Shadis #27: The Edge: HOL (Human Occupied Landfill)

HOL (Human Occupied Landfill)

by Daniel Thron, Todd Shaughnessy, and Chris Elliott
Dirt Merchant Games
Reviewed by Cullen Bunn

Hol, Human Occupied Landfill, from Dirt Merchant Games is crude, mean-spirited, and offensive — and those are some of its good points! The designers of Hol went out of their way to create a truly twisted, humorous, surreal, and just plain strange role-playing system which pokes fun at everything from traditional science fiction to other games to Patterson, New Jersey. This is science fiction role-playing, it claims on the back of the book, for gamers who have had a really bad day.

Hol is a tiny planet in the farthest reaches of the Confederation of Worlds (C.O.W. for short) which is not only used as an intergalactic waste dump, but as a handy place to get rid of all the psychotics who might otherwise terrorize civilized folk. The player characters are, of course, these stark-raving lunatics.

The characters are as bizarre as the world they populate. Examples of character templates in the rule book include Captain Wacky, a jester with a love of razor sharp weapons, Frank, the were-guy; and the King, for whom tabloid papers have been searching for years. (The character background for the King reads, "Whaddya want? It's Elvis.") Vital statistics break down into the attributes of Greymatta, Meat, Mouth, Feets, and Nuts. Some of the skills available to round out a character include Repair Toasters, Pummeling Something With The Assistance of a Large Cannon-Shaped Object, That Psycho Bruce Lee Sh**, Operating Vehicles Smaller Than Something Really Big, and (my personal favorite) Make Sharp Things Go Through Soft Things That Bleed & Scream.

Game mechanics are boiled down to rolling a couple of six sided dice, adding any modifiers, and consulting the appropriate chart. Basically, the higher you roll, the better. Low rolls are bad. And the roll of snake eyes is a complete failure. Only a few pages are dedicated to game mechanics, mainly because rules are not really that important to playing Hol.

Hol is presented completely in a handwritten format, with lots of drawings and lots of notes (not to mention jokes and insults) scrawled in the margins. You can tell when the writers switch off by the changes in handwriting. In any other game, this would be considered a layout disaster, but in a weird way, it works quite well for Hol (although it may take a little getting used to).

Hol is a blast to read and many of the jokes are laugh-out-loud funny. It is not, however, the kind of game I would get together with a bunch of friends and play. My gaming group would hate it. I can see how other groups (if they are crazed and bloodthirsty and looking for a game that allows them to blow off a little steam without worrying about complex rules) would get a kick out of playing it, however. In short, Hol is not a game for everybody, but if you want to read something funny, and are not easily offended, you might want to check it out. It might even be the game your group has been looking for. SIDEBAR: Everyone in the AEG office is pretty convinced that Hol is not a role-playing game. It does, however, have a great deal of fun thumbing its nose at other role-playing games. Just recently, Hol was purchased by White Wolf for their "black dog game factory" division (that's where they make all those "adult" games). A suppliment for Hol, called buttery holsomeness, is just as much of a riot as its predecessor.