In Night’s Black Agents, the PCs are considered to be operating under one of three levels of funding:

• Insufficient Funds
• Steady Funds
• Excessive Funds

As described on p. 95 of the Night’s Black Agents rulebook, their level of funding determines what types of supplies they can easily obtain. (For example, agents with Steady funds can buy same-day plane reservations, while those with Insufficient funds can’t. If you’ve got Excessive funds, on the other hand, you can just charter a plane.)

If you don’t have the funds for the op you’re trying to put together, then you’ll need to figure out some way around your constrained funds. (And the game gives you plenty of tools for doing this, ranging from hitting up the black market, reaching out to friendly contacts, making it for yourself, or stealing it.) You can also, of course, try to figure out how to improve your funding, which usually means doing some sort of job.

(You can also find details on this in the Night’s Black Agents system cheat sheet.)

The great thing is that all of this encourages the players to dig in: Whether it’s stealing what they need, sourcing from a black market dealer (who may betray them to the conspiracy), or taking an iffy job that pays well enough to keep them swimming in silver bullets for a few months, all of it fuels the complexity, paranoia, and tough choices at the heart of the espionage genre.

As I’ve been running Night’s Black Agents, though, I’ve found myself wanting a little more structure for tracking and making rulings on the PCs’ current funding status. Partly for my own sake, but also because I think having some structure will help the players feel in control… which will drive further strategic decision-making and create interesting choices and dilemmas in play.

PATRONAGE

If the PCs are supported by a patron — an intelligence agency, occult billionaire, etc. — the patron will provide either Steady or Excessive funds.

This funding will only change if their patronage is endangered (e.g., their patron is killed or the PCs are blacklisted).

Note: If you don’t want to worry about fluctuating funding, just give the PCs some form of the patronage. If you don’t necessarily want it to come with a string (or even a face attached), consider some sort of trust fund. I would generally recommend having patrons offer Steady funding, thus encouraging the PCs to occasionally have to figure out how to get their hands on Excessive funding when the occasion calls for it.

STRAINED FUNDING

If the PCs are providing their own funding, then they begin each op with a Funding pool of 5 points.

Each time the PCs make a significant purchase, they have to spend one point from this pool. The GM ultimately decides what constitutes a significant purchase, but they should remember that Funds should still effortlessly cover regular expenses and typical lifestyle. (And, of course, they should try to be consistent in these rulings.)

Tip: I’ve found hotels to be a useful way to think about this. A group with Steady funds, according to the rulebook, can stay in a normal hotel. So if they want to book a four-star hotel? Or simultaneously rent rooms at multiple hotels? Those are probably significant expenses.

On the other hand, a group with Excessive funds can regularly stay in four-star hotels, so that wouldn’t be a significant expense for them. If they want to rent a $10 million mansion, on the other hand? Spend a point of Funds.

The group with Steady funds, however, couldn’t rent the $10 million mansion from Funds. (If they need such a mansion, they’ll either need to improve their funding or they’ll need to create a bespoke solution for using the mansion.)

If the group needs to make a significant purchase, but they don’t have a Funding point to spend, then the op has strained their Funds. They can continue making significant purchases, but they will begin their next operation with strained funds.

If the group has strained funds — e.g., Steady (strained) — then they begin each op with a Funding pool of only 3 points. In addition, if a group with strained funds once again needs to make a significant purchase when they don’t have a Funding point to spend, they’ve exhausted their funds and their funding level drops by one level (e.g., a group with strained Steady funds would now have Insufficient funds).

Repairing Strained Funds: If a group has strained funds, they can take action to repair it — e.g., doing a well-paid job or robbing the payroll for a black ops mercenary team. If that happens, simply remove the strained condition from their funds.

Optional Rule — Strong Funding: In addition to strained funding, you could also introduce a class of strong funding — e.g., Steady (strong). This doesn’t increase the group’s Funding pool, but if a group with strong funding strains their funding, they only lose their strong funding status. (So it gives them some protection from strained funds.)

Optional Rule — Out of Cash: There’s no funding level below Insufficient, so if a group with Insufficient (strained) funds runs out of Funding points, they can no longer make significant purchases for the remainder of the op.

Note: This can easily doom an op. They can’t travel, get a car, or even rent a hotel room. In some campaigns, that can easily be a feature (and strongly motivate them to solve the problem). But if that doesn’t sound interesting, just don’t use this optional rule. Insufficient funds are punishing enough all by themselves.

Optional Rule – Insufficient Funding Crisis: Alternatively, if a group with Insufficient (strained) funds strains their funding again, this will trigger a funding crisis: Their car gets repoed. They get kicked out of their hotel room. A source of stability badgers them about unpaid child support (and they can’t use that source of stability to refresh until they solve it).

