OSSR: Nightlife

[Username17]

Nightlife



The year is 1990. Well, I'm reviewing the "third edition" which came out in 1992, but Nightlife was frankly little changed in the new edition it came out with each year between 1990 and 1992, and the concepts and aesthetics are well and truly dated to their 1990 origin.

So it's 1990, vampires are cool, cyberpunk is cool, and D&D is a slowly dying whale. People are striking out with new mechanics. Whitewolf hasn't published Masquerade yet, but it's about to. It is an age of experimentation and fanboyism, and this all comes out plainly on the cover of Nightlife, which has the actual words on it:

Play a Vampire!
Play a Werewolf!
Play a Ghost!
NIGHTLIFE
The Role-Playing Game of Urban Horror

So let's get the mead and start reading.

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Table of Contents
The first thing it gives you is a table of contents. The table of contents is almost useless because it is too detailed. It lists every single sub-heading in the book. Meaning that, for example, page 69 (which has the initiative rules on it) is listed in the table of contents seven actual times. To contrast, pages 61-63 are not listed at all because they have no subheadings on them - being "mere" continuations of the "General Skills" list that starts on page 60. This system causes the table of contents to be three actual pages long, which makes it more like an index, but things are still just listed in the actual order they appear in the book and so it's not much use to anyone. You could seriously find anything in the book faster by just thumbing through the book until you found what you were looking for than by trying to figure out what it was called in the ToC. Especially as many of the subheadings are pretty much meaningless outside their context in the book (such as "The News" or "Mapping").

Then comes a one page story that is entirely in italics. I want to point out that yes, this is the format that Shadowrun adopted for its fourth edition in 2005. Because Nightlife is in many ways way the fuck ahead of its time. The story itself isn't a bad opening, but the plain text introduction that follows it sure is.

The actual intro is four pages long. It has a "wat is role playing?" section, but before that it attempts to hook you into the splatterpunk genre. Because it's 1990, and people thought "splatterpunk" was a genre. For those of you too young or too sane to know what splatterpunk even is, it's basically a late eighties/ early nineties attempt by proto-hipsters to make grindhouse movies cool by enjoying bad gore special effects ironically. And of course, being really pretentious about it. It very unironically attempts to present a grand-unified theory of horror that, I-shit-you-not draws a line between Dracula, Hiroshima, Vietnam, and Night of the Living Dead to get to the supposed apex of Horror: Clive Barker and Lost Boys. I feel it very important to reiterate that I am not making that up. The authors want to underline that they are part of a cultural movement that is going to change the world by making and enjoying low budget horror films with very visible fake blood and teenagers dying on camera. Aside from all the batshit crazy, they do introduce a rather neat conceit, which is that the MC for this game is called the City Planner (CP). So the CP is literally the inverse of the PC, and represents one of the first games to effectively take the word "Master" out of the title of the MC and have that stick.

The mechanics of Nightlife are absolutely insane, but this is only hinted at in the intro. The intro informs you that it is helpful to have lots of d10s handy, and tells you that you are going to be summing them, dividing them, and using them to generate sequential digits in multidigit numbers. It also uses a hex map, and despite being set in a city, uses hexes that are five yards across.

Designate the distance across one hex to be 5 yards. Characters are considered to be in the center of the hex. This makes figuring ranges and keeping track of the exact location of characters very easy.

Yes, "adjacent" characters are considered to be fifteen feet apart. Because that makes keeping track of exact locations very easy. I need a drink.

Character Creation
Again, you get a little one-pager story in italics to help set the mood. These stories do a much better job of this than the rant about living in the moment through being a fan of objectively terrible horror movies. It gets off to a rather bad start in that the very first thing you do is to choose your race. You are going to be a member of "the Kin", which is what the game calls all supernatural creatures collectively. There are dozens of flavors of supernatural creatures (so many that any one you encounter is basically going to be a Steve). As a player character, your initially presented choice of race (there are a bunch more you can select from at the back of the book, and a bunch more you can't) is: Vampyres (yes, spelled with a Y, because fuck you), Werewolves, Ghosts, Daemons (spelled with an "ae" to... avoid pissing off Christians? I don't know), Wyghts (also spelled with a Y, because fuck you), Animates, and I swear I am not fucking making this up: Inuits. Yes, the Canadian First Nation people. Seriously. Drinking a shot is now required and I haven't even completed the first paragraph of the first real chapter.

Characters have Abilities (your stats), Humanity (which is another stat, but one which is even specialer than Luck and thus not categorized with the others), Edges (your magic powers), Flaws (your supernatural weaknesses), Skills (exactly what they sound like), a Personal Profile (a description and backstory of your character), Possessions (actual stuff you own), and Connections (think 1st edition Shadowrun contacts). Character generation has very large random components in it. You roll 4d10 and add them together and then apply racial modifiers to generate all your stats (except Humanity, which starts at 50). Then your skills are equal to your base stat plus a number of extra d10s that you assign to them from your pool of thirty (yes, 30) starting skill advancements. Stats are Strength, Dexterity, Fitness, Intelligect, Will, Perception, Attractiveness, and Luck. There are also derived stats of Survival Points (Luck + Fitness) and Hand-to-Hand Damage (Strength divided by 5), but these are not listed separately, they just happen to tell you that they have special systems to derive them in their text bodies. Luck goes up by a d10 every single adventure, but I think it maxes out at 100 (that is extremely not clear).

Humanity starts at 50, and the maximum starts at 100. You can spend maximum humanity to increase your magic powers (which have numbers on them). Humanity is like a special morality gauge, and when it goes down you have a harder time passing yourself off as human. You lose it by eating people and otherwise being a cock. You get it back by doing trivial shit like interacting with humans. It bounces up and down a fucking lot. You can spend your maximum humanity to get new powers or improve the ones you have on character advancement, but you can also just do it at character creation. You know, whatever. To make assigning skill advancement rolls more complicated than it even already was, you assign a number of advancement rolls from your pool of 30 one skill at a time, and some skills have a requirement that you have a total value of 30 in certain other skills before you are allowed to select them. Yes, I think that means you can flub your advancement rolls on a prerequisite skill and then not be allowed to spend any on a specific skill you actually wanted. Because "busting" in chargen is awesome. The Connections is literally rolling on a chart to see if you start with less connections or more connections. If you get more connections you also get a couple of elite connections that are like mob bosses and investment bankers and shit. Because game balance is for people who aren't living-in-the-now.

