent millennial tension that drove Vampire kind of disappeared and they were left struggling to find a strong direction. Regressing to the 1970's as the golden age of horror - which it totally is not - seems indicative of a problem with the larger approach.
The authors of the book do find a particularly useful way to tie the Slasher phenomenon in with Hunter: it's very easy for Hunters to step over the line from just hunting down monsters to hunting down their own kind. Every compact gets a breakdown of their interactions with slashers, and a bit about how one of their members crossed the line - the intellectual Loyalists of Thule have one of their own create a gas-filled death maze, while a member of the Long Night might just decide that everybody's sinful and decide to wipe everybody out. The Cheiron group actually nicknames members who become slashers "Batemans", after the protagonist of American Psycho, which is kind of a nice little shout-out.
As every cobra needs its mongoose, the book introduces VASCU - Vanguard Serial Crimes Unit - a new Compact of hunters drawing its members from the ranks of the federal government, dedicated to hunting down serial killers. The obvious comparison to Delta Green is pretty much inevitable, except that instead of simply gunning down the cultists on the spot, as a good investigator should, you're trying to bring slashers to justice through the legal system. In keeping with shows like Millenium and Profiler, agents of VASCU are all psychic in various ways - and if they're not psychic, then they can be made psychic.
What really hurts VASCU is the fact that its members have to, in theory, try to bring the various non-supernatural slashers to justice, which is kind of like trying to get a unicorn a low-interest fixed-rate mortgage on its magic tree stump: Even if you do manage to accomplish it, it's not really keeping in tone of the genre and is fucking boring.
I mean, seriously, what's the average trial for a slasher going to look like? I tell you what it's going to look like: a subhuman murder engine named Murderlurch whipping machetes at various court personnel at every available opportunity, interspersed with breaks to hose the blood off the walls. And, in keeping with the broken, clanking logic of comic book justice - designed to keep the Joker at large despite the obvious utility of just killing the son of a bitch - the murder will inevitably break out of prison and make a beeline for the nearest PC loved one, as reliable as the return of the swallows of Capistrano. At a certain point, the actions of the people in a story about serial killers less resembles the actions of free-willed individuals and more like an inevitable biological process, as if the pheromones necessary to the reproduction of the human race are only released if the children of the heroic prosecutor are menaced by the sadistic, puzzle-themed serial killer.
The book does address this problem - and really, I like that little play too much to delete it - by pointing out that most serial killers and/or slashers are shot down after they butcher up a few FBI agents, and that obviously supernatural creatures are packed off to the Lansing facility without going through a trial. But it also suggests that if a slasher does go to trial, then an agent is going to have to carefully put together a case that allows him to present evidence that works around the fact that the agent has psychic powers, and that a charismatic serial killer - particularly one with the Genius undertaking - is going to be able to run rings around a judge and jury. In the previous chapter, it's suggested that one of the reasons why VASCU agents go nuts and go over to the dark side is because serial killers keep skating free from the legal system. It seems like such a frustrating, deliberately balky way to approach the problem, giving all of the drawbacks of the legal system - its inability to create an immediate and satisfying result - while granting none of its benefits, like a society that can deal with problems without having to resort to vigilante justice. I mean, this is the end of Dirty Harry in a nutshell: The hero can't cope with the bureaucratic subversion of justice, chucks his badge into the water and walks away. Delta Green solved the conundrum neatly by placing its agents firmly outside of the law to begin with, cutting the Gordian Knot with gusto. Why doesn't Slashers do the same?
I suppose that using the alternate morality system from Hunter: The Vigil would work to fix the problem of VASCU agents who simply headshot people that they know to be serial killers. Put it this way: You're going to have to make your own decision as to whether or not it's acceptable for FBI agents to headshot serial killers that they know to be serial killers.
The book introduces a new antagonist in the form of the Hunt Club, which is essentially a society of serial killers who meet up to compete with each other for kills. I'm reminded of Dan Simmon's Carrion Comfort - which had mind-controlling bastards competing for the best kill - and the serial killer convention in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, where serial killers get together to rub elbows. (Fun fact: I never liked Sandman, still don't.) It's much like Ashwood Abbey, except that they've slid over the line from slapping werewolves in the face with their junk over to full-scale murder of human beings. It's essentially a club for slashers, although more likely the charming/seducing/genius types more than the Brutes and Freaks. There's even different rules, by the country - Melbourne rules are different than London rules, which are different than Boston's rules. Each modifies the central concept enough to make it interesting, but not so much that it divorces itself from the original concept.
