With Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk arriving on bookshelves as we enter the twilight months of 5^th Edition in anticipation of the release of D&D 2024 / OneD&D / whatever we end up calling it, I thought it would be interesting to go all the way back to the beginning and take a peek at the D&D Starter Set first published in 2014.

But let’s start by going even further back and discussing the history of D&D introductory sets. (This is something I discuss in even more detail in Every Edition of D&D if you want to go on a real deep dive.)

D&D was originally published as a boxed set in 1974. In 1977, however, the product line bifurcated: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons would be published as a set of three hardcover books, while Dungeons & Dragons would be published in the boxed Basic Set. (This is why that version of the game is often called Basic D&D.)

In 1981, the Basic Set was revamped and an Expert Set was added as a supplement. In 1983, the Basic and Expert sets were revamped again, and the Companion, Master, and Immortals boxed sets were also added.

Now, here’s the key thing: Dungeons & Dragons was NOT the same game as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The Basic Set (and its supplements) were a complete, stand-alone game that even had its own campaign worlds and adventures.

Starting in 1991, this changed. The Basic D&D game remained distinct from AD&D for a while longer, but its rules were compiled into the Rules Cyclopedia. Later, after Wizards of the Coast bought D&D, they would end Basic D&D and drop the “Advanced” moniker from the 3^rd Edition of AD&D (now referred to simply as D&D). A multitude of Basic Sets, Introductions, First Quests, Starter Sets, Adventure Games, and Basic Games would continue to be published as boxed sets, but there was an important difference:

They weren’t complete games.

They were pay-to-preview ads for the Player’s Handbook, and they were usually designed accordingly: You bought them. You played them once. Then you threw them in the trash, bought the core rulebooks, and never touched them again.

I’ve talked in the past about the fact that I think this killed D&D’s gateway product and did an incredible amount of harm to the entire RPG industry. Personally, in my ideal world, D&D would be a game sold in a box, and when new players asked, “What do I need to play D&D?” you’d say, “You need the big box with DUNGEONS & DRAGONS on the cover.” Simple.

Obviously, we don’t live in that world. But this should give you a barometer for what my ideal Starter Set would look like: It would be a meaty, full-featured version of D&D. It would introduce complete neophytes to roleplaying games and teach them not only how to play, but also how to be a Dungeon Master. It would give a complete gaming experience, even if you never picked up the Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide.

And if you bought it, you would absolutely not feel like you paid money to have someone tell you that you should buy something else.

OPENING THE BOX

So let’s crack this thing open.

What’s actually in the D&D Starter Set box is pretty barebones:

• The 32-page Starter Set Rulebook, which gives you all the rules for the game.
• The 64-page Lost Mine of Phandelver, which serves as an adventure book, monster manual, magic item vault, and index.
• Five pregen characters sheets.
• A set of dice.

Honestly, I think this barebones approach is okay. You don’t need a fancy gizmos and gadgets to play a roleplaying game. Would a poster map of the Phandalin region (where Lost Mines of Phandelver is set) have been a nice bit of highly practical bling that might have been wonderfully intriguing to a new player? Almost certainly.

But barebones here gives you an MSRP of $20, which is an absolutely fabulous price point. That puts the Starter Set in the territory of an impulse buy, and that was often even more true in actual practice. (I got my copy for $10.)

Nevertheless, there are a couple of things I will ding here: First, the included dice set only includes one d20 and one d6, which I think is inadequate for a game that includes advantage/disadvantage and the fireball spell.

Second, the two booklets would really benefit from cardstock covers. Instead, they’re just stapled paper and very flimsy.

THE RULEBOOK

The Starter Set Rulebook is very good.

The introduction it provides to RPGs — what they are, how they’re played, etc. — is workmanlike, but solid in its execution. More importantly this is a complete and fully functional rulebook. It’s not painfully incomplete. It doesn’t constantly tease with how the real rules are in another book. It’s a rock solid volume, and you could run a complete Tier 1 campaign with this rulebook with zero difficulty.

In fact, except for one thing that we’ll get to in just a moment, you could run multiple Tier 1 campaigns.

Combined with the magic items and monsters found in the companion volume, a DM has enough material that they could comfortably create their own campaign. I could even imagine someone skipping the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, grabbing a Monster Manual to give them more options for foes, and continuing to game happily for months or years or forever.

This is, in case I’m not being clear, a really fantastic achievement.

Unfortunately, as I hinted above, there are a couple gaping holes here that, in my opinion, stop this from being a total triumph.

First, there are no rules for character creation. Instead, players will need to pick one of the five pregen characters included in the boxed set. This is the truly crippling blow, and the only thing that truly limits the Starter Set.

Second, the books do a pretty good job of orienting first-time Dungeon Masters. There’s a lot of practical advice for how they can referee the session, make rulings, set up adventure hooks, narrate the action, play the monsters, and so forth. But the major oversight is that they never actually tell the DM how to run the dungeons included in the adventure book.

D&D actually has a long history of failing to do this (the 5^th Edition core rulebooks are actually worse!), but it’s ultimately kind of amusing when you realize that the Starter Set includes multiple, detailed explanations of exactly how boxed text is supposed to be used, but nothing on how dungeons are supposed to be used.

