Beyond the Supernatural, Second Edition

Overall score:

I was not a fan of the original Beyond the Supernatural, though I was familiar with many of its concepts thanks to Rifts (Rifts Earth was, in many ways, the future version of BTS’s modern horror setting). When they announced the BTS second edition and we put it into our long-term review schedule, I assigned it to a staff member and didn’t think much of it—after all, how cool could it be? When our review copy arrived, however, and I started to flip through it, I was amazed by almost everything in there. I kept it for myself, and told Spriggan (the now out-of-luck staff member) that I’d buy him an extra one out of my own pocket. That makes Beyond the Supernatural Second Edition the first RPG I’ve paid real money for since…well, since I started this site. That’s high praise right there.

The setting of Beyond the Supernatural is fairly standard: it’s our modern world, but with a hidden layer of supernatural evil lurking beneath it. The nice thing about the setting is that you could take it in any number of different directions, from a gritty paranormal detective (Cthulu-esque), to a creepy supernatural conspiracy (X-Files), to a combat-oriented monster bash (Evil Dead), and so on. The bad part about this setting is that there is very little information on it—they just assume that we’re already pretty familiar with the world we live in, and leave it at that. This is a fair assumption, and it’s not like adventure ideas are hard to come by for a game about modern horror, but it would have been nice to have some specific organizations and villains and NPCs to work with.

The one organization we do get, however, is a pretty good GM tool: the Lazlo Agency is a group of paranormal investigators and researchers which the players are welcome to join, and much of the book (and most of the book’s fiction) is told from the agency’s perspective. Taking an extra step to establish this agency, Palladium has created the website, www.lazlosociety.com, as a sort of in-character message board for Lazlo Agency members to share insights and ideas. A site like this, especially one with completely unrestricted membership, has a lot of potential to degenerate from a cool RPG tool into a typical Internet forum, but so far lazlosociety.com has managed to avoid that, and is actually very useful. Some of the posters are Palladium writers (in-character as Lazlo Agency leaders, of course) posting adventure ideas in the guise of urban legends or “inside information,” and other posters have followed suit by linking to real news articles and giving them creative supernatural twists. One of my favorites was a rather sad story from the Denver Post about an archeologist who was robbed and murdered because the thugs hoped they could sell some of his artifacts for big bucks; it turned out that the pieces they stole were scientifically important but monetarily worthless, but the police had yet to recover them. The player who posted this followed up with the suggestion that something in the archeologist’s collection may have been a dangerous artifact, and that it was now on the loose—similar to the post-soviet fears of nukes getting into the wrong hands. Other posters took this idea and ran with it, offering several intriguing ideas (all in-character) that a GM could easily turn into a whole series of adventures.

I was wary of the website when I first heard about it, but I’ve become impressed by it as a live, ongoing source of adventure and character ideas. Since it’s free and optional, you can register and join the community, lurk anonymously and steal ideas, or ignore it completely.

There are two other holes in the game, though each will be filled by already-announced supplements; you could consider these three books to be the core of the game, and it won’t really be complete until all three are released. The next book, called Arcanum, will add magic classes, spells, and items—of which the first book has literally nothing—while the third, the Tome Grotesque, will function as a monster manual. The base book has a few monsters in the back (about fifteen), so you can get by for a while, but more are definitely needed. Tome Grotesque will likely have human NPCs and villain organizations as well.

I began this book by saying that it was incredible, and then proceeded to talk about what’s missing from it. If it doesn’t have any magic, many monsters, or a well-defined setting, what on Earth could it have to make it so good? Simply put, it has the best character options I’ve ever seen in an RPG. There are 14 classes; each class description is about five pages long (the biggest is seven, the smallest is four), and includes a short fiction piece, a description of what it’s like to be in that class, a list of special abilities, full stats, equipment guidelines, and even housing suggestions. On top of this each character gets an occupation, of which there are 42; each occupation description is about half a page long and includes skills, pay, and a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages inherent to that kind of job. You can further customize your character through elective skills and the long list of psychic powers (all but three of the classes are psychic)—there’s even a section called “Rounding out your character” to help new players create a complete background and personality. It’s obvious that the game is heavily centered on character depth and growth.

The character options are more than just deep, however—they’re also very broad, with the fourteen classes covering an impressive range of both powers and personal traits. Consider the Psychic Sensitive, a person blessed and cursed by the power to see and feel the demons, ghosts and monsters that most people are oblivious to. “It’s like a window stuck wide open,” says the woman in the fiction. “When a demonic being enters my range of psychic senses I don’t just know about it like a pop up message on a website, I feel it…. My skin crawls, and no matter how loud I turn up my television I can still hear its footsteps.” A character this open to the supernatural would be an invaluable asset to a party of monster hunters, but dealing with the consequences makes it into a true roleplaying experience. One of the classes that most fascinated me was the Psychic Medium, a person whose sole power is a connection to the dead: he can receive visits and messages from ghosts, and is in fact followed at all times by a Spirit Guide (such as a dead ancestor) who offers advice and grants the Medium vicarious psychic ability. If you want something a little more action-oriented there is the Firewalker (with pyrokinetic powers) or the Physical Psychic (with telekinetic powers); if you want something a little more cerebral there is the Diviner, whose power is focused around finding and interpreting signs and omens. How about a Latent Psychic, with powers so new and recent that you don’t know how to use them very well, and might even be afraid of them? How about a Nega-Psychic, who believes so adamantly in the falsity of the supernatural that he serves as a sort of psychic null field? If you really want a challenge, there’s an Autistic Psychic Savant who balances incredible mental powers with, well, a brain that doesn’t work right. In every case, in every class, the challenges and realities of your powers are given equal weight with the powers themselves.

