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The Esoterrorists RPG
The Book Of Unremitting Horror
A horrific supplement for The Esoterrorists and Fear Itself
Players in horror campaigns are a little too accustomed to the nightmares their characters face; even the most eldritch of tentacular horrors is less intimidating when you know exactly what it is, because your PC has faced it before.
New times demand new nightmares. This, therefore, is a book of horrors, not a manual of monsters. The horrors are nightmarishly intimate, often created from human vice, or let loose by human greed. They show us the ugliness that underlies reality. They are the crawling things under the rock of the everyday, sane world. Consequently, we’ve detailed our creatures in depth.
Each one has its own agenda, its own reason for existence and its own legend. We’ve made these creatures unusual, frightening and bizarre, yet sufficiently comprehensible that they players realize they are up against something intelligent, if inhuman.
The Book of Unremitting Horror includes thirty creatures each with:
* Diary entries, articles and transcripts
* A detailed description with behaviour
* The forensic clues left behind by the creature
* Details of their history and origins
* Their special abilities
* Their GUMSHOE system stats
The Book covers using creatures with The Esoterrorists background, and another includes detailed adventure hooks for use with that setting. There are also artefacts and new GUMSHOE abilities.
Finally, the book includes two full length adventures.
Using BOUH with The Esoterrorists and with Fear Itself
In Esterrorists, you are a highly competent investigator, tracking down creatures of Unremitting Horror. You may risk injury, madness and death, but it’s your choice. In Fear Itself, your just a normal person, and the creatures are after you. Let’s take an example creature, the Sisterite. She hunts down vulnerable men online, arranges a date, then kills them. In Fear Itself, the adventure would start with your techie friend going missing. In Esoterrorists, you would be part of the OV investigating the work of a peculiar serial killer.
Players in horror campaigns are a little too accustomed to the nightmares their characters face; even the most eldritch of tentacular horrors is less intimidating when you know exactly what it is, because your PC has faced it before.
New times demand new nightmares. This, therefore, is a book of horrors, not a manual of monsters. The horrors are nightmarishly intimate, often created from human vice, or let loose by human greed. They show us the ugliness that underlies reality. They are the crawling things under the rock of the everyday, sane world. Consequently, we’ve detailed our creatures in depth.
Each one has its own agenda, its own reason for existence and its own legend. We’ve made these creatures unusual, frightening and bizarre, yet sufficiently comprehensible that they players realize they are up against something intelligent, if inhuman.
The Book of Unremitting Horror includes thirty creatures each with:
* Diary entries, articles and transcripts
* A detailed description with behaviour
* The forensic clues left behind by the creature
* Details of their history and origins
* Their special abilities
* Their GUMSHOE system stats
The Book covers using creatures with The Esoterrorists background, and another includes detailed adventure hooks for use with that setting. There are also artefacts and new GUMSHOE abilities.
Finally, the book includes two full length adventures.
Using BOUH with The Esoterrorists and with Fear Itself
In Esterrorists, you are a highly competent investigator, tracking down creatures of Unremitting Horror. You may risk injury, madness and death, but it’s your choice. In Fear Itself, your just a normal person, and the creatures are after you. Let’s take an example creature, the Sisterite. She hunts down vulnerable men online, arranges a date, then kills them. In Fear Itself, the adventure would start with your techie friend going missing. In Esoterrorists, you would be part of the OV investigating the work of a peculiar serial killer.
- GenresRole Playing GamesHorror
220 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 28, 2017
The Book of Unremitting Horror is a source book for the GUMSHOE role-playing system, which I've been considering running with a Fear Itself game. It's an interesting type of source book, with most of the text taken up by various monsters whose descriptions imply a mystery. A flash fiction horror story introduces each monster, followed by sample clues that they could leave for enterprising investigators, and then stats. It's an interesting setup, because it inspires creativity and gives enough information to convey a tone, but allows the reader to plug them into their own stories where appropriate.
The book then takes a similar approach to various artifacts/relics, which in most cases complement the monsters that came earlier, and gives another story hook or two for each. Finally, it contains several sample storylines for The Esoterrorists and Fear Itself games that incorporate the monsters. Like the entries themselves, these serve as an example of how to build an investigation game around the themes and tone of the monsters, without it seeming like a monster-of-the-week pulp TV show.
While it was a great resource for the game, I had to knock it down a star because the creator seems to like different horror elements than I do. I tend toward creepy horror focused on building atmosphere, whereas a fair number of the monsters were more body horror, big monsters, or slasher types. And they were good examples of those, but not really my bag, so I could only really picture using a few of the monsters in a game.
But even so. It was a really interesting imagination-sparker, and worth checking out for fans of horror gaming or writing.
The book then takes a similar approach to various artifacts/relics, which in most cases complement the monsters that came earlier, and gives another story hook or two for each. Finally, it contains several sample storylines for The Esoterrorists and Fear Itself games that incorporate the monsters. Like the entries themselves, these serve as an example of how to build an investigation game around the themes and tone of the monsters, without it seeming like a monster-of-the-week pulp TV show.
While it was a great resource for the game, I had to knock it down a star because the creator seems to like different horror elements than I do. I tend toward creepy horror focused on building atmosphere, whereas a fair number of the monsters were more body horror, big monsters, or slasher types. And they were good examples of those, but not really my bag, so I could only really picture using a few of the monsters in a game.
But even so. It was a really interesting imagination-sparker, and worth checking out for fans of horror gaming or writing.
July 7, 2016
Fantastic modern creepy horror of all sorts. From gory physical dangers to creepy psychological creatures to things defying description, it's a really good read as well as a really solid game resource for Gumshoe
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews