RPX Rollup - Episode 39 - Hunter The Reckoning 3rd Ed

[00:00:21] Hello, welcome to The Roleplaying Exchange Podcast. This is Adam, and today we are going to be rolling up Hunter the Reckoning 3rd Ed. And joining me today are my good friends. Hi, this is Crazon, or Vucultist, or Chris. Man of many names. And this is Jeremy, a man of one name. I want to just kind of go into confession as I yawn right now, or stretch as we're doing this here.

[00:00:45] The, I think the second tabletop game I ever purchased in my life, I picked up like D&D 3rd Ed, or something like that. And then I picked up Hunter of the Reckoning. So, I never got to run it then. I picked it up, loved the book. I've seen that they've had maybe two or three iterations. I can't remember which one I jumped in on. I would say it's the one with the orange cover on it, but this one has an orange cover as well.

[00:01:12] That's kind of their color theme here. But I've always been kind of interested in this, and it's exciting to actually get into exploring that today. Yeah. I mean, my experience with Hunter is the old couch co-op Xbox games, so. Oh, that's so good. Yeah. So edgy at the same time. I played those same games along with Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, and then also played the tabletop versions of Vampire.

[00:01:41] I did some Mind's Eye Theater LARP, also Old World of Darkness, just random smatterings as the young edgelord was. And I think this book, if I'm not mistaken, both Chris and I picked this up at Gen Con. It was Impulse Spy. We were walking by, and it had an orange cover, and it was pretty. And it looked pretty, yes. It's like, ooh, that looks pretty, and I like Hunter the Reckoning. I liked that video game. Let's see what the tabletop game's like.

[00:02:08] They did make it Hunter orange for a reason, apparently. Okay. Oh, dear, I can't read the book. I see it. Sad. So I can sit in my blind and read a book. Ah, goodness. It also drives dogs crazy. Or is that yellow? I don't particularly know. I don't know. Never held yellow in front of a dog.

[00:02:34] So for those of us that are unfamiliar with the world of darkness, it's dark, wouldn't you say, Chris? It is our world, but of the dark. Yeah, no, it's our world, the modern day, the here and now. But vampires and werewolves and all manner of other supernatural factions and entities exist in the shadows. Probably controlling the world, I think, is the general consensus.

[00:03:00] A lot of them, they're secretly running the show, but also doing their own thing. And most people, either because of some meta plot shenanigans or ingrained setting stuff about a genetic fear memory or something, or a fear genetic memory thing, we tend to just like... Normal people, when they see vampires or werewolves, their brain just kind of turns off and is like, that wasn't a werewolf. That wasn't a vampire.

[00:03:28] That was a construction accident gone wrong. Like, that's what that was. But hunters are, I think, in most of the iterations of the lore, is hunters are people who can see the monsters for what they truly are. And usually through trauma, because world of darkness. And so they decide to do something about it and go hunting as a result,

[00:03:57] to try and make the world a better place in their vigilante way. Yeah. So the world of darkness, yeah, it's kind of messed up like that. You got monsters hiding in plain sight. Running things or, you know, causing people to die and other people just kind of shrugging it off because of some kind of weird shenanigans. And with our hunters, we have this weird little thing.

[00:04:23] It's kind of noted in the book as an awakening or this horrific epiphany, if you will. Yeah, usually it's like trauma triggered, right? Yeah, typically. Like, yeah, it's, uh, so, I mean, it's either fear, awe, anger, suspicion. I mean, just tons of different things can lead about there. And we're going to kind of work with this today by making our hunters. And yeah, we've got the book here. We're going, we might as well go ahead and start.

[00:04:52] I think one quick thing to add in before that, I think that the entire world of Hunter the Reckoning, your hunter isn't really working solo. We're kind of working in sales. It's not exactly like a secret society that these men are and women are a part of. It's just, as you said beforehand, people who, who are ahead of crisis, who find each other. Oh my God. It's a support group. Yeah. It's a support network.

[00:05:23] Yeah. I mean, that was kind of very similar. I mean, in a way, super, uh, I think supernatural kind of took that idea either from like earlier Hunter the Reckoning stuff or Hunter is kind of, uh, maybe just like, just a happy kind of like. Like existing side-by-side sort of situation where like, cause like the, the organizational like kind of status of the hunters in the show supernatural, like Dean and Sam Winchester.

[00:05:48] It felt, it feels very much like, like it's all people who have come face to face with the supernatural and usually experienced some kind of trauma as a result. And they decided to do something about it. And so like, it's a ragtag organization that's, uh, laying like kind of off the grid and outside the confines of the law because a lot of the monsters that they fight end up either turning back into humans or it looks like you're just killing humans.

[00:06:17] You know, the book had really, I can't remember what page it is. I apologize. I have a cat in my lap where I would do the control F thing to find it out. But the book had this really kind of funny example here of like, why are an electrical engineer, graffiti artists, a hotel housekeeper and a former member of the Iraqi Republican guard meeting or shop and whispering? Wow. That's also like the same could be said about like call of Cthulhu adventure, like investigators. I'll walk into a bar.

[00:06:48] Yeah. It's also the start of a bad joke. And the book is pretty explicit about the benefits of sales. They have like three purposes and we're going to form a sale today, obviously. So it's companionship, uh, you know, when you're the only one, it feels like it sees this stuff and knows this stuff is very isolating. So, you know, you have companionship, there's protection, obviously safety in numbers with people who know what's going on.

[00:07:16] And finally, complimentary skills. So you trust your fellow hunter with their guns as much as they trust you to do the research and the planning and whatnot. Again, a support group, the supernatural support group. So as far as the book goes, a typical game of hunter seems to the hunt is broken down into an investigative phase.

[00:07:44] You've got your prep phase and then there's the confrontation, which is the smallest of that pie diagram that you got going on there. It's not a game really about like kicking down doors. It's about just the painstaking process of figuring out what you're doing and how you're going to do, how you're going to do what you're, you want to do and how you're going to get away with it or survive. Yeah.

[00:08:09] And I guess at the end of each one of these missions, you, the hunter's got to deal with the aftermath of everything that goes on. If it succeeds, there's probably a body, crime scene, evidence. And if it doesn't succeed, well, life gets a little bit simpler, I guess, doesn't it? Yeah. Because life ends. Or, I mean, worse thing happens, you get vampire, you get vampirized. Yeah. It's just, yeah.

[00:08:36] The book kind of also has got this thing where it, I think it mentions that you need to be cautious that the thing that you're going after is actually a monster or to, to kind of borrow from Nietzsche, you know, beware you who hunt monsters lest you become one. I'm kind of paraphrasing that, but. Well, gentlemen, if you will, I think we've went enough into this.

[00:08:59] Let's go ahead and look in our hymnal or book to page character creation begins on 53. And then there's a nice little quick summary on page 54 here. So the summary goes, we're going to choose a concept, ambition, desire, and touchstones. Then we're going to choose a creed and drive.

[00:09:24] Then we're going to allocate our attributes that we'll probably end up doing off mic and then going back to discuss what we did. Along with allocating skills and advantages. Yeah, that's kind of what we're running into here. So our concept that we're going to work with here is states that your character concept is like a pitch, a high level hook your character's thing. Monster hunting soldier of fortune or drug addled revenge seeker.

