October 1, 2025 • 48 mins
To: hunterlist@hunter-net.org
From: witness1
Fellow imbued,
I must report a disturbing incident. Our latest transmission regarding the Mission was compromised. The audio files were corrupted - the music loud, blaring, almost as if something didn't want this information shared.
You know what I'm talking about. They got to it.
But the Messengers work in mysterious ways. The tainted files have been purged. A clean recording has been restored and is being redistributed as we speak.
The truth will be heard. The mission continues.
Stay vigilant. Check your audio equipment. They're always watching... and apparently, now they're listening too.
Inherit the earth
-- Witness1
EDIT: yes, the sound gremlins did their thing again so we had to upload a new recording - sorry!
---
The cover promised chainsaws and gun-fu; the text delivered conscience, fear, and the price of seeing too much. We dive deep into Hunter: The Reckoning as it was meant to be experienced: a grounded horror RPG about ordinary people who wake up to a world that doesn’t want to be seen, and the fragile choices that follow. From edges and second sight to conviction and creeds, we trace how the mechanics hardwire moral perspective into play, and why that makes every victory feel earned and every misstep costly.
If this kind of human-centred horror speaks to you, hit follow, drop us a rating, and share the episode with a friend who still thinks Hunter is a superhero game.
Contact us at:
EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog
HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Iain (00:40):
I almost never heard this game at all.
I remember seeing the shell in1999 on the cover with the wall
and shall just like some kind ofheavy moment I was thinking
another game where you just wantto have something done.
By the time I was done, Idiscovered the game I absolutely
(01:14):
love.
This wasn't so this wassomething completely different.
This was a game about ordinarypeople discovering the world and
having to deal with thatrevolution.
It was the second main game inthe World of Darkness series,
(02:17):
and it represented somethingrevolutionary for the line.
For the first time, White Wolfwas asking players to take on
the role of ordinary humans whosuddenly became aware of the
supernatural world that lurkedin the shadows, and it was being
presented as a core game.
Now it used a familiarstoryteller system but
introduced some key mechanicalconcepts that were unique to
(02:40):
Hunter.
First there were edges,supernatural abilities that
hunters could manifest throughfocused will.
These weren't spells ordisciplines in the traditional
sense, but rather miraculouspowers that hunters could call
upon in moments of crisis.
Second sight, which all huntershad, was the ability to see
through supernatural deceptionsand illusions that most humans
(03:03):
fell prey to.
Vampires couldn't hide behindtheir masquerade from someone
with second sight, for example,and werewolves couldn't use the
delirium to make hunters forgetthem, however much the hunters
might want to do that.
A hunter using second sightcould clearly see all
supernaturals around them.
They didn't necessarily knowwhat they were facing, they just
(03:23):
knew that what they werelooking at wasn't human.
Conviction was a measure of howstrongly a character believed
in their mission, and it servedmultiple functions.
It powered second sight, itfuelled some of the more
powerful edges, and itdetermined how effectively a
hunter could maintain theirfocus in the face of the
(03:44):
supernatural.
There were also creeds,philosophical outlooks that
determined how a hunterapproached the supernatural and
what type of edges he couldaccess.
Each creed was also aligned towhat was called a virtue.
There were three virtues in theHunter the Reckoning world:
mercy, vision, and zeal.
At their core, virtuesrepresented a hunter's
(04:05):
philosophical outlook.
Someone who was high in zeal,for example, might take a less
forgiving approach to monsterscompared to someone who had a
high mercy score, who insteadwould be looking at how they
could help monsters or cure themof whatever was afflicting
them.
These virtues were whatdetermined what edges a
character could get access to.
(04:27):
All of this supernaturalmetacurrency aside, one of the
really interesting things aboutHunter the Reckoning was the
characters that people played.
These weren't action heroes,the imbued, as they were called,
were just regular peopleaccountants, teachers, cab
drivers, retail workers,ordinary folks who experienced
(04:48):
what the game called theimbuing, a moment of a crisis
where mysterious entities calledthe messengers gave them the
ability to see the truth aboutthe world, and that truth was
terrifying.
These hunters had no ancientorganisations backing them up,
no centuries of accumulated loreand knowledge, no vast
resources.
(05:08):
They had something called aHunternet, which was an internet
forum where they could shareinformation and theories, but
even there they had to becareful about what they said and
who they trusted.
Hunters weren't superheroes,they were people who heard
voices, saw monsters everywhere,and slowly watched their normal
lives crumble under the weightof what they now knew.
(05:29):
The real horror of Hunterwasn't the monsters they fought,
it was what the hunt did to thehunters themselves.
As they grew in supernaturalpower, they slowly went mad as
their fragile human minds werenot meant to contain the power
being fed to them by thecelestial messengers.
The more they embraced the roleas hunters, the more they lost
(05:51):
their grip on their humanity andtheir sanity.
It was a game about ordinarypeople being transformed into
something they didn't understandby forces they couldn't
comprehend for reasons thatremained frustratingly unclear.
However, this all leads me toone of the most persistent
criticisms I used to hear aboutHunter the Reckoning.
People who hadn't actuallyplayed the game would say things
(06:14):
like, I don't like Hunter theReckoning because it just lets
you play superheroes.
And they also tended to followthis up with The Hunter's Hunted
was a much better game becauseit was about real people hunting
the supernatural.
This criticism always used toannoy the hell out of me because
it was based on a fundamentalmisunderstanding of what both
(06:34):
games were actually about, solet's just take a look at that
for a second before I finish myrant.
The Hunters Hunted, publishedall the way back in 1992 as a
supplement for Vampire theMasquerade, was not about normal
people.
Yes, you could theoreticallycreate normal people using these
rules, but look at the actualsample characters provided in
(06:57):
the book.
You had a ghoul with true faithwho was several hundred years
old, you had an actual vampire,you had a werewolf, a mage, you
had a TV host with vastresources at his disposal, and
more importantly, look at theorganisations that player
characters could belong to.
The FBI's special affairsdivision, think the X-Files, a
(07:19):
government agency with high-techequipment and inside knowledge.
The Centre for Disease Control,with their scientific resources
and authority, the Arcanum, aglobal network of occult
scholars with centuries ofaccumulated lore and some actual
magic.
The Society of Leopold, theInquisition's modern incarnation
(07:40):
with extensive supernaturalknowledge, Vatican backing and
Vatican Commandos.
These were an odd room ofpeople stumbling about in the
dark.
They were well-informed,well-trained, and well-armed
individuals who understood theirsupernatural foes and had
institutional support behindthem.
They probably knew karate aswell.
Compare that to Hunter theReckoning characters.
(08:01):
These people had no idea whatthey were up against.
They generally had very littlein the way of resources,
whatever they could scrapetogether from their day jobs or
scrounge up from militarysurplus stores, and yes, they
had supernatural powers, butthese powers came with a
terrible price.
Every time they embraced theirroles as hunters, they risked
losing more of their sanity.
(08:22):
Every time they gainedknowledge of the supernatural,
they found themselves furtherisolated from normal human
society.
Hunter wasn't aboutsuperheroes, it was about the
everyman discovering thesupernatural and being forever
changed by that knowledge.
It was about ordinary peopletrying to maintain their normal
lives whilst fighting animpossible war against creatures
(08:44):
that most of humanity didn'teven believe existed.
So where did all this hostilitytowards Hunter come from?
Well, this segues nicely intoone of Hunter's biggest
problems, namely the artwork.
I mentioned earlier how thecover nearly put me off buying
the game, and I'm pretty sure Iwasn't alone in that reaction.
There's probably a whole bunchof people out there who would
(09:07):
never play Hunter because theyliterally judged the book by the
cover, and to be honest, Idon't blame them in this case.
Throughout its early releases,the art in Hunter consistently
portrayed these muscled-upspecial forces types rather than
the ordinary people that thegame claimed to be about.
You'd see images of hunterswith like chainsaws and assault
(09:28):
rifles looking more like actionmovie heroes than the frightened
office workers and concernedparents that the game was
actually about.
This created a massivedisconnect between what the game
claimed to be about and whatpotential players thought it was
about based on the visuals.
The artwork suggested a gamewhere you'd kick down the doors
and blast the monsters to bitswith heavy weaponry.
(09:51):
The text described a game aboutparanoia, introspection, and
the psychological cost ofknowing about the supernatural.
I can't tell you how manypeople I met over the years who
had dismissed Hunter becausethey thought it was just another
action game, a game where yougot to wail on vampires and
werewolves and go toe-to-toewith these incredibly powerful
(10:11):
supernatural creatures.
The irony is that Hunter wasactually one of the deepest,
most psychologically complexgames in the world of Darkness
Line, but you'd never know itlooking at the pictures.
Anyway, rant over, let's talkabout what they actually
released for Hunter.
It had a pretty impressivepublication run during its
(10:32):
5-year lifespan from 1999 to2004.
In 1999 it launched with theCore Rulebook.
It was the flagship publicationfor the year of the reckoning,
surprise, surprise, and this wasa 300-page hardcover that
introduced the imbued and theirstruggle against the
supernatural.
This book was packed withfiction that brought the setting
(10:56):
to life through forum posts,chat logs, and personal
accounts.
Also in November 1999, we gotthe Hunters Storytellers
Companion.
Whitewolf did a lot of bookslike this, there were a little
booklet along with a GM screen,but this came with some
additional guidance on runninggames, namely how to include
(11:16):
certain monster types in thegames to use different rules
than for those that were in thecore rule book.
December also brought us theHunter Survival Guide, and that
took the approach of providing aglobal perspective on the
hunter's world, and it showedhow the supernatural threat
manifested differently indifferent parts of the globe.
