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Ordinary People, Unseen War -A History of Hunter: The Reckoning

• Iain Wilson • Season 1 • Episode 75

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To: hunterlist@hunter-net.org

From: witness1

Fellow imbued,

I must report a disturbing incident. Our latest transmission regarding the Mission was compromised. The audio files were corrupted - the music loud, blaring, almost as if something didn't want this information shared.

You know what I'm talking about. They got to it.

But the Messengers work in mysterious ways. The tainted files have been purged. A clean recording has been restored and is being redistributed as we speak.

The truth will be heard. The mission continues.

Stay vigilant. Check your audio equipment. They're always watching... and apparently, now they're listening too.

Inherit the earth

-- Witness1

EDIT: yes, the sound gremlins did their thing again so we had to upload a new recording - sorry!

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The cover promised chainsaws and gun-fu; the text delivered conscience, fear, and the price of seeing too much. We dive deep into Hunter: The Reckoning as it was meant to be experienced: a grounded horror RPG about ordinary people who wake up to a world that doesn’t want to be seen, and the fragile choices that follow. From edges and second sight to conviction and creeds, we trace how the mechanics hardwire moral perspective into play, and why that makes every victory feel earned and every misstep costly.

If this kind of human-centred horror speaks to you, hit follow, drop us a rating, and share the episode with a friend who still thinks Hunter is a superhero game. 

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).

Iain:

