An Inside Look at Compacts & Conspiracies
White Wolf’s Hunter: the Vigil has always offered a twist on the usual World of Darkness dynamic — you’re a human fighting against the supernatural instead of being a supernatural being yourself. Compacts & Conspiracies twists the formula yet again, creating new levels of intrigue and mystery for hunters to unravel (or ravel further).
You might expect a book called Compacts & Conspiracies for a game with Hunter’s X-Files-like premise to offer a host of corrupt worldwide organizations for the players to penetrate and uncloak. This book does offer that. I mean, technically, you could use it as a sort of “monster manual” of shadowy groups. But the twist is that the intended function of these groups in a Hunter game is to provide a home base, a social and professional community for your hunters to exist within. From the outset, you’re part of the conspiracy.
Even with that surprise (which may not be entirely unexpected if you’re familiar with Hunter), things aren’t that simple. Being part of a Hunter compact isn’t like joining the Justice League of America. Everyone in your group isn’t going to be a convivial teammate fighting by your side to right the wrongs of the world. It’s far more likely that there are conspiracies within conspiracies, that even as an initiate you don’t know the true motivations of your compact, and that your fellow Hunters might be a wee bit more fanatical than you’re prepared to deal with. And you can’t just quit, you know. They’ll find you.
This means that each of the dozen compacts described in this book can play several different roles within a Hunter campaign. They could be NPC allies, straightforward bad guys with intentions deleterious to your own, something in between with goals sometimes coinciding with the players’, or a complicated group that the players have joined, becoming deeply intertwined with every plot thread the campaign produces. In other words, a Storyteller can get a lot of mileage from this one.
Each compact/conspiracy gets a broad overview, different ways to join or encounter them, various sub-groups and cliques within the conspiracy itself, and some tasty conspiratorial plot hooks that add layers of mystery and adventure for the players to interact with. There’s a nice helping of crunchy new rules material with each group as well (although no new talents) — new endowments and other systems give players who join a given group a unique flavor.
Highlights include Ashwood Abby, a monster-hunting group for the bored and rich, which includes what might be the second ever RPG rules set devoted to running an orgy (I’m being a bit sensationalist here, as it’s actually quite abstract, but on some level that is the intended purpose). I’m a big fan of Task Force: Valkyrie, a U.S. military group made up of government officials who have had contact with the unknown. I love the idea of playing it up with guns blazing, as players get wasted or go insane and new recruits are sent in to replace them, contrasted with more sedate investigational passages. As a gamer who has wondered what it would be like to have a atheist D&D character living in a world regularly visited by deities (my 3.5 character eventually became agnostic), I’m also quite enthralled with Null Mysteriis, a group of rational scientists and researchers who are certain all this supernatural vampiric demoney nonsense can be explained if you just do enough experiments and carefully controlled studies. Of course it never really fits together for them, so their sanity erodes the whole time.
There’s plenty more to satisfy your cravings for dark secrets and forbidden mysteries, and the lengths human go to to keep them covered up. This is an excellent book to flesh out any Hunter (or other humans vs. the supernatural) campaign.
June 1st, 2010 10:02 PM
Task Force: Valkyrie & the Nulls are the LEAST interesting to me; weird that we are such opposites. “Guns blazing!” is already the default in games like DnD. I’m not saying they don’t have uses (see also, the film Aliens) but I’m not crazy about them; same thing with the Nulls– atheism is a tough sell; it ain’t “science” if you have to deny your observations! Then again, I get that the point of them is to be like “Necro-what now? Stop being so superstitious. Why, it says right here: Ash Nash Gimbatul….AG:KHJF;kfasdlvnsad”
June 1st, 2010 10:39 PM
Aliens is exactly what I was picturing, I almost mentioned it in the review.
We do seem to have opposite tastes, mordicai. Hopefully that still makes the reviews useful! “Ed hates this, I better pre-order a copy.”
June 3rd, 2010 2:48 AM
My only problem with WoD is that it seems quite a bit rules light, though in all fairness I’ve only read the core book. I love the ability to cherry-pick what you want across rule books and games. It’s the same feeling I get thinking about RIFTS, but with rules that work.
June 3rd, 2010 7:51 PM
Hey, diversity is the spice of life & all that such yadda yadda. Besides, thinking about using something that seemed dull at first blush can sometimes yield huge dividends in a different context. I have a friend who thinks the Lucifuge are lame & Judeo-Christian…& I can’t help but see it differently. The Lucifuge are rife with potential! I want to take the Lucifuge in a Werewolf game who is in a pack with a bunch of werewolves…& they all have a Maeljin, a primordial demon that the Lucifuge keeps whipped into shape…
ITS ALL FOR YOU DAMIAN!
June 3rd, 2010 7:52 PM
…& I’m the opposite of ggodo, too. I USE the WoD BECAUSE it is rules light. Dumb ole rules! It makes cherry picking super easy, like you say. Super huge selling point; very easy to run any non-combat monster game.
June 4th, 2010 2:29 AM
Yea, I’m just not confidant enough to run a story based game, my players are big on the combat, and I’m good at setting up interestng combats, so that works well. Although, is there more crunch in the non core more themed books, like Hunter or Mage? the core World of Darkness just didn’t seem worth its price, especially if the focused ones have more to them.
June 4th, 2010 4:25 PM
Hunter does have crunch, but lots of rules crunch, actually. The thing I like about WoD’s system is how if you scrub the description, it becomes really easy to port things around– like a vampire bloodline’s powers? Sure, your werewolf can take them, lets just invent the spirits that teach it to you. Like the rules for “were bat” powers? Why not let the vampires buy ‘em!
June 5th, 2010 4:03 PM
`Ok, the core WoD book was a half dozen stat blocks, a setting description, and the plots from a few Twilight Zone episodes. It didn’t seem like there was much game there for the GM to work with. Some people like that, I need a bit more of a base to build off of. I might have to skim a couple of the other books at the store today, I feel like I judged it prematurely.
June 9th, 2010 6:46 PM
Ggodo: I think the meat & drink of World of Darkness is definitely in the “monster mash” books– your Vampire, etc. They are taking a very “pick & choose, a la carte” approach– if you want psychics, buy Second Sense; if you want Frankensteins, buy Prometheus; if you want devils, buy Inferno….
June 10th, 2010 12:37 PM
I read a quarter of the Mage book, I like their representation of magic as this reality altering force that you use to just “Make It So” but if you do something too weird then reality breaks a little. I haven’t even seen Inferno, What is that one?