Go to Campaign Status Documents

Generally speaking, my campaign status document is not the place for full NPC write-ups to live. Whether you’re using something like the Universal NPC Roleplaying template or even the briefest of write-ups, these NPCs will consume your campaign status document and choke the life out of it.

So NPC write-ups go somewhere else: Maybe that’s in a specific set of scenario notes or faction notes. Maybe you just have one big folder where all the free-roaming NPCs or notable NPCs from defunct scenarios get filed in alphabetical order.

But what I will keep in my campaign status document, when it’s appropriate for the campaign, is a list — or, in some cases, multiple lists — of the major NPCs in the campaign.

This is not, of course, a list of every single NPC they’ve ever met. That would just be a bunch of noise drowning out the signal. What you’re looking for is a quick reference of all the important, recurring characters. You’re looking for characters who:

• Show up in more than one scenario (or outside of scenarios entirely), because otherwise they would just be attached to that single scenario.
• Show up in more than one location, because otherwise they would just be in the notes for that location.
• Have some personal connection to the PCs or are otherwise important to them.

(Of course, some NPCs who start out as part of a single scenario or single location will end up clicking with the players or otherwise find their role in the campaign expanding beyond the original plan of action.)

You might title this section of your campaign status document the Cast of Characters.

To understand the function of this cast list, the key thing is Neel Krishnaswami’s Law of the Conservation of NPCs: Whenever a scenario or circumstance demands a new NPC, check to see if there’s an existing NPC who could fill the role. Each reappearance of an NPC will deepen that character and also inherently develop the PCs’ relationship with the character. This creates a lovely feedback loop, because the NPC being richer means that whatever purpose you’re turning the NPC to (exposition, scenario hook, dilemma, dramatic bang, etc.) will also become richer and more meaningful to the players.

For example, if the PCs go looking for information, instead of having some random dude tell them about it, consider having it be someone the PCs know.

The cast list, therefore, can ultimately be thought of as a menu: Whether you’re prepping a scenario or improvising in the middle of one, the campaign’s cast of characters makes it easy for you to quickly find the character you need to fit the hole you’re looking to fill.

You can also flip this around, looking through your cast of characters, identifying old favorites who haven’t put in an appearance lately, and figuring out how you can bring them back onstage. This can often be a great way to find inspiration for scenario hooks or entirely new scenarios.

TAVERN TIME

In some campaigns your Cast of Characters, or sections of your Cast of Characters, may become more specialized in their function. One example of this is the Tavern Time scenario structure, in which you develop a cast of recurring characters who give continuity and life to your PCs’ favorite tavern (or other home base).

You can see a detailed example of the Tavern Time system in action in A Night in Trollskull Manor. The full scenario notes are kept separate from the campaign status document, but I do find it useful to include the random table of tavern patrons, like this one for the Ghostly Minstrel tavern in my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign:

Each of these characters then appear in their own write-ups, either as part of the write-up for the Ghostly Minstrel, as part of other scenario notes, or in my larger Ptolus NPC file. I personally just know where to find these write-ups, but you could easily include a direct reference in your list.

SYSTEMIC CONNECTIONS

In Technoir, during character creation, each player selects three Connections from the setting guide. These are, of course, relevant not only for roleplaying, but also because they’re tied into specific procedures of play. As the GM, I find it quite useful to have a quick reference for which PCs have a direct relationship with which Connections in the campaign, so during the first session I’ll make a point of jotting these down, and then I’ll transfer them to my campaign status document for long-term reference (along with any other notes about debts owed and the like).

Trail of Cthulhu similarly features Sources of Stability: NPCs created by the players during character creation who are the most important people in their characters’ lives. These characters are vital, serving as touchstones of humanity that allow PCs to recover the Sanity and Stability lost during their harrowing adventures. Although, as a result, the Sources of Stability are rarely made an active part of the action, I make sure to include them in my campaign status document so that they can be referred to and incorporated “offscreen” at appropriate moments. (I’ll also maintain a correspondence tracker featuring these characters.)

Another example along these same lines are the Friends & Rivals players create for their PC in Blades in the Dark. These lack the more formal procedural and systemic incorporation found in Technoir and Trail of Cthulhu, but also serve as a good reminder that this is something you can easily incorporate into the character creation of any RPG, not just those that include it in the rulebook.

However you go about it, finding a way to seed a supporting cast list at the very beginning of the campaign is just good praxis.

MAINTAINING YOUR SUPPORTING CAST

You’ll introduce some characters to your campaign with the intention of making them recurring characters.

As I mentioned earlier, though, you’ll also want to keep your eyes open: During the course of play, some NPCs are just going to “click” with the players. (And with you.) It’s going to be fun roleplaying scenes with them. Maybe your players will talk about the NPC in later sessions or even mention them during conversations outside of the game. (If your players start deliberately seeking the NPC out, that’s a dead give-away.) These are all characters that you’re going to want to get onto your supporting cast list ASAP.

On the flip-side, it’s also a good idea to periodically review your supporting cast list and remove any NPCs who are no longer relevant to the campaign. (If you’re not certain, maybe you could drop them into a Probationary section of the list and then purge them if they still haven’t shown up after three or five sessions or whatever seems appropriate.)

In some cases, this removal will be quite definitive: Maybe the NPC died. Maybe the PCs slipped into another dimension and left the NPC behind.

In other cases, the pruning is much more subjective: Do you still care about this NPC? Do the players still care? Are there any loose threads still attached to the NPC (in which case you might want to tie those off and then remove them)? Are they — in position, role, theme, or otherwise — still relevant to what’s happening in the campaign?