I almost never heard this game at all. I remember seeing the shell in 1999 on the cover with the wall and shall just like some kind of heavy moment I was thinking another game where you just want to have something done. By the time I was done, I discovered the game I absolutely love. This wasn't so this was something completely different. This was a game about ordinary people discovering the world and having to deal with that revolution. It was the second main game in the World of Darkness series, and it represented something revolutionary for the line. For the first time, White Wolf was asking players to take on the role of ordinary humans who suddenly became aware of the supernatural world that lurked in the shadows, and it was being presented as a core game. Now it used a familiar storyteller system but introduced some key mechanical concepts that were unique to Hunter. First there were edges, supernatural abilities that hunters could manifest through focused will. These weren't spells or disciplines in the traditional sense, but rather miraculous powers that hunters could call upon in moments of crisis. Second sight, which all hunters had, was the ability to see through supernatural deceptions and illusions that most humans fell prey to. Vampires couldn't hide behind their masquerade from someone with second sight, for example, and werewolves couldn't use the delirium to make hunters forget them, however much the hunters might want to do that. A hunter using second sight could clearly see all supernaturals around them. They didn't necessarily know what they were facing, they just knew that what they were looking at wasn't human. Conviction was a measure of how strongly a character believed in their mission, and it served multiple functions. It powered second sight, it fuelled some of the more powerful edges, and it determined how effectively a hunter could maintain their focus in the face of the supernatural. There were also creeds, philosophical outlooks that determined how a hunter approached the supernatural and what type of edges he could access. Each creed was also aligned to what was called a virtue. There were three virtues in the Hunter the Reckoning world: mercy, vision, and zeal. At their core, virtues represented a hunter's philosophical outlook. Someone who was high in zeal, for example, might take a less forgiving approach to monsters compared to someone who had a high mercy score, who instead would be looking at how they could help monsters or cure them of whatever was afflicting them. These virtues were what determined what edges a character could get access to. All of this supernatural metacurrency aside, one of the really interesting things about Hunter the Reckoning was the characters that people played. These weren't action heroes, the imbued, as they were called, were just regular people accountants, teachers, cab drivers, retail workers, ordinary folks who experienced what the game called the imbuing, a moment of a crisis where mysterious entities called the messengers gave them the ability to see the truth about the world, and that truth was terrifying. These hunters had no ancient organisations backing them up, no centuries of accumulated lore and knowledge, no vast resources. They had something called a Hunternet, which was an internet forum where they could share information and theories, but even there they had to be careful about what they said and who they trusted. Hunters weren't superheroes, they were people who heard voices, saw monsters everywhere, and slowly watched their normal lives crumble under the weight of what they now knew. The real horror of Hunter wasn't the monsters they fought, it was what the hunt did to the hunters themselves. As they grew in supernatural power, they slowly went mad as their fragile human minds were not meant to contain the power being fed to them by the celestial messengers. The more they embraced the role as hunters, the more they lost their grip on their humanity and their sanity. It was a game about ordinary people being transformed into something they didn't understand by forces they couldn't comprehend for reasons that remained frustratingly unclear. However, this all leads me to one of the most persistent criticisms I used to hear about Hunter the Reckoning. People who hadn't actually played the game would say things like, I don't like Hunter the Reckoning because it just lets you play superheroes. And they also tended to follow this up with The Hunter's Hunted was a much better game because it was about real people hunting the supernatural. This criticism always used to annoy the hell out of me because it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what both games were actually about, so let's just take a look at that for a second before I finish my rant. The Hunters Hunted, published all the way back in 1992 as a supplement for Vampire the Masquerade, was not about normal people. Yes, you could theoretically create normal people using these rules, but look at the actual sample characters provided in the book. You had a ghoul with true faith who was several hundred years old, you had an actual vampire, you had a werewolf, a mage, you had a TV host with vast resources at his disposal, and more importantly, look at the organisations that player characters could belong to. The FBI's special affairs division, think the X-Files, a government agency with high-tech equipment and inside knowledge. The Centre for Disease Control, with their scientific resources and authority, the Arcanum, a global network of occult scholars with centuries of accumulated lore and some actual magic. The Society of Leopold, the Inquisition's modern incarnation with extensive supernatural knowledge, Vatican backing and Vatican Commandos. These were an odd room of people stumbling about in the dark. They were well-informed, well-trained, and well-armed individuals who understood their supernatural foes and had institutional support behind them. They probably knew karate as well. Compare that to Hunter the Reckoning characters. These people had no idea what they were up against. They generally had very little in the way of resources, whatever