(11:39):
Each section was written fromthe perspective of Hunter
characters posting on HunterNet, giving their first hand
accounts of the situations intheir region.
2000 was when the line reallyhit its stride though, and it
got a real steady stream ofreleases.
February saw the publication oftwo Creed books simultaneously.
(12:00):
These were, to use a parlanceof the time, Hunter's Splats,
the equivalent of Clans andVampire, or Tribes and Werewolf,
or Traditions and Mages,basically what supernatural
group did your character belongto.
And whereas in the other gamelines, these were things that
were very much referred to inthe world.
When it came to Hunter, thesplats, in this case the Creeds,
(12:23):
were very much individualphilosophies.
The two books released inFebruary were Avenger and
Defender, so it offered two verycontrasting views on how the
hunt was.
And these books were veryinteresting in how they were
laid out.
There were several chapters ofextensive fiction, followed by
one chapter at the end of Rules,and they did a brilliant job,
(12:45):
all these books, of setting uppotential players for the
different creeds.
It showed you how people inthose creeds thought and
generally gave different pointsof view.
This was nice as it showed thatin Hunter the creeds were made
up of individuals and not thesemonolithic bodies where everyone
acted and thought the same.
(13:05):
May brought us The WalkingDead, the first of what would
become known as the enemy booksor monster books, and that
explored ghosts and wraiths fromHunter's perspective, these
being the primary antagonists ofthe main core book.
Interestingly, this book alsoteased a link between Hunter and
the game Kindred of the East.
(13:27):
And it's curious all throughoutHunter's run that more so than
any other world Darkness line,it found itself constantly being
intertwined or linked withother games, other core games in
the World of Darkness series.
June of this year also got ustwo more Creed books, in this
case Hunter Book Innocent andHunter Book Judge.
(13:50):
Again, exploring two differentsides of the same coin.
Speaking of which, August sawthe beginning of the Predator
and Prey novel series, which, abit like the Creed books,
explored two different visionsof the hunt.
In this line of six books, youwould get one book about a
supernatural antagonist, andthen the following novel would
(14:13):
be about a hunter exploringthat.
September brought us one of themost fun books that was
released for the Hunter line, inthis case Hunter Apocrypha.
Now, any player of White WolfGames will be familiar with this
format of a book.
They are the small trade-sizedbooks that come with a full
(14:35):
leatherette cover.
And yes, Jason and Steve, I canhear you laughing at me
already.
Everyone knows my love of fullleatherette books, but they're
very much presented as in-worlddocuments.
In this case, Apocrypha waspresented as the ravings of one
of the more insane.
There was that visionarymembers of the imbued, and there
(14:55):
were various Maginalian notesmade by other imbued who were
commenting on this document.
And it was very atmospheric,hell, weathered, handwritten,
and there was all sorts oflittle disturbing drawings
thrown in there.
It made a great prop forthrowing into your game for
those players who were reallyinterested in exploring the
(15:16):
lore, and it helped them get togrips with the questions of what
has chosen us for this, whatare we meant to do?
Why were we chosen?
It was also curiously writtenat a time when White Wolf was
still hinting about linksbetween Hunter and their new
fantasy game, Exalted, and as Imentioned before with Kindred of
(15:36):
the East, Hunter often founditself with these links, but we
will talk more about thatshortly.
The year this is a really busyyear for Hunter wrapped up with
Hunter Book Martyr in Novemberand Hunter Book Redeemer in
December, along with some morenovels in the Predator and Prey
series.
2001 was what White Wolf deemedthe year of the Scarab, and it
(16:00):
opened with Hunter BookVisionary, which completed the
primary creeds all having aCreed book of their own.
May was a particularly busymonth with the release of Hunter
the Recon and Player's Guide,which, like most supplements in
the line, followed that patternof heavy fiction with mechanical
content both bolted on at theend.
The fiction really was the starof the Hunter line.
(16:22):
White Wolf understood that thebest way to convey what it was
like to be a hunter was to showrather than tell.
This book also contained rulesfor playing bystanders, that was
humans who had received thecall of the messengers but chose
to ignore it, turning away fromthe supernatural rather than
embracing the role as hunters.
Additionally, this bookincluded invaluable rules on law
(16:46):
enforcement interactions,really recognising that hunters
would inevitably fall foul ofthe law and providing good
guidance for storytellers whowanted their games to have a
more realistic legal system andlegal consequences rather than
just using typical Hollywood coplogic.
May also saw Hunter BookHermit, which dealt with the
(17:06):
first of what was called theLost Creeks and the most
solitary of those hermits.
June also brought us a bookcalled Inherit the Earth, which
(17:46):
was a fiction anthologycontaining nine stories about
famous hunters like Witness One,who is the founder of Hunter
Knight.
September though, yikes,September gave us Hunter Holy
War, which explored thereligious dimensions of the
hunt.
And this book was prettycontroversial and not without
(18:07):
reason.
While not overtly racist, itdid fetishise the Middle East in
pretty problematic ways.
The premise adopted by thisbook was that there was a whole
community of Middle Easternhunters who had never used
Hunternet because they had noneed for it.
The messengers had supposedlygiven them the ability to
(18:28):
directly commune with each othervia a telepathic hive mind
while meditating on the Quran orother holy scriptures written
in their original ancientscripts.
Hunternet was presented as asecond best solution given to
Western hunters who lacked thisability due to being cut off for
their ancestral beliefs.
(18:49):
For some unexplained reason,Middle Eastern hunters were just
inherently better than huntersanywhere else in the world.
Bear in mind this book wasreleased in the same month that
(19:10):
9-11 happened.
Yeah, yikes.
As a personal anecdote, Iactually got banned from the
White Wolf Forums for a week forcalling out this book for its
nonsense.
Turned out that the authorsweren't too keen to hear that
sort of criticism.
Anyway, October brought us amuch better book, The Hunter
Storytellers Handbook, which wasfantastic despite suffering
(19:33):
from the same horriblenon-thematic artwork that
plagued the rest of the line.
The first chapter, Unveilingthe Night, gave brilliant advice
on creating antagonists andmonsters as part of ongoing
campaigns, ensuring that everysession wasn't just a Monster of
the Week, but part of a largerconspiracy for players to
unravel.
Genuinely great advice thatcould be used for any
(19:56):
role-playing game where you wantto have some big bad pulling
the strings.
The second chapter, creatinghuman drama, got to the core of
what Hunter was about.
The section on truth andconsequences really underscored
the cost that Hunters paid forthe mission, and again, this is
a chapter well worth reading forany game that involves any form
(20:18):
of personal interactions.
Vampire could really havebenefited from having this
section in one of their books.
The final chapter was all aboutplaying God, and it was
remarkable because it actuallywent a long way to spelling out
the nature of the messengers andprovide a lot of the hunter
backstory.
This was actually pretty rarefor White Wolf at the time, who
used to spend a lot of theireffort sort of quietly
(20:41):
suggesting what might be realand what might be myth and what
might be a legend, and wellthey'll just have to buy the
next book to see.
This went a long way toaddressing the metaplot concerns
around a lot of the White Wolfgames, namely that White Wolf
were telling their own story inthe background and what they had
planned for the future mighthave an impact on your game
because of future supplementsthat they decided to release.
(21:04):
By making this information onthe messengers available, it
meant that storytellers could beconfident that when they wrote
their game, what they hadinterpreted the messengers to be
would not be contradicted in afuture supplement.
Invaluable for the worldbuilding.
2002 was White Wolf's Year ofthe Damned, and it began with
(21:25):
one of the most interestingreleases, which was Hunter Book
Wayward.
This book was genuinelydisturbing in its portrayal of
hunters because it featured onthose hunters who had snapped
under the weight of theirimbuing, and snapping in a
horrific way.
Waywards weren't just peoplethat couldn't handle the
knowledge.
Like hermits, they were themessengers' first attempts at
(21:47):
hunters.
They were meant to be generalsor leaders.
They were meant to be the oneswho took the other imbued into
battle and identified targetsand dealt with them.
However, the fragile humanminds couldn't take it, and as a
result, you were left withthese broken individuals who
were usually overcome withbloodlust or rage because they
(22:08):
were conduits for themessengers, anger, and
resentment at the monstrouscreatures that were inhabiting
our world.
This was a fantastic book,again, made up of most parts
fiction with a tiny bit of rulesin the end.
And what I found is most peoplegenerally used this book as an
enemy book.
It was pretty much made clearthat Waywards didn't make great
(22:29):
player characters, not beingones really to play well as part
of a team, and therefore itgave a really interesting
dimension that you can includeas an enemy, namely another
hunter, not a supernaturalcreature, but another person who
actually thought they weredoing the right thing.
It also introduced one of themost beloved signature
(22:50):
characters of the line, God 45,Joshua Matthews, whose story was
really well spelt out acrossthe pages in the book Wayward
and which was picked up in otherbooks along the line.
March brought us First Contact,which dealt with what happened
when the imbued encountered thetraditional hunters from
(23:10):
supplements like the HuntersHunted, presumably they were
jealous of all the cool toys andcool organisations that the
Hunter's Hunted folks got toplay with.
April also saw a book calledThe Nocturnal, which exploded
vampires from a hunter'sperspective.
May the 21st, my birthdaynonetheless, marked a
(23:32):
significant moment with therelease of the Hunter the
Reckoning video game.
Would you like to guess if thisgame stayed true to the spirit
of the RPG?
No, of course it didn't.
This was a hack and slash game,which, surprise, surprise,
completely missed the point ofthe thoughtful RPG it was based
(23:52):
on.
The video game portrayedexactly the kind of chainsaw and
rocket launcher nonsense thatthe RPG explicitly wasn't about.
