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Bloody Hooks |
$1.49 |
Average Rating:4.3 / 5 |
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This is an excellent product and is not expensive.
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Despite the low price, this is a quiality product. You get a goodly number of clearly written, system-generic scenario seeds. Best of all, they avoid religious overtones entirely, which is something this genre is inclined to tread harshly on.
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As is expected with the better adventure hook compilations, I found about half of the scenarios on offer here to my liking, and the rest may be useful with a little alteration. For example, "The Projectionist" (a captive audience at a horror film festival suffers the deaths depicted onscreen) does little for me on its own, but it would be great as an escalation to the menace in "The Collector" (Monsters vanish from old horror film posters along with their collector). I'll have to do the work of fleshing out specific stats and encounters, but I have plenty of books and PDFs full of those without much in the way of suggested adventures, so this should be quite useful.
I especially like the sidebar called "The Devil is in the Details" which is filled with delightfully creepy little events to drop into an existing adventure just to get everybody unsettled, which may or may not have bearing on the horror at hand (but your players won't know that... bwah-hah-hah...).<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Acceptable<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>
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A series of short (1 to 2 paragraph) un-statted story hooks in the genre of psychological horror and weird events, as well as a useful sidebar of minor disturbing events. The hooks without explanations were better than those with, I thought.
Readers of d20 Call of Cthulhu will recognise the layout in slope-sided columns.
The document is only 5 pages plus cover, but the space is all content (two columns, no OGL and a column's worth of art). The price is steep for what you get, but quality of writing and ideas is high.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>
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Bloody Hooks is a short 6 page pdf containing a number of horror-related plot hooks. It's suitable for use in most horror games, although in particular for modern horror, rather than fantasy horror since most of the plot hooks provided contain elements of some form of modern technology. The pdf contains some pieces of excellent art, including the cover, and the writing is wonderfully visual and evocative in its execution. Editing is acceptable, but for a small and short product the overall presentation is excellent.
The pdf provides twenty-two plot hooks for use in modern horror games. Each plot hook is only a paragraph long, and the intent is to present the seeds of an idea in a GMs head, or to spark the imagination of the reader. Creative GMs can then take the plot hooks provided and build adventures or even entire campaigns based on them, whether they are for single characters or larger parties. The plot hooks cater for a wide variety of different concepts, from stalkers, to murderers, to the macabre. Originality and creativity abounds, although one has to admit that some of the plot hooks hold elements of the stereotypical, probably not due to any fault of the writer, but just due to representation of the genre in the modern world.
Examples of the plot hooks include the Collector (a horror-movie collector strangely gone missing), It Slices, It Dices (featuring a rather strange game show), Bloodwork (people seem to require a whole host of repeated blood transfusions), and Grand Guignol (a theatre company that is not all that is appears to be). I generally liked all that I read - the writer has a way of drawing the reader into the text, and providing strong descriptive representation of each plot hook in the writing. All of the plot hooks were decent, and should provide numerous ideas for horror-related games.
In addition to the plot hooks, a single sidebar also provides a number of short descriptive pieces of text to add an element of flavor to the game, or to heighten the sense of dread in a game. These are nice little touches to round of the plot hooks of the pdf.
Bloody Hooks is an evocative (in name and execution) product from Big Finger Games that provides a number of horror related plot hooks. This is a short product, and despite the lack of detail in the plot hooks, stands well on its own and succeeds at its intention to inspire or spark the imagination. If you're looking for a few ideas, perhaps just some random elements of thought, then this is a nice little product to take a look at.<br><br>
<b>LIKED</b>: Bloody Hooks contains some decent and very useful plot hooks for modern horror games. Writing is very good, and the plot hooks strong in their concepts and ideas. Presentation is very good.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: Nothing much - the product doesn't really support fantasy horror, but that's not really a dislike, more a general comment. Some of the plot hooks can sound familiar, although the writer has succeeded at adding elements of the creative in all of them.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>
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There is something to be said for the inspiration for Bloody Hooks, by Big Finger Games. I imagined the author sat in front of their television, swapping DVD after DVD in a darkened room, sifting through scary movie plot after scary movie plot taking notes on what worked and what did not work with every blood curdling scream and dramatic slasher intro. Only until every hair on his head had been scared white, he compiled the best plots, scaling out most of the bad ones and summed up what he had into this creepy little 6-page summation of plot hooks.
