Review: Dead Inside

Posted by Bryant on February 13, 2004 at 01:33 PM

Dead Inside
Atomic Sock Monkey Press
128 pages; $13.95 (PDF) / $25.00 (print)
Written by Chad Underkoffler; art by Chris Cooper

You've lost your soul. You want it back. That's the premise in a nutshell. How'd you lose it? That's up to the players and the GM. How do you get it back? Probably by doing good deeds, resisting your Vice, and paying attention to your Virtue -- but there's some flexibility there as well.

In 128 pages, you get the following things: a solid cosmology, a simple robust system, some cool powers, a nifty world, a good set of mechanics for moral consequences, and an adventure which could easily be a complete campaign. In fact, it's really a campaign in a box, which is a great concept. A lot of roleplaying books are toolkits designed to provide the GM with tools to make a campaign. Dead Inside, like My Life With Master or the Savage Worlds campaign books, is more of a game than a toolkit. The GM has a lot of flexibility -- it's by no means a straight-jacket -- but if you want to just run a quick pickup game, or possibly a quick pickup campaign, you're getting exactly the tools you need.

I ran one session of the game, using a PDF copy, from which I draw the impressions that follow. (Full disclosure: I talked Chad into giving me a free copy in exchange for a review here. Same deal's available to other smart self-promoters, of course.) This review overlaps and hopefully complements Rob's review.

So what's in the book?

First off, the layout is good and the artwork is a little less polished than I'd expect in a book I can hold in my hands. As a PDF, I didn't mind the art so much. The book makes very good use of layout to segment and present information, which matters more than the art for a book I'm not holding in my hands.

The setup and introduction is the first 8 pages. That gives you the basic cosmology, some info about what it means to be Dead Inside, some ways to lose a soul, and some ways to get a soul back. You also get a brief blurb titled "What Do The Dead Inside Do?", which sets up the big drivers for a Dead Inside campaign. Blurbs like this show up throughout the book; it's more pregenerated setting and motivation, which can be a starting point for the adventurous or a comfortable common ground for the lazy. Again, you're getting the tools you need.

Chapter two is 16 pages on the Real World and the Spirit World. Most of it's on the Spirit World -- the Real World gets only three pages. The descriptions of the Spirit World are beautiful; the City at the center of the Spirit World is strange and baroque and becomes marvelously real thanks to some lovely descriptive work. I was somewhat worried before the game that I'd have trouble getting across the feel of the Spirit World in a single session as a novice Dead Inside GM, but it worked out just fine. Chad does nice adjectives.

I did wind up wondering something, however. The game's premise is that being Dead Inside is an awful state of being. In the Spirit World, you don't feel the loss of your soul so much. If you can flee to the Spirit World and get away from the worst of the effects of losing your soul -- plus you get magic -- does that undermine the drivers that push the game along? Possibly you need to rely on human contacts to keep the characters from giving up on the Real World altogether, but if you have a lot of human contacts, are you likely to lose your soul? All questions I'd think deeply about before starting a campaign.

(Chad promises a supplement, Cold, Hard World, which will cover the Real World in detail. I am perhaps being premature, therefore. Covering the Spirit World in detail is important to hook people on the game, so you wouldn't want to reverse the order of things and flesh out the Spirit World in a later supplement, but... I still think another few pages on the Real World would have been useful.)

Chapter three is 7 pages on character creation, followed by chapter four and about 25 pages on mechanics. This rocks. The PDQ (Prose Descriptive Quality) system is simple but has enough crunch to avoid being simply GM narration. It took me about ten minutes to explain the system, albeit to experienced gamers, and we were good to go. It'd be about that simple for novice gamers too.

Chapter five is dedicated to GM advice. These 31 pages are, in my book, the heart of the system. This is where Chad gets deeply into the moral questions which are at the heart of the system. The rest of the book is a neat scaffold, but the GM advice section is where you learn why you might want to put something on this particular scaffold. It's a thirty-one page treatise on running games driven by questions of virtue and vice.

Now, I gotta refer you to Rob's review for the consequences and implications of this. He nailed it. As the GM, I'll just echo his comments and note that it'd be very tough to run an ongoing Dead Inside game. It would help to shift the narrative burden of coming up with moral scenarios to the players, but that might exacerbate the difficulty Rob mentions: the players need situations that are genuinely hard to do good.

Making that happen is really what this chapter is all about. There's an extensive explanation of how to set up moral quandaries and how to resolve them, including a detailed flowchart on the steps a GM takes when giving the players Virtue or Vice checks. There's a great discussion of story arcs, relating back to the "What Do The Dead Inside Do?" blurb I mentioned earlier. There are sample NPCs, locations, and "monsters." There are hints on what a PC could do after regaining his or her soul. It's one of the better GMing sections I've read in a long time, up there with the GM advice in Over the Edge. You not only find out what to do, you find out how to do it.

Mind you, while the advice is very good and very clear, it's advice on doing something very difficult. Setting up physical conflicts is relatively easy. Players can't argue about whether or not a monster is dangerous when it's doing a full attack ("claw, claw, and bite on Steve the Mage!"). Players can argue about whether or not a certain situation is a fair moral test. I like the idea of introducing new players to roleplaying with Dead Inside, but I'd think twice before handing it to a novice GM.

Finally, there's one particularly great sidebar in this section that I've got to spotlight. It discusses changing the core Virtues. The default Virtues and Vices are pretty standard Western ethos-driven moral tenets... but hey, you could certainly use Viking virtues. Or Buddhist vices. And another set of moral standards makes this a very different game. It's an obvious idea once someone points it out, but for me it rescued the game from being a little too nice and sweet, and I never would have thought of it on my own.

Chapter six is a quick bibliography and glossary, about which I can't say much other than "it's complete and made me want to read some of the books." I always figure that's what a bibliography is for.

Finally, and this is tremendously cool, chapter 7 is a 22 page introductory adventure. Much like the GMing advice, this is state of the art stuff designed to make it easy to slip into playing. The adventure has a nice flow diagram showing how to get from one bit to another, with multiple paths. Each encounter has a bit on the kinds of Vice and Virtue checks that might be appropriate, a bit on things PCs might learn from the encounter, and even a note on whether or not you could end a session at the end of the encounter. Really superb. More adventures should be written up like this. It's plenty mineable for people who don't want to run it as written, too.

Interestingly, if you play all the way through the adventure, you'll most likely win. Or, anyhow, stop being Dead Inside. I don't think this is a bad thing, but it did leave me wondering how long a Dead Inside arc is meant to take. I'm pretty sure I could finish up the adventure as presented in a matter of four or five sessions.

And that's the game, except for the requisite character sheet and GM record-keeping sheets. Come to think of it, the latter aren't so requisite, so I'll mention them in particular. Like that.

It's a cool game. I don't know that I'd want to run an extended campaign, since it'd be hard on the players and on the GM. I do know that I want every game I buy to be written with the same attention towards functionality and that the play drivers are unlike almost anything else out there, which for a neophile like me is a big recommendation.