[HOE] I hate the Book o' the Dead

[toadpooka@juno.com]

OK, that might be a little strong, but I really don't like it.
This being PEGs first sourcebook, it seems to me that they made a lot of
mistakes that were corrected in later books.  most of this stems from who
they chose to write it.  If you ever have the choice between reading a
book by Lester Smith and swallowing razor blades, take the latter option;
it'll be far less cruel.  Soon after buying the Book, I hunted down Mr.
Lester at GenCon, seeking an autograph and some insight into his take on
Deadlands.  The man could barely remember writing BotD, and didn't seem
to have read the main rulebook all the way through.  And it shows, with
how well-balanced and complete the harrowed rules are.
In that entire book, there are about ten powers or less that are so
phenomenally far above the rest in power level that I've rarely seen
anyone use anything else.  Of those ten, I think PEG has had to issue
official errata on 7 of them.  A lot of the other powers don't even make
sense, and I suspect that the only reason PEG hasn't had to issue errata
on them is that no one's ever used them in a game, and therefore had to
ask about them.  Harrowed, with respect to other arcane characters, have
a degree of power imbalance that most gamers haven't seen since they quit
playing Rifts.  With the rules in Book o' the Dead, it's almost
impossible for a character to ever lose enough Dominion for the manitou
to be a threat.
The rules that have been polished, cleaned, and mostly re-written were
reproduced in Cyborgs.  The powers listed in Cyborgs are probably the
only decent ones out of BotD, also cleaned and polished.  The ones that
were left out are either horribly unbalanced, incomprehensible, totally
useless or, in some cases, all three.
BotD does have some information on what it's like to be harrowed, and
what that experience is like for the corpse.  But you can get almost the
same exact feel from readin Wraith, which at this point, you should be
able to pick up for about seven bucks (BTW, when I get to the point of
reccommending a White Wolf book over a PEG book, you know I'm serious).

From Whom It May Concern,
Rich Ranallo

"There will be no Year 2000.  At least, not as we know it."
-Hunter S. Thompson

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