Hunter: The Reckoning

 Hunter: the Reckoning is a fascinating artifact. It's an rpg whose high-concept elevator pitch has broad appeal - monsters walk among us, preying on humanity while disguising themselves so effectively that most people don't even suspect that they exist, and your characters have been singled out by a higher power and granted extraordinary abilities to detect and . . . deal with the threat - but then instead of making a fun game that people will enjoy, White Wolf decided that they were going to indulge all of their most idiosyncratic bugbears and pretensions. But the strangest thing about it is that it's still a pretty great game, and not even in spite of its baffling choices, but arguably because of them. 

The thing to understand about Hunter: the Reckoning is that it "is not a game about superheroes."  And the thing understand about that is that White Wolf is in denial. They're not lying. They genuinely believe it.

So, obviously, this is a game about superheroes. It could not be more about superheroes if it was officially licensed from DC and Marvel. You start with ordinary people, have them experience a transformative event (an "origin story," if you will) where they heroically intervene to save lives or deliver justice, and then they use their strange and uncanny powers to fight super-powered villains. You could 1000% make a superhero comic out of this. Doctor Strange and Blade would fit right in, no problem.

But White Wolf can't make a superhero game. That's not who they are. The Aberrant Players Guide, of all things, opened with an essay titled "This is Not 'Superfriends'." You think they're going to break for Hunter?

So what they do is they sort of make a list of all the things they regard as characteristic tropes of the superhero genre (and for all the shit I talk about White Wolf, as a company by the late 90s they were masters of navigating genre) and they deliberately subvert them. This is going to be a horror game, damnit! You have powers, yes, but the powers' largest effect is to alienate and isolate you. The most likely outcome of your hunting career is that you die a violent death. The second most likely is that you'll be branded a violent criminal. There is no glory. Living out a power fantasy is a surefire way to get yourself killed. You do have a secret identity, which you must maintain by constantly lying to your loved ones about where you're going and what you're doing, but it's treated as living under an oppressive cloud of terror, rather than the mild social obstacle that's more typical of the superhero genre.

And it's all run through this characteristically White Wolf filter of "self-identified social liberal whose brain has been cooked by immersion in right-wing talk radio." Hunter: the Reckoning presents the World of Darkness like the David Icke cinematic universe - "Every systematic ideology in the world serves the secret agenda of . . . the creatures who rule from the shadows [and] control the media."  The main power of Imbued hunters, beyond even their edges is just the ability to penetrate the WoD's genre-protecting assumptions. Normally, things like the Masquerade, the Delirium, and the Technocracy are treated as being unreasonably effective, but hunters are cursed with the knowledge that this storytelling convention is powered by handwavium.  Specifically, they can spend a point of Conviction to detect the other splats and become temporarily immune to illusions and mind control and just this little bit of insight is enough to make them be like, "wait, are we living in some kind of world of darkness?"

(The quote was only hypothetical, but I'll admit, if they'd had the audacity to actually do the title drop, we'd be having a very different discussion right now).

Another thing I noticed about Hunter: the Reckoning is that it sits at the confluence of pretty much every revised-area setting and mechanical trend. It's reminiscent of Time of Thin Blood's suggestion that we learn to enjoy playing weaker characters, or Bitter Road's insistence that a person with an ordinary job is perhaps even more interesting than a full-time wizard. Except Hunter has no pre-existing canon to contradict so it's just all those things right from the start. In a way, it feels like the intended entry-point to the series as a whole, so much so that there's a sidebar in the introduction that advises players to "try to maintain your distance from the other Storyteller games."

And I have to take a beat to really just sit with that bit of anti-marketing, because it really is the spirit of 90s White Wolf. There's another line, later in that same sidebar that says "You might never have played a Storyteller game before because all that angsty-goth or save-nature crap just turned you off. Well, here's an opportunity to do something about it." And that's the spirit of White Wolf too. It's hard to read that line and not think, "finally White Wolf is making one just for the chuds," but really it's a line that is absolutely dripping in insecurity. They're a company that's so certain of their purist convictions that they'll boldy tell people not to buy their other products in order to better enjoy the intended Hunter experience, but so embarrassed by their own moments of vulnerability that they'll engage in performative insincerity ("ha, ha, yeah, I guess we were being lame and weird before, HA!") I guess what I'm saying is that White Wolf was Gen-X to its core and Hunter: the Reckoning is like the Nevermind of rpgs.

