Green's Guide to Ghosts

[Prest0]

So you think strapping a nuclear reactor to your back and waving a proton-thingamahoochie around makes you a ghost hunter? Think again! My name is Jackson Green, and I'm a professional ghost hunter. I’ve seen some stuff that would make your hair curl if it’s straight or straighten it out if it’s curly. Ghost hunting is a job that requires preparation. Walking into a supernatural situation without the right instruments and knowledge is like trying to fix a ’56 Chevy without a toolbox.

illustration of Jackson GreenThis guide is your toolbox. It’s a collection of notes from my close brushes with the supernatural, and hopefully this book can help you avoid some of the bumps and bruises I earned by learning things the hard way. You may be familiar with some of these techniques as published in Last Rites and Bloodlines, but most parts have never seen the light of day before now.

Now, there's other guides out there that give you new ghost-hunting professions, skills, feats, magic, and whatnot. This ain't like those guides. No sense in going over the same old crunch. My guide tells you:

* How to conduct a ghost hunt if you're a player or how to run one if you're a GM
* Ghost hunting equipment used by real-world ghost hunters and advice on how to use it
* Detailed information about the different kinds of ghosts
* A template for converting characters to ghosts
* A random Seance outcome table
* Three ghost-themed adventure outlines for GMs
* FORTY-SIX additional adventure seeds, just 'cause I'm a cool guy
* A Paranormal Lexicon with terms and concepts vital to ghost hunters.
* A short list of websites that make for great research

And here's the nitty-gritty:

* 46 pages, not counting front cover or OGL
* Color cover, illustrations, and helpful sidebars throughout.
* Includes "printer-friendly" version with all color and artwork removed.
* Requires free Acrobat PDF Reader 5.0 or newer (available here)

 

[Crothian]

Green’s Guide to Ghosts

It is nice to once again see a product that details the finer art of Ghost Busting. What really amazes me is how well the two products work together and have very little duplicated material. It is rare to see that in the d20 market. Usually books that cover the same subject cover the subject in mostly the same way. But with this and with RPG Object’s Blood and Ghosts people will get two products that work well together.

Green’s Guide to Ghosts is a PDF by the guys at Twelve to Midnight. This forty eight page book has a nice lay out and some good art. The book is well book marked and come in both a print version and an on screen version. The on screen has the art, color, and just looks really good. The print version is black and white and still well laid out. They did a nice job with the look of the book.

The book is one of the rare ones that has little for the player. It has good equipment but no classes or feats are in the book. I should probably repeat that since in this day and age of d20 a book with no classes and no feats or even skills or player options is unheard of. Heck, a lot of adventures seem to have the random feat and class in an appendix these days. The book has adventures for running this type of game. That is actually what I was hoping for from this book. 12 to Midnight has not made a lot of books, but their adventures have really been good. I was pleased to see that their style and skill for adventures was used here.

There is some really fun stuff in here. I like the template that turns a character into a ghost. The options that opens up for role playing and for seeing characters die and come back is great. There is a table for séances. There is a chance on it that the medium will be taken over by the dead grandmother of one of the players. There is a great ten tips for running more horror based games. It has some nice simple tips to really help the game happen and be a little more scary and less campy.

I do not like to give spoilers for adventures so I will just say there are some cool adventures here. They have three that are fully written up. None are that long but can easily be stretched out and a good DM can really use them to start some greater. Even better are the little adventure ideas in here. They have a little less then fifty adventure ideas in here.

As I said in the first paragraph I am really impressed on how well this goes with Blood and Ghosts. That one is more player oriented The equipment lists do cover some of the same material but for the most part they compliment each other nicely. I also want to mention that the book works well for Orpheus, a White Wolf game that is about ghost hunting. The rules for that game are not d20 but the ideas can be used together. Orpheus does have a much bigger plot oriented to the game with a lot of the assumptions on ghosts fully detailed in there.

Green’s Guide to Ghosts does a nice job of presenting the supernatural for a D20 game. They also have the book designed for Savage World and while I have not seen that version, it is really cool to see other game systems being supported for this book.

 

[Greatwyrm]

A very solid and very useful title.

Uprfront

I received a copy of Green’s Guide to Ghosts as a free review copy through the pdf review program Crothian set up.

This is not a playtest review.

Contents

Green’s Guide to Ghosts comes with two pdfs. One is a full-color file with art. The other is a printer-friendly version. Both use a two-column layout, with the art and backgrounds not included in the printer-friendly version.