they could scrape together from their day jobs or scrounge up from military surplus stores, and yes, they had supernatural powers, but these powers came with a terrible price. Every time they embraced their roles as hunters, they risked losing more of their sanity. Every time they gained knowledge of the supernatural, they found themselves further isolated from normal human society. Hunter wasn't about superheroes, it was about the everyman discovering the supernatural and being forever changed by that knowledge. It was about ordinary people trying to maintain their normal lives whilst fighting an impossible war against creatures that most of humanity didn't even believe existed. So where did all this hostility towards Hunter come from? Well, this segues nicely into one of Hunter's biggest problems, namely the artwork. I mentioned earlier how the cover nearly put me off buying the game, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't alone in that reaction. There's probably a whole bunch of people out there who would never play Hunter because they literally judged the book by the cover, and to be honest, I don't blame them in this case. Throughout its early releases, the art in Hunter consistently portrayed these muscled-up special forces types rather than the ordinary people that the game claimed to be about. You'd see images of hunters with like chainsaws and assault rifles looking more like action movie heroes than the frightened office workers and concerned parents that the game was actually about. This created a massive disconnect between what the game claimed to be about and what potential players thought it was about based on the visuals. The artwork suggested a game where you'd kick down the doors and blast the monsters to bits with heavy weaponry. The text described a game about paranoia, introspection, and the psychological cost of knowing about the supernatural. I can't tell you how many people I met over the years who had dismissed Hunter because they thought it was just another action game, a game where you got to wail on vampires and werewolves and go toe-to-toe with these incredibly powerful supernatural creatures. The irony is that Hunter was actually one of the deepest, most psychologically complex games in the world of Darkness Line, but you'd never know it looking at the pictures. Anyway, rant over, let's talk about what they actually released for Hunter. It had a pretty impressive publication run during its 5-year lifespan from 1999 to 2004. In 1999 it launched with the Core Rulebook. It was the flagship publication for the year of the reckoning, surprise, surprise, and this was a 300-page hardcover that introduced the imbued and their struggle against the supernatural. This book was packed with fiction that brought the setting to life through forum posts, chat logs, and personal accounts. Also in November 1999, we got the Hunters Storytellers Companion. Whitewolf did a lot of books like this, there were a little booklet along with a GM screen, but this came with some additional guidance on running games, namely how to include certain monster types in the games to use different rules than for those that were in the core rule book. December also brought us the Hunter Survival Guide, and that took the approach of providing a global perspective on the hunter's world, and it showed how the supernatural threat manifested differently in different parts of the globe. Each section was written from the perspective of Hunter characters posting on Hunter Net, giving their first hand accounts of the situations in their region. 2000 was when the line really hit its stride though, and it got a real steady stream of releases. February saw the publication of two Creed books simultaneously. These were, to use a parlance of the time, Hunter's Splats, the equivalent of Clans and Vampire, or Tribes and Werewolf, or Traditions and Mages, basically what supernatural group did your character belong to. And whereas in the other game lines, these were things that were very much referred to in the world. When it came to Hunter, the splats, in this case the Creeds, were very much individual philosophies. The two books released in February were Avenger and Defender, so it offered two very contrasting views on how the hunt was. And these books were very interesting in how they were laid out. There were several chapters of extensive fiction, followed by one chapter at the end of Rules, and they did a brilliant job, all these books, of setting up potential players for the different creeds. It showed you how people in those creeds thought and generally gave different points of view. This was nice as it showed that in Hunter the creeds were made up of individuals and not these monolithic bodies where everyone acted and thought the same. May brought us The Walking Dead, the first of what would become known as the enemy books or monster books, and that explored ghosts and wraiths from Hunter's perspective, these being the primary antagonists of the main core book. Interestingly, this book also teased a link between Hunter and the game Kindred of the East. And it's curious all throughout Hunter's run that more so than any other world Darkness line, it found itself constantly being intertwined or linked with other games, other core games in the World of Darkness series. June of this year also got us two more Creed books, in this case Hunter Book Innocent and Hunter Book Judge. Again, exploring two different sides of the same coin. Speaking of which, August saw the beginning of the Predator and Prey novel series, which, a bit like the Creed books, explored two different visions of the hunt. In this line of six books, you would get one book about a supernatural antagonist, and then the following novel would be about a hunter exploring that. September brought us one of the most fun books that was released for the Hunter line, in this case Hunter Apocrypha. Now, any player of White Wolf Games will be familiar with this format of a book. They are the small trade-sized books that come with a full leatherette cover. And yes, Jason and Steve, I can hear you laughing at me already. Everyone knows