Michael's RPG Shelf: Supplements For Adding Horror and The Horrific to Your Campaign, Part One

Dungeons & Dragons has always been about the eternal conflict between Good and Evil. The idea of heroic heroes cleansing bastions of corruption has existed in pulp fantasy long before Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax penned the first page of their ruleset for fantasy combat and treasure accumulation. The rules and adventures have always reflected this: the earliest incarnation of the Monster Manual included entries for numerous demons, angels, and devils within its pages, and early adventures like Queen of the Demonweb Pits saw depictions of depravity in the Drow society whose priestesses carried out horrifying rituals in the name of Lolth. Heck, the very first module published for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons product line was The Tomb of Horrors, an adventure which today is stigmatized for being crushingly cruel and unfair to players by modern standards.

But D&D has also long struggled with its identity as a "game for everybody", and over the years we've seen species, classes, monsters, spells, and more come and go with the ever-shifting zeitgeist. Throughout the years of the game's publication, I believe it's fair to say that while capital-E Evil was acknowledged, what it meant to be truly Evil was often glossed over. Sure, plenty of evil gods and demigods demanded and encouraged cruelty amongst their followers, but these were always expressed in fairly generic ways: they perform human sacrifices, they raid villages to enslave their inhabitants, and they animate the dead for use as cannon fodder or menial labor. Story-wise, this is fine. Most gamers don't need a detailed ruleset for exactly what necromantic experimentation looks like or how torture works within the game's mechanics--the fact these things happen in the world is enough for them to want to oppose them.

Occasionally though, D&D wanted to push boundaries, cross lines, and provide tools for both players and Dungeon Masters to add that kind of capital-E Evil to a campaign. So presented for your pleasure(?), here is the first entry in a series about supplements to mine for ideas when you need to pull out all the stops and help not just the characters, but also their players, understand just how extreme Evil can get. And there's no better place to start than the 800-pound gorilla of such supplements:

Book of Vile Darkness (Wizards of the Coast, 2002)

The Book of Vile Darkness, published for the 3rd Edition ruleset, is one of only two supplements to arrive with a "mature audiences only" content label on the cover, with the other being its companion, the Book of Exalted Deeds. Written by veteran tabletop designer Monte Cook, I often see this book derided online for appealing to edgelords, and while I understand this perspective since the introduction takes a somewhat ham-handed approach in defining "Evil" and what makes actions "evil", this is rather like an architect poring over the map for Tomb of Horrors and pointing out all the OSHA regulations it's flaunting. You're free to take that approach, but you will be deliberately missing the point. The Tomb of Horrors doesn't exist as a how-to manual to build your own underground labyrinth of death; likewise, Book of Vile Darkness isn't a philosophy text, it's DLC for your RPG bookshelf which exists solely to gamify stuff that some people wanted gamified and others did not. As Cook put it in a pre-release interview, "I didn't push it as far as I could have, though, and that made some people happy and others disappointed. Ultimately, the content in the book is as vile as I'd want from a book."

Named for an actual in-game artifact which made its appearance back in the 1st edition Dungeon Master's Guide which served as a powerful source of experience and knowledge for evil Clerics, this supplement is for the DM's eyes only. Although there is a short appendix which deals with evil PCs and party dynamics, as well as crafting and running an evil-themed campaign, the bulk of the book is made up of variant rules, classes, spells, artifacts, diseases, monsters, and archetypes meant to give your players the shivers. The stuff in here is best used like powerful spices in cooking: sparingly. When the time comes that you want your PCs to have to look upon true horror in a most visceral form, as opposed to its more abstract sense, that's where this book shines. The first time your players encounter a sorcerer who assails them with the Hellraiser-ish horror of a Dancing Chains spell, suffer the malady of a Warp Touch disease, or witness a companion Mola Ram'ed via Heartclutch, they'll instantly intuit shit has well and truly gotten real in ways that an upcast Fireball simply cannot replicate. There is some incredibly creative, cruel, and borderline-offensive material in here, including some NSFW art. As mentioned, it was made for 3E, so making use of it under later rulesets will require some re-jiggering. But what's most interesting about the book, at least to me, is just how all-in Wizards of the Coast went on it.

