Pyramid Review
Blood! The Roleplaying Game of Modern Horror
Published by Postmortem Studios
Designed by James "Grim" Desborough, Norley Tucker, Paul Campion, and Steve Osborn
Illustrated by Gavin Hargest, Darkzel, Bradley K. McDevitt, James "Grim" Desborough, and Paul Campion
158-page b&w hardcover; $35
158-page b&w softcover; $27.50
159-page 11.76 MB b&w PDF; $11When Blood! The Roleplaying Game of Modern Horror appeared in 1990, it was a quintessentially British game of visceral horror heavily influenced by the genre films of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as by the works of authors Clive Barker, Shaun Hutson, and Graham Masterton. It was intended as a self-aware gorefest with heavy mechanics that centered on a weapons list that included items as domestic and deadly as the kettle, the toilet lid, and the wheelie bin. It also provided a set of critical hit tables that detailed the ultimate effects of everything from the bite (large and small) to the power tool (the drill, the sander, and the chainsaw). The game's rules encompassed not just hit points lost but also blood loss, meaning that victims could quite literally bleed to death.
If that first edition of Blood! had any failings, it was in the lack of monsters and any rules for handling the psychological impact of see frightful monsters and suffering grievous bodily harm. In hindsight, the self-published game was never really going to be a success, given it that it was released not long before roleplaying the horror genre turned . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: March 14, 2008
Copyright © 2008 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.