There’s also need to be too afraid of making a mistake here: Pruning an NPC from the list doesn’t mean they’re gone forever (although it might). You never know when they might come back onstage, find the spotlight, and earn their place on the list once more!

Everybody knows how an encounter starts: The goblins (or the SWAT team or the cyborg death squad) come through the door, snarl, and attack. Roll initiative!

Or the PCs are walking through the jungle when they suddenly see, or are ambushed by, the goblins (or the special ops team or the cyborg death squad). Roll initiative!

Or the PCs kick down the door, the goblins look up, snarl, and… Well, you get the idea.

All of these, however, are bang-bang encounters: The PCs see the bad guys (bang) and combat immediately begins (bang).

Nothing wrong with a good bang-bang interaction, of course, but this is just one way of initiating an encounter. If all of your encounters are bang-bang encounters, then you’re missing out on some fun options and your adventures will be unnecessarily one-dimensional. There can also be some tack-on effects in terms of game balance and scenario design that you may find surprising if you’ve only experienced bang-bang encounters.

STARTING OLD SCHOOL ENCOUNTERS

If we look back at the oldest editions of D&D, we’ll discover that they featured a procedural method for triggering encounters. The exact methods varied from one version of the game to another, but broadly speaking the procedure would look something like this:

1. Determine surprise. This could result in the monsters becoming aware of the PCs before the PCs become aware of the monsters; the PCs becoming aware of the monsters first; or both becoming aware of each other simultaneously.
2. Randomly determine the encounter distance. (For example, in a dungeon the encounter might start at 1d6 x 20 ft.) This could notably generate results farther than the current limits of the PCs’ line of sight, implying that the PCs would hear the monsters before seeing them (or vice versa).
3. Make a reaction check, which could result in monsters being, for example, Friendly, Neutral, Cautious, Threatening, Hostile, or Immediately Attacking. (The players, of course, would determine how their characters would react.)

You can see how a GM, by simply following procedures like these, would generate a huge variety in how their encounters would be initiated.

What may be less immediately obvious is the effect this has on actual gameplay:

• Spotting the goblin warg riders at a thousand feet creates a completely different combat dynamic than noticing those same warg riders when they’re only fifty feet away.
• Hearing a group of kobolds arguing on the far side of a door in the dungeon gives the PCs an opportunity to barricade the door, ambush them, sneak past them, eavesdrop for information, or any number of other options.
• Compared to an ogre who immediately attacks, a threatening ogre who says, “You don’t belong here! Get out and never come back!” offers the PCs a completely different range of potential responses, from drawing their weapons to attempting negotiations to accepting his offer and beating a hasty retreat.

And so forth.

The nifty thing to note here is that the GM doesn’t have to design all these different types of encounters. Instead, a simple, procedural variation in a handful of initial encounter conditions creates the opportunity for the players to approach each encounter in significantly different ways. Combined with different creatures, environments, and continuity, you end up with an essentially infinite variety of encounters with little or no effort.

This also has a direct impact on encounter balance.

For example, when discussing hexcrawl campaigns (or other sandbox structures where the encounters aren’t geared specifically to the PCs), I’m often asked what will happen if low-level PCs stumble into a section of the hexcrawl designed for higher-level characters or get a bad result on the random encounter tables. That’s surely just a TPK waiting to happen, right?

If you’re running exclusively bang-bang encounters, there’s a lot of truth to that, and counteracting that will require the GM to significantly limit the dynamic range of their encounter design (e.g., the world levels up with the PCs) and/or take on the responsibility of manually creating all kinds of signals warning the PCs away from dangerous areas.

But the procedural encounter methods also had the practical effects of creating ablative layers between the PCs and TPK. For example, imagine a party of 1^st-level PCs encountering a beholder. Actually getting into a lethal combat encounter with the beholder would mean:

1. Randomly generating the lethal encounter. (Which was statistically less likely.)
2. Not having the % Tracks check indicate that the PCs are encountering monster-sign instead of the monster itself. (A tracks result would, of course, procedurally warn the PCs that something big and dangerous is in the area.)
3. Failing to gain surprise. (Which would allow the PCs to silently withdraw.)
4. Generating an encounter distance close enough that the PCs couldn’t slip away.
5. The reaction check needs to generate a hostile response. (Or the PCs need to provoke a hostile response.)

As D&D stripped these various structures out of the default mode of play, however, the game gravitated towards a mode of play in which the encounter simply existing is functionally equivalent to a PC dying.

Note: The original 1974 edition of D&D also featured a fully functional mechanical structure for retreating from combat, so even when the ablative layers of the encounter system and/or the players’ commonsense failed and they found themselves in over their heads, the PCs would still have the opportunity to escape the imminent catastrophe. But that’s a topic for another time.

CREATING YOUR PHASES

Again, the point here isn’t that bang-bang encounters are bad. The point is that variety is good, and bang-bang encounters are just one option among many.

The point also isn’t that the procedural encounter-framing of old school D&D is the One True Way™ of gaming. That point is that encounters are, in fact, framed, just like any other scene in your game.

This means all the advice about scene-framing from The Art of Rulings applies to combat encounters, too:

• What is the agenda of the scene? (There are other options than “fight to the death,” even if you’re using the combat system.)
• What is the bang? (Bang-bang is, as we already know, only one option.)
• What are the elements of the scene? (These include both characters and location.)
• How does the scene end? (Are victory and defeat the only options? And, if not, what options have you been overlooking?)

What I will say is that playing around with old-school-style encounter framing procedures is, in my experience, a good way to experiment, push yourself out of ingrained habits, and begin exploring new alternatives. But these are, of course, random in nature and, ultimately, simulationist/gamist in nature. Which means that there are, once again, a lot of alternatives here. For example, you can frame dramatically or make deliberate creative choices in your encounter framing. And there are also completely different procedural methods you could explore.