July brought The Moonstruck,which was another enemy book
about shapeshifters from ahunter's perspective.
This book looked at thedifferent types of werewolves
and helped build them assomething more than just big,
(24:14):
furry, skinny monsters.
Like all the enemy books, itnever used game line-specific
terms.
You wouldn't find any guru inhere or any tribes, but there
were some nice little Eastereggs for those of us familiar
with other White Wolf games.
The chapter on werewolves ashumans who had stolen skins from
actual werewolves was aparticularly nice touch.
(24:36):
September had two majorreleases, Hunter Utopia and
Hunter Fall from the Grace.
Hunter Utopia explored whathappened when Hunters dreamed
big, imagining a paradise freefrom the monster's grip and
actually working to achieve it.
The book showed how huntersmight organise movements and
revolutions against thesupernatural, whether in a
(24:57):
neighbourhood, a city, or acrossthe world, and it also explored
the lengths hunters might haveto go and the sacrifices that
they'd have to make to see theirutopian goals fulfilled,
revealing that even successfulrevolutions could bring loss and
punishment.
Fall from Grace was myabsolutely favourite book for
the Lion Though.
(25:17):
It dealt with hunters who hadgained deep insights into the
supernatural but then emerged asthe most powerful and dangerous
of the imbued.
But it really took the time toask the question are they still
even human?
This book finally revealedrules for obtaining level 5
edges, the most powerfulabilities the hunters could have
(25:37):
that were teased in the CoreRoad book but never actually
given rules for accessing.
It also explored what happenedto hunters who became extremists
in their creeds, payingterrible prices for ultimate
power.
It was a fantastic book and itadded a lot to any Hunter the
Reckoning Chronicle.
It gave you a direction to takeplayers who wanted to explore
(26:01):
Hunter's more cosmic side and itgave inevitable consequences
for that.
It had some of the best fictionas well written across the
Hunter the Reckoning line.
2003 was when the beginning ofthe end for White Wolf was
beginning to come as the timecrept forward towards the time
of judgment.
(26:21):
For Hunter, we got a bookcalled Urban Legends, which was
genuinely fascinating.
It offered new possibilitiesfor enemies, mainly in the form
of whatever the storytellerwanted to put together.
There were some chapters onsome obscure White Wolf stuff
that you might not get fromother game lines, but there was
also rules for making up things.
(26:42):
I think there's a chapter onthe Chupacapra, for example,
that never features in any otherWhite Wolf game line, and it
includes rules for just mixingthings up so that your players
are continually surprised.
Players who are longtimeveterans of something like
Vampir and Masquerade might notbe that much surprised when you
include vampires in the game,but if you include something
(27:03):
truly out of the ordinary, it'syour own creation, and this book
gives lots of rules for that,that goes a long way to keeping
things fresh for your players.
This year also saw the releaseof the Spellbound enemy book,
which dealt with mages from ahunter perspective.
This had some truly greatfiction in it.
My personal favourite was thechapters dealing with some
(27:27):
technologically inclined mageswho decided to try and hack
HunterNet and the disastrousconsequences that they suffered.
This year also saw the releaseof the infernal enemy book.
They explode demons and fallenangels.
The Blood Beaven has the reallyominous line at the beginning
that says they say angels oncerebelled against God and were
(27:50):
cast out of heaven.
This gives you the chance toinclude some truly otherworldly
nasties in your game.
Whereas things like vampiresand werewolves ultimately have
humanity at their core.
Angels are something that werenever human in the first place,
and one that's gone rogue makesfor a truly terrifying villain.
If you want to construct a goodHunter the Reckoning chronicle,
(28:13):
you could set one of thesebeings as a mastermind behind
everything.
This book gave you rules fordoing so.
It was a wonderful tie intoDemon the Fallen and really
fitted perfectly into Hunter'smythos.
January also brought us Laws ofthe Reckoning, which was
adapting Hunter for White Wolf'sMind's Eye Theatre Lamp System.
(28:35):
I'll talk more about thatlater.
This was something I wasinitially sceptical about and
then grew to love.
Oh, and the video game also gotthe sequels Wayward and
Redeemer, which, surprise,surprise, continued the mindless
action mobs of the original.
The line concluded in 2004 withWorld of Darkness Time of
(28:56):
Judgment.
Now, when White Wolf initiallybrought their World of Darkness
to an end, the three big gameswere like the Vampire, Werewolf
and Page, each got their own endtimes book.
These were generally greatpublications that were packed
with different adventures thatwere each had a different take
on how the world could end andinclude all sorts of rules for
(29:19):
how things changed in the endtimes, as well as chapters on
how to structure a story inthese epic settings.
For the other smaller games,Hunter included amongst them,
they were all bundled togetherin this one book called Time of
Judgment.
That included scenarios notjust for Hunter, but for Demon,
Changely, Kindred of the East,and Mummy, Poor Old Wraith
(29:42):
having got its own send-off thesame year that Hunter was
released back in 1999.
What's remarkable about Time ofJudgment from a Hunter
perspective is for a game linethat had built up such wonderful
backgrounds through fiction andrich character development,
Time of Judgment.
And the scenarios for Hunterwere an absolute disappointment
(30:04):
because they basically threwthis all out the window.
Now, without giving too manyspoilers for people who might
still want to experience thesescenarios, there were three of
them (30:14):
Cleansing Fires, Glimmer of Hope, and Winds of Change.
And these basically amounted tohunters go and kill lots of
stuff, hunters find a way ofcuring monsters with a magic
guffin, and hunters lead humansto fight back.
The scenarios felt incrediblyshallow compared to the deep new
(30:34):
storytelling that hadcharacterised the rest of the
line.
As an example, Vampire'sGehenasaurus movement had
several scenarios that includeda whole lot of the signature
characters getting a send-off.
Not one single of the signaturecharacter got a send-off.
For a game that created suchcompelling characters over the
years, Doctor 119, Witness 1,Kabby22, and so many others,
(30:58):
none of them got the send-offthey deserved.
There was little to no closurefor any of the ongoing
storylines and made built upthrough years of supplements,
and it felt that the writers hadjust given up on the rich
narrative they'd been developingand defaulted to these generic
action scenarios.
At the beginning of thechapter, there were about 16
(31:18):
pages providing background onwhat was happening in the Hunter
universe, but much of this wasjust repeated from the Time of
Judgment news ticker that WhiteWolf had been running on their
website for the past few months.
It felt perfunctory, like theywere just going through the
motions to wrap things up.
And ironically, one of theendings for the Demon Fallen
game line actually gave Hunter abetter send-off than the Hunter
(31:42):
section did, showing how theimbued fit into the larger
cosmic struggle between Heavenand Hell, and this in many ways
felt more true to the game'sthemes than its own ending
scenarios.
Anyway, that ran out of theway.
What's really remarkable aboutHunter's release schedule is not
just the volume of supplementsthat were released over a period
(32:04):
of five years, but theconsistent quality of the
fiction and the innovativeapproaches to game design that
it showed.
It could very easily have beena case of White Wolf saying,
well, if you want monsters, justbuy one of our core books for
the other game lines, butinstead they set about producing
books for those creatures thatmade them different from Hunter
(32:25):
to give the players a whole newexperience.
What I also loved is thatthroughout the line, with a few
notable exceptions, they reallyspent the time sticking to their
ethos of showing rather thantelling what it meant to be the
Hunter, and most follows theperformance put multiple
(32:45):
perspectives of the samesupernatural friends in the same
room, and in some cases evengiving the superfashals
impression of what the huntersare.
Now, I mentioned earlier in2003 while we've released the
laws of the recognition, whichwas adapting Hunter for the Mind
Eye Theatre System.
I've been a longtime player ofVampire LARPs.
(33:06):
Anyone who's listened to thispodcast will have had that
bowled into their brain, and Iwas obviously familiar with the
format, but much as I lovedHunter, I was genuinely worried
about how Hunter would translateto live action play.
You've got a game that'sintrospective and it's
psychological.
Would that work well in a LARPenvironment?
(33:27):
Something like Vampire, whichwas inherently political, was
incredibly well suited toLARPing.
But Hunter, would that work?
I thankfully was completelywrong.
Laws of the Reckoning led me torunning what I honestly believe
was the best LARP game I'veever been involved with.
Where the game really workedwas in the human interactions
between the players, the moraldilemmas that came with being a
(33:50):
Hunter, the fragility of Hunterversus Supernaturals, the
constant tension betweenmaintaining normal lives and
fulfilling the supernaturalmission.
All of my players were longtimevampire players, and there was
one session that perfectlyillustrated the difference in
power levels.
They decided to go after acouple of ghouls, vampires are
(34:10):
mortal servants who aretypically very low on the
supernatural food chain whenyou're playing a game of
vampire.
In vampire larves, ghouls areusually minor threats at best,
but these players went inwithout a proper plan, treating
like any other vampire game, andthey got into serious trouble,
the ghouls are going to killthem.
And it was a wake-up call thatit taught them the hunters have
(34:32):
to be small and they have toplan and they have to fuck to
kill them in order to survive.
The vulnerability was real inthe way in any other one this
game was coming in, and it waswonderful for that.
And surprise, surprise, theplayers absolutely loved that.
Now I mentioned thispreviously, but one curious fact
(34:53):
about Hunter is the fact thatthroughout its run it has been
consistently linked with othergames in White Wolf's portfolio.
Now, this isn't surprising,more so than any other game out
there, Hunter calls forinteraction with other games,
namely because the protagonistsfrom all the other game lines,
(35:13):
the vampires, the werewolves,etc., are actually the
antagonists as part of Hunter.
However, it's super surprisingthat the first game that Hunter
was really posited as having alink with was Exalted White
Wolves brand new fantasy game.
