Watchmen Sourcebook

by Ray Winninger, Dave Gibbons

This book is a supplement for use with the DC Heroes Role-playing game, Second Edition. All the statistics and game mechanics contained herein conform to the rules and guidelines for play presented in the second edition boxed set, except where specifically noted in the text.

Genres: Role Playing Games

Paperback

Published January 1, 1990

About the author

Ray Winninger is a game designer who has worked on a number of roleplaying games, including the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game.

Reviews

[Spaghett · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Watchmen Sourcebook is the third and final of the RPG gamebooks based on Watchmen, which are notable for being the only spinoffs Alan Moore ever directly contributed to. Where the other two books are campaigns for you to actually play through, the Watchmen Sourcebook is almost pure lore. The only gamey thing here is that you get some stats for each character, and sometimes for some equipment or locations (particularly Night Owl's tech), but other than that, we're presented with all kinds of background info on the various characters. The book is presented much like the prose sections at the end of each issue of the original comic book, with various clippings, articles, and documents arranged in a collage of sorts to tell you about each character's life stories. Several of these are actually from the book, you can read almost the entire "Under the Hood" section in order, which is an interesting way to experience it, and various character interviews are included from the original. But in addition to these, several of the documents are entirely new for the sourcebook and give very interesting details you wouldn't know just from the original.

As with the other two RPG books, Captain Metropolis gets a lot of fleshing out, and reading this after reading the other two RPG books gave me a lot more consideration for who was mostly a minor character in the comic. We see more of his unseemly side, but also understand what drove his more decent traits. Hooded Justice also gets a lot of juicy info, and combined with the sordid details we already know from the book, it's not a pretty picture. Rorschach has a whopping three journal entries (one of which we got a portion of in "Taking out the Trash"), all of which are fantastically in-line with something Alan Moore would write, and I particularly liked all the paperwork we see from the Comedian, as we learn that his superiors were very much aware of his misdeeds (and get to read the reports on some of them).

It's not just the information that makes the Watchmen Sourcebook special, though. The book's presentation takes great care to present this info in a way that feels fitting to the universe, and gets so many small little details right. One bit I particularly loved is when we see some of Malcolm Long's notes on Rorschach, you can notice he begins to write "Rorshach" but crosses it out to write "Walter", something he mentioned doing accidentally in the original book. My only complaint presentation-wise is that some sections have very hard to read cursive. I was able to make my way through the cursive in the Captain Metropolis section, but the writing in some of Mothman's entries is completely unreadable (very small and compressed), which is unfortunate because the bits of his that aren't in cursive are very interesting. Someday I may sit down and really try to parse it out, as it's clear something coherent was written down, but it will take a lot of focus.

That one gripe aside though, the Watchmen Sourcebook, along with the other RPG books from Mayfair, is a treasure. It feels far truer to the tone, style, and atmosphere than Before Watchmen and even seems to have influenced that series to an extent. Rorschach mentions meeting a like-minded Taxi Driver in the Sourcebook, while his prequel comic has him meeting the actual Travis Bickle, and the name "Liquidator" for Silhouette's killer originates from Taking out the Trash and the Sourcebook, and comes up again in the Minutemen series. I found the scrapbook style very immersive and it really lets your imagination take you to the Watchmen world, perhaps even moreso than looking at a stylized drawing. The characters feel even more like real people when you read about them this way, and I walked away with several interesting tidbits to chew on.

[Index Purga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anexo rolero de Watchmen, sourcebook originalmente publicado como DC Heroes Role Playing Sourcebook.
Índice pendiente.