Looking at the lessons that can be learned from old-school procedures, however, one that I find particularly useful is that the beginning of an encounter is inherently phased. (Even the choice to do a bang-bang encounter is, ultimately, a choice — conscious or otherwise — to collapse all of those phases into a single moment.) These phases include:

• Seeing monster-sign (they’re close!)
• Line of sight
• Encounter distance
• Surprise (aka, who’s aware of who? and when? and how?)
• NPC reaction/mood/morale

Think about how (and why) certain phases are skipped or become irrelevant in some encounters, but not others.

Do these phases need to occur in a specific sequence? What happens if you change the sequencing?

During what phases (or after which phases) are the PCs able to take action? Do their choices affect the sequence or phases or which phases occur? What about the NPC choices?

Are there other phases we haven’t identified here?

Rolling for initiative (or, more generally, moving into combat timing) is usually a key pivot point in a combat encounter. It’s a big, definitive bang. But it can be very empowering to remember that there are many encounters that could become combat encounters but don’t necessarily need to end up that way. (Monster reaction checks remind us of that procedurally.)

Similarly, even after initiative has been rolled, remember that scenes can have more than one bang! That might be:

• reinforcements (whether more bad guys or allies or neutral parties who could go either way)
• environmental changes (the lava is getting closer! the ceiling starts descending! poison gas fills the room!)
• retreat
• surrender
• negotiation and/or hostage-taking
• momentous death

The fact that most RPGs feature a highly structured system for resolving combat can be a very useful and powerful tool, but don’t let it become a trap. Remember that you control the framing of the scene and empower your players to shape the outcome of the scene in ways that transcend the combat mechanics.

Let’s say that you want to skip over a large chunk of time in your campaign.

Actually, let’s back up for a moment. It’s possible that the idea of skipping time has never occurred to you. Much like dungeon scenarios can condition us to resolve everything one action at a time (much to the detriment of sequences run outside of the dungeon), so, too, can other scenario structures and situations trap us in a pattern of resolving every single day as if they were all of equal importance and focus.

When combined with the XP systems in D&D, for example, this can easily create a hyper-compressed narrative where the PCs are getting out-wrassled by giant rats one day and slaying Zeus a couple weeks later. But even without those kinds of advancement mechanics, getting stuck in a cycle where every day is jam-packed with adventure can be very limiting in the kinds of adventures you run and the scope that your campaigns are capable of.

(Conversely, some campaign structures and concepts can make it completely appropriate to remain laser-focused on the problem at hand. That’s just fine. I’m just pointing out that there are other options.)

It should also be noted that players are often motivated, for any number of reasons (including their own rote habits), to fill every day to the brim with stuff they want to do. So if you want to decompress the campaign a bit, you may need to push back against that impulse and/or incentivize taking realistic breaks from the breakneck action.

For example:

• Leveling up in D&D might require more than just XP. You could introduce a rule that in order to gain a level, PCs must spend a period of time training. (This period could be set to almost anything and you could justify it: A fortnight. One week times the character’s new level. A cycle of the moon. One full season. A year and a day. Whatever.)
• Mysterious dames with suspiciously missing husbands don’t show up on the doorstep of the detective agency every single day. Once the PCs wrap up their current case, there’ll be a fallow period of humdrum work until the next exciting adventure lands on their doorstep.
• The vampires are hunting them and the only way to get the Heat off them is to lay low for a while… maybe a long while.
• Yes, they’re adventure archaeologists: But now that the Spear of Destiny has vanished into vaults beneath the British Museum, there’s a lot of research to be done before they can identify their next expedition. And you can’t rush research!
• In Ars Magica, the projects and research performed by the wizards take one or more seasons to complete. The cycle of play, therefore, is broken down into season-long turns, and the wizards can generally only undertake a single adventure during each season as well.

On the flip side, it’s quite possible that the players will, without any kind of structure or prompting, want some downtime for their characters for any number of reasons.

Which ultimately brings us back to: Let’s say that you want to skip over a large chunk of time in your campaign…

SKIPPING TIME

First, determine how much time is passing before the next scenario is triggered (or whatever will signal the end of the skipped time). The amount of time may be obvious given the reason you’re skipping time in the first place, or it might just be an arbitrary decision on your part. (Or maybe you randomly determine it; e.g., 1d6 months.)

Regardless, frame things up by simple stating the period of elapsed time: “Three months pass.”

Next, go around the table and ask each player what their character did during that time. When it gets to your turn, as the GM, you inject event(s) that you want them to react to and/or develop the actions they’ve described.

In practice, the players will build off each other’s actions and the events you provide, weaving an interconnected narrative. You may also find it useful to:

• Play out short roleplaying vignettes.
• Use simple skill checks or similar mechanics to determine specific outcomes.
• Allow the PCs to use other mechanics (like downtime, research, or project mechanics) to advance their interests (or set things up for the next adventure).

But this isn’t strictly necessary. In any case, you want to make sure you don’t get too bogged down. You’re looking for a relatively high level of abstraction possibly coupled to a highlight reel. Don’t get sucked back into day-to-day logistics.

You can do just one pass around the table, but I find it’s often better to split the time up into three chunks. (Or, if you’ve got a certain number of events for them to respond to, an equal number of chunks.) Each additional pass gives the players more opportunities to weave their stories together and develop their own characters.

Your first instinct might be to have all the chunks be of the same length (e.g., we’re skipping three months and we’re doing three passes, so each pass will be one month long), but I often find it more effective to make each chunk progressively longer:

• “One week has passed. What has Charlotte been doing?” (go around the table)
• “Another month has passed. Where are you now?”
• “Now it’s July. What did you spend the last two months doing?”