Now, what I'm about to go intohere is fairly heavy and exalted
(35:35):
lore, so if you don't know whatExalted is, my apologies, it
will all sound like completejibber jabber.
These links can be seen earlyon in Hunter's line.
You can see an advertisementfor Exalted in the original
Hunter rule book, and there's afinal piece of fiction there
that hints at this connectionbetween the two games.
Hunter a Procropha alsocontains strong hints about
(35:59):
links to Exalted's cosmology.
Now the theory that emergedfrom various sources that was
White Wolf intended originallythat Exalted was going to be the
prehistory of the old world ofdarkness.
The Hunters were beingdeveloped right at the time when
this connection was beingposited.
Both Exalted and Hunter featurea Scarlet Empress and an Ebon
(36:22):
Dragon as major cosmic forces.
And while never officiallyconfirmed, there were heavy
implications that the imbuedwere originally meant to be the
deeply degraded remains of thesolar exalted long after some
catastrophe had transformed thecreation of Exalted into the
world of darkness.
Other hints in different gamelines suggested potential links
(36:43):
between the Abyssal Exalted andVampires, for example.
And the concept might have beenthat the Scarlet Empress and
the Ebon Dragon, having somehowsurvived, whoever ultimately
destroyed their cosmology, weretrying to use what was left of
the Solar Exalted in a desperateplea to save the world from the
same suffering and fate thattheirs had befallen.
(37:03):
However, White Wolf veryquickly abandoned this concept
entirely.
Hunter's official backstory, asrevealed primarily in the
Hunter Storyteller's Handbook,presented a cyclical view of
history, similar to what waspositive for Exalted.
The current generation ofimbued weren't the first time
(37:24):
that heroes had been chosen fromhumanity.
It had happened at least oncebefore in a distant, almost
mythical past.
And again, here you can see theexalted roots.
According to this backstory,the powers of bee, which are
very heavily implied to bedivine forces, had been absent
from Earth, and predictably thedemons had taken this as an
(37:44):
excuse to cause havoc amongsthumanity, and when the heavens
turned their attention back toEarth, they saw all this trouble
going on.
So they decided they were goingto choose heroes and champions
from amongst humanity to fightthem off, and after the demons
were banished, humanity entereda golden age.
However, the heroes eventuallystarted abusing the power and
(38:05):
began fighting amongstthemselves.
The heavens, fed up with thiswhole hollow balloon, damned the
heroes and turned their backson creation.
Predictably the forces ofdarkness used this opportunity
to gradually wheel their wayback into the world over the
ages, leading to themonster-infested mess that the
present-day world of darknessis.
(38:27):
Now, although the creatorremained absent, the ministers,
these are the divine forces onestep below the creator, decided
to interfere with the currentsituation as they couldn't stand
to see the world going to rackand ruin.
Their first attempts atcreating champions and conduits
for communicating with thedivine field horribly, because
(38:48):
unlike the mythic past, mankindhad changed over the ages and
become more fragile and lessreceptive to divine power, and
these broken imbued became thewayward and hermit creeds.
The Ministers then tried again,being less direct, hence the
ambiguous nature of themessengers that the imbued hear
(39:08):
and created the imbued as weknow them.
However, they locked away themore powerful abilities
available to these championsbecause they knew that the
hunters probably wouldn't beable to handle them and didn't
want them going off allhalf-cocked and corrupted like
the heroes of old had.
And as things went from bad toworse, the ministers chose some
hunters who were on the edge ofgreat power and offered them the
(39:31):
chance to unlock this divinepotential.
Meanwhile, the forces ofdarkness, who are strongly
implied to be the earthbounddemons from the recently
released Demon the Fallen,offered the imbued the ability
to remove the locks put in placeby the ministers to access
their full potential.
And there were also somehunters who were just
strong-willed enough to unlockthe power on their own, but they
(39:52):
were without exceptioncompletely mental.
All of this created afascinating backstory where
hunters would begin to realisethat the forces empowering them
might have their own agenda, andall these monsters they were
seeing everywhere, well thatwasn't necessarily the real
world, but rather the world astheir benefactors wanted them to
(40:13):
see it.
Interestingly though, an earlyhunter supplement, the Walking
Dead, strongly suggested acompletely different origin tied
to Kindred of the East.
This theory framed both the QuiJin, which are the Eastern
Vampires, and the imbued asfailed experiments by powerful
spirit entities of the Far East,the Ebon Dragon and the Scarlet
(40:36):
Queen.
Those names keep popping up,and in Hunter's Lord these would
be identified as the ministersthemselves.
According to this version, thespirits had originally created a
race of immortals to protectthe world, the Ten Thousand
Immortals, awesome name.
However, these protectorsbecame corrupted and eventually
became the Qui Jin.
The Imbued were, in thisinterpretation, the Spirits'
(40:58):
second attempt at creatingheroes.
Interestingly, Time of Judgmenthas a scenario for Kindred of
the East called the Trumpet ofMount Meru, and that included
rules for turning imbued intothese legendary immortal heroes.
It was certainly a lot moreinteresting than what Time of
Judgment had to offer for Hunteritself.
(41:18):
So we've already got twosettings claiming hunters as
ancient heroes from the past,but we've also got Demon joining
the party because Demon theFallen, as previously stated,
flat out says in its Time ofJudgment scenarios that the
imbued were created by celestialforces that were, or maybe once
(41:38):
were, angels.
In a memorable scene, Luciferhimself encounters the Hunter
Crusader 17.
He's one of Hunter's signaturecharacters who'd become an
extremist, and is disgusted tofind that the ministers had
apparently hollowed him out andwere using as some kind of
puppet, something that Lucifer,despite his rebellion, never
wanted for humanity.
Interestingly, Lucifer alsorefers to Goddess She in Demon's
(42:02):
cosmology, which was sure toannoy certain corners of the
internet.
What this does mean is if youlook at these different origin
(42:39):
stories and connections, it'sclear that this was somewhat of
a disorganized mess.
White Wolf really seemed to bemaking things up as he went
along, creating multiplecontradictory explanations of
the same phenomena.
The connections were alsoextremely inconsistent, and it
wasn't really until Time ofJudgment that White Wolf
clarified that the world ofDarkness games, which had
(43:00):
previously felt interconnected,actually all existed in their
own separate realities, and thismade sense from a practical
standpoint since you couldn'treally have Gehenna, the
Apocalypse, Ascension, and othergame-specific geschatological
events all happeningsimultaneously in the same
world.
I mean you could, but it wouldbe a complete mess to run and
(43:21):
not much fun for the players.
The result was a rich butconfusing mythology that left
many questions unanswered whenthe game line ended and also
many contradictions unresolved.
Now, as you can tell by thelength of this podcast, I am
definitely a fan of Hunter theReckoning, but looking back on
(43:42):
it more than two decades later,I'm struck by how much the game
was let down by its presentationand marketing.
The artwork suggested one kindof game, while the text
described something completelydifferent.
And the name Hunter impliedthat all the characters were
these predators stalkingsupernatural play, when in fact
some of the creeds, like theRedeemers and the Innocents,
(44:05):
were more interested in helpingand healing monsters than
destroying them.
If I could rename the gametoday, I might call it something
like Imbued the Awakening,something that emphasized the
transformative moment whenordinary people suddenly saw the
truth about the world.
Because that's what Hunter wasreally about.
Not hunting in the traditionalsense, although you could do
(44:26):
that, but people who had beenfundamentally changed by
knowledge that they couldn'tunknow.
The core concept was absolutelybrilliant.
What happens when regularpeople discover that the world
is full of monsters?
How do they cope with thatknowledge?
How do they maintain theirnormal lives while carrying this
terrible burden?
How do they fight the creaturesthat are stronger, faster, and
(44:48):
more experienced than they are?
What price are they willing topay for victory?
And what do they do when theyrealize that the forces
empowering them may have anagenda of their own?
Hunter the Reckoning tackledall these questions with
intelligence and sophistication.
Yes, there were some droppedballs like Hunter Holy War, but
it was a game about ordinaryheroes in an extraordinary
(45:11):
situation, about people whochose to stand up and fight even
when they were hopelesslyoutmatched.
It was about hope in the faceof despair, about retaining your
humanity while fighting inhumanfoes, and about the terrible
cost of power.
Some of my favourite books fromthe line, Fall from Grace,
Hunter Book Wayward, TheInfernal, they all dealt with
(45:33):
what happened when hunters werepushed beyond their limits.
They explored the thin linebetween Hero and Monster,
between Righteous Fury andDestructive Obsession.
They'd hard questions about theprice of power and the cost of
conviction.
And despite all its problemswith presentation and marketing,
despite the misleading artworkand the disappointing ending,
Hunter the Reckoning remains oneof my favourite RPGs of all
(45:56):
time.
Once you get past the surfaceand really dug into what the
game was trying to say, youfound something truly unique and
powerful.
A game about ordinary peopledoing extraordinary things about
the everyman versus thesupernatural.
And you know what?
Maybe that's the mostappropriate legacy for a game
about Hunters.
Like the imbued themselves,Hunter the Reckoning was
(46:18):
misunderstood, underestimated,and often dismissed by people
who never took the time to seewhat it was really about.
But for those of us who didtake that time, who looked past
the awful artwork with itschainsaws and shotguns to the
heart of the game, we foundsomething truly special.
And please never say to me, butisn't Hunter's Hunting a more
(46:41):
realistic game?
It's for people like that thatI reserve the chainsaws and
shotguns.
We hope you enjoyed it.
(47:12):
We're a semi-regular podcastabout the history of roleplaying
games.
