I couldn’t help it. After writing up Lawnmower Man, I had to track down a copy of the Bram Stoker’s Dracula RPG. It is, well, coming from the folks that licensed Lawnmower Man for an RPG, it is not as bad as I expected.

Sort of. The Leading Edge house system is hopelessly complicated and I have zero desire to learn it, not even for you, dear followers. That said, the core concept is interesting enough. The events of Dracula happened and the RPG takes place in the aftermath, when a whole host of vampire activity starts in the wake of the big guy’s death. The rules are meant to be usable for any historical era, from medieval to the present, so there is a lot of tech (helicopters, modern military materiel) statted out that you might not expect for a Victorian vampire sourcebook.

The approach to vampires is actually pretty interesting and worth tracking down the book for if you have the desire to run a game about vampire hunters (the vampire stuff is pretty system agnostic). They have a range of powers, not all of which your players will be expecting, and they are arranged in households, with a mix of young and old vamps and thralls of varying power levels. As vampire households are discreet, there are endless scenario possibilities for how they have insinuated themselves into society and for ferreting them out.

Like Lawnmower Man, the art is exclusively black and white reproductions of film stills accompanied by just about every line of dialog from the movie in pull quotes. That made the Lawnmower Man book ridiculous, but here it kind of works because Bram Stoker’s Dracula is actually a good movie.

Biggest mystery: of all the stills they could have used from the movie, why use that one for the cover? Like, why not use the one where he is at least standing straight up?