For example, at the beginning of the adventure they tell you:

• This is boxed text. You should read it.
• Here is a list of specific things you should do; including getting a marching order so that you know where the PCs are positioned when the goblins ambush them.
• When the goblins ambush them, this is the step-by-step guide for how combat should start and what you should be doing while running the combat.
• Here are several specific ways that the PCs can track the goblins back to their lair, and here’s a walk-thru of how you can resolve each one.

This is all great. Concrete, specific advice presented in a clear and highly usable format.

But then the PCs get to the goblins’ lair and… nothing.

To be clear, they do a fantastic job of presenting the dungeon:

• General Features
• What the Goblins Know (always love this)
• Keyed map
• And, of course, the keyed entries describing each room.

Again, these are all great.

But the step-by-step instructions for how you’re actually supposed to use this material? It just… stops. The designers obviously just assume that reading text out loud requires a detailed explanation, but how you run a dungeon is just a skill that everyone is born with.

Which is, of course, really silly.

But I digress. As I mentioned, this problem is a much larger and more systemic than the D&D Starter Set. It’s just particularly sad to see the ball getting dropped in an introductory product.

QUIBBLES & NITPICKS

Two more quick nitpicks before we do a proper dive into the adventure book.

First, Wizards of the Coast is allergic to referencing page numbers and I don’t get it. The “logic,” which they’ve explained from time to time, is that they don’t want to include, for example, a specific page number in the Monster Manual because it’s possible that they’ll revise the Monster Manual and the page numbers will change.

But in the 20+ years they’ve been eschewing page numbers, and I cannot emphasize this enough, they have never done this. The first time it might happen is next year.

It’s, frankly, dumb in general because it makes their books much, much harder to use than they need to be. And in the specific case of the D&D Starter Set it’s even dumber because this is a self-contained product. If you were to some day revise the Starter Set, you could just update the page references.

But because Wizards of the Coast is allergic to page numbers, brand new DMs will be cursed with needlessly flipping back and forth through the books, trying to figure out where specific sections are after the authors wave vaguely in their direction.

(I will give them partial credit for an Index that isn’t complete garbage.)

Second, the random encounter procedures for dungeons given in the Starter Set are kinda garbage. They give random encounter tables, but then instruct brand new DMs, “Make an encounter check whenever you feel like it. Or don’t. But you definitely should. But don’t make too many of them, because you’ll ruin your game. How many is too many? Eh. I dunno. You’ll figure it out. Maybe.”

I suspect this text may have originally been more closely tied to detailed dungeon procedures which were present in pre-5^th Edition D&D Next playtest material but removed from the game entirely at the eleventh hour. But this is, nonetheless, bad praxis, and even moreso in material you’re presenting to first-time DMs.

LOST MINE OF PHANDELVER

Which finally brings us to Lost Mine of Phandelver, the adventure book.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here: This is good.

It’s really, really good.

I’m pretty comfortable describing Lost Mine as the single best introductory adventure D&D has ever had, and I don’t think the competition is even close.

First, it’s not just an adventure. It’s an entire campaign. In just 50 pages, Lost Mine of Phandelver presents seven — seven! — different scenarios plus the lushly detailed village of Phandalin. (The other 14 pages in the booklet are devoted to the monster manual, magic item vault, and rules index.) I am completely blown away by this.

And it’s not just the amount of material presented here. This is a really good campaign, and it’s particularly excellent as an exemplar for new DMs figuring out how to make their own campaigns.

We can start by looking at the structure of the campaign:

• Lost Mine of Phandelver starts with the PCs on their way to the village of Phandalin.
• A simple ambush-based scenario hook pulls the PCs into a goblin lair called the Cragmaw Hideout. The initial encounter is a perfect kickoff for first-time players and DMs, starting with an intriguing enigma (dead horses lying in the road) before smoothly transitioning to a combat encounter featuring a simple, but meaningful tactical dilemma for the players.
• The Cragmaw dungeon itself is absolutely fantastic: It’s non-linear. It takes advantage of the third-dimension. The key is clear, clever, and features several really cool ideas (like the dams that the goblins can use to create a defensive flood). It repeatedly emphasizes the opportunity not only for combat, but also roleplaying and clever problem-solving. Everything here implicitly tells the players that their choices matter and teaches the DM how to actively respond to what the PCs are doing.
• The Cragmaw hideout also features multiple scenario hooks, giving the players several options to pursue.
• Whenever the PCs arrive in Phandalin (whether they head there immediately or after pursuing the scenario hooks from the Cragmaw hideout), the entire village is set up to deliver another half dozen or more scenario hooks to them. The result is that the players end up with an entire menu of scenario hooks to choose between, once against emphasizing that their choices matter.
• The individual scenarios are also interconnected, in a really beautiful node-based design that ultimately funnels the PCs into the campaign finale at Wave Echo Cave, which (a) has been foreshadowed since the very beginning of the campaign and (b) is another fantastic dungeon scenario with excellent non-linear design and multiple factions.