The advantage of this progressive sequencing is that it allows the players to be fairly precise in their immediate reaction and follow-up to the dramatic events of the most recent scenario, and then slowly transitions them to thinking in the longer term.

You may or may not want to frame the final pass along the lines of, “In December, you all meet again in London. Tell me how you get there and where you meet.” (In other words, prompt the players to pull it all together and position them for the next scenario.)

EPILOGUES

The Eternal Lies campaign for Trail of Cthulhu by Will Hindmarch, Jeff Tidball, and Jeremy Keller uses a similar technique to provide a satisfying epilogue to the campaign.

If you’re wrapping up a dedicated campaign, it’s likely something that you’ve spent weeks, months, or even years playing these characters. A big, satisfying conclusion to the campaign is great (and a topic for another time), but even after the conclusion, you want to give space for loose threads to be wrapped up and for the players to say goodbye to their beloved characters.

There are many ways to handle this, but one powerful and flexible method is to cue up a time skip… just without returning to game play on the other side.

• Where are you one week after the campaign ended?
• One month after the campaign ended?
• One year after the campaign ended?

The exact periods of time you choose for each pass will depend on any number of factors — the characters, the nature of the campaign, whether you’re planning to run another campaign in the same setting, how big the fallout from the campaign’s conclusion is likely to be, etc.

This technique can be particularly cool in historical campaigns, because you can relate the time skips to the passage of real world events. For example, if you were running a Fall of Delta Green campaign in the ‘60s, you could skip forward all the way to 2023 and discover where the characters would be today.

In some cases, you might want to drive all the way forward to the characters’ deaths. But that usually won’t be the case: To live is an awfully big adventure, and there are many forms of closure far more satisfying than the Grim Reaper’s icy grip.

ADVANCED EPILOGUES

As you’re prepping to run your epilogue (whether using the skipped time method or not), you should look back at the totality of the campaign and think about:

Unfinished Threads. It would be great if every single loose thread in a campaign was neatly tied off, but that’s usually not what happens. Real life can be messy, and so can the lives of our characters. Particularly in the big drive to the campaign finale, it’s likely stuff will get left unresolved.

For example, in my Dragon Heist campaign, one of the characters had a driving motivation to figure out what had happened to her mother. For one reason and another, however, it had never been prioritized during the campaign. (Neither by me, her player, nor the character herself.) This made it a perfect target for the epilogue.

Themes. What were the major themes of the campaign? These may have been planned. They may have emerged through play. (Quite probably both.) Either way, try to pull these themes into the epilogue. In some cases, themes may even have a resolution.

Characters. What members of the supporting cast were particularly memorable or important? Make sure to pull these characters into the epilogue and give them a sense of closure, too.

This will likely include mostly allies, but it’s not unusual for an enemy or two to still be hanging about. What happens to them? What’s their legacy?

Rewards & Consequences. The PCs fought hard to achieve things. (Or maybe they strived and failed.) Along the way, there were probably prices that had to be paid. Cementing those costs and payoffs and consequences in the epilogue is a way to invest the events of the campaign with even greater meaning.

It’s one thing to save a village. It’s another to see all the children growing up who would never have lived if you hadn’t.

In Night’s Black Agents, the PCs are retired intelligence agents. Maybe they left willingly; maybe they’re ex-pats on the run from their own governments. Regardless, they’ve been putting their skills to use as mercenaries, doing whatever jobs their consciences can live with in the gray and black markets of the world.

And then they discover that vampires are real.

In fact, there’s a vast vampire conspiracy. It’s infiltrated (or has begun infiltrating) every corner of the modern world, feeding the murderous hunger of the undead.

Which, of course, means that — even as their minds reel from the sanity-shattering immensity of this revelation — the agents must dust off their skills one last time and save the world.

It’s not like anyone is going to believe them, after all.

In large part, Night’s Black Agents is driven simply and entirely by the immense erudition of Kenneth Hite, whose mastery and appreciation of both the espionage and vampires genres is vast. Even more impressive is Hite’s success in boiling his knowledge down onto the page and making it effortlessly accessible to you.

Sure, you’ll benefit mightily from flipping to “Sources” on page 207 and at least sampling the array of vampire and spy fiction that Hite recommends. But the point is that you don’t need to, because Hite has packed all that lore into this remarkably thin rulebook in the most practical and useful ways possible. With nothing but Night’s Black Agents in hand, you will be able to dial in everything from James Bond to John Le Carre; from Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

THE GUMSHOE SYSTEM

The GUMSHOE system was originally designed by Robin D. Laws explicitly for designing and running mystery scenarios. It’s been adapted into a dozen different games over the years, and Night’s Black Agents isn’t even Hite’s first rodeo. (He previously designed Trail of Cthulhu.)

The central conceit of the GUMSHOE system is that it divides all of the PCs’ skills into Investigative Abilities (e.g., Cryptography, Electronic Surveillance, Accounting) and General Abilities (e.g. Athletics, Gambling, Shooting), both of which have pools of points which can be spent by the players.

While General Ability tests are resolved by rolling 1d6 + the number of points spent vs. a difficulty (which generally defaults to 4), the GUMSHOE gimmick is that you never need to test Investigative Abilities: If you are in a scene where a clue can be found using a relevant Investigative Ability and you use that ability, then you gain the clue. (The points for Investigative Abilities can be spent, but only for various enhancements to the action. You never need to spend or roll for a core clue required to solve the scenario.)

