I’ve been running a Night’s Black Agents campaign for a while now, the Pelgrane game of elite spies versus vampires and the rules, the ideas for structuring campaigns and the atmosphere have all combined into being one of the most involving and exciting games I’ve played in a gaming career that goes back far longer than I am comfortable admitting.

For most of those years of gaming I’ve been pretty emphatically anti-crunch.  I’ve played with players, lovely each one of them, that fall everywhere on the spectrum from “pure story” to “pure number crunching” but I’ve always been biased toward the former end.   Consequently I’ve tended to favour systems that are light on mechanics and that de-emphasise combat detail in favour of narrative immediacy.

However in Night’s Black Agents the details actually do their damned job and make the game more exciting.   The core mechanics of the Gumshoe system are simple enough to make intuitive sense and even when adding in all the Thriller combat options and the expanded options from the Double Tap supplement things just flow well enough to convey the action in detail without slowing things down or taking the focus away from what’s happening “on screen.”

In last night’s episode we ended up using rules we hadn’t touched before and, other than a moment when I totally blanked on how suppressive fire worked and had to look it up, everything just shot along at a hair-raising pace just as it should.

Rules that were new to us included:

Sneaking into the concealed terrorist headquarters in a run down part of Siegen using the extended Infiltration rules from Double Tap (made harder by the fact that combat-monster Hans has no infiltration skills and had to be nurse maided past the tricky security by Rowan… but it was worth having him along when a botched roll led to a sudden encounter with a single sentry… that ended a second later with a silenced single shot from Hans)

Deciding halfway through the infiltration that some sort of escape-diversion might prove handy later and Hans making a cherry-rich Preparedness spend to have already taken care of that by placing flashbangs and noisemakers adjacent to one of the other exits prior to their ingress.

Our heroes becoming trapped in a dead-end attic corridor after rescuing a pair of prisoners, and the campaign’s first use of Suppressive Fire as Hans emptied his MP5 downrange.   One of the enemy tried to risk moving for a better angle and got his head blown off, the others kept well out of the line of fire.    This was followed up by one of the surviving bad guys lobbing a grenade into the corridor so we also got to play with the explosive rules and – more specifically- the panicky use of Athletics skill to leap for cover before the damn thing went off.

Honestly I can’t recommend this game enough.   As it happened in last night’s session there wasn’t even the sniff of the supernatural so even if you’re only interested in playing high octane modern action this is definitely worth checking out.

“You don’t need two hands to hold a severed head.”

Not an actual depiction of events Hans is more Swedish and better dressed

You know that the session of Night’s Black Agents has taken a dark turn when one of the player characters muses aloud along those lines.

Last night’s session ended up with Hans losing enough Stability to be Shattered for the first time anyone’s hit that state in the campaign after witnessing someone who they thought was a potential ally massacring a group of innocent bystanders at a barbecue, just after an encounter with the revived corpse of someone Rowan had killed in cold blood in a previous session (the former owner of the aforementioned severed head) and a furious thespian vampire who had just ripped out Rowan’s throat (she’ll live – barely) following Rowan’s taunts about her being second rate.

If things needed to go further south, Hans was having flashbacks to a mission gone wrong in Belarus as he drove to the safehouse where their friendly medic lives and recalled in vivid detail the time he had to shoot his way past a police roadblock.

When he reached the safehouse in a slightly more stable frame of mind he realised his pistol had been recently fired…

 In last night’s session of Night’s Black Agents a vampire nearly houseruled the system spontaneously by so clearly failing a stability test it took the Director- me- aback.

Okay so vampires don’t make stability tests, nor did I roll one.   But it sure as hell felt like he failed one.

Here’s a bit of backstory to set the context.

In 1917 Captain Nathaniel Soames was crippled during a shell attack in Belgium during the Great War.  His pelvis and legs were shattered and he was paralysed from the waist down, surviving only because he was dragged back from No Man’s Land by a cockney infantryman Private Harry Sparrow.

Sparrow was an up and coming gangster in the immediate post war years and he was startled to be approached one evening by his former Captain, Soames, healthy as can be and offering Sparrow anything he wanted to set the balance straight.   Sparrow asked for prosperity for his band of miscreants and Soames promised him a century of unhindered dominance over the East End.   The Chapel Boys, as the gang became known, started to piece things together over the next hundred years and stories spread in whispers about the nature of the aid they occasionally received.   The imminent arrival of the end of that promised century is weighing heavily on the minds of their bosses.

Anyway… in addition to keeping his word of honour to the Chapel Boys, Soames has been hiding a secret of his own.  In the mid 20s, adjusting badly to his new undead state, he became obsessed with the young daughter of a family who were his neighbours in life.   Little Dorothy Coleridge (she hated the name Dolly even then) caught Soames’ attention as a spark of lively energy that he’d lost contact with.   He turned her, making her like himself, condemning her to an immortal life in the body of a twelve year old.   Her mind broke and she became cruel and savage.   Soames confined her within a private asylum guarded by his loyal servants and Renfields who occasionally roamed the streets of London to find playmates for Dolly, playmates who would soon become prey.

Soames tried to put his mistake from his mind, but in the way of some vampires he found it easy to grow obsessed and less easy to move on from his mistakes.   Dolly preyed on his mind.  He rarely visited if ever but he never got over her and what he and done to her (and his hopes for what she could have been).

So…  when our bold heroes, Rowan and Hans located the asylum while following up reports of missing girls taken from the poorer parts of London, when they confronted Dolly – which led to Hans being ripped apart by teeth and claws and left half dead – and Rowan staked her, reducing her to foul dust and decay… you can imagine Soames would not react well.

He ditched the job he was undertaking (of which more later) and returned to London, tearing witnesses and leads apart to try to find out who was responsible for the death of his inappropriate immortal paramour.

It came to a head with his hands round Hans’ throat in a side courtyard in the Tower of London with Soames hissing in his face.   “Tell me who killed Dolly and I’ll give you a swift death.”

That was Rowan’s cue to appear on the scene.

“I killed her,” she told Soames, grinning, “Staked her through her itty-bitty heart.”

The combination of the phrase and the way Rowan’s player said it hit me/Soames like a hurled brick.  I actually froze on Soame’s behalf.

“You know,” I said, “I think he just failed a Stability Check.”

And that probably saved their lives in the conflict that followed, throwing Soames off balance and giving our heroes a moment or two to act while he just howled at them in fury.

They made it out alive, and Soames melted away into a crowd of angry ravens after a short and intense encounter but the high point was certainly that moment when the Vampire took the Stability rules unto himself and was found wanting.

This very practical travel kit for the aspiring vampire hunter went on sale in North Yorkshire in 2012 and raised £7500 at auction.

It was put together in the 19th century and contained all the stuff you’d expect:

A crucifix
Stakes and a mallet
A Pistol
Glass bottle of Holy Water, another of consecrated earth, another of garlic paste
The Book of Common Prayer
A handwritten Bible verse (Luke 19:27  “But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.”)

It was left to a Yorkshire woman in her uncle’s will and apparently dates from the late 1800s.   The auction house, Tennants of Leyburn, North Yorkshire,  commented it was probably a novelty item put together to capitalise on the property of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  A likely story.

Bidding was apparently fierce with half a dozen telephone bidders involved in the auction and it went for about four times the price expected.

It’s current owner and location are as yet not known.    Except, I expect, to one or two currently extinct vampires.