The Watchmen Sourcebook: The last of the role-playing material

In 1990, Watchmen made one last foray into the DC Heroes role-playing game. But instead of writing another adventure, Ray Winninger was tasked with creating a comprehensive sourcebook for every single character seen or mentioned in the Watchmen comic book series. This was probably a good idea, seeing how difficult it was to make a decent campaign for these characters — not to mention all the editorial interference that crippled the last one. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that Winninger returned for this project. But I guess his love for this material (and his friendship with Alan Moore) outweighed his disappointment from Taking Out the Trash (which he wanted to call The Harlot's Curse).

Of course, I wonder exactly how much new material Winninger wrote for this. The whole book is basically just an encyclopedia of all the Watchmen characters, providing their DC Heroes statistics and their background information. The vast majority of the background info is regurgitated supplemental material from the Watchmen issues and the previous role-playing adventures. The new stuff that Winninger did write tried to follow the format of newspaper clippings, letters, etc. This may help preserve the "flavor" of Watchmen, but I think this book would have been a lot more usable had all the text been presented in a straight-forward way.

It also hurts that this is a visually unappealing book. It's filled with the bland stock images of the characters and random panels from the comic, presented in black, white and an off-putting shade of orange that was used way too much. Dave Gibbons did provide an original cover, which was strong enough to be reused for the Watchmen Companion in 2019. But beyond that, this is an ugly, boring and bland book.

The worst part was the Villains section. Watchmen doesn't have any traditional villains, but role-playing games need them. Beyond Moloch (who was prominently featured in both the adventures), Winninger really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. He included every single villain mentioned in casual passing throughout the series, and the whole exercise reeks of inauthenticity.

On a random note, I was surprised by Winninger's omissions in the Hooded Justice section. In Taking Out the Trash, Winninger came right out and said that not only was Hooded Justice a gay white man, but that he was also secretly killed by the Comedian. But none of that is mentioned here, falling back to the ambiguous backstory originally presented by Moore. I prefer the wiggle room created by Moore, especially because I like what the HBO series did with the character. But that review is for another day.

I'm sure this sourcebook would have been quite valuable for obsessive nerds like me in a pre-Wikipedia age. It would have been incredible to have all the backstories of all the Watchmen characters in one place without having to flip through the comics. Unfortunately, this information was not presented nearly as well as it could have, or should have been. In fact, I'd even go as far as to declare this book unreadable, which may have contributed to DC's decision to stop trying to create more role-playing material for Watchmen.