I have some quibbles with this gimmick: First, the claim is that it eliminates the risk of the players failing to find and follow a clue! But that’s not actually true. They can still fail to look for the clue and, if they find the clue, they may still misinterpret it. You can mitigate these problems somewhat with point spends, but the solution ultimately ends up being the Three Clue Rule. And if you’re using the Three Clue Rule, then you don’t actually need the “you never roll!” gimmick to begin with.) Ironically, the claim that it’s magically solved the problem can actually exacerbate the problem at some tables.

Second, this system can create some very nasty hard limits in play: The plethora of pools creates a multitude of limited resources, any one of which the PCs can unexpectedly and catastrophically run out of in ways that can completely derail scenarios or result in horrific TPKs.

A sufficiently savvy table, however, will be able to get a general feel for how scenarios need to be paced in order to work, and later GUMSHOE games have found ways to soften the hard limits. Night’s Black Agents, in particular, is festooned with a cornucopia of systems designed to flexibly replenish pools and route around the hard limits.

And despite my reservations, I’ve consistently found the various GUMSHOE games I’ve played and run deeply satisfying. A large part of this seems to be the skill lists, which are all built on the same chassis while varying somewhat game to game, and are universally excellent for investigation scenarios. This is paired to a character creation procedure which systemically divides these skills evenly among the PCs, neatly setting things up so that spreading the spotlight around during investigation scenes is a seamless and virtually automatic process.

Character creation also features a handful of other features that efficiently flesh out characters and motivate them for investigation. In Night’s Black Agents, this includes backgrounds (quickly orienting players into the milieu of the game), drives (directly motivating the characters), and sources of stability (which define people, places, and ideologies that are significant to the character and then ties those things to the dehumanizing themes of the spy genre).

The result is a system that’s not only good at the table, but also fabulous during prep.

CONSPYRAMID & VAMPYRAMID

The heart of Night’s Black Agents is the Conspyramid, a campaign structure/recipe that the GM can use to reliably create an effective conspiracy for their campaign.

The core concept is that the conspiracy is broken down into nodes — sources of blood, funding, and protection; cults, institutions, infrastructure, front companies, and so forth — and these are arranged into a pyramidal structure and then connected to each other:

For example, in this sample Conspyramid, agents investigating the Ganymede nightclub might find leads pointing them towards the Abkhaz gangs or the renfield H. Volov. Similarly, those investigating Volov would find connections to Istanbul Customs and the S.S. Paradine. The idea, of course, is that the players will work their way up the Conspyramid to the core leadership at its pinnacle and then burn it all down.

What makes the Conspyramid sing in actual play, though, is how Hite has broadly integrated it into the other mechanics and structures of play.

The simplest example of this is that the default difficulty of relevant tests is equal to 3 + the row of the Conspyramid. So, for example, Infiltration tests to break into the Ganymede will default to difficulty 4, but if you’re trying to break into the Hungarian Interior Ministry (up in row 3), the tests would generally default to difficulty 6. A key word here, of course, is “default,” but the overall effect is that the stakes of the campaign will naturally escalate as the campaign continues — the players will feel the pressure and the difficulty as they climb the conspiracy’s ladder.

A more complicated example are the adversary mapping mechanics. Here the basic concept is that the PCs will use Human Terrain, Traffic Analysis, Surveillance, asset interviews, ops, and other relevant abilities and actions to discover how the conspiracy is organized (i.e., the links between nodes). What’s really cool is that Night’s Black Agents is designed to empower the PCs to create their own ops: Once you’ve identified the Ganymede on your adversary map, do you place it under surveillance, interrogate the owner, put a tap on the computer servers in the basement, or just burn it to the ground and see who collects the insurance money?

The agents’ adversary map will not always precisely match the GM’s Conspyramid, but the Conspyramid gives the GM everything they need to respond flexibly and confidently to the agents’ investigation no matter what form or direction it takes.

The players are also mechanically incentivized to build out their adversary map because the more links an op has, the more bonuses they’ll receive when staging an op with that node as their target, thus encouraging a slightly more contemplative style of play in which the PCs figure out how stuff is connected before choosing how and where they want to strike.

Perhaps the most significant integration with the Conspyramid, however, is the Vampyramid, which I consider the other pillar of a Night’s Black Agents campaign:

Although superficially similar to the Conspyramid, the Vampyramid, based on the Push Pyramid from Elizabeth Sampat’s Blowback, is a structure for running the active vampiric response to the agents’ actions. Each tier of the Vampyramid is “unlocked” as a result of the PCs targeting one of the nodes on the corresponding tier of the Conspyramid. The GM then selects an appropriate response, following a “path” up the Vampyramid.

For example, let’s say that the PCs hit the Ganymede nightclub, make a copy of the server hard drives, and then destroy the data center. This unlocks Tier 1: Reflex on the Vampyramid, so the GM scans through their options and decides Offer Payoff is the best fit:

OFFER PAYOFF: Some seemingly unconnected node of the conspiracy offers the agent a handsome payoff to walk away… This also offers the players a clue to another node of the conspiracy.

So we need to grab another node from our Conspyramid: We could go up the Conspyramid, perhaps having someone from Lisbon Import-Export, LLC approach the PCs. But at this early stage of the campaign, it might make more sense to stay lateral, so maybe we grab a rep from the Szegeli Clan to make the approach.

Since the PCs grabbed the data and slagged the servers, it probably makes sense if the conspiracy wants that data back. In fact, they might even assume that the PCs are just blackmailers. “We know you made a copy of our data. So how much do you want?”