[00:09:53] Edward Snowden, but he exposes supernatural maleficence. I think I said that word right. If not, I had the accent. Malfeasance. Malfeasance. Thank you. Yeah. I'm thinking of the movie. The movie. Yeah. You're thinking of Angelina Jolie and I understand. Yeah. It's, you know, she's world of darkness. If you know the hunter setting, you might have a concept that ties into the creed, drive, edge, et cetera.

[00:10:21] Massively entitled underground capo, capo, generous, faithful, creed, blah, blah, blah. It's kind of goes on to, I don't want to read every single bit of this here, but I think I kind of covered the main part of it is. So offhand, what do you all think your, what's character concept? Maybe we should introduce our cell concept first. Sure. Yeah. Okay. I think. Yeah. So the cell. Well, yeah.

[00:10:49] Well, we're, we're working together as a cell. And even though it's character creation, our cell is, we've been kicking this idea around forever. Ever. We had a whole thing on, on my, on my podcast about it. Uh, the, was it the monster hunting convoy of truckers? Yeah. Yeah. A monster hunting convoy of truckers. Uh, we will, if I remember, include that in the show notes here in case you want to catch up on that.

[00:11:16] But we have a cell of, uh, long haul truckers that are the routes are scheduled along places that they can deal with monster problems. I do like that idea. 10 for you, buddy. It gives you a reason to go across country. The only other thing I would think that would kind of fit that same bill would be a small time gig band or something. Cause. Oh yeah. Nobody would look at you sideways if you were going back and forth across country doing things.

[00:11:46] Yeah. Like a roadie, like just like a all roadies. Yeah. Can I take the, like, you guys remember that the Fright Night or review or remake they did with like where David Tennant was, I think it was like Peter Vincent, the, uh, the, the vampire hunter or the vampire. Oh yeah. But he was like a rock and roll like guy kind of guy. Yeah. That was a really good remake. Yeah. Listen, you got a vampire named Jerry. But yeah, I like the idea, especially like, cause we're obviously doing this in, in

[00:12:15] America. Yeah. Or North America. Yeah. Canada, like the same situation, like America and Canada both have a vast network of roads and highways for like trucks and transportation, like truck transportation is sort of the lifeblood of North America. Well, same way even down into Mexico. Yeah. So yeah, like there's like various veins all across like the North American continent that

[00:12:45] like give you access to the rest of the continent. So, and we can expand expunge on this a tad bit more here. This, we're just part of a larger organization that is set up to use people that are in gig economies that travel for, I mean, this could even be like a radiologist technician that just works at a hospital for six months, goes to another hospital for six months.

[00:13:13] Like all these gig workers are kind of tied together. Some of them are actually taking care of the problem. Some of them are, they're flagging it and passing it on. Like, you know, say for example, bodies are disappearing out of the board or whatnot. And they notice that kind of, you know, that's the feelers that are out there. So, you know, if you wanted to, like we can go for a truck driver because I mean, not demeaning of people because that's definitely a job that I could do there.

[00:13:42] But I mean, if you, you could have another type of background and have a, go out and get a CDL. I know like as a teacher, there's several teachers that have CDLs that actually drive school buses and stuff like that as well, because that's the world we live in. But yeah. So don't, don't feel married to the idea that you're the actual trucker here or maybe the trucker, you know, you had a life before this life, you know what I mean? So you can kind of pull up on it. Yeah.

[00:14:12] So anything kind of sticking out to you so far? So we got our trucker thing as our concept. Yeah. Would you like to start on that more? Go ahead. In terms of the, the sell concept or like a personal concept for. A personal concept or sell concept at this point. Yeah. Cause I, I think I'm starting to grow an idea of like a, like kind of like a veteran fisherman sort of angle or like a, like a, like a veteran angle, like weekend angler sort of guy.

[00:14:39] Like he goes, like goes out on the weekends to like, like in a, in a big camper or something like that on those lines and, and goes out into like the wilderness and fishes and such. And maybe that's how he, like something happened to his family or something while on one, on some camping trip. And that's what woke him to the, the dangers of the supernatural. Maybe he like, he found like the, with the beast of Busco, that giant snapping turtle thing, your monster. Is that an Indiana? Is that in Indiana or is that in Kentucky? Is that? I don't know.

[00:15:10] I know there is a giant like catfish monster, uh, somewhere in West Virginia or like, or Appalachia. So I'm thinking like, yeah, that kind of kind of situation. And then, yeah, like that's his, that's his weekend. Like that, that was a, like, like his kind of side thing, like his hobbies and some of that, but then probably like some kind of like a, a trucker of some kind, or even just has like a pickup truck that he takes around places and such. Okay. Let's rephrase this here. It could be gig. It could be gig workers, but just people would have a transient lifestyle.

[00:15:39] If that makes sense. Yeah. Okay. I like that. So you're, you're thinking of a fisherman. That's great. Jeremy, what about yourself? I keep kind of leaning towards something around the lines of a, basically a scientist that stumbled on, I think, think something along the lines of the, the doctor in Blade where she went to go cut somebody and the dude jumped up off the table.

[00:16:05] I kind of liked that idea where he's just like a, like a scientist who it's trying to understand the supernatural and how to do experiments on it to make them weaker. Cause he's, if I'm making him that way, he's highly intelligent, but he is not physically capable. So he kind of the, the leveling the playing ground type type kind of character. Yeah. All right. I guess I'm going to, I was, I was playing with the idea earlier of maybe a state policeman

[00:16:34] that it's, that's all too much. But since I kind of mentioned the truck driver aspect, I just, I want to, I'll go ahead and be the muscle then I'll, I'll take former. I could, it always ties in with why, why, you know, these skills and stuff. A former army. Yeah. Soldier. So I mean, my grandfather actually in the Korean war, he was a truck driver for the army.

[00:16:59] And also, you know, I'll, I'll go ahead and like, so he's somebody who, he made it out, but over in one of his deployments, there was somebody that kept shooting that didn't go down and he was lucky to have made it, made it out where others didn't. So a haunted veteran. In a former life, his name was Sergeant Grant Storm.

[00:17:28] And then he became a ghost and now he's in Orpheus. In another world of darkness. Also, yeah. Fun, fun fact. This, this iteration of Hunter the Reckoning does have a, have a little bit of a blurb on, on the Orpheus group. Mm-hmm. So. They, they haven't been published yet because of series. Oh, I thought it was. No, no, it's fine. It's like, I was just going to mention, we are somewhat familiar with this thing to our

[00:17:54] good friend, Sean, for running, he'd been running an ongoing Orpheus campaign with us. So it, it has a nice little blurb here. They're the ones that involved with the ghosty part of all of this. So, okay. We've got, let's go ahead and go for our, our ambitions and desires. And then we'll start filling out our character sheet here. So the book states that a character's ambition keeps them acting and moving both every day and in the Chronicle.