We have over 70 episodes in ourback catalogue now dealing with
all sorts of things likehistory episodes like this one,
roundtables, interviews, productreviews, and some actual plays
as well.
So if you're a new listener andyou fancy binging, we've got
(47:34):
lots of content for you.
If you enjoyed this episode,please, please leave us some of
those nice stars on your podcastdirectory of choice.
It really helps us withvisibility and it keeps us
motivated and chunning outnonsense like this for you to
listen to.
If you want to get in touchwith us, either to discuss
Hunter the Reckoning or evenjust to suggest the next episode
(47:57):
that you would like to hear,then please mail us at
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Until next time, may yoursecond side always keep you safe
from mind control and may yourconviction burn brightly.
(48:20):
Thanks again for listening.
I almost never heard this game at all.
I remember seeing the shell in1999 on the cover with the wall
and shall just like some kind ofheavy moment I was thinking
another game where you just wantto have something done.
By the time I was done, Idiscovered the game I absolutely
(01:14):
love.
This wasn't so this wassomething completely different.
This was a game about ordinarypeople discovering the world and
having to deal with thatrevolution.
It was the second main game inthe World of Darkness series,
(02:17):
and it represented somethingrevolutionary for the line.
For the first time, White Wolfwas asking players to take on
the role of ordinary humans whosuddenly became aware of the
supernatural world that lurkedin the shadows, and it was being
presented as a core game.
Now it used a familiarstoryteller system but
introduced some key mechanicalconcepts that were unique to
(02:40):
Hunter.
First there were edges,supernatural abilities that
hunters could manifest throughfocused will.
These weren't spells ordisciplines in the traditional
sense, but rather miraculouspowers that hunters could call
upon in moments of crisis.
Second sight, which all huntershad, was the ability to see
through supernatural deceptionsand illusions that most humans
(03:03):
fell prey to.
Vampires couldn't hide behindtheir masquerade from someone
with second sight, for example,and werewolves couldn't use the
delirium to make hunters forgetthem, however much the hunters
might want to do that.
A hunter using second sightcould clearly see all
supernaturals around them.
They didn't necessarily knowwhat they were facing, they just
(03:23):
knew that what they werelooking at wasn't human.
Conviction was a measure of howstrongly a character believed
in their mission, and it servedmultiple functions.
It powered second sight, itfuelled some of the more
powerful edges, and itdetermined how effectively a
hunter could maintain theirfocus in the face of the
(03:44):
supernatural.
There were also creeds,philosophical outlooks that
determined how a hunterapproached the supernatural and
what type of edges he couldaccess.
Each creed was also aligned towhat was called a virtue.
There were three virtues in theHunter the Reckoning world:
mercy, vision, and zeal.
At their core, virtuesrepresented a hunter's
(04:05):
philosophical outlook.
Someone who was high in zeal,for example, might take a less
forgiving approach to monsterscompared to someone who had a
high mercy score, who insteadwould be looking at how they
could help monsters or cure themof whatever was afflicting
them.
These virtues were whatdetermined what edges a
character could get access to.
(04:27):
All of this supernaturalmetacurrency aside, one of the
really interesting things aboutHunter the Reckoning was the
characters that people played.
These weren't action heroes,the imbued, as they were called,
were just regular peopleaccountants, teachers, cab
drivers, retail workers,ordinary folks who experienced
(04:48):
what the game called theimbuing, a moment of a crisis
where mysterious entities calledthe messengers gave them the
ability to see the truth aboutthe world, and that truth was
terrifying.
These hunters had no ancientorganisations backing them up,
no centuries of accumulated loreand knowledge, no vast
resources.
(05:08):
They had something called aHunternet, which was an internet
forum where they could shareinformation and theories, but
even there they had to becareful about what they said and
who they trusted.
Hunters weren't superheroes,they were people who heard
voices, saw monsters everywhere,and slowly watched their normal
lives crumble under the weightof what they now knew.
(05:29):
The real horror of Hunterwasn't the monsters they fought,
it was what the hunt did to thehunters themselves.
As they grew in supernaturalpower, they slowly went mad as
their fragile human minds werenot meant to contain the power
being fed to them by thecelestial messengers.
The more they embraced the roleas hunters, the more they lost
(05:51):
their grip on their humanity andtheir sanity.
It was a game about ordinarypeople being transformed into
something they didn't understandby forces they couldn't
comprehend for reasons thatremained frustratingly unclear.
However, this all leads me toone of the most persistent
criticisms I used to hear aboutHunter the Reckoning.
People who hadn't actuallyplayed the game would say things
(06:14):
like, I don't like Hunter theReckoning because it just lets
you play superheroes.
And they also tended to followthis up with The Hunter's Hunted
was a much better game becauseit was about real people hunting
the supernatural.
This criticism always used toannoy the hell out of me because
it was based on a fundamentalmisunderstanding of what both
(06:34):
games were actually about, solet's just take a look at that
for a second before I finish myrant.
The Hunters Hunted, publishedall the way back in 1992 as a
supplement for Vampire theMasquerade, was not about normal
people.
Yes, you could theoreticallycreate normal people using these
rules, but look at the actualsample characters provided in
(06:57):
the book.
You had a ghoul with true faithwho was several hundred years
old, you had an actual vampire,you had a werewolf, a mage, you
had a TV host with vastresources at his disposal, and
more importantly, look at theorganisations that player
characters could belong to.
The FBI's special affairsdivision, think the X-Files, a
(07:19):
government agency with high-techequipment and inside knowledge.
The Centre for Disease Control,with their scientific resources
and authority, the Arcanum, aglobal network of occult
scholars with centuries ofaccumulated lore and some actual
magic.
The Society of Leopold, theInquisition's modern incarnation
(07:40):
with extensive supernaturalknowledge, Vatican backing and
Vatican Commandos.
These were an odd room ofpeople stumbling about in the
dark.
They were well-informed,well-trained, and well-armed
individuals who understood theirsupernatural foes and had
institutional support behindthem.
They probably knew karate aswell.
Compare that to Hunter theReckoning characters.
(08:01):
These people had no idea whatthey were up against.
They generally had very littlein the way of resources,
whatever they could scrapetogether from their day jobs or
scrounge up from militarysurplus stores, and yes, they
had supernatural powers, butthese powers came with a
terrible price.
Every time they embraced theirroles as hunters, they risked
losing more of their sanity.
(08:22):
Every time they gainedknowledge of the supernatural,
they found themselves furtherisolated from normal human
society.
Hunter wasn't aboutsuperheroes, it was about the
everyman discovering thesupernatural and being forever
changed by that knowledge.
It was about ordinary peopletrying to maintain their normal
lives whilst fighting animpossible war against creatures
(08:44):
that most of humanity didn'teven believe existed.
So where did all this hostilitytowards Hunter come from?
Well, this segues nicely intoone of Hunter's biggest
problems, namely the artwork.
I mentioned earlier how thecover nearly put me off buying
the game, and I'm pretty sure Iwasn't alone in that reaction.
There's probably a whole bunchof people out there who would
(09:07):
never play Hunter because theyliterally judged the book by the
cover, and to be honest, Idon't blame them in this case.
Throughout its early releases,the art in Hunter consistently
portrayed these muscled-upspecial forces types rather than
the ordinary people that thegame claimed to be about.
You'd see images of hunterswith like chainsaws and assault
(09:28):
rifles looking more like actionmovie heroes than the frightened
office workers and concernedparents that the game was
actually about.
This created a massivedisconnect between what the game
claimed to be about and whatpotential players thought it was
about based on the visuals.
The artwork suggested a gamewhere you'd kick down the doors
and blast the monsters to bitswith heavy weaponry.
(09:51):
The text described a game aboutparanoia, introspection, and
the psychological cost ofknowing about the supernatural.
I can't tell you how manypeople I met over the years who
had dismissed Hunter becausethey thought it was just another
action game, a game where yougot to wail on vampires and
werewolves and go toe-to-toewith these incredibly powerful
(10:11):
supernatural creatures.
The irony is that Hunter wasactually one of the deepest,
most psychologically complexgames in the world of Darkness
Line, but you'd never know itlooking at the pictures.
Anyway, rant over, let's talkabout what they actually
released for Hunter.
It had a pretty impressivepublication run during its
(10:32):
5-year lifespan from 1999 to2004.
In 1999 it launched with theCore Rulebook.
It was the flagship publicationfor the year of the reckoning,
surprise, surprise, and this wasa 300-page hardcover that
introduced the imbued and theirstruggle against the
supernatural.
This book was packed withfiction that brought the setting
(10:56):
to life through forum posts,chat logs, and personal
accounts.
Also in November 1999, we gotthe Hunters Storytellers
Companion.
Whitewolf did a lot of bookslike this, there were a little
booklet along with a GM screen,but this came with some
additional guidance on runninggames, namely how to include
(11:16):
certain monster types in thegames to use different rules
than for those that were in thecore rule book.
December also brought us theHunter Survival Guide, and that
took the approach of providing aglobal perspective on the
hunter's world, and it showedhow the supernatural threat
manifested differently indifferent parts of the globe.
(11:39):
Each section was written fromthe perspective of Hunter
characters posting on HunterNet, giving their first hand
accounts of the situations intheir region.
2000 was when the line reallyhit its stride though, and it
got a real steady stream ofreleases.
February saw the publication oftwo Creed books simultaneously.
(12:00):
These were, to use a parlanceof the time, Hunter's Splats,
the equivalent of Clans andVampire, or Tribes and Werewolf,
or Traditions and Mages,basically what supernatural
group did your character belongto.
And whereas in the other gamelines, these were things that
were very much referred to inthe world.
When it came to Hunter, thesplats, in this case the Creeds,
(12:23):
were very much individualphilosophies.