Book of Vile Darkness didn't just get its own hardcover release. Oh no. The Book got its own 11-page web supplement, with even more Archfiends that didn't make the original cut, a three-page FAQ of clarifications, an image gallery, even a freakin' screen saver. Note that while the download for the screen saver works, it was developed for Windows XP, so you may have trouble getting modern-day versions to even recognize it. And we're still not done.

The October 2002 issue of Dragon pictured above featured a 16-page sealed section meant to intersect with the Book's release, detailing a new offshoot of the Necromancer known as the Skinscribe, fourteen new 'Corrupt' spells that conjure up hideous effects, and four new monster cultist prestige classes: the Faceless One, Deep Thrall, Shoal Servant, and Tiger Mask. Nothing in this is terribly offensive, it's more focused on the gross-out than anything else -- I mean, come on, there's a spell called Wall of Maggots -- but Paizo still made the right call in making it "opt-in" for potential readers.

More interesting than the sealed section, in my opinion, is the editorial, "How Far Should You Go?", which starts on page 44. Penned by Monte Cook himself, it breaks down four separate and distinct campaign styles that players and DMs can experience.

• The Light-Hearted Game is one where the group is there just to have a good time without getting too heavily into the role-playing aspect and little time is paid exploring just why the "bad guys" are bad. In this play style, it's enough that the players have been contracted to stop the evil wizard, because he's an Evil Wizard doing Evil Wizard Things: blighting crops, stealing livestock, being a general sort of nuisance. No need to elaborate, it's just how things are.

• The Standard Game is what the core rules of D&D are structured around: things aren't necessarily "evil" by fiat, and the bad guys are bad guys specifically because they do bad things. But these bad things are either fairly mundane, or, if they are irregular, the specifics are kept off-screen or only hinted at. In this style of play, party might be hired to stop the evil wizard because he's graduated from crop-blighting and livestock theft to full-on assholery. Now he's kidnapped a few villagers because he plans to extract their vitality to create a truly potent Potion of Longevity which will allow him to add decades to his lifespan. You won't delve into the specifics of how he's going to extract their vitality, but the 'how' is unnecessary: the fact he is doing so makes him evil, and thus worthy of the players' time and attention.

• The Mature Game takes the Standard Game type and layers in some heavier content, leading to players having to more seriously consider the ramifications of their actions, and being more explicit in its depictions of evil. In this style of play, the party is hired to stop the evil wizard for the same reasons, only now he's kidnapping children and his method of extracting their vitality is grotesque: he subjects them to continuous magical nightmares and collects their waking screams. He's focused on children because he's discovered their pain and terror are so much more visceral and potent than that of adults, because their imaginations are so much more expansive. If you're running this kind of game, it's because you and your players are all okay with pushing some boundaries and using enemies that are truly depraved.

• The Vile Game is everything in the Mature game, but with the safety rails removed. There are no actions too heinous, no immorality too depraved, to be considered off-limits. You'll know you're in a Vile Game when the evil wizard is kidnapping children because he's a necrophile who uses their reanimated corpses to appease a sadistic Thrall of Graz'zt, who in turn grants him greater power the more innocents he corrupts. What's more, the PCs will see evidence of his activities all over the tower when they eventually storm the place, possibly having to weigh the moral costs of slaughtering zombie children with the need to get to the wizard and his consort quickly, as well as deciding what to do with the mentally-broken but still-living husks of the kids who have witnessed what happened to their friends and gone insane as a result.

How this didn't get locked down behind the sealed section is beyond me, because in my eyes, what it talks about is a lot darker and more twisted than most of what's in there. But that's the way the intestines unwind, I suppose. While those who wanted something harder in their sealed section might have been disappointed, they needed only wait another month to get something that would satiate that desire. It came in the form of....

That right there is the November/December 2002 issue of Dungeon, and it too shipped with a sealed "Mature Content" section. But while the section in Dragon #300 was relatively tame in the grand scheme of things, Paizo were not messing around when it came to this one. Locked away in its own special 29-page vault, "The Porphyry House Horror" by James Jacobs is a 10th-level adventure built specifically around the ideas and themes contained within the Book of Vile Darkness. Set in a near-lawless seaside town called Scuttlecove founded by a trio of cannibalistic ur-priests who stole their divine power from various gods and goddesses they despise, where the law of the land is, "If you can get away with it, do it!", the PCs are tasked with entering this hive of scum and villainy to complete a most unpleasant mission. Years ago, a cadre of Demogorgon-worshiping cultists arrived at Scuttlecove and founded a brothel known as Porphyry House, named for the locally-mined mineral which gives the building its distinctive façade. Success came virtually overnight, and now the leader of the Demogorgon cult is ready to make a play for her own transformation into an immortal demon. She plans attract his attention (and hopefully his blessing) by performing the largest sacrificial orgy in history within Porphyry House, something the PCs should be only too happy to help quash once they learn about it.