[00:18:23] It provides a motivation for the player and a story hooks for a storyteller. And ambition must be measurable in game terms. My, my ambition is to become a master of medicine or concrete achievement. My ambition is to have a home I can safely call my own. And ambition is not something vague like end racism, achieve world peace. Instead, it focuses on something like expose corruption inside society of St. Leopold or be elected city council.

[00:18:51] If your character achieves our ambition and the Chronicle continues, a player should decide on a new ambition. Jeremy, you think it sounds like you already kind of have an ambition going on here for your character. His is to, to level the playing ground, to either find cures or find ways to help people like him that don't have the physical muscle to actually take these things on. Yeah. Okay.

[00:19:22] Chris, what about yourself? Yeah. I'm trying to think, I think like my, a go-to like, I have like a snap reaction. One kind of comes to mind is like, just, I don't know if this is an ambition or like protect those in need sort of thing, or like, like make sure, make sure what happened to my family doesn't happen to others. But another idea I actually just came across, I'm thinking less veteran. I think more like just like an older, maybe a veteran, but like an older guy. Like, and so maybe he's actually like, but he's younger than a lot of his friends.

[00:19:52] So like, maybe he's basically trying to ensure like, I don't know. I was thinking of something weird and like the, the, something like the, he's trying to ensure the safety of his, his, his friends, old folks home. Really thinking something like that, but I don't know. We gotta say direct center guys. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Your character could actually be retired police or somebody who had to take early retirement

[00:20:20] or something like that too. I mean, you have, and maybe you actually got a lawsuit and made a little bit of money off of that to where they wrongfully discharge you or something like that. It just, whatever you're going with, I guess it needs to be something that's clearly measurable. So. Yeah. Um, I was, the other idea I could think of is I could go the Moby Dick route and like, I'm hunting, uh, I'm hunting my white whale.

[00:20:46] The, the, the, again, the beast of Busco, the, the were snapping turtle that took my family. That sounds good. Yeah. I like that. I kind of like that idea. I think, I think I might go with that then. Uh, just like, I'm just, I'm always on the hunt for this, for, for this elusive, this elusive snapping turtle beast that, that, that took my family so many years ago. I think mine's going to be a simpler, but I don't want to say vague, but the reason my

[00:21:14] character survived is because when his squad mates were being ripped down, he got into the truck. That when it started looking hopeless and he just ran. So I think my desire or my ambition is, is this time I won't run. Um, so that would be something kind of clear. So if, you know, if this was a one shot style game, if I stand, make the fight, even if it's,

[00:21:41] it looks hopeless and stuff like that, and I make it, then, then I can pick a new ambition. That makes sense. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Where did we get these wonderful character sheets for you, Jeremy? You can find those wonderful character sheets on Mr. Gon's website. He is a, surprisingly, I actually know the guy and he makes all sorts of fun and really cool character sheets on his website for all manner of World of Darkness characters, sheets and games.

[00:22:11] And if you want something you, and you're seeing a really cool character sheet with a lot of dropdowns and a lot of fillable PDF type stuff, I guarantee it's probably coming from him. Nice. All right. Let's go into desire. Desire reflects a less of a lifelong ambition and more of a momentary wants. Each session, the character can select a desire or keep an unfulfilled desire from the previous session.

[00:22:41] Once per session, when the character definitively acts to further accomplish their desire, they may immediately recover one point of spent or damaged superficial willpower. Since desires change rapidly, you don't need to write them on your character sheet, though there is a space provided. Just write it on your current desire on an index card or a sticky note. So, let's see if it gives us an example here.

[00:23:10] So, on page 56, the metric, I want to drive a cherry Maserati or I want to have a normal date, fail as desires, but I want to steal that fucking vampire cherry Maserati or I want to date the GIGN agent's sister, make excellent desires. So, that makes sense there. So, desires connect hunters to the outside world.

[00:23:35] If it doesn't involve someone or something named in a relationship map, it's not worth considering a desire. Well, we haven't quite got the relationship map, but at the moment, I guess just to illustrate it since we don't actually have a session going on here, what kind of desires can we cook up here? I do like the idea, again, going back on my character's like concept of being like us, I'm thinking, I've switched him from like a veteran to like an early retiree hunter-fisherman.

[00:24:05] Okay. Yeah, like basically the kind of guy that would like, like he was, again, like kind of going on like early retiree, like cop and then like weekends going out on going hunting or fishing and such outdoorsy type guy. So, I'm thinking like maybe like one of his desire is or his desire would be basically like to just have a normal day of fishing or just like, just have a normal day, like a semblance of normalcy, like, or like, like the good, have a, maybe like be able to like have some

[00:24:35] semblance of like the good old days or as he was calling in quotes, good old days, whether that's, whether that's like finding it, like as, as, as, like, as we're like traveling and from place to place or something, he like spots like an old creek, like sees a creek on the side of the road. It's like, oh, that would be perfect for like a couple of hours of fishing. Or again, just stop it at some place like that, some place on the side of the road. That's like reminds him of like some place that they used to visit often, like on road trips,

[00:25:02] like a waffle house or something, something more, maybe something a little bit more, a more niche than that. I'm going to do a vague one and tell me if this sounds good. I want it to feel fear. So whatever we encounter this session, I want it to be scared. Yeah. Because I experienced it on the other end. Jeremy, what about yourself? I think mine's more kind of a desire, kind of borderline obsession with just wanting to

[00:25:31] know more about everything, not just supernatural stuff, but just that drive to unlock new mysteries, whether it be he finds a cool plant that he sees or sees a werewolf and he wants to see how those two would interact with each other. Okay. Yeah. I think, like, I think I might be, I might go, mine might be a change to like, to ground myself in some normalcy at least once, once, once a hunt. Cause like, I kind of like the idea of this, of my character being like, like he does this

[00:26:01] because he's like obsessive over like finding, trying to find the beast that killed his, uh, his family, but it's also starting to get to him. So like, he needs to like try and ground himself in some way. I don't know. What do you guys think? Is that too, too vague? Or is that, is that too straying away from the concept or the, the desire idea? Yeah. I mean, not every character has to be a murder hobo. You have to have something that's going to be, that you want to actually achieve outside of just killing things. Yeah.

[00:26:31] You know, sitting in, sitting in a coffee shop, just sitting there, just strolling on your phone, doing dumb shit, maybe something that grounds your character too. Just like this moment that shows that the world isn't always fucked up as you have learned it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's kind of what I'm thinking for this is like, like just using those like little, like those little beats just to like have some sense of normalcy. Like, like my life was better back.

[00:26:59] Like I had a family once and then this, the shitty, this world of darkness credits took it all away. It took my sense of normalcy away and like took everything I, I knew as normal. Like he's nostalgic for like a life of normalcy, but he, but he continues doing this like crazy shit, like hunting down monsters. So he uses like, yeah, like time at a coffee shop or like, like even like a, like a half

[00:27:26] hour on a, on a, at a Creek shore doing some fishing just to kind of like feel something normal before he goes back into the fray. Yeah. And these are things that are going to change from session to session. So we won't keep these continuing to go over and over again. Hmm. So yeah, I mean, that sounds good. All right. So to finish up this final little bit here, and I don't necessarily see anything for touchstones

[00:27:53] on the character sheet, but in the summary, the touchstone section. Oh yeah, there is at the bottom of the first page there for Mr. Gons. There's a touchstone section. So touchstones are the people your hunter is still fighting for, not causes, not ideas or some abstract, some abstract humanity things. You need specific individuals, most of whom absolutely have no idea of the supernatural. Okay.