However the PCs turn that approach to their advantage, we can assume they continue mucking about in their investigation and maybe they eventually track things back to the Dagestan Militia. That node is on the second tier of the Conspyramid and it unlocks the corresponding tier of the Vampyramid. Looking at the pyramid, the GM can just follow the arrows to find “the most natural escalations.” The idea is that, depending on which initial node you select, you can chart a course up through the Vampyramid in a process that creates great complexity and variety from a surprisingly simple structure.

Our chosen example, however, does reveal one structural drawback of the Vampyramid: Once you hit one edge of the Vampyramid, you end up “locked” into a single chain of response actions. (Offer Payoff, for example, connects only to Kill Enemy.) In practice, this is ameliorated because the Vampyramid is designed as a tool, not a straitjacket: You can always skip to a completely different node or improvise a custom response if it’s more appropriate for your campaign. You can also always return to the bottom tier and initiate a new response path.

Regardless, the Vampyramid provides a simple, default scaffolding that makes the Conspiracy a living, breathing entity that’s actively opposed to the PCs and reacting to their operations. It’s also, as we can see in the Offer Payoff example, yet another mechanism Night’s Black Agents uses to dynamically introduce clues into the PCs’ investigation. (The game is simply excellent at making it virtually impossible for the PCs to ever dead-end.)

The tight integration of the Conspyramid with the rest of the game can also be seen in the system for Heat.

The Heat mechanics provide a model for how much pressure the PCs are under from the authorities as a result of their actions: Did they kill someone? Did they blow up a building? Did they kidnap the daughter of a vampire scion? Did they get involved in a massive car chase through downtown Lisbon? All of these actions will generate Heat, and once per operation the GM can call for the players to roll against their current Heat level.

If the roll fails, some sort of official interference will crop up during the op. That might be the CIA agent who’s been tracking them catching up and ruining their cover stories. Or a SWAT team raiding their safe house. Or “a whole fleet of cop cars joining the chase.”

Notably, getting rid of Heat generally requires the PCs to either skip town (pushing their activities into the international scope of cinematic espionage films), make a deal with someone in power (further entangling them), and/or staging some kind of op (creating exciting game play). So this is yet another example of Night’s Black Agents using simple systems to dynamically generate complex and rewarding play.

But the other thing to really take note of here is how all of these different elements are put into motion and swirl around each other: The PCs are actively investigating the conspiracy’s infrastructure (Conspyramid), the vampires are actively trying to shut them down (Vampyramid), and the cops and other official agencies are getting drawn into the vortex (Heat). The ops generate Heat and unlock new tiers of the Vampyramid; the Vampyramid creates situations which draw Heat and introduce clues for tracing the Conspyramid; and Heat can either trigger responses from the Vampyramid or force the PCs to diversify their investigation into the Conspyramid.

This isn’t just a random assortment of resolution mechanics. It’s an engine that generates espionage and drives the campaign forward.

THRILLER RULES

With Heat and the two Pyramids driving the action, Night’s Black Agents packs even more action into GUMSHOE with the Thriller Rules, a selection of optional mechanics that are designed to evoke the espionage genre. These include:

• Thriller Chases
• Extended Chases
• Thriller Combat
• Special Tactics

The rules for Thriller Chases provide a robust, but not overly complicated system for resolving either foot or vehicle chases. The Extended Chase system sounds like it would be an add-on for Thriller Chases, but it’s actually a completely separate system for handling scenarios where the PCs are fleeing from trouble across multiple countries and is tied into the Heat system.

The Thriller Combat rules are designed to patch up the major problem with using GUMSHOE as the engine for an espionage action game: Combat in GUMSHOE kinda sucks.

The problem ultimately boils down to the core math of the combat system: You roll 1d6, add the points spent from the General Ability you’re using to attack (Hand-to-Hand, Shooting, or Weapons in Night’s Black Agents), and compare it to the target’s Hit Threshold. Hit Thresholds are almost universally between 3 and 5 (although some supernatural creatures will exceed those limits), so you can hit your target even if you don’t spend any points, but obviously you can improve your odds (or even hit automatically) if you do spend points.

From the player’s side this is very simplistic, but mostly works. They have a limited pool of points that likely needs to be stretched across multiple combat encounters in a scenario, and so they need to strategically decide when and where to spend their points. (This is largely a binary choice, though: If you’re going to spend points, you’re almost always going to want to spend enough for an auto-hit.)

The big problem is on the GM’s side of the screen. NPCs are built to have roughly the same range of ability ratings that PCs do, which means they also have a similar number of Hand-to-Hand, Shooting, and Weapons points to spend. But the NPCs don’t need to stretch their points across multiple encounters and usually don’t have a variety of targets to prioritize: They can spend two or three points on every single attack, automatically hit the PCs every single time, and almost certainly never run out of points before the encounter is finished.

In practice, this means that the GM can make one of three choices:

1. Automatically hit the PCs every time. (Providing a flat and ultra-lethal combat experience. In fact, you’ll almost certainly TPK the group in any fight where the PCs don’t dramatically outnumber the opposition.)
2. Never spend ability points for NPC attacks. (Another flat experience, and one in which there’s no difference between tussling with a random street thug and the ultimate battle with Dracula.)
3. Just arbitrarily decide when the NPCs will hit the PCs. (Which kinda negates the entire purpose of having a combat system, and still doesn’t mechanically reflect NPC skill, but is probably fine if you’re the sort of GM who likes stuff like railroading and fudging.)

I’ve run a lot of GUMSHOE and, frankly, the combat system is fundamentally broken. Its only saving grace is that it’s just barely functional enough that you can sorta just coast through the occasional combat encounter. It’ll be vaguely bad and unsatisfying, but not game breaking.

Okay, but the Thriller Combat Rules are ostensibly designed to fix this, right? So do they pull it off?

