User Blog:
What We Should Play - Demon Hunters

A few days ago in my discussion about killing characters, I mentioned the cult films "The Gamers" and "The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising." If you haven't seen them, there are Youtube links in the article. Go. This article will still be here. 

There. Now that's over with, you're ready to purchase anything those funny guys write, right? Good. 

That said, we're talking about their (Dead Gentlemen Productions) RPG, "Demon Hunters." It's published by Margaret Weis Productions, and uses their Cortex System. I won't go too much into the system, since you can find a heaping helping of information about Cortex all over the web. If you like Cortex, you'll like this version of it. If you don't, you won't. (It's used in a number of popular, licensed properties such as Serenity and Supernatural. I think it does just what it needs to, personally.) 

The first thing you'll notice is that the game is funny. I find this a strong asset. Anymore, dredging through RPG books bores the shit out of me in a lot of cases, it's not the case with Demon Hunters. It's far from silly, but manages to poke a little fun at a lot of the industry. Having done a healthy amount of writing for White Wolf's World of Darkness game line, a primary target of said poking, I'm greatly amused. If you have a deep amount of knowledge of RPGs, you'll get a lot of little in-jokes that'll make reading it a blast, even if you never get the chance to play or run it. 

The second thing is, it's not unfamiliar territory. In Demon Hunters, you hunt monsters. Or as the game puts it, you are going to war against horror. Somewhat unimportant to the game itself, it assumes the reader has joined the game's monster hunting organization, The Brotherhood of the Celestial Torch. The game book is presented as a manual, and as a way to play 'tabletop simulations' of hunting monsters (read: playing the game.) They did a wonderful little video primer here. The game takes place in a world not dissimilar from our own, where essentially, people are too stupid to realize there are monsters all around them. It assumes that basically every urban legend and campfire tale is real, and that the hordes of Satan are invading the world to cause chaos and annihilation. Pretty standard faire.