Buffy the Vampire Slayer

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a 90s action horror television series which is /tg/ relevant because, apart from being a big inspiration for Urban Fantasy gaming in general, it has an official licensed adaptation under the Unisystem mechanics printed by Eden Studios - in fact, BtVS: The RPG was Eden Studios' biggest hit in terms of licensed games, as the only Unisystem game line whose list of splatbooks can equal those of All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

The Show in a Nutshell

Since not everybody who uses 1d4chan is a crusty grognard who was around in the 80s and 90s, we'll clue you in to the basic setting.

Created by Joss Whedon, who was one of the big nerd-followed directors of the 90s, Buffy was born out of a surprisingly concept: what if the hot blonde teenage girl you normally see as the first kill in a slasher or monster movie was actually the heroine? Enter Buffy Summers; an ordinary teenage girl who discovers that she is the latest of the "Slayers"; women chosen in early puberty by an ancient magical spell that grants them superhuman powers and charges them to fight and kill vampires, fiends and other monsters.

The character actually first starred in a movie in 1992, but relatively few people remembered it. Much more popular was the 1997 television series, which was set directly after the movie and involved Buffy moving to the town of Sunnydale to get away from the social stigma of having burned down the school gymnasium to kill a flock of of vampires in the movie. Except it turned out that Sunnydale is actually built around an ancient portal to the Lower Planes, and as such the town is infested with monsters and lunatics of every type imaginable, from vampires and demons to killer robots and genetically engineered horrors. Now under the wing of her Watcher, a kind of mentor and advice provider assigned to each Slayer, the series ran for seven seasons and revolved around Buffy's ongoing efforts to juggle a normal life with her monster-fighting duties, alongside a small gang of normal human friends.

Character Creation

Like all Unisystem games, the first step to crafting a character is determining what character type you're going to choose. By default, there are three options, which determine how many points you have to spend on Attributes, Qualities, Drawbacks and Skills.

White Hats are the "normies" of the game; just regular joes and jills who've been sucked into the occult underground. They get the least amount of Attribute, Quality and Skill Points to play with, but they do have lots of Drama Points to burn - 20, in fact, which is double the Hero's allotment and on par with the Experienced Hero's. White Hats are recommended for more low power or gritty-flavored games.

Heroes are the "Primary Protagonist" type; they get the middle road in terms of points to spend. These are your vanilla choice.

Finally, Experienced Heroes are the prodigies and the veterans, the big badasses. These are the high power game characters.

People actually familiar with the show might be asking at this point "Hey! What if I want to play a Slayer, a werewolf, a mage or a redeemed vampire? They were all in the show!" Well, that's actually handled by taking qualities that mark you as uniquely special in some way. The Corebook lets you take a Quality to be a Robot, a Slayer, a Watcher or a Vampire, whilst taking the Psychic Visions, Sorcery, The Sight or Telepathy qualities adds mystical powers. The splatbook "Monster Smackdown" offers a number of other monstrous player races handled by taking the appropriate qualities, including several flavors of Demon, Trolls, and Zombies.

Angel: The Roleplaying Game

In the first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of the most popular secondary protagonists was Angel; a handsome, brooding guy with whom Buffy was smitten and who turned out to be a repentant vampire desperately seeking to atone for the evil he had done before a magical spell had forcibly restored his soul. Angel and Buffy engaged in a romantic cat-and-mouse game for many episodes before finally sleeping together... which turned out to be the key to breaking the spell that bound Angel's human soul to his undead body. Reverting to "Angelus", the monstrous side of himself, he caused great trouble before Buffy managed to forcibly rebind him to his human soul by the end of the third season. Understandably, Angel took this as a sign that he and Buffy couldn't be together, so he split; leaving Sunnydale, he moved to Los Angels and set up an occult detective business, along with a half-demon oracle and Cordelia, one of Buffy's former bullies.

Naturally, Eden Studios couldn't resist expanding the BtVS RPG by following in the series' tracks and doing an Angel RPG to match the spin-off.

Mechanically, Angel follows the same basic principles as its elder counterpart, although it changes the character type names - White Hats become Investigators, Heroes become Champions and Experienced Heroes become Veterans. It's all just semantics. Whereas BtVS Corebook presented the option to play Slayers, Robots, Vampires and Werewolves, Angel offers Demons, Half-Demons, Revenants and Vampires. In the case of the Demon and Half-Demon, there are specific versions of the quality to represen demons and half-breeds established on the show, as well as rules for custom-building your own. The Encyclopedia Demonica offers more Demon and Half-Demon variants as playable races, and of course you can always borrow from the BtVS races (or vice versa).

Splatbooks

The Buffy RPG had a pretty solid run of splatbooks, although nowhere near as many as All Flesh Must Be Eaten. Aside from the Corebook, which comes in Original and Revised flavors, BtVS managed to get the following splats out the door before Eden Studios went under:

• Monster Smackdown, the game's official bestiary.
• Magic Box, which expanded rules and lore for magic and magic users.
• The Slayers Handbook, which further examines the titular dynasty of Chosen Women.

The Angel RPG, in contrast, only got a corebook... at least, officially.

The Could-Have-Beens

When Eden Studios suddenly crashed and burned behind the scene around 2006, the Buffy and Angel RPG lines were orphaned; both lines had books that had been developed to the point they were ready to be officially announced, but with the company shutting its doors, they couldn't be shared. Not even on DriveThruRPG. But, some heroic soul(s) behind the scenes said "fuck you" to corporate greed and released the completed splats onto the internet, where you can find them to this day if you dig around (or just go asking on /tg/):

• Welcome to Sunnydale, an expanded sourcebook for the BtVS series' setting.
• Tea & Crossbows, the Watchers sourcebook to go hand in hand with the Slayers handbook.
• Military Monster Hunters, which examines the Initiative (America's secret government-backed anti-monster branch of the military) and offers rules for playing them.
• Encyclopedia Demonica, an Angel bestiary that also doubles as a source of new playable strains of Demon and Half-Demon.
• The Investigators Handbook, which examines playing investigator or cop characters in Angel in greater depth, as well as being a splatbook for the canon characters.

A fourth Angel splat examining the demonic legal company Wolfram & Hart, titled Lawyers, Gods & Money, had been assigned to a writer, but was never completed. Similarly, a Cleveland sourcebook and a "Bizarro World" sourcebook were both planned but failed to get written.