[00:28:21] So this would be like where I put, like, I'm, I'm doing this to protect like the rest of my, my, my old, my older buddies and such. Like they don't have to. Yeah. Like, yeah. Basically like my, my friends and family, the friends and family I have left. That's what I'm, I'm, that's what I'm doing this for kind of thing. They'll never know the things that I'm doing for them type thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The book mentions the justification of the, for the reckoning and the hunt becomes concrete in other people.

[00:28:47] These are touchstones who help them stay grounded, empathetic, and stay in touch with their communities and even themselves. So I think we're supposed to pick, I think there's three that we got to have, but why does it say pick one or one to three? One to three. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And cause more touchstones means more risk, but it also gives you a greater connection to the world and the people that you love and such. So yeah.

[00:29:15] The examples we have in the book is Lillian's touchstone is her eldest daughter who turned her back on her mother because the stress and weirdness of Lillian's life became too much to keep making excuses for that. So it's already damaged as you can say. And there's another one. It was like Omar's childhood friend drifted. He drifted away from, he wants to reconnect to give himself a personal reason in the middle of all the grimness. So yeah, it could be any of that.

[00:29:45] So I'm going to, well, I'm always prone to being a father to make my character a father that's got a child and stuff like that. I will say my mother and Chris can tell you what my, what my mother's name will be. Cause it's canon. Sarah. No, no. Oh, always. Oh, mom's for Joyce. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. My bad. Yeah.

[00:30:12] Sarah's my, my, uh, like all in all games, there must be a Sarah. And I think that I want to, I'm going to do a second touchstone and the second touchstone will be my recruiting officer. Hmm. When I came back home, he saw that I was fucked up from this experience.

[00:30:35] And I've never told him everything about what happened over there, but he knows it was traumatic. So somebody from home, somebody from work kind of thing like that. I'm thinking, like I said, I'm going to probably go with my brother, Dale and my other brother, Dale. No, my brother, Dale, I'm thinking like he was the other survivor of like the event that

[00:31:02] happened, but it, he, unlike me who like was able to keep my faculties, like he just was never the same after. So, uh, and he's like my older brother. So like maybe he's in like the home or something or in like a care center of some kind. Yeah. So I, I do it to keep, basically keep him safe and like, and try to help him to get some closure on things. And then of course I'm going to have to have like a niece named Sarah. Yeah. Who maybe I, yeah, like I, yeah.

[00:31:28] Like I, she's the, she's like, like, I'm like, like I'm one of those, like the uncle that like she always, like she latched onto. So. And you're taking care of her dad. Yeah, exactly. Mine's the, a former professor that he had. They kind of helped drive him in the, in the way of his curiosity to never stop learning, to never stop growing, to never stop paying attention to the little things because the little things may be big things.

[00:31:54] It's someone that really kind of mentored him, put him under his wing and, and helped make him feel like he wasn't weird for just being kind of an obsessive about learning new things. Okay. Sounds good. So we'll go ahead and mark those. It never mentions when you put names and stuff like that. So what have you guys been thinking about your character's names? First off, like I've never even thought of mine yet, but. Well. You got.

[00:32:24] Probably going to go with the, the inspiration, the, the person that keeps popping in my head when I think of my character, I'm probably going to go with that guy's name. He's from the walking dead. The, the older guy. Yeah, no, the old, the old, yeah. The old, well, the older guy that had the, had the, the, the camper. Okay. Like early season, like season one, I think. Yeah. So. I know the concept. Yeah. He was also in the mist as well. No flipping movie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:32:52] Very, uh, very, uh, lighthearted, uh, little, uh, little flick. Such a lighthearted movie. Yeah. Definitely didn't need a name or didn't definitely didn't need a hug afterwards. Yeah, exactly. Definitely. Oh, no, it's not Gregory. What the hell is this guy's name? Find him. Okay. Cast of the mist. Maybe I can find that guy. Oh, so I'm going to go with Jeffrey Miller, Jeff Miller. That's going to be my character's name.

[00:33:20] Joseph Miller was, it was that same character, that same guy's character in the expanse. Nice. I'm, I'm going a different route. You're going like dark stuff. I'm picking the name Kenneth Blankenship or Kenny Blankenship. From MXC? Yeah. Nice. I could be Gila douche. Or Captain Tennille. I thought I, okay. I thought I recognized. Well, so like I made my brother's name, Dale.

[00:33:51] Jeff, Jeff, Jeff Damone is the, uh, is the actor and he plays Dale Horvath in the, in the walking dead. So yeah. So yeah. So my, my brother's name is Dale Miller. I'm, but I'm going with Jeff Miller. Um, and that's pulling the first name of, of Jeff Damone and his character in the mist was his last name was Miller. So, yeah, that's my thought process on the character. Yeah. I'm just running mine through a name generator and seeing what happens.

[00:34:21] Oh, well, I did that doc. I'm going to go with Sean Collins. Seems like a very easy name. Very strong Irish name. Yeah. So, all right. We got some names. We got some contacts or touchstones, which kind of, I think the touchstone things in Hunter also kind of work like relationships and bonds to in Delta green. The, if you don't have any of these touchstones that we picked out a moment ago, then you're not going to be able to soak any willpower damage.

[00:34:51] And also they do have a mechanical benefit here. So let's go ahead. And I guess it is on to creed and ambition. So I am on to page 57. So every hunter has a creed and a drive. Think of the creed as their outlook, how they hunt, the supernatural. Drive is why they hunt, their, their motivation.

[00:35:20] Here's a quick summary for the sake of character creation. Much as information is available about the creeds on page 31. All right. So what we got here and more on drives on one 29. So creeds entrepreneurial, which kind of actually sounds almost like what you were talking about there, Jeremy, bold innovations and experimental approaches.

[00:35:44] Who's faithful, which is how our, higher powers, divinity, informed worldview, inquisitive, gathering intel, understanding the query, Marshall attacking the supernatural by arms and tactics. And underground guile, subterfuge and knowing the right people. Also, let me look at third 31 real quick and just see how that varies. It's got a nice picture. I do like the artwork. Yeah. Yeah. The art is pretty nice in this book. Yeah.

[00:36:14] So you can, you can go to each one of these particular ones and starting at 31 and branch out from it. It goes for personality, risk takers, tactics, dangers, et cetera. Like, so it, it elaborates a bit more offhand. And which one of those kind of jumped out to you guys? For me. Entrepreneurial? Yeah. Entrepreneurial works definitely for, for your character.

[00:36:40] I'm, I, the, as I looked at that, I think inquisitive because like knowing your quarry, like my guy's like older, he's not going to be able to like pull, draw on like a lot of strength or like a lot of like, just like, like raw power. So like he, he's got to be smart about his, about hunting and some of that. So yeah. Yeah. I'll go with Marshall with that and drives are next. So we have, by the way, I do like to drop down that this gentleman put on the character sheets.

