Hellboy - The Roleplaying Game - Corebook.pdf

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Corebook
Contents
Introduction
.....................................................................1
Chapter 8: Ingenuity and Doom..............
11
9
Ingenuity ............................................................... 119
Doom ........................................................................121
PROJECT LEAD
Mantic Games
COREBOOK LEAD
Kimberly Nugent
GAME DEVELOPMENT
Alex Delaney,
Benn Greybeaton,
Marc Langworthy,
Kimberly Nugent
ADDITIONAL WRITING
Richard August, Kevin Ross,
Sara Thompson
JUNGLES OF THE MIND
Benn Greybeaton
EDITING
Kimberly Nugent
PROOFREADING/INDEX
T.R. Knight
LAYOUT
Marc Langworthy
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Duncan Aldis, Marc Ducrow
CARTOGRAPHY
Paco Garcia Jaen,
Terry Maughan
TIMELINE
Chris Campbell
PLAYTESTING
Quinn Bastin, John Bird,
Sam Costidell, Sridat Kota,
Hope Muckett, Hal Mycroft,
Katie Wise
SENSITIVITY/
PROOFREADING
Paco Garcia Jaen
Special thanks to Robert J.
Schwalb for the alternative
intiative system.
DARK HORSE
Katii O’Brien, Michael
Gombos, Jenny Blenk,
Maria Saracino-Lowe,
Nick McWhorter
Hellboy and B.P.R.D. are
™ & © Mike Mignola. Abe
Sapien, Liz Sherman, and all
other prominently featured
characters are trademarks of
Mike Mignola.
Produced for Mantic Games
by Red Scar Publishing.
Part I: Joining the B.P.R.D.
Chapter 1: Origins
........................................................8
Character Creation .............................................8
Origins ......................................................................10
Life Before the B.P.R.D. .................................24
Recruitment ........................................................ 25
Drive .......................................................................... 27
Languages ............................................................28
Levelling .................................................................28
Chapter 2: Roles.........................................................29
Field Agent ...........................................................30
B.P.R.D. Consultant ......................................... 37
Experimental Engineer ................................43
Field Analyst ....................................................... 48
Oversight and Security................................. 52
Personnel Development ............................ 55
Chapter 3: Customisation
..................................59
Chapter 4: Equipment
..........................................73
Part III: Conquering the Darkness
Chapter 9: Running a Game
..........................124
Building a Case File ...................................... 124
Cryptobioogy .................................................... 129
Demonology.......................................................132
Ghost Hunting ................................................. 134
Hauntings............................................................ 138
Alternative Dimensions ............................. 143
Sites of Power ................................................... 145
Chapter 10: Rituals and Magic..................147
Performing a Ritual ...................................... 147
Rituals .....................................................................153
Dark Rituals ........................................................ 167
Chapter 11: Other Weirdness
....................169
Weird Science ................................................... 169
Occult Organisations ................................... 178
Part II: Mastering the Mechanics
Chapter 5: 5E Basics
...............................................92
Checks and Skills .............................................. 93
Attribute and Skill Descriptions .............94
Saving Throws ....................................................98
Time and Movement .....................................99
Resting .................................................................. 103
Chapter 6: Backup Agents
..............................105
Chapter 7: Combat
................................................109
Actions on Your Turn .................................... 110
Movement in Combat ....................................111
Making an Attack .............................................113
Damage and Healing ...................................115
Conditions ............................................................ 117
Part IV: Agents and Enemies
Chapter 12: Foes and Allies
.............................186
Beasts ..................................................................... 186
Demonic ............................................................... 189
Fae ............................................................................ 192
Nazi Minions ......................................................194
Undead.................................................................. 195
Legendary Foe: Rasputin .......................... 199
Playable Legendary Agents .................... 201
Jungles of the Mind
......................................211
Appendix A: Integrations..........................
229
Appendix B: Hellboy Timelines...............
235
Index
................................................................ 239
Hellboy Timeline Poster
............................243
Introduction
Welcome to the B.P.R.D.