I really can’t emphasize just how great this is.

On top of this rock solid campaign frame, the individual adventures are, as I’ve already suggested, equally excellent. I’ve mentioned the strategically interesting non-linear design of the dungeons and the Three Clue Rule, but they also feature retreating foes, personalized magic items redolent with history and flavor, and a wonderfully varied cast of characters.

On top of all that, although I quibbled about the presentation of the random dungeon encounters, the random wilderness encounters are given a very effective procedure AND they’re linked to the scenarios, providing another level of interconnectivity in the campaign.

THE VERDICT

The Starter Set Rulebook is very good, but unfortunately flawed in a couple key ways.

That almost doesn’t matter, though, because I’d pay $20 for just Lost Mine of Phandelver in a heartbeat. And I’d do it even faster than that if I could.

Best introductory adventure for D&D ever published? Definitely.

Best adventure book of any kind published by Wizards of the Coast? Quite possibly.

Overall, the 1983 Basic Set probably remains the best introduction to D&D ever published. But if I’d been given Lost Mine of Phandelver when I was a first-time DM, it would have made me a much better DM than I was, and that’s something special. Even if you’re an experienced DM with years of play under your belt, it’s still a really enjoyable campaign that’s immaculate in its construction.

I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

Grade: A

• Lost Mine of Phandelver: A+

Lead Designers: Mike Mearls, Jeremy Crawford
Design Team: Christopher Perkins, James Wyatt, Rodney Thompson, Robert J. Schwalb, Peter Lee, Steve Townshend, Bruce R. Cordell
Adventure Designers: Richard Baker, Christopher Perkins

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $19.95
Page Count: 96

D&D Beyond: Lost Mine of Phandelver (Free!)

FURTHER READING
Review: D&D Essentials Kit
Review: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle (D&D Starter Set 2022)

Buy Now!

On April 3^rd, 1998, a new column appeared in Pyramid Magazine for the first time: “Suppressed Transmission” by Kenneth Hite.

Let’s unpack this.

Pyramid, which premiered in 1993, was a gaming magazine published by Steve Jackson Games. It had been preceded by the legendary Space Gamer (1980-85) and Roleplayer (1986-93). The original Pyramid ended its run in March 1998, but only because SJG was taking the unprecedented step of offering Pyramid as a subscription website.

Today, this is likely to elicit little more than a shrug. At the time, though, it was a hugely controversial decision. Pay money?! For a website?!

But Pyramid was the last of the generalist RPG magazines. (Dragon had finished its transformation into a complete house organ. White Wolf and Challenge were already gone. Shadis would be out of print by the end of the year.) Going to an online subscription model would allow it to survive. And survive it did, each week delivering a half dozen or so articles and reviews.

Note: Some of my earliest professional sales were made to Pyramid Magazine during this time period. Check the Bibliography for more information.

And right from the beginning, Hite’s “Suppressed Transmission” was there.

To describe Hite’s column as a “hit” honestly feels inadequate. A common “joke” at the time was that the majority of Pyramid’s subscribers were only subscribing so that they could have access to “Suppressed Transmission,” but I’m not really sure it was a joke. No matter where you were hanging out in the online RPG community, each new column would immediately spark furious discussion. It sometimes felt like we were all just waiting for the next column to drop. It rapidly established itself as something between a tentpole and a shibboleth.

Sheer popularity alone, however, doesn’t fully describe the impact of “Suppressed Transmission.” It was a huge influence for an entire generation of game designers and game masters, mainstreaming — at least in the RPG field — a slew of ideas and influences which had previously existed out on the fringe.

“You know about the suppressed transmission, of course?”
– Slacker

Okay, enough beating around the bush. What is the Suppressed Transmission?

There is, in truth, an ineffable quality to the column that can make it difficult to capture exactly what makes the column so special. But the short version is that Kenneth Hite has a voracious appetite for:

• Conspiracy
• Secret History
• Horror
• Alternate History

He takes these four elements and, like a master alchemist, mixes them into potent elixirs — “suppressed transmissions” ready for broadcasting into your campaign.

So that’s part one: Hite has collected a treasure trove of the most amazing and crazed material, and he shares it freely with the reader while inventing even more besides. For example, when the world went mad for the “truths” revealed by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, I was underwhelmed largely because Kenneth Hite had already revealed those “truths” to me… and a dozen other Grail conspiracies besides, all trussed, roasted, carved, and served up for the game table.

The second thing — and this can be quite hard to communicate to anyone who hasn’t actually read one of the Suppressed Transmissions — is the sheer density Hite achieves. Reading these columns is like having a firehose aimed at your brain. In a four-page essay, Hite can deliver mind-blowingly brilliant concepts for a dozen — or more! — full-fledged campaigns. A Suppressed Transmission collection is like a neutron star, and every paragraph neutronium.