Your Personal Profile is super important, and contains things that are actually game mechanically relevant like the faction you are associated with. This is the days before anyone learned anything from White Wolf, and the factions are supposed to fucking murder each other like Camarilla and Sabbat. The game suggests that characters in the same group should all be about the same in "their standing on pro- or anti-human beliefs, and their affiliations should reflect this." I am not making that up. Your Possessions are composed of a d10 times a thousand dollars in assets plus a hundred bucks per year of life. The Kin are immortal, so you can have as many possessions as you want by just writing an arbitrarily large age down. I think it is also important to note that the game explicitly tells you "Fashion is wildly important on the club scene of New York, and The Kin realize that chic dress is virtually a necessity."

Races of the Kin
Again, you get a story section. This is where they first come clean on the fact that the seven offered races are not the only races, but they tell you that it is up to the CP as to whether to allow you to play other races of the Kin. Spoiler: the CP section has the expanded list of kin types and literally tells you that some are playable and some aren't. I'm not sure how you could see the writeup of the non-standard kin you wanted to play without getting the information about whether you could play one or not - making the "ask the CP" step something of a formality.

There are 14 "Common Edges", which are powers that anyone can get. Some of them are powers that you start with (like Drain), and some are ones that you are allowed to buy. They include physical powers (Armor and Speed), magic powers (Weather Control and Aura Sight), and even flaw reduction (Photogenics is the "power" to be less limited by the "difficult to photograph" flaw that all members of The Kin have). But on top of that, every type of The Kin starts with completely arbitrary lists of powers, including a unique list of powers. Some of these powers are actually unique. Also they are all saddled with flaws, which are similarly completely fucking arbitrary. When your current Humanity is above 50, you take less damage from your bane items, and when it is below 50 you take more. Also various other stuff. Your Humanity is also your power points, in that it costs humanity on a daily (and sometimes individual action) basis to use your powers, and you get bonus Humanity for not using your powers.

I think it is also important to note that the various races of The Kin are extremely not balanced against each other. Not only do the stat modifiers not add up, there is as far as I can see not even a cursory attempt to make the starting or purchasable powers be vaguely comparable. To add insult to injury, some of the races attempt to sell you on a higher or lower starting Humanity as a selling point or disadvantage. This is fucking hilarious, because the actual example of tracking humanity for a character (spoiler: you do not actually get this information until page 143) has it going up and down by 18 points in an ordinary week. So starting with a Humanity of 40 or 60 instead of 50 is so amazingly not-relevant that it is hard for me to wrap my mind around why they would feel the need to even write that up. Even maximum humanity (the thing you spend to get super powers) is trivially easy to get, because every time you push your current humanity 10 points above your maximum humanity you trade that shit in. You can get up to 15 humanity per fucking day by simply holding a customer service job. You can max out all your powers by just having your character work at Best Buy for a few months.

And yes, one of the seven races of the Kin it wants you to play is named "Inuit". For serious. Also they are "the most flamboyant of the major races." It suggests that you be conservation and environmentally minded. Because the early nineties.

It should also be noted that the game totally goes off on feeding habits like all the time. Feeding is a special power that everyone has which allows them to brutalize people (or in some cases: animals) in some way to steal their life force in exchange for very small amounts of healing. This power is in almost all cases completely meaningless, as the amount of healing you get is bullshit and no one fucking cares. Some of the Kin races also starve if they go more than a few days without feeding, so they will obviously have to fit feeding on people or perhaps animals into their weekly schedule. But for the most part, it's a massive section of the rules that is almost 100% pointless.

Edges
Edges cost max humanity to buy. And they cost max humanity to raise their value. And some of them cost current humanity to use. Some powers are on a 100 point scale (where you roll a d100 against them when they are activated), and others are on a 20 point scale (where they go against d10s added together or d100s that have been divided by 5). Sometimes these have wildly different "cost ratios" (the amount of Edge Value you get for a lost point of humanity max or the amount of humanity max you have to spend for a point of Edge Value if the bigger number is on the other side of the division sign) to make up for this difference. Sometimes they don't. Powers are often incredibly redundant. There is a power called Aviary that turns you into a bird, there is also a power called Bat Form that turns you into a bat. They are right fucking next to each other, have completely different mechanics, and completely different costs. No one knows why.

There is a general rule that powers used on other Kin don't work well. Which is manifested by them getting -50 to their escape tests (that makes it easier for them to escape, by which we mean resist, so the power doesn't work as well). But many powers don't actually allow escape tests, which means that they work just fine on supernaturals. Also some abilities specify that they work fine on other supernaturals. Really, it seems like they could have just marked a couple of powers as not working well on supernatural creatures.

Normal humans are called "Herd", which means the same thing as "Kine" that were called in Masquerade, and Nightlife was printed first. So there's that. Humanity costs are incurred when you use powers that have humanity costs, but if you use them against a Kin instead of against a Herd, that cost is waved. I have no idea how that is supposed to work with things like Aura Sight that passively give you information about the people around you. Extra hilarity for having a Danger Sense power that you have to voluntarily activate and spend humanity to use that has a really short duration.

I think I need to point out again that there is really no commonality between different powers and the numbers attached to them. Many work if you roll under their value on percentile dice. But others are added as modifiers to other rolls. And some are divided by various numbers and then used as modifiers. Still others simply have their primary effect without checking the value at all and have their actual number you can buy up for humanity checked only in some obscure edge case.

Flaws
It is technically a chapter, so you get a little story vignette. It is a short vignette and it is a short chapter. The entire thing (story and all) is only 3 pages. It doesn't need to even be that long, because every race is enough of a Steve that they have to explain their Flaws in each racial writeup anyway. Like seriously: Vampyres need to sleep on a bed of earth, and the writers don't even try to pretend that that shit is categorizable.

Ugh. I have run out of booze and need to sleep. More laterz. We are only up to page 55.

-Username17

[Username17]

Alright, we're back and drunker than before. And that means we can start going into the nitty gritty of Nightlife's mechanics sections.

