Product Blurb

Taking Back The Night

For centuries, supernatural powers have reigned, warring among themselves, culling the human herds and lashing out from the shadows. The creatures of the night have held court since before the dawn of history. Nothing lasts forever. From the throng of humanity, individuals emerge who know the truth. They know monsters exist. Enough is enough! The forces of darkness must pay their due. The time of retribution is at hand.

One Monster at a Time

Hunter: The Reckoning is the sixth Storyteller game released for the modern World of Darkness. This lavishly illustrated, hardcover book presents all the rules and background information needed to finally bring mankind’s fight to the supernatural. This game is not a Hunter’s Hunted second edition. These are all-new character types with their own agendas for the world… and the monsters that inhabit it. The cataclysmic finalé to White Wolf’s Year of the Reckoning.

From the White Wolf website which can be found at www.white-wolf.com

Product Review

“As you look up, you behold the church were you last saw the rot. But it has somehow changed. The windows seem infested with cockroaches and the sign ‘Church of the Saintly Bones’ has changed to ‘Crunched will be your bones’. The walls seem ancient and decayed. A stench of putrescence travels the air to meet your nose. A sudden chill walks your spine. You see a child walking out from this building, probably a beggar that asked for food, and he looks too pale. The rot has feasted on him for sure. Then, the bus stop sign on a side of the block reads clearly ‘STOP THEM’. You hold tight to your wooden baseball bat. It’ll draw wicked blood once again.”

- Any Hunter of the Reckoning storyteller, preparing the players for the action.

That’s right. You have portrayed the sad vampires. Poor them! Cursed forever to kill innocents to sate their ungodly thirst. You have incarnated the mighty werewolves, smashing their Wyrm-war witnesses “not to lift the Veil”. You have haunted ‘your’ house as an eternal wraith, and made the ‘trespassers’ pay for their error. You have played your magic tricks on your inferior ‘mortals’ as a Mage. Now, all of those characters will get their payback. Humanity was too sick to be preyed on again and again. Humanity has spoken. Now, you play a Hunter, one of the valiant mortals who brave the night to shatter the beasties that stop your kids getting a good night’s sleep.

Hunter the Reckoning is a game about people who “know the truth” (or are completely insane; it’s in the eye of the beholder) and stand as the last line of defence for a battered humanity. Hunters are not all the same, however. Some of them “wanna make the freaks pay”, while others seek to understand the nightly creatures, and even bring them back into the fold of humanity. Others feel that they are monsters too, and feel that this maybe a punishment from God. Another kind wants to study the monsters and find out “why”.

These people, collectively known as Hunters, are folks who were touched by some kind of supernatural force and can now see what most people can’t: that we are not alone in this World of Darkness. Otherwise normal people (the idea of the game is that a Hunter could be you, me, your neighbour or my auto-mechanic) start changing their views and start acting in what others perceive as an insane way. What fascinated me with this game is the detachment of the character with what, until a certain day, was his life.

The hero must be cast away from the society, as Joseph Campbell realized in his studies. The hero is ostracized, sometimes even feared. He must abandon his everyday life, his loved ones, to accomplish the greater good. What would happen if your best friend told you he believes in vampires… and he’d actually staked one last night? What would happen if your girlfriend started to arrive late to your dates, and used lousy excuses, and had her blouse covered with badly-wiped-out bloodstains? This estrangement from the Hunter and his/her loved ones is, I believe, the core of the drama in Hunter.

Then, you have the Horror (that’s right, in my opinion, Hunter is the only true horror game White Wolf has published). Imagine that your oh-so-hated boss is actually one of the walking dead. Wouldn’t you go to jail if you clubbed him to death? And wouldn’t they commit you to an asylum if you shouted that he was a monster risen from his grave? And if one of your prey followed you home, would you be able to sleep at night, knowing that he could snap your family’s necks in less than a heartbeat? Or, how would you feel if you faced a monster that could throw your Hunter friends and companions in the air like they were toys? Would you stand your ground or would you run in panic?

Now you get the picture of life as a Hunter, it’s time to get technical. Hunters are created as regular humans in the World of Darkness, which makes them weaker than many of the creatures they may face. To help them though, they have Conviction, a trait that works in part just like Willpower, but it enables you to recognize a monster for what it is, and to resist a great variety of mental powers.

You also have your Edges, which are the powers Hunters are given by the mysterious Heralds. “One moment there, mister!” you say, “How can they have powers if they’re just normal humans?”. Yes, I know. I thought that too. But, let’s face it, Hunters have a slim chance to beat their enemies even with their powers. Without them they’d fail for sure.

Hunter also has a source of in-game philosophy, namely, are Hunters humans or are they a new breed of monster? And, in World of Darkness cosmology, are they related to the Solars from Exalted. Humans “touched by the gods” to smash the forces of darkness. Sure, they are larger than life, but they have to be, to fight against such tough odds. Anyway, what I like about this, is that you can approach all the “Hunter issues” from various angles and points of view. Maybe Hunters are insane, and the beasties don’t exist. To hell with the World of Darkness. Then, they can be “the defender God has sent”, or actually unknowing pawns of a third supernatural party, that is not as benevolent with humans as it first seems. There are many more possibilities. And as it’s the youngest of the World of Darkness games, these possibilities have not yet been “mapped out of existence”.

So, if your looking for an ultra-gritty game of stripped-bare humans against the power of the monsters, you are not exactly getting what you want (you can do this, anyway, play Hunter but ban the powers, that works well, but it is as deadly as it can get for the characters). On the other hand, Hunters aren’t that powerful, so, even with the powers (Conviction and Edges) they get it hard, and there’s the issue no power can solve. They have a life besides hunting, and that life can’t be fixed with powers.

I almost forgot to tell you this: there is no relation whatsoever between Hunter: the Reckoning and the “Year of the Hunter” sourcebooks. Those hunters have not been imbued by the Heralds and have no powers (save for Numina and True Faith), and are less like the ‘normal’, I-work-and-pay-my-taxes types you play in Hunter. But both kinds co-exist in the World of Darkness, each one not knowing the other.

So, until next week at the same Hunter-hour and on the same Hunter-channel, keep yourself safe and remember, Batman never had it this good in his fight against darkness.

Reviewed by Matías Timm