For example, in “Six Flags Over Roswell,” Hite takes the Roswell alien crash in 1947 (conspiracy) and looks at what might have happened if the crash had really taken place at six different points in time (alternate history). Not only is every one of these variations pure gold, but for most you can just as easily frame a campaign around the event itself (PCs are Union spies racing their Confederate counterparts to investigate the crash), the immediate aftermath (psychic alien body-jumpers are infiltrating the Mexican government), or the strange other-world that results (the covert war of the Wizards of Menlo Park or the steampunk Republic of Texas).

Or all three.

In “Justinian and Arthur,” Hite introduces the concept of “high historical fantasy.” From Procopius’ Anekdota he takes the claim that Justinian and Theodora, Emperor and Empress of the Byzantine Empire, were secretly possessed by demons. Then he observes that King Arthur was essentially Justinian’s contemporary, and from Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur he takes the Roman War in which Arthur fought an emperor who “had gotten with him fifty giants which had been engendered of fiends.” Sure, the emperor in Malory is Lucius, but that’s easily swapped out, and then:

Set [the PCs] out on the wild frontier between Arthur’s Britain and the Byzantine Empire. (No, there wasn’t any such border in Real History. I’ve got news for you; there weren’t any demons in Real History and there probably wasn’t any King Arthur, either.)

As the PCs find out more and more about Justinian’s demonic plans, they can work with Arthur’s spies, be harassed by the Unseelie Court of Morgan le Fay, and generally skulk around dodging fiend-engendered ogres Nazgul enforcer types. […] Finally, they uncover Jusinian’s plan — to find the Holy Grail and pervert it for his diabolical ends! Warning Arthur just in time, the PCs must keep the Grail safe from Justinian’s demon-giants and distract Belisarius (or convince him that Justinian is a demon; no small task given that his wife is in the same coven as Empress Theodora) so that Arthur can defeat the evil Romans and save the day. This is the sort of thing you can call “historical high fantasy;” it has the advantages of historical games (evocatively familiar and wonderful names and places, conveniently assembled background materials for research at your whim) without the disadvantages (having to do research to get things perfect, having to stay true to history, having to risk a player who knows more about the period than you do). When you add the cool fantasy trappings like giants, monsters, demons, magic swords, sorcery, and poison, you got game.

Oh, and do take the time to read Procopius. The bit with the demon-Emperor’s disappearing head is a hoot.

This is the sort of thing that Hite does all the time, taking 2 + 2 + 2 and somehow making it equal 187 (which means “the beginning of great enlightenment” in New Age kabbalism).

But it’s more than that.

As Hite takes you on wild romps like:

• Who Killed Kit Marlowe?
• A Night To Embroider: Who Sank the Titanic?
• A Dish Best Served Cold: The Antarctic Space Nazis
• Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
• Patterns in Amber
• Things To Do In Gaming When You’re Dead

The real suppressed transmission — the transmission hiding within the transmission — is that Hite is showing how he creates campaigns and adventures. Every column is an exemplar of how he sources material and then combines it, twists its, inverts, bissociates it, and builds upon it to create pure gaming gold.

As you work your way through a Suppressed Transmissions collection — and I do recommend taking it slowly; this is material best savored rather than binged (no matter how tempting the binge might be) — you can feel Hite reprogramming your brain.

And we haven’t even gotten into his alphabets (here’s 26 bite-sized, themed bits of awesome to inspire your adventures) or his how-to essays that peel back the curtain to look at each of the four pillars of Suppressed Transmissions (conspiracy, alternate history, secret history, and horror) in detail.

It will probably come as no surprise at this point to learn that I consider “Suppressed Transmission” to be a major influence on me as a creator and as a GM. Despite this, until recently, I haven’t talked about the column very much. The primary reason for this is that it simply wasn’t available: When the online version of Pyramid was shut down in 2008, the archives became unavailable and the published collections went out of print.

Sadly, for the most part, this remains true. Hite wrote over three hundred “Suppressed Transmission” columns, and the vast majority of these remain available only to those of us who were subscribed to Pyramid in its final days and downloaded the archives before they were taken offline.

But at some point in the not-too-distant past, Steve Jackson Games has brought Suppressed Transmission: The First Broadcast and Suppressed Transmission 2: The Second Broadcast back into print. These two collections include several dozen of the original columns, each of which has been festooned with detailed footnotes and extensive commentaries that somehow manage to make them even more awesome.

In conclusion…

… what the heck are you waiting for?

Grade: A+

Author: Kenneth Hite

Publisher: Steve Jackson Games
Price: $29.99 (each)
Page Count: 128 (each)

At the moment, there are three major published campaigns for Night’s Black Agents. I’ve previously reviewed The Zalozhniy Quartet, and The Dracula Dossier is a beast still awaiting its time in the sun for me. (If you’ll forgive either the least or the most appropriate metaphor of all time). So today let’s take a peek at The Persephone Extraction.

At first glance, this looks like an adventure anthology: Five adventures. Five authors (each presumably writing one of the scenarios). And, in its first paragraph, the book does kind of limply wave its hand in the direction of “they can be played individually.”

In reality, however, this is definitely a mini-campaign. In fact, it’s virtually impossible to imagine running this in any other way: The continuity between the scenarios is tightly woven and all of them are pretty immutably bound to the specific vampiric mythology of the campaign.