Skills
The Skills chapter starts off right: with a picture of various supernatural creatures doing "stuff". One of them is like a zombie doing a no-hands ollie on a skateboard, because this is the early nineties. Also the ladies have big hair. We've already looked in on the magic powers chapter, which defies role playing precepts by being located before the rules for actually performing mundane actions. Well, now we're in the chapter of skills and it literally just starts in with the skill list. It doesn't bother to tell you how to actually use these fucking things. So I think it's time to do something of a major spoiler and skip ahead to the part where it actually tells you how to perform actions so that we can make any sense of this shit at all.

The basic mechanic is that you roll d% and try to roll under your skill. Modifiers modify the die rather than your effective skill, so a "+20 modifier" is bad, while a "-10 modifier" is good. This is all explained after all the skills are described, so an initial reading of the chapter will be super confusing. Another thing you have to keep in mind is how absolutely hilariously full of failure everyone is in this game. Every skill has a base value equal to a stat (or the average of two stats in some cases), and those stats start at 4d10: an average of 22. You then put d10 skill advancements into things, but those average 5.5 each. So if you put a 2 die skill up into a skill and have an average associated stat, you fail two thirds of time before any positive (by which I mean bad) modifiers kick in. The game loves to hand out positive modifiers. Another thing to notice is that having even 2 dice of skill advancement in something is pretty fucking optimistic because there are a lot of fucking skills and you "only" start with 30 skill advancement dice.

Just focusing on the combat skills for a moment, it is a separate skill for every weapon and standard combat maneuver. And I don't just mean that Sword and Knife are separate skills (although they are), but that fucking throwing is split into multiple skills (the example is literally that rock throwing, knife throwing, and grenade throwing are all considered different skills). At least the spear skill lets you stab and throw with one without getting separate skills. But the knife skill specifically doesn't. There are literally over twenty combat skills listed, with four of them being represented by different styles of unarmed combat. And that's before we get into the fill-in weapon skills you are encouraged to make up like Special Weapon (Chainsaw) or Throwing (Axes).

Now let's go back and talk skill nomenclature for a bit. Every skill starts at the level of its associated attribute (which in most cases is either Int or Dex). This means that you have all kinds of crazy shit at a painfully shitty level. Nevertheless, you achieve "competence" in a skill if you get it to 30. When you have competence, you are allowed to do "normal" skill tasks without rolling dice - like Take 20 or Take 10 or something. If you are less than Competent, you have to roll. But remember, you're rolling a fucking d% and trying to roll under the skill. So even supposedly competent characters will fail more than two times in three that they are required to roll even without a difficulty bonus (yes, I said difficulty bonus, fuck you). Another thing to keep in mind is that stats are rolled on 4d10, which gives you a 10.8% chance of simply having a Dex of 30+ even before racial modifiers, which would cause competencies to literally rain on you. If you decide to be a Werewolf and transform into a giant dog, the +20 Dex you get for that is 98% certain to cause you to be competent in everything from photography to manuscript illumination. Regardless of this core fact, the rules talk about "having" skills and specially call out the fact that every character starts with the completely worthless Hand to Hand skill (worthless because the martial arts and street fighting skills start at the same value and are in all ways superior or the same).

Skills are categorized into "Combat Skills", "Archaic Skills", and "General Skills". General Skills is seriously longer than the other skill lists combined. I think it important to point out that some of these skills are a fucking pain in the ass to use. For example: Ambidexterity is a skill roll, where if you fail you get a +25 modifier when using your off hand. It would be the same in the long run (though far less irritating) to have the penalty for using your off hand be +25 - 1 for every 4 points of Ambidexterity. But Nightlife likes to make people roll extra unnecessary percentile dice. Many skills are secretly called for in other parts of the book - Fear effects go against your Will, but you actually have a skill called "Fear Resistance" that starts valued at your Will and is used in place of your Will to resist Fear. Still other skills aren't rolled at all and merely modify other things: Stage Presence is just a package bonus to Acting, Dancing, Juggling, Mimie, Musical Instrument, and Singing (every five points adds a -1 to your rolls on any of those skills); Fashion Sense is a 1:30 bonus to your Attractiveness stat. And special props have to go to the Gambling skill. Skill advancement on Gambling is per game of chance, meaning that you will never ever do that. But the base value of your Gambling Skills are your Luck stat, and your Luck stat advances by a d10 every single fucking adventure - meaning that after 14 adventures or so, every character has maxed out all Gambling.

Except you know, maybe not. Because the "change in ability" section talks about having skills decoupled from their attached attributes, though I don't see how or when that would happen either during chargen or afterward. Basically, it looks like there were two skill systems being written, one in which you had skill ranks and stat modifiers, and another where your stats changed the cost of buying into skills but had no further effect on them. I have no idea how this is actually supposed to be played, and doubt anyone else does either. For example:

A character can also increase a Basic Ability (See Elders). In such a case, Skills already possessed that are based on the Basic Ability that changed are not affected

When a Basic Ability increases, all Skill and Edge Scores based on that Ability also increase by a like amount.

Fucking fuck! Note that even though the part of the book that tells you how Basic Abilities and Humanity increase tells you explicitly that your Skills increase, it doesn't say when or by how much.

We could go on about how loony tunes the skill lists are, with their Skateboarding skill, their Dexterity based CPR skill, and their seemingly serious suggestion that you might want to track Physics and Nuclear Physics separately on your character sheet. But I think we're basically done. About the only thing we really need to go over is the fact that the Skills chapter contains the actual rules for activating your magic powers, but doesn't give even the slightest hint as to how or if skills improve.

Combat
Combat is divided into six second BTs. The BT stands for "battle turn". And during a BT you can on average run 22 yards or walk 7 yards, which is "easily" tracked in 5 yard hexes. This is such a clusterfuck that I don't even. I'm going to pour myself some bourbon and see if it makes it any better.

It doesn't make it any better, but I also have no words to adequately express how fucking weird it is that the game adamantly refuses to use speeds and ranges that divide evenly into its preferred measurement system. To their credit, they do end page two with this:

If the CP is using a hex map for movement in personal combat, 1 hex should be yards across, unless such a scale proves to be inconvenient.

Are you fucking kidding me!? Of course it is fucking inconvenient! Movement rates for normal characters are 22 yards running, 7 yards walking, and 3 yards crawling. None of those divide equally into 5 yard increments, you fucking assholes!

