In January, I kicked off a new roleplaying game campaign using Night’s Black Agents. The premise of this GUMSHOE-based RPG is basically “what if a couple of Jason Bournes were hunting vampires?” Intrigued, I ran the NBA one-shot “The Van Helsing Letter” from Free RPG Day 2016, and the group liked the system and concept well enough that we decided to dive in with our own characters and story. Who’s behind Unternehmen Braun, and what do they want? Is Operation Edom friend, or foe? And what else besides vampires might stalk the night?
To facilitate character creation at today’s session zero, I quickly worked up this Agent Creation Cheat Sheet to help guide the group through the process. Along with printed out character sheets and a copy of the core rulebook, the session ran as smoothly as I could hope for. Download the PDF for free here.
What is Night’s Black Agents?
The Cold War is over. Bush’s War is winding down.
You were a shadowy soldier in those fights, trained to move through the secret world: deniable and deadly.
Then you got out, or you got shut out, or you got burned out. You didn’t come in from the cold. Instead, you found your own entrances into Europe’s clandestine networks of power and crime. You did a few ops, and you asked even fewer questions. Who gave you that job in Prague? Who paid for your silence in that Swiss account? You told yourself it didn’t matter.
It turned out to matter a lot. Because it turned out you were working for vampires.
Vampires exist. What can they do? Who do they own? Where is safe? You don’t know those answers yet. So you’d better start asking questions. You have to trace the bloodsuckers’ operations, penetrate their networks, follow their trail, and target their weak points. Because if you don’t hunt them, they will hunt you. And they will kill you.
Or worse.
Source: Night’s Black Agents Product Page
Night’s Black Agents uses the GUMSHOE system, which differs dramatically from most d20-based systems. Instead, a single d6 being used for skill tests, and even then the die is used only some of the time. Since investigation is a pillar of the system, you don’t have to roll at all to get what’s called “key clues” needed to solve the mystery. As long as you have at least one point in the necessary investigative skill, you succeed automatically. If you spend points from your investigative skill pool, you can get even more insight from the clue.
Of course, PCs will be PCs, and there’s still the chance they misinterpret a clue or skip the scene where the clue is offered, but because of the improvisational nature of many of the NBA campaigns, that NPC or location they skipped earlier can still be brought forward, albeit changed. There are a lot of prepping and pacing lessons from NBA that can be applied to other games, so I’m excited to take these lessons to heart in my own sessions and adventures. I’ll be running the “(S)entries” introductory scenario in the core rulebook, and then stealing shamelessly from the Dracula Dossier, Edom Files, and Zalozhniy Quartet modules. Wish us luck and good hunting!
Featured Image by Chris Curry on Unsplash