Unfortunately, the person they're most apt to learn the truth about Porphyry House from is herself a half-fiend, devoted to the worship of Graz'zt, Demogorgon's most hated adversary. The PCs, even at 10th level, do not have the resources to fight the entirety of Scuttlecove, nor can they afford to divide their efforts in trying to take down both groups (or a third competing force, an evil wizard who wants sole control of the drugs concocted by the Porphyry House cultists and does not care how this comes about). No matter who the PCs wind up siding with, Evil in some form or another is going to win, and anybody playing a Paladin or even a Good-aligned Cleric is going to have to make some very difficult choices, not to mention possible atonement, assuming they survive.

---

Both Paizo and Wizards of the Coast received blowback for this brief dalliance with producing mature-labeled products, and barring the Book of Exalted Deeds, it was the last time an official 3E product shipped with any kind of mature content warning. But this wasn't quite the end of the Book of Vile Darkness. In 2012, a direct-to-video film with the same title was released. Unlike the prior two films, Dungeons & Dragons, and Wrath of the Dragon God, The Book of Vile Darkness leaned heavily into its subject matter, featuring copious amounts of violence and nudity. Ignored by critics and excoriated by viewers, the film was a resounding flop and it would be eleven years before the brand would return to the screen.

But if you think that means Wizards of the Coast didn't put out a 4E version to supplement this SyFy Channel disasterpiece, then you haven't been paying attention.

Released in a shrinkwrapped folder-style package of two booklets and a poster map, pictured above is the DM's book, which features 96 pages of content reworked and updated from earlier versions, along with a short adventure, "The Vile Tome", which takes as inspiration the events of The Book of Vile Darkness film, so you know it's (ahem) a quality production. The second, and much shorter, booklet is a Player's Book, which uses its 32 pages to offer up hints, tips, and ideas for creating and playing Evil-aligned characters, along with a bevy of similarly-aligned Feats, Themes, Prestige Classes, and Destinies to make your Big Bad a truly deplorable being.

But if you were expecting a 4E retread of the 3E product, you'll be disappointed. This is very much an all-ages, all-gamers product, keeping well in line with Hasbro's rules of decency. You'll find no spells in here that explode an opponent's eyeballs, no rules for how much damage is taken each hour by a crucified creature, no grotesque artwork. No real horror at all, in fact, but that was never 4E's forte to be sure.

---

At this point, if you're a certain kind of gamer, you're probably wondering how easy it is to get your hands on these supplements. Well, first the good news. Dragon #300 and Dungeon #95 are fairly common and relatively inexpensive. Expect to pay around $5-$10 for the former, and $12-15 for the latter, depending on condition and whether or not Dungeon is missing its sheet of monster tokens. You can also acquire a digital version of the 4E Book from DriveThruRPG for $14.99 (although it often goes on sale for under $10). That's the good news.

The bad news is that if you want physical copies of either the 3E or 4E versions, you're going to have a rough time of it. The 4E Book was one of the last supplements produced for 4E during its run, and as such, had a small print run. There are copies out there, but expect to drop $175 or more to get a complete one. Trust me when I tell you, unless you are trying to complete your 4E book set for some reason, this is not worth it.

But if you thought that was bad, trying to find a copy of the 3E Book is a colossal pain in the ass. DriveThruRPG is no help here, nor is any other site that traditionally sells digital versions of old D&D supplements. What's more, Amazon views the book's existence as so problematic that they don't allow it to be listed or sold on their US storefront. There are plenty of other storefronts where you can find copies (hello, eBay!), but when the world's largest retailer won't stock it, that's quite a roadblock. Expect to drop $200 if you want to add this one to your shelves. Yeah, the time to start collecting 3E books was right around fifteen years ago. Sorry, I should have told you earlier.

My bad.