Anyway. During a BT, you can move or use an action. It is, and I am not making this up, under the CP's discretion whether you can do both during a BT or not. Like, literally the CP is supposed to decide on a case by case basis whether you get a Move and a Standard or a Move or a Standard. I don't see how tactical thought is even possible when how many actions you get in a turn is explicitly left up to magical teaparty.

Actual attacks are resolved in a sort of THAC0 style. You are trying to roll under your currently relevant combat skill and modifiers move your die roll up and down (mostly up). Most of the modifiers are listed under optional rules, but I assume they are supposed to be used. Anyway, weapons have a "damage potential" and this is increased by 1 for every ten whole points you beat your skill by with your attack roll. Melee weapons are also increased by your HTH, which means that melee is very highly incentivized in these rules. Then you reduce the damage by armor. Sorry, that would make too much fucking sense and not involve me pouring another glass. What I meant to say is that you roll an activation roll for the target's armor based on how much of the body is covered and then subtract armor from damage if it kicks in. Despite being pretty fiddly, attack damage is pretty deterministic. The actual weapon chart is in the appendices and with a few weird exceptions (grenades do 100 damage), small weapons (like a .22) do 10 damage and big weapons (like a shotgun) do 20 damage. Normal characters start with an average of 44 hit points (sorry: Survival Points), and getting 5 points of always-active magic armor is almost free. Also remember that characters gain a d10 of Luck and thus a d10 of SP every fucking adventure, and the game tells you to only stop accumulating more hit points only when you get to ten times your fitness score (which is several hundred).

Between the underlying large number of hit points in the hands of PCs and the small and fairly deterministic damage of weaponry, it takes a lot of hits to drop any magic critter. And on top of that, the writers of the combat chapter do not seem to have talked to the writers of the skill system. Like, at all. There are several examples of combat and they all flippantly talk about characters with combat skills in the seventies. That just isn't happening. There's even an example with a character being shot at by supposedly laughable gutter trash, who nonetheless has a pistols skill of 50, which is actually damn good for even a PC. Using the actual mook generation system in this game, a piece of gutter trash would be lucky to have a pistol skill of 18. With attacks whiffing constantly and hits needing to come in very large numbers to accomplish dickity fuck, it's actually OK that the game seems to expect you to set entire rounds on fire to draw weapons or cross the room. Seriously, who gives a fuck about losing a BT here and there for maintenance when a fight between two offensively minded starting characters could be reasonably expected to drag on for 10 rounds or more before a winner is declared? The rules for cover and ducking are fucking nuts: when you are firing from cover you add a penalty to oncoming attacks of seventy fucking five, hell you can pick up a +20 to their attack rolls by simply ducking. Fighting in dance clubs gets its own subsection and fucks you out of 25 points on the attack dice. Even opting to only attack every other BT by aiming only gives you a -20, so even the most casual attempts to avoid getting shot are going to leave almost any conceivable opposition fishing for 01s and the automatic hit (at minimum damage) they provide.

So the combat rules also include rules for poison and fire and falling and stuff - as you do when you're making a combat chapter in a game like this. The part where I am now drinking 151 straight from the glass kicks in on the falling chart, where depending on how far you fall your roll to reduce damage will be based on Dex or Fitness. So if your Dexterity and Fit are not close to one another, it is extremely plausible that falling farther will cause you a lot less damage than falling less far. The game also loves inflicting ability damage. This is way more effective than inflicting actual damage. For example, when you use the Coronary power, you inflict direct damage to the target's Fit score equal to the Edge value (which is scored on a 30-100 score), which means you pretty much insta-gib anyone it works on.

The game thinks it is highly lethal and gives out really large numbers of extra lives to Kin (and by extension, all PCs). This is in fact, not true. Unless you just say "fuck it" and go for the full Santa Sack of Grenades, dropping enemies or getting dropped before one team or the other just gets bored and leaves is simply not going to happen.

Feeding
For some reason, this gets a whole chapter. Feeding is generally speaking fairly pointless. You can use it to heal yourself by hurting or killing animals or Herd, but there's not a lot of reason to do that. If for some reason you really wanted to heal up, you still wouldn't feed on random people, or even maintain a herd of addicted Herd or any of that shit. You're gonna use your Drain ability on your party members because every SP you inflict on Kin heals two of your SP, so if you just Drain back and forth for a few seconds a party of Kin can recover from even near total party wipeout to full health.

This also means that the character types who are required to feed to keep from starving are really not much disadvantaged. All it means is that they gain magic powers slower because they go less days without feeding.

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What follows is split between setting and CP information. Character advancement is considered CP information, because it's more annoying that way. We'll save that stuff for Part 3.

-Username17

[Username17]

Now we're past the mechanical portions for the most part, and we're in the section where it starts describing the world. The book is rather short on explaining what the fucking hell is going on before it jumps elbow first into its frankly unplayable mechanics.

Death After Midnight: A Kin Guide to New York City
Yes, that is the actual name of the chapter. It starts out with a little primer on New York City history, with a chunk of secret history for supernaturals. This is about what you want for a book like this, but it needs editing badly. The timeline mentions some basically random New York events that are not tied to secret magic history at all. Is it in any way important that a plane crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945? Not if you don't tie it into some sort of supernatural event it isn't! Where this really gets weird is where the history timeline keeps going into the late nineties. Yes, really. Despite having been made in 1990, Nightlife has fictional events going out to 1996. Here on page 86 they reveal to you that Nightlife takes place in the near future rather than a present day. Why? I have no idea. If this was an attempt to keep the work from feeling dated when read a few years later, it did not succeed.

They also give you some of what we'd call "Wikipedia Facts" about New York if the book came out in the 21st century. Average temperature by month, crime stats, population numbers, that sort of thing. This is deeply weird, because they're presenting game information and they still hedge on the numbers involved. I mean, the number of Kin in New York is listed as "several hundred". Note that there are more than fifty flavors of Kin in this book, so the difference between a "unique" Kin type and a "standard" Kin type is apparently only a handful of creatures in the setting. You could meet half the Kin in the setting and still never meet another version of whatever the fuck it is you're playing - whether you're technically unique or not. I also think it important that despite not telling you exactly how many supernatural or normal human creatures there are, they do mention a fictional future 1995 "Special Census" that reported New York's population at 8,127,900. It just seems very odd to me that they tell you precisely how many hundreds of people are listed as living in a city in one fictional future government report but don't tell you how many fucking vampires their setting has in it. Maybe I'm not drinking enough. There's an event calendar that has a parade or fair or something listed for every month of the year, which is a surprisingly useful RPG tool and I wish that 4th edition Shadowrun had done that for its cities. It really gives PCs and CPs alike a tool where the current action can be tied into an upcoming event so as to make things seem topical.

