Hunter: The Reckoning vs Night's Black Agents
Compare Hunter: The Reckoning and Night's Black Agents side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.
| Hunter: The Reckoning | Night's Black Agents | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Horror, Modern | Horror, Modern |
| Tags | Investigation, Mystery, Character-Driven, Gritty, Deadly, Atmospheric, Social Combat, Strong GM Support, Lore-Heavy, Urban Fantasy | Investigation, Espionage, Character-Driven, Gritty |
| Core Mechanic | Roll a pool of d10s, usually an Attribute plus a Skill. Each 6 or higher is a success. Meeting the Storyteller's Difficulty wins. Each pair of 10s counts as four successes. On tests within their creed's Field, Hunters may choose to add Desperation Dice equal to the cell's shared Desperation rating. A 1 on any Desperation Die turns a win into a choice: keep it and raise the cell's Danger, or fail and enter Despair. A failed test with a Desperation 1 always causes Despair. | GUMSHOE engine. Investigative abilities auto-succeed: if you have the skill and there's a clue, you find it. General abilities (combat, athletics) roll 1d6 + spent points vs. difficulty 4. Point pools refresh between sessions, creating resource-management tension. Four play modes (Burn, Dust, Mirror, Stakes) tune mechanics to your preferred espionage tone. |
| Dice | d10 dice pool | d6 |
| Complexity | Medium | Medium |
| Availability | Paid | Paid |
| Runnability | 5 of 5 book tools | Book tools not listed |
| License | All Rights Reserved | GUMSHOE SRD (CC BY 3.0 / OGL) |
| Third-Party Publishing | Commercial publishing allowed — Storytellers Vault | Not yet researched |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Publisher | Renegade Game Studios | Pelgrane Press |
| Year | 2022 | 2012 |
| Languages | English, French, German, Italian, Spanish | English |
| Best For | Groups who want investigation-heavy modern horror in which a cell of ordinary people researches, plans, and confronts a monster at real personal risk. | Groups who want spy-thriller action fused with supernatural horror: burned agents unraveling a vampire conspiracy through investigation, chases, and tradecraft. |
| Highlights | Desperation rises after the cell's setbacks, so mounting trouble adds both dice and risk to later Field tests. Overreach lets a player keep a win by raising the cell's Danger, which escalates the quarry's response against the whole cell. Monsters have weaknesses Hunters can discover, so research pays off as concrete advantages in the final confrontation. | Investigation never stalls: clues flow automatically, Conspyramid campaign structure is a well-designed GM tool, four tonal modes let you dial in the spy genre you want, highly modular vampire creation system, works stripped of vampires for pure espionage |
| Considerations | Desperation Dice apply only to tests within a Hunter's creed Field, so a character's signature boost sits idle outside that specialty. The book recommends ending most conflicts after about three turns, which leaves little room for extended tactical combat. The content warning covers themes such as sexual violence and torture, so groups should calibrate boundaries before play. | NPC combat math can feel unbalanced against PCs, multiple point pools to track can bottleneck play, narrow genre focus limits reuse, requires significant GM prep for conspiracy networks |