Bloody Hooks is a collection of 23 scary adventure hooks ready to be implemented into any horror themed Role Playing System. Each hook is a good paragraph long. These are not complete adventures nor even brief summations but small idea plots. They are designed to inspire horrific adventures.
For the Game Master
As a person whom watches at least one scary movie a week (preferably Asian Horror), I can say with some authority that the plot hooks introduced are beyond the campy slasher flicks of the 90s and are genuinely creepy. I obviously watch too many horror movies when I can read through each plot hooks and attach a movie to it. Heck, that may even be an ideal for a party game on Halloween night. You can break out Bloody Hooks, say a plot, and each team has to guess a movie associated with it.
However, if you are using it for its purpose, you will not be disappointed, at least most of the time. These plots are for serious horror fans. My favorite plot hooks are It Slices It Dices, where only you see a late night infomercial guy get mutilated (how many of us have not wanted that to happen), and The Video Diary, which puts a slight twist on the Ring mythos. There are some duds though. I could live without the UFO and cattle scenarios. There is also a couple that reek of 1950s horror plots, which works for some but not for this reviewer.
The Iron Word
Despite a couple of duds, this is a nice collection of inspirational scenarios fit for your horror campaign. <br><br>
<b>LIKED</b>: - 23 for 2 bucks isn't bad. That's 10 cent a plot hook
- The plot hooks are quite different.
<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: - There are several different generes of horror presented. Some of which are better than others. <br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>
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Adventure hooks are a useful thing. Sometimes, all you need to craft a good scenario is a push in the right direction. Bloody Hooks provides just over 20 short adventure ideas for the horror genre. Each is about a paragraph long. Some give only a hint of whats going on, while others offer a little more explanation. In all cases, the brunt of the work is up to the gamemaster.
You'll probably find some of these more to your liking than others. It's not that any of them are bad, in fact they're all pretty good, but some probably won't fit whatever type of horror game you're playing. A few are rather grim while others seem a bit campy. Fortunately, many of the ideas can be tweaked with relative ease to fit your campaign. Out of the twenty-two hooks, a creative GM should be able fashion a half dozen or so into lengthy adventures.
The writing here is top-notch, and does a good job inspiring the reader's creative mind. The few typos are minor and don't take away from the main text. Of the hooks, Video Diary was probably my favorite. Its a longer hook, and sounded like the plot of good paperback horror novel (more Koontz than King). It could be easily stretched into a series of adventures. The only drawback I saw was the plot's solo nature. The GM would have to modify things a bit to include a group of player characters.
Normally, I would say that a collection of horror hooks really belongs in a full-fledged rulebook. Perhaps tucked into the appendix of a set of horror rules, or maybe in a large setting / campaign book. Bloody Hooks is, after all, only six pages long. In this case, I'm willing to overlook the small page count and narrow focus of the product because of the very low price. At a meager $1.35, these hooks are priced somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.06 each. I think that Bloody Hooks would make a good article in a professional gaming magazine, and its priced about perfectly from that perspective.<br><br>
<b>LIKED</b>: Bloody Hooks contains several well written adventure hooks that capture a wide variety of ideas from the horror genre. While the product is short, and the hooks require a lot of work to turn them into full adventures, the book's low price makes up for the brevity.
The author clearly knows the horror genre, and he's done a good job here giving just the right amount of detail to inspire while letting the GM take the adventure in whatever direction he thinks is best.
Also, for whatever it's worth, I really like the title. Bloody Hooks is both evocative...and it makes me chuckle.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: While I gave Bloody Hooks a bit of a pass because of its low cost, I would have liked to see a longer product. I would have even been willing to pay more money for a longer product. $1.35 for just over 20 hooks is a good start, and certainly worth the money, but I think a much longer book would have greater longevity and thus moved this book from a ?pretty darn good? to ?must have.?
Also, you may recognize some of these hooks from actual horror stories / movies. It isn't that Bloody Hooks is too clich?d, on the contrary it's fairly original, it's just that the horror genre itself tends to cut all its stories from a similar cloth.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Excellent<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>
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