I think that I have to bitch some more about the uselessness of the Table of Contents to this book. Remember when I mentioned "The News" as one of the bits in the ToC back in part 1? Well, it's in this section, and it is literally a single paragraph that gives you a list of what newspapers are available in New York. They get less than a sentence of description each, the New York Fucking Times is described only as being "austere". They aren't even tied in to the fictional world in any way. You might think that there'd be something in there about how there was secret supernatural news hidden in the New York Daily News or something, and that's why werewolves read shitty tabloids. But no, it's just a paragraph of wikifacts that is almost completely useless even if it is 1990 and you don't have wikipedia to look this shit up on. And that single uninteresting paragraph gets a whole line on the ToC because it happens to be preceded by a subheading.

We get various other wiki-facts and are treated to a neighborhood roundup of Manhattan. Here is where it really goes off the rails. Apparently, Tribeca has been renamed the "Dead Light District" and is now under the control of magic creatures. This is really a sticking point with me, because it means that the entire setting is deeply incoherent. Are monsters public knowledge? Are they secret? What the fucking hell is supposed to be going on? If monsters aren't secret, why is the rest of the setting mostly just regular America five minutes into the future? If monsters are secret, why the fucking hell are whole neighborhoods renamed in honor of their Vampyre Overlords?

There are of course descriptions of other neighborhoods, a thing on points of interest, and so on and so forth. Most of these are in the same rough format as the Shadowrun place books of the period. Because it was the early nineties and that is simply how such things were done. You get a bolded title of a place, and it is followed by a paragraph describing it. The "voice" of these is all over the place. Some of these are dry descriptions of reality, some of these are boosterish tourism guides, a few (too few) have actual plot hooks tied into them, and some have speculative future events in the mid nineties change them in radical ways. The descriptions don't call out these retro-future events, which means that people who are familiar with New York or had some other source of information about New York would be constantly confused. The information isn't in-depth enough for you to really be able to run Nightlife without some other source of New York info, so really I can't see it as even being possible to attempt to play this campaign setting without massive confusion. The nightclubs get longer writeups - seriously half a page in some cases to describe various sketchy dives and loud dance halls. They are, as far as I can tell, fictional clubs - and some of them have plot hooks and named NPCs written for them. But then again, some don't. Then you have "Kin Night Clubs" that are given even more text and fake review excerpts and plot hooks, and then you go back to more neighborhoods and points of interest like the whole bit about Nightclubs was simply in the wrong part of the book and wasn't really supposed to start yet.

By far the weirdest bit is that in among the other neighborhoods they have this one called "The Wormholes", which is a secret tunnel complex that leads to the underground empire of crazy alien monsters that have giant twisty straws for heads and shit. This is just sort of a toss-off, but spoiler alert: later in the book there is a whole section on the Wormholes and the alien monsters that live in it.

Drugs
We haven't actually started a new chapter, but after twenty something pages, the book just sort of drifts off topic and starts talking about rules and shit. The section on Drugs gets its own intro fiction, so I guess we might as well call the new chapter at that point. Why not? The 151 certainly isn't telling me no. despite having its own into fiction, "drugs" is actually just a paragraph about how drugs are bad m'kay. Then we go into criminal syndicates and cops, which might actually be the part where a new chapter is supposed to begin. Look, I just don't know, OK?

You get rundowns on the Mafia, the Yakuza, the Triads, and the Police. Each one has a bit on their relationship with supernatural creatures. This section is actually not bad. Then we get the Human Gangs segment and it all goes to fuck. There are new mechanics for gang prestige and it just plops it down in the middle of a description of social structures for crime and punishment. The thing on gangs is also super cheesy and talks about how you have to wear colored bandanas to get FACE bonuses from your gang. There are then individual gang writeups. Gang stats are very stupid, and include a line for "Orientation", which is pointless because all listed gangs are "Neutral". The gangs themselves are also underwhelming and cliche, with the Katanas, the Czars, and the Muertes standing in for the generic ethnic gangs you knew were coming.

Humanity and the Kin
This chapter is frankly pretty cool. And I am not saying that because I am drunk off my ass. I am firmly on my ass. And drunk. In Czech Republic this is this stuff that is beer and grapefruit juice mixed together. A bottle of it has about as much alcohol as a shot of Irish Cream, so you aren't getting drunk on it. But it will keep you drunk in a very delicious way if Bacardi has already taken your sobriety.

Anyway, humans who know about the Kin get called "Crowleys" and "Renfields" and "Hunters". This is to divide them up into the humans in the know you can share a beer with (Crowleys), the humans who are servile to their supernatural masters (Renfields), and the humans who try to fight monsters to the best of their ability (Hunters). This feels very organic, like it's terminology that people in the world would actually use. Unfortunately, the section on why supernatural creatures aren't public knowledge doesn't make any sense. "Keeping the Secret" is what they call the Masquerade, but it apparently isn't actually enforced or anything. There's a Van Helsing Society who are made up of hunters, and they haven't managed to convince the rest of the world that monsters are real for... no adequately explained reason.

You don't get the glossary of slang until page 117, and it is severely hit and miss. Some of the stuff in here is just the slang of some random group of people in Ohio who tried to get other people to use their group catch phrases (is anyone really going to say "Butt it" to mean "be quiet"?). However, some of this is actually pretty inspired. Disposing the body of someone you drained to death is called "rinse and floss", which is both in-your-face punk and also a plausible sounding euphemism that monsters might actually use in character. Still others are just normal pieces of slang or even just normal words that the authors think they are cool enough to teach you. Like "GTA" for stealing cars, or (and I swear I am not making this up) "Rap" for "A popular form of music performed with a heavy beat to spoken lyrics".

Kin Factions, Gangs, and Related Groups
Page 119 and the book is considering telling you what the fucking hell is going on. There are two main factions: the Commune and the Complex. You are assumed to belong to the Commune, which is basically the Camarilla. They have five "tenets", which are basically like the Camarilla's Traditions. As it happens they are pretty much the same, except there's no Sixth Tradition forbidding you from murdering other Kin, as long as you keep the secret and respect domains while doing it.