my love of full leatherette books, but they're very much presented as in-world documents. In this case, Apocrypha was presented as the ravings of one of the more insane. There was that visionary members of the imbued, and there were various Maginalian notes made by other imbued who were commenting on this document. And it was very atmospheric, hell, weathered, handwritten, and there was all sorts of little disturbing drawings thrown in there. It made a great prop for throwing into your game for those players who were really interested in exploring the lore, and it helped them get to grips with the questions of what has chosen us for this, what are we meant to do? Why were we chosen? It was also curiously written at a time when White Wolf was still hinting about links between Hunter and their new fantasy game, Exalted, and as I mentioned before with Kindred of the East, Hunter often found itself with these links, but we will talk more about that shortly. The year this is a really busy year for Hunter wrapped up with Hunter Book Martyr in November and Hunter Book Redeemer in December, along with some more novels in the Predator and Prey series. 2001 was what White Wolf deemed the year of the Scarab, and it opened with Hunter Book Visionary, which completed the primary creeds all having a Creed book of their own. May was a particularly busy month with the release of Hunter the Recon and Player's Guide, which, like most supplements in the line, followed that pattern of heavy fiction with mechanical content both bolted on at the end. The fiction really was the star of the Hunter line. White Wolf understood that the best way to convey what it was like to be a hunter was to show rather than tell. This book also contained rules for playing bystanders, that was humans who had received the call of the messengers but chose to ignore it, turning away from the supernatural rather than embracing the role as hunters. Additionally, this book included invaluable rules on law enforcement interactions, really recognising that hunters would inevitably fall foul of the law and providing good guidance for storytellers who wanted their games to have a more realistic legal system and legal consequences rather than just using typical Hollywood cop logic. May also saw Hunter Book Hermit, which dealt with the first of what was called the Lost Creeks and the most solitary of those hermits. June also brought us a book called Inherit the Earth, which was a fiction anthology containing nine stories about famous hunters like Witness One, who is the founder of Hunter Knight. September though, yikes, September gave us Hunter Holy War, which explored the religious dimensions of the hunt. And this book was pretty controversial and not without reason. While not overtly racist, it did fetishise the Middle East in pretty problematic ways. The premise adopted by this book was that there was a whole community of Middle Eastern hunters who had never used Hunternet because they had no need for it. The messengers had supposedly given them the ability to directly commune with each other via a telepathic hive mind while meditating on the Quran or other holy scriptures written in their original ancient scripts. Hunternet was presented as a second best solution given to Western hunters who lacked this ability due to being cut off for their ancestral beliefs. For some unexplained reason, Middle Eastern hunters were just inherently better than hunters anywhere else in the world. Bear in mind this book was released in the same month that 9-11 happened. Yeah, yikes. As a personal anecdote, I actually got banned from the White Wolf Forums for a week for calling out this book for its nonsense. Turned out that the authors weren't too keen to hear that sort of criticism. Anyway, October brought us a much better book, The Hunter Storytellers Handbook, which was fantastic despite suffering from the same horrible non-thematic artwork that plagued the rest of the line. The first chapter, Unveiling the Night, gave brilliant advice on creating antagonists and monsters as part of ongoing campaigns, ensuring that every session wasn't just a Monster of the Week, but part of a larger conspiracy for players to unravel. Genuinely great advice that could be used for any role-playing game where you want to have some big bad pulling the strings. The second chapter, creating human drama, got to the core of what Hunter was about. The section on truth and consequences really underscored the cost that Hunters paid for the mission, and again, this is a chapter well worth reading for any game that involves any form of personal interactions. Vampire could really have benefited from having this section in one of their books. The final chapter was all about playing God, and it was remarkable because it actually went a long way to spelling out the nature of the messengers and provide a lot of the hunter backstory. This was actually pretty rare for White Wolf at the time, who used to spend a lot of their effort sort of quietly suggesting what might be real and what might be myth and what might be a legend, and well they'll just have to buy the next book to see. This went a long way to addressing the metaplot concerns around a lot of the White Wolf games, namely that White Wolf were telling their own story in the background and what they had planned for the future might have an impact on your game because of future supplements that they decided to release. By making this information on the messengers available, it meant that storytellers could be confident that when they wrote their game, what they had interpreted the messengers to be would not be contradicted in a future supplement. Invaluable for the world building. 