Pitch: Night's Black Agents

Originally published October 20, 2014

Another post in my continuing series of campaign ideas. This week involves a somewhat complicated pitch about a game of destroying a conspiracy of monsters. As always, let me know if anything sounds like something you would like to hear more about.

Night’s Black Agents

You were the best of the best. Elite agents working for one of the world's top intelligence agencies. For one reason or another you dropped out of the game. Maybe you quit, maybe you were a victim of cutbacks, maybe they burned you, maybe you just burned out. In any case you didn't come back out of the cold.

To pay the bills you still did an odd op now and again. You knew better to ask questions. Who gave you that job in Prague? Who paid for your silence in that Swiss account? You told yourself it didn't matter.

Now you wish you did ask. You knew the people who you worked beside might be monsters, but you thought they were still human. Turns out you were wrong.

Monsters 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 their 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.

In this game you play highly skilled ex-spies working for hire. You are freelancers with the skills of Jason Bourne or even James Bond who have stumbled across a conspiracy of supernatural monsters.

By default, these are vampires but depending on the choices of you and your fellow players it could be aliens, genetically engineered super-agents, the demonically possessed, or something else entirely. Using your investigative skills, contacts and expert training, you must untangle the conspiracy, tracing back the connections to the hidden masters behind it, and destroy the monsters at their source before they manage to destroy you.

Inspirations: James Bond (Dalton, Brosnan, or Craig), Bourne Series, the Femme Nikita, Hannah, Ronin, Taken.

System: Night's Black Agents.

Conspiracy Questions

To fine tune the game here are a series of questions about what you want to see in this game.

Mirrors: (Indicate if you agree) The conspiracy has its fingers in everything and can turn anyone. Your former (and current) employers, your contacts, even loved ones and trusted comrades could all be turned or compromised. If they haven't been already.

Burn: (Indicate if you agree) Fighting monsters on your own is stressful. Seeing those close to you die, things you value corrupted, and impossible horrors revealed sap your psychological stability. Will you crack before the monsters get you?

Monsters: Can science explain them or does religion and folklore hold the only answers?

Monsters: Is the condition highly contagious or can it only pass with difficulty (if at all)?

Monsters: Circle all that appeal to you: Undead/Shapeshifters/Aliens/Possession/Psychics

Conspiracy Theories

Here are a few basic concepts currently rattling around in my head.

The Forgotten: A conspiracy survives on its secrecy. Only dead men tell no tales. So what about a conspiracy of memory devouring undead? With so many secrets and the ability to erase themselves from the memories of those who see them, how can they possibly be stopped?

The Empty: these pale men who follow you, why do they cast no shadows? No reflections? Is it because they are empty, soulless monsters? Why do they cling to the shadows and the organizations that lurk there? What secrets are they hunting and to whom are they delivering them to? These vampires can drain your life with just a breath and none of that messy blood. Then you become like them. Empty.

Ultraviolet: The Cold War spawned many things: the space race, proxy wars, MAD. In a hidden Soviet military research facility, it birthed genetically engineered supersoldiers. Stronger, faster, and with a thirst for human blood. With the fall of the U.S.S.R. they disappeared into the shadows. Now they and their children have chosen to reemerge.