STRUCTURAL ISSUES

The Persephone Extraction is also pretty wedded to the idea that you can play most of its scenarios, after the introductory scenario, in any order.  Which is good in theory, but in practice you can’t have a big finale adventure with a bunch of continuity dependent on the PCs’ having played the other scenarios in a wide-open node structure where the PCs could head to the finale at literally any time.

Well… you can. It just won’t end well.

(Pun intended.)

With that being said, The Persephone Extraction repeats the gimmick from The Zalozhniy Quartet where the clues pointing to other scenarios are listed in the “Aftermath” section at the end of the scenario, instead of being mentioned in the locations where the clues would actually be discovered. So the idea may be less that the players are free to pursue the scenarios in any order, and more that the GM is free to choose the order in which they will be played and can choose which clues to seed into each scenario to force that to happen. (Which is such an anathema to me, that it’s difficult to understand why anyone would want such a functionality, but maybe they exist.)

Either way, I’m fairly certain the number of GMs who will get to the end of one of these scenarios and go, “Crap. I forgot to include the clues they need for the next scenario,” will be non-zero. It’s just such an unfriendly way of organizing material for actual play.

On a similar “unfriendly for actual play” note, some of the authors also have a deep desire to title every scene as if it were a short story:

• When the Wind Blows
• The Thin Red Line
• Guerilla Gardening
• Going Viral
• City on the Edge of Nowhere

I get the impulse, because they sound cool and feel evocative. In practice, sadly, it just makes it incredibly tough to simply flip through the book and find what you’re looking for.

CONSPYRAMID & VAMPYRAMID

The fact that the book is titling individual scenes has probably also made you suspicious that they’re once again prepping plot instead of Conspyramid nodes. This is, unfortunately, true. Unlike The Zalozhniy Quartet, however, The Persephone Extraction does include a Conspyramid.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, Night’s Black Agents features a campaign structure called the Conspyramid. It consists of various nodes — the cults, front companies, sources of blood, and other infrastructure of the vampire conspiracy — arranged into a pyramid diagram and connected to each other.  The result is a model of the conspiracy that the PCs can navigate through using both clues from their investigations and the games’ proactive investigation mechanics.

The Conspyramid in your Night’s Black Agents campaign, therefore, is also the structure of play.

The Conspyramid in The Persephone Extraction, on the other hand, is largely incoherent because it’s so utterly divorced from the tightly-plotted, linear scenarios that fill the rest of the book and are the actual structure of play. This actual structure of play is perhaps better represented by the “scene flow diagrams” that are jammed in at the back of the book, although only somewhat.

Of far more use, however, is The Persephone Extraction’s custom Vampyramid.

The Vampyramid in Night’s Black Agents is a parallel structure to the Conspyramids and is basically a system for managing the conspiracy’s reactions to the PCs’ actions. Unlike the Conspyramid, which is unique for each campaign, the core rulebook includes a standard Vampyramid that can be used in every campaign. The Persephone Extraction, however, eschews the standard Vampyramid, and instead offers a heavily customized version for use with the adventures in the book.

This is really cool tech: It’s a cool enhancement for this campaign specifically, and it’s a great model for doing the same thing in your other Night’s Black Agents campaigns.

(The only quibble being that the Vampyramid is designed to be used in conjunction with a fully functional Conspyramid, and since The Persephone Extraction isn’t actually structured around the Conspyramid, you can’t actually use the Vampyramid procedures. Whoopsie. But the material is nonetheless useful, even if you’re going to have to improvise a bit to make it work.)

SPOILER WARNING

Let’s lay all these structural problems aside and assume that you’re just going to run The Persephone Extraction as the lightly branch-plotted experience it’s primarily designed to be.

What is this campaign, exactly?

We’ll be revealing some spoilers here. Proceed at your own risk, wanderer!

THE SPIRITS OF HADES

The vampires of The Persephone Extraction are Orphic in nature: The Greek legends of Hades reflect a dark truth and the tale of Orpheus, in particular, is the refracted memory of a vampire origin story. A mortal descends into a strange realm filled with the souls of the dead, and as they return one of those souls follows them out. One might even say that the dead was shadowing them… literally, because that dead spirit was hidden within their shadow.

Destroyed by the sun, just like any vampire of the non-glittery variety, these undead spirits can become bound to the shadows of their hosts as companion spirits and thus escape their purgatory. Nonetheless, they remain terribly diminished, little more than a memory of their mortal selves; reduced physically to a vaporous spirit and even mentally to an often confused and dazed state.

… until blood is spilt near them.

From the lifeblood of mortals, the vampiric spirit can draw strength. The more blood spilt, the more powerful it becomes. Powerful enough to escape its host shadow. Powerful enough to taste life again. Powerful enough to forge a global conspiracy to ensure that the blood will always flow.