2002 was White Wolf's Year of the Damned, and it began with one of the most interesting releases, which was Hunter Book Wayward. This book was genuinely disturbing in its portrayal of hunters because it featured on those hunters who had snapped under the weight of their imbuing, and snapping in a horrific way. Waywards weren't just people that couldn't handle the knowledge. Like hermits, they were the messengers' first attempts at hunters. They were meant to be generals or leaders. They were meant to be the ones who took the other imbued into battle and identified targets and dealt with them. However, the fragile human minds couldn't take it, and as a result, you were left with these broken individuals who were usually overcome with bloodlust or rage because they were conduits for the messengers, anger, and resentment at the monstrous creatures that were inhabiting our world. This was a fantastic book, again, made up of most parts fiction with a tiny bit of rules in the end. And what I found is most people generally used this book as an enemy book. It was pretty much made clear that Waywards didn't make great player characters, not being ones really to play well as part of a team, and therefore it gave a really interesting dimension that you can include as an enemy, namely another hunter, not a supernatural creature, but another person who actually thought they were doing the right thing. It also introduced one of the most beloved signature characters of the line, God 45, Joshua Matthews, whose story was really well spelt out across the pages in the book Wayward and which was picked up in other books along the line. March brought us First Contact, which dealt with what happened when the imbued encountered the traditional hunters from supplements like the Hunters Hunted, presumably they were jealous of all the cool toys and cool organisations that the Hunter's Hunted folks got to play with. April also saw a book called The Nocturnal, which exploded vampires from a hunter's perspective. May the 21st, my birthday nonetheless, marked a significant moment with the release of the Hunter the Reckoning video game. Would you like to guess if this game stayed true to the spirit of the RPG? No, of course it didn't. This was a hack and slash game, which, surprise, surprise, completely missed the point of the thoughtful RPG it was based on. The video game portrayed exactly the kind of chainsaw and rocket launcher nonsense that the RPG explicitly wasn't about. July brought The Moonstruck, which was another enemy book about shapeshifters from a hunter's perspective. This book looked at the different types of werewolves and helped build them as something more than just big, furry, skinny monsters. Like all the enemy books, it never used game line-specific terms. You wouldn't find any guru in here or any tribes, but there were some nice little Easter eggs for those of us familiar with other White Wolf games. The chapter on werewolves as humans who had stolen skins from actual werewolves was a particularly nice touch. September had two major releases, Hunter Utopia and Hunter Fall from the Grace. Hunter Utopia explored what happened when Hunters dreamed big, imagining a paradise free from the monster's grip and actually working to achieve it. The book showed how hunters might organise movements and revolutions against the supernatural, whether in a neighbourhood, a city, or across the world, and it also explored the lengths hunters might have to go and the sacrifices that they'd have to make to see their utopian goals fulfilled, revealing that even successful revolutions could bring loss and punishment. Fall from Grace was my absolutely favourite book for the Lion Though. It dealt with hunters who had gained deep insights into the supernatural but then emerged as the most powerful and dangerous of the imbued. But it really took the time to ask the question are they still even human? This book finally revealed rules for obtaining level 5 edges, the most powerful abilities the hunters could have that were teased in the Core Road book but never actually given rules for accessing. It also explored what happened to hunters who became extremists in their creeds, paying terrible prices for ultimate power. It was a fantastic book and it added a lot to any Hunter the Reckoning Chronicle. It gave you a direction to take players who wanted to explore Hunter's more cosmic side and it gave inevitable consequences for that. It had some of the best fiction as well written across the Hunter the Reckoning line. 2003 was when the beginning of the end for White Wolf was beginning to come as the time crept forward towards the time of judgment. For Hunter, we got a book called Urban Legends, which was genuinely fascinating. It offered new possibilities for enemies, mainly in the form of whatever the storyteller wanted to put together. There were some chapters on some obscure White Wolf stuff that you might not get from other game lines, but there was also rules for making up things. I think there's a chapter on the Chupacapra, for example, that never features in any other White Wolf game line, and it includes rules for just mixing things up so that your players are continually surprised. Players who are longtime veterans of something like Vampir and Masquerade might not be that much surprised when you include vampires in the game, but if you include something truly out of the ordinary, it's your own creation, and this book gives lots of rules for that, that goes a long way to keeping things fresh for your players. This year also saw the release of the Spellbound enemy book, which dealt with mages from a hunter perspective. This had some truly great fiction in it. My personal favourite was the chapters dealing with some technologically inclined mages who decided to try and hack HunterNet and the disastrous consequences that they suffered. This year also saw the release of the infernal enemy book. They explode demons and fallen angels. The Blood Beaven has the really ominous line at the beginning that says they say angels once rebelled against God and were cast out of heaven. This gives you the chance to include some truly otherworldly nasties in your game. Whereas things like vampires and werewolves ultimately have humanity at their core. Angels are something that were never human in the first place, and one that's gone rogue makes for a truly terrifying villain. If you want to construct a good Hunter the Reckoning chronicle, you could set one of these beings as a mastermind behind everything. This book gave you rules for doing so. It was a wonderful tie into Demon the Fallen