Product Review: Rogue Publishing’s The Collectors

Imagine that you are an everyday person. You have your daily routine, and you make the best of what you have. Except you have a special job for a very demanding boss that you can never leave. You also have a partner who is stuck in the same job with you. You and your partner do your best at this job because neither of you want to be sent back to the home office again. Ever.

The job? The collection of souls that have been sold to the darkest of powers. The home office? Hell itself. The boss? To quote the Rolling Stones, he’s “a man of wealth and taste”. Hope you guess his name.

Welcome to the world of The Collectors where the player characters are demons making sure that those who have made deals with he-who-shall-remain-nameless pay up in the form of their soul. That is apparently the currency of Hell, and collectors make sure that all bills are paid in full.

Written by Thomas MacKay, with artwork by Eric Lofgren, and published by Rogue Publishing, The Collectors is not a Fudge game as much as it is “A supernatural mystery scenario for Fudge” according to the cover. I feel that this is an important distinction to make, because the work is not a collection of rules for the Fudge game system as much as it is setting material for the Fudge game system.

If you want detailed rules for combat or social encounters this is not the product for you, because in true Fudge tradition this work gives you just enough rules so that you can flesh out what works for your group and your game. What you do get is a great setting and all of the traits needed to create a collector character. Including a wonderful selection of Affinities which are a form of demonic magic and are treated as a special form of gifts in Fudge.

The best quality about The Collectors though is that it sets up the players for a wonderful tale of morality. Playing the game you could go the route of being the evil and powerful beast that walks into the room and slaughters everything between it and its objective. Yet that is discouraged by the setting for two reasons:

1. Demons do not like to be reminded of Hell, even by their own demonic abilities. They don’t quite remember Hell, and they want to keep it that way.
2. Drawing attention to the raw power of a demon is bad for business. New potential “customers” are not going to want to make deals once they see the true nature of demons. Some might actually run to the “competition” instead and find religion.

Playing and running The Collectors  I also noticed that because demons would rather embrace their human facade they really do not like their collecting jobs. In fact, as a player I began to despise the job in character because the people whom you collect from often do not understand the consequences of what they are doing.

Yeah, sure, you could play the game with the demons as “heroes” collecting bloody serial killers and wicked corporate CEOs who cause misery for all of those people surrounding them. That sort of game is pretty typical though of any RPG. To truly enjoy The Collectors  you should play a game where the soul being collected is someone that the player characters like, or someone that they feel was duped into selling their soul. This game is not about being a demon, as much as it is about questioning what it is to be human.

At $3 for the PDF copy of the players section (28 pages) which has everything that you need to create and play a collector character, and $4.50 for the PDF copy of The Collectors: The Burning House (81 pages) which is a gamemaster’s edition with a complete adventure included, you will get a good product for a low price. The material provided can easily be expanded upon, and creative gamemasters will find The Collectors to be great source material in developing demonic NPCs for their games.

I have two criticisms. The first is that the book could have contained more material on both the Enim (higher level demons that take the form of earthly objects) and the competition (angels from heaven who are a lot like collectors except they want to go back). More material on beings beyond the typical collector demon would allow for comparisons, and thus a better understanding of the collectors themselves. Collector demons are “evil”, but the Enim are just plain scary evil and you get a better sense of how this world of the collectors works by comparing the two.

The second complaint is there should be a table of contents. Yep, no table of contents. When I use the PDF this isn’t much of a problem, but I paid to have a copy printed and bound. With a paper copy it is a bit of a pain to flip through the book to find a section even if it is less than one hundred pages.

For The Collectors  and The Collectors: The Burning House I give both products a Fudge rank of GOOD. You get a great setting at a very reasonable price. The text is well written and the artwork, although scarce, is well done. I enjoyed reading, running, and playing The Collectors and I am sure others will as well. Do yourself a favor and buy The Collectors: The Burning House edition though, as you get a lot more material for a mere $1.50 increase in price.

Own or play The Collectors? Looking for more information on the product?Share your comments and questions below.