The two books released inFebruary were Avenger and
Defender, so it offered two verycontrasting views on how the
hunt was.
And these books were veryinteresting in how they were
laid out.
There were several chapters ofextensive fiction, followed by
one chapter at the end of Rules,and they did a brilliant job,
(12:45):
all these books, of setting uppotential players for the
different creeds.
It showed you how people inthose creeds thought and
generally gave different pointsof view.
This was nice as it showed thatin Hunter the creeds were made
up of individuals and not thesemonolithic bodies where everyone
acted and thought the same.
(13:05):
May brought us The WalkingDead, the first of what would
become known as the enemy booksor monster books, and that
explored ghosts and wraiths fromHunter's perspective, these
being the primary antagonists ofthe main core book.
Interestingly, this book alsoteased a link between Hunter and
the game Kindred of the East.
(13:27):
And it's curious all throughoutHunter's run that more so than
any other world Darkness line,it found itself constantly being
intertwined or linked withother games, other core games in
the World of Darkness series.
June of this year also got ustwo more Creed books, in this
case Hunter Book Innocent andHunter Book Judge.
(13:50):
Again, exploring two differentsides of the same coin.
Speaking of which, August sawthe beginning of the Predator
and Prey novel series, which, abit like the Creed books,
explored two different visionsof the hunt.
In this line of six books, youwould get one book about a
supernatural antagonist, andthen the following novel would
(14:13):
be about a hunter exploringthat.
September brought us one of themost fun books that was
released for the Hunter line, inthis case Hunter Apocrypha.
Now, any player of White WolfGames will be familiar with this
format of a book.
They are the small trade-sizedbooks that come with a full
(14:35):
leatherette cover.
And yes, Jason and Steve, I canhear you laughing at me
already.
Everyone knows my love of fullleatherette books, but they're
very much presented as in-worlddocuments.
In this case, Apocrypha waspresented as the ravings of one
of the more insane.
There was that visionarymembers of the imbued, and there
(14:55):
were various Maginalian notesmade by other imbued who were
commenting on this document.
And it was very atmospheric,hell, weathered, handwritten,
and there was all sorts oflittle disturbing drawings
thrown in there.
It made a great prop forthrowing into your game for
those players who were reallyinterested in exploring the
(15:16):
lore, and it helped them get togrips with the questions of what
has chosen us for this, whatare we meant to do?
Why were we chosen?
It was also curiously writtenat a time when White Wolf was
still hinting about linksbetween Hunter and their new
fantasy game, Exalted, and as Imentioned before with Kindred of
(15:36):
the East, Hunter often founditself with these links, but we
will talk more about thatshortly.
The year this is a really busyyear for Hunter wrapped up with
Hunter Book Martyr in Novemberand Hunter Book Redeemer in
December, along with some morenovels in the Predator and Prey
series.
2001 was what White Wolf deemedthe year of the Scarab, and it
(16:00):
opened with Hunter BookVisionary, which completed the
primary creeds all having aCreed book of their own.
May was a particularly busymonth with the release of Hunter
the Recon and Player's Guide,which, like most supplements in
the line, followed that patternof heavy fiction with mechanical
content both bolted on at theend.
The fiction really was the starof the Hunter line.
(16:22):
White Wolf understood that thebest way to convey what it was
like to be a hunter was to showrather than tell.
This book also contained rulesfor playing bystanders, that was
humans who had received thecall of the messengers but chose
to ignore it, turning away fromthe supernatural rather than
embracing the role as hunters.
Additionally, this bookincluded invaluable rules on law
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enforcement interactions,really recognising that hunters
would inevitably fall foul ofthe law and providing good
guidance for storytellers whowanted their games to have a
more realistic legal system andlegal consequences rather than
just using typical Hollywood coplogic.
May also saw Hunter BookHermit, which dealt with the
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first of what was called theLost Creeks and the most
solitary of those hermits.
June also brought us a bookcalled Inherit the Earth, which
(17:46):
was a fiction anthologycontaining nine stories about
famous hunters like Witness One,who is the founder of Hunter
Knight.
September though, yikes,September gave us Hunter Holy
War, which explored thereligious dimensions of the
hunt.
And this book was prettycontroversial and not without
(18:07):
reason.
While not overtly racist, itdid fetishise the Middle East in
pretty problematic ways.
The premise adopted by thisbook was that there was a whole
community of Middle Easternhunters who had never used
Hunternet because they had noneed for it.
The messengers had supposedlygiven them the ability to
(18:28):
directly commune with each othervia a telepathic hive mind
while meditating on the Quran orother holy scriptures written
in their original ancientscripts.
Hunternet was presented as asecond best solution given to
Western hunters who lacked thisability due to being cut off for
their ancestral beliefs.
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For some unexplained reason,Middle Eastern hunters were just
inherently better than huntersanywhere else in the world.
Bear in mind this book wasreleased in the same month that
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9-11 happened.
Yeah, yikes.
As a personal anecdote, Iactually got banned from the
White Wolf Forums for a week forcalling out this book for its
nonsense.
Turned out that the authorsweren't too keen to hear that
sort of criticism.
Anyway, October brought us amuch better book, The Hunter
Storytellers Handbook, which wasfantastic despite suffering
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from the same horriblenon-thematic artwork that
plagued the rest of the line.
The first chapter, Unveilingthe Night, gave brilliant advice
on creating antagonists andmonsters as part of ongoing
campaigns, ensuring that everysession wasn't just a Monster of
the Week, but part of a largerconspiracy for players to
unravel.
Genuinely great advice thatcould be used for any
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role-playing game where you wantto have some big bad pulling
the strings.
The second chapter, creatinghuman drama, got to the core of
what Hunter was about.
The section on truth andconsequences really underscored
the cost that Hunters paid forthe mission, and again, this is
a chapter well worth reading forany game that involves any form
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of personal interactions.
Vampire could really havebenefited from having this
section in one of their books.
The final chapter was all aboutplaying God, and it was
remarkable because it actuallywent a long way to spelling out
the nature of the messengers andprovide a lot of the hunter
backstory.
This was actually pretty rarefor White Wolf at the time, who
used to spend a lot of theireffort sort of quietly
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suggesting what might be realand what might be myth and what
might be a legend, and wellthey'll just have to buy the
next book to see.
This went a long way toaddressing the metaplot concerns
around a lot of the White Wolfgames, namely that White Wolf
were telling their own story inthe background and what they had
planned for the future mighthave an impact on your game
because of future supplementsthat they decided to release.
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By making this information onthe messengers available, it
meant that storytellers could beconfident that when they wrote
their game, what they hadinterpreted the messengers to be
would not be contradicted in afuture supplement.
Invaluable for the worldbuilding.
2002 was White Wolf's Year ofthe Damned, and it began with
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one of the most interestingreleases, which was Hunter Book
Wayward.
This book was genuinelydisturbing in its portrayal of
hunters because it featured onthose hunters who had snapped
under the weight of theirimbuing, and snapping in a
horrific way.
Waywards weren't just peoplethat couldn't handle the
knowledge.
Like hermits, they were themessengers' first attempts at
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hunters.
They were meant to be generalsor leaders.
They were meant to be the oneswho took the other imbued into
battle and identified targetsand dealt with them.
However, the fragile humanminds couldn't take it, and as a
result, you were left withthese broken individuals who
were usually overcome withbloodlust or rage because they
(22:08):
were conduits for themessengers, anger, and
resentment at the monstrouscreatures that were inhabiting
our world.
This was a fantastic book,again, made up of most parts
fiction with a tiny bit of rulesin the end.
And what I found is most peoplegenerally used this book as an
enemy book.
It was pretty much made clearthat Waywards didn't make great
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player characters, not beingones really to play well as part
of a team, and therefore itgave a really interesting
dimension that you can includeas an enemy, namely another
hunter, not a supernaturalcreature, but another person who
actually thought they weredoing the right thing.
It also introduced one of themost beloved signature
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characters of the line, God 45,Joshua Matthews, whose story was
really well spelt out acrossthe pages in the book Wayward
and which was picked up in otherbooks along the line.
March brought us First Contact,which dealt with what happened
when the imbued encountered thetraditional hunters from
(23:10):
supplements like the HuntersHunted, presumably they were
jealous of all the cool toys andcool organisations that the
Hunter's Hunted folks got toplay with.
April also saw a book calledThe Nocturnal, which exploded
vampires from a hunter'sperspective.
May the 21st, my birthdaynonetheless, marked a
(23:32):
significant moment with therelease of the Hunter the
Reckoning video game.
Would you like to guess if thisgame stayed true to the spirit
of the RPG?
No, of course it didn't.
This was a hack and slash game,which, surprise, surprise,
completely missed the point ofthe thoughtful RPG it was based
(23:52):
on.
The video game portrayedexactly the kind of chainsaw and
rocket launcher nonsense thatthe RPG explicitly wasn't about.
July brought The Moonstruck,which was another enemy book
about shapeshifters from ahunter's perspective.
This book looked at thedifferent types of werewolves
and helped build them assomething more than just big,
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furry, skinny monsters.
Like all the enemy books, itnever used game line-specific
terms.
You wouldn't find any guru inhere or any tribes, but there
were some nice little Eastereggs for those of us familiar
with other White Wolf games.
The chapter on werewolves ashumans who had stolen skins from
actual werewolves was aparticularly nice touch.
(24:36):
September had two majorreleases, Hunter Utopia and
Hunter Fall from the Grace.
Hunter Utopia explored whathappened when Hunters dreamed
big, imagining a paradise freefrom the monster's grip and
actually working to achieve it.