Note: Remember, there are already rules in the game for improving your current funds.

OPTION: STRAINED PATRONAGE

As another option, even if the PCs have a patron, you can still choose to track funding strain: The agents won’t necessarily find their funding pulled, but they might have to do one or two “budget ops” while their accounts are being audited or deal with some other logistical or bureaucratic consequences for taking advantage of their patron’s generosity / abusing the tax payers’ money.

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

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

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

(click for PDF)

Night’s Black Agents is Kenneth Hite’s love letter to spy-fi and vampire horror: The PCs are ex-intelligent agents who have sunken into the cold, mercenary realities of the underworld… and in that underworld they find the vampire conspiracy waiting for them. Whether it’s for salvation or survival, it’s time for them to get back to work.

• Innovative systems for Heat, thriller chases, thriller combat, and spy tradecraft that pivot GUMSHOE’s focus from reactive mystery-solving (“let’s go look for some clues!”) to proactive covert ops (“let’s go make some clues!”).
• The incredibly cool Conspyramid campaign structure, which not only guides the GM to prepping amazing conspiracies, but is also seamlessly integrated into the game’s core mechanics to give the GM everything they need to respond to the PCs as they strike out against the vampires!
• The equally cool Vampyramid, derived from the Push Pyramid from Elizabeth Sampat’s Blowback RPG, which gives the GM a secondary campaign structure in which the vampire conspiracy strikes back against the PCs!
• A robust system for creating completely original vampires, so that in every campaign the players are truly discovering vampires for the first time!

I’m gearing up to run a weekend-intensive campaign of Night’s Black Agents (3 days, 30 hours of gaming), and so I’ve developed one of my system cheat sheets for the game.

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED

These cheat sheets are not designed to be a quick start packet: They’re designed to be a comprehensive reference for someone who has read the rulebook and will probably prove woefully inadequate if you try to learn the game from them. (On the other hand, they can definitely assist experienced players who are teaching the game to new players.)

The cheat sheets also don’t include what I refer to as “character option chunks” (for reasons discussed here). In other words, you won’t find the rules for character creation here.

HOW I USE THEM

I usually keep a copy of the cheat sheet behind my GM screen for quick reference and also provide copies for all of the players. Of course, we’ll keep a copy of the rulebook on the table, too. (Many of my players also bought PDF copies for character creation, too.) But my goal is to summarize all of the rules for the game. This consolidation of information eliminates book look-ups: Finding something in a dozen pages is a much faster process than paging through hundreds of pages in the rulebook.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive.

PAGE 1: The core mechanics coupled to a list of the Investigative and General Abilities. Being able to rapidly and confidently identify pertinent Investigative Abilities that might be able to pull information out of a scene is pretty much the heart and soul of the GUMSHOE system, so I put these lists front-and-center for easy reference. This page also includes a reference to the Mode symbols, which are used to indicate various options that can be used to dial Night’s Black Agents into a particular sub-genre of spy fiction (ranging from John Le Carre to James Bond).

PAGE 2 – HEAT: I wanted this to be front-and-center for the players. As they do jobs, they accumulate Heat. It’s a significant part of setting tone in a Night’s Black Agents game.

PAGES 3 to 4 – TRADECRAFT: Night’s Black Agents includes a ton of specialized mechanics for running spy tradecraft. A lot of these — like adversary mapping, asset handling, covers, and contacts — are designed to give the PLAYERS tools for proactively sculpting their investigation. So I’ve gathered these from across the rulebook into arguably the most important pages for the players in the whole cheat sheet.

PAGE 5 – TOOLS: Rules for Funds & Acquisitions. Closely associated with Tradecraft, so it gets positioned here.

PAGES 6 to 7 – THRILLER CHASES: Whether running vehicle chases or foot chases, the thriller chase rules for Night’s Black Agents are robust.

PAGES 8 – EXTENDED CHASES: A similar-but-distinct system handles cross-continental pursuits as the PCs attempt to escape the police or conspiracy agents (or both!) trying to hunt them down.

PAGE 9 – COMBAT: This page includes the rules for Recovery, since about half of those are tied to healing those who have been injured in combat.

PAGES 10 to 12 – THRILLER COMBAT: These pages include combat options, the thriller combat rules, and special tactics. Like the thriller chase rules, the thriller combat rules are designed to give the PCs the ability to use their Investigative Abilities to pursue the “investigation by fist” tactics of noir and spy fiction. The half-page section on Trust & Betrayal is also slotted in here, mostly because it conveniently fit.

PAGE 13 – HAZARDS: Everything from acids to toxins.

PAGES 14 to 15 – STABILITY: Night’s Black Agents features a simplified Stability system (compared to Trail for Cthulhu) for handling the mental stresses of dealing with unspeakable horrors. I’m a fan of the optional It’s Cold Outside rules which encourage the players to leverage the Stability system to represent the dehumanizing demands of the spy world.