The classical, Greco-Roman mythological inspiration for these vampires is basically straight up my alley. I love everything about them: I love how you can pull source material from mythologies across the globe, give it a twist, and end up with a new scenario. I love that they feel utterly alien to what we think of when somebody says “vampire,” but are nonetheless so firmly rooted in vampiric traditions as to leave no doubt to their right to bear the name. I love how the mythology provides an easy mechanism for ramping up threat and difficulty (increase the available blood = increase the difficulty of the vampire). I love that it takes what we know about history and mythology and warps it through a lens of “truth” that leaves your faith in reality deeply shaken.

These vampires are so cool, they almost sell The Persephone Extraction all by themselves.

I do, unfortunately, have to ruin things with a few more quibbles.

First, the mechanical implication of the concept – which features a triptych of bulky stat blocks – feels pretty clunky and very finicky. But, to be fair, I have not actually run a game with these stat blocks, so perhaps they work better in actual practice than it would seem.

More problematic, in my opinion, is that the handling of the vampiric metaphysics in The Persephone Extraction is pretty sloppy. For example: What can a vampire do while it’s hiding in its host’s shadow? Depending on the adventure, the answer seems to vary from complete impotence to a poorly defined grab bag of supernatural chicanery.

I suspect the problem here boils down to the multiple writers working on the book. I’m only assuming that each of them worked on a separate scenario, but it would neatly explain these inconsistencies. (Of course, that doesn’t mean you won’t have to figure out how to fix things up at your own table.)

THE PALE AGENDA

The vampires atop the conspiracy move at a different pace from the modern world: They sleep long and awaken rarely, leaving their day-to-day affairs in the hands of their philomeli; their hosts. As technology and communication have sped up, the ancient spirits become more disoriented and confused. Some have withdrawn into permanent torpor.

Others, however, have concluded that the herd is out of control and it’s time for a culling.

To this end the conspiracy has spent several years experimenting with the Marsburg virus, creating the experimental MAR-VX variant. This is the apocalypse in a bottle, capable of wiping out 99% of the human race and returning the population base to a level that the vampires feel they will be able to control.

This is known as the Pale Agenda. Originally initiated as a safety contingency, part of the conspiracy has decided it’s time to put the plan into motion. This has created a schism, however, between the Loyalists (“we do whatever our lords and ladies tell us to do”) and the Dissidents (“we like being rich and powerful, and our money and our power depends on modern civilization existing”). This division within the conspiracy creates a lovely dynamic, which is reflected in both the scenario design as well as the variant Vampyramid.

The Pale Agenda is, obviously, horrific almost beyond the scope of imagination. It’s a great way of cranking up the campaign stakes: It’s not just a vampiric conspiracy you’re struggling against; it’s the literal end of the world.

The only drawback, unfortunately, is that the continuity is, once again, a little sloppy.

For example, in the opening scenario the Loyalists frame the PCs for destroying the MAR-VX virus and all the research that would allow the conspiracy to recreate it. Which kinda undermines the campaign stakes I was just lauding, but then there’s a scenario where the PCs have to stop the vampires from getting their hands on a sample of the MAR-V virus that the MAR-VX virus was based on. (But I thought all the research showing how to turn MAR-V into MAR-VX was destroyed?) And then later none of that actually matters, because in the final scenario “the last surviving canister of augmented MAR-VX” just shows up no matter what the PCs have done.

THE SLOW DECAY

I read The Zalozhniy Quartet and The Persephone Extraction back-to-back to see which campaign I would be running this summer.

For the first half of the book, I was terribly excited about The Persephone Extraction and it was easily outpacing the Quartet: The overall design was far stronger and more coherent. The concept for its vampires electrifyingly original. The scenarios interesting and varied.

In the back half of The Persephone Extraction, unfortunately, the promise of the pomegranate blossom wilted pretty fast. As the campaign moves forward, both the mythology and the logistics of the conspiracy seem to melt down into an inchoate mess.

Some of this is the result of the myriad continuity errors we’ve already discussed, but another factor seems to be the designers’ desire to prep heaping mounds of contingencies on top of a vaguely defined mythology.

The failure to achieve a coherent metaphysic for the mythology is perhaps best exemplified in the second-to-last scenario, which is designed to allow the PCs to pass through a gate and into the Underworld from which the vampiric spirits come. This Orphic journey is insanely ambitious and the excitement I experienced in reading the initial pitch for this scenario was immense. Unfortunately, the book just can’t nail down what’s actually happening to the PCs and, like the dog who’s just caught a car and has just realized that they don’t know what happens next, the designer seems to have no idea how to actually realize the epic scope of what they’re grasping for, and so we end up with a weird railroad built on top of amorphous geography.

Contingency-based-prep, on the other hand, is when you “try to second-guess your players and develop mutually contradictory material for every possible choice they might make.” The Persephone Extraction’s plot-based prep combined with the directive that the scenarios should be playable “in any order” (or skipped entirely) unfortunately takes the perfectly legitimate desire to have the PCs’ actions in the previous scenarios impact the final scenario and makes it cancerous.

They still might have pulled off this nigh-impossible juggling act if they weren’t balancing on the house of cards formed from their ill-defined mythology. The result is a final scenario that just doesn’t really make much sense: Baffling stuff just sort of arbitrarily happens while the GM is awkwardly shoving the PCs around. This becomes a feedback loop, because the less stuff makes sense, the more confused the players will become, and the more the GM will need to shove them into situations they don’t (and can’t) understand.