The book showed how huntersmight organise movements and
revolutions against thesupernatural, whether in a
(24:57):
neighbourhood, a city, or acrossthe world, and it also explored
the lengths hunters might haveto go and the sacrifices that
they'd have to make to see theirutopian goals fulfilled,
revealing that even successfulrevolutions could bring loss and
punishment.
Fall from Grace was myabsolutely favourite book for
the Lion Though.
(25:17):
It dealt with hunters who hadgained deep insights into the
supernatural but then emerged asthe most powerful and dangerous
of the imbued.
But it really took the time toask the question are they still
even human?
This book finally revealedrules for obtaining level 5
edges, the most powerfulabilities the hunters could have
(25:37):
that were teased in the CoreRoad book but never actually
given rules for accessing.
It also explored what happenedto hunters who became extremists
in their creeds, payingterrible prices for ultimate
power.
It was a fantastic book and itadded a lot to any Hunter the
Reckoning Chronicle.
It gave you a direction to takeplayers who wanted to explore
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Hunter's more cosmic side and itgave inevitable consequences
for that.
It had some of the best fictionas well written across the
Hunter the Reckoning line.
2003 was when the beginning ofthe end for White Wolf was
beginning to come as the timecrept forward towards the time
of judgment.
(26:21):
For Hunter, we got a bookcalled Urban Legends, which was
genuinely fascinating.
It offered new possibilitiesfor enemies, mainly in the form
of whatever the storytellerwanted to put together.
There were some chapters onsome obscure White Wolf stuff
that you might not get fromother game lines, but there was
also rules for making up things.
(26:42):
I think there's a chapter onthe Chupacapra, for example,
that never features in any otherWhite Wolf game line, and it
includes rules for just mixingthings up so that your players
are continually surprised.
Players who are longtimeveterans of something like
Vampir and Masquerade might notbe that much surprised when you
include vampires in the game,but if you include something
(27:03):
truly out of the ordinary, it'syour own creation, and this book
gives lots of rules for that,that goes a long way to keeping
things fresh for your players.
This year also saw the releaseof the Spellbound enemy book,
which dealt with mages from ahunter perspective.
This had some truly greatfiction in it.
My personal favourite was thechapters dealing with some
(27:27):
technologically inclined mageswho decided to try and hack
HunterNet and the disastrousconsequences that they suffered.
This year also saw the releaseof the infernal enemy book.
They explode demons and fallenangels.
The Blood Beaven has the reallyominous line at the beginning
that says they say angels oncerebelled against God and were
(27:50):
cast out of heaven.
This gives you the chance toinclude some truly otherworldly
nasties in your game.
Whereas things like vampiresand werewolves ultimately have
humanity at their core.
Angels are something that werenever human in the first place,
and one that's gone rogue makesfor a truly terrifying villain.
If you want to construct a goodHunter the Reckoning chronicle,
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you could set one of thesebeings as a mastermind behind
everything.
This book gave you rules fordoing so.
It was a wonderful tie intoDemon the Fallen and really
fitted perfectly into Hunter'smythos.
January also brought us Laws ofthe Reckoning, which was
adapting Hunter for White Wolf'sMind's Eye Theatre Lamp System.
(28:35):
I'll talk more about thatlater.
This was something I wasinitially sceptical about and
then grew to love.
Oh, and the video game also gotthe sequels Wayward and
Redeemer, which, surprise,surprise, continued the mindless
action mobs of the original.
The line concluded in 2004 withWorld of Darkness Time of
(28:56):
Judgment.
Now, when White Wolf initiallybrought their World of Darkness
to an end, the three big gameswere like the Vampire, Werewolf
and Page, each got their own endtimes book.
These were generally greatpublications that were packed
with different adventures thatwere each had a different take
on how the world could end andinclude all sorts of rules for
(29:19):
how things changed in the endtimes, as well as chapters on
how to structure a story inthese epic settings.
For the other smaller games,Hunter included amongst them,
they were all bundled togetherin this one book called Time of
Judgment.
That included scenarios notjust for Hunter, but for Demon,
Changely, Kindred of the East,and Mummy, Poor Old Wraith
(29:42):
having got its own send-off thesame year that Hunter was
released back in 1999.
What's remarkable about Time ofJudgment from a Hunter
perspective is for a game linethat had built up such wonderful
backgrounds through fiction andrich character development,
Time of Judgment.
And the scenarios for Hunterwere an absolute disappointment
(30:04):
because they basically threwthis all out the window.
Now, without giving too manyspoilers for people who might
still want to experience thesescenarios, there were three of
them (30:14):
Cleansing Fires, Glimmer of Hope, and Winds of Change.
And these basically amounted tohunters go and kill lots of
stuff, hunters find a way ofcuring monsters with a magic
guffin, and hunters lead humansto fight back.
The scenarios felt incrediblyshallow compared to the deep new
(30:34):
storytelling that hadcharacterised the rest of the
line.
As an example, Vampire'sGehenasaurus movement had
several scenarios that includeda whole lot of the signature
characters getting a send-off.
Not one single of the signaturecharacter got a send-off.
For a game that created suchcompelling characters over the
years, Doctor 119, Witness 1,Kabby22, and so many others,
(30:58):
none of them got the send-offthey deserved.
There was little to no closurefor any of the ongoing
storylines and made built upthrough years of supplements,
and it felt that the writers hadjust given up on the rich
narrative they'd been developingand defaulted to these generic
action scenarios.
At the beginning of thechapter, there were about 16
(31:18):
pages providing background onwhat was happening in the Hunter
universe, but much of this wasjust repeated from the Time of
Judgment news ticker that WhiteWolf had been running on their
website for the past few months.
It felt perfunctory, like theywere just going through the
motions to wrap things up.
And ironically, one of theendings for the Demon Fallen
game line actually gave Hunter abetter send-off than the Hunter
(31:42):
section did, showing how theimbued fit into the larger
cosmic struggle between Heavenand Hell, and this in many ways
felt more true to the game'sthemes than its own ending
scenarios.
Anyway, that ran out of theway.
What's really remarkable aboutHunter's release schedule is not
just the volume of supplementsthat were released over a period
(32:04):
of five years, but theconsistent quality of the
fiction and the innovativeapproaches to game design that
it showed.
It could very easily have beena case of White Wolf saying,
well, if you want monsters, justbuy one of our core books for
the other game lines, butinstead they set about producing
books for those creatures thatmade them different from Hunter
(32:25):
to give the players a whole newexperience.
What I also loved is thatthroughout the line, with a few
notable exceptions, they reallyspent the time sticking to their
ethos of showing rather thantelling what it meant to be the
Hunter, and most follows theperformance put multiple
(32:45):
perspectives of the samesupernatural friends in the same
room, and in some cases evengiving the superfashals
impression of what the huntersare.
Now, I mentioned earlier in2003 while we've released the
laws of the recognition, whichwas adapting Hunter for the Mind
Eye Theatre System.
I've been a longtime player ofVampire LARPs.
(33:06):
Anyone who's listened to thispodcast will have had that
bowled into their brain, and Iwas obviously familiar with the
format, but much as I lovedHunter, I was genuinely worried
about how Hunter would translateto live action play.
You've got a game that'sintrospective and it's
psychological.
Would that work well in a LARPenvironment?
(33:27):
Something like Vampire, whichwas inherently political, was
incredibly well suited toLARPing.
But Hunter, would that work?
I thankfully was completelywrong.
Laws of the Reckoning led me torunning what I honestly believe
was the best LARP game I'veever been involved with.
Where the game really workedwas in the human interactions
between the players, the moraldilemmas that came with being a
(33:50):
Hunter, the fragility of Hunterversus Supernaturals, the
constant tension betweenmaintaining normal lives and
fulfilling the supernaturalmission.
All of my players were longtimevampire players, and there was
one session that perfectlyillustrated the difference in
power levels.
They decided to go after acouple of ghouls, vampires are
(34:10):
mortal servants who aretypically very low on the
supernatural food chain whenyou're playing a game of
vampire.
In vampire larves, ghouls areusually minor threats at best,
but these players went inwithout a proper plan, treating
like any other vampire game, andthey got into serious trouble,
the ghouls are going to killthem.
And it was a wake-up call thatit taught them the hunters have
(34:32):
to be small and they have toplan and they have to fuck to
kill them in order to survive.
The vulnerability was real inthe way in any other one this
game was coming in, and it waswonderful for that.
And surprise, surprise, theplayers absolutely loved that.
Now I mentioned thispreviously, but one curious fact
(34:53):
about Hunter is the fact thatthroughout its run it has been
consistently linked with othergames in White Wolf's portfolio.
Now, this isn't surprising,more so than any other game out
there, Hunter calls forinteraction with other games,
namely because the protagonistsfrom all the other game lines,
(35:13):
the vampires, the werewolves,etc., are actually the
antagonists as part of Hunter.
However, it's super surprisingthat the first game that Hunter
was really posited as having alink with was Exalted White
Wolves brand new fantasy game.
Now, what I'm about to go intohere is fairly heavy and exalted
(35:35):
lore, so if you don't know whatExalted is, my apologies, it
will all sound like completejibber jabber.
These links can be seen earlyon in Hunter's line.
You can see an advertisementfor Exalted in the original
Hunter rule book, and there's afinal piece of fiction there
that hints at this connectionbetween the two games.
Hunter a Procropha alsocontains strong hints about
(35:59):
links to Exalted's cosmology.
Now the theory that emergedfrom various sources that was
White Wolf intended originallythat Exalted was going to be the
prehistory of the old world ofdarkness.
The Hunters were beingdeveloped right at the time when
this connection was beingposited.
Both Exalted and Hunter featurea Scarlet Empress and an Ebon
(36:22):
Dragon as major cosmic forces.