and really fitted perfectly into Hunter's mythos. January also brought us Laws of the Reckoning, which was adapting Hunter for White Wolf's Mind's Eye Theatre Lamp System. I'll talk more about that later. This was something I was initially sceptical about and then grew to love. Oh, and the video game also got the sequels Wayward and Redeemer, which, surprise, surprise, continued the mindless action mobs of the original. The line concluded in 2004 with World of Darkness Time of Judgment. Now, when White Wolf initially brought their World of Darkness to an end, the three big games were like the Vampire, Werewolf and Page, each got their own end times book. These were generally great publications that were packed with different adventures that were each had a different take on how the world could end and include all sorts of rules for how things changed in the end times, as well as chapters on how to structure a story in these epic settings. For the other smaller games, Hunter included amongst them, they were all bundled together in this one book called Time of Judgment. That included scenarios not just for Hunter, but for Demon, Changely, Kindred of the East, and Mummy, Poor Old Wraith having got its own send-off the same year that Hunter was released back in 1999. What's remarkable about Time of Judgment from a Hunter perspective is for a game line that had built up such wonderful backgrounds through fiction and rich character development, Time of Judgment. And the scenarios for Hunter were an absolute disappointment because they basically threw this all out the window. Now, without giving too many spoilers for people who might still want to experience these scenarios, there were three of them: Cleansing Fires, Glimmer of Hope, and Winds of Change. And these basically amounted to hunters go and kill lots of stuff, hunters find a way of curing monsters with a magic guffin, and hunters lead humans to fight back. The scenarios felt incredibly shallow compared to the deep new storytelling that had characterised the rest of the line. As an example, Vampire's Gehenasaurus movement had several scenarios that included a whole lot of the signature characters getting a send-off. Not one single of the signature character got a send-off. For a game that created such compelling characters over the years, Doctor 119, Witness 1, Kabby22, and so many others, none of them got the send-off they deserved. There was little to no closure for any of the ongoing storylines and made built up through years of supplements, and it felt that the writers had just given up on the rich narrative they'd been developing and defaulted to these generic action scenarios. At the beginning of the chapter, there were about 16 pages providing background on what was happening in the Hunter universe, but much of this was just repeated from the Time of Judgment news ticker that White Wolf had been running on their website for the past few months. It felt perfunctory, like they were just going through the motions to wrap things up. And ironically, one of the endings for the Demon Fallen game line actually gave Hunter a better send-off than the Hunter section did, showing how the imbued fit into the larger cosmic struggle between Heaven and Hell, and this in many ways felt more true to the game's themes than its own ending scenarios. Anyway, that ran out of the way. What's really remarkable about Hunter's release schedule is not just the volume of supplements that were released over a period of five years, but the consistent quality of the fiction and the innovative approaches to game design that it showed. It could very easily have been a case of White Wolf saying, well, if you want monsters, just buy one of our core books for the other game lines, but instead they set about producing books for those creatures that made them different from Hunter to give the players a whole new experience. What I also loved is that throughout the line, with a few notable exceptions, they really spent the time sticking to their ethos of showing rather than telling what it meant to be the Hunter, and most follows the performance put multiple perspectives of the same supernatural friends in the same room, and in some cases even giving the superfashals impression of what the hunters are. Now, I mentioned earlier in 2003 while we've released the laws of the recognition, which was adapting Hunter for the Mind Eye Theatre System. I've been a longtime player of Vampire LARPs. Anyone who's listened to this podcast will have had that bowled into their brain, and I was obviously familiar with the format, but much as I loved Hunter, I was genuinely worried about how Hunter would translate to live action play. You've got a game that's introspective and it's psychological. Would that work well in a LARP environment? Something like Vampire, which was inherently political, was incredibly well suited to LARPing. But Hunter, would that work? I thankfully was completely wrong. Laws of the Reckoning led me to running what I honestly believe was the best LARP game I've ever been involved with. Where the game really worked was in the human interactions between the players, the moral dilemmas that came with being a Hunter, the fragility of Hunter versus Supernaturals, the constant tension between maintaining normal lives and fulfilling the supernatural mission. All of my players were longtime vampire players, and there was one session that perfectly illustrated the difference in power levels. They decided to go after a couple of ghouls, vampires are mortal servants who are typically very low on the supernatural food chain when you're playing a game of vampire. In vampire larves, ghouls are usually minor threats at best, but these players went in without a proper plan, treating like any other vampire game, and they got into serious trouble, the ghouls are going to kill them. And it was a wake-up call that it taught them the hunters have to be small and they have to plan and they have to fuck to kill them in order to survive. The vulnerability was real in the way in any other one this game was coming in, and it was wonderful for that. And surprise, surprise, the players