The three non-psychic classes are equally interesting, despite being “normal.” The Genius/Natural is a person who trades psychic ability for intense mental or physical prowess; a simple point system lets you build an Einstein or a Michael Jordan by tweaking attributes and other stats. The Parapsychologist is essentially Fox Mulder (though, to be fair, the class was present in the first edition and thus predates Mulder by several years)—a character with nothing more than a fascination for the supernatural and an extensive knowledge of how it works. Lastly, the Ordinary Person is just that—an ordinary person with no special abilities at all, only the knowledge that the world is full of monsters, and the determination to do something about it. The Ordinary Person may be the most intriguing class in the book simply because it makes no attempt at balance; its weakness is part of its appeal. On the plus side, an Ordinary person doesn’t have to deal with the challenges of psychic power, so he may be the most emotionally stable member of the party.

I should point out that one class seems out of place and gimmicky—the Psi-Mechanic. The Psi-Mechanic is a character who has psychic powers but can’t use them directly; instead, she creates machines and gadgets imbued with power and channels her psychic abilities through them. This is very similar to the Rifts Techno-Wizard, and in fact the Psi-Mechanic from BTS first edition was the obvious inspiration for techno-wizardry. I dislike the class for two reasons: first, I think that techno-wizardry is a better use of the idea, and having both styles in the megaverse is weird and redundant; they would have done better, I think, to delete the Psi-Mechanic and then reprint the Techno-Wizard in Arcanum with the magic classes. That wouldn’t really solve my problem, however, only lessen it, because my second complaint about the class is that it doesn’t seem to fit with any other aspect of the BTS world. It’s a little too mad scientist, and a little too steampunk, to blend well with the understated darkness and pathos of the other character classes. I suppose there is a segment of the audience who will love this character, and I can’t fault the writers for trying to give as many options as possible, so I won’t say that the class should have been cut. Instead I will say that they should have done more to make it fit—again, a stronger description of the setting could have helped this significantly. As it is, it feels very out of place.

As wide as the character selection is, I would have liked to see more of the “repentant monster” variety made popular by shows such as Buffy and Angel. It’s all very well to have a group of psychics and detectives and ordinary joes fighting a supernatural menace, but why not toss a werewolf or a vampire or a demon into the group as well? How about a ghost? We may see something like this is Tome Grotesque, but I doubt it, and honestly it will be no major loss if we don’t—the characters as they are are complex and fascinating. I’m just saying it would have been an interesting addition.

Fans of other Palladium RPGs will notice a few changes to the rules system. Some of these were also present in Splicers, but I assumed they were an anomaly; seeing them presented again in BTS2 represents a sweeping change to a traditionally unchanging game system, and I approve of the new direction. One of the most notable is a rather simple tweak to the combat—instead of running the entire combat in the typical round-robin style (highest initiative takes an action, next-highest initiative takes an action, etc.), you now run back-and-forth combat between pairs of characters (highest initiative takes an action, his target counterattacks, and back and forth like that until you reach a dramatic stopping point; then it’s on to the next highest initiative and his target). It’s a more simplified system, and a potentially implausible one since many battles aren’t exclusively made of one-on-one fights, but it’s faster and more cinematic, which are both very good things.

Another change, new to BTS2, involves the way ISP works. ISP, or Inner Strength Points, are a slowly regenerating pool of power that characters use to “cast” their psychic powers. Past Palladium games have given characters dozens of ISP points, but most characters in BTS2 will be lucky to have more than 10—making their powers very difficult to use. In most situations, however, this number will be multiplied significantly. ISP multipliers are a new concept for Palladium, but blends admirably with the established rules of their supernatural system: the presence of magic and the supernatural enhances all of the other magic and supernatural stuff nearby. It’s the core of the Rifts storyline—lots of magic energy was released at once, which reacted synergistically to create more magic energy, and now the world is the greatest nexus of magic in the megaverse and even simple spells can do unbelievable things. That same principle governs the ISP multipliers—when a monster shows up your ISP increases, and the bigger the monster the more you get. In addition to meshing perfectly with the established “rules” of the world, this system keeps psychic powers low-key while still giving you the chance to let loose when it really counts; a telekinetic under observation in a lab will struggle to bend a spoon, but if a pack of hungry demons show up he can easily toss a car at them.

With so much to like about the game, and so many options already available, it’s hard to complain about what’s been relegated to future books. Magic will enhance the game significantly, but you can get along quite well without it in the interim thanks to the vast selection of Psychic classes and powers. Setting information and adventure ideas can be easily drawn from lazlosociety.com and from your local newspaper or tabloid; it’s risky for them to rely so heavily on the website, perhaps, but for the moment it’s an excellent resource. The only really significant problem with the book is the small selection of monsters, but it should be enough to get you by for a few months of adventure, and a clever GM can create plenty of human villains to fill in the gaps. Since the game is fully compatible with Palladium’s other games, you can pull monsters and baddies from games like Nightbane and Heroes Unlimited, or adapt them from Rifts and Chaos Earth; the pair of Rifts Conversion Books could be especially helpful by simply converting the MDC into SDC. (And honestly, how many Player's Handbooks contain any monsters at all? Having even fifteen could be seen as a bonus, not an oversight.)

At its heart, though, the game is not about what you fight but about who you are—not the challenges you face but how you face them. BTS2 goes to great lengths to help you create complex, challenging characters, and gives enough options that every player is sure to find something they love. When more books come out to supplement the line, they will only be gravy on an already excellent gaming meal.

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Written by Fellfrosch on February 11th, 2005