The world isn’t what it seems, you know this, right? You look
smart, you look like you’ve seen some stuff. On the surface, sure,
there are still supermarkets and pubs, wrestling bouts and cin-
emas, but beneath that there is another world. Another world
that pokes its way through the glass and steel of our world,
pokes its way through and demands to be seen. It’s usually
the colour of blood. You know the score — vanished children,
nightmare beasts erupting in the centre of a suburban town full
of nice, prosperous parents with gum-chewing, grinning kids.
The old stories that fill books even now are all true. Every fairy
tale, every half-murmured urban myth, every fanciful drawing
in the corner of a medieval map…every one of them is true. And
the world needs protecting.
That’s what you’re here for. That’s why you’ve been invited
to join us, here at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and
Defense. You’re one of those who’ve seen the darkness lying
beneath, but you’ve not blocked it out, or pretended it wasn’t
real. You’ve put yourself in its path. You’re the kind of person
we need. We want you on the team. But let’s bring you up to
speed first…
The Hellboy-verse
Hellboy bursts into the world in a ball of flames. Literally. His
arrival on earth turns a church to ash. It’s quite the entrance.
It befits a character who is destined to end the world. The first
time we see the hero of Mike Mignola’s epic series, though,
he’s a tiny demon with an oversized right fist. And he’s cute.
Cute demons are still not so common that the first appearance
of Hellboy isn’t worth remarking on. He might become a big,
hulking hero, with enough brooding intensity to power a Brontë
novel, but the first time we meet him, he’s a little guy, all alone.
Even at the start, it’s clear that Hellboy isn’t just about a big
red monster punching an ugly monster in the face until it lies
down and stops twitching. It is about that, but it’s also about
a whole lot more.
The Hellboy universe is vast. Absolutely vast. It spans, well,
a whole universe. From the icy depths of dimensionless space
where the ancient elder beings, the Ogdru Jahad, wait eager
to return, to the wintry tracts of a Russia preserved in Baba
Yaga’s dream. It contains an entirely new and secret history of
the world, preserved in a lost language. It’s a universe filled with
magic, with arcane science, with Nazis who need punching,
and with characters who are always that little bit more than
you expect them to be. It’s a universe of stories. And with this
RPG, you get to tell your own.
So, let’s get started with an overview of Hellboy, the world
he inhabits, and the organisations he’s a part of. As men-
tioned above, the world of Hellboy is big and this introduction
is designed to be a primer. It’s to give you an insight into the
things this book contains, the themes and kinds of stories you
can tell with it, and the fictional universe you’re going to be
inhabiting. For more detail, you’ll find it elsewhere in this book
or in one of the Hellboy comics. Which, y’know, everyone should
read at least three or four from start to finish.
So Who Is This Hellboy Guy?
Hellboy is the main character of a series of comics conceived
and masterminded by Mike Mignola. He's also the star of three
live-action films, two animated films, and a board game. And
now this RPG.
He’s a big red half-demon whose destiny is to bring about the
apocalypse, and lead the armies of Hell to conquer the realm of
the living. More or less. He’s also the world’s greatest paranor-
mal investigator for the B.P.R.D. (we’ll get to them), he’s a son
to Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, and he’s a friend to a half-fish
man, a woman who can set things on fire with her mind, and a
whole host of other strange people. Hellboy is an iconic figure.
He’s got the trench coat, the chin, the cigar clamped between
his teeth, and the sardonic attitude of an action hero. Hellboy
always, always has a line.
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But there’s more to him than just being cool and dangerous.
He’s alone. He wants, desperately, to be normal. There’s a reason
he files down his horns. Or perhaps normal isn’t quite the right
word. He wants to be left alone. Hellboy finds out, in the first
arc of the comic, that he was summoned to bring about the
end of the world, to be the means by which the Ogdru Jahad
(we’ll come to them too) are reborn into this world. But Hellboy
doesn’t want that burden, partly because he doesn’t want to
destroy the world, but also because Hellboy doesn’t like the
idea of being pushed around or dictated to.
That’s the thing about Hellboy that doesn’t always get
remembered. He’s got the mind of a hardboiled detective in
the body of an action hero. Raymond Chandler described the
hardboiled detective like this:
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself
mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is
everything. He must be a complete man and a common man
and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered
phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without
thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the
best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."