The Guide is a 48 page document. Four pages are taken up by the cover, credits, authors’ notes, and OGL statement. The remaining 44 pages include sections on ghost hunting equipment, tactics, the ghosts themselves, adventure outlines, and an extensive glossary. Throughout the document, there are also sidebars from the fictional Jackson Green, from which the Guide takes it’s name.

Tools of the Trade

This section contains equipment that real world ghost hunters use to assist and document their investigations. Each item has a brief description of what it does, why a ghost hunter would find it useful, and the appropriate game statistics. Many of the items also include an illustration. The illustrations are a bit simplistic, but not having any idea what something like an Air Ionic Meter would look like, I found them somewhat useful. All of the game statistics are also nicely summarized in a mock-up of a catalog order form, complete with purchase DCs.

Overall, the gear is well thought out and well presented. A number of the items here would also fit well in other types of campaigns, such as modern espionage.

My only concern with the gear section is that many of the different types of items provide specific and different named bonuses. With the right combination of gear, you could rack up a fairly high bonus to related Search checks. However, with the sample DCs provided for various ghost hunting Search checks, I doubt they’d be overpowering.

The Ghost Hunt

This section provides information for both players and GMs on playing in and running realistic ghost hunts. Now, by “realistic” I mean “not Ghostbusters.” In addition to the advice on ghosts and horror, there are a number of anecdotal sidebars from Jackson Green. These sidebars, coupled with the photographic illustrations throughout the Guide really helped in setting the mood for this type of game.

Horror is a tough genre for some to play in. There’s just a disconnect between sitting at the kitchen table with your buddies and the investigator crouched down in the spooky basement. The authors do provide some good advice for trying to overcome that and even using that complacency to the GM’s advantage once in a while.

Ghosts

I’m sure we’d all be surprised if there wasn’t a chapter about actually making ghosts. It includes templates for expanding on the standard d20 ghost, as well as their motivations and tactics. The Lesser Manifestation, Poltergeist, Atmospheric Ball of Energy, Phantom, and (pretty vicious) Dominating Spirit are introduced.

All five are pretty different from each other. While they’re all ghosts, an encounter with a Phantom and an encounter with a Dominating Spirit will be significantly different challenges. It’s unlikely your players will be saying, “Oh, another ghost.” Each has its own niche, M.O., and special qualities. The new special qualities are clearly written and appropriate for the CR adjustments.

Adventure Outlines

Three outlines for ghost hunting adventures are included. Each is two or three pages. They provide an interesting background story, notes on the major characters, and a bullet-point outline of events and options for the adventure.

The way the characters are handled struck me both as a good thing and a bad thing. The characters’ backgrounds and motivations are clearly laid out, without being a straight-jacket for their actions. This is good, giving a GM plenty of room to modify them to suit the story they want to tell. The bad thing is there are no actual stats for them. It’s good to still leave that openness for the GM, but it makes it difficult to use the outlines for a quick pick-up game. I’d like to have seen even a suggestion for classes and levels. In all fairness, though, they are outlines, not full adventures.

Lexicon of Terms

This section is a nice glossary of terms you’d probably come across in ghost hunting adventures. Nice, but not remarkable. What is remarkable is the number of adventure ideas packed in right along with the definitions. There are more than 40 adventure hooks in this section. You could come up with any number of adventure ideas just taking them one at a time or picking two or three and coming up with a way to make them fit with each other. This takes a fairly dry section, which some people might otherwise skip over, and really adds a whole dimension of usefulness to the Guide.

Web Resources

At the end, there are ten additional web resources listed for additional real-world investigation info. These are a welcome addition, including even more resources for equipment, news stories, pictures, and even hoaxes.

Overall

I was very impressed by Green’s Guide to Ghosts. The dossier style layout is interesting. It’s well edited, with only the occasional typo. All of the material in it would be very useful in a game with regular supernatural incidents. I can even see uses for some of it in other types of games. The bottom line is Green’s Guide to Ghosts is a supplement a Modern supernatural/horror GM should have.

 

[Starman]

Green's Guide to Ghosts Review

Green’s Guide to Ghosts is a 48-page .pdf from 12 to Midnight Games. It is, as the title suggests, a guide to ghosts and related paranormal activities for d20 Modern. It was written by Preston P. Dubose and Ed Wetterman. Artwork was done by Preston P. Dubose and Woody Hearne. It retails for $8.00.

The book is written from the point of view of Jackson Green, a ghost hunter/paranormal investigator. He “says” that everything he is writing about is real, but that he couches it in game terms to avoid censure from government agencies and MIB. I groaned the first time I read it, but it actually works out all right and didn’t distract from the product at all.