The Commune is composed of small groups of player characters Kin who are allowed to do pretty much whatever they want, but they are loosely organized and sometimes give each other quests. The Complex is evil and bad, and you can tell they are bad because they are trying to take over the world and also because they are liberals who want to legalize gambling and pass gun control. I am too drunk to make that shit up and clearly I need to get drunk enough to forget that happened. There are also a bunch of minor factions that are discussed a bit later in this thread, and most of them are villains. There are Kin Gangs, who are for the most part about as uninteresting for the most part as the Human Gangs were. The primary difference is that now they have actual things written in their Orientation line. They range from pro-human to extremely anti-human. Most of these are supposed to be antagonists I think. Also there are music groups, but despite getting a good amount of ink each, I can't care enough to review any of them.

City Planner Information

It's page 131, and as a player you are supposed to stop reading I think. This is of course insane, because as previously mentioned many of the things mentioned earlier in this book (like what the fuck your humanity score is and does) are only described here or given such a perfunctory description elsewhere that they might as well be only described here. There is a little bit of advice to keep the horror going, but it's mostly not helpful (merely pointing out that characters are monsters and that horror should follow). Then it starts getting into the crazy. There's a secret part of chargen where you roll percentile dice and have a 28% chance of starting with various amounts of stat, skill, and power bonuses. It also lists some alternate campaign ideas and gives you the rules on humanity. The rules on humanity, as alluded to earlier, are fucking insane. Saving the day (by which I guess they mean winning the adventure) is worth 3-15 humanity, but simply "close interactions with humans" is worth 1-7 per day.

The advancement rules are pretty batshit. You have "life stages" where eventually you become powerful enough that you stop gaining skills and start gaining attributes. But your skill gain in the first place is undefined. Maybe it's supposed to be the same as for human characters (listed later), who get a bunch of d10s to distribute to their skills every adventure, but it doesn't actually say that. Advancement is, as previously alluded to, incredibly fast. You get an extra d10 to luck (and therefore hit points) every single adventure. Humanity gain (and thus rate of super power increase) is measured per day. I think it important to note that there are some rules that only make any sense once you realize how berserk the advancement rules are. For example, you can attempt any test by using your Luck divided by 5 instead of the skill. This is completely meaningless at chargen, when people have all stats in the twenties or thirties and luck divided by 5 is still 15 or more points lower than just using it untrained. But NPCs in this book have Luck scores of over four hundred, which give them a Luck default of 80+. And using the advancement rules here, that kind of bullshit is totally achievable in like two years of weekly gaming (assuming that you survived the early stages when you had a two thirds chance of failing every single thing you were supposed to be "competent" in).

There are advanced drug rules that involve rolling d% on a chart to see if there are crazy side effects (hint: there are). Also random city encounter table that involves crazy monsters showing up all the time. Also you get some more ruminations on feeding on mortals that probably should have gone into the actual chapter on feeding. Or just been cut entirely because who gives a shit? Then there is another essay on the humanity score, which almost certainly should have gone into one of the other places that they talked about humanity. It's a pretty scatterbrained chapter.

The Rest of the Family: Other Races of the Kin
There are 44 creatures listed here, 7 of which are the creatures from earlier in the book. The range from standard fare like Wereboar to batshit insanity like the Kikulaluit (who are tunnel dwelling people with see-through green-tinged skin) and Data Haunts (who are incorporeal will-o-wisps that live in computers). The Toxxixx are the guy from Toxic Avenger. Many of these creatures are sufficiently monstrous in appearance that there is absolutely no fucking way that they can interact with society and as such there is absolutely no way they could be playable characters in any meaningful sense.

And you'd think that this would be the complete monster list. But you'd be totally wrong.

Important NPCs
Many of these are big penis NPCs. They lead off with Golgotha, who is the most powerful vampire that they wank to throughout this entire fucking book. He is "maxed out", or as near as it comes in this game, with all his magic powers at over one hundred and all his skills at over one hundred and all that shit. It also writes up a bunch of the people who are in the examples and stories throughout the book, which is a nice touch. There are two "unique" typed characters, of which the interesting one is Parliament: who is an unconscious Henry Rollins who died of cancer and had his cancerous organs individually become sentient and powerful sorcerers and now acts as a thing you get quests from. I am not making that up.

Enemies of the Kin
This is a list of sample antagonist NPCs. But it also has some supernatural types that didn't make the cut for the "other supernatural types". Why? Because Fuck You, that's why. There are seven new supernatural types that are antagonist-only, and there's another Steve who is a body jumping serial killer. Then we get to Virus, who are the Borg from Star Trek: Next Gen. I don't even know. I think maybe this was supposed to be elucidated in one of their campaign books or something. It talks about how they seem to be building up forces for some big plan or something, but it doesn't say what it is, even though this is supposed to be the City Planner's section.

Creatures Associated with Kin
This is a list of supernatual creatures that you can't play. There are seven of them, and they are either considerably weaker than normal Kin, or magic animals, or both.

Elementals
Why was this not folded into the previous chapter? I don't know. Elementals are Nature Spirits (including Spirits of Man and shit) from Shadowrun. Pretty much exactly. They have a "Dominion", which is exactly like a first edition Shadowrun Domain. There are named-character Elementals, who are all way more badass than you. Also, there are generic Elementals, who are "just" mid-level characters.

Then, without actually starting a new chapter, it starts right into the rules for playing a Herd. Which is I think where the rules for skill advancement are. This is an ectopic sub-chapter and requires me to finish my glass.

Into the Wormholes
This is a chapter about New York's dungeon complex full of aberrations. It has its own random encounter tables and also has seven monster types that live in it and its own Steve named "The Worm". I'm actually not sure if that last one is actually supposed to be a Steve or if there is more than one "The Worm", it's surprisingly ambiguous on that point. The chapter ends with a "Why go into the Wormholes?" subsection that essentially acknowledges that there isn't any compelling reason but suggests that there are rumors that there might actually be one and that the CP might want to make a reason.

Origins of the Kin
This sets itself up to be an actual chapter that tells you the secret history or soemthing, but it's really just a page and a half of metaplot cock tease.

