Role playing game reviews: Hunter: The Vigil

By admin · Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

White Wolf’s new World of Darkness focuses on the monsters. Their flagship line is about vampires; their other two main games feature werewolves and wizards; they’ve got games about fairies and Frankenstein monsters, and ghosts and spirits make regular appearances in even a generic WoD game. “Hunter: The Vigil” looks instead at the humans who fight back.

The most obvious thing about Hunter is that it takes the “five inherent, five social” structure of the other games (OK, Changeling has 6 and 4. Still.) and tosses it right on out the window. Instead of metaphysical groups that a character is “born” into, you get careers-things like teacher, soldier, or academic-and there are something like 25 of them. Similarly, when it comes to social groups above the “these are my buddies” level, you can have anything from hedonists who hunt for the thrill through people who believe they’re descended from Satan and working stiffs who object to monsters messing up their neighborhoods to agents of the US government and the Inquisition itself. There’s a *lot* of character customization possibility here, only slightly limited by the fact that it’s probably best to keep the characters all in one group, especially if it’s one of the more specialized ones-it seems unlikely that Team Valkyrie would be working with some guy who’s organized his neighbors, at least on a long-term basis.

To give the mere mortals a chance at standing up to the guys with super-strength, claws on demand and various kinds of magic, the book presents two kinds of edges: one available to any hunter team (”cell”), and one that requires joining one of the big conspiracies. Any team that trains together can learn tactics, which give them an edge when fighting in specific situations; a cell that practices vampire-hunting gets a bonus for trying to stake a sucker, for example. But giving up some of a character’s autonomy grants even cooler abilities, as when the Cheiron Group implants you with monster bits that allow you to give back some of what the monsters dish out.

The best part of the game, however, is the consideration of feel. If you want to play Hunter in a Halo-esque “We’ve got a nest of suckers in Cleveland” kind of way, you can; tune Morality to “anything you do to a monster is OK”, and off you go. Groups that want to explore shades of grey and whether the hunters eventually turn into monsters just as horrible as the ones they hunt can have that just as simply. Plus, the whole premise is that it’s group-oriented and humans need to band together to survive; this makes it a perfect fit for a gaming group.

Also entertaining is the hunter’s-eye-view of the monster groups. It doesn’t take much tweaking for the inherently scary vampires and werewolves, but the maneuvering to make the downsides of mages and changelings look malevolent is kind of fun.

Bottom line: Hunter is great as a sort of “gateway” WoD game. It can get uncertain immigrants from other systems into the mindset while still allowing them to hunt the monsters, rather than playing them. It’s not a game for those who want big, spectacular powers, but powers aren’t everything…

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