There aren’t many better definitions of Hellboy than that. He
beats the unholy crap out of monsters the size of mountains,
but there’s a melancholy to him. There’s a tragedy. There’s a
tragedy to most things in the Hellboy universe. Things are going
to end. You can’t deny fate forever, and you can’t hold back all
the monsters. It’s just not possible. Hellboy knows this, and now
you know it too. It might not end tomorrow, or the next day, but
it will at some point, and it does, Hellboy is going to be there.
the ancient nightmare of the Ogdru Jahad back into this, into
our, reality. The Ogdru Jahad are beings beyond man’s ability
to comprehend. Things from the deep and impossible past,
always seeking to return and claim what’s rightfully theirs. Their
servants are everywhere, recruited into sinister and secret cults.
They include some of the most famous (or infamous) people in
history. Grigori Rasputin, a devotee of the Ogdru Jahad, sum-
mons Hellboy to Earth because he knows what the Right Hand
of Doom can achieve. He also thinks he is capable of binding
Hellboy to his will. He’s wrong about the last part.
The Ogdru Jahad are the big bad of the Hellboy universe.
They don’t appear in every story, but when they do appear you
better believe those stories matter. They can’t be explained, they
can’t be reasoned with. Even their children, the Ogdru Hem, are
utterly beyond human comprehension except in the broadest
terms (I mean what are ‘frog monsters’ exactly?). Their human
cultists are altogether easier to understand, with motives usu-
ally involving money, power, domination, and revenge. The
Odgru Jahad provide a means to get those things, no matter
that terrestrial concerns will be irrelevant when they're released.
Heaven and Hell
So, this is a Lovecraft-inspired universe, then? It’s a place of
scientific rationalism and cosmic horror, right? Well yes. And
no. Hellboy’s name is literal. Hell exists; it’s real. Hellboy’s dad
was a demon and his mother was a human witch. Evil, compre-
hensible human-scale evil, is a thing in Hellboy’s world. Morality
is never totally clear-cut, but trying to see through the shades
of grey to something like black and white is important. A per-
son's actions matter. They aren’t simply disposable in the grand
cosmic sweep. They have moral weight. Hellboy’s world is one
where personal evil coexists with cosmic evil, and where the
all-too comprehensible exists with the impossibly alien.
It’s true demons don’t appear too often in the Hellboy stories.
But they’re there. The demon Astaroth, Hellboy’s uncle, collects
the stolen crown of flames from the dead demon Ualac after his
failed plan to force Hellboy to obey him. Ualac, in partnership
with the endlessly irritating occultist Igor Bromhead, besets
Hellboy with a series of traps and tricks of exactly the kind you’d
expect of a demon.
It’s not necessarily clear what a demon is in this universe.
After all, you might expect a world populated by demons to
have angels in. But there aren’t any. There’s definitely no evi-
dence of a God. There are a lot of gods (note the small g), but
they tend to be scheming bastards, certainly not the kind of
avuncular figure with the beard and the smile and the open
gate for anyone who turns the other cheek and atones for his
sins. Maybe demons are the children of one of the Ogdru Hem,
the cruel, wicked progeny of the Ogdru Jahad’s flaked flesh.
The Ogdru Jahad
The universe is deep and dark and ancient. The oldest surviving
beings in existence are the Ogdru Jahad, created from the mud
of the earth and infused with the darkness of the first night. As
it slowly woke, parts of the beast sloughed off like fragments of
dead skin. These became the Ogdru Hem, three hundred and
sixty-nine in number and every one of them an abomination.
The first beings, the Watchers, were so repulsed by the things
spawned from their creation that they wiped the earth clean
with lightning until the Ogdru Jahad were the only survivors.
And then the Watchers hurled them into the abyss, sealing
them away. Forever. The Watcher who had dared to begin the
creation of the Ogdru Jahad was murdered by his fellows, in
retribution for his hubris. So utter was his destruction, that only
his right hand was left behind.
The Right Hand of Doom
Hellboy’s enormous, indestructible stone right hand is, of
course, the Right Hand of Doom, the very key to unleashing
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