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Andy Leighton
England
Peterborough
Unspecified
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Night's Black Agents
This review is based on a read-through of the Dragonmeet Special Edition which does not have internal art, or the final page layout.
Night's Black Agents is a game about spies vs vampires. The PCs are ex-agents rather than working for one of the big national agencies, although they may still have contacts with their agency or even moonlight for them from time to time.
Of course not every spy thriller (on TV, films or books) are the same. Some are black and white thrill rides, some are darker, more psychological where trust is often betrayed. To help with this Night's Black Agents offers a number of modes to help improve how the game models the type of spy story you want to play. The modes are not exclusive, and it often makes sense to use more than one mode. Or you could just choose to play without any of the modes active.
These modes are -
Burn - This models games where psychological damage is more intense, where the agent is closer to falling into a pit of despair and madness. It puts a ceiling on your stability.
Dust - this turns the game into a more realistic (less cinematic) thriller. It introduces a ceiling for your health, and removes some of the new rules.
Mirror - this turns the game into one where trust is rare, your contacts and even your team (the other PCs) are unreliable. They may help or betray you. The book warns that this mode encourages PvP story lines.
Stakes - this mode features PCs following a powerful drive to get the job done.
There are clear icons to help you pick out which rules apply to which 'modes'.
The first part of the book is Character Generation which comes with a list of colourfully named backgrounds (fore example Cuckoo - you pretend you're someone else). If you have played any GUMSHOE system game before you will be familiar with how it works. It is basically a point buy. You have a certain number of build points (based on party size) to put into investigative abilities. You then have a lot of build points (certain modes reduce this) to spend in general abilities (which also include things like Health and Stability). You also choose your MOS (military operation speciality) - this lets you automatically succeed on a test once per session. If a general ability is 8+ you may have a cherry which is a special benefit - for example the Athletics cherry is "Hard To Hit" which increases your hit threshold from 3 to 4).
The book then moves into discussing the rules. Some of the more interesting differences from other Gumshoe games are the Thriller Chases (which also include more options for highly skilled characters - for example Parkour). Combat has also been beefed up compared to some other Gumshoe games - and for the spy thriller genre then it needed to be. Another feature that the game models is 'heat'. Running around killing vampires (and their agents) is bound to attract the attentions of government agencies and police forces. The more the party attracts heat the more the officials are likely to make you the targets of special attention, and the less likely the underworld are to deal with you.
The book then has a chapter on tools, tradecraft and techniques such as asset handling.
We are halfway through the book and we finally get to the vampires. Everything up to this point has mostly been spy thriller stuff. This is good. It means that there is enough meat in the book that you could use it for standard spy thriller. We get a brief description of four types of vampire - Supernatural, Damned, Alien and Mutant. This chapter covers a lot of ground, talking about prevalence, vampiric abilities and weaknesses and how they are modelled in game. As with the modes, each vampire type has an icon which helps identify which abilities apply to which type. It then gives some example vampires and related creatures - this has far more examples than I expected.
There is then a chapter on building a conspiracy. Hite describes something he calls a Conspyramid and tells how it can be used in narrative planning and can provide a story map.
A chapter on cities follows which is interesting although not that essential. It does build out Marseilles and populates it with a vampire menace to show you how to do things.
Finally there is a chapter with plenty of advice on running the game (including using a different campaign frame to the default spy vs vampires) and finally a sample adventure.
One warning - Hite doesn't like playable vampires and warns strongly against using them. Vampires are restricted to being big scary opponents in this game. If you want sparkly or good vampires then this isn't really the game for you.
Having read the game I feel that it does a great job of genre-emulation. The new combat options really improves an area of Gumshoe which many felt weak. The thriller chase rules should give some great game-play as long as the players join in with inventive narration. If you have any interest in playing games pitting secret agents against vampires then I would recommend this game very highly.
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Lowell Francis
United States
South Bend
Indiana
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beat me to it! I'm still going to write a review as well. I'm pretty pleased with this so far.
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Eric Dodd
New Zealand
Martinborough
Wairarapa
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Sounds like a great book to play an Ultraviolet campaign:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_%28TV_serial%29
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Andy Leighton
England
Peterborough
Unspecified
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Red Wine Pie wrote:
Absolutely I mentioned that I immediately thought Ultraviolet when talking to Robin Laws and Ken Hite.
For those who haven't seen any Ultraviolet it is on youtube but it can't be viewed in an embedded player. Search for 9mmypScXo7w for the first episode.
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commited hero
United States
Raleigh
Unspecified
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Red Wine Pie wrote: Sounds like a great book to play an Ultraviolet campaign
This is the first thing mentioned in his sources.
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