absolutely loved that. Now I mentioned this previously, but one curious fact about Hunter is the fact that throughout its run it has been consistently linked with other games in White Wolf's portfolio. Now, this isn't surprising, more so than any other game out there, Hunter calls for interaction with other games, namely because the protagonists from all the other game lines, the vampires, the werewolves, etc., are actually the antagonists as part of Hunter. However, it's super surprising that the first game that Hunter was really posited as having a link with was Exalted White Wolves brand new fantasy game. Now, what I'm about to go into here is fairly heavy and exalted lore, so if you don't know what Exalted is, my apologies, it will all sound like complete jibber jabber. These links can be seen early on in Hunter's line. You can see an advertisement for Exalted in the original Hunter rule book, and there's a final piece of fiction there that hints at this connection between the two games. Hunter a Procropha also contains strong hints about links to Exalted's cosmology. Now the theory that emerged from various sources that was White Wolf intended originally that Exalted was going to be the prehistory of the old world of darkness. The Hunters were being developed right at the time when this connection was being posited. Both Exalted and Hunter feature a Scarlet Empress and an Ebon Dragon as major cosmic forces. And while never officially confirmed, there were heavy implications that the imbued were originally meant to be the deeply degraded remains of the solar exalted long after some catastrophe had transformed the creation of Exalted into the world of darkness. Other hints in different game lines suggested potential links between the Abyssal Exalted and Vampires, for example. And the concept might have been that the Scarlet Empress and the Ebon Dragon, having somehow survived, whoever ultimately destroyed their cosmology, were trying to use what was left of the Solar Exalted in a desperate plea to save the world from the same suffering and fate that theirs had befallen. However, White Wolf very quickly abandoned this concept entirely. Hunter's official backstory, as revealed primarily in the Hunter Storyteller's Handbook, presented a cyclical view of history, similar to what was positive for Exalted. The current generation of imbued weren't the first time that heroes had been chosen from humanity. It had happened at least once before in a distant, almost mythical past. And again, here you can see the exalted roots. According to this backstory, the powers of bee, which are very heavily implied to be divine forces, had been absent from Earth, and predictably the demons had taken this as an excuse to cause havoc amongst humanity, and when the heavens turned their attention back to Earth, they saw all this trouble going on. So they decided they were going to choose heroes and champions from amongst humanity to fight them off, and after the demons were banished, humanity entered a golden age. However, the heroes eventually started abusing the power and began fighting amongst themselves. The heavens, fed up with this whole hollow balloon, damned the heroes and turned their backs on creation. Predictably the forces of darkness used this opportunity to gradually wheel their way back into the world over the ages, leading to the monster-infested mess that the present-day world of darkness is. Now, although the creator remained absent, the ministers, these are the divine forces one step below the creator, decided to interfere with the current situation as they couldn't stand to see the world going to rack and ruin. Their first attempts at creating champions and conduits for communicating with the divine field horribly, because unlike the mythic past, mankind had changed over the ages and become more fragile and less receptive to divine power, and these broken imbued became the wayward and hermit creeds. The Ministers then tried again, being less direct, hence the ambiguous nature of the messengers that the imbued hear and created the imbued as we know them. However, they locked away the more powerful abilities available to these champions because they knew that the hunters probably wouldn't be able to handle them and didn't want them going off all half-cocked and corrupted like the heroes of old had. And as things went from bad to worse, the ministers chose some hunters who were on the edge of great power and offered them the chance to unlock this divine potential. Meanwhile, the forces of darkness, who are strongly implied to be the earthbound demons from the recently released Demon the Fallen, offered the imbued the ability to remove the locks put in place by the ministers to access their full potential. And there were also some hunters who were just strong-willed enough to unlock the power on their own, but they were without exception completely mental. All of this created a fascinating backstory where hunters would begin to realise that the forces empowering them might have their own agenda, and all these monsters they were seeing everywhere, well that wasn't necessarily the real world, but rather the world as their benefactors wanted them to see it. Interestingly though, an early hunter supplement, the Walking Dead, strongly suggested a completely different origin tied to Kindred of the East. This theory framed both the Qui Jin, which are the Eastern Vampires, and the imbued as failed experiments by powerful spirit entities of the Far East, the Ebon Dragon and the Scarlet Queen. Those names keep popping up, and in Hunter's Lord these would be identified as the ministers themselves. According to this version, the spirits had originally created a race of immortals to protect the world, the Ten Thousand Immortals, awesome name. However, these protectors became corrupted and eventually became the Qui Jin. The Imbued were, in this interpretation, the Spirits' second attempt at creating heroes. Interestingly, Time of Judgment has a scenario for Kindred of the East called the Trumpet of Mount Meru, and that included rules for turning imbued into these legendary immortal heroes. It was certainly