Back on topic, Hunter is filled with a bunch of little White-Wolf-isms. Like the weird insistence that none of the splats know anything about each other. And you might argue that it makes sense for hunters, because of how and when they came to be, but I'd say from a Doylist perpective that the causality is backwards. Hunters were designed the way they were in order to have a splat where "neither I, nor anyone I know, has ever talked to a [vampire, werewolf, mage, ghost, etc] long enough to even get the name of one of their most influential organizations" is actually convincing. 

Likewise, it encourages the "wouldn't it be cool if your mage had a job washing dishes in a restaurant" (based on a real canon NPC) idea in the most direct manner imaginable - hunters are chosen more or less at random, with possibly the only selection criteria being a moral tendency to rise to the challenge. The implication being that most hunters were completely normal people, prior to the imbuing.

This is a very important nuance of the game. I'm old enough that I was able to catch the tail end of the Year of the Reckoning discourse on the Ex Libris Nocturnis message boards and one of the fault lines in the fandom was over whether Hunter: the Reckoning could really be described as "ordinary people fighting monsters" when the Imbued had magical powers. A lot of people felt like "ordinary people" was a taxonomic classification and that badass government agents or holy inquisitors armed with nothing more than top of the line equipment and training, supported by some of the world's most powerful organizations, were "more ordinary" than a housewife that can cast divine smite 3/day.

It was all so very long ago, and it seems like history has vindicated the "we want Hunters Hunted, part 2" crowd, seeing as how the Imbued have never returned. But I get what White Wolf was going for. The magical powers were intended to preempt and obviate the need for characters to have a badass backstory, and White Wolf, in its zeal to not make a superhero game, correctly intuited that "my superpower is gun" is very much a genre trope.

I'm only partly on White Wolf's side, though. The way powers work in this game is kind of ridiculous. Each of the seven Creeds (Hunter's answer to Clans, Tribes, Traditions, etc) is ruled by one of three Virtues - Zeal, Mercy, or Vision. As you progress through adventures, you gain Virtue points whenever you max out your Conviction pool (by taking risks with your powers and succeeding) and then you spend Virtue points on Edges associated with one of the Creeds that is ruled by that particular Virtue (so you can spend Zeal points on Avenger, Defender, or Judge Edges, Mercy Points on Innocent, Martyr, or Redeemer Edges, and Vision points on Visionary Edges). Edges cost 1 virtue point per Edge rating, from 1 to 5.

Virtues max out at a rating of 10. Which means that if you stick to one Creed per Virtue, you can get a maximum Edge rating of 4, but if at any point you split your points, you lose out on level 4 forever. And so far, just looking at the rules in the core book, there's no way to get a level 5 Edge at all. This is White Wolf's "don't let your head get turned by kewl powerz" nonsense baked into the mechanics of the game, despite the fact that the kewl powerz in question are essential to the game's fucking themes. Edges are what allow you to play plumbers and mail carriers instead of Vatican assassins and they are hit and miss at best (most are slightly behind the curve compared to similarly ranked Disciplines, but a few have surprisingly good utility and some are powerful, but overly specialized).

Classic White Wolf.

Also classic White Wolf, but in a bad way - language that can reasonably interpreted as racist, sexist, or ableist. The ableism goes without saying ("derangements" anyone) but hits especially hard because "society calls us insane, but they'd agree our actions make perfect sense if they knew what we knew" is  one of the major themes. With the others, it's about an even split between things which might be justifiable for the fiction's verisimilitude (there's a Black character who uses the n-word to bitterly lament a cop's racism) and out of character thoughtlessness that really should have been caught in editing (such as the Storyteller chapter lampooning the plot of Titanic with "let the rich ho take care of herself for once.")

Overall, I'd say Hunter: the Reckoning is a promising start to a new line of rpgs. Like much coming from this era of White Wolf, it is alternately frustrating and enticing, firing up the imagination even as it sometimes pushes too hard on the One True Way. But whatever else I might say about it, it definitely has a point of view. This is a game that could only have been make at this particular time, by this particular group of people and there's something beautiful about that specificity. I look forward to reading more of it.

Ukss Contribution: The strange beings who give hunters their powers, the Messengers, have a number of ways to communicate their wishes. Often, it's voices or visions, but my favorite is when they change the text of street signs or advertisements. It's a trick that was almost certainly inspired by They Live, but it's a great bit. Probably the spookiest possible way for a divine being to communicate with a mortal.