digitaltempest

Last night while gaming with friends, I read this during moments in our mission where people were leveling or working on adding enhancements to their character before moving on to our next missions. The story took place in India and played around with the Aghoris. If you're not familiar with them, they're followers of Shiva who believe everything is sacred, everything comes from "God." They're known for their cannibalism. They eat corpses because they believe that keeps them in touch with "God" and that it helps them to transcend their earthly body and keeps them in touch with the universal mind. Other than that, they're vegetarians.

I knew this before I read the book because I have intense interest in theology and the beliefs of people. And it was cool to see it in the comic. I think Kotian did a very good job of explaining the Aghoris. And this book had a great premise surrounded around the Aghoris and the fate of five strangers who (most of them unaware, except one) are trying to "better their karma" by breaking a negative karmic circle that they began together in a former life hundreds of years ago. But because it was a one shot the story suffered greatly. It just wasn't meant to be a one-shot, in my opinion.

The descriptions of the the Aghoris and a creature called the Adrika were well-written. However, you don't get a chance to care about the characters like you ought to, and these were characters you definitely needed to know more about, especially Joel, for this story to be as gripping as it could've been. In other words, it would've benefited from being more than a one-shot. (And that bitter ex-boyfriend hate text that Raj wrote could've been taken out because we got he hated his girlfriend for breaking up with him. Something else could've filled that space... LOL)

Some one-shot horror comics work, but there was too much going on this for me to feel completely satisfied with it. So, even though I said, I give it a 2.5, it's on the lower end of that.