a lot more interesting than what Time of Judgment had to offer for Hunter itself. So we've already got two settings claiming hunters as ancient heroes from the past, but we've also got Demon joining the party because Demon the Fallen, as previously stated, flat out says in its Time of Judgment scenarios that the imbued were created by celestial forces that were, or maybe once were, angels. In a memorable scene, Lucifer himself encounters the Hunter Crusader 17. He's one of Hunter's signature characters who'd become an extremist, and is disgusted to find that the ministers had apparently hollowed him out and were using as some kind of puppet, something that Lucifer, despite his rebellion, never wanted for humanity. Interestingly, Lucifer also refers to Goddess She in Demon's cosmology, which was sure to annoy certain corners of the internet. What this does mean is if you look at these different origin stories and connections, it's clear that this was somewhat of a disorganized mess. White Wolf really seemed to be making things up as he went along, creating multiple contradictory explanations of the same phenomena. The connections were also extremely inconsistent, and it wasn't really until Time of Judgment that White Wolf clarified that the world of Darkness games, which had previously felt interconnected, actually all existed in their own separate realities, and this made sense from a practical standpoint since you couldn't really have Gehenna, the Apocalypse, Ascension, and other game-specific geschatological events all happening simultaneously in the same world. I mean you could, but it would be a complete mess to run and not much fun for the players. The result was a rich but confusing mythology that left many questions unanswered when the game line ended and also many contradictions unresolved. Now, as you can tell by the length of this podcast, I am definitely a fan of Hunter the Reckoning, but looking back on it more than two decades later, I'm struck by how much the game was let down by its presentation and marketing. The artwork suggested one kind of game, while the text described something completely different. And the name Hunter implied that all the characters were these predators stalking supernatural play, when in fact some of the creeds, like the Redeemers and the Innocents, were more interested in helping and healing monsters than destroying them. If I could rename the game today, I might call it something like Imbued the Awakening, something that emphasized the transformative moment when ordinary people suddenly saw the truth about the world. Because that's what Hunter was really about. Not hunting in the traditional sense, although you could do that, but people who had been fundamentally changed by knowledge that they couldn't unknow. The core concept was absolutely brilliant. What happens when regular people discover that the world is full of monsters? How do they cope with that knowledge? How do they maintain their normal lives while carrying this terrible burden? How do they fight the creatures that are stronger, faster, and more experienced than they are? What price are they willing to pay for victory? And what do they do when they realize that the forces empowering them may have an agenda of their own? Hunter the Reckoning tackled all these questions with intelligence and sophistication. Yes, there were some dropped balls like Hunter Holy War, but it was a game about ordinary heroes in an extraordinary situation, about people who chose to stand up and fight even when they were hopelessly outmatched. It was about hope in the face of despair, about retaining your humanity while fighting inhuman foes, and about the terrible cost of power. Some of my favourite books from the line, Fall from Grace, Hunter Book Wayward, The Infernal, they all dealt with what happened when hunters were pushed beyond their limits. They explored the thin line between Hero and Monster, between Righteous Fury and Destructive Obsession. They'd hard questions about the price of power and the cost of conviction. And despite all its problems with presentation and marketing, despite the misleading artwork and the disappointing ending, Hunter the Reckoning remains one of my favourite RPGs of all time. Once you get past the surface and really dug into what the game was trying to say, you found something truly unique and powerful. A game about ordinary people doing extraordinary things about the everyman versus the supernatural. And you know what? Maybe that's the most appropriate legacy for a game about Hunters. Like the imbued themselves, Hunter the Reckoning was misunderstood, underestimated, and often dismissed by people who never took the time to see what it was really about. But for those of us who did take that time, who looked past the awful artwork with its chainsaws and shotguns to the heart of the game, we found something truly special. And please never say to me, but isn't Hunter's Hunting a more realistic game? It's for people like that that I reserve the chainsaws and shotguns. We hope you enjoyed it. We're a semi-regular podcast about the history of roleplaying games. We have over 70 episodes in our back catalogue now dealing with all sorts of things like history episodes like this one, roundtables, interviews, product reviews, and some actual plays as well. So if you're a new listener and you fancy binging, we've got lots of content for you. If you enjoyed this episode, please, please leave us some of those nice stars on your podcast directory of choice. It really helps us with visibility and it keeps us motivated and chunning out nonsense like this for you to listen to. If you want to get in touch with us, either to discuss Hunter the Reckoning or even just to suggest the next episode that you would like to hear, then please mail us at roll.two.save.pod at gmail.com or you can find us on Instagram and Facebook by searching for roll to save. Until next time, may your second side always keep you safe from mind control and may your conviction burn brightly. Thanks again for listening.

Contributor

Iain Wilson

Host
Contributor

Jason Downey

Co-host
Contributor

Steve McGarrity

Co-host