“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 |