Sadly, despite so much of this confusion being in service of “making the PCs’ actions matter,” the designers — trapped in their plot-based prep — ultimately can’t even deliver on that promise (as evidenced by the aforementioned canister of MAR-VX that materializes out of thin air because the plot requires it).

So, ultimately, we are left with the incredible concepts at the heart of the campaign and the very strong opening giving way to a disappointing finale, with my own opinion slipping from “must run ASAP” to “maybe I’ll fix this some day.”

Hopefully this review has captured this dichotomy — not only reflecting my ultimate disappointment, but also my excitement at The Persephone Extraction’s very real strengths.

In the end, I give The Persephone Extraction a cautious recommendation. But my own decision, ultimately, was to run The Zalozhniy Quartet, and that’s also what I’d recommend to anyone else trying to figure out which Night’s Black Agents mini-campaign they should check out first.

Grade: C+

Story Design: Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
Designers: Heather Albano, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Emma Marlow, Will Plant, Bill White

Publisher: Pelgrane Press
Cost: $29.99
Page Count: 160

The Zalozhniy Quartet is a mini-campaign for Night’s Black Agents, the thriller RPG where retired special ops agents discover that vampires are real and then vow to destroy the undead conspiracy once and for all.

Or, at least, that’s what I’m choosing to call it.

The Quartet bills itself as a “thriller story arc of four missions,” in which “each of the missions can be played individually, or linked into a campaign in any order.” But this doesn’t seem to hold up to close inspection.

We’ll come back to that.

SPOILER WARNING!

This review is absolutely going to ruin the twists and surprises of The Zalozhniy Quartet for you. So if you have any intention of playing in this mini-campaign at some point in the future, you should leap through the nearest window and make a daring escape. (Figuratively speaking.)

The major opposition of the Quartet is the Lisky Bratva, a Russian mafia that has figured out how to create the zalozhniy: Vampiric entities whose moment of death has been undone, transforming them into killing machines that can only be stopped if you recreate the lethal wound which has been “edited” out of their personal timeline. For an extra creep factor, this temporal meddling causes all kinds of weird, non-linear events whenever a zalozhniy is near.

In addition to the criminal machinations of the Lisky Bratva, the Quartet also features the Philby Plot, in which the historical figures of Henry St. John Philby and his son Kim Philby, both spies whom infamously betrayed the British government during the 20^th century, are revealed to have been part of an alchemical plot in which the entire Saudi royal bloodline was given a vampiric contamination. Anyone who can track down the tri-partite alchemical reagents known as the Albedo, Nigredo, and Rubedo will be able to complete St. John’s final ritual, transform the entire Saudi royal family into their vampiric thralls, and take de facto control of one of the richest nations on the planet.

… guess what the Lisky Bratva want?

Together, the zalozhniy and the Philby Plot form two fantastic pillars for The Zalozhniy Quartet to build around. The myriad individual ops are also great – varied, dynamic, and well-tuned to show off the strengths of the Night’s Black Agents system.

The basic bottom line here is that the core of the Quartet is very good. Personally, I find the concepts compelling and the raw material useful. It’s the type of adventure that you read and think, “I can’t wait to see what my players do with this!” And, as a testament to that, I’m currently halfway through running a Zalozhniy Quartet campaign.

So, obviously, I’m going to recommend The Zalozhniy Quartet. If you have any interest in Night’s Black Agents, this gives you a lot of awesome stuff to play with and great bang-for-your-buck.

But I do have some reservations.

THE FLY IN RENFIELD’S OINTMENT

Robin D. Laws often says that published adventures are valuable because they teach you what and how to prep for the game.

And that’s the problem with The Zalozhniy Quartet: This is not how you’re supposed to prep a Night’s Black Agents campaign.

A Night’s Black Agents campaign is organized around the Conspyramid, a selection of nodes — sources of blood, funding, and protection; cults, institutions, infrastructure, front companies, etc. — arranged into a pyramidal form and connected to each other, creating a model of the vampiric conspiracy which the agents will navigate.

This is not, however, what The Zalozhniy Quartet does.

Now, to be fair, the intention of the Quartet is that it can be plugged into your existing Conspyramid. For example, if you have a Russian mafia node on your Conspyramid, you can just use the Lisky Bratva! This is why the book says the adventures can be played in any order, because the idea seems to be that each adventure can be plugged in as a separate node on your Conspyramid (and the agents should be free to navigate the Conspyramid without being locked into a sequence).

This is good in theory, but the actual execution is flawed.

For example, the adventures can’t actually be played in any order. At least, not as written. There are too many continuity errors, including one instance where, if the PCs aren’t playing them in the right sequence, there’s supposed to be a phone call that basically says, “The stuff that happens in the other adventure is already over-and-done. You missed it.” Another of the missions — “The Zalozhniy Sanction” — is clearly designed to be played first.

I suspect this is because the series was originally designed to be played in sequence, and then at some point in development it was decided that they should become modular. The retrofit, however, was slapdash, and it wreaked havoc on the book.