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but… No.

They do their best, but ultimately can’t route around the fundamental mechanical flaw. What they can do, however, is add a lot of fun options to the fight that can distract the players from the unsatisfying core mechanics and keep them entertained.

All this flash and bling, however, does highlight another slight tarnish in the system, which is that there seems to be a handful of minor mechanics scattered throughout Night’s Black Agents where the math just seems wonky to me.

Take called shots, for example. Useful mechanic to have for a vampire game (where you may need to stake them in the heart), but one of the generic effects is a damage boost. Check this out, though: Aiming at either the Heart or the Throat is +3 Hit Threshold, but hitting the Heart does +3 damage while hitting the Throat only does +2 damage, so you’re obviously always going to pick the mathematically superior option every time.

(It should be noted that these wonky bits are so minor in nature that, in practice, it’s quite difficult to spot them. But if you’re the sort of person who would put together a comprehensive cheat sheet for the game, they will pop out at you.)

What does make a big difference in Night’s Black Agents combat, though, are the Special Tactics. Tactical Fact-Finding Benefits (TFFBs) and Tag-Team Tactical Benefits (TTTB) both give the players (a) a channel for using their Investigative Abilities to gain tactical advantage in combat and (b) methods for the PCs to collaborate with each other and form mechanically impactful tactical plans on the battlefield. They’re flexible, powerful, and very satisfying to use.

VAMPIRES!

The final trick Night’s Black Agents has up its sleeves is an incredibly robust system for creating custom vampires.

These aren’t just palette swaps. Hite provides an almost overwhelming variety of options drawn from across world mythology and vampire fiction, strapping them into a modular system that can combine them fruitfully into an almost infinite variety of forms. This system is, in fact, so robust that it can be trivially adapted to creating supernatural foes of any type.

More importantly, this means that every time you start a new Night’s Black Agents campaign, the players will be legitimately in the dark about exactly what form the dark, vampiric threat will take. Every campaign is an exciting journey of discovery and revelation.

CONCLUSION

Night’s Black Agents takes the rock solid investigation mechanics of the GUMSHOE system and enhances them with Thriller Rules and Special Tactics that can flip the reactive investigations of Christie (“let’s look for the clues they left behind!”) into the explosive investigations of Fleming (“let’s blow stuff up and make some clues”). It then marries those mechanics to the tripartite espionage engine of Heat, Conspyramid, and Vampyramid.

The result is an RPG that’s not only delightful to bring to the table, but also a truly unique experience.

The core concept of “secret agents hunting vampires” is also surprisingly perfect in its conception and execution. When first pitched, it can seem almost random, but the more you think about it (and play with it), the more it seems not only utterly natural, but also inherently awesome.

It’s worth noting, though, that Night’s Black Agents is a fantastic RPG for even a mundane espionage campaign without a trace of vampiric action or supernatural conundrum: Drop the Vampirology ability and, on the player side, you’re just left with secret agents. On the GM’s side, the only potentially thorny issue is the Vampyramid, but that’s mostly just the name. (In a pinch, you could even grab the Push Pyramid from Sampat’s Blowback and plug it in.)

This is largely because, as I mentioned before, Hite is so effective at boiling down the huge breadth of not only the vampire genre but also the espionage genre into the game in a shockingly practical fashion. Truthfully speaking, either genre would be capable of supporting an entire game in its own right, and to have both so perfectly blended together in Night’s Black Agents is the gaming equivalent of possessing the riches of Croesus.

(Who, infamously, has no reliably recorded death, and is, therefore, almost certainly a vampire. Feel free to use the Lydian conspiracy for your first campaign.)

But I digress. The point is that removing the vampires from Night’s Black Agents nevertheless leaves you with a comprehensive and fully realized espionage game capable of handling everything from James Bond to Jason Bourne to George Smiley. In fact, Hite will help you dial in the subgenre of espionage you want with different modes of play:

• Burn games will focus on the psychological damage and personal cost of the spy game.
• Dust games eschew cinematic excess and instead dial in the gritty realism of The Sandbaggers or Three Days of the Condor.
• Mirror games feature the deception and betrayal of the spy game, where corrupt agents and agencies pursue ends that justify the means until, finally, they forget what the ends were supposed to be.
• Stakes games, by contrast, will shine the spotlight on the high ideals of espionage, where the fight really is about protecting the ideals, nations, and people that you believe in.

Through the Night’s Black Agents rulebook, symbols associated with each of these modes clearly mark various options and advice that you can use to dial in exactly the style of espionage campaign you want.

I offer this as the conclusion of this review because I think it speaks deeply to Kenneth Hite’s philosophy as a designer and to what Night’s Black Agents offers you as a game: Hite wants to give not only the GM but also the players everything they need to make the game that they want, and he achieves that by loading you up with a truly astonishing array of tools, options, and information. He doesn’t just dump this material on you, though. Instead, it is meticulously organized, designed, and implemented to make it as easy as possible for you to use it. Everything is designed to effortlessly empower you.

Night’s Black Agents comes bearing gifts.

And you should invite it in.

GRADE: A+

Designer: Kenneth Hite

Publisher: Pelgrane Press
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 232

FURTHER READING
Review: The Zalozhniy Quartet
Review: The Persephone Extraction
System Cheat Sheet: Night’s Black Agents
Untested NBA: Funding

Go to Part 1

The noir detective, stymied in his investigation, returns to the scene of the crime. He paces slowly, lost in his thoughts. He must have missed something here. Some vital clue. But what could it be?

The PCs have been eating at Norma’s Diner every day since they came to the sleepy town of Everglade, gathering there every evening to compare their notes and brainstorm what their next steps should be. But then they discover evidence that corpses are being shipped from the county hospital to the basement of the diner. What exactly has Norma been cooking up this whole time?