Death and its Effects on The Kin
In Nightlife, supernatural creatures get extra lives. Like, a lot of extra lives. When you die, you respawn in a few days. There is a description of what the fuck you'd actually have to do to make death "stick". For Trolles, for example, you have to cut the heart into four pieces and put them into the sunlight until they shrivel. Ghouls have to have wrought iron pounded into their heart and brain. Goblynnes have to be burned and then thrown into moving water. And so on. Some of them are pretty cool, a lot of them are uninspired (several are basically "behead and burn"). All in all, pretty neat. Has the kind of lore feeling that does the Supernatural show.

Appendices
The various Appendices in this book range from the uninteresting (price list for stuff at the mall, which is automatically wrong and useless because it's set near the "present day" and prices and resources are just in USD) to batshit insanity (a chart that tells you which Kin are able to interbreed and which ones have to breathe). You get modestly useful ones like the normal animal stat chart and useless ones like the "miscellaneous reference tables" that includes a few chargen tables and a few edge-case combat non-standard damage charts. It is important to note that the quick guide to chargen at the back of the book gives you different numbers of skill advancements than the chargen chapter.

Index
The Index suffers from the fact that the book itself is full of crazy and repeats and contradicts rules segments multiple times throughout. But considering the Herculean task of explaining where things in the Nightlife book are, it does a tolerably good job. A much better job than the Table of Contents, that is for fucking sure.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

And yes, one of the seven races of the Kin it wants you to play is named "Inuit". For serious. Also they are "the most flamboyant of the major races." It suggests that you be conservation and environmentally minded. Because the early nineties.

My Nightlife character.

[Korgan0]

This is one of the greatest things I have ever read.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I don't suppose there's a chance of getting a rundown of what the various Kin are, interms of society, personality and/or powersets?

I can kind of see "Vampyres" being hip urban-blight hipster punks, and I can kinda roll with Werewolves and "Daemons" the same way, but I don't know how ghosts and "Wyghts" even operate on the same level with these guys. Do they haunt trendy downtown nightclubs and boredly chat with the people there? And I don't even know what Animates fucking are. And that doesn't even approach the WTF of Inuits. Were I to guess, I'd say they'd probably be like the Wendigo from Werewolf:The Apocalypse, angry shamans of the frozen north that summon and/or become huge nasty monsters to devour the enemies of Mother Nature? That's probably wrong, at least I hope that's wrong.

[Username17]

I don't suppose there's a chance of getting a rundown of what the various Kin are, interms of society, personality and/or powersets?

Sure. There are a fuck tonne of Steves. There is a whole list of "Kin" (which are variously playable and not). I mean, just the Drain table lists 38 types of Kin, and that doesn't include the variants like Wereboar. And then there are crazy batshit monsters that live in "The Wormholes" that look like giant fat dudes with giant sucking tubes instead of heads and shit. The character generation table provides 43 races of Kin with chargen rules

Of the supposedly "common" races, you have seven:

• Vampyres have the longest list of drawbacks and are obviously the ones that the game is actually made around. You are super strong, get bonus attractiveness, and are basically a movie vampire. You take damage from sunlight, are repulsed by holy objects, have to sleep in a dirt filled coffin, and take extra damage from wood. All of the feeding rules are written with the basic idea that you are a vampire even though you almost certainly aren't.
• Werewolves have two alternate forms. Their Hybrid form looks like a Lon Cheney Werewolf and the real money is the super powerful dire wolf form. You can heal yourself by torturing people and animals and you can cause fear, you suffer from fire and silver. This kind of werewolf infects its victims and doesn't "breed true" or any of that shit.
• Ghosts have the smallest stat modifiers of anyone. They are damaged and repulsed by Wrought Iron and are otherwise immune to weapons. They have a really long list of available powers. Each Ghost has a "relic" that is some item that they need to keep track of to keep from being banished to "the Twisted Dimensions". They can manifest a corporeal body if they want, but this makes them vulnerable.
• Daemons are aliens from another dimension. They have shape shifting abilities and breathe fire and shit. They have a pretty cool backstory where they are actually a servitor race who are compelled to follow the orders of their old masters, so human demonologists are people who learned the parts of the ancient language of the Daemon Overlords and can compel unwilling obedience in that way. They are hurt by Fire (despite being fire themed), Holy relics, and Flint (yes, really). They breed true.
• Wyghts are combat monsters. +30 Str, +10 Dex, +10 Fit, +10 Per, -15 Attractiveness. They are reanimated dead bodies. They look like dead bodies. They have the power to reanimate other dead bodies as shitty zombies and people they kill can come back as Wyghts - but they have the shortest power list of any race (weird bullshit like Piranha Men included). They have to drain the youth of the living. I have no idea why these things are listed as playable in any fashion.
• Inuits are Dryads (in that they have a particular tree that they need to keep alive). They are required by law to dress like they are in The Village People. They can turn invisible and have a long list of available powers that lets them like turn into birds and talk to animals and shit. They can also turn people crazy and force them to run out into the woods and become an Inuit themselves. I don't even know.
• Animates are golems and Pinocchios and shit. The picture at the front shows Chucky, Frankenstein, Robot Maria, and a dude wearing shades that I would probably recognize if I watched more terrible movies in the late 80s. This is the "build-a-type" type. There's like a whole page that gives very minor bonuses and penalties depending on whether you are an animated plastic mannequin or a statue come to life due to unrequited love or whatever.

With the exception of Wyghts, these all fit pretty well into Scooby Gangs of supernatural detectives or packs of high fashion murder hoboes or whatever else you wanted to do with your coterie in the setting. Wyghts are... I just don't even fucking know. They can't pass for human and have little in the way of abilities. Other than cutting shit up with an ax or raising a small army of zombies to help them cut things up with axes there isn't much for them to do. They still need to get humanity back on a regular basis to keep from being super fucked, but I have no idea how they are supposed to do that. They look like this.

Anyway, you're supposed to protect the Masquerade, which in this game is called "Keeping the Secret". You also get to be a member of one of the "pro-human factions". These are the Commune (which is essentially the Camarilla), and The Failsafe Coalition (who are a secret paramilitary organization dedicated to peace and fighting supervillains). Your enemies come from the "anti-human factions", which are The Complex (who are Cobra Command: they are super villains who have a "long term goal" of world domination and choose to advance it by doing white collar crime and arming street thugs), the Morningstar Corporation (who are Pentex), Red Moonrise (who are the Sabbat, showing up in small packs to perform extreme ultraviolence for no reason), and The Laughter Factory (who are basically the Jokerz from Batman Beyond). Also there is a secret human government monster-hunting force called Target Alpha that you are supposed to work with and fight alternately between and within adventures.