For example, if the adventures can be played in any sequence, then logically each adventure should include clues pointing to all the other adventures. And this is true. Except the clues aren’t integrated into the adventures. Instead, they’re listed as separate Exit Vectors and Entry Vectors for each scenario, which also don’t match each other. (So, for example, the entry vectors for “Out of the Ashes” say that PCs in “The Boxmen” will be able to trace the owner of a safe deposit box or some business correspondence to get to “Out of the Ashes.” But if you check the Exit Vectors for “The Boxmen” these clues do not appear!)

It’s difficult to really express how intensely unfriendly this presentation is to the GM.

Similarly, the book also provides an adversary roster for the Lisky Bratva:

At first glance, this seems useful. Except:

1. There are significant continuity errors between the structure shown on the map and the structure described in the text of the book; and
2. The structure shown in the diagram doesn’t match the structure of play.

See, the function of an adversary roster in Night’s Black Agents is to guide the players’ investigation: They follow the connections from one adventure to the next.

But there’s no way to do that in The Zalozhniy Quartet as written, because, in addition to the damage wrought by the retrofit, the original structure of the scenario was clearly a linear railroad and that structure hasn’t actually been removed!

You can see this very clearly, for example, in the first adventure in the book, “The Zalozhniy Sanction.” The PCs are hired to investigate a Lisky Bratva smuggling operation, but the job is scripted to fail and the GM needs to force them to go on the run. (Oof.)

And not just on the run in general (despite the extended chase rules in Night’s Black Agents being specifically designed to empower the players to choose how and where they run to). The GM needs to force the PCs to specifically make a run to their handler’s safe house in Vienna. (Oof again.)

With the PCs forced onto this path, an effort is then made to actually invoke the extended chase rules… except that just won’t do, because on their way to Vienna, the PCs need to be dragged through a whole sequence of ops:

• Sabotaging a football team
• Infiltrating a vampire monastery
• Rescuing an investigative reporter
• Breaking up a human trafficking ring
• Disrupting a mafia meeting

So the extended chase rules are invoked in name-only, but don’t actually do anything. (Oof a third time.)

(This “just ignore the chase rules” thing happens quite a bit in the adventure. For example, there’s a thriller chase elsewhere in the adventure where if the PCs lose the chase, the target they’re chasing goes boom; but if they win the chase, then the target goes boom and so does a PC. Which is backassed adventure design.)

Plus, this whole thing doesn’t really make any sense because the Lisky Bratva’s reaction to the PCs is insanely out of proportion. For example, they stage a major terrorist incident killing hundreds of people in an effort to silence some people who… tried but failed to steal some intel?

Then, on top of all this, the Quartet’s best intentions end up biting it in the ass: It wants to be something that any Night’s Black Agents GM can plug into their campaign, which is admirable. But Night’s Black Agents notably includes a system for creating custom vampires, which means in any given campaign they could be anything from Nosferatu to psychic statues to alien space vapor.

So as you draw towards the finale of The Zalozhniy Quartet and, in particular, the Philby Plot comes into focus, the writers have a problem:

• What, exactly, did Philby do?
• What, exactly, are the albedo, rubedo, and nigredo?
• What, exactly, does the final ritual entail?

And so forth.

In a quest for genericness, the writers literally can’t answer these questions. They do, to their credit, offer you a bunch of options, but they are, perforce, vague options. They can’t actually nail anything down, which means they also can’t design concrete, playable scenarios. The inevitable result is that, as the campaign reaches its grand conclusion, it just kind of dissolves into a mushy non-entity.

CONCLUSION

That seems like a lot of problems. And it is.

But I also said that The Zalozhniy Quartet is very good and that I heartily recommend it.

So… what gives?

Well, remember those ops I mentioned above? They’re all pretty great. So are the other ops in the book:

• Extracting an enemy intelligence agent
• Performing a heist on a private Swiss bank
• Raiding a museum in Baghdad
• Tracking down the Thing Which Was Once St. John

So, yes. There are some large scale structural problems. But the actual adventure content ranges from pretty good to really good, and the core pillars of the campaign — the zalozhniy and the Philby Plot — are conceptually fantastic (even if you need to fill in a few holes).

Plus, here’s the great thing: Night’s Black Agents already has an incredibly flexible and robust campaign structure. Remember the Conspyramid? All you need to do is pull the ops out of the book, plug them into a fully functional Conspyramid, and you’re good to go. As remixes go, Night’s Black Agents makes this one really simple.

Don’t get me wrong. If The Zalozhniy Quartet wasn’t so messy, it would receive a significantly higher grade from me. It doesn’t take much imagination, in fact, to see that it might have been one of the best RPG campaigns ever written. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and what we’re left with is a flawed masterpiece.

But even a flawed masterpiece is going to create some pretty cool experiences at your table.

Good hunting!

Grade: B-

Author: Gareth Hanrahan
Story Design: Kenneth Hite

Publisher: Pelgrane Press
Cost: $26.95
Page Count: 148

FURTHER READING
Review: Night’s Black Agents

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