This dynamic is a staple of the mystery genre. Another common variant is when a spy publicly approaches a target during daylight hours, socializes with the bad guys (or their staff) for a bit, and then comes back later after everybody has gone home to conduct a more thorough investigation. (James Bond does this in almost every film, for example.)

Structurally, at the game table, we’re talking about a situation where the PCs go to a node — a person, place, organization, event, etc. — and fail to find all (or possibly any) of the clues. Then, later, they return and discover what they missed.

This might occur for purely practical reasons: The PCs’ investigation has stalled out and they need more info, so they have no choice but to double back and try to figure out what they missed.

But it can also be played for dramatic effect: What seemed innocent is revealed to be sinister. The twist villain reveals themselves. The irony of discovering that you were standing on top of Captain Adachi’s treasure the whole time.

If you’re using node-based scenario design in concert with the Three Clue Rule, this will often occur organically: The PCs don’t realize that a clue means they need to look UNDER the apartment building, so they stake it out for a bit, come up empty, and decide to pursue other leads. Then, later, they find a new clue, realize their mistake, and rush back to the apartment building for some clandestine excavation.

In this sense, it’s kind of like red herrings: You don’t need to prep this dynamic; it will just emerge during play. It’s just a natural consequence of missing or misinterpreting clues, and we know the PCs will do that (which is why we’re using the Three Clue Rule in the first place).

But you can also prep some variants of this dynamic deliberately.

For an easy example, the PCs may visit a location for reasons that aren’t investigatory — their friend invites them; they have a seemingly unrelated appointment; etc. — and then later clues point them back to the earlier location with investigation on their minds.

More complex versions may have one set of clues which point the PCs to a node and then another set of clues that they’ll likely encounter later in the scenario that will point them to a completely different aspect of the node. For example, they find clues suggesting that they need to talk to Miles Duverney, who lives in the penthouse of Central Park Tower. They question him there and then continue their investigation… only later discovering the clues that reveal a secret satanic temple was built beneath the building.

In either case, you need to be mentally prepared for a clever or insightful party to make an intuitive leap that uncovers the “hidden” aspect of the node they first time they explore it. (“Wait a minute… Why did Duverney help design Central Park Tower? I’m going to go check out the architectural plans on file with the Department of Buildings.”)

JUST ONE MORE THING…

This is a dynamic that the GUMSHOE system, used in RPGs like Trail of Cthulhu and Esoterrorists, actually struggles with because the PCs in that system are supposed to automatically find every clue in every scene. As a result, it can’t emerge organically and instead has to be arbitrarily forced by the GM.

GUMSHOE recognizes it has a problem, however, and attempts to rectify it through another structure which can be conceptually useful in a wide variety of investigation games: leveraged clues.

A very common form of the “revisit a node and learn new information” dynamic is questioning suspects: It’s bog standard for a detective to talk to a suspect (or witness) early in their investigation and then question them again later and gain new information.

But in GUMSHOE, this doesn’t work because you’re supposed to get all the information an NPC has when you talk to them! Rather than having all of the social dynamics of a mystery story flatten out, therefore, GUMSHOE patches over the issue with the leveraged clue: In order to get certain clues from an NPC, you first need to obtain a different clue — the prerequisite or leverage clue — and then invoke it while talking to the NPC.

Columbo, for example, is basically this conceit injected with steroids and then turned into a procedural formula where every episode is just him repeatedly re-engaging with the same NPC node, but with new leveraged clues each time.

And, as Columbo demonstrates, this concept can be quite useful for organizing dynamic NPC interactions that evolve over the course of a scenario.

FAILING SCENARIOS

In some cases, however, the PCs revisiting nodes they’ve already investigated can be a sign that the scenario has gone awry: They’ve missed enough clues that they don’t know what to do next, and so they’re being forced to retrace their steps and try to dig up clues

Most of the time, though, this is still just fine: The players have already identified the problem and are taking action that will likely solve it. (Unless, of course, they’re still missing all the clues for the same reason they missed them the first time through — e.g., they just aren’t thinking to check the cult members’ computers and that’s where all the information they need is.)

What’s more problematic is when the players have become stuck and aren’t going back to find the clues they missed.

When this happens, one technique described in Three Clue Rule for getting the scenario back on track is to use a proactive node to give the PCs a new clue. This might be a clue directly pointing them to a revelation they need, but it could also be a clue pointing them back to a node where they’ve been but missed a clue at.

Note that it’s not enough to just point them back at the node. (This can be too easily dismissed with, “Well, we’ve already been there and didn’t find anything.”) Instead, the new clue must specifically indicate how they’re supposed to investigate the node in order to find the clue they missed (e.g., “the note in his pocket is written on Linustech stationary and appears to be the user name and password for System 42” or they get a phone call from an informant who tells them to “follow the money”).

WHILE YOU WERE GONE

Another variant of this technique is when the PCs return to a former node and discover that it has changed in the interim: The apartment has been ransacked. The NPC has been murdered. The laundromat has burned down.

This can create all-new clues for the PCs to find, or make the clues they previously missed more obvious.

Personally, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time prepping this type of thing ahead of time unless there’s a separate set of clues specifically indicating that the PCs should revisit a location. (Or if there’s some other structural reason for them to do so.) But if a mystery scenario has derailed, the players are feeling lost, and they double back to a location they’ve already been, improvising such changes in order to get them back on track is a solid option.

Next: Enigma

Thanks to the members of the Alexandrian Discord, particularly bobamk and Alberek, for suggesting and inspiring this article.