Also, there are a bunch of gangs you are supposed to fight and honest to goodness musical groups that you're supposed to care about. Much of the action takes place at The Musical Vein, which is essentially The Succubus Club from Vampire (although, obviously, written first). The default assumption is that you work for The Commune and you are a group of supernatural detectives who spend a lot of time swanking it up at nightclubs that secretly serve blood and stuff. It also suggests alternate campaigns of:

• Rock Band
• Gang
• Mercenary Group
• Vigilantes
• Criminals

-Username17

[nockermensch]

Of the supposedly "common" races, you have seven:

• Vampyres
• Werewolves
• Ghosts
• Daemons
• Wyghts
• Inuits
• Animates

I can think on yet another alternate campaign for Nightlife, right now.

[Username17]

Although actually Rikuo would probably be a Piranha Man, Felicia a Weretiger, and Sasquatch a Trolle or Hafgryr. Because the game is full of Steves. Also because Inuits are so fucking weird that I honestly cannot think of a single character from any story who would be one.

-Username17

[talozin]

The picture at the front shows Chucky, Frankenstein, Robot Maria, and a dude wearing shades that I would probably recognize if I watched more terrible movies in the late 80s.

"Robot/Golem dude with shades from the late '80s" to me suggests this guy:

[Red_Rob]

I love the werewolf peeking out of the subway in the background on the cover. Because the artist doesn't quite understand this "perspective" thing, it looks about 12 feet tall compared to the railway tunnel it pokes out of. It's fucking Were-Godzilla.

We should set up a fund for regular shipments of mead and shitty 90's RPG books to Eastern Europe. That's got to be worth a kickstarter....

[Koumei]

We should set up a fund for regular shipments of mead and shitty 90's RPG books to Eastern Europe. That's got to be worth a kickstarter....

I'm pretty sure the booze is both cheaper and better quality there than in most of the world. West Europe probably has them beat (or equal: it's likely where they import it from) on quality, but not price.

[Username17]

Happy Halloween!

-Username17

[Ikeren]

I am really happy I found this thread.

[Maxus]

Happy Halloween!

-Username17

Same to you.

Thanks for getting the review finished.

[Koumei]

This was an awesome read.

[Red Archon]

Where are the space aliens? I might sound sarcastic, but I really mean, what's with the lack of Predator and shit?

[Username17]

Where are the space aliens? I might sound sarcastic, but I really mean, what's with the lack of Predator and shit?

I give a 50/50 chance that the big reveal behind the Wormhole monsters was supposed to be that they were from space. I give a virtually 100% chance that the big reveal behind Virus was that it/they were from space.

It's a techno-magical Virus that makes you get covered with wires and lose all your individuality. It's literally the Borg.

To date, the Virus has done little, but unlike most supernatural creatures, its population has not remained static. Every year there seems to be more Virus and perhaps they are only waiting for their ranks to swell a bit more before they act.

Note: Individuality is abhorrent to the Virus. Thus, individual personalities are impossible to give. The self is eliminated when a character becomes one with Virus.

-Username17

[Ted the Flayer]

A good read, but it made me sad. Why? Because if the mechanics were more coherent, and there were fewer Steves, this game would be the shit...

I really wish someone would make a coherent Monster Party kind of game...

[JigokuBosatsu]

Monster Party RPG? I'd play that!

[Username17]

A good read, but it made me sad. Why? Because if the mechanics were more coherent, and there were fewer Steves, this game would be the shit...

I really wish someone would make a coherent Monster Party kind of game...

I did actually make a game called After Sundown. It presents 18 playable monster types and is rather more playable than Nightlife. It has less of a combat focus, and does not have random encounter tables where you get ambushed by John Travolta impersonators with zippers instead of eyes on a regular basis while wandering around town (I am not making that up). It also requires MC permission (and a tiny bit of fidgeting) to play a winged demon. It does, however, give better access to playing Creature from the Black Lagoon. Both games are about equal on playing a bag of skin full of crawling insects (called a Bug Walker in Nightlife and a Mi Go in After Sundown).

Looking back on it, I really should have included an unconscious Henry Rollins cancer mage whose cancerous organs had taken over and were now a cabal of sorcerers.

-Username17

[Koumei]

and does not have random encounter tables where you get ambushed by John Travolta impersonators with zippers instead of eyes on a regular basis while wandering around town (I am not making that up).

Can you honestly say that lacking such a thing is a feature, though?

[Username17]

and does not have random encounter tables where you get ambushed by John Travolta impersonators with zippers instead of eyes on a regular basis while wandering around town (I am not making that up).

Can you honestly say that lacking such a thing is a feature, though?

The Zipperheads of Nightlife are cool. But I don't know what the fuck. I mean seriously: they look like John Travolta from Grease, and wear big dark shades because they have zippers instead of eyes.

Now partly I don't know what the fuck because seriously: what the fuck? And partly I don't know what the fuck because the book explicitly tells you that no one (including therefore the City Planner, whose fucking section they are written in) knows where they came from or what they want. They just show up in hoodlum groups and fight Kin, but they also kill humans and noone knows what the hell.

But I think it somewhat important to note that they are actually called "Zipperheads", which is a derogatory term for Koreans. It's actually obscure enough that I grant it entirely possible that the authors of Nightlife had no idea that was the case. But considering how deliberately un-PC they are in other places, it is equally possible that the Zipperheads are some sort of complicated racist joke that I don't get and probably wasn't that funny.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

Zipperhead is also a slang name for a tank crew member (canadian I think), and according to what I heard once, stems from the fact that sooner or later they'd hurt their head inside a tank and need stitches. I didn't know until today that it was a derogatory name for asian people.

[Red_Rob]

I really wish someone would make a coherent Monster Party kind of game...

Yeah, thats quite a zinger given the author of the thread. If you actually were unaware of After Sundown (which I find unlikely for a regular poster on the Den) it sounds like it would be right up your alley. I certainly don't regret the dollar i spent on my copy.