And while never officiallyconfirmed, there were heavy
implications that the imbuedwere originally meant to be the
deeply degraded remains of thesolar exalted long after some
catastrophe had transformed thecreation of Exalted into the
world of darkness.
Other hints in different gamelines suggested potential links
(36:43):
between the Abyssal Exalted andVampires, for example.
And the concept might have beenthat the Scarlet Empress and
the Ebon Dragon, having somehowsurvived, whoever ultimately
destroyed their cosmology, weretrying to use what was left of
the Solar Exalted in a desperateplea to save the world from the
same suffering and fate thattheirs had befallen.
(37:03):
However, White Wolf veryquickly abandoned this concept
entirely.
Hunter's official backstory, asrevealed primarily in the
Hunter Storyteller's Handbook,presented a cyclical view of
history, similar to what waspositive for Exalted.
The current generation ofimbued weren't the first time
(37:24):
that heroes had been chosen fromhumanity.
It had happened at least oncebefore in a distant, almost
mythical past.
And again, here you can see theexalted roots.
According to this backstory,the powers of bee, which are
very heavily implied to bedivine forces, had been absent
from Earth, and predictably thedemons had taken this as an
(37:44):
excuse to cause havoc amongsthumanity, and when the heavens
turned their attention back toEarth, they saw all this trouble
going on.
So they decided they were goingto choose heroes and champions
from amongst humanity to fightthem off, and after the demons
were banished, humanity entereda golden age.
However, the heroes eventuallystarted abusing the power and
(38:05):
began fighting amongstthemselves.
The heavens, fed up with thiswhole hollow balloon, damned the
heroes and turned their backson creation.
Predictably the forces ofdarkness used this opportunity
to gradually wheel their wayback into the world over the
ages, leading to themonster-infested mess that the
present-day world of darknessis.
(38:27):
Now, although the creatorremained absent, the ministers,
these are the divine forces onestep below the creator, decided
to interfere with the currentsituation as they couldn't stand
to see the world going to rackand ruin.
Their first attempts atcreating champions and conduits
for communicating with thedivine field horribly, because
(38:48):
unlike the mythic past, mankindhad changed over the ages and
become more fragile and lessreceptive to divine power, and
these broken imbued became thewayward and hermit creeds.
The Ministers then tried again,being less direct, hence the
ambiguous nature of themessengers that the imbued hear
(39:08):
and created the imbued as weknow them.
However, they locked away themore powerful abilities
available to these championsbecause they knew that the
hunters probably wouldn't beable to handle them and didn't
want them going off allhalf-cocked and corrupted like
the heroes of old had.
And as things went from bad toworse, the ministers chose some
hunters who were on the edge ofgreat power and offered them the
(39:31):
chance to unlock this divinepotential.
Meanwhile, the forces ofdarkness, who are strongly
implied to be the earthbounddemons from the recently
released Demon the Fallen,offered the imbued the ability
to remove the locks put in placeby the ministers to access
their full potential.
And there were also somehunters who were just
strong-willed enough to unlockthe power on their own, but they
(39:52):
were without exceptioncompletely mental.
All of this created afascinating backstory where
hunters would begin to realisethat the forces empowering them
might have their own agenda, andall these monsters they were
seeing everywhere, well thatwasn't necessarily the real
world, but rather the world astheir benefactors wanted them to
(40:13):
see it.
Interestingly though, an earlyhunter supplement, the Walking
Dead, strongly suggested acompletely different origin tied
to Kindred of the East.
This theory framed both the QuiJin, which are the Eastern
Vampires, and the imbued asfailed experiments by powerful
spirit entities of the Far East,the Ebon Dragon and the Scarlet
(40:36):
Queen.
Those names keep popping up,and in Hunter's Lord these would
be identified as the ministersthemselves.
According to this version, thespirits had originally created a
race of immortals to protectthe world, the Ten Thousand
Immortals, awesome name.
However, these protectorsbecame corrupted and eventually
became the Qui Jin.
The Imbued were, in thisinterpretation, the Spirits'
(40:58):
second attempt at creatingheroes.
Interestingly, Time of Judgmenthas a scenario for Kindred of
the East called the Trumpet ofMount Meru, and that included
rules for turning imbued intothese legendary immortal heroes.
It was certainly a lot moreinteresting than what Time of
Judgment had to offer for Hunteritself.
(41:18):
So we've already got twosettings claiming hunters as
ancient heroes from the past,but we've also got Demon joining
the party because Demon theFallen, as previously stated,
flat out says in its Time ofJudgment scenarios that the
imbued were created by celestialforces that were, or maybe once
(41:38):
were, angels.
In a memorable scene, Luciferhimself encounters the Hunter
Crusader 17.
He's one of Hunter's signaturecharacters who'd become an
extremist, and is disgusted tofind that the ministers had
apparently hollowed him out andwere using as some kind of
puppet, something that Lucifer,despite his rebellion, never
wanted for humanity.
Interestingly, Lucifer alsorefers to Goddess She in Demon's
(42:02):
cosmology, which was sure toannoy certain corners of the
internet.
What this does mean is if youlook at these different origin
(42:39):
stories and connections, it'sclear that this was somewhat of
a disorganized mess.
White Wolf really seemed to bemaking things up as he went
along, creating multiplecontradictory explanations of
the same phenomena.
The connections were alsoextremely inconsistent, and it
wasn't really until Time ofJudgment that White Wolf
clarified that the world ofDarkness games, which had
(43:00):
previously felt interconnected,actually all existed in their
own separate realities, and thismade sense from a practical
standpoint since you couldn'treally have Gehenna, the
Apocalypse, Ascension, and othergame-specific geschatological
events all happeningsimultaneously in the same
world.
I mean you could, but it wouldbe a complete mess to run and
(43:21):
not much fun for the players.
The result was a rich butconfusing mythology that left
many questions unanswered whenthe game line ended and also
many contradictions unresolved.
Now, as you can tell by thelength of this podcast, I am
definitely a fan of Hunter theReckoning, but looking back on
(43:42):
it more than two decades later,I'm struck by how much the game
was let down by its presentationand marketing.
The artwork suggested one kindof game, while the text
described something completelydifferent.
And the name Hunter impliedthat all the characters were
these predators stalkingsupernatural play, when in fact
some of the creeds, like theRedeemers and the Innocents,
(44:05):
were more interested in helpingand healing monsters than
destroying them.
If I could rename the gametoday, I might call it something
like Imbued the Awakening,something that emphasized the
transformative moment whenordinary people suddenly saw the
truth about the world.
Because that's what Hunter wasreally about.
Not hunting in the traditionalsense, although you could do
(44:26):
that, but people who had beenfundamentally changed by
knowledge that they couldn'tunknow.
The core concept was absolutelybrilliant.
What happens when regularpeople discover that the world
is full of monsters?
How do they cope with thatknowledge?
How do they maintain theirnormal lives while carrying this
terrible burden?
How do they fight the creaturesthat are stronger, faster, and
(44:48):
more experienced than they are?
What price are they willing topay for victory?
And what do they do when theyrealize that the forces
empowering them may have anagenda of their own?
Hunter the Reckoning tackledall these questions with
intelligence and sophistication.
Yes, there were some droppedballs like Hunter Holy War, but
it was a game about ordinaryheroes in an extraordinary
(45:11):
situation, about people whochose to stand up and fight even
when they were hopelesslyoutmatched.
It was about hope in the faceof despair, about retaining your
humanity while fighting inhumanfoes, and about the terrible
cost of power.
Some of my favourite books fromthe line, Fall from Grace,
Hunter Book Wayward, TheInfernal, they all dealt with
(45:33):
what happened when hunters werepushed beyond their limits.
They explored the thin linebetween Hero and Monster,
between Righteous Fury andDestructive Obsession.
They'd hard questions about theprice of power and the cost of
conviction.
And despite all its problemswith presentation and marketing,
despite the misleading artworkand the disappointing ending,
Hunter the Reckoning remains oneof my favourite RPGs of all
(45:56):
time.
Once you get past the surfaceand really dug into what the
game was trying to say, youfound something truly unique and
powerful.
A game about ordinary peopledoing extraordinary things about
the everyman versus thesupernatural.
And you know what?
Maybe that's the mostappropriate legacy for a game
about Hunters.
Like the imbued themselves,Hunter the Reckoning was
(46:18):
misunderstood, underestimated,and often dismissed by people
who never took the time to seewhat it was really about.
But for those of us who didtake that time, who looked past
the awful artwork with itschainsaws and shotguns to the
heart of the game, we foundsomething truly special.
And please never say to me, butisn't Hunter's Hunting a more
(46:41):
realistic game?
It's for people like that thatI reserve the chainsaws and
shotguns.
We hope you enjoyed it.
(47:12):
We're a semi-regular podcastabout the history of roleplaying
games.
We have over 70 episodes in ourback catalogue now dealing with
all sorts of things likehistory episodes like this one,
roundtables, interviews, productreviews, and some actual plays
as well.
So if you're a new listener andyou fancy binging, we've got
(47:34):
lots of content for you.
If you enjoyed this episode,please, please leave us some of
those nice stars on your podcastdirectory of choice.
It really helps us withvisibility and it keeps us
motivated and chunning outnonsense like this for you to
listen to.
If you want to get in touchwith us, either to discuss
Hunter the Reckoning or evenjust to suggest the next episode
(47:57):
that you would like to hear,then please mail us at
roll.two.save.pod at gmail.comor you can find us on Instagram
and Facebook by searching forroll to save.
Until next time, may yoursecond side always keep you safe
from mind control and may yourconviction burn brightly.
(48:20):
Thanks again for listening.
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CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.