ZQ1: The Demon Collective, vol. 1




The Demon Collective, Vol. 1, by GMDK


 Spoilers for adventures below.


Pitch: A collection of four horror adventures by well-known OSR folks.  


Why I backed: Reputation of the team.


What I received: A thick stapled zine with a glossy black cover and a separate reference sheet for each adventure.


What I thought: The layout and design is gold standard, with map cutouts in every spread, reference sheets, and more.  


Two of the adventures stood out to me.  Mabel Harper’s “She’s Not Dead, She’s Asleep” mashes up the jenga block mechanic of Dread with the “you woke up the setting-altering baddies” plot of Death Frost Doom, and breathes fresh gothic life into what could easily have been tired vampire imagery.  I love the vampire princess’ giant mosquito steed and the human thralls in their Edenic prison.  


Dai Shugars’ “Hush” makes a session out of a game of cat and mouse with a single standard monster (a basilisk) in a very small space with the aid of magically-enforced darkness and silence.  Making bespoke crazy monsters is all well and good, but taking the standard D&D pieces and using them to build something original and scary is also an art and it’s pulled off well here.


The adventures in this volume stretch OSR design to the breaking point, and you can see the seams bulging in several places.  One adventure (“Bad Faith”) builds a mechanic for exploring a shifting extraplanar labyrinth out of OSR pieces (will saves and encounter rolls), but the result seems like it could create frustrating gameplay.  Some elements of “Hush” (e.g. how to tell when a PC who sees the basilisk makes eye contact and thus needs to save or die; how to play and adjudicate the ghosts trying to douse the party’s lights) seem too important to leave as much to GM improv as they do in the dangerous-but-fair mode of OSR play.  Ultimately I think the scenarios in this book (with the possible exception of “Night School” by Camilla Greer) might work better if run in a game like Trophy, where the more abstracted mechanics can ease the tension between adventure and system.


What I’m going to do with it: Holding onto it, particularly for She’s Not Dead, She’s Asleep.

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