Night’s Black Agents is available now from the store
A new GUMSHOE Game from Kenneth Hite (Trail of Cthulhu) that brings the excitement of your favorite high-octane spy thrillers to the table. Check the Resources page for blank agent dossiers, quick-reference sheets, a 20-minute demo and more.
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.
Night’s Black Agents brings the GUMSHOE engine to the spy thriller genre, combining the propulsive paranoia of movies like Ronin and The Bourne Identity with supernatural horror straight out of Bram Stoker. Investigation is crucial, but it never slows down the action, which explodes with expanded options for bone-crunching combat, high-tech tradecraft, and adrenaline-fueled chases.
Updating classic Gothic terrors for the postmodern age, Night’s Black Agents presents thoroughly modular monstrosity: GMs can build their own vampires, mashup their own minions, kitbash their own conspiracies to suit their personal sense of style and story. Rules options let you set the level of betrayal, grit, and action in your game. Riff from the worked examples or mix and match vampiric abilities, agendas, and assets for a completely custom sanguinary spy saga.
The included hook adventure gets the campaign going; the included city setting shows you what might be clotting in Marseilles’ veins even now. Rack silver bullets in your Glock, twist a UV bulb into your Maglite, and keep watching the mirrors … and pray you’ve got your vampire stories straight.
An interview with the publisher.
Listen to Ken Hite talk about Night’s Black Agents on the Fear the Boot podcast
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
[...] is Dungeon World Link to Dungeon World Home Page GNS Theory Nights Black Agents Lumpley Games Choose Your Own [...]
[...] them all very much, of course, but I certainly hope my finest piece of work is my most recent one: NIGHT’S BLACK AGENTS, my vampire spy thriller RPG from Pelgrane Press. That said, the original-series STAR TREK RPG from [...]
[...] 1812. We’ve outlined a couple of potential games of vampire-hunting espionage in the style of Night’s Black Agents set in this era, and explored at length one of the age’s iconic heroes: Davy [...]
[...] couple of weeks ago we were playing a game of Night’s Black Agents (which you simply MUST try if you haven’t already (imagine “must” said in foppish [...]
[...] as they try to fulfill their destinies during a war along the Silk Road . After that, we have a Night’s Black Agents campaign called the Tribes of Tokyo – a group of security experts uncovers a horrific vampire [...]
[...] for the Stars is our first attempt at creating a Night’s Black Agents [...]
[...] Superhelden und Copstories in Mutant City Blues, Vampirverschwörungen und Geheimagenten in Night’s Black Agents, Sci-Fi und Detektivgeschichten in Ashen Stars verbinden lassen. Die Zahl der weiteren [...]