[Destriarch]

Another thing that Esoterrorists suffers from is the lack of a well-developed combat system. Certainly, combat is not meant to be the focus of the game. However given that the game follows terrorist activity, albeit of a magical nature, it's bound to crop up occasionally (if not frequently) and a more strictly bound combat system would have helped immensely. As it is, combat is extremely loosely organised placing an awful lot of emphasis on how the GM interprets the situation. Some may like this 'low impact' approach. I find it doesn't give enough of a safety net when faced with 'killer' GM's.

And I'm still not entirely certain why the Esoterrorists do what they do, or more precisely, I don't understand how the things that they do are connected to the reasons that they do them. The manual states that they do it for money and power, and that they do so by calling unearthly creatures to our world (by rather circuitous methods). It does not explain how the summoning of bloodthirsty, and apparently uncontrollable, creatures is the ticket to making a fortune. The background information on both the Esoterrorists and the PC organisation set up to combat them are both annoyingly vague.

BIG agreement with the reviewer regarding monsters too. Not only are there only three monsters, but each is described in three sentences or less and the whole section takes up less than half a page. When you consider that, according to one fan of the game, 'the monsters ARE the adventure', a lot more detail about those monsters would have been useful in demonstrating just how each monster can represent an entire adventure in itself.

All in all, I think Esoterrorists was a missed opportunity. It lacks the detail necessary to provoke the atmosphere it requires, and the tools to make an extensive game viable. There's too many gaps here that needs to be filled in by the GM.

Ash