[00:37:10] So definitely see Jeremy's here. Uh, curiosity. What do monsters do? And why? I'm just asking questions. What's the deal with monsters? Tell me about yourself. Settle a score with the supernatural. That seems pretty good for me. Oh yeah. The, yeah. Or you. Yeah. I hope. Either of us. Yeah. Oh, actually maybe the, yeah, I don't know. Keep going. Sorry. I'm, I'm interrupting. No, you're fine. So oath is a promise made that binds a hunter to honor it.

[00:37:40] Greed. Take ill-gotten gains of month that monsters have stolen. Pride. World belongs to us humans. Not you supernatural fucks. It doesn't say that, but I added the fucks in. That. It's a bluff. Envy. Join the night or die trying. That's dark and atonement makeup for aiding supernatural in the past. I said, I'm going for atonement shit. Yeah. I think I'm thinking either vengeance or oath. Cause like I, for oath, I feel like, like it's, that falls in for my character of like,

[00:38:09] again, like promising to like promising my brother to like, to deal with this and get some closure and such. So yeah. But atonement for your character. I ran. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, and I did go to 129. It elaborates a little bit more, not as much as like the three page descriptions for your creed and all.

[00:38:31] But so for example, atonement is knowing or unknowingly a hunter has aided a monster in the past and now seeks to atone for actions. They know the innocence had been hurt due to their actions and willingly put themselves in harm ways to settle the debt. Yeah. That's definitely your character. Yeah.

[00:38:53] So, and it, it mentions for each one of these and it doesn't mention it on 57 or 58, whatever we were at there, but you have like, so you may want to take a look at this real quick, but there's a, uh, 129. So there's a redemption section for each one of these. So redemption, the cell must protect someone from the quarry or a similar creature, either directly or by proxy by standing in harm's way or taking a proverbial bullet for them.

[00:39:21] Alternatively, the hunter can redeem themselves by doing the same for a cellie or helping somebody else out like that. So your curiosity, Jeremy, is the cell must uncover new information about their quarry. And what did you pick? I went with oath. So yeah, um, the redemption is the cell must help the hunters to active, actively uphold their oath or bring it closer to fulfillment.

[00:39:49] So basically, yeah, just like hunting monsters that would, would, will do what they did to my family and, and my brother and such. So, yeah. Yeah. Looks good. So far, so good. Very deep. I'm sorry. I can't go more into detail on the individual cells and stuff like that. That just seems to be, there's quite a bit there to kind of parse through. Mm-hmm. So, so then we got drives, attribute skills.

[00:40:18] So we're getting ready to get to where we're going to be doing our first break, it seems. So when a hunter wants to smooth talk their way past a warehouse security, which Jeremy, tell us what a warehouse is on mic. That's a man that turns into a house. Oh no, the full moon. Ikea. Yeah. Or put the herd on a gang of crazed cultures pursuing them. Or dig through the ruins of a burned down mansion.

[00:40:47] They use both the natural, their natural attributes and learned skills in an attempt to succeed. Even when lacking any special trainer, the hunter can use an innate, physical, social, or mental traits to attempt a task at hand. So you've got to die in something at least. So attribute ratings go from one to poor, up to five, which is like peak ability. Attribute zero indicates an actual ability.

[00:41:17] For a zero skill merely, for a skill, zero merely signifies a lack of training or experience. A skill three indicate a veteran, a veteran prowess. Four means expert. Five is like godly and all that. So we are going to be distributing this out. So it looks like attributes, a character's attributes indicate raw potential.

[00:41:44] Take one attribute at four, three attributes at three, four attributes at two, and one attribute at one. And these attributes are strengths. There's a physical realm. Strength, dexterity, stamina, social, charisma, manipulation, composure. And then the third and final one is intelligence, wits, and resolve.

[00:42:09] And as far as skills, let's look here real quick to... Oh, I do like this, by the way. So for under each one of these two, if you guys are looking with me on 57 going on, for example, dexterity, you're clumsy with one dot. But then it goes through all the way up to five dots. Your movements are liquid and hypnotic, almost superhuman. So there's kind of a... They clarify some of this stuff here. So I like that. Let's see.

[00:42:40] Looking at skills real quick, because we're going to do all this at one time on recording. Jeremy, how do skills work? Skills have a good breakdown, where whenever you take your attributes, you're going to take one attribute at four dots, three attributes at three dots, four attributes at two dots, and one attribute at one dot. So at the end, you always will have one in something, but you just need to make sure that you pick the stat that you want to be the worst, and then work your way up from there, basically.

[00:43:10] Okay. Sounds good. Well, I'll tell you what, folks. We're going to go ahead and work on our skills and attributes. We're going to do a little break here, and we'll be back in a few seconds with our completed characters.

[00:43:32] All right, guys. So we are back. Now, we went ahead and took some liberties here, because this is actually... We're going to get into this, but this portion of distributing attributes and skills and edges, it kind of...

[00:43:58] We ran into a little bit of problems with it, but we'll go into it from the beginning. I mean, we'll touch into that at the end. Excuse me. Anyway, as far as attributes goes, I put my focus for my martial character in the physical realm.

[00:44:13] So I took strength and dexterity at three, stamina at four, and then social, I kind of added charisma one, manipulation two, composure three, and then everything that's mental, which is intelligence, which is resolve is two. So we're back. We went ahead and got everything all rolled up here. All right. Let's start with attributes. Start right out there. This was easy in the beginning.

[00:44:38] We were going to take one attribute at four, three at three, three attributes at three, four attributes at two, and one attribute at one. So that's where I was... I set up everything more physical for mine. So I did three for strength, dexterity, and I did four for stamina. Then I'm just going through the list.

[00:45:01] I gave charisma at one, manipulation two, composure at three, because that has mechanical benefit as well as intelligence at two, wits at two, and resolve at two. I think it was resolve and composure that helped with determining hit points, right? Or what was that? For your willpower, it's composure and resolve. It's composure and resolve. And then for health, it's stamina plus three. Yeah. Stamina plus three.

[00:45:29] So that was pretty simple. What did you turn out with? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah. For, for, for old Jeff, I gave him more on the mental side of things. So like his resolve is this, is his powerhouse at four, wits at three and intelligence at two. In social, his charisma is a three and his manipulation and composure are two. And then physically, but those, those attributes, I gave him a one in strength as through kind of,

[00:45:59] with his age and such, but gave him a dexterity of three and a stamina at two. So. Yeah. Yeah. And for Sean, I made him more of the mental, mental character where I went with intelligence for wits at three, resolve at three. And then for social, I put three and composure one in manipulation because he doesn't really know how to manipulate people. Charisma too, because he's not completely socially awkward. He just is very truthful.

[00:46:28] And then for physical, I put twos all the way across the board for strength, dexterity and stamina. Cause he's still fairly healthy. He just doesn't really know social cues. Yeah. So as we were discussing a tad bit earlier there, this was the easy part. Now the wheels kind of fell off the bus. Wasn't that right, Jeremy? Yeah. Yeah. They broke down three different packages. They had jack of all trades. They have balance and they have specialist.