The layout is decent and easy to read, a simple two-column setup. An excellent set of bookmarks make finding whatever you are looking for relatively easy. The artwork is simple, but effective. Many of the pieces are “photographs” of supernatural phenomena, which was a nice touch rather than just doing them as regular piece of artwork. The cover is a mock file folder of Jackson Green’s ghost file with some phone messages clipped to it. None of the art was spectacular, but it was evocative of the source material.

The book opens with an introduction from Jackson Green and is an overview of the product. It is about what you would expect from an introduction.

Chapter 1 is Tools of the Trade. It has a whole list of equipment for the would-be ghost hunter. It starts by listing many of the things that a ghost hunter should always take with him for his investigations from the basics, things like cameras and flashlights to more exotic items like barometers, thermometers, and motion detectors. Much of it is common sense, but it is great for those less practical minded people who need a reminder of what to bring. The next part of the chapter deals with the mechanics of the hunt itself. Rather than making individual checks with each piece of equipment, it recommends making a single Search check modified by the equipment being used. For example, a digital camera provides a +1 optical search bonus and a barometer provides a +1 atmospheric pressure search bonus. I like the idea of reducing all of the rolls into a single Search roll, however keeping track of all of the different bonuses could be a pain. I would use the “order form” on page 7 to do this. Just print it out for your players and have them check off what they have. All of the equipment has a brief description including a purchase DC. The part I liked the best was the three kits listed. These are a compilation of items that you can purchase without having to individually pick out everything you want. This was a nice touch.

Chapter 2 is The Ghost Hunt. This chapter gives a player’s guide to ghost hunts such as what to look for and what one can expect to run into when looking for the supernatural. It also has some tips for the Gamemaster on running a horror game such as setting the mood and creating spooky events. It also talks about running an in-game séance complete with a table of random events that can occur during one. This chapter is short, a lot of the advice I’ve seen in other horror products, but it does what it sets out to do, and the book would be remiss without it.

Chapter 3 is Ghosts. This chapter describes the different types of ghosts and gives templates for them. There are two classes, echoes and lost souls. Echoes are strong emotional residues or psychic impressions. They are generally just harmless apparitions. The other type is lost souls, which can be anything from ABEs (atmospheric balls of energy) to poltergeists. These are the fun ones to interact with and can be benign or deadly. The type of lost soul something becomes depends on how many hit dice it had. One odd thing is that in the template description under Defense, it notes, “A lost soul retains no natural or equipment bonus to AC but retains any class bonuses and dodge bonus due to Dexterity +1.” I’m not sure what the “due to Dexterity +1” part means. Nowhere does it say that a lost soul gains a bonus to Dex. One thing to keep in mind is that if you are running an FX-lite game than player’s are not going to be dispatching lost souls in combat as magic weapons are needed to harm them. Of course, this is in keeping with most of the genre, as generally you need to find out why the ghost is doing the haunting and rectify the situation, if possible, to get rid of them. It bears keeping in mind, though, if your player’s are used to fighting their way out of tough situations.

Chapter 4 is Adventure Outlines. Three short adventure ideas complete with basic NPCs, background, and outline of events are given. These are a nice touch and a good way to help a gamemaster generate ideas for his or her campaign. Last Call for the Big Thicket Flyer deals with a ghost train that has started appearing at a retirement home. In A Call from Beyond, a medium contacts one of the PCs with a message from someone they know who has died. Constance Smith’s Last Laugh is about a family being haunted through multiple generations. All three of these highlighted different aspects of ghost hunting and are excellent jumping off points for a campaign.

Chapter 5 is Lexicon of Terms and is the longest one in the book. This is, obviously, a lexicon of terms dealing with supernatural phenomena. The best part about it is that it is quite extensive and all sorts of adventure seeds are sprinkled throughout in sidebars. All of the terms come from real world tales of the supernatural and gives the whole thing a grounding in, uh, “reality” that gives it a solid feel.

Chapter 6 gives a list of websites devoted to the supernatural for the gamemaster wanting more resources.

Chapter 7 is a one-page note from both authors about the genesis and writing of the product. I always like reading stuff like this, so I enjoyed it.

Overall, this was a great product. It is mostly fluff with the only crunch being the list of equipment, the Search rules, and the séance random event table. It was nice to see a product that didn’t focus on new feats and prestige (or advanced) classes, not that I don’t like more of those, but everyone seems to be doing it. I don’t know if I could get into a campaign devoted wholly to ghost hunting but the occasional one-shot would be fun and this .pdf made me want to run or play in some.

Shane E Noble