PAGE 16 – CONSPYRAMID/VAMPYRAMID: One-sheet reference for the GM.

PAGE 17 – VAMPIRES: Vampires can be radically different in Night’s Black Agents thanks to the vampire-creation rules, but my goal with this page is to hopefully give the GM all the general rules they need. When in doubt, though, I err on the side of assuming you can include pertinent details in the stat sheet for the specific vampires you’re running (rather than just choking this sheet full of maybe-if’s).

PAGE 18 to 19 – CHERRIES: A final GUMSHOE innovation in Night’s Black Agents are cherries; special bonuses that PCs get in any General Ability where they have 8+ points. These are all pulled together here for easy reference. (Something which may be confusing is that some of the cherries which are described in the “Thriller Combat” chapter of the book are placed here instead of with the general Thriller Chase rules. I found it was almost always less confusing to have the “only some characters can do this” reference in its own section, and it also made the cheat sheet more manageable in general. I will confess I had one, “Where the heck are the rules for using a mook shield?!” moment before I remembered that it was a cherry and not a general rule. But this quickly sorts itself out.)

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat sheets can also be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).

Personally, I use a four-panel screen and use reverse-duplex printing in order to create sheets that I can tape together and “flip up” to reveal additional information behind them.

I’m still experimenting with the best arrangement of these sheets for my GM screen, but I’ll come back and tell you when I figure it out!

NBA TOOLS
Revised Agent Tracking Sheet

FURTHER READING
Review: Night’s Black Agents
Review: The Zalozhniy Quartet
Review: The Persephone Extraction

Go to Part 1

Character Backgrounds by Chris Malone

FATHER GUSTAV, CLERGY

Age: 60

Gustav Rand was born in Austria in 1865, the youngest boy in a large Catholic Family.  With little opportunity to distinguish himself above his brothers and sisters, he went to Seminary more as an eventuality than as a passion.  It wasn’t until he joined the Jesuit order that he found some semblance of a calling, travelling the world as a missionary.  Helping those in need and facing dangers with strength and faith connected him more to God than any scripture or devotional did.  His diligence and fortitude recommended him for some of the most extreme places in the world, as he traveled to Ethiopia, Brazil, Guatemala, Australia, and other remote places.

As he aged and his body began to tire, he began to seek other opportunities to explore and express his faith.  Father Rand’s exposure to numerous cultures granted him a degree of prestige within his order, and he could transition out of his missionary role and began a more scholarly calling.  In 1913 Father Rand took a teaching position at Boston College, teaching archaeology and anthropology while undertaking various expeditions.

In 1919 he traveled with several students and faculty on one such expedition to Libya and the ancient city of Cyrene near modern Bengazi.  It was here that Rand had his first encounter with obvious supernatural evil, as the unearthing of an ancient chamber resulted in release of an obviously violent entity that caused members of the dig to become violent and blasphemous.  Only with the assistance of Maggie Pearson, a prodigal student, and the strength of will were you able to successfully perform an ancient rite uncovered in scrolls at the site and banish the foul creature.  While many might have found these events a challenge to the faith, Rand found them affirming; he had always known supernatural evil exists.  What ended up shaking his faith was the response of his Order.  Upon filing a report and wishing to further examine the site and document the event, The Jesuit Order terminated the expedition and commanded Rand to destroy all evidence of what had happened, and commanded him to remain silent.

Rand did mostly as ordered, only retaining private notes and few of the scrolls that helped him bind and banish the creature.  Shortly thereafter Father Rand left the Jesuit Order and petitioned to become a diocese priest.  The Archdiocese of St. Paul had recently suffered significant attrition, and so he was assigned there.  Father Rand quickly insinuated himself into several philosophical circles and serves as an occasional guest lecturer at local colleges.  To his surprise, Maggie Pearson arrived in the Twin Cities several years after he did.

Through his connections to Max Bruener, a recent friend and lay student, Rand has found himself the most curious assistant in a private investigation firm run by Jake Connor.  Several years ago you were approached by Max to help parse out some writings that were found at the scene of several disappearances.  You helped identify the texts and continued with the case, surprised to find yourself again in the company of Maggie Pearson, who happened to be Jake’s cousin.  The case was most unusual; two seemingly separate instances of a young man and a young woman disappearing led Jake and his companions to a secretive cult operating within the Freemasons that was engaging in human sacrifice in the name of some esoteric and foul deity.  Jake and company acted quickly and rescue one of those who had disappeared (the other, sadly, was long dead) and bring the perpetrators to justice.  Now the local police come to Jake and company with queries or leads into strange or occult cases.