[00:46:54] And each one of them has their own set of points that you put into them with different, different skill allocations. It would be okay if those skills were across the board the same, but they are not. Some of them, jack of all trades are more, obviously a little more loose with your points where you had 29 points to deal with. Balanced was obviously a little more balanced with 26.

[00:47:18] And then specialist, you had more highs and less kind of points to play with at 22. Yeah. And it was, it made it awkward. Like the packages are fine, but I wish that they would have done points the same across the board and then just gave you caps on what you could use as opposed to saying you could, you know, you get one for specialists, you get one skill at four, three skills at three, three skills at two and one and three skills at one.

[00:47:46] Wish they would have just said, okay, don't cap over this. And then you could have just min max to your heart's content if you really wanted to. Yeah. It's a bold choice when like, cause most, most RPGs, like, like, like you said, like have like, they have a consistent number of points that you allocate. And then there's like some configurations for, for out to allow for specialty or min maxing in this one, they're just like, no, you're getting penalized. Like, so it's, it's, it's a bold strategy.

[00:48:17] I mean, you can end up rolling. So if like, for example, I was wanting to do intelligence academics to do a role, I just don't get to add in those academics points or two. So you, with, with your abilities, you're probably, you at least have one die that you can roll on this stuff here. You're just at, you know, kind of a great disadvantage and all that. So you're never not going to be able to roll finance, but at the same time, it just, you

[00:48:45] know, it felt weird and it was confusing for me a little bit, just how it bounced around on that. And then you get to add a specialty to it. And so whenever you roll that, you roll a specialty. I mean, it wasn't too bad. Actually on that, on the specialty thing, I would like to kind of bug whoever, if anybody's listening from, from Renegade or whoever wrote this book, the specialty, like when it brings up the specialties, it really should have like, all right, you can pick, you get one free, one free specialty, allocate them to like this, this, this.

[00:49:15] And then the book says this, this, this, and this, not this, this, this, this, or this. And like, maybe that's a nitpick, but like that, that's confusing language to me. So there, I got my grammar inquisition in. It's all good, man. It's all good. You know, and then once we got to this point, we finished out our skills. I think the only thing noteworthy to say about my particular character skills, I went with

[00:49:43] the, the balance build. So I had the 26 points there and I just put an emphasis on like physical things like firearms and drive and whatnot there. That was kind of my big ones there and awareness because like Kyle Cthulhu taught me about spot hidden, but I know I had a couple of things in with that. Is there anything noteworthy you guys want to say about what you took skill wise?

[00:50:11] I mean, I, I, I, I, my, my top one was, I went with the, uh, Jack of all trades. So I got the one strong suit for driving. Cause I figured my character drives a lot, like going from lake to lake or creek to creek and some of that in his camper and such. And then like, I gave him like a lot more of the outdoorsy kind of thing or things that I felt would fit for like an outdoorsy type person. So like stealth, survival, animal can medicine investigation and all.

[00:50:38] And that like, those are all twos, some street wise and persuasion also twos. Then I basically allocated my ones to like, like the basics, like athletics, brawl, craft insight and leadership. Cause he's, I figured like an early retiree of like a, like a probably like police officer or something like that. He's got some technology. He's got a little bit of medicine and again, awareness. Because yeah, you need that perception. You need that perception skill. Okay. So yeah.

[00:51:08] Oh yeah. And I, and the occult of course, but. Oh man. And for mine, I did the specialty build just to be different because I kind of want to make my guy more of a science based character. So I did four dots in science with a specialty in chemistry, three dots in technology, three dots in academics, three dots in craft. Cause I feel like he's going to be building things. I put two in finance because I feel like he's the one that's funding the operation because

[00:51:35] he's rich investigation put into medicine too, because we need somebody that can actually sew people up. And then I put one in a cult drive and firearms. Nice. And then the next step that we were going to go is you had seven points to distribute for advantages and two for flaws. And I just, the layout of this kind of mess with me a bit. You had, yeah, it, it took a little bit of wrapping our heads around this.

[00:52:03] So the, everything ranges from merits to is like linguistics abilities, good looks, nutritionists, physical, psychological traits, which are actually negatives that are flaws. You can take supernatural situations, which are, can be flawed and merits. I guess one thing here is like, so yeah, like the book lays it out with like merits and then backgrounds.

[00:52:32] And then you would expect after backgrounds, we'd get maybe flaws, like a tape, like a listing of flaws, but no, the listings of flaws are integrated into merits and backgrounds as like the double, the, the, the other side of the coin, I guess. Yeah. They could have taken, yeah. They could have taken 10 pages of text and turned it into one table. Exactly. Yeah. Like, again, I do feel like an RPG book does need to have a, have the, have the descriptions

[00:53:01] to give you a better sense of like what like merits and backgrounds and flaws are, but they also benefit from having a table so you can quick reference guide. Yeah. And this did not have that, but we, we somehow made it through. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the advantages that I ended up taking, because we had seven to spend good stuff on is I took a mentor at three. So I have an experienced mentor that I talk with.

[00:53:29] I added contacts at two to help me get illicit shit and supernatural situations at two. And that one was kind of cool. The, I'm trying to actually find a summary of it there, but yeah, I can sense. It's no, I think this, the one that I put, it's like the creatures of night sometimes mistake me for one of their own. I think that's one of the things there. They, they overlook me.

[00:53:56] And flaw wise, I didn't want to go through the entire list again and pick out the one point to two point, the one point, you know, cause we had two points to spend. I didn't look for two ones. I just took two points on living on the edge. So, you know, I'm a loose cannon. Yeah. So what about your all? Yeah. For, for backgrounds, I took resources at two. So I've got basically like middle-class financing and living conditions status too.

[00:54:23] So in regards to like my status among hunters or other hunters, I'm respected and like people look up to me. Mm-hmm. Safe house. I took a safe house at two. So it's basically like, like a one story, like bungalow sort of place. Nothing too fancy, but like big enough to, to have things in it. However, I also added with the safe house, I gave it the flaw haunted safe house. So there's, there's something supernatural going on with my house.

[00:54:49] And I'm, I'm thinking my, my poor character on top of losing his family to the beast of busco also just happens to have a safe house. That is also the Diana house from that, from that titular creepypasta. So it's a house. That's also a flop. That's also a mimic or like a, uh, or a pitcher plant essentially, but I'll let the storyteller figure that out or like play with that. Every time you take your shoes and socks off, one of your socks just disappears automatically. Yeah. It just dissolves.

[00:55:19] Like, so you just, they're just like, there's just, you just gotta watch like where you step on the rug. Cause there's some pool, uh, some pooling of digestive, of the digestive acids. I mean, I have a cat. It throws up everywhere. Oh my God. I've got a guard. It's also, it's basically a garden L that, uh, that Appalachian cryptid. It's like a ghost cat would be very disturbing. You just hear a ghost like hack, hack in the middle of the night. Ghost beagle.