This points to one of the broader problems with the concept of playing the antagonist to a serial killer. All of the tropes that make serial killer films work - the last girl, the pack of halfwitted idiots that the slasher picks off, the various gory setpieces in which the halfwits are dispatched - are things that just don't work within the context of a role-playing game. And this isn't the first time that this kind of thing has been tried; for instance, in It Came from the Late, Late, Late Show - a friend of mine is a huge fan of it - it's actually part of the game that the players will have their actors do stupid stuff in exchange for the equivalent of Willpower points. In fact, Cynthia Celeste Miller did something very similar with Slasher Flick, where people gain points they can use for doing stupid stuff.
But the average player isn't going to march his carefully constructed PC into a trap because it's genre-appropriate. Nobody wants to play the halfwit who grabs for the shiny piece of candy and gets both of his arms chopped off; they want to be the guy who says "It's a trick. Get an axe." They want to be the smart guy who outwits the killer, the guy who happens to have brought along a .50 Desert Eagle - for once, appropriately - to put some holes in Jason, they want to be the guy who outfoxes Freddy Krueger at his own game and who just fills the lair of the inbred cannibal clan with gasoline and lights a match instead of wandering down with a look of credulous boobery on their face. They will put safety shots into corpses - lots of safety shots - they will stick close to each other and not wander off alone into the killer's lair, they will use their Tactics and teamwork in order to fight the villain. If the villain falls down, then they will be aware of the old "sudden return from the dead" trick from the movies and go to extremes to make sure that there's no plausible way that the slasher can get up again.
(There was a Robot Chicken sketch where somebody uses a minigun to turn a werewolf into red slush, then dries out and snorts the remains, then poops said remains into the sewer system - and then we cut to some guys playing D&D, one of whom assures the others that according to the rules, the werewolf can only be killed by silver and is still alive. Don't think that your players won't try it.)
They will be, in short, player characters - an army of Final Girls, as David Giles (a friend of mine) put it. (One of the reasons why Night of the Living Dead is so scary is that everybody acts like a rational adult, but bad luck, ego and the weight of numbers fuck everything up. You can look at the people dying and easily think "That could have been me", as opposed to "How fucking stupid do you have to be to go out alone when you know that there's a serial killer on the loose?") If you're going to play the game, you're going to have to accomodate for this.
One problem with Slashers is that it suffers from the same problem that anybody gets when they're trying to write about serial killers: It's very hard to write them. If you're not absolutely careful, you slip over that fine line seperating the cleverness of Hannibal Lecter into writing Insane Clown Posse lyrics. The little blurb on the back, a rewritten version of "Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts" - including the lines "mutilated maiden's meat" and "little dirty flirty feet" - reminds me a lot of FATAL. On the other hand, FATAL's a pretty good examination of an unwell mind, so there's kind of a chicken or the egg scenario going on there.
Slashers also tries to replicate the genius serial killer genre; if you're thinking of Silence of the Lambs, then you've got it in a nutshell; Saw too.
One problem with an emulation of these kind of killers is the same problem that dogged a particular scenario in Blood Brothers, Nemesis Strikes, which attempted to replicate the Dr. Phibes movies. Phibes would go about creating elaborate, Rube-Goldberg death traps to dispatch his enemies in poetically appropriate ways, much like the five Saw sequels force people to gouge out their eyes or eat a big plate of snakes in order to escape from certain death. (I've never seen the Saw movies myself, so...) The problem is that the entire point of those movies is to watch the elaborate deathrap do its thing; the deathtrap is the protagonist. If you stop it from happening, then you essentially stop the movie. Having somebody explain just how the deathtrap would have gouged both your eyes out and squirted lemon juice in the sockets is kinda boring.
Slashers tries to also replicate what it's like to hunt genius serial killers, and the first thing that popped into your mind is Hannibal Lecter. Silence of the Lambs can essentially be seen as a movie-length escape scene, as Lecter manipulates everybody around him in order to get what he wants: his own freedom.
(And here it ends. Pity; I should have finished the review.)
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