At the risk of giving away the surprise ending of this review, I have a new favorite World of Darkness game. I whined like a stuck pig about Hunter: the Reckoning back in 1999:
It’s not about badass Green Beret gunslingers puttin’ down the dead and smokin’ cheroots, despite the promotional art. Which is a shame. I wanted it to be; I like humans, even Dirty-Harry-humans, Navy-SEAL-humans, Batman-humans maybe, but humans nonetheless who kick monster butt. … Personal prejudice; I am, after all, a human.
Maybe a young Chuck Wendig read those words nine years ago, and said “When I become the Hunter developer, I’m going to give Ken Hite the game he wants.” Well, along with Justin Achilli, Richard Thomas, and a dozen writers, he did. The badass Green Beret gunslingers are on pages 147-149 of Hunter: the Vigil (372-page two-color hardback, $34.99). And their awesome ghost-killing “Etheric Rounds” lead off 8 more pages of the monster-killing arsenal available to Task Force VALKYRIE, the U.S. government’s interagency monster squad. (There’s even a shout-out for Very Old-School Hunters: Hunted fans — Project TWILIGHT is a VALKYRIE sub-agency.) That monster-killing arsenal is one sort of Endowment that your high-end hunters get as a benefit of membership in a high-end hunting conspiracy. Each conspiracy gets a different sort of Endowment; my least favorite by far is the devil-spawn conspiracy with demon powers, but I have to say I love the weird syncretic Egyptian guys who drink poison Elixirs almost as much as I love the multinational European medical conglomerate that vivisects monsters for biotech Endowments. Plus a magical relic-hunter conspiracy, and of course the Catholic Church, which gets its Endowment mojo from Upstairs. All of which supernaturalism sets up a nice Nietzschean abyss-staring type vibe.
But if you don’t want even that much inhumanity on the scale, you can just drop down a level and play a member of a “Compact,” which has nothing but human ingenuity and cussedness going for it: from the Wobblies’ Supernatural of “the Union,” to the Eurotrash John Constantines of “Ashwood Abbey,” there’s a great spread here, too. Or just play a gang of hunters with no friends but their shotguns at “cell level.” The game world is modular; any piece can come out or get slotted in sideways. Mechanically, there are superb uses of the Status Merit, a glorious tie between Willpower and Morality, a sweet “R&D” system to get new Endowments, a surprisingly comprehensive “build your own monster” section in the back, and best of all, Tactics rotes for player teams to smash up monsters big-time. It all adds up nicely to the sweet spot: humans are still horrifyingly fragile unless they hit monsters hard and hit together.
More mundanely, the cyan-tone color scheme is quite effective, although none of the art really jumped out at me; the editing has a few gaffes (including, ironically, a missing Editor credit); the main text hits the high Fortean note of the core World of Darkness book better than the Antagonists chapter does, although that chapter has to carry a lot as it is. And there’s no map of Philadelphia in the provided city setting, which in the world of Google Maps is probably no great crisis. The big picture, though, builds exactly the sort of multivalent-modular setting/game that White Wolf does better than anyone when they do it right. And Hunter: the Vigil does it so very, very right.
Tags: chuck wendig, corebook, horror, hunter the vigil, white wolf
You know, it’s true. I was a wee tot, and I wanted to be the Hunter developer when I grew up, knowing that I could offer you the game you needed at just the right time.
Thanks, Ken, for the great review. Glad our hard work paid off!
– Chuck
Thanks for the great review, Ken. It was a pleasure to be a part of the project, and gaining kudos from someone such as yourself is a delight.
CHUCK CAN SEE THE FUTURE.
And I’m really not happy about what he said would happen to me when he was sloshed to the gills at GenCon.
Ken,
As a writer on Hunter, I am chuffed.
By the way. You’re going to flip when you see Night Stalkers. Hopefully in a good way.
Good review, though it doesn’t sound like my sort of product. Thanks especially for the note about cyan – I’ve never been fond of printing in this color, which tends to make me think of either layout that somehow got printed by mistake, or hazardous chemicals.
Wow. There might be a part of the World of Darkness I actually care about? Could have fun in? If it were anyone but the Enlightened Hite saying so, I’d disbelieve.
I was always a tad disappointed with the original Hunter myself. I wanted kick-ass witch hunters and vampire hunters and monster hunters toting shotguns, but got another variant of weird monsters dressed up as humans.
This sounds like the revision I’ve been waiting for too.
[...] mentioned above (and elsewhere in this space) how much I like Hunter: the Vigil. I especially like that it’s technically a [...]