[00:55:47] It's old Lucy in the background. Just like, ah. I just want it to be a haunted dryer. So it actually does steal every left sock. Oh man. Oh, hang on. Oh yeah. Sorry. And then linguistics. I just took like one. So I guess it means I have like one other language I've, I'm fluent in other than my, I guess an English. And then my other flaw, cause you have to take two flaws. I added stalkers.

[00:56:16] So apparently my character was like maybe on like some show, like mountain monsters or like it was on some other was like, is, is notable enough that like there's people that follow him or like that just like obsess over him. And like, so, and if any, if they, if they ever, you know, disappear in quotes, another fills their ranks. So I can't avoid it. I can't escape it.

[00:56:42] We're just going to have a nuisance basically stalking us sometimes in our, in our hunts. But yeah, that's, uh, that's my advantages and flaws. So. What about you, Jeremy? Jeremy. For me, for my background advantages, I took resources at three. I made him as the rich guy that funds the operation that they're doing. As far as the trucking owns kind of the owns the business, does the finances. I took status. So status at one. So he's kind of the up and comer linguistics. I took it three.

[00:57:12] So he's well-versed in different languages for learning chemistry and, and different things for flaws. I took infamous partner. Partner. So somebody in his past, he worked with kind of tarnishes his name. And then by extension, there's a little small cult following behind him because of that infamous partner. So I took stall stockers at one. Okay. We're all just being followed by, by, by fans. This is what happens when you join only hunts. Nice.

[00:57:42] Well done. Not to be confused with the, uh, with the vampire, the masquerade one, only vamps. Oh God. I'll be here all night. Don't forget to tip your weights now. Now, as we finish this up here, we needed to, and I didn't plan on doing this beforehand, but I'm glad we did because we'll, we'll get into the, uh, a couple of other observations that we had about it.

[00:58:08] But the last thing we needed to take is edges and perks. So you can either have two edges or one perk. And this was also one of these kind of layout things. I just had trouble, trouble struggling. I mean, make my way through here. There were three categories from assets to aptitudes to endowments. And I ended up taking, what did I end up taking? Let's look at my character sheet.

[00:58:38] I ended up taking two edges and a perk. So I took arsenal with the perk of exotic arsenal. So I already had a mentor. So I'm saying that I already have holy water and stakes and the bones of saints or whatever that I'm using to fight the undead with. And in true MacGyver fashion, I decided to take my edge two as improvised gear. So, you know, I can fudge some shit together if I had to.

[00:59:06] There, there were some cool perks with arsenal. I could have taken one particular perk that, you know, I can't just get one assault rifle. I can get assault rifles for everybody. I could be the Oprah of assault rifles, but I chose. You get a assault rifle. You get the assault rifle. Look under your desk. Look under your seat. What's up about you guys? Yeah, I went with a library basically.

[00:59:33] Cause again, I see my character as being like, he is resolved to hunting down and he needs to like, again, like being, having to rely more on cleverness than, than strength and brute and like raw power. He, he's basically relying on like the ability to hunt and like being able to, to know his prey, know his quarry. So yeah, I went with a library and then something that kind of got brought up that we were talking about. I was trying to, I was having a problem.

[00:59:58] I was having a bit of delay, like trying to figure out what my, what either, what my other edge would be or what my perks would be. So Adam suggested going with the thwart the unnatural. So like, maybe that's why I was the lucky one of my family when they get in the lake monster got my folk or got my, got my family because it, I was able to thwart it. And so I gave that also went with my single perk was the creature specialization, specifically

[01:00:26] monsters that live in lakes or like, again, like aquatic monsters.

[01:00:58] Yeah. He's, he's an academic. Yeah. You know, and we, there was a whole section that we kind of skipped over here, but this would be more suited for your table and stuff like that. So after you go through this process, there is a set of questions you can answer to help you kind of flesh out who your character are, which we did some of that stuff during, during chat here.

[01:01:22] There's there's on page 81, there's 41 questions that, you know, range from, uh, where did you get that? Where did that scar come from to your grandmother always told you as a child, an odd version of a classic fairy tale, which one and what's odd about her version. I mean, there's some really cool stuff there that you can kind of jump into, but what I want to kind of mention to you, uh, real quick before we go is we took a break by our time and I'm

[01:01:51] looking at my log here in the discord bot. So we went for break at 1245 and we did not get finished distributing the skills, the attributes, the edges and perks and all that fun stuff for 59 minutes. It was 144 when we, when we got back in here to do that there, there was a bit. Uh, like I said, some of the stuff seemed to be hard to navigate, not saying it wasn't informative.

[01:02:20] It's just, you know, if I were a game master trying to set this up and take a group of players through character creation, I would make a decent little cheat sheet for skills for starters and whatnot. It just seems like between skills and the everything after that, it just bogged down excessively. What do you guys think? Yeah, no, it definitely fell into like, I mean, we are also like, none of us have actually

[01:02:48] like really dug into this book until like very, but it definitely fell into that whole thing of like when you're making character create characters for a D and D game or something like that. And it takes up the entire session. Yeah. So it's a little bit like old school style character creator. I mean, it's, again, it's no make, it's no doing your taxes. Like you get in shadow run fourth edition or eclipse phase as much as I love those two, both those, those IPs.

[01:03:13] My God, the complexity is staggering, but it definitely felt like this is again, similar. Like it's, it's kind of tied to the older way of, of character creation in tabletop RPGs in that it takes a while. Yeah. I have to agree. I think a lot of it could have been streamlined. Like we were saying earlier, where it's give us a clear, this is what we're doing as opposed to doing how they did it with the packages.

[01:03:40] Give us extra points or give us points or just be explicit to say, this is what we're doing. Cause the way it's kind of laid out, it was a little cumbersome along with the page layouts where you have 10 pages of text where it could have been one table. And as Chris said, I get where they need to have some explanation, but slotting flaws in with advantages and not really having it laid out to where they're super obvious was a bit

[01:04:04] cumbersome because a lot of the times, whenever you're making a character, the fun is the funnest part about it in the part that generally takes the longest is figuring out and fleshing out the character and not trying to allocate points and read a book. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I will say this is definitely, I've seen older editions of, of other world of darkness game books and they are, and this is definitely cleaner than some of those, both in terms

[01:04:34] of like font standardization, like both like size and style of the fonts and also just like the layout. But like, again, there's still room for improvement. Yeah. They're definitely getting there, but they have a little bit to go. Yeah. Hopefully with this new hunt, uh, this new vampire, the masquerade edition that I'm hearing is coming out soon. Maybe they'll, they'll improve more on it, but we'll see. I'm looking at what we were talking about this.

[01:05:01] I even started looking on Google right now to see if there's any like online character creation tools that would help you get through this much quicker. And it looks like, I mean, RPG stack has a hunter builder for fifth ed. There's another website called Shrek.net. Shrek.net. But I mean, I haven't used these nor am I going to go through the processes, but you may want to look into it if anybody had it before you jump into it, just see if there's a streamlined way that you can get your character sheet where, I don't know where everything was easily accessible.