RELATIONSHIPS

Jake Connor — Jake’s a veteran and a private investigator.  Father Rand finds Jake’s passion and energy refreshing, but sometimes finds himself frustrated with Jake’s lack of introspection and philosophical inquiry.  Regardless, Rand knows that Jake is courageous and respects his strength.

Maxwell Bruenner — Max is a wealthy young man in charge of a manufacturing business left to him by his father.  Max came to Father Rand during a spiritual crisis, seeking answers to the things he saw during the War and trying to understand his place in a seemingly cruel world.  Father Rand has helped to guide Max’s inquiry, encouraging exploration of the spiritual and the unseen, as opposed to coercing or suggesting that he become a Catholic.  This has formed a strong bond between the two.  The only real point of contention is Max’s vocal agreement and support of Prohibition, a point which you two disagree upon, but you feel much less passionate about.  You took on vows of poverty and celibacy, not sobriety.

Maggie Pearson — You first met Maggie in 1917 when she was a student in your Early Religions course at BC.  An apt student with energy and passion, you quickly became fond of the young girl distinguishing herself in a place that only just started allowing women to attend.  On the Libya expedition, she handled herself smartly, helping you eradicate the entity before it could cause serious harm.  Since your reintroduction to her in St. Paul you see her regularly, either when working cases with her cousin or on your regular Wednesday luncheons.

MARGARET “MAGGIE” PEARSON, SCIENTIST

Age:  26

Maggie grew up in Boston, the eldest of four daughters, in a middle-class family, her father a dentist with her mother at home.  Showing a strong mind with an aptitude for critical thought and quick wits, she claimed a place among the first class of female students at Boston College.  Despite the hostile environment, oppressive curfews, and constant scrutiny from the administration, Maggie thrived in an environment that rewarded her intellect and provided her new experiences.  Virtually all her professors were inimical towards her, save for one notable exception.

Her freshman year met Father Gustav Rand, a Jesuit who was teaching archaeology and anthropology.  He treated her fairly and with praise and encouragement, showing her respect and deference that few others would.  Even when not studying under Father Rand, Maggie would regularly meet with Father Rand and discuss her studies.

In 1919 Rand invited Maggie on an expedition to Libya.  With much cajoling, pleading, and threatening Maggie convinced her father to allow her to go, and it was there that she faced a life-changing event.  During the dig at Cyrene, near modern Bengazi, strange things began to happen.  Workers and other students acted violently, and several people became hurt.  After a horrifying experience where she felt the alien presence of some foul thing pressing into her mind, Maggie convinced Father Rand that a supernatural threat was present.  Working together, Maggie and Rand used some ancient scrolls and a bit of alchemical knowledge to destroy the entity.  Maggie returned to BC shaken, but confident in her strength and ability.

Shortly afterward, Father Rand left the Jesuit Order and Boston College.  While upsetting, this event only spurred Maggie on to finish her bachelor’s degree and leave that place.  Following her graduation from BC, she managed to land a graduate position at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches and studies today in pursuit of her doctorate in the Sciences.  Her decision to move to Minnesota was partly prompted by the fact that her father refused to let her go somewhere without family, especially without a strong male presence to guide her to make sure she remains virtuous.  To this end, her cousin Jake Connor serves as a chaperone and confidant.  A larger part of her decision was informed by her correspondences with Father Rand, and her desire to reconnect with him.

About two years ago Maggie began helping her cousin Jake with the private investigation business that he owns and runs.  During an odd case involving the disappearance of a couple of seemingly unconnected people, Maggie identified a rare sedative used on both victims, and used her resources to find the supplier (and purchaser) of that sedative.  The case turned strange, as the two people who disappeared were involved with an inner sect of the Freemasons, which turned out to be pursuing occult ritual and human sacrifice.  You and the others were able to disrupt the ritual and stop them, but only after one of the kidnapped victims were killed.  Since then you have been learning how to handle yourself in a fight and have helped Jake from time to time.

RELATIONSHIPS

Jake Connor — Your cousin Jake is a veteran of the War and a private eye.  He is protective of you and at times seems to regret his decision to involve you in his line of work.  You love him, but he can sometimes frustrate you with his superficial thinking.  His vehement anti-Prohibition rhetoric can sometimes get tiresome as well, as you find that the need to drink is a silly diversion from rationality.

Maxwell Bruener — Max is Jake’s friend and helps on cases sometimes.  While he seems kind and gentle, you have seen his strength and courage during the Freemason case when he charged into a room full of cultists and fought them off with his bare hands.  His philosophical inquiries are engaging, and overall you find him a pleasant enough fellow to spend time with.

Father Rand — Father Rand is more than a mentor or a professor to you, he is your confidant and guide.  At times you have wondered if you might have more than a reasonable amount of affection towards him, but you quickly squash these thoughts with study and diversion.

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