[01:05:31] I mean, this is not going to be a deterrent for me to play. And I feel like maybe some of it was on me as I've gone through it here, but it just, like Jeremy said, it was some of the formatting there. I had me second guessing some stuff, but overall, I think it would be a cool, I do like the concept. I have partaken of maybe 16 or 17 sessions of Orpheus ran by our good friend, Sean.

[01:06:00] So this definitely seems familiar and I like it. So, I mean, I won't let that be a deterrent for me, but I just, if you were coming into this, just be aware that it kind of slogs down there a bit. I agree. And it's not going to stop you from playing if we ever do play, but just know that character creation is going to take a little longer than what you think. If you're going to, if you think you're going to start a character or start a game right after the characters, plan an afternoon around it. Yeah.

[01:06:30] You got another thing coming. So overall impressions, I know we kind of jumped into this, but what are y'all, anything you'd like to add about the rest of this? No, not particularly. It's, I'm looking forward to giving it a shot. Yeah. We'll see how it plays out. But if it's anything like the, like the other world of darkness games I've played, like it should be pretty fun. I'm a big fan. Yeah.

[01:07:00] I'm a big fan of dice pools. So like, that's, that's one thing I like about this system is that you just like roll a fistful of dice and see how, how the dice roll. So. And I agree despite its flaws, it has come a long way and I do have a sweet spot for the old world of darkness stuff and look forward to giving it a, giving it a go. As Chris said, sometimes just rolling a big fistful of dice is nice. And it also is very cathartic. Yep.

[01:07:29] It's, it's appealing to me. This is a game where it just feels like you're punching up at like we're squishy little humans and vampires are scary. Oh, and I don't know. I kind of like it. I know that my, my health pool is like seven right now, so I know I'm not going to be going in there wrecking shit. So when the health pool is capped at what seems like 10, you're, you're a little better than average. Yeah.

[01:07:56] Well, that's, that's the, I think the appeal of Hunter, the reckoning is like having this cathartic sort of like power fantasy of like being like, again, like, like you said, the squishy human, like being a regular human, but with your only advantage being that you can see the monsters that, that, that hunt our society. So, and being able to do something about it or having the willpower of the gumption to do something about it. So. And kudos on the creators of the book, as I was going through it last night before I

[01:08:24] went to bed to kind of prep on this stuff here. I encountered several times, like mentions of X cards and making sure everybody's on the same page at the table and stuff like that. Cause these games can get pretty dark. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you probably make sure, need to make sure everybody's on the same page and they know their audience on that and they're warning everyone. I mean, you could jump into stuff with human trafficking, which is a legit horrible real world thing that goes on.

[01:08:54] And then you tie it in with like vampires or something like that. And that may not go over well because I mean, you're taking a real life travesty and making the monsters, not the monsters that they really are. You know, kind of what I'm saying. Yeah. Like it's, I mean, I obviously like horror, like with horror stuff, like you're trying, you're using it as a way of processing like real, like real demons or real, like real thing, real subjects and stuff like that. Just, but like in a safer space.

[01:09:23] So like it is, I've, I've sort of grown away from like the fact that like, oh, the monsters are behind all this like travesty and stuff like that. But I do get the appeal of like having that kind of little like facade of fantasy, like that safety blanket, the supernatural safety blanket here. But yeah, I'd also like as, as edgy and dark as, and horror can be. And like, like you want to be like, it's horror. You want to be scary. You want to have these like really creepy moments in your, in your play and some of that.

[01:09:52] But you also want everyone at the table to be comfortable while that's going on. So you do need to like, kind of have those like sort of X cards or like things like you have to have that conversation of like, all right, we're doing this. Like if these subjects aren't your for you, maybe step away. So, or we won't, we won't tackle those necessarily. Like, yeah, it's all about like kind of balancing the, the, the scary stuff with like what people are comfortable with.

[01:10:21] I know that's sort of a newer thing, like a newer progressive take, but. You want to use them as a, as a, we generally play these games because we want to use them as a bit of an escapism. Yeah. We want to not feel worse when we leave. Yeah. It is, it is nice that like the newer, this new world of darkness stuff is kind of like kind of putting that stuff in out there, like also like kind of incorporating that.

[01:10:48] So, cause I know some of the older world of darkness stuff was a little less. Subtle. So, yeah. It is based on, it's a series called Brotherhood of the, I think it's like Brotherhood of the Wheel. And it's about like, it's by R.S. Belcher. You can find these books on Amazon.

[01:11:15] There's like two in a series called Brotherhood of the Wheel and King of the Road that follows like a truck driver and a biker and a cop that like are monster hunters in a larger organization. So, you know, it things, if you're looking for inspiration, that's a good one. And I've realized throughout the rolling of this that Chris actually created a character from a John Lankin horror story called The Fisherman. Yeah. Yeah. I wish I could, I wish I could check that out, but apparently the audible version is

[01:11:44] only in French in Canada. So, and I don't, despite what people may think about Canadians, not all of us speak fluent French. So. Well, you just, well, but that one point you put in linguistics, buddy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's why it's like, it's escapism. Yeah. I want to thank you all. We recorded this on Memorial Day, 2026, and I appreciate y'all joining me today for this year. Thank you, Jeremy.

[01:12:14] Thank you, Chris. If you are listening to this in May of 2026, I'd like to thank you for being one of our Patreon backers. Without you, we would not be able to do what we do to keep this podcast and podcast network afloat here. So thank you very much. If you are listening to this in the month of August, I would like to welcome you to the Rolepoint Exchange. We are an actual play podcast. We're part of the Crit in the Night Network. And once a month we do these roll-ups.

[01:12:42] And if you are a backer on our Patreon at a certain tier, then you will get these episodes three months I've had of everybody else. So thank you so much on that. And, you know, go to patreon.com slash roleplanetexchange. If you would like to back and help us keep those horrible hosting bills at bay and get these episodes a bit sooner and just help us do what we love. We would appreciate it. Chris, I was talking about Crit in the Night Network.

[01:13:10] I mean, I've just got one podcast on this network that we created here, but you are quite the scholar. I wouldn't go that far, but I do have two other podcasts when I'm not gaming with you guys at RPX. I have my own actual play roleplaying podcast called One Less Die. We tackle various games like Shadowrun and a whole bunch of D20 games like 5th Edition Dungeon Dragons and Cthulhu D20 and Monster of the Week stuff.

[01:13:40] Just a smattering of games through the years that I've been recording and getting around to editing and posting online. So just me and my friends and both online and in meatspace, rolling dice and having laughs and fighting monsters. So, and when I'm not running games or playing games, I'm talking to my buddies about creepy stories online with al dente rigor mortis, my creepypasta discussion podcast where I don a don a hooded cloak and become the review cultist.

[01:14:09] And alongside my two other co-hosts, we read and discuss a creepypasta. Those internet stories, most creepy and most pasta that have been around on the internet campfires for several years now, at least maybe several decades at this point. So yeah. Awesome. Well, I'd like to thank you all again for tuning in. Thank you guys for joining me. And I guess until next time, we'll see you all later. Goodbye.

[01:14:39] Sleep well. Goodbye.